Arquivo para a ‘Linguagens’ Categoria
Form and act
16
Nov
Information is a strong word at this time in history, however
the concept of form of in-form seems to be separate from the concept of matter, hylé for the Greeks.
Modern philosophy has separated form from content, as well as separating a label from the ingredient in a bottle, but this comes from the reduced understanding of what matter is, the hyle of the Greeks, whose thinking in Aristotelian terminology interconnects them in hylemorphism ( ὕλη, hýle = “matter”; μορφή, morphé = “form”) and in-formation is that.
For this to have an anthropological reach, necessary for the discourse of cultural diversity, it is necessary to link act and potency, as Thomas Aquinas did, where matter is not what we call today (as substance, for example), but what it is as a possibility or in potentiality, written like this by Thomas: “matéria est id quod est in potentia” (matter is what is in potentiality) (THOMÁS, ST I q.3 a.2 c).
Thus the act is the actual existence, or the acting itself, that is, “forma est actus (form is act) (ST I q.50, a.2, obi.3).
Thus, the articulation of the binomials potency x act and matter x form in this way, “matter is nothing but potency, since form is what something is for, as it is the act” (TOMÁS, ScG II, c.43), these categories they give a distinction from fundamental metaphysics, and anthropologically they mean that one thing is the possibility of existing or acting: potency or matter, something else is actually existing or acting: act or form.
Some modern theologies want to separate body and soul, that is, without eschatological and biblical foundation, otherwise the human figure of Jesus would be divided into two: the divine and the human, which would be in opposition and fight against each other, and that is why the Christian anthropology must be strictly unitary, as it is in Thomas Aquinas.
The existence of a body in the human condition is the union between power and act, between matter and form (seen in this new aspect linked to content and essence), without its actual existence (form) the body would not even exist , but only the possibility of existing (potentially) makes it exist in act, this unity is radical, since the necessary condition for its existence is the body. this is fundamental to understand the Christian anthropology written clearly by Thomas: “The human being is not just soul, but something composed of soul and body” (THOMÁS, ST I q. 75 to 4c), if on the one hand all materialism (which is not hylemorphism) denies the existence of the soul, a lot of bad theology seeks to deny the existence of the body, it is the modern dualistic relationship, crystallized in objectivity and subjectivity, in which both are mutilated.
According to Thomas Aquinas, human living bodies and actual existence (form, also called by him the intellective soul) is immortal, unlike other non-human living bodies, whose existence has a beginning and an end, not an eschatological end, but the finalist end of an interruption, for all humans die, and for him death is explained as a temporary deficiency through which we pass into immortal existence and overcome the radical deficiency of the living body through death.
Put more clearly: “That the soul remains after the body, this happens because of a deficiency of the body [per defectum corporis] which is death.
THOMAS AQUINAS. Theological Summa São Paulo: Loyola, 2001-2006. 8 v.
The cry of the afflicted
04
Nov
In many moments of personal difficulties, world conflicts and natural
tragedies, there is always an apparent cry of despair and pain, but our time is a silent cry for those who lose their reason for living, the pandemic has also caused many anguish, loneliness and despair.
The famous pcitura Norwegian Edvard Munch’s The scream represents an androgynous figure in a moment of deep anguish and despair, with the Oslo fjord at sunset in the background, characterizes well what affliction means in our time, in addition to misery and lack of solidarity , the anguish and anxiety of the figure may be the author’s own, the phrase written at the top of the painting: “it could only have been painted by a madman”, analyzed by the Oslo National Museum concluded that it was the author’s.
The aspect of anxiety would remain veiled, were it not for this analysis, since the author stated on one occasion: “I have suffered a deep feeling of anxiety that I have tried to express in my art”, and this reflects our contemporary fears.
GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) is one of the symptoms of this condition, which can also be bipolar or some other type of lack of control, this type was generically called Neurotic Anxiety, but there are two others: Realistic and Moral.
Realistic anxiety refers to the fear of something existing in the outside world, so a pandemic or a natural catastrophe (hurricane, earthquakes, sudden changes in climate, etc.) is basically a kind of fear of something real happening but that puts us in a different adrenaline.
Moral is the one that refers to the feeling of guilt, which triggers a fear of being punished, and this leads to a situation of conflict in the interior, so the person loses sensitive aspects of their interior: the unconscious threatening to enter the conscious what it means in practice a loss of self-control.
