Augustine: Confessions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. William Watts translation, revised by W. H. D. Rowse.

 

If the liberation offered by the liberal arts culminates in the philosophic life, and the philosophic life culminates in in in the trial and death of the philosopher at the command of the city, Christianity demurs. Christianity begins in humility; not wonder but fear of the Lord is the beginning of its wisdom. As Ann Hartle observed some years ago, a confession is the opposite of an apologia. Confession is humble, the opposite of presumptuous self-defense (VII. xx. 395).

Augustine devotes the first book of his Confessions entirely to prayer. His only judge is God—not the people, not his philosophic friends, least of all himself. And he admits his guilt forthwith.

Early education is a metaphor for man’s relationship with God: no one wants to go to school, but it’s good for you (I. viii. 30). God’s school is much better for you than the schools of men. The liberal arts are mere ornaments of pride; the truth is humblingly simple. Two plus two equals four, no matter what rhetorical embellishments human learning can add. Rhetoric stems from vanity, the desire “to content the eyes of mortals” instead of God (II. I. 65). Men do evil apparently for the thrill of liberation, love passion for the sake of the feeling of passion, but really only to please other men (II. iii-viii). Philosophy or the love of wisdom is only the most refined form of love for human admiration. (The ‘modern’ or Machiavellianized version of this claim is Nietzsche’s: philosophy in only the most refined form of the will to power.)

Augustine’s philosophy and his Manichaeanism contradicted each other. Philosophy can refute false religious doctrines (V. iii. 211; VI. xiv. 259, 261). False religions typically make claims to control the natural world, but philosophy really does understand nature as it stands, if not in its origin. Pseudo-religious niaiseries quickly succumb to philosophic scrutiny.

The vanity of public display, the rhetoric of the philosophic life, caused Augustine to become “a great riddle to myself” (IV. iv. 161). Contra the philosophers, philosophy cannot bring self-knowledge precisely because it must become politic and is at core social, vain. One cannot know what never stops changing: the self is driven by the passions, especially the passions of the crowd. In the central book of the Confessions Augustine confesses, “I was not able to discern my very self” (VII. I. 335). “I stood with my back to the light, and with my face towards those things that receive that light” (IV. xvi. 199). This is Socrates’ image, but Augustine replaces the Good with God. “The good that you love is from Him” (IV. xii. 181).

Turning from the crowd, Augustine examines his own soul. He sees that he has a will, which chooses good and evil (VII. iii. 343). Over the mind that examines itself and the rest of the soul is the light of God. ‘Over’ means not only ‘superior to’ but ‘prior to’: Whence came this soul, this willing mind, if not from a creator-God, that is, one who first of all wills? If corruption is a fading-away of being, then is genesis not the source of goodness, of strength of being or virtue? The Creator who can create such a being as man makes Augustine not wonder like a philosopher but “tremble with love and horror” (VII. x. 373). “I learned to rejoice with trembling” at the thought of such a powerful God (VII. xxi. 397). “Thou has created us for thyself, and our heart cannot be quieted till it may find repose in thee” (I. I. 3). Although introspection is necessary, it is insufficient. You cannot know yourself directly; your own passions preclude such knowledge. You can only know yourself by knowing your Creator, who knows you because He created you. Seneca advises: Let your true ancestors be the philosophers. Augustine replies: Your true father is God.

Both the philosophers and the Christians see the conflicts of the human soul. Philosophers see a battle among the elements of the soul itself—reason versus spirit versus appetites. Christians see the soul more as a battlefield where spiritual beings contend for rule: angels and demons, God and Satan. But in Augustine these spiritual beings approach the soul through the mind in the form of opinions. Bad people are not by nature any worse than good people; good people too are by nature fallen, inclined toward evil. Bad people are rather those who believe bad opinions; good people are those who believe good opinions (VIII. x. 451). In this, Augustine follows Paul in I Timothy 1:10 on “sound doctrine.)

This is why Christianity must open itself to philosophy with deadly seriousness, while at the same time must firmly rule it. Without a detailed legal code or praxis, as in Judaism or Islam, Christianity faces a paradox. “The unlearned start up and take heaven by violence, and we with all our learning, see how easily we wallow in flesh and blood!” (VIII. viii. 443). The unlearned easily accept right opinion. The learned must think before the accept, and are easily misled by corrupt thought-processes. Thus the audience of the Confessions cannot be God, to whom it seems to be addressed—why confess to an omniscient being?—but learned men, students of the liberal arts (II. iii. 71).

