I encourage you to read these articles (and watch the videos) to gain understanding and perspective concerning the historical federal case of United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
Month: June 2023
Uncertainty and Our Search for Meaning: Legendary Psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom on How We Glean Our Sense of Purpose
Here’s the link to this article.
“The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely. Meaning ensues from meaningful activity: the more we deliberately pursue it, the less likely are we to find it.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“The sole purpose of human existence,” Carl Jung wrote in his notebooks, “is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” In a universe devoid of purpose in the human sense, in which we are but a cosmic accident, the darkness of mere being can easily overwhelm us — and yet we go on striking the match of meaning. “However vast the darkness,” Stanley Kubrick urged in a 1968 interview, “we must supply our own light.”
How we supply that light is what the great existential psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom (b. June 13, 1931) explores in a portion of the wholly illuminating 1989 classic Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (public library).
Yalom has done for psychotherapy what Oliver Sacks has done for neurology, using case studies as a storytelling springboard for contemplating some of the largest and most perennial human questions. Through the stories of ten patients, he examines what the four main aspects of psychotherapy — the inevitability of death, the freedom to shape our own lives, our ultimate aloneness, and the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life.
The last of the four, which Yalom considers the existential human dilemma of “a being who searches for meaning and certainty in a universe that has neither,” is both the most elusive and the most fertile, for embedded in it are the other three. He writes:
If death is inevitable, if all of our accomplishments, indeed our entire solar system, shall one day lie in ruins, if the world is contingent (that is, everything could as well have been otherwise), if human beings must construct the world and the human design within that world, then what enduring meaning can there be in life? … We are meaning-seeking creatures. Biologically, our nervous systems are organized in such a way that the brain automatically clusters incoming stimuli into configurations. Meaning also provides a sense of mastery: feeling helpless and confused in the face of random, unpatterned events, we seek to order them and, in so doing, gain a sense of control over them. Even more important, meaning gives birth to values and, hence, to a code of behavior: thus the answer to why questions (Why do I live?) supplies an answer to how questions (How do I live?).
Indeed, humanity’s entire history of contemplating how to live is rooted in this question of meaning. And yet Yalom argues that we can only search for meaning indirectly. In a sentiment that calls to mind Virginia Woolf on the paradox of writing about the soul, he asserts:
The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely. Meaning ensues from meaningful activity: the more we deliberately pursue it, the less likely are we to find it; the rational questions one can pose about meaning will always outlast the answers. In therapy, as in life, meaningfulness is a by-product of engagement and commitment, and that is where therapists must direct their efforts — not that engagement provides the rational answer to questions of meaning, but it causes these questions not to matter.
In both therapy and life, this sidewise gleam of meaning requires cultivating a comfort level with uncertainty and continually asking what Hannah Arendt so memorably termed the “unanswerable questions” that make us human; it then requires that, to paraphrase Rilke’s immortal words, we live those questions. Yalom writes:
The capacity to tolerate uncertainty is a prerequisite… The powerful temptation to achieve certainty through embracing an ideological school and a tight therapeutic system is treacherous: such belief may block the uncertain and spontaneous encounter necessary for effective therapy.
[…]
I must assume that knowing is better than not knowing, venturing than not venturing; and that magic and illusion, however rich, however alluring, ultimately weaken the human spirit.
How to dispel those illusions and strengthen the human spirit through meaningful uncertainty is what Yalom explores in the remainder of the altogether revelatory Love’s Executioner. Complement this particular focal point with Parker Palmer on how to discern your purpose, Viktor Frankl on the human search for meaning, and Hannah Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning.
06/21/23 Biking & Listening to The Dictionary of Lost Words
Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
Here’s a link to today’s bike ride.
Something to consider if you’re not already cycling.
