Chapter 1801

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Professor Max Müller’s Lectures—On the Philosophy of Mythology—are before us. We read his citations of Heracleitus (460 b.c.), declaring that Homer deserved “to be ejected from public assemblies and flogged”; and of Xenophanes “holding Homer and Hesiod responsible for the popular superstitions of Greece,” and for ascribing “to the gods whatever is disgraceful and scandalous among men ... unlawful acts, such as theft, adultery, and fraud.” Finally the Oxford Professor quotes from Professor Jowett’s translation of Plato, where the latter tells Adaimantus (Republic) that “the young man [in the state] should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes, he is far from doing anything outrageous, and that he may chastise his father [as Zeus did with Cronus] ... in any manner that he likes, and in this will only be following the example of the first and greatest of the gods.... In my opinion, these stories are not fit to be repeated.” To this Prof. Max Müller observes that: “the Greek religion was clearly a national and traditional religion, and, as such, it shared both the advantages and disadvantages of this form of religious belief”; while the Christian religion is “an historical and, to a great extent, an individual religion, and it possesses the advantage of an authorized codex and of a settled system of faith” (p. 349). So much the worse if it is “historical,” for surely Lot’s incident with his daughters would only gain, were it “allegorical.”