← Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend the Great Books podcast, we cover the first part of Euripides, the Bacchae, a chilling yet captivating Greek tragedy that questions piety, erotic desire, the divine and societal order. The main character of the Bacchae is a God. It's Dionysus. But he's undergone a terrible transformation. The jovial wine God of Homer is made into something cruel and beyond classification, a divine that is worshipped through frenzied madness and the bestial release of sex and violence. I am utterly fascinated by this play. Its graphic images and raw intensity set alongside an ambiguous moral gives a lot of room for discussion. But I'm particularly interested in it because it serves as an antecedent to Plato's Symposium, which in turn shaped Western spirituality for almost a thousand years, or for really over a thousand years. Moreover, this play has several stark, clear parallels to Jesus Christ and the Gospels. It has a very nascent spiritual message in it, I think for the west that we'll see develop with inside the Western Canon. So again, this play has layers, bloody terrible layers, but it is certainly worth your time. So join me and the always insightful Dr. Frank Grabowski as we discuss the darkly mesmerizing drama of the Bacchae. 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. Tulsa. It's a beautiful evening here in rural Oklahoma. You can check us out on Twitter or X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters. You can check out thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have various guides up for classical works that you can go and check out. And today we are discussing the Bacchae by Euripides, one of my favorite favorite plays. We also have a guest so friend of the podcast, Dr. Frank Grabowski, professor of philosophy at Rogers State, member of our Sunday Great Books group that meets at my home, teacher at our new classical high school here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a third order Franciscan, Dr. Grabowski, how are you doing?
- [02:37]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
A lot of titles doing really, really well. This has been a great summer. I always go into summer as a college professor wondering how I'm going to spend the next three months. And more often than not, the time goes by so quickly and I look back at the summer squandered. But this has actually been quite productive and it's actually been quite, quite positive in terms of just my moral and spiritual growth too. So in fact, this weekend I'm going to be Driving out to Oklahoma City to meet up with Father Elkin and my other members of my formation cohorts to have a spiritual retreat. So I'm running with it.
- [03:16]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, very good. Yeah, very good. And the. You're also in the diaconate formation program. Yes, probably should mention that.
- [03:26]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah.
- [03:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Also. Also studying to be a deacon.
- [03:28]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Also studying to be a deacon. You know, again, a man needs a purpose in life, and it's not one of marriage and childbearing and rearing that. And I really find that I'm being called to a diaconate vocation. Yeah, that's been great. The guys in the cohort are great. And you and the other members of the institute who've been taking us through these difficult texts and really helping us to grow intellectually and really helping to build the fraternity. It's been wonderful.
- [04:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, it has been. It's been wonderful to read the great books in the setting of, like, Formation of Clerics, but also particularly because when you teach in the diagonal program, it's all adults, and that kind of brings in, like, a really unique aspect. And so there are all these men, you know, and they're mainly, what, 40s and 50s, early 60s, and for a lot of them, like, this is the first time they're ever going to read the Iliad, right? This is the first time. So we read.
- [04:25]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yes, go ahead. No, no, I was going to say. I was going to say that's. That's precisely. I mean, what's. What's been so fascinating about. About the last year of formation is that, you know, you and Dr. Milan and Dr. Spencer have. Have walked us through the great Books, through Scripture, through some more philosophy, and it's quite remarkable. And obviously, a lot. A lot can be attributed to your talents as teachers. But I mean, just to see these. These men who, as you said, are by and large, you know, novices when it comes to these books and philosophy, just how they managed to grow in. In their reading comprehension, in their. In their analysis. And so it's been. It's been to me, it's been. It's been a great experience, not just personally, because I think I've grown as. As a reader, but it's been. It's been a great joy and a great pleasure to see these other men really grow, not only just in their ability to read, but in their love of reading and their love of these great books they're really passionate about. It's genuine.
- [05:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think we had a lot that. I think we had a lot that were a little suspect at the beginning, it's like, hey, come join the deaconate program. You're gonna learn to be a deacon. By the way, we're reading the Iliad. And I am. I am grateful for, you know, you know, my superiors in the program that allow a Great Books formation program to be part of our formation, just simply because I think that's unique. And a lot of them didn't read the great Books, so they're kind of looking at the fruit that it bears on the men immediately. But it has been like, it's just been a joy to kind of walk with the group through a lot of these texts and some of the texts that we've read this year. So in the formation program, we read the Iliad, and then we read the Orestaya, and then we read the. We read Antigone, right? And then Bacchae. Is that all of them?
- [06:17]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I think so, yeah.
- [06:19]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And it. And for some of those texts, you know, I was still pretty green to them. And so actually, to have those discussions with a group was really helpful. I just, you know, as we kind of, whether it's on Twitter or talking to people, and they're like, you know, how do you get your insights in the text, or how do you get familiar with it, or what commentaries do you recommend? And there are good secondary literature, but honestly, 1. Reading a text more than once, like, just reading. Reading a text, I think is the absolute best commentary. Because the first time you read something like, whether it's the Bacchae or the Iliad, you're simply trying to grasp the literal. Like, you might also be grasping some of, like the allegorical or the analogs behind the scenes. But a lot of your attention, your effort is just trying to understand the literal, like, what's actually happening. And that makes sense because the literal is the foundation, right? That's where all these analogs have to rest. They rest in the literal. You have to understand literally what's happening in the text. So literally, just reading them again, I think provides one of the best commentaries. And I actually think that I was reflecting on this the other day. Reading them in a group is somewhat of a. Of a cheat or a hack to that, because when you read it in a group, it's like you've read it multiple times simultaneously, right? Because someone else has done the work to read it another time. And hopefully, like, you know, you're reading it with. With insightful people, they bring a different insight, right? So, like, if we're sitting there, you know, chit chatting about a book or I guarantee will happen tonight with the Bacchae. It's like, you know, here's the theme that I really pulled out. Here's what really stood out to me, and here's all different ways I see it playing in. But then someone else is like, oh, well, no, wait, look, I also see this. And it's really beneficial to read things in a group because it really does serve as a way that you've read a text like multiple times.
- [08:01]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And I think that's, you know, your emphasis on reading together in a group has, has been really, I think, so valuable in impressing upon the cohort and also those who attend your month meetups at your house that just how, you know, valuable it is for the individual to read the text and to bring his thoughts, his or her thoughts to the table. Like, you know, again, all the credit to you and the other professors of the cohort. Yes, there are times where the teacher has to lecture and has to present certain ideas, but you've really allowed us to make discoveries on our own. And that was most evident the month you unfortunately were unable to attend when we had our presentations. And I mentioned to you in private, and I mentioned to others too, just how impressive it was to listen to these non PhDs, these non MAs. People who have not, who don't. Who are not credentialed in the classics, handle these difficult texts with great maturity and with a certain degree of mastery. Again, I think that says a lot about how the pedagogical approach that you've taken, but also the joy and the excitement that you bring to class that these are not just texts that we have to learn for the quiz, but that there's real valuable that, that, that these really do address some important issues involving the human condition, man's relationship with the gods and so on.
- [09:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, there's perennial questions here. That's why we read the great books, right? There's, there's these perennial questions and commentaries on the human condition. And we should say, I think that, you know, how we've structured our diaconate program with this great book sequence here in Tulsa is, you know, we. It's like joining the National Guard. It's one week in a month. And so I get to teach on Friday nights for two hours. So for two hours, I have the cohort on Friday night and we have basically a Socratic circle on, you know, whatever text. And then the rest of the weekend is basically dedicated to, you know, systematic theology and practicums and general formation. But then once A year in the cycle, they allow me to teach the entire weekend. But instead of teaching it, what I do is I. I break all the text that we've read into themes and say, okay, what are the major themes that we've done? Because one of the problems is only talking to each other for two hours a month is we barely have enough time to discuss the text. We don't have a lot of time to do comparative literature. And so the whole weekend then, which I did miss. I did miss it because the birth of my fifth child. So I had somewhat of an excuse, but I did. Don't tell my wife, but I did really. I did. It really pained me to miss the weekend because I don't teach the weekend. So what I do, you know, for the listener, is I. I can't remember. We have seven or eight sessions, and we have seven themes. You know, we talk about suffering, we talk about Arete, we talk about Providence. Right. Yeah. All these deep themes that we've tracked mainly since the Iliad. And the cohort breaks into groups and then presents on these questions that I have given them. I even meet with them throughout the month prior to the presentation to make sure they're on the right track. And, yeah, a lot of their stuff I wouldn't answer for them. Right. Like tonight, one of the questions that kept coming up in the studies was, is Pentheus a good person? Is he virtuous? And that threw everyone for a loop. And the reason I mentioned this and just go into detail is because we should mention that we're going to do this on the podcast, too. So we're going to do the same thing. So we've got the Bacchae, and then I've got two. Well, I think we're gonna have two on Aristophanes. So we're gonna read the clouds, and then we'll read the frogs, and then we're going to have a roundtable on all these plays and really kind of even touch back into Homer, because it's hard to talk about the plays without talking about Homer and really just have a whole podcast dedicated to a roundtable. Invite a lot of people who helped us through the plays to talk about these themes, to actually pluck out suffering, to pluck out virtue, to pluck out Providence and fate and actually talk about, like, how do we see these in different authors? And I'm very much looking forward to that conversation.
- [12:25]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
No, it's. No, I am, too. You know, again, I can't help but stress how, you know, fun it is to just to see people who would not otherwise read these texts, read them without any sense of intimidation, but beyond that, to read them with a great sense of love and interest. You know, I, again, I saw that in the presentations. I see that every month that we meet at your house and at St. Francis for formation. That, I mean, the conversation doesn't just happen when you walk into the room, Deacon. The conversations are happening on group meet. They're happening when we're having our meal or even before classroom between classes.
- [13:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So.
- [13:11]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And there are varying levels of interest. Obviously some people are, you know, some of them, the court, are more interested than others, but I think every single one of them appreciates, you know, what you're exposing us to. And I think we've gotten to a point where, you know, just to give you one example, there's a member of the cohort who, interestingly enough, and I was shocked, pleasant. I mean, not. Not that I didn't expect anyone to post this on groupmeet, but somebody had posted an image of the COVID of the Leo Strauss commentary on User Forbe.
- [13:46]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, really?
- [13:47]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And I thought, my goodness, like, of all the commentaries, it was, you know, recently published. Maybe it was the first hit on, on Amazon. I'm not going to say one way or the other, but I thought, my goodness. And I own it. And I've been trying to get through it. It's a slog because it's just notes. I mean, I have it right here. It's just like his notes collected and an interpretive essay. And, you know, but my point is that that shows that, that we have these ambitious individuals who are trying to get a. A head start on working out what the youth of froze about because they don't want to show up. And, well, I'm sure some of it is competitive, but, you know, they don't want to embarrass themselves, but they also want to make real contributions to the discussion. They want to be part of this process. I think it's wonderful.
- [14:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And if anyone's unfamiliar, you know, after the Poetics, we're going to go into Plato. So actually not here too long. We've got what, two episodes on Aristophanes and then the Round Table, and then we're launching into Plato and we're going to be studying Plato for a little bit. And so actually, that Leo Strauss commentary slash notebook on the Euthyphro, that is a wonderful little volume.
- [15:02]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Have you read it?
- [15:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It is a wonderful volume. I have it. I have not dug into it.
- [15:06]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I've been trying.
- [15:06]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It is my Goal is actually to read that and use it as prep for the euthyphro for the podcast.
- [15:13]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah. And I think, you know, just one last comment on, you know, as we transition from these. These plays, you know, the poetry to Plato, I mean, it's such a. In a way, a seamless transition because of the way that Plato writes. He writes dialogues. And I think, you know, that's something to always be mindful of, is that these are not just philosophical works, but they're dramatic.
- [15:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And it's.
- [15:35]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
It's important to see how the philosophy and the drama inform each other.
- [15:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, very much so, yeah. It's actually said that Plato wrote a lot of plays, and then upon meeting Socrates and deciding to follow him, he burned them all.
- [15:50]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
He burned them all.
- [15:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But luckily, or providentially for us, the dramatist in him survived. And we get these wonderful dialogues and it just as a reminder to everyone, right, this is why are we reading the replays? Right. They actually serve as this intellectual bridge between Homer and Plato. And I'm so glad we did this, because me too, I did not. The plays were not a part of my initial Great Books formation. Actually, neither was Homer. We dove straight into Plato, which then kind of makes Socrates seem like he popped out of a vacuum. Where does a guy like this even come from? But after reading Homer and then seeing how the playwrights, the tragedians interact with him, but the questions and the principles that they're pulling out of these kind of legendary stories, you know, to my mind, as you read it, a philosopher coming out of this culture now all of a sudden is not too shocking, right? That someone would say, you know what, Instead of doing a play, why don't we actually do a writing that just does a drama on a philosophical principle? And then you really see how Plato's dialogues didn't pop out of a vacuum. They actually kind of organically grew out of this incredibly rich Greek culture.
