Usquequo, domine?
I started this essay a while ago, with no idea what time had in store for me. I might work on it more, but I figured, despite its shagginess, it'll do for now.
Quousque* is one of those Latin words that, even now, you find popping up in rather unexpected places. Most recently, I saw Quousque tandem abutere used to title a dance.
For me, the quousque came today. I've been making cheese and I loved it, but my body has said "enough." I'm hurting all over, so I'm passing the creamery on to someone else. I'll continue making things. Maybe I'll return to teaching in a classroom. Who knows?
When is the quousque for a cheese? I found that the only way to know was, as the saying in the profession has it, to "always be tasting." You know the window of time that a cheese wants based on how you've handled it in the vat, how much or little moisture you let it keep, how big or small the curd, to what temp you took them, whether you "cooked" them, and so many other things that I'm just relishing and know I'm going to miss. You make a cheese hundreds of times and you know the quousque of all these steps as second nature. And then, with the affinage (the aging of it), you had to learn your cheeses, just like you have to learn another person, if you really wanted to turn out a product that wasn't just done by the recipe books, and the only way to do that is by core sampling. All of this kind of knowing of the limit isn't what Augustine's god can do. The model that Augustine gives us is that of a divine knower that brings into time what has forever been known, which has to be an eternal moment of delight.
*The two parts of quousque are inverted to usquequo in the Latin version of the psalms, but Augustine still favors quousque (by a ratio of roughly 4:1).
Et dixit deus, Fiat lux, et facta est lux. (Gen. 1.3).
Hoc non solent reprehendere Manichaei, sed illud quod sequitur:
Et vidit deus lucem quia bona est. (Gen. 1.4).
Dicunt enim: Ergo non noverat Deus lucem, aut non noverat bonum. Miseri homines, quibus displicet, quod Deo placuerunt opera sua, cum videant etiam hominem artificem, verbi gratia, lignarium fabrum, quamvis in comparatione sapientiae et potentiae Dei paene nullus sit, tamen tam diu lignum caedere atque tractare dolando, asciando, planando, vel tornando atque poliendo quousque ad artis regulas perducatur, quantum potest, et placeat artifici suo. Numquid ergo quia placet ei quod fecit, ideo non noverat bonum? Prorsus noverat intus in animo, ubi ars ipsa pulchrior est quam illa quae arte fabricantur. Sed quod videt artifex intus in arte, hoc foris probat in opere, et hoc est perfectum quod artifici suo placet. Vidit ergo Deus lucem quia bona est: quibus verbis non ostenditur eluxisse Deo insolitum bonum, sed placuisse perfectum.
De Genesi contra Manichaeos 1.4.14.
I
The De Genesi contra Manichaeos (of the years 388-89) gives us Augustine, recently baptized and returned to Thagaste, attempting to find a way to reach two extremes at once: a learned and lettered audience, on the one hand, and an uneducated and illiterate one, on the other. From the opening, the trained rhetorician, the teacher of rhetoric, the provincial boy who had scaled the heights of rhetorical performance to the imperial capital Milan, asserts his pleasure of learning that real Christians (vere Christian[i]) – and learned ones (eruditi liberalibus litteris), at that – were of the opinion that he needed to use the common manner of speaking (communem loquendi consuetudinem) :
Placuit enim mihi quorumdam vere christianorum sententia, qui cum sint eruditi liberalibus litteris, tamen alios libros nostros, quos adversus Manichaeos edidimus, cum legissent, viderunt eos ab imperitioribus, aut non aut difficile intelligi, et me benevolentissime monuerunt ut communem loquendi consuetudinem non desererem, si errores illos tam perniciosos ab animis etiam imperitorum expellere cogitarem. Hunc enim sermonem usitatum et simplicem etiam docti intelligunt, illum autem indocti non intelligunt. De Genesi contra Manichaeos 1.1.1
II
What we get is Augustine commenting on Manichees commenting on Genesis. Augustine's brings out their way of reading in verbs like vituperare and, in the first passage above, reprehendere: they find cause to rebuke these writings.
For Augustine, the existence of creation can have no other cause except divine goodness (de Civ. Dei xi.22), so he is quick to pounce. And it is fitting that his choice of attack disparages his opponents' intelligence, disparages their ability to draw conclusions from their experience of the world, but I am going to pause him for a moment and linger on attributing ignorance to a god.
And here, in Genesis 1.4, their particular rebuke is that this creator of light didn't know the light or, as they argued, what is good until after he had made it. It is not hard to see that, phrased in this way, the Manichees have some problems. Not the least of these is how to contend that the good (bonum) has been made by a god that is not good – their central claim about the creator of the material world. Such a problem stems from their contention that light and goodness are coterminous.
Let's set this identity of light and goodness to the side and consider the matter of a creator learning by doing. When humans make things, we learn and can often be delightfully surprised at what we do. Those aha moments – which Augustine will discuss about this time with his son Adeodatus in the De Magistro – that are akin to a light going on inside of us – are they available to the divine? Are there (to use Jean-Luc Marion's terms) saturated phenomena for the divine – events that break its expectations and bring it to marvel, ecstatically, and change. Would not that mean there is development in the divine; that this seeing is a moment of learning; that the divine can undergo an experience and come through it and be able to reflect on a before and an after?
Is it really such an odd conclusion to draw from this verse that the god of Genesis was awed and underwent a change? For Augustine, yes. For anyone who holds to the analogy of faith (1 Cor. 13.12), for whom this god's knowledge is the source of all creation, yes, it is. For anyone with such an understanding, visible light shows us something about the true, uncreated light, which is the creator god (de Trin. vii.3.4). There is lux aeterna and lux creata (de Gen. ad litt. iv.22.39). How could lux creata, whose existence is shaped and formed by lux aeterna, change lux aeterna?
