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1. 1 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 31 October 2008:

   People who are enslaved to passions are not wealthy …

   Given the large number of folks in this western civilization that are drug-dependent, I agree whole-heartedly. If one adds all the other Anonymae, gamblers, alcoholics, porn addicts, spendaholics, et cetera ad nauseam, we may rank as the poorest rich country ever. I reckon the most mischievous amendments of the Postbellum years did nothing to improve society. The question we must ask ourselves is, do we have the cojones to repeal them? It might be in the best interest of our society to declare any and all getting government “treatment” for their conditions to be helots, i.e. — state property, and deprived of their right to vote. Not a sermon, just a thought.

2. 2 Comment by The Fronde on 31 October 2008:

   “In these dark times, his common-sense pagan wisdom has much to teach us.”

   The pagan religions of the world are the natural preparation for the final revelation found in Jesus Christ. Christ fulfills and transcends, but does not deny, the good which is to be found in pagan culture. We moderns do not understand Christianity because we have ceased to understand paganism. We have instead embraced a “third way,” consisting mainly of socialism and sentimentality, to which we erroneously attach the Christian label, and we do worse still; we qualify our heresy as “true Christianity.”

   Paleocons take note: Nothing can help our cause so much as a good old pagan appreciation for the facts of life. Reality is on our side. Remeber this, and do not despair.

3. 3 Comment by Josh Cooney on 31 October 2008:

   “he…understood property as the foundation of prosperity and happiness.”

   The fact that Xenophon begins with the household is already a radical departure from our understanding of economics. We think almost exclusively in terms of markets, free trade, and Wall Street. He works from the inside out. At the end of book I,while speaking about the effects of vices, Socrates’ words apply perfectly to our condition today: “…we must constantly fight for our freedom against these influences even more than against armed men trying to enslave us…mistresses such as I have described perpetually attack the bodies and souls and estates of men all the time that they dominate them.” Our vices cause far more damage than corporate greed and government stupidity combined.

   Would it be fair to say that for Xenophon the prosperity of the entire polis rests in the health of individual estates, even over several generations? What would the Greeks think of our practice of owning 3 or 4 homes in a lifetime, and then, finally, selling the last one to enter a retirement community in Florida?

   Though I’m not running for President, Xenophon’s words on the role of a wife in preserving wealth did remind me of my own grandmother. I recall with amazement her skill at gardening, canning, making meals from scratch, sewing, and knitting. Also, hand me downs were a given. As a successful lawyer and judge, my grandfather was a worthy breadwinner, but without my grandmother’s great skill at housewifery, I’m quite certain he would have squandered much of his income. If such women existed today, they might be enough to save us from economic ruin.

4. 4 Comment by Robert on 31 October 2008:

   In the Western Tradition the same truths keeps repeating themselves or revealing themselves to those who care to look or come to know them from generation to generation. These truths which the ignorant and condescending youth of today refer to in quotations as the “permanet things” but only because they do not know them. And why should they, since our institutions of learning have clogged the arteries of our “culture” which once upon a time took them for granted and actually did attempt to cultivate them like their own gardens.
   Here is John Donne describing in a poem the same truth that Xenophon remembered Socrates describing when the old phiosopher said:

   “My belief is that a good wife, being as she is the partner in a common estate, must needs be her husband’s counterpoise and counterpart for good”

   1500 years later John Donne describes the same or similar facet of relations between spouses in the following lines addressed to his wife upon his leaving for a brief trip.

   Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
   A breach, but an expansion,
   Like gold to aery thinness beat.

   If they be two, they are two so 25
   As stiff twin compasses are two ;
   Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

   And though it in the centre sit,
   Yet, when the other far doth roam, 30
   It leans, and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.

   Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
   Like th’ other foot, obliquely run ;
   Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
   And makes me end where I begun. “

5. 5 Comment by Frank on 1 November 2008:

   I’d read this and a few other works by him previously without thinking of Xenophon as not being brilliant – I was impressed.

   This sort of common sense wisdom brings one back to first principles – as you say it’s what people need in these dark times.

   The conversation style is more enjoyable than the text book. Were this but a list of points, it’d be boring. Pictures I think would make this far more popular, though I know there’s a popular aversion to “picture books”.

   I suspect some moderns will come away viewing how to train servants as manipulative, but we learn these lessons whether we acknowledge or ignore the lessons.

6. 6 Comment by Frank on 1 November 2008:

   Ah, what I mean is pictures would make this more enjoyable, though picture books are derided. I don’t mean going to the extent of a comic book though. Anyway, this conversation style is a potent medium.

7. 7 Comment by Andrew G. Van Sant on 1 November 2008:

   “My belief is that a good wife, being as she is the partner in a common estate, must needs be her husband’s counterpoise and counterpart for good; since, if it is through the transactions of the husband, as a rule, that goods of all sorts find their way into the house, yet it is by means of the wife’s economy and thrift that the greater part of the expenditure is checked, and on the successful issue or the mishandling of the same depends the increase or impoverishment of a whole estate.”

   “Dost thou contribute much wealth? but it is she [the wife] who preserves it, and this care of hers is an equivalent, and thus there is need of her, because many, who had great posessions, have lost all because they had not one to take care of them.”

   The second quote above is from St. Jhon Chrystostom’s Homily 5 on 2 Thessalonians as quoted on p. 132 of Patrick Mitchell’s The Scandal of Gender.

8. 8 Comment by Robert on 1 November 2008:

   Andrew,
   Thanks for this additional echo from another observer who noticed an abiding difference between men and women, between feminine and masculine qualities, This acknowledgement is part of our Tradition “And to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them.” It is Marx and Engels who appealed to the anti-tradition in their discussion of the family and promised in exchange for liberation from these ancient realities men and women could be free and happier. As was once said of a great Church architect,” If you want to understand their work, look around you.” This talk of Obama being a Marxist or McCain a socialist is all non-sense because as a past issue of Chronicles correctly stated, “We Are All Socialist Now!” There are only two Traditions in the West and it is not difficult to distinguish them — one procedes by attacking, destroying and sapping the living thing that gives it life and the other energizes and sustains it. One gives life and the other despises it. It is obvious in our times who has pride of place in practcially every sphere, but our civilization has endured such attacks before and will endure this one as well. Provided of course that the younger generation listening in on these conversations will wonder, admire and live instead of fearing, hating and destroying.

9. 9 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 1 November 2008:

   @5 and 6 Frank

   Why not a “graphic novel?” Then it would be picked up for movie rights — as so many recent blockbusters are. Actually when the Khazar scum in Hollywood find out that Xenophon has been dead for a few centuries. they’ll hack out a revised script — based on a true story — and claim the author’s fees on the back end, and the whole story can be either ignored or derided, and the folks who need it most will be deprived of yet another classic.

10. 10 Comment by Josh Cooney on 1 November 2008:

    Robert,

    I’m not sure how far into the book you are, but I think you’ll enjoy chapter VII, where Ischomachus discusses the natural roles of men and women, field and household, in procuring a wealthy estate. He seems to have the crazy idea that a man’s body and temper are better suited to outdoor labor and war, and a woman is superior in running a household and nurturing children. Further, Ischomachus can see that when we go against nature, we end up in the soup: “If someone behaves in a way contrary to the nature god has given him, perhaps his disobedience will not escape the notice of the gods, and he will pay a penalty for neglecting his proper business…” Greek wisdom is so simple it’s almost like, well, common sense.

11. 11 Comment by T. Chan on 1 November 2008:

    Dr. Fleming, is there a reason why the business of educating a woman to be a good wife is assigned to the husband and not to her parents?

12. 12 Comment by Robert on 1 November 2008:

    Josh,
    These cliches such as ” Greek wisdom is so simple it’s almost like, well, common sense” are true. In the long history of the world this really is the common sense of most people in most places. The uncommon non-sense is same sex marriages, treating our women like playboy models, forcing them to get jobs, to sleep rough like soldiers and grizzly bears, to hunt moose, run fishing nets and glorify their sass in political circles; and to create effeminates on the other side of the equation with pacificm, sentimentality in religion, co-ed education for adolescent boys and other such practices. We are the exception in the history of culture, the experiment that has proven why the ancient and common sense was indeed common. . That is to say, we have it all almost without exception, ass-backwards. We have created the “change that made a difference” and are now groping in the dark after the other half of the half truths we embraced.

13. 13 Comment by Josh Cooney on 1 November 2008:

    Robert,

    I should probably add that I think much of Greek thought penetrates very deep into the human mind and heart. I din’t mean to reduce “Greek wisdom” to the level of a cliche. I only meant to underscore that Xenophon’s common sense is so notable because it is so rare today.

14. 14 Comment by Hermes on 1 November 2008:

    Ο λόγος για οποίο ελληνική σοφία φαίνεται τόσο απλό είναι γιατί δεν βλάπτη τη φύση. Συγκρίνετε αυτό με ότι άλλο πολιτισμό που είναι τόσο δημοφιλές σήμερα που μισεί τη Φύση.

    The reason why Greek wisdom appears so simple is because it does not go against Nature.

    Thanks Mr Fleming.

15. 15 Comment by Allen Wilson on 2 November 2008:

    Considering Socrates’ comments on the training of a wife in household management, what would he say of it if he saw the sorry state of our own age? How could you train a wife in household management when she has grown up as she has, in this world of TV ads and all the manipulative marketing campaigns of today? We live in a society where all our base emotions are manipulated on a daily basis to sell us something we dont need. Obviously the problem of mismanagement existed back then too, but it has expanded by a factor of ten thousand today.

    Aside from this, since Greek girls married at about twelve years of age, he would be in prison already, with all this talk of taking young girls away from home and ‘training’ them. It’s a commentary on how depraved our society is compared to the society of the Greeks that they could train teenage girls to manage a household or even an estate and we corrupt them beyond redemption while at the same time preventing them from marrying.

16. 16 Comment by Allen Wilson on 2 November 2008:

    ‘Soc. A good suggestion, Critobulus, for the base mechanic arts, so called, have got a bad name; and what is more, are held in ill repute by civilised communities, and not unreasonably; seeing they are the ruin of the bodies of all concerned in them, workers and overseers alike, who are forced to remain in sitting postures and to hug the loom, or else to crouch whole days confronting a furnace. Hand in hand with physical enervation follows apace enfeeblement of soul: while the demand which these base mechanic arts makes on the time of those employed in them leaves them no leisure to devote to the claims of friendship and the state. How can such folk be other than sorry friends and ill defenders of the fatherland? So much so that in some states, especially those reputed to be warlike, no citizen [1] is allowed to exercise any mechanical craft at all.’

