The Virtù of Heaven

Part of the difference, then, between the gods and the heroes seems to lie in the fact that the gods have a less active role in maintaining their awesomeness.  Being naturally able to leap tall buildings with a single bound is admittedly impressive, but not nearly as impressive as having worked out to the point where you can press 200, when you started with a measly 45.

Sorry, Superman.

But the difference between Homer’s gods and Homer’s heroes is not just a matter of who has to work harder to achieve their results; it is also about what sort of results are valued by whom.  There is a telling passage in the Odyssey in which, if memory serves, Odysseus turns to his patroness Athena and complains about lost family time (for which he is himself admittedly partly to blame).  And Athena, goddess of wisdom though she is, doesn’t get it.  She doesn’t get it because she is immortal, and the immortals don’t have the same concept of finitude that human beings have.  Rather like Hercules with his strong arm, they don’t always seem to see the consequences of their actions upon ordinary human beings; they cannot relate to them because they have not lived like them.

(This, incidentally, is one difference between the pagan concept of the gods and the Christian concept of God: Christians do not in fact hold that God needed to become man in order to fully comprehend his creatures.  But that is a topic best saved for another post.)

Because they do not have to experience the same set of limitations that human beings experience, the Homeric gods oftentimes come across as emotionally and morally stunted by comparison with their human contemporaries.  And this may not be a matter of appearance only: human beings, after all, seldom if ever attain heroic heights of character without having to go through some form of fire.

This is not to say that everyone who emerges from suffering possesses a kinder character.  What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger; conversely, some spirits do seem to wither and become crabbed with extended adversity.  But (as the pirates say), the choice is up to you!  And there is no doubt that a naturally nice human being becomes not only far more interesting and but actually better for the trials they undergo.  I defy anyone to prefer Jane Bennet before she has gone through the wringer; Anne Eliot would have been just such another were it not for her backstory.  What both women have had—Jane at the end of her novel and Anne at the beginning of hers—is the opportunity to grow in virtue; in this (if only in this) they resemble Achilles and Odysseus at the ends of their respective epics.

But the gods never quite receive such opportunities.  When passing physical pain and embarrassment are the worst you have to face in the course of your immortal existence, it is not surprising that whatever moral fiber you had initially possessed at birth (or at death, if you ever were a human) is what you get to live (subsist?) on for the remainder of your aeviternity.  Not surprisingly, a fair number of the gods behave, when in straits of any sort, more like oversized babies than anything else.  Their intelligence, their strength, their will to power, and occasionally their loyalty (to especially loyal human beings) are oversized; they possess few other virtues.  Even their generosity tends to be quid pro quo.  They have, in fact, most of the virtues that Machiavelli would recognize and applaud, though perhaps a dash less foresight than he would prefer.  Their virtues are, in other words, mostly virtù in the Machiavellian sense.

Glory vs. Honor

It occasionally strikes me as being a bit pretentious to distinguish within an argument amongst terms which are used interchangeably in everyday speech—but my goodness, isn’t it helpful?  (And in English we have enough words to do it too.)  And one does want a way to distinguish between the gods of Olympus and the heroes of the same world; for after all, though the gods don’t always seem admirable—at least from a modern western standpoint—they are admired.  Clearly, then we want a way to distinguish between the two kinds of awesomeness in play in the Greek world.

The first possibility that came to mind—because, as usual, it had cropped up in my recent reading—was the distinction which Aquinas purportedly makes, somewhere, between glory and honor.  (I say “purportedly” and “somewhere” because despite the fact that I usually mark these astonishing passages, I seem not to have done so on this particular occasion, and Google is of no help in tracking down the reference.  There is thus a possibility, albeit a slim one, that I am making this up.  At any rate …)  Aquinas, though he generally uses the terms “glory” and “honor” interchangeably, at one point makes a distinction between what those terms signify in describing our attitude towards God.  We honor God, says Aquinas, for who He is, but we give Him glory for what He has done.

And that, interestingly enough, strikes me as very close to the difference between the way we (or at any rate, I) feel about the Greek gods and heroes.  A certain amount of respect goes to the gods just because of what they are.  You can shift shape? smash mortals with lightning bolts? remain ever-young with magical drinks?  Cool beans.  Respect.  Or, in Aquinas’s lingo, honor.  Mostly because I would prefer not to be smashed by a lightning bolt.