Augustine had once believed that Genesis presents us with a god who changes, a god that experiences, learns, rages, repents, and has preferences. And for anyone reading Genesis, is this not so? Who does not see that this god is particular to the descendants of Jacob, grows angry, needs to be appeased, and is more to be feared than loved? Does not the existence of a people chosen by this god contradict the concept of a good and universal creator? And does not this history teach that history's winners are the chosen ones of this god – as Josephus concluded about the Romans, just as some did of a Protestant modernity over a traditional Catholicism, and as some US citizens have done, and not a few athletes and sports fans everywhere when victorious? God, being the source of all good, must be involved in such good outcomes somehow, but we cannot but notice that our perspective is quite narrow and cannot take in the full scope of what these outcomes from the most trivial (sports events) to the most consequential (the character and destinies of nations) entail. How do we reconcile the gap between an affirmation of this perfect beginning and the flux of all things that can make acceptable (and even promoted) what was once condemned (e.g. separation of church and state, Syllabus Errorum 55.)
Why is it odd to think of a god that doesn't know or that can learn and change. As scripture tells us (James 1.17) and as Augustine does as well (De natura boni 24), the divine knows no change, experiences no change. Such a claim makes no sense except as an assertion, and it has many uses, not least of all when a believer needs to hold on to belief in the face of experience. I am familiar with the arguments about change having to be toward something inferior or superior in some regard, but if my – or anything's existence – is an effect of being lovingly known by this god, if I can change, if anything can change, and that change is real, god either ceases to know me or the nature of this god's knowledge of me changes by willingly being stretched out through time.
Now to Augustine's pouncing. Though not a skilled worker, he preached to opifices, artifices, architecti, structores, and fabri and lived with them in his monastery. When he talks about such skilled work, he is usually following the lead of scripture in comparing the divine to a carpenter or an architect. He rarely speaks of real carpenters, artists, and smiths (for an exception, see De cura pro mortuis gerenda 12.15). Augustine's more common use of this comparison is to meditate upon creatio ex nihilo (see Conf. xi.v.7), but here, he explores the delight of the worker, and so, when I came upon this passage, it struck me.
What is he saying about delight or taking pride in one's work? I don't see him saying that there is joy – or flow, to use Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's term – in the work.† From the carpenters and woodworkers I know, they experience flow.° Just as there is for a writer a joy in hewing (dolando), carving (asciando), smoothing (planando), turning (tornando) and polishing (poliendo) a sentence (based on an idea intus in animo) into a finish product (opus), so with wood and glass and other materials comes a similar joy.
Augustine, locked in confrontation with his former co-religionists, the Manichees, is focused on this delight that comes from the finished product rather than in the job (et hoc est perfectum quod artifici suo placet). Elsewhere, Augustine discusses the dilatatio – a musical concept – the spreading out of time for creation, but he is explicit in several places that this is all present at once to the divine. So even if there is flow for us, for the divine, there isn't. Even the six days of creation are just an expression of the order and contours of the divinity's single thought that brings creation out of nothing (De Civ. Dei xi....).
This joy is in the judgment of conformity between outward work and inner idea (quod videt artifex intus in arte, hoc foris probat in opere). Whichever way we cut it, the delight or the pride comes at the end. All doubt is removed by the quousque: the worker doesn't stop – ...tam diu [lignum caedit et tractat]... – until the work meets standards (ad artis regulas perducatur) and pleases its artist (placeat artifici suo).
Augustine seems to have given some attention to carpenters. He adds the tam diu to the observing (cum videant). He had spoken of them earlier in his dialogue De musica in words very similar to those above.
Magister: Nam credo videri tibi aliud esse tornatum aliquid ligneum, vel argenteum, vel cuiusce materiae; aliud autem ipsum motum artificis, cum illa tornantur.
Discipulus: Assentior multum differre.
Magister: Numquidnam ergo ipse motus propter se appetitur, et non propter id quod vult esse tornatum?
Discipulus: Manifestum est.
Magister: Quid? si membra non ob aliud moveret, nisi ut pulchre ac decore moverentur, eum facere aliud nisi saltare diceremus?
Discipulus: Ita videtur.
Magister: Quando ergo censes aliquam rem praestare et quasi dominari? cum propter seipsam, an cum propter aliud appetitur?
Discipulus: Quis negat cum propter seipsam? De Musica I.2.3.
I hesitate to say that Augustine foresaw some of 20th-century choreography's greater innovations, since I have no idea what dancing looked like in his day. We could draw too much from these words and claim that there were some dancers who mimicked the smiths and carpenters. Be that as it may, we can see that for Augustine, some things are done for themselves (propter seipsam) and some aren't. Skilled workers are not dancers, since the formers' movements (motus) are not propter se.
I do not want to get into Augustine's opinions about whether dancing was acceptable, because it is a very interesting question, but one that will divert me from the issue of Augustine's judgments about true delights and pleasures.
Sed miseri homines, quibus cognita vilescunt, et novitatibus gaudent, libentius discunt quam norunt, cum cognitio sit finis discendi. Et quibus vilis est facilitas actionis, libentius certant quam vincunt, cum victoria sit finis certandi. Et quibus vilis est corporis salus, malunt vesci quam satiari, et malunt frui genitalibus membris quam nullam talem commotionem pati; inveniuntur etiam qui malunt dormire quam non dormitare, cum omnis illius voluptatis sit finis, non esurire ac sitire, et non desiderare concubitum, et non esse corpore fatigato. De vera religione 53.102
*artifex occurs 239 times; opifices 60; faber 39; architectus 29; structor 17.
†flow
°The artists I'm referring to are Keith Fritz and Nicci Wyels.
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