If we are to love the world ourselves, or at least understand the “calling and mode of inspiration” of someone who has been supposed to do so pre-eminently (Jesus), we should join the great German philosophers of the nineteenth century in their effort to revive this paradoxical logos. Not only Nietzsche, but also Hegel made this a goal: “There is no aphorism of Heraclitus,” he wrote, “that I have not adopted in my Logic.” Becoming God joins this effort, recounting how the clash between Heraclitus and Parmenides over the correct way to think about the world made its way into the dialogues of Plato, who decided in favor of Parmenides and his logic of consistency, thereby occluding Heraclitus and his superior logic of chiasmus. The early Christian theologians were primarily Platonists, however, and so the crosswise interpretation of Jesus available to the Heraclitean tradition was overshadowed by the logic of consistency that would strive but fail to understand a human god. This fourth post aims in the end to present this interpretation.

More immediately, its purpose is to show how evenly Heraclitus straddles the distinction between transcendence and immanence. Before adducing the relevant aphorisms, let us recall the necessary conditions of a philosophy that is as immanent as it is transcendent: (i) it must teach that the highest good is human flourishing, but also something transcending the human; (ii) it must teach that the natural and temporal world is all there is, but also that this world is transcended by the supernatural and eternal divine; and (iii) it must teach that we humans are mortal, but also somehow immortal. Two words for each of the three conditions will recall their contradictory concerns: for the first, these are virtue and the good; for the second, the cosmos and god; for the third, life and death. Accordingly, we shall organize a few of the Heraclitean aphorisms around these three concerns. But we shall take them in a different order, starting with the second about cosmos and god. Connecting this fundamental contradiction to the other two will be the self we discover whenever we go in search of ourselves.

First, then, the natural and temporal cosmos. That it is the ultimate reality—rather than being a product of an eternal realm, say of Platonic Forms, let alone some mythic time, such as Hesiod depicts—is the account of two aphorisms we considered in the previous post. One spoke explicitly of a world that “no god nor man has made,” adding that “it ever was and will be: fire everliving, kindled in measures and in measures quenched.” Nothing superior to this temporal world could have created it, in fact, because for Heraclitus there is no vantage of eternity above time from which such a creation might occur. This is not to say that eternity does not exist for him—on the contrary, it does—but only that it holds no higher rank than time, the everliving fire, whose moments are simultaneously kindled and quenched. Nothing transcends fiery time, reports another aphorism we examined earlier, because “all things are a requital for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.”

So immanent is Heraclitean cosmology, in fact, that this requital and exchange of everything in the natural world is none other than “the god (theos): day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger.” The quoted list of nouns is the first half of the only aphorism that explicitly defines the Heraclitean god. As if its succession of natural states were not temporal enough, the second half says of this god that “it alters, as when mingled with perfumes it gets named according to the hēdonē (scent, pleasure) of each.” Approaching the altar fire of a god, Greek worshippers threw upon it various perfumes: myrrh, cyprus, rose, and so on. The names they gave this fire depended on the scents it consequently produced, just as the names worshippers gave the divine depended on the pleasures associated with it. Day and night, for example, are among the many gods named by Hesiod, as are others listed in the first half of this aphorism, no doubt because they affect human life, bringing us pleasures (and pains).

“The teacher of most is Hesiod,” Heraclitus wrote with scorn; “it is him they know as knowing most, who did not recognize day and night: they are one.” Naming according to superficial pleasures, or pains, Hesiod failed to recognize the concealed nature of the divine. The one god Heraclitus reveals may be defined by a list of these superficial names, but it is not any one of these pleasures or pains, nor all together in an indiscriminate mixture. Instead, it is the concealed structure of their values to mortals. Day and summer are safe, winter and night threaten; war and hunger are destructive, satiety and peace preserve. The chiastic pattern of mortal pleasures (+) and pains (-) in the first half of the aphorism is thus: + – - + | – + + – . This is another Heraclitean fugue, ingeniously weaving misunderstandings of the divine into a complex pattern that nevertheless reveals its concealed structure. This theo-logos, like so many other Heraclitean logoi, thereby exhibits what it reports—the divine logos itself.

“Crosswise logic” argued that this logos is chiasmus, an eternal cross in the midst of time. “All things come to pass in accordance with this logos,” Heraclitus writes, yet “this logos holds forever.” God may be the alternation of “day night, winter summer, war peace, hunger satiety,” but also divine is the eternal structure of that very alternation. Both immanent (as the natural world in time) and transcendent (as the eternal logos of that world), Heraclitean theology is thus contradictory. But inconsistency is not the vice for this logos that it would be for other theologies and philosophies. Indeed, this particular contradiction is its chief virtue. This is not to say that everything is permitted to it, recall, because the principle of non-contradiction and its correlative activity of analysis remain essential to its harmonic structure. Whenever it turns upon itself, however, to contemplate the divine order (kosmos), it surpasses the inadequate logic of consistency with the synthetic activity of its own chiastic principle.

“The wise is one,” writes Heraclitus, “knowing the plan by which it steers all things through all.” Several other aphorisms attest in this way to the transcendence of god, but of them all the most paradoxical and richest with hidden meaning is the following: “The wise is one alone, unwilling and willing to be spoken of by the name of Zeus.” Set apart from all things, alone, this god should not be called by the name even of the most powerful Greek divinity—so perfectly does it transcend all things. And yet this god is no less within all imperfect things, so that it may be called by the name of Zeus among other things more mundane: day night, summer winter, etc. Named according to the pleasure of each worshipper, furthermore, the divine acquires an infinite variety of forms according to the infinitely various anxieties brought to the altar of time, this vale of tears. The Heraclitean god may reveal itself to us in time through these anxieties, but to know it fully we must also recognize it as the concealed and eternal structure of that perpetual revelation.

This proves also to be the structure of the self that we discover whenever we contemplate ourselves. “I went in search of myself,” reported Heraclitus, as though simply describing the beginning of his own philosophical quest. But the apparent simplicity of this aphorism conceals a deep philosophical contradiction, one that resides likewise in the Delphic imperative to know thyself, not to mention the appropriation of this imperative by Plato to characterize the beginning of philosophy. Here in brief is the puzzle it generates: if I am to search for myself, I must somehow be absent from myself; for anything to be absent from itself, though, it must both be and not be itself. (Here is a fuller account of the puzzle, which Becoming God elaborates further.) Thanks to this contradiction, the self appears opposed to itself, not-whole, divergent, and dissonant. Whatever unity it may appear to have before we consider its inner conflict, in other words, the self now fragments into an inconsistent plurality. Yet this is only one half of its inquiry, for the lesson of this puzzle turns out to be the same one learned earlier from the paradox of fire and the temporal cosmos it symbolizes.

Self-inquiry may be contradictory at each moment, according to our quick analysis, but as with fire the momentary opposition of a self in search of itself is united through the flow of time and our emotional engagement with it. After all, turning our contemplation outward to the relation of our self with others—the hope and fear, anger and lust, love and hate we experience in community—we appear to others and ourselves rather whole, convergent, and consonant. Whatever plurality may have been revealed by our analysis of inner conflict now achieves a consistent unity. No sooner is this fragmentation and opposition overcome, however, than our new unity generates a fresh opposition for self-inquiry: between opposition and unity, whole and not-whole, convergence and divergence, consonance and dissonance. Once this new synthesis is analyzed, in other words, it produces a further contradiction (between analysis and synthesis), until this fresh conflict is in turn reconciled by time and a fresh emotional engagement with it. And so on.

