1.
Places and People: Adam, Eve, & Prometheus
“And I wish that I were not any part / of that fifth generation / of men, but had died before it came, / or been born afterward,” (Hesiod. Trans. Richard Lattimore. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969; p. 39).
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Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. The true and honest experience of their former idyllic lives was now sullied by a pervasive internal vision. They knew that they were and they became conscious.
There’s that old adage that people are gods that shit. We can envision this as the story of an Adam and an Eve happily shitting away in Eden day in day out until that moment they discovered the God in them (i.e. the moment they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil), and never again would they be able to so blissfully vacate their bowels in the bosom of nature as once they had done. This is the quintessential tale of the noble savage—in which humanity is pure, ignorant and blissful—but there is a snake in this garden.
What would this snake be if not language biting us with its cruel distinctions and categorizations? What is knowledge of good and evil if not the simplest, earliest type of categorization, of something as “good” and some other thing as “bad”? This snaking introspection is distinct from the “still small sound” of Elijah, but is it possible that Elijah’s “still small sound” is where the snake is leading Adam? Adam, as the animistic primitive is being led out of this state of naïveté by a flowering of language that will eventually make the truly private monotheistic experience of the Hebrew prophets possible?
The world is born out of language, according to the bible—and God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light, and so on—and it is language that creates the dichotomy of the shitting god, or more specifically the alienated beast, the thing of nature that sees itself as distinct from nature, the worm that pontificates on politics and other worldly affairs. Throughout Genesis, God is teasing out dichotomies, of darkness and light, of land, sea, and sky, and categorizing the things that traverse it. Is God making the world, or is God naming the world, and by so doing, creating it in language?
This act of creation can then be seen in contrast to the dichotomy of good and evil that leads to Adam and Eve’s expulsion. We gain knowledge, like God, of language, but this knowledge will always be a sham when compared to the mystical language of creation. However, the history of civilization has been a history of humanity’s efforts to prove this ancient dictum false—that we can create through language, mathematical and ultimately genetic language.
Eden could be considered like a first utopia. A society (albeit of just two, but a society nonetheless) living in perfect harmony, with no possessions, without even a clear possession of themselves. It is a porto-utopia. The impulse to write utopian literature is always an attempt to recreate Eden—through whatever system they have devised—which is also why utopias always fail. You cannot go back to Eden. As long as we are conscious, the world will be imperfect.
Eden is a mystical utopia in that it’s perfect society is possible because the human animals living within it have not yet embraced the linguistic faculties that will one day make this joyous immersion in the present tense impossible. Not to mention that these human animals are being cared for by an all-powerful deity who gives them all they need and keeps any and all discomforts at bay. Which is precisely why it can be understood as the first utopia—because it exists as a place outside of place. Utopias will always only exist in our dreams.
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But utopian literature, like realist literature, is a child of two parents, the merging of two cultures, the Greek and the Hebraic. As Eric Auerbach showed in his remarkable masterpiece on the development of realism, Mimesis, realism as we know it is a combination of the detail-oriented literature of the Greeks and Romans and the subtextual literature of the Jewish and Christian story-telling traditions.[1] In the same way, the conceptual seeds for utopian thought do not just sprout in the Garden of Eden.
For example, Hesiod lived among the iron race, after fire had been introduced into the world by Prometheus chained to a rock forever for his crime against the gods. Hesiod’s acknowledgment of a future in conjunction with an allegorical-historical past similar to the Adamic myth of Hebraic literature suggests a more hopeful perspective. Hesiod’s saying that not only were there good times in the past, but those good times are coming back. He also speaks of a “Golden” time when men “lived like gods, with carefree heart, free and apart from trouble and pain”, and when “the fertile earth produced fruit by itself”, and even at one point compares two cities, presenting one of these as an ideal he, meaning Hesiod, hoped for and even proposed as a model of the ideal city-state.[2]
Plato’s Republic is of course the first true utopia to have been written—as in, an official ideal society laid out in writing to possibly, hopefully, be put into practice—and it also deals with different coinages of men, but in his case these golems are part of a hierarchy of the state. Gold is of course reserved for the philosopher-kings and silver for the auxiliaries of the ruling class, while those who would protect this hierarchy are gifted with souls of bronze. But what is the foundation of this republic? Is the ideological foundation of this republic, the philosopher’s journey from the cave of ignorance into the bright day of correct thinking?[3] Or is this republic founded on the “noble lies” necessary for a well-ordered polis to continue to function? Perhaps Plato’s condemnation that Hesiod “did not speak falsely well” when he spoke of the gods, specifically that he said something that was not untrue and said it well, might give us a hint.[4] Or, as Plato has the King of Egypt say in Phaedrus, concerning the fallacies of the written word: “And you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” In Plato’s ideational landscape, the Word—of truth, understanding, illumination, and being—and the work-about words that make up our everyday reality are very far apart indeed. Between the golden soul of the philosopher-king and the rabble of the streets lies a similar unbridgeable gap of understanding, for the truth cannot be told, but only seen, as “light that is kindled by a leaping spark.”[5]
Is it any shock that Rudolf Steiner, the ideological godfather of the Neo-Con movement, derived his ideas specifically from Plato’s Republic?
