SPANISH VERSION HERE
A devastating plague dominates Thebes. Sophocles (Oedipus Rex, first intervention of the chorus, vv. 158-215) has its people call on the gods:
First we call on Athena, deathless daughter of Zeus, / and Artemis, earth upholder, […] / and Phoebus [Apollo], the far shooter, / come to us now […] / Our sorrows defy number; […] / In the unnumbered deaths / of its people the city dies; / those children that are born lie dead on the naked earth / unpitied, spreading contagion of death; and grey haired mothers and wives / everywhere stand at the altar’s edge, suppliant, moaning; / the hymn to the healing god [= Apollo] rings out but with it the wailing voices are blended. / From these our sufferings grant us, o golden daughter of Zeus, / glad-faced deliverance. / There is no clash of brazen shields but our fight is with the war god [= Ares], / a war god ringed with the cries of men, a savage god who burns us; / grant that he turn in racing course backwards out of our country’s bounds […] / […] smite the war god, father Zeus, / beneath your thunderbolt, / for you are the lord of the lightning, the lightning that carries fire. / And your unconquered arrow shafts, winged by the golden / corded bow, / Lycean king [= Apollo], we beg to be at our side for help; / and the gleaming torches of Artemis with which she scours the Lycean hills, / and we call on the god with the turban of gold, […] / the Bacchic god [= Dionysos] with the wind flushed face, / evian one, who travel / with the Maenad company, / combat the god that burns us [= Ares]; […] / for the god that is our enemy is a god unhonoured among the gods.(*)
It would be all too natural to suppose that, with these words, the Theban people invoque the aid of the personified supernatural powers in which they believe. After all, do we not tend to envisage “religion” as a question of “belief” in “supernatural beings?”
It would be all too natural to suppose it, yet it would also be profoundly misleading and all too unnatural.
To begin with, there is nothing like an “Ancient-Greek religion,” since the term “religion” (religio) is a (late) Latin term without any Greek equivalent.(**) Daniel Boyarin and Carlin Barton make this crystal clear in their book Imagine no Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities (2016).
Secondly, as Walter Otto wrote long ago, the Greeks never “believed” in their gods – they “experienced” them. Now, to “experience” has nothing to do here with intense believe and the self-persuasion (or self-delusion) about its alleged objectivity. We have alluded to it elsewhere: when, in Iliad 22.224-5, Achilles tells Hector that he will die because, he says, Athena will kill Hector by means of his (i.e. Achilles’s own) spear, the name “Athena” on Achilles’s lips signifies the “clear vision” that must assist anyone – and, therefore, that one must experience – in order to win a combat.
Lastly, and for the very same reason, the Greek gods are not “supernatural “beings.” They are rather the ever-living forces of the world.
To think about “religion” as “belief” in “supernatural beings,” or in a supernatural (in the sense of extra-cosmic or extra-terrestrial) being, makes only sense in the case of Christianity and its monotheist siblings. Which, by the way, makes all the more ridiculous attempts, like Pascal Boyer’s, to explain religion (in line with other evolutionary psychologists of today) as a universal psychological phenomenon.
Moreover, in Ancient-Greece the gods were less beings than they named events, as Károly Kerényy observed some time ago upon noticing that, before the arrival of Christianity, the term θεός (theos, “god”) was mostly used as an exclamation before the apparition, i.e. before the shining forth, of something.
Heidegger makes a similar point when, while inquiring on the meaning of the term ἀείζωον (aeizoon, “ever-living”) in Heraclitus in light of the use that Homer and Pindar make of the prefix ζα- (za-) – a prefix which is morphologically and semantically linked to the noun ζωή (zoe, “life”) – he writes: “Linguistics ‘explains’ that ζα here is an ‘intensifier’; accordingly, ζάθεος [za+theos] means ‘very godly,’ ‘very holy’ […] [in the same way e.g. that] ζαμενής [za+menes] means ‘very powerful’ or ‘very forceful,’ [given that] μένος [menos] […] mean[s] power or might. This linguistic explanation of ζα as an intensifying morpheme is perfectly correct,” he adds, “yet it is also untrue. [For] [s]uch an explanation thinks ‘mechanistically’ and not in a manner that attends to what is said: that is, it does not arise out of what is named through the ‘intensifying’ word ζα, nor from out of the context in which the poetic saying is compelled to speak in such a way. […] Pindar refers, for example, to localities, regions, mountains, and borders (e.g., the banks of a river) as ζάθεος, in order to indicate that in these places the gods – i.e., the appearing ones – often and properly are present.” In short, concludes Heidegger, “[t]hese places are ‘especially holy’ [and named thus by Pindar] because here the appearing ones give forth their appearance, and the localities and mountains emerge entirely within such appearing and are enveloped therein.” In this, Heidegger’s attitude to Ancient-Greek language is not dissimilar from Walter Benjamin’s approach to the translation of the intentio of the expressed in the original language, which cannot be rendered into a different language but as a “supplement” to it, thus allowing it to be “powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.”
