Silliman's Papers

Child OK after four-story fall

By Daniel Silliman
dsilliman@news-daily.com
July 2006


A 2-year-old fell about 35 feet from an apartment window, but wasn’t hurt.

“I think God was there holding his hand,” said Carolina Sena, a friend speaking for the boy’s family, “because it was a miracle.”

The boy, Elias, and his 4-year-old sister were reportedly playing in the back bedroom of a fourth-floor apartment, at 3130 Summer Court, on Sunday afternoon. The children’s parents were in the Jonesboro home, according to the Clayton County Police report, and were told by their daughter that the 2-year-old had fallen out of the window.

According to the little girl, she had opened the bedroom window and her brother pushed on the screen, which popped out.

The boy fell out after the screen, tumbling down from the window and landing in a bush.

An ambulance was called at about 12:55 p.m. Paramedics found the 2-year-old with no apparent injuries, but flew him to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Scottish Rite, to be safe.

Doctors released him Monday.

On Monday afternoon, Elias was back with his parents, playing happily in the apartment. He had no broken bones and only a few scratches to show for the fall, Sena said.

When his father picked him up, out of the bush, he wasn’t even crying, according to the family.

“He didn’t cry,” Sena said. “He was asking, ‘Mommy! Mommy!’ He was fine. He never lost consciousness. The doctors, they can’t believe it.”

Clayton County Deputy Police Chief Greg Porter said he couldn’t believe it either.

The incident was ruled “just a freak accident,” Porter said, and the parents are not facing charges.

Special Report: Inside the Clayton County District Attorney's Office
Backlog of pending cases clogs up justice system

By Daniel Silliman
Clayton News Daily, Oct. 29, 2007

Kenneth Jerome Alexander has been under investigation on child molestation charges for more than three years -- technically.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation finished investigating the 45-year-old former police officer in 2004. Warrants were applied for and received, the preliminary case was presented to a magistrate judge and accepted, and the case was sent to the Clayton County District Attorney's office in March of that year.

But it hasn't moved since then.

More than three years later, the file is still there. The district attorney's office has not dismissed the charges against Alexander, and it hasn't brought them to a grand jury for indictment.

According to the GBI, the case is considered "under open investigation" until the district attorney moves on it.

District Attorney Jewel Scott said the case is "peculiar," but, according to records obtained by the Clayton News Daily, Alexander's case is not all that unusual. It is one of more than 750.

Those cases, including aggravated assault, child molestation, drug possession and rape, have apparently languished in the district attorney's office for at least a year. Some for as long as seven years.

The records show pending cases dating back to 2000, when Bob Keller was re-elected to the district attorney's office.

Seven cases have been in the district attorney's office since then. There are eight more that have been waiting to be indicted or dismissed since 2001. The number of cases waiting for action has increased dramatically since 2005, when Scott took office.

There are more than 200 pending cases which were first brought to the office in 2005, and more than 450, open and unindicted, cases between Jan. 1 and the end of September 2006.

"You've got cases that are sitting there too long," said Leon Hicks, a veteran defense lawyer with an office in Jonesboro. "I've got cases where nothing's been done for six months, eight months, 10 months, a year, and I ask, 'Where's this at?' 'Well, it hasn't been indicted yet.' Either do it or don't, but do something, that's my attitude."

There are no records now available that show the backlog of unindicted cases when Bob Keller was district attorney. Even so, Hicks and attorney, Joe Roberto, both believe the situation got worse under Scott.

Reality or misconception?

Senior Assistant District Attorney Todd Naugle, however, said that's a misperception. Naugle was a senior assistant district attorney in Keller's administration and has continued in that role with Scott, since she beat Keller in the 2004 election. He said the case backlog isn't a new problem.

"That number has probably been consistent for years," he said. "The victims move and you can't find them. You wait for reports from the police department. There's a backlog at the crime lab ... There's always been a backlog of cases."

The two long-time lawyers, however, say there was a significant change in 2005, when Scott took office. Cases that used to move quickly now languish in limbo for years, they said, and each assistant district attorney has stacks of pending cases which have been "left on the floor."

"You can ask anybody who was there for that regime and this one -- it's taking longer," Hicks said. "If you've got a backlog of cases that haven't been indicted, there has to be a reason."

Roberto said Scott, who had no courtroom experience when she was elected the county's top prosecutor, had a "disastrous" learning curve. He attributes the growing backlog to a number of staffing decisions and management-structure changes.

"It used to be that the number-one and number-two people in the district attorney's office attended the probable cause hearings," Roberto said. "So they knew what was coming into the office. I could walk up to [Bob Keller] and say, 'Hey Bob, I've got such and such a case, what do you think about a bond?' He would deal with it on the front end, instead of letting it go on forever."

Hicks agreed, saying defense attorneys used to call assistant district attorneys and work out deals over the phone. Today, he said, if he approaches a prosecutor, he or she declines to negotiate, deferring to superiors.

Under Scott, Roberto said, the assistant district attorneys, who attend the probable cause hearings at the front-end of the court process, don't have the authority to negotiate plea deals and bonds. Everything has to be checked and approved by Scott, or one of the top two assistants.

Because cases can't be dealt with quickly, he said, they go through a series of hearings and calendar assignments, with paperwork accumulating and the system falling even further behind.

There have been no policy changes, however, in the authority given to the assistant prosecutors, Naugle said, and he argues that the procedures haven't changed, either.

"I'm the one who was calling the shots before, and I'm still doing it the same way," Naugle said. "I do the same thing. I haven't changed how I go about giving them authority and autonomy with the cases. There may be a perception of that, but I don't see the reality."

Smaller cases gunk up the works

Both Roberto and Hicks said the district attorney's office, under Scott, has not successfully separated the smaller, more negotiable cases from the larger ones, which require major investigation and attention. Cases that could be dealt with in a few minutes of negotiation, they said, are among those that have remained unindicted for years.

Court records show unindicted, yet undismissed cases involving driving with a suspended license, loitering, and possession of less than an ounce of marijuana while driving.

"The way you clean your desk off," Hicks said, "is you take the cases that are easy and quick, and you take care of them. You get rid of all the chaff and then you have that wheat."

Naugle maintains the backlog isn't made up of the "smaller cases." A smaller case that is difficult to prosecute -- such as a criminal trespassing charge, in which the business making the accusation no longer exists, leaving no witnesses to the alleged crime -- can be dismissed.

It's the bigger cases, the more serious ones, which can't be dismissed even years after the incident. Though some of the cases coming into the district attorney's office are difficult to prosecute, and may take years to investigate and bring to trial, the office can't dismiss them, because the charges are too serious, Naugle said.

"If it's a murder or an armed robbery, and there's a witness who has disappeared, we're not going to close that case," the senior prosecutor said. "The citizens of Clayton County are entitled to have these cases prosecuted. Even though the cases are old and witnesses may be hard to find, the citizens are entitled to have them prosecuted."

Though the office is dealing with the cases in the same way it always has, according to Naugle, he does admit that it has gotten harder. He also admits that prosecutions are more likely to be delayed than they used to be. Naugle and Scott blame that on societal changes.

"The major difference," Naugle said, "is that, in 2004, the crime rate started taking off. We were dealing with about 7,000 warrants around that time. Now, we do 10,000 a year."

It is not simply an increase in cases that is clogging the wheels of justice, though, according to the district attorney's office. More and more cases involve victims and witnesses who are transient. Many of the pending cases are on hold because investigators are trying to find the witnesses or the victims, who have moved since the crime occurred.

"It has become increasingly difficult for us to track our victims, because we have such a transient population," Scott said.

Some suggest that tracking victims becomes even more difficult the longer the case is delayed. The longer it takes to bring a case to trial, they say, the harder it will be to successfully prosecute it. Victims and witnesses, for example, often lose confidence that prosecutors are actually going to do anything, and move on with their lives.

Memory fades, testimony changes

"When you have something that's four year's old, people's recollections change," Hicks said. "People remember it differently. Their perspectives change. Witnesses move away. Witnesses die."

Even Naugle said cases are significantly harder to prosecute after about a year, or a year and a half.

Whatever the explanation for the hundreds of unindicted cases, the practical results are a clogged-up prosecution process and a large number of people, who are unable to argue their cases, so they can get closure.

"It overly taxes the [district attorney's] staff," Roberto said. "They've got a bunch of status reports and a whole bunch of calendar hearings that shouldn't be there ... You've also got a lot of little guys with these indictments pending forever. They've got clouds over their heads. The indictments could come down at anytime."

Hicks said defendants, facing the possibility of an indictment, can't do anything but wait. They can't petition for a speedy trial, because they have not been officially charged, and are only under perpetual "ongoing investigation."

Defense attorneys can pester prosecutors to do something with a case, but that's the extent of their recourse. Whatever plans a defendant makes, he has to take the ever-pending indictment into consideration.

Kenneth Alexander's livelihood, like that of the others with pending cases, could face daunting challenges because of his situation. He can not work as a police officer for as long as the case is pending. Even though it isn't ready to go to trial, he is still under suspicion.

Although, under our legal system, he is innocent until proven guilty, even a cursory background check would raise legitimate questions for anyone interested in hiring the 45-year-old former cop.

At the same time, the two teens, who accused him of molesting them, are now nearing their 18th birthdays. They have spent the majority of their high school years knowing that Alexander is a free man, and, perhaps, wondering if he would ever be prosecuted.

When asked about a potential indictment of Alexander, all Scott can promise is that it will happen "some time soon."

Though her office disputes the cause of the backlog, Scott has argued that the solution involves more funding. She has annually appealed for more money from the Clayton County Commission. Currently, according to information from the county, the district attorney's office -- with the departmental goal stated as, "Prosecute all defendants in a timely manner while keeping budgetary costs at a minimum" -- has 62 positions and a budget of about $3 million.

"We need more, but we appreciate the county's limited resources," Naugle said. "Our staff has not increased proportionally [to the growth in the crime rate], to do what we need to do to keep up."

Scott has lobbied Commission Chairman Eldrin Bell for increased funding to pay for additional investigators and prosecutors. Bell, however, has said a budget increase would require a tax hike, and he said he will not raise taxes to give the district attorney's office more money.

Bell said he believes Scott has a record of mismanaging money and staff, which he said is made clear by the number of undismissed and unindicted cases.

Action being taken

Naugle said the office has already made changes, though, in response to the more than 750 pending cases, and he believes those adjustments will reduce that number in the future.

The office has designated some of its investigators as a "cold case unit." Currently working on the more than 450 cases from 2006, those investigators review each case, determining why it wasn't worked when it came into the office and attempting to move forward on it.

The office also recently added a case-evaluation system, in which a senior investigator categorizes the difficulty in prosecuting a case as the file comes into the office, Naugle said.

Though critical of the district attorney, Roberto also thinks that things are getting better in the prosecutor's office. He said he believes the office has made the necessary changes to staff and procedures, and Scott has passed through the learning curve.

Roberto said he would support Scott, in her upcoming race for a second term, because, he said, she has grown into the position.

"She's got a pretty good house now, but that painful period of learning on the job, and staffing mistakes, just kind of gunked up the system," he said. "She's running a pretty tight ship, but she's still bailing water."

Family struggles with knowledge of murder
By Daniel Silliman
Clayton News Daily, Nov. 26, 2007

The solar-powered cross is supposed to light up over the grave, at night. But it doesn't.

Donald Ray Skinner's grave is shadowed, all day, and the small solar panel doesn't get the sunlight needed to light the cross. The dead man's mother and sister visit him every day, and they move the cross to a lighted patch of yard, and return again, in the evening, to replace the grave ornament for the night.

The two women visit the grave every day, and every day Donald Skinner's mother cries, sobbing like a child.

"That was her only son," said Robin McPherson, Donald Skinner's sister. "He was like the pick of the litter. I'm his baby sister, and me and him look alike, and I used to be his sidekick when I was little. He's just really going to be missed."

There is a stone bench over Donald Skinner's grave in Douglasville. There is a picture of a tractor trailer on one side, and a picture of a man fishing on the other, because those are things he loved.

It says "In Loving Memory," on the bench and it has his nicknames inscribed: "Bubba," and "Donnie Ray Skinner." It doesn't have his real, full name. His mother, Carol C. Skinner, is trying to get that changed. It's hard, though, because the burial arrangements are legally controlled by Donald Skinner's wife, who is in jail on charges she conspired to murder him.

His widow, 51-year-old Carolyn Allene Skinner, wanted her husband's life insurance money and convinced a police officer to murder him, according to Clayton County police and prosecutors. The investigators say she asked a relative to help her kill her husband about eight years ago. The relative said, no, but Allene Skinner allegedly began an affair with a Atlanta State Farmer's Market Police Officer in 2006, and convinced him to ambush her husband, chase him across the parking lot of a truck depot and shoot him four times.

The officer, 49-year-old Charles Alan Smith, confessed to killing Donald Skinner, who was 49 when he died. He said he waited for Donald Skinner to drive the refrigerated semi truck into Cool Cargo Inc., on June 9, and shot him with a .40-caliber police pistol.

Smith told police he did it because he loved Skinner's wife, Allene. He said she told him a fantastical story about how she was an undercover government agent, and her husband was going to get her killed. He said he did it because she asked him to.

Allene Skinner was driving the police officer's truck, the days following the killing, and almost immediately applied for his life insurance benefits, according to Clayton County detectives.

Donald Skinner was shot four times, at the Forest Park trucking depot, in the early morning hours: once in the thigh, once in the left hand, once in the side, the bullet fatally piercing his liver, and once in his eye. Investigators found high-quality bullet shell casings, scattered at the scene, and connected them to the police officer's gun.

On June 9, a trail of Donald Skinner's blood zig-zagged across the parking lot, and the veteran detective said he could picture the 49-year-old truck driver's last, futile efforts, running back and forth before he died.

Carol Skinner and Robin McPherson went to the murder scene. They stood there, in the parking lot. Just looking at the place where the man they knew as son and brother died.

They imagined that his ankle, injured in an accident when he was 19 or 20, was stiff after the long drive, and it was probably hard for him to walk. They wondered why he left his two pistols in the cab of the truck, tucked in a black bag. He carried the guns for fear of robbery, they knew, and they wondered why he hadn't been robbed. They tried to picture their loved one's last moments.

"He was pushing away on his elbows, when he died," Carol Skinner said. "My son did not know who that man was. He had no idea who that man was, who was killing him. I know my son was looking up at that police man, when he shot him. That's the question I want to ask that man, 'Was my son looking at you when you shot him?'"

McPherson is a former crime scene investigator, so she had visited crime scenes before and knew how to look at the left-behind details and picture the violence happening. This time, though, it was her brother.

"I kind of know what my brother went through," McPherson said, and that's all she will say about it.

The two women are still, sometimes, shocked by the story of Donald Skinner's death. Other times, it seems like maybe they knew, all along, like maybe they saw it happening and just didn't understand it until now.

The last time she saw her son, Carol Skinner followed him outside, she said, urged by something unseen, to tell him she loved him one more time.

He went to his mom's house, in Douglasville, down the street from the graveyard where he's now buried in blue work clothes, before he left on his last truck drive. He ate dinner. He picked up a videotape of the most recent "Survivor," so he could watch it in his cab. When he left with Allene Skinner, Carol Skinner followed him outside and she said, "I love you, baby. Be careful."

He said, "I love you too, Mama."

"He was dead the next Saturday," Carol Skinner said.

It seems, the women said, like God had worked everything out before hand. Donald Skinner spent last Christmas with his mom, for the first time in a long time, and ate his favorite holiday meal, chicken and dumplings. The Wednesday before he was murdered, he attended a bible study. He was asked if Jesus was his Lord and Savior and he said, according to the people who were there, "Oh yeah," reassuring his mother that his soul was in the right place, when he died.

There were other signs of the impending murder, too. Sinister signs. Looking back, it's hard for the women to know if they recognized them.

McPherson recalls that Allene Skinner was driving the police officer's red pickup truck, when she told the family that Donald Ray had been killed. "The minute she told me," McPherson said, "I just dropped to the ground. After they picked me up off of the ground, it just come out of my mouth: 'That [nasty woman] killed my brother. That just came out of my mouth."

Skinner's mother said the family seemed to immediately sense his wife was behind the murder.

"I knew she told lies," Carol Skinner said. "I knew she had done things, conned people and all ... She was a con artist from way back. She was manipulative. She spent all his money. He told that truck driver that rode with him that she just spent too much money for him."

Allene Skinner has remained silent on the charges against her. Her lawyer cannot be reached, though he has been called repeatedly for comment.

Finances had always been a strain, on the Skinners' relationship, McPherson said, and had finally led to the couple's estrangement.

"Daddy said, 'Son, you ain't never going to have nothing as long as you're with that woman.' But he took her back, because he felt sorry for her," McPherson said.

The two women know now, that they had reason to be concerned about the woman in Donald Skinner's life. They now know that those nagging thoughts were, actually, signs pointing to something sinister.

The detective told them how their son died, and how his wife was having an affair and talking about having him killed. Now, five months after the murder, approaching the holiday season and waiting for justice, they're trying to figure out how to live with the knowledge.

"Nobody knows heartache until they've buried one of their kids," Carol Skinner said. "I miss him all the time. I remember him all the time, and they took him away from us. I don't look forward to living long, and then I'll be with him."

Carol Skinner said her anger is directed at Charles Smith -- "He knew better. I wouldn't have killed a dog like he killed my son." -- and not at the woman her son loved. Carol Skinner said she feels a little sorry for her daughter-in-law, because nobody ever loved her. Still, she hopes the woman who allegedly conspired to kill her son is sentenced to death. She hopes the police officer is sentenced to death, too, even though the district attorney's office said the case doesn't rise to the required legal standard for the death penalty.

"He was my only son," Carol Skinner said. "I want them to seek the death penalty."

McPherson's sympathies run the opposite direction. She describes her sister-in-law with words like "evil," "devil," "liar," and "manipulator." McPherson said she thinks the Farmers' Market cop fell under Allene Skinner's spell, just like her brother did.

The two women agree, though, that they don't ever want the pair to walk free. They will attend Smith and Allene Skinner's arraignment, on Dec. 5, and every court date after that, in hopes of seeing justice.

They will visit Donald Skinner's grave, every day, move the solar-powered cross and stand where his body is buried.

They are trying to get Allene Skinner's name taken off of the contract with the graveyard. McPherson visited her sister-in-law at the jail, trying to get the woman to sign over the authority for the burial plot. Allene Skinner refused, though. McPherson said she was reduced to pounding on the glass, dividing the prisoner from the visitor, hitting the glass repeatedly with her bare hand and "looking like a crazy woman."

The other day, McPherson took a recent photo of her brother, where he's smiling, sealed it in water-proof plastic and posted it at the grave. She put it next to the cross, by the bench where it says "In Loving Memory." She wasn't supposed to put anything there without Allene Skinner's approval, according to the legal contract, but she didn't care.

She just wanted, she said, to see her brother's face.

‘What is aggravated assault?’
By Daniel Silliman
Clayton News Daily, Feb. 13, 2007

In the days after the trial, one juror had a question.

After a week-long trial — sitting with 11 other people in the jury box in Clayton County Superior Court and listening to four defense attorneys, a prosecuting attorney and a string of family members, police officers and experts — she still had a question.

She didn’t bring up the question when the judge read the law, on a Thursday afternoon in May. It did come up briefly, however, during jury deliberations. The jury wrote a note asking the judge. It was the last thing the jury did before court was dismissed for the night.

The question: What is aggravated assault?

Sitting on the witness stand on Thursday, more than seven months after the trial ended and two men were each found guilty of two counts of aggravated assault, an appeals attorney asked former juror Stacey Sullivan about that question.

“Did you understand what that charge meant?” asked Herbert Adams, Jr., during a hearing on a motion for the retrial of the two men convicted of shooting and killing 4-year-old Travon Wilson.

“I didn’t fully understand,” Sullivan said.

“If you had fully understood, would you have voted differently?” Adams pressed.

Sullivan chewed gum. She has streaked blonde hair. She wore royal blue hospital scrubs and hoop earring and she didn’t want to be there, on the stand.

“It may have been different,” she said.

Sullivan was one of a few jurors from the Wilson murder trial who went to the defense attorney’s office, the week after the verdict, and asked the question.

Xavious Cordera Taylor, 18, and Christopher Allen Emmanuel, 19, were each found guilty of two counts of aggravated assault in connection with the child’s death. Two other men were found not guilty. Eleven others pleaded to lesser sentences for their parts.

Wilson was shot while riding his red bicycle, a birthday present, in the park in Riverdale in 2004. According to police and prosecutors, two gangs met at the park in 2004 to fight. The Hit Squad gang, including Taylor, and the Southside Mafia gang, including Emmanuel, met by arrangement around 10 p.m. that spring.

Taylor was sentenced to 35 years. Emmanuel, who admitted to firing an SKS assault rifle in the park the night Wilson was killed, was sentenced to 40 years.

The jurors wrote out the question about the definition of aggravated assault and gave it to a bailiff to give to the judge, after a few hours of deliberations.

According to state law, aggravated assault is defined as an assault with “an intent to murder, to rape or rob,” an assault with “a deadly weapon,” or an assault with “any object when used offensively against a person is likely to or actually does result in bodily injury.”

The judge received a second note written on lined yellow paper before the jury went home for the night telling him to disregard the previous question.

“The court has a duty, a legal duty, to answer their question,” Adams said during last week’s hearing on a motion to impeach the verdict and retry the case.

In the more than 2,000 pages of trial transcripts, the question comes at the end of the ninth volume. According to Judge Matthew Simmons, he told the four defense attorneys the next morning that the question had been withdrawn. None of them objected.

A few days after the trial, Sullivan and other jury members went to one of the lawyers and asked why the question had never been answered. In a sworn affidavit written by Adams and signed by Sullivan, Sullivan said understanding the charge would definitely have led her to a different verdict.

Adams subpoenaed her to testify at the hearing on the motion to retry the case, hoping to use a juror’s confusion to undermine the jury’s verdict.

A few days before the hearing, Sullivan walked into the district attorney’s office crying, saying she didn’t want to testify and she didn’t mean for her question to be a defense of Taylor and Emmanuel, said Deputy Chief Assistant District Attorney John Turner.

The motion for a retrial was routine, Turner said. The other arguments in the hearing — including the argument that part of Riverdale might not be in Clayton County so maybe the defendants were tried in the wrong jurisdiction — were routine.

