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to the end, I will give him the Morning Star.'[1] Commentators from early times have often taken these words to mean 'I will give him myself,' and though this interpretation seems to me rather unnatural, it is clear that the 'Morning Star' here is something very closely connected with Christ.
The Church might also have put a Christian interpretation on the double character of the planet of Friday. Tennyson fell unconsciously into language curiously suggestive of the Apocalypse when he wrote in In Memoriam:
And a still more striking association might have been found. One of the fancies that gathered round the planet was that as morning star it shone upon the living, as evening star went down to shine upon the dead. This thought is expressed in an epigram attributed to Plato, best known, perhaps, because Shelley by setting it at the head of his Adonais applied it to Keats:
- ↑ Bouché-Leclercq, L'Astrologie Grecque, p. 607, has an attractive explanation of these words. The third heaven which according to the 'Slavonic' Enoch was the place of Paradise is of course the zone of Venus in the normal astrology and indeed according to 'Enoch' himself. Thus to give the Morning Star is to give Paradise. He supports this by 2 Cor. xii, 2–4, where St Paul tells how he was 'caught up as far as the third heaven and into Paradise.'