Or so it goes for the consummately reflective self, sharing with the temporal cosmos its eternal structure: “wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one all things.” Chiasmus is therefore the logos of the self as much as it is the logos of time. When self-inquiry directs this principle inward rather than outward, therefore, it discovers the activity of chiasmus to be the self sought. This surprising discovery—that the self is not only one and many, but the active principle that makes such a contradiction intelligible—is required by the logic of self-knowledge. For in self-knowledge, properly speaking, the knowing subject must be the same as the object known, otherwise the knowledge would not be of self but of other. Seeking self-knowledge, accordingly, we reveal our self to be this very same chiasmus. Far from the purely intellectual feat of navel-gazing it might at first appear to be, this activity of genuine self-inquiry would be as affective as cognitive, as loving as rational, as much about the world and its god as about oneself. Practiced well, crosswise logic reveals the concealed structure of all three.

“Thinking well,” Heraclitus thus writes, “is the greatest excellence.” Thinking crosswise, that is, we perfect the divine in our selves. Although its logos is already ubiquitous, it is only imperfectly realized whenever we become preoccupied with an immanent world of time, or for that matter a transcendent and eternal heaven. The typical result of such preoccupations, as “Love and reason” argued, is resentment. If we wish to love more purely, therefore, we should cultivate an impure devotion both to the divine immanent world and to the god who nonetheless transcends it. Living in time, we already participate in its chiasmus, just as a fire must do to burn. But some fires grow weak, whether by excess need or satiety, whereas other fires grow thanks to their more perfect synthesis of this characteristic conflict. A later Heraclitean, Marcus Aurelius, makes this analogy explicit, twice comparing the virtuous self to “a bright fire that appropriates whatever you throw into it and from it produces flame and light.” Such a light would shine in the dark, and no darkness could ever extinguish it. Heraclitean ethics enjoins us to become such a light to the world.

The perfect realization of this light would be a self who incarnates a cross of immanence and transcendence. Both the good sought and the life lived by such a self would thus reveal it. With divine conflict, his highest good would be the immanent flourishing of human excellence, the cardinal virtues celebrated in naturalistic philosophies from antiquity to the present; but his highest good would also be the superhuman life of god, the theological virtues, now understood as the chiasmus of love and reason. Distinct from this perfect divine activity, as human, he would nonetheless be identical with it, as god. Here, for instance, is how his dual and contradictory nature would manifest itself. Emotionally, his all-too-human weeping over our mortal limits would reside alongside his supernatural confidence in our transcendence of these limits. Intellectually, his surprise over the peccadilloes of his friends would reside alongside his knowledge of every hair on their heads.

Living these contradictions, he would likewise die them, because such a self would have to be mortal insofar as he was immanent. Dying in time with bodily corruption, then, he would nevertheless have to be immortal as well, living in eternity with divine activity. Heraclitus unites these opposing demands in his masterpiece of form and content: “Immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living the other’s death, in the others’ life having died.” Presenting a semantic chiasmus in the first half, then a syntactic chiasmus in the second, this logos replicates and thus recalls the complex chiastic structure of the aphorism that defined god (+ – - + | – + + -). Whereas that theo-logos reported a natural world of time that was ultimate but transcended by god, this bio-logos (or thanato-logos) consigns us to an irrevocable death in time that is superseded by eternal life. In other words, the corruptible shall put on incorruption, and the mortal shall put on immortality, but death cannot be swallowed up in victory. Fortunately. For if ever it were, along with it would go meaningful life.

The self incarnated in this way would be both fully immanent and fully transcendent. Thinking so, living truth in the midst of conflict, he would be free to love the world perfectly. Not resenting the temporal world as an obstacle to an eternal paradise, he might reveal the kingdom of god to be within you. Not resenting time as an inexorable thief of our beloveds, he might say today you will be with me in paradise. This twin revelation, his crosswise logos, would communicate the love’s knowledge he would himself embody. Such a logos, or word of god, would be the Heraclitean Christ. Whoever confesses him would try to imitate him, living a Christian life, with most of the anxieties this paradoxical vocation has always provoked. Is this genuine prayer or sophisticated idolatry? Is this authentic meditation or simply self-help? Is this chastity or repression, courage or pride, charity or vanity? Heraclitean Christianity offers the anxious believer no special solace but one.

Since the first Pentecost, and no doubt before that, Christians have struggled with contradictions. All religions must, of course, but the religion that confesses a human god assumes a unique burden in this regard. Tertullian famously shrugged it off with these words: certum est, quia impossible; it is certain, the immortality of mortals, because it is impossible. Such fideism has always tempted Christians, and it is arguably more tempting now—in an age even more diffident about philosophical truth than it is about religious doctrine. Theologians who have put aside the Thomistic synthesis of faith and reason, ironically for good reasons, reach instead for Kierkegaard or some more recent iteration of the fideist position. Yet this choice, between consistent or irrational faith, preserves the false dichotomy that has bedeviled Christian theology from its earliest Platonic forms: either Christian doctrines can be rendered non-contradictory and thus acceptable to reason, or their irrationality must be admitted, sometimes with a smug contempt of reason.

Heraclitean Christianity escapes this false dichotomy by denying its implicit assumption that reason is consistency. If the highest form of reason is instead crosswise, as this series of posts has argued, then Christian confession would be reasonable despite its contradictions. Not every contradiction is allowed; this cannot be emphasized enough; only those required by careful meditation upon this world are permitted. But according to the Heraclitean meditation of these posts, these permissible contradictions are the three just canvassed—between time and eternity, nature and god, mortality and immortality. As it happens, moreover, these are the same three contradictions which the Christian confesses in one person: Jesus Christ. Far from irrational, confessing him would instead be the summit of reason.

Many Christians worry less about irrationality than they do about orthodoxy, so a few words are in order about the fidelity of this interpretation to Christian tradition. Is it heretical to confess Christ crosswise? Here a philosopher must hand the baton to theologians, but only after quickly acknowledging important differences between this Christ and the one so deeply indebted to Platonism and its logic of consistency. As already mentioned, neither his death nor ours is swallowed up in victory. On the contrary, death remains as invincible as the natural and temporal world it presupposes. As a result, no final resurrection will erase death forever, no pure eschaton will put an end to this impure world, nor will any future time witness the separation of wheat from tares. Yet this is already happening now, so to speak, in eternity. Here in time, following the crosswise confession, we foresee no ultimate reconciliation of all contradiction. Conflict is everliving, just as the cosmic fire.

Nevertheless—and this is the only solace crosswise logic offers the anxious Christian—there is truth in conflict. Heraclitean philosophy permits us to speak this truth intelligibly, to think it reasonably, and thereby to feel it most maturely. The crosswise Christian, in sum, could sing this Polish Christmas carol (Bóg się rodzi) with not only the lips, but also the mind as much as the heart:

God is born, great powers tremble,
Lord of Heaven lies forsaken.
Fire is frozen, splendor darkens,
feeble nature God has taken.
Lowly born, yet Lord to Praises,
Mortal yet the King of Ages.
Now indeed the Word made Flesh has
come on earth to dwell among us.

Heraclitean logic is the logos. This Greek word condenses many English translations, of which three give a sense of its wide range: ‘speech’ (language), ‘reason’ (thought), and ‘structure’ (world). Whenever he invokes the logos, Heraclitus exploits this range and alludes to all three domains. Indeed, holding in mind at once all three—world, thought, and language—is essential to the Heraclitean way of thinking. Thus, when he insists that “all things come to pass in accordance with this logos,” he means that everything coming to pass—in the temporal world, that is—shares the same structure. But he also means that accurate reasoning about this world shares this structure, just as accurate speech must too. This accurate speech is presumably his aphoristic style, so to understand it, its characteristic way of thinking, and the world it describes, we must understand this shared structure. It cannot be consistency, as “Truth in conflict” argued; instead, as this post argues, it is chiasmus.

