Christmas Day 2014

According to the Greek historian Plutarch in his essay "The Obsolescence of Oracles,"  during the reign of the emperor Tiberius the news of Pan's death came to one Thamus, a sailor on his way to Italy on a boat out in the Mediterranean. A divine voice hailed him across the salt water, "Thamus, are you there? When you reach Palodes be sure to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead."  Which Thamus did, and the news was greeted from shore with groans and laments.  The adult life of Jesus is conventionally dated in the early decades of the Common Era during the reign of the emperor Tiberius.  So it was that a great religious system came into existence as another collapsed.  As the distinguished classicist Hermann Fraenkel argued in his Sather lectures "Ovid, A Poet Between Two Worlds," it was at this moment in time that the idea of love entered the world.  The pagan poet Ovid hinted at this new sentiment in his poetry, which became incarnate in the person of Jesus whose preaching focused on love more than anything else.  For many it defines Christianity. For all its many virtues classical antiquity never really discovered the idea of love, either romantic or ethical.  The ancient poets sang of men and women burning with desire, that's about as far as they got toward love. And of course they never really got their minds around the idea of heaven or redemption.  Friederich Nietzsche in his long essay "The Birth of Tragedy" identifies what is the salient feature of pagan antiquity, an abiding sense of irony, a deep suspicion of hope, an instinctive understanding of the futility of all things, the calm acceptance of death as the end of life, death that in turn informs everything that is life.  At the same time the ancients had the imagination to quicken everything in their existence, every tree, rock, blade of grass, with the spirit of something beyond the immediately experienced world.  In this way they sensed themselves to be part of a greater whole to which they owed a debt in some way or another.  They peopled this larger world with a community of superior beings, their gods, a group of thoroughly egotistical beings who, like any aristocratic, self-obsessed group, rode roughshod over the feelings and needs of their underlings; they sometimes picked them up and loved them, sometimes it was rape, sometimes more sympathetic, or in a fit of pique slapped them down, or even killed them. The ancients never had to cry out "Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?" because frankly, my dear, the gods never cared.  No, the humans were happy if they escaped notice, and most of the time their gods left them alone to live their human lives with energy, intelligence, dignity, and grace.  Look at the sculpture, read the writings, they were in love with beauty, with the moment, able to let the shadow of death cross their path and not flinch nor moan, yes, curse, rage, and cry, but never flinch nor moan.