The Logos Scripture · Gospel of Antisthenes
Gospel of Antisthenes 5 · 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).