Augustine – GV Loewen

Sin Agog

Sin Agog (the radical propriety of conversion)

It is a not uncommon feature of our finitude to accrue to oneself a sense of both regret and redemption. This is, for us, primarily a Christian frame of reference, for there is but fate inexorable and penance pedantic in the Greek moral mythos, and even in that Egyptian, from which the Christian sensibility is ultimately derived, one finds that living-on produces only the ledger by which Horus judges whether or not the soul has lived up to its predetermined value, or perhaps has even exceeded it. Thus, there is no redemptive force in pre-Christian moral cosmology. But we can ask, why redemption at all? What have I done, or not done, in this life such that I would require some soteriological entry into the next? Of course, if there is no ‘next’ phase of existence, redemption becomes purely a private matter, and it would be to my own person as an expression of the call to conscience afore which I would stand and be tested. For us today, this test is no longer a moral one, but one of public ethics to which the private self must for the time being bend its will and desire.

We have, however, a mythopoetic landscape first to tread, and like all mythic narrative, hyperbole and metaphor rule the day. Confessionals, pioneered by Saul into Paul in terms of posterity – Peter immediately felt remorse in realizing he had, in the most Greek sense, fulfilled Jesus’ simple declaration regarding denying Him thrice , but this was a private comprehension and never meant to be taken even as a Christian viewpoint; it was not prophecy in the Judaic sense nor prescient in that pre-agrarian, nor was it to be made into a foundation for a conversion event – and given an entire discourse, that of subjectivity, by Augustine. Before one is born again, one’s subjectivity is one of subjection; we have yet to object to ourselves as being mere objects in another’s eyes. The twice-born are not elites, merely those who have been enlightened; they are the to-be-saved, and form a pool of willing souls who have undergone the sternest of earthly examinations. Self-examination is also not Christian, but the entire rationale for submitting oneself to this perhaps daily evaluation shifts from the now transient Greek ground, moving from mythic and poetic thought to that historical and linguistic, scientific and aesthetic, to one of a kind of dress-rehearsal for judgment day, once again Egyptian in pedigree. One ideally would not appear before God wearing the dross of any worldly subjection, including the objection others make at our very existence.

In order to prepare oneself for potential salvation then, one needs to undergo conversion. In the Gospels, we have but a kind of charismatic convincing or yet baptism. One, there is yet no church to which to convert, nor even a systematic set of beliefs to adopt. Two, there are no figures who preach conversion as a liminality, or as an event in its own right. One is immediately transformed in Jesus’ presence, whether the interlocutor is beset with sin or blight, disease or infamy. This is Socratic dialogue taken in its most guttural, but also radically flattened-out, manner. There is no philosophical argument to be made or accepted, no dialectic, and no evaluating audience. The thesis is how I have lived, the antithesis how I must live from now on, and there is no further Aufheben yielding a synthesis,. The entire thesis must in fact be discarded in conversion; it is the patently non-dialectical process. Jesus presents his case not as a position within discourse, but one that hails from a source beyond all human thought. Yes, he certainly humanizes the glad tidings of redemption through faith, but their contents and their force emanate entirely from a non-human sphere. Like any visionary, Jesus is met with incredulity at times, and his message finds its most receptive ears amongst the marginal, the last who shall be first in the new leaven of things. But with Paul, who has, in spite of himself, pronounced his own conversion event and thence makes it into that apical ancestor of all further such experiences – if we are to take up the faith and become ‘twice-born’ we must picture ourselves on the road to Damascus, as the very first person to be converted – not only does his name change – this hallmark is found even in social contract societies within the rites of puberty and of death and has nothing to do with religion at all – he gains repute through taking up the message of the Gospels, with a variety of political adumbrations, no doubt, but yet with a sense of keen sincerity and concern for a wider humanity, the kernel of which is first seen with Alexander and his sense of cosmopolitanism.

