Chapter II: Part 2

And, again, a third operation could not but assist these two former, and combine with their results. For the unaided intellect of man seems not to have had _stamina_ to carry, as it were, the weight of the transcendent idea of one God, of God infinite in might, in wisdom, and in love. Again, it was awful as well as ponderous; because it was so remote from man, and from his actual state. He therefore lightened the idea, as it were, by dividing it from one into many; and he brought it nearer to himself, nearer to his sympathies, by humanizing its form and attributes. By this process he in time destroyed indeed his reverence, but he also beguiled his fears, and created for himself objects not of dread, so much as of familiar association.

Yet once again; it may, I think, be shown that a kind of natural necessity led man to denominate actual powers, which he saw and felt about him, not through the medium of generalization by abstract names, but by making them persons.

Thus easy, and almost inevitable, under mental laws, was the road to Nature-worship. The path, that led into the deeper corruption of Passion-worship, has been already traced.

~_Progressive deterioration._~

It is then in entire accordance with what has preceded, that, when the Pagan system has come into its old age, we should find it so wholly deprived of all the lineaments of original beauty, grandeur, and goodness, that we can read the destructive philosophy and poetry of the atheistic schools, and of Lucretius in particular, without the strong sentiment of horror, which in themselves they are fitted to excite.

Milton, in the First Book of Paradise Lost, treats the Pagan gods as being, under new names, so many of the fallen angels, who with Satan had rebelled, and with him had been driven out from heaven, so that the world of heathen from the first had simply

‘devils to adore for deities.’

Whether this sentiment be poetically warrantable or not, (and for my own part I cannot but think it was one too much connected with a cold and lowered form of Christian doctrine,) it is not historically sound. We should distinguish broadly between this assertion, that the Pagan religion was an original falsehood, and the declaration of St. Paul, ‘I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God[16].’ To the same class as the words of the Apostle, belong, as I conceive, these (and other) sentences of Saint Augustine[17]; _non sunt dii, maligni sunt spiritus, quibus æterna tua felicitas pœna est.... Proinde si ad beatam pervenire desideras civitatem, devita dæmonum societatem_. For these terrible descriptions apply not to the infancy, but to the decrepitude of Paganism. The difference between them was as the difference between the babe in arms, and the hoary sinner on the threshold of death: and while the one representation summarily cuts man off from God, the other only shows to how fearful a distance he had by degrees travelled away. As time went on, and the _eidola_ of succeeding generations were heaped one upon another, the truly theistic element in the Pagan mythology was more and more hidden and overborne, until at length its association with evil was so inveterate and thorough, that the images, which the citizen or matron of the Roman empire had before the mind as those of gods, bore no appreciable resemblance to their divine original, but more and more amply corresponded with that dark side of our nature, on which we are accessible to, and finally may assume the likeness of, the evil one.

[16] 1 Cor. x. 20.

[17] De Civ. Dei, ii. 29.

But the critical error that we seem to have committed may be thus described; we have thrown back upon the Homeric period the moral and mythological character of the system, such as we find it developed in later Greece and Rome: forgetful of the long and dim interval, that separates Homeric religion from almost every subsequent representation, and not duly appreciating the title of the poems to speak with an almost exclusive authority for their own insulated epoch.

~_Paganism in its decay._~

Further, it is reasonable to remember that some of the powerful alteratives, which in subsequent ages told upon the form and substance of this wonderful mythology, had not begun to act in the time of Homer. These alteratives were speculative thought, and political interests. Philosophy, ever dangerous to the popular religion of Greece in the days of its maturity and prosperity, became its ally in the period of its decline, when its original vitality had entirely ebbed away, and when the _Vexilla Regis_, raised aloft throughout the Roman empire, drove it to seek refuge in holes and corners. Then the wit of man was set to repair the tottering fabric; to apologize for what was profligate, to invent reasons for what was void of meaning, to frame relations between the depraved mythology, and the moral government of the world. Even that corrupt and wicked system had, as it were, its epoch of death-bed repentance.

The services thus rendered by philosophers were late and ineffectual; but it was the civil power, which had been all along the greatest conservator of the classical mythology. It felt itself to have an interest in surrounding public authority with a veneration greater than this world could supply: a commanding interest, with the pursuit of which its necessities forbade it to dispense. Whatever exercised an influence in subduing and enthralling the popular mind, answered its purpose in the view of the civil magistrate. Hence his multifarious importations into religion, each successively introduced for this purely subjective and temporal reason, removed it farther and farther from the ground of truth. Every story that he added to the edifice made its fall more certain and more terrible. _Numerosa parabat excelsæ turris tabulata._ But in Homer’s time there is no trace of this employment of religion by governments, as a means of sheer imposition upon their subjects.

So likewise in Homer there is no sign that conscious speculation on these subjects had begun. Indeed, of that kind of thought which involves a clear mental self-consciousness, we may perhaps say, that the first beginning, at least for Europe and the West, is marked by the very curious simile in the Iliad[18]--

[18] Il. xv. 80.

ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἀΐξῃ νόος ἀνέρος κ.τ.λ.

Homer, then, spoke out in simplicity, and in good faith, the religion of his day, under those forms of poetry with which all religions have a well-grounded affinity: for the imagination, which is the fountain-head of poetic forms, is likewise a genuine, though faint, picture, of that world which religion realizes, through Faith its groundwork, ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen[19].’

