The Life of the Mind (66 page)

We know the Hebrew solution for this perplexity. It assumes a Creator-God who creates time along with the universe and who as legislator remains outside His creation, and outside of time as the One "who is who he is" (the literal translation of "Jehovah" is "I am who I am") "from eternity to eternity." This concept of eternity, having been framed by a temporal creature, is the absolute of temporality. It is what is left of time when time is "absolved"—liberated from its relativeness—time as it would appear to an outside observer not subject to its laws and by definition unrelated by virtue of his One-ness. To the extent that the universe and everything in it can be traced back to the region of this absolute One-ness, the One-ness is rooted in something that may be beyond the reasoning of temporal men but still possesses a kind of rationale of its own: it can
explain,
give a logical account of, the existentially inexplicable. And the need for explanation is nowhere stronger than in the presence of an unconnected new event breaking into the continuum, the sequence of chronological time.

This seems to be why men who were much too "enlightened" to still believe in the Hebrew-Christian Creator-God turned with rare unanimity to pseudo-religious language when they had to deal with the problem of foundation as the beginning of a "new order of the ages." We have the "appeal to God in Heaven," deemed necessary by Locke for all who embarked on the novelty of a community emerging from "the state of nature"; we have Jefferson's 'laws of nature and nature's God," John Adams' "great Legislator of the Universe," Robespierre's "immortal Legislator," his cult of a "Supreme Being."

Their explanations clearly work by analogy: just as God "in the beginning created the heavens and the earth," remaining outside His Creation and prior to it, so the human legislator-created in God's own image and therefore able to imitate God-when he lays the
foundations
of a human community, creates the condition for all future political life and historical development.

To be sure, neither the Greeks nor the Romans knew anything of a Creator-God whose unrelated One-ness could serve as the paradigmatic emblem for an absolute beginning. But the Romans at least, who dated their history from the foundation of Rome in 753, seem to have been aware that the very nature of this business demanded a transmundane principle Otherwise Cicero could not have held that "human excellence nowhere so closely approaches the paths of the gods as in the founding of new and the preserving of already founded communities."
¹³¹
For Cicero as for the Greeks, from whom he derived his philosophy, the founders were not gods but divine men, and the greatness of their deed was to have established a law that became the font of authority, an immutable standard against which all positive laws and decrees enacted by men could be measured and from which they received their legitimacy.

Harking back to religious beliefs right in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment might have sufficed if there had been no more at stake than the authority of a new law; and indeed it is striking to find explicit mentions of a "future state of rewards and punishments" inserted into all American state constitutions, although we find no allusion to a hereafter in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States. The motives for such desperate attempts to hold fast to a faith that in reality would be unable to survive the co-tem-poraneous emancipation of the secular realm from the Church were entirely pragmatic and highly practical. In his speech on the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul to the National Convention on May 7, 1794, Robespierre asks "
Quel avantage trouves-tu à persuader l'homme qu'une force aveugle préside à ses destins, et frappe au hasard le crime et la vertu?
" ("What advantage do you see in persuading men to believe that a blind force presides over their destinies, striking crime and virtue at random?"), and in the
Discourses on Davila,
John Adams speaks in the same curiously rhetorical way of "the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fireflies, and that this
all
is without a father...[which would] make murder itself as indifferent as shooting a plover, and die extermination of the Rohilla nation as innocent as the swallowing of mites on a morsel of cheese."
¹³²

In brief, what we find here is a short-lived effort on the part of secular government to retain not the Hebrew-Christian faith but political instruments of rule that had been so very effective at protecting the medieval communities against criminality. In retrospect it may look almost like a tricky device of the educated few to persuade the many not to follow on the slippery road to enlightenment. In any case, the attempt totally failed (at the beginning of our century few indeed were left who still believed in "a future state of rewards and punishments") and was probably foredoomed to failure. Nevertheless the loss of belief and, with it, of a good deal of the old panic-stricken fear of death has certainly contributed to the massive invasion of criminality into the political life of highly civilized communities that our own century has witnessed. There is an odd built-in helplessness about the legal systems of entirely secularized communities; their capital punishment, the death penalty, only gives a date to and accelerates a fate all mortals are subject to.

In any event, wherever men of action, driven by the very momentum of the liberation process, began to prepare in earnest for an entirely new beginning, the
novus ordo seclorum,
instead of turning to the Bible ("In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"), they ransacked the archives of Roman antiquity for "ancient prudence" to guide them in the establishment of a Republic, that is, of a government "of laws and not of men" (Harrington). What they needed was not only an acquaintance with a new form of government but also a lesson in the art of foundation, in how to overcome the perplexities inherent in every beginning. They were quite aware of course of the bewildering spontaneity of a free act. As they knew, an act can only be called free if it is not affected or caused by anything preceding it and yet, insofar as it immediately turns into a cause of whatever follows, it demands a justification which, if it is to be successful, will have to show the act as the continuation of a preceding series, that is, renege on the very experience of freedom and novelty.

And what Roman antiquity had to teach them in this respect was quite reassuring and consoling. We do not know why the Romans, in the third century
B.C
. or perhaps even earlier, decided to trace their descent not from Romulus but from Aeneas, the man from Troy who had brought "Ilium and her conquered household gods into Italy" and thus became "the fount of the Roman race." But it is obvious that this fact was of great importance not only to Virgil and his contemporaries in Augustus' time, but also to all those who, starting with Machiavelli, had gone to Roman antiquity to learn how to conduct human affairs without the help of a transcendent God. What men of action were learning in the archives of Roman antiquity was the original purport of a phenomenon with which, curiously enough, Western civilization had been acquainted ever since the end of the Roman empire and Christianity's definite triumph.

Far from being new, the phenomenon of re-birth or renaissance, from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onward, had dominated the cultural development of Europe and had been preceded by a whole series of minor renascences that terminated the few centuries of what really were "dark ages," between the sack of Rome and the Carolingian renaissance. Each of these re-births, consisting in a Revival of Learning and centering on Roman and to a lesser degree Greek antiquity, had altered and revitalized only the rather restricted milieus of the educated elite inside and outside monasteries. It was not till the Age of Enlightenment—that is, in a now completely secularized world—that the revival of antiquity ceased to be a matter of erudition and responded to highly practical political purposes. For that enterprise the only predecessor had been the lonely figure, Machiavelli.

The problem men of action were being called upon to solve was the peiplexity inherent in the task of
foundation,
and since for them the paradigmatic example of a successful foundation was bound to be Rome, it was of the greatest importance to them to find that even the foundation of Rome, as the Romans themselves had understood it, was not an absolutely new beginning. According to Virgil, it was the resurgence of Troy and the re-establishment of a city-state that had preceded Rome. Thus the thread of continuity and tradition, demanded by the very continuum of time and the faculty of memory (the innate lest-we-forget, which seems to belong to a temporal creature as much as the ability to form projects for the future) had never been broken. Seen in this light, the foundation of Rome was the re-birth of Troy, the first, as it were, of the series of re-nascences that have formed the history of European culture and civilization.

We need only recall Virgil's most famous political poem, the Fourth Eclogue, to understand how vital it was for the Roman view of their state to interpret constitution and foundation in terms of the re-establishment of a beginning which, as an absolute beginning, remains perpetually shrouded in mystery. For if in the reign of Augustus "the great cycle of periods is born anew" (as all standard modern-language translations render Virgil's great line "
Magnus ah integro saeclorum nascitur ordo"),
it is precisely because this "order of the ages" is not
new
but only the return of something antecedent. To Augustus, who in the
Aeneid
is supposed to start this re-birth, a promise is even given that he will lead the way still further back and "again establish the ages of gold in Latium over the fields that once were the realm of Saturn," i.e., the Italic land before the arrival of the Trojans.
¹³³

