THE GREEKS OF Homers era lived intense and meaningful lives,
constantly open to being overwhelmed by the shining presence
of the OlYmpian gods. As happy polytheists, their world was the op-
posite of our contemporary nihilistic age. How did the West descend
from Homers enchanted world, filled as it was with wonder and grat_
itude, to the disenchanted world we now inhabit?
To pose the question this way is to mock the traditional story of
the West. At least since Hegel, in the early nineteenth century, the nar-
rative of Western history has been one of progress. We have learned
to think of the Enlightenment, or some more recent period, as the
pinnacle of this steady advance. The self-sufficiency of freedom, the
lucidity of reason, and the security of a world completely explained
and controlled: all these indicate history’s advance
There is, to be sure, a traditional counterstory as well, a story that
sees our current disenchanted state as the result of accumulating de-
cline and loss. Nostalgia pervades this counterview: it rejects the con-
temporary, disenchanted world in favor of an earlier, enchanted age.
The burden of standing as ones own free ground; the arid, ruthless
path of reasons march; the sad inertness of a world explained and
controlled: all these indicate history’s decline.
But what if neither story is right? V/hat if the idea that both sto-
ries share—that wonder and enchantment have been left behind—is
instead a misunderstanding of the contemporary world? What if we
haven’t lost the sacred, shining gods, but have simply lost touch with
the meanings they offer?
Indeed, both smug celebration of our progress and nostalgic regret
at our loss are misguided. The nihilistic burden of our secular age
undermines the idea of progress, while the meaningful possibilities
on the margins of our secular world cast doubt upon the idea of loss.
. The story of how we lost touch with these sacred practices is the
hidden history of the West. Rather than a catalogue of unrecognized
historical facts, this history can be described as a series of stages by
which We obscured the worldly wonders that people in the Homeric
Age saw everywhere. It is the history of the way the gods were ignored,
not lost; of the way we closed ourselves off to their beckoning call. To
understand this hidden history is to see that this type of engagement
with the world is still available to us. It has been marginalized in our
culture, to be sure, but it stands ready to be cultivated and revivified.
*
The reader may rebel at our steadfast refusal to explain any tran-
sition from one epoch to the next. But whereas the brief engage-
ment with each work is a narrative choice, our inability to explain
the transition between epochs is imposed from without. True, in the
traditional narratives of both progress and loss one expects a rational
account of the process of history. In Hegel’s view, for example, the
transition points in history are not chance occurrences but rational
events: each movement of history is a solution to the contradictions
in the period before. But the movement from Homer’s understand-
ing of human excellence to Aeschylus’s is no more rational than the
movement from Aristotle’s understanding of science to Galileo’s. As
Thomas Kuhn points out, the transition from one scientific paradigm
to the next is a complete Gestalt shift that is inexplicable precisely
because it leaves nothing by means of which to explain it. There is no
rational relation between Aristotle’s account of motion and Galileo’s;
the two are simply incommensurate. And so it is with Homer and
Aeschylus. We can say something about what each has that the other
does not, but we cannot tell a story about why and how history made
the transition from one to the next.
Still, the fact that each work is a part of our history, the history of
the West, is crucial for the contemporary age. For something of these
past practices is preserved in the margins of our contemporary world.
By attuning ourselves to the senses of the sacred that animate each
of the following works of art, we will be able to recognize and bring
back to life those practices that can sustain a sense of the sacred in our
secular age.
and
Aeschylus wrote several hundred years after Homer, at the begin-
ning of the Classical period in ancient Greece, and his gods, though
the same Olympian gods in name, were not Homer’s diverse collec-
tion of moods. Instead, Aeschylus’s gods were radically different. They
had become the forces underlying the Athenian world. In Aeschylus’s
writings the gods govern what matters and determine what it makes
sense to do in every situation. They demand a kind of unity to all
one’s actions, and cannot rest content with the happy diversity that
Homer allowed.
Despite the demand for unity, there is a competing group of gods
in Aeschylus’s age. In the Odyssey, Homer’s gods were a diverse but
tolerant family. They cooperated in guiding and protecting human
beings at home, at war, in lovers’ beds. But Homer and his worship-
ers of the Olympian gods achieved their happy state only by repress-
ing an older group of gods-—the ancient gods of family loyalty, who
stood for fertility, blood relations, and revenge. These ancient moods
of vengeance and blood loyalty—amazingly!—-are simply not a part
of Homer’s world. But according to Aeschylus, there was a price to
repressing these ancient moods. What mattered most in his world was
not the happy diversity of Homer’s Olympian gods, but the opposi-
tion between two total and uncompromising senses of what is right:
the new Olympian gods represent one, the ancient, primitive Furies
the other.
