Nathaniel Perrin

[Photo by Sebastian Voortman.](https://www.pexels.com/photo/two-white-concrete-statues-covered-by-dust-566641/)

*I wrote this originally five years ago for a former iteration of this blog.*

> the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
> excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
> o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
> with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
> me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
> What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
> how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
> express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
> in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
> world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
> what is this quintessence of dust? - Hamlet

It is hard to write about a human condition. Single line platitudes invariably fall into some mixture of sentimental contrivance and egregious myopia. It just sounds repulsive to the modern ear. Perhaps this is due in part to advertising and its unrelenting recycling of banalities. Motivation taglines that reduce the universal human to a universal consumer.

But fortunately a phrase such as "quintessence of dust" has not yet been co-opted by the marketing machine. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Quintessential is a term that has fallen out of usage. To be quintessential is to be classic in some sense. The diner, for example, is quintessentially American.

But let's pick apart this term etymologically. "Quintessence" derives from the scholastic concept of *quinta essentia* which is recognizably translatable as the "fifth essence". It is a Latinization of a Greek term we recognize as "element".

These elements are, for Greek science, what we remember as fire, earth, water, and air.

There is something we have lost with our modern periodic table ranging across 200 distinct entities.

When you say something is elemental, something is essential to the very thing, there is a lot more meaning when you liken the heart to fire than to carbon or nitrogen. Something more visceral when you have four elements to choose from.

The entire cosmos from droplets of dew to the burning of the stars to the sinewing of the flesh to the rock formations torturously sundered into the face of the earth, all these are derived from four base elements.

The world cannot exist apart from these four. Or so it was told.

Then Aristotle comes along as he does, and he theorizes that fire, water, earth, and air don't quite capture the totality of the universe. There must be a fifth element out there: aether.

So he coined it. And so aether entered scientific discourse for a very long time. So long in fact that it was tossed around as a hypothetical until Einstein definitively put it to bed in 1905.

Aether as a concept is significantly older than gravity, electricity, waves, particles, fluids, and planets.

So what is aether?

Though it had a long shelf life in the scientific world, there was never quite a firm agreement on what aether is. Is it the force of life? Some light-bearing invisible substance that passes through the vacuum? 

This fifth element aether became a mysterious silhouette that coul potentially answer many leading scientific questions across disciplines such as optics, biology, astronomy, chemistry, and others.

It was the theoretical missing link that could potentially unify all of natural science.

So, if you will permit some creative reading for the sport of it, what if Hamlet's idea is taht the fifth essence of the universe--something on the level of aether--is dust. Dust as the missing link.

And not dust as we typically imagine it. But what we are. Humans, transmogrified from the dust.

Dust itself is a primary theme throughout the Hebraic telling of things. The word "עָפָר֙" appears over a hundred times across the Old Testament: it refers to lowliness as in the case of *Job*, ephemerality as in the case of *Ecclesiastes*, or as a metaphor of innumerable abundance as in the promise made to Abraham of his descendants.

It first appears in the Creation myth when God forms man out of dust and breathes life into him. While the rest of creation is spoken into being, the human race is culled out a pre-existing material substance. Dust.

Hence the cliche "From dust you came and to dust you will return" coined either by Kansas or *Ecclesiastes*, take your pick.

This image should give us pause. What it is to be made of dust.

Consider the last person you held in your arms, how they could simply evaporate into a sooty, powdery pile of dust through your fingers. In fact they will invariably end up this way.

Consider how much of your past self lies as sheets of dust under bed. The more you cast off of yourself, the more there is to haunt you. Dust as a specter, your past self as a voyeur of the future.

Consider old houses abandoned by dead relatives or strangers. Shelves and furniture and books caked in the flesh of the dead.

This is what dust is. This what you were, and this is what you will become.

We forget how appalling such an image should be. To call ourselves dust.

But that is not the end of the story. This isn't some ode to rejoice in the meaninglessness of life.

We are not mere dust but the quintessence of it.

We are not derivations but elevations. Whether as the Hebraic says by the breath of God or as the Hellenic says by the possession of *logos*. Or as others in the West have gone on to name as the soul or free will or consciousness. All of these as some label to distinguish the animating force that exalts us from the dust.

These various terms do not capture such a quintessence in its entirety. There is something indeterminable, ineffable about the human being that these concepts can barely taste.

It is because of this unnamed thing that we are raised from brute materialism to pure determinism.

With the assiduous encroachment of sciences social and physical into all spheres of lief, there is a strong temptation to parse out every single occurrence into a predetermined cause-and-effect. Genetics, economics, sociology, psychology, among other disciplines whose langauge games we widely employ to rationalize the problems of our lives. It is the tool of identitarianism (a term whose meaning also is revealed in etymology) to cast blame on the forces of determinism.

