Series:
Essay #11:
Synopsis:
Ends & Means
Splendid Pagans
The answer to the secular why? is aesthetic beauty… but there’s more out there than beauty: there’s a God who knows my name
Both Aristotle and Aquinas seek the flourishing that’s appropriate for people, but they end in different places.
Aristotle sees life as a pie that needs multiple ingredients to be delicious, like health, family, friends, work, -plus- the virtues like temperance, courage, prudence, justice, each said virtue being centered on its appropriate mean. All things in the right proportions. Then Aristotle adds one more thing to make the pie perfect, which last little bit is: contemplation of the truth of being, including contemplation of the divine unmoved mover.
To bake the Aristotelian pie, I train my natural virtues. I consistently engage in good thoughts and actions, thereby creating good habits and a virtuous character. To follow Aristotle is to train all the time, develop character, desire the right ends and use the correct means. That’s a lot of work, so why do it? For Aristotle, the why of ethics is aesthetic beauty. Like a beautifully trained fighter who moves in dance while he finishes his opponent. Behold, what a specimen of man! And it would be perfect beauty, but for the C.S. Lewis line, “The Fall is, in fact, Pride (in oneself).” The virtue of the pagan is splendid vice.
Like Aristotle, Aquinas believes in habits and training and the Aristotelian pie. Aquinas walks the path of Aristotle, and then he goes one more step. Both walk to God, but for Aristotle, the divine unmoved mover is impersonal, while for Aquinas, God knows my name. Fr. James Brent (from a lecture heard on The Thomistic Institute Podcast published June 23, 2021) says the last step is charity (love / agape), which leads me to God and opens a personal friendship with God. For Fr. Brent, Jesus made it plain when he said to the disciples, “I no longer call you servants, but friends.” So, for Aristotle, the point of it all is beauty (including contemplation of the divine), while for Aquinas, it’s a relationship with a personal God.
Splendid pagans and beatific saints. One is brilliant in the here and now, the other would transcend that brilliance and go to a personal God. I think of the novel, A Man at Arms, by Steven Pressfield. The novel went to that most modern of places right in between Aristotle’s beautiful warrior and Aquinas’ friend of God.
The novel is set in AD 55. The Roman government in Judea receives intelligence of a courier going to the city of Corinth in Greece, carrying a letter from Paul the Apostle. The Romans hire Telamon to track down the courier and get the letter. Telamon is Greek, and a former Roman legionnaire who’s since retired and become an itinerant mercenary. There are two letter couriers: Michael, an adult Christian, and Ruth, who is a feral, mute girl of age 9 or thereabouts. Telamon finds the couriers but decides not to give them to the Romans; instead he’ll protect them and escort them to Corinth. The chase begins.
Telamon is the perfect warrior. His character appears in three other books by Mr. Pressfield, even though the stories are set in different historical eras. In the Art of Manliness Podcast, March 15, 2021, Mr. Pressfield said,
“To me, Telamon is sort of the supreme archetype of the warrior. But he is also the universal soldier in the sense that he appears in century after century unchanged…. I just see him as stuck in this archetype and sort of condemned to live it over and over.”
Telamon serves no one, certainly not Rome. His code is, “I fight for the fighting alone, I serve for the serving alone, I tramp for the tramping alone.” In the words of Pressfield,
“he’s like a Clint Eastwood man-with-no-name type of gunslinger. He’s like the Humphrey Bogart character in Casablanca, an individual who has cut himself free from any collective beliefs, any flag, any cause, any leader. And he’s trying to navigate his way just as an individual by his own code.”
Telamon fully lives the Aristotelian virtues that are applicable to a warrior, and like Casablanca Rick, he’s built a cozy little space for himself in a meaningless world. But now what? Pressfield:
“He’s up against the wall, like he’s exhausted that archetype. And much like (the Bogart and Eastwood characters) they know in their hearts that something is missing, that they’re stuck. And this story…is about bringing the warrior beyond that to the next level, which involves a step into love. And that’s where the Apostle Paul’s letter comes into this whole story.”
Telamon comes to love the girl, Ruth, in agape like a father, and he puts himself in her service. Pressfield:
“he begins to not so much care for any message or any spiritual doctrine as he cares for her, and that’s…where love kind of enters the picture, but he remains a warrior throughout the whole thing, and his warrior skills are set in the service of this love.”
In the first part of his life, Telamon developed the skills that gave him identity and made him useful as a fighter. Self-development is important because, if I don’t develop anything of value, I have nothing of value to give to others. Once developed, though, what’s the purpose of those beautiful skills? A warrior must have a master, and Telamon puts himself in service of Ruth, whom he loves as a daughter. To paraphrase Viktor Frankl: I become myself when I love and serve another, when I become responsible for him.
That’s the end of the story: Telamon, the perfect warrior, comes to serve his adopted daughter, Ruth, in charity. Notice that the author, Steven Pressfield, didn’t have Telamon convert to Christianity and take Jesus as King. Pressfield wasn’t comfortable with that. Just can't do it. Aren’t we moderns a bunch of Charlie Browns?-- stuck in the middle between, on the one hand, admiration of that perfect worldly beauty as the ultimate end of human flourishing, and on the other hand, that next step to a personal God whom we just can’t bring ourselves to believe in.
Essays in this Series, Ends & Means: