Posted on 06/25/2004 1:59:30 PM PDT by Ed Hudgins
The Iliad and Islam By Edward Hudgins
"Sing, oh Goddess, the wrath of Peleus' son Achilles, which brought pains a thousand-fold upon the Achaians."
So opens "The Iliad," the world's first great literary work. Homer's poem about the Trojan War has intrigue, politics, sex, and vast battles—all the elements of an exciting epic, whether recited in the halls of ancient palaces or made into a Hollywood blockbuster. The Bronze-Age society of the Greeks who fought before Priam's fortress around 1250 BCE was in many ways primitive and brutal. After the sack of sacred Ilium that society collapsed. Five hundred years later Homer told the tale in a Greek society that had emerged from a dark age and was in transition to the classical civilization that marked the birth of the West.
America today is at war with barbarians from a culture that also is primitive and brutal but which is hopefully in transition to something far better. Homer's Iliad thus offers lessons for us today that echo from that distance age.
Wars are always brutal, ancient ones especially so. The battles described in the Iliad were gory, blood-soaked affairs, with spears spilling brains from skulls and swords tearing out entrails. Homer's epic portrayed courage in battle, but also dramatizes a particular cause of war and violence.
Achilles was a man driven by his unrestrained passions. When the Greek commander Agamemnon took from him a captive woman he was awarded by the army, Achilles sulked in his tent, seething with anger, as Hector and the Trojans killed his friends and threatened to drive the Greeks into the sea. When his beloved friend Petraclos was killed by Hector, Achilles' grief and fury turned him into a human killing machine, hacking off heads and limbs, as he butchered his way to the walls of Troy and slew Hector. His anger still unsated, he committed sacrilege, dragging the body behind his chariot. Only when Hector's father, King Priam, sneaked into Achilles' tent and begged for the body of his son for a proper burial did Achilles' fury finally dissipate. He became human again, recovering his sense of decency.
The classical Greek philosophers who came after Homer understood that reason, not emotions, should rule the soul, that whims should be subjected to cool, objective appraisal, that one should discipline one's passions. Aristotle taught that anger out of all proportion to the incitement is a vice in an unbalanced soul. Plato taught that the souls of the most miserable individuals are ruled by master passions that drive them to spiritual and physical destruction. Such thinkers understood that it is to the extent that a society's culture is ruled by reason that the arts of peace and civilization flourish.
Radical Islamists today—like ancient Achilles—are dominated by their rage and hatred. Add to that envy of the West, which is heir to classical Greece. We see in their obsession with abusing and mutilating the bodies of dead enemies and cutting of the heads of the innocent a reflection of the wrath portrayed by Homer that has brought pains a thousand-fold upon the Middle East.
Further, Islamists share with Bronze-Age Greeks an obsession with religion. When those Greeks got ideas in their heads, it was the gods who were whispering them in their ears. When they showed courage or succumbed to fear, it was often the gods who prompted them. They saw their fates in the hands of the gods; they sought the gods' favor and acted in the names of the gods.
Similarly, Islamists are immersed in a primitive theistic mindset. God is responsible for all things. It is through the will of Allah that everything happens and in the name of Allah that they commit the most heinous crimes imaginable. Allah is as real to them as Zeus, Poseidon and Ares were to the warriors before the walls of Troy. But, of course, all of those gods were simply in their heads, not in Olympus or heaven.
But the classical Greek thinkers, Aristotle especially, understood that impersonal laws of nature—not the gods—govern the order of the world, and that our rational minds are capable of understanding the world—thus the birth of science. They understood that each of us - not the gods—are responsible for our own actions, that our individual wills—not those of the gods—create the character of our souls, and that the path to happiness is through self-discipline and subjecting our whims to the rule of reason—thus the birth of ethics.
Of course most Greeks in classical times were not atheists. But it was the secular elements that distinguished the classical culture from the Bronze Age, that produced the great achievements in classical times and still produce achievements in our own society today.
A millennium ago Islam had a tradition of rational thought and critical thinking that created a major civilization; Islamic scholars in that era reintroduced the works of Aristotle into backwards, Medieval Europe. Today the backwards cultures in most Islamic countries are dominated by anger, violence and superstition. And it will only be an ethic of reason and the subjugation of whims to thoughtful reflection that can lead those cultures and their people back to enlightenment and free their imaginations and creativity so they can lead truly human lives. ----------
Edward Hudgins is the Washington director of the Objectivist Center.
Bumping for a later read.
Outstanding.
I agree with your points. Homer and the Greeks understood courage, a point I make only in passing in my short piece. (I also mention the envy of Islam for the West, its hatred of us for our virtues, something that distinquishes that culture from Bronze-age Greece and could be the subject of a book!) Observing the importance of the Iliad, I note that half of the plays that come down to us from the three great classical Greek dramatists concern Homeric characters.
I would never put Achilles in the same category as terrorists; I was simply using several lessons from Homer to point to several of the dysfunctional aspects of Islamic culture today. And indeed, one of the universal values found in Western civilization is an appreciation for the lessons of history!
By the way, see my review of a book about my political hero, Marcus Cicero. I'd like to make a movie of his incredible life!
http://www.objectivistcenter.org/text/ehudgins_founders-fathers.asp?navigator
Ed Hudgins
You'll need a pitchfork for that load...
