Truman G. Madsen Lectures on Eternal Man

It’s a signal honor to be asked to speak at an event associated with Truman Madsen. I, like countless others, have been profoundly affected by his work, his life, and his testimony. I had only one encounter with Professor Madsen when I was a student here at Brigham Young University, and I guess you could call it my exit interview with him. I expressed at that time my desire to continue my studies at the graduate level and eventually secure a teaching position in the humanities. Professor Madsen suggested that I might consider something more practical instead. I resisted his counsel, so he said he would give me his blessing contingent on one promise: I would have to assure him that I would never return to BYU with my hat in my hand, asking for work. So I want him to know, wherever he is, that I was invited here tonight.

In 1818, as the poet John Keats nursed his beloved brother Tom through the final months of a hopeless struggle against tuberculosis, he wrote a sonnet about his own fears that he, too, would die before his pen could glean the wonderful riches of what he called his “teeming brain.” By the next year, the disease had indeed caught hold of him, and he burst forth in a creative flood of poetry, producing a string of odes that are still the staple of many an English major’s diet: “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and others.

As winter turned to spring, the torrent of words spilled over the borders of his poetry and into his letters, where he contemplated the grandeur of the human race and the wellsprings of his own imagination. To his brother George, he wrote: “There is an electric fire in human nature, tending to purify; so that, among these human creatures, there is continually some birth of new heroism; the pity is, that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.”[1] He opined that Jesus may have represented a heart and a system completely pure, before his words were written and revised by men interested in the pious frauds of religion. Like so many his age, Keats was disheartened by institutionalized systems of religions that almost universally emphasized human depravity and inherent guilt, while themselves doing more to justify than to alleviate human suffering. But something would not let him give into despair as he wrote hopefully (and I believe with an attitude of envisioning Christ’s splendor), “Even here, though I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of—I am however young, writing at random, straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness.”[2]

He continued that, while unsure of his own conclusion, he was confident that a superior being could not but be pleased with his struggle to make sense of it all. In his rather comical analogy he said, “Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine.” At the least, whether he pled to God or to his brother is unclear: “Give me this credit: do you not think I strive to know myself? Give me credit.”[3]

The image is a haunting but a hopeful one, “straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness.” It suggests, as it did for Keats’ entire cohort of romantic poets and for myriad others, not just the reality of a realm of eternal truth behind the shadowy idols of the present, but a realm that beckons to us, through faint traces of memory that pierce the long night of forgetfulness. I want to consider tonight some of the implications of what we could call this secret life of the soul, and what might be and has been revealed therein.

The novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson has recently referred to “the odd privilege of existence as a coherent self, . . . that haunting ‘I,’ who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the ‘I’ we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves.”[4] We all know the sensation of having failed to live up to who we are, the sense that there exists a different “I” than the one sometimes manifest through our actions. This perception is engrained in our very language of self-justification. “I wasn’t myself,” we might say. Or, “you are better than that,” a friend or relative might tell us after disappointing course of conduct. Who is this “I” we are referring to in such instances? It could be just an idealized self we have failed to manifest, except the sense is too strong that it is our actions that are unreal or fall short of an actual standard that already exists in some form. In other words, is our most plausible candidate for this other “I” a hypothetical self we might someday be? Or is it rather what George MacDonald called, “an old soul,” a self with a long history that provides the contrast with current patterns of behavior?

One of the earliest church fathers, Clement of Alexandria, who lived in the second century, felt only the second hypothesis could explain the remarkable decision of an individual to abruptly reserve the course of one’s life in quest of a better. This, he reasoned, can only be because when we sin, we sense we are falling short of who we really are and were. He believed only memory of the past, not imagination about the future, could be a credible prompt to such repentance. In the midst of lowly actions, our souls sometimes resonate with the dim intimations of a heavenly past and evidence of a more supernal destiny than the one our poor choices foreshadow. As Clement wrote, we at some point come to a vague reminiscence of better things and desire to renounce our iniquities and “speed back to the eternal light, children to the Father.”[5]

But it doesn’t require the sense of guilt to turn our gaze backward in time in a quest for self-knowledge. One contemporary philosopher finds other common linguistic formulations reveal hidden insight into our souls’ nature and history. “I . . . have the intuition,” John Knox writes, “that I—this very self—might have been born of different parents, indeed as a different species of animal. And this intuition is very strong with me; I think it is sound. If it is, then that very fact may imply that my birth and my beginning are two different things.”[6]

In other words, if you can say meaningfully, “If I had been born in Calcutta,” then you are presupposing an independently existing “I,” who preexisted your birth in Orem or Panguitch, and might have been born elsewhere. What shines forth in such utterances, John Knox argues, is a deep core of identity that could have been manifest in any number of ways or places. Such a hypothetical statement could never be taken as proof of human preexistence, but he believes that that the ease and naturalness with which we can say such things is evidence of a deep, even unaware, assumption on our part that we really do intuit an eternal self behind the contingencies of our own mortal form and history.

That intuition is more rigorously analyzed in one of the greatest works of introspection and soul examination in the Western tradition. Writing his Confessions at the end of the fourth century, St Augustine begins with a series of questions: Where do I come from? Was I anywhere before I was in my mother’s womb? Why does nothing satisfy the deep hunger of my soul? Why in spite of my success, my fame, my friends and family does this great chasm remain? Because it is not filled with God, he determines, nothing except God can fill the cavern of my soul. But how can that be? How can I possibly have such love for a God I have never seen?

To answer this question, he does not look to the natural world to theology or philosophy. Instead he turns inward and journeys ever deeper within himself because God, he concludes, must dwell in that same place where, in the moments of still solitude, we come face to face with all the great loves of our life. It is of course, in memory that such forms dwell, and this is where we encounter God. Strangely, he continues, this recollection is also our initiation, but how can this be?

His argument turns out to be a great psalm of wonder and praise. In his quest of knowledge for God, he writes, “I will pass beyond this power of my nature, rising by degrees unto him who made me, and I come at last to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images. When I enter there, I require what I will to be brought for, and something instantly comes. Others must be longer sought after, which are fetched as it were out of some inner receptacle. All these doth that great harbor of our memory receive in her numberless secret and inexpressible windings, to be forthcoming and brought out at need.”[7]

And now, across the span of almost fifteen hundred years, we hear his words foreshadow those of Keats: “For even when I dwell in darkness and silence,” he notes, “I discern the breath of lilies from violets, though smelling nothing. . . . These things do I do within, in that vast court of my memory. For there are present within me, heaven, earth, sea and whatever I could think on therein, besides what I have forgotten. . . . nor do I comprehend all that I am.”[8] And then, he finally comes to this great revelation: “The images in my mind of mountains, billows, rivers, and stars–all those things that populate my memory–could not be there unless at a prior time I actually saw the mountains, billows, rivers, and stars, because if a thing is imprinted on the memory, it must have first been present.”[9]

But what of God and the life of godliness? “For when I seek thee, my God, I seek a happy life.” How can that be possible? Clearly by analogy, those who seek God and the happy life must have been happy once, just like the New Testament woman who lost her coin. She would not have found it if she had not remembered it, and she would not have remembered it unless she had previously known it. Knowledge of God, Saint Augustine concludes, must then be memory of God. C.S. Lewis said something very similar. He wrote, “My own experience is a rather ‘devastating desire’—desire for that of which the present joy is a reminder. All my life, nature, and art have been reminding me of something I’ve never seen, saying, ‘Look! What does this, and this, remind you of?’”[10]

As it happens, few if any religious or philosophical ideas in the history of Western thought have experienced such widespread fervor followed by such precipitous decline to the point of erasure as the belief that Augustine here expressed, that these faint intimations betoken a life before birth, lived in God’s presence. The story of why the idea of preexistence suffered recurrent suppression is complex, and involves shifting theological winds that pushed it aside: the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, the overshadowing of free will by grace, the removal of God to realms of incomprehensibility and inaccessibility. All these militated against the idea.

But the story of why the idea persisted, surfacing time and time again in spite of anathemas, purges, and orthodox resistance, is more simple. This idea has demonstrated greater intellectual power than its alternatives. Over its three thousand plus years of history, the idea of preexistence has been invoked in a large array of arguments, and the philosophical and theological work that it has performed is immense. Origen was convinced that it gave the most persuasive background to a world so variegated in its populous beings. Some Neo-Platonists opted for preexistence because, simply put, it was more symmetrical and aesthetically satisfying than a universe where humans were endless in one direction only; they suddenly appear on the scene of eternity.

In the seventeenth century, Cambridge Platonists had recourse to preexistence because, among other merits, it gave the most logically coherent account of the soul’s origin, with fewer problems than the Catholic version that God creates the soul at birth or the Lutheran version that the parents created it at conception. Preexistence was employed by philosophers like Immanuel Kant to ground a theory of free will and theologians like Julius Müller to justify human accountability. Its most conspicuous use in the nineteenth century was to give a more coherent account of the justice of God, as when Edward Beecher wrote almost a thousand pages on the topic to explain our immersion in a life of pain, sin and suffering.

Any one of these topics could fill hours in the telling, from the ancient Greeks and Christians and Jews to Medieval mystics to Renaissance humanists to American transcendentalists like Emerson and Alcott to the poet Robert Frost. All these people arrived at the idea of preexistence through deduction, inference, or as a desperate measure to make sense of other religious and philosophical problems. But today I’ve chosen to keep the focus, not on the intellectual rationales that sustain the scaffolding once it was up, but on what we could call the most intuitive dimensions behind the foundations themselves. I want to survey what we could call the history of intimations of premortality, or what I called earlier, the secret life of the soul.

Today seems a propitious moment to emphasize this approach because of recent developments in the God debates: the New Atheism that was referred to earlier. Terry Eagleton is no choirboy but a seasoned Marxist critic. And he has recently taken the secularists to task, not for failing to answer the right questions, but for failing to even ask them. Science has gone a long way toward explaining our world, he explains, but it has yet to explain “the kind of commitment that human beings make at the end of their tether, foundering in darkness, pain and bewilderment, who nevertheless remain faithful to the promise of a transformative love. . . . Maybe,” he reasons, “reason is too skin-deep, and science does not go back far enough.”[11]

To quote Marilynne Robinson again, in her Dwight H. Terry lecture on religion at Yale she refers to the lamentable triumph of scientism in the human sciences. One result, she remarks, is the odd practice of “defining humankind by exclusion of the things that distinguish us as a species.”[12] What she means is that curiously, those things that are most closely wrapped up with what it means to be human—the inner life that defines us, those things that defy measurement or analysis or reproducibility—cannot be taken too seriously in the intellectual pursuit of self-understanding. More specifically, there has been for some time an arrogant and yet provincial modernism, holding that, “the experience and testimony of the individual mind should be excluded from consideration when any rational account is made of the nature of human beings.”[13]

One problem with modern approaches to the human being begins with the assumption that there is no qualitative distinction between the animal and the human. But as the scientist John Polkinghorne has observed, “Our surplus intellectual capacity, enabling us to comprehend the microworld of quarks and gluons and the macroworld of big bang cosmology, is on such a scale that it beggars belief that this is a fortunate by-product of the struggle for life.”[14] G.K. Chesterton put the case rather more simply. He said, “It sounds like a truism to say the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey, and it sounds like a joke to say the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. This human creature is truly unique and different from all other creatures.”[15]

Now, acknowledging this difference, I want to emphasize, does not require a religious perspective per se, since it is embraced by any number of atheist philosophers, such as John McTaggart, who affirmed the eternity of the human soul, or Thomas Nagel, who wrote that it is hardly credible that the appearance of that miracle called the human mind can be explained in the same way we account for the emergence of mammals. What all these commentators have in common is a shared conviction that the fullest understanding of what it means to be human must come from taking more seriously the personal, the subjective, the intuitive, the inner world we inhabit, filled with its private but very real yearnings, loves, and hopes, for they are what actually nourish, guide, shape, and ultimately define us.

Principal among these sources of insight and illumination is a kind of vague longing, a straining for residual particles of light that Keats described. What Keats felt, and Augustine plumbed, was a sentiment as universal as hunger and thirst. Even Freud acknowledged that almost everybody had an innate desire to connect with something eternal and oceanic, and, in the final analysis, that is why the doctrine of the preexistence has never died out. As I said, any number of rationales for the preexistence has been articulated, but the idea has erupted into poetry, letters, sermons, and philosophical texts over the centuries, impelled by something more fundamentally human than syllogistic argument. I believe that it is only the coming together of the rational and the affective, or the emotional–only the doctrine’s pull on both the heart and the mind–that can explain its tenacious grip on the human imagination, despite the best effort of emperors, priests, and secularists to expunge the idea from Western thought.

Let me give you a brief survey that will illustrate this point. “The oldest religious system we are aware of,” writes Jean Bottéro, “is the religious system of ancient Mesopotamia, dating from the fourth millennium B.C.”[16] One of that civilization’s creation narratives recounts an assembly of gods, convened to plan the making of humans under extraordinary circumstances. According to Atrahasis, an Akkadian poem dating to about 1700 B.C., a minor race of deities inhabits the earth, doing the work of the greater supreme gods. They sculpt the mountains, dig the rivers, irrigate the land, but so burdensome does their labor become that they unite in protest and plan to go to war against the seven ruler gods. These greater gods convene a council to consider the problem, and one of their number proposes a brilliant solution: they will create a new race, they will call them humans, and they will make them out of clay. But if they are to perform the work of the gods, they decide that they must infuse that clay with the divine element. So they take a god and sacrifice him and take his spirit and put it into the clay tabernacle of these humans. According to this Mesopotamian myth, the foggy recollection of our ancestry remains, but it so shrouded in oblivion that we will never aspire to return to our home and threaten the dominion of the gods.

In the process of its mortal incarnation, the soul is reduced to a distant and pale shadow of immortality so that we would never seek it again. And thus is established a pattern that will persist for almost 4000 years. Cultures and peoples inside and outside Christianity will simultaneously assert memory and forgetfulness of pre-earth life. The proof of the first is the yearning, the haunting echoes, and the traces of the eternal that clearly persist in human consciousness. As for the oblivion, well, we can only imagine or infer a series of explanations. A recurrent form memory takes is melancholy. Sadness itself does not betoken loss, but that variety that goes by the name of nostalgia does. Nostalgia is rooted in a perceived chasm that separates present conditions with the happy experience or past now lost to us. Sometimes the sadness is indistinct enough that we grope feelingly toward the nearly effaced memory.

