Lewis Richard Farnell

“ Finally, the Homeric ritual appears as on the higher level of theism. We can detect it in no trace of savagery and but little contamination of the religion with magic. The sacrifice is more than a mere bribe; it is a friendly communion with the divinity; and the service is solemn and beautiful with hymn and dance. The cult is furnished with altar and sometimes with temple and a priesthood, but not yet, as a rule, with the idol, though this is beginning to appear. ”

“ The sacred place of worship might be a natural cave, or a ‘temenos,’ a fenced clearing in a grove, containing as the ἄγαλμα of the deity a tree-trunk or holy pillar or heap of stones, whence gradually an artificial altar might be evolved; the latter had become, some time before Homer, the usual receptacle of sacrifice and was a prominent figure in the Minoan-Mycenæan religion, which usually associated it with a sacred tree or pillar, the token of the deity’s presence or a magnet for attracting it, but not with any iconic statue or idol. ”

“ Sketch of Homeric religion.—The poems of Homer present us with an advanced polytheism, a system in which the divinities are already correlated in some sort of hierarchy and organised as a divine family under a supreme God. These divine beings are not mere ‘daimones’ or ‘numina,’ such as were in the main the old deities of Rome, vague and dimly outlined forces animate yet scarcely personal; but rather concrete and individual Θεοί of robust and sharply defined personality, not spirits but immortal beings of superhuman substance and soul, conceived in the glorified image of man. ”

“ And the surviving works of sculpture, painting and glyptic, wrought either for public or private purposes, present us often not only with facts of religion and ritual unrecorded in literature, but also with an impression hard to gain otherwise of the religious consciousness of the people and serve also as witnesses to the strength of the religious feeling. For instance, the knowledge and appreciation of Athena’s personality that we derive from Attic monuments is deeper and more vivid than any that we gain from the literature. ”

“ The moral judgment begins to look to the soul or the inner principle; the doctrine begins to be proclaimed that God as a spiritual power can read the heart of man and judges him by that; that sin lies not in the external act alone; that external ritualistic purity is of less avail than purity of soul. Such thoughts as these which could serve as the foundation-stones of a new religion and which helped to shape the later religious history of Europe were mainly a heritage from the speculation of the sixth century and were in the air of the fifth. ”

“ Nothing is more erroneous than the view which is sometimes expressed, that the popular devotion to the old religion was abating and its divine personalities and forms losing life and value towards the close of the fifth century. In their dark days the Athenians bided truer to their old faith than did Rome in her time of terror. We do not find a prostrate Athens turning desperately for aid to alien Oriental cults. We hear indeed of the beginnings of Adonis-cult in the latter part of the Peloponnesian war, the first ripple of a wave of Orientalism that was to surge westward later. ”

“ The stories about the Gods, often of the type natural to savage folklore, did not constitute ancient religion; and they were the less able to choke the growth of a higher ethical-religious spirit in that they were not enshrined in sacred books that could speak with authority to the people. Yet we have not infrequent proofs in Greek literature, notably in Plato’s Euthyphron, that they might exercise at times an immoral influence on men’s conduct. Meantime the educational movement in the sixth and fifth centuries had awakened men’s minds to the importance of the moral question in literature. ”

“ At the same time, our knowledge is much indebted to the great prose-writers of Greece, the philosophers, historians and orators; among the philosophers, especially to Plato, who more copiously than any of the others reveals to us, however much he idealises, the religious psychology and cult-phenomena of his period; among the historians, especially to Herodotus, who is the intellectual ancestor of the modern anthropologist and student of comparative religion and whose presentation of the facts is coloured with religious conviction. ”

“ It affords a keen stimulus to local patriotism and quickens an ardent life within the wall of the city; it has at the same time the natural defects of narrowness of view. Yet, in the course of religious evolution, we must regard the old Hellenic conception of the God the Father of the tribe or the city as pregnant of the larger idea of God as the Father of mankind, an idea which had already dawned upon Homer at a time when the tribal spirit of religion was still at its height. ”

