Odysseus Elytis and the Discovery of Greece

Odysseus Elytis and the Discovery of Greece Philip Sherrard The search for identity—the search to discover who one is, or who I am—has been a central preoccupation of man ever since, one might say, his expulsion from Paradise; and no doubt it will continue to be a central preoccupation for so long as "the crime of being born/ Blackens all our lot." But the intensity of this search, and its dimensions , have varied from age to age, from country to country. Where the prevailing pattern of human and social life has been determined by adherence to a particular religious tradition—as was the case in mediaeval Europe, or in the Byzantine world, or with the great civilizations of India, China or Islam—the answer to the question of who man is is given by the teachings of that tradition itself: it is enshrined in its sacred books, in its rituals and liturgies, in the counsel and example of its holy men and saints, its sages and prophets, in the works of its poets and painters. Anthropology—the science or knowledge of man—is always part and parcel of any religious doctrine; and the problem for man in societies of which such a doctrine is so to speak the spiritual lifeblood is not so much to discover who or what he is, as actually to become what he knows he is capable of becoming. The emphasis, that is to say, of the Pindaric injunction, "learn what you are and become it," is more on the becoming than on the learning; because the norm of what constitutes his humanity, or his essence as a human being, is already given to man by the religion to which he subscribes; and what he has to do is to try to fulfil that norm. It is in ages and places, and in societies, for which the over-riding authority of a particular religious tradition ceases to be effective, that the emphasis shifts and man finds himself confronted by the question of his identity without the traditional guidelines. What now tends to happen is that he is faced with dozens of alternatives, dozens of images , often conflicting and each claiming his recognition of its superiority . This is roughly what has happened in our own age in Europe, or in the West generally, though under the influence of the West it is now happening practically everywhere else as well. The authority 271 272 Philip Sherrard of the particular religious tradition—in the case of the West, the authority of the Christian tradition—in which man's nature and his place in the universal scheme of things were clearly articulated, has broken down, and in its place various other theories, which generally regard man as a more or less self-contained and autonomous being, compete to fill the gap. Thus, in the West, there are the theories of Darwin, or Marx, or Freud, or of countless other philosophers, scientists, psychologists and even sociologists. All these anthropologies jostle for attention. The result is that man—modern man—now finds that his ancestral universe, his spiritual cosmos, has been shattered into a thousand fragments and that he is left helpless and disorientated, the victim of the most terrifying psychoses. With no clear image of what or who he is, he is pulled this way and that by these conflicting theories. And as such a state of psychological and social instability and disequilibrium is difficult to sustain, he is generally induced to throw in his lot with whatever theory happens to be in fashion among the social group to which he belongs. But for those who do not succumb in this way—and even perhaps for those who do—the problem of their identity and of what it means to be a human being remains an agonizing and relentless pursuit. It is a pursuit from which people born into the modern Greek world are by no means exempt, even though from many points of view they may not yet be estranged so decisively from their traditional roots, religious and other, as many other western peoples. But on the other hand the question of identity in Greece has a specific...