Hello World. I’m still alive and well. Tacy and I just returned from a belated anniversary trip to St. Michael’s, Maryland. We had a great time and before school busyness hits me again, I thought I’d make a short ramble.
This semester has both flown and crawled by. On one hand I can’t believe the semester is nearly over; on another, I can’t believe how much we’ve read and discussed thus far. My mind has been pulled in more directions than ever before. Immerse yourself in the Greek language and literature day and night for weeks on end, and your mind will be affected, for better or worse. If anything you should have a little less assurance and a lot more curiosity about words. Hope comes from Plato’s Meno in which Socrates says one who knows nothing true is closer to Truth than one who knows something false. I do feel like I know less than before I arrived, but that is supposedly a great and liberating thing.
I’ve certainly come away with a strong intimation of another world, that of the Greeks, which is said to hold so much power over our western world. The spectacle of the mysterious world of man presented in epic poems and tragic plays has left me confounded. It is a world both full of divine things and very human things. Chesterton’s view of history comes to mind as I read these works: Man came from Eden, and began monotheistic; post-fall man departed from the truth, and invented new gods, though forever imitating in various ways the Truth from the past. Peter Kreeft says that the Greeks exemplify man’s greatest plight for Truth, and likely came as close as is possible for unaided man. However, Truth must come to man, and so he has, in Christ. Still, in my readings, I see much Truth and Wisdom about humans. In fact, half the time I feel like I am reading verbatim out of the Old Testament Scriptures. Though seemingly polytheistic, my humble opinion is that in practice, Zeus (or maybe the unnamed singular god in Oedipus at Colonus) is the highest authority, and it is he that ordains everything, the other gods actions can never (though they try) cross his ultimate plan (just like the Judeo-Christian God and his rebellious angels). So essentially the show is run monotheistically. And in this pseudo-monotheistic world, man is caught between the god and the animals. He has a free will, though the exertion of that will may never yield what he desired and can never escape suffering (i.e. tragedy). He looks at the gods and longs for immortality and greatness. The gods look back on him and wonder at him, unable to feel his mortality. And this relationship between immortal and mortal is something curious. In Christianity, I see something similar… men are created by God, and are mortal and created in His image, unlike God’s other created beings, the angels. Men stand before God weak, yet strong and beautiful in his likeness, and the entire spectacle of God’s love for man has these immortal beings, the angels, looking on us with wonder, and ‘longing to look in to the mysteries of God’s salvation of the church’. So, in both Greek literature and Christian Scriptures, something about the human condition is special in a way that other immortal beings cannot understand. We humans are privileged to know God in a way that no other created being is able. If Wisdom is of God, and our condition, so full of suffering, is the ordained means of becoming one with God: then a Christian may believe with the Greeks that Wisdom truly comes only through suffering. For the Greek this is Tragedy, for the Christian, Comedy.
Post a Comment