Читать книгу The Woods - Vladimir Bibikhin - Страница 9

This autumn’s semester is a direct continuation of the spring semester course on Principles of Christianity. There we sought to show what is intimate and personal to us in faith. There is always the wretched possibility that faith will be left a notional concept of merely historical interest, a construct in the science of theology, whereas what we are interested in is a fundamental hermeneutics or phenomenology, in the sense of Husserl and Heidegger, or a grammar in the sense of Wittgenstein.¹ In order to avoid any risk of straying into mental constructs and lexical exercises, of failing to notice what we are drowning in and merely enumerating concepts, we are going to take a large step backwards to first principles, until, like the defenders of Moscow, we can retreat no further.

Those words, ‘behind us lies Moscow’, whether or not uttered in 1941, were no less applicable in 1812.² Then Moscow was captured, but it caught fire or was deliberately set ablaze. Moscow was built mainly of wood, the most readily available material, intimately familiar, particularly in those years when the forests of Russia were all but untouched. For a Russian, for a Muscovite, the burning of that wood, that ‘hyle’, was something personal. Leo Tolstoy tells us that a wooden township that has been abandoned cannot but catch fire; that is just something it will do. What is our attitude towards hyle? It continues to be very personal. Today we have a standing column of smoke over Moscow from the daily combustion of 10,000 tonnes of petroleum products. In this city alone, 30 million tonnes of fuel will be burned in a decade.

The origin of our main modern fuel is organic, mostly prehistoric ‘floating forests’, planktonic, free-floating algae, of which there were vast quantities in the water basins from 500 million years to about 30 million years ago. We heat ourselves and our homes and light our world with a bonfire of petroleum and coal; its combustion beneath pistons in cylinders moves mechanisms that catch fish for us, plough our fields, reap the harvest, and deliver the grain to our bakeries.

Just as humankind sat around a campfire in the forest in ancient times, so today it warms itself at a campfire diligently replenished (because who can bear to stand back and watch a fire go out?) with some 5 million tonnes of coal and oil, which will add up to around 15 billion tonnes in a decade. We are starkly reminded that this is necessary by the fact that thousands of people die every day from not being close enough to the fire. Humanity, the greater part of which has managed to find a place more or less near the fire, does sometimes reluctantly glance across to those hapless others, and is acutely aware of those who have failed to find a place there. It sensibly, prudently, takes special care to keep the fire fuelled.

People say humanity will find other sources of energy, but the fact remains that by far the greater part of our needs is supplied today, as in the distant past, by burning the forest: no longer the forest around us, because that was all burned long ago, but faraway forests. Faraway not in terms of space, because those forests, too, have been felled, but from far back in time, from the millions of years before humanity appeared and after it appeared. At that time the forest was still close to human beings, not only in the sense that they lived in it, but also in the fact that they were themselves covered with abundant growth, a forest of hair. The forest encroached so intimately upon them that it comprised their very skin, their very bodies. There was far less need then to burn the forest because human beings were kept warm by this fur which covered and was part of their body. Was this the only way they were related to the forest?

A close relationship with the forest seems to continue among the so-called primitive tribes who live there now and whose abhorrence of tree felling is so deeply ingrained that, even when their communal ways are taken from them, for example when they are brought into civilized society, they never become loggers, will not work with chainsaws, on trailing tractors and the like. Violation of the forest is tantamount, as far as they are concerned, to violation of their own body, although no surviving furry human beings are known to science today. The hairy yeti still stalks our minds and inhabits folklore, close to modern humans. The yeti has no place near the fire either, but his is a different kind of distance from that of the unfortunates who would be glad of a place.

Just as modern humans are almost devoid of hair, so the earth today is losing its forests. More important, though, than the visible forests for fuelling the fire humans cluster round are those invisible forests from half a billion years ago now so tangibly present in the form of coveted coal and oil. Is there not, however, another way in which the forest is even more germane to how we exist today? There is indeed, and when we recognize that, several doors immediately open. For now, we shall only peep through them while deciding which one to enter. We are in a hall of mirrors.

