IV. What Judaism Had, What Greek Religion Had, and how Christianity Took the Best of Both Worlds
The Benefits and Problems of Greek Religion
One of the major flaws with
Greek Religion was its lack of any kind of all-powerful
deity to whom man could appeal. All of its
gods were very personal and very human, and all were subject to
jealousy,
envy, and
fate. Looking at just a few of the better-known
myths,
Zeus was constantly
philandering, leaving poor
Hera out in the cold. As seen above, the
goddess Persephone was forcibly abducted from her
mother and made to live in
Hades.
Dionysus died. These characters don't seem particularly
godly; they simply seem
super human. Certainly having
gods so similar to man is tempting: they are easy to appeal to because they are so much like the worshipper. Their will is easy to do because they seek the same things men want. They are easy to plead with and easy to exhort.
And yet though this jealousy, envy, lust, and very near
mortality makes them approachable, it also makes them difficult to deal with, plainly open to
weakness and
folly, and ultimately
incomplete.
One of the rudimentary ideas of
paganism is that no
god is fully supreme and that an
all-powerful,
all-consuming, entirely
impersonal force controls everyone. To the
Greeks, this force was the
triad Clothos,
Lachesis, and
Atropos: the
fates, the
moira. "
Greek moira . . . not only predetermines the
destiny of men, but of
gods as well" (Zeitlin 1). Under this system of beliefs, both
gods and men are under the thumb of
fate.
Edith Hamilton writes, "
Zeus was not omnipotent or omniscient, either. He could be opposed and deceived . . .
Homer makes
Hera ask
Zeus if he proposes to deliver from death a man
fate has
doomed" (27). So if even
Zeus, the mightiest of all in the
Olympian Pantheon, can be
deceived as man,
opposed as man,
thwarted as man, lacks
omniscience, and is subject to
moira's whims, how much help or
salvation can such
gods possibly offer?
Furthermore, though
Greek Religion did have some common ideas about how the gods were to be worshipped, little of it was actually written down. It lacked "an explicitly formulated and dynamic
theology." This was because the
cults were run by a professionally trained
priesthood with an internalized creed, and also because
Homer and
Hesiod had enumerated the gods' natures, doings, and beliefs centuries upon centuries before (Price 126).
By virtue of all of this,
Greek Religion also didn't have a firm
morality in place; how could one exist in a world with so many disparate
gods? Who doesn't know the story of the
apple of discord, in which
Paris incurs the
wrath of some
gods in an attempt to please others?
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