No one who believes in gods according to the laws has ever voluntarily done an impious deed or let slip an illegal utterance unless he is suffering one of three things: either…he doesn't believe; or, second, he believes they exist but do not think about human beings; or, third, he believes they exist but do not think about human beings; or, third, he believes they are easily persuaded if they are brought sacrifices and prayers.
--Plato, The Laws, X, 885b (Bloom)
Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not from the world." Pilate said to him, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice." Pilate said to him, "What is truth?"
--John, 18:36-38 (RSV)
On May 13, 1964, while discussing a story, "The New Shadow," which he was never to finish, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote to Colin Bailey that he found the story's subject matter "both sinister and depressing." Tolkien's reason for this mood is of some interest, I think, in our topic of the state and the sacred. "Since we are dealing with Men," he explained, "it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their natures: their quick satiety with good." Wars and rumors of war, earthquakes and floods, as we know, make much better copy, to give even lives that lack theoretic purpose a kind of meaningfulness. Indeed, as some of the existentialists have proposed, "action" for its own sake, for whatever goal, is the one thing we can do to give our lives the impression, at least, of design in a cosmos, so they hold, without order or finality.
As a kind of odd illustration of this point, I have somewhere a wonderful cartoon from an old New Yorker, which depicts three cool devils at a Manhattan street corner, long tails and all, enthusiastically playing jazz on a sax, a bass, and a trumpet. Opposite them, slightly around the corner, in the same evident business, but looking on gloomily, were three Salvation Army Band members, with a drum, a tuba, and a coronet. The band members were particularly dismayed since the onlookers, consisting of four rather seedy, but wickedly grinning middle-aged males, hands in overcoat pockets, were watching and listening to the devils, not them. The
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