The tyrant is the real slave, possessed of desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy, and of more wants than any one

But he does know how to stay in the news.

Posted at 10:29 PM Friday night.

Promoted by the irredeemable Rod Dreher Saturday morning.

Trending #1 at CNBC Saturday night.

If Trump had any real power, US Treasury Bills wouldn't be yielding more as he posted this than they have in nine weeks.

 

 

The good we love for its own sake we obey

 It is not imaginable that men will be brought to obey what they cannot esteem.

 

-- Robert South

There is a kind of good we love both for its own sake and for its consequences.

-- Plato, Republic II, 357b,c

On the pre-existence of the soul

 

No man in his wits can seriously think that his own soul hath existed from all eternity.

-- Richard Bentley

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. 

-- Matthew 10:28

The soul is immortal and capable of enduring all extremes of good and evil.

-- Plato, Republic, X, 621c

If anyone asserts the fabulous pre-existence of souls, and shall assert the monstrous restoration which follows from it: let him be anathema.

-- Second Council of Constantinople, A.D. 553

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

-- Jeremiah 1:5

Catholic Bishop cannot remember his Aristotle, says Aristotle good, Plato bad

I'm guessing he probably never read either one.

Bishop:

"The guardians, Plato’s philosopher-kings, can utterly control the lives of those in his charge, even to the point of censoring music and poetry, regulating pregnancy and childbirth, eliminating private property, and annulling the individual family. Aristotle departed from this conception of the good society and took as his point of departure the aspiration and freedom of the individual."

Aristotle, Politics, 1.1253a: 

"The city-state is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually...the state is prior by nature to the individual...a man incapable of entering into partnership...must be either a lower animal or a god."

Critics of Plato on this subject routinely omit that the idealistic elements of his utopian state apply only to the few, the guardian class, not to the general population, and that the guardians will be comprised only of the best sort. One may criticize Plato for making naive assumptions about human nature, but he does not deserve to be read any less carefully than does Aristotle, who is anything but a libertarian individualist.

The Gospel of Luke's unique use of "pestilences" (loimoi) turns Jewish apocalyptic into Greek

And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven. (King James Version)

(σεισμοί τε μεγάλοι κατὰ τόπους καὶ λιμοὶ καὶ λοιμοὶ ἔσονται φόβητρά τε καὶ σημεῖα ἀπ᾽ οὐρανοῦ μεγάλα ἔσται) (Textus Receptus)

-- Luke 21:11

The parallel use of loimoi in Matthew 24:7, found in the KJV and NKJV (footnoted), is weakly attested in the manuscripts and is therefore omitted by the NIV, ESV, RSV, ASV, NET and NASB.

Luke alone in the New Testament uses the otherwise relatively rare "loimos" (see in Bruzzone, below, p. 890), and in but one other place, Acts 24:5. There Luke puts the word in the mouth of a trained orator employed by the Jews to accuse St. Paul of being a "pest", which is quite funny actually (cf. Demosthenes 25.80). It must have been the mention of "famines", "limoi", in the tradition received by Luke which probably triggered his addition of "pestilences". 

This is likely because "limoi" and "loimoi", "famines" and "pestilences", are part of a classic literary constellation of calamities, those two especially and frequently in combination with "polemos", "war" (which Luke also has in 21:9f., kicking off the list of troubles). These terms in combination reach deep into Greek memory, back to such eminences as Homer (Iliad 1.61), Hesiod (Erga 243), Aeschylus (Suppliants 659), the historian Herodotus (7.171.2; 8.115.2f.), Plato (Laws 709A), Pindar, Sophocles, and particularly to the historian Thucydides (1.23; 2.47; 2.54), whose account of the famine and plague at Athens opens his History of the Peloponnesian War. The pairing of famine and plague in particular had become a topos taught in the schools already by the time of the Attic orator Aeschines (3.135), so thoroughly ingrained in the imagination had it become by then (see now Rachel Bruzzone, "Polemos, Pathemata, and Plague: Thucydides' Narrative and the Tradition of Upheaval", Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 57 (2017) 882-909, esp. 888ff., here).

As an obviously educated writer, Luke probably had learned the topos as a boy. 

