IV. Homer (1967)
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What did they mean by that? (Gods) made by human beings, by singers! Are they merely fictions? Why did they believe in them, if they were so clearly conscious that they had been made? What they meant is that "they have been formed, or shaped, for us by Hesiod and Homer". The gods of ancient Hellenic myth were in part mythical (natural) experiences and natural manifestations. Homer humanized them completely. There was only one moral for him, and it appears with Zeus who is described (as is every Olympian God) in the perfect form of perfect man. It was a humanization that went down to the very body. It was not like the Hebrew where the spirit is only taken, but rather a complete humanization from the beginning. One that goes on and on through Hellenic culture with more and more humanizing of the gods until only one thing is left: Namely, life forces, virtues, forces that can direct and conduct life, and at this point we are already with Socrates, and Hellenic culture comes to an end.
In the beginning is Homer. Might this (in itself) explain why they were so ready to believe in the inspiration, the higher inspiration of the muses and the arts? The beliefs that come to inspire most men (prophets so to speak) they didn't have. No God was talking to them, and they were not inspired by the gods. They were inspired by the muses, and the muses are nothing but manifestations of the capabilities of human beings. Homer says:
"Sing to me oh muse of the scorn of Achilles"....."Sing to me
oh muse of this man Odysseus, who broke so many cities and
survived it all". (1)
It seems so realistic, and he hopes (that is his belief) that the muses will inspire him to sing rightly. He shapes, or forms the gods of the Greeks from the beginning, and we meet the strange event that a singer, a mere poet, a man who did not have any kind of mythical belief (but who just used myth for poetic purposes) became the founder of the highest Greek religion which we call the Olympic religion. He really made their gods, and for hundreds of years that religion was accepted by the leading men in every Greek polis and in all of the city states. It is very strange, for us who analyze things, and who know that poetry means merely to create an illusion, but an illusion of a perfect life and a perfect world.
Homer did the sane, but he wasn't regarded as having done the same. He was regarded as the real architect of the Greek world. How does this world look, that he is singing about? The Greeks had an anecdote. It is about how Homer died. He is supposed to have been, like all Hellenes, a lover of riddles, and when he was very old they tell how he met some boys who were fishing on the shore. He asked one of them "what have you been doing"? It seemed obvious, that they were fishing. They said to him "those we catch we leave behind, and those we do not catch we take away with us". What had they been doing?
The Greeks say that Homer couldn't solve the riddle and hanged himself, because now he knew he was old, and that he had to go. This readiness to go (is characteristic) of a man who had created a world view which is one of the few (except the Hebrew) that accepts death as the fate of man; that does not want for an eternity, a hereafter, for a dear soul in a sweet paradise; that knows that man is condemned to die (as Buddha knew) and accepts it. It is this readiness to die in the fullness of time (after he has fulfilled his human task) that the Greeks prayed for.
The love of riddles that comes to the fore here was so widespread in the Hellenic world, that even their gods talked in riddles. The Oracle at Delphi (where Apollo speaks indirectly through a priest) gives oracle sayings and they are all riddles. You have to handle them and interpret them rightly, or else you are fooled. There is no servitude to the Hellenic gods. Hellenes admire their gods, honor their gods, sacrifice the best part of the cow for them (the fat which they couldn't eat) but they absolutely refuse to bow down to them. There is no gesture of bowing down ever in Hellenic life. When the gesture of prostration was recommended to them by the Persians (during the Persian war when a Persian general tried to bribe one of the Greeks, and then take him over to the other camp where he would prostrate himself like a servant) he said to him, in the double way that Greeks could speak: "Your advice general is not from both sides well considered". That means there is no reason in it, and he could have added: "We Greeks listen only to reason".
Try to convince me. It is not well considered from both sides,
because what servitude is you indeed know well. It has its glories
too. It has its rewards, and you know about them. But you don't
know what freedom is, because if you knew what freedom is you
would recommend to me that I should fight for it not only with
spears, but with axes too.
This love of freedom, this independence, shows up very early in the Homeric epics. The condition for all relationships (between nature, man, the world, and the gods) is that each keep within their proper boundaries, and do not over step their lines. That goes first for man. No gods are all powerful. Even Zeus is not all powerful. He is immortal, like all of the other Greek gods, but the day might come when he finds himself living in the darkness of Hades where he cannot die. He might be dethroned. His power is not unlimited, he is not the absolute God. We can argue with him, and he will say that he knows better than us, but finally he will say "lets have another thought about it", and he is so far humanized that you can almost argue with him.
