What Is a “Confession?” Part 3

Early Christianity found itself bound up with the problem of time. As the years moved on and hopes faded for the physical return of Christ, one is faced with two choices: either chalk it up to a colossal misunderstanding and give up or find new ways of interpreting the prophecy. For those who took the latter path, the contradictions and logical problems that could be glossed over when the “end times” were near must be confronted and reconciled. To use Hans Blumenberg’s characterization, “apologetics” must give way to “system” as a short-term belief faces ongoing challenges to its coherence as time moves on. Once we reach the point of “system,” then we are confronting the limits of our thinking:

At some point, apologists have to transform the aggregate of what they are defending into a ‘system.’ This means that every part of the narrative has to stand in a dependent relation to every other part, such that changing, for whatever reason, one part entails adding or subtracting other parts. Once the limit of the system has been reached, the whole process moves ‘as if by itself’; the limit produces increased attention and emendations along with their secondary corruptions and ‘radiations’ until the system as a whole, weakened by calcifications and extenuations, is condemned to be replaced by another, wherever it may come from. (St. Matthew Passion, 27)

As time moved on without the the prophetic return, the more the short-term belief needed to become a long-term coherent worldview. This is a massive challenge. The fact that Christianity authoritatively spread beyond its small original communities of believers is testament to its social and psychological power, as well as to its ability to adapt its forms of power and authority to the long arch of history.

It is no mystery that those who took up this massive challenge were the classically educated of the second and third centuries CE spread throughout the Roman Empire. These “Christian Apologists” understood their religion to be the apotheosis of, and a corrective to, ancient “pagan” philosophy. Pierre Hadot has pointed this out in Philosophy as a Way of Life:

The identification of Christianity with true philosophy inspired many aspects of the teaching of Origen, and it remained influential throughout the Origenist tradition, especially among the Cappadocian Fathers: Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa. It is also in evidence in John Chrysostom. All these authors speak of '“our philosophy’; of the “complete philosophy”; or of “the philosophy according to Christ.” (Philosophy as a Way of Life, 129)

This use of philosophy was also very much about holding these communities together in the face of an increasing realization that the second coming was either not imminent or badly misunderstood. The problem of community is therefore fundamental to early Christian philosophy and is bound together with the problem of time marching on with no end in sight. If your community is based on a shared belief that will be proven dramatically and unequivocally True within a generation or two, you can stick together and ignore criticisms from the outside. Resolving contradictions in the foundational Truth doesn’t have the urgency or importance if the second coming is immanent. But as time marches on, you need to develop a more coherent worldview that can be passed on to others — across generations and across geographical space.

We oversimplify this challenge if we see it as “swapping” a pagan Truth for a Christian one as if the two “religions” were symmetrical. Christianity required a fundamentally new orientation of the individual to Truth and therefore to the community of the converted. In fact, “paganism” is a term invented by Christians that makes a wide range of beliefs appear to be structurally similar and symmetrical to Christianity. In other words, Christianity needed an Other that looked like itself — an Other that offers a competing Truth that could be replaced, especially as it gained legitimacy in the generations after Constantine.

This can explain, in part, why Plato was always more important to early Christian philosophers than Aristotle. To quote Peter Brown, “Both [Christianity and Platonism] pointed in the same direction. Both were radically otherworldly: Christ had said, ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’; Plato had said the same of his realm of ideas” (Augustine of Hippo, 84). Insofar as Plato (as interpreted by Plotinus and his student Porphyry in the third century CE) offered a concept of Truth that was structurally useful to Christianity, paganism could be construed as a coherent religion structurally symmetrical to Christianity. The battle would thus be between two equivalents. The first challenge thrown down becomes converting people to an orientation to a particular concept of what Truth is and to convince them that paganism and Christianity share the same orientation to Truth. Once that’s done, the battle can be over who has the better version of Truth.

This makes Plato an attractive source for Christians. For Plato, the philosopher is the best ruler because he has access to Truth understood as Universals. “Particulars” are mere reflections of Universal Truths and must conform to them. Truth-seeking becomes not just a political act but the core skill of any intellectual activity. Action (praxis), as Hannah Arendt might have put it, is subordinated to contemplation at the moment when particulars shed their specificity and must find their meanings in Universal Truths.

