Notes on Ancient Conversion

Abstract: I offer here some miscellaneous notes on ancient conceptions of conversion, focusing primarily on two models: the Greek metanoia and the Roman conversio. I trace some of their historical vicissitudes and offer a political reading of their ongoing relevance.

As to metanoia, I ought to trace its beginnings as both a rhetorical and philosophical principle: as a trope of rhetoric, it is a form of correction, where one may retract and thus amend a statement; as a philosophical tenet, it has an important trajectory, beginning as a Greek idea approximating a “change of heart” but welding to the moralizing doctrines of Christianity as closer to repentance and reformation. Plato, primarily in terms of “turning the eye of the soul” (Rep. 533b)—we should compare this to the stoic Polemon’s turn from hedonism to moderation, the stories of Plotinus and Antisthenes, and Nock’s commentary on Apuleius’ Golden Ass. For Socrates, the essence of metanoia is through paideia: the right/correct knowledge is all the soul needs to “see” in order to transform. Metanoia’s personification as a female, shadowy companion to Kairos, as opportunity in negative; the Christianization of this figure preserves the feel of melancholy and regret, as well as the ultimate change in agency, but directs the discourse more toward confession and sin (see Foucault). See Philo Judaeus and his Judaic-Hellenistic syncretism, and particularly his appropriation of Aristotle: conversion will look differently under the one true god as it does the pluralism of pagan mysteries.

Abraham stands as the archetype of gentile conversion, while it is Moses who represents the figure of the “returning Israelite”—Philon’s reading is here particularly instructive. See, too, the myth of the instant-conversion, of Saul into Paul of Tarsus (Acts 9:3-5); for the apostles, the focus was on the spread and replication of miracles, which trumped preaching in the vulgate; the mass conversion of barbarian populations were still based around narratives of the immanent use of miracles, well into the Medieval era. Justin sits at the threshold between Neoplatonism and Christianity (Trypho 4): the idea of rekindling belief as the basis of conversion. Augustine as the exemplar of the crystalline conversion from Manichaeism, to Platonizing Christianity and finally to a full-fledged biblical faith[1]; see, too, Augustine’s commentary on Victorinus. Antony’s departure to the desert, the turn to the wilderness and the rise of monastic asceticism. Clovis the Frank modeled after Constantine and the conversion at the Mulvian Bridge; see also Aethelbert of Kent (c. 601) and Reccared (from Arianism to Catholicism, c. 587). Cicero develops a full theory of rhetorical movere drawn from Roman political/judicial practice; Quintilian, in turn. Finally, Hierocles is worth note, both for his Golden Verses and Proem, and his commentary on metanoia.

I recently reread Hebrews 11:13 (“All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth”; see, also, Genesis 23:4 (“I am a foreigner and stranger among you. Sell me some property for a burial site here so I may bury my dead”); Exodus 2:22 (“Zipporah gave birth to a son, and Moses named him Gershom, saying, ‘I have become a foreigner/pilgrim in a foreign/unholy land’”); 1 Chronicles 29:15 (“We are foreigners and strangers in your sight, as were all our ancestors. Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope”); Psalm 119:19 (“I am a stranger on earth; do not hide our commands from me”); 2 Corinthians 4:18 (“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal”—see the Platonic doctrine of eidos and Arthur Lovejoy’s notion of otherworldliness), 5:6 (“Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord”)), and realized that the problem of alienation and its relation to homeness is here displayed viz. the problem of “making peace” with one’s alienated, earthly condition. Is the sacred not based on this alienation, not as tangential pillar, but as necessary condition? The sacred, I would argue, is that which is either too alien/distant, or too immanent/familiar/intimate (see Robert Orsi, History of Presence; Thomas Romer, The Invention of God; Rudolf Otto on the sacred)—either condition is one of infinity, determined by infinitely giving into this alienation or by infinity transcending it.[2] The corresponding spectrum runs between two antipodes which are both forms of decadence: at the one extreme, asceticism and nihilism; at the other, unrestrained hedonism and philistinism.

I previously and naïvely thought that what religion in part accomplished viz. its faithful was a fairly direct injection of homeness into the conscious life-world of the believer—but of course the story is far more complicated than this. What we see in Hebrews11:13 above is the acknowledgement that this world means: alienation, strangeness, discomfort, tribulation, suffering. It is at best a “test” of one’s faith to even exist. The great Catholicism of Kant and Hegel was to redeem this suffering structurally, to make it a necessary and even “happy” condition of history itself—a metaconversion of abstract discourse and raw pain. To this end, and against this pessimism, Christianity offers an inverted home: “yes,” it says, “you are a stranger, an alien, a nomad—but you can make peace with this. Your true home is elsewhere, beyond the meanwhile; it is after; it is God.” So stand’s Weber’s analysis of the puritan ethic, Lovejoy’s understanding of otherworldliness, and the whole business of worldly rejection—a rejection that is ironically supposed to instill the comforts of a prorogued homeness. And so the distance between where one is and where one has yet to go/arrive constitutes the journey—but it is this chasm between the lived world and the envisioned home which is also the basis for alienation. And so religion provides a particular pharmakon in reaction to this existential anxiety: but its relief is mixed with the continued existence of the disease, and the practice of religious homeness becomes parasitic at this juncture. How can rejection of this form ever not be a paradox—e.g. ever provide the type of homeness that narrows/eradicates the gap between actual and envisioned homes?[3] Or: why is it that so many find solace in this form—what type of solace is offered, and what type is found? At its best, this rejection may also be read as an acceptance, a giving into one’s experience of alienation that has the potential to also transcend it; but how does this transcendence occur? Does one diminish alienation not by resisting it, but by accepting it? Or perhaps it is more pragmatic, more human: because suffering is immediate and cannot be relieved, hope alone provide the only impetus forward, the only response to Camus’ Sisyphean injunction. Religion provides this hope, though it may never be satisfied.[4]

Man was not necessarily born malignant, nor is it really a matter of delaminating a natural innocence/goodness vs. civilizational corruption[5]; we might rather say: man was born with daemons. That is, he was born too close to himself.[6] To this end, the great object of philosophy and government is to provide a specific type of therapy viz. the creation of a home for man by drawing him out of himself in particular ways. This “drawing out” is not an effort to abstract or excise man, but to ek-stasisize him, to have the will-to-second-order-perspectivism come not from without, but from within.[7]

I am reminded here of a structural affinity between William Connolly’s notion of the split between one’s sentiments and one’s dogmatic beliefs, and Simone Weil’s notion of a universal vs. particular love (see her May 26th, 1942 Letter VI from Casablanca, titled “Last Thoughts”—Simon Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 49-51): “Our love should stretch as widely across all space, and should be as equally distributed in every portion of it, as is the very light of the sun….When a soul has attained a love filling the whole universe indiscriminately, this love becomes the bird with golden wings that pierces an opening in the egg of the world. After that, such a soul loves the universe, not from within but from without; from the dwelling place of the Wisdom of God, our first-born brother. Such  a love does not love beings and things in God, but from the abode of God….We have to be catholic, that is to say, not bound by so much as a thread to any created thing, unless it be to creation in its totality…They [the Saints] were able implicitly to give the right place in their soul, on the one hand to the love due only to God and to all his creation, on the other to their obligation to all that is smaller than the universe….Friendship is the one legitimate exception to the duty of only loving universally.”—it seems to me that Weil’s division between universal love and particular friends, the “thread” that connects us to the material world that she associates with Saint John of the Cross, is analogous to Connolly’s notion, in that one may love one’s beliefs, but must hold friendship with one’s sentiments. In the background, too, is Kant: in order to make a universal law, one must first possess the right frame of love, e.g. universal love.