- [17:02]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah. And just one last comment before maybe we jump into Bacchae. And that is, you know, this whole. Well, the experience of reading these texts, both in the information and with the group, the Great Books Group that meets monthly. It's been wonderful for me, just on a personal level, because I'm so accustomed to reading works of philosophy, and so I'm very good at abstractions. In other words, I can sort of work out big ideas in my head. And so I find reading Aristotle very easy, and I find reading Kant very easy, which most people find to be very strange. And literature has always been difficult for me. And I've kind of wondered why is that? And I think what I've discovered recently is that reading literature forces a person to try to picture in one's own mind what's happening. In other words, to come up with an image, very much a spatial image. And, and of course, you know, when you know, for instance, there's, you know, the great fight between Achilles and Hector, I mean, what, what you picture may not necessarily be what I picture, but yet we still have formed in our minds particular instances of these individuals and, and how they're related to each other. And, and, and to me that, that's an important step in improving one's reading comprehension because it forces you first to sort of work with the particular and then you can kind of then move to the more abstract questions involving justice and piety and beauty and some of these other things. And so it's really helped, I think me, and I'm, I'm, I'm by no means I haven't completed my journey, but, but, but this has really helped me on a personal level to be a better, to be a better reader.
- [18:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, that's beautiful and I appreciate you sharing that because I do. I mean like we talked about with, you know, the, the gentleman in your class, you know, one of our theses at the beginning is if you read Homer, if you read the playwrights, you will become a better reader of scripture. And when you return to scripture, you're going to have a much broader skill set, if you will, to actually extract the principles from this. But not even like a cold abstraction to try and read scripture as I think it's supposed to be read, right. As this drama where all these details matter. Right. The, the greatest teachers teach in story. Actually. The greatest teachers don't write, right. Socrates in Christ. Right. The greatest teachers don't write, they just talk. But then their, their followers, right. Then very much communicate those truths in stories, whether it's the dialogues, the dramas, the gospels, et cetera. So I think that, no, I think there's a lot of richness there to learning how to receive these philosophical principles from the drama. Not as like a cold abstraction from them. Like, because that's how Plato used to be taught, right? You just, we don't need to read the drama also. Just go read Aristotle, right? Why even read Plato? Like just read Aristotle because he's already abstracted it all. I think actually speaking of Strauss, I think Strauss was probably almost single handedly the one that brought back into the academy, like, no, you have to read these as a drama and these little Details matter. And there's a lot more in these texts than just like one on its face philosophical principle.
- [20:25]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And that the. The way you put it, I think is crucial. He brought back into the academy, which suggests that it was lost. And I do think that there, you know, there was a very rich history proceeding, dating all the way, I'm sure, back to the ancient world where the dialogues were very much treated as such. And then people became prudential and they became experts. And then they didn't care about the dramatist Persona, they didn't care about the setting. They just give me the ideas behind all these characters. And, yeah, you really lose. I mean, you, you, you. And I think, you know, some would argue you completely miss Plato's.
- [21:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Agreed. Well, we're not quite the Plato. I'm really excited to get there. It's gonna be wonderful to read Plato in this group. But we are still enjoying the Greek plays. So tonight we are reading the Bacchae by Euripides. So maybe just some, like, brass tacks before we jump into the text itself. So Euripides was born in 480 B.C. and died around 406 B.C. he's one of the major tragedians, along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, both of who we've covered here on the podcast. It said he wrote over 90 plays. We have 18 to 19 of them. One of them is. The authenticity is questioned. His personal life is somewhat of a disaster. He had two failed marriages and actually legends grew that he just left society to live in a cave and. Right. He just kind of ostracized himself. He's also often presented as cantankerous, a recluse, a curmudgeon. Most of his adult life was during the conflict of Athens and Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. He actually dies right before that conflict comes to an end. In 408 BC, at the age of 70, he entered into voluntary exile and left Athens for Macedonia and died there in 406. So he dies in exile. It was there that he wrote his last plays, which included the Bacchae, and his son, aptly named Euripides the Younger, brought them back to Athens to be produced. So this is one of the last plays that we're reading today that he put together. The Bacchae itself was produced in 405 BC in Athens. The first time it was actually put on stage was 405, and it actually won first prize. It should be mentioned that the play has come down to us, is not complete. So if you haven't read it yet, that was a spoiler for me because I didn't know that when I read it. I did not know that. And I got to the end, I was like, what is this? So there's some. The gist of the story, actually way more than a gist, but substantial parts of the story are there, but we have some lines towards the end that are missing. And so it's not the one copy we have is not exactly intact. Anything else on, like the Euripides or the play itself?
- [23:26]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, I guess the one thing that I would mention is just that, you know, also at that time were living both Sophocles and Socrates. In fact, to give you some dates, Sophocles dates are 497 to 406. So they died in the same year. So they were again, roughly the same age. And Socrates 470 to 399. So, you know, again, it may not always be a good idea to historically locate these plays within a historical context, what was going on at the time. But I do think that given what was happening with the Peloponnesian War, given what was happening with Socrates, and this may come up in our discussion today, and the ology, one of the charges that he was to defend himself against was promoting gods other than those that were sponsored by or worshiped in Athens. And so, you know, this, this is an issue that comes up in Bacchae, which is you have a new God and what are you supposed to do? Right. He, he just shows up. So, and, and to give you Plato's dates, 428 to 348. So it's very likely that Plato as a young man, a teenager or in his early 20s would have witnessed some of these plays being.
- [24:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, you know, the, the intellectual richness that popped out of Greece during this time period is almost unfathomable.
- [24:56]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Off the charts. Yeah.
- [24:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And that goes back to, you know, a lot of times on podcasts we've talked about Greek reason coupled together with Hebrew faith and a Roman order, prepared the world to receive Jesus Christ. And one of the things to that, I think on its face is just how much Athens, particularly like just the intellectual reflection and kind of antecedent philosophy and the philosophy itself that came out of this polis in a very short period of time.
- [25:21]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And, and, and also, and I don't know exactly the population of Athens, but we're again, the, the listeners have to think that we're not talking about Dallas, Fort Worth, we're not talking about New York City, we're Talking about a relatively, you know, small polis, a relatively small. So one would, I think, be, you know, it would be reasonable to say that they, they may not have known each other personally, but it was a very tight knit intellectual and artistic community. And so that's, I think that that's also, you know, worth, worth bearing in mind.
- [25:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And one thing we're going to see too is that then sometimes they interact. And the tragedians, they typically write about legends that they have received and they take them, they modify them, you know, they kind of build the myths. But the comics, like Aristophanes, tend to invite or invent new stories, but use modern people. And so when we read the Clouds by Aristophanes, which I think we're reading next, that one is all about lampooning Socrates. Like Socrates is actually a character in the play itself. And then after that we'll read Aristophanes frogs. And the premise of that one is, is that Dionysus thinks all the new tragedians are terrible. So he goes down, he goes down to hell. He goes down to Hades to get Euripides back, to bring Euripides back. And it's a funny premise, but he's getting him back because in there it admits that the poets, the playwrights are teachers and Athens has lost its lesson. Athens needs to be taught some lessons.
- [26:58]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah.
- [26:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And then he goes, when he goes down there, he realizes that Aeschylus is actually the one that's praised as the best and him and Euripides are fighting. And so Dionysus hosts a poetry contest between the two to actually see who's better, to go back to Athens and save it. And it's really fascinating because they critique each other's poetry.
- [27:21]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah.
- [27:21]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So. And so it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful kind of comedic play. I'm new to it, I'm kind of simmering in it, if you will.
- [27:28]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, I remember the Gravity Clouds.
- [27:31]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's a very different type of read. So maybe taking a step back then, Euripides, that's the Bacchae. Why do we read this? Right. So the listeners who have read it that are reading along with us kind of as we kind of wrap up the Greek plays right here towards the end, this play is very different and we're going to get into the reasons, but I mean, it is different. And then also, you know, a lot of people might have been put off just morally speaking. Right. I mean, it's a very immoral play insofar as the bestial release, the implied sexuality at Least the violence. The violence that's done throughout all the relationships, the perversion of those relationships. So we read this in our diaconate formation program for the formation of, you know, Catholic clerics. So why do we read this? And so I think there's. There's a few thoughts that. That occur to me. You know, one is that this really. It really sets up Plato's Symposium. Well, and so we're going to read Plato's Symposium when we get into reading Plato. And Plato's Symposium takes place right after one of these famous contests where Agathon the poet has won. And they're going to give all these speeches about Eros, but the judge is Dionysus, and Dionysus actually haunts the whole dialogue. They're drinking or not drinking wine. Alcibiades comes in basically dressed like Dionysus with his bacchae. Like, the premise that we see in this play about what Dionysus represents, Plato very much riffs off that in his Symposium. So it's kind of important to understand how he's being presented, because we should note, and we'll get into this in the text, that the Dionysus, this God of wine that we find in the Bacchae, is very, very different than the God we saw in Homer. In Homer, we get a brief reference to him and he's, like, scared of a mortal and hiding under the skirt of, you know, Thetis, the sea nymph, if memory serves. This one is cruel, licentious, just like, just almost.
- [29:39]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, he's diabolical.
- [29:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, he is diabolical. He just seems to enact a certain cruelty that has no emotional impact on him. So he can turn people inside out, have them.
- [29:54]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right. Some malevolence. Like it. It. The. The way that he. Without any sort of a conscious empathy or sympathy. Right, we'll get into this. Truly. Yes. I mean, he wants people to revere him, to worship him, but the means by which he accomplishes this seem totally counterproductive.
- [30:20]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, that's a. And that's a great premise, because I think one of the questions we have to ask ourselves is, what is his purpose in coming to Thebes and is he actually doing it correctly, or do his actions and his words, like, actually align? But actually, even taking a step back, as a preliminary, one of the things that I want to ask is, you know, when we read this is do we, like, what is the purpose of the play from Euripides standpoint? And just as like, just to let everyone know, this is kind of a blood on the floor conversation about what did Euripides actually mean by this play. And so there's a few things I think I'll throw out. Not to. Not in a conclusory way right now, but to kind of like maybe get us thinking as we move through it, which is one. One is it's a critique of religion, that religion is anti logos, it's destructive, it turns the family inside out, it turns polis inside out, it is destructive, and it's an anti logos, anti logic creature to the degree that in the Enlightenment, Pentheus was often presented as a hero. Right. Like one who pushed back against, you know, this blind faith of religion. So that's certainly one way. You know, the other way could be that it's not religion wholesale that he's pushing back against. Right. That maybe he is not fighting the entire pantheon, but there's something about the Dionysian cult that he's trying to point out. And we'll even tether it to what I just mentioned. The Dionysus in this play is very different than the Dionysus and Homer. What's happened and why is his cult that we're even told in this play has spread now throughout all of Hellas. What has happened to it? And I think one thing to note here is how often Euripides talks about that the cults come from the East. Over and over again, he talks about they've been imported from the East. And I think that's a fact that I think we have to, you know, take into account. The other one is that this is actually a praise of Dionysus, that it's not a critique, it's not a warning, it's a. It's a praise of him. And I think it's a hard read. I. I don't. It's hard to see that in the text itself. Also, we should know, you know, for the listeners, that Euripides, as part of his kind of cantankerous curmudgeon background, was also very much known for being a critic of the Pantheon. He was known for being critical of the gods. So him writing a play, being critical of, you know, an Olympian religion is not outside the ambit of what would be expected of him. So I think for me personally, as I read through the play, you have this oscillation of, like, how much is this a critique of religion wholesale, and how much is this a critique of something specific that's happened to the Dionysian cult? Or does he think the Dionysian cult is an analog for religion as a whole? Like These are some of the things we have to play out.
- [33:13]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I think that's a great way of setting this up, Deacon. And truly, I'm at a point where I think the answer to that question, that initial question for me is inconclusive. I honestly don't know. And that may in fact be the brilliance of the play is that Euripides is very ambiguous and unclear about what we're to make of the ultimate message. At what point Euripides is trying to get across to us. And it may very well be that Eurcides himself is unsure.
- [33:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, you know, what did he try and offer us here? You know, poetically, with his dying breath? Right. This is one of his last works. What did he have to offer us? And I think that what Euripides point is, like I said earlier, is, I mean, so much ink has been spilled on trying to argue what this play means. I think where I tend to land is how do I view this play back through Plato, because how did Plato receive the Dionysian culture? And I would argue that the way that Plato pivots off the Dionysian cult is very similar to the cult that we see in this play. And so, like, when he has Alcibiades in the Symposium come out with the laurels and the flute girls and he's drunk, like, he's very much pitching a Dionysus figure, everyone agrees with that. But does he mean the Dionysian figure from Homer that's, like, just jovial and timid? Or does he mean this kind of cruel, unfeeling, kind of bestial release that we see in the Bacchae? I think it's very much more towards the latter. So this kind of sets us up. I think it actually, it sets us up too, for another one of Plato's dialogues, the Euthyphro, because it has questions about piety. So I think we read this not necessarily to exhaust what Euripides intent was, even though I think that's important, but rather because I think this view of the gods, out of this kind of culture, this churning, if you will, on these questions, Plato's going to take up some really important answers, or at least better questions to them. All right, let's dig into the text.
- [35:23]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
So it opens, what, an opening, right?
- [35:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I love this opening. I am Dionysus, the son of Zeus. So, I mean, just like a few preliminaries right off the bat. One, our main hero, our protagonist in this play is a God that's unique. So we're going to have a. A. A God as A protagonist. Let me maybe just a little bit of backstory on him that he gives in the play is Dionysus is unique insofar as he had a mortal mother. And so he has a mortal mother. Her name is what? How? Simile.
- [36:01]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yes.