Empedocles was an ancient Greek philosopher who took the melancholy of his human condition as a whole to point unmistakably to a happier preexistent life. “I wept and shrieked,” he wrote, “on beholding the unwonted land where Murder and Wrath, and other species of Fates and wasting diseases . . . [prevail]. From what honor and how great a degree of blessedness have I fallen here on earth.”[17]

Plato, his more famous successor, turned to the theme of preexistence in half a dozen of his works. He used logic, analogy, and deduction to make his points, but he also relied upon the simple human experience of falling in love. Human love, he was convinced, was an imperfect echo of an earlier knowledge of a more perfect beauty. Previously, he believed, beauty was radiant to see at that time when our souls saw the blessed and spectacular vision. Beauty, he said, can only be experienced by someone who has seen as much in heaven. But how do we know that this mortal love is not the real thing? How do we know this is an echo of a more perfect form? Because, as he writes elsewhere, we spend our lives searching for our soul mate. And when we find each other, he writes, “the two are struck by their sense of love, by their sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another even for a moment.”[18] And yet, he says, it is obvious that the soul, even of every lover, longs for something else, but his soul cannot say what it is.

From Mesopotamian and Greek sources alike, belief in the preexistence made its way into the very early Christian church. An early vociferous opponent of the idea was the church father Tertullian in the second century. He thought preexistence was a dangerous idea; it made us too like God, he worried, and he thought he’d found its Achilles’ heel in the soul’s failure to preserve a memory of that prior estate. I cannot allow that the soul is capable of a failure of memory, he says, and then he elaborates a series of related objections: How happens it that the knowledge of the intellectual faculties fails, which are supposed to be so superior? Why and how does the soul forget, only to remember again?

In the seventeenth century, a group of churchmen known as the Cambridge Platonists would answer Tertullian’s query. Why should it be surprising, they reasoned, if the soul cannot recall all that has passed, when in the brief span of life, we have again forgotten so much? “For who can call to mind when first he here saw the sun, or felt the gentle wind?” Henry More was the most prolific memory of this group. He was sure there was proof of the preexistence in those traces of memory that do remain. The “Idea of a Being absolutely and fully perfect . . .” he said, “is Naturall and Essentiall to the Soul of Man, and cannot be washt out . . . by any force or trick.”[19]

Where, he said, could that have come from? He wrote thousands of lines of poetry elaborating the doctrine of preexistence as the most plausible explanation. “It seems indisputable,” he writes, “there is an actual knowledge in man of which those outward objects are rather the reminders than the source. The mind of man may be jogged and awakened by external objects, but those outward senses do no more teach us of eternal truths than he that wakes up the musician taught him how to play.”[20] One of his poems begins: “I would sing the Preexistency / of human souls, and live once more again / by recollection and quick memory / all that is past since first we all began. / But all too shallow be my wits to scan / so deep a point.”[21]

A kindred spirit in this regard was Benjamin Whichcote, a contemporary who noted: “No sooner doth the truth of God come to our soul’s sight, but our soul knows her as an old acquaintance.”[22] Another of the group, Nathaniel Culverwel, in trying to account for human recognition of ideas and universal values, similarly refers to “seeds of light scattered in the soul of man, which fill it with a vigorous pregnancy that brings forth innumerous and sparkling posterity.”[23] Other thinkers from Descartes through the nineteenth century commonly invoked preexistence to explain the innate sense of universals, of morality, and of God.

Echoing the Cambridge writers, the philosopher Kant confessed, “There are only two things which fill my soul with endless wonder: the starry sky above, and the moral law within me.”[24] Whence could we have acquired that moral faculty which intuition told him was not a simple social or cultural acquisition? Kant would eventually come around preexistence from three separate arguments. His most un-philosophical sounding argument is based entirely on the human sense of self. It’s neither logical nor empirical, but it is intuitive. Kant asks us, does it make sense to believe that a being invested with an infinite potential and eternal future and a divine nature could just have come into existence through casual sex or happenstance? It is difficult to believe in the eternal existence of a being, “whose life has first begun under circumstances so trivial.” If we could see ourselves and other objects as they really are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures which did neither begin with our birth, nor will end with our death.

In these same centuries, defenders of preexistence are returning to the objection raised so long ago by Tertullian, trying to explain, if we had a preexistence, why we have forgotten it. If the Babylonians had imputed the veil to the gods through jealousy and insecurity, wanting to keep us at a safe distance from godlike aspirations, Christian theorists suggested something more like mercy was at work. One English poet, Abel Evans, conceived of the entire human race as the fallen angels from the war in heaven. In his version, God casts them—that is, us—all out but decides to let us expiate our crimes with time served on earth. With questionable mercy, God imposes by way of preparation for our descent here long drafts of the river forgetfulness. The resulting human condition is one that dulls the shock of our cataclysmic expulsion from heaven, like a narcotic.

But at the same time, the vague memory torments the soul, Tantalus-like, with reason and memory alike, that feed but cannot satisfy an inarticulate longing for home. Though we are entombed in flesh in a fallen world, the physical travails pale alongside the horror of a fettered spirit, displaced from heaven. “We had been inexpressibly more miserable,” another eighteenth-century author concluded, “if we had retained the full memory of our former Glory.”[25]

In a later century, the greatest poet of the age, the German Goethe, suggested a personal belief in some kind of human pre-mortality–stages of preexistence, he said, on our way to a glorious future. As to why we cannot remember any of it, he wrote to his friend Johannes Falk, “the former states or circumstances through which we . . . have passed, were too insignificant . . . for much of it to be, in the eyes of Nature, worthy to be remembered.”[26] Then he admitted his intuitions about the human soul and its potential were greater than even for his evidence for God himself: “If there is not a God, yet, perhaps, there will be one.”

With Goethe we come to the greatest modern flowering of modern poetry: the Romantic Movement. Most Mormons are familiar with Wordsworth’s great ode describing how we come to earth, “trailing clouds of glory.”[27] Latter-day Saints may celebrate it, but generations of scholars have been embarrassed by Wordsworth’s intimations of a pre-earth life, admiring the poem, but treating its theological content with a deafening silence. Wordsworth begins his ode with a meditation on the mystery of human melancholy. Given the beauties of the world we inhabit, the laughter of children, and the richness of nature, how can we explain that nagging sense of loss, that in his words, “there hath passed away a glory from the earth”? The answer, he senses with equal power, lies in the only spiritual anthropology that makes sense out of this human condition. “It must be that we experience at our birth what it actually is,” he wrote, “the loss of a greater Eden we once knew.”

In an interview after his poem was published, Wordsworth was too embarrassed to own up to his own belief. “I think it right to protest,” he said, in one of his conversations with Isabella Fenwick, “against a conclusion . . . that I meant to inculcate such a belief [in the preexistence]. It is far too shadowy a notion to be recommended.” Still, he could not resist defending what he had felt. “For there is nothing [in scripture] to contradict it,” he wrote, “and the fall of Man presents an analogy in its favor.” And then the inner Wordsworth speaks, “To that dream-like vividness and splendor which invest objects of sight and childhood, every one . . . if he would look back, could bear testimony.” Or, as he had phrased the case in his poem, “there is a presence which is not to be put by.” So if Wordsworth’s conservatism was ultimately sufficient to impel him to a formal disclaimer, it took the form of Galileo’s confession as he murmured before his inquisitors, “And yet it does move.”

The case of Samuel Coleridge was perfectly parallel to Wordsworth. In a magnificent sonnet to his sleeping child, Hartley, Coleridge ponders the possibility that “We liv’d, ere yet this robe of flesh we wore.”[28] He even imagines that if he found his child had died, he would know it was from shock at his fall from heaven into this lower sphere. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge tries to insist that he doesn’t really believe in this descending and incarcerated soul as anything more than a poetic device. At the same time, however, he confided to his friend Thomas Poole, that he had often experienced the feeling of a pre-mortal past. To his friend John Thelwall he said, “If you have never had [intimations of preexistence] yourself, I cannot explain [them] to you.”[29]

What we find in every case I have mentioned so far is that, although the cardinal insight leads to wonderful poetry, sound philosophy, or even good theology, it begins as pure intimation, prompted by introspection, meditation, or reflection upon a sleeping child. Human intuition, not logical deduction, is the starting point.

One nineteenth-century Biblical student helps us see why this might be so. Wilhelm Benecke came to religious studies late in life, after a career in business. He was materially prosperous, but tragedy intervened to rob him of wife and child alike. The agony of personal loss combined with the intellectual incomprehensibility of human suffering to plunge him into a spiritual crisis. It is at this point in his life, he writes, that a mysterious mentor appeared, under whose tutelage he emerges from despair in a story has the ring of legend. He said a man with “an apostolic appearance and bearing,” whom he met by chance, led him to “the fountain of all solace” by bringing him to look upon this life as a short period placed between a preexistence and a future existence.[30]

Benecke found that this doctrine once furnished him with the key for the solution of all his religious and philosophical doubts. He kept his personal understanding of his sublime theodicy to himself through years of exile from Hamburg during the Napoleonic wars and during years of wandering abroad, but eventually he returned to Heidelberg, the seat of German philosophical and theological training. There he took up religious studies and produced, in 1831, a highly regarded exposition of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans. There he proposed human preexistence as the only workable solution to the problem of original sin and human suffering. Other theologians were shocked by his stand, though they acknowledged him “one of the finest theologians of our time” and “one who has few peers.”

This is the case that Benecke makes for preexistence: because God inhabits a spiritual world, and this is a fallen, mortal one, revelation is necessary, if there is to be any communion at all between the two realms. Our powers of reason and sensation are insufficient to penetrate beyond the visible world. What spiritual certainties we do attain to cannot emerge in a vacuum, but they are present in our hearts and souls nevertheless—it’s as if we speak fluent German before we have learned a word of vocabulary. We can sing a sacred hymn though we have never learned the words or the music. Yet, we do speak the language of spiritual recognition, he wrote. In no other sphere do we find a certainty which our intellect did not provide. So it can only be the outgrowth of that which we find ourselves endowed with in our entrance into the world, as a gift in the germ. In other words, we somehow come to have a sense of certainty about certain supersensible propositions that was not logically derived. If conviction about such truths takes root or resonates, he says, it can only be because like is responding to like. We must come already equipped with the language or background to make sense of these spiritual intimations.

Preexistence then, in his argument, represents not the consequence of reflection; it’s the very precondition for the possibility of attaining to any spiritual knowledge we have. It is not a mere religious proposition, nor even one truth among many. It is the condition of all other eternal truths that can be known. Spiritual memories, in this case, are like the footprints in the snow: they tell us whence we have come. But of perhaps greater importance, they are the grammar that allows us to decipher the only language that penetrates our soul. And they are the aspect of self–an eternal self–against which we measure the reality and the value of all which we experience in this world of sense.

Preexistence, like many other myriad intimations of the human soul, cannot ultimately demand ascent on the basis of purely human feelings. Certainly memory is as prone to its own errors as our other faculties. But the reasons why preexistence has faded from the religious landscape have nothing to do with the roots of the idea in the inner life of the soul. As a Cambridge classical scholar wrote not too many years ago: “However many readers believe that their soul will survive death, rather few, I imagine, believed that it also preexisted their birth. The religions that have shaped Western culture are so inhospitable to the idea of preexistence that you probably reject the thought out of hand, for no good reason.”[31]

A case in point comes from a highly regarded biblical commentary. Noting the allusion to premortal existence in the ninth chapter of John, you may remember this is where Jesus passes through the temple and there was the man who was born blind, and his disciples ask, “Who did sin, this man, or his parents?” And Jesus says, “Neither [one], but that the works of God should be made manifest.”[32]

Most commentators recognize in this episode a clear assumption on the part of his apostles that there was a preexistent life. Here is what a rather well-known scriptural commentary says about this belief in the preexistence: “There is something majestic in this conception of a fundamental justice woven into the very web of life, running through all things, and working itself out in everything that happens to us: a conception which leaves no room for whimpering or whining or self-pity or railing against fate.”[33] Majestic and effective. Nevertheless, our commentator concludes with unexpected curtness, “surely it is much too crude and easy a solution.” For those who value the strains of the soul over the strictures of convention, however, simplicity has never been a barrier to beauty.

Q&A

Question: Your examples [are] from the Western tradition. Can you give a non-Western example of this “human intuition”?

Givens: No. There are, as I understand, and am superficially familiar with, other traditions of the preexistence in Egyptian texts and in Hittite texts. There are extensive beliefs involving transmigration and reincarnation, more in the Eastern tradition than in the Western. But I felt that I was already showing brashness and presumptuousness enough in pretending to try to cover the Western tradition, so I will leave the Eastern to someone else. I will just add that the American transcendentalists like Bronson, Alcott, and Emerson, and many others of the nineteenth-century were themselves profoundly influenced by Hindu and other Asian traditions.

Question: As a child raised in the Lutheran faith, when I would play pretend games, I would give myself names along with my playmates, and I always chose names like Joanna and Christina and similar names that sounded beautiful to me. After I joined the church and had an outpouring of genealogical information about my father’s ancestors in Germany, the names of the ancestors that I found on the roll of film were Joanna and Christina, and the other names Catherine, with a “C.” (I loved the name Catherine spelled with a “C.”) All of those names that I loved as a child were in the genealogical records. Could you comment on the possibility that the Spirit of Elijah is related to the intuitions and intimations that you’ve described and how that might fit into the proto-Indo-European poetics where eternal fame and memory of the dead is the most important definition of civilization?

Givens: Let me just say this: the thing I love about political debates is they teach you how to just ignore any question you don’t want and pretend to answer it with a different one. Most of us are familiar with near-death experiences. That seems to be a phenomenon that transcends culture and time; they tend to have certain commonalties wherever they’ve been recorded. They’re not quite as well known, but there have been several collections in recent years that have been made of pre-birth narratives as well. Some of those are particular to Mormon theology and to Mormon culture, but there have been studies that have collected similar kinds of stories about contact with or intimations of people from the preexistent world, especially in the African subcontinent. So, what you’re describing has this peculiar caste in Mormon theology, being associated with the Spirit of Elijah, but it does seem to be a rather universal phenomenon. I actually cover that in my last chapter in the book on preexistence.

Question: When we talk about “pre” and “post,” or “simultaneously,” we’re generally talking about time. Modern science seems to indicate that there may be states of existence that are outside of time, and I know early Christians talk about eternity being outside of time. I was curious how that plays into what you’re talking about.

Givens: Mormons are virtually unique among Christian traditions in defining eternity differently. Going all the way back to Neo-Platonic traditions, eternity has always been defined in atemporal terms. In other words, God is that being who inhabits a realm outside of space and time. Mormon cosmology collapses that kind of dualism, because Mormonism is radically materialistic. Mormonism simply extends the present into an eternal future so that eternity simply becomes an endless continuation of the present. What this means is that the significance of preexistence will have a different valence for those inside the Mormon tradition and those outside.

