← Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend the Great Books podcast, we are ending our journey through the Greek plays. Congrats to everyone who's completed this journey with us. I have very much enjoyed reading these texts with you. I've enjoyed all the feedback. As I've said many times, I was a first time reader on many of these texts, but they were very important and I enjoyed kind of the maturation of my own intellectual journey. As we said since the beginning, the great plays are an intellectual bridge between Homer and Plato and I think they're incredibly rich and I'm very glad that we read them together to end this journey and to end it well. We have an excellent roundtable of friends to compare and contrast key themes in the tragic plays. The main plays we'll discuss are the Oresteia, Prometheus Bound, the Theban plays and the Bacchae. And we'll toss in some Homer, Hesiod and Aristophanes as well. The major themes that we'll discuss that are woven throughout all of these texts are divinity, Eros, fate, justice, the cosmos, virtue and suffering. As a brief reminder, we start Plato next week, so go check out our website, thegreatbookspodcast.com to see our reading schedule. But today, enjoy a wonderful conversation of friends discussing their love of the Greek plays. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father and serve as the Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. It is a beautiful evening here in rural Oklahoma. You can check us out on x or Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters. And you can check out thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have guides and articles and all kinds of resources to help you understand the great books today. Today's gonna be a good episode. Today is unique. We are doing a roundtable on key thoughts and themes in the Greek play. So we are kind of wrapping up our several months on the Greek plays. And so tonight we're gonna pick out some of our themes that we've mentioned and talked about over the last couple months and actually kind of have an opportunity to compare, to contrast them and work through them. So we have returning again Dr. Frank Grabowski, who's part of our Sunday Great Books group. Like all of our guests this evening, he's also teaching at our classical school. He's a professor of philosophy at Rogers State. He's also a third order Franciscan. And I'm sure there's some other accolade.
- [02:34]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
That I'm missing Let's not forget that I'm in the formation program.
- [02:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's right. I knew I was missing something.
- [02:41]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
We'll be becoming candidates. You're very soon, so that's exciting.
- [02:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, congratulations on that. Becoming a candidate. So you've gone through a year of kind of mentorship and then an aspirincy year, and then this will be your canis. Your first year of candidacy.
- [02:55]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, it's been. It's been wonderful.
- [02:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Congratulations.
- [02:58]
David Niles
That means, God willing, ordination in what year?
- [03:02]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Oh, gosh, I forget. Like, I think I have three more years. That sounds about right. I think it's five years. So three more years, which would put me 20, 27 in three years is.
- [03:12]
David Niles
Is like a blink.
- [03:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's gonna be great.
- [03:15]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
It can be, but. But I've. I've really savored the. The time with. With Deacon Harrison and Dr. Milan. Dr. Spencer, my mentor, my spiritual director. So it's been. It's been. It's been really exciting. And. And one of the things.
- [03:31]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
One of the things about the Deaconate Information Program, I was talking about someone about this other day, is that you get so accustomed to the fraternity and, like, enjoying and seeing your brothers. And then once you're ordained, you're spread throughout all of Eastern Oklahoma, serving in different capacities. So I have brothers in my class that I have not seen since ordination. So that time that you have together, that's like, very fraternal. That's something very much the treasure. So also, you have already heard from him. Mr. David Niles has returned. He's in our Sunday great books, lover of the great books. Also co host of the Catholic man show, the David, how are you doing tonight?
- [04:08]
David Niles
I'm doing great. Happy to be here.
- [04:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
How's the farm?
- [04:12]
David Niles
You know, we've got some homeowner struggles today. I was mentioning. I don't know if it's like this happens to everybody, but I have the worst luck. I think every other time I mow and I should probably change my tires or something, I have gone through more inner tubes. I think this is the sixth one. Just this summer. It's in. I can't tell you how much I hate that. So I popped another tire today, just casually mowing the yard. Then I came in and the outlets on my back patio for some reason not working, which includes my beer fridge. Like I wouldn't care except that my beer fridge is plugged into these outlets. And then my septic is backing up. All of which I think I will resolve.
- [04:59]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
But.
- [04:59]
David Niles
But exciting things. My sow. My sow is going into heat this, this weekend. So I'll be impregnating her with AI, the original AI Artificial insemination.
- [05:16]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Thanks for clarifying that. Yeah, we'll have to have you on, we'll have to have you on next week so you can tell us how that went.
- [05:22]
David Niles
Yeah, I'm honestly a little, I'm a little bit nervous about it. Cause she's like 350 pounds and you know, like never, I, I have never done this before.
- [05:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Is this where you're doing, you're doing it on your own like for the first time? Is this something that you watch the YouTube video about now you're going to do it?
- [05:38]
David Niles
Oh, I've definitely watched YouTube videos about it.
- [05:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah.
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David Niles
I mean like many.
- [05:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think we're going to come back to you when we talk about the theme of suffering. So before we, before we go any deeper on that subject, we also have to introduce Mr. Thomas Lackey, friend of the podcast, Independent scholar and also a member of our Sunday great books. Thomas, how's your evening going?
- [05:58]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah, I don't really know how to follow that one up. Nothing, nothing as dramatic or as horrifying as any of that. Yeah, we're doing pretty well. So our littlest one, Mary Olivia is four weeks old today, so that's exciting. She's sleeping pretty well, growing like a weed. Very cute. So that's probably our, still our biggest news of the, of the year.
- [06:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So David, how many kids do you have now?
- [06:34]
David Niles
We have number six. On the way.
- [06:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
On the way. That's beautiful. Congratulations.
- [06:39]
David Niles
Thank you.
- [06:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So you're really just sitting there as your septic tank overflows.
- [06:44]
David Niles
Well, it's like I told everybody not to flush any more toilets, so it's be all right.
- [06:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I never think, I don't even know.
- [06:50]
David Niles
Why it shouldn't be that serious. There's a clog clearly, but it's between like the house and the cleanout. And so my future brother in law is bringing a snake over right now. In fact my, my, my heart's desire and earnest hope is that he's actually out there fixing it for me right now.
- [07:10]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
We'll see.
- [07:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, we appreciate you being here through all of that. So the works that we've discussed during our study of the Greek plays, we have the Oresteia, Prometheus Bound, the Theban plays or the Oedipus cycle and the Bacchae. We also probably gonna throw in some Homer, some Hesiod and some Aristophanes as well. The themes that we're going to talk about. Tonight are divinity, eros, or erotic love, fate, justice, the cosmos, virtue and suffering. So those are some of the main themes that we've kind of talked about, we've unpacked, we parsed out over the last couple months. And so I think tonight will be really good to compare and contrast them before we do that. Just kind of like a lightning round. I'm really interested in like what your favorite play was or like what surprised you the most as we read through these because I think for a lot of us we were first time readers of this, so to kind of. Sally fourth. I think the one that surprised me the most was either the theogony, because I had heard it was just a. I heard it was just a genealogy of the gods. It was really boring. And I really just, I really, really enjoyed our conversation with Dr. Grabowski and Thomas that evening. And it just, I got so much out of it that I did not, I don't think I would have received if I had not read it like in a fraternal manner with you all. And so I deeply appreciate that. And now it's like the four primordial gods and the role of Eros and like Zeus as this bringer of civilization is something I'm constantly coming back to. I also think the Oedipus plays like Oedipus at Colonus really surprised me. That really made me. I didn't Oedipus the king. I wasn't sold a bit Colonus. I really enjoyed and really made you think of that coupling of suffering that curse, but being a blessing to others. I still think my favorite play is Antigone. It's hard to beat Antigone. The dark sign of the gods, a structured cosmos standing up to what's wrong. It's, it's just, it's just hard to beat her. Even though I think, you know, this time around I think I finally fell into the, the understanding that I think she fell short of being that dark sign. But yeah. David, what about you?
- [09:12]
David Niles
Yeah, I'm really going to echo a lot of what you just said because my favorite, my favorite play is Antigone. And then I also really enjoyed Oedipus at Colonus because I had read Antigone in the past. So when we read it again, this, this time through, it was, it was, it was still really great. But then when we read Oedipus at Colonus, that shed so much more light on Antigone, which I thought gave a lot of good context and it, you know, and you fall in like, I love the character Antigone. Right. Even though she's not the character that you, like, want her to be at every scene in the play, but still she comes through just like marvelously in Oedipus e Colonis, she's just. She's the daughter that everybody wants to have. But of the books, of all the books we've read, I still think that the Iliad is just like. Holds sort of a pride of place for me, just because it's so. It's so. It keeps you so rooted. And the more we read, I think the more you like, the greater my appreciation grows for it. When you can look back and see, like, this anchor point of how things have developed and, you know, hey, this is kind of where we started in the west, and, you know, this is how far we've come. And without that anchor point of the Iliad, you wouldn't have as much appreciation.
- [10:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No. Very good. Thomas, what about you? What's kind of your favorite read so far, and what's something that surprised you?
- [10:47]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah, I think my favorite play is probably Agamemnon, but the most surprising was Oedipus at Colonis, and that might tie for favorite as well. It's so close. It's a tough one, but. But I. It definitely gets most surprising because that was far and away my favorite of the Theban plays.
- [11:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Very good.
- [11:08]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah. With. I gotta go with David a little bit, though. If we expand that to include Homer, I do think the Iliad still kind of takes pride of place. But play wise, I'm going to go with Agamemnon.
- [11:20]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Dr. Grabowski, what about you?
- [11:21]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
My favorite work is usually the one that I have read most recently. I think that's true. In this case, I would cast my vote for the Bacchae, mainly because of its treatment of piety, the rather sophisticated way that Euripides approaches this question of what constitutes true piety, or we can even use instead the word faith. What is faith, and how do faith and reason relate? This came out, I think, clearly in our discussion, Deacon, during the podcast. So I've been giving a lot of thought to that. Also just to mention how I think the Bacchae does tie in closely with euthyphro, which, you know, we'll be reading and discussing later. So it'll be interesting to see how members of the reading group, if they notice any. Any connections between Euripides play and Plato's dialogue. But just, just once again, to. To echo Plato, Thomas and David, Homer, for me is always going to be the touchstone. I'VE been returning time and again to Homer, most specifically with his treatment of fate and what exactly that means, which will no doubt come up in today's discussion at some point. But I can't pick the Iliad or the Odyssey, because I think that those are complimentary works. And I don't think that one can really read one independently of the other. I mean, you can, but I think that they inform each other very well.
- [13:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, very good. Well, I'm glad you said the Bacchae, because I think I look forward to you kind of unpacking the mystery that is the Bacchae as we move through this evening, because it tends to turn all the themes on their head, Right? So you can see. You'll see things that in Aeschylus and Sophocles, they kind of mirror one another. You see mutual lessons that I think they're trying to teach. The poets are teachers, you know, to their populaces. And then I think the Bacchae turns a lot of those on their head. And it actually, I think you have to really. You said sophisticated. I can see that. I think you really have to, like, think through the kind of argument he's trying to make about piety, the gods, things like that. So I look forward to you shedding light and illuminating all those mysteries as we work through that, The. So let's look at the actual text. Let's just jump into some of these questions that we have. So, again, the themes that we're picking out are divinity, Eros, fate, justice, the cosmos, virtue and suffering. So we'll take them in that order. So I'll kind of set us up on divinity. So one of the questions here is, like, is there a maturation of thought on what is divine? As we've read through these works, so, like, particularly looking at the plays, but it's hard, as we already done, it's hard to kind of unpack the plays without having recourse back to Homer. So the question here is, you know, do we really see a maturation? And so I. I think in Homer, right, just as, like a foundation, we see that the gods are creatures. They're. They're finite creatures that are subjected to time. Poseidon goes and hangs out with the Ethiopians, and therefore we can do things while he's gone. Zeus leaves at one point, and they can do things while he's gone. They're very much creatures inside of time. They have these imploded personalities that are obsessive on certain traits, but then they tend to reflect, like, the worst of humanity. There's not really like a God that's like, hey, here's, here's the virtuous. Even, even Athena as wisdom. You know, she's really more of like a cunning strategic wit than like a philosophical wisdom. But all the gods that seem very imploded and have these obsessive protection personalities that are capricious, etc and how they relate to humanity might be even worse, right? Humanity is at best something that they tend to care for in some way, but only because there seems to be some personal attachment to the human. It doesn't seem like there's a true benevolence and the gods care for mankind. I mean Zeus at one point tried to wipe them all out except for the human know, intervention of Prometheus. So if we look at like the gods in Homer, right, as these kind of creatures subject to time, these imploded personalities, do we see anything as like a maturation or something we can push into as we kind of read the Theogony or maybe even Aeschylus?
- [16:00]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, I would, I would make one, one brief remark and this will certainly come up later in our discussion of faith. But there's the moment at the beginning of, of the Odyssey where I think we do see a rather mature Zeus where Zeus is defending not only himself but the entire Greek pantheon against those accusations made against the gods by mortals. I mean, certainly we see in the Odyssey divine intervention on the part of Athena throughout as well as at the very, very end. But I would just sort of keep in mind that the opening of Odyssey, book one and just the way the gods are presented there, particularly Zeus in his, that short soliloquy that he gives.
