Dictionnaire Éthique

Contents

Translator’s preface [OSW]

Translator’s preface [RdR]

Preface

Translator’s preface [OSW]

A polemic

Never have we been more informed. And never less educated.

No people in human history have dedicated themselves as single-mindedly as we do to staying current, moment by moment, atop the crest of information’s storm surge, riding whatever plank of flotsam we can grab for fear of drowning—or worse, being passed by. Yet only in the most exceptional cases—like catching a stray jewel being washed along beside you—has the surge contributed to something that could be called education.

Sure, we can cram our heads with more facts.¹

We can acquire skills of all sorts, ranging from the essential to the recondite. But for all of this, education eludes us.

By “education” I’m obviously talking about something irreducible to the facts or skills that populate so-called curricula endorsed authoritatively by faculty committees and Departments of Education. It’s certainly irreducible to the degrees to which they lead. I’m calling upon an older idea that can be difficult to understand precisely because we’ve fallen into such desperate need for it.²

True education is character formation. It draws out the soul (in the literal Latin sense of educare), helping it to take shape, so that it can itself lead us through the travails of life.

Its focus isn’t so much what you know as who you are. It’s concerned, for example, with whether you’re a courageous enough lover of truth to say what you know to someone who doesn’t want to hear it and has the power to hurt you.

Forming and informing are not necessarily opposed. We need both. But informing has begun to wash away all traces of the other, more central task of education. And whatever may happen for us in classrooms, the poisoned informational sea into which we’re cast beyond them (algorithmic update feeds, outrage memes, chatter taken as authoritative, and on and on and on)—this soaks our inner world with a sense of the current, to keep us coming back like so many addicts.

That sea is part of no grand plan for forming character. Yet few activities are neutral when it comes to formation. Applying ourselves to something, whatever it is, shapes us.

One way our information obsession shapes us is a generalized forgetfulness on matters of character and moral value. It isn’t that most people are terribly worse today than their forbears—though some clearly are. It’s that we have lost a vocabulary that may once have inspired and sustained a pursuit of becoming better, leaving us in the gray, featureless plain of under-realized potential, plodding along in quiet despair while others exploit our moral amnesia to arrogate power to themselves.³

This is a counter-intuitive claim, I know. Outrage being such a critical fuel for the attention economy, much of what parades before us as information are moral judgments or factoids that suggest them. If anything, we’re drowning in the language of morality.

But let us recognize these for the imitations they are. Vehicles of outrage are less moral judgments than call signs of tribal membership. Their aim is to form you into the sort of person who could be one of them, or to repel you as an outsider. Seldom do you find the depths of reasoning or vision that marks an encounter with something straining after the good and duly humbled by the pursuit. And as we tarry with imitations, the genuine article fades into unrecognizability.

We need to start over with the basics. In a time of value displacement and amnesia, little else will do.

And if we are to recover this lost language of value, we need more than vague longing—we need material to work with. To answer that necessity, I offer here the first English translation of Roland de Rochecarmes’s monumental Dictionnaire Éthique. Entry by entry, over a process that may take years, we can begin the difficult work of rebuilding together.

In a time of moral amnesia, any positive statement will necessarily be an act of recovery. This translation may well be a metaphor for the very effort to live a good life. But I undertake it with no shortage of trepidation, for no one is exempt from the amnesia, and we may well wonder in that case what legs any recovery has to stand on.

A discovery

Rochecarmes may be the most important writer you’ve never heard of. I encountered him by pure accident that carried the sparkle of serendipity.

The Andover Theological Library at Harvard Divinity School, in diligent accommodation of the new, occasionally sheds the old—volumes deemed to lack further scholarly importance, left to be scavenged by the hungry and willing. Its judgments of value are typically correct. But one can sometimes find wonderful gems on the cheap, things like a Chicago Manual of Style just one edition out of date.

While rummaging through the piles one autumn as a shaggy doctoral student intent on a deal, I found a crumbling folio wedged behind some Lutheran camp brochures from the 1990s and a self-published commentary on the Heart Sutra. With its cracked leather binding and yellowed pages, it seemed like something that would have belonged in a rare books collection. But here it was, cast among the detritus. I happily bought it for two dollars.

What drew me to the book is hard to pin down precisely. The antiquarian in me is a serial sucker. But in this case, the title page suggested something strange and important that I wanted to understand, something that rang an inner “yes” like when two strings of an instrument come into proper relative tune.

In its entirety, it read (I am translating from the French but leave the titles intact in their original):

Dictionnaire Éthique

A new translation by

Roland de Rochecarmes

Of the classic

Hortus Moralis

by Juliana de Fontmorigny,

Abbess of the Monastery at Saint-Cécile-du-Lac

Second edition

Typographia Batavorum, Amsterdam, MDCCLXXIII

A question

Just what is the Dictionnaire?

Rochecarmes gives a rather clear and confident account in his own preface, to which I will cede the floor momentarily. But after struggling over the text for several years, landing temporarily on answers that I later came to view as hopelessly naïve, replaced by others that I now regard as more naïve still, I am convinced that the question may be unanswerable.

