The Ghost Who E'er Denies

Contradictions inhere in evil. We picture it as powerful, often as superior in intellect, but when we look at evil closely, analytically, comprehensively, it turns out to be pathetic, limited, deficient, and contemptible. The philosophers’ definition of evil as the absence of good turns out to be narrowly correct. Let’s take a moment to examine that contradiction—power and absence—before turning to other aspects of this subject.

Genuinely powerful phenomena have a neutral character: tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides. We know them to be innocent of the least intention. They represent release of energy. Droughts that come when the rains fail and devastate the land represent the opposite, denial of energy. Droughts also lack intentions; they are conditions, not real denials of anything.

But the power we associate with evil is also simply energy. But those who release or deny it are people who have what nature lacks: intention. What we mean by that word, strictly speaking, is a fusion of will and consciousness. When consciousness is missing we’re dealing with instinct. The tiger may “intend” to eat, but it has no awareness whatsoever that its victim is just another “tiger” in a different form.

People are capable of evil because they innately know—and the more sophisticated they are the more certain we can be that they do—that what they intend will cause harm to others; but they do not care. Innate knowledge and choice of action contrary to it is of the very essence of evil. If we deny this innate knowledge, we cannot really hold people responsible. Conscience must be an absolute, must be really present—or to put it more sharply must have been present at some point and then been consciously overstepped—before evil is possible. And the knowledge that I talk about is the real sort of thing, not a conceptual structure but something fused with a feeling best rendered as empathy. To harm others knowingly shows an absence of empathy, and in the philosophical “absence of good,” the real absence is that of empathy. It is a hardening of the heart. This hardening, however, does not deprive the evil-doer of power; it redirects this power to an evil expression.

It intrigues me that the personification of evil—as Mephistopheles—achieves an ambiguous but yet heroic status in Goethe’s Faust as the nineteenth century dawns (1808). It is from Faust that my post’s title comes, rendered in the same beat Goethe used, I am the ghost who e’er denies (Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint). The Enlightenment is then already in the past, and the devil is now promoted to the status of God’s agent provocateur. Mephistopheles becomes a more interesting figure than Faust; Faust wins in the end; we like this sort of story; it means the cake and eating it too.

The Faust figure appears to have been a real person who styled himself Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior. In his own time, the early sixteenth century, he was uniformly denounced as a charlatan, alchemist, moving about with a performing horse, a dog, familiar and evil spirits, and in league with the devil who eventually carried him off. In all of the earlier literary works based on Faust, the magician reaches a bargain with the devil, benefits for a set number of years with all kinds of rewards, but in the end is carried off to hell. Thus Encyclopedia Britannica informs me—and thus also end of story. In Goethe’s Faust we encounter the blessed transformation to modernity—at least if we view the story from a distance. Faust enjoys the powers that he bargains for but at the end is—saved! saved in part by the pleadings of the virtuous Gretchen, whom he seduces, gets pregnant, and who, in turn, drowns her illegitimate child—but she is saved and enters heaven anyway. There, in a role that evokes Dante’s Beatrice in Heaven, she intercedes for Faust. And all ends well.

But does it? In the earlier tales, the high sophistication, towering intellect, and all those other things Goethe lavishes on Faust do not produce the transformation. The absence of empathy corrupts. In the long run things always end badly. It might be time, again, to write another Faust, in modern dress. Ah, if only I had the energy, the poetry—and the years left for the labor—I might attempt it myself. That being beyond me, I invite a kindred spirit to do this necessary task.

Oh, yes. Perhaps I’d better define what “kindred spirit” means. It means a spirit of the new times, now in process of gestation. In those times it is Gretchen that matters, and who gives a fig for Faust. A kindred spirit will not give a dime for Faust’s ever so exalted soul if his will is bent the wrong way round. The poet will see him enter hell and wait for the doors to slam shut. And leave judgment to the Almighty.

Remembering Self-Remembering

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread…
     [Milton, Lycidas]

I encountered the writings of P.D. Ouspensky roughly in the 1970s and soon learned about George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who was Ouspensky’s inspiration. Both men were Russians born in the nineteenth century; both died in the late 1940s. Gurdjieff was the leader of a spiritual teaching movement; Ouspensky, while part of this grou for a while, was more broadly speaking a philosophical writer. Much later I discovered that Gurdjieff had latched on to his ideas from Sufi sources and turned a narrow slice of these into the foundations of his work; he himself characterized what he taught as esoteric Christianity and never acknowledged his debt.

