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Greek Mythology and Judaism
I am listening to the incomparably wonderful Stephen Fry read his own brilliant and entertaining summary of all Greek myth and legend, Mythos. It is an experience both informative and deeply revealing about the nature – and failures – of pagan cultures.
For starters, I think we can all agree that myth satisfies the deepest human intellectual need to try to understand how we got here, and why, and what, really, life is all about. No thoughtful person is immune from these deep-seated questions. The answers we have available to us are impossible to prove, either way – which is why it comes down to faith. And even though it is fashionable to suggest that the Greeks didn’t really believe in all that silly Pantheon stuff, it still did not stop them from sacrificing children to the gods.
Then there is the Greek attitude toward fate. Every tragic story (from Chronos to Oedipus) seems to have the very same moral: No matter what you do to avoid your fate, all that will actually happen is that you will accelerate that very same fate. Imagine growing up in this kind of culture, where the stories children are taught hammer this basic point home: any thought that you have free will is illusory at best – and the more you believe it, the less free will you actually have. In a way, the Greek attitude toward free will is like the Freudian dealing with a patient who denies something: the very fact of denial proves the opposite ever more strongly.
Indeed, the absence of free will extends toward technological innovation as well. Man is so small, so puny, that in Greek myth, every innovation came from the gods – Promethus gave man reason and intelligence, and he also brought fire and all the technology that came with it. Hephaestus gave us skills and tools, Demeter farming, etc., etc.
So what is left man, when fate runs the world, when mankind’s belief in free will is a childish fiction, and when everything that man uses to improve himself was actually given by a third party? Nothing except hedonism – a fixation of engaging, as the gods do, in every pleasure of the flesh.
Stephen Fry, an openly homosexual and secular man, deeply approves. I am horrified anew, because Torah Judaism is so deeply oppositional to all of the above.
Greek myth emphasizes that because we are subservient, we are dependent on making frequent offerings to the gods, as part of a mafia-like protection racket. The Torah, from the very beginning, rejects this attitude. In the Torah, our relationship with G-d (as shown in the Cain-and-Abel and Korach stories) is never meant to be transactional, merely paying G-d off. Instead, we are meant to engage in constructive and developmental interactions as we grow and seek to emulate G-d by being holy. It is all very different from Greek myth.
Except for one shared kernel, as heretical as my thought might be: In Fry’s telling, Zeus creates mankind essentially for entertainment and companionship – for connection. It may have been a connection based on shallowness and maximizing sexual opportunity, but even the Greeks think the gods want some kind of relationship with mankind.
In a way, I think there is something here that is correct (absent the shallowness and sex): the G-d of the Torah clearly desires that mankind should acknowledge Him and seek to have a relationship.
Everything else might be different, but I think G-d’s desire for connection is possibly the only rational explanation that anyone who believes in a deity of any kind can find for why the deity made us. Otherwise, what explanations might there be for why we are here?
Published in General
It sounds nihilistic to me. I’m not surprised. Stephen Fry, whose performances I enjoy watching, has previously claimed to be asexual and suicidal. I have inferred that he was a deeply unhappy person.
Stephen Fry is witty and clever and a devout vulgarian and hedonist. It spoils every effort where he is given the slightest latitude, which is a crime given his gifts. If he is being drawn toward the Lord he has certainly taken the long way around, may the Lord have mercy.
I’ve never heard of Stephen Fry, but I’m pretty sure I would have much the same reaction as you do.
Lately I’ve been interested in the history of the northern Crusades in which the Germans (to use perhaps not quite the right term) conquered and Christianized the Wends. It would take too much preliminary explanation to explain here how it relates to some issues in my relatively recent family history, so I’ll skip that. But ninety percent of YouTubers who talk on the subject seem to see this transition from paganism to Christianity as a tragedy. The Christianization may or may not have been done in a very unChristian manner, but I am deeply suspicious of those who see the paganism that preceded Christianity as a paradise lost.
It is akin to the “noble savage” canard that has been flogged ever since Tacitus romanticizing the German barbarians. If one is untainted by Western civilization, then one is automatically wiser, kinder, and more just. Why? Umm … reasons. Rousseau ran with it too. The less you know about Rousseau’s personal life, the more likely you are to take his moral judgements seriously.
I didn’t know the noble savage idea goes back to Tacitus. Did Rousseau ever cite him or give evidence for picking it up that way?
Tacitus was trying to understand the Germans, and wrote Germania (original title was a mouthful of Latin I can’t remember) that said that the strength of their culture could be because of how closely they hewed to what the Romans saw as their own cultural strengths, but that they hadn’t developed them based on contact with Roman culture because they hadn’t had any. After all, who would want to live in a place with weather as rotten as Germany? Actually, he was looking for common traits, rather than differences. Rousseau was the one who ran with “they’re not us, so therefore they are better than us.”
In the case of Rousseau, almost everyone is better than Rousseau, so he was flailing at some small grain of truth. Worst father ever.
I’m just a child. But it doesn’t bother me.
Stephen Fry is an incredibly talented person. Here he is reading a mere bedtime story.
Stephen Fry had some interesting alternative history novels – this one was good
“Making History”
As to most atheists, those who preach it (e.g. Maher, Dawkins and Fry) treat Atheism as a religion. Atheism is worse as it has not central tenet which society can be built (e.g. the Ten Commandments). Humans have a tendency to Narcissism, religions like Judaism and Christianity hit back at that tendency because it tells us there is something greater than yourself.
He likely is quite unhappy much of the time. He has been open about the fact that he has bipolar disorder and struggles with his mental health constantly.
Although I read Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization a few years ago, I just stumbled on the author’s other books on the contributions of different cultures to Western civilization. A few weeks ago, I finished Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, and just yesterday completed Cahill’s The Gifts of the Jews.
This passage from the latter book really made me mark it and refer back to it multiple times:
Stephen Fry, like the late Christopher Hitchens, is not one of “ours”, but he’s a man of knowledge and gifts that we can in some respects learn from. (And he could learn from us. Unlike many leftists, he doesn’t have to be prodded to say that.)