Beyond Space and Time: Unity and form in Augustine's Confessions

Beyond Space and Time: Unity and form in Augustine’s Confessions Timothy Rogers, [email protected] January 2014 Abstract: An exploration of Augustine’s approach to unity through three inter-related formal “aspects”, namely monadic, dyad and triadic forms. Augustine’s formalism is used to interrogate the concepts of space, time, light and void (nothingness) in modern physics. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord —Mark 12.29 One is ineffable. Whenever we speak about unity we speak provisionally. Images and formalisms can help us, but if they become too inculcated they may become hindrances or even barriers to understanding. We may be thrown off course or lose our way. Systems of thought, formed from false images of unity, may perpetuate the dis-course. With Augustine as a guide, this paper is an investigation of such entrenched habits of thinking about unity. It is particularly concerned with habits of thinking in the field of physics that have been problematic for me. The method for the investigation is suggested by Augustine’s observation of traces or “vestiges” of Trinity in creation. In this paper, unity will be considered as if it had three formal aspects, namely: monadic, dyadic and triadic forms. By the term aspects I do not mean properties or characteristics. Unity is simple and indivisible. Rather, aspects are perspectives or points of view that are consequent from our own finitude as creatures1. Aspects refer to unity as we experience it in creation and are therefore not absolute, although collectively they may tell us something about the One. Aspects are not separable or independent, although they are distinguishable. Aspects are progressive and cyclical. This approach is similar to that of Peirce [Robinson], although the way in which the aspects work themselves out will follow Augustine’s Confessions2. It also has similarities to Hegel’s approach to unity in Phenomenology of Spirit, except that I expressly do not assume or expect that the formal aspects of unity explored here can be extrapolated to an “absolute knowing”—the mystery of Trinity is beyond the scope of this paper3. By way of introduction, I will start by attempting to briefly sketch the three aspects. However, this sketch is necessarily tentative and will progressively develop through ongoing engagement 1 Aspects say more about our finitude than they do about God. Roughly speaking, the monadic form belongs to Peirce’s category of “thirdness”; the dyadic form belongs to his category of “secondness” and the triadic form belongs to his category of “firstness”. 3 Most attempts to speak of Trinity use triadic images as likenesses. Here, I hope to explore a movement of the mind or ‘logic’ that has a triadic form. This ‘logic’ is different from the more common binary or bivalent form of logic, such as propositional logic, syllogistic logic, computational logic, etc. (See Logic in Wikipedia). 2 1 Timothy Rogers with Augustine’s text. So the whole paper may also been seen as a tentative sketch of which the introduction is a pro-type. Throughout the process, the movement of thinking is as meaningful as what is thought. And in relation to this, the tendency to take each form as a separate entity should be held in check—one form leads to the next and both are fulfilled in the third which then returns to the first form although at a ‘higher level’ of hermeneutic. My attention in this investigation is on the nature of errors in thinking that may occur if this process, or approach to unity, is interrupted. The monadic form comes most easily to mind. It is the form of a body, an object, a thing. The monadic form is what allows us to perceive and speak about things as things. It has the quality of distinctness, separateness, totality, all-at-once, simultaneous. The monadic form provides the sense of “in-itself”. The grammatical structure4 which reflects the monadic form is the simple proposition: “A is” or “A is ---” (where --- stands for some property or characteristic). If the world were made of simple propositions, all would be reducible to monadic forms. Monadic form whole, total, all-at-once (Starting image of “self”?) However, things do not merely exist; they exist in relation to other things. The dyadic form is the form of relatedness. It has the grammatical form: “A loves B“, through which attention is on the dynamics or “verbalness” of the verb (in this case: “loves”). Instinctively, there is a tendency to reduce the dyadic form to a combination of monadic forms. For example, we might reduce the statement “A loves B” to: “A is”, “B is” and “love is”. As a result, we might tend to think of “love” as a thing among things. Any named verb, by virtue of being named, can assume the form of a thing, which is to say a monadic form. What is lost in this reduction is the way in which the verb affects the being of A and B. The pure dynamism of the verb is only apparent through the dyadic form. The tendency to reduce the world to monadic forms results in a vision of eternity as timeless or spatial. I will call this kind of error an error of the first kind. The biblical name for an error of the first kind is an idol: the monadic form in-itself is the form of an idol or graven image. The grammatical structures of the monadic, dyadic and triadic forms are taken from Raposa’s discussion of Peirce’s semiotics [Raposa, 1989]. 