MATHETΩN

… Only let me not give up my life irrationally, only let me not give up my life faintheartedly, or from some casual pretext. For again, God does not so desire; for he has need of a good universe and of good men to go to and fro upon earth. …

What then? Must I explain these things to the multitude? When the children come up to us and say ‘Happy Saturnalia!’ do we say to them, ‘No, all this is not good’? Not at all; but we cheer too. And so you, therefore, when you are unable to make a man change his belief, realize that he is a child and cheer with him or hold your peace.

All these things a man ought to remember, and then, when he is summoned to meet some difficulty, he ought to know that the time has come to show whether he has learned. Wrestling students act displeased with the youths of light weight: ‘He cannot lift me,’ says one — ‘bring me a sturdy young man.’ But when the crisis comes, sometimes they weep and say, ‘I wanted to keep practicing!’ Why, what did you practice for! Now, I like to think that someone among you reading this is in travail within his soul, saying, ‘Alas that such a difficulty does not come to me now as came to such-and-such good man! Alas that now I must be sitting in a corner!’ You ought all to be thus minded.

If one should take away from a good tragic actor his paraphernalia, is he lost or does he abide? And so it is in actual life. God may say, ‘Take the governership’: I take it and show how a man educated in the good comports himself. ‘Lay aside the robe of state and put rags on’: What then? Has it not been given to me to mount the stage now as a witness summoned by God?

What kind of witness do you bear for God? ‘But, O Lord, I am in sore straits and in misfortune; no one regards me, no one gives me anything, all blame me and speak ill of me.’ Is this the witness that you are going to bear, and disgrace the summons so important?

Or what if the priest declares, ‘He is impious’ — what has happened? ‘I have been pronounced impious.’ Nothing else? ‘No nothing.’ And if he had made a declaration: ‘When it is day, then it is dark,’ or: ‘The circumference of a circle is not equidistant from its center’ — would the educated man pay attention? So why when he passes judgment on what is holy and unholy, just and unjust?

How great is the injustice committed by us if we do so! Leave to others quibbles, grumbling about the good. For what is lacking now is a man to bear witness to these arguments by his acts. This is the character I would have you assume, so that we may no longer use old examples of good men in the schools but may have some examples from our own time!

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.

I might wish that Prof. Gates’ harassment was racial so that I can pretend that I myself am insusceptible to being arrested in my own home.

The stark truth is that the police can abuse in a wide variety of ways anyone they choose to. In this very valley two years ago an elderly woman was beaten by two policemen, handcuffed in such a way as to dislocate her shoulder, and afterward charged with assaulting an officer (which threatens a stiff penalty including jail time) — all on her own front porch, and all because she had not watered her lawn. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed not long ago that police may search anyone’s car at anytime in any place for no reason. When a federal agent shot and killed a boy in Idaho, was fired for the offense, and subsequently tried, his trial was dismissed by the judge per “sovereign immunity”, a Medieval doctrine tied to the divine rights of kings.

In short, if one keeps an eye on the news or talks to enough of one’s fellows, one soon learns that in this land police can do nearly anything they please and be supported in it by the courts and other government. Why? Because we, the middle class, rely on them to work our iniquities for us. The viler the deeds they do, the more we sanctify them, so that we need never do these evils ourselves nor ever think of them.

The same is true, needless to say, in the case of our armies. We need never crush the skull of a child in a foreign land because we hire men to do this for us, and we need never admit what they do for us if we always shout out “The soldier is like unto a god in his purity!” And this explains the rabidity with which his neighbors will condemn a pacifist as a hater of his country. For if he is allowed to expose the evildoing of the troops, then he has — as it were — broken a vial of poison that taints everyone.

He seeks to poison the whole land, his enemies fear unconsciously — and yet in truth he would merely throw a light upon the rotted blood we in our conspiratorial darkness already swim in.