Note that Plato also distinguishes between different tiers of language, between “truth” and pretty words. Once again, one the one hand, we have the Word, and we have the snake of everyday language. And furthermore, there is this idea that they seem the same, but they are not. They both use words, but the nature of the words is different. There is the common language, and then there is a language that approaches something more.
But Plato is not defining a perfect society, he is creating an allegory for society as it exists. This is the myth of society in general, that leaders are our philosopher-kings and that there are certain things we do not need to know, and should not know, for our society to continue to function normally. But with the creation of this allegory of the polis there comes the possibility of its opposite, of a place that is also a place outside of place, but here the people are not shut out from the workings of the larger societal sphere, to instead be themselves the mystical components that define how history unfolds. A world in which each of us have an equal atomic weight in the unfolding of the “powerful play” mentioned so stunningly by Apple in one of its more recent advertisements. (They were quoting O Me! O Life! as read by Robin Williams, in The Dead Poets Society.)
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Utopias are part of a larger fantastical tradition that threads itself from these early stories, through the allegorical fantasies of the middle ages, and on into our own contemporary ideologies of place.
This ideology of place developed in conjunction with the development of the monotheistic and then messianic Hebraic religions, as well as increasingly the modern concept of progress, which is itself dependent upon the sciences (remember we are speaking specifically in terms of the development of these ideas within Western—as in European—civilization) that first began with the great civilizations surrounding the Mediterranean: Romans who borrowed from Greeks who borrowed from Egyptians, Indian and Mesopotamian cultures. Just as with Auerbach’s analysis of the development of the novel, the argument is that these two forces, of rational scientific inquiry and Hebraic messianic religions, have worked as a dichotomy to fuel an increasingly more realistic sense of place. How?
The dichotomies of ancient Greece evolve into a specific dichotomy of truth and faith. Medieval Christianity presents a vision of redemption as directed upward and static, which is then upturned as a result of the scientific revolution, after which redemption becomes temporalized into “progress”—see Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being for more on this—with a crescendo of this particular brand of utopian thought in the nineteenth century then transforming in the twentieth century from a positive vision of future catharsis to a negative vision—from the ideal of a perfect city-state soon-to-be-realized to the nightmare of an apocalypse around-the-corner.[6]
Throughout all of this, utopian literature created places outside of place, that were presented as something to achieve, while at the same time acting, much like Plato’s Republic, as allegories for society as it was. Utopias can serve to define both the ideological and allegorical boundaries of an age. (Not to mention, convey the idiosyncrasies of their authors.)
The development of contemporary civilization can be understood as also the on-going development of a reality defined explicitly in materialistic terms, through a segregation of fantastical elements to a past, a future, and an internal place outside of place, but in doing so, the actual physical world we reside in is transformed as well.
Could it be that this becoming “like one of us” as God says in Genesis, that these words without “reality” that Plato put into the lips of the Egyptian king, that in both cases what we are seeing is a living language turned dead? That words can be doors, but in the wrong hands they are walls? That words are a guide to what cannot be seen, but if you are not looking, then the words will pen you in? Maybe.
There is always going to be some prophet who claims that the once living entity has been transformed into a meaningless mass by the uncomprehending dolts. And whether it’s the past you idolize, some heightened reality in the present, or a dream of future perfection, the ideal is always to find the actual and the genuine.
On page 27 of The Disenchantment of the World, Gauchet’s political history of religion, he states that “Religion, in its pure state, is a desire to merge with nature.” He goes on to say:
“When we talk about religion we are ultimately talking about a well-defined type of society based on the priority of the principle of collective organization over the will of the individuals it brings together… [This] model coincides historically with the age of what might be called religious societies, not in terms of their members’ beliefs but in the way these beliefs are actually articulated around a religious hegemony, that is, around the absolute predominance of a founding past, of a sovereign tradition, which predates personal preferences. On the other hand, entering the age of individualism means leaving the age of the religious, where both dependency on the whole and indebtedness to the other are simultaneously relinquished,” (Gauchet, Marcel. The Disenchantment of the World, Trans. By Oscar Burge; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Trans. of Le desenchantement du monde. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1985; p. 27).
The argument behind this fine book is that the history of religion from animism to atheism is precisely this “entering the age of individualism”, that with each stage of religion (from animism to pantheism to monotheism to messianic religion) God is made more “other”, and the self simultaneously becomes more well-defined to the point of a final break with religion—as a means to social control and a comprehensive epistemology—during the scientific revolution.
Utopian thought, then, is the attempt of a newly secular society to recreate an animistic egalitarian existence in a world that has eaten of the tree of knowledge, has discovered fire, but it is also a politicization of our imaginal interiority and the polis dreaming itself into existence through what Oscar Wilde called, “beautiful untruths”.
2.
The Imaginal Realm: Visions, Journeys, & Texts
“When they went on they saw a very high wall, and within the wall on the side they were coming from they saw a great multitude of men and women enduring wind and rain. They were very sad, enduring hunger and thirst; nevertheless they had light and did not smell the stench. The soul asked, ‘Who are these who linger in a place like this?’ The angel responded, ‘These souls are evil, but not very evil. Indeed they tried to follow honesty, but in good times they were not generous to the poor, as they should have been, and therefore for many years they deserve to suffer this rain; then they will be led to a good place,’” (Tundale. “Tundale’s Vision.” Trans. Ellen Gardner. Visions of Heaven & Hell Before Dante. Ed. Ellen Gardner; New York: Italica Press, 1989) pp. 180 & 181.
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The Vision of Tundale cited above was written in 1149 by an Irish knight who was struck dead but due to a warmth in his left side was not buried by his friends. It is important to note here that most visions (and probably this one among them) were not actually written down by the visionaries but dictated to a church official. This one in particular was translated into thirteen different languages and was one of the most popular visions of its day. It is important also to note that unlike many of the other visions which were exclusively excursions into hell, in this particular vision the soul travels through a proto-purgatory to heaven. (Purgatory’s first official definition was by Thomas Aquinas midway through the thirteenth century, although even then it had not been given the credence of dogma and still remained the theological version of a hypothesis.) The visionary himself, also unlike many of the other excursions into the afterlife, actually himself underwent torture for his various sins as a warning.
Henry Corbin in his essay, Mundus Imaginalis, makes the claim that our imaginations exist in an actual “imaginal” realm. Just as in physical reality we have very real physical sensations, in imaginal reality, we receive very real imaginal sensations. That our imaginations are literally real. And although this essay was written by a twentieth century sufi mystic, the concept itself that venturing into the imagination is venturing into an actual “place that is nowhere” is relevant when considering the journeyings of these visionaries, into places that are neither fact nor fiction, that all the same can be read both as “noble lies” and “beautiful untruths”, that are both personal and political.[7]
These visions exist in a static and allegorical present, in which we are given glimpses not of a dark and hell-ish past and a bright future, but of a dark literally and geographically situated below and a bright heaven literally situated above. The present is always and forever purgatory and death is our gateway into an imaginal realm that is the actual reality. In this paradigm, a physical thing is of less reality than its ideal and allegorical counterpart.
In the sixth and seventh centuries the accounts are brief, with very little distinction of sin, or even of character; attention focuses instead on scenery and the torments themselves. A change was then effected with the birth of popular penitential books. These penitentials were the forerunners of the confession manuals.
The earliest compositions occurred in Ireland, Brittany, and Scotland during the sixth century. These were basically rule-books. Two penitentials, both equally influential, came about in the seventh century. One was, the Penitential of Cummean, and the other, the Penitential of Theodore. The first of these was composed either in Scotland or Ireland, and the second was purportedly composed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, although more likely a composite work. Both of these list sins from the Decalogue as well as from Gregory’s formulation of the capital vices.
Returning to the passage cited above, however, what I personally find so striking is that all the emphasis of reward et cetera is placed on the other-worldly-ness of heaven in opposition to the grotesque physicality used to describe hell. As if this is a journey away from a physical and into an imaginal reality, from extreme physicality expressed as pain and disgust, through a moderate physicality of sorrow and hardship, and culminating in slight (almost nonexistent) physicality in which external beauty is described, but the beings who inhabit it themselves have no corpulescence to them. A place without place is also a place without hardship?
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Dante’s Comedia has been described as a turning point from the ancient to the modern world, and it also follows this similar pattern, beginning in gross corporality, then progressing through levels of increasingly more ephemeral existence till it finally achieves the heavenly placeless place. It is also a kind of utopia in so far as it presents us with an ideal conception of the world. It is, technically, a eupsychia, wherein the world is changed through the changing of the people in the world. It is a prescription on how to change, focusing on what to avoid and then describing the true and accurate way in which to exist in the world. Or the true and accurate way to exist in the world as according to Dante Alighieri.
It is well known that Dante fell in love at an early age to a woman by the name of Beatrice. He met her when he was nine, but did not become enamored of her until much later. It was from his feelings towards her that his belief in Divine Salvation through the love of a woman sprouts. After she died eight days after his twenty-fifth birthday, Dante was left emotionally bereft. For some time he worked on a series of poems entitled the Vita Nuova (or “New Life”) in which he laments his love of her. Her death was the first of three events that were crucial to the shaping of his philosophy and art. The second came while he was working on Vita Nuova. It came in the form of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. He actually felt guilt regarding his tender feelings towards philosophy (see p. 28 of Dante: Phylomythes and Philosopher, Patrick Boyde, New York: Cambride University Press, 1990) because Philosophy, viewed as a woman (as indeed it is in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy) could be seen as a breach in the promise Dante made that he would never love another woman after Beatrice. The philosophical base of The Consolation of Philosophy can be found in one of Boethius’ commentaries on Porphyrie:
“This love of wisdom [or philosophy] is the illumination of the intelligent mind by that pure wisdom [defined as the self-sufficient living mind and sole primeval reason of all things], and is a kind of return and recall to it, so that it seems at once the pursuit of wisdom, the pursuit of divinity, and the friendship of the pure mind,” (p. 21).
This is also Dante’s philosophical base and his correlation between love of a woman, love of God and love of knowledge, which he expresses in the form of his three guides through the Comedia. Virgil (Philosophy) can take Dante through Hell, but Beatrice (Love of a Woman) must take him up to the threshold of God, and Bernard of Clairvaux (Divine Love or Wisdom) must take him to the pure ecstasy that is God.
Remember that Dante is literally exploring this book with us. He is being led through his own philosophical landscape by these three guides even as he is actually writing it. He is both within and without, both an imagined entity and the imaginer, both an artificer and the object of artifice.
What sets this document up as the turning point between the medieval and the modern is this ambiguity between the sincere vision and the arch creation. It might perhaps be worth noting that the reason why Dante called the Comedia a comedy is specifically because it met the classic aesthetic description of a comedy, but it’s also worth noting that by framing his work in this way, Dante is classifying his work as a work of artifice, while the genre he was working within had traditionally been understood as a nonfiction genre.
Dante does not just represent a turning point from the ancient to the modern world but also, according to Auerbach, a synthesis of the Hebraic and the Greek outlook, incorporating the use of subtext and detail, scholastic philosophy and vulgar Italian dialect. Dante’s Comedia exists between the worlds of Plato’s Republic and the Adamic myth. It is a book written both in the common language to the common people waiting for redemption and a book that explains all of creation with its aristotelian physics and explores all that is without creation with the help of divine revelation. It ties together the world of Virgil with the world of Bernard of Clairveaux and that which ties these two worlds together is Love, the paradoxical love of a man for a woman, paradoxical because it is both of the flesh and of the spirit, both a selfish need and a selfless act, both God in Man and Man in God. Dante’s Comedia is both the culmination of an allegorical worldview and a first ironical step into the modern age with all its literalism.
[To continue on to the second part of this essay go here.]
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1. Auerbach, Eric. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
2. Hesiod, Works and Days, Trans. by R. S. Caldwell, Newburyport: Focus 1987
3. A kind of inversion of the Adamic myth, in which the apple of knowledge leads us out of the confused shadows and into an Eden that is everywhere and always, a eupsychia that transforms the subject into a king among men.
4. Plato, Republic, Book II 377e7
5. Plato, Seventh Letter, 341c
6. The Kuna Yala of Ecuador (a horticulturalist society), on the other hand, consider themselves to currently be living in the golden age, even though their world is being infringed upon by both settlers overwhelming their tribal lands and the tourist trade introducing currency into a culture formerly unfamiliar with it except as a means to obtain some extravagance from the external world.
7. Corbin himself defines the persian term na-koja-abad as “place that is nowhere” and defines it specifically in contradistinction to utopia as in, “no-place.”
