The Legacy of Greece. Various
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The Classics are not taught; the Bible is not taught; history is not taught to any effect. What is even more serious, there are no social traditions. The modern townsman is déraciné: he has forgotten the habits and sentiments of the village from which his forefathers came. An unnatural and unhealthy mode of life, cut off from the sweet and humanizing influences of nature, has produced an unnatural and unhealthy mentality, to which we shall find no parallels in the past. Its chief characteristic is profound secularity or materialism. The typical town artisan has no religion and no superstitions; he has no ideals beyond the visible and tangible world of the senses. This of course opens an impassable gulf between him and Greek religion, and a still wider gulf between him and Christianity. The attempts which are occasionally made, especially in this country, to dress up the Labour movement as a return to the Palestinian Gospel, are little short of grotesque. The contrast is well summed up by Belfort Bax, in a passage quoted by Professor Gardner. ‘According to Christianity, regeneration must come from within. The ethics and religion of modern socialism on the contrary look for regeneration from without, from material conditions and a higher social life.’ Here the gauntlet is thrown down to Christ and Plato alike.
Quite logically the new spirit is in revolt against what it calls intellectualism, which means the application of the dry light of reason to the problems of human life. It wishes to substitute for reason what some of its philosophers call instinct, but which should rather be called sentiment and emotion. There is no reconciliation between this view of life and Hellenism. For science is the eldest and dearest child of the Greek spirit. One of the great battles of the future will be between science and its enemies. The misologists have numbers on their side; but ‘Nature’, whom all the Greeks honoured and trusted, will be justified in her children.
The new spirit is especially bitter against the Stoical ethics, which as we have seen were taken over, with the Platonic metaphysics, by Christianity. Stoicism teaches men to venerate and obey natural law; to accept with proud equanimity the misfortunes of life; to be beneficent, but to inhibit the emotion of pity; to be self-reliant and self-contained; to practise self-denial for the sake of self-conquest; and to regard this life as a stern school of moral discipline. All this is simply detestable to the new spirit, which is sentimental, undisciplined, and hedonistic. It remembers the hardness of Puritanism, and has no admiration for its virtues.
It is often said that the modern man has entirely lost the Greek love of beauty. This is, I think, untrue, and unjust to our present civilization, unlovely as it undoubtedly is in many ways. It is curious that modern critics of the Greeks have not called attention to the aesthetic obtuseness which showed itself in the defective reaction of the ancients against cruelty. It was not that they excluded beautiful actions from the sphere of aesthetics; they never thought of separating the beautiful from the good in this way. But they were not disgusted at the torture of slaves, the exposure of new-born children, or the massacre of the population of a revolted city. The same callousness appears in the Italian cities at the Renaissance; Ezzelino was a contemporary of the great architects and painters. I cannot avoid the conclusion that it is connected in some obscure way with the artistic creativeness of these two closely similar epochs. The extreme sensibility to physical suffering which characterizes modern civilization arose together with industrialism, and is most marked in the most highly industrialized countries. It has synchronized with the complete eclipse of spontaneous and unconscious artistic production, which we deplore in our time. Evelyn, in the seventeenth century, was still able to visit a prison in Paris to gratify his curiosity by seeing a prisoner tortured, and though he did not stay to the end of the exhibition he shows that his stomach was not easily turned. It is certain that our repugnance to such sights is aesthetic rather than moral, and probable that it is strongest in the lower social strata. Several years ago I went to the first night of a rather foolish play about ancient Rome, in which an early Christian is brought in to be very mildly tortured on the stage. At the first crack of the whip my neighbours sprang from their seats, crying, ‘Shame! Stop that!’; and the scene had to be removed in subsequent performances. The operatives in a certain factory stopped the engines for an hour because they heard a cat mewing among the machinery. Having with difficulty rescued the animal from being crushed they strangled it. The explanation of this extreme susceptibleness must be left to psychologists; but I am convinced that we have here a case of transferred aesthetic sensibility. We can walk unmoved down the streets of Plaistow, but we cannot bear to see a horse beaten. The Athenians set up no Albert Memorials, but they tortured slave-girls in their law-courts and sent their prisoners to work in the horrible galleries of the Laureion silver-mines.
This emergence of a new spirit, which seems to be almost independent of all traditions, makes it difficult to estimate our present indebtedness to Greece in matters of religion. It would be difficult even if the industrial revolution had not taken place. The northern Europeans have hardly yet attained to self-expression. Their religion is a mixture of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew elements which refuse to be harmonized, and which in this country sometimes clash with the ideal of a gentleman, that lay religion of the English-speaking peoples, which has no longer any connexion with heraldry or property in land. The English gentleman is not a Greek any more than he is a Jew. His code makes Odysseus an amusing rascal; Achilles a violent and sulky savage; and Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχος (as has been said) is rather like a nobleman in a novel by Disraeli, but not like any other sort of gentleman. The Englishman is by nature religious; but Christianity in its developed form is a Mediterranean religion; in all external features it might have been very different if it had been first planted north of the Alps. There is, therefore, a chronic confusion in Protestantism which makes its conflicts with the Latin Church like the battles of undisciplined barbarians against well-drilled troops.
Nevertheless, though it is so difficult to separate out the various threads which make up the tangled skein of our modern religion, it may be worth while to make the attempt to distinguish, first, those parts of current Christianity which are not Greek, in the wide sense which I have chosen for the word, and then those which, in the same sense, are Greek by origin or affinity.
Among those elements which are not Greek, the first place must be given to the original Gospel, of which I have said nothing yet. Our records of the Galilean ministry, contained in the three synoptic Gospels, were not compiled till long after the events which they describe, and must not be used uncritically. But in my opinion, at any rate, the substance of the teaching of Christ comes out very clearly in these books. No Hellenic influence can be traced in it; there is not even any sign of the Hellenized Judaism which for us is represented by his contemporary Philo. But neither is it possible to call the Gospel Jewish, except with many qualifications. Christ came before his countrymen as a prophet; he deliberately placed himself in the line of the prophetic tradition. Like other prophets of his nation, he did not altogether eschew the framework of apocalyptic which was at that time the natural mould for prophecy. But he preached neither the popular nationalism, nor the popular ecclesiasticism, nor the popular ethics. His countrymen rejected him as soon as they understood him. The Gospel was, as St. Paul said, a new creation. It is most significant that it at once introduced a new ethical terminology. The Greek words which we translate love (or charity), joy, peace, hope, humility, are no part of the stock-in-trade of Greek moralists before Christ. Men do not coin new words for old ideas. Taken as a whole the Gospel is profoundly original; and a Christian can find strong evidence for his belief that in Christ a revelation was made to humanity at large, in which the religion of the Spirit, in its purest and most universal form, was for the first time presented to mankind. This revelation has to a considerable extent passed into the common consciousness of the civilized world; but its implications in matters of conduct, individual, social, and international, are still imperfectly understood and have never been acted upon, except feebly and sporadically. It is a reproach to us that the teaching of Christ must be regarded as only one of many elements which make up what we call Christianity. The Quakers, as a body, seem to me to come nearest to what a genuinely Christian society would be.
Secondly, the Greeks escaped the evils of priestly government. The Oriental type of theocracy, with which they were familiar in the Egypt of the Pharaohs, was alien to their civilization. Their sacrifices were for the most part of the genial type, a communion-meal with the god. But even in Greece we must remember the gloomy chthonian rites, and the degradations of Orphism mentioned by Plato in the Republic. ‘They persuade not