← Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend the Great Books Podcast, we are discussing Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. It tells the story of Zeus, newly ascended to the throne over gods and men, binding Prometheus to a rock for helping mankind. And why should you read it? Because it is a story of tyranny, freedom, and human civilization. Mankind lived a cold, dark reality devoid of purpose until Prometheus planted hope within humanity and gave man the gift of fire. The play invites the reader to consider how technological progress affects human nature and civilization. We are joined today by Dr. Jared Zimmerer of Benedictine College, who will help us explore these themes and also how our flat understanding of culture can make us miss the depth and beauty of human culture. Presented by Aeschylus. If you're new to the Greek plays, you might check out our introduction to the Greek plays, which came out on January 1st, and our introduction to Aeschylus, which came out on January 14th. So join us today for an excellent conversation on Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. For those who are new, I'm a husband, father and chancellor and general counsel for the Diocese of Tulsa. I'm recording here in rural Oklahoma, and you can check us out@thegreatbookspodcast.com we have some resources up, some guides. We just finished A Year of Homer, so you can check out a guide to Villiad into the Odyssey. You can also follow us on X, formerly known as Twitter, YouTube, and support us on Patreon. Today we have a guest. Dr. Jared Zimmerer is the Content Marketing Director and Great Books Adjunct professor for Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, the former senior director of the Word on Fire Institute and the Dean of Pastoral Fellows. He holds a PhD in humanities from Faulkner University and a master's degree in theology from Holy Apostles College. He and his wife Jessica live in Atchison, Kansas, with their six children. Dr. Zimmer, welcome back to the podcast.
- [02:20]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Good to be with you again. Yeah, this has been great.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. I think last time you joined us, you helped us unfurl the kingship of Odysseus, I believe.
- [02:30]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yes. That's one of my favorite books, especially the book that we went over. But his return to home, his return to himself, it's just so. There's so much to unwrap in that particular chapter. So I appreciate that conversation.
- [02:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, it was very good. I enjoyed it as well. How are things at Benedictine going?
- [02:49]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Really well. Going quick. We've been launching some new series that we've had just recently launched a new one on the fight for free enterprise in the United States. We've got several other short films, actually, that we're filming this summer. One particularly on Christ's use of parables, which I believe maybe some of your listeners might be interested in, of why he used story to communicate certain truths. Truths. And we'll be launching some of that stuff later this year.
- [03:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Wonderful. Tell us a little bit about being a Great Books professor.
- [03:17]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
So one of the nice things, you know, the Great Books program at Benedictine is very, very solid. And I don't know if you know Dr. Edward Holland. He is a longtime Great Books champion and one of the people on staff that knows Greek and Latin and all the other languages that are involved in Great Books. So the linguist of the bunch, but he's kind of our. Our chair of the department. And we actually team teach. And so we have two professors per class and we have sort of a four semester cycle if you want to go through the whole cycle, starting with the ancient world and ending up in the modern. So each one of ours has two professors and there's not very much lecture. It's largely just having a conversation, Socratic dialogue. And it's a lot of reading and it's a little intense, but I think the students really, really like it. So. And it offers two things. We do have a Great Books route towards the degree, but then we also have just general education. So we have quite a few athletes and people who aren't necessarily going into like an English degree or something like that that take our classes, especially the Ancient World. So it's great to be able to sit down with people that just want to be interested in Homer and just want to, you know, learn a little bit more about Cicero. So being able to go through these works with them is really good.
- [04:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
How do you. I'm just curious, like, how do you sell the program? So you got these, these young guys showing up and they're like, oh, I can study the great Books. Like, what are those? Like, what's the benefit of, of reading the Odyssey? What's the benefit of reading Prometheus Bound? Like, how do you pitch the Great Books to them?
- [04:47]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Well, largely, I think, at least I've been at Dicton. The, the, the program's been around long enough and that there's enough of a reputation in it that the students really, really enjoy it. And so it ends up becoming kind of a. Of course I'm going to take the Great Books program because that's what everybody does, because we've Got a pretty good amount of students that go. I think that's a large, big part of it is just great reputation on campus. But then I do think there's this resurgence of classical education, and it's finding people, regardless of their background, regardless of what they want to study, that it's kind of this. It's sort of like the Jordan Peterson phenomenon. All of a sudden we're talking about, like, these classical liberal principles that we haven't been talking about for 40 years and these, like, Freudian principles that haven't really been part of the lexicon in a long time. Not necessarily. I agree with him on everything. But it's just an interesting kind of insert of these ancient principles or older principles into the conversation. And so movies, like 300 and stuff like that. I think it's just kind of piquing people's interest in these works.
- [05:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It is interesting. One thing that Jordan Peterson seems to be able to do is get people interested in the great books slash scripture, that otherwise would never, ever open that book. And so, like, it's amazing how many people I have that like, just in my own community that really would never, like, if I invite him to a Bible study or something. No, like, you're Catholic. I'm not. I'm, you know, I'm okay. But then, like, I see them online, like, paying money to go to the Jordan Peterson lecture in which he explains Genesis to them. So it's an interesting phenomenon where they find him almost like, you know, somewhat of. Of a safe thinker, because they don't think he brings, like, an ideology to the table. Right. Like, he's not religious. So, like, he's. He's gonna have, like a. A clear view of this. Right. He doesn't have a presupposition, but then he really has, I think, sown a lot of good seeds, because the people I've seen that dig into it, they. They get into it, like, on a surface level and kind of like that psychological read of Scripture. But then the deeper they read, particularly when they want scripture to harmonize with itself, because you can. You can pull all kinds of reads out of scripture if you take. I'm just gonna take Genesis and read these types out of it.
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Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Right.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, if you don't have to link that to the New Testament, then you can pull out all kinds of, you know, psychological tropes out of that. But I think that there has really invited a lot of people to take the Bible more seriously. And it's interesting then the small step between his psychological read, which is Sometimes can be a little bit scattered to then people rediscovering the church's allegorical read and like typological read is like, well, you know, someone who also reads scripture, like this is the early church fathers, but they read it in a way that actually makes it consistent with like, the entire text. And so it's interesting to try to encapsulate the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, but I know a lot of young men that have actually been brought closer to reading scripture than I don't think ever would.
- [07:34]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
There's also a resurgence of the interest in the Stoics, which is interesting because that was actually my route into the love of great books. I was introduced to the works of Cicero part of my senior year of college as well, our second year of high school, and then had a really good professor on Shakespeare the same year. And that kind of just piqued my interest because that stuff was just not talked about. And that was the beginning of my route into it. And almost every young man I talked to in our program are interested in the Stoics. They're interested in how do I live my life. You know, it's. It's an interesting thing of this kind of introspection of what's going on in your mind, what's going on in your heart, your soul that a lot of young guys today are ignoring. But there's this resurgence coming back of I want to be a man basically is what it ultimately is, I think, boiling down to. And if that's leading them to reading Homer and Aeschylus and the wipe and Fantastic.
- [08:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, well, it's always funny where providence can work you, right? So, like, I'm a convert and if I look back at like, what caught my attention, like I started reading Kirkegaard, like, that was like the thing that I started reading of all things. But then it like started making me ask questions. I kind of bumped into Catholicism a few times and I was like, yeah, no, thank you. I'm not really like interested in that. So it's always. I just, you know, I think there's a lot of patience there involved because you never know how the Holy Spirit is kind of like tilling that soil, right? Some seed has been planted. And I think this, like, particularly in our age, getting anyone to just know thyself, getting anyone to have, like, take your interior life somewhat seriously, that you should be self reflective. I mean, anything that just starts to do that on some level, I think is. Is pretty good within reason, because it can start that introspection, I think then lends into a lot of the perennial questions of the Great Books, of like, oh, well, what. What does it mean actually to be a good man? Like, I want to live a good life. Well, then I have to know. Know what good means. Well, then who's had these conversations? Like, I can't be inventing this. And so I do think it leads in a certain way to trying to rediscover the intellectual history of the West.
- [09:29]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Absolutely. Yeah. I think. I think there's just a big conversation going on, too, because I think people are feeling that we're losing something, and they. They want to know, what is that? What is it that I've lost? You know, I. I felt kind of gypped when I finally found out about the Great Books and. And what kind of education Mortimer Adler was talking about. Also, I'm like, what in the world?
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right?
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Dr. Jared Zimmerer
I was like, giving anything else. You know, I have conversations here with. With folks like Dr. Anika Prather and folks in that work, and they talk about the history of what happened to classical education. Although it wouldn't have been classical, it was just education at the time, but how quickly we modernized it and made it very progressive and very materialistic. And so what we lost, I have a feeling people are just like, whatever we lost, we need to bring back. And so if I feel like I lost out on something, I'm going to seek it out. And I think there's a lot of that going on in this. This younger generation as well.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I agree. And Alan Bloom's the Closing of the American Mind. He talks about his students, like, the flattening of their souls. Like, he just realized, like, over the decades that their souls just became more flat. And, like, he gives the example, going by memory, he gives the example of reading Romeo and Juliet with his students. And he remembers, like, you know, in the 1950s or whenever he started, you know, reading this and, like, this would invoke a lot of passions and, like, the students would understand the tensions and et cetera. And then he's, like, teaching in the 90s, and everyone's, like, saturated in sexuality and pornography and free sex and whatever, and no one can understand the tension of Romeo and Juliet. Like, no one understands, like, what's going on. And he kind of talks about this, like, there's been this, like, flattening of the soul that it, like, starts to lack the capacity to engage in the perennial truths that are expressed through the Great Books and obviously mostly through scripture. And I. Yeah, I think we are seeing a reawakening to A certain degree only because things have gotten really bad, Right. So people are, like, looking around, Right. So it's not like we moderated as a culture and got better. I think it's just that things are getting really bad and everyone's turning into like a little iPad blob. And like, I think a lot of people are like, looking around and being like, man, there's got to be something better than this.
- [11:37]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yes. I think that the numbness has been enough. I think they're tired of being numb.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. Numb's a good word there. That's a good operative word. So when we discussed the Odyssey in our conversations there, I think it was offline. You told me that you really liked Prometheus Bound because I told you, like, hey, we're going to go after the Odyssey. We're going to go and start reading a bunch of great plays, which we have. And so, you know, we've worked through. See, we did Hesiod's Theogony, we did Aeschylus's Oresteia, and now we're coming up on Prometheus Bound. And then we're going to get into. We're going to read Sophocles. So we're going to kick into Antigone and the. The rest of the Theban plays. So what is it about Prometheus Bound, though, that's like, captured your attention?
- [12:22]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Well, I think so. The first time I read it, I, I remember thinking, this must have been very controversial. And even today it's extremely controversial. I, I think there's so much in this work that tells us about human nature. It tells us about ideas like tyranny and freedom and even drive versus humility and how those two things work together. It's also an odd thing that you have at a moment, especially because this is right before you start seeing the rise of Socrates, right? And you start having this, this kind of flip of questioning the given. And so you have Prometheus, who's sort of, in a. In a way, an anti hero, but he's the hero. He's the guy you're cheering on. He's the guy you're. You're pitying, while Zeus, the father of the gods, is who everybody starts to hate. Like, what a strange way to kind of undermine the whole system without really making it totally blatant, blatantly obvious. Because if, if everyone doesn't like Zeus now and everyone thinks he's just a big tyrant jerk who is willing to, to use and abuse and destroy whoever he wants, you've got now this Flip this corrupting of the youth that you end up with in, in Socrates. So I just see it as this kind of major, kind of lightning bolt that hits the Greek world and I think it still hits us today because we always have this natural desire to, to rebel. We have this natural desire to keep going deeper and deeper into the truths of things. But I think it invites us to use reason like to. Invites us to really dig deep into the beauty of human nature, the beauty of human civilization and culture building that we can do and realize that this act is not just, you know, some, some easy thing. It's literally a participation in the divine. And I think sometimes we take the idea of culture and flatten it. Sort of what we're talking about with the closing of the American mind. We take this idea, especially today with pop culture and stuff, it's so flat, it's so shallow. But when you think of it as this was a literal fire that was given to human beings to go out into the world and one through sciences, hard sciences, to control and to help nature work in our favor. But the other is to build beauty to, to, to create culture and create meaning in our world. I just, man, it really hit me the first time and I've now read it probably six, seven times and I, every time I get a little something else out of it and it's only. You could read it in about 45 minutes, right? It's not, not super long. So I just, I don't know. The first time it just hit, just really hit me like lightning bolt.
- [15:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So yeah, that's, that's beautiful. I, I'm a first time reader of this. So I, I read it. Actually I read it for the first time in anticipation of, of I had heard about it actually. It wasn't originally on my list of great books, you know, to do. And then you said that you loved it and so I was like, okay, well I should like visit this text. Maybe we can kind of tee this up by understanding what we have and what we don't in like its historical context before we look at the text itself. So let me tell you what I know and you can tell me whether I'm correct. So you know, Aeschylus writes these trilogies. So we just went through the Oresteia and the. All three parts are supposed to be read together, right? There's a whole arc of narrative. Because this is different than like when we get into Sophocles who wrote like Antigone and then the Tomb plays about Oedipus. Those were like Scattered over his whole life, he actually wrote. That's why they're not in order, because he wrote them over his whole life. But Aeschylus wrote these as you're intending to see the whole. And my understanding is, is that what we have, Prometheus Bound is the first play and that we don't have the second or the third play. I will tell you, as a first time reader, like, that really irked me because I, like read it and I was like working through it and I was like, okay, well, I'm kind of curious. I'm kind of curious to see where Escalus takes this, because to piggyback off something you said, I found him really impious or impious at times. It's like, how's he getting away with some of these statements about Zeus in a time period in which they're still persecuting people that they think are causing dishonor, you know, against the polis, because they've. They've dishonored the gods. Because he's kind of. He seems to be playing with a line at times. Because if you remember in the Oresteia, I think it's in Agamemnon, he even talks about Zeus, if that's your real name, right? This nameless divine. That's the name I call you. And it's a huge philosophical line because you're like, whoa. He's realizing that, like the Persona of Zeus might actually just be like a mask, like a way we know the divine, but the true divine, the nameless divine, is something beyond it. It's almost analogous to what you sometimes think Homer's playing with of the nameless fate, like in the Iliad. Right. There's something there. So then I get to this one and he's like contextualizing Zeus as a tyrant. That was one of the questions I had. Is this like. I feel like he gets away with a lot in this play.
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Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yes. Yeah. So there are fragments of the third, just very, very, very few. But it's. You would have Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and then Prometheus the Fire Bearer is technically the trilogy as far as we understand it. And it's interesting, you know Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, right. The idea, the subtext of that is actually a Promethean tragedy. It's interesting how much this has become part of our lexicon of this idea of the human person. And the things that we have are dangerous, they can lead towards monsters, yet they also are the thing that make us the most human. You know, it's Such a strange thing. But yes, that's. That's right. It's also. Aeschylus was likely a soldier in the battle of Marathon. He fought against Persia there and potentially two other battles as well. And they say that he got away with some of this stuff because of the respect that he got as a soldier in Marathon. And so whether or not that's true, but that's just what the scholars say, you know. But it's also interesting, you know, these plays were always done within the context of religious celebrations. So these were within sacrifices, within, you know, offering things to the gods, things like that. So it's literally within a religious context that he's providing a questioning of the religion itself. I just find that fascinating.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
It is. I like what you said about Marathon because my understanding is, you know, the famous battle in which they. They push back the Persians the first time, and because that's what actually was engraved on his tombstone, was that he had fought a marathon. My understanding is that he dictated what he wanted on there. It wasn't him, the first tragedy in. Right. Or him, the playwright, that won all these awards. It was that he had fought at Marathon. I think that does actually inform a lot of his writings. Yeah. My assumption, not to belabor this point too much, but my, My assumption was is that a lot of the things he says about Zeus is in the mouth of Prometheus. And so this is a. This is a typical characteristic, right, In. In. In fiction, is that you can put these critiques in the mouth of someone else. You're like, well, see, this guy's being punished. And so you can see his bad idea, but you're actually sowing these seeds of these ideas into your audience. And so I just kind of assumed in like play two and three, Aeschylus, you know, was careful enough to kind of like walk this line. But that was a question that I had. What translation are you using tonight?
- [19:52]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
So I have David Green's.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, very good. That is what I am using as well. If anyone doesn't have that collection. David Green and Latimer did a complete Greek tragedies collection. And it is wonderful if you can find it and pick it up. So why don't we. Why don't we start with the text and I'll just kind of turn it over to you.
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Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah. So I guess if for your listeners, what you're basically starting, you. You have this kind of background information that you. You learn through the text the first time you read it. So at the very beginning, you end up in this situation where These three, basically two soldiers for Zeus, if you will, that are called might and violence in this translation or might and power in some of the other translations. But basically two, what do you call it, Hitmen for Zeus who are dragging Prometheus to this crag or this rock and along with them is a God named Hephaestus who is a metal worker who actually built these chains that they're bringing with them to go place him against this crag and under the, under the basically dictatorship of Zeus, go nail him up. And so almost immediately you notice in Hephaestus, a pity for Prometheus. You don't quite know yet what he is being punished for necessarily, but in the very first 10 lines it does say that he may learn to endure and like the sovereignty of Zeus and quit his man loving disposition. So almost right away you realize, okay, so he undermined Zeus in some way and that has something to do with something he did for humanity. I'm sure given the popularity of this, people already know about the fire and things like that. We'll go, we'll go through that. But basically, so my. And violence starts, basically commanding Hephaestus to put the chains on him, and not only chains to his hands and his feet, but also a jaw of adamantine wedge right in between his chest. So literally nailing him to a crag. And interestingly, I always think of Christ the minute I see that scene because he's getting his hands and his feet bound, something go right into his chest. And you're kind of like as a Christian, as a Catholic, you're thinking, well, we already got a Christ figure, don't we? I mean, is this, you know, he's being punished for the love of humanity and he's being nailed to the side of a mountain. Not necessarily cross, but the, but the word oftentimes is actually crucifixion. I mean other translations use that term. And so it's an interesting kind of pre Christian narrative of something between the divine and the human, that this person's getting punished for love of humanity. It's a very interesting kind of foreshadowing.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think one of my, one of my questions reading Prometheus Bound is whether I think Prometheus is a better analog to Christ or Lucifer. And it's a really, it's really weird that that is, that is the question. But I was, I was contemplating this. Like there were certain points. Yeah, it's hard of the Catholic, right? I mean we have crucifixes everywhere. It's hard of the Catholic to be like, oh, and then they nailed this God, you know, to this. And everyone had pity on it because of his love of humanity. It's hard to read that and not think of things that are analogous to Jesus Christ. But then as this like plays out, there are other points where I was like, okay, now I'm thinking about Lucifer and now my patience a little bit confused on how this works. I, I mean I, I like what you said. I noticed just kind of as a first time reader that you talked about the pity of Hephaestus and line, I don't know, 13 or so when this is how he opens his first, you know, dialogue or monologue. In this he says might and violence in you. The command of Zeus has its perfect fulfillment. And that is very distinct than from what I think of Zeus and like a Homeric aspect and definitely different than like Hesiod where you get, at least in Homer, when I think of Zeus, you do get the fate. You do get this nameless fate or this will that moves all things to their end. But you also get Athena. Right. If you think about what, what embodies Zeus, you're going to think about, well, he has this cunning. Wisdom might be a thick term, but he has this cunning that he can outsmart everyone. And that comes into this too with Prometheus. But just for Hephaestus to say, oh yeah, when I think of Zeus, I think of might and violence. It really just struck me at the beginning of like, okay, how is Zeus being presented in this text? Because it's going to be different.
- [24:25]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah. And it's interesting that those are the names of the people. Given the fact that you don't actually ever see Zeus in this play. There's no lines from Zeus in this place, so instead it's a representation of him. And also later on about 34. So the background information is that there was a war between the Olympians and the Titans after Zeus had already overthrown his own father Kronos and released his brothers who, brothers and sisters who he had swallowed, sent Kronos down to Tartarus and now Prometheus decided to actually fight for the Olympians even though he was a Titan. Largely because we'll find out later in the, in the text. It's because the Titans didn't listen to him. They didn't understand that he wanted to strategize and they just wanted to use force. But interestingly, because of that background, you, you have this line that it says, for the mind of Zeus is hard to soften with Prayer, because he's basically saying, shouldn't Zeus have pity on him? Shouldn't Zeus. You know, this is way too much to. To give as a punishment. But it says, and every ruler is harsh whose rule is new. And every time I think of that, I always think of, like, mafia figures that if you want to be the top dog, you better show you're not messing around. You're going to start making examples of people. You're going to be overly violent. You're going to do all these things that people are going to think, what. What in the world? But that's. That's the divinities that these people are thinking of. That's the kind of divinities that they pray to. And so if you have this new divinity that just took the throne from his own. Killed his own father. Well, killed, given he's a God, but, you know, but he took the throne from his own father, and now he's making examples of anybody who undermines him or anybody who. He just doesn't like what their decisions were. And so because of that, it's harsh.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, well, it's like a prison yard ethic.
