Ten Great Religions Part 25

The artists, following the poets, developed still further the divinely human character of the G.o.ds. The architects of the temples gave, in their pure and harmonious forms, the conception of religious beauty and majesty.

Standing in some open elevated position, their snowy surface bathed in suns.h.i.+ne, they stood in serene strength, the types of a bright and joyful religion. A superst.i.tious wors.h.i.+p seeks caves and darkness; the n.o.ble majesty of the Greek temples said plainly that they belonged to a religion of light and peace.

The sculptor worked originally in company with the architect. The statues were meant to adorn the temples, the temples were made as frames and pedestals for the statues. The marble forms stood and walked on the pediments and gave life to the frieze. They animated the exterior, or sat, calm and strong, in the central shrine.

The poets, in giving a moral and human character to the G.o.ds, never quite forgot their origin as powers of nature. Jupiter Olympus is still the G.o.d of the sky, the thunderer. Neptune is the ruler of the ocean, the earth-shaker. Phoebus-Apollo is the sun-G.o.d. Artemis is the moonlight, pure, chaste, and cold. But the sculptors finally leave behind these reminiscences, and in their hands the deities become purely moral beings.

On the brow of Jupiter sits a majestic calm; he is no angry wielder of the thunderbolt, but the gracious and powerful ruler of the three worlds. This conception grew up gradually, until it was fully realized by Phidias in his statues at Olympia and Elis. Tranquil power and victorious repose appear even in the standing Jupiters, in which last the G.o.d appears as more youthful and active.

The conception of Jupiter by Phidias was a great advance on that of Homer.

He, to be sure, professed to take his idea from the famous pa.s.sage of the Iliad where Jove shakes his ambrosial curls and bends his awful brows; and, nodding, shakes heaven and earth. That might be his text, but the sermon which he preached was far higher than it. This was the great statue of Jupiter, his masterpiece, made of ivory and gold for the temple at Olympia, where the games were celebrated by the united h.e.l.lenic race.

These famous games, which occurred every fifth year, lasting five days, calling together all Greece, were to this race what the Pa.s.sover was to the Jewish nation, sacred, venerable, blending divine wors.h.i.+p and human joy. These games were a chronology, a const.i.tution, and a church to the Pan-h.e.l.lenic race. All epochs were reckoned from them; as events occurring in such or such an Olympiad. The first Olympiad was seven hundred and seventy-six years before Christ; and a large part of our present knowledge of ancient chronology depends on these festivals. They bound Greece together as by a const.i.tution; no persons unless of genuine h.e.l.lenic blood being allowed to contend at them, and a truce being proclaimed for all Greece while they lasted.

Here at Olympia, while the games continued, all Greece came together; the poets and historians declaimed their compositions to the grand audience; opinions were interchanged, knowledge communicated, and the national life received both stimulus and unity.

And here, over all, presided the great Jupiter of Phidias, within a Doric temple, sixty-eight feet high, ninety-five wide, and two hundred and thirty long, covered with sculptures of Pentelic marble. The G.o.d was seated on his throne, made of gold, ebony, and ivory, studded with precious stones. He was so colossal that, though seated, his head nearly reached the roof, and it seemed as if he would bear it away if he rose.

There sat the monarch, his head, neck, breast, and arms in ma.s.sive proportions; the lower part of the body veiled in a flowing mantle; bearing in his right hand a statue of Victory, in his left a sceptre with his eagle on the top; the Hours, the Seasons, and the Graces around him; his feet on the mysterious Sphinx; and on his face that marvellous expression of blended majesty and sweetness, which we know not only by the accounts of eyewitnesses, but by the numerous imitations and copies in marble which have come down to us. One cannot fail to see, even in these copies, a wonderful expression of power, wisdom, and goodness. The head, with leonine locks of hair and thickly rolling beard, expresses power, the broad brow and fixed gaze of the eyes, wisdom; while the sweet smile of the lips indicates goodness. The throne was of cedar, ornamented with gold, ivory, ebony, and precious stones. The sceptre was composed of every kind of metal. The statue was forty feet high, on a pedestal of twelve feet. To die without having seen this statue was regarded by the Greeks as almost as great a calamity as not to have been initiated into the mysteries.[240]

In like manner the poetic conception of Apollo was inferior to that of the sculptor. In the mind of the latter Phoebus is not merely an archer, not merely a prophet and a singer, but the entire manifestation of genius. He is inspiration; he radiates poetry, music, eloquence from his sublime figure. The Phidian Jupiter is lost to us, except in copies, but in the Belvedere Apollo we see how the sculptor could interpret the highest thought of the h.e.l.lenic mind. He who visits this statue by night in the Vatican Palace at Rome, seeing it by torchlight, has, perhaps, the most wonderful impression left on his imagination which art can give. After pa.s.sing through the long galleries of the Vatican, where, as the torches advance, armies of statues emerge from the darkness before you, gaze on you with marble countenance, and sink back into the darkness behind, you reach at last the small circular hall which contains the Apollo. The effect of torchlight is to make the statue seem more alive. One limb, one feature, one expression after another, is brought out as the torches move; and the wonderful form becomes at last instinct with life. Milman has described the statue in a few glowing but unexaggerated lines:--

