I wrote this after having become interested in the Stoics’ so-called “animating” or “soul” principle, and its relationship with the (mostly literary) figure of the devil. The association isn’t as weird as it sounds, and I’ll have the opportunity to clarify it as I go along. In order to make it more readable, I’ve separated the text into two posts, the first one dealing with the writings of Augustine of Hippo (and a few other authors as well), while the second post is a commentary on Daniel Suarez’s Daemon, a recent sci-fi novel that deals – in a really cool and uncanny way – with the stuff I develop in the first post.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, — “But these impulses may be from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.”
Ralph Emerson, Self-Reliance
(In the usual order, our guys Augustine and Ralph Waldo Emerson)
The locus of Pure Thought
By placing the integrity of the mind within the realm of the sacred, Emerson locates reflexive thought in a place whose original state matters less than its impending erosion. If he does not fear « living from the devil » here, it might be because the mobility of free thought bears more value to him than any culture that might set it down into specific rites, symbols and institutions. What we observe in this passage, albeit in a queerly modern form, is the traditional Christian rhetoric of using the figure of the devil to reflect on earthly civilization as the locus of the deep, painful division of the human soul. This rhetoric, which arose at a time when Christian doctrine was seen as an impetus to the destruction of long-standing pagan symbols and temples, yokes together a daemonic figure inherited from the works of Plato and Apuleius with the human sense of immanent existential emptiness. In the writing of Augustine, for instance, God’s greatness comes from his indivisible, resolutely topical presence, which serves as therapy for the harrowing human desire that ends up severing all forms of earthly meaning or satisfaction. By emancipating himself from the Manichees, for whom the Prince of Darkness acted as alter-ego to a God totally separated from any form of philosophical contemplation, he crafted the idea that human thought takes place in an immutable City of God sketched out from the sacred zone surrounding the ancient pagan temple. The classical daemon, or demon, in this context, is relegated to the symbolic representation of the carnal temptation that cleaves bodies and words from their eternal grace. This epistemological framework, which plays an integral part is Augustine’s setting down of traditional Christian dogma, was a fundamental transition, a complete transformation, in fact, of the traditional role of the daemon in classical thought.
Rarely discussed in terms of its epistemological underpinnings, this transformation has had a huge influence on the way human thought has been conceptualized in modern times.
And I marveled that I now loved thee, and no fantasm in thy stead, and yet I was not stable enough to enjoy my God steadily. Instead I was transported to thee by thy beauty, and then presently torn away from thee by my own weight, sinking with grief into these lower things. This weight was carnal habit. But thy memory dwelt with me, and I never doubted in the least that there was One for me to cleave to; but I was not yet ready to cleave to thee firmly. For the body which is corrupted presses down the soul, and the earthly dwelling weighs down the mind, which muses upon many things. My greatest certainty was that “the invisible things of thine from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even thy eternal power and Godhead.” For when I inquired how it was that I could appreciate the beauty of bodies, both celestial and terrestrial; and what it was that supported me in making correct judgments about things mutable; and when I concluded, “This ought to be thus; this ought not”–then when I inquired how it was that I could make such judgments (since I did, in fact, make them), I realized that I had found the unchangeable and true eternity of truth above my changeable mind.
Augustine, Confessions, Book 7, chapter 12
The immobile, transcendent realm
Augustine is often seen as the one who reconciled Christian faith with the platonic system based on the force of contemplative thought; he is in many ways the first to invest in the idea of a philosophical approach to transcendent faith, an idea that will become an integral part of the 17th century’s basic approach towards establishing the tenets of lay understanding. This being said, what I would like to highlight in this context is how the figure of reflexive thought passes from an economy of dialogue to an economy of personal attachment to the fixed, transcendent locus of absolute truth. To understand the full significance of this passage, one needs to remember the tradition that Augustine was definitely dismissing: the 4th and 5th centuries indeed mark a time when the stoic tradition was quickly losing its grasp upon what we might anachronically call European thought. For late stoics like Epictetus and Marcus-Aurelius, thinking is an activity, a dialogue, that takes place between oneself and what they considered to be one’s personal daemon.
