Читать книгу Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals онлайн

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And not only would it have been difficult to give adequate expression to the essential ideas of Greek religion, but there was no motive for attempting the task. Those of the philosophers who dealt with religion wrote and taught for the reason that they had some new idea, some fresh doctrine, to advance. Plato certainly abounds in references to the popular beliefs of his age: but his object is not to expound them for their own sake: rather he utilizes them as illustration and ornament of his own philosophical views: his treatment of them in the main is artistic, not scientific. In fact there was no one interested in giving to popular beliefs an authoritative and dogmatic expression. There was no hierarchy concerned to arrest the free progress of thought or to chain men’s minds to the faith of their forefathers. A summary of popular doctrines, if it could have been written, would have had no readers, for the simple reason that the people felt their religion more truly and fully than the writer could express it: and few men have the interests of posterity so largely at heart, as to write what their own contemporaries will certainly not read. Thus it appears that there was neither motive nor means for treating the popular religion in literary form: to formulate the common-folk’s creed, to analyse the common-folk’s religion, was a thing neither desired nor feasible.