Nathaniel Perrin


[Image Source](https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/andrew-jackson-the-battle-of-new-orleans/)

H.W. Brands' biography of Andrew Jackson takes the appropriate posture every biography should take towards its subject: curious admiration, literary infusion, apologetics with candor, the chiseling of example.

Andrew Jackson is a beautiful figure of history for how he has remained both so unremittingly controversial and blatantly unenigmatic.

One needs no hermeneutic cipher to divine who Andrew Jackson is or what he stood for. The cryptic mind games of late modern diplomacy have no place in the world of Jackson.

The kernel of Jackson can be felt in his familial constitution. For he came from, as Brands so aptly puts it, the particularly savage tribe of Ulster Scot.

For centuries, the Ulster had fought tooth, nail, and claymore first against the perfidious brutes of Longshanks (English *Sassenach*) then, upon emigration to Ireland, the savage bog-trotters who clung to the Pope. under the dark, clammy skies of the northern British Isles.

If there is one thing that can be learned from *Albion's Seed* (and there are certainly many things to learn), the Scots-Irish are descended from centuries of brutal and ruthless warfare in the borderlands.

They knew little security, little safety, for nothing could be guaranteed among such neighbor-aggressors. This inculcated an epigenetic profusion of ruthlessness, iron-will savagery, and tribalistic fervor among the Scots-Irish that can be traced to the present day.

The deaths of Andrew Jackson's parents are a testament to such spirit. His father died before his birth from the overwork of trying to cull and tame fields of newly acquired property for the sustenance of his family in the bleak early days of Carolina settlement. His mother died having spent her last years shuttling between various Revolutionary War prison camps to bring her sons aid and plead for their freedom, exhausting every last thread of energy and soul on travel across the cold, dangerous roads of wartime colonial America.

Jackson himself demonstrated this cogenital fierceness when, in a famous encounter, as a boy the British had occupied his home and the presiding officer demanded young Andrew shine his boots. Jackson refused with impudence and even after the officer slashed the boy's cheeks with sword lacerations that would scar his cheeks for life, Andrew seemed no less obliged to submit.

Such scars would mark Andrew not just physically but would disinter themselves through a lifelong policy of hatred toward the British. One that would more than come to be avenged in the years to come.

Even as an orphan, Andrew slowly but surely found his way into an ever expanding sphere of success. He moved and became deeply affiliated with the founding members of Nashville, Tennessee, marrying Rachel Donelson through a not uncomplicated series of circumstances, but in unadulterated devotion.

It should be noted here that even though many snide or disparaging comments were made about Rachel Donelson over the years as she physically aged and did not acquire the social graces of political society, Jackson would tolerate nothing even close to a negative insinuation against his wife.

To his dying day, which lay so long after hers, he had nothing but devoted admiration for who he treated as angelic being, and though his worst detractors leveled a wide array of accusations against Jackson, no one could ever doubt the sheer loyalty and dedication he had for his wife.

Decades of legal work, speculation, and other ventures would eventually land Andrew Jackson among Tennessee's foremost gentry, including a short-lived term in Congress which Jackson resigned because he felt Washington life was a waste of time. Of course throughout this time Jackson also engaged in a number of duels and public fights, something he would never back down from even when his supporters felt he was too old to respectably engage in this kind of violence.

Aspirations and grudges led him to jockey with rivals like John Sevier until he became both a judge and the major general of the Tennessee militia.

This landed Jackson in a remarkably opportune position for the beginning of the War of 1812. For even as the federal military struggled both against the Indian forces on the Western front though led by acclaimed general William Henry Harrison as well as on the coast with defeat after defeat against the British, Jackson leveraged his state level power first to bring the Creek War to a seismic conclusion which would completely eviscerate the Indian military presence in the southern frontier. 

It is far too easy to forget how dangerous how life was on the interior for the tribes of whites and Indians alike as the unilateral guarantee of security for white settler life was only produced through Jackson's military action in this corridor at this time. There has been much that has been and could be said on the morality of such actions, but as Brands points out, one must remember that Jackson's people had been engaged in such ruthless neighbor genocide for centuries back home in Britain. This was simply business as usual.

Yet Jackson's star would not rise on this most decisive victory against the natives.

