[A letter to Estellise Azimi, containing certain excerpts]

[Xenoboskion]

Honoured Apothar,

As I promised you, here are the relevant excerpts from my recent work upon judgement and motivation, in which you have expressed an interest. I would be honoured to answer any questions, or hear any thoughts, that you might have upon reviewing them.

- ac. Nebtu Xenolyta

1. What is eudaimonia?

In simple terms, every person, and each thing, has a daimon: its fatal form; its true essence; in the lexicon of the Academies, its hypostasis. It cannot be seen, heard or felt with the senses of mortals. Only the gods, and those who make themselves godlike in the employment of the divine faculty, intellect, can know the daimon, and through dianoetic anticipation it can, in part, be beheld.

The daimon, being as I say the predicate, final end, and very truth, of its person, is a mirror of the soul of that person; or, more truly, the daimon is the very soul of the woman, and the woman is the mirror of the daimon. The daimon of a bad woman is ugly to behold; the daimon of a good woman, beautiful.

And whereas the bad woman may deceive the world from behind a painted mask, appearing beautiful in the flesh to the eye of a man, and seeming good in the performance of one particular action or another in the opinion of a man, her daimon cannot but be ugly, for it is absolutely what it is, as at the noetic level, all things are as they truly are, without and beyond the misleading modalities of time and place.

To say that the daimon of a good woman is beautiful is the same as saying that a woman is pure [...], for to be pure is to be beautiful and good; indeed, purity is the nexus of goodness and beauty. On the part of a woman, every action and the implications of every action offers glimpses of her daimon, as one might catch a glimpse, in the corner of one's eye, of one's mirror image when passing by a reflective surface.

If she is virtuous, meaning that her intentions are good and also that her actions succeed in effecting those intentions, she will purify herself [...], and she will be happy. If she is not virtuous, she will fail to attain purity, and prove either powerless over her own destiny and that of others, or corrupted by whatever power she attains, and she will be unhappy.

It is the natural desire and the natural goal for everyone to be happy, as it is the natural desire and the natural goal for everyone to achieve eudaimonia; for all strive to do what they understand to be good, and all strive to stand as a beautiful daimon before the discerning gaze of God, and in the final judgement to have been right instead of wrong.


2. On error

[...]

The errors of mortals fall into three kinds: those born of ignorance, those born of weakness, and those born of perversion. The first kind is pitiful, the second tragic, the third execrable; all are sins.

The first kind is a sin not of the individual but of her community; for as ignorance may be expected of the beast, the child and the uneducated, so it is the responsibility of the community to train the beast, raise the child and teach the uneducated, preventing thereby, through whatever means are appropriate, the predictable commission of errors.

The second and third kinds of error are the sins only of she herself who errs; for having emerged from ignorance, she cannot invoke that excuse for her actions. The weak sinner, who knows what is right and wishes to do right but fails, deserves compassion; the perverse, who knows what is right yet wishes to do otherwise, damnation. Each will, freely or against her desires but inexorably, remove herself further from eudaimonia by every action; the daimon of the sinner, revolting in the sight of God, is a djinn that whispers corrupting lies in her ear, and feeds itself upon her sins as well as those of all whom she catches in her web of wrongs.

[...] There is a special class of doctrine which arises out of the sisterly love between those whose inner vision have beheld the good and who strive towards it and seek to help one another reach it with ever greater facility; this is the class of catechesis. Here, then, is offered a catechism, on how to avoid sins [...]


3. The Path of Noble Apathy

[...]

In the first chapter of this work I have written of the dire consequences for a woman whose lack of virtue causes in her a failure to attain purity. [...]

[...] It is worth retrieving from the twilight of time certain observations, concerning the dynamics of emotion and motivation, that were first made among the sages of the Caliphate and valued precisely for their aid in warding off corruption; their subsequent doctrine was called, in the Lexicon, ataraxia, or the Path of Noble Apathy.

In summarized form, here is what the sages enjoin you to know:

I. Phantasia: When you first perceive a thing with your senses, it is conveyed, together with all related perceptions, to your mind, as an impression; that is to say a representation, a formulation, an interpretation, of how things are. To this impression, you may assent or withhold assent; this is your power and your responsibility. Should you withhold assent, another impression will be formed; and to this also you may assent or not.

II. Patheia: If the impression to which you have assented is such that it it stirs in your heart emotion, you may, again, assent or withhold assent to being moved in spirit and in whole by this emotion.

III. Lecton: If the impression to which you have assented is such that, whether or not it stirs emotion in you, it impels you to take a certain action, you may, again, assent or withhold assent to this impulse to act, this whispering of the daimon in your ear.

The proof that such a power, that of assenting or refusing to assent, indeed exists is the great legacy of the sages of the Sublime Garden, for it is well attested by all accounts that they came to exhibit it freely, and used it to achieve great virtue. But how? Were these sages heartless, that they could choose what emotions to be moved by; were they mindless, that they never doubted which impressions to assent to; were they Stonefolk, that they could resist many impulses that would have moved most people to action? The answer to all these questions is no. The sages stood out in wisdom alone; and because they were wise, they were powerful, and because they were powerful, they strove for purity [...] It is wisdom that enabled these powers of assent and refusal of assent.