Aristotle, as I covered previously, offered a different way of thinking about truth, universals and particulars. Universals are prone to error when applied to the particular challenges that arise when humans join together as a community. Universals are necessary — that is how values and laws are codified — but they don’t have final authority over the particulars in Aristotle’s polis. The day-to-day will always outpace the ability for Universal Truth to deal with the facts (NE 5.10 1137b10-28).

For this reason, the Aristotelian community will place far more value on “characteristics” and “dispositions” habituated in its citizens. Rather than dogmatic application of Truths to particular situations, the Aristotelian citizen exercises prudence (phronesis) in the application of virtues to the opportune moments (kairos) that present themselves. Phronesis is not the ability to decide which values are appropriate in any given kairos. Judgment does that work. Phronesis is the practical use of reason (logos) to decide which actions are appropriate to enact the relevant virtues (that have already been decided on by judgment). As such, prudence as phronesis is skilled at “deliberation” — the ability to weigh universals and particulars to achieve the best outcomes. For the Aristotle of NE and the Politics, particulars will always hold their own in this tension:

He who is a good deliberator simply is skilled at aiming, in accord with calculation, at what is best for a human being in things attainable through action. And prudence is not concerned with universals alone but must also be acquainted with the particulars: it is bound up with action, and action concerns the particulars. (6.7 1141b 13-17)

For Aristotle, particulars will always have their own truths that are not completely subsumed by Universals. This theme is pervasive in NE and is the basis of his critique of “the good” as a Platonic idea in 1.6 and 1.7. The citizen is skilled at weighing, calculating and applying universals in a way that the specificity of the particulars is respected.

This is not a Truth-seeking community. Rather, for Aristotle, community is local and based on shared values that are part of its nomos (customs, traditions and laws). They are handed down in its endoxa (received wisdom). In this worldview, Truth is far less important than local truths expressed as the values the community lives by. The contemplative life may be the best according to Aristotle (NE 10.6-7), but when it comes to living together, adherence to Truth is far less important than the practical application of communal values — justice, equity, friendship — to the day-to-day particulars of living together.

Early Christianity went the way of Plato, Plotinus and Porphyry to found itself on a single universal Truth accessible through contemplation and revelation. This made it much easier to find its pre-Christian philosophical inspiration in Plato, not Aristotle. Augustine was the major influencer (though not the only one) in this turning away from Aristotle’s pragmatic, value-driven community to Plato’s Truth-seeking one. Through Augustine’s movement from Christian apologetics to the rigor of a philosophical system founded on a single Truth, we inherit a modern individual who can imagine him/herself as part of a global community that shares the same Truth. This individual finds his/her life’s meaning by being converted to and aligned with this Truth that transcends time and space.

This embracing of Plato at the expense of Aristotle had significant consequences that we are living with today. We can look at these consequences in many different ways, but I’ll focus on the consequences related to how one “belongs” to a community. Augustine’s definition of belonging demands an acceptance of a Truth before one can belong to the community. In such a situation, the values of the community are subordinated to, and derived from, how this Truth is conceptualized and propagated. Universals will always seek to encompass the particulars. Any particular that doesn’t conform is an error or a mistake, or possibly the exception that proves the rule. The attempt to encompass particulars within universals will turn to attempts to control the particulars. Heretics will be identified and dealt with by the orthodox.

This dominance by the universal over the particular, to be effective, must transform the individual — the ultimate particularity. Belonging will be a matter of personal transformation as one makes oneself into the scene of the action in the confrontation of the universal and the particular. By using the concepts of an inherited moral psychology, Augustine narrativizes and systematizes “belonging” in the form of personal storytelling in the Confessions. For the Confessions, belonging is profoundly personal and the result of significant intellectual and emotional work on oneself. It requires a personal story that is part of a community of personal stories of conversion. Thus Augustine gives us a mode of self-creation that makes the ongoing and total application of Universal Truths to one’s own particular situation into the very meaning of life. Without the personal quest for an elusive, Universal Truth as it applies to oneself, one’s life has no meaning.

