The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Ii Part 45

THE WOMAN HATER.

Act. I. sc. 2. This scene from the beginning is prose printed as blank verse, down to the line--

E'en all the valiant stomachs in the court--

where the verse recommences. This transition from the prose to the verse enhances, and indeed forms, the comic effect. Lazarillo concludes his soliloquy with a hymn to the G.o.ddess of plenty.

ON THE PROMETHEUS OF aeSCHYLUS:

An Essay, preparatory to a series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian, in connection with the sacerdotal, theology, and in contrast with the mysteries of ancient Greece. Read at the Royal Society of Literature, May 18, 1825.

The French 'savans' who went to Egypt in the train of Buonaparte, Denon, Fourrier, and Dupuis, (it has been a.s.serted), triumphantly vindicated the chronology of Herodotus, on the authority of doc.u.ments that cannot lie;--namely, the inscriptions and sculptures on those enormous ma.s.ses of architecture, that might seem to have been built in the wish of rivalling the mountains, and at some unknown future to answer the same purpose, that is, to stand the gigantic tombstones of an elder world. It is decided, say the critics, whose words I have before cited, that the present division of the zodiac had been already arranged by the Egyptians fifteen thousand years before the Christian era, and according to an inscription 'which cannot lie' the temple of Esne is of eight thousand years standing.

Now, in the first place, among a people who had placed their national pride in their antiquity, I do not see the impossibility of an inscription lying; and, secondly, as little can I see the improbability of a modern interpreter misunderstanding it; and lastly, the incredibility of a French infidel's partaking of both defects, is still less evident to my understanding. The inscriptions may be, and in some instances, very probably are, of later date than the temples themselves,--the offspring of vanity or priestly rivalry, or of certain astrological theories; or the temples themselves may have been built in the place of former and ruder structures, of an earlier and ruder period, and not impossibly under a different scheme of hieroglyphic or significant characters; and these may have been intentionally, or ignorantly, miscopied or mistranslated.

But more than all the preceding,--I cannot but persuade myself, that for a man of sound judgment and enlightened common sense--a man with whom the demonstrable laws of the human mind, and the rules generalized from the great ma.s.s of facts respecting human nature, weigh more than any two or three detached doc.u.ments or narrations, of whatever authority the narrator may be, and however difficult it may be to bring positive proofs against the antiquity of the doc.u.ments--I cannot but persuade myself, I say, that for such a man, the relation preserved in the first book of the Pentateuch,--and which, in perfect accordance with all a.n.a.logous experience, with all the facts of history, and all that the principles of political economy would lead us to antic.i.p.ate, conveys to us the rapid progress in civilization and splendour from Abraham and Abimelech to Joseph and Pharaoh,--will be worth a whole library of such inferences.

I am aware that it is almost universal to speak of the gross idolatry of Egypt; nay, that arguments have been grounded on this a.s.sumption in proof of the divine origin of the Mosaic monotheism. But first, if by this we are to understand that the great doctrine of the one Supreme Being was first revealed to the Hebrew legislator, his own inspired writings supply abundant and direct confutation of the position. Of certain astrological superst.i.tions,--of certain talismans connected with star-magic,--plates and images constructed in supposed harmony with the movements and influences of celestial bodies,--there doubtless exist hints, if not direct proofs, both in the Mosaic writings, and those next to these in antiquity. But of plain idolatry in Egypt, or the existence of a polytheistic religion, represented by various idols, each signifying a several deity, I can find no decisive proof in the Pentateuch; and when I collate these with the books of the prophets, and the other inspired writings subsequent to the Mosaic, I cannot but regard the absence of any such proof in the latter, compared with the numerous and powerful a.s.sertions, or evident implications, of Egyptian idolatry in the former, both as an argument of incomparably greater value in support of the age and authenticity of the Pentateuch; and as a strong presumption in favour of the hypothesis on which I shall in part ground the theory which will pervade this series of disquisitions;--namely, that the sacerdotal religion of Egypt had, during the interval from Abimelech to Moses, degenerated from the patriarchal monotheism into a pantheism, cosmotheism, or wors.h.i.+p of the world as G.o.d.

