The issue of gender ideology, and more deeply the issue of the archetypal dialectic between masculine and feminine, is essential, not peripheral, to understanding the character of a cultural world view, and language provides a vivid reflection of those underlying dynamics. In the retrospective analysis that follows the narrative, I will address this critical subject more fully, and suggest a new conceptual framework for approaching it.
Part I. The Greek World View
1. John H. Finley, Four Stages of Greek Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 95–96. Closely related to this discussion about gods and Ideas is a valuable point originally made by the German scholar Wilamowitz- Moellendorff, and recounted by W. K. C. Guthrie: “… theos, the Greek word which we have in mind when we speak of Plato’s god, has primarily a predicative force. That is to say, the Greeks did not, as Christians or Jews do, first assert the existence of God and then proceed to enumerate his attributes, saying ‘God is good,’ ‘God is love’ and so forth. Rather they were so impressed or awed by the things in life or nature remarkable either for joy or fear that they said ‘this is a god’ or ‘that is a god.’ The Christian says ‘God is love,’ the Greek ‘Love is theos,’ or ‘a god.’ As another writer has explained it: ‘By saying that love, or victory, is god, or, to be more accurate, a god, was meant first and foremost that it is more than human, not subject to death, everlasting.… Any power, any force we see at work in the world, which is not born with us and will continue after we are gone could thus be called a god, and most of them were’ [Georges M. A. Grube, Plato’s Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 150].
“In this state of mind, and with this sensitiveness to the superhuman character of many things which happen to us, and which give us, it may be, sudden stabs of joy or pain which we do not understand, a Greek poet could write lines like: ‘Recognition between friends is theos.’ It is a state of mind which obviously has no small bearing on the much-discussed question of monotheism or polytheism in Plato, if indeed it does not rob the question of meaning altogether” (W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle [New York: Harper Torchbook, 1960], 10–11).
2. By the time of Homer, an essential transformation in the Greek mythological sensibility had already taken place, with the more animistic, mystical, and nature-oriented matrifocal mythology—immanent, all-permeating, organic, nonheroic—having been subordinated to the Olympian patriarchal mythology, the character of which was more objectified, transcendent, articulated, heroic and autonomy-supporting. See, for example, Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), and Charlene Spretnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). Yet as Joseph Campbell pointed out in The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Viking, 1964), suggestive signs of the Greeks’ dual mythological heritage can be seen even within the Homeric canon itself, in the striking shift from the world of the Iliad to that of the Odyssey.
The Iliad is an historical epic, and sings of the great patriarchal themes: of the wrath of Achilles, of the courage, pride, and excellence of noble warriors, of manly virtue, strength, and warcraft. It is staged in the day-world of public activity, where heroic men strive on the battlefield of life. Yet that life, though glorious, is short, and death tragically final, beyond which is nothing of value. The greatness of the Iliad rests especially on its epic rendering of that tragic tension. By contrast, the Odyssey, rather than a commemoration of a collective historical event, is an epic of an individual journey with a distinctly imaginal character; it deals throughout with magical and fantastical phenomena, is informed by a different sense of death, and is more concerned with the feminine. Odysseus, the wisest of the Greek heroes at Troy, undergoes a transformative series of adventures and trials—encountering a succession of magical women and goddesses, entering the underworld, being initiated into dark mysteries, experiencing several sequences of death and rebirth—and is thereby finally enabled to return home in triumph, twice-born, to reunite with Penelope, the beloved feminine. In this reading, the shift from the Iliad to the Odyssey reflects a continuing dialectic in the Greek cultural psyche between its patriarchal and matriarchal roots, between the Olympian public religion and the ancient mysteries. (See Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, 157–176.)
The Odyssey still evidences the Iliad’s appreciation of the individual and the heroic, rooted in that ancient Indo-European admiration for individual prowess in war that would so profoundly influence the character and history of the West; but the heroism has taken on a decisively new and more complicated form. An important later expression of this same dialectic can be found in Plato’s Symposium, where it is the wise woman Diotima who plays the pivotal role in Socrates’s initiation into the transcendent knowledge of the Beautiful. As with Homer’s Odysseus, the element of individual heroism is clearly present in Plato’s Socrates, but in yet a further metamorphosis—more intellectual, spiritual, inward, self-conquering.
3. Both of Thales’s successors in Miletus, Anaximander and Anaximenes (both fl. sixth century B.C.), made contributions of importance for later Western thought. Anaximander proposed that the primary substance or essential nature (arche) of the cosmos was an infinite and undifferentiated substance he called the apeiron (the “boundless”). Within the apeiron arose the opposites of hot and cold, whose struggle in turn produced the various phenomena of the world. Anaximander thereby introduced the notion, essential for later philosophy and science, of going beyond perceptible phenomena (such as water) to a more fundamental, nonperceptible substance whose nature was more primitive and indefinite than the familiar substances of the visible world. Anaximander also postulated a theory of evolution in which life originated in the sea, and appears to have been the first person to attempt to draw a map of the entire inhabited Earth.
