Author: castoreum

Augustine was the first of his circle of friends to disembark from the Manicheanism train.  Thereafter, and especially once he’d become a Christian, he spared no effort in turning others away from what he always acknowledged was a seductive cosmology that offered a straightforward and simple (to his mind, simplistic) account of the origins of evil.  Most of what Augustine wrote in service of this end is polemical, and Augustine’s willingness to slander his co-religionists makes these texts a funny but unenlightening read.

Perhaps because it takes the form of an epistle to one of his still-Manichean friends, De utilitate credendi is different.  In this interpersonal rather than polemic scenario, Augustine cannot speak as though, since one must believe in something, the choice between Catholicism and Manicheanism is a given.  He not only needs to show that Manicheanism deserves to be abandoned, but also to demonstrate that Catholicism, rather than a general skepticism, ought to take its place.

It would be going too far to say that Augustine proves this case, or even, on the whole, that he argues it well.  Augustine’s own option for Catholicism over some other form of Christian belief (or even a “secular” neo-platonism) will seem arbitrary to modern readers, and De utilitate credendi suffers from a certain degree of bad conscience about this.  The best argument that Augustine can muster in favor of Catholicism is that it draws a crowd.  Schools of rhetoric, where one can indeed learn something, also draw a crowd.  But so does a garbage fire.

Where Augustine’s arguments carry more weight is on an antecedent question, whether we should believe things on faith or only accept claims on the basis of rational proof.  Since Catholicism insists on faith, whereas heretics (and Manicheans) promise rational proof for their doctrines, Augustine finds himself in the unusual position of having to argue, not only for the validity of belief, but indeed for its superiority in many cases over rational knowledge.

Augustine’s strategy for showing this looks to us like a radical extension of what counts as belief.  We know either what we perceive with our senses (although see his Retractiones on this) or what we can rationally understand by way of facts and concepts.  Everything else, we only believe – or, if we think we know it rather than believe it, “opinate.”  This is a theory of knowledge with deep Platonic roots, as Miles Burnyeat has shown, but Augustine applies it in some rather original ways.  Here, for instance, is my favorite of Augustine’s test-cases:

“But, if what is not known should not be believed, I ask how children are supposed to serve their parents and love them with mutual family feeling, when they don’t believe that these are their parents.  For this cannot be known by reason in any way, but is believed about the father on the mother’s authority; about the mother, in many cases, not even on the mother’s own authority but on that of midwives, nursemaids, servants.  Now, isn’t it possible that someone who can steal a child and put another in its place might just as well deceive by accident, being in error themselves?  Nevertheless we believe, and we believe without any doubt, that which we agree we cannot know.  Unless this were so, who doesn’t see that family feeling, the most holy bond of humankind, would be violated by the most overweening crimes?  For even a madman would not think him blameworthy who does his duty to those he believes to be his parents, even if they aren’t.  Who, on the other hand, wouldn’t judge him worthy of death who, just because he fears to love false ones, fails to love his real parents?” (DUC 12.26)

Kinship – all kinship – is a matter of belief, not knowledge.  If we accept the very plausible theses about infant memory that Augustine puts forward in the Confessions, then his argument here does in fact follow: we “know” who our parents are in the same sense that one could be said to “know” who Jesus’ parents are, because one has heard a story.  In short, we only believe that our parents are our parents.

This is an argument that puts paid to most ideas about the “naturalness” of consanguinal kinship by contrast with the “artificialness” of affinal or otherwise ascriptive kinship.  Both, on Augustine’s reasoning, are equally matters of belief.  Yet it is not an argument that, to my knowledge, skeptical practitioners of anthropology in the tradition of Sahlins have ever put forth.  This may be because it derives from a recondite source, or because it employs a notion of belief with which anthropologists have come to feel uncomfortable.  There are negative reasons for this – the attacks launched by analytic philosophers like John Searle against forms of relativism that frame all mental commitments as “beliefs” – as well as positive ones – for instance, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s polemic against anthropology as a logging of delusional “beliefs” and in favor of anthropology as the study, through alien cultures, of “possible worlds.”

It seems to me, though, that Augustine’s notion of belief is broad enough that it does in fact capture most of what we might mean by “mental commitments” – excepting only that strange class of commitments which Augustine calls “knowledge,” and which may be unique, conceptually, to cultures in the tradition of Ancient Greece.  In any case, few anthropologists would disagree with Augustine that this kind of knowledge is rare – the exception rather than the rule – and surely no kind of basis for social life:

“I could set forth many examples by which it would be shown that nothing of human society would remain stable if we committed to believing nothing that we could not know by direct perception.” (DUC 12.26)

Where Augustine may seem to modern readers to have gone wrong is in asserting this broad notion of belief without, as we would do, drawing a further distinction within it.  Some entities – tables, cars, parents – we can know to exist by direct perception; about these, we then believe predicates – “old,” “yours,” “mine” – which we cannot by Augustine’s standards know to be correctly applied.  When it comes to Catholicism, though, we need to believe in God’s existence as well as that a particular set of predicates hold true about him.  To accept that entities should be believed to exist without evidence, just on somebody else’s say-so, would be to commit ourselves to populating the universe with all sorts of gods, not to say entering into any given schizophrenic’s delusion.

