Elizabeth P. Peabody

“ The Dorian Jupiter is never at all the Ionian Jupiter described by Homer, but is absolute, un-manifest, except by the oracle and action of his son. This oracle and action betray the finiteness inseparable from manifestation; but, nevertheless, there is a sublimity about Apollo which we find nowhere else in the Greek heaven. He is no instinct, no power of external nature personified. He is nothing less than the moral and intellectual harmony of the universe. In his action we find the practical religion of the Dorians. He is beautiful: his recreation is music. ”

“ And to see this futility, and bravely acknowledge it, is to die to the life of mere passion, and to rise to the intellection of the secret of life eternal, which is no less than this: All human passion is to re-appear even upon earth, no longer as master, but as servant, to do the behests of that will, become by gratitude an infinite principle of love, and displaying the office of every faculty and every feeling of human nature, to manifest something of the divine life. ”

“ Of course, it is bad for any human beings to be exclusively dancers. "There is a time to dance," and a time for other things, said Solomon. But how easy it would be for all children to be trained to dance, among other things; and then for talent to idealize, in the ballet, the customs of nations, historical events, even the processes of many kinds of industry; while genius, "at its own sweet will," should rise into the region of the allegoric and mystic dance! ”

“ Life, then, is sacred: even the all-divine Son of God, if he violate it in its lowest, most degraded manifestation, must expiate the deed afterwards by years of activity in the service of Death. The best life pays this tribute, and thus acknowledges a certain equality before God with its opposite; for even a bad life has divine right, inasmuch as it is. "To be is respectable." The expiation, indeed, is measured, and comes to an end; and Apollo is interpreter of God for evermore, and king, giving a death which does not wound or pain its recipient,—euthanasia, if not immortality. ”

“ What an original affluence of intellect, what a training of mind, is necessary in order to grasp all this life, and legislate for it in such a manner that it may not prove suicidal! In truth, man seems to be placed under the United States' government, free of the universe, and, as in the case of Adam in his garden, amid such a luxuriance of all that is desirable, that the chances are entirely that he shall miss of the tree of life, which is not so obvious to the eyes, but requireth that they be "purged with euphrasie and rue." ”

“ But it is time that the importance of music, taught thoroughly, especially in its theory, should be recognized in education; and that the hideous screaming, without melody, measure, or harmony, which is heard in most places of Protestant worship, should be stilled, together with the scraping of violins and bass-viols, and the pounding of the keys of piano-fortes and organs, to the destruction of all musical ear, and the derangement of every standard of proportion which God has planted in the nervous organization of man, for the first discipline of the mind to order. ”

“ Cast coolness o'er Cocytus' glow;
⁠All this he heedeth not:
He only knows thou art not won—
⁠The "perfect good and fair:"
The race of life is yet to run;
The only deed is yet undone;
⁠The Hero still must dare. ”

“ We are rich, and can tax ourselves for conservative as well as for destructive purposes. Why not employ these artists and scholars to make a new revival of learning, which shall be, to times to come, what that, produced by the dislodged Greeks of the captured Eastern Empire, was to Europe in the fourteenth century? Why should not our merchants become, like the merchant-princes of Italy, the patrons of science and art, and give their children as well as their money to these pursuits? ”

“ The whole thing is fainter in the Grecian form, because addressed to a nation, and not to humanity,—to a nation at a peculiar stage of culture, and not to humanity through countless ages. Apollo may be held as the Word of God to a tribe of ideal Greeks, whose life can be counted by centuries. Christ is the Word of God to humanity, thinking and Buffering all over the globe and through all time, and whose influences take hold of eternity. ”

“ It is necessary to understand distinctly, that Greece, at least Dorian Greece, was, in most important respects, very different from Rome. Both nations had organic genius, but the Greeks only the artistic-organic. The Romans organized brute force, together with the moral force of the Sabines, the cunning of the commercial colonies of Magna Græcia, and the formal stateliness of a sacerdotal Etruria; forming a compound whole, which expressed one element of human nature,—that which commands and obeys. On the other hand, the Greeks organized the harvest of their sensibilities into ideal forms. ”

“ Nevertheless, it is our only hope that we should eat of the tree of life, and the passion of this people be subjected to the κόσμος which breathes in a baptism of fire from the Rock of Joseph, whence rose man glorified as God. In other words, we must be educated by our religion, which comprehends in its scope the life that now is, no less than that which is to come;—a religion which honoreth the spirit in its regenerate human manifestation, even as it honoreth it absolute and unmanifest in the Father. ”

“ His name and origin were Asiatic, and his worship had all the characteristics of Asiatic worship. It was the exciting, even to frenzy, of that elemental, mysterious, vital power, which is not idea, but seems its polar basis of life, the source of the substance that we are "without form, and void." The Asiatics always seem to regard this fury as divinity in its purest form. The Dorians opposed to Bacchus, Apollo, who, by the law which he is, arranges in order this blind force. Hence, the characteristic difference of Asiatic and Dorian worship. ”

“ Virtue, in the strict sense of the word, seems never to have pervaded any society, ancient or modern, so completely as it did the Dorian. For, if friendship—and not philanthropy, or the charity which is founded on the Christian's faith and hope—was their highest social characteristic, yet, on the other hand, must be subtracted from their condition those depths of spiritual vice and social wrong, to which the eternities, unfolded by the same hope and faith, have opened the passions of Christendom. ”