    This sounds like Jefferson, and a lot like my own personal experience. Wage jobs as the exist today are enslaving, they make you waste your life, promote ignorance by denying those who have the desire to undertake humane and leisurely pursuits the time and energy to do so, break down family cohesion, especially in the extended family, prevent the refinement of both individuals and society, and generally work to break down civilisation. I think the agrarians were right. Industrialism, when it is allowed to take over and define society, is a road to ruin.

17. 17 Comment by Robert on 2 November 2008:

    #13 “I should probably add that I think much of Greek thought penetrates very deep into the human mind and heart. I din’t mean to reduce “Greek wisdom” to the level of a cliche.”

    Josh,
    I intuited what you meant and meant what I said about cliches. They are like old customs, fairy tells, and fables — there is always more to them than what the modernist would have us believe. The difference between sheep and goats, the size of a mustard seed, a woman’s place, a man’s resposibilities, etc. Don’t ever be afraid to use a cliche if it describes accurately what you mean. Socartes described courage as knowing what to fear and what not to fear. ‘Fear those who kill the spirit, not those who kill the body”, is another good cliche.

18. 18 Comment by Josh Cooney on 2 November 2008:

    “There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies. I may be wrong, as I am no commerical expert, but I have not heard of them yet.” –GKC

    Somewhere along the way we have lost our proper reverence for the life of the household. Xenophon compares it to the action of a beehive and a military garrison. It’s a far more interesting place than the office or factory.

19. 19 Comment by Robert on 2 November 2008:

    @19 “I think the agrarians were right. Industrialism, when it is allowed to take over and define society, is a road to ruin.”

    Mr. Wilson are you still teaching? If so I would like to know because your presence in any educational setting would be another example of minor miracles still occuring in our midst. God bless you.

20. 20 Comment by TJF on 2 November 2008:

    Yes, one important aspect of pagan thought is the way it reflects the Logos and constitutes a Praeparatio Evangelica. There are sincere Christians who take the point of view of Tertullian, that we should eschew the entire classical inheritance. Two problems ensue: 1) We condemn ourselves to barbary–not even Augustine succeeded in drawing up a Christian curriculum; and 2) we are acting as if our faith and its moral system were capriciously imposed by an arbitrary creator on people whose nature is inconsistent with reason and morality. I had a good Baptist friend in college, and he used to say that if he were not a Christian, he would he capable of every crime. I pointed out to him that other than drinking too much and chasing girls, most of us “pagans” were not so bad, really. Speaking personally, I didn’t kill or rob anyone, preferred not to lie, and did not chase other men’s wives or girlfriends. The extraordinary thing about Christianity in the beginning, as Justin Martyr points out, is that it made ordinary ignorant people capable of routinely living according to the highest standards that the philosophers advocated and found difficult to live up to.

    Yes, we shall get down to men and women later in the book. Why, though, is it the husband’s job? I don’t think Xenophon rules out the idea of parents–rather mothers–training their daughters, but it is not something that one would want to take for granted. Besides, many Greek girls married rather young, and their education would have just begun. The Athenians were particularly restrictive, by the way, and disapproved both of the education received by some Ionian Greek women and of the freedom enjoyed by Spartan women.

21. 21 Comment by Marc on 2 November 2008:

    Further as to Josh@18, let me add a further quote from GKC, from his essay “The Little Birds Who Won’t Sing”: “If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while auditing and bankers while banking? If there are songs for all the separate things that have to be done in a boat, why are there not songs for all the separate things that need to be done in a bank?” Chesterton on the “economy” (especially as that word is being used here), on men and women and their respective duties and responsibilities, on the family, and on so many other things, seems so radical and counter to what many of us were brought up with and what all of us are constantly bombarded with now by our garbage culture, but his wisdom in so many ways is simply a restated and baptised form of what Dr. Fleming calls “common sense pagan wisdom” — as he himself expressed many times.

22. 22 Comment by Josh Cooney on 2 November 2008:

    “Yes, one important aspect of pagan thought is the way it reflects the Logos and constitutes a Praeparatio Evangelica.”

    Dr. Fleming,

    I apologize if this is a stupid question, but could you explain the meaning of “Logos.” I’ve never been confident that I understand the word. It seems that the Greeks use it to mean “reason.” St. John calls it the Word, obviously referring to Christ. I’ve heard preachers use it to describe Christ as the “image” or “icon” of God the Father, which makes sense, but that seems to have a different connotation than reason. The way you use it in the sentence above suggests that the Logos reflects the general order and plan of creation. Perhaps something like what C.S. Lewis meant by the Tao in The Abolition of Man?

23. 23 Comment by The Fronde on 3 November 2008:

    @21 Josh Cooney,

    I know you addressed this question to Dr. Fleming, but I thought I might add something as well. If I recall correctly from Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology, the “logos-structure of reality” is a profound and all-inclusive metaphysical absolute that has its roots in the divine life of the Trinity. In fact, it *is* the divine life of the Trinity, in which all prior categories of philosophical understanding, expressed by means of polarities (i.e static and dynamic elements, essential and existential natures, etc.), are united and transcended by Revelation. The term is all-inclusive because it recognizes, without falling into the heresy of Modalism, that, while no one Person of the Trinity is imaginable without the other two Persons, the Father-Son-and-Holy-Spirit interaction is the necessary and appropriate way of witnessing to God’s omnipotence in all dimensions of human existence.

    1. God the Father (God’s originating creativity). God as Father is the unconditional ground and abyss of all Being. He infinitely transcends all catagories of reason and perception. In his love he actively creates and sustains everything that has being, while also judging his creation as finite, conditional, and concupiscent. God the Father is correlated with man’s existential questions about the source and nature of his being. He is the God of philosophers, the God whose existence was intuited by Aristotle (the “prime mover”), arrived at by the Thomistic proofs, and implied by the childlike infinite regression of “whys.”

    2. God the Son (God’s saving love). Jesus the Christ is the logos made flesh. His life, death, and resurrection reveal to us all there is to see of the Father. He has won salvation for the entire fallen world by subjecting himself to the forces of existential estangement (sin and finitude) and conquering them. Only a human being unites all dimensions of created being – the physical, biological, psychological, cultural, and spiritual dimensions – together in one integral self. Jesus as man, and especially the resurrection of his body and particular human nature, indicate that all dimensions of being participate in salvation and salvation history. The teachings and miracles of Jesus’ ministry are examples of the Spirit of God in action, but this takes us directly to the final Person.

    3. God the Holy Spirit (God’s directing creativity). God as Spirit is the rational structure of physical reality as well as the providential structure of historical reality. It is the work of the spirit which allows us to enter into revelatory constellations with events in the physical and historical worlds. Thus, God reveals himself through the prophetic history of the Hebrews, culminating in the final and complete revelation, his son Jesus Christ. It is also the Holy Spirit which gives rise to the structures of life: causality, the dependability of natural laws, generation, growth, entropy, decay, cultural and dynastic change, etc.

    All this is “logos.” The logos is the unity of reason and revelation, the doctrine that all truth is an expression of Him who is truth itself.

24. 24 Comment by TJF on 3 November 2008:

    I thank the Frondeur for his elucidation, but I don’t think Paul Tillich is an especially good authority to quote in response to philological questions. His theology strikes me as a modernist caprice of no use to serious students, and about his personal morals, the less said the better.

    Logos means a number of things in everyday Greek: speech or rational utterance but also ration and proportion. The Stoics, borrowing from Heraclitus, used the word to express the organizing principle of the universe. St. John begins his Gospel with the statement that the Logos was in the beginning and through Him, all things that have come into existence came into existence. Thus in traditional Christian terms, logos properly refers to the Son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity. The Authorized Version’s use of “word” to translate Logos, thus, has many problems, not the least of which has been the tendency of some Fundamentalists to interpret John’s opening sentence as a reference to Scripture.

25. 25 Comment by Josh Cooney on 3 November 2008:

    Thank you for both responses, they were helpful.

26. 26 Comment by Robert on 3 November 2008:

    Dr. Fleming,
    What is the purpose of managing a household? Or perhaps I should ask, ” What was the purpose for the average family during the time of Socrates?” To add to ones wealth, to rear a large family, to pay tribute to the gods, or was it muti-cultural: each individual satisfying his own desires independently of long customs and practices,? Was it a secular culture like our own ? A culture of many religious varieties ? Could you just give us a little picture of the ordinary life of its citizens ?

27. 27 Comment by Edward on 3 November 2008:

    “People who are enslaved to passions are not wealthy, no matter how much they may own, because they use their money to their own detriment.”

    Does it follow, then, that only the virtuous can be considered truly wealthy?

    Also, if we accept this idea along with the Christian view of the corrupting nature of wealth, can we say that wealth is better achieved through poverty?

28. 28 Comment by Allen Wilson on 3 November 2008:

    @27: Dr Fleming most likely will have a better answer, but I think of it this way: what good is money blown on things we dont need? Does is not harm us to be under the spell of those desires which cause us to waste money, especially since we have that little feeling way back there in the back of our minds telling us that it’s not right? Then, when we have spent the money and are stuck with what we wanted but didn’t need, it takes up space, we eventually realise we wasted our money, and we resent ourselves for it.

    I would think that only the virtuous can be considered wealthy since prudence in managing money and property is itself a virtue, aside from the fact that immoral behaviour generally leads to waste and loss of what you had.

    Your third question is a little above my head, unless you’re talking about spiritual wealth, and all I can come up with is: ‘put the Kingdom of Heaven first and all else shall be added unto you’. Spiritual wealth is unconnected to material wealth, and can come to one in conditions of extreme material wealth or abject poverty. What is important is that you put the Kingdom of Heaven first, then it matters little whether you become a tycoon or die in poverty.

29. 29 Comment by Josh Cooney on 3 November 2008:

    @27 “Also, if we accept this idea along with the Christian view of the corrupting nature of wealth, can we say that wealth is better achieved through poverty?”