There are plenty of arguments that Augustine would probably want to present on this point, but I don’t think that many of them would hold water for us.  One argument that Augustine might not have cared to present, but which does carry a certain amount of weight, has to do with the theory of interpretation he presents in the DUC and elsewhere.  There are, he says, three kinds of interpretive mistakes.  You can take fiction for truth – which would be like someone reading Vergil and thinking that Aeneas really had gone to Carthage.  Or you can fail to see that what an author takes for truth is really fiction – which Augustine says would be like believing Lucretius.  Or, finally, you can derive a better lesson from a work than its author intended to put there – which would be finding the truth in fiction.  The first two of these are evils; the last of them, though it is a form of error, may be not evil but good:

“What, then, if I should hear about a person I had some affection for that he, although he was already wearing a beard, said that in the presence of many that he so liked boyhood and infancy that he swore he wanted to live that way, and it should be so proved to me he had said this that I would be a fool to deny it?  Would I really be deserving of rebuke if I supposed that he, in saying this, wanted to indicate that he liked innocence and a mind free of those desires in which the human race is ensnared, and for this reason I loved him more than I had before?  Although perhaps he had really been hankering for a certain freedom to play and eat and a lazy leisure characteristic of boyhood?  Now suppose he died after this was announced to me, and I was not able to ask anyone to explain his opinion.  Would there be anyone so nasty as to blame me for praising the man’s purpose and intention through the words that I had heard?  A just appraiser of things would perhaps not hesitate to praise my opinion and intention, since I both liked innocence and, being a man, thought well of another man in a dubious matter, when I might have thought ill of him?” (DUC 4.10)

When it comes to dubious matters, there’s no harm, says Augustine, in believing the “better” of two (or more) interpretations, and in fact “credulity” in this sense reflects well on the believer.  Thinking back to the parallel example Augustine offers in the passage I quoted before of someone who acts with pietas towards people he takes to be his parents even though they are not really his parents, we can see the appeal of Augustine’s argument.  If it could in addition be shown that believing in the God of the Catholics was really the “better” interpretation of the cosmos, then Augustine would have succeeded – not in showing that other people should share his belief in that god, but in showing that this belief was, in his own case, just fine.  Not the usefulness of belief, then, but something like the non-usefulness of non-belief.

There’s a lesson in this for skeptics, which is that the will to truth can’t stand as its own justification: the mere fact that a belief is held on epistemologically unsatisfactory grounds is insufficient argument that the belief shouldn’t be held.  What needs to be shown in addition is that the belief in question is bad, either consequentially (although this, given that beliefs tend to entail divergent visions of their own consequences, seems like an unproductive tack to take) or by itself.  Only in a case like that would non-belief turn out to be useful.

 

In Emile Benveniste’s Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society (finally available in an affordable English edition, thanks to the very rad Hau Books), I find an intriguing and plausible etymological connection drawn between Latin censeo and Old Persian θatiy.  Although censeo eventually became the standard Latin word for “giving an opinion,” at an earlier point in Rome’s history it referred more exclusively to the opinions, statements or judgments of those in authority – a sense preserved in the Republican office of the censorship.  By contrast, θatiy may appear to have meant nothing more than “say.”

It is the most common, though not the only, speaking verb in the Bisutun inscription.  Each colon of the inscription begins with the fixed expression “Darius the King says,” where θatiy translates “says.”  On the basis of this usage, Benveniste suggests that θatiy carried the same connotations of authoritative speech as censeo originally did.  He treats both of these verbs, in virtue of their political function, as alethourgic or truth-making – as “speech acts” (though this is not Benveniste’s expression) that make true what they assert.

So far, Benveniste’s analysis offers strong support for the argument I’ve been making in this series of posts.  If Darius’ political authority consists in his being able to designate others’ speech as false (drauga), then it is of a piece with this that his chosen verb of speaking should mark out his own speech as true.  Benveniste runs into some confusion, though, when he confronts another series of usages that (if his etymology is right) would also raise difficulties for my own reading of the inscription.  I have pointed out that, in the summary narrative at the end of the inscription, Darius uses the word “adurujiya,” “he lied, saying…” to describe the claims to kingship set forth by each of his defeated rivals.  Earlier on, though, the word he has them use is aθaha.  

