Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Musen - Dichter (Pindar); Mnemosyne; Paralelle zu Israel

Kurzinhalt: The parallel with the relation of Israelite prophets to the dabai of Yahweh is obvious - with the important difference, however, that in Israel the transcendent God manifests himself through the word, while ...

Textausschnitt: 139c In a study on order and history the enigma, for which the name of Homer stands, is not the authorship of a work of literature, but the creation of a symbolism that expresses a new experience of human existence under the gods, of the nature of order and the causes of disorder, and of the historical decline and fall of a society. Who was the man, if it was only one man, who broke with the cosmological myth and created a noncosmological form of social order? The problem is adumbrated in a passage of Herodotus (2.53): (Fs) (notabene)

Whence came into being each of the gods, or whether they had all for ever existed, and what forms they had, the Hellenes did not know until the other day, so to speak. For the age of Hesiod and Homer was not more than four hundred years before my own, I believe. And they were the first to compose theogonies for the Hellenes, to give the gods their epithets, to allot them their ranks and functions, and to describe their forms. (Fs)

140a From this text two pieces of information can be extracted. In the first place, the Hellenes knew that the order of their gods was of recent origin and could not be traced beyond the age of the epics. The time span surmised by Herodotus places the event, at the earliest, in the ninth century B.C. And second, they were convinced that the myth had not grown anonymously over a long period of time, but had been created by definite persons, the poets. These facts, to be sure, do not illuminate the darkness in which the historical Homer is shrouded, but they come close enough to the enigma to allow its circumscription through the definite questions: What is a poet? What is the source of his knowledge? And by what authority does he create a new symbolism of divine and human order? (Fs) (notabene)
140b The sources that will supply the answers to these questions are surprisingly scarce. Still, they are sufficient to make recognizable a relation between the poet and a divine source of revelation that resembles the relation between the Israelite prophet and the word of Yahweh. The Iliad opens with the verse: "The wrath do thou sing, O goddess, of the Pelide Achilles"; and the Odyssey with "Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices." As in the prophetic texts of the Bible Yahweh and his prophet are interchangeable as the speakers of the word, the dabar, so in the epic the Muse and the singer are interchangeable as the speakers of the poem. For the rest, the Iliad is uninformative since it invokes the goddess only by the standard formula: "Tell, me now, O Muses, housed on Olympus [...] " as an authenticating opening line for a new section of the story. In the Odyssey, however, we find an interesting passage. Demodocus is introduced (8.62-64) as "the singer [aoidos] whom the Muse loved greatly, and gave him both good and evil; of his sight she deprived him, and gave him sweet song." The passage suggests a connection between blindness to the world and song, since both are given by the Muse. And the theme is resumed in a paean of Pindar (7, b) where the poet prays for inventive skill to Mnemosyne and her daughters, the Muses. "For the minds of men are blind"; they need help who, without the Muses, "seek the steep path of them that walked it by their wisdom [sophia]"-, to the poet, Pindar, the Muses have charged this "immortal labor." The terseness of the verses, as well as their fragmentary character, make it impossible to decide whether the immortal labor means Pindar's walking of the "way of wisdom" for himself, or as the helper to his blind fellow men, but the latter seems to be the more probable meaning. The Homeric and Pindaric passages together formulate the great theme of blindness and seeing that recurs in Aeschylus and Plato: Who sees the world is blind and needs the help of the Muses to gain the true sight of wisdom,- and who is blind to the world is seeing in the wisdom of sweet song. The Muses, and through them the poets, are the helpers of man who seeks to ascend from his darkness to light. (Fs) (notabene)

141a More explicit on the subject is Hesiod in the opening pages of the Theogony. A tale of the gods must begin with the Muses, for whatever the poet knows about them he has learned from the Heliconian maids. They were begotten, by Zeus on Mnemosyne, to sing to the gods about the things that are, and shall be, and were aforetime,- and to praise to men the Olympians. They sing to remember-the world to the gods, and the gods to man-and they remember in order to make forget. They are "a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow." For though a man's soul be troubled and his heart be distressed, when "a singer, the servant of the Muses" sings the deeds of the forebears and the blessedness of the gods, he will forget his heaviness, and the gifts of the goddesses will turn him away from his sorrows. This antinomy of remembrance and forgetting corresponds to the previous one of blindness and seeing. The sorrow of "the newly-troubled soul" will be forgotten when the truly memorable is remembered; and the tenaciously held grief and distress is a forgetfulness about the things that are preserved by true memory, by Mnemosyne. The same opposition of true and false reality recurs in the tragedy, in the Aeschylean distinction between true action in conformity with the order of Zeus and the evasive or indifferent conduct that does not even deserve the name of action,- and it is ultimately transformed by the philosophers into the tension between true Being and the turgid stream of Becoming. (Fs)

142a The Hesiodian text (99-100) refers to the singer as the servant (companion, attendant, theiapon) of the Muses; the same formula occurs in Homeric Hymns 22.19-20. More frequently he is the prophetes, the interpreter or spokesman of the gods. The term is generally applied to the interpreters of oracles at temples; Herodotus speaks of the prophets at a shrine of Dionysus (7.3) and of a prophet at Delphi (8.36-37). The "truthful seer" Teiresias is for Pindar the "prophet of Zeus" [Nem. 1.61-62). And Pindar himself, "the holy mouth of the Muses,"1 succinctly enjoins them: "Reveal [manteueo], O Muse, and prophesy shall I" (frag. 150). The parallel with the relation of Israelite prophets to the dabai of Yahweh is obvious-with the important difference, however, that in Israel the transcendent God manifests himself through the word, while in Hellas the gods are still present and visible within the world and the "word" spoken is the poet's song. The logos has no function yet in the symbolism of the prophetic poets,- only with the philosophers does it begin to replace the earlier theophanies.2 (Fs)

142b The poets sing what is memorable; and the life of man reaches its climax, even in suffering, when his action and passion is worthy to be sung. A few texts will illuminate the problem. In Iliad 6.354-58 Helen speaks of the evil fate that Zeus has brought on her and Paris "so that in days to come we shall be a song for men yet to be." In Odyssey 8.579-80 Alcinous speaks of the ruin that the gods have wrought on men at Troy "that there might be a song for those yet to be." Pindar (Nem. 6.29-31) invokes the Muses to praise the victor; for when the heroes have passed away, "songs and legends store their noble deeds." And Euripides [Troiades 1242-45) lets Hecuba, about to be carried off into slavery, reflect: Had not a god thrown us down, even beneath the earth, "we would have been unfamed, unhymned by lays, and not a song to the mortals to come." The poet himself is not exempt from the hunger for survival through his song. A fragment betrays the proud consciousness of a Sappho: "Happy in truth have made me the golden Muses-when I die I shall not be forgotten."1 (Fs)