Readings: The World Is Too Much With Us

Compare the wisdom of Don Quixote below to the excerpt from Plato's Timaeus that follows it:

Cervantes:

In response to hearing the confession of a character driven into a life of banditry “by a lust for vengeance,” Don Quixote says, “once a man recognizes his infirmity and consents to take the medicines prescribed by his physician, he has taken the first great step toward health. You are sick; you know your infirmity, and God, your physician, will apply medicines that, provided you give them time, will certainly heal you. For sinners who are men of understanding more easily mend their ways than fools, and as your superior sense is manifest, be of good heart and trust in your recovery.

Now, Plato:

When a man is always occupied with the cravings of desire and ambition, and is eagerly striving to satisfy them, all his thoughts must be mortal, and, as far as it is possible altogether to become such, he must be mortal every whit, because he has cherished his mortal part. But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine, if he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal; and since he is ever cherishing the divine power, and has the divinity within him in perfect order, he will be perfectly happy. Now there is only one way of taking care of things, and this is to give to each the food and motion which are natural to it. And the motions which are naturally akin to the divine principle within us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe. These each man should follow, and correct the courses of the head which were corrupted at our birth, and by learning the harmonies and revolutions of the universe, should assimilate the thinking being to the thought, renewing his original nature, and having assimilated them should attain to that perfect life which the gods have set before mankind, both for the present and the future.

Plato speaks of "the revolutions of the universe" as being the motion "akin to the divine principle within us." Circular motion, rather than linear, is the motion that moves us towards peace of mind and salvation. One who is "driven into a life of banditry by a lust for vengeance" is one who has lost control, who is moving forward, not through exercise of his own will, but "driven" like a farm animal.

It is our appetites, whether for vengeance, fame, wealth, power, food, copulation, entertainment, or even spiritual greatness, that prod and lure us ever further away from "the divinity within" us. This divinity is our sun, around which we must orbit, and the pure light energy of which is our proper and perfect food.

I have been reading Don Quixote, the Timaeus, and Jack Kerouac's Buddhist notebooks, Some of the Dharma, simultaneously. As Kerouac studied the Buddhist scriptures with a patently desperate yearning toward enlightenment, he was struggling against--and repeatedly defeated by--his appetites for fame, success, booze, sex. A subsequent post will excerpt and reflect the pain inflicted by Kerouac's inner contradictions. It is relevant, for the sources of his pain are the sources of ours.

Readings: from the Timaeus

Check it out:

What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is. Now everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created. The work of the creator, whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must necessarily be made fair and perfect; but when he looks to the created only, and uses a created pattern, it is not fair or perfect.

...

As being is to becoming, so is truth to belief.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Religion: All Greek to Me

As a Christian Platonist, Simone Weil found the theme of a divine mediator to be essential to her religious philosophy. In the essay “God in Plato” from the anthology On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, Weil quotes Plato’s Symposium:

“God does not communicate directly with men, but all intercourse and converse between the divine and the human is effected through [an] intermediary.” [p.130]

A bit further on, she states in her own words:

“The idea of mediation is essential in Plato because, as he says in the Philebus, it is important not to proceed too quickly to the one.” [ibid., p.131, emphasis hers]

She subsequently turns to the Timaeus, making this rather striking observation:

“The Timaeus is an account of the creation. Its source appears to be so different that it is unlike any of Plato’s other dialogues. Either he was inspired from a source unknown to us or else between the other dialogues and this one something had happened to him. It is easy to guess what. He had come out of the cave and seen the sun and returned to the cave. The Timaeus is the book of the man who comes back into the cave from above. …

“In the Timaeus there is a trinity: the Artificer, the Model of the creation, and the Soul of the world.” [ibid., p.132]

She next quotes a passage from the Timaeus containing a proof of God’s existence. Because I have no Greek, I will eliminate the Greek words she incorporated to clarify her translation, but I will flag their locations with [*]:

“First of all we must, in my judgment, make this distinction. What is that which is eternally real but never coming into existence, and what is that which is always coming into existence but is never real? The one is apprehended by thought with the help of reason [*] since it is eternally self-consistent reality, whereas the other is a subject of opinion based on unreasoning sensation, since it becomes and perishes without ever possessing real existence. Again, everything which becomes [*] must necessarily have some author [*] since it is quite impossible for there to be a becoming without a cause.” [ibid., p.132, emphasis added]

Plato is, Weil says, “expounding a theory of artistic creation and, by analogy, of the divine creation.” She goes on to develop her explication of this analogy thusly:

“In creating a work of art…the artist’s attention is oriented towards silence and the void; from this silence and void there descends an inspiration which develops into words or forms. Here the Model is the source of transcendent inspiration—and therefore the Artificer fitly corresponds to the Father, the Soul of the World to the Son, and the Model to the Spirit. A model which is ultra-transcendent and unrepresentable, like the Spirit.

“ …This Model is a living Being, it is not a thing. “ [ibid., p.133]

The Soul of the World, in Weil's words, is "the engendered God who is related to the creation as mediator, at the intersection of the other world and this world." She has pointed out, just above, that Plato refers to the Soul of the World in the Timaeus as "the only son [*] which has been, is, and will continue to be." [ibid., p.135]

We can see that a divine trinity corresponding to the Christian concept of the Triune God is explicit in Plato. In the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament, however, this concept, if found at all, is found only by looking backward, after the established fact, to find text that can be interpreted as being vaguely referential to the persons of the Holy Trinity. In fact, the God of Israel is One, so far as Judaism is concerned. The Messiah of the Old Testament is not God, but a temporal warrior-king. The Holy Spirit, as such, is unknown. The Jews have yet to develop the doctrine of a divine trinity out of their own sacred scriptures. And it is at this point where I become a quasi-Marcionite.

Religion: Gravity and Grace

On page 304 of the Notebooks, Simone Weil presents this other aspect of duality:

“God gives himself to Man under the aspect of power or under that of perfection: the choice is left to Man.
[Krishna’s army – is it not the Prince of This World?]”

Later on (p. 436), she writes:

“Timaeus. God cuts in two the Soul of the World. This represents duality (in the Hindu sense). The Cross is this duality. In order to find the One, we have to exhaust duality, go to the very extreme of duality. This means crucifixion. We cannot arrive at this extreme without paying the price in full.”

Paying the price in full means personal crucifixion; the death of the guna-entangled Self. On page 502, she merges this Christian concept of the ultimate sacrifice with the message of the Bhagavad Gîtâ:

“God making evil pure – that is the idea behind the Gîtâ.”

It is also that which makes the Crucifixion a Necessity.

On page 388, Weil describes this mechanism:

“Creation is made up of the descending movement of gravity, the ascending movement of grace, and the descending movement of grace raised to the second power (is it this perhaps which lies beyond the gunas, and therefore sattva itself, in the Gîtâ?”

Thus, we see how Weil synthesizes Christian theology with the Platonism of the Timaeus and the religious philosophy of the Bhagavad Gîtâ.

In what I find to be the most beautiful of all passages in Gravity and Grace, the extraordinary compilation of Simone Weil’s writings, gleaned by her friend, Gustave Thibon, from manuscripts left in his possession after her death, Weil describes this “descending movement of grace raised to the second power”:

“God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightening flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has come entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.”

On the next page we have this:

“I have to be like God, but like God crucified.
Like God almighty in so far as he is bound by necessity.”

Paradox. Contradictories. Beyond sattva.