Socrates in love

In a new book about Socrates, Bettany Hughes sees him as a pioneer bridge-builder too, connecting words to deeds, passion to action.

Hughes urges us to keep the Socratic flame alight, ‘above all to remember ta erotica - the “things of love”, the things that drive us to pursue the good’. She paints him as a very relevant reminder today that ‘eudaimonia (a kind of good karma, realising all your potential as a human being) is more important than jewels, baths, designer clothes, warships, dogma’. She endorses his critique of ‘the pursuit of plenty’ and ‘mindless materialism’, arguing that his key challenge is to suggest that it is ‘us’, not ‘them’, who can make things better. She even flirts with casting him as a bit of an anti-imperialist, a bit of a proto-feminist. In her telling, the city takes the criticism and the man is defended. She makes Socrates sound very like Jesus, ceaselessly haranguing the Pharisees. She even has Socrates echoing modern-day concerns about thoughtless consumerism making us miserable. The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life, by Bettany Hughes

So the cliche is right: it's love that generates the passion that makes the world go 'round. Not stuff, not money.

If you like this book you'll probably love Chris Phillips' Socrates in Love.

no gurus

Here's a thought:

Spiritual life means mastery of oneself - no tears, no stupidities, no depression, no complaints, no praise, no blame. The opposites collapse. Where there are opposites there is no peace, no true happiness, no power. Human beings and animals are the victims and slaves of joy and sorrow, hatred and love. The lover of the Divine is above this. He does not lose his head - always calm, always in self-control, always in the same state, always all-independent. In disease and in death, in merriment and in happiness, he remains above the mind. Guru is such a person. He lives in the Light...

Here are some other thoughts, from Chris Phillips:

"It seems to me that the gurus are flourishing... There has been an upsurge of interest in the irrational." His solution: Socratic humility as a basis for respectful engagement across all our many cultural divides, and as a spur to "an enduring curiosity that cannot be quenched or satisfied by the facile responses of know-it-all gurus."

Or, to paraphrase the slightly more crytpic (and lyrical) words of Van Morrison: "no gurus, no teachers, no method." Well, no method except for the Socratic one.

Inspired

Speaking of "faithheads"...

(That term, by the way, popularized by Richard Dawkins, is more derogatory and incendiary than I'm generally comfortable with. But sometimes the company one must keep, here in the buckle of the Bible Belt, just makes it bubble up, benign intentions and tolerant impulses notwithstading. Sorry. But I'm leaving it in.)

A religious zealot and publisher in Murfreesboro, Tennessee named Shelton Smith comes in today for what strikes this free-thinker as a fawning and uncritical feature story in the Nashville Tennessean about his "embrace of old-time religion." That's not terribly unusual around these parts, unfortunately.

Smith, an "Independent Baptist," publishes Sword of the Lord. He is committed to halting "spiritual drift" and spreading the Verbal Inspiration of the Bible, the Deity of Christ, His Blood Atonement, Salvation by Faith, New Testament Soul Winning and the Premillennial Return of Christ; Opposing Modernism, Worldliness and Formalism."

Smith contends that only the 1872 King James Bible is inspired. All else is imposture and fraud.

So, inspiration happened once in all of recorded human history? It simply falls to you and me to salute and genuflect and defer and shut up?

Socrates and Emerson (and Twain and Nietzsche) had a lot to say about that benighted suggestion. Why are you and I here at all, if not to enjoy "an original relation to the universe" and so on? But Smith says simply: "There's what I think, and then there is what the Bible says. I'd rather go with what the Bible says."

I'd rather think about it myself, thanks all the same. I'd rather honor the inspiration that offers itself afresh every day, beginning with the sunrise, to me and you and possibly even to Shelton Smith, though I doubt he'd notice.

But what really galls about this story is the gratuitous insult to baseball fans the Tennessean reporter hurls with its first sentences: "Being a Christian is a lot like playing baseball. Get the fundamentals wrong, and everything goes to hell in a handbasket."

"Faithheads" is too kind.