We happy few? You will find your true friends only among those who are truly good. Aristotle says as much, but Augustine adds: The truly good share the same opinions, they share the Holy Spirit (IV. iv. 159). Given the immortality in Heaven of right-minded souls, you will never lose a true friend. (I once talked to a Christian college professor who regretted the death of an unbelieving friend because “I’ll never see her again.” Augustine would have had to convince him that she had not been a true friend. Augustinianism need not take second place to Stoicism in the severity of the love and the liberation it offers.)

How then shall the learned few be brought to believe? Unlike Socrates, who knows he does not know and lives with that knowledge, the young Augustine sought certain knowledge (VI. iv. 279). He wanted to be as certain in spiritual matters as he was of arithmetic truths. God rectified his heart by causing him to reflect upon the many things he believed that he could not see; “we could do nothing at all in this life” without such beliefs (VI. v. 283), such as reports of reliable witnesses of cities we have never seen and of medical remedies we have never tried. The reports of Scripture, preached “among all the nations” (VI. v. 283), supplements the human-all-too-human inability to find the truth by “evident reason” (VI. v. 285). Unassisted human reason cannot account for its own genesis, and must therefore depend upon reports. What the Bible reports are the right opinions brought by the Holy Spirit which alone make human souls good—happy because they have rediscovered their true nature or origin as images of God.

Human souls confirm the truth of the Holy Spirit not first of all by thinking but by first of all believing—by gaining a knowledge available only by means of believing because it is a knowledge granted, not achieved. To Socrates Augustine replies: What you know you do not know is what you most need to know, and you can know it only if you first believe the true reports of the Holy Spirit as He spoke through His prophets. Only after you believe those reports is the Holy Spirit likely to speak to you as well, although the Holy Spirit has been known to speak in a still, small voice to unbelievers. Only then will the question of human origins be answered for you. The right questions are not ‘What is?’ (the ancient philosophers) or ‘How?’ (the modern philosophers) but ‘Who?’ and ‘Where from?’

This is why, before philosophizing, Augustine prays to the most authoritative Person: “Courage, my mind, and press on strongly. God is our helper, he made us, and not we ourselves.” (XI. xxvii. 264). Unassisted human reason can understand nature ‘as it stands,’ refuting the charlatanries of astrologers. But unassisted human reason cannot understand the origin of nature, cannot understand nature as a whole as it exists in time.

Augustine’s meditations on time (Book XI0 and on substance (Book XII) both concern origins. His meditation on time is a meditation on the beginning of time, where the Bible narrative itself begins. This meditation is a ‘baptized’ version of the philosopher’s ‘eternal present’—now truly eternal and truly present because Augustine acknowledges the Creator-God. The meditation on substance is a meditation on chaos, the first substance, the stuff the Creator-God shaped.

To be, to know, to will: One being ‘does’ all these; the knowledge of the Creator-God is creative as no ‘god of the philosophers’ can be. What the Creator-God wills is absolutely coterminous with what He does and knows. Human art is only weakly analogous to this; it is merely productive, not truly ‘original’ or creative. The coterminousness of being, knowing, and willing are more analogous to the three-personed God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A being that is knowing and willing—whose very being deliberately creates—is one person and three.

For a Christian, to love wisdom is to love God. But this love differs from philosophic love in two ways. To love God is to love a person. A person is not a form, nor is it ‘the Good’—which, in Plato, somehow accounts for the forms. A form can be ‘seen’; it is an object of noēsis. A person can be seen externally, but not fully understood by sight. A person’s soul also can be known as it were externally, by classifying it as to its ‘type.’ And a person can be known intimately but remain surprising in ways that a form, once known, cannot be. God says: “My thoughts are not your thoughts.” And some of God’s creations—angels, men—can surprise God, rebel against Him, change their minds and thereby induce God to change His mind—as he does more than once in the Bible. God knows man much better than man knows God, but man, being a person too, having free will, retains a touch of opacity even in the eyes of God.

The Christian love of God differs from philosophic love in a second way. The Confessions is is no more a Symposium than it is an Apology. To desire the wisdom and power of God would lead not to the Cross but to Machiavelli. Agapic love is neither erotic nor ‘philiac,’ friendly. God is not our beloved or our friend. Even as God does not love human beings erotically or as a friend—why would he need or desire or buddy up with an inferior?—God properly loves man agapically, as does man love God. Agapic love can be between unequals. In Greek, agape refers to brotherly love, or the mature fondness of a husband and wife; it is the only kind of love associated with justice.

God’s knowledge of man is superior to man’s knowledge of himself because God is the creator of man. “There is some thing of man, that the very spirit of man that is in him, knoweth not. But thou knowest all of him, who made him.” (X. iv. 85)  To create is to know in a way that the introspective philosopher wants but cannot do; it surpasses even the self-knowledge that comes from dialogue with other people. God’s knowledge is the only kind that is intrinsically efficacious, a perfect fusion of theory and practice. Machiavelli and his followers (most spectacularly, the Germans) attempt to know man by making him a self-creating being. The results are more impressive than felicitous.

