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.”

Plotinus, The Enneads

I’ve been very satisfied with the progress I’ve made on my reading list thanks to this blog, if only because I finally finished Brothers Karamazov. Alas, this post documents a rare failure: I gave up on Plotinus’ inscrutable Enneads. It came in waves. When I got my copy, I set out to read it in its entirety. Then I noticed that the allegedly abridged version was still over 600 pages in 8-point font. Somewhat disillusioned, I persisted and got through the first two books. (“Ennead” comes from the Greek word for “nine,” and stands for the fact that the treatise is made up of six books, each of which has nine chapters or sections.) It was incredibly dense, but I resigned myself to not understanding all of it, and I still managed to get a good deal out of it.

Then, slowly, my will faltered more and more. The third book took over a week, and by the time I began the fourth, I had started to Google which sections I could skim, and then which sections I could skip altogether. Even getting through those sections was difficult, though, and in the middle of book four, I admitted defeat.

Plotinus is an incredibly challenging read for two reasons. The first is his style. My best approximation is that he reads like Heidegger if Heidegger had been translated from a dead language. He has the same penchant for inventing terminology (“All-Soul,” “Real-Existent,” and other doubly capitalized, hyphenated words) that describes esoteric concepts and is never properly defined to begin with. The second is the translation. Penguin Classics went with a translation by Stephen MacKenna, who translated Plotinus in the early twentieth century. Translations from that long ago are usually difficult enough without the added burden of translating someone as inscrutable as Plotinus. Though his translation is highly praised (George Steiner called it one of the great achievements in translation of the twentieth century), it may be better read for culture than understanding.

Despite all this, Plotinus is worth reading. If nothing else, his influence is considerable: his thought allowed Augustine to reconcile important ideas about God and he thereby exerted a profound influence on modern Christian theology. Dillon, the editor, points out that Plotinus’ notion of the “we” prefigured Freud’s “ego,” but this feels tacked on, like when they said Epictetus prefigured modern neuropsychology.)

Soul

Let’s begin where Plotinus does: with the soul. As a neo-Platonist, Plotinus derives much of his philosophy from close readings and interpolations of Plato’s dialogues, especially the Timaeus, but this is not to say that he keeps his distance from other philosophers. Often, he reads quite like a Stoic, which seems to be popular in late Antiquity, and in his descriptions of the Soul, he sounds awfully Aristotelian: the soul and the body are connected, but like the “axe-form on iron” – things happen to the iron of the axe, not to the form it takes. “The permeating soul might remain entirely untouched by what affects the body – as light goes always free of all its floods.”

What is the business of the soul then? Plotinus gives us a roadmap. There is, at bottom, the ‘Ours,’ the basic couplement of soul and body. Through sensations, we are able to discern impressions (a Stoic concept), which “are already Intelligibles” that need to be unlocked, in some sense, by the soul. Once the soul has translated these impressions into Intelligibles, they become connected to Ideal-Forms; from knowledge of Ideal-Forms, we have what gives us the “peculiar” We, so called, I think, because it, like the Ours, is a couplement of body and soul. (It is interesting to note that “We” has also been translated as “personality.”) To reiterate:

Ours –> Sensations –> Impressions –> Intelligibles –> Ideal-Forms –> We

The first three are the domain of our body – that is, our five ordinary senses – and the final three, of our soul. Says Plotinus: “Thus assuredly Sense-Perception, Discursive-Reasoning, and all our ordinary mentation are foreign to the Soul: for sensation is a receiving – whether of an Ideal-Form or of a bodily affection – and reasoning and all ordinary mental action deal with sensation.”

Trinity

The Soul, then, is our connection to the world of Intelligibles, of Ideal-Forms. If the Soul is the means by which the animate turns impressions into Intelligibles, where does it come from?

There is, primally, the One, what all Forms are, in their essence. If it helps, we can relate the One to God, although Plotinus would probably spit at us for doing so. Everything is the One, because the One is what all things, material and immaterial, come from. However, those “things” are not created by some action of the One, for action would imply change and the One is incapable of change (like Republicans, hey-o!). Rather, everything is an “emanation” from the one, a byproduct necessitated by the very existence of the One.

The primary emanation of the One is the Intellect, which is the locus of the spectrum of all Forms; all things are united in the One, but each also has an identity. The Intellect maintains something of a “catalog” of Forms, allowing for the possibility of “equality”: thus, we can say that something is both three-dimensional and solid because the two distinct concepts are connected by this Intellect identifying each with each. Without the Intellect, predication is impossible. The Intellect (here’s where it gets really screwy) is in eternal contemplation of the One, analogous to Plato’s Demiurge.

