The Republic - Closing

"And thus, Glaucon, a tale was saved and not lost, and
could save us, if we were persuaded by it, and we shall
make a good crossing of the river of Lethe and not defile
our soul.. But if we are persuaded by me, holding that soul
is immortal and capable of bearing all evils and all goods,
we shall always keep to the upper road and practice justice
with prudence in every way so that we shall be friends to
ourselves and the gods, both while we remain here and
when we reap the rewards for it like the victors who go
about gathering in the prizes. And so here and in the
thousand year journey that we have described we shall fare well."

The Republic - pg. 296

"And won't we agree that everything that comes to the
man dear to the gods - insofar as it comes from gods - is
the best possible, except for any necessary evil that was
due to him for former mistakes?"

The Republic - pg. 295

"... But it must be seen such as it is in truth, not maimed
by community with body and other evils, as we now see it.
But what it is like when it has become pure must be examined
sufficiently by calculation. And one will find it far fairer and
discern justice and injustice and everything we have now
gone through more distinctly. Now we were telling the truth
about it as it looks at present. However that is based only
on the condition in which we saw it. Just as those who
catch sight of the sea Glucon would no longer easily see his
original nature because some of the old parts of his body have
been broken off and the others have been ground down and
thoroughly maimed by the waves at the same time as other
things have grown on him - shell, seaweed, and rocks - so
that he resembles any beast rather than what he was by
nature, so, too, we see the soul in such a condition because
of countless evils. But, Glaucon, one must look elsewhere."

The Republic - pg. 291

"But if not, my dear comrade, just like the men who have
once fallen in love with someone, and don't believe the love
is beneficial, keep away from it even if they have to do violence
to themselves; so we too - due to the inborn love of such
poetry we owe to our rearing in these fine regimes - we'll
be glad if it turns out that it is best and truest. But as long
as it's not able to make its apology, when we listen to it, we'll
chant this argument we are making to ourselves as a countercharm,
taking care against falling back again into this love, which is childish
and blongs to the many. We are, at all events, aware that such poetry
mustn't be taken seriously as a serious thing laying hold of truth, but
that the man who hears it must be careful, fearing for the regime in
himself, and must hold what we have said about poetry."

The Republic - pg. 281

"Therefore, imitation is surely far from the truth; and, as
it seems, it is due to this that it produces everything - because
it lays hold of a certain small part of each thing, and that
part is itself only phantom. For example, the painter, we
say, will paint for us a shoemaker, a carpenter, and the
other craftsmen, although he doesn't understand the arts
of any one of them. But, nevertheless, if he is a good pointer,
by painting a carpenter and displaying him from far off, he
would deceive children and foolish human beings into
thinking that it is truly a carpenter."

The Republic - pg. 275

"But in heaven," I said, "perhaps, a pattern is laid up for
the man who wants to see and found a city within himself
on the basis of what he sees. It doesn't make any difference
whether it is or will be somewhere. For he would mind the
things of this city alone, and of no other."
"That's likely." he said.

The Republic - pg. 267

"Then would you be surprised if those who are inexperienced
in truth also have unhealthy opinion about many other things
and are disposed toward pleasure and pain and what's between
them in such a way that, when they are brought to the painful,
they suppose truly and are really in pain, but, when brought
from the painful to the in-between, they seriously suppose they
have come to fulfillment and pleasure; and, as though out of
luck of experience of pleasure they look from pain to the painless
and are deceived?"

The Republic - pg. 261

"One part, we say, we say, was that with which a human
being learns, and another that with which he becomes
spirited; as for the third, because of its many forms, we
had no peculiar name to call it by, but we named it by what
was biggest and strongest in it. For we called it the desiring
part on account of the intensity of the desires concerns with
eating, drinking, sex, and all their followers; and so, we also
called it the money-loving part, because, such desires are
most fulfilled by means of money."

The Republic - pg. 256

"Therefore, they live their whole life without ever being
friends of anyone, always one man's master or another's
slave. The tyrannic nature never has a taste of freedom
or true friendship."

The Republic - pg. 253

"And, you demonic man," I said, "a man becomes tyrannic
in the precise sense when, either by nature or by his practices
or both, he has become drunken, erotic, and melancholic."

The Republic - pg. 246

"He must, therefore, look harply to see who is courageous,
who is great-minded, who is prudent, who is rich. And so
happy is he that there is a necessity for him, whether he
wants to or not, to be an enemy of all of them and plot against
them until he purges the city."

The Republic - pg. 244

"Isn't it also the same for the leader of a people who, taking
over a particularly obedient mob, does not hold back from
shedding the blood of his tribe but unjustly brings charges
against a man - which is exaclty what they usually they do
- and, bringing him before the court, murders him, and,
doing away with a man's life, tastes of kindred blood with
unholy tongue and mouth, and banishes, and kills, and hints
at cancellations of debts and redistributions of land; isn't it
also necessarily fated, I say, that after this such a man either
be slain by his enemies or be tyrant and turn from a human
being into a wolf?"

The Republic - pg. 239

"And then the greediness for wealth and the neglect of the
rest for the sake of money-making destroyed it."
"True," he said.
"And does the greediness for what democracy defines as
good also dissolve it?"
"What do you say it defines that good to be?"
"Freedom," I said, "For surely in a city under a democracy
you would hear that htis is the finest thing it has, and that
for this reason it is the only regime worth living in for anyone
who is by nature free."