But it’s a very different feeling than the feeling one has for the heroes.  Killing Hector or a Cyclops takes a certain amount of grit and effort (magical armor and sleeping drugs notwithstanding); and any human who can pull that off earns my respect in a completely different sense—they deserve, in other words, the glory they receive.

This is not to say that the gods never pull off any impressive stunts in their Olympian careers, or that human beings never give them “glory” in the specialized sense with which I’m here concerned.  But that strikes me as a somewhat rarer sort of thing than the “honor” which the gods typically receive; and it tends to be the fruit of particular personal patronages involving particular personal helps (e.g., Athena’s help and patronage of Odysseus).

Glory Is for Men

I can’t recall what brought the topic to mind in the midst of morning coffee (it was not the proximity of September 11, but it might as well have been); but we found ourselves talking (not for the first time) about the relative merits of the Iliad and the Odyssey.  This time, however, it devolved into a comparison between the two epic’s mostly contrasting heroes.  Achilles and Odysseus are both faced with a fundamental choice, and both make a choice which could be characterized as choosing to be more human.  For Achilles, the choice (largely offstage in the Iliad, but nevertheless recurred to) is between a short life with glory, or a long life without it; for Odysseus, the choice is between mortality with his family and immortality without them.  In both cases, while there is something human about the latter, unchosen choice—one can easily imagine the appeal of long life, or the appeal of immortality—it is a quisling kind of humanity, which betrays itself in choosing as it does.  To put the matter another way: both Achilles and Odysseus choose the nobler path.

It is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the path which is less godlike, at least in the case of Odysseus, who quite literally rejects the option of becoming a demigod with Calypso.  Even for Achilles, however, the choice of glory over long-life is in some ways incomprehensible—even if admirable—from an Olympian standpoint: incomprehensible because the Olympian gods are portrayed more often being shamed than earning more glory.  Mars and Venus dragged up to the high courts in a net, Venus wounded by Diomedes, Mars shrieking in pain—these are moments of ingloriousness which have more hold on the imagination than all Zeus’s potent thunderings.  In some sense it seems that, precisely because the gods are the gods, they are supposed to be glorious—supposed in the sense of supposition, but also in the sense of obligation.  They operate a height from which they can fall, but above which they cannot rise.  That, perhaps, is why we have a tendency, like Prometheus, to prefer human beings.

Boxes

I’m not sure that it is entirely necessary for the human body to prepare for motherhood so far in advance.  Certain things, perhaps, make sense: producing milk, for example, is complicated, and thus one is not surprised to learn that there is a casual sort of ramping up to the big day.  Likewise, pushing a five-to-ten pound human being out of one’s normally self-contained body seems like it should require a considerable amount of muscular practice; hence the reason for those delightful Braxton-Hicks contractions, also dubbed “practice contractions”.

But I would have thought that sleeping at night got a pass.  I know, of course, that one can’t really bank sleep the way one banks cord blood.  If I manage an extra hour each night for nine months, it’s not as if those 275 hours will be available to draw on when the rubber hits the road.  And yet it would be so nice to enjoy these last couple of months of the parenting equivalent of irresponsible bachelordom.  But no; no: no matter how much weariness comes with the territory of carrying around an extra twenty plus pounds, there is no guarantee that sleep will knit up your raveled sleeves.  If decreased space for fluids and increased softness of joint don’t get you, there’s always …

… your ears?  Yes, your ears.  You see, parents tend to sleep lighter after they’ve become parents than before.  Makes evolutionary/design sense, no?  Being able to tell when your offspring are in danger, in trouble, or just plain hungry is a useful skill; if you neglect to notice this once too often, you may not have offspring for very much longer.

But did you know that mother’s ears actually start tuning to potentially dangerous noises even before the baby arrives?

I didn’t either.  I admit, though, that it makes logical sense that moving from one place to another would trigger this adaptation.

Did you further know that this tendency to alarm at noises is actually beyond rational control?

Me neither.  Though once again, moving to a new place makes the irrationality seem a whole lot more rational, seeing as how we don’t really know the area yet.

