1
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�Lecture Schedule 1972-1973
Sept 15, 1972 Hugh McGrath
SJC Annapolis
Sept 22
Nancy Wilson Ross
Old Westbury, NY
Sept 29
Richard Kennington
Penn. State Univ., University Park, PA
Oct 6
Eva Brann
SJC Annapolis
Oct 13
Harford Theatre Assn.
Oct 20
Oct 27
Nov 3
Nov 10
Nov 17
Dec 1
Dec 8
Dec 15
Jan 12, 1973
Jan 19
Jan 26-27
Feb 2
Feb 16
Feb 23
Mar 2
March 9
April 6
April 13
Douglas Allanbrook
SJC Annapolis
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
SJC Annapolis
Wye Allanbrook
SJC Annapolis
Virgil Thornson
NYC
Leonard G Ratner
Stanford Univ., Stanford CA
Mortimer Adler
Inst. for Philosophical Research, Chicago
IL
Erwin Straus
Lexington KY
Edward Sparrow
SJC Annapolis
George Wend
SJC Alumnus, Baltimore MD
Christopher White
Curator National Gallery, Washington DC
King William Players
Sen. Eugene McCarthy
Washington DC
Matitiahu Braun
Jacob Klein
SJC Annapolis
William O’Grady
SJC Annapolis
Herman Kahn
The Hudson Inst., Crodon on Hudson NY
Amadeus String Quartet
San Francisco CA
Muhsi Mahdi
Harvard Univ. Cambridge MA
“The Circle and the Square”
“Asian Wisdom and the
Modern World”
“Decartes and the
Enlightenment”
“The Poet of the Odyssey”
“The Abduction from the
Seraglio”
“Keyboard Music and the
Art of Illusion”
“The Rhetoric of J.S. Bach”
“Dance, Gesture, and The
Marrage of Figaro”
“Words and Music”
“Rythmn in Classical
Music”
“The Objects of Discourse”
“On Hamlet”
“Jesus of Nazareth, Lamb
of God”
“Computer Mathematics”
“Dürer as a Draftsman”
“Taming of the Shrew”
“Poetry and Politics”
Violin Concert
“Speech, Its Strength and
Its Weaknesses”
“Plato’s Republic and the
Search For”
“The Prospects for
Mankind”
Concert
“The History and Myth of
Philosophic Religion”
�April 27&28
May 4
May 18
Catholic Univ Players
Catholic Univ, Washington DC
Nicolas Nabokov
Paris France
Modern Theatre Group
Apr. 27: “As You Like It”
Apr. 28: “The Birds”
“Stravinsky and Irony”
“The Dolls House”
�
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Description
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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4 pages
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paper
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Office of the Dean
Title
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Lecture Schedule 1972-1973 (handwritten & transcribed)
Date
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1972-1973
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Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1972-1973 Academic Year.
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Lecture Schedule 1972-1973
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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pdf
Relation
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October 06, 1972. Brann, Eva T. H. <a title="The poet of the Odyssey" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/261">The poet of the Odyssey</a> (audio)
October 27, 1972. Ruhm von Oppen, Beate. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3605" title="Bach's rhetoric">Bach's rhetoric</a> (audio)
October 27, 1972. Ruhm von Oppen, Beate. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3585" title="Bach's rhetoric">Bach's rhetoric</a> (text)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
McGrath, Hugh
Ross, Nancy Wilson, 1901-1986
Kennington, Richard, 1921-
Brann, Eva T. H.
Allanbrook, Douglas
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Allanbrook, Wye Jamison
Thornson, Virgil
Ratner, Leonard G.
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Straus, Erwin
Sparrow, Edward
Wend, George
White, Christopher
McCarthy, Eugene
Braun, Matitiahu, 1940-
Klein, Jacob
O'Grady, William
Kahn, Herman
Mahdi, Muhsi
Nabokov, Nicolas
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3699f7070d5520f9406a8d2f65319874.pdf
9621f2c4d8351777ffb527a29732d7ab
PDF Text
Text
\
\
•
\
s,- )€?HN's CoLLEGE
P.O. ~ox 1671
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21404
FouNDED 1696 AS KlNC WILLIAM's ScHOOL
LECTURES/CONCERTS - 1988-89
September 2
Ms . Wye Allanbrook, Tutor
Ms. Eva Brann, Tutor
St . John's College
Annapolis
Music: The Representative
Liberal Art
September 9
Dr. Cyri l Ponnamperuma
University of Maryland
College Park
The Origin and Evolution
of Life in the Universe
September 16
Dr. Sherman .Lee
Chapel Hill, NC
Chinese Landscape
Painting
September 23
Mr. Douglas Allanbrook, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
The Most Serene
Republic
September 30
Ms. Patricia Locke, Tutor
St . John's College
Annapolis
Hegel's Reading
of Antigone
October 7
Concert
October 14
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 21
Mr. David Eisenhower
Berwyn, PA
Eisenhower at War:
1943-45
October 28
Mr. Laurence Berns, Tutor
St. John 's College
Annapolis
The Relation Between
Philosophy and Religion
November 4
All College Seminar
November 11
Mr. Bruce M. Metzger
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, NJ
The Formation of the
New Testament
Nov ember 18
Mr. Samuel Bowles
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts
Democracy and Capitalism:
Jefferson's Hope,
Tocqueville ' s Fear
November 25
Thanksgiving
No Lecture
December 2
Mr. Joe Sachs, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
Antigone: All-Resourceful/
Resourceless
December 9
King Wi lliam Players
December 16January 8
Winter Vacation
TELEPHONE 301·263-2371
No Lectures
�•
STJoHN's CoLLEGE
P.O. BOX 1671
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21404
foUNDED 1696 AS KING WILLIAM'S ScHOOL
LECTURES/CONCERTS - 1988-89 - SECOND SEMESTER
January 13
Thomas J. Slakey, Dean
St. John's College
Annapolis
January 20
Concert
January 27
Mr. Peter Kalkavage, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
Dante and Ulysses: A
Reading of Inferno XXVI
February 3
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 10
Mr. Edward Sparrow, Tutor
St. John 's College
Annapolis
The Number Line Erased
and Redrawn: An Exercise
i n Rationality
February 17
Mr. Mark Jordan
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN
The Summa Theolog iae
and the Care of Souls
February 24
Concert
March 2-1 9
Spring Vacation
No Lectures
March 24
Dr . Mariam Cohen
Scottsdale, AR
From Biology to Psychology:
An Aspect of the Development
of Freud's Notion of t h e
Unconscious
March 31
Mr. Lee Clark Mitchell
Princeton Uni versity
Princeton, NJ
"And What Wi ll She Do?"
Jamesian Portraits of
a Lady
April 7
Concert
April 14
All College Seminar
Apri l 21
Mr. Mortimer J. Adler
Institute for Philosophical
Chi cago, Illinois
Great Books, Democracy
and Truth
April 28
Mr. Samuel Kutler, Tutor
St. John's College
Annap olis
Philosophical Questioning
May 5
King William Players
May 12
Mr . Peter Arnott
Winchester, MA
May 19
Commencement
TELEPHONE 301-263-2371
The God W
ho Is and
The God Who Speaks
Marionette Performance
of Sophocles' Electra
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
2 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture/Concerts - 1988-89
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1988-1989
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1988-1989 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1988-1989
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
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St. John's College
Language
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English
Type
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text
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
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pdf
Contributor
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Allanbrook, Wye Jamison
Brann, Eva T. H.
Ponnamperuma, Cyril, 1923-
Lee, Sherman E.
Allanbrook, Douglas
Locke, Patricia
Eisenhower, David, 1948-
Berns, Laurence, 1928-
Metzger, Bruce M. (Bruce Manning), 1914-2007
Bowles, Samuel
Sachs, Joe
Slakey, Thomas J.
Kalkavage, Peter
Sparrow, Edward
Jordan, Mark
Cohen, Mariam
Mitchell, Lee Clark, 1947-
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Kutler, Samuel
Arnott, Peter
Relation
A related resource
October 28, 1988. Berns, Laurence. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1096" title="On the relation between philosophy and religion.">On the relation between philosophy and religion.</a>
December 2, 1988. Sachs, Joe. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3721" title="Antigone: all resourcefullness/resourceless">Antigone: all resourcefullness/resourceless</a>
January 27, 1989. Kalkavage, Peter. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3810" title="Dante and Ulysses: a reading of Inferno XXVI">Dante and Ulysses: a reading of <em>Inferno</em> XXVI</a>
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e135a839d3f5734df662dac67d615f9f.pdf
111cbb45ea98e31646e4fb29b9eabcdc
PDF Text
Text
The St. John's Review
Volume XXXVIII, number one (1988 - I)
Editor
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Board
Eva Brann
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Cary Stickney (Santa Fe)
John Jim Doren (Alumni)
Robert B. Williamson
Assistant to the Editor
John Lavery
The St. John's Review is published thrice yearly by the Office of the Dean, St.
John's College, Annapolis; William Dyal, President; Thomas Slakey, Dean. For
those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $12.00 yearly. Unsolicited essays,
stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the
Review, St. John's College, Annapolis, MD 21404. Back issues are available, at
$4.00 per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
© 1988 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part
without permission is prohibited.
ISSN OT/7-4720
Composition
Best Impressions
Printing
The St. John's College Print Shop
�A Notice about Volume Numbering and Dating
The two preceding issues of the Review were Volume 37, number one, which
contained the writings ofWilliam O'Grady, and Volume :rl, numbers two and three,
the double issuethatincludedessays in honor of Mr. O'Grady. They bore the dates
Winter, 1986, and Spring, 1986. The Review now continues with Volume 38, of which
there will be three issues, labelled one, two, and three, and bearing the date 1988,
without the specification of seasons. No issues of the Review bore the date 1987.
�Contents
LECTURES
1 ...
25 . "
'Ear-Tickling Nonsense':
A New Context for Musical Expression
in Mozart's 'Haydn' Quartets
ftYe J. Allanbrook
Some Interpretations of The Magic Flute:
The Auden Translation and the Bergman Film
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
OCCASIONAL SPEECHES
41
The Program Old and New
Douglas Allanbrook
47
Truth Given and Truth Sought: Two Colleges
J. Winfree Smith
FICTION
55 ...
How Liberty Won the Sweet Sixteen
From The Tales of the Liberty Renaissance
Ken Colston
VERSE
66
Two Translations of La Fontaine
Elliott Zuckerman
BOOK REVIEW
71 . "
Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind
Eva Brann
Decorations by Emily Kutler
Musical calligraphy by Tina Davidson
��'Ear-Tickling Nonsense': A New
Context for Musical Expression in
Mozart's 'Haydn' Quartets
Wye J. Allanbrook
My talk today is a "likely story" -an attempt to present a coherent aesthetic context in which to place some familiar music, in the
light of several questions that have occupied me recently. The music
is some string quartets of Mozart. The questions are threefold: first,
the problem referred to by the teaser in my title: why did late-eighteenthcentury theorists and critics think so little of music without a text, that
"ear-tickling nonsense," as one described it?' Second, why is there
so little recognition today of the importance of the topos, or characteristic musical style, to the rhetoric of Classic music? And finally,
perhaps most perplexingly, what does instrumental music express? Can
we say that it is about something? I think the three questions are related, and the following is my attempt to tell a convincing story about
this music that takes them into account.
It is strange that a repertoire we place high in the canon of serious music-the Classic instrumental ·repertoire-developed without
Wye J. Allanbrook is a Tutor and Assistant Dean at St. John's College, Annapolis. She
is the author of Rhythmic Gesture inMozarl: Le nozzedi Figaro and Don Giovanni (University of Chicago, 1983). This lecture was written while she was in residence at the National
Humanities Center in North Carolina. It is a sketch for the introduction to a book on the
chamber music of Mozart and Haydn.
A shorter version of the lecture was delivered at the October, 1987, conference of
the Midwest Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and was awarded the prize for the
best paper.
1
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
spokesmen for its new and.compelling ways; no one seemed to be watching. Or the few who were watching clung to a tradition that devalued
instrumental music as at best unnatural and uninstructive, and at worst
"nothing but mere noise. " 2 We think of the last decades of the eighteenth century as the time when instrumental music had at last attained
its majority: Haydn "fathered" the string quartet and symphony, so
the story goes, and J.S. Bach had already contributed masterworks for
various instrumental ensembles. Nevertheless, as one observer points
out, in Bach's oeuvre vocal works predominate; he did not grant pride
of place to these autonomous instrumental marvels. 3 And, as the quotations suggest, writers on music in the latter half of the century seem
strangely to overlook the untexted works of instrumental genius that
were being composed under their noses. We expect such "mainstream"
music to have been as central to its own time as it is to ours, and not,
as is more the truth, somewhat condescended to. Did late-eighteenthcentury writers on music simply ignore a considerable body of eloquent
and popular music? Is this another occasion to chide music theory for
being myopic about actual musical practice? My "likely story" lays
less blame at the feet of the theorists and critics of the period, although
it does not pretend to return them to full authority. The very aesthetic
theories that devalued instrumental music-the body of mimetic
doctrine-nevertheless provide a surer foundation for understanding its
late-eighteenth-century flowering than any theory that followed. But
our peculiar modern unease with aesthetic theories that characterize art
as referential, not to say imitative, has blinded us to this relationship,
leaving us to construct after our own lights a picture of Classic instrumental music that has stubbornly prevailed.
Although it is fairly well accepted that Baroque music operated
under the old-fashioned Aristotelian dogma that art is imitation, most
students of what we call "Classic" music abandon this kind of talk with
relief, even though these two repertoires have in fact much in common. Talk that suggests pictorialism or a program is avoided by the
sophisticated. Of course it is difficult to ignore the obvious: no one would
think of discussing Beethoven's Sixth Symphony without mentioning
the pastoral, or Mozart's so-called "Hunt" Quartet without a reference to the type of music that gave it its nickname. But these are considered exceptional, and the ubiquity of such allusions is ignored: no
standard analysis of the first movement of Mozart's String Quartet in
D minor, K. 421, mentions the flavor of the antique lament it takes
on by using that old-fashioned organizing device, the chaconne bass;
or that his Sonata in B-flat major, K. 333, opens with the piano imitating a music box playing a tune in the so-called Empfindsamer, or "sen-
�ALLAN BROOK
3
sitive" style. Although sophisticated techniques exist for structural
analysis on the deepest levels, the level that is in fact most palpable,
and moves us most directly-the level on which the expressive gestures
that enliven the work are operating-is generally treated as though it
didn't exist.
One reason for this silence is the powerful legacy left by writers
on music aesthetics in the nineteenth century. The intellectual traditions
of the previous age have been rendered opaque to us by the radical change
in attitudes toward expression in music that took place over a period
of one hundred years. Two oft-quoted remarks provide the extremes
for this enormous traversal of aesthetic distance. "Sonata, what do you
want of me?" asked Fontenelle, or at least, more importantly, in 1768
Rousseau says he did. 4 A little over one hundred years later Walter
Pater turned matters on their head in a remark that has become an
aphorism: "All art aspires constantly to the condition of music. " 5 My
gloss of this hypothetical exchange between epochs: the eighteenth century asks a rhetorical question: "Instrumental music, whatever can you
imagine you offer me?" The nineteenth century's reply is, resoundingly, "Everything. "
Clearly, the type of music each era embraced as the appropriate
paradigm for the art was closely linked to the prevalent attitude toward
musical expression. Eighteenth-century theorists and composers consistently gave primacy to vocal music, to music "completed" by a text.
Rousseau quotes Fontenelle approvingly on instrumental music's inscrutability because of his own strong preference for song. His article
on unite de melodie in the Dictionnaire (1768) clearly articulates this
prejudice:
Now the pleasure in harmony is a pleasure of the senses pure and sirilple,
and the pleasure of the senses is always brief; saturation and boredom fol-
low it quickly. But the pleasure in melody and song is a pleasure of interest
and feeling which speaks to the heart . ...
Music, therefore, must necessarily sing in order to move, to please,
to sustain interest and attention . ... Any music that does not sing is boring.
[italics mine]
Rousseau's judgment was echoed by most respectable writers through
the century. H. C. Koch, an important thinker about musio to whose
work I will return, could still write in his Musikalisches Lexikon of 1802,
in the article Instrumentalmusik, "It remains an absolute fact that song
maintains a most obvious and undeniable superiority over instrumental
music. " 6
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
4
It is true that Koch has some positive things to say about the possibilities for imitation in the instrumental works of certain composers:
The possibility of injecting ... a particular [bestimmt] character into the sonata, as a pure piece of instrumental music, has long since been demonstrated
by the sonatas of C. Ph. E. Bach, and in Haydn's and Mozart's works of
this type one finds more recent evidence for this assertion. (article Sonate)
But he still finds it necessary in the last analysis to make the same judgement about the relative merits of instrumental and vocal music that his
predecessors had been making throughout the century. The sonata
presents a blank and impenetrable facade to these writers because, in
their opinion, without language it can imitate no objects, and thereby
offers the listener mere sensual pleasure instead of moral articulacy.
Music left to itself, they argued, can paint feelings only in a vague and
generic way, since its means of painting are necessarily "indeterminate"
(unbestimmt). Koch concedes that textless music can "work directly
on our hearts and ... arouse in us pleasant or unpleasant feelings." "If,
however," he continues,
it should undertake to stimulate in us feelings for which the situation in which
we find ourselves offers no occasion, feelings to which our hearts are not
open, . .. it lacks the means to make these feelings interesting to our hearts.
It cannot make intelligible to us in these circumstances why it wants to transport us into gentle or sad, exalted or happy, feelings; it cannot awaken in
us either the images of that good whose enjoyment is to delight us, or the
images of that evil that is to cause fear or distress . ... In vocal music, on
the other hand, the text prepares the spectator, helps him to the intended
frame of mind, and gives interest to the feelings to be expressed. (article
Instrumentalmusik)
Only a text can provide a context, can supply for the music the determinacy necessary if the listener's cognitive and moral faculties are to
be brought into play. Because pure instrumental music moves the feelings directly, without reference to an external correlative or final cause,
it must always remain incomplete.
But confidence in the expression in music of such moral universals, and in the existence of the universals themselves, was on the wane.
Thus, as the nineteenth century began, this apparent deficiency began
to take on the look of a virtue. As they came to place a high value on
originality and individual expression, writers delighted in the very muteness and lack of prescription in instrumental music that had so disturbed
the eighteenth-century rationalists. As Joseph Kerman points out, it was
not "hymns or waltzes or cantatas" that Pater idealized, but "pure"
symphonic music, 7 which, precisely because of this freedom from con-
�ALLAN BROOK
5
nection with extra-musical things, epitomized to the Romantics what
is most "musical" about music. "Pure music" had the potential to be
the truest poetry, "which is all the purer," said one early nineteenthcentury critic, "the less it is dragged down into the region of vulgar
meaning by words (which are always laden with connotations). " 8 In
short, the doctrine of music as a mimetic art yielded to that of music
as an autonomous one, and there was little looking back. We today have
inherited this aesthetic with its elevation of instrumental music as the
dominant mode, and consequently we resist a perspective that asserts
the natural primacy of song as a first principle. So firmly are we in
the grip of this particular notion of musical priorities, however dimly
we perceive it, that the high position the eighteenth century accorded
to melody seems touchingly primitive, and not worthy of much attention.
***
If Classic instrumental music is not the ideal and autonomous
music the Romantics imagined, how can we bend mimetic doctrine to
describe it? A brief look at the long history of the doctrine is in order:
in one form or another it influenced thinking about art from classical
antiquity until the end of the eighteenth century, when it seems to disappear. Although the nature of object and imitator has varied with different aesthetic practices, one central assumption unifies them all: that of
a world held in common among human beings, which it is the artist's
role to copy in some fashion in his art-to "catch in his mirror," in
M. H. Abrams' well-known metaphor.• This world is external to the
individual soul, and the composer must look to it to give form to his
musical materials. Of course the constituency of this external worldthe nature of nature-has varied from time to time. Most mimetic doctrines are in some way didactic or corrective: in the Renaissance music
was essentially a Pythagorean art, imitating the numbers that inform
God's cosmos; human music, by vibrating in time with universal harmony, would bring human souls into a proper attunement. But over
the years after the publication of works like Descartes' Les passions
de l'ame in 1649, attention turned to humankind in a more rational,
mechanistic cosmos, and the enterprise was to represent human nature
by codifying our passions and thus speaking to our· souls. Descartes
legitimized the passions, acquitting them of mere excess, and proposing them as an instrument whereby the body could be brought under
some measure of control. ''Even those who have the weakest souls,''
he stated, "could acquire absolute mastery over all their passions if
we employed sufficient ingenuity in training and guiding them." 10 Thus,
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
although the moral intent was somewhat mooted in the eighteenth century, still to "paint the passions" amounted to a moral imperative to
the composer. "The expression of the passions in their different modifications," says Koch in his article on expression, "is the proper aim
of music, and ... the principal requirement of every composition.''
''Expression'' became the word of choice in the later eighteenth
century, supplanting "imitation" in accounts of music's natural task,
and this use of the all-important word has misled many modern scholars. But too frequently in eighteenth-century texts the term has been
read as meaning "self-expression"-the venting, or "pressing out,"
of the artist's original and idiosyncratic feelings in an uncalculated, spontaneous manner. As a result, recent writers have tended to discover this
predominant doctrine of nineteenth-century aesthetics in texts earlier
and earlier in the eighteenth century, assuming that the word "expression" directs the composer to turn inward to his private passions. 11 Yet
in most cases the adoption of the word "expression" in eighteenthcentury texts does not represent a substantive rejection of mimetic doctrines, for the question does not actually turn on the use of the verb
to "express" over the verb to "imitate." The crux is whether or not
there exists a confidence that human feelings have models, which we
can construct because of our shared knowledge of what the passions
are like. If such a confidence exists, then the composer is involved in
the act of expressing feelings, of "painting the passions," not when
he looks to the unique inner authority of his own emotions to give shape
to his musical materials, but when he consults these universal authoritative models.
Where this confidence in a shared human nature is absent, as
it was in the nineteenth century, feelings are judged not to be susceptible of codification; they are fluid, mysterious, part of the dark self.
Clearly, however, Koch still trusts in the consensus gentium; he sees
the composer in possession of a "science"-a psych-ology-for portraying the passions, which he defines as "movements of the soul"
(Gemuthsbewegungen). Because music is a sequential art, he argues,
it is "fully suited to portray all these kinds of movements of the soul,
so to make them perceptible to the ear, if they are only sufficiently
familiar to the composer and he is sufficiently in possession of the science
to imitate each movement through harmony and melody." (article
Ausdruck 12)
On occasion Koch seems to hint that the source of the feelings
is to be found within the composer himself, in passages that have been
interpreted as a nod toward the doctrine of self-expression: "Only that,"
he says, "which [the composer] feels vividly will he express success-
�ALLAN BROOK
7
fully." (article Ausdruck) This sentiment would seem to echo the dictum of C.P. E. Bach-"the extreme expressionist of the eighteenth
century," as Dahlhaus calls him 13 -that a musician cannot move others
unless he himself is moved. But the rest of Koch's discussion leaves
no reason for doubt that for him the subject matter of music is not the
personal and interior, but the enduring and universal passions of men
as they are recognized by persons of reason and taste. Success comes
to the composer from his familiarity with the structure of these shared
passions, and from a careful study of the means music has at its disposal to imitate them. To "feel vividly" is to put oneself in the mode
that the model codifies, to see what it feels like to experience a particular passion; study-not self-expression-makes the artist.
Koch was not alone in styling passions as "movements of the
soul.'' It was the consensus in the eighteenth century that the link that
binds music and the passions is motion-that music imitates the passions by means of musical movement. One could quote as an exemplary passage Daniel Webb's argument from his Observations on the
Correspondence Between Poetry and Music (1769):
I shall suppose, that it is in the nature of music to excite similar vibrations,
to communicate similar movements to nerves and spirits. For, if music owes
its being to motion, and, if passion cannot well be conceived to exist without
it, we have a right to conclude, that the agreement of music with passion
can have no other origin than a coincidence of movements. 14
Johann Jakob Engel, in his Ueber die musikalische Malerey (On Painting in Music; 1780), a treatise that Koch quotes extensively, elaborates
a theory of the reciprocal transmission of these vibrations from soul
to body and from body to soul that is typical of popular attempts at
scientific explanations of music's effects:
Since all representations of the passions of the soul are bound inseparably
with certain corresponding movements in the nervous system, they are maintained and strengthened by the observation of these movements. Yet not only
do these corresponding natural vibrations arise in the body when previously
in the souls the representations of the passions have been aroused~ but also
these representations of the passions arise in the soul when p,reviously in
the body the related vibrations have been produced. The influence is mutual: the same path that travels from the soul into the body travels back from
the body into the soul. By nothing, however, are these vibrations so cer-
tainly, so powerfully, so variously produced, as through pitches. 15
In this resonance theory of affects, if the soul can be the sending oscillator, Engel reasons, why can't the process be reversed?
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
There are obvious problems with this ''theory,'' none of which
should worry us unduly; they do not seem to have troubled its advocates, and our concern is with what satisfies them. The principal difficulty
is precisely what does occur in the soul of the listener: is he transported
by the effects of pitches to experience the passion in its fullness on the
spot, or does he merely recognize the feeling pricked out by the tones?
Somehow the motions of the tones, imitating the recognizable motions
of our passions, steal upon us as listeners and have thie effect; we recognize what we already knew, and in the directness of this sensing lies
the enigma that often causes heavy weather in modern struggles with
the question of expression in music. Engel's position on the question
is somewhat ambiguous. When he is advancing the theory of sympathetic
vibrations, he does use the verb "awakens" (erweckt), as if the listener
were roused to experience the same emotion as the subject. But he follows by comparing the effect on the soul of the listener to the ''compassion," or "feeling with" (Mitleid, Mitfreude), that arises in the soul
when one hears the howls of a suffering beast (p. 143). This comparison gives a certain distance to the feeling in the listener's soul; compassion is not the same as passion. In speaking of imitation in more
narrowly musical terms, he neatly sidesteps the problem by calling the
effect of the oscillations an "impression" (Eindruck) made on the soul.
When the actual act of composition is in question, the feeling is not
so much aroused in the soul as it is impressed therein, perceived, not
awakened: ''the impression of a gentle color has something similar to
the impression of a gentle pitch on the soul" (p. 140).
Peter Kivy, in his influential book on musical expression, The
Corded Shell, in which he elaborates a modern theory of expression
that takes its inspiration from eighteenth-century writings, is critical
of what he terms the "arousal" theory, arguing, for example, that no
listener could or would willingly endure the range of emotions and the
deep anguish depicted in a five-hour performance of Tristanl 6 His
studied readings of the texts seek an exactitude in these writers that they
do not possess. They are interested in the exercise of their craft, and
somewhat loose in determining the precise way in which the listener
is affected. Is the listener aroused? Does he recognize? Both accounts
have some plausibility. At times the notion of being "transported irresistibly" (p. 144) to joy or sadness does find a place in the prose,
but the specter of an audience now moved to martial wrath, now dulled
to melancholy, does not seem to weigh on the minds of these writers.
Surely they would find the picture of an audience collectively weeping
in the concert hall as absurd as does Kivy, and are using the verb "to
arouse" in a metaphorical sense. Perhaps the happiest resolution of the
�ALLAN BROOK
9
question is to take "arouse" as "arouse to sympathetic cognition of,"
in accord with the ambiguities eighteenth-century proponents of the
theory seemed to have comfortably accepted.
***
Both Engel and Koch assert that music has sufficient means to
imitate tbe motions of the passions, and they inventory these resources
in various passages. Here late-eighteenth-century mimetic theories grow
vague. Recent scholarship has rectified the false impression that writers
in the tradition of the Baroque doctrine of the affections-Mattheson
et al.-not only retained the confidence that the passions could be codified, but had codified them thoroughly . 17 Such attempts were, in fact,
rare, and often idiosyncratic; the confidence didn't produce the cookbook. Later eighteenth-century notions are even less specific; the notion of the imitation of move;nents is left to a large extent to the taste
and science of the composer. Koch, for example, lists as the devices
at music's disposal:
!)Harmony, ... which in gentle and pleasant affects must progress lightly
and naturally, without great complexities and heavy delays; in unpleasant,
especially vigorous affects, however, [it is] interrupted, with frequent modulations, . .. with greater complexities, many and uncommon dis-
sonances .... 2)Meter, by means of which just by itself we can imitate the
general quality of every kind of movement. 3) Melody and rhythm,
which ... are also already capable by themselves of picturing the speech of
all passions. 4) The alterations in strength and weakness of tones, which
also contribute much to expression. 5) The accompaniment, and especially
the choice and variety of accompanying instruments; and finally 6) Modulations and delays in other keys. (article Ausdruck)
Elsewhere, in the article Leidenschaft ("passion"), Koch quotes a long
excerpt from Engel that categorizes the passions themselves, following it up with a lengthy but again only general discussion of particular
musical devices for representing them.
The concern seems to be that too profuse a system of categories
will lead to gimmickry in music. We can better understand this concern if we look at the kind of composition these writers disapproved
of. The change in terminology from "imitation" and "mimesis" to
"expression," far from stemming from a disaffection from the aesthetic
position that art is properly a reflector of a common nature, seems to
have come about on account of a growing distaste for the narrowly
mimetic effect, for the habit of "madrigalism" or "word-painting."
Much of the word-painting in Baroque vocal texts seemed all too bes-
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
10
timmt, too "determinate," for this galant age. Engel makes clear this
distinction between the mimetic expression of feelings (Empfindungen)
and the mere representation of an object-"word-painting'' in the strictest sense of the word:
The composer should always paint feelings rather than objects of feeling;
always the state into which the soul and with it the body are removed through
contemplation of a certain circumstance and occasion, and not this circumstance and occasion itself . ... One should . .. paint the inner movements of
the soul in a storm rather than the actual storm that arouses these move-
ments. (p. 146)
Often, as both Koch and Engel point out, the internal and the external
will coincide. A musical figure, for example, which paints the restless
bobbing of a skiff on the sea is really catching the motion of the soul
torn between fear and hope; Koch uses this example in his own article
on "painting," "Malerey." In other cases, seizing on a single word
and giving it an individual expression- "painting" it-will either trivialize the feeling of the whole or divert it in an inappropriate direction.
The advice to paint feelings rather than objects was hardly new, having been given as early as 1719 by the Abbe Dubos, in his treatise
on a comparative system of the arts, 18 and it was echoed with increasing frequency as writers looked back with scorn on what they took as
the madrigalizing habits of their Baroque predecessors. By the end of
the century it had become canonical. The inscription placed by Beethoven
at the head of the Pastoral Symphony, ''Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerey" ("Not painting, but the expression of feeling") has
been connected with Engel's formulation quoted above, ''The composer
should always paint feelings rather than objects of feelings." Beethoven's
characterization of the expressive matter of his famous programme symphony manifests the thorough distaste of the times for too literal a connection between tone and text. In this context Koch quotes an image
from Sulzer's article Ausdruck:
The kind of work that merely fills our imaginations with a row of harmonious tones without engaging our hearts, resembles a heaven beautifully painted
by the setting sun. The lovely mixture of various colors amuses us; but in
the figures of the clouds we see nothing that can engage the heart. (article
Ausdruck; italics mine)
Again there is the echo of that phrase of Rousseau's: ''to engage the
heart.'' The desideratum is a music that, neither abstract nor filled with
fussy pictorialisms, speaks directly to the soul. And the operative
metaphor is still captured in the word "speaks."
***
�ALLAN BROOK
11
Clearly, from this account, the aim of this music is the same as
that of the art of rhetoric-to persuade. That is, to arouse the listener
to sympathetic cognition of common human conditions. To learn just
how Classic instrumental music is to "speak to the heart," we can again
turn to Koch. In his article on instrumental music, he invents a pseudohistory for its development, hypothesizing that instruments first performed separately from voices at the time of the Pythian games in honor
of Apollo. This could take place because the victory songs with their
texts were already familiar to the spectators.
The entire substance of such a piece . .. was not only a well-known theme,
but also an engaging one. The feelings it was supposed to express were nearly
aroused in the spectators already; their hearts were . .. opened up just for
these feelings. It is thus understandable that music in these circumstances
could have a very specific effect on the hearts of the spectators even without
song, that is, without being united with poetry, through its inarticulate but
passionate tones, which in their sequence and movement had certain similarities with the natural utterances of these feelings. These were the circumstances in which at this time the remarkable separation of song from
instrumental music took place, which in later times had such a great influence
on music. On the one hand it gave rise to the high degree of development
instrumental music has now attained, but on the other hand ·it assured that
[instrumental music] would be used on those occasions and circumstances
in which it must necessarily work a specific effect on our heart.
If instrumental music . .. is meant to awaken and maintain specific feelings, then it must be involved in such political, religious, or domestic circumstances and actions as are of pronounced interest for us, and in which
our heart is predisposed to the expression of the feelings [the music] is supposed to awaken and maintain. (article lnstrumentalmusik)
Koch's account is revealing because it connects successfully expressive instrumental music closely with occasions; instrumental music is
properly "occasional music," because the occasion provides the particularity the medium lacks by itself. He thus identifies the source of
the efficacy of the topoi or characteristic styles: the "political, religious,
or domestic" associations they bring with them supply the context that
complements the indeterminate feelings aroused naturally by the textless music itself; the minuet was the favorite dance of the ancien nigime, fugues were popularly used in church music. The step Koch fails
to take is to realize that these occasional styles can be imported from
their religious or social rituals into art music to provide that music with
the particularity-the referentiality-mimesis requires. For this reason
he must always assert that the high instrumental forms are poorer than
their vocal correlates.
�12
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
At the same time these characteristic styles begin to be woven
together in a new way. Where a Baroque work would imitate one temperament, one stance, in each movement, a Classic movement admits
of several, in a play oflight and shadow. The result is that each movement is not monolithic, but an entire universe of discourse, functioning as a cosmic mirror, a micro-world reflecting the protean activities
on the stage of the theatrum mundi. Having a serene confidence in the
pre-existing hierarchy of kinds and classes, Classic instrumental music
approvingly images them in their variousness and order. The characteristic styles, the "commonplaces" of musical discourse, are a readyto-hand vocabulary of musical expression gathered from the simpler
music written to accompany daily activities: court life, worship, the
hunt. From their connections to the noble, middle-class, and humble,
the pious and impious, whatever is proud or abased, tranquil or restJess, antique or modern, in these occasions, they draw their referential
power and their affect.
There is a second way in which this music imitates the word:
the topoi, the content, as it were, have to be woven together "grammatically" into a convincing musical "text." Here the developing teaching about the "syntax" of a musical period is important. Whereas in
earlier music its resemblance to speech was most often remarked in
the most obvious imitations of speech rhythms-recitative, and its descendant, declamation-in Classic music the relation of speech to music becomes thoroughly internalized, extending to all articulations of musical
lengths. Koch begins his treatise on the composition of melody, a volume
entitled "The Mechanical Rules for Melody," by comparing melody
to oratory:
Certain . .. resting-points for the soul are generally necessary in speech, and
thus also in the products of those fine arts that attain their goal through speech,
namely poetry and rhetoric, if the subject they present is to be comprehensible. Such resting-points for the soul are just as necessary in melody if it
is to affect our feelings. 19
Although Koch never doubts that vocal music is music's paradigm, his
treatise is clearly about instrumental melody; it provides a sure training in the musical period-the 4-, 8-, or 16-measure phrase-and the
techniques like extension and elision that help to make "instrumental
speech" extensive, persuasive, and engaging. The point is not that vocal
music ceases to be a model for Koch, but that the new instrumental
music also maintains a connection with Rousseau's notion that passionate
speech is the origin of the art of music. The solidifying of the ways
of the musical period in imitation of rhetorical principles is connected
with the new habit of admitting contrasting affects into a movement,
�ALLAN BROOK
13
thus allowing variety and structural counterstatement. This combination results in works that do indeed "engage the heart" by their persuasive powers like a convincing oration-a "discourse of the passions."
The formal principles of this music are borrowed from rhetoric, with
the topoi-lively imitations of the way we are-embedded in its matrix
and shaping the surface. This interweaving produces the image of moral
suasion without a specific moral content; the principles of rhetoric and
mimesis come together in a passionate speech-without-words-the overt
theater of topic against the background of grammar and rhetoric as structural process.
The range of topoi available to Classic composers reflects the
homely and the elegant in their quotidian world-music that accompanies daily activities or has a resonance from concert life, the church,
even musical pedagogy:
the courtly-marches, fanfares;
the hunt;
the pastoral, as represented in the slow 6/8, the Siciliano, the
more sophisticated gavotte, and the drone or musette;
the exotic-for example, Turkish music;
the Empfindsamer or 'sensitive' style with its intimacy and unpredictability;
the declamatory, to break an even stride or make a regular rhythm
more thorny;
the musical dialogue;
the brilliant, soloistic, concertante style;
the passionate Sturm und Drang;
the singing allegro, with its trammel bass and vocal melody;
the music box, the mechanical clock;
the contrapuntal, otherwise known as the learned, or bound style
(stile legato), because of its strict old-fashioned control of dissonance,
often found in the solemn "church" meter of alia breve or 2/2;
its extension, the ecclesiastical, and, ultimately, the sublime, often
represented by a topos I have called the "exalted march" 20 ;
social dances such as the Liindler, the bourni'e, the minuet and
contredanse;
types of basses like the descending-tetrachord or chaconne, associated with lament and the antique;
the minor mode, which is a special affect for Classic composers,
not a mode of expression parallel to the major;
the wind serenade sound, so prevalent in Mozart's piano sonatas (he took great delight in having the salon-bound pianoforte imitate
out-of-doors music);
�14
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the "tune," which so often sprouts out of seemingly neutral
material to reveal a new rhythmic stratum and a newly articulate voice,
and is an effective stabilizing force.
Clearly, topoi, types, styles, tend to shade into structural
devices-opening and closing gestures, for example, or styles that normally create or undermine stability: the march is a typical opening
gesture, while the drone and the tune provide broad areas of arrival,
adding besides the flavor of folk and the country. Fugato is an obvious
undermining gesture. Topoi even become, as it were, "movementspecific.'' While the minuet and contredanse reveal Classic instrumental works as latter-day dance suites, they also have sound compositional and affective reasons for appearing there. The minuet provides a
laboratory for Classic composers' experiments with meter and topic,
because the paradigmatic regularity of the minuet's period structure,
combined with the built-in ambiguity of its evenly accented triple measures, offers an open field for experiment; often the first step away from
naivete results in the greatest complexity. The contredanse finale offers
a civilized wit that is an appealing closing gesture for a work; the notion of the sublime instrumental finale, so familiar to us from the symphonies of Beethoven, does not appear in Mozart's music except in the
last movement of the "Jupiter" Symphony.
Parts of the catalogue above suggest that topoi not only serve
a structural function, but often are topoi by virtue only of the structural
function they serve, and this is true: conventional opening and closing
gestures sometimes cannot be categorized as other than that. Indeed,
some movements offer more of a topical formedness than others, in
which the rhetorical play with periodicity, meter, harmony, and other
less referential musical devices presents itself as the surface of the work.
In other words, not all movements have as obvious a topical "conceit."
It begins to seem that structure itself is expression; the two weave in
and out in the Classic composer's effort to "engage the heart by a discourse of the passions.''
***
Having stunned you with this catalogue of topoi Leporello-style,
let me end with a few examples to illustrate the rich fund of devices
I've mentioned; they are drawn from Mozart's String Quartets dedicated to Haydn. I'll start with a favorite movement, the finale of the
Quartet in G major, K. 387, which brilliantly counterstates a motetlike alia breve fugue with a breakneck contredanse (ex. I):
�ALLAN BROOK
15
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Aside from the wit of decomposing a sober fugue into a country fiddler's tune, this opening illustrates the enormous power that the possibility of counterstatement gives to a work, assisted by the incisive profiles
of the tapai, and why the ultimate effect of this music is that of clearsighted comedy: the monoaffective style conduces to the survival of
the serious and magniloquent, but in music that plays with affect the
high-minded will always give way to the undermining commentary of
the comic.
Mozart uses fugal techniques more overtly in this movement than
in other sallies on the learned tapas: he sets up a second subject cleverly fashioned to fit in the interstices of the first: the t\'10 together build
up tension for the move away from home base to a new harmonic place,
the key of the fifth degree, the dominant. Final arrival there is confirmed by that most stabilizing of tapai, the "tune," which grows out
over the accompaniment figure in the first violin. Working on a third
�16
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
rhythmic level to provide a mean between the longbreathed phrases of
the fugue and the headlong fiddling of the contredanse, it specially "engages the heart" with the exuberance of its articulate singing voice while
providing closure for a major section of the movement. In the coda the
learned and the galant have a final tangle and resolution: a little imitative dialogue on the transition figure leads to a tight stretto of the opening subject-four entries of it in the space of six measures- which
relaxes into the reductio ad absurdum of a galant cadence crafted out
of that same sober motif Again the frame of comedy indicates that
nothing is immune to change in this gloriously many-faceted world.
The minuet of this same quartet shows us Mozart setting the
mechanical in motion, throwing off the rhythm both of the phrase and
of the measure. He creates two ten-measure phrases by offbeat punctuation in the accompaniment followed by a four-measure piano-forte alternation in duple rhythm, a playful "tick-tock" that momentarily
suspends the minuet's regular triple beat (ex. 2):
):.:-....
.l
--ff
I
J
. ,L
I~
1'
fJ'f
J'ft
J
f
p
~
'
'J
"'
,,
I
I
-
1'-l ~
11
~-#
'-'-.J.J
1".:..7--I'
f
p j 1'
i
1'
f
f
I
f .P f
�ALLAN BROOK
17
The imbalance created by this mechanical tick-tack is set right in measure
21 by a series of waltz-like four-measure phrases: again the "tune"
is a force for stability, and the more eccentric Minuets in the chamber
works all tend to end with one.
***
The first movement of the A-major Quartet, K. 464, has period
structure itself as a subject matter. One can clearly see the joins where
a 32-measure song reprise has been pulled apart and new, more mobile
and forceful material interleaved, to turn these 32 measures into a fullfledged quartet exposition. (At this point the reader will find the discussion easier to follow if he has a copy of the score at hand.) This
imaginary reprise would have a remarkable consistency in itself, and
could stand alone as the first section of a briefer, less imposing movement. It opens with a typical 16-measure period in a simple sentimental singing style, properly symmetrical and with all its parts. The triple
meter also emphasizes the unassuming nature of the theme (ex. 3):
./• .. f
___,---
•
J'
I
p+
...
..r
~
I
. . .
... 11:
•
-....._
1'
-e-
iJ'
,
.:.
.;..
...
;.
7
.
#-
1'
At arrival on the new harmonic plateau, the dominant, four more
measures of this Ur-Reprise stabilize the new key. Next, four measures provide a final cadence in E, the dominant, consisting of the opening
material made closing by a re-harmonization. And finally four more
measures provide a brief valedictory coda.
But the exposition is swollen from 32 to 87 measures by the much
more dramatic and labile material that forces itself in at the joins in
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
18
this Ur-Reprise; it is almost a textbook illustration of Koch's methods
of melodic extension. An inflection of the minor mode and a brief fugato
in the pathetic style on the opening theme provide the departure from
A major, home base, but only reach C, an intermediary between A and
E, where an entirely new "tune"-a Liindler with hurdy-gurdy drone
bass-provides four measures of a false stabilization, in the wrong key
(ex. 4):
Jl..t
----..
' J'
.
"
b...
'
'
'
I
1..
'
.J. ..fi:
....
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'
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:
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A passage in concerto style pushes away from the C major and arrives
in E for the second part of the Ur-Form. The four measures of this
so-called "second theme" look to be repeated, but a passage in dialogue style opens out into an ascending passage of parallel chords in
the "bound style," answered by a similar passage descending, but in
a more sentimental vein. More concerto style brings the exposition to
the embedded four-measure closing theme, which is separated from the
codetta by yet more measures in imitative style. The bound style in the
exposition is pure churning of the waters, but grows substantive in the
development, where harmonies and rhythms turn dense and clotted. Most
interesting is the Coda, where a rhythmic retardation in bound style
gives one serious pause before the opening motive is made three times
cadential-a final summary of the embedded Ur-Reprise.
I'll close with a discussion of the D-minor Quartet, K. 421, because it strikes me as a rare example of topical unity over four movements rather than the affective counterstatement that is usually the rule
from part to part. The first movement opens with a chaconne or
<;Jescending-tetrachord ba~s-a slow-motion descent through flat 7 to
5, and after a pause on 5, the tonic (ex. 5):
�ALLAN BROOK
19
J I;:J2J
This is an ambiguous opening for the first movement of a quartet, with
its suggestion of the antique and the pathetic, rather than the usual brisk
annunciatory march. Its unusual pathos caused one nineteenth-century
French theorist, Jerome-Joseph de Momigny, to put it to words as a
tragic duet between Dido and Aeneas. 21 The first violin ornaments the
pathetic bass with galant-style figures, but in bits and pieces (ex. 6):
The four measures are repeated in a more expansive register, and it
is this slightly varied repetition that articulates the frrst period's cadence,
rather than a through-composed unit as is more conventional in these
beginnings. This opening ambiguity is in keeping with a movement in
the minor mode, where often the key attained in the motion away from
home base provides not the usual counterstatement or challenge to the
home key, but a consolidation and stabilization in the major after the
weaker minor. Here the F major arrives as a singing allegro, with ornamental cantabile figures over repeated sixteenths, each measure arranged iambically to provide arrival (unlike the open-ended trochees
of the chaconne). The development begins with a startling play on the
linearity of the chaconne, at first mimicking the opening period but in
the surprising key of E-flat major; the bass, however, fails to stop at
the appropriate tone, extending the vertiginous scalar motion ad
absurdum-or four more steps to F, and a sleight-of-hand modulation
to the key of A minor. Thus the most distant key attained in the
movement-theE-flat -is abandoned in a matter of measures by this
cool dissolve down the scale to a key surprisingly close to home base.
�20
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
While the development proceeds to a further anatomizing of the figures
of the opening period, in part in fugal style with close entries, it takes
place in thoroughly familiar keys; the harmonic crisis is over before
it began, and it is the drama of the chaconne that has given form and
affect to the movement. Little that is new takes place in the recapitulation. But hearing the cantabile tune-earlier an affirmation of arrival
in upright F major-recast in the minor leaves an imbalance that, if
one accepts the premise that the minor is a weaker reflection of the major
mode, the rest of the quartet must put right.
I will pass more quickly over the other three movements, because my primary interest is in that unusual topical unity that seems
to prevail over the whole, and in how the D-minor uncertainty is worked
out. The second movement is a simple and grave Siciliano in F major.
Its single eccentricity is that the figuration in the opening phrase is rearranged: the normal fifth measure that we expect is inserted between
measures 2 and 3, causing a new and passionate accent to intrude in
the trim rhetoric of the eight-measure period. That we recognize this
displacement is further proof of the syntactical clarity that informs this
music (ex. 7):
~misplaced~
r s.
2..
A.,1,
~
p
~
.
I~,
J'' '
J'
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ffl)'
-._..-
• ....
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.......,
"']~ ~
1"'~-
r
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m.f
;, ~
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........
�ALLAN BROOK
21
Strikingly, Mozart ends the movement with measure 5-the triadic upbeat figure that was misplaced; he is clearly aware of his original permutation. In fact, I am increasingly struck by Mozart's habit of
summarizing in some neat and economical way at the end of a movement his primary intent with the whole.
The third movement, the Minuet, is based on another chaconnetype bass; it is a dense, gnarled, motet-like ten-measure period with
polyrhythms throughout, and no half-cadence-again the minuet as
ground for rhythmic and textural experiment.
The fourth movement, a theme and variations, echoes the topic
of the second, just as the Minuet did that of the first. The theme is a
bittersweet, Empfindsamer Siciliano-a nostalgic pastoral song-in D
minor, with gypsy violin figuration perhaps borrowed from a
tarantella-a high repeated-note figure (ex. 8):
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
22
The first reprise stays in D minor throughout, and the move to a major
key in the second reprise is damped by its brevity. So the movement
seems at first to provide no resolution to the grip of the minor. Since
even Mozart's great G-minor Quintet ends with an affirmative movement in G major, this dwelling in the minor seems uncharacteristic.
Yet at the very end a quicker, gigue-like variation, with the wayward
tarentella figure tossed obsessively from voice to voice and growing
into substantive material, ends in a surprising and otherworldly major
cadence in which the tarentella receives its apotheosis (ex. 9):
"'# ~
I
,
e·
f
f •'
.p
•••• "'t:"'
~-
'
.
ltrr·
y,
.
,7-
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:
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The allusive brevity of the resolution-perhaps the Pythagorean perfection of the major third has an ecclesiastical resonance here-is fully
in keeping with this terse and idiosyncratic work.
***
What then is the end of Classic instrumental music? To engage
the heart, to persuade. To persuade of what? That a complete and winning whole has been presented, a convincing mirror of the cosmos in
its variety and its order; styles, types, ways of being are stated and counterstated, developed and transformed, tangled and resolved. Always there
is the narrative attitude, though never a story; always the shape of moral
oratory, but never the moral. The imitative and referential are rarely
absent from this great instrumental repertoire, which quietly blossomed
while everyone was praising song.
If at the end of my "likely story" I may diffidently offer what
may seem a fanciful comparison-! hope it won't seem utterly so in
�ALLAN BROOK
23
your second thoughts-I would summon up the comedic vision of Dante's
Divine Comedy with the panoramic nature of its embrace, nothing less
than all human affairs, and its tranquil confidence in the mode and order of God's creation, and its commitment to a comic equilibrium, adjusting imbalances and asserting a "happy ending." It is a view of the
world in which even the tragic mode must take its proper and limited
place (remember the special treatment of the minor mode in Classic
music as a dependent of the essential major). In service of this vision,
both men use the vernacular to "engage the heart." Dante develops
the vulgar tongue into his powerful dolce stile nuovo, that most appropriate language for speaking to common humanity about sin and redemption, while Mozart develops the charming simplicities of the galant
style-artless dance melodies and popular tunes-into a complex musicallanguage that nevertheless remains true to its origin in the musical
vulgate. Both had as predecessors an elevated and weighty languageDante the high Latin tongue and Mozart the grand and pathetic style
of the Baroque. Encompassing both hell and paradise, and the purgatorial
ground in between, the Comedy sets them in order, culminating in the
great final vision of the deity who holds them properly in place. In the
same way, the Classic repertoire, a secular divine comedy, taking the
best of the notion of passionate speech, and the best of the powers of
instrumental music and the dance, with them mirrors all categories of
human experience in a mode of profound urbanity; it is a moral entertainment in the deepest sense.
Footnotes
I. Christian Gottfried Krause, quoted by J. F. Reichardt, Schreiben iiber
die berlinische Musik, Hamburg, 1775. For a fuller discussion of
eighteenth-century opinions of the new instrumental music, see Bellamy
Hosler, Changing Aesthetic Views of Instrumental Music in 18th-Century
Germany (Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1981), pp. 1-30.
2. Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schonen kiinste, 2nd ed.,
4 vols. (Leipzig, 1786-87), s.v. lnstrumentalmusik.
3. James Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between
Poetry and Music (New Haven, Yale University Press, 198l),y. 217.
4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768), s.v.
"Sonate." The translations in this essay are the work of the author.
5. Walter Pater, "The School of Giorgione," in The Renaissance, following the text of The Works of Walter Pater, vol. I, p. 135. Quoted in Winn,
p. 289.
6. Heinrich Christoph Koch, Musikalisches Lexikon (Frankfurt am Main:
August Hermann, 1802), s.v. Instrumentalmusik.
�24
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
7. Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 65.
8. Remark in an article in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1801) quoted
by Carl Dahlhaus, Esthetics of Music, trans. William Austin (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 27.
9. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, London: Oxford University Press, 1953.
10. Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch; 2 vols. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), I, 348.
II. See, for example, John Hollander's distinction between "imitation" and
"expression" in The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 172-76; Alan Lessem,
"Imitation and Expression: Opposing French and British Views in the
18th Century," Journal of the American Musicological Society 27 (1974),
325-30; Winn, pp. 232-38. For a dissenting view, see John Neubauer,
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in
18th-Century Aesthetics (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986), pp.
149-67.
Here Koch is quoting from Sulzer (s.v. Instrumentalmusik), from whose
work he adopted many opinions.
Dahlhaus, p. 22.
Daniel Webb, Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and
Music (London, 1769), p. 7.
Johann Jakob Engel, Ueber die musikalische Malerey (1780), in J. J. Engel's Schriften, Vol. IV: Reden und iisthetische Versuche (Berlin, 1844),
pp. 142-43.
Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 23.
See, for example, George Buelow, The New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London, 1980), s.v. "Rhetoric."
Dubos, Jean Baptiste. Reflexions critiques sur Ia pOesie et Ia peinture.
1719. Paris, 1770. Facs. rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1967.
Heinrich Christoph Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, 3
vols. (Leipzig, 1782-1793), II. S. 77.
Allanbrook, Wye J., Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and
Don Giovanni (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 18-22.
JerOme-Joseph de Momigny, Cours complet d'harmonie et de composition, 2 vols. (Paris, 1806), I, p. 371 and pl. 30.
�Some Interpretations of
The Magic Flute:
The Auden Translation and the
Bergman Film
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
The interpretations I want to discuss are not those of the theoreticians but those of practitioners: producers, directors, translators. All
translation is bound to have an element of interpretation. I do not know
whether producers and directors are so bound; they could simply be
faithful to plot, text, music, and stage directions-unless there are compelling reasons to depart from them. And here I do not speak of "inner'' compulsions, but of political taboos. To take just two: the masonic
anti-feminism of Mozart's masonic opera and the wicked blackamoor
Monostatos. His one aria makes it quite clear that he is more lecherous
than wicked. It is very quick in tempo and to be sung pianissimo. Will
he have to become colorless in our enlightened age? Bergman, in his
film of 1975, had him somewhat swarthy, perhaps a swarthy redneck,
but took care to introduce representatives of all humanity, a cunning
racial mix, in the audience he shows us, people who are unlikely to
represent the audience of a Scandinavian opera house, but whom it
Beate Ruhm von Oppen is a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. Her German edition of the wartime letters of Helmuth James von Mo1tke is about to be published by
C.H. Beck Verlag, Munich, with an English edition to fol1ow. Her essay on Moltke,
'Trial in Berlin,' appeared in the January, 1977, issue of the Review.
25
�26
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
pleased the master of obtrusive symbolism to put there, so that we should
know that Mozart's Magic Flute is a work for everybody, every man,
woman, and child, and has a universal message.
In the second half of the twentieth century the Metropolitan Opera
in New York found this eighteenth-century fairy-tale blackamoor an
embarrassment. So the old Met had a production with a white Monostatos
and a black Pamina. The new Met, in a new production in the midsixties, with a gorgeous setting by Chagall, tampered with the German
text (they were singing the work in the original language and were afraid
that New Yorkers might understand it) so that in this aria of complaint
Monostatos is made to sing of his frustration not ''wei! ein Schwarzer
hiisslich ist" (because a black man is ugly) but "wei! ein Wilder hasslich ist" (because a savage is ugly). I do now know how many liberal
consciences were saved by that change. Mozart's music here is so light,
so unvengeful, in fact the music of a darker Papageno and not, say,
a raging Ferrando after Dorabella' s betrayal of him in Cosi fan tutte,
that the editorial precautions seem superfluous.
When W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman were commissioned
to produce an English version of The Magic Flute with which NBC was
going to celebrate the bicentenary of Mozart's birth on television in
1956, they too deleted all reference to the color of Monostatos (and
the performance had the black beauty Leontyne Price as Pamina). But
then they also deleted all elements of Freemasonry, deleted Pamina' s
dead father and made her illegitimate, changed the order of scenes, and
took a lot of other liberties. They produced an interesting and readableeven singable-libretto and one that I want to discuss later in some detail. Convinced, as they said in their preface, that the original libretto
needed not just translating but improving, they set to work to produce
something that would sound as though the music had really been composed for it-not the usual translation into a non-language they call
"operese" (we all know examples of that, I'm sure) but a poetic recreation, so to speak, which reads so well that they had it printed with
especially emphatic warnings against infractions of copyright.
Their work raises two or three questions. Did the original libretto
need improving? Is their version an improvement? How singable is it
and how faithful to the music? In other words, would Mozart, if he
knew enough English, have approved of it? We know that he took the
work very seriously-despite the tricks he played on one occasion, with
unexpected glockenspiel, on his fellow-mason, librettist and first Papageno, Emanuel Schikaneder. But then Schikaneder should have been the
first to understand, as an experienced Shakespearian actor who knew
the importance of light relief in certain circumstances. He just didn't
like to be upstaged from the wings.
�RUHM VON OPPEN
27
Despite the playfulness Mozart was very serious about the work,
as he told his wife, as he told those around him in his last illness, when
he was struggling-unsuccessfully-to finish his Requiem. When he
knew there was a performance of the Magic Flute at the Theater an
der Wieden, he took part in it in imagination, followed its progress,
saying: now they've got to this bit or to that, singing, and probably
wondering whether he would ever see it again. There is another reason
to think that Mozart took the work seriously: a contrapuntal study on
the cantus finnus of the Men in Armor in the second finale may have
been the first thing he wrote down of the entire opera, or at any rate
of the second act. It is an ancient hymn with text by Martin Luther based
on the twelfth Psalm, "Ach Gott vom Himmel sieh' darein." At the
most solemn moment of the Magic Flute it is the tune of this hymn which
is sung by the guardians of the dreadful gates of the final tests, but with
a text about purification by fire, water, air, and earth.
The Auden/Kallman translation has great felicities-one of them
the setting of this chorale, and no wonder, for Auden was a fervent
hymn-singer and came into his own with the language of hymnology
even in its Masonic-Egyptian variant: "Now shall the pilgrim tread a
valley dark and dire ... " ('Dir.e' is treated disyllabically, as a spondee.) But there are infelicities too and, what is worse, infidelities not
just to the original libretto but to that libretto as composed, interpreted
in the music. The composer, after all, was the first interpreter. Mozart
once wrote to his father, in connection with an earlier opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio, that the text has to be an altogether obedient
handmaiden to the music. That means for us that, since the music is
there, it must govern translations. The translator is bound by the interpretation of the composer. Wben the composer makes something clear,
he has to reproduce that clarity as best he can; where the composer
is deliberately ambiguous, he has to try to preserve the ambiguity. Just
one example: In Tamino's long and crucial dialogue with the Speaker,
where the Speaker patiently and forcefully and step by telling step disabuses Tamino of the illusions he arrived with, having believed the tale
of woe, vengeance, and promise of the Queen of the Night, this impetuous if noble young man reaches the point where he exclaims: ''So
ist denn alles Heuchelei!"-meaning "So then everything is hypocrisy!" The text in the score at that point has an exclamation mark, but
the music introduces doubt, indeed a question into this sentence. The
Speaker was in E-flat major. Tamino exclaims:
�28
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
(wW!Jehen)
~
)
~'j
.
