The Church and Greco-Roman Mythology
We forgot the phenomenology of being-in-the-world where the gods had played.
One reason for taking on the challenge of gathering the Greco-Roman classics, mythology, and history has to do with the need to better understand what is happening today. We often speak of western civilization as grounded in the Church, which is true (irrefutably so, even Nietzsche agreed). However, it was the appropriation of the Greco-Roman world by the Church that more fully explains our roots. Those of us with western roots, either by ancestry or intellectual orientation (or both) came out of not merely a Christian culture but a Greco-Roman framework.
The Church did not defeat the Roman world; it appropriated its wardrobe. The Church defeated the pagan gods but remade the world in which those gods had thrived to reflect the one true God. St. Paul told the Corinthians that sacrificing to these gods was sacrificing to demons. The sacrifice of Jesus was the genuine sacrifice. Still, the Greco-Roman “world” became the world of the Church and ultimately of Christendom, which built western civilization.
The second reason for taking on the challenge of gathering the Greco-Roman classics, mythology, and history is Martin Heidegger’s unique and compelling insight. The ancients prior to Plato and Aristotle, going back to the Trojan war in 1194-1184 BC, were not wrong to see the world in terms of gods and goddesses *from a phenomenological perspective.* This was the world before metaphysics (that began with Plato and Aristotle). The pre-classical ancient Greeks knew the world as a phenomenology of Being. It was not a calculative metaphysical world, but one of unconcealment, wonder, and astonishment. Reality was what the gods revealed.
Once Plato arrived on the scene, reality became an idea, an essence (eidos, a “form”). On the heels of Plato, Aristotle took that further to calculative metaphysics (e.g., the syllogism). But prior to that, the world was a place of gods (wonder). The rising sun at dawn had a personality. The terror of a thunderstorm had a personality. Love between a man and a woman had a personality. There was no calculation - it was up to the gods. A formal name for this phenomenon of non-calculative “being-in-the-world” would be “Aletheia.”
This aspect of seeing the world phenomenologically as being-in-the-world prior to calculative thinking is the meaning of Being (that is, the Being of beings) Heidegger was after. The ancients erred in sacrificing to these gods, as St. Paul warned them. But they were not wrong in their phenomenological understanding of being-in-the-world. They misunderstood Aletheia, unconcealment, as a “god.” They erred in sacrificing to them rather than to the one true God (revealing Himself just around the corner through the Israelites). This is what Heidegger meant by going to the grounds of metaphysics where even the gods are subject to Being and Time. This does not mean God as subject to Being and Time, but the gods (phenomenological understanding of Aletheia).
The Greco-Roman world and the Church, once freed, collided. The Church did not appear out of nowhere by the dictate of Constantine, enmeshed in the syncretistic pagan trappings of the ancient world (as many falsely believe to this day). Christ instituted the Church before His crucifixion, which, freed centuries later by Constantine, collided with the Greco-Roman world, conquering their gods but always embracing the phenomenology of Being that built their world. Heidegger’s point was that over the centuries, and notably in the Middle Ages, we chiseled in granite the metaphysics of our victory over the gods but forgot the phenomenology of being-in-the-world where the gods had played, which is the source of our depressing nihilism today.
Once Gods Walked
Once gods walked among humans,
The splendid Muses and youthful Apollo
Inspired and healed us, just like you.
And you are to me as if one of the Holy Ones
Had sent me forth into life, and the image
Of my beloved goes with me,
And wherever I stay and whatever I learn,
I learned and gained it from her,
With a love that lasts until death.
Then let us live, you with whom I suffer
And inwardly strive towards better times
In faith and loyalty. For we are the ones.
And if people should remember us both
In years to come, when Spirit again prevails,
They'd say that these lonely ones lovingly
Created a secret world, known to the gods alone.
The earth will take back those concerned
With impermanent things: others climb higher
To ethereal Light who've been faithful
To the love inside themselves, and to the spirit
Of the gods. Thus they master Fate
In patience, hope and quietness.
Friedrich Holderlin