Chiasmus is usually known as the literary figure in which elements are repeated but in crosswise order (A : B :: B : A). Here is an example from Shakespeare: “Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves.” A pleasant change of consonants adorns the reversal of meanings: strongly loving is doting; to suspect is to doubt. The elements reversed can also be syntactic, however, as in this example from Milton: “Love without end and without measure Grace.” Here, a noun and a prepositional phrase trade order.  Again, a substitution of words introduces some pleasant variety, though now it also adds layers of concealed meaning. By substituting ‘Grace’ for ‘Love,’ and thereby assimilating them, Milton suggests that divine love is freely given. By adding synonymous prepositional phrases, he suggests that the gift is eternal and boundless. For Christians like Milton, the sign of this love and grace is the cross. With this crosswise figure, then, he communicates a Christology—a logos, or account, of his God.

No figure could be more appropriate to the logos of Christ, for a cross has always symbolized this word, beginning as it does with a Greek letter that resembles one. Chi looks like our English X—so much like it, in fact, that we shorten “Christmas” to “Xmas,” usually without recognizing the Greek contribution to our abbreviation. The same letter appears more faithfully on the candles and vestments of Christian churches, where it joins the letter Rho to symbolize the Messiah. But before there were any Christian churches, the letter Chi symbolized the literary figure it names. Chiasmus comes from chiazō, which the Greek grammarians used to convey the crosswise pattern of its principal letter. The association between Christ and the pattern of chiasmus was thus natural enough, at least in the symbolic imagination of the Hellenistic world. The association is more substantial for Heraclitean philosophy, which reveals chiasmus as the concealed structure of the world, just as Christian revelation proclaims Christ as the truth of the world.

To appreciate the depth of this association, we must first understand how a literary figure could reveal the concealed structure of the world. Let us begin by recalling the polysemy of logos: in order to signify one chiasmus shared by world, reason, and speech, Heraclitus crafts aphorisms (logoi) that exhibit what they report. Here is an especially dramatic example of the technique: “All things are a requital for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.” In this faithful English translation, the complex chiasmus of meanings shines through (A : B :: B : A ::: C : D :: D : C). Below this semantic pattern, additionally, is a dazzling arrangement of nouns whose syntax cannot be rendered into English. Their cases (Nominative and Genitive) and their numbers (Singular and Plural) make the following pattern, GS : NP :: NS : GP ::: GS : NP :: GP : NS. In the first half of the sentence is a chiasmus according to case (G : N :: N : G). In the second half, one according to number (S : P :: P : S). This is a fugue in Greek, weaving linguistic opposition into a complex unity, but what is its philosophical significance?

“Truth and conflict” adduced Heraclitean fire not only to humble the principle of non-contradiction but also to herald its more catholic rival. Analyzing fire’s burning into moments, we found it to be an opposition of “need and satiety” at each one. This came as a surprise, no doubt, because when we do not deliberately analyze fire in this way—whenever we use it to warm our hands or cook a meal; whenever we fear it as the destroyer of homes and cities; whenever, that is, its burning affects us in time, entering into the narratives woven by our emotional engagement with the world—we contemplate something whose unity appears undisturbed by the opposites it synthesizes. Analysis may reveal a fire that is in conflict with itself at every moment, but through the continuity of time it synthesizes these opposites into a unity. Whenever we relax our analysis, returning to affective engagement with fire, we overlook its momentary dissonance and appreciate instead this synthetic unity. Correlatively, whenever we disengage emotionally from fire by activating consistent reason, we lose sight of its continuity and consonance, foregrounding instead its opposition and conflict.

Were we to select one perspective exclusively—whether purely consistent cognition or purely emotional engagement—our comprehension of fire would be limited by omission of the other. Neither by pure cognitive analysis nor by pure emotional synthesis can we comprehend fully anything temporal. Neither by a narrow focus on its instantaneous opposition nor by attending to its temporal unity alone can we understand it. Its concealed structure reveals itself only through an impure chiasmus of both. Beginning with a unified flame, accordingly, we analyzed its burning into moments of contradictory opposition. Synthesis and unity were thus conjoined with analysis and opposition. Stepping back from this conjunction, we now recognize its fresh contradiction: consistency forbids the simultaneity of unity and opposition, synthesis and analysis. And yet their harmony is nonetheless accomplished—just as fire accomplishes its own burning—through the continuity of time. Conjoined with this additional analysis into opposites, then, is another synthesis into unity. And so on, world without end.

All told, our comprehension of fire reveals the following pattern. Unity : opposition :: opposition : unity (U : O :: O : U). This particular set of terms, and the artless aphorism it informs, puts the emphasis on the object of our comprehension, the structure of fire itself. Putting the emphasis instead on the structure of our comprehension, as subjects, we may switch to the following set of terms. Synthesis : analysis :: analysis : synthesis (S : A :: A : S). Whichever set we choose—one focusing on the world, the other on our thought of it—we find the same crosswise pattern. This is of course chiasmus, and it can be iterated infinitely (SU : AO :: AO : SU ::: SU : AO :: AO : SU …). More than a complex literary figure, however, this very iteration is the crosswise logic of the temporal world. “Kosmos,” writes Heraclitus, “the same for all, no god nor man has made, but it ever was and will be: fire everliving, kindled in measures and in measures quenched.” More than a mere figure of speech, in other words, chiasmus is the eternal structure of both our fiery temporal cosmos and the activity of comprehending it in thinking and speech.

Heraclitean philosophy is a meditation on this kosmos (Greek for ‘order’ or ‘structure’). Heraclitus consummates this meditation with a principle that has a more legitimate claim than non-contradiction to be the firmest of all: “wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one all things.” This principle describes a complex activity that is as synthetic as it is analytic. Wholes consonant and converging are synthesized into one from all things, while not-wholes dissonant and diverging are analyzed into all things from one. Exhibiting the structure of chiasmus it also reports, as Becoming God argues, this logos challenges the principle of non-contradiction. Indeed, this principle of chiasmus appears to have been the target of Parmenides and the Platonic tradition founded upon his rejection of it. Thus, if we defy this tradition, emboldened by its failure to think the temporal world, if we adopt Heraclitus’s more capacious mode of reasoning, bolstered by its chiasmus of consistent thought and passionate longing, if we assimilate ourselves to this cross—a task that is by no means easy, requiring a spiritual discipline of its own—we can reasonably confess a philosophy that is neither immanent nor transcendent, but both.

Lest this mode of impure reason seem too abstract, complex, or even impossible, here are two analogies that might make it seem less so. First, we can compare crosswise logic to looking at the duck-rabbit drawing popularized in philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Looked at in one way, the drawing appears to be of a duck; looked at in another, it appears as a rabbit. We alternate between seeing it one way and then another, back and forth, often quickly, and sometimes involuntarily. When we willfully contemplate not just the drawing but also these very alternations, we rise to a higher level of reflection, coming to see the drawing as duck-rabbit, a unity in opposition (or opposition in unity). Similar epiphanies occur, secondly, when we study contrapuntal music. Listening to a Bach fugue, for example, we can with disciplined effort discern not only one theme or its counter-point, nor only both in alternation, but both at once. Beyond this already difficult accomplishment, the highest comprehension of the fugue discerns the concealed structure of its harmonic conflict. To fully appreciate it, in other words, we must hear the unity in opposition as well as the opposition in unity that is Bach’s composition.