This idea of ‘humanity’, so dear to us today as an ideal in spite of our reckless shunning of it in practice, is also something that can be queried. For if the road to salvation demands conversion, we must first reflect upon how our previous life, also human, does not and has not measured up to the new ethical standards of late presented to us. Youth can be baptized, but they cannot, in truth, become ‘converts’, for conversion, by its very character, must have material through which a point-by-point comparison may be made between the first born life and that twice born. This requires time served; indeed, one might suggest that conversion only is authentically itself completed by living the new life for some few years so that the comparative analysis itself may be completed. There is thus a conversion ‘event’, but this is not at all equal to conversion as an experience. The road to Damascus introduces the conversion experience, but only the Pauline epistles complete it. In them, we find references to not only how the author blanches at his previous life and the sometimes nasty actions which populate it, we also see that he widens his self-scrutiny to the cultures around him, be they Greek, Hebrew, or Roman. An ethnic chameleon himself, Paul is roused to rhetorical force in the face not so much of active resistance but rather of a placid disinterest. He is aware, as is any good orator, that resistance means that the other has begun to consider one’s arguments, whereas the apathetic or yet the diffident are much more at risk for missing their Kerygmatic content. Paul imparts the crucial idea that the new church shall not discriminate against any human being; all can convert to Christianity and indeed, all should do so post-haste.

But the other chief sensibility that the epistles own and thus introduce to Western discourse is that of the existential anxiety. This was non-existent for the Greeks, whose fates were predetermined and whose notion of Hades included only a one-way ticket. Anxiety is today understood as an elemental aspect of the Being of Dasein, but the Pauline version specifically addresses me to attend to how I have lived and the reasons for my life. Instead of desirefully feeling agog within our sinful subsistence, we must shed the very desire for that kind of life; we must, in our newly examined life, feel agog at the nature of sin itself, and thus question why on earth I have participated in it. This intensely interested concernfulness, the very source-point of Heideggerean ‘guilt’ – a term which he takes great, but to me, unconvincing, pains to make value-neutral – is shifted, in the process of the conversion event, from reveling in sin to examining it. And it is precisely this shift which, though a politics in Paul, becomes a full-fledged discourse with Augustine.

Yet we are not quite as fully absent from mythical narrative, even here. For Augustine consistently overdoes it, making his first born life out to be a veritable salmagundi of secularist sin. I once overheard one student who was appalled that he was having sex with a twelve-year old girl, but of course during this time period such an age was very much an adult; Mary was the same age when carrying Jesus. It is of interest that Augustine’s own audience would have found fault with different aspects of his self-examination than we today, but this makes for an enduring testament, allowing for errors of interpretation along the way. At the end of the day, however, we have no idea what Augustine did or did not get up to in his younger years, and this function of memoir in general – we must take the author’s statements at face value or, at the very least, as well-intentioned euphemisms to be used as both metaphorical models at first of – the pre-conversion life – and thence for – the newly ‘good’ life of the twice-born – is another invention of his. The essential tension which resides in subjective narrative is that it is always an amalgam of memory and imagination, of reality and fantasy, and the admixture very much depends on what kind of message one desires to communicate. The confession as part of conversion begins with Augustine and has had a great many mimics since. But as with any literary or even aesthetic form more generally, it can truly only be ‘done’ once. Given this, what are we to make of its historical appearance?

It most forceful sensibility is one of a radical propriety. I must come to own my prior life, warts and all, and to thence possess its experience as an absolute benchmark against which my new behavior and outlook can be measured. In conserving the notion of sin, mainly past but still possible for me, I can evaluate each present action through the comparison with the perduring shadow sin casts over human outcomes. Just because I have undergone a rite of passage, that I am a convert, does not mean that I am exempt from sin, only that I have a powerful manner of adjudicating it in my life and perhaps in those of others as well, which I could not have had before the conversion event. Just so, I must also learn to own this new ability; I must exercise just as radical a propriety over self-examination in the light of redemption as I do over the haunted landscape of my sinful past life. That life is over, but sin itself remains, since it is after all its own force, and does not accrue especially to me nor does it regard me as its only vehicle. And just as I was merely another once-born sinner, so too I now realize that in the light of a redemptive soteriology, I learn to take the human being in me as an end in itself; neither a means for other’s ends in subjection, nor as a way to judge others as fitting mine own through objectification. Thus the concept which is given the truest shift is neither that of sin nor even of action, but rather of interest; it is the orientation of my being agog that is transmuted from reveling to evaluating.

