prominence, but ultimately of about equal importance and longevity.
Most obvious, especially if we begin our study with Homer, is the
mythology which presents us with a multitude of gods, male and female,
often related by blood, and having social and even hostile relations
with one another. If we examine their characters, attributes, and
fables, we readily perceive that most of them are impersonations of
natural forces. Some, however, figure prominently as patrons of special
arts or special places, as Apollo of prophecy and music, of Delos and
Delphi; and yet others seem to be wholly personifications of human
powers, as Athena of prudence and of martial and industrial arts.
Underlying this mythology is another element, probably more ancient,
the worship of ancestors, local divinities, and domestic gods. With
these were naturally connected various ritual observances, and
especially the noblest and most important of rites, the sacrifice.
Such practices may be supposed to have belonged originally to the
tribal religion, and to have passed by analogy to the great natural
gods, when these had been once created by the poet and perhaps
identified with the older genius of that spot where their efficacy was
first signally manifested.
Finally, as a third element, we find the religion of the priests,
soothsayers, and magicians, as well as the rites of Orpheus, Bacchus,
and the Great Goddesses at Eleusis. These forms of worship showed
Oriental affinities and partook of a kind of nocturnal horror and
mystical enthusiasm. They were the Greek representatives of the
religion of revelation and of sacraments, and bore much the same
relation to the supernaturalistic elements in Christianity as does
the idea of a shade in Hades to the idea of a soul in heaven. The
fundamental intuitions were the same, but in Pagan times they remained
vague, doubtful, and incoherent.
These three forms of religion lay together in men's minds and habits
throughout the formative period of Greek literature. There was an
occasional rivalry among them, but the tolerance characteristic
of Paganism could reconcile their claims without much difficulty,
and admit them all to a share of honour. The history of the three
elements, however, differs essentially, as might be expected after a
consideration of their respective natures. The antique family religion
lived by inertia; it was obeyed without being justified theoretically,
and remained strong by its very obscurity. Many customs which a man
may have occasion to conform to only once or twice in his life endure
for ages and survive the ebb and flow of intellectual and political
systems. Nursery tales, trivial superstitions, customs connected
with weddings or funerals, or with certain days of the year, have a
strange and irrational persistence; they surprise us by emerging into
prominence after centuries of a sort of subterraneous existence. Thus
the deification of Roman emperors was not the sacrilegious innovation
which it might appear to be, but on the contrary a restoration of the
spirit of the most ancient faith, a revival called to the aid of a new
polity by the mingled statecraft and superstition of the times. Thus,
too, the Christian care in the burial of the dead (contrary as it is to
the theoretical spiritualism of Christianity), the feast of All Souls,
and the prayers for the departed are evidences of the same latent human
religion underlying the cosmic flights and public controversies of
theology.
The mysteries, on the other hand, had essentially a spirit of
self-consciousness and propaganda. They came as revelations or as
reforms; they pretended to disclose secrets handed down from remote
antiquity, from the primeval revelation of God to man, or truths
recovered by the inspiration of later prophets supernaturally
illumined. The history of these movements is, accordingly, the
history-of sects. They never constituted the normal and common religion
of the people, and never impressed their spirit on the national
literature. Æschylus or Plato may have borrowed something from them;
but they did so most when they assumed an attitude of open opposition
to the exoteric religion of their country. Thus when Plato makes his
Socrates propound a Pythagorean or Orphic doctrine of transmigration,
he represents the very members of the Socratic circle as surprised,
or as incredulous: and when they are finally silenced by the proofs
advanced, it is only because they are overawed by the dogmatic unction
of a dying sage, who stimulates their imagination with poetic myths,
and confuses their intellect with verbal equivocations. When the mist
of the argument has cleared away, like incense after the sacrifice,
there remains indeed a profound emotion, a catharsis produced by the
sublimity and pathos, so artfully mingled, of both scene and argument;
but the bare doctrine enunciated, true and profound as it is in its
deeper meaning, is quite incapable of appealing to an undisciplined
mind, and could not pass for a religious dogma except for the priestly
robes in which it is dressed. Thus the function of the mysteries
of which Plato's Phædo may be regarded as a philosophic echo, was
to be the vehicle of revolutionary tendencies, tendencies which a
philosopher might privately shape in one way and a superstitious man in
another. Both could find in the spell of an occult ceremonial and in
the prophecies of an oracular creed an escape from the limitations of
the official religion. Mysticism and the claim to illumination found
in these mysteries their natural expression. The many fundamental
questions left unanswered and unasked by Paganism, the many
potentialities of religious emotion left unexercised by it, were thus
allowed to appear.
