Next, let us consider what happened when, instead of merely rejecting the Gods en masse, people tried carefully to collect what remained of religion after the Olympian system fell.
Aristotle himself gives us a fairly clear answer. He held that the origins of man's idea (ἔννοια) of the Divine were twofold,[136:1] the phenomena of the sky and the phenomena of the human soul. It is very much what Kant found two thousand years later. The spectacle of the vast and ordered movements of the heavenly bodies are compared by him in a famous fragment with the marching forth of Homer's armies before Troy. Behind such various order and strength there must surely be a conscious mind capable
Κοσμῆσαι ἵρρους τε καὶ ἀνέρας ἀσπιδιώτας,
To order steeds of war and mailèd men.
It is only a step from this to regarding the sun, moon, and stars as themselves divine, and it is a step which both Plato and Aristotle, following Pythagoras and followed by the Stoics, take with confidence. Chrysippus gives practically the same list of gods: 'the Sun, Moon, and Stars; and Law: and men who have become Gods.'[136:2] Both the wandering stars and the fixed stars are 'animate beings, divine and eternal', self-acting subordinate gods. As to the divinity of the soul or the mind of man, the earlier generations are shy about it. But in the later Stoics it is itself a portion of the divine life. It shows this ordinarily by its power of reason, and more conspicuously by becoming ἔνθεος, or 'filled with God', in its exalted moments of prevision, ecstasy, and prophetic dreams. If reason itself is divine, there is something else in the soul which is even higher than reason or at least more surprisingly divine.
Let us follow the history of both these remaining substitutes for the Olympian gods.
First for the Heavenly bodies. If they are to be made divine, we can hardly stop there. The Earth is also a divine being. Old tradition has always said so, and Plato has repeated it. And if Earth is divine, so surely are the other elements, the Stoicheia, Water, Air, and above all, Fire. For the Gods themselves are said by Plato to be made of fire, and the Stars visibly are so. Though perhaps the heavenly Fire is really not our Fire at all, but a πέμπτον σῶμα, a 'Fifth Body', seeing that it seems not to burn nor the Stars to be consumed.
This is persuasive enough and philosophic; but whither has it led us? Back to the Olympians, or rather behind the Olympians; as St. Paul puts it (Gal. iv. 9), to 'the beggarly elements'. The old Korê, or Earth Maiden and Mother, seems to have held her own unshaken by the changes of time all over the Aegean area. She is there in prehistoric Crete with her two lions; with the same lions orientalized in Olympia and Ephesus; in Sparta with her great marsh birds; in Boeotia with her horse. She runs riot in a number of the Gnostic systems both pre-Christian and post-Christian. She forms a divine triad with the Father and the Son: that is ancient and natural. But she also becomes the Divine Wisdom, Sophia, the Divine Truth, Aletheia, the Holy Breath or Spirit, the Pneuma. Since the word for 'spirit' is neuter in Greek and masculine in Latin, this last is rather a surprise. It is explained when we remember that in Hebrew the word for Spirit, 'Ruah', is mostly feminine. In the meantime let us notice one curious development in the life of this goddess. In the old religion of Greece and Western Asia, she begins as a Maiden, then in fullness of time becomes a mother. There is evidence also for a third stage, the widowhood of withering autumn.[138:1] To the classical Greek this motherhood was quite as it should be, a due fulfilment of normal functions. But to the Gnostic and his kind it connoted a 'fall', a passage from the glory of Virginity to a state of Sin.[138:2] The Korê becomes a fallen Virgin, sometimes a temptress or even a female devil; sometimes she has to be saved by her Son the Redeemer.[138:3] As far as I have observed, she loses most of her earthly agricultural quality, though as Selene or even Helen she keeps up her affinity with the Moon.
Almost all the writers of the Hellenistic Age agree in regarding the Sun, Moon, and Stars as gods. The rationalists Hecataeus and Euhemerus, before going on to their deified men, always start with the heavenly bodies. When Plutarch explains in his beautiful and kindly way that all religions are really attempts towards the same goal, he clinches his argument by observing that we all see the same Sun and Moon though we call them by different names in all languages.[139:1] But the belief does not seem to have had much religious intensity in it, until it was reinforced by two alien influences.
