Greek Ideals and Modern Life

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Text originally published in 1935 under the same title.

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GREEK IDEALS AND MODERN LIFE

BY

SIR R. W. LIVINGSTONE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

PREFACE 4

I—INTRODUCTION 5

II—THE GROWING INFLUENCE OF HELLENISM 9

II—GREEK HUMANISM 23

IV—HUMANISM IN POLITICS AND ECONOMICS 45

V—THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND THE AGE OF PLATO; AN ANALOGY 55

VI—CHRISTIANITY AND HELLENISM 66

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 80

PREFACE

THE substance of this book was delivered as lectures on the Charles Martin Foundation at Oberlin College, Ohio. In publishing it I should like to express my thanks both to the kind hosts who made my visit to Oberlin delightful and to those friends in America who welcomed a stranger with the generous hospitality characteristic of their country.

I—INTRODUCTION

THE title of these lectures is Greek Ideals and Modern Life. They are a plea for Greek studies—not as a field of scholarship, not as a mental discipline, not even as the key to one of the two greatest literatures of Europe, but as indispensable to the spiritual life of our civilization. They are based on three assumptions: first, that Huxley was right in his belief that ‘no human being, and no society composed of human beings, ever did, or ever will, come to much, unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal’; second, that the chief weakness of this age is a vague mind and a feeble grasp, so far as ethical ideals are concerned; and third, that Greece offers us a corrective of our errors and a guide in our uncertainties.

Those who doubt the remedy will not deny the disease. We know that the world is, economically, in grave difficulties. We have begun to see that its spiritual condition is at least as unsatisfactory, and that the future may admire us less than we used to admire ourselves. Ages are not taken at their own valuation by posterity, and the achievements which they view with most complacency often appear to their successors negligible or even ridiculous. It was so in Greece. Aeschylus expected to be remembered not as a poet, but as a combatant at Marathon. Isocrates speaks as if the greatness of Athens lay in its empire. Every generation is a bad judge of itself. Much of which it is proud is forgotten by its successors. Whole epochs which were well satisfied with themselves are found in the sequel to matter nothing to the world, and to have made no contribution to its progress. Two hundred years hence our own age may be regarded as one that possessed, for its time, considerable material civilization but very little else, a substantial body and a soul which died from fatty degeneration.

The real cause of our malaise is the absence of what Huxley (afraid of the word ‘spiritual’) called an ‘ethical ideal’. This explains, if not the disease, the difficulty of curing it. We do not know what we believe; therefore we do not know what we want. So we succumb to heady emotions, like nationalism, fascism, communism, militarism, pacifism.{1} ‘L’esprit croit naturellement et la volonté aime naturellement; de sorte que, faute de vrais objets, il faut qu’ils s’attachent aux faux.’{2} We become the slaves of our material civilization and not its masters. No steady wind of purpose fills the sails of our ship. The modern world has no definite view of life. Christianity, though still a living religion and, even with those who reject it, a powerful influence, is no longer the creed of Europe, and nothing has taken its place. The majority of men have exchanged the certainty of faith for a twilight of opinion. Here the pagan world was better provided than the twentieth century. It had at least the two great ethical creeds of Stoicism and Epicureanism by which men could anchor their lives and ride out whatever storms might come. But, apart from Christianity, our age has no such definite philosophy. Intellectually it is adrift. That is, ultimately, a graver danger to the world than economic collapse, or even war. Without a clear and accepted view of life, men waste and misuse material resources and are as lost in their rich profusion as travellers in a tropical forest who have neither guide, map, nor compass. Without it the abundant intelligence and goodwill in the world is dispersed instead of centring on a universal purpose. Without it there can be no unity or common ideal for mankind. This is apparent in international affairs. What we are witnessing in Europe and elsewhere is much more than the normal ebb and flow of conflicting political tides. It is the confusion brought by the collapse of a spiritual ideal. The whole trend of civilization is to unite men. Each improvement in transport and communications brings them together. Science, thought, and their creations are the common possessions of humanity. And yet, in spite of the unexampled growth of these uniting forces, there is less unity in Europe today than fifty years ago and, in the things which matter most, less than in the Middle Ages. Material unity exists; spiritual unity is gone. The latter is more important than the former, and confusion may grow into chaos unless it is restored or replaced. But this is impossible without a clear view of life. Nor is it only in international relations that such a view is needed. Without it the individual cannot bring harmony and order into the tumultuous mixture of instincts, desires and opportunities which compose life. He, too, becomes confused and chaotic. ‘Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.’ If so, to judge by our films, advertisements, and cheap press, we are living in an age of barbarism.

