But such reassertions of the antique temper were of rarer and rarer occurrence. The ancient world to which it had given such toughness and energy of purpose was on its death-bed. With the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth century it enters upon its last agony; a general failure of nerve had long threatened the loosely bound masses that shared in the Græco-Roman civilization. In the general atrophy that beset its old age the vigorous blood of the genuine and unadulterated Greek and Roman stocks was flowing but feebly. Now the universal process of decay sets in irresistibly. It was its own inherent weakness that made the attacks of outside forces so ominous to the old world. In the West the old order vanished more swiftly and submitted more [545] completely to the new forces, than in the Hellenized East. It was not that the old civilization was any less rotten in the East than in the West. The enfeebled hand and the failing mind betray themselves in every utterance—in the last spasms of vital energy that inspired the art and literature of moribund Greece. The impoverishment of the vital forces out of which Greece had once brought forth the flower of its special and characteristic spirit makes itself felt in the altered relation of the individual to the whole, and of the totality of visible life to the shadowy powers of the unseen world. Individualism has had its day. No longer is the emancipation of the individual the object of man’s endeavour; no longer is he required to arm himself against all that is not himself, that is outside the region of his free will and choice. He is not strong enough, and should not feel himself strong enough, to trust to the self-conscious strength of his own intelligence. Authority—an authority that is the same for all—must be his guide. Rationalism is dead. In the last years of the second century a religious reaction begins to assert itself and makes itself felt more and more in the period that follows. Philosophy itself becomes at last a religion, drawing its nourishment from surmise and revelation. The invisible world wins the day over the meagre present, so grievously bound down by the limitation of mere experience. No longer does the soul await with courage and calmness whatever may be hidden behind the dark curtain of death. Life seemed to need something to complete it. And how faded and grey life had become[171]—a rejuvenation upon this earth seemed to be out of the question. All the more complete, in consequence, is the submission that throws itself with closed eyes and eager yearning upon another world, situated now far beyond the limits of the known or knowable world of the living. Hopes and a vague longing, a shrinking before the mysterious terrors of the unknown, fill the soul. Never in the history of the ancient world is the belief in an immortal life of the soul after death a matter of such burning and exacerbated ardour as in these last days when the antique civilization was preparing itself to breathe its last.
Hopes of immortality, widely espoused by the masses and fed rather on faith than on reflexion, sought satisfaction in the brilliant ceremonial of religions that easily outshone the simple worship of every day officially undertaken by the city. In these new rites the worshippers united in the secret cult seemed to be placed more directly in the hands of the gods; and, above all, a blessed existence hereafter was assured to pious [546] believers. In these days the ancient and hallowed mysteries of Eleusis awake to a new life and remain in vigorous activity till nearly the end of the fourth century.[172] Orphic conventicles must have attracted worshippers for ages;[173] the Hellenized Orient was familiar with many such orgiastic cults.
In the mixed populations of the East the new religions proved more attractive to the Greeks, too, than their old worship of the gods of Greece. Clear and definite obligations, fixed commandments and dogmas, holding the weak and frail individual in their stronger embrace, seemed to belong more peculiarly to these foreign worships than to the old beliefs of Greece. Rigid and unalterable maintenance of primitive ideas and practices seemed to give the former the stamp of sacred and certain knowledge. From all men they demanded perfect submission to the God and his priests; perfect renunciation of the world, conceived as dualistically opposed to the divine; the purging away of the contamination of its lusts by purifications and sanctifications, ceremonial expiations and asceticisms. By these means the faithful prepared themselves for the highest reward that piety could conceive; an unending life of bliss far away from this unclean world in the realm of the holy and the consecrated. To the belief in a blessed immortality these foreign mysteries contributed their much desired support; and the populace welcomed their message of salvation with all the greater eagerness since their varied and impressive ceremonial contrasted so strikingly with the plain and homely worship of the Greek gods. In the symbolism of these exotic cults men seemed to discern a mysterious and secret knowledge; and to the divine figures illuminated by such a halo were easily attributed strange and magical powers beyond belief or experience. The cult of the Egyptian deities had long been familiar both in the East and in the West, and they maintained and extended their influence down to the last days of the ancient religions. The Phrygian deities, the Thraco-Phrygian cults of Sabazios, Attis, and Kybele, and the Persian worship of Mithras were later comers, but they, too, took equally firm root and spread over the whole extent of the empire.[174]
