The Secret Vault presents: The Christian and Pagan Creeds Collated. Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
By the Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
This was a deity who united the divine and human nature in one person, and was confessedly "both God and man" - perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting; equal to the father as touching his godhead, but inferior to the father as touching his manhood: who, although he was God and man, yet was he not two, but one Prometheus; one, not by conversion of the godhead into flesh, but by taking the manhood into God: one altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person: for as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Prometheus: who, for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate, and was made man, and was crucified also for us, under force and strength; he suffered, and descended into hell, rose again from the dead, he ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father, God Almighty.
Thus far the Pagan and the Christian credenda ran hand in hand together; and it is a more than striking coincidence, that the name Prometheus should be directly synonymous with the Logos, or Word of God, an epithet applied by St. John to the God and man, or demi-deity of the Gospel, from [GK], before-hand, and , [GK] care, or counsel; hence, directly signifying the Christian deity, Providence, which we see emblemized as an eye surrounded with rays of glory, and casting its beams of light upon the affairs of our world. Indeed, under this designation, he continues to this day a more fashionable deity than the Logos of St. John. We find acknowledgments of dependence on Divine Providence, and the blessing of Providence, or Prometheus, spoken of in our British parliament, occurring in his majesty's speeches, and received with the most respectful sentiment from one end of the kingdom to the other, where the introduction of the name of Jesus Christ, in the place of that of Prometheus or Providence, would be received with a universal smirk of undisguised contempt.
The best information of the character, attributes, and actions of this deity, is to be derived from the beautiful tragedy of [GK] or Prometheus Bound, of Aeschylus, [Or Potter's beautiful translation of it, of which I here avail myself.] which was acted in the theatre of Athens, 500 years before the Christian era, and is by many considered to be the most ancient dramatic poem now in existence. The plot was derived from materials even at that time of an infinitely remote antiquity. Nothing was ever so exquisitely calculated to work upon the feelings of the spectator. No author ever displayed greater powers of poetry, with equal strength of judgment, in supporting through the piece the august character of the divine sufferer. The spectators themselves were in consciously made a party to the interest of the scene: its hero was their friend, their benefactor, their creator, and their saviour; his wrongs were incurred in their quarrel -his sorrows were endured for their salvation; "he was wounded for their transgressions, and bruised for their iniquities; the chastisement of their peace was upon him, and by his stripes they were healed," (Isaiah 53-5).
"He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth." The majesty of his silence, whilst the ministers of an offended God were nailing him by the hands and feet to Mount Caucasus, could be only equalled by the modesty with which he relates, while hanging on the cross, [The cross referring to the attitude of the sufferer, Prometheus may be called [GK] or [GK] as well as Jesus.] his services to the human race, which had brought on him that horrible crucifixion: -
"I will speak,
Not as upbraiding them, but my own gifts
Commending. It was I who brought sweet hope
To inhabit in their hearts - I brought
The fire of heaven to animate their clay:
And through the clouds of barbarous ignorance
Diffused the beams of knowledge. In a word,
Prometheus taught each useful art to man."
In answer to a call made on him, to explain how his philanthropy could have incurred such a terrible punishment, he proceeds: -
"See what, a god, I suffer from the gods!
For mercy to mankind, I am not deemed
Worthy of mercy; but in this uncouth
Appointment, am fixed here,
A spectacle dishonourable to Jove!
On the throne of heaven scarce was he seated,
On the powers of heaven
He showered his various benefits, thereby
Confirming his sovereignty; but for unhappy mortals
Had no regard, but all the present race
Willed to extirpate, and to form anew.
None, save myself, opposed his will. I dared,
And boldly pleading, saved them from destruction -
Saved them from sinking to the realms of night;
For which offence, I bow beneath these pains,
Dreadful to suffer, piteous to behold!"
In the catastrophe of the plot, his especially professed friend, Oceanus, the Fisherman, as his name Petraeus indicates, (Petrous was an interchangeable synonym of the name Oceanus,) being unable to prevail on him to make his peace with Jupiter, by throwing the cause of human redemption out of his hands, ["Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, saying, be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee." - Matt. 16-22.] "forsook him and fled." None remained to be witnesses of his dying agonies, but the chorus of ever amiable and ever-faithful women which also bewailed and lamented him, (Luke 23-27,) but were unable to subdue his inflexible philanthropy. Overcome at length, by the intensity of his pains, he curses Jupiter in language hardly different in terms, and but little inferior in sublimity to the "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani" of the Gospel. And immediately the whole frame of nature became convulsed: the earth shook, the rocks rent, the graves were opened; and in a storm that seemed to threaten the dissolution of the universe, the curtain fell on the most sublime scene ever presented to the contemplation of the human eye - a Dying God! The Christian muse has inspired our modern poets with no strains on this theme, but such as bear the character of plagiarism, parody, or paraphrase on the Greek tragedy.
A worshipper of Prometheus would look in vain through all our collections of sacred poetry for a single idea which his own forms of piety had not suggested, or a single phrase whose reference would not seem to him, to have as direct an application to the god-man of Aeschylus, as to the Jesus of the Evangelists:
"Lo, streaming from the fatal tree,
his all-atoning blood!
Is this the Infinite?
'Tis he -Prometheus, and a God!
Well might the sun in darkness hide,
and veil his glories in,
When God, the great Prometheus, died,
for man, the creature's sin."
The preternatural darkness which attended the crucifixion of Prometheus, was natural enough as exhibited on the stage, and is beautifully described in the language of the tragedy. Nor is there any difficulty in conceiving, that when the mighty effect of so deep a tragedy on the feelings and sentiments of the audience, became an inexhaustible source of wealth to the performers, there would be found those who would be shrewd enough to discover the policy of enhancing and perpetuating so profitable an impression on the vulgar mind, by maintaining that there was much more than a mere show in the business; that it was an exhibition of circumstances that had really happened; that Prometheus was a real personage, and had actually done, and suffered, and spoken as in so lively a manner had been set before them; that the tragedy was a gospel put into metre; and that nothing but "an evil heart of unbelief" could induce any man to doubt "the certainty of those things wherein he had been instructed." It is probably no more than a figure of speech, though certainly very injudiciously chosen, in which Origen [a] calls the crucifixion of Christ the most awful tragedy that was ever acted. [LN., Aeschylus, around 525 to 455BC, he was an ancient Greek tragedian.]
[a] His answer to Celsus, chapter 27. What other than this is the sense of those words of the apostolic chief of sinners, "O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth crucified among you?" - Gal. 3-1. Surely, it was not in the country of the Galatians that Christ was crucified; nor could he have been set forth before their eyes, and evidently, otherwise than by a picture, or in a theatrical representation!]
But the pretence of the reality of the event would break down, in the judgment of the better-informed, from the total want of evidence to support that part of the detail, which, had it been real, could not have wanted the dearest and most constraining demonstration. The darkness which closed the scene on the suffering Prometheus, was easily exhibited on the stage, by putting out the lamps; but when the tragedy was to become history, and the fiction to be turned into fact, the lamp of day could not be so easily disposed of. Nor can it be denied that the miraculous darkness which the Evangelists so solemnly declare to have attended the crucifixion of Christ, labours under precisely the same fatality of an absolute and total want of evidence.
Gibbon, in his usual strain of sarcasm and irony, keenly asks, "How shall we excuse the supine inattention of the pagan and philosophic world to those evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses? This miraculous event, which ought to have excited the wonder, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history. It happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects, or received the earliest intelligence of the prodigy. Each of these philosophers, in a laborious work, has recorded all the great phenomena of nature -earthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses, which his indefatigable curiosity could collect; both the one and the other have omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness since the creation of the globe." - Gibbon, vol. 2, Ch. 15, p. 379. [LN., Gibbon, Henry, 1737 to 1794, member of Parliament, English historian.]
This objection of Gibbon is answered by Bishop Watson, in a double-entendre paragraph, which opens with the curious word to the wise, that "though he was aware he was liable to be misunderstood in what he was going to say, yet Mr. Gibbon would not misunderstand him." Then follows the most extraordinary declaration of his own, (a bishop's) faith, "that however mysterious the darkness at the crucifixion might have been, he had no doubt the power of God was as much concerned in its production, as it was in the opening of the graves, and the resurrection of the dead bodies of the saints that slept, which accompanied that darkness." - Third Letter to Gibbon, last paragraph. Another way of saying, that every sensible man must perceive that one part of the story was just as probable as the other, or that it was a romance altogether.
The good Bishop ventured to trust his security to the well-proved truth of the adage, "None are so- blind as those who will not see."