But what is meant by wisdom in this particular respect? Here it is necessary to resist convolution and to answer in very simple terms: wisdom in this instance is to know: that both emotions and impulses arise from impressions, which are judgements about the nature of things; that impressions can be morally true or false; that bad emotions and bad impulses arise from false moral judgements, and good emotions and good impulses from true moral judgements; how to discern right from wrong; and the true nature of love, and to let it guide the power of assent.


4. On true and false love

What has now been said warrants a further explanation, which shall begin to close this catechism [...] For what has been written above must be further elaborated: how indeed is right discerned from wrong, in terms of choosing what impressions to assent to, what emotions to be seized by, and what impulses to act upon? The answer hinges upon something that has been left out of the discussion thus far, but which plays a central role in the present discussion, and that now must be addressed, which is love.

It has been correctly noted that love encapsulates a unity of opposites: it is a lack and the drive to obtain the object of that lack; the poets, for their part, have called love the daughter of Poverty and Plenty, inheriting from them her dual nature. Love, however, while a form of desire, is not merely that, but a special kind of desire which directs a mortal's attention towards objects of beauty, identifying them as the means to satisfying the mortal's profoundest existential deprivation: our separation from the sublime divine. Of love much more has been written by the philosophers, which will not here be repeated; for our purposes a more summary treatment is appropriate.

Let it suffice to observe the following:

- That all living beings desire that which they lack;

- That all living beings love, for their desire eventually turns to what seems beautiful to them;

- That love, by extension, is the central overriding principle of motivation for all choice;

- That the unpurified woman sees beauty in particular things and in particular mortals, and she wants and lusts for them; this is a false, base love, which chases after mirages and mirror images, instead of their true causes;

- That the purified woman recognizes universal beauty in the transcendental objects that share in them, the good, the true, the divine, beauty itself, the pure daimon, and she contemplates them and is pleased by them; this is a true, transcendent love, which pursues the very causes of love.

The content of wisdom is, among other things, to distinguish between the particular and the universal, as between the false and the true, and to understand what false beauty is, and what true beauty is, and consequently, to love truly instead of loving falsely, and to lust not and want not.

Love, thus understood, provides the answer to the questions raised earlier: true love, the love of the truly beautiful, including the beauty of the daimon, is the motivating principle in choosing which impressions to assent to, in choosing which emotions to embrace, in choosing which impulses to act upon. Each decision must be an act of true love: love for the true objects of love, being truth, true beauty, the good, not for their false idols. [...]


5. Judgements and emotions

Restated more simply and explicitly: each impression assented to must be in pursuit of real truth; each emotion assented to must be in pursuit of noble desire for the transcendental beauty of the daimon; each impulse assented to must be in pursuit of the good. It follows from this what is right and what is wrong; let us take the following example.

An emotion results from an impression that something is truly good or truly bad for you; if the impression - that something truly good or truly bad has occurred, meaning something that will be decisive in one way or the other for your destiny and your soul - is correct, then an appropriate emotion will result, whether it is joy or sadness, which should be assented to, and will aid in the purification of the heart.

If the impression is incorrect, for example if a thing that is merely disappointing, but not truly harmful to your soul or to the destiny to which you are committed, even perhaps ultimately irrelevant and indifferent, is nevertheless, because of a lack of wisdom, or a polluted mind, falsely judged as being truly bad, or for example of a thing that is merely pleasing to the senses, or not at all actually beneficial for your spiritual development is falsely judged as being truly good, then an inappropriate emotion will arise in the heart, and unless refused will pollute it; these are the passions of this world.

And it is the same with impulses: they will arise from impressions that are true or false in a moral sense and in a real sense, and will accordingly be good or bad, in their carrying out and in their effects.


6. Conclusions

It follows from all this that it is of the utmost importance to interrogate our judgement and ensure that our impressions are correct in light of wisdom and true love; whether we have understood matters in terms of what is actually good and truly important for us, in terms of what is true in a real and not merely an apparent sense, and in terms of what it will cause us to feel as the result of true rather than false desire. If these ends are not satisfied, then an impression must be refused, and another formed in its place.

By such means, that is by means of cognizance of all that is contained in this catechism; by means of asserting the power of assent over our first-order impressions, and our second-order emotions and impulses; by means of orienting ourselves toward the happiness that is the beautification of the daimon, and the love of true things and truly beautiful things, and truth and beauty themselves, rather than of the flimsy distractions of this world and vulgar objects of lust; by letting ourselves always be guided only by that truth that has been revealed to us by oracle and by intellect; by being mindful always of the imperative of purification, and the avoidance of corruption; by such means we can avoid [...] sins [...] and secure for ourselves [...] eudaimonia.