Flight from the World and Constitution

 

3.1. There is, however, an aspect of the rules according to which they can be considered as juridical acts; it does not concern civil or penal law, but public law. It is possible, that is to say, to consider the rules as constituent acts, which bear on the formation of those “political” communities that cenobies and convents undoubtedly are, even if in a peculiar sense. At the foundation of this jurispublic nature of the rules stands the doctrine of the fuga saeculi as a so-to-speak constituent process of the community of believers, which was elaborated by Philo and picked up and developed by Ambrose.

Let us first consider Philo’s De fuga et inventione (On Flight and Finding). Here the flight of Jacob is motivated first of all by the fact that Laban has abandoned all care for the law, in such a way that the “ascetic powers” that drive Jacob to flee act in order to reclaim an inheritance that has been unjustly taken from them. And the places of refuge and exile (phygadeutēria; phygē, in Greek, means in the first place exile) are here—on the basis of a midrash on Numbers 35:11–14, with regard to the places where those guilty of involuntary homicide could find refuge—genuine cities that each symbolize, however, a divine power. There are six of them: the first, the mother-city (mētropolis), is the divine word (logos), the first place in which it is useful to seek refuge. The other five, which are “colonies” (apoikiai) with respect to the first, are described as follows:

their leader being creative [poietikē] power, in the exercise of which the Creator produced the universe by a word; second in order is the royal [basilikē] power, in virtue of which he that has made it governs [archei] that which has come into being; third stands the gracious [hileōs] power, in the exercise of which the Great Artificer takes pity and compassion on his own work; fourth is the legislative power, by which he prescribes duties incumbent on us; and fifth that division of legislation, by which he prohibits those things which should not be done. (17, 95)

Flight is thus conceived as a process that carries the fugitive or the exile through six cities that are so many constitutive “political” powers: the divine word (identified with the great/high priest), creation, kingdom, governance, positive and negative legislation.

The cities are, moreover, Levitical cities, because the Levites are themselves in a certain way also fugitives and exiles (phygades), who have abandoned parents, children, and brothers in order to please God. To the Levites and priests are entrusted the care of the temple and the leitourgia (that is, the public function of the cult). In the same way, even the fugitives who have been rendered guilty of an involuntary fault “are also engaged in a service [leitourgousi]” (17, 93). In this dense midrash, which was to have a long posterity in Christianity, exile is seen paradoxically as a “liturgy,” a public service by which the exiled are assimilated to priests.

It is well known that Ambrose’s De fuga saeculi (Flight from the World) depends heavily on Philo’s text and that, in this sense, it certainly does not sparkle with originality. Yet the very fact that he had decided to insert Philo’s midrash into one of the foundational works of Christian asceticism inscribes the theme of the flight from the world within a peculiar perspective, in which renunciation and asceticism are linked closely to the exercise of the priesthood, that is to a public practice. Not only does chapter 2 take up once again, almost literally, Philo’s exegesis of the cities of refuge, but with a development that is pregnant with significance, the high priest, whom Philo already assimilated to the divine logos, is identified without reserve with the Son.

Who is this chief priest but the Son of God, the Word of God? We enjoy his advocacy in our behalf before the Father, for he is free from every offense, both willed and unintentional, and in him subsist all things which are on earth and which are in heaven. For all things have been bound by the bond of the Word and are held together by his power and subsist in him, because in him they have been created and in him all God’s fullness dwells. And so all things endure, because he does not allow what things he has bound to be loosened, since they subsist by his will. Indeed, as long as he wills, he keeps all things in check by his command and rules and binds them by a harmony of nature. (Ambrose, pp. 85/291)

At the suggestion of Philo and the Pauline letter to the Hebrews, the Word is immediately associated with the great priest of Psalm 109:4:

Be satisfied now that he is the great high priest. The Father swore an oath in his regard, saying, “You are a priest forever.” . . . This is the Word of God, in whom there inheres the high priesthood. In the account of the clothing of the high priest, Moses describes the garments symbolically, because the Word put on the world by his own power and is resplendent among all men as if he were clothed with it. . . . Christ is the head of all, and from him the whole body extends and is joined by a mutual joining of its parts to one another, while receiving its increase in the building up of itself in love. (ibid., pp. 88–90/293–94)

Here the theme of the flight from the world, so constitutive of monasticism, is united with the exercise of an ecclesial practice in which the fugitive appears as a true minister of the community: “the minister of God’s holy altar is one who is in flight from his own” (fugitans igitur est suorum sacri altaris eius minister; pp. 78/285). And it is on this basis that monastic exile from the world could be conceived as the foundation of a new community and a new public sphere.

א By making exile a constitutive political principle, Philo was in reality referring to a tradition established in Greek philosophy, which made use of exile as a metaphor of the perfect life of the philosopher. In the celebrated passage of the Theatatus (176a–b), in which assimilation to God appears as a phygē (phygēēde homoiōsis theōi kata ton dynaton), it is necessary to restore to phygē its originary meaning of exile (“assimilation to God is virtually an exile”). And it is in perfect analogy with the Platonic metaphor that in the Politics (1324a 15–16) Aristotle can define the form of the philosopher’s life as “alien” (xenikos bios). And centuries later, when Plotinus at the end of the Enneads will define the life of “divine and happy” men (that is, of philosophers) as a phygēmonou pros monon, the passage becomes fully intelligible only if the political character of the image is not lost: “exile in solitude to the solitary” (Ennead 6.9.11). “Exile from the world” is first of all a political gesture that in Philo and Ambrose is equivalent to the constitution of a new community.

3.2. In 1907 Ildefons Herwegen, the initiator of the liturgical movement in the Benedictine abbey of Maria Laach, called attention to an exceptional document that casts new light on the rules and monastic professions and, in particular, allows one to situate them in a jurispublic perspective. The text in question is the so-called Pactum, which is found at the end of St. Fructuosus of Braga’s Regula communis. The interest of this document, from a little before 670, is that it is presented as an accord or contract between two parties, the group of monks on the one hand (designated with the generic term nos omnes) and the abbot on the other (defined as tu dominus), in which they found and regulate the community through decreeing reciprocal obligations:

Thus, fired with divine ardor, lo, all of us whose names are subscribed below entrust our souls to God and to you, our master and our father, that we may live in one monastery under Christ’s guidance and your teaching according to the edict of the apostles and the Rule, and as sanctioned by the authority of the fathers in the past. Whatever you desire for the safety of our souls to pronounce, teach, perform, reprimand, excommunicate, or correct in accordance with the Rule [annuntiare, docere, agere, increpare, imperare, excommunicare, secundum regulam emendare], we shall completely carry out with humble heart, all arrogance aside, with mind intent, with burning zeal, with the aid of divine grace, without making excuses [inexcusabiliter], and with the Lord’s favor. If any of us shall be complaining, obstinate, disobedient, or slandering against the Rule and against your command [contra regulam et tuum praeceptum murmurans, contumax, inobediens vel calumniator], then, you may have the power to bring all into an assembly and to read the Rule in the presence of all and to correct our guilt publicly, and each one who is guilty shall receive his due, the lash or ban of excommunication, with due consideration for his misconduct. If anyone shall secretly intrigue with his parents, brothers, sons, relatives, or neighbors, or especially with a fellow brother in the absence of the above-mentioned father, you may have the power over each one who has attempted such a crime to have him put under ban of excommunication and confined to a dark cell for six months on bread and water alone, wearing a penitential tunic or sackcloth, without cincture and without shoes. If a monk is unwilling to undertake such a penance with full consent, he is to be stretched out naked and given 72 blows with a lash and to be deprived of the clothing of the monastery and to be expelled from the institution in conspicuous disgrace. (Fructuosus, “Pact,” p. 208; cf. Herwegen, pp. 2–3)

Opposite this subjection of the monks to the sovereignty of the abbot stands, however, the obligation of the abbot to govern with justice and equity:

We remind you, our master, that if you should treat any of us unjustly—which it is unreasonable to believe and which may God not allow to happen—if you should treat any of us with pride or anger, or should love one and show hatred and rancor for another, or should dominate one but revere another, as people often do, then we shall have the right also granted to us by God to take our complaint without pride and without anger through the dean to the prior, and the prior shall humbly kiss the foot of you our lord and lay before you the details of our complaint, and you must be willing to listen patiently and to bend your neck humbly to the common rule and correct and reform yourself. If you are not willing to correct yourself, then we may also have the power of consulting another monastery, or else a bishop who lives under the Rule, or a Catholic count who is a defender of the Church, and of inviting them to meet with us, that, in their presence, you may correct yourself and fulfill the tenets of the Rule. (Fructuosus, “Pact,” p. 209; cf. Herwegen, pp. 3–4)

Herwegen, who lingers on the juridical meaning of the document, renders an account of the constitutional character of the pact with respect to the convent community, but without drawing all its consequences. “This formula,” he writes, “is the expression of a juridical negotiation through which a multiplicity is united for a common cloistered life. A superior power, under the reservation of certain rules, is conferred on an abbot defined as ‘lord and father,’ in the form of a monastic profession. The agreement is presented here as the foundation of a convent, connected with the subjection of the monks to the abbot” (Herwegen, p. 4). From this perspective, he seeks to demonstrate the possible influence on the pactum, on the one hand, of the oaths of subjection between subjects and sovereign contained in the lex Visigothorum and, on the other, of the Roman legionnaire’s oath of obedience. It is all the more surprising, then, that Herwegen, exclusively preoccupied with relating the pactum to its Visigothic context and distinguishing it from the monastic profession in the strict sense, does not notice that the pactum constitutes, perhaps, the first and only example of a social contract in which human beings in a group subject themselves unconditionally to the authority of a dominus, attributing to him the power to direct the life of the community that is thus founded in all its aspects. With respect to the Hobbesian covenant or Rousseau’s social contract, in which the authority of the sovereign knows no limits, to the monks’ obligation of subjection there corresponds the obligation to govern with justice on the part of the abbot. In any case, however, what is decisive is that the pactum is not in any way assimilable to a private contract and that by abstracting the question from the discussion—which is, all things considered, sterile—of the contractual or votive character of the monastic profession, it allows us in some way to consider the rules in their integrity as true and proper constituting documents (constitutiones, as they are after all often designated) of the cloistered community.

