But suppose that he who has authority pronounces, “I judge you to be godless and unholy”, how does this affect you?
“I am judged to be godless and unholy.”
Nothing more?
“Nothing.”
If he had been giving judgement on a hypothetical proposition and had declared, “I judge the proposition ‘if it be day, there is light’ to be false”, how would it have affected the proposition?
Who is judged here? Who is condemned? The proposition or the man who is deluded about it?
Who in the world then is this who has authority to pronounce upon you? Does he know what godliness or ungodliness is? Has he made a study of it? Has he learned it? Where and with what master?
If a musician pays no heed to him when he pronounces that the lowest note is the highest, nor a geometrician when he decides that the lines from the center of a circle to the circumference are not equal, shall he who is educated in true philosophy pay any heed to an uneducated man when he gives judgement on what is holy and unholy, just and unjust?
What a great wrong for philosophers to be guilty of! Is this what you have learned by coming to school?
—from Epictetus, Discourses 1.29
I won’t lie, I do feel hurt when someone denies a value I hold dear.
Why am I offended? The first question should really be whether I am right or wrong in my assertion, not whether I am better or worse in the eyes of another.
My feelings about approval and disapproval are once again getting in the way of my judgments about the true and the false. You’d think I would have picked up on this pattern earlier; few things are peskier than a stubborn habit.
We regularly try to hurt one another by various forms of rejection, censure, mockery, or exclusion, which only goes to show how quickly we allow human worth to be reduced to a popularity contest. It ties back to our obsession with appearance over reality, to being seen as good instead of simply being good.
While man was made to be a social animal, he is at his worst when he blindly surrenders his conscience to the conventions of the tribe. Be prepared to face some fierce resistance if you wish to think for yourself—the herd enforces a variety of shallow platitudes, and it will be outraged when you fail to comply.
Modernity has its own secular gods, of course, but I have also experienced the old-school recriminations about impiety and heresy among those holy rollers I can’t seem to shake off.
They say I am an apostate, and I find myself shunned around town. I may alternate between feeling guilty and resentful, and then I remember how I am confusing what they claim to know about me with what I actually know about myself.
So I may be condemned as godless and unholy by someone else, and however important he believes himself to be, that is ultimately about him. The true state of my soul is between myself and my Maker.
To get over the initial shock of being dammed to Hell, I can replace the harsh spiritual disapproval with some far more innocuous content. What if he shakes his finger in my face and insists that water is not wet? Or that dogs are just the same as cats? Or that day is night and night is day?
Even as I still desire the good for him, I would shrug off his claims without hesitation. Why should it be any different when he pontificates about anything he does not understand?
Last week a child at the grocery store pointed at me and called me an “ugly faggot.” I smiled at him and went about my business, quite aware that both his sense of aesthetics and morality were not yet properly formed.
It should be no different when the demagogues or the bullies are spouting their nonsense. I choose to be different from them by distinguishing between loving my neighbor and being intimidated by my neighbor.
I won’t lie, I do feel hurt when someone denies a value I hold dear.
Why am I offended? The first question should really be whether I am right or wrong in my assertion, not whether I am better or worse in the eyes of another.
My feelings about approval and disapproval are once again getting in the way of my judgments about the true and the false. You’d think I would have picked up on this pattern earlier; few things are peskier than a stubborn habit.
We regularly try to hurt one another by various forms of rejection, censure, mockery, or exclusion, which only goes to show how quickly we allow human worth to be reduced to a popularity contest. It ties back to our obsession with appearance over reality, to being seen as good instead of simply being good.
While man was made to be a social animal, he is at his worst when he blindly surrenders his conscience to the conventions of the tribe. Be prepared to face some fierce resistance if you wish to think for yourself—the herd enforces a variety of shallow platitudes, and it will be outraged when you fail to comply.
Modernity has its own secular gods, of course, but I have also experienced the old-school recriminations about impiety and heresy among those holy rollers I can’t seem to shake off.
They say I am an apostate, and I find myself shunned around town. I may alternate between feeling guilty and resentful, and then I remember how I am confusing what they claim to know about me with what I actually know about myself.
So I may be condemned as godless and unholy by someone else, and however important he believes himself to be, that is ultimately about him. The true state of my soul is between myself and my Maker.
To get over the initial shock of being dammed to Hell, I can replace the harsh spiritual disapproval with some far more innocuous content. What if he shakes his finger in my face and insists that water is not wet? Or that dogs are just the same as cats? Or that day is night and night is day?
Even as I still desire the good for him, I would shrug off his claims without hesitation. Why should it be any different when he pontificates about anything he does not understand?
Last week a child at the grocery store pointed at me and called me an “ugly faggot.” I smiled at him and went about my business, quite aware that both his sense of aesthetics and morality were not yet properly formed.
It should be no different when the demagogues or the bullies are spouting their nonsense. I choose to be different from them by distinguishing between loving my neighbor and being intimidated by my neighbor.
—Reflection written in 5/2001
IMAGE: Jean-Paul Laurens, The Excommunication of Robert the Pious (1875)
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