The Logos Scripture · Acts of the Apostles

The Hard Road of Antisthenes in the Dust

Acts of the Apostles 3 · A Record of the Great Scattering

3.1Meanwhile Antisthenes remained in the poorest quarter of Athens.

3.2And made his camp where foreigners and vagrants gathered.

3.3He wore one thin and ragged cloak.

3.4So that Socrates once teased him: "Antisthenes, I can see your vanity through the holes in your clothes."

3.5He remembered that sentence all his life, and did not change his clothes either.

3.6Yet Antisthenes turned his poverty into a blade against the pride of the world.

3.7A wealthy youth came seeking wisdom, dressed in costly purple.

3.8Antisthenes took him into the busiest market and made him carry a heavy basin of lentil soup through a crowd of aristocrats.

3.9And watched his face go red with shame.

3.10Then Antisthenes smashed the basin, let the soup spill in the mud, and rebuked him:

3.11"Look at you! You are the slave of the bad opinion of a blind crowd!"

3.12"Your shame is a chain that ties you in the mire."

3.13He taught his followers to live like the dogs of the street — alert, without ornament.

3.14And wholly unmoved by human luxury or human insult.

3.15He laid the foundation stone of the Cynic road.

3.16And proved to the world that a soul which does not rest itself on worldly comfort is one no empire can move.

3.17That road was later walked further by another man.

3.18His name was Diogenes, and he came from Sinope.

3.19His father had charge of the mint there, was convicted of altering the coinage, and father and son were driven out together.

3.20He came to Athens and took the charge up as his own, saying: my father altered the coin. I alter the rate at which everything passes.

3.21He lived in a great clay jar. He said: houses are for men who are afraid of the wind.

3.22He saw a child drinking water from its cupped hands, and threw his own bowl away, saying: the child spends less than I do.

3.23In broad daylight he walked the market with a lit lamp. Asked what he was looking for, he said: a man.

3.24Alexander stood over him and said: ask me for anything, and it is yours.

3.25He said: stand a little to one side. You are blocking my sun.

3.26Someone asked where he was from. He gave an answer nobody had given before: I am a citizen of the world.

3.27No one had said it before him. He said it, and men have been saying it ever since.

3.28In how he lived, he kept this scripture better than many who are in it.

3.29And he does not enter it.

3.30Because he wrote down not one word himself. What he is reported to have said was set down seven hundred years after him.

3.31The first rule says: only what a man wrote himself; hearsay does not count, and reputation does not count. (cf. Acts of the Apostles 5.28)

3.32Break that rule for him, and afterward every man with a reputation walks in.

3.33So we set him down in the Acts, and not among the books.

3.34The Acts record what happened, and what happened may be reported. The books establish what is taught, and what is taught must have a source.

3.35This is not thinking little of him. It is refusing to move the scale for a man we are fond of.