[Milton-L] Zeus's self-exculpatory voice

Fri Oct 10 13:56:55 EDT 2008

Just to add a detail that should remind us of how aware Nietzsche was of
all of this when he made the provocative claim that James mentions.  The
passage James was recalling come in section 23 of the second essay of
*On the Genealogy of Morals*.  Here is what N. has to say in that
section about the very line in Homer we've been discussing: 

After noting that the Homeric Greeks "went very far" in the direction of
using the gods to "ward off the 'bad conscience,'" Nietzsche says that
they themselves knew that sometimes they went too far (I quote from
Walter Kaufman's translation):

"...and no less and authority than the Homeric Zeus himself occasionally
gives then to understand that they are making things too easy on
themselves.  'Strange!' he says once--the case is that of Aegisthus, a
*very* bad case--

	Strange how these mortals so loudly complain of the gods!
	We alone produce evil, they say; yet themselves
	Makes themselves wretched through folly, even counter to fate.

Yet one can see and hear how even this Olympian spectator and judge is
far from holding a grudge against them or thinking ill of them on that
account:  'how *foolish* they are!' he thinks when he observes the
misdeeds of mortals--and 'foolishness,' 'folly,' a 'little disturbance
in the head,' this much even the Greeks of the strongest, bravest age
conceded of themselves as the reason for much that was bad and
calamitous--foolishness, *not* sin! do you grasp that?"

Now what N means by all of this is complicated and probably beyond the
bounds of this discussion, but at least it should be clear that he
understood that the Homeric Greeks were not entirely consistent about
some of these things, although I think he would have thought it a
mistake to think that they thought much like Christians (or that they
thought like a lot of later Greeks, for that matter).  

Does anyone know if N discusses the end of *The Iliad* anywhere?  It
would be a shame if he didn't because it's fascinating from a
Nietzschean perspective.  It's full of the emergence of the tragic
humanity that Carroll described so eloquently earlier in this thread,
and full of the sort of tragic rebalancing of the self between fate and
will that he values as a counter to the submission required by what he
calls in the *Genealogy* the "maximal god" of Christianity.  

On the other hand, it seems to me that the question of how free Achilles
is to affirm his humanity against the backdrop of a tragic reality
controlled by inscrutable gods is at least a little open.  There's some
talk in the episode about the role the gods do play in his giving back
Hector's body and in Priam's ability to come seeking that boon in the
first place.  This is not a sort of wavering toward Christianity (or
some other form of the "maximal god" and his sponsoring of conscience
and guilt), but it does suggest that Homer was asking some questions
about the will that Milton recognized and internalized in his own terms.

I'll have more to say about this once I've had a bit more time to think
it through.  Who would have thought that such an old and in some ways
obvious question would get such an interesting discussion going!

Louis

===========================
Louis Schwartz
Associate Professor of English
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA  23173
(804) 289-8315
lschwart at richmond.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: milton-l-bounces at lists.richmond.edu
[mailto:milton-l-bounces at lists.richmond.edu] On Behalf Of
jfleming at sfu.ca
Sent: Friday, October 10, 2008 10:27 AM
To: milton-l at lists.richmond.edu
Subject: Re: [Milton-L] Zeus's self-exculpatory voice

very good, John! although I suspect that Nietzsche, if reminded what
Zeus
says there, might respond: "Well he would, wouldn't he?" 

And while I perhaps generalized egregiously re: "Greek religion,"
perhaps no
less egregious is our man M when he suggests, in the DDD passage you
quote,
that the _Odyssey_, of all texts, is an epic of free will and stop
blaming
immortals. Best, JDF

On Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:33:51 -0400 milton-l at lists.richmond.edu wrote:
> John Rumrich suggests that Homer's Zeus, like Milton's God, employs
"the 
> free will defence," to which James Fleming replies:
> .
> 
> 
> > But in Greek religion -- as Nietzsche points outs somewhere -- is it
not
> > precisely the case that the gods made you do it (whatever it was)?
"He 
> > must
> > have been deceived by a god," say the Greeks, at the downfall of a
great
> > man.
> 
> "Greek religion" may well express this view, some of the time, as did 
> "seventeenth-century Protestantism" (some Protestants, sometimes).
> But John 
> Rumrich was not speaking off the top of his head.  He was recalling
> Milton's 
> words on Odyssey 1.32, where Zeus does blame mortals for blaming the
gods.

> Milton quotes these lines alongside Prov. 19.4 at the end of Christian

> Doctrine I.4 to make the point that God blinds those who blind
themselves,

> so sinners have only themselves to blame.  Milton refers to the same
> Homeric 
> passage in DDD:
> 
> "That mans own freewill self corrupted is the adquat and sufficicent
cause

> of his disobedience besides Fate; as Homer also wanted not to expresse

> both 
> in his Iliad and Odyssei" (YP. 2.294).
> 
> There's my one post for the day.
> 
> John Leonard
> 
> 
> 
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James Dougal Fleming
Associate Professor
Department of English
Simon Fraser University
778-782-4713
cell: 604-290-1637

Nicht deines, einer Welt.
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