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
and it may well be that it is by this path that our contemporaries may
recover that belief in eternal life which is at present burning very
dimly among us.
In conclusion, what has the religion of the Greeks to teach us that we
are most in danger of forgetting? In a word, it is the faith that Truth
is our friend, and that the knowledge of Truth is not beyond our reach.
Faith in honest seeking (ζητησις {zêtêsis}) is at the heart of the Greek
view of life. 'Those who would rightly judge of truth', says Aristotle,
'must be arbitrators, not litigants'. 'Happy is he who has learnt the
value of research' (ἱστορια {historia}), says Euripides in a fragment.
Curiosity, as the Greeks knew and the Middle Ages knew not, is a
virtue, not a vice. Nature, for Plato, is God's vicegerent and revealer,
the Soul of the universe. Human nature is the same nature as the divine;
no one has proclaimed this more strongly. Nature is for us; chaos and
'necessity' are the enemy. The divorce between religion and humanism
began, it must be admitted, under Plato's successors, who unhappily were
indifferent to natural science, and did not even follow the best light
that was to be had in physical knowledge. In the Dark Ages, when the
link with Greece was broken, the separation became absolute. The
luxuriant mythology of the early Greeks was not unscientific. In the
absence of knowledge gaps were filled up by the imagination, and the
'method of trial and error'. The dramatic fancy which creates myths is
the raw material of both poetry and science. Of course religious myths
may come to be a bar to progress in science; they do so when, in a
rationalizing age, the question comes to be one of fact or fiction. It
is a mistake to suppose that the faith of a 'post-rational' age, to use
a phrase of Santayana, can be the same as that of an unscientific age,
even when it uses the same formulas. The Greek spirit itself is now
calling us away from some of the vestments of Greek tradition. The
choice before us is between a 'post-rational' traditionalism,
fundamentally sceptical, pragmatistic, and intellectually dishonest, and
a trust in reason which rests really on faith in the divine Logos, the
self-revealing soul of the universe. It is the belief of the present
writer that the unflinching eye and the open mind will bring us again to
the feet of Christ, to whom Greece, with her long tradition of free and
fearless inquiry, became a speedy and willing captive, bringing her
manifold treasures to Him, in the well-grounded confidence that He was
not come to destroy but to fulfil.
W. R. INGE.
PHILOSOPHY
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