The Republic - pg. 239

"Then, " I said, "he also lives along day by day, gratifying
the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and
listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing;
now praticing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting
everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he
were occupied with philosophy. Often he engages in politics
and, jumping up, says and does whatever chances to come
to him; and if he ever admires any soldiers, he turns in that
direction; and if it's money-makers, in that one. And there
is neither order nor necessity in his life, but calling this life
sweet, free, and blessed he follows it throughout."

The Republic - pg. 236

"Then, democracy," I said, "would have all this and other
things akin to it and would be, as it seems, a sweet regime,
without rulers and many-colored, dispensing a certain equality
to equals and unequals alike."

The Republic - pg. 230

"It's plain, therefore," I said, "that in a city where you see
beggars, somewhere in the neighborhood thieves, catpurses,
temple robbers, and craftsmen of all such evils are hidden."

The Republic - pg. 228

"Instead of men who love victory and honor, they finally
become lovers of money-making and money; and they
praise and admire the wealthy man and bring him to the
ruling offices, while they dishonor the poor man."

The Republic - pg. 222

"It won't be hard for you to hear them," I said. "For those
I mean are also the ones having names; the one that is
praised by the many, that Cretan and Laconian regime;
and second in place and second in praise, the one called oligarchy,
a regime filled with throngs of evils; and this regime's
adversary, arising next in order, democracy; and then the
noble tyranny at last, excelling all of these, the fourth and
extreme illness of a city.. Or have you some other >idea
of a regime and dits into some distinct form? For dynasties
and purchased kingships and certain regimes of the sort
are somewhere between these, and one would find them
no less among the barbarians than the Greeks."

The Republic - pg. 213

"Then it will be acceptable, " I said, "just as before, to call
the first part knowledge, the second thought, the third
trust, and the fourth imagination; and the latter two taken
together, opinion, and the former two, intellection. And
opinion has to do with coming into being and intellection
with being; and as being is to coming into being, so is intellection
to opinion; and as intellection is to opinion, so is knowledge to
trust and thought to imagination. But as for the proportion
between the things over which these are set and the division
into two parts of each - the opinable and the intelligible - let's
let that go, Glaucon, so as not to run afoul of arguments many
times longer than those that have been gone through."

The Republic - pg. 197

"Then, if this is true," I said, "we must hold the following
about these things: education is not what the professions
of certain men assert it to be. They presumably assert
that they put into the soul knowledge that isn't in it, as
though they were putting sight into blind eyes."
"Yes, " he said, "they do indeed assert that."
"But the present argument, on the other hand," I said,
"indicates that this power is in the soul of each, and that
the instrument with which each learns - just as an eye
is not able to turn toward the light from the dark without
the whole body - must be turned around from that which
is coming into being together with the whole soul
until it is able to endure looking at that which is
and the brightest part of that which is. And we
affirm that this is the good, don't we?"
"Yes."
"There would, therefore, " I said, "be an art of this turning
around, concerned with the way in which this power can
most easily and efficiently be turned around, not an art of
producing sight in it. Rather, this art takes as given that sight
is there, but not rightly turned nor looking at what it ought to
look at, and accomplishes this object."

The Republic - pg. 196

"... At all events, this is the way the phenomena look to
me: in the knowable the last thing to be seen, that with
considerable effort, is the ideaof the good; but once
seen, it must be concluded that this is in fact the cause of
all that is right and fair in everything - in the visible it gave
birth to light and its sovereign; in the intelligible, itself
sovereign, it provided truth and intelligence - and that the
man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see it."

The Republic - pg. 189

"Therefore, say that not only being known is present in
the things known as a consequence of the good, but also
existence and being are in them besides as a result of it,
although the good isn't being but is still beyond being,
exceeding it in dignity and power."

The Republic - pg. 183

"You know that natures that are good at learning, have
memories, are shrewd and quick and everything else that
goes along with these qualities, and are as well full of
youthful fire and magnificence - such natures don't willingly
grow together with understandings that choose orderly
lives which are quiet and steady. Rather the men who
possess them are carried away by their quickness wherever
chance leads an all steadiness goes out from them."

The Republic - pg. 180

"Then, it's the philosopher, keeping company with the divine
and the orderly who becomes orderly and divine, to the
extent that is possible for a human being. But there is much
slander abroad."

"Now, if the many become aware that what we are saying about
this man is true, will they then be harsh with the philosophers
and distrust us when we say that a city could never be happy
otherwise than by having its outlines drawn by the painters
who use the divine pattern?"

The Republic - pg. 178

"Well, it was on account of this," I said, "foreseeing it then,
that we were frightened; but, all the same, compelled by
the truth, we said that neither city nor regime will ever
become perfect, nor yet will a man become perfect in the
same way either, before some necessity chances to constrain
those few philosophers who aren't vicious, those now called
useless, to take charge of a city, whether they want to or not,
and the city to obey; or a true erotic passion for true philosophy
flows from some divine inspiration into the sons of those who
hold power or the office of king, or into the fathers themselves.
I deny that there is any reason why either or both of these things
is impossible. If that were the case we would justify by laughed
at for uselessly saying things that are like prayers. Or isn't that so?"

The Republic - pg. 176

"None at all," I said, "but this is the very charge I'm bringing; not one city today is in a condition worthy of the philosophic nature. And this is why it is twisted and changed; just as a foreign seed sown in alien ground s likely to be overcome and fade away into the native stock, so too this class does not at present maintain its own power but falls away into an alien disposition. But if it ever takes hold in the best regime, just as it is itself best, then it will make plain that it really is divine as we agreed it is and that the rest are human, both in terms of their nature and their practices. Of course, it's plain that next you'll ask what this regime is."

The Republic - pg. 165

"To an understanding endowed with magnificence and the
contemplation of all the time and all being, do you think it
possible of all time and all being, do you think it possible
that human life seem anything great?"

The Republic - pg. 161

"And, as for those who look at many fair things but
don't see the fair itself and aren't even able to follow
another who leads them to it, and many just things
but not justice itself, and so on with all the rest, we'll
assert that they opine all these things but know nothing
of what they opine."

The Republic - pg. 155

"We'll deny, therefore, that the one who's finicky about
his learning, especially when he's young and doesn't yet
have an account of what's useful and not, is a lover of
learning or a philosopher, just as we say that the man
who's finicky about his food isn't hungry, doesn't desire
food, and isn't a lover of food and a bad eater."

The Republic - pg. 154

"Unless," I said, "the philosophers rule as kings or those
now called kings and chiefs genuinely and adequately
philosophize, and political power and philosophy coincide
in the same place, while the many natures now making
their way to either apart from the other are by necessity
excluded, there is no rest from ills for the cities, my dead
Glaucon, nor I think for human kind, nor will the regime
we have now described in speech ever come forth from
nature, insofar, as possible, and see the light of the sun.
This is what for so long was causing my hesitation to speak:
seeing how very paradoxical it would be to say. For it is
hard to see that in no other city would there be private or
public happiness."

The Republic - pg. 132

"Come, then," I said, "let's see if we can find the way
out. Now we agree that one Nature must practice one
thing and a different nature must practice a different
thing, and that women and men are different. But at
present we are asserting that different natures must
practise the same things. Is this the accusation against us?"
"Exactly"
"Oh, Glaucon," I said, "the power of the contradicting art is grand."
"Why so?"
"Because," I said, "in my opinion, many fall into it even
unwillingly and suppose they are not quarreling but discussing,
because they are unable to consider what's said by separating it
out into its forms. They pursue contradiction in the mere name
of what's spoken about, using eristic, not dialectic, with one another."

The Republic - pg. 123

"And in truth justice was, as it seems, something of this sort;
however, not with respect to a man's minding his external
business, but with respect to what is within, with respect to
what truly concerns him and his own. He doesn't let each
part in him mind other people's business or the three classes
in the soul meddle with each other, but really sets his own house
in good order and rules himself; he arranges himself, because
his own friend, and harmonizes the three parts, exactly like
three notes in a harmonic scale, lowest, highest and middle.
And if there are some other parts in between, he binds them
together and becomes entirely one from many, moderate and
harmonized. Then, and only then, he acts, if he does act in some
way - either concerning the acquisition of money, or the care of
body, or something political, or concerning private contracts.
In all these actions he believes and names a just and fine action
one that preserves and helps to produce this condition, and
wisdom the knowledge that supervises this action; while he
believes and names an unjust action one that undoes this condition,
and lack of learning, in its turn, the opinion that supervises
this action."

B. R. Ambedkar

"All I would like to say in this connection is that the Hindus before determining their attitude towards this question should note certain important considerations.

In particular they should note that there is a difference between Macht Politic [Power politics] and Gravamin Politic[in which the main strategy is to gain power by manufacturing grievances.] ; that there is a difference between Communitas Communitatum and a nation of nations; that there is a difference between safeguards to allay apprehensions of the weak and contrivances to satisfy the ambition for power of the strong: that there is a difference between providing safeguards and handing over the country.

Further, they should also note that what may with safety be conceded to Gravamin Politic may not be conceded to Macht Politic. What may be conceded with safety to a community may not be conceded to a nation and what may be conceded with safety to the weak to be used by it as a weapon of defence may not be conceded to the strong who may use it as a weapon of attack.

These are important considerations and, if the Hindus overlook them, they will do so at their peril."

The Republic - pg. 113

"Then the just man will not be any different from the just
city with respect to the form itself of justice, but will not be
like it."

The Republic - pg. 110

"If, therefore, any city ought to be designated stronger
than pleasures, desires, and itself, then this one must
be so called."

The Republic - pg. 109

"Moderation," I said, "is surely a certain kind of order
and mastery of certain kinds of pleasures and desires,
as men say when they use - I don't know in what way
- the phrase 'stronger than himself'; and some other
phrases of the sort are used that are, as it were, its tracks..."

The Republic - pg. 108

"How could we find justice so we won't have to bother
about moderation any further?"

The Republic - pg. 104

"Being harsh with the man who says something good
isn't charming."

The Republic - pg. 102

"...someone might perchance suppose the poet means not
new songs, but a new way of song, and praises that. Such
a saying shouldn't be praised, nor should this one be taken
in that sense. For they must beware of change to a
strange form of music, taking it to be a danger to the
whole. For never are the ways of music moved without the
greatest political laws being moved, ..."

