Boethian Meditation the Fourth

There is a side of things Boethius does not talk about in the passages we have already seen.  He does not ask whether the good man who is destroyed or harmed by the wicked suffers real harm or destruction.  He talks about this elsewhere, however, and the answer is No.

It seems to me that Boethius must say this in order for the world to be set right.  If one is seriously to believe that the wicked have no power, while one nevertheless experiences the mundane fact that the wicked kill people every day, or forge malevolent rings, or construct unassailable fortresses from which to deploy vast armies of orcs, then one must save face somehow.  One must revert to saying that those who seem to have power over the body have no power over the soul.  And perhaps one will emphasize the fact that the wicked have only a transitory power even over the body, and that in the resurrection, the wicked will have power over nothing.

The resurrection is a controversial subject to broach in Middle Earth.  Elves have no need of it, and Men do not philosophize about it.  Death is a gift, a boon from Iluvatar, and appears not to need revoking.  I will let that sleeping dog lie.  But even without a resurrection in Middle Earth, it is fairly clear that death is not an evil.  In the unknown realm into which the dying go, the goodness of Iluvatar must still order all things.  And one suspects that in that realm, whether in or out of the world, wrongs will be set right.

Thus Boethius appeals to the afterlife:  no matter what goods may be destroyed in this world, our happiness consists in another, in becoming divine (as he puts it): in becoming “gods.”  This, too, is what the wicked lose.  Moreover, whatever wrongs we suffer in this life at the hands of wicked men or fickle Fortune, are actually goods sent by divine mercy to prepare us for the long-awaited happiness.

These are threads Tolkien does not weave into the trilogy.  The reward of good deeds in Middle Earth is the song that is sung of them afterwards, by whoever is left to sing.  The righting of wrongs in the afterlife is a hope which, if yearned for, is still unspoken.  And yet there is the hint eveywhere that death is not really to be feared, that (like Gandalf, perhaps) the righteous man is ultimately unslayable.  He may go to the halls of his fathers, he may go down into the earth or pass over the falls to the sea–but in the end he is accounted for, and preserved from the reach of those who can kill the soul.  In whatever place the dead wait, he too awaits the unbending of the world and the fate of the children of Iluvatar.

 

Boethian Meditation the Third

So since he who has control over good things can do all things, whereas those who control evil things cannot do everything, it is clear that those who can do evil things are less powerful.

The professor whom I am assisting in the course on Boethius neatly divides Boethius’s “evil beings” into three categories.  Some men are evil through ignorance, because they simply do not know what the good is, or because they are deceived.  Some are evil through weakness of the will, because they know what is good but they desire evil more than the good.  But some are evil through malice, and they do what is evil because they know it is evil.  They take delight in the harm they cause.

In the case of Tolkien’s characters, at least the ones who are tempted by and succumb to the Ring, the first two categories seem to merge.  Through weakness of will Isildur keeps the Ring on account of its beauty, and he is thereby deceived into thinking it harmless.  Through ignorance, Bilbo and Frodo keep and use the Ring for many years, and it wears away the strength of their wills to the point that Bilbo barely gives it up, and Frodo cannot do so at all, even though at the last he knows with perfect clarity how evil it is.  Gollum desires the beauty of the Ring from the beginning, and murders for it; he is then deceived into thinking that, with the Ring’s help, he can learn great secrets under the mountains.  In all such cases, the action of the Ring depends on deception and the weakness of its wearer’s will, and its result is not to increase the wearer’s power, but to drain it away.

But what of the beings who are evil for evil’s own sake?  In what sense are they powerless?  Here I think my two previous meditations pertain the most.  For it is of these evil men, and only of these evil men, that Boethius asserts that they simply do not exist.  He qualifies this, of course, by saying that such men do not exist as men—they exist as something less, as corpses exist.  But do what sorts of powers pertain to a corpse?

… All power is to be reckoned among desirable things, and all desirable things are related to the good as to the high point of their nature.  But the capacity to wreak evil cannot be related to the good, and so is not something to be desired.  Yet all power is desirable, so it is clear that capacity for evil is not a power.

As it is with the Ring, so it is with Sauron and all evil beings.  They possess no powers except temptation and deception, acting like parasites on the ignorance and weakness of other beings.  In cases where these other beings resist temptation and deceit, they sometimes have the power to destroy.  But Sauron and all his ilk are wholly powerless to create: they can only destroy what has already been created.  They are powerful in the sense that leeches are powerful, deriving their capacity to cause harm only from the constitution of their victims, and not from any real power radiating from their own beings.

You see kings seated high on lofty thrones,
In gleaming purple bright, fenced by grim arms,
Speechless with rage, threats on their louring brows.
Draw back this veil of arrogant, empty show,
Then see close chains which bind the lords within.
Lust with its poisonous greed excites their hearts;
Wild anger whips up storm-waves in their minds;
Grief plagues these captives, slippery hope torments.
The king you see by many lords possessed,
His aims frustrated, by harsh masters pressed.

Or, as Boethius writes in the following chapter:

True voices and true shapes were lost;
Bereft of human norms,
Their minds alone endured unchanged
To mourn their monstrous forms.

(Consolation of Philosophy, V.2 & 3)

 

Boethian Meditation the Second

“But evil men, you will say, have power.”

My second meditation on Boethius begins with his own objection.  Having pressed his claim that evil men do not exist, Boethius comes to the sticking point:  if evil men don’t exist, why are they so powerful?  This is neither more nor less than the problem we have with Sauron and the Nazgul.  If Tolkien really embraces the Boethian/Augustinian view that evil is nothing, why is it that his evil creatures can cause so much harm?

“I would not deny this myself, but their power stems not from their strength but from their weakness.”

What weakness is this?

“If, as we concluded a little earlier, evil is nothing, it is obvious that wicked men have no power, because they can perform only evil deeds.”

This is hard to swallow.

The thing is that you can’t criticize Boethius for not knowing how much harm an evil person can do.  You can’t bring the Holocaust or World War II against him.  As Boethius pens the lines above, he is witnessing the final collapse of Roman civilization while pining in the prison whither he has been sent after betrayal and disgrace by his fellow senators.  The wicked men he mentions will eventually put him to death—an eventuality that he already suspects.  So there is no telling him that he does not know what he is talking about when it comes to the power wielded by evil men.

But power, Boethius suggests, is always a power for something.  Now, what if you set about to get something you want, but it turns out that every power you thought you had ends up hindering you in your quest?  Clearly these “powers” would not be real powers at all—they would be handicaps, because they would render you powerless to fulfill your desires.

It is precisely this that becomes the curse of the wicked.  For they too have desires (for happiness of course, like the rest of us), but they have chosen the ways of evil to bring them about.  And the problem with the ways of evil is that they take no account of the good.  But the good, as Boethius argues, is what all desire, and what is necessary for happiness.  Thus, having cultivated the wrong powers and become strong in the wrong paths, evil men are powerless to attain the good.

What is the weakness of Sauron?  It is the weakness that Boethius ascribes to the evil man.  “He is very wise,” Gandalf says of Sauron, “and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice.  But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts.”  In his weakness of mistaking power for the only desirable good, Sauron is blind to all other goods.  On this blindness depends the web and weft of the ensuing plot:  Sauron cannot think that someone would refuse power, and actively seek to destroy the One Ring.

 

Boethian Meditation the First

Until now, I had thought that Tolkien’s representation of evil followed either Augustine or the Angelic Doctor or both.  But teaching a bit of Boethius to my undergraduate students this week has opened up new worlds of possibility.  Boethius has much to say of evil, even though it be hard to be understood.  Moreover, it is material Tolkien would have known well, as Boethius’s works impinged like no others upon the medieval world of which Tolkien was a student.

What I am doing for the next couple weeks, therefore, is to take a break from dogging the Fellowship so literally, and instead to look at the theme of evil in Boethius.  This post is the first of four meditations on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.  In all these meditations I will try to uncover the hidden tracks of Boethius’s influence over Middle Earth, and with the aid of Lady Luck perhaps this will redeem said meditations from the tedium of the lecture hall.

Quoth Boethius:

“This claim of ours may perhaps sound surprising to some, that wicked men, who form the majority of mankind, do not exist, but that is the actuality.  I am not denying that evil men are evil, but I am claiming that in the pure and simple sense they do not exist.”*

There is a claim to wake one up in the morning, no?  But it fits hand-in-glove with the hints Tolkien has been dropping about the Nazgul.  I think Boethius puts the case more strongly than either Augustine or Aquinas.  He goes on to draw an analogy:

“You could say that a corpse is a dead man, but you could not call it a man pure and simple; in the same way, I grant that corrupt men are wicked, but I refuse to admit that they exist in an absolute sense.  Whatever maintains its due order and preserves its nature, exists; if it abandons its nature, it ceases also to exist, for its existence is bound up in its nature.”*

So corrupt men are like corpses.  The image resonates with the Barrow-Wights, with the army of undead cowards in the Paths of the Dead, and with the nature of the Nazgul as “less” than men.  How is it that these men lose their nature as Men?  Boethius tells us that the nature of Man is to seek the good.  The wicked fail to seek the good for whatever reason.  And that makes them corpse-like, for man is not man insofar as he lives but insofar as he lives well.

There is more where this comes from, and I will wrest a few more thoughts out of it before moving on.

 

 *Should you like to read this passage and the more that is where it comes from, as indeed you should, you will find it in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Book IV, at the end of chapter 2.  Should you have difficulty finding Boethius in the archives of your library, perhaps you might look for him under his full name, Anicius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boethius.  There is a Tolkienesque ebullience to such a name, and it suggests that his mother most likely thought him important.

 

Ringwraithery: Or, The Problem of Evil Continued

I am becoming more and more intrigued by Tolkien’s evil creatures, especially the more powerful ones like Balrogs, Ringwraiths, and fallen Valar (or Maiar or whatever Sauron is).  Tolkien was an intelligent Catholic, and it would therefore be expected of him to assume an Augustinian/Thomistic view of evil across all worlds—a view in which evil is not a substance but a privation, not something that exists but something negated from existence.

This view, of course, leaves an elephant in the room when it comes to explaining why evil beings cause so much harm in the world.  (How, we ask, could the atrocities at Auschwitz be said to derive from a “nonexistence”?)  It also complicates a fictional world where evil beings can wield incredible powers that cause supernatural harm.  So the question is, Does Tolkien really assume any such Augustinian account of evil while imagining the actual operations of Barrow-wights and Wraiths?

The encounter with Ringwraiths on Weathertop clears up none of these problems, but it does give us a glimpse into what might be called the “psychology of Ringwraithery.”  I want to highlight two things about the operation of evil in this chapter.  The first is about perception, and the second is about the will.

About perception, the easiest way of putting things is that the Ringwraiths don’t quite inhabit or perceive the waking world that we do.  As Aragorn discourses at length: 

They themselves do not see the world of light as we do, but our shapes cast shadows in their minds, which only the noon sun destroys; and in the dark they perceive many signs and forms that are hidden from us…. And at all times they smell the blood of living things, desiring and hating it.  Senses, too, there are other than sight or smell.  We can feel their presence—it troubled our hearts, as soon as we came here, and before we saw them; they feel ours more keenly.

In short, the Ringwraiths do not live in the world of substance, but of shadow.  So far so good… it is a very Augustinian way of structuring their psychology.

But whence, then, come their powers?  Or, rather, first of all, what exactly are their powers?  I find that this question is not so easy to work out.  The Wraiths live in a world of shadows, but apparently they are solid enough to wear cloaks, ride horses, and wield knives.  They are also responsible for causing certain privations (as all respectable evil beings do), such as darkness and cold.  But I find their most interesting power to be Temptation.  Frodo knows he is in the presence of a wraith when he has an overwhelming desire to put on the Ring.  And this is important, at least as far as Augustine is concerned.  For Augustine thought that evil did not exist anywhere except in the Will; and even in the Will, evil was not a reality in itself.  Evil consisted in the perversion of the Will when it turned away from the highest Good to seek something else.

The brilliance of the attack on Weathertop is that these themes of perception and will come together.  By putting on the Ring, Frodo succumbs to an evil will.  Simultaneously, the wearing of the Ring causes him to enter the world of the Ringwraiths and see as they see.  The altering of his will alters his perception:  evil beings appear to become more substantial, and what the other Hobbits perceive to be merely black shadows, Frodo now perceives as clearly-delineated kings with robes and helms and hands.

All this leads to the question:  Does the “substantiality” of evil in Middle Earth in fact have to do more with the perspective that it is seen from?  Do evil beings seem more powerful precisely in proportion as they have control over the perceiver’s will?  And if a perceiver’s will is not corrupted—as in the example of Tom Bombadil—does evil in fact not seem to be substantial at all?

I have a suspicion here that I am equivocating the terms “substance” and “power”, and “evil” and “evil thing.”  I shall have to turn to culling out a few more definitions from Augustine.  But in the meantime I find the idea highly suggestive that, in the case of the unfallen Valar and certain uncorrupted characters like Bombadil, evil beings really appear to be nothing.

 

Scotus Subtilis

All I can say is, kudos to John Duns Scotus.  He has me thoroughly befuddled.  I don’t remember spending this long trying to figure out a philosopher since reading Husserl as an undergraduate.

The question is:  When Duns Scotus tries to argue that the “nature” of a thing (its species or form) is “less than numerical unity,” what in the world does he mean?  I could understand it if Scotus drew an analogy with the geometric point so beloved by mathematicians.  A point (commonly referred to as a “unity,” since Euclid defined it as “that which has no part”) has no length or breadth or height.  That is to say, it has 0 spatial extension.  So, even though it involves a concept of unity equal to 1 (a single thing), its numerical value would be 0.  This, of course, creates problems for how to talk about points… you can say, for example, “Here’s point A and there’s point B, so that means we have two points total in our diagram.”  But two times zero is still zero; so even if you have two points, you really don’t have anything.  And whatever you do have, numerically speaking, is going to be less than the number one. 

This is really the only case I can get my brain around for a sort of “unity” that has a numerical value less than one.  Too bad Scotus does not use this illustration.  Too bad that I have a dark suspicion that he is not talking about geometry when referring to natures and forms.  Too bad that it’s been more than 500 years since anyone last used his philosophical lingo, and that I might have to resort to using mediums to bring him up for extended questioning.  (That is an advantage to knowing Latin… with a universal language, Scotus’s ghost and I could probably keep up a decent conversation.)  It is all too, too bad.

 

Confessions of Writing a Paper on Augustine

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.

 

Plotinus: Ennead I.6 – “Beauty”

Quoth the Sage: “Never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.”

But if a soul is not beautiful, how can it see the First Beauty?  It must make itself beautiful.  But how can it make itself beautiful?  It must have an exemplar to follow.  But surely the only true exemplar of Beauty is Beauty itself.

So how can the soul make itself beautiful in order to see Beauty, unless it has first seen Beauty?

What Plato’s language of rebirth and memory captures, well before Plotinus’s language about the ascent of the soul toward Beauty captures the same thing, is a real necessity of prior knowledge of some things, some things that Aquinas would call “known in a general and confused way” but not known clearly and perhaps not even consciously.  The soul begins by knowing something about beauty.  Based on that, it can make itself a little beautiful.  Being more beautiful, it can see and recall beauty more clearly.  And hence it makes itself a little more beautiful.

But this account of the journey of the soul, by steps, to some great but dimly foreshadowed End, is nothing other than a literary construction known as a Quest.  When Perceval (or any other knight, for that matter) sets out to find the Holy Grail, he knows what he seeks, but not how impure he is or how unworthy to find it.  As he realizes his defects, he undergoes purification.  The purification is what enables him to see what he could not see before.

And it all comes down to the seeing.  Is there a medieval Grail legend anywhere in which the knight takes the Grail home, quaffs mead from it at feasts, gives it to his lady, or donates it to the local museum?  The desire for the Holy Grail is not the desire for acquisition but for Sight.

But the distinction between the pleasure of acquisition and the pleasure of seeing is exactly the distinction that Aquinas draws between the Good and the Beautiful.

Now at last all is clear.  The knight questing for the Holy Grail is the divine spark of the Soul seeking to return to its first sight of Beauty.  The Primal Beauty is the Holy Grail.