The Intellect, being an emanation of the One and hence “the same as” the One (again, it is helpful to think of the Christian Trinity, where the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct and yet the same), must also have an emanation. That emanation we identify as the Soul. Everything, from animals to plants, has a soul, because everything is an emanation from the One, but the highest action of the Soul is in contemplation of the Intellect, which is the only way that the One can even remotely be reached. Only people are capable of Intellection.

I should take a moment to say that I don’t know how accurate all of that was. It was pieced together from the text, the introduction, and the extraordinarily helpful Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. If anyone has read Plotinus (doubtful) and can correct or verify any of that, it would be most appreciated. 

That is Plotinus’ triad, the sum of his mystical beliefs and the foundation upon which the rest of his philosophy is built. It is difficult not to see echoes of this in the Christian Trinity, but I’ll save that discussion for a future post on Augustine.

Ethics and Aesthetics 

Having explained the foundation of his theory, Plotinus moves on to its applications. One remarkable feature of the Enneads is the way that Plotinus is able to knit together far-flung areas of philosophy, such as ethics and aesthetics as we will soon see, with his abstract metaphysics. 

For example, order is of great importance because it is a reflection of the Intellectual-Principle in the material world. Everything that we consider ordered possesses order only through imitation of the original Order, and by contemplating ordered things, we are actually contemplating the Intellectual-Principle and drawing ourselves closer to the One. It is important, then, for us to direct our Souls toward contemplation of the Intellectual-Principle: we must view something that is beautiful as "not some one shape of beauty but the All-Beauty, the Absolute Beauty; and the truths of philosophy must be implanted in him to lead him to faith in that which, unknowing it, he possesses within himself." (We possess the knowledge within ourselves because we are all emanations of the One.)

So, we've concluded that order is an “inner idea stamped upon the mass of exterior matter.” This means that there are certain things we must seek out: virtue, for example. Virtue, both moral and civic, is important to Plotinus because it brings “bound and measure to our desires and to our entire sensibility.” That which is bounded -- the One is infinitely bounded and unified -- is always, by definition, preferable to the boundless. Virtue, then, is a way of aligning our Souls with Intellection. Beauty is the same: "He must be led to the Beauty that manifests itself through these forms [tone, rhythm, design; in essence, through worldly things]; he must be shown that what ravished him was no other than the Harmony of the Intellectual world and the Beauty in that sphere." 

The Nature of Evil

If order, limit, and bound are characteristics of the One and hence of the Good, it is not surprising that evil is defined as “Undetermination-Absolute, some Absolute Formlessness…the kind whose place is below all the patterns, forms, shapes, measurements, and limits.” Included in this limitlessness is matter, which is also inherently evil. (This is a Gnostic idea, although Plotinus hated the Gnostics for reasons I couldn't figure out.) 

He explains: “The bodily Kind, in that it partakes of Matter, is an evil thing. What form is in bodies is an untrue form: they are without life: by their own natural disorderly movement they make away with each other; they are hindrances to the Soul in its proper Act; in their ceaseless flux they are always slipping away from Being.” That last bit sounds an awful lot like entropy. Can you tell us more, Plotinus?

“The Measurelessness is evil primarily; whatever, either by resemblance or participation, exists in the state of unmeasured, is evil secondarily.” I think we get the idea. Simplicity is good, complexity is evil. Fastidiousness is good, changeability is evil. I always like to bring this back to Othello: Iago’s formlessness, Othello’s Classical heroism. We can also recall in Kafka’s The Castle, K. is a land-surveyor, in charge of delimiting boundaries. This all works out very nicely. We are to align our Souls with Intellect and not with our bodies because bodies are matter and matter is evil.

If we are not concerned with matter, then we need not fear evil. This is a Stoic argument. But Plotinus goes a step further. If we are not distressed by the possibility of evil, then why be distressed by actual evil? “What then, we ask, if he had died without witnessing the wrong [one's daughters and daughters-in-law dragged away to captivity]? Could he have quitted the world in the calm conviction that nothing of all this could happen? He must be very shallow. Can he fail to see that it is possible for such calamities to overtake his household, and does he cease to be a happy man for the knowledge of what may occur? In the knowledge of the possibility he may be at ease; as, too, when the evil has come about.” This fits in nicely with the classical argument for courage: we should not be cowardly because cowardice is fear of something that has not yet happened. If we are brave then we will not fear what has not yet happened; if we do not fear evil that has not yet happened, we will also not fear that has happened.

