The Economist
Xenophon's Oeconomicus offers a pragmatic alternative way of looking at questions of wealth, property, and human happiness. He is neither an economist nor a philosopher, only a man who, though he valued courage and honor above wealth, understand the true significance of property as the foundation of prosperity and happiness. In these dark times, his common-sense pagan wisdom has much to teach us.
I shall be quoting from the widely available (on Gutenberg.org) translation of H.G. Dakyns, if only because it saves me the trouble of acquiring a translation. Where relevant, I shall correct or clarify the translation by referring to the Greek text, which is also available on Perseus, if that site is up and running again. Let me begin with a few remarks on the author, cribbed largely from the Oxford Classical Dictionary .
Life of Xenophon
Xenophon, son of Gryllus, was born to a wealthy Athenian family in 428/7 BC and died about 354. As a young man he attached himself to Socrates, though it was not to the Platonic metaphysician we know from the later dialogues but to the reactionary sophist who criticized the mores of the Athenian democracy. One of the charges against Socrates was that he corrupted the youth. When we look at some of his prominent disciples and friends--Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides, Meno the Thessalian--it is easy to see why this charge stuck. Alcibiades was a brilliant opportunist who betrayed his city, Critias and Charmides were leaders of a clique of fascist thugs who ruled Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War as "The Thirty," and Meno, according to Xenophon, was perfectly corrupt and dishonest. Some of Socrates' prominent students--including Plato--were anti-democratic and expressed admiration for the Spartans. This was an aristocratic fashion that Socrates did not invent, but he did nothing to discourage it.
Xenophon left Athens in 401, just two years after a democratic restoration that might have made life difficult for a man of aristocratic leanings. He accepted the invitation of Proxenus of Thebes to accompany him on an expedition whose ultimate goal was the elevation of Cyrus, the younger son of the late king Artaxerxes, on the Persian throne. He immortalized his adventures going up the country in the Anabasis. On the expedition, he collaborated with Spartan adventurers and enlisted under the Spartan Thibron. The politics are complicated but the result of his collaboration was a sentence of exile. Upon returning to Greece, he went with his comrades to Sparta, where he as treated with respect and later given an estate. As a friend and admirer of the Spartan king Agesilaus, whom he memorialized in a biographical essay, he found himself on the Spartan side at Mantineia, fighting against Athens. As relations between teh two fading great powers improved, he returned to Athens. His son Gryllus died fighting for Athens and was honored by having one of Aristotle's dialogues--a published work that has not survived--named after him.
Xenophon was an exemplary Greek: a soldier, a traveler, a man of unbounded curiosity who wrote works of history (the Hellenica), biography, and recollections of Socrates as well as treatises on hunting and, in the case of the Oeconomicus , household management. Solid, intelligent, gentlemanly, but never brilliant or eccentric, he gives us a rare glance into the mind of an affluent and intelligent Greek of his day.
One of the many topics that have occupied--rather fruitlessly--the attention of scholars is the different portraits of Socrates drawn by Plato and Xenophon. Plato's Socrates evolves from a dialectical gadfly who drives interlocutors into a corner where they have to confess their ignorance into a comprehensive metaphysician and finally into something like a skeptic. I have always believed that the evolution is more Plato's than his mentor's. Xenophon's Socrates has many traits in commons with Plato's first version in the "aporetic" dialogues (Euthyphro, Laches, etc.), but he is more practical and down-to-earth. Common sense suggests that each writer took from Socrates what most interested him. The question is ultimately as insoluble as which portrait of Jesus is correct, Mark's or John's?
Oeconomicus chapters I-III
I. Socrates and Critobulus enter into a discussion about the management of wealth and the role of the oeconomicus or household manager, whether he be the owner or merely a hired steward. If economy is a skill, they agree, then it is a valuable one. They also agree that the oikos (household) should be regarded as a man's entire property and not just what is in his house. But, once Socrates gets the sucker to admit that a man's enemies are not part of his wealth, he forces him to acknowledge that true wealth is only that which is beneficial to the possessor. Thus ownership of a piece of unproductive land on which we labor in vain only to starve, is not wealth. Similarly money, if squandered on vices that harm us, is not wealth, while enemies--if they provoke us to improve--are. 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.
II. Socrates sets out to prove that the poor philosopher is wealthier than the rich Critobulus, who is forced to spend vast amounts on a lavish life style, various charities, and liturgies--that is, committments to pay for public activities such as the staging of tragedies or the fitting out of a ship. Nothing constitutes wealth unless it is possessed by someone who knows how to use it. Along the way, Socrates casually distinguishes between resale value and use. Thus an unmusical person who owns a flute has wealth if he is willing to sell it, but not if he wishes to retain it. This is a significant point, I believe, and quite Greek. While we tend to think of property rights almost exclusively as the right to buy and sell, they were more interested in maintaining possession. Now that the question of expertise has been introduced, Socrates uses his famous irony to provoke the wealthy Critobulus into giving him lessons on oikonomia, wealth-management. In doing so he alludes to his own propensity for grilling supposed experts on their technical knowledge, and the reader knows full well that his procedure is to make the general confess he knows nothing of courage, the pious man nothing of piety, etc. We almost pity Critobulus.
III. Socrates begins by distinguishing beween two kinds of possessors: 1Those who waste their money on worthless display, and 2) Those who are content with owning only what they need and can use. Parallel to this set are those who 1) cannot even lay their hands on their stuff when they need it and those who 2) have everything in its proper place and available for use. As a corollary to this distinction, he sets up two classes of husbands: those whose wives are trained to be good managers and those whose wives are careless spendthrifts. The wives are bad either because their husbands failed to train them properly or because they are simply perverse. This is an important point, because husbands and wives are partners, not masters and slaves. When Critobulus admits that he does not often converse with his wife, Socrates blames him for not educating her. Nothing is more important for household success:
"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."
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.
In VI-VII, Socrates outlines the argument so far and begins to flesh out the abstractions by describing a man who is kalos kai agathos, which can be translated as handsome and good or as good and brave or a combination of these qualities. It is the Athenian ideal of what used to be known as the gentleman and includes nobility of appearance and conduct, a good family, and bravery in war. Socrates recounts a meeting with this gentleman, Ischomachus, in the portico of Zeus Eleutherios, who has the time to spend on public business and in discourse with his friends because his wife, whom he has trained, is capable of managing affairs at home. Note that the training began with prayer and sacrifice, dedication to a common purpose. It was for this common purpose that the two families joined them in marriage, which joins their funds together as well as their persons. 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.
Husband and wife have a common purpose, but each is framed by divine and natural power to perform a discrete set of tasks: Men are stronger and bolder and to them is assigned hard labor and fighting, while women are born with a greater affection for children and the ability to tend to more sheltered activities. In the many ethical qualities needed in both sets of functions, they are equally endowed.
The woman's job is like that of the Queen bee, who supervises all within the hive and makes sure that the laborers go out and perform their duties. 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. As my old friend Mel Bradford once observed, when it was the fashion to attack black men for their evil ways, black women, in making themselves sexually available at an early age, were failing in an essential duty.
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.
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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.
"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.
"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.
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. "
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.
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.
“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.
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.
@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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
#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.
"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 "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.
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.
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.
"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?
@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.
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.
Thank you for both responses, they were helpful.
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 ?
"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?
@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.
@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.
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.
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"
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.
"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.
#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.
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.
"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.
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
"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,.
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
Josh Cooney @33:
You may like a couple of short books by Vigen Guroian:
Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening
and
The Fragrance of God.
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."
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.
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
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.
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.)
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.