MELIORA A Hopeful Journal of the Western Tradition
James Hankins The Christian Humanism of the Renaissance and the Revival of Classical Latin
Louis Markos Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in Plato's Myths
Andrew Seeley Amor Quo Caelum Regitur: Boethius and the Journey Toward Wisdom
James Matthew Wilson Mimesis Unbound (A review of Beauty & Imitation)
Martin Cothran Excavating Freud (A review of Mortal Secrets)
Poetry & Student Essays Michael Yost | Dana Gioia | Amanda Joske | Kate Parker
Memoria College Press
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THE CHRISTIAN HUMANISM OF THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REVIVAL OF CLASSICAL LATIN1 by James Hankins
I
n my teaching and writing over many years about Renaissance humanism, I've discovered that the word "humanism" can be an obstacle to many students, especially Christian ones. Students with some awareness of modern humanism think of it as an anti-Christian movement, which makes them in turn suspicious of Renaissance humanism. Modern Humanist Associations, which exist on many campuses, including mine, boast, falsely, of their roots in Renaissance culture.2 Since the nineteenth century, the phenomenon of "humanism" has been widely understood as non-religious by definition or as a substitute for religion. This understanding is correct as regards post-Enlightenment humanism. As Europeans and later American elites lost their belief in Christianity in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Darwinian revolution of the later nineteenth century, many people began to worry that the social order would come unglued without the 1. The latter part of this essay, on the revival of Latin, draws on Chapter 10 of my forthcoming book, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition (Encounter Books), volume 1. 2. James Hankins, "Two Twentieth-Century Interpreters of Renaissance Humanism: Eugenio Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller," Comparative Criticism 23 (2001): 3–19; idem, "Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller: Existentialism, Neo-Kantianism, and the Post-War Interpretation of Renaissance Humanism," in Eugenio Garin: Dal Rinascimento all'Illuminismo (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2011), 481–505. 1
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Christian system of belief to hold it together. Rousseau already posed the question in a well-known passage of his novel Emile known as the "Profession of a Savoyard Vicar." Avoiding a direct reference to the Christian doctrine of the afterlife, he describes how "Mahometans" use the threat of punishment in the afterlife to force the unjust to make restitution for their evil deeds. If they did not first make amends, they would not be able to pass over the fearful bridge called Poul-Serrho, spanning the fires of hell, and arrive safely in paradise. If the Persians were deprived of this idea, if they were persuaded that there was no Poul-Serrho, nor anything of the kind, where the oppressed were avenged of their tyrants after death, is it not clear that they would be very much at their ease, and they would be freed from the care of appeasing the wretched? But it is false to say that this doctrine is hurtful; yet it would not be true.—O Philosopher, your moral laws are all very fine; but kindly show me their sanction. Cease to shirk the question, and tell me plainly what you would put in the place of Poul-Serrho.3
Without religious sanctions, in other words, some new source of moral suasion would be needed. How would modern societies, without established, dogmatic religions backed by the state, enforce their norms? What would replace incentives in the form of rewards and punishments in the afterlife? The various humanist movements of modern times tried to provide an answer to this burning question, beginning with Kant's Religion 3. Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent, 1921). 2
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Within the Limits of Reason (1792). Thus the modern humanist movement tries to base morality in the dignity of human nature itself, above all its rationality, cut off from its theological roots or, following Hume, on the presumption of natural sympathy among human beings. If we wish to be reasonable, if we want to be fully human, we must be moral. Often added to this toothless plea is some version of the old Stoic argument that virtue is its own reward and vice its own punishment. The movement known in recent scholarship as "Renaissance humanism," however, has little or nothing in common with modern humanisms of this kind. The fundamental difference between modern humanism and Renaissance humanism has long been accepted in modern scholarship, thanks, above all, to the work of Paul Oskar Kristeller, the great twentieth-century authority on Renaissance humanism. For Kristeller, Renaissance humanism was a literary, not a philosophical movement, and it was, furthermore, a movement populated almost entirely by believing Christians, not atheists, crypto-pagans, proto-secularists, or secret enemies of the Church. The chief concern of Renaissance humanists was promoting the humanities—the studia humanitatis—which according to Kristeller embraced the literary disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy—the latter discipline being studied and written in a non-technical way, in the manner of Cicero and Seneca. These core disciplinary interests set humanist teachers apart from teachers of other disciplines of the later Middle Ages such as law, medicine, and theology. Kristeller thus also denied that there was any genetic relationship between the humanism of the Renaissance 3
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and modern philosophical humanism. That such a continuity existed had been a theme of the Italian scholarly tradition, whose most distinguished twentieth-century representative was Eugenio Garin, as well as of the leading German historian of Renaissance philosophy, Ernst Cassirer. Both saw Italian humanists as forerunners of modern, post-Enlightenment humanisms. In Kristeller's view it was vain to look for such connections, since to classify Italian humanism as a philosophy was a kind of category mistake. There were no overarching, unifying philosophical themes in Italian humanism. It was not a philosophical tradition like Platonism or Stoicism. It was not a "philosophy of man," as was suggested by the title of a popular collection of Renaissance humanist texts.4 Insofar as the humanists made use of philosophy in their literary writings, they were eclectics, borrowing from the ancient philosophers they admired, yet eager to show the compatibility of ancient philosophy with Christian belief. Today, the Christian character of Renaissance humanism is not in doubt among serious scholars. This is hardly surprising: Medieval humanism—meaning the cultivation of classical literary disciplines, wis4. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John H. Randall, eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 1967. Cassirer died in 1945 and Kristeller took over the editorial work on the volume out of respect for Cassirer, despite his lack of sympathy with the volume's title. John H. Randall, Kristeller's senior colleague at Columbia, was a leading figure in the American Humanist Association. He was also a signatory of the original "Humanist Manifesto" of 1933, which promoted humanism as "the religion of the future." 4
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dom traditions, and virtues—was always Christian too.5 In fact medieval humanism was mostly based in cathedral schools and was an outgrowth of the need to train Catholic clergy in Latin, the language of the Church, and in the arts of careful reasoning and communication. For these purposes the classical heritage was indispensable. Dante's humanism was of this same kind: deeply imbricated in classical culture yet deeply Christian. Renaissance humanism was distinctive in many respects. It differed from medieval humanism in scale, audience, methods, and cultural ambition. Its philological methods were more highly developed, and it laid great emphasis on Greek studies and public eloquence. Above all its commitment to transforming the moral character of the leadership class, secular and religious, went well beyond the reach of the humanism of medieval cathedral schools. Nevertheless, with very few exceptions, Renaissance humanists were fully Christian.6 Like earlier Christian humanists going back to St. Basil of Caesarea, Augustine, and Jerome, they believed that Christianity needed classical culture to flourish. They held that the recovery of classical antiquity was an indispensable step needed to bring about the reform of the corrupt Christianity inherited from the medieval centuries. Reform, as always in premodern societies, meant return to the 5. C. Stephen Jaeger, Medieval Humanism: Collected Essays (New York: Italica Press, 2024). 6. For an exceptional case, see Anthony F. D'Elia, Pagan Virtue in a Christian World: Sigismondo Malatesta and the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 5
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sources, ad fontes.7 The reconstitution of ancient literary culture—above all its moral purpose and its arts of persuasion—went hand in hand with the reform of religion. A great deal of study has been devoted to Renaissance humanism since Kristeller's time and some of it has necessarily modified and qualified his thesis. Humanism was not a philosophical movement, but it did have a coherent reforming message which impressed itself on other disciplines, so that one may speak of humanist law, humanist medicine, humanist theology, and even humanist influences on scholasticism, its ideological rival. The study of antiquity and especially the humanists' mastery of ancient Greek reshaped all these traditional studies. Renaissance humanists also had a characteristic strategy for the reform of politics, as I have argued in a recent book.8 But in the balance of this short essay, I would like to discuss the humanists' central cultural project, which was the revival of ancient literary education, and above all, the revival of the ability to speak and write classical Latin. Why did Renaissance literati believe learning a dead language was so important? To grasp the reason for this one must appreciate the underdeveloped state of the vernacular languages in the medieval period. The Tuscan language which Dante and Petrarch used to win 7. An unjustly neglected masterpiece of scholarship on this theme, showing its deep roots in the Church Fathers, is Gerhard B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959, reprint 2014). 8. James Hankins, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). 6
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fame, for example, was well-known only in an area of central Italy roughly the size of Massachusetts. Other parts of Italy had their own dialects: The peninsula used more than thirty major ones. Outside of Italy Tuscan was known only among scattered colonies of traders. If an author hoped for a fame that could spread throughout the world and outlast his own time, the humanists believed, he or she would have to write in Latin. Latin had already lasted more than two thousand years. It had been the language of the most successful empire the world had ever seen. It was the language of Holy Church, founded by Jesus Christ and destined to last to the end of time. It was the tongue used in diplomacy, on inscriptions, and in the most permanent government records, and it was the medium of communication for all the learned professions: law, medicine, theology. All science and all philosophy was written in Latin. University statutes required that it be spoken in classes and official meetings. Latin's timeless classics—the writings of Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Seneca, Sallust, Livy, Terence, and many others—were, and had always been, the basis of literary education in Christendom. The classics stood for all that was noble and civilized. The vernacular speech, by contrast, despite Dante's efforts to "ennoble" it, was all too close to the loose, gabbling talk of ordinary people. It stank of the street and the shop. It was impossible to use it with precision and elegance. Or so most humanists thought before the sixteenth century. The humanists had what seems to us nowadays a wildly impractical ambition to revive classical Latin as a literary language. We think it impractical because we now realize that Latin was in origin a natural language 7
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spoken by the ancient Romans. How could a later age ever expect to speak or write fluently, let alone artistically, in a dead language? The humanists believed, however, that Latin was an artificial language created by literary men to be an elevated medium of expression. Surely classical Latin, with all its complicated accidence and syntax that took years to master, could never have been the language of the common man? The belief that Latin was an artificial language made the idea that it could be revived more plausible. For a century after the time of Petrarch literati were animated by the hope that they too might write great works of literature that could stand alongside those of the ancients. That was Petrarch's hope for his great epic, the Africa, which, significantly, he left unfinished. And in fact the humanist movement, which gradually spread from Italy across Europe, from the British Isles to Eastern Europe, eventually produced tens of thousands of works in prose and poetry. This branch of Latin literature is now known as Neo-Latin. But before this great (though now largely forgotten) literary movement could get started, the Latin speech inherited from the humanists' medieval forebears would have to be reformed. In the late medieval world Petrarch inhabited the Latin-speakers—lawyers, doctors, clergymen, bureaucrats—spoke an efficient but flat and graceless jargon that the humanists hated. It was full of ugly technical terms of recent coinage. Its sentences were flaccid and broken-backed. It lacked the syntactical and lexical richness that allowed one to express the intimate nuances of one's mind and heart. Petrarch and his fellow humanists believed that the refined and civilized speech of the 8
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Romans had been corrupted by contact with barbarians from the North such as the Gauls and the Germans. The humanists longed to master the language the ancient Romans had spoken: copious, precise, lapidary; grave and elegant by turns. Latin, they thought, had once been an imperial language, a language of timeless beauty, spoken by beings of superior wisdom and virtue. It was a language bursting with potency, able to fire cold hearts and elevate base spirits. That language was now lost. If, as Petrarch and his followers hoped, the strength and civilization of the ancient Romans could have a second birth, that renaissance would have to begin with a rebirth of the Latin language. A renewal of the ancestral language and literature of Italy was the key to the return of her ancient greatness. It took more than a century before deeper literary study revealed to the humanists the uncomfortable truth: Latin had indeed once been a natural language. Nevertheless, the ambition to revive and extend the genres of ancient Roman literature survived this sobering realization. More importantly for the future of Europe, the love of literature and the aspiration to write with precision, grace, and power remained rooted in the educational system the humanists had built. As Latin declined and the vernacular languages of Europe rose to take its place, the literary standards the humanists had created for modern Latin literature were extended to the various vernaculars. The idea, invented by Dante, that vernaculars could be "ennobled" on the model of Latin, spread from country to country. The distinction between common usage and good usage, meaning elegant or educated usage—a distinction now, sadly, rejected by 9
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lexicography—was transferred from Latin literature to the vernaculars. Despite the rise of vernacular literatures, the study of Latin continued to dominate Europe's (and soon North America's) schools. This was not merely a reflection of the conservatism of educators. Most writers and most patrons of writers before the modern period, from Lorenzo de' Medici to Samuel Johnson, felt that Latin was not a superannuated rival of the vernaculars but an indispensable tool for refining and enriching them. The literary academies of early modern Europe—like the Accademia della Crusca or Académie française, founded in 1583 and 1683 respectively to cultivate the Italian and French languages—modeled their activities on those of classical philologists. All the scholarship the academies produced—the grammars and dictionaries; the uniform editions of canonical authors; the commentaries and the literary journals—had the goal of fitting the vernacular languages and literatures into the mold of the classical languages. Latin was the model par excellence for ennobling the vernaculars—for making them, too, languages worthy of a great civilization.
10
TRUTH, GOODNESS, AND BEAUTY IN PLATO'S MYTHS by Louis Markos
T
hese days, one can generally spot a classical educator by how many times he refers to the three transcendentals: the good, the true, and the beautiful. If he goes so far as to suggest by his tone and body language that when he says good, true, and beautiful, he means Good, True, and Beautiful, then you can be certain. Here is no mere teacher, but a genuine defender of the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian tradition that is rooted in the five books of Moses and the two epics of Homer, that flowered in Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, and that draws its philosophical nourishment from Plato as well as Augustine, Aristotle as well as Aquinas. Apart from the order, balance, and harmony that unite Truth to Goodness and Goodness to Beauty, there would be no center around which to organize our thoughts, perceptions, and desires. Apart from the eternal, essential, unchanging nature of the transcendentals, we would possess no touchstone against which to measure the fleeting things of our earth. Apart from the ability of the broken bits of truth, goodness, and beauty that are scattered across our world to participate in their divine Originals, we would be unable, to borrow a phrase from Blake, to see eternity in a grain of sand. But what exactly are these transcendentals, and why have they exerted so great an impact on the West and, through her, the world? Normally, I would look to the dialectical sections of Plato's dialogues for answers. In those sections, Plato, usually through the mouth of 11
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Socrates, engages in a vigorous volley of questions and answers meant to scrub away the false, the fragmented, and the fleeting and so catch a glimpse of the pure, the perfect, and the permanent. Much is to be learned from these sections, but I prefer to cast my eye past the philosophical debate to the myths (or allegories) that Plato conjures up to climax and incarnate his dialogues. Through his dialectical gymnastics, Plato defines, deconstructs, and discerns, but in his myths, he yearns and soars, defying all limits that would keep him from those greater realities that transcend even reason and logic. It is in the myths that Plato teaches us what it means to love the True, pursue the Good, and long for the Beautiful. Each myth is a journey of desire and a voyage of discovery that opens on to a new vista. In the sections below, I shall follow Plato as he embarks on three pilgrimages that will draw him, and us, closer to the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty that await us at the end of the road.
