Enter, for here the Gods also dwell!
Reply #2 - August 05, 2014, 11:26 AM
Chapter 2
In the first place, it is unmistakeably evident that Indo-European religiosity is not rooted in any kind of fear, neither in fear of the deity nor in fear of death....
Fear could not arise because the Indo-European does not consider that he is the creature of a deity; he neither regarded himself as a creature nor did he comprehend the world as a creation the work of a creative God with a beginning in time. To him the world was far more a timeless order, within which both Gods as well as men had their time, their place and their office....
Still less was a religious attitude possible here, which saw in man a slave under an all-powerful Lord God. The submissive and slavish relation of man to God is especially characteristic of the religiosity of the Semitic peoples. The names Baal, Moloch, Rabbat and others, all stress the omnipotence of the Lord God over enslaved men, his creatures, who crawl on their faces before him. For the Indo-Europeans the worship of God meant the adoration of a deity...
As a complete man with his honour unsullied, the honest Indo-European stands upright before his God or Gods. No religiosity which takes something away from man, to make him appear smaller before a deity who has become all-powerful and oppressive, is Indo-European. No religiosity which declares the world and man to be valueless, low and unclean, and which wishes to redeem man to over-earthly or superhuman sacred values, is truly Indo-European.
As a result it is sometimes difficult for us to comprehend its greatness today. We are today accustomed to seek true religiosity only in terms of the other world and to regard religiosity of this world as undeveloped or lacking in some respect.
Whoever wishes to measure religiosity by the degree of man's abasement before the divine, or by how questionable, valueless or even tainted this world appears to man when faced with that other world, and whoever wishes to measure religiosity by the degree to which man feels a cleft between a transitory body and an indestructible soul, between flesh (sarx) and spirit (pneuma) whosoever seeks to do this will have to declare that the religiosity of the Indo-Europeans is truly impoverished and paltry.
In the nature of man himself, just as the deity wishes, lie possibilities, seemingly divine in origin, diogenes, and thus it is that every Indo-European people has readily tended to assume the incarnation of all aristocratic national values in human families, the kalok agathia.
Indo-European religiosity is not slavery, it contains none of the implorings of a downtrodden slave to his all-powerful lord, but comprises rather the confiding fulfilment of a community comprising Gods and men. Plato speaks in his Banquet of a mutual community between Gods and men. The Teuton was certain of the friendship of his God. In the Bhagavad Gita of the Indians (IV, 3) the God Krishna calls the man Arjuna his friend. The highest deity such as Zeus is honoured as Father of the Gods and of men as a family father, as Zeus Herkeios, not as a despot. This idea is also expressed in the names of the Gods: Djaus pitar with the Indians and Jupiter with the Romans. The name of the Indian God Mitra, which corresponded to Mithra in Iran, means friend. Mazdaism, founded by Zoroaster, called the morally acting man a friend of Ahura Mazda. According to Plato the man of moderation and self-control is above all a friend of God.
To the belief in the Gods as friends there thus corresponds the Indo-European idea of kinship between the high-minded and morally acting man and the Gods. This kinship rests above all on the view that Gods and men are bound through the same values, through truth and virtue.
In the Indo-European realm God is again and again regarded as Reason ruling through world phenomena. Thus before Kleanthes of Assos, Euripides in Hecabs prayer equated Zeus to the natural law and reason. The Stoics were convinced that the same law of destiny bound both Gods and men, that therefore freedom for man was only possible as the moral freedom of the wise man who had overcome his desires through rational insight.
Paul distinguishes the religiosity of the Indo-Europeans from that of the Semites, when he asserts that while the Hellenes strove for knowledge (sophia), the Jews desired revelations (semaia), and Aurelius Augustinus attempts by citing Bible passages, to disparage the wisdom (sapientia) of the Hellenes, alien to him as a Christian, as a folly before God and to find the highest wisdom only in the obedient humility (humilitas obedentiae) of the faithful.
Topic: Enter, for here the Gods also dwell!