Daily Archives: January 24, 2011

Caligula

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfgDPLkMg-w

From the British television adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius: Caligula (now incarnated as Jove) addresses the Senate after winning his “battle against Neptune”

On this date in 41 the emperor Caligula was assassinated (born 12).

Frye in The Double Vision:

In religion, too, we must keep a critical attitude that never unconditionally accepts any socially established form of revelation.  Otherwise, we are back to idolatry again, this time a self-idolatry rather than an idolatry of nature, where devotion to God is replaced by the deifying of our own present understanding of God.  Paul tells us that we are God’s temples [1 Corinthians 3:16]: if so, we should be able to see the folly of what was proposed by the emperor Caligula for the Jerusalem temple, of putting a statue of ourselves in its holy place.  (CW 4, 197)