I’ll give you just one example of this. One of the ways in which Kant argues for the human preexistence is in his belief that we are free. He recognizes, as most philosophers do, that free will is a very, very difficult proposition to prove, but he said the fact that I feel guilty when I do something wrong is, in and of itself, proof to me that I could have acted differently. So I know that I’m free. But how can I be free if I’m a material entity embedded in a causal chain of events that have material causes themselves? In other words, there’s no way to step outside of this causal chain that we’re imprecated in and find a place that we can act spontaneously out of a genuinely free will.

Yet Kant says, I know that I am free. He solves the problem by positing a kind of preexistence, a functional preexistence, related to what he calls “noumenal man.” In other words, he says there is a phenomenal aspect of the self–a material, this-worldly aspect of the self. There’s also a dimension of the self that is not subject to the constraints–the contingencies–of space and time in quite the same way. One could say that he is believes that there is an aspect of the soul that exists outside of time and is therefore free from this causal chain of events and can act as a genuinely spontaneous and free will. So, in many cases when people refer to eternity, it’s not clear if they’re talking about something that is right before the creation of the world or something outside the framework altogether.

Question: With your work in Mormon studies, in furthering the cause of faith and intellect together, and with the Mormon studies program at Claremont, do you see further opportunities for Mormon studies to hit the mainstream? Might it become not just something that’s centered around BYU but, in a larger historical and comparative literature sense, an opportunity to discuss what we believe in an academic world?

Givens: Mormon Studies is a two-edged sword. Mormon Studies faces the same kind of challenges that Women’s Studies did and that African-American Studies did. I remember, for example, a statement made by Maya Angelou, who was listed in a literary dictionary as an African-American female author. She said, I resent that. I’m not an African-American female author. I’m an author; I’m a writer. No one defines William Shakespeare as an Anglo-Saxon male writer.

The problem is the problem of ghettoization, and yet there seems to be a period of transition that every subculture, every minority group has to go through. First you ghettoize them. At least by doing so, you acknowledge their existence as a significant entity in their own right and attribute to them an important cultural identity and heritage. But at some point, that entity has to become assimilated into the broader culture of which it is a part or they’re going to continually be patronized and ghettoized.

I see a similar problem in the case of Mormonism. For many, many years, in the American religious tradition, Mormonism was completely ignored. There was a Puritan narrative of religious history in this country, and then suddenly in the last generation people realize, “Wait a minute. There’s a whole flowering of American religious traditions that are indigenous, that don’t have anything to do with Puritan roots.” Suddenly, Mormonism is becoming incorporated into that narrative.

It’s a struggle that Mormonism is in the midst of. On the one hand, Mormonism wants to be recognized as having a significant theology, a significant cultural heritage and tradition, but at the same time, it wants that story to be told in the larger context of American history and American religion. One solution that I’m trying to enact in my own work is represented in a book that I’ve just spoken about. Rather than write a book about Mormon preexistence, I write a book about the preexistence and suddenly, you see this enormous and vibrant conversation that’s been going on for thousands of years, in which Mormonism has a really important role. But you only see that if you see the larger conversation. That, ultimately, is the kind of Mormon studies that I think we need to be pursuing, in which we are integrating Mormonism into broader disciplinary conversations.

[1] John Keats, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, ed. Richard Monckton Milnes (New York: Leavitt, Trow & Co., 1848), 176.

[2] Ibid, 176-77.

[3] Ibid, 177.

[4] Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness From the Modern Myth of the Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 109.

[5] Clement of Alexandria, “The Instructor,” in The Ante-Nicene Fathers Volume II: Fathers of the Second Century; Hermas, Tatian, Theophilus, Athenagoras, and Clement of Alexandria, ed. Rev. Alexander Roberts, Sir James Donaldson, and Arthur Cleveland Coxe (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 217.

[6] John Knox, “Pre-Existence, Survival, and Sufficient Reason,” American Philosophical Quarterly 32.2 (April 1995): 176n.

[7] Saint Augustine. Confessions of St. Augustine. (Auckland, NZ: The Floating Press, 1921), 264. Accessed May 8, 2017. ProQuest ebrary.

[8] Ibid, 266-67.

[9] Ibid, 267.

[10] C.S. Lewis, “To Mary Van Deusen” (March 3, 1955) in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963, Volume 3, Ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 583-584.

[11] Eagleton, Terry. Reason, Faith, and Revolution : Reflections on the God Debate. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 37.

[12] Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness From the Modern Myth of the Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 37.

[13] Ibid, 22.

[14] John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven, US: Yale UP, 1998), 2.

[15] G. K. Chesterton, “The Everlasting Man,” in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton Volume II (San Francisco, US: Ignatius, 1986), 166.

[16] Jean Bottero, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), vii.

[17] Empedocles, “On Purification,” no. 390, 128.

[18] Plato, “Symposium,” in Plato on Love, ed. C.D.C. Reeves (Indianapolis, US: Hackett Publishing Co., 2006), 49.

[19] Henry More, “An Antidote Against Atheism,” 1.3.5, in Philisophical Writings, 1:13, 17

[20] Ibid.

[21] Henry More, “The Pre Existency of the Soul,” Philosophical Poems, lines 468-473.

[22] Benjamin Whichcote, Sermons, iii. 17.

[23] Nathaniel Culverwel, On the Light of Nature: A Discourse (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable & Co., 1858), 81.

[24] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (Raleigh, N.C.: Generic NL Freebook Publisher), 136.

[25] “An Impartial Inquirer After Truth,” A Miscellaneous Metaphysical Essay; or, An Hypothesis Concerning the Formation and Generation of Spiritual and Material Beings . . . (London: A Millar, 1748), 68.

[26] Sarah Austin, ed. And trans., Characteristics of Goethe, From the German of Falk, von Muller, 3 vols. (London: Effingham Wilson, 1833), 1:78-84

[27] William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” in Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest d Selincourt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 460-62

[28] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Sonnet on Receiving Letters,” in The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (New York: Penguin, 1997), 121.

[29] Letter to John Thelwall (19 November 1796) and Letter to Thomas Poole (1 November 1796), in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols., ed. E. L. Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 1:260-61 and 1:246.

[30] Wilhelm Benecke, An Exposition of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, trans. Friedrich Wilhelm (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1854), xii-xiii.

[31] M. F. Burnyeat, “Other Lives,” London Review of Books 29.4 (22 February 2007).

[32] John 9:2-3

[33] George Arthur Buttrick, ed., The Interpreter’s Bible, 12 vols. (New York: Abingdon, 1952), 8:611.

John W. Welch, professor at Brigham Young University, presents the 2014 Truman G. Madsen Lecture on Eternal Man, speaking on the parable of the Good Samaritan and its application to friendship and to eternal progression.

Transcript:

President and Peggy Worthen, the Wheatleys, the Madsens, and friends of Truman, thank you for your presence and for your support of the Wheatley Institution’s efforts to strengthen the core institutions of ethics, family, and society. I have been humbled by this invitation.

Thanks especially to this splendid Wasatch Chorale. The words in the opening musical number could not have been more suitable to our subject this evening: “Tend your sick ones, O Lord Jesus Christ; rest your weary ones; bless your dying ones; soothe your suffering ones.”^[1]

At this event Truman Madsen is sorely missed. When I agreed to be a backup speaker for the very ill David Bentley Hart, I had hoped for several reasons that he would be well enough to be here. Really I wanted to hear him, and I hope we can have him here at another time in the future. I hope that what I will say will resonate with his deep interests in the early Christian fathers and his eagerness to extract from ancient texts insights that might “fruitfully be brought into living contact with contemporary questions.”^[2]

I am thankful for help from Barney Madsen who is well on his way toward the completion of Truman’s biography. And also for Emily Madsen Reynolds who has struggled alongside me in my efforts to explore a number of possibilities as I finally settled on the title for tonight’s lecture.

But most of all, we are here to pay tribute to Truman. He was an amazing Samaritan in many ways. I was indelibly blessed to know him when I was a student in his philosophy classes, to work with him on the boards of FARMS and the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, and to enjoy many personal connections. I hope to say something now that would make him rock back, grin, put his hand on my shoulder, and, nodding, smile with his patented pure joy.

Let me begin with a word about my title: “Plumbing the Heart of Social Institutions: Revealing Truths from the Parable of the Good Samaritan.” Knowing how Truman relished the playfulness of words, yes, the triple entendres in this title are intended. I realize that it is unrealistic to offer the world today any kind of panacea for all of its horrendous atrocities and perplexities, but I still hope to say something relevant as well as revealing, something not just on my mind but also in my heart. In plumbing the depths, in keeping us true or plumb to the world, and in having us think about the pipelines that interconnect our social relations and spiritual lives, I love how the parable of the Good Samaritan reveals new ways to see the world, new insights into rightful thinking about duties, and eternal realizations that other people are always with us. These thoughts go to the heart of all human relations.

The story of the Good Samaritan is familiar the world over. Biblical scholars, even the most critical, agree that if Jesus said anything, he told this story. Secular legislators in many states and countries have adopted Good Samaritan laws to encourage and protect even bungling people who stop to help those in dire need. I believe that this parable is generic and compelling enough that it can serve as a common paradigm of ethics, values, and social institutions in every culture, and thus everyone interested in establishing justice and promoting the general welfare can draw important social capital from this timely and timeless tale. I would nominate this parable as the paradigm to use in strengthening our core institutions.

My interest in the parable of the Good Samaritan goes back many years, to the 1970s when I began reading books about the Jewish backgrounds of Jesus’ parables. But 20 years ago, a new insight into the meaning of this parable was stunningly put in my path. That insight came while my wife, Jeannie, and I happened to eavesdrop as Malcolm Miller explained to a group of tourists the Good Samaritan window in the Chartres Cathedral in France. Soon I realized that there was much more to this parable than a simple story with the headline: “Man Helped on Way to Jericho.” Over the last 20 years I have devoted considerable time to researching, writing, movie consulting, travelling with Jeannie to photograph stained glass windows in France, looking for obscure works of art depicting the Good Samaritan in museums all over Europe, speaking at conferences and firesides, publishing articles about this parable, and coming to understand why this parable is often given a place of honor close to the high altars of Gothic cathedrals. In all of this, Jeannie and I have become deeply impressed that this parable epitomizes the plan of salvation and offers the master plan for actuating beneficial human relations. I want to acknowledge her priceless contributions to our development of this understanding. For years, she and I have talked of these things as we have sat in our house, walked by the way, lain down at night, and when we have risen up in the morning. And then she goes out and feeds the homebound, visits the sick, and tends toddlers, the least of these. Her steady schedule of compassionate service qualifies her, more than me, to expound this text.

Like all parables, this story can be read on at least two levels, so that those with ears to hear would hear, and those without ears to hear would still hear at least something. Indeed, the Prophet Joseph Smith affirmed that the deeper symbolic meanings in each of the parables “were all plainly elucidated” by Jesus to his disciples.^[3] This double level of meaning is not surprising because with this one story Jesus actually answers two questions: “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” and “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10: 25, 29).

At the first of these two levels, this parable is a report of an all too common occurrence on the robber-infested road that went down precipitously from the rocky heights of Jerusalem to the sandy bottom at Jericho, near the north end of the Dead Sea, the lowest place on planet earth. Jericho was famous in antiquity as a winter spa for the self-indulged aristocracy in the world of Jesus’s day. Read at this level, it is a story of flesh and blood, meanness and misfortune, hopelessness and indifference—but also of compassion, healing, and selfless service. The compelling and expansive moral of this story has made it one of President Thomas S. Monson’s favorite texts, because it leads us in the pathways of perfection, gives new lease on life, and applies to everyone in the world.^[4]

The words in this story have been carefully selected. The Greek yields interesting nuances.^[5]

When it says that the man fell among thieves, the Greek is not kleptoi but leistai, bandits, outlaws.

When they stripped him of his raiment [all one word] the word for stripped is ekdusantes (they undressed or disrobed him), the opposite of endusantes (to get dressed). These participles come from the verb endu?, a lot like the root behind the English word “endow.”

When the Samaritan had compassion on him, the word is esplanchnisthe, the word used for divine compassion.

And when he pours on oil and wine, he gushes it out generously.

He took care of him that night and when he departed, he paid the innkeeper to take care of him, using same word, epimelomai—in effect asking him to take care of the wounded man just as he himself would have cared for him.

The Samaritan’s promise to repay when he come again is more than just covering the costs but also promising to reward the faithful innkeeper.

Enriching, and not detracting in any way from its moral mandate, a second level of meaning sees this parable as being profoundly allegorical, laced with specific details that have been intentionally included in the story to support its very evocative symbols that convey deep religious and eternal-man meanings.^[6] This was the traditional Christian meaning that I first caught a glimpse of twenty years ago in Chartres. In with this masterful allegory of the plan of salvation, the Master effectively answers the first question last, and then the second question first.

Read in this symbolic way, the parable is clear that the man who descended from Jerusalem represents all of mankind, coming down from a holy beginning.

The thieves or robbers represent Satan and his minions.

When they strip the traveler, they do not take his goods (which the parable never mentions) but they literally strip or undress or disrobe him, wanting something he has brought from above.

The wounds represent sins or disobedience.

They leave him half-dead, having suffered one death but not the second.

The priest and Levite, who are there by chance, do not stop to help but we are not told why. They saw but turned away, and passed by on the other side. There may have been several reasons for this, both legitimate reasons (such as a fear that they might thereby become the next target of the robbers) or conveniently concocted excuses (such as the possible inconvenience of contracting some minor impurity).

But a certain Samaritan who came, evidently not by chance, saw the half-dead man, had divine compassion, and went to him.

Bound up his wounds, and binding more than wounds, he covenantally bound the man to him.

Generously he administered soothing or healing oil.

And likewise wine to wash away the sins, to cleanse, and to give drink to comfort him and to dull the pains.

Putting him on his very own beast (or body, as the Greek has been read), he took him to an inn, stayed the night with him, and when he left the next morning, he gave the innkeeper two d?naria, silver coins equal to two full days’ labor, and promised that he would return and reward the innkeeper, covering at least whatever costs he might incur.

Christians as early as the second century saw the figure of the Good Samaritan as a reference by Jesus to himself, perhaps turning the tables on those at the temple in Jerusalem who had previously derided him saying, “Speak we not well that thou art a Samaritan?” (John 8:48). Indeed, it makes sense to see this Samaritan, the rescuer, as the savior of this fallen man, who had fallen prey to this band of robbers. Both Jesus and Samaritans were despised and rejected. Both Jesus and this Samaritan brought the man to safety. Both disappeared from the scene, asking no payment, only our thanks, appreciation, and imitation.