Let us consider a burning wood fire. In his latest, as yet unpublished, work, Andrey Lebedev examines the etymology of hyle, the word for ‘wood’, ‘forest’, in ancient Greek and concludes that fire and conflagration are inherent in it; the etymology suggests flammability and burning.³ Since the point is still under debate, let us leave it for now and pursue a different avenue of inquiry.

Besides today’s forests, which are all but exhausted, and the ancient forests, which are half-exhausted, one of the most significant sources of energy must surely be nuclear energy. Atomic energy can also be seen as a product of combustion, but of what? Even highly specialized knowledge will take us only so far here because of issues science has yet to resolve. We can, and commonly do, represent an atomic reaction as a kind of burning, an explosion, a fast-developing fire or a process of slow decay. But a burning of what? In autogenous welding, the elements of hydrogen and oxygen combust, combine, become a molecule of a different compound, water, cease to exist autonomously but remain unchanged as water. A thermonuclear reaction, too, involves elements – uranium, plutonium, hydrogen – but something transformative is done to the elements themselves. We are talking about changes not to elements but to matter itself: the transformation of matter into energy. That is, what is ‘burning’ is not wood, petroleum, or coal, not compounds of elements. In a thermonuclear reaction, what is burning is matter itself.

How curious that the original meaning of the word for ‘matter’ in ancient Greek philosophy is wood, forest. The word ‘materia’ is Latin and its original meaning is primal matter. In Cicero, it is the matter of the world, of which everything consists and in which everything exists: materia rerum ex qua et in qua sunt omnia. This Latin philosophical term is a translation of that Greek philosophical term, ὕλη, hyle, whose primary meaning is ‘wood’. It is entirely possible that the official, technical meaning of materia in Latin, then meaning ‘matter’ as it now does in Russian and English, only became primary within official culture, while in popular culture the main meaning continued to be combustible material and, more specifically, wood in the sense of fuel, firewood. That is, before it was squeezed out there, too, by the philosophical usage. In Latin, felling timber is materiam caedere. In one of the Romance languages, this expression became madeira, whose primary meaning is simply forests.

In atomic energy, then, in a thermonuclear reaction, if we want to avoid a lot of specialist terminology, we can say more or less accurately that what is being burned is actually wood.

Unexpectedly, our own philosophical language is telling us that what is burned in the promising new thermonuclear energy reactions is the matter of the world: ‘wood’. In the light of this discovery, we shall exercise caution before deciding that hyle, meaning ‘an area of land covered with trees’ or ‘timber’, should take precedence over the classical philosophical meaning of ‘matter’. Language in general does not arise from adding sememes together; its origins are as deep as dreaming. In the word ‘wood’ it refers to trees, to fuel, and to the matter of the world. Let us not, therefore, be in too much of a hurry to decide which meanings are original and which are derivative. May not the use of materia in philosophy as well be, not a departure from the original meaning of ‘wood’, but a return to it? For now it seems that, as soon as we get into the forest, we lose our way.

Let us approach the forest from a different angle. This other aspect has long been present and all we need to do is look at it attentively. There is nothing new about comparing the world to a living being. No European figure has articulated such comparisons more comprehensively and clearly than Leonardo da Vinci, whom we will need to study closely. In this simile, the forests of the earth would correspond to the hair or fur on the body of a living creature. Here is one context:

… potrem dire, la terra avere anima vegetativa e che la sua carne sia la terra; li sua ossi sieno li ordini delle collegazioni di sassi, di che si compongono le montagni … il suo sangui sono le vene dilli acque; il lago del sangui, che sta di torno al core, è il mare oceano: il suo alitare è il crescere e decrescere del sangue … e il caldo dell’ anima del mondo è il foco, ch’è infuso per la terra …

