Development of Religious Thought - Essay Example

Running Header: THE POWER OF WORSHIP The Power of Worship: Divinity in Western Beginnings Your Name Your Professor Your Class Date of Submission Religion has had many definitions and many functions over time. In the earliest civilizations, though, perhaps the best definition of religion would be the basic human response to existence. As a result, individual cultures often came up with cosmologies that radically differ from one another, because of the various influences that acted upon those cultures. A civilization born on the warm, tropical islands of Polynesia would, then, have a far different view of deity than one born in the deserts of northern Africa. The West these days has, in many ways, appeared to move beyond religion. Church attendance in Western Europe is very low. While church attendance is higher in the United States, there is little evidence that religion has much effect at all on moral behavior. Divorce rates are higher for self-identified Christians than for those who are not Christians, for example. Churchgoing may well have become, for many, a social phenomenon rather than a religious experience. Given the vast amounts of Western art and architecture that was intended for religious purposes, this religious silence is a deafening example of irony. It may be that the promises of technology have made many people in the West feel so self-sufficient that they do not perceive, any longer, a need for divine assistance. Also, the brutal historical events of the twentieth and early twenty-first century may have persuaded many Westerners that God either does not exist, or is so apathetic about the course of human events that His existence is not significant enough to take notice of. It was not always this way, though. Back at the dawn of civilization, people clung, white-knuckled, to their existence through a battle for day-to-day survival. One farmed, or one fished, or one hunted, and what one was able to win from the earth became one’s subsistence. One of the earliest Western civilizations about which there is significant cultural information is the Minoan culture. This was a society of sailors, who left home for long periods of time in pursuit of their vocation (and sometimes in pursuit of war). The Minoan women stayed at home, managing their families’ affairs. This system of management was unique among ancient cultures, and the Minoan cosmology appears to have been similarly unique. The Minoan religion focused on the worship of nature, specifically the life cycle (birth, death, regeneration). The primary deity was an earth goddess, whose earthly representative and incarnation was the queen. Archaeologists agree, however, that this society was neither patriarchal nor matriarchal – instead, a system of shared responsibilities appears to have held sway. The way that temples were built and situated lends credence to this earth-goddess orientation. All of the major Minoan temples sit in enclosed valleys. The north-south line points toward a nearby hill and either toward a more distant saddleback, or a set of double hills. The paired hills could be seen as breasts, and the saddleback could be seen as the female cleft. While all the major temples show this orientation, the ones at Knossos and Mallia show it most clearly (Lamm 1996, p. 45). The Minoans were just one of many ancient cultural groups that were swallowed up by the Greeks. The Hellenic period is known as one of the earliest flowerings of culture, because the improving standard of living permitted people the leisure time to engage in the contemplation that leads to a deepening religious sensibility, as well as a furthering of progress in the arts. The Greek focus was on the person: the philosopher Protagoras wrote that “man…is the measure of lal things.” The Greek playwright Sophocles wrote that “[m]any are the wonders of the world, and none so wonderful as man” (Fleming, p. 48). These two statements are the epitome of humanism, and humanism was the founding philosophy of the Greek pantheon. This stands in stark contrast to the way of the Minoans, to whom nature appeared to be the fundamental idea. All one has to do is look at what the Greek gods represented to the people to see the humanistic impulse. Zeus, the king of the gods, was a masculine creator; his wife, Hera, was the iconic mother; Athena stood for wisdom, Apollo for young beauty, Aphrodite for feminine sexuality. Other gods represented ways that human fears were placed under divine control. Poseidon, for example, was not only the god of the sea, but also of storms and earthquakes (Lamm, p. 56). The Greek religion has a unique feature that shows the growing complexity of human thought: the ability to simultaneously process information on a literal and figurative level. Zeus was abstract, for example, in his control over the entire cosmos, but he was also highly concrete, as shown in his lustful encounters with mortal maidens. Similarly, Aphrodite symbolizes all of the more abstract, idealistic attributes of love, but her lusts are every bit as powerful and diverse as those of Zeus (Lamm, p. 56). Another unique factor of the Greek religion is the lack of a “revealer,” or divinely ordained prophet to bring news of the religion to a particular deity’s chosen people. The major religions of the world today (Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam) all feature some sort of revelation from the divine. The Greek religion also lacks a divine text – the closest that the Greek pantheon gets to a holy scripture is the book of Greek myths that one can find in any library. Because the stories spread orally, there were no standardized versions of even the most central myths. The philosopher Hesiod tried, in the eighth century BC, to give a systematic basis to the stories of the Greek gods, but the resulting work, Theogony, only had partial success. This was one of the most creative religions ever to appear on the planet (Lamm, p. 57). Since the Greek gods were such a close reflection of people, it stands to reason that the primary concern of the Greek people would be human in nature. The philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon suggested that all beings would create gods who looked like them: if a horse could paint like a man, then a horse would paint a god who looked like a horse. A key difference between mortals and gods in Greek thought, of course, was that the gods were more beautiful, and completely