The vast myth of the Ring is related in full several times in each of the three main dramas, with ruthless disregard for the otherwise magnificent dramatic effect of the whole; hosts of original dramatic and ethical ideas, with which Wagner's brain was even more fertile than his voluminous prose works would indicate, assert themselves at all points, only to be thwarted by repeated attempts to allegorize the philosophy of Schopenhauer; all efforts to read a consistent scheme, ethical or philosophical, into the result are doomed to failure; but all this matters little, so long as we have Wagner's unfailing later resources in those higher dramatic verities which present to us emotions and actions, human and divine, as things essentially complex and conflicting, inevitable as natural laws, incalculable as natural phenomena.
Tatian does not deny the stories of the Greek mythology - indeed he protests against any attempt to allegorize it - but he insists that these stories are the record of the deeds of demons and have no religious value.
Of the many paradoxes in the Divine Legation, few are more extravagant than the theory that Virgil, in the sixth book of his Aeneid, intended to allegorize, in the visit of his hero and the Sibyl to the shades, the initiation of Aeneas, as a lawgiver, into the Eleusinian mysteries.
If even now philosophers and theologians cannot resist the temptation to allegorize, how inevitable was it that this course should be pursued by early Jewish theologians!
In this sense he was the pattern if not the " father " of all such as allegorize and reconcile.