If our greatest needs are clear standards and a definite philosophy of life, the classics can help us. This, though it is one of the strongest arguments for their study, is not the one to which we are most accustomed. The Greeks did of course produce a great art and architecture, and a literature greater still. They were the creators of science, philosophy, political thought, and much else. But they did something even more important. They were the first people to ask rationally what is the right life for man and to give, if not the most satisfactory answer ever given to this question, at any rate one which no intelligent man who realizes the problem can ignore. The attempt to make life rational and worthy, to introduce harmony into its discords, order into its chaos, system into its profuse abundance—how rarely has it been made, how seldom succeeded! There are only three instances in the history of that western civilization which America shares with Europe; the Roman Empire; the Medieval Church; and that Hellenism from which the other two took so much, and which still survives, significant and fresh. The Greeks started with the chaotic beliefs of a primitive people. Their work in the world might almost be defined as bringing order out of chaos. In nature, starting in a world where lightning was a weapon of Zeus and the winds were alternately imprisoned in and released from a leather bag, they reached the conception of a universe formed out of atoms in infinite space. In religion, starting with a multitude of gods feasting and quarrelling on Olympus, they ended in pure and lofty theism. In ethics, starting with the moral confusion of the Homeric poems and the Hesiodic age, they achieved the exalted conceptions of Platonic and Stoic philosophy. ‘In the beginning’, said Anaxagoras, ‘all things were together; then mind distinguished and ordered them.’ The words describe the part played by Greece in human civilization.

‘The classics’ are the story of the birth and growth of these conceptions and their application to the life of men. In this Greece and Rome played different parts. As the Bible expounds a religious ideal in its essential purity, while the history of the Church is the attempt to apply that ideal to the complexities of the social and political life of mankind, so with Greece and the Graeco-Roman world. Greece developed on the small stage of the city-state a conception of what human existence should be: part of the interest of Roman studies is to see this ideal applied in the organization of a great empire and to the life of a practical people.

The following chapters deal with some aspects of the relation of Hellenism to the present day. The second traces the new attitude to Greek studies that developed in the nineteenth century among thinkers who were disillusioned with their age and perceived that Hellenism offered a corrective to many of its faults and an ideal by which men could live. The third, after pointing out that our conception of a civilization based on science and technology originates in Greece, discusses the meaning and value of the Greek ideal of humanism. The fourth chapter suggests some criticisms which a Greek thinker might make on our attitude to politics and economics. The fifth points out the close analogy between the spiritual problems of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. and those of our own day. The last deals with the general relation of Christian to Greek ideals and indicates some points in which Christianity corrects and supplements Hellenism.

Before proceeding to my subject, I wish to anticipate certain criticisms. Some people put the Greeks out of court at the outset because they owned slaves. That, it is implied, deprives their life of significance for us.

It is hard to understand the logic of this argument. Does it mean that the character of Socrates, the ideals of Plato and the Stoics, the genius of Homer or Aeschylus or Aristotle are meaningless to us because they lived in a slave-owning society? That is clearly not true. Or is it suggested that a society in which bad institutions exist has no message for posterity? If so we must cease to read Shelley and Wordsworth because the labour of children working sixteen hours a day in factory and mine entered into the coal that they burnt and the clothes that they wore; we must reject the virtues of every epoch—including our own—because they co-existed with institutions and customs in which succeeding ages find much to reform. Or does it mean that the peculiar virtues of the Greeks could only exist in a slave-owning society, and that therefore they can have no value for us? That also is untrue. The leisure which the Greeks owed to servile labour is made possible for us by technology. The machine has replaced the slave, and if we were fortunate enough to produce a Plato or an Aristotle, they could live in this modern world, without slaves and with infinitely more comfort, the lives which they led in Athens. We do not avert our eyes from Washington or Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton because (in the eighteenth century after Christ) they kept slaves. We need not be severer to the Greeks.

But there are graver counts against them than an institution which survived them for nearly 2,000 years, and a critic might object that I have ignored these and described not the real Greek, but a Hellene of the imagination. Greek life was lived on a lower level than this book suggests. Much was corrupt in the soil from which the flowers of its art and thought sprang. There can have rarely existed more unpleasant old men than the acquaintances of Cephalus,{3} and the law-court speeches of the orators show Greeks very unlike Plato and his friends. Yet these find no place in the following pages, and slavery, paederastia, hetaerae, the crude Olympian mythology, the savage political