Music presents the best analogy to crosswise logic because it likewise touches our hearts as well as our minds. Whether listening to it attentively, performing it well, or composing it creatively, we must both think and feel deeply. To practice chiasmus, similarly, we must turn our emotion as well as our cognition toward the world of becoming. Engaging it emotionally, we affirm the continuity of time; cognizing it simultaneously, we affirm the conflict of its every moment. After recognizing the opposition between these activities, furthermore, crosswise logic unites them in chiasmus: a higher unity of the opposition between opposition and unity. And so on, ideally, although not all emotions will engage the world equally, nor is all cognition consistent.

Not everything should be permitted to reason. To think consistently, after all, we must practice the principle of non-contradiction, recognizing the conflict inherent in the temporal world. With this practice, notice, we show crosswise logic to be more generous than its rival. For although it dethrones non-contradiction, it installs it as the prince of all logical offices, second only to the king, namely, chiasmus itself.

Nor should every emotion be permitted to it. Resentment is forbidden because it disengages from the world that crosswise logic seeks to engage. For the goal of resentment is destruction. Anger and hatred seek to destroy, too, but for them destruction is always a means to preserve some other end, some thing considered good independent of the act of destruction. Resentment, by contrast, seeks the preservation of nothing but itself. In fact, according to Nietzsche, “nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.” It destroys even the resentful self. Its ulterior motive, so rarely recognized by the soul being consumed by it, is destruction for its own sake, destruction of everything that opposes it, destruction ultimately of the whole world. Fortunately, as Connolly’s grid acknowledges, resentment is opposed by love, an emotion that engages more deeply with the world than any other because it is most open to its differences, least limited by defenses against its inevitable conflict, and most single-mindedly invested in the creation of independent good.

Requiring extraordinary strength of character, then, crosswise logic demands that we love the whole world of becoming while thinking consistently about it. Indeed, it is the supreme activity of loving and thinking together: Love without end and without measure Reason. This eternal cross thus manages to bind our deepest longings—which, Augustine rightly argued, cannot be satisfied by the temporal world—together with our intellectual powers—which cannot conceive a meaningful life in eternity without contradiction. Requiring a love so strong and pure that it remains undiminished in the midst of the world’s conflict, such an achievement would appear beyond any mere mortal. Confessing the immortal mortal, however, the Heraclitean tradition is uniquely “equipped to honor Jesus by offering a distinctive interpretation of his calling and mode of inspiration.” Making this confession will be the aim of the next and final post.

Humble it, that is, but not reject it. For without it, as philosophers say, everything is permitted. Some recent ones have questioned it nonetheless, reviving the Liar Paradox of late antiquity: “This sentence is false.” It appears to be a normal declarative sentence, so it should be true or false. But which? If it were true, what it says must be the case, so it should be false. Yet if it be false, this is exactly what it says, so it should be true. Despite elaborate attempts to defuse it, this paradox persistently threatens an explosion, the logical equivalent of a nuclear detonation, destroying the principle of non-contradiction and thus the imperative to think consistently. But even those who champion the paradox recognize the incoherence of abandoning this principle altogether. Their goal is to humble it, not reject it. Similarly respectful of it, this post seeks only to demote it from the status Aristotle assigned it, namely “the firmest of all.”

Whether or not it can be saved from the Liar—which could perhaps be dismissed as an anomaly, radioactive uranium to be safely contained somehow, somewhere where it will not corrupt the rest of our thinking—the principle of non-contradiction exhibits a more serious flaw: it cannot accommodate anything in time, let alone time itself, where we live and breathe and have our being. Here, in brief, is the problem: this logical principle requires that everything temporal be consistent at a moment, although no moment is itself consistent. Aristotle formulates the principle this way: “The same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect.” He adds that we may supply other qualifications as needed, but the most important of all he has already mentioned: time. Yesterday, for example, was not contradictory if it was both cloudy and not-cloudy; it may have been cloudy in the morning and sunny in the afternoon; the attributes cloudy and not-cloudy belonged to yesterday at different times. If anything were to undermine the principle, then, it would have to do so at the same time—in other words, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.

Now, ironically, Aristotle himself observed that if time were a succession of moments, each one would have to perish, for only so could these moments yield to one another and produce the flow of time. When, however, could a particular moment perish? In which moment could it do so? Not in itself, for then it would both exist and not exist; nor could it perish in any other moment, for then it would be simultaneous with a different moment. Both options, in short, would violate the principle of non-contradiction. So too would the same options available to any moment that is supposed to be born. It could only be born in itself or in another moment, and both are equally contradictory. Indeed, the paradoxical options available to anyone who freezes time into moments resemble nothing so much as the dilemmas produced by a student of Parmenides, Zeno of Elea.

Zeno’s most beguiling paradox, the Flying Arrow, invites us to imagine the flight of an arrow frozen in a moment. Were we to freeze a flying arrow in a ‘now’—catching it on film with a high-speed camera, so to speak—it would occupy a space equal to itself. For if it should occupy a space longer than itself, it would be moving, not frozen. In our photographic analogy, it would be as if our shutter speed were too slow; rather than catching the flying arrow at a moment, we caught it over several moments, creating a blur. Catching it in a ‘now,’ we would find it occupying a space equal to itself, which is to say motionless. In every ‘now,’ at every moment, it must be motionless. Yet at each moment it must also be moving. After all, it is a flying arrow: if it never moves, it cannot fly. In sum, then, at every moment it must be both moving and still. The flying arrow would seem to violate the principle of non-contradiction.

According to Aristotle, however, such an absurd “result follows from the assumption that time is composed of moments: if this assumption is not granted, the conclusion will not follow.” In other words, if “time is not composed of indivisible nows,” but is instead infinitely divisible, there is no freezing the flying arrow in a moment. For if a motion happens over time that is infinitely divisible, every division of its duration should reveal it to be moving. While moving, it must always occupy a space longer than itself, only less so with each finer division. Because there is no final division, neither is there any moment at which the arrow turns out to be still. One solution to this paradox, therefore, is to claim that time is not composed of ‘nows’; instead, it is infinitely divisible, a flowing continuum rather than a particulate succession.

Is the same Aristotelian solution available to explain a related puzzle, the paradoxical change of everything in time? Consider an especially vivid instance of this change: fire. As a process, it is ever-changing, a sort of motion. Dividing the duration of its burning—where this burning is parallel to the arrow’s moving—we shall never reach a moment when it ceases to burn, anymore than we shall reach a moment when the arrow is still. The parallel is important to keep in mind, because the same photographic temptations arise for fire that arose for the flying arrow. We imagine capturing a fire on film, and with the image of such a fire before our minds, we are tempted to think that we have frozen it in exclusive satisfaction, the way we were tempted by Zeno to think of the arrow as perfectly still in a ‘now.’ But if time is infinitely divisible, however finely we divide the duration of the fire’s burning, it is no more static in this division of its duration than was the arrow perfectly still in its own. In every division, no matter how fine, the flying arrow is moving. Correlatively, in every division, no matter how fine, the fire is burning.

This burning is a satisfaction with fuel, lest it be extinguished, but it is also a need for fuel, lest it be static. Fire, wrote Heraclitus, is “need and satiety.” It cannot consistently burn in a moment, anymore than an arrow can fly in a moment, and so it should come as no surprise that any analysis that freezes it so creates a conflict. Thanks to the analyses of Aristotle and Zeno, though, we can say more precisely that the logical offense occurs only when we conceive of time as divisible into ‘nows.’ Yet there is a deep irony here that Aristotle himself does not seem to recognize: the principle of non-contradiction that he himself codified requires us to conceive time and change this way. It analyzes time into moments in order to insist, as a necessary condition of being and knowledge, that the attributes of everything so analyzed be consistent with one another.