Truth in the Allegory of the Cave The Republic is a dialogue with a clear and focused goal: to define justice with a capital "J." As Socrates and his interlocutors track their elusive prey, however, they fall down a series of increasingly deep rabbit holes. Two of the deepest holes lead them to construct a perfectly just state and to fashion an ideal educational curriculum to produce the kinds of leaders needed to establish and maintain that just state. But Plato does not stop there. In seeking to define justice in the soul, in the state, and in education, he finds it necessary to throw Socrates and company down the deepest hole of all. 12
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In what is surely his best-known myth, Socrates reveals that we are deceived about the nature of reality. We are like prisoners chained in chairs at the bottom of a deep, dark, winding cavern. All our lives, we have stared straight ahead at the back wall of the cave, for the chains on our chairs prevent us from turning our necks or looking away. Behind us a mighty fire blazes, while between the fire and our rigid backs, puppeteers carry cut-out figures back and forth along a low wall. The figures mimic the real things that dwell in the world outside the cave, but we gaze neither at the real things nor at their imitations. All we see are the shadows of the figures that are cast on the cave wall. We call those shadows real life, and we pride ourselves on our ability to predict which shadow will appear next on the wall and what sequence will follow in its wake. We even award prizes to those prisoners whose predictions are the most accurate. Our knowledge, our studies, and our degrees are all based on the things that we perceive with our eyes. We consider those things to be true, but they are only the shadows of shadows, twice removed from the true things that lie outside the cave. They are illusions, not in the sense that they are not real, but in the sense that they are only a dull reflection in a dirty mirror of that which is truly true and really real. The distinction is vital, for Plato is not a nihilist. He does not believe that nothing exists, but that the things that we see with our eyes are partial fragments of the true reality (the Truth) that transcends us and our prison-house world. Eternal Truth is not wholly other from the temporal truths that we see around us. Though Plato did not have access to the Old Testament, and thus did not know that 13
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we are made in the image of God he understood that we have the capacity to apprehend and understand Truth. To access that Truth, however, we cannot rely on our five senses alone. We must go on a rigorous philosophical journey that will lead us to the absolute Truth that lies behind our relative truths, to the true Light of which the fire is but a weak reflection. Thankfully for the would-be Truth-seeker, Plato includes in his Allegory of the Cave a description of the philosopher's journey. Interestingly, the philosopher does not choose his path, but has it forced upon him by some external will that Plato leaves unnamed. Imagine now how their liberation from bondage and error would come about if something like the following happened. One prisoner is freed from his shackles. He is suddenly compelled to stand up, turn around, walk, and look toward the light.… Would he not be at a loss? Would he not regard those things he saw formerly as more real than the things now being shown him?… Again, let him be compelled to look directly at the light [of the fire]. Would his eyes not feel pain?… Then let him be dragged away by force up the rough and steep incline of the cave's passageway, held fast until he is hauled out into the light of the sun. Would not such a rough passage be painful? Would he not resent the experience? And when he came out into the sunlight, would he not be dazzled once again and unable to see what he calls realities?1
Just as a midwife must pull us, kicking and screaming, out of our mother's safe, warm womb, so something 1. Plato, Republic, trans. Richard W. Sterling and William C. Scott (New York: Norton, 1985), 515c–516a. 14
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from outside the cave (God? Providence?) must force us to be born again out of the narrow tunnel that leads out of the cave and into the light of the world (a clear reference to the birth canal). Not only are we incapable of initiating our movement out of the shadows of error and into the light of Truth (we need what Christians call prevenient grace), but we resist that movement every step of the way. Gazing upon Truth is a painful thing, as blinding as a fire would be to a man who has lived his life in the dark, or the sun to one who has known only artificial light. For Truth is dazzling. It shatters the shadows and dispels the delusions that we have spent our lives mistaking for the Truth. Had Plato ended his myth here with his prisoner-turned-philosopher happy to know the true nature of reality and content to remain in contemplative ease in the sunny world outside of the cave, one might accuse him of dismissing our earthly existence as only an illusion, a vale of tears with no value. But he does not. He makes it clear that his escaped prisoner (his philosopher) must be compelled to return to the cave to teach and enlighten those still chained to their chairs. Though there are passages in Plato that seem to treat Truth as a static end-in-itself, in his Allegory of the Cave, Truth is more dynamic, more aggressive. The philosopher who knows the Truth has a duty to use it to free his fellow prisoners—which is to say his fellow human beings—from the chains of error to which they have been bound all their lives. I firmly believe that Plato would have understood and given his assent to Jesus' promise to his disciples that they would know the Truth and that that Truth would set them free (John 8:32). 15
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Truth is more than an academic subject for Plato. It is a liberator that opens the eyes and the ears to reality as it is, which is not to say that Plato is a foolish idealist who thinks it an easy thing to shake off one's chains. Though he insists that his philosopher return to the cave, he knows full well what the outcome will likely be for the one who descends back into the cave carrying the light of Truth. The moment he returns, his eyes, accustomed to the light of the sun, will be darkened, and he will find himself unable to compete in his former games. Rather than be applauded by the prisoners, he will be dismissed as an absent-minded professor whose journey out of the cave has left him singularly incapable of predicting the sequences of shadows on the wall. If he yet persists in proclaiming the Truth he has seen and known, Plato tells us what will likely happen to him. Would he not be laughed at? Would it not be said that he had made the journey above only to come back with his eyes ruined and that it is futile even to attempt the ascent? Further, if anyone tried to release the prisoners and lead them up and they could get their hands on him and kill him, would they not kill him? (517a)
Plato clearly has his beloved teacher Socrates in mind, who had been put to death by the Athenian assembly in 399 B.C. for asking too many questions and trying to shame the morally and ethically compromised Athenians into acting in accordance with a fixed standard of Justice rather than political expediency. And yet, the Christian who reads these words cannot help but discern a shadowy pagan prophecy of Good Friday. On that terrible day, the One who tried to speak Truth to 16
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Pontius Pilate (see John 18:37) was put to death by the Romans, who were themselves incited by Jewish leaders who saw in Jesus' words not Truth but blasphemy, not Light but darkness (see John 8:36–47, 9:39–41). Truth is sacred and precious, but it is often feared, despised, and attacked in our world where shadows are cherished and errors clung to. To be a friend of truth— one reasonable translation of what "philosopher" means in Greek—takes grace, persistence, and courage. It is not for the faint of heart. Those who seek it with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength must be willing to be judged and transformed by it. And they must be willing to share that transforming light with others. That is the challenge that Plato passed down to the tradition, a challenge that comports well with the call issued to Christians. Indeed, when Socrates reflects on the myth he has shared, he assures his listeners that the power to perceive the Truth that lies outside the cave "is already in the soul of everyone" (518c). Like the gospel, the Truth is accessible to all people, even if few are willing to make the necessary sacrifices. For gospel and truth alike call for a radical, life-altering commitment that will change the very shape of what we have hitherto called reality. What does it take to crawl one's way out of the cave and gaze upon the Truth? "[T]ogether with the entire soul one must turn away from the world of transient things toward the world of perpetual being, until finally one learns to endure the sight of its most radiant manifestation" (518c–d).
Goodness in the Myth of Er Plato generally confines himself to one myth per dialogue, but such a limit will not do for a work so great as the Re17
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public. Having offered up his Allegory of the Cave as an incentive to leave error behind and seek after Truth, Plato ends his lengthy dialogue with a second grand myth that calls his readers, then and now, to seek that absolute and eternal Goodness—a Goodness that transforms those who pursue it. That myth is of a kind that Plato would resort to more than once: a myth not of beginnings but of endings, not of creation but of judgment. One hears often today of people who have had a neardeath experience (NDE), who have been pronounced dead, have left their body to ascend to a heavenly realm, and have returned to their body to live out the remainder of their earthly lives. Plato's Myth of Er reads like an NDE. It tells of a soldier killed in battle who was revived twelve days later, only to insist that he had spent those days journeying to the afterlife and viewing the final state of our souls. In fact, during his journey, he is told by the judges of the underworld that he has been chosen to be a messenger to his fellow mortals of what awaits us after death. Plato's myth of the afterlife is one of strict, absolute justice, so much so that Er is shown that whereas those who committed evil in this life were punished tenfold for each of their crimes, those who led a life of justice were rewarded by the same ratio for their good deeds. While the just go up and to the right toward heavenly vistas of inconceivable beauty, the unjust go down and to the left into a darkness of weeping and lamentation. Souls remain in those places until they have received their merited rewards or punishments. During his journey, Er sees a group of tyrants trying to leave hell before having expiated the full measure of 18
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their crimes. What Plato tells us about the fate of those unfortunate souls is as terrifying as anything in Dante's Inferno. The hell mouth roared whenever someone tried to get out who had not yet paid the full penalty for his crimes or whose evil was incurable. There were men stationed there … fierce men and incandescent from the fires within them. On hearing the sound of the roar they seized some of the souls and led them away.… [Others] they bound hand and foot and head as well, throwing them down on the ground and stripping off their skin. They dragged them by the side of the road so that the thorns pierced their flesh. (615e)
Good and evil are no laughing matter; both carry consequences in this life and in the next—whether or not there was someone to witness our deeds of darkness or light. I think of Jesus' sober warning to his disciples: Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops. I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him! (Luke 12:2–5; ESV)
Both the Bible and the Myth of Er take place in a moral universe of cause and effect. Good and evil are not subjective opinions or arbitrary cultural markers. For Plato, they are linked closely to the virtue of piety and 19
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the vice of impiety: "Er told of still greater rewards and punishments for piety and impiety toward the gods and toward one's parents, and for suicide" (615c). Goodness in Plato is inseparable from the awe and obligation we owe to the gods and our parents. That is to say, Goodness, like Truth and Beauty, is fundamentally hierarchical. The transcendentals do not govern an egalitarian world where all are the same, but a ranked and ordered cosmos where some people and some objects come closer to embodying the fullness of Goodness, Truth, or Beauty. Goodness is neither unselfishness nor simple kindness; it exists in a set of relationships where we owe reverence to those who are above us. Suicide is impious, not because it involves destroying the body given us by God (as it does for Christians), but because it means abandoning the post where one has been placed by a superior. For Plato and Christianity alike, the possession of Goodness empowers us to make the right choices in relation to God, others, and ourselves. To emphasize this connection, Plato infuses his Myth of Er with a vision of reincarnation that he learned, indirectly, from Pythagoras. People still debate whether Plato believed literally in the transmigration of souls. Whether he did so or not, it is worth noting that he only speaks of it in his myths, never in the dialectical portions of his dialogues. This is vital because reincarnation serves a specific purpose in the Myth of Er: rendering concrete and dramatic the nature of choice and how it is influenced by a steadfast, lifelong pursuit of the Good. At the end of his journey, Er meets a vast gathering of souls who are instructed by the Fates that they must 20
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choose their next bodily incarnation from a selection of different lifestyles: He whose lot bids him choose first must, like all souls, select a life to which he will be bound by necessity. Yet virtue is not bound by any master, so that each will possess as much virtue or as little as he does honor her. The blame belongs to him who chooses. God is blameless. (617e)
Plato's myths may appear similar to those in Homer, but there is one major difference. Whereas the gods of Homer are arbitrary in their actions, those of Plato are just, allowing men to choose freely in accordance with the virtues or vices they practiced and accumulated in their lives. To make that life-defining choice, we must prepare ourselves carefully and deliberately. Indeed, Plato, through the mouth of Socrates, warns his interlocutors that that moment of choice is the time of man's greatest peril. It admonishes each of us—even if we neglect all other studies—that a man should be concerned first of all with searching out and studying that which enables him to discern the good. He must seek out those who will give him the capacity and knowledge to distinguish the good life from the bad, so that he might always and everywhere make the best choice conditions allow. (618c)
Just as philosophy draws us out of darkness and error toward a transformative vision of the True, so a life of virtue draws us away from evil and impiety toward a dynamic vision of the Good that focuses and clarifies our power of choice. 21
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in Plato's Myths
How are we to achieve that Goodness and so prepare for that choice? Plato explains that as well: Fixing on the nature of his own soul, a man will call worse anything that brings the soul closer to injustice and better that which brings it closer to justice. Everything else he will renounce, for he knows that this is the supreme choice in life as in death. He will be adamant in carrying his conviction even into the house of death so that he will not be seduced by wealth and all the other trivia to be found there. So will he be armored against embracing tyranny and other vices that would cause him to inflict irreparable evils on others and suffer still greater evils himself. So he will learn how to shun excess. He will choose a life that avoids the extremes both in this world, as far as that is possible, and in all life to come. (618e–619a)
Goodness is more than a feeling or an action. It is a state of mind, an orientation toward the world that sifts what is temperate and edifying from that which is excessive and destructive. It is strong and wise and patient, and it gives birth to decisions that guarantee a life of strength and wisdom and patience. Like Truth, it sees through shadows, choosing that which lasts over that which is fleeting and ephemeral. It keeps us on track, grounding us in the knowledge that all will be well. Even so, Paul assures us, the commandment to honor our father and mother (Plato's piety toward parents) is the first commandment to come with a promise: "that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land" (Ephesians 6:2–3; ESV).
Beauty in the Ladder of Love But what of Beauty? How does one pursue Plato's third transcendental with the same dedication and persever22
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in Plato's Myths
ance as the philosopher seeks Truth or the virtuous soul seeks Goodness? To answer that question, we must close the Republic and open the Symposium, arguably Plato's most imaginative and entertaining dialogue. Set during the height of the Golden Age of Greece, the Symposium dramatizes a drinking party where each of the guests takes up the challenge to sing a paean to Love. Plato naturally saves the last spot for Socrates, knowing full well that his master's paean will outshine all the others. In a nice twist, Socrates confesses that what he knows about Love and Beauty was taught to him by a woman named Diotima. As Socrates does in the Republic, Diotima first directs her eager pupil toward the truth about love by means of dialectic and then soars past dialectic on the wings of a myth. That myth, which is as brief as it is beguiling, builds a stairway up which the initiate must ascend if he is to gaze upon Beauty in its complete and perfect form. The first rung of Diotima's Ladder of Love calls on the initiate to gaze with appreciative wonder upon the beauty of a single person. The second rung widens his scope so that he can discern and admire beauty in all people, not just his beloved. From there, he must learn to love beauty of soul more than beauty of body, a vital step that empowers him to love the beauty of such non-physical things as events and institutions, science and morality. Freed from a narrow devotion to a single object, the initiate is ready to gaze in full upon the celestial ocean of Beauty. Diotima explains: The man who has been guided thus far in the mysteries of love, and who has directed his thoughts towards examples of beauty in due and orderly suc23
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cession, will suddenly have revealed to him as he approaches the end of his initiation a beauty whose nature is marvellous indeed, the final goal, Socrates, of all his previous efforts.2
Just as the philosopher who escapes from his prison turns his gaze from the multiple truths in the cave to the one Truth that exists outside, so the initiate moves beyond the partial beauties of this world to fix his sights upon that absolute and eternal Beauty that is the origin and source of all the lesser beauties that catch our eye as we live among shadows and shadows of shadows. But what is the nature of that divine Beauty that dwells above and beyond? Plato, through the mouth of Socrates, through the mouth of Diotima, describes it thus: This beauty is first of all eternal; it neither comes into being nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes; next, it is not beautiful in part and ugly in part … nor again will this beauty appear to him like the beauty of a face or hands or anything else corporeal, or like the beauty of a thought or a science … he will see it as absolute, existing alone with itself, unique, eternal, and all other beautiful things as partaking of it, yet in such a manner that, while they come into being and pass away, it neither undergoes any increase or diminution nor suffers any change. (211a–b)
The Beauty that awaits the initiate who perseveres to the top of the Ladder of Love is pure, self-contained, and unchanging. It has a wholeness, a unity, an integrity that transcends the most beautiful people or flowers or 2. Plato, Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 1951), 210e. 24
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works of art on the earth. This Beauty is unmixed with even the faintest trace of ugliness. Just so, the Truth and Goodness Plato celebrates in the Allegory of the Cave and the Myth of Er are unsullied by even the shadow of error or evil. Such Beauty is the origin of all other beauty, but it is also the divine Touchstone against which earthly beauty can be assessed, measured, and judged. Like the prisoner who escapes from the cave, the initiate is content to spend his life contemplating the Beauty he has found. He needs nothing else to bring him joy. But Diotima-Socrates-Plato will not have that. Just as the philosopher who knows Truth must carry that Truth back with him into the cave, so the lover who gazes upon Beauty must incarnate and share that Beauty with others: Do you not see that in that region alone where he sees beauty with the faculty capable of seeing it, will he be able to bring forth not mere reflected images of goodness but true goodness, because he will be in contact not with a reflection but with the truth? And having brought forth and nurtured true goodness he will have the privilege of being beloved of God, and becoming, if ever a man can, immortal himself. (212a–b)
Note that in this sublime moment when the nearly deified human lover finds a way to body forth that Beauty which is ineffable and inimitable, Plato links it with Goodness and with Truth. But then he cannot help but do so. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty are not separate entities but three faces of a single divine order that runs throughout the universe and holds it in an eternal, exquisitely poised harmony. They are the glue that binds the cosmos and gives it its balance and its purpose. Of the transcendentals, we can almost say what Paul says 25
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of Christ: "He is before all things, and in Him all things consist" (Colossians 1:17; NKJV). Let us then make every effort to see past the mangled truth, compromised goodness, and shriveled beauty of our fallen and fragmented world and fix our eyes on that which is ever True, ever Good, and ever Beautiful. Plato showed us the way, even as the incarnate Christ brought the light of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty into our false, vicious, and unattractive world.
