Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals

by J. C. Lawson

Indeed it would have been hard for the ancients to regard morality as a religious obligation, when immorality was freely imputed to their gods. This was a real obstacle to the ethical improvement of the people at large, and was recognised as such by many thinkers. Pindar strove to expurgate mythological stories which brought discredit on the morals of Olympus. Plato would have banished the evil records of Homeric theology from his ideal state, and ridicules Musaeus for forming no more lofty conception of future bliss than ‘eternal drunkenness.’ Epicurus defended his own attitude towards the gods on the plea that there was ‘no impiety in doing away with the popular gods, but rather in attaching to the gods the popular ideas of them[61].’ In effect, in order to reconcile religion with the teaching of ethics, the would-be preacher of morality had either openly to discard a large amount of the popular theology or else to have recourse to adaptation and mystical interpretation of so artificial and arbitrary a kind that it could gain no hold upon the simple and spontaneous beliefs of the common-folk. Yet even among the ordinary men of those days there must have been some who, though they did not aspire to instruct their fellow-men, yet in hours of sober reason and cool judgement cannot have viewed unabashed the inconsistencies of a religion whose gods were stained with human vices. But such thoughts, we may suppose, were swept away, as men approached their sanctuaries and their mysteries, by a flood of religious fervour. Passion in such moments defeated reason. Emotion, susceptibility, imagination, impetuosity, powers of visualisation regarded among western nations as the perquisite of the inebriate, powers of ecstasy not easily distinguished from hysteria,—such were the mental conditions essential to the highest acts of worship; by these, and not by sober meditation, the soul attained to the closest communing and fullest union with that god whose glory for the nonce outshone all pale remembrance of mere moral rectitude and alone was able to evoke every supreme emotion of his worshipper.

If then morality was ever to be imposed and sanctioned by religion, a wholly new religion had to be found. This was the opportunity of Christianity. Paganism, in some of its most sacred rites, had availed itself even of immoral means to secure a religious end: Christianity gave to ethics a new and higher status, and was rather in danger of making religion wholly subservient to morality. That it was difficult to bring the first converts to the new point of view, is evident from the rebukes administered by S. Paul to the Corinthians, who seem not only to have indulged in many gross forms of vice in everyday life, but even to have made the most sacred of Christian services an occasion for gluttony and drunkenness[62].

In all then that concerns the ethical standards of the people, our study of modern Greece will contribute little to the understanding of ancient thought or conduct. Christianity has fenced men about with a rigid moral code, and has exerted itself to punish those who break bounds. Duty towards man is now recognised as the complement of duty towards God; and any one who by a notoriously evil life has outraged the moral laws of conduct, is liable to be deprived by excommunication of the established means of worship. The frailties of the Greek character remain indeed such as they always were: but now religion at least enjoins, if it cannot always enforce, the observance of a moral code which includes the eighth commandment, and Pataecion, though he go regularly to church, yet lacks something.

But while the Church had an open field in matters of morality and had no system of ethics based on Hellenic religion to combat in introducing her higher views of man’s duty towards his fellow-men, in the province of pure religion and of all that concerns the relations of man with his God or gods she necessarily encountered competition and opposition. Primarily the contest between paganism and Christianity might have been expected to resolve itself into a struggle between polytheism and monotheism: but as a matter of fact that simple issue became considerably complicated.

The minds of the educated classes had become confused by the subtleties of the Gnostics, who sought to find, in some philosophical basis common to all religions, an intellectual justification for accepting Christianity without wholly discarding earlier religious convictions. This however was a matter of theology rather than of religion, appealing not to the heart but to the head: and so far as the common-folk were concerned we may safely say that such speculations were above their heads.

