'All Things That Are Done on Earth' -- Cicero's Somnium Scipionis

Although I still can’t recall what sparked the conversation in the first place, or what precisely got said on the subject in the second, a few weeks ago during #porchtime at my house some reference was made to Cicero’s now little-known ‘Dream of Scipio’, for centuries nearly the sole-surviving portion of a larger work, De Republica. [1] A very brief description was given for the benefit of those who had not read or heard of it, and a friend of mine who works as a curator of mediaeval manuscripts mentioned that her only familiarity with Cicero’s text was through the famed Late Antique commentator, Macrobius, whose commentary on Scipio helped to preserve the latter text throughout the Middle Ages as well as to insure its influence on the mediaeval worldview.

One of the more interesting questions to me with regard to Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero is the former’s interpretation of a single, at first quite plain passage in the original text. Having appeared in a dream to his adopted grandson, Scipio Africanus the younger, Scipio Africanus the elder tells him:

Every man who has preserved or helped his country, or has made its greatness even greater, is reserved a special place in heaven, where he may enjoy an eternal life of happiness. For of all things that are done on earth nothing is more acceptable to the Supreme God, who rules the whole universe, than those gatherings and assemblages of men who are bound together by law, the communities which are known as states. [2]

...omnibus qui patriam conservaverint, adiuverint, auxerint, certum esse in caelo definitum locum, ubi beati aevo sempiterno fruantur; nihil est enim illi principi deo qui omnem mundum regit, quod quidem in terris fiat, acceptius quam concilia coetusque hominum iure sociati, quae civitates appellantur;... [3]

To the casual reader, it appears of course that Cicero is glorifying the political life of civil service, that of all human activities it is that which is highest and most pleasing to God. This is not of course the Christian view, but we do not expect Cicero to exhibit Christian views. Neither, however, is it the view of Late Antique pagans like Macrobius or the so-called ‘Neoplatonists’ (I shall leave aside for the moment the question of whether it is the view of earlier pagan philosophers before Cicero). For both Christians and Late Antique pagans, however they may differ on the details of what it might mean, the highest human activity is the contemplative, and the most divine life is the ‘philosophical’ one. [4] But Macrobius reveres Cicero [5] and holds him to be in essential agreement with himself and the later Platonic tradition, so he has to figure out what Cicero means here. Here is Macrobius’s conclusion:

Now if the function and office of the virtues is to bless, and, moreover, if it is agreed that political virtues do exist, then political virtues do make men blessed. And so Cicero is right in claiming for the rulers of commonwealths a place where they may enjoy a blessed existence forever. In order to show that some men become blessed by the exercise of virtues at leisure and others by virtues exercised in active careers, he did not say with finality that nothing is more gratifying to that supreme God than commonwealths, but added a qualification, nothing that occurs on earth is more gratifying. His purpose was to distinguish those who are primarily concerned with divine matters from the rulers of commonwealths, whose earthly achievements prepare their way to the sky. [6] 

In other words, of ‘the things that are done on earth’, nothing of course is more pleasing to God than politics, but the contemplative, philosophical life is not really something ‘done on earth’. Since it lifts the mind and soul to God, it is a heavenly activity, not an earthly one. Macrobius refers to philosophers as ‘those who are primarily concerned with divine matters’, reminding us of the definition of philosophy of St Cyril the Apostle-to-the-Slavs: ‘Knowledge of things divine and human, as much as man is able to approach God, for it teaches man by deeds to be in the image and after the likeness of the One who created him.’ [7] Here is William Harris Stahl’s take on Macrobius’s interpretation: 

Cicero implies in Scipio’s Dream that the efforts of statesmen and military leaders are most gratifying to the Ruler of the universe. Macrobius cites Plotinus’ treatise On the Virtues--although he is probably more dependent upon Porphyry--and points out that Plotinus admitted political virtues into his scheme. Political virtues have their rightful place, although they are not on as high a plane as the contemplative virtues. Hereupon it is revealed that this truth was apparent to the profoundly wise Cicero, for in his statement that ‘nothing that occurs on earth is more gratifying to that supreme God than the establishment of commonwealths’ the words on earth allude to the practical virtues and at the same time intimate that there are other types of virtues. [8] 

C.S. Lewis says something very similar in his treatment of Macrobius in The Discarded Image: 

What Cicero meant by his parenthetical reservation [quod quidem in terris fiat] I am not sure; probably he was distinguishing earthly affairs from the motions of the heavenly bodies, which God would undoubtedly prize more highly. But Macrobius (I, viii) regards this saving clause as Cicero’s way of leaving room for a whole system of ethics which Cicero might have strongly repudiated: a system which is religious, not secular; individual, not social; occupied not with the outer but with the inner life. [9] 

Indeed, earlier in this section, Lewis had written, ‘Cicero, as we have seen, devised a heaven for statesmen. He looks no higher than public life and the virtues which that life demands.’ [10] But is this really quite fair? I’m no expert on Cicero, but recall that previously I left open the question of whether earlier philosophy had prized the active, political life quite as much as the Roman statesman appears to do here. I think I can confidently answer that in the negative. Plato certainly insists that the philosopher imitate the divine (Theaetetus 176 AB), and Aristotle finds that the ‘intellect’ is the highest and most divine faculty, and therefore that ‘contemplation’ is ‘the highest form of activity’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1177a). [11] We know that Cicero looked to the Greeks for his philosophical learning, and although the Roman mind is always noted for its practicality in comparison to the Greeks, it seems unlikely that Cicero would have directly reversed the judgement of the two greatest of the Hellenes. Is it possible Macrobius’s reading of Cicero is not so very far-fetched? 

[1] Michael Grant points out that about a third of the original work was discovered by Cardinal Mai at the Vatican in 1820 (Michael Grant, tr., On the Good Life, by Cicero [Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971], p. 337). 

[2] Ibid., p. 344. 

[3] Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, I and Scipio’s Dream, ed. by Frank Ernest Rockwood (Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma, 1970), p. 6. 

[4] In a passage I like to quote often from C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval & Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 2002), he writes: A world-renouncing, ascetic, and mystical character then marked the most eminent Pagans no less than their Christian opponents. It was the spirit of the age. Everywhere, on both sides, men were turning away from the civic virtues and the sensual pleasures to seek an inner purgation and a supernatural goal. (47) 

[5] Indeed, William Harris Stahl notes, ‘To Macrobius, Cicero is incapable of error; his wisdom, often concealed in subtle language, will be discovered upon careful examination of his words (or through the assistance of the commentator)’ (Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, tr. William Harris Stahl [NY: Columbia U, 1966], p. 14). 

[6] Ibid., pp. 123-4. 

[7] Ihor Ševčenko, ‘The Definition of Philosophy in the Life of Saint Constantine’, For Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, 11 October 1956 (The Hague: 1966), p. 450. 

[8] Macrobius, p. 14. 

[9] Lewis, p. 68. 

[10] Ibid., p. 65. 

[11] Aristotle, Ethics, tr. J.A.K. Thomson, rev. Hugh Tredennick (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), p. 328.

'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?': A Cliché Examined

In a lovely apologia for the importance of culture entitled ‘Christianity & Culture’, C.S. Lewis includes among a list of authors that he consulted on the question only two Church Fathers: St Augustine and St Jerome. I shall quote the passage in full:

St Augustine regarded the liberal education which he had undergone in his boyhood as a dementia, and wondered why it should be considered honestior et uberior [higher and richer] than the really useful ‘primary’ education which preceded it (Conf. I, xiii). He is extremely distrustful of his own delight in church music (ibid., X, xxxiii). Tragedy (which for Dr Richards is a great exercise of the spirit’) is for St Augustine a kind of sore. The spectator suffers, yet loves his suffering, and this is a miserabilis insania...quid autem mirum cum infelix pecus aberrans a grege tuo et inpatiens custodiae tuae turpi scabie foedarer (ibid., III, ii). [1]

St Jerome, allegorizing the parable of the Prodigal Son, suggests that the husks with which he was fain to fill his belly may signify cibus daemonum...carmina poetarum, saecularis sapientia, rhetoricorum pompa verborum (Ep. xxi, 4). [2]

Let none reply that the Fathers were speaking of polytheistic literature at a time when polytheism was still a danger. The scheme of values presupposed in most imaginative literature has not become very much more Christian since the time of St Jerome.... [3]

While it is certainly somewhat surprising that Lewis only quotes two Fathers, and neither of them Greek, he at least gives an explanation for this that really amounts to an apology: ‘If my selection of authorities seems arbitrary, that is due not to a bias but to my ignorance. I used such authors as I happened to know.’ [4] In their treatment of essentially the same general question Lewis had faced, however, three later Protestant literary critics—Leland Ryken, Donald Williams, and David Lyle Jeffrey—offer no explanation so far as I can tell for dwelling almost exclusively on one or both of the same two Latin Fathers. The first two, to make matters somewhat more irksome, choose to begin their discussions with one of the most overplayed quotations on culture from the early centuries of the Church—Tertullian’s famous ‘What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ [5]

I daresay that reference to this quotation, and the tendency to treat it as something of a fountainhead for a discernible and unbroken tradition throughout Christian thought, is due at least in part to its rhetorical cuteness. Tertullian himself is of course consciously echoing the high rhetoric of II Corinthians 6:14-15—‘For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial?’ Tertullian in turn is later echoed by St Jerome, who actually quotes the II Corinthians passage in his letter to the Roman matron Eustochium before improvising upon the theme: ‘What has Horace to do with the Psalter? or Virgil with the Gospel? or Cicero with the Apostle?’ [6] Then, finally, and more well-known to the Anglophone world than St Jerome’s letter, is the comment of Alcuin of York to Hygebald, Bishop of Lindisfarne in 797: ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ? [7]’ [8]

I suggested already that the use of these quotations seemed likely to be due to their rhetorical cuteness. Certainly, it strikes me that short of the ignorance to which Lewis confesses, this can be one of the few possible reasons for focusing so exclusively on the Tertullian-Jerome-Alcuin chain and then at best looking to St Augustine [9] for a more balanced approach to the problem, while simultaneously leaving the entire tradition of the Greek Fathers’ engagement with secular culture completely untouched. Otherwise, why, just to take two outstanding examples, do none of these scholars make any reference to St Basil the Great’s wonderful Address to Young Men on How to Profit from Greek Literature, or to St Gregory the Theologian’s Eulogy on St Basil?

The complete oversight of the Greek stream of Christian thought notwithstanding, there remain unfortunate shortcomings in these various scholars’ attempts to grapple with the Latin Fathers on this subject of secular culture (and primarily literature). Lewis and Leland Ryken seem content to tell us that St Jerome and St Augustine are ‘against us’ on this question. Lewis hopes ‘to answer the Fathers’ attack on pagan literature’, [10] and Ryken is convinced that ‘The specifically Christian tradition of opposition to literature begins with the Church Fathers.’ [11]

With Donald Williams, however, we begin to see that perhaps things are not so black and white. Williams at least, after trotting out some of the usual anti-lit passages from St Augustine, then observes:

Yet even as we read these passages, we cannot believe that for Augustine they tell the whole story. Where, we ask, would the felicitous style of the Confessions have come from if he had never studied the classics from the standpoint of rhetorical analysis? And where would he have found such a perfect concrete example had he remained ignorant of the dolors of Dido? Indeed, if we just keep reading, we find that there is more to Augustine’s view of literature than at first meets the eye. [12]

Jeffrey, for his part, not only deepens and extends the consideration of St Augustine’s view of literature, but also discovers that even St Jerome is not so one-sided as he may appear from the Epistle to Eustochium alone (which besides the II Corinthians echo, also features the famous dream where the irascible translator is accused in heaven of being a ‘Ciceronian’ rather than a Christian). In Jeffrey’s words, after the ‘What has Horace’ passage, ‘Jerome then makes clear that his concern is [not with literature per se, but] with priorities, with the ordering of Christian life in such a way that extrinsic interests remain secondary.’ [13] Jeffrey then notes:

But it is this same prioritizing of means and end which allows Jerome in a letter to another correspondent, the Roman orator and convert Magnus (Epist. 70), to defend the considerable use of non-Christian classical authors in his own writing....Jerome’s reply, a kind of ‘apology for poetry’, accordingly makes several arguments in defense of a Christian use of secular literature—which use is presented as not at all the same thing as an idolatrous passion for literature per se. [14]

But even Jeffrey leaves poor Alcuin to fend for himself. For a vindication of the great Carolingian scholar, we have to turn to a bona fide Anglo-Saxonist. In his charming but relatively obscure book, Anglo-Saxon Christianity: Exploring the Earliest Roots of Christian Spirituality in England, Paul Cavill not only provides some more context for Quid Hineldus...?, but considers the passage at some length. First, here is as much of Alcuin’s text as Cavill includes:

Let us prepare ourselves for meeting the great king, so that we may find him kindly, for no one can escape him. Let us think daily what gift we will bring, as scripture says, ‘Thou shalt not appear before the Lord God empty-handed’. No precious metal, no bright jewels, no vain clothing, no worldly luxury will be acceptable there to that fairest of Judges: only generosity of almsgiving, and multiplied good deeds will avail...

