In this episode, Rabbi Reinman shows how Aristotle completed the creation of Hellenism, but that Alexander the Great, his student, was the true embodiment of the Greek ideal.
WATCH:
Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Greek Warrior King
After The Iliad gained wide readership, hellenism took root in Greek society. The Greeks saw themselves at the pinnacle of the universe, superior to the god race. They built magnificent edifices. They studied the human condition in literature, art and drama. Idolizing the human body, they exercised in the nude in the gymnasiums and publicly displayed the beauty, perfection and prowess of the human body in organized athletic competitions performed in the nude.
The Greeks gloried in their new divinity, but they still lacked a sophisticated view of the universe and the profound questions of existence. Early hellenism had a mind, a body and a heart, but it lacked a soul until the philosophers arrived.
There were a number of early Greek philosophers, but the famous Big Three, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, established the idea that human reason is the ultimate measure of knowledge. Socrates said that man should always search for the truth by asking numerous questions, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” The authorities in Athens thought he was dangerous and executed him. Socrates did not write a book, but Plato, his student, recorded his teachings and added many of his own. But Plato’s student Aristotle had the greatest impact on Western thought. Socrates and Plato were artists. Aristotle was a scientist.
Aristotle was remarkable for the orderliness of his brilliant mind and the sheer number of directions in which he pointed it. Never one to plunge headlong into the seas of knowledge, he always began with a dissection of the subject under study. He delineated his objectives, defined a set of terms to categorize his research, and only then, he conducted his inquiry. In this way, he formalized logic, developed controlled experimentation and the scientific method of inquiry and compiled veritable encyclopedias of information through observation, analysis and speculation. He also formulated numerous terms, such as matter, form, energy, infinity, genus and species, which endure until this day as basic units of Western thought. Above all, he was a disciplined student with an insatiable appetite for knowledge of practically any kind…
But if humanity had assumed the mantle of the god race in the Greek mode of thought, the idealized image of the ultimate man, the “Greek god” so to speak, was not the homely, squint-eyed thinker such as Socrates or Aristotle. For if man was a god then all of him was divine, his body, his mind and his soul.
Just as, in our own times, the crowds cheer the drivers of racing cars rather than the engineers who design them, the adoration of ancient Greek society was reserved for the sun-bronzed, heroic warrior-athlete, his body perfect and beautiful, his mind enriched by philosophy, his soul nourished by literature. The philosophers and writers were admired but not idolized as heroes. They were the engineers who designed the cultural tools, but the true Greek gods were the splendid human sculptures molded by those tools, the ones who trained unclad in the gymnasium while they discussed philosophy with their fellows.
The man who came closest to the Greek heroic ideal was Alexander the Great, who was not even a Greek but a Macedonian. Macedonia was a country of hardy mountainfolk so backward that in all of antiquity it did not produce a single philosopher, scientist, thinker, writer or artist whose name is known to history. But the ambitious King Philip II, an ardent admirer of Greek culture, he hired the best tutors to give his gifted son Alexander the benefits of a first-class Greek upbringing. Among others, the illustrious Aristotle was brought to the Macedonian capital of Pella to help mold Alexander’s mind during his teenage years. Philip himself trained the boy in the arts of war.
Alexander thus became a potent blend of Macedonian toughness and Greek intellect liberally seasoned with the overpowering personal ambition he inherited from his father. Alexander was a superb physical specimen, a ferocious and tireless warrior, a man with a kingdom at his command and the dream of world empire in his heart. He was also a lover of Greek culture who carried Homer’s The Iliad with him on his campaigns and kept it under his pillow at night next to his dagger. He was cast in the true mold of the Greek hero, and as we trace his career from its meteoric rise to its tragic end, we find that it mirrors the parabolic course of the Greek civilization from which it sprung….
Read full chapter and earlier chapters at www.rabbireinman.com.
