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Chapter One:
War
Drums
In this chapter (a different version of which has
already been published elsewhere under the title
Sophist Blindfold or Escape From the Cave?) Dr. Rao
discusses the ancient roots of the War of the Words
Against the Word.
Many of the great men of the western past warned against
too easy an acceptance of the lessons of immediate
sensual and emotional experiences, fearing that their
powerful impact would divert necessary attention away
from the thought and reflection which could place them
in their proper perspective. Any unquestioning love
affair with the messages sent by the intense sensations
of ordinary daily existence would, they argued, ensure
loss of a deeper understanding of the meaning of life
and how to pursue that meaning and fulfill it. A romance
of this kind would only guarantee indulgence in what was
superficial, deceptive and ultimately completely
self-destructive.
Nevertheless, the dominant forces of the contemporary
western world encourage just such a passion. In varying
ways, they all insist that voluntary abandonment to the
teaching of surface phenomenon, far from being a
frivolity, is actually the only realistic approach to
existence that men and women can possibly embrace.
Anyone seeking meaning, fulfillment and joy in life must
energetically fight off that temptation to deeper
thought and reflection which prevents “closure” and
“moving on” to satisfaction of the ever changing and
evolving messages of immediate sensation.
Study of the roots of the militant modern
preference for the shallow over the profound must begin
in the ancient, pagan world. For the conscious
encouragement of a spirit favoring “closure” and “moving
on” over “stepping back” and “reflecting” is already
noticeable in the Classical Greece of the Fifth and
Fourth Centuries B.C., especially in the eye-opening
period of the Peloponnesian War and its dismal aftermath
(431-336 B.C.). This is because Greece, as the home of
the first insightful discussion of the meaning and
practice of education, paideia, inevitably
provoked the original vocal battle between those
primarily valuing either the lessons of surface
phenomenon or the hunt for underlying and more nuanced
truth.
Epic, lyric, and dramatic poets were the first teachers
of Hellas. They sought answers to the basic issues of
life by asking aesthetic questions, queries regarding
the meaning of beauty. Aesthetic preoccupations led them
to tackle the problem of how best to educate for a
knowledge and possession of “the Beautiful”. That hunt
for the tools essential to a primarily aesthetic
formation gradually became “holistic”. It slowly
uncovered the need for consultation with, and guidance
from, a variety of different sources: the individual and
his immediate desires, the family and its long-term
requirements for stability, and, perhaps most
importantly, the demands of the polis, the
city-state, in its search for attainment of a common as
opposed to a merely individual or familial “beautiful”
life.
The reputation of the polis as an aesthetic,
educative, guiding force was enormous at the end of the
Persian Wars (490-479 B.C.). Athens and Sparta, its two
greatest contemporary representatives, had assured their
polis’ prestige by winning a victory over the most
impressive power in the world; a force before which, in
startling contrast, a number of important individuals
and purely family-dominated Greek lands had
humiliatingly cowered. Such an unexpected but clear
triumph made it appear that the community-focused polis
could, in effect, accomplish absolutely anything. It was
for this reason that Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.), in his
Oristeia trilogy, has an unending cycle of
superhuman vengeance and counter-vengeance concluded
through polis-shaped (i.e., political) judicial action.
Beauty, education, and the polis, one might have said;
now and forever; one and inseparable.
Unfortunately, however, it was precisely the same
cherished polis of Athens and Sparta which revealed
insane, self-destructive passions and limitations during
and after the Peloponnesian War, thereby stimulating
further debate regarding the basic tools required for a
proper education designed to gain possession of the
beautiful. Control of the renewed dialogue passed out of
the hands of the poets alone, who had said everything
that they could possibly say on all sides of this issue
of paideia by the time of Euripides (480-406
B.C.).
Greece, even before this moment, had witnessed the
emergence of a quite different approach towards
education, along the lines suggested by the first
philosophers, the so-called pre-Socratics, who wished to
replace an aesthetic understanding of man and nature
with one founded firmly upon knowledge of the material
structure of the universe itself; knowledge of its
constituent “scientific” elements.
