Errare Humanum Est
February 19, 2014
The wrongs and injuries of base mankind
Fresh to my sense, and always in my mind.
The bravely-patient to no fortune yields:
On rolling oceans, and in fighting fields,
Storms have I pass’d, and many a stern debate;
And now in humbler scene submit to fate.
What cannot want? The best she will expose,
And I am learn’d in all her train of woes
These words are from Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus, on reaching the palace at Ithaca, considers the trials he has endured on his ten-year odyssey and the uncertainty of what the future holds, and is resigned to the comfort of his fate.
Alexander Pope was by all accounts a remarkable man. His translations of Homer’s epic poems, completed early in the eighteenth century, are regarded by many as the classic rhyming translations by which all others are measured. He was an avid poet and critic, and if not for the Illiad and Odyssey, is probably best remembered for having penned the phrase To err is human, to forgive divine, possibly the best known of all English proverbs. What wisdom could have been embedded into these seven simple words to have caused them to be remembered for so long and known to so many? I think it’s that they capture, in the most concise way possible, the two poles that lie at the very heart of the human condition.
It’s been a revelation to me how, as I’ve got older, I’ve increasingly found wisdom in ancient writings. I recall dwelling on the biblical concept of original sin in years gone by, and of the notion of we as human beings having fallen, and coming to the conclusion that it was ridiculous and nonsensical. If eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was a metaphor for our transition to rational beings, how could the act possibly be sinful and constitute our fall? I’d always considered our intellect and ability to reason as the essence of our humanity and correspondingly as our greatest gift; Shouldn’t we celebrate the event instead?
While I still do see reason as one of our great gifts, time and experience have tempered my views to the point where it’s impossible for me to look upon intellect with the same indiscriminate reverence that I once did. Is it really our greatest gift, or are there other gifts that rival or surpass it? What good is intellect if it’s misdirected, and having asked that, what is it that provides direction and guidance to our thoughts and ultimately to our actions? It’s by asking questions like these that we begin to wade into the deep waters of ethics and aesthetics, and our notions of perfect love and perfect beauty that lie at their heart.
My favourite modern philosopher is Bertrand Russell, not because I think he was the smartest or made the most significant contributions to philosophy, but because he was so acutely human and aware of it. In mathematics, he single-handedly destroyed the dreams of the idealists by showing that even mathematics, our purest science that many had thought perfect, had inescapable logical flaws. He wrote prolifically on a multitude of subjects and was never afraid to voice his opinion. His work was and remains controversial, and Wittgenstein, his pupil, famously said that Russell’s works should be divided into red books on mathematics, that everyone should read, and blue books on everything else, that nobody should be allowed to. It was of Russell, defending his controversial appointment to a post at the College of the City of New York, that Einstein wrote:
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
In a 1959 BBC inverview, Russell was asked what message he would choose to pass on to future generations, were he given the opportunity. Fittingly, he broke his advice into two parts, the first intellectual, that when searching for truth we should try to consider only the facts, putting those facts above any desired outcomes or presupposed notions, and the second moral, that hatred is foolish and love wise.
Truth, and love. If these are our two great gifts, where do they come from? We certainly don’t need them for survival and it’s curious to me that we have either. It was Einstein again who noted that the only unintelligible thing about the universe is that it’s intelligible to us at all. It needn’t be so. And what about love? Surely we would be just as well off, or even better off, had we been more like other animals who go about ensuring their survival with brutal and banal efficiency?
Whatever the answers and despite the oddities of our human predicament, I cannot but think what an unlikely journey we’ve had in getting here. From the very instant of the Big Bang, in those first zillionths of a second when the universe started, had the explosive force been even minutely more or less, the elements that are the building blocks of life and everything around us wouldn’t have been formed and the universe as we know it would simply not exist. I read somewhere once that the precision required of that explosion was so great that the probability of it happening as a chance event would be like shooting an arrow in a random direction and having it strike a bulls-eye at the other end of the known universe. Yet, despite the odds, it happened.
In Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, he discusses experiments in pre-biological organic chemistry at Cornell University, where some of the basic building blocks of life, like amino acids, can be synthesised easily from inorganic compounds. Easy as that may be, the step from amino acids to even the most simple life forms, such as bacteria, is like the step from a chunk of brass to a functioning Swiss clock. Of course we can’t discount that it happened by accident, but the spontaneous creation of life as a chance event must leave even the arrow analogy pale by comparison.
These are only two unlikely events on a road that is staggeringly full of fortuitous accidents of nature from beginning to end. Sometimes when I think about the events that have led us to where we now are, and even given the billions of years that it’s taken for us to get here, it’s hard for me to accept that it’s all been purely accidental. As a person of science with an enquiring mind, I don’t for an instant believe that we should ascribe any event to the realm of supernatural miracles, but an essential part of life for me has become embracing the uncertain and the unknown as a necessary part of our existence, and celebrating the reality that we are surrounded by ordinary miracles every minute of every day.
The religious zealots will have us believe that the existence of God can be proved, while at the same time the fanatic atheists will ridicule all who choose to believe in any form of deity. The truth, of course, is that it’s a matter that can neither be proved nor disproved, nor will it ever be, for the answers lie in a realm beyond anything we can conceive. But I can’t help wondering what if, before anything else, there was a singular God of beauty and of love? Is there anything more cruel and lonely than love unrequited? It leads me to feel, sometimes overwhelmingly, that we are Children of a Lonely God. That perhaps all those uncanny accidents of nature were somehow not accidental at all, but part of a larger play that has culminated in the existence of us as rational beings, floating on this pale blue dot in the vast loneliness of space and able to grasp and marvel at the beauty and majesty of nature. That it’s no accident at all that we have been given reason and love, and that the most important choice we can and must make is the choice to love, and through love to connect with and discover the Divine. If this is true, then perhaps the Universe and everything in it is nothing but a celebration of beauty and of love.
But despite the divine origin of the seeds that lie within us, the tragic human reality is that we as beings are fatally flawed. It’s as though we’ve been given the notions of perfect beauty and prefect love, but for us they remain just that. Notions. We dream of replicating perfect beauty or realising perfect love, but for us, such perfection will be forever elusive. However noble our intentions and no matter how hard we might try, it will always be impossible for us to turn those notions into perfect reality, as under the critical judgement of our own honest intellect, we will always fall short.
Should we just concede defeat or resign ourselves to bitterness in the futility of it all? Of course not. For me, being human is about accepting the flaws that are part of my makeup and choosing to try and rise above them. About taming and tempering the animal within and striving to exist beyond the physical plane. About never abandoning those perfect notions of beauty and love and all the virtues they inspire, and trying to live up to them and do them justice. This, for me, defines human purpose and I believe that it’s this singular activity that has the ability to truly enrich and add meaning to our lives.
I don’t think it really matters how we choose to go about it – whether it’s raising children with love, writing poetry, creating a beautiful garden, or nothing short of setting out to change the world – ultimately I think it’s less about what we do and more about the way in which we do it. Whatever we choose to do, if we do it with earnest, it will be a road on which we will often need to go by feel and which will never be without risk. And we cannot allow ourselves to shy from risk for fear of devastation; In the end, there is little to be gained from living a life in which we are not true to ourselves or which is less than the one of which we are capable. It’s inevitable that at times we will err in our judgement and make mistakes – we’re only human after all.
Although we’re all familiar with Alexander Pope’s famous proverb, fewer are aware that the saying itself had its roots in antiquity with Seneca’s less forgiving Errare humanum est, sed in errare perseverare diabolicum (to err is human, but to persist in the error is diabolical). A stoic philosopher, Seneca has always been considered to be a humanist saint and it’s fitting for me that having been born in 4BC, his life and that of Christ, the divine saint, would have been concurrent so that we today can imagine the human and the divine juxtaposed in time, just as it is within ourselves. I have little doubt that Seneca himself felt these poles in his own being and that had he chosen to define this, he might instead have written Errare humanum est, amāre sacrum.
You couldn’t easily find a better partner for human nature than Love. That’s the basis for my claiming that every man should hold Love in respect, and I myself respect the ways of love and practice them with exceptional care. That’s why I urge others to do the same, and on this and every other occasion I do all I can to praise the power and courage of Love. ~ from Plato’s Symposium – The closing of Socrates speech.