Do not Fear Death, because Perfect Love Casts out Fear

Posted on May 26, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

Death is the last act of life that occurs in an instant in time, yet it opens to eternity. Hence the moment and the eternal are combined at once in death. Death is a time when our perceptions of life are focused upon what is important–life, love–so death helps bring life into perspective. Death is closely associated with love and life because of the perspective it brings. Death, like love, is eternal. Without death, without confronting our end, we would have less perspective on the importance of life. Confronting death makes one aware of the end of corporeal existence and all that is connected with it. Health may mean happiness in our day-to-day affairs on earth, but ill health, like death, reminds us of our mortality and forces the mind to awareness.

Death is the great leveler. It is a reminder of the silliness of reputation and status. Death is a time when the great truths are discovered because of our heightened awareness. Strange that mortality can help us discover what is immortal. As the act of love, the experience of the body, leads us to a sense of unity with another, of one rather than two, which is the essence of that universal phenomenon, love, so death is an explosive experience, a bodily occurrence that is a singular act but leads to a perception of life, life that transcends just us, life as a force that transcends the ages. Death, it seems, at the moment life ends, is the time of the greatest apprehension of what life is. A momentary awareness of truth occurs then is gone. Before death, when perceiving or expecting it, awareness grows, and it would seem insights into the act of death.

Death is bitter and painful, the last bodily suffering, the last consciously experienced molding of the clay by God. Death is fearful, it is inevitable. And it is uncertain: when, how, why, what, and what happens after, if there is an after. What if there is nonexistence? Is it perhaps narcissistic to assume that a person will exist after death? But then again, what about love? Nonexistence means the end of love. It means that the quest for unity is over, that unity is never attained, unless it is unity with the universe by turning back to dust. But love? to end? Love is knowledge, to end? There must be a truth in human existence, something that goes beyond time and place, which is love. Love is the basis for life. How can the creation of another human be merely material and physical? The fact that we love, which is transcendent, means that there is love both in life and death.

Love is a thirst to end loneliness, to be united with another person. Nonexistence is loneliness, it is dark, cold loneliness. One won’t know, but it is still loneliness, or it is perceived as such. Nonexistence is the exact opposite of life, because life is the thirsting and the search for unity, and love is the basis for unity.

Nonexistence is dissolution and dismemberment, it is sinking back into nothingness, dissolving into dust, scattering into chaos. Existence, rather, is the constant movement forward, it is completedness, wholeness, unity.

Love, faith, hope: all are connected. God’s love is something we feel. Love is unity, God is love, God loves us, life will not end with death, for God, the source of unity, will draw us to Him. This is felt not known. This feeling of love is the basis for faith and hope.

Life is a journey between two poles of unknowns, yet what connects these poles, what directs life, is God—or Love. God is inscrutable, but where do we come from? Who creates us? God, and why? God loves, so he creates, He extends outward, He is the unity from which the parts come and to which they will go. Death is the return, not the end. Death is the call from God to the completion of the journey. It is a call of Love, to return to the ultimate Lover. Hence, Love: what about faith and hope? Like love, how one lives his life and what he believes depends upon how he feels. With faith and hope we have a trust in the future, a trust based upon our feelings of love and God’s promise of Love. We hope for something to be fulfilled in the future, something we expect to happen, but since it is of the future, it is not completely certain. Yet the hope is rested upon God’s love, and upon our own awareness too. If I didn’t feel love as the principle of existence I would not be able to have hope in unity with the ultimate unity. Faith is faith in God’s promise but also faith in oneself and what one feels to be true. Love is love of God but also confidence in the feeling of Love one has, and an awareness that comes from oneself of what love is, an introspective feeling. This awareness of knowledge of oneself is love of oneself.

Why fear death then if death is fulfillment? For Love is the whole key to human existence, to all the other universals in peace, harmony, hope, to conquering fear and conquering death.

Love is universal, but our modern age has corrupted it.

Our existence is predicated upon our lives—our bodies, our earthly experiences, our families and friends, our earthly loves. It is all we know, it is the focus even of our love, as well as our hope and faith. But death dissolves this anchor of existence. Even if we don’t fear nonexistence, we face the end of all we know to be existence. We have faith and hope in a further existence, but we cannot be certain of this further existence. So even if there is no fear of nonexistence, there is the apprehension of having all one knows become what one doesn’t know–hence the need for faith and hope. But here love is important too, for if God is love and we are called to this unity, then we know of love too, and perhaps can sense or feel that this love isn’t transient. Here love is a guide, the faint glimmer in our ignorance, to help us in death.

If death is the door of love to God then why not experience it? If it is a time of love and pathos with family, where a certain beauty exists, which is love, then why not experience it?

Further, the fear of death is usually tied to images of real experiences of seeing others die, or images of the imagination thinking of oneself dying. But it can be countered by the images of Love, based on the experiences of love in life as well as the imaginary future possibilities of love in death.

The Apostle John knew about all that I write above, as he expressed in his Gospel, and in his three Letters, especially the first of which, in which he declared emphatically:

1. God is Love.

2. There is no fear in Love, because perfect love casts out fear.

3. There is no fear in death, because death is the reunification with Love itself.

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The Writings of Francesco Petrarca, “Petrarch”

Posted on April 14, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

           Reading the Roman historian Livy’s account of Philip V of Macedon’s ascent of a peak in the Hebrus Mountains inspired in the Italian Francesco Petrarca, Petrarch, the desire to attempt the ascent of a similar summit. Petrarch recorded the adventures of the ascent in a letter to his confessor Father Dionigi in 1336. Petrarch professed to write the letter later in the day of the journey. Some scholars doubt that the ascent was ever made; others believe that the letter was written years later. Indeed, the letter betrays a sense of retrospection, of thought in focus on one moment of existence.