But pre-Socratic approaches to life and education proved
to be too radical a break with the traditional aesthetic
vision for the mainstream Greek world to accept. They
were rejected, in particular, by two schools of thought
both active in the war and post-war period, which were
themselves destined to lock horns in mortal combat. One
of these schools was that of the Sophists, men concerned
with rhetoric, the successful use of language. Sophists,
in effect, argued that the old-line aesthetic approach
to hunting for the Beautiful was correct, but that it
needed to be organized, taught, and followed much more
rigorously if it were to become a sure foundation for
the individual, the family and society. The other school
was that of Socrates (469-399 B.C.), who, while also
retaining much of the traditional aesthetic approach to
education, felt a call to critique, transform, and
elevate it. The battle that this entailed was related
for us not by Socrates himself but by his most brilliant
pupil, Plato (427-347). And Plato reveals the nature of
the conflict in his debate with Isocrates (436-338),
perhaps the most self-conscious and instructive
proponent of the opposing, sophistic, rhetorical
approach.
Plato’s great achievement as a philosopher
and as an educator was one of demonstrating that the
classical Greek formation of an individual for the
possession of the beautiful required an understanding
both of the nature of goodness as well as of the
underlying truths of the universe for which the
pre-Socratics were groping. He presented Socrates, his
model teacher, as a “soul doctor”, a man who sought the
cure of moral and intellectual flaws in his continued
hunt for aesthetic perfection. Education for beauty in
the fullest possible sense was indeed a holistic
project, Plato insisted, but an exciting and dramatic
one, drawing the individual closer and closer to God,
the measure of all things, shaping his soul as an image
or icon of the divine as he advanced. Every tool that
the Greeks had come to consider to be important--the
polis included--had a crucial role to play in this
all-encompassing, life-long enterprise. Nevertheless,
those valuable tools were flawed, each and every one of
them. Paradoxically, the means of education themselves
required correction and improvement at the hands of the
individual “icons” that they helped to shape. Soul
doctoring could be a perplexing, immensely difficult,
exhausting task, involving much meditation and
self-questioning. And such an enterprise could not help
but appear to be a pointless, frustrating detour to
those on a perpetual hunt for “get possession of beauty
quick” schemes; those interested in “closure” and
“moving on”.
“Pointlessly frustrating” was certainly the
criticism attached to Platonic education by Isocrates,
who claimed the title of philosopher with as great a
sense of justice and fervor as his fellow Athenian did.
Still, apt student of the Sophist Gorgias that he was,
Isocrates understood philosophy to be a wisdom that only
the trained rhetorician could possibly grasp and
use properly. This inevitably meant that his definition
of any Good or Truth underlying the Beautiful would
differ considerably from the one given to them by
Socratics eager to pass beyond the borders of rhetoric
alone.
For Isocrates, there was no question of
seriously critiquing, transforming, and possibly even
rejecting the immediate emotional and sensual
experiences and preoccupations of the ordinary man. Man
was the measure of all things, and unquestionably
correct in his urgent, common sense appreciation of the
importance of obtaining the riches, power, and fame that
he obviously knew would yield the beautiful life.
The average individual’s sole problem was a technical
one: he could not relate one, justifiable, obvious,
common sense experience to another, and thereby
understand how best to exploit and satisfy them
regularly and comprehensively. His efforts to explain
his reactions to daily problems, both to himself as well
as to others, proved to be “dumb” ones. It was effective
words, and the arguments shaped through them, which were
lacking to the average man. Only the well trained
rhetorician, the master of words, could clarify the full
depth of immediate feelings and experiences, show where
they were headed, and stir people to do what was
necessary to fulfill their promise. The Good and the
True were, therefore, ultimately nothing other than
“appropriate” explanations and developments of those
obvious and common sense reactions to the raw stuff of
daily life which are themselves absolutely infallible
guides to the possession of Beauty.
To take but one simple example, the average person might
be said to have an eminently justifiable, positive,
common sense reaction to the powerful feeling and
experience of sexual passion. Nevertheless, without the
right words and arguments to explain his “opinions”
regarding this formidable force de la nature, he
is not able to relate the meaning of his reaction to
experience properly; not even to himself. Pragmatic
efforts to gain the full promise of sexuality and cause
it to work together with other deeply felt experiences
about which he has positive “opinions” are even further
out of his reach. It is the rhetorician who illuminates
Everyman through the use of appropriate and stimulating
words, demonstrating the key to sexual understanding and
its link with the multitude of other desirable goals.