The words of God should be read at the monks’ feasts. There the reader should be heard not a harpist, the discourses of the Fathers not the songs of the heathens. What has Ingeld to do with Christ? The house is narrow, it cannot contain both. The kind of the heavens will have nothing to do with heathen and damned so-called kings. For the eternal king rules in the heavens, the lost heathen repines in hell. The voices of readers should be heard in your houses, not the cackling of the crowd in the street. [15]

So, the reference to the ‘monks’ feasts’ should suffice to remind us that Lindisfarne, home of Bishop Hygebald, was a monastery, not simply a local church of laymen. In other words, Alcuin’s advice to listen to Scripture or the Fathers at mealtime rather than heroic tales is not offered as general advice for Christians—much less a dogmatic statement on the relationship of Christ and culture, as he seems often to be taken—but specifically for monks. As Cavill notes, ‘Alcuin is using all the accumulated associations of Bible and Fathers to persuade the monastery at Lindisfarne that secular song at a monastic meal is a contradiction in terms.’ [16]

Finally, even Tertullian needs to be taken with a grain of salt, and should certainly not be seen as representative of any patristic ‘tradition’ concerning secular culture. Contra this idea of a ‘tradition’ stemming from Tertullian, Josef Pieper has noted:

In opposition to the sectarian narrowness of Tertullian, the fathers of the early Church, from Justin Martyr to Origen and Augustine, have unanimously championed their conviction of the power of the divine word to germinate and spread, and of the presence of seeds of truth active in human history from the beginning in the folk wisdom of the different peoples and in the teaching of the philosophers. [17]

John Mark Reynolds has gotten downright deconstructive in his response to the ‘What has Athens...?’ question. In his own suggestively titled, When Athens Met Jerusalem: An Introduction to Classical & Christian Thought, he writes:

How did the church deal with the massive intellectual and cultural heritage of this classical civilization?

One response was to reject ‘secular learning’ to keep the church pure. Theology had nothing to learn from philosophy. ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ thundered Tertullian, a champion of keeping the two far apart. A great deal as it turned out, since Tertullian’s own writings echoed Greek philosophy on nearly every page.

Judaism itself had been influenced by Greek learning. There was no ‘pure’ stream of knowledge that did not run through Athens. The very Greek language that the early Christians used to communicate their message was soaked in centuries of classical thought. Trying to pry Athens and Jerusalem apart usually led to inconsistency and heresy.

Tertullian ended up trapped in the heresy of Montanism, which taught that Jesus was going to land the New Jerusalem in a remote backwater of the Roman Empire. Private revelations to wild prophets stood on par with Scripture. Jerusalem without Athens becomes a weird place. [18]

Reynolds’s observation about the Greek philosophy in Tertullian’s own writings is perhaps more reason than the usual, basic one to examine the context of the famous statement in De praescriptione haereticorum. [19] While even I haven’t read the complete work, I first encountered the quote in at least some of its context—that of the complete seventh chapter, included in William Placher’s valuable little reader for undergraduates, Readings in the History of Christian Theology. Here is that chapter in full:

These are ‘the doctrines’ of men and ‘of demons’ produced for itching ears of the spirit of this world’s wisdom: this the Lord called ‘foolishness’, and ‘chose the foolish things of the world’ to confound even philosophy itself. For (philosophy) it is which is the material of the world’s wisdom, the rash interpreter of the nature and the dispensation of God. Indeed heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy. From this source came the Æons, and I known not what infinite forms, and the trinity of man in the system of Valentinus, who was of Plato’s school. From the same source came Marcion’s better god, with all his tranquillity; he came of the Stoics. Then, again, the opinion that the soul dies is held by the Epicureans; while the denial of the restoration of the body is taken from the aggregate school of all the philosophers; also, when matter is made equal to God, then you have the teaching of Zeno; and when any doctrine is alleged touching a god of fire, then Heraclitus comes in. The same subject-matter is discussed over and over again by the heretics and the philosophers; the same arguments are involved. Whence comes evil? Why is it permitted? What is the origin of man? and in what way does he come?...Unhappy Aristotle! who invented for these men dialectics, the art of building up and pulling down; an art so evasive in its propositions, so far-fetched in its conjectures, so harsh, in its arguments, so productive of contentions—embarrassing even to itself, retracting everything, and really treating of nothing! Whence spring those ‘fables and endless genealogies’, and ‘unprofitable questions’, and ‘words which spread like a cancer?’ From all these, when the apostle would restrain us, he expressly names philosophy as that which he would have us be on our guard against. Writing to the Colossians, he says, ‘See that no one beguile you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, and contrary to the wisdom of the Holy Ghost.’ He had been at Athens, and had in his interviews (with its philosophers) become acquainted with that human wisdom which pretends to know the truth, whilst it only corrupts it, and is itself divided into its own manifold heresies, by the variety of its mutually repugnant sects. What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? what between heretics and Christians? Our instruction comes from ‘the porch of Solomon’, who had himself taught that ‘the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart’. Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel! With our faith, we desire no further belief. For this is our palmary faith, that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides.[20]

Much of this blog presupposes, but it also occasionally explicitly proposes (see in particular this post), a particular answer to Tertullian’s ringing rhetorical questions. I hope too that the comments quoted above from Donald Williams, David Lyle Jeffrey, Paul Cavill, Josef Pieper, and perhaps even John Mark Reynolds suggest some part of an answer. But leaving aside the whole question of St Paul’s relationship to philosophy and his mission to Athens, it suffices here to note that Tertullian has merely assembled a list of heretical beliefs which either originate with or are held in common with philosophers. It would be just as simple, of course, to produce a list of orthodox Christian beliefs which are held in common with philosophers. Thus, we are back to carefully evaluating Athens, the Academy, Horace, Virgil, Cicero, and Ingeld instead of merely dismissing them. In the process, I suspect it will be difficult not to fall in love with much that they have to say and offer. If we do not find it difficult, I believe that ought to be classified among our defects rather than among our virtues.

[1] ‘wretched insanity....What marvel was it that an unhappy sheep, straying from Thy flock, and impatient of Thy care, I became infected with a foul disease?’

[2] ‘the food of demons...the songs of poets, secular wisdom, the pomp of the rhetoricians’ words’

[3] C.S. Lewis, ‘Christianity & Culture’, The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis (NY: Inspirational, 1996), p. 183.

[4] Ibid., p. 183.

[5] William C. Placher, Readings in the History of Christian Theology, Vol. 1: From Its Beginnings to the Eve of the Reformation (Philadelphia: The Westminster, 1988), p. 44.

[6] Qtd. in David Lyle Jeffrey, People of the Book: Christian Identity & Literary Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 76.

[7] For some reason the Latin text of this one is given more often than that of Tertullian or St Jerome: Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?

[8] Qtd. in Paul Cavill, Anglo-Saxon Christianity: Exploring the Earliest Roots of Christian Spirituality in England (London: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 57.

[9] Or, in Jeffrey’s case, St Jerome and St Augustine. Though to be fair, Jeffrey may also be consciously focusing on the Western Christian tradition, and may see the Greek Fathers as not contributing to that tradition in a sufficiently direct way to warrant attention.

[10] Lewis, p. 184.

[11] Leland Ryken, Triumphs of the Imagination: Literature in Christian Perspective (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1979), p. 14.

