Sit Back and Watch the Felix Culpa

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 30 June 2014.

"...like a Kierkegaardian Abraham"

I love Aristotle and I think it's remarkable that Poetics holds up so well after the whole rise and fall of Western Culture.

His method in all things, though, was to study every example of the subject that interested him and seek the patterns. I love this method: pattern recognition. McLuhan says it's the key to our ability to fabricate a survival strategy. But Aristotle only got to look at the art of his day, all of which was governed by the absurdities of polytheism. The pagans gave us tragedies of fate and epics of action; Christianity gives us tragedies of action and epics of...well, fate isn't the right word, but humility, maybe alignment with God's will.

I think the spirit of Poetics holds up, but I think the letter would be different if he had had the advantage of looking back from our point in time and space. So, yeah, I take liberties with Poetics because I see Shakespeare, Miller, and all sorts of other artists and philosophers continuing the work of the original text.

The question of Odysseus' virtue is impossible to reconcile since the gods don't have a unified will: none of them stay even personally consistent.

It's the problem of Plato's Euthyphro: polytheism just can't deal well with virtue, which is crazy considering how much the ancient Greeks prized it. I don't see Odysseus as having humility in the Christian sense. He doesn't become more devout, he doesn't say Zeus must increase and I must decrease. He is still a man who strives with gods, to steal from Tennyson. He's humble in the same sense I'm humble when I drive: I'm better at not getting caught when I speed than I used to be, I'm less reckless, and I could probably handle a conversation with the cops better. I even have a sticker in my window that shows I donate to law enforcement. I'm about as humble in the face of speed limits as Odysseus is in the face of "the gods." And if Officer Athena counseled me on how to beat the system, the analogy would be even better, not that it's that good.

The Greek epic hero has to figure out how to assert his humanity to its fullest extent, something approaching "god"liness. The Greek tragic hero in some ways just doesn't have as many resources available to prevail.

I see Oedipus as a supremely screwed character. I read him like a Kierkegaardian Abraham, put in a position in which serving the heavens means doing the opposite of what a moral person would expect of a divine request.

Humility means accepting his lot and killing his dad and marrying his mom, or at least resigning himself to that future. Morality means protecting his family. So he can't be moral and humble. And he doesn't earn his curse, really; it's like he's the living punishment of his parents' transgression. But even then, what makes their attempt to defy fate immoral, if morality comes from the gods and Kronos and Zeus are both child killers, not to mention father killers? Again we hit Euthyphro: morality must come from a source higher than the gods.

I've probably mentioned this before, but I think Zeus was probably Satan.

Anyway, from Marlowe onward, we've got tragic heroes who aren't marked by Olympus to suffer, but who bring about their own suffering, although there are always extenuating circumstances. And we get the Christian approach to comedy and the epic, plus the morality play about finding one's proper place within God's perfect plan. I wonder to what extent Milton set out to mock the pagan epic by having Satan more or less get smashed by the God's providence, and not by a set of death-defying scampers (if you cut out the pre-story of the war in Heaven).

God just spells it all out in Book 3, and we sit back and watch the felix culpa.