Once this is appreciated, one can also observe and better appreciate Luke's (double) introduction of the felicitous "te...kai" construction, also in imitation of good style found in Herodotus and Thucydides in similar contexts, and how Luke uses it to pair "great earthquakes" with this topos "famines and plagues" in the first half of the sentence on the one hand, and in the second half of the sentence, the "signs from heaven" with a description of them as "both fearsome and great" on the other.

The only translation I know of which even attempts to capture this, at least in the first half of the sentence, surprisingly, is that of J. N. Darby:

there shall be both great earthquakes in different places, and famines and pestilences; and there shall be fearful sights and great signs from heaven.

Luke's is a morbidly beautiful sentence in its way, if not pulled off entirely successfully, attempting as it does to express how more or less two things of all too familiar and essentially terrestrial terror will be doubly echoed in the heavenly realm by signs at once spectacular and disturbing, confirming the gods' displeasure with men:

There shall be both great signs in place after place, as well as famines and pestilences, and signs from heaven both fearsome and great.

These "te...kai" and topos niceties are wholly lacking in Matthew 24:7 and Mark 13:8, which are artless and probably closer to the original form of the saying, omitting "pestilences" and "both...and". Hence the confusion in the manuscripts with the word order in Luke 21:11 itself, producing many variant readings, because the introduction of the terminology by Luke fought with the received elements.

It's all Luke's fault.

Smart people are frequently misunderstood.

But if one can keep from getting bogged down in all that for one moment, it points to the effort made by Luke to make the apocalyptic teaching of the Christians intelligible to Greek minds. He's trying to make it sound even more familiar to them than it already was. And this begs the question of the origin of Christian apocalyptic in the first place. Just how Hellenized was all this to begin with? It looks more plausible to me after reading Bruzzone, who, by the way, says narry a word about it. The success of the Christian movement is at least partly explained by the resonance of its message with the actual hopes and the fears shared by its hosts.

Bruzzone makes a good case that the Greek tradition is immemorially rich with suspicions of divine involvement in human ills of civil strife, war, natural calamities, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, as well as wonders and portents in the skies, and on the earth below famine, plague, and mass death (loigos). All of these things are associated, if not always in every detail, with the gospels' memory of Jesus' apocalyptic teaching . . . and with Thucydides.

Oh my God, not Thucydides.

This unique case in Luke's Gospel involving pestilence might lead some quickly to say and too quickly to say, "See, Luke was a physician, preoccupied with 'medical' terminology. That's all this is." Well, that hardly makes Luke a physician than it makes one of Thucydides.

But maybe it makes Luke an historian, and a very Greek one at that, at least in his own imagination.

Donna Zuckerberg, sister of Mark, opts for Athenian ostracism (and maybe worse): Lincoln and Douglas debates = good, Socrates' debates = bad

The unemployed classics PhD (Princeton) lives in Silicon Valley with her husband and two children, and runs a much fancier online presence than yours truly. She remains discomfited that America is more Rome than Athens.

The problems with online ‘debate me’ culture:

As the editor of an online publication that runs articles about the intersections of classical antiquity and the modern world, often from a feminist and progressive perspective, I’ve gotten my fair share of “debate me” challenges. Many of these have come after I began writing about far-right interest in ancient Greece and Rome in 2016. Blocking some of my would-be adversaries on Twitter seemed to just energize them — and convince them I was afraid to engage.

A call to debate may seem intellectual, even civilized. In theory, well-structured and respectful debates are an ideal opportunity to reach an audience that isn’t fixed in its views. In reality, however, most “debate me” types seem to view them mainly as a chance to attack their opponent’s credibility. Their model is not Lincoln and Douglas, but rather Socrates: By needling their interlocutors with rapid-fire questions, they aim to reveal, as they see it, their opponents’ ignorance and stupidity, and their own superior intelligence and logic. ...

These modest men also identify with Socrates, the original “debate me” troll. The Platonic texts show Socrates pulling any number of Athenians into debates, and although some are eager to argue with him, others can hardly wait to escape him by the end of the dialogue. Plato’s “Euthyphro” concludes with Euthyphro insisting that he has to leave, while Socrates calls after him, complaining that they haven’t yet figured out the nature of piety. Many of the dialogues end when the interlocutor has been bludgeoned into submission and seems to find it easier to agree with Socrates than continue further — every “debate me” man’s dream. ...

