"The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely. For a warning of what happens in the absence of such a pressure valve, we have the example of the Romans. The emperors. Think, for example, of Tiberius, the ugly stepson trying to live up to the command of his stepfather Augustus. Think of the tremendous, impossible strain he must have undergone, following in the footsteps of a savior, a god. The people hated him. No matter how hard he tried he was never good enough, could never be rid of the hateful self, and finally the floodgates broke. He was swept away on his perversions and he died, old and mad, lost in the pleasure gardens of Capri: not even happy there, as one might hope, but miserable. Before he died he wrote a letter home to the Senate. 'May all the Gods and Goddesses visit me with more utter destruction than I feel I am daily suffering.' Think of those who came after him. Caligula. Nero.
He paused. "The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw," he said, "was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws - this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos." He laughed. "Easy to see why the Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly - how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it. Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. For all their logic, who lived in more abject terror of the supernatural than the Romans?
"The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism." He looked at the ceiling for a moment, his face almost troubled. "Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?" he said. "It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripedes speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, 'more like deer than human being.' To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortals than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn."
-Julian in The Secret History
Now aside from the technicalities I disagree with [such as the Romans finding their release in things like warfare and ... perverse sexual deviance and not in eventual madness; Julian's reasoning of the Roman persecution of Christianity - it's more likely that it was the Christian denial of other gods presented a more political front] the whole thing has to be viewed from another perspective. Julian is talking about bacchanals, where basically the Greeks got wasted and went insane for short periods of time. He compares their repression of the primitive to our repression of the primitive and I don't think that's totally valid in the case of modernity. Ancient and modern architecture, literature and laws only vaguely resemble each other. Compare our [in my opinion, rather ugly] skyscrapers and suburban houses to the Greek Parthenon, the Roman Pantheon; our trashy crime and romance novels to the Homeric epics and Dante's Divine Comedy; our laws which are more restrictive in every sense and much less democratic than the ancient Athenians would have allowed. It's easy to see from all of this that the repression of modern times is different; more resigned to its lack of release than in antiquity, perhaps. What is the likelihood that this is due in part to Christianity? Christianity and time. Christianity, in its development, has taught us to cultivate certain traits in ourselves and our children early on. Early Christianity was just as violent as the area in which it developed - Rome. Christianity as a doctrine [not necessarily the followers' "secret hearts" so to speak] has developed into something more loving, caring, and - depending on your perspective - something duller than its roots.
Christianity has a quiet, sad resignation in its culture. There is little joy to be found in most of its branches; either sadness, ordinary discontent or, in the case of some denominations, very ugly hatred [cough: westboro baptist church]. In this it is reminiscent of the early religions; little comfort - emotionally, anyway - was to be found in worshiping the gods and goddesses of archaic religion. Few Christians find real, solid comfort in God. This spills into the American culture to create an even more melancholy aspect of our country; in essence, our lives suck. We and those around us find little comfort in one another [lack of common courtesy, I believe, is a cause of the lack of real happiness in our personal relationships], the government [although this has, if you pay attention to the country's history, never been much of a comfort anyway], our popular culture, and now the leading religion in America is unhappy with itself. We work too hard and don't get enough in the way of reward. We have little to nothing in the way of money, love, or happiness. Thus, our repression is similar to that of the ancients, but the differences must be noted.
If only because our repression produces nothing worth noting by our descendants in twenty generations...
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