Redemption: The Third Act of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”

“Without being compatriots, they were all Romans.  When everyone became a Roman citizen, Rome ceased having any citizens; and when being a Roman citizen became equivalent to being a Cosmopolitan, neither Rome nor the world were loved: the love of Rome as fatherland having become cosmopolitan, it became indifferent, inactive and null; and when Rome came to coincide with the world, it ceased being anyone’s fatherland, while Roman citizens, having the world as fatherland, ceased having any fatherland and they showed that much in deeds” – (Giacomo Leopardi)[1]

Introduction: Eve’s Redemption[2] in Acts 1 and 2

The first two acts of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar have invited us to discern the problem of danger as key to political life.[3] Act two suggested the need for collaboration between lords and ladies in facing danger without being overtaken by it.  Husbands may be the only ones capable of slaying dragons, but their victory presupposes their having listened to their wives as moral compasses.  Both Brutus and Caesar ought to have recognized their respective wives as mirrors of their proper end.  Tragically, however, the husbands either postpone (Brutus) or dismiss (Caesar) the challenge of heeding their wives’ counsel; the lords are impatient, busy, preferring outward solutions to “inner” work, superficial success within arm’s reach to long-term latent or “hidden” success.  The men are “womanish” in spirit, behaving much as Eve does in the Garden of Eden, when she leaves Adam behind, as if “at home” (focusing on an “economic” inventory of creatures).  The spirit of Eve has seemingly overtaken the husbands.  Their wives, on the other hand, are guided by the spirit of Adam, the spirit that patiently attends to what is latent.  Yet, the ladies do not have the “bodies” of men; they lack the appearance of Adam, being thereby ill-equipped to face danger, what lies outside or at the hidden center of legal certainties.  The ladies are unfit to expose themselves to the uncertainties of politics and its pantheon of masks; they recoil before exposure, not primarily out of fear of danger, but moved by prudent recognition of a natural division of labor between lords and ladies.  While neither party is to seek safety per se, women are to face danger through men, even as men are to face it through their women.  While “womanish” lords navigate the stormy surface of life, ladies labor beneath it, keenly conscious of danger in accepting as their task a self-giving, even a self-sacrifice propaedeutic to the outward one of their male counterparts.  Both Portia and Calphurnia are readily willing to let go of their own authority so that it may be transposed outwardly in their lords’ garbs: the hidden authority is to manifest itself through a metamorphosis.[4] Yet, the metamorphosis whereby the lady gives birth to a “manly man,” is brought about successfully through the agency of a poet, who is strictly-speaking “gender-free,” even if its preferred persona is a Muse.

Poetry makes it possible for us to face outer danger without being overtaken by it.  In Biblical terms, poetry makes it possible for Eve to eat justly through Adam an otherwise forbidden fruit.  Shakespearean poetry invites the understanding that Eve’s fault, if of a fault we must speak, was to act without any regard for Adam, forgetting that Eve is no longer within Adam, or that in exiting the body, mind becomes feeble.  The feeble mind manifest in Eve reaches out to wisdom as a ready-at-hand fruit, as if the fruit did not expose us to dangers lying outside of the Garden of God-given certitudes.  (Here, Eve appears forgetful of her Adamic soul.  Or rather, in Eve we see the erring of Adam’s mind.) Had Eve not followed reptilian imposture, she could have let Adam eat of the fruit in God; she could have let Adam eat before her, anticipating her, quite aside from any betrayal.  For Adam knows nothing of the snake; he has no ear for insinuations lurking in the dark.  Upon Eve’s “departure” from Adam, the Adamic soul is left bent upon “sweetness and light,” all that is exposed, innocent, sincere.  All he sees he sees “in God”.  Yet, evidently, in the Garden Adam does not see everything.  He fails to see the Snake, danger hiding in Adam’s safe haven—danger irrupting from without the Garden through hearsay, as in an echo.  The reptilian imposture “replicates,” anticipates the abyss of the divine mind.

What good poetry shows is that Eve can help Adam transcend the limitations of his Garden without falling out of it.  For this to happen, Eve must collaborate with Adam, returning “home” or within Adam’s body, as it were, asking it to step in front of her, doing what she does, though in the open, or in God’s own eyes. (The exteriority Eve is lost in would then be a sham imitation of exposure to God, exposure in which both Adam and Eve are found.) In Shakespeare’s play, the womanish man must return home to be made whole, again, or so that he may be guided by a lady’s “manly mind”.  Where the manly mind (the one that otherwise “errs” in and with Eve) acts in a manly body, the fruit of wisdom will not be approached as an object to grasp (Eve, the weakened Adam, “grasps” to compensate “her” loss), but as a gift that Adam dares receive by exposing himself to danger as the hidden presence of God’s intimacy in the middle of man’s own world (Adam must “wait” to receive the fruit from God, in the beginning).  What must Eve do, then?  Act 2 of Shakespeare’s tragedy points to a redeeming answer: the lady is to call her lord to face danger on her behalf, to slay their dragon by way of saving the lady, the lord’s paradigmatic Muse. (The ambiguity of genders, whereby Eve’s spirit appears as lord and Adam’s as lady, entails transcendence of physical appearances.  As a personage seeking its author, to paraphrase Pirandello, Eve is to recover her Adamic appearance [pace Freud]: the male body reminds the woman of her lost strength.)  Politics is the stage of lady-intimacy’s redemption.  Yet politics is now “fallen,” incapable of delivering what it is originally intended to deliver.  Only the intervention of a mediator could bring politics back on its right path.  That mediator, as we have seen, is none other than the Shakespearean poet, or rather the logos proper to the human being as such.  In its fallen condition, politics is a superficial problem—an obstacle, rather than a solution or a path pointing to a solution.  Politics is certainly not its own solution.  Yet, once proper poetry opens politics to its “domestic” intimacy, a proper relationship between lord and lady can be “reactivated,” to disclose a “portal” to the otherworldly.  Politics will no longer be mere politics; people will no longer be marred in the swamp of tribal warfare; instead, politics will be restored in the light of a theological dimension, as the arena of testimony to divine transcendence.  How is the “restoration” brought about?  Poetry must draw the political course (the “running” found in Act 2) back home, to a “present” that can thereupon be opened to eternity.

Portia alone cannot open the “portal”; she must be patient, awaiting Brutus’s return home; ­ hoping that a poet or soothsayer seduce the lord into returning, lest the lord be lost in a vortex of repetitive blood-shedding.  Upon returning home, Brutus could heed Portia’s bidding, preparing for danger without “falling” into it (weakened by having lost its manly body, or by having erred in Eve, Portia’s manly mind must stay away from danger as long as it has not regained its lost body: mens sana in corpore sano).[5] Danger would convert from being a temptation into which we are compelled to fall, to being a challenge we desire to rise to.  The real “dragon” to be slain will come to light behind the stage of false dragons, of shadows of dragons.  No longer attempting to fight political windmills, the lord will turn “upward” to face his opponents as spiritual entities, creatures of the mind (as in the first Canto of Dante’s Inferno)[6]—fears, diversions and finally outright evil, Satan as “first betrayal”.[7] Thanks to Porta’s intimacy, Brutus could emerge as a poet whose battle is fought, not against a physical enemy, but against himself as “fool” who has sought to overcome alterity—ultimately, death itself—in the interest of self-assertion.  The fool must die so that the true hero may rise on the quest for final awakening.[8] Yet, the poet’s “vertical” battle does not entail any defection from his old, “horizontal” front.  The poetic quest moderates “historical” strife by opening the physical quest to its transcendent solution, what ultimately “endangers” our strife, “risking” to subvert it altogether.  Now we no longer fight to win in the here and now of our everyday dying, but to expose the battlefield, the theatre of our daily life, to fundamental questions; or to expose “mere-politics” as the shadow of real problems, real challenges and real life.  The real enemy is not the discrete one we face on the battlefield, but the reptilian root of war—of Mars.  Thus ought we embrace our enemy, drawing him out of subjection to the reptile.  Fighting aimed at liberating our enemies from the illusions of tribal warfare, from the delusive belief that the Other is the consummate obstacle to peace.

We have heard the plea to, “Love thy enemies” (Matthew 5:44).  Yet, that plea was co-opted by the prophets of Universalism to mean that all enemies should be friends, or that as long as we all love each other there can be no war.  Yet, as Leopardi reminds us, universal peace entails not love, but elimination of alterity.  Universalisms make the Gospel’s injunction senseless.  Does this mean, however, that we need enemies, inimici or those who are “not-friends”?  Should we conclude with Hobbesians that our identity is bound to the identification of enemies?[9] Is it in our interest to use enemies?  Does our good demand the sacrifice of enemies?  If we do not take our bearings from our enemies, must we not yearn for the universal peace that would render the Gospels anachronistic?

The Gospels point us beyond both tribal warfare and universal peace, beyond both the twelve tribes of Israel and the pax romana.  In the Gospels the tribes become, as it were, disciples of a higher truth speaking an ecumenical language, a tongue that Rome could readily understand—if only it “returned home,” after the manner indicated by Shakespeare.  What are we then to say about our enemies?  That they are our enemies only to the extent that they see us as their enemies.  We “turn the other cheek,” the left one, the one demanding justice on behalf of the righteous cheek (Matthew 5:39), by way of signaling that there is a debt to be paid unto heaven (viz., a dept in the eyes of God)—a wrong to be made right beyond tribal strife, but also beyond a peace demanding the elimination of enemies.  In tribal warfare, the enemy “shall strike you on your right cheek” (σε ῥαπίζει εἰς τὴν δεξιὰν σιαγόνα σου).  He provokes you without your having provoked him; he is thus offending you unjustly.  Your actions have not moved him into action; neither will they alone draw him to a ceasefire, insofar as the source of his offence is not within you.  Indeed, it may very well be that your enemy felt offended by your right cheek, by your own righteousness.  In offering the other, or left cheek, the just man gives testimony of the offence, showing that “the other” is merely the shadow of “the same”—that in offending the righteous we are offending ourselves.  For we are all “in the same boat” and injustice is destructive first and foremost of those perpetuating it.  In turning the “left” cheek, we are showing the offender that the cycle of tribal warfare is open to a metaphysical end; that the real danger he is after—the one he seeks to overcome, to deny at its root—is not his brother or sister, no matter how diabolical he or she may be assumed to be, but the context of all of our certainties, of all that remains outside of our world, be this a pristine Garden of blessings, or a “fallen” valley of tears and brokenness.  The tribal villain, the “first offender,” sees in the Other the presence of danger in a place of safety, or there where safety is to be expected.  Yet, in our world we are all dangerous to each other.  Eve is dangerous for Adam, for she carries within herself the seeds of danger, even as these seeds may be hidden, or lost in the midst of earthly or apparent delights.  But is Adam dangerous to Eve?  Does she seek a safety he cannot offer her?  Is his wisdom—the wisdom of a “name giver”—not satisfactory to her?  Why else would she reach out to a forbidden fruit, a wisdom entailing direct access to the mind of God?  Surely Eve is unaware of the abyss of danger awaiting outside of Eden.  Yet, she is not mistaken in intuiting God’s mind as ultimate safety net.  But why would Eve not feel safe or satisfied in her Garden?  In seeking satisfaction, is she not necessarily exposing herself to dissatisfaction?  In seeking safety, do we not expose ourselves to danger?  But where, in the Garden, is danger?  The Snake comes to mind, of course.  But is the Snake dangerous in itself, or does it merely “represent” danger?  Does it speak for itself, or is it a mere mouthpiece?  Might the Snake manifest a voice hidden within Adam himself?  Does the Snake tell Eve what Adam dares not say out loud?  Does Eve fear Adam’s limitations?  Does she sense them as a trap, if not as an outright temptation?  Is Eve moved by desire to escape dependence upon Adam, even as she may be tempted to relapse “into him”?