The reason, or pretext, a.s.signed by the Hebrew legislator to Pharaoh for leading his countrymen into the wilderness to join with their brethren, the tribes who still sojourned in the nomadic state, namely, that their sacrifices would be an abomination to the Egyptians, may be urged as inconsistent with, nay, as confuting this hypothesis. But to this I reply, first, that the wors.h.i.+p of the ox and cow was not, in and of itself, and necessarily, a contravention of the first commandment, though a very gross breach of the second;--for it is most certain that the ten tribes wors.h.i.+pped the Jehovah, the G.o.d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, under the same or similar symbols:--secondly, that the cow, or Isis, and the Io of the Greeks, truly represented, in the first instance, the earth or productive nature, and afterwards the mundane religion grounded on the wors.h.i.+p of nature, or the [Greek (transliterated): to pan], as G.o.d. In after times, the ox or bull was added, representing the sun, or generative force of nature, according to the habit of male and female deities, which spread almost over the whole world,--the positive and negative forces in the science of superst.i.tion;--for the pantheism of the sage necessarily engenders polytheism as the popular creed. But lastly, a very sufficient reason may, I think, be a.s.signed for the choice of the ox or cow, as representing the very life of nature, by the first legislators of Egypt, and for the similar sacred character in the Brachmanic tribes of Hindostan. The progress from savagery to civilization is evidently first from the hunting to the pastoral state, a process which even now is going on, within our own times, among the South American Indians in the vast tracts between Buenos Ayres and the Andes: but the second and the most important step, is from the pastoral, or wandering, to the agricultural, or fixed, state. Now, if even for men born and reared under European civilization, the charms of a wandering life have been found so great a temptation, that few who have taken to it have been induced to return, (see the confession in the preamble to the statute respecting the gipsies); [1]--how much greater must have been the danger of relapse in the first formation of fixed states with a condensed population? And what stronger prevention could the ingenuity of the priestly kings--(for the priestly is ever the first form of government)--devise, than to have made the ox or cow the representatives of the divine principle in the world, and, as such, an object of adoration, the wilful destruction of which was sacrilege?--For this rendered a return to the pastoral state impossible; in which the flesh of these animals and the milk formed almost the exclusive food of mankind; while, in the meantime, by once compelling and habituating men to the use of a vegetable diet, it enforced the laborious cultivation of the soil, and both produced and permitted a vast and condensed population. In the process and continued subdivisions of polytheism, this great sacred Word,--for so the consecrated animals were called, [Greek (transliterated): ieroi logoi,]--became multiplied, till almost every power and supposed attribute of nature had its symbol in some consecrated animal from the beetle to the hawk. Wherever the powers of nature had found a cycle for themselves, in which the powers still produced the same phenomenon during a given period, whether in the motions of the heavenly orbs, or in the smallest living organic body, there the Egyptian sages predicated life and mind. Time, cyclical time, was their abstraction of the deity, and their holidays were their G.o.ds.

The diversity between theism and pantheism may be most simply and generally expressed in the following 'formula', in which the material universe is expressed by W, and the deity by G.

W-G=O;

or the World without G.o.d is an impossible conception. This position is common to theist and pantheist. But the pantheist adds the converse--

G-W=O;

for which the theist subst.i.tutes--

G-W=G;

or that--

G=G, anterior and irrelative to the existence of the world, is equal to G+W. [2]

'Before the mountains were, Thou art.'--I am not about to lead the society beyond the bounds of my subject into divinity or theology in the professional sense. But without a precise definition of pantheism, without a clear insight into the essential distinction between it and the theism of the Scriptures, it appears to me impossible to understand either the import or the history of the polytheism of the great historical nations. I beg leave, therefore, to repeat, and to carry on my former position, that the religion of Egypt, at the time of the Exodus of the Hebrews, was a pantheism, on the point of pa.s.sing into that polytheism, of which it afterwards afforded a specimen, gross and distasteful even to polytheists themselves of other nations.

The objects which, on my appointment as Royal a.s.sociate of the Royal Society of Literature, I proposed to myself were,

1st. The elucidation of the purpose of the Greek drama, and the relations in which it stood to the mysteries on the one hand, and to the state or sacerdotal religion on the other:--

2nd. The connection of the Greek tragic poets with philosophy as the peculiar offspring of Greek genius:--

3rd. The connection of the Homeric and cyclical poets with the popular religion of the Greeks: and,

lastly from all these,--namely, the mysteries, the sacerdotal religion, their philosophy before and after Socrates, the stage, the Homeric poetry and the legendary belief of the people, and from the sources and productive causes in the derivation and confluence of the tribes that finally shaped themselves into a nation of Greeks--to give a juster and more distinct view of this singular people, and of the place which they occupied in the history of the world, and the great scheme of divine providence, than I have hitherto seen,--or rather let me say, than it appears to me possible to give by any other process.

