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Prayer on the Acropolis - (Ernest Renan 1865 - English translation)
“O nobility! O simple and true beauty! Goddess whose worship signifies reason and wisdom, you whose temple is an eternal lesson in conscience and sincerity, I arrive late at the threshold of your mysteries; I bring much remorse to your altar. To find you, it took me endless searches. The initiation that you conferred on the nascent Athenian by a smile, I conquered it by dint of reflection, at the cost of long efforts. " I was born, goddess with blue eyes, of barbarous parents, among the good and virtuous Cimmerians who live on the edge of a dark sea, bristling with rocks, always battered by storms. You hardly know the sun there; the flowers are the sea mosses, algae and colorful seashells found at the bottom of solitary bays. The clouds appear colorless there, and even the joy is a little sad; but fountains of cold water issue from the rock, and the eyes of young girls there are like those green fountains where, against the backdrop of wavy grass, the sky is reflected.
My fathers, as far as we can ascend, were dedicated to distant navigations, in seas your Argonauts did not know. I heard, when I was young, the songs of the polar voyages; I was lulled to remember the floating ice, the misty seas like milk, the islands populated by birds which sing at their hours and which, taking their flight together, obscure the sky.
Priests of a foreign cult, who came from the Syrians from Palestine, took care of raising me. These priests were wise and holy. They taught me the long stories of Cronos, who created the world, and of his son, who is said to have traveled on earth. Their temples are three times high as yours, oh Eurhythmia, and like forests; only they are not solid; they fall into ruin after five or six hundred years; these are the fantasies of barbarians, who imagine that we can do something good outside the rules that you have traced to your inspired, oh reason. But these temples pleased me; I had not studied your divine art; I found god there. They sang hymns that I still remember: "Hail, star of the sea, ... queen of those who moan in this valley of tears." Or: "mystic rose, ivory tower, golden house, morning star ..."
Here, goddess, when I remember these songs, my heart melts, I become almost apostate. Forgive me this ridiculous; you cannot imagine the charm which the barbarian magicians have put in these verses, and how much it costs me to follow reason quite naked.
And then if you only knew how difficult it has become to serve you! All nobility has disappeared. The Scythians conquered the world. There is no longer a republic of free men; there are only kings born of heavy blood, majesties at whom you would smile. Heavy Hyperboreans call light those who serve you ... a formidable pambéotia, a league of all the nonsense, spreads over the world a leaden cover, under which one suffocates. Even those who honor you, they must pity you! Do you remember that Caledonian who, fifty years ago, smashed your temple with a hammer to take it to Thule?
So do they all ... I wrote, according to some of the rules that you like, O Theoneo, the life of the young god whom I served in my childhood; they treat me like an Evhemere; they write to me to ask me what goal I have proposed; they only estimate what serves to make their tables of trapezites fruitful. And why do we write the life of the gods, O heaven! If not to make people love the divine who was in them, and to show that this divine still lives and will live eternally in the heart of humanity?
Do you remember that day, under the Archontate of Dionysodorus, when an ugly little Jew, speaking the Greek of the Syrians, came here, walked through your courts without understanding you, read your inscriptions all crookedly and thought to find an altar in your enclosure? dedicated to a god who would be the unknown god. well, this little Jew won it; for a thousand years you have been called an idol, O truth; for a thousand years the world has been a desert where no flower sprouted. During this time you are silent, O Salpinx, bugle of thought. Goddess of order, image of celestial stability, we were guilty of loving you, and today that by dint of conscientious work we have managed to get closer to you, we are accused of having committed a crime against the human spirit by breaking the chains that Plato did without.
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You alone are young, O Cora; you alone are pure, o virgin; you alone are healthy, O Hygeia; you alone are strong, oh victory. The cities, you keep them, O Promachos; you have what it takes of March, O Aréa; peace is your goal, o pacific. Legislator, source of just constitutions; democracy, you whose fundamental dogma is that all good comes from the people, and that, wherever there is no people to nourish and inspire genius, there is nothing, teach us to extract the diamond from the unclean crowds. Providence of Jupiter, divine worker, mother of all industry, protector of labor, O Ergané, you who make the nobility of the civilized worker and put him so much above the lazy Scythian; wisdom, you whom Zeus gave birth after having withdrawn into himself, after having breathed deeply; you who live in your father, entirely united to his essence; you who are his companion and his conscience; energy of Zeus, spark which kindles and maintains fire in heroes and men of genius, make us accomplished spiritualists. The day when the Athenians and the Rhodians fought for the sacrifice, you choose to live among the Athenians, as wiser. Your father, however, made Plutus descend in a golden cloud over the city of the Rhodians, because they had also paid homage to his daughter. The Rhodians were rich; but the Athenians had wit, that is to say, true joy, eternal gaiety, the divine childhood of the heart.
