Lesson 6: Greek Religion and Philosophy
Understanding Greek Religion
In order to understand Greek religion, it is necessary for us to make a leap of the imagination.
One of the barriers to us being able to understand Greek religion is the enormous influence which the monotheistic religions have had in formulating our thought.
For example, almost everyone in the modern world would agree with the statement "God is good".
This kind of thinking is actually a product of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world-view. In our society, it is all-pervasive.
An Ancient Greek would not have agreed with this sort of statement.
It is true that in some of the dialogues of Plato, we do find ideas similar to it, but we must remember that Plato did most of his writing only in the fourth century BC, that is, long after the 'golden' age of Classical Athens. In any case, Plato's views were not representative of those of the ordinary Athenian in the agora.
To the Ancient Greek, the gods were not necessarily either good or bad. They just existed, and behaved in a manner not entirely different from the way in which human beings did.
At one level, this kind of thinking was not entirely illogical. For example, one of the dilemmas of monotheistic theology is the question of evil. That is, if God is good, then why does he allow so much evil in the world.
This question would simply not have occured to the average Ancient Greek.
Another way in which Greek religion differed from our modern idea of 'religion' is that it had no definite set of central ideas. The Greeks had no sacred scriptures that can be compared to the Bible of the Quran. Most Greeks knew the poems of Homer, but these were widely regarded as having only been written by a mortal man and not regarded with the same kind of awe with which Christians regard the Bible, or Muslims do the Quran. The Homeric epics were never read out to the faithful in temples by priests. Nor were they ever used as the basis for religious disputes about the nature of the gods. This also meant that there could never be any 'heretics' in the Ancient Greek world.
Each individual city-state had its own set off rites and rituals, but no-one could accuse anyone else of not doing things the "right" way. For example, even after Socrates had been condemned to death in Athens for not having honoured the gods, his friends were still able to offer to help him escape to Thessaly where it was quite clear that he would have been able to carry on with a relatively normal life. This would have been unthinkable in, say, Medieval Christian Europe for someone who had been found guilty of witchcraft!!
In fact, in Ancient Greece, the very concept of 'witchcraft' as we know it today did not really exist. Anyone who claimed to have supernatural powers would probably have been considered to be a person that was somehow favoured by the gods!!
