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"You have in those words explained the thing which Europeans least understand in all Dante: his Beatrice. Yes, Beatrice, that ideal figure, the queen of the poet's fancies, chosen above all the elect, consecrated with tears, deified by memory, and for ever young in the presence of ineffectual desire!" "Prince," said the Duke to Emilio, "come and sup with me.
Sacrifices were at once offered, and the stone was deified, and received regular worship from that time forward. In B.C. 659, a third Duke was in a trance for five days, when he saw a vision of God, and received from Him instructions as to matters then pressing. For many generations afterwards the story ran that the Duke had been up to Heaven. This became a favourite theme for romancers.
In the religion of the Greeks, the æsthetic and moral character of the Grecian people was deified, and in the Romans also we see how that which men value most exerts an influence upon their worship of the divine.
It is, indeed, no small gain in the rude ages of warring instincts and intuitions, when there is as yet no science to define them, and compare them, and pronounce from its calm height its eternal axioms here when the world is a camp, and hostilities are deified, and mankind is in arms when all the moral terms are still wrapped in the confusion of the first outgoing of the perplexed, unanalysed human motivity it is no small gain to get the word of the nobler intuitions outspoken, to get the word of the divine law of man's nature, his essential law pronounced even in rudest ages overawing, commanding with its awful divinity the intenser motivity of the lesser nature able to summon, in rudest ages, to its ideal heights, those colossal heroic forms, that cast their long shadows over the tracts of time, to tell us what type it is that humanity aspires to.
In all countries, at a certain stage in the history of religion, the transference of female deified power to mortal man may be observed. In the attempt to change Seth or Typhon into a male God may be noted perhaps the first effort in Egypt to dethrone, or lessen the female power in the god-idea.
Christianity assigns to women their proper place in society, neither admitting of their being tyrannized over by despotic authority, nor impiously honoured by a ridiculous adulation. They are to be viewed as help meets, not, as slaves; to be respected and loved, but not deified.
Phoenician and Greek cities brought to this scene new factors and new forces: the rudiments of science; trade and commerce, including a money economy, accounting and cost keeping; the elements of economic organization; the conduct of public affairs by governments based on law rather than on the whim and word of a deified potentate; and the construction of cities and city states built on these foundations.
The city of Cyzicus was next accused, "of not observing the established worship of the deified Augustus;" with additional crimes, "of violences committed upon some Roman citizens."
To be the most beautiful man in Greece was in the eyes of a Greek the height of human felicity; and with the Greeks, beauty necessarily included strength. So ardently did this gifted people admire corporeal perfection that they actually worshipped it. According to Herodotos, a young Sicilian was deified on account of his beauty, and after his death altars were raised to him.
Instead of the Jesus of the gospels, they give us, as the actual Man, Jesus the Sage, or the Visionary, or the Prophet, or the Philanthropist, who, they think, was subsequently deified by His followers. Such reconstructions handle the sources arbitrarily, eliminating from even the earliest of them that which clashes with their preconceptions.
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