The present Essay, however, I devote to the purpose of removing, or at least invalidating, one objection that I may reasonably antic.i.p.ate, and which may be conveyed in the following question:--What proof have you of the fact of any connection between the Greek drama, and either the mysteries, or the philosophy, of Greece? What proof that it was the office of the tragic poet, under a disguise of the sacerdotal religion, mixed with the legendary or popular belief, to reveal as much of the mysteries interpreted by philosophy, as would counteract the demoralizing effects of the state religion, without compromising the tranquillity of the state itself, or weakening that paramount reverence, without which a republic, (such I mean, as the republics of ancient Greece were) could not exist?

I know no better way in which I can reply to this objection, than by giving, as my proof and instance, the Prometheus of aeschylus, accompanied with an exposition of what I believe to be the intention of the poet, and the mythic import of the work; of which it may be truly said, that it is more properly tragedy itself in the plenitude of the idea, than a particular tragic poem; and as a preface to this exposition, and for the twin purpose of rendering it intelligible, and of explaining its connexion with the whole scheme of my Essays, I entreat permission to insert a quotation from a work of my own, which has indeed been in print for many years, but which few of my auditors will probably have heard of, and still fewer, if any, have read.

"As the representative of the youth and approaching manhood of the human intellect we have ancient Greece, from Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus, and the other mythological bards, or, perhaps, the brotherhoods impersonated under those names, to the time when the republics lost their independence, and their learned men sank into copyists of, and commentators on, the works of their forefathers. That we include these as educated under a distinct providential, though not miraculous, dispensation, will surprise no one, who reflects, that in whatever has a permanent operation on the destinies and intellectual condition of mankind at large,--that in all which has been manifestly employed as a co-agent in the mightiest revolution of the moral world, the propagation of the Gospel, and in the intellectual progress of mankind in the restoration of philosophy, science, and the ingenuous arts--it were irreligion not to acknowledge the hand of divine providence. The periods, too, join on to each other. The earliest Greeks took up the religious and lyrical poetry of the Hebrews; and the schools of the prophets were, however partially and imperfectly, represented by the mysteries derived through the corrupt channel of the Phoenicians. With these secret schools of physiological theology, the mythical poets were doubtless in connexion, and it was these schools which prevented polytheism from producing all its natural barbarizing effects. The mysteries and the mythical hymns and paeans shaped themselves gradually into epic poetry and history on the one hand, and into the ethical tragedy and philosophy on the other. Under their protection, and that of a youthful liberty, secretly controlled by a species of internal theocracy, the sciences, and the sterner kinds of the fine arts, that is, architecture and statuary, grew up together, followed, indeed, by painting, but a statuesque, and austerely idealized, painting, which did not degenerate into mere copies of the sense, till the process for which Greece existed had been completed."[3]

The Greeks alone brought forth philosophy in the proper and contra-distinguishable sense of the term, which we may compare to the coronation medal with its symbolic characters, as contrasted with the coins, issued under the same sovereign, current in the market. In the primary sense, philosophy had for its aim and proper subject the [Greek (transliterated): ta peri arch_on], 'de originibus rerum', as far as man proposes to discover the same in and by the pure reason alone. This, I say, was the offspring of Greece, and elsewhere adopted only. The predisposition appears in their earliest poetry.

The first object, (or subject matter) of Greek philosophizing was in some measure philosophy itself;--not, indeed, as the product, but as the producing power--the productivity. Great minds turned inward on the fact of the diversity between man and beast; a superiority of kind in addition to that of degree; the latter, that is, the difference in degree comprehending the more enlarged sphere and the multifold application of faculties common to man and brute animals;--even this being in great measure a transfusion from the former, namely, from the superiority in kind;--for only by its co-existence with reason, free will, self-consciousness, the contra-distinguis.h.i.+ng attributes of man, does the instinctive intelligence manifested in the ant, the dog, the elephant, &c. become human understanding. It is a truth with which Herac.l.i.tus, the senior, but yet contemporary, of aeschylus, appears, from the few genuine fragments of his writings that are yet extant, to have been deeply impressed,--that the mere understanding in man, considered as the power of adapting means to immediate purposes, differs, indeed, from the intelligence displayed by other animals, and not in degree only; but yet does not differ by any excellence which it derives from itself, or by any inherent diversity, but solely in consequence of a combination with far higher powers of a diverse kind in one and the same subject.