I encourage you to start riding a bike, no matter your age. Check out these groups:
Cycling for those aged 70+(opens in a new tab)
Solitary Cycling(opens in a new tab)
Remember,
Here’s what I’m listening to: The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams
Amazon abstract:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY AWARD
Here’s a few photos from along my pistol route:
Post Arraignment, Day 8
I encourage you to read these articles (and watch the videos) to gain understanding and perspective concerning the historical federal case of United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
Articles
Videos
Hope in the Dark: Rebecca Solnit on the Redemptive Radiance of the World’s Invisible Revolutionaries
Here’s the link to this article.
“The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet whether they will have any effect…”
BY MARIA POPOVA
I think a great deal about what it means to live with hope and sincerity in the age of cynicism, about how we can continue standing at the gates of hope as we’re being bombarded with news of hopeless acts of violence, as we’re confronted daily with what Marcus Aurelius called the “meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.”
I’ve found no more lucid and luminous a defense of hope than the one Rebecca Solnit launches in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (public library) — a slim, potent book penned in the wake of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq; a book that has grown only more relevant and poignant in the decade since.
We lose hope, Solnit suggests, because we lose perspective — we lose sight of the “accretion of incremental, imperceptible changes” which constitute progress and which render our era dramatically different from the past, a contrast obscured by the undramatic nature of gradual transformation punctuated by occasional tumult.
Each of our lifetimes brims with personal evidence of these collective cultural shifts: At the time I was born, no one imagined that the Cold War would end and a girl raised in communist Bulgaria would make a life for herself reading and writing about books in English while facing the Manhattan skyline; a mere decade ago, it seemed inconceivable that a distributed tribe of strangers would raise a million dollars for refugees in another part of the world via an instantaneous global communication system of 140-character neo-telegrams; just a couple of years ago, it was hard to imagine that the day would come when all of us would be able to marry the people we love.
Solnit writes:
There are times when it seems as though not only the future but the present is dark: few recognize what a radically transformed world we live in, one that has been transformed not only by such nightmares as global warming and global capital, but by dreams of freedom and of justice — and transformed by things we could not have dreamed of… We need to hope for the realization of our own dreams, but also to recognize a world that will remain wilder than our imaginations.
In a sentiment that parallels the relationship between dark matter and ordinary matter in the formation of the universe, Solnit offers the perfect metaphor for the source of our tenuous grip on hope:
Imagine the world as a theater. The acts of the powerful and the official occupy center stage. The traditional versions of history, the conventional sources of news encourage us to fix our gaze on the stage. The limelights there are so bright they blind you to the shadowy spaces around you, make it hard to meet the gaze of the other people in the seats, to see the way out of the audience, into the aisles, backstage, outside, in the dark, where other powers are at work. A lot of the fate of the world is decided onstage, in the limelight, and the actors there will tell you that no other place matters.
In a passage that calls to mind Simone Weil’s memorable words — “When someone exposes himself as a slave in the market place, what wonder if he finds a master?” — Solnit adds:
What is onstage is a tragedy, the tragedy of the inequitable distribution of power and of the too-common silence of those who settle for being audience while paying the price of the drama. Traditionally, the audience is supposed to choose the actors, and the actors are quite literally supposed to speak for us. This is the idea behind representative democracy. In practice, various reasons keep many from participating in the choice, other forces — like money — subvert that choice, and onstage too many of the actors find other reasons — lobbyists, self-interest, conformity — to fail to represent their constituents.
Hope, Solnit observes, dies when we choose to watch the unfolding drama in resignation and abdicate all responsibility, pointing a blaming finger at those in the limelight. (Lest we forget, Joseph Brodsky put it best: “A pointed finger is a victim’s logo.”)
She considers the disposition of the hopeless:
They speak as though we should wait for improvement to be handed to us, not as though we might seize it. Perhaps their despair is in some ways simply that they are audience rather than actors.
Our most radiant horizon of hope, Solnit argues, lies in the darkness beyond the limelight:
The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet whether they will have any effect, in the people you have not yet heard of who will be the next Cesar Chavez, the next Noam Chomsky, the next Cindy Sheehan, or become something you cannot yet imagine. In this epic struggle between light and dark, it’s the dark side — that of the anonymous, the unseen, the officially powerless, the visionaries and subversives in the shadows — that we must hope for. For those onstage, we can just hope the curtain comes down soon and the next act is better, that it comes more directly from the populist shadows.
