Читать книгу Five Stages of Greek Religion онлайн

18 страница из 50

* * * * *

To turn to our immediate subject, I wish to put forward here what is still a rather new and unauthorized view of the development of Greek religion; readers will forgive me if, in treating so vast a subject, I draw my outline very broadly, leaving out many qualifications, and quoting only a fragment of the evidence.

The things that have misled us moderns in our efforts towards understanding the primitive stage in Greek religion have been first the widespread and almost ineradicable error of treating Homer as primitive, and more generally our unconscious insistence on starting with the notion of 'Gods'. Mr. Hartland, in his address as president of one of the sections of the International Congress of Religions at Oxford,ssss1 dwelt on the significant fact about savage religions that wherever the word 'God' is used our trustiest witnesses tend to contradict one another. Among the best observers of the Arunta tribes, for instance, some hold that they have no conception of God, others that they are constantly thinking about God. The truth is that this idea of a god far away in the sky—I do not say merely a First Cause who is 'without body parts or passions', but almost any being that we should naturally call a 'god'—is an idea not easy for primitive man to grasp. It is a subtle and rarefied idea, saturated with ages of philosophy and speculation. And we must always remember that one of the chief religions of the world, Buddhism, has risen to great moral and intellectual heights without using the conception of God at all; in his stead it has Dharma, the Eternal Law.ssss1