Benveniste unconvincingly glosses this by saying that “they spoke (untruthfully); however, they claimed to be telling the truth, and their assertion was an emanation of authority.”  Well, either they spoke truthfully or not; either they did or did not have real alethourgic authority at the moment they were making these proclamations.  Or alternatively one might sever the alethourgic element from Benveniste’s treatment of OP θatiy, leaving attached to it just a notion of de facto authority.

Better still, I think, would be to grant θatiy its full weight here, but then to highlight Darius’ redescription of these speech acts as drauga at the end of the inscription.  The switch could then be seen as a narrative choice, one that emphasizes Darius’ now full (at the time of inscribing) and fully-achieved authority over the Persian Empire.  Only from this position of actual power is he able to regulate the truth or falsehood of his rivals’ claims; at the moment of conflict, what one had instead were rival claims to truth.

 

 

But nevertheless this was laid up in his memory by way of a cure in times to come.  And likewise the fact that, when he was still engaged in his studies at Carthage and attended my lectures, and while he wandered the forum at midday (as scholars often do) thinking over the speech he was going to make, you let him be seized as a thief by the watchmen of the forum – My lord, I don’t think you let this happen for any other reason than that a man who was going to attain the degree of power for which he was bound would begin to learn how cautiously, in hearing cases, a man should be condemned by another man with hasty credulity.  It happened that he was pacing before the tribunal with a tablet and stylus in his hands, when lo! a certain teenage student – a real thief, this one – entered, without Alypius realizing it and secreting an ax, onto the lead-railed ballustrades that look out over the Vicus Argentarius and started chopping off the lead.  When they heard the sound of the ax striking, the silversmiths below raised a clamor and sent people to lay hold of whomever they might find up there.  When he heard their voices, the thief ran off, leaving his tools behind, so as to avoid being taken with them in his hands.  But Alypius, who had not seen him entering, noticed him leaving and saw how he made himself scarce, and, wanting to know the reason, entered the place himself and found there the ax, which was puzzling over when those who had been sent up found him alone with that instrument by whose sound they had been stirred to action in the first place.  They took him, they dragged him off, they boasted before the whole neighborhood as though they had caught the thief red-handed; thence he was led off to be offered up to judgement.

But the lesson was to go thus far only.  At once, lord, you sent aid to an innocence whose only witness was you.  When he was being led off either to be jailed or to be executed, they ran across a certain master-builder whose greatest concern was the maintenance of public buildings.  They rejoiced that they had encountered him, whom they were used to come to when they suspected someone of having made off with some part of the forum buildings, as though he alone were able to judge who had done it.  But he had seen Alypius before, in the house of a certain senator to whom he frequently paid court, and as soon as he recognized him he took him by the hand and drew him apart from the mob and asked what the reason was for this great evil.  He heard the tale of what had happened and ordered all the people who were there, clamoring and raising noisy threats, to come with him.  And they came to the house of the teenager who had done the deed.  As it happened, there was a child in front of the door, and he was such a small lad that he could in no way report the whole truth out of fear of his master, for whom he was a lackey in the forum – thus Alypius, once he had worked it out, informed the master-builder.  But he showed the boy the ax, asking him whose it was.  “Ours,” said the boy straightaway; then, under interrogation, he revealed all the rest.  Thus the blame was shifted onto that house and the crowd confuted, which had already begun to crow in triumph over that man who was going to become the steward of your word and the investigator of many cases within your church – a man who left this affair both wiser and more experienced than he had been when he had entered into it.

 

(This is a passage that really ought to have featured in Auerbach’s wonderful essay on Marcellinus and Apuleius.  Like the texts he treats there, this one invests a late Roman urban space with a kind of intense physicality that’s situated or focalized within a particular observing subject – in this case, Augustine’s friend Alypius.  The carefully-established contrast between the speed of the action as a whole and the slowness of Alypius’ own thought creates a nice comic effect throughout, as when the aeditumi lay hold of while he “admirans considerabat” the ax that the actual criminal had ditched in his haste to flee.  Everyone acts, everyone even thinks much faster than Alypius does; but precisely that slowness of thought, it turns out, will become Alypius’ signal virtue as an examinator causarum later in his career.

Curiosity – pace the widely-held view that sees Augustine condemning it in every form – does have its uses.   Just the interest in things that got Alypius into trouble when he turned it toward the circus or gladiatorial shows turns out, in this episode and elsewhere in Augustine, to be what separates good judges from bad ones.  Alypius’ false arrest looks like an axial point between these two applications, and valuations, of curiosity.  If it really does function this way, that explains why Augustine displaces it from its natural place in the chronology of the Confessions, which would be close to the beginning of book 6, and chooses instead to remind us of this Carthaginian episode after Alypius has already moved to Milan.)