At best, man knows by seeing, first, that the senses collect data but do not bring knowledge. He then sees that sounds are not the things signified by the sounds, as sounds differ from language. Neither sense impressions nor words by themselves yield knowledge. As for the operations of the mind, memory in the simplest sense—memory of sense impressions including those made by words—does not bring knowledge. Animals have such memory. To know, one needs the Platonic notion of ‘remembering.’ ‘Remembering’ or seeing the forms must then be reconciled with the God of the Bible. Unlike such disguised ‘Christian’ Platonists as Clement of Alexandria and Origen, Augustine really does adapt Platonism to Christianity (and not the other way around) by asserting that the core memory is the ‘memory’ of God in oneself, the self created in the image of God. This image is not darkened by ‘selfishness’—actually false selfishness or love of corporeal things. Love of things aims at the created, not the Creator. Just as God’s crating is as much will as knowledge, so man must “make choice of thee” in order to know God (X. ii. 77). Only in such choosing can such knowledge be had.

Against Plato, Augustine maintains that there can be no noble lie. God and a lie “cannot be possessed together” (X. xli. 199) precisely because God is a creator. Divine truth is persuasive by itself—creative or transforming. When he writes “On Lies” Augustine permits, at most, misdirection. Lies are human pseudo-creations, apings of God—private, one’s own, like sin. God and Word are seamless; His creating Word is eternal, wisdom’s self (XI. ix. 229). To the philosophers, by contrast, wisdom has no self. It is an attribute of a self.

Augustine answers not only Plato but Nietzsche and Foucault, in advance. To Nietzsche he says: Wisdom and life are one in God’s creating Word (XI. ix). Light is the first of all created things because God’s mind is enlightening to all His creations. Christianity is therefore not Platonism for the people. It is the salvation of the philosophers, saved from their own inability to explain origins. How can any will to power be separated from some one who wills it?

Against Foucault, Augustine warns that the desire to know is “more dangerous” than sensual temptation—”of making experiments with the help of the body” (X. xxxv. 175). Foucault therefore in a way does not love too dangerously but not dangerously enough. To attempt to combine the desire to know with sensual experiment would misdirect mind and body alike, ending in un-creating wordlessness. The better course is, “Be angry and sin not”—angry at one’s self for its clottishness (IX. iv. 21).

A genuine liberal education would aim at—or, more modestly, keep before it—the angelic ideal. Angels read not books but the face of God. Angels “always behold thy face.” “They read, they choose, they love. They are ever reading; and that never passes away which they read; because by choosing and by loving, they read the very unchangeableness of thy counsel.” (XIII. xv. 407) As for Christians, they should follow a special form of the Biblical injunction to increase and multiply: They should spread the Word as preserved in the Book of books. For man, believing is seeing (after hearing); for God, seeing and speaking is creating.

It is very difficult for a philosopher to convert to Biblical religion. Intellect, reasoning, aim at principles, even as the senses aim at empirical substances. A Biblical orientation elevates the dialogical or ‘political’ element of Platonic philosophy to a ‘metaphysical’ level. Dialogue becomes a meta-cosmic condition, but it is not a dialogue among equals—even less than a Socratic dialogue is a dialogue among equals. Although not political in Aristotle’s distinctive sense—as the dialogue between God and man more resembles fatherly rule than it does the reciprocity of ruling and being ruled between husbands and wives or among fellow-citizens—it is political in the more capacious sense of personal rule, including rule by God via His laws. In this, philosophy retains a place, as a handmaiden, because creation also means separation; in Christianity if not in Judaism you do have nature, if in a weaker sense than in ‘the ancients,’ many of whom supposed nature to be eternal. (In saying the personal is the political, modern feminism follows Christianity. But by focusing politics narrowly on human ‘power relations’ its atheism deprives it of Christian metaphysics and classical rationalism. Indeed, its irrationalism tends to give feminism its secular-fanatic air, its ‘German’ tendency to conflate the least lovely elements of philosophy and Biblicism.)

The Confessions shows the difficulty philosophers and ‘intellectuals’ more generally have in converting, reorienting their souls, away from nature, from principles, and toward personhood as a metaphysical truth.

Damascene Christensen: Not of This World: The Life and Teachings of Fr. Seraphim Rose. Forestville, CA.: Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1995.

 

Note: Father Seraphim Rose (1934-1982) was a convert to Russian Orthodox Christianity. Born Eugene Rose in San Diego, California, he entered the Orthodox Church in 1962, eventually living a life of strict asceticism modeled on Eastern monastic way of life. He was a prolific author, translator, and publisher, and above all Christian witness until his untimely death.

