Religion: Magic vs. Solace

There are those who turn to religion in search of magic; I would suggest that the vast majority of the adherents of the world's religions belong to this population. Included in this group are those who desire salvation--which, as a practical and emotional matter, consists in deliverance from guilt over past actions. The Christian doctrine of "substitutionary atonement" is, in this sense, a magical offering to the believer.

On the other hand, there are those who turn to religion for solace (consolatio). These individuals are, likewise, the "philosophically" (falsafi) inclined. Their religiosity does not emerge from the well-springs of regret but from a more hopeful orientation. Comfort may be derived from the excellent example, the beautiful vision, the fair deed--for all of these gifts of the religious imagination suggest possibilities for future attunements, future attainments (in the present life, primarily, but also in a "next life" which is ontologically continuous with the present one but which represents an ethical and aesthetic advance over it).

I am with the second population: a minority of minorities but a persistent one, nonetheless.

Rumi Kalam

What we have to seek for, then, is that which does not each day pass more and more under the control of some power [like time or chance] that cannot be withstood. And what is this? It is the soul: upright, good, and great. What else could you call such a soul than a god dwelling as a guest in a human body? A soul like this may descend into a Roman knight just as well as in to a freedman's son or a slave. For what is a Roman knight, or a freedman's son, or a slave? They are mere titles, born of ambition or wrong. One may leap to heaven from the very slums. Only rise

And mold thyself in kinship with thy God.
[Vergil, Aeneid, viii].

This molding will not be done in gold or silver; an image that is to be in the likeness of God cannot be fashioned of such materials. Consider this: that when the gods were kind to men they were made of clay.

Seneca the Younger to Lucilius, Epistle XXXI (tr. R. M. Gummere, slightly modified).

Socrates, "Our Imam"

While incarcerated, Socrates discoursed and, when given the opportunity to escape, he refused; in so doing, he offered to humanity liberation from the two most grievous things which afflict it: death and imprisonment.

Seneca the Younger, Letters to Lucilius, No. 24 (the Latin translation is my own).


Our Imam Suqrat (as Abu Bakr al-Razi referred to him) taught that the most insidious of diseases are diseases of the will.

Humanism Is An Orientation

Humanism is not itself a religion--though some have attempted to position it as such. It is, rather, an orientation (a qiblah, if you will): a solemn commitment to inquire about and value the human condition. It involves, therefore, an intellectual preoccupation and a moral stance.

Although Humanists may be theists (indeed, historically speaking, most Humanists have been theists and many have been trained as clerics of one sort or another), they tend not to expend much energy on theology. Speculation about supernatural beings is of interest to Humanists because such speculation is, historically, a human pastime. But to engage in such speculation oneself is, for a practicing Humanist, largely irrelevant.

Ironically, the most difficult thing about being a Humanist is other human beings. Jean-Paul Sartre, who argued that Existentialism is a Humanism, also argued that Hell is other people. Anyone who orients herself towards humanity must do so with open eyes.

Falsafa: Irano-Semitic-Hellenic Humanism

The Hellenization project that followed Alexander the Great's conquests of the Ancient Near East created, over time, a rich blend of intellectual cultures and humanistic practices that would flower in the 9th century CE as "falsafa." Contrary to "the usual portrait of the 'mainstream' of world history" (parodied by J.Z. Smith in his landmark essay "Map Is Not Territory"), falsafa is not a scrambled version of ancient Greek philosophy (produced by unsophisticated Arabs who were incapable of appreciating the subtleties of European intellection); instead, it is Hellenistic philosophy translated into, and interpreted within, an Arabo-Muslim universe of discourse conducted under the auspices of the Persianate cultural sphere. In other words, it is a classical expression of Irano-Semitic-Hellenic humanism.

Falsafa is a uniquely synthetic tradition of thought and practice that simply could not have grown, developed, and flourished in the intellectual atmosphere of Medieval Europe. As the beneficiary of repeated purges of Greek philosophical schools at the instigation of zealous Christian emperors, Muslim civilization was, perhaps, the only historical context in which the genius of Hellenism could not only be preserved but, indeed, remain vital.

Majid Fakhry suggested as much (perhaps without intending to) when he noted that the ignorance of Greek which prevailed among Arab intellectuals in 9th century Iraq was, in fact, an asset and a spur to philosophical creativity because it reduced the tendency to "slavish" interpretation of Greek texts as compared to "early Greek commentators, such as Themistius and Alexander" (Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, 3rd edition, xxv).

An abundant "harvest of Hellenism" (as Frank Peters termed it) was vouchsafed to "Allah's Commonwealth" (another Peters coinage) during the 'Abbasid caliphate (750 CE to 1258 CE)--a half millennium during which Muslims took center stage in the long and rich articulation of humanistic thought and practice outside of China.