- [16:55]
Thomas Lackey
I think there's an interesting shift as well from the agency of the gods and how it's presented going through the Iliad and the Odyssey and by the time you get to Aeschylus and Agamemnon where Zeus has retreated into a character that we reference, but not one anymore that we see. And then when the prayers are addressed to him, they address them under the name of Zeus, if that which is the name which we call him. So there's again another indirection which is saying that there is this God and, and we call him Zeus or he has even revealed his, you know, he likes us to call him Zeus, that sort of idea. There's a sense in which there's, he still stands somewhat behind that picture that we have. And so I think there is a. There's something going on there and I would lean more heavily into it leading towards where we see in Plato a view towards, you know, the God instead of just the gods, except for Prometheus Bound, which does throw a little bit of wrench into this otherwise sort of uninterrupted omnipotence of, you know, or like maturation towards something like a monotheism that you might have drawn out of Aeschylus if you didn't see Prometheus bound here. Kind of putting Zeus in a, in a less favorable light.
- [18:22]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh.
- [18:23]
Thomas Lackey
Although I will say he still retreats. Right. Because again, he's not in Prometheus Bound at all.
- [18:28]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
But I'll just mention one more thing too that just came to mind and that is, and I'm not sure if this is just me, but isn't there a difference between the way that the gods intervene say in the Iliad, which seems to be very direct and one might even say very physical where they take charge and they actually physically engage the heroes? The relationship between Athena and Odysseus is very different and even the relationship between Athena and Telemachus is very different where Athena, rather than sort of bringing about, rather than inserting herself physically, I mean she very often gives advice, she gives.
- [19:16]
Thomas Lackey
Help and so encourages people.
- [19:19]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, yeah. She allows the hero to dig deep and to draw upon his own virtue. And so I'm not sure if anyone here also noticed that or.
- [19:32]
Thomas Lackey
No, I think it's important. If you look in the Iliad, you see a lot of what would like literally be over determination of causes. So that for example, I think one time when they're attacking the rampart, I believe, and you see simultaneously some soldier taking action and then what the characters in the story don't see, but Homer relates to us is the gods simultaneously taking a, a similar action and so that the wall gets knocked down by the, by the, the visible action of the soldier and the invisible action of the gods. But we also see them, you know, sometimes quite quail people like they do to Hector. But like, like you're talking about, we get a shift by the time you get to the Odyssey where Athena is more putting courage into Telemachus, putting, you know, you know, helping, you know, and she does transform Odysseus's looks and things, but it's, it just doesn't, it's not. Even though it's more frequent, it's less heavy handed in some ways in the Odyssey it's. Yeah.
- [20:38]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, the one scene that always stands out to me in the Iliad is, you know, Athena physically grabbing Achilles hair to hold him back from killing.
- [20:49]
Thomas Lackey
Oh, I was thinking about Aphrodite. Picking up Aeneas for a second too.
- [20:53]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, sure, yeah. I mean, there are a number of examples that we can identify in the Iliad where the gods, you know, very literally they seem. If we, if we read it explicitly, they very literally come in and physically.
- [21:06]
David Niles
I was just, I was just going to point out, you know, very similar in the. Along the similar lines that it's as we progress through, you know, through these plays as time passes in Greek culture, it does seem like characters have. They get further and further from the gods. Whether. Whether you take that as the gods becoming more divine and less human or whether it's. You take that as a culture who is starting to critical of the existence of the gods. It is very clear that the distance between gods and man grows drastically over these plays.
- [21:48]
Thomas Lackey
Right.
- [21:48]
David Niles
Just like in the Iliad, they're here you can see many of the characters have the ability to recognize them and see them on the battlefield where you get to the libation bearers. Still a point where, oh, the gods are clearly very important. We still depend on them, but we're all. We're offering prayers and just hopes that maybe these prayers will get answered.
- [22:10]
Thomas Lackey
Right.
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David Niles
It's not, you know, you don't. You're not expecting that one of them is going to manifest themselves in front of you and that they're just going to solve all your problems. And, you know, then you get to the point where it's like, yeah, it's like kind of what Thomas was saying, you know, this is what we. We call them Zeus, but we don't really know. You know, it's a. Where I was just sitting here thinking about how it's in some ways inverse in Hebrew culture because we're kind of going through Greek culture and we're not reading about the Hebrews. We could. But they, on the other hand, are going through an opposite arc going from God being far away as God is approaching once the. With the incarnation getting closer and closer. So it's just kind of interesting these two cultures going through different tracks on the distance between God and man.
- [23:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah. For the Greeks, God seems to be almost moving away. He's becoming more transcendent from the God that actually comes down and might have intercourse with the princess or whoever it is. We're having that God moved to a more transcendent God. And then the Hebrews have a transcendent God that tends to now become more imminent, obviously terminating then in the incarnation. That's a fascinating kind of juxtaposition as I kind of Listen to you all talk. I mean, the two things that come to mind is one, it does seem like there's a broad arc moving from fate to human agency. The Iliad is like a very fatalistic text, but then overall it seems like the gods kind of keep moving, move, moving further and further into the background and human agency seems to having more of an effect as the kind of Greek thought tends to mature. The other one too is, I do think, as Thomas already mentioned, I do think then there's also a separate arc towards monotheism. And I don't really think that's a huge stretch because we have to keep in mind that like Socrates and Plato are contemporaries of these authors. And so while they're sitting here, you know, Aeschylus has his famous line of. And actually, I found it. I'd like to read it because we've mentioned it several times, Aeschylus and Agamemnon. This is Fagles, a little bit before 165, he says, Zeus, great, nameless, all in all, if that name will gain his favor. It's a fascinating, very historic line, as you guys already mentioned, because what it means to say or what it seems to imply is that there's a divinity behind Zeus.
- [24:41]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right?
- [24:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Zeus might just simply be a name for a divinity, but not necessarily the Zeus that we have received from Homer. And so I do think, I don't think it's a stretch then to say that there is an arc here moving towards monotheism. And as we get into Plato, sometimes that's a jarring, you know, if you don't read the plays, sometimes it's a jarring juxtaposition to move from the gods of Homer to all sudden Socrates telling us that there's one God and he has a vocation. So I do think the plays, you know, as many times throughout the year we've said that the plays serve as an intellectual bridge between Homer and Plato. And I think that really comes true in the subject of the divine.
- [25:22]
Thomas Lackey
Well, one thing I'd like to pick back up on slightly is your. You mentioned a kind of imploded personality to the gods. I'm not sure if I would quite put it that way. I think it's more of a splintering, if you will. But I don't think that's necessarily attention or, you know, looking at, for example, their obsessive quality to the extent that the gods are related to natural things in some way. So Aphrodite simply is desire. So it doesn't really make a lot of sense to ask if people believed in Aphrodite any more than it asks, you know, any more to ask someone whether or not, well, they. Do you believe that sexual desire exists? Well, obviously that exists. You, all you have to look at is, you know, creatures and you know that that's a thing. But precisely the identification with a kind of a natural, natural process or natural event with the gods narrows their personality to that thing, right? So they, there, there's almost that. That they can't really be a fully formed personality because they, their entire uniqueness is predicated on being assigned to some particular natural analog. And I think that that also brings up attention that you start to see in the clouds with Aristophanes where, well, maybe in that case then you, you simply, you strip them of their divinity and you focus simply on the natural, the, the natural phenomenon and say, no, there's no gods there. It's just a natural thing. And I think that, I don't know that you could possibly have escaped that tension, even though it's interesting that you see it sort of expressed most fully in a comedy that, well, maybe it's just natural. Maybe there is nothing behind it, no personality to be found.
- [27:18]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think we see that most. I mean, I think that's a good thought. There's a tension when you talk about the Greek gods in nature, about how do they see those two relating. So for instance, like, is the sea a sign of Poseidon or is Poseidon a sign of the sea? Like which one are they actually trying? Like which one is the sign and who's being signified? And so I do think, I do think the default reaction is to say, well, no, they, they have the gods to explain natural phenomenon. So like they're, they've got the gods. And so Poseidon and you know, he has windy breath and that's what creates this, or Zeus creates the lightning and etc. Peter Kreeft actually pushes back against that. He, he critiques like it's our, our modern naturalist mind that tends to, to read things that way and says no, no, no, that it's not that Poseidon's a sign of the sea, that they, they had to like create these things, but rather the sea is a sign of Poseidon that radly. It's part of his glory and majesty. And so it's, it's interesting because I think that you can read it both ways and there's probably, I'm not really sure how much they actually can be divorced from one another, but I saw that most clearly when we did the Theogony, Because I think that's really where you see them mapping it out. And I think Dr. Hraski talked about this really well when we did that episode. Like, there's an inherent rationality and order to the genealogy of the gods. Like the things, like things that are related seem to be related. Like they have a rationality to why they're related. And so I think you can say that they're kind of moving towards. I mean, if you take it as a sign of natural phenomenon, then I think you can say they're starting to amalgamate. And then. Yeah, like in Erisophane's Clouds, or later on, do they get. Do the natural phenomenon get stripped of the divine and you get a form of atheism?
- [29:08]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah. To pick up on the craft theme, I think a way to put that is that. Are you reading it as a kind of natural revelation? And I think that was where I was trying to lean with it is at least that it looks like they were reading it as a revealing that these natural things were revealing of higher truths and divinities and things like. And at some point, maybe it's at Aristophanes and maybe it comes even just a little bit earlier. The. The inherent tension there does kind of snap, at least in a comedic form. And they're like, well, maybe it's not revealing anything. Maybe it was just a cloud. Right. Or, you know, there is that. That sort of thing. Although. And funny enough, and that. That's a bad example because the cloud's the only actual divinities there, but we'll skip that.
- [29:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I think you're. I think your point's well made. And I think one thing we have to sync up too. When we get into Plato, then we're going to see that the aristocratic class of Athens. Right. I mean, there's. There's a good understanding there that they have completely lost their faith in the Pantheon. So they have like, you know, it's like an esoteric atheism. So they've. They. They give whatever they need to do to seem pious. But behind the scenes, when they have these conversations, you know, no one's really believing in the Pantheon anymore. And. Yeah, I think you see the roots of that in the plays.
- [30:29]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah. When Strepsides offers to pay. I didn't bring this up the other day, but I like our. The. The translation I have, because Socrates kind of snickers and says, the gods are not a current coin with us.
- [30:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You know, another aspect of the libation, or. Excuse me, another aspect of Divinity, the libation bearers was mentioned. But I want to point that out just simply because I think there's a maturation there of how we interact with the divine. And so there's actually intercessory prayer, not only for the dead, but the dead praying for us. And Hermes, the divine, then, is the mediator between these two humans, the living and the dead, being able to talk to one another, which is definitely an antecedent of, you know, what we end up seeing in Christ. And you see an aspect of that, too, amongst the Greeks, or at least the Hellenized Jews and say, like Maccabees. Right. Sort of having. Praying for the dead as well. So the divinity, too, seems to be taking on an aspect of connecting humanity, even through death.
- [31:32]
Thomas Lackey
One question somewhat related, I guess, in this arc is within the Oresteia, we see Aeschylus reticence to pin Zeus down, essentially. But by the time we get to the third play, we have the personification in their normal presence of Apollo and Athena. Well, if Athena is Athena and Apollo is Apollo, then how is Zeus just not who we know him to be and have known him to be from all these stories all along? It seems like a little bit of tension even within that one trilogy.
- [32:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I think that's a good thought. Do you want to. Dr. Krabowski? So here's your moment. The Bacchae. So you have all these things with the divinity, and then the Bacchae comes in of Dionysus. And, you know, I mean, there's a lot of questions about what was Euripides purpose to that play? I mean, a lot of people think that it's a. It's a straightforward critique of religion, that religion. Religion is anti Logos. It's. It's erotic. A Eros that's not tethered to Logos. It's one that brings a mania that also destroys relationships. I mean, the Bacchae, the play is one of perverted and disordered relationships, starting in the family and going all the way up to the polis. And it brings disorder to both, but it's all at the will of a God. So, like, how do we. It seems to me that the Bacchae under Euripides, where we have Aeschylus and Sophocles pushing piety so much, right? With Oedipus, with Antigone, with Orestes, we're seeing this push for piety, that there's a cosmic order. The gods have to be honored first, and that kind of order cascades down to the polis, and then to the family, the Bacchae seems to turn this all on its head.
- [33:20]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right. Well, it's really, it's, it's hard to know what to make of the Bacchae. I, you know, I think it, I think we should just. We should resist a dogmatic interpretation of it. I think that, you know, in writing the Bacchae as he did, I think he intended for his audience to see it as problematic and to see it as not really presenting a solution to the question of how are we mortals to relate to the gods. You know, we'll, we'll. Again, we'll get around to this issue of piety a bit later, but Dionysus is, is a very strange divinity. I mean, you know, we've, we've spoken before about how he is, you know, wholly unlike at least as he's presented in Bacchae. Not theogony, but, but he's, you know, he's, he's, he's very, very different in not only his origins, but also in how he acts, how he influences. And briefly, he does come across as somewhat demonic in how he possesses the Bacchae, the Maenad. So, yeah, I don't know if Thomas or David. I'm just wondering if either of you have read the Bacchae, if you had any thoughts about the way that Dionysus is presented in that particular play as it, you know, contrasts with the way that these other playwrights have depicted the gods.
