Plato As Prozac

Philosophical Counselors help people understand how the great minds in history have dealt with hardship.

Aristotle

"In all of nature, there is something of the marvelous."

Ave Maria

This started out to be a rather long-winded post, but then I got hit upside the head by the reality of having a four year old and a newborn and realized that I don't have time for long-winded posts! So, the abridged version: I was recently reading a magazine article that asked me to pick a person who inspired me. I picked Mary the mother of Jesus. Being Catholic, maybe that's not surprising, but it goes deeper than that. Since becoming a mother, I've thought more and more about her, what her life must have been like. She is, to me, the best example of trusting God despite no matter what happens. We see her embracing whatever God sends her way throughout the gospels, from the nativity to the cross to the resurrection. We see her give birth to Jesus and then watch him die and then see him rise again. How did she do it? How did she handle it? Upon becoming pregnant with Jesus, her life was in danger. She could have been stoned for adultery! And yet, not only did she accept being the mother of Jesus humbly - "Behold the handmaid of the Lord" (Lk. 1:38) - she actually went on to praise God, completely faithful that He would fulfill what He promised. "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." (Lk. 1:46,47) When presenting Jesus in the Temple, Mary is told that "A sword will pierce your own soul too." (Lk. 1:35) Mary never runs from difficulty or pain. This is almost impossible for me to comprehend. Across all faiths, it seems that the path to enlightenment is by embracing whatever God sends you at the moment, taking the good with the bad, but realizing that the transience of both does not change the nature of God. I can understand that mentally, but putting it into practice is another thing. The fact that she stands at the foot of the cross, helplessly, watching her son die. Did she have any idea at that moment about the resurrection? Then Jesus, ignoring his own pain, instructs his disciple John to adopt Mary as his mother (Jn. 19:26, 27). Mary always holds fast, she always stays the course. I would like to have that kind of strength, that kind of faith, and I would like my children to have it as well. I would like us to be brave enough to fulfill our purposes in life, whatever they may be, with the knowledge that doing so might sometimes cause us pain, and to be okay with that. The alternative is a life half-lived.

Note: The icon above shows the Blessed Mother holding a prayer that reads, in Greek, "Our Jesus Christ hear the prayer of your mother." It is located in the Church of the Dormition of Theotokos in Kondopoga, Russia.

Completion

There's this blog that is part of the daily "friends" list that I read, and all it is is this dude's love of G.K. Chesterton and endless quotes from the same. I hate that blog, but, you know, you don't want to hurt the writer's feelings, etc., etc.. And, also, there's the hypocrisy thing. Has this not started out as a blog of my love of Edith Hamilton and endless quotes from the same? Well, the tea party's over, lady. Today is the last Hamilton post in awhile. Future posts will draw on more diverse sources of information.

I believe Ms. Hamilton summarizes "The Greek Way" quite nicely on pages 255-258. Since we have not evolved much since the time these words were written (1930), her words are as appropriate today as they were then. Any notes in parentheses are my own attempts at providing context.

The opposition between the spirit and the mind which we are chiefly conscious of is that between the individual and the community... For nineteen hundred years (again, this was written in 1930) ...we have been in school to the foremost individualist of all time who declared that the very hairs of each man's head were numbered (Christ) .... It is not men's greed, nor their ambition, nor yet their machines, it is not even the removal of their ancient landmarks, that is filling the present world with turmoil and dissension, but our new vision of the individual's claim against the majority's claim.

Things were simple in days of old when the single man had no right at all if a common good conflicted, his life taken for any purpose that served the public welfare, his blood sprinkled over the field to make the harvest (coughoilcough) plentiful. Then a new idea, the most disturbing ever conceived, dawned, that ever human being had rights... The individual had made his appearance and nothing was to be plain and simple again; no clear distinction could be drawn any more between what was just and unjust...

Along with this realization of each unit in the mass has come an over-realization of ourselves. We are burdened with over-realization. Not that we can perceive too clearly the rights and wrongs of every human being, but that we feel too deeply our own, to find in the end that what has meaning only for each one alone has no real meaning at all...

Greek scientists... saw a whole made up of related parts, and with the sweep of their vision the old world of hodge-podge...fell away and a world of order took its place... Greek artists... saw that what is permanent important in a man and unites him to the rest...

(Modern) science has made generalization of greater truths than the Greeks could reach through a greater knowledge of individual facts. If we can follow that method and through our own intense realization of ourselves reach a unity with all men, seeing as deeply as the great tragic poets of old saw, that what is of any importance in us is what we share with all, then there will be a new distribution in the scale and balance held so evenly in those great days of Greece that may be ours as well...

The bitterest conflicts that have divided the minds of men and set family against family, and brother against brother, have not been waged for emperor or king, but for one side of the truth at the suppression of the other side... In our present...adjustment (the beginning of World War II) which not only seems to us, but is, more difficult than any before because we are aware of so much more, it is worth our while to consider the adjustments achieved in the past. Of them all, the Greek was the most complete.

Inspirational Tragedy

My husband and I were watching a documentary on The Discovery Channel on Roman vice which originally aired a couple of years ago.  One of the remarkable things in it was the martyrdom of the Christians, the remarkable thing being that the Roman emperors, Nero specifically, sought to present the Christians as criminals but, ironically, the martyrs faced death with such bravery that they ended up converting many more people to the faith rather than being dissuaded from it.  How can this be?  And,  yet, it has been this way all along.  The idea of inspirational tragedy is, in fact, the very source of the continued popularity of the Greek tragedies.  Ms. Hamilton writes on page 231 of "The Greek Way"...

