Delphic Maxim 137: Grieve for no one
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
137. Grieve for no one
Often as I’ve responded to these maxims I’ve felt the need to temper the intensity of them. Today’s is one of those instances where I think the maxim crosses the line from simply being stoic into a level of absolutism that isn’t quite…human. Of course it is fine to grieve when we lose someone, though I’m also conscious that you could read this quite literally as ‘grieve for no one’ (as if ‘no one’ was a positive thing). But let’s not go there — that’s getting far too metaphysical.
Grief is ever-present in the Homeric epics, Iliad and Odyssey. When Achilles kills Hector underneath the walls of Troy and hauls his body back to the Greek camp, all of Troy grieves the loss of their hero. King Priam disguises himself and sneaks into the Greek camp to find Achilles and beg for the return of his son — he is stricken with grief so much that he risks his own life. Recognising this, and recognising his own grief at the loss of his cousin Patroclus, Achilles returns the body. Grief gives him a sense of identification with Priam.
In the Odyssey, grief is a regular feature of Odysseus’ journey home, as his crew is progressively killed — by the cyclops Polyphemus, by the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, by the gods for a thousand petty transgressions. Throughout the story, Odysseus and his crew are caught in fits of grief, bursting into tears and wailing at the loss of their comrades and the hopelessness of their fate.
But after a time, they stop, and this is where I think the virtue of temperance kicks in. I’ve mentioned the virtues enough times throughout this project that I don’t think I need to return to a definition, but Aristotle even name-checks grief in the Nichomachean Ethics. It is fine for a person to be distressed, to show grief, for a time, but not so much that it paralyses us from continuing to live our lives. We carry sadness and grief with us, but I think Aristotle’s point is that we also have a duty to go on living.
I think that grief is our way of processing a traumatic event, it allows us to sink for a time into the abyss of loss, to simply feel the hollowing out that opens up in our souls when we lose someone or something that we considered (or maybe didn’t even realise) was a core part of who we are. That kind of loss is a kind of rupture, and because these things don’t happen often in life it is something that we find difficult to describe. To crudely put it in Lacanian terms, it is a moment when the traumatic Real — of mortality, of loss, of emotional dependence and love — intrudes on our fantasy world. We can’t capture that in words, it is pre-symbolic.
So that’s really the role that grief plays in our lives — to make meaningful an event so traumatic that it might otherwise be impossible to give meaning. Grieving for someone is just fine, it’s part of our becoming human again.
