In the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul says: “For when the Gentiles, who have not the law, do by nature those things that are of the law; these having not the law are a law to themselves: who shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness to them” (Romans 2:14, Douay-Reims American Edition).
Here, St. Paul speaks of the moral law of right behavior that binds both the Jews, who received the law directly from God through Moses, and the Gentiles. But another passage of the Bible suggests that the Gentiles possessed more than just a code of ethics that corresponded to the divinely instituted moral law. In the Book of Acts, at the Aeropagus in Athens, St. Paul appealed to Greek poetry itself to convert his listeners (17:22-28):
Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are too superstitious. For passing by, and seeing your idols, I found an altar also, on which was written: To the unknown God. What therefore you worship, without knowing it, that I preach to you: God, who made the world, and all things therein: he, being Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands…For in him we live, and move, and are: as some also of your own poets said: For we are also his offspring.
St. Paul recognized that the Greeks and Romans were also inheritors of a religious tradition which contained elements of the truth about God and about the human condition. The patterns of thought contained in classical paganism pointed the way to the message of Jesus Christ in the Gospels.
What were some of these thought patterns? For instance, the very language of Greek and Roman religion attests to the existence of the one true God. Consider the name of the Roman high god, Jupiter. Jupiter is not properly a name, but the title of the Supreme Being. It is traceable to two combined words from Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancestor of both the Greek and Latin languages: dieu-*ph2ter (de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages, 315) These two words are recognizable in the Latin words Deus and pater: that is, “God” and “Father.” The literal meaning of Jupiter, therefore, is the familiar “God the Father,” a term known to every Catholic schoolchild as the title of the First Person of the Trinity.
Nor is this all. By the classical era, the word *dieu meant “god” or “deity” to the Romans (De Vaan, 315). The Latin Deus occurs everywhere in the Catholic faith, especially in the Bible and in the text of the Mass. In Greek the word survived in the vocative form Zeus (Zεύς), the name of the high god in the Greek pantheon (Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 498-99). But what was the original meaning of the term *dieu? By comparison with the other Indo-European languages, *dieu seems to derive from the root *di or *die meaning “to shine,” in the sense of “the brightness of the sky” (West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, 167). The very word *Dyeus identified the supreme being with Heaven, precisely as the Bible does. Therefore, we can say—with a little poetic license—that the actual meaning of Jupiter can be approximated by the phrase, “Our Father who Art in Heaven”—the opening words of the Pater Noster, the prayer that the Lord Jesus Christ gave to his disciples during his ministry on earth.
The names of the gods themselves are not the only signs pointing to the truth in the Greco-Roman religious tradition. Often their actions in the myths have an uncanny echo with the stories of the Bible. In his History of Rome, Livy says that the city of Rome was founded when Romulus murdered his twin brother, Remus (I.7, 25). The idea occurs in the Bible in the Cain and Abel story. Abel, a shepherd, found favor with God by sacrificing the animals of his flock. In jealousy, his brother Cain murdered him. God curses Cain and sends him into exile—but Cain’s descendants became the founders of civilization. Cain’s son Enoch founded the first city. Lamech began the practice of polygamy. Jubal invented music. Tubalcain invented ironworking (Genesis 4).
The biblical story and the Roman story, while not identical, share the same underlying meaning. The organization of society in a fallen, sinful world is connected to sacrifice. The original sacrifice of reverence is subverted in a founding murder which establishes an order permanently opposed to God, as Rene Girard argued in his work Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World. A curious echo of the story reappears in the Gospels in the temptation of Christ. Lucifer, the fallen angel personifying evil, offers to Jesus the kingdoms of the world to tempt him away from his mission. Christ chooses sacrifice and death in fulfillment of the Father’s command (Matthew 4). While Christ and Lucifer are not brothers by any stretch of the imagination, the typology of evil working in the fallen world by subverting good remains. While Christ and Lucifer are not brothers by any stretch of the imagination, the typology of evil working in the fallen world by subverting good in the interactions of a twin-pair remains. In fact, St. Paul in the Book of Hebrews describes Abel as a type of the faith in God which saves—and therefore, as a forerunner of Christ and of those who believe in his message (Hebrews 11).
But the two stories echo in another way. Both Cain/Abel and Romulus/Remus are examples of the motif of the Heavenly Twins, an idea that reverberates across world mythology. The imagery associated with the Twins has many elements. They are always imagined as two young men (West, 187). In some cases, they are assimilated to the stars. In Greek mythology, as Castor lies dying, Pollux appeals to their father Zeus to give his brother immortality. Zeus complies by raising Castor and Pollux into heaven as the constellation Gemini, where the twins ride across the sky as part of the precession of the equinoxes (Howatson and Chilvers, The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, 185). The imagery of horsemanship and war is another common association with the Twins. In Vedic Hinduism, the Aśvins or “horsemen” ride shining chariots and are the bringers of light to men (West, 187-8). In Latvian mythology, the twin Ašvieniai pull the chariot of the sun across the sky (West, 189).
