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.