The drama of the Oresteia consists in the fact that the old and new
accounts of justice are completely opposed. The old gods of revenge,
the Furies, who are all women, put the family ahead of all other values;
the new gods, mostly men, are for detached universal law that makes
no exception for particular individuals, families, or cities. Apollo ar-
ticulates the new, detached conception of justice when he proclaims:
Never, for man, woman, nor city . . . have I spoken a word,
except that which Zeus, father of the Olympians, might com-
mand. This is justice}
In contrast with this, the Furies care only about family, and think ofus-
tice in terms of exacting revenge upon those who harm a blood relative:
We drive from home those who have shed the blood of kin.
The Furies’ mafia-like conception of justice had no place in Homer’s
world; Homeric culture repressed the natural tendency toward blood
loyalty. According to Aeschylus, the Furies are outraged at having been
treated this way; they are furious at having been “set apart” and “driven
under the ground” by the sky gods on Olympus. They respond:
. [W]e are strong and skilled;
we have authority; we hold
memory of evil; we are stern
‘nor can men’s pleadings bend us.
The conflict between the old and new gods is central to Aeschylus’s
conception of classical Athenian culture. This conflict plays itself out
in ever increasing and subtle ways. The first and most straightforward
of these takes place in Agamemnon, the first play of the trilogy.
*
With civic pride as the society’s most overpowering emotion, and
Athens as the locus of this total devotion, Aeschylus’s conception of
the sacred moves away from Homer’s polytheism toward a more uni-
fied, monotheistic conception of the universe. This poses a peculiar
problem for Aeschylus’s conception of the Olympian gods. In particu-
lar, without Homer’s polytheism there is no place for Zeus in Aeschy-
lus’s Athens; no place, in other words, for the father of the polytheistic
Olympian family of gods. Aeschylus recognizes this problem and has
an amazing, if only barely articulated, solution to it.
For Aeschylus, Zeus is no longer a personified god presiding over
the pantheon. But he isn’t a cultural force like the Furies and the
Olympian gods in the Oresteia either. Instead, Zeus has become the
taken-for-granted way of acting that sustains all these forces. As the
pervasive background, he cannot be described, but he underlies all
significant events. The chorus, for example, refers to “Zeus: whatever
he may be” and adds: “For what thing without Zeus is done among
mortals.”‘
Zeus, in other words, is the hidden and unrepresentable background
that sustains all the meaningful practices of the culture. This is such a
deep and powerful conception of the sacred that it will figure centrally
in the Judeo-Christian account of God the father, but it will not be
evoked as the possible poetical achievement of Western culture until
Melville’s Moby Dick.
Aeschylus’s Oresteia doesn’t just describe a solution to the tensions
in Athenian culture; it actually brings that solution about. As the Athe-
nians march together out of the theater, singing their praise of Athens,
they not only see what is great about their city, the pride for'Athens
wells up around them. But Aeschylus is such a deep thinker that he
even has a sense for the dangers internal to the patriotic mood he estab-
lishes. In particular, he recognizes that overpowering emotions such as
patriotism cannot so easily be made constructive. Once all the citizens
have been led by Athena to share an identity that gives them an over-
whelming mood of patriotism, the feeling is so powerful that they des-
perately desire to hold onto it forever. This temptation goes against the
transience of p/aysis, however. Homer understood that moods, insofar
as they make things matter, necessarily run a transient course: they well
up, dominate everything for a while, and finally fade away. Aeschylus
could see this about the mood of patriotism as well. W/hen the Furies
anxiously ask Athena whether she will “guarantee such honor for the
rest of time?” Athena answers honestly: “I have no need to promise
what I can not do.” But the desire for permanence was built into the
patriotic mood of Athenian culture nevertheless. The seed of Athens’s
undoing was planted with it at its inception.
In the years following Aeschylus’s triumphant play, the Athenians
set out to establish the universality and permanence of Athens by
force. They attempted to guarantee that their city-state would last for-
ever by annexing all neighboring states into an Athenian empire. Col-
onies that did not acknowledge the Athenian gods and pay a yearly
tribute to Athens were destroyed—the men killed and the woman
and children sold into slavery. But rather than securing the empire,
this ruthless rule led to rebellion in the colonies and factionalism and
even civil war at home. In the end, the Golden Age of Athens lasted
only fifty years.
THE ORESTEIA MANIFESTED and focused for all Athenians what they
were up to as Athenians. Heidegger calls anything that performs this
focusing function a work of art. The Greek temple is his primary ex-
ample of an artwork working. The temple, Heidegger says, held up to
and focused for fifth-century BC Greeks everything that was impor-
tant and meaningful in their world. As he puts it:
It is the temple work that first fits together and at the same time
gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in
which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and dis-
grace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for
human being.”