powerful; they also never aged. However, all elements of human behavior were taken to extremes by the gods. If a human like Socrates could be wise, then the goddess of wisdom, Athena, would be wise too, but to a much greater degree. Mortals could feel and express lust, but not to the degree that Aphrodite or Zeus could. When life ended, the mortal soul went down into the earth, into a land of shadows, while the gods lived an endless existence of “boundless beauty, vigorous youth, and absolute power” (Lamm, p. 58). The ways in which the Greeks viewed their deities were important in many practical aspects of everyday life. Because the Greek gods were so much like people, and were subject to many of the same lusts and temptations as people, there was not a list of ethical rules for the Greek people to follow. While there were certain important principles that could bring the wrath of the gods down on one, such as not giving bodies an honorable burial, or failing to extend hospitality to a guest in one’s home, there was nothing like the proscriptions given to the Hebrews in Mosaic law, or the prohibitions handed down by the priests in Egypt (Lamm, p. 58). While the Greek intellectuals were skeptical about many of the claims of the mystics in their society, most Greeks believed in the power of the oracles, which were actually consulted to make important political decisions. Also, while the Greeks struggled to define the actual interaction between the will of the gods and the ability of human effort to affect one’s own personal destiny, Greek philosophers agreed that each person had his or her own moira, or pattern of life, that he or she would ultimately fulfill. Also, there were three forces that interacted to generate every person’s fate: free will, accident, and divine intervention. These three forces were said to contend with one another over the course of a person’s life, and ultimately, at the point of the person’s death, one could judge how much that person had brought positive (or negative) energy to his or her own existence. A major factor in both free will and divine intervention was the idea of hubris, or excessive pride. This pride could (and usually did) lead to swift destruction (or nemesis). During this period in Greek culture, though, character was fate. And so people expected to receive the natural consequences for their actions (Lamm, p. 59). The early philosophical leanings within the Hellenic culture concerned social relationships, the place of people in nature, and the role that people played in the grand scheme of fate. Hellenic humanism emphasized that the present day was a good thing, and to be enjoyed. This way of thinking would find its opposite in the self-denial preached during the Middle Ages (Fleming, p. 49). This deepening of culture also was reflected in a flourishing of the arts. While the scientific philosophers were attempting to reduce the universe into four basic elements (earth, air, fire and water), the soul was seen as a very real entity. Because the soul was part of the body, and thus part of nature, according to the Greek view of existence, the ponderings of the soul were just another phenomenon of nature. Because of the varied number of things that could now be associated with nature, the Greeks viewed art as a mimesis, or an imitation of nature (Fleming, p. 48). Sculpture was the easiest way, in those days, for art to imitate nature. Because the Greek gods were human in appearance, it was fairly simple for artists to use mortals as models and design idealized statues of Athena and Apollo, who were designed to look like “idealized image of perfect feminine and masculine beauty” (Fleming, p. 48). Imagination appeared in this art form too, as such creatures as the half-human, half-equine centaurs and other monsters that symbolized various natural forces in those days. Sculpture was also an easier medium for Greek artists to use than it would prove to be during eras governed by Christian sensibilities. Christian doctrine centers, in some ways, on a separation of flesh and spirit, almost as two warring entities within the same person. One only has to read the writings of St. Paul to see how the lusts of the human animal often provided torment to those trying to live a life according to the loftier aspirations given them by their interpretations of the Bible. Greek doctrine has no such separation. The human form at its peak of development was not something to be hidden behind clothing, but instead something to be admired. Greek young people were trained from early childhood for competition in the Olympic Games. Because it was in the perfection of the body that mortals could get close to resembling their deities in the Greek way of thinking, the body had spiritual as well as physical associations. While the nude male body was available for constant observation at the gymnasium, the male nude form was one of the first areas in which sculpture began to develop in the Hellenic period. Examples of this type of sculpture include the Discobolus by Myron (Fleming, p. 49). As time went by, and Greece began to grow, what had been the Hellenic style became even more complex and developed, until it transformed into what has been called the Hellenistic style. The social humanism that sought to emulate the easy interplay of the gods up on Mt. Olympus became a more self-absorbed individualism under the influence of such thinkers as Pergamon. What had been a collection of entities governing themselves through a fairly aggressive form of democracy now saw oligarchies sneaking in to make life more efficient, clustering themselves around a monarch who had been, somehow, endowed with semidivine status. During this period, a cult of hero worship grew up around the story of Alexander the Great. Biographies were written of great men. Temples began to be constructed in honor of military heroes and kings, rather than gods. Sculptors began to focus less on the human form in general, moving on to emphasize characteristics of individual people, showing a variety of personality traits and racial differences in their works. Writers who had been amateurs during the Hellenic period began to find the economic support to live on their craft during the Hellenistic age. As far as religion went, the Greeks distanced themselves further from their gods in the day-to-day affairs of their lives in the Hellenistic age. Stoicism and Epicureanism, basically human-oriented philosophies, began replacing the