- [36:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And so Zeus gets her pregnant. And Zeus, you know, cares for her as much as Zeus cares for mortals. However, she's tricked by Hera to ask Zeus to reveal himself in his glory. Like, Zeus is like, oh, I'll give you whatever you want. What do you want? Hera tricks her into asking to be able to see Zeus in his glory. He says, you don't know what you've asked. And so, you know, this is almost, you know, God, forgive me. This is almost like touching the ark. Like, you can't survive this. And so she's basically burnt to a crisp while pregnant. However, in his Zeus capacity, he's able to save the unborn baby. And he sews the baby up in his own thigh and the baby gestates in his thigh and then is born. And this is where Dionysus comes from. And what's unique is. Well, there's several things that are unique, but the other thing that's unique is that he has a mortal mother, but he is fully God. And we could, I guess, attribute that to being sewed into Zeus's thigh, maybe. But regardless, we don't see this, right? This wasn't the case with Achilles. This wasn't the case with Hercules. These demigods, right, were always half God, if that occurred to them, but he's fully God. And so that kind of lends a little bit into the premise of the play, which is there's an identity crisis going on. So Dionysus has returned to Thebes because people are doubting who he is, Right? He says this explicitly. He says down on For I have come. This is 25. I am reading. Which translation am I reading?
- [37:43]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Aerosmith.
- [37:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, this is the Aerosmith one.
- [37:45]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Not the steep period.
- [37:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yes, this is the Aerosmith one. He says on line 25, for I have come to refute that slander spoken by my mother's sisters, saying that Dionysus was no son of Zeus. So he's coming in here, and I think this is going to be important to the play, that a lot of this comes into his identity and who he is. And he says that he's coming in, right, to show him, right, to prove to them that he is a God. But the way he goes about doing this, I don't know.
- [38:20]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I have questions and just to underscore one point here that I'm sure many of the listeners have worked out. But for those who haven't, Dionysus is very young. He, unlike the Olympian gods that we're accustomed to, that are much, much, much older. I mean, as those who followed the Hesiod the Agony podcast, you know, we know that all the gods have an origin within Greek mythology. So there's a time and place where they were born or they came to be. I mean, that is true of both Zeus and Dionysus. But Dionysus, at least within this particular mythological story, isn't one of the old gods. He's a very, very new God. In fact, he is younger than some of the other characters that will meet the human, mortal characters that will meet in this particular play. And so as we begin to think about, you know, Dionysus, and he's very resentful because, you know, there are people who are dissing his mother and accusing her of being a liar, the question is, well, what reason would anyone have to believe in such a God, a God who would be younger than those he's trying to convince, Right? So.
- [39:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And I mean, there's. There's a parallel here, too, actually. I want to point this out because we're going to see it a few times that surprisingly, in this play, which is filled with, I think, some unsettling violence and perversions, we actually see some really interesting comparisons to Jesus Christ, which really shocked me the first time I find him. It's really like finding a diamond in the rough. You're like, wait, what is this doing here? And one of them, this is a slight one, but one of them is just the general principle that, you know, prophets are not accepted in their hometowns. And actually, from when we're recording this, that was the gospel reading not too far away from now a couple Sundays ago, in which Christ can't really perform any miracles. He's in his hometown. They know who he was. They knew he grew up at his boy. They knew who his parents were. This can't be a son of God. And so you actually see a similar dynamic here of Dionysus. It's like, we all know your mother. We know who you are. You're not a God. And that. That makes sense, right? You know, another preliminary. I think you actually might have been the one that mentioned this maybe in Sunday great books, that this one doesn't start off with, like, a herald. It doesn't start off with a third party coming in. You know, we always get, like, you think about the. The Oresteia, you always get like kind of a third party that's speaking at the beginning, that kind of sets up the context or whatever, that this is just a really bold, you know, I am Dionysus.
- [41:02]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I have come, I am here, like in the flesh, quote unquote, but I am present. And. And that, yeah, that in itself, I think, is quite shocking to an audience to. To be face to face with a God who is claiming that there are those who don't believe. And so of course the audience should believe because there he is on the stage, at least within the context of the drama. And so it does. Yeah, it creates a very unique and novel just presentation, setting, beginning.
- [41:38]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And speaking of him, I mean, as kind of a novel presentation, he himself, right, the character of Dionysus on the stage, he's presented as effeminate. He has these long. He's a male, but he has these long blond curls. He's beardless. And then again, the actors are all wearing masks during this time period. And so one thing to remember is that he has this, like, big smiling mask that he's wearing. I think that's part of the unsettling nature, you know, this kind of demonic underpinning that we see in this is that he does these, like, horrific things to people while having this giant smile on his face. I mean, for a mundane example, you see this same juxtaposition in like the Joker and like the Batman series. Right? That's what makes him. There's. There's something about him that's deeply unsettling because he stays comedic even when doing horrible things, which makes him deeply inhuman. Right. That it's not soliciting. This should solicit some type of, like, empathy, but it doesn't. And so Dionysus is able to come in and do terrible things to people, seemingly having no empathetic impact on him at all.
- [42:49]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, there's a, you know, a fairly well known, at least within analytic philosophical circles, well known book written by a philosopher named Noel Carroll on the philosophy of horror. And in it he attempts to define monsters. And what he arrives at is a definition that emphasizes a kind of, what you're talking about, an interstitial interstitiality. That they're interstitial, that they sort of. They don't belong to fully one category or another category, but they are uncanny in a way. And so, I mean, if you've ever heard of like the expression the uncanny valley where, you know, animators or people who work in robotics try to create these very human, like, representations and there's something odd and very scary and unsettling about them. It's usually in the eyes, the way they haven't been able to really represent eyes, human eyes. But I mean, I think in the same way you get this because he, he's a God. He's a God incognito, we're told that he has disguised himself. And so, yeah, it's unsettling to see the God, but then that he has somehow disguised himself. And why is he disguising himself? If the whole point, if his whole point is to try to convince people that he really exists, why would he arrive in a kind of disguise? It's very strange.
- [44:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
He also, I guess we're stacking preliminaries upon preliminaries. But another one too to watch here is somewhat similar to Aeschylus in his Agamemnon play. There is a lot of play between the genders here.
- [44:30]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, yeah.
- [44:31]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So remember, Clytemnestra was like a man and Agamemnon would be effeminate, you know, or like a woman. And you see some very similar things. One of the things I wanted to point out, what does he look like? Because that actually plays into then his parallels with Pentheus. Just kind of moving on into the narrative as he's kind of giving this opening monologue, you know, a few things to note. One, like we mentioned, just notice how often Euripides tells us that this came from the east, that this is something foreign, this is something imported into Athens, into Greater Greece. Because I personally, I find that to be maybe not dispositive, but a key clue into Euripides point that something has happened to the cult of the Bacchae. Right. This is not the timid little wine God anymore. Like, this is something that's actually pretty unique. And he just hammers this home over and over again. The original Bacchae that come with him are from Asia, which this is all kind of modern day Turkey. Right. Like Asia, what we would call Asia Minor. Like where Troy was. Right, where Troy over there was. But there's been this importing of something alien into the Greek mind, to the Greek religion. And I think trying to figure out what that is helps unpack what Euripides is trying to do here.
- [45:45]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah. And shortly after that. And Deacon, I'm interested to hear your thoughts about his emphasis on, you know, what is so important to the Dionysian cult. It isn't necessarily a set of beliefs, but rather mysteries and rites. In the translation, Dionysus says, you know, I taught my dances to the feet, dances to the feet of living men, establishing my mysteries and rites that I might be revealed to mortals for what I am, a God. And so there's something real vital to the Dionysian cult that involves action in practice. It isn't right right away we can see it isn't about, you know, cognition or what you said earlier, Logos. Dionysus isn't. We don't. He doesn't necessarily want us to wrap our minds around him, but he wants us to be participating in these bacchanalic, very frenzied, sort of drunken, wine driven, ecstatic practices.
- [46:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, it's a mania, right? It's not a logos. It's not, it's not a intellectual reflection. It is a mania. Right. There's this like bestial release of violence and sex that accompanies his cult. His rights, I mean to piggyback off of that, is that he's also not worshiped in a temple. Right. He's one of his. Yeah. His cults are out in nature and particularly have a, have a theme of ascent. Right. They go up the mountain, right. They go up the mountain to find the God. And that's something that Plato's going to parallel pretty heavily in his Symposium. Is, is this really the true path of the ascent? Like if we become. Because how this cult works and we'll see it in the, in the text, like there's a few spots where it's, it's a little bit more clear is, you know, they go up and one of the things they'll do is they'll consume animals, right? They'll consume these, these sacrifices. And in doing so, part of that is that they believe that they become one with the God. You know, one of the questions I think that we're going to have to have in this is what is piety? And so like if we looked, if you remember when we studied, you know, when we studied the Oresteia or even the Theban plays, piety plays a major role. How are we pious towards the gods? What gratitude do we have towards them? And how does that gratitude animate a certain action towards them? This, I think in a lot of ways just throws it on its head. Because the question is here is, is Dionysus good? And you know, a flat read of it is like, well, he's a member of the pantheon, right? So therefore you have to be pious towards him. But I don't. But we just. See there just seems to be that Euripides isn't that flat, that there's something else at work here. And so, you know, we have a whole lot of questions that start to pop up. Which is, which I think is something that you've paid attention to more than I have is how, how does each character then react, the Dionysus? Like, how is there, if we want to contextualize the reaction as a, like what kind of piety do they have? And as Euripides, using these various characters as different analogs to how humans relate to the divine. And is there a good or the bad? But he turns it all in its head because we still can't figure out whether or not the God is good or not. And so, for instance, like if you have, you know, Pentheus's character, if he pushes back, then is he being impious or is he being virtuous? If he doesn't follow this false God, but it's a real God, but is the real God good? And if he's good, by what standard do we call him good? And so this is where, you know, for those who are familiar, I think this play sets us up really well for Plato's Euthyphro, his dialogue on piety, which then also gets into a question of the nature of the divine.
- [49:44]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And, and, and to come back to just briefly, one, one point that you made, which I thought was, was really, really good. And that is that the, the my neds, as they're sometimes called, or the Bacchae, the, the followers, the priestesses of Bacchus do not worship in a place. I mean, well, they worship at a place, they're out there in nature, but there isn't a de place where they practice their rights. And I think that those who are listening to our conversation and who come from, you know, a traditional sort of Christian background, sacred places are really, really important. I mean, they're vital to worship. And so this was, as you noted, rightly, Deegan, this was even true of for the Greeks. They had their temples, they had their sacred places. So this is yet another aspect of the cult that is strange, that is sort of antithetical to what everyone would have come to expect from a religion. And which would yet be yet another reason by someone you would expect why that person would be skeptical of Dionysus claims to divinity.
- [51:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, there's something, there's just there are a lot of unique aspects to his culture. So one of the things too that we're tracking is like, what's his purpose? So he's coming to reveal himself. Dionysus is very much tethered to his own self identity. And I Think that theme starts to unfurl a bit throughout the whole play. But he affects the women first. And I guess on its face, that's because he specifically states that he is coming to refute the slander spoken by my mother's sisters. And so there is a feminine aspect here at the beginning. And so it's interesting that he comes with bacchae, right? He comes with a certain cult following from Asia, these Asian women. But then he also causes the women of Thebes to enter a mania and to become part of his bacchae as well. And this is like, this happens right at the beginning, right? I mean, this is. This is the situation to a certain degree, where were in media res. To a certain degree, right? Like, things have already occurred, and so he's already driven them. And it's interesting that he. I think he does this, like, as a punishment. Right. Because of that offense. This is line 33 or so. Because of that offense, I have stung them with frenzy, hounded them from home up to the mountains, where they wander, crazed of mind and compelled to wear my orgies livery. And so, you know, every woman in Thebes, but the women only I drove from home mad. And so it's interesting to me that one this disordered. Well, I guess I'm playing too many of my cards, but that this Dionysian cult at the beginning affects the women. And I think in the. In the play, like I said, you could probably tether that to the fact that it's the women that have been slandering him. But then he turns them into his bacchae, and this kind of gets into, yes, he's coming to reveal himself, but how? Well, this isn't just like an evangelization. He could do that easily. He could stand in the middle of town and be like, I'm a God. Watch me turn this chicken into a donkey, or whatever.
- [53:08]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
He wants to do miracles later. I mean, right, the earthquake, we'll get to that. The palace collapsing. So he has the capacity.
- [53:16]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
He could do these things, but he doesn't. He wants to prove his divinity through a punishment, through punishing them for their offense. But I think, as you've already noted, is their offense really that irrational? Like, hey, we know that, like, this woman that was not a God, that's not a goddess, was pregnant, and now we're saying her child is fully God. I mean, even if you were a complete adherent to the Greek pantheon, but there are some things about this that are incredibly suspect.
- [53:48]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, I would just add maybe one or two points and and, and that would be that, you know, he, he accuses. So he's. Yeah, I have come to refute this, that slander spoken by my mother's sister. So Semile. And then as we'll learn, Kadmus is the dad. And, and he had, I can't remember the number, like five or six or however many daughters. So the sisters are the ones who didn't believe that Dionysus was the son of Semele. But rather than just striking them mad, he strikes every woman in Thebes mad. And so there's a disproportionality here, I think that at least occurs to the. That should occur to the audience, you know, so we can understand why. Well, you know, maybe he has good reason to be angry at Semele's sisters, but yet he drives every woman in Thebes mad. And I think, again, that just raises the question of, you know, does the punishment really fit the crime?