So then we may say that the earth has a spirit of growth, and that its flesh is the soil; its bones are the successive strata of the rocks which form the mountains; its cartilage is the tufa stone; its blood the veins of its waters. The lake of the blood that lies around the heart is the ocean. Its breathing is by the increase and decrease of the blood in its pulses … and the vital heat of the world is fire which is spread throughout the earth …⁴

The human body nowadays is not completely covered with hair. I cautiously say ‘nowadays’ in order not to be drawn into the debate over whether early human beings were or were not covered with hair. For the theory of evolution, the issue is not crucial because there are other hairless animals – elephants, for example. What is phenomenologically important for us is to note that in our minds, our myths, and our fiction, the bigfoot, the furry anthropoid, the child born covered with hair, caesariatus, recur regularly and are evidently dear to us. We are intrigued by the idea that human beings can be hairy. It makes them either frightening, like the Leshiy, the Russian wood demon, or auspicious, as suggested by caesariatus in Latin, covered with hair, having long hair.

What is not speculation but fact is that the parts of the body covered with hair are prominent, most notably the head, hence the mind. If the most distinctive feature of humans is intelligence, then the locks on their head are an indication of that. They are like a microcosm. The beard clearly has a demarcation function: men have beards and women do not, so, in a manner still under debate, that is an indication of gender. Science tells us that chest hair betokens the presence of androgens, while underarm hair suggests a vestigial role for odour in the life of the species.

In folklore, mythology, and poetry, hair in that part of the human body directly serving procreation may be called a grove, a forest, or a meadow in the forest. In a recent article, Andrey Lebedev analyses a passage about the Naassenes in that great work by Hippolytus (born before 170 AD, died 235), Refutation of All Heresies.⁵ ‘Naassenes’ is the Hebrew name for the Ophites, of whom there were several varieties in the second century. The belief they held in common was that Jehovah had created only the material world, transient and illusory, and that man would have been left mired in it and blundering about for eternity but for the revelation of the serpent, ὄΦισ, of which in the first book of the Pentateuch of Moses it is said that it first opened man’s eyes to the abyss of the spiritual, by enabling him to discriminate between good and evil.⁶ The serpent, however, did not show the way, and it was for this that Christ came, the Light of the material world. Refuting the Ophites, Hippolytus paraphrases their teachings about mystical descents to earth which, incidentally, follow the paths of Aphrodite and Persephone.

It seems to me intuitively – and that is all one can say until Lebedev’s new etymologies of the forest are published – that wood-as-fire points us in a direction we need to think about. In his second article, while agreeing with attribution of the fragment about the sacred grove of Aphrodite to Empedocles, I would have argued with Lebedev’s approach. In my opinion, it is a dead end when it separates the physiological, embryological, and anthropogenic realities in the thought of Empedocles from the philosophical and poetic metaphor: Lebedev thinks that scientific positivity requires remaining down to earth, and believes that, in talking about the meadows and groves of Aphrodite, Empedocles ‘is describing metaphorically the female genitals’.

The tenacious, supposedly objective scholarly distinction between physical realia and poetry is neither self-evident nor factual. It proceeds from a questionable academic mythology that tries to distinguish what is a legitimate object of scholarly study from what is not. For example, the poetic. The delusion that anything properly scholarly and technical must be readily open to study betrays a blindness scholars allow themselves. We are not going to indulge in this blindness. […]⁷ The supposed encompassing of the world by science and technology encompasses nothing. Their victory is a myth, and the scholarly euphoria over the triumphs of technology is no better than the delight of one of Leo Tolstoy’s characters, a three-year-old girl who sets fire to hay in her log hut and invites her little brother to admire the splendid stove she has managed to light.⁸ All will be restored to what is dismissed as ‘poetic’, to the ‘gentle power of thought and poetry’.⁹

