{"id":9653,"date":"2019-01-28T05:54:35","date_gmt":"2019-01-28T10:54:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=9653"},"modified":"2019-01-28T05:54:35","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T10:54:35","slug":"the-return-of-the-greeks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=9653","title":{"rendered":"The return of the Greeks"},"content":{"rendered":"

I pointed a while back<\/a> toward the recent revival of interest in Stoicism, wondering if it might be grounded in the decline of Christianity.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s easy to say that Christianity is untrue, that its teachings are degrading, and that its ethics are grounded in cultism \u2026 but what then? What replaces Christianity and provides a framework for thinking about the world and our place in it?<\/p>\n

[ … ]<\/p>\n

If publishing trends can be trusted, a lot of people are looking toward Stoicism, a pre-Christian philosophical movement nearly wiped-out when the Roman church seized control of the western half of the Roman empire following Rome\u2019s collapse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What do you know? The latest self-help guru seems to be … Aristotle<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Cold showers have their virtues: They prepare an adult for the unavoidable tortures and small indignities of the day. But Hall\u2019s treatment of Aristotle\u2019s \u201cNicomachean Ethics\u201d reveals that true virtue, the inner core of human happiness, is a matter of living in accord with \u201cthe ancient Greek proverb inscribed on the Delphic Temple, \u2018nothing in excess.\u2019\u201d According to Aristotle, the first Western theorist to develop a moral system tethered to this principle, \u201ccharacter traits and emotions are almost all acceptable \u2014 indeed necessary to a healthy psyche \u2014 provided that they are present in the right amounts. He calls the right amount the \u2018middle\u2019 or \u2018mean\u2019 amount, the meson.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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“Christianity cheated us out of the fruits of ancient culture, and later it cheated us a second time out of the fruits of Islamic culture.”<\/b><\/p>\n

Nietzsche, 1889;
The Antichrist, §60<\/p>\n

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Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, laid the groundwork for Christian metaphysics with the theory of ‘forms.’ Aristotle, with his almost zoological listing and classifying, laid the groundwork for science and, ultimately, the rejection of metaphysics. When the Roman church seized control of the western half of the Roman empire following its collapse, Aristotle was banished. Had his works not been smuggled to Arabic scholars, all of his writings would have been lost; as it is, Aristotle was unknown in the West for almost 1,000-years.<\/p>\n

I have a couple editions of the Nicomachean Ethics<\/i> at hand, and am unlikely to buy a commentary; I’m already familiar with the material. What interests me, as in the case of Stoicism, is the revival of the Classical world as Christianity disintegrates. This, I think, is a wholesome development.<\/p>\n

Epicurus knew that the moon travels around the earth, that the earth travels around the sun, and that the earth is a globe. Epicurus had worked-out the essentials of the theory of evolution, too, and allowed women to study at his school. We know those things because denunciations of Epicurus by the early church fathers, especially Lactantius, remain available; virtually all of Epicurus’ writings, save a few letters, were deliberately destroyed.<\/p>\n

So the freewheeling intellectualism of the Classical world is having the last laugh, reviving as its tormentor, Christianity — which has never been able to sustain itself without force — staggers toward the dustbin. To paraphrase a modern aphorism, You just can’t keep good ideas down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I pointed a while back toward the recent revival of interest in Stoicism, wondering if it might be grounded in the decline of Christianity. It\u2019s easy to say that Christianity is untrue, that its teachings are degrading, and that its … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9653"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9653"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9664,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9653\/revisions\/9664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}