Independently of these two comparatively silent streams of religious
life, we may trace the current of polytheistic theology,--a current
which naturally left a plainer trace in literature, since it contained
all there might be in Greece of speculation and controversy in
religious matters. The moral sanctions of religion were embodied in the
domestic and civic worship; the pious imagination remained thereby all
the freer to follow the analogies of physical objects in its mythology.
Apollo was the father of Asclepius and the leader of the Muses; his
ideal dignity and beneficence were vouched for by those attributes.
He could well afford, therefore, as the Sun-god, to decimate the
Greek army with the same fatal shafts with which he slew the Python.
The moral function of the god was certain on other grounds, being
enshrined in the local religions of the people. The poet might follow
without scruple the suggestions of experience; he might attribute to
the god the various activities, beneficent and maleficent, observable
in the element over which he presided. This is a liberty taken even
in the most moralistic religions. In the Gospels, for instance, we
sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn
from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of
justice; as when we hear that to him that hath shall be given and from
him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Such
characterizations appeal to our sense of fact. They remind us that the
God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God;
they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing
into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought
and endeavour. For we naturally seek to express his awful actuality,
his unchallengeable power, no less than his holiness and beauty. This
sense of the real existence of religious objects can only be maintained
by identifying them with objects of actual experience, with the forces
of Nature, or the passions or conscience of man, or (if it must come to
that) with written laws or visible images.
An instinctive recognition of this necessity kept Greek mythology
ever ready to return to Nature to gather its materials afresh from a
docile, if poetical, observation of reality. The character of the god
must be studied in the manifestations of his chosen element; otherwise
men might forget that, although the form of the god was poetical, his
essence was a positive reality of the most practical kind. Zeus must
still toss his ambrosial locks with a certain irritation, in order
that we may recognize him in the rumblings of the sky; he must still
be capable of wrath and deliberate malice, that his awful hand may be
thought to have hurled the thunderbolt. Cronos must not be forbidden
to devour his children, else we should no longer reverence in him the
inexorable might of time. Mythology was quite right in not shrinking
from such poetic audacities. They were its chief title to legitimacy,
the proof, amid the embroideries of fancy which over-lay the divine
idea, that the god was not an invention, but a fact. He had been found,
he was known. His character, like all character, was merely a principle
which reflection discovered in his observed conduct. The reality, then,
of the mythological gods was initially unquestionable; and the more
faithful the study of Nature by which the poet was inspired, the more
authority did his prophetic vision retain.
But the intense imaginative vitality that must have preceded Homer and
Hesiod, the prodigious gift of sympathetic observation to which we owe
Zeus and Pan and all their endless retinue, was too glorious to last.
No later interpreter could find so much meaning in his text. Mythology
was accordingly placed in a sad dilemma, with either horn fatal to
its life; it must either be impoverished to remain sincere, or become
artificial to remain adequate. The history of Greek religion, on its
speculative side, is nothing but the story of this double decadence.
Reflection upon the process of Nature and desire for philosophic truth
led inevitably to a blank pantheism and to the reduction of positive
traditions to moral allegories. This was the direction taken by the
Stoic theology. On the other hand, adherence to the traditional gods,
with no further vivifying reference to their natural functions in
the world, could lead only to arbitrary fictions, which, having no
foothold or justification in reality, were incapable of withstanding
the first sceptical attack. What an age of imagination had intuited as
truth, an age of reflection could preserve only as fable; and as fable,
accordingly, the religion of the ancients survived throughout the
Christian ages. It remains still the mother-tongue of the imagination
and, in spite of all revolutions and admixtures, is the classic
language of art and poetry, which no other means of expression has
superseded.
Beginning, however, with that zealous Protestant, the old Xenophanes,
the austerer minds, moralists, naturalists, and wits, united in
decrying the fanciful polytheism of the poets. This criticism was
in one sense unjust; it did not consider the original justification
of mythology in human nature and in the external facts. It was,
like all heresy or partial scepticism, in a sense superficial and
unphilosophical. It was far from conceiving that its own tenets and
assumptions were as groundless, without being as natural or adequate,
as the system it attacked. To a person sufficiently removed by time or
by philosophy from the controversies of sects, orthodoxy must always
appear right and heresy wrong; for he sees in orthodoxy the product of
the creative mind, of faith and constructive logic, but in heresy only
the rebellion of some partial interest or partial insight against the
corollaries of a formative principle imperfectly grasped and obeyed
with hesitation. At a distance, the criticism that disintegrates any
great product of art or mind must always appear short-sighted and
unamiable. Socrates, invoking; the local deities of brooks and meadows,
or paying the debt of a cock to Asclepius (in thanksgiving, it is said,
for a happy death), is more reasonable and noble to our mind than are
the hard denials of Xenophanes or Theodoras. But in their day the
revolt of the sceptics had its relative justification. The imagination
had dried up, and what had once been a natural interpretation of
facts now seemed an artificial addition to them. An elaborate and
irrelevant world of fiction seemed to have been imposed on human
credulity. Mythology was, in fact, already largely irrelevant; the
experience poetized by it had been forgotten and the symbol, in its
insignificance, could not be honestly or usefully retained.