 

“The City of God is captive and stranger in the earthly city.”
–St. Augustine

Augustine means that the City of God is persecuted on earth, by the earthly. But he also and equally means, the City of God is here. Not of course in the fullest sense of its re-founding, an event that awaits the return of Jesus Christ and finally the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, ruled by Him. Rather, the City of God is here insofar as the Holy Spirit recruits citizens who live on earth now, and will never be silenced. Christians are not of this world because they fear God as ruler more than they fear any man or group of men as rulers; their hope rests in God, even as they cherish unworldly hopes for man.

What do the Christian fear and the Christian hope mean in the United States of America? Father Seraphim Rose never stopped raising this question. Through his life and the example he left, he built the foundation of an answer with the living materials of Scriptural doctrine. In defending St. Augustine against detractors within the Church, Father Seraphim defended nothing less than his own experience, his own living witness, as “captive and stranger” in his own earthly city.

Long before knowing what he needed, Eugene Rose knew what he did not need, or want. He did not need the America of his place and time: California in the 1950s, the drive by, drive-in way of life. Looking back, some might mistake the place for a paradise during a time of innocence. There is pleasure in rootlessness. ‘Fifties California might be described as ‘Lockeland’ with beaches, a place in which the life of comfortable self-preservation commended by the English philosopher needed little of the sober and industrious habits of mind and heart Locke judged necessary and commendable. This laid-back Lockeland had a religion of sorts, and Eugene Rose called it by its right name: “comfortable Christianity.” Comfortable Christianity’s faithful went to church Sunday morning while looking forward to the real highlight of the week, football. Comfortable Christianity prefers compassion to charity, eros to agape; it goes along to get along.

Eugene Rose was born in but not of this bourgeois world. He was well-named. ‘Eugene’ means well-born, and this young man was what Thomas Jefferson called a natural aristocrat. A natural aristocrat’s soul wants not pleasure and comfort but honor and victory. It is spirited, not erotic. Depending on the direction it takes, it may despise the weak or defend them; either way, it will not rest satisfied with weakness. At every one of his way-stations to the Cross, Eugene Rose enacted his aristocratic, spirited nature: first Spinoza, disciple of Machiavelli, that derider of effete Christianity; then Nietzsche, the manly and eloquent ‘Anti-Christ,’ condemning Pauline Christianity with the ferocity of Luther attacking the Papacy. Eugene Rose later saw that real atheism is both spiritual and spirited—a passionate wrestling with the angel of God. Music, too, is the sound of passion, of a spiritedness that wants to leap beyond this world, that hates finitude, loves liberty; and he loved music. Even his heavy drinking at this time fit the portrait; I never knew a serious drinker who didn’t have a chip on his shoulder. Self-destructive rage is as spiritual and as spirited as determined atheism and the impassioned love of music; such rage is a critique of the self, a symptom of dissatisfaction of the earthly city. From the first Eugene was, as his biographer tells us, “a warrior of the mind and spirit.”

The soul of the spirited man cannot sustain itself on spiritedness alone. Hitler went from conquest to mass murder to suicide. Nietzsche’s soul descended to madness. the soul of Alan Watts, Eugene Rose’s teacher, descended to slack eroticism, enabling his student to see through the hypocrisy of the ‘Sixties—that bizarre pose of high moralism covering soft self-indulgence—before the ‘Sixties began. His own hedonism was characteristically spirited: unsatisfied and unsatisfiable, resulting in a sort of Hell-on-earth or demonic possession. When he saw that spiritedness and spirituality can degrade as well as ennoble, Eugene Rose became ripe for the sanity of Orthodox Christianity.

But not immediately. He did not want to be his father, a kind, well-meaning man, a Christian man, but lacking his son’s fire. Frank Rose was an American democrat, the sort of man Tocqueville describes as tyrannized by public opinion, Nietzsche’s “Last Man,” who has replaced the morning prayer with the morning newspaper, a man who says, above all else, ‘Please do not hurt me.’ Frank Rose was not a bad man. He was a kindly, sympathetic man. But neither was he a strong man, a ‘man’s man,’ as people said in those days. Not the sanity of Orthodox Christianity but the sanity of Chinese tradition, the down-to-earth sobriety of the Tao and Confucius, attracted Eugene Rose before Orthodoxy did. “The end of learning is to be a good man, he teacher Alan Watts told him; “respect is the regulating force of love.” Aristocratic, yes: but the wisdom of China was not enough for Eugene Rose. The real answer to a spirited soul must be a personal God, whom China does not recognize. (Watt’s “Impersonal Self” is a flat contradiction in terms.) Only a personal God can care, can accept honor, can show favor by His Providence. To this God, to the God of the Bible as found in the living tradition of the Orthodox Church, Eugene Rose finally turned.