“ The peculiarity of Grecian freedom is, that it respects every thing, consecrates every thing that lives. It worships life as divine, wherever manifested. The very word theos, which represents something out, proves manifestation to the apprehension of man, to have been inseparable, in their opinion, from the idea of God; and their own active character and plastic genius received its impulse from this religious intuition. "As a man's god, so is he." Certainly, as a nation's god, so is it. ”

“ The sacredness of a life which neither evil nor deformity could quench, Apollo acknowledges by service of Pluto. His own superior divinity is manifested, in that he never ceases to act and assert himself, under whatever penalty.
Let the self-righteous of modern time, who may not learn of Christ, meditate this lesson promulgated in Greece, and which was one of the formative or creative principles of the Dorian culture and character. The Greeks dared to look the prime difficulty, the great mystery of life, in the face, and reverently to bow before it. It is good for man to shun evil and do good ”

“ It is a disposition of elements, such that the weak may borrow of the strong, and the strong be adorned. Thus their aim in politics was far other than to exhibit the right of the strongest. It was to have a society perfectly organized to express the beauty of the most beautiful.
The genesis of the Dorians is yet undiscovered. Like their god Apollo, they are the children of the creative wisdom and mystery. That festival of Apollo, which commemorates his return from the Hyperboræans, is possibly the mythic history of their origin,—too obscure, perhaps too fragmentary, to be clearly elucidated. ”

“ Another consequence of the Dorian music and dance was the sculpture of Greece, which took its ideal character from the Dorians, who had Apollo for model, and the unveiled human form, beheld with a chaste delight in the gymnasium, for their school of art. Their love for proportion, harmony, and regularity, rather than for luxuriance of ornament and glitter, is also exemplified in their architecture, which betrays a certain relation to the sculpture of the nation and era. ”

“ The mere enjoyment of an education, such as has been here hinted at, is the least of its advantages, though it is one not to be despised. Its use in preserving the race under the political forms which, as we showed above, are alone, of all yet discovered, elastic enough to admit the whole man to be unfolded, can be shown to be probable. The mass of mankind have no fancy for governing; and they would not be driven to meddle with what they know nothing of, if there was no social oppression to cast off, or they could so exercise their energies as to be in a state of enjoyment already. ”

“ Philology should be studied as the most important of sciences, not only for the sake of knowing the works of art and science that the various languages contain, but because words themselves are growths of nature and works of art, capable of giving the highest delight as such; and because their analysis and history reveal the universe in its symbolic character. Moreover, no language, learned in the light of philology, could be forgotten. ”

“ He leads the Muses with his harp in hand, and even mingles in the dance. He is resplendent; where he is, darkness cannot be: his inevitable arrow destroys deformity. Excellence is his prerogative: whoever contends with him is worsted and dies. His first great oracle commands to man self-consciousness. ”

“ There are multitudes of the fathers of our country who, as school-committee men, direct its education, who never have thought of music but as an amusement of the senses; who never have dreamed of its moral, far less of its intellectual, influences. And there are some who look upon it, when introduced into religious services, as a mere rest of the weak mind from the laborious act of worship. ”

“ It is the only Pagan religion which can be brought into any comparison with Christianity, because it is the only one which involves the contemplation of man in an objective relation with Divinity; and its inferiority consists, not in its leaving out the antagonism,—rather the triplicity of life; for it did not do this,—but in its not estimating the infinite reach of passion. The Dorians do not represent, all of humanity: they were of an exceptional organization. Apollo was not "tempted in all points, like as we are." He was not all of God, and not all of man. ”

“ This is well, and might be much extended, when, by a thorough study of the theory of music, the vast treasury of religious strains which the genius of the Old World has accumulated, shall be put within the powers of execution of more learners. Music affords, indeed, the only means of persuading the soul of childhood into any thing that may bear the name of worship, at the early age before experience has revealed to the soul its necessities, and opened its eyes upon the great truth which solves the problem of evil, and gives the second birth. ”

“ Nothing but the artificial asceticism which arose from that one-sided view of religion which the too energetic Puritans had, could have crushed out of human nature, even so far as it has done in New England, the natural tendency to dance, and degraded the music of motion with associations of presumptuous sin. It is unquestionable that a corrupt people will dance in a manner to corrupt themselves still more; but "to them that hath shall be given." The system of dancing, natural to the innocent-minded and intellectually cultivated, will refine and elevate. ”

“ Hence, the human instincts and divine ideas which each divinity represented were thrown into a common stock. Hence, Homer made of the gods of the several tribes a community acting together; and explained the variations of man's mortal life, by their antagonisms and harmonies. Hence, Hesiod conceived the idea of a Theogony, in which we see a vain attempt to make into one consistent whole, what was but the imperfect reflex of the spiritual life of many nations not harmonized. This high influence of toleration came from the Dorians, who were pre-eminently the genius of Greece. ”

“ To stop here: our religion would be gloomy, but it teaches us another thing. It teaches us, that the first phase of human life does not exhaust us, but that it is ours to see the futility of all feeling and activity, unenlightened by God's plan for making his finite creature live on an infinite principle. ”