When I began this little series of Chronicles, I hadn’t given any real thought to the interaction of the Jews and the Greeks as it played out in history, having simply taken for granted the synthesis of Hebrew and Greek elements in what must still be called Western Civilization. But given that by fate or coincidence this series brought us to the “holiday season” when, as rarely occurs, Christmas and Hanukkah began on the same day, I found that we could not avoid reflecting on this chronologically youngest of the Jewish festivals, which indeed concerns a real-world conflict between our two cultural “protagonists.”
For the Maccabees were fighting not against “antisemitism” but against a more insidious, if less ugly and violent, danger to the Jewish people’s continued existence: assimilation. And the “Greek” nature of this assimilation, as embodied by Antiochus IV’s invasion of Judaea, was no accident; as has remained the case throughout the history of Western civilization, the quasi-secular classical world, whose religious traditions are remembered and transmitted via the arts, and in particular through literature, a secularized form of sacred legend in which the individual reader/spectator’s sense of the sacred is appealed to not through accounts of human history but through fictions. Fictions are hypothetical models of human action that we “imitate” in our souls, and whose truth we experience—or not—according to the ability of the artist/narrator to create and transmit them, and ours to grasp and vicariously experience them, as significant, in the sense of providing believable and meaningful models of human behavior—which we are asked on the one hand to understand, that is, to mimetically “resonate” with, and on the other, to judge as to their agreement or disagreement with the sacred morality most simply formulated in Hillel’s Golden Rule.
No doubt the victory of the Maccabees was temporary, and the classical world of Greece, and then Rome, ultimately conquered and destroyed the Jewish polity, inaugurating for the Jews two millennia of “exile.” But Hanukkah, particularly after the (re)establishment of Israel in 1948, is a celebration of spiritual resistance that has confirmed and justified the Jews’ unflagging hope to return to their ancient homeland.
It is worth pointing out at this preliminary stage that Judeo-Christian Western Culture, although founded spiritually on the two Testaments, is founded culturally on a corpus of European literature whose core is constituted by classical Greek and Latin texts. That Freud’s attempt to define the roots of the European psyche found his models in Greek mythology rather than in Biblical narratives seems so natural to us that we rarely reflect on why Oedipus strikes us as providing a clearer model of the tensions within this psyche than any Biblical character. This occurs precisely to the extent that he is indeed literary, providing for the reader/listener of his story a far stronger mimetic appeal than the personages of sacred history. For it was in Greece and not in Israel that sacred myth/legends were acted out rather than simply recited as sacred texts, that is, offered to their audience in a scenic context—one that, like the originary event, begins in medias res rather than, like the Bible, “in the beginning.”
For despite the appeal of “the Bible as literature,” the Bible really isn’t literature in the sense that the Greek tragedies and the Homeric epics are. It is very clear that when the stories of the personages of the Bible are adapted to literature—for instance, in films of Bible stories—it is as popularizations of sacred material not comparable in significance to the works of high culture, which first found their material in classical mythology and later in courtly and crusade adventures before finding it in the “realist” realm of ordinary life.
And thus it is that Girard’s analysis of mimetic desire, which lies at the root of generative anthropology, began with his study of the modern “realist” novel, in a world where the characters no longer have a predetermined social role but must make their way by finding and discarding models encountered in their process of maturation—a perspective that makes the Freudian categories rooted in myth appear somewhat archaic. Girard’s analyses show that modern literature is fundamentally an instrument of moral education with the intent to purge our “soul,” our repository of the sacred, of the mimetic desire that is ultimately unworthy of our fundamental intuition of human reciprocity, in contrast with classical literature’s focus on its protagonists’ ability to fulfill their predefined destiny in a world where the challenges of modernity have not reached the level of requiring the individual to work out his destiny for himself.
The Iliad as a full-fledged literary masterpiece is no longer, like the Gilgamesh Epic, an allegory of the transition from the archaic to the Axial world; it already fully belongs to this world. But what then is it about Achilles that makes him a literary figure where David or Solomon is not? Achilles’ so-called founding “myth”—that he was dipped in the Styx and thus invulnerable except for the spot on his heel where his mother Thetis held him and prevented the protective water from reaching his skin—is an accretion posterior to Homer; it does not prevent him from embodying for us the Greek form of the key paradox of the human condition: the human resentment of the gods.
