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Jesus changes the prohibition of all the outward actions mentioned in the Hebrew Law into the prohibition of the inner thoughts of those actions. Paul emphasizes what was later put down by Matthew, that “thoughts [of] murder, adultery, fornication, theft, perjury, slander—these all proceed from the heart; and these are the things that defile a man” (Matthew 15:19). In so doing, he switches private inner feelings in general from the margin of one’s life to one’s central concern.

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The Homeric Greeks were open to the world in a way that we, who are skilled at introspection and who think of moods as private experiences, can barely comprehend. Instead of understanding themselves in terms of their inner experiences and beliefs, they saw themselves as beings swept up into public and shareable moods.

For Homer, moods are important because they illuminate a shared situation: they manifest what matters most in the moment and in doing so draw people to perform heroic and passionate deeds. The gods are crucial to setting these moods, and different gods illuminate different, and even incompatible, ways a situation can matter. The goddess to whom Helen was most attuned was Aphrodite; she illuminates a situation’s erotic possibilities and draws one to bring these out at their best. Achilles, by contrast, is sensitive to Ares’ mood—an aggressive mood in which opportunities to shine as a ferocious warrior become the most important aspects of the situation at hand. Other gods call forth other attunements.

The best kind of life in Homer’s world is to be in sync with the gods. As Martin Heidegger puts it: We are thinking the essence of the [Homeric] Greek gods, if we call them the attuning ones.

At the center of Homer’s world, then, is the sense that what matters is already given to us, and that the best life is the one that manages to get in sync with it. This vision speaks eloquently to our own modern needs. Homer’s Olympian gods give his Greeks a sense of the sacred that underwrites the joys and sorrows of a truly meaningful existence. To lure back these Homeric gods is a saving possibility after the death of God: it would allow us to survive the breakdown of monotheism while resisting the descent into a nihilistic existence...

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Cognitive_Shift said:
You would find interesting the topic of "the absurd" in a philosophy text book.  It deals with this longing for people to find meaning in their lives and their inability to find meaning.  Hence the absurdity of it.  Check it out Kurt for real it would be an interesting read for you IMO.

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"there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity."

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Jesus transforms radically the whole Hebrew understanding of human being and of what counts as a life worth living. Instead of outward actions, Jesus organizes the worthy life around private, personal, inward desires.

In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus says: “[You] were told, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But what I tell you is this: If a man looks on a woman with a lustful eye, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

This makes the inner desires of the heart more important than outward actions. From a Hebrew point of view it is a crazy idea. My desires are private. The law can’t prohibit looking on a woman with a lustful eye. There can’t be witnesses who take someone to court because he was caught lusting. I can’t control my desires, and after all why should I? They don’t hurt anyone. In general, then, the idea that one is guilty for one’s desires must seem crazy to the Hebrews.

For Jesus to make sense at all, the idea that one is guilty for one’s desires requires that the culture must have some marginal understanding of private desires, and even think that some are condemnable. Otherwise no one could have understood Jesus’ condemnation of a lustful eye.

Imagine someone in Homeric Greece preaching: “He commits adultery who lusts after a woman in his heart.” People would not have understood a thing. If you can’t cry or dream inwardly, how could you lust inwardly? Even if the Hebrews, unlike the Homeric Greeks, experienced private desires, for a law-culture such desires shouldn’t have even marginal importance. So how could the Jews understand the prohibition of lusting in one’s heart? The answer must be that the Hebrews understood and condemned a few desires. They just didn’t consider it that important. And indeed that is exactly what we find. Among the Ten Commandments, exactly one prohibits an inner desire.

In particular, the tenth and final commandment prohibits coveting your neighbor’s things, including his slaves, donkeys, house, and wife. Paul saw the connection between Jesus’ prohibition of adultery and the commandment prohibiting coveting. He says: I had not known sin, but by the Law: for I had not known lust, except the Law had said, Thou shalt not covet. For the Hebrews the coveting prohibition was marginal. It is only one commandment out of ten, and the last commandment at that. But Jesus singles out all private inner experience and makes it central.

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I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

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Ahab’s monomaniacal purpose, his “quenchless feud,” (Note: with the white whale Moby Dick, who took his leg) is to force a confrontation—face to face—with that “inscrutable thing,” to delve beneath its inscrutability and find out whether its attack upon him was truly malicious or whether in fact the whale is merely a dumb and meaningless brute. In an important passage Ahab lays out the metaphysical picture of the universe that animates his hatred: that every act, every object, and every event in the world has a deep truth standing behind its surface affairs, and that man’s purpose is to uncover these final, eternal truth:

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“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks,” Ahab says. “But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

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(...)There is something admirable about Ahab’s pursuit. It recalls those hallowed scenes of dogged determination in American history, of “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” or “Win one for the Gipper!” It is a strength of purpose and determination of will to keep up a “quenchless feud” against the odds. And it is not just individual determination either, but the ability to lead, to bring others along with you, to rally the troops in support of the cause. Ahab has this effect upon all; even moody Ishmael falls under his spell:

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“I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of the murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.”

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(...)But if the whale is God then he is a polytheistic god, and his is a world of multiple meanings and truths. Look at the extraordinary distinction that Melville draws between the Sperm Whale and the Bible’s God. By tradition the Hebraic God refuses to show his face. When Moses asks God to show His glory, the Lord replies:

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“I shall make all my goodness pass before you, and I shall pronounce in your hearing the name, ‘Lord.’ I shall be gracious to whom I shall be gracious, and I shall have compassion on whom I shall have compassion.” But he added, “My face you cannot see, for no mortal may see me and live.” [Exodus 33:18–20]

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Melville has this Hebraic tradition firmly in mind when he proposes the Sperm Whale as a new kind of god, and he intends to go one step beyond the Bible’s account. The extraordinary and sacred power of Melville’s Sperm Whale consists not in its hiding its face from man. Rather, the Sperm Whale has no face at all:

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“But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles …”

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To say that the Sperm Whale has no face at all is to go beyond any traditional kind of religious mysticism. It is not just that his face is too awesome to look at or too complex to grasp. It is not a matter of his exceeding the bounds of our capacity to understand him. Rather, the god of Melville’s universe, and therefore Melville’s universe itself, lacks a hidden truth. Its face is not hidden behind some pasteboard mask. The mask—the skin, the riddled brow—is all there is. At the center of Melville’s understanding of the whale is the idea that there is no meaning to the universe hidden behind its surface events, that the surface events themselves—contradictory and mysterious and multiple as they may be—are nevertheless all the meaning there is. As he says in a later chapter,

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“Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep.”

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Ishmael’s amazing strength is that he is able to live in these surface meanings and find a genuine range of joys and comforts there, without wishing they stood for something more. This is what he means by

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“lowering the conceit of one’s attainable felicity”: “I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country.”

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