26
AMOR QUO CAELUM REGITUR: Boethius and the Journey Toward Wisdom by Andrew Seeley
S
everal years ago, I was called on to write a paper on Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy for the Center for Thomas More Studies at the University of Dallas.1 I am very glad I was, though I was nervous about it at the time. I had been familiar with Boethius since my student days, when I plowed through the Consolation in two sittings for a seminar class devoted to Roman and medieval literature. As an upperclassman, I had learned from his De institutione musica about the amazing connection between music and mathematics, and I learned that St. Thomas Aquinas drew on Boethius' works to distinguish the branches of philosophy2 and to define eternity3 and person.4 I am sorry to say that I wasn't very impressed then, nor even after the few times I led conversations on it as tutor at Thomas Aquinas College. The Consolation seemed pale to me as a dialogue and as philosophy in comparison to the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, which we had studied much more carefully. I had not been accustomed, therefore, to thinking of Boethius as a deep source of wisdom, inspiration, and
1. Andrew T. Seeley, "Drawing Near to God: Lady Philosophy as Physician in the Consolation," Moreana 60, no. 2 (December 2023): 160–167. 2. The Division and Method of the Sciences is a part of Thomas' commentary on Boethius' De trinitate. 3. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I.29.1. 4. Ibid., I.10.1. 27
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guidance.5 My impression was completely changed, however, through the close reading that preparing for my essay demanded, in which I explored the subtle but profound way in which he models what it means for philosophy to be a propaedeutic and a handmaid to Theology. I was inspired to write another essay,6 in which I reflected on the way the dialogue invites us into a much deeper understanding of human nature than can be gained from the formulaic definition, "Man is a rational animal. " I think a lifetime of careful reading—especially of the educative drama built into philosophical dialogues7—along with some significant if imperfect progress along the road to wisdom, and a decade and a half spent actively working to put philosophy into action by contributing to the classical liberal arts renewal, helped to open my eyes to the treasures contained in this work. I have often been asked about how to introduce philosophy to high school students. I don't like to be asked, because I am hesitant about any philosophy being taught in high school. I am skeptical of the capability of high school students to think well in the abstract mode that most philosophy texts employ. Even collegiate students too easily end up experiencing philosophy as a word 5. I had much the same reaction to most of the Roman works I read sophomore year. But we never read the Consolation carefully. 6. Andrew Seeley, "Re-Turning the Whole Soul: How Boethius Comes to Truly Know Himself in The Consolation of Philosophy," The Aquinas Review 26, no. 2 (2023): 109–126. 7. For an excellent introduction to the proper reading of such dialogues in Western tradition, see Jeffrey S. Lehman, Socratic Conversation: Bringing the Dialogues of Plato and the Socratic Tradition into Today's Classroom. 28
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game. Because of this, many younger people are bored or turned off, but even those who are excited by it often fail to encounter philosophy appropriately. They learn to use words like "form," "matter," "essence," "universal" in such a way that they can talk the talk and think that is really philosophy. My recent studies of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, however, make me think that this might be an excellent text to use with students. Its dramatic reality appeals to the young. The integrity of Boethius, a leading statesman of his era and an intimate counselor of his king, led him into prison and ultimately to execution because he opposed the injustices and heresies of the king and his senate. Boethius wrote the Consolation while he was in prison—it was certainly no word game for him. He does not present Philosophy as a list or even science of doctrines; rather, he gives us a window into the real life of a devoted disciple of wisdom suffering because of his commitment to justice. He openly confesses his lingering struggle to understand how God can be believed to rule the lives of human beings when evil people can cause so much suffering to the good. Sometimes the richest and most complete work on a subject was written with the needs of the uninitiated primarily in mind. Euclid's Elements, Aquinas' Summa theologiae, and Lavoisier's Elements of Chemistry are among the very, very few Great Textbooks of the Western World. The Consolation belongs in this company. It will mean even more to adults who have themselves experienced "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" than to the young. Thomas More, whose famous family 29
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portrait includes the Consolation,8 "was deeply affected by Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy and made the work part of his innermost being."9 What a consolation it must have offered to him as he suffered a similar fate!10 Thomas More wanted "that beautiful and holy poem of Boethius, " which meant so much to him, "to keep singing" in the ears of his children.11 The Consolation is more than just a personal testimony; it is a compendium of ancient wisdom and an exemplar of the best philosophical practice composed by one of the most learned men the Roman regime ever fostered. Anicius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boethius was born in A.D. 480, four years after what might be considered the beginning of Christendom.12 Our imagination might 8. Cf. "Thomas More Family Portrait" on the Thomas More Studies website, taken from Gerard Wegemer, "What Holbein & Lockey Captured in The Family of Sir Thomas More: A Family 'furnished for the whole scope of human life,'" Moreana 45, no. 1 (December 2008): 103–116. 9. Elizabeth McCutcheon, "Wings and Crosses: Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae and More's Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation and Other Writings," Moreana 50, no. 2 (December 2013). 10. More composed his own Dialogue of Comfort during his imprisonment. 11. Louis L. Martz, "The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght," University of Rochester Library Bulletin 23 (1983): "Onward then in that new and admirable science by which you ascend to the stars! But while you gaze on them assiduously, consider that this holy time of Lent warns you, and that beautiful and holy poem of Boethius keeps singing in your ears, teaching you to raise your mind also to heaven, lest the soul look downwards to the earth, after the manner of brutes, while the body is raised aloft." 12. I prefer this way of describing the period in the West when politically separate peoples were united within a common Christian order over the traditional "Middle Ages." 30
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lead us to think of this as the age of the barbarians, but much of Roman civilization would persist for centuries. Boethius came of age under the rule of Theodoric the Great, who had been educated in Constantinople and saw himself as the heir of the Western Roman Emperors as well as the king of his own people, the Ostrogoths. Boethius also received a fine education in the classics, fell in love with philosophy as a young man, became a senator at the age of twenty-five and consul (by then an appointment of the emperor) at the age of thirty. Like More, in the midst of his many public duties, Boethius continued a course of philosophical and theological studies and writings. In important ways, he set the intellectual tone for the age of Christendom. He codified the tradition of the seven liberal arts as the foundation of a life of learning and helped ensure its survival by translating and paraphrasing important Greek works on logic, arithmetic, and music. He anticipated the scholastic style and doctrines in theological treatises on the Trinity and other topics. Perhaps most importantly, his teaching and example made Western Christendom ready to embrace a purified ancient Philosophy as the most important handmaid for theological development. Most of Boethius' intellectual writings were the result of what he considered his life's mission—to gift the semi-civilized nascent Christendom a complete presentation of a unified Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy in Latin, the West's language of learning and worship.13 But Providence had other ideas. His trial for treason put an end to his great plans but instigated the com13. Boethius, Perihermenias, Book III, Introduction. 31
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position of what was to become "the most popular and influential philosophical work, especially among laymen, from the sixth to the eighteenth centuries."14 Boethius poured all of his learning into the Consolation of Philosophy, making it a treasury of Stoic, Platonic, and Aristotelian wisdom applied to topics such as fortune, happiness, the good, nature, human powers, God's causality, fate, Providence, eternity, free will, and predestination. It is an exemplar of the many branches of learning that the philosopher should be able to draw upon: logic, rhetoric and song,15 astronomical and natural studies, ethics and metaphysics. Boethius also poured his heart out into the pages of the Consolation, and readers experience the truth that Philosophy is first and foremost a philia, an amor. He helps us feel this by imagining Philosophy as a woman, tall, strong, and commanding, and yet one who had been his intimate companion in the days of his youth. The first book contains passages of nostalgic remembrance of that period of idealistic love which reminds me of the heady days of when I first tasted delight in passionate discussions that spilled from the classroom to the lunch table and continued sometimes far too late into the nights. As a teacher, I have rejoiced whenever I have seen it awaken in my students over the years and often lead them to lives devoted to service in Church, state, and school. 14. Harvard's Geoffrey Chaucer website. Chaucer was the first to translate the Consolation into English. 15. Boethius' poetry, which was intended to be sung, has been brought to life through the recovery work of the choral group Sequentia. 32
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Boethius rails like a disappointed lover when he dumps upon the Lady a cascade of complaints about what has happened to him. His early romantic love of Philosophy had led him to enter the political world in the first place.16 You used the words of [Plato] to argue that this is why the wise must take part in public affairs, so the helm of state won't fall to wicked and criminal men, who would bring ruin and destruction to the good. And so I followed this advice and chose to apply to public affairs what I had learned from you in our quiet hours together. You and the God who planted you inside the minds of good men can bear witness that I only took part in public life for the sake of benefiting all good men. (16–17)
Philosophy had taught him that God rules the world.17 That conviction undergirded his idealistic political involvement. By serving the state, Boethius believed he was serving God, and so, through patient persistent commitment to what was just and wise, he could overcome all difficulties. The Lady had thought at first that Boethius just needed a reminder of his old convictions in order to recall 16. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Scott Goins and Barbara H. Wyman (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012). "When I had barked out these complaints in my unending grief, Lady Philosophy looked at me serenely, untroubled by my lament," 25. Quotations of the Consolation are taken from this translation, unless followed by Latin, in which case the translation is my own. 17. He recalls the time "when I was delving into nature's secrets, when you charted out for me the course of the stars, when you taught me how to live and what life meant, by seeing the heavens as patterns of reality" (16). 33
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him from his self-absorbed misery. She also remembered fondly his youthful devotion to her, but the way he has been indulging his sorrow in prison leads her to wonder whether Boethius, like many boys in love, ever really knew his beloved (10). Had he mistaken his enjoyment in book-learning for the real inner life of the mind? "I don't miss the walls of your library … so much as I miss my seat of honor in your mind, where I gathered together not books, but the things that give books their value" (25–26). Attending to the essence of his complaint makes her realize that he is in much worse danger than she thought. She thought that, because he felt so miserable, he wasn't remembering his old convictions; now she sees that indulging his misery has led him to doubt the most important convictions of a man of faith. He is now questioning both the Providence of God over human affairs and the help that Philosophy can give him in answering his questions. Many who suffer as Boethius did will question God's very existence. Boethius is not tempted to do that. Philosophy has taught him too well for him to deceive himself in that way. I could never think that such an ordered world is ruled by random accident … I know quite well that God presides over the work he has created. And there will never come a time when I will abandon the truth of this assertion. (27)
But his passions have brought him to the brink of denying that God rules over human affairs, because it looks to him as though only Fortuna does. 34
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Though taken aback by how far from the truth Boethius has come, the Lady does not immediately respond with arguments. She realizes that his illness has affected both his heart and his mind, and so she needs to work to heal both. She models the great traits of philosophers such as Socrates by listening carefully and asking just the right questions to come to understand what lies behind the passionately spoken words. Acting as a physician of the mind,18 she identifies three ignorances, which, together with his passionate grief, have put Boethius' soul in great danger. His conviction that God rules the natural world, especially the heavens, will be his saving grace. But he is ignorant of how He rules and to what end He leads it. He has falsely imagined how this occurs, which has prevented him from seeing the real character of Providence. His most significant ignorance is about what a man is. He offers a formulaic definition, "rational and mortal creature," which the Lady finds wholly inadequate: "Now I know the other, in fact the greatest, cause of your disease: you no longer know what you are" (28). Having identified these serious problems, she prepares to lead him on the mental, spiritual, emotional, and imaginative journey to help him find his way back to his true spiritual home, so that she might find her true home again within him. Understanding the ways and power of love is central to the journey. His misery has come from losing what he loves. Philosophy closes Book I by singing to him of the need to banish the passions of joy, hope, and fear 18. Cf. Jeffrey S. Lehman, "Lady Philosophy as Physician," in Goins and Wyman, 187–211. 35
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which shackle the mind (30). Boethius admits later how difficult it is for him to really believe arguments when his feelings are so strong: Yes, these arguments sound good…. [But] the pain of sorrow lies too deep when someone is miserable. As soon as the words stop sounding in the ears, the grief deep in a man's heart weighs him down. (38)
In Book II, she supplies him with persuasive images and reasoning to help him loosen and escape those shackles. Happiness, Philosophy reminds him, is what we all want, but the goods that Fortune can take from us cannot bring it to us. They are not worth loving. She does not want to rid him of all desire, however, but rather to order his love rightly to what is worth loving. The goods of Fortune are shadowy images that men think will bring happiness, but what they really want is God Himself, the One Good. He is the only thing worth loving. You too, earthly creatures, dream of your origin, although only in faint images. And you envision that true goal of blessedness, although you do so with the reason you possess, one that is very short-sighted. For this reason your natural inclination leads you to the true Good, while numerous errors lead you away from it. (69)
Boethius knows from his own experience that human beings seek happiness, not because they are commanded externally by God, but from a drive built into their nature. The Lady helps him to realize that this is how God rules both the human and the natural world—from within. She had anticipated this in her beautiful song ending Book 36
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II. At the end of his complaint in Book I, Boethius had invoked God as the ruler of nature: "O Builder of the starry universe! / Sky spinner, star whirler …" (23). But Boethius imagined that God rules like his own emperor, "forcing the stars to suffer law" (legem pati sidera cogis). But the Lady's song opens a new vista (61–62). God does not forcefully command the natural world. Rather, He rules all of creation through inspiring love for Him even in natural beings. The result is a harmony that marks the natural world in spite of all its seeming instability and conflict. She likens this to a perpetual pact (foedus) among the elements which come from love's rule. Love, more than justice, governs even human affairs in its best moments. Although laws are in place regarding marriage, "chaste loves" are the tie that really binds a couple. Love, not law, "determines for faithful companions their rights and duties (iura)." Instead of praying as Boethius had, "Your law binds all but man…. O Fastener of earth's bonds— / look back on us!… Steady the earth, surround it / with Your law which rules the vast sky" (25), he should have prayed as she does now, "O happy race of men! / If that Love which rules the heavens / might also rule your hearts!" (62) What she poetically suggested at the end of Book II, Lady Philosophy explicates more carefully in prose toward the end of Book III. "[A]ll things … as I taught you, hurry towards the Good by natural inclination" (102). She immediately adds that this is the very same inner, natural governance that works in human beings as well. "Surely it can't be doubted that things possessing a will freely (sponte) direct themselves towards the will of the one ordering them" (102). 37
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Understanding this will help Boethius see in Book IV, at least in a general way, that God always rewards the good and punishes the evil. Human beings can act against their natural love for God, but doing so gradually destroys the nature within them. She will go so far as to say that those who choose to be evil have ceased to be men. They continue to look like men because of their bodies, but "if you saw a man transformed by vices, you couldn't consider him human" (120). The Lady lists the vices that make men into wolves, dogs, foxes, lions, deer, asses, birds, and sows. "And so it happens that a man who abandons virtue, since he can't become godlike, turns into a beast" (121). They are punished, therefore, in the worst possible way even though they might seem to triumph, and they are also subject to being overwhelmed by fate. Returning to the end of Book III, the Lady believes that she has led Boethius far enough along the road to wisdom that he is now able to return to his fatherland "safe and possessed of happiness" (102). This does not mean the journey is finished—Boethius' questions continue. Before he can really understand the ways of Providence, he needs to be given wings to see things from the divine perspective, which will require "a new beginning, " a faith-led glimpse into the eternal being of the Providential Intellect far beyond reason. Knowing the difficult intellectual journey ahead, the Lady ends Book III with a poetic warning woven in a lovely way from the story of Orpheus' journey to Hades to recover the soul of his dead wife, Eurydice. Orpheus, the greatest musician of Greek mythology, sang so beautifully that he not only was permitted to enter the under38
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world, but brought all its torments to a halt: "desperate Tantalus with eternal thirst / spurns the river's water; / and the vulture, tearing Tityus' liver, stops" (108). Hades' ruler is compelled to admit defeat and allows Orpheus to lead his wife back to the upper regions. But he lays down a repressing law—Orpheus must not look back. Unfortunately, the journey back is too long for Orpheus to hold his love in check. Love is more powerful than coercion. The Lady reflects: "Who can give rules to lovers? / Love itself is a greater law" (108). Orpheus turns back and all is lost. The warning is clear—Boethius finally has his passions calmed and his mind oriented rightly on the true path to happiness. He must not turn back, allowing the desires she has purged to well up again and drag him back to Hell! "Since, whoever, having been weakened, / turns back a gaze to Tartarus' chasm— / whatever excellence he has gained, / looking back, he loses" (108). Boethius must nurture authentic natural love for wisdom and wisdom's God in order to complete his spiritual ascent. I hope that I have succeeded in presenting a tempting invitation for you, old and young, teachers and students, to join Boethius in his effort to complete his journey. Providentially, I am writing this conclusion on the evening I heard a talk entitled "Why Read Boethius Now?" given by John Marenbon of Cambridge University to open a conference on "Boethius After 1500 Years" sponsored by the University of Tulsa Honors College. Professor Marenbon spent the bulk of his lecture arguing that we should read Boethius for cultural reasons given the profound influence his mathematical, philosophical, and theological works had for over 1,000 years. 39
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He highlighted the unique influence of the Consolation both inside and outside of academia. But we should also, he argued, read him today for the sake of growing in wisdom. Philosophy today is too often practiced as a dispassionate building up and tearing down of arguments. In the Consolation, Boethius, perhaps more than any other philosopher, brings us to embrace philosophy as a way of life devoted to the pursuit of wisdom, that is of a comprehensive view of all things that bring us happiness. He concluded: Maybe an historically informed, context-sensitive reading of Boethius' Consolation can give us the courage to use the word "wisdom" without embarrassment or reservation and be proud that, as philosophers, we are devoted to searching for it.19
I couldn't agree more.