    I think many monks and ascetics would think so. That seems to be the logic of taking a vow of poverty. If one believes that wealth is harming his soul, or that one can love God more perfectly in poverty, then I would think poverty may be neccessary. But we are not all called to be monks, and even monks are not perfect. So, I would say, for some people (spiritual) wealth is better achieved through poverty. I would differentiate between poverty and squalor, though.

30. 30 Comment by TJF on 4 November 2008:

    Added:

    IV Socrates distinguishes between the baser mechanical arts that distort the body and narrow the mind and the nobler arts of farming and the military. He cites the example of the younger Cyrus, whom he had served in his attempt to seize the Persian throne. Cyrus was a well-known Hellenophile but also a model Persian. Xenophon, like Herodotus, admires many features of Persian life, a position that some modern multi-culturalists would say was incompatible with the supposed xenophobia of the Greeks. He repeats teh story that Cyrus claimed never to have sat down to supper without having worked up a sweat, either in agricultural work or in some military exercise. Socrates goes on (V) to praise the life of the farmer as the most conducive to human happiness: It brings plenty, both for everyday use but also the products to be offered in sacrifice to the gods. And, agriculture–unlike mechanic arts that distort the body or business that requires no exercise–demands the exercise that makes the body strong and healthy. He even goes so far as to praise the beauty of the natural world, which Greek writers often take entirely for granted. Farming also requires the kind of cooperation that will be demanded in battle, when the farmer-soldier is called upon to defend his land and those of his neighbors.

31. 31 Comment by Josh Cooney on 5 November 2008:

    What can the agrarian sensiblities of Xenophon’s Socrates teach us today? Even those of us who are sympathetic to the thought of Wendell Berry, the Southern Agrarians, the Distributists, etc. are not farmers, and if their ideas were far fetched in their own day, they are almost obsolete now. My parents and grandparents were not farmers, but they did like small town and country life; they would garden, hunt, fish, cut their own wood, etc. But in my generation (21-30) that has almost disappeared. Everybody wants a cushy office job, a big screen television, and an ipod. I suspect Xenophon would see these things as weakening the body and soul as well. Maybe if times get really tought people will see things differently, God only knows.

    “We’re from North California and south Alabam
    And little towns all around this land
    And we can skin a buck; we can run a trot-line
    And a country boy can survive
    Country folks can survive”

32. 32 Comment by Robert on 6 November 2008:

    Josh,
    Most men are farmers, some are craftsmen, some clerics, some soldiers and a few are lovers of wisdom. These categories are as handy today as ever although our own ideas of these various types has narrowed. Most people like to garden and landscape in some form or fashion even if they have others doing the work. There are more than a few with their garages full of saws and hand tools who like to work on projects from restoring old cars to building bird houses, furniture, projects around the home and other such things. It is common among modernist and liberals to simply deny things they don’t understand and to be superstitious about things they think they know. So as I read Xenophon I try to understand him by asking myself or musing to myself, “Is it true?” In large cities the beautiful parks, the fountains, the lakeshore drives,with some folks jogging in the semi- nude, or riding their bikes, the apartment garden pots, manicured lawns and beautiful yards, etc. are all a reflection of Xenophon’s description of most men’s desire to farm , which “demands the exercise that makes the body strong and healthy. He even goes so far as to praise the beauty of the natural world.” Imagine if we worked our own gardens, how much less jogging would be necessary in the world!!
    Now of course if the only person you recognize as a farmer today are truck drivers in the fields driving back and forth slapping in crops and spreading fertilizer a few weeks a year, then you probably don’t have the imagination to benefit much from ancient writers. The only book I would ever recommend written by Victor David Hanson, (and then only if you found it somewhere used for no more than a quarter or a dime) is his book about farmers in California. Its value is what it says about farmers and the fact that they are alot like brick layers, lawyers, doctors and writers –some are really good, some are really bad, but most are pretty average folks. Like Xenophon says “most people” are farmers.

33. 33 Comment by Josh Cooney on 6 November 2008:

    “So as I read Xenophon I try to understand him by asking myself or musing to myself, “Is it true?” In large cities the beautiful parks, the fountains, the lakeshore drives,with some folks jogging in the semi- nude, or riding their bikes, the apartment garden pots, manicured lawns and beautiful yards, etc. are all a reflection of Xenophon’s description of most men’s desire to farm”

    Robert,

    Yes, I think you are right. It seems no matter how much industry and technology change our way of life, people have an inherent, if subconcious, desire to connect with the land. From a Christian perspective, the desire to garden and landscape reflects our ability to participate in God’s Creation. Once we lose all form of creativity then we are in big trouble. It probably all goes back to property, then. Perhaps we should replace “farmer” with “yeoman.” In that case, a healthy economy is one of many yeomans, or property owners (not neccessarily farmers), who can retain a sense of independence and creativity.

34. 34 Comment by Robert on 6 November 2008:

    #33 Yes, I think you have it right. But folks are no longer willing to live the simpler lives that obtaining independence would require. We admire the Amish for their independence, but few of us would be willing to make that type of sacrifice to obtain it.
    Another matter is the artificiality of our every day existence — neo-cons originated in a modern experiment which forced humans to live under neon office lights, climate controled conditions, high/rise apartments, asphalt and think tank offices full of ugly plastics that none of us have any co-natural knowledge of at all. Eventually our whole culture despaired of real wood paneling, ivy covered stones, or the babbling brooks that Socrates and his students listened to below their conversations. When people’s senses are permanently deprived of anything real or anything co-natural to fix upon, they become dulled and people become sentimental with even a small taste of reality or honesty. Some say the principles of modernity are materialsim and Atheism but later writers discovered the principles to be artificiality and sentimentality. Whichever is the most accurate description, one can certainly conclude that Xenophen and Socrates were different and in many ways much better men than we are.

35. 35 Comment by Mormon Paleo on 6 November 2008:

    Dr. Fleming wrote:

    “The two purposes of mariage, as he says, are 1) procreation of children to continue the family, and 2) to rear the children to the point that they will be able to reciprocate when the parents are old. The Greeks very firmly believed that it was the child’s duty to take care of aged parents, and that is Medea’s chief preoccupation, in Euripides’ play, when she murders her children. I knew a Chinese lady whose children did well and she made each one of them contribute $100 per month to her, if only as an acknowledgment of their debt.”

    This brings to mind a closing scene in the controversial late 1960’s film, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” when the African-American father of the Sidney Poitier character, trying to convince his son not to marry a white girl, tells his son that he owes him for raising him. Sidney Poitier’s response, so characteristic of the moral bankruptcy of that time (and much more today), was the profane, “I don’t owe you a G–d–n thing.”

    This was not simply an apathy of taking care of one’s parents, but a rejection of that notion altogether, and a declaration that respect for parents was at-most extraneous and more likely a burdensome chain to be tossed aside.

36. 36 Comment by Robert on 6 November 2008:

    “So long as there is an orderly life, to say nothing of civilization, it is woman’s job to make man work to deserve her. ”

    This is quite a beautiful way of putting the matter. It is often argued today whether it is man or woman who have the principle role in maintaining a civilization. ( And thus, who is more responsible for the current break down.) It is like asking if the fish rotted from the head down or the tail up. Our univerities are full of men and women working overtime (and full time) to discredit this truth that deserves repeating.

37. 37 Comment by Jim on 6 November 2008:

    I hope I’m not sullying the discussion by posting the following, but thought it might be interesting input as to how the post-modern world treats this dialog. It’s from Wikipedia. Perhaps Dr. Fleming would like to add a line or two.

    Begin Wikipedia: Recently the dialogue has received much attention from two rather disparate intellectual traditions. Michel Foucault devoted a chapter in his The History of Sexuality (1976-1984) to “The House of Ischomachus”, and Leo Strauss wrote a political-philosophical commentary on the dialogue. Foucault took Xenophon’s depiction of the relationship between Ischomachus and his wife as a classical expression of the ancient Greek ideology of power, according to which a man’s control of his emotions was externally reflected in his control of his wife, his slaves, and his political subordinates. Strauss took the Oeconomicus as a more ironic examination of the nature of the gentleman, virtue, and domestic relationships.
    Following Foucault, feminist scholars and social historians have explored the Oeconomicus as a source for Greek attitudes on the relationship between men and women, but successive interpretations have differed. Some see Xenophon’s attitude toward women as misogynist and patriarchal, while others maintain that he was a proto-feminist in certain ways.
    The ironic line of interpretation has treated Ischomachus as a target of satire rather than a stand-in for Xenophon. Many have suggested that the Ischomachus of the dialogue is the same man whose family became the subject of ridicule in Athenian political oratory. After this Ischomachus died, his widow moved in with her daughter and son-in-law Callias and soon became pregnant with the man’s child, which eventually led to the daughter’s suicide attempt. Callias was frequently parodied in Athenian comedies for his sexual excesses and pseudo-intellectualism.
    Some have taken Xenophon’s use of Ischomachus as a supposed expert in the education of a wife as an instance of anachronistic irony, a device used by Plato in his Socratic dialogues. The import of such irony has also been the subject of much contention: are his wife’s actions a sign of a bad education or just the inevitable result of the loss of the controlling influence in her life? How responsible was Ischomachus for his daughter’s marriage to a man of such poor character?
    As for being informative historical sources about Socrates, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and his Symposium are regarded by most scholars today as practically worthless.[1]
    ““ end Wikipedia

38. 38 Comment by Robert on 6 November 2008:

    “As for being informative historical sources about Socrates, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and his Symposium are regarded by most scholars today as practically worthless.”

    Jim,
    I will wait for Dr. Fleming to knock the muti-headed monster completely dead and to cut off its ears but the above quote is so laughable as to be immune from attack. I suggest instead of taking anybody’s word for it, you simply read Plato’s Apology, Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus, Ion and perhaps a few of the others dialogues ( they are not exhausting to read in any form) and then read Xenophon. You will come to understand why much of what “most scholars conclude today” is either half truth or arrogance reduced to subjective guess work with agenda. Serious scholars concluded the same thing about New Testament scripture years ago and some of the poorer protestants have been believing it since 18th century, while just recently apostate Catholics seem to have re-discovered it and picked up where their protestant friends had left off some two centuries ago,.

