I'm slowly reading (and greatly enjoying) The Confessions by Saint Augustine. As a young student in approx 370AD, Saint Augustine hated studying Greek literature, including the works of poet and author Homer who often wrote about the gods.
Reflecting on the nature of education and role models of his time, Augustine writes:
Woe, woe to you, you flood of human custom! Who can keep his footing against you? Will you never run dry? How long will you toss the children of Eve into a vast, terrifying sea, which even those afloat on the saving wood can scarcely cross?
Did you not give me a story to read in which Jupiter is both the Thunderer and an adulterer? He could not possibly be both; yet so he was represented, to the end that his real adultery might seem to establish itself as deserving imitation because a faked thunderclap acted as go-between.
... Homer did indeed make up these tales, and thereby seemed to invest the disgraceful deeds of human beings with an aura of divinity, so that depraved actions should be reckoned depraved no longer, since anyone who behaved so could pretend to be imitating not abandoned humans but the gods above.
... (A) young man looks at a mural painting which shows how Jupiter tricked a woman by sending a golden shower into Danae's lap. Watch the dissolute youth making use of heavenly instruction to work up his lust! "What a god!" he exclaims, "a god who makes the temples of heaven ring with his thunder!" Well, a poor little fellow like me can't do that, but I have imitated him in the other thing, and what fun it was!
In the 1,700 years since Augustine wrote, few things have changed. Just as Augustine's young mind was fed on gods who both thundered and adulterated, so too our young people grow up on the same diet. To be sure, time has changed the details, we've replaced Jupiter for film stars and thunder for giftedness, but the underlying message remains the same - "Your divine thunder validates your disgraceful behaviour."
Hollywood presents our young people with role models who for 90 minutes on screen can be both thunderer and adulterer, creating a fictional world where the two attributes can happily coexist. In fact, the thunder is so celebrated that surely the adultery is to be celebrated also. For example, James Bond's daring exploits are so heroic and worthy of emulation, that to his captive audience, surely his sexual exploits are heroic too!
And so today, a young man looks not at a mural but at a big screen. He watches not a mythological god but an action hero. He observes the hero leap from building to building and woman to woman, thinking to himself, "What a man", and then leaves the cinema to emulate all of Bond's behaviour that he can.
