Thinking of Sin, Wrong Deeds, and the Redeeming Value of Time

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christianity, deeds, Horace, latin, mos maiorum, right, rome, sin, time, tradition, wrong

It is time for some Latin. Let’s take a look at a statement from Horace (Quintius Horatius Flaccus), poet extraordinaire.

Bonī propter amōrem virtūtis peccāre ōdērunt.
Because of their love of virtue, good men hate to do wrong.
Los hombres de bien odian pecar debido a su amor por la virtud.

Notice Horace’s minimization of language here. There is almost a sense of paucity to Roman poetry which can be used to identify it and separate it from any other genre in the language. First and foremost, Horace separates ‘good men’ from ‘bad ones’ in a single word: “Bonī.” This plural Nominative used as a Substantive noun tells us ‘good men’ stands for not just a group, or even just Romans, but for every good man (and I would argue, also woman) who is good by deed. Bad men, thus, are winnowed from our statement at the offset. No chance for those who choose to do bad deeds. These “good men” then hate to sin, written here as the infinitive form of the verb. Although, sin is just not a good translation for the noun in this context, let us think of how the Romans saw “peccāre.”

Before religion took hold in the Roman Empire (whether you think of the period as immediately after Christ’s death in 33 CE or post-legitimization of the religion by Constantine in 311 CE doesn’t really matter) peccāre was used as ‘to do something wrong.’ This idea of the deed rather than the value of the action was quite common in the Roman world. What do I mean? To a Roman ‘doing’ was the thing that mattered most; only after the deed had been done could one really weight its merits or demerits. Thus, if I killed an animal, for example, only after the fact could anyone determine if my action had been justified, or not. In essence, I was assumed innocent until proven guilty because guilt (culpa) or innoncence (iniuria – more like injustice) could only be established after the case had been weighted by a jury of peers. Thus ‘sin’ implies ‘culpa,’ something the Romans would have vehemently opposed before religion came along. Therefore, in this time-context of pre-christian Rome, peccāre is only ‘to do wrong.’

I can almost hear you saying that ‘to do wrong’ also implies guilt. Let us consider roman morality (mōs – the concept of mōs maiōrum, also known as ‘the wisdom of the elders’ was sacred in Rome before religion came along). To the Romans, what was good was a heap of decisions made in the past and which had proven to be good. Rome was the seat of law in the Ancient World, thus, their ‘good things’ were deeds that had been proven to be good for the state. If you have ever heard a lawyer speak of precedence and how they allow a course of action in the present, you understand Roman Law and its concept of good a bit better. In a way, if killing a Gaul (something the Romans thoroughly enjoyed) had been proven beneficial in the past, it was also beneficial to do it in the present, and it would always be beneficial to do it; of course, only until Rome had to consider whether killing a Gaul was a good thing (during Caesar’s time when Gauls of southern Europe had become loyal friends of the would-be Empire) did they have to think of the act as a possible bad deed. Never mind you are killing someone – anyone. Thank you Rome.

Thus Horace’s statement, loaded, as it is, with meaning, speaks to us of Roman culture before religion and before sin. Only good men wish by nature to avoid wrong doing; a doing they do because of their love of virtue which, as we have discussed, was subject to precedence more than actual guilt. However, therein resides the beauty of the statement. We, if we do something considered wrong to some, may be considered as doing the right thing in some future time. This is the redeeming virtue of Roman thinking; the possibility of change through time and space. ‘Sin’ will always be bad, but ‘to do wrong’ was subject to time and culture. So don’t give up on doing what you believe is right; we may find you the subject of some great biography in the future.

Valete!

Thinking on Mothers, Chiding, and Children

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Aesop, ancient greek, chiding, children, deeds, fables, fate, future, morality, mothers, Past, Present, time

One of Aesop’s most alarming fables is that of a bad child who blames his mother for his death. As the fable goes, a child brings a stolen book to his mother; however, she does not chide him for the deed. Noticing no rebuke, the child soon moved on to stealing many and greater things. Eventually, as a youth, that same child was caught stealing from a merchant on the road and killed. With his last breath, he blamed his mother for his death. Aesop closes the fable with this moral:

Μὴ οὖν μέλλετε, ὦ ἄξιαι μητέρες, τοἴς ἀναξίοις τέκνοις ἐπιπληττειν.
Do not hesitate, therefore, o worthy mothers, to chide unworthy children.
No dudéis, por lo tanto, buenas madres, en admonestar malos hijos.