The box of trial transcripts sitting on the judge’s desk, the appeals attorney calling on the defense attorney to testify for their client, the inmates wearing red jumpsuits trying to turn around to see their families sitting in the back of the mostly-empty courtroom — all of this was normal legal proceedings in the years following a long sentence.

What was unusual, in the hearing, was the juror on the witness stand.

“It’s legal garbage,” Turner said.

“That’s nonsense,” Adams said.

“According to the Georgia legal code and case law,” Turner said, “juror confusion is not grounds for impeaching a verdict. Juror misconduct would be reason for a new trial. This is not sufficient to grant a new trial. Georgia law is clear that this is unacceptable.”

On the stand, Sullivan maintained her question but hedged on the importance of the answer.

“You’re not sure that anything may have been different? Is that your testimony today?” Turner asked her.

“I’m not sure,” she said.

When asked about the trial, Sullivan told the court she didn’t remember any specifics.

Defense Attorney Katrina Breeding said she thought the hedging was enough to move for a retrial.

“That’s all we need,” she told Simmons. “A ‘maybe.’ That’s not beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Simmons, after listening to more than an hour of criticism of the way he handled the trial, denied the motion to retry. He told the lawyers that it was an aggressively tried case, and he didn’t think the four defense attorneys were sleeping through the trial, ignoring opportunities to object to the way it was tried.

“I’m going to deny the motion and you can take it up with the appeals court,” Simmons said.

Sullivan left the courthouse frowning when she was done testifying, not waiting for the judge’s ruling.

Emmanuel’s mother walked through the double doors into the hallway, sat down and wept.

Trucker’s murder motivated by lust, greed, fantasy
    Murder, conspiracy charges against victim’s wife, police officer go to grand jury

By Daniel Silliman
Clayton News Daily, July 13, 2007



The 49-year-old was shot four times.

He was shot once in the left hand. It bled as he ran, leaving a 200-foot long zig-zagging trail across the parking lot of the truck depot in Forest Park.

Donald Ray Skinner, who had just delivered a truckload of fish, was shot a second time in the thigh. The .40-caliber bullet grazed his flesh. He was shot a third time, and the bullet pierced his liver.

He was shot a fourth time in the right eye.

Clayton County Police found him three hours later, on June 9, lying on his back in the parking lot. He was holding his keys in his right hand, Detective Scott Eskew testified in court, Thursday. The refrigerated tractor trailer he drove for Cool Cargo Carriers, Inc., was still idling and its headlights were still on as the sun was coming up on the scene.

“The blood trail allowed us to visualize Donald Skinner’s last movements,” Eskew said. “He was moving back and forth, back and forth. When he had such a large area in which to flee, all he did was go back and forth in a zig-zag pattern.”

Charles A. Smith, 49, looked down at his jail-issued sandals while the detective testified against him in the probable cause hearing. A military veteran and an Atlanta State Farmers Market Police officer, Smith allegedly told the detectives he didn’t say anything, when he shot Skinner with the state-issued, .40-caliber pistol.

He told detectives he thought he heard Skinner say a single word, before he died.

“He said ‘Why?’ He thought he heard, ‘Why?’ The word ‘why.’ But at that point he was already committed to killing [Donald Skinner],” Eskew said.

According to police and prosecutors, the answer is a mixture of lust, greed and fantasy.

Smith is charged with murder, conspiracy to commit murder, violating his oath to uphold the law and using a gun to commit a felony. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s firearms lab matched the shell casings, at the scene, to the gun issued to Smith.

The victim’s wife, 50-year-old Carolyn Allene Skinner, is charged with murder, conspiracy to commit murder and obstruction of justice.

Smith was in a romantic relationship with Donald Skinner’s wife for about eight months before the shooting, Eskew said. She reportedly introduced him to friends and family as her husband, while he introduced her as his fiancé. At some point, the detective said, Allene Skinner and Smith tried to buy a house together.

Allene Skinner was the named beneficiary of Donald Skinner’s $90,000 life insurance policy. Married for 17 years, her daughter, sisters-in-law and mother-in-law characterized her as “evil,” Eskew said. Sitting in the second and third row of the Clayton County courtroom, Donald Skinner’s nine relatives laughed and cheered, when Eskew said that, and were reprimanded by Magistrate Judge Richard Brown.

“Not that she was just evil,” Eskew continued. “She was also a liar.”

Allene Skinner wore an oversized, green jail-issued jumpsuit, during the hearing, and kept her chin raised and thrust forward. She never looked at Smith.

Eskew first saw Allene Skinner at the scene of the shooting, when she drove into the parking lot in a red, Ford F-150 pickup truck registered to a member of Smith’s family and, apparently not noticing the marked patrol car and uniformed officer, walked to the tractor trailer and climbed inside.

When Eskew went to the insurance company to look at the policy on Donald Skinner, he said, Allene Skinner was sitting in the waiting room. Family members told detectives she had previously asked them to help her kill her husband.

Smith, an officer at the Farmers Market for three years and for the Jonesboro Police Department before that, told police she had encouraged him to murder Donald Skinner.

She had, Smith told police, told him a long, involved story about how she was working for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and was “mixed into something. She was mixed up with some important people, some bad people,” Eskew said. Smith told detectives Allene Skinner had told him she was going to get killed by the “important people” and “bad people,” because her husband had found out something and had been talking about it. If she was going to remain safe, she allegedly said, her husband would have to be killed.

Eskew described the story as “a fantasy that only a fool would believe. A fool in love would believe it.”

Malcolm Wells, Allene Skinner’s defense attorney, found the story beyond belief.

“It defies belief, unless we’re not in Clayton County, Ga., but in an episode of ‘Miami Vice,’” Wells said. “That’s the story he gave you? He never mentioned the insurance money or anything? He said he killed [Donald Skinner] to save her from the D.E.A.?”

Smith’s attorney, Joe Roberto, did not deny Smith shot Donald Skinner to death, but questioned the detective about Allene Skinner’s character.

Wells argued, before the judge, that the characterization of Allene Skinner as “evil,” was understandable, given the family’s grief, but unsupported by the facts. He argued the woman’s affair with the police officer wasn’t sufficient evidence to support the charges against her. “One thing is clear, [Smith] killed him for her, not that she asked him too. The only person we know is evil is the ‘trigger man,’” he said.

Allene Skinner, listening to the closing arguments, looked at her lawyer and cried.

The case was bound over to Superior Court, where Smith and Allene Skinner will face possible indictment by a grand jury. A bond hearing is set for Friday at 9 a.m.

Family killed in motel fire remembered
‘I’ve never had to stand in front of this number of coffins before’
By Daniel Silliman
Clayton News Daily, June 16, 2007


The five were dressed for a wedding.

Shikita Jones, 32, wore a long, white, wedding dress and a wreath of white flowers on her head. Fred Lee Colston Jr., 26, was dressed in the white tuxedo of a groom. Melvin Jones, 42, and Devon Butler, 11, were wearing tuxedos, and 10-year-old Desha Butler was dressed as a bridesmaid.

The five were dressed for a wedding that never happened. They lay in five white coffins.

The coffins were open at the front of the sanctuary, Friday, end-to-end, covered by white gauze and white flowers. Shikita Jones and Colston were planning to get married in July and planning to move out of the Budget Inn the day the 709 King Road motel burned and the smoke killed them.

Family, friends and officials filed to the front of Divine Faith Ministries International, in Jonesboro, to view the bodies of the family. Some wept openly. Others stared at the bodies, one after another, their faces blank. Women, wearing black dresses, stood at either end of the line of coffins holding out boxes of tissues.

Clayton County Fire Chief Alex Cohilas paused, in front of each coffin, and crossed himself. He paused for a moment longer, in front of the dead children, placing two fingers on the edge of each cold white casket.

Officials said Wednesday that they believe the fire was caused by arson. On Friday, during the funeral for the five killed in the suspicious fire, family and friends remembered the lives of the deceased, and expressed feelings of loss, grief and hope in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

“They were a family,” said Juanita Jones, a cousin to Shikita. “Shikita loved Fred, Fred loved Shikita and they both loved these kids ... I pray for them. I pray for the person that done this. I don’t know what they should do [to the arsonist], I really don’t, but as long as we are all in God’s hands, it’s all right.”

The family filed into the sanctuary, following the Reverend Otis White, who recited Psalms into a cordless microphone. “I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel; my reins also instruct me in the night seasons,” White read. “I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth; my flesh also shall rest in hope. For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell.”

Fred Colston’s uncle said his heart was heavy and said he understood grief in a new way. He sang a song about getting ready to go home, in another country, up the ladder, into heaven. “I got a home -- hallelujah! -- over the mountain,” he sang.

White, the pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, pointed a hand at the five and said he had never had to stand in front of this number of coffins.

“I’m not going to say God did this,” White said. “I told you before it was the enemy. You can be angry, you can feel frustrated, you can point your finger at the owners of that hotel, you can cast your words at the community, but let me tell you, an enemy has done this.”

To shouts of “amen,” “un huh,” “yes” and “hallelujah,” White preached on the need to take this time to re-examine life, to commit to Jesus and to trust God. “In times like these, it’s time to trust God’s will,” he said.

“Why didn’t God protect them from the fire, like the three Hebrew children we read about? Why? Have you been asking why? I’m just telling you to trust in God.”

He urged those in attendance to make Jesus their Lord and Savior, if they wanted to see the deceased again in heaven.

The white coffins were wheeled outside the Tara Boulevard church, and loaded into five black hearses. The hearses were waiting, open, backed up to the front of the church. Six black limousines were waiting to take the family.

The two Joneses and the two Butlers will be buried in Chicago, where the family is originally from. Colston will be buried in Clayton County.

Detectives looking at murdered girl’s troubled past
By Daniel Silliman
Clayton News Daily, Sept. 20, 2007

Detectives are considering everyone as a “person of interest,” in the murder of a 17-year-old Jonesboro girl, and are investigating every theory -- from an angry boyfriend to the possibility of a serial killer.

Clayton County Police identified the 17-year-old, who had been killed, badly burned and dumped in a wooded area near Shamrock Lake, as Jennifer Lee Chambers. Her body was found there, partially covered by a multi-colored poncho, on Sept. 5. She was reported missing by her mother nine days later.

Chambers’ mother, Betty Jean May, filed a missing persons report with the Jonesboro Police Department on Sept. 14, saying she had seen the news about the dead girl and was afraid it was her daughter.

Authorties had reported that the dead girl weighed about 100 pounds, was about five-feet, four-inches tall, and had long, straight, brown hair. Chambers weighed 95 pounds, May said, was five-feet, two-inches tall, and had long, straight, dark-black hair.

A check of dental records confirmed the mother’s fears, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s forensic anthropologists identified the murdered girl as Chambers.

May told the Jonesboro police she had last heard from her daughter on Sept. 1, according to the police report. “She had been living out on her own and would call in to her family every week or so,” Clayton County Deputy Police Chief Tim Robinson said. “I think that was what accounted for the time delay.”

May reported that the 17-year-old had been living in a mobile home park with a Hispanic man known as “Miguel Ramirez.” She described Chambers as a troubled teenager, who had been involved with drugs and prostitution. The 17-year-old was not enrolled in Clayton County high schools, according to the school system’s spokesman.

When May saw the news, she checked with her daughter’s friends and the neighbors in the mobile home park, and none of them had seen Chambers in a few weeks, according to the missing persons report.

Some of them reportedly told the worried mother that Ramirez had recently learned he had contracted HIV from Chambers, who was, allegedly, HIV positive. The man was not living in the mobile home, and neighbors reportedly told May he had gone home to Mexico.

May said she was worried for her daughter’s safety before the disappearance. In the end of August, according to May, Chambers got into an argument with another woman, and the woman had poured lighter fluid over the 17-year-old and tried to set her on fire.

Since the identity of the murdered girl was confirmed by the GBI, Clayton County detectives have spoken with Chambers’ mother, aunt, grandmother and some of her friends. They are working on the teenage girl’s “victimology” — her background and the series of events leading up to her death.

“We’re getting information from a variety of sources and we’re trying to answer those questions about her and her background,” Robinson said.

“She had a troubled youth, but no one deserves to be killed and burned and left in the woods. Even though she may have had a troubled past, she and the family deserve to see her killer brought to justice, and the department is committed to seeing that justice is done,” added Robinson.

Detectives are looking for Chambers’ boyfriend -- “Miguel Ramirez.” The two had reportedly been living together since the beginning of August. They are not saying he is a murder suspect, but do believe he is “a person of interest,” and want to know when he last saw the 17-year-old.

At this point in the investigation, however, “everyone is a person of interest,” the deputy chief said.

The detectives in the crimes against persons division are sending the information from Chambers’ case to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Behavior Science Unit, along with three other cases of young women who have been murdered and dumped, to see if their deaths have enough in common to support a serial killer theory.

“There were some similarities, but we’re wanting someone outside to actually give us an opinion,” Robinson said.

•An unidentified black female was killed, burned and dumped in a wooded area off of Garden Springs Drive, on the northern edge of the county, in 2002.

•In 2005, Nicole Johnson, also known as “Peaches,” was found killed and dumped off of Lee’s Mill Bridge, near Interstate 75.

•In 2006, Latisha Tramble was found killed and burning in a trash bin behind an apartment complex, on the northern end of the county.

Chambers was found two weeks ago.

According to Robinson, all of the women were young, were killed and were dumped, but the theory breaks down in the other details.

Three of women were small, but the fourth was taller. Three of the women were African American, but one was white. Three of the women were reportedly involved in prostitution, but one wasn’t. Three of the bodies were found near “No Dumping” signs, but the fourth was found in a trash bin. One of the women wasn’t burned. There were different causes of death in the four killings.

Three of the bodies were found on the northern end of the county, but the latest one was found on the southeast side.

“Unless our killer lived up there and knew the area up there and then moved down here, I don’t think it makes sense,” Robinson said. “I really don’t think that it’s true, but that’s why we’re getting someone to look at it. We don’t believe it to be the case, but just to be thorough and to make sure, the [four cases] are being submitted to the FBI.”

Anyone with information about Chambers is asked to call Detective Steve Rotella at (770) 477-3624.

Man wanted for murder, armed robbery turns self in
By Daniel Silliman
Clayton News Daily, March 27, 2007

Alfonso Mason saw his face on television. It was an older picture, so his glasses weren’t as thick and his hair wasn’t as gray, but it was him.

The 56-year-old was in an extended-stay motel in DeKalb County. All he did all day was sleep and watch TV and when he saw his face and saw he was wanted by the Clayton County Police for the murder of a motel maid, the armed robbery of Stockbridge’s Suburban Lodge and the car-jacking of the assistant manager’s car, he decided to turn himself in, Clayton County Police Detective Tom Martin said.

“He said his life was meaningless. He was waking up and watching TV and it was the same thing every day,” Martin said.

Mason walked into the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office at 2:38 a.m. Sunday, 17 days after he allegedly stabbed a woman to death and held up the 7465 Davidson Parkway motel. He told the deputy on duty who he was and surrendered, Clayton County Police Chief Jeff Turner said.

He had a black revolver in his pocket when he turned himself in, Clayton County Police said, a gun fitting the description of the one used in the robbery.

During a four-hour interview with Martin, Mason described his life from the time he was the vice president of a bank in New Jersey to early in March, when he was planning to kill the 49-year-old cleaning lady at the motel where he had lived for about a year, Martin said.

“This is a man who went from making a six-figure income to using his Home Deport credit card to pawn items he’d just bought,” Martin said.

Mason confessed to the armed robbery immediately, and told police he had planned the robbery because he was having trouble paying his rent. He told Martin he had been a vice president at The Bank of Tokyo until 2000. His severance pay ran out in January 2007 and he began to struggle to afford the $190 weekly rent for the motel room.

Martin said Mason had originally moved to Georgia to be near his daughter, but the two weren’t getting along. Mason had been a resident at the extended-stay motel for long enough that the employees knew who he was and thought he was joking when he said he was robbing them.

They described him to police as a clean man who wasn’t likely to commit a crime.

Mason had a drinking problem, Martin said, and was growing increasingly depressed and frustrated that people making an hourly wage at a cheap motel were kicking him out.

“He just started losing it,” Martin said.

At about 1 p.m. on March 7, he approached the motel assistant manager, 40-year-old Bridgett McLemore, and told her he was having money problems, according to police reports.

“He was having money problems because he couldn’t contact a friend living in New York to send him some money,” McLemore told Clayton Police Officer Michael Medious. He was “basically rambling and not being very coherent,” she said.

Mason then followed McLemore back into the office, according to the police report, pressed a small black revolver into her back and took $1,812 out of the cash register.

Police later found the body of Cynthia Hyman, who worked as a maid at the motel, between a bed and a wall, in a room used for storage. She was stabbed five times in the stomach a few minutes before the robbery, Martin said.

Mason drove off in McLemore’s 2000 silver-colored Pontiac Sunbird and police put him on a wanted list. The motel offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to Mason’s arrest and conviction.

He turned himself in.

“He said he saw his picture on TV and thought he should turn himself in,” Martin said.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was preparing to broadcast Mason’s face on a television list of people wanted on the East Coast later this week.

During the interview, Mason also confessed to the murder, Martin said.

Mason is facing charges of murder, armed robbery and car-jacking in Clayton County Superior Court. He is also facing federal prosecution on the armed robbery charges.

Police are still looking for the Pontiac, which was last seen in the parking lot of a DeKalb County strip club, Martin said.

Anyone with information about the vehicle was asked to call Martin at (770) 477-3635.

Cop who confessed to murder has history of failure
    His hard-luck life has lawyer asking for leniency in brutal slaying
By Daniel Silliman
Clayton News Daily, Aug. 31, 2007

A sworn police officer and a confessed murderer, Charles Alan Smith has a history of failures leading up to the moment he was charged with killing his girlfriend’s husband.

The 49-year-old saw himself as the “black sheep” of his family and was struggling to become “the good guy,” according to his attorney, who is arguing Smith is different from other murderers.

To prosecutors, however, he is simply a killer, who deserves “nothing less” than a life sentence in prison — his history is irrelevant.

Whether or not Smith’s past warrants a plea for leniency, it shows a police officer descending to murder, and a man desperate to overcome his failures the morning he -- according to his confession -- ambushed a man and shot him to death in a warehouse parking lot before the sun came up.

Born in North Dakota on Oct. 8, 1957, Smith grew up on the east side of Jonesboro. A neighbor still living in the area — someone Smith listed as a reference when applying for a job, but who asked not to be named in this article — described the Smith family as a “model family,” an “average family” and “good church-goers.”

“He would have been any kid in our neighborhood,” the neighbor said. “He was just your average young boy playing football.”

Smith joined the United States Army and finished his high school degree while stationed in Germany. He married a nurse while stationed in Denmark, according to documents obtained by the Clayton News Daily.

A Southern Baptist, Smith married a Catholic girl from Detroit, Therese Rose Dugan, on August 15, 1984. Four years later, with a newborn son, the two returned to the United States, and moved to Georgia, where they had a second son.

After eight years, though, Smith’s life unraveled, and documents show he has been grasping at the loose ends since 1996. Therese Smith became a Jehovah’s Witness, and following the tenets of her new-found faith, stopped celebrating holidays, didn’t accept gifts and didn’t allow the two boys to accept gifts. According to Clayton County Superior Court documents, she criticized her husband’s language, accused him of being an absentee father and pushed him to join the Witnesses.

He said she was a fanatic, and that she had “changed considerably” since their marriage, 12 years earlier. Therese Smith wasn’t working, at the time, and Smith was making $7.75 an hour as a “control specialist” at a freight company.

Disagreeing with his wife over religion and their children, and stressed about finances, Smith left his wife and family in March of 1996. He moved into an extended-stay motel, and filed for divorce, documents show.

Smith’s attorney, Joe Roberto, said the failed marriage devastated Smith’s self worth. Living alone, he spent the next five years losing a series of jobs, and arguing about child support and visitation rights. In 1998, he got a job servicing fire alarms. He worked his way up to $18 an hour, but then the company was sold and he lost his job.

He took another job servicing fire alarms, in 2001, but was fired after one month. He took a another job, that year, installing fire alarms, and was fired after four months.

Late that summer, Smith went to work for Waffle House, cooking food for $6.80 an hour. He worked there for the rest of the year, earning a 20-cent raise. In January 2002, he applied to the Jonesboro Police Department, citing his military experience and a desire to help people. He got the job, and worked as a patrol officer for two and a half years.

According to Jonesboro records, he worked without distinction until he made an inappropriate comment to a female co-worker. In May 2004, Smith made a crude joke, according to the department’s internal investigation, and was reprimanded for visiting a female officer’s apartment while the two were on duty. In June, he made a comment while talking to another female officer, and the woman reported him, saying she felt offended and disrespected.

While being interviewed by then-Chief Robert Thomas, Smith asked if he could keep the incident out of his personnel file by resigning. Thomas told him the investigation would end, and Smith typed out a resignation, effective immediately.

When he applied for a position at the Atlanta State Farmer’s Market, one month later, he listed his reason for leaving as “personal.” He was hired at the farmers’ market and started working for Police Chief Freeman Poole, a former member of the Jonesboro force.

Poole later described Smith as one of his best officers and as someone who was always willing to help. But Smith’s police department file shows a different story.

In the Spring of 2007, he was reprimanded twice for misconduct. He was regularly late to work, according to a written reprimand, showing up late more often than he showed up on time. He left work to run personal errands, while on duty.

His supervisor called him unreliable and disruptive to normal operations. Smith had a supervisory position taken away, and his superior officer “made it very clear that he did not want Charles Smith working on his shift any longer,” according to an internal memo.

At the time, Smith was in the middle of a romantic relationship with a married woman. It was the first relationship he’d had since his divorce. He had met 50-year-old Allene Skinner in a Forest Park truck stop, according to Clayton County Police, and the two were reportedly married in an unofficial ceremony.

Roberto said Skinner, who was legally married to Donald Ray Skinner, a truck driver, “twisted him all around” and made him act like a love-sick 14-year-old. The two had an off-and-on relationship, and Smith wrote Skinner letters, Roberto said, promising he would make their relationship work and dreaming about buying a house with her.

Clayton County detective, Scott Eskew, said the two applied for a home loan, but were denied.

On June 9, Donald Ray Skinner was found dead in the freight company parking lot. His tractor trailer was still running, nothing had been taken and he appeared to have been ambushed, chased and shot four times. He was shot in the eye with a bullet Eskew identified as the type of round — a high quality .40-caliber bullet — used by police.

Seventeen days later, Smith and Skinner were arrested on charges of conspiring to murder and murdering the 49-year-old trucker. Skinner was allegedly motivated by her husband’s $90,000 life insurance policy. Smith was allegedly motivated by love.

Skinner’s attorney, Malcolm Wells, did not return repeated calls, but said in court that his client didn’t conspire to murder her husband of 17 years; that Smith acted alone.

Smith confessed to the crime, telling detectives he had waited in the woods near the truck depot and had shot Donald Ray Skinner four times, listening to him say “Why?” as he lay on the concrete and died.

Eskew described the arrested police officer as “a fool in love.” Roberto agreed with the description, saying “this was love gone woefully awry. I don’t mean to diminish what he did, the taking of life is a crime and a horrible thing, but I want to distinguish him from many of the murders we see in Clayton County,” Roberto said.

Smith is a murderer, according to his lawyer, but he isn’t cold blooded, isn’t a drug dealer and doesn’t have a “nefarious background.” Roberto said he is begging the District Attorney’s office to allow his client to plead guilty to manslaughter.

Donald Ray Skinner’s family asked the district attorney to pursue the death penalty, but they were told the case does not meet the legally required aggravating circumstances.

Executive assistant district attorney, John Turner, said there’s no way, however, that someone who pulled the trigger can be charged with anything less than murder.

“To me, murder is murder,” Turner said. “There’s no defense and there’s no excuse ... To me, it’s worse when a cop does something like that. They know better than that. There’s no excuse.”

Turner is reviewing the case this week, preparing to bring the charges to a grand jury for indictment.

Woman killed after two years of reported domestic violence
By Daniel Silliman
Clayton News Daily, Sept. 18, 2007

Police found the 36-year-old woman lying face down in the kitchen, surrounded by a pool of blood.

There was a bloody kitchen knife in the sink, and the woman, with multiple stab wounds through the back of her black T-shirt, didn’t respond to the officer’s question: “Can you hear me?”

Ani Hacardyan Rose, a German native living in Ellenwood, died on the floor of her kitchen a little before 9:30 p.m., Sunday. Ani Rose called 911 at 9:12 p.m., Clayton County Police said. She told the 911 operator she had a protective order against her husband, but he was in the 5371 Pecan Grove home and the couple was fighting.

Demetrio Patricio Rose, a 38-year-old native of Panama, called 911 a few minutes later, and told the operator he needed an ambulance, because he had stabbed his wife.

When Officer S.R. Malette knocked on the door, Demetrio Rose answered and said, “My wife needs an ambulance.”

He was wearing gray sweat pants, and the pants were wet around his ankles, Malette wrote in the police report. There was blood on the steps leading to the kitchen.

Demetrio said again, “I need an ambulance,” and Malette said, “Who is stabbed?” according to the report.

“The male stated, ‘My wife!’ I asked, ‘Who stabbed her?’ The male stated, ‘Me, I did!’” Malette reported.

The two Rose children, 14-year-old and 9-year-old girls, had locked themselves in a bedroom in the back of the house, during the fight.

Demetrio Rose was arrested on charges of murder, aggravated assault and cruelty to children. He was taken to the Clayton County Jail.

Police dispatchers couldn’t find a record of a protective order, Sunday night. Ani Rose, in the middle of divorce proceedings against her husband, filed for the order in May, but It was dismissed by Clayton County Magistrate Judge Bobby Brown in June. Brown cited a lack of sufficient evidence.

Attorney, Leon Hicks, who shares offices with Ani Rose’s lawyer, Joseph Baker, said he didn’t understand why the judge didn’t err on the side of caution, a ruling which might have saved the 36-year-old mother’s life. “This is just a horrible decision on his part,” Hicks said.

At the June hearing, Ani Rose and her lawyers gave the court photographs, showing bruised arms, Hicks said. She testified under oath that those were her bruised arms, in the photos; that Demetrio Rose had hurt her, and that the photos were true and accurate representations of the facts.

“She had evidence in this case,” Hicks said. “There was no evidence to the contrary.”

Brown could not be reached for comment, Monday.

Chief Magistrate Judge Daphne Walker said the case was dismissed because of a lack of sufficient evidence, and that the case can’t be judged in retrospect.

Walker received an award, last week, for the work she’s done in improving the county’s magistrate court response to domestic violence and protective orders.

Karen Geiger, staff attorney for the Family Violence Project at Georgia Legal Services, said Walker’s magistrate court is held up as an example around the state. “I know she’s very committed to always doing the right thing for victims and filling in some of the gaps that we see in some of the court systems around here,” Geiger said. “[Clayton County] has a more well-thought-out, and consistent, system.”

Rose was appealing the dismissal of the protective order, and Superior Court Judge Deborah Benefield was scheduled to hear the case next month.

“This was the fastest we could get any kind of hearing at all,” said Esther Hart, a paralegal for Baker. “Ani called several times, saying she was concerned because he was so verbally abusive. We knew this was going to happen.”

Police were called out to the Rose’s Ellenwood home in April, when the court served them with mediation papers as part of the divorce proceedings, according to a police report. Demetrio Rose allegedly got angry, when the papers arrived at the house, and the couple got into a verbal dispute. The Police officer advised Ani Rose to get a protective order against her husband.

Ani Rose had previously reported her husband to police in August 2006. Her husband had taken their children’s social security cards, passports and birth certificates, she said, and she was afraid he was going to take them out of the country.

“I don’t know about his plans,” Ani Rose wrote on a police statement form. “He has not been reasonable. He is screaming and cursing at me in front of the children and calling me names.”

In the statement form, Ani Rose lists three incidents of domestic violence, dating back to 2005. First, he threw a cell phone at her, she said, then another time, he threw a ring of keys at her, hitting her in the head. In the third incident, he grabbed her by the hair and threw her to the ground, Ani Rose wrote.

She told him she would report him to the police — next time. “His answer was, ‘I will finish what I started next time,’” Rose wrote in the handwritten report.

The report was filed more than a year before she was stabbed to death. The Clayton County Police officer receiving the report told Ani Rose to file a protective order.

There was no protective order, when police arrived at the couple’s home, on Sunday night, and saw bloody foot prints in the kitchen, dining room, hallway and up and down the stairs.

A letter and a few thoughts on atheism

E,

Very interesting. I haven't read all of these yet, but have looked over Turner and McGinn and, rather than waiting for some full fledged response which may never happen, here are a few thoughts.

The thing, I think, that disturbs me about atheists is that they seem to know exactly what God is. They have rejected a very specific idea, one which they don't seem to state and which I don't know.

Augustine asked, "what do I say I love when I say I love my God?" People that say they love God ought to ask this, but people who say they don't believe in God ought to rephrase the question so they can ask it too.

McGinn takes some time to say that for him there is nothing where for other people there is God, that he hasn't replaced God with something else on his intellectual map and that there's not a blank spot on that map where other people put God, but that the map doesn't even go there. I don't see though, that he's willing to say what, exactly, isn't there.

There are a lot of kinds of theists and a lot of kinds of atheists. Not all atheists are angry 15 year olds and not all theists are hicks. To run the conversation as if they were is pointless.

I find it very interesting that Turner - if I understand him - thinks that the theist's question is "why is there something rather than nothing?" Which is the question of ontology. Even down to Heidegger, when people talk about Being this is their starting question.

Some of the continentals talk about ontotheology when they talk about their atheism, like Derrida and Caputo. The talk about ontotheology is very worthwhile in that it, at leasts, is specific about what sort of thing it is rejecting when it rejects God.

To reject ontotheology, where God is Being, is not a specifically atheistic move. Even someone as traditional as Aquinas could reject that God.

I suspect that one of your questions is, how do I read the last line of Wittgenstein's tractatus? I read like this: a) we must speak of what we cannot speak, knowing that we will always be failing but still have to speak; b) what is silence?; c) the inside and the outside are, at least at some points, indivisable, so that speaking will always include not speaking and silence will always have words.

Another problems I have with this debate: I'm not interested in proving the existence of God, either to myself or to you. This is because I take (any interesting) belief in a god to be acting rather than in certainly saying. My belief in God leads me to act in such a way that even if he doesn't exist in any satisfying manner, I would have to act as if he did. In this sense, it would be more correct to say that I hope in God rather than believe in him.

Who can you read who says what I'm saying? Kierkegaard, tho I'm not familiar enough with his works to say what specifically you should read. Derrida, try Caputo's secondary work The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Graham Greene, try Monsignor Quixote. None of those actually speak straight forwardly for my "camp," but they are camping here.

I think I should probably say why I act this way rather than some other way, but will for now leave that alone.

Moving Past the Problem of Evil
A Fairfield presentation

John Milton wrote his great Epic, Paradise Lost, with the goal, as he said, of asserting Eternal Providence and justifying the ways of God to man. This project, as old as men’s belief in God, is called theodicy, which means to justify God, to explain how it is that evil comes into the world created by a Good God. Unfortunately, Milton ends up making a hero of Satan, who flamboyantly enters the story in doomed and dubious battle with nothing but the courage never to surrender his will to the overwhelming power of an absolute tyrant. Milton, however, does not leave Satan strutting in all his emo glory, but does reconcile how it is that God takes the glory even from this evil. Hell, we find, is not a realm beyond the glory of God, but the place where God relegates evil that he might regulate evil to his glory, evil being not beyond the divine but part of it. A universe of death, Milton says, which God by curse/ created evil.

But let us not too quickly blame blind old Mr. Milton. It is not his fault that the justification of God became an apology for evil. It is the fault, actually, of the project. All theodicies end like this - with God as evil, weak, or incompetent. Milton looked at the problem of evil and said God is in some way evil. Woody Allen looked at problem of evil and said that God is either impotent or an under-achiever. These are, I think, the three possible answers.

The problem of evil emerges from the contradiction of Christian dogmas:
God is good.
God cares about humans.
God is all powerful.
God is all knowing.
God is ever present.
There is evil in the world.

The project of justifying God, for someone who is orthodox, is to explain how all of those statements about God can be true, given the fact of evil. There are a number of unorthodox solutions, such as Maltheism which denies that God is good and that he cares about humans, Open Theism which denies God is all-knowing, and post-holocaust theology which denies God is ever-present. If we are willing to give up these propositions about God, then there is no problem of evil. To remain within Christian orthodoxy, though, we must maintain all of those propositions as true, even in a world where evil exists.

Christian theodicies can be grouped into two types: the free will answer, and the purposes-of-God answer.

The free will answer says that evil exists in the world because God gave men free will and with that will men chose evil. That is to say that the Good, caring, powerful, and present God gave men freedom, gave them a will to act against him, and that with that will they chose evil. Or, rather, they created evil by choosing against God. The relieves God of responsibility by saying that it isn’t God who perpetuates evil in the world, but men. God is not responsible for the massacre of children while the Jesus, Mary, and Joseph fled by cover of night to Egypt, Herod is. The problem though is that we were created by God. We were given wills and placed in a world such that we chose evil, we willed against God. Why did humans, made in the image of God, choose evil? There had to have been some flaw in our nature, or our will, or the world, such that evil appeared to us to be the better choice? Only God can be responsible for the fact that the will of Eve was deceivable, that the will of Adam was weak enough to fall. Even Satan, said to be the height of the light and glory of created beings, was contaminated by pride, greed and envy. This leaves us to point out that God created and is therefor responsible for these wills and these beings and this world, such that they begat evil, and to ask, is this the best God could do? Therefor I don’t see how “free will” relieves God of responsibility for evil, or justifies him in the face of it.

Of course, not all Christians believe in free will and there is then another answer to the problem of evil. In fact, even among those who do believe in man’s free will the second answer is readily banked upon. It is after all, probably the most quoted verse of the bible - Romans 8:28: All things work together for good. This position holds that, all right, evil exists in the world but it exists for a purpose and even though we do not know the specifics of that purpose, we know that it is good and for the glory of God. As I recently heard Dr. Burke explain this position, even though there is evil in this world, it’s probably there for a purpose, brings some good result in the future. Evil, that is to say, has a purpose, and that purpose is good and therefor evil is a means to good. I doubt you can go to a Christian funeral in this county without hearing this argument or some version of it. Of course this is not just a Christian argument, but the argument used everywhere people are treated as a means and not the end. It is the argument of tyrants and terrorists, who say their evil is just “collateral damage” and the breaking of eggs for the purpose of an omelet. Which is to say, this argument is hideous. This is not a description of a Good God who cares about people, but about who one doesn’t give a damn about people, who is self-serving, self-aggrandizing, and who is, at least in part, evil.

I suppose some of you figured I was going to give the third Christian answer to the problem of evil. The non-answer answer which goes “how can you judge God? By what criterion can you evaluate God?”

I once found this a compelling case, but now oppose this answer to the problem of evil for a few reasons. First, we must judge him lest we accept as God something which isn’t God. How else can we separate idols from the true God, separate God from false doctrines about God, from theories and projections of ourselves. Second, the criterion for judging God is God’s revleation of himself. If God tells me that he is Good, is love, is just, merciful, powerful, and so on, and I talk about God as if he is weak, brutal, arbitrary, and merciless, then one or the other of us must be wrong. Third, I reject this answer because it’s a really horrible thing to say to someone suffering or in pain from the effects of evil.

Now I don’t want you to think that I’ve made these answers up. For this reason I want to mention a Southern Baptist seminarian I know, who attempted to “answer the God-critics” last year in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Southern Baptist seminarians, I think it’s safe to say, are less prone to heresy than was John Milton. His agreement, as to the problem of evil in regards to the dead and the devastated on the Gulf Coast, was 1) maybe they had no right to be there and so it was their own fault; 2) the area was a cesspool of sin and deserving the judgement of God and so it was their own fault; 3) maybe it was God’s will for these people to die and/or God has the right to kill people; 4) maybe it wasn’t evil.

Lest you’ve forgotten, this is not a theoretical question. Where theological debates about the Trinity, or the divinity and humanity of Jesus certainly have consequences, the problem of evil begins with the consequences and those consequences have names and faces. In my case,* a theodicy is what I’m going to say to my friend Marie, who was raped last fall and doesn’t think she can tell her parents because of how devastated they would be. The problem of evil has the name of John, who will live the rest of his life with schizophrenia. A theodicy is what I’m going to say to Mathew, who sat in the snow on a ski slope for 30 minutes waiting for an ambulance as his 22-year-old fiancee died. It is the face of Cathrine, who’s cries when she remembers how her son, my childhood friend, died in a fireworks accident. I don’t bring you these ghosts of my pain to shock you, or to stake a claim to pain. I am sure each person here has, in their lives, pain and evil and hurting people. What I’m saying is don’t forget them. Do not give any answer to the problem of evil that you wouldn’t give to them, that wouldn’t be credible when directed towards their pain, and their suffering. This is not a theoretical question and yet those Christian answers are theoretical answers. This is the test of any answer, any theodicy - does it cause an ethical response to the suffering? Does it cause us to act more like Christ?

To this point let me re-tell a story:

There once was a man riding from Jerusalem to Jericho, and on the way he was beset by thieves. They stole everything he had, leaving him naked, beaten, bleeding, and dying. Laying there, in mud and pain, he moaned “I have been forsaken by God.” A Christian passed and hearing him said, “God is not responsible for this. This evil came into the world by free will, God has nothing to do with it.” A second Christian passed and hearing the man he said, “this, like all things, will work for good. Be content knowing that this evil will be the means for good.” And in saying so he sided with the thieves. A third Christian passed, and hearing the man he chided him, saying “who are you to judge God? Is God to be held accountable to you?” Finally a fourth Christian passed and hearing the man he said nothing, he had no explanation for how it was that a Good, caring, knowing, present and powerful God could let this happen. So saying nothing he took the man and bound his wounds, carrying him to an inn and paying for his care. Now which of this four, do you think, acted rightly? Which of them went the farthest to justify God in the face of evil, in the face of pain?

I don’t have an answer to the problem of evil. I don’t have a theodicy. And I don’t have a way of making the question go away. My answer then, is to bracket off the question. I assert that God is good, cares for us, is all powerful, ever-present and all-knowing. I know that there is evil in the world and I don’t know how rectify that with the existence of my God. I am, in this sense, agnostic. I just don’t know. What I do know is that my answer to the problem of evil is unimportant. All the answers I know of or have ever heard are withered and weak, make a mockery of God and trivialize pain. But I am not required or called to answer the problem, or to make the question go away, but only to follow Christ in reaching out to the suffering. Granted, one could give any of those the standard Christian answers to the problem of evil and also act to care for the suffering. There are many, I’m sure, who do, and may God bless them. I encourage those Christians, though, to abandon those answers and embrace the actions. Let God justify God and let Christians act as if they see the face of God in the face of men.

My point, in conclusion, is that the correct Christian response to the problem of evil is not to act like theologians, but like Christ. Dr. Reist is found of telling a story where a praying priest, despairing of ever getting help from God, looks at his crucifix and yells, “don’t just hang there, say something.” Looking at Christian theodicies I despair, and I am saying, “Don’t just say something, hang there.”


*all names are changed

Points clarified in questions and answers:

I do believe that there’s answer to the problem of evil, that there is something that God says or can say to himself that explains the existence of evil. Given eternity and the possibility of infinite knowledge God could reveal the solution to us. For this reason also I do not hold that the question is wrong to ask, but that all the answers I have heard or have thought of are wrong.

I’ve conflated pain and evil more than they probably should be.

Even if the answers weren’t the wrong thing to say to someone suffering, they would be troublesome because they detract from the character of God. That is to say, even when disjoined from the ethical concerns these answers create more problems than they solve.

Jesus does say that the blind man was blind for the purposes of his glory. I don’t know how to deal with that.

I do not think the end of Job gives us a theodicy beyond “there is an answer, but it is beyond your comprehension. Glorify God.” I think the fact that Job is declared to have been righteous means that his demanding answers was not wrong.

I am uncomfortable with any theodicy that is abstract, which is not good as an answer to someone in pain, and think that all theodicies should end up urging us to love God, and love our neighbor.

Jesus Christ and Josey Wales
Reimagining the Christic “Sacrifice” through the American Western

Preliminary comments:
1. All Christians, by definition, agree that the crucifixion of Jesus, incarnate God, was an act in time with redemptive consequences. However, among Christians there are two theoretical debates – who and how.
2. These debates are, literally, besides the point. The question adressed here of how redemption happened or happens is important only inasmuch as it moves one towards a better understanding of Christ and that that understanding moves one to respond to redemption worshipfully.

Introduction:
1. There are various debated explanations as to how Jesus’ death is redemptive.
A) The Romans responded to the early Christian’s claim of crucified messiah was “so what?” (Justin Martyr quotation.)
B) My father, who did not grow up in a religious home, was baffled when he first heard of “Good Friday,” asking “If Jesus was a good guy, why do you call the day he was executed good?”

2. All of the explanations of the how of redemption are metaphors.
A) Legal justification metaphor. (C.S. Lewis/Chronicles of Narnia quotation).
B) Ransom metaphor. (St. Anselm quotation).
C) Bride metaphor (Quotation? God/man, dieing/undieing inversions).
a) These metaphors are not mutually exclusive.
b) Each specific metaphor has specific problems
i. A) seems to over-credit or normalize the system we need redemption from.
ii. B) seems to be a Manichean sort of dualism between God and Satan.
iii. C) doesn’t necessitate death or go beyond Christ-as-example.

In being metaphorical, the explanations for the how of redemption are not primarily or necessarily theoretical or theological.
1) Consequently, we are free to mine any field which might give us profitable metaphors.
2) Therefor let us here turn to literature, looking for a profitable metaphor to explain how redemption happens.
A) Literature is full of “Christ Figures,” that is, a character who parallels Jesus Christ in that he or she is messianic, of a higher or divine order, preforms miracles, imparts grace or forgiveness, brings about a new age, or is killed in a way that redeems others.
1) E.T. is a Christ figure in that E.T. is more evolved and therefore of a higher order, imparts wisdom, and marks the advent of a new age of peace and understanding.
2) William Wallace in Brave Heart is a Christ figure in that Wallace is of a “heroic” and thus higher order, preforms miracles (of a sort), brings about a new age, and is killed in a way that redeems others.
(Note: Science Fiction films are filled with redemptive themes and Christ figures and, in the opinions of some scholars, took in the 70s and 80s the socio-cultural place of the 40s and 50s Biblical epics of DeMille and others. Mel Gibson’s films are filled with Christ figures and almost every character he plays is tortured in a pivotal scene (What Women Want may be the only exception).

3) We are going to look at the American Western for a Christ figure and a Christic “sacrifice” metaphor.
A) Because I like Westerns.
B) Because it gives me an excuse to watch Westerns.
C) Seriously, because the Western is definitive for America’s understanding of itself and everything else. If one wants to understand America one only needs to understand this genre, from “Buffalo” Bill Cody’s Wild West Show to the first Western film Cripple Creek Barroom to High Noon to Clint Eastwood’s Spaghetti Westerns to Star Wars to Kevin Costner’s Open Range a few years ago. Or, to put it another way, the Western is ever-changing genre illustrating the American psyche as it changes from the Indian Wars and Westward expansion to “Roaring 20s” to the Cold War to the late Cold War to the present War on Terror.

4) The hero-gunslinger of the Western at first appears to be an objectionable Christ figure.
A) The hero-gunslinger is violent.
B) The hero-gunslinger is a fallen human, esp. in the more recent “revisionist” or anti-hero Westerns, e.g. The Wild Bunch and The Unforgiven.

There are three ways in which the hero-gunslinger exeplifies the Christic action that results in redemption, which might be helpful in reimagining the how of redemption.

1) The hero-gunslinger protects and defends weak strangers without personal benefit or without or beyond reason.
A) Josey Wales gathers a motley and rag-tag caravan, which slows him done and leads to his death.
a) A hostile and biggoted old women
b) A retarded girl.
c) A distrusting Cherokee.
B) Shane protects farmers that disgust him. (Quotation.)
C) John Wayne in The Searchers protects those he considers to be the enemy, who are tainted by the very evil he's fighting.
a) A half-Anglo, half-Comanche boy.
b) A culturally Comanche girl.
c) An estranged family and their stupid neighbors.

Imaginations: The hero-gunslinger-Christ gathers to himself the weak , the dispossessed, and the unlikable, becoming one of them.

2) The hero-gunslinger engages in the system of violence in order to overthrow that system, taking all of the violence upon or into himself.
A) John Wayne’s Searcher takes scalps, and is equal to the brutality of the Comanches. He is a man who, in hating the Comanche's brutality and ugly life, hates his own violence.
B) Josey Wales is a “bush whacker” who guns down a score of men and who is falsely said to have killed between 50 and 100. He is portrayed as a man, to quote another Eastwood film, who knows that "it's what people know about themselves inside that makes them afraid."
C) Shane learns the peaceful life of the hard-working farmer, but restraps on his gun in order to meet as an equal the mercenary killer hired by the rancher to drive out the farmers.