Alexander's Victory

In the late 4th century BCE, Alexander the Great embarked upon an ambitious program of military conquest that included mass marriages of his troops with Iranian women. It appears that his goal was to efface, once and for all, the perceived Europe-Asia divide and to offer, in its place, a Mediterranean oikumene. The fascinating thing about this project is that Alexander was, in many respects, doing little more than offering himself as a replacement for his august Iranian predecessor, Cyrus the Great.

In other words, the desired oikumene already existed; what it "lacked" (note that it was only the Europeans who perceived this state of affairs as a shortcoming) was Macedonian political domination and Hellenic cultural supremacy. Alexander only lived long enough to see the former plan effected; the realization of the latter plan was left to those among his successors who chose to implement it. Some attempted to do so with more enthusiasm than others--and with mixed results: cultural engineering is an uncertain business at best.

Nevertheless, over subsequent centuries, the Irano-Semitic oikumene that had been created by Cyrus the Great acquired a distinctive Hellenistic coloring. Alexander's dream was, in important respects, fulfilled. Seeds of Europe transplanted in Asian soil sprouted into sturdy flora and were woven together in a compelling tapestry throughout the Near East--with Hellenistic accents rather than deep shadings. But those accents, subtle though they may be, are to this day important ingredients of the civilizational complex that is characteristic of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Iranian plateau.

Sadly, this fact of Near Eastern cultural history has failed to satisfy subsequent generations of European colonizers of the region: generations determined that "they" must be just like "us."

And, in this fashion, Alexander's great victory is dismissed by his European heirs as an ignominious defeat. Such historical and cultural ignorance would be laughable were it not the subconscious impetus for actions that have visited so much misery upon the region.

Our Santayana

Ancient Gnosticism, whether pagan or heretically Christian, was frankly magical in its depiction of the spirit's imprisonment in a lower world of matter ruled by demonic powers. In its flourishing mythological accretions of aeons and demons and angels between that lower world and the transcendent brightness of an invisible God of pure light, it was far removed from the firmly naturalistic outlook of Santayana. The phantastic cosmological speculations of Hinduism were alien to him as well, and he specifically detached himself from any such superstitious extravagance. Steady retention of a naturalistic base reminds us that Santayana managed in his later writings to sustain by poetical ph[r]asing, and at times virtual self-contradiction, an intensely felt paradox: redemptive spirituality within the framework of an intransigently monistic materialism. All real causal efficacy lies in the realm of matter at the mercy of external relations; yet spirit at certain phases and in certain temperaments may reach a harmonious integration of powers that detaches it from the distractions of animal faith so as to attain a virtual interior transcendence of its material nexus. A stranger, it lives as if pure spirit, even though it is not substantially so. Such spiritual life need not dwell only on the heights, like the mystic absorbed in his vision of Pure Being. It may come to a musician absorbed in his art, or to a child at play. It is actively free, pure, and self-justifying. It is both fruition and release.

Anthony Woodward, Living in the Eternal: A Study of George Santayana (1988), 111-112.

Wandering in the Ruined Stoa

Philosophy has the single task of discovering the truth about the divine and human worlds. The religious conscience, the sense of duty, justice and all the rest of the close-knit, interdependent "company of virtues," never leave her side. Philosophy has taught men to worship what is divine, to love what is human, telling us that with the gods belongs authority, and among human beings fellowship. That fellowship lasted for a long time intact, before men's greed broke society up--and impoverished even those she had brought most riches; for people cease to possess everything as soon as they want everything for themselves.

Seneca the Younger, Letters to Lucilius, XC.

The Skies Are Painted With Unnumbered Sparks

The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks;
They are all fire, and every one doth shine.

Wm. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 3:1:69-70.

Wittgenstein's Ladder Revisited

Wallace Stevens held that, even if we accept Wittgenstein's stipulation that metaphysical talk be abandoned as "senseless," there is still room for (and, indeed, a crying human need for) "Supreme Fictions." For Stevens, entertaining this most human of needs was not a retreat back into the arms of religious self-delusion but a determined advance towards the creative imagination: an embrace of elusive "poetic truths" where, formerly, we had craved the solid ground of [equally elusive dreams of] scientific or theological certainty.

Wittgenstein's correct Methode der Philosophie yields scientific propositions accompanied by an understanding that what such propositions leave "unsaid" is the "knowledge" of what Stevens called "how to live/what to do" (savoir faire). The latter knowledge is, perhaps, best communicated by lived example (tarbiyya). It is also intimated, however, by speech that conforms to Ibn 'Arabi's (d. 1240 C.E.) "law of Idris" (Enoch). That "law" is the same law identified by Stevens in his poem "Large Red Man Reading": the law of "being and its expressings...Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines...."

We arrive, at last, in the sacred precincts of Norman O. Brown's most vatic lines:

The antinomy between mind and body, word and deed, speech and silence, overcome. Everything is only a metaphor; there is only poetry.

Climb Wittgenstein's ladder, climb it! But don't forget, when you've reached the top, to follow his advice and toss it away.