39. 39 Comment by Jim on 6 November 2008:

    Robert,
    Oh, I got a laugh out of it all right! Just wanted Dr Fleming to cover the modernist “interpretation” before the subject closes. I know Foucault and Strauss being listed as the only valid interpretations will set him off, LOL. Let’s just get a third (true) option added to Wikipedia. After all, in today’s wired generation, that’s all they will ever see when they do their “research” for their “perfessors”. Thanks for the comment, RR.
    Jim

40. 40 Comment by Andrew G. Van Sant on 6 November 2008:

    Josh Cooney @33:

    You may like a couple of short books by Vigen Guroian:

    Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening

    and

    The Fragrance of God.

41. 41 Comment by Robert on 7 November 2008:

    Jim,
    Here is one final thought on Xenophon and his knowledge and admiration of Socrates which the Gradgrind types, who think a horse should be defined by its number of teeth, will never understand or even admit as existing in human experience and history. Thanks, and good to hear from you.

    “It was but the other day that, with an American friend at my side, I
    stood looking at the little brass plate which says that here Charles
    Stuart faced (he not only faced, but he refused) the authority of his
    judges. I know not by what delicate mechanism of the soul that record
    may seem at one moment a sort of tourist thing, to be neglected or
    despised, and at another moment a portent. But I will confess that all
    of a sudden, pointing out this very well-known record upon the brass let
    into the stone in Westminster Hall, I suddenly felt the presence of the
    thing. Here all that business was done: they were alive; they were in
    the Present as we are. Here sat that tender-faced, courageous man, with
    his pointed beard and his luminous eyes; here he was a living man
    holding his walking-stick with the great jewel in the handle of it; here
    was spoken in the very tones of his voice (and how a human voice
    perishes!–how we forget the accents of the most loved and the most
    familiar voices within a few days of their disappearance!); here the
    small gestures, and all the things that make up a personality, marked
    out Charles Stuart. When the soul is seized with such sudden and
    positive conviction of the substantial past it is overwhelmed; and
    Europe is full of such ghosts.”

42. 42 Comment by TJF on 7 November 2008:

    From Ft. Worth, without my laptop, a few brief remarks. Life’s too short to bother with either Foucault or Strauss. Neither can be taken seriously. As for the Straussian view of Xenophon, it is the same as their view of everyone: Every great writer is “ironic,” by which they mean he is a liar. The only element of truth in this, as has been explained more than once, is that the Straussians elevate lying to the highest moral level, because it aids them in their search for power, even if it only means the power to infiltrate and corrupt academic disciplines. I have read and known Marxists I respected, but nary a single Straussian. To classical scholarship, they–unlike Marxists and feminists–have contributed nothing. Foucault did one service to classics, namely, he infected a leftist academic with AIDS and shortened his soul-destroying career.

    The lesson we can take from Xenophon is not whether we can or should become farmers but how can we begin to look at our economic lives from a perspective that frees us from the double strait-jacket of liberal individualism and socialist collectivism. But, on this issue, we cannot escape our humanity. Man by his nature loves things that grow and leap, even when his not killing and eating them. EO Wilson has suggested that we are all by our nature inclined to be naturalists, because the study of nature was necessary in human evolution. He also suggests, not altogether fancifully, that men like to have vistas of parkland because that was the terrain in which we evolved and on which we can view game and spy out our enemies. For whatever reason, men think of Paradise as a garden, which is of course what paradise means in Persian, from which the Greeks borrow the word. Not a vegetable garden but parkland, fruit trees, etc.

    As for Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, it is a perfectly dreadful movie from every perspective, but when I watched it I wondered if the scriptwriter did not want us to loathe Poitier as a self-righteous prig. This reminds me of another script I have been thinking about, the script for Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. At the end of the film, the young people are in the back of the bus, after Dustin H abducts Katherine Ross from her wedding, and they look at each other clueless. My old friend EC Kopff, at the time, told me it was a conservative script, because they are shown as completely without purpose. I doubted you could get away with that in Hollywood. Years later I discovered that the script was written by long-time Chronicles reader, Calder Willingham, who also wrote the script for Little Big Man and his fine novel, End as a Man. Dr. Kopff was absolutely right. I wonder if Nichols understood? My point in bringing this up is simply this: Here in Obamaland, we are–at least that portion of “we” that voted for change–in the back of the bus (pun intended) with the kids.

43. 43 Comment by Robert on 7 November 2008:

    Jim @39 said:
    “I know Foucault and Strauss being listed as the only valid interpretations will set him off, LOL. Let’s just get a third (true) option added to Wikipedia.”

    Dr. Fleming states,
    ” I have read and known Marxists I respected, but nary a single Straussian. To classical scholarship, they–unlike Marxists and feminists–have contributed nothing. Foucault did one service to classics, namely, he infected a leftist academic with AIDS and shortened his soul-destroying career. ”

    Jim,
    Well, you did ask for it. And good luck with Wikipedia and the third option !!!!rr

44. 44 Comment by JE on 7 November 2008:

    Many thanks to TJF and all contributors for starting and fructifying this discussion. I would have contributed earlier, fearing somewhat that this apparently prosaic text might too easily not bear the rich fruit it might, well-tended, produce..had my computer not literally fallen apart, and my writing not fallen behind. But it seems that Xenophon needs no defense from this classics grad!

    A few words, however, pertaining partly to the text, and, a little less, to the discussion. First, Xenophon is actually talking in a thoroughly non-blindered way about the kind of things that the much-blindered academy infuriatingly trips over itself trying, and failing, to explain. The intellect is for contemplating ens per se; the theorists, if they consider themselves responsible, think it is for ‘making the world a better place’. (No need at the moment to trace this attitude precisely to Eden-exiting gnosticism, but surely at even a glance we might see glimpses of pathetic creaturely pride: we can all tell, I think, that this sort of ‘making the world a better place’ is somehow exactly the opposite of ‘tending the God-given Garden’.) The result is that the theorists bungle the world completely, and precisely the seriousness of their theory births Nazism and Communism — which, twentieth-century evils as they are, are something worse than than merely A Group of Bad People Messing Things Up.

    Xenophon is not interested in ‘making the world a better place’. The Oeconomicus presupposes what Socrates (Pelagianly) claimed as demonstrable doctrine, and what Platonic rhetoric perhaps sometimes glosses over: that the reader is genuinely interested in living and acting well. (He may not be; but then Xenophon is not really talking to him.) The craft of management does not treat ends; the Oeconomicus is written as if the ends were already known, but the means to achieve them not entirely clear. Platonic knowledge of ends comes from disembodied contemplation; Xenophontic knowledge comes from plain sense, in both senses. This, I think, explains why Xenophon’s Socrates’ descriptions are vivid, meaningful, and alive, while Plato’s Socrates’ are fascinating and thought-provoking, but not very familiar, and certainly not as alive.

    Socrates’ distinction between the two kinds of possessors roughly parallels the distinction between the two ‘kinds’ of money — ‘commodity’ and ‘medium of exchange’. (Here I think the Misesians are wrong, and Aristotle is right, but that is because Mises is a Kantian, as is just about every other silly intellectual.) The difference is profound; and unless the first is strongly subaltern to the second, the difference easily becomes the difference between world-affirming and world-rejecting, the latter without the implicit affirmation of sacrifice. The theoretical distinction is between a subjective-utility notion of value, and a kind of Hellenized timocratic analogue to a Marxist labor notion of value. Only a madman or a miser would take more joy in money than in a glass of wine — even if the miser were an a metallist and the money were a brick of gold. All capitalists (of a sort) are misers and all ideologues are madmen, and it is rather too easy in this post/neo-Marxist world to suppose that all men must be either or both. Xenophon is neither; his Socrates values means in proportion to their ends, and prefers ‘these’ values to ‘value as such’. This is why he needs to give us so lovely and impressive a *picture* of the kalos-kai-agathos man.

    Charles Williams, the Oxford publisher and Inkling, wrote an astonishing poem on money, part of his Arthurian cycle ‘Taliesin through Logres’ (the only significant Arthurian poetry of the twentieth century); he treats exactly this distinction in a way that is somehow, I think, very profoundly correct, but rather obscurely so (and I’m afraid that’s all I can say at the moment, but look at the poem if you can find a copy). The repeated stanza-ultimate line is ‘money is a medium of exchange’, or rather very slight variations on this formula, producing some deep and powerful poesy; Luther’s interpretation of Tzetzel has something to do with it (and Williams talks about this elsewhere), and I do think that ecclesiology can never be left entirely out of economics or politics, and is perhaps the reason economics and politics can never in any case really come apart. But this is to ramble into vagueness, and to stray far from Xenophon’s clarity in particulars.

45. 45 Comment by JE on 7 November 2008:

    One other note on Tillich, Foucault, and Strauss –

    I don’t know Tillich well, but his logos-doctrine sounds like an vaguely Kantian form of some of Scotus’ theological positions. This is most likely quite unfair to Tillich, but I’ll proceed on this assumption for now, hoping that the crude, shoe-horning translation won’t catastrophically harm its offspring.

    Now the danger of this part of Scotism is that by strongly theologizing everything, it verges on a kind of panentheism; while the danger of the antithetical part of Thomism is that its epistemology becomes too easily dualistic. The direction of much modern Catholic theology, and some Lutheran too, is very much panentheistic — mostly, I think, because it is attempting to respond to Kant’s and Hegel’s dualism. (It is in any case significantly, and sometimes explicitly, Scotist.)

    Scotus avoids this error (or tries to avoid it) by a radical position on divine contingency — and he gets there only by an extraordinarily complex system of metaphysical and logical distinctions, quite a bit of which was at the time, and is now, simply not understood. But one of the problems with the perichoretic paradigm that Tillich is (I think) proposing is exactly that it tends to remove contingency from the world by projecting Trinitarian relations onto creation univocally (as if ‘ad intra’ meant anything outside of a single substance!). (But I’m probably quite wrong about Tillich, ignorant of his writing as I am.)

    As to Foucault — TJF is quite right about Foucault and life’s brevity. His stuff is not entirely worthless, but everyone — except the madmen, and including the misers — has much better things to do.

    Strauss is *not* entirely worthless, and *has* contributed to classical scholarship — but that contribution *is* their elevation of lying. (Some Straussians are simply dimwits, but so are plenty of classicists.) It *is* true, as Straussians say, that all of Aristotle is unintelligible nonsense if God does not exist. But then it is simply true that God exists; the Straussians simply wrongly assert that He does not. Their reading of Aristotle affirms, satanically, that at the center of Everything is a Vast Empty Hole, which Aristotle, along with the other ‘greats’, falsely fills by lying that God Is. But at least they know Who is at the center of Everything. (Satan did too, and elevated lies for the same reason.)

