5. Hercules: Joves great son (8). The use of the
patronymic ('Son of,'
as in John-son, Robert-son, Richard-son) identifies Hercules as
a
god-man, the son of Zeus by a mortal mother (Alcmene). In the same way,
Jesus, the son of Mary, was also the Son of God. The linkage thus
created between Hercules and Christ is typological.
Strictly speaking,
a type is a person, thing, or
action in the Old Testament that
foreshadows the Messiah (Gk. Christos)
in the New Testament, who is
said to fulfill and clarify the meaning of the type. For
example, in
Paradise Lost, 12.240-41,
"Moses in figure" foreshadows the Mediator,
the God-man. In addition to biblically sanctioned types, Renaissance
poets frequently treated classical fables
as foreshadowing New Testament truths. Hercules rescuing Alcestis and
Orpheus, who almost rescued Eurydice, his wife, from the Underworld,
were favorite subjects for typological interpretation. Alexander Ross
is typical of Renaissance mythographers when he reads Orpheus as a type
of the New Adam (Christ), at once suggestively like and crucially
unlike the dying and rising Son of God: Christ is "the true Orpheus; .
. . [he] went down to hell to recover the Church his Spouse, who had
lost herself . . . among the Grass and Flowers of pleasure, [and] was
stung by that old serpent the Devil." (Mystogogus
Poeticus, p. 338.)