The Metaphysics of Memory - Part Six
'Lean neath stone pine the pastor lies with his crook; young pricket by pricket's sister nibbleth on returned viridities; amaid her rocking grasses the herb trinity shams lowliness; skyup is of ever-grey'.
- James Joyce, (1882 – 1941), 'Finnegans Wake'.
Upon consideration as to how and in what way a theological outlook might be consistent with his own philosophical viewpoint Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770 – 1831), directed his thoughts towards the Holy Trinity. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity contends that God is one yet three coeternal, consubstantial persons, or hypostases, the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ) and the Holy Spirit; one God in three Divine Persons. (In metaphysics hypostasis is substance, essence, foundation; in theology, it is one of the three persons of the Trinity, the union of Christ's human and divine natures). These three persons are distinct, and yet are one substance, essence or nature. Within such a context, a nature is what one is; a person, on the other hand, is who one is.
'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost'.
- 'Matthew', 28:19.
According to legend it was St. Patrick (a fifth-century Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland, indeed, the apostle of Ireland, as he has been designated, Ireland's principle patron saint) who schooled the Irish about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity by exhibiting to them the shamrock, a three-leafed plant, using it as an illustration of the Christian teaching of God in three persons.This is alluded to in the 'Finnegans Wake' quote with which I began; and although the story, as it appears in writing, can only be traced back as far as 1726, though it may well be older, the shamrock has subsequently become a central symbol for Saint Patrick's Day.
Ceiling painting of St Patrick lighting the paschal fire on the Hill of Slane, 433 AD, by Vincenzo Waldre, 1792, in the St Patrick's Hall in the State Apartments at Dublin Castle , Ireland
In pagan Ireland, three was a significant number; the Irish had their own triple deities, a fact that may well have assisted Patrick in his endeavours to evangelise when he held up a shamrock and uttered forth upon the Christian Trinity. The Morrígan (also known as the Morrígu, the phantom queen), for instance, was a shape-shifting and therianthropic Celtic Goddess of War, Fate and Death. The Morrígan was often characterised as a trinity of individuals, all of them sisters, called the three Morrígna. According to one account, the three representatives of the trinity were Badb (a war goddess that frequently assumed the form of a crow, this is the therianthropic aspect of the goddess), Macha, and Nemain. It was widely held that these were all names for the same goddess.
Macha Curses the Men of Ulster, illustration by Stephen Reid, from Eleanor Hull’s 'The Boys’ Cuchulainn', 1904.
The Morrigan also presided over rivers, lakes and fresh water, in addition to being a patroness of revenge, night, magic, prophecy, priestesses and witches. The Anna Liva Plurabella section in 'Finnegan’s Wake', (see 'The Metaphysics of Memory' – Part Three) may be read as a modern recreation of the Morrigan, beginning as it does with an exhortation to describe the river Liffey; then we listen in on an intermingling of speech and diverse tones of discourse of the washer-women, describing the beguiling effects of human beauty, the nature of women, evoking as they chatter voices from Celtic epics, all intertwined with strands from the 'Book of Kells', an illuminated manuscript, in Latin, comprising the four Gospels of the 'New Testament', together with sundry prefatory texts, created in an Irish monastery around 800 AD. And within such an reverent/irreverent recollection of historical events, legends, myths, is heard the voice of the Bean Nighe, (Scottish Gaelic for 'washer-woman', a female spirit seen as an omen of death, haunting bleak and isolated streams, washing the clothing of those about to die), as they do Ireland’s washing, together with evocations of other female archetypes; they wash, haunted, as night descends.......:
Ivan Kramskoi, 'Drowned Maidens', ('Русалки'), 1871
'Ireland sober is Ireland stiff. Lord help you Maria full of Grease, the load is with me'.
- 'Finnegans Wake'.