There is so much meaning hidden in these few words, one can almost feel a sense of overwhelming etymology. We shall start here:

Children vs. Youths

Aesop calls the child a τἐκνον (tecnon) in this fable, a child of no more than five years old. This mother, although worthy of her title, decides to allow this child to steal since, in the  beginning, he was only taking little things. The case is also illustrative of how Ancient Greek parents saw their children. A child was literally ‘that which one had made’ or, in other words, technology (the word child is exactly where technology comes from – think of ‘this project is my brain-child’). Because mortality rate was quite big in Ancient Greece, somewhere between 45 to 65 percent according to many scholars, there was a disconnect between parents and children. Although there was a ceremony to name the child after his clan once the baby was eight days old (only for boys) in order to give it what we would think of as a last name (patronym), the child would not get a first name until he overcame his first few years in the world. This child could have easily been called, because of his ‘qualities,’ Kleptiscos (little thief); but only once he had reached identifiable maturity. Consider the mother’s hopes that he would only have been a thief during his youth (hence my diminutive) and will not continue to do so as an adult. Thus, when your technology, with your last name but not a first name, misbehaved, there may have been a temptation on the part of the mother to let it do its thing.

Another fact is that τέκνον was a neuter term, meaning neither male nor female. In our modern world, we have lowered this age of cognitive thinking to a much earlier time. Toddlers (our neuter term for a boy or girl of two) are thinkers, babies have gender since birth; this, to the Ancient Greeks, was visible but not necessarily true. Until a child developed his own conscience sometime after age five, they were a thing. For us, although babies are neuter, we feel the need to ask ‘is it a boy or girl?’ After that, even babies are conscious beings. We have even pushed gender into the womb, so we can attach consciousness to fetuses within the first 12 weeks of life. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the Ancient Greeks believed the child would develop according to the traits given it by the gods, and made no effort to encapsulate their being with a first name or a gender until they were quite older.

A Warning for Mothers

Aesop is warning mothers who are tempted to let the thing be because its actions are small and insignificant. While that was true of good deeds, the writer warns about bad things. After all, it is the duty of a mother ἐπιπλήττειν (literally meaning ‘to hit upon’ – chiding came with a sense of physical violence) her child, especially if the deed was bad. That is why Aesop makes the contrast between “good mothers” and “bad children.” Good mothers with good children have it easy, for they can let the child go; but it was possible to be a good mother with a bad child, in which case it was the responsibility of the mother to teach said child. However, responsibility of the mother did not take responsibility from the adult in which the child would turn into; that is why Aesop insists the mother is good, even though her child is not.

Destiny and Bad Teens

The child-now-turn-youth argues “ἐμοι ἥδ’ ἡ μοῖρα ἐστιν” (this very fate belongs to me) upon his death, because of his mother. Fate here is transient, changeable. Kleptiscos (let us keep the name we have made up for the sake of argument) says that if his mother had chided him (and possibly given him a different name like ‘the chided one’ – Epiplettos) he could have avoided his fate. Fate, then, is dictated by the actions one takes in his or her lifetime. Aesop, while agreeing with the Ancient Greek version of fate, says the boy is incorrect; for mothers do not dictate fate, but your own actions. Aesop still argues, however, that “good mothers” will chide their small children when they do something wrong since, one never knows, they could grow up to be thieves and wrongly blame them for their final fate.

But isn’t fate dictated? You ask. How can mother and child possibly be held liable for fate? Because, as we argued previously, fate is an accumulation of decisions. In “Thinking of the Ancient Greeks, Deeds and Time,” I put forward this very notion. Fate is the irrevocable destination we give ourselves when we have committed certain actions in our past. This is what was so amazing about time in Ancient Greece, if you had made the right decisions, it worked to your benefit; if you had not, you were doomed to a bad fate.

