“Education is the best provision for old age.”
- Aristotle
Philanthrophy in Gregory of Nazianzus
In a land where the sick, suffering, poor, and needy cried out for aid, one Father of the Church called upon his congregation to enact their Christian duties. He did not advocate for “faith, hope, and charity,” but for the virtue that subsumed these three: philanthropy.
Inventing the Individual
The Iliad centers on Achilles’s rage: “Sing, Muse, of the rage of Peleus’s son Achilles” (Iliad 1.1). Throughout the poem, however, the object of Achilles’s rage shifts, as does his mode of comprehending and recompensing it. While we are told first of Achilles’s rage toward Agamemnon, who wrongfully usurped Achilles’s courtesan, this rage has ceased by book 18 and has officially been repented of through the reconciliation in book 19. There, Achilles’s wrath—his μῆνιν—shifts toward Hector, toward active vengeance rather than passive avoidance.
Praising Pain: Martyrs, Holocaust, and Depth Psychology
Early Christian martyrdom provides a model of aiming toward a goal and accepting the focus, limitations, and freedoms that an aim entails. Viktor Frankl’s psychological research supports this claim.
Origen’s Psychology: The State of the Question
Time has not looked kindly on Origen, but perhaps time should change its opinion. Origen’s psychology has undergone repeated scrutiny which demonstrates its usefulness for today.
Modern Art: The End of Art?
Some claim that modern art constitutes a Hegelian synthesis of what artistic endeavor has thus far revealed. Others claim that it marks the end of artistic expression in its Platonic sense of representing nature. This essay explores whether the art of the ready-made culminates or collapses art.
3 Top Creeds (say neuroscientists) for 2021
In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, first amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt forward three sapiential phrases—three creeds—that they suggest can motivate positive social and emotional outcomes in those who adopt them. They contrast these with the “great untruths” of safetyism.
“The Lord is her Name?” Possible Translations of Ezekiel 48:35
The pointed Hebrew text names the city “The Lord is there,” but read unpointed, words might be “The Lord is her name,” creating a matrimonial metaphor between Yahweh and Israel.
History: Doomed to Repetition
History will repeat itself as long as the nature of man remains the same: as long as men seek power above virtue and view virtue as valuable only as a means of self-promotion, disposable once it fails to attain its intended end, the lust for power will continue to arise and strangle the seedling roots of virtue. The seeds of lust for power grow into a kind of tantalian tree, always promise, yet always failing, to bring relief, but men will ever reach skyward for lust’s fruit.
War: Plague of the Human Psyche
Thucydides juxtaposes the true motives of actions taken in the Peloponnesian War with the specious motives given by those acting in order to portray the disease of war as something which makes men usurp honesty and virtue with whatever qualities best catalyze the increase of their own power.
The Great and Wonderful Works: What Monarchy Reveals
Through a review of the kingship of Cambyses through the lense of the statements on kingship of Otanes and Darius, the Histories’s travelers can see that a system of government with checked power far surpasses that of a monarchy.
Justice is Served: Livy on the Moral Life
Livy demonstrates in his moral paradigms that people who regard personal benefit more highly than the needs of their state are met not only with human contempt but also with life’s curses. He contrasts private gain with civil good to convey that human beings attain their telos by choosing justice over personal gain.
Stoic Emotions: Literary Examples
Cicero gives a Stoic argument against emotions in his Tusculan Disputations. In medias res, he defines some such emotions as should be avoided. Among the twenty-two listed reprehensible reactions are the negative emotions of mourning and jealousy and the positive emotion of compassion. These three emotions are seen in the actions of Achilles, Jacob (brother of Esau), and Mary Magdalene, respectively, and each emotion serves to develop the person’s character in the story.
Verbosity and Truth in Plato’s Gorgias
Vain arguments, big words (the sesquipedalian variety), and rhetorical tricks obscure the truth. Plato argues that simple, reasoned discussion constitutes the best path toward reliable philosophical conclusions.
Longinus on the Sublime: The Profound Peroration
Longinus, au fait with the naivety of his shipmate, highlights in the rhetoric of his peroration the standard of excellence elucidated in the work to inculcate sublimity in Terentianus’s soul.
Philosophy: Soul Medicine in Boethius
Philosophy alludes to Homer’s Odyssey to demonstrate that power over one’s body is no true power. True excellence lies in controlling one’s thoughts.
Boethius: The Possibility and Scope of Human Free Will
Lady Philosophy demonstrates that human freedom can only be limited by individuals’ own failure to act in consonance with reason. God’s eternal nature precludes his limiting human free will since his perception of all events in an “eternal present” negates the dilemma of imposed necessity.
Comparative Revolutions: Scientific, Englightenment, French
Revolutions brought us the scientific method, inquisitory minds, and natural rights. How do these compare?
Heroism in Shakespeare and Dante
Shakespeare’s view of heroism distinguishes itself from Dante by focusing on affirmative, rather than negative, moral imperatives. While Dante concerns himself chiefly with conveying what his readers ought not to do, Shakespeare concerns himself with conveying what his readers should do.
Human Nature in Dante and Machiavelli
Human evil constitutes a political tool for Machiavelli but connotes depravity to Dante. Human nature ought to align with a political agenda according to the former and God’s will according to the latter. For Machiavelli, Dante’s circles of hell can be turned upside-down to help rulers stay in power.
Faith vs. Reason: Reformed Inferno
Philosophical shifts from Dante’s Inferno to the Reformation and the Enlightenment demonstrate the changing relationship between religious faith and human reason in the West between the 13th and 18th centuries. The dramatic differences between the text’s and the later historical events’ dealings with faith and reason demonstrate a stark change from utter reliance on canonized religious ideals to a focus on reason, even reason of the lay class.