- [54:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I think that's a really good point. Is, is his punishment disproportionate? I think a proportionality question is one that probably haunts the entire dialogue, because this begins. Actually occurs to me that this dialogue, or dialogue, we talk about Plato, this play begins with punishment and ends with punishment. It's bookended by that. And probably, I would argue it's bookended by disproportionality as well. Right. Are the punishments actually fitting to the so called crimes? And so we're going to see this on both sides of this play. You know, a few other things that occur to me too is the comparison between Dionysus and Athena, both of whom come from the body of Zeus. And so Athena comes from his head and she very much is an analog for his mind, the divine mind. Right. Zeus dialoguing with Athena is almost an internal dialogue between him and his own intelligence. Right. I mean, that's why there's very little daylight between them. We see a little bit in the Iliad at times, but for the most part there's not a whole lot of daylight ever between Zeus and Athena. So now we have a God who's come from his thigh.
- [55:58]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well. And he could even say, extrapolate and say from his loins.
- [56:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right? Yeah. Which would get the point across even more because that's what I think then Dionysus, I think then in a lot of ways represents this kind of baser appetite. Right. These, these passions, the erotics, actually. Right. This, this kind of satiation of the lower passions. He's tied to wine and sexual. But here in the Bacchae, he's also tied the violence. And so these things all kind of intermingle in somewhat unsettling ways to just. He just becomes very bestial. There's a bestial release of passion here that at times is incredibly inhuman and cruel. But there is a very much a comparison, I think, between the God that comes from Jesus head and the God that comes from Jesus loins.
- [56:49]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yes, I agree.
- [56:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And so too, I want to point out that I am struck now. Some people listening might know that I actually, I've done some writings and I actually part of my own spirituality plays heavily into Eros, right into this erotic love, which might sound odd if you're not familiar with how that term eros is used in the Platonic tradition and then the Neoplatonic and then in the Christian tradition, particularly with the Greek fathers, as this natural love that we have that desires to be satiated. It's a need love. It seeks to be satiated in beauty. And you know, Plato and our Greek fathers in the Church will talk about that. This is a love that actually naturally calls us to ascend. It naturally calls us to ascend towards God. And so you see some deep parallels here of the erotics in this play, that the erotics of Dionysus are also a call to ascend, to go the mountain and have communion with the divine. But the other thing that I find very interesting is that Eros is always also tied to our self identity. Because Eros is a self love, it's a need love. And what we satiate our love in helps us understand who we are, right? We find our identity in that which we love. And, you know, you see this beautifully with husband and wife. So when a husband loves a wife and becomes married, his self love is extended to her because she becomes part of his flesh, right? So the erotic, there's an erotic binding between husband and wife that happens. And then he finds himself in his wife, right? He actually comes to know himself in her as part of her identity, that they're actually one flesh and, you know, head and body and how they live. And so it's really fascinating to me that Euripides, obviously, before the Symposium, but he's playing off these erotic desires, can see even here that Eros is so intimately tied to self identity. That Dionysus comes in and the whole. His whole scheme, his whole kind of erotic mania that he paints on Thebes is all tied to him showing them who he is and them coming to know him. It's very much tied to identity. And he just to anchor this in the text, I don't know. Line 46, 7 or so he says. Therefore I shall prove to him and every man in Thebes that I am a God. So the women are punished and turned into a mania. And via that punishment the men will come to know that he's a God. It's an interesting. Yeah, it's an interesting play there. Right, so we step into our first.
- [59:27]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Choruses are very important, right, Deacon? I mean, all of the choruses. I mean, choruses and all of the Greek tragedies that we've read together are important. But I think in this play in particular, the chorus really does provide a lot of vital information and access to Eurobides mind.
- [59:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So what. What would you say in this first chorus is like the theme, the main principle, like, is there. Does it have a pedagogical purpose? Like, what would you say this chorus is?
- [59:57]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, this one in particular, I didn't have very many lines underlined, but the one that struck out to me, and I know that you brought this up in our formation meetings as well as during our Great Books session, but Blessed, blessed are those. What does that remind us of? Right, yeah.
- [60:23]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
There's another kind of Christological analog here, another allusion, if you will, to the Beatitudes. And when I read this, I found it really shocking. And one of the things that I was trying to discern, which I have not. And so if you're listening and you know the answer to this, you know, please comment is, you know, sometimes when Christ does things in New Testament, if you're not familiar with reading other ancient literature, you think Christ like invented something, right? Like he invented the parables or he, you know, he invented, you know, certain things when in reality he's taking certain tropes that would have been known to his audience and. And he is repositioning them or using them to teach some truth. Like, for instance, one thing that occurs to me is Peter denying him three times. And then Christ our Lord, has Peter say, do you love me three times? And you know, for those who know underneath that there's like a juridical custom or ritual of the saying something three times binds you to it. And so you see that ritual playing out in Christ. So one of the things I was really curious about, that never would have occurred to me is, are the Beatitudes something like that? Are the Beatitudes actually formulaic that there would have been other Beatitudes in the ancient world? Because you see this in the play, like you said, it's clear as day. Blessed, blessed are those who know the mysteries of the God. Blessed is he who hallows his life and worship of the God. So there's what, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7 of these beatitudes. And we see Christ give a list of Beatitudes too. So one of the things I was really curious about is was this. Blessed are those who X. I was wondering if that was a religious ritual at the time that our Lord then uses to give like, well, here are the true or perfected Beatitudes. But here in the Dionysian cult, we see Beatitudes tied to his mysteries as well.
- [62:17]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, yeah, I mean, there must be some sort of historical precedent or analog to the attitudes that we're familiar with on the Sermon on the Mount. The other thing just to, I guess, keep in mind as we're reading ahead is that, you know, the word that's being translated by Euro Smith as blessed or blessed is really pious. It's. It's the same word that Plato is going to use.
- [62:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, really?
- [62:41]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Oh, yeah.
- [62:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, okay.
- [62:43]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
So, you know, something to attract as we read through this particular tragedy and as we move on to the Euthyphro, is that, you know, piety really seems to be weighing on the minds of the Greeks at this particular time. You know, what, what, what constitutes or what amounts to true piety or reference? How should the gods be revered? And of course, that comes out a bit clearer later when we are introduced to these different characters who seem to have different approaches or different attitudes towards piety.
- [63:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, you kind of see the immediate crisis that can happen, right? We go back to Hector and this kind of threefold piety that we've seen, it's also been haunting Aeschylus, it's been haunting Sophocles writing, where you have this piety towards, you know, your family and then the polis and then the gods. And the gods are the ones that order. The divine is the highest order, and the highest, always low orders the lower. Well, this is really the lesson in Antigone, is that we live within an ordered whole, and this is what Creon can't do. So your reaction up into that higher echelon is the highest piety. You have the piety towards the gods. Well, if we can't figure out what piety is, I think, I guess phrase it this way, the question of piety is a question of justice. How do we give the gods their due? And if I can't figure out what's due to the gods, how then do I order the lower? How am I supposed to order the Family, how am I supposed to order the polis? And you actually, I think, somewhat lampooned Antigone for this in that play, because that was one of the questions that I think you raised that I thought was a really good question, which is, how does Antigone know that this is what the gods want? Like how? Like, because Creon, at least at the beginning, if you remember in the play, he is. He's not against the gods. Later on, he kind of makes some statements that are slightly blasphemous, I think, but in the beginning, he's like, no, why would the gods want to bury a traitor that was against the state and all these other things? So it's really. Even Antigone. It's a question of piety. How do we order an action in the family, in the polis, according to the highest principle, which is the divine. But if we have conflicts amongst piety, then it's going to disorder the lower levels as well. So the Bacchae then throws this whole thing on its head by putting in a divinity that we're not even sure is good.
- [65:09]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And you.
- [65:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You.
- [65:10]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
You've read my mind, and I think that you might have peeped at my little legal pad here, because that's something that I had actually written down, namely the similarities between the Bacchae and Antigone. And what I really wrote to myself was, you know, the danger of the dangers of. Of piety unfettered to Nomos. Unfettered. Right. And because this is something that really comes up in the Antigone, I think, very, very clearly is how, you know, there's the struggle between faithfulness or fidelity to this higher law, you know, which. Which Antigone has, and then a faithfulness to the state, which. Which Creon has. And so we're sympathetic towards Antigone. I think that we have this sort of natural or instinctive tendency to sort of see Antigone as the heroine. She's doing the right thing because it's not just her reverence for the gods, but it's reverence for her brother, her family.
- [66:15]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right?
- [66:16]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
But yet there's this tension between piety to the gods and doing what's best for the state. Right? And I think that that very same tension is evident in, as we'll see shortly, in Euripides, because these Asian Bacchae or these Asian Minads are very transparent in their disassociation from Greece. These are barbarians. And they say very explicit later, that we do not follow the laws of this land.
- [66:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But see, that's. That's like, part of why I tend to read this as a warning, because then all of a sudden, your piety towards the gods is disjointed and actually even disordering to the polis into your family. And it just seems like that tends to throw what we saw with Hector and Antigone and these characters on its head.
- [67:09]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right.
- [67:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So this then brings in the question is, like, what is Euripides critiquing here?
- [67:14]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, I mean, just. We'll come across this line later, but it really made it. As I was rereading this for the podcast, it made a huge impression on me. When the. The chorus is singing and these are the Asian line ads for those following. And at one point, this is much later, around line. We'll get to this. But just to sort of put this on the table.
- [67:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Around.
- [67:35]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Around line. 10, 1005. 1505. They say there are. They say other things are great and clear and make life beautiful. This is. They're talking about wisdom, right? They say, I don't resent wisdom, and I rejoice it, but other things are great and clear and make life beautiful. And here they mention purity, piety, day into night, honoring the gods. And then they say, rejecting customs outside justice. Rejecting customs outside justice. Which again, is this tension between, well, what is justice tied to the nomas? Or is justice something that exists apart from the laws? Which, again, is this question that Aeschylus, Sophocles. I mean, they're. They're wrestling with, you know, what is. What is the true nature of justice? Is it something that is convention, or is it something that is nature? And clearly we're being a nature cult. We all know where the bacchae are going to locate it.
- [68:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. Yeah. No, I think that's a fantastic insight. Yeah. Maybe just to kind of like, keep pushing us forward. Yeah. That chorus, you know, I'm not sure if I distilled an overall theme. You know, just the same kind of observations that we saw. Right. It emphasizes that the bacchae are coming from the east. We saw the Beatitudes. We saw that they worship outside and not in a temple. You know, the. The movement. Yeah. Of. Of this cult is. Is very much outdoors in nature. It talks about the thigh in the womb a little bit before 100. So you kind of get into that intellect versus the passion.
- [69:23]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And then again, possession by Dionysus.
- [69:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, Dionysus. And I'm not sure. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but, like, I don't remember possession. Like a. Like a God possesses you again, like We. We would see that analogous to, like, the demonic. Yeah, but like, I don't remember this really in the Greek mythology. I mean, the closest I can come up with is the mania that the muses kind of give you. Like, they. They use you as an instrument. And maybe that is really what's. Maybe that is the same. But this idea that the cult is that you commune with the gods, you become one with him and he possesses you and you open yourself up to possession. Like, you don't. You don't really see that with, like, Ares or Athena, like, this kind of intimacy. There's. Again, it's just something very unique about the Dionysian cult.
- [70:15]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
No, I mean, even in the. In that great scene that I bring up repeatedly, repeatedly in Iliad where Achilles is about ready to murder Agamemnon, Athena doesn't possess Achilles. You know, depending on how you read it, he. She grabs onto his hair. So she, like, physically, you might say, if you take that literally, holds him back so she doesn't enter his body and possess him and stop him that way. So, yeah, this. This, I think, is very unique. And at least from a, you know, a contemporary point of view, it's. It's quite terrifying.
- [70:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It is, I think, the question here, too, one of the questions here that, as I kind of wrote at the end of that chorus is Euripides is presenting this as the ascent to the divine, right? So this is the path to the divine. You, you go up the mountain. We'll see some other rituals that come up a little later, but like right now, like, you go up to the mountain, the God possesses you, you eat the sacrifice, you participate in the mysterious rituals. And I think that's part of the question of Euripides and definitely a question later in Plato is, is this really a true path through the vine? Is this really a true path for man to actually ascend to God? And if not, if this is a false path, then what is this that's actually being presented? So we. We get Tiresias. Tiresias comes back and I, I tell you what, I. I find Tiresias character here. I think in certain ways he is emblematic of the entire play because trying to figure out where Tiresias falls. I don't think you can determine how to take Tiresias without understanding the whole moral of the play, which is a complicated thing to figure out, because I guess what I mean by that is Tiresias always plays like the Gandalf figure. He plays the prophet Nathan figure, right? He walks in, he tells everyone what they've done wrong. What he says is a one for one correlation on what the gods want. And then he leaves. And you better do what Tiresias said. I mean, think about him at the end of Antigone, right? He comes in and says, here's what you need to do, and you're at fault. And X, Y and Z. And so anytime Tiresias comes in, like, that's what he plays. But now we have a play in which we're questioning the nature of the God. And surely if you question the nature of the God, that's going to cause you to question the nature of the prophet, because those two are tethered. And so Tiresias comes in, he's blind, like he always is. And he, you know, he's with Cadmus, which is kind of like the. The founder of the. The city, right? He's the grandfather.
- [73:01]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, he's. He's the dad of Semile and.
