Hylomorphism: Heidegger and Hermes-Trismegistus v. Augustine on Idolatry

"Demons, man." -overheard in Cairo.

The story behind this article is fairly typical of me. Rather than finish any of the books I currently have to read, I decided to stumble into the Waterstones in Reading and have a nibble on a few texts I haven’t picked up already. Among these was Augustine’s The City of God [not as embarrassing as my never having touched Wuthering Heights, but not great]. As it happened, one of the essays I had taken a break from at the same time was Yuk Hui’s outstanding Rhythm and Technics: On Heidegger’s Commentary on Rimbaud. While Hui’s text is really concerned with Heidegger’s ideas about rhythm as ‘ontogenesis’ -or a kind of organising mainframe behind different ontologies of artistic expression- the fact it was in my mind while looking at Augustine was not inconsequential, especially because the sections of Augustine I read were those on idolatry as described and defended in the writings of Hermes-Trismegistus, a legendary Egyptian polytheist/Pagan.

Not only does Trismegistus anticipate some of the critiques made by Heidegger of Aristotle’s Hylomorphism -the belief that objects are comprised of form and matter (of which more later)- but, further than that, I contend Heidegger can be used to overwrite some of the anti-idolatry arguments made by Augustine himself. We’re basically doing an apologia for “Demons” that claims part and parcel of the Christian strategy to gain religious authority is activating a geskell, or Enframing, that shuts down its own conception of the spiritual world. [Strap yourselves in, heretic bros.]

Here’s the deal. Hylomorphism basically refers to a mode of interpreting reality derived from Aristotle’s Metaphysics in which beings are understood as existing in reality between matter and form e.g. a statue can be understood as “the matter” of marble/stone given “the form” of a human head imagined by its artist. Now, at least to Aristotle, this ultimately means that matter is subject to form -in particular the causa finalis, or ritual purpose for which, say, a chalice is constructed. On top of the causa efficiens, the silversmith himself, who has his own limiting preferences, the causa finalis creates an important foreclosing end standard for the chalice in question i.e. if your priests are thinking of using it to praise the Gods rather than get plastered, it will and should look more decorative.

                          Aristotle’s Hylomorphism, courtesy of Franklin Puzzeti Dyer

Evidently there is reason for Heidegger to critique this way of understanding the manufacturing of art. For one, it’s counter-imaginative: so interested in the way art-generation is narrowed increasingly that creating art in accordance with it might well make the work in question less expansive and interesting. Hui: ‘artisans bring the objects into presence; but in the form of imposition practices (of pre-existing ideas/forms imposed upon an inert matter), abstract thinking precedes the process of making. This transition is what Heidegger calls forgetting of Being as closure.’ For Heidegger, Hylomorphism thus creates an artificial destiny for an artistic project, not derived from what he describes as the ‘fittingness’ of natural rhythm. The bagginess and looseness of the term 'fittingness' in English is itself fitting. It’s nothing like the mechanical tightness of ‘gestalten’, Heidegger’s word for the ontic structure or skeleton that emerges in the production of technology when most creative options are cut off. If, for Heidegger, Aristotle’s Hylomorphism pushes up a generic set of bones through the "matter" of the imagination, perhaps he would have trusted more something like Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome, the endlessly spawning radical seed, following and abandoning its own tradition/trajectory simultaneously. This is somewhat akin to the idol-production which Augustine describes Hermes supporting:

‘The Egyptian, however, says that there are some gods made by the supreme God, and some made by men. Anyone who hears this, as I have stated it, no doubt supposes that it has reference to images, because they are the works of the hands of men; but he asserts that visible and tangible images are, as it were, only the bodies of gods, and that there dwell in them certain spirits, which have been invited to come into them.’

So long Aristotle. The "form" of the idol-God is not carved into the statue’s materials, says Hermes, rather it is ‘invited in’. The causa finalis is self-determining, and so the artist is permitted to follow their own whims to a much greater extent while creating the idol. The divine is also allowed the confidence to decide autonomously what it inhabits, perhaps in a process like literary canonization, instead of having to abide by hyper-Aristotelean authoritarianism: one God, ultimately only one way of doing things.

In contrast, when Trismegistus himself suggests that ‘the statues, animated and full of sensation and spirit…do such great and wonderful things.’, the key word is 'animated’. If he was presented with Bel or the Dragon statues from The Old Testament -cold and uninhabited by the libidinal energy of their believers- he would not be moved. For Trismegistus, it is implied the statues are made magical in proportion to their accessibility for spirits. In other words, they seem to be arranged in a hierarchy from dead and stony to almost living. This might explain why Egypt is Trismegistus’s ‘image of heaven, or. . .a translation and descent of all things which are ordered and transacted there.’ The statues supposedly taken over by a number of Gods would have presented a direct, exciting and mobile spirituality with its own regularly jostled or rhizomatic organisation. Forget Satan. All ‘the angels’ are competing for class advancement in Trismegistus’s period. It’s logical to assume this would have cohered with a broad sense of cultural centrality: only a Pop chart of Gods and idol makers could have generated Hermes’ confidence Egypt was ‘the temple of the whole world.’ -that is, its living magical centre.

What Augustine tries to do in reaction is impose a Christian Enframing, aggrandising Christian aesthetics as holy and rejecting the independently spiritual. The one acceptable "form" is that which is sourced immediately from God. Augustine thinks there are no Gods that are ‘works of the hands of men’. On this he quotes 'the holy prophets, who, foreseeing these things, said with exultation, “If a man shall make gods, lo, they are no gods.”’ The counterargument that, if men can make gods, men are necessarily god-like does not cross Augustine's mind. Nor does the idea that gods might, in fact, be above men while still being created by them (bodily). This is possibly because he is so locked-up in the Great Chain of Being, he can't help but imagine all man-created divinities are denigrations, movements farther from God that undermine his hierarchy by giving up their positions as humans to the idols below them. [Below-ness and all heretical artistic production are implied to be the same.] Hence Augustine writing: ‘But unclean spirits, associated through that wicked art with these same idols, have miserably taken captive the souls of their worshippers, by bringing them down into fellowship with themselves.’ Men are reduced under ‘demons’, who are implied, in an at least hierarchal sense, to be those divinities which do not straightforwardly impress their "forms" into the world by means of one holy gestalten. God is for artistic production possibly worse than any (other?) demon, given that he refuses all aesthetics not direct towards the telos of himself.

[On this note, it’s miraculous to me that Augustine can call Paganism the worship of ‘dead men’ -recently deceased rulers or celebrities- and not realise he's advocating for the biggest death cult of them all: the faith of the more distantly dead, sacrificed Christ as opposed to someone who invigorated life only a few years ago and died recently. The undertone is that Paganism is more akin to living freely today.]

Further than this, Augustine demonstrates the anti-imaginativeness of his own faith using an image I found myself scared of. Contra idol worship, he describes ‘a house. . . being built to the Lord in all the earth, even the city of God, which is the holy Church, after that captivity in which demons held captive those men, who through faith in God, became living stones in the house.’ Here Augustine seems to acknowledge that the means of cultural capture demons use on their idol worshippers is analogous to the capture God uses on his worshippers to make them ‘living stones in [his] house’. The idea is that WE are Gods idols. Our bodies are the “matter” he imposes his ontogenetic “forms” onto. We're the materials that make something not like himself but for him to reside in: a human soul house. And apparently, we're more like this than creatures who can in anyway build to God ourselves with our own art. Faith, as it is described here, might then be the ultimate ‘forgetting of Being’, as Heidegger describes it. The artistic-faith-energy that could have gone into the localised idolatry Hermes-Trismegistus admires is instead drained by YHWH into the noumena; the inaccessible divine steals the reality of the grassroots Paganism belonging to where people actually live. What was last year’s Catholicwave meme again? Do not love this world. That's the attitude God imposes on Pagan communities and artists.

In Heideggerian terms, probably the one way out for Augustine’s Christianity is via the concept of rhythm itself. Yuk Hui says ‘Dancing is an action which is in rhythm with the music’ rather than being an independent act. This is the difference between certain directions an art form can take and the underlying ‘right way’ of doing it, which is the guiding rhythmic principle. Heidegger himself quotes Paul Verlaine on rhythm to exemplify this point: ‘Poetry will no longer takes its rhythm from action; it will be ahead of it.’ There’s an inherently formulating thing inside rhythm, and it's different from the artificially imposed gestalten of Aristotle. Might we say this is the divinely ordained potential for artistic production? If we apply a Heideggerian idea of rhythm to idol production, we might say that unless idols are being created to worship the ordained rhythm -that is, the creator God of that rhythm- they are bastardisations of it; they abandon Heidegger’s ‘fittingness’ as well as Augustine’s suggestion of the ‘fittingness’ of each individual brick in the house of God.

While I ultimately think Trismegistus beats Augustine on being more Heideggerian and life-encouraging, this Christian ‘way out’ does seem like an interesting one. This is principally because it predicts Aquinas's distinction between being and privatio. We can dismiss idols as demonic, regardless of trying to help God conquer the world of spirits, by saying that they are bad versions of true icons: they are deprived of finding their proper Platonic forms. So it’s not like Hylomorphism has to be insisted on to make them godly. It's that if we assume God is himself the natural rhythm behind all artistic production, and artists are interested in delivering quality, then they will almost always arrive at him. This way, art is still restricted to being divine. But who would want art that isn't, when 'divine' just means 'good'? While Egypt may have been the temple of an exciting world, according to this logic, God will always be the holiest part of it. Your home: made of living stones.

[Then again, this scene from Angel’s Egg came to mind when I first read the bit about the house of God made of humans. Make up your own mind, lol.]