Sometimes it seems to me that Greeks are idealisied and therefore falsified in the manner in which they are made to serve a program, an agenda, of a philosopher that wishes to utilise the inherent admiration the majority of people feel towards the Hellenic tradition. Thereofre if you despise christianity you make it into a polar opposite of greek tradition. But is it really so? Is greek religion, for example, completely alien to christian religion?
I don’t know but I am not so ready to extricate christianity from the greeks.
For one we should recognize that Christianity is paganism. Paradise Lost is a Homeric hymn with christian figures as it’s heroes so it is not all that impossible to find a connection.
The next thing is that the greek and the christian are still human beings still endowed with the same biological needs and predisposition, so that there are necessary needs that christianity and greek polytheism satisfy. The difference in approach does not falsify the similarity in scope and aim. What we should ask is how one approach is adopted or abandoned. Why did Christianity win over so many converts, and or why did plytheism lose so many, if indeed it was a better system than Christianity? The answers are not just to be found in the design of each because these in the end are just means to a human end. The answers rest in circumstances, in historical convulsions that dethroned a God and crowned another.
For example, greek polytheism, which is indebted to mediterrean religions, which also lended concepts to judaism which itself influenced christianity, had it’s heyday after the ascendancy of the city state, the defeat of Persia. The rise of philosophy, not it’s creation, comes at the decline of the city state and the comming of empire, whether greek or Persian. Prior to that there was only an open answer to life’s questions and a strenght that could live with the tolerance of many possible answers. The crisis brought about, as it always does, a diminuition in the available answers, a serious critique of the plurarity of deities which, as they proved impotent, where seen as either entirely false or in need of a serious reinterpretation, just like today.
Christianity has a deep and lustrious root, but in the end it is a vine of revenge. Religion serves certain functions. One is the need for control, Will to Power. It makes Being, spontaneous Existence, Zoe, into a manageable existence, determined, calculable. It is because of this that science, including the concept of determinism, finds it’s roots in religion. Much change in the beliefs of man can be traced to a dynamic relation between reality and successful interpretations of reality.
Christianity is the latest installment of an old need of man. When a person finds himself in a situation outside of his control, he finds ways to submit reality to his will. This at first is merely the exchange of valuables with an anthropomorphized Nature. The reason why there are human gods is so that we can exchange with them. An inhuman god is no God because it is of no use to us. This is the greatest fear that one can notice in the story of Job.
In a time of strenght, the exchange is believed to have worked, and if not then something was wrong with the exchange. Eventually, rites fail to obtain desired ends and so since we cannot obtain direct responses from Nature, for the antropomorphism is our creation, we are left with only the need for control and the principle of exchange. This redirects power back. Rite is seen as in error, but we still consider that there still exists a rite, that though hidden from us, exist, and more importantly, that such rite is asccesible to humans. The object of exchange is revised again and again until we offer that which is the finest, or to use Plato, what is hardest to do or obtain.
In the Christian Paul this process is abandoned (not in Jesus), and exchange is abandoned. Nature becomes a loving mother which gives what we need as a gift, unearned, unpurchaced. Wherefrom did Paul gather this conclusion? Paul reached a veredict that was anticipated by greek philosophy. In the years that followed, polytheism was either absorbed or defeated using the arguments of greek philosophers. Christianity was impervious to these because it did not claim to be rational. Jesus declares that he is the Son of God and the only path to God without bothering to demonstrate, as others might, the rationality of their belief. There was no need. The truth of his approach was unverifiable. There was no rite and no longer an attempt to control this reality, to anticiptae the unknown in a constructive way. By placing Christ’s apotheosis in the untestable beyond, Paul eliminated the possibility for new rites, new gods etc. He said that by their fruits you shall know them but in his case the fruit lay at the very Last Day. Christianity was to become nihilistic because of Paul only in the perspective of priests…certainly not christian priest but any other administrator of rites. Paul’s christianity would make adherents to it visitors to a lost world. There was no more need for sacrifice or even politeness because all had been predetermined. (Those that say that Nietzsche was a determinsit should note that that would make Nietzsche little better than Paul and place him at the gate of Christianity.) There was no possibility to improve our condition so there was no need for rite. What is, necessarly has to be. A mystery is thus introduced because evil is that which is unecessary. If everything is necessary then how can anything at all be evil, or guilty? Paul can offer no good answer.
Saying all this still gives the sayer a sense of control, as we see in the martyrs, the control that despises the vicissitudes of this flus, this changing world. They have overcome this world and have become citizens of the next. What need do they have of exchange.? But this is all the Higher end of Christianity, meaning that this is what was written but then as of now it is not what is believed by the majority that call themselves christians. When it comes to theory we find many differences between the greek tradition and the Christian religion but when it comes to praxis we find less of a divergence. There you find prayer and miracles and the striving to be morally good before the eyes of God, the belief in a causal connection between sin and punishment even in this life. If one understood Paul then all of this makes no sense. For him nothing we do or refrain from doing merits a miracle. But because of the inconsistency of his thought, the mystery of God’s will, the predeterminationhs are unknown and we are as if we live in a free universe, agonizing over choices and even feeling guilt.
The scheme constructed by Paul made guilt really a psychological phenomenon. In the greek tradition guilt had a physical root and could be relieved. Because Christian guilt is independent of physical events (because events are predestined) it is beyond elimination through our own action…in theory. In reality such beliefs offer nothing to a pagan audience. So in praxis again Christianity abandoned it’s theoretical roots and adopted pagan rites, such as the invocation of saints, the mother of Jesus, in times of need
But after everything that I have said none of you have to believe in anything I have said. But travel a little, or watch the travel channel. See the religious practices of other cultures, see Catholic rites and processions. What you find is a discontinuity between theory and praxis, just as Luther saw. The Church conquered an empire not because it sucked the blood out of it but because it was like the empire before it so much that the change from one to the other went unnoticed. The Church has a wide mouth at it’s practical side which easily translated polytheism into itself and drew, eventually, some, though not all, the societies it pulled towards it’s narrow theoretical center. It conquered nothing but reinterpreted a lot and thus it preserved a lot. It became everything and that is why it seems that everything became Christian.
There is, I admit, a theoretical rift between Paul and the greeks just as there is a rift between Plato and Theogonis, but we have to remember that the masses were sheltered from wide readings of trhe Bible, even the new testament and that allowed the Church to remain ambigious enough to absorb and link the most diverse groups of pagans in the empire. In practice we see a pagan church that sanitizes pagan rites, which though incompatible with Pauline revelation, are still used to gain new adherents, to be palatable to a wide audience. And it is the assistance of greek education that makes this all the easier.
Nietzsche makes too much I think of the acceptance of excess in greek society. The truth is probably that while accepted as real, it was not accepted as good and the goal was always as to how to stirpate and domesticate man, how to attain prudence, control over excess. The excess of the gods was eventually seen as the falsity of the gods as early as Plato. How similar was this to the moralization of Yahweh after the fall of Jerusalem.