دانلود کتاب The Dionysian Gospel: The Fourth Gospel and Euripides

"Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them." Dennis R. MacDonald offers a provocative explanation of those scandalous words of Christ from the Fourth Gospel—an explanation that he argues would hardly have surprised some of the Gospel's early readers. John sounds themes that would have instantly been recognized as proper to the Greek god Dionysos (the Roman Bacchus), not least as he was depicted in Euripides' play The Bacchae. A divine figure, the offspring of a divine father and human mother, takes on flesh to live among mortals, but is rejected by his own. He miraculously provides wine and offers it as a sacred gift to his devotees, women prominent among them, dies a violent death—and returns to life. Yet John takes his drama in a dramatically different direction: while Euripides's Dionysos exacts vengeance on the Theban throne, the Johannine Christ offers life to his followers. MacDonald employs mimesis criticism to argue that the earliest Evangelist not only imitated Euripides but expected his readers to recognize Jesus as greater than Dionysos.

About the Author

Dennis R. MacDonald is John Wesley Professor of New Testament and Christian origins at Claremont School of Theology and the author of numerous books, including Mythologizing Jesus: From Jewish Teacher to Epic Hero (2015), The Gospels and Homer (2015), and Luke and Vergil (2014).

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Book Review:


We in contemporary Western culture are continuing the ongoing Dionysian crucible involved in the end of print culture 1.0 and the emergence of print culture 2.0. Our contemporary oral culture 2.0, powered by the communications media that accentuate sound, resonates in our collective unconscious to renew the ancient Dionysian spirit of oral culture 1.0.

In the new book The Dionysian Gospel: The Fourth Gospel and Euripides (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), the American biblical scholar Dennis R. MacDonald (born in 1946; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1978) explores how the anonymous author of the Fourth Gospel (also known as the Gospel According to John) may have been drawing on and competing with Euripides’ Bacchae. In Appendix 2 (pages 203-218), MacDonald helpfully provides his own original translation of sections of Euripides’ play that are most relevant to the Fourth Gospel. In Chapter 2, MacDonald constructs his learned commentary on the earliest stratum of what eventually became the Gospel According to John and Euripides’ Bacchae.

We in Western culture today, Christians and non-Christians alike, are currently undergoing a Dionysian crucible. So MacDonald’s detailed study can help us understand and navigate our current cultural crucible. Because so many white Christians voted for so-called President Trump, MacDonald’s new book is a timely reminder for those Christians of the Dionysian crucible embedded in the Gospel According to John.

Now, in the massively researched book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale University Press, 1990), the American aesthete Camille Paglia (born in 1947; Ph.D. in English, Yale University) notes how Euripides influenced the Christian tradition of thought:

“Chronicling the birth of a religion out of the collapse of the old, the Bacchae [by Euripides] strangely prefigures the New Testament [which chronicles the birth of a religion known eventually as Christianity out of the supposed collapse of the old religion known as Judaism]. Four hundred years before Christ, Euripides depicts the conflict between armed authority and popular cult. A long-haired nonconformist, claiming to be the son of God by a human woman, arrives at the capital city with a mob of scruffy disciples, outlandish provincials. Are the palms of Jesus’ march on Jerusalem a version of Dionysian thyrsi, potent pine wands? The demigod is arrested, interrogated, mocked, imprisoned. He offers no resistance, mildly yielding to his persecutors. His followers, like St. Peter, escape when their chains magically fall off. A ritual victim, symbolizing god [sic], is lofted onto a tree, then slaughtered and his body torn to bits. An earthquake levels the royal palace, like the earthquake during Jesus’ crucifixion that tears the Temple veil, symbol of the old order. Both gods are beloved of women and expand their rights. The play identifies transvestite Dionysus with the mother goddesses Cybele and Demeter. He avenges his mother’s defamation by maddening her sister Agave into infanticide. Agave, cavorting onstage with her bloody trophy, cradles the severed head of her son Pentheus in a grisly mock-pieta. Against her will, she mimes murderous mother nature” (page 103).

More briefly, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychological theorist C. G. Jung, M.D. (1875-1961), also notes the Dionysian parallel with the New Testament portrayal of the supposed Christ in his 1,600-page commentary titled Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 by C. G. Jung, 2 vols., edited by James L. Jarrett (Princeton University Press, 1988, pages 448, 657, 816, 1526, 1527, 1533, and 1538). Jung connects the Dionysian with the psycho-spiritual process of deification.

For book-length studies of various ancient and medieval conceptualizations of the psycho-spiritual process of deification, see the following eight books:

(1) M. David Litwa’s Becoming Divine: An Introduction to Deification in Western Culture (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books/ Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013);

(2) Litwa’s Desiring Divinity: Self-deification in Early Jewish and Christian Mythmaking (Oxford University Press, 2016);

(3) Litwa’s Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014);

(4) Litwa’s We Are Being Transformed: Deification in Paul’s Soteriology (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2012);

(5) Norman Russell’s The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2004);

(6) A. N. Williams’ The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford University Press, 1999);

(7) Bernhard Blankenhorn’s The Mystery of Union with God: Dionysian Mysticism in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas (Catholic University of America, 2015);

(8) Daria Spezzano’s The Glory of God’s Grace: Deification According to St. Thomas Aquinas (Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University, 2015; distributed by Catholic University of America Press).

Incidentally, what Blankenhorn refers to in his subtitle as “Dionysian Mysticism” involves the mystical thought of the Christian writer known as Dionysius the Areopagite (also known as Denys the Areopagite and Pseudo-Dionysius) – not to the ancient Greek god Dionysos.

Now, even though Paglia is well versed in Jungian thought, she does not happen to explicitly advert to Jung’s commentary on Nietzsche. MacDonald also does not happen to advert to either Jung’s commentary on Nietzsche or Paglia’s 1990 book.

Now, Paglia works with the Apollonian/Dionysian contrast that she borrows from Nietzsche, but with her own operational definitions of these two terms, she manages to work out a sweeping account of our Western cultural history. Basically, she aligns the Dionysian as she operationally defines it with the feminine dimension of the human psyche, and the Apollonian, with the masculine dimension.

Our current cultural crucible in Western culture today involves the understandable fear of the Dionysian – in preference to the Apollonian. For example, so-called President Trump’s most fervent supporters fear the Dionysian – in preference to the Apollonian.

Because the human psyche contains both the feminine and the masculine dimensions, each person is psychologically androgynous. Nevertheless, optimal psychological androgyny is not easy for the individual person to work out. It remains for me now to explain what would constitute optimal psychological androgyny.

By coincidence, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s short seminal book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990) was published in the same year in which Paglia’s Sexual Personae was published. But Moore and Gillette are not as sophisticated as Paglia is. Nevertheless, they subsequently published the following four books with William Morrow in New York:

(1) The King Within: Accessing the King [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (1992; revised and expanded edition, Chicago: Exploration Press, 2007);

(2) The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (1992);

(3) The Magician Within: Accessing the Shaman [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (1993);

(4) The Lover Within: Accessing the Lover [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (1993).

In addition, Moore and Gillette claim that there are four corresponding archetypes of the mature feminine in the female psyche – which they refer to as the Queen, Warrior, Magician, and Lover archetypes.

What Paglia refers to as Amazonism involves what Moore and Gillette refer to as the Warrior archetype of the mature feminine.

Moreover, like Jung and Paglia, Moore and Gillette claim, in effect, that all human persons are basically psychologically androgynous, in the sense that all persons have the complete set of masculine archetypes of maturity and feminine archetypes of maturity in their psyches.

By definition, the optimal form of psychological androgyny involves accessing the optimal forms of the masculine archetypes of maturity and the feminine archetypes of maturity.

Furthermore, Moore and Gillette also claim that each optimal form of each archetype of maturity is accompanied by two polar opposite “shadow” forms of the same archetype of maturity – Paglia in effect discusses certain “shadow” forms of the various archetypes of maturity.

