Humanism

The Greek Ideal and Its Survival

Moses Hadas

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000527087
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Greek Ancient History

Originally published in the UK in 1961 this was an unconventional book when first published but a powerful interpretation of Greek individualism. The author examines the influence of the Greeks on European philosophy, religion, literature, art and architecture and challenges many commonly held assumptions: 'Those items in the Greek legacy which are most easily recognizable as such are in fact the least important.'

IV. The Supernatural

DESPITE all that has been said in praise of their rationalism the Greeks were as intensely and continuously concerned with proper attitudes to the supernatural as any people we know. This concern appears, in some degree, in every book the Greeks wrote and in every statue they carved, and the greater the work, the more central the concern with the supernatural tends to be. In the course of the fourth and following centuries, it is true, art forms literary and plastic tend to lose the religious burden they were originally designed to serve and come to be cultivated only for their aesthetic value; but almost always the emptied form took on a new religious content. The Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes is mere belles-lettres, because it retains the epic form without epic seriousness, but then Vergil fills the form with a new and different religious meaning. Other forms exhibit an analogous progression.

If awareness of the supernatural was so central a preoccupation in the Greek intellectual climate, some understanding of its religious premises is essential for an appreciation of the Greek outlook in general. But understanding requires a great effort of the imagination. It is hard enough for a modern to naturalize himself into the intellectual climate of classical Greece; to make himself at home in its religious climate is almost impossible. The trouble is with the word “religion,” which two millennia of the Judaeo-Christian tradition have encrusted with meanings now inseparable from it. Faith has little to do with it; even the militant atheist premises the familiar tradition for his opposition. And the difficulty is aggravated, not lessened, by the circumstance that for considerable areas, possibly because of common origins in the remote past, Greek and Hebrew premises and practices are very like one another; the problem would be less complicated if the two climates were wholly diverse.

Typical attitudes to Homer illustrate the difficulty. The supernatural element in the epic is impossible to ignore, as any unprejudiced reader must see, and yet in ages of enlightenment, ancient and modern, admirers of Greek rationalism did ignore it as an integral factor. One explanation of the gods is that they were merely poetic decoration, to enhance the importance of crucial scenes by making them require divine intervention or to clothe the whole, as a romantic poet might, with the dignity of archaism. A more plausible method of dealing with the divine (and other) crudities is to dismiss them as allegory: this method was practiced, by Theagenes of Rhegium, as early as the sixth century b.c., and was much elaborated by the Stoics. Now it may well be that when Athena prevents Achilles from attacking Agamemnon in the public assembly, an intended meaning is that Achilles experienced a sober second thought, or that Circe’s transformation of Odysseus’ crew indicates that excess of food and drink served by an enchanting woman may turn men into beasts. But no collateral meanings, however near the surface they may be and however valid, can supplant the plain meaning of language in a poet as direct as Homer. Actually allegorical interpretation, whether of the sixth century b.c or of the nineteenth a.d., amounts to spiritual arrogance: the poet should and therefore probably did mean the thing the interpreter thinks appropriate.

But if we take what Homer says in its simple, not polysemous, significance, we encounter a confusion which must be disturbing to minds accustomed to theology systematic and consistent. Even when we have negotiated the leap from monotheism to polytheism the gods we see are disorderly and unpredictable and oscillate between extremes of kindliness and cruelty. Even on the question of the sovereignty of Zeus, where we should expect a definite and consistent position, there is ambiguity; sometimes Zeus is sovereign, bound by no will but his own, and sometimes he is subordinate to Fate and only the executive arm for the decrees of Fate. Here too, plausible explanations have been proffered. One is simple anachronism. A poet dealing, on the basis of tradition, with an intellectual environment which prevailed half a millennium before his own time would naturally and unwittingly introduce later concepts. There are apparently unwitting anachronisms in the armor, metals, social organization, and other usages which Homer attributes to his people: why not then in religion also? Another explanation is that the tradition which Homer followed was already an inconsistent conflation of disparate elements, corresponding to the different racial strains represented in Homer’s dramatis personae. We emerge then with something like the documentary hypothesis as applied to Genesis; discrepancies are explained by R’s faulty welding of J and E.

The analogy of Genesis is instructive. R himself and untold millions of his readers were unaware of inconcinnities but accepted Genesis as an integral entity corresponding to their apprehension of the relations between God and man. So Homer and untold numbers of his readers have been undisturbed by inconcinnities and have accepted the totality of the epic as an adequate and illuminating representation of the actual relations between gods and men. Nor need we condemn them as naive for so doing. Aside from the circumstance that only brooding scholars closeted in their studies perceive the inconsistencies, it is only a sophisticated superstition which demands that the relations between man and the supernatural should be reducible to a unified system consistent and explicable at every point. The confusion presented by the phenomena of religious belief in Homer and later Greece does in fact represent the confusion of life, as I shall attempt to show more fully in subsequent paragraphs; and phenomena deriving from disparate sources survived side by side because each supplied answers to continuing needs and because in combination they supplied answers for more complex needs as they developed, for which neither element alone could suffice.

