Jesus the Jewish Cynic. Interpreting the historical Jesus as a holy fool. Part 2: Who were the Cynics?
Jesus is so wellknown to us, that I do not introduce him. But I will introduce the Greek Cynics, unknown to most of us as they are, and a little of their history. This will give you a taste of the connections between Jesus and the Cynics, for you to understand why I connect these two phenomena.
The first Cynic mentioned by history, yes the very founder of Cynicism, is the somewhat unknown Greek philosopher Antisthenes, who lived in Athens 446 – c. 366 BC. He was a disciple of the famous Greek philosopher Socrates, and learned from him the fundamental ethical precept that virtue, not pleasure, is the goal of existence. "He held virtue to be sufficient in itself to ensure happiness, since it needed nothing else except the strength of spirit", Wikipedia says. Antisthenes lived an ascetic life because of this philosophy, and held firmly that infame is a positive thing, as also pain is. We should only obey virtue, not government laws. None of his many writings, mostly in the form of dialogues, has survived into our time. This is a great tragedy.
Antisthenes would perhaps not have agreed in being named a Cynic by later historians, it was his disciple Diogenes of Sinope (b. 412 or 404 BC, d. in Corinth in 323 BC) who really earned this name and would have agreed to it. As I have hinted at, the word Cynic comes from the Greek word kynikos, and means "dog-like". Diogenes was dog-like, and this fact made people call him a Cynic.
For Diogenes, the dogs were his masters, nature was everything, and the government and social codes nothing. As was common in antique Greek philosophy, nature was the measuring rod by which everything was to be measured. Not government law, not the wisdom of the philosophers, not man as in modern humanism, but nature. Diogenes taught that man should follow nature, become one with nature, obey nature instead of the artificial rules of society. What was natural, was good. That's why he followed the lifestyle of the dogs, and was called dog-like, a Cynic. He was shameless in his behaviour, just as the dogs are, and lived in Athens as a homeless, sleeping in a tub, he masturbated and ate publicly in the market place (the old Greeks thought it improper to eate there), and everywhere he went, people were disturbed, because he did strange things all the time, strange things which had deep spiritual symbolism, like carrying a lighted lantern through the market place in full daylight, and answering, when he was asked why he did that, "I seek for a man". He was never imprisoned, because in the antique Greek society holy fools were revered as holy men, or, as they liked to say, philosophers. Though, Diogenes ended his life as a slave, captured by pirates, dying in Corinth. According to Wikipedia, it was also in Corinth where he taught his disciple Crates of Thebe, who in his turn taught Zeno of Citium, who transformed Cynicism into Stoicism, one of the most popular philosophies of late Hellenism.
Although Diogenes of Sinope despised bookly learning (for him philosophy was to live a virtuous life, not to have much learning), he was revered by people as a philosopher, and was treated as such by later historians, both in the Greek antiquity and later in our time. But he mocked the famous learned philosophers in Athens, and disturbed them with his shamelessness. Diogenes is known for sabotaging Platon's lectures, sometimes distracting listeners by bringing food and eating during the discussions.
But people loved him, and when his tub once went broke, people collected money and bought him a new one. As I said, he was never imprisoned, as far as we know, despite all his insanity and opposition to the government, and herein he reminds of the Russian holy fools in the Orthodox Church, which were regarded as being above the law, immune to and above all moral judgment, beyond good and evil, like the animals in the forest. In our society Diogenes would have ended up in mental hospital, for sure, and would have been silenced and passivated and broken by antipsychotic medications, but Greek antiquity had no mental hospitals and no such medications.
Diogenes lived by begging in the streets, and thus became one of the earliest inspiration sources for all later mendicant monks in the Christian era, people like the Franciscans.
Diogenes probably wrote texts, but none of his writings has survived, which also is a tragedy, the medieval monks did not find him interesting to copy and preserve. His teaching survived through his disciples, of which Crates of Thebe (c. 365 – c. 285 BC) is the most wellknown, who in his turn was the teacher of Zeno, founder of Stoicism. Crates was not as extreme as his teacher Diogenes, but did very strange things, like renouncing a life as a wealthy man, heir to a big fortune, which he gave away to the poor, living after that in the streets in Athens like another Diogenes. A woman was in the end attracted to him, fell in love with him, and they married, and had at least two children in their homelessness. Crates and his wife lived as equals in the streets, both beggars, and had sexual intercourse in public.
Many funny and deeply spiritual stories could be told about the Cynics in this space, but let me only at last mention Demetrius the Cynic, who lived in Rome during the reigns of Caligula, Nero and Vespasian (37–71 AD), a contemporary with the apostles of Jesus, a man who maybe met and talked with Saint Peter in the market place in Rome. The contempt of Demetrius for riches is legendary, which is shown by his reply to Caligula who, wishing to corrupt him, offered him two hundred thousand sesterces (a currency at that time, very much money). Demetrius replied, "If he meant to tempt me, he ought to have tried to do so by offering his entire kingdom."
Greek antiquity had no tradition of prophets, like the Jews had, their prophets were the philosophers. Had Diogenes lived in Israel, he certainly would have been revered as one of the prophets, in some strange pseudepigraph, because there was a lot of holy foolishness in the old prophets of Israel, prophets like Elijah, Hosea and Jesaja. None was called a philosopher in Israel.
Little was heard of the Cynics in second and first century BC, but in the first century AD Cynicism experienced a revival, and Cynics appeared up until the 5th century, after which the movement declined and died out.
It reappeared in the holy foolishness of the monasticism of the Christian religion, in strange holy men like the desert fathers and Simeon the Stylite, who lived 37 years on a small platform on top of a pillar near Aleppo (in modern Syria). Simeon and the first desert fathers were contemporary with the Cynics, but similar strange things appeared in their footsteps during all of church history after the Cynics were gone. Franciskus of Assisi in the thirteenth century AD was a Cynic-like saint, in him we find the special, deep reverence for nature which was typical for the Cynics. And the holy fools of the Eastern Orthodox Church throughout history were Cynic-like, pretending to be insane wherever they went. We have Cynic-like people even today, but they are mostly mental patients, overlooked by media and society. They are not allowed to live out their modern Cynicism, because our modern society is not so tolerant any more as it once was. The myth of progress don't work here. The existence of real Cynics or holy fools in the market place who dare to do strange things can be a test upon the tolerance of a society.
Let me say one last thing about modernism in literature. It has a Cynic element in it, in the will to break rules and shock and provocate. But when the rulebreaking has become the very Parnassus itself, when we break rules for its own sake, as a religion, it loses its power and just serves capitalism, consumerism and the destruction of nature. That has happened in our time. The artists are no longer true Cynics, as the first Modernists, like some of the Finno-Swedish Dadaists, were. Postmodernism is just late modernism, and has never overcome modernism. There scarcely exists any real postmodernism. True art and literature only lives in the poverty and suffering that was characterizing for the first Cynics and all holy fools. In suffering our hearts are made to sing their most beautiful songs. This is very strange. It is, in fact, a paradox. A Cynic paradox.
I think our best songs will be sang in the collapse of the industrial civilization, which awaits us.
