Note 157.1 — Chapter VIII · Religion and Morality.

It is easy in all this to detect the intimate associations with Biblical thought and feeling; and we may trace back to Babylon the daimonistic theory of morals that colours the New Testament, and has prevailed throughout the centuries of Christendom, and is only slowly losing its hold. But at the same time all this sharply divides early Babylonian thought from what we can discern of the early Hellenic, and more than any other evidence confirms the belief that the great Eastern and Western races were not in close spiritual contact at the time when Hellenism was in the making. Certain external resemblances in the thought and feeling about these matters are to be found in Hellas and in Mesopotamia; that is to say, the germs are identical, for they are broadcast all over the world; but the intensity of their cultivation, and their importance in relation to other life-forces, are immeasurably different. In the earliest Greek legend we discover the reflex of that external unpurposive morality that I have tried to define above: the acts of Oedipus were not according to our moral judgment ethically wrong, for they were wholly unintentional: yet in the oldest legend he is πᾶς ἄναγνος, as he calls himself in Sophocles’ play, and a sinner in the eyes of the gods; nor could all the virtue and valour of Bellerophon save him from the wrath of heaven aroused by the accidental slaying of his brother. Certain acts were supposed to put upon a man a quasi-physical, quasi-spiritual miasma, without reference to will or purpose, and render him hateful to God and man. But the bondage of the Greek mind to this idea was slighter and more temporary. And after all, the external sins in these legends were parricide, incest, and fratricide, dreadful things enough in themselves. We do not hear of any Hellene’s agony of remorse on account of treading accidentally on filth, or eating malodorous food. Homer, indeed, is marvellously untroubled by any ritualistic pharisaic code; we might even take him as a witness that there was none at all in earliest Hellas. We should be undoubtedly wrong. The early Greek must have had, like all mankind, his “tabus” in plenty; for to suppose that all that we find in Hesiod and in the later inscriptions were a sudden discovery, would be childish. I may be able to consider the evidence concerning early Greek tabus when I compare the ritual. I will only say here that we have reason to believe that at no period was the Hellene morbidly perturbed about these, or ever moralised them up to that point where they could exercise a spiritual tyranny over his moral sense. He might object to touching a corpse or to approaching an altar with blood upon him; but it does not seem to have occurred to him, as it did to the Persian, and with almost equal force to the Babylonian, that accidental contact with an impure thing instantly started into existence an army of demons, who would rush abroad to destroy the world of righteousness.157.1