Hope in the Dark is an immensely invigorating read in its entirety. Complement it with E.B. White’s elevating letter to a man who had lost faith in humanity, Albert Camus on how to ennoble our spirits in dark times, and Viktor Frankl on why idealism is the best activism, then revisit Solnit on how we find ourselves by getting lost, what reading does for the human spirit, how modern noncommunication is changing our experience of time, solitude, and communion, and her beautiful manifesto for the spiritual rewards of walking.
How Christians reframe prayer to sound exciting and effective
Here’s the link to this article.
For decades, Christians have lamented their inability to pray regularly. And for decades, they’ve tried dishonest reframing to make prayer sound infinitely more exciting and effective than it really is.
by JAN 20, 2023
If there’s one universal complaint I’ve heard from Christians, one monolithic sore spot that seems to affect almost all of them, it is their inability to establish prayer habits. Even the most fervent and gung-ho of them willingly admit that their prayer lives are lacking.
But instead of stressing the real-world good of cultivating such a habit, Christians tend to try to drill down harder on the imaginary aspects of what they’re doing.
Prayer 101
Religious people call the process of talking to their god(s) prayer. Christians almost universally believe that prayer works all kinds of miracles. Their Bible commands them to pray without ceasing. In the gospels, Jesus is often seen praying and admonishing his followers to pray.
In the modern day, Christians believe that their god actually listens to their prayers. Many even believe that he responds to them in some way: giving them comfort, answering their questions, telling them what to do next, and more. They’ve even defined different kinds of prayer:
- Praise and adoration
- Petition (asking for stuff)
- Intercession (asking for stuff still, but for someone else)
- Confession (apologizing for stuff so they don’t go to Hell)
- Thanksgiving (for the stuff they think their god did for them)
In times of great stress, Christians learn that they should pray for help and comfort. (I recently saw The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). One hostage character prayed almost the entire way through the movie. This wasn’t particularly played for laughs.)
But Christians also learn that they should pray all the rest of the time too, and to cultivate what they call a prayer life. Their leaders teach them that prayer is a sublime and fulfilling experience—a sort of red Bat-Phone call straight to Heaven.
And the problem: Christians tend to neglect prayer
Despite centuries of consistent education on this topic, Christians don’t pray much at all. A 2021 Pew Research survey found that the number of Christians claiming to pray daily fell from 58% in 2007 to 45% in 2021. Meanwhile, the number of people saying they seldom or never pray rose from 18% in 2007 to 32% in 2021. Those are some serious shifts!
I use the word “claiming” up there on purpose. I’m pretty sure that Christians not only vastly inflate how much prayer they do, but that they also count any kind of prayer as prayer. That means quick blessings over their meals, ritualistic requests for divine protection before they start driving anywhere, or the brief little prayers they say over social media entreaties. These are simple magical invocations, no different from Wiccans saying “so mote it be.” And they’re certainly not what Christian leaders mean when they talk about cultivating a prayer life.
I can absolutely assure you that 45% of Americans are not actually getting on their knees in their war room to pray for hours on end for Republicans to win the next election and Aunt Nancy’s Stage IV cancer to go into spontaneous remission—much less to tell Jesus for hours at a time how wonderful he is.
Even in the most fervent evangelical circles, it’s always perfectly safe to lament one’s neglect of prayer. Usually, this confession prompts everyone listening to nod along in chagrined silence.
The stakes for neglecting prayer
One evangelical site, The Gospel Coalition (TGC), understands exactly what the stakes are here:
It’s shameful but true. Christians have long struggled to exercise their most astounding privilege: permission to approach the throne of grace and talk to God, communicating with the One who makes and rules the world, who creates and redeems, who loves with an everlasting love that has overcome the power of sin, death, and the Devil. Though such a privilege takes our breath away when rightly understood, it is all-too-often neglected, taken for granted, and performed as if what we profess about God isn’t true.The Gospel Coalition
That last bit is the most telling: “performed as if what we profess about God isn’t true.”