Yesterday was both cloudy and not-cloudy, but this was no true conflict because its contradictory attributes belonged to it at different times. No such analysis is available when we use the principle to think fire, however, because its satisfaction and neediness remain forever intertwined in each moment. So likewise, it turns out, whenever we scrutinize anything else in time, which is itself both dying and being born, inextricably together, in every moment and forever. If the principle of non-contradiction really is a necessary condition of knowledge, as Aristotle claimed, knowing any object must require freezing it in a moment and finding it consistent then. But if everything in time—everything that undergoes process, change, and motion, albeit less visibly and dramatically than fire—must be inconsistent in each moment, nothing temporal can be known as such. Indeed, because Aristotle thinks that nothing contradictory can be, nothing temporal can ever exist as such.

Philosophers who revere the principle of non-contradiction thus require true existence to be unchanging, timeless, and eternal. Plato’s Forms are but the paradigms of this requirement, showing most clearly how devotion to consistent thinking favors transcendence by rendering the immanent world impossible, unknowable, and even an evil illusion. If the argument of “Love and reason” was accurate—that a purely transcendent philosophy inhibits love of the world—the emotion associated most often with this way of thinking should be resentment. This was Nietzsche’s abiding critique of philosophers, principally those in the Platonic tradition; this critique drove him and those indebted to him, especially Heidegger, to seek a way of thinking otherwise. Finding his alternative in the philosopher whom Parmenides attacked for his “crosswise” way of thinking, Nietzsche wrote that “the world forever needs the truth, hence the world forever needs Heraclitus.” The next post turns to him, attempting to reveal his concealed logic before using it in a final post to answer Connolly’s invitation “to honor Jesus by offering a distinctive interpretation of his calling and mode of inspiration.”

The result of Connolly’s division of traditions according to both belief and emotion is a four-point grid that neatly categorizes both traditions and the individuals who inhabit them. A horizontal axis stretches from immanence in the world on the left to transcendence of it on the right. The vertical axis descends from love of the world at the top to resentment of it at the bottom. In the top-right corner, therefore, are those who affirm a god that transcends a world they nonetheless love, whereas in the top-left are those who believe nothing transcends the world they love no less. In the bottom-right corner are those who resent the world transcended by their god, whereas in the bottom-left corner are those who resent the merely immanent world they profess.

Connolly recognizes that between these abstract cases are the infinite varieties of lived philosophy and religion. Few are pure, either cognitively or affectively. Yet the extreme corners of his grid reveal two insights. First of all, clashes of worldview—say, between fundamentalist preachers and the new atheists—become bitter less because their beliefs are in conflict than because their proponents share an affect: resentment. Secondly, diverse philosophical traditions—say Platonism and Freudianism, one teaching transcendence, the other immanence, but both aiming to promote love—begin to appear more as allies than as rivals in the history of ideas, so long as they seek to cultivate the same affect. With the varieties of lived philosophy and religion in between the extremes, Connolly’s grid helps us to see more clearly their unique combinations of cognition and emotion.

But can emotions and beliefs be mixed and matched so easily, or is there a tighter relationship between them? Are some beliefs more likely to produce love; others, resentment? To be sure, there are individuals who manage to love the world no matter what they believe, just as there are others who would climb any mountain to punch a shadow. Through chance and willpower, individuals seem to manage every possible combination of belief and emotion. Rather than focus on individuals, we should investigate whether divergent traditions constituted by rival beliefs about the nature of the world are more or less likely to foster love of it. Correlatively, are traditions of one sort more inclined than traditions of the other to foster resentment?

Augustine and Nietzsche thought so, although they disagreed about which was which. Augustine’s restless heart could not love constantly until he believed in a god transcending the limits of temporal goods. Only such a god, he argued, could satisfy the human longings for joy and peace, forgiveness and redemption. No longer frustrated by the imperfection of this world, Augustine’s love could at last see the world for what it truly was: the creation of a perfect god. Without God, however, he declared that this “life is a misery.” For his part, Nietzsche found devotion to this same god fraught with sadism and masochism, not true love. To love this world, according to his Zarathustra, we must forswear the hinterworldly fantasies that prompt us to despise it and everything in it, including ourselves. “No longer bury your head in the sand of heavenly things,” he preached, “but bear it freely instead, an earthly head that creates a meaning for the earth.” Despite their disagreements, then, both Augustine and Nietzsche agreed that the way we think about the world affects, for better or worse, the way we feel about it.

In their agreement, they were correct: the way we think about the world does affect how we feel about it. Or, at the very least, it should. On one hand, if you think this vale of tears is but a prelude to paradise, should you not resent the delay? Purely transcendent religions may prescribe practices of patience, especially prayer, but the longings for secure beauty, goodness, and communion cannot be postponed. Prayer may temper frustration, but it cannot eradicate it. Resentment becomes likely. (One of my earlier posts made this argument in more detail.) On the other hand, if you think this same world of brutality, ugliness, and death is all there is, should you not resent it for perpetually disappointing the same inexorable longings? Purely immanent worldviews may seek to silence these longings with spiritual practices, especially meditation, but their success (if possible) comes at too high a cost: dissolution of self. (The Buddhist teaching of anatta, or not-self, is a paradigm of this strategy.) Here, too, resentment becomes likely. (Another of my earlier posts was more hopeful.)

In an odd way, Augustine and Nietzsche were collectively correct in the midst of their critical disagreement: love is fostered neither by purely immanent worldviews (Augustine) nor by purely transcendent ones (Nietzsche). The common quest for purity produces instead resentment. Thus, for example, if Plotinus and Epicurus were in fact lovers of the world, they were so not because of their beliefs but despite them. In other words, if any worldview successfully promotes love, rather than resentment, it must be impure: it must be as transcendent as it is immanent. Whatever can this mean? To make this demand more clear, let us recall Taylor’s distinction between transcendence and immanence, helped by the editors of this volume. Speaking of transcendence, they outline its three dimensions as follows: “a good higher than human flourishing (such as love in the sense of agape), a higher power (such as God), and extension of life (or even ‘our lives’) beyond the ‘natural’ scope between birth and death.” Immanence is naturally the contrary of all three: a good of merely human flourishing, no power beyond the cosmos, and the finality of bodily death.

A philosophy that is as transcendent as it is immanent, therefore, must present the following, paradoxical profile: (i) it must teach that the highest good is human flourishing, but also something transcending the human; (ii) it must teach that the natural and temporal world is all there is, but also that it is transcended by the eternal divine; (iii) it must teach that we humans are mortal, but also somehow immortal. Mere mention of such contradictions should exasperate anyone who must render a philosophy consistent in order to find it intelligible. This will include most philosophers nowadays, and indeed most Western philosophers since Greek antiquity. But their persistent demand for consistency above all has not been universally shared; revealing the early history of this demand—as I have tried to do in my forthcoming book, Becoming God—helps expose its weaknesses.

To codify consistent thought, Aristotle famously proposed a principle of non-contradiction, calling it “the firmest principle of all things,” and argued that anyone who tried to deny it would in fact assert it (implicitly), or become “like a plant.” Not entirely joking, he believed that anyone who failed to respect the supremacy of this principle would surrender reason and mimic the life of a non-rational organism. Although Aristotle gets the credit for this principle, it is already explicit in Plato; more primitively, it is present in the extant fragments of Parmenides. “Equally deaf and blind,” he called those who refused to think consistently, adding that they are “hordes without judgment, for whom both to be and not to be are judged the same and not the same, and the path of all is crosswise (palintropos).”