How to be an Orthodox Christian in Lockeland-by-the-Beach? America, let alone California, has no long tradition of Orthodoxy, as Russia does. A false ecumenism along the lines of the World Council of Churches—really the Worldly Council of Churches—could never satisfy a manly (or womanly) Christian. As monks recently ordained in the Russian Orthodox Church, Eugene Rose and his Russian émigré friend, Gleb Podmoshensky, set sail on an ocean that was anything but pacific.

Taking the Russianness of Russian Orthodoxy most seriously, they revered czarism, hearkening to the words of a Russian who warned that “a government must rule by the Grace of God or the will of the people.” They perhaps did not recall that this was precisely Lincoln’s point when he confronted Stephen Douglas’s argument for ‘popular sovereignty’ in the 1850s. Lincoln knew (having learned it from reading Jefferson) that popular sovereignty must itself be governed by “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” or it can excuse slavery or any other evil—”blow out the moral lights around us,” as Lincoln said. Vox populi is not vox Dei. Neither Eugene Rose nor Gleb Podmoshensky had a teacher on America, which by their time and in their place had wandered far from its best principles, enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. And so they had to find their way slowly, according to the Spirit of God, not the ‘spirit of the times.’

They did find their way. His friend saw the beginning of an answer: The earthly city is here, but so is the City of God. The City of God is not so much to be founded (although it is to be re-founded and perfected). It has already been founded by the Prince of Peace, the Archegos or Founder. This spiritual city, this spiritual regime, maybe be easier to rediscover at a distance from the secular cities; hence their move to the fruitful ‘desert’ of the California forest, and their cultivation their of “the desert ideal.” In so moving, the two men faced their most dangerous challenge not from indifferent, indulgent America but from their own archbishop. Once again, Gleb Podmoshensky proved to be at least as ‘American’ as his friend: The archbishop “wants to take your own piece of American earth, for which you labored, in order to kick you off it!” What you earn by your labor is yours. So spoke Locke, so spoke Jefferson, so spoke Lincoln; so spoke a Russian émigré who knew why he wanted to be in America. The archbishop wanted these spiritual brothers to be dependent upon himself, rather as George III wanted to bring the American colonists to heel. He wanted to compel obedience for the ostensible good of the souls of these young monks. (Similarly, the divine right of kings, asserted by the English, was very far from a despicable doctrine; it was intended as a framework for Christian peacemaking, as Robert Filmer makes clear in his Patriarchia. The problem remains the same, however: Where do wholesome obedience and due humility end, servility and cowardice begin?) In modern terms, the ethos of the archbishop is the ethos of bureaucracy, the dream of the false elder who, in the words of I. M. Kontzevich, “eclipses God by means of himself.”

The brothers did the American, as well as the Christian thing. They declared their independence. There are no ‘masters’ and ‘slaves’ in the Church. The master/slave dialectic is Hegelian and Marxist, not Christian. “To meekly bow down to tyranny, most especially when this tyranny only destroys a God-pleasing work and extinguishes the Christian and monastic spirit in its victims—is certainly only a parody and mockery of Orthodoxy and monasticism,” Brother Eugene remarked, in the spirit of God and with the spiritedness of the Continental Congress of 1776. “The canons were made for man and not man for the canons”; “above the canons is the spirit that inspired them,” namely, the spirit of the Creator-God, and of His laws and the laws He put into nature. Above the United States Constitution, Lincoln said, is the Declaration of Independence, affirming the self-evident, God-endowed rights of every human being.

The author of the Declaration of Independence was no Christian, although many of those who signed his declaration were. The Declaration is deliberately crafted to form the foundation of a political alliance between religious and secular men. As such, it can be overbalanced fatally in the direction of secularism, whether of a vox populi that commands as if it were the vox Dei, or of a bureaucracy seeking to instantiate Hegel’s ‘Absolute Spirit,’ which is anything but holy. It took Lincoln to see the spiritual dimension of the American regime. Democracy, Lincoln said, was the desire to be neither master nor slave, but a self-governing citizen under God. The United States Constitution, the letter of the law, is not enough. Only a rededication of Americans to the principles of the Declaration could renew the spirit of the law, bringing “a new birth of freedom.” Brother Eugene and Brother Gleb asked, If monasticism is not for the salvation of souls, then what is it for? Lincoln asked, If America is not for self-government in accordance with the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, then what is it for?

