The Dilemma of Rebellion

And the State of the Western Mind

All of us enter the House of Truth through a different door. Mine happens to be the door of stories. Stories help me make sense of things that should never make sense. They help me discover the underlying values of their time and place and because they stir feelings as well as thoughts, stories help me to understand both my personal history and the history of the world around me. In the essay which follows, I explore, in no particular order, what I consider three of the great foundation myths of what has become Western civilization. They are Homer’s Iliad, which shaped the classical mind, the Bible, which shaped the Middle Ages, (among others), and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the foundation story of the Age of Religious Conflict and the Age of Revolutions whose tectonic convergence ushered in the Modern world. I begin to trace themes of rage, uprising, and the quest for equality which appear in all three. In this essay, I focus upon rage. Don’t worry if some of this seems strange. We’ve entered strange times. If we are going to be shaken up by them anyway, we might as well look for the roots of the shake-up.

As I suggested, no matter how much we would like to think ourselves reasonable, we live, not according to our facts, but according to our myths. That is why it matters who, if anyone, controls the social narrative. We are a storytelling people and the social narrative shapes us. “Mythos,” tale, is the partner of “logos” which means “thought, or reason.” Both stories and thoughts can be true or false, and sometimes they are both, which is when they become the most interesting.

Foundation stories vary widely from culture to culture. Many of them deal with gift and sacrifice or the moral dilemmas raised by conflict among people who care for one another. Western foundation stories tend to be driven by anger, by conflicts painted in black and white, which is why we should be less surprised at the prevalence of rage in our time.

The Foundation Myth of the Greco-Roman world begins with these famous lines: “Sing, Goddess, of the deathly rage of Peleus’ Achilles, which shattered the Achaeans and sent many stalwart souls to Hades.”

The Bible ushers in a culture of salvation anxiety by beginning with God wresting order from chaos and continuing with men, again and again, rebelling against the teachings of God and incurring God’s wrath, until we’re all reduced to a state of perpetual defensive vigilance, which easily slips into vigilanteism. Wars were fought in Europe over who would be going to heaven and who were destined to be consigned to hell.

Paradise Lost, which has shaped our world more than we might like to think, begins with “Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit/ Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste/ Brought death into the world. More stalwart souls headed for Hades!

Rebellion against authority, both human and divine, has been a literary trope for so long in our history and culture that most of us take its existence for granted. Rebellion is simply human nature, what we in this techie age would call “hard wired into our brains.” That’s what foundation myths do. They give us the qualities we take for granted. We may love or deplore them, but rarely do we question their right to exist.

I was a rebel when I was young. I cheered Achilles’ rage, because it was my rage. Why should I submit to my father’s edicts when he so clearly didn’t? Revolt was what characterized the sixties. Bring down hypocrisy. The wheels of democracy were too slow to meet our urgency. It didn’t even matter whether we had a cause. Rebellion, not solution, was the order of things.

To paraphrase Kyle Whyte, the ecology professor I quoted in my last essay, foundation myths show us the values and relationships with which we govern ourselves. Or, in the case of the present moment, the values and relationships which prove we cannot govern ourselves at all.

When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters….God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. (Genesis 1:1-2,27)

In a creation wrested from chaos and wind, dominion becomes a loaded word. Consider what Bill Nye has to say about that:

“For me, the fundamental idea I believe we all need to embrace is this: Humankind is in charge now of our whole planet. This is not a gig we auditioned for. Our species has become so influential, so powerful, and frankly so dangerous, that we need to accept responsibility for managing our world. We control the fate of every species here, especially our own. And it’s not that we need to somehow save Earth–Earth is going to be here no matter what humankind does. We want to preserve Earth’s climates and ecosystems so that we, and virtually every other species here, can thrive. It really is up to us.” Bill Nye “Clear Thinking About Climate,” Skeptical Inquirer, Vol 49, No. 1, January/February 2025

Despite their different sources, biases, and perspectives, Genesis and Nye inhabit a common imaginary.^[1] Both wonder what it means to exercise dominion and creativity, although they do not always agree on the details. God gives us dominion in Genesis; Nye counters that this dominion is not a gig we auditioned for. (I quite disagree, but you decide.) Nye also assumes that we want to preserve Earth’s climates and ecosystems even as our actions tell a very different story, an assumption he can easily make thanks to the pervasive Christian doctrine of sin. “I do what I do not want,” laments Paul in his letter to the Romans.

Dominion, creativity, and sin, or if you prefer, transgression, have captivated us for hundreds, if not thousands, of years–Bill Nye the Science Guy is hardly the first educated and amiable humanist to have celebrated and worried about our achievements, and it was no one less than Plato who suggested that the violent, temperamental and philandering Zeus might be a less than ideal object of worship.

I’m not sure the Biblical God does much better in the minds of many. How can one worship a being who judges us so harshly? Speaking of the sacrifice of Isaac, my friend Alice called God “abusive,” and although she was in seminary, announced that she could not give her loyalty to such a being.

Milton’s God, too, appears as a distant and judgmental figure. That Satan, “Th’Infernal Serpent,” would rebel against such a righteous prig is simply a given. “His pride cast him out of heaven with all his host of rebel angels.”