[That is, 'Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee', the 'Hail Mary', or 'Ave Maria', (Latin), a traditional Catholic prayer asking for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. The other reference is to Father Theobald Mathew, (1790–8 – 1856), Irish Catholic priest, teetotalist reformer, advocate of temperance: 'Ireland sober is Ireland free']
Evidence is lacking to suggest that the shamrock was ever sacred to the pagan Irish; although it may have symbolised nature's powers of regeneration; and it could be cast anew to accord with a Christian viewpoint. St Patrick is often depicted in icons with a cross in one hand and a sprig of shamrocks in the other; and perhaps it may be reasonable to suppose that the goodly saint drew upon the visual concept of the triskele while making the shamrock serve to assist in his explanations of the Trinity.
Triskelion/Triskele Celtic Symbol
'Triskeles', Greek, meaning 'three legs'. The Triskele, a triple spiral is a complex ancient Celtic symbol, sometimes referred to as a Triskelion, its earliest creation has been dated back to the neolithic era; it can be seen at the entrance of Newgrange, Ireland, a Boyne valley tomb. They form part of the design of an astronomical calendar carved into the rock and have been dated back to 3200 B.C. Such a connection between so ancient a structure and the triskelion may account for a widely held association between the symbol and Celtic culture, though the native inhabitants of Ireland at the time were not Celts; they immigrated there at a later stage, but the triskele consistently appears in Celtic art for thousands of years, especially after 500 BCE.
The entrance passage to Newgrange, 5000 year old monument, and the entrance stone
This archaic symbol is one of the most complex to decipher as symbolists believe it to be reflective of many areas of culture from the time. And it reappears in the culture of our own time; in the Triskelion building, for instance, headquarters of Marvel comics' S.H.I.E.L.D. (an acronym that changes over the years, 'Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division', or 'Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate', or 'Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division'), a fictional espionage, special law-enforcement, and counter-terrorism agency. The main building of the Triskelion is three tall structures connected at the top, and arranged in a circle; three spokes in a roughly circular arrangement; a three-point or three-body formation, with all three bodies of the trinity being equal in volume.
The Triskelion, primary headquarters for S.H.I.E.L.D., Theodore Roosevelt Island, on the Potomac River, between Wahington, D.C. and Virginia.
And so, one of the most curious and thought-provoking facets of the history of human existence that has been bequeathed to us by our ancestors is that of the language of symbols. They are to be found the world over and in all cultures, and they furnish us with a connection to our common past; and yet more often than not they raise more questions than they answer. In the case of the triskelion an individual who inhabited this planet untold millennia ago combined three separate spirals into the shape that is now referred to as the triskelion; we can only speculate as to whether they ever believed that they were creating a shape that would endure for so long into the future. Was it merely a plain and simple matter of aesthetic imagination and invention that spurred such an individual onwards? Or was there within their psyche a more profound understanding of some kind of universal scheme of things, an apprehension at some fundamental level of the workings of the cosmos, a sliver of awareness and comprehension that is now obscured and irrecoverable by the murkiness of our distant, primordial past?
The meaning of the triskele is diverse, varied and with many possibilities. It may perhaps represent motion; all three arms are arranged to give the appearance of an outward motion from the centre; and motion, it is presumed, signifies energies; in particular, for a Celtic symbol, we may presume such energies to comprise of movements of action, momentum, cyclical courses, development and growth, rotations, turnings and reversals, unfoldings, struggles of engagement, the desire for mastery and the betterment of others. But what, we may wonder, is the precise symbolic significance of the three arms of the triskele? This depends on the particular epoch, the culture, the mythology, the history; the three extensions in the triple spiral symbol can connote, among other things, past/present/future, creation/preservation/destruction, life/death/rebirth, spirit/mind/body, mother/father/child, power/intellect/love.
Celtic Trinity Knot Or Triquetra
And the Celtic triskele most probably represents three Celtic domains; the spiritual, the present one, and the celestial. Like the Celtic Trinity knot, the Triquetra, (Latin for 'triangle'), the number three incorporates a particular symbolism. The Trinity Knot is a time-honoured Celtic symmetrical design of three arcs interlaced to form a triangular shape, a symbol that may have come from the Christian Monks who converted the Celts, or it may have been an original Celtic design; but by the 9th century A.C.E. it featured as decoration in the Book of Kells. This religious symbol served for many years in Christian and pagan heritages; the three arcs can be regarded as representative of many things. For Christians it serves as representative of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; for others it symbolises Earth/Sea/Sky, or Earth/Fire/Water. Within certain cultures it represents eternal love, and is frequently spoken about as the Irish Love Knot. Archaeologists have discovered the Celtic Knot close by lunar and solar symbols on Celtic sites, from which we may conclude that the Celts believed it to represent something of the lunar and solar cycles.
