Misanthropy Page 4
It is hardly surprising, then, that Juvenal should be given to savage indignation, that an electrifying rage should pulsate through the satires (though he becomes more moderate, or at least ironical, as they progress). But what both Persius and Juvenal understand very well is that the social scene that they hold in such contempt is a manifestation of and inseparable from an arbitrary and despotic power. When Persius satirizes contemporary poets and their clichéd, thoroughly conventional box of classical tricks, he is particularly thinking of those who clustered round Nero. When, in Satire IV, Juvenal wants to expose the vacuity of Roman political structures and social life, together, he stages a discussion of the fate of a giant turbot – as held by Domitian, chilly, sadistic tyrant, with the assembled grovellers that make up his Privy Council, quailing ‘beneath the Emperor’s hatred’, their ‘drawn white faces’ reflecting ‘that great and perilous “friendship”’ (SSiv, 73–5, p. 26; intellectual disgrace, indeed). As Persius puts matters, ‘Sadistic lust with its dagger/ Dipped in fiery poison invites dictators to crime’ (Siii, 35–6, p. 145). The corruption of the people is both their refuge from the horror of the regime to which they are implicitly subscribing and a token of their craven failure to resist it.
Present-day critics have complained about Juvenal’s misogyny, his homophobia, anti-Semitism and racism. Indeed, they have sometimes been so embarrassed by such attitudes (as they take them to be) that they have argued he was inventing personae, as if nice Juvenal donned nasty mask in order to fulfil his principal intention, which was to satirize prejudice.41 But they miss the point. Juvenal castigates everyone, emperors, Romans, men and heterosexuals, too. He takes aim, indiscriminately, at a social order he sees as rotten from the very top to the very bottom. The critics merely show how remote our mindset, with its liberal concern for identity politics and partial interests, is from that of the great satirists, who insist on a misanthropic critique of the whole. As Peter Green says, particularly in his early satires, Juvenal was a ‘flay-all’ (SS, p. xvii). So, too, was Persius, if in somewhat less specific terms.
Nor will it do to suppose that both satirists were just concerned with very particular historical cultures, and would otherwise have let people off the hook. Persius refers us to pre-Neronian times – Caligula’s farcical German campaign, for example, where the Emperor avoided having his army fight, then dressed up some of his own Gauls as prisoners to persuade other people of his triumph – stretching his account of venality and frivolity back in imperial history. But it is Juvenal, above all, who thickens the historical picture, making it hard, on occasions, for us to tell in which period a satirical scene is set. He was familiar with his friend Tacitus’s often scathing account of the Julio-Claudians, and illustrates what he has to say with fairly prolific allusions to the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Otho and, more subversively, Julius and Augustus Caesar. Indeed, though the Nervan dynasty may have seen the beginning of a ‘golden age’, things certainly got better for Juvenal under it, and the tone of his satire changes accordingly, Trajan and Hadrian do not come off lightly in his hands. What seems to be praise for Hadrian at the beginning of Satire VII is carefully judged but distinctly ironic. Satire XVI attacks the much-abused privileges of the military, some of which Hadrian had conferred. As Juvenal slyly notes, Trajan and Hadrian continued with Domitian’s tradition of using spies and informers against enemies and carrying out summary executions. In general, the Satires suggest that the social phenomena he most heartily despised remained the same under the new dynasty.
Certainly, over the Satires as a whole hangs Domitian, whom Juvenal recalls spending hours catching flies and stabbing them to death. The detail captures the very spirit of, or, rather, the hopelessly inane lack of spirit in, Domitian’s Rome. But, as Gilbert Highet pertinently remarks, Juvenal conceived of satire as intrinsically unconfined, supposing that its purview both went back a long way beyond ‘the fiendish emperor of yesterday’ and looked ahead to ‘perhaps another monster tomorrow’.42 Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, Juvenal might have growled:
To these habits of ours there’s nothing more, or worse, to be added by posterity: our grandsons will share our deeds, our longings.
(SSi, 147–8, p. 7)
As far as he was concerned, the Satires mocked the general way of things as it had prevailed historically, was prevailing now and would prevail in time to come:
All human endeavours, men’s prayers, fears, angers, pleasures, joys and pursuits, make up the mixed mash of my book.
