Chapter III: God as the Supreme Being (2)

From this, or concurrently with this, the student proceeded to compositions of his own. Beginning with mere imitation of style, he was gradually led to invent the structure as well as the style of what he wrote, and to vary both the style and the subject-matter. Sometimes he had the use of the professor’s library;[21] and though writing in his native language, he had to construct his periods according to rules of art, and to avoid all words for which an authority could not be quoted, just as if he were an English undergraduate writing his Greek prose. The crown of all was the acquisition of the art of speaking extempore. A student’s education in Rhetoric was finished when he had the power to talk off-hand on any subject that might be proposed. But whether he recited a prepared speech or spoke off-hand, he was expected to show the same artificiality of structure and the same pedantry of diction. “You must strip off all that boundless length of sentences that is wrapped round you,” says Charon to the rhetorician who is just stepping into his boat, “and those antitheses of yours, and balancings of clauses, and strange expressions, and all the other heavy weights of speech (or you will make my boat too heavy).”[22]

To a considerable extent there prevailed, in addition to Belles Lettres and Rhetoric, a teaching of Philosophy. It was the highest element in the education of the average Greek of the period. Logic, in the form of Dialectic, was common to Philosophy and Rhetoric. Every one learnt to argue: a large number learnt, in addition, the technical terms of Philosophy and the outlines of its history. Lucian[23] tells a tale of a country gentleman of the old school, whose nephew went home from lecture night after night, and regaled his mother and himself with fallacies and dilemmas, talking about “relations” and “comprehensions” and “mental presentations,” and jargon of that sort; nay, worse than that, saying, “that God does not live in heaven, but goes about among stocks and stones and such-like.” As far as Logic was concerned, it was almost natural to a Greek mind: Dialectic was but the conversation of a sharp-witted people conducted under recognized rules. But it was a comparatively new phase of Philosophy that it should have a literary side. It had shared in the common degeneracy. It had come to take wisdom at second-hand. It was not the evolution of a man’s own thoughts, but an acquaintance with the recorded thoughts of others. It was divorced from practice. It was degraded to a system of lectures and disputations. It was taught in the same general way as the studies which preceded it. But lectures had a more important place. Sometimes the professor read a passage from a philosopher, and gave his interpretation of it; sometimes he gave a discourse of his own. Sometimes a student read an essay of his own, or interpreted a passage of a philosopher, in the presence of the professor, and the professor afterwards pronounced his opinion upon the correctness of the reasoning or the interpretation.[24] The Discourses of Epictetus have a singular interest in this respect, apart from their contents; for they are in great measure notes of such lectures, and form, as it were, a photograph of a philosopher’s lecture-room.

Against this degradation of Philosophy, not only the Cynics, but almost all the more serious philosophers protested. Though Epictetus himself was a professor, and though he followed the current usages of professorial teaching, his life and teaching alike were in rebellion against it. “If I study Philosophy,” he says, “with a view only to its literature, I am not a philosopher, but a _littérateur_; the only difference is, that I interpret Chrysippus instead of Homer.”[25] They sometimes protested not only against the degradation of Philosophy, but also against the whole conception of literary education. “There are two kinds of education,” says Dio Chrysostom,[26] “the one divine, the other human; the divine is great and powerful and easy; the human is mean and weak, and has many dangers and no small deceitfulness. The mass of people call it education (παιδείαν), as being, I suppose, an amusement (παιδίαν), and think that a man who knows most literature—Persian and Greek and Syrian and Phœenician—is the wisest and best-educated man; and then, on the other hand, when they find a man of this sort to be vicious and cowardly and fond of money, they think the education to be as worthless as the man himself. The other kind they call sometimes education, and sometimes manliness and high-mindedness. It was thus that the men of old used to call those who had this good kind of education—men with manly souls, and educated as Herakles was—sons of God.” And not less significant as an indication not only of the reaction against this kind of education but also of its prevalence, is the deprecation of it by Marcus Aurelius: “I owe it to Rusticus,” he says,[27] “that I formed the idea of the need of moral reformation, and that I was not diverted to literary ambition, or to write treatises on philosophical subjects, or to make rhetorical exhortations ... and that I kept away from rhetoric and poetry and foppery of speech.”

II. I pass from the forms of education to its extent. The general diffusion of it, and the hold which it had upon the mass of men, are shown by many kinds of evidence.