In sum, conversion is both an event and an experience. It is a point and a series. It contains the limen of the born-again but in so doing, does not purge the actual presence of sin, but instead reorients my interest toward it. I no longer desire it as an ‘in itself’, even if I may yet sin as my twice-born selfhood, but I rather desire to examine it and evaluate it as an action in the world. In conversion I move away from the shadowy essence of sin in order to actively grapple with its existence, in my life and in that of others. In the model of which the confessional representation of conversion begins, I am all agog within sin and because of it, but in the model for with which this same narrative structure concludes, my intense interest is in sin as a space that I may live without, and that in both senses of the term. Conversion excerpts us from the sinful life but does not exempt us from examining the character of sin which remains as part of my general humanity. If we take this language in its historical and thus wider sense, our conversion ethics of today allows us to critically examine our entire way of life and how it pronounces, in part, a misery upon others. ‘Sin’ in modernity orbits round injustice and inequality and is thus no longer radically subjective in its record. Even so, we must attempt to own it as if it were my personal error; the kind of mistake reserved for those whose conscience remains once-born.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Trouble with Tribal

The Trouble with Tribal (Regression in self-identity)

Any time we imagine that our selfhood is in majority defined by what we are rather than who we are, we risk the loss of that very selfhood. We have already spoken of one level of this self-misrecognition, that of the life-chance variable. These factors, such as gender, age, level of education, socio-economic status and such-like, certainly influence, sometimes to a great degree when combined with one another, an individual’s ability to access resources, gain employment, marry up or down, as well as one’s longevity. Just so, they are factors that impinge upon our personhood, they do not define it. We are, at our best and most developed in terms of worldview, singular souls who must come to terms with our own finitude. At once, this condition allows us to share intimately the pith of what it means to both be and to become human, and this is of the species-essence, while confronting the equally profound, though this time existential, situatedness of being a thrown project into the world and ‘running along’ towards mine ownmost death. Avoiding either of these means evading them both, and the most common, and also base, manner of doing so, is hanging one’s existential hat up upon the tribal peg.

More ancient than modern life-chance variables, and therefore sometimes more potent to the unconscious mind, are traditional factors such as language group, ethnicity, region of birth, sex rather than gender, caste rather than class. These variables, some almost primordial for human beings, influence us at a deep level, often escaping conscious reflection. Far easier it is to identify through analysis the roadblocks present in our lives due to contemporary features of organizational and family life, aspects of our social role panoply that would include wealth and social status, ability to ‘pass’ as a member of a certain class or professional group, and so on. These are factors which could be said to be ‘in hand’; they are present or absent along the lines of how we can use them in the day to day. I lost a major status when I retired from the academy, as well as major wealth. These were easy to understand and were even partly measurable. But the deeper and thus more disconcerting loss was of my personal identity, for I had made the ethical error of making too close an alignment between my profession and my person. Though this is a commonplace mistake – I am what I do for a living – it results in existential avoidance that, if there is a life-change at hand, one must then confront rather nakedly and without guidance.

I witnessed, before I retired, a number of older colleagues who exhibited what could only be referred to as an abject terror at the prospect. They really were what their work life had made them into. There could be no future vision from such a vantage point. This was one minor factor influencing my own decision-making at the time; I didn’t want to end up like them! And even though it took a few years, I have remade my professional identity. That was, it turned out, the easier part, which underscores the point we are making here. More challenging was extricating my personal selfhood from that professional. The ego was a major instigator of the desire to hang on to the latter. From having a built-in audience transfixed by one’s every word – on a good day – to possessing the ability to possess through relatively unlimited consumption, to being called ‘professor’ or ‘doctor’ innumerable times a day, all of this contributed mightily to the sense that this must be who I am, as it felt so good. This ‘goodness’ was in fact a mark against my character; the one who is moved by praise and power alone. Before entering into an Augustinian retrospective, I have maintained some of this sensibility, though with more circumspection and even modesty than previously, in my current professional role. There is yet no money in it, but the promises of El Dorado are enough, at my age, to pique my declining pecuniary interest.

