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
We can walk
unmoved down the streets of Plaistow, but we cannot bear to see a horse
beaten. The Athenians set up no Albert Memorials, but they tortured
slave-girls in their law-courts and sent their prisoners to work in the
horrible galleries of the Laureion silver-mines.
This emergence of a new spirit, which seems to be almost independent of
all traditions, makes it difficult to estimate our present indebtedness
to Greece in matters of religion. It would be difficult even if the
industrial revolution had not taken place. The northern Europeans have
hardly yet attained to self-expression. Their religion is a mixture of
Greek, Latin, and Hebrew elements which refuse to be harmonized, and
which in this country sometimes clash with the ideal of a gentleman,
that lay religion of the English-speaking peoples, which has no longer
any connexion with heraldry or property in land. The English gentleman
is not a Greek any more than he is a Jew. His code makes Odysseus an
amusing rascal; Achilles a violent and sulky savage; and Aristotle's
μεγαλοψυχος {megalopsychos} (as has been said) is rather like a nobleman
in a novel by Disraeli, but not like any other sort of gentleman. The
Englishman is by nature religious; but Christianity in its developed
form is a Mediterranean religion; in all external features it might have
been very different if it had been first planted north of the Alps.
There is, therefore, a chronic confusion in Protestantism which makes
its conflicts with the Latin Church like the battles of undisciplined
barbarians against well-drilled troops.
Nevertheless, though it is so difficult to separate out the various
threads which make up the tangled skein of our modern religion, it may
be worth while to make the attempt to distinguish, first, those parts of
current Christianity which are not Greek, in the wide sense which I have
chosen for the word, and then those which, in the same sense, are Greek
by origin or affinity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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