Know Thyself, Pt. 2

Part One

It's been awhile since my last post, so I apologize in advance for any discrepancies in tone or content.

As I mentioned last time, Reinhold Niebuhr suggests that the classical and biblical worldviews are necessarily distinct but brought together on the issue of man's contingency. Man is subject to the world around him; really this is to say that he is the object of the world around him, that things happen to him beyond his control and his understanding.

The Jewish tradition differs from the Greek, of course, in its monotheism, from which most of the other differences spring. Suddenly we are presented with a singular God, rather than the capricious and contradictory pantheon of the Greeks--and while there's an argument to made that the God of the Hebrews is capricious and bloodthirsty, He enters into a covenant relationship with Noah, then Abraham, then Isaac, then Jacob, and down through the line. He seeks a relationship with mankind, and if it comes primarily through the nation of Israel, there are at least glimpses in the Hebrew Bible that He wishes to extend it to humanity as a whole. (See, for example, the Book of Jonah, my favorite part of the Hebrew Bible, in which God reveals not only His sense of humor but His concern for those outside of the fold.)

But God's covenant with the Jews does not result in freedom from contingency. It may change man's place in the universe but it certainly does not change the fact that he has one and that it is inescapable. Man's place becomes less fragile but more defined:

"Come now, and let us reason together,"
Says the Lord.
"Though your sins are as scarlet,
They will be as white as snow;
Though they are red like crimson,
They will be like wool.
If you consent and obey,
You will eat the best of the land;
But if you refuse and rebel,
You will be devoured by the sword." (Isaiah 1:18-20, NAS)

This is the message we get over and over again from the prophets: Do what God requires of you, and He will bless you; refuse to do so, and He will cripple you. There's little room in this for self-made morality or for choice as choice. If you submit, you will receive what is coming to you; if you don't--well, you'll also receive what's coming to you, although you may not like it. Either way, God sets the terms of the covenant and the penalties for breaking it.

Note that there is no theodicy in this covenant. God, as far as I can tell, does not promise understanding of the way He works. Nowhere is this more clear than the Book of Job, in which God makes a deal with the devil that he may destroy a righteous man's life. Job keeps his cool for thirty excruciating chapters, at the end of which he finally questions his lot in life. He is innocent, he claims; he has kept the Law of God; he has done what is right, even through the extreme trials he's suffered:

Have I not wept for the one whose life is hard?
Was not my soul grieved for the needy?
When I expected good, then evil came;
When I waited for light, then darkness came.
I am seething within, and cannot relax;
Days of affliction confront me . . .
Have I covered my transgressions like Adam,
By hiding my iniquity in my bosom,
Because I feared the great multitude,
And the contempt of families terrified me,
And kept silent and did not go out of doors?
Oh, that I had one to hear me!
Behold, here is my signature;
Let the Almighty answer me! (Job 30:25-27, 31:33-35)

This is not a harsh statement, exactly; Job does not curse God, as his wife tells him to. He merely asks questions, questions we've probably all asked at some point. But God doesn't explain. He gets angry (and sarcastic--I love it when God gets sarcastic):

Who is this that darkens counsel
By words without knowledge?
Now gird up your loins like a man,
And I will ask you, and you instruct Me!
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth!
Tell Me, if you have understanding,
Who set its measurements, since you know?
Or who stretched the line on it? (38:2-5)

He continues in this vein for two entire chapters, until Job collapses under the weight of his own questions. The moral is clear here--man is what he is, and he can neither understand nor question God's decisions about the operation of the universe. He can only accept it.

The New Testament extends more or less logically from the Old, but it also has the advantage of showing up after Plato and Aristotle had already set the rules for philosophy. As such, St. Paul's admonitions to the Church sometimes read like a combination of Hebrew theology and Platonic philosophy. Nowhere is that more clear than in 1 Corinthians. (I shamefully admit that I shamelessly stole this analysis from Nathan Gilmour, great or otherwise.):

Now you are Christ's body, and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church, first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, administrations, various kinds of tongues. All are not apostles, are they? All are not prophets, are they? All are not teachers, are they? All are not workers of miracles, are they? All do not have gifts of healings, do they? All do not speak with tongues, do they? All do not interpret, do they? But earnestly desire the greater gifts. (1 Corinthians 12:27-31)

The echoes of The Republic should be clear--each has his place in life and in the life of the Church, and one must act within one's place. (Paul leaves open a desire for greater gifts but leaves it at desire--you can't make those happen; they must come from God, if they come at all.) Further, that your station depends on gifts rather than merit suggests there's not a whole lot you can do about it. You are what you are, and you have to operate as such.

Christian theologians through the years have softened these hard truths, for better or for worse. This post is already getting long, so I'm not going to go through a lot of them, but I do want to address John Calvin's view on contingency, both because I'm a Presbyterian and because I'm reading through The Institutes right now. Calvin expands and explicates the Book of Job on understanding God. Calvin's God is more understandable than Job's, it is true, but the end result is essentially the same:

Our knowledge should serve first to teach us fear and reverence; secondly, with it as our guide and teacher, we should learn to seek every good from him, and, having received it, to credit it to his account. For how can the thought of God penetrate your mind without your realizing immediately that, since you are his handiwork, you have been made over and bound to his command by right of creation, that you owe your life to him?--that whatever you undertake, whatever you do, ought to be ascribed to him? (Institutes I.ii.2).

Calvin thus collapses knowledge about God into submission to Him; in the end, knowledge and submission become the same thing, since knowledge without submission gets corrupted due to human stupidity--which "is caused not only by vain curiosity but by an inordinate desire to know more than is fitting" (I.iv.1). True knowledge, true wisdom, and true submission are thus all the same thing, all bound up in what Calvin calls piety. To know anything requires a recognition of one's place in the universe and a submission to it.

Next time: Where it all went wrong, at least in America.

I Need a Love to Make Me Happy

As I'm sure many others did, I went through college with the simplistic notion that Aristotle was the opposite of Plato. That idea is true to some extent, of course, but I'm fifty pages into On Rhetoric (my first Aristotle), and it's already obvious to me that Aristotle doesn't so much push against Plato as build off of him. He takes Plato's definition of rhetoric, for example--an art that is not an art, since it doesn't impart specific knowledge--but turns it around on itself and treats it as a good thing.

Likewise, he agrees with Plato on the meaning of life. Socrates takes it as a given that all men desire first and foremost to be happy (Euthydemus 278E), and if he posits virtue as the most important factor to happiness, he never doubts that happiness is the ultimate goal. Aristotle both expands and refines this concept:

Both to an individual privately and to all people generally there is one goal at which they aim in what they choose to do and in what they avoid. Summarily stated, this is happiness and its parts . . . Let happiness be defined as success combined with virtue, or as self-sufficiency in life, or as the pleasantest life accompanied with security, or as abundance of possessions and bodies, with the ability to defend and use these things. (On Rhetoric 1360B)

George A. Kennedy, who translated my copy of the book, suggests that Aristotle privileges the first definition of happiness there (“success combined with virtue”), and I've got no reason to doubt him. But I am more interested in the “parts” of happiness:

good birth, numerous friendships, worthy friendships, wealth, good children, numerous children, a good old age, as well as the virtues of the body (such as health, beauty, strength, physical stature, athletic prowess), reputation, honor, good luck, virtue. (1360B)

What strikes me about this catalogue of needs is how many of them are uncontrollable. Of these, only virtue is under the control of the individual (although friendships, wealth, health, and reputation have some element of controllability).

Thomas Aquinas famously combines Aristotle and the Bible to come up with his theology, and I have to wonder what he does with this portion of On Rhetoric. That's because I don't see any way to combine Aristotle's viewpoint with St. James'. Now, I've elsewhere made my peace with the Greek concept of happiness as the chief end of man, but it's the uncontrollability of happiness that sticks in my craw. James seems to claim willful, that is, controllable, happiness, opening his epistle with his famous exhortation to “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance” (1:2). The image is of a person forcing himself to be happy (or joyful--I never bought my youth group's distinction between happiness and joy).

