THE RELIGIOUS TEACHERS OF GREECE LECTURE I THE PLACE OF POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF GREEK RELIGIOUS THOUGHT WHEN I accepted the invitation to deliver the Gifford Lectures at the University to which I owe the greatest intellectual impulse of my life, I was fully sensible of my inability to rival some of my distinguished predecessors in their own particular field. The studies which circumstances as well as inclination have led me to pursue are concerned with the past rather than with the present; and I cannot pretend either to criticise any existing system of philosophy, or to construct a new one in its place. But it seemed to me that there was room for a series of lectures which should attempt, however imperfectly, to reproduce, as far as may be without prejudice or passion, the kind of answers which the religious teachers of ancient Greece-that is to say, the poets and philosophers-were able to supply to those spiritual problems which are not of to-day or yesterday, but for all time. There is a profound truth in the ancient saying, neminem vere vivere diem praesentem, nisi dierum praeteritorum memorem. In its special application to the history of religious thought, it is difficult to exaggerate the significance of this remark. I do not think merely of the historical fact that the science of Natural Theology-to quote the words of Professor Case "in its foundation and main principles, is a development of Greek metaphysics." That in itself would seem to be ample justification for discussing the philosophers of Greece in a course of Gifford Lectures; but the particular suggestion which I desire to make is that the religious ideas of Greek philosophy are of peculiar importance for the student of early Christian literature in general, and more especially for the student of St. Paul's Epistles and the Fourth Gospel. "Neque sine Graecis Christianae, neque sine Christianis Graecae litterae recte aut intellegi aut aestimari possunt." The early Fathers of the Church were conscious of the spiritual connexion between Greek philosophy and Christianity when they spoke of philosophy as the preparation or propaedeutie-προπαρασκευή \or πρoжaideía-for the Christian faith; and it is from this point of view, as well as on account of the bearing of the subject upon Natural Theology and Theism, that I invite you to consider the development of religious ideas in Greek philosophy and poetry from Homer down to Plato. Let us begin by endeavouring to form a general idea of the relative position of poetry and philosophy in Greek religious development. In a well-known passage of the Republic,1 it is said by Plato that between philosophy and poetry there was an ancient and hereditary feud. By way of illustrating and enforcing his assertion, Plato cites a number of poetical fragments in which Philosophy and her votaries are satirised by the followers of the Muses. Philosophy, one of the poets says, is but a clamorous hound, baying at her master"; the philosopher, says another, is "great" only "in the vain 1 x. 607 B. babblements of fools"; a third speaks of the "rabblerout of wiseacres"; while another ridicules the poverty and destitution of "these threadbare thinkers." This deep-seated antagonism, which continually meets us in Greek literature, is not sufficiently explained by a reference to the familiar antithesis between the philosophic and the artistic temperaments; for whether that antithesis is true or false in modern life, it is subject to essential qualifications before we can apply it to Greek antiquity, in which the provinces of the poet and philosopher continually overlap. Nearly all the greatest Greek philosophy is coloured by poetical imagery and ideas: and, conversely, there are few of the great Greek poets in whom we do not meet with reflections indicative of a decidedly philosophical habit of mind. It is enough at present to mention Heraclitus among philosophers, and Aeschylus and Euripides among poets. And, as we shall afterwards see, it is precisely in Plato, who more than any other Greek author unites the poet and the philosopher, that this hostility to Greek poetry is most marked. What, then, are we to suppose to have been the originating cause of the antagonism? From a passage in the Laws, it appears that the first of the four quotations selected by Plato to exemplify the feud between poetry and philosophy has reference to the atheistical views of Anaxagoras and his disciples on the subject of the heavenly bodies. The ordinary Greek believed the sun and moon to be Gods: Anaxagoras robbed them of their divinity, and maintained that the sun was nothing but a red-hot mass of stone; while the moon, according to him, contained hills and ravines, and was inhabited like the planet on which we live. In thus rebelling against the national religion and its deities, philosophy resembles a dog barking at its master. This is the meaning and 2 Diog. Laert. ii. 8. 1967 C, D. application of the first of the passages cited by Plato; and as the others refer to more accidental and superficial occasions of dislike, we are led to conjecture that the quarrel between poetry and philosophy originated in differences about theology and religion. The conjecture becomes a certainty as soon as we study the other side of the picture. It will be observed that the quotations which Plato gives serve only to illustrate the attitude of Greek poetry to Greek philosophy. If we are fully to understand the meaning of the quarrel, and appreciate its true significance in the history of religion and religious development, we must also consider some of the attacks of early Greek philosophy on the poetry of Homer and Hesiod. By so doing we shall be enabled once for all to conclude that the most potent cause of strife was the antagonism between poetry and philosophy on the subject of the attributes of the Godhead and his relations with mankind. Among the pre-Socratic philosophers who appear to have expressly protested against the Homeric and Hesiodic theology, three names stand out above all others -Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Heraclitus. There are traces of similar protests also in Empedocles,1 although Homer and Hesiod are not mentioned in his surviving fragments; and we may infer from the general tone and attitude of other pre-Socratic writers on philosophy that they did not sympathise with the Homeric representations of the divine nature, although they may not have given public expression to their dislike. In one of those apocalypses or "descents into Hades" of which we find traces in early Pythagorean legends, it seems to have been related of Pythagoras that in his sojourn in the lower world" he saw the soul of Hesiod, bound to a brazen pillar and crying out, together with the soul of Homer, suspended from a tree, and surrounded by snakes, in 1 Diels, poet. phil. frag. p. 160 f. 2 Dieterich, Nekyia p. 129. return for what they said about the Gods." 1 The story is in keeping with the pervading spirit of Pythagorean theology and ethics, and may well preserve an echo of some of Pythagoras' own sayings. In the fragments of Heraclitus, there is a contemptuous allusion to poets in general,2 as the leaders and guides of the populace, along with severe animadversions upon Homer and Hesiod in particular,3 the former of whom, he says, "is worthy to be cast out of the arena and scourged, ay, and Archilochus along with him." But we have to look to Xenophanes, himself a poet as well as a theologian and philosopher, for the strongest and most emphatic protest in Greek literature against the Homeric conception of the divine nature, at all events until we reach the time of Plato. Xenophanes proclaims his dissent from the anthropomorphism of the Olympian theology in the famous lines preserved for us by Clement. "There is one God, greatest both among Gods and men, resembling mortals neither in form nor in thought." But mortals think that Gods are born, and/ have dress and voice and form like their own." "But if oxen or lions had hands, or could draw with their hands and make works of art like men, horses would draw figures of Gods like horses, oxen figures of Gods like oxen, giving them bodies like the form which they themselves possessed." "The Ethiopians say their Gods are black and flat-nosed; the Thracians make theirs fair-eyed and with red hair." 4 The satirist Timon, author of the famous iλo or satirical verses on Greek philosophers, describes Xenophanes as "the reprover of Homer's lies," 5 and in other fragments of Xenophanes' writings we meet with strictures on both Homer and Hesiod for falsely attributing immorality to the Gods. "Homer and Hesiod" -these are his words-" ascribed to the Gods every4 Diels, frag. d. Vorsokratiker2 i. p. 49 ff. 1 Diog. Laert. viii. 21. 2fr. 111 Bywater. 3 fr. 35, 43: cf. Diog. Laert. "fr. 60 Diels. |