Note 11.1 — Chapter I · Inaugural Lecture.

It suggests what is now the next matter I wish to touch on—the comparison of the Mediterranean religions in respect of their anthropomorphism. Philosophically, the term might be censured as failing to distinguish any special type of religion; for we should all admit that man can only envisage the unseen world in forms intelligible to his own mind and reflecting his own mental structure. But, apart from this truism, we find that religions differ essentially and vitally according as this anthropomorphism is vague and indefinite or sharply defined and dominating; according as they picture the divinity as the exact though idealised counterpart of man, and construct the divine society purely on the lines of the human, or refrain from doing this either through weakness and obscurity of imagination or in deference to a different and perhaps more elevated law of the religious intellect. Now, of the Hellenic religion no feature is salient as its anthropomorphism, and throughout its whole development and career the anthropomorphic principle has been more dominating and imperious than it has ever been found to be in other religions.11.1 At what remote period in the evolution of the Hellenic mind this principle began in force, what were the influences that fostered and strengthened it, in what various ways it shaped the religious history of the Hellenic people, are questions that I may be able to treat more in detail in the future. But there are two important phenomena that I will indicate now, which we must associate with it, and which afford us an illuminating point of view from which we may contrast the Greek world and the Oriental. In the first place, the anthropomorphic principle, combining with an artistic faculty the highest that the world has known, produced in Greece a unique form of idolatry; and, in the second place, in consequence chiefly of this idolatry, the purely Hellenic religion remained almost incapable of that which we call mysticism.