[12] Donald T. Williams, ‘Christian Poetics, Past & Present’, The Discerning Reader: Christian Perspectives on Literature & Theory, ed. David Barratt, Roger Pooley, & Leland Ryken (Leicester, UK: APOLLOS, 1995), p. 54. Incidentally, Jeffrey refers to this book, though it’s not clear to me whether he intends to suggest that it is an example of the modern Christian tendency ‘to uphold a pristine formalist approach to the text in ethical or even theological terms’ (p. 94), or an example of the argument that ‘this strategem is intrinsically vulnerable to the poststructuralist’s denigration to the degree that it remains historically unselfconscious’ (p. 94, n. 19). I’m thinking the latter based on what I know of the book, but I could be mistaken.

[13] Jeffrey, p. 76.

[14] Ibid., p. 77.

[15] Cavill, pp. 167-8.

[16] Ibid., p. 58. Of course, lest we get the idea that Christian monasticism specifically, if not Christianity generally, is therefore ‘against us’ on the question of literature, Cavill goes on to point out:

If Alcuin’s orthodoxy has a certain narrowness, we learn something from his letter to Lindisfarne about the breadth of Anglo-Saxon monasticism. Monks listened to heroic, presumably secular tales, and no doubt enjoyed them. The larger part of the Anglo-Saxon contribution to world civilization was in preserving both Christian and secular classics. Books were produced in monasteries, except for a few, mainly functional and rather dull works, which were written for kings. But the vernacular works—poems particularly, which are both Christian and composed in the Germanic language and style of the ordinary Anglo-Saxons—are worthy of attention, not least because they are less bound by the need for orthodoxy. Not only is there Beowulf, which offers a challenge to the prevailing theological understanding, as exemplified by Alcuin, of the fate of the unconverted heathen. There are also vernacular poems which confound all modern expectations of monastic production. (ibid., p. 60)

[17] Josef Pieper, Tradition: Concept & Claim, tr. E. Christian Kopf (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s, 2008), p. 54. Besides the now familiar passage from De praescriptione haereticorum 7, Pieper also cites Apologeticum 46 as an example of Tertullian’s ‘sectarian narrowness’ (p. 82, n. 18).

[18] John Mark Reynolds, When Athens Met Jerusalem: An Introduction to Classical & Christian Thought (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009), p. 17.

[19] Unfortunately, Jeffrey, whose book is an outstanding work of original scholarship, mistakenly cites Tertullian’s famous quip as De Spectaculis, 18 (Jeffrey, p. 107, n. 21).

[20] Placher, pp. 43-4. Placher’s reader, along with his survey of the history of Christian thought, was the assigned text for my undergraduate Church History course at OCU with Amy Oden, niece of Thomas Oden.

'The Fellowship of Suffering': More Comments on the Iliad

Despite the harsh conclusions of my last post on Homer (here), there are a couple of passages that point toward a kind of redemption. To begin with, the second long passage from C.S. Lewis contains an ellipsis. For reasons of space I omitted his quotation of another simile, this one from Odyssey 8.521-31: 

That was the song the famous harper sang
but great Odysseus melted into tears,
running down from his eyes to wet his cheeks...
as a woman weeps, her arms flung round her darling husband,
a man who fell in battle, fighting for town and townsmen,
trying to beat the day of doom from home and children.
Seeing the man go down, dying, gasping for breath,
she clings for dear life, screams and shrills—
but the victors, just behind her,
digging spear-butts into her back and shoulders,
drag her off in bondage, yoked to hard labor, pain,
and the most heartbreaking torment wastes her cheeks.
So from Odysseus’ eyes ran tears of heartbreak now. [1] 

Now Lewis calls this a ‘mere simile’, [2] and in an interesting paper devoted to the subject of similes, he seems to explain ‘mere similitude’ a bit by arguing that Homer’s ‘long-tailed similes’ typically have little to do, literally or poetically, with what they illustrate: 

I question whether the vignettes of early Greek life which it so often admits into homeric poetry are introduced on any very conscious principle of emotional echo or emotional contrast to the business in hand. It sounds much more as if a poet were interested in the vignette for its own sake. [3] 

But I can’t help but think that we would be remiss if we didn’t see the Odyssean simile above as something more than a vignette meant simply to give us a very vivid idea of what a ‘man of sorrows’ Odysseus really was. In a brilliant introduction to his edition and commentary on Book 24 of the Iliad, C.W. Macleod notes: 

The simile brings out the workings of pity in Odysseus’ mind: he weeps like a woman whose husband has died in defence of his city and who is taken into captivity—she is, in effect, Andromache—because it is as if her suffering has through the poet’s [Demodocus’s] art become his own....So the song which was to glorify the hero is felt by the hero himself as a moving record of the pain and sorrow he helped to cause. [4] 

The episode is thus a supreme illustration of what Macleod, quoting Gorgias’s Helen, tells us is one of the chief purposes if not the chief purpose of poetry—the arousal of pity: ‘A fearful frisson, a tearful pity, a longing for lamentation enter the hearers of poetry; and as words tell of the fortune and misfortune of other lives and other people, the heart feels a feeling of its own.’ [5] 

The Iliad is of course very largely devoid of pity. Macleod points out that several times throughout the poem, ‘a supplication is either made or attempted on the battle-field’, but it ‘is always rejected or cut short, and the suppliant despatched to his death’. [6] But ironically, another passage quoted by Lewis points us toward the ultimate display of pity in that poem, which is also, perhaps, the poem’s ultimate significance: 

‘And here I sit in Troy,’ says Achilles to Priam, ‘afflicting you and your children.’ [7] 

At the beginning of Book 24, the gods are angry at Achilles, for they have ‘in bliss [makares theoi] looked down and pitied [eleaireskon] Priam’s son’, but as Apollo says, ‘That man without a shred of decency in his heart.../his temper can never bend and change—.../.../Achilles has lost all pity [eleon]!’ [8] The slaughter that Achilles inflicts on the Trojan army in the wake of Patroclus’s death, his defeat of Hector, and his treatment of Hector’s corpse would all seem to support Apollo’s judgement. Indeed, Louis Markos recounts one of the events of Book 21 as follows: ‘Rejecting Lykaon’s right as a suppliant and loosing himself from any sense of shame or fear of nemesis, Achilles kills the Trojan in cold blood and tosses his body into the rivers.’ [9] This is par for the course. 

But Apollo, as it turns out, is wrong. Zeus has decreed that Hector’s body is to be returned, Thetis carries the message to her son, and Achilles replies, ‘The man who brings the ransom can take away the body, / if Olympian Zeus himself insists in all earnest.’ [10] Markos notes: 

It is significant, I believe, that when Thetis tells Achilles to stop [grieving and return the body], he immediately agrees. One feels that Achilles has wanted to stop, has yearned to put an end to his self-destructive grieving, but no one has had the courage—or the love—to risk the wrath that might be unleashed. [11] 

Is there a still a hint of reluctance here though? Is Achilles merely acquiescing because he has been commanded by Zeus? Markos wonders whether ‘wrath will seize him again and lead him to kill the defenseless Priam’. [12] If so, by the time he utters the line Lewis has quoted, there has been a real change. Priam himself has come to him, and ‘prayed his heart out to Achilles:’ 

‘Remember your own father, great godlike Achilles—

as old as I am, past the threshold of deadly old age!

