Томас де Квинси
The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1
II. THE LOVELIEST SIGHT FOR WOMAN'S EYES
The loveliest sight that a woman's eye opens upon in this world is her first-born child; and the holiest sight upon which the eyes of God settle in Almighty sanction and perfect blessing is the love which soon kindles between the mother and her infant: mute and speechless on the one side, with no language but tears and kisses and looks. Beautiful is the philosophy … which arises out of that reflection or passion connected with the transition that has produced it. First comes the whole mighty drama of love, purified6 ever more and more, how often from grosser feelings, yet of necessity through its very elements, oscillating between the finite and the infinite: the haughtiness of womanly pride, so dignified, yet not always free from the near contagion of error; the romance so ennobling, yet not always entirely reasonable; the tender dawn of opening sentiments, pointing to an idea in all this which it neither can reach nor could long sustain. Think of the great storm of agitation, and fear and hope, through which, in her earliest days of womanhood, every woman must naturally pass, fulfilling a law of her Creator, yet a law which rests upon her mixed constitution; animal, though indefinitely ascending to what is non-animal—as a daughter of man, frail … and imperfect, yet also as a daughter of God, standing erect, with eyes to the heavens. Next, when the great vernal passover of sexual tenderness and romance has fulfilled its purpose, we see, rising as a Phœnix from this great mystery of ennobled instincts, another mystery, much more profound, more affecting, more divine—not so much a rapture as a blissful repose of a Sabbath, which swallows up the more perishing story of the first; forcing the vast heart of female nature through stages of ascent, forcing it to pursue the transmigrations of the Psyche from the aurelic condition, so glowing in its colour, into the winged creature which mixes with the mystery of the dawn, and ascends to the altar of the infinite heavens, rising by a ladder of light from that sympathy which God surveys with approbation; and even more so as He beholds it self-purifying under His Christianity to that sympathy which needs no purification, but is the holiest of things on this earth, and that in which God most reveals Himself through the nature of humanity.
Well is it for the glorification of human nature that through these the vast majority of women must for ever pass; well also that, by placing its sublime germs near to female youth, God thus turns away by anticipation the divinest of disciplines from the rapacious absorption of the grave. Time is found—how often—for those who are early summoned into rendering back their glorious privilege, who yet have tasted in its first-fruits the paradise of maternal love.
And pertaining also to this part of the subject, I will tell you a result of my own observations of no light importance to women.
It is this: Nineteen times out of twenty I have remarked that the true paradise of a female life in all ranks, not too elevated for constant intercourse with the children, is by no means the years of courtship, nor the earliest period of marriage, but that sequestered chamber of her experience, in which a mother is left alone through the day, with servants perhaps in a distant part of the house, and (God be thanked!) chiefly where there are no servants at all, she is attended by one sole companion, her little first-born angel, as yet clinging to her robe, imperfectly able to walk, still more imperfect in its prattling and innocent thoughts, clinging to her, haunting her wherever she goes as her shadow, catching from her eye the total inspiration of its little palpitating heart, and sending to hers a thrill of secret pleasure so often as its little fingers fasten on her own. Left alone from morning to night with this one companion, or even with three, still wearing the graces of infancy; buds of various stages upon the self-same tree, a woman, if she has the great blessing of approaching such a luxury of paradise, is moving—too often not aware that she is moving—through the divinest section of her life. As evening sets in, the husband, through all walks of life, from the highest professional down to that of common labour, returns home to vary her modes of conversation by such thoughts and interests as are more consonant with his more extensive capacities of intellect. But by that time her child (or her children) will be reposing on the little couch, and in the morning, duly as the sun ascends in power, she sees before her a long, long day of perfect pleasure in this society which evening will bring to her, but which is interwoven with every fibre of her sensibilities. This condition of noiseless, quiet love is that, above all, which God blesses and smiles upon.
