The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Or it might exist, like the Islands of the Blessed, as a place of rest and reward for dead heroes. The Greek poets speak of it, not as an imaginary poetic world, but as a distant re­gion of the real world which they have not visited but of which they have heard reports. Pindar's description of the Hyperboreans is related to his definition of the difference between gods and men in the sixth Nemean:

There is one

race of men, one race of gods; both have breath of life from a single mother. But sundered power holds us divided, so that the one is nothing, while for the other the brazen sky is established their sure citadel for ever. Yet we have some like­ness in great intelligence or strength to the immortals, though we know not what the day will bring, what

course after nightfall

destiny has written that we must run to the end.

Gods and men do not differ in nature, only in power; the gods are immortal and can do what they like, men are mortal and can never foresee the consequences of their actions. Therefore, the more powerful a man is, the more godlike he becomes. It is possible to conceive of men so gifted by fortune that, like the Hypoboreans, their life would be indistinguishable from that of the gods.

This is a conception natural to a shame-culture in which who a man is is identical with what he does and suffers. The happy man is the fortunate man, and fortune is ob­jectively recognizable; to be fortunate means to be success­ful, rich, powerful, beautiful, admired. When such a culture imagines Eden, therefore, it automatically excludes the weak and the ungifted, children, old people, poor people, ugly people.

The first significant difference between the conception of man held by a shame-culture and that of a guilt-culture is that a guilt-culture distinguishes between what a man is to other men, the self he manifests in his body, his actions, his words, and what he is to himself, a unique ego which is un­changed by anything he does or suffers. In a shame-culture, there is no real difference between statements in the third person and statements in the first; in a guilt-culture, they are totally distinct. In the statement Jones is six feet tall, the predicate qualifies the subject; in the statement I am six feet tall, it does not. It qualifies a self which the subject recog­nizes to be six feet tall; the I has no height.

In a shame-culture, the moral judgment a man passes upon himself is identical with that which others pass on him; the virtue or shamefulness of an act lies in the nature of the act itself, irrespective or the doer's personal intention or responsi­bility. In a guilt-culture, the subject passes moral judgment upon his thoughts and feelings even if they are never real­ized in action, and upon his acts irrespective of whether others know of them or not, approve of them or not.

In a guilt-culture, therefore, there are a special series of first-person propositions in which the predicate does qualify the subject. For example:

I am innocent/guilty I am proud/humble I am penitent/impenitent I am happy/unhappy. CI am in a state of pleasure/pain is not, of course, one of them. Pain and pleasure are states of the self, not of the ego.)

If I make any such assertion, it must be true or false, but no person except myself can know which; there is no way in which, from observing me, another can come to any conclu­sion.

A writer brought up in a Christian society who would de­scribe Eden has, therefore, to cope with a problem which his pagan predecessors were spared. As an artist he can only deal in the manifest and objective—his Eden, like the pagan one, must be a fortunate place where there is no suffering and everybody has a good time—but he has to devise a way of making outward appearances signify subjective states of in­nocence and happiness to which, in the real world, they are not necessarily related.

If one compares versions of Eden by pagan writers with Christian versions, it is noticeable that the former are beauti­ful in a serious way and that the latter are for the most part comic, even grotesque; they reserve the serious for descriptions of New Jerusalem.

Suppose a writer wishes to show that every man loves himself, not because of this or that quality he possesses, hut simply because he is uniquely he, what can he do? One possible image is that of an exceptionally ugly man—prodigiously fat, let us say—who is nevertheless convinced that he is irre­sistible to the ladies.

Here the exceptional obesity is an indirect sign for the uniqueness of the subject, and the fantastic vanity—in real life, a man must be reasonably good-looking before he can become vain in this way—an indirect sign for the independ­ence of self-love from any quality of the self. But both signs remain indirect; the ugliest, the most average-looking and the most beautiful human beings all love themselves in the same way.