Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 2 of 3 / Olympus; or, the Religion of the Homeric Age

by W. E. Gladstone

But undoubtedly, after however wide an interval, the Homeric poems thus far at least stand in a certain relation to the Scriptures, that no other work of man can be compared to them. Their immediate influence has been great; but that influence which they have mediately exercised through their share in shaping the mind and nationality of Greece, and again, through Greece upon the world, cannot readily be reduced to measure: Les vraies origines de l’esprit humain sont là; tous les nobles de l’intelligence y retrouvent la patrie de leurs pères[1013]. Insomuch that, passing over the vast interval between those purposes which concern salvation, and every other purpose connected with man, this remains to be admitted, that there is a relative parallelism between the oldest Holy Scriptures and the works of Homer. For each of them stands at the head of the class of powers to which they respectively belong; and the minor seems to present to our view, as well as the major one, the indications of a distinct Providential aim that was to be attained through its means.

The relation, however, of the Homeric poems to the earlier portion of the Sacred Scriptures, appears to me to be capable of being represented in a more determinate form than it assumes when they are merely compared as being respectively the oldest known compositions, and as each confirming the testimony of the other by numerous coincidences of manners.

Providential functions of Greece and Rome.

For the Eastern world, it is, I suppose, generally acknowledged that we ought to regard Mahometanism as having had, no less than Judaism, a place, though doubtless a very different place, in the determinate counsels of God. So in the West, we must view the extraordinary developments, which human nature received, both individually and in its social forms, among the Greeks and Romans, as having been intended to fulfil high Providential purposes. They supplied materials for the intellectual and social portions of that European civilization, which derives its spiritual substance from the Christian Faith. And they wrought out solutions apparently conclusive for the questions which absolutely required an answer, as to the capacity or incapacity of man, when without the aid of especial divine light and guidance, to work out his own happiness and peace. That Divine Word, which tells us that the Redeemer came in the fulness of time, indirectly points to the great transactions which filled the space of ages since the Fall, when time was not yet full; and the greatest of all those great transactions surely were the parts played by Greece and Rome, as the representatives of humanity at large in its most vigorous developments. They too, as well as the discipline of the Jewish people, doubtless belonged to the Divine plan. All these varied manifestations may differ much in their character and rank, but yet, like the body, soul, and spirit of a man, they are to be referred to one origin, and they are integrants to one another.

Just in the same manner with the parallel currents of historical events, it would appear that the early Scriptures and the Homeric poems combine to make up for us a sufficiently complete form of the primitive records of our race. The Scriptures of the Old Testament give us the history of the line, in which the promise of the Messiah was handed down. But the intellectual and social developments of man are there represented in the simplest and the slightest, nay, even in the narrowest forms. With the exception of Solomon, who, in spite of his wisdom, was enticed away from God by lust, and of the two illustrious specimens of uncorrupted piety in the midst of dangerous power, Joseph and Daniel, I know not whether we can, on the authority of Holy Scripture, point to any character of the Mosaic or Judaic history as great in any other sense, than as the organs of that Almighty One, with whom nothing human is either great or small. It is plain that if we bring the leading characters of that history into contrast with the Achilles or the Ulysses of Homer, and with his other marked personages, these latter undoubtedly give us a representation and development of human nature, and of man in his social relations, that Scripture from its very nature could not supply. Each has its own function to perform, so that there is no room for competition between them, and it is better to avoid comparison altogether; and to decline to consider the legislation of Moses as a work to be compared either with the heroic institutions, or with systems like those of Lycurgus or of Solon. We then obtain a clear view of it as a scheme evidently constructed not alone with human but with superhuman wisdom, if only we measure it in reference to its very peculiar end. That end was not to give political lessons to mankind, which are more aptly supplied elsewhere. It was to fence in, with the ruder materials of the ceremonial and municipal law, a home, within which the succession of true piety and enlightened faith might be preserved; a garden wherein the Lord God might, so to speak, still walk as He had walked of old, and take His delight with the sons of men. But this high calling had reference only to chosen persons, a few among the few. Over and above this interior work, there was a national vocation also. The aim of that vocation seems to have been to isolate the people, so as to stop the influences from without that might tend in the direction of change; and so far to crystallize, as it were, its institutions within, that they might preserve in untainted purity the tradition and the expectation of Him that was to come.

When the Almighty placed his seal upon Abraham by the covenant of circumcision, and when He developed that covenant in the Mosaic institutions, in setting the Jewish people apart for a purpose the most profound of all His wise designs, He removed it, for the time of its career, out of the family of nations.

Sacred Books not mere literary records.

Should we, like some writers of the present day, cite the Pentateuch before the tribunal of the mere literary critic, we may strain our generosity at the cost of justice, and still only be able to accord to it a secondary place. The mistake surely is to bring it there at all, or to view its author otherwise than as the vehicle of a Divine purpose, which uses all instruments, great, insignificant, or middling, according to the end in view, but of which all the instruments are perfect, by reason not of what is intrinsic to themselves, but, simply and solely, of their exact adaptation to that end[1014].

If, however, we ought to decline to try the Judaic code by its merely political merits, much more ought we to apply the same principle to the sublimity of the Prophecies, and to the deep spiritual experiences of the Psalms. In the first, we have a voice speaking from God, with the marks that it is of God so visibly imprinted upon it, that the mind utterly refuses to place the prophetical books in the scale against any production of human genius. And all that is peculiar in our conception of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, does not tend so much to make them eminent among men, as to separate them from men. Homer, on the other hand, is emphatically and above all things human: he sings by the spontaneous and the unconscious indwelling energies of nature; whereas these are as the trumpet of unearthly sounds, and cannot, more than Balaam could, depart from that which is breathed into them, to utter either less or more.

But most of all does the Book of Psalms refuse the challenge of philosophical or poetical competition. In that Book, for well nigh three thousand years, the piety of saints has found its most refined and choicest food; to such a degree indeed, that the rank and quality of the religious frame may in general be tested, at least negatively, by the height of its relish for them. There is the whole music of the human heart, when touched by the hand of the Maker, in all its tones that whisper or that swell, for every hope and fear, for every joy and pang, for every form of strength and languor, of disquietude and rest. There are developed all the innermost relations of the human soul to God, built upon the platform of a covenant of love and sonship that had its foundations in the Messiah, while in this particular and privileged Book it was permitted to anticipate His coming.