Willing Supplicants to Jealous Gods

After having read my small part of Ovid's Metamorphoses and thinking of it throughout class today, I simply could not reconcile the humanistic view of the Greek civilization with the idea of jealous, domineering gods who always always get their way. I asked Prof. Sexson about it just after class, and we had a pretty interesting, if short, discussion about this idea.

Think about humanism, this system of thought in which the individual is glorified, wherein human achievement is not only appreciated but expected. Think about it... Creation! Could there be anything so wonderful as this. We, acting as gods ourselves, create. Regardless of discipline, intent, or circumstance, we create. We cannot help it. Even the simple course of day to day life is a sort of creation. We bring ourselves into being, and we define ourselves as we choose.

How can there be, in this time of utmost enlightenment, of achievement and movement, how can there be room in this world for superstition, for the cruel reign of gods and goddesses? How could these men prostrate themselves before an idea not contained within their own being? The greatness we strive for without lives in wait within. How could these men, particularly the men of ideas and wonder, how could they not see this? How could they make themselves so...lowly.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his Brothers Karamazov, says simply "So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship." We actively seek out places to fall and lords to worship. Why? Because standing on our own two feet, without any sort of safety net or eternal scapegoat, is too terrifying.

And yet...

Who are these gods we worship? For the Greeks, they were love embodied in Aphrodite or war embodied in Ares. Wisdom lives through Athena and mischief reigns in Hermes. These are but attributes after all! We define these things we cannot see, hear, or explain within the body of a human being! The fact that we make them live forever as something "not human" betrays only wishful thinking...or the fact that these attributes live on as man lives on. There has always been love and wisdom and as long as we live, it lives in us.

Prof. Sexson said it is the defiance of the gods that is revolutionary here. Though they are all-powerful and though the individual gets torn apart in the end, the idea of even challenging the gods is revolutionary and humanistic. As humans, we are as powerful as the gods, we can be better than they are, sing sweeter, weave better.... but they will conquer us. The abstract concepts of love or hate, death or wisdom, will always hold sway, regardless of our circumstance or any ability. Because these concepts live in all, they will win in all and are inescapable. In this lies the true "will of the gods".