The Religious Thought of the Greeks, from Homer to the Triumph of Christianity

by Clifford Herschel Moore

“Such was the end of these men; they were worthy of Athens, and the living need not desire to have a more heroic spirit, although they may pray for a less fatal issue. The value of such a spirit is not to be expressed in words. Any one can discourse to you forever about the advantages of a brave defence, which you know already. But instead of listening to him I would have you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until you become filled with the love of her; and when you are impressed by the spectacle of her glory, reflect that this empire has been acquired by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it, who in the hour of conflict had the fear of dishonor always present to them, and who, if they failed in an enterprise, would not allow their virtues to be lost to their country, but freely gave their lives to her as the fairest offering which they could present at her feast. The sacrifice which they collectively made was individually repaid to them; for they received again each one for himself a praise which grows not old, and the noblest of all sepulchres—I speak not of that in which their remains are laid, but of that in which their glory survives, and is proclaimed always and on every fitting occasion both in word and deed. For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone, but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war. The unfortunate who has no hope of a change for the better has less reason to throw away his life than the prosperous who, if he survive, is always liable to a change for the worse, and to whom any accidental fall makes the most serious difference. To a man of spirit, cowardice and disaster coming together are far more bitter than death, striking him unperceived at a time when he is full of courage and animated by the general hope.

Wherefore I do not now commiserate the parents of the dead who stand here; I would rather comfort them. You know that your life has been passed amid manifold vicissitudes; and that they may be deemed fortunate who have gained most honour, whether an honorable death like theirs, or an honorable sorrow like yours, and whose days have been so ordered that the term of their happiness is likewise the term of their life. I know how hard it is to make you feel this, when the good fortune of others will too often remind you of the gladness which once lightened your hearts. And sorrow is felt at the want of those blessings, not which a man never knew, but which were a part of his life before they were taken from him. Some of you are of an age at which they may hope to have other children, and they ought to bear their sorrow better; not only will the children who may hereafter be born make them forget their own lost ones, but the city will be doubly a gainer. She will not be left desolate, and she will be safer. For a man’s counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger. To those of you who have passed their prime I say: ‘Congratulate yourselves that you have been happy during the greater part of your days; remember that your life of sorrow will not last long, and be comforted by the glory of those who are gone. For the love of honour alone is ever young, and not riches, as some say, but honour is the delight of men when they are old and useless.’”

The loyalty to the state, however, which animates this oration we must remember actually resulted in the glorification of Athena and the other great gods. For they, too, were a part of the state, and had a share in its reputation and prosperity. But I must point out again that in this exaltation of the Olympic gods there was nothing of that personal relation of the individual to divinity, such as must exist in every really religious age.

Yet at the risk of repetition, I would recall the fact that the practice of religion by individuals had not ceased at Athens. The common man still paid devotion to his guardian gods, made offerings to the dead, and shared in many forms of worship. Furthermore the spread of the Eleusinian mysteries in this century, so that a new and larger initiation hall had to be erected at Eleusis, shows that thoughts of the future life and the deepest religious feelings still existed in large numbers of the citizens. We have here, then, an apparent contradiction, such as has appeared many times and in many places in the religious history of man. Many of the leaders of the state were interested in religion only as it was an affair of state, in the same way in which the army and navy were. On the other hand there were large numbers who felt a more personal interest in religion and who cultivated a more personal relation to divinity. Nor were there lacking men of the most intellectual class to deal with the higher concepts of religion which had been developing during the recent centuries. These ideas find their truest utterance in the work of the poets, and we have already seen how Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles interpreted nobler views with regard to the gods, human conduct, and man’s relation to the divinities, to all Greece and especially to Athens which had now become the intellectual center of the Hellenic world.