- [73:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And so the grandfather of Pentheus, right? He's Tyresius. The way I read this is Tiresias is pro Dionysus, right? And he's trying to convince him, you know what, that we need to partake in this new cult. And like, down at like 195, Cadmus is like, are we the only men who will dance for Bacchus? And Tiresias is like, they're all blind. Only we can see. Which again, is a trope every time Tiresias comes in because he's blind. And therefore, you know, they're all the poets are always playing off who can truly see. But look at tiresias at line 200, he says, we do not trifle with divinity. No, we are the heirs of customs and traditions hallowed by age and handed down to us by our fathers. Okay, that sounds good. No quibbling. Logic can topple them, whatever subtleties this clever age invents. So one, it really kind of plays into this concern we have that the Dionysian cult is anti logos, right? It's not something. It's not simply that. It's not logical. It's something that's actually contrary to logic. It's not compatible with logic. The mania and madness of Dionysus is not harmonious with Logos. And two, I mean, is there not irony to this insofar as, like, we have to believe the customs handed down by our father? Dionysius is younger than half the people in the play. Is this not another guidepost for why a lot of the people don't believe in him? He's not a tradition handed down by their forefathers. I mean, right? I mean, am I Reading it right? No. We are the heirs of customs and traditions, hallowed by age and handed down to us by our fathers. This cult is not handed down. This cult is new. And actually, it's not even handed down by fathers. It's not even originating in Greece. Dionysus goes to, you know, Asia Minor and comes from the east and brings this whole new cult with him. So it's interesting because Tiresias is, you know, I'm not sure if Euripides is painting him as this character of irony because he's saying, let's engage in this cult. Here's why. But the reasons he gives seems to actually only create more warnings.
- [75:18]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, you know, the way that you presented Tiresias initially. I mean, the one word that I. So I. I just very commonly associate with Tiresias is sobriety. He brings a certain sort of sobriety to the table. And the Tiresias that we encounter here is. Has very much, you know, to use a common expression, He's. He's drunk the Kool Aid. Like he. He's. At least it seems as though he has bought in hook, line and sinker. And then shortly, we'll listen or we'll read Tiresias rather lengthy exposition of the Dionysian theology or whatever you want to call it. But. But no, I mean, this. It doesn't square. I mean, everything that Tiresias says about the cult and about Dionysus doesn't really square with everything that we have learned up to this point. Everything that Dionysus himself has taught has told us.
- [76:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I agree. There's just something. There's something off in his character. But this is like. Again, it's like. It's like using the prophet Nathan or Gandalf. It's using some character that's usually just so clear. And you can have such confidence when they speak that they are speaking on behalf of this divine, of this force. To then put that character in ambiguity, even a little bit of ambiguity is unsettling because it's not who we've seen them. That's not his role within the Greek mythology. Also, you know, one thing that occurs to me, that just occurred to me is. Well, what occurred to me too, is that Tiresias has his own gender swap. And that's never occurred to me when I read this, but it just occurred to me right now. And I know you and I discussed that. I think when we did the Odyssey, I think is when. I think that's it. Yeah. When we did the Odyssey, I think you and I discussed that. When Odysseus has to go down into hell, into Hades, and talk with Tiresias that if you ask, like, who's Tiresias? One of the backgrounds to him is that he. There's all kinds of origin stories about how he became blind. And so one of the stories is that he saw two snakes coupling. And when he saw that, then basically he was transformed into a woman. And then he lived as a woman for an indeterminate amount of years. And then he saw the same act again, two snakes coupling, and he was changed back into a man. And so then Zeus and Hera get into an argument about who derives more pleasure from sex, men or women. And so they decide, well, who could you ask better than Tiresias? Which is a hilarious premise if you really think it out for multiple reasons. But anyway, they go ask Tiresias about what's the answer? And he says, I don't remember the exact line, but he says something like, oh, well, I mean, of course women derive ten times more pleasure in sex than men do. And Hera finds this to be an absurd answer and she strikes him blind. And there's like this, there's like this. But there's like this trope in Greek mythology that, like Zeus, a lot of times mortals get punished because Hera is angry, and Zeus won't undo the punishment, but he, like, gives them some type of gift in return. And so what Tiresias got in return is unerring prophecy. And so it's interesting here then in the Bacchae, that one I'm not sure he's unerring. Well, one, I guess this isn't prophecy, but it is commentary on the gods, right? He's a seer. He should know what he's talking about. And I don't know, maybe he's playing an early euthyphro figure, now that I think about it. But then he also, though, has his own gender mixing between male and female in a play that really plays off of that, right? We have this very effeminate God, the Bacchae, go out and actually start playing a very masculine role. Poor Pentheus steps into drag. And so it's interesting then that Tiresias. It's not really mentioned in this play, but Tiresias has his own backstory that kind of plays into that question of.
- [79:30]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Gender I hadn't thought about. That's actually a very interesting observation.
- [79:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Again, it just occurred to me as I was thinking about. Not something I contemplate deeply or often, but.
- [79:42]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
So that would well explain. Well, among other reasons why Tiresias would be present in this play.
- [79:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It could and would have known this.
- [79:51]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
They Would have put two or two together.
- [79:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, we get the entrance of Pentheus, right? King of Thebes. So he's down at 215. He comes in and he sees these two old men, Tiresias and Cadmus, dressed up, looking ridiculous for the rights of Dionysus. Right. And he. He's the grandson of Cadmus, who's basically the. The founder of. Of Thebes, of these people in Pentheus. You know, you can see very quickly why, you know, Enlightenment thinkers found him to be so much of a hero, right? He. He can come off as like anti religion. Like, what are you old men doing? You're embarrassing yourself. But even he. I mean, just kind of tracking themes, right? He. He also actually very critically talks about that these women, these Bacchae, are importing here to Thebes filthy mysteries. And he even says the festival is rotten.
- [80:54]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, I love that.
- [80:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And this has.
- [80:57]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
You've brought this, that this is interesting, given where this would have been performed, right?
- [81:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
The play is being performed in a festival dedicated to Dionysus in Athens. That's where this play is being shown. So you really have this character stepping up and saying, these mysteries are filthy and this festival is rotten, while they're all sitting in a festival dedicated Dionysus that historically would be downstream of his advent.
- [81:25]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah. Euripides decision to introduce Pentheus in this way, I just find very interesting because, you know, it's. Initially he comes across as very sympathetic in that he represents. I mean, sure, we could describe him as being a skeptic, but he seems only skeptical of the Dionysian cult. I guess the inference that we would draw, at least the implication is that, you know, he's still willing to buy into the traditional pantheon. Right. Because, I mean, look at it this way. I mean, Dionysus, if he were to exist, would be related. How to Pentheus? Cousins. They'd be cousins. Cousins. Because Agave or Agave or however you want to pronounce her name. I like Agave. I know that other people don't, but I mean, Agave was Semele's sister.
- [82:23]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's Pentheus's mother.
- [82:24]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah. Agave is Pentias mother. And so Agave and Semele were sisters. Dionysus is the son of Semele, Pentheus is the son of Agave. So they're cousins. I mean, so if you're pantheist, you're thinking to yourself, oh, come on, I don't have a God, you know, for a cousin. That's absurd.
- [82:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right?
- [82:48]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
So, I mean, again, I just think the way of introducing Pentheus here is. I mean, I think Pentheus's response is the way that any of us would respond to the claim that we have a God in the. A God as a family member.
- [83:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But that's part of the tension, right? Is that his rational. I mean, we'll just call it a rational approach.
- [83:08]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah.
- [83:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Seems then to be contrary to piety.
- [83:12]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right? Exact.
- [83:15]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And that seems to be the tension with Pentheus and how you interpret Pentheus, at least in this moment, because I'm not entirely sure Pentheus holds true. But how you interpret Pentheus in this moment, in this kind of early part of the play, I think then has to be tethered to how you read Dionysus overall, because if he's like a great and good God, he's just like, Apollo comes down, everyone's fine, then, no, Pentheus is impious and. And he's wrong. But if Dionysus is something perverted, right, he is something that creates these filthy mysteries that are imported from the east, then is he not worth pushing back against? Like, is this not a rational thing? But again, the piety and the logos don't go together here.
- [83:59]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
No, I just One. One other Just brief thought is that as I think about Pentheus and how old he must be, I mean, it's. And I was trying to work this out of my head. I mean, he had to.
- [84:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Like, he's.
- [84:09]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
We're talking maybe in his 20s, late 20s, early 30s. Right. So he's still relative. We'd say relatively young, I guess, but yet he presents a very mature position and one that's very much rooted in convention. And I mean, he's. He's a kind of a religious conservative of sorts. And I mean that. And that is very much in contrast to Antigone. Granted, Antigone would have been much younger in. In her play than Pentheus is in this particular play. But, yeah, I mean, again, we. We're talking about how these texts sort of have conversations with each other. And, you know, we. Sweet. We set Pantheists beside Antigone. And, you know, we get two. We see two young characters, but two young characters who seem to approach religion and piety in very different ways, which I. Again, I. I just find really interesting.
- [85:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I agree. I like that comparison. You know, if we go back into the imaginative exercise that this play is being performed in Athens, directed by Euripides the Younger, I think it's fascinating to then take that in this context of Pentheus versus Tiresias. Because Pentheus, as we mentioned, ends with like these filthy mysteries and this, this rotten festival. But then look at Tiresias, how he responds. And this is like, I don't know. 272. I tell you, this God whom you ridicule shall someday have enormous power and prestige throughout Hellas. Now this line to me personally is brimming with meaning. Because if Euripides point is to warn people about the cult of Dionysus that something has been imported from the east, that something alien to Hellas has come in, well, we're not actually learning about a new cult in real time. This is a cult that has already saturated itself in the entire Hellenized world. And so he's prophesying something that has occurred because they're sitting here in the festival. Dionysus has already saturated the Hellenistic world. And so this is like ringing all the alarm bells. If you read this as, wait, no, this is wrong. Like, this is like waking up and finding, you know, your entire culture has been invaded and you just realized it overnight.
- [86:34]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
So does this lend then to the one interpretation or the one reading that would regard Euripides as being critical of these novel religions or culture faiths?
- [86:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think maybe, just maybe just play some more cards here as we kind of unravel the text is that, you know, to put this in a historical context, there are commentaries that look at this and say, well, what he's pointing out is, again, remember, Homer's Dionysus is very different than Dionysus in the Machae. And is this just like Euripides invention? Like he just decided to make this God cruel and a bestial release? No, he's actually really commenting on something that has historically happened. And this Athenian empire that grew basically started trading with the East. And one of the things the east has then imported back into Athens are its fertility cults. And where the fertility cults then take a foothold inside of the Hellenized world is they get tethered and connected to the Bacchae, to Dionysus. And so what ends up happening then is that there, the thesis is, if you take this route, is that then there's a notable transformation in the Dionysian cult from like this kind of timid wine God of Homer to this kind of anti logos, bestial release, sex and violence erotics that we now find in the more classical period. A few things too, with Tiresias, he gives this, like, weird. This is like line 290 or so. I'm not entirely sure I understand his intention, but he gives this, like, weird interference for Dionysius's. Dionysus's. That's a hard word to say, origin story, where it's like, oh, no, no, he wasn't sewed into the thigh of Zeus. This is a. This is a grammatical mistake. And it's really that, you know, Zeus showed something not sowed, but showed something to Hera. It's like it was a dummy God. That way Harrow wouldn't try and kill him. And I. I found it weird because I didn't. I. I didn't quite understand why he's running interference on this. Well, what does it matter? What does it matter if he was born in the thigh?
- [88:57]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, my only. My only response to that. And again, this is something that I haven't really delved too deeply into, but the kind of word play, the punning or however you want to describe it, is very reminiscent of what the sophists would have done at that time. Right. They were very, you know, keen on language and word. You know, etymologies and word origins and how words relate to each other. You know, this is all played up very, very clearly in Plato's Cratilus. So, I mean, this may be a wink and a nod to the sophists that perhaps Tiresias is engaging in a bit of sophistry here. Because really, this whole speech, and I mean, you may agree or disagree, Deacon, but I just see this as Tiresias attempt to try to formulate in words a kind of theology or a creed, or call it what you will of the Dionysian cult. We've already been told that what really characterizes the cult are the mysteries and the rites which are practices, and you know, that those aren't necessarily expressible in words. But what paresis is here trying to do. And by the way, it gets the approval of the chorus. But what the chorus says is interesting. But anyhow, what he's doing here, I think is the best that one can do, one's best effort at trying to manifest in words what is fundamentally, again, you described it as erotic, as being rooted deeply within the passion. So I don't know what you would say to that.
- [90:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I definitely think Tiresias is running interference for the God. Like, what is. I like the idea that maybe he's trying to subscribe a creed to him that I don't think really sticks. I think that's the way I read him is like he's. He's trying to do something here to legitimize the cult. But it doesn't seem to be Working. Because some of his statements.
- [91:08]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Authentic. It's authentic from his, like, from his standpoint.
- [91:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You think he's being authentic?
- [91:13]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right? Because I mean, as we'll see, this is what really distinguishes Tiresias from Cadmus. Cadmus was. We'll see is in off that too.
- [91:21]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Okay, that's. That's a good parallel before we get to that. Yeah. There's like this line which I think is hilarious, which is, dionysus does not, I admit, compel a woman to be chaste. Right. So there's a whole question then that kind of haunts the text is like, are they really actually having orgies out on the mountain? And so. Because I think the answer is yes. And so there's. Because Dionysus mentions earlier that how he. How he dresses the Bacchae, and he actually mentions the orgies. And then later Cadmus and Tiresias come down. But there's a question about like, is this really happening? So Tiresias, this thing here of like, no, he's not. Because also, it's all their wives, right? It's all their wives, it's their mothers, it's all the women in their life that are out there doing this. And it's like, wait, have they all sudden now started engaging in orgies? And so he. This line is just hilarious, right? Well, he doesn't. He doesn't like, compel a woman to be chaste. Right. Some things might happen. Like, he doesn't like, compel them to chastity. Right. But he says even in the rights of Dionysus, a chaste woman will not be corrupted. And I don't think that is true. Now he might be. He might. I like your distinction. He might think it's true, but I don't think it's true overall. But again, this turns Tiresias character inside out because we're supposed to be able to trust Tiresias on what he tells us about the divine is absolutely true. And in this one, I don't think you can.