The meadow, the sacred grove, the forest in folklore and mythology, in poetry and philosophy, are in no way a mere metaphor for coyly referring to vulgar realia. We first understand the forest in industrial and aesthetic terms, and are then unable to find a better way of understanding the grove of Aphrodite than as a metaphor, a discreet euphemism, perhaps veiling with a fine phrase a nakedness we find embarrassing. Art has the ability to show nakedness in a way that makes it neither metaphorical nor physiological. Can words be similarly used to name the intimate? Indeed they can, and are, using metaphors like grove and meadow, ἄλσος and λɛιμῶν, between which Lebedev and other writers he refers to see ‘a close association … in sacral contexts’. For Empedocles, a grove is not a metaphor for Aphrodite because, as Lebedev himself points out, he sees that the earth itself is a uterus, the womb of humankind. Lebedev mentions Empedocles’ enthusiastic cult of Aphrodite. The grove or meadow of Aphrodite is not some ‘biological referential signifier’ for us, and neither is alsos a ‘metaphor for the reproductive organs in general conceived as a “holy precinct” with a walled temple-uterus inside’, but rather quite the opposite. The biological referent, if present at all, is referring to the forest as something primal, as matter, as something maternal. Lebedev speaks of the sacred Temple of Nature in pre-Platonic thought, when its sacramental mystery is the formation of the embryo, the focal secret of life and of nature. It is a secret hidden from the profane gaze of ordinary men, but not from the probing insight of the philosopher proceeding along the path of mystical initiation. I would like to read in its entirety the remarkable conclusion of this article, which, as is often the case with Lebedev, opens up much broader perspectives than the primitive positivism about which I have been complaining.

For our present purpose, it is important to notice that typologically alsos Aphrodites represents a variation on the theme of Templum Naturae, a recurrent topos in pre-Platonic thought. Here it probably connotes ἄβατον ἱɛρόν: the formation of the foetus conceived as a mystery of life is hidden from the sight of the polloi, but not from the intellectual eye of a philosophical epoptes. Thus the mystery initiation motif, prima facie eliminated from the fragment together with the Gnostic interpretation, is eventually restored as authentic, though in essentially different form: it has nothing to do with the mysteries of Persephone and Diesseits-Hades of the Naassenes, but relates to the philosophical rite of passage. The metaphorical complex of secret knowledge is well attested in Peri physeos. As a philosophical mystagogue, Empedocles leads Pausanias to the innermost sanctum of nature: the embryological treatise to follow upon the prefatory verses on the anatomy of the female genitals and reproductive organs will reveal to Pausanias the secrets of birth no mortal eye has ever seen. And the same metaphor conveys the fundamental idea of the holiness of life inherent in Empedocles’ philosophy of cosmic Love.¹⁰

So it will be difficult for us, too, as we enter into our new topic of the forest not to follow the mass of the polloi; we shall proceed with caution.

Perhaps the first objection we anticipate, and to which it is important and helpful to respond, is that scientific positivism, whether secondary or not, is what we are familiar with. However, to see the grove and the forest as something sacred and mysterious, we need a trained, discriminating eye. Seeing the forest other than from a commercial or aesthetic viewpoint would not seem to call for preliminary training. People talk about getting lost in the forest. We have the saying that someone ‘could get lost among three pine trees’; or, when baffled, we talk of being ‘in a dark forest’. May the explanation of this – that you cannot see far in a forest, that there are no familiar landmarks – be only a rationalization of an experience that in various guises many people have probably had, namely that being in a forest takes us out of metric space? The presence of trees, being among them, instils, or induces, or lulls us into a sense of – the range of vocabulary itself points to the singularity of the experience – something that does not lend itself to description. What the forest says to us – and the expression ‘trees can talk’ is yet another attempt to characterize the experience – causes a person to become confused and disorientated in more than a narrowly geographical sense.

