Golden Apples

To take another holiday from writing about the disastrous state of our world, here is a fragment of work-in-progress, reflecting on myth. Trigger-warning: it is not friendly to one of the biggest myths current in our world, one that is not without responsibility for some if its problems. As follows:

I was much impressed when I first read Francis Bacon’s interpretation of the myth of the Golden Apples of Hippomenes, the story of Atalanta the swift-footed maiden and her admirer Hippomenes. Bacon’s notion was that the story symbolises the superiority of art over nature, though a better reading might be: rationality over instinct. The story is this: Atalanta was a beautiful maiden, a Princess of Arcadia, who was both averse to the idea of marriage, and a very speedy runner. The juxtaposition of these latter two facts might prompt some facetious thoughts, but Bacon saw a deep lesson here. Many men wished to win her as a bride, but she made her father the King promise that only a man who could outrun her in a race could marry her, and that he would put to death any who failed. Her father agreed, and the result was a lot of corpses. Hippomenes was a man smitten by her beauty, but troubled by the thought that he could not outpace her. He consulted his mother, who advised him to take three golden apples, and at three successively crucial moments throw one to the side of the race-track in front of Atalanta. Her female appetite for pretty things, said the mother, would distract her and make her turn off the track to retrieve them; and thus Hippomenes could win the race. And so it happened. It is a sexist tale – girls are easily decoyed by pretty things, right? – but can be applied to the dangers of distraction in general.

By his artful device Hippomenes shows that a reasoned plan can outwit nature in the form (in this instance) of Atalanta’s natural ability.^[i] Bacon exemplifies the point in relation to pain and grief: ‘in human life, nature is a long while in alleviating and abolishing the remembrance of pain, and assuaging the troubles of the mind; but moral philosophy, which is the art of living, performs it presently.’

It happens that at the time I read Bacon on this myth, nature was in this very respect at work in me, and the encouragement to apply the lessons of philosophy to master its ravages proved, in the outcome, very helpful. I had long been a devotee of Greek mythology, having been sent a book about it by my grandmother when I was eight years old and first at boarding school. I was struck, smitten and delighted by the stories. They were so present to me that when at another boarding school some years later I first paid attention to Christianity, which had not been one whit salient in my life beforehand (apart from an interest in Christmas presents and Easter eggs; I had the good fortune to be raised in a secular family), my knowledge of the myths was both instructive and salutary.

This was because of a new chaplain at my senior school, though inadvertently on his part. Every day we boys had to attend a short – ten minute – Matins service before breakfast, but we never paid any attention to what passed in the way of formulaic mumblings from the far end of the chapel. The opportunity for gossiping in whispers or hastily finishing prep assignments was too valuable. But the new chaplain had evangelical fervour, and on his first day at the altar pronounced the Collect in thrilled tones of worship. It was the Anglican’s Collect of Purity: ‘Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy name: through Christ our Lord. Amen.’ The key point was his pronunciation of the word ‘inspiration’, which issued from him very loudly as a long drawn-out in-spire-rrrashun! I immediately sat up. Inspiration! It means ‘breathing-in’. The Muses of Helicon were forever breathing ideas, poetry, all creative activity, into the minds of men. Without them Homer (if there was such a person) would have strummed his lyre tunelessly forever if the divine fire of Calliope, Muse of epic poetry, had not poured into him a way of telling the story of Achilles’ wrath under the towers of Ilium. Hesiod says it explicitly, in the exordium to his Theogony: ‘the Muses breathed into me wondrous voice, so that I should celebrate things of the future and things that were aforetime’.

As soon as chapel was over I accosted the chaplain and said, ‘This Christianity business; give me a reading list, I want to find out about it.’ I was an earnest, studious and eager boy, then aged fourteen, and perhaps the chaplain thought he had found a soul to save among the mob of young heathens for whom rugby and cricket were far greater religions than his own. He duly gave me a list – it was in itself a rather inspired one; it included Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God and Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground among other things, these latter of course including St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, the ‘great converting epistle of Christianity’, as well as the four canonical Gospels (though I soon found quite a few of the apocryphal gospels, which were rather more interesting – Mary Magdalene being Jesus’s girlfriend, and so on). I might mention that I was spellbound by the language of the King James Bible (‘Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind’ – Psalm 104), and by the fact that a line from Romans has stuck in my mind, atheist that I am, all my life: ‘Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good’.