Exercising this ancient principle, we cannot accept the philosophy whose paradoxical combination of tenets—immanent and transcendent—is required to promote love of the world. Not without risking planthood. The supreme demand of this principle upon our minds opposes the satisfying promises of this philosophy to our heart. Were we forced to choose between them, then, our choice would be between thinking well and feeling well, between consistent cognition about the world and loving affection toward it. Must we choose? If we wish both to think well and to feel well, should we not consider another way of reasoning, even if it be crosswise? That will be the goal of my next two posts. The fourth and final post will use this Heraclitean way of reasoning “to honor Jesus by offering a distinctive interpretation of his calling and mode of inspiration.”

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

Many commentators have taken Barack Obama to be proclaiming a new set of civic virtues or even a new civil religion to guide Americans into an uncertain future.  Yet in his Inaugural Address, Obama himself argued otherwise: “Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old.”  So we may well ask—how old are these values?  In what traditions are they rooted?  Are they religious or secular?  For the answers to these questions will be reflected in Americans’ willingness—or unwillingness—to unite around them.

Obama terms these “values.”  But they are for the most part more specifically virtues, that is, settled traits of character that dispose a person to act in excellent ways.  And Obama does elsewhere speak of these as virtues, most revealingly, I think, in his early memoir, Dreams from My Father, written before he aspired to political office.  During his college years, his growing consciousness of racism tempted him to wallow in hatred and despair, to cling to an identity of alienation from anything tainted by white culture, including its hypocritical moralism, its “needlepoint virtues.”  Yet he eventually came to recognize these virtues as themselves unsoiled, to see that the fact that these were the values of his white Midwestern grandparents did not mean he had to reject them in order to be authentically black. He was able to see that these virtues were exemplified not just by whites but by black people he respected, who had held tenaciously to them despite the degradations they had faced.  These virtues were old enough to grace nineteenth-century needlepoint samplers, but they were not simply white, not simply Midwestern, and not simply American, either; it was to his Kenyan father that Barack’s mother appealed as a model of diligence, honesty, and integrity.  Obama’s list may be carefully crafted to appeal to both Democrats and Republicans.  But while it is an exercise in political rhetoric, it is not solely that; it is genuinely rooted in Obama’s own moral experience.

Western conceptions of the virtues are older, of course, than Obama’s grandparents, going back to the ancient Greeks.  Obama’s list of virtues comes in pairs, and the pairings are mutually illuminating.  I will, though, examine them not in the order in which they are listed in the address, but rather according to the depth of their roots, beginning with those anchored most firmly in the ancient classical and, later, the Christian traditions of the West.  What emerges when we take this angle of approach, I will argue, is not simple continuity.  Neither do we uncover a sharply defined contrast between classical and Christian, or ancient and modern, virtues.  Rather, what comes into focus is a continuously unfolding understanding of the virtues, driven on the one hand by socio-historical changes and on the other by efforts to resolve internal tensions in how the virtues are conceived, both singly and in relation to one another.

Plato and Aristotle recognized four cardinal or hinge virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, and courage.  Only one of these, courage, makes it onto Obama’s list.  But what does he mean by courage?  For Aristotle, performing deeds of prowess on the battlefield was the paradigm of courage.  For Thomas Aquinas, in contrast, martyrdom served as the paradigm, and the heart of courage was endurance for the sake of the good rather than direct attack on evil.  Obama here issues neither a summons to military valor nor to martyrdom.  Like Aquinas, though, he understands courage centrally as a matter of the capacity to persevere in the pursuit of the good, in this case in the difficult but worthy task he sees before us as a nation.

Honesty, loyalty, and patriotism also have a claim to a heritage reaching back to classical antiquity.  Our honesty is not the Latin honestas, which is nearly synonymous with virtue, but rather truthfulness.  Truthfulness remains one of the nameless virtues for Aristotle, but he does insist that falsehood is to be avoided for its own sake.  Aquinas, while noting that without truthfulness, trust and community ultimately become impossible, also insists that truthfulness is owed to one another in justice.  So both agree that the good of honesty is not simply reducible to the good consequences that arise from it or to the bad consequences avoided by it.  Kant raised truthfulness to an exceptionless absolute, arguing that if a murderer comes to my door in hot pursuit of my friend, I must in answer to the murderer’s question truthfully reveal my friend’s whereabouts.  But there is no hint that Obama follows Kant down this specious path; practical wisdom must determine when the virtue of truthfulness becomes the vice of scrupulosity.

Loyalty is closely akin to fidelity or faithfulness; one who is loyal does not abandon commitments when something new and attractive comes along.  Loyal fans support the home team even in the face of a long losing streak; the loyal son does not expose his father’s faults to ridicule.  Loyalty is a virtue that is important for sustaining friendships, families, and communities of all kinds.  But persistent attachment, which turns a blind eye to injustice or falsehood, is not a virtue. Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto, seeking at the time of the Reformation to regain the city of Geneva for the Catholic Church, argued that God would reward faithful Catholics for their loyalty to the faith of their ancestors, even if some errors and abuses had entered into the Church.  John Calvin retorted that adherence to a corrupt Church was not a virtue but a vice.  They agreed that loyalty was a virtue, but the challenge of defining its proper objects and limits remained.

The fact that Obama pairs patriotism with loyalty gives us a strong hint as to how he intends the former.  He means here, I think, not the nineteenth-century concept of nationalism, promotion of the power and influence of one’s nation-state, but something rooted in the classical conception of pietas.  Unlike piety, which in modern English is limited to religious devotion and often carries a saccharine tinge, pietas was for classical Greece and Rome the virtue of dutiful respect for parents, the gods, and other legitimate authorities.  Christians insisted that God was not simply another object of pietas, but the sole proper object of worship.  Patriotism then emerges as a subdivision of this virtue directed toward one’s homeland (one’s patria, literally fatherland), people, culture, and traditions.  With the rise of nationalism, the term became increasingly limited to the political realm and the absolute claims of the nation-state, but contemporary political thought has worked to recover and develop an older understanding of patriotism.  Love of country can motivate critique of the government and its policies.  Like loyalty, patriotism is not a virtue if it is blind.

The remaining four virtues are considerably younger.  The ideal of fair play is a legacy of the nineteenth-century leisured classes, who celebrated the joys of playful competition.  Strict adherence to the rules and an emphasis on process rather than outcome enabled both winners and losers to enjoy the game.  But fair play no longer conveys anything elitist to most Americans today.  Fair play is a gymnasium rather than a needlepoint virtue.  It evokes the screech of rubber soles on polished wood floors and its cousin, good sportsmanship.  But fair play includes fairness as a constituent element, and fairness is closely connected with justice.  So why fair play rather than justice?  Justice has an impeccable pedigree as one of the four cardinal virtues, not to mention as a central theme of the Hebrew prophets.  It is not hard to understand why the other cardinal virtues, temperance and prudence (or practical wisdom), would be missing.  They sound both old-fashioned and puritanical.  Were Obama to summon Americans to temperance, especially now, that would too clearly send the message that now is a time of belt-tightening—which in turn might cause the temperature of an already-deep frozen economy to plummet.

But why not justice?  Because calls for justice are too closely associated with the political left?  Because Obama does not want to be too closely identified with the civil rights movement, too easily seen as a President for black Americans rather than for all Americans?  Perhaps.  But also, I think, because of his own experience of coming to terms with his blackness, his own experience that a preoccupation with identifying the injustices perpetrated by others can too easily become an excuse for evading one’s own moral responsibilities.  So he chooses fair play, with its fresh-paint, clean American feel, instead of justice.  Obama’s commitment to social justice is, I think, unquestionable.  However, his own touchstone virtue is not justice but responsibility, named in the Inaugural Address just a few sentences after the list of eight virtues: “What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility—a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”

This brings us to hard work, which, like dying slowly of cancer, was considered ignoble by the ancient Greeks.  Christians, too, given a savior who called his disciples away from respectable trades into an itinerant lifestyle, have traditionally had ambivalent attitudes toward work.  In the Middle Ages there were intense debates over the moral status of work, ignited by the rise of the mendicant religious orders, whose members took vows of poverty, refused to own property, and depended on charity for sustenance.  Thomas Aquinas defended the legitimacy of the mendicant orders by arguing that manual labor is not a duty held by each and every individual.  Yet this is not to say that he rejected the virtue of industriousness.  The mendicant orders were not mere leeches on medieval society; they worked hard to provide for the spiritual needs of the community, even as they depended on the manual labor of others for their food and clothing.  Hard work really came into its own, though, only in the early modern period.  It was central to the Protestant Ethic, which sociologist Max Weber identified as the source and spirit of capitalism.  Rather than seeking to separate themselves from an impure world, Calvinists sought to transform the world in accordance with God’s will.  The world had been entrusted to the dominion of Adam and Eve, and their responsibilities could be carried out in a fallen world only with plenty of elbow grease.  What began as an expression of religious duty would acquire a dynamic of its own, as divine approval and the purported worldly rewards of industriousness became intertwined.  We see this reflected in Benjamin Franklin’s homespun wisdom, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”  Industry, not surprisingly, was one of Franklin’s thirteen virtues—although we might point out that it is not really a virtue if adherence to it is contingent on whether it yields financial prosperity.

Since curiosity killed the cat, it clearly was not always considered a virtue.  Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Evil for eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which the serpent promised would make them like God.  But the pursuit of knowledge has hardly been condemned outright by the Christian tradition.  In Of True Religion, St. Augustine wrote that “in studying creatures, we must not be moved by empty and perishable curiosity; but we should ever mount towards immortal and abiding things.”  Curiosity is a vice when the pursuit of knowledge is separated from the search for God, for what is of abiding value.  Augustine’s critique is of “mere” curiosity, of value-neutral inquiry.  Curiosity begins to emerge as a positive virtue in the Renaissance, with a new optimism about the human capacity to study the world and thereby mount toward immortal and abiding things, to an understanding of the intentions of the divine Creator.  The legend of Faust, who sells his soul to the Devil for the sake of dark knowledge and power, testifies to a lasting cultural ambivalence about curiosity, an uncertainty over whether it is at heart an expression of a desire to rival God, or of a desire to know and worship God.  Ongoing debates about the proper limits of scientific research are often cast in terms of these alternatives.  But in the context of the early nineteenth-century rise of the ideal of liberal education, curiosity no longer signals hubris or lust for divine power, but a relaxed openness to the manifold variety of the world, a willingness to engage with, and learn from, otherness.  This, I think, is Obama’s curiosity, closely linked to the tolerance with which it is paired—the curiosity of someone who discovered himself as an American through a boyhood in the salad bowl of Hawaii, in Indonesia, and in visiting Kenya.

We come finally to tolerance, a modern liberal virtue if there ever was one.  Why should one refrain from interfering with beliefs and practices that one considers wrong, rather than seeking to correct them?  Augustine infamously advocated that the Donatists be compelled to rejoin the ranks of the Catholic Church.   As long as schism was understood as the breaking of an oath of fidelity, and heresy as willful refusal of the truth, neither toleration as an institutional policy nor tolerance as an individual disposition had much of a chance.  Gradually, though, through the hard-earned experience of the fragmentation of European Christendom following the Reformation, religious dissent came to be understood as inculpable rather than culpable error.  This in turn allowed other traditional Christian teachings, which had long been eclipsed, to come to the foreground in support of toleration—that faith cannot be engendered by compulsion, that it is wrong to go against one’s conscience, that Christians are called to forbearance and charity.  In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the range of tolerance broadened to include not just religion but other sorts of beliefs and practices as well.  The commitment to tolerance need not be associated with skepticism, relativism, or indifference, although it is sometimes attacked as if this were the case.  It stems most centrally from the conviction that only a free acceptance of the truth is a genuine acceptance of the truth.

Obama’s “old things,” then, do have deep roots in both the classical and Christian traditions.  At the same time, they have a contemporary, American feel.  They do not represent a simple retrieval either of the classical cardinal virtues or of the supernatural Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love.  Rather, they represent the ways in which traditional Western understandings of the virtues have evolved over time, working out internal tensions and engaging with changing social realities—religious diversity, the rise of modern science, the emergence of the middle class.  Important debates continue over the proper definition and limits of these virtues, but these debates have not prevented these virtues from earning broad acceptance.  Religious and secular Americans can legitimately claim common ownership of them, though they will not offer all of the same reasons for espousing them.  I have focused my reflections on classical and Christian roots, but I, at least, am hopeful that others can trace analogous lines of development within their own traditions that give them reason to recognize these or analogous virtues as well.  For these are, finally, neither simply old and venerable nor new and shiny virtues—these are living virtues.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

That devotion to the theme “E Pluribus Unum,” “out of many, one,” is among the things that are old in the United States of America, there can be no question. Since 1776 the motto has graced the Great Seal of the United States and is on presidential and other major governmental seals. Citizens carry the theme with them when they carry cash. Many thought of it as the motto of the United States, but it got pushed aside by God, as in “In God We Trust,” when Congress made that phrase official. Official or not, its presence on seals and coins, in textbook titles and legal encyclopedia entries, testifies to the fact that, when serious, leaders and ordinary citizens are devoted to keeping this “old thing” current.

The natural question is, “How old is it?” A French citizen, Pierre Eugene du Simitiere, first put it forward. Some trace its presence, but in a different context than the familiar civil one, to a poem by Virgil. Virgil was big in colonial America, drilled into the minds and ears of founders like James Madison by scholar John Witherspoon at Princeton. Madison knew Virgil very well, but leaves no trace that he was influenced by Virgil when he gave attention to this phrase. There is no question that it has resonance in the writings of Aristotle, whom Madison and other founders knew well, and there is much evidence that the idea of “out of many, one” inspired and engrossed many of these founders and their citizen-beneficiaries ever since.

The usual explanation for the ubiquitous presence of “E Pluribus Unum” in national documents is that it captures so well the issues that were a problem for the founders and an inspiration to them and their heirs: how to produce one nation out of thirteen colonies. The addition of each of the next thirty-seven states to the federal whole occasioned fresh inquiry about it, as do the never ending battles between “states’ rights,” the many, and the federal context, the one.

The motto is too appropriate to be left in isolation in the debates over states-and-federal government. So, from the beginning, it has been used analogously for reaches into many aspects of national life. If Forrest McDonald could keep the Latin of “E Pluribus Unum” in that restricted sense, my late colleague Arthur Mann extends it into the spheres of “the many” races, classes, ethnic groups, interest groups, and religion in his The One and the Many: Reflections on the American Identity in 1979. I subtitled The One and the Many with “America’s Struggle for the Common Good” in 1997. Obviously, numbers of us think of the relation of the plures to the unum as basic among the “old things” in national life.

Many theological and philosophical traditions—which means “older things”—go into the reasoning of the founders and go into the thinking of the many of us who reflect on and extend the theme into our time, when all the old issues remain and when there are new resources to meet new needs. This theme also emerges in the election campaigns and the follow-ups in legislative life and in the courts, when considering how state and federal interests conflict, complement each other, or produce a contribution to “the Common Good.”

