Guardians of the temple

The glorious promontory still stands. The comings and goings of the foolish tribes of men (and women) have surely affected it, but they have not brought it down. For those who have eyes to see it is still sending out its signals. At this time of year it is in wild blossom, clad in the anonymity of its multifarious shrubbery as it cascades seawards. In the recesses of these bushes the grouse are nesting. Whole platoons of them walking up and down among the ruins, showing contempt for the camera-wielding hordes, climbing on top of broken columns, looking out to sea towards Salamis. They are the guardian spirits of this place. Being here one rises above the landscape and it modern scars. It puts you in the mood of forgetting; you do not want to know what you are going back to. The sea path is straight from here all the way south to the lair of the Minotaur. One feels like the aged king in his fatal watch, soon to die due to a mere inadvertence. He died but his name lives in these waters.

I wrote recently of the oracle of Apollo at Abae. The Thessalians destroyed it as they led the Persian host towards Delphi after Thermopylae. There was long-standing enmity between them and the Phocians defending their sanctuary. Herodotus relates that they offered rather generous terms of surrender to the defenders, including the promise to forget about the bad blood of old. The Phocians replied that they were not willing to "betray Greece". But the old fox from Halicarnassus is too shrewd to fall for the pious mendacity of the political orator. I am of the opinion, he comments, that had the Thessalians been on the side of the Greeks the Phocians would readily declare for the Persians, for their chief goal was to oppose Thessaly under all circumstances. Recently I wrote an article for the Athens Review of Books arguing that ancient Greek society does not in any way fit the nationalist stereotype of a homogeneous nation striving for a common historical destiny against its sundry racial foes. I could have used the above example as well to illustrate the point. The thought is a banal commonplace of course for someone who has the slightest awareness of the history and culture of the times. But it has caused offense here....

After the Thessalians had laid waste to the sanctuary and the towns of the Phocians, they marched on to Delphi that was their main target. That place was known to be stuffed with gold up to the gills, and Xerxes wanted to lay his hands on it. But Delphi was saved. Herodotus offers a tall tale to account for this outcome. The inhabitants of Delphi, hearing of the Persian advance, wanted to bury the treasures in secret places, but the God forbade them saying that he "can take care of his own". As a result the Delphians left and only a few priests remained in place. As the Persian contingent, led by Thessalians, appeared at the sanctuary of Athena Pronaea a number of miraculous appearances scared the pants off the invaders. To top it all there was severe thunder on the peaks above the temple of Apollo and huge boulders tumbled down the mountainside scattering the barbarian formations, which turned tail and sped away.

Now, is this the same Herodotus who made the hard-headed comment about the Phocians above? Can he possibly believe that it was divine intervention that saved the navel of the earth from the threatened sacking? Who can tell? The point is that in a cultural environment "saturated with myth" (as Paul Cartledge puts it), myth moreover that is taken as reality and probably has some roots in it, it is a major enigma how genuine historical writing could have arisen. But, maybe, Herodotus is justly considered the "father" of history precisely because he straddles the divide between the mythic and the political age; precisely because he succeeds in reaching beyond the mythical foundation of his consciousness in order to grasp the political foundation of human action and/or the political significance of mythic belief. In any case, wrapped in a hoary garment, factuality does rear its head in the Herodotean account. Herodotus is not lying, and the discoveries at Abae bear out his accounts. Maybe what we learn from Herodotus is how to reach the core of truth in myth.

The temples are still blooming

It may just be that there is life after death. Or even that there is no death at all. What dies is what has been dead all along anyway. But what is left behind is that which is untouched by corruption. The eternal is all around us, except that we do not know how to see it.