The ascent of the mountain was long and tiresome; Petrarch took the long way, less steep, but just as fatiguing as the short, craggy way, which his companion, his brother Gherardo, took. Gherardo got to the summit long before Petrarch, whose path was long and winding; he frequently descended on errant paths. When he reached the peak he was exhausted. So like his climb, he wrote, is the pursuit of truth. The sublime view from the top of the surrounding landscape, the Adriatic and the distant Mediterranean, yielded contemplation. Petrarch thought about his past, his unfulfilled spiritual goals. As he looked upon the Alps he thought about great events of the past: the spectacular, such as the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s march on Rome, and the mundane, such as St. Augustine’s introspective “review” of his “past deeds.” The awesome view of God’s creation lost its hold as Petrarch struggled with doubt and confusion respecting the path he had chosen and the spiritual summit that he had failed to reach. Petrarch had brought with him a pocket copy of Augustine’s Confessions, from which he read the first passage upon which his eyes fell: “men go to admire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean, and the revolutions of the stars—and desert themselves.” Stunned, Petrarch descended the mountain in silence, reflecting on “the courses of my life.” Henceforth Petrarch’s path led within, to himself.

            Even in the simple ascent of a mountain, a personal confrontation with nature, Petrarch engaged in a dialogue with the human past, with Augustine, and with himself. We see in this reflective dialogue a resemblance to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations; but over a millennium separated Aurelius’ life and experience from Petrarch’s. Over the course of these centuries, a vast distance not only of time but of culture and thought emerged, separating the world of Dante and Petrarch from the world of Marcus Aurelius and Cicero. Because of changes in society and culture and changes in his own life, Petrarch was able to see the distinction of the present from the past. But more, Petrarch was able to do what Marcus Aurelius had never done, nor had subsequent thinkers of the European Middle Ages: Petrarch came to empathize with these distant humans of the past, to see them as like—and unlike—himself. “Medieval scholars tended to miss the individuality of the writer,” says Donald Wilcox, “and they studied ancient works only as authoritative guides to general truth. By contrast, Petrarch and his successors considered the ancients to be wise but also human and limited; the classics contained much wisdom, but the insights were those of particular men with personal weaknesses and limitations growing out of their historical situation.”

            Petrarch gained this historical perspective through his intellectual interaction with past thinkers, such as Cicero and Augustine. Finding and reading the lost letters of Cicero to his friend Atticus, Petrarch discovered to his astonishment the letters revealed a different Cicero than the infallible statesman and stoic of the Medieval imagination. Disappointed, Petrarch wrote letters to the long-dead Roman. “I searched long and avidly for your letters,” Petrarch moaned in one letter to Cicero, “and having found them where I least thought to, avidly read them. I heard you, Marcus Tullius, saying much, complaining of much, in various moods. I already knew what a teacher you were for others; now at last I learned that you did not know how to guide yourself.” Petrarch, having once conceived of Cicero in abstract terms, came to see him as an actual man of the past, different yet similar, with a character both good and bad. In his essay, On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others, Petrarch challenged the traditional devotion to Aristotelian thinking, writing: “Aristotle was a human and could well be ignorant of some things, even of a great many things.”

            Petrarch was a superb writer of epistles, whether to friends or to individuals of the past; his most unique epistle was to posterity—to all future humans notwithstanding their birth, status, or heritage. The Letter to Posterity is autobiographical and confessional in nature, as are many of Petrarch’s works. What to us must have been an exciting time to live—fourteenth-century Italy—was to Petrarch a time of suffering and disillusionment, a time to think about the greatness of the past. “I should have preferred to have been born in any other period than our own,” he wrote. “In order to forget my own time, I have constantly striven to place myself in spirit in other ages.” The vicarious experience of the past was Petrarch’s path to contentment in the present.

            Petrarch’s search for happiness by means of the dialogue with the past reached a level of superb literary achievement with the publication of The Secret, or the Soul’s Conflict with Passion, written in 1342. The Secret is, significantly, an imaginary dialogue between Petrarch and St. Augustine, the latter assuming the guise of spiritual mentor, even conscience, Petrarch appearing as the typical vain and ignorant (universal) human. Petrarch’s skill was to bring the reader into the dialogue, so that it seems indeed as if two men are discussing life and the search for truth. Petrarch repeatedly confesses his vanity and sin only to get caught in ever new attempts of self-praise. The recognition of ignorance counters the proclamation of knowledge. The weight of the body hinders the flight of the soul. Self-deception is rampant throughout the dialogue—and throughout life itself.

            Modern historians argue that Petrarch’s time was crucial for the development of Renaissance humanism, namely because of the emergence of teachers, orators, and historians who dedicated themselves to the studia humanitatis, the study of humans and human expression. In part a reaction to the perceived inflexibility of Medieval thought; in part concerned with the importance of eloquence as a vehicle for personal and human truth; in part a patriotic, republican response to the new dynamism of Italian city-states; the activities of Renaissance humanists were cemented together by Petrarch’s new historical perspective. It is no accident that the humanist Lorenzo Valla was not only a philosopher but a philologist and historian who proved the fourth-century Donation of Constantine to be a forgery. Machiavelli not only wrote the most sophisticated political philosophy of his day but also side-splitting comic plays and The Discourses on the ancient historian Livy. Besides being one of the best biblical scholars of the Renaissance, Desiderius Erasmus wrote satire, the Praise of Folly, steeped in the history and legend of antiquity. Petrarch and his contemporaries surpassed the thinking of Socrates, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius by basing their philosophy of history on a personal sense of historical change. Classical antiquity became less a source of abstract truth—a distant, unobtainable mirage—and more a looking-glass into which Renaissance thinkers saw themselves. During the Renaissance “history,” in the words of Donald Kelley, became “the centerpiece of the humanist world view.”

            Yet Petrarch’s life reveals as well that the Renaissance dialogue with the past was by no means secular. The humanists of the early modern world were Christians. Cicero and Socrates were important, but not so important as Christ. The exploration of and interaction with the past was always within the confines of a broader truth rarely glimpsed in time.

