CHAP. I.
fabrication of impurities, the other asserts as strongly the wilful moral corruption exhibited in the theogonic narratives of the Greeks. In the inconsistent and repulsive adventures of Zeus or Herakles it sees the perversion of high and mysterious doctrines originally imparted to man, and discerns in the gradations of the Olympian hierarchy vestiges of the most mysterious doctrines embraced in the whole compass of Christian teaching. By this theory all that is contradictory, immoral, or disgusting in Greek mythology is the direct result of human sinfulness and rebellion, and resolves itself into the distortion of a divine revelation imparted to Adam immediately after the Fall.
Theory of a corrupted revelation.The revelation thus imparted brought before men, we are told (i), the Unity and Supremacy of the Godhead; (ii), a combination, with this Unity, of a Trinity in which the several persons are in some way of coequal honour; (iii), the future coming of a Redeemer from the curse of death, invested with full humanity, who should finally establish the divine kingdom; (iv), a Wisdom, personal and divine, which founded and sustains the world; (v), the connexion of the Redeemer with man by descent from the woman. With this was joined the revelation of the Evil One, as a tempting power among men, and as the leader of rebellious angels who had for disobedience been hurled from their thrones in heaven.[1] This true theology, in the hands of the Greeks, was perverted, it is said, into a Trinity of the three sons of Kronos, Zeus, Hades, and Poseidôn, the tradition of the Redeemer being represented by Apollôn, and the Divine Wisdom being embodied in Athênê, while Lêtô, their mother, stands in the place of the woman from whom the Deliverer was to descend. The traditions of the Evil One were still further obscured. Evil, as acting by violence, was represented most conspicuously in the Titans and giants—as tempting by deceit, in the Atê of Homer, while lastly, the covenant of the rainbow reappears in Iris.
System of secondaries.This theory Mr. Gladstone has traced with great minuteness through the tangled skein of Greek mythology. The original idea he finds disintegrated, and a system of secondaries is the necessary consequence. Far above all are exalted Apollôn and Athênê, in their personal purity[2] yet more than in their power, in their immediate action,[3] in their harmony with the will of the Supreme King, and in- ↑ This theory was put forth more than twenty years ago by Mr. Gladstone, in his elaborate work entitled Homer and the Homeric Age. The seriousness of the issue must be pleaded as a reason for examining it here, as Mr. Gladstone has propounded it again not only in Juventus Mundi, but in some papers on the Olympian Hierarchy in the Nineteenth Century, 1879.
- ↑ Homer and the Homeric Age, ii. 87–107.
- ↑ Ibid. 89–93.
