Euoi!

Dionysus and the new Olympic sport of offence-taking

A naked man, blue and garlanded, sings on a table in front of an assembly of adoring drag queens.

You know whereof I speak. If it sounds like the musings of a Gitane-smoking 1960s philosophe, that is probably not far off the mark. Foucault has left many stains on the French psyche. Let’s hope it has a wipeable surface.

Like me, you may not have seen the footage. The authorities have removed it, for fear of offence. I rather wish they’d had the courage to leave it up, since it seems so able to condemn itself. As it is, we have to rely on grainy stills suggestively juxtaposed with da Vinci’s Last Supper and the inevitable soundtrack of outraged commentary or equally outraged defence.

I usually resist clickbait reactions to current affairs and try to keep my musings to matters of more lasting import (he says with gravitas). But while others add offence-taking to the ever-growing list of new Olympic sports, forgive me if I venture some less outraged words over the cacophony.

Did the artists mean to parody the Last Supper? Many conservatives say, yes, it’s an obvious and direct pastiche of da Vinci; the organisers themselves retort no, any resemblance is purely coincidental; some more consistent liberals respond by saying – as the artistic director of the project, Thomas Jolly, hints (“nous avons beacoup de droits”) – that this is France, and we can mock whatever we like, merci beaucoup. Vive Charlie Hebdo.

But — if I may for a moment subvert a typically French postmodern shibboleth to my own use — the authorial intent doesn’t really matter. M. Jolly did not need consciously to adopt a specific religious image for that image to signify something in their regrettable opus. What he claimed to want to do was to reproduce a pagan feast honouring the Olympian deities. The symbol he chose for that was a long table with people seated and standing behind it. It may be a coincidence that Leonardo chose the same motif several centuries before, but it is not only a coincidence. The coincidence is significant whether intended or not.

In fact, people loafing around a table is neither an accurate representation of the Last Supper nor of a Dionysian orgy. Jesus and His disciples would have most likely reclined in the Roman manner, not sat up on wooden chairs chairs at a 15th century Italian nobleman’s dinner table. The Bacchanal would have been less formal still. There would have been no table in sight. If you wanted to reconstruct their rituals authentically, you would need gallons of booze, a few days to romp over the hillside, and ideally some livestock to tear apart in a frenzy with your bare hands. If you really wanted to carry the transgression all the way, you would find an unbeliever, preferably royal, to be dismembered by his own mother, q.v. King Pentheus. Then, I suppose that spectacle would have fit in quite well with the evenings’ revolutionary theme.

When defenders of this week’s motley diorama call the knuckle-dragging conservatives out for “misinterpreting” it and try to lecture them on the niceties of Greek myth, they are missing the point (though it does irk me that some of their targets cannot distinguish Dionysus from Dionysius). Far more interesting than the tedious round of outrage and apology is the fact that M. Jolly wanted a symbol for religion, and came up with a table. It is a symbol that really has nothing much to do with Dionysus nor with Greek religion in general. Whether he was aware of it or not, he imported a Christian motif into his supposed icon of inclusivity and “solidarité.” It was meant to demonstrate that people who were, within living memory, persecuted by the state because of their sexual predilections could feast together in peace. Nothing in Greek myth could offer anything like that symbol of fraternity.

The way the Dionysian spirit was invoked upon that table is, however, also significant. It shows the kind of egalité to which Jolly and his entourage aspire. The Dionysian spirit is not at all democratic. That is the spirit of Dionysius’ opposite, Apollo, the god of light, order and reason. Dionysus is rather the spirit of the inebriated outsiders overthrowing all boundaries of decency and order, so as to reduce everything to their own confused and irrational state. It is the spirit of the satyr, half-man and half-beast, a priapic and libidinous hybrid. It is the spirit of equality by intemperance, bloodshed and destruction. The vignette of Marie-Antoinette was not a paean to democracy. It was an ode to the terror of the guillotine.

In his early work on this Apollonian-Dionysian conflict, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche insists that both spirits are necessary to balance a society. Without the Dionysian influence to counterbalance the Apollonian, nations end in the calculating rationalism of the Roman empire or modern secular utilitarianism. Posterity might add Communist states to Nietzche’s list. But without the Apollonian, the Dionysian ends in pessimism, passivity, sterility, chaos and futility. A chorus of satyrs may be a necessary corrective to hyper-rationalism, but you would not want to live among them for long.

