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Tuesday, October 6, 2009
The gods of Euripides
In 1969 I was taking a class in reading Greek texts at UCLA. One of the things we read was the play Heracles
From plays like Heracles, Hippolytus, and The Bacchae, we get a well rounded, consistent view of the gods. The gods are real, the gods are powerful, but, unfortunately, our well being is not one of their goals. Indeed, this not unlike the picture of the gods that we get in much of ancient religion. The gods have very human personalities, for better or worse, bestow their favors when they are pleased, and withdraw them, or visit disasters, when they are displeased. They live their immortal lives, next to which our existence is ephemeral and insignificant. This is celebrated by Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom it is the only truly satisfying theodicy in the history of religion. The gods are great just because they genuinely enjoy their lives, and they live them to the full, with all the quarrels, fights, adulteries, and excesses of any confident, irresponsible, and indulgent human adults.
If the rich and powerful could avoid trouble with the law, as indeed they often can, they would or do live lives like this -- a matter of great fascination in the popular media.
But mere humans better watch out. In the Hippolytus and The Bacchae neglect of the requirements of the gods can result in appalling events. Thus, Hippolytus, a devotee of the virgin goddess Artemis, vows to preserve his own virginity and purity out of devotion to her. This seems sensible in relation to the advances of his stepmother Phaedra, but it puts in on the wrong side of the goddess Aphrodite, for whom respect requires sexual activity. In the end Aphrodite kills Hippolytus, and Artemis can only promise vengeance for Hippolytus on Aphrodite's next lover -- Artemis, like her brother Apollo, inflicts silent death by her arrows. Thus, as in much of Greek mythology, mere mortals are caught in the middle, at great cost, of disputes among the gods (the classic case being the Trojan War, which begins as a trivial dispute among the gods).
In the greatest play of Euripides, The Bacchae, we also have a character, King Pentheus of Thebes, trying to maintain certain moral standards. He is scandalized by the behavior of the devotees of the god Dionysius, the Bacchae, whose orgiastic rites violate all propriety. Unfortunately, the god will not be denied, and in the end Pentheus is killed and decapitated by his own frenzied mother. In the 1981 movie My Dinner with Andre, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, both playwrights, are having dinner. Andre recalls how once he wanted to stage The Bacchae and provide an actual human head to be circulated among the audience. Fortunately, this did not happen, but one wonders if this was a real ambition of the real Andre Gregory. It would not be consistent with the conduct of Greek plays, where shocking events take place off stage. Nevertheless, the events of The Bacchae are shocking and could easily be represented in their full horror in any movie version of the play. The power of the god is manifest with a grisly force far beyond what we see in the Hippolyus.
There is thus in Euripides no escaping the gods. Personal devotion and the standards of propriety are irrelevant. There is something owed to Aphrodite or Dionysius which can only be neglected or opposed at one's great peril. To modern judgment this might well be grounds for disbelieving in such gods. However, it was an innovation of Greek philosophy, of philosophers like Xenophanes and Socrates, to see the gods, not only as immortal, powerful, and happy, but also as good and wise. It is a subsequent, modern development to take this as a reducio ad absurdum of the existence of the gods, or of God, at all. If the gods were good, they would protect us; and in great measure this does not seem to happen. The Mighty Hand of the LORD brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, where they were forced to make bricks without straw, while the same God seems to have left Judah, and many others, to die in Nazi death camps, without a hint of miraculous rescue. Thus, those who at least did not lose their lives in the camps nevertheless often left having lost their faith in an apparently indifferent God.
The frequent indifference of the gods, however, would surprise few in ancient religion, and certainly not Euripides. The gods have their own lives to live and enjoy. It can help us to attract their favor, but we also run risk of losing that favor or inciting their wrath. The innovations in belief of Xenophanes and Socrates set the gods up to be discredited by events. Hence the rejection by Nietzsche of gods like those of Socrates. But Nietzsche was also unhappy with Euripides. The reason for that we get in the Heracles. Heracles, the son of Zeus, has returned from his Labors covered with glory and honor. He has not, however, escaped the wrath of Hera, who is jealous of Zeus's adulteries and bastard children, like Heracles. So Hera visits a madness on Heracles (whose name, ironically, means "the fame of Hera"), and he kills his wife and children.
Zeus does nothing in response, and Heracles is thrown back on the comfort of his human father, Amphtiryon. Thus, it avails Heracles nothing that he is the son of a god; and, like Hippolytus and Pentheus, he is caught in the middle of the disputes and grudges that exist among the gods and have nothing to do with us.
Consequently, Euripides sees the value of human life as occurring separately from the gods. Morally indifferent to us, the gods are thus morally discredited, despite their very real existence, power, and danger. It is now common to see moral value as derived from religion and so, ultimately, from God. Nietzsche believes this himself, which means that his self-interested and brawling gods discredit the very existence of traditional altruistic, Judeo-Christian morality. However, although Plato shared the views of Socrates about the gods, his metaphysics made provision for value entirely independent of the gods. The Good thus exists separately, at the summit of the World of Being, where we have the Forms of things, including living things, but not those living things themselves, not even the gods. This reflects another feature of the theology of Socrates and Plato: goodness is not created by the will of the gods; but the gods instead conform themselves to what is independently good. This is not something amenable to the monotheistic religions, and attempts in the Middle Ages to continue a Greek sensibility, and limit the Will of God, in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, tended to be rejected by orthodox opinion. Nothing exists prior to, beyond, or superior to the Will of God. This results in a certain paradox, if one then wants to believe that God is good; and only Islam faced it in the most logically consistent way: "God does what He wishes," , Allâhu yaf'alu mâ yashâ'u [Qur'ân, Surah 3:40 or 3:35]. Nevertheless, even Islam does not seem wholly indifferent to God being good and just.
The theology of Euripides could easily coexist with the metaphysics of Plato. This is what Nietzsche did not like. But this can also just be the beginning of another unusual take on religion, C.G. Jung's Answer to Job. There we have a God who is not originally always good and just, and is really much like the other gods of ancient religion, but who grows, morally, because of interaction with human beings, culminating in the idea that God must become a man, Jesus, in order to morally redeem, not humanity, but divinity. This startling theory has not caught on in any version of Christianity, but it definitely has its own internal logic. Nevertheless, even if appealing, it suffers from the difficulty that the conduct of God does not otherwise seem to have changed. God may be love, and Jesus may have redeemed the mistreatment of Job, but in the 21st century God still fails to appear at the slaughter of innocents or refute the lies of the powerful.
All in all, the behavior of the gods of Euripides is what seems to match our real experience the most closely. But why gods at all? Have we need of any such hypothesis? Again, Jung has a suggestive take on the matter. The gods of Euripides are forces that we must take into account in human life lest they cause great damage. To Jung, such forces are "archetypes" in the Unconscious. Being a Kantian, Jung sees the Unconscious extending beyond our own minds into the reality of things-in-themselves. The forces represented by Aphrodite or Dionysius thus are not merely psychological; they derive from levels of reality not evident in the phenomenal world. As with Jung's God as an archetype, these things can function independently, and even function as personalities, i.e. as personal gods, yet still owe something of their nature and their existence to the Kantian "conditions of a possible experience." Thus, in our experience, they become phenomenal gods, even if there remains a disconnect between the blind causal doings of the world we perceive and beliefs that develop about these divine beings. But this is something already familiar from Kantian philosophy, where the Moral Law imposes a requirement, the Categorical Imperative, to do right, that is incongruous and even impossible in the conditions of mundane life. It is, as Schopenhauer says, "like a meteorite, sprung from an order of things different from that which prevails here." The gods, or God, are also just such a meteorite. The meaning they convey is not that of morality or even mundane good fortune, but the peculiar meaning of religion, the meaning of numinosity, a mysterium tremendum, that reality is sacred, and not just "atoms and the void." Even the gods of Euripides, despite their indifference, cannot be objects of indifference to us. It is thus, overall, a challenging doctrine. The consolations of life may depend, as for Heracles, on our humanity, but then we are not alone with our humanity in the universe.
There is something going on beyond the blind pinball game of physics and chemistry, and we better pay attention to it, or else. Thus, Jung believed that the denial of the Unconscious by those he called the "super rationalists" could result in a reaction, a reaction of forces kept out of conscousness and left in their own blindness, a reaction that consequently will manfest all the ferocity of the irrational and the primal -- a reaction, indeed, rather like the one that rendered Pentheus limb from limb, a reaction that then looks like a great deal of what went on in the history of the 20th century.