Essays and Lectures | Page 4

in its ultimate development passes into the
wider question of the philosophy of history.
Now, while the workings of historical criticism in these two spheres of
sacred and uninspired history are essentially manifestations of the same
spirit, yet their methods are so different, the canons of evidence so
entirely separate, and the motives in each case so unconnected, that it
will be necessary for a clear estimation of the progress of Greek
thought, that we should consider these two questions entirely apart
from one another. I shall then in both cases take the succession of
writers in their chronological order as representing the rational order -
not that the succession of time is always the succession of ideas, or that
dialectics moves ever in the straight line in which Hegel conceives its
advance. In Greek thought, as elsewhere, there are periods of stagnation
and apparent retrogression, yet their intellectual development, not
merely in the question of historical criticism, but in their art, their
poetry and their philosophy, seems so essentially normal, so free from

all disturbing external influences, so peculiarly rational, that in
following in the footsteps of time we shall really be progressing in the
order sanctioned by reason.



CHAPTER II

AT an early period in their intellectual development the Greeks reached
that critical point in the history of every civilised nation, when
speculative invades the domain of revealed truth, when the spiritual
ideas of the people can no longer be satisfied by the lower, material
conceptions of their inspired writers, and when men find it impossible
to pour the new wine of free thought into the old bottles of a narrow
and a trammelling creed.
From their Aryan ancestors they had received the fatal legacy of a
mythology stained with immoral and monstrous stories which strove to
hide the rational order of nature in a chaos of miracles, and to mar by
imputed wickedness the perfection of God's nature - a very shirt of
Nessos in which the Heracles of rationalism barely escaped annihilation.
Now while undoubtedly the speculations of Thales, and the alluring
analogies of law and order afforded by physical science, were most
important forces in encouraging the rise of the spirit of scepticism, yet
it was on its ethical side that the Greek mythology was chiefly open to
attack.
It is difficult to shake the popular belief in miracles, but no man will
admit sin and immorality as attributes of the Ideal he worships; so the
first symptoms of a new order of thought are shown in the passionate
outcries of Xenophanes and Heraclitos against the evil things said by
Homer of the sons of God; and in the story told of Pythagoras, how that
he saw tortured in Hell the 'two founders of Greek theology,' we can
recognise the rise of the Aufklarung as clearly as we see the
Reformation foreshadowed in the INFERNO of Dante.

Any honest belief, then, in the plain truth of these stories soon
succumbed before the destructive effects of the A PRIORI ethical
criticism of this school; but the orthodox party, as is its custom, found
immediately a convenient shelter under the aegis of the doctrine of
metaphors and concealed meanings.
To this allegorical school the tale of the fight around the walls of Troy
was a mystery, behind which, as behind a veil, were hidden certain
moral and physical truths. The contest between Athena and Ares was
that eternal contest between rational thought and the brute force of
ignorance; the arrows which rattled in the quiver of the 'Far Darter'
were no longer the instruments of vengeance shot from the golden bow
of the child of God, but the common rays of the sun, which was itself
nothing but a mere inert mass of burning metal.
Modern investigation, with the ruthlessness of Philistine analysis, has
ultimately brought Helen of Troy down to a symbol of the dawn. There
were Philistines among the Greeks also who saw in the [Greek text
which cannot be reproduced] a mere metaphor for atmospheric power.
Now while this tendency to look for metaphors and hidden meanings
must be ranked as one of the germs of historical criticism, yet it was
essentially unscientific. Its inherent weakness is clearly pointed out by
Plato, who showed that while this theory will no doubt explain many of
the current legends, yet, if it is to be appealed to at all, it must be as a
universal principle; a position he is by no means prepared to admit.
Like many other great principles it suffered from its disciples, and
furnished its own refutation when the web of Penelope was analysed
into a metaphor of the rules of formal logic, the warp representing the
premises, and the woof the conclusion.
Rejecting, then, the allegorical interpretation of the