Page a Day: One Hundred Forty Nine

             “It’s Julius, warlord,” said a voice I recognized, but could not name. “Julius!”

            The night was lit by five thousand orbs of blinding brilliance, arching overhead. I lowered my lightspear, feeling immediately outclassed. Not since the war of the first Faith would there have been a bombardment  of the scale and ferocity of this one.

            “What about him?” shouted the warlord over the fury as the barrage came down. This time, I thought the wall did shake. “Think! Think clearly!”                 

            “We cannot,” said the voice in the quiet after the impact. “The Neverborn diminish. Julius has fallen. Three snipers, the corner of the wall. One shot his head. We reached the top of the bluffs. Julius died the true death. He won’t walk this world again.”

Page a Day: One Hundred Forty Eight

            Breathe in, hold, squeeze, exhale. Figure after figuring standing up atop the ramparts to fire their lightspears into darkness. That was when the first ranks of Julius’s infantry reached us, halfway through my second spear, clomping up through the mud the rain and Marcus’s withdrawal had made. We did not have to warn them about the mastodons, for they had become spectral forms themselves just then. Now Julius's thousands were invisible to Augers, too.   

            Breathe in, hold, squeeze, exhale. Everyone missed that night. The rain blurred the outlines of the targets and the White Swarm blurred our sights, never mind that mastodons never stand entirely still, or that the counter-bombardments came occasionally blindingly close. The more I thought about it, the more remarkable my shot at the three standing on the corner had been, not only across the distance to the wall, but also the distance crossways along it, well over three hundred paces in extremely poor conditions.

            More shouted commands came up from the captains of Marcus’s infantry behind. “Make way! Make way!”

            I squeezed on an empty barrel. Swap, slide, replace: third spear. Very soon I might as well take out my pen and start writing, for all the good I would manage in combat. There was some confusion as Julius’s infantry coming from up front met our infantry coming from the rear, threatening Marcus’s carefully spread formation. Several captains grew cross, and started cursing.

            That did not seem right. We were always having trouble with the converts, through the White Swarm helped more and more with integration. But the Blooded do not make tactical mistakes.

            Breathe in, hold, squeeze, exhale. The figures atop the wall were visibly diminished. We were taking probably half the return fire we once had been. I was about twenty shots into my final spear when everyone finally sorted themselves out and I heard the swoosh of our five thousand pieces of artillery slowing to a formation stop. The cavalry, so to speak, had finally arrived.   

            “What’s that?” I heard Jerem Cozak, asking one of the incoming captains over the whine of five thousand artillery swinging around to bear. “What did you say was wrong?”

These Essays: The Empathetic Imagination

What all iterations of the empathetic phrase “I am you” have had in common, however, has been an ability to make the physically absent spiritual or intellectually present through mimesis. And here Christians who are wondering why we have the Bible might perk up. For while empathy as understood in the phrase “I am you” has many hermeneutically laudatory aspects, its most salutary quality for our purposes may well be its imaginative capacity. 

As the Augustinian scholar Peter Brown writes of empathy: “to let the imagination run; to give serious attention to reading books that widen our sympathies, that train us to imagine with greater precision what it is like to be human in situations very different from our own.”

So we might find that imagination has serious implications for these essays. For I have said that an interpretation’s potential to heal may be called its salutary force. And I have said that Christians ought to prefer those interpretations which possess salutary force to those that do not. Further, I am seeking to argue that they ought to prefer them because those interpretations which possess salutary force will have made more sense of Scripture’s form, content, and transformative purpose than those that do not.

Now I hope I have shown in these essays how interpretations which heal will have been faithful to Scripture’s content; I am currently attempting to show how interpretations which possess salutary force will have been more faithful to Scripture’s form. If Scripture possesses imaginative form, it will have conveyed God’s empathy with humankind, because imagination requires empathy.  

 t is no accident that an Augustinian scholar should have written the quote above; Augustine was one of the main explorers of mimetic empathy in the ancient Christian world, and he did so precisely in the context of reading Scripture. 

As he defends the very purpose of On Christian Doctrine, he writes, “love itself, which binds men together in the bond of unity, would have no means of pouring soul into soul, and as it were, mingling them with one another, if men never learned anything from their fellow-men.”

Now we have spent some time in the last chapter on the latter clause, but we cannot go on without noting the language, perhaps startling to a modern Christian, of pouring soul into soul. Such empathy is dangerous, dazzling, perhaps violently ecstatic; it threatens to erode the boundaries of self and other—and it happens, for Augustine, around the interpretation of Scripture. 

This is mimesis not only in the modern sense of imitation, mimicry. It is also mimesis in the ancient sense of participation through shared experience—and in this particular Augustinian case, the oratorical expounding of the meaning of Scripture, teaching tied to understanding.

So empathy has in Augustinian thought a particular trajectory. Mimesis not only shares experience, but also forms a moral imagination. Augustine could love someone like the Apostle Paul “not as a man, but because of his righteous mind—that is, because his love conformed with a steadfast and unchangeable pattern.” 

The empathy which nears the dissolution of souls in charity also presumes a vast gulf between them; Augustine certainly does not regard himself as having a steadfast and unchangeable mentality.

So the pragmatic problem with Augustinian charity, with Augustinian empathy, is not that it mixes souls. Rather, quite the opposite occurs, and it remains a bit one-sided: “even among brethren, one knew the love with which he loved more than the brother whom he loved.”

Augustinian love seems to work out, all too often, one-directionally, or at least one-dimensionally. One may love God in response to God’s love for us, but God will never “return” our love to us; God’s love for us will not compound because we love God, too. In similar terms, one may love a neighbor, or a brother, but agape has little space for reciprocation. 

With that in mind, “infusing souls and nearly mixing them” sounds less like peril and more like promise, less like disease and more like remedy for the chasm that Augustinian mimesis presumes. I imagine because I cannot myself experience; even conversation between people was, for Augustine, “one abyss calling to one another.”

This difference allowed moral transformation to occur mimetically—or, more accurately in Augustine’s understanding, to grow through imitation by stages. The wise man imitated God, and “union of the lover and the beloved occurred through imitation of subjective reality.” Likewise, “through the Holy Spirit, God diffused a greater than human love in the hearts of the elect.”

This two-step process is the essence of Augustinian hermeneutics—and, we would note, the essence of Augustinian empathy. As Morrison writes: “understanding Scripture meant two contradictory things: first, the estrangement of each human being from God and neighbor, and, second, the renewal through charity of unity with God and with other redeemed souls in God.”

Page a Day: One Hundred Forty Seven

              “Julius!” shouted Jerem Cozak. “From the west along the walls! Spearmen cover their approach!”

                 I held still through the release. The bolt from my starspear took the second one through the head, precisely the point I had been aiming at. The lead one fired his shot into the darkness. The last one never did figure out what everyone else was aiming at, because that was when Marcus’s artillery hit.

                The world vanished in a flash of gold.

                When my sight returned, all three men had disappeared. The wall was singed but otherwise undamaged where they had stood. Just as I’d supposed, it hadn’t mattered. A stray artillery shot had wiped the three Augers out entirely. I looked along the length of the wall for targets.

                Soon enough there were plenty of Augers rearing up along the ramparts that had been hiding them. For a moment I was ecstatic that they could not see us, then realized that their shots went over my shoulders into our own artillery. They were aiming at Marcus’s operators because they could not see us. I chose a human form blurred by distance and the rain and the spectral whiteness of the barrel. I held my breath, let half out, squeezed. The figure fell, but it could have been my shot or the stray of the spearmen next to me. As I said, we don’t call our marks. 

                Breathe, hold, exhale, release. Blurred target after blurred target atop the wall in the darkness. Where did they all come from? I wondered. I squeezed on an empty barrel. As I had done ten thousand times in practice, but never yet in battle, I swapped the starspear to my left hand and slid its sister from my back, replaced it with the empty. That’s when their artillery finally got together another counter-assault, like we had seen from atop the ridge before we charged.

                A line of suns arched toward us through the night, and I remembered Wesing. But this line couldn’t have been more than fifty orbs across, and it was aimed entirely at Marcus, who had spread his infantry out enough: their shells shed most of the energy into the air and earth. It was only when foot soldiers packed together, Julius had taught me, that shells ended up dumping into each other, causing cascading failures through the ranks.

Page a Day: One Hundred Forty Six

              I unlimbered my spear from its cradle in my arm. The other two sat crossed across my back, molded as always to my armor but ready to be released. I scanned the long line of the top of the wall for targets, three hundred paces out in darkness and lashing rain. The shooting would be miserable. 

                “Artillery refocus fire!” Marcus bellowed to his thousand disks. “Northeast wall, southern city!”

                A line of figures running along the top of the wall, silhouettes brought out by a flash of lightning, the long rods of lightspears in their hands. I swung my lightspear up to rest against my shoulder. 

                The artillery whined behind me, as their motors turned their disks back toward the southern city. 

                The figures reached the corner of the wall and stopped, peering outward in the driving rain. They raised their own lightspears, facing in the wrong direction, down the valley toward the bay. I counted three of them. I sighted along the barrel.

                The artillery hissed in the background, charging up for their bombardment.

                This probably wasn’t going to matter, I thought. I’m going to miss. And the disks will blow them away before they figured out what happened. In the corner of my vision, below the city, I thought I saw the darkness move. Were there more dark forms, hunched against the incline along the ground?             

                The artillery spat out their suns.

                Atop the wall, the three Augers did not all raise their lightspears at the same speed. The furthest out along the wall was fast and uncertain, his aim wavering even to my distant eye. The second was calmer and sure, moving as I moved. The one to the rear moved too slowly and could not seem to see what the others saw. I aimed for the second in the line.

                The orbs of light arched over my head, illuminating the wall and the rain and the Augers in noontime glow. I picked my spot: his ear. My eyes traced the individual drops of rain as they fell. The black armor of the Augers glistened. I gently squeezed the barrel.