Those whose personal conceptual space is determined by political ideology are often guilty of this. Concocting general patterns and statistics as pre-emptive authorities over their own lives. To explain the crumble or enfetterment. 

This all depends upon a logic of determinism that all has been decided already in the lot of one's own life. That there is no free will or fate to fight for or overturn. A whole retinue of externalities has totalistic control over our personal lives.

Unfortunately, the extent to which someone assigns an aspect of themselves to this mode of thinking is an extent that has been cordoned off to mental slavery. Enslavement to ideas and thought patterns that increase learned helplessness, anxiety, misery, despair, and those factors. To give the perceived enemy more control and power than they probably even have.

To reject determinism is to recognize this little ineffable, quintessential blip and what it does for us, whatever this blip is. It allows us to strive and to overcome the problems set before us. To contest the roll of the dice. To play the game.

The unpredictable choreography of time, uncountable as dust swirling in a sunlit hallway. Too intricate and random for any finitude to calculate. 

Even in this age, human beings still possess this glint of spontaneous vitality, no matter how insistently other forces have tried to suffocate it. For two millennia, aged scientists with baggy eyes and an aversion to the real world have hunched over lifeless texts to try to determine and control the fifth element ether. To put it into a closed off box.

But vitality can never be captured by science. All you get is an ossified shadow. The residual glow of its power.

And for as long as there is a sliver of the human essence in us. Soemthing that can escape the constricting noose of scientific causality, there is hope. Hope that we are not thoroughly enslaved to external forces. That we do not need to subject ourselves to the prisons of the mind.

That our quintessence, as humble dust, is that we can never be fully determinable.

The quintessence of dust

*Fast Antiates Maiores* reconstructed. [Source URL](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_del_Teatro_Romano_de_Caesaraugusta.43.jpg).

The calendar occupies a strange place between man and cosmos. On the one hand it is a technology for the organization and division of time in the human reckoning of things. On the other a system for mapping the cycles of the stars and planets onto our terrestrial plane.

Our English rendering *calendar* flows down to us from old Roman custom. 

The Romans counted their months by dividing them between three principal days of the lunar cycle: the calends, the nones, and the ides.

The calends was the first day of the month and occurred when the first sliver of the moon appeared in a new moon cycle. Unlike other calendar systems built upon decentralized mathematical and scientific calculations, the Roman calends could only be dictated by the priesthood. When the priests determined it was the first day of the month from their vantage point on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, a priest would stand and call out (*calo*) and herald the coming of the new month.

One must remember that Rome has a long heritage of centralized, pontifical authority. Where persons and offices determine what is true *ex cathedra*, more true than individual observation or conviction.

The calends was noteworthy in the Roman world not merely for the cosmic alignment of moon, sun, and earth to form a new moon but also because it was the day of debts. On the first day of the month, debts could be collected. 

Our word "calendar" derives from *calendarium* which was the name given to this book of debts, an accounting ledger both in a cosmic and fiscal sense which marked how much was owed and by whom.

In the world of modern accounting, we maintain some downstream variation of this in our governmental tax structures, reckoning debts to the state at the level of the year, aligned with the cosmic revolution of the earth around the sun.

But this modern rendering is decoupled from the religious significance of such accounting. And this marks what perhaps is the deepest guilt of modern society, an obligatory truth we have forgotten.

To be born is to exist in debt.

Debt in contemporary vernacular usage has been constrained greatly in scope, often only to refer to fiscal or material forms of obligation.

But debt exists in a much broader scope as its Latin origin indicates. For the original word functions much like an English helping verb indicating that one *ought* to do something, one *should* do something, one *must* do something.

Debt in this sense is deeply tied to concepts of duty, the ethics of obligation.

And the calendar in this light is not just a table for the division of days, weeks, months, and years according to the ways of the gods and the ways of men. It is a cosmic ledger of our debts. The debt of our time.

This is a chief insight of Protestantism, as Weber observes. That our time is not our own. Nothing at all is our own in an absolute sense. All we have and are and will gain is due to God. We are merely borrowers of the thousand talents. One of modern conservatism's fundamental errors is to elevate the notion of property above all else, failing to recognize that all which is owned is also owed.

In the world of finance, we have finite sums that we may can spend or use. In the world of life, we have finite time that me way spend or use until our allocation is extinguished in the embrace of death.

This finite sum is a gift. And it is not one to be squandered.

Richard Baxter treated this theme most exhaustively in his sermon "The Redemption of Time". Much like our life has been redeemed by Christ, so too must we redeem our time, to make it of good use in service to the God who has granted us such time.

In one section, Baxter points to the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus teaches that we shall all on the day of judgment have to explain *every* useless (ᾱ̓ργός) word we have ever spoken. The Greek here is the antonym of ἔργον which is used to indicate any work, labor, deed, or task. The Twelves Labors of Hercules, Hesiod's *Works and Days*, etc. What we do with our lives in the short time we have been granted.

