Piranesi, the shepherd worlding their selves

The Shepherd of Hermas versus Susanna Clarke's Piranesi

Wikipedia says The Shepherd of Hermas, or the Good Shepherd, 3rd century, Catacombs of Rome. But the devotee bringing a lamb to sacrifice is common across many local “pagan” practices in the Mediterranean.

A couple of posts ago (Inappropriation) I introduced the work that led to an awkward conversation. This post is just to add that I’ve finished Jörg Rüpke’s On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome. (Townsend Lectures/Cornell Studies in Classical Philology. Ithaca ; London: Cornell University Press, 2016. ISBN 9781501704703).

The later sections deal with The Shepherd of Hermas. Many regard it as the work of a Christian and was indeed a favourite of many Christians as it dealt with a individual attending to their conscience, which many Christians claim to be their own discovery within various frameworks (obedience to the church over faith, devoteeism for Jesus, faith in faith…).

Rüpke points out that in what became Christianity, a focus on the individual interior life was a widespread phenomena, (regardless of the Church’s substitution of the city of your birth for the emporer’s afterlife in the City of God).

The Shepherd of Hermas, is not now often read by Christians, and which type of Christianity the writer practiced is up for a great deal of debate.

The writer uses the now archetypal trope of a devil and an angel in your head, on your shoulders, each telling you what to do, and how you have to choose between them, and helps the reader by telling them how to tell them apart. Handy if salvation of your immortal soul is important to you.

This focus on the individual is what make it so very Christian to our eyes after some millennia of Christianity as an imperialist force. This is curious because empires do not care about the individual.

It is probably some type of doublethink, or paradox/chaos surfing as a element of statecraft.

But back to the angel and devil’s on our shoulders. The Christian asks themselves why can’t I follow rules, obey the church etc. and this trope turns this inquiry, this attention, into some kind of internal but twisted conversation.

I would argue we are not a Manichean battleground of good and evil spirits, where lions and hyena squabble over our guts in the Colosseum for the emperor’s entertainment, and that to save our souls we must do X and/or believe Y.

Instead, let us consider Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi wherein the protagonist is “the beloved son of the house”, such that we can see, we are each, hopefully, the beloved children of the world. Where we take those voices not as good and evil, but as the views that Janus holds, to self and to world. They are both us, or at least both in and of our bodies, and we must integrate them to live and bear our own children. Not to integrate the evil and the good, but the view out to the world and the view into the self. For the views arise in the same movement, their differences arise in our birth. To pathologize this is disgusting (sorry religious peeps, but you can be disgusting).

The Good-and-Evil voices trick is a simplistic stupid device, it does not integrate, merely helps turn consciousness into a mass of subservient consciences, given over to the state via a government department called the church. If you accept you have a conscience you are a slave.

We find the protagonist in Piranesi when they are worlding to the exclusion of selfing, but eventually return to themselves. Integrate themselves like the wounded fisher king, rather than sacrifice themselves for an imperial stupidity.