On divination and consolation.
S.R.,
I threw myself down on the sky-blue subway seat, and stared out the long rectangular window into the damp void of the station.
I had just finished a long saunter into and out of that summer night, and was now alone in that train car near Columbus Circle.
And that feeling of anguish I had felt throughout the night came to the forefront of my emotions in my solitude.
I was alone, and was lonely, in the midst of that voiceless dialogue with myself.
And so I prayed.
The Stoic sage, Arius Didymus tells us,
“…is the only man able to prophecy, in so far as he has the sort of knowledge that is able to interpret the signs of gods and spirits that pertain to human life. On account of this, the forms of the prophetic art are associated with him: dream interpretation, analyzing the flights of birds, and any skills which are similar to these.”
Arius Didymus, Epitome of Stoic Ethics, 11s (my translation)
In a world that is ordered, and good, and schematic, there must be ways of interpreting the intentions of the divine, its tendencies, whence things come and whither things go– this much, at least, occurred to the Stoics, though the sentiment is as old as the aedifice of philosophy in the West.
And so we find ourselves at the intersection of philosophy and superstition, or a superstition that is amenable to a philosophical interpretation, or a philosophical system that has been made amenable to the truths of everyday life–that there is meaning and purpose in every thing that happens to us.
Are there signs? Of course. If there is a universal reason, if any of this goes anywhere at all, if it is directed (as the Stoics would have us believe), the vagaries of the natural world in general and of human life in particular must be subject to interpretation, and not simply interpretation, but foresight, as all events fall together into a series of causal nexus–the flights of birds and the interpretation of dreams are as intelligible as the use of inference in the simple syllogisms of classical logic, as intelligible as when anyone says anything to you at all and it is understood.
If there is, in other words, nous in any of this, it all is intelligible, and intentional–there is, as it were, a kind of narrative that we can read from past events (and read quite literally, as Arius would have us think).
And so Epictetus says something like this,
“But if the crow’s cawing signifies anything to you, it is not he that signifies it, but God through him.”
Epictetus, Discourses 3.1.37 (my translation)
And so we arrive at one of the presuppositions of divination–the course of events is fixed, or there is a set of permutations of events, given a set of causes and effects. What is past, what is present, and what is future (which depends on the relative past), all exist on a continuum of what is not simply possible, but what is necessary. From an eternal perspective, there is one course, but from a perspective that is inhibited, and subject to time and to motion, there are infinitely many permutations.
There is, then, latent, a kind of determinism.
As with any other core belief of any system, we must accept some of this belief’s presuppositions if we are to hold it, and our metaphysics and theology, in this case, must be compatible with a kind of determinism.
This general determinism (the exactness of which here I have no intention of addressing) let us take for granted in the following form: there is a sum total of causes, i.e., circumstances and the agents who act in them, and that these are conditioned by physical and biological laws, and, in the case of agents, of psychological laws (human beings and all animals and plants are, for the most part, intelligible in their behavior, in so far as we attribute meaning to their activity).
One might also add a further caveat–that of first cause, and that might take the following form:
These causes were set in motion by a greater cause which was itself without cause (every cause needs a cause, but we also need to prevent an infinite regress, so of necessity there must be a first). This greater cause set into motion that great chain of events which we have reduced to agents and circumstances–how intentionality to ascribed to it, and where that fits in, and in what way it is intentional, and whether or not it has reason, these questions are answerable by a system. We might postulate, for example, a Demiurge, as in Plato’s Timaeus, or, to go even further back in the chain, the One of Plotinus, as find described in the Enneads, or the primordial Zeus that we find in the Stoics (if we might speak of these terms broadly, and perhaps not always accurately).
In any case, in any formulation, we find ourselves in the midst of some set of possibilities which, owing to the world within and the world without, culminates in further possibilities, and the latter is necessitated by the former only in hindsight. In other words, we are subject to every agent and circumstance, but are also agents who live and move and have our being in circumstances. This causal chain is as simple and as elegant as cause and effect.
We are, in some sense, very much like that metaphor of the divine puppet in Plato’s Laws:
“Let us consider the matter like this: let us believe that we are each of us living beings a divine puppet.
Whether as a plaything or as something constructed to a serious end–of this we know nothing…”
Plato, Laws 644d6-e1 (my translation)
Our psychology is conditioned by biological and sociological constraints, no matter how much we individually differ in our tastes, dispositions, and desires–our individual variation exists on a spectrum of what is possible for beings that are composed in the same way we are (with our desires, aversions, etc., which are fixed and established in us by nature).
Our activities are conditioned by what was, in hindsight, necessary, and the circumstance into which we are born, and where we choose to be, and how (if there is much choice in the matter).
There seems to be a free variable, that of the will, which is subject to these constraints (our psychological, emotional, cultural, intellectual circumstances), but not completely defined or reducible to them, i.e., we are always welcome to will something that is contrary to our natures and circumstances, and to act accordingly.
“These passions inside of us, like sinews or strings, draw us around and, being opposed to one another, drag us in opposite directions– here lies the distinction between virtue and vice. “
Plato, Laws 644e1-4 (my translation)
So I prayed for a sign, and, taking a book out of my backpack, closed my eyes and let my fingers drum on the leaves as I felt for precisely the right spot where I would cleave it open.
It was a scholarly work on Plotinus, so I half-expected something “full of high sentence but a bit obtuse,” which pertained to me not at all, which I could not render intelligible by interpretation.
But what I got was something different:
“He [Plotinus] came to me suddenly while I was at home, and said that this feeling was not the result of reason, but of melancholy…”
Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 11.13-16 (my translation)
It was a passage I knew quite well-Porphyry tells the story of how Plotinus recognized his emotional state (Porphyry was a melancholic, as are most in the profession) and bids him to travel to relieve it (which only helps a short while). What Porphyry does in that time is unclear, but supposedly it did help.
Upon reading that, I felt a very gentle breeze as the subway doors closed, and so I settled in for the long ride home, setting my head against the guard rails of the seat, and dosed.
It isn’t bad advice, but I would have you know that our feet can’t take us everywhere–only those places down here, in the world down here as we find it, when perhaps what we need is a change of spirit, rather than scene.
And if I would add something anecdotal to the commentary on divination: it doesn’t necessarily provide us with answers. Oftentimes, if not in every case, it reassures us of those things we already knew.
Sincerely,
George