I know no better way in which I can reply to this objection, than by giving, as my proof and instance, the Prometheus of Æschylus, accompanied with an exposition of what I believe to be the intention of the poet, and the mythic import of the work; of which it may be truly said, that it is more properly tragedy itself in the plenitude of the idea, than a particular tragic poem; and as a preface to this exposition, and for the twin purpose of rendering it intelligible, and of explaining its connexion with the whole scheme of my Essays, I entreat permission to insert a quotation from a work of my own, which has indeed been in print for many years, but which few of my auditors will probably have heard of, and still fewer, if any, have read.
"As the representative of the youth and approaching manhood of the
human intellect we have ancient Greece, from Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus,
and the other mythological bards, or, perhaps, the brotherhoods
impersonated under those names, to the time when the republics lost
their independence, and their learned men sank into copyists of, and
commentators on, the works of their forefathers. That we include these
as educated under a distinct providential, though not miraculous,
dispensation, will surprise no one, who reflects, that in whatever has
a permanent operation on the destinies and intellectual condition of
mankind at large,—that in all which has been manifestly employed as a
co-agent in the mightiest revolution of the moral world, the
propagation of the Gospel, and in the intellectual progress of mankind
in the restoration of philosophy, science, and the ingenuous arts—it
were irreligion not to acknowledge the hand of divine providence. The
periods, too, join on to each other. The earliest Greeks took up the
religious and lyrical poetry of the Hebrews; and the schools of the
prophets were, however partially and imperfectly, represented by the
mysteries derived through the corrupt channel of the Phoenicians. With
these secret schools of physiological theology, the mythical poets
were doubtless in connexion, and it was these schools which prevented
polytheism from producing all its natural barbarizing effects. The
mysteries and the mythical hymns and pæans shaped themselves gradually
into epic poetry and history on the one hand, and into the ethical
tragedy and philosophy on the other. Under their protection, and that
of a youthful liberty, secretly controlled by a species of internal
theocracy, the sciences, and the sterner kinds of the fine arts, that
is, architecture and statuary, grew up together, followed, indeed, by
painting, but a statuesque, and austerely idealized, painting, which
did not degenerate into mere copies of the sense, till the process for
which Greece existed had been completed."{3}
The Greeks alone brought forth philosophy in the proper and contra-distinguishable sense of the term, which we may compare to the coronation medal with its symbolic characters, as contrasted with the coins, issued under the same sovereign, current in the market. In the primary sense, philosophy had for its aim and proper subject the {Greek (transliterated): ta peri archon}, 'de originibus rerum', as far as man proposes to discover the same in and by the pure reason alone. This, I say, was the offspring of Greece, and elsewhere adopted only. The predisposition appears in their earliest poetry.
The first object, (or subject matter) of Greek philosophizing was in some measure philosophy itself;—not, indeed, as the product, but as the producing power—the productivity. Great minds turned inward on the fact of the diversity between man and beast; a superiority of kind in addition to that of degree; the latter, that is, the difference in degree comprehending the more enlarged sphere and the multifold application of faculties common to man and brute animals;—even this being in great measure a transfusion from the former, namely, from the superiority in kind;—for only by its co-existence with reason, free will, self-consciousness, the contra-distinguishing attributes of man, does the instinctive intelligence manifested in the ant, the dog, the elephant, &c. become human understanding. It is a truth with which Heraclitus, the senior, but yet contemporary, of Æschylus, appears, from the few genuine fragments of his writings that are yet extant, to have been deeply impressed,—that the mere understanding in man, considered as the power of adapting means to immediate purposes, differs, indeed, from the intelligence displayed by other animals, and not in degree only; but yet does not differ by any excellence which it derives from itself, or by any inherent diversity, but solely in consequence of a combination with far higher powers of a diverse kind in one and the same subject.
Long before the entire separation of metaphysics from poetry, that is, while yet poesy, in all its several species of verse, music, statuary, &c. continued mythic;—while yet poetry remained the union of the sensuous and the philosophic mind;—the efficient presence of the latter in the 'synthesis' of the two, had manifested itself in the sublime 'mythus peri geneseos tou nou en anthropois' concerning the 'genesis', or birth of the 'nous' or reason in man. This the most venerable, and perhaps the most ancient, of Grecian 'myth', is a philosopheme, the very same in subject matter with the earliest record of the Hebrews, but most characteristically different in tone and conception;—for the patriarchal religion, as the antithesis of pantheism, was necessarily personal; and the doctrines of a faith, the first ground of which and the primary enunciation, is the eternal I AM, must be in part historic and must assume the historic form. Hence the Hebrew record is a narrative, and the first instance of the fact is given as the origin of the fact.
That a profound truth—a truth that is, indeed, the grand and indispensable condition of all moral responsibility—is involved in this characteristic of the sacred narrative, I am not alone persuaded, but distinctly aware. This, hovever, does not preclude us from seeing, nay, as an additional mark of the wisdom that inspired the sacred historian, it rather supplies a motive to us, impels and authorizes us, to see, in the form of the vehicle of the truth, an accommodation to the then childhood of the human race. Under this impression we may, I trust, safely consider the narration,—introduced, as it is here introduced, for the purpose of explaining a mere work of the unaided mind of man by comparison,—as an {Greek (transliterated): eros hierogluphikon},—and as such (apparently, I mean, not actually) a 'synthesis' of poesy and philosophy, characteristic of the childhood of nations.
In the Greek we see already the dawn of approaching manhood. The substance, the stuff, is philosophy; the form only is poetry. The Prometheus is a philosophema {Greek (transliterated): tautaegorikon}, —the tree of knowledge of good and evil,—an allegory, a {Greek (transliterated): propaideuma}, though the noblest and the most pregnant of its kind.
The generation of the {Greek (transliterated): nous}, or pure reason in man.
1. It was superadded or infused, 'a supra' to mark that it was no mere evolution of the animal basis;—that it could not have grown out of the other faculties of man, his life, sense, understanding, as the flower grows out of the stem, having pre-existed potentially in the seed:
2. The {Greek: nous}, or fire, was 'stolen,'—to mark its 'helero'—or rather its 'allo'-geneity, that is, its diversity, its difference in kind, from the faculties which are common to man with the nobler animals: