The New Gospel

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">This is the story of a man [Odysseus], one who was never at a loss.&nbsp; He had traveled far in the world, after the sack of Troy, the virgin fortress; he saw many cities of men, and learnt their mind; he endured many troubles and hardships in the struggle to save his own life and to bring back his men safe to their homes.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Then resourceful Odysseus spoke in turn and answered her:</em></p><p><em>‘Goddess and queen, do not be angry with me.&nbsp; I myself know</em></p><p><em>that all you say is true and the circumspect Penelope</em></p><p><em>can never match the impression you make for beauty and stature.</em></p><p><em>She is mortal after all, and you are immortal and ageless.</em></p><p><em>But even so what I want and all my days I pine for</em></p><p><em>is to go back to my house and see my day of homecoming.</em></p><p><em>And if some god batters me far out on the wine-blue water,</em></p><p><em>I will endure it, keeping a stubborn spirit inside me,</em></p><p><em>for already I have suffered much and done much hard work</em></p><p><em>on the waves and in the fighting.&nbsp; So let this adventure follow.’</em>&nbsp;</p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">In Homer there is a design, but it is unchanging and permanent, always renewed but always the same … not moving toward some mighty end; and it is not being woven by a divinity, but has always been there in the threads of human life.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Of all ancient cities, only Athens permitted its citizens reasonable latitude in personal decisions.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">“The right to choose one’s own religious affiliation, a right which we regard as one of the most precious, would have seemed to the ancients a crime and a sacrilege.”</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states, we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves.&nbsp; Its administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy.&nbsp; If we look to laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if to social standing, advancement in public life falls to the reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way … The freedom that we enjoy in our government, extends also to our ordinary life.&nbsp; There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes … We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning and observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality … We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining to struggle against it … our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless … instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action … In generosity we are equally singular … it is only the Athenians, who, fearless of consequences, confer their benefits not from calculations of expediency, but in the confidence of liberality.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The admiration of present and succeeding ages will be ours, since we have not left our power without witness, but have shown mighty proofs … we have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Excluded from commerce with the world, barred from travel, ignorant of science, the literature and philosophy of exuberantly growing Greece, the Spartans became a nation of excellent hoplites, with the mentality of a lifelong infantryman.&nbsp; Greek travelers marveled at a life so simple and unadorned, a franchise so jealously confined, a conservatism so tenacious of every custom and superstition, a courage and discipline so exalted and limited, so noble in character, so base in purpose, and so barren in result; while, hardly a day’s ride away, the Athenians were building, out of a thousand injustices and errors, a civilization broad in scope and yet intense in action, open to every new idea and eager for intercourse with the world, tolerant, varied, complex, luxurious, innovating, skeptical, imaginative, poetical, turbulent, free.&nbsp; It was a contrast that would color and almost delineate Greek history.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The philosophy of the ancient Greeks attracts us at this moment, because never before or since, anywhere in the world, has anything like their highly advanced and articulated system of knowledge and speculation been established </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">without</em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"> the fateful division which has hampered us for centuries and has become unendurable in our days …&nbsp; [Unlike today] there was no limitation as to the subjects on which a learned man would be allowed by other learned men to give his opinion … There was not, as in Babylonia and Egypt, a hereditary privileged priestly caste of the kind that, if they were not themselves rulers, usually side with them in opposing development of new ideas, since they have an instinctive feeling that any change in outlook might eventually turn against them and their privileges … The grand idea that informed these men was that the world around them was something </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">that could be understood</em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">, if one only took the trouble to observe it properly; that it was not the playground of gods.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I believe that the earth is very large and that we who dwell between the pillars of Heracles [at the entrance from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea] and the river Phasis [the modern day Roni River flowing from the Caucasus Mountains in western Georgia into the eastern coast of the Black Sea], live in a small part of the sea, like ants or frogs about a pond, and many other people live in many other regions.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Everything has a natural explanation.&nbsp; The moon is not a god but a great rock and the sun is a hot rock. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I am convinced, then that in the first place, if the earth is round and in the middle of the heavens, it needs neither the air nor any other similar force to keep it from falling, but its own equipoise and the homogeneous nature of the heavens on all sides suffice to hold it in place; for a body which is in equipoise and is placed in the center of something which is homogeneous cannot change its inclination in any direction, but will remain always in the same position.