Lord Ares is a God in Human Shape.
His Human Shape is the shape of a Human Male -- a Man.
That Manly Shape includes his external genitalia -- his Penis and Testicles.
And his broad shoulders and thick, muscular chest, his beefy delts, lats, traps, and meaty levators and rhomboids, his massive quads and hams, his powerful arms and legs.
And that's not an accident.
His Manliness is crucial to his Divinity, for He is the hypostatization of Fighting Manhood.
Fighting, which confers Manliness.
Lord Ares' areté, his excellence, is the uniquely Male, Manly Excellence known to us as Manliness, which is Fighting Manhood :
That's Liddell and Scott's definition ; and, Liddell and Scott add,
From the same root [ARES] come areté, ari-, areion [better -- stronger, braver, more Manly], aristos [best -- strongest, bravest, most Manly], the first notion of goodness being that of manhood, bravery in war; cf. Lat. virtus.
Again, that's Liddell and Scott's definition, which is, appropriately, excellent.
In the Alliance and Ares is Lord we define Areté / Areta as Manly Excellence, which is Manliness, which is Manhood, which is Manly Goodness, which is Manly Virtue, which is Manly Spirit, which is Fighting Manhood.
Werner Jaeger : Areté / Areta -- The uniquely Male, Manly Excellence known to us as Fighting Manhood -- exists in mortal man. Areté is mortal man. But it survives the mortal and lives on in his glory, in that very ideal of his areté which accompanied and directed him throughout his life.
Robert Barron, writing in The Wall Street Journal, 7 April 2023 :
Basic to the ascendant anthropology of the West's cultural institutions is the characteristically Gnostic view of self in relation to body. Instead of recognizing the givenness of the body as an inescapable ingredient in one's identity, we increasingly conceive of it as subordinate to the true self and hence endlessly malleable, subject to the dictates of the "real me."
Thus, though a person is in fact gendered all the way down, even to the level of the chromosomes, he imagines he can escape from his physicality through wishful thinking or surgical intervention, "becoming" a woman, despite the
irreducible maleness of his body. Instead of being an essential aspect of the true self, the body simply serves the true self and assumes a subordinate role. Accepting this dualist understanding establishes within the heart of one's personality a tension that continually generates anguish and frustration.
~Our Bodies, Ourselves, and Our Lord, by Robert Barron.
Bishop Barron leads the Roman Catholic Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minn., and is founder of the ministerial organization Word on Fire.
That brief article from Bishop Barron elicited two letters in response :
FIRST LETTER :
Chromosome Isn't Everything
April 20, 2023
In "Our Bodies, Ourselves and Our Lord" (Houses of Worship, April 7),
Catholic Bishop Robert Barron makes clear that the Catholic Church has
always rejected the idea that you can have a "real self" that is not
manifested by your physical body. On that basis, he goes on to
forcefully assert that a set of XY chromosomes makes one irrevocably
male, end of story.
I assume, however, that Bishop Barron participates in a ritual during
which bread and wine, without any change in their atoms, become
literally transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. That
seems like a heavier lift than accepting someone as female who has XY
chromosomes.
Herb Berkowitz
SECOND LETTER :
April 24, 2023
The Philosophy of the Serpent
Herb Berkowitz ("Chromosome Isn't Everything," Letters, April 20)
seems to believe that each of us has the power to accomplish what only
God can do. Faithful Christians have believed for centuries that the
transformation of bread and wine into Christ's body and blood is
accomplished by the powerful word of God. Mr. Berkowitz accurately
demonstrates the current thinking that human opinions or thoughts have
similar power to change the reality of science and creation. That says
a lot about how we view ourselves and how far we have fallen.
James Burhop
Bill Weintraub :
Right.
Peggy Noonan:
In the Garden of Eden story, Adam and Eve and the fall, at the
beginning of the world -- God told them not to eat the fruit of the
tree, but the serpent told Eve no harm would come if she did, that
she'd become like God, knowing all. That's why he doesn't want you to
have it, the serpent said: You'll be his equal. So she took the fruit
and ate, she gave to Adam who also ate, and the eyes of both were
opened, and for the first time they knew shame. When God rebuked them,
Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. They were banished from
the garden into the broken world we inhabit.
You can experience the Old Testament story as myth, literature,
truth-poem or literal truth, but however you understand it its meaning
is clear. It is about human pride and ambition.
Bill Weintraub :
Right.
So :
I worship Lord Ares, who confers upon Men, Manhood and Manliness through Fight.
Do I know for a fact that Lord Ares exists ?