Χαιρετε!

Thinking of Ancient Greeks, Deeds, and Time.

Tags

Ancient Greece, ancient history, future, isocrates, Past, Present, rome, time

Imagine, for a moment, that you are inside your own head. The space is empty, not of thought, of course, but of anything else, it is the void of physicality. You stand, alone, at the center of this world, looking at something distant and magnificent. The physical takes shape in the most intimate of your memories. What do you see? This, the Ancient Greeks say, is your past, that which has happened and cannot change, it is the perfect. What you are seeing is not a figment of your imagination, but an accumulation of everything you have done up until now (πᾶν ἐστι ἄνθρωπος συμφρονη – man is an accumulation of choices). Facts that can be lied about but never changed.

You may see a previous time, person, even a city; this is where you came from, who you are now. As you look left and right, you also come closer to the horizontal line that represents the present; a line that divides the past, where you are looking, from the present where you stand, and the future to your back. Imagine, now, that you are standing on a compass and, as such, when you turn, the past is no longer the past, but something else, it is a past turning into present. You are then normalizing your past experiences in order to relate them to you, yourself, today; experiences that become entangled in time. Everything becomes imperfect, less certain, more malleable. If you are looking due East at thirty degrees, the imperfection of your actions is so tangled with your present you can think of these things you see as happening now, they can be changed. Imperfect action is part present, and present can be affected by it; it more than likely is.

In order to effect this change you need to see more, see better; try to understand another aspect of your compass, that what is behind you. However, you cannot turn, something holds you in place, restricting your movements solely to your neck muscles. You try, as much as possible, to look beyond the present; to see what lies across that line, but you cannot turn more than fifteen to thirty degrees from this present line, no more than sixty to eighty degrees from your past; you, everything you are, is fixated upon it. We can only focus on the future in limitations of time.

The future you can imagine is directly dependent upon the present you see and a small, predictable possibility. You may, blindly, speak of a perfect future, a time not visible in which you hope your present has become past, but nothing more. You are trapped, as it seems, by your present; a present that locks you, limited by your own physicality, gazing on the past. What is the future, after all, if not a prediction? What is ‘what is to come’ if not an estimation of present circumstances given frame by the actions we can clearly see from our past and the past of others? It is a gamble, an action of time which, inexorably, passes without our moving. We remain, helplessly, locked into our compass; north is the past, south is the future, a future south we cannot see, only make conjectures about.

The Ancient Greeks thought of time exactly in this way. A man was an accumulation of choices. An accumulation of perfect past actions that had come from behind you and moved with time to the present and the past. You can only see what has been done after it had left the future, transited the present, and become the past. This is how the Ancients Greeks broke down time, how they saw their day-to-day. They would say “count no man lucky, until he dies” and “look to the end” because it was impossible to make a decision on the life of someone whose future was still at their back; in the same light, it was impossible to see a man’s end until the ending itself had caught up with him. An ending determined by the Fates, who spin, determine time,  and cut the threads of individuals that make the thread of life on this earth.

Thus, the Ancient Greeks would say ‘look to the past,’ see your choices, accept them, good or bad, and make changes to the present. The future is coming, it cannot be avoided, all you can do is live now, this very moment, the very best way possible. Socrates, when charged with corrupting the youth and impiety to the gods, and asked to make a defense for himself, replied: “I have lived a good life, isn’t that the best way to prepare my defense?” Socrates needed only to point to his past to demonstrate who he was; there was no need to make up a story about him; his history, that record which he and everyone else could clearly see, was the very argument that should save him from death. Socrates died, in the end, and once he had capped his life with sacrifice in obeisance to the polis, the Athenians whom he sought to protect from themselves realized he had indeed lived a good life, and regretted his death.

Of course, Romans would disagree with me and the Ancients Greeks almost in every way; but that, dear friends, is another story, for another time. In the mean time, look to your past, see the mountain you have become, and decide how to make it even more grandiose to those who, in awe, watch you move backwards into the future, building time now and moving on, constructing a personal empire that will last for generations.