Imaginations: By partaking in violence, the hero-gunslinger-Christ ends violence. He, quoting the New Testament, “brings the kingdom of God by violence, takes it by force.” The most violent part of the Western is always the final showdown, which brings about the self-desdruction of the violent system and results in a new age of peace, a new Eden or Kingdom of God. The hero-gunslinger-Christ uses violence in an inverted way, to protect the peaceful, end the reign of brutal force, and move the violence to consume itself.

3) Despite pleas to stay, the hero-gunslinger always dies or leaves, lest he recreate the system of violence and bloodshed.
A) Shane doesn’t come back but rides over the hill. (“Shane! Come back! Shane!”)
B) The last shot of The Searchers shows John Wayne outside the cabin from inside the cabin, framing him in the cabin door and showing him almost ritually removed from the home to which and for which he’s brought peace.
C) Joesy Wales eventually stays in what one character actually describes as “New Eden,” but only undergoing a ritual death and resurrecting as a new man, the non-heroic John Williams.

Imaginations: The hero-gunslinger-Christ takes all of the violence into himself, and then rather than becoming a new king which would necessarily be of the same likeness as the old king (The King is dead! Long live the King!) takes all of that away into the outer darkness or grave. By this inversion, from power for the sake of power to power that undermines and ends the power structure, he leaves behind him a space for a new sort of epoch, a kingdom of peace. With the hero’s literal or figurative death the age of death ends.

Summary: Using the American Western’s metaphor to explain how the Christic act brings redemption, we say that Christ gathers and defends the weak and worthless, engages and subverts the structure of power, and dies to create a space for an epoch of peace or the Kingdom of God.

Conclusion: This metaphor has the advantage of not over-crediting the rules of the system which Christ will overthrow, of avoiding a Manichean dualism, and of explication why Christ had to die.

This metaphor has the disadvantage of being about cowboys, who no one takes seriously.

Qualification: The claim here is very limited, claiming only that this might be a useful way to reimagine how Christ’s crucifixion was redemptive and that even if it isn’t, it may spur us to evaluate and consider what metaphors we do accept and use.

Speaking of God
Explorations in the possibility of theological language from Anselm to Levinas

Theology today is most fundamentally in quest of a language and mode whereby it can speak. Above all it is in quest of a language whereby it can speak of God.
              - Thomas J. J. Altizer

In five succinct paragraphs, Thomas Aquinas makes five straightforwardly philosophical arguments about metaphysics. He argues for an unmoved mover, an uncaused cause, a necessary being, a maximum being, and an intelligent end, and each of the arguments fits solidly in the tradition of philosophical arguments right up until the last line of each paragraph, where he appends this shift. At the very last line Aquinas turns it, ending each philosophical argument with some variation of the phrase “et hoc dicimus Deum” (and this we call God). Aquinas takes the philosophical argument using philosophical terms and then turns them to another purpose, turns them with a phrase to speak theologically. This shift is jarring. It is a change of subject that claims not to be changing the subject at all. It is a move from metaphysics to theology that claims to have made no move, to have been speaking only one language all along. The phrase seems so incongruous that we might do better to ask the statement as a question, noting that in question form this is the basic question of theology – what is it, what is this that we call God? Looking at this incongruity, and the seemingly supposed consistency, let us ask with what language we might answer that question.

When we speak of God in the Western tradition, we have spoken in two ways: philosophically and mystically. With philosophy we explain God’s place in our system of thought, the function of the divine within our world and how, so to speak, God works as a thing in this world. With mysticism we emphasize the otherness and uncontainability of God, the ineffability of the divine. Both of these languages, however, are problematic as theological languages. In mysticism we lose God; in this ineffability he slips beyond our world, beyond our comprehension. We are not speaking here of the worst of mysticism, which is a fetish of secrets and obfuscations that believes itself capable of conjuring or decoding the divine, but rather we are speaking of the best of mysticism which comes from this impulse of due reverence but still always loses the divine into the fog of distance between God and mankind. In philosophy, we lose God in the opposite manner. In philosophy we lose God by containing the divine, bringing God into the circumference of our system and thereby describing God as less than God. In philosophy God reaches mankind and enters into the world but, in fact, becomes a part of the world. He becomes contained and counted among the objects of the world – men and trees and elephants and now, God. If God is included in our philosophy, if our theological language is via affirmativa, God becomes an ontological object, a bit of the furniture that makes up the arrangement of things. If God is beyond our philosophy, if our theological language is via negativa, then the divine doesn’t enter our world and is irrelevant to it. We have God inside and God outside and neither of them are what we want when we want to speak of God. Both our traditional modes of theological speaking, then, are troubled by an inability to say what it is we want to say; we are floundering for a language with which to say what this is that we call God.

We need, somehow, to have God in our world without our world containing God. We need, somehow, God outside our world without eliminating God from it. The God we want to call God is both beyond comprehension and is somehow also comprehensible. If we play it one way we lose God, the other and we still lose God. We seem then to be in an impossible bind. If God is in our world then this thing which we call God is less than God, if outside it, then God is irrelevant. We need a God that crosses the line of outside/inside without falling over it. All of our philosophies and mysticisms attempt this but seem to all fail at crucial moments, letting what we call God be disfigured by our calling, letting that which is hoc dicimus Deum slide disastrously one way or the other.

This is not a problem when speaking of uncaused causes and unmoved movers, or when speaking of Zeus, of angels, or of UFOs. This is the particular problem of theological language. The purpose of speaking theologically is to articulate that which occupies this “space” of entering in and yet still remains beyond. This is not a problem either when we do not speak at all. There is here the distinct temptation to abandon altogether the project of theological language, to stop speaking of God at all or to simply speak of God as no more than a part of the world and a piece of a system. Certainly some have done this and there seems to be no well argued objection to that abandonment. But, for some of us, such a move seems to be impossible. To abandon the project of the possibility of a theological language would not be to abandon a God who both enters into and remains beyond our encapsulating circumference, but to settle for speaking in disfigurements. We seek and have sought a way to speak about God while at the same time feeling that everything that has been said is in some important way wrong, and to stop seeking would not eliminate the problem but accept it. For at least some people, among them both theists and atheists, the search for a theological language and the attempt to describe a “space” such that it is both inside and beyond our world, is an impulse that will not go away. There is a haunting insistence to the question, and we find ourselves asking again, what is this that we call God? Is a theological language possible?

The greatest attempt at speaking of God in such a way as to allow the divine to be wholly other, ineffably divine and yet still to take a place in our world and reach us here, is Anselm’s ontological argument’s thinking of infinity. Anselm attempts to balance God on this line so that God is infinite, so he is the beyond and also enters in. Anselm’s description of God has him piercing into this world and letting us see the Other. The person who approaches God Anselm-wise does so very vertically. He sees by God and through God to a God which cannot be delimited by the sight of humans.

Whether his argument works or not, there is something that feels wrong about it. I find this feeling in the island-argument response of his contemporaneous monk, in Kant’s famous rebuttal, and also in the normal reading of average freshman. It works on paper, the logic is sound, and yet we are deeply uncomfortable with it. There are, I think, two ways it feels wrong: First, it feels like a technicality. There’s a seemingly accidental nature of the proof. It is as if Anselm found a lucky technical solution for God. Second, this God of Anselm’s feels as though he’s present on paper, present to us logically but not viscerally. The common objection here is that Anselm’s God is not personal.

These objections may, however, be caused by asking Anselm’s project to extend way beyond its limited intentions. Anselm is not attempting to prove the existence of God. Anselm’s “proof” is at most secondary, as he is trying to prove that God’s character or nature is as we believed it to be, to answer the question of what this is that we call God, and in doing this he sets out a way we can talk about God. Many readings of Anselm’s argument are trying, really, to follow him backwards. Where Anselm’s move was one of, as he said, “faith seeking understanding,” we read him trying to get from understanding to faith.

Neither we, here in this exploration of the possibility of a theological language, nor Anselm are trying to prove the existence of God or to start from any place other than faith. For the purposes of this paper we are interested in Anselm’s attempt at developing a language with which to speak of that which we call God. Both of the common objections hint at problems in his formulation of a theological language. While not intended as such, both objections can be recast as objections to the way in which Anselm comes to describe God as contained within our world, our logic. What both objections point to as troubling is the way in which Anselm has employed a philosophical syllogism to speak of God and then has spoken of God as a piece of that logical syllogism. Let us ask then, is Anselm describing God in a way that contains God, that speaks of God as in within our world?

Anselm wants to move from meditation on the word “God” to God. He’s echoing Augustine’s language where Augustine says he wants to go from hearing the two syllables of “Deus” to “reach something than which nothing is better or more sublime.” It is unclear whether Anselm knew it or not, but he is also echoing the words of Seneca, where Seneca says God’s “magnitude is that than which nothing greater can be thought.” Where Augustine and Anselm wanted this language to be a theological language whereby they may speak of something that is in but also beyond our world, unencircleable by our systems of thought, Seneca uses the same language to speak of a god that isn’t wholly Other, a god that is one god among many and one worldly thing among many worldly things. The similarity of the phrases brings into question the supposed difference in what is being called God. It is not clear that this theological language is necessarily describing a God who is beyond this world, and it even becomes doubtful how this phrase could possibly be understood to describe such a divine. In a language where God is “that which greater than which none can be conceived,” there is nothing to say that a God such as that must be something more than ontological furniture, more than the world.

Examining Anselm’s own claims for his language leads us to same problem as above. He wants, in the course of his meditation, to move from God in intellectu, in perception, to God in re, in existence or--problematic yet literal--in things. Anselm’s theological language seems constructed then to break the skepticism of idealism, but it is ill designed to speak of a God who is ineffable. He does though, while making the move from God in intellectu to God in re, speak of God as infinite. We cannot rightly read of Anselm’s God in re without remembering that this in re God is also infinite. God is not, for Anselm a thing, but the infinitely greatest thing and great in infinite ways. Yet this language obviously still does not speak of God as beyond and as uncontainable. Anselm wants to explore how this infinite God can be contained within our finite cognition, but in doing that he doesn’t give us a way to speak of that “God” which is beyond our finite cognition.

Following the example of the Christian Apostle Paul’s proclamation that the Athenian altar to an unknown God was actually an altar to the God he had come preaching, Christian philosophers throughout the history of philosophy in the West have found things in one or another philosophical system that they identified as what we had called God. They have undertaken philosophical conversations and then added onto the end of that conversation the claim that “this is what we call God.” This identification always later becomes complicated and troublesome when the thing identified with God did not and could not act as God, and when the system or piece of the system identified with God was later rejected. If what we called God was only some piece of a philosophical system, then God stands or falls with the system and that piece of the system. The examples of this identification becoming publicly troublesome and complicated stretches back from the so called death of God philosophers in the 1970s to Nietzsche’s use of that phrase to Galileo, and back seemingly without end. In one lesser-known example John Scotus Eriugena identifies God with neo-Platonism’s Being and becomes a sort of pantheist condemned by multiple popes.

When those who loved something they called God speak about the death of God, they begin to count our types of God and to show us how the God who is now dead was never the one we wanted anyway. There are of course the old fashioned atheists, like, say, Sartre, who didn’t want a God or believe in any sort of God and who thought an age without God would be a golden one, but there are those who loved something they called God, who’ve lost something they called God. Pascal made this move when he, recording a religious vision on a piece of paper he carried until his death, wrote that he had seen “not the God of the philosophers and scholars,” but “FIRE,” the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,” and the “God of Jesus Christ” Pascal sees that any God who is a piece of a philosophic system is less than God, and he sees us struggling to speak of God in any way so that what we speak of can be the God we and he had set out to love and understand. He wants to stop himself at this point of speaking and say no, something’s terribly wrong with this God who either slips beyond our world into obscure and nonsensical talk or slips into our world and becomes a bit of ontological furniture. He thinks that we began, as Anselm instructed, with faith seeking understanding but that the understanding has destroyed our faith. Let us then, he says, lose this God. We will not, he thinks, have lost something which we wanted. Buber makes this same move, counting in our history two Gods, two things we called God, and saying that now we have lost one but it turns out to be the one that was never really God. We have lost something, but it was the disfigured description of what we wanted. Buber says there is an It-God who was an object, and a Thou-God. Philosophy has always, by the nature of philosophy, been about the It-God, and it may have seduced us into thinking we were loving the Thou-God by speaking of the It-God, but we were mistaken and the sooner the It-God passes away the better.

There is something entirely right about the move these philosophers are making here, but this eagerness to be done with the It-God and the philosopher’s God, to dismiss the disfigurements, seems rushed. There are many things in Buber and Pascal’ analysis and the shift they propose which would be worth exploring, but what their story seems to be missing is the anguish. They’re with Sartre in being too cavalier in dismissing what we said it was we loved, in dismissing that which we would talk about and then say et hoc dicimus Deum. It may well be that the dismissal is right, that we had gotten God all wrong, but to move so swiftly to a solution misses the pain of this loss. Note that Nietzsche’s mad man, after proclaiming in the streets that God is dead and we have killed him, begins to weep and when no one understands him he goes to a requiem for the deceased divine. He is overwhelmed by anguish. When someone says, “God is dead and we didn’t want him anyway” there is something that has been brushed aside. So let us say “yes, perhaps,” but then also query further. When we destroy this idol-god, having thought of it as something which entered into and also remained beyond our world, but seeing now that it was only another thing in the world, we are still losing something, killing something. We are not losing God, but we are losing something nevertheless. We are losing the language by which we were speaking of God. To abandon what we called God, knowing now that it was but a disfigurement, is, it seems, to abandon the possibility of an infinite entering into our world, the possibility of speaking of something which would not by our speaking become a thing.

What we wanted from the Anselmian project was the preservation of the infinite, was the intrusion of the ineffable into our world in such a way that it both reached us and remained beyond us. We need an infinite we can behold without making finite. The initial problem, which still remains, is how to think of and speak of God such that God crosses the space of inside/outside without falling over. Pascal won’t help us if he does nothing more than continue to repeat the phrase “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob.” Buber seems to offer us only a language within which to speak to God, not a theological language, but a romantic and ecstatic one. Though he had, it seems, intended to, Buber never, from this understanding of God as approachable only as a Thou, developed a new way in which to speak of God. Buber and Pascal still need a way to talk about God, still need a theological language. Let’s look at two modern attempts at speaking of God without disfiguring him: first the ethical and second the impossible.

Tolstoy tells a religious story about a cobbler named Martin who despairs of life and wants to see God. Martin is promised in a dream that he would, the next day, see God. So he goes about his day keeping on the lookout for God and does pretty well, but he is distracted eventually by someone in need. They’re cold and need something to eat and a coat so he takes them in and cares for them and realizes later that he was distracted and didn’t see Jesus. That night again he hears a voice promising that he will see God the next day, if he remains vigilant. The same thing happens the next day and he hears the voice again and then again he’s distracted by someone in need and then the last night, in total despair, he apologizes to God for getting distracted and asks to die. That night in a dream he sees the people he has helped walking by and he hears the voice telling him that he has seen the face of God in the face of these people.

Perhaps the error of Anselm’s attempt at beholding the ineffable was its verticalness. In the most recent scholarship on death of God theology there occurs and reoccurs a turn to Levinas and his talk of the face of the other. The “other” in Levinas, is a conflation of the otherness of people, the faces we see around us, and the Otherness of God. This is not a problem but rather the point. He wants to make an incarnational move. Levinas attempts to make the Anselmian move horizontally, and with that horizontality to let us see God in a way that’s not technical and is very visceral. He thinks the face of the other offers us a way in which to see the infinite, the ineffable, the unthinkable divine, without surrounding it, overrunning it, and destroying it. Through the faces of other people we can let God enter the world and reach us while still remaining uncontainable. This ethics can speak theologically without losing God either by enclosing him in our world or walling him outside of it. Levinas offers us the possibility of a theological language that allows us to talk about God so that he’s in our world without our world containing him, and outside our world without being eliminated from it.

Yet the horizontal theological language has only repeated the problems of the vertical one. Buber’s point about the It-God and the Thou-God applies, originally and especially, to people. How does one go about looking with the Levinasian look that doesn’t deface the face of the other? It is no clearer how we can speak of people without treating them as objects, as things in the world, than we could of God. When we speak about people, we speak about them as things in this world, among the ontological furniture. There is nothing about the horizontal move which allows the face of the other to stay at this inside/outside space. It is constantly slipping into our world of things and being overrun and surrounded. In explicitly Christian terms, notice that the incarnate God-the-Son is no easier to explain and no less prone to heresy than the outside-the-world creator God. This horizontal theological language, rather than solving the problem, has recreated it.

There is, though, perhaps another reason for the turn to Levinas. While it is regularly depicted as a new way to see and speak of God, a way which will avoid the old disfigurments of God, it may be that the Levinasian turn to ethics is a turn away from the problems of the possibility theological language. Perhaps this turn is not to be explained by the Tolstoy story, but by a Hasidic parable told about Adam and Eve. On the day Adam and Eve were cast from Eden the sun set for the first time and as the world passed into darkness they were terrified, believing that their sin had set the world sinking into nothingness. They spend the night trembling in fear, eyes dilated to the darkness, looking each other in the face. For them there was now nothing, God had left them and the world had gone dark and there was nothing left but the face of the other. In the case of Tolstoy’s cobbler, looking into the faces of people was a way to see God, but for Adam and Eve it is all that is left. Perhaps the Levinasian turn is best understood not as concerned with a new theological language but with a way forward in a world which has no theological language. This turn can be understood as a manner in which to bracket off the continued unrest in theological language, to leave it unsettled and to still proceed.

It is as if presented with someone on the side of the road, beaten and bloodied and robbed and saying he was “God forsaken,” the Levinasian has put aside the question of whether or not God has indeed forsaken him. An atheist might have said God had. A theist might have said he hadn't. A Levinasian can claim to not know, can leave that question open, and can then, like the Samaritan in the Gospel parable, act to help the man. Where the entire debate has prepared us to engage the question of what it is that the man on the side of the road is calling God when he says that whatever it was he called God has forsaken him, to debate whether that God was the God he wanted to be speaking of in the first place, the Levinasian seeks to forsake that debate in favor of ethical action. The Levinasian is giving up, at least somewhat, the ability or possibility of speaking of God, replacing that with an ethics. The Levinasian takes on a sort of agnosticism, instead acting as God ought act to the beaten man and acting as if the beaten man were God. There is here a theological language, but it is incidental to the ethics.

This is a move, too, that despite its agnosticism and lack of a theological language
is hailed as “true religion” by Jewish and Christian prophets. “For how,” James asks, “could you possibly love God if you do not love your brother?” This Levinasian ethical agnosticism is the course that Jesus says the inheritors of the kingdom of God have taken. They have turned wholly to ethics and in dedicating their lives to helping people – feeding, clothing, washing, and visiting people - they have, to their surprise, served God. They have imitated the Messiah to the helpless, and the helpless have become the Messiah to them. God is thus found by not looking for God, but found without being looked for by looking into the faces of the worst of society.
This is the course that John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath character the Rev. Jim Casey takes. Casey, when we meet him in the novel's opening, has lost his faith and no longer knows how to speak of God. He's gone out into the wilderness to try and regain his faith, to figure God out, and has now come back down knowing only that he knows nothing. He abandons his ministry and refuses the normal deference paid to him, refusing repeatedly to pray over meals, sick people, etc. As he gives up speaking of (and for) God, though, he increasingly responds to the needs of the people around him, dedicating his life to helping people until, in the end of the book, he becomes a Christ figure, saying “you don't know what you're doing” to the man that kills him.
The Levinasian ethics, however, does not preclude a theological language and in fact can return us to the need for a theological language. If we can, at this point, avoid a theological language, avoid appending again that phrase, et hoc dicimus Deum, then we may find ourselves finished with the question. Here, as before, it is tempting to abandon the project, and perhaps it would be better if we did so, but it still seems that to abandon the question is just to answer it in a bad way, to settle for disfigurements. Even here though, we find ourselves wanting to say this is the solution, to say “this is what we meant by God.” Like Levinas, we want to say something about how that which we behold, that which inspires us to this ethical action, is beyond the world and is ineffable. The Levinasian turn may be a turn away from the question to an action, but the question is even here reasserted. We still want to ask what is this which we call God and how could we say what this is? The search for the possibility of a theological language remains.

Perhaps, however, we must come to recognize that theological language is impossible and that we are offered the choice of either speaking about God in a language that disfigures and defaces God or of saying nothing of God at all. But perhaps this impossibility is the key to theological language. Derrida, who says that he “rightly passes for an atheist” and that he “is always praying,” wants to put forward the possibility of a theological language of the impossible.

This is a language that recognizes and remains ever aware of its impossible task; thus it speaks of God, then notes its own inadequacies, then speaks of God, etc. This is a language that continually points out its own failure, a language that is always restless and disturbed. Our third choice is that of a blind theological language that recognizes its blindness, speaking within that blindness so that we know we’re saying impossible things but we are, by grace, through faith, hanging on by our teeth anyway.

In some sense, though, Derrida has not done something totally new here, but has looped us around and returned us to the place Anselm, and the whole Western tradition of theological speaking, began. Anselm begins to speak only after the caveat of the impossibility of speaking. Aquinas wrote for a mere 20 years and was recognized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, not for his philosophical writings and his systematizations of Catholic thought, but rather for his mystical apprehension of God that was, he is said to have said, so beyond anything that he had or could have written, leaving his writings “as straw.” When we speak of God, in the West, we speak in two languages, not choosing between them but speaking both. In our study of the thought of traditional figures we will separate the languages, but Aquinas, Anselm, et al, speak both in mysticism, placing God outside of our world, and in the philosophy placing him within it. They have, all the time, been referring to God, as it is said, via negativa and via affirmativa. We have normally recognized the difficulties and the errors of these languages, but we have found no solution other than to continue speaking in a cycle of theological language modifying theological language. Derrida's move then is not a novel one, but one that reminds us that theological language must be spoken recognizing and declaring its limitations. Derrida's move is one that reminds us why Anselm with his vertical language and Levinas with his horizontal one can, with their deficiencies, continue to speak of God.

With all of our protagonists agreeing, though, let us ask a question: Is this the best sort of theological speaking we can have? Can we only speak of God in the highly complex interplay of these two languages, in this cycle of languages where the first modifies the second and then the second modifies the first? Could there be a theological language such that we could simultaneously speak of God as speakable and of God as unspeakable? Surely no burden is too great in undertaking this project of theological language, so perhaps the answer simply is, “Yes, this cyclical language of speaking and unspeaking is the best we can hope for.” Still, it seems we must note that this is a highly complicated and confusing manner of doing theology, and, though it is profitable and ought not be abandoned, we ought to accept and champion a simpler language if we had it. Such a language, I think, might be found in Jesus' language of parables.

Jesus describes God in parabolic theological language as a father, a mother hen, a shepherd who's lost a sheep, and the host of a party and none of his listeners stopped him to say, “Wait, wait, how could it be both?” Speaking in parables is speaking in a way that we easily understand. It is simple without being simplistic, and it is somehow actively affirmatively speaking of God, thinking about and considering God, while not overstating or erring and without need of the disclaimers and caveats of other theological languages. By never marking themselves as anything more than “just stories,” this theological language of parables is at once describing a God knowable and unknowable, a God inside and outside, and in such a clear and unconfused way that even the least educated and the least subtle thinkers can figure God without disfiguring God. Not what we would normally consider a science of speaking of God, this methodology of simple stories manages somehow to describe God without being fraught by the errors we have seen wrack theological languages from Anslem to Levinas.

Looking, finally, at the three ways of speaking of God, we see that this is everywhere the case – we seek to state by misstating, to describe by misdescribing, to speak by misspeaking, and always to speak of God humbly.

Bibliography:

Altizer, Thomas J. J. Towards a New Christianity: Readings in the Death of God. New York: Harcourt, 1967.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Allen: Christian Classics, 1981.

Buber, Martin. Eclipse of God, Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philsophy. New York: Harper, 1957

Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1997.

Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy, vol II. New York: Doubleday, 1993.

Hamilton, William. A Quest for the Post-Historical Jesus. New York: Continuum, 1994.

Harrington, Michael. The Politics at God’s Funeral, the spiritual crisis of Western civilization. New York: Penguin, 1983.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. London: Penguin, 1985.

Manseau, Peter and Jeff Sharlet. Killing the Buddha, A Heretic’s Bible. New York: Free Press,

McCullough, Lisa and Brian Schroeder, eds. Thinking through the Death of God, a companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer. Albany: SUNY, 2004.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, prelude to a philosophy of the future. Mineola: Dover, 1997.

O'Connell, Marvin R. Blaise Pascal, Reasons of the Heart. Grand Rapids: Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Schrag, Calvin O. God as Otherwise Than Being, towards a semantics of the gift. Evanston: Northwestern, 2002.

Silliman, Daniel. “Disfiguring God: How Eriugena ontologically explained the multiplicity of Being and became a heretic.” http://sillimandoc.blogspot.com/2005/04/disfiguring-god-how-eriugena.html

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking, 1939.

Southern, R.W. Saint Anselm: a portrait in a landscape. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Tillich, Paul. Dynamics of Faith. New York: Hapers, 1957.

Tolstoy, Leo. Where Love Is, There God Is Also. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1993.

The Mind of Wittgenstein
Considerations of how Wittgenstein might approach the problem of mind
take-home exam p. 2
for Dr. Burke

Wittgenstein, whose main interests are the analysis of language and the dissolution of philosophy, does not set out a theory of mind, a philosophy of mind. It has seemed interesting, though, to consider what he might have thought about mind. He does, at various times and in various places, mention existing theories and counter them in particular ways. We can gather from his notes a number of thoughts about the philosophies of mind which, when taken together, do point towards the way in which he might have proceeded to approach that problem.

First, Wittgenstein says that many or most of our bad thinking concerning mind has been due to too many considerations of one example. We ought to consider a healthy variety of examples and thought experiments, lest we be led astray by one example’s peculiarities.

Second, Wittgenstein thinks we have attributed too many things to introspection, treating statements as if they were reports of inner mental states. He thinks that “in some cases it will be possible to say some such thing, in most not.” The example he uses here is the example of expectation. When we say we are expecting something we have thought of this statement as a report of an introspection. As if there were an unmanifest thing going on in the inner processes of the mind which one looked at (somehow) and then stated that others might know. As opposed to this, he considers the possibilities that,

a) the statement may be seen to be the first act of expectation.

b) the statement may be a manifestation of the expectation, rather than a report of it.

c) a state of expectations does not require or imply that something was occupying my thoughts. “Perhaps I don’t think anything at all or have a multitude of disconnected thoughts.”

Third, following and perhaps explaining the second point, Wittgenstein thinks that “an ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria.” In the barest sense, this can be understood as a sort of behaviorism, where inner states are bracketed off and ignored for observable manifested behavior. What we have heretofore called ‘inner mental states,’ he thinks, does not happen isolated from that which is around it, without context. These things are “imbedded in a situation, from which it arises.” The surroundings give these things their importance, he says, pointing to examples of a mouth, which cannot smile independently from the context, the situatedness, of a face.

Fourth, Wittgenstein thinks that even if there is an object which is a mental ‘inner process,’ it can be dropped from consideration. If something is only known and only knowable privately, only by introspection and never anywhere is it observable, then we can stop considering it. It’s attachment to the grammar we speak and share in common becomes irrelevant – even if there is no such inner states we can still speak as if there were, that is to say, our public language could not reflect such private things and would not need to and, therefore, the existence of such private things is irrelevant to our language. This is the famous “beetle in a box” example.

Fifth, Wittgenstein considers the cases of an actor and a stoic. The problem here is that a stoic may feel pain, e.g., but demonstrate nothing and an actor might feel nothing but demonstrate pain. If we hold this position of the necessity of outward criteria, are we to then say that the actor actually feels pain and the stoic doesn’t? Wittgenstein does not think the question is wholly ridiculous. “It makes sense,” he writes, “to ask ‘Do I really love her, or am I only pretending to myself’”? Wittgenstein seeks to answer the stoic/actor problem, and to say how we could answer the question of the perhaps pretended love, in two ways which follow from the third and fourth points above:

a) He overcomes the stoic/actor problem by considering the situatedness of these uses of language. He writes, “let us really think out various different situations and conversations, and the ways in which that sentence will be uttered in them.” The only way one could answer the reasonable question is by imagining situations in which I might be doing one or the other, that is to say, we could only say if I did or did not love by examining contexts. Thus there is a context in which I may speak of pain which is stoically unshown and this is not nonsense, and there are times when I can speak of pretended pain and this in not nonsense. Their meanings are to be understood by their context.

b) Further, such utterances can be uttered and are not nonsense because such statements can be disattached from any object. I need not think that they have real existence in some special space in the world in order for there to be a place for such grammar. I do not have to believe that, somehow, the stoic’s undeclared pain is somehow different than declared pain or that there is a peculiar and special case of a mental object that adhere to pains pretended and not held. I only need to take these sentences grammatically – within language and within context.

While we cannot accurately attribute a position on the question of mind to Wittgenstein, there are here fragments of considerations that might point us plausibly to a theory. It would seems to be behaviorist, in part, but also to go beyond that theory in such a way as not to fall to it’s failings. We might perhaps call it natural language behaviorism, or something of that sort so that we note its behaviorist leanings but also that if it is a behaviorism it is a significantly modified sort. It would seem to be a theory that led us back to our natural manners of thinking as perfectly acceptable and to move us away from the history of weird theories strewn throughout one of the strangest fields of philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s queer problem
take-home exam for Dr. Burke

Really the only thing wrong with what you say is the expression “in a queer way.”
                        - Ludwig Wittgenstein

What happens after therapy, Wittgenstein? If we follow you and eschew philosophy, and not just certain philosophical conclusions but philosophy as a whole project, as a whole way of asking questions and a way of queering the world, what are we left with?

I understand how this is supposed to work, this act of analysis leading to dissolution, but let’s take an example. Take the realism vs. anti-realism debate. A man is standing looking at a tree and wondering how we know it is indeed a tree. While you are sympathetic, at least somewhat and at least as an impulse, to realism’s position that this man is wrong, you are uncomfortable with the way that to engage the man’s problem realism has to grant him the possibility that he’s right. You want to move the man’s thinking back, considering not just why this is or is not a tree before him but why he would even ask the question. When the analysis gets moved back like that, it takes in what you think is the anti-realist’s original misconception but it also points out that the realist has to take seriously that misconception and the possibility of that misconception. You want to get rid of not just the wrong belief, but the possibility of that wrong belief, which is a move that also sweeps away the objections to the wrong belief too.

There is a particular move bothers you, this move that both sides of every philosophical debate must always make at the beginning. The move, you say, is the move of assuming we’re lost. “A philosophical proposition has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’”

Philosophy, you say, is always lost. Not lost because of it’s conclusions, per se, but because of it’s beginnings. Philosophy always starts in error, always by thinking something’s below or behind, something’s secret, something’s queer. Even when you agree with a conclusion, like you sort of agree with realism, you still have a problem with the way the question’s posed. “Really,” you write, “the only thing wrong with what you say is the expression ‘in a queer way.’ The rest is all right; and the sentence only seems queer when one imagines a different language-game for it from the one in which we actually use it.”

You use that word – queer. It’s a word that, honestly, surprised me. It took me a moment to realize that you maybe hadn’t heard it used as an offensive slang term for homosexuals. You were probably using it in a context where it didn’t have those connotations and meant, strictly, something “deviating from the expected or normal; strange.” So while it’s weird to hear, recontextualized as it is, I understand how you use it. To the realist, to stick with the example, you’re saying you agree with the conclusion but think something’s wrong with the argument and that the argument contains it’s opposite argument and you want to get us away from this whole mode of thinking things are queer.

Your point is well taken. But then, thinking about it, it bothers me. Look: the anti-realist said there’s something queer about reality, then the realist said that that’s a queer way to answer the question and said that reality is exactly like we thought it was, then you said that to answer the question was as queer as ask it. What we have here is a regress of queer. The more I read your works and the more I think about them, I think that your idea of philosophical therapy can be stated really clearly as the proposition “it is queer to think that things are queer.”

Forgive me for being cheeky. Honestly, I’m kind of frustrated. I mean, the idea of therapy that would let the world go back to being as it always was, that would allow us to stop all of this weirdness we’ve been engaged in since Socrates, that idea really excited me. I thought, when I first heard of you and when I first read you, that this was it. I had felt an unease all the way through philosophy, that uncanny feeling that something’s wrong but you can’t see it, and then there you were pointing it out directly. It was like you were the first one who thought to call foul. I imagined it like a big long table stretching all the way back with all the philosophers sitting there all talking at once and there you were way down at the end saying “wait a minute. Why? Why do I have to ask that question?” and when you said that the whole table froze. It seemed like a breakthrough.

Now listen, I’m not saying that’s a bad question. Neither is anyone else. All the way back along that table that’s been the most profitable question to ask. More than epistemology, more than ontology, more than any debate any of these guys has ever had, the most profitable field of philosophical thought has been this philosophology. Everybody who’s famous, back there, from Socrates to Hegel, from Aristotle to Nietzsche, from Descartes to the Logical Positivists, started with the question of why we’re asking the questions we’re asking. I’m not saying that’s a bad question and they’re not saying it’s a bad question – you are.

Maybe you could have done everything else, with natural languages and everything, that you wanted to do if you hadn’t made that move. But at least the way I read you that’s the move you’re really getting to. I could see a philosophy of natural language. But what you want is a philosophy of natural language that gets rid of philosophy. How could that even work? How could we philosophize our way out of philosophy? A scaffold, yeah. A ladder, yeah. But really what those metaphors tell me is that I ought, if I buy them, to walk away.

Imagine a black man who drives up to a restaurant in a blue Cadillac, orders a soy burger, and tells me he’s Elvis Presley. What would I say to such a man? Where could I start? Would I tell him that Elvis is white or that he drove a pink Cadillac or that he ate deep fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches? Maybe I’d just say, “hey man, you’re not Elvis. Elvis is dead.” The thing of it is that I wouldn’t know how to disagree with him because to disagree with him is to assume that he might be right, would be to assume that we can even have an argument about whether this guy is or isn’t Elvis. The guy’d have to be crazy and to argue with a crazy man I’d have to be crazy too. If I talked to him it’d just be because I was fascinated by this man’s craziness. I wouldn’t argue with him, I’d stare. And then I’d walk away without raising that question of how queer it is to call yourself Elvis.

Essentially, this is what you say’s the problem with philosophical problems. They’re just crazy, just queer. I understand how that works. What I don’t understand is how you can argue about it. What I don’t understand is why you don’t walk away. If this whole conversation going back all the way to Socrates is queer, then you’re queer for explaining to the queers how they’re queer. Why don’t you walk away, just shaking your head and going, “wow man, those guys are crazy”?

You tried to do that once too, didn’t you? You said philosophy was nonsense, madness, queer. You said we had to get out and as you looked at that statement I get the feeling that you got the feeling, that uneasy feeling where you began to think that maybe you were crazy for talking to crazy people. You said, “the right method in philosophy would be to say nothing… except…[what] has nothing to do with philosophy.” And then you took that to apply to your own work, getting all the craziness over with at once you said,
My sentences are illuminating in the following way: to understand me you must recognize my sentences – once you have climbed out through them, on them, over them – as senseless. (You must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after you have climbed on it.)
You must climb out through my sentences; then you will see the world correctly.
Of what we cannot speak we must remain silent.

I guess what I’m saying here is that if I hear you, if I believe you, then I’m going to have to get out of this regress of the queer. It’s not good enough to comment about how queer it is to think things are queer. I got to walk away. It’s weird that the only way I know to read you rightly is to abandon your project, to walk away from you shaking my head at you shaking your head at all those other guys. It’s weird, but the only thing you say I can say to you now is this: You’re queer, man.

Counting Wittgensteins,
Understanding the relationship of early and late Wittgenstein

In reading Ludwig Wittgenstein, we must each eventually approach the question of continuity, must consider how the 40 year span of his work hangs together. We cannot consider the texts of Wittgenstein without somewhere considering how they relate and the consideration of their relation may be the most basic first step to understanding these texts. How we answer the questions of continuity, discontinuity, and development serves as the fundamental frame within which we will understand these works and will serve as our first characterization of each work. The reading of Wittgenstein is filtered and interpreted through this answer, making it a primary and necessary question to consider carefully. To read Wittgenstein is to take a position on the continuity of his thought.

There is a standard reading of Wittgenstein that understands him as to be understood in two parts, two stages, so that there are two Wittgensteins, an early one and a late one. The early Wittgenstein is defined as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1922, and the later one as the Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953. Between these two works is held a “fundamental division” by which we may understand the whole of Wittgenstein’s thought. There is, in fact, a middle period of his thinking, collected notably in The Blue and Brown Books, which is generally considered to be transitional and is primarily read as work preliminary to later thinking. There is, also, a later period of works written at the end of his life, e.g. Zettel, Remarks on Colour, and On Certainty, which are considered to be peripheral to and not a marked shift away from the Investigations. So while there are four periods of work and could conceivably be a theory of “four Wittgensteins,” the general consensus of the standard understanding counts only two.

While this is the general consensus, there are three main positions on the continuity of the Wittgensteinian corpus operas:
1) no continuity, a sharp division of early and late Wittgenstein,
2) soft continuity, a development of thought but constant in themes and concerns,
3) strong continuity, Wittgenstein always holding to his “late” project.
It has been said that in the study of Wittgenstein, every possible interpretation has been held by some scholar and the question of continuity is no different. There are other positions on Wittgenstein’s continuity, but these are the main one and the ones which will be considered in this paper. This paper will consider each position, present relevant critiques, and argue that the second interpretation is the most reasonable and the most tenable.

For the standard position holding no continuity between the early and late work, there are three arguments: the obvious presence of stylistic changes, Wittgenstein’s own testimony of his change, and the specific propositions explicitly proposed in the Tractatus and then explicitly rejected in the Investigations.

Even the most superficial reader would have to notice Wittgenstein’s stylistic shift. The Tractatus is a dense and highly compressed work, with cryptic sentences of a vatic tone arranged in a numbered nesting. At the top layer, the work is only seven sentences long and the fully expanded work takes up less than 60 pages. The later works, everything after the Tractatus, particularly the Investigations, are written in series of numbered paragraphs, often making use of examples and thought experiments and considering particular cases. The writing is neither dense nor cryptic and exhibits the looseness of rambling reflections rather than the rigidity of sequences of logic.

Both Wittgenstein’s biography and his writing attest to a discontinuity, to a break between the early and later thought. After writing and publishing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein gave up philosophy. In a period biographers call “the lost years,” Wittgenstein gave up philosophy after publishing the Tractatus. He taught grammar school in Austria, worked as a gardener’s assistant in a monastery near Vienna, worked on the design and construction of a modernist-styled house, sought to emigrate to the Soviet Union and do manual labor, but did nothing in the way of philosophy because, we are told, he believed that he had solved philosophy and there was no philosophy left to be done after the work of the Tractatus. In his biography we see a severe break between the publication of the early work and the undertaking of the later work. Wittgenstein writes that he only returned to philosophy, only undertook the later work, because, having reason to re-read and re-examine the Tractatus, he realized that he had made “grave mistakes” in what he had written. He does not hold up the two works as unified but rather says the later to work is to be understood as corrective, understood in contrast. In letters he describes the early work as “arrogance” and “dogmatism,” saying that “only in recent years have I broken away” from the early work.

Finally, and probably most importantly, there is an explicit change of theory. The Tractatus sets forth a theory of a perfect language which is atomistic, fully analyzable, with a logical structure that pictures the world. The Investigations rejects this theory for a theory of everyday and common language. Norman Malcolm writes that Wittgenstein made this shift with full knowledge of the change he was making, and his later writings form a “massive attack on the principle ideas of the Tractatus.” Malcolm lists 15 propositions held in the early Wittgenstein’s work and rejected in the later:
1 That there is a fixed form of the world, an unchanging order of logical possibilities, which is independent of whatever is the case.
2 That the fixed form of the world is constituted of things that are simple in an absolute sense.
3 That the simple objects are the substratum of thought and language.
4 That thoughts, composed of ‘psychical constituents,’ underlie the sentences of language.
5 That a thought is intrinsically a picture of a particular state of affairs.
6 That a proposition, or a thought, cannot have a vague sense.
7 That whether a proposition has sense cannot depend on whether another proposition is true.
8 That to understand a proposition it is sufficient to know the meaning of its constituent parts.
9 That the sense of a proposition cannot be explained.
10 That there is a general form of all propositions.
11 That each proposition is a picture of one and only one state of affairs.
12 That when a sentence is combined with a method of projection the resulting proposition is necessarily unambiguous.
13 That what one means by a sentence is specified by an inner process of logical analysis.
14 That the pictorial nature of most of our everyday propositions is hidden.
15 That every sentence with sense expresses a thought which can be compared with reality.

These seemingly obvious changes have led many to view Wittgenstein’s work as discontinuous, reading it as two distinct and different periods. For these reasons most commentators hold that we are to understand two Wittgensteins, Wittgenstein in two parts, and that “no unbroken line leads from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations; there is no logical sequence between the two books, but rather a logical gap. The thought of the later work is a negation of the thought of the earlier.”

This understanding, though, seems overstated, exaggerating the change until it is construed as some sort of radical conversion. The view is straightforward enough, but seems to lack some needed nuance, and we ought not let go unquestioned this method of emphatic implications.

First, the stylistic changes are undeniable, but what is not so obvious is the import of those changes. If, at a younger age, Wittgenstein constructed his works in more highly complex artifices, this could be understood as a youthful intensity that would later mellow. If, at an older age, Wittgenstein wrote less tightly, less cryptically and less pointedly, it could be accounted for as the result of a development of temperance. There are many reasons a writer’s style might change, and it seems odd to understand these different styles as something besides a natural development of age. The implication that this shift marks some total break and radical disconnection between two periods in a thinker’s thought seems an extreme and possibly post hoc conclusion.

Second, Wittgenstein’s own testimony is being interpreted in the broadest of senses. He was a perfectionist notoriously reticent to publish his work, so the fact that he found “grave mistakes” when re-reading something he wrote years before ought really to be understood as the statement of man who held himself to very high standards. Even if we accept his analysis, accept that there were “grave mistakes,” it does not follow that the entire early period is to be understood as a grave mistake and misdirection. We might well do better to understand those mistakes as particular mistakes, to understand Wittgenstein as rejecting particular pieces of his work and not the entire thing and everything that was associated with it.

Third, Malcolm’s 15 changed propositions focus on the atomism and the picture theory which, while present in the early work, is not really the whole of it. Again it is only by exaggeration that we can move from holding that some things changed in Wittgenstein’s thought to the idea that everything important changed and that this thought is without continuity.

This reading is marked by exaggerations, overstatements, and generalizations. We ought especially to be wary of this counting of two Wittgensteins with its theory of a logical gap as it might lead us to not look at ways in which later Wittgenstein was influenced by earlier work, and earlier work might have latently held later Wittgenstein. By declaring this radical change and a logical gap, this theory casts a darkness over a whole aspect of Wittgenstein, saying it is unknowable.

The second option regarding the continuity of Wittgenstein’s work, which this paper will argue for, is the interpretation of soft continuity. This reading understands there to be a change in Wittgenstein, two projects which can be divided into early and late periods of his work, but an overall constancy of themes and concerns. There is no unexplainable gap between two Wittgensteins, but a normal, natural and quite explainable development of the thinking of a smart man.

While the theory of language can be seen to change so that picture theory, atomism, and the impulse towards a logically perfect language are held and promoted by the younger Wittgenstein and rejected by the older Wittgenstein, this change is structured around what remains for Wittgenstein very important and central themes and concerns. There are, in particular, three constants: his disposition towards ‘philosophy,’ his fundamental turn towards language, and his understanding of the analysis of meaning or sense as key to dissolving confusion.

Wittgenstein’s aim, in both the Tractatus and the Investigations, is the dissolution of philosophy. He is never kindly disposed to philosophy and consistently throughout the “change” describes philosophy as confusion, as a bump on the head of thinking. In the early era he thinks this is due to attempting to move past the limits of language, in the later due to attempting to find the occult secret, the “sublime” that is better than language. “It is quite true that his new and old ways of thinking are poles apart,” writes K. T. Fann, “(h)owever, there is an important continuity in Wittgenstein’s conception of the nature and tasks of philosophy.” For all the change, then, there is a fundamental and important consistency here.

In some sense, then, Wittgenstein’s project was markedly constant, and this continuity could actually be understood as the cause of the particular changes. Wittgenstein didn’t undergo some radical conversion where he was knocked off his horse, but rather realized his earlier work participated and perpetuated that which it was intended to oppose. Wittgenstein then returned to his work, which was the same work, determined this time to accomplish what his earlier attempt had failed to do. If this continuity is ignored, how would we explain Wittgenstein’s return to philosophy? The goal of his writing, the final dissolution and abandonment of the confusion called philosophy, does not change.

There is too an important continuity of method. At some point very early Wittgenstein became convinced that philosophy was an exercise of confusion and that these confusions arose from the misunderstanding of language. From this he never wavers. There is no period where Wittgenstein turns to metaphysics or epistemology, for instance. For although Wittgenstein shifts sharply from seeking perfect language to taking language as perfectly good, throughout both periods his work is always turned towards the understanding of language as fundamental to the understanding of the world. The entirety of both the early Tractatus and the later Investigations are concerned with language.

In particular he is always interested in the use of words and the analysis of meaning and sense. His understanding of what makes up the meanings of words changes, and his understanding of how meanings relate changes, but there is constancy to at least this part of his method. He develops his question from “What is the structure of language?” to later opposing that assumption of a possible final analysis and complete exactness, and he moves to the question of why that first question was confused and to a consideration of normal natural language. Even his understanding of language is not a discontinuous as we have supposed, for in both the Tractatus and the Investigations he seeks to justify the vagueness of ordinary propositions, writing in the Tractatus that “all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order,” and in the Investigations that “what we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” This is not to say that the manner does not change, but to illustrate that there certainly is a continuity and a constancy between the two works that ought to be understood.

There is, then, a change in the Wittgensteinian corpus operas, but it not a total change with two unconnectable parts. If we frame our understanding of Wittgenstein within this theory of soft continuity – the moderate middle position on his continuity – we are able to hold to a development in his thought that seems natural and reasonable. We don’t see two radically different and distinct Wittgensteins, but the natural and normal development of a thinker from his early to later thought. This theory does not fall apart when compared to his biography, and it does not result in weird or tortured reading of some part of the work, nor in too easy dismissals. It seems, then, to be quite reasonable and to be the theory that gives us the best account of Wittgenstein’s work.

The third option regarding Wittgenstein’s continuity is strong continuity, notably held by the “New Wittgensteinians.” The idea of strong continuity is that Wittgenstein never changed his theories, which is the theory normally categorized as “later” Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein does not, the founders of the New Wittgensteinian reading Cora Diamond and James Conant think, come later to think that the thrust of the Tractatus is nonsense, but rather always thought so. There is a continuity without development in Wittgenstein’s corpus operas, though it’s a sort of secret one.

This idea depends on two metaphors for Tractatus. The first metaphor, found within the Tractatus, is the metaphor of the scaffold or the ladder. Wittgenstein closes the Tractatus with the words,
My sentences are illuminating in the following way: to understand me you must recognize my sentences – once you have climbed out through them, over them, over them – are senseless. (You must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after you have climbed up on it.)
You must climb out through my sentences; then you will see the world correctly.

The Investigations’ proclamation that the Tractatus is nonsense is not a change, not a shift, for the Tractatus proclaimed the Tractatus to be nonsense. Any reading of the Tractatus that takes it to be actually proposing a sensible and possible theory has, the New Wittgensteinian theory says, missed the conclusion. Under this we read the Tractatus to ‘work through’ its nonsense sentences—to struggle to make sense of them—but only in order to experience them ‘dissolv[ing] from inside,’ or ‘crumbling in upon themselves’ in the attempt. By means of this process, which some have described as a ‘dialectic,’ the reader is supposed to unmask the disguised nonsense that constitutes the ‘body’ of the Tractatus. …Tractarian nonsense nonetheless possesses enough psychological suggestiveness to generate the illusion of sense and, for some advocates of this view, to count as ‘ironically self-destructive.’

This leads us to the second metaphor, that of the stage. The Tractatus, on this theory, was an elaborate stage on which the problem was presented only in the last act to be shown false. The bulk of the work was a ruse, a prank, a mask, a falsity whereby the reader would come to think that nonsense was sense only to have it revealed as nonsense in the final scene. We ought to frame the relationship of the Wittgenstein, then, not into two distinct and separable periods but as a continuous project unchanged. This view – the so called “resolute reading” – holds that the Tractatus proposed no theses and was but an exercise in the debunking of nonsense.

This reading is, above all else, clever. It fails, however, in four areas that ought to lead us to at least seriously question this theory and probably to reject it. First, there is a misreading of the tone of Wittgenstein’s work and biography. Nowhere does Wittgenstein ever take the pose or the tone that would be necessary for this strong continuity to be true. Second, this theory cannot tell us why one Wittgenstein ought to be believed when the other is acting out a deception, thus leaving the reading either unstable or arbitrary. Third, this theory allows one to dismiss and not take seriously the early work. Fourth, this theory recreates the first theory’s two Wittgensteins and thus suffers from those problems in addition to creating new ones.

First, this theory of strong continuity ignores the tone of the Wittgensteinian texts. Wittgenstein is, throughout, saturated with a tone of earnestness. He’s not interested in the games or elaborate ruses of the Continental philosophers Jacques Derrida or Slovoj Zizek. Even when Wittgenstein is employing various and entertaining examples, he does so quite seriously. Yet strong continuity depends on reading early Wittgenstein and the Tractatus up to sentence 6.4 as an elaborate fake secretly demonstrating the failure of perfect language theory, philosophy, et al. Framed thus, for example, the 15 theses pointed out by Malcolm as proposed in the early work and rejected in the latter, were never really proposed but actually examples of what Wittgenstein wanted to disabuse us of all along.

If this is the case, we would have to think that Wittgenstein always attempts to deceive us about what he was saying in the early stages of his work, that he can be believed in some places though not in others though there is little or no textual distinction that could alert us to the deceptions, and that he moved from an elaborately clever way of demonstrating a point to a mostly straightforward one. If framed this way the break, too, the “lost years” in his constant project, would have to be interpreted as a change of at least some sort. The stylistic change, here, cannot avoid understood being read as a change. It becomes even more dramatic – rather than a shift from prose that is compressed to prose that is loose, Wittgenstein is said to move from an elaborate trap of lies to an honest presentation. Unless his abandonment of philosophy was a pre-planned silence with which to take in the suckers who took seriously his early work, he must have believed his first work, the staged demonstration, to have been sufficient to this project and later have changed his mind, deciding that more was needed.

Second, it is unclear how, if we count two Wittgensteins, one of which is deceptive, we are to know where to believe the text and where to reject it. New Wittgensteinians take the preface and the last few sentences as the guidelines within which to understand the fake-philosophizing that takes place in between them. But why ought we to take that Wittgenstein as earnest and not as some further mask demonstrating nonsense? Introducing this instability into the text cannot help but leave all the corners highly unstable, untrustworthy, and unbelievably. There is no way to limit this method of skepticism once it introduces what are essentially conspiratorial and Gnostic readings. If we accept that at some points or in some periods Wittgenstein is demonstratively deceptive, we lose the good faith with which we might take him at other points or in other periods to be honest.

Third, this reading of strong continuity allows one to simply dismiss the early work, where the Tractatus need not be read seriously because it was, by this theory, never meant to be more than a failure. Rather than engage the text, this theory is poised to dismiss it at any point where it becomes challenging. It was never honestly, they say, held by Wittgenstein and only believed by those taken in by what, essentially, was a philosophical prank. Thus when reading confusing things within the Tractatus a New Wittgensteinian may, on this reading, not attempt to consider how it could be the case and might make sense, but rather wave a hand and attribute anything difficult to intentional errors.

Fourth, this move of strong continuity perversely comes to reassert the “logical gap” and total disconnectedness of the Tractatus to the Investigations that the consensus proposal made in the first position regarding Wittgenstein’s continuity. While strong continuity wants to maintain that Wittgenstein the man was always consistent and nowhere developed, this framing also implies that Wittgenstein the text can be understood as divided into two radical periods. This is to say that the theory of strong continuity supports the framing of no continuity, which, as was argued above, is unsustainable and is an exaggeration or overstatement.

The whole theory of strong continuity, then, results in wild readings, bad readings, and an explanation that everywhere is collapsing on itself. While it has the merit of being interesting in its complications, it is not a theory that seems to be, in any real way, probable. It is a wild story with little basis in the text, none in Wittgenstein’s life, and no way to explain the relationships of the periods of his text and his life without undermining itself into meaninglessness.

This we ought to contrast with the extreme normality and plausibility of the soft continuity theory. If we fame these period’s relationships so that they show natural developments and normal consistencies, we see Wittgenstein’s work come into focus without these contortions. It would seem that in the end of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein became troubled with the possibility that his attempt to show the limits was the sort of transgression of the limits he had wanted to avoid. He worked with that fissure and thought that he had resolved it in such a manner that his theory of language and the world was sound and was right. Thus, thinking he had dissolved the process producing philosophical problems, he left philosophy intending to spend the rest of his life in other pursuits. Years later, having reason to re-read his work, to hear other’s explanations, and to attempt himself to explain it, he recognizes those “grave mistakes” that he had worried about formerly and that he had thought he had resolved. He thinks that the fissure is serious enough that it condemns the whole artifice and he sets to work rethinking the manner in which he approached his project, which resulted in the later period of his work. There is no unexplainable logical gap here, no secret, no mystery. We have, rather, the open and obvious development of a great of the thinkers of the 20th century who strongly opposed illogical sequences and assumptions of secrets. This, Wittgenstein said, was the type of thought which he had set out to solve and to stop.

Bibliography:
Biletzki, Anat, Anat Matar. “Ludwig Wittgenstein,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta ed., Summer 2005 http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2005/entries/wittgenstein
Fann, K. T. Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy. Berkeley, University of California, 1971.
Hartnack, Justus. Wittgenstein and Modern Philosophy. London, Routledge, 1965
Law, Jules David. “Wittgenstein, Ludwig” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, Michael Groeden and Martin Kreiswirth eds., 2005.
Malcolm, Norman. Nothing is Hidden, Wiggenstein’s Criticism of his Early Thought. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Pears, David. The False Prison, A study of the development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, Volume Two. Oxford, Clarendon, 1988.
Peregrin, Jaroslov. “No Change,” The Philosopher’s Magazine, Winter 2001.
http://jarda.peregrin.cz/mybibl/PDFTxt/426.pdf
Proops, Ian. “The New Wittgenstein: A Critique.” European Journal Of Philosophy March 1, 2001
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus¬. London, Routledge Classics, 2001.
Philosophical Investigations. Oxford, Blackwell, 2001.

Wittgenstein and the Dissolution Principles
November 16, 2005
For Dr. Burke



What one has to look for, in any application of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work to philosophy is his principle of dissolution. In both his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the later Philosophical Investigations, he approaches philosophical problems as things to be dissolved, as confusions arising from a misunderstanding of language. As Wittgenstein changes his idea of a correct understanding of language, his understanding of why these confusions exist and the manner in which they cease to exist changes, but the general method remains the same. While “all philosophy is a ‘critique of language,’” Wittgenstein holds that philosophy can be dissolved by language’s critique.

Wittgenstein does not believe that these persisting philosophical problems are resolved by his method of analyzing the logic of language, but that they go away. He doesn’t think he has arrived at a method by which to definitively answer such questions, but that he has shown why these questions make no sense, and why they do not need to be asked. He is not working at resolving philosophical problems but at dissolving them.

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein holds to the idea of a perfect language, one that is fully analyzable to its fundamentally simple “atomic” facts, whose logical structure is identical with, and therefore adheres to and depicts, the logical structure of the world, a logical structure which can and is shown, but cannot be said. A language such as this cannot, he believes, pass into illogicality. With a language such as this, the limits of the world are firmly and clearly drawn so that everything can be said clearly and precisely, or it cannot be said at all. Wittgenstein says this is the “whole sense” of his book, and working from this description of his language and from that sense of limits, we come to the Tractatus’ principle of dissolution.

From this idea of language he reaches the principle which dissolves philosophical problems. “Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers,” Wittgenstien writes, “arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language. And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all.” These problems are not problems because they vanish either inside the frame of language, like tautologies, or outside, like contradictions. Philosophy is made up of riddles and doubts, but Wittgenstein seeks to show that riddles and doubts don’t exist because one cannot have a riddle or a doubt without an answer. “If a question,” he says, “can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it. Skepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical.” So the method is not to try to stop all such doubts from arising, but to realize such doubts have no justification and are simply nonsensical in attempting, as they do, to go beyond the limits of the world and of language.

Wittgenstein realizes this vanishing act leaves us uncomfortable, but says that it is the vanishing itself that is the answer to the question. He writes, “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.” If philosophical diversions, riddles and skepticisms, brought us to the “sense of life” then the sense of life would be found in the vanishing of the so-called problems and we would abandon them.

Consider how this principle might work out as a method. The Tractatus isn’t an attempt to show how one could go about dissolving philosophical problems, and Wittgenstein does not approach the problem, for example, of free will and determinism. He does hint at it, however, when he speaks directly of causality. Traditional problems are rooted in misunderstandings of language. Both approaches to the problem – free will’s proposition that we make choices without being caused to do so and therefore there are states of affairs which are not determined by prior states of affairs, and determinism’s proposition that everything is caused and therefore every state of affairs is necessitated by a prior state of affairs – confusions about language, about the logic of language and language’s limits. Both approaches to the problem and even the problem itself is a confusions rooted in misunderstandings the logico-linguistic nature of causality.

Where the traditional philosophical approach has assumed causation and, from there, made a problem, Wittgenstein dissolution would proceed by showing that the language of causation was confused and this confusion gave rise to the problem. There are two confusions concerning causality: first, that causality was a form of necessity distinct from logical necessity; second, that causality could be stated.

Given Wittgenstein’s language, it is impossible to imagine any sort of causality that is beyond the causality of the logic of language. “The only kind of necessity,” he writes, “is logical necessity.” Since logic is the mirror of the world, and the world is the case, there could be no sort of causation not shown in logic. There is no causality apart from that which is found in logic, that is, nothing is necessitated unless it is necessitated by logic. If states of affairs are caused by will or by prior states of affairs, then that must be shown in the mirror of logic.
We cannot speak of causality, either the illusionary causality that gave rise to the problem, or the logic reflected causality of Wittgenstein’s. In the first case, if causality is above the world, above the assemblage of facts, then it would be like the ancient’s superstitions of gods and of fates. Causality, if it were this sort of thing, would be beyond the facts of the world and we couldn’t speak about it. In the second place, in Wittgenstein’s language, we cannot speak about the logic of language because we would need another logic to speak in, and so on ad infinitum. We cannot, Wittgenstein holds, speak that logic, The logic shows itself, but it cannot be spoken of. Thus causation is either in the world, unspeakable and showing itself through the structure, or outside the world, and unspeakable and indescribable. Either way, to think that we could speak of causality would be confused.

Therefore, if language is explained by Wittgenstein’s picture theory, the philosophical question of free will versus determinism is not even sensible to pose unless one doesn’t understand causality in the logic of the language, unless one has gone the route of imprecision and unclarity. A solution ought not to be attempted for the problem, but rather the language ought to be analyzed to show where the error began.

His understanding of language changes in the Philosophical Investigations. He rejects the idea of a perfect language and embraces, rather, natural language. “When I talk about language,” he writes, “(words, sentences, etc.) I must speak the language of every day. Is this language too coarse and material for what we want to say? Then how is another one to be constructed?” He no longer sees language as the attempt at a fully analyzed atomistic affair that pictures the logical structure of the world by sharing it, but looks to the normal and practical language arising directly out of use in our forms of life. Language is not, he decides, a logic, but a contextual system.

Wittgenstein is clearer here concerning his principle of dissolution, describing philosophy as “the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense” and demonstrating his method throughout the book. The dissolution method of Philosophical Investigations is to present a thought experiment, take a philosophical objection or problem or confusion, to conduct a grammatical investigation of the articulated objection and find the misunderstanding that raised the problem and, finally to show how the problem is not, in fact, a problem. At first it appears that the principle of dissolution is, as it was in the first case, the transgressing of limits. The limits here, however, are not the limits placed upon thought by a perfect logic of language depicting the logical structure of the world, but the grammatical limits of normal and natural language. Wittgenstein’s method shifts from logical analysis to grammatical analysis, from opposing illogicality and mysticism to opposing subliming and secrets, and his dissolution principle shifts from holding philosophy to be confused about the perfect structure of language to holding it as confused about the natural use of language.

Philosophy refuses to accept the limits of common everyday good-enough grammar by looking for secrets, by subliming, by taking natural things and imagining them to be mysterious and extraordinary. Wittgenstein thinks that it should be easy to note these acts of sublimation for the very strange and unusual act that they are, that it should be quite evident that something’s gone very wrong, but that philosophers have become calloused by philosophy.

We set out with the assumption of a secret and so are led astray. He writes,
Here it is easy to get into that dead-end in philosophy, where one believes that the difficulty of the task consists in our having to describe the phenomena that are hard to get hold of, the present experience that slips quickly by, of something of that kind. Where we find ordinary language too crude, and it looks as if we were having to do not with the phenomena of every-day, but with ones that ‘easily elude us’

When one realizes that that nothing is hidden or concealed, that there is no great secret waiting to be uncovered and that we are not waiting for the something to be made sublime, one realizes that the problem isn’t the problem but the question, because the “question contains a mistake.” Then we can turn to common grammar, language in that “kind of way we always use it, the way we are taught to use it,” that we everywhere rely on for our the dissolution of these problems. Returning to the previous example for how this dissolution happens, let us look at the free will versus determinism “problem.”

While Wittgenstein, again, does not approach the philosophical debate directly, he does direct some attention towards the dissolution of our strange idea of willing. We’ve become confused, Wittgenstein says, by thinking that willing was some strange case. We’ve imagined willing to be some strange case that was like wishing, a sort of causal wish, but not like doing a thing. But when one examines the language, “willing” vanishes into acting, for “what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” When one examines the grammar of language, it becomes clear that “willing” and cannot be described as a sort of wishing, for “when I raise my arm, I have not wished it might go up,” and it is the case that “when I raise my arm I not usually try to raise it.” Wittgenstein object, however, to reading this as some sort of strange and remarkable thing. “If (willing) is the action,” he writes, “then it is so in the ordinary sense of the word.”

For what ever reason we are tempted to the sublimation of the will, but we will not have it right, Wittgenstein thinks, until we realize it is normal. By the dissolution principle, focusing on and trusting the grammar, we can, as it were, be talked down
from philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s understanding of language changes, but his method and his idea of what language should do remains. Linguistic analysis, whether through logic or grammar, will bring us to the principle by which the many needless problems of philosophy can be solved. Where philosophy has critiqued language Wittgenstein has undertaken a reversal where language will critique philosophy. With this reversal, he thinks, things will be returned to normal and philosophical problems will fade like the discolored illusions of an eye that has ceased straining to see itself.

Bio Note 2

Daniel Silliman is a senior in philosophy at Hillsdale College, writing his thesis on the possibility of a linguistic solution to the mind/body problem and doing an independent study on the problem of theological language. He intends to earn a Ph.D. in the field and is interested in the work of Derrida, Heidegger, and Levinas.

Bio note 1

Daniel Silliman was born 17 miles from the Pacific Ocean in 1982, in the former chicken-plucking capital of the world, in a mobile home, in the middle of an overgrown Christmas tree forest. His first memory is about losing a fight. His second memory is about feeling guilty and his third is about prayer.

He has driven from coast to coast 8 times in the last 4 years and has worked as a gas station attendant, newspaper reporter, arborist, gardener, & etc.

Thesis statement: Bringsjord & Ferrucci's Brutus project supports Nagel's idea of the irreducibility of mental/phenomenological language.

Short Summary of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is contributing to a system of philosophical atomism, continuing and yet also deviating from Russell’s project of articulating the conditions of a logically perfect language. It was intended to fix the confusions of Frege’s Begriffsschrift and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, and thereby to solve the problems of philosophy. The binding theme of the work is the theme of limits, covering the limits of the world, thought, the expression of thought, and logic/language.

The Tractatus can be outlined in three parts:

1. Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language, whereby the world is made up of atomic facts and pictured by propositions, propositions represent facts by bearing an identical logical structure to them, and the structures common to the picture of the world and the world are shown and not said.

2. Wittgenstein’s exploration of the logical structure of language (which is also the logical structure of the world), covering truth tables, notation, Russell’s paradox, paradoxes, contradictions, etc., concluding with the postulation of the essential logical form of all propositions.

3. Wittgenstein’s considerations of the other side of the limits of the world and logic, the “mystical” – i.e., the will, ethics, aesthetics, God, etc. – which cannot be examined within language.

The Wholly Other and the Possibility of a Theological Language

Theology today is most fundamentally in quest of a language and mode whereby it can speak. Above all it is in quest of a language whereby it can speak of God. - Thomas J. J. Altizer


When we speak of God, in the Western tradition, we speak in two ways: mysticism and philosophy. With mysticism we emphasize the otherness and uncontainability of God, the ineffability of the divine. With philosophy we explain God’s place in our system of thought, what God does in our world and how, so to speak, he works as a thing in this world. Both of these languages, however, are problematic. In mysticism we lose God, in this ineffability he slips beyond our world, beyond our comprehension. I am not speaking of the worst of mysticism, which is a fetish of secrets and obscured theology that believes itself capable of conjuring or decoding the divine, but of the best of mysticism which comes from this impulse of due reverence but still always loses the divine into the fog of distance between man and God. In philosophy, we lose God in the opposite manner, we lose God by containing him, bringing God into the circumference of our system and thereby making him less than God. In philosophy God reaches man and enters into the world but in fact becomes a part of the world. The world contains objects – men and trees and elephants and now, God. If God is included in our philosophy he becomes an ontological object, a bit of the furniture that makes up the arrangement of things. If God is beyond our philosophy, if he doesn’t enter our world, then he is irrelevant to it. We have God inside and God outside and neither of them are what we want when we want to speak of God.

We need, somehow, to have God in our world without our world containing God. We need, somehow, God outside our world without eliminating him from it. The God we want to talk about is both beyond comprehension and comprehendible. If we play it one way we lose God, the other and we still lose him. We seem then to be in an impossible bind. If God is in our world then he’s less than God, if outside it, He’s irrelevant. We need a God that crosses the line of outside/inside without falling over it. All of our philosophies and mysticisms attempt this (note, for example, that Spinoza’s heroic attempt to de-anthropomorphize God is problematized and tempered by the very real and this-world experience of men who love God) but seem to all fail at crucial moments, letting God slide irreconcilably into or out of our world. It is interesting to note that this problem doesn’t exist for Zeus, or angels, or UFOs.