- [34:58]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah, I found it interesting, if unsettling. I think is, is. Is fair. Right. The he. He also has some bizarre reminisce, sort of Christ like overtones at the same time that he's sort of vicious, which is always unsettling in its own Right. But you have the God who's not received in his own city but is received elsewhere, who takes on human form but is unrecognized by the people. I mean, there's a lot, a lot going on there that, that seems to have sort of a. Pre Christian shadows.
- [35:40]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And types, but it's hard to see Dionysus in that particular play as a sympathetic character.
- [35:48]
Thomas Lackey
No. Right. That's what I think doesn't make it disturbing. Right. I mean, he's obviously, at some point it may be that he was giving the king an opportunity to. I don't know if repent is quite the right word, but at least to fall into line. But pretty quickly it becomes clear that he's just. That he's leading him further and further into the trap and laughing all the way.
- [36:13]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right.
- [36:13]
Thomas Lackey
It's very.
- [36:14]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I was Thinking, too. I mean, I don't know if, If. If anyone here tried to draw a parallel and make a connection, but. And I. I've been rereading the Torah, and I was thinking about the. The similarity, the situation of Pentheus and Pharaoh, how they were faced with these miracles.
- [36:33]
David Niles
And.
- [36:34]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
You'll leave.
- [36:35]
Thomas Lackey
That's a good one.
- [36:36]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Leaving aside the whole business of, you know, God hardened Pharaoh's heart and what that means. I mean, obviously it's important and complicated, but, you know, Pharaoh, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the miracles that were repeatedly right. Right in front of his nose, refused. Refused to allow the, you know, the Jewish people to worship in the desert. And so. And to. And, well, I guess to believe in Yahweh and Pentheus in a similar way just is stubborn. He's intractable.
- [37:15]
Thomas Lackey
No, that's a really good analogy, and it's an interesting thought because I think that it connects to the idea that themes of faith, and also just how we assume that had we seen the things that Pharaoh saw or the miracles, for example, that Christ did, that certainly we would believe. Yeah. And then. And then there's some people then describe some sort of, like, unique level of disbelief either to the people of our Lord's time or to the people or to the. Or to Pharaoh. And it's like, I think. I think the Baccha is saying, no, it's not unique. We can, in fact, excuse any. Any number of miraculous signs if we're not willing to believe them. Go ahead.
- [37:58]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I just think what's really interesting in the Bacchae is that if the God is bad, then, you know, is not disobeying him. Good. Right. Then what? Like this. This is what turns the whole concept of piety on its head. So, like, is Pentheus, you know, is Pentheus doing what he should do? I mean, Pentheus is presented in the Enlightenment as an Enlightenment hero. Right. I mean, he's the rational character at the beginning who's pushing back against this dark God. In a lot of ways, I find Pentheus's character analogous to Antigone insofar as there's like an early aspect and a late aspect, you know, early Pentheus, I think, holds strong. Late Pentheus, you know, falls into temptation, is possessed. But how you read the Bacchae really has a question then about what is divinity? And I don't know if any God changes as much as Dionysus does between Homer and the classical period. I mean, if you remember in Iliad, I think it's the Iliad or the Odyssey. It must be the Iliad because it mentions Thetis. You know, Dionysus runs away and hides from a mortal. He's just a jovial little whining God. He's not this cruel, effeminate God that comes in and immediately starts perverting the most natural bonds between man. I think one of the things that we talked about, too, when we talked about the Bacchae, was like, what is his actual, actual purpose? If his purpose is actually to evangelize and convert the town, I think there's a lot of better ways to do.
- [39:22]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
It than going about it the wrong way.
- [39:24]
Thomas Lackey
Right.
- [39:25]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
From my point of view.
- [39:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. So I. I think that, you know, the first thing you do is just drive all the men or all the women, you know, mad that go into the countryside and do horrific things, do very masculine things. Well, Pentheus turned being. It has. Takes on, like, a feminine aspect. And so I think the Bacchae is. It's really a warning, but it. What it's a warning of, I think, is still highly debated. I mean, my personal read of it is that it's a warning, particularly about what has happened to the Dionysian cult, that that cult has been intermixed with the Eastern fertility cults, and it's brought something that's not Greek, something that's not really Hellenized, into the culture. And I think it's a warning about that. But I do. I just. It's a wonderful play on how you approach the divine, because Cadmus basically. Cadmus in that play, basically thinks the gods are a wonderful, noble lie. Why not believe in this God? We get a benefit from it. Your sister would be the mother of a God. Like there's a benefit. I mean, so it's interesting to see Cadmus then presented as a noble lie.
- [40:26]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah, I can just imagine Cadmus saying, imagine the revenues from all the pilgrims that will come. But I would say that I think there is a note in the Bacchae, in a broader theme of simply the gap between humanity and the gods, transcendence might be a little bit too far, but a kind of idea that the gods aren't safe and that they aren't, and that you will simply fail to grasp them. And to call back to the Iliad, there's a point at which one of the gates is assailed and there's only two men guarding it. And this one of the characters, I forget, who tries to attack the gates, and he is mocked several times in the text for this action. Now, At a rational level, this action seems perfectly, of course, attack the weak spot. But what he's mocked for is not realizing that it was to Hector that they intended to give the day. But how is he supposed to know that? I mean, he doesn't have that revelation. And I think there's a sense here the mortals simply can't grasp the minds of the gods and sometimes, in fact they get punished for that. There's a, there's a kind of a, you know, a dangerous about being this close to divinity in which you might well get slammed to the curb and have no idea why. And yet in some sort of overarching, if you had the God's eye view, you would realize, in fact it was your fault. I mean, there's almost a very strange analogy here, but something like the dangerousness of touching the ark of the Covenant. Right. It just, it's. You can't get that close to the gods safely, or in this case to God safely. But yeah, it's something like that.
- [42:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's a good analog. I like that. I think kind of pushing us towards the end of this conversation of divinity. You know, I think Plato's going to pick up that monotheistic trend and I think that's something that's incredibly important. And I think reading the plays helps kind of cultivate our imaginations to then receive Plato, which like I said, can be very jarring after reading Homer, if you haven't seen how that thoughts matured through the Greek playwrights. The other thing too is St. Paul and the unknown God. And so I think that, I think that that's a, I mean, David, you want to take that one?
- [42:45]
David Niles
Well, I mean, it just, that's kind of part of this whole arc of the Greeks getting the distance between God getting further away, that eventually they're worshiping a God they don't know. They have an altar set up to an unknown God. You know, where the idea of setting up an altar to an unknown God in the Iliad is just completely nonsensical because they knew that they knew the gods personally. You know, many, at least many people did. So I think that's, I think, I do think that is the end of the ark for the Greeks is that they, they finally come to terms with the fact that they worship what they don't know.
- [43:26]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, and David, just to add to what you're saying, you have to know the God to whom you're praying. If you're going to ask for what you want, you're going to appeal to a specific God by Name if you want wisdom or if you want love or whatever happens to be associated with the God. If you're praying to an unknown God, what exactly? How are you to address this being, this thing, this person?
- [43:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No. Very good. All right, I'm going to push us into our next subject, which is love. Eros, Right? What. What is Eros? What is erotic love for the Greeks? So, again, kind of just to lay a foundation for the conversation, we pull back and look at the Iliad. And so, if you remember, there's that scene where Hera seduces Zeus and she goes and, you know, she gets sleep to help her, and she gets Aphrodite to help her as well. And there's a lot of statements in that passage about love and about the power of love, that love, particularly Eros, right, this primordial God has the capacity to conquer both men and gods. And of course, then I think the. The zenith of this scene is that, you know, Zeus does make love to Hera, and Zeus then falls asleep. And there's a line in there in the Iliad in which it says that Zeus has been conquered by sleep and love by Eros. And this is a really just kind of a fascinating concept to say that Zeus can be conquered by one of the primordial gods, particularly, because, if you remember, Homer makes it really clear that in Hesiod even makes it more clear, I think, that Zeus is more powerful than all the other Olympian gods could combined. And so this is like the first time we see Eros and what's its power? You know, how does love actually kind of animate and move and act upon men and gods? And then we see it, I think, in a much more mature way in the theogony in which we see then Hesiod present Eros as one of the four primordial gods. And when we had that conversation with Dr. Krabowski and Thomas, I really appreciated it, because I think one of the things that you guys teased out for me is that Eros then becomes the movement of the cosmos. Eros gives the cosmos its fecundity, and so it's able to move right from this chaos into actually having this generation that then creates these gods that in a certain way is actually a movement towards order, a movement towards civilization. And we see Zeus very much kind of take on that mantle. And we see even Aristotle praise Hesiod for his insights that Eros is actually a cosmic force, that Eros is actually moving all things towards their end. And there's these couplings and this fecundity and it's what actually gives the cosmos a certain animation. Because in his metaphysics, as we talked about Aristotle, when he's faced with the question, how does the unmoved mover move all things if the unmoved mover does not move? Right, how is God moving all things in the cosmos if God himself is immovable? Right. There's no change in God or he wouldn't be perfect. Aristotle says that it's Eros, it's love. Hesiod saw this, that actually the cosmos is, is animated by love. I mean, this is a. For those who know me and those who see my writings, like, this is a thought that tends to kind of saturate a lot of my thinking and writing. But I don't know, what about you guys as we kind of move from Homer to Hesiod and then see it a little bit in the playwrights, like, where do you find Eros, kind of that older tradition?
- [47:16]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, I'd just like to make a brief remark about Hesiod's treatment of erosion, and that is just to highlight Hesiod's. The way that he works this out, the way that he orders the emergence of the various divinities, I think shows a high level of philosophical understanding of what is needed if you're going to get from one point to another. So Eros does play the role of an efficient cause. Obviously Hesiod doesn't refer to Eros as an efficient cause, but it does serve that role. And so later, when the early pre Socratic philosophers are trying to explain how elements, various elements, the various physical stuffs, transform into one another, I mean, how does air become fire? Or how does Earth become water? And how, when combining various elements, do we get compounds? You will have someone like Empedocles say, well, it's love and strife. And Anaxagoras says, well, it's. It's nous or mind. All right. And so, yeah, I think that Hesiod, despite, you know, writing theogony several hundred years or 100 years or so before these pre Socratic philosophers, he establishes the importance of giving a rational account, albeit mythological, but a rational account of how things come to be. And that, of course, will all then feed into the early philosophical explanations of cosmology and cosmogony.
- [48:59]
David Niles
I just want to say, for people who might not be familiar with sort of like the fullest understanding of Eros and what is erotic love, our host, Deacon Harrison Garlic did write fantastic article about it.
- [49:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
There's a, there's a few articles online I Think we've got them up on our website. In defense of Erotic Love is a look into Eros inside the Christian tradition. It doesn't go as far back as Homer or Hesiod, but it does look at Plato, because Plato's going to make a lot of Eros, and that's why we're talking about it now, because he's going to pick it up in his Phaedrus, it's in his Republic, it's in very much in the Symposium. And so Pope Benedict in his Deus Caritas est, gives a defense of erotic love. Eros, really in the Greek sense. It's just our natural love, what we call amor in Latin. It's not a competition with charity, with agape, because that's a supernatural love. That's a love that comes only from knowing Jesus Christ, from actually having sanctifying grace and being baptized. We have to know God to know charity and have agape. But Eros is a self love. It's a need love. It's a. It's a need to be satiated, particularly in beauty. And so Benedict 16th gives a good defense of it at the beginning of Deus Caritas est. And I kind of put that into a wider tradition in defense of erotic love. And on just the Josiah's website, I have an article called the Crisis of Fat Sold Men, which is actually a article on erotic love and what happens to it when the soul falls into acedia, when it falls into sloth. Because we misunderstand a city a lot. But one of the ways to look at it is that it's a cooling of love. This is what Dante talks about in the fourth Terrace, I think, on Purgatory is he gives a little talk about how the soul is like fire. It always wants to ascend, it wants to move upward. But Acadia tends to come in and cool that love. And so it distorts these things. So no, But I think right now though, the question is erosion in like the Neoplatonic Platonic Greek Catholic tradition will take on this really rich meaning. But we're not quite there yet. And I don't think we get there until Plato, and we really don't get there until the Symposium. Plato. Symposium in a lot of ways sets a foundation for Christian spirituality for over a thousand years because then everything we have is going to have an ascent. Plato's Symposium has a ladder of love. The soul moves upward. Here in the Greeks before Plato, Eros seems to still one be very much an erotic love of what we typically mean by that which means it's between male and female. It's a sexual love, which when it goes into the broader kind of Neoplatonic Catholic tradition, and even under Plato himself, Eros is going to be. That's where it starts, but it's not where it ends. Eros actually doesn't end for Plato until you're being satiated in the form of beauty. The intellect actually contemplates beauty itself. For the Catholic, we understand that Plato's forms are in the mind of God, they're in the Logos, they're in Jesus Christ. And so it's not until you actually are satiating in the divine beauty itself, God, that Eros is actually finally satiated. But here amongst the Greeks, Eros is still very much a sexual love, but one that also brings mania. So it's not one that brings, like, a scent, it's one that brings a certain mania of the soul. And this is what we see in. I believe it's Sophocles in Antigone. He has a chorus on Eros, and it talks about how Eros is a binding agent. It brings things together, which is true. We see that with Hesiod. It brings things together, it's a binding agent, but at the same time, it brings a mania that is really unique. The erotic love takes hold and there's an ecstasy there, but it also one very much that removes us from reason. And I think probably the best example of that is Haman in Antigone is probably one of the most sound voices of reason in the entire play. He has wonderful rhetoric when he tries to convince his father, Creon, not to do this evil act. He's docile. He. I mean, it's a wonderful. Just kind of masterclass and rhetoric to try and move his father to where he needs to be. And then at the end, he's swinging wildly at his father to kill him, and then he dies, a suicide. I think that juxtaposition bothers a lot of people, but I think Haman in a lot of ways is just simply an analog to or an example of the mania that comes with Eros. Right. The erotic love that he had for his bride to be Antigone.