Whatever Christians say they believe about prayer, their actual behavior reveals the truth. They’re well aware that prayer doesn’t actually spark miracles, get them tangible help in their lives, or offer them any gods standing by to take their calls—much less waiting on pins and needles to respond to them.
But their writer shoots himself in the foot by making a testable truth claim about the results of regular long-form prayer:
Imagine what would happen if we inched our way closer to prayer without ceasing. Imagine if we cultivated the faith, godly discipline, and habit of communicating with God as if he really were with us all the time, ruling our lives and our world in the way Scripture says.The Gospel Coalition
If only. But he’s right about one thing:
We must imagine this result, because there really aren’t any real-world examples he can point out to us.
Why Christians spend so little time on prayer, according to Christians
There’s no shortage of guesses in the Christ-o-sphere about why Christians have such a problem with prayer. One pastor begins his list of guesses with the usual confession:
Over the years I have been amazed at the paltry desire I’ve felt to pray. I am especially aware of this aversion just prior to the times that I’ve specifically set aside to pray, whether in private or with others.Daniel Henderson
His guesses about why this is the case include demons and Bad Christians™, of course:
- “The independence of the flesh.” (In Christianese, the flesh means the material world, our bodies, and our very human desires and motivations.)
- “The relentless attack of the enemy.” (In Christianese, the enemy always means demons. They are—as Umberto Eco once defined fascism so well—both enormously powerful and ridiculously weak.)
- “The busyness of our modern lives.” (He name-drops Charles Spurgeon, who gaslit evangelicals for decades to come by defining prayer as “a saving of time.”)
- “The unpleasant memory of previous experiences.” (He goes on to explain that anyone who turns Christians off to prayer meetings is just a Bad Christian™ who has forgotten what Original First-Century Christianity is all about.)
Overall, his guesses can be found repeated all throughout the Christ-o-sphere. TGC adds an interesting new guess in their own post: “Surely,” he asserts, “this has a great deal to do with our lack of understanding about the nature of prayer.” (Even his own cited sources don’t come close to supporting that guess!)
The solution: Reframing prayer as exciting!
As you might have noticed already, Christians have a couple of different strategies for dealing with this lack of prayer in their ranks. TGC’s writer thought that the solution was simply (re-)telling Christians what he thinks the Bible says about prayer.
(Here, I’ll note only this: My last real act as a Christian, besides one last agonized prayer, was studying what the Bible says about prayer. That’s when I finally understood that it looks nothing like how Christians describe it, and nothing like reality either. Just like that, one of the most important taps feeding my faith pool turned off.)
But most Christians go another route. They try to make prayer sound incredibly exciting, rewarding, and magically effective. In other words, they reframe prayer. We’ve already seen one such attempt in the quotes I’ve offered above.
There’s nothing wrong with reframing, as long as the results are still true and accurate. It can be a healthy way to get past a problem. Sometimes people just need another way to look at a situation. When it’s done to manipulate, though, and it describes something that isn’t true or accurate, then there’s a lot wrong with it. Then, it becomes gaslighting.
In this case, Christians already know that prayer is boring, unrewarding, and the opposite of effective. They’ve done enough prayer to know! They’ve watched themselves do it!
Reframing in action
In 2019, a Calvinist evangelical, Derek Rishmawy, tried hard to reframe prayer:
There are many reasons I don’t pray: distraction, busyness, or the sense that I should be doing something. These are all terrible, of course, but I think the saddest reason is simply boredom. If you’ve grown up in church or simply acclimatized to the secular air we breathe, prayer can appear as small potatoes. It’s something good you know you’re supposed to do because God, like your Great Aunt Suzy, would like you to call more often. But there is little urgency or anticipation.
How much would change, I wonder, if we looked to the story of Moses and the burning bush as our paradigm for prayer?Derek Rishmawy, Christianity Today
He ends with a crescendo of reframed enthusiasm:
Certainly, there is no place for lethargy or boredom. To pray is to enter the Temple, the high and exalted place, where the Holy One dwells in majestic light (Isa. 57:15). It is to call on the name of Yahweh, the fear of Israel (Isa. 8:13).
Considering the One we are praying to, there should be an exhilarating rush of adrenaline and a quickening of the pulse when we take God’s name on our lips. [. . .] Prayer is nothing less than an intimate encounter with the voice from the Flame.Derek Rishmawy, Christianity Today
Impressive, eh? But I wonder how well this reframing attempt worked for him. Does he still find it difficult to find time to pray, even after positioning prayer in this impossibly grandiose way? I bet he does, because back in my Pentecostal days decades ago, my crowd did the exact same thing. And yet we still had trouble finding time to pray.
When the reframing attempt draws a picture that the target knows isn’t true, then it becomes dishonest. The Bible can talk about burning bushes all it wants. Any Christian who’s done more than a few prayer sessions knows perfectly well that it doesn’t feel even a little like “an intimate encounter with the voice from the Flame.” That Bible story describes an encounter that looks like the polar opposite of prayer.
Christians’ dishonest reframing attempts might even backfire by making their targets curious, as I once was, about what the Bible really says about prayer.
When rubber meets the road, Christians vote with their time
We make time for that which is important to us. If we say we know something is terribly important, but we don’t make time for it, that should tip us off about our real priorities.
Sure, we do this all the time with stuff we know is actually good for us. Right now, gym members are likely still dealing with the “resolutioners” who flood their facilities every January. In a few more weeks, most of those folks will be gone.
Exercise is important. It’s one of the best ways humans have to stay happy, healthy, and long-lived. In the moment of exercising, our bodies release all kinds of feel-good chemicals. We’re meant to be active. Our bodies suffer greatly when we’re not. And yet somehow our busy lives get in the way of doing the thing.
The difference between exercise and prayer should be obvious, however. One is a proven-effective activity with observable results. The other has never been shown to do anything that Christians frequently claim it does.
One activity similar to prayer, meditation, appears to have real benefits for those practicing it. Practiced in a similar way, prayer might accomplish similar benefits. But I doubt Christians would ever officially adopt that style of prayer, even if they evolve singly, Christian by Christian, informal redefinitions that inch closer to the truth of the matter (as I also did).
By now, Christians have developed a cultural view of prayer that is both impossibly lofty and completely removed from even their own reality. Nothing else will please most of them. So dishonest reframing it is and shall be forevermore!
Christians will keep dishonestly reframing prayer to try to motivate themselves to do it more often, and they will still keep having trouble finding time to pray. Truly, there’s nothing new under the sun.
06/20/23 Biking & Listening to The Dictionary of Lost Words
Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
Here’s a link to today’s bike ride.
Something to consider if you’re not already cycling.
I encourage you to start riding a bike, no matter your age. Check out these groups:
Cycling for those aged 70+(opens in a new tab)
Solitary Cycling(opens in a new tab)
Remember,
Here’s what I’m listening to: The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams
Amazon abstract:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY AWARD
Here’s a few photos from along my pistol route:
Post Arraignment, Day 7
I encourage you to read these articles (and watch the videos) to gain understanding and perspective concerning the historical federal case of United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
Articles
Videos
The Silence of Pliny the Elder (1st-Century Fridays #7)
Here’s the link to this article.
AUG 06, 2021
Hi and welcome back! As it’s now Friday, let’s turn our gaze to another author alive during the supposed lifetime of Jesus Christ — one who should have known about the creator of Christianity and those earliest Christians he inspired.
Today, our focus rests upon Gaius Plinius Secundus, more popularly known as Pliny the Elder. As he lived between 23/24 CE – 79 CE and was good friends with Emperor Vespasian (who ruled from 69-79 CE), he was very well-placed to know all about this stuff. Let’s see if he did.