Anaximander’s successor, Anaximenes, in turn posited air as the primary substance, and attempted to demonstrate the manner in which that single substance could change itself into other forms of matter through the processes of rarefaction and condensation. Anaximenes’s proposal that a specific element, air, rather than an undifferentiated substance like the apeiron, was the origin of things could be viewed as a less sophisticated theory than Anaximander’s—a step back toward Thales’s water. But by pursuing his analysis of how one primary element underwent change into other types of matter while still retaining its essential nature, Anaximenes introduced the crucial idea that a basic essence could remain itself while undergoing many transformations. Thus the notion of arche, which had previously signified the beginning or originating cause of things, now took on the additional significance of “principle”—something that eternally maintains its own nature while transmuting itself into the many transient and changing phenomena of the visible world. Subsequent philosophical and scientific developments concerning first principles, the dependence of phenomena on a continuing underlying primary reality, and the various laws of conservation in physics all owe something to Anaximander’s and Anaximenes’s rudimentary conceptions. Both men also made pivotal contributions to early Greek astronomy.
4. Of this important fragment from Xenophanes, W. K. C. Guthrie states: “The emphasis on personal search, and on the need for time, marks this as the first statement in extant Greek literature of the idea of progress in the arts and sciences, a progress dependent on human effort and not—or at least not primarily—on divine revelation” (A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1, The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962], 399–400).
5. The evolution of the Greek view of human history and of the human relation to the divine can be discerned in the shifting nature and status of the mythological Prometheus. Hesiod’s earlier depiction of Prometheus as the trickster who stole fire from Olympus for mankind against Zeus’s wishes was greatly expanded by Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound, whose titanic protagonist gave mankind all the arts of civilization and thereby b
rought it from a state of primitive savagery to intellectual mastery and dominion over nature. Hesiod’s seriocomic figure became for Aeschylus a tragic hero of universal stature; and while Hesiod had viewed human history as an inevitable regress from an aboriginal golden age, Aeschylus’s Prometheus celebrated mankind’s progress to civilization. Nevertheless, in contrast with later conceptions of the same myth, Aeschylus’s version regarded the divine Prometheus, not man, as the source of human progress, thus tacitly acknowledging a divine priority in the scheme of things. While it is difficult to ascertain Aeschylus’s precise view of the myth’s ontological significance, it would seem that he conceived of Prometheus and man in essentially mythopoeic terms as a symbolic unity.
For fifth-century Greeks after Aeschylus, however, the figure of Prometheus became merely a straightforward allegorical representation of man’s own intelligence and restless striving. In a fragment from a comedy called The Sophists, Prometheus is simply equated with the human mind; in another work, Prometheus is used as a metaphor for “experience” to explain humanity’s progress to civilization. This demythologizing of Prometheus to the status of allegory is also evident in the Sophist Protagoras’s account of the myth in Plato’s Protagoras (see page 14 above). As the Greek mind evolved from archaic poetry to humanist philosophy, with classical tragedy marking a midpoint, the Greek view of history moved from regress to progress, with the source of human achievement moving from the divine to man. See E. R. Dodds, “Progress in Classical Antiquity,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by Philip P. Weiner (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973) 3: 623–626.
6. Socrates’s combination of intellectual humility with faith in an intelligible order is nicely suggested in R. Hackforth’s phrase “an ideal of knowledge unattained” (quoted in Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers, 75).
7. For the Platonic linking of the irrational and physical with the female sex, and of the rational and spiritual with the male sex, and also for the important association of Platonic epistemology with Greek homoeroticism, see Evelyn Fox Keller, “Love and Sex in Plato’s Epistemology,” in Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 21–32. See also the valuable discussion of Plato’s homoeroticism by Gregory Vlastos in his essay “The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato,” in Platonic Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 3–42. Vlastos points out, however, that Plato’s climactic argument in the Symposium (206–212) shifts suddenly from a homosexual paradigm to a procreative heterosexual one when Diotima describes the highest fulfillment of Eros as the philosopher’s conjugal union with the Idea of Beauty, which brings forth the birth of wisdom. In the same essay, Vlastos offers an illuminating analysis of how Plato’s exaltation of the universal Idea of Beauty in the context of personal relations tends to depreciate the concrete individual beloved person as a valuing subject, potentially worthy of love for his or her own sake—just as, in the context of political theory, Plato’s exaltation of the ideal republic tends to depreciate individual citizens as ends in themselves, and in so doing deprives them of their civil liberty.
8. “The tradition that detailed astronomical observations supply the principal clues for cosmological thought is, in its essentials, native to Western civilization. It seems to be one of the most significant and characteristic novelties that we inherit from the civilization of ancient Greece” (Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy and the Development of Western Thought [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957], 26).
9. Cited in Sir Thomas L. Heath, Aristarchus of Samos: The Ancient Copernicus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 140. See also Plato’s Laws, VII, 821–822.
