Theology and Existentialism in Aeschylus

Written in the Cosmos

Richard Rader

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317633877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Antike & klassische Literaturkritik

Theology and Existentialism in Aeschylus revivifies the complex question of fate and freedom in the tragedies of the famous Greek playwright. Starting with Sartre's insights about radical existential freedom, this book shows that Aeschylus is concerned with the ethical ramifications of surrendering our lives to fatalism (gods, curses, inherited guilt) and thoroughly interrogates the plays for their complex insights into theology and human motivation. But can we reconcile the radical freedom of existentialism and the seemingly fatal world of tragedy, where gods and curses and necessities wreak havoc on individual autonomy? If forces beyond our control or comprehension are influencing our lives, what happens to choice? How are we to conceive of ethics in a world studiously indifferent to our choices?

In this book, author Ric Rader demonstrates that few understood the importance of these questions better than the tragedians, whose literature dealt with a central theological concern: What is a god? And how does god affect, impinge upon, or even enable human freedom? Perhaps more importantly: If god is dead, is everything possible, or nothing? Tragedy holds the preeminent position with regard to these questions, and Aeschylus, our earliest surviving tragedian, is the best witness to these complex theological issues.

1
The Radical Theology of Prometheus Bound; or, On Prometheus’ God Problem

Prometheus Bound (PV) is a meditation on God par excellence, second only perhaps to the Bible or Paradise Lost. It is, accordingly, the only extant tragedy from the ancient world featuring gods primarily as characters.¹ For this reason it stands out in a genre fixated principally on human suffering, where ‘death carries overwhelmingly more weight than salvation.’² Gods, of course, do not suffer like humans: Prometheus, the play’s protagonist extraordinaire, may be subject to an eternity of punishment for stealing fire from Zeus, but his pain, real and visceral as it is, differs from ours in that it lacks the potential closure of death. It is perhaps justifiable then to suggest that the play’s focus is not just the awful things gods are capable of doing to one another (just like humans) but, rather, the meaning of such behavior without the ultimate consequence (death). That is, the portrayal of Prometheus suffering and Zeus menacing redounds equally to the type of characters they are as to simply what they are. Whereas the former aspect is of psychological or political interest, the latter is a theological concern. And PV is theological in its implications as much as it is political. The question is: What type of theology does it convey? The answer is complex.³

In the modern world PV has primarily been read for its political allegory—as a meditation on oppression, or martyrdom for the intellectual cause.⁴ Many critics therefore argue that the play articulates the conflict between Prometheus and the absent Zeus primarily in terms of freedom versus authoritarianism.⁵ As Shelley famously put it many years ago in the prologue to his Prometheus Unbound, the imprisoned Prometheus represents ‘the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends’ (Shelley [1820] 2007: ix). Marx and Goethe felt similarly.⁶ This position aligns Prometheus with the forces of enlightenment and progress against the brutality of Zeus’ authority.⁷ It is not hard to see why this is the case: the play’s unrelenting focus on Prometheus gives little reprieve from the sight of his punishment. His imprisoners (Hephaestus, Kratos and a silent Bia) and visitors (a chorus of Oceanids, Oceanus, Io and Hermes) provide distraction, but not much. They mainly express shock and sympathy for his suffering, drawing attention to the fact that he is a victim of Zeus’ power.⁸ PV understandably became an atheist manifesto.⁹

But what kind of victim is he exactly? Critics have raised objections to the hagiography of Prometheus, but seldom do such critiques go further than pointing out his heroic stubbornness.¹⁰ It is rare that Prometheus’ intransigence, or Zeus’ absence and inability to answer the charges leveled against him, raise questions as to whether we should regard his one-sided account as the truth.¹¹ Two critical discussions of PV provide illumination of these matters. Stephen White has argued that Prometheus misunderstands the theodicy behind Zeus’ responsibility for Io’s suffering. He presents a convincing challenge to the image of Prometheus as heroic benefactor by drawing out his confusions and contradictions: ‘Zeus, far from being a wanton despot and rapist, favours Io with extraordinary grace. The play’s account of her tribulations … provides the key to understanding how it seeks to justify the ways of Zeus to mankind’ (White 2001: 116). Zeus is ‘not a despotic autocrat but the leading member of a deliberative council of fellow immortals’ (132–33). Prometheus, on the other hand, ‘conferred [gifts] without rules or constraints,’ thereby ‘enabl[ing] mortals to plunder the earth, slaughter themselves and ignore the gods’ (133). White (2001) seeks to ‘justify Zeus without demonizing his rival’ (110), paying special heed to the seductions of his rhetoric:

Deceit and deception aside, most characters in tragedy show a very limited grasp of events, and none tells us more than part of what we are meant to believe, much less comprehend fully. Ambiguity, obscurity, conflict and rhetorical distortion enlarge the scope for irony and indirection still further. Such polyphony is especially treacherous here, where the protagonist is a notorious trickster and his antagonist the always remote and often inscrutable Zeus.

(109)

Erik Vandvik noted the seductive power of Prometheus’ rhetoric as well but offered as counterpoint his inability and unwillingness to comprehend the consequences of his behavior for humankind.¹² To Vandvik (1943) the ‘apparent defect in [Zeus’] nature is indeed a defect in [Prometheus’] capacity of comprehending it’ (4). Starting with Hesiod, Vandvik (1943) showed that

there is no evidence of a misanthropic Zeus. Neither is there anything to prove that Prometheus is the great benefactor who rescues humanity … Prometheus believed, indeed, that Zeus intended to destroy mankind. This is, however, not the opinion of the poet, but an illusion of the rebel who had not the wisdom to understand the plans of Zeus.

(9–10)

In PV ‘the criticism of the supreme being is an ex parte argument’ (31), and thus necessarily susceptible to partisan misreading. ‘The Zeus of Aeschylus is never subject to Fate … The consequence of this fact is that the conviction of Prometheus must be a phantasma … The future was unknown to Zeus only till he was warned’ (34).¹³

How much then does Prometheus really know? Are we to trust his accusations or threats? Is Zeus really fated to be usurped by one of his children? Prometheus, we must remember, is a character in the play, not an abstraction. As much as he ‘represents,’ or his name signifies, foreknowledge, he is not himself an abstract embodiment of it.¹⁴ As a character then, especially one who plays in Hesiod a dynamic and shifty part in the early life of the cosmos, he is open to the same examination of ambition, desire and motivation that we bring to others (like Zeus). We must analyze Prometheus with the same scrutiny we train on other tragic protagonists, whose tragedies are occasioned by their own shortcomings. Irrespective of his intellectual reputation, Prometheus can still be wrong; PV is testament to that possibility. Our task then is to consider the links between his (mis)knowledge and the play’s theological insights.

In a famous passage early in PV, for example, Kratos taunts the chained Prometheus with these words: ‘Go on and break the rules up here then, stealing the rights of the gods and giving them to mortals. How are these ephemerals going to help you now? The gods are wrong to call you Prometheus. You’ll need προμηθία to wriggle out of this device’ (82–87).¹⁵ Far from conflating Prometheus with his power, Kratos posits a radical separation of the two. To be sure, the association has to be familiar in order for him to make the distinction, but what is important to Kratos is not Prometheus’ insight but rather his hybris (ὕβριζε, 82), his recourse to theft (συλῶν, 83) and his reputation for trickery (ἐκκυλισθήσηι, 87). The conflation, to Kratos at least, is a mistake and the mistake leads to hybris. To follow this train of thought throughout the play is, emphatically, not to underplay or, worse, provide justification for Prometheus’ persecution. It is simply to probe his rhetoric for its slips and inconsistencies. PV reveals these inconsistencies to suggest there may be a gap between what Prometheus says and claims to know and the way things are or could be in the cosmos. Such revelations speak to the play’s theological scope.

So there are avenues of inquiry that have yet to be fully explored. By asking exclusively after the nature of the political relationship between Prometheus and Zeus (is Zeus a tyrant? what does the asymmetry between Prometheus’ transgressions and his punishment suggest about Zeus’ ambitions as ruler?) we occlude its insights about the nature of the gods. Bearing this in mind, my aim is to explore the way PV both develops and reflects a type of theology; that is, an understanding of the ways of god(s). And this involves essentially coming to terms with Zeus.

We run almost immediately into an obstacle: Zeus is not a dramatic character per se in PV; that is, he does not appear on stage. But although he plays no physical part, he is nevertheless its center of gravity. And in the conversations, threats, fears and questions of the characters who do appear (especially Prometheus) we can trace a discourse about Zeus as well as a broader discourse about the nature of the gods.