As Laurie Penny noted last year with respect to Milo Yiannopoulos, deplatforming white supremacists is a much more successful way to shut them down than insisting that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” and allowing them to air their hateful views in a structured debate setting. 

A Talmudic picture of heaven shares with Plato's Socrates that the debate continues in the afterlife

What Happens in Heaven? Study. Of What? Jewish Law:

But, in one particular text [Bava Metzia 86a], the Talmud presents a picture of heaven quite unlike anything in the Bible, an image that is indeed unthinkable, if not blasphemous, outside of its uniquely rabbinic context . . . :

They were arguing in the Academy of Heaven. If the blotch on the [individual’s] skin preceded the white hair, he is impure. If the white hair preceded the blotch on the skin, he is pure.

Not only does the Academy of Heaven forgo any discussion of ultimate truths, but the question being debated at this highest imaginable institution of learning centers on an issue of law—and not just any issue, but one involving some of the most obscure, picayune, and technical details that can be found in the entire rabbinic canon. 

The picture is hardly unthinkable, nor is it uniquely rabbinic.

Plato's Socrates [Apology 40f.]:

But on the other hand, if death is, as it were, a change of habitation from here to some other place, and if what we are told is true, that all the dead are there, what greater blessing could there be, judges? For if a man when he reaches the other world, after leaving behind these who claim to be judges, shall find those who are really judges who are said to sit in judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and all the other demigods who were just men in their lives, would the change of habitation be undesirable? Or again, what would any of you give to meet with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? I am willing to die many times over, if these things are true; for I personally should find the life there wonderful, when I met Palamedes or Ajax, the son of Telamon, or any other men of old who lost their lives through an unjust judgement, and compared my experience with theirs. I think that would not be unpleasant.

And the greatest pleasure would be to pass my time in examining and investigating the people there, as I do those here, to find out who among them is wise and who thinks he is when he is not. What price would any of you pay, judges, to examine him who led the great army against Troy, or Odysseus, or Sisyphus, or countless others, both men and women, whom I might mention? To converse and associate with them and examine them would be immeasurable happiness. At any rate, the folk there do not kill people for it; since, if what we are told is true, they are immortal for all future time, besides being happier in other respects than men are here.

Shun excess, now and in the life to come

 

 

And a man must take with him to the house of death an adamantine faith in this, that even there he may be undazzled by riches and similar trumpery, and may not precipitate himself into tyrannies and similar doings and so work many evils past cure and suffer still greater himself, but may know how always to choose in such things the life that is seated in the mean and shun the excess in either direction, both in this world so far as may be and in all the life to come; for this is the greatest happiness for man.

-- Plato, Republic, 10.619a, b

Minos, the final arbiter of the two ways in the afterlife

On Minos' right hand Rhadamanthys, and on his left Aeacus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Minos, the strict inquisitor, appears,

And lives and crimes, with his assessors, hears;

Round in his urn the blended balls he rowls,

Absolves the just, and dooms the guilty souls.

-- John Dryden's Aeneid 

 

Then spake Zeus: ... 'Now I, knowing all this before you, have appointed sons of my own to be judges; two from Asia, Minos and Rhadamanthys, and one from Europe, Aiakos (Aeacus). These, when their life is ended, shall give judgement in the meadow at the dividing of the road, whence are the two ways leading, one to the Isles of the Blest (Nesoi Makaron), and the other to Tartaros. And those who come from Asia shall Rhadamanthys try, and those from Europe, Aiakos; and to Minos I will give the privilege of the final decision, if the other two be in any doubt; that the judgement upon this journey of mankind may be supremely just . . .’

-- Plato, Gorgias 523ff.

 

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

-- Matthew 7:13f.

 

There are two Ways, one of Life and one of Death; but there is a great difference between the two Ways.

-- Didache I.1

 

But if he will not hear [thee, then] take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.

-- Matthew 18:16

Transmigration of souls, according to Dilbert

Hysterical.

Here:

Dilbert: I couldn't find any evidence that I have a soul, so I built an artificial one and put it in a drone. When my physical body dies, the drone will upload my memories and personality to the cloud to live forever. Woman: Your soul will be trapped in a server? Dilbert: No, I wrapped it in a virus so I can travel.

