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 every-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 than 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?