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Observation of the stars … shows not only that the earth is spherical but that it is of no great size, since a small change of position on our part southward or northward visibly alters the circle of the horizon, so that the stars above our heads change their position considerably, and we do not see the same stars as we move to the North or South … This proves both that the earth is spherical and that its periphery is not large, for otherwise such a small change of position could not have had such an immediate effect.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">With the Greeks geometry was regarded with the utmost respect, and consequently none were held in greater honor than mathematicians, but we Romans have restricted this art to the practical purposes of measuring and reckoning. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Human beings were routinely bludgeoned to death or mauled by wild animals in the Roman gladiatorial arena.&nbsp; The greatest of the classical thinkers, from Seneca to Cicero, saw nothing wrong with these practices.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Nothing is so damaging to good character as the habit of lounging at the games; for then it is that vice steals subtly upon one through the avenue of pleasure.&nbsp; What do you think I mean?&nbsp; I mean that I come home more greedy, more ambitious, more voluptuous, and even more cruel and inhuman … The outcome of every fight is death, and the means are fire and sword … You may retort: “But he was a highway robber; he killed a man!”&nbsp; And what of it?&nbsp; Granted that, as a murderer, he deserved this punishment, what crime have you committed, poor fellow, that you should sit and see this show? In the morning they cried “Kill him! Lash him! Burn him! … Whip him to meet his wounds! … Come now, do you not understand even this truth, that a bad example reacts on the agent? … What then do you think the effect will be on character, when the world at large assaults it!&nbsp; You must either imitate or loath the world.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I could not forgo the library which with great care and labor I had got together in Rome.&nbsp; And so, miserable man that I was, I would fast, only to read Cicero afterwards …&nbsp; [in a dream] I flung myself upon the ground and did not dare to look up.&nbsp; I was asked to state my condition and replied that I was a Christian.&nbsp; But he who presided said: “Thou liest; thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian.&nbsp; ‘For where thy treasure is there will thy heart be also.’ ”&nbsp; Straightaway I became dumb, and amid the strokes of the whip—for he had ordered me to be scourged—I was even more bitterly tortured by the fire of conscience … In the stress of that dread hour, … I called upon His name:&nbsp; ‘O Lord, if ever again I possess worldly books or read them, I have denied thee.’&nbsp; [coming out of the dream] I acknowledge that henceforth I read the books of God with a greater zeal than I had ever given before to the books of men.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">There was no part of mankind, who had quicker parts, or improved them more; that had greater light of reason, or followed it farther in all sorts of speculations, than the Athenians …&nbsp; [But] ‘tis not enough, that there were up and down scattered sayings of wise men … these incoherent apothegms of philosophers and wise men, however excellent in themselves, and well intended by them, could never make a morality, whereof the world could be convinced … Nobody that I know, before our Savior’s time, ever did, or went about to give us a morality … Such an one [morality] as this out of the New Testament, I think the world never had, nor can any one say is any where else to be found.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The whole labor of the ancient world gone for naught:&nbsp; I have no word to describe the feeling that such an enormity arouses in me — And considering the fact that its labor was merely preparatory, that with adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to go on for thousands of years, the whole meaning of antiquity disappears!&nbsp; To what end the Greeks?&nbsp; to what end the Romans?&nbsp; All the prerequisites to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there; man had perfected the great and incomparable art of reading profitably — that first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and mechanics, were on the right road … Every essential to the beginning of the work was ready … What we have today conquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves … the whole integrity of knowledge … all these things were already there, and had been there for two thousand years! … Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Roman religions did not stress belief or the “intellectual content” of religion.&nbsp; Instead, Roman religion was all about </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">action</em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"> — what one </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">did</em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"> in relation to the gods, rather than what one happened to think or believe about them.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Aristotle isn’t sexy or glamorous.&nbsp; He doesn’t have an outlandish theory of knowledge politics that Plato does.&nbsp; As a freshman one reads Plato and says, “Wow! This is so cool!&nbsp; This is really wild!&nbsp; I never thought about this before!”&nbsp; Then one reads Aristotle and thinks, “This guy sounds like my Dad.&nbsp; That can’t be very interesting.”&nbsp; But over the long haul you realize that the much deeper, much more insightful, much more sensible position is Aristotle’s.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">[Aristotle] rejects the notion that the purpose of politics is to satisfy the preferences of the majority ... The end of the state is not “to provide an alliance for mutual defense ... or to ease economic exchange and promote economic intercourse” [Politics (3:9:1280b)].&nbsp; For Aristotle, politics is about something higher.&nbsp; It is about learning how to live a good life.&nbsp; The purpose of politics is nothing less than to enable people to develop their distinctive capabilities and virtues—to deliberate about the common good, to acquire practical judgment, to share in self-government, to care for the fate of the community as a whole.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">We must not lose sight of the fact that Aristotle was a man of his time – and for that time he was extraordinarily perspicacious, acute, and advanced.&nbsp; Whatever their failings as “science” (construed in a 20th century manner), his scientific treatises are among the most remarkable products that the history of natural investigations has ever produced: and anyone who does not appreciate that is spiritually impoverished indeed.</em></p>