Most of our seminars, tutorials and preceptorials here at St. John's begin with a question. So, for those of you interested in playing along, here's my first post from the program and a question from about half way through class today.
Socrates points out that Homer portrays the diverse disputes of the gods and suggests that such stories must not be accepted in the kallipolis (the Utopian city). He goes further to suggest that all work, including the Iliad, would need to be altered to reflect the true disposition of the gods.
"And, as to the violation of the oaths and truces that Pandarus committed, if someone says Athena and Zeus were responsible for its happening, we'll not praise him; nor must the young be allowed to hear that Themis and Zeus were responsible for strife and contention among the gods [...]"
Why does Socrates insist in the Republic that, in order to establish the kallipolis, the stories about the gods must be crafted to reflect a well behaved population of gods (378c-e)?
The ultimate goal in establishing a truth about the gods that portrays them as a civil and wholly virtuous lot is to create some unified idea of good. If a god will have sex with their mother continuously so that their progeny can't escape their mother's womb and then, having received weapons, the same progeny castrates said father, only to later fall into the same trap of being terrified of their offspring to such an extent that they eat their child, then these are indeed not gods to be looked to in defining something good.
Now, strip away all of the conflict and diverse motives and identities of these gods and present them in only the best light. In doing so we can look up at a single, monumental good. In some sense, we create a monotheism in all practical manners aside from the strictest test of definition. But to what end?
Even if we don't accept this idea that we've established a monotheistic conception of the gods, we at least can look at the consequences of a whitewashing of them, see a simplification and look for its utility.
In the revision of literature we have gods = good. This wasn't the case with Homer's portrayals. Throughout Greek literature to this point we merely have gods as deities--power was not necessarily a virtue.
I believe that Socrates is attempting to do a few things by reducing the complexity of Greek polytheism. The most central to the project of the Republic, it seems, is to give the people one reference point for the holy. Multi-faceted stories of emotional and conflicted gods give the impression that the good is a complex and varied thing, that gods with different viewpoints and in conflict may both think they are right. Hazy or conflicting interpretations are the result and people can take away what they will from Homer and the other literature, rather than a single message.
The purpose of the censorship, the purpose of creating the singular image, is to foster (or at least not oppose) a similarly singular view of the world of human beings and also a stripping away of external justifications for individualism. This singularity is similar to that created with the noble lie at the end of Book III and an idea that is necessary in setting up common education and communal families.
My answer may seem like little more than a basic explanation of Book III, so let me be clear: I believe that Socrates is suggesting throughout this book that, through gods of a single good, an essentialized (and simplified) world-view is going to be a major component in the success of the kallpolis thought experiment.
Well put.
Aeschylus looked at this question, too. The Greeks had been inching toward Socrates' abstracted whitewash for quite a while, as I understand it, with some gods getting cut or relegated to desk jobs.
In the Oresteia the Furies chase down Orestes for revenge-killing his mother. The Furies' domain is crimes against blood relations, but in a way Orestes was encouraged to do it by Apollo, so a clash of old and new gods seems inevitable. Orestes appeals to Athene, and Athene sets up a trial by jury to decide objectively whether the furies have a valid claim. When there's a tie, Athene breaks it in Orestes favor. The trial includes a lot of the furies whining about how nobody notices them anymore, and about how after all they're gods too.
It's not monotheism, by a long shot, but it is different to Homer's portrayal, where many gods, even and especially the powerful ones, are "emotional and conflicted" as you put it.
This trilogy was first performed in 458BC, won a ton of awards and was put on regularly by popular demand. Apparently, Aeschylus had tapped into something vital going on in the society. I guess he was sort of the Michael Bay of his time.
I don't claim to understand the play, in fact it's really complicated and most of it went over my head, but by squinting and blurring your eyes you can kind of see the gods arranging themselves into a hierarchical power structure, with gods of abstraction and detached fairness (Athene & Apollo) having the final say over gods with, say, bleeding eyes. A step towards Socrates/Plato.
Posted by: Dan (a burgeoning polytheist) | July 04, 2008 at 02:32 AM