 |
 |
 |
The Greek reads MHTHP EOY H ANIKHTO - the Unconquered Mother of God, but is transcribed in lower case letters by Ruskin. Pallas Athena would not be called Mother of God, but she and the Theotokos might be described as ‘unconquered’ with the word in Greek including the sense ‘ever virgin’.
This explicit reference to idolatry appears to be the only one in M and M2. It was important enough to Ruskin to be given a later side heading and an entry in the index. There are no explicit references to idolatry in Volume 1 of Stones of Venice, but compare the references in Works, 8.35 to the ‘idolatrous Romanist’ and the mortal dangers faced by the Israelite who showed ‘sympathy with the Idolatrous Egyptian’. The assumptions on which the reference in M appears to be based may be compared with the more detailed working out of his views in the appendix to Stones of Venice Volume 2 beginning at Works, 10.450. For his views twenty-one years after M see Works, 20.219 [n/a] for his summary of the issues to be considered in the lecture beginning at Works, 20.220 [n/a].
On Ruskin’s views some thirty years after M on St Marks as a ‘treasury of art’ and a ‘codex of religion’ and the relationship in that context between Athena and the Virgin see Works, 24.415:
4. Thus, beyond all measure of value as a treasury of art, it is also, beyond all other volumes, venerable as a codex of religion. Just as the white foliage and birds on their golden ground are descendants, in direct line, from the ivory and gold of Phidias, so the Greek pictures and inscriptions, whether in mosaic or sculpture, throughout the building, record the unbroken unity of spiritual influence from the Father of light-or the races whose own poets had said “We also are his offspring”-down to the day when all their gods, not slain, but changed into new creatures, became the types to them of the mightier Christian spirits; and Perseus became St. George, and Mars St. Michael, and Athena the Madonna, and Zeus their revealed Father in Heaven.
In all the history of human mind, there is nothing so wonderful, nothing so eventful, as this spiritual change. So inextricably is it interwoven with the most divine, the most distant threads of human thought and effort, that, while none of the thoughts of St. Paul or the visions of St. John can be understood without our understanding first the imagery familiar to the Pagan worship of the Greeks, on the other hand no understanding of the real purport of Greek religion can be securely reached without watching the translation of its myths into the message of Christianity.
|
|
|
[Version 0.05: May 2008]