Center for Metanoia Studies (Centre d'Etudes Interdisciplinaires de la Métanoïa)

The notion of metanoia gives rise to many conceptual questions. Does it properly describe an act a person performs, or an experience they receive? Does it constitute a return to an authentic original state or a rebirth into a new identity? Does it occur in a single moment or gradually over time? Alone or in company?

But the question I’d like to start with is this: does metanoia happen at all? And the answer I will present here, very briefly, is ‘yes’ – but not necessarily in the way we expect or wish it to.

Pierre Hadot (1968) held that “the idea of conversion represents one of the constitutive notions of Western consciousness and conscience. In effect, one can represent the whole history of the West as a ceaseless effort at renewal by perfecting the techniques of conversion, which is to say the techniques intended to transform human reality.”

This rather sounds like an argument in favour of metanoia as something real. But we should be attentive to a tension in Hadot’s account. In the first instance, we hear that the pursuit of personal transformation is constitutive of who we are as Western people. But on the other hand, we also hear that the history of the West is driven by a search to perfect the techniques of conversion – and further, that those techniques are intended to transform humanity.

But what are we to conclude about the efforts of our predecessors if each of their successive techniques required further perfection? And how should we judge the fruits of their conversions if we have sought, generation after generation, to find better means of transforming the human reality which we inherit? Did their conversions not effect any such transformation?

On the one hand, one might be tempted to take a whiggish view and think of conversion as a technology like powered flight. On this view, the history of innovation in the realm of metanoia attests to our objective progress over time: our predecessors had rudimentary  means of conversion like they had rudimentary means of flight, and just as you would rather cross the Atlantic in an Airbus than in a Sopwith Camel, you would rather entrust your ethos to modern techniques than to ancient ones. Personally, I don’t find this notion convincing.

On the other hand, one might suppose that, although the idea of conversion is constitutive of Western consciousness, the fact of conversion was almost entirely absent from the course of Western history. Metanoia on this view is something like alchemy. It offers an enticing prize – but one that is probably unattainable, regardless of the technique employed. Admittedly, this would be a rather pessimistic note on which to start our symposium!

So here is a third solution to this puzzle of our reiterative struggle of conversion. Maybe there is a disjunction between a certain ideal of metanoia accomplished which we idealise, and the experience of metanoia interrupted which we can actually obtain. And by elevating the ideal, we diminish the real experience – perhaps even to the extent that we doubt its reality and fail to obtain its promises.

Consider for example, the following passage from Adam Ellwanger in which he discusses the dynamics of conversion, repentance, authenticity, and renewal. He writes:

there seems to be some indeterminacy as to the movement of metanoia. Metanoia marks a “change” or a “turning,” but is it a changing or turning away “from” something, or a changing or turning “to” something? Is it a 360-degree turn, where one returns to a prior state of being that was lost? […] Or is it a 180-degree turn, where the subject, in an act of self-negation, turns away from one mode of being and is “born again” as a person with an entirely new ethos?

My concern with this sort of account is that, regardless of whether one opts for the 360-degree turn or the 180-degree turn, these neatly-rounded geometric shapes convey the idea that metanoia constitutes an act that one can perfectly accomplish, such that at some point in the person’s life (whether suddenly or gradually; whether by will or by grace) the turn is complete. The person is converted like a mountain is ascended and then marked with a cheerful banner. From that point, any additional events in the person’s life are supplemental materials which serve only to confirm the validity of the metanoia accomplished. This idea was long sustained in the popular imagination by an unfortunate type of hagiographic literature that represents the saints as people whose beings were so completely transformed by their metanoic experiences that, once converted, they appear ethereal as angels and static as totems.

However, if we actually interrogate the lives of the saints, we find of course that they continued to struggle and falter until the very end. Does this mean that their conversion was illusory or fabricated? No. Simply that it was not perfect in the sense of being fully accomplished.

A seminal example of this is Augustine’s gradual realisation that his conversion to Christianity did not equate to his achieving the life proposed in the sermon on the Mount. And it is noteworthy that he also understood this realisation of the incompleteness of his conversation as a deepening of his conversion. I think this points to something essential about the phenomenon of metanoia, which is that its course is co-extensive with a person’s natural life;  and as such it is never something accomplished but is always interrupted at the caesura of death. Yet by the same token, it is also motivated and oriented by our awareness of this impending interruption.

This incomplete quality of metanoia is not always obvious when we focus on towering figures of virtue who seem so outwardly accomplished in their lives. But we see it more clearly in stories of people whose ethos is visibly in gestation or lives were cut short at a relatively early stage of conversion, such as Bobby Kennedy.

In his book Coming Apart, written in the wake of Bobby’s death, William L. O’Neill supposed that in retrospect Bobby Kennedy’s “foremost quality will seem to have been his capacity for growth. […] After his older brother’s assassination in 1963, Bobby’s character mellowed and deepened. His sympathy for distressed minorities became stronger. He struggled with the great questions of life and death, read Aeschylus and Camus, and exchanged instrumental optimism for a more stoic philosophy.” 

Bobby’s example is particularly instructive because his story is one of metanoia initiated by death (his brother’s) and then interrupted by death (his own). And we see this in his place in the public imaginary, which is not defined by any of his early achievements, but by the ellipses left behind at the moment of his assassination, when he appeared to be in the process of a personal transformation, which was mirrored in his campaign platform for the Democratic primary, and which corresponded to a historical moment when (to quote Sacha) “the possibility for major transformation was palpable, although its direction and drivers remained uncertain”. On June 6^th 1968, these three converging trajectories (the sense of transformation in the man, in the idea, and in the nation) were pregnant with possibility and then abruptly cut short in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

This may seem like an unexpected point of departure for our day devoted to metanoia. Death is precisely the termination of change and the point at which the person’s ethos is fixed in amber. In Dante’s Inferno, the torments are tailored to the sinners’ earthly lives, and they repeat themselves for all eternity.  But, as Bobby Kennedy’s example illustrates, death also establishes the Kairos of metanoia and inspires its associated sense of urgency. Any metanoic movement is set against this horizon of temporal finitude, which motivates, orients, and ultimately interrupts all trajectories of personal transformation. So, in summary I think this is worth keeping in mind throughout today, not out of morbidity by out of realism, that metanoia is not a technology we perfect or a magical incantation, but it is an appropriate response to our mortal condition.

Alexis Artaud de La Ferrière