For example, one “shadow” form of the Warrior archetype of the mature feminine involves hostile over-assertiveness or aggressiveness such as the hostile aggressiveness that certain self-styled feminists routinely express.

Unfortunately, Moore and Gillette do not discuss how the individual person develops both the feminine archetypes of maturity and the masculine archetypes of maturity in his or her psyche, but this is what Paglia dwells on in her discussions of various individual authors and artists in connection with the Apollonian/Dionysian tendencies in their psyches.

In any event, MacDonald’s detailed account of how the Dionysian is deeply embedded in the Gospel According to John could inspire Christians and non-Christians to study Paglia’s discussion of the Dionysian in Western culture in her 1990 book Sexual Personae.

Now, Paglia characterizes the Apollonian thrust of Western culture as connected with the eye and sight.
Here are some recent books that can be used to support her characterization of the Apollonian thrust in Western culture:

(1) Robert Hahn’s Anaximander and the Architects: The Contributions of Egyptian and Greek Architectural Technologies to the Origins of Greek Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 2001);

(2) Raymond Adolph Prier’s Thauma Idesthai: Sight and Appearance in Archaic Greek (Florida State University Press, 1989);

(3) Andrea Wilson Nightingale’s Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

In the massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958), the American Jesuit cultural historian and theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) works with the aural-visual that he acknowledges borrowing from the French Catholic philosopher Louis Lavelle (page 338, note 54). Ong’s account of the visual tendency in Western culture is compatible with Paglia’s account of the Apollonian tendency in Western cultural history. Similarly, Ong’s account of the oral-aural tendency in Western culture is compatible with Paglia’s account of the Dionysian tendency in Western cultural history.
Ong further explored the oral-aural tendency in Western cultural history in the following books:

(1) The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1962);

(2) In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1967);

(3) The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press, 1967), the expanded version of Ong’s 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University;

(4) Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Cornell University Press, 1971);

(5) Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, 1977);

(6) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982);

(7) Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press, 1986), Ong’s 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.

Arguably Ong’s book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981), his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University, is most centrally related to Paglia’s Sexual Personae. In Ong’s earlier comments quoted in Newsweek’s cover story titled “Anything Goes: Taboos in Twilight” (November 13, 1967, pages 74-78). In the half century since that Newsweek cover story, certain Christian sexual taboos have been challenged by various currents in popular culture, which Trump’s white Christian supporters find alarming. In Sexual Personae, Paglia discusses certain Christian sexual taboos that Trump’s white Christian supporters more or less endorse. But certain Christian sexual taboos need to be revisited.

In a number of his books, Ong routinely refers to Jungian thought, as does Paglia in her 1990 book. But Paglia does not happen to advert explicitly to Ong’s sweeping account of Western cultural history in her own sweeping account of Western cultural history in Sexual Personae.

As far as I know, Ong does not discuss Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian contrast, or Paglia’s 1990 book. However, in “Post-Christian or Not?” in In the Human Grain (pages 147-164), mentioned above, Ong perceptively discusses Nietzsche.

For a bibliography of Ong’s 400 or so publications, see Thomas M. Walsh’s “Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006” in the book Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Walsh (New York: Hampton Press, 2011, pages 185-245).

In conclusion, MacDonald’s new book is a timely reminder for Trump’s white Christian supporters of the Dionysian crucible embedded in the Gospel According to John – and in Christian spirituality, broadly speaking. However, apart from Trump’s white Christian supporters, MacDonald’s new book is relevant to understanding and coping with our contemporary Dionysian crucible in Western cultural history, as are Paglia’s discussion of the Apollonian/Dionysian contest in Western cultural history and Ong’s discussion of the visual-aural contrast in Western cultural history. Broadly speaking, the Republican Party tends to represent the Apollonian spirit as Paglia delineates this tendency. In contrast, the Democratic Party tends to represent the Dionysian spirit as she delineates this tendency.