III. WHY THE PAGANS COULD NOT INVEST THEIR GODS WITH ANY IOTA OF GRANDEUR
It is not for so idle a purpose as that of showing the Pagan backsliding—that is too evident—but for a far subtler purpose, and one which no man has touched, viz., the incapacity of creating grandeur for the Pagans, even with carte blanche in their favour, that I write this paper. Nothing is more incomprehensible than the following fact—nothing than this when mastered and understood is more thoroughly instructive—the fact that having a wide, a limitless field open before them, free to give and to take away at their own pleasure, the Pagans could not invest their Gods with any iota of grandeur. Diana, when you translate her into the Moon, then indeed partakes in all the natural grandeur of a planet associated with a dreamy light, with forests, forest lawns, etc., or the wild accidents of a huntress. But the Moon and the Huntress are surely not the creations of Pagans, nor indebted to them for anything but the murderous depluming which Pagan mythology has operated upon all that is in earth or in the waters that are under the earth. Now, why could not the ancients raise one little scintillating glory in behalf of their monstrous deities? So far are they from thus raising Jupiter, that he is sometimes made the ground of nature (not, observe, for any positive reason that they had for any relation that Jupiter had to Creation, but simply for the negative reason that they had nobody else)—never does Jupiter seem more disgusting than when as just now in a translation of the 'Batrachia' I read that Jupiter had given to frogs an amphibious nature, making the awful, ancient, first-born secrets of Chaos to be his, and thus forcing into contrast and remembrance his odious personality.
Why, why, why could not the Romans, etc., make a grandeur for their Gods? Not being able to make them grand, they daubed them with finery. All that people imagine in the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias—they themselves confer. But an apostle is beyond their reach.
When, be it well observed, the cruel and dark religions are far more successful than those of Greece and Rome, for Osiris, etc., by the might of the devil, of darkness, are truly terrific. Cybele stands as a middle term half-way between these dark forms and the Greek or Roman. Pluto is the very model of a puny attempt at darkness utterly failing. He looks big; he paints himself histrionically; he soots his face; he has a masterful dog, nothing half so fearful as a wolf-dog or bloodhound; and he raises his own manes, poor, stridulous Struldbrugs.
Vainly did the ancient Pagans fight against this fatal weakness.
They may confer upon their Gods glittering titles of 'ambrosial,' 'immortal'; but the human mind is careless of positive assertion, and of clamorous iteration in however angry a tone, when silently it observes stealing out of facts already conceded some fatal consequence at war with all these empty pretensions—mortal even in the virtual conceptions of the Pagans. If the Pagan Gods were really immortal, if essentially they repelled the touch of mortality, and not through the adulatory homage of their worshippers causing their true aspects to unsettle or altogether to disappear in clouds of incense, then how came whole dynasties of Gods to pass away, and no man could tell whither? If really they defied the grave, then how was it that age and the infirmities of age passed upon them like the shadow of eclipse upon the golden faces of the planets? If Apollo were a beardless young man, his father was not such—he was in the vigour of maturity; maturity is a flattering term for expressing it, but it means past youth—and his grandfather was superannuated. But even this grandfather, who had been once what Apollo was now, could not pretend to more than a transitory station in the long succession of Gods. Other dynasties, known even to man, there had been before his; and elder dynasties before that, of whom only rumours and suspicions survived. Even this taint, however, this direct access of mortality, was less shocking to my mind in after-years than the abominable fact of its reflex or indirect access in the shape of grief for others who had died. I need not multiply instances; they are without end. The reader has but to throw his memory back upon the anguish of Jupiter, in the 'Iliad,' for the approaching death of his son Sarpedon, and his vain struggles to deliver himself from this ghastly net; or upon Thetis, fighting against the vision of her matchless Pelides caught in the same vortex; or upon the Muse in Euripides, hovering in the air and wailing over her young Rhesus, her brave, her beautiful one, of whom she trusted that he had been destined to confound the Grecian host. What! a God, and liable to the pollution of grief! A Goddess, and standing every hour within the peril of that dismal shadow!
Here in one moment mark the recoil, the intolerable recoil, upon the Pagan mind, of that sting which vainly they pretended to have conquered on behalf of their Pantheon. Did the reader fancy that I was fatiguing myself with any task so superfluous as that of proving the Gods of the heathen to be no Gods? In that case he has not understood me. My object is to show that the ancients, that even the Greeks, could not support the idea of immortality. The idea crumbled to pieces under their touch. In realizing that idea unconsciously, they suffered elements to slip in which defeated its very essence in the result; and not by accident: other elements they could not have found. Doubtless an insolent Grecian philosopher would say, 'Surely, I knew that immortality meant the being liberated from mortality.' Yes, but this is no more than the negative idea, and the demand is to give the affirmative idea. Or perhaps I shall better explain my meaning by substituting other terms with my own illustration of their value. I say, then, that the Greek idea of immortality involves only the nominal idea, not the real idea. Now, the nominal idea (or, which is the same thing, the nominal definition) is that which simply sketches the outline of an object in the shape of a problem; whereas the real definition fills up that outline and solves that problem. The nominal definition states the conditions under which an object would be realized for the mind; the real definition executes those conditions. The nominal definition, that I may express it most briefly and pointedly, puts a question; the real definition answers that question. Thus, to give our illustration, the insoluble problem of squaring the circle presents us with a good nominal idea. There is no vagueness at all in the idea of such a square; it is that square which, when a given circle is laid before you, would present the same superficial contents in such exquisite truth of repetition that the eye of God could detect no shadow of more or of less. Nothing can be plainer than the demand—than the question. But as to the answer, as to the real conditions under which this demand can be realized, all the wit of man has not been able to do more than approach it. Or, again, the idea of a perfect commonwealth, clear enough as a nominal idea, is in its infancy as a real idea. Or, perhaps, a still more lively illustration to some readers may be the idea of perpetual motion. Nominally—that is, as an idea sketched problem-wise—what is plainer? You are required to assign some principle of motion such that it shall revolve through the parts of a mechanism self-sustained. Suppose those parts to be called by the names of our English alphabet, and to stand in the order of our alphabet, then A is through B C D, etc., to pass down with its total power upon Z, which reciprocally is to come round undiminished upon A B C, etc., for ever. Never was a nominal definition of what you want more simple and luminous. But coming to the real definition, and finding that every letter in succession must still give something less than is received—that O, for instance, cannot give to P all which it received from N—then no matter for the triviality of the loss in each separate case, always it is gathering and accumulating; your hands drop down in despair; you feel that a principle of death pervades the machinery; retard it you may, but come it will at last. And a proof remains behind, as your only result, that whilst the nominal definition may sometimes run before the real definition for ages, and yet finally be overtaken by it, in other cases the one flies hopelessly before the pursuit of the other, defies it, and never will be overtaken to the end of time.
That fate, that necessity, besieged the Grecian idea of immortality. Rise from forgotten dust, my Plato; Stagyrite, stand up from the grave; Anaxagoras, with thy bright, cloudless intellect that searched the skies, Heraclitus, with thy gloomy, mysterious intellect that fathomed the deeps, come forward and execute for me this demand. How shall that immortality, which you give, which you must give as a trophy of honour to your Pantheon, sustain itself against the blights from those humanities which also, by an equal necessity, starting from your basis, give you must to that Pantheon? How will you prevent the sad reflux of that tide which finally engulfs all things under any attempt to execute the nominal idea of a Deity? You cannot do it. Weave your divinities in that Grecian loom of yours, and no skill in the workmanship, nor care that wisdom can devise, will ever cure the fatal flaws in the texture: for the mortal taint lies not so much in your work as in the original errors of your loom.
IV. ON PAGAN SACRIFICES
Ask any well-informed man at random what he supposes to have been done with the sacrifices, he will answer that really he never thought about it, but that naturally he supposes the flesh was burnt upon the altars. Not at all, reader; a sacrifice to the Gods meant universally a banquet to man. He who gave a splendid public dinner announced in other words that he designed to celebrate a sacrificial rite. This was of course. He, on the other hand, who announced a sacrificial pomp did in other words proclaim by sound of trumpet that he gave a dinner. This was of necessity. Hence, when Agamemnon offers a hecatomb to Jupiter, his brother Menelaus walks in to dinner, ἁχλητος, without invitation. As a brother, we are told by Homer that no invitation was required. He had the privilege of what in German is beautifully called 'ein Kind des Hauses,' a child of the house. This dispensation from the necessity of a formal invitation Homer explains, but as to explanation how he knew that there was a dinner, that he passes over as superfluous. A vast herd of oxen could not be sacrificed without open and public display of the preparation, and that a human banquet must accompany a divine sacrifice—this was so much a self-evident truth that Homer does not trouble himself to make so needless an explanation.