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Of Love and Empathy

Posted on March 26, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

What is love, and is it related to empathy? Can a person feel empathy if they do not feel love? Can I love a person if I do not empathize with them?

Great philosophers have written great books about such issues. One of the most famous if Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, in which he wrote that each human “carries within himself all of humanity,” that “there is nothing in another person which we cannot feel as part of ourselves,” that “I experience in myself that which is experienced by the other person and hence that in the experience he and I are one,” that “knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race, or culture and penetrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human.” Knowledge of another requires knowledge of self. Love of another requires love of self.

Is it possible to know what someone is feeling, to feel them in yourself, to empathize to where you know them, they no longer hold mysteries, that you know them in a feeling way, not mentally or consciously but you know them in a way best to know them? To know someone in such a way is to feel at one with them, to feel so natural with them, touching—their warmth becomes your warmth, their heartbeat merges with yours, and even if yours and their thoughts do not merge bodily, by means of an act in the immediate moment, you know this human being in a way you do not know those whom you have not touched. The touch does not have to be physical, however. Feelings can be touched, expressed, in other ways, by words, by a look in the eye, something that is shared, that relaxes, that opens up defenses, that makes a person vulnerable.

What does a person learn in such a situation? Ideas, thoughts, feelings that are not objective and identifiable, that deal more with humanity than with personality and behavior, that are not readily perceivable by the mind, nor readily put into images for analysis and expression—thoughts, feelings, and ideas of warmth, love, appreciation, commonality, that make us one, human.

The way to love a human, to empathize and know him or her, is to form this connecting link, to build this sharing; to open yourself to allow them to enter, and perhaps a mutual reciprocation occurs.

Is such love, empathy, a learned phenomenon, or innate?

Scholars, psychologists—such as Leo Buscalia—argue that love is learned, a product of the environment and culture. Such was Freud’s argument as well. I disagree. To me, love is innate; although degrees of love are learned over time, love itself is present in every human being from the moment of birth, and at the moment of death. Part of this belief comes from my notion that humans are created by an act of love, via the parents, via God. From the moment of birth, throughout our lives, we are a part, searching for completion. This search, which is innate, is the basis of love. All humans feel it, many try to ignore it. The striving for unity tugs at us, for we are alone, inherently, and desire unification–or reunification. Love is not of the moment, though we express it in the moment. Love transcends time, and this is evidence of its eternity and inclusiveness. It is experienced in the womb, and once exiting the womb, the desire for reunification drives us; we were once two, then become one, but wish to experience that oneness of the womb, hence we seek throughout our lives unification with others.

Love means life. Love means existence. Love is a source of truth, of unity, which necessitates life, experiences. Death might bring truth as well, but this we do not know. What we do know is that life brings some openings into truth, so to deny life is to deny this possibility of finding truth. Living life means to experience life. How can I love myself, or other humans, if I do not know, or try to know, them? Experiencing life to its fullest helps teach one about self and humans in general. Such knowledge helps me know, to love, me and others. Such statements assume that love for others is based on self-love, and self-love is based on love for others. Inexplicably this is true: to experience ourselves we must experience others, know others. Humans have a need to extend outward, to form a unity, but there can be no object with which to direct and fulfill this need without knowledge, which provides our objects of love.

The objects of love are largely transient, but love itself transcends time. Love is not dependent upon the moment, objective observation in time, which our knowledge of the objects of love depends upon. Rather love is not objective, is not something we know at a certain moment in time, but since it is present before the object is discovered, since it is present from birth, it is inherent, and does not depend upon time and chance. Our knowledge of love, as a result, can hardly be based on specific moments of time, although the objects we seek help us to recognize love. But love can never be fully known, only felt. Love is not connected to the mind, thoughts, images, but is connected with something else. What? The body? Thoughts and images of love spring from experiences and memory, but they are phenomena of the moment, they occur at a distinct moment in time. We feel things in the body at moments in time. Feelings of love are felt at such moments, directed toward some object of love. To know love requires, however, that we sense and remember all of the different instances of love directed toward multitudinous objects. To sense love requires the body as much as the memory. We remember feelings, but more, love is a truth that we sense with our whole being. It is like a sense of empathy with ourselves. To sense love one has to rely on images, but not exclusively or dominantly; one has to rely upon a feeling within oneself, not a bodily stimulus that occurs at a certain moment, but a general feeling of certainty that is not imagined, is not forced. The feeling of love is a vague feeling of being drawn toward another, some feeling that can be sensed, but not totally of the body, not totally of the mind, but both. Love is to sense, feel, empathize, based on memory. The body is drawn toward an object as it has so many other times, as recalled by memory. The mind is drawn to an object as it has so many times, as recalled by memory. Body and mind combine to form an awareness of love driven by experiences at different times and in different places.

Knowing something truly, feeling a truth within oneself, a truth that involves love or unity, right or wrong, God, hope, the future, can only be done by transcending the moment. One reason why absolute knowledge escapes humans is because they are prisoners of the now, the immediate, and only with great difficulty can they escape it. Knowledge is only possible by overcoming immediate thoughts, the imagination, immediate images. For example, lovemaking symbolizes but does not encompass human knowledge because it is so immediate and fleeting, not long enough to recognize its truth, the brief glimpse we have comes and goes. Likewise empathy. Empathy cannot be known in the now, the moment, the immediate. It requires extensive moments over time, transcendent moments and feelings, to empathize with another. This is difficult. To know another with true empathy requires that one know oneself—and who truly knows oneself?

Are Fromm and other philosophers correct that to love another person is to love all humanity, to empathize with another person is to empathize with all humanity? Perhaps in the glimpses of knowing in the immediate moments of feelings of love and empathy a person can start to recognize the transcendent truths that love and empathy are based on.

