On giving blood

I donated blood last week. It’s something that I’ve done quite a few times; I always make an effort to make it work every 70 days or whatever the eligibility period is. The reason is, I think, that I find giving blood a curiously profound experience. Why? I think it’s because it strikes me as an oddly Christian thing to do.

On Plato on teachers of virtue

I recently had a fascinating class in my Plato course. The professor was lecturing on the Meno, wherein Socrates and Meno discuss the definition and nature of virtue. Meno wants to know whether virtue can be taught. and thus whether it is justifiable to pay teachers (the Sophists) in order to become virtuous. After expressing some reservation, Socrates reasons his way to the conclusion that virtue is essentially knowledge, and thus can in fact be taught. But then he raises a counterobjection. Socrates notes that if virtue is such a thing that can be taught, then there should be teachers and learners of it. But, he says, he has been inquiring of people for some time, and has not found anyone who has knowledge, but only many who think they do.

At this point, my professor asked us what we thought of this argument. He has a habit of doing this intermittently, which is good. I often find it all too easy to just go along with the flow of a writer’s arguments, forgetting to examine them. Upon a little collective reflection, we realized that virtue being teachable implies nothing about whether there actually are any teachers. It is possible that Socrates simply hadn’t met any yet. Or perhaps virtue is such a thing that, while it is teachable, there just haven’t yet been any who have taught it. After all, not everything that is teachable needs to be taught in order to be learned. If that was the case, then how would we as a species have ever learned anything? Take the example of calculus. It is clearly teachable, but the first man to articulate it (Newton or Leibniz, take your pick) did not receive teaching from anyone, but rather discovered it on their own. They were self-taught. Perhaps virtue could be similar. It could be teachable, but it could also be the case that (as of Socrates’ time) there had been no one who had discovered virtue enough to teach it.

And this is where a thought struck me. I think something like this last solution is in fact very close to what actually was the case. Socrates (and Plato) lived around the fifth and fourth centuries BC, and I would contend that they were only those four centuries short of seeing the true Teacher of virtue, who was born hundreds of years but only hundreds of miles away. In a stable in a little town was born a child who became a Jewish rabbi—a Teacher. He was also to be the ultimate Human, the Perfect Man, the Archetype for the rest of us—Jesus Christ, fully human and fully God. Since our first father Adam sinned and fell, Jesus came as the second Adam to show us the true right way to live. Understood this way, Jesus is the perfect moral exemplar, and thus the ultimate teacher of virtue. More, given that he is God, he is also Virtue (Goodness) itself.

It is said that Christ descended into Hell after his crucifixion to preach to the souls of the damned, and ransack Hell itself. It may be that Socrates and Plato thus finally got a chance to meet their perfect teacher of virtue. I hope so.