Outline-history of Greek religion

by Lewis Richard Farnell

And yet this triumphant anthropomorphic art must have failed, and judged by the fragments that survive did fail, when it tried to reveal in clear outline and full light the half-shrouded forms of the nether world, the Chthonian Goddesses and the Eumenides whose nature appealed to the sense of religious awe, to what the Greeks called τὸ φρικῶδες, and did not brook to be wholly revealed. We may doubt therefore if even the statues of the Holy Ones, the Semnai, carved by Kalamis and Skopas, were types so expressive of the real moral-religious imagination that fashioned these figures of cult as were certain awestruck verses of Sophocles in the Œdipus Coloneus. Nevertheless, this ideal Greek art, by expressing in palpable forms of benign beauty the half-palpable personages of the lower world, did one service to religion and the religious imagination; it banished the uncouth and the terrible and helped to purge and tranquillise the Greek mind by investing the Chthonian powers with benevolence and grace. We discern here the influence of the Bacchic and Demeter mysteries working upon the artist and of the artist upon the popular faith. That the average Greek of the classic period was saved from the vampire terrors that Mr. Lawson has discovered in modern Greece^[102.2] was due equally to the religion and to the art that he saw around him.

Apart from this special fact, a phenomenon so momentous in the spiritual world as the flowering of this religious art in the fifth century claims prominent notice even in the slightest sketch of the whole history of Greek religion; for it must have worked an effect which no student of insight would be tempted to belittle upon the religious mood and thought of the people. Greek records sufficiently attest its religious working; even the alien Roman, Æmilius Paulus, when he approached the Pheidian masterpiece of Zeus Olympios felt the thrill of the ‘real presence’^[103.1]; when Aristophanes fervently calls on Athena as “the Maiden who holdeth our city in her hand and alone hath visible power and might and is called the Warder of the Gate,”^[103.2] he is thinking of the bronze statue carved by Pheidias and set to guard the entrance to the Akropolis.

It is impossible, then, that this beautiful idolatry, against which the philosophers might occasionally protest,^[103.3] could have weakened the popular faith in the native deities. Introduced suddenly into Rome it helped to destroy the old Roman animistic religion. But the religious instinct and history of Greece was wholly different from that of Rome. Greek polytheism would probably have perished or been transformed by alien systems of cult far sooner than it was, if Greek art had not fortified and ennobled it, rooting it deeply in the æsthetic-religious emotions and perceptions of the people. By establishing so convincingly the individuality of the Greek divinities, it preserved them from a too rapid absorption into the personalities of Oriental religions, when the fusion of west and east had been achieved by Alexander and his successors.

Influence of Literature: Pindar, Æschylus, Sophocles.—More familiar and apparently more answerable is the question concerning the influence of the poetic masterpieces of this period, the works of Pindar and the Attic drama, on the general history of Greek religion. The subject is obviously too complex for the scope of this summary, and has been handled by many scholars in large treatises. There is only room here for the most general statement of facts, tendencies and effects. As exponents of the highest contemporary religious thought the names of Pindar, Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are those of primary authority. It is easy and interesting to collect religious citations from their works, to compare these one with another and with the current polytheism. It is far more difficult to decide generally and in regard to any special point how far any one of them could have influenced or modified the popular religion. Nor are all these four on the same footing in respect of opportunity. For Pindar writes for dynasts and aristocrats and, being a hireling, might be thought fettered in the free expression of his sentiments; and in any case his public was more limited than that which the three dramatists addressed. Therefore their message was likely to reach further and to penetrate the Greek mind more deeply than anything that Pindar had to say; and that this was actually the case can be proved. Nevertheless, Pindar must be reckoned with as an original thinker who spoke words of power; in spite of his profession, his mind remained imperial and free; and in his attitude to the public religion he is to be grouped with Æschylus and Sophocles; and all three stand together and apart from Euripides. All three show the virility, the mental tranquillity combined with imagination and audacity, that marked the typical character of the greatest age of Hellas. And all three genially and without querulous protest, though with some freedom of criticism, accept the existing religious order, desiring to ennoble it, not to destroy it. Pindar himself was the establisher of certain new cults, and the first great literary preacher in Greece of Orphic eschatology, and, we may say, the first great poet in Europe who raised the theme of Paradise to the level of the highest poetry. Such a marvel of song on the mysteries of life and death as the second Olympian ode was a new voice in Hellas; how far it echoed, and with what influence on the faith of the people, is impossible to measure with accuracy. For the progress of this new eschatology, which is a weighty subject for the history of later Hellenism, we have some important negative evidence in the fact that neither Æschylus nor Sophocles show any knowledge of Orphism or interest in it, or any preoccupying concern with the state of the soul after death; nor in their occasional utterances concerning posthumous judgment do they go beyond the popular traditional view: though the thoughtful refinement of Sophocles suggested to him that there might be forgiveness of sins and reconciliation after death.^[105.1] Nor do we find anywhere in the works of the two dramatists any hint of that pregnant Orphic doctrine to which Pindar gives voice, that humanity is of divine origin—ἓν ἀνδρῶν ἓν Θεῶν γένος—a doctrine which passed into the higher thought of later Greece.

Leaving aside this special question, we find a certain general resemblance in the religious view of these earlier poets of the fifth century. All three preach the supremacy of Zeus, his omnipotence and perfect justice, while Sophocles lays stress on his mercy. The effect of this poetic message was probably great and certainly timely; for the growing power and frequency of hero-cult, which Pindar himself and the dramatists indirectly encouraged, was a danger to the higher religion; and the backward and less cultured Hellenes were doubtless liable to the propensity of the savage mind to prefer the worship of the local daimon to that of the high God. Against such degeneracy the works of the greatest fifth-century poets, like the masterpiece of the greatest fifth-century sculptor, served at least as an enduring protest in Hellas.