The Adam created in Genesis 1—the one who is both male and female—had asked God for a companion, not knowing that the companion was within himself.  He had been pained by Eve’s being “trapped” within him; or perhaps, Eve was his pain.  God set her free; a relief for Adam, who thereupon returns to “naming”—to his nominal abstractions; to “definitions”.  Surely definitions can function as a trap (it is not unusual for women to feel “trapped” at home, the “house of definitions”).  That would explain Eve’s distance from Adam, her seeking a voice “from within,” an intimate “whisper”.[10] But in the shadow of wisdom, one may be easily mistaken, led astray by false impressions.  And so can Adam, if only through Eve, but also thanks to her.  While on the face of things, it is Eve who exposes Adam to danger, where Eve is the “exteriorizing” of what is within Adam—the emerging of his inner light—it is Adam himself who can face danger through Eve.  This is not to say that Eve sets Adam free, for in seeking freedom outside of himself, “womanish” Adam meets failure.  Yet, in failure, Adam is reminded of a higher calling; he—as Eve—begins to awaken to the limitation of “names,” not to speak of the very Garden enshrining them.  The safety they provide cannot be a “solution” to Adam’s problems (to that in response to which he acts); they are at best pointers to problems, provided they be interpreted.  But interpretation requires a “stepping outside,” if only in the spirit of piety: leaving for the sake of returning; distancing oneself by way of approximating, even of entering into perfect communion.  Names would have to be exposed to their surroundings, no matter how dangerous these may be.

The danger lurking within Eden turns out to be but a preface (almost a foreshadowing) to the dangers of our “fallen” world.  Yet, what is outside of Eden is irreducible to the world that Adam and Eve will experience (experience requires both Adam’s “form” and Eve’s “content”—both body and mind)[11] once they are left almost “speechless” before God.  The dangers of our “physical” world are but a shadow of the danger of the divine abyss—beyond any and all experience (or “empirical frame of reference”).  We fall into the empirical universe upon failing to rise into God’s mind.  Both are dangerous, but only in one is danger restoration.  Only in one is danger metaphysical; and only one is fully compatible with education, with our “learning to be free”—in a word, with ethics: our preparation for the otherworldly, our effort to face the dangerous God, through the dangerous Man, what we are beyond all pretention, beyond all masks.  It is by becoming dangerous, or more properly speaking, by rediscovering our being-dangerous, that we expose ourselves to the dangerous God.  It is in that exposure that we transcend physical compulsions to enter into our proper realm—that of ethics.

Entering into the realm of ethics we do not leave war behind, but engage in all conflict in the context of ideas irreducible to conflict: strife is lived on the horizon of intelligibility, of permanent problems, of metaphysics as primordial openness to the mystery of Being, the mystery of first questions themselves.  What is mysterious about “first questions,” about thought as “original disclosure”?  Mind (the Latin mens is at once “mind” and “thought”) hides in thinking itself, seeing only its own vestiges.  “Mind does not see mind” (心不見心xin bu jian xin), rings an old Buddhist adagio.  Mind is its own absence (無心之心wuxin-zhi-xin).  All that is ultimately real “hides” behind its appearances, its determinations, thereby testifying to its dependence upon mind itself, mind’s proper mode of being.  Mind recedes, as all things do, albeit not merely “in the past,” but in itself as receptacle (tathāgatagarbha, in Sanskrit).

In bearing witness to the exposure of the battlefield of life and thereby of our own enemies (those who are no longer our friends) to metaphysics, we do not leave strife behind.  As the Arjuna of the Bhagavad Gita (“Song of the Divine”), we are to fight “loving our enemy,” not out of the delusion of saving those we crucify, but with the understanding that those denying our own alterity with respect to them are to be resisted.  For it is in dialogue alone—even agonistic (“competitive”), Socratic dialogue (dialogue, not harassment)—that we can be nourished by metaphysical light.  Those who set out to abolish our irreducibility to them and their self-projections (expectations, ideals, but also fears), are the enemies of dialogue properly understood, of ethics as exposure to divinity.[12]  Our friends become our enemies when they seek to efface us, or to negate our face as mirror of divinity.  Thereupon, their own face becomes an opaque mask no longer capable or reflecting its origin.  Dialogical competition—beyond both tribalism and “imperial” universalism—decays into one-upmanship, or the quest for victory at all costs, above all at the cost of first things (αἱ ἀρχαί) and so of that “dialogue with the divine” that allowed Arjuna to fight justly, or without losing sight of human dignity.

Act 3: Caesar’s Redemption

Act 3 opens with Caesar’s underestimating the origins of political life, taking them for granted, viewing them superficially.  What has “come” is not yet “gone,” warns the soothsayer.  We still stand in the beginning, which is still with us: “the ides of March” mark, not merely the beginning of a new year on the calendar, but the dawn of political order.  Unlike the formal inception of a linear, mechanically-structured sequence, the beginning of political order endures throughout the sequence stemming from it: the dawn of a political order is present in all subsequent “moments” of the order, defining their character, drawing them into their origin as into their own proper unity.  The beginning defines all that depends upon or stems from it, inviting us to understand political order, not in terms of a linear-mechanical progression, but in terms of a cyclical unfolding.[13] Approaching the political problem in terms of mere or physical appearances, Caesar mistakenly “reads” (measures/counts) the Ides of March/Mars relatively to a linear calendar or “schedule,” rather than as pertaining to a whole cycle entailing the return of conflict/Mars in the “now” (3.1.3-9).  In reality, the inception is perennial, as is the celebrated goddess, Anna Perenna (“Perennial Hanna/Year”).  The celebration of the beginning stands as reminder that the inceptual Mars pervades every moment of political life, or that there is war at the heart of all peace.  Indeed, it turns out that the apotheosis of peace (33) coincides with a supreme return to war.