Please note that I am not comparing Bronze-age Greeks to Islamic terrorists. I'm pointing out moral failings that are wonderfully illustrated in Homer (unchecked passion and excusing everything by invoking the gods) and explained by later philosophers. I then observe that those moral lessons certainly tell us something (but not everything) about Islamic culture and terrorists that come from it. Note that I mention Islam's envy for us, the heirs of the Greeks. In a longer piece I would add that they hate us not for our vices but our virtues.
The classics can teach us much!
Clifford -- I did like the made-for-TV movie Helen of Troy. (Achilles was portrayed as a brute, not a brooding Bard Pitt.) But my favorite from an historical perspective is the 6 part documentary In Search of the Trojan War, by Michael Wood, available on DVD. Check it out.
The Islamic terrorists are truly vile and evil. I use Homer to illustrate several, but not all, aspects of their moral failings. In a longer piece I would have gone into fighting over Helen and other interesting themes. But the nice thing about we as Westerner is that we can do this!
Cheers!
ping.
In The Iliad, combatants were not afraid to say who they are and where they came from. Partly out pride and
partly attempted intimidation. Ergo, if you defeat "Joe Blow, son of ..., grandson of ...", so much greater the
prestige gained.
I'm not surprised that the cowardly terrorists gain sympathy. Somewhere along the way, many cultures value the
miscreant. The other week, I heard an old Jean Sheppard broadcast. He was railing against a sympathetic
John Dillinger film because he lived in a town where the Dillinger gang came in, and shot 3 people in cold blood,
just because they could.
And the Arab world's decline is directly related to the reduction of Zoroastrian Persian and Eastern Roman populations through genocide of those populations.
This article is garbage. The Greeks thought so much of honor that they thought using bows in warfare as cowardly because they could not face their enemy face to face - a concept that the European peoples all learned from the Greeks and helped give birth to chivalry - they would have considered al-Qaeda as cowardly barbarians and rightly so.
But lastly - trying to compare bronze age morality with our own modern version - even if it is comparing it to backwards Islam - is bad scholarship.
Worked for the Japanese sure enough. Two well-placed nukes put a swift end to their frenzied kamikaze style attacks. Now they're kittens to us.
> Once they've had their d*cks knocked into the dirt!
Jeez. What do you have against ducks? It's not the ducks fault...
> What would Captain Kirk and Spock do?
Find the master control computer, talk some gibberish at it until it began to smoke and grind to a halt.
Failing that, find the local green chicks and teach 'em how to kiss.
"...find the local green chicks and teach 'em how to kiss."
You REALLY know your Star Trek!
Aristotle's theology is too generous to pit human freedom as an antagonsit against the gods. And we all know that ethics had already walked the earth before Aristotle made his observations to separate humans from natural phenomena. That's where he noticed the real difference: we are not like soulless stones that can't be trained to roll up hill. i.e. we can habituate ourselves. And we don't hate stones for all that. On the other hand, habituation wasn't freedom wasn't enough to throw darts or chase gods out of the universe. Here's an interesting snippet on Aristotle's admiration of the divine:
If then God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and god's self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belongs to God; for this is God.Such a life is superior to one that is simply human, because someone lives thus [in complete happiness], not in so far as he is a human being, but in so far as there is some divine element within him. And the activity of this divine element is as much superior to that in accordance with the other kind of virtue as the element is superior to the compound. If the intellect, then, is something divine compared with the human being, the life in accordance with it will also be divine compared with human life. But we ought not to listen to those who exhort us, because we are human, to think of human things, or because we are mortal, think of mortal things. We ought rather to take on immortality as much as possible and do all that we can to live in accordance with the highest element within us; for even if its bulk is small, in its power and value it far exceeds everything.--Nicomachean Ethics Book 10.7 1177b
> "...find the local green chicks and teach 'em how to kiss."
> You REALLY know your Star Trek!
Pah. That's Kirk 101. For more advanced levels of geekness, point out that it's the green chick in the aluminum bra who will get the most attention, and that Chekov will get the East German track star with the unibrow...
What the War on Terror really needs is a good intervention from the Organians... yeah, that's it...
Actually, I used "BC." Some editor put in BCE. - Ed Hudgins
Cornelis -- I know Aristotle's "Ethics" extremely well; it's a kind of Bible for me. The Greek revolution was the philosophical focus on the natural ordering of the universe, the notion of moral absolutes based in man's nature as a rational being and the ability of humans to create their own moral character.
I like Aristotle's distinction between eudaemonia (translated 'happiness' or 'flourishing') and makareos (sp?) which mean's 'blessed.' One can create virtues in one's soul and still be happy at a deep level even in adverse situations. (Ayn Rand has Roark in 'Fountainhead' say of his pain that it only goes down so deep.) The blessed individual has a virtuous soul and circumstances in his/her favor.
Also note that for Aristotle, God was at base the prime mover, a principle to get the universe going and avoid an infinite regress. (See "Metaphysics.")
To the extent that we can get people in our society focusing on the lessons from Aristotle, the "Iliad" and other classical thinkers, we'll be returning to a civilization worthy of those great thinkers and writers.
Ed Hudgins
Calvin -- I cut out a paragraph on how every time warriors met in battle, they would exchange geneologies. I couldn't fit it, and the implications, in 800 words. Maybe for the next op-ed! -- Ed Hudgins
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