And it would be of interest to consider how far the sculptor, in regard to the general conception of his mighty theme and in the choice of mystic bywork whereby he made it articulate, drew certain suggestions from the poetry of Æschylus.

These poets also deal with the question of Fate and Destiny. The personal, or half-personal, Μοῖρα was an old but insignificant figure of the popular religion and mythology, and Homer is aware of her and has to reckon with her. She might become more formidable under the philosophic conception of τὸ εἱμαρμένον which appeared in the philosophy of Herakleitos; and we know that later philosophy and cultivated thought was much perplexed over the problem of the reconciliation of Fate with the idea of a free divine Providence. The great Attic poets, taking their cue from Homer, “follow a short cut,” interpreting Moira as the voice or agent or emanation of the power of Zeus.^[107.1] And the pupil of Pheidias, Theokosmos of Megara, was working out the same idea when he carved the Fates with the Hours as subordinate adjuncts to the great form of Zeus.^[107.1] We may say, then, that both the poetry and the art of this period worked for the deliverance of the polytheism from the burden of fatalism, which tends to lower the value and sap the force of all personal religion.

The Prometheus Vinctus of Æschylus expresses indeed a view of Zeus that conflicts with the higher religious thought of the poet. But Æschylus has here taken up a crude story that he cannot wholly moralise. On the other hand, his handling of the idea of the curse in the house of Pelops is not worked out on the lines of mechanical fatalism; one is made to feel it as a spiritual atmosphere which engenders a bias towards evil, but does not overpower the freedom of the individual.

Again, each of these poets, while accepting and in certain points purifying the traditional polytheism, was capable of religious thought that worked on other lines than anthropomorphism. The High God, Zeus, is generally for them a definite personal Being; but once at least Æschylus transcends this apprehension of him and defines Zeus pantheistically as a supreme cosmic force; a fragment of his ‘Heliades’ speaks of him thus: “Zeus is air, earth, heaven; Zeus is the whole of things, and whatsoever is higher still than these.” Moreover, the other divine forces that shape our lives are presented by him and his fellow-poets, not always as θεοί, but as moral powers that are only half-personal, not as concrete individual deities, but as emanations of the divinity. We may call them ‘personifications of moral ideas,’ and some are no more than what this phrase implies, such as those for instance with which Euripides capriciously plays. But some may be rather described as the Soul-powers of the High God, like, in some ways, to the Persian Fravashi; such are Pindar’s Σώτειρα Διὸς Ξενίου Θέμις,^[108.1] the Dike of Æschylus, “Justice, the Maiden Daughter of God,”^[108.2] who “shines in the poor man’s smoke-dimmed cabin”;^[108.3] Mercy in the verse of Sophocles,^[108.4] “Mercy shares the throne of God to deal with all the deeds of men.” While Pindar’s genius inclines to the brighter of these emanations, Æschylus broods rather over the gloomy forces of the shadowy world, which he might at times be constrained to present in palpable concrete form for stage purposes and yet his own deeper thought could grasp as half-outlined spiritual powers, not the less real because impalpable. The ordinary Hellene in his religious perceptions laid too much stress on personal individuality, as if this were the only criterion of ideal reality; from his point of view if Eros was to be a real power of the divine world, then Eros must be imagined as a beautiful youth. But Kypris or Aphrodite in a striking Sophoclean fragment is no longer presented as a personal goddess, but as a diffused pantheistic force.^[108.5] And the Attic drama may have enlarged the mental outlook of the succeeding generations in this matter; for the author of the speech against Aristogeiton in the fourth century must have been sure that his audience would understand him when he said, “all mankind have altars dedicated to Justice, Law-abidingness and Pity, the fairest and holiest (being those) in the very soul and the nature of each individual.”^[109.1] This is just how Euripides might speak.

The great fifth-century poets were all moralists each in his own way. The history of Greek ethics only concerns us at the several points where it touches religion; and to this history, both generally and on its religious side, the works of Pindar and the three dramatists make important contributions. Of special interest is their attitude to Greek mythology which, in spite of its general brightness and beauty, seriously needed in parts the puritanical reformer, if it was to be harmonised with the higher religious thought. But none of these poets, not even the grave Æschylus, was willing to undertake such a rôle. Pindar of all the three comes nearest to preaching, for his métier allowed him more personal freedom of comment. While following, on the whole, the beaten path of tradition, he could innovate or invent if a moral purpose was to be gained; for instance, he preaches to a friend the doctrine of forgiveness of injuries and confirms it by the example of Zeus, who forgave and released the Titans, a myth for which he is the sole authority.^[109.2] We find him anticipating Plato in his protest against some grotesque and repulsive stories, such as the cannibalism of the Gods in the myth of Pelops, or blasphemous stories, such as the theomachies and the combats of heroes against divinities: “let all war and strife stand far apart from the immortals”^[109.3] is a good sententious maxim for the expurgation of Greek mythology and for the enrichment of Greek ethico-religious thought. But neither Pindar nor the two older dramatists protest against the more licentious myths, and they accept at need various legends about the amours of the Gods. In fact, the axiom that sexual purity was an essential attribute of all divinity was not yet accepted by the higher thought of Greece.