(In 1st-Century Fridays, we meet the ancient contemporaries of Jesus. We’re using the real definition of the word “contemporaneous” here, not the one Biblical scholars have weaseled to give themselves some leeway with their utter lack of evidence that their Savior actually existed. No, the people we’ll meet here must have been alive during that critical time of 30-35 CE. AND they must have had a good chance of hearing about what Christians claim was happening in Jerusalem at the time. Here’s the largely-canonical list of contemporaries you might have seen around. I prefer this diagram made by one of our other link writers. And here are some other lists.)
Everyone, Meet Pliny the Elder.
Pliny the Elder was a Roman writer, philosopher, and military commander. He lived from 23/24 to 79 CE. At least, we think that’s his birth year. In truth, we don’t know much about his early life. Neither he nor his nephew (Pliny the Younger, natch) said much about his parents. We also think he was born in Como, in way northern Italy. His sister bore his nephew, Pliny the Younger.
As is normal for wealthy highborn Romans, Pliny the Elder enjoyed a good education. In this case, he learned lawmaking. At some point, he seems to have adopted Stoic beliefs. Once that was done, he began that course of military positions and whatnot that would prepare him for a grand future in Roman politics.
The following is a list of the most commented articles in the last 7 days.
He sounds like quite the traditionalist. Though he became quite wealthy, he adopted an archaic lifestyle. For example, he ate austere, reasonable meals instead of huge feasts. He never married or had kids, either. Instead, he adopted his nephew as his heir after his sister’s husband died.
He left the military right around when Nero became emperor. It really looks like Pliny did everything he could to avoid drawing Nero’s attention during those dangerous years of his rule from 54-68 CE. Instead, he worked as a lawyer. He also wrote books about safe topics: grammar, education, etc.
Anything else was too dangerous to contemplate.
Pliny the Elder and His Later Life.
After the tumultuous Year of Four Emperors, Vespasian became emperor in 69 CE. He was, like Pliny, a man of the equestrian class. He’d lived a very similar life. And his #1 priority in those early years of his reign was to get the empire stabilized. He wanted to secure things after all the upsets Rome had experienced recently.
Vespasian called to Pliny to serve him. Pliny responded to that call. He gave up his law practice to become a high-ranking official in various important provinces. The men seem to have become friends. Indeed, Pliny often visited Vespasian in the early morning before going about his own duties.
Toward the end of his life, Pliny published the first books of his Natural History. It was a 37-volume encyclopedia. He used his own experience and other previously-written works to create it. In it, he covered every single topic he could think of. Regarding the title, he meant by it not just what we’d think of as “natural history,” but stuff about life itself, all aspects of it.
And I do mean “all” up there. Various volumes of his Natural History covered Africa, China, and other such places that Roman expansionism had touched and absorbed.
The Last Day of Pliny the Elder.
By now, Vespasian had appointed him the praefectus classis in Miseno. That’s toward the north end of the Bay of Naples. Here it is on a map:
In 79 CE, Pliny stood and watched a weird cloud arising from Mount Vesuvius. It was shaped like a “pine-tree,” or so his nephew says (Book 6, Letter 16, “To Tacitus.”)
Either way, Pliny the Elder wanted to find out what that cloud was all about. Just watching from afar didn’t satisfy him.
He was in the north end of the bay with a fleet of ships. Why not use ’em? After watching the cloud from afar, he ordered a galley to be prepared to sail closer for a better look.
I wonder if he wanted to put this info into his Natural History!
The Death of Pliny the Elder.
But there was another reason why Pliny the Elder wanted to sail into danger.
In the midst of his preparations to explore, he received a letter from his frantic friend Rectina. She had a villa close by the mountain in Stabiae. And she was getting more and more frightened by the moment. She begged Pliny to rescue her. He’d already been getting a galley ready to sail out that way. Now, though, his efforts became focused on rescue. In all, a number of galleys sailed out on the rescue trip. He intended to help as many people as he could.
