The Red Book of Westmarch

I have reached an impasse on my Augustine paper.  My marginalia in the Fellowship of the Ring are collecting dust in the darkness of an unheated dorm room, eight hundred miles away.  Facebook, and my copy of M. C. Escher’s complete works, have been distracting me all day.  And now, when I force myself to return to writing the Augustine paper, I find myself reading the blogs again.

I am impressed with what a master’s program involves.  I’m not talking about the number of credits, or the amount of writing (I flattered myself as an undergraduate that I was used to that), but the sheer responsibility for the written word.  That, more than anything else, makes me lose my stomach for writing my Augustine paper.

Consider the fact that my paper involves trying to determine whether Augustine incorporates or breaks with Platonism over the traditional paradigm for the “ascent of the soul.”  (This is the ascent Plato talks about in the Symposium—love leads you to contemplate first beauty in one material form, then many beauties, then beauty in souls, then practices, and finally Beauty Itself.  The final rapturous vision of Beauty results in the multiplication of beauties… kids, don’t try this at home.)  Plotinus does some interesting things with this blueprint of Ascent in his Enneads, especially I.6, and then Augustine describes what are apparently two or three attempts at Ascent in the Confessions (a couple of them before his conversion, one afterwards).

As an undergraduate, I would simply have done a comparison between these three books, decided that Augustine swallowed the Platonic paradigm hook, line, and sinker (except for Plato’s pederasty, and with certain modifications of Plotinus’s ecstatic language) and called it a day.  Now I’m finding out, however, that that is not a quite respectable way of going about things.  For starters, Augustine probably never read Plato’s Symposium.  For another thing, a lot of the Platonism Augustine was exposed to came from Ambrose, and we’re not quite sure what kind Platonism that would have been.  (Did Ambrose know that Plato’s original Ascent had pederastic overtones?  Or that Plotinus introduced something new when he added introspection as the sine qua non of Ascent?)  Ambrose does an incredible reworking of Plato’s analogy of the soul as a charioteer in the Phaedrus, but Plato’s famous analogies might have been simply “in the air” at the time, or they may have been repeated in epitomes or summaries, and it would be a fallacy to assume that Ambrose or Augustine actually had a copy of Plato in front of him.

So this is the kind of thing I have to deal with as I set out to determine (1) whether Augustine broke with Platonism, and (2) what kind of Platonism he would have broken with, in Milan, in the late 300’s.

Why would this be important?  I wondered about that at the beginning.  It seemed like such niggling drudgery to constantly check one’s generalizations against the meager specifics Augustine actually gives us about his intellectual inventory in the Confessions.  But now, as I slodge through this paper, I think that the reason for the minutia may be humane.  It’s all in the interest of getting inside Augustine’s head and granting him a fair hearing.  If he didn’t know about Plato’s pederasty (I don’t think he did), then he couldn’t have seen himself “breaking with” a practice whose existence he was oblivious to.  If he only read Enn. V.1, and drank in all that dreadfully mysterious rhetoric about the One (called “Father”), the Logos, and the Nous, without having access to the rest of the Enneads to clarify what Plotinus thought about these “Persons” (hypostases), then he could easily have mistaken Plotinus’s account for a traditional Christian explication of the Trinity.  Yes, mistaken.  Plotinus was neither Trinitarian nor Christian.

In the end, I think what my masters degree will force me to do is to take Augustine’s words, and the words of all those fine chaps who lived in days other than our own, with a severe charity.  Charity because one always wants a sympathetic hearing; severe because we interpreters do not dare to make a man say either more or less than he said.  “I testify to everyone who hears the words of this book:  if anyone adds to them, the Academy shall add to him the plagues which are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from them, the true scholars will take away his part from the Academy.”

Amen.  Now back to my Augustine paper.

What fascinates me about all the story-telling in the “Shadow of the Past” is that Tolkien manages to work in a few commentaries on the way that stories and legends develop.  Consider the facts of Bilbo’s departure as Tolkien the Omniscient Narrator lays them out in Chapter 1.  Then consider the way in which the tale of Mad Baggins evolves through the first paragraph of Chapter 2.  The delightful (and slightly leprechaun-like) legend that the Hobbits develop among themselves is not concocted out of pure air—a healthy dose of the core material in the legend is factual.  The most noticeable difference is that the character of Mad Baggins is not quite true to what we know of Bilbo in real life.

Compare this with the rumors that Gandalf finds circulating among the Woodmen of Mirkwood when he comes to them looking for Gollum.  The Woodmen tell horrid tales of a ghost that drinks blood.  Once again, though the stories exaggerate what we know of the powers and ghostly skills of Gollum, we clearly recognize the substance of the stories.  In fact, the stories of this Bloodthirsty Ghost are more true than the stories about Mad Baggins, since (1) the Bloodthirsty Ghost as a character is much closer to the true character of the real Gollum, and (2) comparing Gollum to a Bloodthirsty Ghost actually stimulates our imagination as readers and infuses the real Gollum with a more dangerous aura in Gandalf’s story.  The presence of an “unfactual legend” serves a useful literary purpose.  We recognize the legend as a true untruth.

By presenting us in Chapter 2 with two unfactual legends, Tolkien (I believe) is revealing something of his attitude toward the veridicality of myths and legends in general.  On the surface, “Mad Baggins” exhibits all the irresponsible exaggeration that an anthropologist studying urban legends might find simultaneously charming and ludicrous, but hardly compelling.  On a deeper and darker level, however, Tolkien makes sure we realize that the legend has just enough truth to attract the attention of certain powers who know something of the “real” story of Bilbo Baggins, and who are able to read the truth through the exaggerations.  In short, the anthropologist who ignored or explained away the “unfactual” Mad Baggins legend would do so only to his own cost.

The same goes for the Bloodthirsty Ghost in Mirkwood.  We may laugh at the Hobbits for their ignorance in the Baggins story, but we cannot laugh at the Woodmen for their keenly accurate sense of the kinds of beings who cause terror.  The anthropologist who ignored the Bloodthirsty Ghost, whether or not Gollum was a ghost, would put his own life at risk.

Clearly, in both instances, debunking the legend misses the point.  Gandalf debunks no legends.  In fact, what stands out in Chapter 2 is how much he listens to stories, as well as relates them.  (Incidentally, in Chapter 2 Gandalf mentions having heard two other unfactual stories that were deliberately unfactual:  Gollum’s, and then Bilbo’s, “half-true” accounts of finding the Ring.  Far from debunking them, Gandalf uses the fact that they were not wholly true to prove how true his own story is about the corruptive nature of the Ring.)  Gandalf does not listen for what is incredulous but for what is clearly the case.  And, most to the point, he wastes no time thinking that a story is false unless he has compelling and pertinent reasons for doing so.

Perhaps Tolkien thought that Gandalf and the Woodmen had something to offer historians and biblical critics after all.

Happily, the annual season of the Christmas Break has arrived, bringing with it a satisfying ration of time for leisure reading and writing.

Unhappily, due to airline weight limitations and the irritations of possessing a finite suitcase, I could not bring my bescribbled copy of the Fellowship with me on break.  Perhaps the fact that I did not make room for the Fellowship by throwing out my copy of Augustine’s Confessions, or my winter boots, would prove to some that I am no true Tolkienist.  I would object.  No one can meditate satisfactorily on Frodo crossing the Misty Mountains while his own feet are freezing, and in any case, meditating satisfactorily on Tolkien is impossible without Augustine’s Confessions.

I therefore apologize for the fact that my forthcoming posts on the Fellowship will be somewhat scattered and will not contain those magical ciphers whose presence is so essential to good scholarship—page and paragraph references.