Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 39:156 (Oct 1882)
Article: The Development Of Monotheism Among The Greeks
Author: Edward Zeller

BSac 39:156 (Oct 1882) p. 619

The Development Of Monotheism Among The Greeks

Dr. Edward Zeller

The subject with which the present Article has to deal has claims upon our interest from more than one side. If it is a grateful task, in and for itself, to follow the history of the human mind in one of its highest relations and among one of the most cultured peoples, the attraction of the task is greatly enhanced if it is connected with other questions of the most universal importance. And this is precisely the case in the present instance. The history of religion has to do with no more important fact, none which takes deeper hold of the spiritual and moral life of mankind, than the origin of monotheism and the rise of Christianity, but also none the thorough historical understanding of which is attended with greater difficulties. It is then fortunate that we meet, in a people so well known as the Greeks, a process which offers for the one of these facts — the genesis of monotheistic faith —

BSac 39:156 (Oct 1882) p. 620

at least an analogy; while, at the same time, it contains one of the essential presuppositions by which the other — the origin of Christianity — is historically conditioned. If we see how the faith in the unity of the divine nature was developed among the Greeks from polytheism, we shall likewise find more comprehensible the same faith among other peoples,— even though it may have made its appearance among these in another way and under other conditions; and if Christianity found a definite form of this faith already existing in the province of Hellenic culture, we shall be able the more easily to explain how it could not only conquer the Hellenic portion of the old world in a comparatively short time, but also how it could itself become what it is.

The Greek religion was originally, as is well known, and like all natural religions, polytheism. But the human spirit cannot long rest satisfied with the mere multiplicity of divine natures. The empirical connection of all phenomena, and the need of a fixed moral order in the world, early necessitate the reduction of the multiplicity, in some way, to unity. We find, therefore, in all religions which have only worked themselves in some measure out of the first rude condition the faith in a supreme divinity, a king of gods, who is commonly not thought of as simply dwelling in the heavens, but is really the all-embracing heaven itself. And the world of Greek divinities, so far as our knowledge extends, is brought to a point of unity in Zeus, the lightning-launching god of heaven. The nature of this god, however, appears in the older popular faith, as the Homeric and Hesiodic poems represent it, to be limited in .a threefold relation. In the first place, he has above him the dark power of Fate, to which he ha...