In the past two months, I have been tutoring off and on in English Lit, Composition, the Novel, Poetry and Greek Drama.
Yesterday, I asked my student to watch the fantastic version of Oedipus Rex, from Toronto, directed by Tyrone Guthrie and featuring a famous Treker in the chorus, William Shatner.
One can watch it here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZUCgq8LfhY
This rendition of the play is famous for using Greek masks. Only one other place I know uses the traditional Greek masks, and that is the Genesius Guild, right here in the Quad Cities. Here is the website for the Genesius Guild. http://www.genesius.org/
I had forgotten, having shown this version to my students in 1980, that the Toronto version opened with someone referring to the "symbolic" actions of the Mass. How Catholic Canada was in 1957, or how Anglican, to use the Mass and the re-enactment of Calvary as a starting place for a Greek play. Of course, for centuries, Catholics have seen this play as moral enough to teach virtues, those same virtues praised by Aristotle and held by the Greeks to be necessary for the peace of the polis.
Ironically, both Canada and the States reveal a deeper aspect of paganism than the Greeks ever experience.
The fullness of Revelation had not been given to the Greeks, but to the Hebrews. That the Greeks knew so much about salvation, suffering, morality, and the reparation for sin was a knowledge given to them via both natural law and reason. Reason, the great gift to humans, provided the Greeks with insights into the soul, the mind, the intellect, the imagination.
In our day and age, we see a huge falling off of both the belief in natural law and the belief that reason, one way in which we are made in the Image and Likeness of God, can lead one to moral norms.
The present generations prove to be more pagan than the pagans of ancient Greece. Would today's pagans howl like Oedipus, when he discovered his sins, or rationalize these sins, or worse, accept these sins, patricide and incest, as normal?
The terrible truth of the generations which live today centers on the fact that, unlike Sophocles, these people have been shown the Truth and rejected the Truth.
God has been mocked. Oedipus took on himself his own sins and went into exile. Christ has taken our sins upon Himself and we have made Him go into exile, but marginalizing Christianity from our cultures, our politics, our homes.
I suggest that God will deal much harsher with those who have had the chance to accept Christianity, than with those who lived before Christ.