The Republic - pg. 87

"Doctors," I said, "would prove cleverest if, beginning in child-
hood, in addition to learning the art, they should be familiar
with very many and very bad bodies and should themselves
suffer all diseases and not be quite healthy by nature. For
I don't suppose they care for a body with a body - in that
case it wouldn't be possible for the bodies themselves ever
to be, or to have been, bad - but for a body with a soul; and
it's not possible for a soul to have been, and to be, bad and
to care for anything well."

The Republic - pg. 80

"So, Glaucon," I said, "isn't this why the rearing in music
is most sovereign? Because rhythm and harmony most of
all insinuate themselves into the innermost part of the
soul and most vigorously lay hold of it in bringing grace
with them; and they make a man graceful if he is correctly
reared, if not, the opposite. Furthermore, it is sovereign
because the man properly reared on rhythm and harmony
would have the sharpest sense for what's been left out and
what isn't a fine product of craft or what isn't a fine product
of nature.

The Republic - pg. 76

"Now, as it seems, if a man who is able by wisdom to
become every sort of thing and to imitate all things
should come to our city, wishing to make a display
of himself and his poems, we would fall on our knees
before him as a man sacred, wonderful, and pleasing;
but we would say that there is no such man sacred,
wonderful, and pleasing; but we would say that there
is no such man among us in the city, not is it lawful
for such a man to be born there. We would send him
to another city, with myrrh poured over his head
and crowned with wool, while we ourselves would
use a more austere and less pleasing poet and teller of
tales for the sake of our benefit, one who would imitate
the style of the decent man and would say what he says
in those models that we set down as laws at the beginning,
when we undertook to educate the soldiers."

The Republic - pg. 72

"Your supposition is most correct," I said. And now I suppose
I can make plain to you what I couldn't before. Of poetry and
tale-telling, one kind proceeds wholly by imitation - as you say,
tragedy and comedy; another, by the poet's own report - this,
of course, you would find especially in dithyrambs; and still
another by both - this is found in epic poetry and many other
places too, if you understand me."

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Republic - pg. 58

"Do you suppose the god is a wizard, able treacherously to
reveal himself at different times in different ideas,
at one time actually himself changing and passing from his
own form into many shapes, at another time deceiving us and
making us think such tings about him? Or is he simple and
does he least of all let things depart from his own idea?"

Anselm Kiefer

The Republic - pg. 50

"... let's not say whether war works evil or good," I said,
"but only this much, that we have in its turn found the origin
of war - in those things whose presence in cities most of
all produces evils both private and public."

-- Socrates

The Republic - pg. 45

"a city, as I believe, comes into being because each of us isn't
self-sufficient but is in need of much..."

--Socrates

Roberto Bolaño,

The Republic - pg. 42

But if I'm unjust, but have provided myself with a
reputation for justice, a divine life is promised. Therefore,
since as the wise make plain to me, 'the seeming overpowers
even the truth' and and is the master of happiness, one
must surely turn wholly to it. As facade and exterior
I must draw a shadow painting of virtue all around me,
while behind it I must trail the wily and subtle fox of the
most wise Archilochus.

The Republic - pg. 41

they lead them into Hades and lay them down on couches;
crowning them, they prepare a symposium of the holy,
and they then make them go through the rest of time
drunk, in the belief that the finest wage of virtue is an eternal
drunk.

The Republic - Notes

The men who gather here in happy days for a theoretical
conversation are soon to fall on evil ones in the practice of
politics. The problems of that practice, which are later to
be revealed in deed, are here discussed. This is the drama
of the Republic, without which its teaching cannot
be understood. This friendly association of ten men with whom
Socrates talks in the Piraeus will be replaced by a committee
of ten men who brutally rule there in the name of the "Thirty"
and put the host of this meeting to death. The participants
discuss the best regime but are to experience the worst.

The Republic - pg. 33

"And, further, what about living? Shall we not say that it is
the work of a soul?"

To Do List

• Congestion Control
• Chapter 5
  

Introduction To Christianity - Closing

Even the Christian may be assailed by the nightmares
induced by the fear of fruitlessness, out of which the
pre-Christian world created these moving images of the
anxiety that all human activity is vain. But his nightmare
is pierced by the saving, transforming voice of
reality: "Have courage, I have conquered the world"
(John 16.33). The new world, with the description of
which, in the image of the final Jerusalem, the Bible ends,
is no Utopia but certainty, which we advance to meet in faith.
A salvation of the world does exist - that is the confidence
which supports the Christian and which still makes it
rewarding even today to be a Christian.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 273

The foregoing reflections may have made a little clearer
what is involved in the biblical pronouncements about
the resurrection: their essential content is not the conception
of a restoration of bodies to souls after a long interval; their aim
is to tell men that they, they themselves, live on; not by
virtue of their own power but because they are known and
loved by God in such a way that they can no longer perish.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 271

Immortality as conceived by the Bible proceeds not from the
personal force of what is in itself indestructible but from being drawn
into the dialogue with the Creator; that is why it must
be called awakening.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 264

Because of the Lord's devotion, never more to be revoked
the Church is the institution sanctified by him for ever,
an institution in which the holiness of the Lord
becomes present among men. But it is really and truly
the holiness of the Lord that becomes present in it
and that chooses again and again as the vessel of its
presence - with a paradoxical love - the dirty hands of men.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 250