19. John Marenbon, "Why Read Boethius Now?" (lecture, University of Tulsa, February 6, 2025). 40
MIMESIS UNBOUND by James Matthew Wilson Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts Daniel McInerny Word on Fire Academic, 2024 pp. 448, $34.95
Most poems, Aristotle writes in the Poetics, are "viewed as a whole, modes of imitation." Thus begins the most influential reflection on the nature of the arts ever written. Imitation, or mimesis in Aristotle's Greek, had already been the subject of inquiry by the philosopher's master, Plato, but in Aristotle's attempt to provide the first systematic philosophy of poetry in classical antiquity, a compelling connection between the fine arts and the act of imitation was established that has endured ever after. What actually constitutes the act of mimesis and to what extent mimesis defines the essential nature of the fine arts have remained live questions, however, in the two and a half millennia since Aristotle first wrote about them. Daniel McInerny, in this at once closely argued and warm-spirited study, has taken us a long way toward settling them. By turns a philosopher's case carefully prosecuted and a practicing writer's meditations on how the different fine arts imitate and, further, how they act upon us, their audience, McInerny's engaging prose guides us through an account of the arts firmly rooted in Aristotle's Poetics. McInerny makes explicit and elaborate the dense and gnomic implications of that seminal work. To do so, he draws on the extended studies of mimesis found in the writings of the phenomenologist Robert Sokolowski and the Aristotle translator Stephen Halliwell. He engages, 41
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often in sharply critical ways, the great modern Catholic philosophers of the fine arts, Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson. He follows closely the work of a later Catholic philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, to explore the role of poetry and mimesis in moral and political life, while also drawing on the priest and literary theorist William Lynch and the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar to crown his study with an argument for the necessity of the "Catholic imagination." On these formidable authorities McInerny draws with a light and familiar touch, leading us through some pretty grand ideas in a manner that recalls us to our own experiences of reading Dante and Shakespeare in school or watching Dunkirk or The Empire Strikes Back with our family on the weekend. In all of this, McInerny shows us that human beings are "agent[s] of truth" and also story-telling animals. These are related qualities: To know the truth about themselves, human beings must grasp "the story of their lives," and one of the chief ways we do this is by telling and listening to the stories of others, especially those we invent. McInerny shows all this with compelling precision. It would be hard to speak of mimesis and the arts with greater care and clarity than he does, and most of his arguments about the nature of imitation are, as it were, final ones. And yet, throughout the first half of the book, where McInerny makes his philosophical case, I had the sense of a part (imitation) being taken for the whole of beauty, or at least of the beauty of the fine arts. At the midpoint of the volume, McInerny stages a philosophical dialogue between two characters inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien's story, "Leaf by Niggle." There, McInerny indeed pushes his 42
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case to the limit: In giving an account of artistic imitation he has also provided an exhaustive philosophy of art. The fine arts properly understood are the imitative arts—end of story. The dialogue is winsome yet meticulous. It makes a strong case. I am confident, however, that it is wrong. I would like to review McInerny's argument on the nature of mimesis and consider some of his individual studies of the arts. I will then return to the place where his largely convincing argument reaches the limit of its applicability and so ventures too far. In so returning, we will draw Aristotle's Poetics back into the intellectual world of Plato and so set the philosophy of art more firmly on that foundation McInerny rightly tells us it must have—the foundation of being. A philosophy of art as rich as McInerny's inevitably requires a metaphysics. This much he concedes. But might it be the case that a philosophy of art will also play a role in metaphysics? This he would deny and in doing so he contracts the horizon of the arts and makes them, in his own words, a more "humble" thing than philosophical and historical reflection might suggest. Readers of the great modern Catholic philosophers of art, Gilson and Maritain, may find McInerny's treatment of the fine arts as essentially imitative a shocking one. Both of these philosophers interpreted the fine arts in light of their individual most precious insights gleaned from the works of Thomas Aquinas. Both those philosophers insisted that the essence of the fine arts was to manifest a form and to do so for the sake of beauty. Maritain used the term "poetry" broadly, not in regard to a specific art form but as a general word for a distinct cre43
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ative intuition that sought to make a new material thing expressive of ontological and spiritual realities. In Art and Scholasticism, Maritain somewhat tendentiously interprets Aristotle's use of "imitation" in the Poetics in the context of the philosopher's use of that term in the Physics. In the Physics, Aristotle explains that art (meaning "artifice" or "making" in general) imitates nature in the formal sense that both nature and art bring a new entity into existence. The seed grows into a tree; the carpenter builds a table. Maritain insists that the fine arts are imitative primarily in this formal sense. He further insists that this desire to manifest a form, in the case of the fine arts, is directed to the form's spiritual radiance and beauty, its discloser of divine mystery even. Aquinas taught Maritain that the most impressive feature of the world is the way in which the intellect, including the human intellect, enters freely into spiritual communion with the world of being, and through its grasp of the natural order, the intellect rises toward a knowledge of the supernatural or divine. The fine arts are a particular instance of this freedom, where spirit expresses itself in matter but aims at the divine. Imitation in the "material" sense of an artist copying or borrowing from the forms or ideas of nature is not, in Maritain's view, essential to art. Or, rather, it would not be if making were not a specifically human activity. God's ideas are essentially creative; God thinks things into being. God's thought is the measure of a thing's reality. Human ideas, in contrast, are primarily receptive. Our ideas are measured by things, insofar as, say, my idea of a rabbit will only be an idea of a rabbit to the extent that it conforms to the essence of actual rabbits. 44
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For the artist, this poses a problem: The artist wants to make, to manifest a form, and often wants to do so in a way that approaches the absolute creativity of God, but in truth, Maritain writes, "we have nothing that we have not received." And thus, we do imitate nature in the material sense. We must borrow our ideas from somewhere, because we are incapable of the pure and original act of creation. For Maritain, this fills the artist's activity with a certain pathos: The artist wants to manifest a form that expresses spiritual beauty but can only do so with borrowed materials. Imitation is the condition of art for us, but imitation is not essential to art. Gilson argues something similar in The Arts of the Beautiful. For Gilson, Aquinas' most formidable insight was his grasp of the act of creation that causes beings to exist. "Why is there something rather than nothing?" the philosopher asks, and Aquinas replies: because God is Existence Itself and causes existence in all other things. So too, in the fine arts, Gilson argues, this fundamental impulse to beget, to cause being, of which God is the archetype, finds expression in the artist's desire for a "project." The fine artist wants to make a thing, to impose a form on pre-existent matter, and so to bring a new whole into the world. Why does the fine artist do this? For the sake of beauty. For Gilson as for Maritain, imitation has nothing essential to do with the activity of the fine arts. Gilson too readily concedes that artists, as human beings, must borrow from nature. We are makers, not creators. But imitation is more a point of departure than an end conceived. Indeed, Gilson's book criticizes those who appreciate art for what it imitates, for what it represents 45
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or tells us, rather than for being a form beautifully rendered, as "Philistines." Gilson also tells us that Aristotle and other authorities have focused on the matter of imitation rather than on the genesis of form made for the sake of beauty only because they are philosophers. That is to say, philosophers want to explain everything in terms a philosopher will appreciate. Philosophers seek truth and knowledge, and so, when philosophers write about the fine arts, they skip past the existential mystery of making for the sake of rendering the arts an inferior kind of philosophy. That is wrong, writes Gilson. The fine arts consist not essentially in imitating or in knowing, but in making and, more specifically, in the making of a form for the sake of beauty. Maritain and Gilson alike offer us an essentially formalist theory of art, one that has a place for mimesis, but a secondary and even an ambiguous one. McInerny boldly pushes such objections aside. Aristotle was right. The fine arts are imitative arts, and the only questions remaining pertain to what that entails. And so he tells us and does so in fine detail. Imitation is our natural means of learning and is itself a pleasure. But what does it mean for a fine art to imitate nature? It does not mean a mere copy. When the imitation is of a real person, as in a painted portrait of Winston Churchill, we expect not a photographic likeness but something more, an interpretation of Churchill's character realized in the formal composition. When the imitation consists of a fictional character, as with Shakespeare's Hamlet, it would make no sense to compare the likeness to the "historical prince." The imitation is of a kind of character, of a particular expression of human nature. 46
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When we speak of the imitation of art, therefore, we are most often speaking of the particular expression found in this painting, poem, or novel of more general, universal features of human life and action. This McInerny calls the "mimetic universal." For Aristotle, poetry consists not just of any kind of imitation but specifically of the imitation of human action. It includes character, but character as subordinate to the beginning, middle, and end of a complete action—a unity that Aristotle calls "plot." McInerny explains this idea in light of Aristotle's claim at the beginning of the Nichomachean Ethics that all human actions pursue some perceived good and do so with true happiness as their end. As we encounter an unfolding plot in a work of art, we are able to perceive a character in action, pursuing some purpose. We can evaluate character, action, and purpose alike in light of human nature's end. McInerny has much to say on the structure and form of plots, but his chief aim is to explain what plots do. In his view, the arts are imitative and specifically imitative of human action; all the arts are essentially narrative or story-telling arts. And all stories are ways of contemplating, of learning about, understanding, and judging purposes in light of our true ends. As such, stories constitute a kind of moral argument or inquiry, where the marvelous and probable unfolding of a plot helps us to discover the contours of human nature. They teach us about who we are but also what we ought, or ought not, to be. McInerny refers to these plot-forms of stories as "poetic arguments," which "are based on the power of images, images that can either attract or repel but that can never 47
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command logical assent" (75). Poetry is in this sense a branch of logic and "a kind of moral philosophy, though a philosophy that works by imagery and dramatization" (77). Contra Gilson, McInerny holds that the most satisfactory account of the arts will be one that insists on plot, story, and narrative as essential to the fine arts; it will also necessarily be one which holds that these things are indeed ways of knowing. Such knowing is restricted to the moral or ethical dimensions of human life, and it does not compel assent the way a syllogism compels, but it nonetheless constitutes what McInerny calls, following Aquinas, the infima doctrina, the least of doctrines. Gilson attributes the delights of the arts to a wholly formal encounter with beauty. McInerny once again follows Aristotle: Stories are at once a "delight in knowing" and a "knowing delight." We contemplate the beauty of the work, which comprehends its formal composition, and also its relation to the "probable" universals of human nature, about which we may learn specifically through this act of contemplation. Stories teach us. McInerny's logic is water-tight here. Even those stories that seem to deny that human beings have a true end in light of which their purposes or actions may be judged (and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a good example, is mentioned in these pages) clearly function according to the parameters McInerny provides. Precisely because art makes poetic arguments, McInerny continues, we require what he calls the Catholic imagination. That is, if human lives constitute stories, those individual stories also participate in an order that transcends them and in light of which alone they can be understood. The argu48
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ments of stories naturally invite judgment in that context. The Catholic imagination further emphasizes the way in which stories must be at once concrete, symbolic, and created (although this is my formulation rather than McInerny's). Stories are mimetic arguments rather than abstract ones, and indeed the concrete form of a compelling story can never be wholly reducible to abstract, summary statements. One sign of this irreducibility is that the incarnate or concrete image will be, in Dante's word, polysemous. That is, it will bear distinct levels and nuances of meaning. The literal bears the symbolic inextricably within it. Finally, stories can and do serve a mode of inquiry in which both artist and audience can share, because they depict creatures moving through the world of their creator, their first author, who is God. Many modern artists have pursued what Allen Tate calls the "angelic imagination," in which the artist becomes the little god of his creation and the artwork becomes purely the expression of its creator. McInerny does not deny that many artists have embraced the angelic imagination. He simply shows us that the art conceived by it ceases to serve as the kind of inquiry that makes works of art a distinctive way of knowing. To advocate for the Catholic or symbolic imagination is not simply to state a preference; it is to explain the necessary conditions that make it possible for the mimetic arts to serve the purposes they always have. The Catholic imagination completes McInerny's "Aristotelian-Thomistic" theory of the arts, by showing us that it alone accounts for the delight of form and mimesis together, while angelism misconceives art as pure "expressivity" and formalism excludes the relation of artistic form to the real49
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ity beyond itself. If those theories were right, very few people would ever have taken an interest in the arts. Much of the rest of McInerny's study offers "A Guided Tour of Some Mimetic Arts." He surveys music, poetry, painting, movies, and so on, in one chapter each. Each chapter is insightful, but unevenly so. He offers an excellent reading of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey as a way of illustrating the way novels work and turns to Gerard Manley Hopkins to exemplify poetry as polysemous. His chapter on film is almost an apprenticeship in the form, while his account of stage drama offers a somewhat less essential (but oft discussed by theater scholars) meditation on "presence." In between the opening account of mimesis and the guided tour lies McInerny's dialogue, where he works through the likely objections to his theory. It begins with Atkins, a character from Tolkien's story, expressing awe before Niggle's painting of a leaf: "I mean … That kind of beauty, it's as though it doesn't belong to this world. It's as though it's a glimpse of God's own beauty, if you see what I mean" (208). We soon learn that what Atkins means is that the beauty of the fine arts is an essentially metaphysical beauty: The radiance of the made work is in some sense a revelation of and participation in the divine beauty of God. McInerny's character Miss Parish is not having it. The fine arts are mimetic arts, and what they imitate is "the probable or possible in human action" (217, footnote 11). Any claim that the arts make "contact with transcendental being," Miss Parish says, "goes well beyond mimetic art's humble aspiration to manifest truths about human action and the natural world that is its environment" 50
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(220). Yes, Miss Parish concedes, a certain "metaphysical backdrop" must already be in place, if we are to be able to reflect on poetic arguments as moral inquiry, and, yes, again, "transcendental being is the fabric of, well, everything," but this is just to say that the world must be an intelligible, ontological whole before we can set about learning anything (221). None of that meaningfully enters into the kind of inquiry that takes place in the mimetic arts. Who could object to that? McInerny's argument from the beginning has been to explain the arts in terms of story, and practically everyone understands—however vaguely—that the story-forms of imitated human action can help us to better understand the real forms of human action. We sense instinctively that stories have a moral valence. The great achievement of this volume is its clear explanation of how the arts and moral reflection are related. Even so, someone could object. Plato, for instance. In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates speak of poets and poetry in two different ways. At one point, he refers to poets and artists as mere imitators of human action, just as Aristotle would some decades later. While he readily admits that such imitations may give us the appearance of the "probable" in human action, that is just a sign of their general inferiority. At the moment Socrates says this, however, he is himself reciting a species of poem called a "palinode." It is a poem that reveals in prophetic fashion the nature of souls, the order of the cosmos, and the place where eternal truth itself lies situated "outside the heavens," shining upon minds to awaken them to reality. 51
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At the crucial moment when these highest mysteries are described, Socrates says, "None of the poets here on earth have ever sung the praises of this place beyond heaven, nor will any ever sing of it adequately."1 In other words, most poets give us imitations of human action, but they are hacks. Socrates alone is the true poet, and he describes for us the very "fabric" and "backdrop" that McInerny's Miss Parish deems far beyond the bounds of the arts. McInerny's response to this vision of the transcendent is that it is a mere "reflux," an artist's portrayal of subjective fantasy as objective reality. This seems an unhelpful claim, given that the great achievement of this book has been to account for the dialectical back-and-forth that takes place between a work of art and reality and to explain how it works. All mimesis will involve something of "reflux." I would repeat this more pointedly: Artworks serve as a way of coming to know reality, but so also reality provides the ontological backdrop by which an audience judges a work of art. It is in an audience's movement between art and reality that we form our vision of what is real and our judgment of what constitutes a compelling formal composition and representation of reality. We might ask the reason that Plato seems to hold that a certain kind of poetry can speak beyond the probable and the ethical (as Aristotle describes it) to address or imitate the metaphysical and even the theophanic. The reasons are two and they correspond 1. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Stephen Scully (Focus, 2003), 247c. 52
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roughly to what McInerny means by imitation and by formal composition. First, in the Republic, Phaedrus, and Symposium, Plato treats mythos, poetic story-telling, as giving us dense, iconic images of truths that transcend our imaginations. The rational inquiry and discourse of philosophy is, in no small part, an attempt to unpack and open up for questioning what myths distill in a single vision. Myth therefore spurs us to inquiry and, when we eventually arrive at a knowledge of the truth, the poetic images of myths come to serve as symbolic reminders of what we have come to understand. If this is the case, then it would seem that poetry imitates far more than human actions. It provides us ineffable images of more fundamental truths that metaphysics and theology will later make articulate. Hesiod writes in the Theogony that Mnemosyne (Memory) is the mother of the Muses. This is the case because Memory collects the fleeting stuff of the ever-changing natural world and gathers it into a great store house, where it can be given permanent form in the shape of stories. Stories necessarily deal with the temporal stuff of human action, but they also invite us to contemplate the relationship between the particular and the universal, the temporal and the eternal. In this sense, even stories have a kind of iconic dimension. They lead us beyond the stuff of passing human life to contemplate the eternal forms of things. Second, in the Laws, Symposium, and elsewhere, Plato notes that the essence of poetry is not exhausted by the matter it imitates. Poetry, as metrical, is formed according to the laws of mathematics, one of the liberal arts. As 53
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such, the rhythms of poetry, its numerical formal principles, connect the microcosmic structure of verse with the macrocosmic formal structures of the world. Poetry and mathematics alike reveal to us the order of the world at large and also point us to the principles that stand beneath that order and cause it to be. This is what makes them liberal: They help us move from appearances to reality and to attune our souls to Being. This is why, a few hundred years later, the Roman poet Horace, in his Ars Poetica would proclaim that the poets were the first human beings to bring order into human life. By ordering the natural sounds of the human voice into the numerical structures of metrical verses, poets provide the prototype for every sort of human order, legal, social, and religious. In so doing, the poets help us to become perceptive of the natural order of the world and to conform the human and social order to it. If this is the case, then our contemplation of artistic form does not stop at the level of plot, but burrows all the way down to the formal structures of being. Among other things, then, the poets were the first metaphysicians and indeed they were necessarily metaphysicians prior to becoming moralists. And this, in turn, explains why Saint Augustine, in his otherwise humdrum grammar on poetic meter, De Musica, in its sixth and final book, suddenly swoons in a great ecstatic vision of the numbers of poetic meter ascending from the human world up to God. And further, it explains why—and in my view this is a most important point—artistic form and the forms of human life can find their reflections in one another. Story-telling is doing at the human level something that occurs 54
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throughout the whole form of reality: Microcosmic order is an imitation of, and a means for the contemplation of, the cosmos as a whole. Poetry is no more a substitute for metaphysics and theology than it is for ethics, but Plato gives us strong reasons to believe that it is nonetheless a mode of inquiry for all three of those fields of knowledge. One may concede all this and yet doubt that it makes any difference. The proper study of mankind is man, and stories are a good way to learn about and take delight in contemplating good and evil, better and worse, in human life. Aristotle explains all this, so why bring Plato into it? The answer is that Maritain and Gilson, while wrong about mimesis as being incidental rather than essential to the fine arts, had a good reason for their error. They were trying to understand something about artistic form that includes imitation but is not determined by it. Their mistake was to restrict what we often call formal qualities, such as elements of versecraft, rhetorical figures, choices of color, and brushstroke, etc., while relegating plot and story-telling to the matter, the material cause of art. As good Thomists, Maritain and Gilson knew that formal causality tells us more than material causality about the essence of things, and therefore plot must be inessential to art, especially since (as we noted), such materials seem to be borrowed rather than created. But this gets things wrong. Aristotle's Poetics plainly shows that poetic meter is a formal cause of poetry, but not an exhaustive one. He therefore proceeds to analyze plot, because plot is also a formal cause and one that more fully accounts for the essence of poetry. Maritain and 55
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Gilson are guilty, in other words, of making too crude a division between the mere material stuff and the more profound formal qualities that define the fine arts. McInerny's thorough analysis of plot-form shows us that it has every right to be treated as a formal, and therefore an essential, cause of the arts. Further, according to Plato and Aristotle alike, it is form that constitutes the essential intelligibility of things: When we know the truth about something, we know its form. In vindicating plot as a form, McInerny explains how it should be that the fine arts serve as a way of knowing. As Atkins indicates in McInerny's dialogue, we often sense that the forms of works of art do not just shape our understanding of human action; they shape our understanding of what is in the final and foundational sense of that word. To offer one example: In a poem of religious devotion, the language may give voice to pure expressions of praise. It will imply a story certainly, but it also reaches beyond narration to pure vision. Many works of art seem to begin in the story-telling condition of human life and yet reach beyond it. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to presume that even the most clearly narrative arts, such as film and the novel, offer themselves to contemplation exclusively in their moral dimension. These are, as it were, world-building fictions, that inevitably speak not only of human actions but of the metaphysical stage on which those actions stand. Some works of art may lead us to act differently, but most of them call us merely to see better. McInerny does not deny this, but he does trivialize it. In this, McInerny follows the late James Seaton, who argued that theories of the fine arts are divisible into Pla56
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tonic and Aristotelian schools. The Platonists give art a metaphysical breadth that Seaton finds implausible; the Aristotelians give us an account of the fine arts assigns them a "humbler" place as a branch of moral philosophy. In this, Seaton and McInerny err. Happily, we do not have to make such a choice. Everything that McInerny says about mimesis can be true and find its place within the metaphysical account of poetry that Plato offers. It can and must be given such a place, for only if what Plato says is true can we understand the nature of the relationship between the work of art and reality on which mimesis depends. For too long, modern theories of the fine arts have paid attention to form to the exclusion of the essential role of mimesis. McInerny has corrected this and in a definitive manner. My concern with McInerny's account, however, is that it may lead his readers to underplay the contemplative and formal dimensions of the arts. This could lead to the kind of crude didacticism we find, say, in the early pages of Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy. With that substantial reservation stated, McInerny has given us a great gift, one that will help us all to understand better the nature of the arts in themselves and as a way of knowing.