Like the temple, the Odyssey was a work of art for the Homeric Greeks. ‘
It was the sacred work, in other words, that manifested and focused
the practices paradigmatic for the Homeric world. The Odyssey dis-
closed the existential space in which shining heroes like Odysseus and
Achilles and shining examples of the erotic like Helen, as well as bad
guys like the suitors, made sense as possible ways of life. When sung
about, these figures gave direction and meaning to the lives of the or-
dinary Greeks in Homer’s world. The medieval cathedral and Dante’s
Divine Comedy played a similar role in the Middle Ages: they showed
Christians the dimensions of damnation and salvation, and thereby
made possible sinners and saints.“ And so too for the other epochs in
the history of the West: thanks to works of art paradigmatic for the
age, one knew where one stood and what one had to do.
The paradigms from different epochs are fundamentally incom-
mensurate. They literally have no common measure on the basis of
which they can be compared. What makes sense as a life worth aspir-
ing to in one age might well be reviled in another. There could not
have been saints in Homeric Greece, for example. At best there could
have been weak people who let others walk all over them. Likewise,
there could not have been Greek-style heroes in the Middle Ages.
Such people would have been regarded as impulsive and irresponsible
sinners. To be a saint or a hero is not just to behave a certain way; it
is to be held up as worthy for doing so. The paradigmatic works of
art for an age let certain ways of life shine forth. But in doing so they
cover up what is worthy in other—radically different——ways of life.
Temples, cathedrals, epics, plays, and other works of art focus and
hold up to a culture what counts as a life worth aspiring to. Works
of art in this sense do not represent something else--the way a pho-
tograph of one’s children represents them. Indeed, Heidegger says
explicitly that the temple “portrays nothing.”19 Rather, works of art
work; they gather practices together to focus and manifest a way of
life. When works of art shine, they illuminate and glamorize a way of
life, and all other things shine in their light. A work of art embodies
the truth of its world.
Of course the temple or the tragedy can only shine in this way
when it exists in the context of a living community organized around
it. The same Greek temple today, decaying in a desolate rock-cleft
valley, cannot be organizing a culture; it cannot focus, glamorize, and
stabilize a whole understanding of being for the people whose lives
are organized around it. It no longer “gives to things their look and to
men their outlook on themselves.”2° The temple today can, of course,
be an object of aesthetic appreciation. It can elicit “oohs” and “aahs”
from the tourists who are standing beside it. But when a Greek temple
or a medieval cathedral plays this role, it is no longer “working” as a
work of art.
The job of a work of art is to disclose a world, give meaning, and
reveal truth. In this sense, works of art working can be thought of as
sacred. They give meaning to people’s lives and people guide their
lives by them, so people treat them as divine. They venerate them like
gods and make shrines dedicated to them. ‘That is what happened to
the Odyssey, the Orexteia, and The Divine Comedy. Each of these texts
was venerated as sacred by those in the world it illuminated. In this
way artworks can play the traditional role of a god. They are a nonhu-
man authority that gives meaning and purpose to those whose lives
are illuminated by them.
To bring out a culture in its best light, we can say, is to articulate
the culture. A poet like Aeschylus articulated the Athenian world in
which he lived. But it is not only poets who do this job. Statesmen
like Pericles in Athens, Lincoln at Gettysburg, and Martin Luther
King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial each articulated what mattered for
the culture at the time. A philosopher like Kant or a theologian like
Aquinas might also be said to have articulated his culture. Articulators
focus and so renew what is meaningful in a culture; they bring out a
shared—background understanding of what matters, and therefore of
what it makes sense to do.
Since articulators focus a shared background, their audience un-
derstands them immediately. This was certainly the case for Aeschy-
lus, as it was for Dante, Lincoln, and King. But articulation is the
lesser role for a god. A god at its best doesn’t just renew a world by
glamorizing and focusing it; the most potent gods actually transform
the world, turning an old world into a new one. We can call that
transformation-—the most powerful thing a god can bring about——
reconfiguring a culture instead of merely articulating it.“
Reconfigurers change a culture so radically that they cannot count
on an already established language and shared practices to make
themselves intelligible. As a result, reconfigurers are essentially in-
comprehensible to the people of their culture. Indeed, they are barely
intelligible to themselves.
Reconfigurers are either gods or madmen. But which of these is
only determined in retrospect. If the new god actually works to re-
configure the world, and the practices organize themselves around its
way of life, then the god becomes an exemplar of a whole new under-
standing of everything that matters and of how to act. The chances are
strongly against this, however. There are always powerful conservative
forces in the culture that tend to destroy the new understanding or
to take it over and mobilize it for the current order. If the new world
fails, therefore, it is necessarily measured by the current understand-
ing, and against this norm it can look ridiculous.
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