(A cool and Stoic emperor: Marcus Aurelius)
A dialogue with one’s personal daemon
This dialogue, light years away from any sense of modern chitchat, must be imagined as stretched out onto the wire of what the stoics called hegemonikon, which can be translated as the « animating or soul principle ». For reasons that will become apparent later, I will be using “directing principle”, following the French tradition, when referring to this agent. The daemon of the stoics and neo-platonists like Apuleius (who, amongst a series of narratives such as the well-known Golden Ass, authored a short treatise on Socrates’ personal daemon) was thus a mobile being whose action was ignited by what 21st century cultural thinkers would call a « hegemonic movement ». Having a discussion with one’s daemon meant submitting oneself to the dialogical process through which personal decisions « took place ». The fact that this process presents itself as a hegemonic force highlights to what extent the daemon held an uncanny function in pre-Christian epistemology that can never be reduced to the well-known modern authoritative roles of judge, lawyer or analyst. As many have noted, the great challenge of stoic life was to learn to accept the agency of the directing principle without any trace of affective involvement. For Epictetus, for instance, the task of human existence was to learn to accept the things that did not « depend on us », that is, to accept the things that were not related to the « operations of the human soul ». In the stoic tradition dating back to what we know of Zeno from second-hand sources, the process of reflexive thought is never seen as an activity which consists in gleaning the crops that grow in a field of primordial truth, but rather an act of fundamental dialogue with one’s personal daemon, a dialogue where inexorable existential matters were broached in a pure and often violent fashion. It is worth noting, here, that the term processio was commonly used in this context by neo-platonic mystics like Plotinus to designate the spirit moving externally towards revealing transcendent aspects of existence to the inferior beings that inhabit the sensuous world. Processio implies both a deep desire to touch the original causal entity and the impossibility for the beings who « received » the spirit to actually seize its source, thus creating a fundamental tension. In the thought of Epictetus and Apuleius, the tension engendered by this desire is a resolutely human affair that needs to be dealt with in a cathartic confrontation with one’s personal daemon.
Augustinian soliloquy and the end of daemonic dialogue
For reasons that are always considered in a somewhat subdued fashion by Augustine’s biographers, this tension goes through a radical transformation in the Confessions, as Augustine confronts it in an absolutely personal, intimate manner, which will soon define the universally specific Christian attitude towards human wanting. Deeply affected by the instability of human affairs, Augustine spent much time looking for a quiet place to exist outside the hectic chaos of the world. While he first believed he had located this oasis in the serenity of the Cassiciacum, it is in the sacred locus of Godhead that he will find the absolute peace he had been longing for. The above quoted passage is quite clear: in God’s immutable eternity, Augustine found a process of « correct judgment » that can finally bring him proper consolation for his suffering. The Augustinian sense of the sacred is, in this respect, a way to locate divine experience in the spirit of the faithful. Instead of staging daemonic dialogues like those that are described in the Socratic narratives, where Socrates seems to have been fed hushed answers by an invisible demi-god, the Confessions are built on the strength of personal soliloquy, where classical dialogue is replaced by a rhetoric of existential lament, a rhetoric where the corrupted soul beseeches the divine oasis to ensure its inner fulfillment. The rational directing principle of the stoics, which was personified by the daemon’s mobile presence, is replaced by a nurturing and therapeutic God. This new figuration has profound consequences on the way thought and judgment were soon to be conceptualized in modern culture. Where we once had a personal demon, inspired, in classical Greco-roman thought, by the directing principle that would prompt the human soul to be decisive in settling personal dilemmas « by oneself » in a process which in no way severed itself from the flux of human existence, we now find a large, empty, terrestrial abyss, where words have lost their innate potency. The Confessions is both the story of this terrestrial abyss – whose chaos will soon be controlled by the mediation of the Christian church – and the staging of an original faculty of judgment nested in the impassibility of divine providence.
By sketching the figure of human thought to fit the mode of Augustine’s intimate soliloquy, the Confessions provide a stable home to those perfectly indefinable ideas that have mystified thinkers since at least pre-biblical times – time, space, extension – in order that they may be « touched » by the one who has been enlightened by divine grace. I use the verb touch in its most affectionate sense, as when Augustine is brought to tears by a feeling, shared with his dying mother Monique, of having been in absolute communion with the mover unmoved. When considering this famous narrative, we are perhaps often quick to lose sight of how this epistemological matrix set up by the plot played a crucial role in establishing the secular foundation of modern logic and global « understanding » in the 17th century. When Pascal, in both his Pensées and other short treatises like the « De l’esprit géométrique » (« Of the Geometrical Spirit ») discusses those notions whose purity can never be grasped in the conceptual language of human thought, he is in fact describing a sacred locus which continues to exist in modern culture as a residual space, a locus of transcendent certainty, where disagreements which cannot be settled by a logical application of the « letter of the law » find a conclusive and, at times violent, resolution. In the secular economy of modern thought, human spirit is left to its own devises when comes the time to confront problems that reveal the categorical limits of established concepts. It is in these defining moments, perhaps, that force wins a final bout against reason.
(the discussion continues in the next post, devoted (mostly…) to Daniel Suarez’s 2009 novel Daemon)
Seroquel Bounty 