The central Wisdom of Minerva.
Thus Wisdom is the centre, and every thing that flows forth from it is hers, whether in peace or war.
Over and above all these offices, which seem to have a connection with her ordinary attributes, she appears to share in the most recondite and peculiar functions of other deities. She enters into Apollo’s knowledge of the future; for in the Ithacan cave she foretells to Ulysses all that he has yet to suffer. Her power even descends, as we have seen, into the nether world. It seems as if this power in the Shades were the portion falling to her out of the supremacy over death, assigned by tradition to the Messiah. And she has also, if not the jurisdiction over death lodged peculiarly in her hands, a faculty yet more wonderful ascribed to her, that of staying its approach; for Euryclea bids Penelope in her distress pray to Minerva, who can deliver Telemachus from death; that is, can raise him up again:
ἡ γάρ κέν μιν ἔπειτα καὶ ἐκ θανάτοιο σαώσαι[239].
In truth it seems to be the distinctive character of Minerva in the Homeric theo-mythology, that though she is not the sole deity, yet the very flower of the whole office and work of deity is every where reserved for her: and though she is not directly invested with the external form and body of every gift, yet she has the heart, essence and virtue of them all; insomuch that, practically, no limit can be placed upon her powers and functions. The whole conception is therefore fundamentally at variance with the measured and finite organization of an invented system of religion, and by its own incongruities with that system it proves itself to be an exotic element.
By another path, we arrive at the very same conclusion for Apollo. He too has much of that inwardness and universality of function, which belongs to Minerva, as well as a diversity of offices peculiarly his own. But the argument here admits of being presented in a different form. All his peculiar gifts in Homer are referable to one of three characters, those of Prophet, Deliverer, and Avenger, or Judge. In the first, gifted with all knowledge, he is also the God of Song, which was its vehicle. In the second, he is the hearer of prayer, the healer of wounds, the champion of Heaven itself against rebellion. In the third, he punishes the guilty, and especially administers the one grand penal law of death. All this he does as the organ of one, with whom in will he is perfectly united. The tangled thread runs out without knot or break, when we unravel it by primitive Messianic tradition; because it was fundamental in that tradition, that the person who was the subject of it, should exhibit this many sided union of character and function. But could Deliverance and Destruction, there combined, any where else have been read otherwise than as contradictory to one another, and incapable of being united in the same being?
The conflicting Characters of Apollo.
I know no other principle, on which we can satisfactorily explain either the double character of Apollo as Saviour and as Destroyer, or the apparently miscellaneous character of the attributes which successively attached to him[240]. How strange in itself, that the God, who alone has a peculiar office in bringing death, should also be the God of deliverance from it! The contradiction is harmonized by the supposition of a traditionary origin, but otherwise it obstinately remains a contradiction. Again, look at the nature of this peculiar relation. Death by slow disease was not thought worthy to be referred to the agency of a god, (Od. xi. 200.): the calm death of old age, the sharp and agonizing death of a plague, both these were so, and both are referred to Apollo. How can this be, and what has become of the fine imaginative discrimination of the Greeks, and of their love for logical consistency even in that domain, if we suppose that in all this they were working by pure fancy? Now the difficulty vanishes, if we suppose them to be the mere utterers of the disjointed fragments of pristine tradition, when they had lost the key to their common meaning. For then, He that was to grind his enemies to powder, was likewise to take the sting from death itself, and to make the king of terrors gentle and humane. Again, why was Apollo, thus associated with death, likewise the god of foreknowledge? Why did he, and he only, partake of this privilege with Jupiter? Nay, he enjoyed knowledge apparently in a greater degree; for we are not furnished with any case in which Apollo is grossly deluded like Jupiter by Juno. Why, again, should the god of foreknowledge be the god of medicine? And why should the god of medicine also absorb into himself the divinity of the sun, separate from him in Homer, but afterwards identified with him? Why does his character, as compared with that of the other gods, approach to purity? As the dignity of Minerva is explained by our supposing her to impersonate the ancient traditions of the Wisdom; so in the case of Apollo, we obtain a thread upon which each and all of these otherwise incongruous notions may be hung, if we suppose that he, after a certain severance of those shades of character, which could only find expression for a Greek in the female order, represented the legendary anticipations of a person to come, in whom should be combined all the great offices, in which God the Son is now made known to man as the Light of our paths, the Physician of our diseases, the Judge of our misdeeds, and the Conqueror and disarmer, but not yet abolisher, of death?
They do not harmonize with Olympus.