Islamic Philosophy of the Golden Age: Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Gazali, Averroes

History is not my strong point, largely because I avoided it on principle when I was younger. (My dad is a history professor, so I thought refusing to learn it would be funny.) One of these days, perhaps when I “finish” this reading list, I’ll take some time to learn who Hitler was and how many prime ministers we’ve had, but until then, I’ll remain rather blissfully ignorant. This caveat is necessary because the really fascinating part of today's post involves the history of the Arab world, which is pretty much a dead zone in my learning. So take the historical aspects with a grain of salt, and if there are any glaring errors in my claims, dear reader, kindly point them out.

Personally, I had never heard of any of the philosophers from today's post before compiling my reading list. Whether or not this is due to my hilarious level of historical illiteracy, I would not be surprised if many of the names are unfamiliar even to reasonably well-read people. Therefore, I'd like to take a moment to give a quick overview of the basics of Islamic philosophical history before discussing the ideas of each individual philosopher. 

The details of the golden age of medieval Islamic philosophy (c. 9th - 12th century, AD) are quite incredible, due in no small part to the era in which the philosophers lived and the far-reaching implications of their work. While the works of Aristotle were lost to the West until a later date, his writings found their way to the Middle East. There, Aristotelianism inspired a wave of scientific exploration and discovery; the scientists of the time longed to use Aristotle's worldview to harness the powers of the world, to become true masters and proprietors of nature. Those were the days when alchemists and mystics worked side by side, when Plato’s philosopher-king seemed an ideal within reach, and when learning and erudition were prized above all. 

The first in the line of Aristotelians were al-Farabi and Avicenna, who married Islamic theology and Aristotelianism if not for the first time, at least in the most influential manner. This union precipitated, or perhaps was concurrent with, the development of a great deal of science under the influence of Aristotle – being adjoined to religion, science was in a sense “allowed,” at least until the criticisms began. Aristotelianism was accused of being against Islam, and the harshest blow was dealt by al-Gazali, an Ash’arite Muslim and mystic philosopher. By criticizing philosophy with the indisputable authority of Islam, al-Galazi took Middle Eastern society off the path forged by Aristotelianism and did irreparable damage to the scientific milieu.

Attempts were made to revive the flourishing of the Golden Age, most valiantly by Averroes, who defended Aristotelianism from al-Gazali and even declared that Avicenna’s thought was inimical not to Islam but to philosophy. But the damage had been done. Though Averroes found fame later on, as did they all, with medieval philosophers in the West who slowly rediscovered the philosophy of Aristotle, Aristotelianism never flourished in the Middle East again the way it did during the Golden Age. 

Al-Farabi

In the progression of important Islamic philosophers, al-Farabi is the first, and those who came after, especially Avicenna, are indebted to his interpretations of Aristotle and of the Qur'an. We will only discuss one aspect of his philosophy because, to be quite honest, his metaphysics went way over my head. I read it, and maybe I even understood it, but I can’t say anything interesting about it.

One idea that Avicenna borrowed and Moses Maimonides made his own is al-Farabi’s interpretation of prophecy. In his treatise on metaphysics, al-Farabi discusses the causes that are familiar to us from Aristotle (i.e., formal, efficient, etc.), and then moves on to the Intellect, even giving that topic a little neoplatonic flavor. It all leads to a question: how does the Intellect (that is, God's intellect) descend to us? Al-Farabi's answered that it is through prophecy.

However, prophecy can’t come to just any layman; rather, there is a hierarchy to human intellect and worthiness. Al-Farabi compares it to how an infant first gains basic perception, then understanding of his perception, and finally reason based on that understanding. For most, this is where it stops. As humans, we can use our reasoning skills to logically understand the world; such understanding is alien to, say, a young child who has not yet reached this stage. Similarly, al-Farabi argues that in order to receive prophecy, one must be at an even higher level of intellectual plane.

What is this higher level? Al-Farabi answers, the imaginative faculty. For just as uneducated children may sometimes show glimpses of understanding, so does the layman show glimpses of prophetic ability in dreams, which he claims are not irrational, but superrational, belonging to the realm of God. That is why the earliest forms of prophecy in the Bible, for example that of Joseph, involve interpreting dreams. Prophets then are very similar to philosophers, who have a more highly developed rational faculty than most, but lack imagination. And just as someone of shallow understanding may deny the truth of facts that he cannot comprehend, so too do men with a limited imaginative faculty reject the prophecies of men closer to God in intellect.

Avicenna

By training, Avicenna (pr: 'a-ve-sen-na) was a physician, and one of his most influential treatises is an early medical guide called the Book of Healing. In philosophy, he was the first to give religion "the hallmark of intellectual respectability." Among his most important contributions to Islamic philosophy is the distinction he makes between essence and existence. To Avicenna, essence and existence are ontologically distinct because the answers to the questions "What is it?" and "Does it exist?" may be different. Specifically, essence is prior to existence, a fact which he proves with his "flying man" argument: Consider a man who is suspended in space; he is unable to touch anything, including himself, and all his senses are effectively shut off: he cannot see, hear, taste, smell, or touch. Without any sense input, the man would still be able to affirm, "I am," his essence, on the basis of which he could then postulate, “I exist,” affirming his existence.

The importance of the distinction between existence and essence is that it allows Avicenna to prove the existence of God. The details are murky to me, but the argument is as follows: Essence is prior to existence, and moreover, existence is accident to essence; that is, existence is only possible, not necessary, for a given essence. (We can describe a unicorn’s essence – a horse with a horn – but cannot demonstrate its existence.) Moreover, existence is contingent not only upon essence, but upon any number of things; essence is required for something to exist, but it is not sufficient. Specifically, existence is contingent also upon the existence of other beings.

But if this is true, there would be an infinite regression of beings whose existence is contingent upon the existence of other beings, unless we posit a being whose existence is identical to its essence, i.e. God, so that we have a starting point. We can imagine it this way: a person is a twig on a tree. The existence of any small twig is dependent upon being part of a larger branch, but the existence of that larger branch depends on the existence of an even larger branch. There must then be some root to hold all these branches together; that root is God. This argument also conveniently frees us from the possibility that God, as the author of the universe, could have chosen not to create the universe. Since God's existence is identical to his essence, the trunk of our metaphorical tree exists, which then promotes the growth of subsequent, dependent branches.

Al-Gazali

Al-Gazali (also spelled al-Ghazali) is a much more interesting character to me than his predecessors. He was a Muslim of the Ash’arite sect, a group that didn’t believe in cause and effect per se. Ash’arites refused to acknowledge that there were immutable physical laws, i.e., laws outside the power of God to change. Instead, implicit in every action-reaction pair is God’s hand at work, and He reserves the right to change any reaction, for example, to cause a fire doused with water to grow as if fed gasoline. The answer, then, to the question of “Why?” was for Ash’arites like al-Gazali, “God willed it,” in the most literal possible sense.

Requiring God to be the sole causal force leads al-Gazali to an incredible conclusion, one that he in his time period could never have expected. Al-Gazali recognizes that though God is omnipotent, He cannot do what is logically impossible. It would be absurd, he reasons, to say that God could make a proposition equivalent to its negation, because it cannot be by definition. This extends not only to logic: God also cannot make black equivalent to white because black is by definition not white. That which is logically impossible is outside of the realm of God (as would the paradox of the stone be).

But hold on a moment. In moving from the world of logic (propositions) to the physical world (black and white), al-Gazali has opened the floodgates. Since, for example, mathematics is based on logical propositions, and physical science (in our sense of physics and chemistry) is based on mathematics, and natural science (again, in our sense of biology) is based on that, then conclusions in those fields are immutable truth with which God cannot interfere, according to al-Gazali.

