MATHETΩN

There is an idea in much religion of a metaphysical foundation upon which practical action can be taken. For example, Islam erects the “Five Pillars”

Profession (of the creed),
Prayers,
Charity,
Fasting,
Pilgrimage (to the holy cities).

And ancient Jewish rabbis proposed seven precepts upon which all the world should base behavior; they are the Noachide Laws:

Monotheism,
No murder,
No robbery,
Sexual purity,
No blasphemy,
Kindness to animals,
Just courts.

Another example are the various Catholic religiouses, who generally profess four vows:

Poverty,
Celibacy,
Obedience,
and the fourth varies (e.g., stability, silence, loyalty to the pope).

The Religious Society of Friends has its “testimonies”, which by now have been narrowed to

Honesty,
Simplicity,
Non-violence,
Abstinence from nicotine, alcohol, or recreational drugs.

The Amish – Mennonites among whom I grew up base their copious lifestyle-laws on a three-cornered platform, viz.:

Nonconformity (to American life),
Uniformity,
Obedience.

Perhaps it is my knowledge of these religions that has gotten me thinking: What “pillars” could I discern in Jesus’s and his Envoys’ teaching upon which to base my life’s acts? To list them accurately, I would need to put out of my head all Christian dogma, to read thoroughly but sweepingly, to think systematically. Here, tentatively, is what I propose (roughly in the order the reader can find them):

Slavery,
Poverty,
Love and non-resistance,
Honesty,
Liberty,
Chastity (with a special meaning for the married).

In Jesus and the Envoys’ time, slavery was everywhere and they used it, and its related customs, laws, and emancipation, as a central image — probably the central image — of their teaching. Nowadays we have no slavery and very little idea of it. What could serve as a nowadays analogous image in our teaching? As I puzzle this out, as I look around me, my mind turns more and more to — addiction …

I have seen a certain bulletin plastered on churches by Mathetai so often that I think I must quote at least part of it:

… His [Jesus's] most commonly-repeated command was:

Follow me.

Follow him to where? To his Kingdom of life, through death. Here is a list of questions that ask, Am I following Jesus?

“Have you left your home, your family, and your income?”

“Are you proclaiming, or teaching about, the Kingdom? Are you healing? Are you everywhere doing good?”

“Have you been, or are you soon to be, houseless or arrested?”

“Are you soon to be killed?”

(Once, attached to some Youth Camp caravan, I saw the list limited to the last two questions — but added to them, I think, toothlessness and jailtime — concluded with something flippant such as: “If not, you aren’t doing it right.”)

The most-familiar sighting of a Mathetes is one of the lonely pair on foot or bike forging through the darkest thickets of cities or through rural barrens administering polemic or medicine. Or perhaps one has seen the strange-looking little tan trucks of the Slaves, having driven all night in haste, installing caches of supplies or literature.

But fewer have seen the Mathetai’s permanent communities. These are communist, agrarian, and usually isolated (I am ignoring the large exception in Harlem). They are — one might say — the hive to the Mathetes’ bee, or the mortar to his shell.

These comprise families with children, novices, and Mathetai recuperating from the road. Besides being farms, the communities are small manufacturies, are laboratories and academies.

I mean soon to report from my years visiting them. …

This would be my dream job for the next few years:

Looking Glass Youth and Family Services:
STREET OUTREACH WORKER

Program: New Roads

Reports to: Clinical Supervisor

Comp: $9.50 / hr

Responsibilities:
Is responsible for the provision of education and prevention services regarding issues of sexual abuse, domestic violence, prostitution, and other issues relevant to homeless and runaway youth. In addition, assists with classroom presentations and outreach to community groups.

Availability: Day, evening, overnight

Specific duties:
Provides advocacy services to street youth in the drop-in center and on the street; debriefs with other staff; co-leads weekly support groups; works with related agencies to provide resources for street youth; provides referrals to New Roads case-management and educational services, other Looking Glass programs, &c.; conducts classroom presentations in area middle and high schools; provides coverage at New Roads drop-in center; provides some coverage at a group living facility with up to four residents.

Those of us for whom, for our own countries’ sins, slavery is a parcel with race-hatred will be bemused by the Hellenes’ form of slavery.

Slaves in ancient Greece were almost all the same race and ethnicity as their masters, and even often spoke the same language and had previously had the same statuses as their masters. They were assumed to have the same intelligence and abilities, and to have the same desires, as their masters. They were put in charge of their masters’ manufacturies and trading companies or even rented to others as consultants upon accounting, politics, or science.