- [53:50]
Thomas Lackey
Well, I think that's the only explanation that I can sort of latch onto for that chorus at all outside of his actions. That chorus being where it is in the play is baffling. So I can't even think of anything else it might be referring to because it sort of just swoops in and you're like, what's this about? And then you see what he does, and they're like, oh, I guess that. But I mean, otherwise, just get this little mini treatise on Eros from the. Eros from the chorus. And you're like, what's this about?
- [54:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And Sophocles, too, to your point. I think it's an excellent point because Sophocles is very pedagogical in his courses. Like, he's definitely trying to teach us something. It's very clear in his courses that he wants to teach us a lesson. I think in Antigone, they're. They're almost over the top, clear about what he's trying to teach. As Aristophanes shows later, like in his Frogs, you know, the poets are teachers, they teach the polis. And I think Sophocles giving us that. That's a great question. Why are we being taught this lesson? And, yeah, I think it has to be connected, I think, to Haman, because seeing Eros is like this broader cosmic force, even though it's in Hesiod. I didn't see it a lot in, like, Aeschylus and Sophocles. I really didn't. And we don't really see it much in Homer either, outside that one scene, because I can't even think of an example in Odyssey, at least. Nothing's occurring to me.
- [55:14]
David Niles
And so there is. I don't think it's like. Not explicitly, like, named, but I think that you could make the argument that Odysseus, pursuit of his homeland, is an example of erotic love at work. Right. And, you know, Eros in its fullest sense, and certainly not what they would have understood it to be at the time, but, you know, the desire for that, the beauty of his homeland, you know, for obviously to see his wife again.
- [55:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [55:48]
David Niles
Like, there is certainly elements of Eros at play, because what is otherwise? What's driving him? You know, he's on his way back home. There are many times he's like, hey, you could totally, like, this is a great spot for you, bro. You know, here's a beautiful woman, she's intelligent, or, you know, you're living with a God, she's going to make you a God. You know, there was something else, you know, and so I think that you can make a good argument that it is Eros that's driving him, pushing him back to his home.
- [56:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, I actually completely agree. I think that Eros as, like, the playwrights talk about it, like, as Sophocles talk about. Talks about it, is something very narrow. But if you want to say well, how does Plato talk about Eros as this thing that moves us up the ladder of love? So Eros is motivating each part of the soul towards something. So the appetitive part is going towards pleasure, the spirited part is going towards glory. The intellect is going towards wisdom. If you take that to be the movement of Eros, that it's moving us up this ladder that corresponds with our soul. I actually think Plato, I mean, the current theory I have in my head is that Plato is actually deeply in debt to Homer, because a lot of the characters that Homer gives are wonderful examples of the soul's desire for certain things. And a lot of the conflict then between the characters is actually between these things becoming in conflict. So even, like, you can look at that as Achilles choice. Achilles choice that he has between his two fates in a lot of ways. For if you look at it through the ladder of love are basically two different forms of erotic love. Like, is your repetitive going to move towards pleasure, which kind of terminates in a woman, a family, children, et cetera, or is your erotic love going to terminate in the spiritedness to seek glory and fame? So Achilles choice, in a lot of ways is actually a choice between erotic loves. You don't really see the wisdom aspect as much, but you see it's nascent in Odysseus, the key hero that finally takes down Troy, and also has the full hero's arc of going to Troy and coming back, is the guy that's not connected to simple spiritedness, that's Achilles, but rather is the character that also brings in the intellect. And then I think the whole thing gets turned on its head again by the Bacchae, because the bacchae comes in and the Eros that we see in there is that mania that Dionysian erotics is one that drives people insane and they destroy things around them. They hurt the people that they love, their natural bonds are destroyed and the polis is turned inside out. I really think that there's a lot of lessons there of that. A disordered erotics brings deep disorder to both the family and the polis.
- [58:37]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, that's where we see Eros. Not as a binding agent, not as something, a force that draws people together or opposites or gods together, in order to give birth, in order to be fecund, in order to generate. It's. It's in, at least from my reading of the Bacchae, it's. It's entirely destructive and chaotic.
- [58:58]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Destructive. Yeah, it's much more what Sophocles mentions. There's A mania there that tends to. It is binding, but it's not Hesiod's. It's not like this generative thing that's moving the cosmos. It does bring destruction, just like with Haman and Antigone, because technically, you could maybe argue this is Antigone's problem as well. She kills herself as she's going to be deprived of Haman. So I think the reason to point this and kind of bringing the Eros conversation to a close is we need to understand the Dionysian erotics that we see in the Bacchae and kind of in the greater Greek culture, but particularly in the Bacchae, because this is the Eros that Plato was going to receive. And to make a comparison here, you know, St. Paul did not actually invent the term agape. Agape had a cultural understanding to it, and St. Paul adopted that term to then express our supernatural love, our charity, our caritas. And Plato does the exact same thing. He receives a word, eros, an erotic love that has a particularly narrow concept that is deeply connected to Dionysus. And he takes that, and he saves that concept of love from Dionysus and presents it as something that isn't a descent into chaos and bestial release, but rather it's an ascent into order and beauty in the divine. And I think we'll see this in the Symposium when we get there, because Plato is very much drawing the reader's comparison to Socrates as a figure of this new erotics, this erotics of ascent, and then Alcibiades as a figure of Dionysian erotics. And so this is something that I think is going to. We're just gonna have to track as we start moving into Plato. All right, let's take up the next subject. So we have talked about divinity, and now Eros, and now we're getting into fate and free will. Dr. Grabowski, do you want to kick us off on this one?
- [61:03]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, I'd love to. So I'm going to try to. Try to be brief with my opening remarks. So there really. There are separate. Two separate. At least two separate questions here. You know, one is, you know, do the characters in Homer's epics and the plays that we've read have free will? And what does that mean? What does free will mean? And then we have to, I think, talk a little bit about what we mean by fate? And do we mean by fate what these ancient authors, what they meant by fate? Or the word. The Greek word that they would have used, moira. So I thought I would just Kind of maybe open it up to discussion and first of all, address the question of free will. I mean, do you gentlemen think that the characters in Homer's epics and the tragedies that we've read, do they have free will? And what do we mean by that?
- [62:02]
David Niles
I don't know this, because that, I think, you know, in Homer, that really is the question, what is the relationship between God and men? And I think.
- [62:09]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I think. I say.
- [62:10]
David Niles
I would say no.
- [62:12]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Do they have agency? Like.
- [62:17]
David Niles
I would say they have a limited agency, but I wouldn't say that they have agency, you know, because if you say that, that means, like, you. You get to make your own choices and you, you know, choose your own destiny. And clearly that's not the case in many of the characters in Homer, right, where, you know, you. The gods are prop. Taking weak characters and propping them up, and they're taking strong characters and making them weaker as they see fit, which would otherwise have, you know, so causing results that would have otherwise turned out much, much, much differently. Even to the point where, you know, Hector dies and they just like, bring him back to life because they're not done with him yet. So I think that whatever agency, they don't have zero agency. But it is. There's a heavy amount of manipulation on.
- [63:15]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
The part of the gods to piggyback on. On David's points. I think that, yeah, normally I will contextualize. The Iliad is just like completely fatalistic. I don't think anyone has much human agency at all. And we might get more human agency in the Odyssey. I think that's debatable. And then as we talked about earlier, I do think then there's kind of an arc of fate moving towards the back and human agency moving towards the front as we kind of get into the playwrights. And that will kind of come to a head, I think, in Plato. But, you know, in the Iliad, there really are moments, there's a few that kind of occur to me in which it does seem that the humans can actually affect things, that they're not completely on autopilot. There's even a scene then when the Achaeans are supposed to be retreating, they're supposed to be pushing back. And because that's Zeus's will and they're not, they're actually winning against the Trojans. And Apollo actually comes in and says, like, what are we doing, Hector? Like, we're losing and we have Zeus's will. And even. And even Homer has like, a lot of line. I can't remember if it's that passage, or another one in which the Achaeans, like, pushed back against the will of Zeus, you know, to the detriment of fate or, like tempting fate or something like this. So it does seem that they have some type of agency, you know. Well, if you want to unpack that more, we certainly can. But I think one of the. I think one of the parallel questions there is actually what kind of agency the gods have.
- [64:52]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
So, yeah, here, Deacon, I think it's important to distinguish between fatalism and determinism, because these things aren't the same. You know, this morning, it may. It may have been faded that I had a bowl of cereal this morning, a bowl of Cheerios in milk. But how I come about to having that bowl of cereal could have been that I poured it for myself, my wife could have poured it for me, I could have gone to the restaurant. I mean, so to say that an outcome is faded means that, well, as I understand it, that it doesn't matter what you do, the outcome is. It is going to occur, but that doesn't prevent you from taking multiple paths in order to reach that outcome. And so, I mean, there's a sense in which we're all fated to die. Why? Well, because we're all mortal. I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean that my death is going to occur at a specific time at a specific place. So I agree with you, Deacon, that the characters have a degree of agency insofar as they are responsible for their actions. To return to the Achilles Agamemnon incident early on, I mean, it was. I mean, who. In other words, as Achilles was reaching for his sword to stab Agamemnon, I mean, who or what was responsible for that action? We would say Achilles. It wasn't some outside force causing Achilles to act. It was Achilles. Now, what was stopping him? Well, some would say Athena. Some might say, well, Athena represents wisdom or reason. And so it was really Achilles stopping himself. So I think that there is a degree of agency. Thomas, did you have any thoughts?
- [66:44]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah, I think I agree with the last part. I think I might take a slightly more expansive view than most on the agency that's being described. I think there's something, I think Homer. And then we see this go on further. We see with. With Aeschylus especially wrestling with questions of what we might put as Providence. So providence is. Is. It has to allow for, you know, it to be distinguished from simply determination, is that, yes, there is an order to things and there's a plan and there's a way this, that, that, that, that the, the story of the world will unfold, but that doesn't mean that the individual persons in it have no choice. And, and that that choice is not free. I think that to use the example that I, I already referred to of the man that attacked the gates, the gods mock him for making a bad decision, but they didn't make him make it. They mock him instead for not realizing that it was doomed to fail. And I think, or maybe better to say Homer mocks him there. I think one thing I think comes out in the Greek plays in here is the kind of tragic element of mortality and the limited knowledge and vision of being a human being. I think part of what they're teasing out, the distinction between the men and the gods, is just how short our sight is and how often we make decisions which the gods would have and could have in some cases advised people not to make, not because they appeared to be bad decision, but just because our sight was so very short and they see so much farther than we do. But as we can tell from some of these other stories, the gods can only see so far as well. I mean, Zeus has to go to Prometheus to ask what's going to happen. Right? Zeus doesn't just know. And he also consult the scales. Yeah, he has got to consult the scales. And I think there's always this idea that there's something that reaches just that, even beyond them. And I get the idea we this up in another podcast that, you know, in the Christian tradition, and also it in some of the later Greek philosophers, you have the idea that God's will is absolutely infallible and that he gets exactly what he wills in the way he wills it. And in fact, you know, to bring this out into questions of free will, he wills that his will be brought about infallibly by the free choice of creatures. So it becomes this kind of like fairly tricky thing that you've got to kind of tease apart. But here it's pretty clear that the gods don't get everything that they will, and they certainly don't get everything that they will the way that they will it. But they do get a lot of what they will, at least in its effect, if not always the way they wanted. And so there's. But not everything. Right? So there's a huge gap between infallibly and most of the time. And I think that that's, that's the, that in that gap exists a very different understanding of what it means to be a God in the Christian view versus the Greek sort of Homeric and play playwright view. I think as we progress through Plato and definitely into Aristotle, that changes until they say no really to be God has this, this absoluteness that doesn't seem to exist here yet.
- [70:22]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, I think one of the things there too like we talked about the divinity is that the Greek gods are still creatures inside of time. They're super mortals that seem to know more than us but they're still subject to time to change to all these things that really are subject of creatures. Right now we have comparisons of mortal and immortal. We don't really have comparison between creator and creature. That really seems to be locked in, in the Hebrew imagination but doesn't seem to be there in the Greek. Even though I think they are. They're overall arc towards monotheism might be taking them that way.
