Note 145.2 — Chapter V · THE PERIOD AFTER ALEXANDER

The importance of this movement for religious thought was of the highest. Varro’s view, recorded by Augustine.145.2 that the name of the deity made no difference, so long as ‘the same thing is understood,’ and that therefore the God of the Jews was the same as Jupiter, is a great idea that has been bequeathed to the world by Greek tolerance and Greek sanity. Only a nation could attain to this freedom of religious imagination that was not held captive by the magic spell of names145.3 which made it so difficult for the Jew to shake off the tribal spirit of the religious blood-feud. This Hellenic expression of religious enlightenment prepared the way for monotheism and thus indirectly for Christianity. It also could induce the pantheistic idea of a diffused omnipresent spirit of divinity, such as is expressed in the lines of Aratos, the scientific poet of the third century B.C., “all the ways are full of (the spirit of) God, and all the gathering-places of men, the sea and harbours; and at every turn we are all in need of God,145.4 for we are of kin to him.”