“Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography” by Robert Irwin

Ibn Khaldun viewed himself as primarily a historian, albeit one deeply steeped in Islamic learning and jurisprudence. His day job was as a court politician, who worked as an advisor to and judge for various sultans, sheikhs, and warlords. As such, he was sometimes in positions of great power but, when the winds of fortune shifted, he was also often sent to prison or into exile. It was in 1375, during the start of a four year semi-self-imposed exile, that he began his greatest work, the Muqaddima. “Ibn Khaldun sought the protection of a powerful tribe in the hinterland and, for reasons that are mysterious, the Alad ‘Arif, the leading clan of the Suwayd Arab confederacy in western Algeria and the subjects of the Merinid ruler, welcomed Ibn Khaldun with open arms and lent him a castle, Qal’at Banu Salama…. In the Qal’at Banu Salama, far from libraries and intellectual companionship, this Arab Prospero was to write for the next four years before returning to Tunis where he could check his facts in the city’s libraries…. His withdrawal from politics could be compared to the Sufi practice of khalwa, a temporary withdrawal from society in order to meditate, though Ibn Khaldun’s meditations were focused specifically on how God worked in the world through social processes…. Though he started with a study of the Berber and Arab tribes of North Africa, subsequently the Muqaddima and the ‘Ibar expanded into a comprehensive account of civilization and social organization.” 

Ibn Khaldun was a conservative and an elitist, even for his time. He looked back to the period of Muhammad and the first four Caliphs with nostalgia and reverence. “The most famous and perhaps the central thesis of the Muqaddima is that, in the harsh conditions of desert life, tribal groups of necessity develop a special kind of group solidarity which Ibn Khaldun called ‘asabiyya…. ‘Asabiyya was defined in medieval Arabic dictionaries as “a strong attachment, which holds several persons closely united by the same interest or the same opinion.”” Ibn Khaldun admired the Bedouin way of life. Although an urbanist himself, he praised the rustic spartanism of nomadic culture as opposed to the decadence of cities. Foremost, he celebrated tribalism. “Ibn Khaldun argued that group solidarity, together with the tribesmen’s hardihood and courage gave the tribes who possessed [‘asabiyya] a military advantage…. But within a few generations, perhaps three, maybe four, these conquering tribesmen lost their ‘asabiyya and became civilized. They succumbed to luxury, extravagance, and leisure. Soft urban life led to degeneracy…. [The ruler’s] regime would fall to an assault by the next wave of puritanical tribesmen from the desert.” This was the cyclical nature of conquest and rule that Khaldun expounded in the Muqaddima. Anthropologist Ernest Gellner summed it up, “Characteristically the tribe is both an alternative to the state and also its image, its limitation and the seed of a new state.”

For Ibn Khaldun, all history derived from Islamic precepts. All life was consumed by religion. “Ibn Khaldun defined theology (kalam) as the science “that involves arguing with logical proofs in defence of the articles of faith and refuting innovators who deviate in their dogmas from the early Muslims and Muslim orthodoxy.”” He was a doctrinaire Ash’arite, who traced his scholarly lineage back generations. “Ibn Khaldun, who was an Ash’arite, also described al-Ghazali as an Ash’arite—that is to say a scholar who followed the tenth-century theologian Abu a’l-Hasan al-Ash’ari in using rational argumentation in favor of Islamic orthodoxy…. According to Ash’arite doctrine, God’s omnipotence meant that “everything good and evil is willed by God. He creates the acts of men by creating in men the power to do each act.”” Although tempted, Khaldun tried to steer clear from any causal hypotheses. Instead, Khaldun admonished, “We were forbidden by the Lawgiver (Muhammad) to study causes. We were commanded to recognise the absolute oneness of God.”

Out of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, Ibn Khaldun subscribed to Maliki law. “Fez was the chief center of the teaching of the Maliki madhhab. A madhhab (literally “way followed” or “doctrine”) is a school of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence…. Malikism was the dominant madhhab throughout the Maghreb and Andalusia…. The Maliki madhhab’s name derived from its founder, Malik ibn Anas (d. 796). In his treatise, the Muwatta’ (The Well-Trodden Path), Malik, a practicing judge, had summarized and systematized the views and practices of the jurists of eighth-century Medina…. The Muwatta’ contained some 1,700 hadiths.” According to Khaldun, “[Malik] was of the opinion that by virtue of their religion and traditionalism, the Medinese always necessarily followed each preceding generation of Medinese, in respect of what they cared to do or not to do.” This chain of knowledge was all important to Khaldun, who respected the verbal wisdom of past scholars more than book learning or self-mastery. “Independent judgement no longer had any role in Islam, if it ever had, and adherents to a particular madhhab simply had to obey what was handed down by tradition.” Khaldun stated, “It should be known that the science of the principles of jurisprudence is one of the greatest, most important, and most useful disciplines of the religious law.”

Finally, although never mentioned explicitly by Khaldun himself, Irwin makes the case that Khaldun was probably a Sufi. “Sufis who belong to tariqas (Sufi orders or brotherhoods) trace the origin of their tariqa through an initiatory chain of mystical shaykhs, all the way back to ‘Ali and through him to the Prophet…. The earliest Sufis were individual ascetics and there were at first no Sufi tariqas. The tariqas started to form around the early thirteenth century…. In fourteenth-century North Africa Sufism was so pervasive that it came close to becoming Sunni orthodoxy.” Khaldun wrote in the Muqaddima, “The Sufi approach is based upon constant application to divine worship, complete devotion to God, aversion to false splendour of the world, abstinence from the pleasure, property, and position to which the great mass aspire, and retirement from the world into solitude for divine worship.” He also compared the relationship of a Sufi obedient to his shaykh as “like a corpse in the hands of its washer.” Ibn Khaldun, pessimistic to the end, maintained, “The purpose of human beings is not only their worldly welfare. This entire world is trifling and futile. It ends in death and annihilation.”

“Dead Souls” by Nikolai Gogol (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

I will try to read almost any book translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky. This novel does not always flow, especially in Volume 2, which is hindered by gaps, large and small, in Gogol’s manuscript. The result is a plot that sometimes leaves the reader guessing to fill in the blanks. One is saved by the fact that not too much happens in this story anyway. For the most part, Gogol weaves a beautiful description of provincial life in a Russian town. Of a typical landowner the narrator wonders, “Were you born such a bear, or did you get bearified by the backwoods life, sowing grain, dealing with muzhiks, and turning through all that into what’s known as a pinchfist? But no, I think you’d be just the same even if you’d been raised according to fashion, got your start and lived in Petersburg, and not in this backwoods. The whole difference is now you tuck away half a rack of lamb with groats, followed by a cheesecake as big as a plate, and then you’d eat some sort of cutlets with truffles. Yes, and now you have muzhiks under your rule: you get along with them and, of course, wouldn’t mistreat them, because they're yours and it would be worse for you.” The muzhiks are, of course, serfs bound to the land and their master for life. The “dead souls” in Gogol’s title refer to serfs deemed still alive for the tax purposes of the infrequent Russian censuses, though very much dead in point of fact. “What was this riddle, indeed, what was this riddle of the dead souls? There was no logic whatsoever in dead souls. Why buy dead souls? Where would such a fool be found? What worn-out money would one pay for them? To what end, to what business, could these dead souls be tacked?” Chichikov, the novel’s protagonist, is a mysterious man, who seems to have a gift for buttering up provincial officials of title and repute. “Obscure and modest was our hero’s origin. His parents were of the nobility, but whether ancient or honorary—God knows.” His life’s path did not seem easy, but it was hard to tell just whose fault that was exactly. “Now it might be concluded that after such storms, trials, vicissitudes of fate, and sorrows of life, he would retire with his remaining ten thousand to the peaceful backwoods of some provincial town and there wither away forever in a chintz dressing gown at the window of a low house, on Sundays sorting out a fight between muzhiks that started up outside his windows, or refreshing himself by going to the chicken coop and personally inspecting the chicken destined for the soup, thus passing his none-too-noisy but in its own way also not quite useless life. But it did not happen so.” One longtime landowner summed up provincial life the best, “For us fashion is no order, and Petersburg is no church.”

