The Devil’s Dictionary

I recently bought a Dover Thrift Edition of The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. For $3.50, I am very happy with my purchase.* This thin volume, whose definitions are usually maxims in disguise, satisfies the appetite for aphoristic writing I have been cultivating since my sophomore year at St. John’s College, thanks largely to Solomon and Francis Bacon.  My favorite entry for the moment is

Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

It has a touch of Socratic, but even more of Pascalian, irony. See, for example, the middle of Pensée 327 (my translation):

The sciences have two extremes that touch each other. The first is the pure natural ignorance, in which all men find themselves at birth. The second extreme is the one reached by great souls who, after having rigorously passed through all that men can know, find that they know nothing, and encounter the very same ignorance they left behind; but this is a knowing ignorance, acquainted with itself. Those between the two—who have moved on from the natural ignorance and been unable to arrive at the other—they have some hint of this self-important science, and pretend to be knowledgeable. It is those who trouble the world and judge everything poorly.

The entry from Bierce and the pensée from Pascal overlap, but (as I consider it more) they are obviously thought out in very different spirits. In the end, though Bierce has the bite of wit and concision, I can’t say that I prefer it to Pascal et al.  He is just too odious sometimes, too dark. As I thumb through some of the other entries,† I find the same feelings building up for Bierce that I have for other aphorists such as La Rochefoucauld and Nietzsche—a blend of admiration and contempt—

for all of what they write is written well,
but much of what they think is black as hell.

Some of the entries betray a blackness in him that cannot be excused by the usefulness of satire. Being wary of the corrosive effect of wit and pessimism, I’ll keep The Devil’s Dictionary on hand for special occasions, but only holding it at a distance.

* I know what one of my readers might be saying: “Philip, you should be careful with that book! Look at its title!” But relax. Just because a book is called a “dictionary” doesn’t mean that it’s evil!
† See entries for delusion, emotion, evangelist, extinction, and oblivion, to name a few.

Preview and Update

For my own pleasure I have begun writing a short paper that reads Genesis 3 through the roughly cut lens of Nietzsche’s three moral epochs, as if the first man and woman were “pre-moral” before the opening of their eyes, and obviously “moral” afterward, as described in the thirty-second aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil.  The third epoch, the “extra-moral,” will be the point of departure from the textual explication of Genesis into speculation—probably about how Nietzsche’s “will to power” relates to the curses, Cain and Abel, and the gospel message.  I think it will turn out to be a bigger project than I had anticipated on beginning it, but it should be insightful.  What?  Do I expect Nietzsche will teach me something about Genesis?  It is possible, but it is more likely that Genesis will teach me something about Nietzsche.

In other news, I am doing well.  I have had an unusual week dealing with the large snowfall (“snowmageddon” or “the snowpocalypse,” if you will) in Annapolis, Maryland.  This week will likely  bring what is expected in February here, namely, brisk wind and wintry mix. Hurray?  Apart from being amazed at the weather, I’ve been studying my buns off.  I’ve begun to read Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Darwin’s Origin of Species, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and a wee bit of Einstein.  I am in the thick of things.  My audio-Bible will give me a little rest from this turbulent swell of philosophy, poetry, and physics.

Reflection on Nietzsche’s “Free Spirit”

They looked at this man, this not-man, this murderer, with disgust and horror.—“Is he a psychopath, or just utterly unsympathetic, apathetic, a not-man?”—They cannot understand him.  He must appear masked to them—“What are his motives?”—Why do they care about his motives?—“He is evil, and does he not see it or care?  Without care!”—He is unintelligible without his mask.  He does not play by the rules but, as it is, has enough strength to endure a little while before an enforcer of someone’s rules crushes him with a penalty.  He has risen from a deeper ruin and is rearing his ugly head here.  Is this his convalescence or his last writhing motion before death?—“What is this monster?”— If there is an end for the sake of which humankind exists, then he more than any has failed to meet it.  If there is no such end, he is a god among men.  As a monster or a god, either way he is a not-man.  Behold the free spirit.  If he is not a god, he will die more wretchedly than any man.  If he is a god at present, and does not die, then his is a living death without love, and eventually lacking feeling, lacking pleasure, and lacking consciousness as much as he lacks conscience.  If he is becoming a god, this is worst of all:—not merely having nothing, but being nothing.

Untimeliness

Nietzsche in his short work On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life describes his own studies in the Greek classics as “untimely” and giving him “untimely experiences,” and he also names the book in which that work was published Untimely Meditations.  The study of the classics is untimely insofar as it is “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.”  I find this altogether fascinating.  He thinks that his untimely education is producing in him untimely meditations for his present time and making him an untimely person.  He thinks that by writing he is counter to his own time, reshaping his own time, and benefiting a time to come.  I will hijack this term for the following meditation, acknowledging that what I say is an oversimplification and only a tangent off of Nietzsche’s meaning.

An underlying notion of untimeliness is that we are the children of our time, and that some oddballs by various influences become the estranged children of other times.  I feel as though I have met a few people, here and there, whom I would call “untimely” in this sense, either because of their education or their upbringing or unusual experiences.  They are like the children of a different time, good or bad, and will always stand out in that way to me.  But as I considered this untimeliness more, I began to meditate on a song by Jason Upton called “Dear John,” which takes the tone of Jesus speaking or writing to John the Baptist about their lives.  The following is the third verse:

Do you remember how it made us feel
To be traded for a foolish lie?
I was the song that danced
You were the song that healed
But neither song could satisfy
Wisdom was fighting for her life
We were the children of our time

Commenting on this song, Upton repeated the last line saying, “We were the children of our time, and they killed us, John!”  As at Luke 7.33f., no matter what extreme form the gospel takes—whether coming from John the ascetic wild-man, or Jesus, who eats and drinks and talks with sinners—it will not be appealing to the world and those who live by its principles.  Jesus and John preached the same message through two radically different lifestyles, and both were rejected.  The excuse for this rejection was on the basis for their lifestyles, but in truth it was the message, which was altogether untimely in the sense mentioned above.  Why they did not fit had to do with where they came from and who sent them, not what they looked like or where they lived.  This kind of untimeliness is all about the internal, and nothing to do with what the world looks at on the outside.

When Upton says of John and Jesus that they were the children of their time, this should be colored by the first verse of the song:

Do you remember when our mothers met?
Mama told me that they laughed
Was that a sign for us?
Or a sign for them?
When unborn babies testify
Carried between the earth and sky
Sons of eternity in time

He calls John and Jesus “sons of eternity.”  This is where my meditation led me: they were indeed the children of their time, and all who are a children of this time are, for all times, untimely.

This is now a far cry away from what Nietzsche was claiming about his own work, and I don’t mean to make too much of a comparison.  I only offer some questions evolving from the language that I have stolen:

• Are all followers of Jesus, those who take upon themselves the name of the sons and daughters of the living God, called to be untimely as he was?
• How does such untimeliness come about regardless of lifestyle, regardless of asceticism or (comparative) sybaritism, regardless of the outward appearance?
• What should the untimely meditation look like which comes about from studies in eternity?