To: Cordelia
Talking with Sabrina this morning I mentioned that the word 'Tyrant' originally designated, in Ancient Greece, a 'sole ruler' - one who ruled without the legitimacy of transferred power (they were often aristocrats who had seized power but whose rule benefited, and was acknowledged to benefit, the people).
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The word is neutral, has associations with wealth and power and can therefore be synonymous with expressions like basileus, 'king'. For example, the oldest known use of the word tyrannos is a fragment by the poet Archilochos describing king Gyges of Lydia (ruled 680-644)."
WWW LinkEqually, in 27BC Julius Caesar was proclaimed by the Roman Senate as 'perpetual dictator',
dictator being a legitimate political office. While the evil connotations of the word go back to the first 'democratic' thinkers of ancient Greece (who conceived of the tyrant as their anti-type) there is nothing in the word itself that implies that a 'tyrrany' is necessarily harmful.
To one extent or another we all experience the tyrrany of desire - and it's right and natural that we should because we learn who we are, at bottom, through what we desire and through the lengths we are prepared to go to in achieving that desire.
We are embodied beings, and embodied beings are desirous beings because the chief quality of the flesh is to make demands. Much of the philosophical/theological history of the West has to do with Christianity's demonizing of the flesh and its demands, leading to the division between body and spirit/mind. The intellectual/spiritual passions came to be thought of as naturally directed towards God, the 'lusts of the flesh' as naturally directed away from God. Christians seem to forget very readily that, even in their own dogmas, Jesus was regarded as both perfectly man and perfectly God at the same time.
My particular quest has always been for "the meaning of life" which, if I understand it correctly, will always be a fruitless hunt. I think the generally accepted idea is that you create the meaning in your life, it isn't supposed to come from outside. I have not been very successful in creating this meaning for myself.
Very few people are, which is why religion persists, much to the disgust of atheists. As I've said elsewhere, I have little sympathy for atheism, because I've never had cause to question the existence of God - though for many years I vehemently denied that existence as a kind of revenge for my condition. If the only way I could 'strike back' at God was through denial of Its existence, then deny It I would. And there have been many occasions when I have believed myself to have been abandoned by God (in the days before I came to the conclusion that no one is ever abandoned by God for the simple reason that God chooses not to make a direct connection to us, which therefore can't be 'abandoned' because it never existed in the first place, because God no more cares about us than we do about the fate of a virus).
To me it seems transparently obvious that God
is, and is the author of all things. My question has always been 'what is the nature of God' not 'does God exist'. Of course God exists, in the way that a painter or sculptor exists in relation to a painting or sculpture.
If I've mentioned God and religion to a great extent in this discussion it's because my view of the world, and of the development of the West, is inseperable from my religious sensibility; and because the history of that development is inextricably bound up with the theology of the Roman Catholic Church and
its development.
No one can find a meaning to your life except you. But to look
exclusively within yourself for that meaning is self-defeating. Even to say "I need a meaning to my life" is to imply that that life is insufficient in itself to justify its own continued existence. That being so, to look exclusively to your own life for its meaning is to look toward something implicitly acknowledged to be incapable of supplying what's needed. Faith comes from within - but its object is always something greater than and different to its source.
