Date: 2022-03-23 12:42 pm (UTC)
sdi: Oil painting of the Heliconian Muse whispering inspiration to Hesiod. (Default)
From: [personal profile] sdi
I wanted to leave you all with one last thought from Gilbert Murray:
A creed or catechism [referring to On the Gods and the World] is, of course, not at all the same thing as the real religion of those who subscribe to it. The rules of metre are not the same thing as poetry; the rules of cricket, if the analogy may be excused, are not the same thing as good play. Nay, more. A man states in his creed only the articles which he thinks it right to assert positively against those who think otherwise. His deepest and most practical beliefs are those on which he acts without question, which have never occurred to him as being open to doubt. If you take on the one hand a number of persons who have accepted the same creed but lived in markedly different ages and societies, with markedly different standards of thought and conduct, and on the other an equal number who profess different creeds but live in the same general environment, I think there will probably be more real identity of religion in the latter group. Take three orthodox Christians, enlightened according to the standards of their time, in the fourth, the sixteenth, and the twentieth centuries respectively, I think you will find more profound differences of religion between them than between a Methodist, a Catholic, a Freethinker, and even perhaps a well-educated Buddhist or Brahmin at the present day, provided you take the most generally enlightened representatives of each class.

Time has moved on, and our world is not the world in which men like Sallustius lived and flourished. Rather than reanimating the corpse of Neoplatonism, may its seed cause us to bear new wisdom appropriate to our Age.
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