It first wormed its way into my life as I delicately thumbed through the brittle pages that fateful autumn day.

Given the title and time of publication, I expected something in the style of Bayle, Diderot, or Voltaire—an Enlightenment compendium of grand ambition, perhaps to synthesize all that is known in moral philosophy. And on its face, that’s exactly what we have: an extensive array of entries, organized alphabetically, focused on many of the same themes that would come to mind if one were to create such a dictionary today.

I didn’t trust those first impressions, however. I was (and continue to be) a poor reader of French. Though decent at Latin, I have always felt its modern descendants to be cross-eyed children with dirty feet, running circles about me in wild refusal to be caught.

Linguistic discomfort aside, something seemed off. Just consider the title page.

“Dictionnaire Éthique” is a comically atrocious rendering of “Hortus Moralis,” which we’d probably translate as The Garden of Morality. Somehow, in Rochecarmes’s hands, a garden became a dictionary, related to the original perhaps only inasmuch as a book of dry, pressed flowers resembles a spring meadow.

And that leads to deeper questions about the Hortus. Paired with the attribution to an abbess, the title conjures a walled cloister garden, a space of contemplation and repose, tended silently for nourishment and medicine. (We see some of this, too, in entries that would otherwise have no obvious place in an Enlightenment-era dictionary of ethics. Just wait for “Cucumbers”—restrained, but barely.) These garden spaces would not be without order, but the order of a dictionary, arranged not by relation but by the abstract construct of alphabetical sequence felt implausible, out of sync with a monastic sensibility.

And then there are questions about Rochecarmes’s interest. Why, if he wanted to present a dictionary in the French Enlightenment style, would he undertake a translation? Bayle and Voltaire draw on others but present their works very much in their own voice. Did Rochecarmes find something in Juliana that he could not offer on his own? Or as a Huguenot exile with the metallic stench of gunpowder and blood seared in his sinuses, did he merely rely on Juliana as a device of indirection, of “writing between the lines”?

If Rochecarmes was encoding his own moral reckoning, then reading him might require a different kind of attention—one suited less to argument than to attunement, to deciphering, making sure we’re ready to hear the subtle resonances that may elude the wrong sort of reader.⁴

I thought I might get some resolution by going straight to the Hortus itself—a text I’d admittedly never heard of outside the Dictionnaire. But that too has eluded me.

After scouring the earth and its bibliographic bellows, I could find no extant copy of the text. All I came up with was an obscure mention in Berengar of Aquitaine’s Recursus Saeculorum (ca. 1121):

“The abbess of the monastery at Saint-Cécile du Lac, named Juliana, from the village at Fontmorigny, called by most simply Juliana du Lac, was uncommon among her sex to be regarded as a great source of wisdom in the prince’s court. She was known to have created a little book that caused no little uproar among the religious, the reason for which she professed ignorance to the last. In the end she duly earned her surname, joining the pagan conjurer Cécile—called Saint only by intractable local custom—in the bottom of those purifying waters.”

Along the way, I discovered that the only other copy of the Dictionnaire in existence perished as its home library burned during the firebombing of Leipzig in the Second World War. What I have in my hands is all that remains. And even this, a second edition, published in Amsterdam when Rochecarmes himself was originally publishing in Neuchâtel (then Prussia, now Switzerland), is highly uncertain.

The question—what is the Dictionnaire?—turns out to be an invasive species in any garden of repose. It breeds a thicket, then grows into a maze. Once inside, every step seems to take in you more deeply, and all light takes on the color of the overgrowth.

If there is no way out, then the only question left is how to move within it.

A summons

Not so fast, you say. There’s also the question of whether to enter in the first place.

Why not just consign the Dictionnaire, monstrosity that it is, to the same fate as church camp brochures of yesteryear? What are the chances that an obscure text, the Hortus or Dictionnaire or whatever—this text of texts that no one has ever read—somehow contains the cure to our moral amnesia? What kind of recovery starts with something we never had?

These questions are hard to argue with. I of course do urge you to enter. But no one argued me into the encounter I have come to cherish and count among the few anchors of my life. And I would not do you that disservice.

For me, entering came simply as a summons—one that made the questions fall aside, displaced by the open question it made me to myself, one that I could not refuse even if I wanted to.

Perhaps you too will feel the summons. Or not. It doesn’t come in a heaven-parting, sunbeam-singing kind of way. You only realize it in retrospect, when you’ve gone too deep to get out but realize that you don’t care to anyway.

Stay or leave, but know this: explaining the Dictionnaire is not essential to encountering it. The encounter is the thing. So it is with all strong writing. Not for us, the detached scholarly preoccupation with where it comes from. All that concerns us is here where it wants to take us.

Of course, some concern with origins must occupy us here. We are reading Rochecarmes reading Juliana. So we cannot be indifferent as to who she was, what the Hortus was, what it was for, before falling into the hands of her disaffected countryman seven centuries later. And in that concern, we must know the pang of unanswerability.

