The phrase ‘opening Pandora’s box’ is still in use today as a way of describing a course of action that has unforeseen and calamitous consequences. However, most people are unaware of where this phrase comes from.
The origin of the phrase lies in the story told by the Greek poet Hesiod (circa 700 BC) in his poetic work Works and Days. In it he tells the story of how Zeus was angry that Prometheus had given human beings the gift of fire and having first punished Prometheus decided to punish humanity further.
To do this he sent Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus a wife, Pandora, and a sealed jar (‘box’ is a later mistranslation) which Zeus had told her not to open. However, as Zeus foresaw, curiosity got the better of her. What occurred next is described by Hesiod as follows in section 90 of Works and Days:
‘For ere this the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sickness which bring the Fates upon men; for in misery men grow old quickly. But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men. Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds. But the rest, countless plagues, wander amongst men; for earth is full of evils and the sea is full.’
The key question raised by scholars about this story concerns the significance of the fact that hope remained in the open jar. One view holds that what the story is saying is that hope is a good thing and that human beings can and should hang on to hope even in the face of all the evils that they face in the world. The opposite view holds that hope, like everything else in Pandora’s jar, is to be viewed as an evil. In this view the cruellest punishment imposed by Zeus is that humans struggle on into old age, through sickness, pain, and toil in the continuous hope that things will get better, even though they never will.
On one level this scholarly dispute is a linguistic argument. It is an argument about the meaning of the Greek word elpis which the English word ‘hope’ translates to. Does it mean hope in the positive sense which it now has in English, or did it originally mean a blind and delusive expectation?
Behind this linguistic argument, however, there is a more fundamental disagreement about what sort of a world we live in. Do we live in a world in which hope is always a delusion which in the long term will only ever end in disappointment? Or do we live in a world in which we can hope for things to permanently get better despite the evils with which the world is currently beset?
The British twentieth century philosopher Bertrand Russell gave eloquent expression to the first of these views in his ‘Litany of despair.’ Russell held to an atheistic and materialist world view and on this basis declared that all right-thinking people needed to accept:
‘…that man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcomes of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.’
If Russell is right, there is nothing we can hope for in the long run. Everything we enjoy, everything we strive to achieve, indeed the whole world and solar system in which we exist, will one day come to nothing as ‘death the destroyer of worlds’ has the last word.
The Christian faith takes a totally different view of the matter. It declares that we live in a world in which we may, and should, have hope not just for ourselves as individuals, or for the human race as a whole, but for the whole created order.
The classic expression of this Christian word view is given by Paul in Romans 8:18-25 in which he declares:
‘I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.’
As Tom Wright explains in his Paul for Everyone commentary on these verses, what Paul tells us in this passage is that:
‘The human race was put in charge of creation (as so often Paul has Genesis 1-3 not far from his mind). When humans rebelled and worshipped parts of creation instead of God himself (Romans 1:21-23), creation fell into disrepair. God allowed this state of slavery to continue, not because the creation wanted to be like that but because he was determined eventually to put the world back to rights according to the original plan (just as when Israel let him down he didn’t change the plan but sent at last a faithful Israelite). The plan had called for human beings to take their place under God and over the world, worshipping the creator and exercising glorious stewardship over the world. The creation isn’t waiting to share the freedom of God’s children as some translations imply. It is waiting to benefit wonderfully when God’s children are glorified. It is waiting on tiptoe with expectation in fact for the particular freedom it will enjoy when God gives his children that glory; that wise rule and stewardship which was always intended for those who bear God’s glorious image.’
He also tells us that as the children of God, Christians live longing for the day when they will receive their full redemption and the “promised resurrection bodies”. As such they live in the tension of the future promise and today’s reality. The Spirit is already at work in us and yet our full renewal has not yet been completed.
‘We have the ‘first fruits’ of the Spirit’s life,’ says Wright. ‘Paul uses the harvest image of early sheaves offered to God as the sign of a great crop still to come. We are left with a striking analysis of the Christian hope, hope that like faith is not seen (or it wouldn’t be hope at all), but hope that is certain nonetheless.’
In the Christian world view set out by Paul and expounded for us by Wright, the world is not the product of powers that did not know what they were doing (as Russell claims) nor is it as it is because of the malevolence of gods jealous of human progress (as in the Greek mythology reflected by Hesiod). Rather, an all wise and all good God created the world, and the world is as it is because of human rebellion against him.
This rebellion did not surprise God, nor is he powerless in the face of it. He has a plan to fulfil his original intention that human beings should rule over the world to its benefit in obedience to God. This plan has been put into action through the history of Israel and the obedience of God’s Son, Jesus Christ, the second Adam who overcame the harm caused by the first one (Romans 5:12-21), and it will reach its completion on the day when Jesus comes in glory to usher in the renewed creation (Revelation 21:1-4).
As Wright notes in his book Into the Heart of Romans, this hopeful Christian world view is often challenged, as it was by Russell, on the grounds that it goes against the findings of science which predicts that the created world will either cool down and expand into space or heat up and fall back in on itself, neither of which are good news for humans.
‘The big chill, or the big crunch! How can we then believe that God will renew and restore it?’ asks Wright. The answer, he explains, is that God will do for all of creation what he did for Jesus at Easter: ‘Science studies the normal repeatable evidence within the old creation That’s its job. But the resurrection is the start of the new creation.’
If the God who created the whole universe came in person to begin the new creation in the person his Son and gave proof of this by raising him from the dead, then there is nothing irrational or ‘anti science’ in believing that he will finish the job by raising other humans and renewing the whole created order. We simply have more evidence that the natural sciences don’t know about.
If the Christian world view is true, then this shows us that hope is not necessarily delusional. Some of our hopes within this world may indeed turn out to be a delusion. As a long-term Arsenal supporter, I am hoping that the Gunners will win the Premier League this season, but this hope may be unfounded. However, the overall Christian hope will not deceive us. We can be confident that God will complete his work of re-creation because he has the power to do so, because he has shown himself to be a God who is faithful to his promises, and because we experience in our own lives the first fruits of the new creation as the Spirit works in our hearts to shape us into people who are ready to share in the life of the world to come.
The Church’s season of Advent, which runs during the four weeks leading up to Christmas, is the season when Christians have traditionally celebrated their belief that hope is not delusional. The English word Advent, like the Latin word adventus from which it comes, means ‘coming’ and Advent is the season when the Church recalls and declares that the Jesus who came in great humility as a baby in Bethlehem will come again in glory to usher in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, and therefore we may have hope that sin, evil and death will not have the last word.
