Autor: Walsh, David

Buch: The Third Millenium

Titel: The Third Millenium

Stichwort: Christus als Maß der Tugend; Grenzen der griechischen Ethik; Plato: Philosoph - Tyrann

Kurzinhalt: Reason in the Greek world was bounded by the twin convictions that the cosmos is itself the perfection of order and that the human telos must be achievable within it.

Textausschnitt: 132b Nowhere is our distance from the Greeks more evident than in relation to human nature. Aristotle, as we have seen, struggles manfully to hold together the hylomorphic model of the organism with the transcendent openness of the soul. The results are the notorious tensions between books I and III of the Politics, as well as the enduring inability to break the hold of the polis as the community of fulfillment even in the midst of its swan song. The historical openness of humanity as an eschatological community could not become visible so long as the hold of the cosmic embodiment of reason could not be broken. A universal human nature incapable of any finite fulfillment (and therefore constituted by the history of its movement toward the Beyond) remained on the boundary of Greek consciousness. They could not penetrate to the rational reorientation required because the irruption of transcendent Being had not reached its limits. Reason in the Greek world was bounded by the twin convictions that the cosmos is itself the perfection of order and that the human telos must be achievable within it. Within those parameters, the achievements are remarkable and definitive, but we recognize that the boundaries themselves are impositions of arrested rationality. (Fs) (notabene)

133a Such restrictions do not permit us to come to grips with the deepest problems of existence. Among these are the realization that life, even for the most fortunate, falls far below what could be counted as complete fulfillment and, for the vast majority, is far less than even their natural expectations would lead them to hope. A determination to expend every effort on the acquisition of the only excellence within our power-virtue-ultimately fares no better. Prolonged attention to the problem of virtue brings two things to the forefront. First, as Aristotle discovered, is that the source of virtue is ultimately impenetrable and must be ascribed to a kind of gift of nature. We know how to make men good once they have decided to become good, but we are helpless to bring about the prior movement of decision to seek after goodness. Second, the advance in virtue eventually generates the awareness of how far we still have to go. Plato betrays a fleeting awareness of the problem in his analysis of the parallel, if not proximity, between the philosopher and the tyrant. Do we ever reach a point at which virtue has become a secure and expanding attainment, or is there not lurking always the inclination to transform the very achievement of virtue into a means of domination? The abyss of evil within the human heart may become more evident in light of the transcendent grace required to overcome it, but it is there all along and its rational assessment necessitates its acknowledgement. Nowhere is the closeness of the relationship between reason and revelation more evident than in the necessity of confronting the problem of evil. (Fs)