My Machiavellian minute
Seven years of crossing the threshold the wrong way
Like Hannah Arendt, I love Niccolò Machiavelli. Arendt was all about speech and action, and she understood the 16th century Florentine political theorist as she understood Jesus—as a man who championed action as the highest virtue in public life and who relegated being good to the private realm.1
I love Machiavelli for a different reason, maybe for a contrary reason. I love Machiavelli as a writer—in fact, as a fellow writer of political devotions. Laozi aside, Machiavelli wrote what I think is the greatest political devotional ever. His Discourses on Livy amounts to three books containing 142 devotional-sized reflections on the Romans’ political legacy to republicanism.
Discourses on Livy’s chapter titles are themselves devotional in nature. Check out the title to book 1, chapter 50, for instance:
No one council or magistrate should be capable of blocking legal actions in cities
Or the title to chapter 58 in the same book:
The multitude is wiser and more constant than a prince
Must we bring up The Prince? That short treatise, which champions ruthless authoritarian tactics, still shocks. But some scholars point out that The Prince was itself probably tactical: encourage the Medici to rid Italy of foreign invaders, and perhaps the Medici rule of Florence would eventually resolve back to a republic.2 From my perspective, even if Machiavelli were attempting to restore republicanism, the end doesn’t justify the means. (And if that were his plan, it didn’t work, further damaging Machiavelli’s posthumous reputation.)
I don’t love Machiavelli only because he wrote a great political devotional. I love him also for how he wrote that devotional. Machiavelli grew Discourses on Livy from the marginalia he wrote in the books of his favorite political and historical writers. He also felt a constant connection with the authors of those books. He described this connection in perhaps the most famous paragraph he ever wrote, part of a letter to his friend Francesco Vettori about his writing life:
When evening comes, I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the threshold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered with mud and mire, and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born; and there I am not ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom, I dismiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death: I become completely part of them.3
I can relate. I spent seven years experiencing something like that as I researched and wrote my own manuscript of political devotions. Like Discourses, my manuscript grew out of the marginalia I wrote in my favorite historical and political works. And like Machiavelli, I became close friends—or I felt as if I did—with many of the long-dead authors I read.
I should point out, though, that while we both wrote our devotions in evenings after work, Machiavelli read his authors in the original while I read modern English translations. I also didn’t don “regal and curial robes.” I put on my jammies.
But each day I crossed the same threshold that Machiavelli crossed, the one between work and research-based, inspirational, political writing. And I felt pretty good about that.
Or at least I felt pretty good about it until I read Martin Buber’s take on crossing that same threshold. Quick background: Buber’s I and Thou shears away mere experience from encounters, the kind of encounters I think Jesus says we can have with the Other, the strangers we meet in public.
Notice how similar the structure of this passage from I and Thou is to that of Machiavelli’s paragraph set out above:
At the threshold they take off the clothes of the ugly weekday, shroud themselves in clean garments, and feel restored as they contemplate primal being or what ought to be—something in which their life has no share. It may also make them feel good to proclaim it.4
From Buber’s perspective, it seems, Machiavelli’s and my daily change of garments amounted to shrouding, to concealment. Our respective years of study amounted to poor substitutes for encounters with the Other. Ouch.
Perhaps in comparing a merely bookish, contemplative life with an I-You encounter, Buber nails Machiavelli. And me. Though in Machiavelli’s defense, I’ll point out that he wrote his famous paragraph in political exile. When he wrote it, he wasn’t much more than a year past being tortured and imprisoned. Despite those experiences, he wanted back into what he understood as the public realm as soon as he could get there.
In contrast, my political exile while I was writing my manuscript was passive and self-enforced, like the political exile of most people I know. While I was learning about the Bible’s political activism, I was still acting (or, I guess, not acting) as if public life were only for politicians.
Arendt also spoke of thresholds. However, the same bent for action that caused Arendt to love Machiavelli caused her to speak of domestic thresholds differently. For her, a threshold between work and home wasn’t much of a boundary. Work and home were, for her, two expressions of the same private realm.
Arendt instead spoke of the threshold as a metaphor for the boundary between our private and public lives, and she suggested that courage is still necessary to cross it. She therefore emphasized moving in the opposite direction over our homes’ thresholds than did Machiavelli and Buber. Here’s an example of Arendt on thresholds:
The notion that only he is free who is prepared to risk his life has never vanished entirely from our consciousness; and that also holds true in general for the connection of politics with danger and risk. Courage is the earliest of all political virtues, and even today it is still one of the few cardinal virtues of politics, because only by stepping out of our private existence and the familiar relationships to which our lives are tied can we make our way into the common public world that is our truly political space. Very early on, the space entered by those who dared to cross the threshold of their houses ceased to be a realm of great enterprise and adventures that a man might embark on and hope to survive only if he were joined by his equals.5
I don’t know if Arendt ever read Joseph Campbell’s account of the hero’s journey, but she might have appreciated seeing her notion of what keeps us from public life represented in his writing as a literary archetype:
. . . the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the “threshold guardian” at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. Such custodians bound the world in the four directions—also up and down—standing for the limits of the hero’s present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is darkness, the unknown, and danger . . .6
Arendt cited Jesus a good deal; perhaps she also would have taken to my understanding of Jesus as one of Campbell’s threshold guardians. Jesus often stood between a familiar and self-centered private life and an unknown and dangerous public life. Luke at one point offers three rapid-fire instances of Jesus as a threshold guardian of God’s public kingdom:
As they were going along the road a man said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ Jesus answered, ‘Foxes have their holes and birds their roosts; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ To another he said, ‘Follow me,’ but the man replied, ‘Let me first go and bury my father.’ Jesus said, ‘Leave the dead to bury their dead; you must go and announce the kingdom of God.’ Yet another said, ‘I will follow you, sir; but let me first say goodbye to my people at home.’ To him Jesus said, ‘No one who sets his hand to the plough and then looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’7
I doubt that Jesus here was denigrating sleep, shelter, or familial relations or obligations. But all four represent aspects of our private lives. Private life is not what the Gospels are about. And it’s not what the gospel is about, either.
Admittedly, this post’s “wrong way” subtitle overstates the case: I needed to step over the threshold from work to study for those seven years. But when I finished my manuscript and stepped over my suburban threshold for the last time, I think I was moving in the right direction.
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469—1527)
Jerome Kohn, “Introduction,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003), xxiii-xxiv.
For example, Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, “Introduction,” in Discourses on Livy, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), xiv-xv.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Portable Machiavelli, ed. & trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa (Hammondsworth, Eng. ; New York: Penguin Books, 1979), 69.
Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann, 46. print., 1. Touchstone ed, A Touchstone Book (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 65.
Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schoken Books, 2005), 122.
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: MJF Books, 1997), 77.
Luke 9:57-62 REB.