The Age of the Great Classics
Alexander the Great, Wikimedia Commons
Hellenism: 331 B.C. - 324 A.D.
The Marriage of East and West
The Olympian gods never were confused by the Greeks with the ultimate Being of being. As Prometheus knew, they were the archetypes of the ideals of the Greek city state. In the Hellenistic period, when the brilliant pupil of Aristotle, Alexander the Great, having smashed across the whole Levant into India, had brought together in one world Greece, India, Persia, Egypt, and even the Jews outside Jerusalem, Greek religion advanced to a new phase. On the one hand, grandiose universalism, and on the other, personal inward immediacy. The beautiful Greek gods, far from dying, sent the inspiration of their breath all across Asia, to waken new religious and aesthetic forms in Maurya India, Han China, and ultimately Japan. In the West they wakened Rome and in the South brought a new significance to the old, old cults of the goddess Isis and her spouse.
An appreciation of the point of view of the Hellenistic Greeks toward religion can be obtained from the Alexandrian mythographer Maximus of Tyre (second century A.D.):
“…. we, being unable to apprehend His essence, use the help of sounds and names and pictures,….in our weakness naming all that is beautiful in this world after His nature – just as happens to earthly lovers……If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Phidias, an Egyptian by paying worship to animals, another man by a river, another by fire – I have no anger for their divergences; ..let them know, let them love, let them recall.”
Alexander, invading Persia in the years 336 – 330 B.C., gave strict orders that no sacred object whatsoever should be injured. When the Persians, nearly two centuries before, had sought to overpower Greece, they had destroyed temples, burned the images of gods and desecrated shrines – in the manner of Levantine monotheists. Alexander was the creator of a new world. In the present context, four things may be pointed out.
Firstly, in addition to showing respect for gods of all religions, he showed an almost scientific effort to recognize analogies, so that specific deities of the various lands began to be identified and worshiped as equivalent to each other: Isis and Demeter, Horus and Apollo, Thot and Hermes, Amun and Zeus. The Greeks in Bactria and in India identified Krishna with Herakles, Shiva with Dionysus, and in the West the later Romans saw, not only in the Greek gods but also in the Celtic and Germanic, respectable counterparts of their own. Although syncretic movements had existed on a regional basis before, nowhere before the period of Alexander the Great has the idea of a transcultural syncretism, systematically cultivated, emerged. In this period, the Periclean ideal of the polis expanded to the Alexandrian ideal of cosmopolis.
Secondly, the role of philosophy and science in the higher reading and development of myth had expanded with new developments of mathematics and astronomy. New ideas concerning the structure of the universe were derived, which remained basic to Occidental mythic thought until the century of Copernicus, when the sun displaced the earth as the center of the macrocosmic order.
Thirdly, a breakthrough of the Greek inquiring intellect with Alexander into India, where a totally unforeseen species of philosophic inquiry had been developed in the various yogic schools of the Jain, Buddhist, and Brahmanic centers, may be observed. A far deeper understanding of the practical psychological – as opposed to cosmological – relevancy of mythology was represented in those disciplines than anything the West was to achieve until the century of Nietzsche, Freud and Jung. A formidable influence of only half-comprehended psychosomatic mystic lore was to come pouring out of India into the hermitages and monasteries, schools and universities of the comparatively callow West – from which a number of colourful gnostic, theosophical, and hermetic cults and movements were derived.
Fourthly, after about two centuries of European influence upon Asia, the tide began to turn, until presently a powerful surge of reaction developed, which culminated with the victories of Christianity over the gods and philosophies of Classical antiquity and the subsequent collapse – for a spell of seven centuries – of the civilization of the European West.
Syncretistic and Ethnic Monotheism
Polytheism may be defined as the recognition and worship of a plurality of gods. Monotheism is the belief that there is but one substantial god. Two types of monotheism may be distinguished: 1. The inclusive, cosmopolitan, open, syncretic type; and 2. The ethnic, closed, and exclusive type. The outstanding instance of ethnic monotheism is, of course, the post-exilic monotheism of the Bible, which then passed to Christianity and Islam. The most developed systems of syncretic monotheism have been those of the Hellenized Near East, Rome, Gupta and post-Gupta India, and the humanistic learning of Europe since the Renaissance. Epicureanism, Buddhism, and the higher reaches of Hinduism are exceptional in as much as their final terms are not personified, or in any way anthropomorphized as “God”.