"In the Greek tragedy, the figures are seen very simply from afar, parts of a whole that has no beginning and no end, and yet, in some strange fashion their remoteness does not diminish their profound tragic and individual appeal...  There is only one other masterpiece that can help us to our own understanding of this method, the life of Christ."

I asked myself recently what it is that I wanted out of spirituality.  Not just out of Christianity, but out  of Spirituality in general.  The answer was, first of all, to eliminate the fear of death, both my own and of my loved ones.  And the second answer was to add depth and flavor and excitement to my living days.  In short, I want to get the most out of life, and to believe that what I do matters, that what everyone does matters, and to understand how it matters, and how it is that what we think - what our attitudes and intentions are - matter along with what we do.  And the person who exemplifies not only a life that matters, but the conquering of death itself is, for me, Jesus Christs.  In the same way, the ancient Greeks looked to the bravery and honor of Achilles and Odysseus as examples of how to act in the face of death and temptation.  They had a different view of the afterlife than I have, but what unites us, what unites all peoples throughout history, is the need to live a life that matters. The writers of the Gospels and Homer painted their heroes with broad, fuzzy strokes precisely because, if they were illustrated in too much detail, the reader would not be able to identify with them.  We do not know what their favorite song was, what their pet peeve was, what kind of hair gel they used, did they prefer talipia or sea bass, no.  Those things, which we in America seemed to have an insatiable curiosity about in our own celebrities, did not and do not matter in someone really worthy of emulating.  What matters was their character and how that character naturally produced action and the sum of those actions ultimately produced lives that matter.  

And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown - a life that mattered.

The Heroism of Hope

"The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light..."

Isaiah 9:2

November was not a good month for my nation or for me personally for that matter.  Nevertheless, I think that we Americans are still lucky because we have hope.  No matter how one feels about the outcome of the presidential election, we have some hope that, eventually, our economy will return to normal, we'll find jobs, we'll be able to afford things again someday, etc.. There are many nations in the world that have suffered generation after generation of poverty and violence, so much so that they can't possibly see any future for themselves other than more poverty and violence.  We are not that way, and we must not let ourselves become that way or leave that as a legacy for our children.  As a Christian, I think that this ingrained sense of hopefulness common to Americans comes directly from the role that the Bible has played in the collective psyche of our country.  The idea that Jesus, in his death and resurrection, has conquered all death and even Hell itself is remarkable to me.  The context in which Jesus was born  (Jerusalem conquered - again - living under brutal foreign rule), and then to say, essentially, "these circumstances don't matter;  how you act under them does".  That was a whole other way of looking at things.

The great minds of ancient Greece invariably turned their attention to a whole new way of looking at religion as well.  It is my hope to finish my study of Edith Hamilton's "The Greek Way" by the end of the year.  On page 220, she talks about Homer's attitude towards the Greek gods and goddesses.

"The stamp of the Greek genius is everywhere in his two epics, in the banishment of the ugly and the frightful and the senseless; in the conviction that gods were like men and men able to be godlike; in the courage and the undaunted spirit with which heroes faced any opponent, human or divine, even Fate herself; in the prevailing atmosphere of reason and good sense."

Now, at a later time I might like to argue about some of her points.  I've read recently "The Iliad" and, too long ago, "The Odyssey", and I have to say that there is plenty of ugliness, frightfulness, and senselessness throughout.  Nevertheless, I will agree that, in both works, the prevailing theme of good overcoming evil, and the very basis for all our notions of what it means to be a hero can be found in those works.  

Ms. Hamilton goes on to talk about how one of the defining characteristic of any religion is that of "great communal emotion".  We live in an increasingly isolated society, so I know that maybe many people have not experienced this feeling.  As someone who has, I can attest that when it is marked with the spirit of peace and love and, yes, hope, it is a wonderful thing.  I highly recommend it.  

She says that this "great communal emotion"...

"...is what Aristotle meant when he said tragedy purified through pity and awe.  Men were set free from themselves when they all realized together the universal suffering of life"

- pg. 224

"...whether there are gods or not we cannot say, and life is too short to find out."

- Protagoras

Ah, Protagoras: a scientist always looking for hard evidence.  If one were to look at the hard evidence of the American economy, at the hard evidence of even my own family's financial quagmire (in which we do, indeed, realize together with the rest of the world the universal suffering of life), if one were to look at those circumstances, the mountain of debt, the health problems, the emotional problems, the bad blood and baggage, one would surely be consumed with despair.  The hard evidence proclaims that no one gets out of here alive.  To look at the hard evidence is to see no other alternative than to blow one's brains out.  But Plato, that visionary mind, saw something different when he said that...

"He who not being inspired and having no touch of  madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art - he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted."

Indeed, our world is full of "art" by which we might, supposedly, somehow manipulate God into doing our bidding.  But, it's not art, it's heart.  It's not the circumstances, but what one does under the circumstances.  And the one thing that should be clear to anyone, regardless of whether they believe in God or not, should be that it is precisely what we are doing that has to change.  Everything has to change, it is the natural order, even the natural order of ideas themselves.  Ms. Hamilton speaks about the upheaval and subsequent rebirth of interest in religion that occurred after the Peloponnisian War.  

"One form of religion perpetually gives way to another; if religion did not change, it would be dead."

