Note 89.1 — Chapter III · THE SECOND PERIOD, 900-500 B.C.

Sixth-century philosophy.—The relations of Greek philosophy to Greek religion is a great and complex subject, the theme of many modern treatises; and in this slight sketch of the whole history of the polytheism there is no room for more than a few most general observations. So far as the new speculation, which gave birth to the free secular science of Europe, was preoccupied with questions of the physical origins of things and elemental theories of cosmogony, it would not necessarily clash with any orthodox prejudice of the average Hellene. For he had no sacred books which dictated to him any views concerning the origin of the world or the constitution of nature, and which he would have considered it immoral to disbelieve. In fact when Herakleitos boldly declared that “neither God nor man made the Kosmos,” there was no authoritative Greek myth or theologic dogma to gainsay him. But the great philosophers of the sixth century, Pythagoras, Empedokles, Xenophanes and Herakleitos were also directly concerned with the philosophy of religion, with speculations on the nature and with the true definition of Godhead; and some of the surviving fragments of their works express ideas and sentiments in sharp antagonism to the concepts and ritual of the contemporary polytheism. The main trend of their speculations ran counter to the anthropomorphic theory of divinity; and they tend to define God not as a person, but rather as the highest spiritual or metaphysical or even physical power or function of the universe; and there is a common tendency in this sixth-century thought away from the theistic to the pantheistic view. Pythagoras is said to have explained the conception of God in terms of mathematics and to have been willing to accept the personages of the popular polytheism on condition of finding their true mathematical equation.89.1 But this philosopher stands apart from the other leaders of this first period of Hellenic free thought. The mathematical mind is often a prey to mysticism. And Pythagoras was the most powerful champion and apostle of Orphism, the founder of those secret societies that threatened the secular and the intellectual freedom of Hellas. Equally on its mystic as on its rationalistic side the Pythagorean teaching was in tendency inimical to the public religion of Greece, though the members of this sect appear always to have compromised with it. In the fragments of Xenophanes we find the most severe protests against the current religious conceptions of Hellas; his verses quoted by Clemens89.2 polemise strongly against the folly of anthropomorphism, which is the master-passion of Greek polytheism; and if one or two of his quoted utterances seem to proclaim monotheism, it is clear that for his higher thought Godhead was not a person, but a cosmic principle or a noetic idea. On the whole the same account may be given of the religious theory of Herakleitos so far as this is revealed at all in the fragments. It has indeed been recently maintained that he tolerated and found a place in his system for the contemporary polytheism;90.1 but it is probably a truer view that he regarded it with half-disguised contempt and only used its terms and figures on occasion as literary expressions; while three of his fragments are scornful exclamations against the excesses of the Bacchic ritual, the methods of purification from blood, and the folly of idolatry.90.2