Plato, Saint Augustine, Calvin, the Neoplatonists and Interstitial Space.

A Ribosome Producing a Useful Protein

It's a fair habit, when looking into the face of a Westerner, to ask: "What did Plato and Saint Augustine do to you?" The point being Saint Augustine of Hippo, although he was alive six or seven hundred years after Plato died, had spent many useful hours reading Latin translations of Greek Texts, which in discussing Plato, was a more mystical and spiritually inspired exploration than the one Plato might have appreciated from readers of his own philosophies.

Augustine was a Baptized Neoplatonist, he'd participated in the self congratulatory ritual special making katharsis of washing away his doubts and ascending spiritually to sit by the side of the One God of the Neoplatonists. Augustine's famous prayer "Lord make me chaste but not yet" has followed him like a dog's tail down through the centuries, made him one of the chaps. But try to trust me, any thought of martyrdom was always the furthest thing from Augustine's mind. The boy was of the middle classes of Roman Citizens, ambitious for wealth and status, and asking a Roman to explain Plato was a little like asking a Victorian to explain the people of the Upper Zambezi to you.

Both Plato and Augustine of Hippo were firmly of the opinion that language did not do much more than describe what was already there. Plato saw language as a reflection of eternal ideal forms and pretty reliable so long as there was precision in the use of words, no incomprehensible mumbling, or poor enunciation, or purposeful deception.

Fur Augustine language certainly reflected eternal ideal forms, it signified real things, but it wasn't a reliable vehicle for transcending the earthly plain, exploring the inner world of the truth behind the signs which required an understanding of God the Creator, who God was, what he meant, what he wanted, and why he was so incredibly important to a person's career, for that God needed to say stuff. 

In a sense Saint Augustine, being ambitious for wealth and status in the world of Rhetoric, had an understanding of language which saw language as offering a more creative access to Plato's eternal forms. Plato's world argued for Apollo as the prime source of Divine Truth, he gave Apollo a voice through the Priestess of Apollo who served in the Temple at Delphi, a place of spectacle, games, theater  and pilgrimage. All the same you can't get away from the tongue in cheek of a dialogue that saw Socrates as a tourist, reading an axiom on the temple at Delphi's walls that read "Know Thyself." Apparently a friend had been queuing up and had paid for a chance to ask the Oracle the question "Is anyone wiser than Socrates?" The Oracle had answered "No!"

Of course Socrates knew very well that he didn't know everything and he certainly wasn't the wisest of men and he also believed that Apollo through the Oracle couldn't lie. This left Socrates with the difficult problem of wondering what Apollo, if he couldn't lie, had meant by announcing that no one was wiser than Socrates.

Socrates in his own journey through life, started asking questions of people who'd always made a point of claiming to be wise. It turned out, Plato noted, they weren't the stable geniuses they thought they were. Soon enough Plato understood what Apollo had meant. Socrates the wisest of men because Socrates by knowing he knew nothing, he clearly knew himself. Henceforth for Socrates, his Divine Mission was to ask difficult philosophical questions of one and all, but mostly of Jackasses who claimed to have all the answers.

 The concept of Divine Truth is safe and well with Saint Augustine, less so with Plato. Saint Augustine, like all Neoplatonists, could be extraordinarily creative with his interpretations. He insisted that the Virgin Birth was central to the Christian message and that Mary remained a virgin through the conception of, the bearing of and the birth of Jesus. With out Mary's sacrifice everything else fell apart.

Plato, on the other hand, a man who was concerned with knowing how to understand knowledge, most likely would have considered the story of Jesus' birth a mythical account designed to elevate the individuals involved.

It's kind of like this for me, everyone wants a God or Gods. What Calvin did while God was back up the mountains confidently enjoying a ham sandwich and a bit of respite from his many errors was to give everyone a real powerful interest in experimenting with secularizing idols that offered more immediate comfort than the hellish and endless drudge of making fewer and fewer and less and less worthy people ridiculously wealthy.

But the point I am trying to make is not some obvious economic point about the cliff we've fallen off, the solution to which will be an End Times that offers an opportunity to reinvent ourselves, it's how, as a species, do we understand the space-in-between. To use a term usually understood by the medical profession, how do we understand the interstitial spaces. And I'm not talking God and Man so much as I'm talking the space between "I" and "Me," the recursive to and fro, a backwards and forwards between the two parts of thinking.    

My current thinking in the area is finding some comfort in the idea of this interstitial space suffering from an unfortunate confluence with some sort of infectious protein that has become available to out bodies as a result of an industrialization of diet

The Apocalypse, Descending Escalators, Calvin, Hegel and Wet Dreams

Mary Magdalene's remains were discovered

in Southern France in 1279

 Baxter adores the idea of my disorderly lusting, it's a solution for him, he can absolve himself from all sin by blaming me. He didn't like it, he was just doing as he was told, and it'll be I who enters Hades with an open mind.