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EXCAVATING FREUD by Martin Cothran Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind Frank Tallis St. Martin's Press, 2024 pp. 496, $31.00
The figure of Sigmund Freud occupies a curious place in our culture. There was a time not too long ago when Freud's name still very much occupied our popular consciousness. His personal profile has slipped somewhat over the last several decades, but if his name is not as widely recognized, his ideas continue to permeate our thought unrecognized. These ideas now form a part of our corporate unconscious, a fact that probably would not bother him, given that his privileging of the individual unconscious was one of his most important and longest lasting ideas. As Frank Tallis points out in his new book Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind, our very language betrays his continuing influence: the "libido," the "Freudian slip," "repression," "denial," as well as the various inferiority, superiority, god, guilt, martyr, and Oedipus complexes. We still use the vocabulary, though we have largely forgotten its origin. And, of course, there is the idea of the "unconscious," which, we believe, underlies and dictates much of what happens in our conscious mind. All these concepts and beliefs operate like a computer operating system, behind our explicit understanding of ourselves and our culture, mostly unrecognized, remnants of the great system Freud attempted to construct to help us understand ourselves. 58
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Anyone who was exposed even secondhand to the popular culture of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s will remember how Freudian terminology made its way into every crevice of popular culture. I remember my own mother, born in the late 30s and raised in rural Georgia and who never even graduated from high school, talking about people being "inhibited" or someone being "anal retentive." It seemed an unusual vocabulary for a Southern girl who grew up on a farm. She had a tenth-grade education, and although she wouldn't have been able to connect these ideas directly with Freud, she would have recognized his name. A patient reclining on a couch in an office, the "doctor" sitting at its head, his legs crossed and a clipboard on his lap, is an image with which everyone today would be familiar, and just one of many ways in which Freud and his ideas have become a universal reference point. Although many of Freud's ideas have been problematized at the hands of his more contemporary peers, they are still accepted by our popular culture, and many of the fundamental aspects of the structure of the Freudian system itself endure. We still believe that our past experiences haunt our present and that we can cure our present ills by uncovering our past; that the unconscious dominates our conscious mind; that we go through particular stages of psychosexual development; and, perhaps most fundamentally, that all our behavior is explicable in psychological terms. Not only did Freud attempt to uncover the secrets of the human personality, but his theories about what those secrets were themselves affected our personalities. Tallis explores the psychology behind the psychology of 59
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a great psychologist and how it has affected everything after it. There are other books about Freud's thought—Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist being perhaps the most compelling—but what sets Mortal Secrets off from many other treatments is its emphasis on history and biography. It places Freud on the couch and analyzes his beliefs in light of his own past experiences and in context, much in the way Freud analyzed his own patients. To tell this story completely, Tallis must first explain the historical and cultural context of Freud's thought: Vienna in the first decades of the twentieth century, thriving, vibrant, morbid, and decadent. Freud didn't invent the fixation on sex; he came by it honestly. Vienna was, like many centers of culture, outwardly prosperous and inwardly corrupt. The author skillfully invokes the life of the time, its social structure and its daily routines. He devotes a whole chapter to the culture of the coffee house and the central role it played in Viennese social and professional life. His most salient observation is the prevalence, amidst evident material prosperity, of depression and suicide. Freud's rise as an authority on the soul was aided by a strange cultural development that, though strange, we would recognize today in our own popular culture in our implicit desire to be told constantly what is wrong with us: what the author calls the "allure of nerves." In short, mental illness, once discovered and discussed, became fashionable. "Nerves," says Tallis, "would become the defining feature of Vienna's golden age" (69). The author cites Empress Elizabeth as the first exemplar of the fashionably diseased. There were many more. 60
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So raging a phenomenon did this become that Vienna became history's first destination for "health tourism." To visit Vienna to determine how sick one was, far from being something to be hidden, became something to be proud of. The strengthening associations between luxury, leisure and illness began to shape the Viennese vision of what a mental hospital might look like and what services such an institution should offer. (73)
Many members of the royalty became famous also for being psychology patients, and this "faith in neuroticism" was quickly appropriated by contemporary artists who, undoubtedly attracted by its novelty, connected it also with the burgeoning interest in the artistic rendering of sexual themes (the "concupiscence of sickness," 82). They began drawing and painting emaciated nudes, one famous example of which, a disrobed and anorexic female aristocrat, is portrayed with her hips and bony arms thrust to the side, in a pose familiar, the author points out, to anyone who has seen a model making her way down the runway at a fashion show. It is a way of standing that we have seen reproduced in the fashion sections of countless contemporary magazines—and it is still imitated by supermodels when they pause at the end of catwalks. (82)
It is part of what the author terms the "dark glamour" that still characterizes what now passes for high culture. "[I]t became quite difficult to determine how much of this odd behavior was attributable to nerves and how much was simple affectation" (85). Sickness became styl61
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ish; affliction was all the rage. And there was also suicide, which had its own chic. Freud was original in many respects, yet many of his theories had their origins in the psychological work of others. In the early 1880s, after experimenting with hypnotic therapy to mixed results, Freud turned his attention to the work of his colleague Josef Breuer, who had developed his "cathartic theory" as a treatment for hysteria. Breuer had worked it out with a particular patient, who would be induced into an altered state of consciousness and would then begin to tell stories. The patient (Bertha Pappenheim) called it her "talking cure." It encapsulated "a radically modern idea: that illness can be talked away … Trapped feelings were being released, which was why he called his new treatment the cathartic method" (55). He would later, says Tallis, settle on the term "psychoanalysis" for this method (68). Though he claimed the treatment to be successful, Bertha relapsed five years later. Freud took up Breuer's therapy with the later famous "Anna O," who created her own label for this treatment: "chimney sweeping." The "cathartic method," Tallis tells us, "was only modestly successful." But it was the idea, shared by both Breuer and Freud, that the revelations of their patients under hypnosis also had symbolic significance that was perhaps the most consequential aspect of the cathartic method. "Traumatic experiences, sexual or otherwise, are related to intolerable thoughts or feelings that become separated from consciousness and converted into symptoms. These symptoms are usually, but not always symbolic." The stories told by Bertha and Anna O not only meant what they said, but meant what they didn't say. 62
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Their symptoms were "meaningful": "They could be understood as somatic memories or symbols that could be interpreted" (57). Recovering traumatic memories and "strangled emotions," having been "repressed," were to be "reintegrated" and "the unity of mind … restored" (64–65). In this way, the patient was made whole, all by calling up the memories and bringing them to light. It was a process that Tallis characterizes as "excavation," and the author makes much of the fact that Freud grew up at a time when archeology was much on the conscious minds of Westerners. Freud "stressed the importance of digging down into the mind by comparing psychotherapy with 'excavating a buried city'" (65). Freud saw himself, says Tallis, as "more an adventurer than a man of science" (283). Heinrich Schliemann was discovering the gold of Troy, and Howard Carter was opening King Tut's tomb. The treasures of the past were literally coming to light, and we were unearthing the history of past civilizations. "[A]lmost every aspect of psychoanalysis," says Tallis, "was influenced by classical literature and archeology" (282). Freud viewed his own psychological discoveries in this context, and thought he could use them, as we many times used history, to tell us something significant about ourselves. In this way Freud turned upside down how we thought about ourselves: There were thoughts underneath our thoughts and it was these that were significant. By digging them up and studying them, we could understand ourselves better. Not only were discrete past events relevant to our present condition, but they revealed a story. And, in fact, 63
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Freud "had borrowed the techniques of poets and novelists in the service of science" (67). Almost all of Freud's conclusions were derived, not from what we would now call "scientific research," but from sets of observations put in an attractive narrative scheme. He was classically educated: "Freud was taught Latin and Greek at school, introduced to classical literature around the age of nine, and his earliest heroes were the military giants Alexander the Great and Hannibal" (283). His office was filled with his collection of classical and archeological oddities. And these images and the stories behind them fed his narrative view of the world. The classical stories, as well as those from other cultures which were making their way into the European consciousness, became templates for his theories, very few of which were tested or testable. The Oedipus complex—the idea that boys of a certain age are sexually attracted toward their mother and develop hostility toward their father, which feeds into their attitude toward authoritative males—was simply his own observations and beliefs about certain relationships seen in light of a classical story. The Oedipus story did not dictate the theory, but it did provide a convenient mold in which to cast it. This provokes the question of whether such a heuristic is fully adequate as an explanation. Freud clearly seemed to think so. Freud himself was cognizant of the question about whether the case histories upon which almost all his theories were ultimately based might lack "the serious stamp of science." They were too enjoyable. He subsequently defended his work 64
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by arguing that the kind of writing used by novelists to describe the inner life of characters was exactly the kind of writing necessary to illuminate the inner life of patients. (66)
A theme running through Tallis' treatment is a skepticism of the scientific basis of his theories, a skepticism that, though critical, is not dismissive: Freud was so convinced that he was discovering fundamental truths that he wasn't overly concerned with the quality of his evidence. This is hardly what we expect from a man of science, but it is possible to be right about something in the absence of evidence. (143)
His interpretation of his cases and the conclusions he drew from them were more akin to literary interpretation than to anything like the interpretation of laboratory data. The Oedipus complex is but one example. The "data" he gathered from his sessions with patients he viewed as having symbolic meaning, and he delved into these views using methods more akin to what might be expected from a literary critic than any kind of scientist. As the author points out, Vienna was a gathering place of secret societies, ceremonial orders, and seances. Freud may have been susceptible to these influences. Psychoanalysis resembles mediumship, insofar as it involves relaying messages from the unconscious rather than the afterlife. (160)
This criticism is given credence by one of his methods in particular: the interpretation of dreams. Dreams have been thought of throughout history has having meaning and 65
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were often viewed as prophetic phenomena. They could predict the future and their interpretation could reasonably be considered an occult activity. Freud himself wondered whether they could predict the future, but focused on what they could tell him about a patient's subconscious mind. Tallis explains the doctor's interest in the interpretation of dreams with an ironic anecdote: "After his father's death … he decided that he needed to see a psychoanalyst. The problem, however, was that he was the only one" (97). Unable to occupy both the doctors' chair and the patients' couch, his solution was the interpretation of his own dreams. He proceeded thereafter to use the method on his patients. Again, it involved excavation. He believed dreams were a subconscious expression of wishes, and he focused specifically on the latent content of dreams (what was not remembered) rather than their manifest content. For Freud, once again, the hidden aspects of things are the most significant. But how a person's innermost thoughts can be structured in accordance with a system of symbols of which the patient is completely unaware and, in most cases, which the patient might not understand even if explained to him, is never addressed—by Freud or the author. The patient's mind, according to Freud, has a life of its own. But here again, Freud's thought can be seen in the light of classical thought. It was Plato's account of the soul in the Phaedrus, after all, the author observes, which could be seen as Freud's inspiration: The soul is like a chariot being pulled by two horses with contrasting dispositions, one noble, the other 66
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base and impulsive. Therefore the charioteer must be sensitive to their conflicting natures if he is to steer the chariot successfully. (254)
For every criticism that could be leveled against Freud for occult methodologies, there is a classical analog that could serve just as well. Tallis' weighing of Freud's religious beliefs yields a paradoxical figure: A man to whom "being Jewish was central to his sense of self" was also "an implacable enemy of all religion, including Judaism" (299). Despite this, the author points out, Freud was quite interested in religion as a psychological and cultural phenomenon. He viewed religion as a form of wish fulfillment, but no less self-deceptive for all that. Culturally, Freud saw Western religion as having suffered from three great blows: the Copernican inversion which took away man's central cosmological position, the Darwinian inversion which viewed man merely as an advanced animal, and, finally, his own inversion of the conscious and subconscious. And, of course, there is also Freud's interest in the problem of sex. Tallis wryly observes that the ostensibly prudish Victorian Era turns out to be a golden age for such interests. There have been popular criticisms that imply that Freud's theories are the result of his own personal obsession with sex, but the evidence is not clear and in any case it doesn't get us any closer to properly weighing their truth. We know that he considered sex the "strongest and most primitive" of impulses (65), and could not be ignored if he wanted to pursue an understanding of his patients and be able to help them. 67
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Clearly Freud made great strides in understanding the phases of sexual development, and here too his conclusions were a mix of the observational and the mythological, but Tallis questions how much of what Freud managed to glean about sex is supported by evidence and how much is subject to verification. Rieff does perhaps the best job of fully assessing Freud as a serious, profound, ingenious, and substantial intellect, whatever may be the validity of his theories, although he discusses those too. There is a reason Freud was one of the three or four most influential thinkers of modern times. What Tallis' book does is place the man and his theories on the couch, their past brought forth and examined for the purpose of understanding them better. My chief complaint is the index. Indexes seldom get any love, but a serious book should have a serious index. Where is "complex," "interpretation," "education"? And "science"? How does that word not make it in? And where are the titles to his books? They are missing completely. This is not a critique of the author, but of the publisher, who, despite this fault, we are still grateful to for publishing the book. Freud's theories range from the plausible (the "id," "ego," and "superego") to the fantastic (the Oedipus complex). What strikes you about Freud is his penchant to think big. Whether you agree with him or not (the author of Mortal Secrets gives him mixed reviews) the scope of Freud's project was impressive: the excavation of the modern mind, the uncovering of the things that make us who and what we are. If you don't agree with him, the author sug68
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gests, you should at least be impressed, if not by all that Freud discovered, at least by his intellectual ambitions. Tallis' book comes at a point in modern history when the practical interest in Freud has cooled, and his theories have lost the kind of hold they once had on the Western mind, which makes him less dangerous when he goes wrong, and allows us to appreciate, at a more comfortable remove, the real insight of much of his thought. Freud is one of those thinkers whose answers one should treat with suspicion, but whose questions are questions we should all be asking. Modernity (unlike post-modernity) is characterized by grand themes and great projects to be conducted in order to explain the world. Freud's psychological conclusions have their place in the pantheon of Great Theories, but their significance lies less in whether they adequately explain why we think the way we do, than in how he was able to think of them at all.
