And
strictly speaking it is not possible to speak of outside and inside,
objective and subjective, when no such distinction was actually felt;
indeed it is precisely from this lack of distinction that the feeling
and concept of divinity proceed. The clearer our consciousness of the
distinction between the objective and the subjective, the more obscure
is the feeling of divinity in us.
It has been said, and very justly so it would appear, that Hellenic
paganism was not so much polytheistic as pantheistic. I do not know that
the belief in a multitude of gods, taking the concept of God in the
sense in which we understand it to-day, has ever really existed in any
human mind. And if by pantheism is understood the doctrine, not that
everything and each individual thing is God--a proposition which I find
unthinkable--but that everything is divine, then it may be said without
any great abuse of language that paganism was pantheistic. Its gods not
only mixed among men but intermixed with them; they begat gods upon
mortal women and upon goddesses mortal men begat demi-gods. And if
demi-gods, that is, demi-men, were believed to exist, it was because the
divine and the human were viewed as different aspects of the same
reality. The divinization of everything was simply its humanization. To
say that the sun was a god was equivalent to saying that it was a man, a
human consciousness, more or less, aggrandized and sublimated.
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