A revelation of death. Unamuno, Life 4.4
Having
attempted to sum up the Jews, Unamuno now gives us his take on the
Greeks. For him, their culture offers a revelation of death, from
which life longs to escape. They begin to imagine different
ways of escaping or cheating death (as
various gods and heroes, notably Orpheus, were said to have done or
attempted). But they did not reach the faith of Christians in
personal immortality, even as they never achieved monocult in the
manner of the Jews.
La
cultura helénica, por su parte, acabó descubriendo la muerte, y
descubrir la muerte es descubrir el hambre de inmortalidad. No
aparece este anhelo en los poemas homéricos que no son algo inicial,
sino final; no el arranque, sino el término de una civilización.
Ellos marcan el paso de la vieja religión de la Naturaleza, la de
Zeus, a la religión más espiritual de Apolo, la de la redención.
Mas en el fondo persistía siempre la religión popular e íntima de
los misterios eleusinos, el culto de las almas y de los antepasados.
«En cuanto cabe hablar de una teología délfica, hay que tomar en
cuenta, entre los más importantes elementos de ella, la fe en la
continuación de la vida de las almas después de la muerte en sus
formas populares y en el culto a las almas de los difuntos», escribe
Rohde. Había lo titánico y lo dionisíaco, y el hombre debía,
según la doctrina órfica, libertarse de los lazos del cuerpo en que
estaba el alma como prisionera en una cárcel. (Véase Rohde, Psyche,
Die Orphiker, 4.) La noción nietzscheniana de la vuelta eterna es
una idea órfica. Pero la idea de la inmortalidad del alma no fué un
principio filosófico. El intento de Empédocles de hermanar un
sistema hilozoístico con el espiritualismo, probó que una ciencia
natural filosófica no puede llevar por sí a corroborar el axioma de
la perpetuidad del alma individual; sólo podía servir de apoyo una
especulación teológica. Los primeros filósofos griegos afirmaron
la inmortalidad por contradicción, saliéndose de la filosofía
natural y entrando en la teología, asentando un dogma dionisíaco y
órfico, no apolíneo. Pero «una inmortalidad del alma humana como
tal, en virtud de su propia naturaleza y condición como imperecedera
fuerza divina en el cuerpo mortal, no ha sido jamás objeto de la fe
popular helénica». (Rohde, obra citada.)
Recordad
el Fedón platónico y las elucubraciones neoplatónicas. Allí se ve
ya el ansia de inmortalidad personal, ansia que, no satisfecha del
todo por la razón, produjo el pesimismo helénico. Porque, como hace
muy bien notar Pfleiderer (Religionsphilosophie
auf geschichtlicher Grundlage,
3, Berlín 1896), «ningún pueblo vino a la tierra tan sereno y
soleado como el griego en los días juveniles de su existencia
histórica ..., pero ningún pueblo cambió tan por completo su
noción del valor de la vida. La grecidad que acaba en las
especulaciones religiosas del neo-pitagorismo y el neo-platonismo,
consideraba a este mundo, que tan alegre y luminoso se le apareció
en un tiempo, cual morada de tinieblas y de errores, y la existencia
terrena como un período de prueba que nunca se pasaba demasiado de
prisa». El nirvana es una noción helénica.
Greek
culture, for its part, ended up discovering death, and to discover
death is to find the hunger for immortality. This hunger does not
appear in the Homeric poems (†), which are not incipient, but
final: not the beginning, but the end of a civilization. They mark
the passing of the old religion of Nature, of Zeus, to the more
spiritual religion of Apollo, of redemption. But in the background
always the popular and intimate religion of the Eleusinian mysteries
(‡) endured, the cult of souls and of ancestors. "To the
extent that we can speak of a Delphic theology, we must count among
its most important tenets faith in the continuing life of souls after
death, demonstrated in its popular rituals and in the worship offered
to the souls of the dead," Rohde writes (*). Life offered Greeks
the realm of the Titans and that of Dionysus (⁑),
and according to Orphic doctrine, mankind's duty was to free itself
from the Titanic bonds of the body, which held the Dionysiac soul
prisoner as though in a cell. (Witness Rohde, Psyche,
The Orphics, 4). Nietzsche's notion of the eternal return is an
Orphic idea. But the idea of the soul's immortality was not a
philosophical principle. Empedocles' attempt to affiliate an animate
concept of nature with spiritualism proved that a natural,
philosophical science cannot on its own sustain the assertion that
individual souls must endure. All that such philosophy can achieve is
to provide support for theological speculation. The first Greek
philosophers affirmed immortality by way of contradiction, leaving
natural philosophy behind and entering into theology, where they
established a dogma that belongs properly to Dionysus and Orpheus,
not Apollo. But still, “the immortality of the soul as such, in
virtue of its own nature and condition as an imperishable divine
force in the mortal body, has never been a tenet of popular Greek
religion” (Rohde, from the same book just cited).