In this frame, “virtue” is: a form of the decision’s interpretation. Virtue is categorical—so long as there are others at all. The question: does this action make better off others than they would have otherwise been (“others” here in the universal sense)? It is not “how to legislate for all men?” nor “does this benefit the most men?” but: “how to make benefit all men?” Of course, the narrower the definition of “all men” becomes, the easier the implementation of a program. The focus here is on Jefferson’s understanding of the “living generation”—not, for instance, some imagined future utopianism. Thus, to be virtuous is: to decide in a manner that all are made better. To make virtuous is to convert to goodness. The act becomes the thing itself, and we are left with a model that is closer to Wittgenstein’s notion of rule-following than an abstracted and abstract ethical system.

Laws made out of friendship, laws made with friendship in mind, may be intersubjectively beneficial but are often objectively damaging. Another way to look at this problem we draw from Connolly/Weil/Kant: how does the pragmatic notion of “making another trip” relate to ek-stasisizing another?[8]

More generally, it seems to me that the alienation and release from a man’s natural idiosyncratic proclivities often has the effect of lessening his alienation from his fellow man: Hegel in reverse, where sociation—or, the assimilation into the social world—is not a synthesis of the self to society, but a rejection/suppression of certain impulses and temptations of the self[9]: one trades self-alienation for social alienation, or vice-versa. Or, not Hegel in reverse, so much as the disease to which the Hegelian remedy is applied. And so we see the irony of this paradox, where one must choose between two sorts of home, the first being a home-in-oneself, the second being a home-in-others/alterity.[10] This is the same binary replayed in Lovejoy’s notion of otherworldliness viz. 1 Corinthians 13:12, and the more general paradoxes of religious homeness and alienation I have tried to explore viz. Hebrews above.

Our positive goal here might be to develop a form of alienation that does not suffer from, or operate through, an ascetic decadence or pessimistic nihilism, or a type-of tyrannizing positive liberty, but rather a personal ethics of attentiveness which responds directly to/seeks to pacify the inherent civil war of the self from which religious doctra draw their energies and turns their critical ire.[11] And so the most fundamental irony of organized religion might be this: that so much of its purposeful energies are devoted to alleviating man of his need for religion in the first place—to eradicate the pride that leads him to adopt it, to mitigate the alienation that keeps him amidst its thrones—yet it does so parasitically, impossibly, with the aim not of curing the patient, but of providing palliative care. A permanent form of self-conversion—one that enables both inward and outward movement, the release of energies and drives endogenously and exogenously. We might draw a distinction between religion as cure vs. religion as palliative therapy. Or: the netted catch of religion throws back into the water the souls it gleans—but it does so with hooks left in, so to speak.

But what of a secular sacredness?[12] Just as a crisis in faith does not have to be about God, the sacred need not be a function of the religious—though this is, of course, its most consistent and amenable choice of vehicle/catalyst. I would thus define the condition of sacredness as: that which exceeds its value (“valuation” here taken as constitutive of normal judgment).[13] How does one valuate that which is infinite?—e.g. that which is beyond the measurements of valuation?[14]