- [92:51]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
No. And so at this point, I just want to put to you a question then. So we've now been introduced to. To two characters, Pentheus and Tiresias, both who have. Who have different might say, perspectives on the cult. Pentheus is very skeptical, as we've already noted. And after he speaks, the chorus leader declares, and this is a little bit earlier around, you know, 263. What blasphemy. What blasphemy. You have no respect. Have you no respect for the gods? And. But how does the course leader respond to Tiresias? Well, he Says, or she says, Apollo would approve your words. Now, I, I, first of all. So it's. It's got the imprimatur of the chorus. Good job. But Apollo would approve your words. Why Apollo? Why not Dionysus?
- [93:46]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I guess the. The only thing that occurs to me on its face is just simply that he's the God of prophecy.
- [93:52]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
That's what I was thinking.
- [93:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. And so Tiresias is mainly a servant of Apollo, coming in and, you know, telling the truth and being a seer and these kind of things. And so I took that as a. You have spoken truth. Truthfully.
- [94:05]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right, right, right. But again, so. So I think. I think that's correct. But. But so just, just to kind of double back a second. So one approach to the cult, Pentheus is bad. Blasphemy. Tiresias is better. So at least Apollo would approve the words. And, and the leader goes on to say, wisely, you, Honor, Bromius, which is just another word for another name for Dionysus, a great God. I mean, the course leader doesn't go much beyond that, but at the very least, if we were to sort of rank order piety, if you will, Tiresia, certainly his approach is above that of Pentheus.
- [94:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Do you want to walk us? Because our next little section here. Do you want to walk us into Cadmus?
- [95:00]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, it's just, it's very short. And when I. Okay, so when I first. Yeah, I have to be honest here. When I. When I read the Bacchae the first time, I got to the end, as we'll see, Cadmus gets punished. And I kept thinking, I kept asking myself, and I wrote the margins, why is he getting punished? Right? Like he. He believes, right. He. He participated in the riots, or at least, you know, he was. He was on Team Dionysus. Right, but. But then, you know, after rereading it two or three times, there's this. There's this passage here where he gives his reasoning or his justification for believing. And so he's addressing his. His grandson here, you know, my boy. Tiresias advises, well, but he doesn't tell Pentheus that we ought to believe in Dionysus because of everything that Tiresias has just told us. Instead, he says a bit later, around line, what is it? 333 or so. Even if this Dionysus is no God, as you assert, persuade yourself that he is. The falsehood is a noble one. Oh, what does that remind us of, Deacon?
- [96:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I mean, it's a. It's a foreshadowing, right? It's an antecedent to Plato's noble lie. Right, right. That there are no. I, I, I'm glad you phrased it like that, because that was exactly my read as well, the first time I read the Bacchae. And then we got towards the end, and all of a sudden Cadmus just gets, not only does he get punished, I mean, he receives a severe punishment, right? Same reaction. I was like, this is disproportionate. What did he do wrong? And this, yeah, he, I mean, this has so many implications. So one, again, if you think Euripides is critiquing religion as a whole, Cadmus has basically. I mean, this is a very modern take, right? I mean, a lot of people believe this on a modern level, which is, well, what does it matter if God's real or not? What does it matter if Christ is real? Like, following him has certain benefits. It's a noble lie for the populace. And Cadmus here, it's even, I mean, there's a few layers here, even for Cadmus. One, it's a noble lie that benefits him and his family, because then there's a mother of a God in his family. And so he's trying to show Pentheus, hey, this brings value to our family. Why would you push against this? And again, this goes to, like, your point, which I think is very good of trying to track how all these different characters relate to the divine as different analogues of what piety is. And so here for Cadmus, he's not very pious as I would read him, right? He's very practical. He's almost like Machiavellian, which is just like, listen, this would be a benefit. Who cares? Dress up, go have sex on the mountain. Like, why are you pushing against this? Our family benefits. I also think it's really fascinating if you push into Cadmus himself, because Cadmus is famous for sowing the dragon teeth, right? So the people of Thebes have their own mythic origin story, right? He sows the dragon's teeth, and from this comes the people of Thebes. You know, just in short. And so the guy who told everybody that is also now commenting that sometimes these religious stories are just noble lies that we tell people. And I think that, I think Euripides is playing off of that of like, well, wait, does that mean the entire origin myth of Thebes is also a noble lie? Which would really play into Plato, because part of the reason Plato gives the noble lie is to give the citizenry, right, this understanding of who they are in their own identity. Because they can't all be philosophers. So we got to come up with some kind of lie to just understand how to structure society. And so I think there are some really, antecedents here, not only to Plato, but also just like how a lot of moderns view religion.
- [98:55]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
So. Yeah, so we've. You've already mentioned how Bacchae seem, in a way, by. The play seems to inspire or feed into Symposium, how it feeds into potentially Euthyphro. And now we've seen yet another Platonic dialogue, the Republic, that again, is connected in a very important way to this play, which again, emphasizes just how pivotal, how vital this play, this particular play is to understanding many of the other texts that we're going to be reading. I would just bring up one or two other thoughts during the. I mean, during our Great Books meeting. I mean, this is a kind of Pascalian wager. I mean, it's not Pascal's wager, but it is a kind of a wager that Cadmus is presenting, where, as you put it very well, Deacon, there's real practical value. It's pragmatic for us to believe this. You don't have to. I mean, don't really believe it, but believe it for the sake of the benefits. The other thing I would just mention is I find it. And. And again, this is. I think it shows the brilliance of. Of Euripides. So this is basically the third position that we have here. This is the way, at least that I tend to read this, right or wrong. So we start out with Pentheus, his position, which is totally thumbs down from the chorus leader. Then we get Tiresias, who gets, you know, Apollo would approve your words. But does the chorus respond to Cadmus?
- [100:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No.
- [100:38]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And I think that's what allows the reader by the end of the play to wonder, why did Cadmus receive this punishment? This was so unjust. But then, you know, had the. Had the chorus interjected here and had they told Cadmus, you're doing it for the wrong reason, that would kind of spoil the ending in a way. Does that make sense?
- [101:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, it does. Yeah. I like that.
- [101:05]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
So it's a real. It's a real. It's, I think, a wise dramatic move by Euripides to not give, give, give, give it away. In a. In a sense, to not give away the ending or to. To reveal cannabis as having ignoble or impious inclinations.
- [101:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, very good. The kind of pushing into, like, the next chorus.
- [101:32]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Oh, this is awesome. I love this chorus.
- [101:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
The. Well, good. Let me. Let me just let you Know where I spent most of my time is I. What caught my attention mainly was around 395 when it started talking about, like, what passes for wisdom is not unwise, are those who aspire to outrange the limits of man. And so, because here it's the chorus, it's the. It's the Bacchae then trying to give a commentary on what is wisdom. Right? Of course, like, if this is the problem of piety, see, all these things interlock. So if piety is ultimately towards the gods, but also you can be pious towards your polis in the family. And. But it's ultimately then a question of justice. Like how. How do we order these things? I have to know what to give to the gods, because then giving to the gods, giving to the divine informs what I do with the polis and my family. Well, wisdom then is often read as knowledge of the whole. So justice then is ordering everything. But wisdom then is that I know not just some things, but I know how those things interrelate, right? I know the cosmos, I know the ordered whole. And so then when the Bacchae start commenting on wisdom, it's like, well, wait, what does we have grammatical work to do? What does wisdom mean then for the Bacchae? And so, you know, just like some random notes I put down. Not random, but my notes tethered to this, you know, can piety be rational? Is that a question here? Right? Can. Can piety be rational? And to what degree? I mean, as a Catholic, you know, what we. The contemporary question is, what's the relationship between faith and reason?
- [103:08]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right?
- [103:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's what we always talk about, right? We don't. Piety for us, has piety somehow became very thin for us? It's, you know, piety is I say certain prayers and I pray the rosary and et cetera. But piety in the ancient sense is very thick, right? It's like, no, there's this gratitude there. And you see that in the modern sense. But I don't think we see. We don't see really piety as like a species of justice or like, you know, really an essential part of ordering the cosmos. But the Greeks did, right? And so I think that's here in Euripides because, like, you know, can piety be rational? You know, is Pentheus supposed to be some analog for logos and the Bacchae are an anti Logos. And so we have. We have two claims to wisdom. But it's weird for the anti Logos cult to have claims to wisdom, but then wisdom just becomes a fiat Right. It just becomes a blind piety of just like, well, you know, how you be good, you just obey the gods. It's a, it's a certain type of divine voluntarism. So if, if, I guess we're back ending ourselves into the euthyphro problem here. But, you know, if, if God just says, you know, if Dionysus says this thing is good, don't think about it, just do it. And that's, that's, that's a, that's a type of theology, right. That's a, a volunteerism in which God, whatever is good is what God wills.
- [104:26]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Look, that's exactly what I, what I had mentioned in passing to you, that I, I thought that the, the Baccha. Yeah. Whether it directly or indirectly inspired Plato's Euthyphro. I do think there's a euthyphro dilemma. Yeah, I know it's improper, that's sort of anachronistic, that this would have been written before the euthyphro. But, but I do think there's a euthyphro dilemma present, that it's incipient. It's a proto euthyphro dilemma.
- [104:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Can you, can you give us a working definition of euthyphro's dilemma?
- [104:56]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, I mean, so just, I'll be very, very brief about this and then you can maybe fill in the gaps. But. So the main question in the euthyphro is what is piety or reverence? Reverence to the gods. And so Euthyphro and Socrates begin to have this conversation, because the dramatic setting is that Euthyphro is on his way to court to prosecute his dad for murder, and he considers this to be an act of piety. And Socrates says, oh, what? Lots of. Because I have myself have been accused of impious actions. And so you prosecuting your dad for this act of impiety, you would know better than anyone. So teach me. And this all then leads to one of a series of definitions where Euphra says, well, pioneers is what is loved by the gods. And then this, this allows Socrates to say, well, wait a second, this could mean one of two things. Are you saying, A, that the pious is loved by the gods because it's pious, or B, are you saying that pious things are pious because they're loved by the gods? And so it's a, it's a causal relationship. So does the pious bring about a kind of loving relationship within the gods, or do the gods cause things by some sort of, you might say, divine command? Right. And so I Mean, Yeah, this. This feeds directly into what you just brought up, which is. Okay, Dionysus, like, is. Is. Are the. Are the bacchae, these women? Or are people to be considered pious or blessed, you know, because they truly believe? I mean, isn't this kind of what you're getting at?
- [106:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's. No, it's exactly that. I mean, if the. If. If what is good is good simply because the divine wills it, then you have to follow Dionysus. There's no judging Dionysus because the other you talked about, dilemma, there's die. That means there's. There's two of them. So sometimes it's talking about the two horns. So as you mentioned, but to phrase it differently, you know, one of these is that what is good is good because the gods will it. And so here, what would be good is just simply following Dionysus. Just follow him. And we actually see this exact phrase later when the. The servant comes to Pentheus and he's like, hey, all these terrible things are happening. I don't know what you need to do, but you need to follow this God because he's powerful. Right? Like, just. Just follow him. Right?
- [107:44]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right.
- [107:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, how do we know these things are good? Well, they're good because the gods tell us so.
- [107:47]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right?
- [107:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Or do the gods. Are the gods not. You know, is. Is. What is good isn't created by the will of the gods, but rather the gods are adhering to something that is objectively good. It's. It's something that they actually adhere to. In that way, you could judge the gods according to a standard. So then you could have a God who acts as poorly. You could have a God that does not act well. And the thing is, is that this whole thing gets thrown into a mix because. Well, we already kind of have this because we have a pantheon in which the gods are not monolithic and they all fight against each other anyway. And so even in Homer, we're actually. Even in Homer, we're actually judging the gods by some kind of standard because the gods don't agree. So therefore they have to be judged by something. You can't say. And this is part of the Euthyphro. Very difficult to say that the good is what the God's will, when the God's willing, is not monolithic. And so. But in this text, I think the problem we're getting into is like, okay, are things good because Dionysus says they're good?
- [108:49]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right.
- [108:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Or is there some good that Dionysus is supposed to be adhering to, but he is not. And so. And who makes that determination?
- [108:58]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right? And I mean, this. And this was sort of my. One of. One of my strong reactions to this play, you know, when I. When I first read it, which is. Okay, is d. Is Dionysus even a God worthy of worship? Because I would say. I would say as a contemporary 21st century, whether I'm a Christian or not, I think the obvious answer is, no, he's not worthy of worship. So, I mean, Euripides, I think, is really challenging his audience with this question about, well, what do the. Do the gods, in other words, like, do the gods have to be a certain way in order for us to justifiably revere them? And that means who brings this up? I know, brings this very question up in the Republic, does he not? I mean, this is his criticism of the lyric gods is that these.
- [109:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
These are.
- [109:55]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
These aren't the real gods.
