Pieper & Borges on Missing the Forest

Much like, I suppose, most avid readers, I can never read just one book at a time. For me, this problem may well be exacerbated by a deficient attention span, but I usually have at least 6 or 7 books going at once. Most of the time these cover something of the range of my interests, but as has been my habit here at Logismoi, I still come across intertextual connections with surprising frequency.

For the last week or so, I have been reading—among others—Josef Pieper’s illuminating introduction to Scholastic philosophy, Scholasticism: Personalities and Problems of Medieval Philosophy, as well as Jorge Luis Borges’s delightful Norton Lectures, This Craft of Verse (for more on my love for Borges, see this post). One might think that these volumes constituted two fairly unrelated conversations, but one would be wrong.

Just this morning, I was reading Pieper’s chapter on Aquinas’s polemics with ‘conservative’ Augustinian-Platonists like John Peckham on the one hand, and ‘radical’ Averroists like Siger of Brabant on the other, when I came across the following perspicacious comments on the latter. Allow me to quote at some length:

A word remains to be said about one peculiarity of this new rationalism which at first sight appears strange and positively irrational. F. van Steenberghen speaks of the ‘curious fact’ [chose curieuse] that ‘these bold and revolutionary spirits who did not hesitate to shatter the ideas they had received from their Christian environment should simultaneously have subscribed to a veritable cult of philosophical tradition’, so that philosophizing meant to them above all ‘to investigate what the philosophers thought about any particular question.’ As may easily be seen, this is something which we might call highly contemporary, for this sort of purely historical examination of philosophical questions is much the fashion nowadays. However, to my mind there is nothing curious about it; it is what one would naturally expect to happen. For the very moment anyone engaged in philosophizing abandons the guidance of sacred tradition, two things happen to him. The first is that he loses sight of his true subject, the real world and its structure of meaning, and finds himself instead talking about something entirely different: philosophy and philosophers. The second is that he forfeits his legitimate hold on the solely binding tradition, and must therefore illegitimately and—it must be said—vainly seek support in the mere facts handed down to him, in whatever historical ‘material’ happens to be at his disposal, following the ‘great thinkers’ whom he has encountered more or less by chance, or occupying himself industriously with the opinions of other people.

Here we must recall to mind the dictum of St Thomas, concerning this very matter, addressed in 1271-72 to Siger of Brabant, and since cited many times: ‘The purpose of the study of philosophy is not to learn what others have thought, but to learn how the truth of things stands.’ [1]

So Pieper accuses the Averroists of missing the point of philosophy because of their too keen interest in the history of the subject. They have become more interested in going over Aristotle with a fine-toothed comb than in wisdom itself.

Surprisingly, Borges says something very similar about poetry and literature in the lecture that I read from his book almost immediately after putting down my copy of Pieper. He writes:

I think perhaps we may be led astray by one of the studies I value most: the study of the history of literature. I wonder (and I hope this is not blasphemy) if we are not too aware of history. Being aware of the history of literature—or of any other art, for that matter—is really a form of unbelieving, a form of skepticism. If I say to myself, for example, that Wordsworth and Verlaine were very good nineteenth-century poets, then I may fall into the danger of thinking that time has somehow destroyed them, that they are not as good now as they were. I think the ancient idea—that we might allow perfection to art without taking into account the dates—was a braver one.

I have read several histories of Indian philosophy. The authors (Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Americans, and so on) always wonder at the fact that in India people have no historical sense—that they treat all thinkers as if they were contemporary. They translate the words of ancient philosophy into the modern jargon of today’s philosophy. But this stands for something brave. This stands for the idea that one believes in philosophy or that one believes in poetry—that things beautiful once can go on being beautiful still. [2]

Notice that Borges seems to suggest that the awareness of literary history has had an opposite effect to the medieval awareness of philosophical history. Whereas the Averroists valued ‘the Philosopher’ more highly than the wisdom he sought, the modern literary man—on Borges’s estimation—seems rather to dismiss his writers, to miss their importance, because of his exaggerated awareness of their historical situatedness, and in the process to lose both the mediaevals’ ‘cult of tradition’ as well as their appreciation of the true, the good, and the beautiful. They end up valuing neither Wordsworth nor beauty.

