Читать книгу But For A Penis… - Welby Thomas Cox Jr. - Страница 28

To understand the crusades it is not essential that we are Greek scholars, but the Greek society has given us much to abide. Let us visit therefore briefly that we might better understand what Eleanor was thinking when she led an army of the faithful, leaving families and friends to rid the Spanish of the Moor infidels, the Muslims who without gall absorbed the prima facia, (: pry-mah-fay-shah)adj.Latin for “at first look,” referring to a lawsuit or criminal prosecution in which the evidence, before trial is sufficient to prove the case unless there is substantial contradictory evidence presented at trial. A prima facia case presented to a Grand Jury by the prosecution will most often result in an indictment.) basis of Christianity with the fanatical dogma of Mohammed who did not come to be until the 7th century, six hundred years to learn what it took the Christ of the Piscean Age (*see next chapter IX) to do in less than twenty from the Hindu’s.

The Greeks had no word equivalent of our ‘religion’, (derived from the Latin ligare ‘to bind’, owing to the sense of [binding awe] felt by humans in the face of super-normal or supernatural phenomena). Nor did they distinguish in quite the ways we would…the ‘sacred’ from the ‘profane’ or the ‘secular’. The Greek’s vocabulary of sanctity and piety revolved, rather, around concepts of appropriateness and order, and depended on matter and purpose of persons being allocated to, and remaining in their proper places. The Greeks, therefore would have fallen on the side of the Crusades since the Moors invaded Spain.

But perhaps the chief obstacle to comprehending Classical Greek religion, for those of us brought up within one or the other monotheistic religious culture which is the ‘relationship to or characterized by the belief that there is only one God’ is the Greek polytheism, which is the belief in more than one god. The ancient Greeks adored their gods; Apollo, Athena, Dionysus and Zeus. Theirs was a world ‘full of gods’, as Thales of Miletos (ft.c.600) is supposed to have said. Or, as Carlo Levi much more recently wrote of the incompletely Christianized peasants of Gagliano in southern Italy, there was no room in their mental world for religion ‘because to them everything participates in divinity, everything is actually, not symbolically divine’.

There are of course important continuities as well as discontinuities between the belief of the Christians and that of the Muslims; not only was Christianity born within the eastern, Greek-speaking half of the Roman Empire, but in a crucial sense it could not have been born without it. But the differences between developed Christianity and paganism are far more important, indeed central and essential. In order to bring out this difference of essence, and thus obviate the harm which can be done by interpreting ancient Greek religion in the false light of Christianizing assumptions, it may be helpful to begin this chapter by listing some of the strong contrast between Christianity (seen as an ideal type, ignoring all doctrinal and sectarian fissures within and between the Christian community communions) and Greek paganism.

Christianity, like one of its tutors (Judaism), is a spiritual monotheism. It is premised on faith in revelation which transcends rational belief and is accompanied by a fervency of emotion. By contrast, the Classical Greeks ‘acknowledged’, that it pays to worship the gods its community recognized. So that its faith was chiefly a matter of piety in the performance of cult acts. Christian faith in revelation and the centrality of that faith are anchored to the possession of uniquely treasured text, a professional priesthood, and a church of differing denominations. The Classical Greeks did without sacred books and dogmas for their civic religion, they were innocent of any notion of heresy, and had no vocational priesthoods-or priestess hoods. Unlike Christians, the Greeks made women equal and asserted that they were indispensable. Just another of the positions which the Greeks would have supported against the Muslims who maintain the only worth and reason for women is sex; fixing food, cleaning house, mowing yard, child baring and sex, sex, sex.

Though we have never seen a written word from the Christ, Christianity has from the founder onward drawn a sharp line between religion and other spheres of social interaction or private experience, most between religion and politics: (‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, render unto God that which is God’s’)or, as later redefined, between church and state. The cleavage was to have important historiographical as well as historical consequences. The classical Greeks, on the other hand, though they were able to distinguish what they called ‘the devine’, (to theion) or ‘the things of (the) god(s)’(ta tou theou/ton theon) from that which was purely or largely human, their polis (unlike Augustine’s City of God) was both a city of gods and a city of men simultaneously: religion and politics (and economics, and war, and so on) were for the Greeks... inextricably intermingled.

Perhaps the chief reason Christianity is able to draw such a distinction is this, for a Christian, religion is essentially an individual, personal, and privatized matter. It is a relationship between a particular person’s immortal soul and his god which he may have not selected, but adopted, because it was pushed down his/her throat by parents. By contrast, the Classical Greeks’ religion was typically focused upon relations between men collectively and the gods, and was expressed in collective, official, public rituals, above all festivals. Christianity and paganism, moreover, alot morality a very different place in their respective systems. Whereas Christians claim that their ethical code is Christian in the strong sense that it is grounded directly on the moral principles laid down by the Founding Fathers, the Classical Greeks had no comparable source of moral authority.

Finally, to quote Edwin Gibbon’s famous fifteenth chapter in Decline and Fall, ‘the doctrine of a future state was scarcely considered among the devout polytheists of Greece and Rome as a fundamental article of faith’, whereas ‘the benefits of the Christian communion were those of eternal life’. Although the Greeks did hold after-life beliefs and many were initiated into mystery religions but what really mattered to them was the here and now and this transitory life on earth. One very excellent reason for this order of priorities was that they, being human, were by definition mortal beings. By way of polar contrast, according to the usual Greek mode of thinking, it was of the essence of their gods that they were immortal, that is ‘forever deathless and ageless’, as the poets never tired of repeating.