(SSi, 85–6, p. 5)
He toyed with the idea that, as the Sybilline prophecies of AD 19 and 64 had predicted, the story of mighty Rome was bound to end in disaster: ‘Infection spread this plague,/ and will spread it further still’ (SSii, 78–9, p. 11) – and indeed there was far worse to come. But if Rome, supposedly the great civilized, all-conquering power, was beyond hope, what could be hoped for from the world it ruled? Rome had blighted it. Justice had withdrawn ‘to heaven’ (SSvi, 19, p. 35), and,
In all the lands that stretch far eastward from Cádiz
to Ganges and the dawn, few indeed there are can distinguish
true good from its opposite, or manage to dissipate
the thick mist of error.
(SSx, 1–4, p. 76)
Roman supremacy had ensured that ‘there are no refuges left’.43 But what that in turn meant was that ‘the human race’ had been ‘condemned to a blacked-out future’ (SSvi, 556, p. 51).
In the first century of the Empire, it was quite common for civilized and educated Romans to look back to the past for their moral orientation, whether to a mythical Golden Age or the Republic, its leaders and traditions (and sideways to contemporaries who were still guided by them). Thus Persius refers to Messalla and Cato (the Younger), for example, and expresses his humble gratitude to his old teacher Cornutus (whom Nero drove out). Here, again, we encounter the thought of the exception that seems so deeply written into misanthropy, as though the exception him- or herself is, in his or her strange splendour, a reason for misanthropic gloom. But, in Juvenal, even Persius’s kind of austere exceptionalism (to use the philosophical term, though it is not only philosophical), insisting as it does on the rarity of the exception, tends to break down. There is a side to Juvenal that sings the praises of certain figures in the Republic, but it is hard to quell the suspicion that he at best only half means it, that he is being dutiful and knows so, that the metropolitan distruster of grandiosity in him is also surreptitiously muttering ‘Oh come off it’. In fact, he is also capable of giving short shrift to a range of republican luminaries, from Cato (the Elder), to Rome’s great moral heroine Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, to Brutus and Cassius. This fits with his tight-jawed impatience: what is the point of dwelling nostalgically on Rome’s great and noble families, Satire VIII in effect asks, if they have not themselves been able to survive, sustain themselves, foster and transmit their values? Indeed, Juvenal goes still further. Not only is he reluctant to sentimentalize the past – he can seem sceptical about the literature of the past, notably Homer, Statius and Virgil, and what he takes to be the bogus dimensions of the models they provide for us in their stories – he also debunks the mythical figures of the past, sometimes very funnily. Icarus, Jason, Achilles, Odysseus, Chiron, Hercules – these are just a few of those Juvenal sweeps up in his caustically satirical net. He tends to treat the idea of a Golden Age as a bit of a joke.44 He treats the Gods that way, too. Athene appears to be the only one he has any time for. He seems harshly aware that, if gods are dragged in the dust, not just by money, greed and luxury but, as he and Persius both knew, by the very mediocrity of the forms of attention paid them, they may well not be revivable, whatever others suppose. Gods die. Humans turn out to be unworthy of them, and kill them.
But Juvenal does not tell us this arrogantly: that is no doubt one reason why he has inspired so many other misanthropists and satirists. His voice may be savage; it is not self-important or self-inflating. The ques
tions that concern him get to him too intensely. His tendency is rather to be self-deprecating. He derives this partly from Persius, again. Persius’s third satire, for example, presents the poet as a late lie-abed hardly worthy of his noble art or cause, not least because the world so quickly discourages him. ‘What’s the point of all this?’ asks Satire IV (SSiv, 5, p. 150). So, too, even on the first page of his first satire, Juvenal is admitting that satire is a futile occupation (though one may as well write, since others will as surely waste the paper). Later on, he admonishes another writer for missing the prime of life when he might have become something useful, ‘a sailor, soldier, farmer’ (SSvii, 34–5, p. 56). Now he’s stuck with an old age in which he will learn to turn in hatred on his art. Juvenal is also self-deprecating because he knows that the moralist is always too likely to drift close to or end up resembling the objects of his or her attack, indeed, that, in the end, one can only moralize about or satirize what one recognizes, and one recognizes it because it is a part of oneself. Thus, with insidious brilliance, in Satire I, he himself ends up sounding like the ever-so-exquisite, squirmy connoisseur whom he is apparently taking to task.
