Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Greek Gods in the Twentieth Century
- 1 What is a Greek God?
- PART I SYSTEMATIC ASPECTS
- PART II INDIVIDUAL DIVINITIES AND HEROES
- PART III DIACHRONIC ASPECTS
- 14 Early Greek Theology: God as Nature and Natural Gods
- 15 Gods in Early Greek Historiography
- 16 Gods in Apulia
- 17 Lucian's Gods: Lucian's Understanding of the Divine
- 18 The Gods in the Greek Novel
- 19 Reading Pausanias: Cults of the Gods and Representation of the Divine
- 20 Kronos and the Titans as Powerful Ancestors: A Case Study of the Greek Gods in Later Magical Spells
- 21 Homo fictor deorum est: Envisioning the Divine in Late Antique Divinatory Spells
- 22 The Gods in Later Orphism
- 23 Christian Apologists and Greek Gods
- 24 The Materiality of God's Image: Olympian Zeus and Ancient Christology
- PART IV HISTORIOGRAPHY
- Epilogue
- Index
23 - Christian Apologists and Greek Gods
from PART III - DIACHRONIC ASPECTS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Greek Gods in the Twentieth Century
- 1 What is a Greek God?
- PART I SYSTEMATIC ASPECTS
- PART II INDIVIDUAL DIVINITIES AND HEROES
- PART III DIACHRONIC ASPECTS
- 14 Early Greek Theology: God as Nature and Natural Gods
- 15 Gods in Early Greek Historiography
- 16 Gods in Apulia
- 17 Lucian's Gods: Lucian's Understanding of the Divine
- 18 The Gods in the Greek Novel
- 19 Reading Pausanias: Cults of the Gods and Representation of the Divine
- 20 Kronos and the Titans as Powerful Ancestors: A Case Study of the Greek Gods in Later Magical Spells
- 21 Homo fictor deorum est: Envisioning the Divine in Late Antique Divinatory Spells
- 22 The Gods in Later Orphism
- 23 Christian Apologists and Greek Gods
- 24 The Materiality of God's Image: Olympian Zeus and Ancient Christology
- PART IV HISTORIOGRAPHY
- Epilogue
- Index
Summary
Greek gods and polytheism as a distinctive feature of Graeco-Roman culture and religion were favourite themes among the Christian apologists of the second century. In an attempt to promote monotheism as characteristic of Christian religion, the apologists not only presented pagan religion as a typically polytheistic belief, but also established the ‘disarmingly simple model … according to which mankind … had progressed from polytheism to monotheism under the catalytic action of Christianity’. This idea was pushed so far that the evolutionary model was altered and polytheism presented as a temporary involution: as a corruption of the original monotheism, polytheism had its roots in the transgression committed by Adam and Eve. Since then human beings had surrendered to externalities and sensualism, as a result of which polytheism and its concomitant idolatry established itself as the way, par excellence, to channel human religious experience.
Strange though it may seem, these conceptions are not confined to antiquity and the Middle Ages, however. On the one hand, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), at the end of the eighteenth century, and the philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), in the middle of the nineteenth, are both representatives of the evolutionary model. On the other, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–87), at the end of the seventeenth century, established the scheme according to which monotheism was not only the climax of the spiritual and theological evolution, but also the original, pure and spiritual religion.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Gods of Ancient GreeceIdentities and Transformations, pp. 442 - 464Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010