[19] Heb. xi. 1.

And, indeed, he had no other form in which to speak forth his soul. That which we call the invention of the Greeks at work upon the subject-matter of religion was, in fact, the voice of human nature, giving expression in the easiest and simplest manner to its sense of the great objects and powers amidst which its lot was cast. It has been well said by Professor M. Müller, in an able Essay[20] on ‘Comparative Mythology,’ that ‘abstract speech is more difficult, than the fulness of a poet’s sympathy with nature.’ Thus it was not so much that poetry usurped the office of religion, as that their respective functions brought them of necessity to a common ground and a common form of proceeding. Homer saw, heard, or felt the action of the sun, the moon, the stars, the atmosphere, the winds, the sea, the rivers, the fountains, the soil; and he knew of family affections, of governing powers, of a healing art, of a gift and skill of mechanical construction. Action, in each of these departments, could not but be referred to a power. How was that power to be expressed?

[20] Oxford Essays, 1856, p. 36.

~_On Impersonation in Homer._~

At least for the Greek mind, less subtle, as Aristotle has observed, than the Oriental, it was more natural to deal with persons, than with metaphysical abstractions. It was foreign to the mental habit of the heroic age to conceive of abstract essences; as it still remains difficult, more difficult perhaps than, in the looseness of our mental processes, we suppose, for the men of our own generation. Even now, in the old age of the world, we have many signs of this natural difficulty, which formerly was a kind of impossibility. Especially we have that one which leads all communities, and above all their least instructed classes, to apply the personal pronouns _he_ or _she_ to a vast multitude of inanimate objects, both natural, and the products of human skill and labour. These objects are generally such as stand in a certain relation to action: they either do, suffer, or contain.

If then the Nature-forces could not be expressed, or at least could not be understood as abstractions, to express them as persons was the only other course open to the poet. It was not an effort to follow this method: it would have required great effort to adopt any other. How spontaneous was the impulse which thus generated the mythological system, we may observe from this, that it not only personified in cases where, an agency being seen, its fountain was concealed from view, but it likewise went very far towards personification even in cases where inanimate instruments were wielded by human beings, and where, as the source of the phenomenon was perceived, there was no occasion to clothe it with a separate vitality. Hence that copious vivifying power which Homer has poured like a flood through his verse. Hence his bitter arrow (πικρὸς), his darts hungry for human blood (λιλαιόμενα χρόος ἆσαι), his ground laughing in the blaze of the gleaming armour (γέλασσε δὲ πᾶσα περὶ χθὼν χαλκοῦ ὑπὸ στεροπῆς). Hence again his free use of sensible imagery to illustrate metaphysical ideas: for example, his black cloud of grief, his black pains, his purple death[21]. Hence that singularly beautiful passage on the weeping of the deathless horses of Achilles for Patroclus[22]. Hence too it is, that he does not scruple to carry imagery, drawn from the sphere of one sense, into the domain of another, an operation which later poets have found so difficult and hazardous. He has an iron din[23], a brazen voice[24], a brazen or iron heaven[25], a howling or shouting fire, a blaze of lamentation[26]. Hence, by a system of figure bolder perhaps than has been used by any other poet, he invests the works of high art in metal with the attributes of life and motion. This daring system reaches its climax in the damsel satellites[27] of gold, that support the limping gait of Vulcan: in the dogs of metal, that guard the palace of Alcinous: in the elastic arms of Achilles, which, so far from being a weight upon him, themselves lift him from the ground: and in the animated ships of the Phæacians, which are taught by instinct to speed across the sea, and to pilot their own course to the points of their destination[28]. On every side we see a redundance of life, shaping, and even forcing, for itself new channels: and thus it becomes more easy for us to conceive the important truth that, when he impersonates, he simply takes what was for him the easiest and the most effective way to describe. Every where he is carrying on a double process of action and reaction: on the one hand bringing Deity down to sensible forms; on the other, adorning and elevating humanity, and inanimate nature, with every divine endowment.

[21] Il. v. 83. xvii. 591. xviii. 2, 4.

[22] Il. xvii. 426-40.

[23] Il. xvii. 424.

[24] Il. xviii. 222: more strictly, a voice of bronze.

[25] Il. xv. 328. xvii. 425, 565.

[26] Od. xx. 353.

[27] Il. xviii. 417. For the Shield, notice xviii. 539, 599-602. xix. 386.

[28] Od. viii. 556.

~_Nature of the myths of Homer._~

Homer, then, is full of mythical matter. But the word _myth_, of which in recent controversies the use has been so frequent, is capable of being viewed under either of two principal aspects.

In one of these, it signifies a story which is not contemporary with the date of the facts it purports to relate, but is in reality an after-view of them, which colours its subject, and exaggerates, _ad libitum_, according to conditions of thought and feeling which have arisen in the interval.

In the other of these senses, it is an allegory which has simply lost its counterpart: it was true, but by separation from that which attached it to fact, it has become untrue: being now of necessity handled, if handled at all, as a substantive existence, it has passed into a fable, and is only distinguished from pure fable, in that it once indicated truths contemporary with itself, though probably truths lying in a different region from its own.

It is in this last sense that the term myth is chiefly, and most legitimately, applicable to the religious system of the Homeric poems: but they may also probably contain more or less of the mythical element in the former sense.