Hence, therefore, a case of legislation in St. Paul's Christian administration, which I will venture to say few readers understand. Take the Feast of Ephesus. Here, as in all cities of Asia Minor and Greece, the Jews lived in great numbers. The universal hospitality over all these regions was exhibited in dinners (δεἱπνα). Now, it happened not sometimes, but always, that he who gave a dinner had on the same day made a sacrifice at the Great Temple; nay, the dinner was always part of the sacrifice, and thus the following dilemma arose. Scruples of eating part of sacrifices were absolutely unintelligible, except as insults to Ephesus. To deny the existence of Diana had no meaning in the ears of an Ephesian. All that he did understand was, that if you happened to be a hater of Ephesus, you must hate the guardian deity of Ephesus. And the sole inference he could collect from your refusing to eat what had been hallowed to Diana was—that you hated Ephesus. The dilemma, therefore, was this: either grant a toleration of this practice, or else farewell to all amicable intercourse for the Jews with the citizens. In fact, it was to proclaim open war if this concession were refused. A scruple of conscience might have been allowed for, but a scruple of this nature could find no allowance in any Pagan city whatever. Moreover, it had really no foundation. The truth is far otherwise than that Pagan deities were dreams. Far from it. They were as real as any other beings. The accommodation, therefore, which St. Paul most wisely granted was—to eat socially, without regard to any ceremony through which the food might have passed. So long as the Judaizing Christian was no party to the religious ceremonies, he was free of all participation in idolatry. Since if the mere open operation of a Pagan process could transform into the character of an accomplice one who with no assenting heart ate of the food, in that case Christ Himself might by possibility have shared in an idolatrous banquet, and we Christians at this day in the East Indies might for months together become unconscious accomplices in the foul idolatries of the Buddhist and Brahminical superstitions.
But so essentially were the convivial banquets of the Pagans interwoven with their religious rites, so essentially was a great dinner a great offering to the Gods, and vice versâ—a great offering to the Gods a great dinner—that the very ministers and chief agents in religion were at first the same. Cocus, or μαγειροστ, was the very same person as the Pope, or presiding arbiter in succession to a Pope. 'Sunt eadem,' says Casaubon, 'Cocus et Pope.' And of this a most striking example is yet extant in Athenæus. From the correspondence which for many centuries was extant between Alexander the Great, when embarked upon his great expeditions, and his royal mother Olympias, who remained in Macedon, was one from which we have an extract even at this day, where; he, as we learn from the letter quoted, had been urging his mother to purchase for him a good cook. And what was made the test supreme of his skill? Why, this, that he should be θυσιὡν ἑμπειροστ, an artist able to dress a sacrificial banquet. What he meant is this: I do not want an ordinary cook, who might be equal to the preparation of a plain (or, what is the same thing, secular) dinner, but a person qualified or competent to take charge of a hecatomb dinner. His mother's reply addresses itself to that one point only: Πελιγυα τον μαγειρον λαβε ἁπδ θηστ μητοστ, which is in effect: 'A cook is it that you want? Why, then, you cannot do better than take mine. The man is a reliable table of sacrifices; he knows the whole ritual of those great official and sacred dinners given by the late king, your father. He is acquainted with the whole cuisine of the more mysterious religions, the Orgiacs' (probably from the neighbouring Thrace), 'and all the great ceremonies and observances practised at Olympia, and even what you may eat on the great St. Leger Day. So don't lose sight of the arrangement, but take the man as a present, from me, your affectionate mother, and be sure to send off an express for him at your earliest convenience.'
Professor Robertson Smith in his latest work has well pointed out that even with the Hebrews the sacrifices were eaten in common till the seventh century b.c., when the sin-offerings, in a time of great national distress, came to be slain before Jehovah, and 'none but the priests ate of the flesh,' a phase of sacrificial specialization which marks the beginning of the exclusive sacerdotalism of the Jews.—Ed.