The centuries between the first decline of Classical Athens (starting with the Peloponnesian Wars) and the growth of a radically different setting with the coming of the Christian era (which picked up momentum as the Hellenic era drew to a close), was an age of great transformation in mind sets. It was an age comparable to that of India in the Buddha’s time and of China in the period of Confucius. In each of these, the earlier social structure was in process of dissolution, the centers of higher civilization were crumbling before the sheer power of comparative barbarians. The central task of philosophy had become, on one hand socio-political, how to restore a dissolving civilization to health, and on the other, moral and psychological, how an individual in the shattering world might retain and develop his own humanity.
It was in the writings of the great personalities of the Hellenistic and Roman Stoic school that the most enduring and influential statements of the moral, political, and cosmological implications of Hellenistic syncretic monotheism appeared. Notable in this respect are its Greco-Phoenician founder, Zeno (336? – 264 B.C.), the Roman author Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.), the crippled Phrygian-Roman slave Epictetus (60? – 120 A.D.), and the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121 – 180 A.D.). For all these thinkers, God, the informing spirit of the world, is rational and absolutely good. Nothing, therefore, can occur that is not – in the frame of the totality – absolutely good. The doctrine, essentially, is that satirized by Voltaire in Candide, of the best of all possible worlds. But in strong terms it was reaffirmed by Nietzsche in his rhapsodic Thus Spake Zarathustra, where the word “good” is read not as “comfortable” but as excellent, and a call is issued to each to love his fate: amor fati. Oswald Spengler also represents this view in his motto, adopted from Seneca: “The fates guide him who will, him won’t they drag.” It is a view beyond any kind of pleasure-pain calculation; in Seneca’s words: “Not that you bear but how you bear it is what counts”.
The ideal of indifference to pain and pleasure, gain and loss, in the performance of one’s life task, which is of the essence of this stoic order, suggests the Indian ideal of Karma Yoga described in the Bhagavad Gita. However, the Indian life task is imposed upon each by his caste statutes, whereas the Greco-Roman task is that recognized and imposed on each by his own reason: for God here is Intelligence, Knowledge, and Right Reason. Furthermore, the condition of nirvana, disengagement in trance rapture, which is the goal of Indian Yoga, is entirely different from the Greek ideal of ataraxia, the rational mind undisturbed by pleasure and pain. Yet, between the two views there is much to be compared, particularly their grounding in pantheism – which is fundamental both to the Orient (whether India or the Far East) and to the Classical world. The biblical view, whether in Jewish, Christian, or Islamic thought, stands in firm opposition to this.
Mystery Cult and Apocalypse
In Japanese the term jiriki “one’s own strength” refers to such self-reliant disciplines as Stoicism or, in the Orient, Zen Buddhism, while “tariki” “outside strength, another’s strength” refers to ways that rely on the idea of a savior: in Japan, Amida Buddhism. By the latter, through invoking the name of the infinitely radiant Solar Buddha of the Land of Bliss, one is reborn, at death, in his paradise, there to attain nirvana. During the Hellenistic age Western counterparts of this popular Buddhism were the numerous mystery cults that flourished with increasing influence until, in the late Roman period, first Mithraism, then Christianity gained imperial support and, thereby, the field.
The degree to which different persons need stimuli to enter into a state where they are receptive to exalted thoughts and feelings, varies of course from person to person. Exalted realizations in some persons may come through solitary reflection, whereas others may need incense, music, vestments and processions, gongs, bells, dramatic mimes and cries to be carried beyond themselves. But the ultimate realizations will in any event differ according, on one hand, to those cults in which divinity is seen as at once immanent and transcendent, and, on the other, to the orthodox Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan liturgies, where the ontological distinction is retained between God and Man, Creator and Creature.