I believe I love but what love means is more difficult. To know I love is difficult to realize. Is there a means to express this knowing, to bring it to the surface? Is it by means of the creative surge? Or a time when one tries to express something felt, not consciously known, by means of timeless images? Isn’t this contradictory? How can I express something that seems literally inexpressible? How can I, sitting at one point in time, express truths that are beyond the moment, that make up a variety of moments, that depend not just on the past but the present and future?

Can love and empathy therefore be expressed? Somehow, if it were possible, the means of expression would have to be a spontaneous flow of feelings based on a multitude of moments rather than a well thought-out argument. Feelings and timeless images, not reason, must be used. In art, a sophisticated painting might represent in one glance, one canvass, the whole of love. Or perhaps a melody or song could do it. In writing, verse and prose might accomplish it, but it is difficult: how can abstract general truths be expressed without over-reliance on specific concrete examples? How can a general portrait be painted that is not just a patchwork of immediate impressions? In writing, the language used generates images that symbolize or express the general, the abstract. If a writer can express in one moment all the emotions, images, feelings, and thoughts that go into love, and this general impression hints at specific moments, might a truth be glimpsed by expressing all that goes into it? This truth is one that encompasses time, timeless images and feelings along with concrete feelings and thoughts.

Over the forty and more years that I have contemplated these ideas, and the difficulty that humans have in expressing truths that transcend the moment, the most accurate approximation I have experienced that puts into words, music, art, and symbols the transcendent truths of love and empathy is found in the Roman Catholic mass. The liturgy, the songs of praise, the religious icons, the overwhelming beauty of the service, the feelings of love expressed therein, hint at what true Love is, what is true Empathy, an experience that humans cannot match. But one Person has done so, Jesus Christ, and His mother, the Virgin Mary, as well. Contemplating Christ and the Virgin provides me with a sense of Love and Empathy that I cannot otherwise approximate.

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Reflections on Erich Fromm, “The Art of Loving”

Posted on March 24, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

For Erich Fromm (1900-1980), the German-American psychologist, love is active power, where one preserves one’s own integrity. Love helps overcome separation and anxiety, stimulates union. Love is part of a need to know, to know someone else or self. It is a moment of knowledge of oneself and other humans, all humans. Knowledge comes from the experience of union. 

Knowledge acquired from love based on empathy. Common experiences stimulate empathy. To empathize is to gain knowledge by means of re-experiencing what another experiences, or recalling in the past a similar experience. Empathy is the act of extending my feelings, my sensations, my awareness, my feelings, my memory, to another person. Empathy requires self knowledge. It is a process of self affirmation. 

Love is an act of will, a decision, a judgment. Love is oneness. To love God is an act not a thought. Love is a joining or sharing from a center of existence. Faith is based on awareness of love within oneself. 

Love is an extension outward in an act of certainty in one’s experience, in the unity one feels based on empathy with other people, a certainty that means one’s love is not wasted. It is also a search for knowledge by extending oneself out, to discover, to know.

For Fromm, as humans distance themselves more from nature so that they rely less on instinct unlike their animal counterparts, they fear the separateness that this distance from nature brings upon them. They try to fill in the gap of this separateness by artificial associations, work, corporate units, being like everyone else, keeping up with what everyone else possesses. In so doing a person fools themselves into thinking they will be less alone. They also fool themselves into thinking that the equality of everyone doing and having the same thing makes them feel complete. Only love can make a person complete. 

“Mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality. Love is an active power in man.” This involves giving. “In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. . . . I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. . . . In the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.”

Love involves responsibility, a voluntary act to extend out to another, to recognize the value and worth of the other, whether it is a child, mate, or anonymous human. To respect them requires knowing them. 

Love allows for a union in a way that thought and knowledge cannot do.

Hence knowledge is not just what one thinks, consciously knows, but also what one feels, what is perhaps inexpressible but one knows nevertheless. I know another person over time by their likes and dislikes. I increasingly can predict how they might respond to a given situation. In the process of induction and deduction on my part, of observation and experience over time, I learn the character and traits of the other. But the more I know, intuit, the more I empathize. To empathize depends on my objective knowledge of the character and personality, from which subjective knowledge stems. I know a person’s feelings because I feel them too. The only way to know another person, therefore, is through love; otherwise it is superficial. To love is the willingness to extend myself out to someone, to relinquish myself totally in a desire to know what they are feeling, to give my support, my knowledge, my experiences, to them. This is empathy, an extension of my cares, my loves, my desires, concerns, fears, experiences to another. I am driven to this by feeling, of love.

From argues the love is not just a relationship to another but “an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one ‘object’ of love”–to love only one person is only a “symbiotic attachment or an enlarged egotism.” Regarding all humans, all other life, the more one knows, penetrates to the core, the more one finds not differences, but sameness, hence the ability to empathize. 

To have this ability of empathy implies self-love, that one has penetrated their own feelings, thoughts, past, to know, to understand. There is a desire to go beyond oneself to achieve “transcendence” with the other–nature, humans, God. Love is “respect for one’s own integrity and uniqueness, love for and understanding of one’s own self,” which “cannot be separated from respect and love and understanding for another individual.”

Erotic love is to know a person completely, to their being, their self, and hence to know the being of other humans in general. 

Love of God is the search to know God, to do so involving thought, but more, feeling, not contemplation but action. The more one loves others, the more one has acted upon love, hence the more one loves God, who is the Creator of all. “Love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living.”

Love also involves humility. To love is to realize that one is not omnipotent, omniscient, hence narcissistic, but one knows what one does not know. 

Love helps us to develop faith, not belief, rather faith in oneself, something pervading one’s whole being, an attitude toward life. 

Faith is awareness “of existence of a self, of a core in our personality which is unchangeable and which persists throughout our life in spite of varying circumstances, and regardless of certain changes in opinions and feelings.” Such faith allows a person to know their ability to love. “To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith.”