Federal interests took Jackson's success under its wing as the Madison administration struggled to find a successful poster boy for their efforts. Jackson of course was remarkably aware of the propagandic manipulation of his appointments, but he leveraged them with a degree of canny subtlety one would not expect from the honest world of frontier.

What is not often highlighted in the closing salvo of the War of 1812 is not just how imbalanced Jackson's efforts were against the British but how many different groups he was fighting internally and externally at the same time.

Taking his forces on the dangerous journey down the Mississippi (this was the pre-steamboat era), Jackson had not only to fight against the tropical swamps and disease-ridden mosquitos which were the bane of many early modern militaries, but against his undersupplied, undisciplined and unpaid men. Even when fighting in the Creek War, mutiny always loomed on the horizon but Jackson without hesitation pointed his cannons at those who prepared to march home and cowed any and every element of rebellion.

Once in Louisiana, Jackson fought against the federal authorities in Washington and the War Department. Jackson was no stranger to berating his superiors Madison and Monroe for their incompetence and weak-willed strategy. Yet when he received a countermanding order from Washington to take his troops back home to Tennessee after having just come down to Louisiana, Jackson strictly refused.

Instead he put the city of New Orleans (a melting pot with little American connection newly acquired from the French) under martial law and began stamping his will over the cities' authorities including William Claibourne. There had been a number of plots, including one from the ignominious Aaron Burr, to turn New Orleans over to the Spanish who neighbored in both Mexico and Florida at this time, and Jackson had no trust in the city to remain loyal to the Union. The judiciary overturned Jackson's claim to martial sovereignty over New Orleans, but he ignored the courts. 

The city wasted no time in investing its legal and judicial resources into appealing to Washington to have Jackson dismissed and brought to trial on war crimes.

With the delay of travel and deliberation working to his advantage, Jackson invested the remaining bounds of his energy on preparing the defenses of the city. Undermanned, he recruited from privateers, from men of all races and nationalities and no military training. He knew little time remained.

With full naval superiority, the British arrived and sailed upstream to disembark, planning to march down the bank to assault the city. Sir Edward Pakenham led 10,000 British regulars. These were not random reserves but among Britain's finest infantry who had defeated and uprooted Napoleonic forces in Spain alongside the Duke of Wellington (Pakenham's brother-in-law).

How could it be expected that less than 6,000 untrained men most of whom did not speak the same language as their commander and struggled for supplies, could take on the fully buttressed brunt of the British regular forces with cannon, calvary, naval blockade, and every conceivable resource to take the city?

Through relentess trenchwork, engineering, and haranguing of his troops, Andrew Jackson united a defense of New Orleans that is one of the most lop-sided victories in military victory. While 2,000 British regulars including the leading general Pakenham and many commanders were slaughtered against all expected odds in this clash, the Americans lost under 100 men. Those who had vanquished Napoleon stood no match the ragtag amalgam of Jackson.

The scars of the Revolution were returned mark for mark by a middle-aged Jackson who had lived longer than either of his parents and would have decades to come in shaping the United States of America.

Jackson's sheer force of conviction won him national renown and repute, for though the Treaty of Ghent had already been signed, America had at long last won independent military renown. America's final battle against Great Britain would be a resounding victory that the British would never seek to challenge again.

In the years to come, he would force the annexation of Florida from the Spanish even against the wishes of his superiors in Washington.

He would win election as America's first populist candidate and upturn the political order in Washington. He would be the only president to see the American federal debt paid off in total. He would survive an assassination attempt where two pistols at point blank missed him, and the elderly Jackson beat his attacker with a cane. He would destroy the Second Bank of the United States in a feud with the equally stubborn Nicholas Biddle, both sinking the vibrancy of the national economy into prolonged depression and mass debt default with neither refusing to budge. A feud that Jackson would win as he forced Biddle to exhaust all his resources and accumulated capital to try to preserve the bank. No one would attempt a national bank again for nearly a century and even then under a more euphemistic name.