Let us take a moment to recognize the problem this creates. At one point, Al-Gazali argues that the changing of Moses’ staff into a serpent is not outside the realm of literal possibility. He reasons that since things change state all the time – ice to water, dirt to mud – it is certainly possible that given the right conditions and sufficient time a piece of wood could change into a snake. So God could accelerate the process and make it happen instantaneously. And yes, before knowledge of modern chemistry and thermodynamics, this is plausible, if a little farfetched. But now? Now we know that the changing of a piece of wood into a snake is as absurd and illogical as equating black and white. By al-Gazali’s own argument, the staff could not have changed into a snake.

Al-Gazali’s argument, then, is still incredible, but leaves us in want. For by his own words, the miraculous would be impossible for God, because we as scientists have mapped the terrain of the natural world to such a degree that there is no room for deviation from physical laws. But then again, al-Gazali puts no stock in physical laws in the first place. As if preempting this argument, al-Gazali writes, “For if your faith is based on a reasoned argument involving the probative force of the miracle, then your faith is destroyed by an ordered argument showing the difficulty and ambiguity of the miracle. Admit, then, that wonders of this sort are one of the proofs and accompanying circumstances out of the totality of your thought on the matter; and that you attain necessary knowledge and yet are unable to say specifically on what it is based.” In effect, he is saying, There are things outside the realm of God, but if you spend all your time thinking about what God can’t do, you’ll miss all the things He can.

It is not difficult, then, to see that a man like al-Gazali would take issue with some claims of philosophers like Avicenna, who sought common ground between Allah and Aristotle. But it is more interesting not to dwell on the differences in their beliefs, but to notice the incredible amount of overlap in their worldviews. Al-Gazali, despite his extreme fundamentalism (as we might call it), was an Aristotelian who was simply trying to show the limits of philosophy. He believed that Avicenna had overstepped the bounds of what was possible with philosophy on only three points – the eternity of the world, the possibility of bodily resurrection, and whether God has knowledge of particulars or only of generals. Though he tried to refute these points on philosophical grounds, he more often than not ended up arguing on the basis of theology.

Al-Gazali was also a huge influence on Moses Maimonides, who is coming up soon. For example, Maimonides stresses that men must never learn what they are incapable of tolerating, and this idea is indebted to al-Gazali, although it seems it also has roots in Jewish theology. Al-Gazali talks about how different people are receptive to different levels of knowledge, facts, and truth, and how exposing someone who is not ready for a higher plane of truth can in fact discourage them. “It is therefore necessary, I maintain, to shut the gate so as to keep the general public from reading the books of the misguided [those who teach everyone the same information] as far as possible.” Not everyone is ready for the same information, and to help them, sometimes we must hide it from them. Again, we will deal with this in more depth when we get to Moses Maimonides.

Averroes

Averroes (a-‘vare-oh-ees) is the final philosopher in our chronology. An important philosopher in his own right, he is partially famous for his response to al-Gazali’s takedown of Avicennan philosophers (which was called “The Incoherence of the Philosophers”), titled “The Incoherence of the Incoherence.” Averroes, then, didn’t agree with al-Gazali, and in fact, was more of a hardened Aristotelian than even Avicenna; he felt that the latter gave in too much is theological considerations when he, that is, Avicenna, wrote his philosophical treatises.

Which is not to say that Averroes was some sort of atheist. In fact, he is often misunderstood in this regard, because the writings that made it to the West in the Middle Ages were his commentaries on Aristotle, which are rather divorced from theology, and not his proofs of the existence of God. He became known, then, as a naturalist, the “father of the theory of the double truth, according to which philosophy and religion can stand in contradiction” though he never held such a belief.

The similarities between Averroes and the other Islamic philosophers abound. For example, he asserts, “demonstrative truth and scriptural truth cannot conflict.” Since scripture calls for us to use our reason to understand God’s words, natural science, what he would consider “demonstrative truth,” can never run counter to God’s word, and vice versa. “For truth does not oppose truth but accords with it and bears witness to it.”

As Moses Maimonides will make painfully clear, there is a double meaning to scripture; allegorical and metaphorical meanings are there to hide a deeper truth, so that everyone, even the simplest people, can grasp the outer meaning (i.e., everyone can interpret scripture literally), but those for whom the outer meaning is not sufficient can search out and understand the inner meaning as well. Averroes, on the same topic, writes, “The reason why we have received a Scripture with both an apparent and an inner meaning lies in the diversity of people’s natural capacities and the difference of their innate dispositions with regard to assent.” He especially takes issue with al-Gazali calling al-Farabi and Avicenna unbelievers for holding different beliefs on the issues of bodily resurrection, et al. Those topics, Averroes argues, are not based in “fact” – that is, they have not been proven impossible with reason – and so al-Farabi and Avicenna are not unbelievers by definition, but only tentatively, until such a time as those beliefs are proven or disproven.

Stray Observations

I wish I could've found a place for this somewhere else, but I felt it deserved to be set off from the rest. A bold and rather cryptic statement from al-Gazali: “Believing presupposes understanding.” Really? The converse is (probably) true. Is understanding necessary for belief? This would follow from the notion that everyone should be educated at their individual level: teaching everyone the same esoteric knowledge would dissuade many from belief due to lack of understanding.

From the editors of my edition, regarding al-Farabi’s stance on prophets and prophecy: “According to al-Farabi, the various religions are a more or less close and accurate imitation or mimesis of philosophic truth. This means of course that there is no essential difference between monotheistic prophetic religions, though they can be distinguished and evaluated according to the degree of their approximation to philosophic truth.”

Al-Gazali: “The lowest degree of education is to distinguish oneself from the ignorant ordinary man. The educated man does not loathe honey even if he finds it in the surgeon’s cupping-glass; he realizes that the cupping-glass does not essentially alter the honey.” Cf. Augustine’s Egyptian gold.

The Arabian Nights, Part I

After a long chain of philosophy and other nonfiction posts, I'm glad to be writing about fiction again. This particular post took a while to write, but I'm happy with how it turned out and the conclusions I came to. At any rate, it seems like just yesterday we were reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses and commenting on his extraordinary, Matryoshkan narrative style. Alas, those days are behind us, but with today’s post, we are free to reminisce about Ovid as we consider his Middle Eastern counterpart, the beautiful Shahrazad, lying in bed with a husband whom she fears and a sister who fears for her. This post will only cover the older of the stories in the Arabian Nights. Several of the more famous ones, such as Aladdin and Sinbad, were not written until a few hundred years later, though they are usually included with the others.

The framing device, for those unfamiliar with the Arabian Nights, tells the story of two brothers, Shahrayar and Shahzaman, who are both kings. One day, Shahzaman discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him. Overwhelmed by blinding misery – the world “turned dark before his eyes” – he leaves his kingdom and his home to stay with his brother, Shahrayar. There, he keeps his sadness a secret until one day when he stumbles upon his brother’s wife and her maidservants engaging in a Bacchanalian, Ron Jeremy-esque orgy. At once, he is thrilled to realize that he is not alone in his misery and tells his brother everything that has transpired. Now, his brother is not like him; he is not prone to running from his problems in the same way. Instead, he kills his wife and, having utterly lost his trust in the fidelity of women, proclaims that he will marry a new woman every night and kill her in the morning before she has a chance to betray his trust. While this is completely reasonable, the women of his kingdom do not like the idea. However, Shahrazard, the daughter of the vizier, is the only one with the cleverness to do something about it. She devises a plan to keep him occupied at night with stories, ones that will end with cliffhangers so that he will have no choice but to keep her alive so that he can hear the ending, which is also known as the Lost approach to relevancy.

We will consider two main aspects of the Nights in this post. First, there is the matter of the storytelling. Whenever interesting narrative techniques crop up, there will undoubtedly be differing opinions about them. In this case, we have an interesting proposal by Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who suggested:

"every tale in The Thousand and One Nights begins with an 'appearance of destiny' which manifests itself through an anomaly, and one anomaly always generates another. So a chain of anomalies is set up. And the more logical, tightly knit, essential this chain is, the more beautiful the tale. By 'beautiful' I mean vital, absorbing and exhilarating. The chain of anomalies always tends to lead back to normality. The end of every tale in The One Thousand and One Nights consists of a 'disappearance' of destiny, which sinks back to the somnolence of daily life ... The protagonist of the stories is in fact destiny itself."

He argues that each story is precipitated by an anomaly of fortune or circumstance – such as the common trope of sudden confrontations with demons (in my edition; “genie” may be more accurate, although they seem more menacing) – rather than the actions or choices of any character. These anomalies of fortune "appear" or "confront us" because they, unlike the normal progression of fortune, are different and stand out in some obvious way. It is Fortune that acts, and we can do nothing but react and wait until the anomalies resolve themselves.

Second, there is the story of the two viziers. Since there are so many stories, we cannot address all of them directly – I’m not terribly interested in doing so, anyway – so we will just discuss the most intriguing of the ones I read. Aside from being one of the longest complete stories in my volume, it is also an incredible intergenerational saga, and I would not be surprised if it was an influence for later stories like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Sitting Pretty

Pasolini’s claim that Fortune is the protagonist of the Nights leads to some interesting conclusions. We should first be aware that if the filmmaker is to be believed, then the characters are kept in the dark about this fact. Fortune, to the residents of Shahrazad’s worlds, is not a character, but a menace. For many, fate has long ago determined their lot in life, and social mobility is impossible. Fortune has predestined some to a life of happiness and others to a life of suffering, and the lamentations of the misfortunate are painful:

“Reduce your toil, for gain is not in work. Look at the fisherman who labors at his trade… And sells [his catch] to a man who sleeps the night, safe from the cold and blessed with every wish. Praised be the Lord who blesses and withholds: this casts the net, but that one eats the fish.”

And again:

“Your livelihood is not in your own hands; neither by writing nor by the pen you thrive. Your luck and your wages are by lot… The wheel of fortune lowers the man of worth… Come then, O death, and end this worthless life, where the ducks soar, while the falcons are bound to earth.”

There is a recurring theme of the prosperity of the wicked at the expense of the good. (Also, notice Boethius' wheel of fortune.) This leads to an interesting consideration. If fortune is truly the protagonist, subject to anomalies like men in the world are, then people can come to misfortune even by living good lives. By following the righteous path, the one that is in accordance with nature, they are still not always safe, as if nature were not prescriptive, the way it was conceived by, say, the Stoics; rather, living in accordance with nature is more like being provided a roadmap: the paths are laid bare in front of you, but those paths are still subject the weather, potholes, construction, etc.

In spite of the difficulty of social mobility, fortune is not cast as the villain. Fate is “blameless,” and “not meant to be fair.” Though people may be irked by misfortune, they seem to remember that, in the grand scheme of things, “one day is troubled, one day fair.” Ultimately, it is they who, through their own actions, retain control. Thus, the weight of personal responsibility has never been greater than it is in the Nights. In Sophocles, for example, Oedipus is sickened by his actions and casts himself out of his kingdom for what he’s done; but as the chorus reminds us, the events were caused in no uncertain terms by Fate. Fate follows the family of Orestes in Aeschylus, and gods and men alike are subject to it in Homer and Virgil. Moreover, the story of Job and the Divine Comedy of Dante are both filled with the notion of retributive justice, fortune as reward or punishment.

Everywhere else, fate causes, it punishes, and it rewards; it is in control. But in Shahrazad’s world, it is not. Anomalies as Pasolini calls them force fortune to be almost human, and this seems to take away the ability to call fortune the arbiter of people's lives. Indeed, as one character is reminded, “’tis tit for tat; blame not just destiny.” Destiny is outside of our actions, not fully, but at least partially. We act – or react, as the case may be – to the twists and turns that fortune suffers. What an astounding conception. Indeed, we can hear this in the words that are repeated throughout the Nights: “We would be sitting pretty, if not for our curiosity.” Demons come and demons go, but our actions are always our own.

Behind the Curtain

But why personify fortune in this way? And why now? I would propose that it is because Shahrazad herself feels the weight of responsibility.

We must remember above all else that Shahrazad is telling these stories to a king who has made it clear that she is going to die. She has not found herself in this situation by an anomaly of fate, but by her own hand. As much as we emphasize how clever she is for coming up with such a solution, and as much as we may scoff at the king for being so easily fooled – hell, even Lost fans caught on after a few seasons – the fear of death is still real, and the sword of Damocles still hangs perpetually over her. Shahrazad is scared, and her fear leaks into her stories.

And this, to me, is what makes the Arabian Nights so powerful and a highpoint of storytelling. The stories themselves give no indication of Shahrazad’s fear. They are not punctuated by asides about her crying or anything silly like that. She always appears completely in control of the situation. But in her subconscious, the weight of her undertaking and the fear for her safety comes out.

The Two Viziers

Moving on, I’ll give a very, very abridged version of the Tale of the Two Viziers, because it’s long and complicated, and I don’t feel like recounting the whole damn thing. Essentially, there are two brothers, Nur and Shams, who are the sons of a vizier, and they get in an argument: They have agreed to marry two sisters, consummate the marriages on the same night, have a boy and a girl, and marry them to each other, thus creating some tightly knit but super creepy family. However, Shams feels entitled to a dowry for his imaginary son, and this leads Nur to leave the country in anger. Fate, however, works to their best interest. Nur has a son, Badr, and Shams a daughter, Sit, and when Nur dies, he tells Badr about Shams and the deal that the brothers struck so many years ago. While the son mourns his father, he encounters two demons who tell him that Shams has had a daughter. Badr, with the demons' help, travels to Sit's country, where she is about to be married to a hunchback as punishment for something. He ends up impregnating his cousin on the night of her wedding, but she doesn’t learn who he is. Her father, however, is well aware, and, upon discovering that his brother has passed, decides to go find Badr. During this time, Badr has taken up residence in Aleppo, and it is not until Shams arrives with Badr's son – 'Ajib, now a young man – and the two come looking for him that he recognizes them and agrees to go home, marry the wife he was intended to marry, and live a happy life.

The focus of the story is reconciliation, and although this fact alone makes the story interesting -- several generations are reunited after decades apart -- it is the means by which they are reconciled that make the story incredible.

The two brothers are reunited through their children, but their children are reunited only by them; specifically Nur is able to reunite Badr and Sit, and when they are separated again by the vicissitudes of fate, Shams reunites them a second time. Shams, in turn, would have been unable to reunite Sit and Badr without ‘Ajib, for it is because of ‘Ajib that Badr makes himself known.

The ending -- this is one of the few stories in the Nights with a satisfying resolution -- reunites three generations of the family. Nur and Shams are reunited only spiritually, since Nur has died; Sit and Badr physically; and ‘Ajib and his parents “socially,” we might say, since their family unit is complete for the first time.

Moreover, the reconciliations occur in chiasmus. Nur and Shams are the first to be separated and the last to be reunited, since, with Nur being dead, they cannot be truly reunited until Shams passes as well. Sit and Badr are separated secondarily and reunited secondarily; and 'Ajib, who grew up being teased for not having a father, is the first to find a complete family. I drew a diagram showing these connections, but I'm too lazy to upload it. Needless to say, the structure of the story is truly awe-inspiring, and if the story seems difficult to understand, it is only because of my hasty and shitty narration: the story in the Nights flows elegantly.


Stray Observations

• A vizier is more or less the king's right-hand man, but it literally translates to "one who bears burdens."
• Returning to the idea of endings, it is telling that the king, so desperate to hear the ending to Shahrazad's many stories, quickly loses track of which storylines have not been completed and only seems to remember what happened a couple days ago. Besides being an interesting account of the nature of memory, it probably also means that Shahrazad only needed to tell stories for a couple weeks before he forgot that he was going to kill her. 
• I found this passage particularly striking, and in particular the first few words: “Once in Damascus I spent such a night that time swore ‘t would never the like allow. We slept carefree under the wing of night till morning smiled and beamed with dappled brow, and dewdrops on the branches hung like pearls, then fell and scattered when the zephyr blew, and birds chanted the words traced on the lake, as the wind rose and the clouds the points drew." Once in Damascus... what a lovely phrase. It reminds me of the Nabokov story titled, "That in Aleppo Once..." 
• The world going black is another trope, occurring when people suffer great shock. Compare with Oedipus' self-imposed blindness.
• “The departure of my soul from my body is easier for me than my departure from your company."
• “He who says that life is made of sweetness a day more bitter than aloes will see.”
• A parallel to the Tree of Knowledge: the third dervish is in a mansion with 100 chambers. His lover, whose mansion it is, leaves and tells him that until she returns, he may go into all of the chambers except one. He obeys at first, but eventually finds himself entering the last as well. Recall Kafka: "There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return."
• About travel: “And if the sun stood in its orbit still, both Arabs and barbarians would tire of the sun, and if the full moon did not wane and set, no watchful eyes would the moon’s rising mark. If in the lair the lion stayed, in the bow the dart, neither would catch the prey, or hit the mark. Deep in the mine, gold dust is merely dust, and in its native ground, fuel aloewood. Gold, when extracted, grows much in demand. And when exported, aloe fetches gold.”
• “He was so faultless in character and looks that the deer stole from him their necks and eyes and every other grace.”

Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy

It’s been a long time since I last wrote, and I’ve been busy. Soon after writing my last post, I packed up and moved to Boston, where I started a new (read: real) job after a few arduous weeks of getting settled, which included acquiring furniture over the course of four separate, poorly planned trips to Ikea. My new location and job have both proved to be conducive to reading, and I’ve been lucky to find a few hours every day to read as well as some nice places to do so.

Having finished with Augustine, we now cross the hazy frontier from Antiquity to the beginning of the Middle Ages, and at that border is a Christian philosopher from Rome sitting in a prison cell, waiting for his death. In many ways Boethius’ story is the perfect symbolic way to begin this new era, since the philosopher of the previous period who most informs Consolation of Philosophy, Socrates, was also famously jailed and executed. And just as Socrates found philosophy to be a panacea during his imprisonment, so too does Boethius, who personifies Philosophy as his nurse and interlocutor.

Boethius is not best known for being a philosopher in his own right, but rather earns his fame in two ways. First, he is an envoy, a messenger carrying the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, of Cicero and Plotinus, across five centuries to the Latin-speaking West; he has been called the first Scholastic, and indeed it is through his translations and commentaries on Aristotle that many in England, France, and Germany first came to know of Greek philosophy. Second, he is an interpreter who took the densest Greek philosophy and made it pragmatic; he showed how the great ancient thinkers could provide comfort in difficult times. Though Plato and Aristotle are not impractical per se, Boethius makes them useful and applicable in a way that we have not seen yet; he's like that cool professor who teaches you to count cards as a way of applying probability. 

It is with this understanding that we should read Boethius: he is a man residing firmly in this world as well as a dedicated scholar whose understanding of philosophy finds solutions to some of the most difficult problems that plagued philosophers and theologians: theodicy – the problem of evil – and free will, the latter of which is given an extended treatment and an especially elegant answer.

Wheel! Of! Fortune!

Boethius began his career as consul – something equivalent to a Prime Minister – to the Ostrogoth rulers who overthrew the emperor of Rome and took control of the Western Roman Empire, but through a series of unfortunate events involving the unwise defense of one friend who was on trial for treason and betrayal by another, the once illustrious statesmen ended up in prison awaiting his death. It is not surprising, then, that Boethius is preoccupied with the capricious nature of fortune, a thread that we will follow in the next post on the Thousand and One Nights. “In all adversity of fortune, the most wretched kind is once to have been happy,” he laments. 

The regrettable passage from happiness to unhappiness is one that other philosophers have studied. We recall in Cicero discussions from Epicureans and Stoics alike that the truly happy can never lose his happiness, and here we see that theory put to the test. But there are still other accounts of reversals of fortune to which we can turn, the most prominent being that of Job. With his family, friends, and possessions torn away from him, he never really passed into unhappiness – which, in turning from the good, would have been akin to losing his faith – although he certainly struggled. We have discussed this elsewhere, so there is no need to belabor the point now, but we can recall that Job, despite some complaining, was ultimately rewarded for his faith – that is, rewarded for placing his happiness in the only true and secure location: with God.

While we may associate ill fortune with the work of a malevolent imp, we can see from the story of Job that fortune is up to the whims of God. After all, though Satan (or some adversarial being) challenges Job’s righteousness, it is God who makes the decision to remove all cause for Job’s piety. And although Job's friends believe in retributive justice, Job was not being punished; he was, to put it tersely, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Boethius, like Job, is certainly unhappy, and he has every reason to be. And in his unhappiness, he searches for comfort – or rather comfort finds him. In the Consolation, he does not call upon Nurse Philosophy; rather, she reveals herself to him. This, I think, is very important. Philosophy is not only a balm that we can apply, but a vaccine that manifests when we require it and without our intervention. For in our unhappiness, how can we be expected to find our own comfort? We must be prepared for it. “The readiness is all,” says Hamlet, and Boethius, the dutiful student, is ready.

"Good fortune deceives, but bad fortune enlightens.” Lady Philosophy tells Boethius that he must take the good with the bad, for, just as a farmer entrusts his livelihood to the earth, so must men who depend on worldly events for their happiness entrust their lives to Fortune and her Wheel. As my edition points out, this is not the first personification of the caprices of fortune as the turning of a wheel, but it is the most famous, being the source for later writers like Dante, who was a devotee of Boethius. The metaphor is particularly interesting because later on, God is referred to as the “still point of the turning world.” God, then, is at the center of the wheel, part of all, subject to none.

Goodness: The Re-return

Medieval philosophy, if Consolation is any indication, will be as concerned with the Good as classical philosophy was. So let’s give it another go: please, Boethius, tell us what the Good is. 

In discussing the varied pursuits of men, Philosophy asserts, “the only thing men desire is happiness.” This isn’t new. Happiness has always been seen alongside the Good, and Aristotle said that men wouldn’t do wrong if they were told it was wrong. Men desire, above all, the Good, and only through error do they pursue what is not good. Philosophy continues: “Each man considers whatever he desires above all else to be the supreme good.” So, in agreement with Aristotle, men in their hearts pursue the Good, but the Good which they pursue takes the form of whatever they desire most, just like the taco-alien from South Park.

And now we get something with a bit of Christian and Neoplatonic flavor. Philosophy continues: “Human perversity, then, makes divisions of that which by nature is one and simple, and in attempting to obtain part of something which has no parts, succeeds in getting neither the part – which is nothing – nor the whole, which they are not interested in.” A very nice thought, and one that is no doubt indebted to Plotinus. The Good is Unity, the One, indivisible, and hence our pursuits of money, fame, and the like are, to borrow Augustine’s favorite word, vanity. Though each is a shadow of the Good, they are ultimately only reflections of ourselves, not of any metaphysical truth. Being the good little chronological readers that we are, we should remember Calvino’s essay on Ovid and universal contiguity. The essential one-ness of nature is demonstrable, and it manifests before our eyes every moment of every day (if you don’t believe me, ask Emerson).

Ain't No Rest for the Wicked

Yet after all the dialectic between himself and Philosophy, Boethius is still troubled, and after being pressed by his nurse, he reveals the root of his misery. “But the greatest cause of my sadness is really this,” he says: “The fact that in spite of a good helmsman to guide the world, evil can still exist and even pass unpunished.”

Boethius wants Philosophy to settle for him the question of theodicy, how a just God (or whichever helmsman) can let evil prosper in the world. Philosophy’s answer is uncomplicated, surprisingly. She says that evil is didactic, there for our own personal growth: “It is in your own hands what fortune you wish to shape for yourself, for the only function of adversity apart from discipline and correction, is punishment.” (We would be wise not to forget Iago's speech: "'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.") 

