Greek Mythology
This is not the case in all religions: many folk religions, especially ones dealing with ancestor worship, will treat good weather, favorable harvests, etc., as a sign that the gods are pleased, and will attribute disease or misfortune to their anger. Many polytheistic traditions portray their gods as feeling a wide range of emotions.
For example, Zeus is famous for his lustfulness, Susano-o for his intemperance, and Balder for his joyousness and calm. Impassibility in the Western tradition traces back to ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, who first proposed the idea of God as a perfect, omniscient, timeless, and unchanging being not subject to human emotion (which represents change and imperfection). The concept of impassibility was developed by medieval theologians like Anselm and continues to be in tension with more emotional concepts of God.
Read more about this topic: Impassibility
Famous quotes containing the words greek and/or mythology:
“I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One may as well preach a respectable mythology as anything else.”
—Humphrey, Mrs. Ward (1851–1920)