Moreover, Christians at least as early as Origen in Caesarea at the end of the second century AD saw the man who went down as representing Adam and his wounds as being the result of disobedience. His falling among the robbers represented the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the loss of his garments was the loss of immortality. His being left half-dead represented his expulsion from the presence of God, the suffering of a spiritual death but not yet the second or physical death. The priest and the Levite represent the law and the prophets; the Samaritan is Christ; the inn is the church, the pandocheion, which receives all (pan); and the promise to return refers to the Lord’s second coming.

Origen himself attributed this understanding to the presbyteroi, the old members of the church who had been taught by the apostles themselves.

This interpretation of the parable was the basis for these depictions of the Good Samaritan in the famous twelfth- and thirteenth-century stained glass windows of world famous French cathedrals in Chartres, Bourges, and Sens in western Christianity. In the East, this understanding also informed this little-known Byzantine mural on the back side of the icon screen in the Greek Orthodox chapel in St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai.

This understanding of the parable prevailed throughout Christianity until the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century, but the Enlightenment overvalued certainty and geometric analysis at the expense of allegory and synthesis. It is too bad that when Descartes said “I think therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum), he didn’t say, “I think ego sum” (cogito ego sum), for ego sum is the Latin for I am, as in the divine appellation, the I am that I am. Actually, perhaps Descartes should have stopped while he was ahead and just said, “I think, therefore I think.” That, after all, would have been a most indisputably certain statement.

While modern scholarship typically dismisses all allegorical interpretations, insisting on reading texts only in their original historical contexts, I reject that dismissal in this case on several grounds. First, what if Jesus originally intended his parables to be understood at two levels? Then the symbolic reading is integral to their original historical context.^[7] Second, the limited secular reading precludes too much, for any legal norm, precedent, rule, or ideal is already—like an allegory—a generalization, abstraction, or projection that rises beyond a mere statement of fact.

Thus, I enlist this classic story tonight, together with its theological overtones. Although this parable “has been subjected to countless interpretations down through Christian history, and [thus] the secondary literature on it is immense,” the potential of this seminal text has not been exhausted.^[8] What more might this parable teach us?

Since it appears that every detail in the parable of the Good Samaritan was consciously and brilliantly chosen by Jesus, out of each of these details we can construct an agenda for developing ideas to strengthen ethics, community, family, and society. For example, the road down to Jericho was obviously dangerous. While we are all called to rescue half-dead travelers on life’s roadside, as Martin Luther King Jr. insisted, more than a Band-Aid solution is needed. Among Martin Luther King Jr.’s dreams was his hope that

one day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial.^[9]

The parable also features the oddity that all of these travelers are traveling alone. No one in the ancient world traveled alone. Too many things could go wrong. People listening to Jesus as he told this parable might immediately have thought to themselves, “Why on earth would this man have gone down that road from Jerusalem all alone? What was he thinking? Of course the robbers would get him!” But the solution is not to dismissively blame the wounded man for his own misfortune but to realize that all of life’s travelers need mentors, companions, trainers, friends, bishops, and teachers to help them understand the risks and even to walk together with them through perilous stretches of the path.

The parable speaks of injuries, both of bodily wounds and the loss of clothing and property, to say nothing of the loss of dignity and confidence. Can we imagine the humiliation and shame that the wounded man must have felt not only to be ignored by the priest and the Levite but also to have to be helped by a Samaritan, and then to be taken to a public place where everyone knew of his misfortune? Legal justice might see that such a man has medical care and receives damage payments, but victim recovery calls for a more robust concern for victims, for programs that counteract society’s propensities to dehumanize and blame the unfortunate, and for the promotion of social principles that bring to life an all-encompassing engagement with the rule of compassion. Anyone interested in victim awareness might want to use, as a sourcebook, Christopher D. Marshall’s superb treatment of the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, entitled Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice, just out in 2012.

The parable identifies not just neglect but blatant turning away as one of our main social ills. While the priest and the Levite come close enough to the victim to see the problem, they both turn away to the opposite side and keep going on their own way. To “pass by on the other side” they may even have had to leave the road and go out of their way in order to distance themselves from this problem. This detail cries out for efforts to encourage people to turn toward and not away from each other. A recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “Masters of Love,”^[10] reports research by psychologist John Gottman, who has studied thousands of married couples to figure out what makes them either masters, or disasters, of love. His research finds that all people, throughout any given day, make requests for connections, what Gottman calls “bids.” When one makes a comment to a spouse or neighbor, he or she is typically not just imparting information, but rather requesting a response, a sign of interest or support or connection, however momentary. Presented with a bid, the other person now has a choice. He or she can either respond by turning toward or turning away from the person who has made the bid. Gottman’s research has found that these bidding interactions have profound effects on marital and social well-being. By observing such interactions, Gottman can predict with up to 94% certainty whether couples “will be broken up, together and unhappy, or together and happy, several years later.” While Gottman’s research bolsters common sense conclusions with quantified scientific support, the world really needs to look no further than to the parable of the Good Samaritan to know that turning away is always detrimental, undesirable, and in many cases even disastrous.

But maybe the priest and Levite were simply unprepared to help and therefore turned away. Maybe they came without bandages, wine and oil, or any ability to help this fallen man. Specialists in organizational behavior know that all performance problems boil down to either an ability problem or a motivation problem. And usually if people have the ability to help and feel confident that they are competent to serve, they will be much more likely to have the motivation to do so. Programs that offer skills development could enable people to deal with the predicable problems that inevitably arise in political, community, or family situations.

The richness of this text also reminds us that things are not always the way they appear. Indeed, turning subjects over often reveals that we have gotten things upside-down.

One of the first lessons we try to teach students at the Law School is that their initial reading of an assigned case is woefully inadequate, that their natural impressions are often misdirected, if not 180 degrees wrong. In his answer to the lawyer, Jesus gave that legal scholar much to think about beyond his normally predispositioned thought.

So we must allow for the possibility that we do not understand everything that we should understand. As Truman’s friend Steve Covey often said, “We must seek to understand more than to be understood.” What could improve family, business, and civic relationships better than a pervasive attitude among all people to sincerely strive to better understand before forming opinions or taking action?

Often, the first step toward wisdom is to understand that the highest good is not necessarily what we think it is. The Lord has said as much: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8). The inverted sayings of Jesus similarly offer important reorientations in thinking about human nature, ethics, society and eternal goals. He said, “He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 10:39). “He that is greatest among you shall be your servant” (Matthew 23:11). And as Paul stated of Christ, “Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that through his poverty ye might be rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9).

Truman Madsen was similarly prodigious in redirecting our thoughts by spinning out clever truisms that I like to call Trumanisms. When theologians belittled the idea of an anthropomorphic God, worried about bringing the divine down to the level of man, Truman spun the idea around with the neologism “theomorphic man,” bringing man up toward the level of God, and adding “God became man so that man could become God.”^[11] When some “despaired of religion and then made a religion of despair,” Truman responded that they have it “exactly backward.”^[12] Finding a religion of joy, you enjoy religion.

Turning again to the Good Samaritan, the parable can teach us startlingly unexpected things. It can shock us to find our own judgmental predilections exposed. We notice immediately that it was the lowly, despised Samaritan who came to the rescue and not, as we would have expected, the public official (the priest) or the dutiful functionary (the Levite). By this unexpected turn of events, we as listeners are arrested, realizing that our strongly conditioned social tendency to place people into stereotyped classes has led us wrong. And indeed, this parable, which is often invoked as Jesus’ social commentary on relations between Jews and Samaritans, actually says nothing about the ethnicity of the man who went down from Jerusalem. For all we know, the traveler could be an Essene, a Galilean, a Gentile, or even another Samaritan. Subsuming that fallen man—or any of our neighbors, employees, or fellow citizens—under some kind of ethnic grouping or social subset already starts us down a steep descent that ends in debilitating discrimination and the paralysis of polarization.

To counteract these problems, our recently retired BYU Law Professor David Dominguez has pioneered an expansive approach to justice. He calls his project “Samaritan Justice” and it has become for him a way of life. I point to his work as a model for bringing principles of the Good Samaritan and objectives of the Wheatley Institution to life.

Standing normal expectations on their heads, Professor Dominguez insists that “a Samaritan is willing to shock the sensibilities of on-lookers and listeners—willing to scandalize traditions because of a higher calling of justice. . . . Samaritan Justice calls out the least among us to demonstrate the most important lesson of life—yes, the Greatest Commandment.

David and his students worked up close with troubled kids incarcerated in Provo’s juvenile detention center. It was those kids, David says, “Who introduced us to Jesus and what it means to love with heart, mind, soul, and strength” and what it means, as Micah says, to “do justly,” “love mercy,” and “walk humbly” with God (Micah 6:8).

At the same time, David served the residents in the South Provo Boulders apartment complex, many of whom are desperately poor. Of them he has said, they “open our eyes to the greatest riches of the kingdom. In fact, Samaritan Justice claims that unless you see such transformation in the despised of our society, unless you witness these glimpses into the kingdom of heaven within us, around us, and through us, there is no living testimony, only an echoing of someone else’s faith.”

In his courses, David combined theory with practice. He taught his law students to explain technical due process rights and court procedures “so that the children and their families can [effectively] advocate conditions for release at detention hearings.” At the same time, he worked to promote new cultural bridges and deeper inclusion in the human family, while empowering young detainees to change their social status. To do this, David “structured opportunities for those young [people] to restore healthy relationships as valued members of a family, school, and society” and to “collaborate effectively with a full range of diverse community representatives: local leaders, school administrators, juvenile probation officers, judges, two universities, and many others.”

David’s Samaritan Justice, which is a variety of restorative justice, uses a full range of legal problem-solving situations “as an opportunity to teach us all new roles in relation to each other: youthful ‘troublemakers’ learn what it means to be trusted teachers; detention staff practice mediation skills; ethnic local leaders participate in the juvenile court system as “court monitors”; university students present pertinent legal information to incarcerated children while serving as mentors.”^[13]

Thus, whether a person in America is religious or not, this parable offers to everyone a real way to model the transformation of society and at the same time to be transformed. As David warns, even the best of our usual interpretations of the parable “come up short.” Why? As David concludes: “Because they stop before dealing with the biggest claim Samaritan Justice makes: if you are doing Christian work, all ‘inns’ and ‘innkeepers’ had better beware, because they will never be the same again; they too will be revolutionized; they too will experience new life and be ‘born again.’ Samaritan Justice warns the jailhouse, ‘We will turn this place of hurting and despair into a space of healing and hope.’ ”

Revolutionary, yes? Joseph Smith said, “Friendship is one of the grand fundamental principles of ‘Mormonism’; [it is designed] to revolution[ize and] civilize the world, . . . to cause wars and contentions to cease and men to become friends and brothers.”^[14]

This Samaritan Justice approach can only be strengthened by further LDS insights to help people think more effectively about human nature, needs, and duties.

For example, in a clever double-reversal, Truman once said of the Declaration of Independence’s pronouncement that all man are created equal, “Jefferson should have written that all men are uncreated unequal.”^[15] Truman’s comment embraces several of Joseph Smith’s teachings: that man is eternal (D&C 93:33) and thus in an important sense uncreated, and that premortal spirits were different in the beginning (Abraham 3:19) as they will be different in their degrees of resurrected glory (D&C 76). This view of man fundamentally inverts the way we think about each other. If every human being, like the traveler coming down from Jerusalem, can be seen in some sense as having been “in the beginning with God” and being with no end (D&C 93:29), then human needs and interests are literally indispensable, and no amount of ignoring, shunning, incarcerating, or mistreating is ever going to make less desirable people evaporate. Human beings are not accidents on the road of mindless permutations of molecules equally destined for a pointless disintegration into lowly oblivion, no matter how much any self-absorbed personality might want to wish them away. Sensing this permanence turns daily trivialities into matters of eternal consequence, either for better or for worse. And when we recognize that human differences are not all bad—and how could they be if they are of eternal essence?—this helps all humans to deal less judgmentally or disparagingly toward others who are somehow unlike themselves. The objective of society is not to be indifferent to those differences or to remove all those differences, but to recognize wherever possible the usefulness of differences and to assist all people to progress within their several or individual capabilities, whatever they may be. That attitude alone would recast the entire human drama.

In addition, since differences are inescapable and always with us, how can we break social stalemates, all of which come from seeing the world in terms of differentiation, in terms of an us/them or a right/wrong? Here too, as Truman often said, Mormonism does not see things as an either/or but as a both/and. And what did he mean by this? Mainly, I think, he wanted people to see human nature and human existence non-dualistically, for dualism untempered usually leads to dueling, competition, and strife: a thirty-years war, trench warfare, overzealous advocates, those who champion long range needs vs. others focused on short range needs.

Academically, where it is said that emotions are so high precisely because the stakes are so low, proponents of science square off against advocates of religion; we pit publishing against teaching, reason vs. revelation, realism vs. idealism, grace vs. works, the “ought” vs. the “is,” spirit vs. matter, or a metaphysic of oneness and moral order vs. a metaphysic of multiplicity and moral relativity.

Unfortunately, these battle lines are often drawn with an attitude of winner-take-all. While it certainly will not be easy to reduce these perplexing tensions, Truman passionately believed that all could grow beyond two-dimensional arguments. In 1989, he wrote:

Is there a religion in the world where the stronger the conviction of its truth and goodness, . . . the stronger the commitment [to the compatibility of] ideals heretofore thought to be theoretically and practically impossible, . . . of pluralism and [of] freedom that recognizes the individual in full and total richness, [while] at the same time [recognizing] the common ground of divine birth, divine nurture, and divine potential, [with] the prophetic promise of divine reunion for all men[?]^[16]

When faced with a choice, I believe that Mormon thought will always promote fullness over barriers, completeness over consistency, and the search for all that the Father has, even if that means that life appears to be overloaded, rationally unprovable, and torn by competing values and obligations that pull, stretch, and expand our souls in many ways.^[17]

Constructive progress toward a both/and solution begins by thinking in the face of gridlock that there must be another way. For example, the priest and the Levite might not have stopped to help the wounded man, thinking they didn’t have time or because they lacked courage.^[18] But in actuality they simply passed by, not even bothering to think, “Maybe I could wait here a few minutes and recruit someone else to help who might be coming this way and together we could do what none of us individually could do.”

