CHAPTER II, VARIOUS ASPECTS OF RELIGION
Religion, for our present purpose, may be considered as (1) popular, (2)
official, (3) poetic, and (4) philosophical. These four divisions, or
rather aspects, are not, of course, mutually exclusive, and they act and
react extensively upon one another; but, in their relations to art, it
is convenient to observe the distinction between them.
(1) The beliefs of the people are, of course, the basis of all the
others, though they come to be affected by these others in various
degrees. There is no doubt that the people generally believed in the
sanctity and efficacy of the shapeless idols or primitive images, and
this belief would tend to support hieratic conservatism, and thus to
hinder artistic progress. But, on the other hand, the people of Greece
showed throughout their history a tendency to an intensely and vividly
anthropomorphic imagination. This tendency was doubtless realised and
encouraged by the poets, but it was not created by them, any more than
by the mythologists who defined and systematised it. The exact relation
of this anthropomorphic imagination to the primitive sacred stocks and
stones is not easy to ascertain; but it seems to have tended, on the one
hand, to the realisation of the existence of the gods apart from such
sacred objects, and thus to reduce the stocks and stones to the position
of symbols—a great advance in religious ideals; and, on the other hand,
to the transformation of the stocks and stones into human form, not
merely by giving them ears and eyes that they might hear and see, but
also by making them take the image and character of the deity whom they
represented.
It was impossible for any ordinary Greek to think of the gods in other
than human form. He had, indeed, no such definite dogma as the Hebrew
statement that "God created man in His own image"; for the legends about
the origin of the human race varied considerably and many of them
represented crude philosophical theorising rather than religious belief.
But the monstrous forms which we find in Egypt and Mesopotamia as
embodiments of divine power were alien to the Greek imagination; if we
find here and there a survival of some strange type, such as the
horse-headed Demeter at Phigalia, it remains isolated and has little
influence upon prevalent beliefs. The Greek certainly thought of his
gods as having the same human form as himself; and not the gods only,
but also the semi-divine, semi-human, sometimes less than human beings
with which his imagination peopled the woods and mountains and seas. His
Nereids had human feet, not fishy tails like our mermaids; and if
centaurs and satyrs and some other creatures of his imagination showed
something of the beast within the man in their visible shape, they had
little about them of the mysterious or the unearthly. It would be a
great mistake to regard all these creatures as mere impersonations or
abstractions. If "a pagan suckled in a creed outworn" could
"Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea
And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn,"
much more were such sights and sounds familiar to his forefathers, to
whom the same beliefs were fresh and real. Even to the present day Greek
peasants may often be found who can tell of such experiences; to them,
as to the Greeks of old, desert places and remote woods and mountains
are terrible, not because they are lonely, but because when a man is
alone then is he least alone; hence the panic terror, the terror of Pan.
The same idea, which later takes the religious or philosophic form of
the belief in the omnipresence of the deity, peopled the woods with
dryads, the streams and springs with nymphs and river-gods, the seas
with Nereids and Tritons. When an artist represented a mountain or a
river-god, a nymph or a Triton, or added such figures to a scene to
indicate its locality by what seems to us at first sight a mere artistic
convention, he was not inventing an impersonation, but he was
representing something which, in the imagination of the people, might
actually be seen upon the spot—at least, by those whose eyes were
opened to see it. It was the same gift of imagination that made Blake
say: "'What,' it will be questioned, 'when the sun rises, do you not see
a disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea?' 'Oh no, no! I see an
innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying "Holy, holy, holy is
the Lord God Almighty!" I question not my corporeal eye, any more than I
would question a window, concerning a sight. I look through it, and not
with it.'"1
1 Blake, "Aldine" edition, p. cvi.
In the case of the gods, the matter is somewhat less simple than in that
of all these dæmonic creatures of the popular imagination. Gods imply a
greater power of generalisation and a higher stage of religious
development. It was not thought likely that the gods would show
themselves to mortal eyes, as had been their habit in the Golden Age,
except perhaps upon some occasion of a great national crisis; and even
then it was the heroes rather than the gods who manifested themselves.
But the ordinary Greek believed that the gods actually existed in human
form, and even that their characters and passions and moods were like
those of human beings. The influence of the poet and the artist could
not have been so vigorous if it had not found, in the imagination of the
people, a suitable and sympathetic material.
(2) Official or state religion consisted in the main of an organisation
of popular ritual. There was no priestcraft in Greece, no exclusive
caste to whom the worship of the gods was assigned, although, of course,
the right to practise certain cults belonged to particular families. But
a priesthood, as a rule, was a political office like any other
magistracy, and there was no exclusive tradition in the case of the
chief cults of any Greek state to keep the point of view of the priests
different from that of the people generally. The tendency of state
religion was, as a rule, conservative, for reasons that we have already
noticed; innovations in the matter of ritual are dangerous, for the new
rite may not please the gods as well as the old; and the same feeling
applies to the statues that form the centres of ritual. Pericles, for
example, doubtless wished to make the Athena Parthenos of Phidias the
official and visible representation of the goddess of Athens, and
thereby to raise the religious ideals of the Athenians. In this last
part of his attempt he was successful; the statue became the pride and
glory of the city in its fitting shrine, the Parthenon; but the old
image was still preserved in the temple of Athena Polias, and remained
the official centre of worship. We are not told that Pericles meant to
supersede it; but it is very probable that he intended to do so, and was
only prevented by the religious conservatism that curtailed other plans
of his for the beautifying of the Acropolis. On the other hand, there is
no evidence that in Greece—at least, in the best period of Greek
art—any statesman held the views as to the official religion frankly
expressed in Rome, that it was expedient for this religion to be
accepted by the common people, but that educated men could only
reconcile their consciences to taking part in it by a philosophical
interpretation.
There is something unreal and artificial about any such compromise. If
Pericles was intimate with Anaxagoras, who was prosecuted for atheism,
he was also the friend of Phidias, who expressly said that his Zeus was
the Zeus of Homer, no mere abstract ideal of divinity. If this was the
case with Pericles, who held himself aloof from the common people, it
must have been much more so with other statesmen, who mingled with them
more freely, or even, like Nicias, shared their superstitions. Under
such conditions the influence of art upon the representations of the
gods could not well go in advance of popular conceptions, though it
might accompany and direct them. The making of new statues of the gods,
to be set up as the centres of worship in their temples, in some cases
received the formal sanction of the Delphic oracle, the highest official
and religious authority. Public commissions of this sort are common at
all times, but commonest in the years immediately succeeding the Persian
Wars, when the spoils of the Persians supplied ample resources, and in
many cases the ancient temples and images had been destroyed; and at the
same time the outburst of national enthusiasm over the great deliverance
led to a desire to give due thank-offerings to the gods of the Hellenic
race, a desire which coincided with the ability to fulfil it, owing to
the rapid progress of artistic power. Such public commissions, and the
popular feeling which they expressed, offered an inspiration to the
artist such as has rarely, if ever, found a parallel. But any great
victory or deliverance might be commemorated by the setting up of
statues of the gods to whom it was attributed; and in this way the
demands of official religion offered the sculptor the highest scope for
the exercise of his art and his imagination.
(3) The influence of poetic mythology upon art can hardly be
exaggerated. The statement of Herodotus that Homer and Hesiod "made the
Greek theogony, and assigned to the gods their epithets and
distinguished their prerogatives and their functions, and indicated
their form," would not, of course, be accepted in a literal sense by any
modern mythologist. But it is nevertheless true that the clear and vivid
personality and individuality given to the gods by the epic poets
affects all later poetry and all Greek art. The imagination of the poets
could not, as we have already noticed, have had so deep and wide an
influence unless it had been based upon popular beliefs and conceptions.
But it fills these conceptions with real and vivid character, so that
the gods of Homer are as clearly presented to us as any personalities of
history or fiction. They are, indeed, endowed not only with the form,
but with the passions, and some even of the weaknesses of mankind; and
for this reason the philosophers often rejected as unworthy the tales
that the poets told of the gods. But even an artist such as Phidias
expressly stated that it was the Zeus of Homer who inspired his greatest
work, quoting the well-known passage in the Iliad in which the god
grants the prayer of Thetis:—
"He said; and his black eyebrows bent; above his deathless head
Th' ambrosian curls flowed; great heaven shook."
Descriptive passages such as this are not, indeed, common, because, as
Lessing clearly pointed out, the poet depends more upon action and its
effect than on mere enumerative description. Even here it is the action
of the nod, and the shaking of heaven that follows it, that emphasises
the impression, rather than the mere mention of eyebrows or hair. In
many other cases the distinctive epithet has its value for all later
art—the cow-eyed Hera, the grey-eyed Athena, the swift messenger
Hermes; but, above all, it is the action and character of the various
gods that is so clearly realised by the poet that his successors cannot,
if they wish, escape from his spell.