True love is excess of justice, excess that goes further
than justice, but never destruction of justice, which must
be and must remain the basic form of justice.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 247

This implies a further and very important consequence.
If the breakthrough to the ultra-complexity of the final phase
is based on spirit and freedom, then it is by no means a neutral,
cosmic drift; it includes responsibility. It does not happen of
its own accord, like a physical progress, but rests on decisions.
That is why the return of the Lord is not only salvation, not
only the omega that sets everything right, but also judgment.
Indeed at this stage we can actually define the meaning of the
talk of judgment. It means precisely this, that the final stage
of the world is not the result of a natural current but the result
of responsibility based on freedom. This must also be regarded
as the key to understanding why the New Testament clings
fast, in spite of its message of grace, to the assertion that at
the end men are judged "by their works" and no one can escape
giving account of the way he has lived his life.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 239

"Heaven" is by nature what one has not made oneself and
cannot make oneself; in scholastic language it was said to be,
as grace, a "donum indebitum et superadditum naturae"
("an unowed gift added on top of nature"). As fulfilled love, heaven
can always only be granted to man; but hell is loneliness of the man
who will not accept it, who declines the status of beggar and
withdraws into itself.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 234

Christian message is basically nothing else than the
transmission of the testimony that love has here
broken through death and thus transformed fundamentally
the situation of all of us.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 229

Death is absolute loneliness. But the loneliness into which
love can no longer reach is - hell.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 226

Thus the article about the Lord's descent into hell
reminds us that not only God's speech but also his silence
is part of the Christian revelation. God is not only the
comprehensible word that comes us; he is also the silent,
inaccessible, uncomprehended and incomprehensible ground
that eludes us. To be sre, in Christianity there is primacy of the
logos, of the word, over silence; God has
spoken. God is word. But this does not entitle us
to forget the truth of God's abiding concealment. Only
when we have experienced him as silence may we hope
to hear his speech too, which proceeds in silence. Christology
reaches out beyond the cross, the moment when the divine love
is tangible, into the death, the silence and the eclipse of God.
Can we wonder that the Church and the life of the individual
are led again and again into this hour of silence, into the forgotten
and almost discarded article, "Descended into hell"?

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 224

"God is dead and we have killed him.: This saying of Nietzsche's
belongs linguistically to the tradition of Christian Passiontide
piety; it expresses the content of Holy Saturday, "descended into hell".

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 221

Why should God take pleasure in the suffering of his creature,
indeed his own Son, or even see in it the currency with which
reconciliation has to be purchased from him? The Bible and
right Christian belief are far removed from such ideas. It is not
pain as such that counts, but the breadth of the love which spans
existence so completely that it unites the distant and the near,
bringing God-forsaken man into relation with God. It alone gives
the pain as aim and a meaning. Were it otherwise, then the
executioners round the cross would have been the real priests;
they, who had caused the pain, would have offered the sacrifice.
But this was not the point; the point was the inner centre that
bears and fulfils the pain, and therefore the executioners were not
the priests; the priest was Jesus, who reunited the two separated
ends of the world in his love.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 215

It says on the contrary that "God was in Christ something
new, something unheard of - the starting-point of Christian
existence and the centre of New Testament theology of the
cross: God does not wait until the guilty come to be reconciled ;
he goes to meet them and reconciles them. Here we can see
the true direction of the incarnation, of the cross.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 213

"Everything is grace" - a saying in which a life which seemed
to be only weakness and futility can see itself as full of riches
and fulfilment - truly becomes in Mary, "full of grace", a
concrete reality. She does not contest or endanger the exclusiveness
of salvation through Christ; she points to it.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 210

The virgin birth is not a lesson in ascetisim nor does it belong directly to the doctrine of Jesus' Sonship; it is first and last theology of grace, a proclamation of how salvation comes to us: in the simplicity of acceptance, as the voluntary gift of the love that redeems the world.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 208

For the Sonship of which faith speaks is not a biological
but an ontological fact, an event not in time but in God's
eternity; God is always Father, Son and Spirit; the conception
of Jesus does not mean that a new God-the-Son comes into being,
but that God as Son in the man Jesus draws the creature man
to himself, so that he himself "is" man.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 204

Let us be plain, even at the risk of being misunderstood:
the true Christian is not the denominational party-member
but he who through being a Christian has become truly
human; not he who slavishly observes a system of norms,
thinking as he does so only of himself, but he who has
become freed to simple human goodness. Of course,
the principle of love, if it is to be genuine, includes faith.
Only thus does it remain what it is. For without faith,
which we have come to understand as a term expressing
man's ultimate need to receive and the inadequacy of
all personal achievement, love becomes an arbitrary deed.
It cancels itself out and becomes self-righteousness:
faith and love condition and demand each other reciprocally.
Similarly, in the principle of love there is also present the
principle of hope, which looks beyond the moment and its isolation,
and seeks the whole. Thus our reflections finally lead of
their own accord to the words in which Paul named the main
supporting pillars of Christianity: "So faith, hope, love abide,
these three; but the greatest of them is love"

