 |
|
III. Homer (1954) <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next>> Lecture VII(Part II) S-II(3-26-54) We have been talking about the emergence of art out of myth in Homer and we have seen that this is an especially hard performance, because art, in order to emerge, needs an artist, a creative personality who is ready not only to reject myth but also to subdue it for the sake of something. Homer is the man who was able to subdue myth for the sake of poetry and that is what makes him the father of poetry. He is also something else. He is the father of Greek religion and of a strange vision of divinity. What was that vision? We have seen how he was driven to rethink all of his concepts in an artistic way; to drive them through to the end, and so it is almost inevitable that he would have come, as all who go this way, to some absolute and this absolute is again, according to the time in which he lived and the seeming easiness of the steps he took, a vision of God and divinity. The gods in Greek myth had two advantages over the gods in all other myth. The first we have already mentioned; namely, that from the beginning they were slayers of monsters. The second is that as gods they were all immanent; therefore their power was limited. The early Greek mythological thinkers understood that one cannot envision immanent gods in a cosmos and then make them all-powerful, because this would be contradictory, so all of their gods are of limited power and moira (necessity) rules over them just as it rules over man. They have been made or has come into being just as man and every other thing in the cosmos has been made, or has come into being. It is true they are of greater power, but their power is not absolute. They cannot act freely, or creatively. When later Greek thinkers ascribed the creation of man to Zeus they did not see how contrary this was to the whole line of Greek mythological thinking. In the central Greek myth of creation Zeus is not the creator of man. True, he is immortal, as all Greek gods were, but he has also been born. Other gods have been before him and they are also immortal, they too still live although they do not govern any more. Now he governs, but his time will come when new gods will govern the world and he will still live on though powerless. What then can he do? He cannot create man. Man has been created by Moira just as the gods have been created by Moira and no further questions can be asked. The question as to the origin of the world and of the gods is never really asked in Greek myth. They have always been there. Homer takes these gods and humanizes them entirely, humanizes them to the point Where Hermes can sing that wonderful song in the Odyssey when Aphrodite commits adultery before the gods and he says
This wonderfully frivolous song is almost cynical and the fact that it was sung and even danced to by the Greeks shows how far Homer succeeded in his endeavor. What kind of concept of divinity is this? It is a human concept, more human even than Abraham's although not nearly so personal. The highest god for Homer is Zeus and he chooses Zeus for a very specific reason. Namely, so that man can be free (which he is not in Greek myth) but man seen only in a very certain light. This man of whom Homer says
a man, the man - man as a free being who has to be free because myth has changed into art. Art is born and the experience of man which is the eternal subject matter of art is placed right in the center. Man is the hero of art and the self-experience of man is this Olympos. In order to show us this "man", in order to give us the whole world history of the "bios" of this man who is MAN, he must first be made free and it is Homer who frees him. But there is a condition to this freedom. Namely, that the highest god Zeus must also be made free and therefore to a certain degree creative. Homer does this in the most wonderfully artistic way. He does not break entirely with the old mythical tradition; indeed none of the ancient poets ever did that. They always carry on tradition. Rather Homer like Laotze (with the Ancient concept of the Tao) takes Zeus and makes just a little repair on the concept, a very small but significant one, which shows again how right the Talmudists were in saying that "when the Messiah really comes he has to do very little". He just has to change one thing a little bit and then everything will change. Yes, that is so. Everything will change but only if that one little thing that is changed is in the center and one can put another center near the old one. Then this little thing that is done will cause the whole cosmic relationship of the world to change position. This change of position, which is a wonder that can only be achieved by the deepest thinking, is reached by Homer. And what is even most amazing is that at first Zeus does not seem to have the power to change anything. If we look at him in the Iliad we see that he cannot help Achilles. He loves Hector, but he cannot help Hector. Hector has to die because Nemesis(Moira) has ordained it to be so, and it almost seems as if he is powerless to help those whom he loves. But there is one terrific thing he can do. He can give glory to Hector and Achilles. Glory, "shine", and the later Homeric Greeks all believed in the power of that, because it is the power of man to give significance to his own deeds.