3.3. In reality, what is decisive here is not so much the problem of the more or less juridical nature of the rules, which cannot be proposed for the earliest rules, but more generally that of the peculiar relation between life and norm that comes to be established in the rule. What is in question is thus not what in the rule is precept and what is advice, nor the degree of obligation that it implies, but rather a new way of conceiving the relation between life and law, which again calls into question the very concepts of observance and application, of transgression and fulfillment.

Already in the earliest rules, the penal apparatuses often refer not to individual actions, but to something like a vice or a spiritual condition of the monk. Qui facilis est ad detrahendum, si in hoc peccato fuerit deprehensus . . . iracundus et furiosus si frequenter irascitur (“The one who is quick to slander, if he is caught in this sin . . . if an irascible and raging person frequently becomes angry”), one reads in Pachomius’s Praecepta atque iudicia. Si quis frater contumax aut superbus aut murmurans aut inoboediens . . . (“If any brother is stubborn or proud or given to complaining or disobedient . . .”), begins the chapter De excommunicatione culparum (About Excommunication for Faults) in the Rule of the Master (Vogüé2, 2, pp. 33/149). And in the rule of Isidore, the index that enumerates the most serious offences is more similar to a catalog of vices than to the outline of culpable offences: si temulentus quisquam sit, si discors, si turpiloquus, si feminarum familiaris, si seminans discordias, si iracundus . . . (“if anyone is drunk, disagreeable, foul-speaking, friendly with women, a sower of discord, irascible . . .”; Regula monachorum, p. 886).

This holds even more so for the monk’s positive obligations. A passage from Bernard of Clairvaux’s De praecepto et dispensatione (On Precept and Dispensation) is particularly significant from this perspective. Responding in an imaginary dialogue to a monk who, having professed the rule, laments not being able to fulfill his vow in the monastery where he is, Bernard writes:

But truly, I say, neither of these complaints is just. He who thinks it perjury not to observe the rule in its purity [ad purum], has I think paid scant attention to what he actually promised. No one at profession [cum profitetur] really promises “the Rule” [spondet regulam], but specifically, that he will act “according to the rule” [secundum regulam] from the moment of his conversion and in his form-of-life [conversionem suamque . . . conversationem dirigere]. This sort of profession formula has, in our day, been adopted by almost all monks. However, God is served in many diverse ways in the various monasteries. So long as one carefully observes the good customs of his house he is beyond any doubt living according to the rule, for the rule admits of variations in local customs. (Bernard of Clairvaux, De praecepto et dispensatione, pp. 250–52/140–41)

As the opposition between a technical legal term (spondere, to obligate oneself personally to something) and an expression drawn from ascetic language (to lead the proper form of life) shows clearly, the passage testifies to a transformation that affects the way we understand the relationship between norm and life. The one who promises does not obligate himself, as happens in the law, to the fulfillment of the individual acts expected in the rule, but puts into question his way of living, which is not identified with a series of actions or exhausted in them. As Bernard adds immediately after, “those who undertake to live according to the Rule [secundum regulam vivere], even if they do not keep it completely in every detail [ad unguem], and even if they change or omit certain details according to the customs of their house, as long as they are faithful to what is locally accepted as a ‘sober, just, and pious life’ [sobrie et iuste et pie vivere], they are truly living the Rule” (ibid., pp. 286/141).

It is most likely in reference to this passage that Thomas can write that “he who professes a rule does not vow to observe all the things contained in the rule [non votet observare omnia quae sunt in regula], but he vows the regular life [votet regularam vitam] which consists essentially in the three aforesaid things [poverty, continence, and humility]. Hence in certain religious orders precaution is taken to profess, not the rule, but to live according to the rule [profitentur non quidem regulam, sed vivere secundum regulam]” (Summa theologica, 2a 2ae, q. 186, art. 9). Even if Thomas seems to reduce the problem to that of the difference between precept and rule, the decisive point, which the authors have difficulty putting in focus, is the transformation that is in question in the passage from “promising the rule” to “promising to live according to the rule” (promising life). The object of the promise is here no longer a legal text to observe or a certain action or a series of determinate behaviors, but the subject’s very forma vivendi.

3.4. In Suárez, this special character of the monastic profession assumes the paradoxical form of an obligation that doesn’t have a certain human act as its object, but the obligation itself. He begins first of all by distinguishing two meanings of the term votum: in the first, the word designates “the obligation and the bond that remains in one who has pronounced the vow” (pro obligatione et vinculo quod manet in homine habente votum), in the second, “the act by which the obligation immediately comes about” (pro actu illo a quo immediate nascitur obligatio; Suárez, p. 804). “I say,” he continues, “that the vow properly so-called, insofar as it signifies that act by means of which a person obliges himself with respect to God, cannot have for its object any human act other than the obligation itself, that is the bond that is realized through the act of vowing oneself” (non habere pro obiecto alium actum humanum sed obligationem ipsam, seu vinculum efficiendum per actum vovendi; ibid.).

The vow, insofar as it “is nothing other than the obligation, by which someone is bound spontaneously to God [se spontanee obligat deo],” does not obligate one, like the law, simply to fulfill determinate acts and keep away from others, but produces in the will a “permanent and, as it were, habitual bond” (vinculum permanens et quasi in habitu; ibid.). Here the vow is a “vow of the vow” (habet pro obiecto votum), in the sense that it does not refer immediately to a certain action or a certain series of acts, but first of all to the bond that is itself to be produced in the will:

And this will, through which the human being obliges himself with respect to God, has for its object the very obligation to God and thus has for its object the vow or the promise, to the extent to which this signifies the bond itself that is to be realized through the vow, and not to the extent in which it signifies the acts to be vowed or promised [habet pro obiecto votum vel promissionem, quatenus haec significat vinculum ipsum efficiendum per votum, non quatenus significat actum vovendi aut promittendi]. (ibid.)

What Suárez here tries laboriously to conceptualize by multiplying his distinctions is the paradox of an obligation whose primary content is not a certain behavior, but the very form of the will of the one who, by promising the vow, has been bound to God. The vow has, that is, the form of law, but not its content, and like the Kantian imperative, it has no immediate object except the very will of the one vowing. For this reason, in the next chapter, Suárez takes care to distinguish the votum in the proper sense, which is realized only through the promise (per solam promissionem), from the traditio, which is added to it in the case of the solemn vow of chastity, in which the one vowing “consigns and consecrates his body to God as chaste in perpetuity” (ibid., p. 805). In distinction from the pagan devotio, in which the devotus consigned to the gods his body and his biological life, the Christian vow is, so to speak, objectively vowed and has no other content than the production of a habitus in the will, whose ultimate result will be a certain form of common life (or, from the liturgical perspective, the realization of a certain officium or a certain religio).

Once more, the decisive core of the monastic condition is not a substance or content, but a habitus or a form. Understanding that condition will require us to turn toward the task of confronting of the problem of “habit” and form of life.

א In our archeology of duty (Agamben 1, §4, chap. 8), we showed that religio is the name that theologians give to that singular relation between norm and life, which configures a sort of juridical duty in the form of a virtue or a habitus.

In order to understand the new figure of the relation between norm and life that here starts to be delineated, it is necessary to refer to juridical situations which find their technical form only later in administrative law—that is, in that branch of modern law that had its gestation in the sphere of the practices of Church administration. It is here that one encounters norms (called instrumental) that provide veritable outlines of behavior, linked to the definition of a “competence-duty,” that is, to an obligation or a legitimation to act that derives from a determinate situation (for example, the assumption of an office). The “duties of office” that result from it configure a type or a normative outline of a practice that is not exhausted in an individual action, but defines a definite conduct of life, whose objective element and subjective element tend to coincide and which recalls, in this sense, the monk’s vivere secundum regulam and religio.

3.5. What is decisive in any case is that the form of life that is in question in the rules is a koinos bios, a common life. Every interpretation of the monastic rules must first of all situate them in this context, from which they cannot be separated. When we ask ourselves about the relation between monks and rules, it is necessary not to forget Wittgenstein’s observation according to which it is not possible to follow a rule privately, because referring to a rule necessarily implies a community and a set of habits. Even for the monk the principle holds according to which “it is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which only one person followed a rule. . . . To follow a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (usages, institutions)” and “‘following a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is following a rule is not to follow a rule. And that’s why it’s not possible to follow a rule ‘privately’” (Wittgenstein 1, pp. 381–82/87–88).

It is important to specify, therefore, that the common life is not the object that the rule must constitute and govern. On the contrary—as both the claim of a “power conceded to us by God” in the “Pact” of St. Fructuosus and the insistence on the distinction between “promising the rule” and “promising life” in Bernard and Thomas testify—it is the rule that seems to be born from “cenoby,” that (to use the language of modern public law) seems to be placed with respect to cenoby like constituent power with respect to the text of the constitution. If the ideal of a “common life” obviously has a political character, cenoby is perhaps the place in which the community of life as such is claimed without reserve as the element that is in every sense constitutive. What is in question, in the life of cenoby, is thus a transformation of the very canon of human practice, which has been so determinate for the ethics and politics of Western society that perhaps still today we cannot fully grasp its nature and implications.

The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life

Giorgio Agamben 

The miracle of parturition, endured or only witnessed, makes any human being wiser and more humble.

 MEDITATION 26

ON DEATHOMNIA MORS POSCIT; LEX EST, NON POENA, PERIRE 1

122: THE SIX MOST important necessities which the Creator has imposed on mankind are to be born, to move about, to eat, to sleep, to procreate, and to die.

Death is the complete interruption of sensual relations and the absolute cessation of vital action, which perforce leaves the body prey to the laws of decomposition.

These aforementioned basic needs are all of them accompanied by and made more agreeable by various sensations of pleasure, and death itself is not without enjoyment when it comes naturally, that is to say when the human body has passed through all its preordained phases of growth, maturity, old age, and decrepitude.

If I had not determined to make this a very short chapter, I would call to my aid the doctors who have watched the almost imperceptible changes which take place when living bodies change to inert matter. I would quote philosophers and kings and writers who, from the very fringes of eternity, far from being prey to pain and grief, have had cheerful thoughts which they could express with poetic charm. I would recall the reply of the dying Fontenelle, who, when he was questioned about what he felt, replied, “Nothing more than a difficulty to go on living.” But I prefer only to state my personal conviction, based both on analogy and on many observations which I feel have been carefully made, and of which this is the final one:

I had a great-aunt ninety-three years old, who was dying. Although she had been bedridden for some time, she was in full possession of all her faculties, and it was impossible to guess her true condition except by the lessening of her appetite and the weakening of her voice.