It's odd and rather sweet that a substantial abdominal aortic aneurysm, a well photographed and much fondled giant of his kind, takes comfort from my attempts to emulate a chaotically entropic universe by maintaining a clock-like disciplined practice of concupiscence in an attempt to encourage Anti-Calvinist habits in others. The reality is of course, I should have gone all the way back to the errors our species made when the first Cock Robin picked up a stick and doodled an IOU into a clay tablet which accidentally got kiln fired when my creditors treasure house burned down and is now hidden away in a Dutch Museum.

We people in the Western Tradition do rather require the convictions of an End of Times to maintain a semblance of hope, and lo, please, pretty please show me the Western Mind that doesn't whisper the sweet nothings of : "Yes, it's just a feeling, but I definitely do think I go somewhere very nice when I die."

We have a damnation that convicts us at birth, it comes down the escalator spouting hatred unless we agree to behave thusly. Death is a blessed release. Here the Question Why is easily answered : "So we can escape the misery we have made for ourselves." As they say, the Apocalypse is the ultimate wet dream, it's the moment we reach the end of the line and stop "progressing."

It wasn't just Augustine or Calvin!! History is replete with goody-goody convictions drilled into us Westerners by the very best universities that saw a flow of inevitability, a predestination, which totally robbed us of our agency and handed the responsibility over to the Big One. Even bloody Hegel, and to a certain extent Kant saw the predestination of our species, none of it our choice. Hegel envisioned his phenomenology of spirit as a preordained process. The Owl of Minerva, Hegel quipped, spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. He meant we only understand reality and history when it's finished and too late to do anything about.

I hope you too find this as deeply offensive as Hannah Arendt did. She saw these holy trinity structures of thinking as a wide open route map for the malevolent minds that claim to understand the direction of history and this special, unique understanding justifying their use if violence today for a Synthesis tomorrow.

Anyway, and this is very, very interesting for anyone still interested in the moods of The Trinity. In 2016 Pope Francis elevated Saint Mary Magdalene's feast day to the same status as that of boy saints. For a gal who had struggled with Seven Demons, each demon representing one of the Seven Deadly Sins, until she met Jesus who wanted her to be an Apostle to the Apostles, follow him around and financially care for her so she could assist him with his ministry, even if it does sound as though Jesus adopted her as a corporate welfare officer, really does sound something like a Pope breaking a glass ceiling for someone who might have enjoyed life.

Socio-Biologists, Hobgoblins and their Spawn

Tree with White Stripes

 Over the last twenty to fifty years, we, or rather I, have been talking about the changes our answer to the Question Why have wrought on the way we people think. And over the years I've had this devotion to an understanding of life as a product of randomness that's more roundly described as a "slope in a random place" than any one of the many other definitions from the great cathedrals of learning.

One of the results of this navel gazing has been a private relationship loosely defined as "me and I" which we've shared with a primary other we can call the written word, which is a place that listens, pauses, tries to make sense of and then attempts to record what's being said.

In our recent campaign of rape and pillage through the meanings of concupiscence, original sin, Saint Augustine of Hippo and other monotheist interpretations of purpose I and my other parts find myself no more or less depressed than when in the 1980's Margaret Thatcher started referring to written words in Herbert Spencer's "Principles of Biology" a book that was written by Spencer in response to Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species." Spencer argued that Social Evolution mimicked Biological Evolution, and he introduced the expression "Survival of the Fittest" both in Biology and Society.  Thatcher and her conservatives were dominated by Spencer's conviction that "there was no alternative" everyone had to accept that government, regulation, handouts to the weak and sick, free milk for growing children interfered with the only true guiding light of humanity which as Spencer claimed in 1864 was survival of the fittest. Spencer was 83 when he died in 1903. Thatcher was 87 when a hundred and ten years later in 2013 she died a baroness of heart problems, cancer of the bladder and dementia in a Posh London Hotel.

I will remind us all of minds like the one represented by Homer and the Welsh Bards. They had a prodigious capacity to use memory. As a matter of course the Pharisees, including the Saul that became Paul the Apostle were obliged to memorize the first five books of the bible. These were not cruel and unusual obligations. Taliesin worked hard to become one with the community of Bards, their job was to remember stuff before getting their chance to contribute their own interpretations. The very fact of poetry had to do with the authority of the apprenticeship which was apparent in the curtain call that was the audible rhyme of spoken words. It's true you and I might have spent hours in detention being forced to memorize one of Blake's existence challenging poems because the English teacher was a frustrated sadist. All the same some lonely souls reveled in the possibility of having something to call their own. And Homer, if he was a bard, had never a need to write anything down, and even if he'd wanted to he probably couldn't write and if he could write he probably couldn't have afforded the papyrus.  No, those beauties carried the life of their poems in their minds, you chased them to the shade of a tree and said tell me a story.

 Then all of a sudden where has the body gone and the linear path of the elected few, those chosen by grace and enforced by the Holy Spirit becomes a cosmic law of the Father and his adoring son. A survival of the fittest if ever there was one masquerading as the hobgoblins of the Christian Church . And this is a reason to spend a lot of time with Hannah Arendt's idea of "Natality."