    The Straussians on Vergil are a good case in point. They are pessimists — they think that Vergil is saying that Augustus’ empire is a bad thing. Now indeed, because they are Straussians, they think that the bad thing is necessary — and hence ‘good’ in the mendacified sense of ‘desirable for a liar’; but at least they are not goofy colonialists, trying to comfort their little Victorian consciences by praising the glory of supreme rule. But they go much farther than other pessimists, arguing that Vergil is asserting not only that Augustus is bad-and-therefore-good, but even that the intelligibility of the entire universe, which Lucretius had affirmed in his colossal ‘De Rerum Natura’, is a dangerous error, because of this mysterious force called ‘furor’.

    At least this most bleak of Vergilian interpretations shows us just how miserable (and pathetic) even the most brilliant pagan really is. Dante’s Vergil cannot even get through Purgatory; Chesterton is right about the Praeparatio Evangelica: the closer man comes to Paradise without the Incarnate, the more terrifyingly the flaming sword blasts man’s shame-twisted face. Most classical scholarship — most scholarship today, period — wouldn’t even bring us into this ballpark. I perhaps show my youth and presumption when I say that I would rather fight Hell than Harvard Law. (Or Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, or the World Bank, or whatever.) (Of course nobody *really* would. (And I’d instantly be crushed by the least powerful messenger from Harvard Law.) But the cross of Christianity is that this is what Christ did in His body, and His Body is what we are in; and the joy of Christianity is that He is in His body, and so in Him we are, victorious.)

46. 46 Comment by Jim on 7 November 2008:

    Excellent posts JE! Thanks.

    So perhaps, JE, you will want to make the update to Wikipedia instead of TJF. It wouldn’t be to rebut either of the two clowns but rather to let honest researchers know there is the third, REAL, understanding of Xenophon.

47. 47 Comment by Robert on 8 November 2008:

    JE@45 “I perhaps show my youth and presumption when I say that I would rather fight Hell than Harvard Law. (Or Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, or the World Bank, or whatever.) (Of course nobody *really* would. (And I’d instantly be crushed by the least powerful messenger from Harvard Law.) But the cross of Christianity is that this is what Christ did in His body, and His Body is what we are in; and the joy of Christianity is that He is in His body, and so in Him we are, victorious.)”

    This is one of the best descriptions of the inspiration of the flesh and the incarnation of the spirit that I have seen. I think you mislead us with your age because that statement contains both the powers of youth and the qualities of age. Thank you and please,” if such music be the food for your love , play on!”

48. 48 Comment by JE on 8 November 2008:

    Slightly too emotionally distant from Wikipedia to bother updating it at the moment (is Random Joe the Wikipedia-Believer really going to read Xenophon, ever? (perhaps I’m wrong and he will)), and following an unearned indulgence in some Straussian irony —

    One of the hermeneutic peculiarities of Scripture is that it can’t in any sense be taken ironically. It might, if the two Testaments did not coexist in their own special relation; it cannot, because the whole point of Christological OT exegesis is that every real event narrated by the prophets is, as narrated, *primarily* semiotic. We ought not read the Hebrew Scriptures as source-matter for complex sociopolitical timelines, nor as strangely disturbing excitations of our sometimes absurdly Hellenized imagination: the ancient Scriptures exist, and what they narrate was made to exist, in order that we may know the coming of the Anointed.

    How is this relevant to Straussian Xenophon? Well, irony depends on the separation of something like ‘meaning’ and ‘reference’ — ’significatio’ and ’suppositio’, really, but the technical scholastic terms are probably too apparently close and too really far from ‘meaning’ and ‘reference’ to do anything but confuse the issue at the moment. (Actually the replacement of ’suppositio’ with ‘reference’ is a particularly pernicious corruption of modern (pre-Kripkean) logic. But back to relevant matters..) The Straussians call the distinction ‘esoteric/exoteric’, but that’s really a sloppy atomisticization: the semantic analysis better captures the definition of irony, that ’someone is ironic who SAYS something but MEANS something else’.

    Now in the murky realm of unbounded intuition, ANY statement at all that actually talks about *something*, could *possibly* be taken to mean something else. It’s possible (if usually self-indulgent) to ironicize just about anything. But because of the Christological character of the OT, the ‘reference’ of every Hebrew verse is *always* Christ, while the ‘meaning’ can wander in a thousand (million) directions from one passage to the next. (This is where ‘reference’ rather than ’suppositio’ gets you into trouble, by the way, as some readers may already have noticed, to their hermeneusis’ pain and disgust. Ah well; I don’t mean ‘reference’, really…)

    We do in fact live in a heavily ironicizing world, and this is one reason sincere-minded persons sometimes find it difficult to be taken seriously. But it’s also one of the symptoms of our loss of multi-layered Medieval exegesis; and inasmuch as that exegesis was thoroughly Christological, modern irony is something of a symptom of the desacramentalization proper to the Renaissance and its offspring. (Many thanks to TJF for noting, in an earlier discussion, the Hermetic link between Renaissance philosophers and modern politicians — I think that serious cultural critics need to look at this a lot more closely. Oddly, perhaps, Theodore Adorno’s diagnosis is closely related, though I don’t really know that much about it, and hope other readers might have more to say.)

    So insofar as Straussian readings pick out ‘irony’ as the specific difference between these different sorts of exegesis, they can help illuminate the deep chasm between sacraments and goetia (and yes, magical thinking is another property of the modern world, or at least the modern West). The very evident difference between TJF’s and Strauss’s readings of the Oeconomicus is a pleasingly obvious instantiation of that chasm. That the non-ironic reading is correct can be seen easily, but not proved, by reading the text simply, almost naively. Because it can’t be proved — Xenophon isn’t Scripture — adopting the TJF hermeneutic requires a ’side-taking’ not fully justifiable by pure dialectic. But rejecting the ironic reading at least *possibly* takes the side of the Christological hermeneutic, and so one can actually increase one’s *disposition* to Christianity by reading Xenophon like he’s just a really smart Greek guy.

    That said, we should probably keep doing it.

49. 49 Comment by Robert on 9 November 2008:

    JE,
    You think like Father Hugh Barbur and in this regard, I am very interested in your distinction between reference and meaning. In the Crito, the reader is stunned by Crito’s recognition of Socrates sleeping peacefully before his upcoming execution. With some modesty Socrates says That no man of his age should be too restless about facing death. Crito observes that it is not the way in the real world with most men of his age and Socrates says, this is true and moves on to change the subject. Plato, through his rhetorical skill is “refering”to the “type” of man that Socrates was. Of course there is a similar story in the Gospels with Christ sleeping peacefully on the waves of a storm at sea while the Apostles are all up in arms about perishing. Another example of the”type” of person Christ was.
    In the oeconomicus I think Socrates is conversing about the type of home necessary and conducive to certain ends. The means to consideration of these ends is Xenophon’s dialogue and he uses the meaning of words,”his skill at rhetoric” to raise questions or “refer” to what is contemplative:What was significant of the type of household that was desirable for folks like him and Socrates. I plan or re-reading it this afternoon in light of your good comments. Thanks much for participating and please continue.

50. 50 Comment by Steve Berg on 9 November 2008:

    I have not been able to contribute much to this fine discussion since I have been buried under a pile of essay tests, and now look at grading a stack of term papers. However, I have been inspired by the comments on this Xenophon thread and decided to weigh in a bit on it, too.

    I have always admired Xenophon and defended him against attacks on his value as a writer. He is one of the very few Greek writers whose entire works have survived to this day. I suspect that some of this is due to Divine Providence, but also to the fact that much of what he writes about is useful. One of my most memorable defenses of Xenophon happened when I told my professor that while Plato was a fine theorist, he lacked quite a bit in practicality. I said that Plato seemed to realize this, and in his later years discussed the rule of statesmen in the Laws rather than having philosophers rule as in the earlier Republic. Then, I added that Xenophon, unlike Plato, was a statesman, and that he was actually able to accomplish a great deal in his life in many important areas of endeavor. The response to this was great anger, and I was soundly chastised as being “a technician of the worst sort.” The result of this discussion was that while I continued to take courses in political philosophy, I was not viewed as being really suitable for it as a major endeavor and was happily relegated to the field of Polis Management. May Paul Gottfried forgive me.

    What does Xenophon give us here in the Oeconomicus? It is a view of how to live the good life. Other works discuss topics from how to educate rulers to boar hunting. Xenophon was also justly considered a brilliant military strategist and tactician. I fervently hope there are some people in the Pentagon reading the Anabasis looking for some good pointers on exiting from Mesopotamia. There is also his historical writing, and some careful analysis of human nature. The Oeconomicus is not the only work where the ideal marriage is discussed. I recall that there is another one in his Symposium. There, the other revelers are kidding Socrates about his marriage to Xantippe.

    I would think that a book educating us on leading a good life is about as high as we can get from a pagan author. Looking ahead to the approaching storm of economic carnage roiling towards us from the downfall of the modern systems of economic thought, Xenophon gives us good advice on how to survive and even prosper. We have the additional advantage, and it is of infinite extent, of Christianity. Donald Livingston has given us some fine thinking about the politics of human scale. Xenophon gives us sound principles for economics on a human scale. The work of the Rockford Institute and Chronicles Magazine is properly aimed at working to attain the good life, but doing so on a family by family approach, rather than trying to impose it politically from the top down. This is the only way that is going to work. There is no salvation through politics. Just electing the right candidates, passing the right laws, adopting the right policies, and getting the right people on the Supreme Court are not going to lead us to the good life, but only to frustration and unhappiness. I cannot read the original Greek like Dr. Fleming or JE, so I cannot vouch for the quality of Xenophon’s use of the language. But, I have always been impressed with his practicality, sense of humor, breadth of knowledge and understanding of human nature. I would rate him higher than Dr. Fleming has done in this discussion.

51. 51 Comment by Robert on 9 November 2008:

    “The work of the Rockford Institute and Chronicles Magazine is properly aimed at working to attain the good life, but doing so on a family by family approach, rather than trying to impose it politically from the top down. This is the only way that is going to work. There is no salvation through politics. Just electing the right candidates, passing the right laws, adopting the right policies, and getting the right people on the Supreme Court are not going to lead us to the good life.”

