Hellenism and Christianity

Front matter

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Preface

HE essays composing this book were written at

different times for different occasions. Yet I

venture to believe that, put together in a single volume, they will present a mental unity—a single body of interests, observations, and ideas, which is one individual’s reaction to the spectacle of the universe. In the history of mankind, during these last few thousand years, in which mankind has begun to have what may be called in the more special sense a history, the two predominant factors appear to be, (1) the rise of rationalist culture, first in the ancient Greek world and then again in modern European civilization, and (2) the entrance of the Christian life into the world process. In the first essay I have tried to show the significance of rationalist culture in its relation to Eastern forms of civilization, and correct what I believe to be some common misapprehensions. Perhaps some explanation is required why this essay in describing the civilization of the West says nothing about Christianity. This is not because I think Christianity an unimportant element in the life of mankind; it is because the modern West seems to me still for a large part to require conversion to Christianity. Such genuine Christianity as has existed in the West has no doubt exerted an incalculable influence in different degrees over the whole field, but when men contrast our modern Western civilization with Eastern civilizations, when they lay stress upon our standards of political life, our intellectual emancipation, our science, our mastery over the forces of Nature, they are pointing rather to the Hellenic, rationalist, factor in our civilization than to the Christian. It is that which constitutes, if I may so express it, the “‘ Westernness of the West.” I once heard a living politician, speaking on a platform, claim for Christianity, amongst other things, credit for the invention of lyddite shells. That seems to me a confusion.

The two following essays deal with the ancient Hellenism, Bacchylides raises the problem why rationalist culture in its first Hellenic embodiment met with an arrest. In the Greek Anthology, of which the third essay treats, there is brought before us an image of the Greek mind in its later literary activities, and we are left listening to the ancient voice calling out of the perished centuries its ever-recurrent burden, ‘‘ Let us eat and drink and follow our light loves, for to-morrow we die.”

In the next two essays we look at the first entrance of the Christian life into this world which fears death, the distinctive Christian idea of the Redeemer. Then we pass to the time when the old paganism is on the point of extinction and the new world of medieval Christianity about to be born, to the great typical figure of Augustine on the threshold of the two ages. In the eighth and ninth essays some questions of moral value connected with the Christian view of life are discussed. If the essays hitherto have looked backwards along the human track through time and tried to discover the significance of 6

Preface

Christianity by glancing at some of the things that went before it, or that have accompanied it up to the present, the tenth and eleventh essays consider the question whither the whole process is tending, since our idea of the significance of any factor in the world movement must be determined as much by our forecast of what it is leading to as by our view of its antecedents. Since the essay on Human Progress was written two notable contributions have been made to the discussion of this question, Professor Bury’s book on “ The Idea of Progress’’ and the Romanes Lecture given in 1920 by the Dean of St. Paul’s. My more discursive treatment of the subject in this essay, however, trenches so little upon theirs, that what I wrote some years ago may still contribute something of an individual character. The last two essays have to do with the relations between Christianity and the rationalist element in our culture and try to determine what the truth is with regard to the conflict supposed to exist between them and the position of Christianity to-day after four centuries of growing rationalism have shaken and sifted the thoughts of men.

The essay entitled ‘‘The Religion of Cheerfulness,”’ the essay on “‘ Human Progress,” and that on “ The Problem of Eschatology,’ are published now for the first time. “The First Contact of Christianity and Paganism” appeared in the Quarterly Review, the first and last essays in the Nineteenth Century and After, “Dirt”? in the Contemporary Review, “‘ The Gnostic Redeemer” in the Hibbert Journal, “‘ Between Two Worlds” and “ Reason and Dogma” in The Quest, “ Bacchylides,”’ ‘‘ The Greek Anthology” and ‘“ The

Prophet of Personality” in the Literary Supplement of The Times. Grateful acknowledgement is due to the editors and publishers of these several periodicals who have given permission for the essays enumerated to be republished as constituents of this book.

September, 1921.

Contents

1; THE EAST AND THE WEST'. 5 ; : A ae ae

Il. BACCHYLIDES . : é hoe WI. THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY . sakes IV. THE FIRST CONTACT OF CHRISTIANITY AND PAGANISM. } 80 V. THE GNOSTIC REDEEMER . ’ oe VI. BETWEEN TWO WORLDS. . 109 VII. THE PROPHET OF PERSONALITY c . 136 VII. DIRT ; : . P : : . 145 IX. A PARADOX OF CHRISTIANITY . 17 X. HUMAN PROGRESS. 4 . 180 XI THE PROBLEM OF ESCHATOLOGY : . 201 XII. REASON AND DOGMA. . 226 XIII. CHRISTIANITY IN THE MODERN WORLD. . 249

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II

ARK indeed is the night which has swallowed D up the great mass of ancient literature and

made questionable ghosts of so many immortals. Yet in these latter days it has been broken into here and there by the light of research and compelled in wondrous wise to restore a part; however small, of its prey. Not to speak of unfathered fragments, or of additions to the works which have come down to us under great names, like Euripides and Aristotle, three figures at any rate, which had lost all definiteness of feature, have once more emerged so far into the light of heaven as to become cognizable persons—Herodas of Cos, Bacchylides of Ceos, and, last, Timotheus of Miletus. And it is natural that upon the dead given back a ferment of scholarship should be concentrated which has no necessary proportion to their absolute merits. But little over twenty years have elapsed since a papyrus roll was brought to the British Museum, which proved to contain over a_ thousand decipherable lines of a poet whom we had hitherto estimated on the strength of a bare 107; and already the bibliography of Bacchylides literature in English, French, German and Italian is swollen to an impressive volume. After Dr. Kenyon’s editio princeps of 1897 three complete editions of the new poems came out abroad, before the poet made, with Sir Richard Jebb’s edition in 1905, a fifth, and one might say a full-dress, appearance.

The large reasonableness of Jebb’s judgment was signally illustrated by his treatment of the question— which, of course, is one of the first which the name of Bacchylides suggests to the students of ancient literature —whether he and his uncle, Simonides of Ceos, were really pointed at in Pindar’s unkind allusions to “‘ vainly chattering crows’’ and ‘‘clamorous daws,” the scornful words he flings out from time to time against certain persons unnamed. Jebb was disposed to believe in a real historical basis for the story, told by the Alexandrian scholars, of Pindar’s hatred of the two Cean poets. On the other hand, he is well aware how such a story, once afloat, would attract to itself all sporadic expressions of contempt in Pindar, how the learned Alexandrian would discover Bacchylides everywhere; and he is accordingly sceptical as to the Scholiast’s interpretation in the majority of particular passages. The “‘ crow’’ passage,? with its remarkable dual verb (yapverov), remains as one in which he thinks an allusion to Simonides and Bacchylides probable.

But was there any real justification for calling the “Cean nightingale,’’ as Bacchylides styles himself, a crow? We are now more able to answer such a question. Bacchylides comes as the final product of a long development, the last of the Nine whom Alexandrian scholarship set apart in the canon, closed for all time, of Lyric Poets. The figure of Bacchylides stands thus as a symbol for one of the great riddles offered by the ancient Greek civilization as a whole—the problem why, having begun a new advance along the various lines of human activity, it came in every line within a relatively short period to a stop. Remember that the essential character of Hellenism was that it broke free from the old rule of stereotyped custom in thought and practice, that it brought into operation a new principle, a new standard of reference, reason applied to the real facts of the world. That was the mainspring of its sudden outbreak in great works of literature and philosophy, of art and political construction. And in the principle of reason one might seem to have got a principle of continuous progress. That which existed would always be subject to criticism, go on always being modified, brought nearer to the rational ideal. In our modern civilization, which reincarnates the Hellenic principle, we ordinarily believe that such continuous modification and improvement is going on. But in the ancient Hellenic civilization the promise and potency of its principle in every line of activity, literature, science, art, politics, seemed to meet with an arrest as suddenly as it had begun.

It is a strange feature of Greek literary history that the tradition, instead of remaining fluid and progressive, crystallizes at a certain point fast and immovable. Greek literature is so akin in essence to the European literature of these past centuries, being in a manner its parent, that the contrast it offers in this respect is all the more striking. Sooner or later the line is deliberately drawn ; all further development is renounced; the roll of classic masters is closed; there may be imitators innumerable, but fellows of equal prerogative none. Greek literature here seems to correspond rather with Chinese literature than with our own. One would have imagined that if original creative activity continued in any branch of literary composition it would be in lyric poetry, the making of songs. But the arrest in this branch comes quite early in the history of Greek literature, before the great Attic age. People went on all through the remaining centuries of ancient paganism singing the songs of Sappho and other poets of the golden prime, but no new songs were made amongst the Greeks which were thought worthy of remaining in the memory of men.

This is so alien to our thought that we have a difficulty in realizing it, or in understanding how immense the ambition really was, when Roman poets aspired to take rank with the singers of old.

It was indeed the hope of a mortal to break the august circle of Olympus.

Why did original creation stop at this or that point in the ancient world, when in our own world fresh springs of creative invention continue to break out? Perhaps no one will ever be able to answer such a question completely ; perhaps an incalculable element will always be there, of which Dei gratia is the only account that can be given. Some of the causes may lie back in regions which psychology, physiology and biology have yet to explore. Others, political or social, or related to the special character of Greek literary tradition, we can in a measure make out. Such considerations give, at any rate, peculiar interest to the final stage in the development, to the man who closes the canon. From the historian’s point of view, as Wilamowitz-Méllendorff somewhere observes, 250 verses of an inferior poet may be of more interest than 250 new verses of Pindar or Sophocles.

The political abasement of the Greeks after the Macedonian conquest had, no doubt, much to do with the cessation of spiritual activity in certain lines, but the Macedonian conquest did not come till a century after Bacchylides. During that interval work of the greatest kind was produced in certain spheres; but lyric poetry ran to seed in the new style of dithyramb. Sir Richard Jebb exposes the futility of the idea that lyric poetry was killed by competition with the Attic drama. It was the New Dithyramb, he says, which strangled it. Yet the rise of the New Dithyramb is less a cause than a manifestation of the process which we want to explain. One may perhaps ask whether there was not in the Greek literary tradition itself something which tended to stereotype it at a certain stage of development.

When we examine the poetical method of Bacchylides our first impulse is to describe it as a mere ‘‘ mechanic art,’ and to class the Cean nightingale with those many warblers who have their tune by heart. Its method looks transparently simple. One seems to start with some simple statement, narrative or gnomic, as a frame, and then proceed to bedizen it, as if working with a Gradus ad Parnassum which supplies a list of conventional epithets to each substantive, or periphrastic formulas which may take the place of the substantive itself. To any warrior you attach an adjective, which means “ with shield of bronze,” or ‘‘ dear to the war god,”’ or ‘“‘ without fear of battle noise’; to any woman an adjective meaning “with beautiful robes,” or “‘ with deep bosom,” or “‘ with a golden distaff ’’; a city is “‘ ancient,’”’ or ‘‘ honoured of the gods,”’ or ‘‘ with fine towers,” and so on. Instead of a proper name you may put a patronymic—for instance, “the son of Amphitryon,” or ‘‘the son of Perseus,” or ‘‘ the son of Zeus undaunted in battle,’’ for Hercules. Or you may amplify a statement by throwing in a genealogical detail of the kind which begins 6y réxev, or some such formula. These conventions are, of course, part of the general literary tradition; but whilst in greater poets than Bacchylides we look through them—almost discount them, one might say, in attending to the creative spirit at work behind them—in Bacchylides they are given to us as themselves constituting the poetry, as satisfying our demand by their own merit.

But a merely depreciative estimate of Bacchylides would leave out of account the conditions under which he had to work, The object of the poet—to start from first principles—is to present his ideas in such a way as not only to convey the logical sense of a proposition, but to suggest thoughts and images, visual or auditory, which are the centres of certain emotional vibrations, vested in an indefinite halo of wonder or charm. Now it depends upon a variety of conditions what sort of thoughts and images among any given set of people have this virtue. Among the Greeks, whose lyric poetry had come in so large part from ancient religious ritual, invocations of the gods with many epithets and under many names, it was, we may believe, the very fact that a phrase had a traditional ring which gave it the required power. We may compare the power of Biblical or quasi-Biblical language over ourselves—a power so signally exploited in his day by Swinburne. The poetic thrill once associated with a definite set of images was apt to become joined too exclusively to their suggestiveness—the shining of gold, wind-swift feet, hair coloured like the dark ion flower, voices poignant with honey-sweetness, and the kindling of desire. To play upon these same strings over and over again was the way for the poet to make his effect; he must speak the emotional language that the people knew. Pindar, it will perhaps be said, maintained his freedom. But the very effort of his originality, his continual protest against skill acquired by mere tradition (the “taught men’’) may show that he felt the tradition stiffening about him. If this be so, the utterances of Bacchylides in a contrary sense—‘“ Poet is heir to poet, now as of old; for in sooth ’tis no light task to find the gates of virgin song’’—such utterances have a peculiar significance. Bacchylides, too, was conscious of the stiffening of tradition, but Bacchylides had no heart to struggle or rebel. We may even ask whether Pindar’s somewhat violent originality did not, as a matter of fact, hinder the appreciation of him amongst the men of his age; the Sicilian despot Hiero, caddy idpis—if the statement is true—thought Bacchylides the better poet.

Greek lyrical poetry, as it goes from Alcman to Bacchylides, seems to be like a vein of precious metal which is definitely worked out. The possibilities of new original invention along that line cease. And one can hardly help raising the question whether the poetical activity of our modern European civilization will also sooner or later work out its different veins. Will a time come when no one will be able to think of new effects in poetry, when all poetical composition will be simply imitation of the models of the past ? Most poets to-day would probably repudiate the suggestion, and yet it remains true that it does become more difficult, as time goes on, to find the gates of virgin song. There are so many simple things which poets could once say with an original note, but which they can say no longer without being commonplace. It becomes harder and harder to combine greatness with naturalness and simplicity. It is easier, of course, to secure originality of a sort by means of the far-fetched and the cranky, but it is a question how much originality of that sort is worth. One notices in this connexion that a modern school of poetry in France believes that the traditional metres of French poetry are instruments out of which nothing further is to be got; all possible effects that can be produced with the Alexandrine line have been produced; that vein seems to them worked out, just as much as the lyrical tradition of Greece seemed worked out to Bacchylides.

It is a striking contrast between such a view and the view of the Greeks that while the Greeks could conceive of no other possible vein of lyric poetry beside that worked

t Paul Duhamel, ‘‘ Paul Claudel.” 46 out in Bacchylides, the moderns have high hopes of striking out along new veins when the traditional one is exhausted. That is characteristic of our general optimism as to the future of our modern rationalist culture. We do not think we have come along any line to such a standstill as that to which the ancient culture came so soon after its start. And yet the very mystery of that arrest (for I doubt whether any explanation yet offered for it fully accounts for it) may perhaps give us occasional uneasiness. Might a similar arrest suddenly fall upon our own culture after all its astounding achievements in the last four centuries—a hand laid upon us out of the darkness, some mysterious ineluctable failure of vitality ?

Within his limits Bacchylides is not without his felicities. It was a fine instinct which made him end the “ Herakles’’ and the “‘ Theseus”’ dithyrambs, one with the bare mention of the poisoned robe, the other with the single line dilnabar Sé dirayAdovs *ABdvas, awaking the suggestion of glories and of calamities to come, the more thrilling that they were left unspoken and undefined. One can pick out some sonorous phrases which might seem to rival Pindar’s, such as

There are similes with picturesque touches which stand out pleasantly, like that of the eagle in Ode V, or of the storm in Ode XII. Perhaps there is no single passage in the new poems quite equal to the familiar fragment ca on Peace, and no single line quite as near to great poetry as the line of Bacchylides preserved by Stobzeus— petlov 7 mevOciv eddvyn xaxdv, adbéykrovow toov,

It may be that we are justified in gathering from this the reflection, comforting in some degree, that where a part only of the works of greater poets than Bacchylides has come down to us, the selection was not made entirely by blind chance.

{Il THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY

HE river of Time, according to Lord Bacon, bears

down the lighter trifles and suffers the things

of weight and substance to sink. It would be ungrateful to apply the principle to Greek literature as a whole, seeing that what we still possess of it exhibits in the main, although with some grievous lacune, its most vital, most permanently important, works. But in regard to some parts of it we must be sensible of a truth in Bacon’s dictum. The four thousand or so short poems preserved for us in the collections made by Planudes and Constantinus Cephalas represent a vast poetical literature continuously added to from the great creative days of the fifth century B.c. till far into the centuries of desiccated Byzantine scholarship. In the Anthology poets, whose bulkier epics and more ambitious constructions have foundered, still live in a few light lines. In the Anthology we have almost all that survives of the love poetry of the Alexandrine age.

The “epigram’”’ was, of course, originally what the word means—an inscription, words carved on a gravestone, to give some information as to the person buried below, or on a votive tablet to record the offerer and the occasion. Brevity was dictated by imperious considerations of space and the labour of engraving. By the fifth century B.c. the elegiac metre with its light-winged movement, falling at the end of each couplet to a definite close, had established itself as the normal metre for such memorial verse. The metre was already associated in the popular mind with gnomic poetry, such as that of Theognis and Solon, where also a form apt to hold the memory and well-managed emphasis were first considerations. How soon the inscription took rank alongside of the higher kinds of literary work, how soon it came to be associated with the names of great poets, remains doubtful, since the tradition is doubtful, which ascribes to Archilochus, to Sappho, and to Anacreon some of the epigrams which we possess. With Simonides of Ceos, at any rate (early fifth century B.c.), the inscription, sepulchral and votive, reached supreme literary dignity. However doubtful, even in the case of Simonides, may be the authenticity of much to which his name is set in the Anthology, nevertheless that many epigrams do indeed show us the hand of the great master—the famous ‘Q éeiv’ dyyevdov amongst them—of this we may rest certain.

By the end of the fourth century the short poem in elegiac metre was no longer necessarily intended for inscription. The epigram in the later sense of the word had established itself as a literary genre. One class of such poems did not even pretend to be inscriptions. To this class belong most of the productions of the school labelled “‘Ionian’”’ by Reitzenstein,* the school represented by Asclepiades of Samos (end of fourth century B.C.) and his imitators, Hedylus and Posidippus (born t “ Epigramm und Skolion,” 1893. 50

The Greek Anthology about 300 B.c.), literary descendants of the old Ionian elegiac poets. Love and wine are still the theme. And we have only to look at the erotic epigrams which constitute Books V and XII of the Palatine Anthology to see what a long life in Greek literature the type of epigram characteristic of Asclepiades and his school was destined to have. Whether Asclepiades was actually the inventor of the type we cannot be sure; we must suppose that Plato anticipated him, if we regard the epigrams ascribed to Plato as really his work. It is true that the later erotic epigrams which belong to this line of tradition no longer show the nimble grace, the lightness of touch, the lucidity of phrase, disencumbered of all superfluous ornament and unnatural diction, which marked the epigrams of Asclepiades and his Alexandrine disciples.

Of the other contemporary school, which Reitzenstein calls “ Doric,” the poetess Anyte of Tegea seems to be the earliest representative in the Anthology. Its great master is Leonidas of Tarentum (first part of third century B.c.). With these poets of the Peloponnesus and of South Italy Eros comes hardly at all into view. In their work another set of motives prominent in later Greek poetry receive literary canonization—the motives inspired by love of the countryside, of woodland and fountain, by interest in the lives of small folk, fishermen, and ploughmen, in the inanimate things which man handles.

I, Hermes, stand here by the windy orchard

In the cross-ways near the grey sea-shore, Giving rest on their way to wearied men ;

And the fountain wells forth cold stainless water.

This is a little picture in four lines by Anyte. Like most of the poems of the “ Doric” school, and unlike those of the ‘“‘ Ionian ”’ school, it preserves the form of an inscription. Perhaps it was really inscribed upon some stone Hermes, or the form may be only a literary fiction. In any case it represents the stone as endowed with conscious life. Reitzenstein suggests that behind the Tegean poetess lay a long tradition of popular bucolic poetry, in that Arcadia where the old music lived on till the days of Polybius. Leonidas of Tarentum bequeathed to poetical tradition a form of epigram in which the later poets were never weary of exercising themselves, the epigram which purports to be the dedication by some humble worker of the instruments of his craft—fisherman, huntsman, goatherd, carpenter, husbandman. The motive gave a fine opportunity to Leonidas, who, in contrast with the ‘‘ Ionian ”’ school, loved fine words drawn from the older literature and charged with rich epic or lyric associations. To invest by their means a catalogue of homely utensils with an ideal dignity was not only a pleasant exercise, but the way to produce an effect of peculiar piquancy. How far his later imitators went beyond him in elaboration, how they laid the swelling epithets thick upon the traditional scheme, may be seen by comparing his graceful spring song * with the later compositions which make variations upon it. Where. Leonidas says simply ‘‘The meadows flower,’ the Byzantine scholar has “At her fruitful birthtide the fair-petalled mead flowereth out of rosy cups.” *

The influence of Leonidas upon the epigram of later ages is conspicuous. In later poets, indeed, the various influences cross and combine. Meleager of Gadara (first part of first century B,c.), the greatest poetical force in

Ub, iis bea es NE Go 52

The Greek Anthology

Greek literature after the bloom of Alexandrine scholarship, whilst, as a writer of love poetry, he derives much from the “Jonian’’ school of Asclepiades, follows Leonidas in his use of rich ornament. The mass of epigrams after those of Dioscorides (middle of third century B.C.), the last of the Alexandrines, are reproductions of the stock themes in the conventional literary phrases— academic work with more or less grace and felicity. Sometimes, indeed, the living world which surrounded the poet’s study broke through his imaginary Arcadia. The passions which were abroad in the days when Rome and Macedon came into conflict find some voice in the verses of Alczeus of Messene (round about 200 B.c.). Still later, at the establishment of the Roman Empire, Philodemus of Gadara (first part of first century B.c.), in his light dissolute verses, and Crinagoras of Mitylene (born about 70 B.C.), household poet of the world-rulers of the day, show touch with real life. In the last age of classical literature, under the Byzantine bureaucracy, we get the strongly personal figure of Palladas (beginning of fifth century A.D.), which, however deficient in the graces and in melody of language, is informed with a rough and fierce sincerity.

We are perhaps apt to think too exclusively of the masterpieces produced by Athens in her great days as constituting Greek literature. It is just its difference from these Attic works, which gives later Greek poetry a particular interest. We are conscious of a change of mood, “ There grew up,” Dr. Mackail puts it, “a thing new to literature, the romantic spirit. Pastoral poetry, with its passionate sense of beauty i ature, reacted

PACIFIC

LIBRARY charm of the country was, perhaps for the first time, realized ; the life of gardens became a passion, and hardly less so the life of the open air on hill and meadow, of the shepherd and hunter, the farmer and fisherman.”’ Perhaps this temper was not quite so new in Greek literature as Dr. Mackail supposes. It may be that if we knew more of the older Greek poetry outside the Attic sphere—of the lost lyric poetry, for instance—we should discover that much which appears to us new in the poetry of the Alexandrine age was really the continuation of a tradition which had been temporarily obscured by the splendid Attic genius. In what remains to us of the older lyrics —of Alcman and Sappho—there are hints of a love of birds and flowers, of an attention to details in nature, which suggest that all through there were more phases in the Greek mind than the concentrated and bridled energy of Attic thought suffered to appear. As has been indicated above, there is a possibility that Arcadia had a tradition of bucolic poetry long before the Alexandrine age. But whether the Alexandrine age brought a new interest into being, or allowed one already existing to come into a new prominence, the significance of the change of mood remains.