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PARTISAN REVIEW
German scholars, Otto does not judge the Homeric gods by the
standards of Platonic and Christian moralism and is thereby able to
regard them not merely as characters in a series of bedroom comedies
but as the expressions of a genuine religious faith. Both in his under–
standing of Hellenism and in the grace and sustained eloquence of his
style he is a true disciple of Nietzsche.
The most significant quality of early Greek religion was its ac–
ceptance of nature. "There has never been a religion in which the
miraculous, in the literal sense of transcending the natural order, has
played so slight a role." In view of the constant interference of the
Homeric gods in mortal affairs, such an assertion may, at first sight,
seem paradoxical; but as Otto shows by a detailed analysis, the gods
are represented not as changing the natural course of events but as
participating in it. The stories of the death of Hector and the home–
coming of Odysseus in no way depend on supernatural machinery and
could have been told without any reference to the gods. For the
Greeks, "the divine is not superimposed as a sovereign power over
natural events; it is revealed in the forms of the natural, as their
very essence and being."
"If
we look more closely at the occasions when
these divine interventions take place, we find that they always come
at the critical moment when human powers suddenly converge, as if
charged by electric current, on some insight, some resolution, some
deed. These decisive turns which, as every attentive observer knows,
are regularly experienced in an active life, the Greeks regarded as mani–
festations of the gods." "For other peoples miracles take place; but a
greater miracle takes place in the spirit of the Greek, for he is capable
of so regarding the aspects of daily experience that they can display
the awesome lineaments of the divine without losing a whit of their
natural reality." This recognition of reality pervades the whole Homeric
epos, which presents life in essentially tragic terms and offers no ir–
rational consolation. Although wickedness and hybris are likely to end
in catastrophe, man's fate is not, in general, determined by any rules
of justice or morality or by any cosmic purpose; it is only the strong
and the prudent who can count on divine aid; and death, which is the
negation of all the natural vitality represented by the gods, is an un–
mitigated evil.
It was Homer's tragic vision that sustained Greek society through
its most creative period, and one cannot appreciate its achievement un–
less one understands why he was regarded as a great religious teacher.
Not until the decadence produced by the catastrophe of the Pelopon–
nesian War did philosophers begin to demand more consoling and less