Yet they were matter-of-factly treated as animals. They were family pets or beasts-of-burden who could be beaten, starved, or worked even to death. They could be heckled by anyone or, in some city-states, slaughtered by anyone with impunity. They could be — and to some indications usually were — refused marriage, children, or friends. They were often barred from religion.

How could the Greek mind contain both these ideas of slaves’ worth, obviously so opposite? I explain it to myself like this:

Hellenic slavery was an institution of war. When a Greek army triumphed over another, or conquered a city or village, then the lives of the vanquished were considered forfeit: i.e., everyone thought it natural or just that the vanquished be killed at once. In fact, on average throughout ancient Hellenic history, all the vanquished men were killed. Those whom the victors spared — customarily only women and children — were now thought to be unnaturally and unjustly in possession of their lives — they were now (and here comes my way of explaining the Hellenic mind toward slavery) the undead.

Weren’t there recently released two movies in which “zombies” are enslaved for the good of humankind?

A final thought: Were a slave ever to be emancipated, he or she was said to have been bought by the gods (sometimes specifically by Poseidon). The newly-free had been by divine agency resurrected.

Here are descriptions of a follower of Jesus by two churchmen; I quote rather-randomly from the first few chapters of their principal works.

Rick Warren, ca. 2000

The disciple:

• makes “a difference in the life of a relative or friend”
• will be “remembered after death”
• “owes it to himself” to accept God’s rewards
• will be more physically, psychologically “well”
• anticipates a reward “too good to be true”
• “balances his earthly concerns with his heavenly values”
• becomes “more responsible”, “more energetic”
• “attends church on a regular basis”
• attains a superior “reputation”
• is now “on a team”; “connected”, “comfortable”
• becomes “healthier, more-capable”
• “respects the ruling political system”
• runs a business “on spiritual principles” and so runs “simply a better business”, for “these things work in the real world”
• is “getting the pie right now because he is following an eternal recipe”
• “sticks to a task” and thus “builds character”
• has his “questions answered”
• has “Someone to help him hold on, in life”

John Climacus, ca. 600

The disciple:

• “freely accepts death”
• bears “a chastised heart”, “unrecognized wisdom”, and “an unnoticed life”
• is always “striving to be humble”
• “wishes for poverty”
• “longs for what is divine”
• “pours out love”
• “denies himself empty pride”
• dwells in “a depth of silence”
• endures “hardship, simplicity” in his “chosen route of great grief”
• is “separated from everything”
• is “set on fire, in the darkness”
• “sits like someone of foreign speech among people of other tongues”
• “drives out his love for family”
• “is a fugitive”
• “mortifies his appetites” and “constantly toils”
• drinks “the bitter cup of dishonor: derided, mocked, jeered”
• “denies his will; he must patiently endure opposition, suffer neglect without complaint, put up with violent arrogance”
• “has undertaken to travel by a short and rough road” of “self-mistrust up to his dying day”
• “turns away from earthly concerns, from human ways, from family; cuts his selfishness away”
• must “never grieve the loss” of these things

” … who feel the giant agony of the world
and, more, like slaves to poor humanity
labor for mortal good.”

– Euripides

Paul certainly offered correctives to Hellenic culture. He reserved the thunder of the prophet for sins in men of every culture, but he offered some correctives such as this:

A Greek dramatist shows a beggar so poor he must hold his own begging-cup — “I must even dress myself,” he implores passersby, “so great is my misery that I have had to sell my slave.”

But Paul writes Followers in Thessaloniki: “Learn to work with your own hands.”

Paul was a middle-upper-class Hebrew — educated, of affluent and influential stock — writing to middle-upper-class Hellenes — educated and very affluent and influential. The Assemblings he fathered were in a few Hellenistic metropoles in Turkey and thereabout, of course, and were composed of statesmen, merchants, ex-clergy, and so on. He writes just as one would expect, then. He attempts to introduce Corinth to some of the better Hebrew mores, but with a liberal spirit. Indeed, he is always liberal toward the Hellenic culture — he writes as a sort of respectful, amiable diplomat.

I suppose what I want to say is that: Jesus contended with the powerful clergy, and so did Paul (per the Acts); but Jesus passed his time with the outcast, while we have no such record of Paul. (And Jesus eventually clashed with the civil powers — which we know Paul did as well, when he volunteered to enter the den of Caesar, but of his showdown we have no record.)

If instead of writing parentheticals to genteel houseslaves, Paul had written a whole epistle to the Empire’s slave-prostitutes, what would he have written?

“Copy me as I copy the Christ” seems the only answer we can read in him. “You have but one Teacher,” said Jesus.