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| Ancient Corinth, Greece |
JMSmith tells us a story. It begins like this:
“You know, I said, that we begin by telling children stories which, though not wholly destitute of truth, are in the main fictitious . . .” - Plato, The Republic (c. 375 B.C.)*
“When I became a man, I put away childish things.” - Paul, 1 Corinthians (A.D. 53-57)
A nation is in large part a creature of its stories, be they stories of its ancestors, of its heroes, of its villains, of its gods. To be a member of a nation is in large part to know its stories, not as a folklorist but as one of the folk who live, and move, and have their being in that lore. It is to read or hear, but certainly to remember, these stories as a bible and not as mere artifacts or divertissements.
Plato makes clear in his Republic that a nation with a bad bible is lost. By bad bible I mean its folklore stunts life, cramps movement, and sings the deadly Siren song of nonbeing. I mean stories that make men begin to believe they are devils, or cyphers, or beasts. Also, stories, as Plato emphasizes, that celebrate rascals, snigger at virtue, or describe heaven as the abode of a boastful mafia don or a gaggle of lecherous drunks.
There are many ways the bible of a nation can go bad. It may be contaminated by addition of new and unwholesome stories that by design or carelessness spread perversion, despair and malaise. It can also go bad because it is already stuffed with cringeworthy “childish things” that must be refurbished for a mature audience or somehow, as Paul says, “put away.”
By Plato’s time, enlightened Greeks were embarrassed by their national bible, while they at the same time clung to that bible because it was theirs. Indeed, without Homer and the gods of Olympus, it was not clear what it meant to be Greek. Enlightened Greeks had therefore arrived at the fateful point where they must cease to be Greeks or allegorize their old stories.
Bonus word of the day. Farther down in his post he uses the word hermeneutic which, according to Google, means ' the theory and study of interpretation, especially regarding written texts, verbal communication, and human behavior'.
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