The real reason for the discrepancy between Christian and Aristotelian thought on this matter comes down to one little compound word: “self-sufficiency.” If man is autonomous--if happiness indeed comes from being enough on his own--then of course the elements of that happiness are going to be beyond man's control. But James' happiness springs from the knowledge that man is not in fact sufficient unto himself. James is able to turn rocks into bread because he knows that his poor circumstances have a relational purpose, that they stem from his dependence upon God.

So Nathan--as the world's only Thomist Protestant (and the only reader of this blog), I'm sure you have the answer to my question. How does Aquinas reconcile these two disparate viewpoints?

How Solomon Broke the Curse

I am certainly not the type to read the Song of Solomon allegorically; it's a dirty/sacred poem about sex, and I don't see a way around that fact--or a reason to find one. But I'm reading through what may be the most neglected book in the Old Testament--except, of course, by amorous teenagers seeking a respite from boring sermons--and I'm noticing some interesting echoes with the rest of the Bible, both Hebrew and Christian.

God's famous curse on Eve, for example, goes like this:

I will greatly multiply
Your pain in childbirth,
In pain you shall bring forth children;
Yet your desire shall be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you. (Genesis 3:16, NAS)

I take the curse to mean that Adam will henceforth seek a power relationship in regard to his wife, and that he will thus maintain a certain aloofness from her--whereas all she will ever want from him is genuine emotional and spiritual connection. She wants him to love her, but he wants to push her around. (Well, he will.)

Compare this idea with the Bride's lament in Song of Solomon:

On my bed night after night I sought him
Whom my soul loves;
I sought him but did not find him.
'I must arise now and go about the city;
In the city streets and in the squares
I must seek him whom my soul loves.'
I sought him but did not find him. (3:1,2)

The Bride, then, is a living embodiment of God's curse on Eve. She is frantic here, waking up alone and searching desperately for Solomon, who is surely making time and God knows what else with one of his 699 other wives. She's not special; she's property. But then something wonderful happens:

I found him whom my soul loves;
I held on to him and would not let him go,
Until I had brought him to my mother's house,
And into the room of her who conceived me. (3:4)

The power relationship has been shattered; the Bride leads the Groom into some sort of bizarre uber-feminine bower, and I suppose if we're using the toothless Evangelical allegory of Christ's love for the Church, we have to connect it with that most Catholic of verses, Matthew 18:18 ("Whatever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven").

But I'm more interested in connecting it to my previous post on the noetic effects of love. If I'm on the right track here, love not only has a noetic power, but it is also capable of breaking humanity's earliest curse. Love--even what the Greeks would later term eros--apparently is a symbol for the Atonement and thus a firstfruit of the New Creation. In that sense, Song of Solomon is indeed an allegory--but only inasmuch as love itself is an allegory.

St. Paul Cleans the Mirror

Just a brief and undeveloped post today, since I haven't formulated an actual theory about what I'm talking about here.

I've complained elsewhere about the neo-Platonist influence on Christianity and how I feel those two systems to be basically incompatible. Ever the contrarian (and ever confusing), St. Paul has confuted me and exploded my binary pair by converging with Socrates. First, Plato:

By our bodies and through perception we have dealings with coming-to-be, but we deal with real being by our souls and through reasoning . . . Being always stays the same and in the same state, but coming-to-be varies from one time to another. (Sophist 248A)

Compare that to Paul:

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know fully just as I also have been fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:12, NAS)

So apparently the neo-Platonist streak has been present in Christianity from the very beginning. But I'm more interested in the verse that immediately follows:

But now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13)

