The "shadow" of sacrificial, tragic mythos, writes David Bentley Hart (in an essay on the First Word in I Am the Lord Your God), "falls across the philosophical schools of antiquity" (63).

Ancient philosophy wasn't, in short, a systematization of obvious common sense, but of ancient common sense. Which is quite different from Christian common sense.

Hart admits that he's writing "impressionistically" (61) and with "reckless" generalization. But his characterization of the "ethos of European antiquity" as "a kind of glorious sadness" (61) rings true.

Centrally, the mythos was a mythos of sacrifice. The cosmos was "a closed system, a finite totality, within which gods and mortals alike occupied places determined by fate." This totality was an "economy, a cycle of creation and destruction, oscillating between order and chaos, form an indeterminacy." It was "a great circle of feeding, preserving life through a system of transactions with death" (61). The cosmos was a fixed hierarchy, the gods at the top and slaves at the bottom, all "bound together by necessity" (62).

Sacrifice was the chief rite for resisting and controlling the "terrible dynamism of nature." It was apotropaic and economic, appeasing the powers and gaining the favor of the gods through cultic gifts" (61). Humans "fed the gods, who required our sacrifices, and they preserved the forces they personified and granted some measure of their power" (62).

Underlying the system was a somewhat veiled but "ineradicable" nihilism, "a tragic resignation before fate, followed by a prudential act of cultic salvage, for the sake of social and cosmic stability" (62).

The festival of Dionysus illustrates the dynamic: It "was a fertility festival . . . but only because it was also an apotropaic celebration of delirium and death." The Dionysia was "a sacred negotiation with the wild, antinomian cruelty of the god whose violent orgiastic cult had once, so it was believed, gravely imperiled the city; and the hope that prompted the feast was that if this devastating force could be contained within the bright Apollonian forms and propitiated through a ritual carnival of controlled disorder, the polis could survive for another year, its precarious peace intact" (62).

Tragedy was a variation on this sacrificial mythos, dramatizing the conflict between chthonian gods and Apollo, between family and city, a "conflict within the divine itself" that could only result in the sacrificial death of the protagonist. Tragedy was a mode of resignation to this necessity, and also an effort to "keep at bay the greater violence of cosmic or social disorder" (63).

Philosopher may have pretended to put all that behind them, but Hart doesn't think so: "from the time of the pre-Socratics, all the great speculative and moral systems of the pagan world were in varying degrees confined to this totality, to either its innermost mechanisms or outermost boundaries. . . . none could conceive of reality except as a kind of strife between order and disorder, within which a sacrificial economy held all the forces in tension" (63).

Platonism's "inextricable dualism" of change and stasis, its "equation of truth with eidetic abstraction" treated the world as "the realm of fallen vision, separated by a great chorismos from the realm immutable reality" (63). Aristotle's "dialectic of act and potency [is] . . . inseparable from decay and death" and his "scale of essences" reflected the cosmic determinism of the myths, in which "all things - especially various classes of persons - are assigned their places in the natural and social order" (63).

In Neoplatonism, the task of philosophy is "escape" from everything that is not the One - "all multiplicity, change, particularity, every feature of the living world." Truth "is oblivion of the flesh, a pure nothingness, to attain which one must sacrifice the world" (64).

Christianity shattered the ancient cosmos, the sacrificial economy that maintained it, the metaphysics that developed from it. Believing in creation from nothing, Christians rejected the "economy of necessity" of ancient metaphysics (67). Christianity implies that God is truly transcendence, not merely the peak of a mountain of being (68).

Of course, Christians made use of earlier metaphysics: "theology rejected nothing good in the metaphysics, ethics, or method of antique philosophy, but - with a kind of omnivorous glee - assimilated such elements as served its ends, and always improved them in the process." Ancient metaphysics and ethics "became richer and more coherent when emancipated from the morbid myths of sacrificial economy and tragic necessity" (68). The church, in short, evangelized metaphysics.

Hart, as I say, admits this is cursory and impressionistic. If anyone is looking for a lifetime project, he or she could do worse than filling out Hart's sketch in a non-cursory, non-impressionistic fashion.