“On the Genealogy of Morals” by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by Michael A. Scarpitti)

In these three short essays, Nietzsche brings his unique take on the progression of mankind specifically to the history of morality. He has no problem casually tearing down all received wisdom. “No one has, up to the present, expressed the slightest doubt or hesitation in judging the ‘good man’ to be of a higher value than the ‘evil man’, of a higher value with regard specifically to human progress, welfare and prosperity in general.” Nietzsche posits that, in fact, it was the aristocracy, from their position of power, who labeled their own actions as ‘good’, in a self-justifying manner. “The judgement ‘Good’ did not originate among those to whom goodness was shown! Rather it has been the ‘good men’ themselves, that is, the noble, the powerful, those of high degree, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good…. It was from this pathos of distance that they first claimed the right to create values for their own benefit…. The pathos of nobility and distance, as I have said, the continuing and dominating collective instinct, and feeling of superiority of a higher race, a master race, in comparison to a subservient race—this is the origin of the opposition of ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’.” Modernity has been crippled by its quest for leveling, for the egalitarian spirit. “Our greatest peril lurks in the European drift towards egalitarianism, for it is this prospect which wearies us—we see today nothing which wishes to be greater, we surmise that everything is still, retreating, going backwards, regressing towards something more reserved, more inoffensive, more cunning, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian.” Human advancement marches towards the mass man, towards blandness.

In his second essay, Nietzsche moves on to the origins of obligations, debts, conscience, repression, and religion. “It is then in this sphere of contracts and legal obligations that we find the crucible of moral concepts such as ‘guilt’, ‘conscience’, ‘duty’, the ‘sacredness of duty’—their beginnings, like the beginnings of all great things in this world, are drenched with blood, through and through…. How can suffering be considered a compensation for ‘debts’?—It is because the infliction of suffering produces supreme pleasure, because the injured party will receive in exchange for his loss (including his vexation at his loss) an extraordinary reward: the pleasure of inflicting suffering—a real feast.” The joy of inflicting suffering had to be restrained as humanity matured. “It was that desire for self-torture in the savage who suppresses his cruelty because he was forced to contain himself (incarcerated as he was in ‘the state’, as part of his taming process), who invented bad conscience so as to hurt himself…. This man of bad conscience armed himself with religious precepts so as to carry his martyrdom to its ghastly extreme…. He takes ‘God’ as the most extreme antitheses that he can find to his own characteristic and indomitable animal instincts.”

Finally, Nietzsche takes on the march from ascetic ideals to secular modernity. “All good things were once bad things…. The feelings we call tenderness, benevolence, care, sympathy—which have been valued so highly that they are now almost ‘intrinsic values’—were for a very long time actually despised by their possessors…. The submission to law; oh, how reluctantly the noble races throughout the world renounced the vendetta and gave to the law power over themselves! ‘Law’ was for a long time a vetitum, an outrage, something unheard of; it was introduced with force, as a force, something to which men submitted only in shame.” The State finally usurped from the powerful. Nietzsche questions the values of secular truth and science, supposedly the outgrowth and cure for religion. “The belief on which our faith in science is based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief. Even we modern men of science—we who are godless foes of metaphysics—light our torches in that conflagration which was kindled by a belief thousands of years old, that Christian belief, which was also Plato’s belief, the belief that God is truth, that truth is divine…. What if God Himself proved to be our oldest lie?” Science is not opposed to asceticism, only art is. “In art, lying is consecrated, and the desire for deception has good conscience on its side. Plato felt this instinctively—Plato, the greatest enemy of art whom Europe has ever produced. Plato versus Homer.” For Nietzsche, only the poet can triumph over the truths. Asceticism alone will never quench man’s thirst. “The ascetic ideal simply means that something was lacking, that Man was surrounded by a tremendous void…. He suffered from the problem of his own meaning…. He was in the main a diseased animal; his problem was not suffering itself, though, but lack of an answer to that crying question, ‘Why do we suffer?’ Man, the bravest animal and the one most inured to suffering, does not repudiate suffering in itself; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided that he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose for suffering…. Man will desire oblivion rather than not desire at all.”

“Laurus” by Eugene Vodolazkin (translated by Lisa C. Hayden)

Vodolazkin is a philologist and expert in medieval Russian history, who moonlights as a novelist. This story, set predominantly in fifteenth-century rural Russia, deals with medicine, mysticism, the nature of time, and faith in an epoch of uncertainty, hunger, and plague. “The house’s masters had not survived the last pestilence. These were years when there were more houses than people.” The novel chronicles Arseny, from an orphaned boy raised by his grandfather, a village healer and prophesier, through his travels around rural Russia and, finally, on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and back. His grandfather, Christofer, mixes the old folk ways with a deep-seated conviction in Christ. “Each of us repeats Adam’s journey and acknowledges, with the loss of innocence, that he is mortal. Weep and pray, O Arseny. And do not fear death, for death is not just the bitterness of parting. It is also the joy of liberation.” After Arseny’s son and the baby’s mother die in childbirth, Arseny leaves home in penitence to begin his journey of suffering. He refuses all companionship and comforts as he wanders from village to village, using the skills he has learned to heal the sick. “You serve your memory and display boundless devotion, but know, O Arseny, that you are destroying the living in the name of the dead.” He would spend years living as a Holy Fool, living in poverty, refusing to speak but his name, while healing all who approached him. “A stranger to your own people, you endured everything with joy for the sake of Christ, searching for an ancient, perished fatherland.” As he begins to doubt the direction of his life’s path, he meets a monk in Jerusalem, “Do you not know that any journey harbors danger within itself? Any journey—and if you do not acknowledge this, then why move? So you say faith is not enough for you and you want knowledge, too. But knowledge does not involve spiritual effort. Knowledge is repose and faith is motion.” Throughout the novel, the book returns to themes of the cyclical nature of life and time. “Arseny thought back to the sorrowful events of his youth, but his thoughts were warm. These were already thoughts about someone else. He had long suspected that time was discontinuous and its individual parts were not connected to one another, much as there was no connection—other than, perhaps, a name—between the blond little boy from Rukina Quarter and the gray-haired wayfarer, almost an old man.”

“Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650” by Carlos M.N. Eire

At just under nine hundred pages, Eire’s history of the Christian Reformation is comprehensive. He begins by stating that one necessary precursor was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, which allowed for the mass dissemination of texts, from books to sermons, printed in the vernacular. “Whereas every book produced before 1455 had to be written by hand, now books could be reproduced mechanically and in any numbers one desired…. While Latin would remain the lingua franca of the educated elite for several generations, the vernacular languages of Europe could flourish like never before.” Another precursor was the humanist movement that began in Italy during the Quattrocento and quickly spread throughout Europe. “Whether or not one uses the term Christian humanist, the fact remains that many non-Italian humanists began to give a distinctly religious turn to the principle ad fontes, seeking to recover an “original” or “pure” Christianity that had existed in antiquity but had somehow been corrupted. Guided by the central paradigm of the Renaissance—the assumption that there was a “dark age” to overcome—these so-called Christian humanists applied themselves to the study of ancient languages and history as a means of finding what had been lost and bringing it back to life. Naturally, these humanists tended to focus more intensely on the Bible and on the writings of the early Church fathers than on pagan authors.” The age of Reformations was a time of institutional decay, but also an age of discovery and the breaking of traditions.

Erasmus was a contemporary of Luther who, although a reformer, remained faithful to the Catholic faith until death. “His Greek New Testament and Latin translation would come to be the single most important text for an entire generation of reformers, both Catholic and Protestant, enabling them to return ad fontes, and providing a common text for all who wished to theologize by scripture alone. In turn, it would also become the basis for many a translation into vernacular languages, from Luther’s in German (1522) to the King James English version (1611).” Erasmus was also a precursor to the later reformers in terms of theology. “Especially taken by the distinction that Neoplatonist metaphysics made between matter and spirit, which gave an intellectual framework to the piety he had picked up from the devotio moderna, Erasmus became an uncompromising critic of popular religion, championing the claim that the spiritual realm is superior to the material, and stressing that genuine piety requires a certain distancing of oneself from rites and symbols. What mattered most in life, Erasmus argued, was the inner disposition of one’s heart and mind. Genuine Christian faith was not to be found in abstract doctrines or in rites such as pilgrimages, processions, fasts, the lighting of candles, and rote prayers, but rather in a total surrender of the self to the divine, and in a total dependence on Christ alone. Rites were necessary, Erasmus argued, but only as entry points into a deeper, purely spiritual connection with God that transcended the visible world and the rites themselves.” This modern interpretation of religion, in itself, came very close to bordering on Protestant heresy.

After detailing prior Christian heretics, Eire finally gets to Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses. “Luther was the first to succeed where many others had failed. He challenged the supremacy of the pope and the legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church, he redefined religious authority and church-state relations, and he changed the focus of Christian piety and ethics.” Luther defended himself thus, “No believing Christian can be coerced beyond Holy Writ. By divine law we are forbidden to believe anything which is not established by divine Scripture or manifest revelation…. I am a Christian theologian; and I am bound, not only to assert, but to defend the truth with my blood and death. I want to believe freely and be a slave to the authority of no one, whether council, university, or pope.”

Contemporaneously to Luther, in Switzerland, Zwingli was laying the foundations for Calvinism and the Swiss Reformed Church. “While Luther’s conversion began with the biblical texts of the Psalms and of Romans, and focused solely on the issue of justification, Zwingli’s began with a poem of Erasmus, with a focus on ritual and piety and the question of proper worship…. Zwingli was more intensely focused on the issue of worship and intercession, and on the need to return to a strict Christocentric piety, than on the soteriological questions that so consumed Luther’s attention. His burning preoccupation became how to best approach God and relate to him, not how to find forgiveness.”

Calvin first published his Institutes in 1536, with a preface directly addressing King Francis I. He stressed two distinct features— “belief in the thorough corruption of human nature by original sin, and belief in election and predestination…. In essence, belief in salvation through faith and grace alone—sola fide, sola gratia—necessarily implies some sort of election, for if salvation is entirely up to God’s will alone and humans can do nothing to be saved, it means that God chooses to dispense his saving grace to some, but not to all… Stressing that every single event, no matter how small, was expressly willed by God, Calvin offered his followers the hope of believing that anything that came their way, no matter how unpleasant, must be God’s will, and therefore good.” Calvin asserted, “No one who wishes to be thought religious dares simply deny predestination, by which God adopts some to hope of life, and sentences others to eternal death…. We call predestination God’s eternal decree, by which he determined himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not created in an equal condition; rather eternal life is fore-ordained for some, eternal damnation for others.”

The Swiss Reformers and the Lutherans, with their distinct emphases, were bound to go their separate ways. “Although the Swiss and the Lutherans shared the same soteriology, believing in salvation by faith alone, the Swiss took a less paradoxical approach to the pervasiveness of sin in the individual and society. While Lutherans stressed the inevitability of sin in the individual and the community, and the dissonance between faith and behavior, the Swiss emphasized the transforming power of faith, especially faith under the aegis of the state. In other words, whereas Luther stressed forgiveness of sins and the enduring corruption of the world, the Swiss insisted on the avoidance of sin and the perfectibility of the community. Whereas Luther taught that everyone was a constant sinner, that a christian prince was a rare bird, and that the kingdom of Christ was simply a promise for some postapocalyptic future, the Swiss insisted that sin could be controlled and that the state itself had a duty to suppress it and build the kingdom of Christ on earth, here and now.”

The Anabaptists (or rebaptizers) sought a complete separation of Church and State and a near total renunciation from the secular world. “As they saw it, genuine baptism could be conferred only on believing adults…. Their vision of the true church [was] as an intimate association of genuine believers…. They believed that the true church of Christ had disappeared from the earth and that they were called to restore it, in all its apostolic biblical purity…. A single belief unites all those listed as “Radicals”: their rejection of any church that mixed with “the world,” that is, any church that relied on civil power and insisted on including everyone in the community.” This was not only a rejection of the Catholic Church, but also of all Lutherans, Calvinists, and other Magisterial Reformers.

Eire next spends hundreds of pages on the Catholic Counter-Reformation, particularly the monastic orders that tried to reform the Church from within. The New World colonies of Spain and Portugal were particularly fertile grounds for the spreading of the faith. Transformative in the Catholic Reformation was the Jesuit order, founded by the knight Ignatius Loyola, after being miraculously saved from a cannonball in battle. The Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was approved by Pope Paul III on September 27, 1540. While recovering in a hospital in Spain, Ignatius wrote the Exercises, which would serve as a founding document for the monastic order. “The Exercises take it for granted that God has a specific plan for every person, and that if one puts in the time and effort, God will reveal that plan. Once one knows what God expects, one can indeed choose the correct path and—with the right kind of effort—receive God’s help to stay on it for the rest of one’s earthly life. Free will reigns supreme in the Exercises. And so does the power of the human mind…. Prayer was an essential part of the process, too, as for Ignatius, prayer involved not just the soul but also the mind, and praying was essential to establish the proper relationship with God, obtaining divine assistance, and ensuring salvation…. The central significance of the Exercises for the development of Jesuit spirituality lies not in its tempered dualism, but in its worldly asceticism, which rivaled that of the Calvinists, as it stressed the principle that the purpose of human existence is to find God in this world, become his “servant and friend” and work within the world to magnify God’s glory through selfless and humble service to others…. The world was a place to redeem rather than to run from, and leading a virtuous life was the best way to magnify God’s glory on earth.”

