‘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.
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]—
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].’