But Achilles’ resentment as expressed in the Iliad’s first word, menin, the objective case of menis, rage, is directed toward Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek expedition, who has “pulled rank” to take for himself Achilles’ captive Briseis when he was forced to return his own captive because she was the daughter of a priest of Apollo. This rage leads Achilles to withdraw from battle, leading to a series of defeats for the Hellenic forces. This presence of resentment as an obstacle to social harmony in carrying out a common task, that is, as putting into question the viability of the social order and its hierarchy, may be seen as the beginning of literature per se, whose eternal theme is the management of mimetic desire within human society.
It is thus after Achilles’ transcendence of his resentful rage that the most moving and revelatory moment of the Iliad occurs. In the last of the 24 books, Achilles, reconciled with Priam after defeating his son Hector in battle, lets him have Hector’s body for the burial that concludes the poem. This moment of reconciliation is made possible by the transcendence of all human rivalries/resentments by that between the humans and the gods, which Achilles recognizes as simply the condition of our existence. As he puts it in lines 24.525-6:
Thus have the gods spun the thread for wretched mortals, That they should live in pain; and themselves are sorrowless.
Here Achilles’ resentment of his hierarchical superior is shown both to reflect and be necessarily defeated by that of the more fundamental difference between mortal man and the immortal gods. In contrast, this potential of rivalry is “always already” transcended in monotheistic religion, and its “Faustian” re-emergence beginning in the Renaissance marks the transition from the neo-classical to the modern era. Unlike the Faustian, Achilles is not asserting a “right” to transcend this barrier, only deploring the condition of mortals in comparison to that of the gods, both groups being presented as comparably multiple categories of beings, in contrast with the one-many distinction between the One God who creates the world and the various populations of its inhabitants.
We should note the difference in thrust between Achilles’ statement and its closest equivalent in European literature, Gloucester’s lament in King Lear 4, 1:
Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.
This affirmation, beyond bewailing our fate, attributes our mortality to the gods’ desire to kill us for their own amusement, an attribution that reduces them to our level. It is this potential flaw in the polytheistic system, invisible to the Greeks, that demonstrates the ontological superiority of monotheism, which clearly separates the will of the sacred from human desire. In this context, Gloucester’s “polytheistic” lament provokes in the audience not sympathy so much as our realization of his ontological error: human mortality must be borne and transcended; the sacred is not our rival but our providence, our source of meaningfulness. And by the same token, this passage figures the contrast between Greek and Jewish culture and its synthesis in Western civilization, in which the polytheistic configuration survives as the basic of secular literature that in fact embodies its own form of sacrality and is the object of its own kind of “worship.”
To understand this broadening of the concept of sacrality, we must return to its origin in the abortion of the gesture of appropriation of the originary object. This is done not simply out of fear, but in response to our sense of the sacred that demands that we refuse to perturb the peace that reigns among those attracted by the object. When Hillel equated the whole Torah to his Golden Rule, he was pointing, in contrast with the modern version of his Rule that resets it as a positive formula for action, to its abortive function, as so to speak: “Abort whatever you think of doing that you wouldn’t want another to do to you.” In this respect, Hillel’s Rule may legitimately be called the first theorization of generative anthropology, reducing the sacred to its minimal moral component.
This obliges us to reflect upon the fact that this minimality, which corresponds to that of monotheism itself, is paradoxically incapable of becoming, in its originary “tribal” form, a “universal” religion that transcends the ethnic particularity of its origin. However clearly Hillel’s Rule applies to everyone equally, his understanding of it was as the essence of the Torah, one that implicitly required its prior study.
In other words, this minimal expression of the sacred could only be acquired as the distillation of the history of God’s creation as focused on the people of Israel. The sacred is supremely general and universally true, but its understanding requires knowledge of the specific history through which our understanding of it would be revealed at a historical moment when this understanding could in principle become universal—that is, through writing—a practice that had not been necessary for the original composition of its contents, but that was indispensable for its canonization as a document whose distribution among a largely literate population, as were the Hebrews at the time of the second Temple, insured the reproducible permanence of its canonical form.
This configuration contrasts the simplicity of the sacred intuition with the complex process by which it is instilled and maintained as the implicit foundation of the Hebrew religion. The 613 mitzvoth are no more than instruments in the process of implanting and reinforcing the Golden Rule. But they are not thereby of secondary importance, for they are the means of maintaining the cohesion of the Hebrew/Jewish community, all the more important throughout the period of exile. Whence, as we have already observed, the inappropriateness of the Hebrew/Jewish religion, despite its underlying simplicity, for the role of world-religion taken on by Christianity and then by Islam.