[Greetings, friends, from Austin! A few years ago, I became convinced that our lives must become one long effort to bring forth whatever beauty rests inside us… if we don’t dedicate our life to this ask, we condemn ourselves to lead deeply restless and dark lives. When I realized this, life suddenly became one big art project.
As I mentioned in On the Lumenorean, I started writing books, planning (free) courses on classical texts, designing shirts, and creating a LoFi library to participate in what I call meaning-making—that is, making things inspired by where I find meaning. Every single cent I’ve made from the sale of my books, plus about $10,000 of my personal money, has gone into editors, designers, and artists to help me bring my visions to life. And I have no plans of stopping this project to make every work of art I have in me as beautiful as possible.
In addition to continuing the edits on my third book, this week saw the birth of two projects I’m very excited about. The first: Anybody that knows me knows Jon Bellion's influence on my artistic aspirations. The album art he had David Lojaya do for Human Condition has always been something I’ve hoped to replicate for my creative projects. Well, I finally found an artist who I think can pull it off, and after a decent bit of back and forth on the concept, the first attempt at bringing the Lumenorean to life as a character is underway. I’m doing my best to manage my expectations, but the truth is I am VERY pumped for this. We’ll see! I’ll keep you updated.
The second: I found an artist to design shirts with about a year ago and, since then, have come up with four designs in the same style but featuring different characters (Hercules, A Danse Macabre Archer, Santa Muerte, and Prometheus) and sayings (“Through Struggle to the Stars,” “Death Stays on Target,” “Thy Will Be Done,” and “From Suffering Comes Understanding”). A couple of days ago, I received the first rendering of my fifth design. Inspired by the mythical Titan Atlas and the idea that “all bad fortune,” as Virgil writes in the Aeneid, “is conquered by endurance,” below is the first look. (P.S. It still has the watermark because I had one edit to correct a common misconception about Atlas. I’ll give you a chance to stare at the picture and try to come up with yourself before telling you below the image).
If you guessed the globe, you got it right. Many modern renderings of Atlas show him shouldering the Earth, but the original myths tell of him holding the celestial spheres or heavens. This makes sense if you consider the Earth existing under the heavens, as many of the ancients (up through the Middle Ages) did.
With Atlas and his symbolism stirring on the surface of my mind this week, I couldn’t help but think of the French philosopher Simone Weil. Among the many works of her short life, a collection of her essays was published under the title “Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks.” In one of the essays, she draws parallels between Prometheus and Christ. Picking up the torch of that work, I think there are also some similarities between Atlas and Christ to be made.
To that task, we now turn to the topic of today’s essay.]
In the tradition of Christianity, many—Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Milton—found Biblical truths in their favorite Greek myths. Even St. Paul pointed to this fact when preaching before the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers in Athens: “For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’”1
Some, like C.S. Lewis and Simone Weil, went a step further and found a foreshadowing of Christ in the characters of Greek legend.2 In this article, we’ll look at two Greek titans with some Christ-like (and some Luciferian) qualities: Prometheus and Atlas.
Prometheus: He Who Suffers on Man’s Behalf
Hesiod tells the backstory of Prometheus in Theogony. After helping the Olympians defeat his fellow Titans, Prometheus watched Zeus turn cold and cruel toward humanity. Taking pity on man, Prometheus decided to defend them against the injustices of Zeus.
“[W]hen the gods and mortal men had a dispute at Mecone” over who would get what parts of a sacrificial ox, Prometheus devised a plan to ensure man received the better pieces. Cutting up the great ox, Prometheus put the best meat in its belly and disguised the bones in what looked like a delicious portion. “[F]or Zeus he put the white bones dressed up with cunning art and covered with shining fat.” As Prometheus had hoped, Zeus selected only bones and fat for himself and the other Olympians, while the mortals were given the most useful parts.
“[W]hen [Zeus] saw the white ox-bones craftily tricked out,” Zeus retaliated, withholding from man the secret of fire. “But the noble son of Iapetus [Prometheus] outwitted him [again!] and stole the far-seen gleam of unwearying fire in a hollow fennel stalk” and delivered this share of the sun to humanity so they might flourish in spite of Zeus—using it to beat back the darkness of the night, warm their homes, cook their food, and ward off wild animals.
To punish Prometheus for his trickery, Zeus devised an eternal punishment. Binding Prometheus in chains and bolting him to a rock, Zeus “set on him a long-winged eagle, [] to eat his immortal liver…” Prometheus’s liver regenerated every night only to be devoured again the next day.
In Prometheus Bound, the Greek playwright Aeschylus picks up the story of Prometheus and brings the audience along to witness the Titan’s suffering on the mountainside and hear his pleas.
