Believing in the Gods

The smirk of the one who knows

Is it possible in our day and age to believe in the Gods of the Hellenic pantheon? Nothing is more effortless. This is a simple act of sound sense and in total accord with our cognitive faculties. I do not mean by this to subscribe to the whole set of devotional practices and underlying popular superstition (which in any case mars every other faith that we know of). This historical and experiential crust must be scraped off. We must yet retain the mythology that informs it, certainly not as a body of factually true occurrences. For it is neither true in that sense not internally consistent by far. But it does not need to be either the one or the other. The mythological core is essential for its unsurpassed aesthetic power and as a set of symbols cryptically containing the gist of psychological and social existence. It is a set of pregnant riddles. Even the inconsistency of the versions and accounts is of prime significance, for inner dissonance and self-strife is the very stuff of being a human self in an impenetrable cosmos.

After we have thus cleansed the edifice of the expendable superveniences, what is left is a core of linguistic descriptions (and artistic renditions thereof) fully corresponding to the perceptible outlines of our natural experience. W. Burkert has already shown that in trenchant detail, but it does no harm to recall this penetrating insight. There is no inherent antithesis between religious faith and the course of the physical world, in fact the former trails the necessities of the latter. Zeus is the power of the sky: where is the dificulty believing in that? "Zeus" is a name, a sign containing as its meaning the imperious dominion, for good or ill, of a given set of natural exigencies. It stands for the turning of the seasons, the consuming power of time, the helplessness of humanity (even of fully matured scientific humanity like ours) in the face of cosmic constants that it cannot counteract or countermand and which will eventually annihilate it. Poseidon is the power of the sea: where is the difficulty believing in that? From the battles of Odysseus with the wrath of the watery main, to the Mary Rose and the Gustav Vasa and other countless ship wrecks, to the disappearing Pacific islands under global warming and the recent tidal wave that devastated Japan there is no more everpresent fact if one cares to reflect on it. Aphrodite stands for the devastating blows of desire: where is the difficulty believing in that? We have all been knocked helpless and unconscious by its pitilessness at one time or another.

It was good old Euripides that laid all that bare for us a long time ago. He was accused of cheapening the mystery: that was wicked jab as far as I am concerned. The mystery becomes all the more intense and threatening once you locate it inside the soul. Once transcendence is suppressed then you are left face to face with your self as the inscrutable demon par excellence. You can no longer blame external forces. That was the convenience of traditional religion. But there is nothing convenient in true faith. For it does not prove anything; instead it forces you to come to blows with what cannot be proven and thus assimilate it into the very nucleous of your inner being. Euripides is terrible, ludicrously terrible indeed at times. But isn't this what being-in-the world is all about? The terror springs from inside, it is the realization of our nullity which has to be made good by a countervailing greatness that we must conjure for ourselves with the meager tools that nature, our nature, provides. One must be able to laugh with that presumption. One must be able to deride one's own pretensions, for it is in this self-willed put-down that one might find the strength to fly over the chasm of our insignificance, nay our non-existence. One has to be a great optimist, a great narcissist even, to attempt something  as vain and doomed as that. But this is the leap of faith. It does not settle anything, but without it nothing is settled either. So in a sense you are forced to undertake it, if only you begin to contemplate. For contemplation is the wheel that mows you down, once you allow it -as you must- to commence its turning.

No, Euripides did not kill faith in the gods. He clothed it in a new kind of beauty, a beauty that is present and at hand, a beauty that is made -if at all- out of our own deeds and failures, i.e. of our mere words, our flatus vocis. Euripides shows that this doomed accident called man is indeed omnipotent, that he is the god. The spark of divinity he can manufacture for himself by striking with the hardest edge of his being upon the absoluteness of the world. This is the proverbial irresistible force colliding with an immovable object. Out of this (logically and empirically, but not aesthetically) impossible encounter anything might flow. Euripides believes as an atheist, and this is the most sublime and menacing form of faith -provided that it is transmuted into a world of incandescent forms. And he did this (something that, for instance, Adorno -another believing atheist- singularly failed to achieve).

But divinity is not only benign -as the Greeks very well knew. God succours, nurtures, but he also smites and pulversizes. The gods are envious and oppressive. They are vengeful and certainly far from fair. It was only the fancy of some odd idelaists, such as Hesiod and Solon, who wanted to see in god the guarantor of a cosmic order of justice. Plato follows suit, but he is wide of the mark in his churlish tirades against the "immorality" of the mythological accounts. Take away this immorality and you denude them of their truth. Then you have a hypothetical, artificial religion that is at odds with the physicality of life. But even Plato in his sane moments fully acknowledged that the concept of god is entirely coterminous with that of the natural universe. Certainly physical pleasure is at the heart of his pursuit of virtue as well.

Rain fructifies the fields, but it also floods and drowns indiscriminately. The first rain that inseminated mother earth was the blood from the genitals of Uranus cut off by the admantine sicle of his son. There is terror and beauty wrapped in one in this anbhorrent image. To be in the throes of faith means to gasp for breath in the coils of contradiction. And the divine deeds of man are equally double-faced, as Sophocles was eager to declare. Knowledge heals, but it also kills. Self-knowledge in particular -and this with regard to the very self engendering it in the first place. We must not beautify god. Apollo is also ἀπολλύων, the destroyer. He is both male and female. He is the killer of the snake, as well as the snake itself. He is the slayer of the Danaans (ἑκηβόλος), the bringer of death. Neither must we idealize the civilization that brought forth and worshipped such a god. The Greek era is awash with the atrocious deeds of the deities as well men striving to deify themselves. Ἄτη herself is a goddess and we know all too well the evil fruits of her exertions. But it is in the midst of such dark toil that humanity rises to the greatness that it demands from itself and knows that it is capable of. And it is upon this greatness (ephemeral, indeed) that we are still feeding.

Light can only grow from darkness. This is the wisdom of Greek religion. And it is the only one that man qua man is capable and worthy of. For it does not demand the superssession of human reality, and it does not posit a fantastic land of unalloyed goodness, as the cult of a later God-Man purported. This latter myth (for which the man who others stamped as the Christ was not responsible for) is a debilitating one. It revels in the nothingness of humanity, without seizing the entrails of this nullity to rise above it. It abides breathless and impotent in the feeling of non-being. Hellenic faith on the contrary is not reductionistic. It equates human consciousness with nature, but it does not level it to the latter's base automatism. The rythm of the world becomes the very pulse that the ignited self perceives within. And this awareness of oneness with external nature becomes an active strength to deflect whatever necessity has in store for us. We know ab initio how this rebellion is fated to end. Achilles knows that if he stays in the Troad he is going to die. But he stays, he dies and he becomes Achilles. If he had lived he would have become a nonentity, scratched from the tablets of our faith and knowledge. Destiny is there to be acknowledged certainly, but one does not prostrate himself before it. Our being fuses with nature, but only to become second nature (φύσις δευτέρα) within it. The task is to rise as high as one feels like or dares to rise. It's not as if there is no deep melancholy here. The Greeks know how to rue and mourn. It's best not to be born, mutters Sophocles, second best to die young. But since we were not granted non-existence, we must prosper with the (poisoned) boon that came our way. They know full well as I said above, how ephemeral all this is. But they do not feel free to be daunted by this knowledge, for thus they would abjure their freedom. The freedom to make the most of the mystery that we come face to face with looking in the mirror.