"Essays 1st Series" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

The fact teaches him how Belus was worshipped, and how the Pyramids
were built, better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of
all the workmen and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the
Mounds of Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the courses.

Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes
against the superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the
part of old reformers, and in the search after truth finds like them
new perils to virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed to
supply the girdle of a superstition. A great licentiousness treads
on the heels of a reformation. How many times in the history of the
world has the Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in
his own household! "Doctor," said his wife to Martin Luther, one
day, "how is it that, whilst subject to papacy, we prayed so often
and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and
very seldom?"

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in
literature, -- in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that
the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible
situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true
for one and true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines
wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One
after another he comes up in his private adventures with every fable
of Aesop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and
verifies them with his own head and hands.

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of
the imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities. What a
range of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has the story of
Prometheus! Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the
history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veiling authentic facts, the
invention of the mechanic arts, and the migration of colonies,) it
gives the history of religion with some closeness to the faith of
later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the
friend of man; stands between the unjust "justice" of the Eternal
Father and the race of mortals, and readily suffers all things on
their account. But where it departs from the Calvinistic
Christianity, and exhibits him as the defier of Jove, it represents a
state of mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine of Theism
is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems the
self-defence of man against this untruth, namely, a discontent with
the believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling that the
obligation of reverence is onerous. It would steal, if it could, the
fire of the Creator, and live apart from him, and independent of him.
The Prometheus Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not less true
to all time are the details of that stately apologue. Apollo kept
the flocks of Admetus, said the poets. When the gods come among men,
they are not known. Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not.
Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, but every time he