But another new force had been developing among the Greeks during the sixth century which was destined to deal a far greater blow to traditional religion than any other—I mean philosophy. This began in Ionia and was cultivated in other parts of greater Greece before it came to Athens. But after the Persian Wars the prominence and prosperity of that city was so great and her intellectual eminence was so high that she attracted the men of note in many departments of life. Among them was the philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae who made Athens his home for about thirty years (c. 462-432 b.c.). He became a member of the most intellectual Athenian society of his day, a friend of Euripides, and an intimate of Pericles. When dangers began to threaten the state, with the prospect of war looming on the horizon, the people began to blame their great leader; to injure him, they banished one and another of his friends. The two most noted were Phidias the sculptor, of whose art the marbles of the Parthenon are still the unsurpassed witnesses, and Anaxagoras the philosopher; the charge against both was impiety. Anaxagoras taught that the sun was a red hot mass of rock, as the moon was a cold mass, like the earth. According to this teaching the sun and moon could no longer be regarded as gods, so that a charge of impiety was as easily based on such doctrines as it was on the teaching of Galileo twenty centuries later. But although the philosopher was driven out, philosophy could not be so easily banished. The eager intellectual life of Athens had caught the spark, and the flame of philosophy was never extinguished on the Athenian altars for almost a thousand years, until the Emperor Justinian closed the philosophic schools in 529 a.d.

Now philosophy aimed from the very first to explain the origin and structure of the universe by reducing all things to a single principle, or to a few principles at most. The purpose of the philosopher was to carry out a more systematic search for unity than the thought of the poet or of the ordinary man could accomplish. We have seen how Hesiod and the Orphics tried by cosmogonies to explain the origin of the world. The philosophers turned to physical science for their explanation. But in every case their work was from its very nature antagonistic to popular polytheism, which saw a separate divinity in every phenomenon. It was inevitable that the conflict should become an open one sooner or later.

Xenophanes of Colophon (flor. c. 540 b.c.) was the first to enter the lists. Driven into exile by civil disturbances at about the age of twenty-five, he lived most of his life in Sicily. He was as much a social and religious reformer and satirist as philosopher. With a frankness which passed beyond the freedom of his age he struck at the popular beliefs with regard to the gods, which taught that the gods were born and had clothes and voices and forms like mortals. He illustrated the folly of the Greeks in making the gods after their own image by reminding them that the Ethiopians made their gods flat-nosed and black, and the Thracians theirs blue-eyed and red-haired, while if cattle and horses and lions had but hands and could draw and mould and fashion like men, then each would draw and fashion the gods in his own image.[155] For the current notions of divinity he held Homer and Hesiod responsible and charged that these poets had attributed to the gods everything that was reckoned as shame and reproach among men—stealing, adultery, and cheating.[156] He likewise opposed the doctrine that the gods had taught men their knowledge, but declared that man had always learned through experience and investigation the better way for himself.[157] Xenophanes went even further than this and used the science of his day to prove that what was regarded as the appearances of the gods was merely meteorological phenomena. In the place of many gods he declared that there was but one, and he not like mortal men either in form or intelligence, but that he was wholly sight, wholly intelligence, wholly hearing—that is to say, god and the universe are identical, and the cosmos is eternal, sentient, and intelligent.[158] There could hardly have been a greater contrast than between this pantheism and the polytheism of the day. It is true that Xenophanes offers no adequate explanation of the way in which phenomena arise; he does not solve the problem of deriving the transient out of that which is permanent and fixed. But nevertheless he crudely anticipated the thought of later philosophers and theologians and began the open struggle with polytheism which was to continue for many centuries.

