Beauty Or Beast

In an earlier post, I stated that while reflecting on the question, “What are you longing for on this pilgrimage to Greece?” I responded that I wanted to reconnect with beauty, and the Acropolis in Athens was the first of many reconnections. (To read that blog post, click HERE

For me, the most arresting collection of statuary was in the museum at Olympia. Here, the art historians and curators recreated some of best preserved fragments from the grounds. For example, the carvings inside the pediments, the triangular toppings of the front and back of the temple of Zeus, were reconstructed and displayed. This way, one could see what the whole pediment looked like, at eye level. The east pediment depicts a chariot race from mythology, but it was the west pediment that caused me to stop and stare in wonder as my eyes teared up.

This western pediment depicts the Centauromachy, the mythic tale of the battle between centaurs and the Lapith people. It’s a convoluted story, but the gist of it is this: at a royal wedding feast, the invited centaurs, unused to wine, became drunk and attempted to rape and abduct the Lapith women in attendance. A battle ensued, and the centaurs were defeated and expelled from the region.

The scene I stood looking at featured grotesque looking centaurs grasping and grappling with distraught and terrified Lapith women. It was very lifelike and vivid, very much alive in the musculature and facial expressions. There was a terrible beauty in the way the sculptor was able to capture the chaos and turmoil.

As I stood looking at this graphic, disturbing scene, I couldn’t help but wonder why this particular story was such a prominent part of the glorious temple of Zeus. Indeed, the Centauromachy continued to be depicted in Greek, Roman, and Italian Renaissance art. Why did it affect me, and many peoples before me, so greatly?

Nearby signage explained that the myth was originally a way of telling the story of how the barbaric tribes that surrounded the more enlightened people of Ancient Greece were subdued. Later, philosophic Greeks used the tale as a metaphor for the interior struggle between our animal natures and our more civilized ones. Today, I might couch it as a struggle between my ego and the better qualities of my god-spark within.

If our animalistic selves are in the driver’s seat, they urge us to pursue whatever gives us pleasure, at a cost to those around us. On a basic level, the human animal, like all animals, needs food, shelter, clothing, and has an instinct to reproduce. It’s when these individual needs and desires do not take into consideration the needs and desires of community that it becomes problematic. Tooth and claw versus heart, mind, and soul.

As I stood in contemplation of this truth echoed in the beauty of the sculpture amidst the terror of the telling, I realized that we all are on this journey of trying to find beauty in the horror, joy in the sadness. That’s just life. We can’t ignore either, at the peril of toxic positivity on one side, or deep melancholy on the other. It’s all there. It’s all good. Or at least it’s all part of the whole, and the whole of creation is perfect.

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