Desiring to find a Samaritan solution opens the mind and heart. I sense that a person who is open to the idea of seeing the parables of Jesus in multiple ways will be more likely to be sympathetic to the idea of dealing with the difficult problems of life and society in a greater variety of ways. This engenders a view that sees life as complex and multifaceted and a desire to create unity within plurality coexisting within a network of beneficial tensions. Try making music on a violin without tension on the strings! Parties may be necessary for elections, but partners are essential for governance.

To dwell another moment on this point, common sense, the American spirit, and Mormonism often find ways to break through frozen road blocks by introducing a third dimension to avert deadlocks, just as boards of directors benefit by having an odd number of voting members.

The idea of a triadic presidency—a president with two counsellors, which is the LDS model of leadership—offers an example of a remarkably effective triangular order that echoes leadership principles found in the unity of the three members of the Godhead. Wisely, the American Constitution set up three branches of government—the executive, legislative and judicial—all three of which are equally important in enabling government to stand stably, like a tripod, even on uneven ground. Any economy benefits from the triangularity of three sectors—the governmental, commercial, and voluntary non-profit sectors—all cooperatively performing their essential parts. The idea of covenant marriage envisions a three-way configuration involving God, a husband, and a wife: “Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 11:11). Seeing marriage as a three-party covenantal arrangement protects it from the all-too-frequent break ups due to two-party breakdowns.

How are these threesomes, and all people, going to navigate their way through perilous contemporary waters? Without wanting to diverge too far off my main subject tonight, let me simply suggest that the answer to this question lies in better understanding the inalienable relationship between rights and duties; here we are again in the arms of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which raises head-on the question of moral duties. Who had a duty to stop and show compassion to the one who had fallen among the thieves? What factors gave rise to that duty? As I have written recently in the Law School’s Clark Memorandum,^[19] I am concerned that modern society sees the relationship between rights and duties backwards, but perhaps the Good Samaritan offers ways to correct that shortfall.

Briefly stated, my point is that the idea of duties has fallen on hard times lately as the rights trajectory of the twentieth century has taken center stage. While I certainly applaud these important steps forward in strengthening rights, I hope that the twenty-first century will see a reciprocal emphasis on duties, to bring this disparity back into balance.^[20]

Implicit in this balancing act lies a crucial point. The world usually thinks that because I have a right, someone else has a duty, namely, for them to fulfill my right. Classical contract theory,^[21] for example, which describes the relationship between two parties to a contract, says, “If I have a contractual right, then you have a duty. If you have a right, then I have a duty.” And that is true as far as it goes. But duties and rights are not polar opposites. Indeed, because every right confers some power, either to act or to prevent someone else from acting, and because every power is innately laden with some sort of duty—for all power is necessarily used either for good or ill—and finally because it is intuitive that people have a duty to do what is good, therefore with every power-conferring right comes some duty. The world is not a duty-free shop! Consequently, as I see it, in every right, power, or privilege that I have, I have some duty. And the greater the power a person has, the higher the duty. This is most evident in cases of high-level fiduciaries, but in cases of weaker powers, obligations also exist but at lower levels. Thus, if I have the right and therefore the power to drive, with it I have the duty to obey the traffic laws, to drive carefully and respectfully. Because I have a right and power to speak, others have a duty to let me speak, but I also have the duty to speak honestly and fairly, and to reciprocate by listening.

I believe it will lift society and strengthen core institutions if people realize that rights and duties go hand in hand, if they read and talk more about duties and responsibilities, tell stories about people who did their duty even under difficult conditions, and encourage students to write more about the interconnectedness of rights and duties.

Joseph Smith sensed this as well. He was wary of rights without duties.^[22] He championed the guarantee of freedom but only so far as the use of freedom “aids in the fulfillment of duty,” and he opposed what some were calling “human rights” when their use was intended to “foment divisions” and detract from civic unity.^[23] Beginning in 1948, Mahatma Gandhi insightfully insisted that to go together with the famous Universal Declaration of Human Rights,^[24] there should be a Universal Declaration on Human Duties.^[25] Perhaps the Preamble, at the beginning of the Constitution, might come to be seen as our Bill of Duties, going hand in hand with the Bill of Rights, at the end of the Constitution.

All of this brings us, again, back to the parable of the Good Samaritan. As mentioned above, the early Christians understood the priest and the Levite as representing the Law of Moses and the Hebrew prophets, and so the medieval window makers surrounded this stage of the parable with images from the life of Moses. Thus, while the priest and Levite fell short in their duty to be of physical assistance to the fallen man, helping as far as their capabilities allowed, they should not be vilified for not saving fallen man, for they did not have the power to do that.

And at the same time, think about the willingly compliant innkeeper who collaborated with the Good Samaritan. Why did this innkeeper undertake the responsibility to care for the wounded man, perhaps even for a long time? While he may have hoped that the Samaritan would actually come that way again, what Jewish innkeeper would have trusted a Samaritan to return to make good on that promise? And didn’t he realize that it might adversely affect business if he took this bleeding, groaning, wounded man into his inn? As the parable is set up, the innkeeper had a power, a fire, a loaf of bread, and shelter overhead, and thus he had a duty to give.^[26]

There are many answers to the question, why should and do we serve? Each of these reasons should be examined and articulated.

King Benjamin’s masterful oration gives many reasons why we, like this innkeeper, should do our duty to serve. Reasons include, because it gives us joy, because we have been commanded to or have covenantally agreed to and will be judged on how we do, but more compellingly because we have received benefits from God and others, and can repay those debts only by serving in return. And more essentially because, when we are truly converted, we cannot do otherwise, and we should be true to whom we really are; and in the end because when we serve with the Master, we come to know the Master’s voice, which we should hear, know, and follow.^[27] As President Monson has said, when we contemplate the words of King Benjamin, that “when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God” (Mosiah 2:17), “an entire vista of opportunity is unfolded to our view.”^[28]

Surely part of that vista is the realization that the world today is more like an interconnected village than an open frontier sparsely populated by unrelated people. Much wisdom is to be found in John Donne’s famous meditation that begins, “No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”^[29] Which brings us to another, final truth I find revealed in the parable of the Good Samaritan. This parable teaches us that, permanently and inevitably, life is not a solo operation. Every person is inevitably our neighbor whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, even if it is inconvenient to do so. Other people in need will always co-exist with us in each stage or sphere of our eternal existence. The end of all of life’s journeys, therefore, is communion with other people. Embracing this reality transforms who we think we are and what we ought to do. Through the system of pipelines and lifelines that connect us all with all other people flows this clear and revealing truth that other people are always with us.

Unforgettable for me was Truman’s demolition of the foundation of Sartre’s Existentialism of extreme individualism. Whereas Sartre had said, “Hell is other people,” Truman happily countered, “Heaven is other people!” His proof: we cannot be saved without our kindred dead.

And what would heaven be without other people? Joseph Smith boldly taught, “The same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory” (D&C 130:2). A few weeks later, on May 21, 1843, Joseph Smith said, “I do not wish to be a great deal better than anybody else. If a prophet was so much better than anybody else was, he would inherit a glory far beyond what anyone else would inherit and behold he would be alone, for who would be his company in heaven?”^[30] No one, and who would want that?

In a strong sense, every human being here on earth is a spirit child of the same heavenly parents. And this invites us to rethink the spurious Western notion of self. Normally people think that morality is doing what is best for “oneself.” But Polonius’s line, “To thine own self be true and then thou canst not be false to any man,” begs the question, what is this self to whom I should be true? If one’s self is more than just one’s body, as it surely is, then why should the self not include other people, all of whom are inescapably a part of our eternal selves? I for one would feel that I had lost more of my self if I were to lose Jeannie than if I were to lose my hands, my feet, my eyes, or my ears. Thus, helping other people paradoxically turns out to be helping our selves, while ignoring others harms our selves.

This ethic of other people is concisely stated in the Golden Rule, which is found in the Sermon on the Mount and in various forms in most religious traditions.^[31] Jesus said, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matthew 7:12); Hillel, the compiler of the Mishnah, said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor, that is the whole Torah.” God himself epitomizes this rule in affirming, “This is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39), basically meaning, as he wants immortality and eternal life for himself, so he will do unto us so that we can have the same and become like him, so we can all belong to each other.

As Truman was wont to say, “How can we know who we are until we know whose we are?”^[32]

Understanding the self in this expansive way makes morality not just a matter of drawing a circle large or small enough to include or exclude certain other people. The parable of the Good Samaritan countenances no such malleability of morals. The man who had fallen among the robbers, whoever he was, was a part of the self of every priest, Levite, or Samaritan passing on that road, whom they needed to love so that they could love that part of their selves.

Even Jesus understood that he was not alone. Truman liked to wander amidst the gnarled olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane, where we are confronted by a small sculpture etched into a wall. It depicts Jesus kneeling at what appears to be a rough-hewn altar. Seeing this Truman wrote,

We are gripped by a sense of total exhaustion. Christ’s body not only kneels but stretches out under the weight upon him—drawn, spent, limp, anguished, writhing under the strain. . . . Even with his inherent gifts of divine intrusion, he still could not turn this oppressive grinding millstone alone. A moment came, the record says, when ‘there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.’ And then ‘he prayed more earnestly’ (Luke 22:43-44). Out of all the panoply of heaven, who would be sent as a celestial Samaritan on this mission of mercy? Someone he knew? Someone who knew him? And how was power transmitted on that awful and tormenting night?”

So, even the Samaritan could use a Samaritan.

While we don’t have answers to those questions, Truman continued,

One truth emerges. If he could not go it alone, neither can we—not without his strengthening us. To endure and overcome the world, our all is required. But our all is not enough. It must combine with his. Only he can lift us to the full reaches of our potential. Much in our secular society says, “Oh, yes I can. I can do it my way.” But that is disabling vanity. . . . For those of us near despair who cry, “Oh no, even with him I cannot go through with this,” he replies, “I can lift. I will heal.” That night he was stretched to reach both human extremities— to the petulant and proud, and to the depressed and despairing.”^[33]

And now, let me draw this story to its conclusion by asking, who are you in this parable? What is our “reader response” to this story?

Are you the man who went down? Yes. Surely we have all come down; we are all injured, and are all in need of a rescuer, a savior. Consider this painting by Vincent Van Gogh, one of the very last he painted as he desperately hoped that someone would come to his rescue. As you can see from the profile of the face of the man being lifted up onto the Samaritan’s horse, art historians believe—based on a sketch of his profile made right after he had died—that Vincent painted himself into this poignant scene in this ever-generative parable.

Or are you the rescuer who shewed compassion? Yes. We are that person too, for we are not just politely invited, but commanded to “Go and do likewise,” to become, in effect, saviors with the Samaritan on Mount Zion (Obadiah 1:21). The Greek word here for “likewise” is homoi?s. It is a strong word, not just meaning “as, or something like” but “in the same way, of the same nature, of equal greatness or importance.” With this moral mandate to do precisely likewise, a broad duty exists, not just to help people we happen to chance upon but also others we seek out. Since Luke’s text does not say that the Samaritan just happened to be there, I like to think that the Samaritan was out looking out for people to help; he came prepared with oil, wine, and bandages. Perhaps this was not the first person he had rescued and taken to that inn.

And how about the priest and the Levite? Certainly, we are priests and Levites too, for there will always be things that we cannot do, as much as we might want to fix certain problems or to heal wounded or grieving souls. As much as we try, and as much as restorative, distributive, or social theories of justice should strive to make up all inequities or losses as possible, there will always be injuries that are beyond our ability to repair. For those, we all must look to Jesus Christ and wait upon him for the things that only he can do.

And what about the innkeeper: Are you an innkeeper? Most certainly we are. We are our brother’s keepers. If you have any power, any station of trust in a family or society, or any sacred vocation or church calling, then you have the good fortune to serve those under the reach of that power.

And don’t forget the robbers. Aren’t we sometimes robbers too? I’m afraid so. We beat up on each other, wounding and harming as we go.

So we are everywhere in the parable, and the correct answer to this exam question is “all of the above.” I believe that it would it strengthen all social institutions if people saw the parable of the Good Samaritan this way, and cast themselves in all of its roles, realizing that we are not just role playing but are playing for keeps.

At the center of all that I have said tonight is the sacred heart of Jesus Christ, overseeing this all. He cast himself as the Samaritan. He binds us to himself. He brings us to the inn. He promises to come again, and he tells us to go and do the same as he did.

Although the world wishes to see human relations and social institutions in purely secular veins, it is the living water of Christ that flows through the connecting vessels, the channels of our souls, to bring these principles to real life. With apologies to Descartes, we can say, “I am a branch. Therefore I am.” Relationships are the fundamental realities. “I am the vine, ye are the branches, . . . without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:5).

But not only does the Samaritan represent Christ as the rescuer, there are hints that the man who comes down from the Holy Place also represents Jesus, who–like us–became flesh. Yet another interpretation saw the man who came down as representing not only the first Adam, but also the second Adam or Christ. For as we survey the wondrous cross, Jesus too was beaten, wounded, stripped, had people cast lots for his raiment, and was passed over by Jewish and Roman leaders who did not come to his help.

Jesus knew that not everyone would be able to believe what he said when he declared, “I am the light and the life of the world.” He still invited them in, saying, then do what you can. Do what I teach, which would be epitomized by his parables and especially the Good Samaritan. And if it works, you will know that whereof I have spoken I have spoken truth (John 7:17).

Under the feet of the Christus statute in the Copenhagen Cathedral, an inscription reads, “Come unto me.” And a second below it promises, “And lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world” (Mt 28:20).

And so it is that in and through the blood of Christ and through the restored and restoring gospel of Jesus Christ, we can be made whole—all of us, as a whole, reunited—and enjoy life eternal, which is what the good lawyer, whose questions triggered this timeless parable, thankfully sought.

References:

[1] Ola Gjielo, “Evening Prayer.”

[2] See the convenient Wikipedia entry about him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart.

[3]Joseph Fielding Smith, comp., The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1972), 98.

[4] Conference addresses in April 1977 and April 1992.

[5] As I have I have discussed in some detail in BYU Studies, 38:2 (1999).

[6] See John W. Welch, “The Good Samaritan: Forgotten Symbols,” Ensign 37 (February 2007): 40-47, and Liahona 31 no. 2 (February 2007): 26-33.

[7] Matthew 13:15; Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 98. In Matthew 13:18-23, Jesus gives the symbolic meaning of the parable of the Sower; in Matthew 13:36-43, Jesus declared the meaning of the parable of the Wheat and the Tares.

[8] See especially Christopher D. Marshall, Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2012), 13-176. Even if Marshall might reject the idea that the Good Samaritan was intended to be “a thinly veiled self-reference” to Jesus, he still insists that “the Samaritan in the story does what Jesus himself is portrayed as doing throughout his career, especially in the Gospel of Luke: he brings a divine like compassion to bear on abject human need, disregarding the conventional boundaries of ritual and religion to do so” (26).

[9] Martin Luther King Jr., “A Time to Break Silence,” Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967.

[10] By Emily Esfahani Smith, June 12, 2014.

[11] Truman G. Madsen Interview with David Fiske 1982 – Truman G. Madsen Journal Fall 84-85, Box 6, in possession of Barney Madsen.

[12] Truman G. Madsen, Why I Believe, 219.

[13] These quotations come from David Dominguez, “Samaritan Justice: Empowering Culturally Diverse Communities to Prevent Local Schools from Becoming Pipelines to Juvenile Prisons,” http://d10.cgpublisher.com/proposals/108/index_html, or from an email from him to me on November 13, 2014.

[14] DHC 5:516-518; Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 316; Willard Richards Journal, in Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, The Words of Joseph Smith (Provo: Religious Studies Center, 1980), 234 (July 23, 1843).

[15] Reported by Charles Randall Paul, “Four LDS Views on Harold Bloom: A Roundtable,” BYU Studies 35, no. 1 (1995): 193.

[16] Truman G. Madsen, “Jerusalem the Branch,” TGM Journal 1989, Box 7.

[17] John W. Welch, “Toward a Mormon Jurisprudence,” Regent Law Review 21:1 (2008-2009), 95-96. Available athttp://www.mormoninterpreter.com/?s=welch+jurisprudence&submit=Search.

[18] Martin Luther King Jr., “On Being a Good Neighbor,” in Strength to Love (1963), quoted in Goodwin Liu, “Martin Luther and the Good Samaritan,” Clark Memorandum (Spring 2014), 35.

[19] John W. Welch, “The 21st Century as the Century of Duties?” Clark Memorandum (Spring 2013).

[20] Welch, Toward a Mormon Jurisprudence, 99.

[21] See the work ofWesley Newcomb Hohfeld, including Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Legal Reasoning, 23 Yale Law Journal 16-59 (1913).

[22] Of the twenty or so legal propositions advanced in the statement on governments and laws in general (D&C 134), over half of these assertions of rights are qualified, limited, or tempered by conditions, provisos, or exceptions.

[23] As he stated in his 1844 presidential campaign brochure, Views of the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States.

[24] See Richard L. Johnson, Gandhi’s Experiments with Truth: Essential Writings by and About Mahatma Gandhi 185 (2006).

[25] See e.g. Declaration of Responsibilities and Human Duties, Globalization.icaap.org (2002) http://globalization.icaap.org/content/v2.2/declare.html (an example of an attempt to realize Gandhi’s idea); see also Press Release from the United Nations Economic Social and Cultural Organization, Declaration of Human Rights and Responsibilities , Written in Valencia, Presented to UNESCO Director-General (April 28, 1999) available at http://www.unesco.org/bpi/eng/unescopress/1999/99-92e.shtml.

[26] Hymn 219

[27] King Benjamin’s profound ethical logic is discussed in John W. Welch, “A Masterful Oration,” in John W. Welch and Stephen D. Ricks, eds., King Benjamin’s Speech: “That Ye May Learn Wisdom,” (Provo: FARMS, 1998), 77-82.

[28] Conference address, April 1990.

[29] John Donne, 3 Works of John Donne 574-75 (1839), accessed at http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/meditation17.php.

[30] Recorded by Willard Richards, in Ehat and Cook, The Words of Joseph Smith, 204.

[31] As my friend Howard A. Christy has especially taught me.

[32] Source needed.

[33] Truman G. Madsen, The Sacrament: Feasting at the Lord’s Table, 8.

Laurence Hemming of the University of Lancaster presented the 2017 Truman G. Madsen Lecture on the Eternal Man. His remarks are entitled, “Eternal Return: Humanity After Eternity.”

I must begin with words of thanks: to the Wheatley Institute for this invitation to speak to you today. It is a great privilege and honour to be here. My thanks go also to Truman Madsen and the Madsen family for making this lecture possible at all. The publicity for this event speaks of its intent “to bring academic experts and civic leaders ‘to the fire’ at BYU.” For a Catholic, the historic resonances of being “brought to the fire” could be a little alarming. It is testimony to the generosity and gentleness of Mormon hospitality that such a resonance never once occurred to the organizers, let alone Truman Madsen, who, I assume, had coined the phrase himself.

I would like to begin this lecture with some preliminary remarks. Barnard Madsen’s biography of his father was hugely helpful: the man he introduced to me I would have enjoyed to meet. I feel I have met him in spirit, not least through the bearing and superbly intelligent scholarship of a number of Mormon academics I discover he taught, and whom I am already privileged to count within my acquaintance. It is unsurprising to find the names of Hugh Nibley and Jack Welch, two giants, within this circle.

I have witnessed more than once the peculiar phenomenon of non-Mormons, invited onto Mormon platforms, spelling out why we are not Mormon. My experience of the privilege you have accorded me has been rather different: I have learned much more about what it means to be a Catholic from speaking and studying with Latter-day Saints—things I could not have learned by any other means. I receive this experience as a gift, and come to this rostrum tonight in part in thanks for what I have received. There is so much we share, and what I want to offer to you tonight is in that spirit—I want to offer, here, for the first time, some questions concerning something that besets all of us who go under the name of Christian in these present days, especially in the West, and especially, but by no means exclusively, here, in the United States.

Before I open that discussion, a further remark. The little book Eternal Man, if brief, is very rich. It speaks with an encompassing voice. The book Eternal Man, forming as it does the basis of these annual events, is a unique and powerful combination of philosophical prowess and LDS spirituality. I do not wish to encroach upon the presentation it makes of the faith of Latter-day Saints. To be frank, you are better equipped than I am for that, and I look for points where we can meet—rather than focusing on where we might diverge. What would—or at least ought to—strike any Catholic reading this text is the extent to which the book, most deeply understood, is really a dialogue between Truman Madsen and Joseph Smith, his prophet. Catholicism is rich in religious founders: St. Benedict, St. Dominic, St Francis, St Theresa of Avila, to name but a few. Catholics naturally understand what it means to live in a tradition shaped by charismatic founders. We are shaped by those who founded the things we have come to know. I recognized the same thing in Mormonism as soon as I began to realize who Joseph Smith was. In the Catholic tradition, we speak of being, and of having been, shaped, not just by God and in Christ, but also by those in a particular tradition in which we stand. If we are a Benedictine monk, for example, by Saint Benedict. Every Mormon I have ever met is shaped, it seems to me, strongly in the spirit of Joseph Smith.

If Mormonism is one of the newest expressions of Christianity, it manages to accomplish what many Christian traditions increasingly forget to do, and it does so first in the writings and person of Joseph Smith. It reaches into the very soil of history and unearths precious things long hidden, but still at work, still—even when occluded—full of power. Mormonism, and Truman Madsen’s experience of it through his dialogue with Joseph Smith, reaches right back as an incipient expression of some of the West’s most ancient ideas. Incipient means: speaking now and all over again from the beginning, that foundational understanding that constitutes history itself. History, understood like this, is not the mere narration of events in their succession. It is altogether greater and other: it is how that beginning still conditions the experience of the whole, of all that we are. That is what I wish to touch upon, and be in dialogue with, tonight. Right there in the Preface to Eternal Man, Madsen quotes Joseph Smith: “by contraries . . . truth is made manifest.”1 No reference is given, but the quotation comes from a letter of Smith’s to Daniel Rupp of June 5, 1844, citing the prophet Jeremiah. Madsen may have been working from memory, for the exact words of the letter are “by proving contraries.” I take the modification to be important: nowadays we hear the word “proving” in the sense of geometrical demonstration, the resolution of a question of the operation of the mind. But this is not what is meant by “proof” in Joseph Smith’s letter; an older sense is intended: living, the “lived experience” of bearing out through the day-to-day, and holding in a place, these contraries, which is what it means to have a human life. Such a sentence could have come from any of those we call the pre-Socratics, the earliest thinkers in the West. The question is how and in whom are such contraries proved? That is one of the fascinating things about the way in which Joseph Smith reaches right in to the soil of Western thinking. That’s who we are. Just to annoy some of my students I tell them that I am completely and utterly Eurocentric, but I don’t mean it in terms of a hegemony. I mean it by what it means to be steeped in history. To be authentically who you are.

Joseph Smith reopens, actually by simply setting aside, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, and in this simple gesture, he sets aside the unforgiving nexus of causality that has constituted the history of metaphysics and defined the agonistic confrontation of necessity with free will in Christianity’s confrontation with Greek thinking. Madsen begins in this spirit by saying “there is no creation ‘from nothing.’ There is ordering of elements.”2 This could have come straight from the pages of the pre-Socratics.

Tonight I want to speak to you, not as a theologian, but as a thinker. One schooled, I could only wish more adequately, in the history of thinking and in philosophy. I want to present to you in a very preliminary form, and (for me) the first time, some ideas that have beset me over many years. I hope this will eventually be a more technical argument, but tonight it will take a very general form.

Why? The question of the eternal—the question of time as such—and the question of who “man” (or the human being) is, are, as Madsen clearly knew all too well, perhaps the greatest challenges in thinking that stand before us. The mere ability to measure time, time as it stands on the clock, the succession of “nows,” so much does not resolve the meaning of time as to cover over the possibility of its resolution altogether. Merely biological conceptualisations of humanity confuse, not only the meaning of “man”, but, as we stand on the threshold of huge medical advances so that there are those who are at least contemplating the possibility of humanity or some section of it standing in this present life with the possibility of it leading off into what might seem to be an eternity, these conceptualizations also confuse further the question of eternity itself. My title has a clear reference to Nietzsche’s doctrine (his word) of the eternal recurrence: one of the most neglected and misunderstood of the things of which he writes. For a people such as the Latter-day Saints, a self-consciously historical people, you will be well aware that we stand at present in the midst of a turning point, a genuine crisis, with respect to history itself. An emancipatory politics—through what has come to be identified in the phrase “identity politics,” but which increasingly comes to stand for “the political” in the West, has come to be marked by a hiatus, an absolute and decisive breach, wherein “we” (whichever “we” is posited, and so needing to assert itself) stand in opposition to, and are cut off from, every sense of the “from whence” the “from out of which” this “we” has come. We’ve been cut off from our history by many contemporary discourses in modern life.

For any “we” that finds itself like this, the past is constituted over and again as a place of injury and the occlusion of identity. I hope you recognize what I am talking about. There is very often more, much more, than superficial justification for the sense of injury, and the occlusion claimed. If you were to take for instance the issue of race, too few people in my country understand the extent to which my own nation in its industrial genesis was predicated on the slave trade. That’s the sense of injury I’m talking about. But in each case every attempt to constitute emerging identities within a wider whole is resisted or declared impossible. Often the establishment of the competing and agonised identities in question is marked by a mood of vengeance. The vengeance in question has nothing to do with a psychological state or outlook: it is in every sense a metaphysical vengeance (often taken up by people otherwise entirely peaceful, and whose intent is peace), an orientation demanded by what seems to be the moment itself, but it springs in fact from how the moment itself appears, from out of the whole. There is a great deal more that we could say here, for which there is not the time.

In each case like this, an overpowering will to power is exercised that demands a kind of satisfaction for past wrongs that can find no resolution. The past—as “history”—has no value, not because it has been devalued, but because no value dare be assigned it: “You can’t go there because we’re too hurt about what happened there.” History is without value because we become unable to know what its value has been. We are by no means at the end of this process; indeed, we stand at its beginning.

And if you are now bracing yourself from an onslaught of this kind from me, and wondering what my onslaught is and what “resolution” I have in mind, and who I must denounce in the process, you may, I hope, breathe easily. For in coming to the end of my opening remarks I want to ask, very simply, “In what way might we set all of this aside?” I hope you see the parallel that I am trying to make with Joseph Smith’s gesture of setting the nexus of causality, of freedom and necessity just to one side simply by abandoning the doctrine of creation ex-nihilo. I am asking, “Is it possible for us to do this in the political arena that is shaping up before our very eyes?”

Let me therefore begin all over again, with, because of the necessary brevity with which I must now speak, what will have to serve as a kind of allegory. I want this evening to undertake a reading of two poetic texts that each points to something far more ancient than itself, and points also to how we may set the will to power that I have named aside. In between the two poems, I will make some brief remarks about the doctrine of the eternal return, to which my title alludes. I begin, then, with a translation of a poem most often known in English as “The Horses of Achilles”, by a Greek author, C. P. Cavafy, written in 1910:
Patroclus: whom they saw in death’s darkness
He who was so brave, and strong, and young
The horse of Achilles started shedding tears
The deathless nature that was theirs
Grew indignant at this thing of death
They tossed their heads, and shook their long manes
Beating the earth with their hooves, lamenting
Patroclus, whom they knew to be without life—present, absent—
Destitute of flesh—his spirit lost—
Defenceless—without breath—
Returned to the vast nothing by life itself
Zeus saw the tears of the deathless-divine horses
And was himself pained. ‘At the wedding of Peleus’
He said, ‘I should not have acted so rashly;
Better that we had not given you away! What business
Had you down there among the wretched race of men,
The playthings of fate? You whom neither death nor old age awaits,
Are yet tyrannised by ephemeral misfortunes. Men have embroiled you
In their troubles.’ Yet the two noble creatures went on
Shedding their tears for the everlasting calamity of death.3
Cavafy, it seems, presents us with an entirely conventional, modern view of the relationship of gods to humans, of the fate of humanity as tragic and concerned only with death, of the chasm between the deathless gods and the race of men. In this view, gods alone are eternal, there is no eternity in the life of man.
Cavafy evokes a remarkable juncture in the Iliad. For Patroclus is dead, and this is as yet unknown to Achilles. Homer says Patroclus is Philos to Achilles: beloved; and more than that, hoi polu philtatos (οἱ πολὺ φίλτατος)—“by far the most beloved”. Who Patroclus was to Achilles has bothered scholars both now in antiquity. The bother takes the form of “were they/weren’t they/did they didn’t they?”—were they lovers, or just good friends? Plato has Phaedrus play with this in his Symposium, asking who might have been pursued by whom and challenging the suggestion in Aeschylus and Pindar that Achilles, though the younger man, was the one pursuing Patroclus—a most un-Athenian state of affairs. Xenophon took the opposite view: they were for him just good friends.

