An Essay

St. Paul the Apostle, upon arriving in Athens as part of his missionary journeys after the Death of Christ remarks, “you Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious”. Paul continues, “For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, 'To an Unknown God.' What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you” (Acts 17: 19-20, NAB). Paul sees himself as able to satisfy a yearning in the Athenians that they are acutely aware of, but do not know how to satisfy. Because they lacked a solution to the insufficiencies of the world, the Greeks accepted living in a world they rejected because what small fleeting happiness the world could provide was their only hope. This paradoxically two-fold morality is seen in their gods, most prominently in the supreme deity of Zeus, who is both the epitome of law and order, yet is notoriously sexually promiscuous. The Greeks did not conceive of a god in whom law and order existed in totality because they could not accept this burden themselves.
That the Greeks had a keen sense of the misery in human existence is irrefutable. While the philosophy of Antisthenes, Diogenes and others may have escaped popular understanding (Socrates did, and he didn’t embrace living like dogs), the plays of Homer and Herodotus provided a clear-cut rejection of the world in popular form. Homer voices his opinion in stunningly eloquent terms through Achilles in the last book of the Iliad, “no [human] action is without chilling grief” (MLS, 504). The defeated Croesus likewise admits, “that the words of Solon had been spoken under god’s inspiration: ‘No one of the living is happy!’” (MLS, 149, lines 20-21) in Herodotus’ History of the Persian Wars. And yet, the Greeks had no way to end their misery but to die, but even in death misery was present. Achilles’, who is visited in the underworld by Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, laments, “I should prefer as a slave to serve another man, even if he had no property and little to live on, than to rule all those dead who have done with life”, (MLS, 141). Life was insufficient, and death was no solution.
The Greeks resorted to awkwardly straddling this philosophical (and emotional) asceticism and worldly indulgence. We see this solution in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle takes a markedly different opinion than Homer and Herodotus on the one hand, in that he claims that happiness is the end of man, thereby positing that it is achievable in the first place. In his search for what happiness consists in, he rigorously debunks the theories of those who believe that happiness can be found in any created good, and yet in the end he concludes, “happiness seems to require this sort of prosperity too [good fortune/luck]” (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1099b, 7-9, trans. Thomson). It would have been irrational to throw away all things, because whatever form of fleeting happiness man had on earth came from the created goods prosperity provides. While the Greeks knew that a good meal wasn’t going to make you happy (the meal is a means to happiness, not happiness itself), they couldn’t deny the benefits of feeling full rather than hungry. To abandon all things, while it may have been philosophically correct, also took away the promise of any form of happiness. This awkward situation is not seen in Christianity, and consequently Western morality, which has no problem with totality, asking men to abandon all things, and importantly promising that then they might receive all things. The Greeks did not have the promise of receiving, so abandoning all things was irrational.
The totality seen in Christian spirituality is likewise seen in the Christian God. St. Thomas Aquinas, in the very first parts of the Summa, at the beginning of his attempt to outline the Divine Essence proves God’s simplicity, that is, that there are no parts in God (see 1a. 3, especially article 7). In its most obvious application this means that God does not have arms or legs, or any sort of physical being, but more subtly, it also means that God’s various attributes, including love, justice, power, knowledge, etc. are all contained in one higher, incomprehensible principle. While men can act out of justice while neglecting love, God cannot. Rather the two are both simultaneously (and not exhaustively) descriptions of God’s action.
The Greeks did not, and could not have this type of god. Totality was irrational, and they certainly could not have irrational gods. Thus, their gods were multifaceted to accommodate the multi-faceted nature that Greek life of necessity took on. As a result, justice and love could exist separately in the Greek deities. Even more, justice and injustice could exist simultaneously. For a god to be wholly and irrevocably just inculcates man in a similar quest, but the Greeks could not accept this totality. They had to choose between death and the awkwardness of a miserable worldly existence, and did not have that third option of life, both now and eternally which Christianity offers. Zeus then, in compliance with the requirements of Greek philosophy, was put in that same awkward straddle. His upholding of law and order had to be colored with sexual escapades to allow Greek law and order to be colored with the same regrettable though necessary conduct.
Zeus’ paradoxical nature results from the paradoxical nature of Greek life, one that understood the miseries of the created world, and yet had not other options at hand. The Greeks knew a complete rejection of the world to be irrational, and so that accepted the world and its miseries, straddling the ascetic and the worldly. Zeus too is enveloped in this multi-faceted existence.