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The Roman satirists were important, not least to St Augustine, who raided them for his own theological and moral purposes.45 St Augustine is crucial to the history of Western misanthropy, for he is the major source of the Christian conviction of the fundamental, ineradicable predominance of evil in all human being. Augustine was haunted, beset by the thought of wickedness. Initially, we may see this in his Confessions, where the wickedness is above all individual, his own. He describes himself when young as a creature of great wilfulness and waywardness. This was the result of the vanity of life itself, which left him but a toy of the flesh, of ‘a wind that passeth away, and cometh not again’ (Ps. 78.39).46 He sought pleasure not in God but in his creatures, created beings. Since he was, it would seem, a very sensual young man – he refers to his sexuality as ‘insatiable’ (C, p. 107) – from the ‘bubbling impulses of puberty’ onwards, he found himself befogged by ‘clouds of muddy carnal concupiscence’ (C, p. 24). A desire for ‘shame for its own sake’ (C, p. 29) further intensified his predicament.
Indeed, in his own terms, the young Augustine lived a life of ‘total temptation’ (C, p. 207). He possessed a faculty of almost delirious imagination, and the phantasmata or corporales imagines, the ‘physical images’ and ‘unpurified notions’ that it summoned up assailed the mind like swarms of insects which he was powerless to dispel (C, p. 111). The vicious drives tugged at his garments, whispered in insinuating voices, like the devils to whom, in City of God, he ascribes such dreadful energy (and cruel laughter). They interrupted and distracted him from his prayers. As a result he became ‘to [himself] a vast problem’ (C, p. 57), from which, for all his intense and indeed agonized struggles, his very serious faith and the help of others like St Ambrose, God’s grace alone could save him. Mercifully, it did, chiefly in a great moment of anagnorisis in a garden in Milan: ‘It was as if a light of relief from anxiety flooded my heart’, he writes. ‘All the shadows of doubt were dispelled’ (C, p. 153). Yet even after this decisive experience, vivid sexual images continued to ‘attack’ him (C, p. 203). He lived, he wrote, in an ‘immense jungle full of traps and dangers’, and often felt ‘stuck in the snares’, ‘pitifully captured’ by ‘beautiful externals’ (C, pp. 210, 212). Part of what seems lovable about Augustine, as opposed to some of his flintier successors, like John Calvin and Martin Luther, is how human and vulnerable to the promptings of the world and the senses he repeatedly turns out to be.
The structure of value implicit in this narrative increasingly became the founding structure of Augustine’s philosophy. Even in the Confessions, he is generalizing on the basis of his own experience. ‘So tiny a child, so great a sinner’ (C, p. 15), he says of himself. But tiny children, he tells us, are never innocent, indeed, the reverse: in their petulance, their tantrums, their incorrigibility, their crazed obsession with getting their own way, essential wickedness appears. So, too, certainly, lust is sexual, and it was as such that Augustine appears to have felt it most keenly. But others know lust differently, because it can assume many and various forms: the lust for revenge, money or applause, for superfluous knowledge or for private superiority, the lusts that make up one’s personal habits, the lust for power over others and the lust to appear to good effect in their eyes. Then there is the lust for untruth, or lying. This is indeed a lust, for people positively hanker after lies, fictions, false ideas (like heresies), ‘superstitions and pernicious mythologies’, and are easily entranced by them (C, p. 56). Even in the very early Against the Academicians, Augustine is asserting that human souls, ‘enveloped in the manifold darkness of error and defiled by the sordid appetites of the body’, must necessarily fail to raise themselves to the highest good.47 Lust and error are everywhere, and are the origin of all evil. Augustine quotes Ps. 130.3: ‘If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?’ (C, p. 6; cf. Jn 8.7). God’s grace alone is ‘indefectible’ (a key word), flawless, not subject to failure or decay. Grace and nothing but grace can melt ‘the hardness of humanity’ (C, p. 72).