But the afflicted are also the helpless, the abandoned and the rejected by society, the various types of prejudices on which current controversies are born.
In the Christian reading, the text of Matthew (5:4) although some translations put as “afflicted”, the translation we prefer here: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted!”, because beyond the aspect of “sickness “there is structural evil and social evil that push many people into this state, and blaming them just means adding to any kind of “affliction” the neurotic anxiety that is born of a disproportionate sense of guilt, and this is the great kind of current social pressure.
But what would be the comfort the bible speaks of, the comfort of those who believe is that the only evil they should fear is the soul, so contrary to what many moralistic interpretations say, it is a balanced morality and without the exaggeration of guilt that it leads to an inner state without this kind of anxiety.
The meekness in times of polarization
02
Nov
Meekness is a fundamental virtue for resolving conflicts,
establishing new spaces for dialogue where it ended and opening new horizons where they seem impossible.
John Calvin has a very noble phrase: “It will be useless to teach meekness unless we have started with humility”, in fact the great reason why some seem right and others unreasonable. on the sides (the opposite of humility) and within these parameters, no dialogue will be possible, or what we prefer, no “new horizon” will be drawn that establishes a future point where conflicting points may enter into a process of convergence.
Polarization is inevitable may be the arguments of some, yes if reaching a certain point of conflict this is valid, but we must know that the actual way out of a conflict will have to have the flag of peace at some point and it cannot be the The flag of submission of the vanquished, the pax Romana, after Rome conquers its territories, it is submission to an authoritarian concept that at a certain point will return to war.
Power is always asymmetrical, this is true, but meekness can lead to it being exercised with modesty and justice.
Polarization is logic may be the argument to justify it, but remember that fuzzy logic, paraconsistent logic and other logics are not binary, yes or no, and that there are never only two sides, this is an idealistic position that it induces duality, there can be multiple sides, so the really fair logic admits a third hypothesis.
These will never be winners and will always be by the wayside may be another thought, as paradoxical as the divine teaching may seem, in many religions, is that meekness and humility lead people to high, one of the biblical beatitudes says (Mt 5, 5): “Blessed are the meek, for they will possess the land” and so where is their power, the conquest through perennial values can only lead to plenitude and perenniality itself, the problem is to yield to values tricky and unfair.
The construction of a perennial reality, a time of peace and justice, as we begin to emerge from a pandemic, is fundamental, even if it seems distant.
The divine environment and the human phenomenon
28
Oct
Chardin’s worldview on the human phenomenon ranges from
cosmogenesis, the origin of the universe and of life to the complexification of nature and the place of man in it, what the pandemic shows is that this complexification grows and even science has limits to deal with it, however, this pandemic can bring new horizons, when it thinking and clarifying it needs science.
Among his various works, Teilhard Chardin makes a singular journey between The divine environment, written between November 1926 and March 1927 and the Human Phenomenon, written between July 1938 and June 1940, which form an “inseparable whole” also says edition I have of Editorial Presença de Lisboa, Portugal.
Singular because it transits from the divine to the human, as the names of the works attest, without slips or ravages, it shows us the “need for the connection between science and religion equally affirmed by Einstein”, an expression by Helmut de Terra, friend and admirer of Chardin. Chardin initiates the divine environment by realizing “the confusion of religious thought in our time” (page 41) and attests that the man of our time “lives with the explicit awareness of being an atom or a citizen of the Universe” (idem).
The timeliness of the text is because the author affirms at the beginning of his book something that has a lot to do with our days, a collective awakening that a beautiful day “makes each individual aware of the true dimensions of life, necessarily provokes in the human mass a profound religious shock, both to slaughter and to exalt ”(ibidem).
This is because the world is too “beautiful: it is to him and only to him that they should worship” (p. 42). What is then the “divine environment”, the world (in our case we explore the universe’s worldviews) will not be more and more fascinating and it would not be and it would be “eclipsing our God” (idem), and there is a connection, in the view of part of Christianity, between God and matter, the Eucharist, she and she alone can create a real sense of reconnecting us to the divine, “this is my body and my blood” said Jesus, and those who eat will have access to eternal life.