cult of the Oracle. Stoicism was founded by Zeno, who believed that the force that created the earth used the “image of the world soul” as its model for humanity. Each individual was supposed to observe universal laws of morality and to live harmoniously with one’s neighbors. Epictetus described this mindset in this way: each person “is like an actor in a play in which God has assigned the parts and it is our duty to perform our parts worthily, whatever they may be” (Fleming, p. 71). Given that Greece, in the Hellenistic age, ruled western Asia, North Africa, and Europe along the Mediterranean, a philosophy that favored peace and order definitely played into the interests of the ruling party. The Stoics believed that “only by cultivating virtue, accepting duty, and maintaining human dignity in the face of adversity can true freedom and mastery of life be attained” (Fleming, p. 71). In some ways, the Heroic ideal of the Hellenic period remained, but there was a much stronger message in the Hellenistic time period of keeping life peaceful than there was in the period before it. The Epicurean philosophy was also centered on finding peace in life, but through the expression and satisfaction of human desires, rather than a repression for the common good, as was suggested by the Stoics. Epicurus founded this school of thinking on the assertion that pleasure was the ultimate good, and in the wealthier parts of the Hellenistic Empire, especially the trade cities in Asia Minor, this line of thinking proved to be highly popular. Epicurus’ world-view centered around a belief in atomism – in other words, the idea that everything is life has been brought about by the random colliding and joining of tiny particles. As these particles join and separate, fate constantly changes. Because death only results in the dissolution of the body’s atoms, there is no reason to consider the afterlife when making ethical decisions in the present. If you combine Epicurus’ thought with the rationalism and logic found in the philosophy of Socrates, it is easy to see how hedonism became the morals of the Hellenistic era: if the present day is the time to be savored and enjoyed, there is no reason for restraint. Similarly to Stoicism, Epicureanism taught that life should be simple and discreet, pulled back from public affairs (Fleming, p. 71). While the Stoics taught the importance of doing civic duty, both of these philosophies appear to have taught a civility in public discourse that the rowdier days of Hellenic democracy would only rarely have seen. A further inclination in the direction of individualism also appears in the changes of emotional orientation in Hellenistic thought. The idea that each person has unique thoughts and feelings, and that no one’s particular experiences make them superior to anyone else, appeared for the first time in the Hellenistic Era. While the Hellenic thinkers tended to look for a midpoint among all of the particular emotions in a situation, Hellenistic thinkers took a particular joy in analyzing the individual. This resulted in a higher degree of individualism in art, as facial expressions and individual foibles received the artist’s focus, rather than the form itself (Fleming, p. 72). While Greek culture remains a prevalent force in our own time, it was conquered in a relatively short amount of time by its neighbors to the west. Ironically, these conquerors sprung from Greek ancestry, at least according to legend. The Roman Empire had its beginnings in the establishment of Rome by Aeneas, a warrior who fought with the Greeks at Troy. Much like Odysseus, Aeneas was kept from reaching home by a mighty storm, and ultimately dumped on the shores of North Africa, near Carthage. After the queen of Carthage revives Aeneas and his crew (and falls in love with Aeneas), he goes on to fulfill his mission of founding Rome (even leaving Dido atop her own suicidal funeral pyre, hoping that he will turn back). Upon his arrival on the banks of the Tiber River, he defeats Turnus, marries the daughter of King Latinus, and founds “the first among cities, the home of gods, golden Rome” (Lamm, p. 127). At first glance, the Roman religion was very similar to that of the Greeks. While the Romans had their own names for their gods, the roles that those gods ostensibly played was quite similar. For Zeus, the Romans had Jupiter; for Hera, Juno; for Aphrodite, Venus; for Ares, Mars. However, while the roles that these gods played sounded quite similar, the actual character of these gods in the two pantheons differed significantly. While the Greek religion was a highly creative one, reflecting the personality of its culture, the Roman religion was a highly practical one, again reflecting the personality of the culture. Greece contributed to art and philosophy; Rome contributed to engineering and politics. Ovid wrote that “it is expedient that there should be gods, and as it is expedient, let us believe that they exist” (Lamm, p. 133). This is pretty much the opposite of the Judeo-Christian perspective on the matter, where, in the book of Genesis, it is God who sets the human world in motion, instead of the other way around. About the difference between the Greek and Roman pantheons, Robert Payne wrote that “we find we are comparing the imagination of the Greeks to the imagination of the Romans; they had almost nothing in common” (p. 68). And so the spiritual needs of the average Roman were not met by this practical religion, meant to serve as a sort of channel for the discontent of the populace, rather than a creative response to the problems of existence. It was in this spiritual vacuum that mystery cults sprang up; it was also in this vacuum that the seeds of Christianity were sown, a religion that would change the world. One wonders how powerfully Christianity would have been able to grow, at first, had its milieu been the fiercely humanistic and rational Greece, rather than the bored, tired religion of Rome. Of all of the effects of the idea of the gods in the ancient world, the opportunities afforded by this vacuum for Christianity to grow may have been the most significant religious influences in world history. Works Cited Fleming, W. (1986). Arts and Ideas. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Lamm, R. (1996). The Humanities in Western Culture. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Payne, R. (1966). Horizon Book of Ancient Rome. New York: American Heritage Publishing Company. Read More