Our Divine Double

Charles M. Stang

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780674970182
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religioni antiche

What if you were to discover that you were not entirely you, but rather one half of a whole, that you had, in other words, a divine double? In the second and third centuries CE, this idea gripped the religious imagination of the Eastern Mediterranean, providing a distinctive understanding of the self that has survived in various forms throughout the centuries, down to the present. Our Divine Double traces the rise of this ancient idea that each person has a divine counterpart, twin, or alter-ego, and the eventual eclipse of this idea with the rise of Christian conciliar orthodoxy.Charles Stang marshals an array of ancient sources: from early Christianity, especially texts associated with the apostle Thomas "the twin"; from Manichaeism, a missionary religion based on the teachings of the "apostle of light" that had spread from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean; and from Neoplatonism, a name given to the renaissance of Platonism associated with the third-century philosopher Plotinus. Each of these traditions offers an understanding of the self as an irreducible unity-in-duality. To encounter one's divine double is to embark on a path of deification that closes the gap between image and archetype, human and divine.While the figure of the divine double receded from the history of Christianity with the rise of conciliar orthodoxy, it survives in two important discourses from late antiquity: theodicy, or the problem of evil; and Christology, the exploration of how the Incarnate Christ is both human and divine.

1

Reading Plato’s Many Doubles

MUCH OF WHAT follows in this book concerns texts from the second and third centuries CE, texts that I am treating collectively as a “tradition.” By “tradition” I mean only that they all witness to a peculiar figure in the religious imagination of the Eastern Mediterranean: the divine double. This book will begin, however, not in the second and third centuries CE, but in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, in classical Athens, home to the philosopher Plato (428 / 427–348 / 347 BCE) and his teacher Socrates (ca. 470–399 BCE).¹ Plato, and in his hands the literary character Socrates, lays out the conceptual landscape of the tradition of the divine double that will occupy us in the chapters to come. Fittingly, my treatment of Plato falls into two halves: comedy and tragedy, confidence and anxiety. To understand the two halves (or, as it were, the two masks of Greek drama), I will begin with a very brief overview of Plato’s metaphysics, according to which the sensible world is an image (eikōn) and imitation (mimēsis) of the intelligible world. We ourselves are images, thrown into that doubled world, and enjoined to move from the sensible to the intelligible, insofar as we can. The first half of this chapter, the comedy, is not very funny at all, but is motivated by Plato’s conviction that we images can conform ever more closely to our eternal archetypes. I begin with Socrates’s famous daimonion or “guardian spirit,” who guides him with negative stimuli on a path to wisdom. The daimonion is also our guide upward to our “divine part,” the root from which we are in fact the downward growth. Plato’s discussions of Socrates’s daimonion thus introduce two crucial axes for the tradition of the divine double: (1) the horizontal—how and why we form pairs with our fellow humans; and (2) the vertical—the disorientation and reorientation that comes when we recognize that we are each the derivative half of some prior pair, and how and why we can each conform to our divine half. I then take up the relationship between these two axes, the horizontal and the vertical, more directly. In Phaedrus and Alcibiades I, Plato establishes lover and beloved not only as an amorous pair, but as horizontal doubles who, like mirrors, allow each to see (what is best in) himself. Lover and beloved see each other reflected in the other, not only as they each are, but more importantly, as they each should be. Thus, the horizontal serves the vertical axis, as the lover and beloved enable each other’s mutual deification. This discourse is comedy insofar as it suggests a happy ending, and thereby exudes confidence. Much of the subsequent tradition of the divine double is funded by Plato’s comedic confidence that we can and should become as divine as our double.

But even within Plato’s writings there emerges another discourse, the tragic—this will occupy the second half of this chapter. Ironically, Plato chooses as the spokesman of this tragic discourse not Socrates but rather his contemporary, Aristophanes, Athens’s most celebrated comedian. For this tragic discourse we look to the Symposium and Aristophanes’s very funny, but not at all comedic, tale about the gods slicing humans in half: we are now only half of a former whole. The gods permit each half to find its other, form a pair, and through sexual union dull the pain of primordial separation. But the gods refuse (or are unable—it is unclear) to undo the original division, to fuse the two into one, to deliver a union without remainder or gap. The sorry souls of Aristophanes’s funny tale are left with the tragic knowledge that the two will never be one again. Instead, they live in a persistent and penultimate two-in-oneness, or unity-in-duality. The anxiety that this introduces into the equation is only made more acute in Plato’s most difficult dialogue, the Parmenides. Threats abound to the comedic confidence of the first half: the sensible and the intelligible worlds threaten to decouple, and the theory of Forms is beset with criticisms Socrates cannot answer. Parmenides schools Socrates in dialectic, and then performs a dialectical exercise in eight deductions. The first two are the most famous, and they begin with the hypotheses “if (the one is) one” (ei hen estin) and “if the one is” (hen ei estin). The result of the first deduction is that if the one is one, then it cannot be; the result of the second deduction is that if the one is, then it cannot be one. Although these two, and the other six, deductions are seemingly intended to salvage Socrates’s teetering theory of Forms, I propose (following ancient precedent) that we read the first two deductions as a sort of philosophical allegory, not so much about the Forms as about us. If we are each of us already doubled, one half human and one half divine, then the first deduction teaches us that the union of our two halves is impossible—that strictly speaking, it cannot be. Short of that impossible goal—union without distinction or difference—we are, which is to say, we exist, as two. The second deduction concludes that the one-that-is is always two, and this is where we find ourselves, we are and so we are doubled, striving after the impossible union that cannot be.

Plato thus ushers us into the tradition of the divine double in the second and third centuries, into those Christian and Manichaean sources (Chapters 2 through 4) that express such a vivid interest in the borderlands between the one and the not-one, an interest mapped directly onto human selfhood. His comedy funds their confidence in union and deification, his tragedy their acknowledgment of how we fall short of that union and deification and must instead negotiate the realm of the not-one, a tense but dynamic model of selfhood constituted by an inalienable duality, a new singularity for which these sources struggle to give an adequate name. With Plotinus (Chapter 5) we come full circle, not only in his innovation on his Platonic inheritance, but also in his own peculiar account of this dynamic model of selfhood and how it fits into a larger metaphysical frame of doubles, all of which must be overcome (if they can be) in our return to the ineffable One.

The Divided Line and the Doubled Person

To appreciate the play of Plato’s many doubles, horizontal and vertical, we must first appreciate that his overall metaphysical framework—the division between sensible and intelligible realities—is already a structure of doubles. This is perhaps best explored through that section from Republic VI where Socrates introduces the analogy of the “divided line” to explain the nature of the world, seen and unseen. First, Socrates states unequivocally that there are “two kinds of things, visible and intelligible” (509d). To explain the relationship between the two and our itinerary from the one to the other, he introduces the notion of a line divided into two unequal sections. The longer of the two sections corresponds to the intelligible world, and the shorter to the sensible world. And within each section the line is further divided in two, and according to the same proportion as the whole line was divided. So the sensible world divides in two: on the bottom of the sensible scale are “images”—“and by images (eikones), I mean first, shadows (tas skias), then reflections in water (ta en tais hydasi phantasmata) and in all close-packed smooth, and shiny materials, and everything of that sort” (509d); at the top of the sensible scale are “the originals of these images”—for example, animals, plants, and presumably also our own bodies. Knowledge of the entire sensible world has the epistemological status of “opinion” (doxa), with the lower realm falling under the category of imagination (eikasia) and the higher of belief (pistis).

But these sensible things—solid, observable things like animals and plants—are in turn “images” of the intelligible realm of the Forms. The lower domain of the intelligible realm is that of soul, and soul uses sensible things, which are themselves really images of intelligible Forms: “the soul is forced to use … as images those very things of which images were made in the section below, and which, by comparison to their images, were thought to be clear and to be valued as such” (511a). Using these sensible things as images, the soul reasons by way of hypotheses and reaches conclusions that have the epistemological status of “thought” (dianoia). These are the “so-called sciences” or technai (511c). The soul, however, can vault from thought to understanding (nous) by shedding these images:

It does not consider these hypotheses as first principles but truly as hypotheses—but as stepping stones to take off from, enabling it to reach the un-hypothetical first principle of everything. Having grasped this principle, it reverses itself and, keeping hold of what follows from it, comes down to a conclusion without making use of anything visible at all, but only of forms themselves, moving on from forms to forms, and ending in forms. (511b)

Dialectic, in passing beyond the use of images as hypotheses, is the true “science” or epistēmē and delivers the soul squarely into the realm of the Forms, where intelligibility is on offer. Ruling over this realm of the Forms is the unhypothetical first principle of everything, a kind of superform, the good itself, beyond being: “the good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power” (ouk ousias ontos tou agathou, all’eti epekeina tēs ousias) (509b).

This brief description furnishes us with a good picture of Plato’s world as doubled or divided between the sensible and the intelligible domains, and further doubled or subdivided in each domain. What is crucial to understand, however, is that the fundamental relationship between the sensible and the intelligible worlds is one of imaging (eikōn) and imitation (mimēsis); and furthermore that this relationship is recapitulated intrasensibly, so to speak, between concrete sensible things (animals, plants, and such), and the shadowy world of representation (words, painting, sculpture, and so on). Everything here is either an image of an eternal archetype (a Form or eidos) or an image of such an image. The great achievement of the analogy of the divided line is that it not only provides a picture of a divided world and the relationship between its two halves, but also places us in that world and puts us on an itinerary from sensible to intelligible, from image to archetype, from opinion to knowledge. What it means to be a human—or perhaps better, a person—is to be somewhere along this itinerary, negotiating doubles, using images and reflections in order eventually to discard them.

The distinction between a human and a person is one introduced by Lloyd P. Gerson in his book, Knowing Persons: A Study in Plato, whereas the human is the composite between body and soul, the person (properly speaking) is a soul.² Sometimes Gerson will speak of the human as our embodied endowment, what is given to us regardless of our efforts; and of the person, by contrast, as our achievement, the philosophical project of becoming a proper person or a self.³ One of the most important, and persuasive, claims that Gerson advances is that (endowed, embodied) humans “are situated within a hierarchical metaphysics by Plato,” and more specifically that “our endowment—the persons we are here below—… stand[s] to an ideal of achievement roughly as images stand to their eternal exemplars.”⁴ In other words, we are sensible objects in the world—composites of body and soul—and so occupy a place on the divided line, namely at the top of the sensible scale. We are images of the eternal Forms, as there are further derivative images of us and other sensible objects (the shadows at the bottom of the sensible scale). But we are distinct in one crucial regard: “For Plato, embodied persons [in other words, we humans] are the only sorts of images that can reflectively recognize their own relatively inferior states as images and strive to transform themselves into their own ideal.”⁵ I have found Gerson’s distinction between human and person very helpful for interpreting not only Plato but other texts in the tradition of the divine double. However, his characterization of the arrival of the person as something “achieved” suggests a striving, almost muscular effort that, to my mind, runs counter to Plato and the texts to which we will turn in subsequent chapters. Perhaps it is better to think of the “achieved” self as the “received” self, because its arrival is more often occasioned by a release or a letting-go than by a grasping effort.

Many scholars, perhaps driven by Descartes’s concerns rather than Plato’s, focus their attention on what we might call Plato’s horizontal anthropology: how he imagines the body and soul forming a composite entity in this world. Gerson suggests that this horizontal anthropology is explicitly in the service of a more urgent, vertical anthropology: “The fundamental contrast for Plato is between the ideal disembodied person or self we strive to become and its embodied image … it is the identity of ideal and image, not that of various diachronic images, that is primary.”⁶ What it means to be a human is to recognize that one’s endowed humanity is a composite and an image, from which recognition two things follow: (1) the practice of isolating the soul from the body and unifying its distinct nature—what we might call a horizontal exercise; (2) the practice of having that isolated and unified soul strive to achieve identity with its ideal or eternal archetype—what we might call a vertical exercise. Gerson is exactly right when he prompts us to ask “in what sense there is truly identity between the embodied person [with its soul isolated and unified] and that person’s disembodied ideal state [the archetype of its soul].”⁷ Not only of Plato, but of all the figures and texts we will soon survey, we will want to ask how each conceives of this union or identity between image and archetype, whether and how such a thing is even possible.

What follows in subsequent sections, namely our exploration of Plato’s many doubles, must be understood against the backdrop both of (a) Plato’s doubled metaphysics, sensible reality as the image of intelligible reality, a world in which we are placed and then urged to move from one to the other; and of (b) the knowledge that...