The Greek View of Life | Page 5

within. The powers
of nature were not the only ones felt by man to be different from and
alien to himself; there were others, equally strange, dwelling in his own
heart, which, though in a sense they were part of him, yet he felt to be
not himself, which came upon him and possessed him without his
choice and against his will. With these too he felt the need to make
himself at home, and these too, to satisfy his need, he shaped into
creatures like himself. To the whole range of his inner experience he
gave definition and life, presenting it to himself in a series of spiritual
forms. In Aphrodite, mother of Eros, he incarnated the passion of love,
placing in her broidered girdle "love and desire of loving converse that
steals the wits even of the wise"; in Ares he embodied the lust of war;
in Athene, wisdom; in Apollo, music and the arts. The pangs of guilt
took shape in the conception of avenging Furies; and the very prayers
of the worshipper sped from him in human form, wrinkled and
blear-eyed, with halting pace, in the rear of punishment. Thus the very
self of man he set outside himself; the powers, so intimate, and yet so
strange, that swayed him from within he made familiar by making them
distinct; converted their shapeless terror into the beauty of visible form;
and by merely presenting them thus to himself in a guise that was
immediately understood, set aside, if he could not answer, the haunting
question of their origin and end.
Here then is at least a partial reply to our question as to the effect of a

belief in the gods on the feeling of the Greek. To repeat the phrase once
more, it made him at home in the world. The mysterious powers that
controlled him it converted into beings like himself; and so gave him
heart and breathing-space, shut in, as it were, from the abyss by this
shining host of fair and familiar forms, to turn to the interests and
claims of the passing hour an attention undistracted by doubt and fear.
Section 4. Greek Religion the Foundation of Society.
But this relation to the world of nature is only one side of man's life;
more prominent and more important, at a later stage of his development,
is his relation to society; and here too in Greek civilization a great part
was played by religion. For the Greek gods, we must remember, were
not purely spiritual powers, to be known and approached only in the
heart by prayer. They were beings in human form, like, though superior
to ourselves, who passed a great part of their history on earth,
intervened in the affairs of men, furthered or thwarted their
undertakings, begat among them sons and daughters, and followed,
from generation to generation, the fortunes of their children's children.
Between them and mankind there was no impassable gulf; from
Heracles the son of Zeus was descended the Dorian race; the Ionians
from Ion, son of Apollo; every family, every tribe traced back its origin
to a "hero", and these "heroes" were children of the gods, and deities
themselves. Thus were the gods, in the most literal sense, the founders
of society; from them was derived, even physically, the unit of the
family and the race; and the whole social structure raised upon that
natural basis was necessarily penetrated through and through by the
spirit of religion.
We must not therefore be misled by the fact that there was no church in
the Greek state to the idea that the state recognised no religion; on the
contrary, religion was so essential to the state, so bound up with its
whole structure, in general and in detail, that the very conception of a
separation between the powers was impossible. If there was no separate
church, in our sense of the term, as an independent organism within the
state, it was because the state, in one of its aspects, was itself a church,
and derived its sanction, both as a whole and in its parts, from the same

gods who controlled the physical world. Not only the community as a
whole but all its separate minor organs were under the protection of
patron deities. The family centred in the hearth, where the father, in his
capacity of priest, offered sacrifice and prayer to the ancestors of the
house; the various corporations into which families were grouped, the
local divisions for the purpose of taxation, elections, and the like,
derived a spiritual unity from the worship of a common god; and finally
the all-embracing totality of the state itself was explained and justified
to all its members by the cult of the special protecting deity to whom its
origin and prosperous