The brief characterization of the components of early Greek religion which we must now attempt is not intended as an antiquarian investigation of sources, therefore, but as a help toward discerning the actual operation of the elements, severally and in combination. Areas of uncertainty are so large that whatever can be said must be tentative, and since lines of demarcation are ambiguous, schematiza-tion is only an artificial device to facilitate description. In general we may recognize three strands, which may be designated Chthonic, Olympian, and Orphic. The sharpest distinction can be drawn between the Chthonic and Olympian, corresponding respectively to the indigenous and incoming elements of the population; but even here we must observe at once that Apollo, who is the perfect embodiment of the Olympian ideal, has been shown to have definite affiliations with the Near East. The Orphic movement, because of its salvationist traits, appears to have the closest affinities with what we commonly think of as eastern religion, though so far as we can see it was not an importation. We shall glance briefly at all three in turn, and first at the Chthonians.

The Chthonians seem to be connected with the widespread cult of the Great Mother, which has been thought to premise a matriarchal order of society, and are concerned with fertility in man and nature. They are logically feminine in nature and their psychology has been called feminine. Ties of blood are of the first importance, and the more exigent as the relationship is closer. Motivations for action are sentimental rather than rational. Relationships with persons are direct and immediate, not from a distance as with far-shooting Apollo or his sister Artemis. Punishment is meted out not by judicial inquiry but by a mechanical rule; bloodshed must be requited by equal bloodshed, without regard to extenuating circumstances and with no possibility for other compensation. The concern for blood carries with it notions of pollution; the taint is present and must be expiated whether or not a man is aware that he has infected himself.

The Olympians, by contrast, are masculine, remote, and rational. The principal figures are Zeus, Apollo, and Athena, and Athena was born from Zeus’s head without a mother and insists that her sympathies are always with the male. Because the Olympians were not monstrous in form but had the appearance and the emotions of handsome and well-bred men, they could be very close to their protégés. But immortality separated them from man by an unbridgeable chasm, and they could remind themselves, when they were tempted to interfere in the struggles of men, that it ill became their dignity to demean themselves on behalf of creatures of a day. Their typical effects they worked from a distance, whether by shooting arrows or putting thoughts in the minds of men. But most of all they operated by reason and eschewed sentimentality, and they were concerned for sane order in human society. But they never allowed concern for mortals to disturb their serene detachment. Certainly, and in this respect their difference from the deities of other peoples is most striking, their main function was not regulating and keeping book on the behavior of men.

Orphism, which premises a dualism of body and soul and enjoins progressive liberation of the soul from the shackles of the body, is most sympathetic to Europeans bred in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, quite possibly because through Plato and lesser channels it had contributed substantially to the shaping of that tradition. The development of Orphism is hard to trace with any exactness. The systematization of its cosmogony may be a later retrojection, as certain Neo-Pythagorean doctrines fathered upon Pythagoras demonstrably are, and a scholar of the standing of Wilamowitz could impatiently dismiss probings into Orphism as a waste of time. But direct references in Plato and allusions in Euripides and Aristophanes make it certain that the tradition of Orphism was very old, and it is clear that it influenced such diverse and influential teachers as Hesiod and Pindar, Pythagoras and Empedocles. Authors of the classical age, aside from Pindar and Plato, tended to despise Orphism, but it burgeoned into new life in the favorable atmosphere of the Hellenistic age. For a concise summary of Orphism we can do no better than quote from the article of Martin P. Nilsson, who is our best authority on Greek religion, in the Oxford Classical Dictionary: “Orphism implied legalism of ritual and life, mysticism of cult and doctrine, a speculative cosmogony and an anthropogony which emphasized the mixture of good and evil in human nature; it contributed to the transformation of the Underworld into a place of punishment. It made the individual, in his relationship to guilt and retribution, the center of its teaching. But its high ideas were mixed up with crude myths and base priests and charlatans misused them in practice.” It is clear that Orphism had a considerable vogue in the pre-classical period, and if its origins were crude and orgiastic there is high probability that so choice a spirit as Sappho was officially connected with the cult. It is clear too that in its more refined and systematized form it flourished and influenced various mysteries in the Hellenistic age. Whether it had any considerable following in the bright light of classical Athens is problematical. Nevertheless, when we imagine the cool remoteness of the Olympians or the primitive starkness of the Chthonians we must think also of the Orphic cults which, if they did not provide a loving refuge in this world did ordain a discipline for spiritual awareness and did provide a tangible motive for spiritual aspiration.