Eire also describes post-Reformation Christians, such as the Deists. “Herbert of Cherbury sought to reduce the Christian religion to its most elemental rational components…. Cherbury proposed a simple five-point creed: (1) That there is a supreme Deity (2) That this Deity ought to be worshipped (3) That true worship and genuine piety consist of virtue (4) That men should refrain from wrongdoing and repent of it (5) That the goodness and justice of the Deity demand reward and punishment for one’s actions, both in this life and after it…. In Cherbury’s reasonable and natural religion ethics displaced ritual and dogma as “the chief part” of religion.” The fellow Englishmen Locke and Toland would modify Cherbury’s deism further. “While Locke undid the Deism of Herbet of Cherbury by denying the existence of innate ideas, he gave shape to a new sort of Deism based on empirical observation and a logical approach to religion as an ethical code that was accessible to all human beings rather than as an esoteric muddle of dogmas, symbols, and rituals…. Toland’s chief argument was as simple as it was revolutionary: he denied the possibility of divine revelation. This meant that there was nothing sacred about the Bible.”

Finally, Eire begins his long conclusion on the significance of the Protestant Reformation. “The ultimate legacy of the Reformations, after all, was the creation of a religiously fragmented Europe, with multiple churches, each of which approached “the world” and life on earth in different ways.” Indeed, the very scope of the world was a point of contention. “The terms religious and spiritual had a very specific meaning, referring to the clergy and those who left “the world” behind. Protestants refused to accept such an assumption, and in various ways they redrew the boundaries between the Christian and “the world.”… Arguing that all baptized Christians were “priests” and “Spiritual” in God’s sight, Luther demolished a basic distinction undergirding the social and political order of his day…. Though he still insisted on a distinction between body and spirit, Luther nullified such dichotomies, secularizing the church and spiritualizing the state…. Protestants changed the nature and function of the clergy by stripping them of the higher ontological, social, and political status that the Catholic Church had upheld for more than a millennium. For all practical purposes, they were laicized; that is, they became common citizens, just like everybody else, subject to the same laws and law courts. Free to marry, they became husbands and fathers, mere heads of household. They were also mere officeholders who could be removed from their posts by the communities they shepherded. According to some historians, this was not only the greatest appeal of the Protestant message, especially to urban populations, but also one of the chief distinguishing features of the transition from medieval to modern.”

Protestants insisted that by returning ad fontes, they were simply returning to the true Church of Jesus. Their reforms were nonetheless radical. “Protestants developed pieties that focused on an omnipresent, omniscient male deity who needed no intermediaries and favored no location in particular over another. Their pieties also tended to assume that human nature was far from perfectible, and that the main purpose of prayer was to praise and thank the divinity and to align oneself with his will rather than to ask for alterations in reality. Forgiveness came straight from the divine, not through any human agency…. Protestants developed a piety that was centered squarely on the Bible, and in which the sermon assumed a central place in worship. The use of Latin in ritual was discarded by all Protestants and replaced by the local vernacular. They also discarded the cult of the saints, the veneration of images and relics, pilgrimages, and processions. Protestants rejected asceticism, and monasticism too…. Purgatory ceased to exist for Protestants, and so did suffrages for the dead. For the most part, Protestants rejected the continued occurrence of miracles…. They also tended to reject mystical ecstasies and visions and supernatural phenomena that normally accompanied them…. As the map was stripped of holy places, so was the calendar wiped clean of special feasts such as Corpus Christi or saint’s days, and, in some cases, of special seasons such as Lent or Advent.”

Eire focuses on the term desacralization to describe the Protestant Reformations. “Desacralization is a process of subtraction from within, of Christians eagerly reducing the scope of the supernatural on earth…. God was spirit, and God had created a material world, ontologically related to him, but metaphysically different and inferior. Humans were the pinnacle of this creation, part matter and part spirit, composed of a mortal body and an immortal soul…. Protestants made matter and spirit much less compatible. And their rejection of material access points to the spiritual realm turned Protestants into iconoclasts…. It was a theological upheaval, and a redefinition of the sacred…. It was an act of violence against the costly symbolic code of medieval Christianity and its guardians, the Roman Catholic clergy…. Religion was no longer a search for the immanence of the divine in this world, an attempt to encounter heaven in sacred spaces or through pilgrimages and the veneration of images and relics. Nor was it a search for the miraculous and otherworldly mediated by priests who enjoyed a higher ontological status and had the power to change bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ the Savior. Religion was something else, something more transcendent, more focused on an unseen spiritual realm and a code of ethics, something internalized by individuals and communities, something less tactile, but definitely more worldly.” Luther sums up this change in theology and faith well, “The summons of death comes to us all, and no one can die for another. Every one must fight his own battle with death by himself, alone.”

“Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” by Susanna Clarke

I was not sure I would enjoy a thousand page novel about magicians set in a slightly skewed Napoleonic England. But to call this playful historical fiction would not be a stretch. British ministers like Wellington and Canning all dip into the story, but Norrell and his pupil, Strange, take center stage throughout. By the turn of the nineteenth century, all of British magic had been lost and forgotten. People still remembered the tales of the Raven King, John Uskglass, who swept down with his fairy armies to conquer the north of England, but the practice of contemporary magic had long ceased. The fun thing about Clarke’s novel is it is interspersed with footnotes for the reader to dig deeper into the history of magic in England. For instance, in chapter 23 footnote 6, we learn, “There have been very few magicians who did not learn magic from another practitioner. The Raven King was not the first British magician. There had been others before him—notably the seventh-century half-man, half-demon, Merlin—but at the time the Raven King came into England there were none.” Active magic dipped into and out of the realm, preserved only in the realm of fairies. In another footnote we learn, “Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic come very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.” Clarke’s dedication to the backstories and fake histories of magic is what makes this novel so memorable. She really builds the edifice on which the story of the novel rests. It becomes just one story within the history of magic in England.

By the nineteenth century, there were only a handful of theoretical magicians, who only studied the history of magic, and a few more charlatans, who claimed to read futures and conjured simple love spells. Norrell was the first practicing magician of his age. A country gentleman, he had acquired every book on magic he could get his hands on from the old aristocratic libraries and made it his task, not just to study, but to do magic. Norrell also hid his books and his spells from almost everyone. That changed with Strange. The brilliantly talented, but unread, Strange became his first pupil. The relationship was always tense. “The silence which followed was peculiarly awkward. Here sat the only two English magicians of the Modern Age. One confessed he had no books; the other, as was well known, had two great libraries stuffed with them. Mere common politeness seemed to dictate that Mr Norrell make some offer of help, however slight; but Mr Norrell said nothing.” Nonetheless, Strange slowly improved his skills through trial and error and was eventually sent to the Peninsular War to help Wellington in action. ““Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”” Throughout the book, fairies play tricks, ladies return from the dead, and widows speak to cats. Eventually, there would be a falling out between the two magicians. Strange kept pushing the limits of practical magic further than Norrell was comfortable. Nonetheless, even after their parting, Strange admitted, “One can never help one’s training, you know. As a magician I shall never quite be Strange—or, at least, not Strange alone—there is too much Norrell in me.”

“Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy” by Wolfram Eilenberger (translated by Shaun Whiteside)

This is popular philosophical biography at its finest—a group portrait of four of the twentieth century’s most profound Germanic philosophers. Eilenberger weaves back and forth between the four men, comparing and contrasting their lives, their struggles, their thoughts on metaphysics, and their place in the Weimar Republic, Austria, and the world of the 1920s at large.

