Augustine

Sin and late political thought. by Gerardo Muñoz

It is noteworthy to remember that around the same moment in mid-twentieth century, two dissertations on the notion of sin were written by two emblematic representatives of late liberal political thought: John Rawls’ undergraduate thesis A Brief Inquiry Into The Meaning of Sin and Faith written at Princeton University in 1942; and only a few months later Torcuato Fernández-Miranda’s El pecado como concepto fundamental del problema filosófico, a través del pensamiento agustiniano (1943), a doctoral dissertation written at the Law School of the Universidad de Madrid. Both scholars would soon become exemplary figures of Atlantic liberalism in their own ways; the first developing the most consequential and systematic work of normative political thought since Kant; and, his Spanish counterpart, becoming the leading constitutional reformist in the Spanish transition to democracy and architect of the “Ley para la Reforma Política” of 1976 enacted that year in parliament. 

Leaving aside major conceptual difference between the two programmatic works, what is symptomatic of them is precisely that a fundamental theological concept is transplanted and weaved for the needs of a political vocabulary that aims at the reinvention of a tradition that could not longer sustained its own secular commitments to individual autonomy and the rational control of state authority. And if we are to follow Eric Nelson’s reading, the intrusion of the doctrine of sin in late modern political thought was the last nail in the coffin of a secularized Pelagianism that dominated the basis of the different normative projects of modern political theory. 

In the new administered world the ground of mediation and legitimacy is wobbly and precarious, thus the notion of sin will infuse an exoteric desecularizing anthropology that ironically attempts to “save” politics through its impolitical other that deploys an instrumental conception of original in order to redeem human collective action through divine grace and mercy (clearly a benevolent inversion of Calvinist damnation). This is why in Rawls’ dissertation levels a critique of individual egotism and moral arbitrariness through the operative efficacy of sin. Rawls traced this morphology from Philip Leon who had already articulated it in his Ethics of Power (1935): “What is the nature of this delight in sin itself? It is, Augustine suggests , a delight in at least a factional opposition to the right, in doing unpunished what one ought not to do, in an imitation of godliness, in a shadowy symbol of omnipotence in the search for a shadow – in sort, in the romantic adventurous for the absoluteness” [1]. What political thought in its reduction of civil society – now distinct from the source of authority and concerted legislation – will craft is the regulatory and counterbalancing mechanisms of social ordering without exception. Precisely, one could say that in the wake of the introduction of sin into late political philosophy the new heresy becomes the shadow or the conspiracy against the social domain that will amount to absolute infraction, a plain crime. 

If the primal scene of sin originally emerged in the context of a fratricide – and thus, in relation to the dead and to the burial and wandering, which will lead to the justification of territorial settlement – it is altogether symptomatic that this snapshot of the slowpaced instance of desecularization appears as a force that only makes living possible within the social bond, fusing Kingdom and justice, compensation and salvation, punishment and rewards, retribution and distribution in an endless cycle that, because it has lost any mediation to redemption, it can only outlive itself by the coordinating services of social force (and there is no surprise that post-rawlsian thinkers precisely developed a theory of exclusive positive law from the conception of service).

One of the consequences is this mutation is that it allows us to think how the end of secularization is not just the usurpation of the theological sphere, but also the realization of the subsumption of human deficiency and stratification as social leveling (a central operative notion that will later enter Rawls’ A Theory of Justice with decisive consequences) will offer legitimation through the total administration of social life even when done in heuristic ideal of a “classless society” dependent on the enforce of a “priestly service” (hierourgounta) that deifies itself as an indivisible administrative of the social temple. Sin guarantees a vicarious subjectivity that is the starting point for implementing the social distribution of needs and services.

At this point, one can recall Erik Peterson’s humorous exposition of this closure that speaks to the ‘social progressive politics’ that still dominates well into our days: “There is perhaps no better symptom of this than the construction of roads between China and Tibet with the purpose to destroy the places in which there are still ascetic practices outside society…our capacity for leveling, as least theologically understood, will ultimately generate the collapse of Heaven and Hell” [2]. For Peterson, the inaccessibility of exteriority [of the desert of the Fathers, and the ‘desert of deserts’ that opens a place] leaves us with the unbreathable and darkening atmosphere of the Social. 

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Notes 

1. Philip Leon. The Ethics of Power or the Problem of Evil (George Allen&Unwin, 1935), 240-241.

2. Erik Peterson. “Fragmentos”, in Tratados Teológicos (Ediciones Cristiandad, 1966), 251.

“An angel passed by”. by Gerardo Muñoz

In the Spanish language there is a wonderful idiom that has gone out of fashion in our times to express a sudden silence: “ha pasado un ángel”, or an angel passed by. The phrase is commonly used whenever a sudden silence imposes itself in the middle of a conversation, which leads to obvious discomfort and embarrassment among those engaged. It is almost as if the invisible angel reminds human beings that conversation rests as much in words as in silence; and that the shadow of silence sooner or later interrupts any communicative practice. According to historians and lexicographers, the inception of this idiom into Spanish remains a curious enigma, since although used in early modernity it does not have a Latinized version, and its origins can only be traced to classical Greek antiquity. In fact, Plutarch notes in his De garrulitate that whenever silence is introduced in a meeting it is said that Hermes has joined the company [1]. The angel thus stands for the nonpresence of language in language, just like an icon is the sublimation of presence in pictorial representation. 

