Cynics, Windmills, and Ex-Lutherans

“There have been many writers who have not known how to mingle the useful with the pleasant, and in consequence their work has come to nought, in spite of all their toil. As they are unable to imitate Diogenes as philosopher or scholar, they go to the opposite extreme and blindly and licentiously try to imitate him as cynic.”

-Francisco Marquez Torres, state censor of Spain, in his official approbation of Don Quixote, Book II, published 1615

“Unable to imitate Diogenes”; of how many people could that be said? In fact, who has ever been able to imitate Diogenes? Diogenes was precisely that prototypical man whom one remembers particularly for those traits which no-one could ever meaningfully mimic. (By the way, the Jesus seminar should get a clue from this: if Jesus of Nazareth was a Cynic, he was hopelessly uninteresting when compared to his forbear.)

Be that as it may, Marquez Torres has a point. However futile it may be to attempt building Diogenes’ platform, there have been multitudes who have tried to speak from it. But perhaps I have spoken rashly of Diogenes’ inimitability; perhaps there are those who can manage both his radical critique as well as his capture of the public imagination. Marquez Torres seems to be saying that whoever would assay one successfully must assay both simultaneously. And he is not far wrong in remarking that Miguel de Cervantes achieved both with his monumental Don Quixote. But he is also correct in his condemnation of those throngs who obnoxiously seize on one trait without grasping the other.

Marquez Torres has, I believe, hit upon an explanation for the unrelenting tediousness of our age. There are legions of opinionators today, but how many of them will be memorable in a later age? How many of them, once the urgencies of the moment have passed, will scorch their marks upon the mind the way Diogenes still does? How many of these anointed sages can do, for example, what Richard John Neuhaus has done with his idea of “the naked public square”? Neuhaus is an uncommonly good opinionator, but what truly distinguishes him is the fact that he has produced an enervating metaphor that continues to captivate the imaginations of many.

What Marquez Torres says to our opinion-guzzling age is this: If, in your search for the good, you’re not capable of taking a lantern with you to the marketplace in the daytime, stay at home.