- pg. 225

God, being perfect, cannot change certainly, as He does not need to.  However, our view of Him has to change, must change, and has changed over time.  Mankind is simply incapable of taking in something as large as God in all at once.  I am someone who hates change.  I hate moving.  I hate having to make new friends.  I crave security.  But in insecure times, it behooves even someone like me to seek out a new attitude.  My generation, GenX, we are collectively a bunch of naysayers.  We can immediately find the downside to any argument.  But, I once had a boss who said, "I'm a glass half-full person.  I cannot function with the glass half-empty all the time."  And she was right.  We cannot function living in fear all the time.  We cannot move forward when we are afraid that it's pointless.  We certainly can't inspire our children or provide them any kind of sense of security without a firm belief in hope.  We must be brave, and we must learn to enjoy ourselves somehow.  

My Christmas wish is for a rebirth of hope and joy in our nation.   

I am Euripides of Salamis, and I approve this message.

"The dogmatisms of each age wear out.  Statements of absolute truth grow thin, show gaps, are discarded.  The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next.  The ultimate critique of pure reason is that its results do not endure.  Euripides' assaults upon the superstructure of religion were forgotten; what men remembered and came to know him for was the pitying understanding of their own suffering in a strange world of pain, 
and the courage to tear down old wrongs and never give up seeking for new things that should be good.  And generation after generation since have placed him securely with those very few great artists

'Who feel the giant agony of the world,

And more, like slaves to poor humanity, 

Labor for mortal good...'"

- "The Greek Way", Edith Hamilton, page 214

Note:  Inclusion of a particular photograph does not necessarily indicate political endorsement by the author.  Not necessarily anyway.  

The Importance of Remembering

Continuing on in Edith Hamilton's "The Greek Way", there's a paragraph on page 213 that, I feel, sums up Ms. Hamilton's purpose in writing the book.  It is my opinion that she was writing to remind mankind of the greatness that they are capable of attaining, to remind them of the obstacles they are capable of overcoming.  She was writing just before World War I broke out.  She could see the storm clouds gathering.  She wrote...

"As defeat grew ever nearer, Athens grew terrified, fierce, cruel... One thing alone to help her he (Euripides) had been fitted to do:  he could so write as to show the hideousness of cruelty and man's fierce passions, and the piteousness of suffering, weak, and wicked human beings, and move men thereby to compassion which they were learning to forget...."

Ms. Hamilton was fitted with the same command.  And I think that it is important today, as we see those storm clouds gathering again, to be reminded through history and literature of what human beings are capable of, to think instead of panic, and to stand firm on the side of independence and independent thought, to value knowledge over willful ignorance, and to always choose compassion.  

History IS Important Dammit

"In a recent survey, new college graduates listed history as the academic subject whose lessons they found of least use in their daily affairs.  In part, this reflects the show-me pragmatism os today's rising generation.  Yet as America embarks on the 1990's, people of all ages feel a disconnection with history.  Many have difficulty placing their own thoughts and actions, even their own lives, in any larger story.  As commonly remembered, history is all about Presidents and wars, depressions and scandals, patternless deeds done by people with power far beyond what the typical reader can ever hope to wield.  If history seems of little personal relevance today, then what we do today seems of equal irrelevance to our own lives (and the lives of others) tomorrow.  Without a sense of trajectory, the future becomes almost random.  So why not live for today?  What's to lose?.....

....This book presents the "history of the future" by narrating a recurring dynamic of generational behavior that seems to determine how and when we participate as individuals in social change - or social upheaval.  We say, in effect, that this dynamic repeats itself.  This is reason enough to make history important:  For if the future replays the past, so too must the past anticipate the future."

- William Strauss and Neil Howe, "Generations:  The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069" (1991)

A Mastermind Outstrips the Ages: Aeschylus

And the Furies that I feared/ were Eumenides to lead me here..."
- Band: Over the Rhine Song: Rhapsody

That line references Aeschylus's play "Eumenides" which ends with Athena re-naming the Furies "Eumenides", and thus re-purposing them as givers of mercy as opposed to justice. (Aeschylus, btw, is pronounced "es'-kuh-lus" or close to that anyway.) The three great Greek Tragedians were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Aeschylus is recognized as the "Father of Tragedy" as a theatrical art form. He had a very colorful life as can be read about on Wikipedia among other places. His works were heavily influenced by the Persian invasion of Greece during which he fought as a soldier. His life ended with a bang; he died by the accident of a bird dropping a tortoise shell on his head.
Here's what Ms. Hamilton had to say about him in comparison to Euripides and Sophocles...

The spirit of inquiry in Aeschylus' day had moved him, too, to wonder and surmise. He was never one to acquiesce in what he found because it was there. He, too, saw war with clear eyes... (However) completely a modern mind he was not. He would never, under no circumstances, in no age, have seen mankind as chiefly pitiable... stamped upon his whole work is the conviction that human beings are capable of grandeur, and that calamity met greatly is justified. Passionate protests against the facts of life is no more to be found in him than in Sophocles, but for a totally different reason; a hero's death awakens neither pity nor indignation.
Completely unlike him in this point, Euripides is nevertheless his opinionated son... Aeschylus disregarded the current religion; Euripides directly attacked it. Again and again, he shows up the gods in accordance with the popular conception of them, as lustful, jealous, moved by meanest motives, utterly inferior to the human beings they bring disaster upon, and will have none of them.:

'Say not that there are adulterers in Heaven,
Long since my heart has known it false.
God if He be God lacks in nothing.
All these are dead unhappy tales.'