The greatest attempt at speaking of God in such a way as to allow him to be wholly other, ineffably divine and yet still to take a place in our world and reach us here, is Anselm’s ontological argument’s thinking of infinity. Anselm attempts to balance God on this line so that God is infinite, he is the beyond, and also enters in. Anselm’s description of God has him piercing into this world and letting us see the Other. The person who approaches God Anselm-wise does so very vertically. He sees by God and through God to a God which cannot be delimited by the sight of man. (I’m not taking the time to recite Anselm’s argument, but if anyone would like we can talk about it during questions.)

Whether his argument works or not, there is something that feels wrong about it. I find this feeling in the island-argument response of his contemporaneous monk, in Kant’s famous rebuttal, and also in the average reading of your average freshman. It works on paper, the logic is sound, and yet we are deeply uncomfortable with it. I think there are two ways it feels wrong: First, it feels like a technicality. There’s a seemingly accidental nature of the proof. It is as if Anselm found a lucky technical solution for God. Second, this God of Anselm’s is entirely impersonal. In being on paper, he’s present to us logically, but not viscerally.

We may, however, be asking Anselm’s project to extent way beyond its limited intentions. Anselm is not attempting to prove the existence of God. Anselm’s “proof” is at most secondary, as he’s trying to prove that God’s character or nature is as we believed it to be and in doing this he sets out a way we can talk about God. Many readings of Anselm’s argument are trying, really, to follow him backwards. Where Anselm move was one of, as he said, “faith seeking understanding,” we read him trying to get from understanding to faith. But even coming from faith to understanding, we have a few problems with his formulation of a theological language whereby we may speak of God.

Anselm wants to move from meditation on the word “God” to God. He’s echoing Augustine’s language where Augustine says he wants to go from hearing the word “Deus” to “reach something than which nothing is better or more sublime.” It is unclear whether Anselm knew it or not, but he is also echoing the words of Seneca, where Seneca says God’s “magnitude is that than which nothing greater can be thought.” Problem: Augustine and Anselm want to use this theological language to speak of something that is beyond our world, unencirclalbe by our systems of thought, but Seneca uses the same language to speak of a god that isn’t wholly Other, that is one god among many and one worldly thing among many worldly things. Reexamining the language where God is “that which greater than which none can be conceived,” there is nothing to say that a God such as that must be something more than ontological furniture, more than the very absolutely biggest thing in the world. Anselm claims that in the course of his meditation he goes from God in intellectu, in perception, to God in re, in existence or, problematic yet literal, in things. So here too God has slipped into our world.

When men of faith talk about the death of God, they begin to count our types of God and to show us how the God who is now dead was never the one we wanted anyway. We are not speaking here of the old fashioned atheists, like, say, Sartre, who didn’t want a God or believe in any sort of God and thought an age without God would be a golden one, but of the men who loved something they called God, who’ve lost something they called God. Pascal is perhaps most famous for this, speaking of the “philosopher’s God” and opposing that God to the God he had, by philosophy, intended to love, the God of Abraham. Pascal sees that any God who is a piece of a philosophic system is less than God and he sees us struggling to speak of God in any way so that what we speak of can be the God we and he had set out to love and understand. He wants to stop himself at this point of ontological speaking and say no, something’s terribly wrong with this God who either slips beyond our world into obscure and nonsensical talk or slips into our world and becomes a bit of ontological furniture. He thinks that we began, as Anselm instructed, with faith seeking understanding but that the understanding has destroyed our faith. Let us then, he says, lose this God. So much the better. Buber makes this same move, counting in our history two Gods, two things we called God and we’ve now lost one but it turns out to be the one that was never really God. Buber says there is an It-God who was an object, and a Thou-God. Philosophy has always been about the It-God, and it may have seduced us into thinking we were loving the Thou-God by speaking of the It-God, but we were mistaken and the sooner the It-God passes away the better.

I am being to quick and short with Buber, Pascal and co., but what their story seems to be missing is the anguish. They’re with Sartre in dismissing this thing we said we loved as a hocus pocus story, and perhaps it was but to rush out to a solution so swiftly misses the pain this loss has caused us. Note that Nietzsche’s mad man, after proclaiming in the streets that God is dead and we have killed him, begins to weep and when no one understands him he goes to a requiem for the deceased divine. He is overwhelmed by anguish. When someone says “God is dead and we didn’t want him anyway” there’s something that’s just been run over. So let us say “yes, perhaps,” but then also query further. When a man destroys his household idols, having thought of them as gods but seeing now they weren’t, he’s still losing something, killing something. What? What did he think he had, what did we think we had with this thing we called God? There is an old joke about the atheist who is mad at God for not existing. It’s a joke because we don’t understand how someone could be mad at something that doesn’t exist because it doesn’t exist, but the anguish is very real. Where Buber and Pascal can be glad to be rid of that God, Nietzsche’s mad man, the atheist, Kierkegaard’s depiction of Abraham’s distress, and Christ’s cry of abandonment all express a pain that’s present in the loss. If we skip this anguish we have missed something, so let us ask again, what have we lost when we’ve lost what we called God?

What we wanted from the Anselmian project was the preservation of the infinite, was the intrusion of the ineffable into our world in such a way that it both reached us and remained beyond us. We need an infinite we can behold without making finite. The initial problem, which still remains, is how to think of and speak of God without either consuming him or losing him. Buber and Pascal still need a way to talk about God, still need a theological language. Let’s look at two modern attempts at speaking of God without disfiguring him, first the ethical and second the impossible.

There’s a Hasidic parable told about Adam and Eve. On the day they were cast from the garden the sun set for the first time and as the world passed into dusk and then into darkness they were terrified, believing that their sin had set the world sinking into nothingness. They spend the night trembling in fear, eyes dilated to the darkness, looking each other in the face. For them there was now nothing, God had left them and the world had gone dark and there was nothing left but the face of the other.

Tolstoy tells a religious story about a cobbler named Martin who despairs of life and wants to see God. Martin is promised in a dream that he would, the next day, see God. So he goes about his day keeping on the look out for God and does pretty well but is distracted, eventually, by someone in need. They’re cold and need something to eat and a coat so he takes them in and cares for them and realizes later that he was distracted and didn’t see Jesus. That night again he hears a voice promising that he will see God the next day, if he remains vigilant. The same thing happens the next day and he hears the voice again and then again he’s distracted by someone in need and then the last night, in total despair, he apologizes to God for getting distracted and asks to die. That night in a dream he sees the people he has helped walking by and he hears the voice telling him that he has seen the face of God in the face of these people.

Perhaps the error of Anselm’s attempt at beholding the ineffable was its verticalness. In the most recent scholarship on death of God theology there occurs and reoccurs a turn to Levinas and his talk of the face of the other. The “other” in Levinas, is a conflation of the otherness of people, the faces we see around us, and the Otherness of God. This is not a problem but rather the point. He wants to make an incarnational move. Levinas attempts to make the Anselmian move horizontally, and with that horizontality to let us see God in a way that’s not technical and is very visceral. He thinks the face of the other offers us a way in which to see the infinite, the ineffable, the unthinkable divine, without surrounding it, overrunning it, and destroying it. Through the face of other people we can let God enter the world and reach us while still remaining uncontainable. This ethics can speak theologically without losing God either by enclosing him in our world or walling him outside of it. Levinas offers us the possibility of a theological language that allows us to talk about God so that he’s in our world without our world containing him, and outside our world without being eliminated from it.

Yet. I had hoped to stop here, and yet the horizontal language has only repeated the problems of the vertical one. Buber’s point about the It-God and the Thou-God apply especially to people. It’s nice to think of the face of the other as happening in this space that is both in my world and reaching me and outside this world saying unencompasable, but really does this happen? Speaking practically and only for myself, I am a solipsist. How does one go about looking with the Levinasian look that doesn’t deface the face of the other? When we speak about people, we speak about them as things in this world, among the ontological furniture. There is nothing about the vertical move which allows the face to stay at this inside/outside space, it is constantly slipping into our world of things and being overrun, surrounded and destroyed. In explicitly Christian terms, notice that the incarnarnational God-the-Son is no easier to explain and no less prone to heresy than the outside-the-world creator God. This horizontal theological language, as far as I can see, isn’t any more possible than the first one.

So that’s it. Theological language is impossible and we are offered the bad choice of either speaking about God in a language that disfigures and defaces him or to say nothing at all. But, enter Derrida, perhaps this impossibility is the key to theological language, perhaps it is only with the impossibility always before us that we can speak about God while not disfiguring him. That is, Derrida wants to put forward the possibility of a language that recognizes and remains ever aware of its impossible task, thus it speaks of God, then notes its own inadequacies, then speaks of God, etc. This is a language that continually points out its own failure, a language that is always restless and disturbed. Our third choice is that of a blind theological language that recognizes its blindness, speaking within that blindness so that we know we’re saying impossible things but we are, by grace, through faith, hanging on by our teeth anyway.

Preliminary example: Parables.






There are, I think, three types of death of God theology:

1. Secularization or Scientification. This is the idea, popular with Chesterton, Lewis and many at Hillsdale College that historical changes have closed us off to the realm of the spiritual, that because of modernization or secularization or whatever historical movement, modern man sees the world wholly physical and scientific terms and cannot fathom the idea of the divine.

2. Theodical – the problem of evil. This is an old theological problem, but it comes up in new and troublesome ways, for example, in Jewish theologies after the holocaust, where they begin to wonder how they can talk about God in a world this evil. The classic example of this is Milton’s theodicy, where he ends up, I take it accidentally, heroizing Satan. Those Christians who say that God doesn’t know the future are, I think, examples of attempts at this kind of theology.

3. Ontological. This is what I’m going to talk about, not because the other two aren’t real problems or important, but because I think this is the oldest problem for theological language, because it’s logically prior to the first two, and because I think this is the problem we talk about the least.

ESCAPE FROM VIOLENCE:
Synthesizing the ethics of Rene Girard, Wendell Berry, & Jacques Derrida

By Daniel Silliman

for Dr. Justin Jackson
Mimetic Theory, Eng. 404

In the works of Rene Girard, Wendell Berry and Jacques Derrida, we are presented, in three disparate fields by three very different writers, with a vision of human culture saturated by violence. Their respective projects aren’t, on the face of it, the same. While Girard is analyzing the literature of Shakespeare or Proust, Berry is culling through statements from the U.S. department of Agriculture, and Derrida is looking at ghosts in Marx or exploring the possibility of a science of writing. Yet, between them there is an important similarity: they are all ultimately concerned with an ethical response to pervasive violence.

Girard is a literary critic and an anthropologist. His work is purposed towards the better understanding of literary texts and cultural rites, to explain them and to explore them. Yet, reading his explanations of the mimetic structure of human nature as he’s discovered it in literature and societies, we find ourselves regularly presented with an ethics. In the end of Job, a book that is both a work of literary criticism and anthropology, we find ourselves choosing a god. “If we want to rid ourselves of the system of action and representation based on the scapegoat,” we are told, and so strong has the aversion to scapegoating been sewn into the text that as a question it is almost rhetorical, we must follow in the path of Job and “hope for the God of victims.” In the middle of the anthropology essay “Are the Gospels Mythical?” Girard becomes almost evangelical, arguing that we should “choose Jesus as our model,” that, “at the first hint, we should abandon the disputed object to our rivals and accede even to their most outrageous demands.” Girard is a literary critic and an anthropologist, but in the end he is an ethicist.

If he weren’t, if he were strictly and properly academic and analytical, he would be maddening. To read Girard is to come again and again to the ethical question: what must I do? How can I escape from violence? Indeed, Girard and his readers are compelled to ethics by the subject matter.

Girard begins with what he considers the most basic human characteristic and moves secondly to what he holds is the foundation of civilization. For Girard, what humans are, most essentially, is mimetic. Mimesis, imitation, is what makes us human, is the substance of the basic relational interactions, between brothers, sons and fathers, and, in fact, is present everywhere someone desires something and is the source of human conflict. Mimetic desire leads to conflict by begetting a rivalry. The imitator, who can not see himself as worthy to be a rival of his model, eagerly imitates his model in pursuing what the model desires and, in this eagerness, threatens the model. As James Williams explains, “If our desire to be like a model is strong enough, if we identify with that person closely enough, we will want to have what the model has or be what the model is. If it is carried far enough and if there are no safeguards braking desire . . . then we become rivals of our models.” By this eager imitation the model is elevated and in that elevation is the threat that he may be debased. The mimesis of admiration becomes the mimesis of envy and model becomes an obstacle. The model is made into an idol, and then smashed. The relationship between the two becomes, inevitably, a struggle, a rivalry. This rivalry leads to violence and mimesis becomes disorder. To restore order, the community unites in violence, converging upon a scapegoat to kill or expel it and the community becomes unified by that violence against the one. One person is found to bear alone the responsibility for the disorder, alone to take on the blame for the problem plaguing the whole community, and is therefore sacrificed, scapegoated, restoring and maintaining order.

Violence is used to solve violence, and human culture and community are founded and preserved by this violence. Girard sees sacrificial scapegoats everywhere, sees our world from the beginning to the present day as drenched in this violence. “Human communities constantly resort to sacrifice,” he writes. For Girard, this violence is pervasive and all but inescapable.

Yet we cannot simply accept this violence, these sacrifices, as necessary. Girard is not merely explaining the mechanisms of the system; he is unveiling the horrific violence behind communal order, behind society itself. He is digging up a mass grave of tortured murder victims, amass grave that stretches back to the beginning. He holds, radically, to the true innocence of all these victims. Girard's case is that no matter how extensive the justification, there was no better reason for the victimization than that somebody had to die to restore order. The guilty become guilty by being named the so, and are rarely given a voice to object. The violence is real violence that has been disguised, these victims are real human victims that have been dehumanized. Girard asks us to stand with him and view the discoveries of this anthropology with revulsion and horror.

Doing this, we come repeatedly to the ethical questions, asking Girard and asking ourselves how we can stop this horror. Reading the text one is driven to demand an answer of how to break the cycle, how to not commit these crimes.

It is, for Girard, a difficult question. The violence he sees throughout history – since the foundation of the world, since the founding violence, since Able was slain by his brother – is one characterized by its disguise, by its self-justification so elaborate as to never appear to need to be justified. The point at which one is confident one is not participating in this violence is the point where one is likely to be guilty. The violence clusters in our blind spots. We are easily moved to denounce the scapegoating of our enemies, to denounce the victimization of those we see as innocent, while still justifying the victimizations, the scapegoating of others. “We ferociously denounce the scapegoating of which our neighbors are guilty,” Girard writes, “but we are unable to do without our own substitute victims. We all try to tell ourselves that we have only legitimate grudges and justified hatreds.” A prime example here is the Christian scapegoating of the Jews for the scapegoating of Christ. To kill a Christ-killer is to become guilty of that which one blames one’s victim, is to be once again “starting up the victimage mechanism.” Girard is making the radical claim that all scapegoats are innocent, our own as much as others. It is easy to think one has embraced Girard’s theory, and with it his ethic, while actually only slipping into a more sophisticated and more subtle form of the same crime. “We practice a hunt for scapegoats to the second degree,”he writes, “a hunt for the hunters of scapegoats.”

Our only hope of escaping from this violence is a “passionate identification with the victim” which he holds “is the authentic source of knowledge.” It must be a passionate and wholesale identification, for anything less – either an equation of sympathy with the victim and the victimizers or an attempt at distance and impartiality – is a maintenance of the system of violence. Our only hope of escaping from this violence is to look always to our own violence, being wary lest in taking the part of the victims we “re-establish the sacrificial system” that creates victims. Our hope is in the imitation of Christ, who wholly rejected this rivalry, this scapegoating, this violence, its very logic, who shared the lot of the victim until the end. We should, Girard writes, follow Job to follow Jesus’ “participation in the struggle against the God of the persecutors. . . when he reveals the scapegoat phenomenon,” in an undermining of the logic of violence. Let us, Girard says, “choose Jesus,” let us “at the first hint . . . abandon the disputed object to our rivals and accede even to their most outrageous demands.”

Wendell Berry, seeking to escape the logic of violence, seeking to “practice resurrection,” starts with humility. The feeling of reading Berry is one of quietness. He is a man frightened by the reality of apocalypse, frightened by the human abuse of the world, by the solutions set out to solve past solutions that are tipping our lives and our world off-kilter, sending them spinning and banging into self-destruction, and yet he speaks softly, calmly. This calmness is humility, for when Berry is worried about strip mining, he is worried about the way he himself puts words to paper, when he is worried about the effects of technology on character, he is worrying about how to cut his grass, when he is worried about the increasing misuse of land, he is worrying about growing trees on his Kentucky farm “The reach of responsibility,” he writes, “is short.”

For Berry, the response to violence must be personal, practical, and local. Responsibility must finally be owned individually. “A proper concern,” he writes, “must be practised, not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves.” Berry is refusing to shrug off the problem of violence, to let himself escape responsibility by some comparison with others, to grant himself a clear conscious. He is taking it personally. He is, in biblical language, looking to the log in his own eye, refusing to say that “the guilty are always other people, and the wrong is always somewhere else.” In this personal and local response, Berry is not setting forth a categorical ethic. He is making a commitment to a manner of living (“invest in the millennium”) that works out in practical terms (“plant sequoias” ). He is committing himself and urging a commitment not to a program, not to the certainty of a system, but to a way of acting, a manner, a consciousness.

It is common to think that a response – a solution – comes with knowledge. More knowledge, more study, more information, it is thought, will provide us with a solution. Berry rejects this. For Berry, “the evidence is overwhelming that knowledge does not solve ‘the human problem.’” Knowledge is not the solution because it is involved in the problem, and a problem cannot solve itself. “Always,” he writes, “the assumption is that we can first set demons at large, and then, somehow, become smart enough to control them.” It is this cycle of solutions, solutions requiring further solutions, that Berry believes we must stop.

Berry is constantly worried about the double bind of knowledge, its function as a pharmakon where the poison is inscribed in the cure, the cure always involving a reassertion of the poison. The pharmakon is technology, and as such it will always be with us. We cannot rid ourselves of technology, which is not just computers, cars, and cell phones but also buttons, hammers, and milled lumber. Berry is often accused of being a luddite, of simply opposing technology, but he is not opposing technology, but arrogance. He doesn’t think that he can escape the pharmakon, can somehow “get past” technology, but thinks he can seek to always remain conscious of it. He believes in the possibility of always remembering his own arrogance. He writes:

“One thing that we dare not forget, is that better solutions than ours have at times been made by people with much less information than we have. We know too, from the study of agriculture, that the same information, tools, and techniques that in one farmer’s hands will ruin land, in another’s will save and improve it.”

We forget, because of arrogance. Looking to the double movement of technological solutions, to this poison labeled as a cure, to this cure that promises to cure itself, Berry sees arrogance. The mark of knowledge, of the faith that knowledge only given time will arrive at the answer, is arrogance. It is arrogance that assumes we will find a technological replacement for personal restraint, arrogance that believes worry is unnecessary for a solution is coming, arrogance that is blind to itself. It is here where Berry identifies the problem: arrogance.

One could perhaps argue that the difference between Berry and Girard is in the locus of the problem. Where Girard begins with mimetic desire, Berry begins with arrogance. This difference, however, is superficial. Berry’s description of arrogance includes desire. The arrogant mind, he says, is “blinded by its visions of what it desires.” Girard, likewise, sees the blind enslavement to mimesis as due to pride and egoism. The arrogant mind is the mind caught up in the mimetic system unaware, blindly looking for specks in other’s eyes, looking for a solutions and scapegoats. The arrogant mind is the mind that thinks itself free from arrogance, thinks that while others are subject to mimesis and imitation leading to violence, it stands free. Both Berry and Girard find the locus of the problem in blindness that does not know it’s blind, claim that the blindness is worst when it claims to see, and they both end with an attempt to act knowing that they’re blind.

What Berry urges, rather than the arrogance of knowledge, is understanding. Understanding is marked by humility, patience, and commitment. In relating a story about an old woman who was known to have lived in the barn with her animals and said that she talked to them so that they might be familiar, Berry says it is understanding, an unquantifiable and uncalculatable knowledge, that allows us to conduct ourselves rightly towards the world. Using the contrast between the “crazy” old lady and the stockman whose wealth of knowledge without familiarity has him always making a skill-less commotion and never tells him the health and condition of his stock, Berry tells us to value understanding, not knowledge. Using the example of marriage, Berry writes, “I take it as an axiom that one cannot know enough to get married, any more than one can predict a surprise. The only people who posses information sufficient to their vows are widows and widowers – who do not know enough to remarry.” Knowledge is not enough, he says, does not see far enough to aid us. What we need is not knowledge, but a comportment of humility.

Knowledge and blindness are arrogant, and cure is blinded to the poison, carrying it along in that blindness. To understand, he says, one must be humble. To recognize one’s own violence, one’s own blindness begotten by desire, one must be humble. Berry is making an argument for humility. More importantly, he is attempting to work out that necessary humility in the quietness of his own life, in “correct discipline that cannot be hurried,” inviting us to follow him into this quietness of humility worked out locally and taken on personally. “It is the properly humbled mind,” he writes, “in its proper place that sees truly, because – to give only one reason – it sees details.”

Any attempt to become conscious of the mechanisms of violence, to see, will need to involve looking closely at the details of the structure, at the little gaps in the structure that already exhibit the full maturity of violence and scapegoating. Attention to detail, a shortening (and focusing) of analysis, will bring us to see our own blindness, will show that the problem of violence has always already begun. Looking at the detail of a painting, down close to the swirl of the paint, can often tell us something about the structure of the whole that the view of the whole hides. We are always tempted to push the analysis out, farther from our own responsibility, our own implication. “There is nothing more difficult than detecting the structuring mechanism at work,” Girard writes, than detecting the “sacrificial subterfuge” – nothing more difficult and nothing more needed. The mechanism hides itself, covers its tracks, recreates itself in our analysis when we look away. We must, if we are to detect the structuring mechanism, if we are to see our own blindness and mitigate our own violence, bring our analysis of the structure in closer and closer.