You certainly would not put the satrys in charge of anything. And I for one would certainly not want to put their blue-dyed imitator, Philippe Katerine, in charge of anything at all. Why he chose to represent Dionysus in that hue is beyond me: there is nothing in the tradition to suggest this colouring. A nod, perhaps, to Dr Manhattan or to Krishna? But his reason for choosing to appear naked is made quite clear, courtesy of the lyrics of the anthem he composed and sung. I will restrain myself and quote only the first verse:

Nu
Est-ce qu’il y aurait des guerres si on était resté tout nu ?
Non
Où cacher un revolver quand on est tout nu ?
Où ?
Je sais où vous pensez
Mais
C’est pas une bonne idée
Ouais
Plus de riches plus de pauvres quand on redevient tout nu
Oui
Qu’on soit slim, qu’on soit gros, on est tout simplement tout nu
Oui
Vivons comme on est né
Nu
Vivons comme on est né

Nude: would there be any wars if we just stayed nude?
No. Where would you hide your revolver when you’re nude?
Where? I know where you’re thinking,
but that’s not a good idea.
Yeah. No more rich, no more poor, when we all get naked again.
Yes! Whether you’re slim or fat, you’re simply naked.
Yes! Let’s live as we were born.
Nude! Let’s live as we were born.

Well, Pindar it ain’t. Not even Pinter. Put aside for a moment the matter of a man singing at an international event watched by millions, including children, about sticking a pistol up his arse. You get his point: equality by nakedness. Leave aside the inconvenient fact that people have indeed fought wars naked, Greeks among them; Don’t worry that it lacks even the political finesse of John and Yoko’s dirge Imagine; M. Katerine is peddling bargain-basement, Rousseavian noble-savage schtick. Lock up your daughters, good folk of Fiji, lest a new, blue Gauguin should haunt your shores.

If this is offensive, it’s not offensive to Christianity: it’s offensive to reason. The French authorities behind this deserve contempt more than outrage. The Boomers are in charge. This is their brave, subversive, transgressive vision for the future: let it all hang out. A bearded man with breast implants, old enough to know better, twirking his bare posterior along a catwalk is the best they have to offer. Their 1990s Eurotrash dream has gone mainstream. M. Katerine is one of them. He has lapped up the outrage, imagining that people are laughing with him. He seems not to have realised that we are laughing at him.

There is talk in Christian circles about diabolic influences at work in the Olympic opening ceremony. Insofar as the demonic is an invisible force which ripples through the world by human agency, I think this claim can and should be taken seriously. Secular or sceptical readers may interpret this as a cultural movement, greater than the sum of the individuals who are giving it momentum: I would ascribe more agency to it than that. Yes, the table that M. Jolly presented at the ceremony was rather far from a family table. Yes, they invoked a demonic spirit, Dionysus, at that table. Yes, the show pushed revolutionary, anti-monarchical, anarchistic motifs. And yes, all this is part of a wider onslaught against Christ and His Church, whether waged consciously (albeit with denials and knowing winks) or, to give Jolly the benefit of the doubt, in complete innocence.

But in the end, all that bluster can come to nothing. Nothing is, in the end, all it has to offer. What was being celebrated around that table was impotence. Instead of celebrating the virility and strength of the athletes, it encapsulated a dying society inverted on itself, all its fecundity diverted towards sterile fetishes. Such is the spirit captured by Silenus, Dionysus’ satyr companion, whom King Midas captured hoping to learn what is best in life. Laughing shrilly, the satyr replied:

“The best thing is beyond your reach: not to have been done, not to be, to be nothing. The second best? To meet an early death.”

That is Dionysus’ best offer. Christ’s is better. And somewhere in their hearts, I think those gathered around the table know that. It is why they used a table, and not a bull. That gives us something to work with. Instead of playing the offence game, let’s show the better way. Let us love those who would make themselves our enemies. Let us pray for them. Christ has the power to cast out the demons and to heal, and this is the Church’s work now. We must be ready to receive and to welcome those who hate us back into the fold. When people recover from the frenzy of the Bacchanal, they look back on it as though it were a dream. How could I ever have behaved like that? How did I believe it?

What is more, we must remember that we are far from immune to demonic assault ourselves. If we sense rising within the spirits of anger, hatred, condemnation or despair, we must know that these do not come from God. The demons within must be defeated before we can hope to fight those without. We must be watchful over the gates of our own hearts.

And we should be confident that if the Devil is showing his hand, it is out of desperation. If, in the short term, European and American Christians feel persecuted by all this, then didn’t Our Lord teach us in the Sermon on the Mount to count such persecutions as blessings? Frankly, they are nothing compared with what the Church in Russia or Romania or the Middle East has faced, or what the Church faced in France before.

So, rather than carping, we should be calling, encore! Bless us with more persecution. Mock us more. Our Lord was spat at in his crown of thorns. Put your Dionysus to the test. Offer him a bull, and let’s see what he can really do against the Lord of Hosts. Keep pushing, go further, see how far you can push your contempt for normality, how far you can test the limits of order and reason and truth, before the “normies” you despise fight back. And when that happens, repent, weep for joy, and come to Our Lord’s table – for in His arms are true refuge and welcome.

Bring it on, blue boomer! Euoi!