Encountering the Divine in Greek, Roman and Biblical Stories

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Have you ever encountered something or someone exceptional in your life? If you were lucky enough to have such an experience, how did you communicate it to your family, friends and schoolmates? Did you give specific details about this encounter, or did you rather focus on your own emotions at that time? In the Greco-Roman and Biblical world, many people had exceptional encounters mostly with gods and divine-like figures. Most of these encounters are conveyed to us in the form of engaging narratives, which will be the focus of this class. We will start from accounts of divine encounters in human life, ranging from Homeric Hymns to the Biblical stories of Abraham, and from the Gospel narratives down to Apuleius' Metamorphoses, the story of a man transformed into an ass and then saved by the Egyptian goddess Isis. Then, we will focus on the Biblical and tragic stories of unjust sufferers such as Job and Oedipus, who, motivated by the desire to understand their suffering, decided to talk with God and the Olympian gods respectively. Finally, we will explore stories whose narrators struggle to provide details of their encounters with gods because the divine presence is beyond human time and space, and therefore their accounts are filled with chronological disorder and repetition. Here Aristides' account of the dreams in which the god Asclepius appeared to him will be followed by Longus' providential story of Daphnis and Chloe, and by a selection of early Christian martyrdom stories. We will conclude the class watching some movies such as the Truman Show, Les Misérables, and Mel Gibson’s Passion, and a selection from the TV Series The Chosen to explore the most popular medium which narrates stories of human encounters with the gods and the Biblical God in our contemporary era. The entire class will be discussion-based, so that we will help each other to become immersed into the world of ancient (and contemporary) stories about the divine. I hope this class will highlight the differences between Greek, Roman and Biblical responses to the gods, and reflect on the way in which each of us understands and narrates the exceptional encounters of our own life.