Once more on polytheism (this time with Geoffrey Chaucer)
I've recently started reading Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
(I'd like to say that of course I've read it before, everyone has, and of course I'm returning to it for a refreshing re-read. This would obviously be a lie. To quote Arnold Bennett:
Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man, who has read steadily that which he ought to have read sixteen hours a day, from early infancy.’
Arnold Bennett, Journal, Oct. 15, 1896
So yes, I'm reading it for the first time.)
In the first story, The Knight's Tale (which has practically nothing in common with the rather good film), two noble knights (Arcite and Palamon) fall in love with the same lady (Emily). After various complications they agree to a suggestion, made by Theseus King of Athens, that they each assemble 100 knights and come together for a tournament. Whoever triumphs wins Emily as his bride (Emily doesn't get much say in the matter).
But before the account of the tournament Chaucer spends several verses describing three temples of the city of Athens. This passage will be relevant to the story (as we'll see), but it is very striking on its own, and raises significant questions about the culture of Athens in the story. (All quotes below are from Nevill Coghill's translation for Penguin Classics.)
The three temples
The temple of Mars, the god of war, is decorated with the most horrific imagery imaginable. It is "hideous to behold," a "ghastly sight" with no windows to alleviate the gloom. On the walls are depicted thieves and pick-pockets, as well as images of treason, murder, rape and suicide.
There I saw madness cackling his distress,
Armed insurrection, outcry, fierce excess,
The carrion in the undergrowth, slit-throated,
And thousands violently slain.
The heroes depicted in the temple of Mars are the insane tyrant Emperor Nero and the traitors who stabbed Julius Caesar. The most violent and deathly evils, therefore, are openly celebrated in the city of Athens.
However, when the battle is joined, the noble Duke Theseus decrees that most weapons are banned and only hand-to-hand combat allowed, with those who are injured removed from the field before they die. This merciful limit of bloodshed is celebrated by all the people.
A similar contradiction can be seen in the other two Athenian temples. Venus, the goddess of love, is depicted naked and surrounded by the love-lorn and sexually promiscuous:
Pleasure and Hope, Desire, Foolhardiness,
Beauty and Youth, Lasciviousness, Largesse,
Philtres [love-potions] and Force, Falsehood and Flattery,
Extravagance, Intrigue and Jealousy...
Across the street, however, a temple stands to Diana the goddess of chastity. Here, those who have succumbed to Venus' charms are depicted as punished:
I saw Actaeon turned into a stag;
This was Diana's vengeance, lest he brag
Of having seen her naked.
So in the same city, the Athenians are encouraged to worship a naked goddess as well as a goddess who punishes anyone who sees her naked. They are encouraged to worship a god who exults in violence and war while also acclaiming a ruler who acts to alleviate it.
This is the tension at the heart of all polytheism. The multiple gods worshipped are in conflict with one another (if they were not, they would collapse into being one god). They each offer a particular good thing to their worshippers - military victory, the indulgence of desire, the safeguarding of the vulnerable. In the Tale the three main characters pray in the three Temples - Arcite prays to Mars for military victory, Palamon pray to Venus for Emily, Emily prays to Diana that both men will fail and she can remain a virgin. But it is not just that three different sorts of people exist - a society will need to keep all the gods happy so that their help will be available at different times. As Ecclesiastes reminds us, there is "a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace" (Eccles 3:8) - or as the Athenians might have it, a time for Venus and a time for Diana, a time for Mars and a time for Theseus.
Well, we might think, so what? Yes, the Ancient Greeks were bonkers. We knew that already. But as we considered last week when we began thinking about idolatry, we shouldn't be so quick to judge what we ourselves practise.
21st century polytheism
Britain (as far as I know) does not have many temples to Mars, Venus, and Diana (it does, of course, have many temples to more mainstream false gods). But it has 775 cinemas, on whose screens we are invited to gaze upon the works of Mars and Venus in the kind of detail that might have made an Athenian blush. We are fed (if we choose to be so) countless images of violence and sex, not only for our entertainment, but for our gratification, and even for our moral education (consider how many films featuring graphic sex scenes have been termed "important" in the last few years).
But this same cinematic world is also paying their obeisance to Diana. In the wake of the #MeToo scandal and the exposure of the sleazy underworld of producers like Harvey Weinstein, we are seeing an increasing demand that actors demonstrate flawless personal lives - both now and in their past, which we'll rake through online - before they are employed. We demand that actors live in chastity like Diana, then demand they are publicly sexually immoral like Venus.
The same kind of contradictions abound in our modern world, and our Greco-Roman forebears would have no trouble identifying a god to help us with it. We want to be safe from attack from enemies (Mars); but we also want to have open borders because we don't want to be seen as racist (Amphictyonis). We want the latest gadgets and the fastest internet so we can distract ourselves more efficiently (Apollo); but we also crave a slower pace of life and a freedom from the anxiety of the need to be in the know (Athena). We want to be able to travel wherever we want, whenever we want (Hermes); but we also want to reduce our impact on the environment, or be seen to be doing so (Demeter). We want to be able to indulge our drinking habits (Bacchus) but behave well and think clearly (Sophrosyne). We want forgiveness for ourselves and for others we like (Clementia) and revenge on our enemies (Nemesis).
The list goes on, and it will continue to expand as long as we have "passions [which] are at war within [us]" (James 4:1). We are complex and divided beings - we are made in God's image and yet have proudly rejected his worship to indulge our desires. What that means is we are a mass of contradictions. We see no way to reconcile our conflicting desires; but we don't want to give any of them up. We know that sexual promiscuity causes utter misery, but we still want to indulge in it (or at least watch it being indulged in). We know that we're destroying the planet, but we still want to go on holiday somewhere far-flung. So the gods proliferate, and we have to placate them all, even as they war against each other.
What is the way out? We could try to prioritise just one of these goods - or maybe a few which vaguely point in the same direction - and live a more cohesive and integrated life for ourselves. But (at least) three factors makes this impossible - our own self-division and sinful inability to meet even our own standards; the difficulty of persuading anyone else to the same point of view; and the fact that each of these goods, when obsessed over and taken to extremes, becomes monstrous. A society that was all Venus and no Diana would be awful - but so would one that was all Diana and no Venus. The monomaniac, the single-issue politician, the fanatic - we are aware that these people cannot live well and we find them insufferable.
So could we try to find an overarching theory to unite them - a principle which includes within itself all the goods which we want to obtain? Some people do try this, usually when they're young and haven't yet had the experience which helps them appreciate the baffling complexity of the human condition. The attempt to formulate this kind of principle is usually preceded with "why can't we just...?" and the answer is almost always "because life's more complicated than that."
I once came across a protest (of sorts) on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, where a bunch of earnest and determined young men and women were marching around with signs that said "STOP THE WAR - SAVE THE EARTH." To which the obvious response is - yes, but how? I'm not sure there was anyone sitting in the US Congress who was genuinely contemplating a "start wars and destroy the earth" policy (and if they were, I'm not sure they'd be persuaded by the signs) - it's just very difficult to do these things. As Oliver O'Donovan comments:
...the peculiarly innocent posture of much modern moral idealism [conflates] its multitude of causes into one grand but illusory project. The term 'ethical', as used in phrases such as 'ethical trade' and 'ethical banking', covers many adventures in moral earnestness which have little in common with one another beyond the fact that the same good people support them through the same coffee mornings and the same sponsored bike rides... the modern will, with its generalised high-mindedness, brushes the differences aside and conceals from itself that carbon-emissions, endemic poverty, torture, speculative bankers, and anti-immigration rallies provide diverse perils, and saving the planet from one of them may not at all be conducive to saving it from the others.
Oliver O'Donovan, Finding and Seeking
In Chaucer, the wise god Saturn intervenes with a plan which means the gods stop squabbling over their three human pawns and everyone gets what they want - Arcite wins the fight, but a sudden very localised earthquake (obviously) throws him off his horse and he dies, so Palamon gets to marry Emily. The sharp-eyed among you will notice that Emily, in fact, does not get what she wanted. But Chaucer tells us she was fine with it, so that's OK then.
A better way
The Bible offers us both liberation and a challenge.
Liberation, because there we read that the unstable, chaotic, anarchic world which polytheism offers us is not the true reality. There is a single controlling principle at the heart of the universe - not the dissatisfying sagacity of Saturn, but the Triune God who is the Creator and Ruler of it. He is not complex and chaotic, not divided or confused - he is (as theologians call it) simple. Not that he is easy to understand or of low intelligence - far from it - but that he is not made up of a collection of warring parts or passions. He is not, like us, self-divided into an aggressive bit and a peaceful bit, a lustful bit and a chaste bit. No - he is who he is, without confusion or incoherence; unchanging and stable, the same yesterday, today, and forever. That means that he can provide every good that is truly good for us:
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
James 1:17
Everything which we desire and which are false gods claim to offer us is either something we could get from the living God from whom we have rebelled, or a perversion of some good thing we can get from that God. We don't have to run around trying to placate multiple warring gods to get what we crave. Rather, we can come to the God - the one who has already done everything himself to be at peace with us - and who promises to give us what we truly need.
But the Bible also provides us with a challenge. In a polytheistic universe, we can have as many gods as we have desires, because the gods are simply created things, formed in our own image. We have sexual urges, so we create a goddess of sex. We have violent urges, so we create a god of war. But worshipping this God means that we must be formed (actually re-formed in Christ) into his image. That means our desires will have to change - we need him to teach us what is good (Micah 6:8), we need to have our minds renewed to approve his will rather than indulge our own (Romans 12:1-2). And in doing so we must become like him - not riven by warring passions, but single-minded in our devotion to him, seeking first his kingdom and righteousness:
There is one, undivided God... and because God is like that, then he must be approached and worshipped by one undivided person: all your heart, all your soul, all your strength... God is not pulled in different directions. So neither should we be in our worship of him.
David Gibson, Destiny, 69