Beautiful Therefore Good

It seems not to be widely enough known that every essential position of Christianity was first discovered and conquered by the thinkers of Greece: dualism, the immortality of the soul, the alleged superiority of the soul over body, and the soul’s supposed independence of the body…

In a culture which, in spite of much unhealthy speculation about the two fold aspects of man, in spite of universal homosexuality, feminism and general disintegration, was still healthy enough to value man as a whole, and unable to separate beautiful looks from a beautiful character—he who was kalos was necessarily agathos, hence the expression kalos k’ agathos: beautiful, therefore good—there appeared a man who, besides being endowed with little of the current health, besides being steeped in the most morbid elements of Greek life and though “he had been the male prostitute of Archelus, wherein he did not differ much from his contemporaries, possessed two qualifications which eminently fitted him to popularize the four positions described above. 

He was of low origin and he was the most repulsive man of his age. This man was Socrates. In a beautiful city of beauty-worshippers he therefore found himself at a terrible disadvantage. Judged by the healthiest values of his age, he was bound to stand at the very bottom of the scale. Unfortunately for mankind, he had a very shrewd mind. He would have made a first-class journalist, an ideal writer of best-sellers. And he determined to get himself across—i.e. to create values by which he himself and his type could be regarded as desirable. 

How could he do this? Only by trans-valuing existing values, by assuring the Greeks that there was no essential connection between a man’s visible and invisible aspects. 

And this he proceeded to do. It was the old hoax of the fox that had lost its tail. But he got away with it. True, he succeeded only with a dolt like Xenophon and a middle-class liberal like Plato, but he did succeed. And although the best of his contemporaries condemned him to death for it, his two apprentices unfortunately survived him and constituted the channel through which we became contaminated with this monster’s unscrupulous bluff to save his self esteem…

He admitted at his trial that he had spent his whole life teaching men to prize the soul above the body…the logical consequence of this attitude was of course to make Socrates no longer despicable. But it had other consequences which Socrates did not fail to see. It made bodily defects respectable. It made disease almost a distinction. And, indeed, Socrates said as much. He declared to Glaucon: “if there be any merely bodily defect in another, we will be patient of it and love the same.” These notes were later taken up by Christianity and sustained in all octaves until the whole of Europe rang with them. And it is more or less true to say that Christianity is merely Platonism for the mob.

-excerpted from The Lost Philosopher: The Best Oof Anthony M. Ludovici (2003) John V. Day