Monday, January 12, 2004
(12:24 AM) | Anonymous:
Dionysus is Jesus sans the Crucified
I am presenting Jean-Pierre Vernant's commentary on Euripides' "The Bacchae" for my Tragedy class tomorrow. The article I read, "The Masked Dionysus" was one of the most faith-shaking things I have ever read which is rather strange considering it never once brings up Christianity in any serious way. It was just that Dionysus, as he is presented in "The Bacchae" and in Vernant's article, is so much like the Jesus I claim to follow.
I don't have the time to write a good extrapolation of the essay at this moment but just to outline briefly how Dionysus sounds like the Jesus of that brand of Christianity I find myself associated with: We see in Dionysus the subversion of all categories (Greek and barbarian, old and young, madness and reason, man and woman, free and slave), the rulers are thrown down for not recognizing the godhood of Dionysus and for shunning his followers, by eating the man whom is possessed by Dionysus the followers can share in his godhood, his wine is his gift to affirm the world regardless of woe, his presence is marked by a distinct absence (they even called his parousia), and so on and so on.
How this comes to bear on my understanding of Nietzsche will be fleshed out in the coming week, so I leave you in anticipation of that coming event.