The D flat on which he lands is a hovering 3, of B-flat minor, as shown
by the accompaniment: the exclamation is not just some accusation of
hypocrisy he casts in the Speaker's teeth, but an expression of agonized
doubt. And a translator must keep the ambivalence of that phrase and
not write, like Auden/Kallman: "Then it is all a painted lie" or, like
Dent: "Your wisdom's naught but vile deceit!" He should keep the
phrase open-ended, express some doubt about who is doing the deceiving, say something like "Then all is naught but vile deceit!" ~which
can apply either to what he has just been told here or what the Queen
told him before. When the Speaker is about to leave and when he has
left, the hypocrisy phrase has a counterpart in Tarnino's questions "When
will this veil of dark be lifted?" and "When, endless night, wilt thou
be riven?" (I follow the translation by Ruth and Thomas Martin). And
he gets the mysterious but reassuring answers first from the Speaker,
then from the Speaker's phrase played by the orchestra, while the unseen chorus shrouds itself in frightful ambiguity by singing that Tamino will see the light "Soon, soon~or never." It is the orchestra that
tells Tamino and the audience that all will be well.
Perhaps the time has come to give you a synopsis of the plot of
this two-act opera. Tamino, a prince, dressed in a Japanese hunting
outfit, runs on the stage, in C minor, pursued by a monstrous serpent.
He calls on the gods to help him and falls in a swoon. He still has his
bow, but no arrows left. Three Ladies come in on his last syllable and
downbeat and rescue him with javelins and a sudden switch, a deceptive cadence, to the chord of A flat which instantly moves on to the
dominant-seventh chord of E flat when they refer to their might making the monster die.
�29
RUHM VON OPPEN
1. u.z. Dame.
'
.,
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3.
L
Dame.
I
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I. ~
~
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.
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5tirb, Un - 9e.- heur! durch un.s - 1
re
.
.
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They indulge in some triumphalism, then fall in love with the recumbent young man, then fall out with each other as they realize they must
tell their mistress (the Queen of the Night) about this incident and none
of them can trust the others not to take unfair advantage while she is
away. The only solution is to depart together.
Enter a man looking like a bird and singing a cheerful ditty about
his trade as bird-catcher and his desire to catch lots of birds from among
whom he could choose one. Tamino comes out of his swoon and in
the ensuing spoken dialogue tries to find out where he is and who this
Papageno is. Papageno does not know much-he does not even know
who his parents were-he only knows that he earns his keep by catching birds for the Star-Flaming Queen and her Ladies. Tamino remembers that his father often told him about her. But how did he stray into
her realm and who saved him from the serpent? Once assured that the
beast is quite dead, Papageno claims that he killed it, with his bare hands.
This is the signal for the Three Ladies to return, put the record straight,
put a lock on Papageno's mouth to teach him a lesson about lying, and
give a small portrait of the daughter of the Queen to Tamino, with
promises of happiness, honor, and renown if he does not remain indifferent to it. He does not. He sings a beautiful aria about it. It is love
at first sight.
�30
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
This brings on the Queen who, in a first plangent, then acrobatic, and always imperious recitative and aria instantly addresses and appropriates Tamino as "My dear son," telling him not to tremble; he
is, after all, guiltless, wise and pious, just the young man to console
her deeply injured maternal heart. Suffering has been her lot since her
daughter was abducted by a villain, despite all her cries for help. The
mother's help was too weak. But now, in Allegro moderato: Tamino
will go to liberate her, will be her rescuer and her husband. After the
Queen has left, with as much eclat as prepared her arrival, Tamino
wonders whether he is hallucinating and calls on the gods not to deceive him, but to protect and strengthen him. In the quintet that follows, the Three Ladies relieve Papageno of the lock on his mouth, give
Tamino a magic flute from their Queen, which has the power to protect its player, give Papageno a set of bells with similar properties, and
tell the men to proceed to the evil Sarastro' s realm. They say farewell
and turn to go but are asked how that destination is to be found. They
take a deep breath and tell the men, in an Andante that is free from
their previous assertiveness, that "Three Boys, young, fair, and wise"
will accompany them on their journey and will give counsel that should
be followed. The men repeat this most important piece of instruction
and another round of farewells concludes the scene.
Next we see a sumptuous Egyptian room and hear three slaves
complain of the black Monostatos, their overseer and tormentor, who,
they hope, will at last get his just deserts because he allowed Pamina
to escape. But they seem to be wrong: Monostatos drags her in, tells
them to chain and fetter her, and to leave him alone with her. In the
trio that follows, she pleads with him: though death cannot make her
tremble, it is her mother who will die of grief. She falls in a swoon;
but before Monostatos can do a thing, Papageno wanders in and he and
Monostatos scare each other into exits in opposite directions. Papageno rallies and returns with the sensible argument that since there are
black birds, why should there not be black men too-both he and
Monostatos had previously thought that the other was the devil. He finds
Pamina and they have quite a conversation. Pamina is very pleased that
the young Prince her mother is sending to her rescue is in love with
her already, and she assures Papageno that heaven will provide him
too with a friend of the opposite sex sooner than he thinks. Then follows their duet about love, by which alone we live and have our being
and, indeed, touch on divinity. The whole opera does not have a love
duet for the hero and heroine. So this duet for Pamina and the Child
of Nature is not only beautiful but important in the context of the whole.
The first Finale begins, as does the second, with the Three Boys.
It is their first appearance, Ingmar Bergman notwithstanding; we have
�RUHM VON OPPEN
31
only heard about them before; but here they are, telling Tamino that
this path will lead to his goal, but that to prevail he must conduct himself like a man. He must be steadfast, tolerant, and taciturn. When he
asks them about Pamina, they reply that it is not for them to tell him
about her and they just repeat their admonition to steadfastness, tolerance, and taciturnity; in brief, the Boys sing, be a Man and you will
win a Man's victory. They go off, leaving Tamino to mull over their
wise teachings and to explore the place they have led him to. Is it the
seat of the gods? The architecture is evidence of wisdom, work, and
arts, and where these dwell, vice is unlikely to maintain its dominion.
He sees a door, goes up to it, with threats against the cowardly villain
Sarastro, and is rebuffed by a voice from within. He sees and tries
another door, with the same result. But when he knocks on the third
door, an awe-inspiring Old Man appears and in a marvelous recitativic
dialogue of 52 bars gets him, in modulation after modulation, from Aflat major to A minor, and from naive and erroneous certainty to serious, painfully serious questioning. In other words-and in music quite
unlike any other in Mozart-he starts him on his quest in earnest. What
went before was just youthful impetuosity and heroics. The Old Man
calls the Queen's claims in doubt, says that Sarastro had good reasons
for his actions, but that he, the Speaker, is not free to divulge them.
After he has gone, Tamino is told by unseen voices that Pamina is still
alive and he starts to give thanks to the gods on his flute. But he breaks
off when he remembers that, though alive, Pamina is not there and goes
off in search of her.
She whom he seeks enters from another side, with Papageno and
a hurried little duet about the need for fast feet and quick courage against
the rage and ruses of the enemy. If only they could find Tamino before
they are caught! Pamina calls his name, Papageno tells her he has a
better signal and plays the five notes on his Pan pipe, to which Tamino
responds offstage on his flute. But before they have finished exclaiming about this happy turn of events, this establishment of communication, here is Monostatos, who has caught up with them and calls his
slaves to bind them. Papageno makes them dance instead, enchanted,
to a spell-binding tune from his bells. But then, with a sudden change
of key, we hear Sarastro's retinue from the distance: the Lord of the
Realm himself is approaching. Papageno would like to flee or hide,
or at least escape by verbal subterfuge; but Pamina tells him that the
truth must be told, whatever the consequences.
She kneels before Sarastro, confesses her guilt of trying to escape, but pleads the wicked moor's lecherous demands in mitigation.
Sarastro knows all and understands all. He knows whom she loves, he
will not force her to love-him?-but, but (lowest note) he will not give
�32
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
her her freedom. And all her pleas about her mother who will die of
grief are unavailing: Sarastro knows her to be a proud woman who would
make Pam ina unhappy. A man is needed to guide the hearts of women,
for without him all women exceed their proper sphere.
Enter the officious and triumphant Monostatos with the captive
Tamino. The lovers see each other for the first time but are restrained
from instant embrace by popular murmuring and the interference of
Monostatos. Then he prostrates himself before Sarastro, asks for due
punishment for the bold malefactor, Tamino, this daring would-be abductor, foiled only by the vigilant Monostatos, who anticipates a rich
reward and instead gets taken away for a beating. The people's acclaim
for the wise Sarastro ends the act. By now, of course, we have a prima
facie case for a complaint not only from the Civil Liberties Union but
also from the Women's Liberation Movement.
But the show must go on. I am still telling you the true story,
not what Auden and Bergman did with it.
The second Act opens with a solemn march of the Sarastrian
priests and a conference with Sarastro in which he informs them of
Tamino's arrival and his Quest. He seems to have all the qualities
needed-virtue, discretion, benevolence-and, Sarastro thinks, deserves
their help. When one of the priests asks whether, as a prince, he will
be up to what awaits him, Sarastro replies: he is more, he is a man.
The tests he is to undergo are not without risk and may, in fact, cost
him his life: but should he die, he will be given to Isis and Osiris and
taste the joys of the gods before those assembled. They signify their
assent at various stages of this proceeding with three lots of masonic
chords on wind instruments (without clarinets, though, since they would,
presumably, make the sound too soft). Sarastro and the priests then sing
a prayer to Isis and Osiris, not just for Tamino, but for the new pair.
There follow the tests for Tamino, with Papageno tagging along
and not trying very hard. The first test is silence, especially toward
women. The Three Ladies come to tempt the men and tell them of dire
things in store for them. Tamino speaks (or sings, it is a quintet) only
to shut up Papageno. The Ladies depart in dismay. The scene changes
and Monostatos sings his very light little aria of sexual frustration based
on racial injustice. The Queen of the Night enters, gives Pamina a dagger, and tells her to kill Sarastro, since Tamino had not done the job
she sent him to do. Pamina tries to plead with her, but her mother
launches herself into a furious aria about hell's vengeance boiling in
her bosom. If Pamina does not kill Sarastro, her mother will disown
her and sever all the bonds of nature. In the spoken dialogue after her
disappearance Monostatos tries to blackmail Pamina into entrusting herself to him, to love him or die. But Sarastro intervenes, simply dis-
�RUHM VON OPPEN
33
misses Monostatos and tells Pamina he will take no revenge on her
mother. He then sings his famous aria about the better ways of these
sacred precincts: if someone has fallen, love will bring about reform.
Guided by the hand of a friend he will walk into a better land. In these
sacred walls (Mauern: the German for Freemason is Freimaurer) no
traitor can lurk, because the enemy is forgiven. The last couplet is beautiful and hard to translate:
Wen solche Lehren nicht erfreu'n,
Verdienet nicht ein Mensch zu sein.
Literally it means: whoever does not rejoice in such teachings does not
deserve to be a human being. With its music it is a very powerful conclusion, because, as in the first stanza, where Sarastro sang about the
journey into a better land at the hand of a friend, the singer's vocal
ascent is continued by the strings when his voice turns down again. Wbat
can a translator do with a memorable phrase like that? The Martins have:
"Who by this law is led aright/will ever share the gods' delight"; Dent
has: ''Those whom this bond can not unite/are all unworthy of the light.''
Auden and Kallman go wild: "The tyrant on a golden throne/Lives in
the desert all alone.'' It is a message that seems to me excessively far
removed from Sarastro's, though, I admit, it scans right-but so do the
two others.
The Three Boys appear for a second time and in a trio tell Tamino and Papageno that they have come to restore their instruments to
them and that at the third meeting joy will be the reward of virtue. But
first there are more tests and troubles, the worst of them just about to
happen. Pamina enters, does not know of Tamino 's vow of silence,
thinks he no longer loves her and sings what is probably Mozart's saddest and most beautiful aria, in G minor: all the happiness of love is
gone, and if Tamino will not look at her tears and feels no more longing, she must find rest in death. She walks out to a brief four-bar postlude. But she does not-yet-attempt suicide. She is brought into the
presence of the Priests and Sarastro. Sarastro tells her to take her last
farewell of Tamino, who may now speak again and is about to undergo
his final testing. The farewell trio for her, Tamino, and Sarastro combines pathos with solace. Sarastro is clearly sympathetic to their plight
and, in fact, promises that they will all meet again. This trio, in this
place, does cause some confusion in the plot. But we are musically too
much captivated by it to worry about that. Still, Auden and Kallman
have a case for a reshuffle here.
Meanwhile Papageno, fond though he is of food and drink, does
want a wife too and has a nice strophic song about it all. Who turns
up? An old crone who says she is eighteen years old and that he must
�34
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
swear that he will marry her or forever live on bread and water. Papageno
as usual takes the line of least resistance and swears. She is transformed
into a young woman, feathery just like Papageno, and her name is
Papagena. But once more those priestly busybodies intervene and send
her packing because Papageno is not yet worthy of her.
Which brings us to the second Finale. The Three Boys start it,
with a song about the imminence of sunrise, the disappearance of
superstition, and the victory of the wise man. Then there is an invocation for the return of peace-when they see the distraught Pamina entering with her dagger and suicidal intentions. They stop her just in
time and restore her to life by telling her that Tamino loves her, whereupon they all go off in search of him. (I am giving a very bare account,
throughout this Finale, of the plot that is full of the most beautiful dramatic changes and music.) A change of scene brings us to two big mountains, of fire and of water. Two Men in Armor and with flaming helmets
guard the gates, and after the contrapuntal introduction mentioned before, they sing the solemn hymn about purification by the four elements:
whoever can overcome the fear of death will rise to heaven and, illumined, will then be in a state to devote himself entirely to the mysteries ofisis. Tamino presents himself and asks them to unlock the gates.
Pamina's voice is heard, calling to him that she must see him before
he goes. He is now allowed to speak to her and to enter the temple
with her. Once more a last couplet, sung by Tamino and the Two Men
in Armor, sums up a new message: A woman who fears neither night
nor death is worthy to be initiated.
Pamina enters on a simple but radiant musical transformation.
The bit about the woman worthy of initiation was in A-flat major, the
strings work up, touching on the relative F minor, to an emphatic halfcadence on the dominant of F, followed by a long rest, and Pamina
comes in on a rising major sixth, C -A, that is, in the unexpected parallel
major of the relative minor. It is one of Mozart's miraculous economies .
...
~
....
....--
Quar+.
I
I
(.)
�35
RUHM VON OPPEN
Andantt
q~di
Pam ina (Tamino umarmend)
r If fijf I r ~
Ta - mi - no __ mein!
~ If
0
r- p I I..
'
}
welch em Gluck!
Tamino shows Pamina the dreadful gates which threaten death
and destruction. Pamina simply replies that she will be at his side, she
will lead him, herself guided by love. Tamino is to play the flute which
will protect them. Then she tells him the brief history of the flute. In
a magic hour her father carved it from the depths of a millennia! oak,
mid thunder and lightning and a roaring storm. But now it is to be played
and lead them on their dreadful journey. They pass safely and serenely
through the fire, accompanied only by flute, timpani, and some subdued brass chords; after the fire they go through the water. On emerging from that they see a door opening on a brightly illuminated temple
and are hailed and invited by the choir within.
The next transformation brings us back to Papageno and his
troubles. He is still wifeless and threatens to hang himself if no-one
will take pity on him. He seems about to do it when the Three Boys
once more intervene to save him, too, and tell him to play his magic
bells. When he does it, Papagena enters and "they sing of married bliss
and numerous progeny.
All that remains to be tied up is the matter of Monostatos, the
Queen of the Night, and her Three Ladies. They have a conspiratorial
quintet in which they propose to enter the temple and destroy it. Monostatos reminds the Queen that she has promised him the hand of her daughter
for his services. She reaffirms the promise. But before they can mount
their attack on the temple, they are discovered and plunged into eternal
night. The loudest chord reveals the whole stage transformed into a sun,
Tamino and Pamina are dressed in priestly robes, flanked by Egyptian
priests on both sides. The Three Boys hold flowers. Sarastro celebrates
the rays of the sun, which dispel the night and destroy the ill-gotten
power of the hypocrites. There is acclaim for the new initiates, and
the gods Isis and Osiris are given thanks before the final chorus, a chorus
about the victory of strength and the endowment of beauty and wisdom
with an eternal crown.
�36
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
So much, then, for the plot. It is not quite what you get in Bergman. Auden and Kallman, too, eliminated the masonic element, tampered with Pamina's parentage and switched the sequence of some scenes
around, perhaps to their advantage. But what strikes me as somewhat
wilful is a change in the general style of the text, at least at times; there
were no nymphs and shepherds in the original-there are in A & K.
There was good reason for their absence in the original; the serious
aspiration of the masonic enterprise and its serious antagonists, balanced
by the feathery children of nature, Papageno and Papagena. Nymphs
and shepherds conjure up the wrong imagery, something like Dresden
china. Auden and Kallman bring them into Sarastro's aria about forgiveness, at the point where they also depart from the mini-homily about
the importance of these teachings of the Brotherhood. Where Sarastro
just sings that "whoever does not rejoice in these teachings does not
deserve to be a human being," Auden and Kallman have, not just "The
tyrant on his golden throne/lives in the desert all alone" but two extra
lines before these two (they often introduce extra lines where Mozart
just repeats):
The homely shepherds when they love
A green and homely pasture rove,
The tyrant on his golden throne ... etc.
In fact that whole number is made, by A & K, into a new song, good
in itself, but rather remote from the-well-known-original. They say
in their preface that that is what an operatic translator may have to do
sometimes: get the gist of a number, then step back and write something really coherent and shapely of his own. That may be a tenable
point of view, though I still think it makes for better reading than singing.
Auden and Kallman must have relied on having an audience which
did not know too much about the original, not even famous highlights
like Sarastro's aria. They may also have thought there was no harm
in approximating Mozart to Sullivan by rendering his text, in places,
more in the manner of Gilbert. They had few qualms or none about
introducing extra syllables where there were available notes in the score,
even if in the original setting those notes were tied together. In the case
of Papageno it does not matter much. When he first introduces himself
as "Der Vogelfiinger bin ich ja," they have
The lark, the ruddock and the willow-wren
And the jolly nightingale I ken;
In vain do all the pretty little creatures fly
When they the tall birdcatcher spy.
�37
RUHM VON OPPEN
The German replaced by the pattering "In vain do all the pretty little
creatures fly" was "ich Vogelfiinger bin bekannt. ... "All right, give
patter song to Papageno:
J
r p
bin
be - kannt
rJ. Ei rJ. Gl I r . p
the
fan - 9er
[Ich] Vo - gel -
?:f
E
tJ CJ Q
[~
!H
J
[In] Vain do all
pret-ty lit -tie
crea-tures fly
In their Notes, Auden and Kallman grant that the effect is different but
take their stand on the belief "that The Magic Flute should sound more
staccato than Die Zauberjlote."
In another case, that of the duet about love sung by Pamina and
Papageno, the translators get slightly cold feet about this and their stand
begins to wobble, and quite rightly too. Still, pride forbids them to put
the "pedantic" alternative version, with its proper scansion, in the text
itself. They relegate it to the Notes at the back, where they inform us
that ''The German lyric is written in iambic rhythm, i.e., in 4/4 time''
(I merely quote, though I must interpolate that every sophomore knows
that iambs can be written in any time signature). They continue: "This
Mozart has set to a tune in 6/8, so that certain syllables have to be (my
italics) spread over two notes, linked by a slur." Naughty Mozart! If
only he'd had the sense to stick to the iambic 4/4, there would have
been no need to spread syllables over two notes. But now that the notes
are there, the translators are jolly well going to use them, and in their
main text give us this:
when IO"ve In his bOsOm desire hils impla'ntid
The heart Of th€ he'rO grOws g€ntli 3nd ta'me;
~
./
~
';'
.~
/
-
/
- -
./
-
And soon from his passiOn enkindled, enchanted,
- :""
- ~ /~The nymph receives the Impetuous flame ...
-
/
for the German
-/-
,--:
_
_,._/~
Bei Miinnern, welche Liebe fiihlen,
- _..-Fehlt auch ein gutes Herze nicht.
/
/
/
Die siissen
- dann derTrfebe mftzllfifhten, ..
-- - Weiber erste Pflicht.
,...,._-- lst
/
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In the comments at the back of the book they say they ''found that the
English language cried out for an anapestic rhythm [?] similar to that
of the notes." And they continue: "If the original relation of syllables
to notes is not an accident of the German prosody, but a profound musical
idea, then, of course, we are wrong, so he who is pedantic, let him
be pedantic still and sing instead:
When Love his dart has deep implanted,
The hero's heart grows kind and tame,
And by his passion soon enchanted,
The nymph receives his impetuous flame . ... ·'
There's that nymph again, who, as I said, is absent not only from that
number in the original, but from the entire opera, which is simply not
written in the nymphs and shepherds and cupid style and in which love,
or Liebe, has the proper German feminine gender.
The posing of the phoney alternative between "accidental prosody" or "profound musical idea" is hardly worthy of the librettist of
The Rake's Progress. Simple respect for the gentle, not to say tender,
character of the combination of the two successive notes in one syllable, .or the music of the music-and-words together, should have made
the translators put the version they call "pedantic" in the main text.
In a later essay on "Translating Opera Libretti" they argue a bit more
cautiously, go into the interesting difference of quantitative and accentual prosody, and call on singers to sing both the iambic and the anapestic
versions (as they call them) several times without prejudice and ask themselves which, in English, sounds the more Mozartian. I am no singer,
but I have tried both, quite often, and have no doubt that a version with
Mozart's syllabification sounds more Mozartian. Perhaps they chose
the wrong idiom in their "When Love his dart has deep emplanted"?
They also state that "in English, on account of its vowels and
its many monosyllabic words, there are fewer syllables which sing well,
and are intelligible when spread over several notes, than there are in
either Italian or German-English being, intrinsically, a more staccato
tongue." They also say that feminine rhymes are more uncommon and
more often comic in English than in German. I wonder about both those
statements. Looking, for instance, at Dido and Aeneas, I found many
unfunny feminine rhymes and Purcell doing beautifully with more than
one note per syllable from the very outset and throughout the work.
I underline the syllables that are given more than one note:
�RUHM VON OPPEN
39
Shake the cloud from off your brow. Fate your wi-shes does allow.
Empire growing, pleasures flow-fig, Fortune smiles and so should
you.
Banish sorrow, banish care, I Grief should ne'er approach the fair;
Banish sorrow, ba-nish care, Grief etc.;
Then Dido herself: "Peace and I are strangers grown .... [and later]
Yet would not, yet would not, would not have ]1 guessed." It was, incidentally, on that monosyllabic two-note "it" that the German translators found themselves forced (or free?) to introduce an extra syllable.
And so on, throughout Dido, one comes up with quite a lot, from the
beginning right through to the end: ''With drooping wings ye Cu-pids come ... and scat-ter roses on her tomb.
Soft, soft and gentle ... as her heart, ... keep here your watch."
Remember, the Auden/Kallman translation was made for television. Its authors actually say that on the stage operas should be, they
think, performed in the original languages and audiences should get
a translation to read, so that they know what it is all about.
Along comes Ingmar Bergman and does a film on the Magic Flute
which is sung in Swedish and has captions, or translations, in the
languages of the country it is shown in. I was amazed at the syllabic
fidelity both of the sung Swedish and of the English translation. It was
faithful in other respects too: to the meaning of the text and, I think,
usually to the rhyme scheme. The only serious departure from the original that I detected in the Swedish and English was the excessive punishment given to Monostatos. In German he gets a bastinado of77 strokes,
in Swedish 555 (and Bergman's English translator follows that). I thought
it might be for the sake of syllables. Not so, I am told by a friend who
knows Swedish: it is simply that the number 7 is quite unsingable in
that language. But 555 seems rather a lot.
I have left myself with very little time to discuss that film. Opinions were violently divided, ranging from blissful enjoyment to outrage.
Let me simply mention some major distractions and distortions-leaving
aside the fillings in Tamino's teeth. The business, especially the sensuous business of pawing, is obtrusive and out of place. The fire and water
ordeals do not take place in Dante's Hell or Wagner's Venusberg and
we should be spared the writhing nude figures. If Bergman decided to
cut out the Freemasons, why did he have to make Sarastro and his Priests into Keepers of some Nordic Grail? How did he have the nerve
to bring on those cute three boys prematurely to sing music Mozart
gave to the Three Ladies? Why must the quintet of conspirators near
the end be represented as a heaving army on the move? Above all: he
�40
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
makes Sarastro Pamina's father and not just in the spiritual sense, but
as her begetter, with clearly incestuous leanings. This is too much!
Mozart's opera is quite explicit about Pamina's deceased father and his
legacy of the flute and the Sevenfold Shield of the Sun, which he bequeathed to Sarastro, whom he considered a worthy successor. He very
particularly did not want his wife to inherit it. Why the change? To
foist some Freud on us?
Heaven forfend any importation of twentieth-century psychology into this work. But Jung would be more suitable than Freud if something of the kind were done. But if it were done, it were better done
honestly, in a new, twentieth-century opera. Michael Tippett has done
it and called it The Midsummer Marriage. It is clearly akin to the Magic
Flute, and equally clearly Tippett's own. Using Mozart for selfexpression, as Bergman does, strikes me as impermissible, despite all
the various beauties of the film and the many people it introduces to
the music. Seductive, verging on the corrupting.
�The Program Old and New
Douglas Allanbrook
Fifty years ago Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan founded
a program of studies at St. John's College in Annapolis. We are here
tonight to celebrate that program, a program dedicated to the proposition that men are educable, a program grand in its aspirations and full
of good sense in the ways in which it lays out its specific course of
studies. Though it is difficult to imagine its having been instituted anywhere except the United States, the allegiance to the program may be
found in the minds and hearts of thoughtful men anywhere. Two men
are particularly linked with both the aspirations and the matter of the
program, Mr. Buchanan and Jacob Klein. Mr. Buchanan was a quintessential Yankee, Mr. Klein a Russian Jew. Without the imprint of
these two extraordinary men we would have no program. For all of
us-alumni, faculty, and students-who have studied the program with
some care there is no tension in this heritage other than that implicit
in the nature of discourse and study.
Fifty years is a long span of time in the ordinary train of human
events. Many students and many teachers have come and gone since
those waning years of the great Depression, years already shadowed
by the imminence of the second great war of the century. Technical
changes both beneficent and terrifying have multiplied at a geometric
rate these fifty years. Money and bombs can be mutually exchanged
Douglas Allanbrook, the composer, is a Tutor Emeritus at St. John's College, Annapolis.
This speech was delivered to the alumni of the college in September, 1987, on the
occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the New Program.
41
�42
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
anywhere in no time at all. There has been a certain progress in the
medical lengthening of our lives. Politics remains the same, though more
expensive-a change in quantity that affects the quality. We are all tempted on many occasions to say as we grow older: tutto declina-everything
is going to pot. The phrase belongs most properly in the mouth ofFalstaff, in Verdi's opera. Verdi himself was of course at a remarkably
advanced age to have been writing such an ebullient marvel. Falstaff
is something of a fool, though a self-conscious one. He is also shrewd,
no dumbbell. He contemplates his youth, his salad days when he was
young and thin, a fetching page for the Duke of Norfolk. The comedy
for him and for us who are getting older consists in confusing our own
waning powers with whatever there is out there that is perennial and
young: love, romance, energy, glory, intellect, and sharp vision.
It takes a certain distance to realize how perennially fresh this
program remains as generations of students pursue its disciplines and
goals. The senior classes it has been my pleasure to teach in recent years
thrust in front of me the fact that this is not an experimental program
but a program that works, and works for an amazing range of people.
A class which discusses Valery and Wallace Stevens with acumen and
passion consisted a mere four years ago of high-school students, some
of whom knew no grammar, and whose cherished books, depending
on the generation, were Catcher in the Rye, and Lord of the Rings. Only
too often these would be accompanied by that ever-present virago, Ayn
Rand. One of our duties as tutors is to realize what can happen, to be
aware of all that does happen in these four years. I would hope that
the program would retain its luster for those of us who have spent our
adult lives in it. The reasons for the efficacy of the program should
now be stated. But before we talk of its grand aspirations, which keep
it pointed where it should be pointed, let us examine its good sense.
Its entrancing folly we will look at last.
The daily round of its tutorials and laboratories is a slogging
through elementary things slowly and methodically. There has never
been any reasonable doubt as to what these elements are and where they
lie. They are found underneath the common skills of daily life: the grammar, rhetoric, and logic of language, the reasoning and structures of
mathematics, the daily experience of nature, the rhythm and tones of
music. From the very beginning fifty years ago it was deemed essential that modern science be dealt with, both as theory and as a world
of objects to be sensed and measured. Many who are not acquainted
with our regular classes find what I have just said vague and just a bit
pious. The very term "liberal arts" is such a casual catch-all for almost
any curriculum. There has also always been the vulgar and catchy phrase
which would describe the program as the ''great books course.'' Peo-
�ALLAN BROOK
43
pie then quite naturally are apt to be either aghast or delighted to find
that elementary does mean elementary. Sentences are to be parsed, congruence of triangles to be proven, nitrates to be distinguished from nitrites, the lack of a urinary bladder in a bird to be noted, Yankee Doodle
to be played on a musical scale constructed on a monochord.
Tutorials are classes with stubborn simple things to learn. What
is studied in them is not arbitrary. The program has never subscribed
to the kind of looseness which finds that it makes little difference what
is studied as long as it is done with conviction and provides a "learning opportunity.'' What is studied in these classes at the college is not
cultural, not intended to be a substitute for experience of the world.
For fifty years neither history nor the fine arts have had a place on the
program. Elementary education has neither the intention nor the time
to expose students to the vast panoply of splendors which the world
exhibits, though a certain necessary nostalgia is present because we don't
look at Chinese painting or the French and Russian Revolutions, or,
in general, learn to appreciate what a sophisticated man appreciates.
There has been no faltering these fifty years that there be tutorials in
language and mathematics, that there be laboratories, and (for thirtyfour years) that there be music tutorials. As for modernity, we study
its roots in Baudelaire, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Einstein more thoroughly than any other undergraduate college in the country. The program
does not change in any essential ways. This is not because of stultification; the program stays as it is because it has its roots in reasonable
judgments as to what is elementary. The tutorials and the laboratories
often employ manuals and similarly uninspired materials. This again
makes good sense if the learning of elements requires help, which it
so often does. The program has always had the obligation to exercise
a student in matters that in certain countries were traditionally dealt
with in high-schools, gymnasia, or lycees.
Tutorials are, however, fixed on splendors. The grandest books
are read: Baudelaire, the inventor of modern sensibility, Einstein and
Dedekind, Sophocles and Lavoisier, and, in the freshman language
tutorial, Plato's M eno, which deals with the crux of how men learn things
and how they deal with what they learn. These texts are read slowly
and at length. They are chosen as exemplifying the highest expressions
of the liberal arts, whether they be by Shakespeare, Euclid, Pascal, Newton, or Homer.
We are nearing the entrancing folly of the program. Sancho Panza
plods through the fields of elementary grammar, logic, rhetoric,
mathematics,and laboratory while simultaneously Don Quixote canters
on, reading Plato in Greek after three months of grammar, and Einstein after only the slightest acquaintance with Maxwell's equations.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
If we leave the tutorials the quest becomes more quixotic. The freshmen read Homer straight off on their entrance to the school, and the
nearly unreadable text of Hegel's Phenomenology is the roadblock which
the seniors encounter as they begin their last year. The good sense of
the plodding part of the program and the enormous difficulties in dealing with the true elements cannot be coped with without the ever-receding
goal of encompassing the very best that has been set down in writing.
Sancho Panza and Don Quixote belong together. The death of the knight
leaves Sancho bereft. Without Sancho the world is only half there, even
though his shrewd horse-sense is well up to ruling his "island."
For fifty years a proposition has been voiced that the books are
the teachers. A certain inference follows from this: Everyone in a class
is a learner, including the teacher. This inference is not quixotic. It is
founded not only on the importance of the books that are read but also
on an understanding of how things are learned-on an understanding
of the soul. Learning is not necessarily play, as some would have it, but
it certainly involves activity on the part of the learner. Opportunities
for learning must be placed in front of the student, his opinions tested
and challenged. It is for this reason that Plato's Meno is not only the
core of the freshman language tutorial but also provides the clue to how
learning is thought to come about in this old program of ours. Let us
list certain things that this implies: No answers given but every opportunity for any possible answer is provided, if there be an answer. Willingness to live with the skepticism that may follow upon this. Wit, irony,
and shrewd observations as to what any particular person is capable
of answering, given that person's make-up. Seriousness deeper than
faith concerning this natural life-giving endeavor of the intellect and
the heart. Living with and putting up with the open-ended and neverending quest that lies behind conversation and argument. It is all these
habits that lie behind our program, not any set doctrine of Platonic
"ideas" or Platonic "politics."
A certain role is then envisaged for a teacher or a tutor in this
program. He may or may not be an expert in some field of knowledge.
In class, with the help of books, materials, and instruments, he provides opportunities for learning, and he himselflearns as the perennial
conversation flows. This is the life of the program and hence of the
college. It could all be done just as well if we hired a bunch of twofamily houses and furnished them with chairs, tables, and blackboards.
These past several years or so when I was on the search committee for our new presidents, traveling around the country and talking
to a great variety of people, it has been illuminating to me to note that
the program is known and widely known and respected for what it is,
and not for what it is not. I have had the same experience in talking
�ALLAN BROOK
45
to many artists, writers, and composers whom I know as a director of
an Artists' Colony. What we are commands respect. Every college from
here to Peoria exposes its students to a mixed menu of liberal arts, fine
arts, history, and, in general, appreciation of what is appreciable. It
would be foolish of this college to attempt any such thing. It would
also be impractical, since most colleges and junior colleges are better
qualified than we are to-offer cultural education. The more serious objection would be that the program would be diluted. It should be clear
that without this program we are nothing in particular, though Annapolis
and Santa Fe are charming towns and the local cultures of some interest.
I was delighted when I arrived here thirty-five years ago, one
hot afternoon after riding the bus down from Baltimore, fresh from four
years as a professional musician, to walk into a remarkably messy office
and to begin talking with someone who did not consider music to be
the most important thing in the world. This was one of the principal
reasons for my coming to St. John's. The program is and always must
be dedicated to the excellences of the reason. That there are other splendors is too obvious, one would think, to be argued. These various splendors do not negate each other, but the program rightly insists that there
is a hierarchy of them. We may not need Aristotle to rank them for
us, but he is a great help. There is also implicit in the program another
perennial question having to do with the highest excellences. It takes
the form of a kind of debate, or better still a conversation, as to the
ends of the intellectual excellences: are they aimed at the theoretical
or the practical? ·
This may be stated more formally as enquiring about the relations between the moral and the intellectual virtues. Are we preparing
for citizenship or for something higher, more open-ended, more beguiling, and entrancingly more dangerous? Such a tension arises from
the nature of the intellectual excellences. It is a philosophic question.
The college, if one can speak of it apart from the program, must
always be chary of making claims for its graduates. The program is
no panacea for success or necessary preparation for good citizenship.
It also cannot teach anyone to think.
These fifty years have shown the freshness, the good sense, and
the grandeur of the program. There is no history of the program, apart
from all of us, old and young, who have passed through it. If we are
ashamed of this program, or bored with it, or unhappy that it does not
encompass a greater range of cultural splendors, we have been poor
students indeed. Its aspirations and humble good sense are meant as
a guide to all who would pay attention to their better selves. It is often
an aid for those who have not noticed what they came equipped with,
who have need to recollect from what race they are sprung. We need
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
not be abashed at being different, nor should we boast too fervently
of our successes. We are a small place and the program will never swamp
the world. What it does is too normal, too extraordinary, and too little
interested in success. Let's hope it will never lose its great-souledness.
�Truth Given and Truth Sought:
Two Colleges
J. Winfree Smith
Bishop Ziemann, President McArthur, members of the Board
of Governors of Thomas Aquinas College, members of the faculty, students of the College, parents and guests of the graduating seniors, and
especially graduating seniors, members of the Class of 1987:
First of all, let me say that I was deeply moved by the invitation
to give this address. I regard it as a sign of the affection that exists between me and this class and between me and the members of this community, and also as a sign of the growth in mutual understanding and
Christian charity between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion of which the American Episcopal Church to which
I belong is a part. This could indeed be an occasion for you to assure
me of what Pope Paul VI assured the Protestant theologian Karl Barth
sometime during an hour-long conversation in 1966. He lovingly assured him of his prayers that certain deeper insights might still be given
him in his old age. That, at least, is Barth's account. We do not have
the Holy Father's account of that conversation.
When I began thinking about what should be the subject of this
address, many reminiscences of my earliest experiences of the Catholic Church came to me. I shall mention a few that take me back more
The Reverend Mr. Smith is a Tutor Emeritus at St. John's College, Annapolis. This
speech was the commencement address, delivered in June, 1987, at Thomas Aquinas
College, Santa Paula, California, where he had been a visiting tutor for two years.
47
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
than fifty years. Sometime in the spring of 1935 I was called to the
priesthood of the Episcopal Church and was headed for seminary that
fall. I was then a graduate student in history at the University of Virginia. Having been a Presbyterian, I had acquired a bit of theology in
my early youth by memorizing the Westminster Shorter Catechism. But
one of my teachers at Virginia, Scott Buchanan, who more than any
other single person was later on the founder of the St. John's program
and hence one to whom Thomas Aquinas College is also indebted, got
me interested in the theology of St. Thomas, especially his theology
of the Eucharist. I thought I ought to find out how the Eucharist as understood by St. Thomas was celebrated in the Church which held his
doctrine. Every week day during Lent of 1935, I attended Mass at the
Catholic Church in Charlottesville and so became familiar with the Latin
Mass as it was celebrated in the United States fifty and more years ago.
I still have the missal edited by the Benedictine Abbot Cabrol which
I acquired in 1934 and took with me to Mass. During all the time that
I was in the Episcopal seminary, when I was not doing my assigned
work and maybe sometimes when I should have been, I was studying
the theology of St. Thomas, having acquired the twenty-one volume
translation of the Summa 7heologiae made early in this century by
English Dominicans. One day, a classmate of mine came in my room,
looked over my books and said, "You don't have books that anybody
else has." "I suppose that's right," I said. "Well," he exclaimed as
he left, "it doesn't seem to bother you."
I have always been grateful for this study and at this moment
am especially grateful because it means that what I have in common
with you and what we both hold precious entered my life a long while
ago.
Let me now cease reminiscing and come to the real subject of
my talk. Often when I was a visiting member of the faculty here, people asked me, and now often in Annapolis people ask me about the difference between Thomas Aquinas College and St. John's College. One
can consider this question about the difference only if one is aware of
how alike these colleges are. Both have in common the view that one
can best learn by reading books of the greatest excellence and that within
limits and always with the possibility of making changes one can identify these books and make a list. The lists for the two colleges are very
much the same, though not identical. The two colleges are in agreement that no student can learn as much from a book through reading
it by himself or through listening to a supposed "expert" explain it
as he can by conversing about it with his fellow-students under the
guidance of one or two fellow-learners called teachers. One can learn
through reading and conversing only if one has a good understanding
�SMITH
49
of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Both colleges, therefore, have stressed
those traditional liberal disciplines, the arts of the trivium as well as
the quadrivial arts of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music that
provide readily accessible examples not only of ways of learning but
of learnable things.
What, then, is the difference between these colleges? A simple
answer to that question is that Thomas Aquinas College is a Christian
college, whereas St. John's has no commitment to Christianity. That,
however, does not tell one very much. Many colleges are nominally
Christian. At this college, the center of the curriculum, and hence the
center of intellectual life, is the Christian religion itself. The study of
sacred theology is the intellectual enterprise that gives direction to all
others. A sign of the centrality here of the Christian religion and of
sacred theology is the presence of a theology tutorial. At St. John's
there is no theology tutorial, although the Bible and several theological
works are read and seriously discussed by all the students. Thomas
Aquinas College, as a Christian college, assumes that there are truths
revealed by God and known by faith. St. John's does not make that
assumption but considers it a possibility to be earnestly investigated.
I have deliberately called this college a Christian college, and
so far I have not used the word "Catholic" of it. For I can imagine
that there might be an Eastern Orthodox college or an Anglican college or a Protestant college that might take this college as a model, and
so might have as the center of its curriculum sacred theology based on
what has been revealed by God in Holy Scripture and articulated through
the tradition of the Church. I am thinking of revealed truths held in
common with the Catholic Church by many Christian communions: that
God is the omnipotent, and consequently the omniscient, creator and
sustainer of the heavens and the earth, that He is three persons or
hypostases in one essence, that man's nature is corrupted by sin and
in need of grace, that grace is mediated through Jesus Christ who as
the second person of the triune God is truly God and who also is one
with us in being completely human, that those who put their trust in
Christ rejoice in the hope of the blessedness of the coming kingdom
of God. I am aware, to be sure, that the statement I have just given
of revealed truths held as such by many Christian communions is from
a Catholic point of view incomplete. It may indeed be incomplete from
the point of view of other communions, for as Pope John Paul II, anticipating the beginning of the Marian year, says in his March 25th
encyclical on the Mother of the Redeemer, "It is a hopeful sign that
these churches and ecclesial communities [he is referring to churches
and ecclesial communities other than the Catholic Church] are finding
agreement with the Catholic Church on fundamental points of Chris-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tian belief, including matters relating to the Virgin Mary. For they recognize her as Mother of the Lord and hold that this forms part of our faith
in Christ, true God and true man."
Thomas Aquinas College is definitely a Catholic college in its
adherence to the whole of what in the Catholic Church is to be taken
as matter of faith. It is its great merit that it stands so firmly and clearly
for God's saving truth as the foundation of theology, and for theology
as the supreme intellectual enterprise.
Sacred theology is, then, a quest that starts with faith. St. Anselm's phrase "faith seeking understanding" is a good way of describing it. It is not simply a body of demonstrations deduced from a minimum
of principles as Euclid's geometry or Newton's mathematical science
of nature is. The Bible itself does not, in the main, prove things about
God. It is a story to be read as a story-a true story of God in relation
to man, beginning in Genesis with the creation of man as the highest
earthly creature and ending with the new heaven and the new earth in
the Apocalypse. Sacred theology, whether as Biblical theology or as
based on articles of faith found in the Bible or in ecclesiastical tradition, offers a vast realm for the intellect and the intellectual imagination to explore. Sometimes in this exploration there occur demonstrative
reasonings. Sometimes, as St. Thomas indicates when he refers to the
various meanings the same text of Scripture may have, theology employs allegory and anagogical reasoning. Anagogical reasoning, in his
view, has to do with eternal glory and matters relating to the ultimate
object of hope; because of the origin of the word "anagogical," such
reasoning can also be thought of as reasoning that leads up to. There
is in theology reasoning that leads up to as well as reasoning that leads
down from. Theology is, in either case, faith seeking understanding.
The outcome in this life is not the replacement of faith by understanding. It is only in another life, the life of the age to come, that faith is
to be replaced by the intellect's vision of God. As long as those in the
pilgrim Church are wayfarers, to use a favorite name of St. Thomas
for Christians, they walk by faith and not by sight.
St. John's College, I have said, has no commitment to Christianity. That does not mean that it is hostile to Christianity. It is a
philosophical college in a very large sense of the word "philosophical.'' Philosophy, like sacred theology, is a quest, a quest for wisdom
moved by the love of wisdom. But it is a quest that does not presuppose revealed truth. What does it presuppose? It presupposes what
Socrates calls "the things around us" and what Genesis calls "the
heavens and the earth," the sky above, the earth on which we dwell,
plants and animals and human life on the earth. It presupposes also the
meaningfulness of human speech. For it is only in speech that we can
�SMITH
51
put before us the questions that arise as we behold with wonder the
things around us. It is worthy of note that Aristotle's names for particular categories are in the form of questions: the "what?", the "how
great?", the "where?", the "when?", and so on. The questions
philosophy raises are the questions that are most important for human
beings, such as the question of what the best life for man is, or the question of the relation of the human to the non-human, or the question that
Aristotle says was asked long ago and is always being asked and occasions difficulties: the question of what being is. Philosophy seeks wisdom or knowledge about being as a whole and in its parts.
One might well wonder whether with such an ambitious aim and
without the help of divine revelation the quest and the questioning ever
attain what is being sought. That wonder becomes all the greater when
one has to consider that over the centuries there have been many answers, often conflicting answers, to these questions and that the love
of truth requires that one not prejudge the answers but honestly and
humbly examine the reasons behind them. Of answers that really conflict with one another, some must be only opinions. Some opinions get
knocked out in the course of philosophizing. The true answer may be
something that is still to be sought with the benefit of whatever opinion
has stood the testing. Scott Buchanan used to give as one criterion for
a great book that it raises unanswerable questions. I would agree with
those who, on the other hand, say that a question, if it is meaningful,
is asking for a true answer. The true answer may not be easily accessible to the philosopher. There may be some answers never actually
reached. The undertaking is indeed a tremendously ambitious one. Some
Christian thinkers have regarded it as too ambitious and have spoken
of the pride of philosophers even to engage in such an undertaking.
However ambitious the undertaking is in itself, St. John's is defined by it. The faculty and students there may not be philosophers.
But they perceive philosophizing in the background of what they do
and they perceive the fundamental questions it raises. Among these is
the question of revelation. The very attempt to philosophize brings one
face to face with the question whether the most important truths are
not truths which cannot be seen as truths by the unaided human intellect
and so have to be accepted on authority. For us who are Christians,
that question is answered even if there are differences among Christians as to the relation between the authority of Scripture and the authority
of the Church.
Revelation contains all the truth we need to know for our salvation. It does not provide answers to all the questions inquiring minds
might legitimately ask. Sometimes we can test by revelation answers
not contained in revelation. Sometimes we are left wondering and, if
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
no Socrates is present, or no one like Socrates, we have to remind ourselves of our ignorance of many things.
I believe that Christians must reject much of modern thought
which does not stand the test when examined in the light of revealed
truth. Of course, that it does not stand the test is something that has
to be shown. Is modernity, then, to be rejected wholesale? It is impossible to deny that modern science has led to the discovery of many truths
and that it has made possible an enormous increase in man's power over
the world at the same time that it has come to place all of human life
in jeopardy. One cannot say that it has led to wisdom. Respect for the
truth requires that we make distinctions. Never forgetting the ancient
and Biblical emphasis on duty and obedience to law as primary, we
must acknowledge the rightness of one modern idea that has been voiced
by several popes and that underlies the Constitution of the United States
with its amendments, and that is the idea that human beings just by being human have certain rights, for instance the right to liberty. In my
opinion, it is a good thing that the Constitution forbids any religious
test for public office under the United States and that the first amendment forbids Congress to make any law prohibiting the free exercise
of religion. It was a shameful thing that in England between 1673 and
1828 no one could hold civil or military offices without taking an oath
in denial of transubstantiation. One might be compelled with one's lips
to profess or deny this or that religious doctrine. But the heart cannot
be compelled. As the Second Vatical Council declared, "No one is to
be forced to embrace the Christian faith."
Aristotle in the Ethics presents two kinds of life as good kinds:
the philosophic life and the political life, and of thes~ two the philosophic
life is immensely superior. According to Christianity, the life of faith
is the best kind of life and it need not require very much in the way
of philosophy or even of theology. I do not have to exhort you to live
the life of faith. It is given you to do so. Nor do I expect most of you
to devote your lives to theology or the philosophizing that accompanies theology. But I would hope that your life in Christ would be a life
in which you continue, in a way made available to you by this college,
to be concerned with the profound theological questions and the profound answers, and the questions raised by those answers. Political life
you can hardly avoid. At the present moment, one wonders whether
the noble attempt of the founders of our republic to solve the problems
of government by the institutions of government will come to grief.
The founders well knew that the problems of government cannot be
solved merely by the institutions of government. Government of the
people and by the people will be government for the people only if the
people are educated in the way in which this college has sought to edu-
�SMITH
53
cate you, the way of righteousness and truth. We do not expect America or the nations together to become by human means the kingdom
of God. But that does not relieve us of our duty to order our own lives
and to do what we can, however small, to make human life for all men
on this planet not only possible but worthwhile. Our political hope,
whether for America or for the nations of the earth, may be~ as maybe
political hope always is~a hope against hope. We have a sure and certain hope expressed in the prayer given us by Christ our Lord when
He bids us to pray to God our Father that His kingdom come.
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�How Liberty Won
the Sweet Sixteen
From The '!hies of the liberty Renaissance
Ken Colston
To The Not Overcareful Reader of These Tales
There are those who maintain that the entire story was a countrybred New Journalist's confabulation, that Clyde Trample, by profession editor-and-typesetter-in-chief of the tiny Northern Kentucky Chronicle, quirky amateur historian and acerb wit by disposition, made it up
out of whole cloth, sending the boxed results to a half-dozen renegade
presses simultaneously, his area weekly having recently come into a
workhouse Macintosh word-processor and two letter-quality printers.
Skeptics point out that there's no such town in northern Kentucky as
Liberty, that the Interstate 64 doesn't even have an extension, that no
governor in Kentucky ever wore hair even with the tops of his ears,
never did, never will, and that Louisville high-school basketball teams
don't compete in the Twelfth or Thirteenth Regions, neither one.
Clyde will reply with eye-rolling smugness that of course in order
to protect his newspaper from unseemly and costly litigation he had
Ken Colston is the Director of Residence at St. John's College, Annapolis. The Tales
ofthe Liberty Renaissance was originally written for the Writing Seminars at the Johns
Hopkins University. Published here are the framing preface and the first part of the
first of the novel's six tales.
55
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
to change the names of certain key personages and of all the critical
locales, but that everything in the book happened as written, give or
take a few colorizing details, and that he can prove it or kick your ass
over it, your choice.
Then some ill-read nitpicking yokel will ask why if the names
is changed does Clyde keep his just as his mother-haw! haw!-give
it to him on the day he was born.
Whereupon Clyde will grip. his Mont Blanc Diplomat like a
Barlow knife and retort, "Hasn't any of you narrow-eyed incest-begot
stump-hilljacks ever heard of playful self-reference?"
How Liberty Won the Sweet Sixteen
It all started with the men who cooked up the United States
Supreme Court, but it is better to pursue a shorter thread.
The Kentucky part of it started long enough ago for memory to
be slightly imperfect when the Fabulous 89th Congress voted money
to the Commonwealth Department of Highways to connect Interstates
64, 71, and 75. The new extension would run right past Liberty, render
the buzzard-dropped burg equidistant from Louisville, Covington, and
Lexington, and pull it into the enlightened lap of the Great Society.
They were even going to build two rest areas, one north and one south
of town.
So excited were some Libertines that you would have thought
that Ford and General Motors had broken ground for assembly plants.
Jacob Range Taylor had to hire three pretty chain-smoking saleswomen
to handle all the calls in his real-estate office, a move that galled the
Backwards-Dunking Baptists. When the news broke in the Liberal, readers accused Editor Clyde Trample of being in cahoots with Jacob Range.
The feed-capped bench jockeys who sat and spat under the catalpa trees
by the courthouse in July humidity or in their pickup trucks during January rain had their suspicions:
"Clyde's made the whole thang up."
"Jacob Range has put his place up for sale. Wants a million dollars. Hit's got to be a lie."
"Better not be. Ape Collins has bought apiece of land off Taylor
for a truck stop."
"I know one thang: if the road comes, a bunch of dern niggers'll
come with it. This town ain't never amounted to nothing."
That was a lie, for Liberty had had its day in the sun-in fact,
had had several. Almost two centuries before, Erasmus Lee Jefferson,
a second cousin of our beloved Thomas, had nourished high hopes for
�COLSTON
57
his Utopian settlement along Quick Creek, a branch off the Kentucky
River. Erasmus had hit the Territory Trail with a wagonload of curious odds-and-ends: nineteen children by his first four wives, Diderot's
and D' Alembert's Encyclopedie, a swivel chair badly in need of an oiling, a telescope with a cracked lens, a rabid fifth wife, two long-rifle
boxes of sugar-cane stems packed in mud, and a map of Caintuckee
that was off by nearly ten degrees of latitude. Erasmus was determined
first to cultivate Saccharum officinarum and then he'd think up some
perfect society worthy of his dreamed Caribbean wealth. In the beginning, he was lucky. The February of his arrival was April-like, and
his wife's rabies cleared up and left her wickedly ambitious. She planted right away. The growing season was hot and muggy, and the first
frost wasn't until December. The harvest was beyond all hopes. Then
a fleet of Cincinnati keelboats took a wrong turn off the Ohio River
and ran aground in Erasmus's back yard just as his wife was wondering what to do with the bumper crop. The captain believed that he'd
never steer back on course without unloading some of the scrawny and
useless passengers, and Erasmus's wife, Gladys Ruth, believed that the
crop would rot on the banks like washed-up cattails unless white slave
labor turned the presses. So the two entrepreneurs made a swap, a barrel of raw syrup in exchange for each man, a half-barrel for each woman. That is how most of the clans arrived-the Armstrongs, Robinsons,
Henrys, Colstons, Cobs, and Taylors. The captain was so impressed
with Gladys Ruth that he dubbed the still unnamed landing Little New
Orleans and sold nonnotarized stocks on it in Louisville, St. Louis, and
Natchez. By Christmas the town boasted a trading post, a hardware
store, a bank that issued its own currency, a schoolhouse with alphabet
horns in Attic Greek, but no church.
That Easter, after putting away a pint of young rum, Erasmus
screwed up his courage and took on Gladys Ruth. He gathered together
the family's newly acquired white slaves, carved them off twenty acres
apiece of his huge claim, and set them free. "We couldn't have kept
them anyways," he shrugged to Gladys Ruth. "For this knobby terrain, like that of ancient Attica, will not admit of bondage. The future
is Liberty.'' Gladys Ruth posted three of her stepsons around the sugar
presses.
Thus, the new town had a name, but Erasmus wouldn't register
it with the Post Office until he decided upon the kind of society he wanted. He took his time because he didn't want to blow it. Our age of mere
perpetuation forgets too easily the enormous responsibility borne by
the founders, who knew that one false step and destiny might never
recover. If they read the rivers wrong, prosperity would harbor elsewhere; if they made no place for the arts, their garden crofts would
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
soon be pig sties; if they didn't strike the right balance between freedom and control, their descendants would live in chaos or in chains.
It was quite a burden, and it gave old Erasmus pause. There was so
much choice; Liberty could be anything he wanted: a theocracy, as in
Massachusetts; a corporation, as at Jamestown; a haven of religious
tolerance, as in Pennsylvania; a republic of small farmers, as cousin
Thomas dreamed about; even a communistic conglomeration of phalanxes, as some of Tom Paine's friends advocated. The kinds of societies were as numerous in those heady days as the brands of soda in these
humble times. Erasmus put off his decision, and the Kentucky Postmaster in the young state capital refused to deliver the mail without
a toponym in the books. Petty-minded bureaucrats, too, can trace their
ancestry.
Erasmus brought up the matter with his hard young wife. ''I fear
lest Government retard the People, Gladys Ruth,'' he told her that May,
when, owing to the mild winter, the mosquitoes were already as big
as hummingbirds and so full with blood that they lay on the grass like
foundered cows.
"So the hell with gov'ment," Gladys Ruth exclaimed. "Just sign
that 'air form from Frankfort so's we can get the 'skeeter netting Momma's sent us.''
"Hot damn!" Erasmus cried. "That's enough to make
Robespierre look like a Tory. Fiat sic. "
And sick it was. Word soon went around that the gobblers and
knobs north of Lexington and south of Cincinnati were a lawless territory, and those sawed-off hills and scrub clearings and swampy valleys filled up fast with Klinkenbeards and Harrisons. In those days, if
justice wasn't local, it didn't exist: no higher authority gave a damn
about some crackpot settlement on the edge of the Shawnees' stomping
ground. Before long, the town was so dark and bloody that the Indians
shied away. One night, the corpulent head of the Klinkenbeards disappeared, and a few days later a rummed-up Harrison bragged that his
brothers had diced him and tossed him into a spicy burgoo. A feud was
on. They gut shot each other's women and children, beheaded each
other's old men, and spoke disrespectfully to each other's coon dogs.
Under pressure from his Baptist constituency, who were embarrassed
by the bad name Liberty was giving the whole state, the Governor dispatched up the militia. They got scared and mutinied just above Quick
Creek, beyond which they had heard that even Georgians feared to go
without a Klinkenbeard or Harrison escort.
Human decency went by the boards. The Henrys and Boyds
walked around naked. The McGoffins staffed a whorehouse with
midgets, livestock, and the hearing-impaired. Apparently getting wind
�COLSTON
59
of this pleasure dome, some dubious emigres who claimed to have
shamed the licentious court of Louis Fifteenth showed up with their
Jesuit confessors in a rickety carrosse. They introduced love aids made
of precious metals and ostrich feathers and offered the patent rights to
anyone-man, woman, or animal-who could show the ennuye Dauphin something new. This supposed royal heir was so obese that he
couldn't close his right eye and had to have an effeminate attendant
moisten it every five minutes with salt water. The contest was on, and
after three days a big Floyd woman and her jack mule won. In no time
at all, gobblers-and-knobs smiths were selling their erotic wares to hucksters bound for the Louisiana Purchase. To this day, one of these contraptions shows up every now and then at a Liberty garage sale. One
rare find is called a cat tweezers, from chatouilleuse, and it still grips
like a professional bowler and cuddles like a collie puppy. Those old
boys were craftsmen.
Young Liberty was as experimental as a freshman dormitory at
a prestigious university, and custom was razed like a country church
by a tornado. The Taylors ate breakfast at sunset; the Jeffersons used
Bible paper as fire tinder; the McDarmint girls refused to give in to
their daddies. Nothing passed on authority. One forward-looking Jefferson boy decided that cooking was a superfluity. He began eating his
pork raw and wound up trading ten acres of prime bottomland to an
Armstrong witch for a worm charm. Another concluded that, Newton
notwithstanding, a wheel and an inclined plane created rather than saved
work. His warehouse went bankrupt, and late in life he found a negative sign in the wrong place. In those revolutionary years, if they thought
of it, they tried it. Some daring Robinson women taught a dozen black
bears to dance. This was a huge success until one night a wild-eyed
high-stepper went into heat and mauled a strongly cologned stringer
from a Louisville tabloid. These folies ursines went out of business,
and the furry chorus girls were ground up into meat patties. Erasmus
Jefferson proclaimed his desire to teach every boy and girl in the gobblers and knobs to do percentages and the brightest to read Greek, and
he was the only laughing-stock.
So it is when the world is new but the people in it have been
around: no traditions, no obstacles. Liberty's frrst promoters found that
they could bill the town anything they wanted. The keelboat captain
called it Little New Orleans, and Erasmus came up with Kentucky
Athens. An Austrian Egyptologist of the first water, enticed by Erasmus's spurious find of Shawnee pictographs bearing striking resemblances to those recently discovered hieroglyphics, proclaimed this
sugar-cane town the Luxor of the West, never minding that Liberty's
would-be namesake was plunked smack in the middle of the desert. The
�60
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
French Jesuits who rode with the obese Dauphin sent back word to Rome
that they had come upon the Sodom and Gomorrha of the New World.
In rushed a tough Spanish comparu'a de Jesus recently reinstated by Pius
IV and ready to prove their mettle in spiritual reform. They hitched
a ride with a one-armed Harrison teamster, who talked ethics with them:
"Personally, I don't care what kind of fucking a man does so long's
he keeps it in the family." He drove his mule up a steep knob, where
his relatives were butchering for a burgoo. The Black Robes took one
look at the ceremony and turned north to work with the Shawnees, where
Satan had not gotten such a foothold. The Jesuitical allusion held,
however, and old men and women high up on Quick Creek still can
be heard saying that they were born in "Solomon and Gonorrhea."
