If we now could consider in detail the various moral conceptions attached to the high State divinities of Greece and the East, we should be struck with a general similarity in the point of view of the various culture-stocks. The higher deities, on the whole, are ethical beings who favour the righteous and punish transgressors; and the worship of Greece falls here into line with the Hebraic conceptions of a god of righteousness. But in one important particular Hellenic thought markedly differs from Oriental, especially the Persian. In the people’s religion throughout Hellas the deities are, on the whole, worshipped as beneficent, as doing good to their worshippers, so long as these do not offend or sin against them. The apparent exceptions are no real exceptions. Ares may have been regarded as an evil god by the poet or the philosopher, but we cannot discover that this was ever the view of the people who cared to establish his cult. The Erinyes are vindictive; nevertheless, they are moral, and the struggle between them and Apollo in the Aeschylean drama is only the contest between a more barbaric and a more civilised morality. In the list of Greek divine titles and appellatives, only one or two at most can be given a significance of evil.
Doubtless, beneath the bright anthropomorphic religion lurked a fear of ghosts and evil spirits, and the later days of Hellenic paganism were somewhat clouded with demonology. But the average Greek protected himself sufficiently by purification and easy conventional magic. He did not brood on the principle of evil or personify it as a great cosmic power, and therefore he would not naturally evolve a system of religious dualism, though the germs from which this might grow may be found in Orphic tradition and doctrine. Contrast this with the evidence from Egypt, Assyria, and Persia. The Egyptian and Assyrian records bear strong impress of the prominence and power of the belief in evil spirits. The high gods of Assyria were continually being invoked and implored by the worshipper to save him from the demons, and one of these, Ira, a demon of pestilence, seems to have received actual worship; and much of Egyptian private ritual was protective magic against them.
But nowhere did the power of evil assume such grand proportions as in the old Mazdean creed of Persia, and the dualism between the good and evil principle became here the foundation of a great religion that spread its influence wide through the West. The religion had its prophet, Zarathustra, in whose historic reality we ought not to doubt. In his system the faithful Mazdean is called upon to play his part in the struggle between Ahura-Mazda and Angra-Mainyu, and this struggle continues through the ages till in the final cataclysm the Daevas, or evil demons, will be overthrown. We note here that this faith includes the idea of a final Judgment, so familiar to Judaic and Christian thought, but scarcely to be found in the native Hellenic religion. Further, it should be observed that the Mazdean dualism between good and evil has nothing in common with the Platonic antithesis between mind and sense, or St. Paul’s between spirit and flesh, or with the hatred of the body that is expressed in Buddhism. The good Mazdean might regard his body as good and pure, and therefore he escaped, as by a different way did the Greek, from the tyranny of a morbid asceticism. Only he developed the doctrine of purity into a code more burdensome than can be found, I think, elsewhere. The ideas of ritual-purity on which he framed this code are found broadcast through the East and in Egypt, and appear in the Hellenic religion also. The Greek, however, did not allow himself to be oppressed by his own cathartic system, but turned it to excellent service in the domain of law, as I have tried to show elsewhere.[20.1]
Generally, as regards the association of religion and morality, we find this to be always intimate in the more developed races, but our statistics are insufficient for us to determine with certainty the comparative strength of the religious sanction of morals in the ancient societies of the Mediterranean. The ethical-religious force of the Zarathustrian faith seems to approach that of the Hebraic. We should judge it to be stronger, at least, than any that was exercised in Hellas, for Hellas, outside the Orphic sects, had neither sacred books of universal recognition nor a prophet. Yet all Hellenic morality was protected by religion, and the Delphic oracle, which occasionally was able to play the part of the father-confessor, encouraged a high standard of conduct—as high as the average found elsewhere in the ancient world. We may note, however, one lacuna in the Hellenic code: neither Greek ethics, on the whole, nor Greek religion, emphasised or exalted or deified the virtue of truth; but we hear of a goddess of Truth in Egypt, and it becomes a cardinal tenet and a divine force in the Zarathustrian ideal.
Again, in all ancient societies religion is closely interwoven with political, legal, and social institutions, and its influence on these concerns the history of the evolution of society and law. It is only in modern society, or in a few most ideal creeds at periods of great exaltation, that a severance is made between Cæsar and God. Save Buddhism, the religions of the ancient societies of the East and of Egypt were all in a sense political. Darius regards himself as specially protected by Ahura-Mazda, and we are told by Herodotus[21.1] that in the private Persian’s prayers no separate personal benefits were besought, but only the welfare of the King and the Persian community. The gods of Assyria inspire counsel and order the campaign; Shamash, the sun-god, is “Just Ruler” and the “Lord of Law”; and Ninib is styled the god “who lays for ever the foundation-stone of the State,” and who, like Zeus ὅριος, and the Latin Terminus, “protects the boundaries of the cornfield.” The Syrian goddess of Bambyke, Kybele of Phrygia, Astarte of Askalon, all wear the mural crown, the badge of the city goddess. But I doubt if our materials are as yet rich enough to inform us in what precise way religion played a constructive part in the oldest civilisations,—namely, those of Assyria and Egypt. We may observe that the code of Hammurabi, our oldest legal document, is curiously secular and in many respects modern.