Against the Federalist old guard, Jackson would be the one of the few to stand up to and defy Chief Justice Marshall in his notorious rejection of the Cherokee ruling. While Jackson is nearly universally condemned for the Trail of Tears today, Brands points out that we must consider Jackson's reasoning in the matter. Jackson argued that there was greater cruelty in keeping the Cherokees as a ghettoized minority in the State of Georgia who would undoubtedly suffer from the resentment and anger of white settlers and that no democracy could guarantee protection of a people not under its sovereignty when the constituents of that democracy would be incentivized every election cycle to force total reappropriation of those lands. The natives would never be safe if they remained unassimilated within American borders. Whether he was right or not, Jackson thought forcing the difficult decision would save both sides from decades of resentment and conflict that would result from moderate compromise.

Jackson is perhaps the quintessential figure of the anti-moderate. He was uncompromising in all his many convictions. A quick way to raise the hatred of those with any contravening opinions. And it is not unsurprising that a firebrand like Jackson would loathe a figure like Henry Clay, the model of American moderation, whom he labeled a slippery, opportunistic, visionless whisperer who poisoned the American republic through endless talk, compromise, and a refusal to decide.

This brings us to the last great crisis of Jackson's career and perhaps the most defining part of his legacy.

When his former vice president John C. Calhoun threatened complete secession from the Union over the "Tariff of Abominations" that would cost Southern planters more than Northern counterparts, Jackson immediately demonstrated characteristic wrath against such resistance. News came to Washington of military movements and ammunition stockpiling in Charleston and other locales.

Citing the Union of the states as perhaps the most inviolable principle of the United States (ironically baked into the commonplace name of this nation), Jackson promptly mobilized troops and marched them to South Carolina with orders to hang from every tree the first traitors they encountered and to decimate any city which would stand against the Union.

Such a shocking, blunt strategy would be unthinkable in many other decades of American history, but South Carolina immediately stood down and no other states stood by her defense. Jackson, being the clever politician he also was, had secretly offered an exit ramp olive branch for the South Carolina government so they could be exempted from some of the economic pain of the tariff all while clearly bending the knee to the Union. (It must be noted that Lincoln responded with far more caution and appeasement when South Carolina seceeded, though it is a stretch to compare the 1830s to the 1860s.)

The Union had never quite been a principle like this. Even in the 1810s, the Hartford Convention had bounced around the idea of a New England secession due to opposition to the War of 1812. Something Jackson also saw as an abomination.

If there is one thing which Jackson through the sheer force of his individual will has bequeathed to American politics, it is the indivisibility of the Union and the predominance of the American states as the United States. Shaped by decades of war and frontier, Jackson clung to the inviolable truth that the American states could never stand up to the encroaching powers of European empires like Britain, France, or Spain without unity. They would not be able to protect themselves from native resistance without unity. They could never succeed economically, financially, or politically without unity. The Union must be preserved at all costs even if it meant the deaths of many Americans.

It is incredible how much one man could shape the destiny of a nation. 

Jackson cleared the local frontier of an Indian presence, paving the way for cotton farming in the Southern interior. Slavery which had been dying as an institution in the eighteenth century, acquired a second birth through widespread clearing of lands for safe farming. 

Jackson forged a new frontier, much further West, which introduced the era of the steam boat. 

Jackson brought Florida into America. 

Jackson mentored and inspired the young Sam Houston who would go out and bring Texas into America. 

Jackson arranged many of the cards of the deck for his spiritual successor James K. Polk to embrace Manifest Destiny through the Mexican-American War. 

Jackson's military victory would earn America the prestige of a military power who would never again be defeated by a European force. 

Jackson would democratize the voting blocs of America to bring unity to the various classes of working Americans who would provide a check on the elites and bankers and Washington politicians who had attempted to cement control over America.

 Jackson would eliminate, if ever so briefly, the national debt and re-democratize the nation's financials that would set a century-long precedent. 
 
 Jackson would expel Native Americans from within the American heartland to empower the white settlers in the interest of peace, security, and the aggrandizement of his people, the American people.

Andrew Jackson was forged in a world of chaos and violence, where nothing was secure. And it was Jackson's fixation on building security for the United States that would set it on a remarkable course to become not just a ruling world empire, but the ruling empire. A nation-state whose security exceeded anything that Britain, France, or Spain could have dreamt of. Jackson's vision of security for the American people has been fulfilled in such superabundance that no other people can have enjoyed such a level of global security before, and perhaps ever again.

Such peace and prosperity is predicated upon the principle of the Union of the states, a seeming contradiction for an anti-Federalist like Jackson, but entirely consistent with his own predilections and psychology that these states must hang together or we must all hang separately. The expansionism of James K. Polk, the unionism of Lincoln, the soldier-statesman of Grant, the determination and hyperenergy of Theodore Roosevelt, the populists that have come and gone, all of these are children in some way of that childless president Andrew Jackson who claimed the people as his children. This orphan of a backcountry cabin through a dedicated lifetime of public service at the cost of his own family. We live in the inheritance he has left us, this nation of ours.

Jackson: A Determined Union


Easter marks one of the two high points of the church calendar. As Christmas celebrates the advent and birth of the Messiah, so does Easter commemorate his death and resurrection. And yet Easter is one of those odd holidays that moves around each year seemingly by the arbitrary hand of some higher power.

What is not so commonly known today is that the date of Easter proved to be the subject of bitter, and sometimes violent debate in the history of the church, with implications both political and cultural.

## Etymology

But first an etymology.

As most know, Easter is the Christian reinvention of the Jewish holiday of Passover (פֶּסַח - Pesach). Passover was instituted in Exodus 12 at the culmination of the Ten Plagues in Egypt where the angel of death would pass over the households of Egypt and slaughter the firstborn of each household, except for those households of Israel who painted lamb's blood upon the doorway. This symbolizes not only the fulfillment of liberation of slavery but also protection from death through the blood of an innocent sacrifice.

The parallels with Christ's sacrifice are striking, and it is not without reason that it was ordained that Christ was tried and put to death on Passover weekend.

The Hebrew name of Pesach was thus used to refer to the celebration and for most Western languages continues to be used so today.

The Greeks transliterated it into Πάσχα and the Romans carried the name into Latin as *Pascha*.

This name for Easter is maintained in modern Romance languages as Pâques in French, Pascua in Spanish, and Pasqua in Italian.

Even many Germanic languages have maintained this name with Dutch using Pasen and Swedish using Påsk.

Strangely, English and German are the two outliers which do not use the same "Passover" name for Easter.

For English, we first see reference to this Easter name in the chronicler Bede's *De Temporum* (725) where Bede refers to the Saxon name for what we call April as "Eosturmonath". He claims that the name "Eostur" refers to the ancient Saxon goddess "Eostre". This seems plausible at first sight as so many of our months and day names come from Germanic pagan deities. However, there simply is no other reference to or mention of this goddess in any other literature or archeological sources. It is completely possible that Bede merely speculates on this.

Another possible explanation is that Easter occurs around the time of the spring equinox. Because spring equinox festivities generally focus on longer daylight hours and earlier sunrises, and the sun rises in the East, the name is merely a reference to this. Like how the date of Christmas is tied to winter solstice festivals. This idea can be corroborated with a comparison to German who call the holiday *Ostern* and East *Ost*, both from the High German word *ōstarun*. 

## The First Easter Controversy - Quartodecimanism

The first Easter controversy emerged very early on in the history of Christianity, during the apostolic generation, and was concerned with the question whether the celebration of Christ's death and resurrection should happen on the day of his death (the Passover) or on the Sunday of his resurrection. Those who pushed for the Passover date were referred to as Quartodecimanism, because Passover is celebrated on the fourteenth (*quarta decima*) of the Jewish month Nisan.

The very first mention of Easter as a holiday in fact comes from the 2nd century when Melito of Sardis wrote an essay "On the Pascha" arguing for this Passover celebration date. The Western tradition, the generation following the apostolic ministry of Peter and Paul tended toward the Sunday celebration while Eastern Christians following the Apostle John tended toward the Friday date.

It became such a tenuous issue that Eusebius attests (V.23-24) the early church father Polycarp traveled from Anatolia to Rome in part to hold discussions with his Western counterparts on this Easter date issue. However, at the time they decided to practice their customs separately but remain reconciled within a single faith.

At a high level, the issue boils down to questions of theme and identity.

The first few generations of Christianity struggled to establish itself as an independent faith not attached to Judaism. Many external writers of the time referred to Christianity as a Jewish sect (as there were many), and even within the first generation Christ-followers would attend synagogue in cities where there was no establish presence.