"For mild he seemed, as in Elysian towers, Wasting, in careless ease, the joyous hours; Haughty, as bards have sung, with princely sway Curbing the fierce flame-breathing steeds of day; Beauteous, as vision seen in dreamy sleep By holy maid, on Delphi's haunted steep."

All, all divine; no struggling muscle glows, Through heaving vein no mantling life-blood flows, But, animate with Deity alone, In deathless glory lives the breathing stone."[241]

In such a statue we see the human creative genius idealized. It is a magnificent representation of the mind of Greece, that fountain of original thought from which came the Songs of Homer and the Dialogues of Plato, that unfailing source of history, tragedy, lyric poetry, scientific investigation. In the Belvedere Apollo we see expressed at once the genius of Homer, Aristotle, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Pindar, Thales, and Plato.

With Apollo is a.s.sociated his sister Artemis, or Diana, another exquisite conception of Greek thought. Not the cold and cruel Diana of the poets; not she who, in her prudish anger, turned Actaeon into a stag, who slew Orion, who slew the children of Niobe, and demanded the death of Iphigenia. Very different is the beautiful Diana of the sculptors, the Artemis, or untouched one, chaste as moonlight, a wild girl, pure, free, n.o.ble; the ideal of youthful womanhood, who can share with man manly exercises and open-air sports, and add to manly strength a womanly grace.

So she seems in the statue; in swift motion, the air lifting her tunic from her n.o.ble limbs, while she draws a shaft from the quiver to kill a hind. No Greek could look at such a statue, and not learn to reverence the purity and n.o.bleness of womanhood.

Pallas-Athene was the G.o.ddess of all the liberal arts and sciences. In battle she proves too strong for Ares or Mars, as scientific war is always too strong for that wild, furious war which Mars represented. She was the civilizer of mankind. Her name Pallas means "virgin," and her name Athene was supposed to be the same as the Egyptian Neith, reversed; though modern scholars deny this etymology.

The Parthenon, standing on the summit of Athens, built of white marble, was surrounded by columns 34 feet high. It was 230 feet long, 102 feet wide, and 68 high, and was perhaps the most perfect building ever raised by man. Every part of its exterior was adorned with Phidian sculpture; and within stood the statue of Athene herself, in ivory and gold, by the same master hand. Another colossal statue of the great G.o.ddess stood on the summit of the Acropolis, and her polished brazen helmet and s.h.i.+eld, flas.h.i.+ng in the sun, could be seen far out at sea by vessels approaching Athens.

The Greek sculptors, in creating these wonderful ideals, were always feeling after G.o.d; but for G.o.d incarnate, G.o.d in man. They sought for and represented each divine element in human nature. They were prophets of the future development of humanity. They showed how man is a partaker of the divine nature. If they humanized Deity, they divinized humanity.

-- 6. The G.o.ds of the Philosophers.

The problem which the Greek philosophers set themselves to solve was the origin of things. As we have found a double element of race and religion running through the history of Greece, so we find a similar dualism in its philosophy. An element of realism and another of idealism are in opposition until the time of Plato, and are first reconciled by that great master of thought. Realism appears in the Ionic nature-philosophy; idealism in Orphism, the schools of Pythagoras, and the Eleatic school of Southern Italy.

Both these cla.s.ses of thinkers sought for some central unity beneath the outward phenomena. Thales the Milesian (B.C. 600) said it was water. His disciple, Anaximander, called it a chaotic matter, containing in itself a motive-power which would take the universe through successive creations and destructions. His successor, Anaximenes, concluded the infinite substance to be air. Herac.l.i.tus of Ephesus (B.C. 500) declared it to be fire; by which he meant, not physical fire, but the principle of antagonism. So, by _water_, Thales must have intended the fluid element in things. For that Thales was not a mere materialist appears from the sayings which have been reported as coming from him, such as this: "Of all things, the oldest is G.o.d; the most beautiful is the world; the swiftest is thought; the wisest is time." Or that other, that, "Death does not differ at all from life." Thales also taught that a Divine power was in all things. The successor of Herac.l.i.tus, Anaxagoras (B.C. 494), first distinguished G.o.d from the world, mind from matter, leaving to each an independent existence.

