When George Soros Tried To Cancel Pythagoras
By Carlos Perona Calvete, European Conservative. (Image: Bust of Pythagoras in Villa Borghese, Wikimedia Commons)
The founder of Western philosophy was persecuted by the oligarchy-sponsored anti-family egalitarian atheism of his day.
Soon after the Greek philosopher Pythagoras crossed the Adriatic Sea from his native island of Samos, arriving at the Italian city of Crotona, it is said that he was hounded by local youngsters.
They had heard from the sailors on whose ship the foreigner had travelled that he could perform marvels such as none had seen before.
He at first told them that these miraculous things were performed through him, but were not from him and that they should rather be ascribed to ‘The One’ (τὸ Ἕν), the worship of which single, transcendent Deity was to be the whole focus of Pythagoreanism.
From curiosity over supernatural phenomena, the youngsters now turned to curiosity over philosophy, asking that he teach them about his mysterious God.
The philosopher’s response, however, was disappointing to the more raucous among the Crotonan youth: “If you wish to know God, worship Him; and if you wish to worship Him, do good works.”
“What good works should we do?” His interlocutors pressed.
“Works such as might honour your fathers and mothers and be a credit to your families,” he answered.
Seeing how brashly they spoke to a stranger—indeed, one very much their senior, for Pythagoras was around 40 years old when he came to Italy—the Greek thought it best to first teach them filial piety and so recommended that they go attend to their household duties and their parents.
But there was actually a subtle lesson here, as Iamblichus relates in his biography of Pythagoras, for the priority which a parent has over a child in time—in terms of the order in which the one comes into the world, serving as the instrument for the other to do so—is an analogy, a metaphor, for the priority which God has over all things. The structure of reality, including biological reproduction and temporality, reveals things about God’s character.
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