Greek Theology

In the context of the Greek traditions, there was no theology in the sense of a rationalized exposition of the normative understanding of the gods. If one takes the term to refer to any explicit account of the gods in general, or of particular gods, then the Greek tradition abounded in theologies. In the Homeric epics, the dramatic action is often interrupted to tell the history of some god, or some story that accounts for some of the gods honors. The Homeric Hymns are poems devoted to one particular god, but the stories they relate do not pretend to be comprehensive or authoritative.

In the works of the poet Hesiod, whose Theogony provides a creation myth focusing on deified abstractions like Night and Time, one can find an attempt to establish a more or less comprehensive account of how the gods originated, how they acquired their honors--but the long digression in honor of the goddess Hecate, who was by no means a major figure in the Greek religious imagination, shows that the poem could not have been meant to be authoritative in our sense. The decision as to which deities were considered major enough to number among the Twelve Olympians who were the chief gods of the pantheon was no doubt a political decision, at least in part. Because most of the gods were originally local, and inconsistent stories were told of them from one locality to another, the tradition of the ancient Greeks resisted systematization, at least at first. Socrates and other philosophers were accused of atheism by the populists of Athens when they pointed out the difficulties in accepting the received ideas about the gods as a whole. Yet Socrates' view of the gods was ultimately to triumph; as time went on, the traditional piety of the sacrificial rites tended to be dismissed as a sort of folklore, while those who were philosophically minded tended to believe in abstract, remote, and genteel gods who vaguely acted to uphold social norms and public virtues.

The virtues fostered by Greek religion were chiefly respect for the gods, who were majestic (sebastos, σεβαστος) and sublime (semnos, σεμνος) Given the variety of rituals and traditions in the Greek religious state, the devotees of the gods in any one city had to exercise caution when they visited other cities. As mentioned above, foreigners could not freely participate in sacrifices, and indeed one myth relates what happens when a foreigner sacrifices a bull in violation of the tradition, putting the Athenians in great danger until the outsider is made a citizen, at which point he receivers the name Sopater (literally, "Saving Father"). In general, the main religious duties for the ordinary adult male was to conduct his life in a fashion that was dikaiôs and hosiôs--just and pure. But for all, it was important to avoid doing anything that would introduce miasma or pollution into one's personal life and into the household. For example, Orestes was pursued by the Furies for the murder of his mother Clytemnestra to avenge her murder of his father Agamemnon, even though Orestes slew him in what he considered to be his duty. Still, the sacred boundaries and laws must be upheld, and Orestes was unable to win free from the Furies until he was absolved by Athena and performed a quest imposed by Apollo. The dangers of pollution were quite impersonal. In Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates encounters a young man who is prosecuting his father for what we would call manslaughter--after one of the household slaves, in a drunken rage, had murdered another slave, the father bound the murderer up and threw him into a ditch, where he died of exposure while the family awaited word from the exegetes (interpreters of religious law) on how to proceed. Euthyphro's family thought it outrageous that he should prosecute his father, and Socrates is himself surprised, but Euthyphro rather reasonably argued, in effect, that pollution is pollution, no matter who kills and who dies. In this he is simply following Greek tradition, although there were certainly other ways for him to purify the family--the pollution of a single individual endangers everyone in contact with that person--than to prosecute his father.

During the archaic and classical periods, Greek peoples had rather strict procedures for introducing new gods into the traditions of worship, but after the death of Alexander the Great, who had spread the Greek language, and Greek social and political forms throughout the Mediterranean world, the breakdown in the autonomy of Greek cities, and the dissociation of all indigenous cults from local political realities, made it possible for syncretism, the "mixture" of traditions, to flourish. In the Hellenistic world, aspects of Persian, Anatolian, Egyptian (and eventually Etruscan-Roman) religious traditions gained different types of recognition beyond the confines of the peoples with whom they had originated, with Isis being particularly popular, as is indicated by the fact that a name like Isidore ("gift of Isis") established itself even in the Christian world.

Very late in the history of classical religion, the Neo-Platonists, including the Roman emperor Julian, attempted to organize classical paganism into a systematic belief system, to which they gave the name of Hellênismos: the belief system of the Greeks. Julian also attempted to organize Greek and Hellenistic cults into a hierarchy resembling that which Christianity already possessed. Neither of these efforts succeeded in the limited time available; Greek religion had always been local, variable, and inconsistent.

Julian's vision of a synthesis of Platonism and Hellenism was taken up in the 14th century by George Gemistos Plethon, a forerunner of the Renaissance.