The Greek philosophers, as a rule, proceeded cautiously in these
matters. They passed mythology by with a conventional reverence and
looked elsewhere for the true object of their personal religion. But
the old mythological impulse was not yet spent; it showed itself
still active in all the early philosophers who gave the godhead new
incarnations congruous with the character of their respective physical
systems. To the Socratic School the natural world was no longer the
sphere in which divinity was to be found. They looked for the divine
rather in moral and intelligible ideas. But not only did they carry the
mythological instinct with them into that new field, they also retained
it in the field of Nature, whenever they still regarded Nature as real.
Thus Aristotle, while he rejected the anthropomorphism of the popular
faith, attributing it to political exigencies, turned the forty-nine
spheres, of which he conjectured that the heaven might be composed,
into a pantheon of forty-nine divinities. Every primary movement,
he argued, must be the expression of an eternal essence by which
the movement is justified, as the movement of the mind in thinking
or loving is justified by the truth or excellence of the object of
thought or of love. Without such a worthy object, these spiritual
activities would be irrational; and no less irrational would be the
motion of the spheres, were each not obedient to the influence of some
sacred and immutable principle. Forty-nine gods accordingly exist;
but no more. For, since the essence of each is to be the governing
ideal of a motion, the number of motions in the sky determines the
number of divine first principles. The gods, we see, are still the
souls of Nature; a soul without a body would be a principle without an
application; there can be no gods, then, without a phenomenal function,
no gods that do not appear in the operations of Nature. This astronomic
mythology was surely not less poetical than that of Homer, even if, by
virtue of a certain cold and abstract purity, not unworthy of the stars
of which it spoke, it was more difficult and sublime. We may observe in
it a last application of the ancient mythological method by which the
phenomena of Nature became evidence of the existence and character of
the gods.
But the celestial deities of Aristotle, and the minor creative gods of
Plato that correspond to them, retained too much poetic individuality
for the still poorer imagination of later times. The most religious
of sects during the classical decadence was that of the Stoics; in
them the spirit of conformity, which is a chief part even of the
religions of hope, constituted by its exclusive cultivation a religion
of despair. The name of Zeus, and an equally equivocal use of the word
"reason" to designate the regularity of Nature, served to disguise the
alien brutality of the power or law to which all the gods had been
reduced. Against the background of a materialistic pantheism, in which
Stoic speculation culminated, two positive interests stood out: one,
the resolute and truly human courage with which the Stoic faced the
reality as he conceived it, and kept his dignity and his conscience
pure although heaven might fall; the other, the efforts he made, in his
need for religion, to rejuvenate and reinterpret the pagan forms. The
fables he turned into ethical allegories, the oracles, auspices, and
other superstitious rites, he transformed into quasi-scientific ways of
reading the book of Nature and forecasting events.
This possibility of prophecy constituted the Stoic "providence" which
the sentimentality of modern apologists has been glad to confuse
with the _benevolent_ Providence of Christian dogma, a Providence
making for the salvation of men. The Stoic providence excluded that
essential element of benevolence; it was merely the fact that Nature
was prophetic of her own future, that her parts, both in space and in
time, were magically composed into one living system. Mythology thus
ended with the conception of a single god whose body was the whole
physical universe, whose fable was all history, and whose character
was the principle of the universal natural order. No attempt was made
by the ancient Stoics to make this divinity better or more amiable
than the evidence of experience showed it to be; the self-centred,
self-sufficient Stoic morality, the recourse to suicide, and the
equality in happiness and dignity between the wise man and Zeus, all
prove quite conclusively that nothing more was asked or expected of
Nature than what she chose to give; to be virtuous was in man's power,
and nothing else was a good to man. The universe could neither benefit
nor injure him; and thus we see that, despite a reverential tone and
an occasional reminiscence of the thunderbolts of Zeus, the Stoic's
conscience knew how to scorn the moral nothingness of that blank deity
to which his metaphysics had reduced the genial company of the gods.