We, having obtained knowledge of the early derivation and distribution of mankind, and of the primitive religion, from sources other than those open to Homer, shall find in this knowledge the lost counterpart of a great portion of the Homeric myths.

The theological and Messianic traditions which we find recorded in Scripture, when compared with the Homeric theogony, will be found to correspond with a large and important part of it: and, moreover, with a part of it which in the poems themselves carries a cluster of distinctive marks, not to be explained except by the discovery of this correspondence. The evidence, therefore, of the meaning of this part of the Homeric system is like that which is obtained, when, upon applying a new key to some lock that we have been unable to open, we find it fits the wards, and puts back the bolt.

In his learned and acute Essay[29] on Comparative Mythology, Professor Max Müller undertakes to illustrate a doctrine that appears to be the exact opposite of Mr. Grote’s ‘Past which was never present.’ If I understand him rightly, there was at some one time a present for every portion of the reputed past[30]: so that, by a reference to eastern sources, the nature of that present, and of the original consistent meaning for what afterwards on becoming unintelligible is justly called a myth, has in many cases been, and may yet in many more come to be, unveiled. Originally impersonations of ideas and natural powers, the heathen gods never represented demons or evil spirits[31], and were ‘masks without an actor,’ ‘names without being:’ while their reality, consisting in their relation to the facts of the universe, faded and escaped from perception in the course of time. The myths of the Veda are still in the stage of growth: Hesiod and Homer too are of the ‘later Greeks,’ and not only the Theogony of Hesiod is ‘a distorted caricature,’ but the poetry of Homer[32] is extensively founded on myths fully grown, and in the stage of decay, that is to say, long severed from their corresponding deities.

[29] Oxford Essays, 1856.

[30] Essays, p. 42.

[31] Ibid. p. 48.

[32] pp. 43, 47, 49, 55, 87.

I do not doubt that in all mythology at its origin, there has been both a shell and a substance: and that the tendency of the two to part company, which we see even under the sway of revealed religion, must have operated with far more power, where ordinarily at least, man was thrown back, without other aid, upon his reason and his conscience, beset as they were and are with overpowering foes.

But then, as it seems to me, we must anticipate great changes in the shell itself. It will not retain, when empty, the identity of the form; which has lost the support that it had from within when full. On the contrary, it will become unlike its original self, as well as unlike its archetype or substance, so that probably much of it must always remain without a key.

Upon the other hand, as there was already a true religion in the world when an untrue one began to gather upon and incrust it, there must arise the question already put; what, according to the theory before us, became of this true religion? It did not disappear in a day: there was no wilful renunciation of it by single or specific acts, no sharp line drawn between it and the false; but the human element was gradually more and more imported into the divine, operating by continual and successive disintegrations of the original ideas. If so, then there seems to be nothing unreasonable in the belief that the traces of them might long remain discernible in the adulterated system, even if only as the features of a man are discernible in the mask of a buffoon.

No doubt it would be unreasonable to look for such traces in Homer, if he were indeed, in the popular sense of the term, which probably Professor M. Müller does not intend, a later Greek; a Greek dealing with a mythological system of which his nation had already had its use, from which the creative principle had departed, and which was on the road from ripeness to decay. I am far from saying that there are no myths in Homer, where the original and interior meaning has ceased to be discernible: but I shall seek to show that the contrary may be confidently averred, and fully shown, with respect to the great bulk of his mythology, and that we see in him two systems, both alive, and in impact and friction, though with very unequal forces, one upon the other; the first, that of traditional truth, and the second, of the inventive impersonation of nature both material and invisible. And certainly it is very striking that, with one or two very insignificant exceptions, all those ancient fables, which Professor Müller treats as having become unintelligible without the key of the Veda, and which he explains by means of it, are fables unknown to Homer, and drawn from much later sources.

~_Steps of the downward process._~

The general view, then, which will be given in these pages of the Homeric Theo-mythology is as follows: That its basis is not to be found either in any mere human instinct gradually building it up from the ground, or in the already formed system of any other nation of antiquity; but that its true point of origin lies in the ancient Theistic and Messianic traditions, which we know to have subsisted among the patriarchs, and which their kin and contemporaries must have carried with them as they dispersed, although their original warmth and vitality could not but fall into a course of gradual efflux, with the gradually widening distance from their source. To travel beyond the reach of the rays proceeding from that source was to make the first decisive step from religion to mythology.

To this divine tradition, then, were added, in rank abundance, elements of merely human fabrication, which, while intruding themselves, could not but also extrude the higher and prior parts of religion. But the divine tradition, as it was divine, would not admit of the accumulation of human materials until it had itself been altered. Even before men could add, it was necessary that they should take away. This impairing and abstraction of elements from the divine tradition may be called disintegration.

Before the time of Homer, it had already wrought great havock. Its first steps, as far as the genesis of the mythology throws light upon them, would appear to have been as follows: objectively, a fundamental corruption of the idea of God; who, instead of an Omnipotent wisdom and holiness, now in the main represented on a large scale, in personal character, the union of appetite and power; subjectively, the primary idea of religion was wholly lost. Adam, says Lord Bacon, was not content with universal obedience to the Divine Will as his rule of action, but would have another standard. This offence, though not exaggerated into the hideousness of human depravity in its later forms, is represented without mitigation in the principles of action current in the heroic age. Human life, as it is there exhibited, has much in it that is noble and admirable; but nowhere is it a life of simple obedience to God.