Erasmus surveyed his anarchic Utopia and wondered where he
had gone wrong. He didn't like what he saw, but he asked himself where
one should draw the line. Cannibalism was not his cup of tea, but de
gustibus non disputandum est. The Dionysian carrying on broke his
heart. His dream of writing the definitive rebuttal to the Federalist Papers
dried up; Gladys Ruth infected him with the pox; he walked bald and
shivering through the muddy streets, talking in Greek to the hogs and
hounds. When a vision rots, the dreamer's mind goes bad with it.
The next fall, the weather's pendulum swung back like a swing
seat pumped by a hyperactive kid. A heavy snow piled in on All Saints'
Day, a foot dropping in four hours. Erasmus looked at his map and
ran out into the snow in his long underwear.
"Those pox-spreading land speculators!" he shouted.
Gladys Ruth went tromping through the drifts barefoot, wielding a cane sickle. "There ain't enough survived the cold," she declared,
"to soak a sugar tit." That night she left town with the banker, blizzard or no blizzard, and everybody with any sense or ambition followed
them, which explains why Liberty would remain poor and overcrowded for more than a century.
From boom to bust in three years: this foreshortened frontier story
was a miniature of the land of sudden sweeping change. As soon as
the snow melted, the remaining Libertines got religion. It was called
the Quick Creek Great Awakening of 1813. Abraham P.S. Cob, a
harelipped charismatic who had a way with the damned and dispossessed, picked on Erasmus Lee Jefferson in a sermon that lasted for
the entire week-long slow thaw. That babbling beanpole, P.S. whined,
was an atheist, a heliocentric, a Jacobin, a polyglot, and a Bachelor
of Arts. He burned the Bible, worked on the Sabbath, and advocated
vaccination. Moreover, like other Godless men such as Voltaire and
Franklin, he himself suffered from the pox. No wonder the Almighty
went so far as to blow in on a Catholic holiday.
�COLSTON
61
P.S. played to an outdoor crowd warmed by bonfires of burning
sugar barrels on the banks of Quick Creek. On the seventh day of P .S.'s
homily, his shivering congregation took fever. They shaked and quaked,
quook and shook, and then they headed for Quick Creek with Erasmus, dunking him backwards, nine-hundred-and-sixty-nine times-a
backwoods allusion to long-lived Methusaleh-and a Revolutionary War
sawbones said that his heart probably stopped on the hundredth immersion. After this ritualistic purification, they jumped in themselves, all
but the Klinkenbeards and Harrisons, which must have disappointed
the crawdads. Then they stormed over to the schoolhouse with flaming
oak boards, burned that last and best hope for mankind to the ground,
and urinated on the ashes.
They raised a log church on that very spot. It collapsed three
times that winter and killed six people, but was raised anew each time
with increased faith. After the first collapse, the Harrisons and Klinkenbeards headed for the briars and overhangs. P .S. joined forces with
some Robinson and Armstrong elders, and together they made Liberty's
first laws: against cannibalism, bestiality, bundling, hatless women,
Sabbath-breaking, public defecation, atheism, polygamy, snuff, chin
whiskers, earrings, whist, spirits, and the French language. The Gallic
influence got the blame for the late iniquity. Night rides against
homesteaders with names such as Le Jenne and Bomarshay were not
uncommon. Despite the heroic efforts of three Jefferson first-born males,
Liberty would not get another school until the twentieth century, and
that one would not have been built without a mysterious order from
Frankfort and a squadron of Army military police.
The obscure little village oscillated between boom and bust
throughout its !50-plus years. On the eve of Fort Sumter, a Cob discovered a rich saltpeter vein near Quick Creek. Within a month, three
gunpowder plants went up. After the Battle of Manassas, however, where
four kegs mysteriously blew up as if sparked by spontaneous combustion, Abraham Lincoln banned the purchase of all supplies from unreliable Gobblers-and-Knobs Explosives. In the 1880's, the Southern
Railroad put through a section of track connecting with the CovingtonLexington line in hopes of stimulating regional logging. The project
turned out to be only so much worthless steel and labor, for timber companies soon learned that the local white oak and scrub pine was full
of termite holes even when green and became dry and splintery when
seasoned. The last bringer of hope was Liberty Pike, started in the New
Deal and intended to be an alternative route for U.S. 25. Then mercurial Mars (to mix mythology) dealt Liberty another cruel blow on the
day that lives in infamy. With the country's resources devoted to the
national interest, all work on Liberty Pike was immediately stopped,
�62
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and it wasn't resumed until after Potsdam, when less generous Fair Dealers saw fit merely to connect the Freedom Highway, as it was known,
to U.S. 25 via winding back roads maintained by poor counties. For
the last thirty years, the county seat of Cob County had been at least
two hours away from the three great cities of the Commonwealth Golden
Triangle.
Cut off for so long from the world, Liberty was unto itself. Even
in the mid-1960's, Bill Ed Tuck, the barber, used hand clippers. Pap
Henry, the druggist, sold two gallons of enema refills a week; Ape Collins, owner of the Pure Oil gas station and a six-footer with a sevenfoot arm span, packed standard transmissions with sawdust; Rudy Smoot,
the grocer, operated a milk truck; Doc Puckett, the chiropractor, wrote
prescriptions without having a medical degree; most of the Harrisons
and Klinkenbeards owned stills. For beer, the best bet was bootleg,
since Cob County was dry, or Wilma Harrison's First/Last Chance on
the edge of wet contiguous Crackenham County. But this new expressway promised to bring Liberty up-to-date, and fast.
That was how the story of the founding was told in an obscure
historical journal by the ambitious wife of an archaeologist whom the
Commonwealth sent down to dig around before the extension construction began. With the reluctant help of the Backwards Dunking Local
Missionaries, she interviewed the courthouse bench jockeys, the patients at the old folks' home in Ararat, and the regulars at the First/Last
Chance. The journal was eager to increase its circulation and jazzed
up the wife's prose and invented a few corroborating facts without substantially changing the thesis. When the article was published, Brenda
Mane Armstrong, aspiring School Board member and head of the Local
Missionaries, was livid. She seized the tapes she was storing for the
wife in the church basement and spearheaded an angry but unsuccessful protest on ecological grounds against the archaeologist's digs out
where the wife was told had been the Territory Trail.
"You're tearing up nature and everythang," Brenda Mane said.
The archaeologist looked for weeks and never found a sign of
the Trail, although he did delve into an Eastern Woodland midden, from
which he scraped out a buffalo pelvis. Determined to fish out some
pioneer remains, he explored along Quick Creek, but found nothing
more interesting than two ordinary fossils, as common as dirt, and they
were borderline at that.
"I can't understand it," he told his wife. "I haven't come across
anything more than seventy-five years old-not a square-head nail, a
threadless bolt, or a piece of cast iron. This town has nothing beneath
the surface."
�COLSTON
63
"Are you calling me a liar?" His wife got huffy. "I've seen copies
of the newspaper from the Civil War."
The issue was never resolved, and it destroyed their marriage.
The bench jockeys got a big kick out of it.
The wife may have been referring to yellowed issues of the
Liberal, for Clyde Trample still used antique type, spelled "public"
with a final k, spurned headlines and photographs, and wrote columnlength paragraphs. He ran excerpts from her article on the back page
to get Brenda Mane's goat and did a profile on the new governor, who
sported a Paul McCartney haircut and drove a Jaguar.
So even before the first bulldozers were heard, Liberty made ready
for the extension. The Cob County Commissioners took bids on a sewer
system. C. Williamson Robinson, known as the Incest Defender, began reading up on personal injury law. The Dairy Queen put in a whole
new line of ice-ball flavors. Morgana Tuck, Billy Ed's wife, made him
buy a neck vacuum. She had blamed the unfulfilled promise of Liberty
Pike on her husband's failure to go electric.
"This time," she said, "we're not going to let a major highway
connecting us to the throb and beat of the nation get away from us.''
She herself built up a beehive hair-do on her head just as she had seen
on a short woman in Cincinnati. Unfortunately it collapsed on her one
day when she was buying Rainbow Bread at Rudy Smoot's. Delph
Henry, Pap's smart-mouthed boy, saw it cave in on one side and said,
"Quick, Ma, let's git out of here before !hey's a swarm!"
And even before the first dust clouds billowed, the local
churches-queer little sects that had been cut off from low Protestantism for better than a century-voiced their opinions. The Unlimited
Adventists hailed it as yet another Coming. The Grape Juice Christians
said it was the beginning of the end to regional temperance. The Squawking Methodists railed that it was going to be a freeway for the Antichrist.
But the Backwards Dunking Baptists, who proudly claimed to be the
first Baptists to practice immersion in the revealed manner before all
the others climbed on the bandwagon, were the biggest church in Cob
County and their attitude counted most.
"We withhold all judgment," Reverend Isa Dale said, "for a
later date in the future down the road 'cause there is some good thangs
to be said for progriss."
It was Frank Collins, Ape's trouble-maker of a son, who saw
the first signs of the highway. He was on the truck-stop site, standing
on the cab of an asphalt truck looking through binoculars.
"Here they come, Daddy," Frank shouted. "Bulldozers and
cement trucks and a Negro road crew."
�64
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Ape threw down his asphalt rake and cussed Frank down from
the cab. "Don't let me ever hear you call them Negroes again, boy,"
he said, snatching away the binoculars so violently that Frank's head
snapped back. He mounted the cab and took a look for himself. "Them's
niggers, sure enough.''
Yes, it was true: the government was actually paying them money
to stand around with spades over their shoulders. A few operated the
big bulldozers, and one was even a foreman, giving orders to a white
crew. It was hard to take, sort of like watching old athletes sit the bench
while young bloods gained applause. The bench jockeys jabbered about
it:
"I ain't never going to drive on no road built by niggers."
"You reckon they'll be driving on it?"
"Shore. It don't go now heres but to nigger cities."
"Can niggers drive?"
''I seen one driving a Mercury the other day. It was a automatic.''
But that they vowed never to drive on the extension didn't keep
them from watching it being built. During the day, they walked from
the courthouse down to sit among the honey locusts for a close look
at the devastation. It had the magnitude of a disaster movie: dynamite
exploded hills from the ground up, like earthquakes; bulldozers razed
bushes and woods, like floods. Trees lay stretched out and helpless like
bombed soldiers. Deer and rabbits ran recklessly about as if fleeing
a forest fire.
Pretty soon, dairy farmers who had long since let their cows go
dry got two hundred dollars an acre and free barbwire for their wildonioned and yellow-clovered pastures, through which the blazed area
ran, glinting and straight like a zipper. Taking a detour only around
the horse farms near Lexington, it swerved otherwise for nothing, relentless, wide, and cold-eyed, like a convoy of tanks through a forest. "Kiss
my ass,'' exclaimed one bench jockey sitting on a lawn chair, ''if that
ain't going to be a road!"
Day by day, the Negro highway workers inched closer and closer
to Liberty. They drove to the job site six to an Oldsmobile; they fished
and hunted crawdads on their lunch hours; they got within two miles
of the white women. Boss Dunn said he saw a whole gang of them corning out of the woods behind his trailer, each carrying a possum by the
tail. Any day now he expected to see them talking to somebody he knew.
Finally, it happened, one day when the temperature reached a
hundred and the road crew was within walking distance of Market Street.
The Negro foreman tightened his belt a notch and headed straight for
town. By the time he passed the bench jockeys, he had drawn a following of nine boys who thought he was either a space man or a profes-
�COLSTON
65
sional boxer. If he didn't change direction, he would run smack into
Pap Henry's drug store and soda fountain. It was scandalous enough
to make the bench jockeys stand up.
The foreman was brilliant with sweat, and most of the gathered
crowd had never seen a Negro. In fact, they didn't know you weren't
supposed to use that word anymore. Of course, neither Pap Henry's
nor anything else in Liberty had ever been segregated, and, since the
last black in town was a telephone lineman who set foot on earth only
for lunch and coffee breaks, they weren't real sure about unwritten laws
concerning the mingling of the races. Nevertheless, they .had the feeling that this young fellow who shone like Sidney. Poi tier was going to
attempt something reckless and forbidden.
He did. He bought the boys some candy. "Give me a bag of suckers for these childerns," the foreman said inside Pap's.
The boys defied their daddies by accepting, plunking the suckers into jaws packed with chewing tobacco.
Then the foreman walked over to the fountain, and the cashier,
Lilian Waters, forgot to push in on her drawer. She had rung up ten
thousand dollars. Delph Henry got scared and ran into the back room
to fetch Pap. The customers stood close by so as to see which stool
they would have to avoid sitting on forevermore.
Well, he pissed off everybody by not sitting down. ''I's hot and
dripping everwhar," he explained.
Lilian forced a denture smile for a few seconds and then huffed,
"Well, we get by with the fan."
While the foreman eyed the menu above the ceramic-and-steel
milkshake mixers, the customers were taking their time looking over
the Epsom Salts and enemas. Finally, Pap Henry emerged from the
back room, twitching his neck as if to scare off flies.
"Root-beer float," the foreman said. Sheriff Boone was standing in the doorway by then, and he distinctly noticed that the foreman
forgot to say please. The Sheriff was ready to go to work, for there
must have been a dozen voters in there.
Pap's neck twitched some more, and then he picked up the ice
cream scoop with a flourish. "Hit's on the house," he announced. "I
was just fixing to send out some flyers. Until that 'air road is finished,
everthang on the menu's ten per-cent off for you and the rest of your
crew." Pap was a horse trader, and that was a smart move, for the
Dairy Whip was a quarter-mile closer to the ·extension, and he had been
looking for a chance to run it out of business for a long time.
*
��I \\
.,
I
�Two Translations
of La Fontaine
La Cigale et la fourmi
La Cigale, ayant chante
Tout l'Ete,
Se trouva fort depourvue
Quand Ia bise fut venue.
Pas un seul petit morceau
De mouche ou de vermisseau.
Elle alia crier famine
Chez Ia Fourmi sa voisine,
La priant de lui preter
Quelque grain pour subsister
Jusqu'a Ia saison nouvelle.
Je vous ~aierai, lui dit-elle,
Avant !'Out, foi d'animal,
Interet et principal.
La Fourmi n'est pas pretense;
C' est hi son moindre ctefaut.
'Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud?
Dit-elle cette emprunteuse.
-Nuit et jour tout venant
Je chantais, ne vous cteplaise.
- Vous chantiez? j' en suis fort aise.
Eh bien! dansez maintenant.'
a
a
La Fontaine, Fables, I,
1.
66
�LA FONTAINE
67
The Cicada and the Ant
The cicada, having sung her song
All summer long,
Was left deprived
When the north wind arrived:
Not a bit of worm laid by,
Nor bite of fly.
To her neighbor the ant
She went to chant
Her complaint of starvation
And borrow a ration
Of grain
Till summer came round again.
'I'll pay you back with interest before
Next fall,' she swore
Upon her
Insect's honor.
The ant was not a lender
(Heaven defend her
From such an accusation!)
She asked the beggar 'What did you do
When the days were warm and the sky was blue?'
'Night and day throughout the summer
I sang my song to every comer.'
The ant: 'I'm sure your singing was entrancing:
Now try dancing. '
E.Z.
�68
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Le Corbeau et le renard
Maitre Corbeau, sur un arbre perche,
Tenait en son bee un fromage.
'
' '
Maitre Renard, par I' odeur alleche,
Lui tint ii peu pres ee langage:
Et bonjour, Monsieur du Corbeau.
Que vous etes joli! que vous me semblez beau!
Sans mentir, si votre ramage
Se rapporte ii votre plumage,
Vous etes le Phenix des hotes de ees bois.
A ees mots, le Corbeau ne se sent pas de joie;
Et pour montrer sa belle voix,
II ouvre un large bee, laisse tomber sa proie.
Le Renard s'en saisit, et dit: Mon bon Monsieur,
Apprenez que tout flatteur
Vit aux ctepens de eelui qui I' eeoute.
Cette le9on vaut bien un fromage, sans doute.
Le Corbeau honteux et eonfus
Jura, mais un peu tard, qu'on ne l'y prendrait plus.
1,11.
�LA FONTAINE
69
The Crow and the Fox
Sir Crow was perching in a tree
Holding in his beak a brie.
Sir Fox, attracted by the cheese,
Spoke words like these:
'Such handsome plumage! Such a sleek veneer!
If your trilling
Is half so thrilling
How sweetly you must sing! Please do so:
Of all the woodland warblers, let me hear
The Caruso.'
The victim has no choice:
He must show off his voice.
He opens his great beak and drops the cheese.
Seizing the prize, the fox observes: 'Mon cher,
Here is a lesson worth a camembert:
Every flatterer
Lives on the income of his flatteries.'
The crow, ashamed and shaken, swore that he
Never again would be a flatteree.
E.Z.
����Book Review
Allan Bloom:
The Closing of the American Mind*
Eva Brann
I
Here is a book which compels the question whether we should
be glad of its existence. My answer is that we should be thrice glad,
glad once that it was written, and glad that, having been produced, it
found such favor with the public. The bulk of this review will address
itself to the reservations which prompt the question in the first instance.
Of the two reasons for rejoicing in its success-it is at the date of this
writing in first place on the best-seller list-one is somewhat sly and
the other quite straightforward. First, Mr. Bloom's book is the jeremiad of liberal education; but a Jeremiah eagerly heard, a prophet honored
in his own land, is a prophet more than half refuted. As for the plain
pleasure, it is simply that the book will do some concrete good.
Some good, evidenced in small incremental improvements: the
ear of a foundation here, a modest program there. Mr. Bloom himself
has no illusions about a great systemic reprise of liberal education (380).
An indication of the practical impossibility that the requisite cohesion
should ever come back, is in the concurrent success of E. D. Hirsch's
book, Cultural Literacy, in which is advocated a return to what used
to be called "general information" (now defined descriptively as acquaintance with a list of some 3800 terms), while the one solution Mr.
Eva Brann is a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. Shy is the author of Paradoxes
of Education in a Republic (University of Chicago, 1970). This review was written
in July, 1987.
*New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987
71
�72
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Bloom finally offers-to be sure, with many cautionary contortionsnamely the reading of Great Books (344), is disavowed in Hirsch's
preface. In truth, the thought of our whole vast establishment suddenly
converted to liberal learning is somehow appalling, like the image of
a continent-sized wheel of fine, ripe cheese. The factor of scale seems
to me serious and of the essence. Communities of liberal learning require small size and spontaneous beginnings; the unanimity which ensouls and maintains them becomes oppressive and mechanical when
hugely magnified and centrally mandated.
In fact, it is strange to me that Mr. Bloom fixed on the universities as the possible loci for the learning whose loss he mourns, when
surely our three thousand or so small colleges are its more likely home.
The glory of the modern university has properly been not in contemplative reflection and aporetic conversation but in cumulative research
and brilliant breakthroughs. And I will pit my experience in a score
of more or less obscure little schools against his among a thousand
university students: In these places student souls are still capable of grand
longings, books are read with receptive naivete, and religion is not debased to the frisson of' 'the sacred.'' Small places are our internal educational frontier, and the spirit lives in the sticks.
With respect to the effective influence the book might exert (as
opposed to the passing waves it superimposes on the roiled ocean of
opinion), there is something to be regretted in Mr. Bloom's policy of
presenting himself as a voice crying in a wilderness; for in fact the wilderness has quite a few cultivated clearings. He speaks namelessly of his
teachers and not at all of the institutional foci of resistance to the rot
he exposes. His likely motives are most reasonable: not to be set aside
because of sectarian associations, and, by suppressing the names of his
allies and predecessors, to win the right of keeping the targets of his
contempt anonymous. Consequently this irate tract manages to preserve
a certain American civility. Nonetheless, the price is that general readers will have to discover for themselves the addresses of the contemporary sources and places where effective resistance is carried on, such
as St. John's College itself.*
*Some of these fellow-fighters in the battle against the soul-unstaying piffle-terms, those
relaxants of shape and significance, which are the real, or at least the most interesting,
butt of the book, such as creativity, self, culture, life-style, and communication, are
hearteningly easy to find. For example, there are Judith Martin's vastly popular ''Miss
Manners" books, which, under the guise of pronouncing on etiquette, often ironicize
our linguistic mores; thus Miss Manners bids us to "make a special effort to learn
to stop communicating with one another, so that we can have some conversation."
Here is no inconsiderable ally!
�BRANN
73
One word more on the reception of the book. Quite a few people are obscurely enraged by it and express that aversion-just as Mr.
Bloom indeed predicts-by means of certain schematic terms, such as
racism, elitism, and nostalgia-mongering, that are currently used to
impute as sin unpopular though perfectly defensible opinions. It should
not be considered a sin for Mr. Bloom to observe regretfully the more
than occasional self-segregation of black students in the universities.
Again, if one really wished to show him wrong, one would not
angrily call him an elitist-silly term-but, by refraining, prove that
democracies can indeed contain even their contraries. On "Firing Line"
in May of this year Mr. Bloom respectfully but skeptically characterized the views of Midge Deeter (who is, incidentally, one of his predecessors in worrying about America's young) as "serious populism." For
my part, I subscribe to this sort of populism, which precisely disavows
the entity called "the People" because of the conviction that people
one by one have in them, besides sound sense, the roots of reflection;
thus they occupy places in a continuum with the deepest philosophers
and are capable of participating to some degree in a common liberal
education.
This proposition is what Mr. Bloom evidently disbelieves. He
thinks that philosophy, the highest pursuit, is not for everybody. I think
he is wrong, democratic or undemocratic aside. (I do not want to concede either to him or to his opponents that his own opinions are truly
any more incompatible with strong democratic sentiments than many
other things one needs to believe along with one's civic creed. There
is an argument which in its amplitude would have brought even Mr.
Bloom into the democratic fold had he cared to use it: pluralism.)
To begin with, his view of aristocracy has a stylized, unreal air.
He seems to think that the honor-seeking aristocratic type, the magnanimous lover of the beautiful and the useless, is dominant in real-life
aristocracies, just as he must think the vain, sycophantic, utilitarian,
democratic type is pervasive in democracies (250). From what I read
and hear, "the beautiful" for aristocrats has usually meant-and still
means-mostly horseflesh, and if Mr. Bloom were not first run through
by his aristocrat's sword for impugning his stud as useless, he would
soon find himself dying of boredom from the nobleman's conversation.
To be sure, Squire Western is more lovable than the aesthetic snob Mr.
Bloom unwittingly delineates. These aristocrats, who, Mr. Bloom himself is careful to state, are far from being philosophers, are said by him
to be likely to admire philosophers for their uselessness (250). To my
knowledge they used to require them to work for their places at the
bottom of the table as pedagogues and secretaries. But the main point
is that a careless opposition has confused the issue here. The non-
�74
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
utilitarian is not the useless but it is that which is beyond both the useful and the useless, and in particular it is what makes all usefulness
possible. Talk of the uselessness of philosophy obscures its universal
needfUlness.
As for the actual citizens of a democracy, Mr. Bloom writes as
though in this country no businessman had ever written sophisticated
yet beautiful poetry or had ever composed advanced yet lovingly American music, no backwoodsman had ever achieved incomparable yet popular grandeur, no sailor had ever told an enormous moral myth which
was also an account of the whaling industry. Mr. Bloom draws from
his anti-populist views one simple rule for the university: It should not
concern itself with providing its students with the democratic experiences
they cannot escape in democratic society, but it must provide those they
cannot have there (256). It should be a safe-house for aristocracy. This
injunction seems to politicize and turn into paradox a true pedagogical
precept, namely that colleges and universities should provide no "lifeexperiences" at all but should attend to book-learning and the other
theoretical pursuits which are their proper business. Whatever is done
in an American school cannot help but come out as a democratic experience, not least the free and direct discussion of Great Books. For
it involves the democratic presumption that a cat may look at a king.
Europeans tend to find this typically American and somewhat comical.
I have heard the charge of nostalgia-mongering with respect to
what seems to me Mr. Bloom's very restrained rehabilitation of the
fifties. To be sure, I don't quite believe his claim that these were the
great days of the American universities. As I recall it, they were the
very years when professors anticipated Mr. Bloom in bemoaning the
apathy and lack of public commitment on the part of their students, the
years whose prosperous philistinism retarded my Americanization by
a decade. But his praise of the fifties is in any case only the prelude
to the damning of the sixties, the anathema of the book, which Mr.
Bloom hates with verve enough to energize every chapter. This autobiographical impulse is patent to everyone. Not that one would blame
him. What happened at Cornell, what the faculty seems to have permitted itself by way of moral indeterminacy, might well inflict a trauma never to be forgotten. The only saving grace of the episode, which
so blessedly distinguishes it from the case of the German universities
under the Nazis, is that the people of this democracy never made common cause with the professors.
This is the moment to say a word about Mr. Bloom's writing.
As The Closing is, of necessity, something of a magpie book intellectually, so in style it has a sort of mongrel eloquence: literately turned
phrases suddenly develop colloquial cadences, the prose is inspissated
�BRANN
75
with metaphor, and the exposition is torrential. It aroused in me a sense
of sympathetic recognition. This is a style formed under the pressure
of the most pervasive sort of anxiety there is. For most human misfortunes, from physical pain to miscarried love, there is local relief and
the prospect of recovery, but the fear for the spirit of one's country
is an incessant taint upon the enjoyment of life. Mr. Bloom's country
is the America of the Universities, and the anxious patriotism which
steals the serenity from his style does his sentiments honor.
II
To pass from the circumstantial to the substantive: Is this a good
book?
People regularly refer to it as brilliant. So it is, but brilliance
belongs to the demi-monde of intellectual virtues. It would be silly to
regret the flamboyance which is winning it its audience; at the same
time it would be wrong not to register, for the record, certain substantial doubts.
Let me begin this way: I would not recommend the book to students, not because it will offend their sensibilities-it can do them nothing
but good to be forced to defend themselves articulately-but because
it is a book not only of generational pulse-taking but also of intellectual
history. I would not wish our ·students to get their intellectual history
from this book (I shall shortly argue that it is a little too coarse-grained
even of its kind)-or indeed from any book. To my mind, the notion
that the intellect might have a history, that thought might develop a direction over the generations, should come to students as a late and suspect
insight, long after each individual work of thought has been given its
a-historical due.
The Closing of the American Mind is, I am implying, a historicist enterprise or, more fairly, next cousin to it. Since historicism, the
notion that the temporal place of a text determines its significance more
than does the author's conscious intention and that history through its
movements is a real agent, is Mr. Bloom's bete nair, this is no small
charge. But there is no getting around the fact that the book continually
places and positions great names evaluatively from the outside in-of
internal philosophical substance it contains very little. Similarly it persistently sums the spirit of the times and seeks its genealogy in intellectual movements. For example, he says that the university as we know
it is the product of the Enlightenment (250), a typical historicist summation in which the tree vanishes into the forest. Indeed, some of his
judgments are simply distance effects (as are most historicist conclusions), which dissolve under a close inspection. A crucial example is
�76
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the claim that nowadays "all the students are egalitarian meritocrats"
(90). If that were true, and a group held a belief without exception,
one would indeed be driven, willy-nilly to the thought of a domination
by a supra-individual spirit, that is, a congenital psychic infection by
history. In fact it is probably false. In my experience there are always
some students who are acutely if reticently proud of the advantages accruing from the right sex, religion, and social status, while those who
do believe that "each individual should be allowed to develop his special and unequal talents" without reference to those factors might, I
put it to Mr. Bloom, not just generationally believe it but also individually think it; it is certainly what I think.
The title itself is revealing. It is, to be sure, not Mr. Bloom's
choice. He wanted the euphonious and accurate title "Souls Without
Longing" (the French title is "L'Ame desannee''). But he condoned
"The Closing of the American Mind." The "Closing" part is fine:
one of the most convincing chapters is the early one in which he shows
how openness corrupted, which becomes the lazily tolerant path ofleast
resistance, forecloses passionate doubting, and how the springboard of
learning is vigorous prejudice. But "the American Mind" is debased
Hegelianism, and a scandal. Americans do, happily, still have certain
areas of consensus; nonetheless, they have more than one mind among
them.
It is utterly clear to me that Mr. Bloom does not mean what his
words say, but it is odd that he is willing himself to supply the example
of that soul-slackening disconnection of thought from utterance that he
so spiritedly attacks. In fact this permissiveness exacts its price at the
end, when he makes the judgment without which the book would be
pointless: "Philosophy is still possible" (307), even, presumably, in
America. His philosophy of history (and the project of the book really
requires one) is simply too diffuse to support this optimism after all
the gloom: he has obscured the only basis upon which the possible can,
according to Aristotle, ever become actual, namely prior actuality. In
short, "still" is the stumbling block here.
Perhaps what is missing rather than a philosophy of intellectual
history is its antithesis, a theory of opinion-holding, particularly an explanation of how and with what effect people say non-thoughts and become attached to terms of low thought-content. I hold to the axiom,
which must seem culpably cheerful to Mr. Bloom, that shallow opinions are mostly shallowly rooted. Therefore I cannot share his passionate sadness at the deficient eros, the spiritual detumescence (136), of
the American student soul. Though somewhat masked by the gormless
language of the "sensitive, caring and non-possessive relationship,"
lustful, hurtful, exclusive love goes gloriously on.
�BRANN
77
But whether it does or no, there is something not quite consistent in this mourning over the de-compression of the soul. Mr. Bloom
describes with wicked verve the fatal invasion of the limpid American
mind by the dark knowledge of the German refugees. He must know
what a crucial role adolescent intensity played in shaping both these
Europeans and their persecutors. I think that when Americans trivialize the continental depth (!57) they so eagerly absorb, they are often
very sensibly-and not altogether unwittingly-counteracting their own
intellectual prurience. And so, when the young cluelessly acclimatize
Heideggerian Gelassenheit as "staying loose" (or so Mr. Bloom pretends to believe), it may not be such a tragedy: at least from staying
loose there is a possible road to reason.
My doubts so far have really concerned the nature of generalization as practiced in this book, but my final set of complaints concerns its quality. The text seems to be stuffed with truth that is not the
whole truth and not nothing but the truth. Of course it is very hard to
hit all the small nails squarely on the head with so large a mallet, yet
there are fine and there are coarse ways of epitomizing spheres of thought
and trends of opinion. Mr. Bloom's often anonymous and torrential mode
of presentation makes it hard to tell whether the trouble is with his accuracy or his perspective. Moreover, he sometimes seems to present
an anonymous modern opinion as though it had but to come in contact
with the air to self-destruct, while his great moderns, Rousseau and
Nietzsche, seem somehow to merit awed admiration for setting us on
the road we are condemned for following. Mr. Bloom's relation especially to Rousseau is the mystery of mysteries to me. One of the excellences of his exposition is the continual pointing to Rousseau not just
as the uncannily accurate analyst but as the brilliantly effective originator of the corruption-prone side of modernity. (The book neglects
to its detriment the complementary side, the reverence-producing splendor of modern science and mathematics). But then why is Mr. Bloom
not on record as being at least as repelled as he is fascinated by this
"inverse Socrates" (298)?
For Socrates is the pervasive hero of the book-Socrates the
anomalous man, that is, not Socrates the conductor of fairly comprehensible conversations, or the contemplator of communicable truth. This
curtailed Socrates comes before the American public brusquely defining the task of philosophy as learning how to die; from this picture it
takes but a few steps to reach the conclusion that there is an incomposable quarrel between the philosophers and most of mankind (277 -8).
Mr. Bloom manages to turn Socratic philosophizing into an utter arcanum simply through by-passing its substance. I think that when Socrates
is brought on the scene he should appear as practicing the life he thought
�78
THE STJOHN'S REVIEW
worth living.
Indeed, the fact that actual philosophy is kept at one remove in
this book, that it is a tract on the love of the love of wisdom, is responsible for a certain skewing in the analysis of contemporary ills. Let me
give one of many examples I could cite.
That "the self is the modern substitute for the soul" (173) is an
indispensible insight in the analysis of modernity. But in the section
devoted to it Mr. Bloom simply suppresses reference to "subjectivity,"
the philosophical term through which are to be reached the deep and
not ignoble motives for the substitution: to be utterly unfooled, to confront nature as its knower, to be freely good. Consequently contemporary talk of the self and its discovery is deprived of the respectable
strain that, it seems to me, still somehow resonates in the most debased
chatter. Our "three-hundred-year-long identity crisis" is, for all its latterday indignities, the unavoidable working out of a brave and compelling choice: We are essentially neither ensouled instantiations of an eternal species, nor creatures whose souls are made by God, but ungrounded
spontaneous individual subjects. The function of philosophy should be
not to shame us for it, but to re-dignify our dilemmas.
I want to end with the chapter on music, a chapter that is close
to Mr. Bloom's heart, and that he mistakenly thinks is unregarded. In
fact, young readers turn to it first and rage at it, thereby confirming
his observation that rock is their love. It is, to be sure, in a book that
insists that the best is for the few, somewhat inconsistent to discount
the lovers of classical music because they are fewer than one in ten,
but the main point, so truly observed, is that the adherence to rock is
universal. (I have never heard anyone young speak against it.) I do not
quite believe that rock "has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire" (73). I am a sporadic watcher of MTV and know that what
the visualizations pick up in the music is its weirdness, whininess, bizarrerie, meanness, and scariness-in sum, a whole vocabulary of extrasexual excruciation, which is often ironically and even wittily exploited. The appeal is not so hard to understand; it is its universality and
depth that remains a mystery.
For Mr. Bloom's explanation does not quite reach the love aroused
by this, or any, music. For him, following, as he claims, Plato and
Nietzsche, music is the "barbarous expression of the soul," the soul's
primitive, pre-rational speech, pure passion. I take it as read that he
knows his Republic, but where in it did he find this theory? His own
translation corrects the impression given by earlier versions that the
musical modes express the passions (Rep. 398 e 1). According to Socrates
they rather shape them. Moreover, the music must follow the words,
which it couldn't do if it had no close relation to reason. (Indeed it was
�79
BRANN
Socrates' Pythagorean friends who propagated the great tradition or
music as qualitative mathematics.) Some musical modes are more soulrelaxing than others, but these latter, the bracing ones, are the most
potent instruments that the community possesses for forming the soul
into grace amenable to reason. It follows fhat there is nothing truly primitive or pre-rational even about the most orgiastic music, and that when
a sect succumbs to Wagner or a generation to rock, the explanation
cannot start from raw passion, but must begin with corrupt reason. Mr.
Bloom has succumbed to the prime error of those dark Germans, which
is to think that the soul of a rational animal somewhere harbors a naturepreserve of pure primitive passions.
III
To conclude. The Closing of the American Mind is not only an
opportune summation of decades of critique, but it is also among the
early tappings of a turning tide. For the tide is turning, though not to
float a happy and harmonious new liberal learning, but to ground us
in a sad new abstinence. It has very suddenly come home to us that
the world is full of dangers just where we sought our pleasures: spending, sex, substances, sound, even sunshine. We will be drawn in upon
ourselves, we will have to take new thought, and in these straits liberal
literacy, the attentive reading of good books, may eventually play a
modest role as something of a saving grace.
Because of Mr. Bloom this thought may come a little sooner to
a somewhat larger number of people. Moreover, since it comes embedded in a critique of our current condition that is wholly passionate and
largely true, there will be a more immediate effect: Some readers of
the Closing of the American Mind are bound to experience a re-opening
of their minds to the all-but-foreclosed understandings behind our
present. That will be its success beyond celebrity.
�JACOB KLEIN
Lectures and Essays
CONTENTS
1986
393 pages, hardcover, $22.50
The World of Physics and the "Natural" World 0 On a
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KCHTUCKYW\l.sapart of Vtrgmia unttl_11dmtU~d 115 a
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TENNE.SS£I was apart of North Carolina until admitted
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for tt"' W•st.rrn Land claims of South Carolina
and Gtor91a,su Plates 88-89
Summer, 1985
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��THE
ST.
JoHN's REVIEW
Summer 1985
Publius 1804
A Play in Two Acts
John Alvis
Act I
Scene 1
The morning of June 18, 1804. Vice-President Aaron Burr's private
study in his townhouse in New York City. The furnishing of the library
is a matter of indifference as long as there are many books precisely
arranged. A crystal vase containing a single red rose is set on a small
commode and at stage center on the wall a large framed picture which
will be identified as a portrait of Burr's daughter, Theodosia, and her
husband, Charles Alston.
At rise enter from right accompanied by a seroant-woman William
P. Van Ness, middle-aged, rather formally dressed in the style of the
times, fanning himself with his top hat. Throughout the scene Van
Ness is obviously agitated.
Van Ness. [hands hat to servant-woman] Or rather, infernally hot
I should I say, Mrs. Mulroy. The Vice-President expects me?
Seroant-Wdman. Yes, sir. Colonel Burr instructed me to see you
into the library. The Vice-President should be down directly.
Van Ness. Thank you, Mrs. Mulroy. Thafs very fine. [Turns
to look at the portrait]
Servant-Woman. Might I bring you a cup of coffee, Mr. Van
Ness? Or tea?
Van Ness. [somewhat absently] Er, yes, that would be quite acceptable.
Servant-Woman. Which?
Van Ness. [turns to her abruptly] Beg pardon? Oh, ah, coffee
. . . no . . . tea, excuse me.
Servant-Woman. Tea, Mr. Van Ness?
Van Ness. Yes, thank you ... Er, Mrs. Mulroy? I wonder, if
the Colonel is indisposed, perhaps I should postpone my
call ...
Enter Burr in a dressing gown, lightly powdered hair clubbed and
bound with a black band. He carries a small volume in his left hand,
his index finger inserted to mark the place. Burr's movements are slow,
dignified, and somewhat feline; his characteristic gesture is to close
both eyes and to press the lids with thumb and second finger of his
right hand. The movement is expressive of prodigious world-weariness
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and ennui. Yet combined with this prevailing impression of languor
are movements of extraordinary alertness and decisiveness as indicative of substantial resources of energy and will.
Burr. [extending his hand to Van Ness] Never postpone, my dear
William. [mock sententiouslyl''Night cometh and then no man
can work."
Van Ness. [takes Burr's offered hand] Mr. Vice-President ...
Burr. William, we needn't bore each other with ceremony;
we're not in Washington, thank God. This nation should shut
down at the beginning of June. The Virginia river-bottoms
in summer are no fit habitation for civilized men, nor even
for Southerners, I should think, though they seem somehow
to have inured themselves to it;
Van Ness. I trust the salubrious sea breezes of the Battery have
begun to clear· your brain of the marshy miasmas. You appear to enjoy better health, sir, than the last time we met.
Burr. ['m indifferent refreshed, thank you, William. I think I'd
be recovered altogether could I clear my head of the latest fulminations of that fool Jefferson. Our President resents imputations of inconsistency as an old maid aspersions upon the
cleanliness of her linen. Now he iS claiming that his defense
of "the great principle of freedom of the press" never comprehended what he is now pleased to call"license" -to wit,
the recent critiCisms of Mr, Jefferson's rougher tactics by one
... ah-Crosby?
Van Ness. CroswelL
Burr. Croswell, yes. Upstate smalltown newspaper. You
defended him, did you not?
Van Ness. I was one of his attorneys. Along with Hamilton.
Burr. Hamilton, of course. One of Hamilton's few defeats.
Van Ness. Yet he was brilliant in the summing up.
Burr. Is he not always?
Van Ness. In a good cause or a bad.
Burr. So I have reason, sadly, to agree.
Van Ness. I trust I shall not now be the cause of yet more sadness for you but , . .
Burr. [seats himself carefully and motions to Van Ness to take a
chair] I seem to have lived the better part of my life within
earshot of Hamilton's lurid eloquence. What does Milton say?
1
�''his tongue/Dropped manna, and could make the worse appear/ The better reason."
Van Ness. Yes, well, his tongue may have dropped you, sir,
right out of the governor's race.
Burr. Ah, William, such is my fate. We must not kick against
the pricks. Speaking of which ... dear Mr. Jefferson has
cooled toward me of late. I seem not so worthy now of his
tender solicitations as some years hence when I could afford
him my votes. In fact, I have concluded that His Sapience of
Monticello has now determined to drive me out of his political party. He never believed I was truly a republican and in
that one judgment almost alone, my estimable William, he
is correct.
Van Ness. [bitterly] You could have had the Presidency ...
Burr. Ah, William . . .
Van Ness. You could have had it, sir. Nay, but it cannot be
denied! That smooth fellow Bayard. He all but begged you
to offer him the bribe that would have opened the door.
Burr. Yes. And I think of all the good reasons Mr. Jefferson
has to dislike me, that, above anything, festers on the rind
of his dear, compendious conscience. That I should decline
what he could not, for the life of him, could not for all his
protestations of Olympian toploftiness.
Van Ness. And what did he use to buy Bayard's machination?
Burr. I must say I never cared to seek the bottom of that mystery. There are too many plausible bribes that would have
served. Though I should not be surprised to learn that Thomas
Jefferson became third President of these benighted states at
the cost of no more than a promise to keep certain Federalists
in the posts they had gotten themselves well accustomed to
under Washington and Adams.
VanNess. And that was toomuchforyou to pay? You to whom
the same bid was first made?
Burr. Bayard had a kind of unctuous effluvia to him ...
Van Ness. [sadly and wistfully} That odor was the fleeting aroma of a power more lasting, I fear, than ariy, my good patron, you now may ever hope to know.
Burr. Besides, the man intruded with his schemes at the most
inopportune moment for political brokering.
Van Ness. "Politics acknowledges no sabbath," you yourself
have said it, I seem to recall.
B,urr. [ignoring Van Ness and absorbed in recollection] Th~ most
inopportune moment. Just as I was immersed in wedding arrangements for my thrice-blessed Theodosia-the best daughter nature ever provided. We were deliberating, she and I,
upon the date when I should join her and her new husband
on their return from England. We had just set on a time in
May when the flora of South Carolina should have come fully
forth in all its savage abundance and so should have assuaged
somewhat the pains of returning from civilization to these uncouth shores. Just at such a moment of paterfarnilial rapture
a distinct forerunner of said James Bayard crept into my nostrils followed presently by the quintessence itself, the senior
Senator from Delaware, who, with something less of c~re
mony than was found requisite by Satan in proposing mischief to our first parents, commenced plying me with his
assurances of esteem mingled with threats of my public
extinction if I could not bring myself to feel, or at least profess,
an equivalent esteem for himself-or his party, I forget which.
In any event the bumptious indecorousness of his manner
of address so put me out of any hope of a conformable temper that I am bound to say I did not much attend the particulars of his proposal and, thus transported beyond indignation,
I thrust him out of doors.
2
Van Ness. And yourself out of the Presidency.
Burr. Thereby propelling myself into that ungainly super£!
the office of the Vice-President of these United States
office which one might have thought Hamlet had some
occupied from the melancholy of his dry complaint, "
the air promise-crammed.'' [one voracious ingestion of a gt
air]
Van Ness. And only your poor pride prevented the full f,
Burr. [softly} Not only my poor pride.
Van Ness. Pardon?
Burr. [quite softly} Not only my poor pride.
Van Ness. [also abruptly lowering his voice] To be sure, not
that. There was indeed, Hamilton.
Burr. There is always, to be sure, Hamilton.
Van Ness. He could have brought around Bayard, and al
Federalist minions.
Burr. "Thou sayest it."
Van Ness. You, my best of captains, know it to be so.
Burr. [once more rapt in meditation] As I know the abscest
der my tongue, I know it, William. Once, just once, I i
known the sweet relish of triumph over that man. It
almost the first time I collided with him. At the very 01
of the Revolution, Howe's first campaign against Wasl
ton-the summer of '76 on Long Island. Howe had jus
us up pretty badly on Brooklyn Heights and we were tr
to join the main body of the army where Washington
stayed, in upper Manhattan. I was riding towards Wasl
ton's headquarters when I came upon a little fort cram
with confused, fear-bedazed rebels. They were milling a
a great stout fellow, General Knox, who kept swiping a
forehead and looking stupidly at everything and nothing
a steer who's just been polled between the eyes.
Van Ness. Henry Knox. Hamilton propped him up as VI
ington's Secretary of War.
Burr. [busies himself with the fire, speaking with his back to
Ness] The same. This time he was propped against or
Hamilton's beloved cannons. Hamilton had been p1
charge of three little brass fieldpieces that looked hardly
ger than a child's toy guns. When I rode up Hamilton
actually brushing the mud off the carriage as if he were a
to go on parade. Always a cool little fellow except whe
is embarrassed, then he turns the color of a rooster's c
and trembles all over. [The housekeeper enters tentatively]
Mrs. Mulroy?
Housekeeper. Beg your pardon, sir. There's a lady to see)
She would not send her name.
Burr. Do you not know the lady, Mrs. Mulroy?
Housekeeper. No sir. But if you please, sir, I believe it is the J
you were showing out when I came in yesterday morn
Burr. [turns back to the fire scuttle and rakes the coals} Ah,
Please tell the Countess I am momentarily detained. s~
her some of your justly famed coffee, perhaps?
Housekeeper. Yes, sir. [exit]
Burr. [straightening up, turning to Van Ness, and, after the ch1
teristic gesture of pressing the eyes} But presently young Ha
ton had sufficient cause for embarrassment. He found hin
caught between his prudence and his vanity and both C<
not be served.
Van Ness. [sniffs his pouncet box] Knowing the man's bot
less vanity and his small prudence, I cannot think it a do·
ful contest.
Burr. But the circumstances enforced prudence, for hear: K
was unwilling or incapable of movement and what he ,
these men had taken for a refuge was in truth their prh~
SUMMER
1~
�or their grave. The British were strong and near, Knox was
cut off from help. Yet I could not make the fellow see the
danger that was only too evident to everyone else. It was evident to Hamilton once I pointed out the dust from Howe's
columns and the distance up to Washington on Harlem
Heights. Hamilton wavered, but at the same time he would
not second me because he was obviously furious that he had
fallen into a trap and that I was putting him in the position
of having to give over a chance to show his bravery. So just
like the fool Knox, Hamilton stared on the ground and stayed
by his little guns.
Van Ness. A delicate bit of an impasse I should think.
Burr. Resolved only by the most desperate insubordination
which, in a better army, would have gotten me summarily
shot. I jumped ship, so to speak, and a battalion of Continentals jumped with me. I appealed over the head of the General to the troops themselves. Pretty much as that cheeky fellow
Genet recently attempted to appeal over Washington to the
people. As soon as I had informed the men of the death by
hanging that I suspected was the imminent fate of every one
of us, they boiled out of the gate and started up the back roads
to safety. Hamilton and Knox had no choice but to follow.
But Hamilton came near to a youthful demise by apoplexy.
He resented my oratorical success. He was mortified to find
himself hurried along like a cigar butt by a broom. And worst
of everything, he was thrust out of the fort so precipitously
that he lost baggage and one of his revered cannon!
Van Ness. [laughing} Aye, and he's beeri seeking it ever since.
The least commotion imaginable and he was certain to offer
his services as a Major-General. Washington must have sickened over the ridiculousness of his promptness to declare war
on his fellow citizens. Such a pother over a few amateur distillers in the western counties of Pennsylvania!
Burr. [after a pause] Yes. But bating the one time just told, I
cannot say that Hamilton has permitted me to catch him again
thus unprepared.
Van Ness. [quite softly] I think you may now have your chance.
Burr. [not hearing Van Ness's last remark because absorbed in his
recollections} No, I cannot say that General Hamilton has
allowed me the initiative on many occasions since. [Burr ex-
tracts the single rose from the vase and, as he paces back and forth
and narrates his encounters with the rival, he detaches petals for
each item of the narration} First, there was his levering Washington against me. Once Hamilton had intrigued himself onto
the personal staff of the great man, he lost no opportunity
to malign me to Washington's avid, and I must say capacious,
ears. Having convinced our American Caesar that Burr was
insubordinate (which I was) and not to be trusted (untrue but
plausible), I never was from that moment permitted a command suited to my proven abilities. Not though I yearned for
action as the foal yearns for the teat. You might think a
grandee such as Washington could forget over the years. Not
the Virginia squire! When Hamilton maneuvered Adams into
appointing him major general during the tense time with
France, I then asked for the modest recognition of the rank
of Brigadier. Eventually, after some shuffling, Adams had to
confess that he was set upon by the superannuated Washington-prompted by whom I leave to your capacity for
inference-and forced to countermand a commission already
signed! No one dared to gainsay Washington. And Washington dared not pass water without the approbation of his Treasurer and party-head.
Van Ness. [attempts to rise} And Hamilton to this day continues
to malign ...
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Burr. [playfully pokes Van Ness with the rose, forcing him back upon
the settee} There! Did I tell you of the business of the archives?
Van Ness. [somewhat impatient} No, or yes, your memoir of the
revolution . . .
Burr. [brandishing the rose aloft in mock triumph! My expose, my
literary coup d'etat, my thunderclap of divine justice-slow-togather-yet-terrible-in retribution. You know, William, I have
always detested the mechanical toil of scribbling at a desk,
but that particular endeavor savored a piquancy altogether
invigorating. I should have been famed at the very least the
Voltaire of the young republic. The truth about the conduct
of our War of Revolution, think of it, William! Should I have
entitled it The, ah, Pumpkinification of Washington? His head
resembled a pumpkin, you know. Did you ever see him near
at hand? No? Well, I did, and his-ah-southern colonies
resembled two pumpkins set side by side.
Van Ness. [a nod of barely suppressed exasperation} Mr. Vi~e
President.
The Housekeeper abruptly opens the door without knocking and sticks
in her head obviously upset. One hears behind her out in the hall
a tense, feminine voice, "Tell him! Not another minute!"
Housekeeper. [half in the door] I'm sorry sir, the lady here [from
the hall, "Tell him now!" at which the Housekeeper befuddled
steps into the room closing the door behind her and holding the knob
as though she fears the woman in the hall will try to force her way
in] She is really most insistent . . .
Burr. So it appears. Yet milady must learn patience. Detain
her just for awhile longer, could you Mrs. Mulroy?
Housekeeper. [sighs hugely and plaintively] I'll try sir. [As she opens
the door the voice from beyond rises peremptorily, "Well." The
Housekeeper closes the door firmly behind her]
Burr. Ah, yes. My literary career was subjected to the a abhorred shears" by Washington's Secretary of State, Mr. Jefferson again, who suddenly one April informed me that he had
been instructed to close the archives to my researches. Only
the then-as-eve:t:-timid-yet-malignant-Virginia gentleman intimated that Washington was acting under vehement Hamiltonian advice. So [detaches a few more petals] the world was
deprived the only honest account of American origins it
should ever have received.
Van Ness. Sir.
Burr. [oblivious or indifferent} Then there was the more narrowly
political combats. First my little ambush of Hamilton's fatherin-law. The Albany patroon underrated my influence in the
city but he paid for his confidence with his senate seat. Hamilton took such offense one would think he considered the seat
a family fief. Oh, but I paid, William, for that little surprise.
First payment Hamilton exacted by turning enough opinion
against me to scuttle my bid for the vice-presidency in
Washington's second term. My second payment was in the
form of the Ambassadorship to France, which Hamilton had
Washington deny me upon the return of Hamilton's friend
Gouverneur Morris. Then in '96 he imposed a double charge.
He saw to it that I was defeated when New York chose its
senator and he sapped off enough support to cost me the vicepresidency again. Is it not droll, William, that I come by that
office only now when to have achieved it means having failed
to come at the real prize? The gods are indeed ironic in their
givings.
Van Ness. [quickly} To teach us to seize for ourselves.
Burr. [appraises Van Ness] I think you are in the way of becoming an avowed Burrite. A follower of the ''embryoCaesar," the "Cateline of midnight conclave." Those, I'm
3
�told, are epithets coined by Hamilton himself in reference to
the poor present object of your regard.
Van Ness. [annoyed] Will you hear me, sir?
Burr. [still intent on his own course of thought] And yet Jefferson
told me Hamilton once proclaimed that Julius Caesar was the
greatest man who ever lived. What do you make of that, William? [Van Ness shrugs and turns his head away] Perhaps the
venom is in the "embryo." [Mock indignation] That my stature is something diminutive does he mock me with ''embryo,
embryo''? Yet surely the man himself cannot overtop me by
more than a finger's breadth. In minutes only Hamilton and
I stand shorter than our partners. Although, William, you can
attest that between us we attract all the loveliest of the sex.
[Van Ness gestures off-handedly in a mild disgust] No? Well,
perhaps you must judge of that for yourself. So, anyway,
where was I? Oh, yes, vice-presidency blocked, ambassador's
post reneged, vice-presidency blocked again, of senate seat
despoiled [plucks rapidly one, two, three, four petals] and then,
William, and then the unkindest cut of all, to pluck out of
my hands the reins of the Great Republic. To block me from
the Presidency even at the eXpense of installing thereby his
self-avowed enemy Thomas Jefferson, southerner, slaveowner, Francophile, and foe of Hamilton's dear Federalist
party and, unless trustworthy report fails me, a personal
calumniator of Hamilton himself. And worst of aU, to a man
of Hamilton's tastes, a physical coward who took to his heels
when he was governor of Virginia, who ran from the mere
rumor of the approach of British troops. How William, how
could General Hamilton so have treated his fellow New Yorker
and brother at the bar?
Van Ness. Hamilton is reported to have said that of the two
devils he preferred the one who bespoke principles.
Burr. [scornfully] A thin pretense that. For a gentleman, William, only one principle Can be acknowledged: self-respect.
Hamilton has sufficient experience to know I honor that single maxim and have not, nor shall not, fail in it.
Van Ness. But what you think of as self-respect Hamilton calls
ambition.
Burr. [simply] Then he lacks discernment. [At this Van Ness
shrugs urbanely] Eh bien. [Burr regards the rose now stripped down
to a single petal] And do you know, I believe Hamilton may
have reason to credit me with once having saved his life?
Van Ness. If you refer to the "lethal" James Monroe, perhaps,
sir, you somewhat exaggerate the danger of mortality from
that quarter.
Burr. [laughs rather broadly] Ah, poor Monroe! Yes, perhaps I
do exaggerate. Yet to be sure, stranger things have occurred
in duels. What with the unreliability of these pistols, who
knows but that if he could have brought himself to stand at
the barriers, Monroe just might have hit his man with an errant ball. And Monroe professed himself willing to accept the
interview. Anyway, I took advantage of the hesitancy of both
combatants to patch matters between them.
Van Ness. [indignantly] But he would not have done the same
for you, you may count on it he would not. Indeed, is it not
true that when Hamilton made his brother-in-law call you out
he plotted like_ a common assassin? John Barker Church was
no Monroe, nothing like the butt of a jest, unreliable pistols
or not.
Burr. You hatch a verity, William, I'll attest it. I have still the
hole in my coat to witness that at least Hamilton's brotherin-law can hit a mark.
Van Ness. [Rising again and with bitter emphasis] Then let your
enemy teach Jrou the way to clear your road! Challenge
4
Hamilton!
,
Burr. [mock sententiously] Proverbs has it, "He who too vehe-:
mently bloweth his nose bringeth forth blood." Althoug~
should I ever have sufficient cause I should not be absolutely1
averse to drawing forth somewhat of General Hamilton' si
blood.
'
Van Ness. So there we are!
Burr. There~ are my estimable colleague. I am not yet to the:
point of irrevocable hostilities and shall not come to it so long
as Hamilton comports himself according to the code.
Van Ness. [quite blunt] What code?
Burr. Why, the code of gentlemen, what else? General Hamil-·
ton and I have always endeavored to conduct our mutual
enmity in accord with the self-imposed limits one would expect of men of a certain breeding. Two sanctuaries we preserve·
inviolate to attack: the camp and the hearth. Whatever I have
urged against Hamilton, I have never sought to question his
valor as a soldier and he likewise has respected my courage.
Then, no matter how tense the contest I have never caused!
distrust within his family-though perhaps occasion offered!
opportunity to have done so. Neither can I charge Hamilton!
with making dissension at my table or bed-although it cannot be denied that he has been solicited thereunto by occa-'
sions alarming in their abundance.
Van Ness. [Tense with the effort of restraining himself] Have you
read the clippings I sent you yesterday?
Burr. Other affairs diverted me. Anyway, I knew I could counl
on your visit when I should hear from your own eloquent:
mouth.
Van Ness. [still quite tense] Do you have them by?
Burr. So peremptory, William? Yes, I'm sure I put the papers·
on the desk.
Van Ness. [in his vehemence forgetting deference] Get them ancl
read over the passages I've underscored.
Burr. [still hesitates] But they concern my defeat in the electiori
for governor, did you not indicate as much? The election was'
over two months past. I'm half-reconciled now to what
promises to be my continual fate of placing second.
Van Ness. The matter I refer to still shOuld concern_ you. It won't
die.
Burr. [moving to the desk] Well, I could have made timely use
of the governor's office. [Stops and turns back to Van Ness] You
know Griswold and Pickering came 'round again yesterday
after you had left. I have continued to leave them under the
impression that I might be persuaded to a supreme military
commission if events should ever allow the secession of New
England and New York. Ah, William, does your heart not
jump with the thought that someday we might cut free from
the Virginia planters and their black chattels? Let them gaily
devour each other!
Van Ness. [drily and bitingly] Yes. Well, I do not know that I
would now depend upon leading troops in the field if I were
you.
Burr. [regards Van Ness quizzically for a moment] Oh? Well, yes,
I suppose not being governor I cannot now engage to deliver
the militia. I could hardly do so on my authority as VicePresident of those very United States which we might need
somewhat to disunify.
Van Ness. [ignoring Burr's witticism] Not only that.
Burr. [after a moment] Oh?
Van Ness. Read the clippings.
Burr. [locating his spectacles and putting them on] "Dr. Charles
Cooper"?
Van Ness. [rapping it out as Burr resumes reading] One of Hamil-
SUMMER 1985
�ton's party men. Son-in-law to judge Taylor of Albany. A kind
of a mettlesome young popinjay. But his testimony is firsthand, as you will note.
Burr. First-hand it may be, but even so rather indefinite.
General Hamilton and Judge Kent have declared, in substance, that they looked upon Mr. Burr to be a dangerous
man'' and so you yourself have often said, William [Van Ness
gestures to Burr to read on} "and one who ought not to be
trusted with the reins of government.'' So? Hamilton has ranted on that theme for fifteen years. Am I to embarrass myself
by so belatedly confessing that I cannot take what I am accustomed to deal out in the way of the rhetoric of political
contention? Mmm? [Again Van Ness' gesture indicating that he
should read on. After a few moments Burr stiffens a little as he locates the offending passage] Yes, I suppose this is what you have
in mind ... "still more despicable" ... that does obtrude
a certain odor . . . though one might wish Dr. Cooper had
been educated to a more scrupulous regard for clear grammar: more despicable" ... more despicable than what? Than
the opinion that I am not to be trusted with the reins of
government? Is that itself despicable? I can't say I trust anyone
with the reins of government if I have a choice in the matter.
Van Ness. Mr. Vice-President ...
Burr. I think Dr. Cooper is to be despised for his debauch of our
mother-tongue.
Van Ness. You are pleased to be pleasant. But you must see
the opportunity . . .
If
Burr. [after his characteristic gesture and coldly without the characteristic suave irony] Spell it out, sir.