The question can be most fruitfully pursued in the study of the Greek societies; for no other religion of which we have any record was so political as the Hellenic, not even, as I should judge, the Roman, to which it bears the closest resemblance in this respect. The very origin of the πόλις, the city-state, was often religious; for the name or title of the deity often gave a name to the city, and the temple was in this case probably the centre of the earliest residence. In the organised and complex Greek societies, every institution of the State—the assembly, the council, the law-courts, the agrarian economy, all the regulations of the family and clan—were consecrated and safeguarded by the supervision of some deity. Often he or she was worshipped as in a literal sense the State ancestor, and in one of the temples might be found burning the perpetual fire which symbolised the permanence of the city’s life. And in Greece we find a unique phenomenon, which, though small, is of great significance—the deity might here and there be made to take the office and title of a civic magistrate. For instance, Apollo was στεφανηφόρος in Asia Minor cities, and in the later days of Sparta, as the recent excavations have shown, the ghost of Lykourgos was elected as the chief inspector of the education of the young.
To the superficial observer, then, the Greek civic society might appear a theocracy. But such a view would imply ignorance of the average character of the ancient Greek world. There can be no theocracy where there is no theocrat. In Asia Minor the priest might be a great political power, but in Greece this was never so. Here the political, secular, utilitarian interest dominates the religion. The high divinities become politicians, and immersed in secular affairs, and even take sides in the party strife, as some of the religious titles attest. Thus Greek religion escaped morbidity and insanity, becoming genial and human, and compensating by its adaptability to the common needs of social life for what it lacked of mystery and aloofness. Therefore, also, in Greek invocations and hymns we do not often hear the echo of that sublimity that resounds in the Iranian, Assyrian, and still more in the Hebrew liturgies.
Another interesting point of comparison is the relation of religion to the arts and sciences. Their association may be said to have been more intimate in Hellenism than it has been found to be in any other creed. We can estimate what music and the drama owed to Apollo and Dionysos, and how the life of the philosopher, artist, and poet was considered consecrated to certain divinities. We hear of the Delphic oracle encouraging philosophic pursuits. The name “Museum” is a landmark in the religious history of education, and we know that the temple of Asklepios in Kos was the cradle of the school of modern medicine. The records of the other religions of this area show glimpses of the same association, and more extended research may throw further light on it. The Babylonian gods Nebo and Ea were divinities of wisdom and the arts, and to the former, who was the inventor of writing, the library of Ashurbanapal was consecrated. Chaldean astronomy was evolved from their astrology, which was itself a religious system. But demonology was stronger in Assyria, Persia, and Egypt than in Hellas, and demonology is the foe of science. In the Zend-Avesta the priestly medicine-man, who heals by spell and exorcism, is ranked higher than the scientific practitioner. A chapter might be written on the negative advantages of Greek religion, and none was of greater moment than this—that it had no sacred books or authoritative religious cosmogony to oppose to the dawn and the development of scientific inquiry. Asklepios had been a practitioner in the method of thaumaturgic cures, but he accepted Hippokrates genially when the time came.
As regards the relation between Greek philosophy and Greek religion, something may remain to be discovered by any scholar who is equally familiar with both. It would be absurd to attempt to summarise the facts in a few phrases here. I wish merely to indicate the absence in pure Hellenic speculation of any elaborated system of theosophy, such as the late Egyptian “gnosis,” till we come to Neo-Platonism, when the Greek intellect is no longer pure. We discover also a vacuum in the religious mind and nomenclature of the earlier Greek: he had neither the concept nor any name to express the concept of what we call “faith,” the intellectual acceptance and confessional affirmation of certain dogmas concerning the divinity; and in this respect he differed essentially not only from the Christian, but also from the Iranian and Buddhistic votary.
A great part of the study of ancient religion is a study of ritual, and it is interesting to survey the Mediterranean area, so as to discern similarities or divergencies in the forms of religious service. Everywhere we observe the blood-sacrifice of animals, and very frequently the harmless offering of fruits and cereals, and now one, now the other, in Greece as elsewhere, was regarded as the more pious. The former is of the higher interest, for certain ideas which have been constructive of higher religions—our own, for example—have grown out of it. At first sight the animal oblation seems everywhere much the same in character and significance. The sacrificial ritual of Leviticus does not differ in any essential trait from that which commended itself to the Greeks and the other peoples of these lands. Certain animals are everywhere offered, at times as a free and cheerful gift, at other times as an atonement to expiate sin and to deprecate wrath. Certain other animals are tabooed, for reasons that may repay searching out.