This led to an internal tension within Christian communities as to the degree to which Christianity should be a Jewish faith. This is a large theme in the Pauline epistles, as he strove to disconnect Christian practice from "Judaizing" influence which he argued re-introduced legalism that undermined the very core of Christian doctrine.

By celebrating Easter in the same way as the Jewish faith, Christianity seemed to merely be a subset of Judaism.

On the other hand, other Christians felt it extremely important to reclaim the theme of Passover and definitively state that Christ's death is a repetition of the original Jewish Passover tradition. To disconnect the holiday from this historic event was to undermine the definitive theological connection between the two and also to deny that Christ was reclaiming and reinventing the Passover tradition through the new covenant, as much of the Christian tradition frames itself as a new iteration against the old version of Judaism.

Eventually, this conflict came to a head by the close of the 2nd century as several synods were convened to rule on the question of the date of Easter. As Eusebius recounts, these synods ruled that Sunday would be the official day of Easter, placing greater emphasis on the resurrection of Christ and his triumph over death as the real essence of the holiday.

Those who remained stoutly in favor of Quartodecimanism such as Polycrates of Ephesus were briefly excommunicated by Pope Victor I until other Western bishops such as Irenaeus pressed the Pope to re-admit Quartodecimans. We have other testimonies of others like John Chrysostom simply denying Quartodecimans admittance to church at all. This was an issue not taken lightly.

What is not clear after is what point Christians all shifted to celebrating the Easter date on Sunday, though we do know this was very nearly universally adopted following the Council of Nicaea if not before then. However, Nicaea was itself concerned with another aspect of the Easter controversy.

## The Second Easter Controversy - Jewish or Roman Calendar

So it had been established by the end of the second century that doctrinally at least Easter should be celebrated on Sunday. But this did not quite settle the issue as there were different calendars at play here.

The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, consisting of 29-30 days each month, with an extra lunar month added each year to average out the days.

By contrast, the Julian calendar introudced by Julius Caesar is a purely solar calendar of 365 days with a leap day every fourth year.

So while Christians were agreed that Easter would fall upon the "Sunday" following Passover, it was not definitively clear whether this meant adherence to the Jewish calendar for reckoning the date of Passover or if some corollary date in the Roman calendar should be used.

This again sparked dispute and debate depending on the apostolic heritage of various church communities.

In fact, it was of such significance that it was a primary point of discussion during the first ecumenical council of Nicaea which is known today for "writing the book" on core Christian doctrine across various branches and denominations, with regard to the divine and human nature of Christ, and other key theological questions.

Emperor Constantine I took more executive action in this decision and ruled that the date of Easter simply could not be celebrated according to the Jewish calendar because that meant that there would be some years in the Roman calendar where Easter would be celebrated twice.

It was determined that Easter should be celebrated **on the first Sunday after the first full moon following spring equinox** and that decision in 325 AD is how we still determine the date of Easter today. This was based on the Alexandrian method of measuring years, as Alexandria was one of the largest scientific centers of the period and was seen as most precise in calculating time. This ensured that Easter would follow a 19-year cycle before it was celebrated on the same day again, as it continues to this day.


## The Third Easter Controversy - Ireland versus Rome

However, this did not mark the end of Easter's controversies, as trouble reared its head again a few centuries later.

This third one originates with St. Patrick, whose own festival is just now behind us. While we generally picture the spread of Christianity across early medieval Europe as the emanation of concentric circles going from France to England and Germany and from there to Scandinavia and Poland, etc. there are exceptions to this rule.

Ireland is one such exception as one extremely early adopter of Christianity for the region, especially as it was never occupied or controlled by the Romans. St. Patrick is notable for establishing one of the only centers of Christianity north of Mediterranean that was so completely independent of Rome.

Because Ireland was such as an early adopter, Irish missionaries would cross the Irish Sea to evangelize peoples of England. We even have the Irish monk Columbanus traveling to modern-day Belgium as a missionary and founding one of the most popular centers of monastic learning and teaching on the European continent, Luxeuil Abbey in France and Bobbio Abbey in Italy being among them.

On the other hand, we have the famous missionary St. Augustine (no connection to *Confessions* Augustine, the bishop of Hippo) who was sent from Rome to evangelize England. Because of this there were two separate Christian influences in Saxon England, the Celtic and the Roman strain.