1. They are shown by the large amount of literary evidence as to scholars and the modes of obtaining education. The exclusiveness of the old aristocracy had broken down. Education was no longer in the hands of “private tutors” in the houses of the great families. It entered public life, and in doing so left a record behind it. It may be inferred from the extant evidence that there were grammar-schools in almost every town. At these all youths received the first part of their education. But it became a common practice for youths to supplement this by attending the lectures of an eminent professor elsewhere. They went, as we might say, from school to a University.[28] The students who so went away from home were drawn from all classes of the community. Some of them were very poor, and, like the “bettelstudenten” of the mediæval Universities, had sometimes to beg their bread.[29] “You are a miserable race,” says Epictetus[30] to some students of this kind; “when you have eaten your fill to-day, you sit down whining about to-morrow, where to-morrow’s dinner will come from.” Some of them went because it was the fashion. The young sybarites of Rome or Athens complained bitterly that at Nicopolis, where they had gone to listen to Epictetus, lodgings were bad, and the baths were bad, and the gymnasium was bad, and “society” hardly existed.[31] Then, as now, there were home-sick students, and mothers weeping over their absence, and letters that were looked for but never came, and letters that brought bad news; and young men of promise who were expected to return home as living encyclopædias, but who only raised doubts when they did return home whether their education had done them any good.[32] Then, as now, they went from the lecture-room to athletic sports or the theatre; “and the consequence is,” says Epictetus,[33] “that you don’t get out of your old habits or make moral progress.” Then, as now, some students went, not for the sake of learning, but in order to be able to show off. Epictetus draws a picture of one who looked forward to airing his logic at a city dinner, astonishing the “alderman” who sat next to him with the puzzles of hypothetical syllogisms.[34] And then, as now, those who had followed the fashion by attending lectures showed by their manner that they were there against their will. “You should sit upright,” says Plutarch,[35] in his advice to hearers in general, “not lolling, or whispering, or smiling, or yawning as if you were asleep, or fixing your eyes on the ground instead of on the speaker.” In a similar way Philo,[36] also speaking of hearers in general, says: “Many persons who come to a lecture do not bring their minds inside with them, but go wandering about outside, thinking ten thousand things about ten thousand different subjects—family affairs, other people’s affairs, private affairs, ... and the professor talks to an audience, as it were, not of men but of statues, which have ears but hear not.”

2. A second indication of the hold which education had upon the age is the fact that teaching had come to be a recognized and lucrative profession. This is shown not so much by the instances of individual teachers,[37] who might be regarded as exceptional, as by the fact of the recognition of teachers by the State and by municipalities.

The recognition by the State took the double form of endowment and of immunities from public burdens.

(_a_) Endowments probably began with Vespasian, who endowed teachers of Rhetoric at Rome with an annual grant of 100,000 sesterces from the imperial treasury. Hadrian founded an Athenæum or University at Rome, like the Museum or University at Alexandria, with an adequate income, and with a building of sufficient importance to be sometimes used as a Senate-house. He also gave large sums to the professors at Athens: in this he was followed by Antoninus Pius: but the first permanent endowment at Athens seems to have been that of Marcus Aurelius, who founded two chairs in each of the four great philosophical schools of Athens, the Academic, the Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic, and added one of the new or literary Rhetoric, and one of the old or forensic Rhetoric.[38]

(_b_) The immunities of the teaching classes began with Julius Cæsar, and appear to have been so amply recognized in the early empire that Antoninus Pius placed them upon a footing which at once established and limited them. He enacted that small cities might place upon the free list five physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature; that assize towns might so place seven physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature; and that metropolitan cities might so place ten physicians, five teachers of rhetoric, and five of literature; but that these numbers should not be exceeded. These immunities were a form of indirect endowment.[39] They exempted those whom they affected from all the burdens which tended in the later empire to impoverish the middle and upper classes. They were consequently equivalent to the gift from the municipality of a considerable annual income.

3. A third indication of the hold of education upon contemporary society is the place which its professors held in social intercourse. They were not only a recognized class; they also mingled largely, by virtue of their profession, with ordinary life. If a dinner of any pretensions were given, the professor of Belles Lettres must be there to recite and expound passages of poetry, the professor of Rhetoric to speak upon any theme which might be proposed to him, and the professor of Philosophy to read a discourse upon morals. A “sermonette” from one of these professional philosophers after dinner was as much in fashion as a piece of vocal or instrumental music is with us.[40] All three kinds of professors were sometimes part of the permanent retinue of a great household. But the philosophers were even more in fashion than their brother professors. They were petted by great ladies. They became “domestic chaplains.”[41] They were sometimes, indeed, singularly like the chaplains of whom we read in novels of the last century. Lucian, in his essay “On Persons who give their Society for Pay,” has some amusing vignettes of their life. One is of a philosopher who has to accompany his patroness on a tour: he is put into a waggon with the cook and the lady’s-maid, and there is but a scanty allowance of leaves thrown in to ease his limbs against the jolting.[42] Another is of a philosopher who is summoned by his lady and complimented, and asked as an especial favour, “You are so very kind and careful: will you take my lapdog into the waggon with you, and see that the poor creature does not want for anything?”[43] Another is of a philosopher who has to discourse on temperance while his lady is having her hair braided: her maid comes in with a _billet-doux_, and the discourse on temperance is suspended until she has written an answer to her lover.[44] Another is of a philosopher who only gets his pay in doles of two or three pence at a time, and is thought a bore if he asks for it, and whose tailor or shoemaker is meanwhile waiting to be paid, so that even when the money comes it seems to do him no good.[45] It is natural to find that Philosophy, which had thus become a profession, had also become degenerate. It afforded an easy means of livelihood. It was natural that some of those who adopted it should be a disgrace to their profession. And although it would be unsafe to take every description of the great satirist literally, yet it is difficult to believe that there is not a substantial foundation of truth in his frequent caricatures. The fact of their frequency, and also the fact that such men as he describes could exist, strengthen the inference which other facts enable us to draw, as to the large place which the professional philosophers occupied in contemporary society. The following is his picture of Thrasycles:[46]

“He comes along with his beard spread out and his eyebrows
raised, talking solemnly to himself, with a Titan-like look in
his eyes, with his hair thrown back from his forehead, the very
picture of Boreas or Triton, as Zeuxis painted them. This is
the man who in the morning dresses himself simply, and walks
sedately, and wears a sober gown, and preaches long sermons
about virtue, and inveighs against the votaries of pleasure:
then he has his bath and goes to dinner, and the butler offers
him a large goblet of wine, and he drinks it down with as much
gusto as if it were the water of Lethe: and he behaves in
exactly the opposite way to his sermons of the morning, for he
snatches all the tit-bits like a hawk, and elbows his neighbour
out of the way, and he peers into the dishes with as keen an
eye as if he were likely to find Virtue herself in them; and he
goes on preaching all the time about temperance and moderation,
until he is so dead-drunk that the servants have to carry him
out. Nay, besides this, there is not a man to beat him in the
way of lying and braggadocio and avarice: he is the first of
flatterers and the readiest of perjurers: chicanery leads the
way, and impudence follows after: in fact, he is clever all
round, doing to perfection whatever he touches.”

4. But nothing could more conclusively prove the great hold which these forms of education had upon their time than the fact of their persistent survival. It might be maintained that the prominence which is given to them in literature, their endowment by the State, and their social influence, represented only a superficial and passing phase. But when the product of one generation spreads its branches far and wide into the generations that succeed, its roots must be deep and firm in the generation from which it springs. No lasting element of civilization grows upon the surface. Greek education has been almost as permanent as Christianity itself, and for similar reasons. It passed from Greece into Africa and the West. It had an especial hold first on the Roman and then upon the Celtic and Teutonic populations of Gaul; and from the Gallican schools it has come, probably by direct descent, to our own country and our own time.

Two things especially have come:

(i.) The place which literature holds in general education. We educate our sons in grammar, and in doing so we feed them upon ancient rather than upon English literature, by simple continuation of the first branch of the mediæval _trivium_, which was itself a continuation of the Greek habit which has been described above.

(ii.) The other point, though less important in itself, is even more important as indicating the strength of the Greek educational system. It is that we retain still its technical terms and many of its scholastic usages, either in their original Greek form or as translated into Latin and modified by Latin habits, in the schools of the West.

The designation “professor” comes to us from the Greek sophists, who drew their pupils by promises: to “profess” was to “promise,” and to promise was the characteristic of the class of teachers with whom in the fourth century B.C. Greek education began. The title lost its original force, and became the general designation of a public teacher, superseding the special titles, “philosopher,” “sophist,” “rhetorician,” “grammarian,” and ending by being the synonym of “doctor.”[47]

The practice of lecturing, that is of giving instruction by reading an ancient author, with longer or shorter comments upon his meaning, comes to us from the schools in which a passage of Homer or Plato or Chrysippus was read and explained. The “lecture” was probably in the first instance a student’s exercise: the function of the teacher was to make remarks or to give his judgment upon the explanation that was given: it was not so much _legere_ as _prælegere_, whence the existing title of “prælector.”[48]

The use of the word “chair” to designate the teacher’s office, and of the word “faculty” to denote the branch of knowledge which he teaches, are similar survivals of Greek terms.[49]

The use of academical designations as titles is also Greek: it was written upon a man’s tombstone that he was “philosopher” or “sophist,” “grammarian” or “rhetorician,” as in later times he would be designated M.A. or D.D.[50] The most interesting of these designations is that of “sophist.” The long academical history of the word only ceased at Oxford a few years ago, when the clauses relating to “sophistæ generales” were erased as obsolete from the statute-book.

The restriction of the right to teach, and the mode of testing a man’s qualifications to teach, have come to us from the same source. The former is probably a result of the fact which has been mentioned above, that the teachers of liberal arts were privileged and endowed. The State guarded against the abuse of the privilege, as in subsequent times for similar reasons it put limitations upon the appointment of the Christian clergy. In the case of some of the professors at Athens who were endowed from the imperial chest, the Emperors seem to have exercised a certain right of nomination, as in our own country the Crown nominates a “Regius Professor;”[51] but in the case of others of those professors, the nomination was in the hands of “the best and oldest and wisest in the city,” that is, either the Areopagus, or the City Council, or, as some have thought, a special Board.[52] Elsewhere, and apparently without exception in later times, the right of approval of a teacher was in the hands of the City Council, the ordinary body for the administration of municipal affairs.[53] The authority which conferred the right might also take it away: a teacher who proved incompetent might have his licence withdrawn.[54] The testing of qualifications preceded the admission to office. It was sometimes superseded by a sort of _congé d’élire_ from the Emperor;[55] but in ordinary cases it consisted in the candidate’s giving a lecture or taking part in a discussion before either the Emperor’s representative or the City Council.[56] It was the small beginning of that system of “examination” which in our own country and time has grown to enormous proportions. The successful candidate was sometimes escorted to his house, as a mark of honour, by the proconsul and the “examiners,” just as in Oxford, until the present generation, a “grand compounder” might claim to be escorted home by the Vice-chancellor and Proctors.[57] In the fourth century appear to have come restrictions not only upon teaching, but also upon studying: a student might probably go to a lecture, but he might not formally announce his devotion to learning by putting on the student’s gown without the leave of the professors, as in a modern University a student must be formally enrolled before he can assume the academical dress.[58]

The survival of these terms and usages, as indicating the strength of the system to which they originally belonged, is emphasized by the fact that for a long interval of time there are few, if any, traces of them.[59] They are found in full force in Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries: they are found again when education began to revive on a large scale in the tenth century; they then appear, not as new creations, but as terms and usages which had lasted all through what has been called “the Benedictine era,”[60] without special nurture and without literary expression, by the sheer persistency of their original roots.

* * * * *

This is the feature of the Greek life into which Christianity came to which I first invite your attention. There was a complex system of education, the main elements in which were the knowledge of literature, the cultivation of literary expression, and a general acquaintance with the rules of argument. This education was widely diffused, and had a great hold upon society. It had been at work in its main outlines for several centuries. Its effect in the second century of our era had been to create a certain habit of mind. When Christianity came into contact with the society in which that habit of mind existed, it modified, it reformed, it elevated, the ideas which it contained and the motives which stimulated it to action; but in its turn it was itself profoundly modified by the habit of mind of those who accepted it. It was impossible for Greeks, educated as they were with an education which penetrated their whole nature, to receive or to retain Christianity in its primitive simplicity. Their own life had become complex and artificial: it had its fixed ideas and its permanent categories: it necessarily gave to Christianity something of its own form. The world of the time was a world, I will not say like our own world, which has already burst its bonds, but like the world from which we are beginning to be emancipated—a world which had created an artificial type of life, and which was too artificial to be able to recognize its own artificiality—a world whose schools, instead of being the laboratories of the knowledge of the future, were forges in which the chains of the present were fashioned from the knowledge of the past. And if, on the one hand, it incorporated Christianity with the larger humanity from which it had at first been isolated, yet, on the other hand, by crushing uncultivated earnestness, and by laying more stress on the expression of ideas than upon ideas themselves, it tended to stem the very forces which had given Christianity its place, and to change the rushing torrent of the river of God into a broad but feeble stream.

LECTURE III.

GREEK AND CHRISTIAN EXEGESIS.

Two thousand years ago, the Greek world was nearer than we are now to the first wonder of the invention of writing. The mystery of it still seemed divine. The fact that certain signs, of little or no meaning in themselves, could communicate what a man felt or thought, not only to the generation of his fellows, but also to the generations that came afterwards, threw a kind of glamour over written words. It gave them an importance and an impressiveness which did not attach to any spoken words. They came in time to have, as it were, an existence of their own. Their precise relation to the person who first uttered them, and their literal meaning at the time of their utterance, tended to be overlooked or obscured.

In the case of the ancient poets, especially Homer, this glamour of written words was accompanied, and perhaps had been preceded, by two other feelings.

The one was the reverence for antiquity. The voice of the past sounded with a fuller note than that of the present. It came from the age of the heroes who had become divinities. It expressed the national legends and the current mythology, the primitive types of noble life and the simple maxims of awakening reflection, the “wisdom of the ancients,” which has sometimes itself taken the place of religion. The other was the belief in inspiration. With the glamour of writing was blended the glamour of rhythm and melody. When the gods spoke, they spoke in verse.[61] The poets sang under the impulse of a divine enthusiasm. It was a god who gave the words: the poet was but the interpreter.[62] The belief was not merely popular, but was found in the best minds of the imperial age. “Whatever wise and true words were spoken in the world about God and the universe, came into the souls of men not without the Divine will and intervention through the agency of divine and prophetic men.”[63] “To the poets sometimes, I mean the very ancient poets, there came a brief utterance from the Muses, a kind of inspiration of the divine nature and truth, like a flash of light from an unseen fire.”[64]

The combination of these three feelings, the mystery of writing, the reverence for antiquity, the belief in inspiration, tended to give the writings of the ancient poets a unique value. It lifted them above the common limitations of place and time and circumstance. The verses of Homer were not simply the utterances of a particular person with a particular meaning for a particular time. They had a universal validity. They were the voice of an undying wisdom. They were the Bible of the Greek races.[65]

When the unconscious imitation of heroic ideals passed into a conscious philosophy of life, it was necessary that that philosophy should be shown to be consonant with current beliefs, by being formulated, so to speak, in terms of the current standards; and when, soon afterwards, the conception of education, in the sense in which the term has ever since been understood, arose, it was inevitable that the ancient poets should be the basis of that education. Literature consisted, in effect, of the ancient poets. Literary education necessarily meant the understanding of them. “I consider,” says Protagoras, in the Platonic dialogue which bears his name,[66] “that the chief part of a man’s education is to be skilled in epic poetry; and this means that he should be able to understand what the poets have said, and whether they have said it rightly or not, and to know how to draw distinctions, and to give an answer when a question is put to him.” The educators recognized in Homer one of themselves: he, too, was a “sophist,” and had aimed at educating men.[67] Homer was the common text-book of the grammar-schools as long as Greek continued to be taught, far on into imperial times. The study of him branched out in more than one direction. It was the beginning of that study of literature for its own sake which still holds its ground. It was continued until far on in the Christian era, partly by the schools of textual critics, and partly by the successors of the first sophists, who sharpened their wits by disputations as to Homer’s meaning, posing difficulties and solving them: of these disputations some relics survive in the _Scholia_, especially such as are based upon the _Questions_ of Porphyry.[68] But in the first conception, literary and moral education had been inseparable. It was impossible to regard Homer simply as literature. Literary education was not an end in itself, but a means. The end was moral training. It was imagined that virtue, no less than literature, could be taught, and Homer was the basis of the one kind of education no less than of the other. Nor was it difficult for him to become so. For though the thoughts of men had changed, and the new education was bringing in new conceptions of morals, Homer was a force which could easily be turned in new directions. All imaginative literature is plastic when it is used to enforce a moral; and the sophists could easily preach sermons of their own upon Homeric texts. There was no fixed traditional interpretation; and they were but following a current fashion in drawing their own meanings from him. He thus became a support, and not a rival. The _Hippias Minor_ of Plato furnishes as pertinent instances as could be mentioned of this educational use of Homer.

The method lasted as long as Greek literature. It is found in full operation in the first centuries of our era. It was explicitly recognized, and most of the prominent writers of the time supply instances of its application. “In the childhood of the world,” says Strabo,[69] “men, like children, had to be taught by tales;” and Homer told tales with a moral purpose. “It has been contended,” he says again,[70] “that poetry was meant only to please:” on the contrary, the ancients looked upon poetry as a form of philosophy, introducing us early to the facts of life, and teaching us in a pleasant way the characters and feelings and actions of men. It was from Homer that moralists drew their ideals: it was his verses that were quoted, like verses of the Bible with us, to enforce moral truths. There is in Dio Chrysostom[71] a charming “imaginary conversation” between Philip and Alexander. “How is it,” said the father, “that Homer is the only poet you care for: there are others who ought not to be neglected?” “Because,” said the son, “it is not every kind of poetry, just as it is not every kind of dress, that is fitting for a king; and the poetry of Homer is the only poetry that I see to be truly noble and splendid and regal, and fit for one who will some day rule over men.” And Dio himself reads into Homer many a moral meaning. When, for example,[72] the poet speaks of the son of Kronos having given the staff and rights of a chief that he might take counsel for the people, he meant to imply that not all kings, but only those who have a special gift of God, had that staff and those rights, and that they had them, moreover, not for their own gratification, but for the general good; he meant, in fact, that no bad man can be a true master either of himself or of others—no, not if all the Greeks and all the barbarians join in calling him king.

It was not only the developing forms of ethics that were thus made to find a support in Homer, but all the varying theories of physics and metaphysics, one by one. The Heracliteans held, for example, that when Homer spoke of

“Ocean, the birth of gods, and Tethys their mother,”

he meant to say that all things are the offspring of flow and movement.[73] The Platonists held that when Zeus reminded Hera of the time when he had hung her trembling by a golden chain in the vast concave of heaven, it was God speaking to matter which he had taken and bound by the chains of laws.[74] The Stoics read into the poets so much Stoicism, that Cicero says, in good-humoured banter, that you would think the old poets, who had really no suspicion of such things, to have been Stoical philosophers.[75] Sometimes Homer was treated as a kind of encyclopædia. Xenophon, in his _Banquet_,[76] makes one of the speakers, who could repeat Homer by heart, say that “the wisest of mankind had written about almost all human things;” and there is a treatise by an unknown author of imperial times which endeavours to show in detail that he contains the beginning of every one of the later sciences, historical, philosophical, and political.[77] When he calls men deep-voiced and women high-voiced, he shows his knowledge of the distinctions of music. When he gives to each character its appropriate style of speech, he shows his knowledge of rhetoric. He is the father of political science, in having given examples of each of the three forms of government—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy. He is the father of military science, in the information which he gives about tactics and siege-works. He knew and taught astronomy and medicine, gymnastics and surgery; “nor would a man be wrong if he were to say that he was a teacher of painting also.”

This indifference to the actual meaning of a writer, and the habit of reading him by the light of the reader’s own fancies, have a certain analogy in our own day in the feeling with which we sometimes regard other works of art. We stand before some great masterpiece of painting—the St. Cecilia or the Sistine Madonna—and are, as it were, carried off our feet by the wonder of it. We must be cold critics if we simply ask ourselves what Raffaelle meant by it. We interpret it by our own emotions. The picture speaks to us with a personal and individual voice. It links itself with a thousand memories of the past and a thousand dreams of the future. It translates us into another world—the world of a lost and impossible love, the dreamland of achieved aspirations, the tender and half-tearful heaven of forgiven sins: we are ready to believe, if only for a moment, that Raffaelle meant by it all that it means to us; and for what he did actually mean, we have but little care.

* * * * *

But these tendencies to draw a moral from all that Homer wrote, and to read philosophy into it, though common and permanent, were not universal. There was an instinct in the Greek mind, as there is in modern times, which rebelled against them. There were literalists who insisted that the words should be taken as they stood, and that some of the words as they stood were clearly immoral.[78] There were, on the other hand, apologists who said sometimes that Homer reflected faithfully the chequered lights and shadows of human life, and sometimes that the existence of immorality in Homer must clearly be allowed, but that if a balance were struck between the good and the evil, the good would be found largely to predominate.[79] There were other apologists who made a distinction between the divine and the human elements: the poets sometimes spoke, it was said, on their own account: some of their poetry was inspired, and some was not: the Muses sometimes left them: “and they may very properly be forgiven if, being men, they made mistakes when the divinity which spoke through their mouths had gone away from them.”[80]

But all these apologies were insufficient. The chasm between the older religion which was embodied in the poets, and the new ideas which were marching in steady progress away from the Homeric world, was widening day by day. A reconciliation had to be found which had deeper roots. It was found in a process of interpretation whose strength must be measured by its permanence. The process was based upon a natural tendency. The unseen working of the will which lies behind all voluntary actions, and the unseen working of thought which by an instinctive process causes some of those actions to be symbolical, led men in comparatively early times to find a meaning beneath the surface of a record or representation of actions. A narrative of actions, no less than the actions themselves, might be symbolical. It might contain a hidden meaning. Men who retained their reverence for Homer, or who at least were not prepared to break with the current belief in him, began to search for such meanings. They were assisted in doing so by the concomitant development of the “mysteries.” The mysteries were representations of passages in the history of the gods which, whatever their origin, had become symbolical. It is possible that no words of explanation were spoken in them; but they were, notwithstanding, habituating the Greek mind both to symbolical expression in general, and to the finding of physical or religious or moral truths in the representation of fantastic or even immoral actions.[81]

It is uncertain when this method of interpretation began to be applied to ancient literature. It was part of the general intellectual movement of the fifth century B.C. It is found in one of its forms in Hecatæus, who explained the story of Cerberus by the existence of a poisonous snake in a cavern on the headland of Tænaron.[82] It was elaborated by the sophists. It was deprecated by Plato. “If I disbelieved it,” he makes Socrates say,[83] in reference to the story of Boreas and Oreithyia, “as the philosophers do, I should not be unreasonable: then I might say, talking like a philosopher, that Oreithyia was a girl who was caught by a strong wind and carried off while playing on the cliffs yonder; ... but it would take a long and laborious and not very happy lifetime to deal with all such questions: and for my own part I cannot investigate them until, as the Delphian precept bids me, I first Know myself.” Nor will he admit allegorical interpretation as a sufficient vindication of Homer:[84] “The chaining of Hera, and the flinging forth of Hephæstus by his father, and all the fightings of gods which Homer has described, we shall not admit into our state, whether with allegories or without them.” But the direct line of historical tradition of the method seems to begin with Anaxagoras and his school.[85] In Anaxagoras himself the allegory was probably ethical: he found in Homer a symbolical account of the movements of mental powers and moral virtues: Zeus was mind, Athené was art. But the method which, though it is found in germ among earlier or contemporary writers, seems to have been first formulated by his disciple Metrodorus, was not ethical but physical.[86] By a remarkable anticipation of a modern science, possibly by a survival of memories of an earlier religion, the Homeric stories were treated as a symbolical representation of physical phenomena. The gods were the powers of nature: their gatherings, their movements, their loves, and their battles, were the play and interaction and apparent strife of natural forces. The method had for many centuries an enormous hold upon the Greek mind; it lay beneath the whole theology of the Stoical schools; it was largely current among the scholars and critics of the early empire.[87]

Its most detailed exposition is contained in two writers, of both of whom so little is personally known that there is a division of opinion whether the name of the one was Heraclitus or Heraclides,[88] and of the other Cornutus or Phornutus;[89] but both were Stoics, both are most probably assigned to the early part of the first century of our era, and in both of them the physical is blended with an ethical interpretation.

1. Heraclitus begins by the definite avowal of his apologetic purpose. His work is a vindication of Homer from the charge of impiety. “He would unquestionably be impious if he were not allegorical;”[90] but as it is, “there is no stain of unholy fables in his words: they are pure and free from impiety.”[91] Apollo is the sun; the “far-darter” is the sun sending forth his rays: when it is said that Apollo slew men with his arrows, it is meant that there was a pestilence in the heat of summer-time.[92] Athené is thought: when it is said that Athené came to Telemachus, it is meant only that the young man then first began to reflect upon the waste and profligacy of the suitors: a thought, shaped like a wise old man, came, as it were, and sat by his side.[93] The story of Proteus and Eidothea is an allegory of the original formless matter taking many shapes:[94] the story of Ares and Aphrodite and Hephæstus is a picture of iron subdued by fire, and restored to its original hardness by Poseidon, that is by water.[95]

2. Cornutus writes in vindication not so much of the piety of the ancients as of their knowledge: they knew as much as men of later times, but they expressed it at greater length and by means of symbols. He rests his interpretation of those symbols to a large extent upon etymology. The science of religion was to him, as it has been to some persons in modern days, an extension of the science of philology. The following are examples: Hermes (from ἐρεῖν, “to speak”) is the power of speech which the gods sent from heaven as their peculiar and distinguishing gift to men. He is called the “conductor,” because speech conducts one man’s thought into his neighbour’s soul. He is the “bright-shiner,” because speech makes dark things clear. His winged feet are the symbols of “winged words.” He is the “leader of souls,” because words soothe the soul to rest; and the “awakener from sleep,” because words rouse men to action. The serpents twined round his staff are a symbol of the savage natures that are calmed by words, and their discords gathered into harmony.[96] The story of Prometheus (“forethought”), who made a man from clay, is an allegory of the providence and forethought of the universe: he is said to have stolen fire, because it was the forethought of men found out its use: he is said to have stolen it from heaven, because it came down in a lightning-flash: and his being chained to a rock is a picture of the quick inventiveness of human thought chained to the painful necessities of physical life, its liver gnawed at unceasingly by petty cares.[97]

Two other examples of the method may be given from later writers, to show the variety of its application.

The one is from Sallust, a writer of the fourth century of our era. He thus explains the story of the judgment of Paris. The banquet of the gods is a picture of the vast supra-mundane Powers, who are always in each other’s society. The apple is the world, which is thrown from the banquet by Discord, because the world itself is the play of opposing forces; and different qualities are given to the world by different Powers, each trying to win the world for itself; and Paris is the soul in its sensuous life, which sees not the other Powers in the world, but only Beauty, and says that the world is the property of Love.[98]

The other is from a writer of a late but uncertain age. He deals only with the Odyssey. Its hero is the picture of a man who is tossed upon the sea of life, drifted this way and that by adverse winds of fortune and of passion: the companions who were lost among the Lotophagi are pictures of men who are caught by the baits of pleasure and do not return to reason as their guide: the Sirens are the pleasures that tempt and allure all men who pass over the sea of life, and against which the only counter-charm is to fill one’s senses and powers of mind full of divine words and actions, as Odysseus filled his ears with wax, that, no part of them being left empty, pleasure may knock at their doors in vain.[99]

The method survived as a literary habit long after its original purpose failed. The mythology which it had been designed to vindicate passed from the sphere of religion into that of literature; but in so passing, it took with it the method to which it had given rise. The habit of trying to find an _arrière pensée_ beneath a man’s actual words had become so inveterate, that all great writers without distinction were treated as writers of riddles. The literary class insisted that their functions were needed as interpreters, and that a plain man could not know what a great writer meant. “The use of symbolical speech,” said Didymus, the great grammarian of the Augustan age, “is characteristic of the wise man, and the explanation of its meaning.”[100] Even Thucydides is said by his biographer to have purposely made his style obscure that he might not be accessible except to the truly wise.[101] It tended to become a fixed idea in the minds of many men that religious truth especially must be wrapped up in symbol, and that symbol must contain religious truth. The idea has so far descended to the present day, that there are, even now, persons who think that a truth which is obscurely stated is more worthy of respect, and more likely to be divine, than a truth which “he that runs may read.”

