Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/313

 The motive of the highest acts of Greek worship seems to have been not the self-abasement of the worshipper and the glorification of the worshipped, but rather an obliteration of the distinctions between man and god, and a temporary attainment by the human of spiritual equality and companionship with the divine. The votary of Bacchus in his hours of wildest ecstacy enjoyed so completely this sense of equality and of real union with the god, that even to others it seemed fitting that he should be called by the god's own name.

But the hours, in which the Greeks of the historical age attained by a sort of religious frenzy such intimacy with their gods as their ancestors were famed to have enjoyed all their life long, were few and far between. The means of communion had become in general less direct, less personal. Yet even so the desire for communion continued unabated, and the belief in it still pervaded every phase of life. Intellectual progress had curiously little effect upon the dominant religious ideas. A strongly conservative attachment to ancient tradition and custom was strangely blended with that progressive spirit which made the intellectual development of the Athenians unique in its swiftness, as in its scope, among all peoples known to history. Their minds welcomed new speculations, new doctrines; but their hearts clung to the old unreasonable faith. Ancestral ideas remained for them the sole foundation of religion. Each poet or philosopher in drama or in dialogue, each man in his own heart, was free to build upon it and to ornament his superstructure as he would; and his work found a certain sanction in the appeal which it made to other men's sense of truth and of beauty. But for the foundation the fiat of antiquity had been pronounced and was immutable. Plato's reasoned exposition of the soul's immortality culminates in an Apocalypse ratified by the old mythology; and a quotation from Homer ever served to quash or to confirm the subtlest argument.

That the foundation-stone was not, in the estimate of reason, well and truly laid, that the basis of religion was insecure, must have been obvious to many. Pindar saw it, and, by refusing to impute to the gods any deed or purpose which his own heart condemned as ungodly, strove to repair its defects; Euripides too saw it, and scoffed at those who would build on so unstable aand [Greek: Bakchê], cf. Eur. H. F. 1119.]