The influence of the various Greek poets is not, indeed, for the most
part, to be traced in contemporary Greek art. This is obvious in the
case of the Homeric poems, for the art of the time was of a purely
decorative character, and was quite incapable of representing in any
adequate way the vivid and lively imagination of the poets; and, for
that matter, for many centuries after the date of the composition of the
Iliad and Odyssey, Hellenic art made no attempt to cope with any so
ambitious problems. Even when the art of sculpture had attained to a
considerable degree of mastery over material and expression, we find its
aims and conceptions lagging far behind those of the poet. This will
become clearer when, in the next chapter, we consider the conditions of
artistic expression in Greece; but it must be noted here, in order to
prevent possible misconception. As soon, however, as art became capable
of aiming at something beyond perfection of a bodily form—a change
which, in spite of Pausanias' admiration of something divine about the
works of Dædalus, can hardly be dated earlier than the fifth century
B.C.—the Homeric conceptions of the gods came to have their full
effect. Zeus, the king and father of gods and men; Athena, the friendly
protectress of heroes, irresistible in war, giver of all intellectual
and artistic power; Apollo, the archer and musician, the purifier and
soothsayer—these and others find their first visible embodiment in the
statues whereby the sculptors of the fifth century gave expression to
the Homeric conceptions.
The tales, too, that were told about the gods, some of them trivial
enough, but others full of religious and ethical significance, had for
some time before this been common subjects upon reliefs and
vase-paintings, and on these also the influence of the poets was very
great. Here we have not only the Iliad and Odyssey to consider, but many
other early epics that are now lost to us. The vase-painter or sculptor
did not, indeed, merely illustrate these stories as a modern artist
might; often he had a separate tradition and a repertory of subjects
belonging to his own art, and developed them along different lines from
those followed by the poets. But although this tradition might lead him
to choose a version less familiar to poetry, or even to give a new form
to an old story, his conception was essentially poetical, in that it
implied an imaginative realisation of the scene or action, and even of
the character of the deity or hero represented.
The conception of the gods to be found in other early epics probably did
not differ essentially from that we find in the Iliad and Odyssey; but
with the Homeric hymns and with some of the earlier lyric poets we find
a change setting in. There seems to be a new interest in the adventures
of the gods themselves, apart from their relation to mankind; romantic
and even pathetic stories are told about them, implying almost a
psychological appreciation of their personality—the tale of Demeter's
mourning for her daughter Persephone, her wanderings and adventures; of
the love of Aphrodite for a mortal; of how Hermes invented the lyre and
tricked Apollo about his cattle; of the birth of Apollo and the founding
of his worship at Delos and Delphi; of the marvellous birth of Athena
from the head of Zeus. It is hardly too much to say that in the later of
these Homeric hymns—those that are mentioned first in the above
enumeration—an almost human interest is given to the gods, to their
sufferings and adventures. It is the same tendency which we see in the
lyric poetry of the Greeks, with its intensely personal note. The
reflexion of this tendency in art is not, indeed, to be seen until the
fourth century; not only the power of expression, but the desire to
express such a side of the character of the gods seems to be absent
until this period.
It may seem curious at first sight that art was so slow in this case to
follow the lead given it by poetry; but it is to be remembered that a
power of expression such as would have enabled it to do so was not
attained until the fifth century, and that in this age there was an
exaltation of national and religious enthusiasm, owing mainly to the
victories over the Persians, which checked the tendency to sentiment and
pathos; and it was not until this vigorous reaction had died away that
the tendency once more asserted itself. The early fifth century was also
marked by poets such as Pindar and AEschylus, who raised the religious
ideals of the nation on to a higher plane, who consciously rejected the
less worthy conceptions of the gods, and, whether in accordance with the
popular beliefs or not, gave expression to a higher truth in religion
than had hitherto been dreamed of. The gods whom the sculptors of the
fifth century were called upon to represent may have been the gods of
Homer, but they were the Homeric gods transformed by the creative
imagination of a more reflective age, and purified by a poetic, if not a
philosophic, idealism. But while AEschylus suggests "a deeply brooding
mind, tinged with mysticism, grappling with dark problems of life and
fate,"2 and so was, in some ways, remote from the clarity and
definition of sculptural form, Sophocles "invests the conceptions of
popular religion with a higher spiritual and intellectual meaning; and
the artistic side of the age is expressed by him in poetry, much as in
architecture and sculpture it is interpreted by the remains of the
Parthenon; there is the same serenity and wholeness of work; power
joined to purity of taste; self-restraint; and a sure instinct of
symmetry."3 Sophocles was a friend and companion of Pericles, and
therefore probably of Phidias; and in both alike we see the same harmony
and absence of exaggeration that are characteristic of Greek art at its
best. In this case we may say with some confidence that the poet and the
sculptor probably influenced each other.
