Pneumatomachoi:

Diomedes and Jacob in the Heroic Age of Revelation

Abstract:

The tension between reason and revelation may be illustrated by

example through two distinctly modern models: Kierkegaard’s Knight

of Faith, who transcends the worldly through total belief in God and

oneself, and Nietzsche’s—or Zarathustra’s—Übermensch, who

transcends the otherworldly through total belief in nature and oneself.

Both imply the solitary nature of the quest for how to live as well as the

total bifurcation between either ideal or material paths, with no way in-

between.

In the founding texts of reason and revelation, we have two

models who blur these distinctions: Diomedes in the Iliad and Jacob in

Genesis. Both fight against the divine with spirited self-assurance, yet

are somehow rewarded by the divine for the chivalrous faith reflected

in their very acts of impiety. For centuries, both have been taken as

heroic models by pre-modern men who lived public lives balanced

between reason and revelation.

Do these heroes walk a way between reason and revelation? By

comparing these characters’ stories and their spiritedness, I hope to

clarify what piety meant in the Heroic Age (meaning the age of Greek

demigods and Hebrew patriarchs). The immediate relationship these

heroes had with gods enabled them to use their reason in a way totally

alien to our enlightened division between the two. This is simply one

aspect of the birth of philosophy out of theology. This investigation

assumes that the responsibility of the enlightened man to his city must

be understood through his models: the men who fought with gods.