But how will Everyman know that the rhetorician is
“speaking appropriately”? The answer to this question is
also an obvious one. For the master rhetorician’s advice
will not only “sound right”, clearly, consistently and
self-assuredly responding to the average individual’s
personal sense of the obvious truth of his own
preoccupations and where, more or less, those concerns
are headed. Beyond that, it will prove itself by being
crowned with success. Hence, Isocrates’ recognition of
his need to underline the simplicity, lucidity, harmony
of purpose, confidence, and material achievements of
his pupils, while contrasting them with the cranky
and unfathomable detours, self-criticisms, bitter
divisions, and practical failures of the Socratics.
Isocrates longed to prove rhetoric’s ability
to gain possession of the Beautiful on a grand, world
scale. In order for him to find the key to such great
success, the philosopher/rhetorician had to begin with
the study of the raw experiences and the common sense
reaction to them not merely of an individual, but of an
entire people, since only a city-state or nation could
conceivably become a long-term driving force in global
events. The work of Herodotus (484-424), Thucydides
(mid-400’s-403?), Xenephon (430?-355?) and others
offered guidelines as how to how such historical data
might be collected. Rhetoricians like Isocrates saw one
of their tasks as being that of explaining to a
population the appropriate greatness to which its
otherwise “dumb” historical experiences were calling it.
History thus came very early under rhetorical purview
and influence--partly to its profit, since it became
more readable, dramatic and effective, but very often to
its severe detriment, being transformed into a tool of
propaganda.
From the raw history of his environment,
Isocrates claimed to learn a number of important
principles: that there actually was a Greek people,
united by a shared culture, Hellenism; that the
essence of Hellenism was the development of the
illuminating, life-giving, and unifying “word”; that the
universal value accruing from appropriate use of “the
word” gave to a Greece which possessed knowledge of its
significance a world-wide cultural mission; and,
finally, that this universal vocation had been shown to
involve the sea, struggle against Persia, and imperial
expansion.
Fulfillment of future Hellenist destiny would require
two things simultaneously. On the one hand, it was
crucial to maintain a constant respect for the “good old
days” of the foundation of the Greek spirit and the
institutions giving clout to it. On the other, it was
necessary to shape a loyal population obedient to any
vigorous, strong man who might guide that spirit to the
discharge of its contemporary mission. Moreover, the
institutions embodying the spirit of the good old days,
the strong man given them clout and the populations
obedient to his fist were to be stirred to their
appropriate political roles through the vital words of
the creative rhetorical genius.
But “philosophy”, as defined by Isocrates, can easily
constitute a gigantic circle, manipulated by the
rhetorician who, through the clever use of appealing
words and images, may seize control of the familiar
concerns of the average man or State and run with them
where he wills. Common sense experience is pronounced
the infallible basis for action simply because the
experience appealed to is declared “common sensical” and
an infallible basis for action. Successful attainment of
riches and power is said to prove the appropriateness of
the rhetorician’s understanding of the beautiful life
and guidance of Everyman to its promise because
possession of riches and power is presented as
unquestionable, axiomatic proof that beauty has indeed
been grasped. Respect for the “good old days”,
contemporary strong men, and obedient populations are
essential because denial of such esteem to any one of
these elements would rip apart the “beautiful”
rhetorical image tying together ancient roots with
present hopes and future destiny, mass popularity and
elite power. And all those aspects of “the vision” were
necessary since experience had proven them necessary to
construct the career of the master of words, whose
success worked to guarantee the validity of their union.
Absolutely no questioning of “obvious experience”,
“common sense”, “success”, the “historic mission” and
the consistency of the tools required for its
realization could be contemplated, lest this lead to the
unacceptable argument that obvious experience, common
sense, success, the historical mission, and its vital
tools were themselves somewhat problematic. Isocrates,
as Werner Jaeger notes, makes a virtue out of abandoning
any deeper investigation of the meaning of life once he
has shaped what for him appears to be a rhetorically
beautiful “point of view’ with a chance of obtaining a
successful outcome. That “point of view”, if attractive
and potentially useful, must be accepted as
though it were Truth itself. With this, the debate is
over. Closure has been achieved. One must move on to
accomplishment of the Great Promise, or face the wrath
of the rhetorician and the outraged nature whose
infallible voice he has infallibly proclaimed himself to
be.