2 Sir R. C. Jebb in Cambridge Companion to Greek Studies,
p. 110.
3 Ibid. p. 113.
It seems a tempting hypothesis to see something of the influence of
"Euripides the human" in the individualistic tendencies of the art of
the fourth century; but it seems hardly to be justified by the facts.
The influence of his dramas is, indeed, to be seen in later
vase-paintings; but this is not a matter with which we are here
concerned. In his treatment of the gods, Euripides can hardly be quoted
as an example of the humanising tendency. "He resented the notion that
gods could be unjust or impure"; but the purer and more abstract
conceptions of divinity that appealed to him were hardly such as could
find expression in art; it has even been said that "he blurred those
Hellenic ideals which were the common man's best without definitely
replacing them." The bringing of these ideals nearer to the common life
of man finds its poetic inspiration rather in the tendency which has
already been noticed in the Homeric hymns and the lyric poets, and which
now, after the reaction of the fifth century, exerts its full force on
the art of Scopas and Praxiteles.
There is no need to dwell here on the influence of later poets upon
religious art, though we shall have to notice hereafter the parallel
development of the representation of the gods in Hellenistic sculpture.
The Alexandrian poets expressed in elegant language their learning on
matters of religion and mythology, but there was no living belief in the
subjects which they made their theme; and the art they inspired could
only show the same qualities of a correct and academic eclecticism. The
idylls of Theocritus find, indeed, a parallel in the playful treatment
of Satyrs and other subjects of a similar character; but these belong to
what may be called mythological genre rather than to religious art. The
dramatic vigour and intensity which we find in the art of Pergamon
cannot easily be traced to the influence of any similar development in
literature, though its artificial and learned mythology is such as we
find also in the work of Hellenistic poets.
(4) The philosophical aspect of religion had no very great influence
upon art in Greece. We might perhaps expect that, so far as the
philosophers accepted the popular religion, they would tend to purify it
and to give it a higher meaning, just as the more thoughtful of the
poets doubtless assisted the idealising tendency of fifth-century art.
And it might well seem that, for example, Plato's theory of ideas
supplies a more satisfactory basis for an idealist art than any other
system, since it might be maintained that the true artist represents not
the material object which he sees before him, but the ideal prototype of
which it is but a faint and inadequate reflexion. This theory is
peculiarly applicable to statues of the gods, and we find it so applied
by later philosophical and rhetorical writers; for instance, Cicero says
that Phidias "when he was making the statue of Zeus or of Athena did not
derive his image from some individual, but within his own mind there was
a perfect ideal of beauty; and gazing on this and in contemplation of
it, he guided the craft of his hand after its likeness."4 The same
notion underlies the saying quoted by Strabo, that Phidias was "either
the only man that saw, or the only man that revealed to others the
images of the gods."5 But there is no trace or encouragement of any
such feeling in the philosophic literature contemporary with the great
age of Greek art. Plato expressly states that the artist only makes "an
imitation of an imitation"; and the higher ideas of divinity preached by
philosophers did not so much tend to ennoble the popular conceptions as
to substitute others for them. Above all, the monotheistic idea, even if
associated with the name of Zeus, tended to become an abstract
conception with little relation to the national god of Hellas, whom
Phidias embodied in his Olympian statue.
4 Or. 2. 8.
5 viii. p. 353. It does not matter whether the passage is
quoted by Strabo himself or by an interpolator.
The philosophic or theological conception of a monotheistic deity does
not, in fact, seem to lend itself at any time to impressive artistic
representation. We may observe the same thing in Christian art, in which
representations of God the Father are not very common nor, as a rule,
very expressive of the most vivid religious ideals; while Christ,
usually not as God, but as man or child, and the Virgin Mary are the
constant themes of the most devout religious art, not to speak of the
numerous saints who correspond more or less to the gods of a
polytheistic system. Philosophical thought was antagonistic to
anthropomorphism, which, as we have seen, was the most characteristic
feature of popular religion in Greece, and which was essential to Greek
religious art. As soon as the human form is a mere symbol, no longer
regarded as the express image of the god and the embodiment of his
individuality, it loses touch with reality. And this reality in the
relation of the god to his image must be believed in by the people, and
at least through the people by the artist, if religious art is to
preserve its vitality.
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