Orpheus and Eurydice (yer-RID-uh-kee) were not married for long. One day Eurydice was walking through the grass with some friends, when suddenly a snake bit her in the heel and she died. Orpheus was devastated, yet unlike other men, who simply accept that there’s nothing you can do about death, determined that he would go to Hades and try to get her back. Orpheus was the greatest musician of his day, so taking along his lyre, he descended into the underworld. He stood before Hades and Proserpina and declared, “I have come for my wife” (causa viae est coniunx; Ovid, Metamorphoses, X.23). He played and sang so beautifully that the gods of death were willing to grant his request for his wife. “You may receive her back to life,” Hades said, “but if you turn around to look at her before you emerge from the realm of death, she will descend back here forever.”
Orpheus was overjoyed and set off with Eurydice, careful not to look back. But after they had gone on for some time and were near the exit, Orpheus became concerned because he no longer heard Eurydice’s footsteps behind him. “Has something happened to her?” he wondered. “Is she still there, or has some danger overtaken her?” He turned to look, and saw her right behind him where she had been. But that glance cost him dearly. At once Eurydice began receding from Orpheus, stretching out her arms to catch him, he stretching out his arms to catch her, but in vain. She was lost to death forever. Orpheus emerged from Hades grief-stricken. He never loved again, but wandered sadly through the woods playing his lyre and singing, lamenting both the first and second deaths of his bride.
This is a miserable story. The Greeks and Romans had very little concept of the happy ending so prominent among our traditional fairy tales. Death is the end for the pagan; there is no happiness after that. Even Orpheus, as he speaks with Hades, acknowledges that death will get Eurydice in the end; he’s just hoping for a normal lifespan for her before death claims them both. There is no happy ending where death reigns supreme.
But death does not reign supreme. On the Last Day there will be a bodily resurrection. This is one of the most striking of Jesus’ teachings when compared with the prevailing beliefs in the Greco-Roman world. Jesus is the true God. He has mastered Death by His own death, such that His Christians can mock Death, saying, “O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 15:55-57). Jesus will raise us from the dead, and we will live forever, body and soul.
The story of Orpheus and Eurydice has inspired many books, plays, operas, movies, and ballets. Our very own Lutheran kantor Georg Philipp Telemann wrote an opera entitled Orpheus (1726). Jacques Offenbach wrote the operetta Orpheus in the Underworld (1858), from which comes the famous Can-Can (and to which I cannot listen without picturing demons dancing in a kickline). But no matter how you retell the original, there’s no changing the fact that it’s a miserable story. You know how it should end, because you’re a Christian and not a miserable pagan: Orpheus should get his bride back from death, because Jesus got His bride back from death. Jesus came down into this world in order to seek us out and claim us: “I have come for my wife” (causa viae est coniunx). And no one could impose conditions on Him. He shed His blood, God’s blood, and that was absolutely sufficient for our redemption. He Himself rose from death, and we shall as well.
An anonymous Christian felt the same way we do about the story, that it needed fixing, and around the year 1300 wrote a poem entitled Sir Orfeo. The poet retells the story with a musician-king whose lady has been kidnapped by a fairy king. He seeks her out. The description of the king’s departure resembles the Incarnation of our Lord:
Now all his kingdom he forsook.
Only a beggar’s cloak he took;
He had no kirtle and no hood,
No shirt, nor other raiment good.
His harp yet bore he even so,
And barefoot from the gate did go;
No man might keep him on the way.
A me! the weeping woe that day,
When he that had been king with crown
Went thus beggarly out of town!
(lines 227-236)
Orfeo journeys and searches, labors and gets his wife back. Unlike the original, he has no conditions imposed on him and makes it safely home with his bride. Orfeo
had in wilderness full long
Suffered great hardship sore and strong
Had won his queen by his own hand
Out of the deeps of fairy land.
(lines 559-562)
It’s a marvelous story, told the way it should be, and you can pick up a lovely translation of it into modern English by none other than J.R.R. Tolkien (ISBN 978-0358652977).
Christians have an appreciation for the old Greek and Roman myths, can see the wisdom in many of them, and know how to rewrite others to be true to life, rather than true to death. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice shows the pagan longing for resurrection, and the vanity of pagan religion to attain it. Christ is the true Orpheus, and Christians know the true story, thanks be to God.
In Christ,
Pastor Richard
