Editor’s note: Gaedhal’s latest comments to us by email strongly reminded me of what in 2011 I said—and still say—is my metaphysical position: panentheism, something almost identical to what Uncle Adolf believed. Gaedhal wrote:
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Antitheism in Ovid?
This was the original title of my previous email, but I went down so many sidetracks, that I abandoned it.
The comparative, ‘melior’ seems to modify ‘natura’ or ‘nature’. Hence the usual translation: ‘better nature’, or, more idiomatically: ‘kindlier nature’.
However, Metamorphoses is an oral poem. Perhaps in the telling, ‘melior’ might be sounded similar to ‘melius’βit is a linguistic phenomenon that ‘r’s tend to mutate into ‘s’s in Latin. Hence: Melius est [cogitare] naturam [quam] deum litem dirimere. ‘It is better to think that nature rather than a God created’. The ‘m’s at the end of words could be silent, and slurred into the following words in recitative Latin. Like Shakespeare, there is what is written down, and what the audience is likely to hear. If Shakespeare could thus pun to a largely illiterate audience, then so could rhapsodes like Ovid, in a public performance of his poem.
However, if we take the text as written, then nature is somehow kinder than a god in creating the world. This struck me.
I have been on a bit of a deep dive, these days as regards Pessimism, Antinatalism and EFIL-ism. I disagree with these philosophies, however; unfortunately a commenter on a blog I frequent kept dragging me into this stuff.
PineCreek Doug once said on his show that he would not press the abiogenesis button on an earthlike planet, because of the horrendous suffering that would ensue. This is EFIL-ism. This is what Schopenhauer describes in Studies in Pessimism. Twere better if the earth, just like the moon, were sterile and still in a crystaline state.
Is Ovid making a similar point? Blind nature can be excused for creating a world full to the brim with horrendous suffering, but a god cannot be excused. Hence, blind nature would be kinder in creating the world than a conscious omniscient god.
This is why translation is such a fascinating topic. For me, I only see the above, and what was described in my previous email in the original Latin. In a translation, one gets a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional text. And given that 2d objects don’t actually exist in nature, this 2d translation becomes a 3d text all its own. If there is some passing resemblance between the original 3d text and the 3d text that is the translation, then the translator has done well.
And remember, the Renaissance humanists were reading works such as Ovid, and unlike myself, they were actually fluent in Latin. They could read and write Classical Latin as easily as I can read and write English.
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Marxism posits that creativity arises from the strivings of opposing forces… just like what Ovid does. In Ovid, the opposing forces are at a stalemate, and then a god or nature swoops in and breaks the stalemate, and the creation of the world from a primeval atom begins. Marxism posits that strivings between opposing social forces, such as the strivings between the bourgeoise and the Proletariat brings creativity.
Translating a Latin text might seem to be very esoteric. However Ovid described his Metamorphoses as a perpetual song, and in this he has thus far been proven correct. Methinks his “carmen perpetuum” will last till the crack of doom. Texts like De Rerum Natura and Metamorphoses are really the foundational texts of Modern Europe, if we trace Europe’s modernity to the Renaissance, and to enlightenment thinkers such as Spinoza.