[Prometheus]: You bright / blue skies. / You gusts / of wind. / You river / waters / running / toward / the ocean, / then / smacking / like laughter / against / the shore. / Oh, / Mother / Earth, / who / cradles / us all. / I call out / to you, / and to / the all-seeing Sun. / Witness / how the gods / now cause / me to suffer, / inflicting / immeasurable / pain upon one / of their own! / Look upon / the tortures / I shall endure / over this end- / less sentence, / passed by / the newly / self-pappointed / patriarch / of the gods, / the so-called / blessed ones!3
Reading the stories of Prometheus in Hesiod and Aeschylus together, Simone Weil drew parallels between the crucifixion of Prometheus on the rock and Christ on the cross:
Here one might believe that to the torture of crucifixion Aeschylus superimposes the torture of hanging. For mysterious reasons the Christian tradition has always done the same for the Christ (hanged on a tree, hanged upon the Cross). Prometheus suffers because he has loved men too well. He suffers in man’s stead, the wrath of God against the human species is entirely carried by him… His gifts to humanity are first of all salvation, in that he prevented their annihilation by Zeus. He does not say how, but it is for this that he suffers. Then he gave them fire and knowledge of the order of the world, and of numbers and of techniques. But he has also freed men from the fear of death by filling them with blind hopes… one must interpret [Aeschylus’s words in another poem, Agamemnon] ‘He decreed as sovereign law: By suffering comes understanding’ as a link with the passion of Prometheus. The Christian likewise knows that he must go by the Way of the Cross to be united with Divine Wisdom… The story of Prometheus is like the refraction into eternity of the Passion of Christ. Prometheus is the lamb slain from the foundation of the world.4
As Weil points out, on the one hand, Prometheus is a Christ figure—he gives “light to every man”5 and hangs, crucified on a rock, suffering pain and torment on behalf of man. On the other hand, Prometheus is also like Satan—the great rebel and thief who offers man forbidden wisdom and operates with deception.
This makes Prometheus a fascinating and complex figure when viewed through a Christian lens. Not unlike his brother, and fellow Titan, Atlas.
Atlas: He Who Bears the Weight of the World
As with Prometheus, some of our insights on Atlas’s role in Greek mythology come from Hesiod’s Theogony. From Hesiod, we learn that Atlas fought alongside his kin against the Olympians and was ultimately punished by Zeus after their defeat. For his participation in the assault, Zeus tasked Atlas with supporting the celestial spheres:
And Atlas through hard constraint upholds the wide heaven with unwearying head and arms, standing at the borders of the earth before the clear-voiced Hesperides; for this lot wise Zeus assigned to him.
For his toil bearing the heavens on his shoulders, Atlas earned the epithet Telamōn (“enduring”), and became a symbol of strength and stamina.
As with Prometheus, we see also in Atlas intimations of both Christ and Satan. On the one hand, we see in Atlas one who bears the weight of the world (or heavens) on his shoulders so that man may live... just as Christ carried the Cross and relieved the world from the weight of its sin.
On the other hand, we something of Satan (and modern man) also. As a fallen and condemned diety, Atlas is bent under the weight of the heavens for his rebellion… the agony of being eternally crushed under the weight of the world a foreshadowing of what awaits anybody trying to carry things on their own. As Fulton Sheen put it after observing the giant statue of Atlas opposite St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York:
No one will get out of this world without carrying some burden. Atlas will never get out from under that world; the Man Who carried the Cross will get out from under it, for it leads to Resurrection and a crown in Life Eternal. This is the choice before us: either try to revolutionize the world and break under it or revolutionize ourselves and remake the world.6
Stepping out of the stories of Prometheus and Atlas, we are left with the question: how are we to view the two titans? As savior figures to be emulated or rebels with cautionary tales?
My answer: both. We should see them, like the other Greek gods, as models and embodiments of the various competing energies flowing inside us—reflecting our divine nobility and capacity for depravity. Like all great characters of myth and man, we ought to do our best to mimic them in as much as they act virtuously and upright and part from them in as much as they miss the mark.
This is partially why Ben Franklin says to imitate Christ—because he is the only figure, Greek or Hebrew, who pulls up all the virtues of history’s heroes into himself without absorbing any of the vices.
It isn’t just Prometheus and Atlas who might be said to be intimations of Christ; it might be said of anyone every time they act with virtue. When we showcase endurance and self-sacrifice in the interest of others, we are not just paying homage to the spirit of Prometheus and Atlas, we are participating in the spirit of Christ. Just as when we are prideful or envious or resentful, we are not just mimicing villains of our stories, we are embodying the Luciferean spirit that absorbs all vice.
Insofar as figure—whether Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, Japanese, or otherwise—point us upward, they point us toward Heaven; and each one, to the extent they invite us downward, leads us toward Hell. We must follow them up the ladder as far as they go and depart from them when they stray.
This is the way.
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P.S. I understand that reading the myths of Prometheus and Atlas this way—as potential intimations or foreshadowings of Christ—is done with the ever-present risk of reading a something into a story where there is a nothing. But as the Latin saying goes, abusus non tollit usum. “Abuse does not take away use.” If I (and others) stray in the arena of symbolic interpretation from time to time, that does not mean we stray every time.
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P.P.S. Here’s my shirt design inspired by the figure of Prometheus:
Acts 17:26-28. Here, St. Paul is quoting the Cretan philosopher Epimenides and the Cilician Stoic philosopher Aratus. Paul quotes the Greek poets two more times in the New Testament, once in 1 Corinthians 15:33 when he quotes a play by Menander (“Bad company corrupts good character”), and once in Titus 1:12 when he quotes Epimenedes again, this time calling him a prophet (“One of Crete’s own prophets has said it: ‘Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.’”).
As far as we know, none of the great Greek artists—Homer, Aeschylus, Plato, Ovid, Sophocles, Hesiod—had access to the Old Testament scriptures. So, we can’t make the case thatthe Hebrew scriptures influenced them.
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, translated by Bryan Doerries.
Simone Weil, Prometheus (found on p. 66 of Intimations of Christianity in Ancient Greece).
John 1:9.
Fulton Sheen, Our Grounds for Hope.