Alright, kids... trying to chew through something and feel like a bit of a little kid. So if anyone has a knife and fork and would care to sort of work this into more bite-sized pieces, help a little brother out...
Been working through Thucydides. Basically, as I understand it, he is presenting a basic thesis of life and justice and then showing the gritty reality that life is nasty, brutal, and short as well as sort of three dimensional so any basic thesis will fall short of the absolute. Even the best efforts of men will sometimes be wrecked on the rocks of fortune. And the basic thesis he is throwing out there, the contemporary Athenian doctrine is that:
Justice (
dikaiosune) does not enter into the affairs of men or cities until they have achieved empire and become self-sufficient in security, honor, and profit. Once they have met these basic needs, justice is acting in moderation toward others. But until that point, justice is the advantage of the stronger.
Another Athenian traditional idea of justice is that it is giving to each what is owed (to friends, friendship; to enemies, enmity; to benefactors, repayment...).
This is based in the traditional Hellenic worldview, that all we have is this life. Hades is a world of shades. Either we exist there as shadows, or we simply exist in memories of those who have known us or heard of us and what we have done. So essentially, this life is all we have and the best way to live it is to be so heroic and famous that we will be praised and remembered, especially in poetry.
(My friend Helen at work keeps criticizing us men for being aggressive and brutal, starting meaningless wars and then blaming women like her namesake for them. Mostly she says that when I am in the Military History section and she is in her precious Literature or Romance section. I think that it might have more to do with the fact that the present war is keeping her husband a couple thousand miles away. But I think she may have at least a little point in that there seems to be a bit of this heroic motivation in all of us with broken X chromosomes.)
At the same time am working through some parts of the Republic, where Plato's Socrates is attempting to turn a young man (Plato's brother) from a desire to get power and to rule tyrannically over the city and instead to rule his own soul well by privately pursuing philosophy. One of the things he uses to do this is a redefinition of what happens at death, introducing the eternality of the soul.
And as these and some other elements have been rattling around in the old noggin, it occurs to me more really than ever that what we believe and how we live is in a very real way driven by what we believe about death and the afterlife.
I certainly would have agreed with this statement at any point prior to this had I heard it (and am sure I have before). But it strikes me that it is true in a more concrete way than the theoretical religious way I have heard it framed, and in a more real way than the 'guilting folks into a frenzy of activity' way I have also heard it framed. The reality is that if you want to know what a person really believes about death and the afterlife, you can look at the mechanisms that drive them in everyday life.
Just finished a first reading of Henri Nouwen's 'Life of the Beloved'. He says, "Everything changes radically from the moment you know yourself as being sent into this world. Times and spaces, people and events, art and literature, history and science, they all cease to be opaque and become transparent, pointing far beyond themselves to the place from where you came and to where you will return." That in the context of understanding oneself to be truly beloved of God, not having to earn that beloved-ness or prove it, but being able to rest in it and live it actively.
I don't know. Am more inclined to knowing the world in a more I-Thou sense than an over-teleological one. Am excited about knowing God immediately and letting the world fall into place around that focal point. And at the same time can see that under theology and stated beliefs there are very real habits and motivations that perhaps are greatly driven by our real, fundamental beliefs of what comes next.