“ But they also helped the people to imagine them better and more nobly. Perhaps the earliest art of Hellas that takes rank among the works of high religious inspiration are the Attic vase-paintings produced near to 500 B.C. that portray the thiasos of Dionysos. The strong spirit of that religion that lifted the votary above the conventional moral human life, the wild joy of self-abandonment, the ecstasy of communion with the God, all are here more startlingly expressed than even in the lyrics of the Bacchæ of Euripides or in the single perfect Bacchic ode of Sophocles’ Antigone. ”

“ The deity was generally imagined not as a spirit or a vague cosmic force, but as glorified man, and therefore the religion became adaptable to human progress in arts, civilisation and morality. But much in the animal world still appeared sacred and weird; and the deity might be at times incarnate in animal form. At the same time the religious imagination was still partly free from the bias of personal theism, and produced vaguer divine forms, of some force and power, but belonging rather to ‘animatism’ or polydaimonism than to polytheism. ”

“ But the work which reflects most vividly the popular religion and betrays the strongest sympathy with it is the Laws, a work of his old age in which the conservative spirit of the religious reformer is no less striking than the intellectual decay of the philosopher. ”

“ For in spite of its secular freedom, which is its salient achievement, Greek literature in its highest and most popular forms, as well as in its narrower and more special, is deeply infused or preoccupied with religion and religious myth. In fact, it reflects the vivifying penetration of religion into all parts of Greek activity and mental life. ”

“ Ethical religion.—The theistic system had been turned to good account in other directions than the political before it appeared on the canvas of Homer. The whole morality of early social life had been nurtured and protected by it; for we may maintain that the ethical religious spirit of Homer—unless we regard him as a man or as a group of men to whom a special revelation had been made—must reflect in some degree a tradition that had grown up in the centuries before him. ”

“ But happily for the Greek imagination, the divinities of the world of death, abiding below the earth, tended to take on the benign functions of the powers of vegetation. The God of the lower world is scarcely called by the ill-omened name of Hades in cult, but Plouton or Trophonios or Zeus Chthonios, names importing beneficence; for the Homeric and Hesiodic world Demeter is a goddess of blessing, not of terror. ”

“ The early fourth-century art still exhales the religious spirit and serious ethos of the Pheidian school; and it created the type, and almost succeeded in establishing the cult, of the new Goddess of Peace, Eirene, for whose presence among them the wearied Athenians might well yearn; it also perfected the ideal of Demeter, the Madre Dolorosa of Greek myth, whose Eleusinian rites with their benign promise of salvation added power and significance to the later polytheism. The literature of this period attests the enduring vitality of the popular religion. ”

“ It is its higher achievement that makes any particular religion of importance in the history of civilisation; and we are now aware that Greek religion can claim this importance. Nor can the lower elements as a whole be shown to be the germs of the higher within the Hellenic period proper. We cannot show the evolution of the personal anthropomorphic deities of Greece from magic ritual or totemism or theriomorphism without transcending the chronologic limits of the period within which it is allowable to speak of a Hellenic people at all. ”

“ It was of great moment for Euripides that such men as Anaxagoras and Protagoras were active in Athens for many years, and that he had enjoyed familiar intercourse with them {112} as he also enjoyed with Sokrates. It is clear that the poet imbibed deeply their teaching and their spirit; he was also learned in Orphism, antiquarianism and remote folklore. Being by nature a great poet, he has also something of the weakness of the ‘polymath’ or the ‘intellectual’; he had not the steadiness of brain or strong conviction enough to evolve a systematic philosophy or clear religious faith ”

“ 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. ”

“ The view taken of them by those who have in recent times applied comparative Anthropology to the study of Hellenism is the only one that is possible on the whole; these things are a surviving tradition of a mode of religious thought and feeling proper to the aboriginal ancestors of the Hellenic race, or immemorial indigenous products of the soil upon which that race grew up. There is no cataclysm in the religious history of Greece, no violent breach with its past, no destruction of primitive forms at the advent of a higher enlightenment ”

“ Where a family bond exists between the deity and the city, the spirit of genial fellowship is likely to prevail in the ritual and religious emotions, and the family meal might become the type of the public sacrificial meal with the god. Such a religion is adverse to proselytism; for as it is the sacred prerogative of certain kindred stocks, its principle means the exclusion of the stranger. Its religious and moral feeling is naturally clannish; the whole group must share in the moral guilt of the individual, and the sins of the fathers will be visited on the children. ”

“ But its chief religious achievements were to bring some principle of unity and authority into the complex and shifting aggregate of Greek polytheism, and to deepen the impression on the Hellenic mind of the divine ordering of the world; and the fruits of this teaching we gather in the works of Attic tragedy and in the history of Herodotus.
In view of the history of other temple institutions of like power among other peoples—the Mesopotamian, for instance—we may be surprised that the Delphic priesthood made no attempt to impose Apollo as the supreme God upon the Hellenic states. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A great stimulus about this time was given to this practice by the expansion of Greek colonisation, the greatest world-event of the period, which reacted in many ways on religion. As the new colonists could not take with them the tombs or the bones of the aboriginal hero of their stock, they must institute a new hero-cult, so as to bind the new citizens together by the tie of heroic kinship. ”

“ We discern also that the higher deities, Apollo and Athena, though by no means merely ‘functional’ or departmental powers, had acquired the special patronage of song and art. It seems, then, that in the earliest as in the later periods of their history the religion of the Hellenes idealised that sphere of human activity in which the Hellenic spirit was to achieve its highest, the sphere of art, and among higher and lower religions it was unique in this. ”

“ Though the gods and goddesses are shape-shifters and may manifest or disguise themselves in the form of any animal—birds by choice—yet their abiding type is human; nor has Homer any clear remembrance of a ‘cow-faced’ Hera, still less of an ‘owl-faced’ Athena, since for him at least ‘Hera βοῶπις’ was Hera ‘of the large ox-eyes’—the term is a complimentary epithet of women—and Athena γλαυκῶπις, the goddess ‘of the flashing eyes.’ Also his divinities are moralised beings with human passions and ethical as well as artistic emotions. ”

“ While such a religion was a living force, it was not likely that the family could assert itself as against the State; to marry healthfully and early, to beget vigorous children as defenders of the State and the family graves, to cherish and honour one’s parents, to protect the orphan, these were patriotic religious duties that were inspired by the developed State-religion and strenuously preached by the best ethical teachers of Greece. The State being the family ‘writ large,’ private morality and public could not clash. ”

“ But, like the Orphica, they tended to widen the horizon of the religious spirit; for they appealed to a far larger public than the ordinary cults of the city; and while being Pan-Hellenic in this sense they belong to the domain of personal religion, for they satisfied the personal craving of the individual for closer fellowship with the deity and they soothed the troublous apprehensions that were growing up in this second period concerning the individual destiny of the soul. ”

“ It is convenient for the purposes of religious study to mark off the period between the ninth and the sixth centuries as the second period of Greek religion, in which we can observe the working of new forces and the development of older germs into new life. By the beginning of this period the fusion of the Northerners and the Mediterranean population was mainly complete, and the Hellenic spirit had acquired its definite instincts and bias. ”

“ But, at any rate, these various evolutions had already happened indefinitely before the two strains—the Northern and the Mediterranean—had blended into the Hellenic race. The higher and the lower, the more complex and the simpler, forms of religious imagination {55} operate together throughout Hellenic history; and the higher, though dominant, never wholly absorbs the lower, both being an intellectual tradition of an indefinite past. Much work on the origins of Greek religion has been wasted because its chronology is anachronistic. ”