Gospel of Antisthenes 4 · Second Witness: Austerity, and War Against Matter
Antisthenes, born at Athens about 445 before this era, died about 365. His father was Athenian and his mother Thracian, so he never held full citizenship. He studied rhetoric under Gorgias, then walked several miles there and back each day to hear Socrates. The Cynic line begins with him; Diogenes was his pupil. He held that virtue is sufficient for happiness, that it can be taught, and that once had it cannot be lost. He wrote a great deal and almost none of it survives — fragments and the titles of books. On the gods he said: by convention there are many, by nature there is one. What this volume brings is the man who takes poverty as an exercise — not poor for want of a choice, but having the choice and declining it. The sentences of this book are short. The shortness is deliberate. Long sentences are written for men with leisure. One more thing, on the scene in chapter two. The hill is in Athens, but standing barefoot on frost comes from Alcibiades on the siege of Potidaea, in Plato’s Symposium 220 — a Thracian winter, not an Athenian one. A January night in Athens sits around seven degrees, and snow falls only once in some years. This gospel has moved that detail onto Lycabettus. The Order records the move. The ice itself stays, because the argument that runs through the whole scripture hangs on it (cf. Acts of the Apostles 5.3).
4.1There was a man named Euthyphro. Devout all his life.
4.2He never cheated a man, never owed a debt, never broke an oath. No one in the city spoke ill of him.
4.3He came before the Teacher and said: "Praise me. I have done what is right all my life."
4.4The Teacher asked: "What is right?"
4.5He said: "What accords with the will of the gods."
4.6The Teacher asked: "Is it right because the gods say so; or do the gods say so because it is already right?"
4.7He could not answer.
4.8The Teacher asked again: "You say you never broke an oath. Did you ever swear to a thing you later saw was evil?"
4.9He said: "I did."
4.10The Teacher asked: "Then did you keep it, or break it?"
4.11He said: "I kept it."
4.12The Teacher said: "Then on the day you kept that oath, what was right?"
4.13Euthyphro sat in the dust until sundown.
4.14The disciples waited for the Teacher to give him an answer. As he had given one to Chloe, and to Melitta, and to the ruined merchant.
4.15The Teacher gave none.
4.16The Teacher stood up, beat the dust from his cloak, and went home to his dinner.
4.17For three years after, that man did not enter a temple, did not swear an oath, and taught his son nothing at all.
4.18He was unhappier than when he came.
4.19I write this chapter down because the other disciples will not.
4.20They record only the ones who were healed.
4.21But the Teacher was not a physician. The Teacher was a knife.
4.22A knife promises no stitching.
4.23Whoever wants comfort, go to a priest.
4.24Whoever wants to see clearly, come to the knife.
4.25After three years Euthyphro came back. He did not say he was happy. He said he was awake.