His final rejection, 'If gods do evil then they are not gods,' is essentially a rejection of man's creating God in his own image, a practice that was to hold the world completely for centuries after him an is today more common than not. So can a mastermind outstrip the ages. Of certainties he had few:

'For who knows if the thing that we call death
Is life, and our life dying - who can know?
Save only that all we beneath the sun
Are sick and suffering, and those gone before
Not sick, not troubled with evil.'

- "The Greek Way", pg. 212, 213

Aristotle said that Aeschylus, after having been initiated into the ultra-secretive Eluesinian Mysteries kind of pissed all over the sect by placing clues about their rites in his most famous play, "Prometheus Bound". It almost got him killed.

There is nothing secret that will not be revealed. There is nothing kept secret that will not come to light.
- Luke 8:17

Indeed.

Ancient Television

Set your Tivos....

My PBS affiliate, WKOP, will be showing an episode of "Secrets of Archaeology" in which they look at ancient Rome on Tuesday, 9/9 at 12:30 pm. Maybe yours will too.

The History Channel will show "Lost Treasures of Pompeii" at 7 am on Friday, 9/14.

And that's about it for now.

Dylan, Euripides And The Modern Mind

No one is free. Even the birds are chained to the sky.
- Bob Dylan

No one is truly free. They are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.
- Euripides

Bob Dylan and Euripides. Both remarkable people. Euripides was the original "ahead of his time" kind of guy, a playwright. I didn't have too much to say about him until tonight, when I was watching Jeopardy, and they mentioned that Bob Dylan had won a Pulitzer Prize last year for his contributions to society. I thought that was funny because during the time in which Dylan was doing all that contributing to society - i.e. the sixties - I doubt you would find anyone over the age of thirty who thought that what he was doing was prize worthy much less contributing to the betterment of society. But now he gets a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. Euripides was kind of the same way. Not so popular when he was alive; now we see him as being "enlightened". But I think that, like Dylan, Euripides wasn't so much enlightened as he was just honest. Sophocles said that while he portrayed men as they ought to be, Euripides portrayed men as they really were. And - revolutionary - women too. Edith Hamilton referred to Euripides as having the "modern mind". Her description is applicable to any revolutionary...and any teenager worth their salt.

Always those in the vanguard of their time find in Euripides an expression of their own spirit. He is the great exponent of the forever recurring modern mind.

This spirit, always in the world and always the same, is primarily a destructive spirit, critical not creative... The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world.... The established order is always wrong to them.... They behold first and foremost that most sorrowful thing on earth, injustice, and they are driven by it to a passion of revolt. Convention, so often a mask for injustice, they will have none of, in their pursuit of justice at any cost they tear away the veils that hide hateful things; they call into question all pleasant and comfortable things.... They will never accept defeat.
- "The Greek Way", pg. 206, 207

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
- Bob Dylan

Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.
- Euripides

The Idea of Tragedy

Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think it's no coincidence that Fitzgerald and Hamilton, contemporaries of one another, should both write about tragedy.  The times in which they lived saw so much of it.  Edith Hamilton often revisits the idea of the hero suffering nobly throughout her work.  Here is the first thing that I read from her about it.

Why is the death of the ordinary man a wretched, chilling thing which we turn from, while the death of the hero, always tragic, warms us with a sense of quickened life?  Answer this question and the enigma of tragic pleasure is solved.  "Never let me hear that brave blood has been shed in vain," said Sir Walter Scott.  "It sends an imperious challenge down through all the generations."  So the end of a tragedy challenges us.  The great soul in pain and in death transform pain and death.  Through it we catch a glimpse of the Stoic Emperor's Dear City of God, of a deeper ad more ultimate reality than that in which our lives our lived.

- "The Greek Way", pg. 178

   I didn't like her term "tragic pleasure".  I think I associate things with the word "pleasure" that are too much the opposite of "tragedy" so that to hear "tragic pleasure" is an oxymoron.  But the chapter from which this quote was taken did help me to understand a little about why people seem to love those tear-jerker movies so much.  Unless there's alot of action, I don't watch dramas, and I avoid any of those "women" films  at all costs.  I can't relate.  Life inspires enough tears on its own, why go looking for more?  And I especially don't understand the appeal of the victim movies.  Here is a social injustice;  there's nothing you can do about it;  ain't it a shame?  But this chapter shed some light on it.  My deeply religious parents would probably hypothesize that the tragic death of the hero in any story is, at a spiritual level, recognized by the spirit as being an echo of the death of Christ, the ultimate hero, the ultimate tragedy.  I don't know about that, but it is one theory to think about.  I think that there is certainly something in us that recognizes - at a fundamental level - the ancient archetype of the death of the one to save the many, and the heroism inherent when that death is approached by the victim voluntarily.  At any rate, I think that it is all too morbid to spend to much time on.  I don't have the stomach for this stuff.  When are we going to talk about Menander?  