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Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yep.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. It's a prison yard ethic. I think, too. What's really interesting there is, yeah, he contextualizes this as, like, the new rule of Zeus. So that's where we're stepping into this mythology. And I appreciate you giving that backstory, because it's even more interesting that now Zeus would be contextualized as a tyrant that, oh, no, his rule has just started. And we see him already as a tyrant. Because when you read something like Hesiod's Theogony, like, Zeus is very much presented as, like, the bringer of order and civilization. Right. It's Kronos that's the tyrant. And Zeus's rule is going to be, you know, it's not a democracy, but it's like a monarchy where everyone got at least to participate a little bit. Like, Hessid has these lines in which, like, you know, they kind of appointed Zeus the ruler. Like, it's very pro Zeus. And so it's interesting here you're getting this contextualization that, no, we've actually just kind of moved from one tyranny to another, and.
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Dr. Jared Zimmerer
And the idea that power will ultimately corrupt, I mean, almost right away is very apparent in this book, just the fact that, I mean, within a matter of, you know, very little time, he literally is. Is punishing someone who was on his side for something that he didn't want him to do. So if we Continue then. I mean, it's. They now start talking about. Actually, before I continue and talk about Prometheus explaining why he got this punishment, there's an interesting line right around 50, it says there is nothing. And this is might so one of the henchmen. There's nothing without discomfort except the overlordship of the gods, for only Zeus is free. Which I found very interesting because later, even in this work, and especially if you read Theogony and some of these others, fate is always involved. But he is here stating that Zeus is free. And I can't help but think of that tyrannically, but then also thinking of even, like Zeus's followers, they're slaves. They're not actually participating in freedom. As Christians, we understand God as this participation and ultimate freedom. Right. So whenever we submit our will to the will of God, we become more free. But that's not how they saw that relationship with the gods. That's not how they saw Zeus himself. It was a slave master relationship. And if you know a little bit more of the backstory here, and it does come out a little bit later, but only a few lines. Zeus understood humanity as purely, basically another animal. He didn't really think that much of it. He actually had plans to destroy humanity and he wanted them to be victims to the elements. He didn't necessarily want them to have control over the things that he had control of, like the weather and nature and things like that. And so part of what Prometheus is getting in trouble for here is the fact that he undermined that he actually gave them something. And I'm probably jumping ahead, but it helps you understand why he's so angry at the very beginning, why he's going so extreme. Because he had these plans for humanity and Prometheus had pity on humanity and gave them the ability to rationale and to create culture and to create, you know, multiple different things. We'll get into that again later. But I think that the idea of Zeus being the only free one, he wanted to be the only free one. And now there's a certain freedom that humanity has.
- [29:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think there's a lot of grammatical work there. Right. So like when. When it says only Zeus is free, what does it mean by freedom? And it seems it's. It's almost a licentiousness. Right. Like Zeus is the only one that has the power to do as he wills, and therefore, like the rest of us are his slaves. So the question like I had there was like, what does that mean by freedom? It reminds me of you know, as we kind of look ahead to Plato, it reminded me at the end of Plato's Republic, he contextualizes this right, the freedom of the tyrant. The tyrant might get everything that he wants, right? He has the money, he has the power, he has the sex, he has everything that he wants. At the end of the day, he will be unhappy. And so, like, what is his freedom? And you see in that, I think a nascent version of what you already mentioned, right. That Catholic understanding of freedom, which I think is observable by nature as well, which is no, true freedom, is actually our capacity to choose the good right to choose what is actually good, as opposed to, it seems like here at line 50, that freedom here is being contextualized as a certain satiation of desire that comes through only by being the most powerful. So he's free, the rest of us are slaves. And it's a. Yeah, it's that tyrant again. That's, I think, really setting us up well for some of the conversations we'll have in Plato.
- [31:07]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yes, the whole might is right thing. So, yeah. So then Hephaestus continues to kind of complain and pity, you know, and tries to get might and violence to come to his side, although they never really do. They just keep telling him, no, do the hammer as you're supposed to do, and let's get out of here. So there is an interesting right before might, violence and Hephaestus leave, right around. What is this? 86. So the gods named you wrongly, and this is might to Prometheus. It says the gods named you wrongly when they called you forethought. So in other words, for Prometheus is actually forethought to seeing ahead. Or the other idea is planning, strategizing. I said you yourself need forethought to extricate yourself from this contrivance. And I, it's kind of a little bit of an irony that they're talking about, of the fact that you, you literally are forethought. The things that you've been given as gifts or charisms is forethought. It is strategizing is planning. Yet you, you didn't see this in quotes, right? That's what they're trying to say. It's like clearly your whole idea of strategizing, your whole idea of reasoning through the outcomes of your decisions and your actions, look what happened to you. Because might is right, you know, and so what they're saying is it's kind of ironic that you're named that, given that you're going to need A lot of that to get out of this. So as the story goes on, you find out more about what Prometheus is actually doing and what he's strategizing through.
- [32:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Coupling with that in that same paragraph. Just the line before that caught my attention, right? What drop of your suffering can mortals spare you? So you've done all this work for the mortals, right? You've done these grand works for them, which I'm sure we'll explore what they are. And it's interesting that they're like, look, they can't even do anything for you. Why did you think about this? I don't know. So you get some of those analogies to Christ to, like a messiah figure, right. Um, it's almost like to a certain degree, the noblesse oblige, right? It's. It's the higher reaching down and. And helping the lower. And so, yeah, it just. It kind of struck me. Now, I don't know if that's entirely true, because if you know the whole story, which is way outside this play, right? It's actually a half mortal who finally comes in and saves him, Right? Hercules comes in. So it seems like there actually is the cycle in which what Prometheus has done for humanity does end up being, in a certain way, his path to liberation.
- [33:37]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yep, absolutely. Yeah. It's. It's the long thing. It's. It's the foresight, it's the understanding, the long kind of the long game way of playing this thing out. So then I think, so from there, Prometheus then is left alone in his sufferings. And I think the next several, you know, what is it? Almost 100 lines are beautiful in a way. It's just this huge lament of, you know, his sufferings. Why. Why is this happening to him? And it's interesting because now you start to see a interaction with the chorus or what would be kind of the people, representative of the. Of the people themselves, especially during the play. It's as if they're kind of expressing what the people are thinking in this regard. And in large part, it's pity. It's. It's a questioning of why is Zeus so upset about this? Why is he so, you know. Quick bearing. Quick bearing. And everything that he's doing just seems so irrational to be this harsh. But again, he explains it as. It's because of his excessive love of man. That's on 124. He said, you see me, a wretched God in chains, the enemy of Zeus, hated of all the gods that enter Zeus's palace. Hall because of my excessive love of man. So I mean, to him, that's the reason he's getting published or punished because it's not a matter of undermining. It's because he loves humanity so much and Zeus apparently doesn't. So it just sets up Zeus as just like the worst God to worship.
- [35:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And earlier you mentioned that Zeus had actually planned to eradicate humanity. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, so we'll jump ahead. Just. Dion told me to be quiet because I don't. I think it's alluded to here, but I don't think it's ever actually discussed. And my, my. I had a question. There is like, is this the flood? So the, the Greek mythology has a flood narrative. It has a Noah's ark narrative in which my understanding of it is that Zeus is going to flood and wipe out humanity. He does not like humanity. And it's Prometheus that then goes and tells the Noah figure, hey, this is coming. You have to build an ark. I don't think in the Greek one there's like the animals, I don't think they play in as much, but there's a great worldwide flood coming. And so the guy builds an ark and he survives the flood and so humanity survives. Is that what you're mentioning, that he, that he wanted to destroy humanity?
- [36:04]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yes. As far as the association with the flood, I can't remember the name of the work that explains that, but yes, that is basically the whole idea behind it, is that there, there definitely was a flood coming. He was coming to warn them. He was coming to give them basically the science to help them save themselves from being destroyed. But there's, there' there's other traditions that also offer things like fire and other things that he was just going to destroy all of humanity, keep the other animals, but destroy humanity. And largely because all the other animals had things in themselves that allowed themselves to defend themselves, to live out their natural instincts, you know, to kill when need to be. But human beings were so, you know, weak. You compare me to a grizzly bear. Like it's not even close. You know, if we're doing the whole might is right thing, it's not until we start inventing stuff that we really end up finding our way to the top of the food chain. But prior to that, we were just weaklings that were just trying to forage and make it survive. And Zeus didn't see a point. What was the point of keeping that until we were given rationale and we were invent these Things. Yeah. There is connections with that, though.
- [37:16]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I like what you say there, though, which is certainly something I think we'll unpack, which is that Prometheus gave them the art. He gave them the techne to overcome something in nature. I hadn't thought about that with the Flood. But that relationship between Prometheus and man as one that provides techne, I think it's something that comes in pretty strongly here.
- [37:39]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yes, yes. So then we have. So again, the chorus. He goes back and forth with the chorus. And of course, these are the daughters of Oceanus. It still represents the crowd in a way. But these are nymphs of. Of the ocean that come up because they happen to see him on the rock and they're, you know, wondering why he's up there, but they clearly have pity for him. There's some. Some good lines in there, especially in regard to Prometheus, explaining a little bit more about how he understands his punishment and why he made certain decisions. So just kind of skipping a little bit of the chorus lines. But right around, like 208, he talks about why he decided to win with the Titans. First, he was working with the sons of Uranus and Earth, but failed. He said they would have none of crafty schemes and in their savage arrogance of spirit, thought that they would lord it easily by force. So it's an interesting understanding of Prometheus preferring wisdom, preferring strategizing, preferring thinking over just might. And in a way that's undermining once again, Zeus, it's saying that even he thinks this is the only way to win is to just force your enemies into submission. He's saying it didn't work for the Titans, it's not going to work for him. But he is the wise character that understands why you have to see the potential of what your actions are going to cause, not just react, react, react. And so in a way, it's. It's offering the crowd especially, or the reader a way to understand why wisdom is so much more important than just force.
- [39:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Do we know why it's the daughters of ocean that are the course here? Because this really caught my attention because I found them to be such a random juxtaposition, like, wait, why we're. He's being nailed to a mountaintop and all of a sudden, like, the daughters of ocean. And like I even tried to find, I might just failed. Someone's probably listening to this and being like, how can you not see this connection? Very happy to have you guys yell at me on X. Be great. But I guess my point Here is like, I did. I wasn't able to really discern why they were chosen for the chorus. Like, is there a method, like a mythological background here? Any ideas?
- [40:05]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
So to be completely honest, I don't. I don't know why them in particular. I do. The. The connection I make is that this is supposed to be way out in the middle of nowhere where nobody comes. There will be no mortals to find him. So the only people that could potentially do that is the people in the ocean who are able to sense what's going on in places. Because it's supposed to be a crag and it's supposed to be at the bottom is. Is the ocean. Right. And so the water itself is at the bottom of this rock. So that was my only thought, is like, nobody else could even find their way out there. So if anything, you've. Later on, we'll talk about Hermes and so other. Other potential Olympians that could show up. But that was the only thing that made any sense to me is just because it was connected to the ocean.
- [40:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, well, because ocean, I mean. No, I think that's right. I mean, because, you know, ocean's river is the boundary of the known world. So in certain ways, I guess ocean could be seen here as, you know, the juxtaposition that he really is at the edge of what we know.
- [41:07]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Right.
- [41:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
He is really, really far removed. Right. Because the fact that no mortal will find him and he's separated from the humans as part of his punishment. Right. So you helped all these creatures. You even made them. If I understand some of the myths correctly, right, The Prometheus is actually the maker of man. I remember. Right. His brother made all the other animals and, like, you know, like you said, took all the good things like the bear gets the strength and the cheetah gets the speed. And, you know, man's this awkward naked creature, but he gives it an intellect and a few other things that we'll probably get into, but he gives it an intellect. And so part of the punishment is that you can't. You're. It's. The creator is separated from the creature. So I like the idea that ocean may be looking at that as the edge of the world, just as a sign of how far removed he is from everything else.
- [41:54]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yes. Then later on in that same narration by Prometheus. So right around probably 25, it's interesting how so he's kind of going through like I gave. I fought for Zeus. You know, I literally turned on my own people, the same creatures as myself. I turned on them to fight for Zeus. And yet here he does this to me and there's kind of an interesting juxtaposition between friendship and he says this is a sickness rooted and inherent in the nature of a tyranny, that he that holds it does not trust his friends. So isn't that again, to go back to like a mafia figure? Like, almost immediately you start thinking, who's talking behind my back? Who. Who's trying to rise up against me? Who's trying to undermine my authority? That's the nature of tyranny. And I think, two, that Aeschylus, in a way, is cheering on the idea of a republic in a way of we don't want tyrants, we don't want dictators, because look how quick they can easily turn on all of us, no matter even if you fight for them. I just think that's an interesting kind of critique of. Because Greece was in a kind of strange place at the time and the idea of common rule was starting to fall apart. And you do end up with some dictator kings at this time.
- [43:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's a really good. Two things occur to me. One is Aeschylus's own backstory, that Aeschylus is old enough to remember Athens coming out of its tyranny. I think he was in his 20s. And so he has this fledgling democracy. And so having a warning of what tyranny is like. I like that contextualization. The other thing that occurs to me is that in the Iliad, it says. Homer tells us that when Achilles enters into his rage, if you remember, like when I think it's Patroclus is in the tent of Nestor, I think. I guess Patroclus makes the statement that when Achilles goes into his rage, he no longer distinguishes between friend and foe. Right. That distinction goes away. And what's interesting is that then later on, Zeus is described the same way, going by memory. When Zeus gives a strict decree for the gods not to enter into the war, I think it's Ares is like, I'm gonna go do this anyway, I don't really care. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Athena is like, you're an idiot. And you're an idiot, because if you break this, Zeus won't care who broke it. He'll come down and punish all of them, all of us, because he does not make distinction between friend and foe in this rage. I think it's really interesting that then that Aeschylus is kind of using almost that exact same attribute as like a tyranny. Right? When these people enter into this power into this rage, there is no distinction there. Right. It maybe goes back to that freedom. Right. It's a satiation of their own desire, and anyone can get consumed in that.
- [44:54]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
And isn't that also a warning of our own human nature? How quickly we can see red and how quickly we can allow our anger and our intensity to turn on even those we love? Yeah, it's. It's. Yeah. So, yeah, then we kind of continue along and this is now some of my favorite lines. So he continues to talk about what he offered to man. So for example, in 240, he said, I gave to mortal man a precedence over myself in pity. I can win no pity. Pitiless is he that thus chastises me a spectacle bringing dishonor on the name of Zeus. So basically saying his pity on humanity is now ruining him. And now he who pitied cannot receive pity from the person who is doing this to him. And then just a few lines later, 250, it says, so chorus asked, did you perhaps go further than you have told us? And he said, I caused mortals to cease foreseeing doom. So he gave them hope. So two lines later, I placed in them blind hopes. That is just so powerful to me, especially because here in a little while we're going to get into the nature of human beings prior to him giving them these things. But to cease foreseeing doom, I see that as to cease being nihilistic, that there is purpose to their life, that they can be agents in their life, that they can make their life better, that they can have purpose, they can have meaning, they can create. And also, I think, tells you, if we're talking about what he gave them as the arts. And so we're going to consider that as both as we know it now, science, but also the ability to create music and poetry and these other things. Those things, our ability to create those things, to use those things, helped us cease foreseeing doom. It gave us meaning, gave us purpose. That is just. That's one of those lines that I think of a lot, actually.
- [47:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I really want to tether that to the theme of suffering in Aeschylus. So Aeschylus is known for this theme of suffering. It's throughout the Oresteia. I mean, our main character in Prometheus Bound is literally nailed to a rock. I mean, it seems to be a constant theme within Aeschylus's text. And so he's already told us, like in the Oresteia, that he finds that it's in suffering that man finds wisdom. Right. And we even see this from Homer. I mean, think about what Odysseus had to endure on the way home. And so we get this theme of suffering throughout kind of the Greek mind. And so it's interesting here then, that Aeschylus kind of presents Prometheus as the one that's given him hope. So why do we endure all this suffering? Where are these miserable creatures? I mean, Prometheus has given us a few things, and that's good, and we'll get to that. But, like, we're these miserable creatures. We're not gods. We die, which is an important aspect of us, right? But then he's sown in us this blind hope, and it's almost like we're the creatures that embrace suffering. Like we're the creatures that actually will use suffering as a good. And I think if that's not an antecedent to then how Catholicism picks up suffering and suffering being redemptive. I mean, you see that very clearly, I think, in the Greek culture as we talk a lot on the podcast, right? This. This Greek reason coupled together with Hebrew faith under Roman order, kind of prepares the world for Jesus Christ. And so in this, I think one of the themes that you see is that suffering can be redemptive. Suffering can actually be purgative. It can actually be. Be fecund, Right. It can actually create in you virtue and wisdom, and you can grow and in arete and excellence. So I think it's really interesting that Prometheus is the one that sowed. There's a wonderful line. Was it I sowed in them blind hopes, right? He just. It's like just kneaded into our nature that regardless of how much we suffer, we just keep hoping, but not like. I mean, I guess it is a blind hope. He calls it a blind hope. But in Aeschylus, it seems to be that there's. There's a purpose then, to a certain degree. Right?
- [49:08]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yes. But isn't that kind of at the heart of all great stories? I mean, it's. It's humanity overcoming something, and you don't do that. I mean, bears don't overcome. You know, Cheetahs don't overcome. They just are what they are. They might be faster or not than whatever's trying to kill them, but human beings, rather than avoiding difficulty, we look right at it and say, all right, let's go. You know, I mean, I immediately think, like, I love the Rocky films. Rocky would be nothing if he didn't embrace suffering and have a blind hope that he's going to beat Apollo Creed, who was a better boxer. But that's what makes it such a beautiful story of overcoming something. And yeah, for the Greeks to be able to have insight into that so early, I mean, that's unbelievable to understand human nature in that way. And especially Prometheus, who consider forethought, potentially even the idea of wisdom, that you only become wise through suffering. I love that.
- [50:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. My kids and I recently watched a lot of the Rocky films and they definitely noticed that, like, Rocky has to get punched in the face 40 times in the match before he decides to, like, do something, right. He has to have, like, there's a certain amount of suffering he has to, like, absorb before he, like, kicks in. So, yeah, the Rocky movies are a good example of that.
- [50:27]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah. Especially when he fights Clubber Lane. He literally is like, come on, keep hitting me. Come on, let's go.
- [50:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. Lang is such a fantastic character.
- [50:35]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, that's. Well, we can have a whole conversation about the Rocky films, but so then the nymphs of the ocean end up going back into the ocean and now you actually have their father show up. Oceanus. And in a similar way, I, I, every time I read this, I think of the book of Job. And because here he comes and tries to sort of reason with him. Why would you, you know, embrace this? Why, why wouldn't you just go beg for forgiveness? I'll even go beg for forgiveness for you. And it's. I, I, I see Job in this because he's trying to make sense of his situation. He's trying to make sense of this suffering that he's going through. But it's sort of, it's both Job and Anti. Job. Because in Job, you, you have this understanding of God as you, you're not going to rationale through this. Whereas with this one, he is able to rationale through it because he understands Zeus. He knows who Zeus is and how he's going to act and what his decisions are going to be.
- [51:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I wonder if, I mean, so just to kind of throw out some, some fringe theories here, I'm still kind of thinking of, you know, Ocean, like, why, why is he the one that shows up? And also why is he then the intermediary, right? Why, why is he playing this kind of intercessor role, right, that he, because he's also a Titan, but he seems to have, you know, not been disposed. And so he's now, you know, still in his spot in, in the kind of boundaries of the world, if you will. Right. Oceans, River. I just, I don't know, I'm. I'm still captured by. In Homer, there's a line in which when Hera is going to seduce Zeus and she goes to Aphrodite and she gets the breast band and all these things, et cetera. One of the reasons. One of the things she does is she lies and she. She tells Aphrodite she's going down to go see Ocean. And there's like just one little couplet that's in there that Homer puts in there. That Ocean is the fountainhead of the gods. And no one knows what he's talking about because that's not Hesiod, that's not the classical mythology. Like, Ocean is not the fountainhead of the gods.
- [52:51]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Right.
- [52:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
There's. There's very different mythologies. And I, I realize this is a stretch, but I was really curious when I was just. I was just kind of searching, right. Discerning, like, why. Why is it Ocean that's playing this role?
- [53:02]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Sure.
- [53:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It could just be because it's proximate to the ocean. And what other character are you going to have, you know, show up here in the middle of nowhere? But I was wondering if, like, this is pointing to him having some more like, ancient role within the mythology. Like, he has some capacity to be this intercessor. Like, he has some, you know, grandeur about him that he could go to Zeus still as a Titan and maybe like, discuss this. I don't know. I'm still very much wrestling with Ocean's role and even the nymphs here, because I just feel like there's got to be some depth to this, but I'm. I'm still wrestling with it.
- [53:38]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah, I like that a lot. And, and to be honest, I. I ashamed to say I haven't really wrestled. I haven't tried to wrestle with it that, that much. I. I guess I just gave it as. I thought of as, as a given. But I also think, I mean, there was, there was quasi mythical aspects even in Greek culture of what the ocean offers. Right. By this point, they had warships, they had, you know, the ability to travel from one place to another. And ocean also kind of represented chaos in the ancient world. And so what does that have to do with. With some of this as an intermediary? Why is it. Why is it chaotic, perhaps? And so it's not. Not reasonable, basically? I don't know. I haven't really. That's good. It's really good.
- [54:16]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I wanted to. Something else that occurs to me. I mean, it's adjacent to what we've Already said. But that ocean also represents not just like the boundaries of the cosmos, but also a boundary to man's knowledge and his wisdom. So if you remember like the streets of Gibraltar, the, the Pillars of Hercules going out into the ocean was like, that was it. That was the end of the knowledge of man. And only a fool would sail past that because there was nothing there. And if you remember skipping a few thousand years, Dante, when Dante talks about Odysseus and hell, he creates the story. It seems to be Dante's invention. He creates a story that Odysseus can't stay in Ithaca, he's too restless. And so he, he goes and gets another ship and he sails past the Pillars of Hercules to go discover this knowledge and God finally just, you know, strikes the ship and they all die in the ocean. So I like, excuse me, I like what you said about like, you know, could this be a certain boundary of man's knowledge? Because that would also seem to dovetail well into the Prometheus character, right? As forethought, who's given these things to man. So anyway, I don't know, I just, I just keep wrestling with what ocean's role is here.
- [55:29]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah, I like that. Yeah, basically. So in line 3 11, this is where the job type figure comes out. So it actually starts a little bit before that. Prometheus and I want, indeed I do, to advise you for the best, for all your cleverness. Know yourself and reform your ways to new ways. For new is he that rules among the gods. But if you throw about such angry words, words that are wedded swords, soon Zeus will hear you. So what's he saying? Humility. Why don't you have a little humility, man? Like you messed up according to who's in charge. You're now saying things that are very unwise because it's going to get back to Zeus eventually. Why don't you humble yourself a little bit and maybe another Christ figure moment, bring yourself down, you know, why are you embracing this instead? Which sounds so much like Job again, it's like, be humble man. You know, these things happen to you. These, these things happen to everybody.
- [56:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
This, this too maybe where to interject where sometimes I see the Luciferian aspects of him, right? Where. Because there's a, there's a modern tendency, probably after Paradise Lost, to read Lucifer through a Promethean lens. And so just like Prometheus is this, you know, Titan who's pushing back against the tyranny of Zeus and he kind of has this indomitable will that we Kind of like, like, no, I'm going to be chained to a rock and I still won't give up. Right. There's definitely something as modern that we like about that. Or the wind, the will to simply will not break. It seems then that there's also a read in, in modern literature of Lucifer in this light insofar as, like, well, see, Lucifer actually has this like, hero aspect to him, this like, grandeur, because he won't serve right. Better to held and served in heaven. And this is where I really think that type of Lucifer is read through a Promethean lens. Like they're kind of mixing some of these myths about Prometheus and these things about him kicking out against this tyranny of God into the biblical narrative. And we could have a debate about how much Milton intended that. But Milton makes Lucifer. So, you know, his rhetoric is so good. Right. He talks a lot. He has these good arguments and I think people get sucked into that. Whether Milton meant that as, you know, to give us a deceiver in the literature, because he is Lucifer. And so even critics are actually being deceived by Lucifer. And that's what Milton's intent was. I think, regardless, it's very different than say, Dante who Milton's, or excuse me, you know, Dante's Lucifer is down in hell and can't speak. His mouth is full, right. His. His voice has been stripped from him. And so I think that too, I don't disagree with some of the analogues to Christ, but they just are mixed in oddly within a character who's pushing out against a divine tyranny. And I think kind of looking back at this through Milton, a lot of people are going to see analogues to Lucifer.
- [58:34]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yes, Yeah. I think part of it as well is this is one reason I love the ancient world, because as Christians we can look back and say, look what they were doing, look what they had insights into that weren't revealed until later on, but they had insights into these things that are just this odd mix of the truths. So they're not as clear as revelation is. But. But it was insight into something that's just part of reality. That with this character. I think you bring up a good point. You basically see both in kind of this weird mixture of the two and even the idea of non servium. Well, there's a part in humanity that that's a good. I won't serve a tyrant, you know, I wouldn't give in to the regime. I'm going to stand on my own two feet. But yet we also have to submit. You know, we have to give over our will. We have to give over and be able to choose the good, as you said earlier. So that's that weird mixture within us. We, we have the good and the bad within us. And I just, I, I think that the ancients are so interesting when it comes to, prior to Revelation, being able to see those things and, and use narrative to provide a story to help us better understand ourselves, to better understand the divine. But, yeah, I, I don't know, I, I've, I've read Milton, but I don't know Milton nearly as well as some of the other works. But his, his devil character is very interesting and his also is, is there's a little bit. And again, I don't know Milton as well, but almost like he did a favor in him and in Dante, he's this pitiable figure. He screwed up, he messed up, he shouldn't have done what he did. He's even crying, he's sobbing while he's frozen in the ice. You don't see that in Milton. It's a little bit of a I did what I had to do type of thing, which is what you see here, for sure.
- [60:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I agree.
- [60:36]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
So I guess moving, moving along. You've got the moments with the, the strophe and the antistrophe, which again is kind of like a trial participation type of thing. Oceanus after, you know, basically saying, hey man, the best thing you can do is be humble. I might go ask Zeus, but even me asking might get me in the same place where you're at. So we'll see how things go, basically. And after that, Prometheus goes into, and I might read a decent amount from this one just because it's very interesting, he goes into what human beings were prior to his gift, prior to him. So the legend, the tradition has it that he actually stole fire from Hephaestus's, what do you call it, where you make iron, his forge. He stole it, put it in kind of like a lotus flower type of thing, and then brought it to humanity. So it says, do not think that out of pride. So I'm right around 4:38 ish. Do not think that out of pride or stubbornness I hold my peace. My heart is eaten away. When I am aware of myself, when I see myself insulted as I am, who was it but I, who in truth dispensed their honors to these new gods? I will say nothing of this. You know it all, but hear what troubles there were among men. How I found them witless and gave them their use of their wits and made them masters of their minds. I will tell you this not because I would blame men, but to explain the goodwill of my gift first. Men. For men at first had eyes but saw no purpose. They had ears but did not hear. Like the shapes of dreams, they dragged through their long lives and handled all things in bewilderment and confusion. They did not know of building houses with bricks to face the sun. They did not know how to work in wood. They lived like swarming ants in holes in the ground, in the sunless caves of the earth. For them there was no secure token by which to tell winter nor the flowering spring, nor the summer with its crops. So he just goes on and on about, look, I mean, they were pitiable, like useless creatures. They, they couldn't reason. They couldn't even figure out that, hey, if I build this thing in front of the sun, it's going to protect me from the heat, it's going to protect me from these things. So he's saying, like, look, I know I'm in a bad situation. I know I'm pitiable myself right now, but let me tell you why I love humanity, why I gave them what I gave them. And to me, that those lines, it also, I think, helps us understand how Aeschylus and maybe the Greek tradition understood what humanity is without reason, without our ability to create, without music, without poetry, without these things, we're swarming ants, we're, we're nothing, you know, And I think we would say that's the human soul. So without the human soul, we're just animals. And I think they, they recognize that.
- [63:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I was seeing that kind of early acknowledgment that man's reason is what actually sets him apart.
- [63:36]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
So then later on he says, he actually does say, and this is again, kind of skipping a little head about 505. All arts that mortals have come from Prometheus. So there's a tradition and an argument that was Aeschylus trying to set up Prometheus as sort of like a God of civilization. And I've seen both arguments. I would argue that he kind of wasn't really. I think this is much more of a celebration of human rationality. It's a celebration of how, how we participate in the divine. But that's a pretty clear line of all arts came from me, you know.
- [64:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [64:14]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
And so we, we ought to think if we were still Greek worshipers, we'd be thanking him for sure. But I don't Know what do you think?
- [64:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, because it's interesting, right? Because it you. My original understanding just kind of like broadly of the Prometheus mythology was that you know, he gave us the intellect and he gave us fire. And so from these two gifts then man was able to create civilization. So our intellect makes us self reflective. You know, we're the only creature that can think about an act as an act. So the bee keeps making the same hive. You know, even the complex creatures like a spider that makes a web, makes the same web over and over again, we actually can think about, right. Are acts. And we can, since we can reflect on them. One, that's the basis of all morality because then we're accountable for them. And two, though like our techne can grow, it can perfect, right. So we used to live in caves and now we can live in skyscrapers if we want to. And so the, and the fire is similar, right. So we kind of, we don't, I don't think we have an appreciation of fire in like the modern age. We don't really understand why that's such a big a deal. But you know, man was, was cold and then darkness. And if you don't have fire, you can't cook food, you can't forge metals, you can't create light, you can't keep predators away from you. I mean fire really is at the heart of civilization. And also it's very uniquely tied to man.
- [65:39]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Right.
- [65:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Because only man can actually wield it. It's only the rational animal that can come in and actually control fire. But to your point, if that wasn't enough, it seems like it's not just that Prometheus gave us the capacities to then create the sciences, the arts, but then he individually taught us all of them because that's how I kind of read this is like he really kind of goes through like, well, I taught man how to do this particular skill and then I taught man how to do this particular skill and like he really takes credit for like all of these things. So it's very granular. It's more granular than I expected.
- [66:14]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yes. So now we've got the introduction of another character. Her name is IO and actually in the book, if you read the subtext, it says a girl wearing horns like an ox. So it's a girl who has been transfigured into the look of an ox. And she is wandering along and it says that there's this gadfly that keeps stinging her. So anytime she stays still too long, a gadfly comes by. And stings her and she has to keep moving along. And so she comes along and this is kind of another question of why is she here in the outer rim of the world? It makes sense that she's wandering to the farthest parts of the world because she's been punished to do so. So she's com. She. She hears Prometheus's words because he's like, who's there? He can hear her walking, right? And then she says, he basically starts talking about Zeus and she's like, what are you talking about? You know what she calls him? My father. But you come to find out that this poor girl has been punished because Zeus basically visited her in her dreams and lusted after her and basically convinced her to come to a certain place, a certain pond, and to allow his lusty eyes to see her because he wanted to bring her to bed. And she finds herself there, ends up giving in. And now, because Zeus is with another goddess named Hera, he knows for a fact that Hera is going to have anger about this situation. And so he punishes her to look, not look like a woman anymore and now travel the world for the rest of her life suffering. So basically, he raped a girl and then he transfigured her into something ugly and forced her to walk the earth. If that's not tyranny and if that's not the worst kind of God you can think of, I don't know what is. I mean, he used and abused this poor girl and because he knew his wife was going to be jealous, he just punishes her to this lifelong suffering. So her and Prometheus have sort of this moment where we've both now been put in a situation by this tyrant that isn't rational. You know, it's not something that makes any sense and it's clearly just the moves of mad men that we're all at the will or at the will of.