But then, if the people from Thebes do not call on any supernatural beings in which we would have them believe, how must we interpret their words?
Very simple.
Born directly from Zeus’s forehead, Athena is the “clear vision” that allows all things to be in “reasonable order,” and as such she opposes the “confusion” brought about by the plague. Artemis φωσφόρος (phosphoros) is the “light” needed to counter-effect the plague’s darkness. Apollo the “Healer” – for healer is one of his names – is the remedy against the misery caused by the plague. And Dionysos is the much-wished “coming” of it all: order, light, and health – or “life’s restoration”; for Dionysos is the “coming god.”
How not to wish the return of life in the midst of the plague? The Ancient-Greek consciousness speaks in loud voice. Still capable, unlike ours, of distinguishing between what worlds the world and what unworlds it, it names the world’s ever-living forces and calls on them. The gods are their names.
Yet this does not mean that the Greek gods are their personification. If we were to interpret them in this way, we would fatally lose sight of their living essence or “being-ness,” which, by the way, is what οὐσία (ousia) literally means (rather than “substance”). Think in how we still say today: “What a luck!” The Greek goddess Τύχη (Tyche, “Luck,” “Fortune”) consists precisely in drawing close, when it does. And it is her coming close, and no other thing, that her name names. For, in Greek, to “appear” (φαίνω, phaino) and to “say” or “speak” (φάναι, phanai) share the same Indo-European root (bha-). It is thus reasonable to presuppose the existence of a common conceptual perception behind them – as per von Humboldt’s view that languages reflect specific conceptual perceptions of the world – condensed in the basic phoneme bh-, whichcan be easily heard as what it obviously is: an ideophone (or onomatopoeia) expressing the shining forth of things.
Unlike the Ancient Greeks, we no longer call on the gods to assist us in our modern pandemonium. We merely hope for a vaccine to be fabricated at some point, and the sooner the better; be it against COVID-19 or against any of its foreseeable permutations. For if we were to call on “clear vision” and “light” to be with us, we would inevitably have to come to terms with capitalism/modernity, which is the cause of our endemic sufferings – the inorganic virus that has swallowed up the earth by turning all nooks of what the Ancient-Greeks called φύσις (physis, the “springing forth” of the world) into data points, to paraphrase our friend Hilan Bensusan;(***) and ultimately, then, the nihilist force that has finally precipitated the world into its darkest night. But since we are no longer Greeks, it is hard for us to tell the difference between world and unworld, which, in a self-narcotic forgetful cum euphemistic drive, we have come to call globalisation.
(*) Trans. David Grene, slightly modified.
(**) In Julius Cæsar (100–44 BCE), which is its earliest occurrence, religio simply names “commitment to a vow.” Later, with Julian (331/2-363 CE) it comes to designate, very broadly, “culture.” It is around the 5th century that Christian authors begin to use the term religio it to denote a “system of beliefs and its corresponding practices, institutions, traditions,” etc. On their own interest, of course, as Christianity ultimately turns around a belief (namely, the belief that Christ is God’s Son sent by the Father to redeem humans from their sins). In Ancient Greece, however, there was no such term. Eὐσέβεια (eusebeia) means “due awe or amazement” (εὐ, “proper” + σέβας, “awe”) which raises some form of “dedication” (ἱερoῖς, ierois) regardless of whether the latter is turned into some kind of “ritual observation” (θρησκεία, threskeia) or not.
(**) In “On the panpolitics of the virus.”
Athena, Roman copy after a Greek original. Prado Museum, Madrid. Photo by polymorph