Chapter VIII · Religion and Morality.

The comparison must also consider the relation in these various societies between religion and morality, both social and individual. From this point of view, as we are dealing with the second millennium only, it must be a comparison mainly between the Mesopotamian and the Hellenic; for except for a few Hittite letters that reveal little, there is no evidence concerning our races of the west of Asia Minor, since monuments can scarcely be direct witnesses concerning ethics; at least, the Asia Minor monuments are not, and we must await the further discovery and interpretation of Hittite literature. For the proto-Hellenic period also, it may be said, we have no explicit and direct evidence. But we have Homer, whose poems belong to the end of that period and the beginning of the second; and we cannot suppose that the average morality that they represent had all grown up in the century before them, still less that Homer had discovered it as an original teacher. Therefore, cautiously and critically handled, his poems throw some light on the moral facts of the centuries behind them. There is also some evidence to be gleaned from the rich field of Greek mythology and cult; only we must realise that we rarely can determine the date of the rise of an old Hellenic legend or the institution of an old Hellenic cult. The Mesopotamian evidence, then, is direct and explicit, depending solely on the right interpretation of documents; the Hellenic evidence concerning the earliest period is indirect and often hypothetical.

We may affirm generally, then, that the Mesopotamian and Hellenic religions are more or less on the same level of thought in respect of the moral and beneficent character of the deities. But careful study of the Hellenic will give us the impression that the terrible and destructive power of divinity is far less emphasised by cult than it was in the Eastern Semitic world. Every deity might be dangerous if neglected, and certainly would be if insulted. The idea of the “jealous god” is non-moral, and can easily become immoral: that is, it tends to divorce the conception of the divine character from the purely human moral ideal. And this idea is palpable not only in the Hellenic and Mesopotamian, but still more in the Judaic religion, and our own religion is not yet delivered from it. But apart from this, the Hellenic imagination, so far as we can discern it, even in its infancy, did not construct manifold forms of fear out of the dangerous powers in the nature-world, and worship them with the higher forms of cult. We do not come upon aboriginal thunder gods and storm gods per se (I use the term “god” advisedly): Zeus the thunderer had been civilised and moralised before Homer’s time. Poseidon had always his wild side as god of storms and earthquakes; and to the end he remains rather more a non-moral nature-power than the others; but destructive force was certainly not the centre of his personality, and in the pre-historic days he had become the father of the Minyan and Ionic people, and the guardian of their family life. The wind-powers might develop into beneficent gods or ancestors; or might occasionally be regarded from the lower standpoint of polydaimonism, and averted by magical means. The higher Hellenic religion did not admit such beings as “Ira,” the god of pestilence, or a special god of storms or earthquakes, and it is far less than the Babylonian a religion of fear. This difference will emerge more clearly in the study of ritual.

It would be interesting to go more into detail concerning the special moral virtues consecrated by the two religions, or the various moral attributes specially attributed to the divinities. Such a study would demand two long treatises on Greek and Babylonian ethics. I have only time and power to indicate here a few points. The peoples of the old world show many general points of resemblance with each other in their moral ideas, and as compared with ourselves many salient points of difference. And moral statistics have rarely any value for proving the influence of one race upon another. As the Babylonian society was more complex in the second millennium than was the Hellenic, so must its morality have been; but it will not be found futile from the point of view of our main purpose to compare the two in respect of some special virtues, as we have already compared them incidentally in regard to the ideas about homicide.

The ideas connected with perjury have this further value for the history of ethics, that they contributed much to the growth of international morality. It is often supposed that the earliest morality is merely tribal or clannish, and that in respect of the alien it is nonexistent; but this account of morality is false wherever perjury is found to be a sin. For one great occasion for oath-taking is a treaty or a contract with an alien power. And Homer is our witness that it was considered an immoral act for either Achaeans or Trojans to break their mutual oath. And this early idea of international morality inspires the Tel-El-Amarna correspondence and the Hittite treaty with Rameses. International morality also includes the duty of hospitality, and the pre-Homeric world had developed this moral sense strongly, and no doubt through the aid of religion; the stranger who puts himself into communion with Hestia, the holy hearth, or with Zeus Xenios, has a moral right to protection, and the abduction of Helen was regarded as a sin on the part of Paris against Zeus the god of the guest-right. I have not yet been able to find a cult-concept in Babylonian religion parallel to that of Zeus Xenios, or any reference to hospitality as a sacred duty; yet we know that this was and is as highly regarded by some Semitic races as it ever was by the Hellenic. We may suspect, however, that as Babylonian society was in many respects very modern and complex, the religious sanction of hospitality had decayed.

In fact, Hellenic tabus and purification-laws, except, indeed, the law concerning purification from bloodshed, had only this contact with religion, that the breach of them might offend an irritable divinity, which it would be unwise to do; they were not religious, so far as we can discern, in the sense that they were associated with a vivid belief in evil spirits, as they were in the Babylonian and Persian creeds. There were germs indeed which might have developed into a vigorous daimonistic theory in early Hellas. We hear even in Homer of such unpleasant things as “a black Kér”; and a mythic hero of Megara kills a monster called a ποινή, almost, we may say, a devil. Certain days, according to Hesiod, might be unlucky, because perhaps Erinyes or ghosts were walking about, though that popular poet is not clear about this. But certainly not in early nor often in later Greece were men habitually devil-ridden: nor did they see devils in food or blood or mud. Therefore, on the whole and comparatively, early Greek religion, when we first catch a glimpse of it, appears bright and sane, a religion of the healthy-minded and of men in the open air. And therefore, when secular philosophy arose, Greek moral theory made no use of evil spirits except in certain Pythagorean circles where we may detect Oriental influence. Superstition and magic must have been more rife in ancient Greece than the Homeric picture would lead us to suppose: yet the higher culture of the people, in the earliest period which we are considering, was comparatively free from these influences and refused to develop by religious speculation or anxious brooding the germs of daimonism always embedded in the lower stratum of the national mind. The Universe could not, therefore, be viewed by the Hellene as it was by the Zarathustrian, and to some extent by the Babylonian, as the arena of a cosmic struggle between the powers of good and the powers of evil. Nor could the Hellene personify the power of evil majestically, in such a guise as Ahriman or Satan; he only was aware of certain little daemon-figures of death and disease, ghostly shadows rather than fully outlined personages; or such vaguely conceived personal agencies as Ate and Eris, which belonged not to religion, but to the poetic-moral thought of the people. When we compare the various rituals, we shall discern that the Hellenic was by no means wholly bright or shallow, but that some of its most ancient forms were gloomy and inspired by a sense of sin or sorrow: nevertheless, it is just in respect of the comparative weakness of this sense that it differed most markedly from the Babylonian.

The evidence then suggests that the pregnant idea of the godhead as the source of life was more prominent and more articulate in Babylonian than in Hellenic religion.