My favorite part of Lucretius’ theoretical apparatus in De rerum natura (but something I’ve had a hard time getting students interested in) is his theory of time.  Notoriously, Lucretius is a realist about the present time but not about the past and the future; he considers any historical statement to be about eventa, configurations of atoms which have passed away and no longer exist even though the atomic substrate on which they were formed is, of course, eternal.  This is cool, but the really puzzling thing about Lucretian time-theory is that he represents the passage of time as a falling-downward in space.  Everything that exists has been “falling down” forever, through an infinite void, and the various “presents” that have existed are conjunctions of atoms at particular points in this downward course.

The only way to parse this meaningfully, I think, is to understand Lucretius as identifying time, not with an independent fourth dimension, but which the dimension of verticality: his universe is three-, not four-dimensional.  I used to spend a lot of time worrying about how this would work.  Was it really a thinkable thought to treat time as identical with one of the three dimensions of space?  Mathematically, the conversion was possible – but only if one or more of the spatial dimensions were taken to be “granular,” which is to say discontinuous and measured on a number-line that had a cardinality no greater than aleph-0.  I’ll write out the argument someday, when I’ve figured out how to put mathy stuff into wordpress.

In any case, I couldn’t find any evidence in the DRN that Lucretius holds such a position.  He does of course hold something like it for material objects, of which the atoms are discrete chunks, but everything in the poem suggests he considers the void (or space) to be continuous.  Having just read an interesting article by D. L. Dusenbury (“New Light on Time,” forthcoming in Studia Patristica) which argues for a certain granularity in Augustine’s notion of time, in part on the basis of Lucretian parallels, and which shows that Augustine treated time in a spatial way, I wonder if I wasn’t onto something before.  If I was, though, then I think the relevant granularity has to inhere, not in Lucretian physics, but in the Latin language itself.

I posted here a few days ago about the absence of a specialized depth-dimension in some basic fields of Latin vocabulary.  If we suppose that the world does inescapably contain verticality, this raises a phenomenological question: how would a Latin-speaker have experienced this verticality without a fully-articulated three-dimensional language in which to think or express it?  One conceptual possibility, suggested by elementary phenomena like the sky and multi-story buildings (which go far back in Roman history if Livy is to be believed), is that they might have thought of the world as a layered stack of two-dimensional planes.  Latin does, after all, have plenty of words for height-ranking; perhaps these could have done duty in place of words for depth.

If that’s true, then the vertical dimension is exactly the one that’s discontinuous, and Lucretius’ transposition of time onto this dimension becomes thinkable (although not standard for Romans, who seem to have conceptualized time as a line on which the speaker stands, facing the past).  Moreover, my hypothesis can be falsified by looking at actual Latin texts – a project to which I’ll be returning here from time to time.

The thing that puzzled me most in the runup to last November’s election, and that still seems to me the strangest about that whole strange year, was how people could vote for Donald Trump.  Not because he’s a racist, a xenophobe, an obvious con-man – that’s just checking off boxes on the Republican bingo card.  What beggared belief was how anyone, anywhere, could want to vote for this particular man, regardless of what his policies were.  He was so evidently repulsive, physically and rhetorically, a buffoon with a fake tan, cartoon hair, and jowls that hung like plumb-bobs.  I wasn’t alone in feeling this way, either.  Commentators on the left made a regular and almost casual habit of pointing out how ridiculous Trump looked and acted.  For all of us, he had a kind of anti-charisma, which makes it all the stranger that millions of people not only voted for him but did so with a level of enthusiasm Americans usually reserve for teenage pop stars.

For them, he had charisma.  Were they seeing something we couldn’t see, or hearing something we couldn’t hear?  I don’t think that kind of magical thinking has much explanatory value, although, as you’ll see, I’ve come back around to it in part.

What made Trump’s “charisma” make sense to me was an argument I encountered near the end of James Scott’s Domination and the Art of Resistance, a book in which Scott summarizes and theorizes thirty years of anthropological work on the phenomenon of what he calls “the hidden transcript.”  Scott’s basic argument, in this book and elsewhere, is that – pace Althusser et al – downtrodden people don’t often internalize the ideologies produced by their oppressors to justify a state of affairs in which they’re oppressed.  Instead, the wretched of the Earth produce counter-ideologies of their own, which are uniquely shaped by two important factors that distinguish them from the hegemonic ideologies of the master class.  First, they spread without access to the systems of literate mass distribution that dominant ideologies employ; this means that they’re oral in form and, in detail at least, show a lot of variation from one instantiation to the next.  Second, they spread in secrecy so as to escape punitive repression by the dominant class; this means they’re veiled or cast in a language transparent to subalterns, but opaque to those in charge.  Scott’s theory is a powerful tool for interpreting mass attitudes, especially for those who, like me, study ancient materials which only give us access to such mass attitudes through the bewildered eyes and ears of the masters.

