Promethean

A kind of schizophrenic self-alienation lies at the source of all the inadequate mysticisms of heroism and guilt. The longing of man’s restless spirit to transcend itself by its powers is symbolized by the need to scale the impossible mountain and find what is, after all, our own.

“God is less necessary than our sentiments of despair.” ~Merton

We have found ourselves living in a time when it is increasingly difficult to engage with “others”. And this certainly plays out in our everyday life as we attempt to talk to our mate or our “friend” at work, trying to work out the details of making arrangements to reconcile a disagreement or position of subjectivity we have strong feelings about. The “others” are socialized entities that have “drank the cool aid,” if you will. They have had the narrative of lies pumped into their neurons for generations to the point that it has had an epigenetic effect. Merton speaks to this as the “Promethean Theology” of our age. Prometheus set out to be his own god and found that he could do so only by being punished. “In doing so, found he was more enslaved by guilt than would ever have been possible.” ~Merton

“Let them claim that the world has a definite meaning: but they don’t want to know what the meaning is. Let them claim that life has its obligations: but that they do not want to find out what these may be. They assert that the gods are all quite real, but they do not want to have anything to do, one way or another, with divinity. Rightness, piety, justice, and religion consist, for them, in the definition of various essences.

If only these right-thinking men could taste something of Prometheus’s absolute despair, we would imagine them for a moment worthy of honor.”~Merton

We were discussing this recently as to the difficulty we find as we enter into the company of others, the postmoderns, and we are challenged as to whom we are trying to engage with. I have reasoned for a time that anything that speaks to our ontology is readily accepted and integrated into our abstracted construct we call our “self.” The message is evident when the bible declares that man is lost and needs a savior, a messiah. We have been lost for generations, so lost we have lost sense of who we are…a created people in the image and likeness of our God. But the message of Prometheus rings clear to this culture. And we find ourselves comforted by it.

So who is this Prometheus?

Hesiod first mentioned Prometheus, an ancient Greek poet generally thought to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. Hesiod’s version of Prometheus is the “image of humanity's psychology: guilty, rebellious, frustrated, anxious, unsure of himself, his gifts, and his strength, alienated, yet still seeking to assert himself.” Prometheus is the symbol of defeat. Its roots are in the bottomless abyss of man’s nothingness. The mysticism has this negative quality to it; it makes a victory out of defeat and glories its despair.

“Who cannot see that Prometheus’s guilt, and his gods are simply the composite picture of man’s schizophrenia?”~Merton

Virginia Wolfe exclaimed, in 1910, “All human relations have shifted, those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change, there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct politics, and literature.” It was apparent then, as it certainly is a century later, that something had happened. Taking advantage of our ontology, the battle for the heart and mind of the human race took a turn for the worst, and a new message was unleashed on the planet. Or should I say, an old message was repackaged. The original garden message was cleaned up and rebranded.

Welcome to the Postmodern era, a Promethean Theology.”

Thomas Merton, A New Man (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961). p. 25, 27, 29, 31.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Yale University Press, 2009), p. 389