- [70:56]
Thomas Lackey
Well, I think the gods are also. It's as you pick this up mostly in the Iliad, maybe a little bit in the Odyssey are horrified by death. There's something about it that to them is deeply disturbing in a way. You see this particularly in the scene in which Achilles in his sort of glory and it clogs the river with the dead and the river revolts at. But there's inside this text is this kind of like this, this, this recoiling at death that it. As it being something but of course uniquely human but also something which is that gods not only don't understand, they, they don't want to touch and that, that. So the distinction between mortality and immortality pretty much almost comprises the entire definition between a God and a human.
- [71:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So we, but we tend to have as a group I think a presupposition. If I can kind of drag that out and see if I'm. I'm wrong that we, we just seem to be assuming that there is a distinction between Zeus and fate. Not all Homeric scholars believe on that actually I think famously Latimer thought that fate was just simply the alter ego of Zeus. The scales, all these things. Even when Sarpedon dies and which I think is a famous scene of trying to distinguish between Zeus and fate. Where you know, Zeus if you remember is like oh, I could intervene here because serpent needs to die for the sake of his plan working. And Zeus is like, you know, I could intervene here. Where Serpina doesn't die and Hera jumps in is like if you do that it will cause chaos. You'll be against fate. And so there seems, you know, for Latimer, if I understand correctly, that's just Zeus play acting. It's all Him. But our presupposition that I hear in this conversation is that Zeus is distinct from fate. And so I guess maybe if we keep moving up the echelons of creation, I guess my question for Dr. Grabowski is then, well, then if the humans have, say, a limited agency, but an agency, though, that is overly determined or governed by the divine, is the divine then governed by fate? Like, what kind of agency do the Olympian gods actually have?
- [73:09]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, far be it for me to contradict Professor Latimer. I mean, I'm not certainly in his league, but, yeah, I do hold the view that, rightly or wrongly, that there is a distinction between the will of Zeus and fate. And I think the text that I would point to mainly is just that. Again, that famous remark in book one of the Odyssey where Zeus talks about how just this has gone beyond his proper share. And so I mentioned this during one of our podcasts where the word that's being translated as share is moira, and that's the very word that is frequently translated throughout Homer's epics, a fate. And so what is Zeus saying? Well, Zeus seems to be saying there that Aegisthus has really brought suffering upon himself. Why? Well, because he's taken what doesn't belong to him, namely Clytemnestra. And so I think in that passage, what really comes across is a. I guess one would call it a normative or a moral understanding of fate or moira, which I think is distinct from the temporal sense. The way we typically think of fate as taking place in time, the way that Zeus in that particular passage seems to be suggesting is that no fate or moira, it's a kind of ordering, a moral ordering to the cosmos, a metaphysical ordering to the cosmos, where these are the rules that we ought to play by. I mean, one might even say that this is an anticipation of natural law, or if violated, one, it's not the gods punishing Aegisthus. This is Zeus's point. It's Aegisthus punishing just this.
- [75:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So let me just kind of reiterate that, make sure I understand. So the idea there is that fate, I really like the etymology of like, it's a portion, these types of things. So there's a portion that then is given to each, which I think might even include the divine, the gods. And then there's a danger, an immorality about then transgressing that portion or wanting something that is outside your ambit. And so what we see then, then is that just like with Aegistus and how he should not violate his portion by, you know, coupling with Clytemnestra and killing Agamemnon, so too, should Zeus not exceed his portion and save Sarpedon. So in this concept, then fate becomes this kind of architectonic thing that has structured reality that gives each creature, including the gods, a portion. And so then there's like, there's a certain ordering. So the good things happen when we keep our allotted fates, and bad things happen when we transgress them.
- [76:18]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I would just add one other point, and that is, you know, when we're reading these texts, again, something that I always try to pay attention to is who's doing the talking. Very often, the heroes in Homer's epics will speak as though their lives are fated, that the outcomes are faded. There's that famous passage at the very end of the Iliad where Achilles is speaking with Priam, and he refers to Zeus's two jars. There's the jar of blessings and the jar of curses, and it's up to Zeus which jar he puts his hand in in order to distribute the blessings and the curses. And so people might say, oh, well, there you go. Homer thinks that, right, our lives are fated, or that our outcomes are predetermined. But again, those words are coming from Achilles. Those words are not coming from Homer. And so it's complicated when reading Homer because you have at least three different perspectives. You have the perspectives of the heroes, you have the perspectives of the gods, and then you have, you might say, Homer's perspective when he's narrating. And so trying to settle on a definite, you know, a definitive account of Homer's view of free will and fate, I think is quite difficult. But that being said, what you just said, Deacon, is I agree with 100%.
- [77:51]
Thomas Lackey
Well, I would also say that I think within the Iliad, the overarching image, and we've referred to this in many, many podcasts now, is the image of Achilles, shield, of the two cities. But I think the two cities wouldn't have the power it has as a symbol if there weren't some note, some even. Even latent note that you could choose which one to live in. Right. If there's no choice. I mean, if it's literally just a coin flip, then I don't think it would nearly have the powerful resonance that it has within the. Within the story.
- [78:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think that, too. Dr. Kabrowski, to your point, if we go all the way back to the episode that we did opening the Odyssey, I think there, if I can Re articulate the ideas that you shared here. You gave a really interesting thesis there that then in this concept of fate, that everyone has their portion and that there's a certain beauty and order that remains in the cosmos if everyone obeys the ambit they've been given. And then there's a certain chaos that comes. If there's a transgression of these particular portions, that then it's actually Zeus. Zeus takes on almost this, like, benevolent role.
- [79:07]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
He's very paternalistic.
- [79:09]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. He's the one that's actually trying to keep everyone within the ambit of their fate and not allow chaos to come back. It's interesting there whether chaos is just like a force or whether chaos there is. You know, can we tether that to one of the four primordial gods in Hesiod? Is that. Is that chaos then kind of just brimming underneath the surface and can be kind of summoned, if you will, if someone transgresses fate. Because that seems to be Hera's argument of why Zeus should not interfere. Interfere. Interfere with Sarpedon. Right. Is that chaos?
- [79:41]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Thank goodness for Hera in that moment. I mean, this is the. You know, I can't believe I said that. But no, that's not.
- [79:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's not a line we get much.
- [79:50]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
But no, I think, you know, Zeus is weak. He's weak at least in that moment, and it's good that Hera sort of reigns him in. But no, no, I do think, and this is an opportunity, yes. For the listeners to go back and rewatch our podcast on book one of the. Of the Odyssey, but. But no, Yeah, I think that Zeus, at least I. I have grown more affectionate for Zeus as a character. It's very easy to see him as, again, a philanderer, a guy who's always inserting himself and other people's business. But no, I. I do think that he does play a very, very important role in. In maintaining law and order in Homer's epics. Whether or not he plays that same role in some of these tragedies that we've read is a whole other question.
- [80:48]
David Niles
Yeah, I just wanted to make the point that, you know, as we consider, you know, more than just Homer, all of what we have read so far with the idea of agency that by the time we get to the Greek plays, agency is a given that they're, you know, the idea of, oh, does this character have agency here? And it's like, no, no, no. Clearly they have agency.
- [81:09]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And like, that's the point, because they need agency. If they're to be held accountable.
- [81:18]
David Niles
Right, Exactly. And they are, you know, like, you know, we talked about the bacchae. I mean, you want to talk about a play with agency? Okay. Like, the point is that these guys have been screwing up, you know, and Dionysus doesn't like it. So, you know, like, the. Clearly there is a development in Greek thought about, oh, you know, is man free? It's like, you know, they. They have definitely moved in the direction of, yes, man is free, man is responsible, and therefore, like, you know, it's. He needs to be. He ought to be a certain way. You know, so we're starting to see this because without agency, you can't have virtue. Right? And so. And so we are starting to see this, the growth of the idea of virtue.
- [82:04]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
We.
- [82:04]
David Niles
Which is very, you know, as we've talked about, is very nascent in Homer, but is, you know, you can kind of. You can see it. It's like little baby virtues. But they are starting to grow into toddlers and maybe even teenagers by the time we get to some of these later Greek plays.
- [82:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I'm glad you really played that. That analogy out there.
- [82:29]
David Niles
Thank you. Hey, you're welcome. I bring the good stuff for you, Deacon.
- [82:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You do? Yeah. I still haven't got past the septic tank and the story. I'm still stuck on that and distracted. No, I. One thing, too, I liked about Dr. Grabowski's kind of thesis that he sets for there on Zeus. One is because it makes me rethink my characterization of Zeus. Two, it really tends then to. It really leans Zeus towards the Zeus that we see in the Theogony. Because I actually think Homer's pretty critical. Or like, there's another theory would be that Homer. We didn't really talk about this with the divine, but that, you know, is Homer at times presenting the divine as so capricious and so kind of manic that it's actually a critique, that he's actually showing that these gods, like this. This doesn't work. Even the gods, even the people who try to be obedient to the gods, it might not work out for them. Or even like, Aus, who attacks the wall that Thomas has been talking about. He. He actually knew that Zeus was on his side. He just misunderstood what guy was supposed to get the glory for doing what thing, which, as Thomas said, we're not even sure he had the capacity to understand that. And so, you know, I. I think as we kind of move then, you know, out of the concept of, like, fate and free will, I think it's really interesting that this lands us much more towards a Zeus and Hesiod, that he is the bringer of civilization, he is the bringer of order. He is really that king. He's not the tyrant that we see in Prometheus Bound. He's actually the person that brings order. You know, another thing to note that's really fascinating is that sacrifice, like prayer and sacrifice, doesn't really come into the Greek narrative until Zeus. Like, if you notice that, like, humanity, like, there's no offerings at the beginning to Gaia, you know, or Kronos or the Titans. The idea of, like, man's piety, of like, giving something due to the gods, that comes in with the Zeus, Prometheus narrative on sacrifice. And so Zeus is the one that seems to bring this. Not just civilization, civilization, like a political order, but also just like a cosmic order. And so I really like what you're saying there about, you know, is that because he's kind of the tender of fate, right? He's kind of this gardener that's constantly trying to make sure that things actually just kind of operate within their ambitious. And if they warn people like Aegistus that if you step outside it, it'll be bad.
- [84:59]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah.
- [85:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Just.
- [85:00]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Just one last remark. I do like this esoteric way of reading Homer. In other words, as. Not as presenting the gods as Homer saw them, but as in fact offering this kind of subtle critique of Greek mythology. And of course, in that sheds a whole new light on Plato's Republic, because as we know, in the Republic, Socrates ends up criticizing Homer, Homer's depiction of the gods. But if Plato is as smart as we assume he is, he would have already known that Homer was giving a critique of the gods. And so it forces us, I think, then to return to the republic and ask, well, what in the heck is Plato doing there?
- [85:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, there's a good. No, I. I'm really anticipating those conversations because the way I read Homer as a teacher does not align well without Plato critiques him in the Republic. And so I am desperately trying to do the gymnastics to receive Plato's critique but also keep Homer the teacher that I like. So we'll see how that plays out. Okay?
- [86:05]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And it shows. Just one. Like, one more. I'm sorry, but it does show how incredibly insightful these authors are, despite being ancient. I mean, their level of thought, their insightfulness, just absolutely remarkable.
- [86:23]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's the perennial questions, right? That's why these are the great books. They comment on the perennial questions. They have answers. They talk about the human condition. All right, so we've talked about divinity, we've talked about love or Eros, erotic love. We talked about free will and fate. So now on to justice. How do we articulate justice throughout the works? I do want to give a caveat here that this by itself could be a six hour podcast, but we're going to give a good overview, architectonic view of justice throughout these texts. Thomas, do you want to kick this one off?
- [86:56]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah. So I think if we, if we stick with Homer for just a second, you start to see a view of justice laid out in the Iliad. I think there's questions raised as to whether or not, from the very beginning, whether or not Achilles is reacting justly. And this opens into wars, into questions of whether the war itself is a just war. And these are, to some extent, they are not at the surface of the text, but they're very much there. And I think that by the time we reach the later books, we, Homer, the teacher starts to answer some of these. We again, we get this image of the, of the shield. This is very important. The city at war is a city that seems to also go beyond what is just. You see, he foreshadows a bit, but you see, you know, bodies being dragged around the scene and all these rest while the city at peace. I think we even might just call it a city of justice, right? Where because there was a murder depicted on this shield, but they go to the judge and there's a way to resolve this. There's a way to come to a just outcome.
- [88:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And.