Meanwhile, Meanwhile, the twins dramatically reappear in the Gospel. Consider the Sons of Zebedee, St. James and St. John. The title “Sons of Thunder” is not just a reference to temperament or personality. Jesus would have known of the association of thunder and lightning with Zeus—and of the tale of Castor and Pollux, Zeus’s sons. Christ’s use of the imagery of the thunder indicated the divine mission of these two brother Apostles by associating them with the motif of the Heavenly Twins as preserved in Greek mythology. Upon reading the Gospels, the Gentiles would have recognized St. James’ and St. John’s importance by way of their own religious tradition. Interestingly, St. James died a martyr’s death, in keeping with the sacrificial role of one of the Twins, as occurred in the stories of Cain and Abel, Castor and Pollux, and Romulus and Remus. Meanwhile, Christ says to St. John, “I am the bright and morning star” in the Apocalypse (22:16), a disturbing and fantastic parallel to the astral valences of the Twins in pagan mythology. Nor can it be a coincidence that, after the Ascension of Christ into Heaven, the Apostles were greeted by two young men (Acts 1:10-11, Douay-Reims American Edition):
And while they were beholding him going up to heaven, behold two men stood by them in white garments. Who also said: Ye men of Galilee, why stand you looking up to heaven? This Jesus who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come, as you have seen him going into heaven.
It may well be, as the Church Fathers taught, that the “two men in white garments” were apparitions of Enoch and Elijah, the two men alone out of all humanity who never died. Nonetheless, the resemblance of the two men with the motif of the Heavenly Twins is uncanny, as if God had chosen to reveal His message according to a universal sacred pattern, comprehensible to anyone with a knowledge of their own religious tradition.
In some cases, the pagan tradition exactly parallels the Bible. The Greco-Roman Flood story, preserved in several accounts beginning with Hesiod, is one example of a near-exact match between pagan tradition and Christian teaching. According to Ovid, Jupiter proposed to destroy mankind during an age of great wickedness. One couple out of all mankind, Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, survived the Flood in a wooden chest. After the waters receded and the chest came to rest atop Mount Parnassus, Deucalion and Pyrrha asked an oracle how to re-people the earth. The oracle commanded them to “throw behind you as you go the bones of your great mother” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I). Realizing that the earth was their mother, Deucalion and Pyrrha used the stones to do as the oracle commanded. A new race of men sprang up out of the rocks (Ovid, Book I).
The tale of Deucalion is a version of the biblical Flood story. The parallel is almost exact if the metaphors in Hesiod’s account are closely examined. The name Deucalion comes from the Greek word deukos (δευκος), derived from the Ancient Greek word for “sweet new wine” (Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 311 and 334). This is an allusion to another element of the Noah story: the invention of wine. The Book of Genesis says (9:20-21, Douay-Reims American Edition): “And Noe, a husbandman, began to till the ground, and planted a vineyard. And drinking of the wine was made drunk, and was uncovered in his tent.” Likewise, when Noah descended from the Ark, his first act was to offer up sacrifices to the Lord. The offering of sacrifices is ingeniously encoded in the name of Deucalion’s wife, Pyrrha—that is, the Ancient Greek pyrrhos (πυρρός), or “blazing red”—a reference to the fires of the sacrifice (Beekes, 498-499).
Most importantly, consider the strangest part of the Greek story: the oracle’s command to “throw the bones of your mother over your shoulder” to re-people the earth. The command is a metaphor. It is in fact a reference to the sowing of seeds in agriculture. Deucalion and Pyrrha were to re-people the earth by farming. The Greek Flood myth therefore parallels Adam’s curse from the third chapter of Genesis (3:17-19, Douay-Reims American Edition): “Cursed is the earth in thy work…in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” Likewise, God’s blessing to Noah after the Flood is filled with agricultural references (Genesis 8:21-2, Douay-Reims American Edition): “And the Lord smelled a sweet savour, and said: I will no more curse the earth for the sake of man…All the days of the earth, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, night and day, shall not cease.”
The role of agriculture in man’s relationship to God is a potent thread running throughout Christian teaching. This essay argues that the Greek and Roman pagans possessed substantial elements of the truth of the Christian revelation in the patterns of the pagan religious tradition. Those patterns would have made it easier for the Gentiles to accept the message of Christ when they received it. Nowhere is this truer than in the imagery surrounding agriculture in both the pagan myths and in Christianity. The story of Deucalion sowing the bones of his mother over his shoulders is paralleled in God’s blessing upon the earth for Noah and his children after the Flood. The sacrifice of Deucalion imitates the sacrifice of Noah which is then fulfilled in the final blood sacrifice of Christ on the Cross to redeem humanity. And the drunkenness of Noah, hinted at in the very meaning of the word “Deucalion,” is reversed in astounding fashion by Christ in the Wedding at Cana and in the Eucharist.
The institution of the Eucharist, in fact, is a fulfillment of the life patterns contained in the myth of Deucalion. The bread and the wine of the Eucharist are not just the body and blood of Christ. In a real sense, they are the fulfillment of the patterns of myth, for they recall both the waters of the Flood and the tilling of the earth which God required of man after the waters had subsided from the earth. In Christ’s hands the elements of the Eucharist become the means of man’s redemption: the manifestation of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross for all of humanity. The ancient Greeks and Romans, inheritors of an ancient religious tradition, would have recognized the bread and the wine via the symbols contained in their own stories.
St. Paul was right to quote the pagan poets to his hearers in Athens at the Aeropagus. The Gentiles had indeed received more than just the outlines of the moral law. They also possessed a registry of symbols that pointed the way to Christ and his revelation—an astounding manifestation of divine providence in ordering human history.
Featured: St Paul Preaching in Athens, Raphael (1515).
