Column Title: Meaningful-Faith: Words, the Word, and a Life of Substance
Column Entry: “Meaning in Chaos and Collapse: Reflections from the Past”
By Mark Williams, Ph.D.
Professor of Rhetoric, California State University, Sacramento
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Meaning in Chaos and Collapse: Reflections from the Past
In 404 B.C., the Athenian democracy collapsed and there was a brutal transition as rule passed to a criminal gang of thirty citizens The Thirty, as they were called, were allowed to draw up the body of laws under which they would rule the city. One of their first laws established a panel of judges, hand-picked by The Thirty, to review any executive edicts The Thirty created. Oddly, none were found problematic. No other courts could prosecute or review any actions taken by The Thirty. Next, citizens who had supported the democratic system prior to the rise of The Thirty were declared enemies of Athens and executed. In yet another peculiar coincidence, The Thirty had just passed an edict stating that when an enemy of the state was executed, their wealth and property would be transferred to (surprise!) The Thirty. One out of every twenty citizens was killed. In contemporary American figures, that would translate to 16,600,000 executions of U.S. citizens.
The Thirty ruled for less than two years and were then overthrown, but the city of Athens remained in some disarray. About four years after The Thirty were gone, Socrates (who had barely escaped execution under The Thirty) was executed by the new Athenian Democracy (take note: both sides are willing to kill you), and Plato began writing. If you take nothing else from Plato, you can take this: almost everything he writes is a response to the question of his life: “When everything around you falls apart, does anything meaningful remain? What survives the fall of civilization?” Plato’s answer: only what you have already stored up within your soul will survive the coming darkness. And time might be short. It is imperative to proceed immediately to nurture the soul by careful reflection on what is meaningful and where meaning comes from. And when the time comes, one must live in a way that demonstrates, with quiet unflinching resolve, that there is a truth and beauty and goodness that is beyond the reach of darkness.
Three hundred and fifty years after Plato was writing about living a life whose meaning could rise above the ashes, the Roman Republic was collapsing. The systems of governance were largely dysfunctional, and the government itself was factionalized beyond the possibility of reasonable discourse. The great Roman statesman Cicero—as Realpolitik as they come—held out to the very end, pragmatically trying, even in his last months, to turn the current of empire and dictatorship back toward the ideals of a republic. He was executed in December of 43 B.C. In one of his last letters, Cicero writes a friend, saying, “Keep your heart” (xvi.12). In another letter to that same friend, he notes that he is, in his final moths, completing a work on moral duties and says, “I am dedicating it to my son. It seems to me not inappropriate” (xvi.11). In the opening of that book, Cicero, in what is very likely a swipe at his own era, notes that one’s moral choices flow from interior character—the treasures stored up in the heart—and they are revealed in every moment of life, small and great. He then remarks that those citizens are deceived who suppose right can be reduced to one’s own preferences and self-interests; goodness is bigger than that. Such fools have no access to treasures that make life meaningful: true friendship, genuine justice, generosity free of transaction. Only those who have stored up an interior stock of these treasures will have something to spend in the coming days (De Officiis I.ii). This was the only path to a life lived with meaning.
Four hundred and fifty years after Cicero’s Republic was lost and the senate had been reduced to an impotent cheer-leading club for a dictatorial emperor, that very Roman Empire was itself facing a similar collapse. Looking around him, Augustine realized that the vast, ordered, urban civilization of the Roman Empire was doomed. What would survive the coming collapse, he wrote—the only thing that would survive the coming collapse—was the treasure stored in the heart. The City of God, built with great labor within the soul, would remain when the urban centers Rome had bulit ceased to function and fell into ruins. When he penned the magisterial City of God, Augustine noted that the task of the Christian was to build (and such building was a great labor) the truth and beauty and goodness of God’s way into their own hearts. Only if this foundation was done well would the civilization that rose from the ashes of Rome’s urban powers be valuable.
Citizens in the city of God live as a constant reminder, to one another and to those outside, that there is a truth and a beauty and a goodness beyond the reach of darkness. Such lives are the highest form of resistance: a casual, day-to-day mockery of the egotism that is the very defining quality of evil. Living a quiet life of deep meaning infuriates the darkness. Let us get on with it.