So much for the result in superstitious minds of the denial, or rather
the removal, of the Olympian Gods. It landed men in the worship of
Fortune or of Fate.
Next, let us consider what happened when, instead of merely rejecting
the Gods _en masse_, people tried carefully to collect what remained of
religion after the Olympian system fell.
Aristotle himself gives us a fairly clear answer. He held that the
origins of man's idea (ἔννοια) of the Divine were twofold,[136:1] the
phenomena of the sky and the phenomena of the human soul. It is very
much what Kant found two thousand years later. The spectacle of the vast
and ordered movements of the heavenly bodies are compared by him in a
famous fragment with the marching forth of Homer's armies before Troy.
Behind such various order and strength there must surely be a conscious
mind capable
Κοσμῆσαι ἵρρους τε καὶ ἀνέρας ἀσπιδιώτας,
To order steeds of war and mailèd men.
It is only a step from this to regarding the sun, moon, and stars as
themselves divine, and it is a step which both Plato and Aristotle,
following Pythagoras and followed by the Stoics, take with confidence.
Chrysippus gives practically the same list of gods: 'the Sun, Moon, and
Stars; and Law: and men who have become Gods.'[136:2] Both the wandering
stars and the fixed stars are 'animate beings, divine and eternal',
self-acting subordinate gods. As to the divinity of the soul or the mind
of man, the earlier generations are shy about it. But in the later
Stoics it is itself a portion of the divine life. It shows this
ordinarily by its power of reason, and more conspicuously by becoming
ἔνθεος, or 'filled with God', in its exalted moments of prevision,
ecstasy, and prophetic dreams. If reason itself is divine, there is
something else in the soul which is even higher than reason or at least
more surprisingly divine.
Let us follow the history of both these remaining substitutes for the
Olympian gods.
First for the Heavenly bodies. If they are to be made divine, we can
hardly stop there. The Earth is also a divine being. Old tradition has
always said so, and Plato has repeated it. And if Earth is divine, so
surely are the other elements, the _Stoicheia_, Water, Air, and above
all, Fire. For the Gods themselves are said by Plato to be made of fire,
and the Stars visibly are so. Though perhaps the heavenly Fire is really
not our Fire at all, but a πέμπτον σῶμα, a 'Fifth Body', seeing that it
seems not to burn nor the Stars to be consumed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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