Ancient Greek philosophy

“ But on the whole, putting aside for the moment the possible inadequacies of translation, Greek philosophy speaks straight to any human being who is willing to think simply, Greek art and poetry to any one who can use his imagination and enjoy beauty. He has not to put on the fetters or the blinkers of any new system in order to understand them; he has only to get rid of his own—a much more profitable and less troublesome task. ”

“ Even the making of images to the gods became more of a work in art than a matter of worship.
The Olympian gods illustrate man's typical anthropomorphism. But the Greek mythology was more aesthetic than ethic. The Greek religion was helpful in that it portrayed a universe governed by a deity group. But Greek morals, ethics, and philosophy presently advanced far beyond the god concept, and this imbalance between intellectual and spiritual growth was as hazardous to Greece as it had proved to be in India. ”

“ And hence, even at the present day, the consideration of Greek philosophy is not only the most interesting, but also by far the most directly profitable part of the study of antiquity. No man who has not thoroughly studied the systems of Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle can become a profound philosopher in our own time. ”

“ It calls a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old; but its discontent with the old is mainly the result of a moral and spiritual valuation of life. Greek philosophy has really much in common with Hebrew prophecy, though the Greek envisaged his ideal world as the eternal background of reality, and not under the form of history. In its maturest form, it is a transvaluation of all values in accordance with an absolute ideal standard—that of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. ”

“ Others went to the other extreme and wanted everything changed, because to them the new must necessarily be better than the old. But quietly in between these two extremes were the thinkers, those who were keeping alive that Greek spirit which knew that the vision of the whole truth had not yet been given to any man, and that the way to progress was not by destroying the old, but by building upon it in order to go on from a firm foundation to a fuller knowledge of the truth. ”

“ Greek philosophy is not, even now, antiquated. It is not from the point of view of an antiquary or historian {vi} that its treasures are valuable. We are dealing here with living things, and not with mere dead things--not with the dry bones and debris of a bygone age. And I have tried to lecture and write for living people, and not for mere fossil-grubbers. If I did not believe that there is to be found here, in Greek philosophy, at least a measure of the truth, the truth that does not grow old, I would not waste five minutes of my life upon it. ”

“ A certain analogy may perhaps be discerned between the progression of philosophic thought in Greece as we have traced it, and the political development which had its course in almost every Greek state during the same period. The Ionic philosophy may be regarded as corresponding with the kingly era in Greek politics. Philosophy sits upon the heights and utters its authoritative dicta for the resolution of the seeming contradictions of things. One principle is master, but the testimony of the senses is not denied ”

“ It is not confined to the Greeks; but by no people is the ideal of intellectual truth more clearly and universally exhibited than by those who first brought it into an indifferent world, and who built upon it their literature and art no less than their science and philosophy.
The last quality of Greek literature of which I wish to speak is not one which we should expect to find in combination with truthfulness; it is certainly very rare in modern realists. Yet the Greek instinct for beauty is beyond question. ”

“ Absence of sanity and balance, then, are characteristics of the last period of Greek philosophy. The serenity and calm of Plato and Aristotle are gone, and in their place we have turgidity and extravagance.
Lack of originality is a second consequence of the subjectivism of the age. Since metaphysics, physics, and logic are not cultivated, except in a purely practical interest, they do not flourish. Instead of advancing in these arenas of thought, the philosophies of the age go backwards. Older systems, long discredited, are revived, and their dead bones triumphantly paraded abroad. ”

“ Again, at the very starting-point of Greek philosophy a man of most virtuous conduct, gifted likewise with great powers of attraction, had sought to realise in a society the philosophic life. And we have seen this conception of the mode of propagating truth to lie at the bottom of Greek teaching, and to have been pursued by Plato, by Aristotle, by Zeno, by Epicurus, to have been the original and even the only form of teaching which they recognised. ”

“ But the modern world is not intensely enough convinced of the reality of Sin and Judgement, Hell and Heaven, to accept this answer as an authoritative guide in life, and has not clearly thought out any other. The ancient Greek spent a great part of his philosophical activity in trying, without propounding supernatural rewards and punishments, or at least without laying stress on them, to think out what the Good of man really was. ”

“ In fact, they seem to grant to Greek philosophy all that its adherents would claim for it, namely, that, by means of the arguments adduced by its different schools, the Greeks had attained to the opinion that there was something behind the phenomena of nature, but this might as well be a transcendent force or a pantheistic world-soul as an immanent God. With the Apostle on Mars' Hill they would say that the best theology of the Greeks simply put them in a position "that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him." ”

“ Its genius, a mixture of spontaneity and reflection, presented an equal fusion of contraries. The feeling of this auspicious harmony pierces through all the productions of the Greek mind. It was the moment of youth in the life of humanity—a fleeting age, a moment unique and irrevocable, like that of beauty in the individual.
Art attains then the culminating point of sensuous beauty under the form of plastic individuality. The worship of the Beautiful is the entire life of the Greek race. Thus religion and art are identified. All forms of Greek civilization are subordinate to art. ”

“ Greek philosophy was to prove the greatest intellectual asset of humanity. No other civilization or language before the Greek had invented the abstract ideas: time, will, space, beauty, truth, and the others. And from these wonderful, though imperfect, word ideas the vigorous and subtle Greek intellect rapidly raised a structure which found its supreme expression in Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno. But from the close of the Fourth Century before Christ, the time of Aristotle and his pupil Alexander the Great, Greek began to lose its vitality and to decay. ”

