CREUZER, FRIEDRICH. - Philologist, b. in Marburg on 10 March 1771, d. on 16 Feb. 1858 in Heidelberg, where for over 40 years he taught philology and ancient history. In his interpretation of the ancient religions, particularly the Greek one, he followed the symbolist school.
His thesis is set out in the work Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, (2nd ed., 4 vols., Leipzig 1810-12; 4th ed., ibid. 1836-46), translated, with adaptations, into French by Guignaut, Religions de l'Antiquité considérée principalement dans leurs formes symboliques et mythologiques, (10 vols., Paris 1825-51). It maintains that the ancient and simple primitive religiosity of the Greeks, a monotheism tending toward a naturalistic pantheism, through a theological and moral initiation coming from the Asiatic priesthood, rose to a profoundly spiritual meaning that is found again in the teaching of the mysteries. This teaching, which made use of symbolic representations, dealt with cosmogony, with the soul and its migrations and purifications, with the existence of a single God, with the destiny of the universe and of man. Artists and poets of Greece stopped at the symbolic shell beneath which this kernel of profound truths was concealed, whose last echo vibrates in Neoplatonic philosophy (C. was an assiduous scholar, editor and commentator of Plotinus).
This thesis, now completely abandoned, was immediately combated by Ch. A. Lobeck, who dismantled its philosophical-mystical scaffolding, and by Ch. O. Müller, who denied the influence of Asiatic priestly thought on Greek mythology and emphasized its historical origins, bound to race, geographical environment and the historical development of Greece.