Fromm appears to have professed himself nonreligious, but I find in reading his book that many of his ideas seem very familiar to the work of the Medieval German Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart.

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What is True History?

Posted on March 8, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

The mirror of the past is the only way to peer at the image of what is human. The reflection is darkened by time and sin. Specters of the dead, haunting the dusty stacks of long-ago thoughts, turn up repeatedly, if indistinctly, on library shelves and in the dens of archivists. Storytellers such as the Greek Homer, abstract philosophers such as the Athenian Plato and John the Evangelist, poets such as King David and the Italian Petrarch, historians such as the Romans Livy and Tacitus, biographers such as the Greek Plutarch and the Physician Luke, essayists such as the Roman Seneca, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, lived the past, made it their own, spoke to it and heard a response. Such writers expressed empathy toward past lives that span the ages. They engaged in a dialogue with the past, a discussion of self in light of others, creating a sensitive portrait, based on the varied experiences of humans at particular places and times, of the image of God in human, apparent throughout the ages. This is true history.

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Son of Man

Posted on February 12, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

Today we celebrate the birth of 

the unknown,

Who came to earth as all men of a 

mother born,

He proclaimed himself unique coming

to atone,

For the sins of all mankind

so forlorn.

Such pain he took upon himself,

his body,

Suffering death for a truth he

proclaimed,

Crucified as a criminal by the Romans, 

so haughty,

His body nailed to wood, bleeding

and maimed.

He died, a sacrifice it is said to 

human sin,

A mysterious, magical concept hard 

to assess,

Another miracle—he rose from the dead to 

live again,

That’s what other’s saw–me? I’m not 

a witness.

An executed criminal: that’s whose life we 

honor today,

A rabbi, a teacher, though a carpenter

by trade,

Arrogant of his powers, though humble in the

words he would say,

Words and deeds remembered—an organized religion he

has made.

His words naked and without ceremony,

all alone–

Read them without interference of priest

and feel;

I see the truth in what he said, a trust he 

must have known

Words about the state of man, words that are

so real.

He speaks in different ways, to each

one unique,

His message can’t be made a

formula,

He speaks to those who know, 

those who seek, 

A personal truth, neither belief, creed,

nor dogma.

To the rich, whether in power, wealth, 

or fame,

He says: Become poor, not in goods but

in spirit,

Poverty is poverty, whether for gold or glory is 

the same, 

Poverty is humility, he says to those who

can hear it.

Love your neighbor is a difficult rule to

follow,

Listen with your heart, the meaning 

is so clear, 

To give gifts to another, that’s superficial, 

that’s hollow,

Love means to look into the eyes of another

without fear.

To turn the other cheek seems the same as 

to love,

What if you’re slapped? Who can but

attack?

He means but this: keep not a wolf but

a dove,

To learn how not to be slapped–that is 

the knack.

Do unto others, as you would have them do

unto you,

In our age of long lines and traffic?

C’mon, that: so absurd!

All it takes is forbearance—if you want more,

take a few,

And patience: time is a gift to all,

Equally endured.

Look within yourself, he says, see who you 

truly are,

To put on airs, to become something more, is plain

imbecility,

A man doesn’t make a god, nor a star-beam a

shining star,

Who shall inherit the kingdom? Those

with humility.

Break down the barriers,

give in to love,

Put trust in what you feel, what’s in

your soul,

It’s not going to come from God, from

heaven above,

Body and mind combine, from parts forge

a whole.

Faith is not simply a belief in Jesus,

the Lord,

It comes not from the Other, rather inside, 

the “I”,

Oneself is the wellspring, from which to go

toward,

Not others–humans, or the divine, 

most high.

The Bible is a good source to

go within,

Religion is to recognize whence

blessings flow,

Happiness is within—to reject it 

is to sin,

Peruse the pages of your soul—  

you will know…..

The contentment within your soul.

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Review of the novel Joe, by Larry Brown

Posted on February 12, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

Joe is a book showing the underside of rural life among the poor and ignorant in late 20th century Mississippi. The protagonist Joe is a drunk and aggressive man with few concerns about anyone else besides himself but who has an inherent sense of right and wrong and a basic morality of when you can and cannot cross the line of morality/honor. He befriends a teenager, Gary, who has been abused his whole life by an alcoholic, violent, murderer who is father of Gary and four other children, one killed, one sold, one prostituted, and one runaway. The wife/mother is overwhelmed by violence and intimidated by her husband, so completely ineffectual. Joe realizes over time this abuse and slowly begins to do something about it, by educating Gary in his ways or drinking and whoring but also in allowing him the independence of work, making money, and having his own truck. Teaching him to be a man. In the end Joe sacrifices his own well being and independence and freedom for the sake of teenage Gary and his younger sister.

Throughout the book the author provides a background of the peace and quiet and sameness of nature that contrasts with the activity, violence, and artificial actions of human beings. We see this in the epilogue. The author highlights the savagery of humans throughout the book. For example, of the characters, the only one with any common sense is Gary; his mother is crazy, his sister rebellious and hates her father, his younger sister is overwhelmed and internalizes the aggression imposed upon her, his father is a violence criminal, and Joe is a drunkard.

It is a story about survival: survival of the fittest in the natural environment including human environment of animalistic humans. It is a coming of age story, of a boy who learns about life, becomes a man.

Joe, who has nothing to live for, finally discovers something to live for in Gary. Joe realizes the inherent misfortune of Gary’s life, and he becomes a father figure for Gary.

Other themes: Human relations ultimately insignificant according to the backdrop of natural environment; Inherent evil and misfortune of life, little to live for; just a glimmer of hope in the inherent evil and misfortune of life; ignorance of humans in the rural South at the end of the 20th century, which leads to suffering and tragedy.

