An Irish precursor of Dante : $b a study on the Vision of Heaven and Hell ascribed to the eighth-century Irish saint Adamnán, with translation of the Irish text — Dante Alighieri — John Shaqi
An Irish precursor of Dante : $b a study on the Vision of Heaven and Hell ascribed to the eighth-century Irish saint Adamnán, with translation of the Irish text
Dante Alighieri · en
M. Foucart, indeed, holds that the instruction imparted in the
Eleusinian mysteries was _essentiellement pratique; elle avait pour
objet de mettre l’homme en état de se tirer d’affaire lorsqu’il
arrivait dans la demeure d’Hades_ (_op. cit._, p. 63). By ‘practical’
M. Foucart would appear to refer exclusively to those automatic or
quasi-mechanical effects which are supposed, all the world over,
to result from the due performance of certain rites. However, the
testimony of the Greeks themselves, as appears from the examples
about to be cited in connection with our own subject, and from other
evidences that have come down to us, appears to be conclusive as to the
value attributed to the Eleusinian mysteries, at any rate, as an agent
of moral reformation. Sir W. M. Ramsay[44] distinguishes between the
mysteries which had in view the proficiency and advancement of morals,
and the mysteries which were of an exclusively ritual and orgiastic
nature, associating the former kind with Eleusis, and places where
kindred rites were celebrated. In support of this contention, he cites
a number of passages occurring in Greek writers from the fourth century
B.C. onwards, whence it plainly appears that the Greeks regarded a
moral regeneration as a natural concomitant of initiation into the
mysteries, and even as a condition of happiness in the future life.[45]
It is in connection with the mysteries, as representing the moral
and spiritual side of the Greek religion, whencesoever derived, that
the Vision legend becomes impressed with an epideictic character and
develops those elements which had barely existed in germ in the popular
mythology.
In the Dialogues of Plato, the legend already appears as a vehicle of
religious instruction. Plato, indeed, merely gives literary form to
theories which had existed for at least two centuries before his time,
but as he is the first to employ the Vision legend in this connection,
and as it is in his hands that it first assumes its final type,
essentially identical with that of its successors in the Christian
Church, it is convenient to make him a point of departure.