- [68:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, Aeschylus is good about doing this. So I remember in the Libation Bearers when Orestes is kind of being put inside this. This tension inside the kind of primitive justice of the blood avenger and etc. Aeschylus does a wonderful job of bringing in a female character, Electra, that actually at first seems to be in a somewhat different situation. She's trying to understand how to pray for her deceased father, for Agamemnon, but then you realize that her situation is actually incredibly analogous to Orestes. Like they're actually very similar to one another and they're actually navigating the same Challenges, but in kind of different circumstances. And that's how I read IO here, right, that she is also a sign of Zeus's tyranny. Her situation is very different, but on an analogous level. They're both suffering. They're both, like you said, here at the, the outer edge of the known world, her suffering, you know, because this gadfly keeps biting her and she, she seems to be going in and out of madness because of, of this particular suffering. Is this, it's another, you know, signpost of Zeus's cruelty, of the reign of this new God.
- [69:59]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yes. And then you find out sort of the spoiler alert for, for the listeners, what Prometheus's long game is here. And so he speaks to IO about, you know, I know you're going to be suffering a long time and in fact it's going to get really bad. And he explains to her all these different lands that she's going to go to, explains certain rivers that don't you dare cross that one. But when you go to the amazons with the women who hate men, they're actually going to help you out, but they are going to eventually send you along your way. He goes through a lot of what her journey is going to be and even holds back certain parts because he says, I don't want to destroy your spirit and so I want to just offer you knowing it's going to get really bad. But there's a positive on the other end of all of this suffering. Sort of what we talked about a few minutes ago of suffering can lead towards a good. Right, that there's something on the other end of it. And he basically says, so this is around 7:70 ish? She asks, let's see, a little earlier than that, says, so IO says, is it his wife shall cast him from his throne. Talking about Zeus, Prometheus says she shall bear him a son mightier than his father. Then IO has he no possibility of escaping this downfall? None, save through my release from these chains, who will freeze you against Zeus's will. Fate has determined that it be one of your descendants. And then she says, what shall a child of mine bring you free? Yes, in the 13th generation. And as we know, and the crowd would know, they're talking about Hercules. And some of the translations say Heracles, if you're reading it for the first time, same, same name, same person. So they're talking about Hercules ultimately undoing Zeus's rule. And he does that partially through letting Prometheus go. So it's, it's the whole idea of forethought. And it's the whole idea of patience, perseverance and patient suffering. Because knowing that on the other end of this. And to me, again, it goes into the whole idea of like, humans. Was it Nietzsche or. I forgot who said it. Basically, I think it was Nietzsche that as long as there's purpose to suffering, human humanity can go through anything. If there's. If there's a reason to your suffering, you can go through pretty much anything. And so that's what he's giving advice to I.O. of like, look, it's going to get way worse than you think it's going to. But know that in the end, Zeus will. Will pay and it'll be your descendant that does so. Which I think is such a great. I wish there were other two books existed because you would probably find out more about that information. But she's just such a great character, I think.
- [72:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But isn't there. Maybe I read this incorrectly. So help me. There's two things going on here, right? So there's the prophecy to IO that one of her descendants will free him, and that's Heracles. Hercules. I appreciate that you say the same person, because I know when I first got into Greek mythology, I was like, wait, who is this? And this is the same person. What's going on here? But isn't there a second thing going on here that IO's asking him whether Zeus will fall? And he's saying that there's going to be like, he will make a marriage which one day will be his rue. And this is something distinct from Hercules, right? This is that. For me, my understanding of this was that Prometheus knows who the usurper will be. So take a step back into Greek mythology. We have to understand how important this is. So think about, you know, Hesiod's theogony. You think about just general mythology. Greek mythology has this succession of violence, the succession of usurpers. And so first you had, you know, Uranus, and then his son Kronos usurped him and overthrew him, and then Zeus usurped him and overthrew him. And it's this kind of cycle of violence. And there's going to be then, right? Will there be a usurper for Zeus? And so my understanding of this was, is that this is Prometheus, ace in the hole.
- [74:10]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yes.
- [74:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Prometheus knows who he should not wed, because if he weds, then. Well, wed there being a euphemism, probably. But, you know, whoever he weds, this woman, the son will Be greater than the father. Right? And that's actually the most damning prophecy you can get for the gods. And so that, that's my understanding that that's the ace in the hole that Prometheus has, that he is, we don't have other plays, but that he's going to use as leverage to get out of his current situation. Is that, is that generally correct?
- [74:43]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yes. And that's why Hermes shows up, because Zeus heard about this. And so, you know, earlier in the book, Oceanus kind of warns him like, hey man, you, you need to stop saying this stuff so loud. Zeus is going to find out, well, this is the part that Zeus cares about who's going to usurp me. And he knows. So he sends Hermes, the messenger God basically to go ask him, what is it that you know, who are you talking about? And in Promethean way, he denies any information and just says, I'd rather sit here and suffer than give away that information. So is that conversation with IO that somehow found its way back to Zeus? But yes, that's correct. There are two different things going on there also. Sort of jump into the now story along with Hermes. There's some more great lines in there, that kind of thinking through an understanding of freedom. Continuing our earlier discussion, it's about 966. So this is when Hermes basically tries to tell him, like, look man, you're a madman. It's clearly pride that's keeping you here. You know, you need to change your ways. He says, just such the obstinacy that brought you here to this self willed, calamitous anchorage. He's saying like, this is your fault that you did this. You shouldn't have done that for the humans. You knew Zeus was going to get upset. But then Prometheus says, be sure of this. When I set my misfortune against your slavery, I would not change. And it's the idea of, is it worse to serve a tyrant than to be suffering and free? Granted, he's talking about a God right now. So if we take it into Christian understanding versus like a political understanding or at least a cultural understanding, that is a very Greek way to see the world of I, I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees type of thing. And that's why a lot of people say that America at its core was Promethean, because it was the whole idea of, you're not going to tell me what to do and we'll, we'll fight to the death to keep you from telling me what to do. And I think it's so hard because, I mean, as an American, it's very difficult. That's in our blood to think that way about a lot of this stuff. But it can also go way too far. You know, it ends up becoming. It can end up becoming even against God. It's God himself or anything organized or anything that's not my will or that. Anything that I don't want to do or it gets into the whole idea of licentiousness versus actual freedom. But there's still a good there. You still want a people that. That aren't going to, you know, that aren't going to just stand down to a tyrant. You want that, that gumption in people. You know, sometimes I talk about, you know, working with young men. It's like, I don't want to destroy that. That fire, to use the Promethean term, that that gives them, you know, the testosterone. You know, they really want to go take on the world. I'm like, yeah, that's awesome. Now let's steer it in the right direction because if you just allow that to take over, you're going to lose yourself and you're going to turn into something that you don't want to become. You become the monster. You're going to become the tyrant even of yourself. And instead, let's steer it. And I have a feeling that's what escalates is talking about here too. Of. There's a. There's a part of humanity that's so good, but it's also so dangerous. And that's why I love the idea of fire, because fire is so helpful. But you talk about some of the worst suffering if you get lit on fire, or the whole idea of, you know, they talk about Oppenheimer being kind of a Prometheus figure because he created this, this unbelievable invention. And look what happened, right? It's this. This both and of. There's a danger here, but also a beauty. So what do we do with that? And I. I think that line as far as like he's saying that Hermes is the real slave because he's to this tyrant, whereas he's actually feels more free. But he's nailed to cross. But it's his own doing. I don't know. Just so much there to think through.
- [78:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. It strikes me that, you know, one of the distinguishing factors here, as it is in most things is simply teleology, right? The telos, the purpose, the end of a thing. So all things are judged, good or bad, according to their end. Like we know a Good knife must be sharp because we know the purpose of the knife is to cut. And so a bad knife would be dull. And so it is with all things, right? Everything has an end, a purpose. And we judge things, good or bad, according to that purpose. We also then know what's good or bad for that thing according to the purpose, right? So I know a sharpener, you know, some kind of whetstone is good for the knife while, you know, dragging it on concrete would be bad. And so it strikes me here that, you know, one of the challenges with Prometheus is that he has this indomitable will. He has this will that will not break. Like, it just simply won't. And then part of the question though, is like, well, is that a good or a bad? And the question to me seems to be, well, what is his will oriented to? Like, what's the purpose of the will?
- [79:51]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Right?
- [79:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Is it just simply that he's more clever? Is it that this is a tyrant? Like, you know, what is this? And so. And I think Prometheus himself at times is a conflicted character. I don't think he falls clearly into, you know, a virtuous, vicious, you know, distinction. And so I think sometimes that's why it's so hard to navigate him, is because he has this will, but it has to be oriented towards what is actually good. You see this sometimes in, you know, who they do this to. They do this to St. Thomas More, right? And so, like, St. Thomas More becomes the martyr of conscience. And I hate when they do this to him, right? Because what they do is it's like they create the scenario in which it doesn't matter whether St. Thomas More was a Muslim, an atheist, anything, right? He could have been in any religion, ideology, whatever. What's praiseworthy is that the man was Promethean, that he just would not bend, that he picked his principles and he would stay with them. And on a certain level, that is praiseworthy. There's a certain virtue there that I. I think in just a capacity to endure that much, maybe like a fortitude or something like that. But then the day whether that is good or bad has to be whether or not it's oriented to a good. And so, like St. Thomas, mortar can't be a saint simply because his will would not break. But the question is, was his will oriented towards a good? Yes or no? And then it's like, okay, well, the answer is yes, therefore, not breaking was very good. Your will can be oriented towards an evil, and a good king is trying to move you towards what is good and you won't break that. It seems like that can't actually be a good or isn't like fully praiseworthy. And so I think Prometheus presents somewhat of a mixed picture here. That his will is so unbreakable. But at times you really have to take a step back and say, okay, but what is his will oriented to? Like what does its telos, like what does its end?