Modern interpretations line up with or against Xenophon, or Aeschylus, or Plato, always conditioned by their understanding or approval or rejection of the moral probity of such relations. Here we uncover the extent to which contemporary, especially historically Christian, prohibitions on extra-marital erotic love are persistently read back into what we perceive to be the life and mores of antiquity. In this, they miss the point. The schema of “lover” and “beloved” (erastēs and erōmenos) as explaining the sexual behaviour of ancient Greeks is entirely recent—unknown before the writings of Paul Veyne, Kenneth Dover and Michel Foucault. What the debate between Plato and Xenophon—carried out across the two texts of the same name, the Symposia of Plato and Xenophon—serves to indicate (to its contemporary audience and to us) is that attempting to comprehend the nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus in terms of the mores of classical Athens—post-dating Homer by centuries—is to look in the wrong place. Homer’s name for the relation between them—they are to each other philos, “beloved” (of each, by far the most). This is as much he ever says, and it is therefore enough. “By far the most” suggests others to whom the adjective philos must also have applied. He says nothing of them either.

The privileging of the procreative relationship over other emotional relations between persons is a phenomenon not even of the whole of the history of Christendom, gaining full force only after the Reformation. Until then Christianity had privileged only the individual relationship with God. Marriage is low down in Christian priorities and its privileges historically late. St. Paul, almost unique in Biblical authors even to comment on it, says only that it is better to marry than burn with lust. Procreation as the primary purpose constitutive of the relations between persons assumes its most exalted position only in the eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. In Hegel’s earlier Jena period, and in his Philosophy of Right procreation becomes the engine of production itself—the means by which humanity both perpetuates itself not in but as history as such, such that human production arises on the ground of the marriage relation as the cementing and exteriorisation of those resources (Vermögung) that constitute the “external” world and its progress. Toward the conclusion of his Logic of 1831, an immensely important book, Hegel makes a statement that shows the extent to which this understanding of production is grounded in his metaphysical understanding overall: Gattung ist Begattung. “Species”, by which he means the totality of all that is, world, as a whole, “species” is “reproduction,” reproduction in the sexually procreative sense. In this Hegel substitutes reproduction for any talk of death (“in copulation the immediacy of living individuality perishes; the death of this life is the emergence of Geist”4), and establishes eternity materially as the endless—biological—reproduction of the same. In this is the culmination of a centuries-long process: the extreme privileging of the sexual relation as the metaphysical ground of the procreative relation. The Marxist concept of work as the “proving” of the “essence of man” is only possible on the basis of this essentially biological interpretation of human reproduction.5

In a context where everything, to secure its existence, its reason for being, must at the same time justify its existence as one that is productive, every other form of human relating is relativized to the procreative relation. Moreover, and I can add this as no more than an aside, the confusions and contradictions of contemporary identity politics have not escaped the extreme instrumentalism, grounded in this metaphysics, that Hegel names here.

How, then, are we to understand the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus? Cavafy’s is a sensitive, but also cunning, reading of Book 17 of the Iliad. Nothing is as it seems, and as we shall see, something is left out. Homer actually has Zeus ask the question why?—why did he give these horses at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, for them just to be miserable in the fragility of human affairs? Thetis was the mother of Achilles, and she was forcibly married to Peleus, despite that she loved Zeus. (In other versions of the legend the horses were a gift of Poseidon, not Zeus). Pindar names the prophecy of Themis that Thetis, goddess of the sea, was fated to bear a royal son mightier than his father, if she were mated to Zeus or one of the Olympians. Had Thetis borne Zeus a son, Zeus’s fate would have been that of Chronos (Xeus’s father) and in his turn, his father, Ouranos: each son overthrew his father. Not for nothing does Homer remind us, when Zeus laments his gift, that he is “son of Chronos.”6 Cavafy’s poem, and the Iliad itself, therefore shows not the metaphysical gap between divine and human being, but rather that Zeus’s power and continued rulership over the cosmos depends upon, indeed requires the actual and historical world in which Achilles’ existence, and fate unfold. Achilles is the reason that Zeus is still all-powerful, still the head among the gods. That’s why.

What do the horses of Achilles represent? Horses draw chariots, and no divine chariot is of greater significance than that which bears the sun across the heavens. These immortal horses signify the eternal passage of time, the passage of the day from sunrise to sunset and its night, and that this passage is eternally repeated: not as the passage of the hands of a clock across its face, but as the two faces, of eternal time—they reveal how time is visible to mortal men and women. These two are the moment in its “day”, and eternity, the endless repetition of days. The horses have come to a standstill before the body of the warrior beloved of Achilles. Time, and fate itself, the lawfulness of time, stand still in the gap between Patroclus’ death and Achilles coming to know of it. The horses, whom “neither death nor old age awaits” are the harbingers of cosmic time.7

There is in Cavafy’s account a further strangeness that overturns the average and ordinary presentation of the relation between the deathless gods and mortal men and women on which the poem seems to stand but actually does not. The title of the poem in modern Greek is: Ta aloga ton achilleōs (Τὰ ἀλογα τὸν Ἀχιλλεώς). Homer knows nothing of this word, alogo: his word for horses is hippoi. Why then does Cavafy, who quotes Homer at times, and who is skilled in literary, Katharevousa, Greek, choose a modern, demotic, word, alogo, for horse? The word alogo originally means “mute”, the horse as the wordless beast, contrasted to that creature of the word, man, ho anthrōpos, the one ordered to and given to the word. Divine, Olympian, law decrees that only man may speak. And yet, at Book 19, when these same horses stand still a second time, this time before Achilles, at a moment unlike almost any other in the whole of Greek myth, they speak. (I know of no other moment in myth when animals as animals, rather than gods in animal form, are permitted speech.) They repeat to Achilles the promise of his fate: “the day of doom approaches you Achilles, nor are we to blame for it, but a mighty god and all-ruling fate.”8 To which Achilles replies: “Why do you foretell my death? You need not at all.”9 And Hera then strikes them mute. The horses’ second moment of stillness signifies this time as a decisive moment. This moment, two full books later in the text, is the same as when the horses wept before the lifeless corpse of Patroclus. There are many hints in the text that this is so. The posture of the horses is identical in both passages, and speaks of mourning. The prediction made is the same: the death of Patroclus seals the final acceptance by Achilles of his fate—to be that one who will slay Hector and set in motion the events that bring the Trojan War to its end—to become the one, therefore, who will decide the fate of all Hellas. Why do the horses say something Achilles already knows? Or are we not, again, asking the wrong question and looking in the wrong place. What the horses say is unneeded because it is now decided, is what is needful of being said. And this moment is unlike any other: it stands apart and shows all the others in relief. A moment marked by things that never happen, as when two horses break the laws of all the cosmos and speak.

The moment becomes clear not because it is unique, but because it has returned: the horses have stopped a second time. The moment recurs. In returning, it brings a kind of a whole, a unity, to sight. It shows that time is not linear, but circular. It is in accord with that motion that measure time itself: the circular progress of the sun across the heavens and the seasons in turn with each other. It is the decision that is unique, momentary, singular: not the world in which it is decided; this turns and returns. The singular can only be seen, and be taken, from out of its manifold.
And now we know how to look in the right place. What passes between Achilles and Patroclus is of such a magnitude that it is capable of upholding and making visible such a singular moment, a moment of such decision. De-cidere is to cut-off, to split and separate. The question is not whether or not Achilles and Patroclus were lovers, but is of an altogether greater magnitude: what is the consequence of what is decided between them? The answer is: a world. They bring about a world, the world, of Hellas. The end of the Trojan War will bring about the world of Hellas. It is in this that the real meaning of the term philos can be understood, that each is beloved for the other ahead of every other means the world they bring about stands itself in philia, as philtatos, most dearly, foremost, highest. Philtatos signifies nothing merely romantic, or sentimental. There is nothing here of driving inner passion. It signifies how they constitute world: both for each other, and in relation to others, and—still more importantly—for many others too. Thus the phrase hoi polu philtatos—by far the most beloved—does not mean over against others, but for the very sake of others.

This in contrast to that other world, shattered, or rather whose fragility is revealed, by the perfidy of Helen toward her husband Menelaus and the adulterous liaison she contracts with Paris, and the strife—in Greek neikos—that follows. Even if we were to say that what was sworn through Tyndareus, the promise that all the parts of Hellas would come together to defend itself as a whole were Helen to be abducted—even if this is in a sense the promise of the making of a whole world, the restoration of Helen to Menelaus after her adultery could be nothing other than as a prize. What highest world could she possibly bring about? If Helen and Menelaus cannot guarantee the world of Hellas, who can? Now we understand the decisive character of what holds between Achilles and Patroclus. The moment of decision reveals what already stood and what will persist, death notwithstanding—indeed, not dented by death, and only from out of a death truly disclosed and made visible in its already having come to pass. The world Helen and Menelaus bring to pass in strife, Hellas, persists in those beloved. We can speak of it still; we are speaking of it even today.

Do we find here a prefiguration of eternal return? In what ways? My title speaks of humanity “after” eternity. By this I mean that eternity is a concern for men and women, but not in ways that are easy to resolve. We have to pursue the chase after it to seek out how eternity is to be found and by what means. I think this is what Joseph Smith’s own meditation on eternity is about and his meditation on eternity which founds a world for Latter-day Saints and, indeed, for those like me who can learn something of this. Every man and every woman is confronted with the question of what does eternity mean. Even if you turn away from it and think “But I am only mortal” and resolve to yourself that there is no eternity for you. Nietzsche’s “doctrine” of eternal return, as I have already suggested, is among the most neglected and misunderstood of the things of which he wrote. The phrase will to power for which Nietzsche is far more vividly remembered was of interest to him only for a short period, as the title of a book he for a while thought he wished to write, but never actually did. The book of that name contains material written by him, but in an arrangement he never made. Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s most important literary creation however, is described as the “teacher of the eternal recurrence,”10 a title Nietzsche also reserved to himself.

We have only a short time to ask what “eternal return” means. Almost all of Nietzsche’s commentators speak of how Nietzsche’s “references to this doctrine are enigmatic, and the exact interpretation of its meaning remains controversial”;11 other Anglophone authors, equally uncertain of their ground, speak of “what appears to have been Nietzsche’s attempt” with the doctrine.12 Others, like Gilles Deleuze, confuse eternal recurrence with the will to power and speak of it as an aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy of subjectivity.13 Karl Jaspers provides a summary account of its elements, with little insight into its workings, and while admitting “it is for Nietzsche what is most decisive of his philosophising, even if the adoption of Nietzsche has for the most part sought to avoid it.”14

Yet there is nothing imprecise or hazy, nothing “attempted,” nothing confused in Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence. It has, in itself, nothing to do with the will: so little, in fact, that it is only in consequence of the devastatingly impersonal weight of this thought of thoughts that it requires and demands that only the strongest will is able to bear it. In Nietzsche’s own words, “everything passes away, everything returns: eternally rolls the wheel of being,” again, “the ring of being.”15 Nietzsche’s thought of thoughts, the eternal recurrence, is a thought of being. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the one thinker who has inquired into the meaning of the doctrine of the eternal return as a thought of being is that thinker who has attempted to ask the question concerning being: Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger’s principal reading of the eternal recurrence of the same was undertaken in lectures given in 1937. An edited version of these was published in 1961. Heidegger’s confrontation with Nietzsche’s thinking, his engagement with the archive of material in Nietzsche’s remains, and his appreciation of Heidegger’s writing as a fundamental philosophical position and, together with the thought of Hegel as the consummation of Western metaphysics remain unparalleled in their depth and their far-reaching consequences in contemporary thought. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger would be far better known, and far better understood, if more Germans read them (and with sympathy), and if the most basic errors of thinking and translation were not endlessly repeated in English versions of Heidegger as if they were fact.

Nietzsche describes the eternal recurrence of the same as “der Ring des Seins,” the “ring of being.” Anyone even cursorily familiar with Martin Heidegger would recognise the words das Sein as “being,” “being itself,” that took public stage with Heidegger’s publication of his work Being and Time, Sein und Zeit, which asked die Frage, “the question” that goes out “after,” nach, being itself, dem Sein. It is remarkable, therefore, that, even as Nietzsche himself identifies eternal recurrence with das Sein, “being itself,” this word, Sein, makes almost no appearance in Heidegger’s discussion until very late in the text.

What Heidegger does discuss, in huge detail, is not das Sein, but das Seiende, and more specifically, das Seiende im Ganzen. Das Seiende also can be translated as being, and indeed should be: the phrase das Seiende im Ganzen intensifies this—it means “being as a whole.” It is often translated with a subtle difference: “beings as a whole.” When we distinguish beings from being we hear a distinction which focuses on the distinctness of beings, their objectliness over and against each other. In an age of objectification, we are drawn to understand beings as objects. But “being as a whole” means the opposite of this, namely the ground, the general or universal ground, of the things that actually are. In an age of objectification this will inevitably lead us to the objectliness of objects over against us as subjects, causing us to ignore the ground of objectliness, what gives us over to objectify everything that comes across our path, instead of drawing our attention to it. Heidegger tells, citing a fragment from Nietzsche’s notebooks, that when Nietzsche speaks of das Sein he means das Seiende im Ganzen “being as a whole.”16 Why is this distinction important? How are we to understand “being as a whole” or even “being”? Heidegger says “Nietzsche does not speak of being as a whole. We employ this phrase primarily to name all that is not simply nothing: nature (living and lifeless), history . . . God, the gods, and demigods. Being we name also what becomes, emerges and passes away.”17

Heidegger argues that it is through the doctrine of the eternal recurrence that being as a whole comes in to view all over again, as the underlying ground of Western thinking. It does so, however, in an entirely new and decisive way. In this sense, it itself returns, both all over again and utterly anew. At the point where Zarathustra speaks of the ring of being he adds “in each moment being begins.”18 If the ring indicates the eternity of recurrence, how is it grasped? Heidegger answers “this ring and its eternity are only grasped out of the moment.”19 The moment discloses the whole of being—or rather the moment and the whole of being are each time and for all time the same: what is present, what is “presently” present. Das Seiende means whatever is capable of being “present.” Even what passes away is present as what passes away. More importantly for Nietzsche, everything that is, must be as becoming. What he’s saying is that Nietzsche lets us see the whole of being. My point here is that identity politics, which denies the possibility of being as a whole because it concentrates on sectional interests within specified identities, nevertheless also has to rely on being as a whole. Madsen speaks no differently in Eternal Man.