She elaborates: “Now, there are two things on which all the performance of human activity depends, will and power…In the absence of the will, a man is unwilling to do something and therefore does not undertake it; and in the absence of the power to do it, the will is useless... So that if you see someone who wants to get something which he cannot get, you can be sure that what he has been lacking is the power to get what he wanted.” And: “Therefore, men’s power or ability is to be judged by what they can do, and their weakness by what they can’t do.” (We would be wise not to forget the next line of Iago's speech: "Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our will are gardeners.")

I’m with her for most of that, but we should perhaps hearken back to Augustine for contrast: "The mind orders the body, and the body obeys; the mind orders itself and it resists... If the will were a full will, it would not give the order that the will should exist, since it would already exist." When Philosophy asserts that “if you see someone who wants to get something which he cannot get,” he lacks power, we could interpret power to be power over his will and be okay, I suppose, but otherwise, I don’t buy it. Desire and will are fundamentally different, especially in the realm of the mind: if I want an ice cream, I can buy it unless I have am deficient of something (money), but if I try not to think about elephants, I’ll think about elephants no matter what.

Free Will-y

Anyway, back from this sidetrack: Philosophy establishes – more or less – that evil is didactic: to punish, to correct, to lead or lead astray. But Boethius correctly sees a problem with this. God is all-powerful, so shouldn’t he be commanding us? And if he’s commanding us, we don’t have free will, and if we have don’t have free will, we can’t be blamed for being lead astray or not.

Philosophy summarizes Boethius’ position: “You think that the necessity of events is consequent upon their being foreseen, while if there is no necessity, they cannot be foreknown, because you believe that nothing can be comprehended by knowledge unless it is certain.” This is to say that Boethius (and we) believes that if something is said to be foreseen, then it must necessarily happen, i.e. it has been predestined. So if God knows we will do something, then we no longer have the free will to choose to do it, because it has been foreseen. Similarly, if something does not necessarily have to happen, then no one can know it. Philosophy, however, makes a different argument: “Everything that is known is comprehended not according to its own nature, but according to the ability to know of those who do the knowing.”

Here’s where the elegance of the argument really comes in. Philosophy agrees with him on a superficial level -- that is, he has come up with an apparent contradiction, one that needs fuller consideration. She makes a long argument, which I believe I’ve summed up with the following example (nb: I read this and took notes on it a while ago, so I may have unknowingly stolen some of it from the text – if so, oops, my b):

Imagine a man in a dark room. He puts his hand to the wall and walks, tracing the curve of the wall to determine what shape the room is, and he decides by feeling that it is circular. During his walk, he could not have foreseen that the room would be circular -- it may have seemed to be, but could very well have curved wildly at any moment -- and therefore he declares that anyone who claimed the room was circular before walking the entire circuit was imposing necessity -- the necessity that the room was a perfect circle -- where there was none.

Now, imagine that later, another man enters the room, finds a light switch, and turns it on. He immediately sees that the room is circular without having to make a complete circuit. The room was free to curve as it saw fit – he did not impose his will on the room, nor did he have to follow the room to its end to have foreknowledge. It was free to curve, yet he had no problem immediately apprehending that it was perfectly circular.

We are the man in the dark room; God is the man in the lighted room.

This argument – both Philosophy’s and my example – relies on a Plotinian (I never get tired of that adjective) understanding of time: we humans experience time linearly, but God experiences it eternally, like the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five. Eternity, in that understanding, is the simultaneous experiencing of all time, all at once.

Stray Observations

• The text ends abruptly without Boethius' response to Philosophy, but I think we are to assume that it convinced him. To my mind, this is the only satisfying explanation I’ve heard putting free will together with predestination.
• Boethius has a complex conception of Providence and Fate, which are closely tied to free will. The former is “the simple unchanging plan in the mind of God,” and the latter is “the ever changing distribution in and through time of all the events God has planned in his simplicity.”
• “Perhaps, again, you find pleasure in the beauty of the countryside. Creation is indeed very beautiful, and the countryside a beautiful part of creation. In the same way we are sometimes delighted by the appearance of the sea when it’s very calm and look up with wonder at the sky, the stars, the moon and the sun. However, not one of these has anything to do with you, and you aren’t take credit for the splendor of any of them… They would still have been pleasing by themselves, even if separated from your possessions."
• The distinction is made between “intellect” (intellectus) and “reason” (ratio), which the translator chooses to explain by way of Thomas Aquinas: “Intellect (intelligere) is the simple…grasp of an intelligible truth, whereas reasoning (ratiocinari) ins the progression towards an intelligible truth, by going from one understood (intellecto) point to another. The difference between them is thus like the difference between rest and motion or between possession and acquisition.” CS Lewis is also quoted: “Man’s mental life is spent in laboriously connecting those frequent, but momentary, flashes of intelligentia [truth that can be simply seen] which constitute intellectus."
• Recounting the story of Eurydice and her lover Orpheus, who, after saving her from the underworld, disregarded specific instructions not to look at her, causing her to be pulled back into the Hades: “But who to love can give a law? / Love unto itself is law." Incidentally, I've never thought of the biblical parallels in this story. The most obvious one is that of Lot's wife looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah and turning into a pillar of salt, but there is also the savior descending from the world above to rescue someone from pain and torment. This is worth thinking about.

Depicting Disaster: Uses of Catastrophe in "24" and "Breaking Bad"

When discussing series finales, it is hard not to bring up the early 90’s program Dinosaurs. The series, a sitcom featuring anthropomorphic dinosaurs, has become infamous for its shockingly bad ending, wherein patriarch Earl realizes that his actions in the episode are directly responsible for a worldwide environmental catastrophe, triggering the Ice Age that, as the viewers are aware, contributed to the mass-extinction of dinosaurs. Though the show often addressed controversial topical issues, the decision to end a sitcom on such a bleak and uncharacteristic note was poorly received by viewers and critics alike.

As we approach the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad, I wanted to take a moment to consider an important episode in the series’ run, the second season finale, “ABQ,” and address the unique way in which it presents catastrophe. We will consider what the episode says about the intentions of the series as a whole as well as what it may say about the trajectory of the final few episodes. To provide contrast, we will consider alongside it another program that featured large-scale disaster, the suitcase nuke episode of 24.  

24 never shied away from big scenes. The notion of building an entire series around a perpetual ticking-clock scenario is nothing if not ambitious, and as the program continued, it repeatedly tested how much the audience would allow it to get away with. Though it devolved seamlessly from an innovative and challenging espionage thriller into a confused jumble of rehashed plotlines, it was in season six, episode four, that the show jumped the shark, when, after several seasons of teases and threats, the writers set off a small nuclear bomb in a Los Angeles suburb. Nuclear devices had been a fixture of the show since season two (there are only so many weapons a terrorist could utilize, right?), and while they had often come close to detonation, to actually use one on American soil during primetime to kill 12,000 people feels as egregious as having the protagonist of a Jurassic-based sitcom trigger the extinction of his entire phylum.

Yet I recall watching the episode with a sigh of relief. It wasn’t off-putting in the way the Dinosaurs finale seems to have been, but rather the only logical next-step for the show; after all, Chekov’s gun must eventually be fired. Showing more undetonated nukes would make the audience see them as an empty threat, a death warrant for a show structured around unrelenting suspense. Once the idea had been planted in the audience’s minds, the writers’ hands were forced; in the words of Nelson Muntz, “Gotta nuke something.”

I’m focusing on the writers of the show not because I have any idea about their creative process, but because their fingerprints are so present on the detonation scene. What should have been a moment of unspeakable evil and terror became little more than, “Did you see what they pulled off on 24 last night?” Which is not to say the writers should be vilified for this: it was an incredible episode. But because it was so incredible – in the sense of unbelievable – it felt hollow, like a Pyrrhic victory. They had won the title of ballsiest episode of television, but at what cost?

