God and the Little Guy

To bring my blog almost up to date, I thought I'd repost this column that I wrote seven years ago during our annual pilgrimage to Lake Crescent. If you like this sort of thing, you should check out my Classics Corner archive blog, which I'm still in the process of completing.

From time to time, each of us needs to stand back, look ourselves in the eye, and ask, “What has the Protestant work ethic done for us lately.”

We at Classics Corner hid out at a mountain resort last week to do just this. For fun, we brought along Hesiod, a seventh or eighth century BC farmer-poet from the backwaters of Greece. As it turns out, Hesiod is one of history’s first workaholics, but even he says to rest in August, when work is done, the sun is hot, and “women’s lust knows no bounds.”

“Then,” he says, “ah then, I wish you a shady ledge and your choice wine.” He also recommends thick goat’s milk, freshly baked bread, the meat of a free-range heifer, and sparkling wine mixed with three parts water. Having none of these essentials on hand, we substituted scotch and tried to avoid fried foods.

While we did not find Hesiod’s remarks upon the habits of women to be particularly accurate, we were still obsessively drawn to Works and Days, his 829 line poem on how to work hard, marry well, lead an honest life, have good crops, and avoid drowning at sea or blaspheming the gods.

Hesiod’s poem is addressed to his lazy brother Perses, who bribed the local “gift-devouring kings” to lawyer the poet out of his inheritance. Perses is exhorted to end his scheming, get off his butt, and “Work!”

Ever since Prometheus egged the gods into hiding the “means of livelihood” in the earth, most of us poor humans have had to scratch out our precarious existence with constant toil. This, says Hesiod, is the way of the world. Life is struggle, he says. Get used to it.

From the perspective of our lakeside adirondack chair, we found all of this quite bracing indeed.

But we were drawn most to Hesiod’s obsession with justice. Having recently survived the prayer-soaked public coronations of Bush and Gore, we found the poet’s idea of a people’s god immensely appealing.

Belief in justice, says Hesiod, transcends the individual to concern the entire community. In an immoral world where might makes right, “grief and pain will find us defenseless,” and “evil doers and scoundrels will be honored.”

Hesiod believes there are spirits who function as the ethics police, invisibly roaming the earth and seeing that justice is served. When corruption is allowed to spread, he says, the entire community is punished, so everyone has an immediate interest in behaving morally.

Even Hesiod, however, has his moments of bitterness and doubt. “As matters stand,” he says, “may neither I nor my son be just men in this world, because it is a bad thing to be just if wrongdoers win the court decisions.”

In Hesiod’s world, god looks out for the little guy, and his faith in this keeps him an honest man. Hesiod’s practical mind would see a god of the rich, powerful, and corrupt as worse than no god at all. His is a useful belief, and 2,800 years later, with god half-dead, it still rings true.

Waiting for God

For most of my life, I’ve been a religious agnostic looking to be convinced. My God is Awe. I look up at the sky, and there it is. An ant crawls by and there it is again. And so forth. Love and compassion round out the deal and that’s pretty much it. Everything else is speculation.

While I have a deep appreciation for the religious impulse, I have no use for spiritual certainty. We’ve seen where that goes and it’s almost never good.

I'm far from alone in this. Former nun Karen Armstrong, whose History of God documents the political history of monotheism, describes our current state of Godlessness as “a sorbet.” The last course is over, she says, and the next has yet to arrive, and in the meanwhile we’re all cleansing our palates with a nice lime sherbet.

Armstrong writes about the Axial Age, in which Buddhism, Confucianism, and the various shoots of the Tree of Abraham all came together. There was a time, apparently, when the old religious paradigms broke down in the face of a changing world, and the search for something new took religious thought to a higher level of understanding. A new axial age, says Armstrong, is upon us.

In between trips to Disney World, visits with grandparents, and other vacation-related Florida activities, I’ve been reading Leon Golden’s In Praise of Prometheus, a scholarly attempt at resolving the contradictions in Aeschylean thought that was published in 1962. The phenomenon of fifth century Athens occurs well within the parameters of Armstrong’s Axial Age.

I’m not enough of a classics geek to really know whether Golden succeeds or not, but his parsing out of the divergent notions of Zeus in Aeschylus’ work reminds me a bit of our own situation. The Zeus of Prometheus, he says, is a rigid, harsh, unforgiving god, who reflects some of the brutality and arbitrariness of primitive religion. The Zeus of The Suppliants, on the other hand, is an upholder of morality and justice who intervenes in the world on the behalf of strangers and those who need help. These can be reconciled, he says, by the idea that both can and do exist at once. That, culturally speaking, spiritual progress is tenuous.

Thucydides illustrates the contradiction as well by placing his hair-raising account of the plague that destroyed Athens, and the collapse of civilization that occurred in its wake, right after Pericles’ stirring funeral oration that celebrates the achievements of classical Greece. The paroxysms of violence that accompanied the Reign of the Thirty Tyrants shortly before Socrates was executed might be offered as another example. The veneer of civilization, Aeschylus seems to say, is paper thin, and a return to barbarism is always more near than we’d like to believe.

The God of Aeschylus was big enough to express the contradictions of the age. There was an emergence from the darkness of superstition, but there was also a nod to the fragility of the social contract. We struggle toward rationality and compassion, but our progress is never complete.

We have yet to forge a God whose identity is equal to the demands of our age.

The God of the televangelists and the mega-churches is an excuse for the consumerism backed by militarism that is the background of our lives. This is a God that is allied with a morally bankrupt State. Were we to slide once more into barbarism, this comfortable and cowardly God would be of little help.

Our God should lead us toward community and joy. Ours must be an authentically counter-cultural God that leads us into knowing who we are and what we must become. A God for our times should offer us more than the comforts of conformity and consumerism, and call us toward our highest selves.

Maybe our new God doesn’t look like “God” at all. Perhaps our spiritual needs are better met by a different sort of symbolism altogether.

The last Axial Age stretched on for more than 500 years. I’m not sure we have that kind of time. We need to get a move on.