Intimacy of Minerva’s personal relations.
The offices of both these deities, but especially of Minerva, in relation to the guidance of human conduct, are much higher than those of any other deity in their kind. Not only do they both act in the largest and most free manner on the human mind by inward influence, but, if there is any trace in the Homeric system of what may be called spiritual religion, of the tender and intimate relations which have from the first subsisted between the children of faith and their Father in Heaven, it is in Minerva that we must seek for it. It is indeed but a faint resemblance that we shall find; the very application of the word may be disputable. Yet it is something, which appears to show that it was at any rate not of heathen origin: that it is a flower, sickly, because transplanted from a better to a less kindly soil; a shadow, or a wreck of something greater and better, and not a scheme built up from beneath. The mode in which Minerva cares for Ulysses deserves at least thus much of honour. It is a contact so close and intimate, a care so sleepless and so tender, embracing alike the course of events without, and the state of mind within; so affectionate in relation to the person, yet so entirely without the least partiality or caprice; so personal, yet so far from what Holy Scripture calls, with the highest perfection of phrase, respect of persons; so deeply founded on general laws of truth and justice, even if some deviations can be detected, by a jealous eye, in the choice of subsidiary means; that, as it is without any thing like a parallel in the ruder and meaner relations of men with the deities of invention, so it makes its own audible and legitimate claim to a higher origin. The principle at least of inward and sustained intercourse between the Deity and the soul of man is perceptibly represented to us by the literature of Greece in a case like this, and, with the very partial and qualified exception of the δαίμων of Socrates, in such a case only.
Minerva, again, can affect the mind with a friendly bewilderment; as when she paralyses for a moment the understanding of the nurse Euryclea, that she may not give an answer, which would be inconvenient, to the question of Penelope[228]. To her Ulysses looks for the right rearing of his son: and she assures him he need have no anxiety[229]. Even as respects the human person, no powers so large are any where ascribed by Homer to any other deity as those which she exercises, especially in the transformation and re-transformation of Ulysses.
Form of their relation to their attributes.
3. Another very remarkable distinction, or rather cluster of distinctions, attaching to these deities, relates to the manner in which they bear their attributes. Speaking generally, the deities of pure invention are the mere impersonations of a passion, or of an elemental or bodily power, or of a mental gift. They are, in the order of ideas, posterior and ministerial to their own attributes: the mere vehicles for carrying them into movement and action, so that in truth the persons are the embellishments and the attributes of qualities, and not the qualities attributes of persons. To state it at the very highest, the inventive divinity is the steward of his own gifts.
Now the traditive god is their proprietor and master. In the case of the two great traditive deities, Apollo and Minerva, the relation between function and person exactly reverses that which has been described. Here the attribute is something attached to, something in the possession and under the command of, the person; as much so, as the unerring bow of Apollo, or the invincible spear of Minerva. It is not Apollo, but it is the bow of Apollo, which stands in the relation to his office as minister of death, that Vulcan himself bears to the element of fire and to the metallic art, or Mars to the passions and the strong hand of war. If we except the single case of the choice garment of Juno[230], Minerva neither spins nor hammers. Mars always appears fighting, but Apollo does not always appear prophesying or playing the lyre, a function which he seems to perform only in the company of the gods.
The difference is strongly marked in Homer, by the fact that the invented divinities of the second order are identified in common language with their offices. Ares is a synonym for a spear: fire is φλὸξ Ἡφαίστοιο, or even simply Ἥφαιστος[231]: the name Ἠέλιος is absolutely identified with a great natural object: corn is Δημήτερος ἀκτή. But no analogous phrase is applicable to Apollo or to Minerva in Homer. As, with the lapse of time, the will and fancy of man did its work more fully upon the idea of deity, the names of other divinities fell within the circle; and the remembrance of tradition having become fainter and fainter, in the time of Horace the word Minerva could be used for wit (Hor. Sat. II. ii. 3);
Rusticus, abnormis sapiens, crassâque Minervâ.
But, as is often the case, in this change, external as it is, and apparently slight, we have an outward sign of the profound alterative process, which in Homer’s time had largely begun, and which continued until the incrustation and absorption of religious truth became entire.