Beggar

One should play the role of the king, of the beggar, and of the criminal, being conscious of the gods. It is the role he is given: he finds himself in a certain situation which is called ‘king’; another one is called ‘beggar,’ or ‘th

Jung argues, via Eastern wisdom, that ‘beggar’ is an existential role assigned by fate rather than a fixed identity, and that psychological consciousness consists in recognising one’s condition as such — dissolving the ego’s identification with any particular station.

Jung, C.G., Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988thesis

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The animus appears to be poor and often never reveals the great treasures of the unconscious which are at his disposal. In the role of a poor man or a beggar, he induces the woman to believe that she herself has nothing.

Von Franz identifies the animus-as-beggar as a deceptive figure who projects poverty onto a woman’s conscious life, producing sterile self-criticism and a lasting disconnection from the wealth of the unconscious.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970thesis

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Are you not the voluntary beggar who once threw away great riches, — who was ashamed of his riches and of the rich, and fled to the poor that he might give them his abundance and his heart? But they received him not.

Nietzsche’s ‘voluntary beggar’ embodies the paradox of willed self-dispossession — renouncing wealth to give freely — only to encounter the impossibility of genuine giving, revealing that the art of giving is more demanding than the art of receiving.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883thesis

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One would not invite a beggar; such a man would feed on his host. xvii 381-387 For Antinoos, these words are meant to convey that Eumaios, being a stranger himself, would not invite a low-ranking stranger, such as a beggar.

Nagy analyses how the disguised Odysseus as beggar operates in a semiotic field distinguishing low-ranking strangers from honoured ones — seers, physicians, poets — with the beggar figure functioning as the zero-degree of social value against which the poet’s worth is measured.

Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting

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What a bold and anaidés beggar you are! He goes further than this, indeed, and hurls a stool at Odysseus’ back, arousing the censure of several in the company.

Cairns demonstrates that the beggar in the Odyssey tests the community’s capacity for aidos: Antinous’s violent contempt for the shameless beggar draws censure precisely because beggars, as liminal figures, are owed a protective deference connected to the honour-shame complex.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting

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It need not surprise us that a beggar is described as being without the aidos of others, in spite of the fact that the beggar is an aidoios par excellence in the Odyssey.

Cairns contrasts Homeric idealisation of the beggar as a figure owed aidos with Tyrtaean realism, where the beggar’s condition represents total loss of arete — revealing the term’s function as a limit-case for the honour-shame ethics of ancient Greek literature.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting

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Telemachus heads out, telling Eumaeus that the stranger will have to go begging his way… Odysseus enters his own home as a beggar. Telemachus gives him food and tells him to beg from all the suitors.

The Odyssey’s narrative turns on Odysseus’s voluntary assumption of the beggar’s role inside his own house, enacting a structural inversion of identity — the sovereign as suppliant — that carries both strategic and symbolic resonance throughout the depth-psychology tradition.

Homer, The Odyssey, 2017supporting

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Begging orders were resented as unproductive, and hence immoral. The idea of efficiency assumed the role of one of the highest moral virtues.

Fromm situates the cultural rejection of beggars within the Reformation’s emerging efficiency ethic, showing how the figure of the beggar became a screen for anxiety about productivity, moral worth, and the dissolution of medieval structures of communal care.

Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting

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Furtim et pedetentim retrahit gressum, capellum cuiusdam pauperis qui tunc aderat capiti suo imponit, et baculum gestans egreditur foras… clamat verus pauper ad ostium: Amore domini Dei, facite, inquit, eleemosynam isti peregrino pauperi et infirmo.

Auerbach’s account of Francis of Assisi voluntarily assuming beggar’s dress at an Easter feast illustrates the figural tradition in which poverty and debasement become vehicles of spiritual meaning, a literary-theological antecedent to depth-psychology’s valorisation of psychic dispossession.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside

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As Jesus drew near to Jericho a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging… To catch the true meaning of these words, one must remember that th

The Philokalic commentary invokes the begging blind man as an emblem of the soul’s radical need and the invocatory posture of the Jesus Prayer, linking the beggar’s social condition to the spiritual anthropology of kenotic supplication.

Coniaris, Anthony M., Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998aside

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