Lawyer as Writer

A Note on the Greek God Apollo

W.K.C. Guthrie says of Apollo: "Under his most important and influential aspect may be included everything that connects him with law and order." [Cited in Jean Shinoda Bolen, Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men's Lives and Loves 130 (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989)]. Bolen idenifies the Apollo archetype with "the aspect of the personality that wants clear definitions, is drawn to master a skill, value order and harmony, and perfers to look at the surface rather than at what underlies appearances." [Id. at 135]. Those whose energy is directed by the Apollo archetype favor "thinking over feeling, distance over closeness, objective assessment over subjective intuition." [Id.] Those in the grips of this archetype tend to master a classical art form like law easier than those under the influence of other gods and goddesses. "The Apollo mind is logical and easily relates to objective reality. For him, the laws of cause and effect are not lessons to be learned by dint of experience...but principles that an Apollo mind seems programmed in from the start." [Id.]

Apollo is the God of form, of archery, one who with great skill can hit a target from afar. Law makers, like Apollo, sometimes work to hit a target from afar (even as they assume they are in the middle of the fray).

Apollo was known as the "pure, holy, and cleansing god, whose attributes were analogous to the sun, which was his most important symbol." [Id. at 131]. Apollo was a sky god, whose sun aspect is found in legal writing with the strong focus on clarity, on writing that is clear, bright, transparent. Apollo is the god of clarity and form.

"Apollo is the embodiment of a masculine attitude that observes and acts from a distance." [Id. at 130]. "Apollo is uncomfortable with chaos or turbulence, the discordant note, or passionate intensity...." [Id. at 137-38]. Apollo influence results in a predisposition to emotional distance and a focus on rationality. [Id. at 138].

Apollo is a goal-setter. With Apollo energy we know where we want to go, what we want to accomplish, what it takes to win. [Id. at 135]. "Doing well at work comes easily for him, because he has an inherent ability to focus on a task, to want to practice until he masters osmething, and to see the end produce of what he is doing.... [S]tep by step he advances according to plan." [Id. at 144-45]

"The Apollo man has a marked tendency to always do what's expected of him, without questioning whether he really wants to do what he is doing." [Id. at 160].

Apollonian designed legal writing has no place for Dionysus, god of wine and ecstaty; mystic, lover, wanderer. W.F. Otto identifies Dionysus as "the god of ecstasy and terror, of wildness and the most blessed of deliverance." [Id. at 251]. "Regularity and constancy are foreign to him." [Id. at 256]

 

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