The Latin Vulgate

Wittgenstein claimed that he never understood the Bible until he read it in Latin and, as usual, I think he was on to something. In his view, Jerome's Latin translation revealed the Bible's "true shape and greatness," lending the text an aura of rationality that it otherwise lacked. That "aura" was important to the author of the Tractatus, because he denied that language can communicate non-propositional truth (i.e., the alleged subject of metaphysics).

We can never rule out the possibility that readers of texts--and translators--may understand those texts more profoundly than their authors.

Message in a Bottle

In 1965, when Paul Engelmann was in Tel Aviv preparing his book Letters From Ludwig Wittgenstein with A Memoir for publication, Robin Campbell was in Zambia, translating the letters of Seneca to Lucilius. Engelmann's book would appear posthumously in 1967; Campbell would first publish a selection of Seneca's letters two years later. The timing could not have been more apt. Engelmann discovered in Wittgenstein the possibility of a "new" way forward in human "spirituality": one characterized by verbal asceticism because, as Wittgenstein himself had argued, actions not only "speak louder" but with far greater clarity than words.

Campbell, on the other hand, was well aware that the "new" way forward was but an ancient one: the way that Seneca had articulated and, better yet, exemplified, two thousand years before. I quote here from Tacitus' account of the death of Seneca:

Nero sent Gavius Silvanus to Seneca's home to inform him that he had been sentenced to die. Silvanus lacked the courage to do so and ordered one of his staff to bring the grim tidings to the emperor's former tutor. Upon hearing the sentence pronounced, "Seneca asked for his will. But the officer refused. Then Seneca turned to his friends. 'Being forbidden,' he said, 'to show gratitude for your services, I leave you my one remaining possession, and my best: the pattern of my life. If you remember it, your devoted friendship will be rewarded by a name for virtuous accomplishments.'"

Seneca's letters, like Wittgenstein's, point the old way forward--the only way forward "in our epoch of hopelessly tangled and confused ideologies" [Engelmann, 134]; an epoch in which the subjects of an oligarchic empire refuse to accept the truth about their political condition and, like the Romans of Seneca's day, assert that they are the proud citizens of a functioning republic.

Wordless Faith

"And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be--unutterably--contained in what has been uttered!"

--Wittgenstein to Engelmann, April 9, 1917.

Commentary by Engelmann:

In the first place, "ideals" themselves, insofar as they are meant seriously as something to be translated into reality, cannot be communicated by words. They are of the spirit, and can be indestructibly demonstrated only by making them real. What still needs to be said after that by way of showing, explaining, teaching can be done in relatively few words. Only in this way can "the word" be restored to the value, the weight, that belongs to it by right. (133)

The intellectual step forward that is needed is the recognition that if new ways of life are to arise in our epoch of hopelessly tangled and confused ideologies, it is not merely one possibility but the only conceivable possibility that they should arise without waiting for a new ideology which--unspoken--had formed their basis all the time and without which they could not have materialized.

Indeed, the transference of all metaphysical essences to the realm of the unutterable has for the first time created the possibility of a universal human way of life without a denial of metaphysical beliefs [nor, it should be added, a confirmation of them either--Ed.] (134)

So the spiritual task of our time is to find the neutral way of life which can be accepted by either side without denying its ideology, and which will make it possible to erect what is of necessity a provisional emergency building as a temporary home for human society until a genuine edifice can be built to last for generations to come.

Wittgenstein himself would undoubtedly have rejected such an account of his aims as a psychologizing falsification of his ideas. He would have insisted that what he had to say was just what his propositions expressed and no more; and if the propositions failed to express it, then the expression was simply wrong and the propositions concerned were worthless.

What Wittgenstein's life and work shows is the possibility of a new spiritual attitude. It is "a new way of life" which he lived, and because of which he has so far not been understood. For a new way of life entails a new language. His way of life is the same as that of some great men of the past, but its special significance for us lies in the fact that only in our epoch has this example come to point the way to a universal new way of life.

Wittgenstein's language is the language of wordless faith. Such an attitude adopted by other individuals of the right stature will be the source from which new forms of society will spring, forms that will need no verbal communication, because they will be lived and thus made manifest. In the future, ideals will not be communicated by attempts to describe them, which inevitably distort, but by the models of an appropriate conduct in life. (135)

And such exemplary lives will be of incomparable value educationally; no doctrine conveyed in words can be a substitute for them. For even if such communication should succeed to the extent of enabling those who have already grasped its point through personal experience to apply it and realize it in their own lives, the fact remains--of which historical instances abound--that any doctrine uttered in words is the source of its own misconstruction by worshippers, disciples, and supporters. It is they who have so far without exception robbed all doctrines laid down in the words of their effect, and who always threaten to turn the blessing into a curse. (135-6)

Letters From Ludwig Wittgenstein with A Memoir, Paul Engelmann (1967).