What has passed for "Greece" up to now is dead, shriveling away into complete non-being. But the reason for it is that it was dead matter to begin with. Its institutions were a sham, a Potemkin-facade of public rationality, whereas in fact they were there to serve the most feral private greed. No public structure corresponded to its name or its concept. The more high-sounding the appellation, the baser the reality hiding behind it. Economy meant the plundering of the commonweal. Education meant the stunting of the critical faculty. Culture meant empty verbiage and the posturing of clowns. Politics meant the systematic rape of the res publica, of the common ousia, of the δημόσιον πρᾶγμα. Politics, especially, the highest of arts, was perverted into an obscene show of ideological obsession of all stripes, whereby various groups of self-intoxicated nonentities posed as saviors of humankind and in the process had no compunction to destroy everything standing (including real lives) in order to uphold their bizarre "visions". At the moment of writing they are still at it.

In trying to explain this outcome there is a long-term and a medium-term view. The latter is tedious, for it involves recounting the follies and crimes of various public actors over the last hundred and fifty years or so, which all conspired from diverse points of departure to render impossible a community of life in this land. Merely to think of them sullies and deadens the spirit. And in dutifully trying to single out the exceptions of intellectual and practical virtue (i.e. devotion to the common good) makes the whole enterprise even more unbearable. For it simply underlines the fact that the genius of this modern "Greek" system was always in trampling underfoot every manifestation of free and universal thinking.

The long-term view is more enlightening, for it deals with the grand historical forces that swept over this land tearing the heart out of its ancient culture and substituting a life-hating mysticism buttressed by the iron hand of despotism for the exhilarating, open-vista naturalism of the Hellenic era. This was of course the deed of imperial and theological Christianity -a Christianity, be it said, that had nothing to do with Jesus himself or even the message of the gospels. This radical rejection of classical Hellenism was of course prepared during the Hellenistic era, which under a veneer of Hellenization of the orient was in true fact a process of orientalizing Hellenism, i.e. imbuing it with the fanaticism of irrationality and the divinization of political authority. "Orthodox" Christianity was a child of this spasm of otherwordliness that electrified a decaying Oecumene. Constantine's victory at the Milvian bridge was thus the death blow against the difficult, tormented, inwardly torn but still magnificent freedom of the Hellenic spirit.

The Christian empire in the west was in time smashed by the Germanic barbarians -and that was a very good thing. A blast of frigid air came in from the dark forests of the north. The adopted religion of these Teutonic tribes was Arianism, a heretical form of Christianity which the surviving imperial authority was trying violently to root out in the Roman east. Arianism was a last-ditch attempt to preserve a modicum of rational sanity even within the context of the theological hysteria of Alexandrine apologetics. At any event, out of the Roman ruins in the west there would eventually emerge a new European culture of intellectual and ethical freedom premised, among other things, upon a rediscovery of the suppressed Hellenic values. The crucial fact here was that the monarchic claims of the "Catholic" church were energetically challenged by newfangled political communities giving precedence to their secular interests and objectives. The struggle between papacy and empire in the west was the beginning of a movement that would eventually eject theological intolerance from the steering booth of worldly governance. This was not meant to be in the Roman east.

There the unholy alliance, in fact fusion, between imperial despotism and a Christianity of hatred continued undisturbed through long centuries of moral decline punctuated by brief episodes of recovery. Social life was totally theologized, and the random sparks of rationality fueled by some remnants of Platonism were quickly extinguished. John Italos and Michael Psellos were persecuted as heretics in the 11th century. And soon thereafter the hatred towards Jews and other unbelievers, in addition to the internal heretical enemy (endemic from the beginning to official Christianity as a whole) was extended in the Roman east to the western Christians as well. The loathing became mutual of course and was underpinned by intense economic and political rivalry. It led to the massacre of the Latins in Constantinople in 1182 and the plunder of the same city by the crusaders in 1204.

