The Religious Thought of the Greeks, from Homer to the Triumph of ChristianityMoore, Clifford Herschel
Religion
The Religious Thought of the Greeks, from Homer to the Triumph of Christianity
Moore, Clifford Herschel
Greece -- Religion; Philosophy, Ancient; Religious thought -- Greece; Religious thought -- To 600
Yet at the risk of repetition, I would recall the fact that the
practice of religion by individuals had not ceased at Athens. The
common man still paid devotion to his guardian gods, made offerings to
the dead, and shared in many forms of worship. Furthermore the spread
of the Eleusinian mysteries in this century, so that a new and larger
initiation hall had to be erected at Eleusis, shows that thoughts
of the future life and the deepest religious feelings still existed
in large numbers of the citizens. We have here, then, an apparent
contradiction, such as has appeared many times and in many places in
the religious history of man. Many of the leaders of the state were
interested in religion only as it was an affair of state, in the same
way in which the army and navy were. On the other hand there were
large numbers who felt a more personal interest in religion and who
cultivated a more personal relation to divinity. Nor were there lacking
men of the most intellectual class to deal with the higher concepts of
religion which had been developing during the recent centuries. These
ideas find their truest utterance in the work of the poets, and we have
already seen how Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles interpreted nobler
views with regard to the gods, human conduct, and man’s relation to the
divinities, to all Greece and especially to Athens which had now become
the intellectual center of the Hellenic world.
But another new force had been developing among the Greeks during
the sixth century which was destined to deal a far greater blow to
traditional religion than any other—I mean philosophy. This began
in Ionia and was cultivated in other parts of greater Greece before
it came to Athens. But after the Persian Wars the prominence and
prosperity of that city was so great and her intellectual eminence
was so high that she attracted the men of note in many departments of
life. Among them was the philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae who made
Athens his home for about thirty years (c. 462-432 B.C.).
He became a member of the most intellectual Athenian society of his
day, a friend of Euripides, and an intimate of Pericles. When dangers
began to threaten the state, with the prospect of war looming on the
horizon, the people began to blame their great leader; to injure him,
they banished one and another of his friends. The two most noted were
Phidias the sculptor, of whose art the marbles of the Parthenon are
still the unsurpassed witnesses, and Anaxagoras the philosopher; the
charge against both was impiety. Anaxagoras taught that the sun was a
red hot mass of rock, as the moon was a cold mass, like the earth.
According to this teaching the sun and moon could no longer be
regarded as gods, so that a charge of impiety was as easily based on
such doctrines as it was on the teaching of Galileo twenty centuries
later. But although the philosopher was driven out, philosophy could
not be so easily banished. The eager intellectual life of Athens had
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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