Van Ness. The very ambiguity is your grievance and, if properly
managed, your good weapon. Cooper's insinuation of some
dark malignity without specifying your crime gives the widest
scope to conjectures damaging to your reputation.
Burr. Such as it is.
Van Ness. [straight-facedlyl Such as it is, having been already
snipped about the edges by jefferson and Hamilton. The VicePresidency of this great nation ought not be subject to a libel
that will not specify its grounds. You must protect the dignity of the office.
Burr. [drily] But of course. Thus the grievance. And now how
shall Cooper's same damnable syntax provide me, as you say,
with a weapon?
Van Ness. It shall be your net to catch General Hamilton.
As Burr is about to reply the door opens suddenly and the Housekeeper wedges herself in it restraining the woman whose voice had
been heard before from the hall. Both women speak at once.
Housekeeper. [quite upset] I'm sorry sir.
Countess. [trying to get past] I shan't be fobbed off!
Burr. [moves quickly to the door, pushes back the two women unceremoniously but not violently and closes the door upon them], In
a moment my dove, in a moment. Take a turn about my
garden. [Burr holds the doorknob for a moment until the noise in
the corridor subsides, then turns back to Van Ness raising his hand
as if to say "What is one to do?" Van Ness has not moved and
refuses to be amused.]
Van Ness. I said Cooper's ambiguity shall be your means to
ensnare Hamilton.
Burr. [his weary gesture] I am certain you will condescend to
a decade. Yet hitherto they have never surfaced in such a
devastatingly public form as to be captured in the cold print
of a newspaper. Public slander justifies recourse to the ultimate means of redress.
Burr. You intrigue me, William.
Van Ness. [quickly and avidly as he strides to the hearth, even
momentarily turning his back upon Burr] Secundus: As Hamilton is ultimately responsible for the ambiguous adjective
despicable-which we agree has given unpardonable license
to ruinous conjecture-so he is subject to ruin himself if he
should try to avoid your vengeance by offering to disown the
harm.
Burr. Produce your exhibit, counsellor.
Van Ness. If he should choose to back down, he cannot, because the ambiguity in the scope of the slander allows for anything and everything he has ever said against you. And that
great world of wrong he cannot disavow. To attempt to do
so would bring upon him not only disgrace but universal
ridicule which for a man of his Caesarian vanity is not to be
imagined. [A pause after which Van Ness turns back to the middle of the room, now facing Burr] Well, sir?
Burr. No, William.
Van Ness. [incredulous] No?
Burr. My good friend, after all you hold me too cheap.
Van Ness. [uncomprehending] Pardon?
Burr. You set more store by my reputation than I do. As my
grandfather loved to say after St. Paul, "our glory is in our
conscience.'' Hamilton cannot harm my repute any more than
he already has. I thank God my happiness does not depend
upon the position I enjoy in the eyes of a few upstate patrons.
Van Ness. You care not for your fame?
Burr. That is yet another -matter. But Hamilton has not
wounded my fame. As we have agreed, the letter from Cooper
specifies no new indignity-certainly nothing that posterity
will take note of. Although I should dearly thank whatever
deities might see fit to remove General Hamilton from this
world, I must have better cause to take that providence upon
myself. Otherwise, William, I could not be pleased with myself. And that, my dear Mr. Van Ness, is the condition most
requisite to my happiness.
Van Ness. [persistent] But, do you know ...
Burr. [somewhat peremptorily] Sir! We must bear our cross until
we have more honorable cause to shift it.
Van Ness. But ...
Burr. [decisively] If you will pardon me.
[Enter Housekeeper]
Housekeeper. !flustered] Oh, sir, I'm sorry. But this lady
insists ... [the Countess Vendimer forces her way in]
Countess. Take yourself away, madame, if you please. I shall
myself announce my business with your master.
Burr. My dear Countess. That is quite all right, Mrs. Mulroy.
I shall see the lady, and I thank you for having detainedah-entertained her, for the time you could bestow. You may
leave us.
Housekeeper. I'm sorry, sir.
Burr. [showing Housekeeper to the door] Don't let it trouble you.
Notfor a thought. [turning back to his guests] Yes. Ah, Mr. Van
Ness, may I present to you my Lady the Countess Vendimer.
My Lady, WilliamP. VanNess, Esquire and Attorney-at-Law,
my sometime partner at the bar and longtime friend.
Van Ness. [eagerly] Primus: the form of the injury gives you
Countess. [after a quick nod and assessment of the embarrassed Van
Ness] If he's a lawyer also I suppose he knows the word as
a cause actionable in honor. Hamilton has, as you say, voiced
similar damaging aspersions against your character for over
well as you do, sir. On my side of the sea the term is breach of
promise, what ye call it here ye may instruct me if it suits ye.
explain.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
5
�Burr. [presenting the Countess with the almost denuded rose, which
she contemptuously brushes aside] I wonder if we might defer
the clarifying of this misunderstanding untilCountess. Until you can think how to murk it up to a umisunderstanding" when plain as day it be no such thing. Oh no,
Mr. First Minister.
Burr. [murmuring correction} Vice-President.
Countess. Let it be whatever it is; you shall not fob me off.
Burr. My dear.
Countess. Nay, but the time for deferring is past. You would
not defer your pleasure; now you shall not defer the banns.
Burr.. [turning to Van Ness] You would oblige me if you could find
it in yourself to forgive this low comedy. [Van Ness extends his palm
in a blase gesture of commiseration] And could you perhaps
bestow the study on us for half a minute?
Countess. Half a minute!
Burr. Please, my dear.
Van Ness. But the matter I've opened to youBurr. Ought not be made public [discreetly but definitely indicating the Countess]; surely you concur.
Van Ness. [after glancing at the Countess] Even soBurr. Please, William, spare us but the quarter of an hour?
Van Ness. [hesitates another moment, then sadly] Very well. [picks
up his hat and looks again at-the Countess, moving slowly towards
door]
Burr. !lifts the stopper of a cut-glass decanter in one hand and in
the other takes up two wine glasses] My Lady, could I offer some
light refreshment?
Van Ness. [has paused with his hand poised above the latch; he
gathers himself and suddenly wheels] Hamilton has said you
deserted your troops in the face of the enemy. [Burr, about
to raise the decanter, sets it down with deliberate care and with the
same painstaking coolness replaces the stopper and the wine goblets]
Burr. [stands erect and with icy enunciation] You had best be most
careful in what you now report, William. [Van Ness looks to
the Countess, whose spiteful hard smile has given way to an expression of alarm fixed upon Burr, who, in turn, takes note of Van
Ness' hesitation} Come now, William, you were not too delicate to blurt it out. You knew what yoti were doing just now.
Before the day is out, my dear lady will have blazoned your
report from Harlem Heights to the Battery. Can we not count
upon your amplification, my dear? Yes, I thought as much.
Well, William, say on. [turning away] You are cutting near the
bone.
Van Ness. [correcting} Hamilton has ,cut near the bone.
Burr. [the gesture of touching the bridge of the nose] Yes. Say on.
Van Ness. [measured} I have good reason to believe that Hamilton said in the presence of Judge Taylor, Chancellor Kent,
Charles Cooper and others that the general opinion of your
action in the war is founded upon a lie. That you were not
taken with a fever after the Battle of Monmouth, as has been
long believed, but that in fact you-lost your nerve. Besides
himself, boasts Hamilton, Washington knew it. And, Hamilton adds byway of circumstantial proof, although Washington was too gracious ever to have spoken of your shame, for
that reason-and no other-he would never consent to use
you again. [a pause of several seconds]
Burr. [after looking a moment upon the low table, stoops and slowly
takes up the rose that he had earlier stripped of most of its petals]
Tant mieux.
Countess. [shaken] Dear God above!
Burr. As General Hamilton on a national occasion is supposed
to have replied to a similar exclamation, "We shall not require
foreign aid."
6
Countess. [regaining her initiative] What about the urgency tha
lies between us, sir.
Burr. [only half-attentive] Who has lain .between us?
Countess. I'll not be dallied with, nor deceived!
Burr. [now completely preoccupied] Yes. To be sure.
Countess. What? Do you choose to outface me, sir? Well, I'l
give you to know that my forebears enjoyed the privilege
of noble birth while yours were still pedagogues in New Jer
sey. [an unsmiling Burr begins moving a reluctantly yieldin;
Countess towards the door] And you must know Mr. Burr I hav1
friends who'll see to it that justice be dOne me.
Burr. [stops abruptly] Mrs. Mulroy!
Housekeeper. [entering almost imrilediatelyl Yes, sir.
Burr. The Lady Vendimer desires to be shown to the door
Countess. !freeing herself from Burr's hand] Desires-? I desir•
what's mine by right. And by God I'll have it!
Burr. [tense] Show her out. [The Housekeeper moves to taketh
arm of the Countess who indignantly draws herself away]
Countess. !fierce but not shrill] But then of what worth is th•
word of a man who runs from danger? [Burr does not ,mak
as though to advance on her, but, as if he had, the Countess, un
assisted by the Housekeeper turns swiftly and exits. The House
keeper looks after her a moment, turns back for an instant to Burr
registering her amazement, then is dismissed by a summary gestuti
from her employer]
Burr. [turns slowly upon Van Ness] You must know of cours4
that now it is superfluous for me to inquire what corrobora
tive testimony you might adduce in substantiation of you
charge. Ten minutes ago the question might have been materi
al. But as it is . . .
Van Ness. Yes!
Burr. "Yes" what?
Van Ness. "As it is-" [extends a palm outward as sufficient am
plification]
Burr. [pensively] Yes ... yes.
Van Ness. Though, if you do enjoy sufficient honor in your con
science, without other consideration, I suppose the infam}
can be borne.
Burr. [simply] It cannot be borne.
Van Ness. Not to speak of the ridicule.
Burr. Enough William. You have sunk the spur as deep as the
rowel.
Van Ness. I am sorry.
Burr. Your hatred of Hamilton much exceeds in vehemence
my own. Why?
Van Ness. [simply] He has all but ruined the friend I would follow through the fire.
Burr. [after a moment, pats Van Ness on the shoulder, turns back
to the small table and again extracts the much-abused rose from its
vase] You have still the pistols I gave you on your birthday last?
Van Ness. [standing quite erect and solemn] I have them still.
Burr. [after a moment] U I should have occasion this afternoon
to send General Hamilton a note of two or three lines, could
you oblige me by presenting it to the gentleman?
Van Ness. [promptly] I should be honored thus to oblige you.
Burr. [again pensive] My thanks. [Burr regards the rose he holds
in his right hand] You know the man has turns within turns.
He may yet elude us.
Van Ness. [quietly lethal] He shall not elude you, sir.
Burr. [quietly, without particular emphasis, and still regarding the
flower] No, he shall not. [after a pause] I'll own that Hamilton
has sustained griefs-public and private-fully as numerous
and as grave as my own. He maintained that he had withdrawn from public life. He seemed to enjoy the private esSUMMER 1985
�tate. Why then could he not suffer his sun quietly to set? Can
you fathom the man~ my friend?
Van Ness. I do not care to try.
Burr. Indeed? Perhaps after all that is best. I could have been
glad had I never found cause to be thus disappointed in the
man. [Burr takes in his fingers the last petals of the rose, detaches
them and allows them to flutter to the floor. He then holds the now
completely bare stem somewhat conspicuously elevated and speaks
in a tone of self-mocking surprise, calling Van Ness' attention to
the naked stem of the rose] Why, he loves me not. Alas! William
he loves me not. [Van Ness faintly smiling, inclines in a slight
and formal bow of silent acknowledgment as the lights dim]
Scene II
Mid-afternoon of June 18, 1804. A large room of Hamilton's recently
completed house which he has named after the estate of his Scottish
ancestors, "The Grange." Two walls are almost covered with shelves
of books. The study is furnished with a small sofa, two arm chairs,
a low table on which are scattered several books and a somewhat
higher marble commode atop which one sees a decanter of whiskey
and crystal tumblers. Also atop the low table several miniature portraits which will be identified as depicting Hamilton's dead son
Philip and Hamilton's Scottish ancestors. At rise Hamilton's wife
Elizabeth is directing offstage instructions concerning preparations
for a party.
Elizabeth. And I want;avory pies, three or four, left out on
the sideboard. Send own to Solomon's for petits four-the
sort with the chocolate. And tell Mrs. Tryamond that she must
make the blancmange herself. I shall be altogether too busy
with other things. [Elizabeth looks about the room, pivoting in
a complete circle while counting on her fingers. In the midst of her
survey of the room, she pulls herself up as her eyes fall on a small
portrait of a young man set out on the lower of the two tables. She
goes to the table, takes up the portrait~ and slumps onto one of the
chairs. As she is called to from offstage, "Ma'am ... Mrs. Hamilton,'' she does not answer immediately but continues to gaze down
at the miniature of her dead son.] Yes. [wearily] Presently. [Still
she makes no move to leave her chair. Enter Hamilton. There should
be immediately apparent from his somewhat diminutive height, manner of dress, hair, walk, and general bearing a marked resemblance
to Burr. His distinguishing marks are red hair, gray-streaked, a correspondingly florid complexion, and inflections of speech more rapid,
less suavely languid, than those heard from Burr.]
Hamilton. [brisk and animated] Verbena and honeysuckle! Let
them be everywhere! Let's see, some verbena on the mantelpiece there and a spray of honeysuckle intermingled-no-!
shall amend my motion. Rather, twine honeysuckle upon all
the interior columns. We shall simulate the sweet melancholy
of Grecian ruins. [Striding rapidly over to the large bay window
he wheels upon the open room.] We'll throw open the windows
at dusk and let the faint breezes stir the candle flames. And
let there be cut flowers everywhere! When my daughter enters
upon society the earth shall send forth its blossoms as the
slopes of Olympus its flora when Hera and Zeus debauch.
Elizabeth [laughing despite herselfl Debauch!
Hamilton. [accepts correction with good grace] Mmm yes. A typical lapse of decorum only to be expected of a Yankee shyster
staggering under his weight of belatedly acquired Homer. Let
us say rather, "when the Ooud-Gatherer" -ah-" gathers the
ox-eyed Hera, his stately consort."
Elizabeth. I hope no young lady who trusts herself to !"Y hospitality shall be here debauched or merely even "gathered."
Hamilton. Not t'OlJe thought for a moment, dearest Elizabeth.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
[gallantly] Unless perhaps above stairs, after the guests have
been shown on their way~ a certain dark beauty, darling of
the Albany patrons, yet disgraced by her marital alliance with
one descendent of Scot brigandsElizabeth. Whom, said descendent of Scottish theivesHamilton._ [hastily correcting} Reivers, border raiders-not the
same at allElizabeth. [insistent] Whom, said scion of border theives has debauched to the extent of eight children and hence shall not
"gather" this night.
Hamilton. Notwithstanding I shall be in expectation ardent.
Elizabeth. And perforce in imagination you must take you your
satisfaction and not else.
Hamilton. [mock lugubriously] Such is my fate.
Elizabeth. And deservedly so.
Hamilton. [neroously taking up a wineglass and running his finger
around the rim] Ah me. [sits next to Elizabeth] And how does
it fare with our eldest daughter today?
Elizabeth. [her sadness comes back by degrees] much the same as
yesterday, and always. Sometimes she speaks so quite to the
point that I think her not much to differ from any eighteenyear-old marriageable girl. They are all so flighty at their most
lucid. But still the difference remains. How was I told old Mrs.
Clinton put it? ''Poor Angelica Hamilton is quite amazingly,
simple?"
Hamilton. "Simple"?
Elizabeth. "Simple."
Hamilton. [patting Elizabeth's hand] Well. We must be patient.
[notes the portrait under her clasped hands] What have you there?
[she lifts her hands and Hamilton takes up the miniature; his face
and entire posture bespeak a sorrow that verges on desolation] Ah,
Philip. The first-born, the hope of the house died with you,
lad. Dear, brave son.
Elizabeth. [flatly] He was brave.
Hamilton. And can it be that it is now over two years? The
wound gapes as though it were yesterday he was taken.
Elizabeth. [again quite flatly] This fall will be the third since he
was shot dead.
Hamilton. For a time you could not look on his picture.
Elizabeth. This spring for the first time I felt I could.
Hamilton. But, Angelica?
Elizabeth. [shrugs] If she had wept each day these two years
perhaps she would not now be as she is. Tears are rational.
Angelica is deranged.
Hamilton. [shocked] Eliza!
Elizabeth. [emphatically but simply] Deranged. I have learned,
Alexander, to call things by the names proper to them. Angelica has lost the use of her reason.
Hamilton. We do not know that her condition is permanent.
Elizabeth. We do not know that it is not.
Hamilton. Then is it not best to continue in the way we have
set out? To arrange for her something as near as may be to
the usual life of a young lady?
Elizabeth. I suppose so. Just so long as we do not indulge a
delusion.
Hamilton. [Soberly] To be sure. [a girl's voice calls from offstage,
Papa, Papa! Hamilton indicates to Elizabeth his concern that she
not display her grief to Angelica] Should I send her to the other
children?
Elizabeth. No, I'm composed. [again the call, "Papa!"]
Hamilton. We're in the parlor, Angelica. [looks once more with
solicitude to Elizabeth]
Enter Angelica Hamilton, a slender girl who, because of her afflic7
�tion~ looks somewhat younger than her age of eighteen. She carries
a keepsake album.
Angelica. Poor Philip Sparrow!
Hamilton. [glances toward Elizabeth and raises his hand in a gesture
of reassurance] Sweet Angelica. Have you come to help us with
your party?
Angelica. [disarmingly] No. [Embarrassed, Hamilton turns away!
Elizabeth. Do you want me to walk with you in the garden~
dear?
Angelica. [ignores Elizabeth's question and stands stack-still, opening her album] Poor Philip Sparrow, the crow has pecked thy
head.
Elizabeth. Angelica.
Angelica. Philip has gone to Cathay.
Elizabeth. Philip has not gone to Cathay, Angelica. Philip is
dead.
Angelica. He has gone to Grandpa
Schuyler~ s.
He took the
sleigh.
Elizabeth. Not to Grandpa Schuyler's, not to China, nor nowhere. Your brother was killed in a duel. He is gone ... dead.
Angelica. [stares at her mother willfully, uncomprehending, echoing her mother's intonation] He is gone ... [consults the album,
then, obstinately] away.
Elizabeth. [simple emphasis] Dead. [Angelica stares at her mother
steadily but blankly!
Hamilton. [abruptly turning back from the mantel] Let be, Eliza.
_Elizabeth. [also without impatience but firmly! She must acknowledge.
Hamilton. She will not~ and cannot. She is not capable. [takes
Angelica by the arm gently] Do you not want to walk in the
garden, Angelica? I shall show you my young gum trees. Do
you want to see the new trees? Thirteen of them I've planted
in honor of the thirteen colonies that became the first thirteen of these United States. Would you like to see them?
Angelica. They are dead.
Hamilton. [laughing! Indeed they are not flourishing. But not
yet dead, my dear.
Angelica. Where have you put my pistols? [Hamilton starts,
looks apprehensively to Elizabeth]
Elizabeth. Ah!
Hamilton. [to steady his wife! Eliza.
Elizabeth. John Church's duelling pistols. Would my brotherin-law had never brought them across the sea. Would he had
never returned from England.
Hamilton. [simply! John Church's pistols are not to blame.
Elizabeth. Aye. Eaker is to blame. To slay a boy not yet twenty
for defending the honesty of his father!
Hamilton. Philip was abusive beyond all need.
Elizabeth. [overriding! Defending his father.
Hamilton. [absolute dejection] Aye. And if one speak of blame,
I sent Phil to his death. He took my part against Eaker in the
first place. Then he obeyed me both when he accepted the
challenge ... and when he withheld fire.
Elizabeth. Withholding fire! There should have been no shots
to withhold.
Hamilton. Well, as for thatElizabeth. [insisting] No. He need not have faced Eaker. [With
vehemence and disgust] Politics!
Angelica. [abruptly sings her version of the verse of an old war song!
"So bring your Bible and shoot your gun."
Hamilton. [corrects] "Drum/' Angelica. [sings]
"We're going to war and when we die
We'll want a man of God nearby,
8
So bring your Bible and follow the drum."
That's the name of the song, Angelica-''The Drum"'" not gun.
Do you understand, my dear? [a pause as Angelica stares un·
comprehendinglyl Well, dear, go on for your walk and alloY\'
your mother and I to plan your party.
Elizabeth. [to Angelica] Go, call in the children to the back
gallery. [she watches Angelica go out, then half-falls into a chair
at center] I don't think that life shall ever be sweet for me again.
Hamilton. I know~ dearest Eliza.
Elizabeth. [wooden inflections] What I cannot tear from my mind
are those last moments.
Hamilton. Try not to think, my dear.
Elizabeth. Do I not try to forget? Yet all the details of his dying
usurp my mind as though they had worked themselves into
the grain. Every instant they lurk just back of my consciousness. Any moment of the day, when there"s a sudden hush
in the house, or maybe between the bites of a meal., or at a
word that calls to mind his way of speaking-anything serves
to bring back the image of his deathbed.
Hamilton. [painfully but with sympathy! Ah, ElizaElizabeth. Philip, I see-ashen, tense with the agony of the
bullet lodged in his spine. You and I lying on either side of
the poor boy, on the same bed, clenching his hands while
death took its time with him. And to the last wracking breath
Philip tried to play the part he thought you required of him.
Why, Alexander?
Hamilton. [puzzled] Why did Philip have to die?
Elizabeth. Philip had to die because you expected him to uphold your name. I ask why you laid a mortal charge upon
your son. Why must he never decline a challenge, yet never
fire upon ills foe?
Hamilton. I did not absolutely require it of Philip. I-I said such
would be my course of conduct.
Elizabeth. To have said so to a boy such as Phil was as much
as to have required it of him.
Hamilton. Aye" I suppose you are right.
Elizabeth. [numbly resigned] WellHamilton. Well, we must try to live for the other children.
Elizabeth. [slumps] Yes, let us then live for the children that remain [pause]. Perhaps at last we shall be free of contention~
free of politics.
Hamilton. So, we may hope.
Elizabeth. You are content to be a private man?
Hamilton. I could be content to live the rest of my life within
these walls. Were it not for my grief for Philip and for your
sadness, I should say I've never before felt such blessed peace
as now. [after a moment} A man does not need to hear his name
in the public cries. [another moment] I do not, I know.
Elizabeth. Angelica sometimes refers to you as "the Ghost."
Because you are so seldom seen. [somewhat bitterly] What with
your staying in the town all the week, and your constant journeys to Albany ... and then a summons to Washington.
Hamilton. [somewhat plaintively] Not Washington so much any
more.
Elizabeth. [agrees flatly} Not so much any more.
Hamilton. [after a pause] Ah, Liza! my lot is a strange one. I've
spent my life defending a Constitution I but half approved
at its conception. I've neglected our own affairs just to give
myself the pains to prop up that flimsy scaffold. And for my
effort I have the unremitting enmity of Jefferson's party, the
resentment of my own Federalist friends-and a son lost.
Elizabeth. The costs have been as great as a cost can possibly
be. [with force] Let us hope you have done with it.
SUMMER 1985
�Hamilton.
I've done with it. [a Maid enters carrying yet another
vase of flowers]
Maid.
Sir, there's Mr. Pendleton to see you.
Hamilton. [looks with slight concern to Elizabeth] You did not forget to send him an invitation?
Elizabeth. I sent it Monday last.
Hamilton. Show Mr. Pendleton in, Mrs. Baines. [Maid goes off
right] [to Elizabeth] Are you more composed now, dear?
Elizabeth. [rising from the sofa]! am. Do you wish me to stay
or do you have business?
Hamilton. I cannot think Pendleton has business. Perhaps he
cannot come tomorrow and brings his good wishes to
Angelica.
Elizabeth. Alexander, he has tried before to enlist you in some
new cause. Do not let yourself be flattered by men who claim
to need you. [she takes his hand]! need you. Much more, and
there's no flattery.
Hamilton. And you shall have me, my dearest Liza. [the Maid
opens door at right, announcing as she does so, "Mr. Nathaniel
Pendleton."] [enter a well-dressed man of about forty, carrying
his gloves]
Pendleton. Mrs. Baines always takes my hat and cane but
returns my gloves. Good morning Mrs. Hamilton, [to Hamilton] General.
Hamilton. Mrs. Baines believes gentlemen should always have
gloves about their person. It's good to see you, Nat. But you
needn't address me as General.
Pendleton. [bluftl Eh? has the Virginia junta demoted you, then?
Hamilton. They would change the past if they could, I'm sure.
No, Eliza has discharged me from the service.
Elizabeth. [drily] The title seems rather inappropriate, does it
not, since the function expired ten years ago?
Pendleton. Aye rna' am. But there's a world of good men who
still consider the rank suits your husband. Right down to the
ground. And if the entire faction of Tammany still must address Aaron Burr by ''Colonel'' tWenty years since that
esteemed gentleman ever bore arms, why I see no reason my
friend should not have his due.
Hamilton. [glances at Elizabeth] Well, Nat, that time has passed.
Pendleton. [glancing down] Seasons return.
Elizabeth. [quickly with even emphasis] Not that season,
Nathaniel.
Hamilton. [uneasily] Yes, well ... it's good you should come,
Nat, at ~ season.
Elizabeth. [somewhat stiffl If you should need to see my husband about some matter of businessi NathanielPendleton. [awkwardly hesitating] Well, Mrs. HamiltonElimbeth. [quickly to Hamilton]! still have to see about the cakes
(Hamilton takes his wife's hand briefly, she holds his gaze for a
moment longer] Nathaniel. [Pendleton bows and Elizabeth goes
off right]
Pendleton. What did Cooper hear from you-(Hamilton looking after Elizabeth hushes Pendleton with a gesture. When he sees
the door firmly closed, he turns to his friend] What could Charles
Cooper have reported your saying against Burr at the Albany meeting last April?
Hamilton. God! How should I know? When did you say?
Pendleton. At Judge Taylor's house, before the gubernatorial
election.
Hamilton. I dare say I haven't the slightest notion, Nat. [turns
to the table and offers the decanter, which Pendleton refuses with
a wave of his hand] Anyway, what does it matter?
Pendleton. I think it
matter because Van Ness has begun
making something o it again.
mfy
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Hamilton. Van Ness is fond of sowing tares.
Pendleton. That he is. And last night at the Tontine Tavern he
was sowing tares by means of Charles Cooper's public letter
to the Albany Register.
Hamilton. Why that fire is two months cold! Wasn't Cooper's
letter publishedPendleton. At the end of April. But Van Ness has rekindled it.
Hamilton. For what particular purpose? [pours himself a glass of
wine, offers to Pendleton]
Pendleton. [waving away the offer of wine] I don't know. That's
what worries me. But he was making much of it with the Tammany crowd. And he swore he would call on Burr today. Try
to think what you told Cooper.
Hamilton. Let me try to recollect. [after a moment] What have
I not said of my rival of fifteen years? I know he has been
a moral reprobate for as long as I have known him. As a fellow attorney I cannot approve his abuse of the profession.
He has turned public offices to hard dealing and downright
fraud. He makes party allegiance in accord with his ambition,
not from principle. He continues to be a threat to this republic. All of this I have maintained day in, day out. Burr knows
and the world knows. I have struck at Burr and he at me over
the course of a career. Does he suddenly grow tender?
Pendleton. [half turns from Hamilton] I think he grows desperate. Jefferson has cast Burr aside. He terms his Vice-President
"a crooked gun." Burr had hoped to rebuild his power upon
the governorship. Now that he has lost that, every way must
seem blocked to him. For a man of his ambition to stand still
is intolerable. Rather than decline, he would choose ~
course, no matter how dangerous or destructive.
Hamilton. Not unlikely, but what course?
Pendleton. [turns back to confront his friend] Would you preserve
this Union?
Hamilton. It's curious you should ask. I was just saying to Eliza
that it appears I've made an unprofitable career of supporting this ramshackle affair called a Union.
Pendleton. How dear is it to you_?
Hamilton. It should be more dear to me had it not fallen into
the hands of atheistic demagogues such as Jefferson and Monroe. They love anything French, and they shall transport to
these shores all the fury and envy let loose by the Revolution
in France. Everything that we gave ourselves to establish shall
be swept away in a tide of democratic passions.
Pendleton. [coming closer to Hamilton and lowering his voice] Every
prop of stability shall indeed be kicked aside if Burr has his
way.
Hamilton. Burr is no democrat. He is nothing by principle but
everything by opportunity and convenience.
Pendleton. Yes! And he is now the first mover in a plan to have
the New England states secede from the Union.
Hamilton. [regards Pendleton for a moment silently] I have heard
some talk to that effect. But what would he personally gain
thereby?
Pendleton. The opportunity of leading.. of founding a new
government with himself at its head and chief military officer
for life. That's his plan. It has become the common talk in
Tammany. If Burr succeeds in splitting this country into two,
the Virginians shall certainly set up the southern states as an
ape of France and they shall make war on the rest.
Hamilton. [sits back roughly upon the sofa] And Europe will pick
our bones.
Pendleton. And Europe will pick our bones. Unless, General
Hamilton, you save us.
Hamilton. I? I've been rejected by my own party. Half the Fed-
9
�eralists blame me for attacking their man Adams. Besides a
few friends, I have now no followers.
Pendleton. [coming up close to Hamilton] The Federalists will
return to you. They will return to a man, and every man of
this nation who loves order will join them. The time
approaches.
Hamilton. What time?
Pendleton. Time of war. Be prepared to lead out an army of
government troops against Burr and his confederates in the
New England states.
Hamilton. Jefferson would never call on me.
Pendleton. He should have to. He will have no choice. You are
the man chosen by Washington to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. And you are the man Adams was obliged to turn tof
against his will, four years ago during the Pennsylvania insurrection. The country looks to you now only in moments
of danger, but in danger no one else will satisfy.
Hamilton. [after a moment's thought] Let Jefferson find a Virginian.
Pendleton. None will do. Besides, if Burr does head the secession he will look to Federalists for his money. He's already
begun to court your friends. Jefferson will see he must have
a Federalist to oppose Burr so that the force shall be clearly
national and not a party affair. Jefferson will recall your assistance in the 1800 election when you pulled Federalist votes
away from Burr. He will call upon you for another such proof
of selfless patriotism.
Hamilton. I doubt.
Pendleton. [quite animated] Yes. And you become again Generalin-Chief. You shall lead troops into battle. [Hamilton has become rapt as Pendleton concludes with his ann raised in a gesture
of signalling a cavalry charge]
Only last evening I was looking at the uniform I
designed for the Inspector General. Complete with plume.
Have you seen it? [pulls the chord by the fireplace] Adams called
for four generals with the Inspector General over them all.
You don't know, Nat, what it took to get me appointed-{the
door opens at right and the Maid enters inquiring "Sir"] Mrs.
Baines, would you just step into my study there and bring
the round box on my desk. Thank you. [Maid goes off right]
Adams wouldn't have it. Pickering reports his having said
to Abigail that I was the most ambitious man in this country
(which may have been true then) and the most "artful"
(which has never been true. Compared to Aaron Burr I am
an ingenue). Anyway, Adam's entire cabinet, all of whom
were in my pocket, all desired that I should have the highest
command after Washington. And then when Washington
himself backed me, Adams gave up. The day I heard
Washington had decided to support me I gave instructions
for the design of the insignia of the Inspector General. [Maid
comes from right carrying a large hatbox} Yes, that's it, Mrs.
Baines. {takes the box and removes the lid} Yes, thank you. [Maid
goes off right} White knee-breeches, white waistcoat with gold
buttons, a blue coat with gold buttons and braid, and a cape
of blue lined in scarlet. All surmounted by [draws out a large,
black cockade. A spectacular blue plume is affixed}. Magnificent,
is it not?
Pendleton. [taking the hat] To be sure. [After turning it about a
little and appreciatively, Pendleton returns the hat to Hamilton,
Hamilton.
who muses· on it}
Hamilton, {runs his finger along the plume} One could lead a
charge of horse into the mouth of hell with a good mount and
such hat.
10
Pendleton. [heartily and lightly] I would follow.
It's strange though. I had the uniforms sent round
to Washington, but what became of them I do not know.
Washington never mentioned my designs. When finally we
went on campaign we marched in old Continental uniforms.
Rather drab old sacks. Much later this was returned to me
with no explanation.
Pendleton. Brilliance of attire is not thought to befit the military of a free republic.
Hamilton. [takes it in] Pity.
Pendleton. And so it is.
Hamilton. [after a moment, walking to window at left] Do you
know, Nat, when I was sixteen and left St. Vincent to sail
to this country, I told my friend I must seek out a war. I was
certain that only a war could give scope to my spirit and bring
me fame. Just now, when I felt my blood run quicker, it occurred to me that that early conviction has never left me. I've
bred children and lost them; I've enjoyed the devotion of the
best of all wives; I've prospered a little; studiedf helped conceive a frame of government and set it going; known some
power, and kept most of my friends. But I've felt the blood
run to my heart only those times when I had a charge of men
in the face of an enemy. It's only then that the stakes are clear
enough and dear enough for simple action. Every other
undertaking is revision, compromise, scaling down, salvaging. This entire republic is a mere dilution of the strong wine
I sought. The people love safety more than hard liberty and
profit more than grandeur. They shall not produce great men,
and, if chance breeds them, there's no place for their ambition. The Presidency is too brief and too weak for great efforts.
Pendleton. I do not ask you to exert yourself for this republic,
such as it is. Act for yourself. Once men are roused, they may
look about.
Hamilton. [after a moment} Mexico.
Pendleton. Mexico! The entire New World! And by sea who
knows how far our hand may reach. There's grandeur!
Hamilton. [turning half away] If we give the world more than
we take.
Pendleton. [pursues until he faces Hamilton again} We give a new
order of human association: a public life fashioned by free
and equal men taking thought together.
Hamilton. [a shallow, brittle laugh] Do you so describe Jefferson's
new party, a demagogue holding sway over mechanics and
backwoodsmen by stirring up their envy of the rich, while
he holds the planters through their fear of their slaves?
Pendleton. {shrngsl Jefferson is an aberration. You will overcome
him once you have put iron once again in your countrymen.
You will overcome him by vote or by force. Did he not, while
Governor of Virginia, run to the woods in fear of British
regulars?
Hamilton. [laughs] Well, Nat, you bring me up to Jerusalem.
But on what foal of an ass do I ride in my triumphal way?
Pendleton. [laughs in his tum] On Burr.
Hamilton. [puzzled but alert] Strange vehicle.
Pendleton. {now serious} At the right moment you will expose
Burr and call for arms against him. But that is why you must
take care now. I feared that you had flushed hlm too early
and that Cooper's gossip was of the plot to secede.
Hamilton. That's impossible because at the time Cooper reports
my attack on Burr I had not heard Burr took an interest in
such a scheme.
Pendleton. Good. But nonetheless do you not see what Burr
now intends against you?
Hamilton.
SUMMER 1985
�Hamilton. Do you mean a challenge?
Pendleton. Precisely. For the sake of disposing of you, the one
man he knows capable of blowing up his design. Be sure of
it, a challenge is forthcoming, and on no account must you
give thought of accepting it.
Hamilton. Indeed I would never think of accepting it.
Pendleton. [in a lower voice] Yet you must not seem to reject it.
Hamilton. [begins to see the dilemma] Ah!
Pendleton. Yes. If you accept there's every probability given
Burr's marksmanship and experience-he hit your brotherin-law John Barker Church?
Hamilton. His coat.
Pendleton. He shall certainly take more careful aim this time
if he's given the chance. I say if you accept, he stands good
chance of ending your life, yet if you should refuse, he calls
into highly public question your courage. Just the wrong time
to have one's reputation impaired, on the eve of a struggle.
At such a crisis reputation is everything. So you cannot accept, yet you must not appear to decline.
Hamilton. [half-jesting] How if I should accept and slay Burr?
Pendleton. John Church tells me though he had you practice
you have never come near mark. Can you contradict Mr.
Church? [Hamilton says nothing] Then my friend, you must
be more effective as a leader than lethal as a marksman.
Hamilton. In any case it does not matter. On better grounds
I would not in any event accept a challenge to a duel.
Pendleton. What? I thought you had in the past.
Hamilton. That was the past. Now I hope I've put away that
pernicious vanity. It does not now sit well with my conscience.
Pendleton. [after a pause, with an effort] Did you not instruct your
son toHamilton. I did. And I consider the death of Philip a reproof
to my worldliness.
Pendleton. Ah my good friend let me put case to you[Elizabeth re-enters somewhat hurriedly from right carrying an
apron in one hand and another vase of cut flowers in the other]
Elizabeth. [as she goes to mantel and sets down the vase] Excuse
me, Alexander. There's a Mr. Van Ness to see you. He looks
rather solemn. [Hamilton and Pendleton start a little and exchange a look that Elizabeth takes note of. She looks from Pendleton to Hamilton] Is not this Van Ness one of the Tammany
men?
Hamilton. [as Pendleton turns away] Yes he is dear. Did he state
his business?
Elizabeth. [regards Hamilton closely] He would not, other than
to say he must see you privately. What business would you
have with a Tammany man?
Hamilton. [abstractedly] Ah it's hard to say. Would you show
him in dear? And ... [turning slightly toward Pendleton] Nat
has expressed his willingness to give me his opinion on
Stower's plan for the carriage house. Could you show him
the ground?
Pendleton. Should I wait for you to conclude with Van Ness?
Hamilton. That would be kind of you, Nathaniel.
Elizabeth. [continues to regard her husband] Alexander, you have
promised this day tp the family.
Hamilton. I shall be only a minute, my dear. [as she hesitates
a moment more] Elizabeth, if you would [Hamilton reaches for
his wife's hand. Elizabeth takes her husband's hand after a moment,
and hesitantly. She holds his gaze for an instant, then goes out right
on Pendleton's arm meeting Hamilton's gaze a final time as she
closes the door. Hamilton walks over to the mantel, extracts a rose
from the vase that Elizabeth has just placed there, and is sniffing
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the flower as Van Ness enters, walks stiffly to center and fetches
from his coat pocket a folded note.]
Van Ness. [clears his throat} Mr. Hamilton.
Hamilton. [replaces the rose in the vase and turns] Mr. Van Ness.
We have expected you.
_Van Ness.
the room
Hamilton.
Van Ness.
[other than raising his brows and glancing quickly about
Van Ness evinces no surprise] Pardon?
Good day to you, sir.
I'm afraid my business is not agreeable. I have the
honor to bear you a message from Colonel Burr.
Hamilton. [a trace of mock reverence] From the Vice President.
Van Ness. Er-not in his capacity as Vice President, no sir. This
is a matter between gentleman, [amending with unconcealed
irony] in any event, a personal matter.
Hamilton. [bristles] Well, man-to it.
Van Ness. I believe this note sufficiently explains. [Hamilton
takes the note, puts on spectacles and reads]
Hamilton. [careful and formal] You are aware this says you are
to direct my attention to a phrase in a published letter? [Van
Ness produces from another pocket a newspaper clipping]
Van Ness. [handing the clipping to Hamilton] The passage I have
underscored.
Hamilton. [reading aloud] "For really, sir, I could detail to you
a still more despicable opinion which General Hamilton has
expressed of Mr. Burr.'' Is this the passage you are directed
to call to my attention?
Van Ness. It is.
Hamilton. And the Vice President desires I should offer an explanation of it?
Van Ness. Sir, I pray you should not refer to Colonel Burr in
his official capacity. The proceeding we may have occasion
to enter upon, although honorable in the highest degree, may
not be considered by all parties altogether in conformity
with-ah-the law of the land.
Hamilton. [stares for an instant at Van Ness] I see. [glances again
at the note] Mr. Burr has perceived of course that the language
is ambiguous.
Van Ness. I am not at liberty to guess how the Colonel may
regard the grammar of the piece.
Hamilton. But I mean who or what is despised by whom? [offers
the clipping to Van Ness who indignantly looks away]
Van Ness. [refusing to take the clipping] I suppose Colonel Burr
requires of you an explanation of the reference, not a literary
critique, however highly he esteems your literary powers.
Hamilton. [hard] He "requires"?
Van Ness. I believe the note you have in your hand expresses
with tolerable clarity the intents of the gentleman who indited
it.
Hamilton. [reads aloud from the other note} Mr. Burr desires,
[amends with a slight bow to Van Ness] requires ''a prompt and
unqualified acknowledgement or denial of the use of any expressions which would warrant the assertions of Mr.
Cooper." [looks inquiringly of Van Ness who inclines in a slight,
formal bow of assent. Hamilton continues wordlessly to question
Van Ness who at last shows his impatience]
Van Ness. Well, sir?
Hamilton. What" assertions" does he mean? [holds out the letter]
Van Ness. Mr. Hamilton, you are known to be a most imposing courtroom performer. Doubtlessly you have it in your capacity to embarrass me with your dialectical prowess. But
really sir it is most unfair that you should so question me who
am merely the conveyor of the message. Colonel Burr requires
either an acknowledgement or a disavowal.
11
�Hamilton. Burr knows I can scarcely disavow having said things
that bear hard upon him over fifteen years of political rivalry.
[turns from Van Ness, walks to the mantel and creases the note
abstractedly; turns back to face Van Ness] No, I shall not be so
easily trapped. I cannot comply with Mr. Burr's requirement.
Van Ness. [measured] Do you mean you will neither acknowledge nor disavow?
Hamilton. Yes, precisely that. The matter deserves more careful consideration. [Hamilton turns back to the mantel again and
summons a servant by pulling a cord.]
Van Ness. [coolyl In that case, sir, I must bid you a good day
and take my leave.
Hamilton. [as the maid opens the door at right] Good day, Mr. Van
Ness.
Van Ness. [half-turned to go out] Ah, may I ask by what means
will you in due course make your reply?
Hamilton. I shall write by Mr. Nathaniel Pendleton.
Van Ness. [bows] Once more sir, good day.
Hamilton. [bows] Good day. [Van Ness goes off right, the maid
closing the door after him. In a moment Elizabeth returns]
Elizabeth. [closing the door behind her, she stands against it looking
apprehensively at her husband] That was the same man who
came to John Barker Church when Aaron Burr challenged him
to a duel. It came back to me as I was in the kitchen just now.
Hamilton. I-do not recall.
Elizabeth. I do. Van Ness' appearance always signifies Burr's
hand. Alexander, you must tell me what now passes between
you and Burr.
Hamilton. Only another instance of the old struggle.
Elizabeth. What is it now?
Hamilton. The form has not yet become definite, the matter
as always is politics.
Elizabeth. [turns away abruptly] No! I don't want to hear of it.
Not yet again. [turns back to Hamilton] Why can you not leave
Burr alone? Leave him to his small intrigues. Why do you pursue him into every dark comer his designs bring him to? Why
can't you let him be?
Hamilton. [shrugs very slightly] Perhaps we share £he same dark
angel.
Elizabeth. Is the issue-grave?
Hamilton. It could become so. But I shall not let it.
Elizabeth. I must know the details.
Hamilton. [hesitates] AhElizabeth. It is my due! I've borne you seven children, shared
with you the loss of the eldest, helped you (so you've said)
in your successes, taken the disappointments with you ...
[some anger] borne one great disgrace ...
Hamilton. [quickly] In the Albany paper Charles Cooper published a letter to your father in which Cooper makes vague
reference to my having said of Burr something which Cooper
characterized by the word "despicable."
Elizabeth. It sounds so ... yague.
Hamilton. That's where the danger lies.
Elizabeth. What may come of it?
Hamilton. Depending on how the exchange is managed nothing or . . . the last extremity.
Elizabeth. How do you avoid giving further provocation?
Hamilton. I'm not sure.
Elizabeth. Not simply by disavowing Cooper?
Hamilton. Possibly.
Elizabeth. Well, disavow.
Hamilton. I'm not certain that is best.
Elizabeth. [alarmed] "Best"! Best for what? You cannot think
12
of provoking a duel.
Hamilton. It may not be a question of provoking.
Elizabeth. Why then you cannot fhink of anything but of avoiding giving that man an occasion for calling you out. Surely
you conceive no other purpose but preventing such a barbarity.
Hamilton. Of course.
Elizabeth. [misgiving] But you have exchanged challenges
before.
Hamilton. I am not the man I was before. I am sincere in the
religion I profess. I assure you Eliza by the faith we both
revere, I abhor the cruel vanity of men slaying one another
by an absurd and wicked code.
Elizabeth. [baffled] Then, wherein lies the difficulty of abiding
the dictates of God and of your conscience?
Hamilton. Well, perhaps it will not be difficult.
Elizabeth. In any case, you are clear? You see clearly that you
must not accept a challenge?
Hamilton. Yes, I see it clearly. [they continue to mee( each other's
gaze] Is Nat still waiting?
Elizabeth. I believe he is. He said he would wait until you had
finished with Van Ness.
Hamilton. Will you send him to me?
Elizabeth. [hesitates] Will you put off Burr? .
Hamilton. [simple and without hesitation] Yes. May I see Nat
alone? Before~~ he would be embarrassed to go over negotiations.
Elizabeth. [regards her husband carefully for a moment] I shall send
him in. [they touch fingertips briefly and Elizabeth goes off right.
After the door closes upon his wife Hamilton produces the newspaper
clipping from a coat pocket, scans it once again, takes Burr's note
from another pocket, looks from note to clipping, then replaces both
papers and removing the reading spectacles stands for a moment with
head bowed. As Pendleton reenters, Hamilton slowly puts the spectacles in the pocket of his waistcoat.]
Pendleton. [closing the door behind him] Van Ness walked right
past me without seeming to notice I was there. You must have
put a thought in his head. [without replying, Hamilton hands
Pendleton first the note, then the clipping. In taking the clipping
Pendleton merely glances at it appearing to recognize the piece and
returns to a more careful scrutiny of the note, holding out the clipping to Hamilton who pockets it once again.] Acknowledge or
disavow, he says.
Hamilton. Yes, quite clever, don't you think? A perfect
cleftstick.
Pendleton. How do you see it?
Hamilton. If I acknowledge, fhe challenge promptly follows.
On the other hand, Burr knows I cannot disavow for several
reasons. First, on the face of it disavowal appears timorous.
Second, what, in any event, am I to disavow? That I have
brought severe censures against Burr to any number of men
over several years many of which could be termed despicable." That is, if the idea is to supply an adjective for the degree
of villainy charged. But I cannot make such a disavowal
without exposing myself to the charge of misrepresenting
Burr's rharacter in £he first place, or of disloyalty to my friends
and supporters who have acted upon my representations.
Either way, I am destroyed in the trust I have earned with
men of consequence.
Pendleton. It's Cooper's damnable ambiguity that has played
into Burr's hand. I did not think he could have drawn the
noose so tight.
Hamilton. Tight if I stick my neck in it, but! shan't. I shall sim11
SUMMER 1985
�ply refuse Burr's challenge.
Pendleton. Yes, but you must not say so.
Hamilton. Nay, but I shall.
Pendleton. [clearly alarmed] But I thought you understood! You
must not flatly refuse to honor the challenge of a man who
is generally thought of as a gentleman worthy of receiving
and of issuing such challenges.
Hamilton. But I must reject him. Since I hold his code to be
impious if not wicked.
Pendleton. But the code to which you refer is not held to be
wicked by the generality of men, at least not by men of
standing.
Hamilton. Perhaps not, but I cannot see that such a consideration ought to be decisive. My honor is my conscience. I shall
not enter into his code duello.
Pendleton. {turns to the window and after a moment again confronts
Hamilton] You must forgive me, my old friend if I put to you
a question that has puzzled me awhile. This, uh, devout
religiosity that has come upon you in recent years-has it occurred to you that this belated piety has something of awell-of an ad hoc character?
Hamilton. Oaughs ingenuously] Ah N athaniet you are much too
shrewd for me.
Pendleton. [laughs also but with an air of irony] Well, but some
of the more memorable public remarks of your younger days
wereHamilton. As callow and ill-digested as those of any other raw
youth fond of his own intelligence and finding skepticism a
flashy blade with which to astonish his elders.
Pendleton. To be sure. Yet even after you settled into maturity
as a property holder and family head, I cannot say I found
you notable for your devotions.
Hamilton. Well, more's the pity.
Pendleton. But you see, my dear friend, it has seemed so to
most men. Indeed I venture to say that for most of those who
have observed you, it appears that you did not discover you
were pious until-until it became so very clear that your great
opponent Jefferson was a free thinker.
Hamilton. [directly but not angrily] You cannot think it!
Pendleton. Well, I confess some doubt that you know your own
mind. Year before last you inform us that we must proceed
to form in opposition to the Virginia Jacobins a Christian Constitutionalist Party. We should work to propagate New Testament brotherhood and the Federalist construction of the
United States Constitution. The project did not go far despite
your efforts-or, who knows, perhaps because of those efforts. For surely you have been told that your plan was resented by unimpeachably devout men who deemed you to
be setting God's Word in service of party. Not to speak of
an equal number of skeptics and atheists who held the same
opinion but with a different valuation.
Hamilton. And you, Nat, are to be numbered in that faction?
Pendleton. Just now the issue is youh belief, not mine. [Hamilton indicates he will not press] So, t ose who had no cause to
be jealous on behalf of the honor of the Deity nonetheless
resented the alliance just as keenly. They held the importation of religious sentiment to be an imposition and something
of a concession to mechanics and store clerks.
Hamilton. [still in good humor but peremptory] Enough! Upon my
honor, Nat, you could stand in well for a Spanish inquisitor.
How should I reply? My faith I hope is as sincere as I know
how to be. I believe that man is a fallen creature in need of
divine grace. And I hope to be saved by the grace of the Son
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
of God. My political convictions now follow my religion. Assuredly not the other way about. I do not know if my mere
avowal suffices to satisfy your questionPendleton. [meekly] But of course it does.
Hamilton. But let me attest this faith a little by acting under
it. You should do me a great favor by bearing to Mr. Burr the
message that for whatever wrong I may have done him I
repent it, and I shall not enter upon a challenge. Neither shall
I give nor accept a challenge.
Pendleton. Do not ask me to bear such a message. I should not
act the part of your friend if I made that reply!
Hamilton. Why?
Pendleton. It would ruin you as a public figure, and it would
make Burr.
Hamilton. [after a moment] Nonsense, the matter is private.
Pendleton. Burr, or Van Ness on behalf of his chief, will make
itpublic.
---Hamilton. Well, then, publicly I can make known my principles.
Pendleton. They will not be perceived to be the motives that
actually motivated you. Have I not just atte:wpted to tell you
in a kindly way that your professions of faith are not taken
seriously?
Hamilton. [takes fire] Well the world be damned! What other
motive can anyone impute?
Pendleton. [hesitates one instant} Failure of nerve.
Hamilton. [incredulous] "Failure of nerve"! I? I have never
guarded my life!
Pendleton. I know it.
Hamilton. [hotly] And the world knows it. My reputation will
ensure that my true motives are credited.
Pendleton. Men are disposed to believe the worst. They will
believe the lower explanation if you do not confute them by
a deed that cannot be explained away. Reputation is gnawed
away by envy, by fear, even by pity. You keep what you've
earned only by incessantly earning it anew. Otherwise, while
they admit your former bravery, men will shake their heads
and say, ''poor Hamilton, he once gave everything, until middle age taught him to be careful."
Hamilton. {obstinate but subsiding] They cannot say so.
Pendleton. Indeed they shall. They will say you have changed.
Have you not just maintained to me that in respect of the sincerity of your piety you are not the same man the world has
known? Well, the world shall say the same-but in respect
of a former courage now renounced.
Hamilton. [goes to_ small table and regards the miniature portraits
of the lairds] I-may have to accept that consequence.
Pendleton.
Can you?
Hamilton. [after a moment] Have you an alternative to propose?
Pendleton. Temporize.
Hamilton. What do you mean?
Pendleton. Protest the vagueness of the issue as Burr has posed
it. Have me say that you cannot reply to Burr's demand because he has not said how much is comprehended in Cooper's
remarks. Say that when he brings himself to specify, you will
be prompt to acknowledge or to disavow. But that without
his clarifying, you can do neither.
Hamilton. What's to be gained thereby?
Pendleton. At the least, time for careful working. And with time
who knows what may intervene to blow up Burr's project?
Most important, if Burr cannot specifyHamilton. {interjecting] But of course he cannot.
Pendleton. [continues undisturbed in his train of thought] If he can-
13
�not specify and the proceedings stick at that point, you may
ward off his challenge without having to refuse it.
Hamilton. [a shiver of impatience and repugnance] Ugh! I do not
like the shuffling air of it.
Pendleton. You owe yourself some trouble-and for the sake
of your friends. {as Hamilton hesitates, Angelica reenters carrying a wicker basket on her arm and in her other hand the album.
Both men tum to the girl presenting pleasant expressions and she
places the album in Pendleton's hand]
Angelica. [to Pendleton as he takes the album] Write.
Pendleton. {uncomprehending but still smiling] Write what, my
dear girl?
Angelica. [patient and as though lucid] For my fete. Anything.
[offers basket to Hamilton] Peaches. [Hamilton reaches into the
basket and takes a peach without removing his eyes from Angelica]
Philip sent them. [Pendleton turns away, Hamilton passes his
hand over his face but then takes Angelica by the hand] And this
will sustain you as you sail past Madagascar. {reaches into the
basket and presents her father with another peach]
Hamilton. But where am I bound, Angelica?
Angelica. Cathay.
Hamilton. Ah! A year's voyage.
Angelica. I shall await your ship at the Battery.
Hamilton. {tenderly] Where is your mother?
Angelica. You must fetch him back.
Hamilton. Would you ask your mother to fill another basket
with those splendid peaches? For Mr. Pendleton?
Pendleton. [turns back] Why thank you, Angelica. That would
be most kind. [Pendleton moves to take up his gloves as Angelica bows to him and goes off right] Will you at least think over
my advice today?
Hamilton. You know I would do as you wish were I not bound
otherwise by my conscience. I am not free.
Pendleton. True. But you are now claiming a freedom you're
not entitled to. {as Hamilton makes a move to protest] No, hear
this last word. Then, if you are still resolved to deny any
challenge, I shall bear to Burr whatever message you will. Will
you hear me?
Hamilton. Say on.
Pendleton. My devotion to you, my old friend, is the one principle of my life I have never had occasion to question.
Hamilton. I hope I may prove worthy of that trust.
Pendleton. The only condition of that trust is that you do not
repudiate yourself. [at a slight pause from Pendleton, Hamilton makes a gesture indicating that he should continue] As long
as I have known you I have thought of you as representing
the best this nation is capable of producing. In your career
I conceive that I've found a proof of popular government. The
essence of that proof is the demonstration that a man can serve
this people yet remain a gentleman. You have not cheapened
yourself in order to enjoy the favor of crowds, but you have
done good for this country all the same. So you see, there's
something more than personal in my concern for you. You
must defend your reputation as a gentleman as much as your
reputation as a patriot. The honor of a gentleman is only
proved by his willingness to shed his own blood.
Hamilton. {bitingly} Accompanied by the demonstration of a
willingness to break the law and to shed the blood of another.
Pendleton. If you do not offer such a proof, all of your past efforts already attacked by the demagogues will also be doubted
by the better sort of men. They will think that in building a
system to make life secure for tradesmen and mechanics you
in time became more careful of yourself than a man of honor
ought to be. You owe this country a better example, {points
14
to the miniature portraits] you owe it to your fathers. [Hamilton half turns to look down at the portraits and takes one up from
the commode] Will you at least speak with Rufus King? [Hamilton looks up without replying but with interest} Allow me to take
the reply I've suggested and use the time to talk to King. You
esteem Rufus as much as I do. To me he stands for the best
of the men I would have you keep -faith with. Send me with
a temporizing message to Burr and allow me to send Rufus
to you.
Hamilton. [looks down again at the portrait, and then takes up again
the plumed hat] Deliver Burr the message you proposed. [Pendleton bows and goes off right as Hamilton turns away to the window, still with the hat in his hand]
Act II
Scene 1
Burr's townhouse one day later.
At rise Burr and the Countess are seated on a low sofa in the same
drawing room presented earlier. As the Countess holds her hair up
with one hand and adjusts the collar of her bodice with the other, Burr
rises from his place beside her. In his shirtsleeves and waistcoat he
crosses to a chair at left and takes up the frockcoat that has been draped
over the back.
Burr. [putting on the coat] Well, perhaps we might reconsider
the terms of our-ah-mutuality.
Countess. {replacing a pin in her hair] Yes, we were yesterday
both of us perhaps too abrupt.
Burr. But you must understand the manners of this town are
not greatly in advance of the country as a whole. And the
nation has not yet acquired a degree of refinement sufficient
to allow us the liberty of society. Hence my directness with
you which in Paris would not be required.
Countess. Of course my dear {with a certain edge returning] and
hence the vigor of my remonstrations with you-a promptness of resentment which in less provincial circumstances I
should not for the world have thought to exhibit against my
bantam gallant.
Burr. {stares at the woman a moment then acknowledges without
conviction] Mmm, yes. {takes out a long-stemmed pipe and begins
to fill it from a tobacco pouch he takes from the side pocket of the
coat] Now at what point of my narrative did we . , , digress?
Countess. [adjusting herself on the divan] At the altercation between Mr. Hamilton and Mr. James Monroe.
Burr. So it was. Welt the story is further illustrative of the
republican manners to which I just made reference. Mr. Monroe became an actor in the farce when he went with two congressmen to hear Hamilton's explanation of why he was
paying hush money to a scoundrel like James Reynolds. This
Monroe, my nonpareil, is just as cold a cuttle fish as you
should ever have the misfortune to know. I doubt that even
your inexhaustible capacity for stimulation would kindle so
much as a glint in those stony eyes. So you can fancy with
what embarrassment he confronted the realization that the
corruption of office he had hoped to detect was not to be, but,
instead, the unpromising corruption of mere human infidelity in its ageless and humiliating, but politically innocuous,
form of simple adultery.
Countess. {polite snort of bored amusement} Do you have a bit of
tobacco pray?
Burr. Not fine enough for your impeccable nostrils, Madame.
[drawing his pipe] So Mr. Hamilton, the Secretaryofthe Treasury of the United States, made one senator of that Great
SUMMER 1985
�Republic and two members of the House of Representatives
thereof sit down for an hour to read over half a dozen halfilliterate, dull, and redundantly scurrilous love letters which,
supposedly, had passed between Mr. Hamilton and Mrs.
James Reynolds. All to prove that the great Hamilton was no
thief of the United States treasury, but only of another man's
wife! The husband, James, sought to blackmail the adulterer,
Alexander, quite possibly with the collusion, if not indeed at
the instigation, of the loosely-tethered Maria, his wife, if but
in name.
Countess. One should think a challenge might pass between
this-?
Burr. Reynolds.
Countess. Reynolds and Hamilton. But how Monroe?
Burr. Monroe's own meanness let him in for it. He appeared
to accept Hamilton's sordid explanation of his dealings with
Reynolds. Then, years later when the matter becomes public, he spreads it about that he had only left Hamilton with
the impression that his story was believed!
Countess. Mon Dieu!
Burr. At this point Hamilton and his second John Barker
Church meet Monroe and his second preparatory to issuing
the challenge to a duel. But Monroe shifts about, makes some
protestation of his acceptance of Hamilton's account, and the
matter fizzles. But, [holding up one finger] our farce must have
an epilogue.
Countess. Ah, you must let me have it, pet.
