Attic drinking bowl interior, Dionysus and Silen. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Collection of Antiquities / CC BY-SA 4.0.

Henrichs criticized this overemphasis on rituals to the neglect of myths. He pointed to the inherent absurdity of claiming that one worshipped a personified projection of one’s own worship. Henrichs, himself a Catholic, nevertheless made a conscious attempt to view his subjects in terms of their own beliefs, never questioning or denouncing the genuine engagement with their religion. Though he acknowledges the consistency of religious action as a form of understanding religious faith, he pointedly notes that “it was the gods more than their rituals that formed the cornerstone of their [the Greek’s] religion.” When academics dismiss this fact, they themselves dissect the god and consume him for their own purposes.⁶ Yet Dionysus resists this sort of scholarly omophagy.

Henrichs condemned the instrumentalization of the gods in all forms throughout his career. But because of his mysterious and untameable nature, Dionysus in particular has often stood in for human passions. Henrichs locates the modern iteration of this phenomenon in Nietzsche’s 1872 book The Birth of Tragedy, a work Henrichs calls “The Death of Dionysus.” Nietzsche, he says, falsely imports Schopenhauerian pessimism onto myths of the gods, and then claims that Greek tragedy is the “truest art form because the destruction of the tragic hero is the paradigm of existential suffering.” By connecting Dionysus to the Zagreus myth, a story about a god who was dismembered by the Titans and then reborn, Nietzsche had his tragic hero. Like the Ritualists after him, he saw tragedy as a representation of reality, but he viewed drama as recovering a sort of “primal unity,” the source of all existence.⁷Though Henrichs is indebted to Nietzsche and those he inspired by reviving public interest in the arcane god, he warns against the dangers of overintellectualizing the divine. Speaking both to Nietzsche and to the Ritualists, he warns that their manner of abstracting Dionysus out onto structures of society or into psyches may put us “in danger of growing oblivious to that aspect of him that was foremost in the minds of the Greeks—his divine capacity to appear among mortals when least expected and to make his presence felt by affecting their personalities and changing their lives.” He cautions against imposing our preconceived notions—making Dionysus in our image—when conducting scholarship. However, the limits of contemporary epistemology when analyzing ancient sources is a difficulty Henrichs acknowledges but does not readily confront.⁸

Contemporary classicist Michael Squire writes: “The sense of ancient sight is at once tantalizingly accessible and hopelessly distant: look as we may, it is our own eyes that we must see/see through/see looking back at us.” While Henrichs remained sensitive to the dangers of etic viewpoints, he did not find a resolution to the intellectual and experiential rifts that inevitably arise. As a Catholic, he shared a certain engagement in religion with the subjects of his academic inquiry and did not suggest one ought to abandon their beliefs in pursuit of scholarship. However, there is a certain phenomenological gap that goes unaddressed throughout his writings on Dionysus. No amount of epigraphical or philological reconstruction can transport the scholar to the site of a Dionysiac ritual; unlike other academics studying contemporary religious traditions, students of classical religion will never meet a worshipper. While we may not consciously wish to make Dionysus in our image, it may be unavoidable when we search for the god and find only our own eyes looking back at us.⁹

One attempt to bridge this phenomenological gap was made by the German classical philologist Walter Otto, who held an actual belief in the gods of the Greeks and attempted to engage with it in his scholarship. Henrichs writes of his admiration for Otto’s tenacity and his appreciation of Otto’s holistic view of the god as a god. Too often, scholars make the mistake of Pentheus in ignoring the god’s most important aspect, his divinity, and they do so at their own peril. However, Henrichs notes how Otto and other scholars with genuine religious belief in their subjects “had to pay a high price for their unorthodoxy”; they were rarely taken seriously by the field. Otto viewed the gods as a “coherent, fully-formed divine system . . . a permanent reality,” meaning that they were absolute in their nature and did not evolve over time. But the static gods of Otto clashed with the ever-evolving Dionysus, and he does not acknowledge that belief in the god in twentieth-century Germany will inevitably be an interpolation into the Dionysus of fifth-century Athens or Bacchus of first-century Rome.¹⁰