[1] Josef Pieper, Scholasticism: Personalities & Problems of Medieval Philosophy, tr. Richard & Clara Winston (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s, 2001), pp. 125-6.

[2] Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse, ed. Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2000), pp. 114-5.

Marginalia, No. 3

'If the heart of one friend is open to another, the truth glows between them, the good enfolds them, and each becomes a mainstay to his companion, a helpmate in his endeavor, and a potent factor in his attaining his wish. There is nothing surprising in this: souls ignite one another, minds fertilize one another, tongues exchange confidences; and the mysteries of this human being, a microcosm in this macrocosm, abound and spread.' [1]

 

That is the 10th-century Islamic philosopher Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani--who, like Socrates, 'wrote little or nothing himself' [2]--speaking to his disciples in the Muqabasat, or 'Borrowings', of Abu'l-Hayyan al-Tawhidi, quoted from an excerpt of Joel L. Kraemer's Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam found in Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, edited by Robert Irwin.

 

It's a powerful classical conception of friendship, on which of course there is a tradition of philosophy beginning with the ancient Greeks, particularly Aristotle, and running through Cicero, and finding beautiful Christian treatments in St John Cassian's Conferences and Aelred of Rievaulx's Spiritual Friendship. Since this is only a marginalium and not a proper post, I won't go to the trouble of walking downstairs and finding my new volume on Islamic philosophy to see if there are any comments on these figures in there. But I will note that Irwin writes: 'Tawhidi and his teachers and friends were interested in Greek philosophy and Sufism, and in reconciling Sufism with Neoplatonism.' [175] I suppose then that it is at least very likely that Abu Sulayman would have been familiar with Aristotle's thoughts on the subject of friendship, whatever else he may have read.

 

The image above is from a manuscript of the Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa dating from 1287 AD (Suleimaniye Library, Istanbul).

 

 

[1] Robert Irwin, ed., Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (NY: Anchor, 2001), p. 177.

 

[2] Ibid., p. 174.

 

[3] Ibid., p. 175.

'In the beginning was the Act' - Goethe's Faust

I’m not sure when I first learned of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s dramatic masterpiece, Faust, although it was probably around 11 or 12. I’m fairly certain I already knew of it when I saw a copy depicted as part of a small bibliothèque infernale on a poster for the horror-punk band, The Misfits. I think I must have purchased my copy of Walter Kaufmann’s bilingual edition some time during my stint at Barnes & Noble, likely in 1998 or 1999. What finally made up my mind to read it some day, however, was Jaroslav Pelikan’s statement in his brief ‘Personal Memoir: Fragments of a Scholar’s Autobiography’ (here) that he had begun the habit in his teens of reading the whole thing through in German once a year without fail.

By the time I came across that fascinating fact, I already knew of Pelikan’s appreciation for the German Romantic, having heard him refer to Goethe at a lecture at the University of Oklahoma in 1999 (I think) as well as having read his quote from Faust at the beginning and end of his delightful Jefferson Lectures, The Vindication of Tradition:

An older contemporary of Emerson’s, whom Emerson rightly regarded as the wisest and most universal mind of the century (except, Emerson felt obliged to add, for ‘the velvet life he lived!’), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, saw it all more deeply and said it all more clearly:

What you have as heritage,

Take now as task;

For thus you will make it your own! [1]

Nevertheless, despite this long awareness of the book and the inducements of Pelikan’s esteem for it, I only very recently began to read it for myself. When I did, I was very quickly reminded of the treatment of Faust in David Lyle Jeffery’s People of the Book: Christian Identity & Literary Culture, which I finished earlier this summer, so I went back and reread much of that chapter before proceeding further in Goethe.

Jeffrey draws some fascinating connections between Goethe’s depiction of Faust in his study and what DLJ calls ‘the symbolism of the faithful reader’ in the Christian artistic tradition. In this connection, I was particularly fascinated by Jeffrey’s references to the famous engravings of St Jerome by Albrecht Dürer (on which I have blogged a bit here). [2] Indeed, I would love to do some thinking through, or read someone else thinking through, the implications of Yates’s analysis of Dürer for an analysis of Faust.