Burr. {languidly clasps his hands behind his head] Hamilton then
took it into his head that the public at large must be brought
to admit his honesty in office. And how should the public
be brought to admit it? In no way save by the same disclosures
that convinced-or should have convinced-Monroe and his
congressmen. Nothing would do but that the wide world
should read Maria's love notes to Hamilton and his to her.
Yes! He published them in the only book ever credited to his
sole authorship. Published not only his immorality but his
ridiculously conunon taste-for the Reynolds woman was a
public thoroughfare-and in the process assured the lasting
humiliation of his own wife, a woman as fine as the best ever
bred on these shores.
Countess. He subjects himself and his wife to disgrace only to
prove his honesty in office?
Burr. Just so! She ought never forgive him, but he is clean in
his accounts-or so he had hoped. As a matter of fact, he
damned himself the one way without clearing himself in the
other. Men who only suspected his adultery now had proof,
and men who suspected he profited by his office still continued so to suspect him. But the episode demonstrated how
much Hamilton will pay to safeguard his political fame. And
for that same reason, he dare not deny me satisfaction in the
~instance. [measures the Countess with his spectacles] You
dO-ilOf much care for these lessons in statecraft, do you
milady?
Countess. {settling a pillow languidly] Not much, I confess it. {enter
from right the Housekeeper]
Housekeeper. Mr. Van Ness, sir.
Burr. Show him in. [As Countess makes sure of her buttons and
Burr relights his pipe, Van Ness enters from right, the Housekeeper departing]
Van Ness. [a cursory bow to Countess] Should we converse in
private?
Burr. It cannot be worth the trouble, madame knows enough
of our project to be more dangerous in her conjectures than
in knowledge.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Countess. [evenly] Diminutive bastard!
Burr. [unimpassioned] Whore of Babylon! [as Van Ness looks on
a little startled, Burr and the Countess exchange little bows of mutual acknowledgement]
Van Ness. Very well. Hamilton equivocates.
Burr. In what fashion?
Van Ness. Pendleton has just given me a note in which Hamilton says that without your further specifying the grievances,
he can neither acknowledge nor disavow.
Burr. This is mere paltering.
Van Ness. I should say so.
Burr. I expected better of Hamilton.
Countess. Why? A man who would insult his wife as you just
told me he didBurr. [icily] Moral indignation does not become you, my dear,
you tend to bray. [Countess shows her teeth, but does not otherwise reply] Let me see his note.
Van Ness. [handing the note] Pendleton, of course, will be advising Hamilton.
Burr. [scanning the note] How many others have been informed?
Van Ness. I do not know. From Hamilton I suspect no othersBurr. [perceiving the significance of Van Ness~ intonation and emphasis turns to Countess but still without looking up from the note]
Have you yet had opportunity to inform your acquaintances?
Countess. [wrenches away] Hang yourself.
Burr. [to Van Ness] From observing him could you discern anything further of Hamilton's intent?
Van Ness. I would say he was shaken when he read the note.
Though he recovered his color tolerably well.
Burr. Did he raise the question of the law?
Van Ness. No.
Burr. Did you encounter Mrs. Hamilton?
Van Ness. She saw me come and go.
Burr. But Hamilton did not have her by when you delivered
my message?
Van Ness. She was not present.
Burr. That is good. Although I am still concerned that Hamilton might inform her. He has disappointed me twice now and
I begin to misdoubt his delicacy in points of honor. You recall
Hamilton eventually relented when he might have pressed
Monroe, and in that altercation with Commodore Nicholson
at the time of Jay's treaty he showed himself somewhat too
ready to accept an explanation.
Van Ness. Perhaps so. But what has that to do with his wife?
Burr. You have not heard the story of the Earl of Paulett and
the Duke of Marlborough? [to Countess] This will answer to
your taste for the piquant, rna chere.
Countess. You are as copious as a gazette.
Burr. Your only chronicler of the century. Well. Just after he
returned from his wars in the low countries, Marlborough was
assailed by Poulett for misuse of the Queen's troops. After
a time, challenges were exchanged and the time and place
of the interview were set. Having reconsidered, Paulett found
himself not up to it. Yet, rather than retract, he had recourse
to an expedient employed now and then by peaceable fellows
who would have the world think them brave. He let the affair slip to his wife who saved Paulett by making sure the
authorities knew of the impending interview. Marlborough
was obliged by the Secretary of State to accept a composition.
{relights his pipe] I'm surprised, William, to find you unacquainted with the story.
Van Ness. I should think the more pertinent consideration is
whether Hamilton has heard the story.
Burr. [smiling] I learned it from him. [pats Van Ness on thecuffJ
15
�Anyway, Poulett' s finesse has earned him a certain notoriety and has occasioned an unwritten addition to the code of
the duel.
Van Ness. To wit: a gentleman is and ought to be disgraced
by the intervention of his wife and thus no true man shall
in this particular take his wife into his confidence.
Burr. Precisely. You have a genius for inference.
Van Ness. Hamilton must not be allowed to make his escape
by that door.
Burr. We cannot positively prevent the attempt. But if we are
troubled by a sheriff or a justice you must let it be universally
known that Hamilton applied to his wife rather than to his
nerve.
Van Ness. And certainly I shall.
Burr. [to Countess] And you, my ladyship, shall assist. I know
I can count upon your zeal for propagating. That is to say,
for propagating the truth.
Countess. [petulant] I'll turn it over.
Burr. [irreverent] oTurn over" do you say?
Countess. [angry] I'll think about it.
Burr. Oh, I am certain you can do much better. You perform
prodigies.
Countess. Go to hell.
Burr. "Is Saul too among the prophets:' Alas and alack .
[Burr attempts to kiss the Countess on the cheek but fails as she
averts her head. He takes her hand, kisses it, and shrugs as, after
an instant, she pulls away with unconvincing hauteur]
Burr. [to Van Ness] I shall have to write an answer to Hamilton's note. The object is to bring on the challenge as soon as
may be and cut through these disagreeable delays.
Van Ness. The longer Hamilton delays, the greater the likelihood that someone should intervene on his behali. He knows
that, we know it, and he knows we know it.
Burr. Then this is what we shall say: it is not for me to determine in what precise particulars I have been slandered.
Rather, it is necessary that Hamilton signify clearly whether
or no he takes responsibility for the harm already done me.
If you have occasion for further conversation with Hamilton
you must stress that I judge the harm to be a thing already
inflicted-that will tighten our grip on him.
Countess. Or his upon you.
Burr. [ignoring the woman's remark] And to throw another grapnel on our prize, let us add one line more to the effect that
his letter has furnished me with new reasons for requiring
a definite reply.
Van Ness. Still, now that fright has stirred him, the definite reply may be to disavow. Then you shall see your prize raise
sail on sail and fly away.
Burr. [pauses a few moments to think, idling the time by standing
behind the Countess undoing one of the elaborate curls of her
coiffure] Then we must be sure that a disavowal should inflict
disgrace.
Countess. [pulls away from Burr's irreverent doodling upon her hair
and walks to a mirror at left where she attempts to repair the damage]
You are a cool one, sir. You are bound and determined to ruin
General Hamilton.
Burr. [evenly] No, my dear, he need not suffer ruin. To avoid
ruin lies in his hands [approaches Countess from behind and
fastens one button at the tip of her collar. Van Ness discreetly turns
away] I am only bound to slay him. [Burr's and the Countess'
eyes meet in the mirror, she displaying fright. Van Ness turns back
to face Burr] So William, let us phrase it in such a way that
Hamilton cannot disavow without disavowing everything for
16
which he stands.
Van Ness. He stands for nothing so much as unremitting opposition to Aaron Burr.
Burr. Precisely. And so let us call for nothing less than a disavowal of every attack that has given teeth to that opposition. Here. [taking up paper and dipping a pen] In view of the
impossibility of turning up the particular trash imparted to
Cooper let us pose the question in its most lethal form. [writes]
Yes. !after approving the sketch, hands the paper to Van Ness.
The Countess tries to read just as Van Ness rises]
Van Ness. [reciting as though to test the words by sounding them]
''The question is whether you have authorized my dishonor
by uttering expressions or opinions derogatory to my honor.''
Yes. This is pretty much a summary of Hamilton's career.
Burr. He cannot perceive it otherwise. The world will so perceive it. And he knows his followers will so perceive it: Can
you return in an hour for the full message?
Van Ness. [taking his hat] You must leave him no uncertainty.
You must give him to know that you and every public man
shall consider disavowal under these conditions to be the same
as total remorse and promise of penance.
Burr. That is for you to make clear to him, William. Do you
think you can?
Van Ness. [bows] I shall. [Burr sees Van Ness to the door right.
Turns slowly back to Countess]
Burr. It is possible, my dear, that you have just witnessed the
conception of a new nation.
Countess. Let us hope it is the only conception I've witnessed
today.
Burr. !laughs drily] Why? Caesar must have his heir.
Countess. [raises her hand to ward offJ No, by this hand!
Burr. Not by your hand to be sure. [pours two glasses of wine]
Ah, well, perhaps I may find fruit of my loins elsewhere.
Countess. You are famed for having spawned throughout New
England.
Burr. If half the slanders were true, I should have my army
from my own begetting. But, alas, I need a party all the same.
[handing a glass to the Countess] So Colonel Hamilton's old
party must serve. They have grown tired of his blunders and
now begin to cast their eyes on me. On Washington's birthday last they received my overtures quite warmly. Should you
care to be Queen of New England?
Countess. [snorts] The title would prove the best part of the job
I fear.
Burr. [raises his glass] Nonetheless, I propose the toast I raised
to the Federalists: ''To the Union of all honest men.''
Countess. With honest women?
Burr. And with their loins. [As the lights dim, Burr and the Countess clink glasses]
Scene 2
Early evening of June 19. Hamilton's drawing room as arranged in
Act One Scene 2. The double doors at right are open and as Hamilton enters from right sounds of a party can be heard with notes of
a clavichord in the background. The tall hat box is still seen on the
desk at center.
Hamilton. [speaks over his shoulder as he enters] As soon as Mr.
King has spoken with Angelica, please ask him to step in here.
[closes the double doors muting the festive sounds, notes the hatbox
on the desk and takes out the plumed cockade. After a moment Hamilton replaces the hat without having placed it on his head. He takes
up a pen and a book from the desktop and removing a slip of paper
tipped into the book begins jotting upon the scrap. After a time, as
SUMMER 1985
�Hamilton continues to write, Rufus King enters unannounced.
King, a man of middle height, florid complexion, and slightly balding, wears frockcoat and small clothes and in dress and gestures
bespeaks more weight than either Pendleton or Van Ness]
King. [speaks with a Maine accent and with something of the terseness for which people from that region are known} You are sketching another book?
Hamilton. [setting down the pen} Rufus, welcome. [the two men
clasp hands} Thanks for coming.
King. [points to book and paper still in Hamilton's left hand} You
work even through your daughter's fete?
Hamilton. No. I'm listing those of the Federalist numbers that
were from my hand. I've intended to do so for some time now.
You or Pendleton can check them against John's
recollection-and Madison's, if he still deems himself on
speaking terms with us.
King. [becoming quite grave} If you speak to me as though I might
serve as your executor, I must conclude that the matter is fully
as grave as Nathaniel gave me to believe. You are then pursuing a duel with Aaron Burr?
Hamilton. I'm pursuing every possible alternative to such an
outcome. But his last correspondence leaves me little room
to maneuver.
King. To what point has he brought it?
Hamilton. Pendleton gave you the gist of the first exchange?
King. Burr quotes the fool Cooper against you-you require
a more specific grievance. That's what I have from Nathaniel.
Hamilton. Two hours ago Van Ness delivered Burr's reply. He
refuses to specify but instead stipulates that a disavowal must
cover everything said against him that might impeach his
honor.
King. [without irony] That's everything.
Hamilton. Very near.
King. From that fact Burr gets leverage.
Hamilton. Considerable leverage. The more so in that he knows
I must see it in the same light as he himself.
King. The care with which he selects the occasion and composes his demands argues a premeditated wrath.
Hamilton. Premeditated to the last grimace.
King. Further temporizing would be awkward.
Hamilton. Impossible, I agree.
King. Well then, do you seek my advice?
Hamilton. I always welcome your advice, Rufus. Although I
ask you here principally to beg some favors. [at a sign from
Hamilton both men sit. King on the divan; Hamilton brings over
his desk chair}
King. [not unkindly} Favors first, advice, maybe, thereafter.
Hamilton. Nothing but a national calamity can revive my political credit. You are therefore the proper leader of the Federalist party.
King. What's left of it. And if Burr does not steal it away from
us.
Hamilton. The favor I would ask of you bears upon that danger.
King. Ayeh.
Hamilton. First, how certain are you that Burr plots a secession of New York and the New England states?
King. [growing more animated as he proceeds] As certain as I am
that I sit here. I have it from men of our party that are sympathetic to the idea and want me in. They are fed up with
Jefferson and his Virginia Jacobins. They want to know their
property is secure. They hate the whole breed of slaveholding, France-worshipping, atheistic, democratic flatters that
have destroyed good order in this country. They want to see
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
our party revived in a new nation free from the taint of the
South.
Hamilton. [after a moment laughs} I believe I've just heard a friend
of that cause. You surprise me, Rufus.
King. [uncomfortable} Ah General, I'm splitting my heart on this
rock. I've fought men who've proposed no more than I've
just said. But lately I've found less and less to oppose to the
idea. The thought of giving this Union to Virginia slavers galls
me so sore that I'd sooner see it divided.
Hamilton. Then why have you held yourself out of the _counsels of those who would break off New England?
King. Doubt of success, hatred of Burr. [rising] I tell you sir,
nothing will satisfy that man but the throne of God!
Hamilton. He could defend his new creation though. The one
virtue I would not deny him is courage-at least in his ?Wn
cause.
King. I wouldn't trade a Virginia demagogue for a New York
tyrant. [turning to Hamilton and approaching quite close} But I
would pledge my life's blood to the right man. [Hamilton
receives this silently staring back at King] Yes, you are the man.
You could found a new nation and defend it.
Hamilton. [suddenly rising goes to window at left] You are not
serious.
King. Face me. [Hamilton turns back to King] You can see that
I am serious.
Hamilton. [after a hesitation] I am not your man.
King. You know that you are.
Hamilton. What have I said that would lead you to think I might
join such a purpose?
King. All that Y2!:! have ever said. All that you've done. Hear
me out. My father had six slaves on his estate in Maine. They
were as well-treated as members of the family. But I quarreled with my father from the time I could make a quarrel
arguing that he should set them free. And before my father
was well-buried I had signed the papers and beaten them off
my land. Every slave means two ruined men: himself and his
master. I follow you because you"ve set this country on a
course that will abolish slavery by encouraging free men to
work and to love governing themselves. You found this country on the point of destroying itself by freedom run to wildness and sloth. You and Washington put freedom under law
and gave us order and energy and prosperity. That's why I'm
a Federalist.
Hamilton. The party you so nobly extol is doomed.
King. You can transform a doomed party into a new nation.
A nation all of free men equal under the law. AndHamilton. You're dreaming.
King. And, my dear Hamilton, a nation composed all of freemen will offer other opportunities for men of spirit. It will
be a nation of soldiers-every citizen bred up in arms. We shall
not then be subject to the humiliations lately inflicted by the
powers of Europe. The leaders of a nation under arms could
take their place with the great men of the Old World. They
would figure in every chronicle of the race.
Hamilton. [musing] There would certainly be war. With the
South and with others.
King. And with war, vigor, industry; courage ... glory!
Hamilton. Some grief.
King. Ayeh. But ultimately we liberate the entire New World
from Spain. [after a moment, places his hand on Hamilton's shoulder} And who knows, perhaps we shall liberate the Old World
from itself.
Hamilton. You should awaken yourself my old friend.
17
�King. You should be President-for-Life and Commander-inChief-.-
Hamilton. [about to speak falls silent and turns away] No. [but
without positive conviction]
King. You could be another Caesar. But more magnificent.
Have you not said Caesar was the greatest man who ever
lived?
Hamilton. [continues to gaze out the window] When I said so, I
was-dreaming.
King. [ignoring or oblivious to the qualification] But more magnificent. Caesar destroyed a republic to make an e~pire. You
can bring republican principles to the world. [as Hamilton remains silent and continues to gaze out the window] Give the word
and the best men of New England will put aside Burr and
follow you. Burr shall be crushed forever and aye and Jefferson [laughs capaciously] Jefferson will befoul himself with fright
and flee to Monticello. [Hamilton laughs] Will you say the
word?
Hamilton. [his laughter subsides and he holds King's gaze for two
or three seconds] No. [a small silence follows as neither man averts
his eyes]
King. [keeping himself very still] I've not known you to play a
coy maid scene before. Am I supposed to entreat?
Hamilton. [simply] No.
King. [relaxes with one long restrained sigh] You said you had a
favor to ask me.
Hamilton. I want you to help prevent any scheme to have the
. Northern states secede.
King. !after an instant laughs mirthlessly] Ha! You refuse my
prayer that you lead a secession by asking me now to scotch
the whole affair? Back out on Pickering, Sedgwick and all our
friends?
Hamilton. Secession is treason.
King. uTreason"! To stand apart from Jefferson and his Virginia cabal?
Hamilton. Treason to the work we've taken in hand Rufus. [now
King turns indignantly to stare out the window] I've led out troops
against insurrections against this nation. You and I have
worked in every way to lessen the power of these states.
We've shored up the national government by every device
invention could contrive. Our lives have been given to bringing strength and something like justice out of the small passions of men who think only of their near interests. Secession
means betrayal of all that we have given ourselves for.
King. I did not work for a strong national government so as
to give Jefferson an engine for his demagoguery. He wants
to level everything.
Hamilton. We are agreed that the disease of this nation is
democracy. But the cure is just the opposite of what you have
supposed. The cure is union not secession.
King. How when union only feeds the poWer of Jefferson's
democrats? He has set this nation to worship the evil genius
of Equality. Equality, the arch enemy of the moral world!
Equality that seeks its level by degrading what knowledge and
virtue have elevated! Shall every decent man be ground down
between the unwise principles of the Jeffersons and the no
principles of the Burrs? [the doors open letting in the sounds of
the party as the Maid announces, ''Mr. Pendleton, sir'']
Hamilton. [looks quizically to King who returns the expression]
Please show him in, Mrs. Baines. [the Maid goes off and soon
after returns bringing with her Pendleton dressed much like he was
in the earlier scene and again carrying his gloves which he holds
up to the retreating Mrs. Baines who ignores him closing the dou-
18
ble doors behind her] Good to see you, Nathaniel.
Pendleton. [hand clasps all around] General. Rufus, I thought to
find you here. I'm glad. [Pendleton shows some confusion as
he looks from one to the other, evidently uncertain how far King
has _been taken into Hamilton's confidence.]
Hamilton. We have been discussing the exigency posed by Mr.
Burr.
King. [hurriedly] Do you bring news of a development?
Pendleton. Nothing promising. Burr has sent no further messages and from Van Ness I am told that the last allows no
latitude of interpretation. When I asked Van Ness for a restatement of Burr's latest requirement he said it meant that the
General must disavow having said anything that might impair
Burr's honor.
King. Burr is making certain that no explanation can be offered.
Pendleton. That is obviously his intent. And I should say he
has succeeded. [an awkward silence] You have sounded the
General?
King. Ayeh. He refuses, he saysHamilton. Gentlemen, you meet here by prearrangement do
you not?
Pendleton. No.
{Speaking simultaneously]
King. Of course.
[Pendleton shrugs, turns away]
Hamilton. I'm not your man to lead a secession of New England states. I am your man for preventing such a calamity
as far as it lies with me to prevent it. [turning to Pendleton]
I was just attempting to persuade Rufus to assist in urging
Federalists to repudiate the scheme.
Pendleton. As far as I'm concerned, the idea loses half its attractions if you are not the guiding spirit.
King. I counted on you for better persuasion, Nathaniel. [to
Hamilton] General HamiltonHamilton. [to King] Secession would only open the way to the
intrigues of the European powers. We do not want to be subjects again to the King of England or to the mock republic of
France.
King. We can fight them and Jefferson too. Nay, Jefferson
won't fight.
Hamilton. The constitution we now have is the best cure for
the evils we all fear. A strong President, a responsible and
stable Senate, respect for law-these are cures for envy and
equality. But to have them we must have good Federalists.
We must preserve what is left of the Federalist parly and make
that remnant the guardian of the Constitution.
Pendleton. A remnant, that we are.
King. [bitter] A little bit of leaven for Virginia dough. Is that
what we've come to, General? Is that what you're proposing
we settle for?
Hamilton. The better men are always few, Rufus. Do you think
we would ever capture the hearts of the people?
Pendleton. Remember Dallas' warning: "No party so high it
cannot fall, no party so low it cannot rise.'' Politics is a changeable affair.
Hamilton. Changeable it is. Yet I suspect no party shall come
to power henceforth that is not some version of Jefferson's
party.
King. God what a prospect!
Pendleton. For once I'm glad I'm not young.
King. There's more honor in dying by the wall!
Pendleton. You'll have no chance for such glory, Rufus. The
people of New England itself will not follow us.
King. They would follow Hamilton.
Hamilton. You delude yourself, Rufus. I know better. For-
SUMMER 1985
�tunately the scheme will never find the support it needs to
carry through because it is wrong. But if you would try it,
you must either lead yourself, or place yourself under Burr.
Burr. I cannot lead, and I shall never serve Jefferson's VicePresident.
Hamilton. Not even against Jefferson?
King. !after a moment] Not though it should send to perdition
all of Virginia.
Hnmilton. Then you must go further and break up the scheme.
Pendleton. H we do not nurse the plan along, it dies of itself.
Hamilton. We can't be certain of that. If the plan goes forward,
when it fails it will bring the Federalist party into disgrace.
Moreover, Burr will use the plot to steal the party for himself. If you do not want to raise up Burr you must strangle
his monster in its infancy. Follow me, or follow Burr.
Pendleton. Burr must be destroyed.
King. What would you have me do?
Hamilton. Visit Sedgewick in Boston. I'll write to him also.
Then Bayard in Delaware, eventually you must see Pickering. I'll make sure of Morris and Jay. Nathaniel will help me
in the city. [the same thought seems to strike all three men as they
fall silent. Pendleton turns aside to the window but King continues
to face Hamilton]
King. [in a low voice] That is the favor you said you wanted to
ask? [Hamilton nods] I'll do it. {again a pause] But you must
deal with the Vice-President.
Hamilton. I am thinking how best to do so.
King. Burr has appeared to be dead before and has brought
himself back to life.
Hamilton. Recovery is his genius.
Pendleton. {turns back but stays by window] As with a cat, the
resiliency owes to lack of principle.
King. This time he must stay down. Confound it, Mr. Hamilton! Have you never hit anything with a gun? [both Pendleton and Hamilton laugh]
Hamilton. Perhaps if we trundled up naval guns charged with
grapeshot. [Pendleton laughs again. King does not]
King. {pensively] Still pistol and ball is so unpredictable. There's
always the chance. You must stipulate close range. Ten paces.
Mind you, ten paces.
Hamilton. {calmly] But Rufus, surely Nathaniel told you I am
resolved not to accept a challenge.
King. I trust you will reconsider that hasty and ill-advised
resolve.
Hamilton. Neither is it hasty nor adopted upon anyone's advice. It is my settled determination and taken after much
thought.
King. {abruptly] Then you are reconciled to losing your party
to Burr?
Htimilton. [surprised and hurt} You mean he can take it from me
at gunpoint?
King. I mean that among men whose good opinion is worth
having only two qualities are indispensable: courage and
honor. Once these are questioned men will not undertake any
risks on your behalf. When you can no longer bring men to
take risks for your principles, you no longer lead. If you are
known to have declined a proper challenge you will bring
yourself under question.
Hamilton. [drily] It appears that you and Nathaniel are in
remarkable accord.
Pendleton. {hurriedly] Rufus nor I question your firmness.
Hamilton. [somewhat bitterly] But you are certain other men
shall.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
King. A Jefferson could decline to no man's surprise nor
censure.
Pendleton. [to Hamilton] What do you expect from your countrymen?
Hamilton. If I accepted Burr's challenge, I would not fire at him.
Pendleton. {exasperated] That is self-destruction. {turns in disgust
back to window]
King. [after a moment] This also is a settled resolve?
Hamilton. I have proved it with blood more precious than my
own.
King. {abruptly and decisively] Then will you commit that resolve
to writing? [Pendleton turns back obviously astonished and Hamilton, also surprised, stares for a moment at King]
Hamilton. Of course I would. I would owe it to myself, and
to posterity to correct what, without such explanation, would
seem to endorse lawlessness and impiety.
King. You should see now how to be certain of Burr's destruction.
Pendleton. {as Hamilton takes his own counsel] What do you
mean?
King. {speaking only to Hamilton] Write out a full statement saying that your religious principle does not allow your taking
the life of your adversary. Therefore, although you will face
Burr and hazard his fire ~ will not fire upon him. You must
nevertheless try to slay him. {both Hamilton and Pendleton
express incredulity] No, hear me out! You must try to slay Burr.
If you succeed, destroy the note. If you do not hit him but
survive his fire, then your friends may publish the statement
without your taking a hand in it. It Would ruin Burr and endear you both with those who honor duels and with those
who condemn bloodshed.
Hamilton. Come, Rufus!
King. [brn.shes the interruption aside] If, on the other hand, youdo not survive, the world will condemn Burr. He may even
be charged with murder. Certainly he will be ruined as a public figure.
Pendleton. {speculatively] You would either destroy Burr outright, or destroy him as a public figure.
Hamilton. Gentlemen, am I to understand that my carcass may
be as dear to you as me alive so long as it serves to destroy
Burr?
Pendleton. General!
King. {quietly] That's unfair old friend. I advise you to practice your marksmanship, stipulate close range, and fire first.
It is~ who have boasted of wasting your fire.
Hamilton. "Boasted"!
King. Pride is also a transgression against divine ordinance,
if I remember, as also is wilful self-destruction. You sir, are
resolved upon wrong. I'm only attempting to salvage some
good from the waste you're bent upon.
Hamilton. But Rufus by God! What you propose is dishonorable.
King. If it be dishonorable to save your party and your country.
Hamilton. {appealing] Nathaniel?
Pendleton. [discovers finnness and takes a step. toward Hamilton]
Desperate ills require ~ remedy.
Hamilton. Gentlemen this I shall say only once again. So, as
you are my friends, accept my word, and do not try to sway
me. I shall not fire upon Burr. [a lengthy pause as King bows
his head and Pendleton painstakingly inspects his gloves]
King. {very quietly and hesitantly] Does that mean you refuse
to-face him?
Hamilton. [as King's intent becomes clearer to him] What?
19
�King. [getting through it all at one go] And to write out the
statement?
Hamilton. Will you go so far as to urge me to the course you
characterized as wilful self-destruction?
Pendleton. Not I! For God's sake Rufus! Say you do not.
King. [after allowing a certain time to elapse] No, of course I suggest no such thing. [this said in a monotone]
Pendleton. Do not think it, General. [Hamilton and King are facing each other as the Maid opens one of the double doors and tenta-
tively interrupts]
Milid. Excuse me, sir. Mrs. Hamilton asks should I cutthe cake?
Hamilton. Please go ahead. And tell Mrs. Hamilton! shall be
in directly.
Maid. [departing] Yes, sir.
Pendleton. We had best take our leave, Rufus.
King. [sadly] Ayeh.
Hamilton. [as the two other men come together] My wife already
suspects the reason for your recent visits.
King. I'm sorry.
Hamilton. Any further communications must be shielded from
her.
King.
Is there need of further communication?
Hamilton. Burr's last note must be answered. Will you be able
to leave immediately for Massachusetts to appeal to
Sedgewick?
King. [hesitates] l-am not certain that will be advisable.
Hamilton. How do you mean?
King. [looking away from Hamilton] The two concerns stand or
fall together.
Hamilton. You can be clearer, Rufus.
King. If it becomes public knowledge that you refuse Burr's
challenge, I doubt that other Federalists will follow you and
discard an agreement already in the making.
Hamilton. Why, you must convince them then!
King. [turns to foce Hamilton] I don't think! could. I'm not sure
I could carry conviction.
Hamilton. Ah! Does that mean you could not be altogether convinced yourself? [instead of answering, after a second King turns
away to the low table and idly fingers the miniature portraits. Hamilton turns to Pendleton] And you, Nathaniel?
Pendleton. [mutters as he also bows his head with embarrassment]
I would try to do whatever you ask of me ... but-[trails off
with a gesture of discouragement]
Hamilton. [quietly} So. I see. [goes to the desk and stands with hand
on the desktop and head bent] You must allow me to consider
my decision. [both men now watch Hamilton intently] My decision never to fire upon an opponent~ irrevocable. Still, I may
consent to accept his challenge. If I do, Nathaniel will deliver
my note saying that I cannot respond to Burr's demand for
explanation or disavowal and must therefore stand the consequences. That letter I have already written. [takes a sheet of
paper from a drawer of the desk, creases it and hands it to Pendleton who, without taking his eyes off Hamilton's face, places it in
his inside pocket] You will not deliver that letter unless I signify that you should. We must have no further meetings here
that would alarm my wife.
Pendleton. How then will you signify if you choose to have the
letter delivered?
King. And the other letter? The declaration of your intent to
throw away your fire . . . ?
Pendleton. [a pause] You owe an account to those who have reposed their trust in you. You owe posterity.
King. [as Hamilton still hesitates] If you will not kill Burr, you
must render him powerless.
20
Hami!!ton. [takes iU!I' !l!he q;d!Umed !hat
tlRJ1I£! turns it >n lhiis fltr.nds]
Nathaniiel, ylm must Clome by this house tonight when yw>u
take your evertil!lg walk. If I decide tiD have you deli"'"' th.e
letter invitiflg illomr"s duilleRge, [ siln.atl place this hat m fue
window.
King. [tt!lantlessiyJ Shall the sign further assure <IllS that·ymu lhave
written ·out the -ement? !IKirlg bill11ds .to theilecantenand takes
out its stopperJ
Hamilton. llfliace 191!1![1['.,. and if the wo.rst ;ensues, you will 'lmow
soon enouglk ®£ ffih::e stateme;m.t yeu desire..
King. [suggesliwe !hut not hea"'!)!~lm,dedl Yet Wlith the assU<rance
ofit, I>ihou!.d """'Wmore .... mmrictiio<> to .Sedgewicikill!lld the
others~
Hmnilivn. 1Jljfter .a lime} Very well
King. [.rest.mined but iinlsistent"" he poum :wi11I£ Mo t'hwe :§lssses]
Then, 'iE Nathaniel sees th.e halt he will kn001 illhat llhe ,.tatement has been recorded and is . ~ . availlable?
Hamilton. (taking up &e plumed hN wiJJi his head i!JJ>JwdJ i!fihe sees
this hat, he will know that I've left fue sta~marnHor yamnuse.
King. (handing a glass of wine to Pendletnn, then ilo Hammiilton]
I shall set out tomorrow morning as soon as I"ve beam Jfr.om
you. [all three ponder their glasses a moment]
Hamilton. {looking to King then Pendleton] If the l:lwee ;of us
should meet again, let us hope the occasion be to releb.rate
the perpetuation of the Union.
Pendleton. And indeed we certainly shall meet again.
King. And so I do hope.
Hamilton. [continues to hold his glass without drinking] I wonder
if our old toast is altogether appropriate at this momelll.t.
King. Nothing could be more appropriate.
Hamilton. [after a pause] Then-To the union of all honest men.
King. ''To the union of aU honest men.'' [touches Hamilton"s
glass, Pendleton raises his glass to theirs. The double doors are
opened a crack and the Maid just sticks in her head tentatively]
Maid. [hesitantly] Sir?
Hamilton. Yes, Mrs. Baines. I was coming just now. [a bow to
King and Pendleton] Gentlemen. [Hamilton goes off right, the
Maid stepping aside for him and holding the door. The lights dim
as she closes the double doors and as Pendleton and King turn
toward each other with grave but othewise impassive expressions.
They do not raise their glasses a second time]
Scene 3
Same setting as previous scene, toward dusk of the same day. Angelica's party is breaking up, and one hears from offstage voices of guests
taking their leave. After the voices subside, Hamilton and Angelica
enter from right.
Hamilton. [turning back in the doorway at right as Angelica continues into the room] Mrs. Baines, we shall want lights in a halfhour. [turns back to Angelica and takes both her hands in his] Well,
my Lady, Angelica, was your party a success?
Angelica. Papa, you should have seen my aunt pretend she was
you.
Hamilton. Which of your aunts?
Angelica. Aunt Angelica Church. She made herself swell up
like a bantam rooster and said she were you.
Hamilton. [laughs] I hope then she did justice to my fine comb
[tosses his head] and my brave voice o' the morning. Did she
sing?
Angelica. No, Papa.
Hamilton. Your Aunt can sing with the best of this country.
You should make her sing for you some day.
SUMMER 1985
�Angelica. Will you ask her for me?
Hamilton. [dropping his daughter's hands, searches in his pocket]
Certainly.
.
Angelica. Will you come earlier to my next party?
Hamilton. Yes, Angelica, I most certainly shall be more prompt.
{takes from an inside pocket a ring] I hope you will think of your
father when you wear this dinner ring. [slips the ring an Angelica's finger]
Angelica. {looks briefly at the ring but makes no acknowledgement
of the gift] I do not much admire Charles Lansing.
Hamilton. [abstractedly] He is rather a tepid young man is he
not. {kisses Angelica]
Angelica. He betrayed Philip.
Hamilton. [for an instant Hamilton appears perplexed and pained
by the sudden reference] No, dear. Charles Lansing is several
years younger than your brother. They scarcely knew each
other.
Angelica. [incongruously casual] In any event, you must not fail
me another time. Gentlemen must observe punctuality.
Hamilton. {laughs and takes her hand again] Punctual I shall be.
[Elizabeth enters from right dabbing at her forehead with a handkerchief. After she shuts the double doors behind her she leans her back
against them with a broad gesture indicating both fatigue and relief.
Hamilton and Angelica have turned to face Elizabeth as they continue to hold hands.]
Elizabeth. So here you two have hidden yourselves. I wish I
could have said, ''Stand not upon the order of your going,
but go at once." New York is nothing if it is not verbose.
Hamilton. Poor Eliza. You've been on your feet all day. [indicating the sofa] Light and rest.
Eliznbeth. {taking the place Hamilton has indicated] I'lllight but
it's doubtful I'll rest. I'll hear those two dozen silly girls babbling all night. I shan't sleep. Dearest Angelica, would you
hand me that pillow? {as Angelica brings a throw pillow from
the stuffed armchair] Thanks, child. [settling the pillow behind her
head Elizabeth stretches out full length] Did you enjoy your fete,
Angelica?
Angelica. From David Livingston I received a pack of cards.
Eliznbeth. {to Hamilton] A strange gift. Butthen the Livingston's
enjoy nothing so much as inflicting their eccentricities. May
I see them, Angelica?
Angelica. {dutifully handing over a small packet] I should like to
be allowed to keep Mr. Livingston's gift.
Eliznbeth. [glances casually at the pack of cards, then gives them back
to Angelica] Surely you may, dearest. I would wager that your
brother john will play a hand with you if you ask him kindly.
I left him just now in the front parlor.
Angelica. Papa has promised to come from the beginning of
my next party.
Eliznbeth. {simply] Then you may count upon it. For your father
keeps his promises. [as Angelica continues to stand before her]
Your brother john is in the parlor. [kindly] Angelica, will you
go to the front parlor and play at cards with your brother?
Angelica. {making herself, as she thinks, severe] And your promise,
sir, shall I depend upon it?
Hamilton. [seeing her to the door and kissing her] Aye, my dearest,
you may be sure of me. [as Angelica goes off right, a brief silence falls as Hamilton crosses to the small table and takes up the
glass decanter. Hamilton turns to the low table and pours into one
of the wine glasses] Would you take some sherry, Eliza?
Elizabeth. Thank you, no. Please do take some yourself. [as
Hamilton raises his glass to her in a quiet salute] You may have
a little alarmed your son.
Hamilton. Oh? How should I have done so?
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Eliznbeth. I was speaking with john Church just a while ago.
He was sitting by himself as he does whenever there's a party.
He told me that as he read he sensed someone standing in
the doorway. He said you asked him at last if he wanted to
sleep in your room tonight.
Hamilton. [directly and without particular emphasis] Yes, I should
like him to be with me. I've not had much leisure to visit with
the children lately.
Elizabeth. [holds this reply briefly, then, affectionately} Then we
must have our chat here before bed. Now I think of it, a glass
of wine would suit me. Could you?
Hamilton. [as he crosses back to the low table and fills another glass]
A most excellent and collegial motion. [as Hamilton presents
the glass to his wife she looks past him to the hat on the desk and
while taking the glass with one hand, gestures toward the desk with
the other.]
Elizabeth. {lightly] Do you plan another expedition?
Hamilton. {blank but apprehensive] What?
Elizabeth. [points again to the hat] "Hector's helm," as I recall
you once named it.
Hamilton. {turns to follow her pointing finger] Ah ... I had intended to show it to John Church tonight.
Elizabeth. You will not surprise him with that hat. Oh, he
sniffed it out last fall. He's ridden his pony over half of Harlem
Heights waving that feather. In fact, he gave it such hard use
I will not undertake it on my oath that the plume you see is
the one you had.
Hamilton. {laughs] I had not noticed.
Elizabeth. Yes. It may be that the brave flourish which now surmounts the crown came by way of Louisa Charles, who claims
to have had it from Sanbourne's Haberdashery which, in turn,
may have had it from the cast off finery of some unrecorded
lady given to walking Broadway o' nights.
Hamilton. [coughs urbanely] Under whatever banner, I shall
prevail.
Elizabeth. [after another brief interval] You were closeted so long
with Pendleton and King that guests were asking after you.
Hamilton. I'm sorry. The sad fortunes of the party were our
theme.
Elizabeth. I thought the Federalist Party had been pronounced
dead.
Hamilton. Very nearly so I'm afraid. Yet there is still perhaps
some question concerning the manner in which it will choose
to expire.
Elizabeth. How would you have it die?
Hamilton. I'd have it die in such a way that it might affirm the
first principle of its being: the preservation of the Constitution. If we cannot depend upon appeal to men of property
to maintain our existence against the party of the mob, let us
leave behind a legacy for whomever may choose to oppose
Jefferson and his lovers of democracy. Let them unite behind
the Constitution.
Elizabeth. I can think of more inspiring causes. You must forgive me dear, but if one talks of principle I must confess I
see very little of principle in your Constitution. You might
win my heart with the Declaration-even if Jefferson did draft
it. The Declaration at least says what a human being may
choose to live for and die for. But that ConstitutionHamilton. It too says what a man may live forElizabeth. I don't see it. So many rules for who must do whatbut how people are to live does not seem to be its concern.
You lawyers love procedures.
Hamilton. [rises and walks past Elizabeth to the window1We love
procedures because we know that without them men pretty
21
�much follow the direct way of beasts. The Declaration expresses the conviction that by taking thought together men
may secure justice. The Constitution lays down arrangements
that insure we can come at laws in no other~ than by taking
thought together. [turning back to Elizabeth]at is something
to live for.
-Elizabeth. [unbegrudgingly assenting] It is.
Hamilton. Yet it is hardly a war cry I suppose.
Elizabeth. No.
Hamilton. jefferson will lay it all flat.
Elizabeth. Don't let him.
Hamilton. I wish I knew how to prevent him. He has seized
upon the popular element and run away with it. Every move
is calculated to endear him with the populace. And the popular tide carries away everything. So I said it would be if we
did not provide against itf and so it has happened.
Elizabeth. Some would say there's an iron law that the rich seek
more and the poor seek to plunder their wealthy neighborsf
and that government always legalizes the greed of the one
or the other.
Hamilton. Thae s true enough when a nation does not provide
against its own worst passions. We tried to provide against
our worst instincts. We limited the scope of the wealthy and
we tried to make the kind of Presidency that could maintain
its independence of the many poor. But there's nothing to
prevent aristocratic crowd-pleasers like Jefferson who are willing to sacrifice stability and property for popularity. The question is whether the envy of the poor was only kept in bounds
by Washington and the Federalists. What will be our fate
when theref s only the party of Jefferson, or when every party
seeks only to win the favor of the poor and the middling?
Elizabeth. [gets up and walks over to the desk, looking down at the
military hat] In any event, your countrymen could have had
a man who would not demean the Presidency. After Washington, or at least after Adams. But not even the party you led
would put you forward.
Hamilton. As Washington's Treasurer I gained the policies
necessary to put this nation on honorable footing with the
great powers of the world. But my person for the highest office
was considered too . . . risky.
Elizabeth. Your party, for all its bluster, lacks nerve.
Hamilton. I don't know. Under the circumstances I was a risk.
I was caught between one compromising entanglement and
... [embarrassed] another.
Elizabeth. [also embarrassed by the clumsy euphemism, looks away]
Of course.
Hamilton. You lcuow Eliza, I should be glad to live my life again
with all its half-successes, humiliations, disappointments, and
with all my own stupidities-I would live through it all again,
if only I could take back the harm I did you in those three
months at Philadelphia.
Elizabeth. [bitterly] I've asked you never to speak of it again.
Why do you now?
Hamilton. {with great effort] Adultery is a crime. In my case a
still greater wrong of ingratitude. I ... acknowledge. But I
have prayed often for forgiveness. I hope that I have been
forgiven by God and I would ask you again my dear, that
you ... forgive me.
Elizabeth. [turns her back to Hamilton] This is most painful.
Hamilton. Not more so for you than for me.
Elizabeth. [gathering herself and confronting her husband] Perhaps
I am as vain as you, my dear Alexander. Perhaps I am too
stiff. But one quality I esteem even more than loving compliance is honesty. I cannot say with honesty that I've forgiven
22
you. Because the truth is, as I have told you before, not that
I bear an animus against you, but that forgiveness is beside
the point.
Hamilton. Can you be less yielding than the Lord?
Elizabeth. [touches Hamilton's cheek affectionately] The Deity can
afford bounty in his forgiveness since he cannot be deceived
in our disloyalties.
Hamilton. [bitterly] You said forgiveness is beside the point.
What then is now the point of our marriage?
Elizabeth. You are in some ways still a child, my dear husband.
There are many sufficient reasons for our continuance in marriage. But perhaps the best is that I have more regard for you
than for any man.
Hamilton. How can you say that and not forgive?
Elizabeth. Your infidelity transformed me into a more judicious
admirer. It's because you expect more of yourself-a:nd of
others-than other men do, for that I hold you dearer than
any man, except your son.
Hamilton. Except Philip.
Elizabeth. Except Philip. Who expected as much of himself and
did never fail himself.
Hamilton. Then you do not blame me for Philip's death?
Elizabeth. I cannot say I do not. You made him feel you expected so much of him that he felt obliged to court his death.
But then you also succeeded in teaching him that there are
worse ills than death and a finer thing than life.
[a small rapping at the double doors, then the Housekeeper slicks
her head in]
Housekeeper. Ma'am.
Elizabeth. Yes, Mrs. Baines?
Housekeeper. John Church wants to ask something of you before going to bed.
Elizabeth. Tell John Church he has my permission to spend the
night with his father. Is that not what he wants to ask?
Housekeeper. [has edged into the room] I think so, Ma'am.
Elizabeth. If he should need anything further, tell him I shall
look in on him directly. He should wait in his father's room.
Housekeeper. [going out] Yes'm.
{After the door closes H~illilton crosses to the large window and looks
out for a moment]
Hamilton. [without turning] How have you progressed with the
accounts?
Elizabeth. I was just on the point of finishing when Angelica's
party took me away.
Hamilton. Are we yet solvent?
Elizabeth. For the short run we spend no more than you earn.
But the debts are large. We shall be tolerably easy under them
in about twenty years.
Hamilton. [sarcastically] We are not so well off by far as Jefferson's pamphlet writers profess to think us.
Elizabeth. If you had taken a tenth of what they laid to your
charge you might retire from the bar. I doubt any man has
come away poorer from government service.
Hamilton. When Talleyrand was visiting he re_fused to believe
that a man could retire from office poorer than when he went
in.
Elizabeth. Yes I recall.
Hamilton. [angered] And yet Jefferson can believe the French
will succeed in governing themselves. Talleyrand can be venal
and think himself merely civilized. His countrymen confuse
liberty with doing whatever they like.
Elizabeth. [puzzled by his vehemence] Why do you permit yourself anger over affairs across the sea?
Hamilton. Jefferson dotes on France as he does on any scheme
SUMMER 1985
�that cries out for equality. If he can, he will ally us with France
against England. That would split this nation in two.
Elizabeth. There's talk of splitting off New York and the New
England states from the Virginians. Would it not be possible
for the northern states to ally with England?
Hamilton. I would do anything to prevent that.
Elizabeth. I think I have heard that the powerful men who've
conceived the plan would have for their leader Aaron Burr.
Is it for that reason that you oppose secession?
Hamilton. I would oppose the scheme even if a decent man
had been sought out to lead. If the Archangel Michael undertook to lead, still I should oppose it with my blood.
Elizabeth. Why?
Hamilton. The union of these states under the Constitution
honors human nature. Dissolving that union would show the
world almost a second fall of man.
Elizabeth. You feel morally bound to share a common law with
slaveholders?
Hamilton. [fervent] Yes. Or else there is no hope of ever ending slavery. No, nor any hope for proving that men can rise
above their inclinations so as to govern themselves. If we cannot live with this Constitution we shall declare to our children's children that citizens cannot trust the laws to their own
making because they cannot trust themselves to seek justice
when they have opportunity to satisfy passions. They will
prefer to submit themselves to strong men rather than to trust
one another.
Elizabeth. I see.
Hamilton. [dropping every reserve} Do you see that decent men
should go any length to prevent such a shame upon us?
Elizabeth. [carefully} What do you intend?
Hamilton. Some way must be found to stop Burr.
Elizabeth. [apprehensive] How do you mean, "stop him"?
Hamilton. [becomes aware of Elizabeth's tenseness] What?
Elizabeth. How do you mean to "stop" Aaron Burr?
Hamilton. {evasively as he pretends casually to look over the miniature portraits] Oh, you know, there shall have to be combinations.
Elizabeth. [dubiously} "Combinations"?
Hamilton. Yes, as when we prevented his getting Federalist
votes for the presidency in the last election. Letters will have
to be written. Pressure of one sort or another must be brought
to bear on men who contemplate backing his venture.
Elizabeth. Burr's recent defeats must make him a desperate
man.
Hamilton. Presumably.
Elizabeth. I think most certainly. I would not have you oppose
him personally and openly. Desperate men have to be feared.
He is lethal.
Hamilton. I shall take care how I oppose him.
Elizabeth. [very rapidly} Have you? Why did that man of Burr's
come to the house sullen as thunder? I know Van Ness is a
Tammany hack. Did he bear a threat from the man he serves?
{as Hamilton hesitates} Did he convey a threat from Burr?
Hamilton. Of course not.
Elizabeth. [taking his ann} But he did.
Hamilton. No! [after a hesitation} He attempted to secure my
help. For Burr. He ... thought he could persuade me to support the plan of a New England secession.
Elizabeth. Do not attempt to deceive me! Burr would rather fail
in any project than ask your support. Rather than share glory
with you he would much prefer to fail.
Hamilton. !faltering} No.
Elizabeth. Yes! You are lying. There;,; to be a duel. You think
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
yourself bound in honor to keep it from me. But I read it in
your eyes. I could see it in the faces of your friends and in
that slinking Van Ness. [measured and cold} Do you still deny it?
Hamilton. You are as dear to me as life itself.
Elizabeth. [quite still} Aye. But life to you is not dear. All that
is dear to you is your fame.
-Hamilton. My love.
Elizabeth. [stepping back and away from Hamilton's grasp} No!
More than the religion you claim to have found you love your
fame. More than the law you're sworn to uphold. More than
me you claim to revere. More than this family. More than the
son you have seen slain and a daughter lost. You love your
fame more than all. [Hamilton makes a movement toward Elizabeth who again steps back raising an open hand as if to ward of!J
I don't want you to touch me! [Hamilton drops his hand;; to
his sides] See yourself Alexander. See youself, and do not lie.
[after a moment] Mter all is said, a man does not change. When
first I met you, I thought your eyes looked past me to something just on the edge of sight. You were trying to see your
fame. You still have fame only in your sight. You look past
me. Far past me.
Hamilton. Not just my fame. My country. My honor and the
good of my countrymen are joined.
Elizabeth. Are they?
Hamilton. [simply} Aye.
Elizabeth. Be sure they are one. Once before, you have guarded
your fame without helping your country that I could see.
Though you sacrificed your family.
Hamilton. [altogether shaken} For the humiliation I caused
you ...
Elizabeth. [coldly severe} No! Don't think. I'm not referring to
!!!Y shame. That is nothing. It is now nothing to me at all.
Don't you see I can't be wounded there because there's nothing left to wound? I've come to expect much less from you,
and much more. I don't need your affection, Alexander. I've
come to regard you as I suppose you've always intended to
be regarded-as a man whose life belongs to the wide world,
not to me. I'm used to it now. I" too respect the name you
have sustained. It's all I have.
Hamilton. Is that all you have of me?
Elizabeth. In a narrow world it suffices. It will have to. But when
I said you have sacrificed your family without helping your
country I meant Philip.
Hamilton. [wooden] And so I did. [turns and walks to window]
Elizabeth. You have attempted to conceal your trouble from me
because you thought I would shame you by begging or by
exposing your plans. I shall do neither. [at this Hamilton turns
back to face Elizabeth] But I shall put a demand upon you.
Hamilton. [tenderly} What demand?
Elizabeth. In many ways you have raised my expectations of
human beings. You must now meet these expectations.
Hamilton. How do you mean?
Elizabeth. [abruptly takes up the medallion portrait of Philip and hold;;
it before Hamilton's eyes] You must be worthy of your son. You
must be worthy of Philip. Can you risk your life now having
taken away your first-born and the hope of this house? Your
son sacrificed for your honor no less than everything. I charge
you my husband! I charge you by the blood shed by your son
to be worthy of his sacrifice!
Hamilton. {regarding the portrait with pain, but without turning
away. After a moment his expression of anguish gives way to a slowly
grawing triumph. He lifts his hand to the still upraised hand of
Elizabeth that holds the portrait, and clasping hers gently brings
the medallion clasped between them down to his chest] You may
23
�be sure of me. [Steps to the desk at right and taking up the cockade he looks down at the hat while speaking] I shall take no action
that is not worthy of Philip. [turning full face to Elizabeth and
still holding the hat with a manner sad yet triumphant] I shall act
in a manner worthy of our son. [after a moment in which husband and wife wordlessly confront one another] The letters I mentioned to youElizabeth. [breaking in and brushing the matter aside] I'm mindful
of the letters-Pendleton and King. Is your heart quiet now?
Hamilton. It is quietfor the first time in forty years. Yet it might
rest quieter still if we might say we were as we were before.
[he takes her hand]
Elizabeth. [not unkindly but decisively] That may not be. [slowly
withdrawing her hand] My respect you haveHamilton. Your forgivenessElizabeth. [gravely but not harshly] is irrelevant. May God take
you as I take you. [steps to the door, opens it, and with her hand
on the latch half turns] And may God forgive your inscrutable
soul. [goes off neither in a rush nor slow closing the door quietly
behind.]
[Hamilton stands for a moment facing the closed door. He then looks
down at the hat in his hand, walks to the mirror and pauses as though
he has thought to put on the hat before the glass but has changed his
mind. Instead, he walks to the window, places the hat upon the wide
sill, looks out in the distance for an instant, then sits at the table near
the window and taking up a small extinguisher puts out slowly each
of the three lighted candles. For a brief time the fading twilight from
the window faintly illuminates Hamilton's face as he continues to
gaze into the gathering night. Then the outside light fades completely
and the stage goes dark.]
Epilogue
[As the lights dim upon the seated Hamilton they come up upon Van
Ness standing at far left. He is dressed as he has been throughout
the play except that he now holds a folded umbrella in his left hand.]
Van Ness. [facing the audience but speaking as though he were
delivering a deposition at an inquest] I can only repeat to the jurymen what I have earlier attested. They should discern the ob-
vious intent of Mr. Pendleton [glances toward stage right] to
exonerate his patron at the same time he defames my friend
the Vice-President. As I have testified before, the two principals met at Weehawken, New jersey on the bank of the Hudson River at seven in the morning of July 11, 1804. Nathaniel
Pendleton served as second to Colonel Hamilton, I attended
the Vice-President. Colonel Hamilton prescribed a distance
of ten paces. Having taken their positions the two gentlemen
at the command took aim, and Colonel Hamilton fired first.
His shot missing Mr. Burr, the latter fired and Colonel Hamilton fell. The Vice-President threw down his weapon and attempted to approach the fallen man. But I drew him aside
and opening an umbrella before his face led him away.
I have nothing more to add except to emphasize: the fir&t shot
was fired by Colonel Hamilton.
[As he concludes Van Ness takes one step backwards. The lights go
down on Van Ness and come up on Pendleton standing at far right.
Pendleton is dressed as he had been in Act Two, Scene· Three.]
Pendleton. I also have nothing to add to my earlier testimony.
The gentlemen of the jury have inspected the letter of General
Hamilton's detailing his intentions in respect of Mr. Burr. On
all sides the document is admitted to be genuine. For those
of you who are acquainted with the character of the slain
man-and who is not?-the fact that he so cle~rly stated his
intent suffices to refute any testimony that stipulates a contrary action. Nevertheless, I shall again attest it under oath
that in all the other particulars he recites Mr. William P. Van
Ness recounts accurately the events of the morning of June
11, 1804. Yet in this one capital detail his testimony ought not
be accepted: Mr. Burr fired first and fatally wounded General Hamilton. General Hamilton's pistol discharged as he was
struck, the result of a spasm totally involuntary.
As he lay in the boat bearing him back to the city he warned
me to beware the pistol as it was still cocked. He did not know
it had discharged.
Pendleton takes one step ~qd(ahd the lights dim, then leaves a stage
totally dark.
John Alvis teaches English at the University of Dallas.
24
SUMMER 1985
�Abraham Lincoln's Biblical Liberalism
Larry Arnhart
Two Quakeresses in a railway coach were overhead in a conversation: "I think Jefferson will succeed." "Why does thee think so?"
"Because Jefferson is a praying man." "And so is Abraham a praying man." "Yes, but the Lord will think Abraham is joking."
This in newspapers added the information that Lincoln said it was
the best story about himself he had "ever read in the papers."
--Carl Sandburg, "Lincoln's Laughter--and His Religion" 1
Abraham Lincoln manifests more clearly than any other
American the union of wise statesmanship and Biblical
religion. At the deepest level of American history-and
of the entire history of the modern Western world-there
is a tension between two traditions: Hellenism and Hebraism, Athens and Jerusalem. In early American history,
this tension comes into view in the contrast between the
Biblical piety of the New England Puritans and the classical rationalism of the Revolutionary Founders. In critical respects, John Winthrop and Jonathan Edwards lived
in a world unlike that of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander
Hamilton. But Lincoln lived in both worlds, and thus he
became the fullest expression of the American mind. 2
We must reflect, however, on the difficulties that Biblical religion creates for statesmanship. Two of the most
obvious difficulties are political indifference and political fanaticism. A statesman must fully dedicate himself
to his political community as securing the conditions for
a good human life, and he must inspire a similar dedication among his fellow-citizens. But he must also recognize the sometimes tragic limits up'on what can be
achieved through political action. If he is prudent in his
political judgments, he is guided by some conception of
the highest ends of human action; but he also knows that
when the simply best is unattainable-as it usually isthen he must settle for something less than the best. But
Christianity interferes with this kind of statesmanshipeither by making Christians indifferent to political life or
by malcing them fanatical in their apocalyptic expectations
of politics. 3
Consider the controversy among the early Christians
about the interpretation of the Book of Revelations, particularly chapters 20-21. It is written that Christians will
rule with Christ for a thousand years. Afterwards there
shall be "a new heaven and a new earth"; the "holy city,
new Jerusalem" shall descend from heaven. "And God
shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall
be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither
shall there be any more pain: for the former things are
passed away" (21:4). Many Christians interpreted this as
a prophecy of the founding of the City of God on earth,
and they therefore set out to fulfill this prophecy by establishing a Christian political order that would save
mankind from sin and suffering. But Saint Augustine rejected this as ridiculous. He interpreted the Biblical
prophecy as applying only to the ultimate salvation of
Christians in heaven (City of God 20.7-9). He argued that
throughout the bodily existence of Christians on earth,
they must live under the secular authority of the City of
Man while submitting their souls to the spiritual authority
of the City of God that awaits them after death.
The political history of Christianity has been a continual
battle between these two points of view-the millenarian idealists versus the Augustinian realists.• The established Church in the Middle Ages endorsed the
Augustinian view. But the millenarians were never com-
Prepared for presentation at the 1985 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, New Orleans, Louisiana,
August 29 - September 1.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
25
�pletely defeated. Neither side in this controversy,
however, seemed to promote prudent statesmanship.
The official Church seemed to merely sanctify existing institutions no matter how unjust, while the millenarian
revolutionaries led mass movements that threatened to
destroy all institutions.
This conflict between Biblical realism and Biblical idealism has continued-although often through secular perversions of Biblical religion-in both the theory and
practice of modern politics. We have been torn between
Hobbesian realism and Kantian idealism. We depreciate
politics by claiming that it has no claims on the soul and
that the only purpose for politics is bodily security and
cornlort. Or we transform politics into a salvational activity aimed at abolishing politics itself by abolishing the
human conflicts that have made politics necessary. Thus,
we either drain politics of any moral aspirations, or we
inluse politics with a zealous striving for moral perfection. In neither case do we secure wise statesmanship.
But Lincoln's Biblical statesmanship, I shall argue in this
essay, escapes these difficulties. He imbues American politics with a Biblical moral fervor. Yet he accepts the natural limits of political judgment and political action.
Although he appeals to transcendent standards of moral
excellence, he never expects the earthly politics of human
beings to conform fully to those standards.
Lincoln also shows us that heroic statesmanship can
be combined with religious humility. He is surely an ambitious man, a lover of glory. But he sees that political
glory is transitory. It is not the highest human good in
itself. Although he desires glory, Lincoln is humble insofar as he acts in the service of Divine Providence. Lincoln is not, therefore, a philosophic ruler as described by
Plato or a magnanimous, "great-souled" man as
described by Aristotle and Cicero. For Lincoln the activity of the statesman is good not because it serves the life
of the philosopher and not simply because of the glory
won by the statesman himself. Statesmanship is good because it contributes to the moral improvement of human
beings as dictated by the Creator.
Some recent commentators have interpreted this concern for moral elevation as evidence that Lincoln was a
representative of Calvinist communitarianism in opposition to Lockean individualism. But in fact Lincoln saw
the Lockean tradition of natural rights as fostering the
moral emancipation of human beings in accordance with
Biblical teachings. For this reason Lincoln's political
thought should be identified as Biblical liberalism.
We must not ignore, therefore, the importance of Biblical religion in shaping Lincoln's ultimate motives for political action. But neither must we ignore the obvious fact
that Lincoln's religion was not that of an orthodox
Christian.