Remember
the Phaedo
of Plato, and the wandering commentary of the Neoplatonists (††).
There we see already the anxiety about personal immortality, an
anxiety whose inability to find complete satisfaction in the path of
reason produced Greek pessimism. For, as Pfleiderer astutely observes
(in The
Philosophy of Religion in its Historical Context,
vol. 3, Berlin 1896), “No people came to earth so serene and sunny
as the Greeks, in the youthful days of their historical existence …,
but so too no people ever changed so utterly their notion of life's
worth. The Greek culture that ends in the religious speculations of
the Neopythagoreans and Neoplatonists considers this world, which
looked so happy and luminous at one time, as a den of darkness and
errors, and regards earthly existence as a time of trial that never
passes too quickly.” Nirvana is a Greek notion (‡‡).
---
(†)
Greek literature inherited several
distinctive
poems from antiquity (before the
sixth century BCE), credited traditionally to a blind poet from
Chios, known as Homer. Since Milman Parry's research into oral
poetry, it seems that Homer is to the Iliad, the Odyssey,
and
the
Hymns
somewhat as Moses to the Pentateuch: a convenient, constructed author
assigned to what was most
likely a collaborative effort involving many different contributors
over time. In any event, the poems offer some of our earliest and
certainly most compelling insight into ancient Greek culture. They
were widely heard, and eventually read, throughout the Mediterranean
world, from ancient times to the present.
(‡)
Much of pagan religion occurred in local contexts, involving
limited rites from
which foreigners were explicitly or implicitly banned. But several
shrines, notably the one of Apollo at Delphi, or that of Demeter at Eleusis,
were open to the world at large, provided one showed proper respect. The latter
temple hosted secret rituals that
prepared
worshippers for life after death, initiating them into the mysteries
of Demeter and her daughter Kore, also known as Persephone.
(*)
Throughout this passage, Unamuno refers to the book Psyche,
a study of
ancient
Greek religion published in installments from 1890 to 1894 by Erwin
Rohde, a philologist who made friends with Nietzsche while both were
studying at the universities
of Bonn and Leipzig.
(⁑)
The followers of Orpheus, a legendary Thracian poet, were a unique
sect in ancient Greek religion from relatively early times (at least
the fifth century BCE), and they preserved a myth about Dionysus and
the Titans that Unamuno references here. According to this myth,
Dionysus was originally the son of Zeus and Persephone, rather than
Zeus and the mortal Semele. Hera, jealous as usual, sent Titans
against Dionysus, and they rent his body in pieces, devouring all but
his heart, which Athena stole and delivered to her
father,
who used it to regenerate the god
with Semele.
Zeus
also punished the Titans, smiting them dead with lightning.
The
race of man was then born from their smoking ashes, infused with the
heavenly divinity of Dionysus and the earthly wickedness of the
Titans.
(††)
Unamuno has already discussed the Phaedo,
wherein Plato presents the idea that our individual souls participate
in immortality without being individually or personally persistent
(so that soul,
in general, is immortal, while my own limited awareness of self is
not). Neoplatonism is a label applied to philosophy practiced by
students of Plato's writing or tradition in the wake of Ammonius
Saccas, and his student Plotinus
(c. 204-271 CE).
This philosophy remained an active tradition up until at least the
5th century CE, and produced many writings, which attempted to
interpret the world in a manner consonant with its reception of
Plato. Approving the line of thought illustrated in the Phaedo,
it professed belief in immortality, but not necessarily personal
immortality. Many who worked in it were, like Plato, interested in
the even more ancient Pythagoras (c. 570-495 BCE) and his immediate successors, among them the Sicilian alchemist Empedocles (c. 494-443 BCE), whom Unamuno mentions here. Modern scholars
occasionally refer to ancients who studied Pythagoras actively after
the reign of Alexander the Great as Neopythagoreans.
(‡‡)
We find the idea that life is suffering, to which death offers
release, in Epicurus, but also much earlier, for example in Theognis. It is thus rather hard for me to accept Pfleiderer's oversimplifying observation as astute.