But the truly significant turn in Augustine’s thought comes about in his confrontation with Pelagius. Early in his career, Augustine had inclined towards Manichaeanism. The Manichees postulated that the world was divided between two powers, one good, one evil. There existed ‘a race of darkness’ that opposed itself to God. But this had to mean that there was a zone of being where God was ‘open to violation and destruction’, where he was nothing, where the power and reach of his goodness ceased (C, pp. 112–13). That could not be the case: God is all-loving and all-powerful. Not surprisingly, Augustine moved away from Manicheanism. But this in turn appeared to drive him towards the Pelagians. Pelagius held that God made human beings good by nature, and ordered them to do good. Humans were not intrinsically and fundamentally corrupted by sin; the lusts were not evil. Sin was not a universal imperfection, a flaw in all souls. People could attain to perfection by their own unaided efforts, and therefore had no need of divine assistance.
But to Augustine Pelagianism was extremely dangerous, because it appeared to suggest that man might aspire to the condition of God. This was overweeningly arrogant and presumptuous. Pelagianism did not accord with Augustine’s thought up to the point in his life when he began to address it. But it also failed to accord with his own experience. His experience logically pointed in a Manichean direction. But he had barred himself off from Manicheanism. Thus, as a means of navigating between his Scylla and his Charybdis, in his various writings against the Pelagians (the Work on the Proceedings of Pelagius, the Treatise Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, the Treatise on Grace and Free Will, the Treatise on the Predestination of the Saints, and others),48 to the end of his life, Augustine increasingly elaborated a moral theology based on five key concepts: total depravity, original sin, grace, election and predestination. First, we are totally depraved. Human beings are by nature vitiata, poisoned by sin. Their minds lie in darkness unless God purges them. Certainly, they have freedom of will, but they will to sin. They cannot but do so, for sin blinds and weakens the human will from the start. Nonetheless, humans are responsible for their sins. It is not the Devil who makes them act sinfully.49 There could hardly be a more vivid commitment to an effectively misanthropic vision than this: in reality, humanity in toto constitutes what Augustine calls a massa damnata.
Secondly, evil begins with Adam, and is then integrally transmitted through the generations without intermission in ‘the chain of original sin’ by which ‘in Adam all die’ (C, p. 82, 1 Cor. 15.22; Augustine actually came to think that original sin was passed on by natural descent through natural generation, in and through the sexual act). Adam chose evil, and human beings can never erase the consequences of that choice from what they are by nature. Thirdly, only the unexpected, unwilled grace of God can save human beings from their depravity, in a pr
ocess of alienatio, separation of the individual soul from common humanity and its ways of thinking and seeing. Grace comes to people, like a visitation. That is why all infants behave so wickedly, above all, before baptism (It is because they are wicked, Augustine thinks, that they wriggle to avoid it and bawl at the font). As yet, grace has not touched them. Fourthly, we return to exceptionalism: in fact, evil is really nothing, a young Augustine writes, in the Soliloquies, but to only the few does God grant grace to know that.50 The later Augustine firms this idea up. The few, the saved, are God’s elect, God’s chosen ones. God in his mercy singles them out and prepares them for restoration to a pre-Adamic state. But, fifthly, since God is all-knowing, he must have chosen them from the start, and since he is all-powerful, he must have predestined them to salvation, though, paradoxically, it was also necessary for them to will it. We shall watch this structure, blessed few versus massa damnata, replicate itself again and again.
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Augustine for Western misanthropy. His theory of evil survived the attentions of other great Christian theologians (Bede, Scotus Eriugena, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard, to name only the most eminent) until the thirteenth century, when it came under pressure from the new Aristotelianism (Roger Bacon and, above all, Thomas Aquinas), especially the Aristotelian insistence on formal logic. But after the Reformation, when Catholic orthodoxy had parted company with Augustinianism, ironically, Protestantism injected it with a formidable new life, particularly through Luther and Calvin, both of whom busily promulgated the doctrines of total depravity, original sin, grace, election and (in different ways) predestination, seeking to return Christianity to what Bertrand Russell called Augustine’s ‘gloomy sense of universal guilt’,51 the moral impotence of man and the absolute imperative of grace. In effect, as Gillian Evans says, they kept Augustine ‘alive’ into ‘the modern world’, notably in northern Europe and America.52