Looking ahead, I will mention another way of talking about this osmotic quality of the forest: it is said to act like a drug, sometimes more, sometimes less powerful, depending on the experience. This power of the forest can be intimidating, and I will mention here a literary example to which we shall return: nausea, or perhaps more the sense of disorientation at sea, which the narrator of Sartre’s La Nausée experiences in the vicinity of a tree or of tree bark.¹¹ Another example is the experience described by Vasiliy Belov, where a great pine tree evokes a sense of reverence in the person felling it.¹² We need not enumerate other instances because everybody has felt them at one time or another. There is nothing contrived or artificial about these; on the contrary, they are unexpected and amazing, but feel out of the ordinary only because our habitual ways of looking at the forest are utilitarian or aesthetic. How we came to develop that habit we need not go into, because much more interesting is how insecure it is, how ready to be displaced and to yield to the amazing experiencing of the forest.

A constant feature of the experience of the forest is how intimate it feels, even while it seems intimidating, as in Sartre or as in the figure of the wood demon. The fear that grips us in the forest is not of a kind that we can take practical measures against; it is too much a part of us. We find the demon seems to be within us and that what we fear in him is ourselves, different, altered. When the spirit of the forest is something we desire and are seeking, it feels near and dear to us.

The experience we have of our relatedness to the forest might seem to be pointing us towards the secrets of the sacred grove, through which initiation into the mysteries begins, and there is no call for us to rush to decide which interpretation, the philosophical or the gnostic, is better. Of one thing we can be sure, and that is that every interpretation will be lame, will flounder, which is precisely why a plurality of interpretations is needed. That is why I am so lacking in confidence when I say that the signs might seem to be pointing in a particular direction, and why I believe it is better to indulge that uncertainty. One thing that is clear is that Empedocles, and the ancients generally, were far more at home with and had a much better understanding of the forest than we do, and that their thinking may well include insights we will be hard pressed to keep up with. May these reflections on our experiencing of the forest serve for the time being only to let us see how unartificial this unfamiliar way of seeing, or intuiting, the forest is.

The second doubt hanging over our choice of topic, which some have already voiced, is why particularly wood, the forest, should be singled out. Why not also the meadow, the more so when there are studies on the links between the forest and the meadow? Or why not take as our topic water, earth, sky, the sea? Experiencing the sky or water is no less of an issue for us. We are captivated by the starry sky. Come to that, just about everything captivates us no less than the forest. The first answer is that the earth which Xenophanes saw as infinite, the water which Thales saw as the first principle, could have established themselves in philosophical thought as primal matter, materia, but did not.¹³ The fact is that it was wood, hyle, the forest, that was adopted, and it is another question whether that came about before or after Aristotle. Perhaps it was an accident and came about simply because Aristotle, while lecturing, was looking for an example of what material eidos, form, is made of and took the nearest object to hand, which happened to be a wooden table. He had a concept for which he needed a name. The name reaches out towards the concept and acquires content. Content is the giving of form to the formless or, in this case, since wood is not formless, to something whose form is of no importance and can be used to provide a foundation for form that is of importance. Form puts its imprint on what it will, on a basis of matter: you can saw a piece of wood and form from it anything you like. This is a traditional and ostensibly philosophical commonplace, but we are about to say goodbye to it forever, because the much-vaunted indefiniteness of matter is going to prove to be its fundamental indefinability.

It is intriguing that the choice of wood to designate primal matter is at least partly due to a connectedness with the forest that we do not have with water, sky, or earth: that we seem, not so long ago in geological terms, to have been covered in vegetation but are so no longer. Something akin to deforestation has happened to us, and it is the destruction of the forests that is presently so alarming us on our planet.

