Salvation of Man: The Protagorean Restoration

Understanding the revealed gospel according to the measure of all things

You can listen to the audio version of this essay here.

It’s now October and the fall rolls on, and we do too with the third and final stanza of Keats’s “To Autumn”:

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

It’s sad that this poem has to end, and even sadder that autumn does too. The months from September to December are so full of good things—color, weather, food, everything—that it’s always such a disappointment to follow them with the frozen gray of January and February. I’m a person who likes to save the good part of everything for the end: I eat everything on my plate before the steak and even when I get to the steak I eat around the marbling at first, I listen to “Tonight, Tonight” last with all eleven of my Smashing Pumpkins playlists, I never start watching the Saturday evening college football game until my kids are in bed, I always watch the Alien movies in reverse chronological order. That’s just me. So if the structure of the year’s seasons were up to me, if I were calendar-king for a day, I’d go through the natural suckiness of January and February, then do spring with the clear, cold-windy days, then do summer with all the heat and busyness, and then last I would do fall, as the reward for putting up with all of that. But that’s just me; that’s just what I would do.

Today we’re continuing our study of the principle of context for revelation. The principle of context says that revelation is contextual, and the purpose of the current sequence of essays is to flesh out a reasonably complete picture of what that means. We’ve now introduced the principle, done some initial exploring of what is contextual, and have thought about how different “levels” or contextual factors affect revelation.

That’s all been nice, and now the nice stuff is going to continue because we’re now going to begin thinking in more detail about what exactly a context for human beings contains. We’ll look at our linguistic and cultural contexts, our spiritual contexts, our neurological contexts, and others, all to get insight into how our human context has such an impact in determining how we receive revelation and what we get.

To help us get started today with the human context, I’ve enlisted the help of an old, dead friend: the ancient philosopher Protagoras. We’ll see his most famous idea, that people are the “measure” of all things, and we’ll see where it came from and why Plato hated it so badly. And of course we’ll focus on how this idea helps us understand the importance of context in thinking about God’s giving revelation, and our receiving it.

So let’s get started. Spear shall be shaken; shield shall be splintered; it shall be a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!

This is no amateur Tagoras

In discussing Protagoras, it is of course of exceeding importance that we not confuse the man with other important figures from the history of human thought. Those commonly mistaken with him include Brotagoras, the khaki-shorts-and-boat-shoes wearing ethicist from the medieval period (“That’s so funny, bro. Dude, bro, that’s so funny. Dude. But it’s ‘fraternity’, not ‘frat’, man”); Costeautagoras, the political theorist from Atlantis; Doughtagoras, the ginger bread man; Thoreautagoras, the men’s rights activist who lives in that weird cabin in the woods behind the Dollar Tree on Market Ave.; Eautagoras, the adjunct instructor at a Florida State satellite campus who slathers every inch of his skinny frame in Axe body spray because he can’t afford to shower all the time; Foregotagoras, the one no one reads; Althoughtagoras, the adversative one; and Skyrizitagoras, the rep from the pharmaceutical industry. So to be clear, I am *not* talking about any of those guys.

The Protagoras I am talking about is an ancient philosopher who belonged to the group of thinkers we refer to as “sophists.” The Greek root of the word “sophist” is σοφία, sophia, so a “sophist” is really just a wise person. But by the time of Protagoras the word had acquired a negative connotation because the sophists were traveling teachers that many people thought were basically out there teaching their students to deceive everyone and trick people with fancy arguments. It was like if Jacob Wohl started an online course called “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” That’s how a lot of people saw the sophists.

Protagoras gets lumped in with this group of people, and in fact Plato tells us that Protagoras took upon himself the title “sophist,” though in the positive sense of being a “wise person” or “sage.” He was born around 490 BCE in Thrace, a region of Greece, and lived until he was around 70. He visited Athens twice that we know of and the visits were sort of a big deal so he must have had a reputation even during his lifetime. Plato wrote a whole dialogue called Protagoras, and it’s about virtue and whether you can teach it. He also discusses Protagoras’s views a lot in another dialogue, the Theaetetus, which is about knowledge. We’ll get back to the Theaetetus later.

Protagoras’s crucial idea: man the measure

Protagoras is like many philosophers before Plato in that we now know their work only in fragments, or quotations made from their writings by other authors. We do know that he wrote a book called Truth, and out of all the ancient works of philosophy and science that were lost to history, his Truth is one of the ones I most wish we still had access to.

Fortunately for us, it seems that we do actually know the very first line of that work, and that line gives us the crucial idea we want to look at today. Here it is—it was quoted by many different ancient authors, but this version comes from Sextus Empiricus, a Roman philosopher, in his book Against the Logicians:

Of all things the measure is man: of those that are, that they are; and of those that are not, that they are not.¹

That’s it. Sometimes people will give it as “Man is the measure of all things,” and that’s the basic idea. It’s simple but there are a lot of goodies here, so let’s see if we can get a grasp on what it means.