An abiding city
J. Enoch Powell
The City Of The Gods, a study in myth arld mortality John S. Dunne (Sheldon Press £4.50) Professor Dunne's book — he is professor of Religious Studies at Yale — was published ip the United States as long ago as 1965, and it Is surprising that it has had to wait till noW far publication here. Since Frazer's Golden Bough (1890) we had all known the king who must be slain, ar,!" usually eaten too, in order to save his people, iy renewing the virility of the kingship, on whic depends the fertility and survival of the tribe, its herds and its crops. What Father Dunae, does is to add a new dimension to the death nAl the god-king; he dies in order to visit the wall,' of the dead and obtain immortality vicariousu for his people by 'tasting death.' Often he last death' by becoming the consort of the clea, goddess, who lives in the city and whose citade' it is necessary to capture in order to seize frorn its owners the secret of immortality. From this point new perspectives open upon Eve, who gives Adam the fatal apple which is both death and knowledge, and upon the TNjan War, which in its original form with Hele,„ri as the city goddess was entirely rational lY motivated. There is indeed much to show that Helen started life as an immortal — indeed, hY marrying her Menelaus became immortal like a god — and Father Dunne argues persuasive,Y that the Iliad is a profound commentary unaa the tragedy of a war which had become unintelligibly futile once Helen was humanised int° a mere 'beauty queen.' On this theory, the wrath of Achilles over the slave-girl Briseis is a savage parody of the wrath of the Achaeans over the stolen Helen. The golden bough of the grove of Nemi itself falls into place as the neace offering by which Aeneas is able to descent' into Avernus and return thence with the tkanloitwyledge of the future that is Rome's immortality. The saviour king, dying to 'taste death' and bring back knowledge and power for his people, who both die and triumph vicariously with hint, is no less manifest in the Christian Gospel than the god-king who is killed and eaten to renew his people. The first words of the risen Christ in Matthew 28.18: "There has been given to me all power in heaven and on earth," are the usual announcement of the god-king returning in triumph from the underworld; and those whd so early — but not as early as the Gospels — added to the crucifixion and resurrection the "descent into Hell" and, presently, the "harrowing of Hell" were, consciously or not, reproducing a very old pattern. The place where the king, and thus vicariously his people, cohabit with the gods and participate in the commerce between the gods of the living and the gods of the dead, is the city. Not the least striking and fruitful of Professor Dunne's propositions is that the city is not in origin a place for men to live in (as modern man would assume without question) but a place where gods live and where therefore men live with them. The more one reflects on the Mesopotamian cities, for instance, with their ziggurats, or on Athens, with its autochthonous Erechtheus and its eponymous Athena, or on Rome, with its Jupiter Capitolinus, the more persuasive it begins to appear that the gods live in the city first and are then joined there by the people. Are the very walls designed in the first place fordefence, or is their purpose rather to hedge a divinity, not to say a king — so that in the beginning they would be a sort of temenos, a temple enclosure, rather than a place d'armes? MaYbe it was merely a lucky chance that the walls of a city turned out to be an economical and effective instrument of defensive warfare, and conceivably the primitive and forgotten Purpose of the walled city has been the means of shaping the behaviour of its occupants, in Peace and in war — not necessarily in every respect beneficially. It is not to the author's prime thesis that the doubts of a reader tend to attach, but to his determination to fit it into a pattern of man's Limmortality-contriving sufficiently compre"ensive to embrace Socrates and Hegel, Shakespeare and Nietzsche. One accompanies him far enough to agree that when men could no longer credibly inhabit "the city of the gods" — became (so to say) de-urbanised — one formula for securing immortality was ruled out fl,d substitutes had to be sought. Thereafter, nowever, the evidence of archaeology and enthropology seems too often to be replaced by Metaphor and a vivid imagination and power of Combination. The pattern which Professor Dunne believes he finds is, briefly, as follows: 1. The "city of the gods," terminated by the realisation that everlasting life is not thereby guaranteed (the Giigamesh epic).
2. Mummification, whereby the dead particiPate in the life of the living, which is interrupted and discredited by political interregna (for example in Egypt).
3. The immortality of fame and achievements (Homer, classical Greece), which yields to doll'S whether the past is immortal (Socrates). 4. The "practice of dying" by the philospher's renunciation of the will to live (the Platonic Socrates) — a form of mysticism which is then translated into law by the deified Hellenistic saviour, kings.
5. The continuity and universal quality of life
in the Roman world (Marcus Aurelius), broken down
by the collapse of the Roman Empire, and after a gap reconstructed under Christianity into
6. the continuity of a hierarchical society. This in turn breaks down at the end of the Middle Ages with the realisation ('dance of death,' cadaver tombs, Shakespeare) of the sovereignty of death.
7. Thereafter the various forms of the modern assertion of man's 'autonomy,' designed to deprive death of its sovereignty, which even embrace the indifference of totalitarianism to individual human life.
It is all a fascinating and rather breathless rush through history, where a hop, skip and jump land one out of "the period of the estates which formally began in England with the signing of Magna Charta" into "Nietzsche showing that he, like Camus, experienced the future as a transcendent value and had not been able to assimilate personally his doctrine of the eternal recurrence." One ends up wondering whether such a comprehensive perspective is practicable at all, but exhilarated nevertheless and with a stock of new queries for one's private reflection and enquiry.
The Rt Hon ./. Enoch Powell has been Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney, and is expected to contest South Down consituency in the Unionist interest at the next election
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