BOOKS
563
realistic beliefs. Plato insisted on reading an ethical meaning into
cosmic processes and was thereby led to preach sublimation of man's
natural vitality and to condemn the Olympians as immoral. Divinity,
which the early Greeks had apprehended under many different names
in all forms of heightened experience, could be found only through a
mystical withdrawal from nature. Platonic monism was a denial of
the whole genius of Greek civilization, as was also the totalitarian so–
ciety envisaged in
The Republic
and
The Laws,·
yet Western scholar–
ship, especially in Great Britain and the United States, has generally
approached Hellenism by way of Plato and has accepted his dismissal
of the Homeric religion as a mark of moral and intellectual enlighten–
ment. After the Greeks had become sophisticated, they could, of course,
no longer believe in the physical reality of Apollo and Athene and
Aphrodite; but though the Olympians were merely symbols, they rep–
resented genuine aspects of human experience. To believe that in mo–
ments of intellectual insight or sexual emotion the human personality
was irradiated with influences from another dimension of being was
certainly less stultifying, both morally and intellectually, than to be–
lieve, with Plato, that all material things were merely shadows of divine
ideas, or, with Judaeo-Christian theologians, that the world was governed
by an omnipotent deity who could be trusted to punish the wicked and
come to the aid of the meek and the oppressed.
1
The spirit of Western civilization has always been predominantly
Platonic and Hebraic, and it would, of course, be futile to deplore
it.
But as we move toward barbarism and catastrophe while the disciples
of Plato and the prophets continue to deceive us with impossible utopias,
a study of Hellenism can do something to restore our respect for human
nature. At least once in human history there was a society which could
accept all forms of natural experience without, on the one hand, read–
ing some moral or historic purpose into the course of events or, on
the other hand, denying the objective validity of man's aesthetic and
spiritual insights.
Henry Bamford Parkes
1 Aristotle, another product of the decadence, has been almost as serious an
obstacle as Plato to the understanding of Hellenism. How many generations of
critics have been led astray, for example, by his statement that the tragic
hero comes to grief because of some
hamartia
(flaw or error)! This essentially
Philistine conception, which implies that suffering is a punishment for sin,
does not apply to a single Greek tragedy, not even those of Sophocles. Oedipus
and Antigone do not suffer because of any flaw or error but because life is
like that.