In the motion picture 'Thor' a Triquetra symbol is displayed upon Thor's hammer Mjollnir.
Thor, 'The Dark World'.
The number three certainly seems to have held a particular attraction for those of a contemplative disposition, directing their thought's to life's meaning, or to higher powers, given its persistent reappearance in sacred texts, in myths, in legends, in fairy tales from the world over. The Celtic Knot is often to be observed with a circle looping through the three arcs, emphasising the unity of the three forces. But what forces might they be? In the tradition of Christianity, the Holy Trinity of the father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; or the three failed endeavours of Satan to tempt Christ in the wilderness; or the three days after which Jesus rose from the dead. And, transcending particular religions and cultures, the three planes of existence, Heaven, Hell and Earth; and we encounter the number three through the concepts body/mind/spirit; or in temporal distinctions, past/present/future. In mythology, the three Norns, the three Fates; in fairy tales, the three little pigs, Goldilocks and the three bears. And not to mention, of course, three witches:
FIRST WITCH:
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
SECOND WITCH:
When the hurly-burly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
THIRD WITCH:
That will be ere the set of sun.
- 'Macbeth', Act 1, Scene 1.
The Three Hegelian Witches
Thought generates its triadic structures driven as it is by its mission to uncover deeper meanings behind this thing called life; hence with purity and earnestness the number three emerges both within cosmogonic myths and within philosophical discourse. The Triskelion and all such symbolism represent three opposing forces, the opposition of which tells a tale of a progressive forward movement towards reaching an understanding; Hegelian dialectic, that is. This is normally presented as comprising three dialectical stages of development: a thesis giving rise to its reaction; an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis; and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis. But this is not Hegel's formulation; after all, why would a thesis necessarily stand in need of an antithesis? Better to employ a three-valued logical model: abstract-negative-concrete; the suggestion then is that the initial thesis is flawed, or incomplete, in some manner, which is to say, it is too abstract; and as such it lacks the negativity required to put it to the test; the concrete, or the synthesis, must therefore forever have to surmount the negative phase, in the course towards completion, that is, mediation; the concrete is mediated, unlike the abstract. And so it goes on …. and on ….
'Aufhebung' is the term Hegel employs to describe this operation of the dialectic, this activity of overcoming the negative, at times it is translated into English as 'sublation', at others as 'overcoming'. Such dialectical operations preserve the advantageous parts of an notion whilst moving beyond its limitations, whereby implicit contradictions are rendered explicit; each phase of the process is the result of contradictions inherent or implicit in the preceding stage. And such a dialectic cannot automatically apply to any selected thesis, for then the selection of any antithesis, aside from the logical negation of the thesis, will be subjective, and if the logical negation is then used as the antithesis, there is no rigorous way to derive a synthesis. It is not rhetorical contradictions that we are after, as would be the case were an antithesis opted for simply to match a subject's subjective purpose; rather it is logical ones, so that the ensuing synthesis may be unerringly vindicated against a plurality of alternate conceivable syntheses. Contradictions or negations do not come from the exterior of things, but are inherent in and internal to things, and the purpose of dialectics, Hegel claims, is 'to study things in their own being and movement and thus to demonstrate the finitude of the partial categories of understanding'.
The doctrine of the Trinity has made evident how the shape of religious consciousness has already accomplished the surpassing of the distinctions between appearance and essence, the world and reason, in precisely the manner that is requisite for its appropriation by speculative philosophy; nonetheless, it still does not proceed with this advancement in appropriately conceptual terms, but merely in its characteristic picture-thinking; hence, my discourse concerning the triskelion and the Trinity knot, to clarify this point; they are externally representational forms. The consequence of picture-thinking for religion is discourse in terms of God the Father and God the Son, of God creating the world, of the Fall; and faith inclines towards an understanding of such doctrines in literal terms; and from this arise inescapable complications, the real significance of which is essentially philosophical, implicitly reflecting an understanding into the manner by which reason is actualized in this world.