In contrast to the brashness of 24, Breaking Bad in its early days did not aspire to grand scenes of action. It has always been a slow burn, one that occasionally built to big payoffs, but just as often to quiet victories and heartbreaking loss. Before diving into an analysis of “ABQ,” let's get the spoilers out of the way and review for those who need a refresher. Walt is on the precipice of becoming a big-time drug manufacturer. He meets with Gus Fring, who tells him to ditch Jesse as a partner because he is not the businessman that the two of them are. Indeed, Jesse is laying in his apartment, strung out on heroin with his relapsed-drug-addict girlfriend, Jane. When Walt goes to Jesse's to get their money as a capital investment, Jesse is passed out and Jane, asleep, begins to choke on her own vomit. Walt goes to help her, but, seeing her as an obstacle to his partnership with Jesse, chooses to let her die. The next morning, her father comes to check on her and finds her dead. Devastated, he makes her funeral arrangements and then, not wishing to sit at home and stew, returns prematurely to his job as an air traffic controller. There, his grief gets the best of him, and he allows two planes to crash. As debris from the crash falls to the ground, the oracles that had haunted the season -- the pink teddybear, the bodybags, the men in hazmat suits -- materialize in a way no one expected.

I’ve read much and talked to many people about this ending, and I’ve heard many differing reactions. On the one hand, it’s seen as creator Vince Gilligan widening the scope of his story of a school teacher-cum-drug manufacturer; the plane crash is a Cambrian explosion, prefiguring the discovery of the complex and multilayered world of the drug trade. On the other hand, it is identified as a twist: we have been led to believe that the flash-forwards were indicative of a major catastrophe specific to the White family, whereas in reality they were portents of something wildly unexpected. Others see it as a physical manifestation of the world into which Walt has descended (or ascended) and the suffering he has caused and will cause. Still others choose to see it as the judgment of God quite literally raining down upon Walt. These explanations all have glints of insight, but fall short of grasping why it is such a shocking end. I think its true power in something more subtle and unique to the program. Let us first consider each of these explanations and see how closely they approximate the truth. 

“ABQ” is more than another instance of what has been called a “morality play,” a moniker given to another fantastic show, The Sopranos. Within this framework, Walt and his brother-in-arms, Tony Soprano, are experiencing the consequences of their immoral behavior, one painful lesson at a time. This is, to me, a simplistic explanation. To say Breaking Bad is a show about consequence is absolutely true, but to say it is show where consequence is the primary focus is misguided. Walt's is not a world in which the Hand of an Angry God is constantly pointing an accusing finger at him, doling out punishments only for him to quickly and reliably go astray. Walt is driven by a determination to succeed where in the past he has failed, and therefore, consequences are not as important to him as solutions, and Walt has proven himself resourceful in the most terrifying ways. (The one who struggles with consequence is Jesse. He cannot extricate himself from the suffering his actions cause, and so turns to Walt, his father figure, who constantly points him in the wrong direction.)

Nor does the plane crash function to signal Walt’s descent into the world of drugs; this already happened when he shaved his head. Consider the function of hair: major characters – Gus, Mike, Hank, Hank’s boss, Tuco, Hector, Victor – are all bald or nearly so from the moment we meet them, but Walt and Jesse go through stages of hair loss and growth. I believe that those involved in the drug trade on either side of the law are bald, and those without have hair. Walt shaves his head, ostensibly because he will lose his hair to chemotherapy, but also to appear as less of an outside before facing Tuco. Jesse's hair constantly grows back, symbolizing his wish to escape from the world of drugs.

The ending does seem rather like a twist insofar as we are led to believe one thing while another is delivered. Consider, however, successful twists in other works of fiction: The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club. In all of these, [spoiler alert] the twist relied on imperfect knowledge: we depend on someone else fumbling through a story and thereby hiding the truth from us. Verbal hid the fact that he was Keyser Soze; Bruce Willis could not have known that he was dead; the narrator was delirious and unaware that Tyler Durden was a part of his own personality. But the truth in “ABQ” isn’t hidden; it is a surprise to everyone: Walt, Jesse, and even Jane’s father, whose occupation is also not hidden by design, but rather by consequence: there was no point in revealing it until the last minute. Moreover, twists are more for the audience than for the story. We walk away from a twist lauding the creative minds for pulling the wool over our eyes so effectively. We see the author's hand at work in a twist, and they are more artificial for it.

But let us press this idea of a twist. We said that twists bear the imprint of the creator: they are exciting because they demonstrate how creative the writer was and how well we were duped, much like in a magic trick. But fiction is great when it feels inevitable. In "ABQ," we see the catastrophe unfold even before the characters do, and this sets Breaking Bad apart from 24. Walt and Jesse don't even find out that Jane's father was behind the crash until season three: if anything, the causes of the crash are more of a surprise for them than they are for us. Moreover, the crash should be relatively benign to us, the viewer, since we were not invested in the characters that died; even in the case of 24’s suitcase nukes, we had met a couple of the characters. Donna Bowman, in her review of the episode over at the AV Club, hopes aloud, "Oh Lord, I hope it's not anyone we know" in the crash. In the cold open of “ABQ,” when the camera draws back from the Walt household to the city at large, with two pillars of smoke rising from the earth, we learn that we are no longer comfortably situated within the White family. Walt’s actions are no longer part of a vacuum, a microcosm that only involves those we know, but rather within the real world, one inhabited by more people than we could imagine or hope to know. (“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…”) Unlike 24, where Jack Bauer is accused of bringing suffering and misfortune to everyone he comes into contact with, Walt does not even need to meet the people he makes suffer.

Which brings us to the explanation of widening scope. Whereas 24 had been threatening game-changing disaster for years, Breaking Bad in season two only intimated disaster for the White family. Shifting our concern from the White family to dozens of anonymous victims is an interesting idea. We can think of this in terms of the famous quote misattributed to Josef Stalin: The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic. We as humans do not possess an infinite capacity for sympathy. When one person dies, we can concentrate all our feeling on that one person; but when many die, we must divide our sympathy among all of them or else allow it to overwhelm us. Breaking Bad threatened the former, preparing us to feel something for whomever is about to die in the White family: first, the pink teddybear makes us think it could be Holly. Then, the broken windshield and multiple bodybags hint that it could be several people. And just when we can handle no greater tragedy, the camera reveals that it is more than just the White family in peril. In an instant, our sympathies are diverted to a national tragedy, a singular event that forces us to sympathize not with Walt, not with Jesse, but with an event that we may see on the news and say without much personal investment or true feeling, “How terrible that this happened.” The pity and fear that we had reserved, that we had set aside for one or all of the White family, we are now being told to direct toward the faceless victims of this tragedy.

That is the power of "ABQ." After we have processed how unique this ending is, let us consider how great the difficulties are that it creates. Not only does it refuse to give Walt an easy way out, not only does it deny him an easy way out, it refuses to let him – or us – suffer simply. We arrived at the tragedy by having our sympathy diverted from family members we knew to hundreds we did not; we were commanded to feel for them by consequence of how the show was presented. On the other hand, Walt watched it unfold linearly. He never suspected that his family was in danger; he never got the hints that we had received from the beginning; he never had his sympathy spread so thin.

And so he feels nothing. His family's death would probably have been enough to get him out of the business. Though we want to ascribe to Walt a cold heart, recall that, at least at the beginning, he did everything for his family. In the opening of season two, he calculates the $737 thousand (737, like the plane, get it?) that he needs for his family. So his family’s deaths would have taken away his reason for cooking meth. He would have taken revenge, perhaps died in the process, and that would be the end of his story. But Breaking Bad doesn't go easy on Walt or its viewers. In the first episode of season three, Walt is comparing the ABQ crash to that of greater air tragedies like Tenerife. He certainly feels remorse since he is not (yet) a monster, but he is rationalizing. He, in his brilliance, can get his conscience out of anything.