Thus the reality which the naturalistic gods had borrowed from the
elements proved to be a dangerous prerogative; being real and manifest,
these gods had to be conceived according to our experience of their
operation, so that with every advance in scientific observation
theology had to be revised, and something had to be subtracted from
the personality and benevolence of the gods. The moral character
originally attributed to them necessarily receded before the clearer
definition of natural forces and the accumulated experience of
national disasters. Finally, little remained of the gods except their
names, reduced to rhetorical synonyms for the various departments of
Nature; Phoebus was nothing but a bombastic way of saying the sun;
Hephæstus became nothing but fire, Eros or Aphrodite nothing but love,
Zeus nothing but the general force and law of Nature. Thus the gods
remained real, but were no longer gods. If belief in their reality
was to be kept up, they could not retain too many attributes that
had no empirical manifestation. They must be reduced, as it were, to
their fighting weight. All that the imagination had added to them by
way of personal character, sanctity, and life must be rejected as
anthropomorphism and fable.
Such is the necessary logic of natural religion. If Nature manifests
the existence of a god, she must to that extent manifest his character;
if she does not manifest his character, she cannot involve his
existence. We observe to-day a process exactly analogous to that by
which the natural divinities of Greece were reduced again to the
physical or social forces from which poetry had originally evoked
their forms. Many minds are grown too timid to build their religious
faith unblushingly on revelation, or on that moral imagination or
inward demand which revelation comes to express and to satisfy. They
seek, therefore, to naturalize the Deity and to identify it with some
principle of history, of Nature, or of logic. But this identification
cannot be made without great concessions on both sides. The
accommodations which ensue inevitably involve many equivocations, and
some misrepresentations of the heterogeneous principles, now natural,
now moral, which it is sought to unify. Confused and agonized by
these contradictions, the natural theologian, if he keep his honesty,
can only rest in the end in a chastened recognition of the facts of
experience, toward which he will, no doubt, exercise his acquired
habits of acquiescence and euphemism. But these habits, the survival
of which gives his philosophy some air of being still a religion, will
not be inherited by his disciples and successors; a pious manner may
survive religious faith, but will not survive it long. The society
to whom the reformer teaches a reticent and embarrassed naturalism
will discard the reticence and avow the naturalism with pride. The
masses of men will see no reason why they should not live out their
native impulses or acquired passions without fear of that environing
power of which they are, after all, the highest embodiment; while a
few thinkers, devout and rational by temperament, will know how to
maintain their dignity of spirit in the face of a universe of which
they ask no favour save the revelation of its laws. Thus irreligion for
the many and Stoicism for the few is the end of natural religion in the
modern world as it was in the ancient.
But natural religion (that is, the turning of the facts and laws of
Nature or of experience into an object of worship) is by no means a
primitive nor an ultimate form of religion; it is rather of all the
forms of religion the most unnatural and the least capable of existing
without a historical and emotional setting, independent of its own
essence and inconsistent with its principle. No nation has ever had
a merely natural religion. What is called by that name has been the
appanage of a few philosophers in ages of religious disintegration,
when the habit of worship, surviving the belief in any proper object
of worship, has been transferred with effort and uncertainty to the
natural order which alone remained before the mind,--to the cosmos,
the self, the state, or humanity. Mythology, of which natural religion
is the last and most abstract phase, was originally religious only in
so far as it was supernatural in so far, I mean, as the analogies of
outer Nature led the poet to conceive some moral ideal, some glorious
being full of youth and serenity, of passion and wisdom. Only when
thus transfigured into the human could the natural seem divine. The
Greeks were never idolaters, and no more worshipped the sun or moon
or the whole of Nature than they did statues of bronze or marble; they
worshipped only the god who had a temporal image in the temple as he
had an eternal image in the sun or in the universe.
It happened, therefore, that in the decay of mythology the gods could
still survive as moral ideals. The more they were cut off from their
accidental foothold in the world of fact, the more clearly could they
manifest their essence as expressions of the world of values. We have
mentioned the fact that the greater gods of Greece were almost wholly
detached from the cosmographical hints which had originally suggested
their character and fable. Thus emancipated, these nobler gods could
survive in the consciousness of the devout, fixed there by their
purely moral significance and poetic truth. Apollo or Athena showed
little or nothing of a naturalistic origin; they were patrons of life,
embodiments of the ideal, objects of contemplation for souls that by
prayer would rise to the semblance of the god to whom they prayed. This
transformation into the moral had been going on from the beginning in
the religious mind of Greece. It was really the legitimate fulfilment
of that translation into the human to which mythology itself was due.
But mythology had merely turned the physical into the personal and
impassioned; religion was now to turn the psychical into the good.
This tendency came to a vivid and rational expression in Plato. The
gods, he declared, should be represented only as they were, _i.e._ as
moral ideals. The scandal of their fables should be removed and they
should be regarded as authors only of the good, in their own lives as
in ours. To refer all things to the efficacy of the gods should be
accounted impiety. They, like the supreme and abstract principle of all
excellence which they embodied, could be the authors only of what is
good.