Re: Restored (and a final story for Luke and Daniel)

Responses below:

"L. Manning Vines" wrote:

> Aristotle EXTOLLED vengeance in the Ethics? The Nichomachean Ethics? This
> doesn't sound familiar to me.

Like I said, it's been years and my memory is probably imperfect. I looked up
an online version of the NE and found:

-some references to a sulky man who holds on to anger a long time (after being
slighted) and isn't satisfied until he takes revenge

-to rulers who take vengeance on wrongdoers

-to friends who take vengeance on perceived wrongs from other friends by doing
the friend good. This would be Christian if it was extended to enemies and not
just friends, and perhaps Christ's "love your enemies" and the claim that those
who love their friends are just doing what comes naturally -- so there's no
virtue in that -- is a deliberate attempt to argue against this Aristotelian
idea, but it's impossible to tell.

It seems most likely to me that this particular Hellenic ideas was simply
absorbed by Palestinian Judaism and disseminated throughout that society, so
Christ observed it and taught against it. The option that Christ or the
Pharisees/Sadduccess widely read Aristotle and were therefore debating the
merits of his ethics seems much less likely.

None of these fit the bill, of course, and somewhat contradict it.

Then there's this:

> Men, then, as well as beasts, suffer pain when they are angry, and are pleased when they exact their revenge;
> those who fight for these reasons, however, are pugnacious but not brave; for they do not act for honour's sake
> nor as the rule directs, but from strength of feeling; they have, however, something akin to courage.
>

Which is hardly high praise for the person who takes vengeance, though there is
some slight merit -- what they have is "like courage" though not courage
itself. In context he's defining courage, I think, and excluding this type of
person as an example of it.

I may have been thinking about this in book IV:

> The deficiency, whether it is a sort of 'inirascibility' or whatever it is, is blamed. For those who are not angry at the
> things they should be angry at are thought to be fools, and so are those who are not angry in the right way, at the
> right time, or with the right persons; for such a man is thought not to feel things nor to be pained by them, and,
> since he does not get angry, he is thought unlikely to defend himself; and to endure being insulted and put up with
> insult to one's friends is slavish.
>

He's of course advocating the Aristotelian mean -- we should be proportionately
angry to offenses, not lacking in anger altogether or indulging in excessive
anger. He seems to take for granted that anger desires vengeance in other
places, but qualifies this in the paragraph immediately before this one by
saying the good tempered man will tend to err on the side of not being angry
enough, and seems to consistently cast a negative judgment upon refusing to be
appeased until vengeance is taken.

He also says this, simply by way of observation:

> and sometimes we call angry people manly, as being capable of ruling.
>

So my memory was somewhat imperfect. My point, of course, was that Christ's
ethical teachings aren't quite parallel with Greek ethical teaching, and you
never intended to say they were so, there we have it :)

Jim

PS I'll respond to the rest of your post later. I appreciate the insights,
though.

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Received on Sun Jul 20 12:01:44 2003