Focalized though it may be through the perspective of Prometheus, PV sets in tension two theological discourses: (1) the personal, in which Zeus figures as a negatively omnipotent ruler; and (2) the impersonal, in which the universe is governed by deterministic forces of Necessity and Fate. In this play Zeus is portrayed as both a Punisher and just another god subject to the iron law of the cosmos; he not only exercises an ‘arbitrary tyranny’ (Solmsen 1949: 149, 152) but is also (potentially) subject to a fatal sexual liaison in the future, of which Prometheus claims exclusive knowledge. Once I have teased these two discourses apart and shown their interrelationships, I suggest that PV’s radical theological insight is the ‘third discourse’: (3) the interpersonal, in which Zeus and Prometheus have a meaningful and dynamic part to play in the creation and sustenance of a universe without design.

What I offer here is an organic reading of PV’s radical theology, not a comparative approach with other plays of Aeschylus in order to develop a systematic theology or to stake some speculative claim on the lost Prometheus trilogy. I do this for two very specific reasons. First, Zeus’ role in this play, his absence especially, is different from his absence in other plays where—with the exception perhaps of the Psychostasia—he is more an abstract principle (of right, justice, etc.) than a proper character. Thus Zeus’ actual portrayal in PV, even in absentia, serves a particular dramatic and theological function that differs from its dramatic and theological function in others. Second, and complementarily, as Thomas Rosenmeyer has compellingly argued, gods in tragedy are malleable to dramatic purpose: ‘When it was a matter of using the gods in his plays, Aeschylus was, within the limits of mythology, bound only by the dictates of his dramatic purposes … His control over them is the same as his control over most of his material’ (Rosenmeyer 1955: 250). The virtue of this approach is that it frees us of the responsibility (or necessity) of squaring one depiction of Zeus with another in the service of some systematic Aeschylean theology.¹⁶ All of this need not raise the specter of PV as Lesedrama, unconnected to an original trilogy,¹⁷ although my treatment of the play will seem to fall in line with that possibility—if only because the remains of the trilogy provide little clue about the relationship between PV and Prometheus Lyomenos (see Griffith 1983: 281–305), and because too many assumptions about the latter are ‘retroboded’ back into the former without the slightest methodological self-consciousness. Ultimately, this is less a matter of endorsing one theory over another than interrogating in the fullest way possible the world PV constructs irrespective of its supposed relationship to other plays.

Background: Hesiod’s Cosmos

The conflict between Prometheus and Zeus that PV made (in)famous was a feature of their shared mythology from long before Aeschylus dramatized it. Hesiod’s Theogony, which deals centrally with the ascension of Zeus to king and with all the struggles and uncertainties this entailed, sketched out a picture of the discord between them along similar lines.¹⁸ A fresh look at how Hesiod’s Theogony forges a theological framework with regard to Zeus will help us better appreciate the way PV engages with that poem’s theology for its own purposes.

The theology of Hesiod’s Theogony hinges in many ways on the question of whether Zeus’ ascent to supremacy is ‘teleological’; that is, whether a sort of external cosmic momentum is behind his rise to power.¹⁹ Tracing the line of generational violence from Ouranos to Kronos to Zeus, and mapping it onto the transition from a primordial Chaos through to the establishment of order and justice, critics justifiably see in Hesiod’s cosmos a deterministic force (albeit a force for good). But succession patterns cannot account for the subtle ways Hesiod highlights Zeus’ difference from his predecessors, whom he makes a point of depicting as a flexible, open-minded decision maker. Unlike Ouranos and Kronos, who act out of instinct and despotic self-regard, Zeus is shown on several important occasions to be amenable to the advice of others—advice that ultimately proves integral to his successes.

When, for example, Ouranos and Kronos feel threatened by the potential of being overthrown by one of their own offspring, they both try to single-handedly thwart that usurpation: ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prelude: On Non-Compulsory Literary Criticism
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Written in the Cosmos
• 1 The Radical Theology of Prometheus Bound; or, On Prometheus’ God Problem
• 2 The Curse of Inherited Guilt in Seven against Thebes
• 3 The Necessity of Agamemnon
• 4 Fatal Aftermaths: Libation-Bearers and Eumenides
• Bibliography
• Index