Simone Weil in her essay “The Illiad: A Poem of Force” spoke of proud Priam clutching the knees of Achilles begging for the body of his son. You may recall the scene. “Godlike Achilles, remember your own father, who is of such an old age as I, on the deadly threshold of old age. It might be that his neighbors harass him, and there is no one to ward off war and ruin from him. But when hearing that you are alive he rejoices, and his days are full of hope that he will see his dear son coming from Troy; but I am completely doomed. I brought the bravest sons in broad Troy, but of them I say there is not one left. I had fifty when the sons of the Achaeans came; nineteen were from one womb. Women in the palace bore the others for me. Violent Ares cut the knees from under most of these sons. This was my only surviving son. He guarded the city and its people. You have recently killed him, as he guarded his fatherland, Hector. And so I have now come to the ships of the Achaeans, in order to ransom him from you; I bring a huge ransom. But respect the gods, Achilles, and take pity on him, remembering your own father. But I am even more pitiful; for I have suffered such things as no other mortal man on earth has, I have put to my face the hands of the man who killed my sons.” So he spoke; he stirred up in Achilles a longing to weep for his father. And so, grasping the old man by the hand he gently pushed him away. They both remembered. Priam, remembering man-slaying Hector, wept intensely, crouching at Achilles’ feet; but Achilles wept for his own father, and then for Patroclus. Their wailing stirred up the house. But when godlike Achilles had his fill of grieving and the longing for it left from his heart and body, he arose from his seat, and raised the old man by the hand, pitying his white head and white beard.”
Alas our MUTANTS hold man and human life in complete contempt. There is no need for human emotion, only the naked pathological will to power of fallen Faustian reason acknowledging no God and Mammon as only master. It does appear in this chapter of the Human Comedy that the Freddie Krueger character is globally normative in important power positions of our Technological Age.
Berdyaev: “The tragedy of the situation lies in the fact that great masses of humanity have awakened and come into power at the moment of a falling away from Christianity and the loss of all religious beliefs.
We are witnessing a judgment not on history alone, but upon Christianity in history, upon Christian humanity,” necessarily because “Christianity in history has been not only the revelation of God, but also the work of man,” and “the purity of revelation has often been sullied by the human element, the human consciousness through which it has been filtered.” Berdyaev devotes a paragraph to listing the human deformation of Christianity. In a preliminary conclusion, he states: “The judgment on Christianity is a judgment upon the false theophanies, the false sanctification of the natural and the historical.” What meaning attaches itself to Berdyaev’s phrase, “false theophanies”? These would be the heresies that take some tiny part of Christian revelation and blow it up until it overtakes the whole and relinquishes and context.
In a secular order, the heresies become the ideologies. It would be possible to supply specific references that Berdyaev, who probably assumes that his readers are familiar with them, omits. Consider, for example, those expressions of the late Renaissance, the utopias. There is the original Utopia of Thomas More; there are the technical utopias of Sir Francis Bacon and Tomasso Campanella. Then there are the radical Protestant sects, such as the Anabaptist movement, which anticipate the Revolution in France. There is the Cartesian reduction of consciousness and the absurd theory of the “Blank Slate.” (Everyone can compile his own long list.) Berdyaev writes:
The judgment upon Christianity is going on in all phases of human life and culture. It is a judgment upon false monism and false dualism, upon extreme immanentism, upon the deification of human frailties and the degradation of human dignity. The world crisis is a judgment both from above and from beneath. The tragic conflict between Christianity and history is nothing new – it is eternal and in the process each judges the other. History’s judgment upon Christianity is its revelation of Christianity’s failures in history… But on the other hand this defeat of Christianity turns into a judgment upon history. The failure of Christianity is the failure of history as well. This is more clearly evident now, than ever before.
I've said it before but the removal of the women gods was a mistake. Leaving us with just Zeus & Apollo, who came up with that idea?
I always liked Hektor. I preferred him to the various Greeks.