Alas, reading Artemidorus’s warning as “mad” (9), Caesar remains trapped in the cycle of bloodshed (20-24).  Caesar’s death will be “marked,” not accidentally, but ineluctably by a new ruler whose name is not-accidentally Mark Antony (on the playful affinity between the two senses of “mark,” compare 3.1.18-26 to Acts 1.2 and 2.3).  Be that as it may, Caesar knows nothing of liberty, standing as immutable presence of the heavens in the midst of men (3.1.58-73).  We had read of the opposition between stars and men.  Now we learn from Caesar himself that he, as immutable constant, bridges the gap between heaven and earth.  Caesar is his own title, his authority, the presence of necessity at the center of the “liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement” invoked by his own assassins (81).  Upon his death, Antony is no longer “marking,” for he has “fled to his house amazed” (97).  The political stage has become a maze for him, a place of confoundment.  For “the Northern Star” (60) of liberty, of politics itself, has died.  Yet, if Caesar is right, then in dying the star must resurrect and it must do so from within a new star’s “house”.  The old marker (1.2.234) must emerge as the “mark” itself, the living mark: Mark Antony.  Not Caesar, then, but “Tyranny is dead!” (78), although his suitors see not how.  Distracted by the masks of politics, they have no patience to return to “houses” whence the masks first spring.  Not Caesar dies, but those who “stand upon” him (98-100).  Yet, Caesar rises in his blood above them (105-09), so that men cry—not “out” as theretofore (80 and 97)—“Peace, freedom, and liberty!” (110).  A reversal has occurred: no longer moving from within without, the cry returns to liberty from peace established, where liberty is home and peace befitting death (102-03).  Both Cassius and Brutus see the stage they stand upon, one of theatrical reenactment of a seemingly perpetual scene (111-04).  Freedom cannot be immediate (54), coming through death (the “peace” proclaimed—110), so that the path of “enfranchisement” cannot be granted from above (57 anticipating 81).  Death has freed from fear thereof “the men that gave their country liberty” (118).  The “hearts” of which our Caesars are bereft are now supplied by “boldest” men who stand beneath them (120-21 after 34 and 56); not to flatter Caesar (42-43 and 52), but support him as the head of state; for in him only do our boldest men secure their rule.

Marc Antony’s response to Caesar’s assassination is pregnant with lessons about the nature of political order. What the assassins stand over is the mere corps of Caesar; and as they stand, their arms are drenched in blood, suggesting de facto that the rise of a new Caesar is the logical and natural consequence of the death of a prior one.

Antony decries the death of mighty Caesar while upholding Brutus as “noble, wise, valiant, and honest” (126)—words relayed by Antony’s servant and so to be taken with a grain of salt.  Nevertheless, the assassination of Caesar emerges as instrumental to the life of Caesar, or the thriving of Caesarism.  Caesar is the great embodiment of resistance against political anarchy, or what, in 2 Thessalonians 2:7, St. Paul called, “the mystery of lawlessness” (τὸ μυστήριον τῆς ἀνομίας), noting that it is “secretly at work now” (ἤδη ἐνεργεῖται).  The forces of political anarchy are presently at work beneath the surface of all legal-moral order, to destabilize and ultimately subvert it.  What holds those forces back, what St. Paul calls τὸ κατέχον, is Caesar as emblematic face of political order, a façade without which the nations of the world cannot endure.  The people of Rome need a Caesar to reassure them that “the end of times” (τὸ ἔσχατον) has not yet come; that ordinary life is still possible; that human error or divagation is still permitted; that the dialectic between appearance and concealment is still nourishing us.[14] For all this to happen, we need Caesar, albeit not as mere or opaque mask in the hands of Satan, but as mirror of divinity.  To the extent that Caesar flees danger (Acts 1-2), he falls prey to it (Act 3), feeding into a cycle of death-and-resurrection, or of “rebirth,” exposing Rome to “the end of times,” or anarchy.  The wounded Caesar is none other than a wounded Rome; the blades that cut through Caesar’s flesh are those that cut through the people of Rome (1.200).  Rome is bleeding and so needful of a remedy, a bandage for its wound.  Rome’s own death must be concealed.  The alternative would mark the triumph of the end of humanity.  But perhaps humanity is destined to be overcome, after all, superseded by a trans-humanist age.  Does Christianity, most notably in the person of St. Augustine, not teach that the legal-moral structures of the nations of the world are the playthings of Satan?  Is Satan using them to destroy them?  How could he achieve the self-destruction of law?  Would he not need to first eradicate people’s natural yearning for law and order?  Yet, he cannot.  All that he could possibly do is deviate, or pervert people’s natural desire, using it as fuel for compulsions obscuring it.

In a climate of compulsion, Satan could use law to demonize all alterity (the very outcome that Antony sets out to avert), if only in the name of “radical difference” or “chaotic plurality”—the unleashing of the vortex of unruly passion (ἐπιθυμητικόν) that Plato likened to a monster of all monsters.[15] The Other that is necessary to dialogue would then be defined as primordial enemy of law and order.  Yet, is Satan himself not the consummate “other” with respect to divine law?  Is Satan not demonizing himself, confirming his irredeemable nature?  Or is his purported “confirmation” a mere self-justification, a pretext to perpetuate a primordial betrayal of light?  The very trinitarian structure of the divine bespeaks the blessings of alterity, allowing for its restoration as positive “carrier of light,” or Lucifer.[16] Satan rejects any such allowance as untenable “compromise” (where Satan marks the impossibility of any return).  For Satan himself is denial of all dialogue at its root, and so of the very doubt (σκέψις) that allows us to call appearances into radical question, which is to say, to expose them to their own ground.  Satan rejects philosophical doubt in favor of suspicion against the ground of appearances, a fear distracting us from that ground by trapping us in “genealogical reductionism,” the vicious cycle of image-production that Dante would describe as an immense vortex of self-referentiality.