Chardin says “the slowly accumulated tension between Humanity and God will reach the limits set by the possibilities of the World, and then it will be the end” (p. 177)… that we must wait not as a catastrophe but as an“ exit ”to the world to which we must collaborate with all our Christian forces without fear of the world, because his enchantments could no longer harm those for whom he became, in addition to himself, the Body of the One who is and the One who comes ”.
Chardin, Teilhard. (no year). O meio edivino: ensaio sobre a vida interior (The divine environment: I teach about the inner life). Lisbon: Editorial Presença.
Man’s place in nature
27
Oct
Edgar Morin we’ve already done some posts here. However, we
want to dialogue with the anthropocentric concept that dominates many studies and increasingly we see that it is a limitation since nature has its own course, and the brutal interference of man can modify and harm this course.
According to Ways (1970) cited in Chisholm (1974) there is a tendency in Western epistemology to objectify nature to see it “from the outside”, and this is responsible for the arrogant and insensitive way of dealing with the natural world, according to the author’s own attitude of separation of man from nature constitutes the basis of the growing human knowledge of nature, being, therefore, an anthropocentric interpretation of the evolution of the natural world.
On the other hand, the complexification of nature in man is undeniable, as an animal that is aware, or in other words aware of its own conscience, which can lead to another extreme, which is the “internalization” where culture and nature are confused , where subjectivism can be a responsible trend for this aspect.
The paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, in his work “The Human Phenomenon”, observes that there is no anatomical or physiological trait that distinguishes man from other higher animals, on the other hand, it has the zoological characteristic that makes it a being apart in the animal world. , is the only one that inhabits the entire planet, another characteristic that comes from its form of consciousness is its organization as consciousness and thought structure, which Teilhard de Chardin calls “noosphere”, a sphere of thought that is also world-wide.
As for man, it remains to be seen, and even science does not know, if it is a mere superficial accident that has happened or if there is an intention in him since the Universe was created, whether Big Bang or not, reflects Teilhard Chardin: “that we should consider it – about to sprout from the smallest fissure anywhere in the Cosmos – and, once it has arisen, unable to waste all the opportunity and all the means to reach the extreme of everything it can reach, outwardly of Complexity, and inwardly of Consciousness” (CHARDIN , 1997).
CHARDIN, T. (1997) Man’s place in nature, trans. Armando Pereira da Silva, Ed. Instituto Piaget, Lisbon.
CHISHOLM, A. (1974) Ecology: a strategy for survival. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.
The plague, the truth and blindness
22
Oct
There comes a time when resigning oneself to the disease and
not setting new paths is also cowardly, says Camus in his chronicle The Plague: “But there comes a time in history when he who dares to say that two and two are four is punishable by death”, as it is “…an idea that might make you laugh, but the only way to fight the plague is honesty”.
Overcoming fear, and for many the pain, “I understood that all the misfortune of men came from not having a clear language. So I decided to speak and act clearly, to put myself on the right path.” This implies not only wisdom and courage, but also overcoming human blindness.
Thus: “From the beginning of history, the scourges of God have placed the proud and the blind at his feet. Meditate on this and fall to your knees”, and in the present case, a tiny virus brings all human wisdom and intelligence to its knees, so that they are not allowed to admit the infinite, the Love and the presence of a mystery in life.
Camus saw this not in a religious way, but in a true way: “The evil that exists in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good will, if not enlightened, can cause as much harm as evil. Men are more good than bad, and that’s not really the point. But they are more or less ignorant, and this is what is called virtue or vice, the most desperate vice being that of ignorance, which thinks it knows everything and is then authorized to kill”, but hatred and war are waged.
The biblical figure of the blind Bartimaeus is very illustrative of human blindness, but this blind man was aware of his limitation, when he knew that Jesus approached him, he shouted for him to have pity on him, the apostles were bothered, but Jesus will ask, he shouted (Mk 10 :48-52): “Son of David, have mercy on me” Then Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.” They called him and said: “Courage, get up, Jesus is calling you!” The blind man threw off his robe, jumped up and went to Jesus. So Jesus asked him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man replied: “Master, let me see! Jesus said, “Go, your faith has made you whole.” Instantly he regained his sight and followed Jesus along the way”.
