The contradictions and inconsistencies which were inherent in the system were felt by the common people. Thus Euthyphron defends his action against his father by the analogy of Zeus’s treatment of his own father Kronos. The worship of the different gods in the State was loosely co- ordinated into a religion. In Athens the enjoy- ment and splendour of the great festivals of Athena were supplemented by the solemn impressiveness of the Mysteries. The feeling of awe, the fear of God, and the dread of divinely-sent calamity, grew with the spread of education into a vague consciousness of sin, and of the need for recon- ciliation with an offended God. On this conscious- ness the Orphic Mysteries were based; and in them certain observances ensured Divine forgive- ness and future happiness. Strolling prophets even professed to sell indulgences, and in return for money to ensure, by performing certain rites, safety from punishment. At the same time a vague idea was growing in the popular mind that a good and pious life was needed to please God, quite as much as compliance with a stated ritual.
There was only one possible cure—raising the
RELIGION OF GREECE 147 conception of God and intensifying the tendency to monotheism inherent in human thought, and not entirely lost sight of in the Greek religion. No adequate provision existed in the religion for educating the people and purifying itself. The Delphic with other Oracles had carried on this work for centuries, and eEnynral, appointed with its sanction in many States, were judges in difficult points of religion, and had some influence in co. ordinating the several cults; but the influence of the Oracles began to grow weaker after the end of the 6th cent., and their character deteriorated.
“The established religion became purely conserva-
tive, and the effort of all its ministers was solely to keep up the traditional state of things. The only hope Jay in the literature of the age and the spread of higher thought. As poets had formu- lated with the help of the prophets the prevailing system, they with the help of the philosophers had now to raise its character. This was the religious work that the Gnomic poets, Pindar, and the Tragic poets successively performed.
The first adequate recognition in modern times of this important side of Greek literature is prob- ably to be found in the pages of Zeller and of Trendelenburg, to whom especially we owe much in the following paragraphs.
Although the religious thought expressed in Greek literature and philosophy tended constantly to separate itself from the common religion, yet it was only the development of the latent capacities of that common religion. In its earlier stages literature worked hand in hand with the Delphic Oracle. The great Lyric and even the Tragic poets were recognized as the servants and ministers of the god. They wrote hymns for the worship which the Oracle propagated over Greece; and there is every reason to think that their finest conceptions of religion were practically those of the Oracle. Those brief proverbial utterances in which the wisdom of the 7th and 6th cents. con- centrated itself are in the records expressly brought into connexion with the Oracle, over whose entrance was inscribed the undév dyay of the Wise Man.*
But the relation between the two did not always continue so peaceable. Apart from those who simply denied the truth of the prevailing religion, those who like A’schylus or Socrates continued in sympathy with, and tried to read a higher mean- ing in, the established religion, found themselves i in frequent danger of being misunderstood. Aischylus was accused of revealing the Mys- teries to the profane, and Socrates was condemned as seeking to introduce new deities into the State. The Delphic rule of maintaining the hereditary order of things (74 mdrpia) was generally on the side of the uneducated, though the Oracle seems on the whole to have appreciated the work and char- acter of Socrates. The conflict of religion and science, which had begun in the 5th cent. or even earlier, was the prominent fact in the 4th.
Two questions rose naturally to the minds of all who thought about the common religion: first, what was the relation of Zeus to the other gods, and how could will and power in them be recon- ciled with his omnipotence? And, second, what was the relation of Zeus to that overpowering fate that seemed at times to control even his will? In truth, the two questions are but two aspects of the same difficulty, and the answer to one involves the answer to the other. As long as the con- ception of God contains any of the capricious human element, so long must the will of Zeus clash with the will of the other gods and be over- ruled by the unbending, unvarying order of nature. When the Divine nature is conceived as absolutely
* See especially a paper on Freedom and Necessity in Greek Philosophy in Trendelenburg’s Beitrdge.
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regular and the Divine will as absolutely free from arbitrariness and caprice, opposition between the will of the different gods and disagreement with the course of fate tend to disappear.
As we have already seen, the religious view in Homer varies between the opposite and_ incon- sistent views, and the same wavering is seen throughout Greek literature.
Herodotus represents more completely the lower view of Divine nature than any other of the great writers. In his view, success produces pride ; man believes in his own power and sufficiency, and recognizes not the unseen power of God: the gods blind him and lead him into destruction through his own arrogance. This view, that the gods, act- ing as the instruments of an inscrutable fate, blind men, involves essentially the same idea of fate as the other view, that the gods are friends of men, but that fate is over the gods and too powerful for them. The latter view is summed up in the words of Pittacos, dvdyxa 5’ ode Oeot udxovra, To Hero- dotus mere success is in itself a defying of the Divine law: the Divine power is chiefly seen in the misfortune which it sends on men. ‘The order and regularity of the world, recognition of which is the fundamental idea of his work, is quite above and apart from human reason ; man cannot adapt himself to it, but only mourn when he has felt its power. Only when he dies is a man safe from the calamity that the god may at any moment send on him.