Greek mythology

Anthropomirphism

"The dark night of the soul," no less than the Götterdämmerung, was, in the

ancient mind, just the condition of the soul's embodiment in physical forms. Taylor reasons that Minerva (the rational faculty, as Goddess of Wisdom) was by her attachment to body given wholly "to the dangerous employment and abandons the proper characteristics of her nature for the destructive revels of desire." All this is the dialectic statement of the main theme of ancient theology - the incarnation of the godlike intellect and divine soul in the darksome conditions

of animal bodies.

Modern Analysis

Similarly it is that during those periods of spiritual dryness we can, if we

have so trained ourselves, commune with God through various forms of Art, for Art fundamentally is a revelation of the Divine Nature, it reveals what Plato called the Idea or the Archetype. The ancient Greeks were particularly sensitive to this aspect of Art. If they looked at a statue of Apollo, the sun-god, it was not merely to them a statue of some handsome youth, but there radiated from the statue a mysterious influence, so that they came to feel the influence of God. Similarly with the goddess Minerva; they felt, when there was an adequately beautiful image in a temple, that somehow as they offered their adoration to it, the image was like a wonderful window through which they looked into the Divine

Nature.