Geine = family
One can say that what happened after the homeric age was a kind of modernisation, a kind of urbanisation (though more closely polisisation).
This individualiation created a problem of identity, which created an atmosphere of right and wrong people, some who did ”witchcraft”, being wrong, and some doing ”philosophy”, being right. And so on the need to define the soul and so on as something real and identifying of one person as distinct from another. This specific witch hunt structure was however discovered in enclavistic communities in Congo by Douglas (in the 50s during colonial Congo).
In the Pheado, Socrates is quite individualistic, he only cares for his death and completely leaves his family behind.
Today: Theology
When christianity came around, there was suddenly more focus on the body than in comparison to eg Socrates and neoplatonism. Firstly, God took flesh, and during the end times, everyone comes back in flesh, something completely incoherent in a neoplatonist conception. Suddenly, everyone’s individuality is furthermore hardened, but rather individuality is preserved in the body, as a proof of the remaining of one’s soul.
Christianity at this time was not intellectually accepted as making sense.
Spinoza: Instead of thinking that the entity that is most supreme depends on other things to be what it is, it rather is pure substance, and all what exists is substance, and all is a manifestation of that substance; God.
Paul came up with the idea that christianity is not just part of the jewish tradition, and that gentiles too can convert to christianity.
(Koine Greek is simplified Greek?)
Thessalonians:
Paul was initially against Christianity. Then he fell from his horse and became enlightened (?).
”Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the lord word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the lord, will certainly not preede those who have fallen asleep. For the lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud comand, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in crhist will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be cuaght up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.”
The eschatological idea at that time was that the world would come to an end quite soon, and that one needed to be prepared of this fact, for the last judgement.
Later letters show a kind of conflict, with some references that…. Don’t know.
As in Mark 16 1-8
Jesus had risen, but one needs to be there when he comes back. (don’t know what he on about tbh)
1 Corinthians 13
Something about love and faith.
It is good to think about the typical of being a christian. The Roman virtues were quite masculine, were about strongness and fortitude whilst in Christianity one deals with things by not being assertive, by being soft and loving, and so as a religious movement, it must’ve been strange in the Roman context.
In the letter of Romans 3, 21-30
This one is about how one needs to deal with the law. If the law becomes a tool through which to find out whether one is right about things, and to check whether one is justified as long as one follows rules, then the way one uses the law becomes problematic. If one is interested in Ethics, and knows that one cannot be blamed because they followed all the rules, is that person ethically motivated, or are they only busy with their own personal justification.
If I see someone suffering and help them without forethought, or if I help them because I think about whether it is right, and if it is an ethical issue, it isn’t about the rewards you get for acting ethically, but rather one needs to immediately have an access to the ”what needs to be done”.
Too many people do ethics only in order to check the boxes of ”right”, one is busy with self-justification, trying to find a definite best way of being, and for Paul, without the help of God.
The kind of mentality that desires motivation as justification is already wrong. It is already sinful.
The christian is free from the law, however, they will of course follow the law, but not because this is the only way to be blessed. If one uses the law for a kind of project where one wants to self-justify oneself. If we are saved, it is not because I justified myself. Rather we need to trust that we will be saved by God. It is God’s initiative, all I can do is have faith.
In all the catholic countries, there seems to be a kind of thinking, of a later development, there is a kind of idea that going to heaven will ”be arranged”, and so one can kind of relax.
In protestant nations, instead, there is usually a lot more of a pessmistic view on the matter, and one needs to actively work a lot harder in order to be the kind of person that will be saved.
It is important if one wants to understand later texts of philosophy, that one understands the kind of theological background of those.
Roman virtues were all very masculine.
The Didache:
Love thy neighbour as thyself; and all things whatsoever thou wouldst not have done to thee, neither do thou to another. Etc. etc.
In the Didache, it seems to suggest a type of mentality in which one doesn’t want to fight or be emperor, one is supposed to get close to those that one is vulnerable against, and to be honest of that, it is the oppsite of being assertive.
Tacitus on the fire in Rome during Nero.
All christians were blamed for that fire and were punished for it severly. An official pogrom against christians. Tacitus was not christian.
The christians were trying to be perfect (?).
There is also a kind of ideal they wanted to reach, they weren’t only doing things for generally good reasons. The death of a martyr is rather the most perfect death. Being killed for one’s faith is actually kind of the best.
There were not that many moments during which the christians were subject of the terror. It was mainly during Nero, Dominitianus, Trajanus, and later Marcus-Aurelius.
There were quite long periods during which the periods were tolerated, and it was only under certain emperors that they were actually ostracised.
Because there were a lot of different cultures in rome, there were quite a lot of different religions there too, and sometimes some of them were persecuted, whilst others weren’t. The ideal of a christian was someone prepared to give their life for their fate, but this was not the case as often as has been stated before.
How could one show one’s faith if one was not persecuted anymore?