Quite apart from whether the human species really is Desmond Morris’s ‘naked ape’,¹⁴ whether it ever was hairy and, if so, when it stopped being hairy, what is phenomenologically of value to us is that the experience of being hairy is simultaneously inaccessible to us and very close. We can readily imagine what it would be like to be hairy, although, if we imagine ourselves hairy, it is ourselves we are seeing as hairy, our real selves except, perhaps, for our consciousness.¹⁵ The original hairy human’s consciousness must surely have been different, primal, although the primitive mind was not necessarily crude and underdeveloped, something to be despised. On the contrary, we are curious and feel it is relevant to us. We can see that in the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and in all our scientific and artistic reconstructions.¹⁶

There is no need for us, in the interests of the integrity and reliability of our work, to start vexing ourselves over whether humans were ever hairy, or speculating about the nature of primitive consciousness. What is of significance for us, though, is the presence in the human experience of primitive tribes, their presence in the thinking of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the arts, in writing (for example, in C.S. Lewis, who imagined a sweet-natured, hairy primal human being, a wise superman – the snow man in the American film Bigfoot evidently draws on Lewis), an alternative human being whom we find familiar and acceptable, who is more a creature of the forest than we are, partly because of his hairiness, partly because of his categorical refusal to fell trees, and partly because he lives in the forest.

Today’s urbanized and technologically minded people keep the forest at a distance, enjoying its wonders in measured doses that pose no risk to health: enjoying the countryside, going for a stroll in the park. The forest, however, precisely because it is pushed back, eats its way into humanity ever more vengefully and irrevocably. It is as if humankind has failed to make its peace with the forest and now it is payback time. I do not think it unreasonable to see tobacco, wine, and drugs as the forest’s revenge, tightening with its juices, poisons, and smoke the grip it has on humanity. The modern city has no escape from the forest, which reaches out after it through the power of its alcohol, tobacco, and cocaine. With these so much in evidence, we can see that the ancient religions and civilizations have lost none of their power. In using cocaine, individuals tear down the fence artificially separating them and surrender to their authentic element, the forest, to shamanism and fire. Of course, they are thereby desperately flinging themselves headlong into the fire, but that results from something that has built up over a long period during which they artificially separated themselves from the forest, from its matter.

I emphasize that we need to refrain, in the interests of good order, from any attempt to resuscitate the benign hairy human. Our focus is only on what there is today and constitutes our phenomenology. Whether we fear the hairy hominid or feel drawn to it, we are different. We are confronting a different consciousness, which it is impossible to imagine, reconstruct, or compute, but with which, in some strange way, it is entirely possible to conduct mental experiments.

What was the faith of this individual? ‘Primitive.’ The same as Michel Foucault describes in a child, a lunatic, or a poet.¹⁷ There can be no end to replies of that kind, where we say much more than we have any business saying, more than is sensible or necessary. In attempting to answer the question, we will do better to behave like good phenomenologists and make notes and take readings of what we can see here and now.

And where does that leave us? Let us suppose someone believes in God. They go to church and profess their faith, but they can see within themselves a different faith. I invite you to look, and to see that all of us live believing in two faiths. In just the same way that, without being able to step outside the consciousness in which we live, we can easily feel our closeness to that other one, the forest dweller, with his primaeval consciousness which is no different from ours in content. The Fathers of the Church see the Church as beginning with Abel. The Roman Catholic theologian Bernhard Welte always associated the Abel of the Bible with the people who inhabited caves of volcanic origin on the Mount of Olives near Cologne 10,000 years ago. Is there anything we can know about their worship of God? Welte felt himself in a eucharistic communion with those cave dwellers. How is that possible if theirs was a different faith? Or can we indeed talk about a faith we share with cave dwellers from 10,000 years ago?¹⁸

St Paul invites us to recognize Abel’s sacrifice as coming from unshakeable faith (Hebrews, 11: 4). St John Chrysostom, interpreting chapter 4 of the Book of Genesis, speaks of the right disposition of Abel’s heart, compared with that of Cain. Cain’s countenance fell because God did not respect his gift. ‘And the Lord said unto Cain, “Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.”’ This is already a matter not solely to do with the offering of sacrifices; it concerns any act a person may perform. This can be a good deed, the person ‘raises their countenance’ and God looks upon them in response; or the promptings of their heart can go awry, the person’s countenance becomes dark, confused, their eyes look downwards, and they become a prey to loneliness and are accursed. It is up to individuals to desire an open countenance for themselves and to be afraid of a fallen countenance, or to suppress that fear, as Cain suppressed the fear of his own disgruntlement and envy, and cast aside his concern about what the commentators call his ‘inner disposition’.