4 2 Timothy Rogers Combination of Monadic Forms is also a Monadic Form = + + Instead, the monadic form, through the dyadic form, overflows to reference beyond “self”. Socalled existence in-itself, which we might call being, lives for another5. The dyadic form, which is the relatedness, tends to elude direct perception by the mind which is much more comfortable with monadic forms (although Augustine seems to suggest it is more directly perceptible through the heart). Following Levinas, it might be thought of as relation without relation [Levinas 2002]. Time is an exemplar of this form which I will discuss later in the paper. The dyadic form is found in the passing of time where each moment substitutes itself for the next without ever achieving co-presence. Metaphor is another example of this form, in which two things are said to be and not to be the same. The dyadic form in metaphor has to do with the way in which the mind responds to the paradox—a kind of energy or enlightenment in the back-and-forth movement between the two images of the metaphor [see, for example, Frye or Zwicky]. The way in which a word (signifier) refers to a meaning (signified) is a third example. The form is found in the process of reference as “pointing beyond”. As discussed later in the paper, the dyadic form is intentional. Levinas has written extensively about this form which he claims is the basis of ethics [Levinas 2002]. For Augustine, “being” and “life” are different categories that are united in God. For example, Augustine writes: “In you [God] it is not one thing to be and another to live: the supreme degree of being and the supreme degree of life are one and the same thing” [p8]. This is one of many examples where I am reading significance into the way Augustine differentiates static, spatial concepts (eg. Being) from dynamic, temporal concepts (eg. Life). 5 3 Timothy Rogers Dyadic Form movement one moment (an incomplete monadic form) substitutes itself for the next proximate moment in time dyadic form (Zeno’s arrow?) The dyadic form reveals the incompleteness or brokenness or openness of the monadic form. What about the tendency to reduce the world to combinations of monadic and dyadic forms? In my reading of Confessions, this is a central concern for Augustine. I will call this an error of the second kind. Early in the book, using beauty as an indicator of unity, Augustine writes: “… in bodies one should distinguish the beauty which is a kind of totality and for that reason beautiful, and another kind which is fitting because it is well adapted to some other thing, just as a part of the body is adapted to the whole to which it belongs as a shoe to a foot and like instances” [Confessions: IV; p65]. Here I take the beauty in “totality” to be indicative of the monadic form and the beauty in “fittingness” to be indicative of the dyadic form. An error of the second kind comes about, following Augustine, from taking bodily forms as the model for understanding unity: “my mind moved within the confines of corporeal forms. I proposed a definition and distinction between the beautiful as that which is pleasing in itself and the fitting as that which 4 Timothy Rogers pleases because it fits well with something else. I supported this distinction by examples drawn from the body. Moreover I turned to them to examine the nature of the mind, but the false opinion which I held about spiritual entities did not allow me to perceive the truth” [Confessions: IV; p67]. Augustine locates the source of an error of the second kind in the intentionality of the mind. “Just as crimes occur when the mind’s motive force, which gives the impetus for action, is corrupt and asserts itself in an insolent and disturbed way … so also errors and false opinions contaminate life if the reasoning mind is itself flawed. That was my condition at the time. For I did not know that the soul needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in the truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth” [Confessions: IV; p68 italics added]. The biblical term for an error of the second kind is sin. In this paper I attempt to trace Augustine’s movement beyond monadic and dyadic forms to arrive at a triadic form which is their origin and fulfilment. This exploration involves thinking through and beyond the deeply entrenched categories of space (monadic formalisms) and time (dyadic formalisms) that condition our perceptions of the world. One of Augustine’s first encounters of the triadic form in Confessions comes through the feminine image of a mother or nurse feeding her child, in which the body becomes food and life for the infant: For by an impulse which you [God] control, [my mother’s and nurse’s] instinctive wish was to give me the milk which they had in abundance from you. For the good which came to me from them was a good for them; yet it was not from them but through them. Indeed all good things come from you, O God, and from my God is all salvation [Confessions: IV; p7] The triadic form is that of a gift, or rather gift-ing, and has the grammatical structure: “A gives C to B”. The third—in this case the gift “C”—is not merely another monadic form brought into relationship with the other two (namely, A and B), it conditions and affects the being of A and B and their relatedness. Gifting involves a self-emptying which is completed in the return to the source. Whereas the monadic form has the nature of “sameness” and the dyadic form brings into play the irreducible “Other”, the triadic form introduces the “other of the other who is also another to me” [Levinas, 2002]. In the situation cited above, God might be taken as “Other” for Augustine (who is a man) and women are other of the “Other” who are also another to men. Within the triadic form comes the possibility of agape and return—a transcendental movement that is not reducible to monadic and dyadic forms. An archetypal image for this form, used often by Augustine, is light. 