I. Institutions and Ideas determining the Moral Type
The city state the mold of Greek morality and the chief sphere of Greek moral activity
The Greek city state was the creator of the Greek conscience; that is to say, the relationships and activities of the Greek as a citizen, and not his relationships and activities as a husband or father or business man, determined his chief duties. Conscience was very little involved in that part of his life which lay outside the civic sphere. It was solely as a member of a city community, which was to the Greek what the Church was to the man of medieval times, that he could live the truly moral life and attain the highest virtue.
The Greek view of man’s nature as good
The common Greek view of man’s nature was like that of the Chinese moralists; that is, it conceived human nature as being essentially good.[428] And this conception included the whole of man’s nature, his body as well as his spirit. As we shall learn, this doctrine influenced profoundly the Greek conception of what is permissible and right in conduct. It made it seem right to give full, though regulated and reasonable, indulgence to the bodily impulses and instincts. It made the fundamental maxim of Greek morality to be, Live according to nature. It left no place in Greek thought for the Oriental notion of an antagonism between the flesh and the spirit. Hence asceticism with its repressions of the bodily instincts and appetites, which is so common an expression of the moral sentiment among the Oriental races, found no place in Greek morality till after Greek culture had come in contact with the religious and ethical systems of Asia.
The idea of harmony in the god world
Closely connected with this idea of the essential goodness and oneness of man’s nature was the conception of unity and harmony in the god world. In passing from the Orient to Greece we leave behind not only Indian pessimism, but Egyptian and Persian dualism. We leave behind that conception of disharmony and conflict in the invisible world which is such a characteristic phase of much of Oriental thought. We hear, indeed, the faint echo of a prehistoric struggle between the earth gods and the sky gods. But all now is peace. The Titans are chained, and the gods that are the friends of men reign supreme.[429]
Just as that Oriental dualistic world philosophy exercised a vast influence upon the moral ideals of the East and of the later Christian world that inherited that system of thought, making the moral life serious and strenuous, a fight against evil, so did the opposing Greek conception of unity and harmony in the god world exert a profound influence upon Greek morality, emptying the moral life of everything like strenuousness and battle. It made Greek morality to be like the morality of sensuous, joyous youth.
The character of the Greek gods
In strong contrast to Hebrew morality, which, as we have seen, was almost exclusively a religious one, springing, that is to say, from certain conceptions of God’s character and of his relations to man, Greek morality was in the main a lay or secular one. Aristotle, who gave scientific form to Greek ethics, allowed hardly any place in the moral code to religious duties. Yet, though the Greek moral ideal was not based upon religion, it was influenced by it; for there cannot be an entire separation of religion and morality. Religious beliefs, like beliefs of every other kind, help to shape men’s ideas of what is right and what is wrong in conduct.