Sparta Versus Athens

The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.
- Thucydides, "The History of the Peloponnesian War"

   So, I've made my statements about what it is about Edith Hamilton's take on the Greeks that I disagree with.  Let's get back to the fun stuff of enjoying her wit and wisdom.  Ms. Hamilton talked a great deal about the Spartans versus the Athenians as seen during the Peloponnesian War in a chapter of The Greek Way entitled "Sparta Versus Athens".  I have some quotes from her below.  I hope that I'm not stepping on any copyright infringement in quoting her so liberally.  I intend to quote a great deal of other sources once I'm done with her.  In an effort to avoid copyright problems, and because it's been hard to find the exact images that I want, I've taken to drawing my own images to illustrate the posts.  They're not great artistically, and their creation slows down the rate at which I post, but they express exactly the idea I wanted to express, and they're wholly mine, I'm not stealing them from anyone, or stealing bandwidth from anyone by posting them.  I thought the shields were a very appropriate choice since they illustrate very clearly the difference between the Athenians and the Spartans.  The Athenians could illustrate their shields however they liked, Gorgons and personal deities being the most popular decorations.  I chose to depict a fierce Gorgon for the Athenian shield.  All the Spartans, however, had the same decoration on their shield, because "freedom" and "individualism" were dirty words in their opinions.  The decoration was always the Greek letter "lambda" which was the first letter in Lacedaemon, the actual name of the city-state of Sparta.  I did not previously know this, but the Spartans didn't call themselves "Spartans".They called themselves "Lacedaemonians".  Therefore, Leonidas never actually said, "THIS IS SPARTA!!!!"  I guess it's possible that he might have said, "THIS IS LACEDAEMON!!!".  I'm sure it would sound more ferocious in ancient Greek.  I gather that the name Sparta came about because, according to mythology, their city was founded by the Lacedaemon, son of Zeus, who gave his name to the region, and named the capital town of the region "Sparta" after his wife Sparta.  So, it stands to reason, since when you visit a region you're unfamiliar with, you're going to start with the capital, there developed the long-winded explanation of "Who? Those people over there?  Oh, they're the Lacedaemonians, you know, the ones from Sparta."  And then that all got shortened to "They're from Sparta."  And that got shortened to "Spartans".     

(Please excuse my editing on all this.  I'm still trying to figure it out.  I can't rotate the images yet.  I can't figure out how not to write on top of the images.  I can't figure out why sometimes it automatically wraps the text around the images and other times I have to tell it to do it manually. Ugh.  Anyway....)

While Thucydides may have been ambivalent about the participants in the insane chaos that was The Peloponnesian War, Edith Hamilton was decidedly pro-Athenian.  Here's what she has to say about "Sparta versus Athens".  Note that she was writing this in 1930.   

   The idea that underlay the young Spartans training was their obligation to maintain the power of the state and ignore everything that did not directly contribute to it.  All the other possibilities of life - imagination, love of beauty, intellectual interests - were put aside.  The goal of human aspiration and achievement was to uphold the fatherland.  Only what helped the state was good; only what harmed it was bad.  A Spartan was not an individual but a part of a well-functioning machine which assumed all responsibility for him, exacted absolute submission from him, molded his character and his mind, and imbued him with the deep conviction that the chief end of man was to kill and be killed. Plutarch writes:

"In Sparta, the citizens way of life was fixed.  In general, they had neither the will nor the ability to lead a private life.  They were like a community of bees, clinging together around the leader and in an ecstasy of enthusiasm and selfless ambition belonging wholly to their country."

   Athens was a democracy.  The General Assembly to which every Athenian belonged was the final authority.  The executive body was a Council of Five Hundred for which all citizens were eligible.  Officials were chosen by lot or elected by the people.  

   The state did not take responsibility for the individual Athenian; the individual had to take responsibility for the state.  The result was, of course, a totally different idea of what the state was from that in Sparta.  In Athens, there was never a notion that it was a kind of mystic entity, different from and superior to the people who made it up.  Athenian realism blocked any idea like that.  The idea of the Athenian state was a union of individuals free to develop their own powers and live in their own way, obedient to the laws they passed themselves and could criticize and change at will.  And yet underneath the apparently ephemeral view of law was the conviction peculiarly Athenian which dominated the thought and the art of the fifth century - that the unlimited, the unrestrained, the lawless, were barbarous, ugly, irrational.  Freedom strictly limited by self-control - that was the idea of Athens at her greatest. Her artists embodied it;  her democracy did not.  Athenian art and Athenian thought survived the test of time.  (However) Athenian democracy became imperial and failed.  

Imperial autocracy, when it came to fighting, proved the stronger.

- pg. 149, 150

  How did Edith Hamilton feel as she wrote this?  Her life had been spent in equal parts Germany and the U.S..  She was an academic, headmistress at Bryn Mawr, well acquainted with the history of politics, the rise and fall of nations.  She'd lived through World War I.  In 1930, when this book was first published, the Nazi party was gaining popularity in Germany.  She must have seen the writing on the wall.  Fascism versus Democracy.  And she knew that the good guys don't always win, that war twists peoples' souls, hardens hearts, the end result of war being oftentimes ugly.  But she also knew what was at stake.  I will never know how exactly she felt, but I think it must have been a mixture of fear and faith, faith that, whatever the outcome, there would still be people willing to die for the sake of freedom, just like the ancient Greeks.  And so maybe I was a little rough on her in criticizing her take on the Greek response to the Persian invasion, for it must have been in that spirit of faith that she quoted Herodotus' retelling of something the Greeks had said to a Persian official's demands for submission...

You know perpetually what it is to be a slave.  Freedom you have never tried, to know how sweet it is.  If you had, you would urge us to fight for it not with our spears only, but even with hatchets.

- pg. 133

Thucydides - For All Time

More from Edith Hamilton's "The Greek Way"

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge had little attraction for the Athenians.  They were realists.  Knowledge was to be desired because it had a value for living; it led men away from error to right action.  Thucydides wrote his book because he believed that men would profit from a knowledge of what brought about that ruinous struggle (The Peloponnesian War) precisely as they profit from a statement of what causes a deadly disease.  He reasoned that since the nature of the human mind does not change any more than the nature of the human body, circumstances swayed by human nature are bound to act in the same way unless it is shown to them that such a course in other days ended disastrously.  When the reason why a disaster came about is perceived, people will be able to guard against the particular danger.  