Further, I want to explore more thoroughly the role of vanities, memento mori and discourses regarding ars moriendi and their relation to a society’s view of itself and its thaumaturgic relation to death—and whether a ghostly, haggard aesthetic of this kind constitutes a workable system for the type of political “wonder” appropriate to the secular democratic state. See Plato (Phaedo, 64a4) and Jeremy Taylor (Holy Living, Holy Dying, c. 1650) on its relation to the cultivation of Christian character.[15] See Ecclesiasticus 7:40: “in omnibus operibus tuis memorare novissima tua, et in aeternum non peccabis” (“In all thy works be mindful of thy last end and thou wilt never sin”); Virgil’s Ecologues, 42ff: “et in arcadia ego” as used to combat the ancient doctrines of hedonism, captured in the classical notion “nunc est bibendum” (“now is the time to drink”). See, too, the prevalence of inscripted “death clocks”: “tempus fugit”; “ultima forsan” (“perhaps the last [hour]”); “vulnerunt omnes, ultima necat” (“they all wound, the last kills”)—all employed to counter the presence of vanitas as an individual character flaw. Or: against death, what is man’s pride? Death conquers vanity, and all wonder, all poetry has the tinge of death to it. See, by example, the Jacobean cult of melancholia at the end of the Elizabethan era—the birth of the “elegy” and “requiem” as artistic, existential-expressive forms. See, too, the notion of the “vallis lacrimarum” (“vale of tears”), or “sic transit gloria mundi” (“so passes the glory of the world”)—used in papal coronations from 1409 until 1963. See Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ (1418): “o quam cito transit gloria mundi” (“oh how quickly passes the glory of the world”). See, too, Thomas Moore’s pessimism, captured in the phrase “all that’s fair must fade”; or Locke’s notion of perpetual perishing. Of course, the pinnacle of the otherworldly mentality, 1 Corinthians 13:12: “videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate: tunc autem facie ad faciem. Nunc cognosco ex parte: tunc autem cognoscum sicut et cognitus sum”; Horace’s Odes: “pulvis et umbra sumus.” Virgil’s beautiful line: “Death twitches my ear: ‘live,’ it says, ‘I am coming.’” But from this invocation we arrive at such varied responses: Schopenhauer’s pessimism; Nietzsche’s split between the nihilism of the last man and the laughing exuberance of the ubermensch; the divergence between asceticism, with its rejection of/turning away from the world, and epicureanism, with its reveling in/celebration of the world, more generally—the latter might be summed up by the expression “dum vivimus vivamus” (“while we live, let us live”). But which of these fundamental discourse-cleavages turns away from death, and which towards? The invention of Eros and Thanatos. See, too, the potential of wonder and curiosity: “ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt” (“where are those who came/were before us?”). How far from the ancient tree has our modern, popular discourses—I think of the YOLO campaigns, Springbreakers, etc.—fallen? We seem to have amputated the reflection on death but kept the hedonistic reaction—a hollowed-out hedonism that has neither the romance nor the affect of its ancient counterpart. Is YOLO merely a modern memento mori—but neoliberalized?

It would be interesting to compare all this to what Josef Chytry has termed the “aesthetic state,” and, on a more philosophical level, how aesthetic dimensions of memento mori relate to Kant and Schiller’s idea of play. Further, to what end do these memento mori ground their aesthetic force/employ the use of existential fear?[16] Does one’s proximity to death in this colloquial capacity desensitize and ameliorate, or does it magnify and intensify?

I am reminded here of George Saunders’s recounting his near death experience in a plane (On Joel Lovell, review in NY Times, Jan. 3rd, 2013)[17]: there is a unique clarity arrived at “near the end”,[18] a unique clarity that comes about only as a “death perspective.”[19] This is different than having “one’s life pass before one’s eyes”: it is rather a type of fresh-breathe, a cutting-through, a clearing. The question really becomes one of sustainability, whether the adoption and vigilant management of a regime of attention is really ameliorative in nature or whether it adds another burden, and what the nature of this burden looks like. Or: how to make colloquial a type of care reserved for a brush with the extraordinary? How to make the poetic moment a daily occurrence—but to do so without depleting it of its force and fury?

Certainly, and in a more explicitly political/historical format, the relation between these death-discourses and the authority of the state, particularly its monopolization over forms of violence[20], ought to be scrutinized further. If we accept this monopoly of violence as a condition of modern sovereignty, then is it such a stretch to suggest something like: the state should retain a monopoly over death more generally? But this of course sounds very totalitarian, almost Auschwitz-like in its dystopian shadow; this is not what I envision, though I need to flesh out the way death/depictions of death might factor into the utopia I am working through.

Another aspect of conversion that seems salient is the problem of Katecheseis Mystagogikai. “Mystagogy” in the traditional sense refers to a period of indoctrination following the baptism of adults: the sacraments are not so much the focus as are the various rituals, metaphors, rites and practices that surround and buttress and make pragmatic those sacraments.[21] Neophytes are asked/placed in a situation where a new faith, drawn from new sources, supposedly emerges—all in the context and with the participation of the whole congregation; see St. Ambrose and St. Cyril for early examples of homilies aimed at initiating the newly-baptized more completely into the Christian fold. Many aspects of mystagogy fell out of use following the middle ages, when the baptism of children came to replace the baptism of adults as the common practice. Only post-1972, with the Rites of Christian of Adults, does mystagogy re-appear as a generally recognized practice within the church.