5 Timothy Rogers Triadic Form --Three incomplete monadic forms --Each substitutes itself for the other --The movement returns identity Taking one of the three monadic forms as an index: difference --it is identical to the two others because of proximity and substitution identity --the proximity of the two others—from the vantage of the index—is an inaccessible difference identity = resonance difference = opposition Triadic form 6 Timothy Rogers In relation to physics, the following conjecture may help to orient the exploration in this paper. If we consider the monadic form to be abstractly represented by whole numbers and correspond to the form of discrete things, then dyadic form might be abstractly represented by real numbers and correspond to the form of the continuum. As a result of this consideration, complex numbers might provide an indication of the triadic form and correspond to the form of light. And for each of these forms there is a corresponding habit of thinking to be overcome. Space and synchronicity Lets return to the monadic form through which things are perceived (or conceived) as existing in-themselves. This is the form of bodies and also, through metaphorical extension, the form of ideas as things-in-themselves. What easily fades from view when considering the monadic form is the matrix of relatedness in which monadic forms are embedded (which may include dyadic or triadic forms). A common image for this background is the world through which things live and move and have their being. An error of the first kind involves assuming that this background also reduces to monadic forms. For example, to take the world as merely the totality of all things present. Such an image of world is what Augustine refers to as “corporeal”, in part because it comes from our experience of physical bodies. What is lost or missed in the corporeal image of world is the dynamical, relational nature of the dyadic form and the creative—receptive nature of the triadic form (these aspects will be explored more fully later in the paper). Theories of physics are particularly prone to errors of the first kind as I have discussed elsewhere [Rogers]. Their interpretation tends to become dominated by a concept of “absolute space” as an empty, inert and immutable6 container in which reality is inscribed. The container itself, which is a formed image of what would remain if the world were emptied of all “things”, is described by a particular mathematical system of geo-metry. In Newtonian physics, this container is Euclidean space, and in modern physics, this container is Riemannian spacetime. Augustine locates similar images of absolute space—nothingness—through a type of via negativa that uses corporeal bodies as a guide: Although you [God] were not in the shape of the human body, I nevertheless felt forced to imagine something physical occupying space diffused either through the world or even through infinite space outside the world. Admittedly I thought of this as incorruptible and inviolable and unchangeable, which I set above what is corruptible violable, and changeable. But I thought that anything from which space was abstracted was nonexistent, indeed absolutely nothing, not even a vacuum, as when a body is removed from a place, and the space remains evacuated of anything physical, whether earthly, watery, airy or heavenly, but is an empty space—like a mathematical concept of space without content [Confessions: VII; p111]. Here we might locate the Newtonian concept of space (Euclidean geometry) in what Augustine calls the “mathematical concept of space without content”. The Riemannian concept of Throughout Confessions, Augustine insists that the term “immutable” only refers to God. Therefore, for him, space cannot be immutable because it is not God (even though it might be “timeless”). The way that Augustine uses the term immutable—particularly by disengaging it from temporality—is key to his take on nihil or nothing. 6 7 Timothy Rogers spacetime comes from assuming that “anything from which [spacetime] is abstracted” is absolute in its nothingness. To see why Augustine calls these approaches to truth errors, it is helpful to note that he gives the word nothing or nihil special status as a word. In the dialogue Concerning the Teacher, Augustine’s son asks him: “What does nihil [nothing] signify except that which is not?” Augustine’s reply penetrates to the heart of his concept of error and sin: “Perhaps you are right. But I cannot agree with you because of your recent admission, namely, that a sign is not a sign unless it signifies something. And that which is not cannot in any way be something.” He goes on to say of nihil: “What shall we do? Since the mind does not see the thing and yet finds, or thinks that it finds, that it does not exist, can we not say that a certain affection of the mind is signified rather than a thing which is not?” [Teacher: II; p363-4 italics added]. Nihil or nothing, for Augustine, is not a substance that has being; it is neither a thing among things nor an idea among ideas. Rather, nihil is related to the affection or condition or state of the mind that perceives things and thinks ideas. The problematic “affection of the mind” that Augustine calls into question in Confessions mistakes nihil as an origin or source of order in creation. It might be seen to come from the assumption that “our thoughts are God’s thoughts” without due consideration of the mutability of the created mind that thinks (the “interpreter”). As it applies to theories of physics, this type of error leads us to mistake the nature of simultaneity or co-presence. It leads us to assume the simultaneity we experience in the hereand-now—our experience of the present world—has the same form as eternal presence. That is to say, the assumption that we are ideal observers who can see creation laid bare all-at-once in the same way that God might “see”7 it. For Augustine, and for modern physics, simultaneity in creation is actually a relative state of synchronization. In physics the synchronization is indexed to a particular frame of reference. The frame has the form of space and the origin has the form of “nothingness”. For Augustine, the synchronization is indexed to a particular “interpreter” (as origin) and it is necessary to consider the formal aspects of the interpreter as part of the synchronization process8. Augustine sharply contrasts the relative and mutable simultaneity we call the “present” from God’s eternal present: How many of our days and the days of our fathers have passed away during your [God’s] Today, and have derived from it the measure and condition of their existence? And others too will pass away and from the same source derive the condition of their existence. But you are the same, and all tomorrow and hereafter, and indeed all yesterday and further back, you will make a Today, you have made a Today. If anyone finds your simultaneity beyond his understanding, it is not for me to explain [Confessions: I; p8]. 