While the Greek colonies in Asia Minor developed thus the Asiatic form of philosophy, the colonies in Magna Graecia unfolded the Italian or ideal side. Of these, Pythagoras was the earliest and most conspicuous. Born at Samos (B.C. 584), he was a contemporary of Thales of Miletus. He taught that G.o.d was one; yet not outside of the world, but in it, wholly in every part, overseeing the beginnings of all things and their combinations.[242]

The head of the Italian school, known as Eleatics, was Xenophanes (born B.C. 600), who, says Zeller,[243] both a philosopher and a poet, taught first of all a perfect monotheism. He declared G.o.d to be the one and all, eternal, almighty, and perfect being, being all sight, feeling, and perception. He is both infinite and finite. If he were only finite, he could not _be_; if he were only infinite, he could not _exist_. He lives in eternity, and exists in time.[244]

Parmenides, scholar and successor of Xenophanes at Elea, taught that G.o.d, as pure thought, pervaded all nature. Empedocles (about B.C. 460)[245]

followed Xenophanes, though introducing a certain dualism into his physics. In theology he was a pure monotheist, declaring G.o.d to be the Absolute Being, sufficient for himself, and related to the world as unity to variety, or love to discord. We can only recognize G.o.d by the divine element in ourselves. The bad is what is separate from G.o.d, and out of harmony with him.

After this came a sceptical movement, in which Gorgias, a disciple of Empedocles (B.C. 404) and Protagoras the Abderite, taught the doctrine of nescience. The latter said: "Whether there are G.o.ds or not we cannot say, and life is too short to find out."[246] Prodicus explained religion as founded in utility, Critias derived it from statecraft. They argued that if religion was founded in human nature, all men would wors.h.i.+p the same G.o.ds. This view became popular in Greece at the time of the Peloponnesian War. Euripides, as we have seen, was a sceptic. Those who denied the popular G.o.ds were persecuted by the Athenians, but the sceptical spirit was not checked by this course.[247] Anaxagoras escaped with his life only through the powerful protection of Pericles. Protagoras was sentenced to death, and his writings were burned. Diogenes was denounced as an atheist, and a reward of a talent was offered to any one who should kill him. For an unbelieving age is apt to be a persecuting one. When the kernel of religion is gone, more stress is laid on keeping the sh.e.l.l untouched.

It was in the midst of these dilapidated opinions that Socrates came, that wonderful phenomenon in human history. A marvellous vision, glorifying humanity! He may be considered as having created the science of ethics. He first taught the doctrine of divine providence, declaring that we can only know G.o.d in his works. He placed religion on the basis of humanity, proclaiming the well-being of man to be the end of the universe. He preferred the study of final causes to that of efficient causes. He did not deny the inferior deities, but regarded them only as we regard angels and archangels, saints and prophets; as finite beings, above man, but infinitely below the Supreme Being. Reverence for such beings is quite consistent with the purest monotheism.

In Plato, says Rixner[248] the two polar tendencies of Greek philosophy were harmonized, and realism and idealism brought into accord. The school of realism recognized time, variety, motion, multiplicity, and nature; but lost substance, unity, eternity, and spirit. The other, the ideal Eleatic school, recognized unity, but lost variety, saw eternity, but ignored time, accepted being, but omitted life and movement.

The three views may be thus compared:--

Italian Philosophy, Plato. Ionian or Asiatic Atomic.

or Eleatic.

The One. The One in All. The All.

Unity. Unity and Variety. Variety.

Being. Life. Motion.

Pantheism. Divine in Nature. Naturalism.

Substance. Substance and Manifestation. Phenomena.

The philosophy of Plato was the scientific completion of that of Socrates.

Socrates took his intellectual departure from man, and inferred nature and G.o.d. Plato a.s.sumed G.o.d, and inferred nature and man. He made goodness and nature G.o.dlike, by making G.o.d the substance in each. His was a divine philosophy, since he referred all facts theoretically and practically to G.o.d as the ground of their being.

The style of Plato singularly combined a.n.a.lysis and synthesis, exact definition with poetic life. His magnificent intellect aimed at uniting precision in details with universal comprehension.[249]

Plato, as regards his method of thought, was a strict and determined transcendentalist. He declared philosophy to be the science of unconditioned being, and a.s.serted that this was known to the soul by its intuitive reason, which is the organ of all philosophic insight. The reason perceives substance, the understanding only phenomena. Being t? ??, which is the reality in all actuality, is in the ideas or thoughts of G.o.d; and nothing exists or appears outwardly, except by the force of this indwelling idea. The WORD is the true expression of the nature of every object; for each has its divine and natural name, beside its accidental human appellation. Philosophy is the recollection of what the soul has seen of things and their names.