No.
But I think it's probable that He does.
And I get the idea of "probable" from Cicero.
Cicero (106 - 43 BC) was a statesman and a lawyer, the head of the Roman Bar and a staunch supporter of the Roman Republic -- and a moderate, un-dogmatic, man.
As a lawyer, he was used to weighing evidence, and for that reason he was agnostic on many issues, saying simply that we cannot know for sure.
But he also spoke in terms of probabilities, of what was not just possible, but probable -- he thought that we as Men could legitimately do that -- and that it was probable therefore that there was a guiding or controlling mind which had created and continued to uphold the cosmos.
That, in Cicero's lifetime, was the Stoic point of view, and it differed sharply from that of the Epicureans, who maintained that the universe was the result of a series of accidents, the fortuitous collision of innumberable fortuitous atoms, and that there was no mind in back of those atoms.
That made no sense to Cicero -- and it doesn't to me either.
It seems to me that the universe -- and the world -- and human beings -- and esp Men -- are not
the result of a series of accidents, but the work of a Controlling
Mind, eager and able to achieve a Good Purpose, Object, Outcome.
In this case, Manliness, and Manhood, Fighting Manhood.
Which I experience as Good, Divine -- Blessed.
Aggression and the Beauty of Guys who Assert that Aggression.
Lord Ares is the Divine Being who wants and enables you to experience
that Beauty --
The Irreducible Goodness, the Irreducible Aggressive Male Beauty -- of Fighting Men.
And if the assertion of Man-Against-Man Aggression is Good, if follows that there have to be Fight Schools, Wrestling Schools, Palaistrai -- to teach Men how to Aggress -- and that activating the Fight School there has to be a Controlling Mind :
Cicero :
When a man goes into a house, a wrestling-school or a public assembly and observes in all that goes on arrangement, regularity and system, he cannot possibly suppose that these things come about without a cause: he realizes that there is someone who presides and controls.
. . .
Again, if you see a spacious and beautiful house, you could not be induced to believe, even though you could not see its master, that it was built by mice and weasels; if then you were to imagine that this elaborate universe, with all the variety and beauty of the heavenly bodies and the vast quantity and extent of sea and land, were your abode and not that of the Gods, would you not be thought absolutely insane?
There's also an aesthetic issue.
Cicero speaks of a spacious and beautiful house, designed by someone who presides and controls.
The Male Body, which houses the Man's Fighting Spirit, was designed to be essentially flat and angular --
with genitalia protruding --
often exuberantly.
Alain Danielou on the Phallus as Sacred :
It is only when the penis stands up straight that it emits semen, the source of life. It is then called the phallus, and has been considered, since earliest prehistory, the image of the creative principle, a symbol of the process by which the Supreme Being procreates the Universe.
This is not the case of a symbol plucked at random but the recognition of the continuity of the process that links all the various levels of manifestation, according to cosmological theory. The phallus is really the image of the creator in mankind, and we rediscover the worship of it at the origin of every religion.
A source of pleasure, the phallus evokes divine bliss, the Being of Joy. Within the microcosm of the living being it represents the progenitor, which is always present in its work.
Contempt for this sacred emblem, as well as degradation and debasement of it, pushes man from the divine reality. It provokes the anger of the Gods and leads to the decline of the species. The man who scorns the very symbol of the life principle abandons his kind to the powers of death.
~ Danielou, Alain. The Phallus: Sacred Symbol of Male Creative Power. (1995). Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions.
You can see that the body is male -- irreducibly male.
At the same time, you can see that the transsexual contempt for the male body, including the phallus, has led to degradation and debasement.
I once received an email from a male-to-female trans who said that he thought of his penis as a deformed vagina, and his testicles as deformed and descended ovaries.
They aren't.
A penis and testicles on the body of a person who thinks of himself as a woman -- are still a penis and testicles.
The male is irreducibly male.
And, as I said, there's an aesthetic question, or, really, a question of ethical nihilism, a belief system which
questions all standards of morality and aesthetics, and confuses justice and injustice, beauty and ugliness.
And, as I also said, this beautiful Male body houses the Man's beautiful Fighting Spirit.
Neither the Male's body nor his Fighting Spirit are ugly.
Both -- are Beautiful.
5 May 2023
© All material Copyright 1997 - 2023 by Bill Weintraub.
IRREDUCIBLE
MALENESS
OF HIS BODY
This is a so-called transsexual, a "trans" :
IRREDUCIBLE
MALENESS
OF HIS BODY
Bill Weintraub
All rights reserved.