The Life of the Mind (45 page)

 

The Will, split and automatically producing its own counter-will, is in need of being healed, of becoming one again. Like thinking, willing has split the one into a two-in-one, but for the thinking ego a "healing" of the split would be the worst thing that could happen; it would put an end to thinking altogether. Well, it would be very tempting to conclude that divine mercy, Paul's solution for the wretchedness of the Will, actually abolishes the Will by miraculously depriving it of its counter-will. But this is no longer a matter of volitions, since mercy cannot be striven for; salvation "depends not upon man's will or exertion, but upon God's mercy," and He "has mercy upon whomever he wills, and he hardens the heart of whomever he wills" (Romans 9:16, 18). Moreover, just as "the law came in" not merely to make sin identifiable but to "increase the trespass," so grace "abounded" where "sin increased"—
felix culpa
indeed, for how could men know the glory if they were unacquainted with wretchedness; how would we know what day was if there were no night?

In brief, the will is impotent not because of something outside that prevents willing from succeeding, but because the will hinders itself. And wherever, as in Jesus, it does not hinder itself, it does not yet exist. For Paul, the explanation is relatively simple: the conflict is between flesh and spirit, and the trouble is that men are both, carnal and spiritual. The flesh will die, and therefore to live according to the flesh means certain death. The chief task of the spirit is not just to rule over the appetites and make the flesh obey but to bring about its mortification—to crucify it "with its passions and desires" (Galatians 5:24), which in fact is beyond human power. We saw that from the perspective of the thinking ego a certain suspicion of the body was only natural. Man's carnality, though not necessarily the source of sin, interrupts the mind's thinking activity and offers a resistance to the soundless, swift dialogue of the mind's exchange with itself, an exchange whose very "sweetness" consists in a spirituality in which no material factor intervenes. This is a far cry from the aggressive hostility to the body that we find in Paul, a hostility, moreover, that, quite apart from prejudices against the flesh, arises out of the very essence of the Will. Its mental origin notwithstanding, the will grows aware of itself only by overcoming resistance, and "flesh" in Paul's reasoning (as in the later disguise of "inclination") becomes the metaphor for an internal resistance. Thus, even in this simplistic scheme, the discovery of the Will has already opened a veritable Pandora's box of unanswerable questions, of which Paul himself was by no means unaware and which from then on were to plague with absurdities any strictly Christian philosophy.

Paul knew how easy it would be to infer from his presentation that we are "to continue in sin that grace may abound" (Romans 6:1) ("why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying" [Romans 3:8]) although he hardly foresaw how much discipline and rigidity of dogma would be required to protect the Church against the
pecca fortiter.
He was also quite aware of the greatest stumbling-block for a Christian
philosophy:
the obvious contradiction between an all-knowing, all-powerful-God and what Augustine later called the "monstrosity" of the Will. How can God permit this human wretchedness? Above all, how can He "still find fault," since no one "can resist his will" (Romans 9:19)? Paul was a Roman citizen, spoke and wrote koine Greek, and was obviously well informed about Roman law and Greek thought. Yet the founder of the Christian religion (if not of the Church) remained a Jew, and there could perhaps be no more forceful proof of it than his answer to the unanswerable questions his new faith and the new discoveries of his own inwardness had raised.

It is almost word for word the answer Job gave when he was led to question the inscrutable ways of the Hebrew God. Like Job's, Paul's reply is very simple and entirely unphilo-sophical: "But, who are you, a man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, 'Why have you made me thus?" Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for beauty and another for menial use? What if God, desiring ... to make known his power, has endured ... the vessels of wrath made for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for the vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory ... ?" (Romans 9:20–23; Job 10). In the same vein, God, cutting off all interrogation, had spoken to Job, who had dared to question
Him:
"I will question you and you shall declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?...Shall a fault-finder contend with the Almighty?" And to this there exists indeed only Job's answer: "I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know" (Job 42:3).

Unlike his doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, Paul's
argumentum ad hominem,
as it were, cutting short all questions with a Who-are-you-to-ask? failed to survive the early stages of the Christian faith. Historically speaking, that is, since of course we cannot know how many Christians in the long centuries of an
imitatio Christi
remained untouched by the ever-repeated attempts to reconcile absolute Hebrew faith in the Creator-God with Greek philosophy. The Jewish communities, at any rate, were warned against any kind of speculation; the Talmud, provoked by Gnosticism, told them: "It were better for the man never to be born who thinks about four matters: what is above and what is below, what was before and what will be afterward."
²⁴

Like a faint echo of this faithful awe before the mystery of all Being, centuries later we hear Augustine repeating what must have been a well-known joke at the time: "I answer the man who says: What did God do before He made heaven and earth?...: He was preparing Hell for those who pry into such deep matters." But Augustine did not let the matter rest at that. Several chapters further on (in the
Confessions),
after denouncing unjokingly those who ask such questions as men attacked "by a criminal disease that makes them thirst for more than they can hold," gives the logically correct and existentially unsatisfactory answer that, since the Creator-God is eternal, He must have created time when He created Heaven and Earth, so that there could be no "before" prior to the Creation. "Let them see that there could be no time without a created being."
²⁵

In the Letter to the Romans, Paul describes an inner experience, the experience of the I-will-and-I-cannof. This experience, followed by the experience of God's mercy, is overwhelming. He explains what happened to him and tells us how and why the two occurrences are interconnected. In the course of the explanation he develops the first comprehensive theory of history, of what history is all about, and he lays the foundations of Christian doctrine. But he does so in terms of facts; he does not
argue,
and this is what distinguishes him most sharply from Epictetus, with whom otherwise he had much in common.