The passage that carried me a little further outside Faust itself, however, was Jeffrey’s section on ‘Logos and Lector’, where he focuses on Faust 1224-37. I will quote in full Kaufmann’s translation of this passage, including in brackets the German for a few key terms:

(He opens a tome [of the New Testament] and begins.)
It says: ‘In the beginning was the Word [Wort].’
Already I am stopped. It seems absurd.
The Word does not deserve the highest prize,I must translate it otherwise
If I am well inspired and not blind.
It says: In the beginning was the Mind [Sinn].
Ponder that first line, wait and see,
Lest you should write too hastily.
Is mind the all-creating source?It ought to say: In the beginning there was Force [Kraft].
Yet something warns me as I grasp the pen,
That my translation must be changed again.
The spirit helps me. Now it is exact.
I write: In the beginning was the Act [Tat]. [3]

Now I admit that the import of all of this is most unclear to me. Why can Faust not accept the first verse of St John’s Gospel? Because all of this follows on his reference to attempting to translate the NT into German, I’m a little tempted to wonder if it’s more the German word Wort he’s objecting to, and not the Λόγος of the Gospel. But I admit that the successive attempts give me the chills, carrying as I’m afraid they can no longer help but do the crushing weight of German fascist association. [4] For his part, Jeffrey finds, ‘Faust rejects in this formulation the source of all Christian symbol, “the Law of the Lord”, but most specifically the Logos, the doctrine of the incarnate Word.’ [5]

My readiness to accept this reading, as undeveloped as it was, predisposed me to be a little shocked when I turned to another reference to this passage from Faust: the epigraph to Chapter Two, ‘Answerability & Ethics: Toward a Philosophy of Action’, in Alexandar Mihailovic’s remarkable monograph, Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse. It had been some time since I’d looked at this book, and I only went back to it on a hunch (since Johannine logology was such an important part of Mihailovic’s analysis). Sure enough, at the heading of Chapter 2, we see:

Im Anfang war die Tat.

--Goethe, Faust.

Now, this was intriguing enough by itself, but it was followed immediately by a second epigraph:

The Formalists are imprinted with the seal of overripe clericalism. They are Johannites. For them ‘in the beginning was the Word.’ But for us in the beginning was the act: the word appeared only after [the act], like a shadow made of sound.

--Leo Trotsky, Literature & Revolution (1924) [6]

At this point, of course, I was fully engaged. Unfortunately, a quick skim through the chapter failed to turn up any further references to Goethe or Trotsky until the very end. There we read: ‘In a very real sense, Bakhtin inverts the Johannine conception of the conception of the word: for him, as for Trotsky--and this is the only area in which the critic and the revolutionary would agree--the act comes first, the word proceeding from it as its concretized efflorescence.’ [7]

Of course, I am hardly inclined to take this at face value. First, note that ‘word’ is not capitalised, either in Trotsky’s statement about its appearance after the act, or at all in Mihailovic’s statement about Bakhtin. Indeed, Mihailovic’s whole point seems to be that Bakhtin’s use of theological language almost invariably replaces the theological content of that language with discursive content. He takes what Christians say about ‘the Word’, and applies it to what we say about ‘the word’, i.e., discourse. [8] Second, Mihailovic himself states that for Bakhtin it is precisely ‘Incarnational theology [that] provides a framework for understanding the formal and material dimensions of the human community; according to Bakhtin, it unites that which has been separated by contemporary approaches to ethics.’ [9] If the rejection of Wort for Tat is a rejection of ‘the doctrine of the Incarnate Word’, as I’m inclined to believe it is for Faust, for Bakhtin it must mean that he cannot follow Faust as easily as Mihailovic seems to suggest.