-- Tuesday, November 8, 2016 "The Virus Afterlife"

Sorry Kevin Shrum, But St. Paul, Like Jesus, Demoted Marriage By Exalting The Single State

St. Paul exalted the single state above the married state because he believed, like Jesus and in keeping with Jesus' teaching about marriage (Matthew 19:10ff., Luke 20:34ff.), that the world was coming to a sudden end:

Now concerning the matters about which you wrote. It is well for a man not to touch a woman. ... I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. ... I mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none . . . But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desire under control, and has determined this in his heart, to keep her as his betrothed, he will do well. So that he who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better.

-- 1 Corinthians 7, passim

And Jesus answering said unto them, The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: Neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.

-- Luke 20:34ff.

Paul would not have agreed in his own time with this from ours, by one Kevin Shrum, here:

'If marriage implodes then so, too, does a civil, productive society. Any culture that demotes, demeans, demoralizes, diminishes, denigrates, or re-defines marriage does so at its own peril. Cultures that eviscerate marriage will survive, but those same cultures will be, as Plato would argue, mere shadows of the "real thing," of the "real idea." How can we help our neighbors see and hear the truth in this matter of marriage?'

The irony of such statements is that despite the radical teachings of Jesus and Paul about marriage, Christianity went on to conquer the West and recreate its culture in its own image . . . and flourish.

Put By More Than Money

So advises the ghost of Christmas present to Scrooge, as played by George C. Scott in one of the many productions I have seen of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The line is not in the original, but captures the spirit of it pretty well. The idea seems oddly out of place these days, seeing that many people haven't put by nearly enough money to survive what has turned out to be a protracted period of unemployment, crushing debt, dispossession and economic stagnation.

We watch a number of these productions in our home in the days leading up to Christmas every year, and in 2009 Disney produced another which was notably the occasion for some materialist nonsense by one Peter Foster (which can still be accessed in full here):

Would the world have been better without Scrooge? Did he force people to do business with him? Was Bob Cratchit not free to find better employment elsewhere? And if no such employment was available, was that Scrooge’s fault? Scrooge’s “conversion” is also problematic. Once Marley’s spectre has shown Scrooge what the afterlife looks like for the uncharitable, is there any need for the three Christmas ghosts? Scrooge has been “scared good” the old Christian way. With fear of eternal damnation.

The author is at pains in the essay to help the reader achieve, dare we say it, a more charitable view of capitalism than these productions usually afford, the 2009 Disney production starring Jim Carrey in sympathy with and perfectly timed for, it would seem, that odd thing, the wealth re-distributionist 44th president. Foster points out, quite rightly, how there has been a strong tendency in all quarters and evident for a long time, to encourage us to bite the invisible hand that feeds our society. And in this Mr. Foster surely is correct.

But if this tendency often expresses itself in caricatures of the reality in films, it is to miss the point entirely to conclude that Scrooge was simply "scared good." If Mr. Foster had taken the time to re-familiarize himself with Dickens' story, it is not evident from that remark. The ghosts were not superfluous because Dickens was anything but a proponent of some stern form of Christian fundamentalism any more than he was of the revolution of the proletariat. 

On the contrary, we should consider that the ghosts sent to Scrooge revealed to him many important truths which speak to the mysteries and wonders of life beyond the superficialities of mere production and consumption with which both Marxism and now capitalism concern themselves in a world flattened by the dismal science of economics. And it is this flat view of life which animates Mr. Foster no less than it does his anti-business bogeymen.

At least the economists of the past paid back-handed compliments to the more real, multi-dimensional world we all used to inhabit, where "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" and "in the long run, we're all dead." As Dickens reminds us in the beginning of his story, at Christmas we open our shut-up hearts freely and think of people as "fellow-passengers to the grave," into which no new 3D film technology from Disney will scarcely be able to take us.

No, Dickens is more a proponent of the methods of Socrates than of some wild-eyed hellfire and damnation preacher. Scrooge lives the unexamined life, which to Socrates is a life not worth living. Wedded to a Christian conception of reality in which the grace of God trumps all, it is Divine Providence which sends the spirits who help awaken Scrooge to life's examination and explanation, showing him the meaning behind the "shadows of the things that have been, that are, and are yet to come."