One can get a sense for the Puritan interpretation of time here by his reading:

Now then if there be an account to be given, and a reckoning to be made for these rubbish speeches, judge, if it be not a want of redeeming the time, to lay it out in such a thing as will bring a sore and heavy burden afterwards without repentance to cast it off; and judge if he which makes much of time had not need take much heed of this ill-spent breath. Not alone then wicked speak∣ing when one bel•heth forth lewd and filthy words, not slanderous and backbiting talk, (when one whispers of his neighbour's faults behind his back, uttering (perhaps) also lying reports, and fathering that upon him which he never did or meant;) but even vain, needless, and unprofitable words..."

Biblical ethics places great emphasis on the sins of the tongue, the words spoken and the things said. But there is a sense in the Puritan reading where the sin is not just a matter of the motives or consequences of the words, but the fact that they misuse the time granted us.

This may seem rather extreme in a contemporary lens, but it does make one wonder the exactitude to which God would judge us for redeeming the time. For as history shows time and again, the extremeness of a belief has little to do with its usefulness. Extreme views quite easily become mainstream and former commonplace wisdom can become taboo even within the space of a generation.

This uneasiness we feel toward the use or misuse of our time can be seen as the wellspring of guilt. It is no coincidence that the Germans use the one word *Schuld* for both guilt and debt.

We feel guilt at the theological debt owed.

And this brings us back to Rome.

The *calendarium* appears twice in Seneca's "De Beneficiis", a Stoic treatise on gifts, charitable services, essentially giving something without anything ostensibly being required in return.

The gift has taken on a new level of significance in 20th century philosophy as a central theme in Derrida and other postmodern writers who write on how even a "free" gift introduces social or psychological obligations that consequently mean the gifter actually is receiving something in return.

In simple terms, it is why ancient kings would give away lavish gifts or Caesars would give bread and circuses for the poor. Not out of charitable selflessness but rather as ostentatious display or politicking. One can readily see this in modern philanthropy and the tax exemption structures built around the nonprofit industrial complex which fund lucrative or desirable outcomes. This is a primary mode of dark liberalism which leverages capital to the benefit of the giver but behind the safety net of sanctimonious platitudes.

This idea was brought back to the forefront by Marcel Mauss in his famous seminal essay "The Gift", but it should be noted that this essay is itself deeply indebted to Seneca's work "De Beneficiis".

Seneca refers to calendars twice. In the first instance he writes, "Nemo beneficia in calendario scribit" (*De Beneficiis* I.2). In translation this can be rendered as "No one records gifts in the book of debts (calendar)".
This highlights the spontaneity of the gift as something falling outside the exact, deterministic ordering of time. At the same time, one does not record or remember a gift because as a gift it is not a debt to be owed. One does not remind the recipient of a debt to be collected.

In a later passage, Seneca is characterizing gold, silver, and iron as evils the gods buried beneath the earth but which we have dug up to inflict evil upon one another to satiate our vindictive greed. And then he writes,

"Et tamen adhuc ista aliquam materiam habent; est, in quo errorem oculorum animus subsequi possit. Video istic diplomata et syngraphas et cautiones, vacua habendi simulacra, umbracula avaritiae quaedam laborantis, per quae decipiat animum inanium opinione gaudentem. Quid enim ista sunt, quid fenus et calendarium et usura, nisi humanae cupiditatis extra naturam quaesita nomina?" (Ibid. VII.10 )

To paraphrase in translation: And yet even these things have some substance; there is something for the mind's eye is able to follow. I see bonds and contracts, securities, empty symbols (*simulacra*) of possession, some kind of shelter for laboring greed, through which the mind is deceived, rejoicing in the illusion of ownership. For what are these very things, what are interest and ledgers (*calendarium*) and loans, but names for human desire sought beyond nature.

Again, Seneca introduces the calendar as a nefarious force. One that constricts and confines us as tools of human greed. Taken on its own, this quote shows remarkable applicability for a global financial market which recently crashed from collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and once again chokes the middle class out of home ownership through real estate investment trusts (REITs). 

For time immemorial, financial systems and institutions have concocted a panoply of wizardry and fancy terminology to camouflage the unending extraction of wealth.

But moralisms aside, one should consider this from the viewpoint of temporal debt.

If God has granted us time, is it as a gift or as a loan?

The concept of "redeeming the time" runs the risk of casting God as a greedy lender who is waiting to pounce on his returns. We must not forget that Jesus also parables God as a generous master who forgives debts. How Pauline theology underscores Christ as a liberator who grants us freedom.

The guilt of debt lends itself to legalism. That life must be crushed in the grindstone to extract every kernel of worth.