Long before the entire separation of metaphysics from poetry, that is, while yet poesy, in all its several species of verse, music, statuary, &c. continued mythic;--while yet poetry remained the union of the sensuous and the philosophic mind;--the efficient presence of the latter in the 'synthesis' of the two, had manifested itself in the sublime 'mythus peri geneseos tou nou en anthropois' concerning the 'genesis', or birth of the 'nous' or reason in man. This the most venerable, and perhaps the most ancient, of Grecian 'myth', is a philosopheme, the very same in subject matter with the earliest record of the Hebrews, but most characteristically different in tone and conception;--for the patriarchal religion, as the ant.i.thesis of pantheism, was necessarily personal; and the doctrines of a faith, the first ground of which and the primary enunciation, is the eternal I AM, must be in part historic and must a.s.sume the historic form. Hence the Hebrew record is a narrative, and the first instance of the fact is given as the origin of the fact.

That a profound truth--a truth that is, indeed, the grand and indispensable condition of all moral responsibility--is involved in this characteristic of the sacred narrative, I am not alone persuaded, but distinctly aware. This, hovever, does not preclude us from seeing, nay, as an additional mark of the wisdom that inspired the sacred historian, it rather supplies a motive to us, impels and authorizes us, to see, in the form of the vehicle of the truth, an accommodation to the then childhood of the human race. Under this impression we may, I trust, safely consider the narration,--introduced, as it is here introduced, for the purpose of explaining a mere work of the unaided mind of man by comparison,--as an [Greek (transliterated): eros hierogluphikon],--and as such (apparently, I mean, not actually) a 'synthesis' of poesy and philosophy, characteristic of the childhood of nations.

In the Greek we see already the dawn of approaching manhood. The substance, the stuff, is philosophy; the form only is poetry. The Prometheus is a _philosophema_ [Greek (transliterated): tautaegorikon], --the tree of knowledge of good and evil,--an allegory, a [Greek (transliterated): propaideuma], though the n.o.blest and the most pregnant of its kind.

The generation of the [Greek (transliterated): nous], or pure reason in man.

1. It was superadded or infused, 'a supra' to mark that it was no mere evolution of the animal basis;--that it could not have grown out of the other faculties of man, his life, sense, understanding, as the flower grows out of the stem, having pre-existed potentially in the seed:

2. The [Greek: nous], or fire, was 'stolen,'--to mark its 'helero'--or rather its 'allo'-geneity, that is, its diversity, its difference in kind, from the faculties which are common to man with the n.o.bler animals:

3. And stolen 'from Heaven,'--to mark its superiority in kind, as well as its essential diversity:

4. And it was a 'spark,'--to mark that it is not subject to any modifying reaction from that on which it immediately acts; that it suffers no change, and receives no accession, from the inferior, but multiplies it-self by conversion, without being alloyed by, or amalgamated with, that which it potentiates, enn.o.bles, and trans.m.u.tes:

5. And lastly, (in order to imply the h.o.m.ogeneity of the donor and of the gift) it was stolen by a 'G.o.d,' and a G.o.d of the race before the dynasty of Jove,--Jove the binder of reluctant powers, the coercer arid entrancer of free spirits under the fetters of shape, and ma.s.s, and pa.s.sive mobility; but likewise by a G.o.d of the same race and essence with Jove, and linked of yore in closest and friendliest intimacy with him. This, to mark the pre-existence, in order of thought, of the 'nous', as spiritual, both to the objects of sense, and to their products, formed as it were, by the precipitation, or, if I may dare adopt the bold language of Leibnitz, by a coagulation of spirit. In other words this derivation of the spark from above, and from a G.o.d anterior to the Jovial dynasty--(that is, to the submersion of spirits in material forms),--was intended to mark the transcendancy of the 'nous', the contra-distinctive faculty of man, as timeless, [Greek (transliterated): achronon ti,] and, in this negative sense, eternal. It signified, I say, its superiority to, and its diversity from, all things that subsist in s.p.a.ce and time, nay, even those which, though s.p.a.celess, yet partake of time, namely, souls or understandings. For the soul, or understanding, if it be defined physiologically as the principle of sensibility, irritability, and growth, together with the functions of the organs, which are at once the representatives and the instruments of these, must be considered 'in genere', though not in degree or dignity, common to man and the inferior animals. It was the spirit, the 'nous', which man alone possessed. And I must be permitted to suggest that this notion deserves some respect, were it only that it can shew a semblance, at least, of sanction from a far higher authority.