We know that in Antiquity the angel as a minor divinity (angeloi) was a mediator between heaven and earth, only that in that moment that an ‘angel passed by’, it is not all clear on which side is there heaven and where earth [2]. In his beautiful book Angels & Saints (2020), Eliot Weinberger reminds us that for Saint Augustine the angels were first and foremost original gardeners of Paradise – given that they are free from felix culpa and sin – and that they are messengers between the living and the divine, as documented in the beggar Lazarous carried by angels to the bosom of Abraham [3]. Here it seems that the invisible inception of the angel relates fundamentally to the dead and conclusion, which also carries its aspiration in the lacunae of a conversation that reaches an impasse, and that for a moment effectively dies. 

The angel that accompanies the dead and the poor – and thus our structural poverty in language, being in the language that always lacks a grasping signifier – is also confirmed by lexicographer Alberto Buitrago, who in his entry on the idiom writes that the expression has its origins in the fact that in antiquity whenever a dead person was mentioned or brought up in conversation there was a silence held, because it was thought that his “spirit” (his angel) had become present in its nonpresence of language [4]. Although Buitrago does not provide any documentation for his assertion, it does bring to bear that whenever we are in communication, whether we like it or not, we are in the communion of angels that are expressing the soul of the dead through the litany of their names. 

This is why Antelme could suggest the similar enigmatic notion that being powerless and in poverty means to ‘have to forever be’ in a silence adjourned so that language can continue speaking. This is why perhaps the irruption of authentic silence has the effect of a certain petrification of the human expression, as masterfully captured in Velázquez’s Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan (1630). It is through silence that we encounter the divinity that for a moment places itself outside of language in order to contemplate it, letting the angel make his entrance. The language of computational machines is not only a language that has renounced its poetic and ethical instance; it is also a form of gated communication that has expelled itself from the angelic visitation of its own contemplation. 

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Notes 

1. Plutarch. “Concerning Talkativeness” (De garrulitate), Moralia 6 (Loeb Classical Library, 1939 ) 502F.

2. Paula Fredriksen. Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2012), 54.

3. Eliot Weinberger. Angels & Saints (New Directions, 2020), 30. 

4. Alberto Buitrago. Diccionario de dichos y frases hechas (Espasa, 2007), 333.

Charity and faith. by Gerardo Muñoz

In a letter dated from January of 1962 to his friend Carlos M. Luis, José Lezama Lima makes a case for the intimate relation between language and charity: “What lasts [la cantidad] is only possible through faith. Because what lasts with faith is charity. Omnis credit – believe all things. Charity is belief in anticipation. And what is poetry (the image), but this superabundance of charity that always presupposes creation? [1]. The question in the last sentence – a question that could have only come from a great poet – is not all naive, since it is also a slight displacement from the canonical source underlying the notion of charity. In fact, the expression caritas omnia credit comes from Saint Augustine’s Confessions (Book X, Section 3), where the Church Father treats the reception of his testimony to the rational knowledge of the “hearing of men” who will be attending to his words [2].

This means that for parole to be heard and enunciated in its original presence, there has to be a gathering in charity that makes not just ‘true’, but most importantly, a garment of faith in the occurrence of language. This means that for Lezama Lima, there was no distinction between “theological language” and “language as such”, or “poetic register”, since they are all participants in the mystery of charity, because only charity can welcome language as abode. Poetics as such is understood as facticity of parole. But for Lezama, the word depends on having grasped the motion of charity. 

Lezama’s test for Carlos M. Luis was quite high: if you lose your faith, you would have given up on language as creation. This was not a new problem for the poet who already in his essay “La dignidad de la poesía”, mentions caritas omnia credit, as a process of destruction of representational (merely transactional and duty driven language) communication that arrives at the order of charity through language as intangible and inexistent by virtue of transcending what does not exists, thus manifesting itself as possible [3]. This is the moment in which the charity of language appears as both presence and promise, and what Lezama calls “el resurgimiento del verbo” (the reemergence of the word). Poetics is thus neither the subject matter of poets, nor the master dogma of theologians; rather it is the faith in language that once enunciated it can only move towards a greater opacity of the shadow of mystery. This is why a great Christian theologian says that charity (agape) is partial knowledge of the divine, otherwise there will be only a detestable army of mere academics, scribes, and administrative experts  [4]. 

In other words, charity does not belong exclusively to the Saints, but it runs through All Souls and its dead. The long history of the Church has betrayed the parole of charity, going as far as transforming it into a social mechanism of distributed goods that has become known as the subsidiarity principle. But for Lezama Lima, in an esoteric pauline tone, charity had nothing to do with political absorption and pastoral power; it was fundamentally a problem of language as a relation of reciprocity between beings in order to subsist as species, to paraphrase a well versed French priest on the matter [5].

In our days we see that “believing in language” has become in the public the inverse: non-belief through credit; that is only after possessing it (I do not need to believe in you insofar your credit validates who you are). It has been noted that by a kind of philological accident in the history of secularization, the word charity in English came to be understood one handedly as almsgiving and subsidiarity over the original divine love, which is love supreme in language. A language that does not unify, but that creates ethical relations; in fact, this might be the only uninstructed means of allowing them to fruition. 

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Notes 

1. José Lezama Lima. Cartas a Eloísa y otra correspondencia (Verbum, 2013), 324.

2. Saint Augustine. Confessions (Penguin Books, 1961), 208.

3. José Lezama Lima. “La dignidad de la poesía”, in Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar Editor, 1977), 774.

4. Claude Tresmontant. Saint Paul and the mystery of Christ (Harper & Brothers, 1957), 157.

5.G. Desbuquois, S.J. Charity (Fides Publishers, 1965), 33.