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The same kind of difficulty which had been felt on a large scale in the Greek world in regard to Homer, was felt in no less a degree by those Jews who had become students of Greek philosophy in regard to their own sacred books. The Pentateuch, in a higher sense than Homer, was regarded as having been written under the inspiration of God. It, no less than Homer, was so inwrought into the minds of men that it could not be set aside. It, no less than Homer, contained some things which, at least on the surface, seemed inconsistent with morality. To it, no less than to Homer, was applicable the theory that the words were the veils of a hidden meaning. The application fulfilled a double purpose: it enabled educated Jews, on the one hand, to reconcile their own adoption of Greek philosophy with their continued adhesion to their ancestral religion, and, on the other hand, to show to the educated Greeks with whom they associated, and whom they frequently tried to convert, that their literature was neither barbarous, nor unmeaning, nor immoral. It may be conjectured that, just as in Greece proper the adoption of the allegorical method had been helped by the existence of the mysteries, so in Egypt it was helped by the large use in earlier times of hieroglyphic writing, the monuments of which were all around them, though the writing itself had ceased.[102]

The earliest Jewish writer of this school of whom any remains have come down to us, is reputed to be Aristobulus (about B.C. 170-150).[103] In an exposition of the Pentateuch which he is said to have addressed to Ptolemy Philometor, he boldly claimed that, so far from the Mosaic writings being outside the sphere of philosophy, the Greek philosophers had taken their philosophy from them. “Moses,” he said, “using the figures of visible things, tells us the arrangements of nature and the constitutions of important matters.” The anthropomorphisms of the Old Testament were explained on this principle. The “hand” of God, for example, meant His power, His “feet,” the stability of the world.

But by far the most considerable monument of this mode of interpretation consists of the works of Philo. They are based throughout on the supposition of a hidden meaning. But they carry us into a new world. The hidden meaning is not physical, but metaphysical and spiritual. The seen is the veil of the unseen, a robe thrown over it which marks its contour, “and half conceals and half reveals the form within.”

It would be easy to interest you, perhaps even to amuse you, by quoting some of the strange meanings which Philo gives to the narratives of familiar incidents. But I deprecate the injustice which has sometimes been done to him by taking such meanings apart from the historical circumstances out of which allegorical interpretation grew, and the purpose which it was designed to serve. I will give only one passage, which I have chosen because it shows as well as any other the contemporary existence of both the methods of interpretation of which I have spoken—that of finding a moral in every narrative, and that of interpreting the narrative symbolically: the former of these Philo calls the literal, the latter the deeper meaning. The text is Gen. xxviii. 11, “He took the stones of that place and put them beneath his head;” the commentary is:[104]

“The words are wonderful, not only because of their allegorical
and physical meaning, but also because of their literal
teaching of trouble and endurance. The writer does not think
that a student of virtue should have a delicate and luxurious
life, imitating those who are called fortunate, but who are in
reality full of misfortunes, eager anxieties and rivalries,
whose whole life the Divine Lawgiver describes as a sleep
and a dream. These are men who, after spending their days in
doing injuries to others, return to their homes and upset
them—I mean, not the houses they live in, but the body which
is the home of the soul—by immoderate eating and drinking,
and at night lie down in soft and costly beds. Such men are
not the disciples of the sacred word. Its disciples are real
men, lovers of temperance and sobriety and modesty, who make
self-restraint and contentment and endurance the corner-stones,
as it were, of their lives: who rise superior to money and
pleasure and fame: who are ready, for the sake of acquiring
virtue, to endure hunger and thirst, heat and cold: whose
costly couch is a soft turf, whose bedding is grass and leaves,
whose pillow is a heap of stones or a hillock rising a little
above the ground. Of such men, Jacob is an example: he put a
stone for his pillow: a little while afterwards (v. 20), we
find him asking only for nature’s wealth of food and raiment:
he is the archetype of a soul that disciplines itself, one who
is at war with every kind of effeminacy.

“But the passage has a further meaning, which is conveyed in
symbol. You must know that the divine place and the holy
ground is full of incorporeal Intelligences, who are immortal
souls. It is one of these that Jacob takes and puts close
to his mind, which is, as it were, the head of the combined
person, body and soul. He does so under the pretext of going to
sleep, but in reality to find repose in the Intelligence which
he has chosen, and to place all the burden of his life upon it.”

In all this, Philo was following not a Hebrew but a Greek method. He expressly speaks of it as the method of the Greek mysteries. He addresses his hearers by the name which was given to those who were being initiated. He bids them be purified before they listen. And in this way it was possible for him to be a Greek philosopher without ceasing to be a Jew.

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