The life and essence of all things is from G.o.d. Plato's idea of G.o.d is of the purest and highest kind. G.o.d is one, he is Spirit, he is the supreme and only real being, he is the creator of all things, his providence is over all events. He avoids pantheism on one side, by making G.o.d a distinct personal intelligent will; and polytheism on the other, by making him absolute, and therefore one. Plato's theology is pure theism.[250]

Ackermann, in "The Christian Element in Plato,"[251] says: The Platonic theology is strikingly near that of Christianity in regard to G.o.d's being, existence, name, and attributes. As regards the existence of G.o.d, he argues from the movements of nature for the necessity of an original principle of motion.[252] But the real Platonic faith in G.o.d, like that of the Bible, rests on immediate knowledge. He gives no definition of the essence of G.o.d, but says,[253] "To find the Maker and Father of this All is hard, and having found him it is impossible to utter him." But the idea of Goodness is the best expression, as is also that of Being, though neither is adequate. The visible Sun is the image and child of the Good Being. Just so the Scripture calls G.o.d the Father of light. Yet the idea of G.o.d was the object and aim of his whole philosophy; therefore he calls G.o.d the Beginning and the End;[254] and "the Measure of all things, much more than _man_, as some people have said" (referring to Protagoras, who taught that "man was the measure of all things"). So even Aristotle declared that "since G.o.d is the ground of all being, the first philosophy is theology"; and Eusebius mentions that Plato thought that no one could understand human things who did not first look at divine things; and tells a story of an Indian who met Socrates in Athens and asked him how he must begin to philosophize. He replied that he must reflect on human life; whereupon the Indian laughed and said that as long as one did not understand divine things he could know nothing about human things.

There is no doubt that Plato was a monotheist, and believed in one G.o.d, and when he spoke of G.o.ds in the plural, was only using the common form of speech. That many educated heathen were monotheists has been sufficiently proved; and even Augustine admits that the mere use of the word "G.o.ds"

proved nothing against it, since the Hebrew Bible said, "the G.o.d of G.o.ds has spoken."

Aristotle (B.C. 384), the first philologian and naturalist of antiquity, scholar of Plato, called "the Scribe of Nature," and "a reversed Plato,"

differing diametrically from his master in his methods, arrived at nearly the same theological result. He taught that there were first truths, known by their own evidence. He comprised all notions of existence in that of the ??s??, in which were the two spheres of the earthly and heavenly. The earthly sphere contained the changeable in the transient; the heavenly sphere contained the changeable in the permanent. Above both spheres is G.o.d, who is unchangeable, permanent, and unalterable. Aristotle, however, omits G.o.d as Providence, and conceives him less personally than is done by Plato.

In the Stoical system, theism becomes pantheism.[255] There is one Being, who is the substance of all things, from whom the universe flows forth, and into whom it returns in regular cycles.

Zeller[256] sums up his statements on this point thus: "From all that has been said it appears that the Stoics did not think of G.o.d and the world as different beings. Their system was therefore strictly pantheistic. The sum of all real existence is originally contained in G.o.d, who is at once universal matter and the creative force which fas.h.i.+ons matter into the particular materials of which things are made. We can, therefore, think of nothing which is not either G.o.d or a manifestation of G.o.d. In point of being, G.o.d and the world are the same, the two conceptions being declared by the Stoics to be absolutely identical."

The Stoic philosophy was materialism as regards the nature of things, and necessity as regards the nature of the human will. The Stoics denied the everlasting existence of souls as individuals, believing that at the end of a certain cycle they would be resolved into the Divine Being.

Nevertheless, till that period arrives, they conceived the soul as existing in a future state higher and better than this. Seneca calls the day of death the birthday into this better world. In that world there would be a judgment on the conduct and character of each one; there friends would recognize each other, and renew their friends.h.i.+p and society.

While the Epicureans considered religion in all its usual forms to be a curse to mankind, while they believed it impious to accept the popular opinions concerning the G.o.ds, while they denied any Divine Providence or care for man, while they rejected prayer, prophecy, divination, and regarded fear as the foundation of religion, they yet believed, as their master Epicurus had believed, in the existence of the immortal G.o.ds. These beings he regarded as possessing all human attributes, except those of weakness and pain. They are immortal and perfectly happy; exempt from disease and change, living in celestial dwellings, clothed with bodies of a higher kind than ours, they converse together in a sweet society of peace and content.

Such were the princ.i.p.al theological views of the Greek philosophers. With the exception of the last, and that of the Sceptics, they were either monotheistic or consistent with monotheism. They were, on the whole, far higher than the legends of the poets or the visions of the artists. They were, as the Christian Fathers were fond of saying, a preparation for Christianity. No doubt one cause of the success of this monotheistic religion among the Greek-speaking nations was that Greek philosophy had undermined faith in Greek polytheism.

This we shall consider in another section.