“Listen to this when you can. After, I want your opinion. Thank you.”
Rick
“House-born slave-boys” who are properly raised through stern testing by their just master are likened to the man unto the god. Seneca uses God often in this translation and I am not certain if that is a translation of Jove Eternal or the Aristotelian notion. Good men, as opposed to bad men, who charge about seeking pleasure and richness, are spoken of as having a relationship with God based on good behavior, discipline and virtue.“
Their strength and courage droop without an antagonist,” writes Seneca, while speaking of athletes, athletes which only have one activity, fighting. These men are mentioned sometimes fighting more than one opponent to test themselves. The parenting of the mother is properly viewed as toxically coddling for the boy or youth and absolute poison to the man who permits her to protect him, as she seeks to shelter and protect and thus witlessly render vulnerable the man. In our own time, the fact that civilization, in the form of modernity has weakened us below the threshold of manhood by ancient or even early modern standards of resiliency, shows us as having turned away from God and into the plush arms of our earthly mother.
Iroquois, and many other tribal mythologies, place the masculine spiritual force of life as thunder and rain [Thunderer, and his son He-Who-Makes-Rivers] and the feminine as earthly. The female deity often rules the house of death as well, sometimes as reflected via the sterile face of the moon.
“God bears a fatherly mind towards good men and loves them in a manly spirit…those who are surfeited with ease break down…from a single blow…”
The current situation in America where men who have been denied the right to defend themselves or their loved ones or property and especially their honor, has critically wounded the spirits of most of us to a point of making us merely the spectator. Even as we worship millionaire athletes who would once have been mere slaves, there is a hope which Seneca brings up, that reminds me much of The Book of Job and also of Christ’s temptation by Satan. It is mentioned that Fortune or Fortuna [Time weaving Fate’s wicked little sister] is used by God to test man in the very same way that Satan serves in Christian faith, within the field of Time. Man’s occupation of the field of Time is regarded as his chief difference from the gods [in other words, of having been made according to the divine image]. This man is viewed, in this stoic wise, as something of a child avatar of the eternal cast into the temporal and subjected to the terrible sufferings of the mortal.
There is an unspoken promise of ascension here for the stoic mind. The stoic mind sought a place among the Eternal beyond the field of suffering Time as an athlete of the human spirit seeking reunification with its source. In Corinthians, Paul speaks of testing himself as an athlete, and not being a mere boxer of shadows, but suffering bruises in his quest to better appreciate and express the will of God. Recall that the champion athlete sacrifices himself to the suffering within the field of Time to attain a place beyond Time.
Within Christianity, the term “Our Father who art in Heaven,” and other paternal references to the metaphysic sphere, are predated in such works as the Aeneid along with contextual reference to God being Eternal, which is beyond the Field of Time. This is well-referenced in The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, and, I might postulate, is at the core of much time travel science-fiction, that writing discipline being something of an attempt at prophecy for many of its practitioners.
The bestowal of the promise of eternity on every man women and child who simply submits to a specific highly cultivated image of God is an ingenious means to negate the stoic strength of the Good Man and place him at the mercy of Bad Men, a trick of Fortuna or Satan one might say, used to segregate the mass of humanity from God and label the Seeker of God a heretic. This mechanic would be a key driver of religious warfare in late antiquity and into the modern era, expressed in part by the heresies of the Bogomils, Albignasians, Hussites and Cathars and echoing down to our time in an unending bifurcation of Christian sects.
One might see most starkly the antitheses of stoicism’s masculine relationship with God in postmodern atheism, which is in our current time the primary seat of mob rage, hysteria, panic, fear and a coddled inability to confront reality.
Rick, thanks for introducing me to this fine reading channel. Simply reading the first few pages of this single work from Seneca provides more insight into the human condition than reading every American newspaper and journal of record from front to back. For each of those documents is a nursery rhyme told to us by the devilish servants of our Mother Modernity, the tart who was our test, a test which we failed, who has become our Cruel Goddess Proximate.
Rick, try Oliver’s Hobo History channel. We did one on Marcus Aurelius.
James is a full-time writer, part-time coach and part-time wage slave with an extensive history of brain trauma. Check out: http://www.jameslafond.com/