If grace is given to us as a gift, then in what ways could we say that time is also a gift to us. To enjoy without use or end goal. And in enjoying this gift to thereby redeem it, perhaps.

It is a difficult question and one that cannot be answered here. Only posed. How we can balance the obligation we owe to the divine versus the freedom we have in what we have been granted.

And there are much broader investigations we could make. A structural comparison of how calendars ranging from the Mesoamerican to the Mesopotamian to the Chinese illustrate cultural or universal characterizations of the relation between man and cosmos, debt and time. This is only one strand.

It is perhaps most fruitful to reflect in closing on Christmas, a calendar holiday most associated with gift giving. How in the Christian understanding, Christ is the gift God gave to the world.

We commemorate this holiday not because God instructs us too, but rather, as is good etiquette for any recipient of a particularly lavish gift, we make sure to remember and express our gratitude for what we have been given. 

The calendar implication of Christmas is that we are marking our own accounting books to remember the debt that we paid in our sin. But one that we have been redeemed of. A transaction that has been zeroed out on our behalf. And to be freed from debt is something to rejoice in. As we augur a new year, a new cycle of time that we have been granted. To use in grace, not just for ourselves as some idea of property, but as something for the larger whole.


A quick reflection on the Roman and Christian implications of the calendar

Calendratics: debt and time


Il Morazzone's (1573-1626) *Lotta di Giacobbe con l'angelo*

### Preface

For a denizen of antiquity, Augustine has a nearly unparalleled bulk of writing which have survived to our day.

Even so, not all of Augustine's oeuvre has been translated into English, [though that work is currently in progress](https://www.newcitypress.com/catalog/category/view/s/the-works-of-saint-augustine/id/24/).

As an exercise for myself, I took on a translation project for Augustine's *De agone christiano* which has only been translated once before in a collection by the Catholic University of America Press just under a hundred years ago.

*De agone christiano* (396) dates to Augustine's early mid period, roughly between *De doctrina christiana* and *Confessiones*. It is a short tract of about thirty pages which frames the earthly temporal struggle of Christian life as one of fighting the desires of the heart which are corralled by the devil to steer us into depravity.

From the perspective of the history of theology, I find this treatise is interesting as a sample case of how Augustine decisively and distinctly casts the terms of Christian spiritual ethics in light of an interior struggle. A war against desire, so long as we remain in this life. A framing with long lasting implications, not without controversy in the course of all Western history.

If you are interested in discovering other minor works by Augustine, you should check out [this bibliography here](https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/twayne/twaynebib.html).


I have translated most of this book (if not finished by the time you read this). I am still deciding what to do with it. If you are interested in reading more, feel free to [reach out](https://www.ngperrin.com/contact).

Note - Biblical references are generally taken from the ESV with minor alterations in translation.

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### Chapter 1

<br>

The crown of victory is not promised to us except through struggle. However in the divine
Scriptures, we constantly find the crown to be promised to us, if we do overcome what we face. But, so as not to be overly verbose in drawing upon many different quotations, this can be seen most evidently in the writings of the Apostle Paul where he says:

”I have completed the work I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth
there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness.” (2 Tim. 4:7-8)

Therefore, if we are to be crowned, we must recognize who this very adversary is, whom we must overcome. For it is this very adversary which our Lord previously overcame,
so that we might also overcome him through perseverance in the Lord. And indeed by excellence and wisdom and the Word of God, the God through whom all things were made, who is the only Son of God always remains unchanging, above every creature. And since under him are even the creatures who do not sin, how much more under him is every sinful creature! Therefore since all the holy angels are under him, how much more under him are all the fallen angels, of whom the devil is ruler.

But due to the fact he had deceived our nature, the only begotten son of God deigned to take our very nature so that the devil might be overcome, whom he subjugated under himself, and even subjugating him under us. This is shown when Paul says, “The ruler of this world has been cast out”. (John 12:31)

Not because he was cast out of the world, like in the way certain heretics are punished,
but cast out from their souls, those who are united in the Word of God and do not
cherish this world, of which the devil is ruler, because he controls them, who cherish earthly goods, which are contained in this visible world, not because that very lord is of this world, but the ruler of their desires, through which things are craved, but which all pass away, that they are subjected to him, those who disregard the eternal God and cherish instability and the changeable. “For the root of every sin is desire: it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows.” (1 Tim. 6:10)

Through this desire the devil reigns in man and hold his heart. Such is the case for all
who cherish this world. However the devil is cast out, when the heart in its entirety
renounces the world. For in this way is the devil renounced, who is ruler of this world,
when he is renounced along with his corruptions and his pomp and his angels. And that
same Lord, already bearing the triumphant nature of man, says to us, “Take heart; I
have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

A new translation of the first chapter of De agone christiano

The quintessence of dust

Calendratics: debt and time

Augustine translation: The Christian Struggle