...

Revere the gods, Achilles! Pity me in my own right,

remember your own father! I deserve more pity...

I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before—

I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.’ [13] 

These words, of course, do their work. Immediately, we read: 

Those words stirred within Achilles a deep desire
to grieve for his own father. Taking the old man’s hand
he gently moved him back. And overpowered by memory
both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely
for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching
before Achilles’ feet as Achilles wept himself,
now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,
and their sobbing rose and feel throughout the house.
Then, when brilliant Achilles had had his fill of tears
and the longing for it had left his mind and body,
he rose from his seat, raised the old man by the hand
and filled with pity now for his gray head and gray beard,
he spoke out winging words, flying straight to the heart:
‘Poor man, how much you’ve borne—pain to break the spirit!
...
Come, please, sit down on this chair here...
Let us put our griefs to rest in our own hearts,
rake them up no more, raw as we are with mourning.
What good’s to be won from tears that chill the spirit?’ [14] 

As Macleod observes, ‘Priam’s speech makes Achilles think of his own father and so enables him to feel pity for the Trojan father too.’ [15] Indeed, the line that Lewis quotes above—24.542, a line which taken out of context might suggest a particularly unfeeling Achilles—is uttered as the captain of the Myrmidons is reproaching himself for not being a more devoted to son to his own father: ‘...I give the man no care as he grows old / since here I sit in Troy....’ [16] Elaborating on this in a series of comparisons between the new Achilles and his character and actions earlier in the poem, Macleod notes that Peleus’s son now ‘associates the suffering he causes Priam and his sons with his failure to care for his father’s old age’, and ‘he is moved by the harm he does to his enemies’. ‘In short, ambition, vindictiveness and resentment all give way to pity.’ [17] 

What this pity means is revealed by the whole of Achilles’ speech. It is not only an emotion, but an insight: because he sees that suffering is unavoidable and common to all men, he can keep back, not without a struggle, his own pride, rage and grief. [18] 

Macleod notes that in Book 23, Priam actually ‘becomes a new kind of kero who shows endurance (24.505-6) and evokes wonder (480-4) not merely by facing death but by humbling himself and curbing his hatred before his greatest enemy.’ [19] By refusing to perpetuate the cycle of violence, he is able to end it and bring about reconciliation in what Markos calls ‘the fellowship of suffering’: 

What makes it so difficult to be a human being, so difficult to be a mortal in a world of mortals, is not so much that we will die ourselves but that we will lose the ones we love. In their shared mourning, the two men weep for different people, yet ultimately it is the same grief: the grief of the survivor who must continue to live in a world that has lost much of its light and hope. Even Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus, sharing with his good friends Mary and Martha in the fellowship of suffering. ‘For we have not,’ the author of Hebrews tells us, ‘an high priest [Christ] which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin’ (Hebrews 4:15). [20] 

Thus, the war poem par excellence, the epic whose lesson is ‘that on this earth we must enact hell’, ends on an unexpected note of pity and redemption. Witnessing the mutual grief of Priam and Achilles, the spectacle of the old man embracing the killer of his son, the killer recognising the likeness of his enemy’s father to his own father, the reader’s heart feels acutely that ‘feeling of its own’, that ‘fearful frisson’ of which Gorgias spoke. Surely in the experience of compassion, in the thrill of something very close to forgiveness, we have a glimpse as in a dream of the coming of the compassionate One who will forgive us all. 

[1] Robert Fagles, tr., The Iliad, by Homer (NY: Penguin, 1990), p. 208. 

[2] C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (NY: Galaxy, 1965), p. 30. 

[3] C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 1998), p. 65. 

[4] C.W. Macleod, ed., Iliad Book XXIV (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 1995), pp. 4-5. 

[5] Qtd. in ibid., p. 5. 

[6] Ibid., pp. 15-6. 

[7] Qtd. in Lewis, Preface, p. 31; the line is Iliad 24.542, and is found on p. 606 of Fagles’s translation (who renders it ‘since here I sit in Troy, far from my fatherland, / a grief to you, a grief to all your children...’) and p. 77 of Macleod’s edition. 

[8] Fagles, p. 589; translating lines 23, 40-1, 44. 

[9] Louis Markos, From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2007), p. 72. 

[10] Fagles, p. 593; ll. 139-40. 

[11] Markos, p. 76. 

[12] Ibid., p. 76. 

[13] Fagles, pp. 604-5. 

[14] Ibid., p. 605. 

[15] Macleod, p. 26. 

[16] Fagles, p. 606. 

[17] Ibid., pp. 26, 27. 

[18] Ibid., p. 27. 

[19] Ibid., 22. 

[20] Markos, p. 77.

Liturgical Consummation, Part III: St John Damascene

This will be the final installment in my ‘Liturgical Consummation’ series of posts consisting of excised material from a forthcoming paper called ‘Likeness & Approach: M.M. Bakhtin, C.S. Lewis, & the Liturgical Consummation of Literary Genre’ (first post here, second here). The more time goes by since I wrote these, the less I like them, but here you go anyway. 

c) St John Damascene 

The Paschal Canon (Anastaseos emera) of St John Damascene (c. 655-c. 750) [1]—still sung at the Easter Vigil in all churches of the Byzantine rite [2]—is a supreme example of the paradoxical possibilities of Christian liturgical poetry. Egon Wellesz notes that this hymn is traditionally referred to as ‘The Golden Canon’ or ‘The Queen of Canons’, [3] and the great Modern Greek writer and painter, Photios Kontoglou calls it ‘immortal’. [4] The canon form, like the Ambrosian stanzas used by St Venantius, constitutes a divergence from the ancient genres stemming from the acceptance among Christian poets of the loss of the classical long- / short-vowel distinction in the ancient meters. Already with the kontakion, the generic predecessor of the canon, ‘A new system of versification had developed based on the principle that all the stanzas had to have the same number of syllables as the Hirmus [the eirmos, or model-strophe of the form] on which they were modeled and that the stress accents had to have the same place in all the stanzas as in the verses of the Hirmus.’ [5] It was a new prosody based on the changing sound-patterns of the living language—which had become ‘qualitatively a different thing for the consciousness that creates in it’ [6]—yet still requiring great skill to compose. [7] A canon consisted of eight or nine ‘odes,’ each made up of six to nine stanzas (or troparia), but later only two, based on the same eirmos. [8] 

Here are the first stanza of the ‘First Ode’ (the eirmos of that ode) and the third stanza of the ‘Third Ode’ (really the second of the odes, since there is no ‘Second Ode’ on Pascha) of St John’s Paschal canon: 

This is the day of Resurrection
let us be radiant, O peoples [laoi]:
Pascha, the Lord’s Pascha;
for from death to life
and from earth to heaven
Christ God
hath passed us,
as we sing the victory hymn. 

Yesterday I was buried with Thee, O Christ,
I arise with Thee today in Thy Resurrection.
I was crucified with Thee yesterday—
glorify me with Thyself, O Savior,
in Thy Kingdom. [9] 

The Subject of the first of these stanzas is appropriately Heroic, and the faithful rightly sing to Him a victory hymn. Note the contrasts, however, between death and life, earth and heaven: the poet is acknowledging the lowliness inherent in nearness to God by approach by describing human beings as being ‘passed’ [10] by Christ from the lowliness of death and earth to a share in the God-like categories of life and heaven. The poet addresses ‘peoples,’ the term laos, which St John uses in the plural. This apostrophe represents the intermingling of different cultures and classes in the assembly of the Church, St Ephrem’s ‘Church of the Nations’. [11] But while the laos certainly constitutes the ‘visible community’ that performs the ‘mysterious work (ergon)’ of the liturgy, [12] in a further dimension of the polyphony of the hymn, the apostrophe also calls upon the Church Triumphant, which is invisible, as it seeks ‘assistance for projects related to the vocation of the liturgical journey’. [13] More importantly, the second-person plural verb ‘let us be radiant’ (lamprynthomen) identifies the poet with the people, once again, in a chorus: Bakhtin almost seems to be speaking of this canon when he writes, ‘This expression of value [here, of the desire for life, for heaven] becomes strong and powerful (not naturally and physically, but axiologically strong and powerful, axiologically victorious and conquering) only in the chorus of others.’ [14] 

The second stanza quoted here recognizes the paradox by which it is in crucifixion and burial with Christ—by following the cruciform way of approach—that one draws near to God and puts on His divine qualities. Our nearness, the intermingling of the Highest and the lowest, is signified by the prefix syn- attached to each of the Greek verbs in the stanza and represented in English by the preposition ‘with’. But this sharing is only made possible by the Incarnation, the prior condescension of God Himself. [15] A reference to this hymn in the work of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek writer, Alexandros Papadiamandis, should make a fitting coda to these observations: 

[Upon hearing the] allegro, the first hirmos, that is to say, of the canon of the day [Easter] . . . [little Toto] leapt for joy, and her little face lit up. Her eyes, her mouth, her cheeks, all became more beautiful and smiled an ineffable smile of joy. It moved me. It seems that those inspired songs of our holy Church truly have an ineffable fragrance and beauty, witnessed to from the mouths of babes and sucklings. [16] 

In the doxological mode of liturgical poetry, the poet is able to celebrate the humble and the lowly, that which is near to God by approach—‘For,’ as a Byzantine hymn for the Nativity asks, ‘what is meaner than a cave, what is humbler than swaddling clothes?’ [17] But through paradox these poets lose none of the solemnity, the ‘specific delightfulness’ of ritual, which is nearness by likeness—‘Yet therein shone forth the wealth of Thy divinity: glory to Thee, O Lord.’ [18] It is in this way—holding in tension the categories of nearness to God by likeness and approach—that liturgical poetry represents a ‘consummation’ of literature. 

[1] These dates are based on Fr Andrew Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition & Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford: Oxford U, 2002), p. 5. 

[2] It was also turned into a rather unimpressive English hymn by the great John Mason Neale: Hymn 132 in Hymns Ancient & Modern, standard ed. (London: William Clowes, 1916), p. 133. It is easy to see why even the ‘hymns ancient’ are not exempted from Lewis’s criticism of the book in Reflections on the Psalms, p. 94. 

[3] Egon Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music & Hymnography, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford U, 1961), p. 206. 

[4] Constantine Cavarnos, Byzantine Sacred Art (Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies), p. 145. 

[5] Wellesz, p. 181. 

[6] Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas, 1998), p. 12. 

[7] Wellesz, pp. 181-2. 

[8] Wellesz, p. 198. 

[9] My translation. For the full Greek text with translation, see Wellesz, pp. 207-14. 

[10] This is a reference to the Hebrew meaning of ‘Pascha’ inspired by the Oration 45.10 of St Gregory of Nazianzus. For the passage in St Gregory see St Gregory the Theologian, On God & Christ: The Five Theological Orations & The Letter to Cledonius, tr. Frederick Williams & Lionel Wickham (Crestwood, NY: SVS, ), p. 170; for an analysis of St John’s use of the orations of St Gregory in this hymn see Louth, p. 260. 

[11] Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1992), p. 119. 

[12] Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 159. 

[13] Pickstock, p. 193. 

[14] Mikhail Bakhtin, Art & Answerability, eds. Michael Holquist & Vadim Liapunov, tr. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: U of Texas, 1995), p. 169. 

[15] Louth, p. 262. 

[16] Qtd. in Anestis Keselopoulos, Greece’s Dostoevsky: The Theological Vision of Alexandros Papadiamandis (Thessaloniki: Protecting Veil, 2011), pp. 173-4. 

[17] The Festal Menaion, tr. Mother Mary & Archimandrite Kallistos (Ware) (South Canaan, PA: STS, 1998), p. 272. 

[18] Ibid., p. 272.

Liturgical Consummation, Part I: St Ephraim the Syrian

As a few readers may know, I spent the first couple of weeks after school got out for the summer working on an expansion and revision of the paper I presented at the C.S. Lewis & Inklings Society Conference (held here in OKC at Oklahoma City University two years ago) and posted here. The original paper was a very short, informal essay into the topic written quickly and intended to be read to about five or ten people in less than 20 minutes. But when it was considered for inclusion in an anthology of papers from the conference, the editors asked me to bring it a bit more up to snuff. The result is now entitled ‘Likeness & Approach: M.M. Bakhtin, C.S. Lewis, & the Liturgical Consummation of Literary Genre’.

One of the things that I did was to take the suggestion at the end that liturgical poetry could be read as a reconciliation of the virtues of both the novel (as described by Bakhtin) and epic poetry (as described by Lewis) and expand that into a full-fledged thesis, complete with an analysis of three examples of such poetry. Well, this didn’t go over as well with the editors as I’d hoped—at least the analysis didn’t—but since I was loathe to let something on which I’d expended some effort go entirely to waste, I thought I’d at least post it here, in three parts since it is longish. Now, I was never entirely happy with these analyses myself, and at one point was in utter despair that they were even coherent at all. Of course, taken out of context of the entire paper, they will likely be even less coherent. But perhaps someone will get something out of it.

I have included the paragraph—some form of which will still appear in the final paper—immediately preceding the analysis sections to give at least a little bit of context, but maybe I should add one more thing. The distinction between ‘nearness to God by likeness’ and ‘nearness to God by approach’ is one that I have taken from Lewis’s The Four Loves and used as a framework for my analyses of Bakhtin and Lewis on genre. Earlier in the paper I wrote:

He [Lewis] uses the analogy of walking down a mountain towards a village—at any point, one may be quite near the village in the sense of being on a cliff directly above it (corresponding to  ‘nearness by likeness’), but the only way actually to approach the village is by means of the apparently greater distance constituted by a winding path (corresponding to  ‘nearness by approach’). [1] According to this distinction, examples of nearness by likeness would be qualities like beauty, strength, majesty, but nearness of approach would be characterised first and foremost by humility and obedience.

So, hopefully that will be sufficient background for most readers to get some idea of what I’m up to here. Now, back to the lecture at hand:

That said, exactly how does liturgical poetry constitute the ‘consummation’ of literature? The short answer, as should be apparent by now, is that it possesses and communicates not only the virtues of Bakhtinian pre-novelistic and novelistic literature, i.e., nearness to God by approach, but also the virtues of Lewisian, ritualistic epic literature, i.e., nearness to God by likeness. While the latter quality, however, is inherent in the poetic form and liturgical setting of the poetry—it is a ritual genre after all—the nearness of approach in liturgical poetry may require a few examples to be clearly seen. This paper will focus on three, one from each of the three major cultural divisions of ancient Christendom: from the Syriac, the hymn de Fide 31 of St Ephrem the Syrian referred to above; from the Latin, St Venantius Fortunatus’s famous Vexilla Regis; and from the Greek, the Paschal Canon of St John Damascene.

a) St Ephrem the Syrian

In his journal entry for Ash Wednesday, 1747, John Wesley famously wrote of St Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306-373), ‘Surely never did any man, since David, give us such a picture of a broken and contrite heart’, [2] while Robert Murray has called the Syriac Father ‘the greatest poet of the patristic age and, perhaps, the only theologian-poet to rank beside Dante’. [3] St Ephrem is firmly within the Christian liturgical-poetic tradition of approach/likeness. Although he ‘probably did not know Greek’, Sebastian Brock points out that ‘by the fourth century AD, Greek and Semitic cultures had already been interacting in the Middle East for over half a millennium: no Syriac writer of Ephrem’s time is going to be purely Semitic in character or totally unhellenized…’. [4] Thus, St Ephrem’s poetry certainly does not belong with the truly ‘monoglot’ classical genres. That said, St Ephrem worked primarily within two poetic genres peculiar to the Syriac language: the madrasha and the memra. The former—from which genre the present example is chosen—is a stanzaic form, punctuated by a refrain and based on repeating syllabic patterns, that is, regular numbers of syllables. [5] The intermingled faithful of a Syrian congregation—a local gathering of what St Ephrem calls ‘the Church of the Nations’ [6]—would have participated in St Ephrem’s madrasha by singing the refrain, anticipating the kind of ‘call and response’ performance that Mara Scanlon identifies with Bakhtin’s ‘polyglossia’ and ‘dialogism’. [7]

St Ephrem’s cycle ‘On Faith’ includes a madrasha particularly germane to the present thesis—Hymn 31. [8] After an initial stanza calling for thanksgiving for the various anthropomorphisms of Scriptural language about God, the second stanza of this hymn reads:

We should realize that, had He not put on the namesof such things, it would not have been possible for Himto speak with us humans. By means of what belongs to us did He draw close to us.He clothed Himself in our language, so that He might clothe usin His mode of life. He asked for our form and put this on,and then, as a father with his children, He spoke with our childish state. [9]

The virtues of God being celebrated here, then, are not epic qualities like His majesty and power—in 4.2, it is said that God ‘became like a Hero, a Valiant Warrior’, but the mutability suggested by the verb and the comparative ‘like’ demonstrate that this is every bit as metaphoric as the other ‘terms that He has put on’ in 3.1. [10] Rather than praising God’s ‘likeness’ attributes, this hymn is celebrating precisely God’s condescension: God is the Hero Who drew ‘close to us’ and ‘spoke with our childish state.’ It is a celebration, moreover, in which all strata of society could participate, and thus the hymn exalts ‘them of low degree’ (Luke 1:52), to borrow the language of the Authorised Version. Kathleen McVey has noted that St Ephrem incorporated into the praise of God a class certainly not to be identified with ‘the ruling social group’ [11]—women. [12] In the words of a memra on St Ephrem by Jacob of Sarug:

By you even the sisters are strengthened to speak.
Your instruction has opened the closed mouth of the daughters of Eve,
and with their voices throngs of crowned women are singing out,
and women teachers are being called into the congregations—
a new vision that women will speak the Gospel! [13]

This opening of ‘the closed mouth of the daughters of Eve’ surely belongs with the ‘scandal scenes, eccentric behavior, inappropriate speeches and performances’ that characterize pre-novelistic discourse, [14] and it reminds the modern reader that St Ephrem’s voice is not merely his own, but ‘a voice that feels a possible choral support outside itself’. [15] Finally, the irony that Bakhtin considers inimical to the ancient genres and crucial to the pre-novelistic ones, the ‘laughter that destroys the epic’ [16] can be found in the sixth and seventh stanzas of St Ephrem’s hymn, where Brock notes ‘an undertone of subtle humour, [as St Ephrem] compares God’s efforts to teach humanity about himself to those of someone who is attempting, with the aid of a mirror, to teach a parrot to talk’. [17] A poetry of humor, however subtle, gives voice to the consciousness of human beings who must cease taking themselves too seriously in order to draw near to God by approach.

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Orlando: Harcourt, 1988), p. 5.

[2] John Wesley, Journals and Diaries III (1743-54), ed. W. Reginald Ward & Richard P. Heitzenrater, Vol. 20 of The Works of John Wesley (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), p. 162.

[3] Robert Murray, ‘Ephrem Syrus, St’, A Catholic Dictionary of Theology, Vol. 2: Catechism—Heaven (London: Nelson, 1967), p. 222.

[4] Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1992), pp. 17, 143.

[5] Sebastian Brock & George A. Kiraz, ‘Introduction’, Select Poems, by St Ephrem the Syrian, ed. & tr. Sebastian P. Brock and George A. Kiraz (Provo, UT: Brigham Young, 2006), p. xiii.

[6] Qtd. in Brock, Luminous, p. 119.

[7] Mara Scanlon, ‘Ethics and the Lyric: Form, Dialogue, Answerability’, College Literature 31.1 (2007), p. 16.

[8] St Ephrem the Syrian, Select Poems, ed. & tr. Sebastian P. Brock & George A. Kiraz (Provo, UT: Brigham Young, 2006), pp. 18-27.

[9] Ibid., p. 19.

[10] Ibid., p. 21. Obviously, I am more than a little hampered in analysing the diction of St Ephrem’s poetry by my complete lack of Syriac!

[11] Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas, 1998), p. 4.

[12] Kathleen McVey, ‘Ephraem the Syrian (ca. 306-373)’, Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, Vol. 2, 2^nd ed., ed. Everett Ferguson, 2 vols. (NY: Garland, 1997), p. 376. Brock refers to St Ephrem as ‘a poet who wrote specifically for women’ (‘Introduction’, Hymns on Paradise, by St Ephrem the Syrian, tr. Sebastian Brock (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 1990], p. 22).