At any rate, the order invoked in the Fourth Eclogue is great by virtue of going back to and being inspired by an earlier beginning: "Now returns the Maid, returns the reign of Saturn." And yet the way
back,
seen from the viewpoint of those now living, is a true beginning: "now from high heaven a new generation is sent down."
¹³⁴
This poem, no doubt, is a nativity hymn, a song in praise of a child's birth and the arrival of a
nova progenies,
a new generation. It has long been misunderstood as a prophecy of salvation through a
theos sōtēr,
a savior god, or at least as the expression of some pre-Christian religious yearning. But, far from predicting the arrival of a divine child, the poem is an affirmation of the divinity of birth as such; if one wishes to extract a general meaning from it, this could only be the poet's belief that the world's potential salvation lies in the very fact that the human species regenerates itself constantly and forever. But that meaning is not explicit: all the poet himself says is that every child born into the continuity of Roman history must learn "
heroum laudes et facta parentis
" "the glories of the heroes and the deeds of the fathers," so as to be able to do what all Roman boys were supposed to do—help "rule the world that his fathers' virtues have set at peace."
¹³⁵

In our context, what matters is that the notion of foundation, of counting time
ab urbe condita,
is at the very center of Roman historiography along with the no less profoundly Roman notion that all such foundations—taking place exclusively in the realm of human affairs, where men enact a tale to tell, to remember, and preserve—are re-establishments and re-constitutions, not absolute beginnings.

This becomes quite manifest if one reads Virgil's
Aeneid—
the story of the foundation of the city of Rome—side by side with the
Georgics,
the four poems in praise of husbandry, of "the tending of fields and flocks and trees," and of the "quiet earth" assigned to the care of "the circling toil of the husbandman, [which] returns even as the year rolls back on itself along the familiar track": "she abides unstirred, and oudives many children's children, and sees roll by her many generations of men." This is Italy before Rome, the 'land of Saturn, mighty of men"; he who lives in it, "who knows the gods of the country, Pan and old Silvanus and the Nymphs' sisterhood" and remains true to the love of "stream and woodland," is "lost to fame." "Him fasces of the people or purple of kings sway not ... not the Roman state or realms destined to decay; nor may pity of the poor or envy of the rich cost him a pang. What fruits the ... gracious fields bear of their own free will, these he gathers, and sees not the iron of justice or the mad forum and the archives of the people." This life "in sacred purity" was "life golden Saturn led on earth," and the only trouble is that in this world full of wonders and a superabundance of plants and beasts, "there is no
tale
of the manifold kinds or of the names they bear, nor truly were the tale worth reckoning out; whoso will know it, let him ... learn likewise how many grains of sand eddy in the west wind on the plain of Libya, or count ... how many waves come shoreward across Ionian seas."

Those who sing of the origin of this pre-Roman and pre-Trojan world, whose circling years produce no tales worth telling, while at the same time they produce all the wonders of nature that never cease to delight men, those who in Virgil praise "the realm of Saturn" and creation-myths (in the Sixth Eclogue or in the first book of the
Aeneid
) are chanting of a fairy-tale land and are themselves marginal figures. Dido's "long-haired" bard and Silenus, "his veins swollen as ever with yesterday's wine," entertain a youthful, playful audience with old tales of the "wandering moon and the sun's travail; whence is the human race and the brute, whence water and fire," "how throughout the vast void were gathered together the seeds of earth and air and sea, and withal of fluid fire, and how from these all the beginnings of things and the young orbed world itself grew together."

Still—and this is decisive—this Utopian fairy-tale land outside of history is sempiternal and survives in the indestructibility of nature; husbandmen or shepherds who tend the fields and the flocks still testify, in the midst of Roman-Trojan history, to an Italic past when the natives were "Saturn's people whom no laws fettered to justice, upright of their own free will and the custom of the god of old."
¹³⁶
Then no Roman ambition was charged "to rule the nations and ordain the law of peace" ("regere
imperio populos ... pacisque imponere morem"),
and no Roman morality was necessary to "spare the conquered and beat the haughty down" ("
parcere suiectis et debellare superbos").