Atua

“ As the mythology of pagan Rome has yielded to a more spiritual idea of Deity, so shall our material theology or doctrinal religions yield to a more spiritual idea of God than a material man presents, until all materiality shall disappear in thought, and the finite give place to the infinite, and the impersonal, unlimited, and unerring idea, and the impersonal, limitless, or infinite Principle of this idea shall appear, and “Thy kingdom have come on earth as it is in Heaven.” ”

“ I see the Roman city and soil full of temples to gods and goddesses, from all the known lands of the world, that they might reply to the still more urgent questionings of humanity:
“Is there a God?—What and who is He? Is there a life after death for us who suffer, love, and die? Is there reparation for those who testify to the truth, and fall victims to lies? What have we to hope for? What shall we believe?”
And the temples multiply ever more and more, and the gods and their priests increase. ”

“ He fills it like an unseen god. Not as Phoebus or Athene, from their marble pedestals; but as an abiding spirit, felt everywhere, nowhere seized, absorbing in itself all mysteries, all myths, all burning exaltations, all abasements, all love, self-sacrifice, pain, yearning, which the thought of Christ, sweeping the centuries, hath wrought for men. ”

“ The painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with another boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in his mother's arms, smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble, stately figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life. Even when they drew him crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had inflicted suffering. ”

“ Gods in myth, and God in religion—The society of the gods like that of men in Homer—Borrowed elements in Greek belief—Zeus—His name—Development of his legend—His bestial shapes explained—Zeus in religion—Apollo—Artemis—Dionysus—Athene—Aphrodite—Hermes—Demeter—Their names, natures, rituals, and legends—Conclusions.
In the gods of Greece, when represented in ideal art and in the best religious sentiment, as revealed by poets and philosophers, from Homer to Plato, from Plato to Porphyry, there is something truly human and truly divine. ”

“ Would the poets or prose writers of modern times, who praise, in harmonious numbers or well-turned periods, the religion of their country, welcome that religion if she were to disengage herself from the attractions of the mitre, and the associations of sacred altars and antique buildings, and rise up before them in the simplicity of her attire, and, with an authoritative voice, as when she first despoiled Greece and Rome of their elegant mythology, demanding from them repentance towards God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ? ”

“ What Protestant, for instance, can be properly and permanently imbued with the fervent devotion or saint-like purity of the Catholic religion, or hope to transfer the pride, pomp, and pageantry of that detested superstition to his own canvass, with real feeling and con amore? What modern can enter fully into the spirit of the ancient Greek mythology, or rival the symmetry of its naked forms? ”

“ What were your gods but once men, first revered, then worshipped, and now their stone images deemed to be the very gods themselves? Thus the original idea—the effect, we may believe, of an early revelation—of one supreme Deity has been almost lost out of the world. ”

“ Theology.—The characteristic appellation of a divine spirit in the oldest stratum of the Roman religion is not deus, a god, but rather numen, a power: he becomes deus when he obtains a name, and so is on the way to acquiring a definite personality, but in origin he is simply the 'spirit' of the 'animistic' period, and retains something of the spirit's characteristics. ”

“ The prayer of a worshipper addressing such an image will be transmitted to the deity whom he addresses, and the deity may even come in person to hear him, if special aid is required. A close parallel may be found even in modern days. I have known of a child, brought up in the Roman Catholic religion, who had a particular veneration or affection for a certain statue of the Virgin, and used often to address it or, as she said, converse with it. ”

“ The ancient world no doubt peers into this world of the Catholic poet, but only as the guiding star and companion of human wisdom and culture; for, where it is a question of doctrine and dogma, it is the scholasticism of Christian theology and love which speaks. ”

“ In this oldest Jupiter of the Latins and Romans, the god of the light and the heaven, and the god invoked in taking the most solemn oaths, we may undoubtedly see not only the great protecting deity of the race, but one, and perhaps the only one, whose worship embodies a distinct moral conception. ”

“ Despoiled yet perfect, with thy circle spreads A holiness appealing to all hearts— To art a model; and to him who treads Rome for the sake of ages, Glory sheds Her light through thy sole aperture; to those Who worship, here are altars for their beads; And they who feel for genius may repose Their eyes on honoured forms, whose busts around them close. ”

“ Religion is mainly ancestor worship or vague spirit worship; ghosts are propitiated with food. There are traces of an original divine being whose name is becoming obsolescent and a matter of jest.
4. Early civilisations. Monarchic or aristocratic. (Greece, Egypt, India, Peru, Mexico.) Polytheism. One god tends to be supreme. Religiously regarded, gods are moral; in myth are the reverse. Gods are in receipt of sacrifice. Heavenly society is modelled on that of men, monarchic or aristocratic. Philosophic thought tends towards belief in one pure god, who may be named Zeus, in Greece. ”

“ And if you write the description of certain deities the description will not be held in the same veneration as the picture of the Deity, because prayers and votive offerings will always be made to the picture, and many peoples from diverse countries and from across the Eastern seas will flock to it. And they will invoke the picture, and not the writing, for succour. Who is he who would not lose hearing, smell and touch rather than sight? Because he who loses his sight is like the man who is driven from the world, because {125} he sees neither it nor anything else any longer. ”

“ I am debtor both to Greeks and to Barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you also that are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is revealed a righteousness of God by faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous shall live by faith. ”

