The Cipher

Why this mark, this cipher?

For the simple reason that life, as Santayana reminds us, "is a movement from the forgotten into the unforeseen" [The Birth of Reason and Other Essays (1968), 70].

The human being naturally finds these circumstances (i.e., its own condition) difficult to comprehend and, once comprehended, next to impossible to bear. Consequently, she represses her apprehension of them. This willed amnesia allows for the ordinary business of life (acquiring, consuming, and begetting more of the same) to continue apace. But, every so often, it is salutary for an individual to be caught up short and reminded (as was Santayana's wont) of the nature of her predicament--if, for no other reason than to induce modes of reflection that, in some personalities, conduce to charity.

As Santayana understood (and was quick to point out), the cipher considered here is one such reminder. "What inspired Mohammad?" he asked. Considering the Prophet's cultural context and geographical location (with its attendant climate), Santayana ventured that "amid the burning deserts and under the intense skies of Arabia, where profound meditation and lyric eloquence are natural to everybody, [the Prophet] had ample leisure to think, and enough contacts with the world to know and detest superstitions that prevailed in it. But it was not to destroy traditional religion that his zeal was moved, but only to purify it" [ibid., 95].

"Purification" in this context translates into a kind of acceptance of (or surrender to, i.e., the literal sense of the Arabic term islam) the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: "...all must be received and retained as the gift of Allah, the immediate, pervasive, all-seeing, all-working will of God. It was this intense presence of the Unfathomable that inspired [Muhammad] and imposed on him the vocation of a prophet and of a conqueror. Away, then, with all vain dogma and ritual. Let religion become a perpetual direct prayer, an uninterrupted colloquy with God. What secrets, what music, what rapture might not break in upon that sacred solitude? What wise monitions also for the conduct of life? To what submission, to what courage, to what sublime identification with divine power might not the spirit, so fortified, attain?" [ibid., 95-96].

Although an outpouring of language is a typically human, all-too-human response to the "intense presence of the Unfathomable" (hence, the related phenomena of prophecy and mystical poetry), language so disgorged may often prove itself as overwhelming as the experience to which it responds. Perfectly suited to practices of memorization, recitation, and as an aid to reflection, such language is not--nor can it substitute for--the experience that engendered it. That experience is universal--though its intensity is muted in most individuals by the psychological filters which enable us to conform our thoughts and actions to socially determined standards of "sanity."

The cipher serves as a kind of hieroglyph for what Eric Voegelin named the "engendering experience" of the mystic or prophet. It does not "capture" that experience (no such experience can ever be "taken alive") but, rather, gestures towards it--weakly, inadequately, but nevertheless, persistently. In so doing, it preserves the possibility of repetition or, at least, an echo of its experiential inspiration.

Voegelin was convinced that a characteristic of the "late modern condition" is the pervasive presence of ideologies that deform traditional symbolism, rendering their meaning opaque and obscure. The vocation of the historian became, for him, a priestly one: valid historical inquiry is not the satisfaction of antiquarian interests but, rather, the retrieval of those engendering experiences that gave rise to "the symbolic articulation of the truth of existence" in the first place [see Michael P. Federici's Eric Voegelin, 216].

Although I tend to regard much of Voegelin's work with extreme circumspection and resist, in particular, this somewhat self-aggrandizing view of historical labor, his notion of the relationship of "engendering experience" to its "symbolic articulation" and the pervasiveness of ideological distortion merits cautious consideration. It is something to keep in mind whenever we consider a cipher such as the one depicted above.

We are a long way from what Voegelin called symbolic "transparency" (see, ibid., 234-5). The questions I always put to Voegelin and his epigones are: when have we not been so estranged? Is not the human condition one of exile from all manner of Edens, experiential, linguistic, symbolic? Is historical inquiry best configured as an outlet for messianic hope? Is this what Walter Benjamin imagined? Do we, as historians, really want to go there? Or is not historical inquiry better conceived in humanistic fashion (a la Seneca)?

At first glance, Seneca's admonitions appear congenial to Voegelin's--and, perhaps, they are. But I tend to read Seneca as advocating (like Santayana) a program of imaginative self-improvement and edification; I tend to read Voegelin as issuing a call to radical restoration of past conditions. Seneca's program is surely within every thinking individual's grasp. Voegelin's tends to appeal most to political and cultural reactionaries.