And did you further know that even having a clean conscience, a brain attuned to logical probabilities, and a protective husband can’t actually put you back to sleep right away?  Because adrenaline.  Once you open those gates, baby, it’s not going back.  You can practice labor-and-delivery relaxation techniques all night long (well, for an hour or two anyway) and have no tangible results to show for it.  By which I mean, everything is still tangible: the mattress, the sheets, the pillows, the outline of the door(s) … and the noises that started it all.

There have been frog noises; bird noises; probably cricket noises; neighbors-trying-to-be-quiet noises; and mysterious, still-unresolved noises that come (I hope and sincerely believe, but it’s only eight o’clock in the evening at the moment, which makes optimism easier) from the kitchen.  One of my favorites to date comes from the (truly most necessary) air conditioning unit, which switches into high gear at regular intervals with a sound that is exactly like the cha-chick of a shotgun shell being clicked into place.  (Having shot skeet, I should know.)

But my real favorite was the night the boxes fell down.  You see, when you move, there are a lot of boxes; and when there’s a chance you may move again soon, and you had to beg for these from a couple of different stores, and you’re an introvert who hates asking for anything, even when the Barnes and Noble employees are super-nice about it—well, you’re not going to throw those boxes away.  No, you flatten them, and then in due course and the fullness of time (i.e., many days later than was actually necessary) they are taken upstairs to a closet and deposited on a shelf.

And then, that night, you are awakened from a not-so-deep slumber and a moderately terrifying to dream to the sound of stuff falling.

At first you think that it was just one of those vivid dreams, and the sound wasn’t real.  But you’re very much awake now.  (See: above: adrenaline.)

And then it happens again.

And it occurs to you that it might be the boxes, but you’re not sure; and anyway, it sounded like it came from downstairs, and could it be burglars, but there’s no way they would make that much noise, and maybe the house is haunted, and you really should have gotten a priest to bless it right away, but could anyone really have died here because the development is less than ten years old, and …

And for about ten minutes nothing happens, and then there’s the noise again, and it does NOT sound like boxes falling in a closet, because it is VERY loud; but it’s GOT to be the boxes in the closet, because that’s the only rational explanation, and you are a rational human being.

Then you decide that if the three of you are going to get murdered in bed, at least you’ll all be murdered together, which is better than some of the alternatives.

At this point, you decide that you’re not actually being all that rational, and that you either need to (1) get up and see if it really is the boxes, or (2) wake up your husband and tell him what’s going on.

Since (1) is obviously untenable, you go with (2).  He is sympathetic, if somewhat sleepy, and asks if he should go see if it is the boxes.  And—this is how you know that you’re pregnant, because this is truly irrational—you say no, because (out loud) you’re know it’s just the boxes, but really, secretly, you don’t want him to get killed by burglars without you.

And then the boxes are entirely and one hundred percent quiet for the next five minutes as your husband falls back asleep.  In fact, they remain entirely silent for the next 1,427-odd breaths which you take before you and your shattered psyche fall asleep.  Boxes are like that: quiet.  Nefarious.  Tricksy.

Anyway, it was the boxes.  There are no burglars in the area (that we know of) and the house still hasn’t been blessed (although we really need to get that done).  And I know a lot more about the hormones that make pregnant women sleep more lightly than usual than I did before this happened.

I’m not sure there is a moral or a philosophical reflection to go with this story.  Then again, perhaps that is the moral: not everything gets a moral, a diagnosis, or an explanation, especially things related to children.  (Also, boxes.)  That, and maybe patience: there is nothing quite like the frustration of losing sleep over something that you know is nothing.  But quite a lot of parenting in the early stages is just that: lots of fusses about nothings, and you can’t explain to your irrational infant that really, he just needs to burb and everything will be fine.  Perhaps, all things considered, it’s good to have a little practice dealing with oneself in the same irrational, midnight-of-the-brain state.

P.S. We still haven’t put the boxes back up.  At this point I figure they’ve reached some sort of disheveled state of equilibrium halfway between the shelf and the floor.  We’re not using the closet right not anyway.  Why would I mess with a perfectly satisfactory situation?