Recently, I received a note from a dear friend of mine, who is a retired rear admiral in the US Navy and a former assistant Surgeon General. My friend is a personal friend and former colleague of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and he, my friend, informed me that “Tony” had recently received death threats and has now been given a security detail. This astonishing and horrifying development was soon after corroborated in the news, along with Dr. Fauci’s courageous and cool-headed response that these threats will not deter him from the work he is doing to aid us in our common peril.

A short time later, I was reading Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion and came across the following passage, which comes from the life of Apollonius of Tyana (c. 15 – c. 100 CE), a Neopythagorean philosopher and wonderworker:

“As the plague was raging in Ephesus, the miracle man Apollonios assembled the entire population in the theater, then suddenly he pointed to an old beggar clad in rags: this was the plague daimon. Thereupon the poor beggar, in spite of his pleas for mercy, was stoned until a great cairn towered over his corpse. The aggression excited by fear is concentrated on some loathsome outsider; everyone feels relieved by the communal projection of the fury born of despair, as well as by the certainty of standing on the side of the just and the pure.” [From Walter Burkert, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, trans. John Raffan (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), p. 83. The reference is to Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, 4:10ff. The full story can be read here at www.theoi.com.]

Superficially, the distinguished Dr. Fauci, as consummate a D.C. “insider” as one can be (he has served in his current office since 1984), is very different from the wandering beggar, whom the Ephesians murdered as a “loathsome outsider.” But that difference may not be as great as it seems, considering the fact that for the past three years, many distinguished public servants of our nation have been vilified as “swamp rats” and treated as “outsiders.” We are learning, the hard way, how much we have always depended on these quiet, hardworking, unsung people; it is more than a little ironic that Dr. Fauci, who has been “outsidered,” if perhaps not exactly “othered,” by the current administration, is now getting a security detail from the Feds to protect him from the very people the current administration has done so much to encourage.

But whatever the superficial differences between the Ephesian plague and the current pandemic, or between the poor beggar and the great healer, what Burkert says about crowd psychology in a time of pestilence is worthy of our consideration:

“The aggression excited by fear is concentrated on some loathsome outsider; everyone feels relieved by the communal projection of the fury born of despair, as well as by the certainty of standing on the side of the just and the pure.”

This remark has powerful implications for how we as Christian educators and pastors should think of our work during these dark days: For not only is fury born of despair, despair is born of ignorance and superstition. So much of contemporary American culture is marked by a combination of scientific ignorance and superstitious religiosity, so that when pandemic strikes, people look about desperately for quack nostrums and convenient scapegoats—dependence on either of which, or both of which, only makes a terrible situation worse. 

So the moral of the two stories told above is this: We must oppose ignorance with good science and superstition with good theology. By “good science,” I here mean to include not only the natural sciences, but also the social sciences, the arts and humanities, and the professions. And by “good theology,” I do not simply mean courses taught by members of my own School, but an approach to everything we do that is inspired and infused with the knowledge and love of God. Doing our “ordinary” work in this extraordinary time, and doing it as well as we possibly can under very unfamiliar circumstances, will be our modest but worthy contribution to the common good. May the Lord bless us and keep us as we do it. And maybe, just maybe, on the other side of this crisis, there will be a bit less ignorance, a bit less despair, and a bit less fury in our world.