This was not problematic earlier on as they shared the common goal of converting pagans on the British Isles to Christianity. However as paganism began to disappear from English shores, the cultural tensions between the Celtic and Roman variants became more pronounced, as is only natural when two cultures come in contact with one another.

Ironically, the one single issue which was the breaking point between these two Christian elements was the date of Easter.

Because Ireland never had a Roman presence, it never had adopted the Roman calendar. Irish monks at the isle of Iona had adopted the practice of celebrating Easter on an 84-year cycle which had been the general practice in Celtic Gaul and even for some Romans prior to the Council of Nicaea. However, this clashed with the 19-year cycle ruling established by the Council of Nicaea.

This proved one of the most politically significant disputes in the episodes of Easter controversies as bishops, priests, and even political appointees were chosen, passed over, dismissed, and even exiled based on their positions on this issue in medieval English lands.

The most notable of these situations involves the kingdom of Northumbria, in Northern England today. While Roman Christianity had gained a strong foothold in Northumbria, a man named Oswald gained the throne in 633, and he was incidentally educated and raised in part by Irish monks. Oswald invited many Irish monks to positions of prestige and influence in his kingdom, and he was one of the most proactive rulers of Northumbria to promote a general conversion to Christinaity.

Following Oswald's death, Oswiu came to power in Northumbria which had grown very largely divided between Celtic and Roman Christianity. The issue of the date of Easter was coming to a head not only because it proved logistically challenging for lords to arrange feast days in mixed communities, but also because it was an indicator of which side possessed true hegemony, and neither side wished to back down.

To resolve this, Oswiu called the Synod of Whitby in 664 AD to rule once and for all on this date of Easter question. The other prime issue of this synod was whether monks were to shave their heads (tonsure) in the Irish or Roman style. After long and tenuous debate, it was ruled that Northumbria would align itself with Roman Catholicism on both issues. By all accounts, Oswiu merely attended and presided over the synod without intervening directly, but this was also politically convenient for him to align himself with Roman Christianity as it gave him more leverage to wage war against the Britons to the West and the Scottish peoples of the North who were more Celtic than Roman.

In either case, this synod incidentally spelled the beginning of the end for Celtic Christianity as a cultural hegemon as the major English kingdom of Northumbria swung to the side of Rome, and over time all of the British Isles would slowly align themselves to Roman Catholicism for the following centuries until the Reformation came nearly a millennium following the Synod of Whitby.

## The Date of Easter Today

One would think the matter definitively settled by this age, considering how many controversies have existed over the date of Easter.

However, many Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate Easter on a different day than Western churches. Again this boils down to the divergence of calendars.

The Julian calendar was the universal Christian calendar for quite some time, but it is not the calendar we use today.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII, the central pope of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, also implemented a new reformed calendar that added precision to the Julian Calendar. This Gregorian Calendar added exceptions to leap years in order to keep the calendar better aligned with the solar cycle. For the Gregorian Calendar, leap years would be celebrated every four years except on a century year unless that century year was divisible by 400. So for example while 1600 and 2000 were leap years, the years 1800 and 1900 were not. 2100 will also not be a leap year.

The adoption of the Gregorian calendar was very gradual and unique to each country, but it was adopted across the British Empire in 1752 when a few days were "erased" from history. This also is one of the last British reforms to have taken root in colonial America before the American Revolution severed ties between the two states.

So while the Western world today celebrates Easter according to the Gregorian calendar, the Eastern Orthodox church uses the original Julian calendar and Alexandrian method as ruled by the Council of Nicaea. However, with the Western and Eastern churches already split by the time of this divergence, there was no need for further controversy.

--

One cannot help but reflect that this was certainly was one of Christ's chief concerns when he died on the cross and rose again, and one can only hope that Heaven is keeping its calendar in line with ours, lest there should prove to be a Fourth Easter Controversy when Christ returns and there is a calendar desync between the new heavens and new earth.

The Easter Controversy (x3)

*Prometheus Chained* by Harold Parker, R.S.A. [Source URL](https://victorianweb.org/sculpture/parker/3.html).

