Thursday, November 21, 2019
Unsatisfied Hunger
George Santayana (1863-1952), "The Homeric Hymns," Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Scribner, 1924), pp. 24-48 (at 24):
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We of this generation look back upon a variety of religious conceptions and forms of worship, and a certain unsatisfied hunger in our own souls attaches our attention to the spectacle.Id. (at 35-36):
These were truly, as we see, the hymns of a levitical patriotism. With Homeric breadth and candour they dilated on the miracles, privileges, and immunities of the sacred places and their servitors, and they thus kept alive in successive generations an awe mingled with familiar interest toward divine persons and things which is characteristic of that more primitive age. Gods and men were then nearer together, and both yielded more frankly to the tendency, inherent in their nature, to resemble one another.