Satan betrays his own Other by concealing his own departure from divine unity.  For Satan, there is no God prior to Satan’s departure, thus no good to return to in the eyes of the Other.  The Other cannot but be an absolute enemy to be annihilated.  Inevitably, in the hands of Satan, law must oppose all alterity.  Yet, political life requires alterity.   To return to St. Paul’s κατέχον, or “that which withholds” (akin to Socrates’s δαιμόνιον, or “divine sign”),[17] in appropriating law, Satan uses it, not as bulwark against chaos, but as machinery of production of absolute enemies, of forms of radical alterity to be abolished on sight.  Only thus can Satan sidestep the problem of the ineradicability of man’s natural desire for the good, or our dialogical nature.  By reducing the Other to an absolute enemy, indeed by demonizing the Other, Satan makes dialogue impossible.  Yet, given the resilience of man’s dialogical impulses, Satan’s work must be ceaseless.  For the enterprise of thwarting the very emergence of interlocutors inviting openness to the divine conditions of possibility of legal-political order, requires relentless investment of resources into demonizing alterity.  Thus would a Satanic headmaster preside over a machinery of seamless production, if only as recycling, of enemies.  All in the interest of the “legal” machine, or rather of the mechanical appropriation of law.  This, in sum, is the evil that Caesarism protects us from, namely institutionalized Chaos.

Mark Antony is well aware of the threat Rome faces most notably as it transitions towards the rise of a new Caesar.  Accordingly, Antony has it reported that he loves Brutus, even though he cannot yet fear him.  For Brutus has not yet acquired the “might” of Caesar.  It is, again, Antony’s own servant who relays the message (3.1.135-36): Brutus has yet to acquire the might making him worthy of being feared.  Yet, might is acquired by fortune or hazard, rather than any merit, if only one granted by the heavens.  Antony cannot but feign complete trust in Brutus (135-38) and “all kind love” couched in malice (174-76).  Malice replaces might as love’s own motor, suggesting that the death of one Caesar signals the perversion, rather than the end, of politics.  The attempt to establish a political solution to political problems merely adds insult to injury.

Brutus responds to Antony’s servant by returning half of the master’s compliments, leaving out nobility and honesty/honor (126, 138, 141).  Yet, it is doubtful that Antony would agree with Brutus that wisdom and worth (“valiance”) are independent of character and truth, for Antony is weary of vain recognition and uncertain about those whose worth is a mere nominal façade for lack of established authority (155-56, comparing 143 and 151).  It is not that Antony sees in Caesar a response to political problems, for in the latter, nobility/character is might, wisdom boldness, worth royalty and honesty fearsome love (125-29); yet, Caesar’s might offers Antony a reassurance that Brutus’s false nobility could hardly justify.  Nor is Antony satisfied by Cassius’s grounding of authority in consensus built on rhetoric (177-78).  Brutus’s Machiavellian pronouncements notwithstanding, our ideals, no matter how lofty—indeed, especially insofar as they are lofty—do not justify our means.  Why, Brutus’s speech succeeds merely in confirming that the assassin’s “wisdom” is devoid, not merely of nobility and honesty, but also of valiance (183); his wisdom is not only false, but unsupported by authority (as the “dignity” of 178); it is thus not only pretentious, but shameless.  Truly, Caesar’s “replacement,” seducer of “the master spirits of this age”—these spirits being the very people of Rome—appears most ignoble in the face of old Caesar’s greatest might (163, 195, 199 anticipating 256): for in him alone was authority certain and one, while in Brutus it is uncertain and broken.[18]

Antony loved Caesar because he feared Caesar, though now he fears him not: Caesar was truly lovable because he was mighty (126-29, 135-38).  Yet, Caesar was sacrificed as game; his heart, almost by fate ordained, is in the hands of new hunter-priests of State (204-209 echoing earlier references to “heart,” esp. in Act 1.2 and 2.2.5 and 40-43).  Surely Antony is not as ungrateful as those “countrymen”—“cruel men of Rome”—who, with hearts of stone (not unlike the sculptures of their triumphant lord—1.2.283-85), having once acclaimed Pompey, would then rejoice before his mighty slayer (1.1.37-56).  For Antony, to thoughtlessly befriend the murderers of Caesar could not but be a sign of cowardice or flattery (193, 203)—so must he fearlessly feign both (Brutus is wrong to believe Antony a friend—143-45).

Feigning love of enemies must be compatible with nobility and honor, or character and truth (202-03 after 189, 126 and 138).  The honest art of rhetorical concealment dispenses Antony from formally embracing the Christian call to “love thy enemies”.  That call, as seen, announces publicly the end of tribal warfare and the return to universal peace (Virgil, Eclogue 4.5-8): to love your enemies is to carry the burden of prophetic representation of a world of dialogue open to eternity.[19]  Yet love does not make warring obsolete.  Christian Virgilian love makes possible, not universal earthly peace, but fighting justly in a world of foes (211-13).

This, Brutus does not see, for he—unlike the Cassius whose cunning speech had moved him—mistakes the ceremonious masks of politics for truth itself (241 after 232 and 143-45).  He does not therefore fear, as Cassius does, the danger lurking from within the present, assuming wrongly that appearances can keep all death at bay (204 and 222 after 145).

What Antony can see is that we should not speak to conceal death (as Brutus does), but to bear witness to it, lest empty words (2.1.146) distract us from the earth whence Caesars gain their strength.  In Caesar’s absence, that earth is now exposed begging the heavens to heal its wound (257 after 163; and 274 after 1.3.3-4 and 44-45: the heavens respond to the whole earthly city stained by Caesar’s death, cursing “the tide of times”).  Once again, we find the earthly city, including its unruly passions or material strife, mirrored in the heavens, whence befalls the curse of anarchy, both in mores and speech (3.1.261-63, 72 and 2.1.146).  Far from justifying Brutus’s Machiavellian “solution” or end, the assassination of Caesar exposes violence as norm (3.1.178 and 265-69 after 170-71).  The adoption of Cassius’s ideals as solution to political problems leads to a “new normal” in which foul means become our ends, while brave new hunters are by earth’s own spirit slain (204-09 and 273-74).  A political order founded on blood and empty words spells “Havoc” (273).