   "It will perhaps be found," he writes, "that the absence of storytelling in my work makes it less attractive to listen to, but I should be satisfied if it is considered useful by all who wish to know the plain truth of the events which happened and will according to human nature happen again in the same way."

   It was written, not for the moment, but for all time.  

- pg. 140

Part Two - East vs. West - Spirituality

What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of thinking that one knows; for it is impossible to get a man to begin to learn that which he thinks he knows.

- Epictetus, "Discourses"

   In my last post on this topic, I was discussing what Edith Hamilton had said in regards to Eastern and Western art/spirituality.  She asserted that, in ancient times, the art produced in the West reflected its love of order and realism (relative realism anyway) whereas the art of the East reflected fear, chaos, and dark imaginings. Since most art is religious art, "art" in this context became synonymous with "spirituality". The spirituality of the East, she concluded, was despotic, irrational, and downright evil.  I disagreed.  What's more, I wondered what her motivations were in ultimately condemning Buddhism while writing under the guise of a discussion about The Battle of Thermopylae seeing as how the ancient Persians were certainly not Buddhists.      

   This leads me to my next point:  the ancient Spartans were certainly not Christians!  The Spartans weren't anything but Fascist animals whose modus operandi was entirely blood lust.  Now, an argument that the rest of the Hellenistic world - specifically the Athenians - could be made that they were the first to actually think about what they were doing in terms of spirituality, they were the first to question it all, they were the first to envision the idea of a personal relationship with God, and to ultimately deny their own myths in favor of the idea that God had to be always good (revolutionary at the time).  The Spartans didn't do any of that.  The Spartans didn't believe in anything but war.  The movie "300" was very popular among the video game crowd, but the historic inaccuracies of that film have been well-documented.  I like action movies, but I wasn't going to throw money at anything that aggrandized a group of people who "toughened" their sons up by throwing them out into the wilderness at the age of seven, "And don't come back until you've killed a slave or two!"  They were murders, sadists, and thugs of the most unnatural kind.  Indeed, the only natural urge they ever valued was rage.  Love, affection, mercy, family relationships, male and female relationships, hunger, sadness - all these things were weakness to the Spartans.  So, for the movie to portray the Spartans has "normal" and the Persians as "freaks" is contrary to reality.  Indeed, if modern man were to be stuck in a time capsule and shot back 2,500 years, everyone would appear to be quite freaky to him.  Furthermore, for Ms. Hamilton to use The Battle of Thermopylae as a backdrop for a conversation about how the Western approach to spirituality was superior to the Eastern approach completely ignores the fact that the very reason there was only a very small number of Hellenes fighting the enormous Persian forces was that everyone else  in Greece was too busy observing religious various religious festivals, the biggest one being the Olympics!  How's that for a denial of reality? 

   
Ancient Persia is modern day Iran, and the Iranians were incensed at the portrayal of the Persians in "300".  They should have been.  Considering how sour the relationship between the United States and Iran is, I totally thought the movie was a piece of propaganda.  The creators claim that it wasn't;  it was just meant to be a little bit of pornography for people who get off on violence more than sex.  And maybe they're telling the truth, and it was just poorly timed.  After all, "a small army of ancient thugs fights a large army of ancient thugs; small army dies" sounds unappetizing.  "A tiny army of superheroes stands up to an enormous army of ambiguously gay monsters; tiny army dies heroically" equals box office gold.   We don't want the truth; we want heroes.

   In a later chapter in "The Greek Way", this one specifically devoted to Herodotus, Ms. Hamilton finds the real heroes in the Athenians at the Battle of Marathon.

How could it happen like that - the little band of defenders victors over the mighty armament?  We do not understand.  But Herodotus understood, and so did all the Greeks.  A free democracy resisted a slave-supported tyranny.  The Athenians (Athenian soldiers) at Marathon had advanced at a run (i.e. willingly); the enemy's officers drove them (the Persian soldiers) into battle by scourging them.  Mere numbers were powerless against the spirit of free men fighting to defend their freedom.  Liberty proved her power.  A wave of exultant courage and faith swept through the city, and Athens started her career.

- pg. 135

  As a lover of Democracy and all the liberties that I enjoy as an American, I do hope that it happened that way, but nothing is that simple.  

    In the August 2008 issue of National Geographic (which, coincidentally, is devoted primarily to Iran) there is also an article on modern day Moscow. In it, an interviewee says, "Americans will never understand Russia because they see things as black or white. Russians see a gray area of 80 percent." I think that's true. Here in America, as they say on basic cable, "You're either in or you're out." Anything else is impossible to identify with. Hell, it's worse than that; it's not fit for prime time! But I am not a reality TV contestant. I'm becoming comfortable with uncertainty. Indeed, I'm finding that uncertainty is the very frame of mind one needs to learn anything.

Orithya or Boreas?

(As taken from Edith Hamilton's "The Way of The Greeks")

Socrates and Phaedrus are taking a summer stroll....

"Is not the road to Athens made for conversation?" 

The younger man asks if they are not near the place where Boreas is said to have carried off Orithya.

"The little stream is delightfully clear and bright.  I can fancy there might be maidens playing near.  Tell, me, Socrates, do you believe the tale?"

