Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

ACTING IN THE FACE OF DIVINE ENVY 151
ical theories. His view of the phenomenon enables it to be included in my
general theory of envy.
Aeschylus spoke of the envy of the gods as of a venerable and
immemorial doctrine. Dodds points out that the idea that too much
success, if boasted about, involves supernatural danger is found independently
in the most diverse cultures. Hence it must be deeply rooted in
human nature, as can be seen from our own custom of touching wood
immediately after making an optimistic or boastful remark which a
subsequent event might cause us to regret. 20
Levy-Bruhl and others have found among many primitive peoples a
non-moralizing belief that awareness of one's own favourable position
invites danger from some sort of power. This conception appears in a
moralizing form in ancient China: 'If you are rich and of high degree,
you become proud and so expose yourself to inevitable ruin. If all goes
well with you, it is expedient to keep yourself in the background' (Tao Te
Ching, 4th century B.C.).
In this connection it is tempting to recall the song from the American
musical Oklahoma! ('I got a wonderful feeling, everything's going my
way'): It is no doubt an indication of the relatively carefree American
national character and the American's relative freedom from fear of
divine envy-a fact of decisive importance-that a song of this kind
could become popular and even conceivable as a folk song. Most cultures
would regard this self-satisfied couplet as a most dangerous challenge
to fate.
Dodds also cites the Old Testament, in which God's envy is mentioned
several times, as for instance in Isaiah (1O:12ff.), and believes that the
uninhibited boasting of Homeric characters shows that the envy of the
gods was not really taken seriously at that time. It was not until late
archaic and early classical times that the fear of phthonos assumed the
proportions almost of a religious threat. The notion then gradually
became a moralistic one: it is not just that the mere sin of too much
success incurs the punishment of a divine power simply because the
latter is envious; rather, it is believed that success leads to koros,
self-satisfaction, which in turn gives rise to hubris, the arrogance of
assured success. And this is punished. 21
20 E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951, p. 30.
21 Op. cit., pp. 30 ff.