7 The concept of simultaneity is deeply connected with vision. We see the simultaneous co-presence of things in our world. The “field of vision” is like spatiality. Hearing, by contrast, is very temporal. 8 Augustine does not use the concept of “interpreter” which I am actually loosely borrowing from Peirce’s concept of “interpretant”. In Confessions, Augustine is undertaking an interior exploration of his own mind, so “mind” is the interpreter. However, using Peirce’s theory of signs, Robinson has developed a concept of “interpretant” that includes biological organisms [Robinson, 2010]. 8 Timothy Rogers The problem of simultaneity is also one of the core insights of modern physics which raises important metaphysical issues [Rogers]. There is the tendency in physics to assume that an external vantage exists through which spacetime is totalized as a “block universe” existing all-atonce and that this external vantage has the same form as the vantage of an observer within creation. Augustine rejects this assumption because it turns nihil into a substance. Modern theories of physics, on the other hand, tend to circumscribe a geo-metry of spatio-temporal being that is formed with nothingness as origin. Such attempts treat nihil (which Augustine identifies as an affection of the mind) as absolute monadic form. My claim, drawing from Augustine, is that monadic form cannot be separated from dyadic and triadic form in this way. Accordingly, the way in which we come to synchronize our world as a co-presence of beings (which involves intentionality) must be factored into any understanding of spacetime. Intentionality may also play a role in the way other beings in creation come to synchronize a world for themselves, such as other forms of life [see, for example, Robinson]. In order to overcome the tendency of the mind to interpret reality as embedded in inert space (or spacetime)—a tendency that comes from the contemplation of physical bodies—Augustine turns inward. He focuses attention on memoria (memory), where he finds “some interior place—which is not a place” [Confessions: X; p188]. Although memoria might be translated as memory, in this exploration I will leave the term untranslated in order to open up the possibility that what Augustine means by memoria is both richer and less ego-centred than the modern concept of memory (roughly in the way that Jung’s concept of the unconscious is different from Freud’s). Memoria offers Augustine a different take on unity—with different figures and images—than come from his contemplation of the physical or corporeal world. Augustine makes an important distinction between memoria and mind. The mind, for Augustine, is the plenitude of present awareness that is temporally conditioned. The modern term “consciousness” probably gets close to this meaning. Memoria is the much larger background from which the “stuff” of mind or consciousness emerges. The objects in memoria include stored images of perceived physical bodies, acquired skills, ideas, and affections of the mind. While these objects may be monadic forms, memoria also has a dynamic aspect of relatedness through which the processes of the mind, such as thinking, occur. This is a dyadic form which gathers together the objects of memoria into present awareness. For example, he describes learning in the following way: “by thinking we, as it were, gather together ideas which the memory contains in a dispersed and disordered way, and by concentrating our attention we arrange them in order as if ready to hand, stored in the very memory where previously they lay hidden, scattered and neglected” [Confessions: X; p189]. Unity through such temporally conditioned ordering has the nature of “fittingness” which is associated with dyadic form. Following the Platonists, Augustine progressively ascends the types of objects in memoria in order to arrive at the light which illuminates them. During this ascent, his attention is fixed on Truth. He takes ideas as superior to images that come through bodily senses because memoria contains the reality of ideas rather than images of them. Ideas are monadic forms that come from the questions: Does A exist? What is A? What kind of thing is A? [Confessions: X; p188]. Truth is the light by which the mind recognizes true ideas and stores them in memoria: 9 Timothy Rogers How did [ideas] enter my memory. I do not know how. For when I learnt them, I did not believe what someone else was telling me, but within myself I recognized them and assented to their truth. I entrusted them to my mind as if storing them up to be produced when required. So they were there even before I had learnt them, but were not in my memory [Confessions: X; p189, italics added]. Unlike the Platonists, however, Augustine does not concern himself with where the ideas exist before they were learned. What is meant by the term “where” is spatially conditioned and this question could easily lead back to contemplation of a world in which ideas are embedded—an image that Augustine has already rejected as coming from bodily or corporeal images. Instead, Augustine considers the affections of the mind. By an affection he means a feeling, such as sadness, that fills the totality of momentary awareness or present state of mind. He notes that memoria can contain images of past affections. Since these images are imprints of the mind itself, through memoria the mind can become present to itself [Confessions: X; p191]. This form of return in which consciousness becomes self-conscious is a triadic form [see, for example, Hegel or Rogers]. Memoria mind memoria Through memoria mind stores an image of itself which it can encounter in remembering image of mind Augustine identifies this form as linguistic. An affection of the mind can be stored as an image in memoria. The image, which is not the affection itself, can be recalled and named. Repeated recall of the named image implies a notion: Who would