Missing the mark

I watched last month’s Beijing Olympics with a wondering heart. Is its spirit still kept, and is it even relevant?

These days we limit what we call the Olympic spirit to the camaraderie of even warring nations standing together in competing spirit and peace. But for ancient Greeks the Olympic Games were not just games, but religion in the true sense of the word.
We hear comments like football being the religion of our era, but this does not mean the same as when one says the Olympic Games were a religion of ancient Greeks. For one thing, they were held in honour of Zeus of Olympia, not for greed and profit. They were a competition for a complete man; fusion of the physical, the intellectual, the moral, the spiritual and the sensuous. Hence Aristotle could remark that a gentleman should be able to play the flute, but not too well, as this would entail neglect of other measures of excellence. An individual had to be holistic. In our age of specialisation we have no such qualms.

Many scholars tend to idealise ancient Greeks by judging them by what was best in them (understandably so, since what we have now are remnants of what was best and worst in their culture). But in this case we’d do well to emulate the ancient Greek Olympic spirit. Their games were organised to promote aretê, which may be translated as virtue. That’s why serious poets, such as Pindar, wrote odes for Olympian athletes. It would be akin to a poet laureate writing poems for Michael Phelp or Usain Bolt today. But what’s more surprising is that the ode is not jubilant, but sombre:
He who wins, of a sudden some noble prize

In rich years of youth
Is raised high with hope; his manhood takes wings;
He has in his heart what is better than wealth.
But brief is the season of man’s delight.
Soon it falls to the ground; some dire decision
uproot it.

–Thing of a day! Such is man; a shadow in a dream.
Yet when god-given splendour visits him
A bright radiance plays over him, and how sweet
is life!
–Agina, dear mother, guide this city in the path of liberty.

Pindar was not only an old man when he wrote this, but the Aeginetans, his kindred Dorian people, were menaced by Athens. He’s not only thinking about a mere athletic event here, but urging his kindred towards greater victories for virtue, and towards political, social liberty and religious aspiration. Striving for freedom, with sense to prove their character and better themselves against imperialistic Attica’s best is what drove his kindred. Perhaps, who knows, that’s what goes through the minds of Jamaican, Kenyan, Ethiopian or Zimbabwean athletes as they take to the field.

Pindar’s ode is also a perfect warning for every young person striving for excellence in any field today. Remember death, for a “thing of a day…Such is man; a shadow in a dream”. A psalmist would say: “They are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up, in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.”
Hardly 20 years after Pindar’s death, Euripides was writing scathing lines about Olympic victors. They were now, according to Euripides, just “men of brawn and no mind, who receive praise and adulation of a city to which they contribute nothing”. Words like hybris (wanton wickedness) and pleonexia (trying to get more than your share) kept appearing in the writings of his age, far removed from the “wisdom”, “prudence”, “temperateness”, “chastity”, “sobriety” and “modesty” of Pindar’s age. What had happened in such a short time of space?

The short answer is that things had shifted from character building into profiteering. Then all of a sudden things started “missing the mark”. Missing the mark was another term for sin in ancient language. Where does our age measure in all of this?
Teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.