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A NOTE ON PHAEDRUS 251A–E by Michael Yost for my wife
At first, there was a moment, quick with pain Marked off from prior silence, future's reign Of possibility. And then a single White feather sprouted from the flesh, to mingle Hot blood between each yielding, waxy tine. The dorsals grew, and started to combine Their nascent airiness with nature's weight. All this because the light, affiliate Alone with its own self, shone here in this Particular participant in bliss. The sculptured shadows falling round her arms, Her profile carved against the room; those charms Shown by her body to my open eyes Had waked the long forgetful soul, that lies With seedling wings in its half fertile soil. And now those wings unfolded, fledged. Their roil Spread out across the soul's circumference, And lifted it through shivering wheels of dense And spectered fire, to recollect and know Some still and half forgotten shape whose glow, Though muted somewhat by the steep descent Of Mansoul through the world, was permanent As smells that silently will ring, impress Upon the mind, with their own changelessness The force and speed of time's relentless change. And just as bird's wings open, float and range Upon the empty certitudes of air So was my soul upon the gusts of bare 70
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Desire lifted. I was brought to know The inward substance of that outward show Of flesh's movements, animal and sleek, So tangible, and yet so passive, weak Before sensation, pressure, love, or piercing hate, And all invasions that will not abate; Surrounded by its context like a sea, And souled in it. Yet what becomes must be, And so in this framed cutting of the now, That is eternity, I felt just how A passing thing can move and be forever Still, a thing that time may melt or sever Yet never quite destroy. I will recall, And then my memory enfleshed, and all Alive with living light will co-create You in the New Jerusalem's estate, Not in the Byzantine machines of gold That some have dreamt, but in our own ensouled And utter flesh; what love shall we make there Where bodies dance to reason's classic air, By One, with One, in One never forgotten? What fruit will then be plucked? What fruit begotten? Then shall my soul disclose, in close embraces Your soul's closed maze, unveil its secret places. I'll know what you have known when you have wept, And every bitter treasure you have kept, And see them all transformed into our joy, In that unending, limitless envoi. For Dido and Aeneas, as they lay Beneath the gods together in their play Knew not each other as, in time, we will Beneath that Mind that moves and yet is still. 71
CLEARED AWAY by Dana Gioia Around the corner there may be a man who shop by shop, block by ruined block, still sees the neighborhood which once was here, who, standing in the empty lot, can hear the vacancies of brick and broken glass suddenly come to life again, who feels the steps materialize beneath his feet as he ascends the shattered tenement, which rises with him in the open air— story by story, out of memory, filled with the smells of dinners on the stove and the soft laughter of the assembled dead.
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MUSIC TUNES JUSTICE: A Defence of Music and Poetry in Plato by Amanda Joske
I
t's a new academic year, and the planning templates are out. Educators have been deliberating over the content of their curriculum for the upcoming year. Literature choices have been sifted and narrowed down according to need. Is it age appropriate? Are the themes and content suitable? Will the characters be relatable? Does the plot engage the reader? The selection process matters. Teachers know that students need to have something worth reading. As each text is appraised, many are discarded. The censoring process seems harsh, but no one thinks to eliminate books and reading entirely. Teachers realise the power of inspirational stories, chosen at the right time, for the right purpose. In the same way, Plato describes Socrates in the Republic, designing curriculum for youths who would become the guardians of his "ideal State."1 Socrates, too, was faced with the dilemma of what reading and listening material would suit his charges. At first glance, it seems as if poetry and music—the basics of Greek education—are viewed by Plato in a negative light, for he has Socrates censor, and ban, most of the traditional education provided by them (377). Upon closer inspection, however, it can be argued that Plato actually endorses both poetry and music because of the essential and positive role they play in developing the passionate aspect of the guardians' souls. 1. All translations of Plato are by Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892). 73
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Poetry and music will be examined independently, as they are presented in Books II and III of Plato's Republic. I will first examine the restrictions that Socrates places on the poets, including what he eliminates from his ideal curriculum, and why he makes such choices. After outlining the prosecution of poetry, we will hear her defence. By drawing upon evidence from Plato's other works, I will demonstrate that he intends poetry to be used as a moral vehicle to move readers out of the mundane and lead them to contemplate divine truths. Next I will examine the role of music. Several modes of music will be explored, as well as the related instruments and cult practices of the time. Although it seems that he is dismissive of most musical forms, Socrates nevertheless insists that music is essential to the education of the youth. Plato, stressing the importance and power of music to bring about change, highlights that music does more than strike the senses; its rhythms penetrate deeply into the soul, where it modulates the passions and allows the guardians to experience well-ordered emotion. Ultimately, music and poetry, used together as Plato suggests, have the capacity to lead the guardians to become philosophers who have their souls tuned to justice.
Music Education: Poetry When planning curriculum for the guardians, Socrates begins by reviewing the tradition of story-telling. He emphasises that stories should not be carelessly selected, for children could receive into their minds incorrect ideas, which could form patterns of negative behaviour. Pointing out that even the greatest story-tellers of mankind, namely Homer and Hesiod, had written poems 74
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which contain faults, Socrates proposes to censor or discard much of poetry's content. When questioned about the faults of poems, Socrates asserts that his greatest objection is that the poets did not represent the nature of gods and heroes correctly (377). Most of what was known about the gods of ancient Greece came from descriptions made by the poets. Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus determine that a god must be thoroughly good, do no harm or evil, be perfect and unchangeable, and never lie or deceive. The poets' tales, unfortunately, portray gods who can't be trusted and who fight and argue, rebel against their parents, disguise themselves, and commit evil deeds such as adultery, rape, and murder (378–385). Since Socrates' aim is to raise guardians who are just, upright citizens, his pursuit is a moral one. He is conscious that if their youthful disciples are expected "to honour the gods and their parents, and to value friendship with one another," then allowing them to hear of the gods acting unjustly, quarrelling and warring in heaven, would be counterproductive (386). The children may take such stories literally, for they would be too young to understand the allegories within the poems. Exposing the guardians to the current literature would be giving their young charges a false view of reality. It could lead them to imitate the corrupt actions of the characters by believing that the behaviour, coming from gods and heroes, is acceptable. Next, Socrates points out that poet's narratives expose heroes' weakness and promote a fear of death. Future guardians, whose task will be to defend the city, need brave heroes to emulate. If they listen to Achilles weep75
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ing and wailing and Priam begging and rolling in the dirt, or if they hear about the horrors of Hades, children may be in danger of losing their courage and fearlessness (388). How can they be expected to face death head on, when their own heroes do not? So far, Plato, through the dialogue in the Republic, has attacked the subject matter of poetry on ethical grounds. Acknowledging that poetry is the universally recognized teacher of the Greeks, "Plato's indictment," according to James Adam, "is not that poetry does not teach," for indeed her methods are extremely effective, rather, that her traditional precepts are "demoralising and degrading."2 Although Socrates insists that the existing content must be censored for the city's guardians, poetry itself should remain, with poets commissioned to compose new work containing models of virtuous thoughts, which proves that Socrates does not disapprove of poetry in general, but only the moral effect of the poetry popular in Athens at the time (378–9). Next, since Socrates is conscious of the effect poetry has when it mimics reality, he unpacks her various styles to see where imitation is used most. Socrates explains that choral hymns, where the poet narrates in third person, lack imitation, whereas pantomimes, such as tragedy and comedy, are completely imitative, for the characters speak in first person, assuming the roles of heroes and gods, and taking on their voice, gestures, and dress. Epic poetry is a combination of the two, for sometimes the poet speaks as 2. James Adam, The Religious Teachers of Greece (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1908), 10. 76
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narrator, and other times he gives the characters their voice (393–4). Although Socrates points out that "indeed the pantomimic … is the most popular style with children," and that the mixed style of epic "is also very charming," he is not judging poetry based on its literary form (397). Rather, he needs to determine whether imitation, in any of its forms, should be allowed in the city. Since the guardians' sole purpose is to "dedicate themselves wholly to the maintenance of freedom in the State," Socrates concludes that guardians should hear poetry from the stricter poets, who imitate the virtuous only (395, 398). Imitation of any other kind would distract them from performing their job properly. Later, in Book X of the Republic, Socrates revises his stance. Socrates unpacks the definition of imitation, and uses it as a premise for banishing all imitative poets from the State. Imitation, he argues, does not require any true knowledge. Using the analogy of a bed, Socrates first shows that one can conceive the idea of a bed in the mind, because of the many encounters with true beds before. The combined knowledge of all the individual beds that have been experienced is used to give to them a common name and "assume them to have also a corresponding idea or form" (596). The carpenter, familiar with the universal form of a bed, can construct a bed from the pattern he has of it in his mind. He truly knows beds. A painter, however, upon noticing the bed made by the carpenter, is able to paint a copy of that bed, without necessarily having any real knowledge of the essential nature of beds. The painter uses his art to 77
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imitate things, not necessarily as they truly are, but as they appear (598). As Carleton L. Brownson notes, the copy-cat or "mimetic artist, therefore, has little to do with truth. He can imitate many things, based on his surface level encounters."3 Socrates, then, likens poets, who are also imitators, to such painters. Although he previously admitted poets who imitate virtue into the State, Socrates' concern now is that those very poets may only be copying what appears to be virtue, rather than emulating true virtue. Moreover, Socrates indicates that the imitative poet, when performing at public festivals in front of an immoral crowd, is not likely to choose to play the part of a rational, principled character, for this will not be the most popular option. Rather, the poet will choose the passionate and fitful temper which, "awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings" (605). By doing so, reason will be overpowered and weakened. So Socrates, resolutely, though somewhat reluctantly, asserts that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men will be the only poetry permitted. Within a hair's breadth, however, Socrates, perhaps regretting his decision, provides a loophole to retrieve poetry from her exile. Admitting that his own education had implanted a love of poetry, which inspired him, Socrates states, Let us assure our sweet friend and the sister arts of imitation, that if she will only prove her title to exist in 3. Carleton L. Brownson, "The Reason for Plato's Hostility to the Poets," Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 28 (1897): 9. 78
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a well-ordered State we shall be delighted to receive her.… I propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but upon this condition only—that she make a defence of herself.… And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on her behalf: let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States and to human life … for if this can be proved we shall surely be the gainers. (607)
Therefore, following the advice given by Plato through Socrates' voice, the argument shall proceed by hearing poetry's defence. As William Chase Greene points out, Plato himself is an artist endowed with a profoundly poetic spirit, one who "never wearies of quoting the poets," so there is no better authority to consult than the various works of the philosopher himself.4 It is important to remember that Plato writes in dialogues, and dialogues themselves are dramatic. Although his own thoughts are often reflected in the actors of his dialogues, a subject such as poetry, imbedded in reasoned discussion, may be presented in different and often contrasting lights, according to the context and the plot of the dialogue. One particular scenario does not necessarily reflect Plato's ultimate views of poetry. His works, therefore, should be taken as a whole, in order to reveal his true convictions concerning the value of poetry.5 In the Ion, Plato has Socrates echo the belief, generally held by the Greeks, that many poets do have access to the truth given to them by divine revelation. He empha4. William Chase Greene, "Plato's View of Poetry," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 29 (1918): 1. 5. Ibid., 3. 79
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sises that all noble poets compose their beautiful poems not by the art of imitation, but because they are inspired. Reverently, the poet is described as a "light and winged and holy thing," who is not able to craft his tales unless the Muses stir him to speak (534). Such beautiful poems give utterance to thoughts that are more precious than that which could be the work of man. Unlike the human poet, who writes about the mundane without contemplating higher truth, the inspired poet receives truth directly from the gods. Next, within the dialogues of the Phaedo and the Phaedrus, Socrates discusses the struggle of moving past the bodily senses to the acquisition of knowledge by thought and reason. He proposes that the patterns for true beauty, goodness, justice, holiness, and all other forms are imprinted upon the soul before birth (Phaedrus, 249– 250). Socrates notes that not all souls easily recall these universal truths. If a soul has been turned to unrighteousness by a corrupting influence, it may have lost the memory of the pure things which it once saw. Through the senses, however, a knowledge of these patterns can be recollected. By repeated encounters with objects that manifest a form, a process of remembrance occurs, until the form can be apprehended by the mind (Phaedo, 75). Socrates uses the example of beauty to explain this process. Beauty is one universal pattern that can be clearly seen in many particular instances on earth: in a sunrise, in a work of art, in nature. When a soul sees "the beauty of the earth, [it] is transported with the recollection of true beauty" (Phaedrus, 249–250). By conveying literary images of what has previously been felt by the senses, inspired poetry has the capacity to provide a bridge be80
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tween the material world and the guardians' ongoing thought and reasoning processes. Greene notes that, "Reality can be apprehended only by thought, yet we live in a world of sense; poetry can be approved only if it helps us to pass from sense to thought."6 In the Symposium, Plato unpacks the education of a virtuous man via the use of poetry. Diotima claims that poets are men who are more creative in their souls (209). Having the seeds of wisdom and virtue implanted within them as youths, the poets are inspired and conceive those things which are proper for the soul to contain, with the greatest wisdom being temperance and justice.7 Desiring to share their wisdom, the poets seek after beauty, and when they find a well-nurtured soul, they will speak to him of virtue and the nature and pursuits of a good man. By having their disciples touch beauty, which is ever present in the poets' minds, the poets endeavour to educate their charges. They teach them to become familiar with each particular beautiful thing and to beget beautiful thoughts, so that they might recognise, comprehend, and love the pattern and form of beauty. Rising from the world of sense to the world of pure thought, the student will be moved to identify the superiority of beauty within a soul, the beauty of laws, and the beauty of knowledge. Contemplating the vast sea of beautiful things, the disciple's fair and noble thoughts will grow into the boundless love of wisdom, until at last, the essence of beauty, in her true and eternal form, is revealed to him (209–210). 6. Greene, "Plato's View of Poetry," 66. 7. Ibid. 81
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Garnering the insights taken from Plato's various dialogues, it can be seen that the champions of poetry have much to say in her defence. Because the poet is believed to be divinely inspired, he has access to truth and thus has the capacity to genuinely imitate virtue and other universal forms. In order to ensure that his poems convey truth, the poet will choose particular examples, such as those permeated with beauty, which bear a likeness to their essences. He will use such likenesses repeatedly, in different ways, to move the hearer toward the recollection of universals, and ultimately wisdom.