In cults of the former type, the two strengths, “outside” and “within” are finally recognized as identical (“all things are Buddha things”), whereas in the great Near East orthodoxies no such identity can be imagined or even created as conceivable. Since syncretism was no less congenial to the native religions of Europe than to those of the Orient, there developed throughout the post-Alexandrian world - from Scotland to North Africa and eastward into India, with extensions even to the Far East – a single, rich, and colorful religious empire with an infinite wealth of forms, joining and harmonizing on many levels all the pantheons of the nations: Celtic, Germanic, Roman, Greek, and Oriental.
The syncretic mythic lore of this cosmopolitan period was in no sense a mere hotchpotch raked together from every corner of the earth. The symbolism throughout was consistent, and in accord, furthermore, with a common heritage shared by all from of old. Common symbols in worship are found to a large extent. The rites of Demeter and Persephone of Eleusis, Isis of Alexandria, Mithra of the Persians, and the Great Mother, Cybele, of Asia Minor, mutually influenced and enriched each other in the course of these centuries – all in terms of a common ability to sense and experience the miracle of life itself as divine. In these rites the notion of time was as something that was boundless.
In contrast to this we find that in the orthodox Zoroastrian church, as well as in Judaism and, later, Christianity and Islam, the view was not of boundless time, but of a time when time began, as well as of a time when time would end. An abundant, imaginative Apocalyptic literature developed during the Hellenistic period, notably from about 200 B.C. to about 100 A.D., first among Jews, but then also among Christians. This Apocalyptic end would then be followed by a return in glory of God.
The Watchers of the Dead Sea
The dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls is estimated between about 200 B.C. and the time of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66 – 70 A.D.). They are the oldest Hebrew manuscripts known. Their contents are of two kinds: 1) Fragments of Bible text from the period of the Septuagint (the version of the Old Testament that was translated into Greek, by seventy two translators according to legend – six from each of the twelve tribes. The texts they produced were miraculously identical. The text was produced from the first to the third centuries B.C.). 2) Writings original to the Essene sect, of which the chief examples are the scroll of the war of the sons of light with the sons of darkness, the manual of discipline, and the Habakukk commentary.
The legalism and the exclusivism of the Old Testament is seen in all the passages of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but when the time of the later Christians came, this cosmic crisis of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness had been passed, and the old ethic of Judgment therefore could yield to Love and to the notion of mankind in more general terms than the Chosen People.
The Olympian gods never were confused by the Greeks with the ultimate Being of being. As Prometheus knew, they were the archetypes of the ideals of the Greek city state. In the Hellenistic period, when the brilliant pupil of Aristotle, Alexander the Great, having smashed across the whole Levant into India, had brought together in one world Greece, India, Persia, Egypt, and even the Jews outside Jerusalem, Greek religion advanced to a new phase. On the one hand, grandiose universalism, and on the other, personal inward immediacy. The beautiful Greek gods, far from dying, sent the inspiration of their breath all across Asia, to waken new religious and aesthetic forms in Maurya India, Han China, and ultimately Japan. In the West they wakened Rome and in the South brought a new significance to the old, old cults of the goddess Isis and her spouse.
An appreciation of the point of view of the Hellenistic Greeks toward religion can be obtained from the Alexandrian mythographer Maximus of Tyre (second century A.D.):
“…. we, being unable to apprehend His essence, use the help of sounds and names and pictures,….in our weakness naming all that is beautiful in this world after His nature – just as happens to earthly lovers……If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Phidias, an Egyptian by paying worship to animals, another man by a river, another by fire – I have no anger for their divergences; ..let them know, let them love, let them recall.”
Alexander, invading Persia in the years 336 – 330 B.C., gave strict orders that no sacred object whatsoever should be injured. When the Persians, nearly two centuries before, had sought to overpower Greece, they had destroyed temples, burned the images of gods and desecrated shrines – in the manner of Levantine monotheists. Alexander was the creator of a new world. In the present context, four things may be pointed out.
Firstly, in addition to showing respect for gods of all religions, he showed an almost scientific effort to recognize analogies, so that specific deities of the various lands began to be identified and worshiped as equivalent to each other: Isis and Demeter, Horus and Apollo, Thot and Hermes, Amun and Zeus. The Greeks in Bactria and in India identified Krishna with Herakles, Shiva with Dionysus, and in the West the later Romans saw, not only in the Greek gods but also in the Celtic and Germanic, respectable counterparts of their own. Although syncretic movements had existed on a regional basis before, nowhere before the period of Alexander the Great has the idea of a transcultural syncretism, systematically cultivated, emerged. In this period, the Periclean ideal of the polis expanded to the Alexandrian ideal of cosmopolis.