This faith in the gods of antiquity was a far cry from the traditional classics scholarship, which often did not even acknowledge the beliefs of the ancients. Henrichs gestures at this oversight when he admits that, until very recently, both “theology” and “polytheism” were taboo words for scholars of Greek religion. The history of classics is marked by a skepticism so strong it often denied the religion of its ancient subjects, preferring to preserve them as eminently rational political philosophers. August figures in scholarly history, such as Benjamin Jowett, the nineteenth-century Oxford translator of Plato and professor of many future leaders in the British Empire, pointedly ignored the religious beliefs and practices of the cultures on which he worked. Perhaps he worried that a true reckoning with the Greeks’ own religiosity would undermine the view cultivated in England, that they were paragons of rationality and the intellectual wellspring for English culture. Indeed, classics had gained prominence as a discipline in part because it was seen as the analytic basis for republican political philosophy around Europe and abroad in the fledgling empire of America.¹¹

Because the figure of Dionysus clashed with this view, he was heavily featured in texts disputing the irreligious reason of the Greeks, such as Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational. As a foreign god responsible for the death of a city’s ruler in his most famous depiction, Dionysus began to represent an irrational force, destructive to civilization. This distinction is most famously displayed in the Dionysian and Apollonian opposition in Nietzsche’s 1872 book, although it has resonances in earlier works. While Apollo represented logic, prudence, and reason, Dionysus was dangerous, especially for empires asserting their legitimacy and, later, for a continent trying to rebuild itself in the wake of two world wars.¹²

Metal engraving of Bacchus by unknown Mexican artist, ca 1890-1910. The Met, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1946 / Public Domain.

This complex reckoning with Greek irrationality likely stems from the fraught relationship between Christianity and classics that immediately emerged. From their earliest beginnings, the fields of ancient philology and archeology were employed in the project of searching for the “essence of Christianity,” a preoccupation stemming from the desire to define the “Greekness” of this religion. The consequences of this became clear as Christianity expanded to occupy the place of defining “Western civilization” as such; but how different was this faith from those that came before it? Classicists took different stances: like Dante placing Greek philosophers and poets where they might “gain heaven’s grace” even in limbo, some academics “saved” the ancients by viewing them as instrumental for Christianity. Others fell squarely on the side of either reason or revelation, antagonizing the Church with textual criticism’s ruthless eye or completely denying the presence of Hellenism in any of the Christian canon.¹³

Dionysus proved an especially polarizing figure in this regard. As Henrichs notes, the mysterious god of wine, said to have died and been reborn, was a particularly suitable candidate for comparison with Christ. From a second-century story where Dionysus turns water into wine in a suspected parody of the Eucharist, to “Christus Patiens,” to a twelfth-century play depicting the Passion and written largely using verses from the Bacchae, to the view that Dionysus was Christ’s brother in one 19th-century German poet’s work, the two have been juxtaposed for centuries. The comparisons have been dismissed for centuries, too, first in favor of Dionysus and later Christ. As late as the 692 CE Quinisext Council in Constantinople, the Church Fathers were warning Christians not to invoke Dionysus as he was the primary pagan antagonist to Jesus. But the fact that Dionysiac worship endured this late into antiquity is a testament to the compelling nature of his divinity. In Henrichs’s words, “It is almost as if Dionysus had made one final and massive effort to leave a lasting imprint on a changing world and to bequeath the bulk of his pagan blessings to Christianity.”¹⁴

In the aftershocks of this syncretism and following pious refutations, scholars of both traditions have struggled “longingly and dismissively” to articulate their relationship with one another. As classics continued to evolve as a discipline, it drifted further and further from Christianity, until the two now seem to be entirely separated.¹⁵ Throughout the classics department chairmanship of Zeph Stewart, also a scholar of ancient religion, from 1979 to 1982, Henrichs consistently taught his Dionysus classes at Harvard and was often joined in the course catalog by Emily Vermeule’s “Greek Mythology and Religion.” However, after his chairmanship from 1982 to 1987, during which he gave the same classes and a course on “Sacrifice in Greek Religion,” the department’s focus on ancient myth and ritual waned. Henrichs taught primarily on classical philology after that, offering “Greek Literary Papyri,” “Greek Prose Composition,” and “History of Greek Literature” a total of thirty times. Nevertheless, his publishing on Greek religion remained strong as ever, as evidenced by the nearly 600 pages of collected papers printed after his death in the appropriately titled Greek Myth and Religion.