"The wise are doubtful," Socrates answers, "and I should not be singular if, like them, I too, doubted.  I might have a rational explanation that Orithya was playing when a northerly gust carried her over the rocks, and therefore she was said to have been carried off by Boreas.  Now I quite acknowledge that these allegorical explanations are very nice, but he is not to be envied who has to make them up; much labor and ingenuity will be required of him; he will have to go on and rehabilitate Hippo-centaurs and chimeras dire.  Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace, and numberless inconceivable and portentous natures.  And if he would fain reduce them to rules of probability it will take up a great deal of time.  Now I have no leisure for such inquiries; shall I tell you why?  I must first know myself as the Delphic inscription says; to be curious about things not my concern while I am still in ignorance of my own self would be absurd.  And therefore I bid farewell to all that sort of thing.  I want to know about myself; am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a lowlier and diviner destiny?"

- Ms. Hamilton's translation is from Plato's "Phaedrus"

Seven Sages

According to Wikipedia...

The Seven Sages (of Greece) or Seven Wise Men (Greek: οἱ ἑπτά σοφοί, hoi hepta sophoi; c. 620 BC–550 BC) was the title given by ancient Greektradition to seven early 6th century B.C. philosophers, statesmen and law-givers who were renowned in the following centuries for their wisdom.

Wikipedia goes on to say that some people say that they didn't exist, most people say that they weren't wise at all, they were just politicians, and everyone agrees that the quotes attributed to them were not actually their own.  But I say that the quotes are wise nonetheless, and, if it's about Ancient Greece, I want to know about it, seemingly irrelevant or not.  So here it goes.

The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece are (drum roll):

Solon of Athens - "Nothing in excess."

Thales of Miletus - "To bring surety brings ruin."

Chilon of Sparta - "Know thyself."

Bias of Priene - "Too many workers spoil the work."

Cleobulus of Lindos - "Moderation is impeccable."

Pittacus of Mitylene - "Know thine opportunity."

Periander of Corinth - "Forethought in all things."  

Michael Lahanas has an excellent site profiling them all.

Part One - East vs West - Spirituality

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
- George Santayana

My next discourse was going to use as a jumping off point quotes from Edith Hamilton's ideas about the differences between Eastern and Western ideas about art and spirituality. The time frame to which Ms. Hamilton is speaking throughout "The Greek Way" is primarily the Classical Age, and specifically, in this chapter, 480 BC, The Battle of Thermopylae.  Therefore, by "Eastern" she means "Persian" - but she generalizes it to include all of the Middle East and Asia.  Likewise, "Western" starts out as meaning "Greek", but as a term grows to encompasses all of Western European and America.

So, I start thinking about all this, and it's all soon turns into a mess. Why? Because I'm not just thinking about what I'm thinking about, I'm also thinking about the context in which I'm thinking about what I'm thinking about. Let me make it more plain: this is personal. I am a white, middle-class, Christian, American woman living in the 21rst century. That's the context in which I'm learning all of this. And it's that context, I have found, that can be a stumbling block when I'm studying the history of other cultures, and especially ancient ones. I have to be aware of that context whenever I start nodding in agreement when people are passing broad sweeping judgements on the people of the past. I have to be aware of that context when people are passing broad sweeping judgements on modern people in foreign lands. Why am I nodding in agreement? Am I nodding in agreement because what they're saying is true, or am I nodding in agreement because what they're saying strokes my ego, "proves" to me that my way of being is far superior to theirs?

So then, thinking about THAT, I have to re-evaluate my initial reaction to my beloved Ms. Hamilton's musings on "The Way of the East and The West in Art". Since most art is religious art, "art" in this context became synonymous with "spirituality".  She talks about how the rejection of spiritualism in favor of realism shows itself in the art of the Western world.    Conversely, the favoring of the spiritual realm over harsh reality is displayed in the art of the Eastern world.  The art produced in the West reflected its love of order and realism (relative realism anyway) whereas the art of the East reflected fear, chaos, and dark imaginings. That, in turn, leads her to this comparison:

Abide by the facts, is the dictum of the mind; a sense for fact is its salient characteristic.... In proportion as the spirit predominates, this sense disappears. So in the Middle Ages, when the West was turning more and more to the way of the spirit, the foremost intellects could employ their great powers in questioning how many angels could stand on a needle's point, and the like. Carry this attitude toward the world of fact a few steps farther and the result is the Buddhist devotee swaying before the altar and repeating 'Amida' a thousand, thousand times until he loses all consciousness of the altar, 'Amida', and himself as well. The activity of the mind has been lulled to rest and the spirit, absorbed, is seeking the truth within itself.

I liked this passage because, at the time, I was disillusioned with religion, both with Christianity and Buddhism, which I had been investigating wholeheartedly. What seemed to be working for everyone else in the way of spiritual enlightenment was not working for me. So this passage soothed the ego.  Hamilton went on to compare two sources. First the East:

"Let a man," say the Upanishads, the great Brahman document, "meditate on the syllable Om. This is the imperishable syllable and he who knowing this, loudly repeats that syllable, enters into it and becomes immortal."

Then the West:

"God offers to everyone," says Emerson, "his choice between truth and repose. Take which you please - you can never have both."

Ah-ha! I thought. There you have it. All this spiritual nonsense it's all an enemy of the Truth! What's more, in an ironic twist, it's an enemy of God! That's why I'm not getting it. I knew it!