    Just as Xenophon and Socrates teach us in the last chapter of the book, there is something inspiring in some people and not so with others. We should become lovers before we are anything else. Cyrus seems to be such a man as described by Socrates with his love of beauty and health and all that the good earth is capable of providing for those who have hearts large enough, minds keen enough and wills strong enough to seek it. Technique is always secondary to art and the contemplative is always primary. It is the same always and everywhere. To do a few things well is the most efficient means to maintain a household, a magazine, a community or any other human endeavor. Much better than trying to do alot of things without understanding, which always lends itself ultimately to mediocrity and ugliness.

52. 52 Comment by Andrew G. Van Sant on 9 November 2008:

    I think Steve Berg (50) and Robert (51) are on to something here.

53. 53 Comment by Allen Wilson on 9 November 2008:

    It seems that some modern ’scholars’ appear to be using the well-deserved praise of Cyrus by Xenophon and others to turn Cyrus into some ridiculous ‘hero’ of multiculturalism and ‘cultural tolerance’ etc. In pursuing this propaganda, they even erected a monument to him exactly where it does not belong, in Australia. This is an insult to his memory.

54. 54 Comment by TJF on 10 November 2008:

    JE knows something I do not, which is the Straussian contribution to classical philology. I’ve read a modest amount of the old man himself, some Bloom, Pangle, Carnes Lord, Benardete, Jaffa, Rosen, and over the years have met many if not most of the leading Straussians. Lord seemed quite normal and seemed to have a good command of Greek, Bloom witty if freakish, Jaffa an extraterrestrial, but in all these years the only Straussian I have met or read who could make a contribution was his adopted daughter. Perhaps I am being too severe, but I do not regard bright ideas or interpretations of literature to constitute scholarship. I don’t think, either, that a straightforward approach to a text requires taking sides. The very least we can say of it is that we can understand what common readers took away from the text–irony or no irony intended by the author. And, since I am no longer much interested in a particular author’s point of view, whether Xenophon, Aristotle, or Leo Strauss but only in the issues they treat and the light their work can shed on certain problems, it does not ultimately matter much to me if the Straussians or Foucaultians should turn out to be right on this or that. Besides, if they should turn out to be right, the texts themselves would have no utility except as a peg from which to dangle their Pangles.

55. 55 Comment by TJF on 10 November 2008:

    Lest I be misunderstood, I should have prefaced my quibbles with an expression of gratitude for the fine contributions made to this discussion, especially those of Steve Berg and JE, who have raised the level far above my pedestrian effort to present a few basic points, which is all I have had time to do. I probably have also overinterpreted JE’s backhanded defense of Strauss. LS was certainly a learned man, in the sense of being broadly and deeply read, but his learning in classics was like my learning in Italian studies: the erudition of an interested amateur. But, like Strauss, I am intending to continue my ricerche into the Neopaganism of the Renaissance. After reading several dissertations, I am convinced that several generations of experts cannot see what is before them because they think that anyone who cries Lord, Lord is a Christian.

    On dimwit classicists, JE could not be more right. The range when I was a student ran from plodding dulllards (I name no names) to groovy flakes like JP Sulllivan, William Arrowsmith, et al. But things have got far worse. Between feminists and lit crits, there is not not much room for the plodding dullards that made classics a refuge from the would-be brilliant. Marxists are among the best of the ideological scholars, because they go chasing after economic details, and there is fine work still being done by ancient historians who either apply more anthropological methods or are at least reviving what the French were doing at the turn of the last century. As an amateur student of Roman history, I have learned an enormous amount from, say, Richard Saller and Susan Treggiari on Roman family life, and Lawrence Richardson’s book on Roman topography is my constant reading in the Fall, as I prepare for an annual descent on Rome.

    Years ago–about 25–I foolishly did a review essay on the state of women’s studies in classics. The Maenads went mad and declared that, because I was no longer teaching in a university, I had no status in the profession. A journal editor got sacked, manifestos were read at professional meetings, hysterical articles were published, psychological daggers hurled at me at the few meetings I attended thereafter, all because I pointed out that Judith Hallet did not understand history or anthropology and Sarah Pomeroy–the deanette of women’s studies-did not, apparently, know enough Greek to realize the existence of two-termination adjectives (that is, adjectives without a feminine form.) Jiminetti, as we used to say in high school. I did receive letters of thanks from two of the women’s studies scholars I respected, Mary Lefkowitz and Larissa Bonfante, and I later learned a great deal from conversations and letter exchanges with the American women’s studies queen, the late Elizabeth Fox Genovese. But we live, alas, in a world were theory and ideology not only take precedence over the stuff of everyday reality: they completely occlude it. Nothing today is more mysterious than the ordinary.

56. 56 Comment by Jim on 10 November 2008:

    Robert@41: I have not at my command your vast repertoire of germane quotes. A google of a line from #41 directed me to, get this: wikipedia. (First and Last by Hilaire Belloc, The Absence of the Past)

    I make no brief for wikipedia — caveat emptor — but my point is that people do use it for many different reasons and who knows what could happen if a hook they find in it leads them to question post-modern wisdom. I know many parents who sent their Christian conservative children off to college to have them overwhelmed by the post-modern monolith and lose their moorings. Many freshmen navigate first to Wikipedia to obtain clues and direction for their papers so to JE@48 I can only respond with “who knows”. It seems to me we should not surrender all media to the prince of darkness.

57. 57 Comment by robert on 10 November 2008:

    Jim,
    I don’t think we should surrender but retreat, which Marine’s always referred to as an attack in the other direction. My daughter told me this morning that she saw her English professor at Mass yesterday and as he passed by her after Mass, he said,” Surprising isn’t it?”
    They have read nothing in the class except modern, anti-western, bilge and even some smut written by authors with organic mental problems. I recognized one of the titles, Book of Dave, or some such non-sense but was happily ignorant of the rest. Now here is a fellow who the polls would indicate is a “religious person who attends services once a week.” That is to say, he is supposed to be one of the good guys. Well, what it really demonstrates is the triumph of ignorance and the complete abandonment of any possible seriousness in life in exchange for a job.
    One final comment on Belloc’s quote. My classic’s professor asked his students at the beginning of the year to tear out the introductions and simply read the primary works assigned. He also had the habbit of passing out poems without the name of the author so he did not have to listen to graduate students talk about the poet, instead of the poem. Belloc for instance, is only remembered today, if at all, as an anti-semite, belligerent, drunken, bitter, expatriot of “Old Europe”, who is better off forgotten when not absolutely forbidden. Yet, he was probably the best writer of English prose since John Henry Newman. So in order that we might enjoy the kernel, I usuaully attempt to remove the shell. Anybody that knows me, knows that my hobby is attempting to collect all of his works

58. 58 Comment by TJF on 10 November 2008:

    Oeconomicus VIII-X

    After embarrassing his wife by asking for something in the house she could not find, Ischomachus apologizes for having failed to tell her where to put it. There is nothing so useful or so good/fine, he explains as order, taxis, a word often used in military language. The old soldier Xenophon doesnot hesitate then to draw out an allegory of the household as an army in which good order produces good results. If Xenophon seems a bit obsessive on storage, it may be that Greeks of his day had not reached the pitch of organization we have, with closets, shelving, etc. They used mainly chests or left things lying about.

    Ischomachus finds his wife wearing high heels and having used pigments to improve her complexion. Somewhat priggishly he chides her by suggesting these arts are dishonest. Now, if his wife is under 30–as she is–his objections are well-taken. Young women don’t need to wear make-up, but a wise man should never be unhappy with his wife’s efforts to make herself more pleasing to him. The case of a young American woman flaunting her looks in public is entirely different. Athenian women lived rather seccluded lives.

59. 59 Comment by JE on 10 November 2008:

    (I should say — ‘incapable of sacramental marriage’.)

60. 60 Comment by JE on 10 November 2008:

    [..I can't seem to post, so if this shows up more than once I apologize, and hope for deletion!]

    We might continue the hermeneutic discussion elsewhere, fruitfully toward Chronicles’ and TJF’s programme. Here I meant not so much that a particular interpretation need be taken in contradistinction to the ironic, but rather that non-ironic readings affirm a non-ironic hermeneutic, and the susceptibility of certain texts to non-ironic reading (completely irrespective of authorial intent, of course) renders them potentially closer to the irony-precluding Gospels. Straight-talkers like Xenophon are beautiful and bracing tonics to Enlightenment sophistry, if only because Xenophon honestly looks to the things right in front of his face.

    As to the Straussians and Marxists, together: insipid ironists aren’t always so easy to pick out as liars; rabid ironists are all obviously liars if both sense-data and intellect really exist, and there is no more rabid group of ironists than the Straussians. Marxists, or at least Marx’s followers, are the opposite of ironic; Marx has gripped the world (or at least the west) so tightly because dialectical materialism is, like the Gospels, essentially non-ironic. (This doesn’t mean that irony can’t compose part of the dialectic, only that the dialectic as such is not ironic. Marx himself is actually very witty, a fact that translations often don’t capture.) Most Enlightenment writers just aren’t serious, grave as their errors are; this is why a glance at the parallel lines of intellectual and sociopolitical history since the eighteenth century strikes the non-critical modern as peculiarly schizophrenic. Marx is serious; within the academy he, and to a lesser extent his followers are practically the only serious mainstream thinkers. (Nietzsche was serious too, but is no longer ‘mainstream’ — again, however profound his real sociopolitical influence was.) He can’t be otherwise: the whole point of dialectical materialism is that *everything everyone does really, physically matters*. There was a pretty sophisticated attempt to Enlightenment-ify Marxism in the 70s, led by G. A. Cohen — ‘analytical Marxism’, they called it — but it died, because the Marxists realized that simple philosophical-economic analysis does not participate in the dialectic. (Most things labeled ‘analytical’ are or soon will be dead.)

    Little as I know of women’s studies in classics, it does seem that most of the good work has been done within the last quarter-century. The specific difference has been precisely ‘looking at everyday reality’, and coincides methodologically with a vast and otherwise related advance in legal anthropology, led by Pospisil, among others.