Antony’s response to political chaos, or outright evil, points to a new Caesar, whose providential coming, however, is contingent upon Antony’s own rhetorical success (276-96).  As we begin to see from the very inception of Scene 2 of Act 3, Brutus’s own rhetoric fails to satisfy the plebes insofar as it appeals to a reason of State abstracted from plebeians’ natural reason, which the logic of assassins divides to conquer (2.1-10).  Popular patience built on Brutus’s own impatience cannot but be short lived (11). The new order turns death itself into a norm and wisdom into blind embrace of norms (11-22).  No longer is law a gift from heaven, but the voice of death itself, of freedom that no Caesar can unite (22-28).  Loving one’s country bears no overarching soul, thereby becoming the means to satisfy the plebes, a mask to normalize mischief.  Caesars must die so as to live in stone for Rome’s own glory (36-40, 45-50), while Brutus borrows life (51-53) so as to die, though unbeknownst to him, ingloriously, where thrice is life proclaimed and thrice the peaceful veil of death (47, 54-55 and 73).  The crown of life divided—of public masks alien from home and God alike—rewards ambition masked as patriotic love (45-52), while Caesar’s own love served his country more than words can say (98-114).[20] Such is the lesson that Mark Antony proclaims, not silencing the reason of the plebes (as Brutus did impatiently), but saving it from slumber fit for “brutish beasts” (104-06).  Caesar, for Antony, is not a tyrant (70-73), but the man in whom all Romans know themselves—their own nobility (107, 125-27, 142-46)—beyond the sheer belief upon which Brutus seeks to found his own authority (compare 102 and 13-16).  Caesar’s own will is Rome’s own will—the people’s own (129-46).  It is written in a sealed parchment that Antony found in Caesar’s study (“closet”—129-30).  The terms evoke another “paper” that Brutus’s servant had found sealed in his master’s study on the eve of the assassination (2.1.35-37).  That earlier paper called Brutus to awaken from servitude to Caesar (46-58), though it is doubtful that the servitude was imposed, rather than willful.  In writing to Brutus, Cassius seems to have mislead his reader into assuming that his master was Caesar, rather than Brutus’s own “fault,” or slavish nature (1-5).

In finding Caesar’s own will in the ruler’s study, Antony seeks to awaken the plebes to the truth of their own condition.  If the plebes are subject to Caesar, that is not out of his fault, but out of the plebes’ own shortcomings.  Indeed, the plebes need Caesar, in whose will they are given to know their own.  The “awakening” Antony is after is evidently not the false or illusory one that Cassius had called for.  The freedom Cassius points to amounts to alienation, not liberation from servitude, whereby awakening is but a dream within, not out of Brutus’s own dream.  Accordingly, the purported awakening does not entail common knowledge (3.2.224) of our common condition, but the use of a special belief to flee a common condition, indeed to reground our means cutting them off from our/their natural ends.  With Cassius, our natural ends are to be replaced by artificial ones that alone are capable of solving political problems, once and for all.

Antony rejects Cassius’s Machiavellian project in favor of awakening the plebes to their natural limitations—limitations that imply, not merely and not even primarily misery, but constitutional openness to what lies above and beyond them.  Unlike the Brutus “awakened” by Cassius (a Brutus whose truth is ignoble and whose nobility a lie), the plebeians awakened by Antony in Caesar’s own words know that they do not know, accepting pious ignorance as the necessary stage for participation in, or exposure to the original unity of nobility and truth (159-66, 170, 199).  And as men awaken to the noble truth (the truth lived by the noble) of Rome, so do they begin discerning that there is nothing honorable about Brutus’s nobility, for true might is that of Rome itself—its people, whom Caesar’s slayers have murdered in their leader (154-56, 191).  Beneath Caesar’s own “mantel” Antony invites a ring of people to discern truth at their center (164): death, their own death, is the mark of betrayal (183-97) and the first or paradigmatic traitor is Brutus, “Caesar’s angel” (181).[21] The people respond at once to Antony’s words, which dispel the illusions generated by Brutus’s appeal to blind belief and anarchic freedom.  Knowledge and piety are to take their place, even as the people’s temptation to relapse into anarchy is still present (200-05).

Knowledge and piety are antidotes to the “fall” of Brutus, Caesar’s ungrateful angel, in whom all Romans fell (181-91).  For that primal fall was in the act of treason against the angel’s father.  The intention was inseparable from the act, taking shape as the act was executed.  Thus does Brutus fall in Caesar’s own fall: the son’s death is inseparable from his father’s own.  Otherwise stated, the father died in the son in the respect that, upon betraying his father, the angel brought with him the corpse or “ruins” of the father (3.1.256).  In killing the father, the son committed suicide, falling-anew, or remaining in the vortex of barbarism that Cicero had once evoked in terms of “the scum of Romulus” (faex Romuli).[22]

The theological import of Antony’s speech is confirmed in the light of a passage from Act 1 in which Cassius had referred to Lucius Junius Brutus’s preferring the devil’s rule to that of a king (1.2.59-61).  Antony now warns that “the evil that men do lives after them” (3.2.76).  Brutus is a paradigm, as Caesar is, an archetype, or a poetic form.  All Caesars are Caesar, just as Brutus denotes a lineage.  The fallen angel is with us now as he was “in the beginning”.  Brutus’s preference of the devil to the king is a preference of himself to his archetypal father (the ancient chronical relative to Tarquins and the founding of the Roman republic points beyond itself to permanent problems at the heart of the human condition).

