Man alone has the capacity to say “no” to himself
When the tomes of history speak of ancient Greece, it is as the standard-bearer of intellectual and cultural enlightenment in antiquity. But where the historians see light, Chazal saw only the blackest darkness. V’choshech al pnei s’hom, zu Yavan — “choshech,” they tell us, refers to Greece. And the metaphor of darkness appears again when Chazal teach that when Ptolemy compelled the translation of the Torah into Greek, “three days of darkness descended upon the world.”
What happens when the world goes dark for someone? He’s not dead or injured; he’s physically and mentally intact. But the inability to see anything at all renders him immobile, inert, almost lifeless, save for his basic senses of hearing, smell, and touch. Even in his own home, surrounded by everything that’s most familiar and comforting to him, he is a prisoner, chained to his place by invisible shackles. It is a particularly excruciating form of psychic torture, as the Egyptians learned during the three days of Makkas Choshech.
Greek society celebrated the fullness of human self-expression, the seemingly limitless aesthetic, physical, and intellectual potential of the individual. This was humanism at its best. The problem is that just as Communists have little use for the simple folk of the commune, many humanists don’t truly have all that much regard for humans.
True, these self-conceived champions of the human spirit believe deeply in the freedom to self-actualize, to realize one’s potential in every possible way. Yet their conception of humanness is fatally flawed, because it doesn’t account for humanity’s defining feature — a soul. To be ignorant of the soul’s existence is no less tragic than to be introduced to human physiology by a copy of Gray’s Anatomy missing the section devoted to a not inconsequential organ called the heart.
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