willingly speak of such matters if, every time we mentioned sadness or fear, we were compelled to experience grief or terror. Yet we would not speak about them at all unless in our memory we could find not only the sounds of the names attaching to the 10 Timothy Rogers images imprinted by the physical senses, but also the notions themselves. These notions we do not receive through any bodily entrance. The mind itself perceives them through the experience of its passions and entrusts them to memory; or the memory itself retains them without any conscious act of commitment [Confessions: X; p192]. Having identified the triadic form, Augustine then applies it to memoria itself. “I mention memory and I recognize what I am speaking about. Where is my recognition located but in memory itself? Surely memory is present to itself through itself, and not through its own image” [Confessions: X; p192 italics added]. Here Augustine comes close to isolating the triadic form which cannot be reduced to monadic or dyadic forms: namely, the reflexive movement of selfreturn—memoria is present to itself and through itself. I will borrow the term “Return” from I Ching in order to refer to this reflexive movement as a “pure” form. According to I Ching: “Return is small yet different from external things”, to which is added “Return leads to self knowledge” [see also Rogers]. Return External to mind: reflexive movent of return exists in memoria yet is not mind Different from external things: reflexive movement cannot be found in corporeal bodies Transcendental movement = light 11 Timothy Rogers Through Return, Augustine arrives at a new take on nihil. If it were the case that when I remember memory, memory is available to itself through itself, what would it mean to remember forgetfulness? If forgetfulness is loss of memory, how can it be remembered? Notice that this apparent aporia has a similar form to the question we encountered earlier: What does nihil signify? Augustine’s solution to the problem is that there is a kind of unity in memoria which makes it aware of what has been forgotten as if it were missing a part of itself and it seeks the return of the missing element. This is a transcendental movement which draws the mind beyond itself, so that it is never wholly known to itself. Ultimately, the forgotten element for Augustine is the authentic happy life in God: the happy life is joy based on truth, my illumination, the salvation of my face, my God. This happy life everyone desires; joy in truth everyone wants … they love the truth because they have no wish to be deceived, and when they love the happy life (which is none other than joy grounded in truth) they are unquestionably loving the truth. And they would have no love for it unless there were some knowledge of it in their memory [Confessions: X; p199]. Where does this exploration through space leave us with regard to theories of physics? When theorizing about the physical world or universe there is a tendency to consider the monadic form as constitutive. For example, we might assume that the “universe” is made of “elementary particles” or “fundamental states” (all three concepts being monadic forms). Instead of arriving at true knowledge of unity, this tendency risks turning nothing (for example, the zero or null state) into a substance and taking its status to be an absolute original form. The tendency might be overcome by identifying the dyadic and triadic forms through which the monadic form is sustained. The dyadic form is dynamic and the triadic form is reflexive. By bringing an image of totality (such as the mind) back into contact with itself (for example through self-reflection) the image overcomes itself. In this way the image becomes intentional; it becomes a transcendental form. The process can be stabilized through naming. The name points through the intentionality of the image to the notion which is formed by the repeated instances of the self-overcoming image. The notion becomes the sustained monadic form. Naming draws the image to the notion. An example of the application of this approach is renormalization group theory in which a “bare electron” is postulated as a seed image which interacts back upon itself through the electromagnetic field which it creates. The (infinite) process of return results in a “renormalization” of the bare electron and its field towards a fixed state which represents the properties of the “real” electron [Rogers]. Time and intentionality Through memoria we discovered with Augustine that an affection of the mind, although seemingly a totality of present awareness, overcomes itself. The process of a present state being overcome and flowing into another present state discloses the dyadic form. The dyadic form is movement—a perpetual restlessness which resists resting in any monadic form. Levinas has written extensively about this form which might be glimpsed by considering a given subjectivity (the “same”) coming into proximity with and then substituting itself for another subjectivity (the “Other”), such as one’s own encounter with the face of a neighbour [Levinas, 2002]. The dyadic 12 Timothy Rogers form refers to the process of continual substitution—such as giving my food, my sustenance to the Other—in which relatedness is a priori and the subjectivities are ephemeral, never achieving full actuality. It is like the process of becoming. The dyadic form resists totalization into the same. The Other remains other and is never absorbed into the same, like the giving of a gift with no expectation of return in which the gift is myself. Here, the “same” is to be taken indexically, like the term I; the dyadic form lacks an origin of indexicality. It is like movement through an unbroken chain of linear succession. Substitution Whereas space is an exemplar of the monadic form, time is an exemplar of the dyadic form. Not unlike modern theories of physics, Augustine takes time to be a part of creation. Since time was created with heaven and earth, “there was therefore no time when you had not made something, because you made time