- [88:16]
Thomas Lackey
Another, perhaps it's an odd scene, but when Achilles judges the games and there's this dispute over the chariot race and you know, you have something very much like the setup to the Iliad where someone feels that they have a prize which has been taken from them, and he, you know, is, this is Nestor's son and he doesn't want to give up his prize, but he's ultimately, there's an interesting thing where Achilles gives up some of his own possessions and then also Nestor's son reconciles with the older man here, Menelaus. And so it's also, by the way, the only time it says in the whole book that Achilles smiles is when, when, when I think he kind of recognizes this same sort of mirroring of what's going on, of something that could easily have been gotten out of hand, but now has come to a resolution and that we're, I think we are supposed to recognize this again, this ordering this, this, this give and take, where someone actually does give up something that maybe they had a right to. But no, I'm going to give it up and for the sake of this order. While also you have the young respecting the old, which is in itself both a concept of piety and a concept of justice. So, I mean, I think we got, we build into the Odyssey where you have. I think that book is, is. Is a book almost entirely about justice understood in the sense of retribution. So it's, it's not a book about mercy in any stretch, but it is a book about this, this wrong action resulting in this reaction that is at an almost natural force level, like Dr. Grabowski was saying before, and Antinous did this, this happens. Odysseus goes beyond and offends Polyphemus and these things result. Right? These are, these are. And I think most of most of all. Well, let me change that. We, we see this reinforced down in Hades. I think, I think at the end of our Odyssey book, I mentioned that this is essentially like the three last things of death, judgment, and Hades within Greek culture. And you see some of the punishments meted out in Hades being very much tied to the crimes that the people had committed in life. And this is a warning and a lesson to Odysseus and it draws in through also to the suitors, in which you see that the slaughter of the suitors at the end is meant to be the just retribution for their crimes. And their crimes are absolutely monstrous within Greek culture because they're an insult to tear down the family, to tear down the state, and to tear down any notion of the piety related to guest friendship. I mean, all of these have been violated at the most, you know, most egregious levels. And then the retribution is meted out on them in such a way that all of the guilty are punished and the innocent are let free.
- [91:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And.
- [91:29]
Thomas Lackey
But there's still this tension at the end where some of the people whose sons were killed. I think it's beautifully done because not everyone whose sons received their just punishment is outraged. One of the people that helps Odysseus, his son was one of those killed, and he was killed in the goatherd son in sort of one of the most awful ways. But nonetheless, I think there's a sense in which some people are willing to let. Are not willing to let this go, and others actually do see, say, well, you know, in some real sense they had this coming and so they're willing to let it rest. But there it remains in that book a little bit of this tension of, well, if we have this notion of retribution, and I am the judge of my own cause. Maybe I'm just upset that this has happened and I don't care about the just outcome. My son is dead, therefore I will kill you or your son. And that is all there is to it. And that really leads us straight in to the question that Aeschylus then begins to rest wrestle with in the Oresteia. Agamemnon has sacrificed his daughter. I think relating to that already is the question, was this just or unjust? I like the read that it was unjust from the beginning and that Artemis, in demanding the sacrifice, was not in fact demanding a sacrifice. It was the. It was an absurdity or at the least a kind of inherent punishment. Right. You intend to go beyond what is just in the prosecution of this war. Basically, the gods see into their. Into his heart that he intends to do this to others. Okay, well then are you willing to pay the price?
- [93:18]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I like the. I like the read on Artemis there. I think just as like a comment on Homer, before we get into Aeschylus, because Eschylus actually takes things up explicitly. I was trying to figure out what I thought a definition of justice was for Homer. And it seems very concomitant with Zeus's will. So Zeus has given us certain cultural norms like guest friendship that he oversees and then that guest friendship and how you interact with it seems very much then to express how, like, what's just and what's not. So even Odysseus, right, he's hesitant to clear the suitors out of his house until he has the divine. Go ahead. That he can kill guests in his house because his guests are actually violating guest friendship. Or in other words, they're the actual ones that are unjust. So I was trying to think of like, do we see the only commentary on justice, like, per se in itself? The closest we get, I think, is the shield, which tends to be the most philosophical passage, or at least the one that's the most obviously philosophical. You can see clearly that there's. There's imagery being used, but then everything else seems to be justice as known through law. And the Lawgiver is Zeus. There's like these cultural norms that they have to follow, and that's what actually animates a lot of their understanding of justice as opposed to like an Aeschylus. What you're getting into is, I mean, the whole Oresteia is explicitly on the maturation of justice from, you know, the Blood Avenger model to a more procedural political model.
- [94:48]
Thomas Lackey
I think there's A lot about piety, incidentally, which is obviously a virtue, sub. Virtue of justice in, in the Iliad, right, as this opens and Apollo has Smith Mitten the, the. The Achaeans with the plague for having violated justice, really. I mean it is piety, but it's just, it is not just to have taken the priest's daughter, right. And she should be returned. And you see this, I think, played out also in the rampart that gets torn down at one point precisely because the sacrifices weren't offered to the gods. And so Poseidon takes part and the. And actually are these torn down at that time? Are actually, I think we're just told they will be torn down after the war, right. Because they can't be allowed to stand because they've not been offered with the proper hecatombs. So I think there's, I think in that sense you see a lot of references to what man owes to the gods and that sort of sense of justice, but I think it's a little less direct about what man owes to man.
- [95:56]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And actually, and I would just add one thing and that is there seems, at least in the Iliad, there seems to be a connection between justice and honor, or Timae. I mean, this is the whole crux of the Iliad, which is that Achilles believes that there has been an injustice perpetrated against him. And that's tied directly of course, to his feeling, his having, at least in his eyes, been dishonored. And so justice has a lot, I think, to do, at least in the relationship between Achilles and Agamemnon. It has to do with what belongs to whom, or at least what one believes belongs to whom. And that if there has been a dishonor perpetrated, that that brings about some kind of injustice. So I don't know if it's, if it, if it's exclusively law related, but I do think that there is a close connection between Dike and Timei, at least in the Iliad.
- [97:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, even in, even in like Alcibiades, the first Platonic dialogue that we'll read, Plato in the mouth of Socrates explicitly states that both of Homer's works are about justice. That's what they are. But it doesn't seem then kind of like the push the narrative forward a little bit into the actual plays themselves, we get Aeschylus, and Aeschylus is very much showing us a maturation of justice, removing from the blood avenger model the kinsman redeemer. This is the person in the family that has to take Revenge upon someone else. And we get. It's very much eye for an eye. What is that? Lex talionis. And it gets moved then to a procedural justice that has, like a jury and a court. It moves from the family to the polis, which tends to stop the cycle of violence, because then, like if your family is killed by a Blood Avenger, then you become the blood Avenger to go kill that person. The polis taking on that mantle of justice seems to kind of break the cycle of violence, if you will. But the justice as like a definition, which I think is probably animating in Homer too, but it's actually explicitly stated in Aeschylus, is that we love our friends and hate our enemies. That's justice. And if you do that right, you'll be a just man. And you can even see that in the Christian tradition because if you look at the bottom of Dante's Inferno, where who's frozen down there in all the ice? Well, it's the betrayers. Well, you'll never be a betrayer if you love your friends and hate your enemies. And so even at the end of Aeschylus, you know, justice, I think, as a definition has stayed that way, even though the procedures around it have changed.
- [98:43]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah. Thomas used the word retribution as being the model that Homer seems to have in mind, or what we see in Homer's epics, where justice is the consequence, it's how things turn out. Was justice done? Did someone get his or her just deserts? But as you said, Deacon, in Aeschylus, especially in Eumenides, it's the working out of justice. And it's. So it's not a complete repudiation of retributiveist understandings or conceptions of justice.
- [99:15]
Thomas Lackey
No, I don't think we can ever, even within the Christian tradition, repudiate retributive justice. Retributive justice is a sort of baseline that can never be moved entirely. In fact, to be explicit, Pope Pius XII writes that says that verbat, almost verbatim. So, but I think actually in the concept of retribution, just to recur to Homer briefly before moving forward, I do think that part of the question, the Iliad, is the relationship between wrath and justice. Right. Which is something we get more explicitly in the New Testament where we have the line that the wrath of man does not work the justice of God. So again, that's a paraphrase, but it's pretty close to a quote. Look up the exact wording later. But I think there's. There's an open question there. And. And we see that then taken up in Aeschylus, as to whether or not this I, I'm going to put it as retributive wrath on the part of Clytemnestra is in fact the just outcome. And I, I think the answer ultimately that Aeschylus tries to pull towards is to tease apart the retribution which is in fact just from the wrath that has in itself this tendency to go beyond justice, or at the very least to taint it, to blind and to make even the most just of outcomes, then have this sort of question mark hanging over it all along. So in this case, Orestes, for example, avenging his father, I think we're led to believe is in fact the just outcome. Especially Homer affirms this repeatedly in the Odyssey. And I don't think Aeschylus is challenging it. And yet there hangs over it this sort of cloud of whether or not it was really the right, right way. And I think Aeschylus tries, in this procedural move, tries to come to a dispassionate administration of justice so that we can have confidence in the result.
- [101:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think that's really good. I think too, to your point, you know, we see both in Troy or the fall of Troy and Clytemnestra, the justice that goes too far, the justice that turns into wrath. Clytemnestra kills Cassandra. I don't think there's any just way that you can justify the killing of Cassandra, just like you can sack Troy. That's just. But you actually, now I think of it, it's also Cassandra, right. You can't rape Cassandra at the altar of Athena. Right. So there's these, this I like Al you put that juxtaposition between the justice and the wrath, and that these things that go too far. What's really interesting then is like, you know, in the Odyssey, Odysseus does terrible things. So does Telemachus, you know, say to the serving women or. The worst death in all of Homer, even including the Iliad, is the death of the goat herd at the end of the Odyssey. What's interesting is that they're never chastised for that as a wrath. You kind of think they. They might be, have they gone too far, but they're not chastised through Athena of that justice actually turning into a wrath. I think that. Two thoughts. One is that, you know, I like what you articulated Thomas of. You know, at least where St. Thomas Aquinas is concerned, religion is a natural virtue to man. We naturally want to give God his due, and it's under the Virtue of justice, right? So religion is a species of justice. And then under religion is the concept of piety. And that piety is actually a just act. And we have, you know, we can do pious acts towards our family, towards the polis, and also towards the gods. And so, you know, as much as we've talked about piety, kind of through this journey through Homer and all the playwrights, you know, really, in a lot of ways, that's. That's also been a conversation about justice. And I think that you see this clearly in Sophocles. This is why I love Antigone so much, is because I think that this is what Sophocles does so well, is Antigone becomes that dark sign of the gods to address an injustice. Something has actually happened that is disordered within the cosmos, within this kind of trifold ordering of family, polis and the gods, the divine. And so, you know, you have to bury the brother. The dead have this universal right to burial. And at least the early Antigone, I don't think she really came to understand herself as the dark sign. But the early Antigone, right, stood up for this, like, reordering for this justice. How do we, though, handle the concept of justice and the story of Oedipus? Because Oedipus, like, very clearly, I think if we look at the narrative as a whole, particularly Oedipus at Colonis, right. It. Sophocles makes it painfully obvious that Oedipus sees himself as having done nothing wrong to deserve this curse. And I think it's pretty much confirmed at the end that he has done nothing wrong to deserve the curse. And therefore his curse then becomes a blessing. How do we. I mean, that's like Job, right? How do you answer the question of justice in the narrative of Job? How do you answer the question of justice and the narrative of Oedipus?
- [104:39]
David Niles
You know, I think that question gets a lot harder in a Greek pantheon, obviously, for the Christian who can point to an. A perfect God who is all loving, omniscient, who very. Who. Who. Who has a purpose and a greater good, you know, that he can accomplish through the suffering. I think the problem of suffering, in my opinion, the greatest objection to overcome with regard to the divine, no matter. No matter what religion you're talking about, right? The Christian, I think only. Only Christians can really answer it. But yeah, with regard to. If you have a pantheon, yeah, the suffering is like, well, these God. The gods aren't all good, right? And so what is my suffering for it becomes very Very, very difficult to answer.
- [105:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Because you can even, like, you know, with Job, you could say, well, look, all his stuff was restored. And actually he. He's in a better state than he was at the end. I mean, it's fine for Job, but, like, where's the justice for, like, Job's first children? Where's the justice for, like, the servants of Job that were, like, tending the sheep when, like, the fireballs blew them up or whatever happened? Same thing for Oedipus. Oedipus actually seems in certain ways more analogous to the servants of Job than to Job himself, because Oedipus is never restored. So he has this. This ending. But. And I think it's really beautiful where his curse, where he kind of sees the reason or rationale for his curse is not something that he will reap, but only those that are living will reap in his death. It's not just a curse like in his death, then that will become a blessing to Athens that they'll have this victory. And so you could say, then that's the justice to a certain degree, at least on the larger architectonic side of things. In the long arc Oedipus suffering becomes a blessing for others, but for he himself, he's never restored. He sees the reason of his suffering is the blessing, but the blessing doesn't come until he dies.
- [106:57]
Thomas Lackey
Also, there's a kind of almost apotheosis of Oedipus there at the end, though, where he sort of just. It's. It's almost like a. A kind of assumption of sorts. He does die, but there's a sense in which he's somehow. There's something miraculous about the. And transformative about his death, and it unlike any sort of normal man. So I think there's a sense somehow, and I think Aeschylus means this to be mysterious, that there was something transformative and elevating about what he suffered, that he became something great somehow. And again, I think this somehow is just left. This is somewhat nebulous. I will even say in Job that Job having gone through this, he's never really given an answer as to why all this happened. It's left hanging. I think Peter Kreeft, I love how he phrased it once, that the final answer is something to the fact of Hush Child, you couldn't possibly understand. And I think there's something like that going on in Oedipus at Colonis, and we're shown the transformative result. And so we know that the answer isn't baked in there somewhere, but Like Job, it's left ambiguous. Or unspoken would be better. It's left unspoken.