The Evil of Nature

A discussion of evil leads easily into the question of theodicy. Evil, as we have seen, is not the caused by the One, as if it had engendered it in some way: the One, to reiterate, does not “act” in any sense of the word. Evil, instead, arises by necessity, as a byproduct of the nature of the One: just as the Intellect and the Soul emanate from the One, so too does evil come about because the emanation is not limitless (if it were, it would be evil). Think of this as a flashlight. A flashlight illuminates the area around it, but it is not the intention of the flashlight to create darkness or even to leave darkness as it is. Rather, the flashlight is limited in its capacity; light can only stretch so far. This is pretty standard reasoning when it comes to theodicy, and I don’t think it originated from Plotinus.

In his own words: “We are like people ignorant of painting who complain that the colours are not beautiful everywhere in the picture: but the Artist has laid on the appropriate tint to every spot… Again, we are censuring a drama because the persons are not all heroes.” Evil arises not through carelessness on the part of the One, but through necessity.

This necessity is interesting to me, particularly because of the sense of coexistence and unity inherent in it. Here’s Plotinus again: “All things, as they rise from a unity [the One], come back to unity by a sheer need of nature; differences unfold themselves, contraries are produced, but all is drawn into one organized system by the unity at the source.”

Eternity

Plotinus draws an interesting distinction between time and eternity. The usual notion of eternity is infinite linear time (or at least that’s how I always thought of it), but he distinguishes it in a different way: “We know it as a Life changelessly motionless and ever holding the Universal content in actual presence; not this now and now that other, but always all." That is, eternity is not infinite time, but all of time at the same instant, in the same place. Time is an imperfect image of the Real Being, eternity, and so in imitating eternity, it produces a discursive level of being (not my phrasing), where one thing follows another. Cause and effect are illusory because in the Real Being, there is no “this now and now that other.” This should make us think of two things: the distinction between the third and fourth dimensions (I like to reference this video), and the Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. 

Also, we can (Plotinus does not) equate eternity with repose: since one thing does not follow another, there is rest.

Free Will

 

“Again, if all our action is determined by a natural process, how can the distinction be maintained between behaviour in accordance with nature and behaviour in conflict with it? And what becomes of blasphemy against the divine? The blasphemer is made what he is: a dramatist has written a part insulting and maligning himself and given it to an actor to play.”

Plotinus raises the question of free will – if someone deity has predetermined the actions of every person at every time, how can a blasphemer be held accountable for his insolence? He answers himself, to a degree, later on: “The act of the libertine is not done by Providence or in accordance with Providence; neither is the action of the good done by Providence – it is done by the man – but it is done in accordance with Providence, for it is an act consonant with the Reason-Principle. Thus a patient following his treatment is himself an agent and yet is acting in accordance with the doctor’s method inspired by the art concerned with the causes of health and sickness: what one does against the laws of health is one’s act, but an act conflicting with the Providence of medicine.”

Nature, in the sense of that which is preordained, perhaps does not exist, then, as something inalterable, but as a prescription like that of a doctor. Many philosophers repeat the adage that God (or the gods) don’t subject us to more than we can bear, so if perhaps things seem unbearable at times, it is only because we have wandered off the path that is consonant with nature.

That which is done in accordance with the good – that is, with eyes toward the Intellectual-Principle – can only ever be consonant with the flow of nature, and that which is not is never so. This is a way of reconciling free will with predestination. The path is determined, but we are free to wander: there are limitless options from which we may choose, but there is only one correct way, that of the good. Just as a doctor may prescribe a drug with the knowledge that his patient will toss the script away, so too is predestination compatible with the “act of the libertine.”

Stray Observations

• In case all of the above was too straightforward, here’s one of my favorite impenetrable sentences from the book: “When the Intellect is in upward orientation that (lower part of it) which contains (or, corresponds to) the life of the Soul, is, so to speak, flung down again…” Can you imagine what that looks like in Greek?
• There’s a nice analogy of a musician that I chose not to discuss because it’s very similar to a lot of what’s already been said in previous posts, but I’ll quote it here. “When the lyre fails him, [the musician] will change it, or will give up lyre and lyring, as having another craft now, one that needs no lyre, and then he will let it rest unregarded at this side while he sings on without an instrument. But it was not idly that the instrument was given him in the beginning: he has found it useful until now, many a time."
• “Feelings are not states; they are action upon experience, action accompanied by judgement.” State would imply something fixed: the state of the weather currently is “rainy,” and it must be rainy until a different state replaces it. Calling it action gives agency to the individual rather than some inherent quality of being. As Iago says, “’Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus."
• If anyone out there has been inspired to read Plotinus, I’d give the Loeb Library editions a go. They’re expensive, but the translation is much more recent, which may help.