Evidently, the son fails to overcome the father, who lives on as Rome itself.  Rome cannot live without its father.  In Christian terms, Man cannot live without God: political unity is guaranteed by theological unity alone.  Political life without Caesar is a Tower of Babel fated to collapse.  For its principle is the Satanic one of “Havoc”; its inception is a paradigmatic act of betrayal, a treason of souls, of beings that act in thinking.  In Pauline terms, all apparent fault presupposes a fault of the mind.[23]

In theological terms, Brutus stands to Antony, as the Antichrist itself (otherwise incarnated in Judas Iscariot), stands to the Christ: both are sons of the Father (Caesar as Jove/God); both are paradigms of responses to authority.  In the face of authority, there would then be ultimately only two paths whence stems the primal sense of our liberty.  The primal instantiation of our “freedom of choice” (liberum arbitrum) entails a response to a fundamental calling (where the Latin term arbitrium is derived from ad-bitere, or “coming-to”).  Now, where there is an original calling, there can be a “fallen” or derivative (even parasitic) sense of it—a deviation or distraction from our own proper response.  This is the central problem around which revolves the opposition between Brutus and Antony: Antony’s “second” call unmasks Brutus’s first call as an imposture.  Similarly, in Christianity the Second Adam is the original one in which the First Adam is redeemed.

Shakespeare’s text invites us to recognize that our response to authority is not to be understood as cut off from authority itself.  It is Brutus (or “reptilian” Cassius via Brutus) who asks us to conceive our freedom independently of its “Father”.  Antony responds by grounding liberty in authority, where the two terms are mutually compatible.  Necessarily, liberty entails the self-sacrifice of authority (something we have already seen exemplified by Portia) in terms of liberty, where liberty is none other than the self-giving of authority—as the Son is the self-giving of the Father.  Liberty is then not grounded in an autonomous “son,” but in his “nomic” (having the character of law) father.  Whence the importance of Antony’s response to Brutus’s challenge.  The salvation of Rome depends upon that response, which exposes the will of Caesar as that of Rome itself: true liberty (“the political/human”) is the incarnation of authority (“the theological/divine”) necessarily exposed to liberty’s proper or original heavenly seat.

Rome’s salvation (salus populi) comes through gratitude, just as its perdition comes through ingratitude.  Both salvation and perdition—both restoration and chaos—transcend the rule of law.  For here we face the very principle of legal interpretation, beyond traditional allegiance to words.  Significantly, in Act. 2 Brutus had shown himself aware that political life transcends the certainty dispensed by names-alone.  No oath can guarantee political success (1.2.73 and 2.1.114-40).  Yet, Brutus underestimates the limitations of oaths (the reason why oaths fail to save us).  It is not mere revolutionary daring or boldness that limits and thus “completes” the effectiveness of oaths, but the very fiber of reality, which spells danger.  Facing danger, above all the dangerous God evoked in Matthew 5:33-37 (where we are invited not to swear any oath), is impossible as long as we seek certainty in anything falling short of the dangerous.  What Brutus offers us is no solution to political problems, but self-serving camouflaging; as Nimrod’s boldness, anticipating that of Caesar’s fallen angel.

It now becomes clear that it is by way of reversing the precipitous fall provoked by Brutus that Antony has exercised the art of honest concealment: his “love of enemies” opens the door to restoration of order via riddance of its subverters.  These had insinuated words in nature to silence wits; it is now Antony’s turn to draw words out of nature to awaken wits (225-30).  Yet, the rise of the people out of induced silence—the people’s return to its common knowledge (224)—calls for more than the peace Antony otherwise evokes in addressing the plebes as gentle and sweet (141, 210).  In calling plebeians back to what they know themselves, and so in rendering them a voice, given the absence of both Brutus and Caesar, Antony has exposed the people to danger, and thus to doing what they know not (235).  The matter is settled: havoc is to ensue (261), albeit only to purge Rome of those who severed wisdom from truth, both in deed and word-alone (Scene 3).[24] Even the composers of “bad verses” are to be punished, then, in preparation for the return of a new Caesar (2.252 anticipating 263), be he one, or be he triune (265, 272).  For the plebes are now awake to the danger in which poets habitually abide and out of which they speak and move all other men to work (261-62).

NOTES:

[1] “sans être compatriotes, ils étoient tous Romains [citing Montesquieu].  Quando tutto il mondo fu cittadino Romano, Roma non ebbe più cittadini ; e quando cittadino Romano fu lo stesso che Cosmopolita, non si amò nè Roma nè il mondo : l’amor patrio di Roma divenuto cosmopolita, divenne indifferente, inattivo e nullo : e quando Roma fu lo stesso che il mondo, non fu più patria di nessuno, e i cittadini Romani, avendo per patria il mondo, non ebbero nessuna patria, e lo mostrarono col fatto” (Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, Dec. 24, 1820).

[2] This title was gracefully suggested to me by my friend Kate Kleiderman.

[3] This is the third of a five-part study of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.  The first two parts appeared in VoegelinView on April 26-27, 2022.

[4] The dynamics in question are addressed by the story of the Samaritan Woman at the Well in John 4.  See “The Nature of Context: Beyond Modern Secularism” in VoegelinView (May 7, 2022).

[5] Portia vehemently rejects being lowered to the status of a harlot.  The harlot, whose mind is mercenary and whose spirit is that of betrayal, seeks emancipation or attempts to overcome her limitations by exposing the death/mortality of the male body.

[6] Dante’s three “beasts” are the “lynx” of stained prudence, the “lion” of monarchic authority and the “she-wolf” that corrupted the second.  That the first of the three “beasts” is a stained representation of the human being as such (even of poetic-philosophers) is suggested by Plato’s adoption of the images of the human-being/ ἅνθρωπος, the lion/λέων and a hydra-like “fluctuating and multi-headed beast” (θηρῐ́ον ποικῐ́λον καὶ πολυκέφαλον) (occasionally, apt evocation of sophistry) corresponding respectively to our being-in-dialogue (λογιστικόν), our character (θυμοειδές as the Latin animus or “manly” form/εἶδος of anima, or “soul/spirit”/πνεῦμα), and our compulsions (ἐπιθυμητικόν, or the “vortical stream of compulsions swirling around our “temperament” or θυμός); see Plato, Republic, Book 9, 588c-d.