Jacques Derrida wants to turn us to the structure, to zoom us in, asking the questions before the questions and looking always especially closely at the details. Girard, as we’ve noted, begins with mimesis. In laying out his theory that all desire is mimetic desire, he quickly moves to making that case and moves over the description of why that case needs to be made. All desire is mimetic and the reason we flatter ourselves otherwise is because we privilege spontaneity over mimesis. Girard recognizes this, saying “our languages are constructed to contrast the mimetic with the spontaneous,” and yet he also misses this, not stopping to fully realize what he’s just noted. “Mimetic desire,” he says, “is intrinsically good,” as if we have been but innocently mistaken and a correction can happen easily and quietly in a side note. Derrida urges us to stop at this point, at noting the contrast between the two words and to note, further, that it is more than a contrast and that this is more than an innocent mistake. The Derridian project looks to the polarities and the dichotomies arranged, in Western Metaphysics and by Western Metaphysics, in hierarchical structures privileging immediacy and presence. Derrida would look into this dichotomy, spontaneity vs. mimesis, and find here an opposition such that “the two terms are not simply opposed in their meanings, but are arranged in a hierarchical order which gives the first term priority.” That is to say, he finds here, already, violence. Mimesis, Derrida points out, is a charge, an accusation. Are you guilty or not guilty? The trial has already begun, here before we have started. “Homer, the blind old father, is condemned,” in Plato’s Republic, “because he practices mimesis,” is “cast out of the city, like every other mimetic poet.” Thus before Girard has completed his first move, Derrida has moved into the details of the cracks of the structure and found the problem, the violence, already full formed.

Andrew McKenna will call this Derrida’s “preoccupation with formal structures,” faulting him for holding an ethics that seems to be worried about structures rather than humans. Perhaps so. Reading Derrida, the desire arises to turn away from his endless detours into the details of writing, to dismiss them, to move to the real ethical crises. But we ought not to go until we note the ethical message of Derrida. The ethical message is this: wait wait. Look again. Do not think we have so easily escaped. The violence has already begun.

Derridian ethics tells us to look for and be attentive to the poor, the hidden and marginalized, the parenthesized. The use of the parenthetical, in the Disemination sentence “this (therefore) will not have been a book,” displays this Derridian ethic of the parentheses. The urge is to read the sentence having excised or incorporated the parenthesis, to read either, “this will not have been a book,” or “this, therefore, will not have been a book.” The parenthetical is annoying. It is a mid-text side step, a two-step disrupting the unity of the sentence, the placement of the sentence, and is a move that throws the unity of the text off center. Parentheses are un-subsumed fragments still worrying the edges of the oneness of the text, demanding either to be cut or considered. It stands bracketed in a middle non-position, neither brought into the text, admitting the material, nor expelled. The parenthetical is the stranger. The stranger within the gates is a disruption of the community until he is either counted and made familiar, or put out. Parentheses mark a ruption. They are the disinherited, erased from the sentences, arrested. The Derridian ethic of the parenthetical is the ethic of realigning with the parenthetical, of stilling the urge to strike the disunifying element and encouraging rather an attentiveness and openness towards the parenthesized. It is the opposition to the urge of violence that rises at the rupture, the attempting to approach the stranger as the face of God.

Derrida does not think this is an easy move, a simple attainable act. The parenthesis will disturb the text until it is integrated or expunged, but to make either move is not to end the problem. To solve one parenthetical is to let another in and if they are absent then they are, like ghosts, like homeless people hidden from a political parade, there precisely in not being there. To realign one’s self with the parenthesized could be merely to invert the order but still to maintain it, perpetuating the order and its violence. He always moves first to the inversion, turning the hierarchy on its head in a display of the ridiculousness and the violence of the hierarchy, yet he knows and wants us to know that the logic of the violence is still in place. That which we must seek to avoid is not this particular hierarchy of Western Metaphysics, but Western Metaphysic’s hierarchies as such. Considering the example of writing and speech, Johnson tells us that “in the course of his critique, Derrida does not simply reverse this value system and say that writing is better than speech. Rather, he attempts to show that the very possibility of opposing the two terms … is an illusion.”

For any move to be fixed, to be final, would be a reestablishment of the violence we sought to escape. To arrest the continual reconsideration, for Derrida, is to loose the “ethico-religious dimensions” of his project and thereby reassert that which he sought to work against. To embrace this ethic of the parentheses would mean to always remain open to the parenthesized, open even to that which was put out of the text while we were accepting the first parenthetical. To embrace his “lost sheep ethics” requires that we always remain willing to pursue another sheep, even that sheep which was lost while we were finding the first lost sheep. Derrida is urging us towards an ethics that is self-conscious and never closed. We cannot conclude our escape from violence without reasserting that violence, without merely moving it into our blind spot. We must, then, continuously seek the escape as “a hope, an expectation, a tear, a prayer.”

There is a final similarity, even a unity, in the diverse works of Girard, Berry, and Derrida. Even when these three are not saying the same thing, their messages and worries neatly join and work together in a united ethics. Their respective fields bring them to this ethical consideration in different ways and with different practical concerns. Girard is never concerned about the metaphysical status of writing. Berry is never worried about primitive taboos about twins. Derrida never talks about trailer parks. To stop with any one of them would be to narrow our ethical concerns. By synthesis, by bringing in all three of these thinkers, we allow this ethics to be emphasized where they repeat each other and brought to bear on the width of human activity where they differ. The three, combined, marshal a force of argument they may not be able to carry individually. The three of them each approach and consider vital the question of how one ought to live in this world and, when synthesized, present us with a full-bodied set of ethical concerns, and a manner in which to ethically live.

Each of them reaches for an ethics founded on the three principles of awareness, openness, and humility. Seeking awareness, they are all worried about violence, especially hidden violence. They seek to not stop with a simple answer, but to let their ethical concerns complicate the world and their lives. Seeking openness, they are attempting to reorient their world around concern for victims. They are seeking to be an aid to all that is weak, poor, marginalized, helpless, and strange. Seeking humility, they are all especially attempting to be aware of their own arrogance and blindness, of that violence which they themselves perpetuate. They seek to take ethics personally. They seek to be patient, to labor faithfully, not opting for a fix, a simple, singular and once-offered answer. They seek a manner and a way of living that will not allow them to be blinded into accepting their own actions that are, as Berry writes, “making a nigger of the world.” They seek a manner of living such that they may not participate, as Girard said, in creating a society where everyone is “ruled by mimetic desire, everyone shares in making existence as barren as the desert, but no one is aware of it.” They are all, in their various projects, attempting to work out an ethical plan that will not be another disguise for violence. They are seeking a life of ethical awareness, openness and humility and they recognize that this may well be impossible, that they may be seeking the life of the saint, yet that they have no other option.

“It is,” Berry writes, “an old story. Evil is offering us the world: ‘All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.’ And we have only the old paradox for an answer: If we accept all on that condition, we lose all.”

Works Cited:

Berry, Wendell. “Getting Along with Animals.” New Farm Magazine, September/October, 1979
“Global Problems, Local Solutions.” Resurgance, 2001, issue #206
“A Good Scythe” in The Gift of Good Land. Berkely, North Point, 1982.
“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” Reclaiming Politics Fall/Winter 1991
Standing by Words. Berkely, North Point, 1983.
What are people for? Berkely, North Point, 1990.
The Unsettling of America. San Francisco, Sierra Club, 1986
Caputo, John. “The Jewish Augustinianism of Jacques Derrida.” Hillsdale College, April 18, 2005
“Deconstruction in a Nutshell I.” Hillsdale College, April 19, 205.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Chicago, University of Chicago, 1981.
Girard, Rene. “Are the Gospels Mythical?” First Things, April 1996.
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Maryknoll, Orbis, 2001
Job: The Victim of His People. Stanford, Stanford University, 1987.
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Stanford, Stanford University, 1987
Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1979
Johnson, Barbara. “Translator’s Introduction” in Dissemination.
McKenna, Violence and Difference. Urbana, University of Illinois, 1992.
Williams, James G. “Forward” in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning.

DISFIGURING GOD:
How Eriugena ontologically explained the multiplicity of Being and became a heretic

for Dr. Thomas Burke
Medieval Philosophy 212

There is a tension, in the work of John Scotus Eriugena, between ontology and orthodoxy. He approaches one of the main problems of metaphysics from within Christian philosophy and, in doing so, falls outside of it. This paper is an exploration and hopefully and explication of a series of relationships: between Eriugena and the problem of the One and the Many, between Eriugena and Christianity, between Christianity and neoplatonism, and between Christianity and the problem of the One and the Many.

Every ontology must answer the problem of the multiplicity of Being, must explain how the total and singular Being relates to the plurality of beings. Often called the problem of the One and the Many and approached since the pre-Socratic debate we find in the fragments of Heraclites and Parmenides, this taxonomic question is one of the basic questions of metaphysics and one that reemerges needing to be answered with each ontological explanation of existence.

Simply put, the question is this: what is the relationship between Being and beings. One might conceivably answer that there is no unity or that there are no particulars, yet the philosophers of the western tradition have agreed that there is a One and there are Many, leaving the relation between them a continuing debate. Metaphysics wants to identify and describe the “basic and pervasive categories” of everything and the most basic categories are the One and the Many. We have recognized in the world many different and unique beings, and yet also cannot conceive of that which exists without the conception of a unity of Being, of a One that is the source of the Many and more than a collective name for things that exist.

In the similar though less theoretical and simpler question of genera, we ask about the relationship between men and a man, or leaves and a leaf, seeing that there is an emphatic particularity marking the particular, Socrates, yet not such that we cannot identify him as relating to and participating in this more general group. Similarly, the problem of the multiplicity of Being asks how is it that there is a oneness of being and also these particular things that are beings. All ontological theories start with the simplicity of two categories: that which is and that which is not, Being and nothingness. Yet, the unity of Being quickly becomes confusing and tenuous in trying to see how it actually categorically unifies all that is the case and works out into each individual piece of the world. We recognize, through the data of the senses, the reality of particulars, the reality of normal objects in the world, yet we also recognize an ultimate reality that is more than the sum of individualized and particularistic realities and binds them all together. The question is how the two relate in such a way that particular realities – the existence of chairs or cats – takes place within the single category of that which exists, of Being as a unity. We cannot create a third basic ontological category for particular beings without separating them from the category of Being. In order for there to be beings they must be unified with Being, must all be contained within or under Being. Thus, the One must be One, but also divided and the divisions must be divisions though they are whole, and we struggle to clarify the problematic and persistent tangle of that relationship of the One to the Many and the Many to the One.

John Scotus Eriugena, in his On the Divisions of Nature, sets forth an ontology that deals with the multiplicity problem by what has been characterized as a neoplatonic pantheism. In Eriugena’s ontology, everything that is, is nature. Nature, in its four parts of (1) that which creates and is not created, (2) that which creates and is created, (3) that which does not create and is created, and (4) that which neither creates or is created, is One. Nature is One, Being, and Being is God. As Eriugena quotes from Pseudo-Dionysius, “esse omnium est superesse Divinitatis” (the being of all is the over-being of God). The first division of nature is God “in His primordial, finite” being. The second division of nature is God in the second person of the trinity “engender[ing] in Himself the forms or ideas.” The third division is the third person of the trinity bringing about the effects of the eternal causes to create the external world, which is “a multiplicity of manifestations of God.” The forth division is the flow of nature back into itself, God returning to God, the end terminating in the beginning where they exist as they have from eternity past.

This ontology is distinctly neoplatonic in its language of emanation. Neoplatonism is an ontology that holds to a single transcendent One, God beyond comprehension, which emanates or effulgrates outward into the multiplicities of mind, souls and nature, so that all that exists are emanations of the One. It is a reading of Plato that beings in the 3rd century with an Alexandrian dockworker and is systematized in the writings of Plotinus, 54 treaties that were edited by his disciples into 6 groups of 9 and entitled Ennead. Plotinus argues from Plato that the principle of all reality is not matter or multiplicity, not below us, but above us. The principle of reality is in spirit which is One and transcendent and emanating. The ontological (and the ethical ) explanations of neoplatonism are synthesized with and integrated into a Christian framework by Pseudo-Dionysius in the 5th century. Pseudo-Dionysius adopts the neoplatonic metaphors of Being as flowing water the explanation of Being as light moving out from a single source, becoming more dispersed yet always remaining a single unity, and becoming weaker as it moves from the source until it ceases. He uses neoplatonism and its metaphors as a framework for Christian doctrines, especially for the trinity, and for the fall and redemption of creation. Pseudo-Dionysius, translated into Latin by Eriugena, teaches that the ontological fabric of the world is the emanations, the flowing forth, of God, the world being the procession from and returning to God.

Eriugena’s neoplatonic ontology solves the problem of the One and the Many by describing a relationship between the two categories such that there is a One and a Many. He doesn’t lose either of the One or the Many and ensures that they are at once distinguishable and united. He holds to a One that is all and in the multiplicity of all. The analogy here is light, which radiates or emanates outward from a source, can divide and, in passing through a prism or just the atmosphere, change from containing all colors to the particulars of the color wheel while never ceasing to be united as light. Using the language of light’s emanation, he says that God, the One Being, flows and passes into the particulars of beings, is the source and reality of all that is more than the sum and never not God. The particulars are divisions within the undivided unity of the whole. In this way Eriugena sets forth a relationship between the One and the Many that allows both the unity of Being and the diversity of beings to coexist, diversified and unified within a single category of that which is.

This ontology is pantheistic in as much as, for Eriugena, there is no world extra deum. The reality of the world is the reality of God, so that if all-that-is were a circle, God would be the center with the radii of primordial causes and, farther our, phenomena, coming from, being, and returning to God. God is everything that truly is, since He makes all things and is made in all things. “When we hear that God makes all things,” he writes, “we should understand nothing else but that God is in all things, i.e. is the essence of all things. For He alone truly is, and everything which is truly said to be in those things which are, is God alone.” Nature is One, is all that is, and the One is God. The creator and the created are God, one and the same, for God can be said to be “created in creatures” in that the One manifests itself to itself, creating in itself and from itself that it might know itself. God knows God, reflexively, in the manifestation of creation. Yet, while Eriugena does set forth a pantheism, such that everything that is, is God, he’s also not a pantheist in that there is a distinction being God, who is Being, and creatures, which are Being and God only in as particulars and divisions. Eriugena’s pantheism is an ontological and at least quasi-Christian manifestation of pantheism. But, at the same time, his ontological and quasi-Christian pantheism still does not fall into any orthodox Christian schema

The objections to Eriugena’s solution for the relation between Being and beings are not philosophical objections, but rather theological ones. In condemning his work as pantheistic, Pope Honorius III said Eriugena’s On the Divisions of Nature was “a book teeming with the worms of heretical depravity.” His book was banned, in 1585, by Pope Gregory XIII as outside of acceptable Christian understanding of the world, as containing abhorrent theological consequences. The objection to his ontology was not that it didn’t work philosophically, but that if his ontology were to be accepted then God looks nothing like the orthodox Christian conception of God.
Eriugena’s ontology is rejected because “the God of the Neoplatonists is too remote from the world to serve satisfactorily.” This solution to the problem of the One and the Many is a solution where God has lost a face. He becomes too remote by becoming everything and thereby becoming impersonal. Eriugena’s neoplatonism loses the Christian distinction between creator and created, and the two collapse into One so that the creator is “created in creatures.” Being becomes indistinguishable from beings and God, identified by Christians in the language of philosophy as Being, becomes indistinguishable from chairs and trees and people and dogs.

Eriugena’s ontology further strays from orthodox Christian doctrine by redefining the nihilo from which creatures were created in the Christian understanding of creation. For Eriugena’s neoplatonism, there is nothing, no space or principle, outside of God from which God could create. Thus God creates ex nihilo and a se, that is, from a nothing that is from within himself, his superabundance and transcendence. This is Eriugena’s rigorous explanation of the idea of God’s transcendence by means of neoplatonic ontology, which cannot allow him the traditional Christian description of the doctrine where God speaks or calls things into being out of a void, since such a God would be bounded and limited.

The objections concerning these theological consequences are serious. Eriugena’s ontology could be said to have disfigured God. In the 9th century, there was little distinction between theology and philosophy – certainly Eriugena made none – so this counter-objection to the opposition to Eriugena’s ontology, that it is all theological and not philosophical, is not one that would have been raised by Eriugena or anyone else at the time. Nevertheless, let it stand to highlight the difficulty that orthodox Christianity did not have a better solution for the relation of Being to beings and in objecting to heretical consequences and not to the ontology per se, does not come any closer to a solution.

There was no intention of unorthodoxy on the part of Eriugena, who considered himself a faithful son of the Church, a point that is regularly emphasized in secondary works. He didn’t disregard the church fathers or church orthodoxy or consider them irrelevant in coming to his conclusions. He doesn’t hold his ontology as in rivalry with an orthodox ontology or believe he’s thinking outside of the framework of orthodoxy or the community of the church. Eriugena, it seems, would have taken the condemnations of his writings by Pope Honorius III in the 13th century and Pope Gregory XIII in the 16th century quite seriously.

Indeed, Eriugena saw himself as rigorously applying the philosophy of the Church and the thought of the church fathers. He wasn’t attempting to propose anything radical or original, but to work out a consistent, thorough and systematic understanding of the neoplatonic ontology that was, then, also Christian philosophy. He extensively quoted the church fathers, especially St. Augustine, St. Basil, and St Gregory of Nyssa, in support of his views, and was working from a neoplatonism that was understood to be the philosophy of Christians. Even when Eriugena claims that reason held primacy over authority, he points out that this is because the two could not possibly be in contradiction. As Coplestone notes, “John Scotus is not questioning a dogma as such or claiming the right to deny it.”

This neoplatonism, for early Christianity, was not considered something foreign but something distinctly Christian and was appealed to as authoritative. Eriugena was renowned for translating the works of the Christian neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the philosopher who was then believed to be the dramatic Pauline convert mentioned in the Acts 17.34, St. Dionysius, and who was given, at that time, a near apostolic status. Pseudo-Dionysius’ writings were appealed to by Severus, the Patriarch of Antioch, in the 6th century to defend the doctrine of monophysitism and by iconoclasts during the Eastern Orthodox church’s iconoclastic controversies of the 8th century, and while the iconoclasts and the monophysites were eventually declared unorthodox, their appeals to the works of Pseudo-Dionysius as a recognizable authority points to his place in the philosophical tradition of Medieval Christendom. The 6th century sainted Pope Gregory “the Great” called Pseudo-Dionysius an “ancient and venerable Father.” Pseudo-Dionysius is cited in the letters of Pope Martin I and Pope Agatho, in the 7th century. Pseudo-Dionysius is mentioned in the 680 Constantinople and 787 Second Nicene Councils, which used, in the formulation of perhaps the most universally accepted and definitive creed, the neoplatonic language of procession to describe the inter-relations of the trinity.

Augustine, the Roman church’s largest intellectual influence on Eriugena, points to neoplatonism as leading him closer to Christianity and making it possible for him to accept the Church’s and the scripture’s intellectual position of authority. Augustine makes use of neoplatonic philosophers, specifically Plotinus, to answer the problem of evil, to oppose the dualism of the Manicheans, and to describe the ontological position of sin, and possibly it is at work in his doctrine of illumination, his vague thesis that God plays an active role in human understand by illuminating the individual mind in a way that might be compared to what’s happening in Eriugena’s second and third division of nature.

Eriugena was firmly, and saw himself as being firmly in the tradition of Christian neoplatonic ontology, and was attempting to work it out to a systematic formulation when he ending up with a position that was irreconcilable to orthodoxy. Yet, if Christianity abandons the neoplatonic ontological pantheism as heretical, as leading to an understanding of God, the problem of the multiplicity of Being remains.

Perhaps the most accessible Christian ontological answer to the problem of the multiplicity of Being is Bonaventure’s analogy of the prism, where unified light refracts and divides into colored light. Yet this is straightforwardly neoplatonic, and if pushed would look explicitly like Eriugena’s ontology and would likewise be found unacceptable to orthodoxy, with the same heretical outcome of disfiguring God.

The most thorough Christian answer to the problem of the One and the Many is Aquinas’ “analogy of being.” Aquinas argues that the word “Being” can be attributed only in a secondary and lesser way to beings, and is an essential attribute only of God. The being of creatures is “a different kind of being from the divine being, since it is received, derived, dependent, finite.” God and creatures, the One and the Many, have nothing in common. They are radically and absolutely different from each other, and are only similar by analogy. A comparison between the created and the creator can only rightly be done as a sort of symbolism. “God and creatures,” Copleston writes, “have no mutual real relationship.” Creatures, in their particularity and therein finitude, can have no real identification with the infinite perfection of the One, and even while we can compare creatures to God, we cannot in reverse compare God to creatures. Aquinas, like Eriugena, starts with the transcendence of the One, yet constructs it so that there can be no actual relation between the One and the Many. Aquinas’ ontology could not be charged with unorthodoxy, or with pantheism, or with an un-Christian conception of God, yet in remaining orthodox he fails to propose an explanation of the relationship of Being to beings. He so strongly emphasizes the gulf between the One and the Many, their dissimilarity and disconnection, that one finds no possible taxonomic reconciliation between them, and we are consequently left with three basic ontological categories: Nonbeing, Being and beings.

It is unclear, actually, that an answer to the problem of the One and the Many could be offered within an orthodox Christian ontology. As long as God is identified with Being, any system understood such that Being and being were somehow unified would seem to be strongly objectionable. After all, Christianity, in that identification, changes philosophy by establishing at that point a great metaphysical divide between Being and beings, emphasizing the separation between man and God, creation and creator. Thus, for an orthodox ontology, the distance and difference between the one Being and the many beings seems crucial, for the very extremity of the distinction which causes the dangling and enduring question of the multiplicity of Being is definitional of the orthodox Christian’s ontological God. For an ontology to remain acceptably Christian, the ontological relationship between Being and beings may have to be distant, dis-related and problematic.

Notes:
This paper will focus on the neoplatonic ontology as seen by Eriugena, but ethics could be conceived of as the primary focus in a mysticism that sought to ascend from the lower physical realities to the ecstasy of union with the higher spiritual realities of Being.

The emanation of light is used both as a metaphor and literally. At some points it is a picture to explain the process of Being and the relationship of the One and the Many and at others light is Being. With our science explaining light in terms of waves and particles, it’s difficult to understand the latter as more than the primitivism of the ancients, yet the former, metaphoric use of light comes to us easily.

Augustine’s earlier writings, like Against the Academics, express a certainty in the extensive compatibility of neoplatonism and Christianity, while in his Confessions he notes divergences between the two and in City of God the difference are marked as important and Christianity is said to be able to stand on its own. To consider how the Christian Augustine broke with neoplatonism, see Wittgenstein, Augustine and the Fantasy of Ascent by C. Thompson in Philosophical Investigations, April 2002, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 153-171(19).

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