Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.1998, Page 46

Duncan B Forrester
ters as little passions which helped to shape a free nation, and tears still flow at
the recalling of the ‘flowers of the forest’ who fell at the disastrous defeat of
Flodden Field, or centuries later, at Culloden. Our sufferings and those of the
past, for all their bitterness and desolation, receive some kind of meaning from
the sufferings of Christ, and our intense emotions are given dignity and direction
by the fact that Christ’s feelings of desolation, compassion and anger were
central to his incarnate life and the fulfilment of his work.
The Greek Duality
When we enquire as to the place and significance of passion, emotion, feeling,
suffering in our understanding of practice, and in particular of the practice of the
presence of God, it may be good to start with the contrasting position of the
Greeks. They say a duality, two poles between which one hand to choose or for
ever oscillate between them. The two poles were represented by the gods Apollo
and Dionysus (or Bacchus).2 Dionysus represented the affective life and was
associated with strong emotions of joy, fear, pain, delight love, lust and so on.
The dominant philosophical tradition looked askance at the Dionysian element
in life, often regarding intense emotion as dangerous, unpredictable, irrational,
meaningless and brutish. Emotion might need some outlet, some relatively
harmless discharge, even among educated and enlightened people. Hence Plato’s
Guardians were allowed strictly controlled opportunities for sexual activity, for
instance. Sexual desire in itself was seen as a distraction from serious practice,
an obstacle to prudence, a disturbance of the inner tranquillity required if one
were to know the Good. Emotions were believed to require control if they were
not to become destructive of a balanced understanding, of wisdom, and of a
stable social order. In the Apollonian world view the head should rule the heart,
reason must regulate the emotions. Hence Socrates, the quintessential Apollo-
nian, is depicted as a man who dies without fear, regret of distress, secure in the
intellectual conviction that death is unimportant and that it is unseemly for a
philosopher to be emotional. In patriarchal style he insists that his wife, Zant-
hippe, be removed because her distress is disturbing the tranquillity of a true
philosopher’s deathbed and confident, serene passage to eternity.
This duality, of course, not only uses gods - Dionysus and Apollo - as types,
but reflects differing understandings of God. The highest God, according to the
philosophers, is apathetic, impassable, detached, uninvolved; and this god’s dis-
ciples should shape their lives accordingly. Dionysus of Bacchus, on the other
2 This duality is developed by Nietzshe in The Birth ofTragedy.
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