I wonder if 1 Corinthians 13 is in some way a response to Platonic idealism (expressed most clearly in Phaedo and Sophist). I imagine that Paul would agree with Plato's debasement of bodily pleasures in favor of the soul, and perhaps he'd even teeter on the edge of Plato's body/soul dualism.*

What's interesting to me is the way Paul sets up the noetic effects of love. We've all heard the "faith, hope, and love" verse a million times, but until today I never made the connection between it and the "glass darkly" verse that immediately precedes it. Is love, for St. Paul, a remedy for Platonic dualism, for not being able to trust our senses (and perhaps our ostensibly rational conclusions, although Paul is less of a rationalist than Plato)? Is love one of the "first fruits of the Spirit" (Romans 8:23), a glimpse of the sanctified new earth to come? What I'm getting at: Can we believe the things we learn in love in a way that we can't under Plato's system? Does love take some of the dirt off the mirror?

---
*Dualism is a sticky subject in Christian theology, of course. St. Paul sets the spirit against the flesh in Galatians 5, but it's in no way a given that "flesh" means "physical body," and credible theologians have fallen on either side of that debate for two thousand years. One thing is clear: The orthodox Christian cannot fall into the traps of either Gnosticism (the body is evil, and the soul is divine) or Manichaeism (the force of good is equaled by the force of evil); if St. Paul does mean "the body" when he says "the flesh," he cannot mean that the body is itself evil. After all, at the end of time, we are promised new bodies for the new heavens and the new earth. The issue with any body/soul dualism we may find in St. Paul is an issue of the old earth vs. the new earth.

Plato's Pleasure Principle

Plato's ethics are built on a pleasure system--what is pleasurable is right, and what is painful is wrong, or at the very least, what is wrong causes pain, and what is right causes pleasure. This concept shows up throughout his dialogues, particularly those of the middle period, and they've always rung false to my Presbyterian mind. In Timaeus, however, he gives us a scientific defense of his ethics; in this passage, he deals with the mechanics of taste:

Whenever the composition of the particles which enter into the moist parts is naturally akin to the state of the tongue, they oil its roughened parts and smooth it, contracting the parts that are unnaturally dilated or dilating those that are contracted, and thus settling them all, so far as possible, in their natural condition; and every such remedy of the forcible affections, being pleasant and welcome to everyone, is called "sweet." (66C)

I guess that's not really a defense of his ethics, per se, but we can extrapolate one. What is right has the effect on the soul that sweet things have on the body--it sets it right, and since pleasure is the effect of everything being in its right place, right equals pleasure.

Can the dour Presbyterian mind get behind such a formula? Perhaps, if we tweak it a little. Calvinists believe that everything (yeah, depending on the Calvinist) is predetermined; therefore, God is always already in control of everything; therefore, everything is naturally in its proper place (and proper is always a good word for Presbyterians). Doesn't that produce a certain pleasure (the patriarchs call it joy), even as it may also cause pain? Calvinists are fond of the idea that we do the right thing at the expense of our comfort, but it seems more accurate to say we exchange one (lower) pleasure for another higher one:

Consider it pure joy, my brethren, when you encounter very various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in
nothing. (James 1:2-4, NAS)

St. James modifies Plato, then: Pleasure is not uniformly good, but in its higher, divine form (that knowledge of/faith in God's properly ordering the universe), it can be. It is this knowledge and this faith that properly orders the soul and comforts us, provided we do the right thing through them.

I think this is my first positive post about Plato, and it was going to be negative until I worked this out. Maybe Nathan is right--I should be more open and charitable to him.

Hieroglyphics

I'm wrestling with the Egyptians--or at least with representations of them--tonight.

Plato presents us with some third-hand Egyptians in Timaeus, and I'm wondering if they're trustworthy as Egyptians--that is, if the opinions they express are more or less legitimate Egyptian opinions (and then if those opinions are valid). They call themselves not the oldest civilization but rather the only one that's not destroyed by divine floods like the one in Genesis 7. At any rate, we should accept Egyptian views on history because

in our country neither then nor at any other time does the water pour down over our fields from above, on the contrary it all tends naturally to well up from below. Hence it is, for these reasons, that what is here preserved is reckoned to be most ancient; the truth being that in every place where there is no excessive heat or cold to prevent it there always exists some human stock (22E-23A).