In sum, Joe is all of the above, but mostly it is a book about the overall insignificance of human affairs in the wider reality of nature, which overwhelms humans and often forces them to act like civilized animals, people who have developed machines and artificial substances and ways of doing things to cover, or enhance, the basic animal tendencies that they still have. The epilogue reveals the author’s overall point of view. There is a greatness and grandeur in nature that dwarfs humans. Modernization has elevated humans but at the consequence of irrational beings that have way too much power and cannot achieve the tranquility and inherent contentment of the past. Morality has been dwarfed by people living in the moment seeking some sort of meaning and contentment but not being able to find it, so they turn to artificial substances and machines to make them feel powerful, better. There is a basic sense of morality that you don’t hurt an innocent, that you try to be fair to others, your equals, and if you can’t keep from hurting, can’t be fair, you will be punished by meaninglessness and hopelessness but also by other humans. It appears to be a godless society, but as the epilogue reveals, there is a basic natural truth that exists that humans can understand and admire.

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Reflections on Daniel Boone, American Frontiersman, and John Filson, his First Biographer

Posted on February 12, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

John Filson, in his 1784 portrait of “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon” appended to The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, declared that “curiosity is natural to the soul of man.” With these words Filson sparked the beginning of the legend of Daniel Boone, the explorer and frontiersman who more than any other American was responsible for the penetration and settlement of Kentucky. Filson, a schoolmaster who wanted to bring fame to Kentucky and fortune to himself, purported to record Boone’s own story, though in the process Filson added his own words and ideas, to create an image of the “natural man,” Daniel Boone, which continues even today. Boone is a good example of fact and folklore coming together to garble the historical reality of one person’s life.

Indeed, historians and biographers of the American frontier often have to use anecdote and traditions to recount lives. Carl Sandburg did this in his monumental biography of Abraham Lincoln. With such sources, a historian can often assume based on a critical perspective that stories might originate with the person under study, hence stories of Boone might have originated with Boone himself, or his family, and that they contain a kernel of truth. The documentary evidence for Boone’s life is sporadic, so that Boone and his children’s stories are perhaps autobiographical, hence valid evidence to reconstruct his life.

Filson uses such folklore though he is at times carried away with it, presenting episodes in the life of Boone as actual occurrences rather than somewhat remote distorted possibilities. Tradition has it that Saucy Jack, a Catawba Indian, lost to Boone in a shooting competition. Saucy Jack’s pride was hurt, and his anger, being nourished by drink, spilled over into threats on Boone’s life. Squire Boone, Daniel’s father, decided to deal with Saucy Jack before something happened to Daniel. Saucy Jack fled to avoid the wrath of Squire Boone. Daniel recounted this story to Filson, and Filson used it in his book. But whether the story was fact or fiction seems to get lost in the narrative: it might just be a story. But then again, it might be a good story that tells of the character of Squire Boone.

Such stories build the character of a man resistant to authority who sought the wilderness as a release from civilization. He admired the ways of the indigenous inhabitants and was more comfortable in the wilderness than with his roles in white society as father, husband, soldier, landowner, and business person. Later, when Boone was living his final years along the Missouri River, and after he died, historians more content with images than reality created a romantic, frontier hero.

John Filson had Daniel Boone say in 1784 that “it requires but little philosophy to make a man happy.” In this simple statement we see the origins of the fascination Americans have had with Daniel Boone. From the security of civilization, it is exciting indeed to imagine oneself pushing the limits of the frontier into the wilderness. Boon did precisely this, but without the romantic courage and suffering that has made its mark on American novels and films about the frontier. Armchair explorers cannot help but assume that such a man would stand taller and appear with more bravery than his contemporaries and descendants.

Filson’s Boone tells us that the explorer is but a normal person made heroic by events, a person who explores not to push forward the boundaries of civilization, who in fact dislikes what civilization represents. Rather this is a man who explores to make a living, because of wanderlust, because he loves solitude, because he fears some of the responsibilities of civilized living, and chiefly because, in Boone’s words, of his “love of Nature.”

Besides Boone, there were countless explorers and hunters who went into the wilderness as the forerunners of civilization. Some are well known. Some are unknown, and are remembered only by a name or passage in a book. One example is a hunter and frontiersman of the Arkansas Territory in the early 1800s, around the time of Boone, whose name was Lee, otherwise little known except that he was a hunter and guide for the natural Thomas Nuttall when Nuttall journeyed up the Arkansas River in 1819. I have told the story of Lee in my book, The Land Between the Rivers: Thomas Nuttall’s Ascent of the Arkansas, published by University of Michigan Press in 2004. If interested, you can purchase the book here: The Land between the Rivers: Thomas Nuttall’s Ascent of the Arkansas, 1819: Lawson, Russell M.: 9780472114115: Amazon.com: Books

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Tecumseh: A Reflection

Posted on February 11, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

When I wish to find out about a person from the past, the first thing I look for, to wrap my mind around so that I feel like I might know this person, is an image, a portrait or photograph. But Tecumseh lived before the days of photography and, according to Glenn Tucker, in a recent biography, Techumseh, A Vision of Glory, “Tecumseh would never allow a white man to paint his portrait, and no Indian undertook it.”

So Tecumseh joins a large list of famous and not so famous people from the past for which no image from life exists. As my mind seeks to know this person, lacking an image, I must go to other sources: recorded descriptions of him, literary sources, traditions. But why is a physical likeness important? A portrait based on life allows the observer to gleam personality traits and characteristics by gazing at the image. The lack of such a portrait leads to so much speculation and imagination. In my own writing and research I have spent years coming to know people from the past for which there are no images from life: Jesus of Nazareth and Christopher Columbus, for example; I have even written books about people, contemporaries of Tecumseh, one of the them a French scientist named Berlandier, another an American frontiersman named John Evans, for whom no portrait survives, which has forced me somewhat reluctantly to describe them without quite knowing what they looked like. Proponents of the old pseudo-science of physiognomy used to claim that by examining the facial and cranial features of an object of inquiry the observer could gain important insights into character. I could not do this with the objects of my inquiry. Nor with Tecumseh. So, I must rely on other sources to paint a visual portrait in my mind.