- [108:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You know, something that occurred to me as you were speaking is because I think where the Christian instinct comes in, as David was alluding to, is, well, Oedipus. The justice for Oedipus will be in the afterlife, right? That's, that's the, that's where the justice comes. So if he suffered from no fault of his own and basically became this catalyst as a blessing for others, then he'll be rewarded in the afterlife. But the Greeks don't seem to have that thick of an understanding of the afterlife, particularly not in Homer. It's a little bit hazier for me amongst the playwrights. It's definitely not like a beatific vision. It's not, you know, all these awards and robes and crowns and things like we have in Christianity. But it's interesting to me that Plato also struggles with that same question in the Republic, which is his dialogue on justice. And then I think we should probably note here that Plato ends his dialogue on justice with a myth, with a religious myth, the myth of, er, in which he shows that when you die, you're judged upon your actions, and your actions in life then affect, you know, how you're basically your status in the afterlife, whether you're reincarnated, whether you're punished, how you're reincarnated, things like this. And so it's interesting for me, even for Plato, that when he's really trying to show why, because there's two questions in the Republic, not just what is justice? But why is justice more beneficial than injustice? So even if we know what justice is, why is it not more beneficial just to be unjust, to be Machiavellian? And it's interesting that even Plato has to rely on a myth with deep religious undertones to try and show that it's better in this life to be just because of the effect. And that's the only way I can really reconcile Oedipus, is that it will be just for him if he then receives some type of, you know, eternal reward for taking on the suffering that in no way he merited.
- [110:24]
Thomas Lackey
But I think also it does reinforce this notion that I think does stretch through all of these, of that there's something sort of simply tragic about being a human being, right, that, that, I mean, I, I, I mean this is part of the cathartic aspect of, of the tragedy that he, he couldn't see this coming, even though, you know, in this dramatic irony sense we all see it coming. And he seemed to make good decisions, all of which turned out badly. I think that it's just the masterstroke of Sophocles to bring this off in Oedipus at Colonus, because if you leave it at Oedipus Rex, I think this leads the question that would ultimately undermine any notion of justice. Maybe it's just better not to know the truth. Maybe it would have been better if we just never found out. And without Oedipus at Colonus, that would be a perfectly reasonable, you know, to think of Sophocles as a teacher. What did he teach us out of that? Well, maybe it's better not to know. But he redeems that message in Oedipusic Clonus and says no somehow in a way that maybe is not particularly obvious. And in fact, it's so not obvious I can't even perfectly communicate it, but I will show it in its effect that it was worth it. Somehow the truth was worth it. Somehow it was worth the price.
- [111:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I agree. All right, I'm going to push us into our next subject, which is one we've actually already really articulated, because it kind of underpins a lot of the other subjects, which is the cosmos, right. This ordered whole, right? What is the nature of the cosmos and how does it affect justice and piety and virtue? So maybe just to kind of, you know, get us started. Even though I think we've really hit a lot of these high points. I mean, when I think of the cosmos inside of the works that we've read, my mind immediately drifts to Achilles Shield. We see that it's a. It's an imagery of the cosmos. And we see there these structures that the cosmos is ordered, it's intelligible, it's balanced. And I think that imagery then is somewhat imprinted onto the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, that both Orestes and Antigone and Oedipus are, you know, these hero like characters that are moving with. Inside an ordered whole. And so Antigone is the dark sign. She's trying to. She's tossed in by the gods to try and reorder something that is disordered, you know, Oedipus, I think, is presented very much as you have presented to Pierre, Thomas and even Orestes. I mean, Orestes is a huge catalyst for change, right? I mean, he is his thing of like, well, I'm the blood avenger. I have to avenge my father, therefore I have to kill my mother. But if I kill my mother, I'M guilty, right, of this blood that makes me subject to then being chased by the furies like his. His actions then serve as a catalyst to reorient justice towards, I think, a more ordered cosmos. And so I just, you know, I. I see this cosmos which then we see the piety can be seen then as. As like the piety can be seen as how you move inside the cosmic hoarder or really virtu virtue overall. Right. That I understand what's due to the family, to the polis, to the gods. And I think this ordered whole is really imprinted on all of the works that we've read. I think the bacchae intentionally turns it. Turns it on its head, which is why it's such a disorienting play. And I, I think, I mean. Two thoughts, then I'll end. One is, is that I think earlier it was mentioned that this starts the. This starts to kind of serve as a nascent natural law. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. They start to realize there are orders and customs and laws about how reality is structured. And we don't, you know, natural law is a very thick concept. Even, you know, I think it's in Plato, Aristotle talks about a natural justice. You know, it's Cicero that talks about a natural law, very much is akin to that Roman mindset. But the idea that the. Or that reality is ordered and we can draw moral lessons from it, I think is very much imprinted on Homer and these playwrights. And I think it's really important to take that into Plato because Plato then is going to expand those orders. And I think one way that we really need to see him doing this, and this is really why we're kicking off our year of Plato with Alcibiades, the dialogue is because I think what Plato immediately adds to that hierarchy is the soul, which we've said so far is kind of too thick of a concept for the things that we've read. But he adds the soul to that. That's the soul, the polis, or excuse me, the soul, the family, the polis, the cosmos. But you really have to start with a hierarchy and a structure of the soul before you understand how to treat those other things. So I don't know. I mean, I find all these works that have a very strong pingent towards a cosmic order.
- [115:45]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right. And, and, and I think what you've just said, Deacon, reveals one of the great insight of the Greeks, namely that there's a close relationship between the sort of the macrocosm and the microcosm, right? The cosmos and the polis, or the cosmos and the individual soul. And so if we're going to understand the world, if we're going to make sense out of our lives, how to structure our governments, how to structure our families, then sort of on the terrestrial level, we have to look to the bigger picture and to see how we fit into that bigger picture. And so if the bigger picture is chaotic or disordered or unknowable, then there's no basis on which to structure our own individual lives. So. So I think that for them, it was really important to at least make a stab at how did the universe come to be. How is the universe ordered? It has to be, at the very least ordered to the extent that we can reasonably understand it. And then we can turn our attention to practical matters.
- [116:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And you can see how well that dovetails then into the Hebrew notion of the creator God. Right? That the reality is ordered and intelligible. It's structured, it's not chaotic. And really, I mean, we haven't seen this yet, but really what that means underneath all this is that creation is good. It's not an accident. Right. There's this relationship between being and goodness that's deeply transcendent. Anyway. David, what do you think?
- [117:26]
David Niles
I definitely think so. And, you know, I really think that there's a connection between their depiction of virtue and their depiction of order and the cosmos. You know, I think that you can see as they come to a deeper recognition of the potential for virtue in a man's soul, I feel like they also start to realize that there is in fact, a greater, like sort of a mirror image of that in the cosmos. You know, for instance, we just. We just read the Clouds. That was the most recent one we read. You know, when you read it, you're not going to come away with like, oh, what a virtuous play, because it's, like, hilariously debaucherous and weird, but. But also very funny. But at the same time, you have a main character who in the end decides that he ought to render to others what is do them. You know, he's trying to escape the debt, you know, interest due to the debt he has voluntarily racked up. You know, he's trying to escape from it. And in the end he decides, no, I should render to the other what is their due, which is a much more mature recognition of virtue. And it. You can only have a virtuous man, which virtue and order are synonymous, right. Within the soul, that if things aren't ordered that there is an order implies that things ought to be a certain way, okay? And so you can only have that exist in a world where things ought to be a certain way. And so there is a deeper philosophical understanding that as you can once again, as you go back and look at the arc between the Iliad throughout these Greek plays, the growth is, it's impressive. And what always astounds me and what gives me admiration for the Greek culture at the time was that, you know, they're doing all of this without what the Jews had. They had no divine revelation, they had, all they had was thinking, you know, it was just a, it was just their own experience. It was the groundworking of philosophy. And they were able to eventually, you know, especially once we start to get into Plato's works about Socrates, the, the truth that they were able to arrive about who man is, you know, what John Paul II would have called an adequate anthropology. It's, it's so impressive. I'm just, they're awesome. Just, it's, it's, it's really quite incredible.
- [120:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, that's the, it's funny, I'm sitting here smiling because as you're waxing on about virtue and an ordered soul, I imagine your brother in law outside your window fixing your septic tank. He's out there cursing and cleaning up your stuff as you're in here podcasting about virtue. I just, it's, it's an image that I am enjoying. So no, I, I think you're right. And I think that again, we kind of go back to the maxim that we've said on the podcast, right? That Greek reason coupled together with Hebrew faith under Roman order prepared the world for Jesus Christ. And really, I mean, I, I, it's amazing what the Greeks were able to deduce from, you know, with a reason from nature. For the sake of time, let me push into our next subject, which is because I think it dovetails here really well, which is then virtue, which I think can maybe be re articulated as how does one act within the cosmic whole, right? So as we see, Dr. Gralski mentioned this and it will become much more explicit in Plato that this, the reality of your soul, the polis, the gods, all needs to reflect one another, right? There's sinews there that the ordering of one very much affects the ordering of the other and they need to stay in a particular order. And so, you know, the virtuous man, from what I can tell in the Greeks, right, the virtuous man is the man that understands this piety. He understands what is due to the family, to the polis, to the gods. He keeps them in their hierarchical order. Right. Creon very much cared about what happened to the polis, but he did so without or at least divorcing it from the divine. Whereas Antigone, I think, you know, dove into the divine and was supposed to be that reminder to him to do these things. And so I think that when you look at the virtuous man, you know, Arete, we had a lot of conversations in our year of Homer about, you know, in the Iliad, you see the comparison between Achilles and Hector. In the Odyssey, you see the comparison between Odysseus and Odysseus, the Greek plays. I thought it was interesting. I don't know, maybe I'm. I'm being obtuse here. I didn't see them pushing virtue that much further down the road, if that makes sense. I really thought. I don't know. I can't think of them, like, pushing it too far. But you do, I think, see something much more akin to what we see in Hector, which is that the virtuous man is the man that acts in a proportionate way to the spheres and orders around him, which is very much the family, the polis and the gods.
- [123:07]
David Niles
Well, you know, Harrison, I would. Deacon, I would just offer this, that. You know, we've already said that throughout the Greek plays, there is this distancing between humanity and the divine, okay? Whether that's for good or bad, there is this distance, you know, so that space is growing. One can only be as virtuous as the good that exists. Okay? So as the divine increases in distance from man, so does its capacity for its goodness, right? That as it gets closer and closer to the infinite, so does that ultimate goodness. Okay? And so what that means is that for man, his capacity to ascend that ladder of eros, that ladder of beauty, the ladder has. Get. It's. They're adding more rungs, you know, and so that just opens up the capacity, the potential for virtue. And I'm not sure that they were aware of it to your point.
- [124:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [124:12]
David Niles
I'm not sure that they themselves were actively trying to cultivate this idea of virtue. But maybe unbeknownst to them, I do see that there is this space that is definitely present at the end of these Greek plays. It just wasn't there. When you read Homer.
- [124:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Dr. Hrawski, what do you think about Pentheus? Was Pentheus a virtuous character?
- [124:44]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, so let me just. I'm going to answer that question in one Moment. But I just, I just want to point out that, you know, we've been talking about the distancing of man and the, and the gods, and, and we don't see that at all in the Bacchae. I mean, Dionysus is there, so to speak, in the flesh. And to me this might be a point that Euripides is actually making, that we need distance. We need to, in a sense, not distance ourselves in the sense of not believing, but to not treat these gods as if they were physically present as we encounter them in Homer's epics. But you ask, is Pentheus virtuous? I don't know. I mean, I think the answer is quite obviously no. But then the question is, does he have any positive moral traits or positive epistemic traits? Because. Right, this is the question that I've been struggling with, gents, and that is, was Pentheus presented with sufficient evidence to believe in Dionysus or was he stubborn, intractable in his disbelief, and was that a moral flaw? But I don't think I have the answer to that. But I think this is certainly the point to make here, at the very least is that we shouldn't identify mere piety with virtue. Because I don't think that we would want to describe the Maenads or, or even Tiresias for that matter, as virtuous based simply upon their belief in Dionysus.
- [126:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I mean, that's how that play turns everything on its head. Right? Because then the question is like, well then is Pentheus virtuous for pushing back against Dionysus in the beginning? Is he pushing back against a false God or even a bad God? Which is an interesting concept to get into. Right? And so he definitely seems to fall. Then when he kind of gives in to the temptation, right, to go see the Bacchae, he gives in to the temptation to go see them in their so called rituals. And that's, there's a line there that very much says that, you know, he, he was possessed by the God and then the God mocks him and enters into a mania, then he's torn apart by his own mother. So no, I think that one thing I will say about the Bacchae is that because we've received this whole cosmic order in structure and then virtue seems to be how to act within the cosmic structure. A play then, that turns that on its head or perverts it, then there's no, there's no way escaping every other concept being perverted. Like there's no way, there's no Way virtue is going to come out unscathed. If you have a cruel and licenses God, there's no way, because piety will shift, virtue will shift, reality will shift. And even if Pentheus is supposed to push back against Dionysus, you say, yeah, he was virtuous in the beginning, he was supposed to push back against him. On what grounds? On what grounds? You would have to have. It actually anticipates Plato's ideas because you'd have to have a concept of the good that is greater than the divine, that you can then judge the divine by. But we don't have that yet. And so man, the Bacchae just turns everything on its head.
