rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_03d39fea-70a7-582f-95de-f90896ba74b3">28 (As the man—who would, since Soconusco, take neither her dollars nor her sarcastic “Senhor Wilie E. Coiote”—stands watch under a thousand thousand apathetic points of someone else’s light in the otherwise heavy, well-woven blackness of an Imperial Sonoran Desert night, the woman who holds her baby close is above all prayer.)29
In the face of the prospect of such disaster it is understandable that we would in our anxiety crave a panoptic vision, a world view, which would take in and hold all that we have discerned and might ever discern,30 a ground for proper action and passion,31 a foothold off of which we might push to make our way into an otherwise paralyzingly uncertain future in the face of an otherwise inhospitably untamed natural world. Besides, we are people who wonder,32 we have a longing for rational unity,33 and we are driven by an aesthetic desire for a vision both coherent and adequate to the broad range of our experience or an erotic urge for far-reaching intellectual satisfaction.34 We are people who desire a grand, integrating vision.35
Surely no one could fault the pious for engaging in just this enterprise, specifying in some detail God’s relation to all the goods (ousia) their inquiries have surveyed, goods that come into their hands as their inquiries grow more and more ambitious.36 Of course, the pious would not wish too quickly to nail God to any vision. They perhaps remember that God is ambiguously related to the act of nailing down. They would want to give God the power to move about freely. Nor would they wish to give God only limited free range.37 And so, the pious might even dare to say that God is in league with that goodness or truth or beauty and in combat against that evil or falsehood or ugliness they have by rigorous and pious effort come to some degree to determine—but they would say this perhaps with downcast eyes, humbly, uncertainly or skeptically or with a knowing, hushed aside that God stands concomitantly in analogical opposition to—even in judgment against—their determinations.38 (That a displaced young woman, holding a little child, would have no place in their ordered whole could not be definitive, they think.)
In this way—perhaps against our best intentions—we have stumbled into the imposing tradition of the Greeks, those masters of health and unity, of balance and justice, of virtue and well-being, of ethics and ontology. The Greeks understood as well as any ever have that a people must keep the lines well drawn that mark the difference between “we are” and “we are not.”39 The literature of the Greeks is rich with a paideic vision, cosmic in scope, for the integrity of the body, the soul, and the city-state. Sublimely conceived, the Odysseus of Homer’s Odyssey,40 the Socrates of Plato’s Apology,41 and the walled polis of Plato’s Republic42 each rises tall silhouetted against the ethereal sky of a sublimely conceived cosmos, threateningly mature, overtly or covertly beautiful, strong, virile, courageous, daring, wise, complex, well armed, just: whole.43 To be well adjusted is here to be hale, an inherent harmony properly exercised in controlled agony at one or another battlefield or palaestra or agora, centered, stalking steadily like a pelican on defensible ground.44 That there are the ill-adjusted among us simply means, they held, that therapeia is to be performed, a therapeia in fact that serves not only the patient, but even more the divine that radiates from the temple at the heart both of the city and of the heroic citizen.45 Indeed we human beings, they held, are here at the center of the cosmos to rise by struggle to become “like the divine, so far as we can.”46 The more we are like the divine, the more we are ourselves, and vice versa. Thus therapeia is in the strictest sense a healing act. Who could blame anyone, especially the pious, for praying for such healing? Indeed, who could blame them for conceiving of prayer as such as a salutary act, the deed in itself (whether it is heard by the Actus Purus or not) as therapy, as a medicine of the soul?47
For the more cerebral Greeks the grandest therapeia is what they called philosophia, a pursuit of wisdom that—far from fearing or petitioning the gods, e.g., for some undue ephemeral benefaction—aspires and conforms to the surpassing-divine goodness, truth, and beauty the gods, too, serve.48 Though it is certainly idealized, a kind of monolatrous prayer plays still in the background history of philosophia. And yet the gods, idealized though they, too, may be, are honored and trusted to do well the tasks they have been assigned (without the distraction of our entreaties).49 And we are to do well the tasks we have been assigned, to fit no less into this beautiful cosmos that is our native soil and theirs. The end of philosophical therapeia is adjustment to the eternally concentric archai that order the many, an adjustment that centers the attendant’s otherwise disparate faculties and makes him whole.50 What is truly one, truly whole, is simply self-identical, untouched by what is other than itself: A ≠ ~A! It simply is. “Integrity” = “identity,” “identity” = “being.” I am insofar as I participate in the integrity that most truly is. It is not accidental that the devotion of the Greeks to integrity led them into that discipline that sets out to clarify the foundational meaning of “being.” An inquiry into the significance of “being” is thus no idle pastime; it is a quest for healing.51
Early Greek thinkers were in fact in more than one sense “physicians.” They were above all concerned with what they named physis, with thinking it and thus serving it. It would be fitting, if anachronistic, to describe at least some of them also as “metaphysicians,” but not in the much later sense that discounts physis. The prefix “meta-” would not, indeed could not, in their case mean “beyond.”52 Physis, which is typically translated into English as “nature,” comes from the same root as the English “be.”53 It signifies “what is,” what rises by force out of the darkness to make a stand.54 Beholding physis filled Greek thinkers with awe and wonder. There could be nothing higher, deeper, richer, stronger, or purer. Indeed, the Greeks would have found odd any suggestion that there might be something beyond it. In this morning of Western Civilization, physis embraced everything without exception, including the earth’s rational animals and their gods. Homer and Hesiod, Parmenides and Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle all agreed:55 there is by definition only one whole, and it is the task of competent thinkers to show how and why and in that way to adjust to it—to imitate it, insofar as they can—and in turn to lead especially their kind to adjust to it as well.56 The intelligibility of the cosmos implies, they maintained, that “what is” constitutes a definite totality.57