Among those traditions, America being a scripted and scripture nation, a privileged place would go to the Bible. The colonial leaders often made much of how the twelve tribes of Israel related to Israel as an elect nation, but that motif did not show up much in constitutional debates, however much biblical thought colored many other “old things” in national life. Quite frankly, the Hebrew Scriptures, which they knew as the Old Testament, do not have much substance for people founding a republic, and the Christian New Testament offers even less. So philosophical roots and analogues are more important, since the founders, influenced by the Enlightenment, were often quite at home with wrestlings over this theme in classical and more recent philosophical thought.

Not cited by Madison and his other well-informed colleagues, so far as I can find, is the quintessential, in my view, word of Aristotle, which should qualify as a very important “old thing”:

The error of Socrates must be attributed to the false notion of unity from which he starts. Unity there should be, both of the family and of the state, but in some respects only. For there is a point at which a polis, by advancing in unity, will cease to be a polis, but will none the less come near to losing its essence, and will thus be a worse polis. It is as if you were to turn harmony into mere unison, or to reduce a theme to a single beat. The truth is that the polis is an aggregate of many members.

Aristotle continues:

Is it not obvious, that a state may at length attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state?—since the nature of a state is to be a plurality, an intending to greater unity, from being a state, it becomes a family, and from being a family, an individual; for the family may be said to be more one than the state, and the individual than the family. So that we ought not to attain this greatest unity even if we could, for it would be the destruction of the state.

When Madison dealt with faction, interest, and sect, as he did in Federalist No. 10, he chose the word “different” to preface each, as in “different opinions concerning religion,” “different faculties,” “different degrees and kinds of acquiring property,” “different interests and parties,” “attachment to different leaders” and “different classes of legislators.”  All of these show up in every election campaign and are present or implied in most executive, legislative, or judicial acts—just as many of them do at the city council, the Parent-Teacher Association or the school board, and other expressions within public life.

I find corollaries to this reasoning and labeling in, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Associations,” Edmund Burke’s “Platoons,” and, best, in a Dutch Calvinist thinker who was probably unknown—but, who knows?—to the founders and most leaders who followed them, Johannes Althusius. He saw a republic as an “association of associations,” which he saw in symbiosis.

The problem for lovers of the republic, those who govern it, and those who practice citizenship and pursue the common good, is to be creative about relating stress on “the one” to accent on “the many.” Many citizens today advocate “one” at the expense of the “many,” when they promote theological, philosophical, or political homogeneity, often enforced by law. The historic demands to make America a “Christian Republic” are one illustration of this, and it is posed over against almost anarchic appeals to individualism. The United States of America, in this conception, is an “association of associations,” an “aggregate of aggregates,” a “community of communities,” which remain in tension, if there is to be justice, and find the common good when there are good reasons to put the emphasis on the unum.

In a healthy republic there can never be a final resolution of the tension; it is always in the process of being developed, tested, traded on, and enjoyed. For that reason, I list “E Pluribus Unum” as one of the “old things” that belongs in “the immanent frame.”

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Wolterstorff’s book is a challenging, serious, sustained reflection on the foundations of justice.  He wrestles with a wide range of difficult issues, often with considerable success.  Yet the net result with which the reader is left seems to amount to something less than the sum of its parts.  I shall point to a handful of difficulties, touching on both his historical narrative (which occupies roughly half the book) and his philosophical argument.

One of the book’s major claims is that the idea of rights that apply equally to all human beings originated in the literatures of ancient Judaism and Christianity, not in pagan sources.  Wolterstorff is certainly right that justice is a central theme in Hebrew Scriptures.  But he also argues that justice is one of the main themes of the New Testament, an argument that runs counter to the widely shared view that the New Testament focuses much more on love than on justice.  Is this claim correct?

I think not.  Wolterstorff rightly notes that the New Testament contains numerous instances of words based on the Greek term diké, which is the root of a family of words that are normally translated by variants of the word “justice” but are in the New Testament commonly translated by the word “righteous” and its variants.  Yet a careful examination of the very texts he cites to support his claim about the centrality of the theme of justice to the New Testament points in the opposite direction, namely to the conclusion that a central aim of the New Testament was to supplant ideas based on justice with ideas clustered around love.  For example, Wolterstorff highlights a passage from Luke that is borrowed, with revisions, from Isaiah.  He argues that since the original passage from Isaiah explicitly invokes justice, the reworked passage in Luke must have been intended to evoke the idea of justice in its early readers, who would have been familiar with the book of Isaiah.  Yet what seems most significant in the passage from Luke is the omission of any reference to justice, an omission that readers familiar with Isaiah would likely have understood to be deliberate.  Wolterstorff is right that the writers of the New Testament were able to “think in terms of justice”—indeed, I know of no one who denies that they were able to do so—but it does not follow that justice was one of their central themes.  The more plausible reading is the more familiar one that love, not justice, is the central theme of the New Testament.

Wolterstorff is right, of course, that Christianity is a major source of the idea that each and every human being possesses a great deal of inherent worth.  This proposition is relatively uncontroversial.  His account of the development and spread of ideas about justice would have been more accurate, however, if he had given due credit to ancient Stoic thinkers who argued, beginning before the advent of Christianity and apparently with no influence from Hebrew Scriptures, that every human being by nature is capable of giving and receiving justice, as well as to the enormous role that was played by Roman law in the dissemination of ideas about justice.

Wolterstorff rejects all secularist attempts to provide a foundation for the idea of justice, including a family of attempts based on the notion that human beings possess a capacity for rational agency, a family of which Kant’s moral theory is the most prominent member.  It is true that arguments that justice is founded in the capacity for rational agency are not free of difficulties.  But some of his central complaints about this line of argument strike me as tendentious. He suggests that some human beings have this capacity to a greater degree than others, and that some, such as infants and those suffering dementia, do not have the capacity for rational agency at all.  I agree that some human beings have more fully developed powers of reasoning than others.  But Kant’s argument is based on the capacity for rational agency, a capacity that in his view creatures either do or do not possess, not on the developed power to reason well.  Indeed Wolterstorff himself suggests that humans and only humans have a capacity for what he calls “moral agency.” It is not clear that he has drawn a real distinction between his view and Kant’s.

Wolterstorff goes to considerable lengths to distinguish his view of justice as inherent human rights from the idea of justice as right order, but his effort leaves this distinction much murkier than he seems to realize.  His chief exhibit among theorists of justice as right order is Plato, for whom, Wolterstorff observes, justice is identical to right social order.  As all careful readers of Plato’s Republic know, however, the definition of justice as right social order is actually preliminary to Plato’s real definition of justice as a rightly ordered soul, i.e. a soul in which the appetites and emotions are subordinated strictly to reason.  Like Plato, Wolterstorff vigorously endorses the idea that some human beings are deformed by virtue of their failure to place their appetites into a proper, natural order; this idea is central to his critique of utilitarian attempts to ground justice in the satisfaction of desires.  Wolterstorff, then, appears to endorse a conception of right order within persons that is very similar, at least on the evidence of his book, to Plato’s conception of justice.

The task Wolterstorff evidently sets for himself in this book is to give an account of the foundations of justice.  He has accomplished that task, and his account will likely appeal to many readers who are theists.  It will not appeal to readers who are not theists, unlike the theory of justice developed by John Rawls, whom Wolterstorff brushes aside (and misreads) in less than three pages toward the beginning of his book.  The widespread acceptance of the discourse of human rights in the twentieth century was neither the product of nor linked to a vast increase in acceptance of Christian teachings, and Wolterstorff’s argument that erosion of the latter—or at any rate, of adherence to theism—would result in the demise of that acceptance seems to me far-fetched.  Although more secularist (and more substantive) accounts of justice like Rawls’s are far from flawless, the wager they place is more likely to yield intellectually persuasive answers to questions about justice than is Wolterstorff’s approach.