The awareness of Bartimaeus’ blindness moved him, and the desire for cure bothered him even more, he who thinks he sees and sees everything in the shadows is blinder than Bartimaeus and as an excerpt from the chronicle The Plague says: “they denied, at last, that we had it was that people stunned that every day one share, piled up in the mouth of an oven, evaporated in greasy smoke, while the other, laden with the chains of impotence and fear, awaited its turn”.
Mass culture and its criticism
21
Oct
In Morin’s book “The Mass Culture of the Twentieth Century”,
it is stated that there is a zone “where the distinction between culture and mass culture becomes purely formal: The Human Condition, Nausea or The Plague enters the culture of mass without, however, leaving the cultivated culture” (Morin, 1997, p. 53) and Camus’ book is interesting for its coincidence with the issue of the current Pandemic, and interesting that it did not enter into the analysis of the cultural aspect of the moment.
We have already posted on the blog at another time about Camus’ book “The Myth of Sisyphus” and oher about José Saramago’s novel Essay on blindness (1995), although widely read in some European countries amidst the pandemic, his analysis was not entered the circles of cultural “high narrative”, that we tried to explain in some posts this week.
Written in 1947 by the weak Algerian Alberto Camus, its origin is important, because its chronicle starts from an analysis of an epidemic that occurred in the Algerian city of Oran, in some year of the 1940s, when Camus worked clandestinely in the clandestine newspaper “ Combat!” where he wrote texts engaged against Nazism, among them “Letters to a German Friend” (1945) stand out.
The book deals with the absurdity of existence, when in the midst of an epidemic there is a lack of love and human solidarity, whose feelings can be summarized where he wrote: “There were common feelings, such as separation or fear, but the personal concerns.
No one had yet truly accepted the disease”. Another excerpt that can be highlighted: “Many continued to hope that the epidemic would cease and that they, with their families, would be spared. As a result, they still didn’t feel obligated to do anything.
The plague was nothing more to them than an unpleasant visitor who would one day depart. Frightened but not desperate, the moment had not yet come when the plague would appear to them as the very form of their life and when they would forget the existence they had been able to lead until then.”
With the war just over in the period that he wrote the book, he remembers: “The scourges, in fact, are a common thing, but it’s hard to believe in them when they befall us. There were an equal number of pests and wars in the world. And yet, plagues, like wars, always find people equally unprepared.”
He shrewdly analyzes the scourges in history: “From the beginning of history, the scourges of God have brought the proud and the blind at his feet. Meditate on this and I fell to my knees.” and adds: “Oh, if it were an earthquake! A good shake, and there was no more talk about it… counting the dead, the living, and that was it. But this damn disease! Even those who don’t catch it seem to carry it in their hearts.”, and his conclusion brings a reflection: “The more the pandemic spreads, the more the moral will become elastic.”
I understood that the absence of solidarity and compassion, as well as the elasticity of morality were not unusual facts in epidemics, but somewhat expected, but I would add that there is always a more humane, more solidary alternative that gives us the hope of a much more just after a sad scourge, learn something from it.
Culture and the great crisis
20
Oct
After analyzing the aspects of homogenization and cultural
colonization, Morin will analyze who the average man is and what culture he consumes, he says:
“The language adapted to these anthropos is audiovisual, a language of four instruments: image, musical sound, word, writing. Language is all the more accessible insofar as it is the polytonic involvement of all languages” (page 45) and, therefore, it is not specific to new media that only enhances them, and it involves more an imaginary than “of the game that overflows the fabric of practical life” (idem).
This is because “the borders that separate the imaginary realms are always fluid, unlike those that separate the realms of the earth” (ibidem), so a man can participate in the legends of another civilization than adapt to the life of this civilization, and so Morin prepares to talk about the great crisis or great civilizing night, which Morin calls “great craking”.
As technical quality improves, it mediates artistic quality, says Morin: “they go up in industrialized culture (writing quality of articles, quality of cinematographic images, quality of radio broadcasts), but the irrigation channels relentlessly follow the main lines of the system (page 50).
Morin separates the cultural currents coming from Hollywood into three main currents: the one that “shows the happy end, the happiness, the success; the countercurrent, the one that goes from The death of a Traveling Salesman to No down payment [AC/DC Rock], shows failure, madness, degradation” (p. 51), but there is a third current that he calls ” black”.