Out of all this, Scott produces a unique theory of charisma that does away with some of the hand-waving one encounters in Weberian accounts.  For Scott, “charisma” is just the enthusiastic loyalty that those who share a given “hidden transcript” will demonstrate for anyone who’s able to give voice to this transcript openly and in the face of elite opposition.  Pragmatically, a politician who speaks from the hidden transcript openly both puts himself at risk on behalf of and seems to identify himself with those whose ideological demands the hidden transcript expresses.  But it’s also a kind of vicarious release to watch someone say all the things you’ve been afraid to say, just to those people whom you were afraid to say them to.

Is that Trump?  But where’s the hidden transcript from which he’s reading?  After all, any objective observer would have to agree that those who responded most enthusiastically to Trump – older white men and women – far from being oppressed, are already in charge.

But Scott’s analysis applies to perceptions, not reality.  Sociologist Arlee Hochschild has powerfully outlined the ways in which white people can feel themselves to be oppressed in America, despite all contrary evidence: they see America as a line, and they feel that all sorts of strangers are jumping in line ahead of them.  Their hidden discourse is actually a hatred of these strangers, almost always expressed in racist, or islamophobic terms.  This transcript used to get transmitted in small-town bars and diners, but over the last two decades it’s metastasized across the internet.  Of course, contra Scott, the internet is itself a system of mass dissemination, powerful in the hands of those who wield it; but it’s not the same system of mass dissemination that proponents of what Trump voters see as an oppressive, dominant transcript enjoy.  Those are the newspapermen, the TV reporters: in short, “the media.”  It is again perception that matters, not facts.

Offline, Trump voters feel constrained to transmit their hidden transcript in coded terms – by making fun of Black Lives Matter protesters, say, or by complaining about Colin Kaepernick’s sense of entitlement.  For years now, Republican politicians have mirrored this tentative, fearful form of engagement by pressing a racist agenda only in coded terms.  Trump, on the other hand, presents their transcript openly.  It’s as though they themselves were speaking their minds.  That’s Trump’s charisma.

In one way I find this account very satisfying, but in another I don’t.  After all, though it does explain why some people might be enthusiastic about Trump, it doesn’t really say why those same people wouldn’t find him just as repulsive – physically, oratorically – as I do.  Where’s the disgust?

In answer to this question, I’d like to make what Scott would probably see as an illegitimate extension of his argument.  It seems to me that Trump gives voice to a hidden transcript not only through his explicit statements, but also through his very way of being.

The body first.  If Trump’s supporters adore him, its because they know that they themselves are, or someday will be, physically disgusting.  Rightly or wrongly, our culture assigns certain perquisites to the beautiful; it hurts to have lost these or never to have enjoyed them at all.  Trump, however, looks revolting and still enjoys every privilege a regular viewer of daytime television could ever imagine.  He has power, fame, and sex, or, if not that (and, indeed, I find it hard to believe that Trump can get it up anymore without murdering a dog vel sim), at least the license to abuse and manipulate members of the opposite sex.  In that respect, Trump’s ascent represents a revolt of the revolting.

Now, the words.  Everybody acknowledges that Trump can’t string more than two sentences together without a solecism or (obviously accidental, often sense-destroying) anakolouthon.  His most popular ideas – “Mexicans are bad hombres,” “Obamacare is a disaster” – are simple, predicative sentences; anything more complicated than that, and Trump gets lost.  I used to think that this was a new kind of dog-whistle, by which a candidate, by eschewing grammar, might cram a few dozen lexical items that scratched the pineal itches of his voters into the same space that a single idea, grammatically expressed, would have occupied.  Now, I think it’s just a question of capacity: Trump really isn’t capable of making sense out loud (to say nothing about whether he’s capable of making sense in his own head).

David Graeber once claimed, as a succinct explanation of why Middle America keeps voting for a Republican Party that screws them at every turn, that most Americans could more easily imagine their children becoming super rich than they could imagine those same children jumping through whatever hoops were required to join the liberal intelligentsia.  If there’s anything to that argument, then Trump represents its apotheosis.  People go to college, at minimum, to learn to do things with words; Trump, apparently, gets things done without words.  In this respect, too, he’s an imago of his own voters.  Their placing him in power is itself an overturning of the dominant transcript.

It would be foolish to deny that there really is some kind of dominant transcript in America, and that elements of it are purely ideological – the notion of meritocracy, for example.  Some elements of that transcript, though, may be basic to any kind of social compact.  I think that an insistence on some basic level of linguistic competency is one such element, since language is what lets us make laws, friendships, and, god forbid, deals.  Trump’s inability to “do” language in a way that would be effective for attaining any of those ends has so far prevented him from accomplishing anything substantial as president.  The failures (Muslim bans 1 and 2, the border wall, the AHCA) keep piling up, and we can take some comfort in this: that the very substance of Trump’s “charisma” makes him unable to write his worst ideas into law.  On the other hand, Trump’s more insubstantial accomplishments should worry us.  He’s succeeded in creating an atmosphere of terror for Muslims and undocumented immigrants and the transgendered.  That’s not nothing; it may be more important than passing laws, and it’s harder for us, as individuals, to fight against.  In each of these cases, Trump has successfully injected a little bit of himself into America as a whole.  He’s turning us from a society of equals into a place where wordless violence rules, and there are plenty of Americans who support him in this.  That’s the real black magic of Trump’s charisma.

Augustine: “I know that this remains to be untied by us, and I promised to explain it at the outset – but, because the matter is extremely subtle, and demands of the mind eyes quite different than those that human habit is accustomed to have in the affairs of everyday life,I warn you that you must go willingly along that path by which I think it necessary that you be led, and do no grow tired because of these necessary detours of mine so that you take it ill how long you need to get to where you want to go.  For first, I ask of you whether you think that there’s any body that does not, in its own fashion, have a certain length, width, and depth?”

Evodius: “I don’t understand what you mean by ‘depth.'”

A: “I mean that by which it comes about that the interiors of bodies may be thought, or, ever perceived – if they are transparent, like glass.  But if you take this property way from bodies, as far as my opinion goes, they cannot be perceived, nor indeed by correctly thought to be bodies at all.  Now I want you to tell me what you think about this.”

E: “Indeed I do not doubt that any body can lack these things.”

(Students of Latin will know that, where English has two sets of pronouns which distinguish between “surface” and “space” – on/in, over/through, etc. – Latin has only one.  In its lexicon, too, one encounters certain words that elide the distinction between two and three dimensions.  Orbis, for example, means either a circle or a sphere; sphaera, which indicates a sphere unambiguously, is a borrowing from Greek.

This is the first passage I’ve ever encountered that suggests this feature of Latin may actually have presented cognitive problems to speakers of the language.  To anyone who reads the text in English, it’s obvious what Augustine means by depth – the third dimension, the one that distinguishes between surface and space – and, conversely, the difficulties experienced by Evodius in understanding this usage seem incomprehensible.  A Latin speaker, however – especially one who, like Augustine and most of his circle at Cassiacum, does not know Greek – might have found this distinction less intuitive.)

When I started this series of posts, Trump’s presidency still seemed like no more than an outside possibility.  Things have changed a lot since then, of course, and what I thought of at the outset as a more or less antiquarian reflection has taken on, for me, an urgency and a contemporary reference.  Paradoxically, this urgency has been manifesting as a kind of blockage: the newfound relevance of the questions I’m asking has compelled me to spend more time and effort trying to get the answers right.

What would it mean to make truth a numinous power that attached to rule?  I had imagined this was an archaeological problem, a matter of recovering something substantive of the mode of thought that lay behind the Bisutun Inscription’s declaration that Darius’ rivals were “lying” in their claims to kingship – a mode of thought that was alien because it was ancient, as I had imagined.  Of the many things Trump’s presidency has told us about ourselves, the one that surprised me most is that at least a third of American voters understand this mode of thinking perfectly well.  When they voted for Trump, what they were voting for was exactly someone who could make their world-picture true by giving it the endorsement of the presidency.  Where the rest of us saw in their vision of American decline brought on by immigrants and minorities a racist-paranoid delusion that could never be made to correspond with reality, they saw a truth that was waiting to take its place in the seat of power.

Trump himself understands this.  It may be the only thing he understands.  His solution for every stumble, setback and scandal is to deny, by fiat, that any stumble, setback or scandal has taken place.  For the most part, the people who voted for him have been convinced by these denials – not, I think, because they think of Trump as especially honest or knowledgeable, but because they still believe that whatever he says ex cathedra as president is  true.  Twitter is Trump’s daily-updating version of the rock face at Bisutun.