I don't doubt that this was a common Greek view of the Egyptians. Herodotus, for example, makes a similar claim in his Histories--against the views of the Egyptians themselves, he claims them as the oldest civilization:

The Egyptians before the reign of Psammetichus used to think that of all races in the world they were the most ancient; Psammetichus, however, when he came to the throne, took it into his head to settle the question of priority, and ever since his time the Egyptians have believed that the Phrygians surpass them in antiquity and that they themselves come second.

Herodotus is clearly not convinced by the bizarre and ridiculous method Psammetichus comes up with for "proving" which race is older--his implication is that the Egyptians were right in the first place and foolish to believe this bit of snake oil.

Herodotus does not exactly bow before the Egyptians, particularly in matters of religion--"I do not think that any one nation knows much more about such things than any other"--but he puts them ahead of the Greeks in science and in the formation of religion, since they were the first to name the gods and to built altars and idols.

I suspect but do not know that 4th-century-B.C.E. Greek attitudes toward Egypt resembled Victorian attitudes toward Asian cultures (some of which, of course, still exist today): "Here's an ancient civilization, in many ways unchanged since the day of its formation, and while it's still largely barbarian, its advanced age gives it access to knowledge--both scientific and mystical--that we don't have." I suspect, that is, that the Greeks orientalized Egypt and that Plato puts the story of Atlantis in an Egyptian's mouth to give it more credence. What I'd like to know is whether or not the Egyptians held this opinion of themselves.

(By the way, the attitude I suspect Greeks had toward Egypt would reappear in the 1820s, when Jean-Francois Champillon found the Rosetta Stone and hieroglyphics became a cultural big deal. You can read all about it in John Irwin's excellent American Hieroglyphics.)

It's an important question for biblical scholars, who are all but expressly told by the Book to distrust Egypt but who are faced with ancient evidence that suggests that Egyptian sources are pretty reliable, maybe the most reliable. Plato's Egyptians, for example, condemn the Greeks (and by extension the Hebrews and the Babylonians) because "you remember but one deluge, though many had occurred previously" (23B). In some ways, this condemnation still jives with the biblical account; after all, much of Egypt was built on the Nile's flood plain, and so you'd expect them to get a whole load of floods--and all the better if you accept Higher Criticism's hypothesis that Noah's flood was local rather than global.

But Israel does not even register as a civilization--or even as a partial civilization--with Herodotus, even though he devotes quite a bit of space to their oppressors like Babylon and Egypt (among others). What's more, he assigns to Egypt rites and beliefs we associate with Israel:

Pigs are considered unclean. If anyone touches a pig accidentally in passing, he will at once plunge into the river, clothes and all, to wash himself, and swineherds, though of pure Eygptian blood, are the only people in the country who never enter a temple.

I'm not sure why a civilization that holds pigs to be unclean would even have swineherds, but no matter--this next passage is even more damning in its way:

They practice circumcision, while men of other nations--except those who have learnt from Egypt--leave their private parts as nature made them.

It's not as though passages like these spell the end of Judeo-Christian faith--after all, they've existed longer than Christianity has, and generations of believers and scholars have dealt with them--but they do complicate it, cast doubt on it. What does it mean that the Egyptians practice circumcision, the outward sign of YHWH's covenant with Abraham? Are we to believe the Egyptians took genital fashion tips from their slaves? Isn't it more likely that Moses took parts of his law from his oppressors--as he took "articles of silver and articles of gold, and clothing (Exodus 12:35, NAS)--and then justified both theft and sudden exit with a cock-and-bull story about Abraham?

I'm not sure either of these views can be proven; like most aspects of biblical scholarship, it's a matter of willful faith, of reading the hieroglyphics and deciding which Rosetta Stone to translate with.