They were just about contemporaries, came from roughly the same region in the Near East, lived in the Hellenized Roman Empire, and spoke the same language (the Koine), though one was a Roman citizen and the other a freedman, a former slave, one was a Jew and the other a Stoic. They also have in common a certain moral rigidity which sets them apart from their surroundings. They both declare that to covet your neighbor's wife means to have committed adultery. They denounce in almost the same words the intellectual establishment of their time—the Pharisees in Paul's case, the philosophers (Stoics and Academicians) in Epictetus'—as hypocrites who do not conduct themselves in accordance with their teaching. "Show me a Stoic if you can!" exclaims Epictetus. "Show me one who is sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy....By the gods I would fain see a Stoic."
²⁶
This scorn is more outspoken and plays an even greater role in Epictetus than in Paul. Finally, they share an almost instinctive contempt for the body—this "bag," in Epictetus' words, which day by day I stuff, and then empty: "what could be more tiresome?"
²⁷
—and insist on the distinction between an "inmost self (Paul) and "outward things."
²⁸

In each, the actual content of inwardness is described exclusively in terms of the promptings of the Will, which Paul believed to be impotent and Epictetus declared to be almighty: "Where lies the good? In the will. Where lies evil? In the will. Where lies neither? In what is not within the will's control."
²⁹
At first glance, this is old Stoic doctrine but without any of the old Stoa's philosophical underpinnings; from Epictetus, we do not hear about the intrinsic goodness of nature according to which
(kata physin)
men ought to live and think—think away, that is, all apparent evil as a necessary component of an all-comprehensive good. In our context the interest of Epictetus lies precisely in the absence of such metaphysical doctrines from his teaching.

He was primarily a teacher and, since he taught and did not write,
³⁰
he apparently thought of himself as a follower of Socrates, forgetting, like most of Socrates' so-called followers, that Socrates had nothing to teach. Anyhow, Epictetus considered himself a philosopher and he defined philosophy's subject matter as "the art of living one's life."
³¹
This art consisted mainly in having an argument ready for every emergency, for every situation of acute misery. His starting-point was the ancient
omnes homines beati esse volunt,
all men wish to be happy, and the only question for philosophy was to find out how to arrive at this matter-of-course goal. Except that Epictetus, in agreement with the mood of the time and in contrast to die pre-Christian era, was convinced that life, as it is given on earth, with the inevitable ending in death, and hence beset by fear and trembling, was incapable of giving real happiness without a special effort of man's will. Thus "happiness" changed its meaning; it was no longer understood as
eudaimonia,
the
activity
of
eu zēn,
living well, but as
euroia biou,
a Stoic metaphor indicating a free-flowing life, undisturbed by storms, tempests, or obstacles. Its characteristics were serenity,
galēnē,
the stillness after the storm, and tranquillity,
eudia,
fair weather
³²
—metaphors unknown to classical antiquity. They all relate to a mood of the soul that is best described in negative terms (like
ataraxia
) and indeed consists in something wholly negative: to be "happy" now meant primarily "not to be miserable." Philosophy could teach "the processes of reason," the arguments, "like weapons bright and ready for use,"
³³
to be directed against the wretchedness of real life.

Reason discovers that what makes you miserable is not death threatening from the outside but the fear of death within you, not pain but the fear of pain—"it is not death or pain which is a fearful thing, but the fear of pain or death."
³⁴
Hence the only thing to be rightly afraid of is fear itself, and while men cannot escape death or pain, they can argue themselves out of the fear within themselves by eliminating the impressions fearful things have imprinted on their minds: "if we kept our fear not for death or exile, but for fear itself, then we should practice to avoid what we think evil."
³⁵
(We need only recall the many instances that testify to the role played in the household of the soul by an overwhelming fear of being afraid, or imagine how reckless human courage would be if experienced pain left no memory behind—Epictetus' "impression"—in order to realize the down-to-earth psychological value of these apparently far-fetched theories.)

Once reason has discovered this inward region where man is confronted only by the "impressions" outward things make on his mind rather than by their factual existence, its task has been accomplished. The philosopher is no longer the thinker examining whatever may come his way but the man who has trained himself never to "turn to outward things," no matter where he happens to be. Epictetus gives an illuminating example of the attitude. He lets his philosopher go to the games like everybody else; but unlike the "vulgar" crowd of other spectators, he is "concerned" there only with himself and his own "happiness"; hence, he forces himself to "wish only that to happen which does happen, and only him to win who does win."
³⁶
This turning away from reality while still in the midst of it, in contrast to the withdrawal of the thinking ego into the solitude of the soundless dialogue between me and myself, where every thought is an after-thought by definition, has the most far-reaching consequences. It means, for instance, that when one is going somewhere one pays
no
attention to one's goal but is interested only in one's "own activity" of walking, "or when deliberating is interested [only] in the act of deliberation, and not in getting that for which he is planning."
³⁷
In terms of the game parable, it is as though these spectators, looking with blinded eyes, were mere ghosdike apparitions in the world of appearances.

It may be helpful to compare this attitude with that of the philosopher in the old Pythagorean parable about the Olympic Games; the best were those who did not participate in the struggle for fame or gain but were mere spectators, interested in the games for their own sake. Not a trace of such disinterested interest is left here. Only the self is of interest, and the selfs unchallengeable ruler is argumentative reason, not the old
nous,
the inner organ for truth, the invisible eye of the mind directed toward the invisible in the visible world, but a
dynamis logikē,
whose greatest distinction is that it takes "cognizance of itself and of all things else" and "has the power to approve or disapprove its own action."
³⁸
At first glance this may look like the Socratic two-in-one actualized in the thinking process but in reality it is much closer to what we today would call consciousness.