Concupiscence, disorderly lusting, Saint Anthony of Egypt, Calvin and Weber.

The Torment of Saint Anthony.

Michelangelo 1487-88

 OK, for those of us who share Hannah Arendt's view of Saint Augustine's understanding of "Original Sin" and "Love" today may have to be a day devoted to a sit down with Baxter and Ivan for a discussion on what "concupiscence" means and why Mathew claimed that Jesus thought lustful gazing was the equivalent of committing adultery in the heart, a verse in the New Testament that put the white meat on the bones of many a monastic order.

But first we have to meet the challenges of the question : "Why do professional groups demand an adherence to their own jargon and why do Theologians insist on using so many long, impossible to retain words that hardly anyone understands without constant reference to an unabridged dictionary." The answer to that question is from Proverbs 25:26 "A righteous man falling down before the wicked is as a troubled fountain, and a corrupt spring." In short "Muddying the Waters."

It wasn't the commandment to "go forth and multiply" that put the sin into Original Sin. It was "disorderly desire" or concupiscence, otherwise known as out of control lusting, and the thing was the Unmoved Mover had given specific instructions to observe the rules for living in Eden. Certainly Eve was very much at fault, but Adam should have known better than to give in to a disorderly desire. And worse, we're talking the Holy Trinity here, it was almost as though one leg of the milking stool had failed to love God with all his heart, soul and mind. Hugely disappointing for all involved. And we could go on to talk about success stories like the the ten year struggle the desert hermit Saint Anthony of Egypt had with perversions, sexual longings, female demons, but some of those accounts might threaten our own immortal souls.

Instead we should broach the subject of how John Calvin, who died when he was 54 in 1564, managed concupiscence. And here you can get the feeling that Calvin was dutiful son of a respectable middle class family who was inches away from being a 16th Century beatnik, waiting to be called to useful service.  His inward looking moments are really all about him and how he shouldn't allow his own access to the afterlife interfere too much with his intellectual life. His early years were spent in France in a flux of ideas that included a Catholic establishment bothered by waves from the Protestant reformation which washed new exciting ideas ashore, some more heretical than others. Calvin's father had initially wanted him to be a priest, but was persuaded that if he became a lawyer he'd earn more money, and here too, in the world of lawyers there were exciting moves being made one of which was referred to as "humanism" which put the onus on the classics as a source of legal precedents. Inevitably young Calvin chose a wrong side, he'd supported the opinions of a man who was burned at the stake, and he had to go into hiding.

Calvinism was a contribution to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th Century. It was all over the place, disputes, heresies, power struggles but as the world entered the 17th Century the Protestant movements had settled into the academically rather dull business of raising money and ministering to the flock. And here, I'm afraid to say we have to talk about the "Five Points of Calvinism" so that we might get a sense of what Max Weber called the Iron Cage into which the Calvinist Protestant Ethic herded much of Western Society, including most of North America.

Point One for Calvin was : Total Depravity and Utterly Perverse. We are all completely hopeless when it comes to sin, we were born concupiscent, disorderly lusting, disorderly desiring, our absolute sinfulness didn't go away and never would. The next three points are convoluted attempts to explain  the extent to which we could do anything about our depravity. The answer was was not much. You couldn't just ask Calvin, or the Holy Spirit or the Father for forgiveness. It was all somewhat predestined, you didn't have a lot to do with your fate, effort grades were recommended but fundamentally it was down to how the other two legs of the the milking stool were feeling about how you were representing yourself in your contribution to The Trinity. Frankly if you weren't the right sort then bye-bye-birdie. Part Five was about the Perseverance of Saints and how they couldn't really help but be Saints and sit up there with the Father himself, so your chances of achieving such an election were beyond remote.

And Yes! The Five Points of Calvin did very little to bring home a sense of well-being unless you were actively working on your appearance as a devoted member of the congregation. You couldn't spend your incomings on dance clubs, fancy shoes, or anything that suggested you were being disorderly in your desires, and god forbid you pine a little for your neighbor's ox. No, you put all those endless hours into maintaining the appearance of a dour, unhappy, hard working citizen who saved his resources in a sensible, possibly interest earning place for a rainy day in the vague hope that one day you'd know happiness 

Max Weber had a mental breakdown in the 1880's, he organized hospitals in the First World War, he supported democratization of Germany, he died in Munich  of Influenza in 1920 when he was 56 years old. His sociology argued for a rational interpretation of human behavior and his analysis of the effects Calvin's thinking, particularly Calvin's Five Points, had on the rapid progress of Capitalism via the Industrial Revolution. He wrote a book called "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism."

The central argument in this book was that the general anxiety produced  by the Protestant reformations with their assertions that "There is not hope in us" had robbed people of any reasonable chance of forgiveness. As result the Calvinist motivation to be good had turned secular and an upright citizen, to become a mover and shaker in the world, henceforward had to judge his or her own worth and future security by their worldly success.