Klu’Skap-O’Kom

In 1989, I read a review of an album in Thrasher magazine that would lead me to one of my favourite recordings—and rock bands—of all time: the Quebecois progressive thrash metal band, Voivod, whose masterpiece, Nothingface, was released that year. I could wax nostalgic about the band all day, but for the sake of this post they’re really just the context for something else. Although I stopped following them actively after several years, they recently released a music video that I came across on YouTube. The song bore the strange title, ‘Kluskap O‘ Kom,’ and the animated video created by drummer Michel Langevin featured a terrifying figure stalking through the woods. I looked up the title, and discovered that it refers to a figure out of Canadian First Nations legend. Eventually, I also came upon the following poem.

Klu’Skap-O’Kom*

By Rita Joe

I left a message to nikmaqq+
In the caves of stone
My home.
The message say I go away
But someday return,
And the sun will again shine
Across the trails
My people walk.

*Klu’skap-o’kom—Klu’skap’s home.

+Nikmaqq—My friends or Micmac.

In Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, there are caves at a place, Kelly’s Mountain, where the legend says that Klu’skap left and will return someday. The place is beautiful in the rising and setting sun, hence the legend the Micmacs passed from generation to generation. The $46 million quarry nearby may destroy the caves, and the legend will only be a story of our past; as always this usually happens.

(Oct. 21, 1989) R.J.)

From Canadian Literature No. 124-125, Native Writers & Canadian Writing (Spring/Summer), p. 122.

'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.

Poetic Knowledge in Virgil & Whitman

In the passage from Newman that I included in my last post, the great divine, philosopher, and man of letters makes the following comment about ‘scientific’ as opposed to ‘poetic knowledge’:

Its mission is to destroy ignorance, doubt, surmise, suspense, illusions, fears, deceits, according to the ‘Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas’ of the Poet, whose whole passage, by the way, may be taken as drawing out the contrast between the poetical and the scientific. [1]

As I reread this passage last week, the first thing I did was track down the ‘Poet’ whom Newman cites. The line, Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, as it turns out, is from Book II of Virgil’s Georgics, line 490. In a footnote to the comment about the Poet’s ‘whole passage’, Newman quotes ll. 475, 477, 483-5, 490, and 493. I shall give the ‘whole passage’, including the unquoted lines, according to David Ferry’s translation into English pentameter:

But as for me, oh may the gracious Muses,

Gracious beyond all else, whose holy emblems

I consecrated bear in the procession,

Grant me their favor and reveal to me

The courses of the stars above in the heavens;

Teach me about the sun in its eclipse,

And about the many labors of the moon;

What is it that causes quakings of the earth?

What force is it that suddenly makes the great

Sea rise and swell and break through all restraints

And then subside into itself again?

Why is it that the sun in winter hurries

To plunge itself into the sea and why

Is the winternight so slow to come to an end?

But if the blood around my heart’s too cold

To gain me access to such mighty knowledge,

Then may I find delight in the rural fields

And the little brooks that make their way through valleys,

And in obscurity love the woods and rivers.

I long for such places, oh I long to be

By Spercheus or at Taygeta in Sparta

Where maidens celebrate the rites of Bacchus,

Or to be safe in the cool Haemian glade,

Protected in the shade of those great branches!

That man is blessed who has learned the causes of things,

And therefore under his feet subjugates fear

And the decrees of unrelenting fate

And the noise of Acheron’s insatiable waters.

He too is happy who knows the country gods,

The sister Nymphs, and Pan, and old Sylvanus. [2]

I take it that Newman is suggesting that the poet’s ‘fear’ before ‘such mighty knowledge’ corresponds to the poetic mode, whereas the desire to learn ‘the causes of things’ represents the scientific mode of knowledge. I am less certain what to make of where Newman would say the poet’s affinity for the still natural but tamer, ‘obscurity’ of fields, valleys, woods, and rivers fits into the scientific/poetic dichotomy. Are these more ‘scientific’ because less ‘vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious’ than the heavens or the ocean? And the country gods’ place in this scheme is still more puzzling to me. But perhaps that is for another post.

In the meantime, I came across another poem, of a much lower order than Virgil’s, which nevertheless constitutes an apt illustration of the distinction between scientific and poetic knowledge. Here is Walt Whitman’s, ‘When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer’, which I only just now discovered was recited on the popular television programme, Breaking Bad:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. [3]

 

[1] John Henry Newman, Rise & Progress of Universities and Benedictine Essays, Vol. 3 of The Works of Cardinal John Henry Newman, Birmingham Oratory, Millennium Edition (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame, 2001), pp. 386-7.

[2] David Ferry, tr., The Georgics of Virgil: Bilingual Edition (NY: Farrar, 2006), p. 85.

[3] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (NY: Barnes & Noble, 1993), p. 228.

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.