The higher culture of these last centuries, having become credulous and avid of marvels, no longer looked with contempt upon the means of salvation and sanctification which had once been left almost entirely to the lower orders of the population. The most cultivated and educated people of these times used their culture and their education simply to justify everything mysterious and incomprehensible in itself—even [547] when it was expressed in the most physical symbolism. The newly awakened religious interest of the populace had coincided with a return on the part of philosophy to the teaching of Plato; a teaching which itself tended towards religion. Platonism had invaded the doctrine of other schools at many points, and it had already acquired a new home for itself in the restored Academy, where once an un-Platonic Scepticism had overthrown the teaching of the master. Now a new Platonism comes forward and overwhelms all the other schools of philosophy. Absorbing the doctrines of Aristotle and Chrysippos (which it fancied it could reconcile with Platonism), it weaved them into its own special teaching so that the whole presented a subtle and far-reaching system of thought. The speculative system of Neoplatonism, into which the old age of Greece, in spite of its weariness, contrived to introduce so much profundity, spirit, and ingenuity (together with a luxuriant mass of scholastic folly), fills the history of the last centuries of Greek thought. Its fundamental tendency is, once more, a turning away from the life of nature, and a determined invasion of a transcendent world of pure spirit; and it was by this tendency that it satisfied the needs of its time. The Sole and First Cause, lying beyond all being and continually expressing itself in creative emanations, yet never troubled or impaired in its perfect and eternal transcendency; the development, in an unbroken process from this One, of the world of thinking, of the Ideas and pure thought preserved in it—the world of Spirit and the world of Matter—until at last, in longing and desire,[175] all things created return to the origin of all Being: to describe and express all this is the single theme, persisting throughout all variations, of this philosophy. The whole fabric of reality, the interplay of cause and effect, depends upon the inherence of the thing caused in its Cause from which it takes its origin and to which it returns at last. That which in the evolution of nature takes its origin from the One, and degenerates more and more completely, in the darkness and corruption of Matter, as it gets further away from its source—now becomes Man and seeks in morality and religion a conscious return to the pure and everlasting and unfailing One. The divine does not descend to earth and man must reach upwards to the divine heights in order to unite himself with the One that is before all multiplicity. This union can be brought about by the pure exercise of the human reason, but also in the mysterious harmony of the individual life with the First Cause that is beyond all reason in the ecstasy [548] that is above all rationality. It can be achieved when at last the whole series of rebirths has been passed through, whereupon the pure soul, the divine in man, enters into the divinity of the Whole.[176]
To fly from the world—not to work within the world to produce something better—is the teaching and injunction of this last Greek philosophy. Away from separate, divided Being, upward towards the uninterrupted glory of the One divine life, the soul wings its way. The world, this visible world of matter, is fair, says Plotinos, for it is the work and image of the divine, present and working in it. A last gleam of the departing sunlight of Greek sensibility seems to break through the words in which Plotinos rejects the Christian-Gnostic hatred of the world.[177] The ugly, he says, is strange and contrary to God as well as to Nature.[178] But the soul must no longer rest in the world of created beauty.[179] The soul is so profoundly conscious of its derivation from the supra-sensual, of its divinity and eternity, that it must rise above all created being and reach out to the One that was before the world and remains for ever outside the world.[180]
This philosophy, profoundly estranged though it was from the old Greek attitude to life with its enjoyment of the world, nevertheless felt itself called upon to oppose the rising tide of the new and irresistible religion. It took under its protection the ancient Greek culture and the ancient faith that was so inseparably bound up with that culture. Its most convinced supporters, with the last of the Emperors of the old faith at their head, threw themselves whole-heartedly into the fray. And before them rode the Genius of ancient Hellas, and the old beliefs of Greece. But when the battle had been fought and lost it became apparent to all the world that it was a corpse that rode before the exalted combatants, like the body of the dead Cid Campeador fastened upon his horse and leading his hosts against the Moors. The ancient religion of Greece, and with it the whole civilized life of the Greek world, faded and died at that discovery, and could not be recalled to life. A newer faith, very differently endowed and having power to crush the heavily laden soul and point it upwards in absolute submission to the divine compassion, held the field. The new world that was coming into being had need of it.
And yet—was Greece quite extinguished and dead for ever? Much—only too much—of the philosophy of its old age lived on in the speculative system of the Christian faith. And in the whole of modern culture so far as it has built itself upon [549] Christianity or by extension from it, in all modern science and art, not a little survives of Greek genius and Greek inspiration. The outward embodiment of Hellas is gone; its spirit is imperishable. Nothing that has once been alive in the spiritual life of man can ever perish entirely; it has achieved a new form of existence in the consciousness of mankind—an immortality of its own. Not always in equal measure, nor always in the same place, does the stream of Greek thought rise to the surface in the life of mankind. But it is a river that never quite runs dry; it vanishes, to reappear; it buries itself to emerge again. Desinunt ista, non pereunt.
NOTES TO CHAPTER XIV
PART II
[1] See above, chap. v, [p. 162] f.
[2] Lucian 50, De Luctu: washing, anointing, crowning of the dead body, πρόθεσις: c. 11. Violent dirge-singing over the dead, 12; accompanied by the αὐλός, 19; and led by a special singer θρηνῶν σοφιστής, 20. Special lament by the father, 13. The dead is before them with jaws tied up and so secured against unsightly gaping—19 fin. (a stronger form of the Homeric σύν τε στόμ’ ἐρείδειν, λ 426). For this purpose narrow bands are drawn round the chin, cheeks, and forehead of the dead man. We sometimes see them represented on vases depicting a lying-in-state, and they have also been found sometimes in graves in which case they have been made of metal (gold or lead): see Wolters, Ath. Mitth. 1896, p. 367 ff. ἐσθής, κόσμος (even including horses and slaves) burnt or buried in company with the dead for his pleasure, 14. ὀβολός given to the dead, 10. The dead fed by χοαί and καθαγίσματα, 9. The gravestone crowned; sprinkled with ἄκρατος; burnt offering, 19. περίδειπνον after a three days’ fast, 24.