It must not be supposed, however, that the popular superstition
described by Plato, however characteristic it may be of the point of
view of the Greeks, represents the highest reach of their thought on the
subject of guilt. No profounder utterances are to be found on this theme
than those of the great poets and thinkers of Greece, who, without
rejecting the common beliefs of their time, transformed them by the
insight of their genius into a new and deeper significance. Specially
striking in this connection is the poetry of the tragedian Aeschylus;
and it will be well worth our while to pause for a moment and endeavour
to realise his position.
Guilt and its punishment is the constant theme of the dramas of
Aeschylus; and he has exhausted the resources of his genius in the
attempt to depict the horror of the avenging powers, who under the name
of the Erinyes, or Furies, persecute and torment the criminal. Their
breath is foul with the blood on which they feed; from their rheumy eyes
a horrible humour drops; daughters of night and clad in black they fly
without wings; god and man and the very beasts shun them; their place is
with punishment and torture, mutilation, stoning and breaking of necks.
And into their mouth the poet has put words which seem to breathe the
very spirit of the Jewish scriptures.
"Come now let us preach to the sons of men; yea, let us tell them of our
vengeance; yea, let us all make mention of justice.
"Whoso showeth hands that are undefiled, lo, he shall suffer nought of
us for ever, but shall go unharmed to his ending.
"But if he hath sinned, like unto this man, and covereth hands that are
blood-stained: then is our witness true to the slain man.
"And we sue for the blood, sue and pursue for it, so that at
the last there is payment.
Even so 'tis written:
(Oh sentence sure!)
"Upon all that wild in wickedness dip hand
In the blood of their birth, in the fount of their flowing:
So shall he pine until the grave receive him--to find no
grace even in the grave!
Sing then the spell,
Sisters of hell;
Chant him the charm
Mighty to harm,
Binding the blood,
Madding the mood;
Such the music that we make:
Quail, ye sons of man, and quake,
Bow the heart, and bend, and break!
This is our ministry marked for us from the beginning;
This is our gift, and our portion apart, and our godhead,
Ours, ours only for ever,
Darkness, robes of darkness, a robe of terror for ever!
Ruin is ours, ruin and wreck;
When to the home
Murder hath come,
Making to cease
Innocent peace;
Then at his beck
Follow we in,
Follow the sin;
And ah! we hold to the end when we begin!"
[Footnote: Aeschyl. Eum. 297.--Translated by Dr. Verrall
(Cambridge, 1885).]
There is no poetry more sublime than this; none more penetrated with the
sense of moral law. But still it is wholly Greek in character. The theme
is not really the conscience of the sinner but the objective consequence
of his crime. "Blood calls for blood," is the poet's text; a man, he
says, must pay for what he does. The tragedy is the punishment of the
guilty, not his inward sense of sin. Orestes, in fact, who is the
subject of the drama with which we are concerned, in a sense was not a
sinner at all. He had killed his mother, it is true, but only to avenge
his father whom she had murdered, and at the express bidding of Apollo.
So far is he from feeling the pangs of conscience that he constantly
justifies his act. He suffers, not because he has sinned but because he
is involved in the curse of his race. For generations back the house of
Atreus had been tainted with blood; murder had called for murder to
avenge it; and Orestes, the last descendant, caught in the net of guilt,
found that his only possibility of right action lay in a crime. He was
bound to avenge his father, the god Apollo had enjoined it; and the
avenging of his father meant the murder of his mother. What he commits,
then, is a crime, but not a sin; and so it is regarded by the poet. The
tragedy, as we have said, centres round an external objective law--
"blood calls for blood." But that is all. Of the internal drama of the
soul with God, the division of the man against himself, the remorse, the
repentance, the new birth, the giving or withholding of grace--of all
this, the essential content of Christian Protestantism, not a trace in
the clear and concrete vision of the Greek. The profoundest of the poets
of Hellas, dealing with the darkest problem of guilt, is true to the
plastic genius of his race. The spirit throws outside itself the law of
its own being; by objective external evidence it learns that doing
involves suffering; and its moral conviction comes to it only when
forced upon it from without by a direct experience of physical evil. Of
Aeschylus, the most Hebraic of the Hellenes, it is as true as of the
average Greek, that in the Puritan meaning of the phrase he had no sense
of sin. And even in treating of him, we must still repeat what we said
at the beginning, that the Greek conception of the relation of man to
the gods is external and mechanical, not inward and spiritual.