In the process, one turns the past into two things at once: 1) a problem to be overcome as the source of our errors and ingrained bad habits, and 2) a story to be deciphered as one looks for the early signs of the Truth that has always somehow been there. It is the essential Platonic exercise applied to one’s thoughts and feelings (which is why memoria as a storehouse of everything that has ever happened to an individual becomes such a critical concept for Augustine). At some point, the self will be conceived of and experienced as bifurcated — split between an old and a new one. This “monstrous condition” that Augustine describes in Book VIII is not an error or a mistake in the process. It is necessary and thus requires a moral psychology that can handle the complexity beyond mere Stoic self-correction:

In my own case, as I deliberated about serving my Lord God (Jer. 30: 9) which I had long been disposed to do, the self which willed to serve was identical with the self that was unwilling. It was I. I was neither wholly willing nor wholly unwilling. So I was in conflict with myself and was dissociated from myself. The dissociation came about against my will. Yet this was not the manifestation of an alien mind but the punishment suffered in my own mind. (VIII x 22, emphasis added)

This is how societies work that are formed on the basis of a conversion to a Truth. They demand a bifurcation of one’s self into higher and lower orders. Because the conversion process is so personal and emotional, the conversion is lived out at the level of experience and not merely an externally imposed ritual like a baptism. This is not simply a Christian model, though arguably Augustine’s Confessions is the first powerful articulation of this bifurcation that is required for conversion to Truth. It’s a model that can be transposed to any Truth-seeking community. As Isaiah Berlin has pointed out (rightly, I think):

… the ‘higher’ self duly became identified with institutions, Churches, nations, races, States, classes, cultures, parties, and with vaguer entities, the general will, the common good, the enlightened forces of society, the vanguard of the most progressive class, Manifest Destiny. (Liberty, “Five Essays on Liberty: Introduction” 37)

Where these institutions start out with a promise of freedom, they more often in the twentieth century turned out to do quite the opposite: “My thesis is that, in the course of this process, what had begun as a doctrine of freedom turned into a doctrine of authority and, at times, of oppression” (Berlin, 37). This is not an error in the system; this is how the mechanics of belonging work for a community based on acceptance of a universal, univocal, totalizing Truth that can be known (by some) as a certainty. They set up a past that must be overcome but also understood as preparing the way for the full realization of Truth. That past exists at the macro level (Christian versus Pagan, Communist versus Capitalist, Aryans versus all others, savage versus civilized, et cetera) but also and necessarily at the micro-level as one’s own thoughts and feelings must be examined and interpreted within the macro-level conceptual framework. These Truth-seeking communities require conformity where each of us has an autobiography that is essentially the story of that conformity.

Aristotle offers us something different, something lost as we moved to this world where the meaning of the individual life is fully contained in itself as it struggles to align the particularities of experience with a Universal Truth as its cipher. Aristotle’s world is more pluralistic without descending into indefensible relativism. To be purely relativist, Aristotle would have to dispense entirely with universals such that the particulars stand solely on their own. But of course this is not possible. Universals at some level are necessary to begin deliberating about anything. For Aristotle, the universals are found in the moral psychology — we all are “habituated”; we all take voluntary and involuntary actions; we all experience pleasure and pain; we all make “choices” (proairesis) . But these universals don’t demand conversion and conformity in the same way that Christianity would eventually require. They are concepts that allow us to make sense of and control our actions. As a result, they are operational concepts whose purpose is practical and not completely theoretical:

Now, since the present subject is taken up, not for the sake of contemplation, as are others — for we are conducting an examination, not so that we may know what virtue is, but so we may become good, since otherwise there would be no benefit from it — it is necessary to examine matters pertaining to actions, that is, how one ought to perform them (2.2 1103b 26-30)

Aristotle gives us a picture of society where its values drive its actions, but those values are not representatives of Truth. They are not subordinate to an inevitable arch of history. What is a value? It is a disposition to behave in certain ways without knowing ahead of time what the right answer will be in any given situation. This is why the opportune moment (kairos) and prudence (phronesis) play such important roles in Aristotle’s elaboration of the political art.

This is not to say that Aristotle got it all right. There is plenty to object to in NE and Politics. Not the least of which is the role of women and slaves in the society he represents. If we’re not careful — if we see Aristotle as providing an alternative Truth to Plato and Platonic Christianity — we’ll end up in a Burkean worldview where society’s traditions and customs replace metaphysical Truth with the same potentially oppressive outcomes. The challenge is to break free from a Truth-seeking society without giving up the importance of truths and facts as important inputs to our conversations. But truths must not ossify into Universal Truth. Not all of our discussions as citizens can and should be over who is right and who is wrong. Rather, more productive conversations happen when we are talking about the right set of values to apply to any given situation. Our discussions shift from right versus wrong to the best way to achieve desired outcomes. This will always be a game of mixing universals and particulars. Aristotle provided us, I believe, with a much better point of departure than the neoplatonist Christians of the third and fourth centuries.