Growing force of personal religion.—Yet the Hellene in the fourth century and in the early days of Macedonian ascendancy began to crave other outlets for his religious emotion than the traditional cults of his phratry or tribe or city. Personal religion was beginning to be a more powerful impulse and to stimulate a craving in the individual for a more intimate union with the divinity, such, for instance, as was offered freely by the Great Mysteries of Eleusis. And we have fairly sufficient evidence that the fourth century witnessed a great extension of their influence.[138.1] The mysteries of Megalopolis were instituted and those of Andania were reorganised by their aid; and the first Ptolemy is said to have invited an apostle from Eleusis to assist in some religious institutions of his new city of Alexandria.[138.2]
The religious brotherhoods.—The same aspiration was also satisfied by the private θίασοι, the guilds of brethren devoted to the special cult of one divinity. These unions belong to the type of the secret religious society which is found in all parts of the world at varying levels of culture. In Greece we have evidence of them as early as the time of Solon; it was probably not till the fifth century that any of them were instituted for the service of foreign divinities; we hear then of the thiasos of the Thracian Goddess, and in the earlier half of the fourth century of the orgiastic fraternity devoted to Sabazios, with which Æschines in his youth was associated. But it is not till the Macedonian period that the epigraphic record of them begins; henceforth the inscriptions are numerous and enlightening concerning their organisation and their wide prevalence throughout the Hellenic world.[139.1] Their importance for the history of religion is great on various grounds.
They show the development of the idea of a humanitarian religion in that they transcend, in most cases, the limits of the old tribal and civic religion and invite the stranger; so that the members, both men and women, associate voluntarily, no longer on the ground of birth or status, but drawn together by their personal devotion to a particular deity, to whom they stand in a far more intimate and individual relation than the ordinary citizen could stand to the divinities of his tribe and city. This sense of divine fellowship might sometimes have been enhanced by a sacrament which the members partook of together; we know that this was the bond of fellowship in the Samothracian mysteries, which were beginning to appeal widely to the early Hellenistic world. A common meal at least, a love-feast or ‘Agape,’ formed the chief bond of the ‘thiasotai,’ and this was sometimes a funeral-feast commemorative of the departed brother or sister. There was nothing to prevent the thiasos choosing as its patron-deity some one of the leading divinities of traditional polytheism, to which they must not be supposed, as Foucart supposed them, to stand in any natural antagonism; therefore, for instance, there were local reasons why Greek merchants whose central meeting-point was Rhodes should form θίασοι under the protection and in the name of Zeus Xenios, the God who protects the stranger, or of Athena Lindia, the ancient and powerful divinity of Lindos, or of Helios, the prehistoric Sun-God whose personality pervaded the whole island. So far, then, the religious importance of these societies consists in their quickening influence on personal religion, in the gratification that they afforded to the individuals craving for personal union with the Godhead, also in their organisation which aroused a keener sense of religious fellowship between the members, and which later served as a model to the nascent Christian community. But in the history of the Hellenic religion their significance is even greater on another ground, namely, that they bear a most striking testimony to that fusion of East and West which it was the object of Alexander, and the mission of his successors, to effect; for many of these religious brotherhoods, whose members and organisation were Hellenic, were consecrated to foreign deities, Sabazios, Adonis, Xousares, the Syrian Goddess; so that they played undesignedly the part of missionaries in the momentous movement sometimes called the Θεοκρασία, the blending of Eastern and Western religions and divine personalities, of which the significance will be considered a little later.
Menander.—The student who is tracking the course of the religious life and experience of Hellas through the Hellenistic period should endeavour to gather beforehand a vivid impression of the spirit of the Menandrian comedy. For Menander, the friend of Epicurus and the devoted admirer of Euripides, was the favoured heir of the humanitarian spirit that had gleamed fitfully even in the Homeric period and had gathered strength and articulate expression in the century before Alexander opened the gates of the East. Patronised and courted by Demetrios Phalereus and Ptolemy, admired by the scholars and reading public of Alexandria and the Hellenistic world even more than he had been by his own contemporaries, Menander was eminently in a position to give a tone to the religious sentiment of this period; and the Anthologies of his works prove that he was actually reverenced as an ethical-religious teacher.[141.1] Therefore, for the general exoteric history of Greek religion he counts for more than any of the philosophers, for he addressed a far larger public. Yet the message that he has to deliver has come to him from the philosophers and from the inspiration of the humanised Attic spirit, of which he appears the most delicate and final expression. While writing and thinking pre-eminently as the cultured Athenian of the close of the fourth century, he is the mouthpiece of cosmopolitanism in ethics and religion—“no good man is alien to me; the nature of all is one and the same (οὐδείς ἐστί μοι ἀλλότριος ἂν ᾖ χρηστός· ἡ φύσις μία πάντων)”[142.1]; the Terentian formula—‘homo sum, humanum nil a me alienum puto’—is only an extension of this, losing something of its ethical colouring. Many of the fragments, showing striking approximations to New Testament teaching, are of vital importance for the history of Greek ethics. As regards religion, they may contain protests against superstition and the extravagance of sacrifice proffered as a bribe[142.2]; but they exhibit no real or veiled attack on the popular polytheism as a whole. On the other hand, they have preserved many memorable sentences that bear witness to the development of a religion more personal, more inward and spiritual than had hitherto been current, save perhaps in Platonic circles. God is presented as a spirit and as spiritually discerned by the mind of man; and a high ideal of Platonic speculation is delivered to the public in the beautiful line, φῶς ἐστὶ τῷ νῷ πρὸς θεὸν βλέπειν ἀέι, “the light of the mind is to gaze ever upon God.”[142.3] The sense of close and mystic communion between man and the divine omnipresent spirit is strikingly attested in the passage of one of his unknown comedies: “a guardian spirit [δαίμων] stands by every man, straightway from his birth, to guide him into the mysteries of life, a good spirit, for one must not imagine that there is an evil spirit injuring good life, but that God is utterly good.”[143.1]
In attempting to grasp what is most elusive, the inner religious sentiment of any period, it is important to remember that the author of such expression was dear to at least the cultivated public of the Hellenistic age.
The Θεοκρασία.—The tolerant humanitarianism of Menander, of which we catch the echo in certain formulæ inscribed on the Delphic and other temples, is reflected in that which is perhaps the most striking religious phenomenon of this period, namely, the ‘theocrasia,’ the fusion of divinities of East and West. As regards religious theory this is not to be regarded as a new departure. Herodotus shows how natural it was to the Hellenic mind to interpret the deities of foreign nations in terms of its native pantheon; and it was easy for Euripides to commend Kybele as Demeter.[143.2] But it was by no means easy, in fact it was exceedingly dangerous, before the time of Alexander, to introduce any unauthorised foreign cult into the City-State. We hear vaguely of the death-sentence inflicted or threatened on those who did so. Nevertheless, as we have seen, such foreigners as Sabazios and Attis were intruding themselves into Athens at the time of the Peloponnesian war, trailing with them the orgiastic atmosphere of Phrygia; and at some indefinite time before this the impure ritual of certain Oriental Goddess-cults had invaded the Corinthian worship of Aphrodite. But after the establishment of the kingdoms of the Diadochi, the gentile barrier in religion loses gradually its force and significance. It was, in fact, a far-sighted measure of policy on the part of some of the kings to establish some common cult that might win the devotion of the Hellenic and Oriental peoples alike. Such was the intention of Ptolemy when he founded at Alexandria the cult of the Babylonian god, Sarapis, whom the Egyptians were able owing to a similarity of name to identify with their Osiris-Apis, and the Hellenes with their Plouton, owing to the accidental fact that an image of this underworld-god happened to be consecrated to the cult at its first institution. Similarly, when the Syrian city of Bambyke was resettled as Hierapolis by Seleukos Nikator, the personality of the great goddess, Atargatis, was blent with that of Artemis, Hera, Aphrodite and other Hellenic goddesses; and the treatise of Lucian, de Dea Syria, gives us the most interesting picture presented by antiquity of the working of the θεοκρασία in the domain of religion and religious art.
The spirit of syncretism grows stronger and more pervading through the later Greek and Græco-Roman periods, and dominates the later Orphic and Gnostic thought; and the inscriptions, usually the best record of the popular religious practice, attest its wide diffusion. We find the deities of diverse lands—Egypt, Syria and Greece—linked together in the same formula of thanksgiving and the same offering dedicated to them all. And the name Zeus is applied to so many gods of the East that in the cult-formulæ it seems often to have lost all its personal and concrete value and acquired the vaguer meaning of ‘God.’ The Jewish Jahivé himself—under the name Ἰάω—was occasionally identified with him and at times, it seems, even with Dionysos.[145.1]
The importance of this movement for religious thought was of the highest. Varro’s view, recorded by Augustine.[145.2] that the name of the deity made no difference, so long as ‘the same thing is understood,’ and that therefore the God of the Jews was the same as Jupiter, is a great idea that has been bequeathed to the world by Greek tolerance and Greek sanity. Only a nation could attain to this freedom of religious imagination that was not held captive by the magic spell of names[145.3] which made it so difficult for the Jew to shake off the tribal spirit of the religious blood-feud. This Hellenic expression of religious enlightenment prepared the way for monotheism and thus indirectly for Christianity. It also could induce the pantheistic idea of a diffused omnipresent spirit of divinity, such as is expressed in the lines of Aratos, the scientific poet of the third century B.C., “all the ways are full of (the spirit of) God, and all the gathering-places of men, the sea and harbours; and at every turn we are all in need of God,[145.4] for we are of kin to him.”
Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism.—This pantheistic speculation inspires some of the dogmas of Stoicism; and for most of the Stoic writers and thinkers the concept of divinity was less that of a personal concrete Being than of a spiritual force or soul-power immanent in things; therefore while some of them tried to find a place in their metaphysical system for the creations of the polytheism and even a justification for augury and divination, the impression left on our minds by the fragments that have come down to us of the religious speculation of the Stoa is as of a system alien and antipathetic to the popular theistic point of view and especially to the social religion of kin-group and city; and Zeno the founder is said to have protested against shrines and idols.[146.1] His protest was in vain; nor is there any clear indication that Stoicism had any influence on the religious thought and practice of the average man of the people; unless, indeed, the emergence of the cult of Αρετή, Virtue, in the second century B.C. at Pergamon and Smyrna was suggested by the strong theologic colouring that the Stoics gave to morality.[146.2]
As for Epicureanism, it cannot be regarded normally as a religious force; if it touched the popular mind at all its influence must have been generally in the direction of atheism or indifferentism; the only signs that it did are occasional grave-inscriptions that breathe the Epicurean spirit of unperturbed quiescence in regard to the posthumous fate of the soul.