This Easter morning, many people feel more the sentiment associated with Ash Wednesday that the feeling generally associated with Easter. At the beginning of Lent, we file in procession to have ashes sprinkled on our heads while the celebrant says: “Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.”
Many feel that all their dreams have been crushed to dust. On Palm Sunday 2020 Pope Francis spoke of the many false securities that have now crumbled, the many hopes that were betrayed and of the sense of abandonment that weighs upon our hearts.
What led to all this, one may ask.
Greek mythology gives us a hint in the figure of Prometheus, the mythological Titan, who stole fire from the abode of the gods on Mount Olympus and gave it to humankind. Zeus was enraged.
As a result of this gift, humans could become – or so they thought – independent from the gods. Prometheus became a figure representing human strivings to become the measure of all things, even if sometimes this could end in tragedy. In the 18th and 19th century, Prometheus’ struggle against Zeus became the symbol of resistance against what was considered to be the tyranny of the institutions, whether ecclesiastical or monarchical or patriarchal.
The literary works of Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley in the 19th century and Ayn Rand in the 20th century are just three examples of our struggle to over-reach our humanity. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is subtitled ‘The Modern Prometheus’. The attempt to go beyond the confines of nature results in the creation of a monster. Percy Bysshe Shelley published the four-act lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound in 1820. Ayn Rand uses Prometheus as a metaphor of her individualist ideology (Objectivism – rational egoism) in Atlas Shrugged (1957).
Pope Benedict writes about the ‘Promethean presumption’ (described by some as Technological Prometheanism) in his encyclical letter Caritas in Veritate (2009). He describes it as the claim of the individual to be radically “responsible for producing what he becomes”. Benedict had also dealt with the theme of human self-sufficiency in his encyclical Spe salvi (2007).
He believes that the Promethean presumption entrenches a false concept of freedom and a false concept of being human.
Within this perspective, what is technically possible becomes licit, each experiment is acceptable, any population policy permitted, any manipulation legitimised. Benedict says that the purely consumerist and utilitarian view of life engendered is wrongly convincing humans that they are the sole authors of themselves, their lives and of society.
This worldview comes at a price
In a December 2012 address to the Roman Curia, Benedict applied this Promethean presumption to the new philosophy of ‘gender’ which he strongly criticised as something which undermines humanity. “People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.”
The dreams and aspirations turned to ashes by coronavirus can only only blossom if we open ourselves to God and to other fellow human beings
Development and the economy are two other victims of this warped vision of the human person. In Caritas in Veritate, Benedict wrote that “the development of peoples goes awry if humanity thinks it can re-create itself through the ‘wonders’ of technology, just as economic development is exposed as a destructive sham if it relies on the ‘wonders’ of finance in order to sustain unnatural and consumerist growth” (Para 68).
Pope Francis in an interview published this week in The Tablet is criticising the fact that “in the world of finance, it has seemed normal to sacrifice [people], to practise a politics of the throwaway culture, from the beginning to the end of life.”
As Pope Francis sees it, “the great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish borne of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures and a blunted conscience” (Evangelii Gaudium, 2013).
From ashes to Resurrection
The Promethean presumption can be considered to be mainstream wisdom on which praxis and policies have been based for decades. We thought that we were omnipotent. Like the people at Babel, we believed that we could build a world in our image and likeness, based on our strengths and capabilities.
Coronavirus has now shown the limitedness and frailty of our humanity.
Does this mean that humanity is a lost cause? It surely does not if the right lessons are learnt.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State, in a 2014 address to the Conference on Human Dignity and Human Development, proposed a solution.
“A Promethean faith in the market … will need to be replaced by faith in God and a transcendent vision of men and women as God’s children.”
Pope Francis repeatedly stresses this point: “If we wish to lead a dignified and fulfilling life, we have to reach out to others and seek their good” (ibid., 9).
The materialistic vision of the human person and society built on the belief that humans are the measure of all things has little or no place for God. This, coupled with the belief that the more humans have time for God the less humans would have time for other humans, has disasterous consequences.
The basic message of Easter in the current pandemic is that the dreams and aspirations turned to ashes by coronavirus can only only blossom if we open ourselves to God and to other fellow human beings.