Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Chapter XXIV.—Agreement of Plato and Homer.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter XXIV.—Agreement of Plato and
Homer.
How, then, does Plato banish Homer
from his republic, since, in the embassy to Achilles, he represents
Phœnix as saying to Achilles, “Even the gods themselves are not
inflexible,”2556
though Homer said this not of the king
and Platonic maker of the gods, but of some of the multitude whom the
Greeks esteem as gods, as one can gather from Plato’s saying,
“gods of gods?” For Homer, by that golden chain,2557
| 2557 That is, by the challenge of
the chain introduced—Iliad, viii. 18. | refers
all power and might to the one highest
God. And the rest of
the gods, he said, were so far distant from his divinity, that he thought
fit to name them even along with men. At least he introduces Ulysses
saying of Hector to Achilles, “He is raging terribly, trusting in
Zeus, and values neither men nor gods.”2558
In this
passage Homer seems to me without doubt to have learnt in Egypt, like
Plato, concerning the one God, and plainly and openly to declare this,
that he who trusts in the really existent God makes no account of those
that do not exist. For thus the poet, in another passage, and employing
another but equivalent word, to wit, a pronoun, made use of the same
participle employed by Plato to designate the really existent God,
concerning whom Plato said, “What that is which always exists, and
has no birth.” For not without a double sense does this expression
of Phœnix seem to have been used: “Not even if God Himself were to
promise me, that, having burnished off my old age, He should set me forth
in the flower of youth.” For the pronoun “Himself”
signifies the really existing God. For thus, too, the oracle which was
given to you concerning the Chaldæans and Hebrews signifies. For when
some one inquired what men had ever lived godly, you say the answer
was:—
“Only
the Chaldæans and the Hebrews found wisdom,
Worshipping
God Himself, the unbegotten King.”E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
