Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/444

 'transgressors of the divine law' might become automatically excommunicate. Certain deadly sins deserved the ecclesiastical curse and, whether it were pronounced or not, incurred the same punishment after death. The list of such sins was certainly extended by the Church so as to include, for example, apostasy, omission of baptism, the more reprehensible acts of sorcery, and suicide, which was, and still is sometimes, a bar to Christian burial. But at the same time the number of those sins which were actually left to work out their own curse was probably diminished; the Church constituted herself judge, and in most cases formally sentenced the sinner to that punishment which the sin alone, without her condemnation, was popularly believed to entail. If then we strip this doctrine of its ecclesiastical dress and put out of sight the intervention of an hierarchy arrogating to itself the office of binding and loosing, there remains the simple belief that certain transgressors of the divine law, certain sinners of deadly sins, were ipso facto accursed and condemned to incorruption.

Is not this precisely the Aeschylean doctrine? Pelasgus, if he should consent unto the violence of those suitors who sought the daughters of Danaus in unhallowed wedlock, if he should defy Zeus the God of suppliants and set at naught those other deities at whose altar his kinswomen sat—would not he indeed be a transgressor of the divine law? He acknowledges it himself, and, conformably to the doctrine enunciated, anticipates that Death himself will turn Avenger and free him not when dead. Orestes, owing to his murdered father the sacred duty of vengeance and expressly urged by Apollo to perform it—would not he too be a transgressor of the divine law, if he should fail or flag in his enterprise of blood? Fitly then did Apollo threaten him that after manifold troubles in life he should die damned to incorruption. The same Orestes, viewed now not from Apollo's standpoint but from that of the Erinyes, bloodguilty with his mother's murder—had he not perpetrated a deadly sin, was he not a transgressor of the divine law? Rightly then may his foes exult that he shall not escape, but, though he be fled from them beneath the earth, still 'hath he no freeing.' In fine, Aeschylus agrees, save for the mediaeval multiplication of deadly sins, with the doctrine of the Church; and this agreement is proof that in the popular creed of