This disintegration of primitive traditions forms the second stage, a negative one, in the process which produced the Homeric Theo-mythology.

When the divine idea, and also the idea of the relation between man and his Maker, had once been fundamentally changed, there was now room for the introduction without limit of what was merely human into religion. Instead of man’s being formed in the image of God, God was formed in the image of man. The ancient traditions were made each to assume a separate individual form; and these shapes were fashioned by magnifying and modifying processes from the pattern that human nature afforded.

Again, as man does not exist alone and individually, but in the family, so the _nexus_ of the family was introduced as the basis of a divine order. This we may call, resting on the etymology of the word, the divine Œconomy of the Homeric religion.

But as with man, so with the supernatural world, on which his own genius was now powerfully reflected, families themselves, when multiplied, required a political order; and therefore, among the gods also a State and government are formed, a divine polity. Human care, by a strange inversion, makes parental provision for the good government of those deities whom it has called into being.

The propagation, for which a physical provision was made among men, takes place within the mythological circle also, under the laws of his intelligent nature. The ranks of the Immortals are filled with persons metaphysically engendered. These persons they represent concrete forms given to abstract ideas, or, to state nearly the same thing in other words, personal modes of existence assigned to powers which man saw as it were alive and at work in the universe, physical or intelligent, around him. But here too a distinction is to be observed. Sometimes the deity was set above the natural power, as its governor and controller: sometimes he merely signified the power itself put in action. The former mode commonly points to tradition; the latter always to invention.

And lastly, when a supernatural κοσμὸς or order had thus been constructed, the principles of affinity between it and the order here below exercised a reciprocally attractive force. The gods were more and more humanized, man was more and more invested with deity: deity was made cheap and common among men, and the interval from earth to heaven was bridged over by various means. These means were principally; first, the translation of men into the company of the immortals; secondly, the introduction of intermediate races; and, thirdly and most of all, the deification of heroes.

Subordinate to this general view, there arises another question: how are we to subdivide the inventive parts of the Homeric mythology? What general statements can be propounded, or criteria supplied, to show how much Greece fabricated or moulded for herself, and what she owed to Egypt, or to Phœnicia, or to other lands in the East, whose traditions she had either inherited or received?

~_Sources of the inventive portions._~

A deep obscurity hangs over this subject. We do not know all that was contained in each of the various religions of the East at any one epoch, much less at all the periods within which they may have contributed materials to the gorgeous fabric of Homer. Many things were probably common to several of them: and where this was so, circumstantial evidence cannot avail for determining the source at which the Poet or his nation borrowed.

But several propositions may be laid down, which will tend towards describing the path of our inquiry.

First, the accounts which, transmitted by Herodotus, represent Egypt as the fountain-head of the Greek religion in its mass, are not sustained by the evidence of Homer. And even with respect to many points where the nucleus of the Greek system has something corresponding with it in the Egyptian, it neither follows that it was originally drawn from Egypt by the Greeks, nor that those from whom the Greeks received it had obtained it there. Yet there remains room for very important communications, such, for example, as the oracle of Dodona, or the worship of Minerva, which may be an historic token of an Egyptian colony at Athens.

Secondly, the correspondences between the Homeric system and the Eastern religions, as we know them, are commonly latent, rather than broad or palpable. This may, in part, be owing to the circumstance that our accounts of these religions are in great part so much later than Homer; and a greater resemblance, than is now to be traced, may have subsisted in his time.

~_Originality of the Olympian system._~

But, thirdly, the differences are not differences of detail or degree. A different spirit pervades the Homeric creed and worship, from that which we find in Egyptian, or Median, or Persian systems. One has grovelling animalism, another has metaphysical aspirations, that we do not find in the Greek: but this is not all. If the Homeric scheme is capable of being described, as to its inventive part, by any one epithet, it will be this, that it is intensely human. I do not speak of the later mythology; nor of Hesiod, whose Theogony so marvellously spoils what it systematizes; but of Homer, in whom the ideal Olympus attained its perfection at a stroke. In his preternatural κοσμὸς there is, as far as I can see, much more of what is truly Divine, much more of the residue of primeval tradition, than we can find collected elsewhere: but there is also much more of what is human. The moral form is corrupt: but I am now also speaking of it as a work of human genius, and certainly as one of the most wonderful and splendid of its products. The deep sympathy with Nature, the refined perception of beauty, the freedom, the buoyancy, the elastic movement of every figure on the scene, the intimate sense of association between the denizens of Olympus and the generations of mortal men, the imposing development of a Polity on high, the vivid nationality that riveted its hold on Greece, the richness and inexhaustible diversity of those embellishments which a vigorous fancy knows how to provide, combine to make good the title I have asserted, and, if we are to believe that Homer, in no small part, made what he described, must place his share in the formation of the system in the very foremost rank even of his achievements.