Eilenberger begins with Ludwig von Wittgenstein, “The Tractatus is a therapeutic contribution to the question of what one can meaningfully talk about as a human being and what one cannot.” As Wittgenstein, himself, concludes his book, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Wittgenstein was not the most easy man to deal with, either personally or philosophically. Initially, he also had a high idea of the Tractatus. In fact, after he finished writing the book, he thought that it had solved all of philosophy’s problems. Nonetheless, he realized that it would be hard to comprehend, even for great minds like Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. “This book will perhaps be understood only by those who have already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts.” He is even more explicit in the forward to the Tractatus, but also states the essential limits inherent in all philosophy. “I am therefore of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in showing how little has been done when this problem has been solved.” Trying to explain more to his publisher, Wittgenstein continues that the “meaning of the book is an ethical one: the present one, and everything that I have not written. And that second part, [the part not written,] is the important one. The ethical is delimited by my book so to speak.”

Wittgenstein clarifies what he feels is the difference between science and philosophy, as well as the limits of both. “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.” Wittgenstein remains enigmatically esoteric to the last, “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions, then he sees the world rightly.” Eilenberger explains Wittgenstein’s thoughts at the time. “The conviction that language, out of its internal logic, bears within itself at every stage and every state of culture the forces needed to heal those very misunderstandings and misinterpretations that language itself constantly provokes and creates was already the foundation of Wittgenstein’s therapeutic program in the Tractatus.”

After returning to Cambridge in 1929 and debating with Frank Ramsey and Piero Sraffa daily, Wittgenstein would largely repudiated his whole masterwork. “I used to believe that there was the everyday language in which we all speak normally and a primary language that expresses what we really know, namely phenomena…. Now I would like to explain why I no longer maintain that view. I believe that in essence we only have one language and that is ordinary language. We do not need to find a new language or construct a set of symbols, rather everyday language is already the language, provided that we can liberate it from the obscurities that lie within it. Our language is already completely in order if only we are clear about what it symbolizes. Other languages than the ordinary ones are also valuable… for example artificial symbolism is useful in the depiction of the processes of deduction…. But as soon as one sets about considering real states of affairs, one sees that this symbolism is at a disadvantage compared to our real language. Of course it is quite wrong to talk about a subject-predicate form. In reality, there is not one, but very many.”

Much of Eilenberger’s book builds up to the famous 1929 debate at Davos between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. Eilenberger builds it as a clashing of two worlds. And philosophically speaking, it was the staid and dull Neo-Kantism of Cassirer being challenged and usurped by a full frontal phenomenological attack by Heidegger, which even paid no respect to his friendly predecessors like Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s former mentor.

But first, Cassirer’s philosophy, “According to Cassirer, the human being is above all a sign-using and sign-making creature—an animal symbolicum…. We give ourselves and our world meaning, support, and orientation through the use of signs… symbolic forms in Cassirer’s terminology—those of myth, art, mathematics, or music. These symbols, be they linguistic, pictorial, acoustic, or gestural, are never self-explanatory; they need interpretation by other human beings. The process by which signs are placed into the world, interpreted, and augmented by others is the process of culture, and it the ability to use signs that enables human beings to ask metaphysical questions.” Cassirer writes, “If all culture is manifested in the creation of specific image-worlds, of specific symbolic forms, the aim of philosophy is not to go behind all these creations, but rather to understand and elucidate their basic formative principle.” Eilenberger expands, “Cassirer sees philosophy more as one innovative voice among many, and one with the function of connecting different disciplines…. One of philosophy’s essential tasks lay in identifying, beyond different disciplines, a common core that runs from one era to the next…. This culture is a continuous process of symbolically guided orientation.”

Heidegger was a protege of Husserl. Heidegger also “stresses the importance of the medium of language in human existence. He sees the actual foundation for humanity’s metaphysical essence as lying not in a distributed system of signs, however, but in a distinctly individual feeling—anxiety. More precisely, the anxiety that grips individuals when they become fully aware that their existence is essentially finite.” The human, gripped with that inescapable fact, then starts “working toward a goal that Heidegger calls authenticity.” According to Heidegger, “it is the role of philosophy to keep human beings open to the true abysses of their anxiety and thus, in an authentic sense, to liberate them.” Eilenberger explains further, “For human Dasein, in the end, there is only one fact that is truly unavoidable and at the same time always certain: the approach of death, which accompanies us as a possibility at all times…. The essential characteristic of Heideggerian “Dasein” is the fact that it is not and cannot ever be plural. “Dasein” is always only something individual, discrete, or, as he puts it, “in each case mine” (Jemeiniges).” Eilenberger stresses that Heidegger’s metaphysics was profoundly a “metaphysics of experience, the experience of Dasein, finite and aware of the fact…. What underlies our metaphysical questioning and hence metaphysics itself is not a foundation but an abyss…. Only the gaze of the abyss produces authenticity.”

Eilenberger writes of Walter Benjamin, “His worldview is profoundly symbolic: for him each person, each artwork, each object is a sign to be deciphered. And each sign exists in dynamic interrelation with every other sign. And the truth-oriented interpretation of such a sign is directed precisely at demonstrating and intellectually elaborating its integration within the great, constantly changing ensemble of signs: philosophy…. The most deviant statements, objects, and individuals, which were for that reason often ignored, contained the whole of society in microcosm…. Free human beings who thirst for knowledge must with every fiber of their being “open themselves up to remote extremes” and cannot “consider themselves successful” in their lives until they have examined, walked, or at least tried out all extremes of possibility.” Benjamin, unlike the other three philosophers, was never an academic. He was best known as a critic. But a very unique kind of critic, practicing what he saw as the only true kind of criticism. Eilenberger writes of Benjamin’s views, “The activity of criticism—if understood correctly—leaves neither the criticizing subject (the art critic) nor the criticized object (the work of art) unaffected. Both are transformed in the process—ideally toward truth…. The function of art criticism lies “not in judgment, but on the one hand [in] completion, consummation, systematization.” Second is the elevation of the art critic to the status of partial creator of the work of art. Third is the recognition that an artwork is fundamentally unstable, and changes and rejuvenates its nature and possible significance across history. Fourth, following from the thesis of the self-reference of all things, is the understanding that any criticism of a work of art can also be seen as the artwork’s criticism of itself. Critics and artists, correctly understood, thus exist on the same creative plane.” Benjamin expounds, “Thus, criticism is, as it were, an experiment on the artwork, one through which the latter’s own reflection is awakened, through which it is brought to consciousness and to knowledge of itself…. Insofar as criticism is knowledge of the work of art, it is as its self-knowledge; insofar as it judges the artwork, this occurs in the latter’s self-judgement.”

Benjamin also paid the bills through translation. Similarly to criticism, he felt, “To grasp the genuine relationship between an original and a translation requires an investigation analogous to the argumentation by which a critique of cognition would have to prove the impossibility of an image theory…. No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original.” Benjamin spent many years painstakingly translating Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Benjamin posited, “Can we say that all lives, works, and deeds that matter were never anything but the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, weakest hour in the life of the one to whom they pertain?”

For Benjamin, to get to metaphysical truth one needs to dig deep into language and meaning. “Whereas all individual elements of foreign language—words, sentences, associations—are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions. This law is one of the fundamental principles in the philosophy of language, but to understand it precisely we must draw a distinction, in the concept of “intention,” between what is meant and the way of meaning it.” Eilenberger explains, “For Benjamin this ideal language is that of the Old Testament God… what he called “pure language,” or indeed “true language,” was the language of God.”

