Christianity and Greek Philosophy / or, the relation between spontaneous and reflective thought in Greece and the positive teaching of Christ and His Apostles

by B. F. Cocker

'First of all was Chaos, afterwards Earth,

With her spacious bosom,

And Love, who is pre-eminent among all the immortals;'

as intimating here that in entities there should exist some cause that will impart motion, and hold bodies in union together. But how, in regard to these, one ought to distribute them, as to the order of priority, can be decided afterwards. [¹⁶¹]

[Footnote 160: ][ (return) ] We do not concern ourselves with the chronological antecedence of these ancient Greek poets. It is of little consequence to us whether Homer preceded Orpheus, or Orpheus Homer. They were not the real creators of the mythology of ancient Greece. The myths were a spontaneous growth of the earliest human thought even before the separation of the Aryan family into its varied branches.

The study of Comparative Mythology, as well as of Comparative Language, assures us that the myths had an origin much earlier than the times of Homer and Orpheus. They floated down from ages on the tide of oral tradition before they were systematized, embellished, and committed to writing by Homer, and Orpheus, and Hesiod. And between the systems of these three poets a perceptible difference is recognizable, which reflects the changes that verbal recitations necessarily and imperceptibly undergo.

[Footnote 161: ][ (return) ] "Metaphysics," bk. i. ch. iv.

Now whether this "first principle," called "Love," "the cause of motion and of union" in the universe, was regarded as a personal Being, and whether, as the ancient scholiast taught, Hesiod's love was "the heavenly Love, which is also God, that other love that was born of Venus being junior," is just now of no moment to the argument. The more important inference is, that amongst the gods of Pagan theology but one is self-existent, or else none are. Because the Hesiodian gods, which are, in fact, all the gods of the Greek mythology, "were either all of them derived from chaos, love itself likewise being generated out of it; or else love was supposed to be distinct from chaos, and the active principle of the universe, from whence, together with chaos, all the theogony and cosmogony was derived." [¹⁶²] Hence it is evident the poets did not teach the existence of a multiplicity of unmade, self-existent, independent deities.

[Footnote 162: ][ (return) ] "Cudworth," vol. i. p. 287.

The careful reader of Cudworth will also learn another truth of the utmost importance in this connection, viz., that the theogony of the Greek poets was, in fact, a cosmogony, the generation of the gods being, in reality, the generation of the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the various powers and phenomena of nature. This is dimly shadowed forth in the very names which are given to some of these divinities. Thus Helios is the sun, Selena is the moon, Zeus the sky--the deep blue heaven, Eos the dawn, and Ersē the dew. It is rendered still more evident by the opening lines of Hesiod's "Theogonia," in which he invokes the muses:

"Hail ye daughters of Jupiter! Grant a delightsome song.