Another philosopher who deserves our attention here is Heraclitus of Ephesus who flourished in the early fifth century. As he surveyed the world he was impressed with the variety of phenomena that moved before him, with the fact that nothing is stable but that everything is always in process of change. He declared therefore that nothing is permanent but that all things in reality are in a state of flux and flow (πάντα ῥεῖ). The explanation for this constant change he apparently found in the crude science of the day which observed that changes in temperature cause changes of form, some solids becoming liquid and liquids gaseous. This phenomenon he thought was due to fire. Fire he regarded as universal in the cosmos—indeed, as identical with it, and he is reported as saying that this universe, which is the same for all beings, no god or mortal has made, but it has always been and is and ever will be eternal fire, which sometimes grows the brighter and again is quenched. This fire he is willing to call god; it is to him the principle which permeates the universe and causes all change within it. Such being the case, Heraclitus maintains that true knowledge is not concerned with many things but solely with the unity in the world which his teachings set forth. In his scorn for his predecessors he outdoes Xenophanes. Not only Homer and Hesiod, but Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Archilochus, and Hecateus are alike condemned. Homer and Archilochus he declares deserve to be driven from the games and flogged, such folly had they taught.[159] In his assaults on the popular religion Heraclitus did not concern himself so much with mythology as with the rites and ceremonies current in his time. He evidently attacked the representatives of the mystery religions, calling them night walkers, magi, priests of Bacchus, devotees of the wine-vat, and mystery-mongers. In another fragment he ridicules those who pray to the images of the gods, for that is as if one were to pray to a man’s house; and again he declares that if men on ordinary occasions sang songs like the hymns which they raise in honor of Dionysus they would be acting most shamelessly. Man’s duty to his mind is to devote himself wholly to the apprehension of the divine unity in the world, of that wisdom to which alone he would consent to give the name of Zeus.[160]

We have now seen from these two representatives how philosophy regarded traditional polytheism, and taught that the unity of the universe was identical with god. But neither Xenophanes nor Heraclitus offered any satisfactory explanation of the way in which multiplicity could arise out of unity. Still less did they conceive of a personal god. This concept was reserved for Plato or possibly for his great teacher. A slight approach toward an explanation of variety was made, it is true, by Heraclitus, through his “fire” and also through a doctrine which I have not mentioned, namely that “strife,” the action of opposites, is the cause of change. Now another philosopher, Empedocles of Agrigentum, whom we have already met as a mystic, offered an explanation of the cause of phenomena not dissimilar to that of Heraclitus, and yet one that marked an advance. For his elements Empedocles took the four of popular belief—earth, air, fire, water, which he said were combined in various forms by the principles of “friendship” and of “strife”; or, as we should say today in less symbolic language, by affinity and incompatibility. But like Heraclitus Empedocles fails to make clear how or why these principles act at all on his elements. In short before Anaxagoras no thinker conceived of any satisfactory formative or motive principles to explain phenomena; likewise none had arrived at a well defined distinction between a material principle and a formative principle. Anaxagoras solved the problem in a way highly satisfactory for his age and in a manner which unconsciously anticipated many of the principles of modern science. According to him all substances are elementary, existing in seeds or germs, infinite in number, infinitesimal in size. Aristotle and the ancients in general understood him to mean that these seeds or germs are minute particles of the things which we know in the mass, as for example bread or water, or flesh and bones. Some modern scholars think that he meant that the original mass of matter was infinitely divided and that every atom had in it a portion of everything else: the various combinations of these seeds, atoms, we name bread, water, or flesh and bones according to the predominance of these things in the seeds which make up the whole. Yet whether Aristotle and the ancients or the moderns be right is a matter of little moment to us now. Anaxagoras thought that these “seeds,” whatever they were, were set in motion and combined to produce the infinite diversity of the natural objects by Mind (Νοῦς).

Anaxagoras’ great service, then, was his introduction of Mind into philosophy as a formative, a motive principle to provide the cause for change and diversity. It is not to be denied that Anaxagoras conceived his principle to be as material as the elements themselves, and that he did not employ his principle fully, even after he introduced it into the world. Indeed, he did not advance beyond a mechanical concept of the cause of phenomena. But nevertheless he is significant in the history of European thought as the founder of the dualistic system which largely prevailed thereafter. His contemporaries, too, recognized him as an innovator, for we are told that the wits of Athens nicknamed him “Mind.” With the consequences of this new dualism we shall be much concerned hereafter.