‘Exogamic’ internecine role-conflict – that between authentic levels of self-understanding; the idea that I am one thing or rather another – deeply contributes to the anomic false consciousness. I realized that I was suffering from this while I was a professor, and indeed, upon leaving that vocation behind for good, entered a kind of ‘recovery’ phase, which for me lasted some years. I was a member of the academic tribe, kindred with that medical, legal, and even other less voluminous professions such as architectural. As with any tribe, to mix imageries, one circled the wagons when there was an external threat – from either proprietary students and resentful administrators, for the most part, and once in a while, from suspicious politicians – and when there was not, one instead practiced a kind of status one-upmanship which of late, so I am told, has migrated from comparing one’s c.v.’s to comparing, in Pythonesque fashion, just how miserable one is being of, or descending from, such an such an identity. You don’t say?

Identifying with historical variables as if they were personal does generate a kind of miserable self-penury. The distance it creates between authentic Dasein and the manner in which one views the world alone is almost fatal to both compassion and a sincerely expressed desire alike. One wills one’s own negation. One says to oneself, ‘Surely it is better to tell the other who is like me that she is my very kindred, my flesh and blood; that we are both, or even all, bred in the very marrow of our kind; language, ethnicity, sex. Only through these deep connections can we make a truer community.’ This outlook presents to modernity the ultimate regression; that we are somehow better off as neolithic gatherings of fictive consanguineals. Not only is this contrary to the evolution of consciousness in general, it is an Edenic fantasy borne on some sort of Nosferatu nostalgia, with the fear of the other as its cardinal theme.

Now none of this is to say that the confrontation with otherness writ small and into the human heart is not a severe challenge to selfhood. Anyone who has lived will attest to the ethical fact that to come to know another as she is to herself is a rare accomplishment, and one deserving of both the utmost care and compliment alike. But to shrink into the shadows of primitive frameworks with the express purpose of avoiding that confrontation and the ever-present conflict which comes along with it, is to deny one’s very humanity. Worse still, it is to deny the same of that very other, for, in identifying too closely with faux essentials such as ethnic group, language, or sex, is to make one’s fellow human being into a shell of herself. I observed, in a number of field studies of professional organizations, that the great bulk of human interaction in modern institutions was geared into shared experiences of this or that work-life. In leisure activities, familial experiences were added in, but always at the same shallow level. In one sense, this is necessary to keep sociality itself afloat, but in another, that same sociality is the vehicle for inauthenticity, for human unfreedom. All of this is very old hat, of course, which simply tells me that we haven’t been listening for well over a century if not more. Speaking of Augustine, the inventor of narrative subjectivity as well as of the apical confessional and perhaps also the autobiography, are we not also avoiding the tribulation, the trial, of having to actually be a person, and that further cast into our mortality?

Instead of the authentic, if extreme, overture of Hamlet, who is apparently willing to at least act out his own demise – with the ex post facto caveat that we might be more careful what we wish for – we have taken the ‘to be or not to be’ and placed it into the melodrama of identity politics. Here, the personal is only the political if the former is vanquished. The sole manner of being is to not be a selfhood, to abandon the personal source of experiences which create and develop the self. To become rather a member of some kind of latter-day tribe is the goal. Its desires are kindred to those of all other attempts to avoid the anguish of human finitude, which, ironically, is one of the essential and real experiences that all of us share as a conscious species. The search for extraterrestrials, in its most desperate and unscientific guise, the quest for immortality through prosthetic or ‘artificial’ intelligence, the sub-culture of social regression hoisted into the limelight by neoconservatives, and the tribalism notable perhaps more on the ‘progressive’ side of fashionable politics, both of which are anti-culture, all share this avoidance behavior with those who dread the confrontation with existential anxiety and ethical anguish. Not that either of these need be Pauline or Augustinian respectively, but how they are presented to us in the present rather than historically, is not ultimately altered by our running headlong away from them.

If we are to have a human future, if we are not to carry on in mass denial of world-altering forces at work around us and through us – tribalism, climate change, warfare, greed – then the first step must be to recover a perspective that respects our own human selfhood. In doing so, we place ourselves back into the world upon which we had been thrown at birth, and we rejoin the movement which traces the existential arc from birth to death, from one happenstance to another. And we do this together, not as a contrivance but as an authenticity; I am at once myself and of a species of consciousness, unique in the universe just as my selfhood is unique within that selfsame species. I am nothing other than this, other than the vehicle for the other to gain her own humanity and lose her like provincial status and outlook. This personal, though not private, risk is the mirror by which we undertake the risk of the future itself.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.