- [81:47]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
That's really good. Yeah, I think with him too. I mean, and this is why as Christians looking at a pre Christian era, it's like that was the problem, right? That's why we needed Revelations, why we needed Christ to come and show us what we're supposed to orient ourselves towards. Because why would I orient myself towards a tyrant? I mean, a God who treats me this way? It would have to be my will. At that point. I just, I'm not gonna, you know, there is no ultimate good that they're aiming at here. I guess the one argument you could aim at is saying that the good of the human person, that humanity, there's something good enough in them that he's willing to lay his life on the line for it. But at the same time he, as you said, he's a mixed bag.
- [82:38]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, part of it too, I think is with Aeschylus. What is the grammar available to Aeschylus? So Aeschylus just wrote this whole trilogy, the Oresteia, trying to move us from a primitive understanding of justice to, you know, a more robust understanding. But really at the end of the day, I mean, not the belittle the Oresteia, but what we see is a justice that moves from the blood avenger kind of familial level. The justice is handled, you know, by this lone agent from the family. To go right or wrong, that then can lead very quickly into a cycle of violence. Because there's no like intermediary right to actually appeal to. There's no mediator, there's no judge to a procedural justice, one that's rooted actually in the polis. Right. So you have Athena holding court and there's a jury. And it's, it's procedural and it's on the political level, not the familial level. However, even in the end of the Oresteia, it's very clear that the concept of justice is still love your friends and hate your enemies. That's still it. And even here at the very beginning, one of the. One of the gods, I can't remember it might be might or violence, one of them actually has a line that's like, how can you, like, not hate the God that's hated by the other gods, right? It's just to hate Prometheus because we all hate him, right? And so, you know, just kind of like the polis is like the standard, right? So the, the, you know, the traitor to the polis is to be hated because they're an enemy and your fellow patriots are to be loved and there's really no in between. And I would, I would argue that this is actually a primitive form of justice. It's not a injustice. Because maybe to riff off your point about the people that are in the coldest part of hell in the Inferno are the betrayers. They're the traitors, the people who betray those closest to them, right? Their family, their lords, their messiah, et cetera. And if you love your friends and hate your enemies, you're not a traitor, right? You won't betray anybody. And so it actually, I think, is a primitive form of justice. I think we have to give it credit for that. But I think Aeschylus is still working through that grammar. So, you know, to kind of push back on, on my own thoughts here. If, if how we are supposed to judge Prometheus is by, well, is his will oriented towards a good. Or rather to say, well, is it oriented towards what's just. You have to have some grammar or some articulation then of what is justice? And I don't think we have it yet. I mean, not, not to Aeschylus's detriment. Well, it is to his detriment, not to his fault. Right, Because I think he's wrestling with this in a really real way that we're not going to get a really robust understanding of until Plato. We have to have the real philosophers kind of come on the stage, right, to understand this and to kind of crack this open for us. But even Aristotle is going to spend a massive amount of time understanding what justice is. And then obviously, in the Christian tradition, we have the cross. At the end of the day, it's actually not so simple to understand the justice of the cross. That's something that's a mystery that has to be contemplated quite deeply at times. And so I think here, you know, as I find myself sometimes wrestling with this play of like, wait, is Prometheus like Christ figure or is he Lucifer? Like, this is kind of a weird conversation to have. I think it's because what is his will oriented to? But then also what is the capacity to judge his will within the play itself, like with, inside this Hellenized culture. It just doesn't seem to me that we quite have the grammar to articulate this. I mean, the other big thing too is that we don't have play two and three. So it's hard to see, like, we don't see where the maturation arc is. Like, we don't. We don't see, like, where. Where is he trying to develop this? Like, you know, imagine if you only had Agamemnon in the Oresteia.
- [86:29]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah.
- [86:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And then. And then you had to guess, like, well, I think we're going to take justice somewhere, but I'm not really sure where he is going to take it. It'd be really hard to like extrapolate from Agamemnon that we're going to have a procedural justice at the end.
- [86:39]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yes.
- [86:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So I guess it's a. It's a shame that we don't have the second, third one.
- [86:43]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah. And every time I read this, I mentioned at the beginning, I just think, you know, we're going through a moment, especially in Western culture, where the idea of high culture or the idea of beautiful culture just in general. So including architecture, but also, you know, even the sciences. The way we've materialized all of that, we have lost such a respect for what we're doing in that and the high capacity that we have, we've flattened ourselves. We've done ourselves a major disservice by not seeing these things as worth our time, worth our money, worth, you know, entire lives to accomplish this level of culture. But what you see in Prometheus Bound is this idea that this is literally a godlike thing, had to basically give his life for us to be able to do these things. So for us to waste them or for us to just throw them aside for the easy thing is one of the greatest sins we could commit. Right. And today we're struggling with getting the rest of the world to understand why we need beautiful architecture, why it's a good thing. Even convincing sometimes people to go to a classical opera or something like that, they don't even understand why. Like, why, why would I even waste my time, quote unquote, doing something like that? And I feel like Aeschylus would just lose it. Like, what do you mean, waste your time? This is the best thing we could do with our time, is to take in beauty, take in the goodness of. Of culture, and build and create and make the best poetry, make the best art. And instead it's, well, I can just press a machine and a beat comes out and that. That's all I need. To do. I. I just. We. We have such lowered our standards in regard to what we mean by culture. And I like pop culture. There's a lot of aspects of films and pop culture that I love, but if we lose that high sense of what we're participating in, we lose part of ourselves. And I think ultimately that's what Prometheus Bound is about. To be honest, I think there's a lot of subtext. There's a lot of subtopics within it. But ultimately, he's saying, guys, what we're doing is divine in nature. Like, we were not supposed to be given this. So we have to treat this at that level. And it takes suffering to get through this.
- [89:19]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Where do you see? Well, I really like what you say about culture. I think that culture is a word we've kind of grammatically gutted, and we don't really know what that means anymore. The operative word that I think comes to mind here is leisure, right? Just as people. Wonderful text on leisure as the basis of culture. And I think that, again, yeah, what culture or leisure is not simply my capacity to lay on the couch and watch Netflix or to be somewhat vapidly entertained, but rather like leisure was actually when we could actually produce things. Well, I. I don't have to be in survival mode, right? I don't actually have to be worried about where my food comes from and et cetera. So what could I do? Well, maybe I can write a play. Maybe I could write a poem. Maybe when we build our buildings, we don't have to build them completely, you know, utilitarian. I can actually spend the time to make a beautiful building. And so I think we do. I appreciate what you said, because I do think there's a certain leisure that has to come about to create civilization, to create a flourishing civilization. And, you know, kind of pulling from the Platonic side of things, you know, your soul and the polis are supposed to be aligned, right? There's supposed to be this order and beauty and excellence that takes hold of your soul and the polis, the civilization. And so it's not just simply that leisure helps our civilization flourish. And so therefore, it's like a utilitarian good for us. It flourishes because our souls become beautiful, right? We pursue what's beautiful, we become beautiful. And then the more beautiful we become, right? We have this arete, this excellence, the more that tends to permeate into our broader culture. And all of a sudden, the culture itself is ascending, just like the human soul ascends to God, culture itself, you know, Somewhat ascends. And so I like the idea of Prometheus being kind of this agent of civilization. You know, here comes our hope, here comes our intellect, here comes our techne. And these are the things then that we can use to create civilization. I'm curious, though. I want to go back to something you said earlier. I'm curious on your take on the fire. And what is. What is it actually an analog of. What I mean by that is it seems. Then let me just throw out a thesis. It seems to be in a lot of ways an analog of the arts of science. Right. Of techne itself, of really almost an early commentary on technology. Because this is what's weird about man, right? Man removed from technology is cold and dark and helpless. We don't have the strength of the bear, we don't have the speed of the cheetah. Right. We don't have wings, and we just have this. This intellect. And so it seems like there's an early. Because we don't really think about the ancient Greeks and technology, but it seems like there's this early critique of technology here that man has to have this thing to create these crafts and do this to actually, like, grow. I think that's really apparent in the text. And Prometheus takes credit for everything that we've done, which is fine. But I like what you said is that. Yes, but fire also can be chaotic. Like fire can burn. I mean, is it. I guess my point here is, is there a warning in the Promethean myth by using fire as that analog that, you know, we can grow in our humanity through this or we can lose it?
- [92:57]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah, I think it's a. It's like the whole idea of. It's this great gift that we've been given, but it's a gift that we ourselves can cause it to turn on us, if that makes sense. It can become the thing that turns on us. Which is why, like, Mary Shelley. Shelley talks about Frankenstein being a Promethean warning. Because, yeah, it was this unbelievable way of controlling nature and controlling, you know, even the idea of potentially a soul. But we materialized it and it turned on us. There's a lot of talk about that right now with like, AI What. What is this Promethean thing that, yeah, it's going to offer a lot of good because it's going to allow us to offload some of the very difficult ways of handling sicknesses and a lot of that kind of stuff, but it also could turn on us very quickly. And so fire, to me, is a perfect example because in an instant, you'd be out on a campsite roasting marshmallows and hot dogs. In an instant, one person could happen to accidentally step too close and their foot's on fire. And now there's major problems, you know, but you're enjoying yourself, you're having a nice time, you're. And then very quickly it turns into total, total chaos and potential injury. And I, I think he's warning of that because, you know, prior to fire too, we weren't wielding steel against each other, right? So because of fire, now we can build swords, we can build bigger and bigger ships and, and kill and main people. So it's a warning, a blessing and a warning. And I think that that's what being a human person is like. We, we are a blessing, but there's also a lot that we can do to ourselves and to other people that is just ugly and nasty. Human beings can be some of the nastiest people to each other. And, and so he's warning of that. But I, I think fire is the perfect example of that because we think we can control it, but you never know if it can hop out of bounds. And all of a sudden now something's a major problem.
- [95:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. The corruption of the best is the worst. The corruption of the higher is the lower, right? And so you see this. I guess we just keep using him as an example. You see this in Lucifer. So Lucifer was the highest of all creation of the angels. He falls and then he's the greatest of the demons, right? The higher the angel, the lower the demon. There's a corresponding reality there. You even see this with tyranny, right? When Aristotle and Plato talk about the regimes, well, the best regime you could ever live in is, you know, this kind of beneficial monk who rules prudently. Would we not all yearn to just live under the rule of a virtuous man and skip all the bureaucracy and just let him do what's good? That'd be great. The problem is you root all of that in one person, the worst thing that can come out is a tyranny. Right? And then we're stuck, kind of like Prometheus is stuck. We're stuck under this tyranny. And so it kind of using that pattern, it seems that technology by these are kind of just raw thoughts. But it seems that technology, by and large is an extension of our intellect. Right? Our capacity to reflect upon an act as an act allows us to create crafts, just like we said earlier, right. I can judge the act and its efficaciousness and so I can say, you know what, it's actually better to build the building this way or better to use this material or this technique. And therefore we grow and our civilizations grow as well. And so if it really is an extension of the intellect, and the intellect is the highest faculty of the soul, then we also see then when the intellect falls, right, man becomes the worst of all creatures. When our baser appetites, you know, the appetitive or the spirited, rules over the intellect, we become the worst of animals. And so it just seems that technology then would just follow that. Right. It could be either the best that we produce that allows for human flourishing and harmony and civilization, or it can be some of the worst. And I think this is the warning of today's age, because we're creating technology today that doesn't have a lot of wiggle room for error. So, you know, back in the day, someone made a bronze sword and misused it. I mean, some people might die, but the world wouldn't end. Today we have technology that someone misuses creations over. Yeah, right. Which is a horrific. You know, maybe that's where it goes back to Mary Shelley and Frankenstein and some of the warnings, I think, that are in there.