Music Education: Rhythm and Melody Returning to the Republic, with the poetic component of music education finalised, Socrates moves to consider her counterparts, specifically harmonies, rhythm, and melody. Following the pattern set out in the debate over poetry, Socrates first addresses the topic of subject matter. Just as he had censored any of poetry's content which did not exalt gods and heroes or which eroded a guardian's courage and fearlessness, in a similar manner, Socrates now seeks to prohibit any modes of music which would do the same. In Plato's day, a number of various musical harmonies had been identified and were named after the regions in Greece and Asia Minor from which they originated, including the mixed or tenor Lydian, the full-toned or bass Lydian, the Ionian, the Dorian, and the Phrygian. The various modes of music each evoke a certain mood or atmosphere, those built on minor scales having darker and more tragic atmospheres, and those formed along major scales providing happier, more uplifting moods. 82
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Socrates considers wailing and lamenting to be unbecoming for the character of the guardian of the State, so he banishes the Lydian mode, which accompanied feelings of woe and pensiveness. Socrates refuses to permit, on moral grounds, the Ionian mode, often used in banquets and festivities where drunkenness and indolence reigned (398–399). The two modes that Socrates allows to remain, the Dorian and Phrygian, are kept because the provided, "the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the fortunate, the strain of courage and the strain of temperance" (399). Socrates desires a harmony that can be used in perilous times to evoke a fighting spirit. The Dorian mode, in particular, exhibits this quality. Being built on a minor scale, it conjures dark, mysterious, and uncertain undertones. Unlike the other minor scales, however, the Dorian mode inspires bravery, strength, and resilience, giving the listeners a sense of hope and optimism. The Phrygian mode also conveys tension, foreboding, and drama, but because it is built on a major scale, it is intense and lively. Next, Socrates addresses the various instruments which would best suit the rhythm and melodies accompanying the songs of the State. He shuns the aulos (a double-flute) and the "many-stringed, curiously-harmonised instruments" (399). This seems to be a response which rejects the "New Music" revolution that had taken root in Athens, whereby the traditional musical practices were gradually being replaced by new innovations.8 Historical8. Nina Valiquette Moreau, "Musical Mimesis and Political Ethos in Plato's Republic," Political Theory 45, no. 2 (2017): 198. 83
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ly, music had played an essential and ethical part in the justice and politics of ancient Greece. Lycurgus, Sparta's legendary lawgiver, had asked the lyric poet Thales to lay the foundation for Sparta's laws with the orderly quality of his songs, and later when the city was in a state of unrest, an oracle proposed that the lyric poet Terpander restore order with his lyre. "Music [had] the same intrinsic properties as law, namely, the capacity for order, establishment and restoration."9 Its role was always subordinate to the poets: rhythm and harmony were "regulated by the words, and not the words by them" (400). Musicians, however, desiring their own recognition in musical competitions, began to experiment with panharmonic scales, new musical techniques, and variations of traditional instruments (such as adding strings and corners to the sacred seven-stringed lyre). This gave rise to the professionalisation of music, separated from lyrics, with the focus being to please the audience, rather than to convey what was "right and wrong."10 Also, certain foreign religious cults—such as the Maenads who worshipped Dionysos, the Thracian god of wine and revelry, and the Phrygian cult of Cybele—had infiltrated Greece and were known for their frenzied fervour and orgiastic rites, including falling into trancelike, manic states. The instruments often used in such worship were the aulos, the fennel rattle or thyrsoi, the cymbals, and the timpani drums. These rituals formed a "sharp contrast to the more characteristically Greek 9. Martin Litchfield West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 31. 10. Moreau, 198–9. 84
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myths of musical magic, which [revolved] around the use of the lyre and the voice, and [were] centred in calm rather than excitement."11 It is clear, then, that Socrates is reiterating his ethical compulsion that in an ideal State that is seeking to grow justice, the traditional modes of musical education should prevail, for they are ordered by reason. Next, Socrates returns to similar sentiments of the Symposium, as was seen earlier in poetry's defence. Here again, it is emphasised that the musicians, like the poets, should be able to discern the true essence of the beautiful and graceful. From their earliest years, the youths' senses are to be exposed to an abundance of fine and beautiful music. The musicians, like the poets, could then draw the soul of the guardians into a likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason. Such music would be like a breath of fresh air from a purer region, and would nourish and supply every good thing to the children (401). Plato understood the power of music, especially when administered early on in the guardians' education. Although he has Socrates censor certain harmonies and instruments that create discord, his dialogue after such banishments leaves no doubt as to his belief that music plays a positive role in moving the affective experiences of the guardian toward justice. He states: [M]usical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which 11. Edward A. Lippman, "The Sources and Development of the Ethical View of Music in Ancient Greece," The Musical Quarterly 49, no. 2 (April 1963): 189. 85
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they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad. (401–2)
Finally, if we turn to one more additional dialogue, the Timaeus, we capture a breathtaking glimpse of Plato's understanding of the depth of music's connection to the soul, one that provides a complete paradigm shift. Here, he poetically describes the creation of the cosmos, made by a divine craftsman known as the Demiurge. Not only is the process beautifully intricate, but it is also potentially perplexing, so for the sake of brevity, I will provide a simple and rather crude summary. Essentially, the Demiurge arranges the various planets of the cosmos, so that they conform to the pattern of justice, all in right relation to each other and moving without interfering with each other, according to their own unique orbit. The positioning is ordered via a specific sequence of mathematical ratios. Pythagoras used these ratios to cut different lengths of string, which would then vibrate at different pitches. He delineated the ratios as a musical scale, and this scale created a harmony that was ideally suited to the hallowed seven-stringed lyre.12 It is music based on the harmony of the cosmos 12. Ian Leask, "Performing Cosmic Music: Notes on Plato's Timaeus," REA: A Journal of Religion, Education and the Arts, no. 10 (2016): 18. 86
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which penetrates the soul and can be used to tune the soul to justice. Thus "the human being is regarded, quite literally, as a micro-cosmos."13
Conclusion When Socrates creates his ideal State in order to seek and defend the nature of justice, he turns first to the musical education provided by poets and musicians. Initially, it appears that he holds a negative view of their contributions. Ultimately, however, he is restricting only certain aspects of poetry and music in order to maintain justice, for he does not wish for the appetites and passions to subvert or enslave reason. Through his other various dialogues, Plato provides the defence needed for poetry and music to return from exile. He shows that for justice to exist within the soul, each respective part needs the freedom to properly play its role, while also respecting the roles of the others. Sometimes that means allowing the affective sphere to be moved by poetry and music in order to come into alignment with the forms.
13. Ibid., 20. 87
"THE EYES OF MY HEART"; OR, HOW TO PAY ATTENTION: Augustine's Relational Self by Kate Parker
T
he faculty of attention is the wisdom of a ready heart. The question of what to properly attend to—how to pay attention, and to what—has echoed throughout my adult life in a dull and numbing throb. I have attended to media, to politics, to bureaucracy, to the thin and twisting threads of most modern relationships. Desperate for substance, I've made myself the problem. I've read self-help books on how to put web blockers on your smartphone so you don't miss the sunset, how to optimize your calendar so you can make time to see the stars, and how to simplify your life so that you can lose yourself in the meditative kneading of sourdough bread. Desperate to absolve myself, I've also made the world the problem. I've lamented the loss of my ability to read long novels in a single sitting, to dissolve hours in joyful contemplation and conversation, to dive into questions of purpose and place rather than skim the surface of a life. I've traded poetry for memes and letters for texts. But, I consoled myself: At least I knew what I had lost. That I might turn my eyes toward what is meaningful, good, true, and real in the world had, frankly, never occurred to me. Not because I lacked the capacity for such attention, but because I simply didn't know where, precisely, to turn "the eyes of my heart." Different ways of seeing and knowing seemed obviously present to others but inaccessible to me. I began to feel imprisoned by 88
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my attachments to ephemera and simulacra. With a few very notable exceptions, my world seemed increasingly narrow and confined. And I can say it honestly did not occur to me that this was because the world was not, in fact, mine—and that any thoughts or actions that suggested so would only serve to tighten my chains. When I picked up the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo for my first class at Memoria College, I did not expect, in any possible way, that the spiritual struggles of a man who lived almost 1,600 years ago would imprint themselves so deeply on my mind and speak the untold whispers calling home my wayward heart. So, what should we properly attend to when we seek freedom from ourselves? What is the relationship between our faculty of attention, our obstinate will, and the possibility of liberation from self-imposed chains? What leads us to sanctity? What tears us from it? Augustine grapples with these questions in Book VIII of his Confessions as he contemplates the nature of the will and the path to conversion. The moment of conversion has received rich treatment in scholarship on Augustine, and scholars such as Phillip Cary argue that "Augustine's inward turn is first and foremost a way of directing the mind's attention."1 In what follows, I trace how Augustine's particular notion of attention comprises responsiveness to both external objects and the imaginative, inner self. Further, one does not necessarily precipitate the other, but both are engaged in a kind of dialogue that shifts his attention from the strict dualism of interior and ex1. Phillip Cary, Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 63. 89
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terior knowledge. Augustine's moment of conversion is not exclusively a turn toward interiority and the finding of God within, as is often argued, but it is also a new understanding of materiality, based on his interpretation of signs of God manifested in the world, that fully breaks his chains. Cary situates Augustine at a critical juncture between earlier, ancient ideas of selfhood as public and external, governed primarily by social roles, and a developing Christian Platonism that posits a self governed, instead, by its internal states: its will, desires, and sin. Augustine, he says, "invented the concept of private inner space"—a technology of inwardness. This new technology opens up a "whole dimension of being that is our very own, and roomy enough that we can in some sense turn into it and enter it, or look within and find things there."2 This "roomy" inner self will lay the groundwork for the individualist thread in Western philosophy and, later, the field of psychology. For Augustine, Cary claims, personhood was not, as it is now, an immediately obvious site of introspection and self-awareness. Rather, the narrative that emerges from the Confessions—that of a complex, inwardly divided being healed by grace—is wholly new and unexpected. In many ways, I am convinced by Cary's arguments— certainly, Augustine's Confessions narrates a repeated and almost compulsive search for what can be shifted within in order to radically change one's orientation to the exterior world—how one consciously behaves and acts. In Book VIII, Augustine grapples with the nature of 2. Ibid., 3. 90
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the inner will as it relates to his desire to serve God and in some sense "publicly" convert to Christianity. As is common in the Confessions, Augustine's language establishes, painfully, the primacy of his individuated self by emphasizing his "I": When I was trying to reach a decision about serving the Lord my God, as I had long intended to do, it was I who willed to take this course and again it was I who willed not to take it. It was I and I alone. But I neither willed to do it nor refused to do it with my full will. So I was at odds with myself. I was throwing myself into confusion. All this happened to me although I did not want it, but it did not prove that there was some second mind in me besides my own. It only meant that my mind was being punished [for the sin of Adam].3
Although clearly grappling with his separation from God, Augustine is also testing a new sense of whole personhood that will distinguish his thought from that of the Manichaeans, who view human nature as possessing "two opposing wills," good and bad (173). Augustine comes to reject this proposition on two premises: (1) that two such wills, springing from "two opposing substances and two opposing principles" (174), are mutually exclusive and can never be reconciled, and (2) that the mind is divisible in the first place. Instead, he posits a single mind that grapples with multiple fragmentary wills that compete for his attention and demand his ac3. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), 173. All quotations of the Confessions are from this edition. 91
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tion. Wills are thus mechanisms by which we pursue particular actions—whether desires or prayers. To illustrate this problem, Augustine imagines a situation in which his mind is simultaneously divided between four conflicting desires: (1) to go to the circus, (2) to go to the theatre (with a performance held on the same day), (3) to rob a house on the way to either of the first two, or (4) to abandon the other options altogether and commit adultery instead. This situation is, of course, absurd, but Augustine uses this thought experiment to theorize a critical distinction between desire and action: "These possibilities may all occur at the same moment and all may seem equally desirable. The man cannot do all these things at once, and his mind is torn between four wills which cannot be reconciled" (174). Each will is directed toward its corresponding desire; as the number of wills fluctuates day by day—even moment by moment—in response to desires, there cannot be a fixed dualism of good and evil will; wills precipitate, but are not equivalent to, action. Actions are limited in a way wills are not. And this same model of fragmentary wills can apply to good and sanctifying desires and their attendant actions as well, such as contemplating beauty, speaking prayer, or seeking God. While wills are by nature fragmented, multiple, and conflicting, Augustine posits the potential for a single act of will to be channeled in one focused direction, with all fragments fused into a whole, into one powerful desire: "All these different desires … are in conflict with each other until he chooses a single course to which the will may apply itself as a single whole, so that it is no longer split into several different wills" (175). This single 92
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whole unites the will with the mind and the body, shaping external behaviors as well as internal thoughts. Right thoughts become right wills which become right actions, and the inverse is true for wrong thoughts. Stated otherwise: What we contemplate becomes our desire becomes our choice. Thus it is ultimately the will that must be controlled before Augustine can make his final act of conversion, "where the light of confidence flood[s] into [his] heart and all the darkness of doubt [is] dispelled" (178). Although Augustine drew heavily from Platonism in forming his understanding of the will, there is an important distinction here when it comes to the faculty of attention. According to Charles Taylor, Augustine's "developed notion of the will" differs from that of Socrates, who sees "our desire for the good [as] a function of how much we see it" whereas "for Augustine the will is not simply dependent on knowledge."4 Taylor's reading is supported by Augustine's example of the fractured and competing single will that struggles to overcome "two radically different moral dispositions." In Greek moral philosophy, Taylor summarizes: "The teleological theory of nature … supposes that everyone is motivated by a love of the good, which can be sidetracked to evil through ignorance (the view that Plato attributes to Socrates) or distortive training and bad habits (Aristotle)."5 For Plato and Aristotle, therefore, objects of contemplation or bad habit either facilitate or hinder the "love of the good," which is the singular and comprehensive te4. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 137. 5. Ibid., 138. 93
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los of philosophy. For Augustine, however, knowledge of the world can lead to sanctifying or destructive actions not simply on the basis of knowing which is right. One must also master the will, which is achieved only through grace. Taylor calls this "the doctrine of the two loves" in Augustine: We love God and we love sin, and "these two directions of attention are also two directions of desire."6 It is a matter of tipping the balance fully in God's favor, which is, for fallen, sinful man, an impossible task requiring the supernatural intervention of grace. While the choice Augustine will make between his sin and his God is certainly the most salient and anticipated moment in Book VIII—the act of conversion is clearly the climax of the text—I consider this scene as an extension of the thought-will-action model I outlined, that is, continuous with it, rather than its rupture or resolution. I argue that Augustine's representation of the fractured will as a destructive impulse of the pleasure-seeking body is mirrored in right action with a unified will that draws the body closer to the inner self. In both forms of action, thought and will are inseparably joined and neither are sufficient to completely eliminate the other. It isn't simply right action—drawing inwardly toward the right "love"—that sanctifies and renders whole. In the scene of conversion, grace is the marriage of the world and the soul, the object and the subject—filtered, significantly, through the "eyes" (outwardly oriented) "of the heart" (inwardly oriented). Only when Augustine perceives the material and the eternal collapsed into a single "course" 6. Ibid., 137. 94
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for his will can he truly convert. He experiences this supernatural grace as he flees into the garden, the penultimate moment prior to his conversion. As Book VIII comes to a climax, Augustine turns his attention entirely to interior conflict and the turmoil of the mind. He describes "mere trifles," "paltry inanities," and "all [his] old attachments" as "pluck[ing] at [his] garment of flesh" (175). The "lower instincts," as he calls them—his unshakable love of pleasure—join memory with corporeality. As he recalls each, the pleasure is distorted into the pain of having his flesh "plucked." Cary, writing about the previous book, argues that "it is moral uncleanness, the culpable love of bodily things, that hinders [Augustine's] vision, like an impurity or disease in the eye."7 Cary describes his imaginative conjuring of past deeds using a corporeal metaphor: a disease of the eye. This is in part because Augustine himself relies heavily on the language of vision to illustrate his final rejection of sin. In Book VIII, Augustine has begun to collapse this distinction between the imaginative and the corporeal. It is now the recollection of things "so sordid and shameful" that serves as a worldly barrier between Augustine and his God, with these voices once again "stealthily plucking" at his flesh and "trying to make [him] turn [his] head" (176). The voices pull and tug at his body while he approaches "the barrier" where he turns what he tellingly calls "the eyes of my heart" toward a second creative vision: "the chaste beauty of Continence in all her serene, unsullied joy … modestly beckon[ing] me to cross over and hesitate no more" 7. Cary, Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self, 64. 95
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(176–7). Continence instructs him to close his "ears to the unclean whispers of [his] body, so that it may be mortified" (176). She invites him to purge his "unclean" body by the physical act of mortification, the subjection of bodily appetites through inflicted pain. Augustine is at the precipice of conversion and in his agony collapses body and vision, so that it is unclear (perhaps even to Augustine) what, precisely, is seen or felt. Does he physically experience the "plucks" at his "flesh," or is this pure metaphor? Do his bodily eyes see Continence, or is this vision purely creative? What do the eyes of his heart gaze upon? Cary would read this moment figuratively. He summarizes Augustine's lament in earlier chapters: "if the soul was only pure enough to see itself and understand what it was already doing, then it would not seem so inevitable that every form of existence must be bodily and spatial."8 And yet here what seems inevitable is that every form of existence is both bodily and spiritual. As the soul purifies, suggests Continence, so must the body, the ears, the eyes. Or rather, sanctification is as much a purge of bodily sin as it is a proper "turning," as Taylor says, "[i]n the image of the eye of the soul … the doctrine that the power of seeing doesn't have to be put into it; rather it just has to be turned." He concludes that "the struggle is over the direction of our gaze."9 Where, then, should Augustine (and, by extension, his reader) direct his gaze? Continence may be said to stand in for what Taylor calls "the vision of cosmic order"—drawing from the 8. Ibid., 65. 9. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 129. 96