Achilles chooses to die young achieving one great deed if he is Accorded this glory and by glory the Greeks understood just this significance. What is this significance, really? It is the kind of thing a man asks for when he wishes his life to give meaning to what he has done; meaning, in the sense that he will be remembered, that he will be sung about later, that even after he dies he will still be immortal in the in the song of man and it will not be as if he had never appeared on this earth. Then he will be like Achilles, he will be the perfect artistic man, because only poetic man can be in this sense. Only he can say "If this is the meaning of my life, then it is enough for me." Only artistic ambition ruled entirely by poetic concepts can be satisfied with the fact that the meaning of man's existence is in his possibility of putting significance into his life and becoming immortal through this significance. To have the possibility for glory and to shine before later humanity for all time. This was, of became after Homer, the great ambition of all Greeks. So there Zeus sits, apparently powerless but truly powerful in one main thing. He is the god who can give or deny significance to a man's life. The deepest thing ever said about art was spoken by Heraclitus in his fragment about Apollo, the god of art. He said:
He gives significance. That is exactly what the artist does. He has the power to give, not meaning, but significance to life. Significance is to meaning as beauty is to truth. We are in the presence of truth when we look at beauty but we do not have truth and cannot use truth there because beauty is much more than truth. Beauty is shine, is glory, and it blinds us for the insight into truth. Likewise, in significance truth is present but it is neither revealed nor concealed. It is shown to the senses. It is presented to us in such a way that we are not separated from it but still we cannot grasp it. In every work of art even the beholder cannot grasp the truth that is there. He can only be placed into the shine of truth, into the beauty which shows to him everything that is there but only under the condition that he be blinded to the truth itself. That is the sense of Heraclitus' saying about the lord at Delphi. That is what Apollo does to the artist and to the beholder. He neither reveals nor conceals but gives significance. Homer, in discovering a concept of God as a giver of highest significance, also discovered himself as an artist. In this sense Zeus is Homer and Homer is Zeus. We have seen this strange process happen many times before; namely, that in making concepts of God we are also making ourselves. Every step towards an absolute in divinity is a step into man's capabilities and a new discovery of man's capabilities. Homer is the artist not only in the sense that he is the father of poetry but also in a more profound sense; namely, that he is the maker of man. In the Iliad it is Achilles, in the Odyssey Odysseus, a man of whom he expressively says "man". In the Iliad he says "The Muse shall sing to him the anger of Achilles". Achilles is not only a man. He is also an event "in man" an event that we shall see puts a power into us that can unfetter all of our other powers, because here is a free human being who has made a decision. The decision that he will not live long, because his father wanted him to be a maker of words and a doer of deeds, so he is ready to die young if he is given this possibility of a few great deeds that will shine in glory forever. And we know from the Odyssey when Odysseus visits the dead Achilles in Hades that Achilles knew he would have to go to Hades, that "I would prefer to live as the servant of a poor man on earth than to be Achilles living in Hades". The Greeks knew the worth of life. So did Achilles. Knowing it so fully, rejecting any concept of immortality in the sense of a hereafter or of any happiness after death, being mere shadows of one's self in Hades forever without knowledge, without solace for later, they chose to stick to life, to love life more than anything else, and yet to say in the same breath "I choose to die young if glory is given to me". This is Achilles' choice. To die for the sake of glory and this glory is given to him in the form of one great deed which is caused by his anger and which is sung about in the Iliad. This anger arises like a storm in the human breast which unfetters all of the storms of violence in the great and brave deeds of men. It is like a whirlwind that originates in the breast of one free man, because this anger was a great thing for the Greeks. It is the capability of man to make a free decision and to stand up for himself, to be a storm of anger for a righteous purpose if he has been insulted, and this storm creates more whirlwinds of greater storms until the Iliad is over after a circle of storms caused by a single man. In the Odyssey we see even more. Here the man himself is not only shown but sung about, the "multi-versed man", the free man, the clever man, the crafty man, the man who can meet every situation and yet be absolutely sincere. It is the story of one of the greatest characters ever created, greater perhaps even than Abraham if he was the creation of a writer. When you read the stories of Abraham you can see one feature running through them. This man made an impression on everyone wherever he went. The impression was such that people were gasping when they saw him. This is what happens to Odysseus. Wherever he goes he makes an impression. Nowhere does this come out more clearly in the Odyssey than in the relation of Odysseus to women. There is not a single one that doesn't love him. Athena not only helps him but she loves him and she has to love him, because it is one of the most humane trends in all of Homer that he binds the gods to man if man is worth his salt in the values of humanity. She loves him because she is bound to him and so are all of the other women in the Odyssey. Nowhere is this more clear than in Homer's portrait of Calypso, the nymph who wants to marry Odysseus and make him immortal. Here we have one of the turning points of Greek myth, and one of the most daring things that Homer ever did. The Greeks envied their gods and that is why they invented the story that the gods envied them. They invented this story because they wanted nothing so much as to be immortal, clinging to life - this life which was for them such a beautiful thing. And in the story of Odysseus and Calypso Homer taught them one thing. He taught them that if a man wants to be immortal then he would have to change into a god and this would mean that he would have to give up himself. The problem is that this runs completely against the pride of man and so for the first time Homer shows man in his full splendor. Odysseus who does not want to be anything in the world but himself rejects the most tempting proposition that could be given to any Greek; namely, to become immortal. He would rather stay mortal in order to stay Odysseus. That is his decision and this decision is manifested a second time in that wonderful episode when he blinds the Cyclops in defiance of the god Poseidon and then exposes himself to Poseidon's anger. Because according to the story he did not have to expose himself. When he blinded the Cyclops he said that he was "Nobody" so Poseidon need never have known what he had done. But instead, there he goes with his little boat and he stands up and says:
and thus exposes himself to the vengeance of the god. He defies this god but again, in order to be nothing but himself, to belong to those he wants to belong to - Penelope, his country, his friends, because they are also himself. This hero who is not even described by Homer as a hero is man and he comes into the full realization of his own power and might, splendor and misery, tragedy and joy, which he has to pay for and which he wants to accept, because he has understood that the one cannot be had without the other. The realization of this man who is the central hero of one of the first free works of art is a very revealing thing. It reveals man as a world-builder, as the center of a world that he creates as a free and responsible agent, a world that is neither revealed nor concealed but given to our senses and presented in the form of a story. That is the over-all meaning of the Odyssey in a philosophical sense. In order to proceed into our last lecture on Homer I would recommend that in your reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey you think about a few questions I am going to ask you and try to make up your mind about them. The first is how does the kind of art that Homer gives to us relate to Plasticity and sculpture as artistic forms? These will become the center of all Greek art and they are already present here in a poetic vision. Then there is the question as to why do all these women love Odysseus'? something we have asked but not yet answered. What are the spheres of the world that Homer creates? We have said that Homer creates a world picture but how is this picture brought about, especially in the Odyssey? What is the specific concept of space and time that Homer uses in his epics? Is there anything poetically and philosophically specific about his use of these concepts? Lastly, I want you to think about two things. The first concerns the Iliad and it is the description that Homer gives of the shield of Achilles. The second is in the Odyssey, towards the end when Odysseus has to reveal himself to Penelope and identify who he is, the story about the bed he builds for her. These two little anecdotes have a central meaning in both epics and I want you to please re-read them carefully and think about them too. <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next>> |
