In this way—perhaps against our best intentions—we have stumbled into the imposing tradition of the Greeks, those masters of health and unity, of balance and justice, of virtue and well-being, of ethics and ontology. The Greeks understood as well as any ever have that a people must keep the lines well drawn that mark the difference between “we are” and “we are not.”39 The literature of the Greeks is rich with a paideic vision, cosmic in scope, for the integrity of the body, the soul, and the city-state. Sublimely conceived, the Odysseus of Homer’s Odyssey,40 the Socrates of Plato’s Apology,41 and the walled polis of Plato’s Republic42 each rises tall silhouetted against the ethereal sky of a sublimely conceived cosmos, threateningly mature, overtly or covertly beautiful, strong, virile, courageous, daring, wise, complex, well armed, just: whole.43 To be well adjusted is here to be hale, an inherent harmony properly exercised in controlled agony at one or another battlefield or palaestra or agora, centered, stalking steadily like a pelican on defensible ground.44 That there are the ill-adjusted among us simply means, they held, that therapeia is to be performed, a therapeia in fact that serves not only the patient, but even more the divine that radiates from the temple at the heart both of the city and of the heroic citizen.45 Indeed we human beings, they held, are here at the center of the cosmos to rise by struggle to become “like the divine, so far as we can.”46 The more we are like the divine, the more we are ourselves, and vice versa. Thus therapeia is in the strictest sense a healing act. Who could blame anyone, especially the pious, for praying for such healing? Indeed, who could blame them for conceiving of prayer as such as a salutary act, the deed in itself (whether it is heard by the Actus Purus or not) as therapy, as a medicine of the soul?47
For the more cerebral Greeks the grandest therapeia is what they called philosophia, a pursuit of wisdom that—far from fearing or petitioning the gods, e.g., for some undue ephemeral benefaction—aspires and conforms to the surpassing-divine goodness, truth, and beauty the gods, too, serve.48 Though it is certainly idealized, a kind of monolatrous prayer plays still in the background history of philosophia. And yet the gods, idealized though they, too, may be, are honored and trusted to do well the tasks they have been assigned (without the distraction of our entreaties).49 And we are to do well the tasks we have been assigned, to fit no less into this beautiful cosmos that is our native soil and theirs. The end of philosophical therapeia is adjustment to the eternally concentric archai that order the many, an adjustment that centers the attendant’s otherwise disparate faculties and makes him whole.50 What is truly one, truly whole, is simply self-identical, untouched by what is other than itself: A ≠ ~A! It simply is. “Integrity” = “identity,” “identity” = “being.” I am insofar as I participate in the integrity that most truly is. It is not accidental that the devotion of the Greeks to integrity led them into that discipline that sets out to clarify the foundational meaning of “being.” An inquiry into the significance of “being” is thus no idle pastime; it is a quest for healing.51
Early Greek thinkers were in fact in more than one sense “physicians.” They were above all concerned with what they named physis, with thinking it and thus serving it. It would be fitting, if anachronistic, to describe at least some of them also as “metaphysicians,” but not in the much later sense that discounts physis. The prefix “meta-” would not, indeed could not, in their case mean “beyond.”52 Physis, which is typically translated into English as “nature,” comes from the same root as the English “be.”53 It signifies “what is,” what rises by force out of the darkness to make a stand.54 Beholding physis filled Greek thinkers with awe and wonder. There could be nothing higher, deeper, richer, stronger, or purer. Indeed, the Greeks would have found odd any suggestion that there might be something beyond it. In this morning of Western Civilization, physis embraced everything without exception, including the earth’s rational animals and their gods. Homer and Hesiod, Parmenides and Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle all agreed:55 there is by definition only one whole, and it is the task of competent thinkers to show how and why and in that way to adjust to it—to imitate it, insofar as they can—and in turn to lead especially their kind to adjust to it as well.56 The intelligibility of the cosmos implies, they maintained, that “what is” constitutes a definite totality.57 Physis is one, a beautifully spherical inherence.58 Here everything is. There simply cannot be an outside. If we thought that we had identified an outside, it would by the very act of identification be inside; and an outside with no place inside is literally unthinkable.59
It is perhaps because the Greeks have taught us so well to wonder, to question, to stay awake (though perhaps a more ancient teaching is responsible) that we may not rest with them in their conclusion. And so, we may find ourselves, against ourselves, asking and asking if perhaps there might be another—uncanny, irrevocably prayerful—way of thinking, a way, say, not out to apprehend, overpower, deport, or naturalize the alien, but rather to defer to her? Might one be of a different mind than that of the founding geniuses of Western Civilization, a mind that opens to what it is not and cannot be? Might there be another way of thinking that would let the outside in without assimilating it? Now, such thinking—if it were possible—would undo “the Man of Reason.”60 It would open wounds through him out into the ground that had hitherto so well supported him, wounds possibly undoing integrity, well-being, wholeness—physis itself. The thinker who would think what cannot be thought would undergo a kind of passion.61 (She shivers in the cold midnight of the Sonoran Desert or faints in the heat of its afternoon. She hides from ICE and even more from Minutemen who would cast her out, with her baby and that strange man. “Pai Nosso, que estás nos Céus, santificado seja o Teu nome. Venha