Since writing that last paragraph, I have read very carefully through an interesting article by a Goethe specialist all about the passage I’ve been considering. I can’t say I have perfectly understood all of Erik Eisel’s ‘“In the Beginning Was the Word...”: The Question of the Origin of Language in Goethe’s Faust’ (here). The gist of Eisel’s argument is that Goethe is making his own contribution to the question of the origin of language, a question memorably essayed by Johann Herder, whose contribution to the subject directly influenced Goethe. I admit I struggled a bit with this aspect of the paper, but I fancy I’ve detected one or two things that dovetail with some of my reflections here.

First, Eisel strikes a note of what Harold Bloom might call ‘anxiety of influence’ in Faust. He asks, ‘Will the appropriation of this primal sentence [i.e., John 1:1] into his own primal writing scene establish a  pattern of continued undifferentiation? Or a hoped-for self-differentiation?’ Comparing Faust’s efforts to translate Scripture into ‘mein geliebtes Deutsch’ to those of his historical contemporary, Martin Luther, Eisel notes, ‘Unlike Luther, he cannot decide whether his translation of “word” into “act” establishes a pattern for the emergence of culture that differentiates him from tradition--or from the former self that he wants to escape.’ Later on, he makes two more comments along these lines. First, he observes, ‘Instead of employing a technique of free translation, Goethe depicts Faust using the literary technique of appropriation in order to transform the “original text”(Grundtext) of the Bible into a personal response to the question of language origin.’ Second, Eisel notes that ‘Goethe prefaces the scene...by emphasizing that translation results from a “personal desire” (mich draengt’s) to make something one’s own, “in mein geliebtes Deutsch ze uebertragen”...’

The last comment reminds me disturbingly of Pelikan’s favourite quotation, from earlier in the poem--‘What you have as heritage, / Take now as task; / For thus you will make it your own!’ Is Faust’s translation attempt a perversion of this charge, or a fulfillment of it? Hoping to get some feel for an answer to this question, I paid very close attention to precisely what it was Eisel was alleging as the object of Faust’s anxiety. In other words, what precisely is the ‘tradition’ that he associates with his ‘former self’ and which he hopes to escape?

I remain slightly unclear on this point. In one place, Eisel writes, ‘For Goethe, translation is the preferred method of creating a literary space where his literary creation, Faust, rebels against the Kantian universe with which he is familiar.’ Okay, so despite the obvious anachronism from an historical perspective, perhaps Kantianism is what Goethe is making his character escape from? But delving into Friedrich Kittler’s ‘wide-ranging work, Discourse Networks 1800/1900’, Eisel suggests an answer that may or may not be connected with Kantianism:

An ‘untimely meditation’ if there ever was one, the melancholic sigh in the opening monologue of Goethe’s play is an expression of Faust’s obvious disgust with the uncomfortable, high-vaulted Gothic den where he lives and works. It is, moreover, an indictment of the circulation of words and books being endlessly renewed with the Republic of Scholars and the Four Faculties. According to Kittler, the beginning of German literature is the dismantling of this obsolete discourse network and the self-generation of a narrative newly oriented towards the reader’s bodily experience of the text and of language.

To me this suggests something generally anti-intellectual, the equation of scholarship and the study of texts with dry, inactive, or ineffectual preoccupations, with a negation of vitality. It suggests that it is the whole tradition of Christian culture--represented first by the Gothic den of St Jerome and second by the traditional connotations of St John’s Prologue--that Faust wishes to distance himself from or escape. I certainly don’t think this tradition is in any way Kantian, though perhaps Goethe is suggesting Kant is a kind of logical conclusion of the tradition?

At any rate, it is in particular the way that Eisel describes Faust setting out to effect this distanciation that is in my opinion closest to some of my considerations above.

[At this point I had to leave off working on this post for a while, and returning to Eisel’s somewhat difficult essay, I found I had completely lost my train of thought! What follows is a much later and necessarily truncated attempt to reconstruct the direction I think I was taking with this post. I hope it makes sense in light of the above reflections.]