And what is asceticism, if not a declaration of independence from the world, the flesh, and the devil? For Brother Eugene, rechristened Father Seraphim, self-government was the chance for victory in the spiritual warfare, in which war he enlisted in the army of God. Whatever they may say, tyrants never enlist in the army of God. Stalin asked Churchill, sneeringly: “How many divisions has the Pope?” Churchill repeated the question to Pius XII, who rejoined, “Tell my son Joseph he shall meet my divisions in eternity.” To Pius XII, Father Seraphim might have replied, “Those divisions are not yours, but God’s. It is for us to soldier on, not to command.” This suggests that in declaring one’s independence from the earthly city, one must not only assert oneself. Nor must one only assert God’s law. One must also repent. Every declaration of independence is also and more importantly a declaration of dependence. Self-government is not autonomy. Self-government is aligning one’s soul with God’s government, to “acquire the mind” of the Holy Fathers, while recognizing that we will not soon live up to God’s government. The warning of St. Theophan the Recluse should resound in the ears of every American Christian: When royal government falls, self-government emerges. If it this is nothing more than government of, by, and for the self, the government of humans who imagine themselves self-sufficient, self-government will fail. There is no such thing as self-government in this sense. There is only government by God or by Satan. The City of God is captive and stranger here, not of the earth but still very much down-to-earth. Only in this living experience of Christianity here can a genuinely American Orthodoxy be built and sustained.

At their next step, it was Father Seraphim, even more than Father Herman, who saw what needed to be done. Life in a commercial republic bustles rather than meditates. Constancy or fidelity finds little encouragement in a society forever in motion. But only he who endures to the end will be saved. How to find constancy in such turmoil. Through work. Down-to-earth, practical work, not meditative navel-gazing, much less chiliastic utopia-building, is the antidote to powerful distractions of the commercial republic, precisely because work is what commercial republicans do and respect. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak? Very well then: strengthen both spirit and flesh by working. Strengthening the flesh is good, if the spirit governs the flesh. Work with all due care, following Bishop Nektary’s injunction not to spill the grace of God. Work intelligently. Add the prudence of serpents to the innocence of doves. Or, as Father Seraphim put it, “We must follow the advice of St. Basil and begin to learn to take from the world around us where there is wisdom, and where there is foolishness to know why it is foolishness.” This is much more than ‘Yankee ingenuity,’ but can take hold in America because it builds on Yankee ingenuity.

Self-government is local government. “To practice love, trust, and life according to the Holy Fathers in the small circle where one is,” and not to cherish grand national or ‘world-historical’ ambitions: Father Seraphim saw, with Tolstoy, that the Kingdom of God is within you, but he did not mean this is Tolstoy’s Rousseauistic sense. Say it, rather, as a question: Is the Kingdom of God, the City of God, the Regime of God, within me? “The original Catacomb Church was not an organization at all, but a gathering in oneness of soul,” Damascene Christensen writes; it is citizenship in the City of God. We strive to be good citizens while knowing we will not be perfect citizens in this life, and with equanimity refusing to expect perfection in our neighbors. Such an expectation would be neither loving nor neighborly, and will lead to disunion, to civil war.

Local self-government requires the right education of the young, so that they may become fellow-citizens. “From infancy,” Father Seraphim writes, “today’s child is treated, as a rule, like a little god or goddess.” As Dostoevsky saw, such treatment ends not in godliness but in Raskolnikov, the son of the most misguided mother in Christian literature. Self-esteem—the obsession of the demi-educated of today—for Christians can only mean esteem for your true soul, as created by God. Inasmuch as every human soul is flawed by sinfulness, this means that true self-esteem is esteem for someone we are not, an undefiled being created in God’s image, or what Lincoln called, thinking not of any individual but his nation, “the better angels of our nature.” True self-esteem is not self-worship but God-worship, loving God and loving neighbor as oneself, as a creation of God. This is difficult but not impossible. The next time you are in a waiting room or on a bus, look at the people around you, at your fellow Americans, and conceive of them as souls. Then you are on the path to loving them. Abraham Lincoln had ‘the kind of face only a mother could love.’ But his soul—that was another matter.

In considering the life of Father Seraphim Rose, American Christians will find a captive, a stranger, a friend and fellow-citizen. They will find themselves. Perhaps American of many faiths will also find him, as they found in Lincoln, a soul who calls them to themselves? And therefore to their Creator, the endower of their unalienable rights. This is the true “new birth of freedom.”

John Donne: “A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day, being the shortest day.”

Originally published in The Rumson Reporter, December 1994.

 

The year’s midnight is the winter solstice. It is the end and the beginning of every natural year, as is every day’s midnight the end and the beginning of a day, and so constitutes a kind of middle. The sun ‘goes south’ to the Tropic of Capricorn, the “Goat” to which the sun has “runne.” It is the shortest day of the year. From then on the days lengthen. Spring is returning with the sun, although it will not seem so for a long time.

Saint Lucia’s commemoration on December 13 marked the solstice on the old Julian calendar. In The Golden Legend Jacobus de Voragine teaches that lucia means light, light means grace and the chastity of the virgin guided by grace. The lucia via, the way of light, leads to God.