For this reason, I don't think we'll see the deaths of any of the main characters this season, or at least no one in Walt's immediate family. One can argue that he cared so much for his family that a death in the family would be the only thing to bring a close to the story (as I argued above). This is not a viable explanation for two reasons. The first is that it would be too simple. Blogs and message boards abound with theories, several remarkably plausible, about the deaths of Holly or Skyler by Walt’s hand. But killing off important characters has never been the modus operandi of this show. Whereas programs like Game of Thrones kill off characters to great effect, Breaking Bad accomplishes as much with life as those programs do with death. Consider Walt's cancer: because he thought he was going to die, he started cooking meth; to provide for his family, he saved up a mountain of money. Though we know that his intentions changed when his cancer went into remission, that doesn't change the fact that the original purpose of the money is no longer present. This is never dealt with explicitly, but I believe it should be kept in mind whenever we think about Walt's success. No matter what his intentions are now, he will be for as long as he lives the man who prepared himself to die and lived.  

Moreover, getting Walt out of the drug world through the death of a family member might have applied to season-two Walt, maybe even season-three Walt. Season-five Walt is a whole new animal. Just as season four necessitated his killing Gus to solidify himself as a ruthless druglord, season five finds Walt having left the drug world, and thus does not necessitate a violent end: consider the quiet way “Gliding Over All” ended: Skyler talks Walt into leaving the drug world, and the entire family sits down by the pool. Even Hank’s discovery of Gale’s book of Whitman is quiet. No, season five needs something else, something that neither you nor I can yet imagine. I think of it in this way: Bryan Cranston’s former show, Malcolm in the Middle, featured an episode where his character was forced to decide whether or not to pull the plug on a man he barely knew. After many sleepless nights and pro-and-con lists coming out even, he sees a third option, one that is never revealed to the audience but for which his wife Lois praises him as he lies in bed, smiling for the first time all episode. Speculation about Breaking Bad is fun (hell, I just wrote 3000 words about it), but ultimately unproductive, especially if we stick with the false dichotomy of kill or be killed. There will be a third option, one that we will not see and will end the show properly.

Which is to say, Walt will blow up Valencia with a suitcase nuke.

Augustine, Confessions/On Christian Doctrine

“Grant me chastity and continence… but please, not yet.”

A few months back, I wrote a post about the difficulty of meaningful change. The aim of storytelling is often the depiction of character change: after this or that circumstance, a character sees something differently than he did at the outset. James Joyce's Dubliners is an entire short story collection dedicated to excavating the exact moment of epiphany and its variegated manifestations.

Augustine's Confessions is usually considered to be the earliest extant work of autobiography (autohagiography?), and it has at its core a theme of reconciliation. Augustine struggles to reconcile on the one hand the ineffable nature of God with the material world, and on the other his innate human sinfulness with the demands of a righteous life. It is a compelling work, not only because it is the testimony of a man from the early days of the church struggling with faith, but because he comes to reconciliation through two topics with which we are familiar through our reading (Plotinus and the idea of random chance, which I haven't finished writing yet). 

This reconciliation -- change from one mode of thinking to another -- is important also to our understanding of Augustine's theology. Coming to the faith by way of pagan philosophy allows Augustine to see the value of utilizing outside, seemingly blasphemous sources in understanding scripture. Additionally, as we can see from what has become Augustine's most well-known quote above, the process of becoming a Christian and separating oneself from the pleasures of this world, was not easy. Augustine was a dirty, dirty man.


You’re So Vain

But Augustine looks with contempt upon his old life, when he privileged the body and materialism over spiritual essence, preventing him from understanding the nature of God. Early on in the Confessions, he wonders how God managed to enter into the world, how his form became imbued in that of other forms: “As nothing can contain your whole being, does each thing contain a part of you?” It’s a natural question, even a necessary one. The material world is important in Christianity. It is God’s creation and a benchmark for His power; Augustine points to Matthew 10:30, which reads, “But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” God is clearly at work within the world, and it, being His creation, is necessarily good (contrast this with the Puritans), though it can also be corrupt and an impediment to knowing God. Alexander Pope said, “Whatever is, is right,” but Augustine amends this to say that “for [God] there is no evil at all… In parts of creation, however, there are some parts that are not appropriate to those parts, and for that reason are thought evil.” The world lacks the order that heaven possesses, an order which was dimly visible to Augustine: 

“I looked around and saw that within physical objects there is one sort of beauty that comes, so to speak, from the totality, and another which gives a sense of harmony through the congruence with which it fits in with another object, as part of a body fits in with the whole.”

The world has reflections of supernal beauty, but he did not yet possess the vocabulary to make sense of it.

Of course, being familiar with Plato, we all see where this is going. Upon discovering Plato’s doctrine of Forms, through the lens of Plotinus’ Neo-Platonism, everything coalesced. Book VII of the Confessions is incredible to read for this reason. It is the document of a man who has come to a new and deeper understanding of the world through the study of another’s philosophy. Though Augustine is usually considered a philosopher in his own right, he is also an interpreter of Plotinus, imbuing early Christian thought with ancient Greek philosophy; this meeting of worlds is spectacular.

Augustine the Greek

There is an abundance of similarities between Plotinian philosophy and Christian theology, not the least of which is the idea of a trinity – One, Intellect, and Soul in the former; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the latter. We can draw further, although perhaps more tenuous, comparisons. The Son is the Intellect, an emanation of the One, but also the same as the One, eternally with the One. Pursuing a life of contemplating the One, as the Intellect (the Son) does (by living as God) is the only true life. However, the world is not to be forgotten, because only through the world can we understand God. Romans 1:20 reads, “I apprehended and perceived your invisible nature through the things you have made,” which is strikingly similar to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. (Okay, maybe not strikingly, but the connections are deeper than one might expect.) Following Augustine's example, we can better understand the eternal world by understanding the material one.

Augustine also has a Plotinian understanding of time. “Most of all, I thought his miraculous virgin birth to be an example of how things temporal are to be despised for the sake of gaining immortality.” Recall that Plotinus considers eternity to be the realm in which cause and effect are of no consequence (no pun intended).

Given his use of Greek (i.e. pagan) philosophy to reach an understanding of the Christian God, it is no surprise that Augustine does not fear ideas outside of the Bible. In fact, in On Christian Doctrine, he famously describes the Egyptian gold taken by the Jews when they left Egypt. Though the Egyptians used gold to fashion idols, there was no reason that the Jews could not appropriate it and use it to worship God; so it is with the wisdom of pagan philosophy, which God placed in the hands of Christians to be used for its true purpose: "Now these are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themselves, but dug out of the mines of God's providence which are everywhere scattered abroad."


Put Your Whole Heart In It

The other major reconciliation documented in the Confessions is Augustine’s conversion to an active religion rather than a passive one. Before he became a Christian, Augustine was a Manichean, which meant, without getting into a detailed discussion of a topic I know nothing about, that he placed evil squarely within the material world and believed that righteousness could be achieved by knowledge instead than action. Christianity, however, declares that people are inherently sinful and that action, in the form of behaving in a way commensurate with Christ’s behavior, is the only way to be a Christian. Manichaeism was passive whereas Christianity was performative.

If, however, we must perform, we cannot perform only with our body (as Jesus says the hypocrites do) but with our soul; and therein lay the problem for Augustine. No longer was religion about faith, which is at its core a sort of knowledge, something “learned”; it was about a state of being.

When he sought to change his disposition, he found to his dismay that his will struggled with him:

“The mind orders the body, and the body obeys; the mind orders itself, and it resists… I repeat: the mind that gives the order to will could not give the order if it did not will to do so; but it does not do what it orders. It does not will with its whole being, therefore it does not order with its whole being… If the will were a full will, it would not give the order that the will should exist, since it would already exist.”

Augustine reasons that if he wanted something in his heart of hearts, he would not have to struggle the way that he does. There must be a part of his will that is not as committed as the rest. “It is not, therefore, such a strange situation, that one should will and not will; it is a sickness of the mind, which, even when uplifted by the truth, does not fully arise, being weighed down by its habit.” We are sinful from birth, and by habit only become more so. Consider the wet dreams which plague Augustine and which he sees as proof of original sin: even if he keeps himself pure when he is awake, his body betrays him.