Hamilton goes on:

The practical divergence is of course immediately apparent in the intellectual realm. Those whose aim is to be completely independent of 'this muddy vesture of decay' do not become scientists or archaeologists or anything that has to do with actualities past or present. In art the result, though less immediately apparent, is no less decisive. In proportion as the spirit predominates, the real shapes and looks of things become unimportant and when the spirit is supreme, they are of no importance at all.
- pg. 40-41

Now, she was really getting to me. I'd just broken up with spirituality; I was on the rebound with reason. But now that I've sobered up - and gotten back together with Christianity - I have to question whether or not Ms. Hamilton's I actually buy Ms. Hamilton's argument, or was I just being a sucker? And there's where I struggle. Reading this chapter last year, I felt elated. Reading it this year, it sounds both narrow-minded and absurd (Now, anyone who has read Hamilton's works will know that she is not narrow-minded. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that I question - not outright disagree, but question - this one part.) Was Hamilton saying that the East was and is the enemy of the Truth, or was she just saying that spiritualism is the enemy of Truth? Because, while she started out contrasting the art of Ancient Persia with Ancient Greece, she wound up contrasting the quest for spiritual Truth (knowledge gained from divine revelation or personal insight) with the quest for rational Truth (knowledge gleaned from reason and experience). Her language is harsh, and I would go so far as to characterize her opinion of spiritualism as intrinsically evil. It's should be obvious which of the two paths this journal intends to explore. But do I think the other path is invalid? Just because it's not my cup of tea, do I think that it's evil? No.

   

   Secondly, I find it confounding that she would lump Persian spirituality in with what is obviously Buddhism, a religion originating in the Indian subcontinent.  I find it particularly confounding because the source she is drawing most of her information from - Herodotus' "Histories" - presents clear evidence that the Persians are practicing an early form of Zoroastrianism, which, to even a part-time religious scholar like myself, doesn't bear any resemblance to Buddhism.  "The Greek Way" was originally written in 1930.  Was Ms. Hamilton just ignorant about this?  I find that hard to accept, but maybe I want her to be as informed as 21rst century technology would have allowed her to be.  But, if she was ignorant of the religious practices of the Persians - and, granted, even with the insights from Herodotus, we don't truly know what their spiritual life was like - why didn't she just lump them together with the other pagan religions as they are described in The Bible?  This would seem to me a common, albeit inaccurate, thing to have done at the time.   The alternative is that it was a conscious choice.  But why?  I wish that I knew.  

To be continued.... 

Ethics

God offers to everyone his choice between truth and repose. Take which you please - you can never have both.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I haven't often considered some of the deeper questions of philosophy. The branches of metaphysics and epistemology are new ways of thinking to me and very exciting, although I think that I may not have enough patience to investigate them thoroughly. The questions of "Where does knowledge come from? Where do we come from? What is the nature of reality?" have rarely crossed my mind. They seem to me to be impractical. Indeed, if anything, I question the point of ever posing those questions because I do not believe that we can ever know the answers. By the very act of asking, "What is knowledge? How is it best acquired - through the senses or by reasoning?" aren't we answering ourselves? Isn't that a question of reason? And shouldn't we be engaged in a deeper investigation of the knowledge that we already do have to see if it leads us someplace else? Isn't that what we do, what history is all about? I don't know. Greater minds have gone before me; who am I to question the conclusions they drew? But maybe a new generation comes up with its own answers to everything. And, even if fresh eyes don't come up with new answers after all, maybe they can learn to better defend the answers already given, especially where the existence of Truth (with a capital "T") is disputed.
I believe strongly in the existence of the ultimate Truth. Of course, the great Socrates was wise enough to not give a definition to Truth because he knew that the height and breadth of it could never fully be grasped. Indeed, perhaps there's a fear that, defining it, is kind of like defining God; we run the risk of limiting our imaginations as to what it is. Nevertheless, I am not as wise as Socrates. So, for the purposes of this journal, I will at least give a broad definition of that which I'm looking for. Truth (capital T) is, in my opinion, the union of the fundamental, all-inclusive explanations as to the nature of life, living, and living things.
This, I think, is where there's a crossover between the branches of philosophy - metaphysics and epistemology - over to ethics, the only branch that really holds my interest. Because, if we're going to talk about "What is ethical behavior?" then don't we have to acknowledge that there is a Truth, a fundamental acknowledgement that X kind of behavior is always harmful and Y kind of behavior is always helpful, or, if not behavior, at least motives? And then we have to acknowledge the Truth in every human heart, right? What I really want to know is, "How should I live? What should I do?" Ethics interests me the most because, first of all, I believe that, at the end of my life, I will have to answer to God as to how I spent my time. But, second of all, even if today I suddenly lost all my faith in a Higher Power or an afterlife, the question of "What is right living?" would still be important because I believe that ethical behavior brings quality and satisfaction to my life as well as making life easier on those around me, thus strengthening our bond as a community, and this has its own intrinsic rewards regardless if there's a bigger one after death. I want to reach the end of my life in satisfaction that I used everything that I was given, and I'd given everything I had. Is that possible? Can we ever be satisfied with our own efforts? That leads me in a circle. The Biblical argument for a Savior is that we need someone to atone for the shortcoming that are the very nature of humanity thus reconciling us with the Perfection that is God. It all tangles my head into knots. I feel that I have been given every advantage that someone can be given and many wonderful opportunities besides. I have not always been thankful for these advantages, and I have not always made use of the opportunities. I can - and, by all means, should - strive towards excellence even if I can't fully achieve it. But I think maybe what's more fundamental to ethics than the goal of excellence is the role of gratitude. I will never be the "best" at anything, I will always fall short in the way of behavior or words, but out of gratitude for the gifts given me, I can take advantage of the opportunities that I have left for service, the gifts for giving. Investigating the questions that the branch of Ethics poses is the only way to know how to do this fully, correctly, and purposefully.