It is a painful thing to grapple with the fixtures of our finitude.

To feel yourself bound in some body, perpetually condemned to wander a restricted zone of space and time. It seems brash foolishness to claim ourselves free when we are locked within temporal horizons of less than a century. How vast the corridors of history, and how small our permitted patrol.

Though the body itself is consigned to extensions of locality, the mind offers an escape through language and intuition.

The utterance of the lips breathes persistence into the past. Even as the spoken word wilts in the stilling and stilting of sound waves, the word enters the ear, and the mind. Here it is lost or stored with varying levels of alterations. But in this way does language slip the bonds of time through the communication of what was into the now. The oral tradition is the persistence of spoken pasts through the networks of minds who hold onto it. Myths, legends, and epics etched upon the ethnic scroll of a people's memory.

Writing too advances this form of historical transcendence. Transmission through sight from ledger to consciousness and back again. Writing is the means of not only conversing with the dead, but living their lives as well. A journey into the underworld.


But this prompts the question: what of the incongruity of temporal consciousness?

This paradigm of transmission and communication presupposes the equality of transmitting consciousness and the receptor consciousness. But time mutates all it touches. And those standing downstream from the original speaker will only hear the word through the reverbations of the Heraclitean river.

How then can we understand the original, standing where we are as we do?

Such is the problem of hermeneutics. Whether by Heidegger's pessimism or Gadamer's optimism, we must recognize our own positioning as beings of historicity. Not just in body, but in mind, and perhaps even in soul. We are historically effected consciousness.

Our minds are rendered partial and finite through their very nature. Our ideas and world will always be enclosed by the lack of what we do not know, and that layer surrounded by what we do not know that we do not know.

Those who stand a millennium, a century, or even one generation before us seem alien and strange to us. Why do they talk that way? What are their thought patterns that could give rise to such expressions? Miscommunication awakens us to the hermeneutic distance which gaps our understanding from theirs.

Our foundations, our innate prejudice, essentially prevents us from grasping them as they know themselves in their foundations. Thus, the impossibility of absolute or universal knowledge. Knowledge is built out of tribes. We only delude ourselves into the myth of universal, scientific knowledge through a tribe that has transformed itself into a world empire. We live under the tribal religion of Western science and culture, whose sprawl and ability to subsume all else allegedly gives warrant to its claim to be "universal". In our moment, one tribe rules over the rest, at least for now.


It is humbling to come to terms to these restrictions. That we may never know some things due to the nature of our birth. The technologies and cultures of our time limit the horizons of our understanding, as it does for all others.

Yet the sense that this limitation is tragic or negative in some sense is itself a presupposition, a prejudice of attitude. To think that knowledge can be formed *ex nihilo* without grounding. That a lever can exist without a fulcrum. It rests upon a mode of Western arrogance which believes that knowledge exists in itself without sociohistorical grounding or timing.

This is why Gadamer frames these limitations, restrictions, and horizons as positive markers. These are the building blocks of shared knowledge and understanding. Without our particularly instantiated language and culture, we would have no means or tools to build any knowledge at all. Gaps and absences, stripped of all positive historical content, cannot be used to build something enduring. A house of winds is no house at all.

His conclusion is that in some ways we can as historically effected consciousness transcend our particular time and place through transhistorical dialogue. As a classicist, Gadamer certainly had specific materials in mind for this. We cannot fully rise up out of our situation, so to speak. But one never could. But we can reach across the gap and thereby reach some shared understanding of the world, thus enriching ourselves and our knowledge while recognizing that we cannot become equal or identical to those on the other side of the gap.

It is a cheery image, but it is also a stark reminder of the cosmic inequality that we inhabit. For those on the quest for knowledge, we suffer such a profuse embarrassment of riches compared to those in pre-literate times, or even those scholars who spent countless years copying texts by hand or doing word counts. All labor that can be achieved digitally now within milliseconds. 

We must remember our fortune, even if we so rarely steward our fortune well. We do not know how long we will be able to keep it.

This is merely a first breath at wrestling with our historicity. Perhaps Gadamer's vision cracks under pressure and closer analysis. That we will have to see at some future time.

What it means to be human, bound in space and time

Jackson: A Determined Union

The Easter Controversy (x3)

Wrestling with historicity