Religious Leadership: Two Faces of Authority

The Greeks and the Romans developed the foundations of the Western rational tradition, with its emphasis on the free and critical pursuit of knowledge in the service of truth and personal well-being. As the Greeks were not dominated and coerced by a priestly class, they were free to draw a distinction between philosophy which is concerned with truth, and religion which is concerned with myth. Their search for the truth of the world took them beyond the evidence of the five senses into the realm of reason. When they announced that the world was really this or that, they began that search for the nature of things which has inspired philosophers and scientists ever since. The ability freely to speculate about the world and themselves, without the interference of religious fanatics, resulted in the establishment of various Greek philosophical schools — Plato’s Academics, Aristotle’s Peripatetics, Megarian, Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics — which flourished until the Romans sacked Athens in 86 BCE.