At any rate, this one thing, I think, is clear; that whatever Greece borrowed from the East, she fairly made her own. All was thrown into the crucible; all came out again from the fire recast, in such combinations, and clothed in such forms and hues, as the specific exigencies of the Greek mind required. Hence we must beware of all precipitate identifications. We must take good heed, for example, not to assume, that because Athene may be Neith by metathesis, therefore the features of the Homeric Pallas were really gathered together in the Egyptian prototype of her name[33]. The strong hand of a transmuting fancy and intelligence passed as a preliminary condition upon everything foreign, not only to modify, but probably also to resolve into parts, and then to reconstruct. So that the preternatural system of Homer is, above all others, both national and original, and has, by its own vital energies, helped to maintain those characteristics even in the deteriorated copies which were made from it by so many after-generations.

[33] Bunsen’s ‘Egypt’s Place in Universal History,’ b. I. s. vi. A.

SECT. II.

_The traditive Element of the Homeric Theo-mythology._

The earliest Scriptural narrative presents to our view, with considerable distinctness, three main objects. These are, respectively, God, the Redeemer, and the Evil One. Nor do we pass even through the Book of Genesis without finding, that it shadows forth some mysterious combination of Unity with Trinity in the Divine Nature.

From the general expectation which prevailed in the East at the period of the Advent, and from the prophecies collected and carefully preserved in Rome under the name of the Sibylline books, we are at once led to presume, that the knowledge of the early promise of a Deliverer had not been confined to the Jewish nation. Their exclusive character, and that of their religion; their small significance in the political system and intellectual movement of the world; and the false as well as imperfect notions which seem to have prevailed elsewhere respecting them and their law[34]; all make it highly improbable that these expectations and predictions should have been drawn from them and their sacred books exclusively. Further, Holy Scripture distinctly exhibits to us the existence of channels of traditional knowledge severed from theirs. Thus much we learn particularly from the cases of Job, who was a prophet and servant of God, though he lived in a country where idolatry was practised[35]; and of Balaam, who, not being an Israelite, nor an upright man, was nevertheless a prophet also. Our Lord, in his answer respecting God as the God of Abraham[36], points to a great article of belief, not expressly propounded in the Mosaic books. And again, there are traditions adopted in the New Testament by apostolic authority, which prove to us that there were some fragments at least of early tradition remaining, even at a late date, among the Jews themselves, over and above what had been committed to writing in the older Scriptures. Such are those given by St. Jude respecting Balaam himself, the body of Moses, and the prophecy of Enoch[37]. Such is the record mentioned by St. Paul[38] of Jannes and Jambres, who are believed to have been the chief magicians of Pharaoh, referred to in Exodus, c. vii: and whose names are mentioned by Pliny, and, according to Eusebius, by Numenius the Philosopher[39]. But it is not necessary, and it might not be safe, to make any large assumption respecting a traditional knowledge of any parts of early revelation beyond what Scripture actually contains.

[34] See for example, in the Apocrypha, Esther xiii. 1-7.

[35] Horsley’s Dissertation, p. 69.

[36] St. Matt. xxii. 32.

[37] St. Jude, ver. 9, 11, 14.

[38] 2 Tim. iii. 8.

[39] Plin. H. N. xxx. 1. Euseb. Præp. Ev. ix. 8. Whitby, _in loc._

Dwelling therefore on what may be gathered from the Sacred Volume, we have seen that at the very earliest date it has set before men the ideas of God, the Redeemer, and the Evil One, and that it has spoken concerning God as in some sense Three in One. When we take the whole of the older Sacred Records into view, we may add some particulars respecting the other two great objects.

~_Messianic traditions of Scripture._~

And first, as to the Deliverer of man. The Redeemer promised was to be human, for He was to be of human birth. As death was the type of the primeval curse, so it was from death that He was to deliver. Again, the woman became a portion of the prophecy, for He was to be the seed of the woman: and while He is thus plainly indicated to us as incarnate, He is, on the other hand, mysteriously identified with the Λόγος, the Divine Word or Wisdom, existing before the world and the race with which He was to be numbered, and invested with the attributes of supreme Deity. Although from a certain period the Wisdom and the Deliverer appear to stand visibly identified, yet the earliest forms of the traditions, as they stand in Holy Writ, are, to a certain extent, ideally separate or separable; and the personality of the former is less clearly, or at least less sharply, marked than that of the latter.

It was always the prevailing tendency of the speculative religions of the East to withdraw the Supreme Being from direct relations with the world, and to assign its ordinary government to the Wisdom, more or less directly impersonated. ‘This,’ says Dean Milman, ‘was the doctrine from the Ganges, or even the shores of the Yellow Sea, to the Ilissus: it was the fundamental principle of the Indian religion and Indian philosophy; it was the basis of Zoroastrianism: it was pure Platonism: it was the Platonic Judaism of the Alexandrian School[40].’

[40] Milman’s Hist. of Christianity, vol. i. p. 72.

Neither were the traditions of the Evil One, more than those respecting the Messiah, limited to a single aspect. On the contrary, they were twofold, and they centred round two ideas: the one, that of force; the other that of fraud: the one, that of a rebellious spirit, whom the Almighty had cast down, with his abettors, from bliss to torment[41]; and the other, that of a deceiver, who lured man by the promise of what he desired, and through the medium of his own free will, away from duty, to his own harm or destruction.

[41] Calmet’s Dict., art. Satan. 2 Pet. ii. 4. St. Jude, ver. 6.

~_Sum of the primitive traditions._~

We may venture rudely to sum up these principal traditions of the first ages as follows:

First, with respect to the Deity.