- [97:28]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah, it's interesting, something that came to my mind. So a good friend of mine is a professor here in philosophy, Dr. Jim Madden. He calls us offloading beings. So what's in the intellect we find in the real world. So even like mechanistic understanding of, you know, creating new ways of building cars and all that kind of stuff. So it all comes from inside here and goes out. So then whenever you see the potential danger, it's a reflection of what's going on in the mind, which is a little scary.
- [97:58]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, yeah. No, it really is. And I think. And then one of the, one of the worst ironies of our age is that somehow we have coupled together the greatest capacity for technology with probably the least humanity. So we are like, we have flat souls. To go back to the flat souls analogy, we are flat souls wielding atomic power and AI. And that is horrific. Right, because we don't even know. We. It's. It's just amazing that we're like, we're creating these things and we don't even know what a human is. Right. Actually, a lot of our basic words and culture now have been gutted. So we don't, like, the base realities that we should know are gone. And then you, like, are holding this new technology. Right. I mean, imagine, you know, a child with a sword. They have, they have they. They don't have the capacity now to make the right judgment calls, but regardless, they're holding the sword and, like, how do we. Right, like, how do we think this is going to end? It's probably going to end poorly. And so. But unfortunately, again, we're dealing with things much more than swords, so want to maybe as we kind of come to the end. Do we know. I mean, I have a theory, but do we know who he's talking about? So when Prometheus talks about, remember, there's the two myths and so one's about IO and Hercules. We know who that is. Hercules is going to come and free him. Do we know? I have a suspicion, but I'm not sure if the mythologies line up. Do we know who he's talking about? That will be the usurper.
- [99:34]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Oh, I think that was lost in.
- [99:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
The other two because there's another myth and I don't. So I don't want to. I don't want to give this. I don't want to. What I want to say, I don't want to tack this on to Aeschylus because one of the problems with. With navigating the myths is that there's multiple variations. And so you can't be like, oh, yeah, this is, you know, this is how the flood narrative worked, or this is what Prometheus did, because sometimes. And also you have to be cognizant that, like Aeschylus, just like he did in the Oresteia, changes the myths. Like he. He's receiving something and he changes something to make a point. But I do know, like, when we studied the Iliad, there's at least one myth that says that this woman is Thetis. And I really like this because it's actually Achilles that would have been the last usurper of Zeus. So in one of the myths, it's Prometheus tells Zeus. So Zeus and Poseidon both like Thetis and they're competing for her, if I remember correctly. And it's Prometheus then who tells them that the myth that I heard had nothing to do with him tied to the rock or anything. But Prometheus tells them, oh, by the way, whoever, you know, whatever child thee just has will be greater than his father. And so it's the last. It's the really the last chance that Zeus had to lose his reign because he's already. He defeated Kronos, right? He defeated, you know, I can't remember its name right now, Typhon, the dragon that was underneath the mountain. Like, he's conquered all of these things and the very last thing he has, he has to worry about this usurper. And so Prometheus says that it's Thetis. So then this is why then the beginning of the Iliad starts off. So what they do is how do you fix this? Well, you, you just marry Thetis to a mortal. That's the way. That's how you fix this. Right? So then you can't have a usurper God. And so Thetis, they, this is why they arranged the marriage between Thetis and Peleus. And so, and then of course that, that wedding is the basis of the war in Troy. But it's really interesting then to look at Achilles as the tyrant, as the rage, as this creature, that if he had have been born of say Zeus and Cetus, he would have been the new God. Like he could have been the kings of God, like king of gods and men, right under that, like particular myth. So I was really, when I was reading this, I was like, oh, I wonder if this is going to be Thetus. And then it like never gives you any clues. And then I was like, oh, there's multiple plays and I have no idea what they're talking about go anymore. But I just, I know there's at least that myth out there that, that it was Thetis that was going to be the last chance for usurper. And this is also why Zeus constantly sleeps with mortals.
- [102:16]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah, right.
- [102:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I mean, it's a joke and we're always talking about Hera and like Zeus is lusting and all stuff, but the reason he has such a. An appetite for mortals is because they can't give birth to a usurper. Right. They're always going to be demigods for the most part. Dionysus is kind of a weird example, but for the most part they're always going to be demigods.
- [102:32]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah, yeah. I really like that thesis though, I think, and who knows, there might be some scholarship on it that I've never seen, but that, that could be very interesting. I, I also find it interesting even the idea of, you know, even Hercules, although he's not the usurper, but the idea of a half mortal being a usurper, or the idea of if Achilles was to be the one, I mean, even if as a mortal, I, I just find that interesting because it's the whole Nietzschean thing of we killed God, I find it interesting that it would be potentially immortal, would be the one to do that because we would be the ones to do that. Right? Like we would cut ourselves off from the divine. So to see that as. I don't. I doubt the Greeks ever saw it that way, but I find that a very interesting pieces for sure.
- [103:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, you know, one of the tensions in that story that you. Maybe I should reflect on further, but it seems like at least a preliminary tension is that Prometheus then is simultaneously claiming that Zeus is a tyrant, but that Prometheus actually holds the knowledge of how the tyrant is going to fall. And it's really fascinating that Prometheus will then leverage that knowledge for his own freedom, which means that he would leverage his own freedom over the fall of the tyrant. So he would rather the tyrant continue. So that's where we kind of get some of these, these tensions. I think of like Prometheus having this as like, you know, indomitable will and he's not going to give up, etc. But then he does seem to leverage knowledge that basically secures Zeus's reign for all eternity, so he can actually go free. And I'm not entirely sure if that is terribly consistent with the Prometheus that we see in Prometheus Bound.
- [104:19]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah.
- [104:19]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Does that make sense?
- [104:21]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
It does, it does. And I think maybe that leans towards the idea of Cunningham being a virtue in a lot of the Greek plays.
- [104:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Because that's one thing we didn't really mention, but that's, that's part of the, the juxtaposition between Zeus and Prometheus is which one is actually more clever. Because the other thing, I don't think we mentioned it. Another thing that Prometheus did is he was the one that tricked Zeus. Regarding the human sac or human sacrifices. Regarding the sacrifices that the humans make to Zeus. Right. So like, Zeus is like, what kind of sacrifices are you going to give me? And so Prometheus is like, okay, well, I'll set this up. He takes basically all the gunk, the sinews, everything you don't want, puts it under the glistening fat and then, you know, hides the good meat and stuff, you know, under the skins. Zeus looks at the fat and says, oh, this is the good part. And therefore, when they, this is why, like in the Iliad, when they offer the sacrifices they have, they basically give Zeus everything they don't want and then they can have a feast on everything. That's wonderful. Right. And so. Well, who figured that out? Well, Prometheus did. And if you remember, Zeus has this, this trait where if he gives his. His ascent, his divine ascent, then he even he can't walk it back. Right. Like, he gives Thetis an Iliad. And so that, you know, that's one of the things that Prometheus does too, which, I mean, there's just so much there because you see that even in that narrative, man's relationship with Zeus, the divine, is even one that can be colored by deceit. That there's still like, that one of us is the. Is the deceiver in this relationship in between the relationship between the human and the divine.
- [105:56]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah. How that would paint to your piety, I think you might be going through the motions, but it's likely just to save your own skin or at least be in the favor of the gods, which makes total sense if you read Homer. But a lot of it is just. Yeah, go through the motions. This is what Prometheus basically told us to do so that we survive and we don't get put up on a crag or whatever. But the heart's not in it. There's really no. It definitely paints what you mean by piety, for sure, because is it really pious if you're not actually doing it out of a real loyalty versus fear?
- [106:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. Yeah. It brings up a lot of just juxtapositions that are very odd. Even in Hessian, his theogony, Hesiod Alpha's piety for Zeus doesn't want to admit that Zeus could be tricked.
- [106:51]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah.
- [106:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Like, Prometheus is this kind of like this idiot that thinks he can trick Zeus, but he really can't. And so Zeus, like, out of his broad knowledge of what would be good for man in the long run, like, intentionally is deceived but knows what he's being deceived.
- [107:05]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Right.
- [107:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
There's like this weird, like, Hesiod runs this interference.
- [107:08]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah.
- [107:09]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
For Zeus. Whereas then, like in the later myths, Prometheus, like, no, he really is tricking Zeus and you get this kind of like, tyrant mentality. So I, again, I think there's a lot to wrestle with these myths.
- [107:18]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
I agree. Yeah.
- [107:22]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Any kind of last closing thoughts or anything that we missed on Prometheus Found?
- [107:27]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Nothing in particular. I think that, you know, just for your listeners, I would definitely highly recommend reading this work. It's one that kind of gets skipped over sometimes, and I just think that there's so much in it. Again, It'll probably take 40, 45 minutes if you really sit down and. And focus up and read it. But to me, I. It's just such an interesting celebration of what it means to be a human person, what it means to be culture, creators, civilization and builders, that there's just so much to think through and how the Greeks understood that and how there was a foreshadowing of what we are as Christian Catholics. I just. I don't know. Big fan.
- [108:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No. Very good. Well, I really appreciate you being here today and kind of helping us navigate Prometheus Bound. Where can people find more of your work?
- [108:12]
Dr. Jared Zimmerer
Yeah. So at Benedictine College, go to Media Benedictine. Edu. You can see some of the shows we're building there. We've got several series that we've released, as well, as I mentioned at the beginning, we've got some short films that we're working on. As far as social media, almost all of my handles are just Jared Zimmerer. So future, look that up. You can follow me on there. And yeah, we love to connect.
- [108:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
All right, well, very good. All right, everyone. Well, thank you for joining us for discussion on Prometheus Bound on Ascend, the great Books podcast. Next week we will be taking up Antigone by Sophocles. See ya.