Ulysses and monotheism

In Roman Palestine, a Greek theatre lay along the itinerary followed by Jesus during his prophetic wandering. We do not know if Jesus (or, for that matter, Simon Peter) ever attended a performance, comedy or tragedy, and, if he did, whether it fuelled his driven sense of mission.

It does appear, however, that by that time the Jewish Passover meal was already influenced by the Greek symposium, a somewhat tipsy, ritualistic meal celebrating friendship, which Plato used as the backdrop to his discussion of love. The Jews adapted the symposium to celebrate the escape from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, while Jesus, according to the evangelists, adapted the Passover meal to enact a dramatic self-portrait.

It is worth remembering these overlaps, both possible and actual, in thinking about Mediterranean identities. Their capacity to stimulate a startling shift in our ideas about ourselves was demonstrated last week during Ulysse 2009, the cultural dialogue and symbolic journey organised by the French Ambassador Daniel Rondeau, with the support of Speaker Louis Galea and Sergio Piazzi, the secretary-general of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean.

Although Christian thought represents a fusion between Semitic monotheism and classical philosophy, there are several interesting streams of 20th-century secular European thought which find it useful to keep them apart and contrast them.

Late-century ethical thinkers like Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum, for example, approvingly find that our secular age has more in common with the Greeks than with Christianity, and both explored how that idea might fertilise an education in being human.

In focussing on the contrast Williams and Nussbaum follow other thinkers, like Sigmund Freud. Stories and myths from the Mediterranean profoundly fired his imagination. But in discussing, say, Moses and monotheism, Freud kept apart his knowledge of Greek myths. What might have happened otherwise?

Like the Greek myths, Freud today belongs to all of us. His idea of monotheism as a religion based on law founded on fear is widely influential, including within the Mediterranean and among people who may have never read him. Like all insights, however, in shifting the spotlight onto one topic, it necessarily left others in the dark.

Mr Rondeau's genial idea was to combine a discussion of Ulysses with one of Semitic monotheism. The distinguished writers, scholars, poets and novelists, from around the region, showed how Ulysses (himself a "religious refugee" as Peter Serracino Inglott quipped, being on the run from one or two gods) might help us think about our conscience and consciousness today.

The lead was given by François Hartog, who described Ulysses as both a frontiersman and a man shaped by memory. Usually, these two figures are kept separate. The man of memory is a man governed by tradition and a reverence for the past. The frontiersman is the pioneer who has no use for the past, being out to create the future and, he believes, himself - as we say, a self-made man.

In combining both, Ulysses makes of tradition not a law, obeyed because of fear, but a voyage characterised by ethical choice and exploration. At the same time he rids the frontiersman of his illusion (or denial) of being independent of others. As I listened to the other speakers talk of the sea as a source of dreams and poetry, its tumult of love and death, I realised that what they were describing (sometimes autobiographically) were the dreams, drives and tensions that would be experienced by someone trying to hold together both tradition and a commitment to create value, not just pass it on.

Joseph Maila, of the Catholic Institute of Paris, was more direct in showing how Mediterranean monotheisms, in their existential versions, brought together ears pricked to the sounds of the past with an eye for the quickening of the future: they are driven by the conviction that humanity inherits the future from its Creator, as much as it does the past.

Or to put it in another way, the conventional way of thinking about the past and the future are reversed by Semitic prophecy. It is not so much that by inheriting the past, we can build the future. Rather, it is by inheriting the future that we can redeem the crazy, amusing, tragic merry-go-round of the past and find in it a new, path-breaking order.

ranierfsadni@europe.com