1. The Unity and supremacy of the Godhead.

2. A combination with this Unity of a Trinity, in which Trinity the several Persons, in whatever way their personality be understood, and whatever distinctions may obtain between them, are in some way of coequal honour.

Secondly, with respect to the Redeemer, or Messiah.

1. A Redeemer from the curse of death, invested with full humanity, by whom the divine kingdom was to be vindicated and reestablished, in despite of its enemies.

2. A Wisdom, which is personal as well as divine, the highest and first in order, concerned in the foundation and continuing government of the world[42]. This is the Wisdom which ‘the Lord possessed from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was[43].’ ‘I Wisdom dwell with prudence; and find out knowledge of witty inventions[44].’ ‘This is with all flesh according to his gift: and he hath given her to them that love him[45].’

[42] Proverbs i. 20-33.

[43] Proverbs iii. 19.

[44] See Proverbs viii. _passim_.

[45] Ecclus. i. 8-10. iv. 11-19, _et alibi._ See also Wisdom of Solomon, i. 6. vi. 12, and seqq. vii.-x. _passim_.

3. The connection of the Redeemer with our race through his descent from the woman.

Thirdly, with respect to the Evil One.

1. A rebellion of great angels or powers against the Supreme Being; the defeat of the rebels, and their being cast into the abyss.

2. The going forth among men of a power who tempts them to their destruction.

A tradition of minor moment, but clearly declared in the earliest Scripture, may be added: namely,

The announcement of the rainbow, as a token which was to convey an assurance or covenant from God to man, with respect to the annual order of nature; an order on which the continuance of the human race depends.

It is impossible to survey these traditions, in their outline, without seeing how easy it was to find a way from them, by the aid of ideas on which they seemed to border, and which they brought within easy reach of wayward thought, towards the principal corruptions of heathenism. They shadow forth, as they stand, the great dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation: but from the doctrine of the Trinity, thus shadowed forth, the next step might be into polytheism; while in the doctrine of the Incarnation, similarly projected, seemed to be laid the foundation of the Greek anthropomorphism, or the reflection of humanity upon the supernatural world. Abstract truth has not been found sufficient to sustain itself among mankind: and in the dispensations of the All-Wise the promulgation of it has always been associated with the establishment of a teaching organ, which should bear living witness to its authority.

Let us now observe how these traditions severally find their imperfect and deranged counterparts in the heroic age of Greece.

First, as to the Godhead.

Its unity and supremacy is represented in Jupiter, as the administrator of sovereign power.

The combination of Trinity with Unity is reproduced in the three Kronid brothers, Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto or Aidoneus; all born of the same parents, and having different regions of the material creation severally assigned to them by lot.

Next as to the Redeemer.

The first form of this tradition is represented chiefly in Apollo. But neither the various attributes which were conceived as belonging to the Deliverer, nor the twofold manifestation of his character as it appears in Holy Writ, could, we must conclude, be held in combination by the heathen mind. The character, therefore, underwent a marked disintegration by severance into distinct parts: and while it continues, in the main, to form the groundwork of the Homeric Apollo, certain of its qualities are apparently transferred to his sister Diana, and others of them are, as it were, repeated in her.

The second form of the tradition is that of the Wisdom, or Λόγος, of the Gospel of Saint John; and this appears to be represented in the sublime Minerva of the Homeric system.

Lastly, Latona, the mother of the twin deities, Apollo and Diana, appears to represent the tradition of the woman, from whom the Deliverer was to descend.

Thirdly, with respect to the Evil One.

As the derivative idea of sin depended upon that of goodness, and as the shadow ceases to be visible when the object shadowed has become more dim, we might well expect that the contraction and obscuration of the true idea of goodness would bring about a more than proportionate loss of knowledge concerning the true nature of evil. The impersonation of evil could only be upheld in a lively or effectual manner, as the opposite of the impersonation of good: and when the moral standard of godhead had so greatly degenerated, as we find to be the case even in the works of Homer, the negation of that standard could not but cease to be either interesting or intelligible.

~_Traditions of the Evil One in Homer._~

Accordingly we find that the process of disintegration, followed by that of arbitrary reassortment and combination of elements, had proceeded to a more advanced stage with respect to the tradition of the Evil One, than in the other cases.

The general form of the disintegration is this: that the idea of a rebellion, menacing the divine dominion with violence, is now clothed in a variety of detached and more or less conflicting forms: while the far more subtle idea of an influence acting immediately on the spirit of man, and aiming a blow at the glory of the Deity through his creatures, whose allegiance it seeks by the perversion of their own spontaneous agency to withdraw, remains in Homer, still indeed both visible and single, but enfeebled and obscured to such a degree, that it, as it were, stands on tiptoe, ready for its final flight from the sphere of the common perceptions of mankind.

The first, the idea of evil acting by violence, is represented, not indeed exclusively, but most conspicuously, in the Titans and Giants.

The second, or the idea of evil acting by deceit, is represented in the Ἄτη of Homer.

Lastly: the rainbow of Holy Scripture is represented in the Homeric Iris.

These, then, speaking generally, are the principal remnants from primitive traditions, of which, if of any thing of the kind, we may expect to find the vestiges within the Olympian Court.