Lucia began her journey on that way in the fourth century of the Christian era. She guided her sick mother to the tomb of Saint Agatha, a martyr and also a virgin to whose name de Voragine ascribes five meanings: saint of God; goddess without a love of earthly things; speaking with perfection; slave of God; solemnly perfected or ended, buried by angels. Speaking perfectly, Agatha told her persecuting, imperial questioner, slavery to Christ is the true nobility. Christ, acting through Saint Peter, cured her torture-wounds. De Voragine calls Agatha “an honor to God and the savior of her country”—Catania, in Sicily.

Lucia’s mother recovered her health by the grace of God through Saint Agatha. The women, of noble family, resolved to give their earth-riches to the poor. Thus following Christ’s command to the wealthy young man, she violated Roman law; betrothed to a noble man, and therefore already his property under that law, she was giving away what was his. “Lucia was a Christian and did not obey the laws of the Empire,” de Voragine writes. She belonged to God and not to any man. To claim her if not her dowry, her betrothed too would have to give himself to Christ, and join her in Christian marriage.

His anger prevailed, instead. After he denounced her to the Roman consul, she said she feared God, not the imperial rulers. When the consul threatened to send her to a brothel, she replied that if her body were violated without her consent, “my chastity will be doubled.” Martyred by the consul’s sword, she spoke miraculously, perfectly prophetically—prophesying the Emperor’s fall that day—before her body died. As Agatha had been, so Lucia became the patron saint of her native city, Syracuse, also in Sicily, where the great military expedition of the Athenian empire had foundered almost seven centuries before.

In 1617, John Donne’s wife, Ann, died. This poem was written in December of that year. Saint Lucia’s day is mostly night, and he calls his poem a nocturnal—at once a night religious service and meditation, in verse and therefore in music, on darkness. He meditates on the short time of light in the middle of the long time of night, in the middle, the end and the beginning, of the year. In one version of the story, Lucia’s eyes were miraculously restored after she had plucked them out and presented them to her treacherous betrothed. A lady’s eyes, twin suns, shine light on her lover, and in northern Europe Christian maidens mark Saint Lucia’s Day by marching in church wile crowned with candelabras on this night when the sun ends its distancing and begins its return to the earth. Without grace, there is nothing new under the sun.

Seven hours: Donne never lived so far north, that he would have seen a solstice day of only seven hours. He chose seven. There are seven canonical hours in the day, the times set apart from ordinary time, for prayer. The Greek medical authority, Hippocrates—before Donne, before Lucia, before the Roman Empire—had associated the number seven with the bringing-into-being of all things, with life-giving metamorphosis. Seven is three, the number symbolic of Heaven and of the Christian God, plus four, the number of the earth, with its four elements, four winds, four directions. Seven unifies heaven and earth, God and man, spirit and nature. The “Nocturnall” consists of 45 lines, nine times five, lines grouped in five stanzas. The number five means growth, the fullness or perfection of life, the ripeness that Lear considers all. The number nine means the triplication of the triple, the end-limit or numerical solstice of the numerical series before its return to unity, the number 10, which starts with ‘1.’ For the Jewish faithful it symbolizes truth; for Christians it suggests the trinity, the number of God, reproducing itself. In Hippocratic symbolism, it represents triple synthesis, the unity of corporal, intellectual, and spiritual.

Donne sees the world dried up in winter, the sap sunk to the roots, even as life was then believed to sink at last to the feet of the dying. For the Christian Donne, life departs from the head, down. For the philosopher, Socrates, life departs from the feet, up, as his friends feel the cold of death first in his limbs; his lips are the last part of his body to stop moving. Or is it simply that, as the Greek Hippocrates taught, the dying man writhes in bed and end up with his head at foot of the bed, the reverse of natural sleep, restorer of life? Donne calls himself the Epitaph of the dead world, the dry earth. As does that most admonitory of writings, the epitaph, Donne speaks to future lovers, the lovers of the next spring; Socrates speaks also to corporeal lovers as a kind of doctor of eros. The god, Love, or Cupid, had, by his divine arts and science, his alchemy, made nothing out of something: He made Donne into the hungry, longing, despairing lover, ruining a man created in God’s image. Love deranged Donne’s nature, separating him from the way of all natural things, which draw all that’s good from each other.

The twenty-third or middle line of the poem, the middle line of the middle stanza, remembers how “we too wept.” Like Christ, Donne and his beloved wept and did not laugh, unlike Socrates, who laughed and never wept. They wept a flood, drowned the whole world, as God did in nearly destroying the things of this world. In so doing, God renewed the world, mimicking His own creation of the world, out of nothing. Donne’s memory of his wife’s and his weeping, their disorder, also has a unity at its core: “We two.” Lovers weep when separated. They become “two Chaosses” when apart, when showing “care to naught else” but one another. Their flooding of the world opposes the winter’s dryness as an equally destructive extreme. But in their separation they are united in a shared act, and in their physical separation their souls withdraw from their bodies in shared thought.