itself” [Confessions: XI; p230]. Therefore time is not co-eternal with God who is immutable. There are two powerful consequences to this conclusion for Augustine. First, eternity is not the same as timelessness. Second, time is not the same as mutability. In the previous section, we identified space, also an aspect of creation, as the complement of time and the essence of timelessness. In the next section we will encounter mutability as formlessness (whereas both time and space are formed). Through his interior journey, Augustine first encounters the fleetingness of time. Taking present state of mind as an index, he concludes the past does not exist because it is no longer present. Likewise, the future does not exist because it is not yet present. But the present state itself also eludes our grasp because it is always passing: “If we can think of some bit of time which cannot be divided into even the smallest instantaneous moments, that alone is what we can call ‘present’. And this time flies so quickly from the future into the past that it is an interval with no duration. If it has duration, it is divisible into past and future. But the present occupies no space” [Confessions: XI; p232] Augustine concludes that “we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends towards non-existence” [Confessions: XI; p231]. Recall, however, that in our exploration of space we identified the affection or state of mind as the totality of present awareness. From the exploration of time we now find that this totality has no being in-itself and rather tends towards non-existence. Therefore, no time is wholly present [Confessions: XI; 228]. Augustine then identifies a triadic form in time, namely: the present past, the present present, and the present future. The present past is the memory of past events. It is shaped into images and 13 Timothy Rogers found in memoria. The present future is the expectation of events to come. The present present is immediate awareness. The triadic form overcomes the tendency of the mind to be distended into the flow of time and ultimately is seen to be the origin of its freedom. Through anticipation and memory, the mind can shape events into images in the memory roughly in the way that speech is shaped into words. When a true narrative of the past is related, the memory produces not the actual events which have passed away but words conceived from images of them, which they fixed in the mind like imprints as the passed through the senses … [Confessions: XI; p234]. When therefore people speak of knowing the future, what is seen is not events which do not exist (that is, they really are future), but perhaps their causes or signs which already exist. In this way, to those who see them they are not future but present, and that is the basis on which the future can be conceived in the mind and made the subject of prediction … [Confessions: XI; p234]. An interesting shift has happened here which has implications for theories of physics. The objects of discourse—events—can no longer be thought of as purely spatial as we might have done when speaking of “things” in our discussion of space. They no longer have a “being-inthemselves”. Rather they are created images of spatio-temporal events and they only exist in relation to other created images of spatio-temporal events. This is similar to the movement in discourse in modern physics away from timeless elementary “particles” or “states” to spatiotemporally conditioned “events” and “changes in state” as the appropriate subject of inquiry. The triadic form (which in physics would be associated with light) mixes together space and time. Formation image-forming movement flow of time future present past present present Augustine’s next step is surprising. He discovers that, as a result of the triadic form in time, his attention can be divided. Through reciting from heart, he can bring into awareness a psalm as a successive flow of words through time and at the same time he can reflect on the passing words as speech. The combination of anticipation, awareness and memory sustains a holistic movement 14 Timothy Rogers which allows this reflexive return. As a result the spoken words take shape on multiple levels which all work together—syllables, words, phrases and so on: Suppose I am about to recite a psalm which I know. Before I begin, my expectation is directed towards the whole. But when I have begun, the versus from it which I take into the past become the object of my memory. The life of this act of mine is stretched in two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say. But my attention is on what is present: by that the future is transferred to become the past. As the action advances further and futher, the short the expectation and the longer the memory, until all expectation is consumed, the entire action is finished, and it has passed into the memory. What occurs in the psalm as a whole occurs in its particular pieces and its individual syllables. The same is true of a longer action in which perhaps that psalm is a part. It is also valid of the entire life of an individual person, where all the actions are parts of a whole, and of the total history of the “sons of men” where all human lives are but parts [Confessions: XI; p243]. The triadic form sustains monadic forms (syllables, words, psalms, …) and their dyadic relatedness. But what about the divided attention which is held in unity? This division-held-in-unity is related to intentionality and also will. Recall intentionality comes from the affection of the mind. However, through sin, Augustine claims, the mind—whose true affection is love—becomes distorted by passion or concupiscence. “By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes necessity” [Confessions: VIII; p140]. The mind loses its freedom and becomes distended into the succession of time because, through unchecked concupiscence, the intentional mind forgoes the capacity to return to itself. “The law of sin is the violence of habit by which even the unwilling mind is dragged down and held, as it deserves to be, since