The image of a wrathful God was commonplace when Milton was writing. It lent itself nicely to the bloody Thirty-Years War in which Protestants and Catholics slaughtered one another. It continues today in Fundamentalist sects which cast men in the role of God and their wives as sinners to be disciplined. Is this what God really is, or is it a reflection of the habitual violence that built the West: conquest, empire, colonialism?

From my own theological vantage, as both woman and priest, I find myself questioning the assumption that violence and war are humanity’s destiny. I have trouble with the idea that I am a sinner in the hands of an angry God. This is not to say I don’t have flaws. I do. Still, everything I have seen and experienced is as Jesus, and much of the Old Testament have said. The essential nature of God is love. Even the sacrifice of Isaac can be seen as an emphatic lesson that God will never accept the sacrifice of a child, even if it appears he is asking for it. And yes, this has implications for how Christians understand the Cross.

I have experienced God as a teacher. Like Milton’s Satan and because I am by nature uppity, I have been repeatedly cast into the Lake of Fire. At first, it feels like a horrific punishment. But later, as I navigate the heat and learn its properties, I discover a host of fascinating insights I would have otherwise avoided, and as I work with myself, begin to better understand the profound and often dangerous forces which shape reality in this universe. What if Milton’s God was not punishing his rebel angel, but initiating him? Reading Milton, I kept asking, why would a God, whose nature is pure love, hurl one of his angels, the most beautiful and complicated one at that, the one who so admired what God had made that he, too, wanted to create and have dominion, “headlong flaming from th’ethereal sky/With hideous ruin and combustion down/To bottomless perdition, there to dwell/In adamantine chains and penal fire?” Unlike my aunt, I don’t think God was seeking an apology. God was seeking a transformation that only fire was strong enough to bring about, a co-creator with whom to bring the dead to life. What else was the Cross but a variation on the theme of the Lake of Fire, this time, a tree of death, whose fruit was the tree of life for those who could understand?

Now consider the opening sentence of Chet Raymo’s lovely primer, Biography of a Planet: We are made of the ash of stars. Stars burn hydrogen, the most common element in the universe. The ash is carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements of life.^[2]

“Be passersby,” says the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas. Nothing is forever. Be suspicious of eternity. Punishments administered by a loving hand come not to torment, but to teach. What Satan mistook for chains and eternal perdition was the very energy that transforms hydrogen into heavier elements, the ash of stars. God lives in the same fire whose only eternal quality is the ability to change all it touches. God gives life, but Satan, who cannot see beyond his own misery, has no desire but the desire for revenge. When Satan blames God and vows revenge, he is just like Adam blaming Eve and Achilles blaming Agamemnon. Satan’s mistake is the greatest of the three, because Satan is immortal.

The seventeenth century brought forth the idea that political revolution was the way to heal an ailing state into new life. The Glorious Revolution against Charles I brought power to the people of Parliament, but it did not take long for the new power to become as tyrannical as what it had overthrown, without even the grace of good manners. Revolutions may change regimes but, because they are at base reactionary, they cannot transform the underlying forces which spawned them. Empires may fall, but new ones rise in their place. Old dynasties are replaced by new dynasties. Power rises against power and in the end, only force persists, handed back and forth between conflicting sides, for power cannot exist without an object to threaten and beat, and thus we swing between the autocrat’s rage to have dominion and the rebel’s demand to be free of the autocrat. There’s a paradox here, which I will deal with later. The stakes: To be the one who gets to tell the story.

I return to my aunt’s words, “The Old Mythology is the New Mythology. Each age has its dragons and heroes, they just call them by different names. Every lifetime is a journey confronted by good and evil.”

What if the truth were less oppositional? What if every lifetime were in fact the opportunity to go beyond good and evil, because good and evil may be the fruit of human wrath, not a fixed truth. I can say that because of our propensity to blame others for our ills, a detail tucked into all the foundation stories cited above. What if there is nothing to blame? Is a supernova evil? Is the death of a possum to feed a bobcat evil? Is an unwanted pregnancy good? Is a religion which leads people into battle good? Is it good to kill unjust executives? To make cutting trees on imperial land a capital offense?

To go beyond good and evil reveals the truth that is so shocking that it can feel like being cast into a lake of fire. To wage war between good and evil is to wage war against myself because I am both good and evil.

This, in my opinion, is where the world which grew out of Paradise Lost ultimately fails. The rebel becomes the hero, but the rebel is Satan. Satan deals in temptation and cruelty, and what beauty can come of those? In England, rebels executed King Charles I for treason. “A king is answerable only to God,” Charles I asserted out loud. So did Jesus, but silently. It’s very easy to confuse things.

That’s because we humans are easily deceived. The myths tell us that, too, but how often to we take it to heart? We mistake our passions for the truth. We are afraid. But if we finally succeed in our rebellion, we end up “so influential, so powerful, and frankly so dangerous,” that our very brilliance might result in the sixth extinction. And that is how Bill Nye, the Science Guy, can write the foundation myth of the moment. Do what you have to do, but just don’t start a revolution.

Now that’s a whole new story.

^[1] “Imaginary” is a word popularized by the philosopher Charles Taylor to describe shared values, beliefs, and ideas that shape a culture. It is a better word that “world-view,” because a less passive one, which suggests that we have a hand in creating what we take for granted.

^[2] Chet Raymo, Biography of a Planet, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1984), 1