Death makes final the physical separation of soul from body, lover from beloved. Donne calls himself, now, “of the first nothing,” the nihilo from which God created the seven, the heaven and the earth, and the five, the fullness of their being (“and He saw that it was good”). The death of his beloved removes Donne from all the things under the sun. His sun, his light or Lucia, her eyes shining with love, will not renew with the earth in the next spring. To the lovers who will enjoy the next summer in eros, this epitaph speaks an ironic toast. If you love bodies, you love what will die, circle away, as will your life. But

Since shee enjoyes her long nights festival,
Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call
This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this
Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.

Conventionally, the night should not be a festival. The feast is during the day, the vigil at night. Donne’s beloved is dead, of the night, but living, bright in his memory, in his mind’s eye and, if Christianity is true, in Heaven. If ripeness or perfection is all, readiness is the lucia via to it. Donne calls this solstice hour her vigil, for remembrance, and her eve, for anticipation. In his wit, he also ‘calls her Eve’ and identifies himself as Adam—woman and man, united at the genesis of the human race before the Flood, before even the expulsion from the Garden. Donne deliberately gives names to the moment—two names, of course—transfiguring time (hour) and word (call). The act of making the poem reenacts Donne’s thought, his intention, to “prepare towards her,” to act in spiritual parallel to the bridegroom on his wedding night, that night when erotic and spiritual love are both consummated. Donne’s quest imitates God’s thought-act of creation, insofar as a creature made in the image of God can imitate his creator without aspiring to godhood. The poetic act imitates the lovers’ reunion, which is why chaos or weeping comes together with unity-in-twoness at the poem’s middle, its solstice.

The story of Lucia is the story of the Roman maiden, Lucretia, baptized or reborn, converted or metamorphosed. Lucretia precipitated the founding of the Roman republic, the republic that rested on martial virtue, not commerce. Violated by the son of a tyrant, threatened with dishonor, she committed suicide in order to prove her innocence of adultery. She swore her father and husband to an act of just vengeance. Her husband’s friend, Lucius Brutus Tarquinus, a cousin of the rapist, seized this chance to overthrow the tyranny, converting his friends’ and hi people’s grief into righteous anger. Fortunately, the previous monarchs had not been tyrannical; Livy praises “the tranquil moderation of the kings,” which nourished the polity so that “its virtues being now ripened… was capable of producing the good fruit of liberty.” Had Brutus acted in “an immature desire for liberty,” he would have done “the greatest injury to the polity.” Brutus was a reverse Lucretia, having survived the rule of his tyrannical uncle by feigning stupidity, that is, by courting and enduring dishonor, while seeking the great honor that accrues to the successful liberator and founder of a just regime.

Lucia’s honor depends not upon human witnesses but upon the all-seeing God. She need not commit suicide to prove her virtue, nor submit to rape in order to vindicate it. She foresees the emperor’s fall (prefiguring the fall of the Roman Empire itself), and needs no prudent Brutus to avenge her death. She shares her honor not with a mortal man (even so extraordinary man as Brutus, who interpreted the Delphic oracle’s prophecy–as an instruction not to rush home to his human mother but to kiss the mother of all, the earth. She shares glory with the divine Archegos or Founder, Jesus the Christ, Son of the universal Father, In His authority she becomes patroness of her city.

We now live quietly in the shadow of another founder, one who ‘interpreted’ Brutus’ prudent kissing of the earth as a call for philosophers to put aside the heavenly and the meditative. Niccolò Machiavelli sought philosophers who were down-to-earth, spirited but astute tyrants of the mind who would rule in the guise of republicanism. “For Fortune is a woman,” he wrote, “and it is necessary… to hold her down.” This vast project, greatly augmented by the techno-scientific modes and orders founded by Francis Bacon, whom Donne would have known—a project assimilated but also to some degree corrected by the Founders of the United States—has gradually come to rule far greater stretches of the world than the Roman Empire ever did. (Or the British Empire, whose genesis Donne saw under the rule of that modern Lucretia, Elizabeth, she who maintained her authority by resisting not violation but marriage.) This project does not kiss the earth but dominates it, and extracts the secrets of nature by methods that Bacon, following Machiavelli, did not hesitate to compare to torture.

Against these new modes and orders, Donne affirms a different empire, the empire of Christendom, in which sacramental marriage symbolizes, but also enacts, the balanced union of physical, intellectual, and spiritual love.