Secondly, the role of philosophy and science in the higher reading and development of myth had expanded with new developments of mathematics and astronomy. New ideas concerning the structure of the universe were derived, which remained basic to Occidental mythic thought until the century of Copernicus, when the sun displaced the earth as the center of the macrocosmic order.
Thirdly, a breakthrough of the Greek inquiring intellect with Alexander into India, where a totally unforeseen species of philosophic inquiry had been developed in the various yogic schools of the Jain, Buddhist, and Brahmanic centers, may be observed. A far deeper understanding of the practical psychological – as opposed to cosmological – relevancy of mythology was represented in those disciplines than anything the West was to achieve until the century of Nietzsche, Freud and Jung. A formidable influence of only half-comprehended psychosomatic mystic lore was to come pouring out of India into the hermitages and monasteries, schools and universities of the comparatively callow West – from which a number of colourful gnostic, theosophical, and hermetic cults and movements were derived.
Fourthly, after about two centuries of European influence upon Asia, the tide began to turn, until presently a powerful surge of reaction developed, which culminated with the victories of Christianity over the gods and philosophies of Classical antiquity and the subsequent collapse – for a spell of seven centuries – of the civilization of the European West.
Syncretistic and Ethnic Monotheism
Polytheism may be defined as the recognition and worship of a plurality of gods. Monotheism is the belief that there is but one substantial god. Two types of monotheism may be distinguished: 1. The inclusive, cosmopolitan, open, syncretic type; and 2. The ethnic, closed, and exclusive type. The outstanding instance of ethnic monotheism is, of course, the post-exilic monotheism of the Bible, which then passed to Christianity and Islam. The most developed systems of syncretic monotheism have been those of the Hellenized Near East, Rome, Gupta and post-Gupta India, and the humanistic learning of Europe since the Renaissance. Epicureanism, Buddhism, and the higher reaches of Hinduism are exceptional in as much as their final terms are not personified, or in any way anthropomorphized as “God”.
The centuries between the first decline of Classical Athens (starting with the Peloponnesian Wars) and the growth of a radically different setting with the coming of the Christian era (which picked up momentum as the Hellenic era drew to a close), was an age of great transformation in mind sets. It was an age comparable to that of India in the Buddha’s time and of China in the period of Confucius. In each of these, the earlier social structure was in process of dissolution, the centers of higher civilization were crumbling before the sheer power of comparative barbarians. The central task of philosophy had become, on one hand socio-political, how to restore a dissolving civilization to health, and on the other, moral and psychological, how an individual in the shattering world might retain and develop his own humanity.
It was in the writings of the great personalities of the Hellenistic and Roman Stoic school that the most enduring and influential statements of the moral, political, and cosmological implications of Hellenistic syncretic monotheism appeared. Notable in this respect are its Greco-Phoenician founder, Zeno (336? – 264 B.C.), the Roman author Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.), the crippled Phrygian-Roman slave Epictetus (60? – 120 A.D.), and the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121 – 180 A.D.). For all these thinkers, God, the informing spirit of the world, is rational and absolutely good. Nothing, therefore, can occur that is not – in the frame of the totality – absolutely good. The doctrine, essentially, is that satirized by Voltaire in Candide, of the best of all possible worlds. But in strong terms it was reaffirmed by Nietzsche in his rhapsodic Thus Spake Zarathustra, where the word “good” is read not as “comfortable” but as excellent, and a call is issued to each to love his fate: amor fati. Oswald Spengler also represents this view in his motto, adopted from Seneca: “The fates guide him who will, him won’t they drag.” It is a view beyond any kind of pleasure-pain calculation; in Seneca’s words: “Not that you bear but how you bear it is what counts”.