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 202

Accordingly, from the point of view of the Christian faith,
man comes in the profoundest sense to himself not through
what he does but through what he accepts. He must wait for
the gift of love, and love can only be received as a gift. It
cannot be "made" on one's own, without anyone else; one
must wait for it, let it be given to one. And one cannot become
wholly man in any other way than by being loved,
by letting oneself be loved. That love represents simultaneously
both man's highest possibility and his deepest need, and that
this most necessary thing is at the same time the freest and
the most unenforceable, means precisely, means precisely that
for his "salvation" man is meant to rely on receiving. If he
declines to let himself be presented with the gift, then he
destroys himself. Activity that makes itself into an absolute,
that aims at achieving humanity by its own efforts alone,
is in contradiction with man's being.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 201

Indissoluble marriage is in fact only comprehensible and
feasible on the basis of faith in God's henceforward irrevocable
decision, embodied in Christ, in favour of "marriage" with
mankind. It stand or falls with this faith; in the long run it
is just as impossible outside this faith as it is necessary within it.
And once again it should be stated that it is precisely this
apparent fixation on the decision of one moment in life that
enables man to march forward, to consolidate himself stage by
stage, while the continual annulment of such decisions keeps
sending him back to the beginning again and condemns him to
a circular motion that encloses itself in the fiction of eternal youth
and thus refuses to accept the totality of human existence.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 197

Christ is the infinite self-expenditure of God.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 196

This is true; a little bit of good will would really suffice;
but it is the tragedy of mankind that it does not possess the
strength for this very thing. Is Camus right, then, when he
chooses as a symbol of humanity Sisyphus, who keeps
trying to push the stone up the mountain and must continually
see it slip down again? So far as human capacities are
concerned, the Bible is as sober as Camus, but it does not
stop at his scepticism. To the Bible, the limits of human
righteousness, of human power as a whole, become an
indication of the way in which man is thrown back upon
questioning gift of love, a gift which unexpectedly opens
itself to him and thereby open up man himself, and without
which man would remain shut up in all his "righteousness"
and thus unrighteous.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 188

I believe that this is also the key to understanding why there
is no similar recourse to the individual in other religions. In
the last analysis Hinduism seeks not the whole but the individual
who saves himself, who escapes from the world, the wheel of Maja.
Precisely because at bottom it does not want the whole but only
to rescue the individual from wickedness it can never recognize any
other individual as finally significant and decisive for my
salvation. Its devaluation of the whole thus becomes a devaluation
of the individual as well, in the "For" disappears as a category.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 187

Talk of original sin means just this, that no man can start
from scratch from scratch any more, in a status integratis
(=completely unimpaired by history). No one starts off in an
unimpaired condition in which he would only need to develop
himself freely and lay out his own grounds; everyone
lives in a web that is a part of his existence itself. Last judgment
is the answer to these collective entanglements.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 184

Christian faith is not based on the atomized individual
but comes from the knowledge that there is no such
thing as the mere individual, that on the contrary
man is himself only when he is fitted into the whole:
into mankind, history, the cosmos, as is right and proper
for a being who is "spirit in body".

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 182

From the standpoint of Christian faith one may
say that for history God stands at the end,
while for being he stands at the beginning.
This indicates Christianity's all-embracing horizon,
which distinguishes it both from mere metaphysics
and from the future-oriented ideology of Marxism.
Since Abraham and until the return of the Lord, faith
advances to meet him who is coming. But in Christ the
countenance of him who is to come is already revealed:
it will be the man who can embrace all men because he
as lost himself and them to God. For this reason the
emblem of him who is to come must be the cross, and
his face in this era of the world must be a countenance
of blood and wounds: the "last man", that is, the real ,
the future man reveals himself in this age in the
last men; whoever wishes to stand on his side
must therefore stand on theirside.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 176

The Rubicon of becoming man, of "hominization", was
first crossed by the step from animal to logos, from
mere life to mind. Man came into existence out of the "clay"
at the moment when a creature was no longer merely "there"
but, over and above just being there and filling his needs, was
aware of the whole. But this step, through which "logos",
understanding, mind, first came into this world, is only completed
when the logositself, the whole creative meaning, and
man merge into each other. Man's full "hominization" presupposes
God's becoming man; only by this event is the Rubicon dividing the
"animal" from the "logical" finally crossed for ever and the highest
possible development accorded to the process which began when
a creature of dust and earth looked out beyond itself and itself and
its environment and was able to address God as "You". It is openness
to the whole, to the infinite, that makes man complete. Man is man
by reaching out infinitely beyond himself and he is consequently
more of a man the less enclosed he is in himself, the less "limited"
he is. For - let me repeat - that man is most man, indeed the
true man, who is most unlimited, who not only has contact with the
infinite - the infinite being! - but is one with him: Jesus Christ. In him
"hominization" has truly reached its goal.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 173

Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033-1109) had been concerned
to deduce the work of Christ by a train of necessary reasons
(raitionibus necessaris) and thus to show irrefutably
that this work had to happen in the precise way in
which it in fact did. His argument may be roughly summarized
like this: by man's sin, which was aimed against God, the order
of justice was infinitely damaged and God infinitely offended.
Behind this is the idea that the measure of the offence is
determined by the status of the offended party; if I offend
a beggar the consequences are not the same as they would be
if I offended a head of state. The importance of the offence varies
according to the addressee. Since God is infinite the offence to
him implicit in humanity;s sin is also infinitely important. The
right thus damaged must be restored, because God is a God of
order and justice; indeed, he is justice itself. But the measure
of the offence demands an infinite reparation, which man is not
capable of making. He can offend infinitely - his capacity extends
that far - but he cannot produce an infinite reparation; what he,
as a finite being, gives will always be only finite. His powers of
destruction extend further than his capacity to reconstruct. Thus
between all the reparations that man may attempt and
the greatness of his guilt there remains an infinite gulf which
he can never bridge. Any gesture of expiation can only
demonstrate his powerlessness to close the infinite gulf which
he himself opened up.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 171