“ But it must be remembered that many of the profoundest as well as the most difficult of human conceptions are to be found in Greek philosophy. Such ideas are difficult in themselves, however clearly expressed. No amount of explanation can ever render them anything but difficult to the unsophisticated mind, and anything in the nature of "philosophy made easy" is only to be expected from quacks and charlatans. ”

“ But more important than the Greek mythology was the Greek philosophy, which was indeed in many ways its antidote. If the mythology of Greece appeared to sanction an infinite number of gods and goddesses, her philosophers taught with equal persuasiveness that the divine reality is one, though its forms be many. A remarkable synthesis was thus gradually accomplished, though it will always be a question whether the stronger tendency was to philosophise mythology or to mythologise philosophy. ”

“ So ends Greek philosophy. She is abandoned, and preparation made for crowning Faith in her stead. The inquiries of the Ionians, the reasoning of the Eleatics, the labours of Plato, of Aristotle, have sunk into mysticism and the art of the conjurer. As with the individual man, so with philosophy in its old age: when all else had failed it threw itself upon devotion, seeking consolation in the exercises of piety—a frame of mind in which it was ready to die. ”

“ It has been said that 'you cannot criticise Revelation.' 'Then how do you know what is Revelation, or that there is one at all?' is the immediate rejoinder. 'You know nothing of things in themselves.'—'Then how do you know that there are things in themselves?' In some respects the difficulty pressed harder upon the Greek than upon ourselves. For conceiving of God more under the attribute of knowledge than we do, he was more under the necessity of {159} separating the divine from the human, as two spheres which had no communication with one another. ”

“ Many things will therefore be passed over in silence which are important in themselves and would have to be fully treated in a complete account. All that can be done now is to indicate the points at which Greek philosophy seems to touch our actual problems. It will be seen that here, as elsewhere, ‘all history is contemporary history’, and that the present can only be understood in the light of the past. ”

“ In their doctrines as to the immortality of the soul, the Greek Philosophers merely stated with more precision ideas long before extant independently among themselves, in the form of symbolical suggestion. ”

“ Men gibe and jest. They see how hollow life is, and also how truth rings true. Love is here, sacred and revered, in forms pure and holy; and not less, that foul pool decked with beauty in which Greek manhood lost its masculine virtue.
Half a century before Christ, when Greek life overspread the eastern Mediterranean, and in every market-place Greek was the tongue of trade, of learning, and of gentle breeding, Greek letters grew conscious of its own riches. For six centuries and more, or as long as separates us from Chaucer, men had been writing these brief epigrams. ”

“ Greek life was not all of human life; Greek life was doomed to pass away; Greek instincts and limitations could not be eternal. The crystal heavens that the Greek saw above him were indeed doomed to be rolled up like a scroll, and the elements of his life were certain to pass away in fervent heat. But then, into all nobler future humanity, Greek life was certain to enter, as a factor, as a part of its civilized instincts, as an ennobling passion in its artistic production, as a moment of its spirituality. ”

“ The Greeks are a people of such swift constructive imagination that they almost always obscure any problem of origins. So fair and magical are their cloud-capp’d towers that they distract our minds from the task of digging for foundations. There is scarcely a problem in the origins of Greek mythology and religion that has been solved within the domain of Greek thinking only. Ritual with them was, in the case of drama, so swiftly and completely transmuted into art that, had we had Greek material only to hand, we might never have marked the transition. ”

“ Above all, we can learn from Greek philosophy the paramount importance of what we call the personality and they called the soul. It was just because the Greeks realized this that the genuinely Hellenic idea of conversion played so great a part in their thinking and in their lives. That, above all, is the lesson they have to teach, and that is why the writings of their great philosophers have still the power to convert the souls of all that will receive their teaching with humility. ”

“ But the main object of pointing out the inferior state of civilization among the Greeks, their non-moral character in certain respects, their ignorance and superstition, and their low standard of morality generally, has to do with the important question of interpreting Greek literature and philosophy. It would matter very little that the enthusiast should picture the Greeks as a race of saints and demigods, if there were no beautiful and valuable literature to be coloured and falsified by reason of such views. ”

“ Of course philosophy may culminate in theology, and the best Greek philosophy certainly does so, but it begins with science and not with religion.
By philosophy the Greeks meant a serious endeavour to understand the world and man, having for its chief aim the discovery of the right way of life and the conversion of people to it. ”

“ The end of philosophy then was no longer universal truth, but individual success; and consistently enough, the philosopher himself professed the individualism of his own point of view, by teaching only those who were prepared to pay him for his teaching. All over Greece, with the growth of democracy, this philosophy of persuasion became popular; but it was to Athens, under Pericles at this time the centre of all that was most vivid and splendid in Greek life and thought, that the chief teachers of the new philosophy flocked from every part of the Greek world. ”

“ Thus it was that Christian philosophy encountered Greek philosophy on the summit of Mars’ Hill, and silenced and dethroned it; and during twenty centuries thus has it silenced and dethroned every system that has come in conflict with it; and although its supremacy has been constantly disputed, it still remains supreme in the domain of reason and of truth. In cultivated Athens we behold the highest point to which unaided human reason can attain, and it is in cultivated Athens that we first find Christianity asserting its claim to be the gospel of reason as well as of faith. ”

“ No attempt has been made to give a general treatment of Greek religion, or to deal with pre-Hellenic origins, with religious antiquities, or with mythology. The discussions are confined rather to the Greeks’ ideas about the nature of the gods, and to their concepts of the relations between gods and men and of men’s obligations toward the divine. The lectures therefore deal with the higher ranges of Greek thought and at times have much to do with philosophy and theology. ”