I find it very interesting to read the respective accounts of Socrates’ life and teachings by Plato and Xenophon. It is sort of like reading in the Gospels the life and teachings of Jesus, from four different perspectives, which provides not only depth of perception, but also the manifold meanings that a single narrative lacks. Xenophon and Plato correspond well with one another in their interpretation of Socrates, the former […]
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“The Apology of Socrates” by Xenophon
Compared to the Socrates of Plato, a dialectician with irony and inwardness, Xenophon’s Socrates is more of a rhetorician, direct and assertive. Nevertheless, their respective accounts of the trial and death of Socrates create a compelling and lasting image of their master, whom I would consider myself fortunate to meet. Socrates’ Self-Approval Who is there in your knowledge that is less a slave to his bodily appetites than I am? […]
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The Divine Comedy: IX. Theft and Identity
It is written in the Ten Commandments: “You shall not steal.” “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” I’ve never thought much about the existential significance of these commandments until I read Dante. Thieves are assigned to the Eighth Circle of Hell, […]
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The Divine Comedy: VIII. Panders and Seducers
“I saw horned demons with enormous whips, who lashed those spirits cruelly from behind Ah, how their first strokes made those sinners lift their heels! Indeed no sinner waited for a second stroke to fall-or for a third.” Dante assigned panders and seducers to the Eighth Circle of the Inferno, people who seduce women or prostitute women to others for their own profit. According to Dictionary.com, pander is “a person […]
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The Divine Comedy: VII. Usury
“nature follows-as she takes her course- the Divine Intellect and Divine Art;… when it can, your art would follow nature, just as a pupil imitates his master; so that your art is almost God’s grandchild. From these two, art and nature, it is fitting,… for men to make their way, to gain their living; and since the usurer prefers another pathway, he scorns both nature in herself and art, her […]
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The Divine Comedy: VI. Heretics
One of the prominent feature of Dante’s justice is “contrapasso”, derived from the Latin contra and patior, literally, “suffer the opposite”, in other words, “whatever a man sows, that he will also reap”, or, punishment fits the crime. In the Inferno, the heretics are buried in great tombs of stone, through which flames were scattered, kindling all of them to glowing heat, and from each tomb they cry in agony. […]
Read moreThe Divine Comedy: III. Abandon All Hope, You in the Crowd.
Kierkegaard spent his life denouncing/warning those who never took the leap of faith, but instead stood apart as an “objective” spectator of life. These people would end up in the Inferno of Dante, who seems to share Kierkegaard’s aversion to “the vulgar crowd”, the noncommittals, the cowards. In life, they never stood or fought for anything, in death, they are forced to run after a banner without respite; in life, […]
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