Davos, Switzerland: March 26, 1929. The debate at last begins: Heidegger opens,”What remains of philosophy if the totality of beings has been divided between the sciences? All that remains is knowledge of science, not of entity…. Kant sought not to provide a theory of the natural sciences, but to demonstrate the problems of metaphysics, and indeed of ontology.” Cassirer rebuts, “If we consider Kant’s work overall, major problems arise. One problem is that of freedom. That has always been the actual main problem for me: How is freedom possible? Kant says the question cannot be grasped, we grasp only the ungraspability of freedom…. The categorical imperative must be constituted in such a way that the law thus established applies not only to human beings but to all rational beings…. Morality as such leads beyond the world of phenomena. That is the decisive metaphysical aspect, that the breakthrough occurs at this point…. Heidegger has stressed that our cognitive power is finite. It is relative and it is bound. But then the questions arises: How does such a finite being come by knowledge, reason, truth?… How does this finite being reach a definition of objects which are not as such bound to finitude?… Does Heidegger want to give up all of this objectivity? Does he want to withdraw entirely to this finite being. Or if not, where does he see the breakthrough into that sphere as taking place?” Heidegger responds, “Cassirer, then, wants to show that finitude becomes transcendent in the ethical writings. There is something in the categorical imperative that goes beyond finite being. But precisely the concept of the imperative as such shows the inner reference to a finite being…. This transcendence, too, still remains within creation and finitude…. Now to Cassirer’s question about universally valid external truths. If I say: Truth is relative to Dasein, that proposition… is a metaphysical one: truth can only be as truth and as truth has only one meaning, if Dasein exists. If Dasein does not exist, there is no truth, there is nothing at all. But it is only with the existence of something like Dasein that truth enters Dasein itself…. An inner transcendence lies within the essence of time; that time is not only what makes transcendence possible, but that time itself has a horizontal character; that in future, recollected behavior I always have at the same time a horizon of present, futurity, and been-ness in general; that a… definition of time is found here, within which something like permanence of the substance is constituted for the very first time.” Cassirer again, “Philosophy must allow humans to become sufficiently free, to the extent that they can just become free. While it does that, I believe, it frees human beings—in a certain radical sense, to be sure—from anxiety as a mere disposition…. Freedom can properly be found only along the path of progressive liberation, which indeed is also an infinite process for him… I would like the sense, the goal, in fact the freeing, to be taken in this sense: ‘Anxiety throws the earthly from you.’ That is the position of idealism, to which I have always pledged myself.” Heidegger concludes, “Humans exist only in very few glimpses of the summit of their own possibility, but otherwise move in the midst of their entity…. The question of the essence of human beings… makes sense and can be justified only insofar as it derives its motivation from philosophy’s central set of problems, which leads human beings back beyond themselves and into the totality of beings in order to make manifest to them there, with all their freedom, the Nothingness of their Dasein. This Nothingness is not cause for pessimism and melancholy. Instead, it is the occasion for understanding that authentic activity happens only where there is opposition and that philosophy has the task of throwing human beings back, so to speak, into the harshness of their fate from the shallow aspect of human beings who use only the work of the spirit.”

Where did all these four great philosophers actually agree? Not in much, but in profound things. Eilenberger states, “A philosopher who had nothing to say about the role of language in knowledge and life in fact had actually nothing whatsoever to say. This was true for Cassirer, and if there was a conviction that Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Benjamin all embraced unreservedly and unconditionally at this stage (and every other stage) of their thought, it was this: The human form of life is one of speech. In this sense language is not one symbolic form among many, but the most important, and elemental, of all. It is the foundation of our understanding of the self and the world.” Benjamin, speaking of humanity through the ages, states, “At the height of their cultivation… [men] are subject to the forces that cultivation claims to have mastered, even if it may forever prove impotent to curb them.” Eilenberger expands, “Benjamin is thus expressing the suspicion, shared by Cassirer, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, that the modern subject’s emphasis on consciousness, precisely where it imagines itself to be entirely free and sovereign, masks only processes of repression and obscurity that, if they are not worked through, can only lead to misery, if not social destruction.” It all sounds a bit Freudian, which, of course, it is. Eilenberger reveals, “None of these thinkers ever wrote about ethics in the conventional sense, or even tried to do so.” Wittgenstein, at a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club of the Heretics in November 1929, perhaps sums it up best, “My tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever wanted to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind, which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” All four of these men thought about the world a little askew from most. They were all geniuses in every sense of the word. But they were also all troubled (aside perhaps Cassirer). An anecdote that Hermine Wittgenstein told of her brother, Ludwig, perhaps, might sum them all up in some regard, “I told him during a long conversation that when I imagined him with his philosophically trained mind as a primary school teacher it felt to me as if someone were trying to use a precision instrument to open crates. Ludwig replied with an analogy that silenced me. He said, “You remind me of someone who is looking through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passerby; he doesn’t know what sort of storm is raging outside and that this person is perhaps only with great effort keeping himself on his feet.””

“The Origins of You” by Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, & Richie Poulton

This book uses case studies, natural experiments, and longitudinal data to identify and dig into a multitude of variations in human development. Its method is mainly prospective, gathering data in real time, as humans age, to be analyzed later, only using retrospective data to confirm results. It was co-written by four scientists, who primarily used the wealth of information from The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, supplemented by the British Environmental-Risk Study and The NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. The scientists begin by recognizing that human development is a complex phenomenon. “There are many factors and forces to consider that interact in complex ways over time and space…. We focus on cognitive, social, emotional, behavioral, biological, and physical development, including health, from birth to midlife, while considering the influence of nature and nurture…. It is probabilistic, not deterministic science.”

One thing the authors stress is that people have agency in how they develop, but also that relationships interact back and forth. “The child’s temperament evoking responses from others… contribute[s] to maintaining and even amplifying the child’s early disposition…. The child can be said to be a “producer of his own development.”” When further discussing the development of temperament, the authors parse out the difference between reactive and proactive person-environment processes. In a reactive process, “individuals with different psychological and behavioral inclinations experience, interpret, and react to the same situation differently.” A proactive process “involves individuals selecting or creating their own experiences and thereby maintaining, perhaps even amplifying, their early dispositions.” The authors refer to this as “niche picking.” This proactive process “challenges notions of children as wet clay, shaped exclusively by experiences that others generate.” Genes also play a formative role in temperamental development, even as they interact with and help shape environmental choices. “Development is a dynamic, ongoing process whereby things occurring within the child and/or within the environment in which the child develops after childhood serves as a pathway that accounts for how childhood functioning comes to predict adult functioning.” Human development is continuous. “Because the effects of early life and most experiences growing up are not deterministic but instead are likely to exert their effects in a probabilistic manner, in part because of the role of various mediators in maintaining or deflecting established development trajectories, we should not expect a single intervention effort at any point in time to get the entire developmental job done when it comes to promoting future well-being.”

This book is filled with numerous examples of how genes and environment together shape human development. One particular finding that I found intriguing was the difference between how mothers and fathers raise their children, at least early on in life. “How mothers in our study who had three-year-olds behaved towards their children systematically related to their experiences as children in their families while growing up, but in the case of study members who were fathers, there was, somewhat surprisingly, no such evidence of intergenerational transmission.”