This is “the current in which fundamental questions and contestations ferment, which remains outside the culture industry: it can partly usurp, adapt to itself, make publicly consumable certain aspects of, say, Marx, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Freud, Breton , Péret, Artaud, but the condemned part, the antiproton of culture, its randium is left out” (idem).
Morin describes this anti-climax at the beginning of chapter 5 “The great ‘cracking”: “long playing records and radio multiply Bach and Alban Berg. Pocketbooks multiply Mlaraux, Camus, Sartes. The reproductions multiplied Piero dela Francesca, Masaccio, Césanne or Picasso” (p. 53), culture seemed to be democratized by the cheap book, the disc, reproduction, as recommended by Walter Benjamin, but the result was vulgarization, because the “culture cultivated” is neither the mainstream nor the specific in mass culture.
The imaginary leaves the rites, parties and dances and goes to radio, television and cinema, there “those ghost spirits, geniuses who permanently pursued archaic man and reincarnated in his parties” (page 62), now they are “rushed away by printed culture”, mass culture breaks “the unity of archaic culture which, in the same place, all participated at the same time as actors and spectators in the party, rhythm, ceremony” (p. 62), spectator and show are physically separate.
This transformation of a “party man” follows what we call audience, audience and spectators: “the immediate and concrete he becomes a mental tele-participation” (p. 63(, this mass media (now confused with the networks, which is something else), while “reestablishing the human relationship that destroys the printed material”, “it is at the same time a human absence, the physical presence of the spectator is, at the same time, a physical passivity.” (page 63 ).
Mass culture maintains and amplifies a “voyeurism”, more broadly: “a mirror and glass system, movie screens, television videos, glass windows in modern apartments, Plexiglas in Pullman cars, airplane shutters, always some something translucent, transparent or reflective separates us from physical reality” (pages 72-73) and all this was prior to the new media, depositing to them only this great “cracking”, is to ignore the construction (or historical deconstruction) of the imaginary , folklore and festivals, which began even before the last century with printed culture, enlightenment and idealism.
Attempts to reactivate “cultivated” culture are not lacking, as we have already discussed, through the same mass media that vulgarize and destroy the substance of human culture, there is no lack of vivid works by Van Gogh that Akira Kurosawa animated in cinema, of large public events with “ animated video-mapping” by Vang Gogh (made at the Atelie des Lumiéres, in Paris, photo), who presented in 2018 the work of Gustav Klimt, also animated.
The cultural crisis is not just its own work, its root is the thought and development of a mass culture of idealism, of an objectivism that ignores the human.
MORIN, Edgar. (1997) Cultura de massas do século XX. (20th century mass culture). trad. Maura Ribeiro Sardinha. 9ª. edição. Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Ed. Forense.
The night of culture and humanism
19
Oct
Edgar Morin considers contemporary culture something broader
than what is considered and was theorized as mass culture, for him it goes beyond media culture, which is in full decline, despite reactions from the art world in some segments, in general it deals with death, the dark and contempt for symbols, values, myths and images related to everyday life and the collective imagination, but regional, religious and humanist cultures persist in an act of resistance.
The industrial process and the success of performance and productivist values hide what is processed in the spirit, something Morin calls “industrialization of the spirit”, this second colonization is not processed horizontally conquering territories, but vertically penetrating the human soul and obscuring it.
The cultural industry has set in motion a third culture (in addition to classical and natural, I would call original), but there is a human resistance that comes from the original culture of each people and each specific culture, but the idea of colonizing is alive.
The multicultural realities present in mass culture are not autonomous, so the idea is to demolish (or erase) the institutions that can resist this new “colonization”, and resistance can only arise from the cultures of peoples, from their original development of culture and its religions and beliefs.
Although one can criticize the current media culture, social networks are a ties between actors that can be made through them, it does not find a society devoid of culture to be omnipresent, it contains social values and symbols, beliefs and ideologies , and in them the transcendental factors are still impregnated, it is not a separate culture.
In Morin’s view, mass culture integrates and disintegrates at the same time in a polycultural reality, it makes contain, control, censor (also in many cases by the state and by the churches) tending to corrode and disintegrate other cultures.
It is now a cosmopolitan and planetary culture, and it will constitute the first truly universal culture in the history of mankind, while conservative thought considers it plebeian barbarism, left-wing critics consider it an opiate of the people and deliberate mystification , and so the only perspective seems to be the authoritarian one.