I read all the books on the list over the subsequent school holidays, the chaplain kindly having lent me some, and immediately upon my return to school, which reconvened on Sundays before the first day of each term, went to see him. ‘I’ve read everything you suggested, and have a question for you,’ I said. ‘The question is: how can you believe this stuff?’ I urged my point: ‘The basic story is that a god makes a mortal maiden pregnant, who gives birth to an extraordinary individual who does extraordinary things, including going down to the underworld and then joining his father in the sky. That’s a very familiar story. For just one example, Zeus was always making mortal maidens pregnant, and they gave birth to heroes like Hercules who did great things, went to the underworld, and eventually ascended to Olympus; or the twins Castor and Pollux – the Boanerges, ‘sons of thunder’ (Zeus being the god of thunder and lightning), who became stars in the sky – etc. etc.…Moreover, the mythologies of most of the ancient Middle Eastern civilisations are full of dying and resurrecting gods and even mortals, tales far older than Christianity – Inanna, Osiris, Baal, Tammuz, Attis, Zalmoxus, Dionysus, Adonis, Zagreus – what’s so special about this version of these myths?’ The chaplain, unequal to the challenge, rather forlornly replied, ‘Every morning when I wake I pray, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief”.’ I said, ‘So you don’t believe it either!’ I’m not surprised!’ Considering that in an earlier historical epoch I would have been burned at the stake for this, the forbearance of the poor old chaplain does him credit, and I am grateful to him to this day for being the unwitting instrument of clarifying my thoughts on the matter of religion as myth.

There is of course the question of the difference between myth and legend. There might well have been a figure, among the very many zealots preaching and teaching in Palestine at the relevant time, promising deliverance to the Jews from another version of their Egyptian slavery and Babylonian exile, this time in the form of Roman occupation, whom Paul – the creator of Christianity – picked on to create a religion. Legends embroider and inflate historical seeds into entire forests. In writing about iconic figures such as Jesus, the Buddha and Confucius I once remarked that they had much in common: none of them wrote anything, they had disciples who ‘bigged them up’, as the phrase has it, attributing all sorts of wondrous things to them; none of them is reported to have said anything particularly original, but what they did say was at least intelligible to most people.^[ii] This in turn suggests that had there been contemporaries among the thousands who were doing the same as they were doing – preaching, teaching, exhorting, promising great rewards such as heaven, release from suffering, or a Utopia – who had deeper and more complex things to say, and therefore harder to understand for the mass mind, they would be forgotten. Or at least: they would be remembered in rather special minority ways, like Socrates and Zeno of Citium the founder of Stoicism. But note that what stemmed from such men as these was philosophy, not religion, despite the best efforts of some epigones to make gods out of them – as with Plato, whom some tried to make others believe was born of a virgin, and had bees clustering at his infant mouth to prophesy the honeyed words that would flow from it.

I should mention in passing that I was always nauseated by the endless praisings and worshippings of a deity who, on the evidence both of the Old Testament and one’s general experience of life, was a malicious old devil. In this I anticipated reading about Augustus Hare, the Victorian travel writer, who blacked out all passages in praise of the Lord in his prayer book, though for a different reason; in his view ‘God is a gentleman, and no gentleman likes to be praised to his face’. I shuddered also at the total invasion of privacy, the police surveillance, of a god to whom all desires are known and no secrets are hid. Above all, I was repulsed by the idea of an omnipotent being who, despite its omnipotence, allows – even indeed creates the conditions for – such a huge quantum of cruelty and suffering in the world, so much of it random, arbitrary and unjust.^[iii] As a small boy I longed for a single magical power: the power to release from their bondage those who suffer from palsy and spasticity, as my beloved sister did. I thought that if there were a deity with such a power, how unutterably cruel of Him, Her or It not to use it, unless He, She or It was malicious and sadistic.^[iv]

The Olympian and other Middle Eastern deities were no better than the Biblical God in point of morals, though they had the virtue of being frankly mythical. My favourite among them were Athene, Aphrodite and Hermes, and from other traditions Nabu (or Nebo) and Thoth, respectively the Mesopotamian and Egyptian gods of scribes. Athene and Aphrodite are obvious choices for one who likes, in equal parts, finding out and thinking about things, and girls. For anyone for whom écrire c’est vivre Nabu and Thoth are shoe-ins likewise. Hermes, as the messenger between the mortal and the divine, the god of travellers and the transcender of boundaries, is an attractive choice too; and there is a tradition that couples him with Thoth not only in that both were psychopomps – conductors of souls to the afterlife – but thereby also as patrons of scribes. This comes from the merging of the two as found in the Hermetic tradition of Hermes Trismegistus, ‘trismegistus’ meaning ‘thrice-great’, an epithet of Thoth who was always hailed as ‘Thoth the Great the Great the Great’ – three times great. As an example of how these mythical beings allow of interpretation and appropriation, I see the psychopompic activity of guiding souls to the afterlife as a version of guiding minds to the eternal – the eternal truths: and as this is the goal of philosophy, though hard of achievement (only mathematics regularly succeeds here), one can see Hermes as helping one along the path even if it has no destination, for the journey itself matters immensely. This thought in turn always brings to my mind James Elroy Flecker’s Golden Road to Samarkand: ‘We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go/Always a little further; it may be/Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow/Across that angry or that glimmering sea,/White on a throne or guarded in a cave/There lies a prophet who can understand/Why men were born.’

Thus it is that all my life I have found interest and inspiration in the ideas, the associations, the connotations, the vividly interesting stories, of mythology; it has been a silver thread in the overall tapestry, even if among the general threads of wool there were other threads that were gold. It is like gazing on, say, the Dame à la Licorne hangings and noticing the congregations of silver threads at crucial junctures – as if indeed they arrived together at the sixth tapestry and the words à mon seul désir’. Since in my case the desire has been to achieve what is even more than knowledge, namely, understanding – making sense of things – following the maze of threads has been everything. One studies philosophy, science and history; one finds in literature spectacularly rich explorations of human nature and experience; and one finds in myths and legends a treasury of hints, suggestions, analogies and insights. A wide horizon of view brings all these contemplations together, so that by its means one can cross the blue mountain barred with snow and the angry glimmering sea, perhaps thereby to gain at least some understanding of why things are as they are, of who and what we are among them - and of what we should better be instead.

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^[i] Actually Bacon, in a rather confused way, makes Atalanta the personification of Art, citing such considerations as that fruit takes a long time to part naturally from its kernel, but is quickly removed by a knife, and that clay takes a long time to harden naturally into stone, but does so quickly when baked. His reason for selecting her as Art is his lament that Art is too often subverted by Nature, symbolised by golden apples in the form of distractions – e.g. seeking gain, fame or pleasure – from earnest, unremitting application to study and science. But in my view the tale, properly considered, exemplifies art in the form of Hippomenes’ plan for winning the race conquering nature in the form of Atalanta’s ability as a runner.

^[ii] See my The History of Philosophy (Viking 2019)

^[iii] This, the ‘problem of evil’, is standardly met with much casuistry and theodicy (‘justification of the ways of god to men’) by theologians. What in fact it demonstrates is the moral indifference of nature and the innate corruptibility of humanity, paralleling the innate capacity for goodness – kindness, love and mercy – also there, and at war with it. See my The God Argument (Bloomsbury 2013).

^[iv] The philosopher Leibniz sought to argue that this world, with its cruelties and evils, is ‘the best of all possible worlds’ because a perfect world in which there is no suffering would deprive us of the possibility of courage, growth, hope and moral action. Since God is all-good, he would create only the best possible world, and therefore its sufferings and evils must be – in some eventual rinsing-out of all things at the end of time – good. One of the great virtues of Greek thought, including the myths, is the frank and steady-eyed view of such causuistry as bosh, and acceptance of the harsh realities that such bosh tries to excuse.