Casting Lots

The climax of his conversion experience takes place, quite literally, by chance. Finding himself constantly subverted by his will, he turns to the Bible for advice. Instead of reading through it or turning to a specific passage that he knew and cherished, he opens it to a random page, putting his future in the hands of – he believes – God. The passage that he opens to proves fruitful: 

“I had left my copy of the Apostle Paul there when I had risen to go aside. I seized it, opened it, and read in silence the first heading I cast my eyes upon: Not in riotousness and drunkenness, not in lewdness and wantonness, not in strife and rivalry; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh and its lusts.” 

Taking the passage to be a sign from God, he resolves to change his life. But as we’ve seen from previous blog posts, true change cannot happen right away. Later, when his mentor, Ambrose, tells him to read Isaiah, he tries but does not understand: “But I, not understanding my first reading from him, and thinking that the whole book was similar, put it off, to be resumed when I was better versed in the language of the Lord.” Though he gives a semi-valid reason for putting it off, he is still shirking his responsibility. Ambrose believed him to be ready, so why put it off unless he was still not completely committed in his soul?

The use of chance as a way of determining divine will is very interesting to me (and will be the subject of its own entry). For now, it will suffice to say that cleromancy, the casting of lots as divination occurs with some frequency in the Bible, among pagans as well as Christians, which is strange given the warnings against divination (e.g. Leviticus 19:26).

Truth: Origins

Keeping all this in mind, especially his understanding of Platonic forms, let us hear about Augustine's theology.

Truth, to Augustine, is similar to memory. Both have the ability to stir intense feelings within us, yet neither can be apprehended physically. Memory, though it is of something that occurred, is in itself incorporeal. So it is with Truth, which seems to Augustine something that has always been present within us.

“My eyes say, ‘If they had colours, then we must have reported them.’ The ears say, ‘If they made a noise, then we informed you of them.’…Whence and by what route did they enter my memory? I do not know how; or when I learnt them, I did not take on trust somebody else’s heart; I recognized them in my own and affirmed that they were true, and put them away so to speak, into safe-keeping, to bring them out when I wished. They were there, therefore, even before I learnt them.”

He points to an instance in the Bible to emphasize the nature of Truth. When Isaac blessed Jacob over Esau even though Esau was the firstborn and therefore the one who should have been blessed, he did so because he was influenced by an abiding Truth that he could not have apprehended in any way except through the influence of God. Isaac "was counted worthy not to recognize his children and thereby to bless them, but to bless them and thereby to recognize them!”

Since Truth comes from God, who is unchanging, there can be no relativism for Augustine. In fact, it is relativism that engenders hatred. 

“Why, then, is ‘truth the mother of hatred’ [a quote from playwright Terence], and why does the man of God become an enemy to those to whom he preached the truth, seeing as men love the blessed life, which is none other than rejoicing in the truth? Why indeed, if not because they love the truth in such a way that whatever else they love, they define what they love as the truth.”

We call Truth that which fits in with our own beliefs, but beliefs are ever-changing and therefore cannot contain abiding Truth. Truth, if it is as inherent as Augustine believes, must come from an outside source, namely, God.


Truth: Understanding

One of the most spectacular things about Augustine’s understanding of Christianity is that this Truth that he ascribes to God is, though fixed, still open to interpretation. Translator Robin Lane Fox writes that Augustine views conflicting interpretations of biblical passages to be beneficial. “It may be more beneficial to entertain a variety of exegetical possibilities [provided none of them is per se wrong] than to commit one’s self to a single interpretation [however correct] at the expense of others.” Augustine assents, saying, “These words may be understood in such diverse senses, seeing as they are none the less true for it.” Moreover, obscurity and metaphor in the Bible is not there by coincidence or carelessness: “And I do not doubt that all this was divinely arranged for the purpose of subduing pride by toil, and of preventing a feeling of satiety in the intellect.” Interpretation is key to Augustine’s Christianity, no doubt because he took so long to come to an understanding of God. We should be warned against blithely rejecting interpretations that differ from our own: “Rather they [those who reject conflicting interpretations] are proud and know not Moses’s meaning, but love their own, not because it is true but because it is theirs.”

Though any interpretation that is not per se wrong may be acceptable, Augustine still gives us guidelines for determining the authority of any particular interpretation.

Foremost for Augustine is Jesus’ command that we love one another. The Golden Rule is the ultimate measure by which to judge what is right and what is not. Augustine asks, “Is there any time or place in which it is unrighteous to love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and to love your neighbour as yourself?"

Times change, he notes, and what is acceptable in one culture may not be acceptable in another. That is not to say that cultural relativism should be embraced by default, but rather it is important to understand that what can be done without “lust” – that is, for the glory of God – by one culture in one time may not be by another culture in another time, and vice versa: what was not acceptable in another time may be acceptable in ours.

This clears up two pieces of advice that seem conflicting. First: “Men are prone to estimate sins, not by reference to their inherent sinfulness, but rather by reference to their customs.” This is not a strange idea. Modern science has shown over and again that people are bad at estimating everything, and sin, according to Augustine, is not exception. But Augustine, like Christ, emphasizes that we should be part of society. “No one, citizen or foreigner, should by their lust violate the social contract that exists within a state or people, whether it is ratified by law or by convention; for loathsome is every part that does not fit into its whole.” The customs of our time are to be respected, just as Jesus commanded to "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's."

Augustine therefore stresses that we above all obey the Golden Rule and use it was a metric for all else. Below that, we should follow the customs of our time, so long as they do not conflict with the Golden Rule. By no means, he seems to say, are we to estimate right and wrong by our own faculties. Truth, therefore, is not objective in the sense that X is always right and Y always wrong, but flexible and subject to hierarchy. In this way, Scripture can remain relevant throughout the ages. 

Stray Observations

• I got kind of bored writing this about halfway through, but hopefully that wasn't too evident (until now, I guess). Also, I was trying to keep it scholarly and minimize the proselytizing, so sorry if it was too preachy.
• Also, I used the Everyman edition of Confessions because it was a gift from my dad several years ago. I thought it was an excellent translation with insightful notes and introduction, although I've heard the Oxford World Classics edition is also highly regarded. I used the Dover Thrift Edition of On Christian Doctrine because it was cheap and used the Shaw translation.
• Augustine is probably the first semiotician. Throughout the entirety of On Christian Doctrine, he stresses the benefit of studying literary techniques like metaphor and being familiar with signs of various kinds. He dedicates several chapters to analyzing the different uses of signs and symbols, not just in the Bible, but in the world. 
• I didn't find a good way to return to the idea of vanity, but there's one other point I wanted to make about it. Augustine places a great deal of focus on counting. Above, he references the Bible verse about God having numbered hairs, and later on, he says, "The arrogant cannot find you, even if in their zeal for their art they number the stars and the sand and measure out the regions of the heavens and trace the paths of the stars.” Numbering the stars and sand, of course, would be an exercise in futility, just like counting hairs; but the latter is possible with God. Hence the idea of trying to count or number that which is essentially infinite -- or perhaps not active "counting" but simple "knowing" -- becomes associated with both the domain of God and the arrogance of men.
• Sin, for Augustine, is imitation of God: “Pride imitates exalted status…Idleness, too, aims for a kind of repose…Envy vies for supremacy…”
• “It is the dead who have lost their life, but the living experience death.”
• “The letter slays, but the spirit gives life.” (2 Cor. 3:6) He views this verse as providing an understanding of passages that seemed “perverse” when he read them literally.
• “You [God] use all things, knowing or unknowing according to the order which you know.” 
• “And I said, ‘Is truth a nothing, seeing as it is diffused neither through finite nor through infinite space?’ And you shouted out from afar, ‘No indeed! I am who I am.’”
• “Pleasure pursues things that are beautiful…whereas curiosity seeks both these things and their opposite, wishing only to try them out… It is for this reason also in religious matters that God is put to the test, when men demand signs and wonders not in order to gain salvation, but for the mere experience of them.” Also: “Men mostly lack understanding when they speak; they speak more of seeking than of finding.”
• “Further, all men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you… Since you cannot consult for the good of them all, you must take the matter as decided for you by a sort of lot, according as each man happens for the time being to be more closely connected with you.”