I found Ouspensky’s (and later Gurdieff’s own) writings fascinating but strange. The essence may be rendered by saying that people are asleep; they have selves but not a genuine core self. That self, the real one, develops after arduous practice; the central technique for producing this initially absent self is self-remembering, thus becoming conscious of self, separating oneself from the flow of mentation, seeing the multiple personalities that constitute us (per G&O) as unreal, and gradually reaching genuine humanity.

I found this strange because I was only too aware—and indeed from childhood on—that I did too have a core self. My roots are in Catholicism, and you don’t go very far from those roots before you’re only all too aware that you have a conscience. But in truth I already knew that as a little child before I’d ever heard of anything like the catechism. Therefore, in the 1970s, the notion that I was an automaton sleep-walking through life was odd. I knew what it referred to, by and large, namely inattentiveness, absorption, passion, and the like, but the notion that you somehow created this self—and in its absence were sort of dismembered after death and blown into the void like dust, as Gurdjieff suggested—seemed illogical. How could you remember the self if there was no self there to do the remembering in the first place. Quite early on, of course, I’d learned Goethe’s famous saying: “Two souls, alas, reside within my breast.” True enough, of course, but Goethe, the third soul, as it were, knew this fact. Later yet I encountered the modern evolutionary doctrine that we are automata—and that our personalities are nothing but discrete (and ever changing) structures of nerve cells engaged in a Darwinian competition. But while that description also fits the G&O model of the ordinary, unenlightened common human, neither of these men came from that modern tradition.

The fascinating aspects of such doctrines is their narrow focus on some aspects of a teaching which, entirely legitimately, uses techniques to nurture human development. The very narrowness of focus is what makes bodies of teaching such as this one cult-like—thus with but marginal influence. The Sufis have developed many techniques of disengaging the human attention from the flux of ordinary life. The repetition of a single phrase, the zikhr—also known to us from the Hindu mantra—was another. Catholicism has both. Self-remembering has the same function as the examination of the conscience; and there is also the repetition of the Holy Name. But what makes a particular practice valuable is the comprehensive structure in which it is embedded. Some teachings tempt people because they promise success by some kind of recipe or formula. Therefore such groups attract those seeking power and—much more poignantly—whose who have been starved of meaning.

The core self is, indeed, enveloped in the material dimension—and, unless cultivated, can readily habituate itself to live in the continuous flux of stimulus that life produces. The proper preparation of the human takes place by nurture in a home and a comprehensively formed society. The vast number of religious and quasi-religious movements that have characterized the twentieth century testify to the failure of homes—and society as a whole—to assume the burden of nourishing the higher aspects of the soul. Then the hungry sheep look for almost anything that seems to offer help.

The Two Faces of Janus

To continue for a little longer on the subject of morality, it strikes me that ethics may be pictured as the Roman god called Janus, a figure with two faces looking in two directions. Janus was the god of gates, of entries (alas, perhaps of border regions too) looking back and ahead. We get our January from this figure because Janus was also the god of endings and beginnings. But my purpose in using the symbol here is to emphasize that the ethical impulse we carry within us is at every step opposed by contrary impulses. Nothing is better known. That is why ethics gets the emphasis it does. No one preaches that we should eat or breathe. That, sire, (as Samuel Johnson might say), you can be sure shall be accomplished.

I concluded the last posting by pointing out that the moral impulse in us indicates a vector, a direction, some place we wish to reach: one face of ethics. Its other face is the resistance to this impulse everywhere manifest and at so deep a level that in the Christian tradition we call it original sin. Janus is a very good symbol for summing up the confusions and contradictions of “being of two minds”; no sooner decided on a path than the other mind has a better idea—and the struggle, therefore, is endemic. As Goethe aptly said:

Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
One wills to part itself from the other,
One holds fast with savage love-lust
To the world with hard organic force,
The other lifts itself by power from the dust
To the domains of higher ancestors.
[Faust, Act I.]

In the cosmic models I’ve discussed in other posts, the notion of one order entering and becoming entangled in another serves as an explanation of why life as we know it, a purposive striving, exists in a universe where nothing analogous is visible to us. The ethical impulse is thus that which “lifts from the dust” and the “savage love-lust” is the other face of our experience which clings desperately to the world. We may very well have this two-faced duality because we only see the one clearly, the world; and the other one, the domain of our origins, we see very dimly by intuition only. We cling to the familiar; we do so in ordinary life as well; we do so even when it is suboptimal; the new seems dangerous. So we cling. But something in us, a secret knowledge we can’t quite grasp firmly enough, tells to go on. Hence the struggle. The curious aspects of this suspension between two realities, only one of which we clearly see, is that the explanation of our entanglement in matter will probably become known to us only after we’ve managed to escape it.

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Image courtesy of this site concerned with Freemasonry.