But when it comes to professors who long for the manly pagan virtues, and are therefore sorry that the movie version of BEOWULF shows the tracks of "the pale Galilean" in its hero's guilty psyche, something has to be done.
Philosophy professor Stephen T. Asma nods in the direction of enlightenment when he says that "our more gentle, egalitarian and diplomatic society" does not, of course, approve of the "social hierarchies, patriarchy, and chauvinism of older honor cultures." But, he nonetheless argues, these honor cultures had "the strong men of action who always seem necessary to save the family or tribe or village."
Oh really! So it was actually ancient Norsemen that discovered penicillin, invented vaccines for smallpox and polio, put human boots on the moon, and got computers talking to each other. Not us faggy, ineffectual moderns. 'Cause it's "brute strength and tribal loyalty" that gets it done, not cleverness and cooperation. Glad we got that cleared up.
But Asma sheds a tear for pagan pride. Proud pagan men used to "fight, protect, take, and defend." Yes, they were men, they were MEN, he tells us, "do[ing] the things they were built by nature and nurture to do." But oh no! Then came "the counterintuitive assertion that 'Blessed are the meek.' Humility and submission became praiseworthy postures." Oh, what a harsh on our Conan the Barbarian buzz.
Okay first of all. Men of the Christian era did not exactly stop "fighting, protecting, taking and defending." And "humility and submission" were rather swiftly reserved for women, gays and the poor--but then, with the exception of homosexuals, those groups were SOL under the pagans too. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
But I have to say...as a freely chosen ideal rather than a posture one is beaten into...WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH HUMILITY AND SUBMISSION? If our goddamn world leaders would show a little of it, we might not be killing ourselves and our planet quite so badly. I think humility and submission is a *great* idea for those big pagan strongmen. As the world-renowned philosopher Spiderman (or was it Batman?) put it: "With great power comes great responsibility." (No, it was Spiderman. Batman said "There is no knowledge which is not power.") Ancient pagan strongmen *sucked* at responsibility. So have two millennia worth of monotheistic rulers, but at least there is the *ideal* that they should be humble.
#
Pride versus humility?
Look at the Iliad. When is anybody going to point out that the big humanizing epiphany of Achilles--"ZOMG, other people hurt just like I do! When I killed Hector, I took him away from people who loved him!"--is completely pathetic? Emotionally, the man is at the level of a three-year-old. These are the wages of the strongman ethos. Or, as Asma puts it, "excess and immoderation." Yeah. You could say that.
Jesus, by contrast, was a true hero. He didn't start any wars. He didn't take any captives. No women went into slavery on his account. He didn't aggrandize his ego. He tried, in his way, to free people. When his disciples knelt before him, he raised them up and called them his friends. Later, he himself knelt and washed their feet. He crossed tribal lines rather than reinforcing them; he wanted Jews and Samaritans, Romans and zealots to get along. His casting out of demons, his raising of the dead, and his talk of worshiping, not in temples, but "in spirit and in truth," can be read as powerful symbols of escape from emotional dysfunction, resignation and superstition. When his actions angered the powers that be, he did not meet them with violence, but with rational argument; remember his testimony at his show trial. And when the moment came, he had the courage to die.
Much as the Church itself has done to stamp out and kill that Jesus in the name of its own power, that Jesus is there in the Bible like a ghost in our culture's machine. And that Jesus, the Jesus of egalitarianism, reconciliation, cooperation, rational argument, and personal liberty and happiness, *is* modernity prefigured.
I will take that over brute force and tribal loyalty any day. Manly pagan heroes are good for certain kinds of fantasy. But in terms of what sort of world I'd rather live in, well, I'm still waiting for the Kingdom, my dear Jesus. I'm still waiting for the Kingdom, even though I know that it's in me.