In the authoritarian case, the state must control the production and distribution of “cultural goods”, while in the democratic case the large cultural groups must dictate the media controlling the production and distribution of content, here digital media is present.
Both currents agree in the criticism of mass culture, classifying it as a poor cultural product, of low aesthetic quality and without originality (kitsch).
The great solution pointed out by Morin is in the structure of the imaginary: the use of archetypes that order dreams, without the standardization of mythical and romance themes, art is a great reaction in this field, the cultural industry was reduced to archetypes and stereotypes, who outside of these there is no cultural “insertion”, and her prisons are individualized products.
It’s not about accepting diversity, but increasing consumption, just as it did with the pop culture of the 60s, movies, radio or TV shows (now lives and stories) are solely aimed at maximizing profit and audience (likes and fanpages).
In religious terms, syncretism is the most suitable word to translate the tendency to homogenize culture and dictate values and the comicity used to these themes plays the role of destroying its essence and originality, everything is similar or equal.
Children’s cultural content is invaded by themes of adult consumption: they are presented in a simplification that takes them (to adult viewers too) as children.
Even leisure is not just a way of allowing a balance of life, but it is invaded by mass culture, the so-called “resorts”, the beaches and leisure places are invaded by the “cultural industry”, everything within reach, just by an app.
This crisis is neither temporary nor fleeting, a great civilizing crisis may emerge from it, but it is necessary to have hope despite the public blindness.
MORIN, Edgar. (1997) Cultura de massas do século XX. (20th century mass culture). trad. Maura Ribeiro Sardinha. 9ª. edição. Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Ed. Forense.
Act, potency and agape
15
Oct
What Aristotle defined as potency was conditioned to the act, so
the act is a current manifestation, in the example of the figure beside the seed), while potency is what could be (virtually, while virtú) the seed in potency is a tree could its manifestation as being to produce fruits and new seeds, while virtual, in the sense of virtue, is to transform it into a table or even a house.
Actual potential actualization is not just the seed that becomes a tree and bears fruit, the main source of change must be completely real and not only correspond to natural potentiality, but that which completes the rest, and this depended on Aristotle’s The first motor that gave meaning to everything, and that Thomas and Aquinas claims to be God, enters the question of conscience.
Here comes Logos or Pathos, since consciousness is always a dictate of reason and will, so for Thomas Aquinas Ethos depends essentially on human will and consciousness, while Logos leads us to a more primordial reason for Being , Pathos moves towards disordered passions and drives, while Logos should lead us to agape and balance.
Potency is thus characteristic of Being and Pathos its distortion, power seen as Pathos is authoritarian and passionate, while power as Ethos is ethical and agapic, in the sense of service done out of gratuitous love to those they are subordinate, so it can until there is asymmetry, but it will only be diversity and never authority in the sense of absolute power as it is united with the Logos.
It is not by chance that Aristotle was tutor of Alexander the Great, and his form of power spread to the peoples, as well as Plutarch in his text “Alexandre (in Parallel Lives”, 1st century): “After this battle of Issus… Macedonians form to take a liking to the other, silver and women, and the way of life of the Asians, becoming so fond of it that, as if dogs, they set out on the trail in search and pursuit of the opulence of the Persians”, is likely. which also influenced the Romans.
That’s how we reach the second war and the dangers of post-modernity, will we leave our childhood civilization and will one day be able to coexist with peoples with different cultures and cosmogonies, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction: polarization.
It was also no different for Jews and Christians, in the nascent community many wanted to have “power” alongside Jesus, in the reading of Mark (Mk 10:36-37) the apostles James and John make a special request to Jesus: “He he asked, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ They replied, ‘Let us sit one on your right and one on your left, when you are in your glory,’ and the master tells them they don’t know what they’re asking for.
Ai asks if they can drink from the cup that He will drink (referring to their type of death), they keep saying yes, then rebuke them and tell the form of power that exists in civilization (Mark 10: 42-43): “Jesus called them and said: ‘You know that the heads of the nations oppress them and the great ones tyrannize them. But among you, it must not be like that: whoever wants to be great, be your service and whoever wants to be first, be the slave of all”.
So those who govern believers in the same way as the temporal power have not yet understood the potency of the agapic Logos.