For we have found that the being of Christ
("incarnation" theology!) is actualitas, stepping
beyond and out of oneself, the exodus of departure from
self; it is not a being that rests in itself, but the act of being
sent, of being son, of serving. Conversely, this "doing" is not
just "doing" but "being"; it reaches down into the depths
of being and coincides with it. This being is exodus, transformation.
So at this point a properly understood theology of being
and of the incarnation must pass over into the theology
of the cross and become one with it; conversely, a theology
of the cross that gives its full measure must pass over into the
theology of the Son and of being.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 168

To that extent it is not until this point that the Christian
revaluation of values reaches its final goal; only here does
it become fully clear that he who surrenders himself completely
to service for others, to complete selflessness and self-emptying,
clearly becomes these things - that this very person
is the true man, the man of the fixture, the commixture
of man and God.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 155

"Christian faith is not related to ideas but to a person,
an 'I', and to one that is defined as 'word' and 'son', that is,
as 'total openness'".

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 151

As a fitting conclusion one could indeed assert that, thus understood,
the teaching and the deeds of the historical Jesus are not as such
important, but the mere fact of his having existed is sufficient - so long
as one realizes this "fact" implies the whole reality of the person who
as such is his own teaching, who as such coincides with his deeds and
thereby possesses his unparalleled individuality and uniqueness. The
person of Jesus is his teaching, and his teaching is he himself.
Christian faith, that is, faith in Jesus as the Christ, is therefore truly
"personal faith". What this means can really be understood only from
this angle. Such faith is not the acceptance of a system but the acceptance of this person who is his word; of the word as person and of the person as word.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 135

But it is the nature of Christian existence to receive and to
live life as relatedness, and thus to enter into that unity which
is the ground of all reality and sustains it. This will perhaps
make it clear how the doctrine of the Trinity, when properly
understood, can become the nodal point of theology and
of Christian thought.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 131

St. Augustine once enshrined this idea in the following
formula: "He is not called Father with reference to
himself but only in relation to the Son; seen by himself he
is simply God."

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 128

So at bottom belief in the Trinity, which recognizes the plural
in the unity of God, is the only way to the final elimination of
dualism as a means of explaining plurality alongside unity;
only through this belief is the positive validation of plurality
given a definitive base. God stands above singular and plural.
He bursts both categories.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 124

Physicists know today that one can talk about the structure
of matter in approximations starting from various different
angles. They know that the position of the beholder at any
one time affects the result of his questioning of nature.
Why should we not be able to understand afresh, on this
basis, that in the question of God we must not look, in the
Aristotelian fashion, for an ultimate concept encompassing the
whole, must be prepared to find a multitude of aspects which
depend on the position of the observer and which we can no
longer survey as a whole but only accept alongside each other,
without being able to make any statement about the ultimate truth?

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 120

The point of departure of this whole approach remains
the idea that the doctrine of the Trinity is the expression
of the historical side of God and therefore of the way in which
God appears in history. Inasmuch as Hegel and - in a different
way - Schelling push this idea to its logical conclusion, they
reach the point where they no longer distinguish conclusion,
they reach the point where they no longer distinguish this
process of the historical self-revelation of God from a God
quietly resting in himself behind it all; instead, they now
understand the process of history as the process of God himself.
The historical form of God then becomes the gradual self-realization
of the divine; thus history certainly becomes the process of the
logos, but even the logos is only real as the process
of history. In other words, this means that it is only gradually in
the course of history that the logos - meaning of all being
- beings itself forth to itself. Thus the "historicization" of the doctrine
of the Trinity, as contained in Monarchianism, now becomes the
"historicization" of God. This again signifies that meaning is no longer
simply the creator of history, instead, history becomes the creator
of meaning and the latter becomes its creation. Karl Marx is the
only one who continued to think resolutely along these lines, by
asserting that if meaning does not precede man then it lies in the
future, which man must himself bring about by his own struggles.

The Republic - Opening

Socrates: I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon,
son of Ariston, to pray to the goddess; and, at the same time,
I wanted to observe how they would put on the festival, since
there were now holding it for the first time.

