#classics things

That guy from Overly Sarcastic Productions really just wrote an epic poem in the style of the classics about the history of Venice, complete with an Italian translation to make it look like something your classics professor assigned you. And after only a day (I think) it's made over $125,000 of its $10,000 Kickstarter goal.

okay so full disclosure greek drama/theater is a pet passion of mine not something that I actually know /that well/, I just happen to have taken a handful of classes and I’m more familiar with the Greek worldview than your average joe - that doesn’t actually mean much bc im a Big Idiot.

That being said:

free will and predestination are in some, inexplicable way not at odds with each other, but rather work together. I’ll look at some examples from greek myth using the greek pantheon I definitely am not intelligent enough to apply it properly to a Christian framework.

So the example I was thinking of when I wrote those tags was Euripides’ Bacchae bc that’s the seminar class we discussed this in. 

If you’re not familiar with the play, Dionysius’ human aunt/cousin/general relatives start shit talking him and denying that he’s a god so he goes back in disguise and drives all the women mad (they become the bacchae/maenads) and his aunt eventually ends up ripping his cousin to shreds thinking he’s a lion cub and they’re on a hunt. eventually everyone gets their sanity back and it’s this horrible realization of what these women have done to the king (who is also his cousin).

From the beginning of the play we know it’s a tragedy, we KNOW bad shit is gonna go down with the mortals who are disrespecting Dionysius. Dionysius himself, either in asides or in disguise, tells us this several times throughout the play. In one sense, it is predestined, the audiences knows how this will end. In another sense however, the king and his mother and all the women bring this upon themselves by shit talking Dionysius and denying his godhood. They are told that he is a god, they are given opportunities to be kind to Dionysius-in-disguise, but they do not. In that sense, it is their free will that brings them to their fates.

A better example, and more well know, is the Oedipus story (which tbh is probably why that’s the one everyone reads in highschool). So Oedipus is cursed by prophecy to kills his father and marry his mother, that is predestined. But it’s the freely-willed actions taken by various characters in the play that lead to that happening. Oedipus’ parents expose him on a mountain expecting him to die, the shepherd takes him in, he’s raised far away never knowing his true parents, he finds out about the prophecy, he leaves his adopted home to avoid the prophecy, but by doing so, his freely-willed action is the very thing which leads to his predestined fate coming to pass.

A big concept in greek tragedy is hubris and while it’s usually translated as fatal flaw it’s more akin to a sort of pride? Pride against the gods, against fate, etc. So these tragic heroes, in acting, of their own free will, they inevitably bring about their pre-destined downfall, the implications being either A) if they had not acted in such a way their fates would not have come to pass or more likely, B) their freewill actually LED to their predestined fate and that’s why it’s tragic.

Not to be like, ‘it’s ineffable’ but that’s basically the Greek worldview (and I would contend, should be the Christian one as well). In some inexplicable way, we still have choice and agency, and yet that free will works in harmony (or for the greeks, it works tragically) with predestination. The actual nitty-gritty how this works? I don’t have an answer, there may be one, but again, I’m not a scholar of Greek drama, I’m not even a Hellenist technically.

In a way, the Christian cosmology both simplifies and complicates this issue. Bc unlike the Greek pantheon the Christian God is not pettily vindictive, and is also omniscient and omnipotent, allowing for a more complete sort of predestination.

I think???? It’s C.S. Lewis??? who says something about this it may have been in The Great Divorce I don’t remember, but he was a classicist! And applying this sort of fate vs freewill thing to Judas, Judas had the freewill to choose to betray or not betray Christ, but God, being omniscient and outside of time, knew what Judas’ choice would be, so in the ineffable plan He ‘predestined’ Judas to betray Christ since He knew that’s what, in those circumstances, Judas would freely choose. On second thought that may not have been Lewis but like jokes on you if I can remember where I read it.

That’s probably a little simplistic and there’s definitely folks out there who know better so if yall want feel free to (gently pls i am soft) make additions/corrections.

THANK YOU ANON!!!

And I just