    One of the extra-disciplinary benefits of this kind of women’s studies — and I think this profoundly impacts the relevant academics’ scholarly motivation, though it does not show up quite so clearly in their published work — has been the observation that something like liberalism, stretching back at least to the Renaissance, is yet another kind of selfish blindness and loveless stupidity — though our ideologizing culture often, exactly in its effort to shut our eyes entirely, blinds us to this also. It is also true that this tradition is profoundly misogynist (though too often not for the reasons somewhat desperately proferred). But all errors are profoundly misogynist, because all errors are profoundly barren; and barrenness harms men in operation, but women in both operation and being.

61. 61 Comment by TJF on 10 November 2008:

    “Incapable of sacramental marriage” implies, a) that sacramental marriage may be something radically different from pre-Christian marriage and that b) non-sacramental marriage is possible between members of the same sex. For that to be true, one would have to redefine marriage as something else than, for example, Greeks, Romans, and Jews imagined it to be. That would require considerable justification.

    On the reinvention of Marxism, my friend David Gordon, so recently excoriated on this site for his failure to appreciate Wendell Berry, wrote an interesting analysis.

    Finally, once women’s studies became profitable, it did not remain the exclusive province of illiterate bra-burners. The study of everyday domestic reality was long overdue, though the French made a pretty good stab over a hundred years ago. One line of research for a young philologist or historian would be to look at how Athenians actually went about their daily business. There have been some good things written about this, of course, but there is still too much “all in the mind” stuff looking at Athenian “ideology” rather than at daily life. Even the study of tragedy would benefit enormously from a more down-to-earth approach, by which I do not mean reading political events and conflicts into the text but an examination of unspoken assumptions.

62. 62 Comment by JE on 10 November 2008:

    I should note that my ‘incapable of sacramental marriage’ remark was intended as a follow-up for a post that it appears never went through. TJF’s response to them as a response to his earlier post is of course quite correct.

    Short version of unposted question: Self-flaunting young women are substantially self-hating; surely most immodestly-dressed young women are not substantially self-hating?

    My wife thinks I’m wrong. Priests, psychologists, and ecclesiastical judges I’ve heard from either directly or second-hand seem to agree, with ’seventy-five percent of American marriages are annullable’ being the eventual result (from incapacity of end-cognizance). But is this really true? I can’t believe the anecdotal remarks I’ve heard; they’re too vast and depressing.

63. 63 Comment by Andrew G. Van Sant on 10 November 2008:

    “I counselled her to oversee the baking woman as she made the bread; to stand beside the housekeeper as she measured out her stores; to go tours of inspection to see if all things were in order as they should be. For, as it seemed to me, this would at once be walking exercise and supervision. And, as an excellent gymnastic, I recommended her to knead the dough and roll the paste; to shake the coverlets and make the beds; adding, if she trained herself in exercise of this sort she would enjoy her food, grow vigorous in health, and her complexion would in very
    truth be lovelier. ” [Ischomachus explaining to Socrates counsel that he gave to his wife.]

    “Nor are women to be deprived of bodily exercise. But they are not to be encouraged to engage in wrestling or running, but are to exercise themselves in spinning, and weaving, and superintending the cooking if necessary. And they are with their own hand to fetch from the store what we require. And it is no disgrace to apply themselves to the mill. Nor is it a reproach to a wife — housekeeper and helpmeet — to occupy herself in cooking, so that it may be platable to her husband.” [Clement of Alexandria from Paedagogus, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 2, p. 283 as quoted on p. 142 of Patrick Mitchell's The Scandal of Gender.]

64. 64 Comment by Andrew G. Van Sant on 10 November 2008:

    “God made provision from the first by shaping. . .the woman’s nature for indoor and the man’s for outdoor occupations. Man’s body and soul He furnished with a greater capacity for enduring heat and cold, wayfaring and military marches; or to repeat, He laid on his shoulders the outdoor works. . . .While in creating the body of woman with less capacity for these things. . .God would seem to have imposed on her the indoor works; knowing that He had implanted in the woman and imposed upon her the nurture of new-born babies, He endowed her with a larger share of affection for the new-born child than he bestowed upon man.” [Ischomachus explaining to Socrates conversation that he had with his wife.]

    “. . .He honored the man with rule and superiority; the woman on the other hand He armed with desire: and the gift also of procreation of children, He committed in common to both, and withal He furnished also other things apt to conciliate love: neither entrusting all to the man, nor all to the woman; but ‘dividing these things also severally to each’; to her entrusting the house, and to him the market; to him the work of feeding, for he tills the ground; to her that of clothing, for loom and distaff are the woman’s. For it is God Himself who gave woman-kind skill in woven work.” [St. John Crysostom, Homily 34 on 1 Corinthians, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1, Vol. 12 p. 205, quoted on p. 132 of Patrick Mitchell's The Scandal of Gender.]

65. 65 Comment by TJF on 11 November 2008:

    I thank JE for the clarification and the suggestion. Here is a round-about way of looking at the question of female immodesty. My wife asked me the other day why Americans eat so much sugar. My reply–which I think I gave in The Politics of Human Nature–was that human beings are programmed to desire that which is necessary and scarce, hence the endless search for meat, fat, salt, and sugar in primitive societies that only becomes pernicious in modern societies where one can eat oneself into the condition of the two thousand pound Mexicans who were in the news a few weeks ago. The same can be said of sex. Men, to begin with, have an urge to spread their genes as broadly as possible, thus they are alert to every signal of sexual availability in females capable of breeding. Women, on the other hand, “know” that they will have to spend 9 months bearing and many years taking care of the consequences and thus pursue a different strategy. Now, it is easy to see what happens to men in a society that has adopted the Playboy Philosophy, but there more interesting question is what has happened to women? One part of the answer must lie in the dawning realization that sex can be divorced from procreation, but, one might argue, many of these women are barely conscious. So, another part of the answer may lie in the devaluation of the female that is so typical of our society. Women who live as women are condemned as housewives, though some try to make up for the lack of a career by imposing endless futile tasks on themselves–driving the kids to soccer games and lessons, joining committees. They remind me a bit of some very wealthy people I have known: Every day they face the horror of voluntarily filling in the void with that other people are compelled to fill in with work.

66. 66 Comment by JE on 11 November 2008:

    Thanks to TJF for his interesting conjecture. I wonder about the easy inference from ‘drive to spread genes widely’ to ‘drive to procreate maximally’ — inasmuch as social conditions, allied with peculiarities of the sexual-recombinatory calculus, often complicate the picture virtually unpredictably, with ‘maximal procreation’ often being superseded ‘maximal gene distribution’ (kinship-altruism and sex-preferential care for larvae are the simplest examples). Of course a more complex sociobiological picture can indeed be painted, and perhaps E. O. Wilson has done this, but the move from ‘gene-spreading’ to ‘procreation-maximizing’ is almost certainly not immediate (presumably in proportion to nervous-system centralization and social complexity).

    This may seem nitpicky, but the distinction is crucially important for any ‘natural good’ ethics to be persuasive. One of the reasons natural-good ethicists like Philippa Foot have received a rather unfriendly reading in both philosophical and scientific circles is that she takes shortcuts of this sort. (William Fitzpatrick wrote a good book on this a few years ago; though it begins stronger than it ends, and I don’t know how it has been received.) (Richard Dawkins makes far flimsier inferences, of course, and apparently people listen to him…)

    Surely the whole point of passing around the label ‘culture of death’ is that the divorce of sex from procreation imprints society everywhere? The world is gnostic, and this is the same as saying that sex is dead. I grant both (a) sex and procreation are divorced and (b) women’s lives are miserable today, but the link between the two must lie somewhere hidden in the vomit-soup of modern culture. If one could show that link *concretely* (which one needs to do to address (b) adequately), perhaps people would recognize that their misery is caused by (a), and reject it.

    This would require detailed, specific treatment of Lots of Parts of Modern Culture — and nothing more, really, since the abstract predication of ‘barrenness’ has already been done. Facile and false condemnations of ‘devilish 2/4 time’ are of course totally useless; I’ve seen many but not much beyond pious sophisms of this sort. Are there any? (Voegelin took an extremely learned stab at the problem, but his gnostics are too Miltonian, and his ‘immanent eschaton’ much too rich. Balthasar thinks Valentinus’ is rich too, but it’s hard to communicate the depth of his emptiness in prose: Satan is not a romantic figure, except insofar as the Romantics hate creation.)

67. 67 Comment by Andrew G. Van Sant on 11 November 2008:

    I’ve made a few posts to show the similarities between Xenophon and traditional Christian teaching on the roles of men and women as provided by the Church Fathers. The modern mind, impressed only by new ideas, thinks the Church Fathers were merely parroting the sexism of the ancients. The modern mind is incapable of discerning truth. Because our education system is intended to develop the modern mind, we will always be out numbered and truth will always be out of favor.

68. 68 Comment by Andrew G. Van Sant on 11 November 2008:

    TJF @65:
    My wife has never worked outside the home, instead taking care of our home and our daughters. She did this mostly because of the example of her own mother and her grandmothers, none of whom were educated beyond high school or worked outside the home. Likewise, my own mother and my father’s mother didn’t go to college and my mother didn’t work outside the home until my sister and I went to high school. The extra income was needed to pay the Catholic school tuition.

    My wife has only one concern: will she have sufficient funds to support herself after I die. She wouldn’t be reluctant to get a job, if necessary; however, lacking experience and education, she doesn’t think she will be qualified for one that pays very much.

69. 69 Comment by Josh Cooney on 11 November 2008:

    #66 “Surely the whole point of passing around the label ‘culture of death’ is that the divorce of sex from procreation imprints society everywhere? The world is gnostic, and this is the same as saying that sex is dead. I grant both (a) sex and procreation are divorced and (b) women’s lives are miserable today, but the link between the two must lie somewhere hidden in the vomit-soup of modern culture. If one could show that link *concretely* (which one needs to do to address (b) adequately), perhaps people would recognize that their misery is caused by (a), and reject it.”

    JE’s discussion is a little bit over my head, but I’d like to try to respond to the specific question of our gnostic attitudes towards sex, and their particular consequences for women.

    The foundation for the Catholic Church’s teaching on sexuality, is “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” The results of splitting apart the dual purposes of sex was discussed brilliantly in Humanae Vitae.