1. Biblical deism
Some of those who knew Lincoln insisted that he was
a devout Christian who through prayer and Bible-reading
sought God's personal intervention in his life. But others
26
claimed that he had adopted the deism of Thomas Prune,
and therefore his only religion was the rationalistic, natural religion of the Enlightenment. As is usually the case
in judging a man as complex as Lincoln, there is evidence
for both points of view. If we rely on Lincoln's own
speeches and writings, we see little that could be interpreted as orthodox Christian piety. But we do see invo-,
cations of the Almighty Will that stands behind the laws
of nature. This is the rational Creator as described in Tom
Prune's Age of Reason, which Lincoln read as a young man.
Like Paine, Lincoln saw the laws of God revealed in the
laws of the universe He had created. But unlike Paine,
Lincoln relied on the Bible as the best guide to God. And
it is his reverence for the Bible that has convinced many
people of his deep Christian beliefs. I think it is best therefore to speak of Lincoln as a "Biblical deist." From this
perspective, Lincoln's religion expresses fully the American religious tradition, because it combines the Biblical
piety of the New England Puritans with the natural
religion of the Revolutionary Founders.'
In 1846 it was easy for Lincoln to refute the charge made
by his political opponents that he was "an open scoffer
at Christianity." But he chose his words carefully so that
he could deny being "an open enemy" of Christianity
without affirming that he was an orthodox believer. One
statement, however, is revealing: "That I am not a member of a Christian Church is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures" (CW 1:382). 6 Of course
to refrain from denying the truth of the Scriptures may
fall short of positively affirming their truth. But considering the evidence of Lincoln's careful reading of the Bible, it is clear that he founded his religion on his own
study of the Bible rather than on any institutional statements of dogma.
According to his wife, "Mr. Lincoln had no faith and
no hope in the usual acst'ptation of those words. He never
joined a Church; but still, as I believe, he was a religious
man by nature .... it was a kind of poetry in his nature,
and he was never a technical Christian.' ' 7 William Herndon used this and other testimony to support his claim
that Lincoln believed in the natural religion of the deistic
tradition. And surely Lincoln would have accepted
Prune's simple creed:
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties
consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our
fellow-creatures happy.
I do not believe in the creed professed ... by any church that I
know of. My own mind is my own church. 8
The human mind is the only true church, Paine insisted,
because it is the immortal part of man through which he
participates in the divine order by studying the rational
laws of nature.' Pagan philosophers might have recognized this as the only proper religion for statesmen. In
Cicero's Republic, Scipio Aemilianus says that the best
SUMMER 1985
�teachers of statesmen are "those who by the investigation of all the things of nature have realized that this
world is ruled by mind. " 10
But the cool rationalism of this natural religion is joined
in Lincoln's thought to a Biblical spirituality. One example of this is in how Lincoln speaks about the religious
foundation of human nature. In his speech to the Temperance Society, Lincoln criticizes the temperance
preachers: they do not understand that to expect to persuade drunkards by deno1,1ncing them is "to expect a
reversal of human nature, which is God's decree, and
never can be reversed" (CW 1:273). That God's moral
laws are manifested in the laws of human nature is part
of Paine's deistic creed. 11 But compare Lincoln's expression of this idea in his speech against the KansasNebraska Act of 1854:
Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature-opposition
to it, in his love of justice . ... Repeal the Missouri Compromiserepeal all compromises-repeal the Declaration of Independencerepeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It still
will be the abundance of man's heart, that slavery extension is wrong;
and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to
speak (CW 2:271).
This kind of Biblical imagery, which permeates Lincoln's
rhetoric, conveys a spiritual fervor in the devotion to
righteousness that transcends Paine's rationalism.
Despite his doubts about many points of Biblical theology, Lincoln did not worship the God of the philosophers
but the God of Abraham and Isaac, a loving God who
offers redemption to all men everywhere.
This God of absolute righteousness and wisdom cannot be confined by human laws. His rule transcends the
rule of any political authority. But for this reason, the worship of this God seems to challenge the moral claims of
every political community.
2. Biblical patriotism
When Jesus separated religion and politics as two
realms, Rousseau complained, he "brought about the end
of the unity of the State, and caused the internal divisions that have never ceased to stir up Christian peoples"
(Social Contract book 4, chapter 8) .12 Rousseau agreed with
Hobbes, therefore, that Christianity subverted politics
when it gave the clergy the power to appeal to standards
beyond the laws of the state. Men can be neither good
human beings nor good citizens when they are torn between their religious duties and their political duties.
"Everything that destroys social unity is worthless. All
institutions that put man in contradiction with himself
are worthless.'' Rousseau's response to this danger is to
have the sovereign establish a ''civil religion'' consisting
of those dogmas essential to social duties.
Ever since the publication in 1967 of Robert Bellah's influential essay on "Civil Religion in America, " 13 many
scholars have regarded Lincoln as one of the principal
contributors to an American civil religion that conforms
to Rousseau's designs. But while the idea of a civil
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
religion is a pagan conception, Lincoln's "political
religion," as he called it in his Young Men's Lyceum
Speech, is grounded in Biblical religion; and therefore
Lincoln and Rousseau are not really talking about the
same thing.
The public dogmas of Rousseau's civil religion ate so
minimal that most people would have no trouble accepting them.
The existence of a powerful, intelligent, beneficent, foresighted, and
providential divinity; the afterlife; the happiness of the just; the
punishment of the wicked; the sanctity of the social contract and the
laws. These are the positive dogmas. As for the negative ones, I limit
them to a single one: intolerance. It belongs to the cults we have excluded.
Rousseau's civil religion would tolerate any religion that
tolerates other religions so long as it does not contradict
the dogmas of the civil religion itself.
The Declaration of Independence seems to assume the
same religious dogmas that RQusseau prescribes. There
are four references to God in that document, two at the
beginning and two at the end. First, there is the appeal
to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," then it
is said that God created men equal and endowed them
with rights. The Declaration concludes by "appealing to
the Supreme Judge of the world fQr the rectitude of our
intentions,'' and ''with a firm reliance on the protection
of Divine Providence." This looks like Rousseau's God" a powerful, intelligent, beneficent, foresighted, and
providential divinity" who judges human conduct and
sanctions the principles of the American regime.
Moreover, it was common for the American Founders
to speak of the need for a civil religion. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, warned:
let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality, can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence
of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail
in exclusion of religious principle. a
Mason Weems's popular biography used the life of
Washington himself to inculcate the union of religion and
morality that Washington advocated.
Lincoln was deeply influenced by Weems's book. And
in his Lyceum Speech, he promoted "reverence for the
laws" in language that echoed Weems's biography." But
Lincoln's "political religion" differs from the civil religion
of Washington and Weems. 16 While a civil religion makes
religion merely an instrument for the support of a political order, Lincoln's Biblical religion presents the political order as ultimately subordinate to God's order.
Lincoln's Biblical imagery of political rebirth-" a new
birth of freedom" -suggests that political life must be
reformed if it is to even approximate God's standards.
If one compares the Declaration of Independence and the
Gettysburg Address, one sees that Lincoln treats the
sacred principle of human equality not as the secure foun-
27
�dation of the nation but as the high goal towards which
the nation must strive .17 While Uncoln' s political religion
promotes the patriotic loyalty of citizens to a regime dedicated to eternal principles of justice, it does not merely
sanctify existing political institutions. Rather, it demands
that citizens acknowledge and then rectify as best they
can the moral imperfections in their regime.
The differences between civil religion and Biblical
religion can be illustrated by comparing the political
religion of Shakespeare's Henry V and that of Lincoln.
Henry leads his soldiers into what is probably an unjust
war of aggression against France. To justify the unquestioning obedience of his soldiers, Henry declares, "Every subject's duty is the king' s; but every subject's soul
is his own" (Henry V, Arden edition, 4.1.182-184). Henry argues that although men do have souls destined for
an afterlife in which they will be judged by God, the
needs of the soul never dictate any challenge to the
authority of a sovereign ruler. God commands obedience
to rulers, but he does not provide subjects any divine or
natural law for judging their rulers' commands as just
or unjust. Thus, Henry's civil religion puts no limits on
the power of a Machiavellian prince. 18 But Uncoln's political religion appeals to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" as providing standards for judging the
actions of both rulers and ruled. When Lincoln speaks
of Americans as God's ''almost chosen people,'' he warns
them that this carries with it an almost unbearable responsibility to fulfill God's law for mankind (CW 4 :236). "We
are no tyrant," Henry says of himself, "but a Christian
king" (1.2.241). Yet does not Lincoln conform more closely to what we should expect of a Christian statesman?19
Lincoln's political religion eliminates any inclination to
political indifference or complacency. Patriotism becomes
a religious attachment to the laws. But citizens are not
permitted to rest on the assumption that the laws are always just. Rather they must continually strive to bring
the laws into harmony with God's justice. The political
life of the Christian citizen is therefore one of restless activity. Thus, Lincoln channels into politics some of boundless moral energy generated by Biblical religion. The
critics of Christianity say that it makes people apathetic
about the things of earthly life. But Uncoln thinks the Biblical vision of life should inspire human beings to transform the world.
3. Biblical activism
In The Age of Reason Paine scorns the Bible as an obstacle to human enlightenment and scientific progress. "We
can know God only through His works." And "the principles of science lead to this knowledge; for the Creator
of man is the Creator of science, and it is through that
medium that man can see God, as it were, face to face."
So instead of studying the Bible, man should study "the
principles of the creation, as everything of agriculture,
of science and of the mechanical arts.'' 20 But Lincoln believes the Bible endorses this pursuit of scientific and technological progress. For he finds in the Bible an affirmation
28
of man's essence as the perfectible being who through
discoveries and inventions becomes the master of nature.
Lincoln's thinking on this point is clearest in his First
Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions, which was delivered on April6, 1858, before the Young Men's Association of Bloomington. 21 One of the many remarkable
features of this lecture is its impressive display of Biblical knowledge: it contains thirty-four separate references
to the Bible. And intertwined with Biblical exegesis is an
almost scholarly survey of the history of technological
progress. (If Uncoln had not had better things to do, he
could have become a fine college professor.) Uncoln
begins:
All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner.
The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it, including himself, in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature, and
his susceptibilities, are the infinitely various "leads" from which,
man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny.
In the beginning, the mine was unopened, and the miner stood
naked, and knowledgeless, upon it.
Fishes, birds, beasts, and creeping things, are not miners, but feeders
and lodgers, merely . ...
Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who
improves his workmanship. This improvement, he effects by Discoveries, and Inventions. His first important discovery was the fact that
he was naked; and his first invention was the fig~leaf apron ... (CW
2:437).
He then devotes his entire lecture to a careful account of
how technological advances have contributed to the evolution of civilization. One good example of how he reads
the Bible comes when he comments on the importance
of iron tools: "How could the 'gopher wood' for the Ark,
have been gotten out without an axe? It seems to me an
axe, or a miracle, was indispensable" (CW 2:438). He concludes his lecture with some remarks on steam-power.
The advantageous use of Steaih-power is, unquestionably, a modern
discovery-.
And yet, as much as two thousand years ago the power of steam
was not only observed, but an ingenious toy was actually made and
put in motion by it, at Alexandria in Egypt.
What appears strange is, that neither the inventor of the toy, nor
any one else, for so long afterwards, should perceive that steam would
move useful machinery as well as a toy.
Because of his Biblical understanding of the human
condition-every man a miner-Lincoln finds it strange
that people in the ancient world did not use their practical knowledge of nature's laws to gain power for the performance of useful work. The ancients scorned manual
labor and technology as ignoble, as distractions from the
truly human pursuit of understanding as an end in itself
rather than as a means to some practical end. But
Christians-particularly those in the medieval
monasteries-saw labor and craftsmanship as service to
the Master Craftsman of the cosmos. 22
Here we see another way in which Lincoln's Biblical
statesmanship departs from the ancient conception of
statesmanship. In the ancient world, the political realm
was restricted to those few people who were free from
SUMMER 1985
�the physical necessities of labor. But like John Locke Lincoln believes that since every human being is in his essence a laborer, each person has an equal right-if not
an equal duty-to labor. The ann of government, therefore, is to secure and promote the laboring activity of men
as they work upon the world for improvement in their
conditions. The ancient denigration of labor reflects an
aristocratic way of life. Lincoin' s elevation of labor reflects
his Biblical liberalism.
4. Biblical liberalism
Since the Bible-or at least the New Testament-does
not prescribe a code of laws for secular life, it leaves
citizens and statesmen free to exercise practical judgment
in deciding what should be done in particular cases. But
the Bible does prescribe a broad moral framework within
which political judgment must be exercised. Moreover,
insofar as this Biblical teaching conforms to the dictates
of nature, as suggested by Saint Paul (Romans 1:18-22),
it does not conflict with-indeed it reinforces-man's
natural sense of right and wrong. This leads us to two
questions. What are the general principles of Lincoln's
Biblical statesmanship? And how does he apply these
principles to concrete cases? In this section, we shall consider the first question.
Lincoln's fundamental principles come into view most
clearly in his arguments against slavery. Often his arguments are legal and historical. Thus, he claims that to up·
hold slavery as just contradicts the principles of the
American Founding as expressed in the Declaration of
Independence, in the Constitution, and in other records
of the views of the Founding Fathers. But he also maintains that these legal norms are grounded in standards
of reason and nature. In understanding why slavery is
unjust, we grasp something about the universal grounds
of all morality. "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is
wrong." (CW 7:281)
When Lincoln appeals to universal standards, he employs three kinds of arguments-Euclidean, Biblical, and
intuitionist. That is to say, he tries to show that any moral
defense of slavery either contradicts itself or contradicts
the Bible or contradicts our natural sense of right and
wrong. Lincoln moves easily from one line of reasoning
to another as though they are perfectly compatible. Many
commentators, however, find his mixture of rhetorical appeals incongruous. For example, in the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln's reference to equality as a ''proposition''suggesting the demonstrative rationality of Euclidean
geometry-seems to undercut the passionate tone of the
speech as conveyed in the Biblical imagery of baptism,
sacrificial death, and rebirth to eternal life. But I believe
that a careful examination of Lincoln's reasoning will
show that his three modes of argument are similar in their
fundamental logic.
Lincoln compares the Declaration of Independence to
Euclid's Elements. Just as Euclid begins with definitions
and axioms that are self-evident and then proves his
propositions as logical implications of these starting-
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
points, so Jefferson begins with the self-evident truth of
equality of rights and then deduces from these the requirements of just government. "The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society" (CW
3:375). It is essential for Americans to accept these principles because without them political argument is impossible. Political persuasion is like geometry or any other
form of reasoning in that it depends upon agreement on
first principles. If everything is doubted, then nothing can
be proven. If Americans disagree about the fundamental axioms of the Declaration of Independence, then their
disagreements will be settled not by persuasion but by
force.
But how can we respond to those who deny the ·first
principles? In a certain sense, we cannot prove the truth
of first principles because they are themselves the presuppositions of any proof. If we try to prove first principles,
we end up begging the question by implicitly assuming
them in the very process of proving them. This explains
Lincoln's frustration when he accuses Stephen Douglas
of "a bold denial of the history of the country."
To deny these things is to deny our national axioms, or dogmas, at
least; and it puts an end to all argument. If a man will stand up and
assert, and repeat, and re-assert, that two and two do not make four,
I know nothing in the power of argument that can stop him. I think
I can answer the Judge so long as he sticks to the premises; but when
he flies from them, I can not work an argument into the consistency
of a maternal gag, and actually close his mouth with it (CW2:282-83).
The nice play on words at the end of this passage-"!
can not work an argument into the consistency of a maternal gag" -suggests a way out of our impasse. If we can·
not strictly prove the truth of our premises to those who
deny them, we can at least show that those who deny
them contradict themselves. Of course despite the importance of rational consistency, it lacks "the consistency of
a maternal gag" that would enable us to stop the babbling of those who won't listen to reason.
Even if we cannot make a demonstrative argument for
the truth of first principles, we can make a dialectical argument. 23 To do this, our opponent must say something,
he must assert something, and then we must show that
his assertion contradicts his denial of our first principles.
Moreover, our ultimate aim should be to show that no
rational human being can deny our first principles
without contradicting himself. Plato's Socratic dialogues
provide many examples of this kind of argumentation.
Lincoln employs this technique in arguing for the equality of rights as an axiomatic truth. In a note probably written when he was debating Douglas, Lincoln reasons as
follows:
If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.-why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter,
having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you
are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your
own.
29
�You do not mean color exactly?-You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to
enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to
the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.
But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it
your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And
if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you (CW
2:222-23}.
No rational man would argue for his own enslavement.
But any man who argues for the enslavement of others
must appeal to some human difference that could be the
basis for his own enslavement. Therefore, no rational man
can endorse slavery without contradicting himself. Human beings differ in an infinite number of ways-color,
intellect, interests, and so on-but each person believes
that he has a right to liberty simply by virtue of his humanity. But if I affirm that I as a human being have a right
to liberty, then to be consistent I must also affirm that
other human beings have a similar right. In Lincoln's
words: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a
master. This expresses my idea of democracy" (CW 2:532).
Geometry teaches us the importance of consistency; and
by adhering to an equally rigorous consistency in our
moral reasoning, we can grasp the first principles of
justice.
In the letter in which Lincoln comments on Jefferson's
Euclidean logic, he writes:
This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave,
must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others,
deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long
retain it (CW 3:376).
Notice how easily Lincoln moves from the argument of
logical consistency to the invocation of divine justice. This.
"world of compensations" was created by a God who
is free of contradictions and who punishes those whose
souls are torn by contradictions.
Lincoln relies primarily on three passages from the Bible to support his Biblical argument against slavery. From
the opening chapters of Genesis, he cites two verses. The
first is from the account of creation: "God created man
in his own image " (Genesis 1:27). The second is from
God's condemnation of Adam after his disobedience: "In
the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return
unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust
thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" (Genesis 3:19).
And finally Lincoln quotes the statement of the Golden
Rule in the Sermon on the Mount: ''Therefore all things
whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye
even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets"
(Matthew 7:12).
In his speech at Lewistown, Illinois, in 1858, Lincoln
quotes from the Declaration of Independence and then
explains: "In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped
with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the
world to be trodden on and degraded, and imbruted by
its fellows" (CW 2:546). In 1864 Lincoln wrote the following response to a delegation of Baptists:
30
I can only thank you for ... adding to the effective and almost unanimous support which the Christian communities are so zealously giving to the country, and to liberty. Indeed it is difficult to conceive
how it could be otherwise with any one professing Christianity, or
even having ordinary perceptions of right and wrong. To read in the
Bible, as the word of God himself, that "In the sweat of thy face shalt
thou eat bread,'' and to preach therefrom that, ''In the sweat of other
mans' faces shalt thou eat bread,'' to my mind can scarcely be reconciled with honest sincerity. When brought to my final reckoning, may
I have to answer for robbing no man of his goods; yet more tolerable even this, than for robbing one of himself, and all that was his.
When, a year or two ago, those professedly holy men of the South,
met in the semblance of prayer and devotion, and, in the name of
Him who said ''As ye would all men should do unto you, doye even
so unto them" appealed to the Christian world to aid them in doing
to a whole race of men, as they would have no man do unto themselves, to my thinking, they contemned and insulted God and His
church far more than did Satan when he tempted the Saviour with
the Kingdoms of the earth. The devil's attempt was no more false,
and far less hypocritical. But let me forbear, remembering it is also
written "Judge not, lest ye be judged" (CW 7:368).
The Golden Rule seems to indicate the fundamental
logic implicit in the other Biblical teachings, which is to
be expected considering the emphasis that Jesus puts
upon it-"for this is the law and the prophets." The
Golden Rule affirms the simple fairness of reciprocitytreat others as you would have them treat you. Any
reasonable person "having ordinary perceptions of right
and wrong" would probably accept this rule. In fact, it
may be one of those few moral principles that would be
endorsed in some manner by every religion and moral
code. But the vagueness of the rule invites criticism. For
instance, George Bernard Shaw insisted, "Do not do unto
others as you would that they should do unto you. Their
tastes may not be the same. " 24 But considered in conjunction with the other Biblical teachings cited by Lincoln, the
Golden Rule can be elaborated in such a way that its inherent persuasiveness becomes clear.
Human beings are needy beings. And the satisfaction
of their needs requires toil-no sweat, no bread. Therefore, every human being-or at least every rational
adult-works for the provisions necessary for his life. He
thereby assumes that it is good for him to have the freedom to provide for his needs and that it would be bad
for someone else to deprive him of this freedom. But on
what grounds could he justify this claim to freedom?
What is there about him that would entitle him to such
freedom? He cannot appeal to any of the various characteristics with respect to which human beings differstrength, color, intelligence, and so on-because then he
would have to give up his freedom to those superior to
him in whatever characteristic he has specified. He must
therefore appeal to the special status that he has simply
as a human being. As the one being "created in the image of God," man has been set apart from the rest of creation. He is the only being capable of becoming a rational
moral agent, but he cannot fulfill that capacity unless he
is free. It is reasonable, therefore, for a man to claim that
as a human being he has a right to freedom, but only if
he understands that consistency dictates that he recognize the same right for all other human beings. To avoid
SUMMER 1985
�contradicting himself, every man must respect the mutuality and equality of the Golden Rule. "In giving freedom
to the slave," Lincoln explains, "we assure freedom to the
free" (CW 5:537).
That all men are created equal is "self-evident," therefore, in the sense that all men are equally men. Moreover,
the rights with which they are endowed can be regarded
as the necessary conditions for human action. To deny
human beings their natural rights is to assert that human
beings should be treated as if they were not human,
which is absurd.
Thus, the injustice of slavery is so clear that anyone
with ''ordinary perceptions of right and wrong'' can see
it. This is Lincoln's intuitionist argument, which reinforces the Biblical and Euclidean arguments. He notes that
even in the south slave-traders are despised: it is considered improper for a gentleman to even shake hands with
them (CW 2:264-65). There is a natural sense of justice
that condemns the enslavement of human beings.
But while insisting that opposition to slavery is grounded in man's natural moral sense, Lincoln concedes that
the promotion of slavery is grounded in another powerful element of human nature-self-interest (CW 2:271).
It is in a man's interest to secure his own freedom while
denying freedom to others. But in doing so, he contradicts
himself. And to hide this contradiction from others-and
perhaps even from himself-he pretends that those human beings he enslaves are not truly human. To show
the falsity of this claim, Lincoln must appeal to the facts
of experience-to our recognition that human beings
differ in degree but not in kind and thus that they are
members of the same species25 (CW 2:264-66). Slavery
arises from unjustified human pride-the pride of the
master that he is superior in his human essence to the
slave. Lincoln ridicules the absurdity of such pride.
Speaking of Douglas, Lincoln observes: "I suppose the
institution of slavery really looks small to him. He is so
put up by nature that a lash upon his back would hurt
him, but a lash upon anyone else's back does not hurt
him" (CW 3:410). Yet even as he condemns the pride of
those who defend slavery, Lincoln must avoid the pride
of self-righteous moralism. "Judge not that ye be not
judged."
To see the injustice of slave labor is to see the justice
of free labor. Lincoln's opposition to slavery was part of
his more general aim to support a system of free labor
that permitted the laborer to improve his condition. In
1861 Lincoln described the Civil War as "a People's contest" devoted to preserving popular government "whose
leading object is, to elevate the condition of men-lo lift
artificial weights from all shoulders-to clear the paths
of laudable pursuit for all-to afford all, an unfettered
start, and a fair chance, in the race of life" (CW 4:438).
Thus, Lincoln interprets equality of rights as the equality of opportunity to get ahead in life. If that's what we
mean by justice, then we need not fear any conflict between justice and self-interest, because it's in the interest
of all to have a chance to improve their conditions and
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
to better themselves. By interpreting equality as the opportunity to get ahead, Lincoln turns an abstract principle into a practical goal to which common people will
want to devote themselves. The chance to get ahead in
life-that's what we call the American Dream. We could
say, then, that Lincoln turns the Civil War into a war for
the American Dream. 26
Abolishing slavery is not sufficient, however, to insure
an equal right for all men to improve their conditions.
To fulfill his Biblical vision of all men as laborers, Lincoln insists there must be no distinction between laboring people and educated people. And here again we see
how Lincoln's Biblical liberalism departs from the
aristocratic assumptions of ancient statesmanship and
philosophy. "The old general rule was that educated people did not perform manual labor. They managed to eat
their bread, leaving the toil of producing it to the uneducated." But this is unacceptable.
Free Labor argues that, as the Author of man makes every individual with one head and one pair of hands, it was probably intended
that heads and hands should cooperate as friends; and that that particular head, should direct and control that particular pair of hands.
As each man has one mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands to furnish food, it was probably intended that that particular pair of hands
should feed that particular mouth-that each head is the natural guardian, director, and protector of the hands and mouth inseparably connected to it; and that being so, every head should be cultivated, and
improved, by whatever will add to its capacity for performing its
charge. In one word Free Labor insists on universal education.
Only by providing universal education for laborers can
we create a community that "will be alike independent
of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings" (CW
3:479-81).
It should be clear by now that those recent commentators who regard Lincoln as an opponent of the Lockean
tradition are mistaken. 27 For Lincoln there was no necessary conflict between the Lockean tradition of individual
rights and the Calvinist tradition of communal virtue. His
Biblical liberalism elevated the right of each man to get
ahead in life into an inspired moral goal that could unite
Americans into one community.
Of course the Lockean pursuit of property can become
debasing. In a speech in 1860, Lincoln explains what he
means by a "free society" in which all have a free chance
in the "race of life." "I take it that it is bestfor all to leave
each man free to acquire property as fast as he can ...
we wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to
get rich with everybody else." He goes on to describe
how any poor man's son can start as a hired laborer, work
for himself later, and then finally become an employer
of others-''and so it may go on and on in one ceaseless
round so long as man exists on the face of the earth!"
(CW 4:24-25). Is this the eternal promise of free
government-every man restlessly trying to get rich, "on
and on in one ceaseless round"? We might be reminded
of Alexis de Tocqueville's melancholic reflections on the
joyless life of Americans in their insatiable pursuit of
material comforts.
31
�But here is where we must stress the Biblical foundation of Lincoln's liberalism. The only justification for liberal democracy is that it allows the many to share in the
highest things. In practice, this is hard to achieve because
it is so difficult to elevate the desires of the many. If liberal
democracy is to be defensible as a high-minded way of
hfe, 1t must somehow be possible to ennoble common
people so that the pursuit of equality becomes a pursuit
of excellence. Doesn't the Bible-both in the style of its
poetry and in the substance of its teachings-contribute
to that goal by combining perfect plainness with perfect
nobleness and thus inspiring common people to moral
excellence? Lincoln surely thought so.
Lincoln's use of Biblical rhetoric to elevate liberalism
is clearest in his handling of the Civil War. John Stuart
Mill provides some testimony as to his success. Prior to
the Civil War, Mill worried about the degrading effects
of Amencan democracy. For example, in the original1848
edition of his Principles of Political Economy, he said that
in America, "the life of the whole of one sex is devoted
to dollar-hunting, and of the other to breeding dollarhunters." But when he revised this passage in the sixth
edition of 1865, he wrote that economic growth "is not
necessarily destructive of the higher aspirations and the
heroic virtues; as America, in her great civil war, has
proved to the world, both by her conduct as a people and
by numerous splendid individual examples. "28
There is a danger, however, in turning politics into an
expression of heroic spiritedness. The moral passionsparticularly those generated by Biblical religion-can excite a general frenzy that impedes good judgment. But
Lincoln in the Civil War demonstrated that Biblical statesmanship could combine righteous fervor with Machiavellian prudence.
5. Biblical prudence
In The Prince Machiavelli explains that "prudence consists in knowing how to recognize the qualities of inconveniences and to pick the less bad as good." 29 It might
seem shocking for a Biblical statesman to exercise such
prudence, especially when the "inconveniencen is slavery. The abolitionist preachers warned that any moderation in dealing with slavery was an accommodation with
Satan. But the Bible itself is more cautious. Although he
knows that all men are free in Christ, the Christian may
have to compromise with the institution of slavery. (See
Romans 13:1-8, Corinthians 7:20-24, and Ephesians
6:5-9.) Although the emancipation of all would be best,
the Bible counsels patience. The Christian must not expect moral perfection in the earthly politics of the City
of Man. But neither must he hesitate to promote moral
reform whenever it is practicable. This explains Lincoln's
handling of slavery, as indicated in his Peoria speech in
1854 on Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act:
Much as I hate slavery, I would consent to the extension of it rather
than see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any GREAT
evil, to avoid a GREATER one. But when I go to Union saving, I must
32
believe, at least, that the means I employ has some adaptation to the
end. To my mind, Nebraska has no such adaptation (CW 2:270).
It is reasonable to choose the lesser of evils because the
end does justify the means-but only when the end is
good and the means properly adapted to the end.
What are the practic~l obstacles to abolishing slavery?
In h1s Peona speech, Lmcoln speaks of the racial bigotry
of whites. The "feelings" of "the great mass of white people" would not permit the emancipation of the slaves on
the basis of social and political equality. "Whether this
feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not
the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded." Furthermore, Lincoln does not assume
that whites in the North are morally superior to those in
the South. "They are just what we would be in their situation." "I surely will not blame them for not doing what
I should not know how to do myself" (CW2:255-56). But
while acknowledging those "feelings" of the whites that
support slavery, Lincoln also speaks in this same speech
bf the natural "feeling" that slavery is wrong. The
problem, then, with the issue of slavery is that it creates
a conflict between the selfish feelings of people and their
just feelings (CW 2:264-65, 2:271, 2:281-82). According
to Lincoln's Biblical understanding of human nature, human beings combine good and evil inclinations. So even
as the statesman fosters human goodness, he must
respect the limits set by the evil in human beings. Of
course, this is even more emphatically true for the
democratic statesman whose pursuit of moral ends is constrained by the need for popular consent.
Thomas Aquinas acknowledges such constraints when
he warns that
human law is laid down for the multitude of human beings, thf
majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Therefore human law doe~
not prohibit ~ the vices from which virtuous men abstain, but onl)
the more senous ones from which it is possible for the majority o:
the multitude to abstain (Summa Theologiae 1-2, 94, 2).
Therefore, "human law cannot punish or prohibit all evil,
for were it to try to do away with all evils it would alsc
do away with many good things" (Summa Theologiae 1-2,
91, 4). Furthermore, Thomas recognizes a tension be·
tween legal duty and natural justice. While claiming thai
an unjust law is not truly a law, he cites Romans 13:1 tc
support his belief that "even a wicked law, insofar as il
keeps something of the appearance [similitudo] of law, or
account of the order of the one in power who made th<
law, is derived from the eternal law.'' Even a wicked Ia;<
may somehow promote the common good (Summa The
ologiae 1-2, 92, 1, ad 4; 93, 3, ad 2). Thomas even advise•
that private individuals should not depose a tyrant if th<
resultant disorder would be a greater evil than the tyrant''
unjust rule (On Kingship, I, 6).
Lincoln made a similar distinction between legal dutie1
and moral judgments. This was evident in his handlin~
of the Emancipation Proclamation. 30 In his letter to A. G
SUMMER
198~
�Hodges in 1864, Lincoln wrote:
I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.
I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have
never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling (CW7:281).
But Lincoln goes on in this letter to justify the Emancipation Proclamation as a military necessity within his
power as Commander-in-Chief in time of war. The
Proclamation itself, as issued on January 1, 1863, is carefully written in accordance with Lincoln's prudential restraint. Consider, for example, the concluding paragraph:
And upon this act sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty
God (CW 630).
Lincoln never doubted the justice of emancipating slaves.
But he refused to act until constitutional legality and practical necessity coincided with justice.
Perhaps the most remarkable martifestation of Biblical
prudence as applied to the question of emancipation is
Lincoln's meeting with a delegation of Chicago Christians on September 13, 1862. Since this meeting has not
received the attention that it deserves, I will quote extensively from the newspaper account found in Basler's Collected Works (5:419-25). 31
Lincoln begins by responding to their memorial recommending emancipation.
The subject presented in the memorial is one upon which I have
thought much for weeks past, and I may even say for months. I am
approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that
by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other class is mistaken
in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not
be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might
be supposed he would reveal it directly to me; for, unless I am more
deceived in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to know
the will of Providence in this matter. And if I can learn what it is I will
do it! These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose
it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must
study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible
and learn what appears to be wise and right. The subject is difficult,
and good men do not agree (CW 5:419-20).
He explains that he does not raise moral objections to
emancipation, such as the danger of bloody slave insurrections in the South. Nor is he any longer bothered by
legal or constitutional objections, because the measure can
be regarded as an exercise of his power as Commanderin-Chief. Consequently he must "view the matter as a
practical war measure, to be decided upon according to
the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion" (CW 5:421). And from this point
of view, Lincoln raises about a half dozen practical objections to emancipation. I will mention only two. Lincoln worries that a proclamation of emancipation from
him would be absurdly ineffective. "Would my word free
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution
in the rebel states?" (CW 5:420). He also worries that after a proclamation, the fifty thousand Union soldiers from
the Border Slave States would go over to the rebels. "I
do not think they all would--not so many indeed as a year
ago, or as six months ago--not so many today as yester"
day. Every day increases their Union feeling. They are
also getting their pride enlisted, and want to beat the rebels" (CW 5:423).
The Christian delegates respond.
We observed (taking up the President's ideas in order) that good
men indeed differed in their opinions on this subject; nevertheless
the truth was somewhere, and it was a matter of solemn moment for
him to ascertain it; that we had not been so wanting in respect, alike
to ourselves and to him, as to come a thousand miles to bring merely our opinion to be set over against the opinion of other parties; that
the memorial contained facts, principles, and arguments which appealed to the intelligence of the President and to his faith in Divine
Providence; that he could not deny that the Bible denounced oppression as one of the highest of crimes, and threatened Divine judgments against nations that practice it; ... so that there is the amplest
reason for expecting to avert Divine judgments by putting away the
sin, and for hoping to remedy the national troubles by striking at
their cause.
We observed, further, that we freely admitted the probability, and
even the certainty, that God would reveal the path of duty to the
President as well as to others, provided he sought to learn it in the
appointed way; but, as according to his own remark, Providence
wrought by means and not miraculously, it might be, God would
use the suggestions and arguments of other minds to secure that
result. We felt the deepest personal interest in the matter as of national concern, and would fain aid the thoughts of our President by
communicating the convictions of the Christian community from
which we came, with the ground upon which they were based (CW
5:421-22).
They then answer each of Lincoln's practical objections
to a proclamation of emancipation. So, for example, they
argue that a proclamation would be effective, because as
the Union armies march southward they could enforce
both the Constitution and the proclamation. Moreover,
the proclamation would have the practical effect of inspiring the people in the North to fight for a high principle. It would also stir greater support for the North in
Europe. As to the possibility of the desertion of Border
State soldiers, that danger decreases every day, as even
Lincoln concedes. And even if some of these soldiers are
lost, the increased recruitment in other states prompted
by the proclamation would probably more than compensate for the loss.
After an hour of u earnest and frank discussion," Lincoln concludes:
Do not misunderstand me, because I have mentioned these objections. They indicate the difficulties that have thus far prevented my
action in some such way as you desire. I have not decided against
a proclamation of liberty to the slaves, but hold the matter under advisement. And I can assure you that the subject is on my mind, by
day and night, more than any other. Whatever shall appear to be
God's will I will do. I trust that in the freedom with which I have
canvassed your views, I have not in any respect injured your feelings (CW 5:425).
33
�Lincoln and the Christians agree on the existence of Divine Providence, which determines the cosmic order in
accordance with which human affairs must be judged.
They also agree that Providence favors the abolition of
slavery. But as to when and how that should be done, the
will of Providence has not been clearly expressed. Lincoln has little patience with Christians who offer him contradictory opinions as coming directly from God. God is
not contradictory. And if God wanted to reveal His will
with respect to the Civil War, He surely would speak
directly to the President. So Lincoln is left to decide the
issue as best he can based on his own judgment. But these
Christians from Chicago-a city famous for political
craftiness-do not claim any direct revelation from God.
Although God no longer works through miracles, He
might "use the suggestions and arguments of other
minds" to help the President determine His will. To believe in Divine Providence is to believe that despite differing opinions about great moral issues in politics, the truth
ts somewhere. To find that truth God has given us minds.
And it is our duty to study the "facts, principles, and arguments" that will allow us to determine what is right.
Therefore, no Christian is entitled to speak about God's
will concerning the proclamation if he has not shrewdly
calculated the political gains and losses, because God's
will may depend upon practical contingencies-such as
the popular reaction in the Border States.
Lincoln and these Christians from Chicago are able to
engage in a tough-minded discussion of a practical political problem because of the intellectual foundation
provided by the American Biblical tradition. They can
agree on certain abstract principles of justice. But they
also agree on the need for a practical assessment of probabilities in deciding when and how to put those principles into practice. Most importantly, their belief in
Providence gives them confidence in the rational order
of things and in the capacity of rational men to live in
accordance with that order. And yet because of the limitation of the human mind, the will of Providence must
always remain mysterious in its unfathomable transcendence of human things. So even as men rationally search
for God's will-believing there is a truth somewhere to
be discovered-they must forever remain humble in the
knowledge of their own ignorance.
Christians need such humility to escape the tempting
presumption that their human purposes coincide perfectly with God's. It is especially dangerous for a statesman
to believe-or to persuade others to believe-that he is
God's agent for executing the final judgment and
redemption of mankind. Is there not evidence that Lincoln yielded to this temptation by transforming the Civil
War into a holy war? Did he not speak with the language
of a millenarian prophet who saw the New Jerusalem at
the end of history?
6. Biblical history
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:/ He is tram-
34
piing out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;/ He hatl
loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:/ His truth i:
marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;/ The~
have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps;J I cat
read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;/ His da~
is marching on.
"
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: f ''As y1
deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;/ Let tht
Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,/ Since Goc
is marching on.''
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;/ Ht
is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat:/ Oh, bE
swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!/ Our God h
marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,/ With a glol)
in his bosom that transfigures you and me:/ As he died to make mer
holy, let us die to make men free,/ While God is marching on.n
It is reported that Lincoln wept when he first heard Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," and he
told the singer he had never heard a better song. 33 Is there
anyone among us who is not excited by this song? Isn't
the appeal of this song a disturbing sign of how Biblical
religion fosters political fanaticism? After all, this song
portrays the Civil War as the Apocalypse-the Last Battle in which God destroys the ruling powers of evil and
establishes the messianic rule of the righteous.
Moreover, some of Lincoln's speeches during the war
seem to indicate that he accepted this millenarian view
of history. Consequently, many commentators on Lincoln's political thought-including many who are sympathetic to Lincoln-agree with Edmund Wilson's
conclusion that Lincoln" came to see the conflict in a light
more and more religious, in more and more Scriptural
terms, under a more apocalyptic vision.'' And Wilson observes, "This conception of history as a power which
somehow takes possession of men and works out its intentions through them is most familiar today as one of
the characteristic features of Marxism, in which 'history'
has become the object of a semi-religious cult and has
ended by supplying the stimulus for a fanaticism almost
Mohammedan." 34 But this image of Lincoln as spiritually intoxicated by what he believes to be his messianic role
in history clashes with the prudent sobriety that we have
seen in his discussion with the Christians from Chicago.
Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Wilson is wrong in his popular characterization of Lincoln
as a man possessed by his own millenarian view of
history.
For one thing, Wilson has overlooked the connection
between Lincoln's religion and his humor. Consider the
story about Jefferson (Davis) and Abraham (Lincoln),
which appears at the beginning of this paper as an epigram. If God suspects that Abraham is joking, is it because God knows that Abraham sees the absurdity of
men on opposite sides in a war praying to the same God
SUMMER 1985
�for victory? Wouldn't this make Abraham more truly pious than Jefferson? For the truly pious man knows that
God cannot contradict Himself. He knows too that God
has His own purposes that may differ from those of men.
So in seeking God's will, the truly pious man must detach
himself from his own passionate commitments so that he
can look down upon the passing scene of practical affairs.
Similarly, humor allows a man to detach himself from
his situation and thus to gain some relief from anxiety
and care. Lincoln once told a funny story to his Cabinet
but no one laughed. "Gentlemen," he said "why don't
you laugh? If I didn't laugh under the strain that is upon
me day and night, I should go mad. And you need that
medicine as well as I. n 3 s
But if Lincoln had to laugh to maintain his sanity, it
was because he took his role in history seriously. And
it is true, as Wilson says, that Lincoln accepted the Biblical understanding of history as a linear progression unfolding from a beginning towards ever higher levels. Here
is another point on which Lincoln would disagree with
ancient statesmen and political philosophers. The ancient
Greeks and Romans were certainly aware of historical development and historical cycles. But they had no conception of history as a rationally ordered ascent from a
beginning to an end. Apparently this idea arose from Biblical religion. 36
One interpretation of Biblical historicity promotes political indifference: Why should we act if God has already
determined the outcome? Another interpretation promotes political fanaticism: Why should we act with
moderation if we are bringing about the final purpose of
history? But Lincoln rejects both interpretations. He believes that history does conform in some mysterious way
to the will of God. But this is no reason for human passivity, because God works through the deliberations and
actions of men. Nor does this justify fanaticism, because
since no man can claim to know God's will absolutely,
every man must act within the limits of human rationality.
Lincoln agrees with the Christians from Chicago that
we serve the will of God by carefully deciding upon
whatever course of action is reasonably justified by
weighing the relevant ''facts, principles, and arguments.''
But the private deliberation of individuals will be ineffective if the general public cannot be persuaded as well.
Lincoln must therefore appeal to the good judgment of
the people as an expression of God's will.
On his way to his first inauguration, Lincoln delivered
many speeches in which he confessed his dependence
on Providence as manifested in the American people.
I am sure I bring a heart true to the work. For the ability to perform it, I must trust in that Supreme Being who has never forsaken
this favored land, through the instrumentality of this great and in-
telligent people. Without that assistance I shaH surely fail. With it
I cannot fail (CW 4:220-21).
In his First Inaugural Address, he was even more explicit
in identifying the will of God and the will of the people.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice
of the people? Is there any better, or equal hope, in the world? In
our present differences, is either party without faith of being in the
right? If the Almighty Ruler of nations, with his eternal truth and
justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that
truth, and that justice, will surely prevail, by the judgment of this
great tribunal, the American people (CW 4:270).
Of course Lincoln knows that the people do make mistakes, especially when they act without careful deliberation. "My countrymen, one and all," he implores them,
"think calmly and well, upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time." But in a certain
sense, Lincoln does believe in the maxim that the voice
of the people is the voice of God. If the Bible supports
the claim of the many to participate in the highest things,
then it is up to the many to verify that claim by showing
that they can govern themselves by deliberating together
as a community.
But any deliberation about practical matters is constrained by the unknowable contingency of history.
Chance is critically important. No human being, therefore, can know the order of history as it is known to God.
In the words of Lincoln's "house divided" speech, we
must first know "where we are, and whither we are tending" before we can judge "what to do, and how to do it"
(2:461). But since we can at best know only the general
tendencies of the near future, we can never know all the
consequences of our actions. Lincoln regarded the Civil
War as an evident example of this since the course of
events in that war conformed to no one's expectations
at the beginning of the war.
Perhaps we should remember Hegel's comment, in the
Preface to The Philosophy of Right, about the owl of Minerva flying only with the falling of dusk. The movements
of history, it seems, are fully comprehensible only when
they are completed. Therefore, those who make history
cannot understand it, and those who understand it cannot make it. When Lincoln looks back at the American
Revolution, he can understand its necessity. ''All this is
not the result of accident. It has a philosophical cause"
(CW 4:168). The "philosophical cause" of the success of
the Revolution was its appeal to the principle of liberty
to all. "No oppressed people will fight, and endure, as our
fathers did, without the promise of something better than
a mere change of masters." But he cannot be as confident that he understands his own historical role in the
Ovil War. "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me" (CW 7:282).
Since God has created human beings with certain
natural inclinations, Lincoln can try to act in accordance
with the regularities of human nature. But understanding these general tendencies of nature gives him no
knowledge of what exactly will happen in particular
cases. In the electoral campaign of 1864, for instance, Lincoln could not be sure that the voters would re-elect him.
He even had to deny rumors that he was prepared to
launch a coup d'etat if defeated in the election (CW 8:52).
But after the election, he could see it as a demonstration
35
�of an uncertain proposition-that a ''government, not too
strong for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough
to maintain its own existence, in great emergencies. rr
The strife of the election is but human nature practically applied to
the facts of the case. What has occurred in this case, must ever recur
in similar cases. Human nature will not change. In any future great
national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak,
and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and as good. Let us, there~
fore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from,
and none of them as wrongs to be revenged (CW 8:100-101).
Lincoln is surely not claiming that from the study of this
one election we can learn to predict exactly the outcome
of any similar election in the future. But we can see in
this election the unchanging regularities of human nature "practically applied to the facts of the case."
Many commentators, however, have concluded that
Lincoln's claim to historical knowledge was not this
modest. Particularly in the Second Inaugural Address,
he seems to assertthat he knows God's purpose for the
war because he knows that God has sent the war as a
punishment for the sin. of slavery. But in fact Lincoln
offers this only as a conjecture-carefully indicated by the
preposition 'if.'
Fondly do we hope-fervently do we pray-that this mighty scourge
of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continues,
until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty
years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood
drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,
as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the
judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether" (8:333).
He does not know that this is what God wills, but he does
know that if He wills it, it will be just. This passage comes
after Lincoln's account of how the war has failed to conform to anyone's expectations, so that we must conclude:
"The Almighty has His own purposes." Rather than
presuming to know God's purpose for the war, Lincoln
is confessing that neither he nor any other human being
can have such knowledge 37
Not long after delivering the Inaugural, Lincoln wrote
to Thurow Weed:
Every one likes a compliment. Thank you for yours on my little
notification speech, and on the recent Inaugural Address. I expect
the latter to wear as well as-perhaps better than-any thing I have
produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not
flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose
between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case,
is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which
I thought needed to be told; and as whatever of humiliation there
is in it, falls directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me
to tell it (CW 8:356).
As in previous cases, we see Lincoln applying the principle of non-contradiction. If God governs the world, and
if He cannot contradict Himself, then there must have
been a "difference of purpose" between God and men
in this war since no man's purpose has been fulfilled.
There could hardly be a clearer denial of Wilson's asser-
36
tion that Lincoln was a fanatic in believing that his political aims were divinely sanctioned. For like Job Lincoln
has questioned God as to the meaning of human suffering. And at last Lincoln has been forced to confess his
own "humiliation" before a mysterious God who "has
His own purposes.''
Lincoln is in a strange position here. On the one hand,
he faces the humiliation of trying to serve a God whose
will is never fully comprehensible to human beings. On
the other hand, he welcomes compliments on his speech,
which he expects "to wear as well as-perhaps better
than-any thing I have produced." In fact, he was so
proud of this speech that he mailed out autographed copies of the eloquent passage quoted above (CW 8:367).
Thus, Lincoln displays the peculiar predicament of the
Biblical statesman-he must combine humility and pride.
7. Biblical heroism
The inscription above the statue in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C., reads:
In this temple as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved
the Union the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.
Is this the reward that Lincoln sought-to live on in the
memory of his people as a godlike hero whose image
would be enshrined in temples and whose words would
be carved in marble? The ancient Greeks and Romans
would have understood this, since they assumed that
great statesmen would always strive for the secular immortality of political fame. After all, don't the Lincoln
Memorial and all the other manifestations of the Lincoln
myth imitate the ancient procedures for divinizing political heroes? But if Lincoln himself sought this as the
proper reward for his deeds, then we would have to question the Biblical foundation of his statesmanship.
We know that Lincoln was an ambitious man. In the
words of Herndon, "his ambition was a little engine that
knew no rest." 38 In the winter of 1840-41, Lincoln
suffered from melancholia. His close friend Joshua Speed
told Herndon:
He was much depressed. At first he almost contemplated suicide.
In the deepest of his depression he said one day he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived; and that
to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation, and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with
something that would redound to the interest of his fellow-men, was
what he desired to live for. 39
In 1863, after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln reminded Speed of the earlier conversation and said,
"I believe that in this measure my fondest hope will be
realized.'' 40
Lincoln spoke candidly about his ambition. But his
pride was combined with humility. In July of 1858, he
prepared himself for possibly losing the Senatorial contest with Douglas. "Even in this view, I am proud, in my
passing speck of time, to contribute an humble mite to
SUMMER 1985
�that glorious consummation, which my own poor eyes
may not last to see" (CW 2:482). (The reference is to the
widow's mites in Mark 12:41-44.) In 1861, on his way to
Washington, Lincoln spoke of the influence of reading
Weems' Life of Washington.
I recollect thinking then, boy-even though I was, that there must have
been something more than common that these men struggled for .
.. that something held out a great promise to all the people of the
world to all time to come ... I shall be most happy indeed if I shall
be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this,
his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great
struggle (CW 4'236).
The success of a statesman-especially in time of warmay require that his people regard him as godlike. But
while he allows or even contrives his own divinization,
the prudent statesman must not deceive himself into believing what he would have his people believe. Like
Shakespeare's HenryV, he must see his divinity as mere
"ceremony" (Henry V 4.1.235-290). 41
Lincoln's humility was surely related to his melancholic
awareness of the mortality of all human things. He was
surrounded by coffins-his mother (when he was nine
years old), his sister, childhood friends, his father, two
children, and 140,000 soldiers. According to one of his
colleagues at the bar, any literary composition "which
faithfully contrasted the realities of eternity with the unstable and fickle fortunes of time, made a strong impression on his mind. " 42 His favorite poem, which he often
quoted from memory, was William Knox's ''Mortality.''
Developing themes from Job and Ecclesiastes, the poem
concludes:
'Tis the wink of an eye, 'tis the draught of a breath,/ From the blossoms of health, to the paleness of death./ From the gilded saloon,
to the bier and the shroud./ Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be
proud! 43
Death also permeated Lincoln's own poetry (CW 1:378,
1:385).
Gcero quotes Scipio Aemilianus as recommending that
statesmen should be taught to see "the fragility of human things and the fickleness of fortune. " 44 The greatest
statesmen, Cicero suggests, may be those who are
philosophers or at least students of philosophers, because
a contemplative vision of the whole can foster a prudent
respect for the limits of political action. But Lincoln was
neither a philosopher nor the student of a philosopher."
His sense of "the fragility of human things" seems to
arise not from a philosophic understanding of things but
from the Biblical tradition.
But Lincoln combined humility with pride. And in his
proud awareness of his own greatness, he seemed to
resemble Aristotle's "great-souled" man-the man who
knows himself worthy of great things and who seeks
glory as the proper public recognition of his greatness.
Surely Biblical religion cannot sanction this proud assertion of human grandeur.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In fact, most of the early Christian theologians refused
to recognize magnanimity-" greatness of soul'' -as a virtue.46 Thomas Aquinas, however, sought to justify the
moral claims of the magnanimous man as consistent with
humility before God. In describing magnanimous hope,
Thomas says, "man has hope in himself, yet under God"
(Summa Theologiae 2-2, 128, 1, ad 2). The greatness of the
magnanimous man does not remove him from his subordination "under God." Thomas distinguishes between
the perfections of God and man: God's perfection is absolute, but man's is according to his own nature-that
is to say, in comparison to God, he is imperfect (2-2, 161,
1, ad 4). Thus, Thomas can endorse simultaneously
without contradiction magnanimity and humility. Against
the objection that Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics does
not mention humility as a virtue, Thomas replies:
It must be said that the Philosopher intended to treat the virtues according as they are ordered towards the civil life, in which they are
limited to the subjection of one man to another according to the order of the lawr and, therefore, they are held under legal justice. Humility, however, as a special virtue, principally provides for the
subjection of man to God, on whose account one subjects oneself
in humility even to others (2-2, 161, 1, ad 5):
Humility comes not from the relationships among men,
but from the relationship of man to God. Magnanimity
and humility do not conflict, then, since they arise from
two different ways of considering man. Magnanimity expresses man's greatness, which is due to "the gifts of
God''; humility expresses man's weakness, which is due
to his own defects (2-2, 129, 3, ad 4). This explains Saint
John Chrysostom's observation that since the greatsowed man shows his greatness by scorning all creation,
even himself, he is also humble. 47
This formulation may be the best way to account for
the complex character of Lincoln as a Biblical statesman.
He knows that he is a great man. He is the kind of man
who always tries to see things for what they are. And
it is easy for him to see that he towers over everyone else.
But to see things for what they are, he must look up as
well as down. And when he looks up, he sees that as
tall as he is, he still stands "under God." He is a proud
man. But the virtue of pride differs from the vice of vanity. And it wouid be foolishly vain for him-for any manto think that his deeds will escape the decay to which all
human things are prone. He must be properly humble
to be properly proud.
It is fitting, therefore, that Colonel Alexander McClure.
chose to conclude his collection of Lincoln's Yams and Stories with a story under the title "No Cause for Pride."
A member of Congress from Ohio came into Mr. Lincoln's presence
in a state of unutterable intoxication, and sinking into a chair, exclaimed in tones that welled up fuzzy through the gallon· or more
of whiskey that he contained, "Oh, why should (hie) the spirit of
mortal be proud?"
"My dear sir," said the President, regarding him closely, "I see
no reason whatever."4s
37
�NOTES
1. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years,
one-volume edition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1939), 573.
2, Harry Jaffa has described Lincoln's "engrafting of the passion of
revealed religion upon the body of secular political rationalism." Crisis
of the House Divided (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 238.
In distinguishing the Biblical and classical elements of the Western tradition, I have found the following writings most useful: Oswald Spengler, The Dec,line of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols. (New
York: Knopf, 1928); Charles Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1957); Hans Jonas, Philosophical
Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall1974), 21-44; Harry V. Jaffa,
Equnlity and Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 209-29;
Leo Strauss, ''Athens and Jerusalem: Some Preliminary Reflections,''
in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago Press, 1983), 147-73;
Matthew Arnold, chap. 4 of Culture and Anarchy, in The Portable Matthew Anwld, ed. Lionel Trilling (New York: Viking Press, Penguin, 1949),
557-73; and Eva Brann, "The Roots of Modernity in Perversions of Christianity," St. John's &view 35 (Spring 1984): 66-69.
3. For elaboration of these points, see Larry Arnhart, "Statesmanship
as Magnanimity: Classical, Christian, and Modern," Polity 16 (Winter
1983): 263-83. On Lincoln, see the last few paragraphs of this article.
4. See Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity (New
York: Atheneum, 1983), 255-64i and Larry Amhart, Political Questions:
Political Philosophy from Plato to Rawls (New York: Macmillan, 1986), chap.
3.
5. Perhaps the three best general introductions to Lincoln's religion
are William J. Wolf, The Religion of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Seabury Press, 1963); David Hein, "Abraham Lincoln's Theological Outlook," in Hans J. Morgenthau and David Hein, Essays on Lincoln's Faith
and Politics, ed: Kenneth W. Thompson (Lanham, Md.: University Press
of America, 1983), 103-205; and Glen E. Thurow, Abraham Lincoln and
American Political Religion (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York
Press, 1976). The serious flaw in Wolfe's work--as opposed to that of
Hein and Thurow--is that he sometimes gives too much weight to dubious reports about what Lincoln believed.
6. The reference is to Roy A. Basler et al., eds., The Collected Works of
Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1953), 1:382. All subsequent references to the Collected Works will be indicated in the text in the same manner.
7. Quoted by William Herndon, Herndon's Life of Lincoln (New York:
Da Capo Press, 1983), 359-60.
8. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life
and Major Writings of Thomas Paine (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1948),
464.
9. Ibid, 482, 484, 591-93.
10. Cicero, De Republica 1.56. Compare the influence of Anaxagoras over
Pericles and Socrates. See Plato, Phaedo 96b-100b; and Plutarch's Lives,
trans. John Dryden (New York: Modern Library, 1932), 185-88.
11. See Paine, 595-604.
12. All the quotations from Rousseau are taken from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R.
Masters (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978), book 4, chapter 8, pp.
124-32.
13. Robert N. Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," in Russell E. Richey
and Donald G. Jones, eds., American Civil Religion (New York: Harper
& Row, 1974), 21-44.
14. George Washington, Farewell Address, in Daniel Boorstin, ed., An
American Primer, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966),
1:202.
15. Compare Mason L. Weems, The Life of Washington, ed. Marcus Cunliffe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 1-5, 172-86, 215-24;
and CW 1:108-15, 4:235-36. For a brilliant commentary on the Lyceum
speech, see Jaffa, Crisis 182-232.
16. See Jaffa, Crisis 238-42; and Wilson Carey McWilliams, "The Bible
and the American Political Tradition," in Myron}. Aronoff, ed., Religion
and Politics (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1984), 15, 24.
17. See Jaffa, Crisis, 191-92, 227-30; Wolf, Religion, 170-72; Thurow,
American Political Religion, 63-87; and Glen Thurow "The Gettysburg
Address and the Declaration of Independence," in Leo Paul de Alva-
38
rez, ed., Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address and American Constitutionalism (Irving, Texas: University of Dallas Press, 1976), 55-75.
18. My reading of Henry Vhas been guided by Michael Platt's commentary on the play in his book, Shakespeare's English Prince (Lanham, Md.:
University Press of American, 1985). See also John Alvis, "A Little Touch
of the Night in Harry: The Career of Henry Monmouth," in John Alvis
and Thomas G. West, eds., Shakespeare as Political Thinker (Durham,
N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), 95-125.
19. Commentators have noticed parallels between Shal<espeare's portrayal of Henry V and Desiderius Erasmus's Education of a Christian Prince
(1540), trans. Lester K. Born (New York: Norton, 1965). If one adjusts
for the differences between a king and a democratic leader, Lincoln
would more fully exemplify Erasmus's Christian prince. Consider Lincoln's comment that he saw in Stephen Douglas' argument for popular sovereignty "a strong resemblance to the old argument for the 'Divine
Right of Kings.' By the latter, the King is to do just as he pleases with
his white subjects, being responsible to God alone. By the former the
white man is to do just as he pleases with his black slaves, being responsible to God alone" (CW 2:278).
20. Paine, Age of Reason, 601-602.
21. This lecture should not be confused with the second lecture as revised and delivered on February 11, 1859. CW 2:437-42, 3:356-63.
Richard N. Current includes only the second lecture in his collection,
The Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1967), 112-21.
22. See Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution in
the Middle Ages (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976); Lynn
White, Jr., Medieval Religion and Technology (Berkeley: University of
California, 1978)i and Lionel Casson, "Godliness and Work," Science
'812 (September 1981): 36-42. Of course one should also consider Max
Weber's classic, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans.
Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribners, 1958). See also Plutarch's Lives,
376-80.
23. See Aristotle, Topics 100a20-101a16; and Metaphysics
1004b19-1012b33. See also Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 42-47.
24. Quoted by Alan Gewirth, "The Golden Ru1e Rationalized," in Human Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 128. Gewirth's
essay is quite instructive.
25. See Larry Arnhart, "Darwin, Aristotle and the Biology of Human
Rights,'' Social Science Information 23 (June 1984): 493-521. On Lincoln's
possible acceptance of evolutionary biology, see Herndon, Life of Lincoln, 353-54.
26. See G. S. Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1978).
27. See, for example, McWilliams, "The Bible in the American Political
Tradition," 30-32, 37.
28. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, ed. W. J. Ashley (London: Longmans, 1927), book 4, chap. 6, sec. 2, p. 748.
29. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Leo Pau1 de Alvarez (Irving,
Texas: University of Dallas Press, 1980), chap. 21, p. 135. On Lincoln's
prudential realism, see Hans J. Morgenthau, "The Mind of Abraham
Lincoln," in Morgenthau and Hein, Essays, 1-101.
30. The best study of Lincoln's·prudential calcu1ations in issuing the
Proclamation is George Anastaplo, "Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation
Proclamation,'' in Ronald Collins, ed., Constitutional Government in America (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1980), 421-46. See also
Anastaplo, "American Constitutionalism and the Virtue of Prudence:
Philadelphia, Paris, Washington, Gettysburg," in de Alvarez, The Gettysburg Address, 77-170.
31. Richard Current reprints Lincoln's comments but not the responses
of the Christian delegates. As a result, Current's editing conveys the
impression that the Christians were naively imprudent in ignoring the
practical problems noted by Lincoln. But a reading of the entire account
suggests to me that Lincoln found the discussion with the Christians
fruitfully challenging. Current, Political Thought of Lincoln, 216-19.
32. Julia Ward Howe, ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic,'' ed. William
G. McLoughlin, in Boorstin, American Primer, 1:380-85. See Edmund
Wilson, Patriotic Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 91-98.
33. Should this remind us of John 11:35, which records the one occasion on which Jesus wept? At least we can say that Lincoln grieved as
SUMMER 1985
�much over the deaths of the soldiers as Jesus grieved over the death
of Lazarus. And although Lincoln could not raise the dead to life, he
looked for every opportunity to commute a death sentence.
34. Wilson, Patriotic Gore, 102, 106.
35. Wolfe, The Religion of Abraham Lincoln, 141.
36. See Karl Lowith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).
37. For careful studies of the Second Inaugural that support this conclusion, see Thurow, American Political Religion, 88-108; and Hein, "Theological Outlook," 111-56.
38. Herndon, Life of Lincoln, 304.
39. Ibid., 172.
40. Ibid., 423.
41. Compare Walter Bagehot's distinction between the "dignified parts"
of the English Constitution and the ''efficient parts'' --the monarch being the head of the former and the prime minister the head of the latter. Bagehot, The English Constitution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1966), 61-86, 150, 235-38, 248-51, 262. Lincoln is one of the best
examples of how American presidents can combine monarchic dignity
and parliamentary efficiency.
42. Quoted by Herndon, Life of Lincoln, 496.
43. Quoted by Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None: The Life of
Abraham Lincoln (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 95.
44. See Arnhart, "Statesmanship as Magnanimity," 268-71.
45. Harry Jaffa implies that Lincoln was in some manner a Socratic
thinker. See Jaffa, Crisis, 5, 207-25, 232, 260-61, 264-65. For critici$ms
of Jaffa on this point, see Anastaplo, "American Constitutionalism and
the Virtue of Prudence," 165-68. At the least Lincoln learned from
Shakespeare and Emerson the Socratic dictum that men cannot do evil
without suffering evil. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, ''Compensation,''
in Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1985), pages
285-302.
46. See Rene Antoine Gauthier, Magnanimite (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1951).
47. Ibid., 430-31.
48. Colonel Alexander K. McClure, Lincoln's Yams and Stories (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Bengal Press, 1980), 368.
Larry Arnhart teaches Political Science at Northern lllinois University.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
39
�After Hecuba
I tell you, no female's god gives birth to warriors.
No, men build gods
and afterward women stumble through their rubble.
Choked on smoke, slipping in blood,
we crept forward from the walls
to drag the bodies back.
But on that field, flatter than my breast,
there arose an Anger before me,
and she spat at me-"Why?"
"Why not leave them for the birds, Hecuba?
They should fill the bellies of some beast of the air
for all the good of their ships on water or their horses on earth."
My sisters, did you wonder at my fury
to build a funeral pyre?
From the first tiny flames until the last dusty ash
I will watch the air carry upward all the fuel of my heart.
Fire, scorch bones, blister eyes.
Wind, bear away all shades of what I have loved.
And when the firelight fails, I will still see it where it was.
M. L. Coughlin
40
SUMMER 1985
�America's Rise to a Mature
Party System
Donald V. Weatherman
Our image of the American founders probably differs
little from the image they have enjoyed ever since we won
our independence. Despite the efforts of political historians like Charles Beard, our founding fathers continue to
loom in our political history like a generation of Davids
conquering one giant after another. Gordon A. Wood
captured the feelings most of us have toward the founders: "The awe that we feel when we look back at them
is thus mingled with an accute sense of loss. Somehow
for a brief moment ideas and power, intellectualism and
politics, came together-indeed were one with each
other-in a way never again duplicated in American history."' The greatest tribute to the American foundersgreater than all the monuments in Washington, D.C.,
even greater than the annual Fourth of July orationshas been the strength and endurance of the republic they
founded. Their plan for government has withstood foreign wars, industrialization, massive expansion, and a bit-
ter civil war. Despite these challenges to their handiwork,
the regime they founded appears so secure that it is hard
for us to imagine the novelty and adventure associated
with such a bold experiment. Equally hard for us to
remember is that one of the institutions that has proven
vital to America's political existence was mortal! y feared
and openly condemned by these same founders. ·
Political parties, as the founders understood them, were
considered one of the greatest threats to the young republic. And yet, the founders themselves could not resist the
temptation to organize parties in support of the causes
they held most dear. For this reason, party divisions
started forming early in America's political history. In
time, some of the most ardent opponents of the "spirit
of parties" began to soften their views on the possible
effects of parties on republican government.
The founders' apparent change of heart toward parties
was never complete and far from enthusiastic. For this
reason the establishment of a mature party system did
not occur until our second generation of political leaders
was in control of the national government. The historical factors leading to our first true party system (which
is, unfortunately, usually called the "second American
party system"') have been adequately covered in such
works as Richard Hofstadter' s The Idea of a Party System.
Let us now consider some of the reasons why the founders appear to have had such an ill-conceived notion of
the role political parties could play in the political system they created out of the ruins of the Revolution.
A full understanding of the founders' opposition to parties requires that we first determine what they had in
mind when they referred to "parties." Generally, it appears that three types of parties were recognized by the
founders. The first type, as we learn in Federalist 10, is
indistinguishable from factions. Parties of this description are primarily economic and are "actuated by some
common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the
rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate
interests of the community." Madison provided further
clarification of these parties when he continued:
But the most common and durable source of factions has
been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those
~ho
hold and those who are without property have ever
*This paper was originally delivered in 1983 at the American Political Science Association Convention in Denver. Mr. Weatherman would like to thank
the Earhart Foundation of Ann Arbor, Michigan, for supporting the research and writing of this paper.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
41
�formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors,
and those who are debtors, fall under like discrimination.
A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow
up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into
different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.
Madison left no doubt that while economic factors are not
the only source of partisan differences they certainly are
the most ''common and durable.''
George Washington has provided us with our second
view of parties. In his Farewell Address we find a slight
distinction drawn between factions and parties, a distinction that renders neither more desirable. As Washington
saw it, parties ''serve to organize factions to give it an
artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of
the delegated will of the Nation, the will of a party; often
a small but artful enterprising minority of the community." He warned against parties generally, but was particularly concerned about parties of a "geographical
discrimination." What economic parties were to Madison, geographical parties were to Washington; the attribute these two types share is that both are products of
selfish concern and serve interests other than the common interest of the community.
The third and last type of party acknowledged by the
founding generation is the philosophical party described
by Jefferson. He believed that these parties develop because of conflicting notions about the extent to which people are capable of self-government. Jefferson explained
to Adams:
at length see that the mass of their fellow citizens with whom
they cannot yet resolve to act as to principles and measures,
think as they think and desire what they desire; that our wish
as well as theirs is that the public efforts may be directed
honestly to the public good, that peace by activated, civil and
religious liberty unassailed, law and order preserved, equality
of rights maintained, and that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or
that of his father's. When satisfied of these views it is not
in human nature that they should not approve and support
them. In the meantime let us cherish them with patient affection, let us do them justice, and most than justice, in all
competitions of interest, and we need not doubt that truth,
reason, and their own interest will at length prevail, will
father them into the fold of our country, and will complete
that entire union of opinion which gives to a nation the blessing of harmony and the benefit of all its strength. 4
Jefferson's optimism was stated more clearly by one of
his partisan successors to the White House. In a letter to
Andrew Jackson, James Monroe expressed his belief that
the existence of parties in ancient republics and in England was due to "certain defects of those governments"
and that "we have happily avoided these defects in our
system."' Given the kind of parties Jefferson had in
mind, such optimism was partially warranted. Jefferson
felt that his partisan beliefs were the only ones consistent with the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence. If the partisan beliefs at that time were based
on such fundamental differences, it would not be unreasonable to expect one of those parties to prevail and,
thus, determine whether or not the principles set forth
in the Declaration were self-evident."
The founders' limited understanding of parties helps
clarify two important points. First, all three of the sources
cited provide an accurate and helpful description of particular types of parties that have historically existed and
do currently exist in the United States. Second, while they
provide an accurate description of certain types of parties, none of them describes what we generally recognize
as political parties. This should not surprise us since the
formal type of grassroots party organization that we are
familiar with was unknown to the founders and everyone else at that time.
The concerns expressed by Madison and Washington
have proven to be well-founded. Harry V. Jaffa equates
the parties or factions in Federalist 10 with what we call
interest groups today. 6 With a few exceptions, these interest groups continue to put their narrow interests before the "permanent and aggregate interest of the
community." Washington's greatest fears about parties
of a "geographical discrimination" could hardly have exceeded the events surrounding the Civil War. As for
Jefferson's statements about philosophical parties, it
would appear that something fairly close to what he
described has appeared, from time to time, in American
politics. America's critical or watershed elections have
usually focused on more fundamental questions than are
generally addressed in American politics. But Jefferson
0
Men have differed in opinion, and been divided into parties
by these opinions, from the first origin of societies, and in
all governments where they have been permitted freely to
think and to speak. The same political parties which now
agitate the United States have existed through all time.
Whether the power of the people or that of the aristoi should
prevail, were questions which kept the States of Greece and
Rome in eternal convulsions, as they now schismatize every
people whose minds and mouths are not shut up by the gag
of a despot. And in fact, the terms of whig and tory belong
to natural as well as to civil history. They devote the temper
and constitution of mind of different individuals. 3
Like Madison and Washington, Jefferson recognized that
parties naturally blossom in free societies; he also concurred with their belief that the naturalness of parties
renders them neither beneficial nor desirable to republican government. However, unlike Madison and Washington, Jefferson did in one of his more optimistic
moments indicate that the United States might be able
to overcome natural and civil history by freeing itself from
partisan differences:
With those, too, not yet rallied to the same point the disposition to do so is gaining strength; facts are piercing through
the veil drawn over them, and our doubting brethren will
42
SUMMER 1985
�did not believe that such a sweeping transformation of
the American electorate would be needed after the '' revolution of 1800."
Lack of foresight is not the only thing that kept Jefferson from being the founder of America's two-party system. Jefferson and most of his followers viewed the
Jeffersonian Republican party as the party to end all parties. What Jefferson and his followers lacked, at least until
the 1920s, was what Richard Hofstadter describes as
"comity." Hofstadter contends:
Comity exists in a society to the degree that those enlisted
in its contending interest have a basic minimal regard for each
other: one party or interest seeks the defeat of an opposing
interest [or party] on matters of policy, but at the same time
seeks to avoid crushing the opposition, denying the legitimacy of its existence or its values, or inflicting upon it extreme
and gratuitous humiliations beyond the substance of the
gains that are being sought/
Few parties have been crushed as swiftly and completely
as were the Federalists. To Jefferson, the Federalists were
as illegitimate as the monocratic values they held.
There was something like Hofstadter's ''comity'' when
Jackson reached the White House. By the 1820s, people
like Martin Van Buren and Thomas Ritchie were fully
aware of the salutary effects political parties could have
on republican government. The alliance forged between
Jackson and the party chieftains of his day, and the
response this drew from Henry Clay and his followers,
gave rise to America's first mature party system.
In Statesmanship and Party Government, Harvey Mansfield, Jr., credits Burke with "introducing parties into the
public constitution. " 8 He contends that parties had existed as part of the private constitution for some time, but
that it would have been totally irresponsible to go "public" with parties because that would have made parties
useful to all, "good men and traitors alike."' Parties were
considered a secret weapon that should be used only in
the most extreme circumstances and, therefore, should
always be publicly decried by the knowledgeable political actors who might find a need for parties at some point
in their political careers. In this sense, parties were an
ultimate political weapon whose potential was recognized
by some politicians, who hoped that they would never
have to resort to their use. Jefferson's involvement with
party politics in the United States appears quite consistent with Burke's belief that one should resort to parties
only as a last resort.
But this attitude did not survive the nineteenth century.
In the United States as in Britain, parties became not only
public, but respectable. Mansfield posits one reason for
the change. "Defining 'party' as a body of men united
on some particular principle, [Burke] made parties available to good men in association against bad men." But
certain sacrifices had to be made to achieve this respectability. Mansfield describes one such sacrifice:
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
A party principle is necessarily attuned to lesser capacities
than is a statesman's principle. Burke conceived the respectability of party because he was willing to accept the less exact principle in exchange for a lessened reliance on statesmen;
for great statesmen are unreliable, at least in the sense that
they are not always available. Burke believed that the regularity of honest men could compensate for their lack of discrimination, and that party government could substitute for
statesmanship .10
Government's inability to rely on great or enlightened
statesmen was noted by Publius as well. Recognition of
this fact is what led him to the "invention of prudence."
This could also explain what the United States did not
turn to a formal party system until the 1820s. If Burke
was correct in his assertion that the only-or primaryjustification for a "respectable party" is the absence of
great statesmen, then the United States clearly did not
need such parties as long as there was a Washington,
Jefferson, or Madison at the helm. Perhaps this is why
Jefferson and Madison looked more favorably toward parties in their later years. Such a change in attitude is especially clear in Madison's works.
Foremost in the minds of the founding generation was
how a popular government could tolerate (or survive)
differences of opinion and still function as a single entity. Only after our institutions of government were wellestablished could politicians look to differences of opinion as something that might be organized to serve as a
positive political force in American politics. Two of the
first and most enduring proposals for using differences
of opinion to serve the interests of government were developed by Andrew Jackson's two vice presidents.
John C. Calhoun's concurrent majority thesis considered using these differences to the advantage of distinct
or fragmented (state) interests; Martin Van Buren's permanent two-party system advocated using these differences to further a national interest or national interests.
The only premise these two proposals shared was that
diverse political opinions could be used to strengthen our
political system. Calhoun's system proposed strength
through greater decentralization of decision making,
while Van Buren's proposed strength through centralization. Calhoun's proposal was designed primarily to
protect economic, regional interests; Van Buren's was
designed to help create, clarify, and perpetuate national
political principles. Van Buren's system was posited on
the belief that the political is superior to the economic;
Calhoun's appears to be based on the reverse assumption. Both are based on assumptions that differ radically
from those of the founders.
Van Buren's recognition of the potential of political parties resulted directly from his ability to expand on the
founders' understanding of parties. Unlike Madison and
Washington, he had no difficulty distinguishing parties
from factions. One of his numerous attacks on the socalled "era of good feeling" pointed out the difference
as he saw it:
43
�In place of two great parties arrayed against each other in
a fair and open contest for the establishment of principles
in the administration of Government which they respectively
believed most conducive to the public interest, the country
was overrun with personal factions. These having few higher
motives for the selection of their candidates or stronger incentives to action than individual preferences or antipathies,
moved the bitter waters of political agitation to their lowest
point. 11
Once he established the line of demarcation between parties and factions, Van Buren's position recalled that expressed by Machiavelli some 300 years earlier. In The
Discourses, Machiavelli argued that few people understand the true nature of parties:
Those who condemned the quarrels between the nobles and
plebs, seem to be cavilling at the very things that were the
primary cause of Rome's retaining her freedom, and they
pay more attention to the noise and clamour resulting from
such commotions than to what resulted from them. . . .
[A]nyone who studies carefully their result, will not find that
they occasioned any banishment or act of violence inimical
to the common good, but that they led to laws and institutions whereby the liberties of the public benefited. (1,4)
Without trying to make more of this analogy than it
deserves, let me make one more comparison. According
to Machiavelli and Van Buren, one of the greatest contributions by parties is their preservation of the public nature of political controversies. Governments that provide
a public arena for opposition to individuals and policies
maintain greater control over such opposition. Public opposition requires that one's claims be backed by evidence;
when such evidence is provided, the party or parties under attack can present evidence in their own defense. An
open exchange of this nature affords government a better opportunity to settle an issue and then to move on
to other matters. Rumors and accusations not made public
have "no need of witnesses or of any other corroboration of the facts." Furthermore, a two-fold educational
advantage comes from public controversies. First, public controversies draw more people into the dispute; second, the larger number of citizens involved is permitted
to consider the evidence of both sides and then to draw
conclusions. There is no better way to educate the general citizenry than to make it a party to the political battles that occur within the state. Another advantage to
which Van Buren alluded is that public controversies tend
to stern from higher motives than do private controversies. This led Van Buren to conclude that the "era of good
feeling" had "moved the bitter waters of political agitation to their lowest point."
Van Buren, like Machiavelli, relied quite heavily on history to support his contention that parties have a salutary effect on republican government. He openly opposed
those who claimed that the party division of the 1790s
was caused by conflicting notions about whether the
United States should have aligned itself more closely with
44
England or France. Van Buren recognized the sharp division on that issue, but argued that to consider this the
source of partisan divisions "is to mistake for the cause
one of its least important effects.' ' 12 He developed his idea
about the source of party differences in this way:
The Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, embracing
a period of sixteen years, from first to last, opposed by the
federal party with a degree of violence unsurpassed in
modern times. From this statement one of two conclusions
must result. Either the conduct of these two parties which
had been kept on foot so long, been sustained with such determined zeal and under such patriotic professions and had
created distinctions that became the badges of familiestransmitted from father to son-was a series of shameless
impostures, covering mere struggles for power and
patronage; or these were differences of opinion and principle between them of the greatest character, to which their
respective devotion and active service could not be relaxed
without safety or abandoned without dishonor .13
To Van Buren, the choice was clear: either one accepted
parties as a healthy and respectable part of America's political machinery or one accus.ed Jefferson and Madison
of being" shameless impostures." Since Jefferson's reputation has probably never exceeded the heights it attained
during the Jacksonian era, Van Buren was confident of
which conclusion the political leaders of his generationand probably the leaders of generations to follow-would
draw. To make this choice clear, Van Buren relied heavily on Jefferson's actions and avoided many of his words.
He cleverly drew on the partisan political history of the
founders to overcome the partisan (actually anti-partisan)
political theories they had espoused. Since Jefferson,
Madison, and Hamilton produced the history upon which
Van Buren rested his case for a permanent party system,
he had at his disposal information that simply was unavailable to the founders. With his Jeffersonian prejudices
intact, Van Buren built a foundation for a new partisan
division based on historical attachments and governmental policies. He began his discussion by echoing Jefferson' s statement on the permanence of party divisions in
Western history, but he quickly translated those natural
parties into American parties and then concentrated his
efforts on the specific policies and programs that had
resulted from those divisionsl4 He glossed over Hamilton's theoretical differences with Jefferson and chose, instead, to focus on the policies that had grown out of
Hamilton's political preferences. Van Buren realized that
party loyalties and antagonisms are easier to maintain if
they are attaclted to specific programs and policies instead
of general theories.
Van Buren's success in building a permanent party system was not based on a rejection of the earlier party theories espoused by Washington, Madison, and Jefferson;
on the contrary, Van Buren was keenly aware of the permanence of the driving passions that produced these
early theories. The future of American parties would be
determined by their ability to maintain a tenuous balance
SUMMER 1985
�between the interests described by Madison and Washington and the ideals described by Jefferson. Van Buren
charted a middle course that could appeal to both the noble and the base and thus provide a common ground for
both the informed leaders our country would continue
to need and their less-informed followers. Statesmen are
able to address the concerns of the entire community
through party principles in a way that they could not with
Madison or Washlngton's parties. At the same time, the
less-informed members of society can recognize the practical effect certain party principles might have in a way
that they probably could not have in Jefferson's parties.
Van Buren certainly realized that party principles are
better understood by people of "lesser capacities" than
are the principles of statesmen. But given the shortage
of statesmen, society as a whole is elevated by these "lesser principles." As the American political system grew increasingly democratic, there was an increasing need for
partisan principles that would help "refine and enlarge
the public's view.''
The founders' partisan oversight, if we can call it that,
was addressed indirectly by Alexis de Tocqueville. In his
discussion of patriotism, he provided at least a partial explanation of the increased need for political parties after
the founding. According to Tocqueville, there are two distinct forms of patriotism: instinctive and reflective. The
former he describes as a "kind of religion: it does not reason, but it acts from the impulse of faith and sentiment."" At the time of the founding, as in a time of war,
such patriotism formed strong bonds between the citizenry and the state. Nevertheless, "like all instinctive passions, this kind of patriotism incites great transient
exertions, but no continuity of effort. " 16 At some point
citizens must make the transition to reflective patriotism
if they are to maintain their attachments to their government. This requires that people "go forward and accelerate the union of private with public interests, since the
period of disinterested patriotism is gone by forever.'' The
transition is especially crucial to republics because while
reflective patriotism is "less generous and less ardent
. . . it is more fruitful and most lasting: it springs from
knowledge; it is nurtured by the law; it grows by the exercise of civil rights; and, in the end, it is confounded with
the personal interest of the citizen. " 17
1
As we have already noted, the hallmark of Van Buren's
party system is the union it forged between the private
interests that sustained the parties of Washington and
Madison and the public interests whlch guided Jefferson's
party. The founders could not have anticipated the necessity for political parties; in the early years of the republic, private and public interests were held together by a
reverence for the authors of America's founding documents and the passions that produce "instinctive patriotism." Political parties filled the vacuum created by the
passing of the founding generation and of the patriotic
passions they inspired.
1. "The Democratization of Mind in the American Revolution," in
Robert W. Horwitz, ed., The Moral Foundation of the American Republic
(University Press of Virginia: 1977).
2. I have explained why this terminology is unfortunate in ''From Fac~
tions to Parties: America's Partisan Education." In Schramm, P., and
Silver T. (eds), Natural Right and Political Right: Essays in Honor of Harry
V. Jaffa. Carolina Academic Press, 1984.
3. Adrienne Koch and William Peden, eds., The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Random House: 1944), p. 627.
4. James Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of
the Presidents, 1789-1908, 12 vols. (Bureau of National Literature and Art:
1909), 1:381-82.
5. John Spencer Bassett, ed., Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, 7 vols.
(Carnegie Institution: 1927), 2:268.
6. "The Nature and Origin of the American Party System" in Equality and Liberty (Oxford University Press: 1965).
7. The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Farrington (New Yqrk: 1968),
p. 454.
8. Harvey Mansfield, Jr., Statesmenship and Party Government (University of Chicago Press: 1965), p. 17.
9. Mansfield, p. 14.
10. Mansfield, pp. 17-18.
11. Martin Van Buren, Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States (New York: 1867), pp. 3-4. This point is also noted
by James Ceaser in Presidential Selection (Princeton University Press:
1979), p. 135.
12. Van Buren, Inquiry, p. 270.
13. The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick
(Washington, D.C.: 1920), p. 123.
14. Van Buren, Inquiry, pp. 7-8 .
15. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley,
2 vols. (Vintage Books: 1945), 1:251.
16. Democracy in America, 1:252.
17. Democracy in America, 1:251-52.
Donald Weatherman teaches Political Science at Arkansas College.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
45
�Penelope's Dream
Navigare necesse est . . .
In the cold olive bed of night
the work of day lies around me,
as if some portion of sunlight were netted there
that in darkness gives up a daily gathered heat.
In imagination I smooth again
the wrinkled surface of my skin,
and resurrect a form of youth memory will be the shuttle of desire.
Each night I lie,
an island in the soft grey sea of sleep,
and count, as waves, the doing and undoing
that run together in a tide.
My wakefulness, a forgotten watchfire, has grown cold,
and still I cannot close my conscious eye.
If I could, all I'd dream would be a vision:
the longed-for draught,
a silence unjoined from solitude,
and a second, more singular journey - begun.
M. L. Coughlin
46
SUMMER 1985
�Housebound or Floating Free:
The American Home in
Huckleberry Finn
Mera
J. Flaumenhaft
Far from home, Huckleberry Finn finds himself in the
house of a family named Grangerford. Among the neatly
stacked books in their parlor is a copy of Pilgrim's Progress,
"about a man that left his family, it didn't say why."
Huck reads "considerable" in it and finds it "interesting but tough." Having escaped from what remains of
his own natural family, and from a well-meaning adoptive family, Huck has attached himself to a fugitive slave
who intends to buy or steal his own family to freedom.
Missing the northern turn, the boy and the slave remain
together in what has become the most famous alternative family in American literature. Huck's experiences
south of Cairo raise the question of what family and civic
arrangements are appropriate to human beings, and especially to human beings in the special circumstances of
Twain's nineteenth century America. These alternatives
help us to reflect on the meaning of the small and temporary community formed by Huck and Jim.
Many of Twain's readers have noted the resemblance
between the Grangerfords' parlor and that of the "House
Beautiful" in Life on the Mississippi. It is clearly the same
room. What differs is the point of view of the describer.
Huck's delighted admiration for the "style" of the "beautiful oilcloth," plaster fruits, and fine pictures is an amusing contrast to Twain's mockery of the vulgar affectations
of a typical well-to-do western family. But there is another
difference between the two passages, one which points
to a much more interesting question raised by the Grangerford episode. The "best dwelling" described in Life
on the Mississippi is located in a river town. The passage
Mera Flaumenhaft is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. She
has published articles about Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Homer and
Euripedes.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
begins by calling the mansion "the home of its wealthiest and most conspicuous citizen" [emphasis added]. The
house is set back in a grassy yard; the paling fence,
painted white, is "in fair repair," and a brick walk leads
from "gate to door." The reader might imagine the "principal citizen" [emphasis added] referred to at the end of
the passage welcoming fellow citizens to his home, walking out the gate to do business in town, and leaving the
town in the luxury steamboat described in the following
paragraphs.
The establishment Huck "runs across" in the dark after a steamboat overturns his raft is markeclly different.
Located a quarter mile of rough ground from the river,
the house sits in an isolated clearing away from any town
and even from other houses. There is no fence, walk, or
yard, and welcoming a visitor requires "unlocking, unbarring, and unbolting.'' Only by relocating the ''House
Beautiful" can Twain in Huckleberry Finn connect this passage with another, not yet related to it in Life on the Mississippi, the description of the Darnell-Watson feud. For
the Grangerfords' feud can only be understood by exploring the implications of their isolated way of life.
While the lengthy, detailed description of the house
marvelously portrays the sensibilities of a boy like Huck,
it is of even greater interest in that it characterizes the
people who live there-not only by what they have in the
house, but by the elaborate, orderly care they take for it.
By dwelling on their dwelling, we become aware that this
private household is the only community in the lives of
its inhabitants. Resembling Homeric Cyclopses, "they
have neither assemblies for council, nor appointed laws,
but they dwell on the peaks of lofty mountains in hollow caves, and each one is lawgiver to his children and
wives.n
The Grangerfords, however, are indoors people, the
products of an economy based on slavery. Huck remarks
47
�on the Colonel's "darkish-paly complexion, not a sign
of red in it anywheres." Freed from the necessity to work,
by themselves or with others, they devote themselves not
to public business, but to family ceremonials, to hunting, and to a peculiar debased form of dueling. Privacy
reigns. As the absolute masters of over a hundred slaves,
they are occupied not in productive work, but in the
forms of their everyday life. This life is static and repetitious in its meticulous routines, and is uninterrupted except by the cyclical feud killings, the round of tribal
parties, and by an occasional visit from a stranger boy
who livens up a midnight snack with his false tales.
The inequality of master and slave is echoed in the
patriarchal arrangements of the Grangerfords. Before we
even hear his name, we realize that the Colonel is running a private military unit:
"Snatch that light away ... take your places."
"All ready."
He refers to his sons, fine men in their thirties, as "boys."
Not free to contract themselves in marriage or occupation, they begin each day with an elaborate ceremonial
in which they pay homage to the patriarchal master of
the house. There is none of the easy affection which Tocqueville notes between most American fathers and the
grown sons who work with them as equal men. Rather,
as Tocqueville says,
When men live more for remembrance of what has been than
for the care of what is, and when they are more given to attend to what their ancestors thought than to think themselves, the father is the natural and necessary tie between
the past and the present . ... In aristocracies, then, the father
is not only the civil head of the family, but the organ of its
traditions, the expounder of its customs, the arbiter of its
manners. He is listened to with deference, he is addressed
with respect, and the love that is felt for him is always tem-
pered with fear. (II. viii)
Colonel Grangerford will pass down to his sons his
house, land, slaves, name, blood and the blood feud that
comes with it. Like all patrilocal aristocratic families, the
Grangerfords look backwards. Their past determines their
present; on Sundays they discuss "preforeordestination." Though Twain may overdo Emmeline, her fixation on death and her family's morbid fixation on her,
ring true. While the sons die off before their fathers in
an ancient feud whose origins they can't remember,
Emmeline's mother spends her days visiting the room
of the daughter who has predeceased her.
Every Grangerford is first of all a Grangerford, tied by
name, looks, and loyalties to his tribal clan. There is little sense of individual identity apart from the home and
inherited name. Family is not a bridge to relations with
others, but an extension of one's self. The feud which
preoccupies them expresses an excessive and inverted
love of one's own. The only social activities we hear of
48
are those extended family "junketings" in which "mostly
kinfolks" come for days at a time to hunt, picnic, and
dance. At such affairs, one imagines, are arranged the
marriages of second and third cousins, unions which
preserve the uworth" of such "tribes" and, above all,
prevent disastrous alliances with the sons of enemy clans
of aristocracy.
The Grangerfords have no public relations, and frequent no public places. We hear of the steamboat
landing-which seems to welcome no one to this backwater settlement-and of the church, the only neutral
meeting place of the hostile clans. There they listen attentively to the sermon-"all about brotherly love." But,
recognizing only blood brothers, they keep their guns
"handy against the wall." In both Huckleberry Finn and
the Darnel-Watson passage in Life on the Mississippi, no
one but the two families seems to be in the church.
Compare this Grangerford Sunday with the St. Petersburg Sunday on which Tom Sawyer loses his pinch bug.
On the latter, the church is full of children fresh from Sunday school, where Tom must introduce himself to the
new judge by his full family name. Older worshippers
are identified by their public position or by family name
and public role: the aged postmaster, the mayor, the
justice of the peace, the widow Douglas-always associated with her palatial "hospitable" mansion, Major
and Mrs. Ward, Lawyer Riverson, young belles, and
clerks, and the Model Boy. St. Petersburg is a community where even the town drunk acquires a sort of civic status. The church is clearly a public meeting place. After
the hymn the minister "turned himself into a bulletin
board and read off notices of meetings and societies
... a queer custom which is still kept up in America."
The prayer which follows is a "good generous" one. Unlike the "ornery" backwoods preaching about brotherly
love, it reaches out to include pleas for
the church; the little children of the church; the other
churches of the village; for the village itself; for the county;
for the State; for the State officers; for the United States; for
the churches of the United States; for the Congress; for the
President; for the officers of the Government; for poor sailors
tossed by stormy seas; for the oppressed millions groaning
under the heel of European monarchies and Oriental
despotisms.
It is to this community of families that Tom makes his tri-
umphal return after lighting out for a boyish adventure.
Twain makes marvelous fun out of the disastrous Sunday school award, the pretenses of the parishioners, the
cadences of the prayer, and the delightful busting up of
the service as all hearts and minds are turned towardsthe pinch bug! But there is no doubt that the members
of the congregation constitute a satisfying community of
fully developed civic beings as well as family members.
The same can be said of the honor-bound First Families
of Virginia in Pudd'nhead Wilson. They show off their
town's new graveyard, jail, town hall, churches, indepen-
SUMMER 1985
�dent fire company, militia company, and "where the
richest man lived" to visiting Italian noblemen. With one
foot tied to their aristocratic Virginia pasts, they eagerly
partake of their democratic Missouri presents and futures,
visiting the homes of Aunt Patsy and the uprooted
Pudd'nhead, even as they duel for their ancient honor.
For all their refinement, then, the housebound Grangerfords seem peculiarly primitive in the light of the new
"sivilization" on the banks of the Mississippi. It is not
just that their carpets and white clothes and plastered,
whitewashed walls cover over the dark savagery of their
ancient feud. It is that their ancient feud-and everything
else in their way of life-harks back to a pre-political condition in which human beings have not yet emerged from
natural family associations to conventional civil law. Not
only do his slaves and his sons remain "boys," but the
undisputed master, as Cyclopean lawgiver to his wife and
children, remains somehow undeveloped. As the only
man among a household of women, boys, and slaves,
he never deals with his equals in a public arena in which
law, and not his own will, regulates relations. Political
life anywhere requires the separation of individual
responsibility and action from blood kinship, and the
agreement to punish wrongs by disinterested communal
authority and law. The first step away from patriarchal
feuds is appropriately an elopement. Lighting out from
their ancestral homes, Harney and Sophia take refuge
across the river, to be married by authorities outside their
families. The children of this union will look like Grangerfords and Shepherdsons, and will probably live in a
town. No longer bound to their paternal origins, they will
turn their attention to the wider community and live by
its laws.
Tocqueville' s observations are again helpful. Free, adult
life in the United States requires that "all classes display
the utmost reliance upon the legislation of their country
and [be] attached to it by a kind of paternal affection"(I.xiv). American patriotism, however, goes beyond
instinctive patriotic feelings which tie men to their birthplace and make them love their country as they "love the
mansion of their fathers." Nurtured by the laws," it encourages citizens to exercise their civil rights" (Lxiv), and
in assemblies to "salute the authorities of the day as the
fathers of their country" (Lxiv). Besides Emmeline's originals in the Grangerford parlor, Huck sees pictures of
Washington and the signers of the Declaration of Independence. It is not clear what place these founding
fathers could hold in the hearts of the "nice family" that
lives there. At any rate, one is not surprised to find that
the "House Beautiful's" chief "slander of the family in
oil" -in big gilt frame-"papa holding a book ('Constitution of the United States')'' -is absent from the House
of Grangerford.
We must return to Pilgrim's Progress, the book in the
parlor. It is about a man that leaves his family. The man
has only one name, the generic name of Christian. Christianity loosens the powerful bonds of blood kinship and
turns man's attention from family and political life to the
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
heavenly city. At the end of the journey all are equalfathers and sons, men and women, aristocrats and com-
moners, freemen and slaves. Universal brotherly love is
promised along with eternal life, liberty and happiness.
The American founding fathers promised much less. In
return for abandoning the unchanging names, property,
privileges, duties, and ceremonies of ancient, ancestral
ties, they offered unlimited mobility, individuality, and
an equal right to this-worldly life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They guaranteed this right not by relying on the private charity of Bible-reading widows,
sermons about brotherly love, or camp-meeting preachings to the wicked, but by inculcating a respect for public institutions and the secular law, a respect which was
closely bound up with self-interest and self-respect. In
America one could always change one's name, earn one's
place, name that place, or light out for the territory. These
are cures for the evils of the House of Grangerford. But
they bring on their own characteristic American diseases,
ones which Twain goes on to explore as Huck travels
south from the Grangerfords. Excessive and exclusive family ties are replaced by excessive isolated individualism,
and then by a complete lack of individuality which also
threatens viable community life. And America is plagued
with its characteristic outsiders, in the forms of drifters
and slaves. In each incident we are still searching for a
viable combination of free individuality and attachments
to family and civic communities, for an appropriate
American home.
Bricksville, Arkansas, is deep south, far from the
westem river towns of Missouri, and a good distance
from the woodland, backwater compound of the Grangerfords. Its ills are a peculiar combination of American
traits and the special perversions of southern slavery. The
town is too close to the river; its characteristic element
is mud. The traces of family, civic, economic structures
are visible, but, with respect to '' sivilization,'' Bricksville' s
"been there before." Private houses are "old and
shacldy," propped up to avoid flooding; their gardens
are full of weeds, hogs, and trash, and the fences are in
disrepair, with hanging gates, "whitewashed some time
or another, but the Duke said it was in Columbus's time,
like enough." The human inhabitants of this community aren't at home much. They have little to do with
women and children. Their ramshackly gates lead out to
a public space where, again, hogs make themselves at
home. Slavery has arrested the development of these men
as much as it has the master, sons, and slaves of the Grangerfords. No one works. They hang around storefronts,
but their only public business is conducted in grunts
about "borrowing" tobacco. Their names echo the first
names of St. Petersburg children and Grangerford
"boys," but they are not completed by surnames; thus,
they seem, at the same time, characteristically American,
and yet un-American. As Huck remarks in Tom Sawyer,
kings and slaves have only given names. Unarticulated
from each other by home, work, or name, and unconcerned with the past or future, these ragged men loaf
49
�away their present, tormenting stray animals, much as
the patched schoolboys "stir up" ticks and pinch bugs
in Tom Sawyer. When a harmless old drunk bearing only
the muddy last name of Boggs is shot to death, this ''com~
munity" bands together to lynch the murderer. They
"swarm" to his house, terrifying women, children, and
slaves, and threatening to "tromp" everything to
"mush." The loafers described at the beginning of the
chapter are the raw material for the anonymous, inarticulate mob which Twain would later describe as the
"United States of Lyncherdom."
They are faced down by the murderer, Colonel Sherburn, the most isolated individual in Huckleberry Finn. His
well-cared-for house and "twenty-foot yard" are the first
objects of attack; the mob must first "tear down the fence,
tear down the fence." Isolated from the townspeople,
Sherburn greets his neighbors from his roof, looking
down on those who would lynch him. He makes the
longest, most articulate speech in the book. He has lived
in many places, north and south, and is apparently unattached to any human being. Unlike Huck, who also has
no family, he is unmoved by the fear and grief of Boggs'
"sweet and gentle" daughter. Sherburn resembles Grangerford, but this colonel stands alone. For him, armies,
like mobs, are composed of subordinate half-men who
can be scared into courage by their mass and by their
officers. The incident which sets off the Bricksville mob
is an anachronistic parody of an aristocratic duel. Sherburn's name has been insulted, and he punctiliously fulfills all the ceremonies-challenges, time, cocked pistol,
discarded weapon-to avenge his detached and selforiented honor. He would not stoop to the ambushes and
bowie knives of the backwater feud. He is unimaginable
in the democratic militias which extended frontiers
against savage Indians and resisted the civilized armies
of European kings. And he is unassimilable in the
democratic towns for which these militias cleared the
way. In sum, he is as far from legal community as are
his anonymous attackers. Twain returns to the entertainments of the Bricksville loafers twice again before Huck
moves on. The murder of Boggs is reenacted in their
pleasure in the drunk circus clown's danger, and in their
early delight in and later revenge against the perpetrators of the Royal Nonesuch.
The two frauds who suffer their wrath again raise the
question of isolated individualism as an American danger.
Mobility, anonymity, and an uncontrolled desire for quick
riches characterize these homeless drifters. They repeatedly light out from "sivilized" communities which they
"work," but within which they have no sustained working identities. Isolated at first, they form an uneasy association based on self-interest, and are never slow to
cheat each other, as well as their shared dupes. Lacking
true pasts or names, they are self-made men who assimilate themselves into the families of European aristocracy
and American democrats whenever they stand to profit.
But the true "secret of their birth" is that they have no
selves. The two buddies who bellow out a version of the
50
love scene from Romeo and Juliet- Twain won't let us forget Harney and Sophia-have nothing to do with homes
and families, feuding or otherwise. Their handbill for the
Royal Nonesuch "fetches" their dupes in Bricksville, but
it also characterizes the dupers: "LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED." Though they carry the rags
and pieces of "sivilized" places in their carpetbags and
heads, they are, like Sherburn, totally detached. We last
see them, like him, being attacked by the anonymous
mob which counters their violations of communal law
with equally lawless punishment.
***
What has this tour through river communities, homes,
and families to do with the lovely boy who reads Pilgrim's
Progress and then follows his heart and vows to go to Hell
to save a slave? Only a reader whose own heart is as
"deformed" as Twain elsewhere says Huck's "conscience" is, would fail to become deeply attached to the
kid who humbles himself before Jim, writes poetry for
Emmeline, "cries a little" over Buck Grangerford, and
feels sorry for murderers, for Boggs, and the clown, and
Mary Jane, and Silas Phelps, and even for "them poor
pitiful rascals," the Duke and the King. His liveliness,
intelligence, and, above all, his sympathy for others, are
born of the heart. Twain gives no other indication of their
origins. But Huck is a sprite-an American one to be
sure-and, like all sprites, he does not partake of the lasting attachment that most mortals form. The Prosperos
of this world are always sadder than the Ariels when the
latter light out for freedom. Our attachment to Huck
should not prevent us from recognizing that America has
a tendency to invite and encourage lighting out, and that
lighting out is the source of both strengths and weaknesses in the home of the free.
Huck is a homeless orphan in St. Petersburg. The boy
is taken in by a well-meaning widow in a nice house-in
Tom Sawyer it's the best mansion in town. He's sent to
school and church, and he plays with the children of
respectable families. To his father's horror, he learns to
read and write, and like all nineteenth century American children, to spell. But he declares his independence
from his first to his last paragraphs with the only misspelling in his book-" sivilization." At home he is taught
table manners and prayers, and is always reprimanded
with the full version of his first name, Huckleberry! But
at night, when the restrictive routine gets him down, he
lights out to less confined spaces, not through the gate,
but out the window and off the roof. Though there are
town fathers in this village, the "sivilization" in which
Huck dwells for a time is primarily female. Miss Watson
and the widow of the former justice of the peace offer
a stiff and somewhat dessicated family, a home from
which men no longer go forth to work with other men.
Huck's father is a juicier type, closer to the river. At
the edges of "sivilization," he's attached to no one.
There's only a passing mention of Huck's mother, and
SUMMER 1985
�the paternal ''home'' has been mostly barrels in a muddy
hogyard. Like all the homeless drifters in this book, he
lives, not by working, but by "borrowing off" others.
Pap-his full name is rarely used-disappears on the river
for long stretches, and returns to plague his son for his
independently acquired legacy. He cannot be received at
the widow's, so he hangs around the garden fence and
later climbs in by the shed. A brief attempt to "sivilize"
Pap by removing him from the tan yard to a new judge's
"own house," ends with Pap's lighting out offthe porch
roof in the middle of the night, returning to make a shambles of a beautiful spare room. Later he imprisons Huck
in an abandoned log hut in a thick wood where "there
warn't no houses." There they live the disorganized life
of men without women-no books, study, prayers,
schedules, or neighbors-and no reliable nurture or protection. Housebound again, Huck escapes from the unpredictable rages of Pap, again not through a door or gate,
but by sawing a hole in the house itself.
In the long trip down the river, Huck lives among men.
You can't live on the river unless you have some kind
of solid platform. But the raft wigwam is unattached; it
has no foundations. It houses an easy, free, unregulated
life which is always in flux. As you drift by, no one knows
your name, or your father's. There are no rooted trees,
no adjacent yards, and no fences to admit neighbors or
prevent others from "borrowing." The river washes a
two story house in its flood and Huck and Jim climb in
a second story window to plunder the dirty detritus of
its anonymous former inhabitants. Their possessions are
further increased by the loot taken from the murderous
thieves who are left to die in the well-furnished Walter
Scott.
The prime cigars which Huck takes from the Walter
Scott remind us that life on the raft is not so pure as it
might at first seem. Like native American huckleberry
bushes, which are neither cultivated nor woods-wild, but
which thrive on cleared land where human settlers have
left their mark, Huckleberry Finn lives off the "sivilized"
life from which he continually escapes. His canoes, hats,
melons, cigars, and even his company, are supplied by
settled towns along the river. The "lazying," "borrowing,'' ''smoking'' idyll is the attractive version of the more
disturbing American lives led by the Walter Scott thieves,
the Bricksville tobacco chewers, and the Duke and the
King. Huck, like them, has no settled home.
Huck is a sojourner in various houses for brief periods
in his trip down the river. At Mrs. Loftus', the Grangerfords', the Wilkses' and the Phelpses' he is welcomed,
entertained, and told all about the inhabitants. Aunt
Sally, who at last knows who he is, invites him to remain
permanently grounded in a community of family farms.
This prompts him to light out for good. All his other hosts
never learn his name, which he freely changes for new
acquaintances. They'll never see him again. Huck is a
homeless guest-friend who'll never reciprocate by freely
offering his own hospitality. His own river home is
peculiarly open to visitors. He himself welcomes the Duke
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and King because they are fugitives from "sivilization,"
and need help. By the time Huck realizes what this
means, his home has become their castle, and the best
he can do is to try to "keep peace in the family." As we
have seen, they "borrow" freely from their oppressed
hosts, and eventually return one of them to his stalj.is as
goods for their own profit. Having no natural or conventional attachments, and no fixed place in a community,
Huck is powerless to defend himself, his home, and his
friend against invaders.
Jim's need for defense raises radical questions about
what kind of home America can be for all the people who
live there. America is born in the declaration that all men
are created equal and that they are endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But perhaps there is a tension between the
unequivocal recognition that slavery is an evil, and other
principles of the new nation. Having abandoned public
exhortations to love one's neighbor and to fight for his
soul, and having relinquished the direct formation of
character in its fullest sense as a public goal, America's
social contract seems to have let loose self-interested individualism. In this respect, the masters of huge estates
and homeless drifters like the Duke and King may not
be so different from each other. Southerners already in
the awkward position of depending on slaves, might
justify wrenching black Africans from their homes and
keeping them homeless in the land these masters considered their own. Even a confused belief that enslaved
blacks were less than human, incapable of contract, was
sufficient to deny them the rights declared at America's
foundation. Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson is as dark a depiction of the consequences of this belief as can be found
in American literature. It is no accident that uprooted
slaves so readily turned to the destination and freedom
promised in Pilgrim's Progress. To those deprived of
names, families, homes, and possessions, the ''home in
that rock" seemed a sure future. Angels in sweet chariots would carry them to the home America promised to
all men but, in practice, did not provide. Twain's story
makes no argument for Jim's rights as an American. His
powerful case against slavery is founded on his depiction of Jim as a full human being who is capable of having home, family, friends and work.
On his own, Huck sleeps in the open. It is Jim, the
domestic slave, who makes their first ~~home/' a cavewith several rooms and a front door-to protect them
from the elements and from other human beings. Their
second house, the raft wigwam, is made and repeatedly
repaired by Jim. It is he who stands watch most often and
who tends the hearthfire during Huck's absences. And,
most tellingly, it is he who grows "homesick" on the
river. For Jim, Huck's judgment that "there warn't no
home like a raft" must be qualified. Attached to his wife
and children, who do not even have the legal status of
family, he looks forward to work among other grown
men, and to keeping the money he will earn by that work.
Though the future for men like Jim is clearly bleak, the
51
�former house slave, ''Miss Watson's big nigger Jim,'' in
seeking freedom seeks the right to own property-a
house for his family-in his own full name. Considering
the numerous snatches of poems, plays, and songs which
echo through this book, it is interesting that Jim never
sings the spirituals which Twain learned in his boyhood,
and loved to sing long after he had left the south. Jim's
"religion" seems relatively uninfluenced by Miss Watson's. For him full adult freedom must mean looking to
the immediate, this-world, future, and freely contracting
for marriage, work, and property of his own earning.
Jim's aspirations, though clearly limited by his education
and the society he lives in, are the clearest indication that
he is, by nature, fully human-more fully human than
many of the "free" men Huck meets on their journey,
and, perhaps, more fully human than Huck himself will
ever be.
Despite the risks Huck takes for Jim, and despite his
genuine chosen friendship and concern for him, his attachment here, too, is passing. Huck fails to comment
on the news of Jim's freedom, and never speaks to him
alone after Tom reveals it. Likewise, he has no response
to Jim's revelation that Pap is dead. The offer of female
"sivilization" is quickly rejected and the last word from
our American sprite is that he will "light out for the territory ahead of the rest." This time he'll go alone, and
we know that Tom's plans for ''a couple of weeks or two''
of "howling adventures amongst the Indians" are unlikely to materialize. America will follow, of course, with
her Declaration of Independence, churches, schools, and
plans for future city halls, roads, and fire departments.
But Huck Finn, the perennial boy among boys, whose
freedom consists.in lighting out through windows and
off roofs, lives always in the present. Always in transit,
never at home, he has no destination. His future offers
only repeated lighting out. Another American future lies
with kids like Tom Sawyer, who hang around the fences
of the little girls they court and eventually marry, who
52
whitewash the fences that separate their own houses from
those of nearby neighbors, and who are expected to grow
up and to go the National Military Academy and the best
law school in the country. And it lies with grown-up men
like Judge Thatcher-and, perhaps, someday, like Jimwho have work of their own and greet their neighbors
through front doors and garden gates.
The picture looks much prettier in Tom Sawyer, the book
for children who'll follow in Tom's footsteps. When
they're older, perhaps, they'll be ready to think about
Huck and what he rejects and embraces. Some readers
think that not only the fence is whitewashed in the earlier book, but also the greed, hypocrisy, and potential violence of the town Huck once considered home. The dark
hints about St. Petersburg are surely more fully developed in Huckleberry Finn, and Tom is, in some ways, the
most disturbing character in the book. But St. Petersburg
with all its warts must be compared to the alternatives
we see. There is little doubt that community life as one
goes down the river gets worse, that Grangerford feuds
and Arkansas towns are more debased than the more
northern town from which Jim runs. Huck's lighting out,
his natural delight in the water and stars, and his unexamined goodness, teach us much about the defects of the
"sivilized" places he moves through. Their slavery is
more than a defect. It is an unacceptable evil, and Twain
has no illusions about the ease with which this evil can
be eradicated. But, as we have seen, Huck's life depends
on the lives of these towns. And, despite the shortcomings which Twain so sharply reveals in the townspeople,
their rootedness and their attachment to homes attached
to other homes, are the only foundations on which viable American communities can be built. If freedom can
mean anything besides continual lighting out, these are
the men and women who will be at home in America.
If not, then Twain's book is very dark indeed, and he has
left us all alone and homeless.
SUMMER 1985
�1784: The Year
St. John's College Was Named
Charlotte Fletcher
In late December 1784, a western shore college was
chartered by the Maryland General Assembly and was
given the name St. John's College. Contemporary records
do not reveal how and why the name was chosen.
If the college was named for a saint, there were three
strong contenders. First was St. John Chrysostom. In 1807
he was a favorite of two of fhe college's early graduates,
John Shaw and Francis Scott Key (class of 1796), who
were young poets with literary ambitions. Chrysostom,
the "golden-mouthed" bishop of Constantinople, was
a muse to John Shaw. "By the blessing of St.
Chrysostom, '' he wrote Francis Scott Key on January 24,
1807, "As I am in great haste, and in no less need for
our Saint's assistance, I hope you have not forgotten our
plans, but will soon be ready in the litany, 0 Sancte
Chrysostome! ora pro nobis. I have examined the college
library and find many valuable books in it. There is an
edition of Chrysostom in twelve volumes, three of whlch
are wanting ... ' ' 1
After 1870, John the Evangelist was generally accepted
as the favored saint. In a dedication speech at the opening of Woodward Hall on June 18, 1900, John Wirt Randall commented that the Evangelist's name was
particularly appropriate for an educational institution because it suggested "more than those of the other
apostles-the relation between a scholar and a teacher."'
Indeed, St. John's College at Cambridge University was
named for the Evangelist. Randall knew this, and also
that a college historian of the 1870s had claimed that certain unnamed 1784 incorporators had attended St. John's
College, Cambridge. For this reason, it was believed, the
Annapolis college had been named "St. John's" after the
Cambridge college.'
In 1894 Bernard Steiner introduced another theory
about the origin of the college's name. He wrote: "Other
authorities say the name (St. John's) was given in comTHE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
pliment to the Masonic fraternity then very strong in Annapolis."' It is true that the seal of St. John's College,
as well as that of Washington College (founded 1782),
bears a masonic symbol. It is also true that the old Masonic lodge of Annapolis warranted by the St. John's
Grand Lodge of Massachusetts in 1750 was a St. John's
lodge. It was a "modern" lodge, i.e., descended from
the Grand Lodge of England (founded 1717). Other
Maryland lodges of the colonial period were chartered
by the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania and were "ancients," or Ancient York Masons. It was customary to call
all local lodges that were warranted by Grand Lodges by
the generic name St. John's lodges. 5
But if the college was named "in compliment to the Masonic fraternity then very strong in Annapolis,'' as Steiner
suggested, a fhird saint, John the Baptist, could have been
the one honored in the naming of the college. The Masons honored two St. Johns, John the Baptist and John the
Evangelist.
Steiner's reference to an active Masonic fraternity is also
unclear because the old Annapolis St. John's Lodge was
moribund after 1764. 6 Yet many Masons visited Annapolis
in the revolutionary period. They came from the counties of Maryland and other states of the Confederation
to attend the Continental Congress, the General Assembly, and the General Courts. They included officers in
the Maryland Line7 and other distinguished military
figures. Moreover, throughout the state new "ancient"
lodges were being warranted under the Pennsylvania
Grand Lodge, and members of "modern" lodges who
wished to enter into the mysteries of Ancient York
Masonry were being "healed." Two Masons in Kent
County were active in promoting Ancient York Masonry
in Maryland during the 1780s: they were the Rev. William Smith and Peregrine Leatherbury, who had been
among the incorporators of Washington College in 1782. 8
53
�The year before, Smith, the Grand Secretary of the Pennsylvania Grand Lodge, had digested and abridged an Ahiman Rezon, or book of masonic constitutions, for the
Pennsylvania Grand Lodge. Published in 1783, the Ahiman Rezon was a guide to Masons on moral conduct and
discretion and laid out an orderly procedure to be followed at lodge meetings. Repeatedly, it designated the
two St. Johns' days, that of the Baptist on June 24 and
that of the Evangelist on December 27, for special business and festive occasions. 9 However, it offered no information about the Masonic symbols used at the time
on official seals like those of Washington and St. John's
colleges.
Two books on European Masonry of the period,
however, do offer examples of Masonic symbols used as
teaching devices. An old Russian Mason in Tolstoy's War
and Peace described an example to Pierre Bezuhov when
he instructed him in the mysteries of Masonry. The old
man described a mount, raised stone by stone by succeeding generations, on which the temple of wisdom, or Solomon's temple, was erected. 10 This description was an aid
in identifying the device adopted for the St. John's seal
(see Figure 1). The layers of stones in the pile number
seven, the usual number of steps leading up to Solomon's
temple and a number corresponding to the seven Masonic
virtues. On the St. John's seal, a man climbing aloft carries a T-square .11
The second book about European Masonry of this period, Jacques Chailley's Magic Flute: a Masonic Opera, 12 is
replete with illustrations of Masonic devices. Washington College adopted one that shows a shield hung from
a column. The three stars on the shield symbolize the
three Masonic degrees of St. John's Masonry: apprentice,
fellow-craft and master mason. Key-like tools hold
garlands of roses as a drapery above the column to
celebrate the enthusiasm that brought about the founding of the college. A picture in the book13 identified these
tools as the miniature trowels used in Masonic rites to
"seal" the mouths of initiates (Figure 2), i.e., to remind
them of the first Masonic virtue, discretion, or the keeping of secrets.
The date on the Washington College seal-1782commemorates the year that the college was founded,
which was also a year in which two well-established Masonic lodges were flourishing in Kent County .14 If the St.
John's seal had been similarly dated with the year that
it was chartered, its seal might also constitute evidence
of a Masonic fraternity in Annapolis in 1784. But the St.
John's seal is dated 1793, the year that the Board of Visitors and Governors ordered that a seal be designed and
executed to imprint diplomas for the college's first graduates.15 Coincidentally, it also commemorated a significant
date for Annapolis Masonry: in 1793 the Amanda Lodge
No. 12, an "ancient," was founded, creating a brotherhood of Annapolis Masons to help lay the cornerstone
of the new capitol at Washington in November 1793. 16
The Masonic device on the St. John's seal dated 1793,
then, does not refer to a Masonic fraternity in Annapolis
54
in Annapolis in the 1780s and does not substantiate Steiner's theory.
Yet a Masonic enthusiasm had promoted education
throughout Maryland in the 1780s. In 1784 the imminent
creation of a Western Shore college was greeted with fervor by Freemason William Smith in his introduction to
An Account of Washington College. The preamble of the
"Charter of 1782" published therein described an eventual state university comprised of a Western and Eastern
Shore college united under "one supreme legislative and
visitatorial jurisdiction." Smith's uplifting and inspiring
introduction was written in the spirit of the times:
For however flattering it may be to consider the growth of
these rising states as tending to encrease [sic] the wealth and
commerce of the world; they are to be considered in another
more serious view, as ordained to enlarge the sphere of HU-
MANITY. In that view .the great interest of civil LIBERTY,
the parent of every other social blessings, will not be forgotten .. .. We must regard the'great concerns of religion and
another world. We must attend to the rising generation. The
souls of our youth must be nursed up to the love of LlliERTY
and KNOWLEDGE; and their bosoms warmed with a sacred
and enlightened zeal for every thing that can bless or dignify
the species . ... 17
In that spirit-wishing "to attend to the rising generation" and to found a university-a group of gentlemen
met in Annapolis to promote a Western Shore college on
December 3, 1784. They ordered
that the reverend john Carroll, William Smith, D.D. and
Patrick Allison, D.D. together with Richard Sprigg, john
Steret and George Digges Esquires, be a committee to complete the heads of a bill for founding a college on the Western
Shore, and to publish the same immediately, with a proper
preamble for taking in subscriptions ....
Accordingly, by December 16 the text of "A Draught of
a Proposed Act, Submitted to Public Consideration, for
Founding a College on the Western Shore of This State,
and for Constituting the Same, together with Washington College on the Eastern Shore, into One University,
by the Name of The UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND" was
released to the public. 18
One subscription list was actually filled by December
16. Known as the Annapolis list, it bore signatures of
sixty-two subscribers who pledged a total of 2703 pounds.
Those who pledged were planters, legislators, state officials, a barracksman, a silversmith, a carpenter, a clergyman, a tavern-keeper, a barber, a sea captain, and all the
merchants of Annapolis.
The six men ordered "to complete the heads of a bill
for founding a college on the Western Shore" were to
be known as ''subscription agents.'' They were a clergyman and a layman from each of the three major religious
denominations in Maryland, the Roman Catholic, the
Presbyterian and the Protestant Episcopal. Of these men,
only William Smith was from an Eastern Shore county.
SUMMER 1985
�The "Draught" borrowed large portions of the
Washington College charter of 1782 but added a new
preamble and plan for electing members to the Board of
Visitors and Governors. Much else was left out because,
as they explained, it would merely repeat similar articles
in the Charter of 1782."
