History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [19]
'But the Greek nation was too full of youthful vigour for the general acceptance of a belief which denies this world and transfers real life to the Beyond. Accordingly the Orphic doctrine remained confined to the relatively narrow circle of the initiate, without acquiring the smallest influence on the State religion, not even in communities which, like Athens, had taken up the celebration of the mysteries into the State ritual and placed it under legal protection. A full millennium was to pass before these ideas—in a quite different theological dress, it is true—achieved victory in the Greek world.'
It would seem that this is an overstatement, particularly as regards the Eleusinian mysteries, which were impregnated with Orphism. Broadly speaking, those who were of a religious temperament turned to Orphism, while rationalists despised it. One might compare its status to that of Methodism in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
We know more or less what an educated Greek learnt from his father, but we know very little of what, in his earliest years, he learnt from his mother, who was, to a great extent, shut out from the civilization in which the men took delight. It seems probable that educated Athenians, even in the best period, however rationalistic they may have been in their explicitly conscious mental processes, retained from tradition and from childhood a more primitive way of thinking and feeling, which was always liable to prove victorious in times of stress. For this reason, no simple analysis of the Greek outlook is likely to be adequate.
The influence of religion, more particularly of non-Olympian religion, on Greek thought was not adequately recognized until recent times. A revolutionary book, Jane Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, emphasized both the primitive and the Dionysiac elements in the religion of ordinary Greeks; F. M. Cornford's From Religion to Philosophy tried to make students of Greek philosophy aware of the influence of religion on the philosophers, but cannot be wholly accepted as trustworthy in many of its interpretations, or, for that matter, in its anthropology.19 The most balanced statement known to me is in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, especially chapter ii, 'Science and Religion'. A conflict between science and religion arose, he says, out of 'the religious revival which swept over Hellas in the
sixth century B.C.,' together with the shifting of the scene from Ionia to the West. 'The religion of continental Hellas', he says, 'had developed in a very different way from that of Ionia. In particular, the worship of Dionysus, which came from Thrace, and is barely mentioned in Homer, contained in germ a wholly new way of looking at man's relation to the world. It would certainly be wrong to credit the Thracians themselves with any very exalted views; but there can be no doubt that, to the Greeks, the phenomenon of ecstasy suggested that the soul was something more than a feeble double of the self, and that it was only when "out of the body" that it could show its true nature…
'It looked as if Greek religion were about to enter on the same stage as that already reached by the religions of the East; and, but for the rise of science, it is hard to see what could have checked this tendency. It is usual to say that the Greeks were saved from a religion of the Oriental type by their having no priesthood; but this is to mistake the effect for the cause. Priesthoods do not make dogmas, though they preserve them once they are made; and in the earlier stages of their development, the