by its own choice it slipped into the habit” [Confessions: VIII; p141]. This is the form of the mind distended in time as a deterministic flow of affection, much like time is a deterministic succession or chain of moments. Augustine’s analysis of sin is quite remarkable. When it comes to commanding the mind, the nature of a sinful mind is to have a divided will. He arrives at this conclusion starting from the mind’s command of the body as a model. Augustine notes that when the mind commands the body it is instantly obeyed, such a will he calls wholehearted. With wholeheartedness there is no resistance to the command—what is willed is immediately done. However, reflecting on his own experience, Augustine observes that when the mind commands itself (to obey God’s law, for example), it may meet with resistance. “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would do that I do not; but what I hate, that I do” [Romans 8.15]. In such a case, even though the recipient of the order is itself, it is not obeyed. Augustine says that the willing is not wholehearted and that the will is not complete: The strength of the command lies in the strength of the will, and the degree to which the command is not performed lies in the degree to which the will is not engaged. For it is the will that commands the will to exist, and it commands not another will but itself. So the will that commands is incomplete [if it meets with resistance and is not obeyed], and therefore what it commands does not happen [Confessions: VIII; p148]. 15 Timothy Rogers As a result, according to Augustine, there are two wills in the mind. “Neither of them is complete, and what is present to the one is lacking in the other” [Confessions: VIII; p148]. Human will, as a result of original sin, is divided into two incomplete and complementary wills—the body and the spirit. Human will, therefore, is not like God’s will which is complete and undivided. This analysis of sin reconfigures how we might conceptualize the dyadic form. We began by talking about the form as a type of temporal passing in which each moment substitutes itself for the next. In such a description, the moments lie on the same temporal plane, as it were, each giving itself up to the next in a deterministic succession, like a chain (which is one of Augustine’s favourite metaphors for sin). But now, through an analysis of sin, Augustine unpacks a “transcendental movement” of the dyadic form where the original unity of the will is divided into two wills—one acting towards a superior level (the level of the spirit) and the other acting on an inferior level (the level of the body). Yet they are each in-themselves incomplete and only become unified through their complementarity. Divided Will spirit body This movement is an uplifting movement in that the united will of the mind with respect to the body, through knowledge of sin, becomes incomplete in itself and can only be unified by virtue of the spiritual will which complements it. The completion, however, lies outside the mind in a union with the will of God. An opposition of sinful will is overcome by re-unification at a higher level, similar to Hegel’s concept of “aufhebung” [Hegel, 1977]. Overcoming Divided Will spirit body 16 Timothy Rogers What I am suggesting is that you imagine an originally united Divine will emptying itself in order to unite with the divided human will and draw it up into its original unity. This is a triadic form which I will call “Increase”, again drawing from terminology of I Ching: Increase. Decreasing what is above And increasing what is below; Then the joy of the people is boundless. What is above places itself under what is below: This is the way of the great light. [I Ching: 42. Increase] In Confessions, Augustine recounts his experience of this movement as his moment of conversion under the fig tree. During his struggle with sin, he first tries to overcome the resistance of the divided wills through his own efforts. He is not able to accomplish this because the unity of the divided wills cannot be found in the sinful mind. In fact, he says that the dissociation of the wills came about against his own will. He writes: “and so it was ‘not I’ that brought this about but sin which dwelt in me [Confessions: VIII; p149, bolding added]. In struggling on his own to unite the divided wills, he makes “not I”—which has no existence—into an ordering principle for his mind and this effort repeatedly fails. Only when he turns to God wholeheartedly for help is the struggle overcome. At this point a feminine figure arrives who asks: “Why are you relying on yourself, only to find yourself unreliable? Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid. He will not withdraw from himself so that you fall. Make the leap without anxiety; he will catch you and heal you” [Confessions: VIII: p151]. And his new insight comes from the external voice of a child who says: “Pick up and read, pick up and read.” What Augustine then picks up and reads is of enormous significance for the narrative of Confessions which I will not discuss here. Instead I want to draw attention to the more general implications of the command “pick up and read”. Augustine started his interior journey in order to move beyond corporeal images of God. And what is shown to him and us is that it is of the nature of the corporeal world to be read. The uplifting transcendental movement opens up the bodily forms of the world into text. Although in themselves they are empty (like text that is not recognized as text), through the uplifting of “light” they reference meaning for the mind whose will is directed to a higher level of spiritual significance. Can we not recognize this as a form of word? 17 Timothy Rogers Transcending Triadic form as “transcending” temporal plane In light of the triadic form we might interpret Augustine’s responses to the Platonists and the Manichees. By reflecting on the monadic forms first of the corporeal world then of the ideas in the mind, the Platonists were able to fleetingly glimpse the “light” of Truth. But, not recognizing