The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Philosophy
The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Greece -- Civilization
Our sense of continuity is dulled in another way. There is a tendency to
isolate certain aspects of Hellenic life and thought as characteristic,
and to stamp others, which are equally found among the ancient Greeks,
as untypical and exceptional. In the sphere of religion, with which we
are concerned in this essay, we are bidden to regard Plato and Euripides
as rebels against the national tradition, and not as normal products of
their age and country. I do not feel at liberty to pick and choose in
this fashion. A national character may be best exemplified in its
rebels, a religion in its heretics. If Nietzsche was right in calling
Plato a Christian before Christ, I do not therefore regard him as an
unhellenic Greek. Rather, I trace back to him, and so to Greece, the
religion and the political philosophy of the Christian Church, and the
Christian type of mysticism. If Euripides anticipated to an
extraordinary degree the devout agnosticism, the vague pantheism, the
humanitarian sentiment of the nineteenth (rather than of the twentieth)
century, I do not consider that he was a freak in fifth-century Athens,
but that Greece showed us the way even in paths where we have not been
used to look to her for guidance. I am equally reluctant to assume,
without evidence, that the later Platonism, whether we call it religion
or philosophy, is unhellenic. It is quite unnecessary to look for
Asiatic influences in a school which clung close to the Attic tradition.
It is more to the purpose to show how a religious philosophy of mystical
revelation and introspection grew naturally out of the older
nature-philosophies, just as in our own day metaphysics and science have
both been driven back upon the theory of knowledge and psychology. It
should not be necessary to remind Hellenists that 'Know thyself' passed
for the supreme word of wisdom in the classical period, or that
Heracleitus revealed his method in the words 'I searched myself'.
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