Pan and Early Christian

Pan and Early Christian | Feb 16 2007

牧神午后贴中关于潘与萨特尔，还有早期基督教的关系有些误会，还
有老方的母狼鞭，我在伊甸写了几个字。怕误了大家情人节兴致，我
单列一线PAN：

Pan was the god of flocks and shepherds. His favorite residence was in Arcadia.

The satyrs were deities of the woods and fields. They were conceived to be covered with bristly hair, their heads decorated with short, sprouting horns, and their feet like goats' feet.

As the name of the god signifies all, Pan came to be considered a symbol of the universe and personification of Nature; and later still to be regarded as a representative of all the gods and of heathenism itself.

Sylvanus and Faunus were Latin divinities.

Milton in his glowing description of the early creation, thus alludes to Pan as the personification of Nature:

"...Universal Pan,
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance,
Led on the eternal spring."

And describing Eve's abode:

"...In shadier bower,
More sacred or sequestered, though but feigned,
Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor nymph
Nor Faunus haunted."

Paradise Lost, B. IV

Nature vs God. Sometimes in our poetical moods we feel disposed to regret the change, and to think that the heart has lost as much as the head has gained by the substitution.

Wordsworth expresses this sentiment:

"...Great God, I'd rather be
A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

Mrs. E. Barrett Browning, a Christian poet, in her poem "The dead Pan" called forth an answer:

"By your beauty which confesses
Some chief Beauty conquering you,
By our grand heroic guesses
Through your falsehood at the True,
We sill weep not! earth shall roll
Heir to each god's aureole,
Pan, Pan is dead."

"Earth outgrows the mythic fancies
Sung beside her in her youth;
And those debonaire romances
Sound but dull beside the truth.
Phoebus' chariot course is run!
Look up, poets, to the sun!
Pan, Pan is dead."

These lines are founded on an early Christian tradition that when the heavenly host told the shepherds at Bethlehem of the birth of Christ, a deep groan, heard through all the isles of Greece, told that the great Pan was dead, and that all the royalty of Olympus was dethroned and the several deities were sent wandering in cold and darkness. So Milton in his "Hymn on Nativity":

"The lonely mountains o'er
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale,
Edged with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flower-enwoven tresses torn,
The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn."

PAN简直是上帝之前的上帝了，就说“自然”吧，有强大的教派，不可
以Satyr等视之。

天主教研究天文地理，就屈从了潘！