And the rhetorician is powerful. He knows that
his words have “the ring of truth”. He knows that he can
count on the support of immediately felt, individual,
family, or polis-wide “common sense” passions in his
call for their immediate satisfaction. He senses the
understandable and well-neigh universal fear that
acceptance of Socratic self-criticism would paralyze
swift action, thus preventing exploitation of favorable
opportunities to fulfill desire and causing men to “lose
out” on success, perhaps even up to the very moment of
death. The rhetorician, with his mastery of words, can
paint the profound, life-determining, “either-or” option
offered to men by Sophists and Socratics in all of its
dramatic colors, though clearly weighted to his
advantage. After he has skilfully organized the picture
as he wishes, any Socratic who calls the average man to
logical, painful soul-searching at the possible expense
of satisfying urgent passion becomes a sitting duck for
his rhetorical abuse. A Platonic philosopher would all
too easily lend himself to the accusation of
representing both a crackpot idealism, indifferent to
the obvious demands of human nature, as well as a
cynical opposition to the successes of “real men”, whom
he cannot emulate, bitterly envies and wishes to destroy
in consequence.
Plato was not just a Socratic philosopher but a literary
genius in his own right, sensitive to the power of
purely rhetorical arguments over the average man, and
the need to respond to them “beautifully” to demonstrate
their flaws. He did so reply, by depicting the pure
rhetorician as an ultimately self-deluding failure. Yes,
Plato argued, the Sophist rhetorician was influential.
But contrary to his claim that that influence came from
his role as a wise man, teaching individuals and states
what the beautiful was all about and how to get
possession of it, the impact actually and ironically was
exercised precisely due to his inability to educate
those whom he claimed to be illuminating. For the “word”
spoken by the rhetorician styling himself to be a
philosopher could itself never rise above “dumb”
opinion, and merely illustrated the trained man’s
ability effectively to flatter peoples’ fancies.
Rhetoricians possessed what he called a “knack” of
appealing to a particular appetite, like that of a cook
in a fast-food restaurant, ignoring entirely the
question of whether such an admittedly successful
flattery and knack ought to have been indulged in the
first place.
The successful rhetorician deceives himself into
thinking that he is superior to his “wordless” audience,
but he is simply more effectively “thick” than it is.
His words resemble an overbearing and endlessly repeated
rock rhythm in a room filled with impressionable, but
musically illiterate hedonists. They fail to elevate,
just as any tool that uses man, rather than God, as the
measure of all things falls miserably short of its
pretensions. Anyone responding to the “either-or” option
confronting him by choosing for the rhetorician would,
therefore, be voting for eternal mediocrity and
blindness. Sadly, precisely due to the rhetorician’s
observable knack for maintaining power over the vulgar
mob, the pathetic outcome of such a wrong choice could
conceivably be hidden from its victims forever. False
rhetorical “philosophers” needed only to do two things:
1) enthusiastically to invent ever “new” surface
variants on the proven appealing slogans to keep men
thinking that fulfillment of the brilliant promise of
the Empty Life lay just around the corner; and, 2)
constantly to drill into a benumbed population’s mind
the fear of the “dead-end” impotence that the Socratic
hunt for a more profound goal would ensure.
One of Plato’s painful labors was that of explaining
embarrassing instances of this seeming Socratic
impotence, the disaster of his own political missions to
Dion in Sicily in 388 and 367 being primary among them.
Such shipwrecks, he insisted, were not attributable to
true philosophy’s innate inability to navigate
effectively. Rather, they were simply another
confirmation of the difficulty and very infancy of the
task that the real lover of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth
had set for himself. Yes, he admitted, philosophy needed
the aid of rhetoric, of the lesser “word” to explain
itself successfully to a world filled with ambiguous
though powerful passions, and convince it to change its
ways. But that secondary “word” must always be
subordinated to a deeper Word, the Logos towards whose
ultimate knowledge it was meant to be employed. Alas!,
at least in Plato’s own day, it had proven to be “hard
to find the creator and father of the world”, and
“impossible to describe his nature publicly.” Men could
not yet be guided properly to the divine imitation that
would definitely perfect them and give them possession
of the Beautiful. As dilemmas went, this certainly was a
killer, and Plato feared that it would remain an
unresolved one unless “some God” came to the earth to
unravel it.