Another issue the authors raise is the metrics by which traditional human developmental researchers measure success. “For most psychologists, sociologists, economists, educators, policymakers, and parents, life is about health, wealth, and happiness. This leads many to conceptualize development as healthy versus unhealthy or “optimal” versus “compromised.”” This does not necessarily make sense from an evolutionary perspective. “What succeeds in passing on genes to the next generation is best, and, critically, that depends on the context or circumstances in which a living organism exists, including those in which it develops…. What will prove most successful in passing on genes to descendants when growing up under one set of conditions, such as in a well-functioning harmonious family, should not be presumed to do so under different conditions, such as when there is much family conflict and limited attention paid to children. This evolutionary-biological view of life implies that the forces of Darwinian natural selection have adapted our species to respond to its experiences growing up in a manner that would increase the chances of the developing child surviving, maturing, and reproducing…. From this perspective, what has long been regarded as evidence of “compromised” development may be actually anything but…. What many today regard as compromised, troubled, or problematic development may well have evolved as a strategic response to adversity…. Our species, like many others, evolved the capacity to vary its development depending on early-life experiences and exposures…. Because evolution typically takes a great deal of time, we retain the responsiveness built into our species over the eons even though it is no longer as reproductively beneficial as it once was…. The fast [female] developer should… produce more children, even while “investing” less in them in terms of energy, time, and economic resources.” The authors suggest this is why, empirically, they found that girls who grew up in dysfunctional homes experienced puberty, on average, one to two years sooner than more advantaged girls. “The more parents regarded and treated their four-and-a-half-year-old harshly, the earlier their daughters had their first period…. By age fifteen, girls who matured earlier had engaged in more sexual risk taking than other girls…. They were not more likely, however, to engage in other risk-taking behavior, such as drinking and drug taking.”

The authors next tackle the issue of genotype relating to phenotype. “There is a long chain of biological (and sometimes psychological and behavioral) events linking genotype with phenotype.” Environmental exposures and experiences are often necessary before a phenotype manifests. The authors refer back to niche-picking in suggesting agency is critical to human development. “Central to the niche-picking idea is an appreciation that individuals are often producers of their own development.” They use the particular example of intellectual development. “In the niche-picking case, genetics and intelligence may go together because those with certain genes find reading and learning more interesting, fun, and thus attractive than do others of a different genetic makeup. As a result, they end up more intelligent not simply because it is in their genes but rather because there is something about their genes that inclines them to do things—such as go to the library and be attentive in school—that foster intellectual development.” Again, the authors also stress the back and forth interplay with others in their environment. “How others react to a person’s behavior and how this feeds back to shape the person’s development and functioning” reinforce each other. “How genotypes can require certain contextual conditions to develop into phenotypes make[s] clear… that genes operate in an environmental context.”

The authors stress that any one individual gene plays a minimal role in almost all phenotype expression. “Because whole-genome research is identifying so many genes related to virtually all phenotypes investigated, there is ever more reason to believe that many genes exert only a very small effect on the phenotype in question, if it is actually causally influencing the phenotype [at all] (and not just correlated with it)…. Many, even most, genes are systematically related to many different phenotypes. Pleiotropy is the scientific term used to refer to this biological reality…. Given pleiotropy, even if specific genes are associated with a particular phenotype, it does not logically follow that all these genes are exclusively associated with that one phenotype.”

The book backtracks somewhat to discuss single gene-environment interaction (GXE). Particularly, they look at the effect of serotonin on depression as expressed through the gene 5-HTTLPR. “Not everyone reacts the same way to the same adversity…. Serious negative life events are a “risk factor” for depression…. Such risks are typically realized when other risk conditions co-occur…. Because of differences in their genetic makeup some people succumb to adversity whereas others do not.” This is called the diathesis-stress (or dual risk) model of psychopathology. “Instead of thinking about genes for this or that illness or psychopathology, we thought about genes for susceptibility to potential environmental influences…. Some individuals are more susceptible than others to both positive and negative environmental exposures and developmental experiences. Thus, imagine a science that sought to identify not just genes that supposedly “code” for some illness or malady but also genes that shape the way we respond to environmental insults—such as toxins or life stressors—and/or supports, such as high-quality schooling or positive life events.”

Finally, the authors sought to establish links between childhood socio-economic class origins and adult health. “Results revealed that three of four measurements of physical health—body-mass index, waist-hip ratio, and cardiorespiratory fitness, but not systolic blood pressure—showed a graded, dose-response relation with a child’s social-class origin…. The same proved true of dental health, indexed by amount of plaque on teeth, bleeding of gums, periodontal disease, and decayed tooth surfaces…. The fact that all these detected effects of childhood economic disadvantage on physical and dental health remained even when study members’ own occupational status at age twenty-six was controlled meant that the findings could not be the result of their social-class “destination.”” However, the authors caution that there could be confounding variables involved and, again, not to assume causation. “Even though adversity in childhood predicted poorer objective health in midlife, the possibility remains that other factors—third variables—might have influenced both the predictor and outcomes.”

The scientists also focused their analysis on the pace of aging versus chronological age. “Cells “turn over,” with existing ones eventually dying and being replaced by new ones through a process of cell division and thereby replication. Every time this occurs, that cap on the end of the chromosome—the telomere—shortens…. A cell line exists for only so long, and after enough cell divisions have occurred, the telomere no longer caps the end of the chromosome and cell death occurs…. [Therefore] the shorter the telomere, the older the cell and thus the older the individual…. It also turns out that they are shorter in adults suffering from age-related diseases than in their healthy counterparts of the same chronological age…. Children whose childhoods are characterized by adversity have shorter telomeres than those of other children of the same chronological age…. [Even] newborns whose mothers have experienced more stress during pregnancy have shorter telomeres than other newborns…. [Furthermore,] our study was the first to shed light on how adversity affects the development of telomeres…. Exposure to adversity in the form of psychological and physical violence predicts the actual shortening or erosion of telomeres over time…. Cells were aging, biologically speaking, faster than their agemates’ cells.” The authors conclude by cautioning, however, that, in general, although “individual differences in children within the first decade of life can forecast how they will function decades later, the power to predict later development from childhood measurements is often, though not always, limited…. The predictive power of any one force or factor will be limited most of the time.”

“Answer to Job” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

In this short book, Jung brings his close reading of Biblical texts to an esoteric interpretation of the story of Job. He begins by putting himself in Job’s head. “[Job] has to admit that no one except Yahweh himself is doing him injustice and violence…. This is perhaps the greatest thing about Job, that, faced with this difficulty, he does not doubt the unity of God…. As certain as he is of the evil in Yahweh, he is equally certain of the good…. [Yahweh] is both a persecutor and a helper in one, and the one aspect is as real as the other. Yahweh is not split but is an antinomy—a totality of inner opposites—and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous dynamism, his omniscience and omnipotence.” This dualism in no way contradicts monotheism, the opposites are contained within one god. “The Book of Job places this pious and faithful man, so heavily afflicted by the Lord, on a brightly lit stage where he presents his case to the eyes and ears of the world. It is amazing to see how easily Yahweh, quite without reason, had let himself be influenced by one of his sons, by a doubting thought, and made unsure of Job’s faithfulness.” Jung makes the case that Yahweh wantonly chooses not to consult his own omniscience and, instead, is swayed by his son, Satan. “His faithful servant Job is now exposed to a rigorous moral test, quite gratuitously and to no purpose, although Yahweh is convinced of Job’s faithfulness and constancy, and could moreover have assured himself beyond all doubt on this point had he taken counsel with his own omniscience.”