The world will only be saved by returning to you, by repudiating its barbaric ties. Let's run, let's come in a troop. What a beautiful day it will be when all the cities that have taken debris from your temple, Venice, Paris, London, Copenhagen, will repair their thefts, form sacred theories to report the debris they possess, saying: "Forgive us , goddess! It was to save them from the evil spirits of the night, ”and will rebuild your walls to the sound of the flute, to expiate the crime of the infamous Lysander! Then they will go to Sparta to curse the soil where this mistress of dark errors was, and to insult her because she is no more.
Close in you, I will resist my fatal counselors; to my skepticism, which makes me doubt the people; to my uneasiness of mind, which, when the truth is found, makes me seek it again; at my fancy, which, after reason has spoken, prevents me from being at rest. O Archégète, ideal that the man of genius incarnates in his masterpieces, I prefer to be the last in your house than the first elsewhere. Yes, I will attach myself to the stylobate of your temple; I will forget all discipline except yours, I will be stylite on your columns, my cell will be on your architrave. Something more difficult! For you, I will become, if I can, intolerant, partial. I will only love you. I'll learn your language, unlearn the rest. I will be unfair for what does not affect you; I will make myself the servant of the last of your sons. The actual inhabitants of the land which you gave to Erechtheus, I will exalt them, I will flatter them. I will try to love even their faults; I will persuade myself, O Hippia, that they descend the horsemen who celebrate up there, on the marble of your frieze, their eternal feast. I will tear from my heart every fiber that is not reason and pure art. I will cease to love my illnesses, to take pleasure in my fever. Support my firm words, oh salutary; help me, you who save!
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What difficulties, indeed, I foresee! How many habits of mind I will have to change! How many charming memories I will have to tear from my heart! I will try; but I am not sure of myself. I got to know you late, perfect beauty. I will have feedback, weaknesses. A philosophy, undoubtedly perverse, led me to believe that the good and the bad, the pleasure and the pain, the beautiful and the ugly, the reason and the madness are transformed into each other by shades as indistinguishable as those of the neck of the dove. To love nothing, to absolutely hate nothing, then becomes wisdom. If a society, if a philosophy, if a religion had possessed absolute truth, this society, this philosophy, this religion would have conquered the others and would live alone today. All those who until now believed they were right were wrong, we can see it clearly. Can we without foolish arrogance believe that the future will not judge us as we judge the past? These are the blasphemies that my deeply spoiled mind suggests to me. Literature which, like yours, would be wholesome in every way, would now only excite boredom. You smile at my naivety. Yes, boredom ... we are corrupt: what to do about it? I will go further, orthodox goddess, I will tell you about the deepest depravity of my heart. Reason and common sense are not enough. There is poetry in the frozen Strymon and in the intoxication of Thrace. There will come ages when your disciples will pass for the disciples of boredom. The world is bigger than you think. If you had seen the snows of the pole and the mysteries of the southern sky, your forehead, O goddess always calm, would not be so serene; your head, larger, would embrace various kinds of beauty. You are true, pure, perfect; your marble has no stain; but the temple of Hagia-Sophia, which is in Byzantium, also produces a divine effect with its bricks and plaster. He is the image of the vault of the sky. He will collapse; but, if your cella were to be large enough to contain a crowd, it would collapse too.
A huge river of oblivion draws us into a nameless abyss. O abyss, you are the only god. The tears of all peoples are real tears; the dreams of all wise men contain an element of truth. Everything here below is only a symbol and a dream. The gods pass like men, and it would not be good if they were eternal. The faith that we had must never be a chain. We get off on it when we carefully roll it up in the purple shroud where the dead gods sleep.
Ernest Renan 1865
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