A more instructive insight into characteristic Greek religious premises is accessible in the interactions between the Chthonian and Olympian deities as represented in literature. The ordinances of the Chthonians, being of the character of natural forces, were not expected to be rational; the rain falls alike on the fields of the righteous and the wicked. But when gods are imagined in the shape of sensitive humans, men expect that their ordinances shall be humanly intelligible. In monotheism the flaws in the universe become clamant and the problem of evil must eventually arise. In polytheism the individual deity need not embody ideals higher than human or indeed be accountable to human, values of good and evil. And yet, as a being of human figure and capable of human emotions, his conduct must have some meaning comprehensible, and therefore somehow profitable, to his public.

In literature the clearest picture of the distinction between the Chthonians and Olympians is that presented by Aeschylus in the Oresteia, and in particular in the last play of the trilogy, the Eumenides. Apollo, in keeping with his concern for the rights of the male and for orderly government, has bidden Orestes to avenge the murder of Agamemnon, a king who was killed by a woman. By Apolline standards the fact that the woman was Orestes’ own mother was indifferent; killing one’s mother is no more or less heinous than killing any other elderly female. But by Chthonian standards the blood tie between mother and son is the closest possible, and matricide therefore the most heinous crime in the calendar. Orestes makes his difficult choice in favor of Apollo, and the Chthonian Erinyes, in keeping with their allotted function, proceed to persecute him. The trial of Orestes, which will settle the issue between the two views, takes place in a court newly established by Athena, with Apollo arguing in defense. The Erinyes need ask only one question: “Did you kill your mother?” When Orestes must acknowledge that he did, the case is finished in their sight. They are not interested in extenuating circumstances or in degrees of guilt; blood that has been shed, for whatever reason, must be requited by blood shed in turn. Apollo argues that the mother is not the true parent of the child but only the nurse of the father’s seed; this is in effect a denial of the claim of blood, and of the matriarchal principle with which it is involved. He maintains also that the murder of a king is particularly evil, thus not only emphasizing the Olympian concern with order, but also denying the principle of automatic pollution by introducing the factor of degrees of guilt. The Erinyes on their part are convinced that it was the deterrents they represented that maintained order in the world, and that if their function were questioned chaos would ensue. The implications of their eventual reconciliation we shall examine presently. For the present we may note that the institution of a court of law, where circumstances and degrees of guilt are examined and determined by a jury of the defendant’s peers, is a great stride forward in civilization. The mechanical law of blood for blood with its corollaries of corporate and hereditary guilt has been supplemented if not supplanted by the rule of reason.

Other of Aeschylus’ plays, notably the Suppliants and the Prometheus, similarly turn upon an adjudication between Chthonian and Olympian views. The Prometheus presents a difficult philological problem. Not only is it different from the other six extant plays of Aeschylus in form and language, but where the other six uniformly exalt Zeus almost to the level of omnipotence and omniscience of the God of the Old Testament, the Prometheus shows him as an unfeeling tyrant. Some scholars have found the discrepancy so striking as to deny the play Aeschylean authorship. But a great part of the difficulty may be that the theology of the Prometheus is higher rather than lower than the reader expects. Prometheus, who belongs to the Chthonic order, is a friend of man and alone made it possible for man to survive by supplying him with a series of crutches; being men, our own sympathies are naturally on Prometheus’ side, and we can only look upon the grievous punishment Zeus inflicts upon him as senseless tyranny. But Zeus, who was indeed new to his office and admittedly had much to learn, had a completely different plan in mind; he operates, as it were, by a non-Euclidean geometry where we and Prometheus and Job’s friends who are equally certain that wisdom will die with them, are limited to the Euclidean. Zeus’s design had been, as Prometheus ruefully says (234 f.), “to bring the whole race of mortals to nothingness and to create another.” In view of the wretched state in which Zeus found mankind, when only Prometheus’ tinkering and pottering could keep them alive, this might have been an admirable plan, but it must take great imagination for a mortal to approve of it. Prometheus is without imagination and without rationality; he works only by sentimentality, which is the Chthonian way and wrong.

In the Suppliants the fifty daughters of Danaus who have fled marriage with their Egyptian cousins take a long while to convince King Pelasgus of Argos that they are in fact of Argive descent (and so entitled to asylum by right of blood), and it is only when they have done so and threatened to pollute the land that the king cries out (438 ff.), “I am driven to this stark pass—a mighty war against one side or the other; there is no escape.” The one side is the Chthonian, which will be outraged if people entitled to it are denied asylum; the other is the Olympian: to incur the danger of war with a powerful foreign enemy for a sentimental cause is bad because it is unreasonable. We do not know how the trilogy of which the Suppliants was part ended, but it is clear that the conduct of the Danaids was not completely justified, for their refusal to marry was not based on sufficient grounds. They did marry their cousins, according to legend, and forty-nine of the fifty murdered them on their wedding night. These are the Danaids in Hades, eternally busy with the futile task of carrying water in a sieve.

The ambivalent ending of the Eumenides is clearer and more germane to our purpose. When the jury voted half for acquitting Orestes and half for condemning him, Athena herself, by the rules of procedure which she had previously laid down, broke the tie by voting for acquittal. The decision, then, amounted to something like “innocent, but don’t do it again.” Even manifest murder does not automatically carry blood guilt. But what happened to the Erinyes is more interesting. With firm kindness Athena reconciles them to the new order by assigning them a new role; their former responsibility would now be otherwise discharged, but they remained earth deities, and as such their new function would be to bring blessings to the earth. Heretofore the Erinyes (“Furies”) had been called Eumenides (“Kindly minded ones”) only as a euphemism; now it has become their proper name. Even when new and better ways are introduced the old and familiar are not abolished but sublimated to new usefulness in an altered role.

It is here that we observe a significant difference between the religious outlook of the Greeks and that of the religions with which we are more familiar. When Judaism prevails in Palestine the older forms are made anathema (though their survival is attested by prophetic admonitions against backsliding), and upon the advent of Christianity both its Jewish and pagan antecedents are rejected. Monotheism is by nature exclusive and hence cannot tolerate rivals. Polytheism can, and it is the peculiarity of the Greek religion that several strands could continue side by side even when one had been partially discredited. Even where a belief is exclusive and codified, honest communicants sometimes find emotional attachment to different premises hard to overcome. Men who believe that the righteous dead enter into a blessed immortality should in logic be pleased when dear ones of whose righteousness they are convinced die, but in fact they lament. Reactions to the supernatural are not only complex but often contradictory, without the individual’s being aware of the contradictions. The disparity which we find in the Chthonian and Olympian elements in Greek religion did not trouble the Greeks.

We return to Homer. In the light of what has been said, what is remarkable about him is not his confusion but his consistency. It is Homer who presents the Olympians most fully and most attractively, and it is the Homeric view of the motives and proclivities of the Olympians that fixed their character in subsequent Greek literature. If, as would surely seem the case, such tension between the Olympians and Chthonians as is reflected in the plays of Aeschylus already existed in the time of Homer, then Homer’s neglect of the Chthonians would appear to be purposeful and his advocacy of the Olympians might make him one of the small handful of religious teachers who have affected the direction of civilization.

To assign such high importance to Homer does indeed seem to be allowing fancy too free a rein: when we know that the materials and forms of the epic are traditional, so that the very existence of Homer could be questioned and his contributions minimized, and when there is so little material for reconstructing the intellectual milieu aside from what the poems themselves provide, how can anyone presume to say that they contain significant theological innovations which can be attributed to Homer? And yet competent students have insisted that the Olympian religion, as it is reflected in later writers and therefore as it has affected European thought, is the creation of Homer, and it is worth our while to follow the train of their argument.

First, of course, we must agree that Homer is not only an individual creator but one endowed with extraordinary insights and originality. This recent trends in criticism have made it easy to do. The materials and techniques which Homer used are indeed traditional, but only a supremely gifted creator could have moulded them into the consistent artistic unity we read and have made of it so profound a commentary on the tragedy and glory of man. But how can we know with any degree of precision where Homer’s own contributions, and particularly those relating to religion, are to be found? The only way is to examine what Homer has included in relation to the larger mass he must have known and to discern some directing principle which determined inclusion or omission or distribution of emphasis. Just such a procedure enables us to see that focusing the broader story upon the tragedy of Achilles is the work of Homer. From the point of view of religious attitudes it is noticeable that later accounts of persons and events associated with the tale of Troy reflect a more primitive outlook than Homer’s, that they envisage such horrors as human sacrifice (as in the story of Iphigenia at Aulis) and cannibalism on the part of the gods (as in the s...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• WORLD PERSPECTIVES: What This Series Means
• I The Legacy and its Distortions
• II Who were the Greeks?
• III The Heroic Code
• IV The Supernatural
• V The Tragic View
• VI Man the Measure
• VII The Cult of Hellenism
• VIII Channels to Europe
• IX Humanist Revival
• X The Return: Machiavelli and Spinoza