Faulty or not, the ideas of his opponents did more than
those of the Socratics to form that mixed Greek/Middle
Eastern/Latin civilization which we call the Hellenistic
World. This new reality certainly did demonstrate the
literal value of the Greek language, whose superiority
in transmitting manifold, complex concepts became
universally recognized. It also reflected all of the
potential practical consequences of a cosmos shaped by a
purely rhetorical “word” alone. For Hellenistic
Civilization was one that did indeed work for the
“common sense” benefit of those “vigorous strong men”
praised by the rhetorician as essential for fulfillment
of its mission. These leaders learned to create and
manipulate powerful state machinery for the purpose of
keeping the “dumb” mass of the population in obedient
submission. Such “doers of great deeds”, from Alexander
through to the Caesars and the Senatorial Aristocracy of
the Roman Empire that worked with them, were even
willing to tolerate satisfaction of certain specific,
immediate desires of the multi-cultural, pluralist world
over which they ruled, so long as its constituent
elements accepted “closure” regarding matters that might
disturb what really counted: the personal power, wealth,
and fame of the victors. And rhetoricians galore gained
a decent income justifying the order thus created.
Rhetoricians were very active from the 300’s B.C.
through the 300’s A.D., providing the Hellenistic
cosmos, or ecumene, the arguments proving that
the debate over who possessed the things that
made life beautiful, and what those things were
was over. They contributed mightily to efforts to
overcome “parochial” religious “superstitions” whose
concerns might threaten the Status Quo. Such integration
of divisive elements involved publicizing the need to
submit to and adore the divinity of the State apparatus
and the self-made men who dominated it. “Closure” had
been achieved in the realm of the gods as well as that
of men, and the “word” could now “move on” to “get the
ordinary job of living done”.
It moved on by devoting itself to legal and civil
service careers, and to sickly praise or boring,
encyclopedic chronicling of the existing, unchangeable
order of things, thereby sharing in any trickle-down
benefits the Divine Masters supposedly serving a Great
Vision permitted. It moved on by finding substantial
employment producing that esoteric, archaic, and
pointless heap of pretty sounds and properly placed
commas adulated by exclusivist literary circles. Failing
that, it moved on by churning out pornographic material
for the gross diversions of a rabble ever tempted to
accept subordination and abandon true enlightenment for
cheap material satiety.
The spiral downward from the more sophisticated
“apologetic” writings and literary achievements of
earlier Hellenistic regimes to the servile, pedantic,
and vulgar oeuvre of much of the so-called Second
Sophistic of the 2nd through 4th
Centuries, A.D. is instructive. Plato, for one, would
not have been surprised by the decline, since he had
argued that word merchants indifferent to true
philosophy were destined to a low-class butchering of
even their own legitimate art and talent. One need only
consult the biographies and stories to be found in
Aulius Gellius’ (123-165) Attic Nights, the 2nd
Philostratus’ (c. 170-248), Lives of the Sophists,
Eunapius’ (346-414) Lives of the Philosophers
and Sophists, Diogenes Laertius’ (no later than
200’s) Lives of Eminent Philosophers, and
Athenaeus of Naucratis’ (200’s) Doctors at Dinner
to test the validity of his hypothesis.
But what about the Socratic opposition? What about their
war with immediate appearances and superficial judgment?
Did not the grasping of the Hellenistic Monarchies far
surpass that of Athens and Sparta at the time of the
height of the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath, when
Socrates himself had shown that the call to possession
of a flawed Beauty could never, in the long-run, satisfy
either the population or the very tyrants misleading it?
Was there not a fraud to be identified and corrected
here? Or had some mystery of iniquity done its job,
quieting the outrage of the true philosopher?
Alas, philosophy had generally been tamed, adapting
itself nicely to the depressing, conformist, “common
sense” rules established and rhetorically-justified by a
combination of power-worshipping adventurers and
sophists. This was partially due to certain innate
weaknesses of the Socratics and subsequent, powerful,
related schools of thought like Stoicism. Aristotelians
retreated into their cubbyholes of knowledge, working in
spheres that did not have to bring up the big questions
disturbing to the Status Quo. Neo-Platonists, even while
conducting a truly exalted discussion of the Hierarchy
of Being leading to clarification of the final, divine,
unchangeable principle of the universe, also became
propagandists for the powers that be. They were fearful
that any disorder and alteration in the political and
social world could open the path to what they considered
to be a totally unacceptable conception of change,
willfulness, and unpredictable action affecting one’s
notion of the character of the very Godhead itself.
Stoic insistence on the purpose-filled structure of the
universe tempted it, in the absence of a concept of sin,
into treating accommodation to the successful status quo
as though it were obedience to the will of God.