Jung goes into more detail about the nature of God. “It is behaviour of an unconscious being who cannot be judged morally. Yahweh is a phenomenon and, as Job says, “not a man.”” In a footnote, Jung expands, “The naive assumption that the creator of the world is a conscious being must be regarded as a disastrous prejudice which later gave rise to the most incredible dislocations of logic…. Divine unconsciousness and lack of reflection, on the other hand, enable us to form a conception of God which puts his actions beyond moral judgment and allows conflict to arise between goodness and beastliness.” This god-beyond-morality is how Jung allows evil and suffering into our world.

Job is singled out as the scapegoat. As with the Girardian scapegoat mechanism, here the scapegoat is the most innocent among men. He is the victim and the one who is wronged. “One cannot doubt Yahweh’s connivance. His readiness to deliver Job into Satan’s murderous hands proves that he doubts Job precisely because he projects his own tendency to unfaithfulness upon a scapegoat…. This vaguely suspected unfaithfulness causes him, with the help of Satan, to seek out the unfaithful one, and he infallibly picks on the most faithful of the lot, who is forthwith subjected to a grueling test. Yahweh has become unsure of his own faithfulness…. Self-reflection becomes an imperative necessity, and for this Wisdom is needed. Yahweh has to remember his absolute knowledge; for, if Job gains knowledge of God, then God must also learn to know himself…. The failure of the attempt to corrupt Job has changed Yahweh’s nature.”

Man was first corrupted when he chose knowledge over faith in the Garden. Wisdom has become a corrective for Yahweh’s wrath. “Fear of God is regarded by man in general as the principle and even as the beginning of all wisdom.” Jung posits that after Job, Yahweh has changed. He wants to feel human. “There is no evidence that Christ ever wondered about himself, or that he ever confronted himself. To this rule there is only one significant exception—the despairing cry from the Cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Here his human nature attains divinity; at that moment God experiences what it means to be a mortal man and drinks to the dregs what he made his faithful servant Job suffer…. Yahweh’s intention to become man, which resulted from his collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering.”

Jung makes much of opposites in his discussion of Saint John’s Revelation and the Apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, he also brings the unconscious to the fore. “But in the unconscious is everything that has been rejected by consciousness, and the more Christian one’s consciousness is, the more heathenishly does the unconscious behave.” John tries to see only a loving God, but must resign himself to his terrible nature, as well. “Just because John loved God and did his best to love his fellows also, this “gnosis,” this knowledge of God, struck him. Like Job, he saw the fierce and terrible side of Yahweh. For this reason he felt his gospel of love to be one-sided, and he supplemented it with the gospel of fear: God can be loved but must be feared.” God is the totality of consciousness and the unconscious. “God acts out of the unconscious of man and forces him to harmonize and unite the opposing influences to which his mind is exposed from the unconscious. The unconscious wants both: to divide and to unite…. The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious. That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite…. The God-concept, as the idea of all-embracing totality also includes the unconscious, and hence, in contrast to consciousness, it includes the objective psyche, which so often frustrates the will and intentions of the conscious mind. Prayer, for instance, reinforces the potential of the unconscious.” The human quest for enlightenment is bound to fail, because it can never be the complete totality of experience. “Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowledge boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.”

“Antkind” by Charlie Kaufman

It would not be hyperbole to say that I have never read a novel quite like this. It is Kaufmanesque in the very best sense. It is hilarious and intellectual and uncomfortable and very very weird. The pace is surprisingly plodding, because each scene is so disjointedly odd. The words need time to be savored. The novel is disorienting. Somehow, just like in Kaufman’s screenplays, the novel just works as a whole though. Did I mention it is over seven hundred pages long? The plot plays with the nature of time, of self, of memory, of consciousness, and of art.

The anti-hero of the novel is R. Rosenberger Rosenberg, a vehemently non-Jewish film critic living in New York City.  He is opinionated, well read, and woke. “What I do, what I give to the world, is that I watch. I observe. I perceive. I take it inside me. In this way, I represent the Universal Feminine. I am not ashamed to be a feminine man. I take creative work inside me like semen. I allow it to impregnate my egg-like mind, to gestate. And what is born is the intercoiling of these two consciousnesses. Without sperm, there is no impregnation, but without the egg, the sperm is useless, hardened into an old sock. I am receptive to true art, to true creativity.”

Traveling down to St. Augustine, Florida on assignment, Rosenberg bumps into his neighbor in a ratty apartment complex. An elderly man of mystery, Ingo, who has created a claymation movie over the course of ninety some years, offers to show Rosenberg his masterpiece, “The film runs for three months including predetermined bathroom, food, and sleep breaks. My idea is the restlessness of the movie will cause it to enter your psyche and thus infect your dream life. It is a filmic experiment of sorts that posits an equal relationship between artist and viewer, in that the viewer will not, after viewing it in its entirety, be certain where the film has left off and his own dreams have taken over. Or hers.” Ingo dies during the course of the screening, extracting a promise from Rosenberg, before they began, that he will never show the film to another living soul.

Ingo has also made a whole world of clay puppets who never make it into his actual three-month-long film, but who, nonetheless, exist, off camera, residing in his film world. Rosenberg extols, “That all these puppets are so delicately and tenderly animated in their pain and that they were meant never to be seen—as most of us are meant never to be—brings an overwhelming pathos to the imagery.” He recounts the words of Ingo, ““Most of us are invisible,” he said. “We live our lives unrecorded. When we die, it’s soon as if we never lived. But we are not without consequence, because, of course, the world does not function without us…. The existence of us, the unseen people, must be acknowledged, but the dilemma is that once acknowledged, we are no longer truly those same unseen people…. Once the Unseen are seen, they are no longer Unseen. These [movie director] men have perpetuated a fiction. I have struggled with this issue, and my solution is to build and animate the world outside the view of my camera. These characters exist and are as carefully animated as those seen in the film. They are just forever out of view.”” Ingo poignantly echoes the end of Eliot’s “Middlemarch”.

One of Kaufman’s reoccurring gags is to have Rosenberg rip on Kaufman. He rips on his movies, his writing, and his comedy. “Who I do not honor are the comedians who condescend, the Charlie Kaufmans, the Pee-wee Hermans, the Robert Downey Seniors (Junior is a genius). These three men (and I use that term in the most derisively contemporary way) have sextuple-handedly corrupted the noble tradition of gentle humor that stretches back time immemorial, by inserting their toxic masculinity, their white cis privilege, their faux concern for the little man, their misogyny, into what was once a pure and delightful form that stretches back time immemorial. Why can’t they see women as a people rather than mysteries and saviors and manic pixie dream whatevers? Maybe they could start by having women as friends. Or maybe they need to get laid.”

Rosenberg’s bildungsroman ends as mysteriously as it began. A memory, perhaps false, of Ingo waxes philosophical, parroting Heraclitus, “Everything is different, always. That’s what I’ve concluded on this journey of mine. The trees along the road may look the same, but they’re not. They change. You can’t see again what you saw yesterday. It’s no longer here and neither are you. We are all of us the victims of the illusion of constancy. I may seem like a continuation of who I was a second ago, but that is only a trick, like a motion picture trick. And we humans do love to be tricked…. Look, you saw then what you could see then. After, you remembered what you could remember. Now you see what you can see now. This is what I call the human condition.”