The Queen of the Air by John Ruskin (general ebook reader txt) 📖

in these creations of his own spirit, practical and helpful to him in the sorrow of earth? I am able to answer you explicitly in this. The origin of his thoughts is often obscure, and we may err in endeavoring to account or their form of realization; but the effect of that realization on his life is not obscure at all. The Greek creed was, of course, different in its character, as our own creed is, according to the class of persons who held it. The common people's was quite literal, simple, and happy; their idea of Athena was as clear as a good Roman Catholic peasant's idea of the Madonna. In Athens itself, the centre of thought and refinement, Pisistratus obtained the reins of government through the ready belief of the populace that a beautiful woman, armed like Athena, was the goddess herself. Even at the close of the last century some of this simplicity remained among the inhabitants of the Greek islands; and when a pretty English lady first made her way into the grotto of Antiparos, she was surrounded, on her return, by all the women of the neighboring village, believing her to be divine, and praying her to heal them of their sicknesses. Then, secondly, the creed of the upper classes was more refined and spiritual, but quite as honest, and even more forcible in its effect on the life. You might imagine that the employment of the artifice just referred to implied utter unbelief in the persons contriving it; but it really meant only that the more worldly of them would play with a popular faith of their own purposes, as doubly-minded persons have often done since, all the while sincerely holding the same ideas themselves in a more abstract form; while the good and unworldly men, the true Greek heroes, lived by their faith as firmly as St. Louis, or the Cid, or the Chevalier Bayard. Then, thirdly, the faith of the poets and artists was, necessarily, less definite, being continually modified by the involuntary action of their own fancies; and by the necessity of presenting, in clear verbal or material form, things of which they had no authoritative knowledge. Their faith was, in some respects like Dante's or Milton's: firm in general conception, but not able to vouch for every detail in the forms they gave it; but they went considerably farther, even in that minor sincerity, than subsequent poets; and strove with all their might to be as near the truth as they could. Pindar says, quite simply, "I cannot think so-and-so of the gods. It must have been this way--it cannot have been that way--that the thing was done." And as late among the Latins as the days of Horace, this sincerity remains. Horace is just as true and simple in his religion as Wordsworth; but all power of understanding any of the honest classic poets has been taken away from most English gentlemen by the mechanical drill in verse-writing at school. Throughout the whole of their lives afterwards, they never can get themselves quit of the notion that all verses were written as an exercise, and that Minerva was only a convenient word for the last of a hexameter, and Jupiter for the last but one. It is impossible that any notion can be more fallacious or more misleading in its consequences. All great song, from the first day when human lips contrived syllables, has been sincere song. With deliberate didactic purpose the tragedians--with pure and native passion the lyrists --fitted their perfect words to their dearest faiths. "Operosa parvus carmina fingo." "I, little thing that I am, weave my laborious songs" as earnestly as the bee among the bells of thyme on the Matin mountains. Yes, and he dedicates his favorite pine to Diana, and he chants his autumnal hymn to the Faun that guards his fields, and he guides the noble youth and maids of Rome in their choir to Apollo, and he tells the farmer's little girl that the gods will love her, though she has only a handful of salt and meal to give them--just as earnestly as ever English gentleman taught Christian faith to English youth in England's truest days. Then, lastly, the creed of the philosophers of sages varied according to the character and knowledge of each; their relative acquaintance with the secrets of natural science, their intellectual and sectarian egotism, and their mystic or monastic tendencies, for there is a classic as well as a mediæval monasticism. They end in losing the life of Greece in play upon words; but we owe to their early thought some of the soundest ethics, and the foundation of the best practical laws, yet known to mankind. Such was the general vitality of the heathen creed in its strength. Of its direct influence on conduct, it is, as I said, impossible for me to speak now; only, remember always, in endeavoring to form a judgment of it, that what of good or right the heathens did, they did looking for no reward. The purest forms of our own religion have always consisted in sacrificing less things to win greater, time to win eternity, the world to win the skies. The order, "Sell that thou hast," is not given without the promise, "Thou shalt have treasure in heaven;" and well for the modern Christian if he accepts the alternative as his Master left it, and does not practically read the command and promise thus: "Sell that thou hast in the best market, and thou shalt have treasure in eternity also." But the poor Greeks of the great ages expected no reward from heaven but honor, and no reward from earth but rest; though, when, on those conditions, they patiently, and proudly, fulfilled their task of the granted day, an unreasoning instinct of an immortal benediction broke from their lips in song; and they, even they, had sometimes a prophet to tell them of a land "where there is sun alike by day and alike by night, where they shall need no more to trouble the earth by strength of hands for daily bread; but the ocean breezes blow around the blessed islands, and golden flowers burn on their bright trees for evermore." II (ATHENA KERAMITIS )

 

(Athena in the Earth.)

