Sophrosyne by Timothy J. Cullen

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A word is forgotten and cities perish"

~ G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Begin with the pronunciation per Webster’s Universal Unabridged Dictionary and phoneticized for normal text: "seh-FROS-eh-knee." Not a word one often sees. Sadly, because Webster’s suggests one compare it with another word of Greek origin, a far more familiar word, likely because it describes a characteristic of governments and of "leaders" in general: HUBRIS.

So as to give this latter word its due, Webster’s again: "Excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance." The word is derived from the Greek hybris, generally considered to mean "insolence." Among its earliest manifestations is what is known in what was once known as Christendom as "Original Sin," the overweening pride in human capacity that allows one to delude oneself that humankind can "be as gods."

This delusion has become ever more universal in the now-thoroughly-secular West. "Religion" is ever more considered a matter of emotion, whereas historically it was meant above all else to appeal to reason, as it still does for those who recognize that the human capacity to reason is limited and will always be limited, scientific and technological progress notwithstanding. To believe otherwise is hubris, the antithesis of sophrsyne, a word Webster’s defines as: "moderation; discretion; prudence," though the word itself has no direct translation into English. Indeed, Plato found himself unable to offer a precise definition even in Greek (from which the word comes); the dialogue Charmides (subtitled On Sophrosyne) attempted to explain it, but it is agreed that it is not precisely defined. As was pointed out in a 1997 web posting by Dr. Donivan Bessinger (to whom my thanks): "The editors of The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton University Press, 1989), in introducing Charmides, write:

The truth is that this quality, this sophrosyne, which to the Greeks was an ideal second to none in importance, is not among our ideals. We have lost the conception of it. Enough is said about it in Greek literature for us to be able to describe it in some fashion, but we cannot give it a name. It was the spirit behind the two great Delphic sayings, "Know thyself" and "Nothing in excess." Arrogance, insolent self-assertion, was the quality most despised by the Greeks. Sophrosyne was the exact opposite. It meant accepting the bounds which excellence lays down for human nature, restraining impulses to unrestricted freedom, to all excess, obeying the inner laws of harmony and proportion.

We have lost the conception of it! It "is not among our ideals."

How sad and shameful. How contrary to the ideals we find at the formative stages of Western civilization, both classical and post-Roman, though post-republican Roman civilization was already on the way to losing ideals not to be fully recovered until the triumph in the West of Catholicism, which had preserved and enhanced the knowledge of them throughout what we now refer to as the Dark Ages.

Sophrosyne represents the antithesis of the following statement: "Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil; it is law to itself, and suffices, by its natural force, to secure the welfare of men and of nations," or so at least believed Pope Pius IX, who characterized such a belief as anathema in his Syllabus of Errors (Allocution "Maxima quidem," June 9, 1862).

"Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain," wrote Chesterton at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the hardening of the human heart had begun to harden the arteries of human reason in the early stages of a spiritual dementia that ends with the terminal senility of the soul, even among men of good will.

Sophrosyne: We have lost the conception of it.

We had best regain it before we forget entirely from where we have come and, more importantly, where we are supposed to be going.

Western civilization has lost its way "because we have lost the knowledge of some fundamental principles which, since they are true, are the only ones which, today as well as in Plato’s own day, any philosophical knowledge worthy of the name can possibly be established," wrote Etienne Gilson in the preface to God and Philosophy, a collection of lectures he gave at a time when the Second World War was proving the truth of his statement.

Prudence? Moderation?

Think "Holocaust," but think it in panorama: Nazi genocide; Communist massacres and mass enslavements; the Dresden fire-bombing depicted in Slaughterhouse Five; Monte Cassino and Coventry Cathedral bombed to bits… Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now think Mutually Assured Destruction: "MAD," as it is known by the hubris-infected secular "humanists" whose narcissistic world planners dreamt it up.

Now ask yourself: For what?

"What profiteth a man to gain the world…?"

Sophrosyne: We have lost the conception of it.

Western – Euro-American – civilization evolved from its Mediterranean, Greco-Roman classical origins more through a process of conversion than of conquest. A civilization is more than a society defined by political frontiers. As the late and undeservedly neglected historian Oswald Spengler put it: "Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture," this latter explained by Spengler in an analogy: "Greek soul – Roman intellect; and this antithesis is the differentia between Culture and Civilization."

And from what do "Cultures" arise?

"Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe…," wrote the equally undeservedly neglected and maligned Hilaire Belloc (The Great Heresies), an unapologetic and staunch defender of the civilization once known as "Christendom," a civilization he correctly foresaw as having lost its way: "In the place of the old Christian enthusiasms of Europe there came, for a time, the enthusiasm for nationality, the religion of patriotism. But self-worship is not enough…"

Sophrosyne: We have lost the conception of it.

The blueprint for the civilization conceived in sophrosyne can be found in what we may well regard as one of the Founding Documents of the West, second perhaps only to the New Testament: The City of God, written by St. Augustine between the years 412 and 426 of the Christian Era, as opposed to Eras established by other cultures that have "year zero" referents alien to those of the culture and civilization that arose in Europe.

Augustine began his work with the sack of Rome by the barbarian tribes pushed westward by the advance of the Mongolo-Turkic hordes that would assault Western civilization again and again throughout its history. The assaults against Western civilization today are many-fold, but perhaps we would be better advised to concentrate on the threat posed to it by the barbarians within the gates rather than look elsewhere for enemies. Augustine well understood that in essence "we can separate humanity into two types, those who live according to the will of man, and those who live according to the will of God." It is the members of the former group – whatever religion they may nominally claim to profess – who reject sophrosyne; the latter group – whatever religion they may profess – must never lose sight of sophrosyne, the antidote to the poison of hubris.

The historian Henri Daniel-Rops, in his excellent study of The Church in the Dark Ages, paraphrases Augustine by stating that "the effort of civilization should be to bring man nearer his divine destination," adding that "Baudelaire [of all people!] summed this up in an unsurpassed phrase, the day that he declared that true civilization was to be found… in the ‘diminution of original sin’

The aforementioned Etienne Gilson (one of the twentieth century’s foremost Thomist philosophers, along with Jacques Maritain) wrote in his Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy a splendidly clear exposition of original sin, basing much of it in Augustine. Those of us who are concerned with liberty and its unquestioned importance to human happiness and well-being should in the interest of exercising sophrsyne take note of a simple observation made in the course of the exposition: "In a world in which all that is, in so far as it is, is a good, liberty is a great good: there are lesser goods, but still greater are conceivable. The virtues, for instance, are superior to the freedom of the will, for it is quite impossible to misuse temperance and justice, whereas we can very easily misuse our liberty."

We in the West are misusing our liberty, mistaking it for license and increasingly opting for a futile search for the Garden of Earthly Delights (a place which the fifteenth century Flemish painter Hieronymous Bosch well understood, as a close look at his painting of that name will reveal) while losing the way to the City of God, the original ideal and destination of Western civilization.

Shangri-la, like Utopia, was never a lost city: it was and will always be imaginary. The City of God is as yet unrealized, but its design was clearly drawn for us at the dawn of a decadent but well worth defending Western civilization. Unlimited material progress turned to avarice, pride, vainglory… These are not the keys to the City of the Free nor to the City of God.

Sophrosyne – prudence, modesty, discretion – is a key.

Sophrosyne is a word – a concept, a human quality, a way of life – we must not forget, lest the City perish.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/cullen/cullen12.html

-- J. Fernandes (goananda@hotmail.com), February 28, 2004

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