be intimate with this crowd, can go hunting with a knapsack on one's
back with Apollo or Athene, or stop Mercury on the way and chat with him as with a
Western Union messenger boy, and if the conversation gets too interesting, we can
imagine Mercury saying, "Yeah. Okay. Sorry, but I'll have to run along and deliver
this message at 72nd Street. " The Greek men were not divine, but the Greek gods were
human. How different from the perfect Christian God! And so the gods were merely
another race of men, a race of giants, gifted with immortality, while men on earth
were not. Out of this background came some of the most inexpressibly beautiful stories
of Demeter and Proserpina and Orpheus. The belief in the gods was taken for granted,
for even Socrates, when he was about to drink hemlock, proposed a libation to the
gods to speed him on his journey from this world to the next. This was very much like
the attitude of Confucius. It was necessarily so in that period;
what attitude toward man and God the Greek spirit would take in the modern world there
is unfortunately no chance of knowing. The Greek pagan world was not modern, and the
modern Christian world is not Greek. That's the pity of it.
On the whole, it was accepted by the Greeks that man's was a mortal lot, subject
sometimes to a cruel Fate. That once accepted, man was quite happy as he was, for
the Greeks loved this life and this universe, and were interested in understanding
the good, the true and the beautiful in life, besides being fully occupied in
scientifically understanding the physical world. There was no mythical "Golden
Period" in the sense of the Garden of Eden, and no allegory of the Fall of Man; the
Hellenes themselves were but human creatures transformed from pebbles picked up and
thrown over their shoulders by Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, as they were coming
down to the plain after the Great Flood. Diseases and cares were explained comically;
they came through the uncontrollable desire of a young woman to open and see a box
of jewels Pandora's Box. The Greek fancy was beautiful. They took human nature largely
as it was: the Christians might say they were "resigned" to the mortal lot. But it
was so beautiful to be mortal: there was free room for the exercise of understanding
and the free, speculative spirit. Some of the Sophists thought man's nature good,
and some thought man's nature bad, but there wasn't the sharp contradiction of Hobbes
and Rousseau. Finally, in Plato, man was seen to be a compound of desires, emotions,
and thought, and ideal human life was the living together in harmony of these three
parts of his being under the guidance of wisdom or true understanding. Plato thought
"ideas" were immortal, but individual souls were either base or noble, according as
they loved justice, learning, temperance and beauty or not. The soul also acquired↓↓
an independent and immortal existence in Socrates; as we are told in 'Phaedo, ' "When
the soul exists in herself, and is released from the body, and the body is released
from the soul, what is this but death?" Evidently the belief in immortality of the
human soul is something which the Christian, Greek, Taoist and Confucianist views
have in common. Of course this is nothing to be jumped at by modern believers in the
immortality of the soul. Socrates' belief in immortality would probably mean nothing
to a modern man, because many of his premises in support of it, like re-incarnation,
cannot be accepted by the modern man.
The Chinese view of man also arrived at the idea that man is the Lord of the Creation
("Spirit of the Ten Thousand Things"), and in the Confucianist view, man ranks as
the equal of heaven and earth in the "Trio of Geniuses". The background was animistic:
everything was alive or inhabited by a spirit mountains, rivers, and everything that
reached a grand old age. The winds and thunder were spirits themselves; each of the
great mountains and each rive