the sinful nature of the mind, they erred in thinking the forms they saw by that light were complete in-themselves and that the mind could approach Truth on by its own efforts. They could see a vision of eternity but did not know that the “way” to get there was not through the “pure mind” but rather by virtue of the incarnation of the Word. The Manichees, on the other hand, remained encased in an interpreted world that was perpetually divided by a dyadic opposition of good and evil because they projected the sinful state of their own minds onto God’s creation. Here “Platonists” and “Manichees”, of course, are not actual persons but rather false systems of knowledge which also bear relevance for our time. Genesis and Word Having located interior light as an uplifting movement exterior to mind, Augustine then looks outward to creation and (re)-turns to the opening of the book of Genesis: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth [Gen 1.1] Since he already identified time as a creature, he seeks an interpretation of “in the beginning” that is not temporal—the formal beginning. However, to enter into a formal interpretation, care must be taken about how words are used. For example, care must be taken not to inadvertently reduce the meaning of words to monadic forms (which would be an error of the first kind.) So 18 Timothy Rogers particular attention must be paid to how we think about “heaven” and “earth”. Augustine overcomes this challenge by setting up a hierarchy of terminology: “Heaven of Heavens” Heaven Earth Formlessness “Nihil” “Heaven of heavens” is a transcendental pointer to the formal origin of phenomena which always remains beyond our horizon of vision or knowledge. “But in comparison with ‘heaven of heavens’, even the heaven of our earth is earth” [Confessions: XII; p246]. (Notice that Augustine anticipates that the visible universe might be corporeal, but uniting heaven and earth in this corporeal way, as Newton did more than a millennium later, merely pushes the horizon for heaven “up” into a new spiritual level.) “Formlessness”—tohu wa bohu or the abyss in Genesis—is mutabililty of changeable things. It is not the same as nihil, however. Formlessness stands between form and nothing, “neither endowed with form nor nothing, but formlessness and so almost nothing” [Confessions: XII; p248]. Augustine goes on to say: For the mutability of changeable things is itself capable of receiving all forms into which mutable things can be changed. But what is this mutability? Surely not mind? Surely not body? Surely not the appearances of mind and body? If one could speak of a ‘nothing something’ or ‘a being which is non-being’, that is what I would say. Nevertheless it must have had some kind of prior existence to be able to receive the visible and ordered forms. Where could this capacity come from except from you, from whom everything has being insofar as it has being? But the further away from you things are, the more unlike you they become—though this distance is not spatial [Confessions: XII; p249]. The triadic movement becomes a descending movement from heaven to earth. This movement is a self-emptying that places what is superior below what is inferior and then draws it back up into itself. It is the movement of the incarnate Word who empties himself in order to take the form of a servant, to die to death, to be resurrected and return to the One: So formless things are dependent on your Word. It is only by that same Word that they are recalled to your Oneness and receive form. [Confessions: XIII; p274] 19 Timothy Rogers Heaven Earth 20 Timothy Rogers Drawing from our journey in this paper, and following Augustine, might we think of “heaven” as like the anticipation of future we experience temporally? And “earth” as like memoria? And the triadic movement as playing out on an indefinitely grand scale? Does heaven become the creative source of phenomena? Is it like speech? And does “earth” or the visible “universe” become the receptive vehicle through which phenomena are given form? Is it like text? Does light have a triadic form? Is it as if God empties himself in a downward movement, creating heaven and earth, which are then drawn back up into himself in an upward movement? Is this the movement of Word? Starting from space, time and nothingness as original forms of creation, we seem to have arrived, with Augustine’s help, at text, speech and light. And along the way we have discovered a formative significance to word. space time nothingness text speech light . 21 Timothy Rogers References Augustine. Confessions. Transl. by H Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. [Referred to as Confessions: Book Number; page number]. Augustine. Concerning the Teacher. In Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, Volume One. Ed. Whitney Jones. Transl. by G.C Leckie. New York: Random House, 1948. [Referred to as Teacher: Book Number; page number]. Frye, Northrop. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of "The Bible and Literature". Toronto: Penguin Books, 1990. Hegel, GWF. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. by AV Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. I Ching. Trans. Richard Wilhelm and rendered into English by Cary Baynes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alfonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002. Raposa, Michael. Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Robinson, Andrew. God and the World of Signs: Trinity, evolution and the metaphysical semiotics of CS Peirce. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Rogers, Timothy. The Proximity of Light: a deconstruction of space (unpublished); Three Reflections on Return: formal convergence of light, life, word (unpublished); and A Physicist’s Guide to [Hegel’s] Phenomenology of Spirit: Resonance, disambiguation and the genesis of spatial orientation (unpublished). Available at: https://utoronto.academia.edu/TimothyRogers Zwicky, Jan. Wisdom & Metaphor. Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2003. 22 Timothy Rogers