- [128:31]
Thomas Lackey
Yes, disturbing. I mean, if we, if you follow this through that the, the idea that, that David was bringing out that of the ordered cosmos being that there's a way that things ought to be. That has a hopeful aspect because then a man can also assume that there is a way somehow or other to live in harmony with the way, with. With the way things should be at the cosmic level, at the political level, at the individual level, there's at least there's a path forward. It's not all chaos and disorder. The Bacchae does throw the wrench in this a bit being saying, well, yes, if there is, though maybe you're still too blind to see it.
- [129:12]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
There's no hope for thieves. There's no hope for thieves. I mean, I think that if we play out the Dionysian cult, Thebes will be no more, there will be no polis. I mean, in fact, this seems to be the point of the chorus when the maenads say that. I forget exactly how they put it. But we are not Thebians. We don't belong to. We're not Greeks. And so the worship of Dionysus brings about the, I mean, destruction of family, but it brings about the destruction of civilization. And that may well be Euripides point.
- [129:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's what I mean. He turns the entire structure. Right. So the whole conversation we had about Zeus brings civilization, the divine brings order, the Bacchae turns that on its head. And I mean, if you're, if you could become devoted to the God, your civilization is over. You all run out from the woods and the families are broken and people are killed, and the men take on feminine traits, the women take on masculine traits. I mean, everything just becomes inside out. But there's no civilization. I mean, Dionysus is unique insofar as he's a Greek God that's worshiped outside a temple. Right. They just worship him out on the wilderness. And there's a false ascent right to the divine, which again, Plato's going to rift off a lot of this. And I think too, just looking at virtue or arete, you know, we really have to just kind of grapple with this right now, because Plato's then going to give us a good definition, right? He's going to talk about what arete is, particularly in his republic, and it's going to turn into the excellence of a thing, right? What's the arete of a knife? What's the arete of a slave? What's the arete of a horse, right? What is its excellence that's tied to its purpose, right. I know a good knife is sharp because its purpose is to cut. A vicious knife, or, you know, a knife with vice would be dull because it'd be contrary to its purpose. I mean, Plato is going to give us a very clear definition of how this works. I think really helps us understand the cosmos because it also introduces teleology, the telos, the purpose of things. But here it's still just somewhat vague. So pushing into our last subject here, which has been already brought up several times, but suffering, we've talked about Oedipus, we've talked about even Odysseus, right? The one who suffers. The one who suffers pain. But the question I think, though, that I would like to raise is whether suffering has a pedagogical purpose, like. So if you look at Oedipus, if you look at Odysseus, does suffering have a purpose with inside the ordered whole?
- [132:08]
Thomas Lackey
I mean, I think you have to answer yes for Aeschylus, because he has this beautiful line that Zeus has ordained, that man learns by suffering.
- [132:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, man suffers into truth, right? Which I think we see Odysseus somewhat, play that out. I think we see Oedipus plays that out, right? Suffering for them is revelatory. They do. If they suffer, then they come to understand things. I mean, I guess even in the. I mean, not to keep beating this horse to death, but, you know, I guess even in the Bacchae, they suffer tremendously. But then what do they see at the end? Oh, he is a God. There's no way to deny it now, right? So they do suffer into truth, even if that truth is horrible. I mean, Cadmus can't say that Dionysus is simply a noble lie. At the end of the Bacchae, he's face to face with a God.
- [132:55]
Thomas Lackey
Well, Hesiod certainly seems to suggest that part of Zeus's Just. Just rule as opposed to just power. His true authority is related to his suffering that he. He himself suffered on his. On his way towards forming the Olympic order.
- [133:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's. I mean, I think that's really important because if Zeus has to suffer into this knowledge and Zeus has to kind of suffer into the creation of an ordered whole, into civilization, then it just simply makes sense to me that of course, then that cascades down to man.
- [133:36]
Thomas Lackey
There seems to be something enormously intuitive about this, even though it's. It's at the same time almost inexpressible. That is, we do parallels in various ways through the Greek heroes, like Oedipus or Odysseus and. Or Achilles himself even, who also suffers that. You. You. And then look at Hebrew parallels that obviously Daniel suffers, Joseph suffers, Moses suffers, that David suffers. Show me your Old Testament figure that doesn't go through great suffering. And yeah, I mean, obviously Job. I mean, I don't want to leave Job off that list. Oh, I will say, I think it's in Aquinas's commentary that he argues that the children at the end are the first children, that they were raised from the dead. It's a. He says it's the. It's a. Yeah, he says it's a. It's a prophecy of the resurrection.
- [134:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, that is certainly one way to handle that problem.
- [134:39]
Thomas Lackey
Pretty sure that's Aquinas. But anyway, yeah, it's an interesting thought, but yeah, no, suffering seems to be, you know, and the idea that suffering brings wisdom, that suffering is redemptive in some way.
- [134:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, it's just, it's just a concept that we're so uncomfortable with as moderns. Like, we don't. We don't want to suffer on anything at all. Right. We're completely comfortable almost all of the time. Any kind of discomfort bothers us. The suffering that we read about, you know, with the saints in the Old Testament and the New Testament amongst the Greek heroes is one. I think that we would like to remain something very poetic, but not within reality, even though it is. I mean, as a Catholic, though, it's inescapable. I mean, my kids are being raised, you know, all five of them running around this little house and they run around in a house that has a crucifix in it, which I know we become somewhat numb to, but for a non Catholic and now a bunch of quote unquote nuns. Right. Those who are not churched at all. I mean, to have this depiction of a man crucified, hung up in your home as normative is actually a really jarring concept.
- [135:47]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah.
- [135:48]
David Niles
Why do you have a tortured man in every room of your house?
- [135:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. But suffering, Right. Suffering is part of the human condition. And I think it's only in. As this has already been alluded to several times, it's most redemptive, then its most redemptive aspect is seen in the cross. And that's what all these things point to. And that's why sometimes Oedipus and the suffering that we see in these characters is a little jarring because we're trying to figure out how it's fully just. So how is the suffering just in the end? And we kind of have to do gymnastics at times to find that. But for the Catholic, you know, which is true, the reality of the cosmos, the true cosmos, then the cross really is that answer. Right. God suffered for us and with us and redeemed us from that.
- [136:38]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah.
- [136:38]
David Niles
You know, I think suffering teaches us the most valuable lesson, and that is about making a gift of ourselves to others. You know, and just in the theme of our conversation tonight, I think that's one of the. One of the things that really stands Oedipus at Colonus apart, that of all of the Greek plays, that one does stand alone giving that message that Oedipus suffers in a way of. Like he's making a gift of himself to other people.
- [137:13]
Thomas Lackey
Right.
- [137:15]
David Niles
And that. That is really the calling of all humanity, that every single one of us is made outwardly oriented. Right. That we are made in order that we might give ourselves away. It's in our personalities. It's stamped into our very bodies. Right? Because the human, like one person's body, makes no sense. A man's body does not make sense by itself. It only makes sense in conjunction with a woman's body. A woman's body doesn't make sense without a man.
- [137:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [137:53]
David Niles
We are both made.
- [137:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's in our very.
- [137:55]
David Niles
It's in our flesh that we're made to give ourselves away.
- [138:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [138:01]
David Niles
And so the, you know, I mentioned Oedipus at Colonus at the very beginning, and that was like. That's. It's just. It's so amazing that here is this lesson. I don't know how many thousand years ago, but a long, long, long time ago. And that's the official dating. Long, long, long time ago.
- [138:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That was very good. I like that. Well, Thomas, Dr. Gowski, any kind of last words, final words?
- [138:32]
Thomas Lackey
This is somewhat tangential, but the. What you talked about, the crucifix. Just an An. It is true that the kids really do pick up on this quite early. I remember walking into the cathedral once with Esther when she was about 3, and she looked up at the. The crucifix behind the altar, and she whispered, really? Ouchie. And I just. I don't think I'm ever going to forget that it was. They. It starts to resonate quite early that. I mean, the. The power of that. Of that.
- [139:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
What a beauty it is to see that with childlike eyes again, too, to see the. Because it's not just simply the image of the cross, but then the image of the cross, of its brutality and pain is then couched in beauty. We've taken this grotesque sign and we've set it inside things that are beautiful. Our cathedral, you know, has a high altar. It's a gorgeous gothic cathedral. Now, I think there's. There's something there that I think the children see that we've become numb to. Dr. Kabowski, do you have the final word for us?
- [139:45]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, sure. I mean, just. Just on this. This issue of suffering, as. As I'm preparing to teach ninth graders these. These great books.
- [139:58]
David Niles
That is going to be a great suffering on your part.
- [140:02]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
No, well, no, I'm not talking about my suffering.
- [140:04]
David Niles
Well, you better be ready for it.
- [140:06]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Referring more to the suffering that I'll be putting them through. But, no, what I'm hoping that they. What these. These. These young boys and girls see is that, you know, suffering is an element of greatness, the achievement in order to achieve, in order to become great at whatever. One cannot just simply live a life of ease. And so as you gents were talking, you know, about David, in particular about Oedipus, and I was just. My mind strayed over to the Iliad again and Achilles, and it was the suffering that he endured at Patroclus's death that ultimately got him up off his butt and back into the battle that. I mean, all of those grudges that he was holding against Agamemnon melted away because of the great sorrow and the pain that he felt upon his knowing that. That his best friend died. And so, I think that, you know, for these. These ninth graders, I mean, yes, they're all Catholic. Yes, they all have an understanding of Christ's death and his passion. But what I'm hoping that they see, too, is that the Greeks very much understood the importance of suffering in our lives and the need to suffer. Suffer to live to suffer to learn, but also just to suffer to achieve.
- [141:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I agree. There's a. If anyone wants to dig deeper into This, I don't think I really grasped the cross until I read Ivan's arguments against Alyosha in the Brothers K of why Ivan? It's not that he's an atheist. He believes in God, but God's not good. And he gives all those examples, horrific examples of children suffering. And, you know, Alyosha, if memory serves, doesn't really give him back a theological response. But then rather the answer is seen then in the Christian life and in the cross itself. Right. That God actually suffers for us, but with us, it's the God that decided to suffer and take on that evil himself. And so, no, I think this is a question. It's a question that we're going to see in Plato and a question that we see the Christian tradition take up as well. So I do want to say thank you to all of you, not just for this evening, for the roundtable, but just also for working through the plays. I mean, Dr. Krabowski and Thomas, I think you guys did a Herculean lift to help lead us through that. David, you did a few things as well, which I appreciate too. And so, but I just, I just want to you guys, thank you because I think it's been, it's been a wonderful journey. I have learned a lot. I was a first time reader on a lot of these plays. I mean, these kind of conversations that we had tonight are ones that I certainly could not have had a year ago. And so I just want to tell you guys, thank you.
- [143:02]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Thank you, Deacon. I've certainly grown in my appreciation, but also my understanding of these books. Had it not been for our Sunday group and had it not been for these discussions on your podcast, I don't think that I would have even bothered to crack these books open again for my youth. And so it's allowed me to revisit them, but also to fall in love with them again. So thank you.
- [143:26]
David Niles
You know, Deacon, if I may, I would like to just encourage your listeners to, you know, think about, you know, they've been going on this journey with you guys. Think about, like, where that they, where they've come and the how, how these plays have informed your thoughts, how they have informed the way you view your own life. And I would just encourage everyone to share this with your friends. Right, because these are, these are the conversations. Like, you know, our great books group, we're actually pretty regular people and like, everyone should be doing this. These are the things. You share this with your friends so that you guys can discuss these things together and it will enhance your friendship, it will enhance your own, just like life. And just the way you. The way you view reality, the way you view who you are, who you're called to be. It's kind of a great irony that studying all these pagans makes us better Christians, but we have just adopted so much of this into Western culture, and these are our roots, and so they really are important things. So if you feel like you've benefited from these conversations, I encourage you to.
- [144:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Share it with your friends. I appreciate that, David. I appreciate that a lot. Thank you. All right, guys, we are actually going to venture into Plato. So next week we will have an introduction to Plato, kind of map out where we are going. And the first dialogue we are going to read is Alcibiades. Sometimes a forgotten dialogue, but a dialogue that for centuries was the first dialogue that people read when they were going to start reading Plato, because it helps them with their own moral formation. Not just approaching Plato as an academic exercise, but as a teacher, one that can actually form our soul and lead us into truth. So thank you, everyone. You can check us out on thegreatbookspodcast.com on Twitter, X, YouTube, Facebook, and all our supporters on Patreon. Thank you and we will see you next week.