 She had always been very fond of me, and it was I who sat by her bed, ready to help her most tenderly, but not the least prevented by this from observing her with the philosophical eye which I have always cocked at whatever goes on around me.

“Are you there, my dear nephew?” she asked me in a barely articulated voice.

“Yes, Aunt. I shall do everything I can for you, and I feel it would do you good to take a little really fine old wine.”

“Give it to me, my dear: liquid always flows downward.”

I hurried to lift her up gently, and made her swallow a half glass of my best wine. She instantly grew stronger, and looking at me with eyes which had once been very beautiful she said, “Deep thanks for this last service. If ever you reach my age, you will see that death becomes a necessity, just like sleep.”

These were her last words, and a half-hour later she had dozed off forever.

Dr. Richerand has described with such truth and philosophy the final changes in the human body and the last moments in the individual that my readers will thank me for making known to them the following passage:

“Here is the order in which our intellectual faculties cease and disintegrate. Reason, that attribute of which man pretends to be the sole possessor, abandons him first. At the beginning he loses the power to link his opinions sensibly and, soon after, follows his ability to compare and assemble and combine together several ideas in order to judge their net importance. It is then said that the sick man is out of his head, or that he is unreasonable or delirious. This delirium focuses usually on the thoughts which are most familiar to him, and his dominant passion is easily recognized: a miser confides the innermost secrets about his hidden gold; another man dies in the clutch of religious terror. Happy memories of the distant homeland, you, too, are reawakened in the exile, with all your charm and all your poignancy!

“After the powers of reasoning and judging, it is the faculty of associating ideas which is next struck down by the progressive destruction of death. This happens also in the state known as swooning, as I myself have proven. I was talking once with a  friend, when I felt an insurmountable difficulty in clarifying two ideas upon whose resemblance I wished to form an opinion. I was not completely unconscious, however: I still kept my memory and my ability to feel, and could distinctly hear the people who were around me saying, He has fainted, and trying to bring me out of this state, which was not without a certain pleasure.

“The next thing to die is memory. The sick man, who even in delirium recognized the people who were near him, now does not know his close associates, and finally ignores those with whom he has lived in the greatest intimacy. Then he stops feeling anything. His senses, however, go out in a successive and set order: taste and smell give no further sign of their existence; his eyes are dimmed as by a dull cloud, and take on a sinister look; his hearing is still sensitive to both sounds and noise. This last is doubtless why the ancients, in order to assure themselves that death had actually occurred, used to shriek into the ears of their corpses. The dying man now cannot smell or taste, and he sees and hears no more. There is still left to him the sense of touch, and he moves about on his bed, stretches his arms this way and that, and changes his position constantly; he reproduces, as we have already said, the movements of a foetus who stirs in its mother’s womb. The death which is about to strike him down cannot terrify him, for he has no more thoughts, and he finishes life as he began it, without any consciousness of so doing.” (Richerand, NOUVEAUX ELÉMENTS DE PHYSIOLOGIE, ninth edition, Volume II, page 600.) 2THE TRANSLATOR’S GLOSSES

 1. This says, “Death demands all: to die is law, not punishment.” The succinct profundity of this undoubtedly appealed to Brillat-Savarin’s orderly mind, as well as to the side of his nature which increasingly found itself preoccupied with the physical act of dying and its infinite spiritual ramifications. For many years before his death he had been known to express a fatalistic interest in the act, which at the same time had nothing morbid about it, and the song he composed and this present Meditation are but two proofs of his impersonal concern.

2. It is perhaps a pity that birth and death are so little watched, in our time. I have always felt that the miracle of parturition, endured or only witnessed, makes any human being wiser and more humble. He who turns away from it is the poorer for his act. And the same may be true of death, which so seldom happens nowadays in the awesome quiet of a familiar chamber. Most of us die violently, thanks to the advances of science and warfare. If by chance we are meant to end life in our beds, we are whisked like pox victims to the nearest hospital, where we are kept as alone and unaware as possible of the approach of disintegration. Those of us who escape bombs and the mad highways have a chance to live much longer than men of the early nineteenth century, but it is hard not to agree with one good reporter of the twentieth who wrote from his cancer-tortured heart, “Science is wonderful … but I sometimes envy my ancestors who died too early to know how painfully life can be prolonged.” For myself, I should like to die like the Professor’s aunt, ancient and aware, at peace in a known room, and in the company of a loved person who was not repelled or frightened by my end. I should like my children to agree with me …

The Physiology of Taste; or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy 

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Warriors of God the Great Religious Orders and their Founders

Introduction

A strange poem in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Stunden-Buch tells of monks who “buried themselves deep down in the earth,” returning, as it were, into the womb; of a life that was “as a thousand years ’ because it was no longer divided into night and day; of pilgrims who come to gaze with reverent eyes upon the “buried ones” whose bodies have never known decay.¹ Rilke was writing about the monks of a cave-monastery in Kiev which had become a famous place of pilgrimage; he was also—unwittingly, no doubt —creating an image of the fate of monasticism in modern times.

With the spread of the ideas of the French Revolution, the very concept of monasticism became increasingly unintelligible to the West. A purely utilitarian world had little place for otherworldly aspirations. Besides, monastic life must perforce be looked upon as contrary to nature. The objection, of course, was not new; it had been raised by men like Erasmus in the sixteenth century, as it had been raised by men like Jovinian in the fourth. But in the Age of Enlightenment the opposition to monasticism gathered into veritable frenzy, forcing the dissolution of numerous monasteries. And monasticism, like the monks in Rilke’s mysterious verse, responded by retreating into the catacombs, hibernating, so to speak, in the caverns of the earth, the better to preserve its secret from impious eyes.
It had not disappeared for good; monasticism is far too deeply rooted in the human heart ever to disappear completely. Signs of a revival were already apparent in the nineteenth century. And just as St. Paul, speaking of the resurrection of the dead, cried out to the Corinthians: “Behold, I show you a mystery!” (I Cor. xv, 51), so we today must tell the world none the less urgently: see, monasticism descended into the bowels of the earth only that it might rise again! Indeed, the true significance of the descent lay in the patient preparation of an imminent reawakening.

The process is a hidden one unperceived by those whose concern is only with externals; from a religious point of view, however, it is one of the most significant developments of our time, and it requires of us a new encounter with monasticism. Here we may recall Franz Overbeck’s dictum that monasticism is a phenomenon that neither Catholic nor Protestant theology is able to assess adequately. Catholic theology having long since lost the necessary purity of understanding, Protestant theology never having been sufficiently objective.² For all that it is so disputable, the statement sounds a warning that merits attention.

To grasp the reality of monasticism is clearly not as easy as it might appear to be. Wel-nigh impassable mountains of prejudice have to be scaled first. And that means, to start with, that the whole subject has to be lifted right out of the context of sectarianism. For sectarianism—not to be confused with membership of the particular denomination in which Providence has been pleased to place a particular individual—is all too conducive to malice, and tends to blur one’s vision of truth. It should be remembered, moreover, that the great monastic orders were founded in the marvelous climate of an as yet undivided Christendom. If only on ecumenical grounds, therefore, it is necessary to break through all narrow partisan attitudes in a Christian spirit that transcends polemics and keeps one mindful of the duty to serve all denominations. In such a spirit, we shall approach monasticism with a new openmindedness, and we shall look upon this mighty edifice of Christian spirituality with loving veneration, though not, of course, uncritically.

Scholarship can provide some of the means of gaining a better understanding of monasticism. Historical methods have been invaluable in the assembling of source material, and the author recalls with sincere gratitude the numerous monographs he has read on particular aspects of the monastic movement. Academic objectivity, however, often leads to an inner aloofness that blinds the scholar to the essential. Although research is necessary, therefore, it must remain peripheral to the subject and cannot be regarded as constituting the final authority.

More than scholarly treatment is needed if there is really to be a new encounter with monasticism. The academic approach has to be completed and lifted to a higher plane by an altogether different approach, such as was formulated, for instance, in the very heyday of rationalism, by the fascinating visionary who called himself Novalis (1772—1802). That Johannine emissary of the divine, having passed through the “Gothic arches of pure reason,” was able to survey the world of sense from the vantage point of a higher reality; in one of his most bewitching poems he speaks of a future when “those who sing or those who kiss will know more than all the great scholars.”³ The man who, “through tales and poems, penetrates to the heart of things” can arrive at the deeper vision of a Novalis. The supra-scholarly approach is not founded on mere emotion; intuitive perception depends upon the illumination of the Logos, and precisely this makes of the new inquiry into monasticism an act of living religion rather than an exercise in academic hairsplitting.

II

In re-evaluating monasticism, we can adopt various points of view. It is doubtless wisest to begin by considering the subject from the point of view of history; we tend, nowadays, to be very conscious of the importance of historical perspective. And history will at once show us that monasticism is heir to a venerable tradition, and that it is common to many religions.

The phenomenology of religious history shows us that there is a deep connection between man’s religious aspirations and the monastic life. India, with its extraordinary talent for religion and its profusion of monasteries, affords an interesting illustration of the point.

Indian monasticism is most strongly marked by the influence of the Buddha, that tremendous figure whose significance no Western mind has yet succeeded in comprehending to the full. Buddha opens his lapidary admonitions with the stereotyped “This, O monks, is the sacred truth, thereby indicating that he is addressing himself exclusively to men who have embraced the monastic state. And Buddha s true disciple is the radiant monk who passes through the world absolved and filled with inner peace: “His heart overflowing with loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic gladness, and even-mindedness, he abides, raying them forth toward one quarter of space, then toward the second and third, then toward the fourth, above and below, thus all around. Everywhere, into all places the wide world over, his heart overflowing, streams forth, ample, expanded, limitless, free from enmity and all ill-will.”⁴

Buddha sent forth his monks, freed from all worldly ties, for the salvation and joy of many, out of pity for the world and for the good of mankind, to announce a teaching that they were also to manifest by their own holiness, reconciling men wherever they went. Buddha s radiant monk is free of earthly dust; the love of his liberated heart transcends the baser preoccupations of the majority of men as the moonlight outshines the brightness of the stars.

Thus, the Buddhistic form of monasticism alone should give us pause: perhaps our opinion of monasticism was overhasty, and needs revision.

Monasticism is, above all, a valid development of Christianity. The single answer to the largely unfruitful discussions on the origins of Christian monasticism is that the monastic life is implicit in the Church, not the product of pagan influences. The eschatological teachings of Jesus brought about a turning-away from the world, an attitude that was already very marked in St. Paul. Christian monasticism is rooted in the New Testament, and the first hermits appealed to the Bible to justify their way of life. Oswald Spengler, whose philosophy of history was certainly innocent of all denominational bias, remarked that “Christian monasticism did not begin with Pachomius (320); he was merely the builder of the first cloister. The movement began with the original community in Jerusalem itself.”⁵

Historically speaking, Christian monasticism stemmed directly from the earliest Christian ascetics, a response to the danger that a secularized Christendom would stifle all genuine religious life. Monasticism and the teachings of the Fathers are the fairest flowers of the early Church. And it is logically impossible to recognize the fundamental importance of the early Church for all subsequent Christian generations and, at the same time, to reject as an aberration monasticism, which was an integral part of that Church. In the deplorable entanglement of ecclesiastical and political issues which was already apparent in the fourth century, the monks represented “as it were the other side of the Church,” and, “thanks to their asceticism, preserved the balance.”⁶ That, in effect, is the ultimate significance of monasticism: to express most purely what is purest in Christian spirituality. We must focus our attention on this other, oft-neglected side of the Church.

The Eastern Church was molded by monasticism; indeed, it cannot be understood at all in isolation from its monastic life. “If you want to know what Christianity really means, you have to know monasticism,” wrote Kirejewsky.⁷ This is no isolated opinion; it is echoed, for instance, by Konstantin Leontiev.⁸ And the legends of the Russian saints make abundantly clear that the Eastern Church is wholly penetrated by monasticism. The growing interest in Eastern Christianity, therefore, will be something more than a vague enthusiasm for the Russian soul only if it also extends to Eastern monasticism, which conceals a truly marvelous piety under its alien garb.

Religious Russians have always been convinced of the immense importance of monasticism in the life of their people. Gogol, for instance, himself a deeply religious man, testified to the intimate connection between faith and the monastic life in the Eastern Church when he wrote: “There is no higher vocation than the monk's. Please God that we may one day don the cowl for which my soul longs. Merely to think of it fills me with great joy. But by our own strength we can never attain to this; we can attain to it only if God calls us to it.”⁹ Even Tolstoy, for all his opposition to the Church, was to experience the loving-kindness of Russian monasticism. During his last flight, at dead of night, he knocked at a monastery door to ask whether he might spend the night there even though he had been excommunicated. “We receive everyone, was the doorkeeper’s answer. Those simple words epitomize an attitude permanently characteristic of Eastern Christian monasticism.

It was in Western Christendom, however, that monasticism flourished most abundantly. During the barbarian invasions that engulfed the Roman Empire like a second Flood, the monasteries served as so many arks, salvaging the greater part of the writings of the classical authors, of the primitive Church, and of the Fathers.

Monasticism reached its peak in the Middle Ages; nearly all the great religious figures of the time were members of orders, and it is mostly to them that we owe whatever great Christian achievements the period produced. The religious orders constituted the spiritual arsenal of the Church; monks were the mainstay of medieval Christendom.

Most of the orders were founded in pre-Reformation times, but only within the Catholic Church have they continued to receive the care and the encouragement they require. That is why one tends to identify monasticism with the Catholic Church. In any case, they are intimately connected, and have constantly enriched one another.

For the Church the orders have been an inexhaustible well of holiness without which the Christian soil would long since have dried out. They have given the Church an abundance of saints whose lives have both demonstrated the transcendent character of Christianity and inspired other men to love it. Catholicism without monasticism is, indeed, unimaginable. It is not surprising, therefore, that those who desire to deal a mortal blow to the Catholic Church always begin by attacking the monasteries, the true powerhouses of Catholicism.

Yet while the Catholic Church lives primarily by the spiritual substance of her orders, and not by their political action, the progress of monasticism within the Church has been neither smooth nor steady. The curve shows sheer ascents succeeded by steep declines—but these latter are always made up again. New orders have constantly sprung up, affording the best proof of the Church’s inner vitality. This fruitfulness certainly did not come to a halt with the founding of the Society of Jesus, with which the present work concludes. The founders of orders we treat in these pages are only the outstanding ones; they are far from exhausting the list.

That Protestantism saw the light of day in the lonely cell of a monastery is too often forgotten. For nineteen years Luther belonged to a religious order, and monasticism was an aid far more than an obstruction in his path. His religious development, however, brought him into serious conflict with the monastic world, and only at the very end of his life did he come to appreciate the regenerated monasteries as fortresses of peace in a wicked world.¹ Btit he arrived at this conclusion too late to prevent Protestantism from inheriting his earlier antagonism to monasticism, and that anti-monastic attitude has remained with it ever since. Luther’s tragic step is too often oversimplified, and there is a tendency to forget that, in the depths of his soul, “he remained a monk, even though he no longer belonged to an order.”²

There are positive overtones even in Melanchthon’s Apologia Confessionis Augustinae, with all its attacks on monasticism; he speaks, for instance, of a few monasteries that “do know the holy Gospel of Christ,”³ and considers that “Bernard, Francis, and other” founders of orders should not be identified with the corrupt monasticism of his own day.⁴ In any case, early Protestantism was hardly in a position to debate these matters; it was in a state of active warfare, and was therefore obliged to combat monasticism in all its forms, eradicating it down to the last decaying institutions for ladies of noble birth. The modern Protestant attitude on this score was expressed by Adolf von Harnack: “The Reformation abolished monasticism, and was bound to abolish it. It rightly affirmed that to take a vow of lifelong asceticism was a piece of presumption; and it rightly considered that any worldly vocation, conscientiously followed in the sight of God, was equal to, nay, was better than, being a monk. But something now happened which Luther neither foresaw nor desired: ‘monasticism’ of the kind that is conceivable and necessary in the evangelical sense of the word disappeared altogether. But every community stands in need of personalities living exclusively for its ends.
The Church, for instance, needs volunteers who will abandon every other pursuit, renounce 'the world' and devote themselves entirely to the service of their neighbor; not because such a vocation is ca higher one, but because it is a necessary one, and because no Church can live without also giving rise to this desire. But in the evangelical Churches the desire has been checked by the decided attitude they have been compelled to adopt towards Catholicism. It is a high price that we have paid; nor can the price be reduced by considering, on the other hand, how much simple and unaffected religious fervor has been kindled in home and family life.”⁵

Protestantism was the poorer for suppressing monasticism. The Baptists who attempted in their own way to remedy this loss were accused by Heinrich Bullinger of new monkery. Nevertheless, various attempts have been made to introduce monasticism within the framework of Protestantism, and these attempts should not be regarded as the product of mere romantic enthusiasm. We might mention the gentle Gerhard Tersteegen, who organized a Protestant monastic community on the Otterbeck estate, giving it rules that have become a revered document of Protestant monasticism. Following in the footsteps of the Muhlheim weaver, Jean de Labadie tried to organize a similar group in Holland. And Albrecht Ritschl noted the connection between monasticism and the sort of Pietism evident in the rule for German deaconesses.

Some individual Protestants, moreover, have shown quite unexpected leanings toward the monastic life. Soren Kierkegaard, in particular, makes repeated references to medieval monasticism in his principal work Concluding Unscientific Postscript. It is characteristic that he should not only have been the first once again to regard Christianity as an existential doctrine, but also should have felt that he himself belonged to the monastic world. In his autobiographical work. The Point of View for My Work as an Author, he remarks that when he was writing Either-Or, in which he set out his views on ethics and esthetics, he was already, religiously speaking, in the cloister—as shown by his use of the name “Victor- Eremita.” He saw himself as a man dwelling in a monastery, and Martin Thust in his monograph on Kierkegaard stresses the theme: “Kierkegaard was a Protestant monk in the sense that he was able to achieve a unique combination of what was deepest in the old monastic way of life with that vindication of life in the world which is characteristic of the Reformation.”⁶ -These different attempts in the direction of monasticism must not, of course, be overestimated; nevertheless, they are symptomatic of a deficiency in Protestantism. The problem has never been fully resolved in the Protestant Church, and it should, indeed, be kept alive. To deal with it is more than ever important, now, when it has become only too apparent that community consciousness by itself offers too narrow a basis for the Christian life. The tragedy occurs when the community, as one of Bernanos’s characters has it, becomes a dead community. The Christian life has to be anchored in something deeper than church communities, and Christian brotherhood offers just such an anchorage.

III

A historical sketch of the development of Christian monasticism would be incomplete without a further analysis undertaken from the point of view of religion. This would be in the nature of an inquiry into the essential significance of monasticism, a weighing of it, as it were, on Job’s scales, to assay its worth in the light of eternity.

We are reminded, in this connection, of the famous words of a sixteenth-century German general, Georg von Frundsberg: “My dear little monk, you are taking a step the like of which neither I nor many a commander in our fiercest battle would take. If you are sure of being right, thoroughly convinced that your cause is of God, then proceed in the name of God, and be of good cheer: God will never forsake you.⁷ These words, spoken on a memorable occasion, could be applied validly to all monks. Nor has the diminutive “little” any derogatory intent; on the contrary, it betrays something akin to tenderness. For the path of the monk has never been easy or smooth; it leads to stark heights and somber depths, and keen courage is needed to tread it.

We shall not grasp the religious significance of monasticism by looking at it through rose-colored spectacles. Uncritical admiration is the principal defect, for instance, of the Comte de Montalembert’s monumental study The Monks of the West; it is doubtless to be ascribed to the author’s personal inexperience of the monastic life. The seasoned religious speaks in very different tones from those of the French romanticist, but he loves his cloister none the less for that. What is needed is not insipid, sometimes downright dishonest, eulogy, but an altogether new language. And this means discarding completely the kind of apologetics which, like Job’s friends, uses deceit in defense of God (Job xiii, 7); it means pointing frankly to shortcomings. Nor does such frankness derogate from the reverence that the subject deserves. It is quite unnecessary to gloss over the infirmities of monasticism. The reality of monasticism encompasses both heroic fulfillment and pitiful failure, and it proves its Christian vitality precisely when it endures the hardest blows.
The monk is called to a life that is far from ordinary. Unfortunately, too many merely ordinary men have sought to embrace it and, being unequal to the hardships it entails, have failed lamentably. It is they who have given rise to the absurd notion that the cloistered are prisoners of their own making, gloomily wasting their lives and depriving their countries of useful citizens. It is they, too, who have created the repulsive character of the monk who seeks to deceive God by means of his tonsure, as Benedict of Nursia puts it in his rule. Such people, who have no vocation, would do better to leap over the wall like Monica Baldwin, but it is certain that no one who has really been called will leap after them. The saddest part of it is the general corruption to which such individual attitudes have led. The decline of monasticism in the late Middle Ages which resulted from the decay of monastic discipline had catastrophic consequences for the whole of Christendom.

The dark pages of monasticism, which its adversaries cite with glee, must not be mistaken for monasticism itself. At the same time, we have no intention of overrating the importance of monasticism by calling it the highest form of the Christian life. Monks themselves have warned against that kind of exaggeration. In the letters of the Russian staretz Feofan, for instance, we read: “It is best not to consider whether or not one is called to the cloister; that is not the point. If the cloister is in a man’s heart, it is immaterial whether the building is actually there. The cloister in one’s heart means only this: God and the soul.”⁸ How admirably put! In appraising the monastic life, we must not be more monkish than the monks.

Considered from the point of view of religion, monasticism cannot but impress one by its greatness. In certain periods its positive contribution far outweighs its deficiencies. Its cultural achievements are there for all to see, and their value is permanent.

And yet to consider only its cultural achievements is to miss the whole point of the monastic life. For Christian monasticism can be comprehended only in terms of its own premises, and they are of an eminently religious nature. If we do not see monasticism as an absolutely Christian phenomenon, we do not really see it at all.

What is far more significant than all its external achievements is the love of God, a love directed straight to the eternal, a love that flourishes in the cloister like a rose.
The monk is the religious man par excellence, whose ardent desire to save his soul governs his every action. He sacrifices everything to his fervent love of Christ, which blazes in him like another burning bush. By means of the rule that he seeks to fulfill, he achieves discipline, and the Christian precepts to which he deliberately submits shape and illumine his whole life. His wholehearted submission to the supremacy of an absolute lends his life an aspect of order to which all confusion, internal or external, is wholly alien. This inner security gives the monastic life its aura of the divine.

By his deference to the rule, the monk is freed from the agitation and perplexity that harass the lives of other men. He knows where he wants to go, and he knows the way there; when he entered the cloister, he resolved to tread that way unfalteringly. The monk is a guide who does not simply tell others where to go, but goes there himself. It is hardly possible to predicate anything greater of a human being, and here we approach the permanent mystery of all monasticism. One of the main causes of the attraction that monasticism has never ceased to exercise lies precisely in the monk’s spiritual power to draw from the rich storehouse of his superior religious experience a positive answer to the problems of our troubled lives. There is nothing we need more, in our cheerless times, than these people who can direct souls, and from whom a healing virtue goes forth.

The objection that this is not a life that suits everyone is easily dismissed. Of course it does not suit everyone. But is there any way of life that would? Nevertheless, monasticism possesses a mysterious power of irradiation capable of penetrating to the darkest recesses of man s being. There are few institutions, indeed, in which the power the Gospel can release in man is so clearly visible. We must learn once more to see monks with the eyes of Leon Bloy: “Those men of prayer, unlettered, uncomplaining under the goad of persecution, whom we, in our idiotic sufficiency, assume to despise, those men bore the heavenly Jerusalem in their hearts and in their minds. They translated their ecstasies, as best they could, into the stone of the cathedrals, into the burning windows of the chapels, into the parch' ments of the books of hours. And all our endeavor, if we have but a particle of genius, is to return to that source of light.⁹

IV

These words bring us to another point: the mission of contemporary monasticism, which we should consider in the light of our analysis of monasticism from the historical and religious points of view.

There is no question, here, of championing a cause with single-minded passion; we are simply anticipating a particular result. The comments that follow should be regarded as the logical conclusion of the work as a whole; they are an epilogue offered as a prologue.

If we look squarely at the twentieth century, which refuses to learn from the experience of two world wars, we can hardly do otherwise than call it the century of destruction. Hurtling from one catastrophe into another, our world seems unable to find a way out of this vortex of death. The hideous symbol of this century is the man armed with a machine gun, stumping off over endless heaps of ruins. And every Christian who really takes his faith seriously is weighed down by the questions: What solution is there to this demonic apocalypse? Who is capable of offering effective challenge to the Beast from the Abyss? Who has the inner strength to meet the robot of our times and defeat him in spiritual combat? These are the tremendous questions that will run like a basic theme through Christian history in the coming decades.

To expect any solution from statesmen is vain. They cannot give what they do not possess. Governments think too exclusively in terms of politics and military strategy, to the total neglect of the spirit. That is why they are now so completely barren of any new ideas, and have to depend solely on diplomacy, which has constantly proved its inadequacy. Only Christianity can provide the means of reversing the tide that threatens to engulf civilization.

By Christianity we do not mean an interpretation of the Gospel which is itself tainted by corruption, but rather a renewed Christianity whose heralds will again go forth wholly unarmed, like sheep among wolves, truly obedient to the new commandment of love by which Christ’s disciples are known, and constituting am other little flock that has been granted the living hope of the kingdom.

Any attempt to achieve this renewal, to arrive at a Christianity free from compromise of any sort, must necessarily involve a return to the founders of the religious orders. Indeed, a renewal of the orders, in their original intent, would be one of the most effective aids in the spiritual conflict of our times. Such a reversion to the founders, unfettered by any preconceived ideas, would lead to a wonderful flowering of the noblest traditions of Western Christendom.

The fundamental and timeless virtues of the primitive Church find their purest expression in the founders of the great orders, and those monasteries whose primitive zeal has ebbed will be reinvigorated only by hearkening to their founders. The founders of the orders can be likened to a seed able to germinate, quite unexpectedly, centuries later. That is why a return to the spirit of the founders is the precondition for the new mission of monasticism in our times. If their first coming had such powerful effect, how great will be the consequences of their second epiphany for the life of the world!

Another major possibility is the deliberate endeavor to create new orders. A seemingly fantastic undertaking, perhaps, until we consider that, at a time when the face of monasticism is so radically changing, it need be no utopia. Indeed, that idea is really the purpose of the present work. And the reader must therefore bear with the author if he sometimes presents in faltering tones thoughts to which he would rather have lent the accent of adjuration.

The Christian knows, of course, that the Almighty is able to fulfill His plans in a thousand different ways that man has not even dreamed of. Yet it is difficult not to believe that it will be new religious foundations that will transform our times. Salvation, one feels, will come from a new, transfigured monasticism.

In order to realize the need for new monastic foundations, we have only to recall the significance of the religious orders of knight-hood for the Middle Ages. How much poorer Christendom became when these lines of communication between religion and the state disappeared! Nor will modern Christendom endure unless the spirit of monasticism is injected into our society anew. The urgency of this problem can no longer be ignored, but it must on no account be approached from a partisan, sectarian point of view, which never serves truth. Threatened Christendom needs new orders because only a new “brotherhood of those marked by pain,” as Albert Schweitzer put it, can provide the antidote to the spiritual malady of our day.

The creation of new orders is by no means outside the realm of possibility, as modern skeptics would have us believe, arguing that nowadays people are no longer capable of such self-sacrificing renunciation, of such an otherworldly approach to life. To this doubt, faith makes answer in the words of Christ: with God all things are possible. And the first timid steps are already being made in that direction. We might mention, among the various indications of this kind, the Protestant venture of Taize, near Cluny, even though it is still in its infancy. The development of similar communities of women in western Switzerland and Germany is proof that this undertaking is meeting a deep-seated need.

Deliverance from the distress of our times can come only from small groups with the courage to remain small, at first, so as not to be burdened by unsuitable elements. Their community life must be based on monastic rules that include binding vows and recognize the principle of religious sacrifice. In the new religious foundations the waters of mysticism are again beginning to flow. For the mystical life, which is one of the most essential conditions of a Christian renaissance, can flourish only in silence, and only in the mystical life can man achieve true union with God, without which there is no recovery.

But the new monasticism can bring about a real transformation in contemporary attitudes only if it does not remain entrenched behind a wall of traditional thinking. Instead of acting simply as the custodian of the past, it must deliberately turn toward the future.

The new foundations must blaze new trails and not be satisfied with being mere replicas of earlier orders. Throughout monastic history such daring ventures have been undertaken. For all that they are rooted in eternity, the new orders must wear the colors of the twentieth century, just as the eremitic movement was cast in a fourth'century mold.

However much we may long for new orders, they cannot be artificially created if they are not to be a mere sham. What is holy can never be commanded; it always grows like a living organism, and almost in silence. That the founders of the old orders were saints, sent by God at particular historical moments, is no coincidence. Holiness is as inseparably linked with the emergence of an order as is the order’s providential mission in history. New orders can only be prayed for; their creation depends on the breath of the Spirit. The founders of orders were vessels of the divine choice, and their foundations were works of grace. Authentic orders are always creations of the Spirit; hence their irresistible advance in their own times. And that is why, too, a new order may come into being at any time.

Until such time, we might well recall Dostoevsky’s Alyosha, that unique figure of holiness in an unholy setting. Surprisingly enough, Dostoevsky, who contributed so greatly to the understanding of the Russian monk, and who saw in him the bulwark against nihilism, does not let Alyosha, the beloved disciple, remain in Father Sossima’s monastery, but expressly sends him out into the world which needs him so very urgently. The intention is not that Alyosha should share in that “Karamazov vileness” which was the downfall of his brothers, Mitya and Ivan. On the contrary, Alyosha hastens off like an angel in human form to bring the message of salvation into the very heart of his brothers’ pain-racked world. Inwardly, Alyosha is enclosed in Father Sossima’s monastery, but outwardly he is in the world. By this duality he personifies the hidden cloister in the midst of the sinister world of the Karamazovs. By his mission, he appears as one of the first harbingers of that transfigured monasticism which we are waiting for and which will surely come. The Alyosha of our times will be a new kind of monk, proclaiming to the modern world a Christian message that alone can save it from its present peril.

WALTER NIGG

The case for polygamy

 

What is the case for polygamy (a.k.a. polygyny)?

Is monogamy the only legitimate form of marriage — or have we created a strange anomaly in which sexual chaos (hookups, serial relationships, sexual irresponsibility, and a kind of de facto poligamy) is tolerated while legal polygyny (which is can be regulated) remains taboo?

In this episode of The Mansplainers, we are joined by Rob Kowalski, author of Man of Options, for a provocative and wide-ranging conversation about polygyny, monogamy, Christianity, marriage, sex, responsibility, and the modern mating market.

Rob makes the biblical case for polygyny and challenges what he calls the modern Christian doctrine of “monogamy-only.” From there, the conversation goes far beyond theology to examine the history of the practic and the practical implications today.

Among the questions we explore:

What happens to other men if some men marry multiple women?

Does being sexually desirable to many women make a man a good husband or father?

How could plural marriage actually function under modern legal systems?

Why does contemporary culture tolerate people cycling through sexual partners while recoiling at the idea of a man assuming lifelong responsibility for more than one woman?

And the question that I found especially intriguing but had never considered:

Can polygyny help us rein in the out-of-control divorce industry?

31: “The Case for Polygamy”, featuring Rob Kowalski

What Is Real?

 

1. On the night of 25 March 1938, at 22:30, Ettore Majorana, who was regarded as one of the most talented physicists of his generation, boarded a Tirrenia steamer in Naples—where he had held the chair of theoretical physics for a year—heading for Palermo. In the words of the announcement published on 17 April in the “Chi l’ha visto?” column of the Domenica del Corriere, from that moment, except for unconfirmed reports and conjectures, every trace of “the thirty-one year old professor, 170 cm tall, lean, dark hair and eyes, with a long scar on the back of his hand” was lost. In spite of searches involving the police authorities and, under pressure from Enrico Fermi, the head of government in person, Ettore Majorana had disappeared forever. His relatives never accepted the possibility of suicide, which in itself seemed to convince the police that he had killed himself, and did not apply for a declaration of presumed death, as is usual in these circumstances. Unverifiable legends then circulated about the scientist’s escape to Argentina or Nazi Germany, his retreat to a monastery, and reappearance as a tramp in Sicily and Rome in the 1970s.

Every reflection on his disappearance should start from the letters Majorana wrote on the very day of his departure and the next as the only indisputable documents. A careful analysis of the texts shows that, at the very moment when he decides to disappear, Majorana seems to suggest divergent explanations for his gesture, as if he wanted to cover his tracks, intentionally leaving it open to contrasting interpretations.

***

4. In the early months of 1941, one year before the publication of Majorana’s article, Simone Weil began to write in Marseille an essay titled “La science et nous,” which is essentially a critique of quantum physics. The heterogeneity of the latter with respect to classical physics is placed in stark relief in the introduction: “To us, people of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have under this name is something different, radically different, and we do not know what it is.”4

According to Weil, classical science was constituted by considering every natural phenomenon in the light of a single notion, derived from that of work: the notion of energy. If I want to carry out work, for instance, moving a body from one place to another, I need to use a certain amount of energy; while, on the other side, the body in question will necessarily have to go through all the intermediate states between the initial and the final one. “Building upon the discoveries of Bernoulli and D’Alembert, Lagrange came to define by a single formula every possible state of equilibrium and motion of any system of bodies subjected to any force; this formula refers only to distances and forces or, what amounts to the same thing, to masses and velocities.”5 Classical physics added to the notion of energy thus defined an equally necessary principle of entropy. “This necessity derives from time itself and consists in the fact that it has a direction, in that the orientation of a transformation is never indifferent, whatever happens. We experience this necessity, not only through the aging that holds us ever more firmly in its grasp and never abandons us, but also through everyday events. A minimal moment or effort is sufficient to throw a book off the table, mix up a pile of papers, stain some clothing, crumple some linen, burn a field of wheat, or kill a man. But it takes considerable effort and time to put a book up on the table, put papers in order, clean clothing, and iron linen; a year of toil and care is necessary to produce a new harvest from the field, and one cannot make a dead man come back to life.”6This means that, in every phenomenon in which a transformation of energy is produced, it is not possible exactly to reestablish the initial state once the phenomenon has been accomplished. The second law of thermodynamics, formulated by Clausius, gave mathematical form to this reality through the fiction of a notion—entropy—that necessarily increases in every system in which a change occurs, so that, if external factors do not intervene, energy is dispersed and moves from order to disorder. “Such was the crowning achievement of classical science, which therefore claimed that it would be possible by calculations, measurements, and numerical equivalents to read across all phenomena that are produced in the universe simple variations of energy and entropy conforming to a simple law.”7 These variations amounted to necessary and continuous processes, and therefore one could say that classical science was based on the same necessity and continuity with which we are confronted every time we carry out work.

Quantum theory radically calls into question this correspondence between physical laws and the image of the world founded on the experience of work. “Twentieth-century science is classical science after something has been taken away from it. Taken away, not added. . . . We have subtracted from it the analogy between the laws of nature and the conditions of work, which is to say, its very principle; it is this that the quantum hypothesis has decapitated.”8 In classical physics, “energy is a function of space, and space is continuous; it is continuity itself; it is the world considered from the standpoint of continuity; it is things insofar as their juxtaposition implies something continuous.”9 Planck’s formula and constant introduced discontinuity into energy at the precise point at which, according to Weil, it cannot take place. In fact the appearance of discontinuity in physics is connected with the investigation of atomic systems, which thus reveal themselves to be subject to laws that are completely different from those of macroscopic systems. Moreover, according to Weil, the introduction of discontinuity entailed the emergence of probability: “Discontinuity, number, smallness; this is enough to make the atom appear, and the atom has come back to us along with its inseparable entourage, that is, chance and probability. The appearance of chance in science has been seen as scandalous; we asked where it came from and did not realize that the atom brought it; we forgot that, already in the ancient world, chance went along with the atom, and failed to realize that it could not have been otherwise.”10In the pages that immediately follow, the decisive factor that has led to quantum physics is not so much discontinuity as the calculation of probabilities. In a curious reversal, probability is not a function of the discontinuity of atomic systems, but rather the latter is derived from the former. Examining Planck’s writings—which Weil quotes repeatedly—“it clearly appears that what introduced discontinuity is not experience . . . but only the usage of the notion of probability.”11 In an article published in Cahiers du Sud in December 1942, this genealogical primacy of probability is stated once again: “One wonders whether it is not the very nature of the calculation of probabilities, which originates from the game of dice, and consequently from numerical relations, that led Planck to introduce whole numbers into his formula.”12 A few pages later, Weil adds: “When scientists came across discontinuity, they still went on reducing everything to variations of energy; they simply located discontinuity within energy, depriving it of all meaning. . . . The difficulty of establishing through the notion of probability a bridge between the world we are given and the hypothetical and purely mechanical world of atoms did not embarrass them; the consequences of quantum theory, which originates from the study of probability, prompted them to locate probability within the atoms themselves.”13 At this point, Simone Weil focuses on an examination of this concept.

5. Weil begins by referring the concept of chance [caso] back to that of necessity:14 “We are often mistaken about chance [hasard]. Chance is not the opposite of necessity and is not incompatible with it. On the contrary, chance always and only appears in relation to necessity. If we suppose a certain number of different causes producing effects according to a rigorous necessity, and if there appears in these effects a set that has a certain structure, we will obtain chance if we cannot group the causes in a set of the same structure. Due to its shape, a dice can only land in six ways; while, on the other hand, there is an unlimited variety of ways of throwing it. If I throw a dice one thousand times, its landings can be distributed into six classes that have numerical relations between them; the throws cannot be distributed in the same way. Moreover, I cannot presume the least deficiency in the texture of the mechanical necessity that determines at each turn the movement of the dice. If I throw the dice once, I ignore what the result will be, not because of an indetermination of the phenomenon, but because this is a problem where in part I do not know the givens. . . . In these games, the set of causes has the power of continuity, which means that the causes are like the points of a line; the set of the effects is instead defined by a small number of different possibilities.”15If chance is, in this sense, inseparable from necessity, then probability is in turn inseparable from chance, and thanks to probability chance becomes a quantity that may be controlled in experiments. “When, in games of chance, I consider the continuous set of causes and the small number of categories into which their effects can be distributed, I affirm that, although each effect proceeds rigorously from a cause, there is absolutely nothing in the set of causes that corresponds to these categories; that is what it means to say that there is chance. Hence these categories all have an identical relation to the set of causes that, at the same time, is indifferent to them. That is what it means to say that they are equally probable. The notion of probability always implies a distribution into equal probabilities. . . . With respect to the relation of probability to experience, it is analogous to the relation of necessity to experience. Experience presents an image of necessity when, by varying a cause, one obtains effects that vary according to a function; it presents an image of probability when the distribution of effects into categories gets closer and closer to the proportions indicated by calculation as the effects accumulate.”16At this point, Weil reconstructs the way in which Planck was led to introduce probability and discontinuity into the theory of physics through his constant, and how this principle was generalized in quantum mechanics: “There is a natural transition between the notion of entropy and that of probability, for the fact that if a system, isolated from external disturbance, can pass from state A to state B by means of any chain of intermediaries, but not the other way round, then state B is more probable than state A.”17 At the precise moment Planck was elaborating these ideas, chance appeared in the sphere of the atom. The observation of Brownian motion in fact showed that a fluid that appears to be in a state of equilibrium at the macroscopic level is not so at all at a microscopic level, and that, in general, a system defined in a certain necessary way on the first level corresponds on the molecular level to a plurality of possible combinations. “If we try to transfer necessity into the atomic sphere, the relation between two states of a system defined at a macroscopic level is no longer a necessity but a probability. This is not because of any flaw in causality, but only because of an effect of the oscillation of thought between the two levels, through a process analogous to that of a game of dice. A natural movement of thought led us to bring together the two probabilities simultaneously arising in our minds—the one linked to entropy and the other linked to atoms—and to consider them as one and the same probability. . . . However, since the calculation of probabilities is a numerical calculus, it was stipulated that the combinations of atoms are, so to speak, discrete and that their quantity is a number; this is the point of rupture with classical science.”18It is evident that Simone Weil is here making a decisive criticism of the idea that the statistical laws of quantum physics are not the consequence of an incomplete knowledge of the data concerning the state of a given system, but refer back—in Majorana’s words—to a deficiency of determinism in reality. The paradigm of necessity and of the cause-effect relation remains valid for quantum physics, and the superiority of classical physics is based precisely on this: “Some splendid verses of Lucretius suffice to give us a sense of what is purifying in the sight and experience of necessity; well-endured affliction is a purification of this kind, as is classical science also a purification, if one makes good use of it, for it tries to read through all appearances this inexorable necessity that makes of the world a world where we do not count, a world where we work, a world indifferent to desire, aspirations, and the good; it is the study of the sun that shines indifferently on the just and the unjust.”19

According to Weil, renouncing necessity and determinism in the name of probability, quantum mechanics has purely and simply renounced science. If the cause of the rupture with the continuous model of classical physics was the numerical character of the calculation of probabilities, Weil wonders at this point why scientists did not choose to work on the very notion of probability in order to elaborate a model of calculation that is not founded on discontinuity but on continuity—instead of changing the theory of physics from top to bottom.206. The same scientists who had contributed to laying the foundations of quantum physics themselves advanced criticisms of its probabilistic character. For instance, Louis De Broglie, who developed the theory of the simultaneously corpuscular and wavelike character of quantum particles, attempted to provide a non-probabilistic interpretation of this duality, which was by and large more compatible with the notions of classical physics. But the prevalent interpretation promoted by Niels Bohr, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and Paul Dirac rejected it. De Broglie claimed that this interpretation “considered both waves and particles, but in a way which relegated both to a sort of phantom existence and without any attempt to connect the two in a clear spatio-temporal model. The particle itself no longer had a fixed position, velocity, or trajectory—it could mark its presence only by revealing a given position, energy, and momentum at the moment of measurement. At any given moment, the particle may therefore be said to have a host of possible positions and momenta, each of which has a given probability of being found on measurement. Side by side with this evanescent particle which had ceased to be a definite object in space and time, there now existed a regular wave that had lost all the physical properties of the classical wave. The wave had become a purely mathematical function representing the probability of obtaining certain results from measurements of the particle.”21Even Einstein, who decisively contributed to quantum theory, had until the end reservations about an exclusively probabilistic interpretation of it. In May 1935, he published with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen an article in Physical Review titled “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?,” in which he argued that, insofar as it is the case that when two physical quantities are given in quantum mechanics, the knowledge of the one precludes the knowledge of the other (following Bohr’s complementarity principle), either the description of reality provided by the wave function is not complete or the two quantities exist simultaneously. The article, which ended by affirming the possibility of a complete physical theory, produced an immediate reaction from Bohr in the same journal. Bohr founded the complementarity principle—according to which it is impossible to assign defined values to two regularly combined variables, such as the velocity and the position of a particle—on the quantum principle that the interaction between the measuring instruments and the object under examination necessarily implies the abandonment of the classical idea of causality. In quantum mechanics, natural laws never lead to a complete determination of what occurs in space and time, and every event depends on chance and probability. At the end of his article, somehow maliciously but not unreasonably, Bohr recalls that what Einstein intended to criticize in the probabilistic character of quantum physics was nothing other than a consequence of his general theory of relativity: “This new feature of natural philosophy means a radical revision of our attitude as regards physical reality, which may be paralleled with the fundamental modification of all ideas regarding the absolute character of physical phenomena, brought about by the general theory of relativity.”22 But this modification of reality in a statistical sense was precisely the difficulty Einstein could not resolve throughout his life—and his reasoning was not without contradictions.

A few months after the polemic between Einstein and Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger—who, among the founders of quantum mechanics, had arguably the strongest philosophical background—intervened and proposed an experiment that became known as “the cat paradox.” He starts off by restating that, according to the prevailing interpretation, it is impossible to describe objects as one does in classical physics, and we therefore need to provide a purely probabilistic representation of them. Before the observer intervenes and measures the variables of a physical system, they have no definite value, and measuring them does not mean verifying the value they objectively have. The measurement irrevocably modifies the system, but prior to it, in probabilistic representation, the observable particle can be, so to speak, found simultaneously in every position it can assume, or, in the case of two distinct states, in any of their combinations.

Here Schrödinger introduces the “ridiculous case” of a cat that we are compelled to suppose is both alive and dead at the same time: “One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The psi-function of the entire system [i.e., the function that expresses its probabilistic state] would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.”23 It is only by opening the box that the observer forces the system (the cat) definitively to pass into one of the two states (alive or dead).

It is evident that, as was suggested by Simone Weil, the paradoxes in question in quantum mechanics derive from the unconditional assumption of probabilistic conceptions, which are not matched by an adequate reflection on the very nature of the notion of probability. For both the supporters of the orthodox theory and their critics, the state of the system before and after observation is not a real but a probabilistic state; however, they seem to produce a representation of this state and argue as if probability were a very special kind of reality, which one can think only in a paradoxical way (for example, as if a particle were at the same time in both state A and state B). But is it correct to represent the probable as if it were something that exists? In other words, what is at stake is a problem concerning the ontology of the probable—or the possible, since probability is nothing other than a possibility qualified in a certain way. Following Weil’s suggestion, at this point it is therefore necessary to focus on the very notion of probability.

7. The calculation of probabilities was elaborated in the context of a consideration of dice games. The treatise De ludo aleae, written by Gerolamo Cardano in 1575 but published only after his death, in 1663, enunciates its foundations for the first time. Cardano starts by distinguishing between games of dexterity—such as ball games—games of strength—such as wrestling and discus throwing—and games of chance—including cards and dice games. Cardano was a compulsive gambler and, in his autobiography, he confesses to playing dice every day for twenty-five years, “with the loss at once of reputation, time, and money.” However, he suggests that experience showed him that dice games are useful remedies against grief and death: “In times of great anxiety and grief, gambling is not only permissible, but even beneficial. . . . When it seemed to me after a long illness that death was close at hand, I found no little solace in playing constantly at dice.”

The “fundamental principle” (principale fundamentum) of dice games is the equality (aequalitas) of conditions, not only among players, who should not be too dissimilar in terms of power, money, and fortune, but first and foremost in the dice themselves, which should not be loaded. In Chapter IX, “De unius aleae iactu” (On throwing one dice), Cardano approaches a definition of probability. “The dice has six faces; in six casts (in sex revolutionibus) every single point should take place (evenire deberent).”24 This means that, if the dice is not loaded and the condition of aequalitas respected, the probability of each point is 1/6; but Cardano writes “should,” since he knows that as a matter of fact it may happen that the same number presents itself more often than others (this led some scholars to claim that he somehow intuited the law of large numbers, on which every statistical calculation is based). Chapter XIV thus articulates what could be regarded as a more explicit definition of probability: “There is one general rule, namely, that we should consider the whole circuit [for Cardano, the circuit is the set of possible results] and the number of those casts that represents in how many ways the favorable result can occur, and compare that number to the remainder of the circuit, and according to that proportion should the mutual wagers be laid.”25 Once he has established that, in the case of two dice, the number of the circuit is 36 (and 216 in the case of three), Cardano can calculate in specific tables the probabilities of the various points—for instance, given that the point three can be obtained only in one way (2+1) and the point ten in two ways (5+5 and 6+4), the probabilities are different in the two cases.

8. After elaborating these tables, Cardano claims that it is impossible to eliminate luck from the dice, “which makes some people benefit from unexpected cases and impoverishes others because of what they were expecting,”26 but a careful reading of his short treatise allows us to extrapolate the first features of a theory of probability. First of all, as Simone Weil sensed, the notion of probability presupposes a distribution among equal probabilities (that is, the principle of aequalitas, which Cardano enunciates in a still vague way). If we acknowledge chance, that is, the fact that the relationship between the events under examination (the landing of the dice) and their cause (the throw) is absolutely indifferent, this can be expressed by saying that such events are all equally probable. As Poincaré observed, from this it follows that the definition of probability is circular, since it contains the term that needs to be defined: “The probability of an event is the ratio of the number of cases favorable to the event to the total number of possible cases, provided that these are all equally probable.”27This circularity implies that the notion of probability never refers to a certain real event (a given throw of the dice as actual) but only to the event as considered in its pure possibility. In other words, probability presupposes that the human mind is capable of considering an event as possible and, moreover, as equally possible with respect to the class of events in question. This is the convention without which the calculation of probabilities is unthinkable. However, the fact remains that this calculation cannot concern an individual case, but only an imaginary being [ente di ragione] we call the “probable case.”

Let us consider the case of the roulette wheel evoked by Poincaré; a small ball is thrown onto a board divided into a large number of sections of equal size, painted alternately red and black. The probability that the ball stops on the red is 1/2. But this does not at all allow us to assume that the result of a given throw will be red even after six, ten, or twenty consecutive results of black. Only after a great number of throws shall we be able to ascertain that the average of the results is distributed according to the expected probability of 1/2. This is the meaning of the law of large numbers Bernoulli enunciated in his 1713 Ars coniectandi, which forms a system with the law of the equality of probabilities and confirms the principle that probability does not concern a real given event but only the tendency to infinity of the number of examined samples.

In other words, the principle that supports the calculation is the replacement of the realm of reality with that of probability, or the superimposition of the one upon the other. Those who act with probability in mind abide by this superimposition and are compelled to acknowledge, more or less tacitly, that although it never determines an individual real case, it can nonetheless influence to some extent their decisions with respect to reality, in spite of the evident paralogism. Modern science—and every single human being with it—directs its decisions according to a criterion that cannot directly refer to the case in question, but only to a “probable case” that can coincide with the former only “randomly” [casualmente].

If the probability of the plane I have to take crashing is 1/1000, then the crashing of that precise plane is an “unlikely case,” which remains such even after the plane has actually crashed. In Wittgenstein’s words, the world is only “all that is the case” and probability can therefore never exist as such, since it is nothing other than that very world, a world whose reality is suspended in order for us to be able to govern it and take decisions about it. What we call “case” is the fiction according to which the probable and the possible “fall” into reality, while the opposite is true; when considered in a certain way, it is the real that suspends its reality and can thus fall into itself as merely probable.

9. Perhaps there is no other text in which the aim and nature of the calculation of probabilities appear more clearly than in the 1654 correspondence between Pascal and Fermat. Antoine Gombault, Chevalier De Méré, proposed to Pascal the problem of the so-called interrupted game: if a dice game is interrupted before the final victory of one of the two players, how should the stake be fairly divided? Pascal’s solution is founded on the possibility of finding, by means of a calculation of risk (Pascal uses the term hasard and not probabilité, which he reserves for theology), the “proper value of each game” (la juste valeur des parties).

“This is the way I go about it to know the value of each of the games when two gamblers play, for example, in three games, and when each has put 32 pistoles at stake. Let us suppose that the first has won two games and the other one. They now play one game of which the chances are such that if the first wins, he will win the entire wager that is at stake, that is to say, 64 pistoles. If the other wins, they will be two to two and in consequence, if they wish to separate, it follows that each will take back his wager, that is to say, 32 pistoles.

Consider then, Monsieur, that if the first wins, 64 will belong to him. If he loses, 32 will belong to him. Then if they do not wish to risk this game, and put themselves at risk without playing it (s’ils ne veulent point hasarder cette partie et se hasarder sans la jouer), the first should say, ‘I am sure of 32 pistoles, for even a loss gives them to me. As for the 32 others, perhaps I will have them and perhaps you will have them; the risk is equal (le hasard est égal). Therefore let us divide the 32 pistoles in half, and give me the 32 of which I am certain besides.’ He will then have 48 pistoles and the other will have 16.”28

Commentators have often dwelt on the increasingly complex examples of calculation that Pascal examines in the course of the correspondence, which certainly influenced later treatises on probability. But we have thus lost sight of what Pascal aimed at with the solution of the problem, namely, to enable a decision about reality through an exact probabilistic assessment of possibilities. As suggested by the very phrase “interrupted game,” it was a matter of suspending the real game in order to replace it with a calculation of risks, which made it possible to decide the division of the stake that was most equitable and useful in this perspective. The expression se hasarder sans jouer is particularly significant; the one who calculates probability relies on risk without actually taking a risk, that is to say, he leaves reality and at the same time transforms chance—l’hasard—into a principle allowing him to decide on reality. This means that probability is never punctually realized as such, nor does it concern a single real event, but, as Majorana understood, it allows us to intervene in reality, as considered from a special perspective, in order to govern it.

The concept of hasard developed in the letter to Fermat reappears in Pascal precisely where we would least expect it, that is, in the well-known passage about the wager (pari) with which the believer wagers on the existence or inexistence of God, and on the uncertainty of eternal life as opposed to earthly pleasures. Let us suppose that heads corresponds to the existence of God and eternal life and tails to his inexistence, and that the gamblers are obliged to wager. The disparity between the infinity of possible gains and the finitude of the equally possible loss requires that we do not take account of a probability that could be calculated but decide only on the basis of the stakes. The uncertainty of the gain is in fact consubstantial with the game, and the calculation is used precisely in order to decide in a situation of uncertainty and not to ensure an impossible certainty. “It is no good saying that it is uncertain whether you will win, that it is certain that you are taking a risk (il est certain qu’on hasarde), and that the infinite distance between the certainty of what you are risking and the uncertainty of what you may gain makes the finite good you are certainly risking equal to the infinite good that you are not certain to gain. This is not the case. Every gambler takes a certain risk (hasarde) for an uncertain gain, and yet he is taking a certain finite risk for an uncertain finite gain without sinning against reason.”29 If the risk of winning is equal to that of losing, but what is at stake is, on the one hand, something infinite and, on the other, something finite, it is clear that the gambler cannot but take this into account. The same calculation that in the “interrupted game” recommended us to divide the stakes of the last game into two equal parts, suggests us here—given that the stake is not divisible—to bet on what would be a decidedly higher gain. The wager with which I decide upon my life depends on the stakes and not on verification of its probability of winning—which is, moreover, impossible.

10. Modern statistics takes for granted the idea that probability is independent of its empirical verification. The recurrent tendency ingenuously to consider the distribution of frequencies of a given value as an objective property of the system under examination is therefore stigmatized as a “naturalistic fallacy.”30 It is in fact important not to confuse the calculation of probability with its experimental verification. If in flipping a coin the observed frequency of heads and tails is not 0.5 but 0.7, or that of a dice throw is not 1/6 but 3/6, this does not mean that the probabilistic theorem is wrong, but that it is probable that the coin or dice is unbalanced and needs to be replaced.

Statistics is not a science that aims at an experimental knowledge of the real; rather, it is the science that enables us to take decisions in uncertain conditions. For this reason, as was evident in its origins in dice games, the concept that underlies probability is not so much frequency over a long period of time as the “critical odds for a bet,”31 in which frequency is used not to infer a supposedly real property of the system, but—precisely as happens in quantum mechanics—to corroborate or refute a previous conjecture (which is fully comparable to a wager).

11. The idea that potency or possibility (dynamis) should be considered as a way of being along with actuality (energeia) dates back to Aristotle. Against the Megarians, who claimed—not without good reason—that potency exists only in the act, that is, in the occurrence of its exercise, Aristotle objects that if this were the case we could not consider an architect to be an architect when he is not building or call a doctor who is not exercising his art, “doctor.”32 In other words, potency (which Aristotle attributes especially to human techniques and knowledge) is constitutively defined by the possibility of its exercise, its power to be or not to be and to pass or not to pass to the act. According to all the evidence, what is here in question is the way of being of possibility, which indeed exists in the form of not yet being in act, that is, of existing independently of its actual realization. For this reason Aristotle can affirm that “every potency is the impotency [that is, the potency not to be] with respect to the same [thing] of which it is the potency.” The possibility of suspending its own realization is inherent to the very concept of potency.

Although he affirms without reservation the existence of potency, not without contradiction, Aristotle decidedly subordinates the sphere of dynamis to that of reality and energeia. Energeia precedes possibility according to both concept and substance, not only because the adult necessarily precedes the child and man precedes his seed, but also because everything that is potential tends toward the act as its own end. Living beings thus have the possibility of seeing in order to actually see, and not vice versa, and mankind has the possibility of knowing in order to know, and not just to have the faculty of knowing. For this reason, Aristotle can state that, on the one hand, if there are no impediments, what is possible will naturally pass to the act, and, on the other, it does not make sense to speak of possibility with regard to things that necessarily exist.33Aristotle was not familiar with the concept of probability, but he addressed chance (which he called automaton and tuche) in relation to his doctrine of the four causes (material, formal, efficient, and final). Chance is a non-cause, or an accidental cause, which we refer to when events that seem to have been produced because of a given final cause are instead produced accidentally and unexpectedly. If a man who goes to a certain place but without the intention of collecting a debt accidently meets his debtor, who is himself there by chance and pays his debt, we will say that the collection of the debt occurred apo tuches, because of chance.34

It goes without saying that Aristotle rules out that there can be a science of chance and what is accidental: “There can be no science of the accidental, because every science has as its object that which is so always or usually, and the accidental falls under neither of these descriptions. . . . Chance [or fortune, tuche] is the accidental cause of things that happen because of a decision in view of an end. Hence chance and thought have the same sphere of action, for there is no decision without thought. There are infinite causes from which fortuitous accidents may come about; for this reason, fortune is inscrutable to human reason and is a cause only accidentally, but in an absolute sense is a cause of nothing.”35If we try to define probability in Aristotle’s terms, we may say that it is a potency emancipated from its hierarchical subjection to the act. Insofar as it has secured an existence that is independent of its actual realization, such a possibility tends to replace reality and thus to become the object of a science of the accidental—unthinkable for Aristotle—that considers possibility as such, not as a means of knowing the real, but as a way of intervening in it in order to govern it. The analogy with Aristotelian dynamis is all the stronger here since the latter was indeed the specific dimension of human techniques and knowledge. In De Anima, Aristotle thus comes to define the intellect as “a being whose nature is potential being” and compares it to a writing tablet on which nothing has yet been actually written. What happened in modern statistics and quantum physics is that the writing tablet—pure possibility—replaced reality, and knowledge now knows only knowledge itself. Following the beautiful image given by a medieval philosopher, what does not stop being written on the tabula rasa of the intellect is not reality but the very potency of thought, “as if the letters wrote themselves on the tablet.”

12. If we now return to the motivation for Majorana’s disappearance, we may argue that the article we examined earlier shows beyond doubt that he had clearly seen the consequences of the introduction of probability into physics. If we need to rule out every psychological interpretation—as he never tires of repeating that we should—then the meaning of his decision to disappear must somehow refer to this problematic context. The limit of Sciascia’s interpretation, however subtle, is that, if we suppose that Majorana abandoned physics because he had grasped that it led to the atomic bomb, then his decision to disappear and retreat to a monastery appears to be a consequence of the dismay (Sciascia speaks of “disquiet” and “fear”) caused by the disastrous path science had taken. This means locating the decision in that psychological dimension that Majorana wanted to dismiss; just like the “Ibsen heroine” evoked in the letter to Cardelli (probably the character of Nora in A Doll’s House, who abandons her husband because she has lost her moral certainties), Majorana renounced physics because he had lost faith in science.

If we instead accept that his case is intentionally “different”—as Majorana insistently demands, and against the biased testimonies of his colleagues from the Institute of Physics regarding the “eccentricity” and “abnormality” of the “Saracen” (as Amaldi defines him, in a friendly spirit)—then his disappearance must contain in itself, along with its motivations and meaning, a decisive objection to the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. It is worth recalling that when Majorana met Fermi, the latter was well known for the statistical model that is still named after him (depending on the statistical model they follow, all particles are divided into bosons, which accord with the statistics of Bose and Einstein, and fermions, which accord with the statistics of Fermi and Dirac). As Simone Weil sensed a few years later, Majorana immediately realized that, as soon as we assume that the real state of a system is in itself unknowable, statistical models become essential and cannot but replace reality (as he wrote in the article we have cited, “the result of any measurement seems, therefore, to be concerned with the state the system is led to during the experiment rather than with the unknowable state of the system before being perturbed”).

The hypothesis I intend to put forward is that, if quantum mechanics relies on the convention that reality must be eclipsed by probability, then disappearance is the only way in which the real can peremptorily be affirmed as such and avoid the grasp of calculation. Majorana turned his very person into the exemplary cipher of the status of the real in the probabilistic universe of contemporary physics, and produced in this way an event that is at the same time absolutely real and absolutely improbable. When, on that evening in March 1938, Majorana decided to vanish into thin air and render ambiguous every experimentally detectable trace of his disappearance, he asked science the question that still awaits its unrequestable [inesigibile] and yet ineluctable answer: What is real?

What Is Real?

Giorgio Agamben