The Greeks agreed with the cosmogonies of the East in deriving all sensible forms from the indistinguishable. The latter we find designated as the [Greek: to amorphon], the [Greek: hudor prokosmikon], the [Greek: chaos], as the essentially unintelligible, yet necessarily presumed, basis or sub-position of all positions. That it is, scientifically considered, an indispensable idea for the human mind, just as the mathematical point, &c. for the geometrician;--of this the various systems of our geologists and cosmogonists, from Burnet to La Place, afford strong presumption. As an idea, it must be interpreted as a striving of the mind to distinguish being from existence,--or potential being, the ground of being containing the possibility of existence, from being actualized. In the language of the mysteries, it was the 'esurience', the [Greek: pothos] or 'desideratum', the unfuelled fire, the Ceres, the ever-seeking maternal G.o.ddess, the origin and interpretation of whose name is found in the Hebrew root signifying hunger, and thence capacity. It was, in short, an effort to represent the universal ground of all differences distinct or opposite, but in relation to which all 'ant.i.thesis' as well as all 'ant.i.theta', existed only potentially. This was the container and withholder, (such is the primitive sense of the Hebrew word rendered darkness (Gen. 1. 2.)) out of which light, that is, the 'lux lucifica', as distinguished from 'lumen seu lux phaenomenalis', was produced;--say, rather, that which, producing itself into light as the one pole or antagonist power, remained in the other pole as darkness, that is, gravity, or the principle of ma.s.s, or wholeness without distinction of parts.

And here the peculiar, the philosophic, genius of Greece began its ftal throb. Here it individualized itself in contra-distinction from the Hebrew archology, on the one side, and from the Phnician, on the other. The Phnician confounded the indistinguishable with the absolute, the 'Alpha' and 'Omega', the ineffable 'causa sui'. It confounded, I say, the multeity below intellect, that is, unintelligible from defect of the subject, with the absolute ident.i.ty above all intellect, that is, transcending comprehension by the plenitude of its excellence. With the Phoenician sages the cosmogony was their theogony and 'vice versa'. Hence, too, flowed their theurgic rites, their magic, their wors.h.i.+p ('cultus et apotheosis') of the plastic forces, chemical and vital, and these, or their notions respecting these, formed the hidden meaning, the soul, as it were, of which the popular and civil wors.h.i.+p was the body with its drapery.

The Hebrew wisdom imperatively a.s.serts an unbeginning creative One, who neither became the world; nor is the world eternally; nor made the world out of himself by emanation, or evolution;--but who willed it, and it was! [Greek: Ta athea egeneto, kai egeneto chaos,]--and this chaos, the eternal will, by the spirit and the word, or express 'fiat',--again acting as the impregnant, distinctive, and ordonnant power,--enabled to become a world--[Greek: kosmeisthai.] So must it be when a religion, that shall preclude superst.i.tion on the one hand, and brute indifference on the other, is to be true for the meditative sage, yet intelligible, or at least apprehensible, for all but the fools in heart.

The Greek philosopheme, preserved for us in the aeschylean Prometheus, stands midway betwixt both, yet is distinct in kind from either. With the Hebrew or purer Semitic, it a.s.sumes an X Y Z,--(I take these letters in their algebraic application)--an indeterminate 'Elohim', antecedent to the matter of the world, [Greek: hulae akosmos]--no less than to the [Greek: hulae kekosmaemenae.] In this point, likewise, the Greek accorded with the Semitic, and differed from the Phoenician--that it held the antecedent X Y Z to be super-sensuous and divine. But on the other hand, it coincides with the Phnician in considering this antecedent ground of corporeal matter,--[Greek: t_on s_omat_on kai tou s_omatikou,]--not so properly the cause of the latter, as the occasion and the still continuing substance. 'Maleria substat adliuc'. The corporeal was supposed co-essential with the antecedent of its corporeity. Matter, as distinguished from body, was a 'non ens', a simple apparition, 'id quod mere videtur'; but to body the elder physico-theology of the Greeks allowed a partic.i.p.ation in ent.i.ty. It was 'spiritus ipse, oppressus, dormiens, et diversis modis somnians'. In short, body was the productive power suspended, and as it were, quenched in the product. This may be rendered plainer by reflecting, that, in the pure Semitic scheme there are four terms introduced in the solution of the problem,

1. the beginning, self-sufficing, and immutable Creator;

2. the antecedent night as the ident.i.ty, or including germ, of the light and darkness, that is, gravity;