My mental portrait begins, therefore, with any kind of personal connection I can make with Tecumseh. The first of which is that there is evidence, not conclusive, that he was part Muskogee Creek, his mother having been descended from the Muskogee Creeks of the American Southeast. I teach at an institution, Bacone College, founded in 1880 on the lands of the Creek Nation in Muskogee, OK. Everyday I teach students of varying tribal backgrounds, especially the Creeks, about history and philosophy. I was born and raised in Tulsa, OK, which was also part of the Creek Nation. The Muskogee Creeks have been a part of my life for the three score years, though subconsciously; not until I took my present job at Bacone College in Muskogee did I realize how much the Indian heritage meant for me, a person born and bred in Oklahoma, which until 1907 was associated with Indian Territory, and still retains so many connections with the Indian past that I hitherto had largely ignored. Although I am not Indian, I have been around Creek Indians my entire life; perhaps Tecumseh had some of the same physical and emotional traits as these people.

The next step in my mental portrait: Tecumseh’s mother (perhaps) was Muskogee Creek, but Tecumseh himself was born in Ohio in 1768, his parents having moved from Alabama in the previous few years. The second connection I can make with Tecumseh is based on my frequent driving of Interstate 70 through the American Midwest. Tecumseh was born near Springfield Ohio on the Mad River, about where Interstate 70 crosses the Mad River, which I have driven over countless times on my way to and from New England, and recently, to and from Canada, as I have traveled back and forth from Oklahoma to New England, where my wife’s family lives, and back and forth from Oklahoma, where my family are, to Canada. On such long drives of over 700 miles my mind seeks diversion, and I find it in thinking about what this area would have been like in 1768, just a few years before the beginning of the American War for Independence. This was a frontier land under competition by whites and Indians; it should have been land shared by all, but human acquisitiveness and lust for power made it otherwise.

The third connection I can make with Tecumseh as I research his life, was that he was raised in the surroundings of continual violence between American frontiersmen and the Shawnee and other tribes. His father, for example, was murdered by whites when he was a young boy, which provided him with an initial childhood reaction to hate war, though war would in time consume him. I have never experienced such tragedy as Tecumseh did, but as a child growing up during the Vietnam War of the 1960s, I grew to hate war as well, and ever since my adolescent years, watching on television the images of war in a far-off country, I have spoken out against, and despise, war.

The fourth connection I can make with him is more difficult, as he sided with the British in the War of 1812, and I was born and bred an American.

But I can empathize with his cause, to unite his people in the face of aggression, to seek a way to gain what is right and just for his people in the face of centuries of dishonesty, violence, broken treaties, and broken promises. I have taught at a college where half the students feel the same way that Tecumseh felt, and I, a white Caucasian, everyday have to meet the challenge of what my ancestors did to the Indians, and I ask myself the question, am I responsible for the mistakes of my ancestors? And my answer is unclear, except that I taught at a small college, Bacone College in Oklahoma, which is dedicated to helping educate the American Indian to help them embrace their future in an America that is no longer tainted so much by prejudice and violence. Perhaps that I, a white male, taught at such a school, which for 145 years was oriented toward helping the Indian, is an answer to my question.

The fifth connection I can make with Tecumseh is that I have repeatedly driven Canadian Highway 401 from Windsor to Hamilton to St. Catharines and back, and I drive over a flat, fertile land, well-watered, where grapes and grain grow. Near where I drive, on the Thames River in Chatham, Ontario, is where Tecumseh met his death facing overwhelming American forces in October, 1813. For some reason the mere fact that I drive across this land where nearly 200 years ago this man died violently stirs some emotion, some connection, in me, and I feel I know him a bit better for seeing where he met his end.

The sixth and final connection I make with Tecumseh is that I have studied Protestant and Catholic missionaries to the First Nations of Canada, particularly in Ontario, and I found, in my research, the following account by the American missionary Jedidiah Morse: “Tecumseh, before his untimely death, had conceived a plan of collecting all the Indians of N. America on some portion of the continent, not inhabited by white people, there to dwell together under their own government and laws, to enjoy their own customs and religion, inherited from their ancestors—to live in a state of independence; to sell no more of their lands to the white people; to cultivate, by all means, peace with them; to wage no other than necessary defensive wars; to quit roving and hunting for subsistence; to divide their territory into farms; and to live, as do the whites, by agriculture and the arts. In this way, and by these means, he conceived that Indians might recover what they had lost, rise again into importance and influence, and once more assume their rank among the nations of the earth. This plan, though no adequate means of accomplishing it exist, is a noble one, and worthy the great and patriotic mind of its author. Had he lived, and in earnest attempted its accomplishment, it probably might have been easily shaped, and, by compromise, have been brought, to coincide with that which is now contemplated by the government of the United States.”

What is remarkable about his comment, penned by the American scientist and clergyman Jedidiah Morse in 1821, is that just eight years before, in 1813, Tecumseh would have been considered the inveterate enemy of any patriotic American, which Morse was. Now just a few years later he lauds this man, a Tory and an Indian, as reflecting the same principles that he, Jedidiah Morse, has been espousing for decades. And these principles were that the Indians of America deserved the freedom to pursue their own lives, to pursue their own destiny, in a continent the dominant government of which espoused the same principles, that freedom and equality are the paramount rights of all peoples, everywhere, on the earth.