Pliny invited his nephew to come along, but the younger man declined; he had some work to finish up. So his uncle set off without him. (Lucky nephew! He dodged that one!)
He did rescue at least one other person in Stabiae: his friend Senator Pomponianus.
Then, his ship got stuck in Stabiae.
Alas, Pliny had hung around Stabiae too long. Perhaps he inhaled too much volcanic ash or toxic gas. Or perhaps he had a heart attack. We don’t know if his rescued friend survived, either. Nor do we know if he ever reached Rectina — or even what happened to her.
What we do know is that Pliny the Elder died in 79 CE in Stabiae.
What Did Pliny the Elder Write About Jesus and Christianity?
So we’ve got this account of a well-traveled, well-read Roman leader who very deliberately and purposefully gathered and wrote down absolutely everything about everything he could find. His encyclopedia has influenced similar efforts for thousands of years.
Thankfully, we can access Natural History in translation here.
And I can tell you now that it does not mention anything about Jesus or the earliest Christians.
Not a word. You can search it yourself if you like! There’s an excellent search function right there.
All you’ll find for these terms are footnotes added by Christians. They clearly felt tetchy about, say, Pliny’s mention of Tyana. I can see why.
After all, that’s where Apollonius of Tyana was from. I’m sure they would indeed have bristled at this reminder of his existence.
Sidebar: The Essenes Have Entered the Chat.
Pliny the Elder does talk a little about Judea in Book V, Chapter 15. Interestingly, he mentions the Essenes. They were a mystic Jewish sect that existed from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE. Of them, Pliny writes:
Lying on the west of Asphaltites, and sufficiently distant to escape its noxious exhalations, are the Esseni, a people that live apart from the world, and marvellous beyond all others throughout the whole earth, for they have no women among them; to sexual desire they are strangers; money they have none; the palm-trees are their only companions. Day after day, however, their numbers are fully recruited by multitudes of strangers that resort to them, driven thither to adopt their usages by the tempests of fortune, and wearied with the miseries of life. Thus it is, that through thousands of ages, incredible to relate, this people eternally prolongs its existence, without a single birth taking place there; so fruitful a source of population to it is that weariness of life which is felt by others.
Yep, that sounds about like the Essenes we’ve met. Off and on through his work, Pliny might also be referring to various Essene people, but it doesn’t sound like historians are completely sure about that. In addition, this same chapter mentions Galilee, the Jordan River, and Herodium.
Otherwise, we see nothing whatsoever of Jesus or Christianity in this vast encyclopedia. All the same, it’s interesting stuff. I especially liked this chapter (VI.37) about “The Fortunate Isles.”
What Pliny the Elder Never Knew.
Like we saw with Seneca the Younger last week, Pliny the Elder really, truly destroys Christian claims of Jesus’ importance. He also wrecks their own historical claims about their religion’s earliest years and their claims about its rapid early growth.
Pliny the Elder was writing and gathering information for his Natural History till his death. His work covered every single aspect of the world Romans knew.
As a well-traveled and well-read Roman leader, he really was in the perfect place to have at least heard about the new religion and its firebrand of a leader — especially if, as Christians like to claim, the new religion swept through the Roman Empire because it was just so, I dunno, DIFFERENT, I guess.
But no. That silence surprised even me a bit, because I expected at least a mention of Christians somewhere in his work.
And yet, Pliny the Elder seems to have known nothing at all of any of it.
Grading Pliny the Elder.
I’m giving Pliny the Elder an A+.
I don’t think we’ve yet found another 1st-century writer better-situated than he was to know about the earliest Christians and Jesus Christ than him. And yet he is utterly silent on both topics. He most definitely belongs on our list of vetted 1st-century writers who really should have known about this stuff but didn’t.
I’m very glad to have learned about him. And I hope you’ll find his adventurous life as interesting as I did!
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The Pencil-Driven Life 