theia_ or
Age of Ignorance, before Zeus came to trouble men's minds, a stage to
which our anthropologists and explorers have found parallels in every
part of the world. Dr. Preuss applies to it the charming word
'Urdummheit', or 'Primal Stupidity'. In some ways characteristically
Greek, in others it is so typical of similar stages of thought elsewhere
that one is tempted to regard it as the normal beginning of all
religion, or almost as the normal raw material out of which religion is
made. There is certainly some repulsiveness, but I confess that to me
there is also an element of fascination in the study of these 'Beastly
Devices of the Heathen', at any rate as they appear in early Greece,
where each single 'beastly device' as it passes is somehow touched with
beauty and transformed by some spirit of upward striving.

Secondly there is the Olympian or classical stage, a stage in which, for
good or ill, blunderingly or successfully, this primitive vagueness was
reduced to a kind of order. This is the stage of the great Olympian
gods, who dominated art and poetry, ruled the imagination of Rome, and
extended a kind of romantic dominion even over the Middle Ages. It is
the stage that we learn, or mis-learn, from the statues and the
handbooks of mythology. Critics have said that this Olympian stage has
value only as art and not as religion. That is just one of the points
into which we shall inquire.

Thirdly, there is the Hellenistic period, reaching roughly from Plato to
St. Paul and the earlier Gnostics. The first edition of this book
treated the whole period as one, but I have now divided it by writing a
new chapter on the Movements of the Fourth Century B. C., and making
that my third stage. This was the time when the Greek mind, still in its
full creative vigour, made its first response to the twofold failure of
the world in which it had put its faith, the open bankruptcy of the
Olympian religion and the collapse of the city-state. Both had failed,
and each tried vainly to supply the place of the other. Greece responded
by the creation of two great permanent types of philosophy which have
influenced human ethics ever since, the Cynic and Stoic schools on the
one hand, and the Epicurean on the other. These schools belong properly,
I think, to the history of religion. The successors of Aristotle
produced rather a school of progressive science, those of Plato a school
of refined scepticism. The religious side of Plato's