Acceptance of the idea of the purpose lying behind every
aspect of natural life also convinced many Stoics that
crude popular experiences of reality, including truly
offensive superstitious practices, should be approached
seriously as well. Plato’s effective rhetorical use of
allegory could be called upon, though in reverse, to
show the more “sophisticated” (dare we say
“appropriate”?) meaning expressed through their vulgar
exterior peculiarities.
But none of this would work if the populations thus
“guided” by the rhetoricians and their allies did not in
some way respond to the song which was sung to them.
This, the majority of them seem to have done, dealing
with the bewildering change backed by willful men and
their propagandists by going on vacation to a Never
Never Land where native beliefs and customs which did
not shake the Established Order could still be
maintained. Many ancient Greeks, Romans, and Near
Easterners took this holiday of denial, stunned as they
were by the innovations accompanying the multicultural
empires shaping their world beginning with the conquests
of Alexander the Great (336-323 B.C.) and continuing
down to the eve of the victory of Christianity. Once
arriving in Never Never Land, they often even denied
that anything new and dangerous had actually entered
into their lives at all. In order to obtain permission
for traditionalist Never Never Land games, however, the
visitors to these varied ancient playgrounds had to
collaborate with the existing system and its rulers on
those matters that really guided their practical lives.
Forget about simply avoiding anything which might give
offense to the powers that be. Personal security
required that they enthusiastically praise the divinity
of the Establishment oppressing them. And this they
readily did: over and over again.
Beyond that, collaboration for the truly powerful might
entail the shouldering of active obligations to the
great monarchs of the age before rushing home to the
more pleasant task of cultivating impotence.
Collaboration, for the weak, might mean just working,
paying taxes, and never transgressing the sacred wall
separating private fantasy from social and political
reality. Most collaborators kept the wheels of the
regime machinery going because they did not wish to risk
their necks by openly opposing it; some since they had
become so used to its gears that they took them for
granted as an unquestionable given, maintaining ties
with their own oppressed traditions through pure
inertia. A few of those who collaborated were fully
co-opted by their masters. They became fervent
propagandists for the new order, alongside the official
rhetorical class, even hoping to be accepted into its
inner circles.
Of course not everyone confronted by bewildering,
force-backed change, justified by rhetorical bombast,
went down the escapist-collaborationist path. A
respectable number reacted to such transformations by
militantly taking up arms against them, and this often
outside of those legitimate structures of their
societies which cowardly or unthinkingly opted for an
accommodating posture. But such a path was fraught with
danger as well. On the one hand lay the overwhelming
power of the existence order of things. On the other,
stood the tendency of initial opponents of the Status
Quo eager for success so to adopt the same approach as
their enemies as to become indistinguishable from them,
while masquerading their transformation by cloaking
themselves with the mere name of “defenders of the
faith”. One can think of the transformation of the
Maccabees from martyrs and confessors into typical
Hellenistic tyrants in this regard.
All this is not to say that that those tyrants and their
propagandists were necessarily “fulfilled” human
persons. How could they be, unless one truly believes
that their pathway is indeed the pathway to individual
perfection? Plato himself insisted that the tyrant had
to be the least contented of all men.
And, in point of fact, the elite of the Status Quo
was shot through with discontent, and not just that
expressed by material dissatisfaction. Some of the elite
itself retreated into the Never Never Lands of the
ineffectual philosophical clubs. Others “went native”,
seeking meaning in the local gods of conquered lands,
gods whose labors could be construed, through Hellenism,
to signify something much more universal than Egyptians
or Mesopotamians had ever thought possible. A few even
went so far as to adore the strangest god of all, the
god of the Jews. But the Status Quo remained unchanged
through it all.
Something “other”, the intervention of “some god”, as
Plato indicated, was needed in order to fight this
unchangeable beast. Only the intervention of a force
from the outside could inject new strength into
sufficiently large numbers of the “dumb”
population—which, by this point, included not only
ordinary individuals but the philosophers as
well--elevate and stiffen its awareness of the real
Drama of Truth in which they were players, and strike
some fear into the opposition. That new force arrived
with the Incarnation. And with the arrival of the
Incarnation, the War Between the Words and the Word
truly began in earnest.
• Up • The War of the Words Against the Word • The War of the Words Against the Word: Chapter One • The War of the Words Against the Word: Chapter Two •
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