This energetic humanization of the gods does not lead to the humanization of the world. On the other hand, it doesn't lead to the Hebrew distinction that we are the masters of the world either. Oh no, we are not the masters of the world. As Heraclitus once said, we have a greater logos than the world has, we are superior, but not absolutely superior. As soon as we move into the realm of nature and try to handle nature we have to be damn careful not to break the laws that rule there. Three compartments are created. First, Olympus, where the immortal gods dwell, and where human beings cannot go. Second, the world of human beings, and third, the world of nature. These compartmentalized pieces of the new world view are absolutely set, like a three layer cake. In that will operate the whole development of Greek art, of Greek philosophy, of Greek science, and it will make true that early idea of the Greeks, that called all of those capabilities art. There is the development of philosophy (the first development in Europe and in the world), and it is influenced by art. There is the first consequential development of science and it too is influenced by art, inspired by art, with the always underlying metaphysical assumptions that sound so artistic and even poetic.
This is all the outgrowth of one conception and one man. There is not a single piece of Hellenic art in later centuries that cannot be retraced to Homer. He is called the father of the Hellenes, the father of poetry, the educator of Greece, and in the fifth century the tyrant [blank in transcript] in Athens collected the works of Homer and made them required reading for all young Athenians as the start of their education. This procedure went on all over Greece, so we have the astonishing phenomenon that at one time a work of art had the decisive voice. A voice was needed, and it developed an entire culture.
When Greece started to decay the Homeric God consciousness was questioned by Plato. The Homeric world consciousness was questioned by some Greek materialists, but all of them without any exception still stood on the grounds that Homer had created for them. Such an effort of poetry and of art has not been there in the world since; not before, and not since. That art was the start of a whole way of life, the beginning of a whole way of Weltanschauung (which was consequentially pursued by the Greeks) is a singular phenomenon. Lets have a look at the man who did it, and how he created this work which influenced them so much.
(As we mentioned before) he has been called the father of poetry, and in a way he is, for western poetry at least. We have no other father. Poetry starts with him, in so far as poetry is a human performance, and not the inspiration of any mystical experience (or of any higher ways, but merely realistically human in spite of all the metaphors he uses). He wrote two works. Both are concerned with man, and with man only. The gods in those works are there only to give a frame for man's actions. Nature is there to give a soil for mans actions, and he says it when he opens the epic (of the Iliad):
"Sing me oh Muse of the scorn of Achilles"
Nothing more. It is a world epic. The scorn of Achilles; now he starts to achieve that. He restricts himself exactly to the scorn of Achilles, and what it causes. He takes Achilles, a figure from Greek myth who, as a young boy, had been given the choice either to lead a very short life, but doing one great deed that would never be forgotten; or, to become a happy man who leads a long life with much success and dies in peace, but is entirely unknown to anybody else. And he makes his choice, for the short life and for the great deed. Portrait of the artist as a young man ... does that say something to you? I would say here that Homer gives a portrait of man as a young man. The life that man can have as a young man, if he is ambitious enough. He describes to us mainly a short life, and he does it in an unmythical way, because in his epic it seems that Achilles only takes it as a pretext that he has been insulted by Agamemnon who supposedly has taken his bride and his booty away, and for which he withdraws into his tent full of scorn leaving us half suspicious. Isn't it perhaps, because he knows that when he fights he will kill Hektor, the hero of Troy, and with this killing Troy will fall, and the consequence will be that Achilles will die. Homer is so human that he tries to show his hero wanting to avoid that very fate which he had chosen, and so the poet has to trick him into it, so to speak, to fulfill his chosen fate. As soon as Achilles gets into this tremendous scorn, it seems like a storm in a glass of water, nothing more, and then all hell breaks loose. The battle of Troy becomes hopeless. One hero after the other has to die, because Achilles has that tremendous scorn, and then finally it involves the whole world, nature, the world of the gods, and they are all fighting each other like mad, because Achilles does not take part in the fight. It is all very very short (although the poem might seem long to us), but as far as a lifetime goes, it is a story of about ten years, no more. Now if Homer had been a mythical poet he would have made it easy. He could have said "this is the fate he has chosen, and now he is going to fulfill his fate", and so on, but he doesn't make it so easy for himself. Achilles truly tries to withdraw. On the one hand he doesn't want this fight, and on the other the fight can never be won without him, because Hektor, the main hero of Troy has to be killed first. It can draw on endlessly (like the war in Vietnam) if Achilles does not join the force.