[13] Kathleen McVey, ‘Jacob of Saruge on Ephrem and the Singing Women’, American Foundation for Syriac Studies, n.p., n.d., Web, 1 June 2012. Jacob’s memra is also quoted at length by Brock (‘Introduction’, pp. 22-5).

[14] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. & tr. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1994), p. 117.

[15] Mikhail Bakhtin, Art & Answerability, eds. Michael Holquist & Vadim Liapunov, tr. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: U of Texas, 1995), p. 170.

[16] Bakhtin, Dialogic, p. 7, 23.

[17] Brock, Luminous, p. 60.

Enacting Hell: Comments on the Iliad

I am ashamed to admit it, but there was a time that I was not interested in Homer. Fortunately, at some point during that time, I came across the following passage in Dame Rebecca West’s Black Lamb, Grey Falcon—a passage that, as far as I can remember, was the first thing to awaken that interest. Speaking of a little girl socking away some cakes in order to preserve ‘the grand classical emotions’, West’s husband says:

Exactly similar movements must have been made a million million million times since the world began, yet the thrust of her arm seemed absolutely fresh. Well, it is so in the Iliad. When one reads of a man drawing a bow or raising a shield it is as if the dew of the world’s morning lay undisturbed on what he did. The primal stuff of humanity is very attractive. [1]

Whether I would have seen it there or not if I had not read these words in West, the ‘dew of the world’s morning’ was certainly there when finally the magnitude of my own folly was revealed to me in a blinding flash and I did read the Iliad through at last. Furthermore, something of this sense that we are coming into contact with the ‘primal stuff of humanity’ is present in some memorable words on the Iliad from two of my favourite 20^th-c. English writers: GKC and CSL. Nevertheless, their perspective on the poem is a bit darker than what we see in West’s reference. Take for instance Chesterton’s application of what one might call his typical ‘defamiliarisation’ technique [2] to a description of the Iliad in The Everlasting Man:

Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth. [3] A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact. It is said that the poem came at the end of the period; that the primitive culture brought it forth in its decay; in which case one would like to have seen that culture in its prime. But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die. [4]

Lewis delves more deeply into the actual language and themes of the poem, and in doing so, seems to me to justify Chesterton’s final judgement as quoted above. First, Lewis begins with the diction:

The actual operation of the Homeric diction is remarkable. The unchanging recurrence of his wine-dark sea, his rosy-fingered dawn, his ships launched into the holy brine, his Poseidon shaker of earth, produce an effect which modern poetry, except where it has learned from Homer himself, cannot attain. They emphasize the unchanging human environment. They express a feeling very profound and very frequent in real life, but elsewhere ill represented in literature....The permanence, the indifference, the heartrending or consoling fact that whether we laugh or weep the world is what it is, always enters into our experience and plays no small part in that pressure of reality which is one of the difference between life and imagined life. But in Homer the pressure is there. The sonorous syllables in which he has stereotyped the sea, the gods, the morning, or the mountains, make it appear that we are dealing not with poetry about the things, but almost with the things themselves. [5]

Already there is that sense of the repetition of timeless actions, not merely as a Romanticised dewyness, but as a ‘heartrending...fact’, a sense that Lewis develops further—‘Homeric pathos strikes hard precisely because it seems unintended and inevitable like the pathos of real life. It comes from the clash between human emotions and the large, indifferent background which the conventional epithets represent.’ [6] But then the emotional effect of all of this is described in positively infernal terms:

Much has been talked of the melancholy of Virgil; but an inch beneath the bright surface of Homer we find not melancholy but despair. ‘Hell’ was the word Goethe used of it. It is all the more terrible because the poet takes it all for granted, makes no complaint. It comes out casually, in similes.

As when the smoke ascends to the sky from a city afar

Set in an isle, which foes have compassed round in war,

And all day long they struggle as hateful Ares birds. (IL. XVIII, 207.)

...

Notice how different this is from the sack of Troy in Aeneid II. This is a mere simile—the sort of thing that happens every day. [7]

Finally, Lewis punches us in the gut with a reference to a telling line from Book XII and the use of the full quote from Goethe, before reminding us of what we love about Homer after all:

Primary Epic is great, but not with the greatness of the later kind. In Homer, its greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux. It is all the more tragic because there hangs over the heroic world a certain futility. ‘And here I sit in Troy,’ says Achilles to Priam, ‘afflicting you and your children.’ Not ‘protecting Greece’, not even ‘winning glory’, not called by any vocation to afflict Priam, but just doing it because that is the way things come about....Perhaps this was in Goethe’s mind when he said, ‘The lesson of the Iliad  is that on this earth we must enact Hell.’ [8] Only the style—the unwearying, unmoved, angelic speech of Homer—makes it endurable. Without that the Iliad would be a poem beside which the grimmest modern realism is child’s play. [9]

I have mused upon these ideas for some years now, and have found them to be more and more true, not simply as statements about Homer, but as a way of speaking about the fallen world. The deep pain we experience when, for instance, we are grieving after a death or simply the loss of a friend, seems to be mocked by the ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, by the interminable cycles of life around us. I cannot help but think of this every time I read the opening words of ‘The Waste Land’—‘April is the cruelest month’. [10] But it is really no less true of bad weather or darker months. However much the falling rain or snow may seem to mirror the pain inside of us, we soon realise that as Lewis says ‘the world is what it is’. Nature has no sympathy for us. It is thus that the Muse sings, ‘But when the tenth Dawn brought light to the mortal world / they carried gallant Hector forth, weeping tears’. [11] The Dawn brings light, but the Trojans are weeping. It will not be the last time that they do so.

[1] Dame Rebecca West, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (NY: Viking, 1943), p. 1044.

[2] A technique which for him is of course very different in intent and effect than it is for Tolstoy.

[3] GKC appears to have the matter of the name not quite straight. Stephen Scully quotes Carl Blegen—‘Troy was perhaps originally the more general name, applying to the countryside—the Troad—while Ilios more specifically designated the actual city. In the Homeric poems, however, this distinction is not maintained, and either name is used without prejudice to mean the city.’ Furthermore, according to Scully himself, ‘The neuter Ilion occurs only once in Homer (Il. 15.70-71), leading Aristarchus to consider it a later interpolation.’ See Stephen Scully, Homer & the Sacred City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1994), p. 7.

[4] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (SF: Ignatius, 2008), pp. 79-80.

[5] C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (NY: Oxford, ), p. 23.

[6] Ibid., p. 24.

[7] Ibid., p. 30.

[8] The line is from Goethe’s notebook for 1860, and was famously quoted by Matthew Arnold in his essay On Translating Homer.

[9] Lewis, p. 31.

[10] T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems & Plays, 1909-1950 (NY: Harcourt, 1971), p. 37. I actually felt that I simply hadn’t yet quoted enough authors remembered for their first two initials + surname.

[11] Il. 922-3; Robert Fagles, tr., The Iliad, by Homer (NY: Penguin, 1990), p. 614.