    A brief synopsis: First, there is an increase in infidelity, which causes pain, anger, and resentment within families. This has a cyclical effect, and ultimately disrupts the well being of society, and perverts the moral order. Second, we become slaves to our passions. This is especially damaging to young people as they are constantly tempted to things they lack the faculties to resist. Contemporary experience and ancient wisdom reveal that nobody can be truly satisfied when they exist in this kind of servitude. It is far worse than physical slavery. The third result is probably most relevant to the unhappiness of women today. I’ll quote the encyclical:

    “Another effect that gives us cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equillibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.”

    This may be at the heart of why so many women are empty and miserable. Most women seem to have a deep desire for affection and a stable, constant relationship with a man. I sense this is why watching romance comedies and Lifetime Network are so popular with women. They don’t seem quite concious of what they are lacking, and they look for it–as the songs says–in all the wrong places. Contrary to what feminists say, a woman is happiest when she is loved and treated with dignity by her husband, has a full household of children, and receives the blessings of Christ and His Church. A proper understanding of sexuality, then, is a source of joy and stability. The misuse of this powerful gift causes great pain on a personal level, and chaos in society. “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.”

70. 70 Comment by Josh Cooney on 11 November 2008:

    I don’t why there is a comma before “is” in the sentence “Catholic Church’s teaching on sexuality, is…” I have yet to write a single post free from typos. Also, I apologize if I am getting off the topic by not staying grounded in Xenophon’s text, but I find JE’s question a fascinating one.

71. 71 Comment by Josh Cooney on 11 November 2008:

    I should clarify, that we “become slaves to our passions” because of bad habits over time, and the general lowering of moral standards. Both are made easier by denying what Flannery O’Connor called, “the hard purposes of sex.”

72. 72 Comment by Josh Cooney on 11 November 2008:

    Again, my apologies to the reader. I seem to have many commas in places they don’t belong. And at least one mistake in grammar. Writing on a computer screen turns my brain into a vegetable. Nonetheless, it is embarassing to make such mistakes in a public setting.

73. 73 Comment by TJF on 12 November 2008:

    Sociobiology provides valuable analytical tools but it can be applied, as JE suggests, too simplistically. I pretty thoroughly studied the state of research down to about five years ago when it ceased to interest me, but EO Wilson was kind enough to say that I understood the subject and was unflinching in applying the results in my first book. I say this not in self-congratulation but to let it be understood that in simplifying the argument I am not acting out of limited knowledge. Yes, on the one hand there is a kind of genetic calculus acting through hormones and brain development, on the other are the pressures exerted by specific social institutions. The two are not separate since they evolve in response to each other in a gene-culture feedback loop, as Wilson described it. One useful concept, in this connection, is hypertrophy: the tendency to exaggerate a successful trait or strategy beyond the point that it is entirely useful. The great antlers of the Irish elk are usually cited as an example: As attractive as they were to females and useful in clashes with other bucks in mating season, they overburdened the poor creatures trotting through the bogs that swallowed so many of them up. Man, it seems to me, continues these hypertrophic adaptations in a social way. An obvious example is the Turkish harem. True, the Sultan gets to impregnate hundreds of women but he is acting more like a rabbit (this is often called an R strategy) in maximizing reproduction rather than the human K strategy that emphasizes quality and duration of care.

    A digression on natural goodness. Philosophers generally accept what they take to be Hume’s distinction between “is” and “ought” and the gulf between them that prevents us from leaping from fact to value. Stephen R.L. Clark some years ago did a good job of showing that Hume has been overinterpreted. This is important because a rigid fact/value distinction would seem to be inconsistent with his generally Aristotelian bent (one that he shares with other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers). It seems to me that all I needed to show, in Politics of Human Nature, was that there are natural tendencies in the created order that, if followed, are conducive to human happiness. (My late friend Sam Francis disagreed with me on this, but in those days he was a rigid materialist.) This is what, for example, Bishop Butler tried to do in his famous Analogy. Revelation perfects our understanding of the moral order but it does not entirely overturn it. As Paul observes, we are looking into a distorted mirror here on earth, but we are not looking into complete darkness.

    Thus, JE is perfectly correct to object to any crude reduction of moral questions either to sociobiological or other material explanations. On the other hand, we are not angels but animals with a soul and/or mind, which is compelled for the most part to work through our organic body. So the question would seem to be, why, considering our natural propensities, we have chosen a sexual morality that is both evil (in the Christian sense) and apparently self-destructive? To answer that would require at least a book, but I do believe that the separation of sex and procreation was part of the Renaissance misunderstanding of pagan sexual mores. Thus Lorenzo and Poliziano with their cheerful celebrations of Eros. The darker side of this can be seen in all the alchemical and magical remedies to prevent or cure the disease of pregnancy–the majority of recipes, according to some scholars. When this is set beside the parallel attempt to create life in test tubes–one of Paracelsus pet projects–we begin to see the outlines of the world we live in. Yes, they thought they were pagans when in fact they were only anti-Christian hedonists, prating about the soul and Platonic love. In a slightly different context, namely Venice, Browning wondered: “What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?” I don’t know if this will persuade JE, but I fear that an old pedant is beginning to lose the attention of his readers. For a more prolonged discussion of this we could set up a separate column or blog. JE is free to send me a message via webmaster. I am, understandably, reluctant to publicize the email, but I will respond.

    Finally, thanks to Mr. Cooney for making the issue at hand plain and clear. Should we wrap up Xenophon or consider the second half of the Oeconomicus? In either event, it has been requested that we take up Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which I promised years ago, or at least the Agamemnon. As for translations, I don’t recommend Lattimore–quite the contrary. Smyth’s old Loeb is fairly clear and the text is quite conservative. My dissertation director Douglas Young did a very literal verse translation published by Oklahoma, which I went over with him, largely to suggest verbal clarity and rhythmic patterns. A straightforward prose translation would be better than something ultrapoetical.

74. 74 Comment by Josh Cooney on 12 November 2008:

    “To answer that would require at least a book, but I do believe that the separation of sex and procreation was part of the Renaissance misunderstanding of pagan sexual mores.”

    Interesting. I was thinking only in the purely literal seperation of sex and procreation manifested in today’s widespread acceptence and celebration of contraception; I never considered the intellectual roots of the schism. It seems we’ve been heading down this road for longer than I previously thought.

    Dr. Fleming,

    The word “Renaissance” is supposed to reflect the rebirth of the classical world. But, how badly did the Renaissance misunderstand Greek and Roman culture in general. I realize that is probably a long subject, but perhaps you could point out some basic starting points. We seem to be losing our energy with Xenophon, so I’m up for Oresteia or Agamemnon anytime. I read both last spring, but would have enjoyed some guidance. I’m fairly sure I missed alot that was there.

75. 75 Comment by TJF on 13 November 2008:

    Yes, the Oeconomicus argument has petered out, partly because it has sunk down to the second page and partly because the second half of the work is so practical as to be of marginal relevance to us. As for sex and procreation in the Renaissance, it is not merely ideology, since we can observe two phenomena: 1) a keen interest in contraception and 2) a high rate of homosexuality, especially in Florence.

    The Renaissance understanding of the ancient world is a very big topic. Generally speaking, Renaissance humanists were interested in recovering texts, correcting their Latin on classical models, and learning Greek. Petrarch, for all his effort to detach himself from the Medieval world and celebrate the ancients, remained a Medieval man. Poliziano, more than a century later, had much better classical Latin and knew Greek quite well. The development of a historical methodology and philology, however, took a good deal of time, and each age reads into the ancients what it is looking for. Some Renaissance men were looking for an excuse for hedonism and they found it, and ever since pious Christians have turned away from the classics on moral grounds. I haven’t thought much about Renaissance Italy since my graduate school days, but this year it is mostly what I am doing.

    Then I’ll post something on the first scene of the Agamemnon tomorrow at the latest. Whether you or anyone will learn something is one thing. You will certainly get a point of view not commonly taught.

76. 76 Comment by JE on 13 November 2008:

    Not that the Romans and Greeks didn’t try their mightiest to separate sex and procreation. It just so happened that procreation was more pragmatically useful for them, on the whole, than for Renaissance intellectuals, and to a much greater degree industrialized moderns.

    It is a simple economic fact that children today, along with the elderly, are burdensome where previously they had been beneficial. This wasn’t so in the ancient world; it is on of modernity’s great systemic disgraces, but I don’t know quite where the pre-industrial switch began.

    Hesiod, the ancient world’s most brazen misogynist, declared that all men are miserable because they must either marry a woman or not; if they do, then they will be cursed by femininity, and if they don’t, then they will be cursed by a lonely death.

    The presupposition is that, even if you utterly hate and/or despise women, at least you must surely want *children*, at least to take care of you in your old age. So even if you can’t stand married life and are nothing but a completely selfish archaic Greek, having children is still an irreducible desideratum. Even the graceless and loveless find children *useful*!

    Industrialization tends to make children economically worthless, because everything they can do, machines can do better (this is of course a big part of modernity’s death-preference). My guess re. Renaissance intellectuals is that their connections with Italian courts separated them from value-generation, which was possible only in a post-Medieval, money-centered economy (allowing the separation of foedus and manor). But perhaps TJF has more to say about Renaissance barrenness-love, not simply as a matter of fact (or as an instance of libido dominandi, which is even in Lucifer’s case merely derivative) but as a matter of (nascent?) systemic corruption.

    We might say more about children’s value in a feudal-manorialist economy, at various levels in such a society, but I’d likely be accused of distributist tendencies…

77. 77 Comment by TJF on 14 November 2008:

    I don’t think an accusation of distributism would bother too many people on this site. There was a study done some years ago that gave evidence that ancient contraceptive techniques were pretty successful. This is a problem in every society that overvalues wealth. But, I would suggest, that the Renaissance both promoted contraception and homosexuality on a practical level and also developed an anti-Christian ideology that culminates in the nightmares that C.S. Lewis intuited both in That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man, nightmares that we are living today.

    One way to sense the difference between late Medieval and early Renaissance Italy is to read the amatory poetry of Dante and his friends and then compare it with Lorenzo and Poliziano, who do not so much write about loving this or that girl but something more like “Of all the girls I’ve ever loved…” A number of things had happened, though it is interesting that several of these neopagan loverboys, Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola, and Politian himself, were driven to repentance and remorse by Savonarola.