We live at a time of great changes. Many are violent and monstrous. Frederick the Great, saw revolutions as part of the destiny of nations, particularly new ones. In 1751 he wrote that “…fragility and instability are inseparable from the works of men; the revolutions that monarchies and republics experience have their causes in the immutable laws of Nature.” In the midst of fires appeared the more elusive flame that Dostoevsky described in the most searching work of fiction ever written about the revolutionary movement: The Possessed.” The fire is in the minds of men, not in the roofs of buildings.” With a match box one has no need of a lever; one does not lift up the world, one burns it.

There are too many lovers of Prometheus, the tragic hero of love of mankind and defiance of God. The biblical story of Adam’s fallen imagination finds its closest Greek equivalent in the myth of Prometheus, but the difference is important. The name Prometheus, meaning foresight designates the power to anticipate by projecting a horizon of imaginary possibilities. But Plato writes in the Republic:

“God, since He is good, is not the cause of everything, as is commonly said; He is the cause of only a part of the things that happen to men and has no responsibility for the greater part of them, for the bad far outweighs the good in our lives…. We will not therefore allow the young to hear the words of Aeschylus: ‘God implants crime in men when He wishes to ruin their house completely’” (Rep. 379c–380a).

Why is Plato so defiant to Aeschylus and to the mythical hero Prometheus? Prometheus provided men with consciousness as the transformation grammar of experience. No wonder the gift also gave men a sense of the endlessness of possibility arising from the endlessness of knowledge and desire. The power of imagination helped men to maintain a relation between themselves and nature, but it did not bring peace between men and gods. The imagination has always been a contentious power, as a result, so far as men are concerned in their relations with the gods the divine power in men, falsely acquired, stolen from the gods in the first of many similar outrages.

Man could only presume to replace the divine by means of imagination, he is always reminded that the very need for the gift of fire—to supplement his earthly existence with the promise of a celestial perfection. Both Prometheus and Adam fulfil the role of the sacrificial victim who, as Northrop Frye points out, ‘is innocent in the sense that what happens to him is far greater than anything he has done provokes…but guilty in the sense that he is…living in a world where such injustices are an inescapable part of existence…. The two parts do not come together; they remain ironically apart.” Promethean creative liberty is therefore merely one of defiance, not of participation. Prometheus was a ‘guilty innocent’ and desperate without a shadow of goodness. First Man’s acquisition of imagination places the guilt of this transgression of divine law on man. He is the one who makes the imagination evil by his own free choice. And by the same token, he is also free, after his fall from paradise, to put the stolen power of imagination. Adam’s freedom of imagination is not merely one of defiance but of participation. There is no question of the tragic hero actively redeeming his transgression by ‘returning’ to the way of God and engaging in a dialogue with his Creator for the sake of an ultimately ‘good’ outcome.

Plato saves the ‘holiness’ of being. His famous simile of the Cave in book VII of the Republic tells that the world of darkness inside the cave is presented as an illusory stage where men live in ignorance, prisoners of man-made images. The world of light and grace is outside—to which all lovers of truth aspire by following the way of reason and responsibility. All possibilities arise from deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. If God can enter then it can apply to small everyday things. Every outrage and every horror shall put up one more piece of love and goodness, drawing strength from within.