- [109:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, one way to look at this is. So we've talked about this, like, trifold piety, right? So we have piety towards your family, towards the polis, and towards the gods. One way to look at this is that what. What Euripides in the Bacchae is intellectually pushing his audience to think about is, is there something else above the gods? Is there something that even the gods adhere to? And so, like, one way when people read the Euthyphro is that when Euthyphro talks about the fact that, like, oh, there's a good. And it makes a distinction between the good and the gods, that is this not an antecedent understanding of Plato's forms or Plato's ideas, that there's something above the pantheon that then can judge the pantheon itself? And then the question is, well, wait, where does a monotheistic God fit into that? And that question is going to have to be taken up on the podcast on the Euthyphro. But here in this. In this dialogue, I really do think there's a lot of antecedent questions that we see explicitly in Plato's Euthyphro that are implicitly being asked of us as we are kind of trying to judge Dionysus. Because the big problem is, okay, let's say, no, I think he's bad. I think he's a bad God. Great. By what standard are you actually judging him? And I think that starts to push us into understanding Plato's forms or his ideas, right? That there's some metaphysical reality that good cannot simply be a consensus of what we think it is. But rather, when we Think of the good, and we're all kind of thinking about it together or judging things. There's something truly good, right? The good by which we can judge all other things and whether or not they are good. And I think we see that in a shadowy way in the Bacchae.
- [111:46]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I agree. And just one. One brief comment to that is. And then that is. Well, I mean, this, I think, was. It really does point to a broader debate within Greek society at that time over whether truth is something objective or whether it's something that is just simply rooted in taste. I mean, this comes across. I mean, comes out very clearly in the dialogues where you have, you know, on the one hand, Socrates, who seems to be this kind of realist about truth, who believes in substance, the substance of piety, the forms, the ideas, things that are independent of the mind. And then on the other side, you have Protagoras and the other Sophists who, you know, man is the measure of all things, that what is right is right because you think it so. And I mean, that. That, I think, is precisely what you're getting at, Deacon. And that is. I mean, how do we arrive at a coherent, objective answer to the question about which gods are real, which gods are worthy of worship? You know, is. Is piety just simply believing? Or is, you know, is. Is piety something that has to be. In a way, we earn.
- [113:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I. I think that question of, is piety rational? Does piety. Does piety integrate us into an ordered whole? Or is it something that can just be alien and isolated? As you already mentioned, the Bacchae make it really clear, I think, that this piety can just simply be isolated and it can even destroy the things underneath it, the polis and the family. Let's look at one of the most fascinating parts of this, which is where Dionysus is brought in as a captive. I know you love in front of Pentheus. So this starts at like 4:35.
- [113:40]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
What does that remind us of?
- [113:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right, so here. Here's our. I lost count of what we are. 2, 3, 4 at this point. Here's another really fascinating comparison between Dionysus talking to Pentheus. He has a God in front of him that he does not understand, and he's asking the God about himself.
- [114:05]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right.
- [114:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And Dionysus is answering in a certain way. That's very truthful. But Pentheus doesn't understand the irony of it. And it's all just. It's kind of just crashing downhill. And as you alluded to, this scene has a lot of really interesting parallels to our Lord before Pilate, where Pilate also is then questioning the man in front of him, not understanding that the man is God. And probably, you know, one of the most ironic statements in the New Testament is where Pilate is looking the Logos incarnate, right? Truth itself, in the face and asks him, well, what is truth? And so there's like this deep irony between this. And so it's really fascinating to me how these two scenes parallel one another. And again, part of me, though, is unsettled because Dionysus is such a disordered and perverted character. But there's no denying, and I think, I guess one point too, to push into this. And we talked about this when we read Homer. There's a whole series of scholarship that really tries to argue that these things in the New Testament in a certain way are very deliberate. Because the hellenized world, even the hellenized Jew. Jews at the time when they were hearing these stories would have been thinking of these things. So, for instance. Of course. And so, like, for instance, you know, Nestor feeds the 4,500 or 4,800 on the beach. Christ feeding, you know, his 5,000. So he feeds more than him. I mean, obviously Christ has a descent into hell, which is like the. The most characteristic Greek hero. I mean, to be a true Greek hero, you have to descend into hell and come back out victorious, right? The greatest of heroes do this, right? So there's. What's the other one that's always interesting? Oh, the other one we talked about when we did our year of Homer and Odyssey is that Odysseus is the king returning home. And he is known by his scars. That's how they know him, right? Now, obviously, Penelope doesn't take that. And it's really interesting that she has her own intimate way of knowing it. All analogs fail at some point. That's why their analogies are not the same thing. But if you remember Eurycleia, the nurse comes to know him. And even, I think, if I remember correctly, even the swineherd and the cowherd, the other I was like some other herder, not the goat herd. He did. He did poorly, but they come to know him by the scars too, which is very analogous to Our Lord and St Thomas. And so there are. I mean, there is a good scholarship here that I think is asking how much of these stories would have been in the back of the mind of the hellenized person that then when they're hearing about Jesus Christ, he's like stepping into this heroic role, if you will, and then perfecting it. And I think it's a fascinating question.
- [117:00]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, I like that a lot because I think that those skeptics would certainly point to a lot of these antecedent stories and they would argue, oh, well, the apostles are just confecting the story of Jesus and using the old stories, importing. Right. I mean, this is, this is what, you know, many skeptics would say that, oh, the story of Jesus is just a pastiche, it's just a collage of these other, you know, heroes and stitched together. But I like the way that you put it where Christ is stepping into, you know, in the flesh, like he is bringing, you know, body and soul, stepping into this, this, this role of the hero, where that really, I think at the time would have been an eye opening experience to people because they would have been like, where have I, I've read this before and here it is where whereas I was first or I first encountered it out of, on, on an age, now I'm encountering it in the flesh.
- [118:06]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I agree. I, yeah, it's interesting because it's a, it's a watershed deal. And I think that a lot of people, it makes them uncomfortable because they, they like to think of the Gospels in the New Testament as like something very like isolated that happened in a vacuum and, and somehow if there's like parallels to it and other texts that somehow takes away from its authenticity. Whereas, you know, as we talk about in the podcast, I, I read it contrary to that insofar as. No, I actually think a lot of these antecedents were providence tilling the soil for the coming of Jesus Christ and coming to understand. Right. St. Paul says he came in the fullness of time. And so, you know, we talk about Greek reason coupled together with Hebrew faith under Roman order, prepare the world for Jesus Christ. But that Greek reason, there really is a broader Hellenized culture and the Hellenized Jews, that there was something unique about, about that Greek culture that helped prepare the world to understand Logos incarnate. And so you can, obviously the Logos is the zenith of that, right, that the Word became flesh. But at the same time there are then all of these kind of secondary and tertiary stories, et cetera, that I think also have echoes in the New Testament. And I think that helps pave the way for evangelization.
- [119:17]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I like that. I like that image too of the tilling the field, preparing the field for the seed or the seeds that would be received in the passion and death of Christ. That's a really good image. And I think. Yeah, I like that a lot.
- [119:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, it's something that I've thought a lot about. And the genesis of my thought on that is Pope Benedict 16th, Reaganburg address. So if you want someone who's much more intelligent and has a lot more authority than I have to articulate this, I would go read the Regensburg address in which he talks about the de Hellenization of the West. And it's the concept of the Logos that really brought this up. And then modernity is actually rejection of the Logos. We think modernity is a rejection of faith, but it's actually a rejection of Logos. It's a rejection of logic. He says the radius of man's reason has shrunk.
- [120:10]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I love that. That's beautiful.
- [120:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So I guess going back then to this very fascinating kind of face to face between Pentheus and Dionysus, just a few things as we're tracking themes. One, again, this Asian influence is very key throughout this. Again, these things are imported from the East. We also, I mean, there's a lot of irony in this. The face to face. Again, he talks about foreigners. Pentheus talks about that foreigners are more ignorant than the Greeks. But again, this is a dialogue of irony. And so, you know, oh, the Greeks were so much smarter. But then it's a cult from the barbarians that seems to be saturating and taking over the Hellenized world. Right. So again, what is Euripides kind of positioning to show us here connects with your.
- [121:04]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Your remark just a second ago about de Hellenization. Right.
- [121:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I like that the. The Hellenized world is being de Hellenized by importing these Eastern cults. Yeah, yeah, I like that. Yeah. Dionysus, I mean, he talks about, you know, the darkness is well suited to the devotion. Right. Of his cult.
- [121:24]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
It's creepy. Right. The whole cult is very creepy and unsettling about how they practice the rites. Who practices the rites? You know, just earlier you mentioned the uncanniness of it. And so, yeah, it's in the dark.
- [121:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
There's a parallel too here that we have to note is there's a lot of things in this text when they're together like this for the first time that then have parallels later when Pentheus and Dionysus are together again in Dionysus is dressing him as a woman. There's a lot of parallels here because, for instance, like here, Pentheus is threatening basically to undress. Right. To. To tear apart Dionysus. Right. He talks about his curls belong to the God. And so you get these things of dress and curls and threats. And then later on, Pentheus is put into curls. You know, he has like a wig on. He's. He's undressed of his armor and puts on the dress of a woman. So there's, there's a lot of parallels. Like we're getting the first half of this comparison right here, and then it kind of completes in that second narrative.
- [122:34]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And in, in the back of, of our minds, we have to just remind ourselves that this Dionysus's plot is unfolding like this is something that he is planning out step by step. And so each of these threats that Pentheus is making, Dionysus is going to invert and impose upon Pentheus himself.
- [122:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
There's also, I think again, we could return to the concept of identity. Oh, right, yes, because like 505, you do not know the limits of your strength. You do not know what you do. You do not know who you are. Pentheus responds, I am Pentheus. And Dionysus responds, pentheus, you shall repent that name. And so there's again, we get into this theme that Dionysus seems to bring a loss of identity, right? The mania which decouples you from the logos. Your own logic also seems to then bring in a mania that makes you lose your identity. And obviously, I guess probably the most pressing of this is not only what happens to Pentheus, but then what happens to his mother. And so we get these two contrasting narratives of a loss of identity. The Dionysian cult robs you of that, and then that, that mania, that erotic mania gives you a new one. And I really want to stress that, that your Eros, your erotic love will always give you an identity. But in Dionysus, it seems to rob you of your true identity and give you an artificial, a false one that's predicated on some type of, you know, bestial release, some type of mania or cruelty.
- [124:16]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Could you, Deacon, just maybe briefly comment on how this stands in contrast to the Christian faith and like the beatific vision? And so, I mean, you know, it's. We often talk about becoming one with God, right? But that doesn't mean a loss of one's own identity.
- [124:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's a great, that's a great point. Yeah. So the, the particularly like on the, the eastern side, right? Eros is a good. Your erotic love is actually a good. And so in short, your, your erotic appetite wants to satiate in beauty and be happy. That's what we want. And so there's. Your soul has. It's kind of tripart, it seeks different things, you know, but erotic's got tied to sex because particularly on a baser level, that's like the most fulfilling thing. And it also tends to be the most easily understood. So the young man, you know, wants to satiate in a beautiful woman. He's drawn by her beauty. And this is why Dao Tima in the Symposium actually talks about that erotics in a young man are typically awoken, if you will, by a beautiful woman. She becomes an analog though. And so what's different is in the Christian tradition is that the woman doesn't become then something to simply consume. So I consume this woman and she's done and I got to go find another woman and consume her. But rather the woman becomes an icon of greater beauties. She's an invitation to ascend. And the soul then moves from lesser beauties to greater beauties, like the beauty of the soul. A man who actually truly loves a woman, starts to love her interior life. He starts to love her soul. It starts to make him think about his own soul. Talk about virtue, Arete, excellence. What's it mean to be a good human? This gets into like the Thumas, right? Oh, well then what do I seek? Glory and et cetera. And the highest is wisdom. Okay, well I, you know, I have an erotic appetite as a rational animal to satiate in this wisdom. And then above that we have the divine itself. Even Plato thinks in the Symposium that the philosopher can satiate in the divine beauty itself. Beauty there being the form of beauty, the idea of beauty, which is one of the transcendentals. And so eros then the erotic love in that sense, particularly when you finally satiate in the divine. Because what we would say, St. Augustine helped us understand that all of Plato's ideas do have a metaphysical address. Aristotle was wrong. The forms actually do exist. They exist in the divine mind, they exist in the Logos, they exist in Jesus Christ. And so when we ascend the ladder of love and satiate our eros in God, that is when we truly start to understand ourselves. Because it's for God that our eros was made. And that's where our self identity is truly found. Because two things. One, your erotic appetite is infinite. Like you, you always want to be happy, right? I don't, I don't ever want to be unhappy. So the problem is, is whether you're satiating on a woman or anything else, even if you have the most wonderful spouse in the world, she's Finite. And so this, if you want to talk about where I think our whole culture is suffering, the disproportionality between having an infinite erotic appetite, but trying to satiate it on finite beauties is at the heart of a ton of frustration in our culture. And you're either dooming yourself to an endless consumption pattern where I just constantly try and consume beauties to be happy, but I end up being unhappy because it's a life that's exhausting, or logically speaking, I have to find a beauty that is itself infinite, that then my infinite appetite can satiate on an infinite beauty and finally find rest. And so this is why the Neoplatonic scholars in the Renaissance, the Catholic scholars, would talk about that love is a good circle, because God implants in you this eros, this appetite, this erotic love, and it calls you back to him because he's the only thing that can actually give you peace and satiate it, because he's beauty itself. He's the infinite beauty itself. And so your erotic appetite that's infinite was actually designed for an infinite beauty, which is God. And in God, then our eros is satiated. We find that self love, that need love. We find ourselves in God and how he truly knows us. And yeah, unlike some of the Eastern religions, when we come to know God, I know myself more of who I truly am. I actually would become more of Deacon Garlic by knowing God and not less. I don't. I don't phase off into the nothingness or the abyss. I actually am satiated and find myself. And then it's in loving God that my need love, my self love is actually satiated. That then gives me a peace to then have a selfless love, or charity, or agape in the Greek. So that our erotic love is actually the basis of having that grace. To receive a supernatural charity. Eros is natural. Charity is supernatural. But we also look at the saints sometimes and say, how would they love the beggars all their lives? Like, they give and give and give and give. Like, how do they do this? That. Well, it's not that they don't need to be loved. I think that's the problem. We turn them into these things that don't need love. No, they're Eros. Their erotic appetite is satiated so much in God that it overflows. And they can have a selfless love that doesn't need anything back, not because they don't need to be loved, but because they are already loved in God. And so they can give to others. So there's this beautiful coupling, this kind of. I almost call it a perichoresis, like this relationship between the two of erotics and agape, a between erotic love and charity that then kind of spiral us up towards God. A selfless love and a self love, if that makes sense. So yeah, that was way, that was way too much than.