“ For the mind delights in definiteness and light.
But the Greek conception of life belongs to an age preceding the advent of what has proved to be the European religion. And Christianity has so reconstructed the experience of the average man through its sensitiveness to pain, and its emphasis on what is called "the inner life," that I want further to illustrate the meaning of {188} discernment in art, by referring to the representation of the spirit of the Renaissance in the painting of Leonardo da Vinci. ”

“ Such I believe to have been the central idea of the beautiful creed which, for 1,500 years, tuned the heart and formed the mind of the noblest of mankind. From this centre it radiated out and spread, as time went on, into the full circle of human activity, flinging its own philosophy and its own peculiar grace over the common details of the common life of all of us. Like the seven lamps before the Throne of God, the seven mighty angels, and the seven stars, the seven sacraments shed over mankind a never-ceasing stream of blessed influences. ”

“ Thus in the Early Christian Painting in Italy. earlier paintings of about the 4th century we find Christ represented as a beardless youth, beautiful as the artist could make him, with lingering tradition of Greek idealization, in no degree like the “Man of Sorrows” of medieval painters, but rather a kind of genius of Christianity in whose fair outward form the peace and purity of the new faith were visibly symbolized, just as certain distinct attributes were typified in the persons of the gods of ancient Greece. ”

“ If Greece and Rome have gathered into their cabinet of curiosities the pearls of heathen poetry and eloquence, the diamonds of pagan history and philosophy, God himself has treasured up in the Scriptures, the poetry and eloquence, the philosophy and history of sacred law-givers, of prophets and apostles, of saints, evangelists, and martyrs. ”

“ Beginning at the right wall by the High Altar we have probably the work of a fine Byzantine master, or at least of one who must have copied a Greek masterpiece. In the Creation of the World, God, represented as a young man seated on a globe of fire, is, with a gesture of his hand, casting upon 161 the earth his last creation—man—who, still suffused with celestial colour, is borne across the sea towards the land. ”

“ The sacerdotal conception of God at Rome and Athens was lower yet. No wonder then, that men soon learned to honor Jesus as a God, and then as God himself. Apostolical and other legends tell of his divine birth, his wondrous power that healed the sick, palsied and crippled, deaf and dumb and blind; created bread; turned water into wine, and bid obedient devils come and go, a power that raised the dead. ”

“ The last centuries before the birth of Jesus and the opening centuries of our era were marked by an increasing religious longing and unrest, first among the Greeks and then among the Romans.{40} There was a weariness and a dissatisfaction with the inherited forms of religious expression; and many felt a sense of separation from God, of a gulf between the human and the divine, which they hoped might be bridged by a direct revelation, by a vision, which would grant immediate knowledge of God. ”

“ Of old he might have been the ancient religious Athenian in the opening of Plato’s Republic, or Virgil’s aged gardener. The happiness of such natures would be incomplete without religion, but only by such tranquil and blessed souls can religion be accepted with no doubt or scruple, no dread, and no misgiving. ”

“ Therefore we find, especially in Rome, where politics were the ruling passion, a watchfulness after the most punctilious observance of traditional religious ceremonies, and a jealous aversion to any innovations in religion. The belief of a divine origin of all existence is a first principle in man’s nature, and he is irresistibly impelled to ascend from many to One. This very feeling showed itself even in the polytheism of national religions, under the idea of a highest God, or a father of the gods. ”

“ Christian Art, like the Religious Art of the world in general,—from the thou and thee of simplest Quakerism, outward and audible sounds of an inward and silent spirit, up to the profoundest mystic ritualism of the Buddhist,—Christian Art abounds in Emblems ”

“ It has been observed by an author, whose name I ought not to have forgotten, that the ideas of the Deity expressed in the writings of philosophers, subsequently to the Christian era, are more clear and sublime than those which are to be found in heathen writers of an earlier period. I therefore represent him also as a Roman, cultivated, contemplative, and refined. ”

“ These religions rapidly became the accepted belief of the lower classes of the Greco-Roman world. And they did much to prepare the way for the rapid spread of the vastly superior Christian teachings, which presented a majestic concept of Deity, associated with an intriguing theology for the intelligent and a profound proffer of salvation for all, including the ignorant but spiritually hungry average man of those days. ”

“ The ancients, from the wise even to the simple, thought of God no otherwise than as being a Man; and when at length they began to worship a plurality of gods, as at Athens and Rome, they worshiped them all as men. ”

“ First of all, don't confuse piety with Christianity. There are pious Greeks and impious Greeks; pious Turks and impious Turks; pious Christians and impious Christians; pious modern infidels and impious modern infidels. In case you do not quite know what piety really means, we will try to know better in next lecture; for the present, understand that I mean distinctly to call Greek art, in the true sense of the word, pious, and Gothic, as opposed to it, profane. ”

“ These rude sculptures, ever repeated exactly, which represent a female divinity upon the walls of the grottoes of Baye, even prove that the religion of Neolithic times had risen to the height of anthropomorphism. Now, a clearly-defined deity, a god in human form, must have priests that are regularly initiated ”

“ Religion. Objects of worship. In religion, the ancient Romans, like the Greeks, personified the powers of nature, and also abstractions, like sowing, field labor, war, boundary, youth, health, harmony, fidelity. The profoundest worship was that of the tutelary deities, who presided over the household. Next to the deities of the house and forest, held in the greatest veneration, was Hercules, the god of the inclosed homestead, and, therefore, of property and gain. ”

“ The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounced that the gods had orderd such things. ”