Eisel draws on a notion he finds in Kittler of ‘the theatricality of performance’ to delineate Faust’s self-distanciation from all the connotations of the Gothic den. At this point I will quote at some length:

It is not Faust’s proverbial thirst for knowledge that makes him an interesting case study for his diagnosis of a European ‘discourse network’, but his love of spectacle and of the physical effect of astonishment. Upon discovering the magic sign of the Macrocosm, Faust shouts out, ‘What play! Yet but a play, however vast!’ [10] Despite reservations about the superficial character of spectacle, he wants more of it, since it commands a sublimity not to be found in the drabness of his Gothic library. In Kittler’s opinion, this appetite for the sublime is something conditioned by the cultural media of the Enlightenment. Faust’s preference for theatrical gesture over linguistic expression grows out of a person ‘resentment’ against the word (Kittler 13). Accordingly, Kittler interprets the crisis of conventionality in the late Enlightenment as provoking the efforts of a new generation of Romantic writers to initiate a ‘paradigm shift’ within the traditional pedagogical scene that Faust describes in the opening lines of his monologue.

Perhaps it’s simply a conversation that I’m coming to far too late, but to me this passage is very obscure. That said, it strikes me that there are a couple of ways to read it. One is that Eisel and Kittler are discerning at work merely the desire for movement and action typical of youth, a desire writ large in the aspirations and fervency of the Romantic movement. But the other is perhaps more interesting. To my mind it may be that these two scholars are talking about an idea with which I have become increasingly preoccupied lately--the idea of poetic knowledge, and its cousin, that of ‘suffering’ or ‘experiencing’ rather than ‘learning about’ divine things (see this post). Although Eisel notes ‘the superficial character of spectacle’, in the enactment of drama (I’m thinking particularly of classical tragedy), we have a discourse that is in some ways akin to liturgy, where the mystery of knowledge is no longer confined to the ‘scientific’ learning of the text, but is entered into by experience with the senses and acted out. Is it possible that it is something not so far from liturgy that Faust is drawn to in his ‘preference for theatrical gesture’?

Either way, I hesitate to make too much of the Bakhtinian inversion of supposedly Johannine ‘word’ that Mihailovic believes he has discovered. If ‘word’ is to be equated with verbal discourse only, then it is natural that it lose its ontological priority, and we could perhaps do much worse than replace it with ‘act’ in the sense of enacting the mystery in which we participate. ‘Word’ can only be restored to primacy of place if it becomes again that Λόγος that dwelt in silence with God in the beginning, already full of the love that would act by creating everything.

[1] Qtd. in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1984), p. 82; see also the epigraph on the dedication page, p. v. The lines are 682-3, and are found on pp. 114 & 115 of Kaufmann’s edition, where they are rendered, ‘What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire if you would possess it’ (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, tr. Walter Kaufmann [NY: Anchor, 1990], pp. 114-5).

[2] David Lyle Jeffrey, People of the Book: Christian Identity & Literary Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), pp. 214-5.

[3] Goethe, p. 153.

[4] My Webster’s New World German Dictionary supports Kaufmann’s renderings of the German terms, though it also gives other possible meanings. The first definition given for Sinn is ‘sense’, followed by ‘mind’, ‘feeling’, ‘spirit’, and ‘point’ (Webster’s New World German Dictionary, Concise edition, ed. Peter Terrell & Horst Kopleck [Indianapolis: Wiley, 1987], p. 389) Under definition (a), Kraft is translated ‘strength’, ‘power, force’, or ‘energy’, and under (b) as ‘power’ or ‘force’ (it is compared to Macht) (ibid., p. 258).

At any rate, as Erik Eisel points out, Hitler himself praised Goethe ‘for giving such prominence to “deeds” over “words”’.

[5] Jeffrey, p. 258.

[6] Alexandar Mihailovic, Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U, 1997), p. 51. I have posted at some length on Bakhtin and the Formalists here, in a post which somehow earned me the accusation that I ‘hate literature’.

[7] Ibid., p. 85.

[8] In their useful, if flawed, intellectual biography of Bakhtin, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist quote Kenneth Burke in order to explain their assumptions about Bakhtin’s project: ‘As Kenneth Burke remarked, “statements that great theologians made about the nature of ‘God’ might be adapted mutatis mutandis for use as purely secular observations on the nature of words…”’ (Katerina Clark & Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin [Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1984], p. 83).

[9] Mihailovic, p. 78. [10] Goethe, p. 99.

'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.