Religion and Art in Ancient Greece | Page 4

Professor Petrie's discovery at Memphis of a number of votive ears of the god, intended to facilitate or to symbolise his reception of the prayers of his votaries. In fact, the taunt of the psalmist against the images of the heathen--"Eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears, and yet they hear not"--is not a merely rhetorical one, as it seems to us, but real and practical, if spoken to men who gave their gods ears and eyes that they might hear and see.
An imagination so entirely materialistic may belong to a more primitive stage than any we can find among the Greeks. As soon as religion has reached the polytheistic stage the gods are regarded as travelling from image to image, just as they travel from temple to temple. Even in AEschylus' Eumenides it will be remembered that when Orestes, by the advice of Apollo, clasps as a suppliant the ancient image of Athena at Athens, the goddess comes flying from far away in the Troad when she hears the sound of his calling. The exact relation of the goddess to the image is not, in all probability, very clearly realised; but, so far as one can trace it from the ritual procedure, what appears to be implied is that a suppliant will have a better chance of reaching the deity he addresses if he approaches one of the images preferred by that deity as the abode of his power; often there is one such image preferred to all others, as this early one of Athena at Athens. The deity was not, therefore, regarded as immanent in any image--at least, in classical times; the gods lived in Olympus, or possibly visited from time to time the people whom they favoured, or went to the great festivals that were held in their honour. But the various images of them, especially the most ancient ones, that were set up in their temples in the various cities of Greece were regarded as a means of communication between gods and men. The prayer of a worshipper addressing such an image will be transmitted to the deity whom he addresses, and the deity may even come in person to hear him, if special aid is required. A close parallel may be found even in modern days. I have known of a child, brought up in the Roman Catholic religion, who had a particular veneration or affection for a certain statue of the Virgin, and used often to address it or, as she said, converse with it. And she said she had an impression that, if only she could slip in unawares, she might see the Virgin Mary herself approaching or leaving the statue, whether to be transformed into it or merely to dwell in it for a time. On Greek vases we see the same notion expressed as in the Eumenides, when a god or goddess is represented as actually present beside the statue to which a sacrifice or prayer is being offered.
In such a stage of religious belief or imagination it is clearly of high importance that the image of any deity should be pleasing to that deity, and thereby attract his presence and serve as a ready channel of communication with him. From the point of view of art, it would seem at first sight that the result would be a desire to make the image as beautiful as possible, and as worthy an embodiment of the deity as the sculptor could devise. This doubtless was the result in the finest period of art in Greece, and it involved, as we shall see, a great deal of reciprocal influence on the part of religion and art. But in earlier times the case is not so simple; and even in statues of the fifth century it is not easy to understand the conditions under which the sculptor worked without some reference to the historical development that lay behind him.
Before the rise of sculpture in Greece, images of the gods, some of them only rudely anthropomorphic, had long been objects of worship; and it was by no means safe in religious matters to depart too rashly from the forms consecrated by tradition. This was partly owing to the feeling that when a certain form had been accepted, and a certain means of communication had worked for a long time satisfactorily, it was a dangerous thing to make a change which might not be agreeable to the powers concerned, and which might, so to speak, break the established connection. But while hieratic conservatism tended to preserve forms and formulae almost for what we may call magic reasons, there was also a sentiment about the matter which gave popular support to the tendency. Thus Pausanias probably expresses a common feeling when he says that