Tuesday, May 20, 2008

The Victory of an Unjust Death

I was pulled up short a bit by this news story from London:

Jimmy suffered fatal cuts to his neck with glass following a row as he went to buy a lottery ticket in Lee, south east London, on Saturday morning.

When Jimmy, a devout Catholic, declined a challenge to fight, his attacker smashed down the door of the Three Cooks Bakery and picked up an advertising board which he wielded inside.

Jimmy, a pupil at St Thomas More Catholic Comprehensive in Eltham, died at the scene in front of his brother, becoming the 13th teenager to be murdered in London so far this year.


Our prayers go with Jimmy Mizen and his family. And Jimmy is in heroic company; as Lady Philosophy tells Boethius:

Surely you don't think that now is the first time that wisdom has been attacked and imperiled in the court of unrighteous custom? Surely in the court of the ancients as well, even before the era of our beloved Plato, we often fought the great fight against the insolence of stupidity; and though he himself survived, his teacher Socrates won the victory of an unjust death....But if, because they happened in a foreign land, you don't know the exile of Anaxagoras, the poison of Socrates, or the torture of Zeno, still you could have known about Canius, Seneca, Soranus, and others like them -- their memory is neither very old nor very obscure. What dragged them down to disaster was nothing other than the fact that, because they were established in our ways, they were seen to be utterly unlike the unrighteous and their enthusiasms.


Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy Book I, Prose 3 (Relihan translation).