~_Varying degrees of the traditive character._~

In order to throw a fuller light upon the subject, I shall chiefly examine the characters of the Homeric deities, and of the more important among them in particular, not as a body but individually. An opposite practice has for the most part prevailed. It has been assumed that they are homogeneous; they have been treated as a class, subject to the same laws; and variations, not to be accounted for from mythological _data_, have been viewed as mere solecisms in the conception of the class. This has mainly tended, I believe, to thrust the truth of the case into dark corners. But the properties which distinguish the Homeric Immortals in common from men are in reality less important than those which establish rules of discrimination within their own body, and which point to the very different sources that have supplied the materials incorporated into different portions of the scheme.

In the enumeration which it will be requisite to make, it might be allowable to treat Neptune and Pluto as traditive divinities, because in their relation to Jupiter, which abstractedly is one of equal birth and equal honour, they appear to share in representing the primitive tradition, which combined a trine personality with unity in the godhead. Effect was given to this tradition by supposing the existence of three deities, who were united by the bond of brotherhood, and of whom each had an important portion of the universe assigned to his immediate superintendence. But for the assignment of attributes to these personages, when severally constituted, tradition seems to have afforded no aid. Jupiter, as the eldest and most powerful, became heir general, as it were, to whatever ideas were current respecting the one supreme God: or the point might be otherwise stated, as for instance thus, that the conception which the Greeks derived from elsewhere of a supreme God, they, on taking it over, shaped into the Eldest Brother of their Trinity. But the concentration of ideas of supremacy upon him was at variance with, and enfeebled the notion of, the trine combination. The tradition itself, moreover, did not determine provinces for Neptune or Pluto; and consequently, though these deities may be considered traditional with regard to their basis, they belonged to the invented class as respects character and attributes, and it is in conjunction with that class that I propose to consider them.

Again, Jupiter does not fully represent any one specific tradition: but he assembles irregularly around him the fragments of such traditions as belonged to the relation between men and the One Ruler of the universe. On the one hand he is in competition with other impersonations; on the other hand, with abstractions, which, if they wanted the life, yet had not forfeited the purity of godhead.

Latona, again, will be known rather by relative and negative, than by absolute and positive, signs; except as to the point of her maternity.

So Diana does not equally divide with Apollo, her twin brother, the substance of the tradition that they jointly represent; but rather is the figure of a person on whom the residue, consisting of properties that the Homeric Apollo could not receive, is bestowed. It is mainly in her ancillary relation to Apollo that she should be viewed.

It will of course be my object to bring out, as clearly and fully as I can, that portion of the evidence, which proves the presence of a strong traditive element in the Theomythology of Homer.

But it is not free from difficulty to determine the best mode of proceeding with this view. The traditive part of the materials is not separated by a broad and direct line from the inventive; nor has it been lodged without admixture in any of the members of the Olympian system. Like the fables of the East, it has undergone the transforming action of the Greek mind, and it is throughout the scheme variously mingled and combined with ideas of human manufacture. There is scarcely any element of the old revelation that is presented to our view under unaltered conditions: scarcely any personage of the divine order, as represented by the Poet, stands in the same relation of resemblance to those primeval traditions, which are to be traced in his figure and attributes. The ancient truths are not merely imperfect; they are dislocated, and, with heavy waste of material in the process, afterwards recast.

On account of this bewildering diversity, it will, I conceive, be most conducive to my purpose if I commence the inquiry with those deities in whom the propositions I maintain are best represented: for the present putting aside others, in whom the representation of tradition, either from the overpowering presence of other elements, or from the general insignificance of the character, is less effective.

I have spoken, thus far, of the ancient traditions, as they are delivered either in the ancient or in the more recent books of the Bible. And I hope it will not be thought to savour of mere paradox, if the result of my search into the text of Homer shall be to exhibit the religion of the Greeks, in the heroic age, as possessed of more resemblances to a primitive revelation, than those religions of the East from which they must have borrowed largely, and which we presume to have stood between them and the fountain-head.

We have doubtless to consider the Greeks, as to their religion, in three capacities: first, as receivers of the remains of pristine tradition; secondly, as having imported, along with it, from abroad the depraved forms of human fable; thirdly, as themselves powerful inventors, working upon and adding to both descriptions of material. But, before we conclude that the religion of Homer must needs be farther from that of the patriarchs than the religions, as we now read them, of Persia, Assyria, or Egypt, we ought to be assured that the editions, so to speak, in which we study those religions, are older than the Homeric poems. Whereas, with respect to the great bulk of the records at our command, this, I apprehend, is the very reverse of the truth.

~_Messianic traditions of the Hebrews._~

There is, however, one source to which we may legitimately repair, as next in authority to the Holy Scriptures themselves with respect to the forms of primitive tradition: I mean the earliest and most authentic sacred literature of the Hebrews. Not that in kind it can resemble the sacred records; but that it is at least likely to indicate what were the earliest forms of development, and the initial tendencies to deviation.

Since that nation became unhappily committed, through its chief traditional authorities, to the repudiation of the Redeemer, a sinister bias has operated upon its retrospective, as well as upon its present and prospective theology. There are nevertheless three depositaries of knowledge from which we may hope to learn what were the views, entertained by the ancient Hebrews themselves, with regard to the all-absorbing subject of the Messianic traditions.