'Creazione di Adamo', Michelangelo, c. 1512
And therefore, apropos the notion of creation, Hegel remarks: ‘This 'creating' is picture-thinking’s word for the Notion itself in its absolute movement’. There is, in Hegel's view at any rate, a parallel between his own philosophical position that reality is informed by reason, and the Christian notion of the creation,whereby God instantiates Himself in the world. And further, the narrative of the Fall conveys the manner in which the thinking subject comes to feel alienated from the world, once he or she attempts to reflect upon it, and relinquishes his or her immediate absorption into nature:
'Immediate existence suddenly turns into thought, or mere self-consciousness into consciousness of thought; and, moreover, because the thought stems from immediacy or is conditioned thought, it is not pure knowledge, but thought that is charged with otherness and is, therefore, the self-opposed thought of Good and Evil. Man is pictorially thought of in this way: that it once happened, without any necessity, that he lost the form of being at one with himself through plucking the fruit of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, and was expelled from the state of innocence, from Nature which yielded its fruits without toil, and from Paradise, from the garden with its creatures... Such a form of expression as ‘fallen’ which, like the expression ‘Son’, belongs, moreover, to picture-thinking and not to the Notion, degrades the moments of the Notion to the level of picture-thinking or carries picture-thinking over into the realm of thought'.
And therefore, through separating out the rational content of religion from its representational form it is Hegel's aspiration to demonstrate how many of the issues with which the critics of religion during the Enlightenment were preoccupied (concerning the mechanics of the creation, or God’s relation to his Son, for example), were not real issues, but simply problems that arose in relation to the form in which religious belief obscured its underlying speculative ideas, ideas which could then be given a less mystifying expression in philosophical thought. Turning once again to the story of the crucifixion and resurrection, Hegel argues that Christianity ought to be a religion in which the divine is seen as living within the spiritual community, and thus as without any completely transcendent component:
‘The death of the Mediator is the death not only of his natural aspect or of his particular being for-self, not only of the already dead husk stripped of its essential Being, but also of the abstraction of the divine Being’.
Nonetheless, Hegel contends that it is difficult for the Christian community to dispense with all facets of transcendence in its religious thinking, and so it therefore persists in maintaining that complete rational insight, the very imperative underlying religious consciousness, in Hegel's view, is only to be acquired in the beyond. It therefore rests upon philosophy's shoulders to demonstrate by what means such insight is attainable in the here and now:
'The world is indeed implicitly reconciled with the divine Being; and regarding the divine Being it is known, of course, that it recognizes the object as no longer alienated from it but as identical with it in its love. But for self-consciousness, this immediate presence still has not the shape of Spirit. The Spirit of the community is thus in its immediate consciousness divided from its religious consciousness, which declares, it is true, that in themselves they are not divided, but this merely implicit unity is not realized, or has not yet become an equally absolute being for-self'.
'In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen'.
- 'Finnegans Wake'
To be continued......
Notes to Quotations from 'Finnegans Wake:
First Quotation:
1. lean = not plump or fat, thin.
2. neath = beneath.
3. stone pine = a pine with wide-spreading glat topped head; and pine (French Slang), penis.
4. pastor = a herdsman or shepherd (now not so common); and pastor (Latin), a herdsman; and St Patrick, buried in Ulster, hence this phrase refers to the province of Ulster.
5. crook = a shepherd's staff, with a curve.
7. pricket = a buck in his second year; and prick (Slang), penis.
8. pricket's sister = female fallow deer in second year.
9. nibble = to bite away little by little.
10. viridities = viridity, a quality or state of being green, greenness (i.e. green vegetation); and virility.
11. amaid = amid; and a maid.
12. herb trinity = plant with violet flowers.
Second Quotation:
1. latter = the second of two or the second mentioned of two: opposed to former.
2. holocaust = 'holo', a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire; a whole burnt offering; and 'In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen', (a blessing).