[7] Dante stresses the primordiality of betrayal vis-à-vis pride (which can be good).  Prior to betraying God out of pride, Satan becomes proud by betraying God.

[8] See references to awakening in Act 2.

[9] See Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue.  Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

[10] To be clear, Genesis’s Garden presents a “metaphysical” reversal of our “fallen” condition in which the “son of Adam” leaves his home to explore dangerous lands, to hunt beastly preys and finally to establish cities over their corpses—as liberty over the death we call peace.

[11] In Shakespeare’s terms, the woman has a man’s mind in a female body, while the man has a female’s (“womanish”) mind in a male body.  Upon Eve’s extraction from his interiority, has Adam lost his mind?  Must he face Eve to recover his own mind?

[12] Plato’s misologist is at once a misanthrope.

[13] Heidegger would often remind us of the classical philosophical lesson that the beginning properly understood is constantly present.  Yet, departing from the conservative spirit of classical antiquity, in countering the vulgar view on account of which the beginning would be something fallen into the past, Heidegger advanced the progressive thesis that the beginning evolves (or “realizes itself”) into the present.  In unfolding, the beginning would then expose ever-new aspects of itself, thereby constituting its own history.  All “history” would entail the progressive revelation of a beginning advancing, not merely via what Edmund Husserl would call “sedimentation” (entailing the concealment of and alienation from the beginning), but more importantly, because essentially, in terms of the “exposure” of multiple aspects of the beginning.  Accordingly, the proper way to understand the beginning would be to study the “history” in which it makes itself known and perhaps knows itself.  On a classical “conservative” reading, however, the beginning has no (existential/essential) “History” singulare tantum, but various poetic “histories” or human accounts of the mystery of the beginning, accounts in which Being itself is present in various degrees of perfection (thereby allowing us to speak of a natural hierarchy of accounts): no literary composition would be a semantic monad “lost in History” (pace historical relativism), but a play (as “ironic” discourse, or logos) in which Being itself (as proper context of the play) is invited to manifest itself—to be-present, or give itself—as a whole.

[14] 2 Thessalonians 2:6-10.

[15] See foregoing references to Book 9 of Plato’s Republic.

[16] On Lucifer as philosopher, see my “Dante’s Statius and Christianity: A Reading of Purgatorio XXI and XXII in their Poetic Context,” in Interpretation: A Journal of Philosophy, 39.1 (2012): 55-82.

[17] Plato, Theages, 128d.

[18] Accordingly, in Antony’s speech, Caesar’s attributes appear refracted throughout “all” of his assassins (183-190).

[19] In St. Augustine’s City of God, that “world of dialogue” is the “City of God,” the political properly understood in its original openness to the theological.  The Bishop’s “City of Man,” no less than Nimrod’s Tower, signals the corruption of properly political life.

[20] In Act 1.2 Caesar had refused the crown thrice before the people, showing his justice, as opposed to any adfectatio regni (“pursuit of royalty”), or libido dominandi (“lust for domination”).

[21] In the first Scene of Act 3, upon being stabbed by his suiters, Caesar cries out, “Et tu, Brutè?”—“You too, Brutus?”.  The Latin phrase echoes a traditional, tu quoque filī mī, evoking in turn Svetonius’s καὶ σὺ τέκνον.  Ioannis Ziogas, after Paul Arnaud, proposes to read the injunction as, “you too, son, will die” (see Ziogas, “Famous Last Words: Caesar’s Prophecy on the Ides of March,” in Antichthon, 50 [2016]: 134-153; and Pascal Arnaud, “‘Toi aussi, mon fils, tu mangeras ta part de notre pouvoir’–Brutus le Tyran?”, Latomus 57 (1998): 61–71).).  Ziogas objects to James Russell’s call to read Caesar’s words as, “to hell with you, too” (see Russell, “Julius Caesar’s Last Words: A Reinterpretation”, in Vindex Humanitatis: Essays in Honour of J. H. Bishop, ed. B. Marshall, Armidale, N.S.W., Australia: University Press of New England, 1980: 123-128).  Neither Ziogas, nor Russell, ground their philological considerations in an intimate appreciation of Caesar’s natural response to betrayal in its primordial dimension.  For the first betrayal is that of a son (even as the Greek τέκνον may be read loosely as “lad/child”).  Shakespeare’s play confirms that the Latin et tu (καὶ σὺ/tu quoque) carries the sense of reciprocity, for indeed Brutus is condemning himself to Caesar’s fate.  Yet, Caesar’s injunction suggests more than future consequences, or an ordinary curse.  It rather bespeaks the metaphysical implications of damnation.  The lord’s message would then read: “In damning me, you are damning yourself, my son”.  Russell’s own reading is redeemable in the sense of the Latin vade retro, inviting the following rendering: “you are damning yourself, my son!”.  Quia fecisti hoc, maledictus es (Ὅτι ἐποίησας τοῦτο, ἐπικατάρατος σὺ/ כי עשית זאת ארור אתה): “Because you have done this, you are cursed!” (Genesis 3:14)—where the Serpent has damned itself to be cast out of Eden.

[22] Epistle to Atticus, 2.1.8.

[23] See my “Introductory Notes on Aquinas’s The Will of God,” at https://voegelinview.com/introductory-notes-on-aquinass-the-will-of-god/ (Jan. 25, 2022).

[24] Civil war is justified only as restoration of an order in which wisdom is no lie and truth-exposed no madness (270; compare the earlier mistaken attribution of madness to the soothsayer, Artemidorus).

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