* "Athena, fit for being made into pottery." I coin the expression as a counterpart of 'ge parthenia', "Clay intact."

STUDY, SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PRECEDING LECTURE, OF THE SUPPOSED AND ACTUAL RELATIONS OF ATHENA TO THE VITAL FORCE IN MATERIAL ORGANISM

It has been easy to decipher approximately the Greek conception of the physical power of Athena in cloud and sky, because we know ourselves what clouds and skies are, and what the force of the wind is in forming them. But it is not at all easy to trace the Greek thoughts about the power of Athena in giving life, because we do not ourselves know clearly what life is, or in what way the air is necessary to it, or what there is, besides the air, shaping the forms that it is put into. And it is comparatively of small consequence to find out what the Greeks thought or meant, until we have determined what we ourselves think, or mean, when we translate the Greek word for "breathing" into the Latin-English word "spirit." But it is of great consequence that you should fix in your minds-- and hold, against the baseness of mere materialism on the one hand, and against the fallacies of controversial speculation on the other--the certain and practical sense of this word "spirit;" the sense in which you all know that its reality exists, as the power which shaped you into your shape, and by which you love and hate when you have received that shape. You need not fear, on the one hand, that either the sculpturing or the loving power can ever be beaten down by the philosophers into a metal, or evolved by them into a gas; but on the other hand, take care that you yourself, in trying to elevate your conception of it, do not lose its truth in a dream, or even in a word. Beware always of contending for words: you will find them not easy to grasp, if you know them in several languages. This very word, which is so solemn in your mouths, is one of the most doubtful. In Latin it means little more than breathing, and may mean merely accent; in French it is not breath, but wit, and our neighbors are therefore obliged, even in their most solemn expressions, to say "wit" when we say "ghost." In Greek, "pneuma," the word we translate "ghost," means either wind or breath, and the relative word "psyche" has, perhaps, a more subtle power; yet St. Paul's words "pneumatic body" and "psychic body" involve a difference in his mind which no words will explain. But in Greek and in English, and in Saxon and in Hebrew, and in every articulate tongue of humanity the "spirit of man" truly means his passion and virtue, and is stately according to the height of his conception, and stable according to the measure of his endurance. Endurance, or patience, that is the central sign of spirit; a constancy against the cold and agony of death; and as, physically, it is by the burning power of the air that the heat of the flesh is sustained, so this Athena, spiritually, is the queen of all glowing virtue, the unconsuming fire and inner lamp of life. And thus, as Hephæstus is lord of the fire of the hand, and Apollo of the fire of the brain, so Athena of the fire of the heart; and as Hercules wears for his chief armor the skin of the Nemean lion, his chief enemy, whom he slew; and Apollo has for his highest name "the Pythian," from his chief enemy, the Python slain; so Athena bears always on her breast the deadly face of her chief enemy slain, the Gorgonian cold, and venomous agony, that turns living men to stone. And so long as you have the fire of the heart within you, and know the reality of it, you need to be under no alarm as to the possibility of its chemical or mechanical analysis. The philosophers are very humorous in their ecstasy of hope about it; but the real interest of their discoveries in this direction is very small to humankind. It is quite true that the tympanum of the ear vibrates under sound, and that the surface of the water in a ditch vibrates too; but the ditch hears nothing for all that; and my hearing is still to me as blessed a mystery as ever, and the interval between the ditch and me quite as great. If the trembling sound in my ears was once of the marriage-bell which began my happiness, and is now of the passing-bell which ends it, the difference between those two sounds to me cannot be counted by the number of concussions. There have been some curious speculations lately as to the conveyance of mental consciousness by "brain-waves." What does it matter how it is conveyed? The consciousness itself is not a wave. It may be accompanied here or there by any quantity