- [130:17]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
No, no, no, no, look, I thought that that was excellent and I know that your. The listeners. I mean that there's a lot there to unpack, but I mean, I'm not a theologian, I'm just a lowly philosopher. But like, what really strikes me based on what you've just said is that the sort of the Dionysian understanding of Eros or the, the Dionysian approach to Eros really does render love impossible. It's paradoxical because love is a relationship, right? If, if, if, if the Dionysian approach destroys the self, then one could never say I love you or I love Dionysus because the eye is gone.
- [131:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, it's a destructive. I think one way to phrase it.
- [131:04]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Here, love anymore, love has to be between a subject and an object or a person and another person. And so, I mean, I think someone who's reading this play closely can only infer from, you know, based on what we've read so far that yeah, Dionysian love is irrational and that it's, it's paradoxical in a very way.
- [131:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I think that's a brilliant insight because it destroys the self. And in destroying the self, then the self really isn't giving a true love. It's a disordered. I think that, I guess where it's coming from.
- [131:46]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Where's the love coming from?
- [131:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I guess like the play my cards here is that I think that. I'm not sure Euripides would phrase it like this, but I think reviewing this back through a Platonic lens. Yes, I think Dionysus in his cult represents a disordered erotics. So I just gave probably too long of a summary.
- [132:05]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
No.
- [132:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
On how that was, how Eros is an ascent on the ladder of love. So notice then that Dionysus has his own ascent. They go up the mountain. And so both of these ascents can't be true. And this is where I think this is. I think this is the crux of the symposium is that these two ascents can't be the same. You can't have this erotic love that moves the soul through its parts from lesser beauties to greater beauties according to logos, according to logic. Right. It actually harmonizes the entire soul and Then Plato, you know, doesn't have it terminating in a monotheistic God. To my knowledge, Plato never really articulates the relationship between the. The God and the form.
- [132:45]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Close.
- [132:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It just, you know, we really. St. Augustine gets a lot of credit there, I think, for finding that metaphysical address. And so these two things can't be the same. And so I really think that's what the Symposium does. The Symposium inherits a Dionysian erotics that is now culturally normative, which is why most of the Symposium is dominated by the concept of pederasty. And Plato was trying to take an idea that already exists erotics and actually show. No, there's a different type of ascent to the divine. This is actually a false ascent, and this is the true ascent. And that true ascent is why the Symposium set the tone of Christian spirituality until maybe the 1400s.
- [133:29]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And this is why Deacon Garlic is on team Plato and not team Aristotle.
- [133:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think Aristotle is a pretty good Platonist, but he.
- [133:41]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Minus the arrows, as you. As you noted.
- [133:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, He's. He's a little unerotic. Okay. Okay. So we have another chorus after this. This is at 5:20. And this, like, little passage here at 5:25.
- [133:57]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah.
- [133:58]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Where it says, like, enter my male womb. I name you Bacchus, and to Thebes proclaim you by that name. I mean, just the male womb. I mean, just. You see that. You see the problem now. Now that we've kind of played more of the cards here. You have this. In my opinion, you have this disordered erotics that Dionysus brings. And he himself then is an analog of this. Right. He has a certain gender confusion about him himself. And so he's masculine, but he. You know, he turns. He's masculine, but he's also effeminate. He tends to be very petty, but then he's capable of great violence. He's born of a man and a woman, you know, in a certain way. Right. He gestates in his mother and then gestates in a man. I mean, the whole thing is just conflated, and it has this disordered erotics to it, and what he. What he stands for.
- [134:48]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And it's not just biologically confusing, it's metaphysically confusing. I mean, I think. And that's what causes, at least, I think, within the audience, within me, at least a kind of, as you note, a disorientation. And I find all of the language that Euripides utilizes here to. I mean, to be really unsettling to my reason. Like, I can't make sense out of who Dionysus is. I can't make even sense out of what's.
- [135:18]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
What.
- [135:18]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
What's motivating the Bacchae.
- [135:20]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, and then he. He serves as the fountainhead, right? So he himself has this type of gender confusion in him, and so then he causes that gender confusion in others. And so.
- [135:32]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right, yeah, right.
- [135:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Because the Bacchae take on very masculine effects. And actually at the end of the play. Agave. Agave. I'm from Oklahoma. You want to say agave, like tequila. But they, you know, she actually prides herself on. Before she kind of comes to herself, she actually prides herself on like masculine traits and being like a man, whereas she just tore apart her son who was dressed like a woman. And so he. He. Right, he flips all these like. Like Bacchus, you know, Dionysus is the fountainhead of this type of gender confusion, which again is deeply tied to our conversation on the fact that erotics bring you a self identity by that which you love. And so if those erotics are disordered, your self identity and how you see yourself is going to become disordered order. They're a one for one.
- [136:20]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And just the question that briefly, before we move forward that, that. That keeps popping into my head is how is any of this good for Thebes? How is this. It is unsustainable. Thebes cannot survive. No, no polis. No community can survive if the. The. The Dionysian cult wins.
- [136:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think that's really a key. I think that's a really key insight. Is that does. Does the Dionysian disordered erotics, is that contrary to both familial and political stability?
- [137:00]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yes. Well, it's already eroded familial stability. We've seen that already. He's driven all of Cadmus daughters. Daughters mad.
- [137:09]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And all the women.
- [137:10]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, all the women.
- [137:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. These are mothers. I mean, it's gonna become more explicit later about. I mean, Euripides really doubles down on this. But. But their mothers, their wives, all of them now have left and they're doing God knows what on the mountain with who knows who.
- [137:25]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right, right.
- [137:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Okay. So then we have thunder, lightning, the earth trembles, and Dionysus in his chorus start going back and forth. Dionysus says, let the earthquake come. That's 585. What did you make of this scene where the earthquake comes and it's destroying, if I understand correctly, it destroys both the jail that Dionysus was supposed to be entrapped in. But we find out that didn't really actually happen. And the palace. Right the overall palace comes crumbling down, and we find out, as you know, there's basically this destruction. We find out that Dionysus wasn't even actually like, shackled. Like, Pentheus, like, took him down and he thought that he had Dionysus all chained up, but actually it was a bull, right? So Pentheus looks like a fool sitting there, like, tying up this bull, thinking he has the best of Dionysus or he doesn't know that's who it is right now. And Dionysus is just sitting there staring, watching him happen. This is. It reminded me of what makes a fool of him. And it reminds me of what happens to Ajax, right, when. When Athena. Remember Athena, like, she makes him go mad and he thinks he's beating up Odysseus in the tent, but it's actually like the ram. And then when he finds out what he's done, he feels like a fool and he goes and kills himself.
- [138:55]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right? Yeah, I guess. So this. Okay, I'm glad you asked this question, because this, I think, forces us to return to a question that we raised initially when we first started this conversation. And that is what is motivating Dionysus, right? What? Okay, so we've got a couple of options on the table. It's on the one hand, he says, look, I want people to believe in me. I want people to accept me as a God, right? But then he's motivated by a kind of revenge, a kind of malicious, you know, this. This anger that he has towards the women, Semeles sisters, who don't believe in him. And so the question then is, well, what's really more important to Dionysus? Is it the belief, the piety? He wants to instill piety, or he wants to earn a sort of reverence from. From the Thebans? Or is he just trying to get revenge on the daughters and. And Pentheus? Because what he's done here with the earthquake and the palace collapsing is he's performed a miracle, right? Which is an invitation for Pentheus to go, oh, I was wrong. I'm sorry. And so I think, and I don't have an answer to this question. It's. This is more of just. Just throwing it out there. But, like, in performing this miracle, does he hope. Does Dionysus hope that Pentheus has a change in mind? Because if Pentheus goes, you know what? You are the God that kind of ruins Dionysus desire to seek revenge for his mother's slander. Is this making sense?
- [140:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It is. I like it. Because I'm not really sure I have an answer either, but I think one of the things that bothers me in this section is why Pentheus doesn't see that Dionysus is a God. Right? I mean, he. He see. So to your point, right, one answer might be that Dionysus isn't going to allow him to do that because he's. He's going to. He's using Pentheus as the catalyst to punish thieves and show him he's going to be the prime example of what it means to deny my divinity. And so Dionysus actually has no interest in there being a metanoia, right? This turning around. And I like that theory because, yeah, you watch all this happen. You watch this guy destroy the palace, the jail. You watch him be Scot free, right? And again, he's just sitting here with his golden curls and his big smiling mask. Mask, right. It's very unsettling. It's. It is demonic. And Pentheus just doesn't. It doesn't seem to click. And I. That was something. I don't know. I like your theory because I don't have a good working understanding of why Pentheus can't see this or even if he does have, like, suspicions, be like, I need to back off, right? But he doesn't. At least I don't perceive him to.
- [142:05]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, and for the tragedy to work, because, I mean, if. I mean, the play can't end with Pentheus converting to the Dionysian cold and then everybody living happily ever after, right?
- [142:16]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [142:16]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
There has to be a tragic flaw, much like in Oedipus, where Oedipus doesn't see the fact that he married or that he married and slept with his mother. So, I mean, Cynthia is. There's a kind of stubbornness here, a tragic stubbornness that allows the tragedy to continue. And in a way, too, I think this allows the reader to not have so much sympathy for Pentheus. You can't sympathize too much with Pentheus. In other words, this is one of Aristotle's points about tragedy where the tragic figure can't be a totally good and noble person because that's not going to generate the kind of response that tragedies ought to have. I mean, you don't want to see the hero die to the villain. That's not a tragedy that brings about not a sense of pity, but a sense of sadness and despair. And so I think that for this to work, there has to be a tragic flaw. And the tragic flaw that Euripides gives Pentheus is this kind of stubbornness. Do you think that's right?
- [143:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I mean, it's certainly a working understanding. I, I'm not sure I have a better. I'm not sure I have a better one because they don't really actually. See, they don't seem to actually Euripides, maybe the way Eurypides handles that is that Euripides doesn't seem to allow Pentheus to have enough time to process. No, because this happens and then the messenger runs in, right. And brings in like this whole new stuff. But even then the messenger terminates in saying, hey, all these terrible things are happening. You should probably follow the God. And Pentheus literally just witnessed another terrible thing. And so you still kind of think like, what is causing him. But again, I don't like just blaming it on the tragedy. But again, this is like the same thing with Creon and Antigone. Like Creon, why can you not see this? But all Antigone's have these like imploded characters. But again, this one's hold all turned on its head because I'm not entirely sure Pentheus isn't the most laudable character in this whole deal.
- [144:30]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
No. And just one other thought that came to mind briefly, and that is, you know, we'll, we'll see very shortly, the collapse of Pentheus's result where he eventually, and I think like, you know, living or experiencing this earthquake, the palace collapses. I mean, Pentheus at this point is in shock. He may not cognitively be able to work out what's happening and, you know, recognize what he's just witnessed and experienced as a miracle. But this has caused him great, however you want to describe it, emotional despair like his, his character has been shook to the core, which is going to allow Dionysus later to perform the, the gender switcheroo on Pentheus, which will then of course lead as. We'll see too.
- [145:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I like the word switcheroo. Yeah. All right, well, that brings us pretty much to the middle of the play. And so I've greatly enjoyed our conversation. I think we went pretty deep, but hopefully also allowed first time readers to kind of track, I think the major subjects. And so we'll do part one this week. Keep reading or reread the Bacchae and we'll do part two next week. And so Dr. Grabowski, I greatly appreciated a lot of your insights and commentary today.
- [145:56]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I love this.
- [145:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So everyone, you can follow us on thegreatbookspodcast.com you can check us out on Twitter and Facebook if I remember to update it. And what else do we have? Patreon, you can we greatly appreciate everyone supporting us on Patreon. You can get on there. If you support us, then you get access to a lot of our guides. And so I think that'll be very good. So next week we will do part two of the Bacchae, and then we'll be looking to move into Aristophanes, reading his clouds and then also reading frogs. And then we will be looking to do a roundtable on the Greek plays as a whole, pulling out themes. And then we will get into play. D'oh. And it is going to be amazing. I'll release our schedule sometime soon. Of all the guests we're going to have on, we discuss Plato. Thank you for joining us today on Ascend, the Great Books podcast, and we will see you guys next week.