10. Finley, Four Stages of Greek Thought, 2. Owen Barfield, speaking of Coleridge’s lectures on the history of philosophy, described the Greek phenomenon in similar terms: “The birth of self-consciousness, the birth of individuality … was taking place with the dawn of Greek civilization.… The whole thing was like an awakening. When you first awaken in the morning you are very much aware of the world around you in a way that you are not when you get used to it during the course of the day” (Owen Barfield, “Coleridge’s Philosophical Lectures,” Towards 3, 2 [1989]: 29).
Part II. The Transformation of the Classical Era
1. It has been suggested on the basis of passages in the Laws and the Epinomis that Plato himself may have implicitly supported the hypothesis of a moving Earth as the way to save the appearances mathematically and reveal the single, uniform planetary orbits, and that in the Timaeus (40b-d) he may have described a heliocentric system. See R. Catesby Taliaferro, Appendix C to his translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest, in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 16 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 477–478.
2. The preeminent Hellenistic supreme deity was the Greco-Egyptian Sarapis, a synthesis of Osiris, Zeus, Dionysus, Pluto, Asclepius, Marduk, Helios, and Yahweh. Established as the ruling city-god of Alexandria by Ptolemy I (reigned 323–285 B.C.), and eventually worshiped throughout the Mediterranean world, Sarapis illustrates the Hellenistic tendency of theological syncretism and henotheism (the worship of one deity without denying the existence of others).
3. Recent scholarship has underscored the abiding vigor of the pagan tradition in the late classical era (see in particular Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987]), in contrast with earlier views which tended to suggest the inevitability of the Christian triumph. For vast numbers of pagans, the ancient gods and goddesses continued to hold meaning, and pagan ceremonies and rituals were attended to with energetic piety. Considered as a whole, the Hellenistic period was an era of intense and multiform religiosity of which Christianity was one characteristic expression. The Christian faith spread gradually among the urban populations in the form of small churches led by bishops and fortified by strict ethical and doctrinal norms, yet by the early fourth century it had not penetrated most of the rural areas, and for many pagan intellectuals the Christian arguments still seemed implausible and eccentric. It was the conversion of Constantine (c. 312 A.D.) that marked the great shift in Christianity’s fortunes, yet even then its ascendance was significantly challenged in the following generation by the emperor Julian’s brief but spirited attempt to restore pagan culture (361–363).
4. It has also been said that Greco-Roman culture was engrafted onto the Judaeo-Christian religion, or that both were engrafted onto the barbarian Germanic peoples, with what is considered the West’s fundamental or primary inheritance changing in each instance. All three perspectives have arguments in their favor, and the truth, like the West itself, can perhaps best be understood as their complex synthesis.
Part III. The Christian World View
1. “Yahweh” (originally, “YHWH”) has been variously translated: e.g., “I Am Who Am”; “He Brings Into Existence Whatever Exists”; and “I Am / Shall Be Who I Am / Shall Be,” wherein the complex ambiguity between present and future tense is unresolved. The meaning of the word remains controversial.
2. Whether the historical Jesus explicitly claimed to be the Messiah as such, or the prophesied “Son of man,” remains unclear. Whatever his private self-understanding, it appears unlikely that he publicly claimed to be the Son of God. A similar ambiguity exists as to whether Jesus intended to initiate a new religion or rather a radical eschatological reformation of Judaism. See Raymond E. Brown, “ ‘Who Do Men Say That I Am?’—A Survey of Modern Scholarship on Gospel Christology,” in Biblical Reflections on Crises Facing the Church (New York: Paulist Press, 1975), 20–37.
3. The other side of the Jewish-Christian paradox (that Christianity was comparatively so unsuccessful among the very people from which it sprung) was that Christians in subsequent centuries so pervasively distanced themselves from, deprecated, abused, and persecuted their Jewish contemporaries, while embracing the ancient Judaic scripture and history as the indispensable foundation of their own religion.
4. The philosophical integrati
on of Hellenism with Judaism was initiated by Philo of Alexandria (b. c. 15–10 B.C.), who identified the Logos in Platonic terms as the Idea of Ideas, as the summation of all Ideas, and as the source of the world’s intelligibility; and in Judaic terms as God’s providential ordering of the universe and as mediator between God and man. The Logos was thus both the agent of creation and the agent by which God was experienced and understood by man. Philo taught that the Ideas were God’s eternal thoughts, which he created as real beings prior to the creation of the world. Later Christians held Philo in high regard for his views of the Logos, which he called the first-begotten Son of God, the man of God, and the image of God. Philo appears to have been the first person to have attempted to integrate revelation and philosophy, faith and reason—the basic impulse of Scholasticism. Little recognized in Judaic thought, he had a marked influence on Neoplatonism and medieval Christian theology.
5. This generalization about the Greeks’ cyclical sense of history should be balanced by the discussion of the Greek experience and conception of progress in the subchapter on the Greek Enlightenment, pages 25–31, and also in note 5, part 1, concerning the figure of Prometheus.
6. Augustine differed from Plotinus in positing an increased distinction between Creator and creation as well as a more personal relation between God and the individual soul; in stressing God’s freedom and purposefulness in the creation; in upholding the human need for grace and revelation; and above all in embracing the doctrine of the Incarnation.
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