Yet for them too the issue was confused in two ways. The first disturbing factor was the attitude adopted by each of the two parties, pagan and Christian, towards the object of the other’s worship. The pagans—so catholic are the sympathies of polytheism—were ready enough to welcome Christ into the number of their gods. Tertullian tells us that the emperor Tiberius proposed the apotheosis of Christ[63]. Hadrian is said to have built temples in his honour[64]. Alexander Severus had in his private chapel statues of Christ, Abraham, and Orpheus[65]; and a similar association of Homer, Pythagoras, Christ, and S. Paul is noted by S. Augustine[66]. Since then there is no reason for supposing that the common-folk were more exclusive in their religious sympathies than the upper classes, it may safely be inferred that the average Pagan was willing to admit Christ to a place among the gods of Greece. The Christians on the other hand did not attack paganism by an utter denial of the existence of the old gods. They sought rather to ridicule and discredit them by pointing out the inconsistencies of pagan theology, and by ransacking mythology for every tale of the vices and misdoings of its deities. They even appealed to the testimony of Homer himself to show that the so-called gods (θεοί) of the Greek folk were mere demons (δαίμονες)[67],—for since Homer’s day the latter word had lost caste. Such methods, had they been wholly successful, might have produced similar results to those which followed the conflict of two religions in the early ages of Greece. As the Titanic dynasty of gods had fallen before the Olympian Zeus, and in their defeat had come to be accounted cruel and malicious powers rightly ousted from heaven by a more just and gracious deity, so too in turn might the whole number of the pagan gods have been reduced to the status of devils to act as a foil to the goodness of the Christian God. But this did not happen. One reason perhaps was that Christianity came provided with its own devil or devils, and the pagans were naturally averse from placing the gods whom they had been wont to venerate in the same category with spirits so uncompromisingly evil. The main reason however must be found in the fact that the Church had nothing to offer to the pagans in exchange for the countless gods of the old religion whom she was endeavouring to displace and to degrade. Indeed the real difficulty of the Christian Church was the tolerant spirit of the Greek people. They would not acknowledge that any feud existed. They were ready to worship the Christian God: but they must have felt that it was unreasonable of the Christian missionaries to ask them to give up all their old gods merely because a new god had been introduced. Even if their gods were all that the Christians represented them to be—cruel, licentious, unjust—that was no reason for neglecting them; rather it furnished a stronger motive for propitiating them and averting their wrath by prayer and sacrifice. Tolerant themselves, they must have resented a little the intolerance of the new religion.

Such being the attitude of the two parties, it may be doubted whether the Church would have made much headway in Greece, had it not been for a fresh development in her own conditions. And this development was the second disturbing factor in what should have been the simple struggle between monotheism and polytheism. Christianity, as understood by the masses, became polytheistic on its own account.

It is true that the authorities of the Greek Church have always taught that the angels and saints are not to be worshipped in the same sense as God. Ecclesiastical doctrine concedes to them no power to grant the petitions of men at their own will: they can act as intermediaries only between man and the Almighty; yet while they cannot in their own might fulfil the requests which they hear, their intervention as messengers to the throne of God is deemed to enhance the value of man’s prayers and wellnigh to ensure their acceptance. But such a doctrine is naturally too subtle for the uninstructed common-folk: and just as Christ had been admitted to the ranks of the Greek gods, so were the saints, it would seem, accepted as lesser deities or perhaps heroes. Whatever their precise status may have been, they at any rate became objects of worship; and a religion which admits many objects of worship becomes necessarily a form of polytheism.

Now while the Church did not sanction this state of things by her doctrine, there can be no doubt that she condoned it by the use to which she put it. The attempt to crush paganism had so far failed, and there was no longer any thought of a combat à outrance between the two religions. Violence was to give way to diplomacy; and the chief instrument of the Church’s diplomacy was the worship of the saints. It became her hope to supplant paganism by substituting for the old gods Christian saints of similar names and functions; and the effects of this policy are everywhere in evidence in modern Greece.

Thus Dionysus was displaced by S. Dionysius, as a story still current in Greece testifies. ‘Once upon a time S. Dionysius was on his way to Naxos: and as he went he espied a small plant which excited his wonder. He dug it up, and because the sun was hot sought wherewith to shelter it. As he looked about, he saw the bone of a bird’s leg, and in this he put the plant to keep it safe. To his surprise the plant began to grow, and he sought again a larger covering for it. This time he found the leg-bone of a lion, and as he could not detach the plant from the bird’s leg, he put both together in that of the lion. Yet again it grew and this time he found the leg-bone of an ass and put plant and all into that. And so he came to Naxos. And when he came to plant the vine—for the plant was in fact the first vine—he could not sever it from the bones that sheltered it, but planted them all together. Then the vine grew and bore grapes and men made wine and drank thereof. And first when they drank they sang like birds, and when they drank more they grew strong as lions, and afterwards foolish as asses[68].’