Let me conclude with a final anecdote, taken from the many sources on Tecumseh, that relates what his character was like, and also provides us with a fitting connection to another person honored in Canada, General Isaac Brock. According to Benjamin Drake, in his Life of Tecumseh, written in 1841, when the two men were contemplating the attack on American forces at Detroit during the War of 1812, the following event happened:

“Previously to general Brock’s crossing over to Detroit, he asked [Tecumseh] what sort of a country he should have to pass through, in case of his proceeding farther. Tecumseh, taking a roll of elm bark, and extending it on the ground by means of four stones, drew forth his scalping knife, and with the point presently etched upon the bark a plan of the country, its hills, rivers, woods, morasses and roads; a plan which, if not as neat, was for the purpose required, fully as intelligible as if Arrowsmith [the great mapmaker] himself had prepared it. Pleased with this unexpected talent in Tecumseh, also by his having, with his characteristic boldness, induced the Indians, not of his immediate party, to cross the Detroit [River], prior to the embarkation of the regulars and militia, general Brock, as soon as the business was over, publicly took off his sash, and placed it round the body of the chief,” which was a distinct mark of honor.

(The foregoing is the gist of remarks I made at the “Tecumseh and Brock Portraits Unveiling” at Brock University, Ontario, October 15, 2010)

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Who Discovered America? If it wasn’t Columbus, if it wasn’t the Vikings, then who was it?

Posted on February 7, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

A historical investigator par excellence, Jeremy Belknap, who lived in late eighteenth-century New Hampshire, posed this question to his many readers in a two-volume work, the first of its kind in American publishing history, The American Biography. He began his two volumes, which was filled with biographies of the first explorers and the first English colonizers of America, with an interesting essay, Preliminary Dissertation. on the Circumnavigation of Africa by the Ancients; and its probable Consequences, the Population of some Part of America.

This question of who first came to America had exercised the minds of European and American intellectuals and historians since Columbus’ four voyages to America ending in 1504. The Europeans were astonished to find a new continent, a New World, other than the three continents taught by the ancients, Europe, Asia, and Africa. And to find this new place, America, inhabited by people hitherto unknown, was even more astonishing.

Ancient writers had long speculated on the possibility of lands to the west of Europe and Africa. Plato placed his imaginary Atlantis there. Now to actually prove the existence of such an unknown land and people required European intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, and theologians to discover how and when such people came to America. And had no one from the Old World ever crossed the Atlantic or Pacific to visit and perhaps influence the development of these people?

The great European intellectual Michel de Montaigne wondered about the Americas in his essay, Of Cannibals. Thomas More imagined a Utopia across the Atlantic. Francis Bacon imagined a superior culture in New Atlantis. Eighteenth-century thinkers such as the English historian William Robertson speculated on the first visitors from the Old World to the New World. Thomas Jefferson hypothesized that people had migrated from northeast Asia to northwest America in the distant past. Others wondered if the indigenous people could have been descendants of the lost tribes of Israel.

Of great interest among the intellectuals of North America was a stone in Massachusetts with ancient writing inscribed upon it: the Dighton Rock. Intellectuals from Cotton Mather to Ezra Stiles tried to decipher the strange script. Stiles believed it was of Phoenician/Carthaginian origin. He wasn’t alone in his interpretation.

One of the leading scholars of the eighteenth century, William Robertson, had hypothesized that the ancient Phoenicians had the seafaring ability to cross the Atlantic in the centuries before Christ. There was much literary evidence in support of such a conclusion. Most noteworthy was the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who in his Histories recorded a story of ancient Phoenicians about six centuries before the birth of Christ voyaging south from the Red Sea along the African coast into the southern hemisphere, where the sun was always to the north (rather than the northern hemisphere, where the sun is always to the south). As they sailed west then north around Africa into the Atlantic, they apparently had the navigational ability to parallel the African coast tacking into the northwesterly trade winds, thereby returning through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. If the Phoenicians could do this, then why not cross the Atlantic with the benefit of the trade winds into America? Carthaginians, Phoenician colonists in North Africa, also had the ability to sail far into the Atlantic, and there are various ancient sources recounting stories of their voyages finding unknown lands. Would the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, had they arrived in America, had any impact on the indigenous people by which to remember them? This is an unanswered question.

More modern researchers into this question, such as the Norwegian archeologist Thor Heyerdahl, have discovered evidence that the Egyptians and the people of Iraq, the Mesopotamians, built reed ships out of the papyrus reed. Heyerdahl made some dramatic voyages, one successfully crossing the Atlantic in a reed vessel, to show the possibility that ancient Egyptians could have come to America. Heyerdahl, in another much publicized voyage, built a reed boat on the Tigris River and sailed down the river from the Persian Gulf to Indus River. Heyerdahl and others of his ilk are cultural diffusionists, convinced that ancient societies shared knowledge all over the world. Why else would there by pyramidal like structures in America, Egypt, and Iraq, than by communication between cultures?

Some scholars argue that the ancient Greeks had the ability to sail the Atlantic. An example is Pytheas of Massilia (Marseilles France), three hundred years before the birth of Christ, who sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Strait of Gibraltar) to the Atlantic, sailing north to a place called Thule (Norway, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, or maybe even America).

Others argue that before Columbus the Irish could have made their way to America. Fanciful evidence is the story of St. Brendan, an Irish monk who according to legend about fourteen hundred years ago sailed with his fellow monks in an Irish curragh (small boat made of seal-skin), where they discovered Paradise, saw a Crystal Castle (iceberg), and met a friendly whale who told them the directions. Timothy Severin, a modern explorer, built an Irish curragh and repeated the feat, sailing from Ireland to America.

Beyond historical evidence is the imagination. What would Phoenicians three thousand years ago who came to American shores have experienced? Would they have interacted peacefully with the indigenous inhabitants. Would they have introduced their polytheistic pantheon of deities to the Americans? Would Baal have been worshipped about the campfire in the northeastern American forest of thousands of years ago?

Let your imagination run wild reading a fictional account of some of the information presented in this blog post. “The Search for the Bronze Amulet” is a fictional historical fantasy about eighteenth-century seekers of the bronze amulet of Baal, left by Phoenicians along the New England coast centuries before. The fun can be experienced by purchasing the paperback on Amazon at this link: The Search for the Bronze Amulet: Lawson, Russell M.: 9798246856833: Amazon.com: Books

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