So how could they now show that they cared for God? Ascetisism was one common sollution, pillarsitters became common.
This was also the time when people wanted to retreat to monastaries in order to allow their life to fully be aimed at God, and began to analyse themselves in order to figure out how they were seduced towards the opposite of what they were attempting to reach.
With reaching this kind of possibility, of apotheosis, the monks had to think about in what direction their natural impulses were taken them, and suddenly a lot of viscious tendencies that seemed natural in us; crystallised as the cardinal sins.
Different between cardinal and deadly sin: you do something with the knowledge that you will go straight to hell by doing that action (also a much later development).
In popular culture, ethics was thought about in regard to the virtues and the sins and the ten commandments.
Ethics has relevance only in this life in something like Socrates’ philosophy, and the same is true in Aristotle. One is not good for the sake of some other time, or some other life, but rather for the here and now. Whilst in christianity the idea that one will, at the end of days, will be finally judged, and one must be prepared for this kind of judgement. (Hell or heaven isn’t really correct for early christianity but whatever, it is similar).
At the end of the Pheado however, there is the idea that we will be judged, and that depending on the life we have lived, we can live the life of a better or worse creature or entity, as a kind of rebirth.
In the traditional Greek thought, one goes to Hades, where there is darkness, one cannot talk, and death just kind of sucks. There is no heaven, just Hades, the land of death generally.
[In gnostic secrets, one had to find one’s true self, and after that true self, one had to live. And in the Jewish tradition there was no idea of the life hereafter.]
The fact of the hereafter has impressed the western tradition so much so that even now today, secularised people too think about what ethics is about what one does ontologically bad or good, from a kind of God perspective. So a lot of people are still interested in ethics to know whether one has sinned (despite not using that word specifically).
Origines, one of the first church fathers:
Wrote a quite complicated text about heaven and hell. The summary:
Is there hell?
No there is no hell. Does that imply that we do not need to believe in hell?
No. We need to believe in hell.
But if there is no hell, why do we need to believe in hell?
Because hell is an image used to make people aware of doing right and wrong.
If there is a supreme being that can judge right from wrong, it will be universal and timeless. So automatically one creates a definite order of what is right and wrong and which counts for everyone. The judgement is the same for everyone. So Ethics is then, how can right be seen from an objective perspective, which is there for God. Right and wrong exist, are ontic.
The kind of analysis done by the notion of the cardinal sins is imperative to understand.
And this kind of moral theology that was taught by Aquinas, was taught more or less unchangably all the way to the 1800s. There was no development in this regard (not entirely true, but sure).
The cardinal sins, from a psychological point of view, they describe desires in an interesting way, even for secularised people.
A lot of tendencies of giving in to destructive desire, can indeed be confirmed to have bad consequences in the world, which the cardinal sins in a sense represent.
The possibility of finding one’s way out of the nature of human beings, the conquest of the cardinal sins. It is not really a pleasant way of life perhaps.
There was a more neoplatonically inspired school of christianity, and then a more aristotelian school of christianity.
The neoplatonic school did not believe that there were essence, whilst the aristotelians believed that indeed everything is guided by a spiritual entity that makes everything what it is.
So there was the belief that ethics could be found directly in the aristotelian nature rather than the pure commandments. This kind of approach is optimistic in the sense that we do not necessarily need revelation.
The platonic group, thinking that in those parts that were not directly revealed to us, we have to use our intellect to figure out what God wants, because this world is definitely different from the world in which we live. This path is defended eg. by Augustine. This was most clearly said against Pelagius, who thought that we do not necessarily need revelation, as revelation does not cover all.
Since there are no essences, they were skeptical towards the metaphysical approach, starting nominalism, that words and names are not based or pointed towards on the essence of the kind of things that we call them.
It is interesting to see that the Aristotelian tradition might’ve led into the classical catholic account of christianity, and that the neoplatonist way of doing christianity aims similarly to the protestant account.
In protestant culture there is a tendency to do some kind of initial research, whilst this is not the case in catholic culture.
Augustine tries to link religion with a kind of rational way of understanding it.
The trinity is one yet it does not clearly depend truly on itself, due to its oneness depending on the different persons.
Augustine was also writing against the manicheism prevalent at the time. Manicheism thinks that there are two supreme instances, one good and one bad, of which there is an eternal struggle.
In the discussion with the manichees, he had to defend that there can only be One God, and so only Good. So for Augustine, the bad is just what turns away from the good, what turns away from God.
Bad is not an instance in and of itself, but is an action of turning away.
And in this, Augustine defends that Nature is good, which reaches a conclusion which he in turn has to deal with, in regards to Pelagius and the Aristotelians.
Here Augustine becomes a more pessimistic theologian, by saying that we are definitely cursed since Adam, and we can only have grace if we trust revelation. This kind of perspective does not in the same way live up to the idea that everything will turn out the right way.