Christianity and Idealism; The Christian Ideal of Life in Its Relations to the Greek and Jewish Ideals and to Modern Philosophy (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE GREEK IDEAL Starting, like the other Indo-European peoples, from the worship of the great powers of nature, the Greeks developed a form of religion which is the highest type of polytheism. This religion was the embodiment of that love of beauty, truth, and freedom, which is distinctive of the Greek spirit. In the Homeric poems, the transition from the worship of nature has already been made. The gods are not only personified, but humanised. Turning his eyes to the expanse of heaven, the early Greek expressed his consciousness of the divine in the majestic form of Zeus, whose nod shook the whole heavens and the earth. The physical splendour of the sun became for him the radiant form of Apollo, shooting down gleaming arrows from his silver bow. Thus was gradually formed, not without the addition of new elements and even new gods, sometimes borrowed from Semitic sources but invariably transmuted into higher form, the pantheon of glorious shapes which rilled the imagination of Homer. The divine nature is conceived as manifested in distinct types, each possessed of intelligence and will, and embodied in human forms, which exhibit the utmost perfection of physical beauty. These gracious forms only differ from man in the perfection of their spiritual and physical qualities, and in their freedom from decay and death. Thus the Greek expresses in his religion his ideal of perfect manhood as the complete harmony of soul and body. Were it possible to secure and retain for ever physi- j cal, intellectual, and moral beauty, the ideal of the early Greek would be realised. That ideal, however, was one which did not separate the good of the individual from the good of society. Achilles is distinguished, not merely by splendid physical beauty, powers, and eloquence, but by h...