Felix Culpa

 

On this slow news day, the closest I want to come to politics is a possibly eccentric meditation on the idea of the margin of error.  John Milton, in his epic treatment of the Genesis story, Paradise Lost, advances a theory of what is called in Latin a felix culpa and in English the “Fortunate Fall”.  This is the somewhat convoluted Christian theological idea that the primal sin of Adam and Eve, though utterly disastrous in its immediate effects, turned out in the end to be the cause of humanity’s greatest happiness, namely redemption through Jesus Christ.  Hence it was a “happy” sin or fault.  The paradox of the felix culpa is actually rather fascinating in its many ramifications.

 

My attention was recently drawn to the idea of fortunate mistakes in art and literature.  The line of thought was introduced by a news squib concerning a painting by the modernist Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944).  Apparently one of his most famous works has been hanging upside down in various museums for the last seventy-five years.  I say “apparently,” because I don’t see how anybody can actually know.  The painting is a group of strips of color crossing at right angles parallel to the four sides of its canvas, a geometrical square.  The expert who declared the painting to have been hanging upside down claims there is independent evidence of this fact, but it doesn’t convince me.  The real reason behind the claim is that this guy thinks it looks better the other way.  I can get behind this argument.  Life would certainly be much improved if it conformed to the way I see things.  And as I look at the painting, it would look about the same whichever of its four edges was “up”.  If the way it has been hanging for seventy-five years is culpable, it is happily culpable.  It's all in the way you look at things.

 

 

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the philosopher-bishop George Berkeley published his novel ideas about ontology—ontology meaning, roughly, how things exist.  What brought things into existence was the fact that they were perceived to exist.  This theory was very elegantly expressed in a short Latin sentence.  Esse est percipi.  “To be is to be perceived.”  You have probably heard about “Berkleyanism” in terms of an example commonly used to illustrate it.  If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to see or hear the crash, did it really fall?  Indeed, did it really exist in the first place?  According to Berkeley it is only the perception of phenomena that makes them exist.  So at first blush it would seem that the answer is negative.

 

            Well, we do say that seeing is believing.  I recall from many years ago a hilarious segment on, I believe, “Candid Camera”.  A refrigerator salesman was trying to close a deal with a supposed prospective buyer (actually a conspirator in on the joke).  How, this man wanted to know, could he be absolutely sure that the interior light in the refrigerator actually went out when the door was shut?  He didn’t want to be paying for wasted electricity!  No amount of explanation and assurance from the salesman, no amount of fiddling with the little switch in the side of the door, could persuade him.  He insisted on actually climbing into the refrigerator and having the door shut on him if he was to be persuaded.  The salesman, apparently willing to do anything to close a sale, cooperated; so he scrunched the supposed “buyer” into the shelf above the vegetable drawers and actually closed the door!  In fact, Berkeley didn’t think metaphysics demanded such strenuous human measures.  Fortunately, all-seeing God, whose divine perception was continuous and ubiquitous, was in charge of ontology.

 

The witty English priest Ronald Knox wrote a limerick on this theme

There once was a man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad”

 

which elicited an equally witty if anonymous response:

Dear Sir,
              Your astonishment's odd.
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
                          Yours faithfully,
                                                  God

            Of course, if there is perception, there must be the possibility of misperception, and thus another chance of felix culpa.  For example I am slightly color blind.  How can I know that what I do not see is better than what I do see?  There are some great examples of masterful mistakes from literary study.  One concerns a very dramatic incident at the end of Melville’s novel White-Jacket: or the World in a Man-of-War.  The narrator, a Yankee seaman who takes his strange nickname from his home-made upper garment, narrowly escapes death in an accidental plunge from a spar high on a mast into the sea.  He plunged deep into the water before resurfacing miraculously uninjured.  In the submerged moment of his terrifying near-death experience, his whole life races through his mind.  “I wondered whether I was yet dead, or still dying.  But of a sudden some fashionless form brushed my side—some inert, coiled fish of the sea; the thrill of being alive again tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning of death shocked me through”  (p.763, LibAm edition).

 

            An eminent Harvard professor, one of the country’s leading authorities on American literature, and a man who had either bad eyeglasses or a bad edition of the novel, waxed lyrical about this passage.  He was particularly excited by the idea of a soiled fish.  He wrote thus: “[Melville’s] “discordia concors, the unexpected linking of the medium of cleanliness with filth, could only have sprung from an imagination that had apprehended the terrors of the deep, of the immaterial deep as well as the physical.”  Now who could possibly doubt the poetic superiority of a soiled to a coiled fish?  And who would settle for rubbing up against a slippery eel if you could have a discordia concors instead?  The mistake is a great improvement on the take.  God bless the typographical error.  O felix culpa!