A thoughtful, educated person would instantly be reminded of the shadows constantly beheld by the cave-dwellers in Plato's allegory in Book X of The Republic, whom the philosopher comes down from the mountain to release, fixed in their seats facing the darkness, unable to see behind themselves. He comes to loosen their chains, which stand for Ignorance, that they may turn and see the objects on which the Light shines, creating the shadows their eyes mistook for the true things.

These Socratic ghosts show Scrooge that he once thought his own life had been truly worth living; 
that he was actually happy once, open to the world and other-directed;
that love was real and precious;
that people could mean it when they repented of their mistakes;
that they could change for the better;
that each life has the potential to mean something positive to every one around it;
that people exist who are quite happy without money;
that if individuals mattered to God they should matter to him;
that we must pay homage to ordered liberty, be thankful and toast the founder of our feast, whatever else others may think of him;
that choosing justice for its own sake is as indispensable for the conduct of his own business as for the conduct of the business of life.

"Mankind was my business!" shrieked the ghost of Marley.

And it is ours.

Divine Elenchus: Pauline Christianity Requires Getting In Your Face

Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is a shame even to speak of the things that they do in secret; but when anything is exposed by the light it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light.

-- Ephesians 5:11ff.

Rod Dreher And David Bentley Hart Finally Say Something Wholly Agreeable And Right

Here:

"If you don’t believe there is any cosmic order undergirding the visible world, and if you don’t believe that you are obliged to harmonize your own behavior with that unseen order (the Tao, you might say), then why should you bind yourself to moral precepts you find disagreeable or uncongenial? The most human act could be not to yield to nature, but to defy nature. Why shouldn’t you? Or, to look at it another way, why should we consider our own individual desires unnatural? Does the man who sexually and emotionally desires union with another man defying [sic] nature? Well, says Hart, it depends on what you consider nature to be."

In the final analysis the struggle for conservatism in America is the struggle for America, the struggle for the priority of what Russell Kirk called the permanent things, for what Plato called the ideas, for what Moses called the words written by the finger of God on the holy mountain, for what Paul claimed was written on every Gentile heart, perhaps even for what the Confucians called the mandate of heaven, and surely for what George Washington called an indispensable support: the religion and morality we all once shared, "with slight shades of difference" he said.

It is fundamentally the struggle for the priority of a transcendent moral order which cannot be derisively swept aside as passe "social issues." Neither "fiscal conservatism" nor liberty can exist without "Thou shalt not steal." There can be no rapprochement with libertarianism, not even as a private matter, and the First Amendment must be rescued from those who insist its intent was inspired by the ideological thinking of the Enlightenment's atheists rather than by the progress of specifically Christian weariness with internecine warfare over religion.

For many are called, but few are chosen

"[T]he worthy disciples of philosophy will be but a small remnant."

-- Socrates, Plato's Republic, Book 6

πάνσμικρον δή τι, ἔφην ἐγώ, ὦ Ἀδείμαντε, λείπεται τῶν κατ᾽ ἀξίαν ὁμιλούντων φιλοσοφίᾳ

"Because strait [is] the gate, and narrow [is] the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."

-- Matthew 7:14

 ὅτί στενὴ ἡ πύλη καὶ τεθλιμμένη ἡ ὁδὸς ἡ ἀπάγουσα εἰς τὴν ζωήν, καὶ ὀλίγοι εἰσὶν οἱ εὑρίσκοντες αὐτήν

Socrates on Obama

"[W]eak natures are scarcely capable of any very great good or very great evil."

-- Socrates, Republic, Book 6 

Socrates on Democracy

"[T]he corruption of the majority is also unavoidable."

-- Socrates, Republic, Book 6

Socrates on Election Campaigns

"The ruler who is good for anything ought not to beg his subjects to be ruled by him."

-- Socrates, Republic, Book 6

Socrates on Pleasure

"A true philosopher . . . will hardly feel bodily pleasure."

-- Socrates, Republic, Book 6

A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country

[P]hilosophers have no honour in their cities . . . their having honour would be far more extraordinary. ... [T]he best votaries of philosophy [are] useless to the rest of the world.

-- Socrates, Plato's Republic, Book 6