| In scenes that became notorious with later commentators, Homer portrays the gods as characters liable to laughter and laughable behavior. Writers from Plato to Reinhold Niebuhr have argued against laughter's place in considerations of the sacred; yet, despite the criticisms, the past century has given us several works that use laughter to depict the God of Christianity. This study examines laughter's role in the religious imagination, first by considering attitudes toward laughter in ancient Greece and the modern West, and then by reading several texts that depict the divine as laughing or laughable. It focuses on several Greek works, especially Homer's Iliad, Euripides' Bacchae, and Aristophanes' Frogs, Birds, Peace, and Plutus. It then asks how the insights derived from that study might apply to an examination of modern literary works that draw on the Christian myth, among them works by G. K. Chesterton, Isak Dinesen, Stanley Elkin, Franco Ferrucci, Archibald MacLeish, Charles Peguy, Anne Sexton, George Bernard Shaw, and Mark Twain.;In both the ancient and modern traditions, laughter is inherently ambiguous, capable of expressing a range of attitudes. It is also inherently ethical, capable of enforcing social norms, disrupting social structures, and creating and sustaining relationships of inclusion and exclusion. Because of this ethical dimension, laughter at and by the gods poses significant questions about good and evil. In particular, it engages the problem of theodicy, the question of how evil can coexist with divine justice. Laughter in these texts can be a response to the divine---sometimes the mocking dismissal of a deity who cannot be counted on to be all-good and all-powerful, sometimes the congenial sharing of a cosmic joke---and can conceptualize the relationship between humanity and divinity in ways that challenge and complement the perspectives of other theological approaches. Laughter addresses the concerns of theodicy by providing ways to question and re-imagine the relationship between human and divine. |
