Why it happened or when we have no idea at all.... in the earliest Greek poets a new point of view dawned, never dreamed of before them, but never to leave the world after them. With the coming forward of Greece, mankind became the center of the universe, the most important thing in it. This was a revolution in thought....
The Greeks made their gods in their own image. That had not entered the mind of man before. Until then gods had had no semblance of reality. They were unlike all living things. In Egypt... a rigid figure, a woman with a cat's head suggesting inflexible, inhuman cruelty. Or a monstrous mysterious sphinx, aloof from all that lives...These and their like were what the pre-Greek world worshipped. One need only place beside them any Greek statue of a god...to perceive what a new idea had come into the world. With its coming, the world became rational.
These are the words of Edith Hamilton, in Mythology (1943). The words of the author of The Greek Way (1923) and many other popular books, must have seemed plausible in a Darwinian world. Plausible because they kept some shred of the real Greek achievement in a world where the worship of science sought to drown out the legitimate intuitions of man's internal world. In fact there was a startling and unanticipated shift in human reality around the 6th century BCE. But it had nothing to do with the man being the center of the world. The insights of the Greek philosophers pointed at the nature of human reason, nous, as a means by which the known and unknown could be separated without diminishing or losing contact with, the authentic mystery which surrounds and suffuses man.
Nor was she perceptive about prior world views. But I bet you would like me to get back to cats.
Doris Fielding Reid said of Edith Hamilton, (Edith Hamilton: An Intimate Portrait, 1967) :
[No matter] where she was living, in a New York apartment or at Sea Wall, she always had a cat or a dog, usually one of each.
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