If, in Hegel, this emphasis on becoming appears as an emphasis on the infinite in being, because the goal of absolute subjectivity in the infinite being of God, in Nietzsche and in the age of absolute nihilism becoming has a more completed character. In fact, even in Hegel the effect is not different, since the infinite God is complete in himself. Completion, fulfillment, perfection, is fulfilled in Nietzsche as, not infinity, but the finitude of being. Becoming is not a state of infinite progress (which for Hegel is only true from the perspective of the as yet incomplete and so as yet less than absolute subject), but is itself a finitude, being as a whole as completed becoming. Heidegger says that in the history of philosophy inasmuch as present being is, for Nietzsche it is as the fulfilment and permanence of becoming: thus “the essence of present being is becoming.”20 Both overall, as a totality, and as experienced through the moment, being, as becoming, is not infinite, but finite. Heidegger cites Nietzsche to show how he thinks this thought: “the measure of total-force is determinate, not ‘infinite’.”21 Heidegger comments, “because the being of the world force itself is finite, the world-totality itself remains finite, and indeed in the sense of a tight limitation, a limitation arising from present being (das Seiende) itself.”22 Heidegger concludes, “accordingly such a finitude of becoming makes an endless progress and advance of world-occurrence impossible. Rather the becoming of the world must run back on itself.”23

We still have not answered the essential question about this technical distinction. Because the world is perpetual becoming, and because everything that can be and has been and will be and is present is itself a totality and a finite one, what then is the perpetuity of becoming itself? Nothing other than eternity as such manifesting itself in the immediacy of the present through the passage of time. Indeed, Heidegger himself says this: “this real, infinite time [Nietzsche] grasps as eternity. Being (Sein).”24

We now understand the distinction that so many Heidegger commentators fail to make: between being as what can be present, both immediately and as a whole (das Seiende, das Seiende im Ganzen), and being as time (das Sein). There is one more thing to be said. Why for Nietzsche is the moment so decisive? Why, in Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, is the thought of eternal return of the same the most nihilistic of thoughts? Here we can give only the most cursory answer, but it is decisive for what I want to say next. For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s thought of eternal return was decisive not only because it allowed the whole of present being to become visible, but because it disclosed its manner of visibility, its “how.”

This “how” is only graspable, however, on the basis of the one grasping—on the basis of that one who thinks about the world and appears within it—the human being, “man.” This is what Heidegger’s understanding of the ring of recurrence means, that ring which, constituting the limit and limitations of the whole, becomes within it. How do we relate to the eternal return? As ones who (have to) become. Why? Because inasmuch as everything is becoming it is at the same passing away: it loses its value. It is this that led Nietzsche to understand the unfolding world as a nihilism. It is not that the same values repeat themselves over and over, but rather that everything that is becomes valueless. The eternal return brings us before the whole of present being as what has been, and is, and will be, but with the overwhelming threat of the valuelessness of all present being. This is the essential connection for Nietzsche of eternal recurrence with the will to power: we do not choose to exercise the will to power. Rather we are driven in to it by the eternal return to the valuelessness, the weightlessness, of the totality of being. Heidegger argues that in this the ring of being—time—the circle—plays a role, requiring that “man be grasped through the world and world through man himself.”25

I put this technical section in, and felt licensed to do so, because right in the middle of Madsen’s Eternal Man is a discussion of being and becoming. He clearly had come across the post-war American discussion of Nietzsche. It’s with being and becoming that being as a whole comes into view. But you remember I said that contemporary identity politics can’t allow this whole to come to the fore. It falls into the background. This is exactly how Heidegger interprets Nietzsche’s eternal return. We are able to see the whole, but only as something which can attain to no value. It falls back. It can’t attain to any value. It’s not that it’s valued less; it is a positivity. But we cannot find what the value is, and this is how for Heidegger, at least, Nietzsche connected eternal recurrence with the will to power. Because if you see the whole recede and therefore you see with that your history (history is part of the whole that recedes), you have to (as Nietzsche puts it) establish new values. You have to reestablish the meaning of yourself because your history has fallen into the background and cannot be reached. Its value cannot be told. Nietzsche describes this as a weight. He says it’s the weightiest of weights, and at one point he says this weight is such an unbearable thing it could even crush you. You should hear this in the modern sense of injury the discussion of identity politics and it’s real because there are real injuries in the past. I’m not trying to suggest for one second that there aren’t. But the problem is that we do not know what to do with them, so we enforce new identities and produce those. That is how Heidegger understood the phrase “will to power.” When everything recedes and can no longer attain to any value we believe our will to be called forward to enforce new values that will explain to ourselves who we are and overcome what appears to us as threatening, as a threatening invisibility and loss.

Contemporary philosophy, contemporary thinking, is very resistant to totality, to any suggestion that the whole has become, or indeed is even capable of becoming, visible. We have begun in the academy routinely to speak no longer of history, but of histories: no longer of identity, but of identities. Every possible posited unity is immediately fractured into multiplicity. For what reason? Often, we say, for the sake of representation: to prevent or restrict exclusion and to maintain the possibility of the most radical inclusiveness. This is, in itself, the moment of a most decisive recurrence of the same. Everything, to represent a plurality, must be capable of recurring in a different guise. History becomes “histories”: “it” is “multiple”. But without the originating unity, no similarity within the multiplicity is possible—this is elementary. If no two histories are alike, what constitutes them both recognisably as histories? The answer is a manner of seeing, namely, as a devaluing—or rather already seeing that they stand devalued, for the sake of a new valuation. Every assault on an originating unity within a finitude “makes way for,” makes space for, a revaluation of “the same” as now “other.” In each case, in each new forging, space is made within the totality for some new identity. Who or what revalues? That one who, seeing the devaluation already taking place, steps in to claim the justification, the right, of a new value. Some one. The ring of eternal recurrence demands, in the face of the valuelessness of all things, those ones who can assert new values. Heidegger points out that, for Nietzsche, the nihilism of valuelessness is not a dissolution into nothingness and the vacuous, but “something affirming positive, and, indeed, the manner in which the whole of being comes to presence.”26

To return to the present, to the politics of identity, of who we are—we see immediately that what Nietzsche explains is a world in which we are forced to assert identity, forced into the most radical individualism through a will to power, not because of an overweening hubris or a desire to exercise power, but through the constant threat of the loss of identity, of the collapse of representation, of the baleful abyss of recurrence, of the failure of power. The abyss is overcome in each case through the will to power, but it is the in each case that is decisive. Only an individualism, an overpowering individuality, strong enough to assert its values over the plenitude of the same (the valuelessness and devaluation that recurrence enforces) can posit itself in the face of recurrence. It is by seizing the moment and casting it through the strength of the overpowering self that an I overcomes the nihilism of eternal recurrence, and secures new values.

Or is it? The question is repeatedly asked “from where did Nietzsche derive the doctrine of eternal return?” The name Empedocles is offered, repeatedly. The question itself is, as Heidegger once derisively said, a shopkeeper’s question. Nietzsche’s knowledge of Empedocles was not strong. He lectured on Empedocles, but in a formula almost entirely derived from Diogenes Laertius, of little interest. But there is one other, whose reading of Empedocles is much more far-reaching, and whom Nietzsche references in an entirely covert way. Friedrich Hölderlin wrote three drafts of a play about Empedocles and his death, and Nietzsche had known these drafts since he was a schoolboy. We know this because he was reprimanded for reading Hölderlin by his schoolmaster, who commented that Nietzsche should have been reading “more German poets.”27 We presume Goethe was intended. At the age of seventeen he wrote (in a text known to Heidegger) of Hölderlin’s Empedocles as “this meaningful dramatic fragment . . . [written] in the purest Sophoclean language.”28 Lines from the drafts of the plays recur, in several places, especially in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra writings.

Empedocles is that one who describes how everything that is, returns, through an endless dissolving away and coming forth, not of the human being, but of the world (physis) as a whole. (What Empedocles says has strange resonances what with what Madsen describes in his dialogue with Joseph Smith, and this is why I refer to the setting aside of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo.) The two forces that drive this constitution of the world are opposites and as such, belong together. We have met them already in Homer. They are neikos, strife, and philia, belovedness. Empedocles sometimes speaks of storgē rather than philia, emphasizing this generative character of belovedness is affective, rather than sexual. We have already seen in what manner strife and belovedness constitute a world, the world of Hellas.

Nietzsche also, early on (1870-72), drafted plans for a play entitled “The Death of Empedocles,” which he presses into the shape of his distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac, and which remains far behind even his presentation of the doctrine of the eternal recurrence.

Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence explains and prepares the ground for the most extreme individualism, an individualism which restricts the whole of present being to the momentary strength of empowering of the subjectivity of the subject, and which isolates in the most devastating way the individuality of the individual so that each one, that one who strives for the empowerment of power must at the same wrest the moment from the whole of present being—tying into a momentary vengeful knot the entirety of past, future, and eternal present. Nietzsche makes manifest how eternal recurrence occurs in the immediate moment, in this now.

Hölderlin, in contrast, and decisively, recapitulates something we have already glimpsed in Homer. For Hölderlin has Empedocles ascend the volcano, Aetna, in order, it seems, to die. His death is a suicide. This accords with an ancient tradition: there is no evidence Empedocles died in this way. Suicide in antiquity is a trope—signalling a transformation of being, from one state to another. Another, equally important poet associated with such a suicide is Sappho. Empedocles has with him Pausanias, a younger man, who is to him (according to Diogenes Laertius) “beloved.”29 Hölderlin has Empedocles reassert to Pausanias his love for him—Pausanias has already described himself to Empedocles as his heart’s “sole and final” friend—Pausanias is Empedocles’ highest love.30 As they struggle with what Empedocles will become: one for whom the future is open, “in steadfast league with powers of nature.”31 Empedocles is preparing, on Aetna, to become a god.

Pausanias is bound, lovingly, to Empedocles: the dramatic poem makes clear that this very binding is also his freedom, but only if Empedocles also attains to what he must become—a higher being. Empedocles asks if Pausanias will give him his life’s blood—but this question is repeated, clearly having been asked before. Pausanias replies “I say and must repeat it / this too, this too, is not a matter of today / when I was born it was concluded.”32 What is not a matter of only today, but is a matter of repetition (as the text asserts) is a matter of eternity: Pausanias was fated for this from the outset.

Pausanias is the lesser of the two men (when compared to Empedocles)—which he admits. And Apollo had told Patroclus, decisively, that he was the lesser of the two, when compared to Achilles. These two do not strive for equality with those to whom they are belovedly bound, but they nevertheless, in each case, are able to bring about, to sustain, a world, because this belovedness is itself the highest, greater than with others. It is Achilles, it is Empedocles, bound freely with another that alone allows each to be entirely who they are. Empedocles, bound up with all the powers of nature, attains a unity with the whole of present being. Because the whole comes in to view, and not just a fractured part, Pausanias is freed, as bound ever to him, and, for Hölderlin, Empedocles can now become a god.

Pausanias recognises who Empedocles is to become: a becoming born out of belovedness and strife. Through it Pausanias is also freed and still bound, and Empedocles will ascend. And Empedocles says, in words that anticipate Nietzsche, words noticed by Heidegger (who does not otherwise comment on Empedocles), words that free us from the will to power in the overpowering establishment of identities: “Go”, which means, “be bound to me for ever and be free”; “fear nothing”, which means, in your being free, there is no loss, nor am I less to you in freedom—because “es kehret alles wieder” “all things recur” and thus this freedom takes place within a finitude and unity of all there is: “what is yet to happen is already accomplished.”33

Hölderlin offers us another form of eternal return. Heidegger says: “‘Nietzsche and Hölderlin’: an abyss separates them both.”34 It is Heidegger who foresaw that eternal return is not an invention of Nietzsche, or either of Hölderlin, or even of Empedocles. Eternal return, returns, eternally. The abyss stands between, not present being and being as a whole (these are the same), but between now and eternity, and therefore between being and time. The ascent to deathless immortality is the how of this becoming manifest and visible: it requires the return of a god. Only after Nietzsche’s death of god can god and the gods return. And for Heidegger, perhaps for us, Hölderlin is their as yet unheard poetic summons.

What Truman Madsen’s little text helped me unfold, and what I hope I’ve unfolded for you, is that we need to be able to explain the whole of being, the whole of present being, the past present, in the future, in the whole of time. We need to be able to understand eternity, we need to understand the human relation to eternity, and we need to understand the human relation to God if we are to preserve the unity that is dissolving before our very eyes and the developments that are taking place in political discourse in our lives.

Notes

1. Truman G. Madsen, Eternal Man (Salt Lake City: Deseret book, 1966), xiii.
2. Ibid., 3.
3. See C. P. Cavafy, “The Horses of Achilles,” in C. P. Cavafy: The Collected Poems, trans. by Evangelos Sachperoglou (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 23. I have substantially modified Sachperoglou’s translation.
4. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik (1832) in W.z.B. vol. 6, 486.
5. Karl Marx, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (1844) in Marx-Engels Werke, Berlin, Dietz, 1990 (1932), 574.
6. Homer, Iliad 17.441.
7. Cavafy, 24.
8. Homer, 19.409–10.
9. Ibid., 19.420.
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, in Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) 4, 275.
11. Glenn Most, “The Stillbirth of a Tragedy: Nietzsche and Empedocles” in Apostolos L. Pierris, The Empedoclean Κόσμος: Structure, Process and the Question of Cyclicity (Part 1) (Patras: Institute for Philosophical Research, 2005), 31.
12. Robert A. Yelle, “The Rebirth of Myth?: Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence and its Romantic Antecedents,” Numen vol. 47 (2000), 175.
13. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1962), 77-81.
14. Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974), 350.
15. Nietzsche, 272–3.
16. Martin Heidegger, Die Ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen (GA44), 97.
17. Heidegger, 24 f.
18. Nietzsche, 273.
19. Heidegger, 71; emphasis in original.
20. Ibid., 227.
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Werke (Leipzig: C. G. Naumann, 1894–1913, 19 volumes), vol. 12, Unveröffentlichtes aus der Zeit der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft und Zarathustra (1881–1886), 51, in Heidegger, 92.
22. Heidegger, 92; emphasis in original.
23. Ibid., 115.
24. Ibid., 95.
25. Ibid., 110.
26. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsches Metaphysik (GA50), ed. Petra Jaeger (1990), 31.
27. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis (GA47), p. 43 f.
28. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Brief an meinen Freund’ of October 1861 in Nietzsche: Werke (5 vols.) ed. Karl Schlechta (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1977), vol. 4, 96.
29. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2.8.60.
30. Hölderlin, “III Stufe. Empedocles auf dem Aetna,” in Norbert von Hellingrath (ed.) Hölderlins Sämtliche Werke: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, vol. 3 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1943, 4 vols), 212, l. 5–6.
31. Ibid., 212, l. 25.
32. Ibid., 214, l. 1–3.
33. Ibid., 216, l5–16.
34. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken” (GA52), 78.