Even in a Savaged Landscape…

If a Lutheran impulse lurks within me, as I noted yesterday, I also have, you might say, a marginally existentialist temperament. When looking for a starting point for making sense of life, I find that point anchored in personal consciousness (with all of its powers included, of course). Before thought, there must be a thinker; before experience, there must be someone to have it. But my position does not extend to affirming what authentic existentialists do, namely that “existence is prior to essence.” For the hard-core existentialist, each human essence (“what we are”) is created by the person’s voluntary action. Curiously, as I grasp this—to the extent that I do—the existentialist’s “existence” is what Aristotle seems to have meant by potential. Potential is a devil of a concept. It must be there, but yet it isn’t—yet. In any case, for me, the core self has “features,” right out of the box, thus something that we are—long before we’ve done anything at all. We are a power of awareness and of will.

Been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Anxiety. It is an admirable, brief summation of Sartre’s philosophy from the perspective of “the eternal feminine.” I owe Brandon Watson for pointing me in that directed quite some time ago. The book is inaccessible to people who’ve never grappled with Sartre—in whose Being and Nothingness the various core concepts de Beauvoir uses are first defined with plentiful examples; de Beauvoir does not bother with definitions: she is addressing other existentialists. But once those notions are firmly renewed, de Beauvoir’s work is helpful. Reading it came the thought: “Lord, that twentieth century! An absolute desert, a ravaged landscape. And yet spirituality rises from that wreckage nonetheless.”

Reorienting myself in this arcane world of thought and feeling born of ruin, I came across a wonderful short paper by Gordon R. Lewis, of the Conservative Baptist Seminary (Denver, CO), titled “Augustine and Existentialism” (link). Lewis traces the essence of existentialism back to Augustine (354-430). Augustine’s view is only marginally existentialist; he would also have found problems in putting essence second. He, of course, lived in a time of disintegration—that of the Western Roman Empire. The cultural landscape might have been similarly savaged.

I’ve come to think, reading another existentialist, Hans Jonas, in his The Gnostic Religion (link on this blog) that the same spirit, minus philosophical machinery, also inspired Gnosticism, a phenomenon that predates Augustine (say second century AD), with the Hellenistic order coming unraveled. The same phenomenon sprouting, each time, from a landscape of cultural chaos.

Wearing a Dunce Cap

I have been wandering of late in the company of a distinct minority within the Age of Christendom. By and large it is the company I’ve kept throughout my life even if, quite often, sometimes for years on end, I’ve been socializing with the same minorities in other cultures—Persian (Mazdaism), Arab (Sufism), but also touching the Chinese (in Taoism). This walk, of late, began with Duns Scotus whom I met, in my childhood, by way of the dunce cap and, growing up, I never questioned the prevalent but mildly expressed view among my teachers in Catholic schools from lowest to highest that Scotus was a rather dim light, if not a small shadow-thrower, in the vast brilliance of St. Thomas Aquinas. Dunce cap? Worn by those who do not get it. You can make one out of some sheets of newspaper, making them into a cone. For the origin of that shape I show a fifteenth century painting of Scotus (who himself lived mostly in the blessed thirteenth century, 1266-1308); the Flemish painter was Justus van Gent (link).

Scotus belongs to the Platonic line traceable backwards by way of St. Augustine (354-430). Augustine himself was part of this minority, close to Manichaeism in youth, a gnostic view which itself has links back to Mazdaism. He lived in a time when the New Dark Age of the Roman Realm was up and running in a serious way. The Visigoths sacked Rome when he was 56 in 410 AD. Therefore his view was darker and more pessimistic than that of Aquinas (1225-1274) who lived as the light of the Renaissance began to signal its own coming with a faint rosy color beneath the horizon. And Aquinas’ great influence was Aristotle who lived just as the Old Modernism, Hellenism, was about to be launched by his pupil, Alexander the Great.  

Let me capture these distinctions in cartoon-like fashion, as it were. Plato stood in relation to Aristotle as Scotus stood to Aquinas. In Plato we see the mature philosophy of a passing religious age, in Aristotle the foreshadowing of a modern time. The same may be said of Scotus and Aquinas, with the small but not very important difference that Aquinas was 41 years older than Scotus whereas Plato was 43 years older than Aristotle. In inwardly-directed religious ages, awareness of the fallen nature of humanity is to the fore. In outwardly-directed secular ages, self-assertion rises. The feeling tone derives from the focus of attention.

So I was reading Berdyaev. He proclaims himself a Platonist, Christian existentialist, and he viewed Duns Scotus as the greatest of the Scholastics. It was the kind of statement that caught my eye, surprised me. I underlined it heavily, adding exclamation marks in the margin—the last time I had read the Russian sage some decades ago with great approval.

So here we have a minority strain of pessimism and a majority dominance of optimism—both within an almost invisibly small cluster of communities that even think about permanent transcendence. I’m still of the pessimistic camp but getting there, in age, I mean. And the odd thing is that, well past the three-score-and-ten, I am feeling optimistic now. If one goes deep enough in any direction with a kind of junk-yard-dog persistence, amazingly the light begins to dawn. I wonder. Does the light eventually dim for the really persistent optimists? If so, my intuition guided me correctly in my gloomy youth.