Related to mystagogy is the logical fallacy Argumentum ad Mysteriam. Elements of this fallacy include: “A darkened chamber, incense, chanting or drumming, bowing and kneeling, special robes or headgear, holy rituals and massed voices reciting sacred mysteries in an unknown tongue  have a quasi-hypnotic effect and can often persuade more strongly than any logical argument.  The Puritan Reformation was in large part a rejection of this fallacy.[22] When used knowingly and deliberately this fallacy is particularly vicious and accounts for some of the fearsome persuasive power of cults.  An example of an Argumentum ad Mysteriam is the “Long Ago and Far Away” fallacy, the fact that facts, evidence, practices or arguments from ancient times, distant lands and/or "exotic" cultures  seem to acquire a special gravitas or ethos simply because of their antiquity, language or origin, e.g., publicly chanting Holy Scriptures in their original (most often incomprehensible) ancient languages, preferring the Greek, Latin, Assyrian or Old Slavonic Christian Liturgies over their vernacular versions, or using classic or newly invented Latin names for fallacies in order to support their validity.” Here we see how the category of the “ancient” may itself become the basis for a form of persuasion and conversion, how the foreignerization of a principle or ideal to the opaque quadrants of unknown and sacred histories haunts the registrar of the logical and the understood. Hazard’s work in The Crisis of the European Mind offers here some powerful insight; while I cannot elaborate fully here, this also reminds me of the power of the “anecdote”—see Haydn White and Paul Fleming.

[1] See Matthew Scherer.

[2] Levinas has some pertinent statements here.

[3] For a theorist like Hegel, this might arrive when the synthesis between object and subject is completed; for Rousseau, Schiller and Marx, a matter of undoing alienation.

[4] See, too, Koselleck here, and the implications this all has viz. frameworks of temporality and worldview.

[5] I mean here to carve out a space between Hobbes’ realist-pessimist account of man and Rousseau’s nature/civilization binary. Madison, too: “If men were angels….”

[6] I think here of Arendt and Kierkegaard.

[7] Berlin comes to the fore here viz. positive liberty: what would a political program devoted to this type of ek-stasis production look like? How would it relate to positive liberty? Foucault, Althusser on internalization.

[8] Peirce, James, Dewey and Rorty all have pertinent models here.

[9] See Wilhelm Reich and Sigmund Freud.

[10] Aristotle on the zoon politikon is here relevant.

[11] A line here connects Socrates to Nietzsche to even thinkers like David Foster Wallace, Heidegger and Arendt.

[12] See Schmitt, Heidegger; Schiller on art. The problem of the optimal relation between state control/intervention and individual freedom necessarily follows in wake, and Koestler moves to the fore. See, too, my general argument concerning the democratic state’s monopoly over the means of wonder/affect.

[13] Marx and Nietzsche take up two tectonic positions here.

[14] Cantor’s paradox, set-theory, Cohen, Quine: it is here that applied mathematics and formal logic might offer valuable theoretical inroads.

[15] I would add: Diderot’s commentary ont eh experience of “ruins,” Heidegger on being-toward-death.

[16] See Corey Robin, Hobbes, Shklar on fear.

[17] I here link Saunders’s account to David Foster Wallace’s idea of attention/awareness in the “This is Water” Kenyon commencement speech and Heidegger’s notion of Being-toward-death.

[18] Kermode: the end is what gives closure/clarity to the whole.

[19] Panofsky on perspective; Plato on turning one’s soul toward truth, seeing truth.

[20] See Max Weber and Foucault.

[21] See David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics and Power.

[22] See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, for some extraordinary inroads on this front. R. H. Tawney also offers valuable resources here.