That unanswerability is core to the encounter. Whatever the text has to teach us, it’s not just the simple declarations—though I promise, there are some real gems. It’s in the spaces between, the silences of unknowability, a work of reading that is always and essentially translation.

What little we can confidently surmise of Juliana’s opinions is that she was steeped in the apophatic tradition of philosophical thought—an odd lineage that supposes that the more nearly we approach the good, the more our language is likely to fail, no effing with the ineffable, as it were.

And so it is with this text. Even to speak about the encounter is to trail off into mysticism. So enough of the “about.” Time for the thing itself.

A method

Good translations eschew fancy methods. They just need competence and love—someone to sit with the text like a dear friend, listen to what it wants to say in one linguistic field, and give it passage to another, sometimes hand in hand, sometimes as a stowaway between closed borders.

The goal is always and forever a faithful rendering. Change is inevitable in any translation, but it should at least create the illusion of straightforward transmission, like a marble falling downward through a spacious pipe.

That’s obviously impossible with the Dictionnaire.

I’ve already alluded to one problem: my incompetence with French. My love for this text is no match for the elusiveness of its language. I’d bravely strike out on my own if we were dealing only with Juliana’s Latin, but Rochecarmes’ French, no.

I’ve reluctantly solved the issue by including another in this project. Callistos Weir is an acquaintance of mine from graduate school, whom I first met after a public lecture that both of us had joined only to fill our bellies on its free spread of charcuterie.

Callistos, evidently determined to avoid his parents’ fate as failed novelists forever lounging about a brownstone in Brooklyn, had resolved to make something of himself by way of a PhD in Romance languages and literature, a venture that cost him 10 years and 4 intimate relationships, in exchange for startling fluency in 14.5 languages (according to his CV) and the opportunity to teach first year composition on one-year renewable contracts for less than minimum wage.

Not one to be so limited, he abandoned his position mid-semester to enroll in a coding bootcamp. From there he managed to land a position during the tech hiring bonanza of the early 2020s. But alas, bonanza turned to bust, right as his company realized they could do without half of their low-level engineers thanks to the AI bot he’d helped to build.

I would never go to him for advice on anything that counts—except a translation of this kind. And trust fund aside, things go better for him when he has work to do. So I regard this as a little mutual favor.

Callistos being Callistos, he thinks I am getting the better side of this deal. In return, he has required 10% of Tokalo’s Substack earnings and the unilateral right to insert whatever editorial opinion he wants, wherever he wants. (As though anyone would read this, let alone pay for it!)

That brings us to the other problem my ideal for translation faces when it comes to the Dictionnaire: It is not simply hard to transmit the text straightforwardly; I don’t even know what that would mean.

Callistos will insert himself obnoxiously, you can be sure. But Rochecarmes, too, has added page upon page of his own commentary intermingled with Juliana—sometimes clearly denoted, sometimes not but clear anyway, sometimes intermingled in ways that blur the voices entirely. So rather than abandon the Hortus to those two, I will also add the occasional commentary. Translation risks transmogrification, but there is no other way.

At risk of cluttering the page, we’ve taken the liberty of denoting authors (something entirely absent in our French copy) to help the reader keep things as straight as possible, somewhat like a dramatis personae:

[no marker] = Juliana du Lac

[RdR] = Roland de Rochecarmes, high confidence

[RdR?] = Roland de Rochecarmes, suspected but low confidence

[OSW] = O. Silas Weissenwald

[CW] = Callistos Weir

Now on to Rochecarmes’ own preface, followed by Juliana’s.

[CW]: Mercifully, both are far less verbose than this one.

[CW]: For your own self-respect, please don’t take any of this too seriously. We’re just in it for the philological gang bang.

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Translator’s Preface [RdR]

Coming soon

Preface

Coming soon

1. Which would be much to the satisfaction of Thomas Gradgrind, the close-throated, dry and grizzled schoolhouse dictator of Dickens’ novel Hard Times, which begins with a characteristic statement: “NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”

2. The film Idiocracy does a fine job of dramatizing a similar experience, where people have forgotten that plain water and not electrolyte-drink is what plants need to thrive. In this work we are after the rediscovery of water, so to speak.

3. I am saying nothing novel here. If anything, I arrive at the party late. For instance, Alasdair MacIntyre published his scathing work After Virtue in 1981, a few years before I was born. MacIntyre accuses the entire project of modern moral philosophy—arguably a discourse that cares at least something about questions of goodness—of being mistaken and forgetful of earlier sources. If MacIntyre is right, I was a child of the wreckage. But in some ways, reading MacIntyre today feels quaint. My contention is not that we have failed to acknowledge the right sources of moral formation. It’s that all traces of any vocabulary are being drained from common inheritance in a collective amnesia.

4. Leo Strauss, in Persecution and the Art of Writing, describes the unique style that writers adopt under conditions of persecution: “Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. That literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only. It has all the advantages of private communication without having its greatest disadvantage—that it reaches only the writer’s acquaintances. It has all the advantages of public communication without having its greatest disadvantage—capital punishment for the author. (Page 25).”