They are artists' dreams, ideals, allegories; they are symbols of something beyond themselves. They are Gods of half-rejected tradition, of unconscious make-believe, of aspiration. They are gods to whom doubtful philosophers can pray, with all a philosopher's due caution, as to so many radiant and heart-searching hypotheses. They are not gods in whom any one believes as a hard fact. Does this condemn them? Or is it just the other way? Is it perhaps that one difference between Religion and Superstition lies exactly in this, that Superstition degrades its worship by turning its beliefs into so many statements of brute fact, on which it must needs act without question, without striving, without any respect for others or any desire for higher or fuller truth? It is only an accident—though perhaps an invariable accident—that all the supposed facts are false. In Religion, however precious you may consider the truth you draw from it, you know that it is a truth seen dimly, and possibly seen by others better than by you. You know that all your creeds and definitions are merely metaphors, attempts to use human language for a purpose for which it was never made. Your concepts are, by the nature of things, inadequate; the truth is not in you but beyond you, a thing not conquered but still to be pursued. Something like this, I take it, was the character of the Olympian Religion in the higher minds of later Greece. Its gods could awaken man's worship and strengthen his higher aspirations; but at heart they knew themselves to be only metaphors. As the most beautiful image carved by man was not the god, but only a symbol, to help towards conceiving the god;[77:1] so the god himself, when conceived, was not the reality but only a symbol to help towards conceiving the reality. That was the work set before them. Meantime they issued no creeds that contradicted knowledge, no commands that made man sin against his own inner light.
FOOTNOTES:
[39:1] Hdt. i. 60 ἐπεί γε ἀπεκρίθη ἐκ παλαιτέρου τοῦ βαρβάρου ἔθνεος τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν ἐὸν καὶ δεξιώτερον καὶ εὐηθίης ἠλιθίου ἀπηλλαγμένον μᾶλλον. As to the date here suggested for the definite dawn of Hellenism Mr. Edwyn Bevan writes to me: 'I have often wondered what the reason is that about that time a new age began all over the world that we know. In Nearer Asia the old Semitic monarchies gave place to the Zoroastrian Aryans; in India it was the time of Buddha, in China of Confucius.' Εὐηθίη ἠλίθιος is almost 'Urdummheit'.
[40:1] See in general Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, vol. i; Leaf, Companion to Homer, Introduction: R. G. E., chap. ii; Chadwick, The Heroic Age (last four chapters); and J. L. Myres, Dawn of History, chaps. viii and ix.
[40:2] Since writing the above I find in Vandal, L'Avènement de Bonaparte, p. 20, in Nelson's edition, a phrase about the Revolutionary soldiers: 'Ils se modelaient sur ces Romains . . . sur ces Spartiates . . . et ils créaient un type de haute vertu guerrière, quand ils croyaient seulement le reproduire.'
[41:1] Hdt. i. 56 f.; Th. i. 3 (Hellen son of Deucalion, in both).
[42:1] Hdt. i. 58. In viii. 44 the account is more detailed.
[42:2] The Homeric evidence is, as usual, inconclusive. The word βάρβαροι is absent from both poems, an absence which must be intentional on the part of the later reciters, but may well come from the original sources. The compound βαρβαρόφωνοι occurs in B 867, but who knows the date of that particular line in that particular wording?
[42:3] Paper read to the Classical Association at Birmingham in 1908.