Living a Purposeful Life. Kalman J. Kaplan

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СКАЧАТЬ Cronus would lose the rule to his own son, he devoured his offspring as they were born.40 The infant Zeus is saved through a ruse. When Zeus reaches adulthood, he makes war on Cronus and the Titans, and defeats him, fulfilling the prophecy of Earth and Sky.41 The drama of infanticide continues. Zeus himself is informed that his own son would displace him. To forestall this, he devours the mother Metis with the embryo in her womb.42

However, the playwright Aeschylus adds that Zeus is not all-powerful, subject himself to the natural force of Necessity, which itself is controlled by the Fates and the Furies.43

      In summary then:

      1.Earth and Sky exist prior to the gods and in fact create them. The world begins in chaos, which must be subdued.

      2.The Earth-mother is a very ambivalent source. She gives life but also destroys it. Such a view creates an ambivalent human attitude towards her, vacillating between paralyzing idealization of and submission to the earth and rebellious destructiveness with regard to it. We will discuss this in far greater detail in chapter 8.

      3.Life is consumed with a search for meaning, not in daily life, but in grandiose tasks and adventures.

      The Biblical Creation Narrative

      The biblical account of creation is very different. God precedes and indeed creates nature. Nature representing the rules which God has put into place to create some order in the physical world he has created. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” God then proceeds to create form out of the unformed (tohu vovohu)—again, not by subduing chaos as in the Greek account. To emphasize, the biblical unformed is not equivalent to the Greek chaos. Therefore, nature does not have to be subdued, but shaped. God is not seen a tyrant but as a potter.

First, lightness is divided from darkness. God then divides water from the land. At this point, God begins to prepare this world for the entrance of man. First, God has the earth bring forth vegetation. He then places living creatures in the sea and fowls in the sky. Now God places living creatures on the earth, cattle, creeping things, and other beasts.44 The world is now ready for man in God’s plan. God creates the human being, male and female, his ultimate handiwork, in God’s own image and gives them dominion over all in nature God has created.45

      The Bible describes the world and all that is in it as created by God in love. Humankind are given dominion over all, and the first people are placed in the garden of Eden “to dress and keep it.” It is incumbent on humanity not to wantonly destroy. Having dominion does not entitle man to misuse nature. Nature is not presented as something alien to man; it is to be neither worshiped nor raped, but instead tended and cared for lovingly and carefully.

      The following points stand out in these biblical narratives:

      1.God exists prior to the heaven and earth and in fact creates them. The world is unformed (tohu vovohu) and must be given form and structure rather than subdued.

      2.Earth is not seen in sexually differentiated terms. There is no sense of an Earth-mother. The earth is not to be ravaged but it also is not to be worshiped. The biblical God creates man and woman to tend and care for the world he has created. People can and do make changes to the world to improve it but must not do this in a callous or needlessly destructive way. This too will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 8.

      3.Life is not about a fruitless search for meaning. It is inherently purposeful. One does not have to pursue grandiose goals. Living one’s own life in a modest and purposeful way is sufficient.

      26. Slater, Glory of Hera, 4

      27. Gen 1:27

      28. Gen 2:7.

      29. Gen 2:7.

      30. Gen 1:26–27.

      31. Exod 9:16.

      32. 1 Sam 12:24.

      33. Snell, Discovery of the Mind.

      34. Hesiod, Theogony l.116.

      35. Liddell et al., Greek-English Lexicon.

      36. Apollodorus, Library 1.1.1.

      37. Apollodorus, Library 1.1.2.

      38. Apollodorus, Library 1.1.3.

      39. Apollodorus, Library 1.1.4.

      40. Apollodorus, Library 1.1.5.

      41. Apollodorus, Library 1.2.1.

      42. Apollodorus, Library 1.3.6.

      43. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, ll. 514–17.

      44. Gen 1.

      45. Gen 1:26.

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      Parables against Riddles

      In many ways, the ancient Greeks saw life as a riddle to be solved. In contrast, biblical man saw life as a parable to be lived. The first view pushes towards an endless search for meaning; the second towards a purposeful life.

      The Ancient Greeks Love Riddles

      Riddles are largely unintelligible and demand a search for meaning. They are admired in ancient Greek thought specifically because they are less intelligible than the simple presentation of facts and transmit no meaning. In his probing discussion of the non-informative aspect of Apollo’s speech, the classicist Bruce Heiden (2005) raises the question of whether Apollo’s noncommunicative oracles served another function. He cites Sophocles’ fragment 771 in this regard.

      And I thoroughly understand that the god is this way:

      To the wise, always a poser of riddles in divine speech,

      but to the foolish a teacher of lessons, trivial and concise.

Heiden СКАЧАТЬ