So what started as an archaeological inquiry got transformed, somewhere along the line, into an essential problem of modern American politics.  I didn’t want it to be this way, of course because Trump’s election win is a disaster but also because I was hoping not to have to take sides between what Herodotus, I think, characterizes as Greek and Persian modes of working with truth.  It would have been nice just to map these onto the polycephalous world of the city-states and the monocephalous expanse of the Persian Empire, respectively, without having to choose between them.  For myself, though, I’d certainly opt to live in the former rather than the latter, and that, now, is a choice that all of us actually face.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes: “it is part of the fundamental faith of all aristocrats that the common people lie.  ‘We truthful ones’ – thus the ancient nobility of Greece referred to itself.” Nietzsche must be making this claim on the basis of Theognis, who was, after Homer, his favorite source as to the “ancient nobility of Greece.”  Did it never occur to him that the repeated protestations of Theognis as to the elemental honesty of the aristocrats could itself have been a lie?

However that may be, Niezsche was right to see this claim as part of the ongoing struggle between mass and elite for cultural dominance that characterized the Greek fifth century.  What Theognis and his fellows meant by it was at least, on the one hand – and as Nietzsche wants to read it – that honesty was a virtue belonging exclusively to people of high birth.  At the same time, there’s also surely a measure of self-reference at work: Theognis is also making a claim for the truth of his poetry and the judgments expressed in it, for the fundamental correctness of the standards by which he, and other aristocrats, make distinctions.

To see that claim exploded, again and again, is one of the real pleasures of reading Greek literature – even Plato, who at least in this respect also counts as a democrat.  Greek acuity of judgment in all concrete matters, the Greek sense for what a later writer, making the same discoveries, would call the “verità effetuale delle cose”: these are talents that develop in order to destroy a declining upper class’s metaphysical claim to truth by showing that this claim does nothing to save the phenomena.

Trump has already tried and will continue to try to frame his administration as the war of truth against the lie.  We, in the meantime, need to stand up against this distinction, not only by reversing it – although it surely does some good to point out that Trump’s version of “truth” has more structurally in common with falsehood than does the mostly accurate reporting he attacks – but also by keeping our eyes open.  More on this in future installments, under another heading.

A story often told about the Arabic root br’, in the sense of “create,” used several times in he Qur’an to refer to God’s creation of the world, is that it derives from an improper analysis on Muhammad’s part of the Hebrew title for Genesis, bre’shit (lit. “in the head/beginning”).  The tendency of a story like this is, obviously enough, not only to paint Muhammad as the confector of a new religion out of borrowed plumage, but also to make him seem incompetent besides.

Arthur Jeffery, in The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’an, ignores this account on the good philological grounds that bar’ is itself attested as a root meaning “create” in Hebrew, Syriac, and Aramaic, all three of which languages deploy it in a theological sense similar to the one it has in the Qur’an.  While Jeffery is carefully agnostic about whether the Qur’an should be read as an inspired document or a pious fraud, the tenor of his explanations in The Vocabulary (“borrowed from the Christians to the North,” “borrowed from the Syriac liturgy”) suggests that, as a scholar, he hews to the latter opinion or something like it.  Charitably, one could imagine Jeffery thinking of the Qur’an as an original composition out of the rich and syncretic religious vocabulary then current in the trading towns of Arabia.

I don’t mean to impugn this opinion, which would in any case be well-supported by many other lexical items.  The particular case of br’, though, leads me to sound a note of caution as to over-easy assumptions of “foreign” influence on the language of the Qur’an – where this means, as it usually does, influence from the literate religious cultures of Syria and Ethiopia.  In my Sabaic dictionary, I find that br’ appears from a fairly early date in Sabaean inscriptions with meanings that range from “create” to “build” (should it then be considered an r/n doublet of bny?).  These early witnesses in a language little-known to Jeffery (because, in 1938, it was little-known to anyone) but closely linked to Arabic suggest that the hypothesis of religiously-motivated borrowing advanced by him should be discarded.  Most of the texts the dictionary cites show br’ being used in an everyday context, for the building projects of individuals or communities.  I find it difficult to imagine that this usage could result from semantic extension out of a primarily religious meaning; the more likely hypothesis is that the everyday usage came first, and the religious usage built upon it.  For comparison, consider the still pretty narrow semantic field of xlq, the main Qur’anic root for “divine creation,” and, on the other side, the way that an Old English poem like Caedmon’s Hymn appropriates everyday “building words” to describe God’s making of the world.

If br’ already exists in the languages of the Arabian Peninsula by the second century CE, then it makes little sense to talk about a religiously-motivated borrowing of the word out of other Semitic languages for the Qur’an; in this case, the Qur’an is just using material that’s already on hand.  One could still speak of the Qur’an’s use of br’ as influenced by the root’s specialized meaning in Christian or Jewish liturgy, but, since the root has already expanded from “build” to “create” in the Sabaic documentation, I’m not sure what additional explanatory value such a hypothesis would have.

The case of br’ shows how necessary caution is in appraising hypotheses of interlinguistic influence or borrowing, especially if these hypotheses – as is the case with most such arguments about the Qur’an – have a polemical intent behind them, and especially if this polemical intent is one with which we might otherwise be disposed to agree.  There’s a broader lesson here, too, for anyone doing philology on a language that, for one reason or another, seems to be “poor in history.”  Whether we’re dealing with Homeric Greek or Qur’anic Arabic, the paucity of antecedents for a language makes it easy to suggest borrowings or foreign influence without fear of contradiction.  Contradictory evidence, though (Linear B, the Sabaic Inscriptions) has a way of cropping up.  We should be cautious about alleging borrowing, especially motivated borrowing, unless one or both of the following circumstances hold: the word in question refers to a concept that can also be plausibly thought to be borrowed (as, for instance, qur’an itself), or the word violates the borrowing language’s phonotactic and morphological rules.

But suppose Herodotus just happened to hit on something true about the culture of Achaemenid Persia by chance, in the course of doing something quite different.  From James Redfield to Maurice Hartog and beyond, modern scholars have long appreciated that Herodotus’ ethnography works by way of negatively defining the Greeks, so that he represents every other people by contrast, or at least with reference, to this “neutral” standpoint.  Can his remarks about Persia’s hatred of the lie be similarly understood?

It would be trivial to point out that Herodotus’ Greeks do lie all the time and as a matter of policy.  When Cleomenes, the King of Sparta, has got an army of Argives trapped in the woods of a sacred precinct, he draws them out in small groups with the promise that their ransom has been paid; but the Spartans take those who have come out of hiding some distance away, then butcher them.  When the remaining Argives catch on and no more will come out, Cleomenes has the forest set ablaze.  The Argives hold a grudge against Cleomenes for this act of impiety, but not for his earlier deception.

The reason it’s trivial to point this out is because, when it comes to warfare, the Persians employ the same kind of tricks without any hesitation.  They capture Babylon (for the second time, after it rebels) only after a Persian nobleman is able to infiltrate the city by mutilating himself and posing as a deserter.  If Herodotus means to draw a contrast between the place of the lie in Greece and in Persia, it can’t be this kind of low-stakes military maneuver that he has in mind.

To get a sense as to what Herodotus does have in mind, it may be helpful to consider a Greek deceptive practice that he marks out for special condemnation. the priests and priestesses of the Delphic Oracle frequently lie because they have been paid to do so.  On Herodotus’ account, the expulsion of the Peisistratids from Athens and Demaratus from Sparta are only two of the many major political shifts in which bribery of the Oracle plays some part.  Since the Oracle’s prophecies are the only statements that all actors in Herodotus assume to be true, the corruption of the Oracle’s servants undermines the very possibility (for Greeks at least) of a single, consensual truth in comparison with which lies could be recognized as such.

Since both these cases impinge on the legitimacy of kings or families of kings, it makes sense to ask: is politics the field in which Greeks, by contrast with Persians, do not recognize the absolute supremacy of truth over lie?  In Herodotus and on the Bisutun Inscription, Achaemenia voices its support for the “true” king Darayavaush/Darius over the false pretender Bardiya/Smerdis.  In Sparta, the line of the true king is fouled by a corrupted Oracle condemning Demaratus, and no one bats an eye.

Persia is a large enough country – sufficiently distant, both in spatial and in cultural terms, from the Achaemenid king who rules it – that the question “who’s in charge here?” needs to be answered in a different way than in the small-scale poleis of Herodotus’ Greece.  For most Persians, at most times, the answer to this question is almost metaphysical in its abstraction and irrelevance; for Greeks, the answer is a matter of the day-to-day experience of power.  In Persia, then, the king’s truth gets assimilated to a properly metaphysical struggle between asa and drug, one of the many cosmic polarities made available by Zoroastrianism.  This is a technology of rule: that the king is true or false metaphysically, irrespective of his actual power or powerlessness.  In a Greek polis, the distinction between these two forms of “truth” would hardly have made any sense.

I take this to be the force behind the ethnographic contrast Herodotus establishes by saying that Persians hate the lie: Persians acknowledge a form of lie, about legitimacy and right to power, which they hate and which simply does not exist in Greece.

Tomorrow: What this means now.  The danger of being outrun by events.

 

“We should not explain why some people believe p by saying that p is true, or corresponds to a fact, or the facts. For example: someone believes that the universe began with what for brevity we call a big bang.  A host of reasons now support this belief.  But after you have listed all the reasons, you should not add, as if it were an additional reason for believing in the big bang, ‘and it is true that the universe began with a big bang.’ Or, ‘and it is a fact.'”