Commemorating Prometheus

Commemorating Prometheus is an attempt to articulate some basic truths about the human condition. Prometheus is best known as the clever Titan who is said to have bestowed upon a nascent humankind the technical arts and a fire stolen from the gods. Our agri-cultural adventures these past 12000 years have elevated such Promethean tendencies while neglecting or forgetting others. This book commemorates a Prometheus who is far older and far more primordial. This Prometheus is the sibling of Epimetheus-an Epimetheus whose foolishness evinced a certain wisdom. For in bringing forth a naked, fragile, and dependent humankind, Epimetheus prepared the ground for the sharing, caring, meeting, dwelling, and loving through which human being is accomplished. And it was to the nurturing and safeguarding of this accomplishment that Prometheus dedicated himself long before any technological adventures. Upon the ground of our nakedness, our fragility, our dependence, Prometheus set about helping to bring us forth by bringing us together. Inclining us toward one another and setting between us a warmth and affection, Prometheus raised us up through drawing us toward one another. He set about teaching us the art of the open hand extended. Setting us along the path of mutual care, Prometheus joined our hearts and hands and he joined our bodies and souls. Thus, long before gathering round the fire of any hearthside, we were gathered round the warmth of caring hearts. And long before our hands were fitted for the grasping of any tool, Prometheus raised us up into our human being. By way of Prometheus, humankind was made pregnant with the future, a future not exhausted by the throwing of any stone or the manufacture of any thing.