The Greek gods of Kaos: A Christ-Haunted Netflix Show

Kaos Rules

There’s a great episode in The Simpsons (remember them?) that deals with the butterfly effect. A Time Machine that Homer accidentally builds when fixing his father’s toaster throws up all sorts of alternate worlds after Homer slightly tinkers with the past.

Those new worlds include, most chillingly, one in which Ned Flanders, his irksome Christian neighbour, reigns supreme. Predictably we get a series of bounce-backs in which Homer tries to right the wrongs and get things back to his mundane, boring and angst-ridden life. Where he is, of course, happiest.

It’s a familiar trope isn’t it? What if the past went a little differently? What would “the now” be like?  And it’s played out to terrific effect by the new Netflix series, Kaos, starring Jeff Goldblum and Janet McAteer among others. Terrific cast. Brilliant set designs and costuming. Goldblum all self-absorbed angst and evil as Zeus himself. McAteer plotting as his wife/sister Hera.

And I don’t know enough about all of the intricacies of Greek mythology, but I get the general gist. There’s Hades, the Furies, Persephone, Aurora (the real sunshine of the show IMHO), and a cast of gods and Demi-gods the likes we have not seen since since Troy was a boy. It’s as if they never left.

It’s an erstwhile modern world, played out in a So-Cal version of the Greek city state of Crete, in which the Greek gods rule and reign, Zeus most memorably from an Olympus that has all of the grandeur of a gaudy faux-French palais.

So when it comes to life under the Greek gods, it’s prayer, but not as we know it. It’s worship, but not as we (thankfully) know it, including human sacrifice. It’s a palm to the right side of the forehead instead of crossing oneself.  It’s the little things that make it so interesting.

When it comes to the little things, The Simpsons played that one right too. Imagine a world without donuts. Homer can’t countenance it.

Kaos is loud, it’s brash, it’s funny, it’s disturbing and it raises all sorts of questions about fate, prophesy and the human condition. It breaks your heart and makes you laugh (and shrink in horror) all at the same time. I loved it.

Christ-haunted

But here’s what intriguing about it. Despite being able to imagine a Netflix series in which the Greek gods still rule, the creators of the show couldn’t quite imagine a world in which the values of the Greek gods rule the minds of humans.

Sure enough, and this is what makes it interesting, the “air we breathe” in the show is Christian air. As Christian author and broadcast Glen Scrivener, and historian and podcaster Tom Holland both point out, the post-Christian world is still very Christian.  It’s just too big a leap for anyone in the West to reconstruct their neural and spiritual pathways to construct a pre-Christian paganism.

Zeus in all of his leisure-suited glory

So the humans are recognisable to us in how life plays out, in a way that the humans of the pagan era that gave us the Greek gods would not have been recognisable to us.

The humans are given over to serving others, loving the good and noble and true, to self-sacrifice and concern for the weak, to noble ideals, and the worth of the individual. Indeed, the search inside oneself for authenticity, the very zenith of the post-Christian psychological age.

Kaos might be ruled by Zeus, but the series is Christ-haunted nonetheless.  After all, when forgiveness is a virtue, you definitely know you are living this side of the cross, don’t you?

Indeed that is what gives it its pathos (ah that Greek term!). If we take Jesus Christ out of the equation there’s nowhere else to go. In a seminal First Things article from 2003, David Bentley Hart points out that we can’t go back. We can’t even imagine a future without Christ. We can only spiral into nothingness, so completely did Christ fill our world. And Hart uses the gods to remind us of this fact:

The gods, at least, were real, if distorted, intimations of the mysterium tremendum, and so could inspire something like holy dread or, occasionally, holy love. They were brutes, obviously, but often also benign despots, and all of us I think, in those secret corners of our souls where we are all monarchists, can appreciate a good despot, if he is sufficiently dashing and mysterious, and able to strike an attractive balance between capricious wrath and serene benevolence. Certainly the Olympians had panache, and a terrible beauty whose disappearance from the world was a bereavement to obdurately devout pagans.

Which is a reminder, that the Greek gods didn’t suddenly up and leave of their own volition. They were swept away by the irresistible force of the cross of Christ.

And that’s what makes some of the lines uttered by Zeus in his terrorising and patronising of his family members so cutting. Let’s give the writers and creators of the show due credit. They too are writing from their Christ-hauntedness.

The King of Love

So, in scolding his son Dionysus for his affection for humans and saying “Some humans are nice, they’re good to be around. And amongst”, the head of the gods says this:

Some of the mothers of my favourite children are humans, but they don’t matter. What matters is our family. You can play with humans, you can eat with them, make love to them, plait their hair, do whatever you want with them. But you must never forget that you are not one of them. Okay?

What a contrast to the story of the Bible. What a contrast to the beginning of Genesis and the creation of humans to reflect God’s glory and fulfil his creation-ruling mandate.

And of course what a contrast to this:

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

And, of course, this:

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

The most chilling moment, for me at least, is when Zeus is reasserting his control over his errant family, whose distractions and plotting threaten his own reign. Zeus stalks around the feasting table with a sharp knife, and with these words, plunges it into the young kitten that Dionysus has taken a liking to – indeed has grown to love:

We do not bring back the dead Dionysus, we do not do it. And love, well human love, that needy, cloying unsophisticated stuff that they experience, is not something to be admired.  Do you know why, do you? It’s, it’s weakness.

And with that, he plunges the knife.

I suppose you think you loved that cat. Well, you didn’t. We’re gods! We’re gods!  We don’t bleed. We don’t die. And we don’t – uh – love anything lesser than ourselves.

And the shiver that goes down our collective post-Christian spines is the very Christ-hauntedness that compels us to call out “No!”

Go watch the show. Enjoy it. And allow the Christ who did bleed and die – for us – not because we are lesser, but because we are going to be changed into his very likeness, to inform you as you do.