The ideal of indifference to pain and pleasure, gain and loss, in the performance of one’s life task, which is of the essence of this stoic order, suggests the Indian ideal of Karma Yoga described in the Bhagavad Gita. However, the Indian life task is imposed upon each by his caste statutes, whereas the Greco-Roman task is that recognized and imposed on each by his own reason: for God here is Intelligence, Knowledge, and Right Reason. Furthermore, the condition of nirvana, disengagement in trance rapture, which is the goal of Indian Yoga, is entirely different from the Greek ideal of ataraxia, the rational mind undisturbed by pleasure and pain. Yet, between the two views there is much to be compared, particularly their grounding in pantheism – which is fundamental both to the Orient (whether India or the Far East) and to the Classical world. The biblical view, whether in Jewish, Christian, or Islamic thought, stands in firm opposition to this.
Mystery Cult and Apocalypse
In Japanese the term jiriki “one’s own strength” refers to such self-reliant disciplines as Stoicism or, in the Orient, Zen Buddhism, while “tariki” “outside strength, another’s strength” refers to ways that rely on the idea of a savior: in Japan, Amida Buddhism. By the latter, through invoking the name of the infinitely radiant Solar Buddha of the Land of Bliss, one is reborn, at death, in his paradise, there to attain nirvana. During the Hellenistic age Western counterparts of this popular Buddhism were the numerous mystery cults that flourished with increasing influence until, in the late Roman period, first Mithraism, then Christianity gained imperial support and, thereby, the field.
The degree to which different persons need stimuli to enter into a state where they are receptive to exalted thoughts and feelings, varies of course from person to person. Exalted realizations in some persons may come through solitary reflection, whereas others may need incense, music, vestments and processions, gongs, bells, dramatic mimes and cries to be carried beyond themselves. But the ultimate realizations will in any event differ according, on one hand, to those cults in which divinity is seen as at once immanent and transcendent, and, on the other, to the orthodox Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan liturgies, where the ontological distinction is retained between God and Man, Creator and Creature.
In cults of the former type, the two strengths, “outside” and “within” are finally recognized as identical (“all things are Buddha things”), whereas in the great Near East orthodoxies no such identity can be imagined or even created as conceivable. Since syncretism was no less congenial to the native religions of Europe than to those of the Orient, there developed throughout the post-Alexandrian world - from Scotland to North Africa and eastward into India, with extensions even to the Far East – a single, rich, and colorful religious empire with an infinite wealth of forms, joining and harmonizing on many levels all the pantheons of the nations: Celtic, Germanic, Roman, Greek, and Oriental.
The syncretic mythic lore of this cosmopolitan period was in no sense a mere hotchpotch raked together from every corner of the earth. The symbolism throughout was consistent, and in accord, furthermore, with a common heritage shared by all from of old. Common symbols in worship are found to a large extent. The rites of Demeter and Persephone of Eleusis, Isis of Alexandria, Mithra of the Persians, and the Great Mother, Cybele, of Asia Minor, mutually influenced and enriched each other in the course of these centuries – all in terms of a common ability to sense and experience the miracle of life itself as divine. In these rites the notion of time was as something that was boundless.
In contrast to this we find that in the orthodox Zoroastrian church, as well as in Judaism and, later, Christianity and Islam, the view was not of boundless time, but of a time when time began, as well as of a time when time would end. An abundant, imaginative Apocalyptic literature developed during the Hellenistic period, notably from about 200 B.C. to about 100 A.D., first among Jews, but then also among Christians. This Apocalyptic end would then be followed by a return in glory of God.
The Watchers of the Dead Sea
The dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls is estimated between about 200 B.C. and the time of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66 – 70 A.D.). They are the oldest Hebrew manuscripts known. Their contents are of two kinds: 1) Fragments of Bible text from the period of the Septuagint (the version of the Old Testament that was translated into Greek, by seventy two translators according to legend – six from each of the twelve tribes. The texts they produced were miraculously identical. The text was produced from the first to the third centuries B.C.). 2) Writings original to the Essene sect, of which the chief examples are the scroll of the war of the sons of light with the sons of darkness, the manual of discipline, and the Habakukk commentary.
The legalism and the exclusivism of the Old Testament is seen in all the passages of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but when the time of the later Christians came, this cosmic crisis of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness had been passed, and the old ethic of Judgment therefore could yield to Love and to the notion of mankind in more general terms than the Chosen People.