It is difficult to speculate exactly why Greek religion faded out of fashion in scholarship as the decades wore on. Perhaps it was Victorian Oxford’s anxiety rearing its head again, an inability to conceive of the Greeks as irrational. More likely, though, the underlying assumptions of classics and religious scholarship began to chafe. Christianity’s own hostility toward Greek religion could be found in the assertion that ancient cult was merely a stepping stone to true revelation if not a total perversion altogether. Classics may have offloaded their religious scholarship to theology departments, just as theology departments abandoned their ancient scholarship to classics. Classics also began to more self-consciously shed its Christian roots, as ancient archeology evolved from an effort to “prove the Bible” to a discipline that became more strictly materialist.

There may have been an assumption that enough had been said already, as the foundational texts of Greek religion—the corpora of Burkert and other foundational scholars like J. P. Vernant and Marcel Detienne—were published between the 1960s and 2000s. Structuralism’s star also began to dim in the face of new theories of religious scholarship, prioritizing modes of analysis to which antiquity gave its students no access, such as spiritual experience gained through ethnography.¹⁶

Regardless of the reasons, when Henrichs passed away in 2017, the Classics Department made no effort to replace him. Kimberley Patton, a former student of Henrichs, has put forward award-winning work on Greek cult from her position as Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion at Harvard Divinity School, but classics continues to maintain a distance from the study of religion.¹⁷

When contemporary scholars view the ancient world through a materialist lens and ignore the religion of the ancient Greeks, a desiccation takes place. Henrichs reminds us that the Greeks were truly religious. They did not sacrifice to an externalization of their passions or to a sublimation of the process of hunting, they sacrificed to gods. This religiosity permeated every aspect of their civilization, from their law courts to their medicine to the creation and structures of their cities. Again and again, Henrich’s scholarship urges students of classical religion to remain rooted in the thought that came before them.¹⁸

Any topic in a discipline so old has its own complex history and Henrichs paid special attention to the record of Dionysiac reception, which allowed him to be conscious of the pitfalls and insights of former scholars. What draws students, poets, and worshippers to Dionysus is his ability to embrace contradictions—merriment and madness, life and death, epiphany and disappearance—and these same dichotomies produce wildly different interpretations across the centuries. In his research, Henrichs was appreciative of the work that came before him but never could be classified as a follower of one sole interpretive philosophy. In this way, he resembled the god himself, multifaceted and ever-changing.

In the study of antiquity, each text or object brings its observers closer to its world of origin, and yet, in its presence, it betrays an uncrossable distance of time. Dionysus, the playfully epiphanic god, toys with his worshippers, alternating between revealing and cloaking himself, making his company even more desired. Though he cannot be reduced to a psychological phenomenon, his presence prompts a reflection in its observers, maybe even something akin to a revaluation of values. He also can lead us to a recognition of our limitations as researchers, engendering a necessary scholarly humility.

As Henrichs himself fades into the history of Dionysiac scholarship, the lasting presence of his writings makes the reality of his absence that much more acute. And yet, in reading and re-reading his work, one always discovers something at which to wonder anew. The reader can feel the enthusiasm of Henrichs—ἐνθουσιασμός, the essence of a god’s inspiration—ever-present in his writing, and this awakens a joyous practice of study that can too often be lost in the mundanity of higher education. Henrichs is a gift to read, a presence that can be felt through the page. His work confronts us, asking if we truly know the importance of what we study and if we have given it its due. Though the author is gone, his thought lives on, revealing itself to us and revealing us to ourselves.