religion really
achieve? First, it debarbarized the worship of the leading states of
Greece--not of all Greece, since antiquity had no means of spreading
knowledge comparable to ours. It reduced the horrors of the
'Urdummheit', for the most part, to a romantic memory, and made religion
no longer a mortal danger to humanity. Unlike many religious systems, it
generally permitted progress; it encouraged not only the obedient
virtues but the daring virtues as well. It had in it the spirit that
saves from disaster, that knows itself fallible and thinks twice before
it hates and curses and persecutes. It wrapped religion in Sophrosyne.

Again, it worked for concord and fellow-feeling throughout the Greek
communities. It is, after all, a good deal to say, that in Greek history
we find almost no warring of sects, no mutual tortures or even
blasphemies. With many ragged edges, with many weaknesses, it built up
something like a united Hellenic religion to stand against the 'beastly
devices of the heathen'. And after all, if we are inclined on the purely
religious side to judge the Olympian system harshly, we must not forget
its sheer beauty. Truth, no doubt, is greater than beauty. But in many
matters beauty can be attained and truth cannot. All we know is that
when the best minds seek for truth the result is apt to be beautiful. It
was a great thing that men should envisage the world as governed, not by
Giants and Gorgons and dealers in eternal torture, but by some human and
more than human Understanding (+Xynesis+),[73:1] by beings of quiet
splendour like many a classical Zeus and Hermes and Demeter. If
Olympianism was not a religious faith, it was at least a vital force in
the shaping of cities and societies which remain after two thousand
years a type to the world of beauty and freedom and high endeavour. Even
the stirring of its ashes, when they seemed long cold, had power to
produce something of the same result; for the classicism of the Italian
Renaissance is a child, however fallen, of the Olympian spirit.

Of course, I recognize that beauty is not the same as faith. There is,
in one sense, far more faith in some hideous miracle-working icon which
sends out starving peasants to massacre Jews than in the Athena of
Phidias. Yet, once we have rid our minds of trivial mythology, there is
religion in Athena also. Athena is an ideal, an ideal and a mystery; the
ideal of wisdom, of incessant labour, of almost terrifying purity,