Greek Morals and Religion

    The story of Prometheus has been adapted, adopted and interpreted by countless writers and thinkers throughout the ages. It represents the high esteem which history has for classical culture; its mythology, drama and poignant messages. But what are these messages really? Freud thought they were the manifestation of unrequited sexual and violent desires, Nietzsche claimed that Greek tragedy, rooted so deeply in mythological narratives, was fundamentally concerned with the attempted taming of chaos and the realisation that chaos and turmoil is an inevitable aspect of existence. Using Prometheus as an example, defenders of Catholicism would use the myth as a proof of the inescapability of divine justice and retribution to the impious. Such careful analysis and interpretation has not been repeated in the study of other mythological corpuses. This is due in large part to the evolution of Western/European civilisation - the Romans adopted Greek culture (though they disdained Greek sensibilities and social practices), Medieval Europe idolised and attempted to recapture the achievements of Rome. The rediscovery of Greek scientific and philosophical writings thanks to the Islamic empire heavily influenced the scientific discoveries of the enlightenment. Thus, the Greeks are intextricably bound up in our cultural and perhaps psychological make up. The mythology of the Greeks then, is the mythology of the Western world and as such has been subject to extreme amounts of critique.

    As I attempted to show with my discussion of Freud's use of myth however, Greek mythology and narrative must be taken as a product of its own age. 

    Regarding the moral nature which has been ascribed to Greek myths I wish to make several comments. The Greeks did not necessarily look to the God's and deities for moral guidance. (1) (2)  Questions such as impiety were answered by myths such as that of King Midas, who was cursed with asses ears for his ridicule of Apollo and of Odysseus' oceanic punishment following his denial of Poseidon's influence over his victory in Troy. Myths such as that of Prometheus (i.e. those set in the primordial past, concerned with the interaction of deities with the cosmos) then should be seen as aetiologies. They are the product of a people seeking explanations for natural phenomena i.e. the existence of earth and sky, the stars, fire, water etc. The men in Hesiod's Prometheus myth are largely inanimate bystanders - they are acted upon by the God's thus giving rise to certain religious practices whose origin went back beyond living memory. All ancient cultures invoked the divine when attempting to explain certain trends and practices in culture and religion, thus the Egyptians would look to Osiris to explain mummification and Jews will look to Moses on Sinai to explain why priests wear certain types of robes etc.

   Freud believed that the God's in Greek mythology represent some ideal of existence, something the human mind subconsciously desires as his/her own reality. However for the Greeks themselves this was not necessarily the case. For Aristotle happiness is only achieved by the active member of the Polis, Homer's 'hearthless, stateless' man  (3) (4)  is beyond happiness as are the Gods who have no morals. They are incapable of moral action because to act in a 'good' way there must be the possibility of acting wrongly or with consequence (5). No action construed by mortals to need moral direction would have a real effect on deities. Thus the examples of virtue the Greeks take is from men. Achilles, Odysseus, etc. 

  I would not therefore ascribe a particular moral message in Prometheus in the Greek sense. We cannot however, forget drama. Aristotle said that the purpose of tragedy was to purge the dark, sinful desires from the audience. By seeing violent and visceral actions on stage the desire to commit such acts themselves would be driven from the Greek mind. They would be emotionally cleansed; Aristotle called this process catharsis. Why then, is Prometheus a fitting subject for Aeschylus? By establishing Prometheus as the ultimate benefactor to mankind Aeschylus sets in motion the concepts of fear and pity evolving in the audience's response. (It is these two emotions that Aristotle postulated were the key to catharsis) We pity Prometheus because he is mankind's hero; punished for helping us, and we fear for him after Zeus hurls him into the abyss at the end of Prometheus Bound. The moral nature of Aeschylus's play then, is not dependent on Prometheus' own actions against Zeus' power, rather the audience is encouraged to pay respect to those who represent virtue.

Greek myths are not fables, they defy a reduction to one line moral messages. Christian uses of Prometheus as the symbol of the punished impious fail to recognise the fact that Prometheus is freed by Hercules. Freud in my opinion was closer to the truth. The mythological corpus is the collection of numerous storytellers, it therefore arguably represents a mean subconscious attitude. However his focus on the sexual rather than philosophical nature of the Greek discourse did, in my opinion, let his theories down. Nietzsche though came the closest. The interpretation of myth and drama as a representation of the conflict between the knowable and the unknowable, reason/civilisation versus chaos is apt. We see countless instances of Hero battling or taming monsters and natural phenomena, and in Prometheus we see the a divine clash of these two warring sides and a titanic intermediary. Prometheus perhaps instigates the concept of reason versus chaos in his introduction of the seed of civilisation (fire). The Olympian Gods meanwhile revel in chaos, they solve problems by destruction and attempt to barbarise mankind after Prometheus' gift. The moral message to extrapolate from this is therefore the very same one that is stolen from Socrates by Alciato the the Emblematum liber of 1531. 'What is above us is nothing to us'. Rather than promoting ignorance and adherence to church doctrine this quote should be taken in its original meaning. Famously Socrates was arrested and tried on charges of impiety and so this quote refers to his attempt to maintain and practice an empirical philosophy. We must trust in what we can see and understand. The gods may exist but they are beyond comprehension. Fire, science, reason, mankind itself; these are the things that can be observed and studied -  it is in these realms that we must search for our moral guidance.


(1) "In Greece it was not a religious leader who divined a morality which superseded the virtues of the tribe, but a philosopher"  Religion, Morality and Philosophy. A.H. Hannay. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. vol 40. 1939-40

(2) "The ancient greeks from the earliest record we have of them tend to see themselves, as it were, 
estranged from the world, they are not part of the divine scheme, 
the olympians are something very different from themselves and aloof to their struggles. 
they are here alone."   Great Ideas of Philosophy, lecture 2. Philsophy, did the Greeks Invent it? Prof. D. Robertson.   (I would recommend buying this set of lectures from www.teach12.com)

(3)    he that foments civil discord is a clanless, hearthless outlaw.  Iliad Book IX. Line 51. http://www.online-literature.com/view.php/iliad   03/12/10


(4) Great Ideas of Philosophy, lecture 14. Aristotle on the Perfect Life. Prof. D. Robertson.


(5) Great Ideas of Philosophy, lecture 2. Philosophy, did the Greeks Invent it? Prof. D. Robertson


Robertson observed that while the Greeks were reverential to the Gods they felt a separation from the divine (shown in Homer's Iliad when the God's can be healed at will on the battlefield while heroes such as Achilles sacrifice themselves for the cause of virtue.). He says that the religious aspect of the ancient greek world calls by default a philosophical approach to the problems of life and mind - and especially morality, virtue, epistemology and governance.

Mythology and Shared Cultural Identity

Having discussed in my previous post the narrative and thematic similarities between the Prometheus stories and stories involving Satan, temptation and knowledge in the Tenakh I feel the need to attempt an explanation for these relationships and what we can learn from them.

Many historians and philologists have noted certain connections between mythological and religious texts; I will take both these genres as a whole corpus as mythology was/is undoubtedly a way of expressing what would be regarded today as religion. It is my opinion that the formation of a specific, doctrinal religion represents an evolution from mythology, which had a distinctly oral tradition associated with it.

To take the Tenakh as a case study again, one can immediately see the use of at least four distinct sources throughout the text. This shows that the corpus of material is a compilation of stories which come from myriad cultural, political and geographical circumstances. No where is this more evident than in Genesis One and Two. Genesis Two appears to many scholars to be based on an older, more pagan background – thus we have the challenge of the serpent to Yahweh’s power and more of a focus on the arboreal, floral and faunal nature of man and the Earth; this is far more similar to mythologies where man, often made from dust or mud, is inextricably linked with the Earth/Mother Earth. Genesis One meanwhile offers itself as a staunch opposition to the Babylonian creation epic, The Enuma Elish. This account is a later addition to the corpus of biblical text, dating from the time of the Jews return to Israel following the conquests of Nebuchadnezzar II and the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BC. It was in this period that the Torah as we have it now started to solidify and take shape as a complete work after centuries of focus on oral tradition and separate scraps of poems, stories and legal documents. Genesis1 can consequently be placed in this context of great upheaval both religious and political. Therefore, the book of Genesis tries to battle against the context of Babylonian polytheism by adopting a similar mythic structure to the Babylonian cosmology. Similarities such as the pattern of universal construction, and the assertion that Yahweh was sole creator and master over previously divine bodies such as the sun.

From this example we can conclude that neighbouring cultures had a profound effect on each others religious and mythological texts. In a period characterised by a constant change in ‘national’, racial and linguistic borders such exchange is inevitable. For the Jews exiled in Babylon it was necessary to adapt their doctrine in order to reflect the environment they found themselves in; an environment which seriously challenged their previously certain beliefs. This example provides an explanation for certain trends in religion based upon texts, written by peoples who had a close geographical and political relationship. However it does not explain why there are recurring motifs in many mytho-religious doctrines from peoples who could only have had minor (if any) cultural meetings.

A prime example of this is the adherence of many cultures to a belief that an episode of global destruction occurred in the primeval past. Meso-American, Indian, Scandinavian, Greek, Sumerian, Hebrew and even Polynesian cultures all record flood myths. In these myths it is a common feature that only very few people are allowed to survive, thus enabling mankind to begin again. It seems to me that this recurring story is an example of a shared culture, a culture which predates civilisation and multi-lingual nations. I would postulate that there resided among shamans, story tellers and priests the memory of an expansion of mankind out of the cradle of evolution. It has been observed by anthropologists and archaeologists that this happened in separate waves, with mankind leaving Africa and travelling around the fertile crescent, into Europe, Asia and beyond. The Ryan-Pitman theory and the Lake Agassiz theory both postulate that a dramatic increase in sea level, caused by either the flooding of the Black Sea or the draining of the great glacial lake in North America (Agassiz) became a fixture in the folklore of these largely nomadic humans.  Couple this with the fact that during migrations very few people would have survived in order to create new colonies and the basis of flood myths becomes apparent.

This is of course theoretical but the consideration of such startling similarities in folklore, myth and religion warrant the postulation of such theories. It must always be remembered that we as a species have a common origin and therefore on some level we share some innate cultural memories which help constitute our psychology. Freud believed that the Oedipus myth was a by-product of just such a shared identity and it represented the deepest parts of our very psyche as a species. This as an example may well have been unsuccessful as the Oedipus style story does not recur in other cultural traditions; however the theory in itself is sound. There is in the mythology of the world shared ideas such as universal destruction and the remaking of civilisation, forbidden knowledge, tricksters who attempt to deceive the Gods or help mankind or both, and many others. The Prometheus myth is a prime example of a story which has its grounding in such shared ideas and as such the studying of it allows us to better understand the psychology of our ancestors; their hopes, fears and how they believed the world worked. Biblical and literary scholars have a process by which they establish the more reliable and plausible aspects of a text. If an item is referred to by multiple sources (such as Matthew, Mark and Luke) it is more likely to be true than if just one source mentions it. If we take world mythology as a whole discourse, an entity in and of itself, and apply this technique we may get one step closer to understanding our ancestors on a deeper, unified level and maybe arrive at truths which geography, imperialism and language has hitherto barred from us.  

An Ambiguous Benefactor

     Having established a possible link between the figures of Prometheus and Satan in an earlier post I have decided to make some more comments on the nature of the ambiguous benefactor character.

In Hesiod’s Theogony Prometheus is presented as an archetypal trickster character who puts himself at cerebral odds with Zeus in order that mankind be better provided for. However, Prometheus’ motive is not initially, explicitly explained. It appears to the reader that he is engaging in a conflict purely for the exercise of his own wit; the so called benefits to mankind seem to me to occur as a by product of attempting to antagonise Zeus. Prometheus becomes seen as a benefactor to mortals because of the gifts bestowed that would otherwise have been withheld; this was expanded even further by Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound  where the Titan is credited with providing, ‘every art possessed by man’ (Prometheus Bound. 506) such as science, reason, divination, agriculture etc. No doubt such gifts do indeed make life liveable, but one must consider that prior to Prometheus’ attempt to dupe Zeus at the sacrifice of Mekone man lived, if not on a par with the Gods, then in a blissful state where they have sustenance provided by Mother Earth, there is no sickness, conflict or toil and no temptation of women to cause disruption, strife and potentially sin. It is at this point that the parallel with the Biblical narrative can be seen.

The Serpent in the Garden of Eden attempts to undermine the authority of Yahweh, very probably not to directly benefit mankind but rather to pursue his own agenda of self aggrandisement. Men lived comfortably in Eden before this sacrilegious intervention just as man in primordial Greece had lived in harmony with Earth but were potentially like pets to the god(s). There is no freedom without the potential to sin, no possibility of the exhibition of virtue without the fear of recrimination and punishment. Hence the double edged sword that Satan/Prometheus swings between the gods and man.

The gift that the serpent bestows is interesting when considering a comparison to Prometheus, for it is the gift of knowledge. The serpent says that, ‘your eyes shall be opened’ (Genesis 3:5) which parallels with Aeschylus’ Prometheus comment about humans that, ‘though they had eyes to see, they saw to no avail.’ (Prometheus Bound. 447). The name Prometheus in Greek literally translates as ‘forethought’ or ‘foreknowledge’ and so he is attributed with the gift of prophecy, a gift he provides for mankind in Prometheus Bound. The acquisition of knowledge is the central theme here, it is knowledge which Yahweh conceals from Adam and Eve in Eden and it is knowledge – manifesting itself in the sciences which Prometheus provides. The serpent says the fruit from the tree will provide mankind with the knowledge of good and evil, but what evil was there in the world before the serpents appearance? What evil was in man’s world before Zeus was forced to punish Prometheus and man with Pandora and all the ills contained in her jar? While it may be that these two figures disrupted the equilibrium of divine existence it can also be argued that they brought mankind out of the primeval darkness. They provided the first glimmers of rational thought, the potential for hope and virtue; they caused us to cease existing as animalistic entities and to emerge into a world of cognition and enquiry. They function in cultural memory as light-bearers, or in the Latin, Lucifers.

A further comparison can be seen between Prometheus and the definitive Satan character (rather than the primordial image of the serpent) in the book of Job. Again in this narrative we see a conflict of wills, egos and wits between the ruling god and the upstart subordinate.

As mentioned previously, the condition of man before the fall (in both Greek and Hebrew stories) leads us to consider the motives of the benefactor characters and this is repeated on a smaller scale, on perhaps a more personal scale in the story of Job.

Job was a man from Uz, he is a gentile, and some biblical scholars have interpreted him as representing ‘every man’ (The Old Testament    Prof. Amy-Jill Levine – The Teaching Company. 2001). Satan comes to God who then boasts of Job’s faith and virtue, Satan replies that Job is only faithful because God has blessed him; he is enclosed in his hedgerow, he grows food without toil etc. Satan then challenges God to test Job’s faith by causing him to feel the burden of hardship. We can thus interpret Job as representing mankind living at ease with gods and natural surroundings. Satan, like Prometheus, disrupts this existence so as to antagonise the ruling God thus causing hardship to rain down upon man. Job is in the darkness throughout the narrative, he does not understand the ways of the world. It is not Satan who provides enlightenment in this instance, it is God in the form of a whirlwind who provides the hitherto unknown knowledge, ‘who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? Therefore have I uttered that I understood not.’ (Job 42:3) Job then, like Adam and Eve, and the primeval Greeks have their eyes opened by knowledge, ‘I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.’ (Job 42:5)

Satan, like Prometheus, instigates the mechanism by which man becomes able to understand the world. While this gift may come through pain and toil, while it may lead us down a path away from a previously happy existence we will ultimately be benefited because the ‘Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.’ (Job 42:10). The ambiguous benefactor then. He leads us into the light through his own desire for trickery and the nurturing of his ego. Do we thank him with a smile for his unintended gifts or do we rage against him for destroying our ‘Edenic’ past? The Lucifers of Greece and Israel have a lot to answer for, but they have also answered the questions which without them, would never have been asked.