Enter, for here the Gods also dwell!
Reply #161 - August 06, 2014, 08:47 PM
Thus the religiosity of the Indo-Europeans, which appears whenever their religion can unfold itself freely, emerges only in that form which religious science has described as nature religions.
No pressing forward to God is possible in this attitude of mind and spirit, no rigid belief, no pretence of a duty to believe, no anxiety to please the deity; freedom and dignity and the composure of the noble spirited, even under deep stress, are characteristic of the purest religiosity. Indeed, one can almost say that Indo-European religiosity and morality emanates from the dignity of man, the dignity of humanitas — from a dignitas which is characteristic of the great-minded and well-born. According to Cicero, a great and strong-minded person (fortis animus et magnus) wishes to carry himself with honour because in such conduct reason controls desire.
In the Middle Ages the church used the word humanitas to describe human lowliness (humilitas) when faced by the extra-mundial, other worldly God. It was not until the advent of the scholars of the Renaissance in Florence, around 1400 A.D., that humanitas was again understood to mean human dignity, and conceived of as a duty which it was incumbent on man to observe.
When today praise is lavished on so-called works of art, it is almost tragic to recall that Friedrich Schiller demanded this very humanitas and dignitas above all from artists; just as Marcus Tullius Cicero did of the Italici:
The dignity of man is given into your hands.
Preserve it!
It falls with you, it will rise with you.
As far as the mature religiosity of the Indo-Europeans is concerned, their morality does not, like the morality of the Bible, spring from a commandment of God, from a “Thou shalt not!” (Leviticus, xix. 18; Matthew, v. 43; Luke, vi. 27). Indo-European morality springs from the positive dignity of the high-minded man, to whom humanity or human love, which may best be described as good-will, comes as second nature — maitri in Sanskrit, or metta in Pali, or eumeneia, philanthropia or sympatheia in Greek, or benevolentia or comitas in Latin. Biblical morality is of alien law (heteronom). Indo-European morality is of its own law (autonom).
Burkhard Wilhelm Leist (Alt-arisches Jus gentium, 1889, p. 173; Alt-arisches Jus civile, 1892-96, pp. 228, 241, 381-82; 1892, Vol. I, p. 211) has proved that such humanity and good will already existed in the oldest legal records of the Indo-Europeans, that Indo-European human dignity had demanded that in man one should always see one’s fellow and meet him with aequitas, or good will (maitri, metta), one of the highest values of ancient India, and above all of Buddhist morality. According to the Odyssey (VI, 207; VII, 165; IX, 270) Zeus himself guides the worthy man who implores him for help and avenges strangers who are cast out and those in need of protection: Zeus xenios, who looks after strangers and all those in want, corresponds to the dii hospitales of the Romans.
However, to the Teutons, who according to Tacitus (Germania, XXI) were the most hospitable of all peoples, “moral demands were not divine commands”, for them a good deed had no reward, an evil deed expected no punishment by the deity (Hans Kuhn: Sitte und Sittlichkeit, in Germanische Altertumskunde, edited by Hermann Schneider, 1938, p. 177). Man’s attempt to wheedle himself into favour with the Gods by offering sacrifices is censured by the Edda (Havamal, 145):
Better not to have implored for anything,
than to have sacrificed too much;
the gift looks for reward.
The morality of human dignity is not inspired on account of the prospect of a reward in heaven, but for its own sake:. This was how Cicero understood the Roman religiosity and morality, . Such aims as the Hellenic kalok’agathia (beauty and fitness), and that of the Roman humanitas — humanitas being understood in the era of the Roman aristocratic republic as a duty or ideal of full manhood, of human wholeness, or of Noble nature — such goals of heroic perfection are therefore particularly expressive of Indo-European religiosity which offers the worship of a resolute, heroic heart.
Since the advent of the twentieth century the Indo-Europeans have begun to withdraw from the spiritual history of the world. Particularly today, what is described as most “progressive” in music, the plastic arts and literature of the “Free West” is already no longer Indo-European in spirit.
Topic: Enter, for here the Gods also dwell!