The immoral and mischievous tendency of the doctrine of atonement for sin, so acceptable to guilty minds, and so eagerly embraced by the greatest monsters of iniquity, had been preached by self-interested priests, and reprobated by all who wished well to mankind, long before that doctrine was deduced from the Christian Scriptures, long before those Scriptures are pretended to have been written.
Before the period assigned to the birth of Christ, the poet Ovid had assailed the demoralizing delusion with the most powerful shafts of philosophic scorn:
"Cum sis ipse nocens, moritur cur victima pro te? Stultitia est morte alterius sperare salutem."
"When thou thyself art guilty, why should a victim die for thee? What folly it is to expect salvation from the death of another."
No particle of difficulty remains, then, in accounting for the fact, that in that portion of the Acts of the Apostles in which the miraculous style is discontinued, and we so clearly trace the probable and most likely real adventures or journal of a missionary sent out from the college of the Egyptian Therapeuts joined on as an appendix to some fragment of their sacred legends which detailed the mystical adventures of the supposed first founders of their order, whose example the missionary was to have continually before him, [This appendix commences in the 13th chapter, where we find Saul in the mission at Antioch, and preaching again, one of the sermons which had been before ascribed to Peter.] we should read, that when the apostolic Therapeut attempted to preach his doctrine of "Jesus Christ and him crucified," at Athens, he found that the Athenians were already in possession of all he had to communicate, and that what he was endeavouring to set off as a doctrine newly revealed, was with them a very old story. He brought to their ears "no new thing." [Acts 17-18] The Epicurean and Stoical philosophers were more at home than himself upon that subject, and called him "a babbler," the very term that most expressively designates the character of a doting ignoramus, who, in the arrogance of his own conceit, will be for ever foisting up old stories of a hundred thousand years standing, and swearing that they had occurred in his own experience, and had happened to nobody else but some particular acquaintances of his.
The majority, however, carried the vote that he should have a fair hearing, and Paul was allowed to preach in the Areopagus. The previous rebuke he had received had completely subdued his impertinence; he no more presumed to lay claim to originality in the crucifying story.
He preached pure Deism, quoted their own poets, and ventured not once so much as to name his Jesus, or to make an allusion that could be construed as referring to him rather than to any other of the god-men or man-gods who had risen from the dead as well as he. (Acts xvii).
Prometheus, exactly answering to the Christian personification Providence, is, like that personification, used sometimes as an epithet synonymous with the Supreme Deity himself. The Pagan phrase, "Thank Prometheus," like the Christian one, "Thank Providence," its literal interpretation, meant exactly the same as "Thank God!"
Thus, in The Orphic Hymn to Chronos or Saturn, [a] we have this sublime address to the Supreme Deity under his name Prometheus, "Illustrious, cherishing Father, both of the immortal gods and of men, various of counsel, [b] spot less, powerful, mighty Titan, who consumes all things, and again thyself repairs them, who holds the ineffable bands throughout the boundless world; thou universal parent of successive being, various in design, who fructifies the earth and of the starry heaven, dread Prometheus, who dwellest in all parts of the world, author of generation, tortuous in counsel, most excellent, hear our suppliant voice, and send of our life a happy blameless end." Amen!
[a] See the original in Eschenbachius's edit. p. 110. Compare also my learned and amiable friend's edition in original Greek inscription types, cast at his own expense.]
[b] The three similar epithets, "Various of Counsel," "Various in design," "Tortuous in counsel," would justify the doctrine, that the whole Trinity was comprehended in this "Prometheus the power of God, and Prometheus the wisdom of God." (1 Cor. 1-24.) "His name shall be called, Wonderful Counsellor, the mighty God." (Isa. 9-6.) Lactantius admits, that though what the poets delivered concerning the creation of man was corrupted, it was not different in effect from the truth as held by Christians; for in that they have asserted that man was created out of clay by Prometheus, they were not wrong as to the fact, but only as to the name of the Creator. - Lactan [.] lib. ii. c. 10. - Kortholto Pagano Obtrectatore, Citante p 34.] [LN., Lactantis, Lucius Caecilius Firmainus, around 250 to 325AD. Was an early Christian author and adviser to Emperor Constantine, his most important book was the 'the Divine institutes'.]
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next Chapter 29. part one; The Sign of the Cross.