In the rump of the eastern empire during its drawn out death throes the complete victory of monkish barbarity was sealed through the victory of the hesychastic movement in the 14th century. This cut off Greek-speaking Christianity from the emerging humanist movement in Italy. The opposition was significant among the educated and political elite of Constantinople, but the monks could mobilize the brutalized masses against the best in their society. The Palaeologian dynasty was western oriented as was natural for the pupils of the great Platonist and Hellenizer Plethon who had kindled in the scholars and rulers of Florence the enthusiasm for Hellenic learning. But the monasteries won, making thus sure that the country would be overrun by the Ottomans. The enlightened elements fled, and the obscurantists sealed their triumph by offering allegiance to the Sultan, and in so doing drastically extending their authority over all the Orthodox Christians of the Turkish realm. Plethon was duly anathematized.

The Ottoman regime was a Muslim theocracy, in all its fundamental principles a worthy continuation of debased Byzantinism. It rule was tyrannical and frequently violent. But the theological rulers of the suffering Christians could explain and justify that by the reference to the "sins" of the Greeks that brought about the fall of the Christian Empire. The greatest of those "sins" was precisely the effort to unite with Roman Catholicism. So slavery had to be put up with under a new despot who was in any case legitimate, having been given his authority over Christians by God. The ecclesiastical rulers adopted the title "despot" for themselves, a word that still today refers to the office of bishop.

The benumbed and benighted masses would henceforth bow and pray under the mantle of ecclesiastical despotism, now functioning as an official branch of the Sultan's government. Many among them would undoubtedly dream of the restoration of the east Roman theocracy. But the chief task now was survival. And thus the memory of Hellenism was completely buried, including that of the fitful Hellenic revivals during Byzantine times that constituted the doomed and transient glory of that era. The fake spirituality of the hesychasts now assumed even more beastly forms of superstition. This was the perfect counterpart of the murderous fanaticism of their Muslim dynasts. To the extent that the Orthodox populations yearned for liberation that meant that they simply wanted to be Turks in the place of the Turks.

Hellenism among Greek-speaking Christians revived during the 18th c. under the leadership of westernized intellectuals (many of the from the lower clergy). But this current of Enlightenment had no roots among the peasant populations. At the time of the Greek Revolution it furnished a political elite that spoke a western language of rationality and freedom thus legitimizing the uprising in the eyes of the fully Hellenized societies of western Europe. This caused the establishment of the modern Greek state. But soon afterwards, after its political use had been exhausted, it simply disappeared as a cultural force in the new kingdom. Popular politics quite naturally continued to flow within the age-hallowed riverbed of theological mysticism and fanatical hatred under a thin veneer of impotent constitutionalism and a national culture that was just empty rhetoric above the people's head.

In the twentieth century the newest import of Enlightenment ideology, itself pioneered by diaspora intellectuals, i.e. Marxism, inevitably enough mutated into a ruthless and murderous theology. And it was in this guise that it triumphed in the collective consciousness by century's end, incorporating in the process the essence of obscurantist nationalism that it had supposedly vanquished. It is this abhorrent hybrid of national stalinism that has ruled the country over the past generation and predictably enough brought about its moral and material ruin.

So now the matter is historically closed. The modern "Greek" state no longer exists as a going concern. It will of course continue as a facon de parler, a mode of political expression -but with no substance. And the only thing left to do, beyond basic survival which is becoming more problematic by the day, is simply an archaeology of memory and feeling -for those at least that are still concerned to preserve a modicum of their violated humanity. Layer upon layer of historical detritus has buried deep the shards and fragments of Hellenism in the land of its birth. Some of them are embedded in the language, itself wantonly defaced by the ride of the ethnostalinist Valkyries. (At least the Christians spoke good Greek -that much has to be conceded to them). Other remnants are hidden in the earth, some of them luckily protruding above them. And all these are still active, like seeds. Visit the temples and you will see: they are in glorious bloom. This must mean something. The soil is still being dug and that amazing past is still bringing forth its life-sustaining riches. The German Archaeological School has over the past couple of years brought to light the oracle at Abae in Phokis. This is a good omen. We do need an uplifting chresmos from the peaks of civilization. Not that anyone here has taken any notice, of course. But that is neither here nor there. Herodotos has been once again proven right. I have been reading him intently. He, if anyone, will help us somehow to survive.