In the first place it would appear, from the very nature of the prophecies of the Old Testament, that there must, in all likelihood, have existed along with them a system of authoritative contemporary exposition, in order that holy men might be enabled to derive from them the consolation and instruction which, apart from their other purposes, they were divinely intended to convey. The highly figurative character and frequent obscurity of their language supports, if it does not require, this belief: and the constant practice, attested by the later Scriptures, of public explanation of the sacred Books, including the Prophets, in the synagogues of the Jews, brings it as near as such a case admits to demonstration.

These expositions of the Sacred Text began, as it appears, to be committed to writing about the time of the Babylonish captivity; when the Chaldee tongue became the vernacular, and the old Hebrew disappeared from common use. They were collected in the Paraphrases or _Targumim_: and the fragments of the oldest of them, which had consisted of marginal notes, were consolidated into a continuous Targum by Onkelos, Jonathan, and others[46].

[46] Schöttgen’s Horæ Hebraicæ et Talmudicæ, vol. ii. De Messiâ, Præf. ss. 3.4.12. and B. I. c. iii. 2, 3.

Apart from the Targumim, the sacred literature of the Jews appears, from the time of the captivity onwards, to have run in two main channels. One class of teachers and writers rested chiefly on the dry traditionary system condemned by our Saviour in the Gospels, and gave less and less heed, as time went on, to the doctrine of Scripture, and of their forefathers, concerning the Messiah. In the second century after Christ, this traditionary system was reduced by the Rabbi Jehuda into a volume called the Mischna. And in the sixth or seventh, there was composed a larger work, the Gemara or Talmud, which purported in part to comment on the Mischna, and which also presented a more extensive and more promiscuous collection of Rabbinical traditions. In the midst of the ordure of this work, says Schöttgen, are to be found here and there certain pearls[47].

[47] Schöttgen Præf. 17. B. I. c. iii. 7, 8. and Rabbin. Lect. B. I. c. 5.

Parallel with this stream of chiefly spurious learning, there was a succession of pious writers, who both searched the Scriptures, and studied to maintain and propagate the Messianic interpretations of them. Of this succession the Rabbi Simeon Ben Jochai was the great ornament; and by his disciples was compiled, some sixty years after his death, or about A. D. 170, the work termed the Sohar, which is so Christian in its sense, as to have convinced Schöttgen that Simeon was himself a Christian; although, perhaps from not being understood, he was not repudiated by the Jews[48]. Upon this work was founded the Cabbalistic or mystical learning.

[48] Schöttgen Præf. 12-15. B. I. and II. c. ii. c. iii. 6, 7. Rabb. Lect. I. c. vi.

From these sources may be derived many Messianic ideas and interpretations that were current among the ancient Jews.

Of them I proceed to extract some, from the work of Schöttgen, which may throw light upon the interior system of the Homeric mythology in its most important aspects.

1. First and foremost, these traditions appear to bear witness to the extraordinary elevation of the Messiah, and they fully recognise his title to the great Tetragrammaton[49].

[49] Schöttgen, I. i. 1.

2. Next, that introduction of the female principle into the sphere of deity, which the Greeks seem to have adopted, after their anthropophuistic manner, with a view to the family order among the Immortals rather than as a mere metaphysical conception, appears to have its prototype in the Hebrew traditions.

When in the Holy Scriptures we find wisdom personified in the feminine, we regard this only as a mode of speech, though as one evidently tending to account for the sex of Minerva. But the Jewish traditions went far beyond this[50]. The two natures of our Lord would appear from the Sohar to have been distinguished under the figure of mother and daughter. The Schechina, or ‘glory of God,’ is of the feminine gender: and the relation of His divinity to His humanity is set forth under the figure of a marriage. He is therefore called mother and matron; _temporibus futuris omnes hostes tradentur in manus Matronæ_, as Schöttgen renders the Sohar[51].

[50] Schöttgen, I. i. 3.

[51] Ibid. I. i. 12, 18.

The Λόγος, or Word of the Lord, is also shown to have been, according to the genuine traditions of the Jews, a common expression for the Messiah. The relation thus exhibited is in marked analogy with that between Minerva and Jupiter. This expression of the Targums of Jonathan and Onkelos is also in correspondence with the language of Philo, De Confusione Linguarum, pp. 255, 267[52].

[52] Ibid. I. i. 2.

4. The ideas of sonship and primogeniture[53] are likewise recognised among the titles of the Messiah, according to the Sohar and other Jewish authorities. We shall have to inquire what Homeric deities there are, who, by the distinction between their mode and time of birth, and that of others, may appear to represent these characteristics.

[53] Ib. I. i. 5, 9.

5. The Lord of Hosts, or Zebaoth[54], is another title of the Messiah: and we may therefore expect, in any traditionary remnant found elsewhere, to discover some strong and commanding martial development.

[54] Ib. I. i. 6.

6. The Messiah was preeminently conceived of by the Jews as being the Light[55]. This property is in immediate connection with the idea of the Λόγος. It cannot fail to be observed, how vividly such an idea is represented in the ancient name Φοῖβος attaching to Apollo, and probably also in that of Λυκηγένης or ‘light-born.’ The same idea appears in the characteristic epithet Γλαυκῶπις, as it is now rightly interpreted, for Minerva. This indeed is not merely an epithet, but it forms one of her titles: as in Il. viii. 406.

[55] Ibid. II. Loc. Gen. xiii. xciv. _et alibi_, and I. iii. 10, 23.