THE REPUBLIC
OF
PLATO

TRANSLATED WITH NOTES AND
AN INTERPRETIVE ESSAY BY
ALLAN BLOOM

1968 by Allan Bloom
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Jacqueline Schuman

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 117

God is as he shows himself; God does not
show himself in a way in which he is not. On this assertion
rests the Christian relation with God; in it is grounded the
doctrine of Trinity; indeed, it is this doctrine.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 114

Love is always "mysterium" - more than one can
reckon or grasp by subsequent reckoning. Love itself
- the uncreated, eternal God - must therefore be in
the highest degree a mystery - "the" mysterium itself.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 112

Once again it becomes evident here how the categories of
minimum and maximum, smallest and greatest, change in a
perspective of this sort. In a world which in the last analysis
is not mathematics but love, the minimum is a maximum; the
smallest thing that can love is one of the biggest things; the
particular is more than the universal; the person, the unique
and unrepeatable, is at the same time the ultimate and highest
thing.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 109

The question to which everything finally leads could be
formulated like this: In all the variety of individual things
what is, so to speak, the common stuff of being - what the
one being behind the many "things", which nevertheless
all "exist"? The many answers produced by history can finally be
reduced to two basic possibilities. The first and most obvious
would run something like this: Everything we encounter is
in the last analysis stuff, matter; this is the only thing
that always remains as demonstrable reality and consequently
represents the real being of all that exists - the materialistic solution.
The other possibility points in the opposite direction. It says:
Whoever looks thoroughly at matter will discover that it is
being-thought, objectivized thought. So it cannot be the ultimate.
On the contrary, before it comes thinking, the idea; all
being is in the last resort being-thought and can be traced back
to mind as original reality; this is the "idealistic" solution.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 104

It is only here, where the God who is recognized as Lord
of all has voluntarily chosen the final degree of powerlessness
by delivering himself up to his weakest creature, that the
Christian concept of the almightiness of God can be truly
formulated. At this point simultaneously a new concept of
power and a new concept of lordship and dominion is born.
The highest power is demonstrated as the calm willingness
completely to renounce all power; and we are shown that
it iss powerful not through force but only through the
freedom of love, which, even when it is rejected, is stronger
than the exultant powers of earthly violence. Here and only here
does that revaluation of criteria and dimensions which
made itself heard earlier in the antithesis of maximum
and minimum finally come into its own.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 99

By deciding in favor of the God of the philosophers
and logically declaring this God to be the God who
speaks to man and to whom one can pray, the Christian
faith gave a completely new significance to this
God of the philosophers, removing him from the
purely academic realm and thus profoundly transforming him.
This God who had previously existed as something
neutral, as the highest, culminating concept; this God
who had been understood as pure Being or pure thought,
circling round for ever closed in upon itself without reaching
over to man and his little world; this God of the philosophers,
whose pure eternity and unchangeability had excluded any
relation with the changeable and transitory, now appeared
to the eye of faith as the God of men, who is not only
thought of all thoughts, the eternal mathematics of the universe,
but also agape, the power of creative love.

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 97

Christianity thus put itself resolutely on the side of truth
and turned its back on a conception of religion satisfied
to be mere outward ceremonial which in the end can be
interpreted to mean anything one fancies.

Kabir #26

The darkness of night is coming along fast, and
the shadows of love close in the body and
the mind.
Open window to the west, and disappear into the
air inside you.


Near your breastbone there is an open flower.
Drink the honey that is all around that flower.
Waves are coming in:
there is so much magnificence near the ocean!
Listen: Sound of big seashells! Sound of bells!


Kabir says: Friend, listen, this is what I have to say:
The Guest I love is inside me!

Kabir #21

What has death and a thick body dances before
what has no thick body and no death.
The trumpet says: "I am you."
The spiritual master arrives and bows down to the
beginning student.
Try to live to see this!

Kabir #17

What comes out of the harp? Music!
And there is a dance no hands or feet dance.
No fingers play it, no ears hear it,
because the Holy One is the ear,
and the one listening too.

The great doors remain closed, but the spring
fragrance
comes inside anyway,
and no one sees what takes place there.
Men and women who have entered through both
doors at once will understand this poem.

Kabir #6

Why should we two ever want to part?

Just as the leaf of the water rhubarb lives floating on
the water,
we live as the great one and little one.

As the owl opens his eyes all night to the moon,
we live as the great one and little one.

This love between us goes back to the first humans;
it cannot be annihilated.

Here is Kabir's idea: as the river gives itself into the
ocean,
what is inside me moves inside you.

Count Juilan - Closing

you will open the book of the Poet and read a few verses
as you undress: then you will draw the cord of the venetian
blind without so much as glancing at the enemy coast, at
the scar dripping poison on the other shore of the sea:
sleep weighs heavily on your eyelids and you close your eyes:
as you know, all too well: tomorrow will be another day, the
invasion will begin all over again

Count Juilan - pg. 197

the moment has come for harkis to spring into action:
their ridiculous disguises fall to the floor, immaculate
white silk turbans cover black turbans of kinky hair:
they pitilessly portion out the sacred booty among
themselves, they charge and bury their sharp, poison-
filled needles in the tender flesh: one ogiastic scene
follows another, accompanied by cries of terror and
ecstasy from the damsels penetrated by the Arab's serpents:
the blood flows copiously, and still the fury of the Moors
is not appeased: death imposes its implacable logic: you
witness this violent, cruel spectacle from the vast
transept of the temple:

Count Juilan - pg. 197

the moment has come for harkis to spring into action:
their ridiculous disguises fall to the floor, immaculate
white silk turbans cover black turbans of kinky hair:
they pitilessly portion out the sacred booty among
themselves, they charge and bury their sharp, poison-
filled needles in the tender flesh: one ogiastic scene
follows another, accompanied by cries of terror and
ecstasy from the damsels penetrated by the Arab's serpents:
the blood flows copiously, and still the fury of the Moors
is not appeased: death imposes its implacable logic: you
witness this violent, cruel spectacle from the vast
transept of the temple: