Ancient & modern
EAST has fought West since the Trojan War, but the roots of the current 'war' against terrorism have specific origins unrelated to the Graeco-Roman world: the peculiar demands of monotheism.
Pagan religion was, broadly, a matter of acknowledging the powerful forces, external and internal, that affected one's life — from the gods of the forces of nature, such as Zeus (weather), Poseidon (earth and sea) and Hera (childbirth), to the gods of human impulses, such as Aphrodite (sex). No priests or scriptures, creeds or dogmas had anything to say about these forces, except that they existed and must be placated; and the means of so doing involved ritual — performing right actions at right times in right ways. No other demands were imposed, let alone ideologies or beliefs. Nor were these forces jealous of each other. Pagan religion was tolerant of all gods, whatever their origins, and eager to accommodate them. Given that the forces of nature affect all men equally, it was not difficult for one culture to see reflections or even sources of its own deities in other cultures. Here is the Phoenician sky-god Baal; he must be the same as our sky-god Jupiter. Here is a Phoenician sex-goddess Astarte; she must be Aphrodite.
The great exception to this attitude in the ancient world was the Jews. It was not just that they insisted on worshipping one god and no other; it was that their god was primarily interested in being worshipped not through ritual but through a commitment to values and a way of life. Yahweh, however, did not impose an evangelising mission on his chosen people: as long as the Jews worshipped no other gods, Yahweh seemed content. The Christian god, however, took a different attitude. Further cultural and ideological, rather than merely ritual, demands went hand-in-hand with the call to ensure that the world acknowledged the one true god — a cry taken up with equal fervour by Islam from the 7th century AD. The means by which extremists on both sides have attempted to fulfil these demands is a major reason for the East-West impasse.
The 5th-century BC Greek philosopher Protagoras thought that 'the obscurity of the subject' made dogmatism about the gods unwise. The historian Herodotus, talking of the Egyptians, said, am not anxious to expound the divine matters in the accounts I have heard . . since I believe all men have an equal sense of the matter.' Not a bad starting-point.
Peter Jones
www.friends-classics.demon.co.uk is the new Friends of Classics website.
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