We can imagine a person, a child, the hairy human, without this concern to retain their portion, to stay with God, not to be bereft, not to fall from his favour; or, if they already have, not to be a prey to anxiety about that fall, to be without irritation or envy, in a state halfway between, on the one hand, the raised face and open expression, and, on the other, that other state of degeneracy. We can imagine them vacillating between Cain, who was spurned, and Abel, who cheerfully raises his countenance and meets the gaze of God.

I want now to introduce a word I have avoided so far: the law of human beings or of human nature. It is a law without limitation, fundamental, and in fact the only law, because in everything else people are unbounded and free. For every person, no matter how they frame their faith, in any situation and condition and age, this is concern about their portion, concern in the sense of Heidegger’s Sorge, their concern in terms of being endowed not dispossessed, of living in prosperity rather than wretchedness, and if in poverty, then in that ascetic poverty that is better than any prosperity.¹⁹

We are completely unable to read or articulate this law of concern, of ɛύλἀβɛια, of right thought and piety, of God-fearing. It is probably operating before we have found any definition of it. Before we have any awareness of it, it is leading us, suggesting how we should act. Everything we do, we do in obedience to it. Can we privately choose not to conform to it? No, it only seems that it can be resisted. It can neither be rescinded nor made more lenient, although the approach of Cain is open to us, to declare, ‘Then so be it: the worse, the better.’ Our freedom here extends no further than to be or not to be in a place where we already are. It is only by recognizing this level of the universal law of human nature that religion can be understood.

Religion will always be found, within its culture, language, and way of life, to be a restoration of that unwritten law, of instinct. Religion is in its essence that same law. Religious discourse is consequently a matter of only secondary importance.

The instinct of piety, the need, second by second, to choose Abel, and the ever-present threat of Cain, is an innate law, and the word ‘law’ needs to have this meaning restored to it. Discriminating between secular and religious law, between civil law and canon law, is essential if the initial law is to remain unsullied. These two parallel systems of law, the secular and the divine, are complementary ways of capturing something it is impossibly difficult to formulate. Sharia and, in Orthodox Christianity, Palamism seek to be the unmediated expression of a single law and hence put the original law at greater risk.²⁰

Having recourse to another of our mental experiments, one has no sense that in any ancient forest and/or hairy incarnation humans could ever have been formed without being creatures of the law of which I am speaking. It preserves the human species. That law is something that restrains us every moment.

Religion: the etymology of the word speaks, I believe, of mindfulness, concern, and piety, and it was formerly known as the Rule. Let us now rehabilitate this old word, whose primary meaning until quite recently, some 300 years ago, was ‘faith, the profession of faith’.

Why do we so formally and superficially call the law of humankind ‘ɛὐλἀβɛια’, a cautious, attentive acumen? Because humans are open, their nature is freedom, and because what people are primarily dealing with, both in themselves and in the world, is indefinable: it is the forest. The forest, an abyss, the forest unexplored and indefinable, the forest that we find again in tobacco (you may recall the ritual tobacco, much stronger than ours, of the American Indians).

The law we have been talking about will need to be compared with Kant’s categorical imperative. I repeat, because for humans there is no other law; because they are faced with substances in which they drown. Matter as the power of the forest, the potency of its materiality: the smoke of tobacco, the wine of Bacchus, narcotics, intoxication, ecstasy. The wood of the forest is the matter from which all else derives; it is not the timber of the carpenter but like passion, the race, the grove of Aphrodite, the smoke, the aroma of tobacco, the inebriation of Bacchus, of Dionysos, the intoxication of coca. The forest, then, is conflagration, the fire of passion. When Aristotle gave primal matter the name of ‘wood’, this was the forest he saw before him, the forest as we shall yet see it.