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connection he posits between Augustine and Plato— which is "the vision of reason, and … the good for humans involves their seeing and loving this order." He says that the soul, which falls victim to "the human absorption with the sensible … must be swivelled around; it has to change the direction of its attention/desire." But he sees Augustine breaking with Plato: "[I]n agreeing with Plato about the pivotal importance of the direction of our attention and love, Augustine alters the balance between these in what turns out to be a decisive way." Taylor concludes that, in Augustine, love entails a particular kind of attention.10 I want to pause on this insight and investigate the scene of conversion, which, as I read it, would complicate Taylor's conclusion—that love of God transcends the "human absorption with the sensible"—in intriguing ways. As Augustine is on the precipice of conversion, then, he is engaged full-throttle in an inner war between the voices and the vision. We know this "wrangling" is inward and silent because he again uses that "I" language, underscoring that it is "with myself, in my own heart, about my own self" while Alypius waits "silently" by (177). As we've seen, the imaginative language he uses to describe this spiritual torment continuously references the inescapable torment inflicted on his body, but no physical action (in the external world) takes place until Augustine runs from the scene: I probed the hidden depths of my soul and wrung its pitiful secrets from it, and when I mustered them all 10. Ibid., 128. 97
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before the eyes of my heart, a great storm broke within me, bringing with it a great deluge of tears. I stood up and left Alypius so that I might weep and cry to my heart's content, for it occurred to me that tears were best shed in solitude.… So I stood up and left him where we had been sitting, utterly bewildered. Somehow I flung myself down beneath a fig tree and gave way to the tears which now streamed from my eyes, the sacrifice that is acceptable to you. (177)
He runs from Alypius as he has run from the voices. He has now "mustered" all his "hidden" sins before "the eyes of [his] heart," and this culminating vision drives him to action. He seeks solitude and to offer God a sacrifice that is at once bodily and symbolic: his tears. As he sits in solitude, a new voice is heard, but it is not imaginary this time—this time, it emerges from his physical surroundings. He hears children say "take it and read," and is moved to take a second action from this "divine command" (177). This sign is emphatically not generated from within; in fact, he has turned his attention so keenly to the world around him that he is able to hear singsong voices—he, in fact, leaves open whether these are actually children or some divine chorus—over both his sobs and his hateful "plucking" voices. He hears the words externally to himself, and then interiorizes them as a sign. He then reaches for his Scripture—again, a physical, material object that is also simultaneously symbolic—and in his reading of Romans "it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled" (178). He has converted. The intrusion of the material world, which reaches him in time and space and through his body, stands in 98
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for the unintelligible sign of God. I differ from Cary, here, who states that "what stood fast for [Augustine] … was the conviction that some sort of turn to the soul was necessary, because God could not be found in the world of bodies."11 I would say this is precisely where God is, ultimately, found. Augustine's inner mind is wrangled together in pain and hope. It is the clear voice of God speaking through the body of these children that precipitates his "turn to the soul." As Augustine reorients his soul, so does he also reorient his body. I also read as significant in the text's climax of conversion that Augustine joins the physical and the spiritual together through his transcendent encounter with Scripture. He recalls: "I marked the place with my finger or by some other sign and closed the book" (178). What, exactly, marks the passage? It is his body (his finger) or "some other sign"—a mysterious, ephemeral object lost to memory. Body and soul, entwined in mystery, unite as he internalizes the passage. And the Scripture itself is inscribed in a physical book (we are reminded he needs to mark the passage by his finger) but it has shifted everything in his soul: "You converted me to yourself, so that I no longer desired a wife or placed any hope in this world but stood firmly upon the rule of faith" (178). Thus the moment of conversion is as driven by signs in Augustine's exterior, physical, spatial world as it is his soulful, spiritual, transcendent inner world. It is, in fact, the convergence of the two—a sacramental communion of the material and the eternal. In Catholicism, sacramentality is the use of physical signs to communicate divine grace to human beings. 11. Cary, Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self, 64. 99
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Augustine's moment of conversion can never be fully interiorized because it is dependent on visible, sacramental signs of God's presence. At the critical moment of conversion, Augustine is led to reconcile the material and spiritual worlds—it is an insight that conjoins two realms that had been mutually exclusive. Augustine had been attempting to renounce the physical world entirely, but is led, instead, to a conversion of vision in seeing the physical world as a means of encountering God's presence. He had been seeking to purge himself of his physicality entirely; he is now reoriented to see that bodies can be contemplative, good, and work for the greater glory of God, and they must be inhabited as the world is. This is the sacramental encounter that is found especially in the Eucharist. This one moment serves as a microcosm of the alignment between self, world, and God, which finally aligns his thought, his will, and his action. He can finally stop struggling with what has held him back: the perceived division between higher and lower, eternal and temporal, soul and will, truth and habit. The higher part of our nature aspires after eternal bliss while our lower self is held back by the love of temporal pleasure. It is the same soul that wills both, but it wills neither of them with the full force of the will. So it is wrenched in two and suffers great trials, because while truth teaches it to prefer one course, habit prevents it from relinquishing the other. (175)
This passage, I think, extends rather than contradicts Taylor's initial insight because it illustrates how Augustine's "true latent knowledge … overlaid by all sorts of 100
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false images" finally seeks resolution: "To dissipate these distorted appearances and get to the truth, [he has] to draw out the implicit knowledge within (which also comes from above)."12 I would simply undo the parentheses here. Augustine's latent knowledge is both implicit within and the result of intervention "from above"—represented in the text by the intrusion of a singsong voice, the unexpected God in the world. Positing Augustine's conversion as a collapsing of the spiritual and the material contributed to my understanding of the philosophical significance of Augustine's narrative of conversion in a number of ways. First, it opened up some nuance for me in understanding Augustine's position in the history of ideas that lead to the modern, individuated self. Understandably, Augustine's attention to his interior world has been the subject of much criticism. Taylor, whom I've cited throughout this paper, considers Augustine within a lineage that traces the language of inwardness from Plato through Augustine to Descartes and Locke. According to Taylor, Augustine "is the originator of that strand of Western spirituality which has sought the certainty of God within."13 He says: Augustine shifts the focus from the field of objects known to the activity itself of knowing; God is to be found here. This begins to account for his use of the language of inwardness. For in contrast to the domain of objects, which is public and common, the activity of knowing is particularized; each of us is engaged 12. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 136. 13. Ibid., 140. 101
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in ours. To look towards this activity is to look to the self, to take up a reflexive stance.14
In large part, my reading of Augustine would support Taylor's conclusion, as I argue that Augustine is often engaged in the imaginative conjuring of both memory and spiritual experience. But I do not see Augustine as purely taking "a reflexive stance" in his language of inwardness. He makes, Taylor says, a "step to inwardness … because it is a step towards God."15 And yet I see his most significant step toward God occurring not purely in the realm of thought, but in the sacramental joining of inner and outer world, which occurs when a childlike voice pierces his wailing despair and orients him toward the action of picking up his Scripture. I don't think that Taylor would necessarily disagree with this. Still, he overly emphasizes the inward-turning aspect of Augustine's new spiritual confidence: "The proof turns on the insight that reason recognizes that there is a truth which is criterial for it, i.e., a standard on which it regulates itself, which is not its own making, but beyond it and common to all."16 In other words, Taylor asserts the primacy of Augustine's belief in the human potential to discover within ourselves a truth that is not of us, not generated by us, but existing within us. My slight disagreement with Taylor can be illustrated by a brief contrast between Augustine's "proof" of God's existence with that of his successor (in Taylor's lineage), Descartes. I acknowledge both the historical and conceptu14. Ibid., 130. 15. Ibid., 132. 16. Ibid. 102
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al distance between Augustine and Descartes, but the importance of external action in Augustine's account serves to illustrate the extent to which Augustine's final moment of "proof" is as dependent upon the supernatural intervention of God in the external world as it is on his self-reflexive interiority.17 In his Third Meditation, Descartes writes that the perception of the infinite in me must be in some way prior to that of the finite: the perception of God, in other words, prior to that of myself. For how could I possibly understand that I doubt, and that I desire, that is, that there is something lacking in me, and that I am not completely perfect, if there were no idea in me of a more perfect being, by comparison with which I could recognize my own shortcomings?18
To paraphrase Descartes, he asks: How could I experience doubt and desire as imperfections if there were no perfect being to whom I must compare myself and find myself lacking? I do not disagree that Augustine can be seen to probe his mind in search of a similar question: Why are humans oriented toward the good if they are not created to be good? And Augustine's rejection of Manichaean dualism elsewhere would seem to make the embracing of Descartes' notion of a mind divorced from a body one he could not fully share. But the con17. Augustine's work has been called a "proto-cogito" by Étienne Gilson (cited in Taylor, 132). Gilson is not responding to Confessions but instead to Augustine's Contra Academicos, translated as Against the Academics and written in A.D. 386. 18. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Michael Moriarity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 33. 103
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trast that most interests me here is that Descartes casts his attention (his "perception," which he often refers to as a state of intense contemplation) to "the infinite in me," which is perceived prior to the "finite." For Augustine, however, the opposite occurs. It is the finite—the things of this world that will inevitably pass away, the voices, the book of Scripture—that attract his intention and inspire his contemplation. His "proof" comes from both an inward preparation to receive God's grace and also the external act by which that grace is delivered. Additionally, Augustine does not locate his understanding of a perfect being in a divided soul—a concept Descartes is able to coolly contemplate. Rather, the soul is agonizingly wrenched apart by competing desires, several wills, that subsume his thoughts and direct his actions. Augustine's conception of his own finitude and his imperfection is deeply visceral and sanctifying at the same time. His form of contemplation is passionate and characterized by spiritual (and emotional) instability. Other critics have seen Augustine's model of the mind as multiple—indeed, as a triumvirate, as trinitarian—as Augustine himself does. Matthew Drever, for example, has tried to account for the ways in which Augustine's splintered inner world has moved beyond the dualistic worldview of the Manichaeans by introducing a triadic model that traces (and helpfully contextualizes and extends) my own argument for the significance of Augustine's linear, internalized process of thought-will-action.19 Drever sees Augustine's concept of the self as gov19. Matthew Drever, "The Self Before God? Rethinking Augustine's Trinitarian Thought," The Harvard Theological Review 100, no. 2 (2007): 233–42. 104
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erned by memory, understanding, and will, which are critically not linear but overlapping and simultaneous as reflected in the Trinity itself.20 For Drever, Augustine's trinitarian thought does not move from the categories of the self to a description of the Trinity. Rather, the reverse is true: through a soteriological reversal, in which the self is first created and then reformed by Christ, the Trinity is the basis for the self.21
Rather than assert a Platonic origin for Augustine's concept of the relational and yet autonomous self, Drever instead seeks a "Christian doctrinal foundation" for Augustine's thought. Drever argues that Augustine models his concept of the self on the Trinity, rather than constructing a theory of the self as trinitarian via Platonic concepts of selfhood. In this way, Drever challenges the lineage of Augustine's concept of the self as proto-cogito and thus proto-Cartesian. As I've argued here, Augustine's understanding of selfhood is hardly coolly contemplative. Drever also notes that Augustine's species of interiority is not the "inner-Cartesian space of rational self-reflection."22 Instead, "It is an ethically charged space, opaque and treacherous as a result of human sin, wherein one is easily deceived and corrupted."23 I'm not in any possible way equipped to comment on Drever's repositioning of Augustine in either Western thought or Catholic theology, but his 20. Ibid., 235. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 239. 23. Ibid. 105
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work inspires my essay's second conclusion. Drever posits an unstable, relational self in Augustine that develops from his integration of an external model and is influenced by his model of the Trinity. Unlike Descartes, Augustine does not seek to invent or prove the existence of the self from scratch. He witnesses and internalizes it, Drever contends, from his contemplation of the relational interplay between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In these outwardly focused meditations, Augustine sees that self cannot be dualistic. The imaginative and embodied faculties of contemplation work together, rather than separately. I interpret Drever's description of the relational self as trinitarian as another instance of Augustine's attention to spiritual truths that are external to himself, and even these truths are also internalized in Augustine and become doctrine. The Trinity establishes a division that is also wholly One. In sensing the self as relational (and thus unstable, dependent on its interplay and interaction with the external world), Augustine reframes his concept of, for example, the higher and lower selves as dialectical rather than dualistic. And these several overlapping dialectics (higher/lower, inner/outer, material/immaterial) are often unresolved until the choice is made, as Augustine says, to channel our whole will into "a single course." It is ultimately what one chooses to attend to that shifts the balance of the dialectic in favor of the godly rather than the worldly. But they must always co-exist. As I, a new (and modern) reader of the Confessions, began to unravel Augustine's idea of the dialectical, relational self, I had to distinguish how this self differed 106
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from postmodern dialectics that are significantly more familiar to me as a student in the twenty-first century. It was absolutely critical for me to understand that— while Augustine clearly finds difficulty in fully resolving the conflicts between thought and will, and will and action—the ontological relations described are anything but arbitrary. Further, dialectical relations that emerge as a result of Augustine's concept of personhood do not ultimately reveal absence, or persist in negation, but instead suggest the potential for radical wholeness. The self in pursuit of a right relation, a balance between polarities, seeks a right order, or telos. The resolution to the dialectic occurs through the supernatural intervention of grace, enabling right thought, right will, and thus right action. The relation between several wills grappling with several desires settles into a stability that is the result of a single course. In better words, "our hearts find no peace until they rest in [God]" (21). I was inspired by this new understanding of Augustine's self as resisting individualization, pursuing right relation, and seeking outward signs of grace to consider how I spend my own light (to paraphrase John Milton)—to explore how what I choose to see and what I choose to pay attention to shapes what I am compelled to do and thus my actions themselves. A sacramental encounter with objects in the world is an expression of grace—including, and perhaps especially (given Augustine's account), the texts we read. But despite a lifetime of reading texts, I never attended to them in the way that Augustine intimates we should. I had rarely considered that "beauty" and "goodness" could be philosophical and theological forms of knowledge rather than descrip107
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tors—arbitrary descriptors, at that. I would have considered myself an aesthetic relativist: All that matters is that you think something is beautiful, whether or not it is inherently so. Although I had (often) been moved by both beautiful and good things—cathedrals, poems, compassionate acts—and I regularly found myself awestruck in front of oceans, mountains, and stars, something inside prevented me from seeing the world both natural and constructed as an expression of God's presence. Before my first class at Memoria College, I had honestly never heard justice defined as things being in their right order. I had only understood justice politically, not as a pathway to my place in the divine universe. So I was surprised as anyone could be when I, on a complete whim, signed up at the last minute to audit Professor Martin Cothran's class on the Western tradition on a warm and muggy June afternoon. I remember, quite vividly, entering my credit card to pay for the course and, at every keystroke, thinking: "What am I doing?" But I knew, deep inside, that I would find the guidance I had desperately sought my whole life if I could just trace the outlines of the intellectual tradition that had inspired and defined the faith of my ancestors—the roots of the rituals that shaped the life of my Polish grandmother, who, until her death in 2022, spoke Catholic prayers in quiet murmurs all day, taped pictures of saints to her broken kitchen clock, and, despite her own poverty, fed her neighbors almost every day of her ninety-eight years in this world. I had viscerally understood what she did, and I strove to live by her example, but I had no intellectual equipment to make sense of the God that ran through her veins by grace alone. 108
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Within weeks of signing up for Memoria College classes I was deeply immersed in the intellectual tradition I had never yet sought but always, I see now, desired. Learning to rightly orient myself around "proper objects of contemplation," as A. G. Sertillanges suggests in The Intellectual Life, truly invited my soul to breathe in a new world, to seek mysteries revealed only in sacred time, to take up my book and read. Like a person starving, I read the books for Dr. D. T. Sheffler's class and considered my responsibility as a scholar and teacher to, as Sertillanges says, "restor[ing] the order that we lack" through my work.24 To do this, I learned, we must believe that "in knowledge itself, in Christian knowledge, we have the stepping-stool which raises us a little towards God, so that we return to study with soul enlightened."25 What did I first see in Augustine that I now saw effortlessly everywhere? Sertillanges states: "Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea."26 I confess now to being passionately absorbed; I can no longer imagine a life devoid of objects worthy of contemplation, the experience of my small, still voice vibrating in the silence of sacred time. I still wonder—often as I settle in with some massive book on my lap—how I wandered into the "halls" of Me24. A. G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, trans. Mary Ryan (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960), 108. 25. Ibid., 32. 26. Ibid., 127. 109
The Eyes of my Heart
moria College, and why I would choose to spend my hours of leisure struggling through passages of dense text that I read over and over again for hours but from which I only seem to absorb a handful of words. Those words, however, shine in my eyes like stars. I wonder why I missed so many—so many—opportunities in my life to open "the eyes of my heart" to these constellations of wisdom and truth. How had I moved through the world in a fog, my faculty of attention dulled and gray? But at least I've begun to replace the question of what I'm doing here to asking a much better question, the kind of question that threads through a life: how I could have missed all this, every word, every page, every single star. Augustine, once again, provides the answer, and asks with singular complexity how one begins to see with "the eyes of the heart." Before you take up your book and read, you must first hear the song. And, then, every page will sing.
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