The Religious Thought of the Greeks, from Homer to the Triumph of Christianity

This 1916 lecture series traces one of the most consequential transformations in Western thought: the evolution of Greek religious consciousness across a thousand years, from the world of Homer to the triumph of Christianity. Moore begins where Greek religion begins, in the Iliad and Odyssey, revealing how these epics did not merely entertain but actively constructed the Greek understanding of the divine. The gods we meet here are startlingly human: petty, jealous, passionate, bound by fate and moral law even as they wield immense power. This humanity of the divine, Moore argues, is precisely what allowed Greek religion to become a launching pad for philosophy, for the great systems of Plato and the Stoics, and ultimately for the spiritual revolution that Christianity represented. The lectures illuminate how the Greeks moved from worship of gods who resembled themselves toward abstract ethical concepts, and how that ethical turn created the philosophical space into which Christianity could eventually step. For anyone curious about where our civilization's spiritual heritage comes from, this remains a lucid and ambitious map of ancient religious terrain.