A letter written by William Smith dated January 16,
1785, told how in early December he had been called "in
Conjunction with two Oergymen of other Denominations
... to draft the University Law which we happily did
Zeal of the Eastern Shore for the Advancement of Learning,
in that the Sum of five thousand pounds which the Act required ... has been nearly doubled in less than One Year,
they trusted that
the Genera1 Assembly will think this College deserving of
their further Attention and favors, and will extend their Views
to the establishing and encouraging of Seminaries of Learning in the State. 25
with great Unanimity.' ' 20
While "happily" drafting the "Proposed Act," the subscription agents expanded paragraph 9 of the Charter of
1782, which read "youth of all religious denominations
shall be freely and liberally admitted ... according to their
merit ... without requiring or enforcing any religious
or civel [sic] test," by adding "without urging their attendance upon any particular worship or service, other
than what they have been educated in, or have the consent and approbation of their parents or guardians to attend." Apparently, the authors of the text that finally
became the "Charter of 1784" intended that students
should enjoy religious liberty and that the college would
nurture students in their own faith, for as John Carroll
said, "It being an intended stipulation that provision be
made, from the College funds, if necessary, to procure
all of them opportunities to frequent their particular forms
of worship. " 21
To the paragraph on civil liberty contained in the
Draught, the Charter of 1784 added an introductory
clause for emphasis, saying the college would be established "upon the following fundamental and inviolable
principles" -and made several other changes as well.
Where the Draught had read "upon the most liberal and
catholic plan," the Charter of 1784 omitted the word
'catholic. ' 2
William Smith explained the necessity for omitting
"and catholic." The word 'catholic,' he wrote, "although
intelligible enough to many, yet-is not approved by
many others, on account of the vulgar application to one
particular church. " 23 He continued to use it in his own
letters, however, in its all-embracing sense. When the
Charter of 1784 was finally enacted, he proudly commented that "Maryland has been among the last of the States
in her Provisions for Learning; but none of them can boast
so noble a Foundation as her University now is." 24
In May 1783, eighteen months before the passage of
the Charter of 1784, William Paca and his council sent a
message to the General Assembly recommending that the
legislature give special attention to two issues as soon as
peace was firmly established: "Trade and Commerce"
first, and then "Matters of so high Concernment as
Religion and Learning."
For the latter they recommended "Public support for
the Ministers of the Gospel," which the Maryland Bill
of Rights allowed, and acknowledging the strong public
encouragement given Washington College, as shown by
the
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
As a matter of fact, the three clergy agents who were
commanded in December 1784 to "complete the heads
of a bill for founding a college on the Western Shore"
had been engaged in "Religion and Learning" all their
lives. All were teachers and educators. John Carroll was
a graduate of St. Orner's College in France and of the
Jesuit academy at Liege, Belgium; he was a priest and a
teacher at the Jesuit college in Bruges until the Jesuit order
in Belgium was suppressed by a papal bull in 1773. In
1784 he was engaged in organizing the American Catholic
Church. Patrick Allison, a graduate and then a teacher
at the College of Philadelphia, came to Maryland in 1764
to become pastor of the Baltimore Presbyterian Church,
where he served for the remainder of his life. And William Smith, a graduate of the University of Aberdeen,
was the young Scotsman whom Benjamin Franklin had
recruited to develop the Philadelphia Academy into a college. He was the teacher of Natl.J!al Philosophy and
Provost of the College of Philadelphia from the time the
College was chartered in 1753 until the revocation of its
charter in 1779. In 1784 he was rector of Chester Parish,
Kent County, and President of Washington College, as
well as a leader in the formation of the new Protestant
Episcopal Church. 26
All three men were polemicists who wrote pamphlets,
letters to the newspapers, and petitions to the Assembly
on behalf of their particular churches, sometimes attacking each other. Though sectarian interests divided them,
the rise of Freemasonry may have created a climate that
allowed them to work in concert for the advancement of
learning. Indeed, John Carroll described a new kind of
religious freedom in America following the Revolution:
in these United States our Religious System has undergone
a revolution if possible, more extraordinary, than our political one. In all of them free toleration is allowed to Christians
of every denomination; and particularly in the States of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, a communication of all Civil rights, without distinction or diminution, is
extended to those of our Religion. This is a blessing and advantage, which is our duty to preserve & improve with utmost prudence. 27
Either Freemasonry or the Spirit of '76, or both, created
such a climate. In the fall of 1784, John Carroll replied
to a "Letter to the Roman Catholics of Worcester," which
was published in three different issues of the Maryland
55
�Gazette28 after having been printed as a pamphlet in
Philadelphia the previous winter. The author, Charles
Wharton, Carroll's cousin and ex-jesuit, had recently
joined the Protestant Episcopal Church. In the "Letter"
he explained to his former congregation in Worcester, England, the doctrinal reasons for his leaving the Roman
Church. All three parts are scholarly, referring often to
the church fathers, and especially to St. john Chrysostom,
who he claimed supported his Protestant view of the
Scriptures. Carroll, a convinced Catholic, took the opposite view and refuted this argument in a pamphlet, ''An
Address to Roman Catholics on Wharton. " 29 He quoted
from the volumes of Chrysostom that he found in the
"public library" in Annapolis. 30 Responses from Catholic
readers assured him that he had succeeded in reaffirming their faith. When Wharton published another letter,
"To the Roman Catholics of Maryland,"31 Carroll refused
to reply: "I shall forbear reviving a spirit of controversy,
least it should add fuel to some spark of religious animosity. " 32 Carroll was eager that Catholic youths and teachers
seize the opportunity offered them by the Maryland colleges. 33
Patrick Allison, on the contrary, was far more conten-
tious in 1783 and 1784 because he saw a concerted effort
to set up a new established church in Maryland. Along
with Anabaptists, Methodists, Quakers, and Roman
Catholics, he continued to smart from having been taxed
for the support of the Church of England in Maryland
before 1776. Immediately after Governor Paca's address
in May, 1783, he began writing a series of articles in the
Maryland Journal against the tax proposed to "support the
ministers of the Gospel." Allison thought the tax could
only benefit the new Protestant Episcopal Church, which
had been designated heir to all real property of the old
established Church of England. Moreover, because the
church's membership and property already exceeded that
of the other sects, the tax would extend its influence out
of all proportion to that enjoyed by the others, and, indeed, lead to a new church establishment. He suggested
that to prevent such a development, former Church of
England property be divided among all the sects that had
paid a church tax before the Revolution. 34
The first of Allison's articles (published july 15, 1783)
attacked the clergyman nominated by the Maryland Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church to become the
first bishop of Maryland, William Smith. Allison used his
rapier pen exuberantly:
Nor is it my wish to disturb the reverend Dr. S. in his retirement from the world and the things of the world, where he
is inhaling copious draughts of sublime contemplation, purifying himself by a course of mental recollection, contrition, and
extraordinary devotion, for the mitred honours to which he
is destined. 3s
Smith took no lasting offence at Allison's attack,
although it may have been one of the factors influencing
the church to reject him as a candidate for bishop. Smith
56
was perhaps toughened by years of controversy endured
in Pennsylvania before he came to Maryland. In 1758 and
1759, while William Paca and Patrick Allison were attending the College of Philadelphia, Provost Smith was jailed
by the Pennsylvania General Assembly on a charge of
libel. However, with the backing of the trustees of the
college, he had continued to conduct classes and to function as Provost while in jail. 36 An appeal to the King freed
him but did not endear him to the Assembly: they already
felt threatened by Smith's efforts to promote the Church
of England in Pennsylvania. Finally, in 1779, when they
revoked the charter of the College of Philadelphia, he was
ousted as both Provost and teacher. He then moved to
Chestertown and started a school. This school merged
with the Kent County School and under his direction
grew in size and importance to the point where its
trustees petitioned the General Assembly of Maryland to
charter it as Washington College. 37
It seems most unlikely, however, that Smith, the Freemason, would have suggested the name "St. john" to
honor a Masonic fraternity in Annapolis at the time when
the "Draught of a Proposed Act" was being written: he
would have been afraid that such a suggestion might destroy the "great Unanimity" that the committee was enjoying. Furthermore, though many Catholics, and notably
john Carroll's brother Daniel, belonged to the Masons,
Carroll would have had a deep personal aversion to them:
they had played an active role in the suppression of the
jesuits in Europe. But while he would not have chosen
to honor the Masons, most likely he would not have objected to naming the college after his patron saint (who
was one of the "johns"). Allison, however, had actually
expressed his personal distaste for Masonry when he
ridiculed Smith's participation in Masonic purification
rites. 38 Moreover, the Presbyterians (like the jews) consider all members of a congregation saints, and they (the
Presbyterians) scarcely ever name their institutions after
any except St. Andrew and St. Giles. These two agents,
then, Carroll and Allison, would certainly not have suggested the name "St. john" to honor the Masons.
On December 24, 1784, ten days after its publication
in Annapolis, the "Draught of a Proposed Act" appeared
in Baltimore's Maryland Journal. Six days later a revised
version that incorporated hitherto unpublished sections
borrowed from the Charter of 1782 was enacted by the
House of Delegates. It included provisions for collecting
revenues through licenses and taxes on the Western
Shore for the support of the college39 and outlined a policy
for the governance of a University of Maryland. Where
blanks had been left in the Draught for insertion of a
name, "St. John's College" now appeared. The naming
action was a fait accompli at the time the bill was introduced, for the Journal of the House reported neither
motions nor discussion regarding the college's name.
Neither the Maryland Gazette, nor the Maryland Journal,
nor the Journals of the Senate and the House of Delegates
for the November 1784 Session of the General Assembly, explains what happened. Some special influence was
SUMMER 1985
�at work in Annapolis during the last week of December
1784.
While Governor Paca spent Christmas at Wye Hall on
the Eastern Shore, the General Assembly convened every day, including Christmas and Sunday, in Annapolis. Two major pieces of legislation that he had
recommended in the message of 1783 were slated to come
up during his absence: one bill embodied the interests
of "Trade and Commerce," and the other, the interests
of ''Religion and Learning.'' Although promotion of the
second, the "University Law" (St. John's College), began early in the session, action on it was delayed until
the report from a conference of Maryland and Virginia
legislators concerned with "Trade and Commerce" was
pushed through the Assembly on December 27.
The Journals of the House and Senate report that General Washington and General Gates arrived in Annapolis on December 22. On the same day the following
Maryland commissioners were appointed by the Assembly to confer with the Virginia delegation: Senators Thomas Stone, Samuel Hughes and Charles Carroll; and
Delegates John Cadwalader, Samuel Chase, John
DeButts, George Digges, Philip Key, Gustavus Scott and
Joseph Dashiell. George Washington-the lone Virginian
after General Gates had fallen ill on arrival-was chosen
to chair the conference.
The Senate and House Journals give the barest facts
about the conference, and the newspapers less. A letter
from George Washington, in Annapolis, to the Marquis
de Lafayette in Paris on December 23, is more forthcoming:
You would scarcely expect to receive a letter from me at this
place. A few hours before I set out for it, I as little expected
to cross the Potomac again this winter, or even to be fifteen
miles from home before the last of April, as I did to make
a visit in an air~ba11oon in France. I am here, however, with
General Gates, at the request of the Assembly of Virginia to
fix matters with the Assembly of this State respecting the extension of the inland navigation of the Potomac, and the communication between it and the western waters; and I hope
a plan which will be agreed upon, to the mutual satisfaction
of both States and to the advantage of the Union at large.
"
On December 22 five days of unremitting labor began
for all the conferees. If there were any parties, balls or
dinners given in honor of Washington between December 22 and 29, 1784, in Annapolis, the Maryland Gazette
failed to report them. On the 28th, Washington wrote
James Madison at the Legislature in Richmond, "It is now
near 12 at Night, and I am writing with an Aching Head,
having been constantly employed in this business since
the 22nd without assistance from my Colleagues, Genl.
Gates having been sick the whole time, and Colo. Blackburn not attending .... "41
The Journals of the House and Senate do reveal one
strange hiatus in these five days of intense legislative effort. On December 27 the commissioners who were
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
preparing a Potomac bill introduced their report in the
House of Delegates and received a first and second reading early in the morning session (only nine dissenting
votes were cast). From the House the bill was taken to
the Senate, where it was read and ordered "to lie on the
table" until the Senate reconvened at five o'clock for a
"post meridiem" meeting: the House followed suit and
also adjourned for a "post meridiem" meeting to begin
a half hour later than the Senate's.
When the Senate reconvened at five o'clock, the
Potomac bill, entitled "An Act for Establishing a Company for Opening and Extending the Navigation on the
River Patowmack," had a second reading; the Senate
then concurred with the action taken by the House and
adjourned, probably no later than six o'clock. The House
had reconvened at five-thirty, and since they had no business to transact-their meeting had apparently been
called so that they would be on hand if needed by the
Senate-had adjourned forthwith.
The Potomac bill thus passed both houses on December 27, 1784, the Festival Day of St. John the Evangelist,
the anniversary celebrated by all Freemasons. On the following day, December 28, the Senate resolved "that an
attested copy of the act . . . be transmitted to Gen.
Washington and Gen. Gates ... signing by the governor will be complied with when he returns to town."
On December 29, the House proceeded to take action
on the second major bill of the session, the "University
Law," which was submitted by gentlemen whose names
were on a list of Annapolis subscribers dated December
16, 1784 requesting that the General Assembly enact legislation to establish a Western Shore college."
Like the "Draught of a Proposed Act," which headed
all the subscription lists, the Charter of 1784 allowed one
vote toward election of a Visitor and Governor to each
subscriber who paid nine pounds or more on any list
totaling one thousand pounds. Other provisos in the
Charter for electing members to the Board of Visitors and
Governors differed in some significant respects from
those in the Draught. Where the Draught specified "person or persons" as sources from whom the agents might
solicit contributions, and who might form a class of subscribers who could elect one board member, the Charter
of 1784 adds ''bodies politic and corporate" ; 43 and where
the Draught said the last seven members elected to the
Board to complete an aggregate of twenty-four "may be
chosen from this or any part of the adjacent states," the
Charter narrows the geographical field to "any part of
this state." In both documents the first seventeen members are required to be residents of the Western Shore 44
These provisos are among the "considerable alterations'' to which William Smith referred in a letter to the
Rev. William White in late December 1784:
Considerable alterations were made in the plan first settled
by Mr. Carroll, Dr. Allison and myself, respecting the nice
provisos amongst different denominations in proportion to
their subscriptions. The paper was printed off before I came
57
�over. But I was told by Carroll of Carrollton, Mr. Sprigg, etc.,
that the alterations were made in concert with Dr. Allison.
I am satisfied, as I hope all our society will be, with the plan
as it now is, and as I would have agreed it should originally
have been, as I know that a few grains of mutual confidence
and benevolence among different denominations of Christians will be better than splitting and torturing a design of
this kind with all the provisos possible . ... Carroll of Carrollton, Mr. Digges, etc. have subscribed liberally, as it is expected the rest of that society will do. 45
During his less than peaceable sojourn among the
Quakers in Pennsylvania, William Smith had very likely
learned to call all denominations ''societies,'' a term used
by some denominations but very seldom used by the
Episcopalians and Catholics to whom he referred in this
letter. For example, the rapidly growing denomination
of Methodists called themselves "members in society"
and their congregations "societies" as late as 1857 46 During Christmas 1784, they were organizing the Methodist
Episcopal Church at a conference in Baltimore, declaring
themselves independent of the British Conference in the
choice of their bishops and superintendents. They were
also laying plans to found a college of their own to educate their youth.
In response to the request of the Annapolis subscribers,
the House of Delegates on December 29, 1784 proceeded
to order a committee of seven men - Samuel Chase,
George Digges, Allen Quynn, Nicholas Carroll, John
Cadwalader, David McMechen and Gustavus Scott- to
prepare and bring in a bill for "Founding a college on
the Western Shore of this State." Chase, Digges, Cadwalader and Scott had been on the committee to confer
with Washington on the Potomac bill; all but Scott and
Cadwalader were signers of the Annapolis subscription
list dated December 16. The very next day they were
ready with the bill.
The Journals reveal no additions or corrections to the
bill as introduced on December 30. The name "St. John's
College" as well as any other changes made in the
Draught must have been agreed on beforehand. The only
recorded discussion or motions on the House floor while
the Act was under consideration came from jealous Baltimore town delegates: they proposed that some of the
proceeds collected in Baltimore from the taxes and
licenses designated for the support of the college be
returned to Baltimore. When the question on the total bill
finally came-no changes had been made in the text introduced by the committee-there were 33 yeas and 18
nays.
The nays came from the counties farthest removed from
Annapolis-Harford, Cecil and Washington Counties; the
Eastern Shore (they already had a college) and southern
Maryland delegates were almost to a man in favor. The
one Baltimore delegate who voted yea was David
McMechen, a Freemason. 47
One year before (December 23, 1783), when Washington had resigned as Commander-in-Chief before the
Continental Congress in Annapolis, the Maryland House
58
of Delegates had sent him the following message:
Having by your conduct in the field gloriously terminated th~
war, you have taught us, by your last circular letter, how t<
value, how to preserve and to improve that liberty for whid
we have been contending. We are convinced that publh
liberty cannot be long preserved, but by wisdom, integrity,
and a strict adherence to public justice and public engage
ments. The justice and these engagements, as far as the in
fluence and example of one state can extend, we an
determined to promote and fulfill; and if the powers giver
to congress by the confederation should be found to be in
competent to the purposes of the union, we doubt not ouJ
constituents will readily consent to enlarge them . ... 48
Proud to have enlarged the powers of the Confederation by the expeditious passage of Washington's Potomac
bill, the Maryland legislators named the Western Shore
college for the day when his bill was enacted, the Feast
Day of the Evangelist. (If the Eastern Shore had not already preempted the name for their college, "Washington" might have been a natural choice for the Western
Shore college.) Not only was it a day that they had ~n
joyed in the company of their former Commander-mChief, but also it was a day that would have had specral
significance for Washington, the Freemason.
George Washington, a private citizen in 1784, would
have observed the Feast Day of the Evangelist. Young
George had been initiated as a Mason in the Lodge ~t
Fredericksburg on November 4, 1752. He attended vanous Masonic functions while Commander-in-Chief of the
Continental Army, notably the celebration of the anniversary of the Evangelist in Christ Church, Philadelphia, on
December 28, 1778, when William Smith preached the
sermon. On December 23, 1783, the brethren in the Alexandria Lodge had sent greetings to him on his return
home, which he had acknowledged on the 28th of December as "Yr. Affect. Bror & obedt Servt" These were
not Christmas greeting that were being exchanged: they
were the customary exchange of greetings between Masons on the anniversary of the Evangelist-December 27.
On June 24, 1784, on the anniversary of St. John the Baptist, another festival day observed by the Mason.s,
Washington was invited to dine with Lodge No. 39 m
Alexandria. He had replied, "I will have the honor of doing it .... "Minutes of Lodge No. 39 for that day record
The Worshipful Master Read to the Lodge a most instructive
lecture on the rise, progress & advantages of Masonry & concluded with a prayer suitable to the occasion. The Master &
Brethren then proceed' d to Jn° Wise's Tavern, where they
Dined & after spending the afternoon in Masonick Festivity,
returned again to the Lodge room. The Worshipful Master
with the unanimous consent of the Brethren, was pleased to
admit his Excellency, Genl Washington as an Honorary Member of Lodge No. 39. 49
Two months after his visit to Annapolis in December
1784, on February 28, 1785, Washington walked in a
SUMMER 1985
�procession of Freemasons at the funeral of his friend William Ramsay.
Moreover, Maryland Masons were particularly in the
habit of observing the St. Johns' days with festivities. According to Schultz, "It will be observed how scrupulously
our Brethren of Maryland in the early times observed the
Saint Johns' days and the custom was continued as we
shall see by the Lodges in the jurisdictions for many
years.''so
It is possible that the Maryland General Assembly
returned for a "post meridiemn meeting on December
27, 1784 for an evening dinner to celebrate the festival
of the Evangelist with Freemason George Washington.
The Journals of the House and Senate show that they did
adjourn and reconvene in the evening, probably for a
joint affair. The House had completed its business for the
day; there was no reason for them to reconvene at fivethirty, one half hour later than the Senate had scheduled
their evening meeting, unless it was to participate in some
sort of event with members of the Senate after the Senate
had concurred with the House's action on the Potomac
bill. The Senate reconvened at five o'clock. An hour
would have given them ample time to read the Act and
concur-no debate or voting was required for this. Their
business could have been finished easily by six o'clock-in
time for a St. John's dinner. The "post meridiem" meeting scheduled by both Houses on December 27, 1784-a
rare event in the recorded history of the two Housesindicates some special circumstance.
Another possibility is that a festive dinner was held during the afternoon recess, although the majority of the
legislators were not Masons. Certainly a number of them
were Masons, and even those who were not Masons accepted Masonic rituals. Masonry provided an accepted
ceremonial in the young republic: for example, Washington, as well as many other prominent men, was buried
with Masonic rites.
Nonetheless, in spite of much interest in Freemasonry
in Annapolis during the 1780s, there was no active Annapolis lodge in 1784. But gentlemen of the town enjoyed
several social and literary clubs, notably the Hominy and
Tuesday Evening Clubs, where subjects of literary and
philosophical interest-and Freemasonry perhaps-were
discussed by "enlightened men." On the other hand, the
counties of the state and Baltimore had only their Masonic lodges for fraternal occasions and for intelligent conversation.
Also, Washington, the Freemason, was aware that a
Western Shore college was being founded as part of a
University of Maryland; he knew that an act for establishing it would be introduced after he left Annapolis. Just
a week later, on January 5, 1785, he wrote Samuel Chase,
a member of both the committee to confer on the Potomac
bill and the committee to present the Charter of 1784 to
the House of Delegates, that
the attention which your assembly is giving to the establishment of public schools, for the encouragement of literature,
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
does them great honor: to accomplish this, ought to be one
of our first endeavours: I know of no object more interesting. We want something to expand the mind, and make us
think with more liberality, and act with sounder policy, than
most of the States do. We should consider that we are not
now in leading strings. It behooves us therefore to look well
to our ways. 5 2
Washington was clearly intrigued with the grander
scheme of which the Western Shore college was a partthe University for "the encouragement of literature"and his letter showed that he must have talked about the
bold scheme with Samuel Chase and perhaps others.
When eleven members were finally elected to the Board
of Visitors and Governors in early 1786 from the various
classes of subscribers, the Board was duly constituted.
Under the date of March 21, 1786 they published the following notice: "The subscribers of St. John's College, by
order of the visitors and governors, are hereby requested
to make their first payment to the subscriber, treasurer
to the college on or before the first day of June next.
(signed) BENJAMIN HARWOOD. " 53 Previous to this, all
notices published by the subscription agents had been
addressed to "subscribers of St. John's or the Western
Shore College." In the notice dated March 21, 1786
"Western Shore College" was omitted, and "St. John's
College" appeared in roman type, alone, for the first
time.
"St. John's College" became the corporate name when
enacted in the Charter of 1784. The tradition promulgated
in 1870 that said that the college was named by its incorporators after an English institution had little basis. If
honoring a noted English college had been the reason for
calling the Annapolis college "St. John's," few of the
Maryland populace would have been pleased, so soon
after the conclusion of a bloody war with Britain.
In 1971, President Richard D. Weigle searched the student rolls at St. John's College, Cambridge (also Oxford)
University to discover which men associated with the
1784 incorporation had actually registered there. Evidently the generally accepted theory that the Annapolis
college had been named after St. John's College, Cambridge (or Oxford), and which went unquestioned for
many years thereafter, reflected the anglophilia of the
1870s rather than the anglophobia of 1784. For no names
of men directly tied with the founding of the Maryland
college were found.
At the same time, The Board of Visitors and Governors
of St. John's College, Annapolis and Santa Fe, were persuaded that prospective students and donors were
repelled by the name "St. John's College," and they considered adopting a secular name instead. 54 As a preliminary step in effecting a change in name, a committee of
the Board sent a questionnaire to all alumni, students and
faculty to gather their reactions. Response from the group
was overwhelmingly in favor of continuing to operate as
"St. John's College," a name now rich with associations
gathered over the years, including the 1937 adoption of
a curriculum nationally known as the St. John's Pro59
�gram. 55 The Board proceeded no further.
In 1786 the name already had strong associations, and
the first Board of Visitors and Governors continued to
use it. They did not revert to "Western Shore College,"
or any other name, although through process of law they
could have. Indeed "St. John's College" proved so acceptable that it prevailed through the first stormy half century of the college's history, and long after participants
in the naming had died. Although no one had bothered
to record the circumstances from living memory, we have
seen that the records show that a remarkable legislative
performance did take place on the Feast Day of St. John
the Evangelist, December 27, 1784, when on behalf of
their good friend, George Washington, Maryland legislators enacted the first piece of cooperative legislation
among the various states in the Confederation following
the definitive "Treaty of Peace." They were naturally
proud of a name that reminded them of that day, and
they adopted it for the new college several days later.
Thus, although no contemporary records state why the
college was called St. John's, one can infer that it was
in honor of the Evangelist, and coincidentally, it was in
compliment to the Masonic fraternity of Annapolis in
1784. Perhaps some few were reminded of the Cambridge
college as well, but no contemporary records suggest this.
It is hard to understand why a cloud of mystery has
ever since enveloped the circumstances of the college's
naming, but if Masons were responsible, one could expect secrecy about their role: discretion, the keeping of
secrets, is the first of the Masonic virtues.
Acknowledgments
I could not have accomplished the necessary research nor have written this paper without help from many quarters. Source material was
obtained in the following collections: EpiscOpal Archives in Austin,
Texas, the Hall of Records, the Maryland State Library and the St. John's
College Archives in Annapolis; the Maryland Historical Society, the
Maryland Diocesan Library and the Maryland Room of the Enoch Pratt
Free Library in Baltimore; and the Manuscript and Rare Book Division
at the Library of Congress. I am grateful to Kathryn Kinzer for many
insights and for all the books she borrowed on interlibrary loan; to Roberta Hankamer, Librarian Grand Lodge of Masons, A.F. & M. Library,
Boston; to Eva Brann, Mary Fletcher, Phebe Jacobsen, Mildred Trivers,
Margaret Ross, Harriet Sheehy and Allison Karslake for reading my
manuscript; to Archivist Miriam Strange for her constant helpfulness;
and to President Richard D. Weigle for granting me two months' leave
from my library duties in the summer of 1977.
REFERENCES
1. Poems by the late Doctor John Shaw, to which is prefixed a Biographical
Sketch of the Author (Philadelphia and Baltimore, 1810), pp. 92-93. A short
essay on the "Eloquence of St. Chrysostom: with a translation of a homily on patience" was published by Shaw in Port Folio, n.s. 3 #2(1807):
pp. 17-19.
2. Memorial Volume: Dedication Ceremonies in Connection with the Formal
Opening of the Henry Williams Woodward Hall at St. John's College, Annapolis,
Md. (Annapoli,, 1900), pp. 30, 31.
3. Bernard Christian Steiner, History of Education in Maryland, Contributions to American Educational History, #19 (Washlngton, D.C., 1894),
p. 103n.
4. Steiner, History of Education in Man;land, p. 103n.
5. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., s. v. "Freemasonry:" Coil's Masonic Encyclopedia, s.v. "St. John As a Generic Term and As a Lodge Name;"
60
Edward T. Schultz, History of Freemasonn; in Maryland, 4 vols. (Baltimore: Mediary, 1884), 1:389-390.
6. One Hundredth Anniversary, 1848-1948, Annapolis Lodge No. 89, A. F.
and A.M. (Annapolis, n.d.), pp. 12, 13.
7. Generals Otto Holland Williams, John Swan, Mordecai Gist, Major
Archibald Anderson, Capt. Stephen Decatur, Commodore James Nicholson, Col. Nathaniel Ramsey; see Schultz, Freemasonry in Man;land,
1:97-106. (General Lafayette also visited Annapolis many times.)
8. Schultz, Freemasonn; in Maryland, 1:382, 393, 396, 397.
9. William Smith, Ahiman Rezon, Abridged and Digested, As a Help to All
That Are, or Would Be Free and Accepted Masons (Philadelphia, 1783), pp.
62, 65, 66. 67, 80, 82, 83.
10. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (New York, 1931), pp. 323-336.
11. Motto encircling the St. John's seal: "Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti"
(No way impassable to courage). There are seven masonic virtues: (1)
discretion, the keeping of secrets; (2) obedience to the higher authorities of the order; (3) morality; (4) love for mankind; (5) courage; (6) liberality, and (7) love of Death. See Tolstoy, War and Peace, p. 331.
12. Jacques Chailley, The Magic Flute, the Masonic Opera: an Interpretation of the Libretto and the Music (New York, 1971), pl. 35, p. 130.
13. Coil's Masonic Encyclopedia, s.v. "St. John."
14. Lodge No. 6 in Georgetown on the Sassafras and Lodge No. 17 at
Chestertown were founded in 1766.
15. St. John's College, Minutes of the Board of Visitors and Governors, July
2, 1793: ''Resolved: that Bishop Carroll, Bishop Claggett, Mr. Nicholas
Carroll, Dr. Scott, Mr. John Thomas, Mr. Jennings and Mr. Hanson,
or any three, be a committee to attend at any time, when requested
by the principal for the purpose of superintending a private examination of such students as shall be candidates for the first degree to be
conferred, at a commen~:ement to take place in November next."
"Resolved: that the said committee be authorized to procure for the
board one common public seal and likewise one privy seal with such
devices and inscriptions as they shall think proper; the particular uses
of the said seals to be hereafter ascertained, fixed and regulated by this
board."
16. One Hundredth Anniversary, pp. 13, 14.
17. William Smith, An Account of Washington College (Philadelphia, 1784),
p. 2. Compare with Pierre Bezuhov's speech to the Petersburg lodge
in 1809 (Tolstoy, War and Peace, p. 405).
18. Maryland Gazette, December 16, 1784.
19. For text of the Washington College charter of 1782 see Smith, Account of Washington College, pp. 5-14. Hereafter Washington College's
charter will be cited as "Charter of 1782;" "Draught of a Proposed Act
... "will be cited as "Draught" or "Proposed Act" (Maryland Gazette,
December 16, 1784), the Act bearing the same name as the "Draught"
will be cited as the "Charter of 1784," or the "University Law" (Laws
of Maryland, Made and Passed at a Session of Assembly Begun and Held at
the City of Annapolis, on Monday the first of November, in the Year of Our
Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty-Four [Annapolis, 1785], c.
36).
20. William Smith to William White, January 26, 1785. The Rt. Rev. William White Papers, v. 1, #56, Archives Historical Collection of the Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas.
21. The John Carroll Papers, ed. Thomas O'Brien Hanley, 3 vols. (Notre
Dame, 1976), 1:158.
22. ''Charter of 1782,'' paragraph 9: ... ''and youth of all religious denominations and persuasions, shall be freely and liberally admitted to equal
privileges and advantages of education, and to all the literary honors
of the college, according to their merit, and the standing rules of the
seminary, without requiring or enforcing any religious or civil test whatsoever upon any student, scholar or member of the said college, other
than such oath of fidelity to the state as the laws thereof may require
of the Visitors, Governors, Masters, Professors and Teachers in Schools
and seminaries of learning in general" (Smith, Account of Washington
College, p. 10).
"Draught" "First, That the said intended college shall be founded
and maintained for ever upon the most liberal and catholic plan for the
benefit of the youth of every religious denomination, who shall be freely
admitted to the equal privileges and advantages of education and to
all the literary honours of the college according to their merit, without
requiring or enforcing any religious or civil test or urging their atten-
SUMMER 1985
�dance upon any particular religious worship or service, other than what
they have been educated in, or have the consent and approbation of
their parents or guardians to attend; nor shall any preference be given
in the choice of a principal, vice-principal, or any professor or master
in the said college on a religious score: but merely on account of his
literary and other necessary qualifications to fill the place, for which
he is chosen" (Maryland Gazette, December 16, 1784).
"Charter of 1784" "II. Be it enacted, by the General Assembly of Maryland
That a college or general seminary of learning, by the name of Saint
John's, be established on the said western shore, upon the following
fundamental and inviolable principles, namely; first the said college shall
be founded and maintained for ever, upon a most liberal plan, for the
benefit of youth of every religious denomination, who shall be freely
admitted to equal privileges and advantages of education, and to all
the literary honours of the college, according to their merit, without
requiring or enforcing any religious or civil test, or urging their attendance upon any particular religious worship or service, other than what
they have been educated in or have the consent and approbation of
their parents or guardians to attend" (Laws of Marylandf 1785, c. 36).
23. Smith to White, January 26, 1785. Speaking of opposition to theReligious Bill in the General Assembly of 1785, Smith wrote "some men
who call themselves Christians,-but I need not tell you, seem never
to be pleased with any Thing however Christian, or however Catholic,
where their Numbers will not enable them to be the sole or chief Directors .... "In passing it is interesting to note that the word "Christian"
never appears in either the 1782 or 1784 charter.
24. Smith to White, January 26, 1785.
25. Archives of Maryland, ed. William H. Browne, 72 vols. (Baltimore,
1883- ), 27o408-409.
26. For Carroll see John Carroll Papers, 1:xlv-li; for Allison see John H.
Gardner, Jr., First Presbyterian Church of Baltimore . .. (Baltimore, 1966)
and William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, 9 vols. (New York:
Carter, 1857-69), 3:257-63; for Smith see Horace W. Smith, Life and Correspondence of the Rev. William Smith, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1879), 1:22-28,
2:18-23, 34, 35 (2 vols. in 1 reprint 1972, New York, Arno).
27. John Carroll Papers, 1:80, 81.
28. Maryland Gazette, September 30, October 7, October 21, 1784.
29. John Carroll Papers. 1:82-143.
30. John Carroll Papers, 1:112: "I procured a friend to examine the edition of Chrysostom's work belonging to the public library in Annapolis." The "public library" -known today as the Annapolitan Library
or the Thomas Bray Collection-is in the possession of the St. John's
College Library and is on deposit at the Maryland Hall of Records on
the college campus. These are the volumes referred to in John Shaw's
letter January 24, 1807 (see note 16).
31. "To the Roman Catholics of the State of Maryland; Especially Those
of St. Mary's County," Maryland Gazette, November 25, 1784.
32. John Carroll Papers, 1:191.
33. John Carroll Papers, 1:185, 186. Carrull wrote to Father Eden at the
Academy of Liege, April1785: "Do you know any young men of improved abilities and good conduct, capable of teaching the different
branches of science with credit and reputation? It is now in contemplation to establish two Colleges in this state, open to Professors and Scholars of all denominations, and handsome appointments are to be
annexed to the professorships. To me it appears, that it may be of much
service not only to Learning, but to true Religion, to have some of these
Professorships fi11ed by R. C. men of letters and virtue; and if one or
two of them were in orders, it would be so much the better.
"
34. Maryland Journal July 15, 1783, "To the Public:" October 28, 1783,
"To the Han. the General Assembly:" November 26, December 7, December 14, 1784. "To the People of Maryland;" December 28, 1784, "A
Design to Raise One Sect of Christians above Another.'' A restatement
of these articles may be found in Allison, Candid Animadversions cited
in note statement of these articles may be found in Allison, Candid
Animadversions cited in note 35.
35. Patrick Allison, Candid Animadversions on a Petition Presented to the
General Assembly of Maryland by the Rev. William Smith and the Rev. Thomas Gates, First Published in 1783 ... by Vindex (Baltimore, 1793) pp. iiiv, 1-16.
36. University of Pennsylvania, Minutes of the Trustees of the College, Academy, and Charitable School (Wilmington, 1974), p. 91: "The Assembly
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
of the Province having taken Mr. Smith into Custody, the Trustees considered how the inconvenience from thence arising to the College might
be best remedied, and Mr. Smith having expressed a Desire to continue
his Lectures to the Classes, which had formerly attended them, the Students also inclining rather to proceed on their Studies under his Care.
They ordered that the said Classes should attend him for that Purpose
at the usual Hour in the Place of his present Confinement."
37. Smith, Life and Correspondence of Rev. William Smith, 2:34, 35.
38. Schultz, Freemasonry in Man;land, 1:382-393: "When Bro. Smith removed to Maryland, he was the Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge
of Pennsylvania, and as all Lodges of Ancient York Masons in Maryland
were under the jurisdiction of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, he
was active in his official and other Masonic duties. The Lodges which
had existed in Maryland prior to the introduction of the Lodges by the
Ancients, were held under the authority of the Moderns, or other branch
of the Masonic fraternity, and as these had now no ruling head in America, many of their members sought admission into the Ancient York
Lodges. Brother Smith, and Brother John Coats, a Past Deputy Grand
Master of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, who also resided at the
time in Maryland, were deputed by the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania
on the 2nd of September, 1782, to take to their assistance such true
brothers as they might see proper, and enter into the mysteries of Ancient York Masonry any respectable Modern Masons in Maryland who
might desire to be so healed .... " and Allison, Candid Animndversions, p. 3.
39. The sources of revenue are similar to those enacted for Washington
College in ''An Act to Provide a Permanent Fund for the Encouragement and Establishment of Washington College," Votes and Proceedings
of the House of Delegates for the State of Martjland (Annapolis, 1783-5), pp.
15-18.
40. Writings of George Washington, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, 39 vols.
(Washington, D.C., 1931-44), 22:17, 18.
41. Writings of G. W., 22:20.
42. Walter Bowie, James Brice, John Bullen, John Callahan, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, James Carroll, Nicholas Carroll, John Chalmers, J.
Chase, Samuel Chase, Abraham Claude, John Davidson, George
Digges, Joseph Dawson, Joseph Eastman, Joshua Frazier, Thomas Gates,
Alexander Golder, John Graham, T. Green, William Hammond, Alexander Hanson, Benjamin Harwood, Thomas Harwood, William Harwood, Samuel Hughes, Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, Thomas Jennings,
John Johnson, Rinaldo Johnson, Philip Key, James Mackubin, Nicholas Mancubbin, George Mann, David McMechen, John Muir, James
Murray, Ben Oake, Aquila Paca, William Paca, George Plater, Edward
Plowden, Allen Quynn, James Reid, Christopher Richmond, Abasalom Ridgley, John Roger, Richard Sprigg, Charles Steuart, James Steuart,
John Steuart, William Steuart, J. D. Stone, Thomas Stone, Michael
Taney, Alexander Travers, James Tro(?), Charles Wallace, James Williams, Nathaniel Yates. (Annapolis Subscription List, December 16, 1784
in St. John's College Archives.)
43. "Draught": "Thirdly, ... agents ... are hereby authorized and made
capable to solicit and receive contributions and subscriptions ... of any
person or persons, bodies politic and corporate, who may be willing
to promote so good a design.''
"Charter o£1784:" "III. ... and they are hereby authorised to solicit
and receive, subscriptions and contributions ... of any person or persons, bodies politic and corporate, who may be willing to promote so
good a design."
"Draught" and "Charter of 1784": "Secondly, there shall be a subscription carried on in the different counties of the western shore, upon
the plan on which it hath been opened, for founding the said college;
and the several subscribers shall class themselves, according to their
respective inclinations, and for every thousand pounds current money
which may be subscribed and paid, or secured to be paid, into the hands
of the treasurer of the western shore, by any particular class of subscribers, they shall be entitled to the choice of one person as a visitor
and governor of said college .... "The addition of "bodies and politic
and corporate" allowed the King William School to give 2000 pounds
and to qualify as two classes of subscribers, each of which could elect
a member to the Board of Visitors and Governors of St. John's College.
44. "Draught of a Proposed Act," Maryland Gazette, December 16, 1784:
" ... and provided further, that is in three years from the first day
of June 1785, there shall not be twenty-four visitors and governors
61
�chosen as aforesaid by classes of subscribers of one thousand pounds,
each class; the other visitors and governors being not less then eleven
duly assembled at any quarterly visitation, shall proceed by election
to fill up the number of twenty-four visitors and governors, as they
shall think most expedient and convenient: provided nevertheless, that
seventeen of the said visitors and governors shall always be residents
on the western shore of this state, but that the additional visitors and
governors (to make up and perpetuate the number of twenty-four) may
be chosen from this or any part of the adjacent states, if they are such
persons as can reasonably undertake to attend the quarterly visitations,
and are thought capable, by their particular learning, weight, and character, to advance the interest and reputation of the said seminary .... "
"Charter of 1784: "IV.... Provided always, that seventeen of the
said visitors and governors shall be resident on the western shore of
this state, but that the additional visitors and governors (to make up
and perpetuate the number of twenty-four) may be chosen from any
part of this state, if they are such persons as can reasonably undertake
the quarterly visitations, and are thought capable, by their particular
learning, weight, and character, to advance the interest and reputation
of the said seminary.''
45. Smith, Life and Correspondence of Rev. William Smith, 2:249.
46. The History of American Methodism, 3 vols. (New York, 1964), 1:222.
47. Schultz, Freemasonry in Maryland, 1:105.
48. Votes and Proceedings of the House of Delegates of the State of Maryland,
1783-85 (Annapolis, 1785), p. 73.
49. William Morley Brown, George Washington, Freemason (Richmond,
1952), p. 332.
50. Schultz, Freemasonry in Marylimd, 1:76-78; and Man;land Gazette, December 29, 1763: "Tuesday last, being St. John's was observed by the
Brethren of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons with great order and decency.''
51. Coil's Masonic Encyclopedia, s.v. "St. John." Smith, Life and Correspondence of Rev. William Smith, 2:85-86.
52. Writings of G. W., 22:25-27.
53. Maryland Gazette, March 30, 1786. For earlier notices to subscribers
see Man;land Gazette, June 9, 1785 (no name at all, only reference to the
Act); December 1, 1785; January 12, 1786. First eleven members of the
Board of Visitors and Governors who were elected March 1786: Thomas Claggett, D.D. and William West, D. D. (Episcopal clergymen, who
would later be elected bishops); subscribers on the Annapolis list of
December 16, 1784: Nicholas Carroll, John H. Stone, William Beans,
Thomas Stone, Samuel Chase, Thomas Jennings, A. C. Janson, John
Thomas (a Quaker) and Richard Ridgeley.
54. Robert Reinhold, "For Relevance, the Students at St. John's College Turn to Galileo," New York Times, October 18, 1971, 39:1.
55. St. John's College, Minutes of the Board of Visitors and Governors, May
12 and 13, 1972. A branch college, St. John's College, Santa Fe, New
Mexico, was founded in 1963.
Charlotte Fletcher was Librarian of St. John's College, Annapolis, and is now retired and living in Annapolis.
62
SUMMER 1985
�Montaigne
Brother Robert Smith
'
'
'
A Ia memoire de M. Jacques de Monleon, homme complete
In his introduction of the Essays, "To the Reader," 1
Montaigne states he has only one purpose in writingto help his relatives and friends to recover after he has
gone the features of "his habit and temperament." This
modest calim inspires two questions: 1) Why should we,
who are not his relatives and perhaps not yet even his
friends, bother to read his book? 2) Why should we believe him when he says such a complex book, stuffed with
quotations from other authors, is a self-portrait?
Besides, what kind of self-portrait can we expect when
we read the title of the first essay? Is it the very general
statement that we-all men, supposedly-arrive at the
same ends by diverse means? Moreover, the first paragraph asserts that "the commonest way of softening the
hearts of those we have offended when, vengeance in
hand, they hold us at their mercy is by submission to move
them to commiseration and pity."' What kind of selfportrait is that?
Maybe most of us have not thought a great deal about
how one goes about making a portrait of oneself, but, off
hand, it does not seem obvious that the way to do so is
to bring up circumstances that one sincerely hopes never
to find oneself in and then to follow up with a plausible
prescription for escape from that plight. Why make general statements if one intends personal and private ones?
Therefore, our two questions can be restated: Are Montaigne's Essays really a self-portrait? Even if they are, what
interest do they have for us?
Montaigne wanted to be judged for his whole book.
He was not satisfied with just parts of it. He kept adding
thoughts right up until his death. He would certainly
have wanted us to hear him through before judging him.
However, in the interests of keeping this discussion a
manageable length, and, I hope, as a preparation for further reading of Montaigne, I propose to discuss here just
the first essay, although Montaigne did not write this es-
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
say first, by giving it the place he did, he asked us to read
it first. The first essay is, therefore, an introduction. It
has other advantages, too. It is short--a mere ten
paragraphs--and Montaigne made additions to it not long
before his death. These additions show that the subject
of the first essay was of lasting concern to him and covered most of his life as a writer.
However, before we begin to analyze the whole essay,
I call your attention to a little phrase in the second paragraph. The phrase is "our Guienne." I intend to expand
these two innocent words beyond all proportion because
they imply a world that Montaigne' s first readers knew
and that we do not, unless we have read and digested
all three Books of the Essays. Nearly all I have to say about
u our Guienne" comes from them, and what comes from
other sources is unimportant. By dwelling at length on
"our Guienne," we may acquire some of the advantages
that the first readers had over us when they opened their
books to Essay One.
One more prefatory remark. I feel the weight of the task
before us. It seems important to try to answer the questions posed above, especially the one about Montaigne' s
importance to us. I think of generations of students whom
I have heard or overheard saying they don't care about
Montaigne' s kidney stones, however painful they may
have been to him. He would certainly have been on the
side of these complainers. Unless a clearly private matter like pain has general significance, it is an intrusion
to bring it up in company. It is not unreasonable to have
the fleeting thought that all or most of Montaigne' s private business is just that, private-a matter for him and
his relatives, not for the rest of us. I hope to change your
mind about that.
On the other hand, in the four centuries since they first
appeared the Essays have been read and loved by many
people. Does it seem likely that all those readers were
63
�led by morbid curiosity about the private life of a sixteenth
century French gentleman? Certainly not all Montaigne's
readers were antiquarians. Shakespeare read and quoted the first English translation of the Essays almost in the
lifetime of Montaigne. At least one passage in The Tempest is a word-for-word transposition of that translation
into blank verse. 3 Apart from this direct quotation, there
are skeptical passages on the condition of man in Measure for Measure that echo similar questioning in the Apology for Raymond Sebond. 4
Montaigne, like Shakespeare, parades before our eyes
an array of characters, from the historically important to
far less important people. We meet kings and subjects,
men and women, wise men and fools, indeed a wide
sampling of mankind. We are shown all the ups and
downs of their lives, and to be uninterested in the works
of these authors, Shakespeare and Montaigne, is to show
lack of interest in life.
Let us now turn to "our Guienne."
Our Guienne
Guienne is a deformation of the word "acquitaine," 5
a Roman name for the southwestern part of France. In
Acquitaine is found a piece of land called Montaigne,
where our author was born. His family name was Eyquem, but he called himself, and was called by others,
Michel de Montaigne.
For us the name Guienne brings to mind three things:
1) the land in which Montaigne was born, 2) the college
at which he was education (which was called the College
of Guienne, and was in Bordeaux, capital of Acquitaine),
and 3) political institutions, like the Parlement of Bordeaux, where Montaigne exercised public responsibilities
and over which he presided when he became Mayor of
Bordeaux. The Parlement, along with a governor appointed by the king, was responsible for the assessment and
levying of taxes, for enforcing laws, and for military operations. This last point is important. During all of Montaigne' s active life, a civil war was being waged in France,
and much of it was fought in southwest France. 6 The war
was of direct personal concern to Montaigne: he took part
in military operations, he was forced to flee from his
home, and, with his family, he lived as a refugee for
several years.
Let us now examine each of these associations with
''our Guienne.''
I. The Montaigne lands
Montaigne was born in the castle of Montaigne in 1531.
That fact and his family's ownership of the lands on
which the castle stood (and still stands) were the basis
of his claim to be a member of the nobility. 7 The significance of this claim lies in the fact that the military commands, the higher administration of justice, the levying
of taxes, and the administration of justice were placed
in the hands of a small group of people, the parliamen64
tary nobles. More importantly, this situation was accepted
by all. No one seriously questioned the right of the nobility to rule. They did not depend on the king for their
position, and, like his, their status came to them through
inheritance. A nobleman often had on his own land men
on whose services he could draw as soldiers. The nobility could and sometimes did wage civil war against the
king.
The king was still only first among equals. After Montaigne' s time the king began successfully to erode the
power of the nobility, and two centuries later, the Revolution abolished their privileges altogether, but none of
this gradual decay had started in Montaigne' s time. Montaigne assumed that he had wide responsibilities, and
others concurred. He spoke realistically of himself when
he said that he was capable of being adviser to the king. 8
There was a king in Paris who trusted him and who
helped to make him mayor of Bordeaux. In nearby French
Navarre, there was a man waiting in the wings to become
king of France. This man twice visited Montaigne's
house, and when he succeeded as king in Paris, Montaigne was one of those who aided in the transition from
one dynasty to another. Montaigne was influential with
each of two suspicious rivals. He said of himself that he
was honest and disinterested enough to say exactly what
he thought without flattery. In doing so he was rendering a priceless service to men whose office invited flattery. No doubt it was Montaigne' s awareness of his own
integrity that made it possible for him to speak the way
he did about his own capacities, but it was also possible
because as a nobleman he had an unassailable, intrenched
position.
Montaigne was well aware of the advantages of being
a nobleman, and he was concerned with the obligation
of living up to what was essentially a military profession. 9
In this context virtue is mainly military and political
virtue-integrity in carrying out public charges, fearlessness in face of death, and courage against any adversitytrue mauliness. When he was young, Montaigne thought
that intrepidity is an advantage nobles have over the common herd. 10 Later he saw the peasants on his lands face
death with courage and without ostentation."
Montaigne thought like a member of a governing class.
For him education meant the formation of judgment, so
that one could take on public responsibility." His heroes
were all public figores, most of them military and political leaders. That Homer, Vergil, and Socrates were also
heroes for him shows the complexity of his mind. Even
so, Vergil and Homer sang of military men.
II. The College of Guienne
Like many people who attend good colleges, Montaigne
was ambivalent about his alma mater. He did say that it
was the best college that ever was, but he also blamed
it for spoiling the purity of his Latin. 13
He could say so because he brought to his school an
extraordinary preparation, one that none of his fellow stuSUMMER 1985
�dents could approximate. His father, like many of his contemporaries, thought that education meant being able to
read, write, and speak the refined Latin of imperial Rome.
His actions were fully consistent with his beliefs. He took
no half measures. He had his son brought up hearing
only Latin spoken. From the age of two, Montaigne had
a Latin-speaking tutor in attendance. Even before that,
all the servants who came into contact with the child
spoke in Latin exclusively. Even his father and mother
mustered up enough Latin to speak in Latin in their son's
presence. 14
As a result Montaigne, was unlike anyone who had
lived in France for more than a thousand years before his
time: His native language was Latin.
The first books Montaigne read were by the best Roman authors and his taste in literature was formed by
them. At a very young age he knew all of Ovid's Metamorphoses. He alsoknewVergil, Plautus, and Terence. Later
he knew historians and philosophers. To the very end
of his life, Seneca held his attention. The fair-mindedness
and the respect for virtue he found in Seneca-and
another favorite author (read in translation) Plutarchwere echoed in his admiration for the Emperor Julian.
Despite the antipathy of Julian toward the Church and
of churchmen toward him, Montaigne said, ''He was in
truth a very rare man, being one whose soul was deeply
dyed with the arguments of philosophy, by which he
professed to regulate all his actions; and indeed there is
no sort of virtue of which he did not leave notable examples. " 15 Montaigne saluted this man because their shnilar educations made them, over the gap of the centuries,
compatriots.
In the same place where Montaigne speaks so admiringly of Julian, he also speaks disapprovingly of the
fanaticism of those who destroyed all existing copies of
works by Tacitus because they contained some sentences
contrary to Christian belief. 16
In discussing miracles he did say that one C<!n well
doubt the prodigies attributed to the relics of St. Hilary
du Bouche!, but lh<!l it is illegitimate to dismiss their
authenticity out of mere prejudice <!g<linst mimcles in
general when they <!re <!!tested to by refined minds like
those of Caesar and Pliny."' He expressed a sympathy
<!ny well-educated Roman might h<!ve- felt.
This does not erase the fact that Montaigne was a
Catholic, and, in my opinion, a devout one in his later
years. On the contrary, there were different strains alive
in his memory, but one did not destroy the others. Again,
Montaigne was like a late Roman of consular familyChristian, but retaining pre-Christian memories.
After this education at home, Montaigne went, at about
the age of six, to the College of Guienne. 17 There he was
surrounded by young people striving with pain and misery to learn the language that had become second nature
to him. No wonder he said his Latin had been corrupted.
Still, he was active, reading a lot on his own, and taking
part in Latin plays written by his tutors. He apparently
did well as an actor. One play performed in his time at
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
school was about Julius Caesar.
One of his shrewder tutors simply left around books
by Latin authors that were not officially being studied.
Montaigne fell into the trap and surreptitiously (or so he
thought) read many non-program books that were still
in the best Latin. Among these were the less than edifying comedies of Plautus. He spoke of Ovid as a source
of delight. He also carried on the work of writing Latin
compositions, but unlike his schoolmates he did so in his
native language.
The authors he read during his school-days-Vergil,
Seneca, and Ovid, for example-were to remain his
favorite authors for the rest of his life. If we add Plutarch,
in French translation, we have completed the list of his
most favorite authors. In the Essays he sorts out his impressions of them and shows their superiority over lesser, although important authors-Cicero, for example. Late
in his life, when he wanted to express what his love affairs meant to him, he turned to Vergil for the words that
express for him what is splendid in the sexual act 18
Around those verses he grouped his further and more
complicated evaluation of what the erotic side of his life
meant to him and how he did or did not square it with
his religious convictions.
Thus the authors that Montaigne started to read in his
youth and continued to read throughout his life were the
touchstones for evaluating his scattered thoughts about
all that mattered to him. This is shown most strongly in
his judgment about what essentially constitutes virtue 19
III. The Parlemenl of Bordeaux
Montaigne was for many years a member of the Parlement of Bordeaux, 20 which ruled over not just the capital city but also the surrounding province. Montaigne,
like his father before him, served as Mayor, or presiding
officer. We now so closely associate the term "mayor"
with a city official that we have forgotten its more obvious meaning-Major (Maior), i.e., senior member of a
governing council.
The Parlement was a body of nobles who had, as has
been said, responsibility for making laws, administering
existing laws, hearing suits, levying taxes, and directing
military operations during the civil war. And we must
note that a civil war meant a war that was even more
savage than other wars, and the fact that the alleged
grounds for fighting were religious made the struggle
very bitter.
When Montaigne wrote of parlays, ambushes, and of
the breakdown of law he was not mulling over passages
in Plutarch or Caesar's Gallic Wars as much as he was
thinking about his own life. When he was quite young,
perhaps still in school, he witnessed a mob murder the
Mayor of Bordeaux, who had left the safety of his fortified residence to parlay with his angry fellow citizens.
The civil war was dangerous for Montaigne personally. He had to flee his home and lands with his family and
servants. He found shelter where he could. The workers
65
�on his lands were scattered; his vines could not be cared
for, and his grapes could not be picked, so he lost his
main source of income. Once he was surrounded and
captured by a hostile band, and he describes vividly in
the Essay On Physiognomy" how he was capriciously
saved from death because his captors decided he had an
honest face.
The war affected him on a more deep personal level.
The war was eventually fought between Protestants and
Catholics, but in its beginnings it was fought between
Catholics who had become reforme, reformed Christians,
and Catholics who had refused that choice. At first-and
by that I mean for a number of years-the reformed allowed themselves to be killed without resistance." Later,
they and their political leaders took to arms. After that,
as in all wars, especially civil wars, horrible things were
done by each side. 23
It is very important to note that the lines did not harden
all at once. Many Catholics did not like all that was done
and said by their clergy or their co-religionists. Some of
these troubled men and women never broke with their
own tradition, while after a long time others did so. This
firming up of sides was still going on during Montaigne' s
lifetime: At some time Montaigne must have chosen to
remain a Catholic. Many others whom he knew made the
opposite choice. His own brother was one of these, at
least for some years, and his sister was until her
death. 23a
Montaigne' s choice was to remain in the Catholic
Church, "in which I die and in which I was bom!" 24 That
this choice was a personal choice need not concern us
directly, but the political decisions that went along with
it influenced his work as a public official, as adviser to
kings, and as writer of the Essays.
The longest Essay, the Apology for Raymond Sebond, is
an attempt to show that there were no justifiable religious
grounds for fighting a civil war. Montaigne tries to prove
that human reason is not capable by itself of proving theological or moral truths. The opinions of men, including
the wisest and most learned, are many and diverse. Custom has not led mankind to a consensus on the most serious matters. Worse, reason relies finally on the senses,
and they are unreliable. Consequently, no one can claim
that he has a right to impose his own version of religious
truth by force of arms. Montaigne's advice is that we
should remain in the way of our fathers and so avoid public disorder.
He charged guilt on both sides, accusing each side of
proclaiming they were justified in fighting for religious
convictions when they were really acting out of worldly,
partisan interest. His proof was that they changed principles as soon as interests suggested. "See the horrible
impudence with which we bandy divine reasons about
and how irreligiously we both (Catholics and Protestants)
reject them and take them again as fortune has changed
our place in these public storms. This proposition, so
solemn, whether it is lawful for a subject to rebel and take
arms against his prince in defense of religion-remember
66
in whose mouth-this year just past the affirmative of this
was the buttress of one party (the Protestants when the
king was a Catholic), the negative was the buttress of the
other (the Catholic) and whether the weapons make less
din for one than the other .... " 25 Montaigne was addressing men who had reversed their strongly touted positions because the lawful claimant to the throne was now
a Protestant.
Montaigne' s political effort was to put an end to the
civil war. It was not to support the Catholic extremists
who wanted to force their opponents to conform. Because
there were deep religious convictions on each side, there
could be no political solution except mutual tolerance. A
law to this effect was made by Henri IV after he came
to the throne and became a Catholic. Montaigne's own
efforts were in conformity with that solution."
Montaigne' s conciliatory bent of mind was not to the
taste of extremists on either side. Montaigne tells how
close he came to being put to death by Protestants who
had captured him in an ambush. Extremists on the
Catholic side had him held in the Bastille until he was
rescued by members of the Royal family. 26• Using terms
proper to the quarrels Dante was involved in, Montaigne
said, "To the Guelfs I am a Ghibelline, and to the Ghibellines a Guelf. 027
Now we have seen how our author was deeply rooted
in his native Guienne. Because of his position there he
was also concerned with the political life of France. He
was an adviser to kings and he participated in the effort
to end the civil war. He was also a private man working
in his library to put his own thoughts in order. The record
of that effort is the three Books of the Essays. It is through
them that we know him. Through them he belongs not
just to Guienne or to France, but to all of us.
Let us now turn our attention to Essay I, 1. The title
of the Essay tells us that we can come to the same end
by diverse means. This general statement is hardly a confidence about his personal life, since the "we" presumably includes everyone, and by that token is not special
to him. However, let us have enough faith in our author
to see what his seemingly vacuous title may be leading
to. If we persevere, we will see that, step by subtle step,
he was making a self-portrait.
The essay reproduced here (see Appendix) has ten
paragraphs, but in its original form it had only seven.
These seven paragraphs are marked by the letter' A' and
are paragraphs 1-4 and 6-8. Montaigne twice made additions to his original text. First he added paragraphs 5
and 9 and the first sentence of paragraph 10. They are
marked by the letter 'B'. Still later he added the rest of
paragraph 10 in his own handwriting on the margin of
the last edition published in his lifetime. This addition
appears as the bulk of paragraph 10 in our text and is
preceded by the letter 'C'.
When studying the text of a Montaigne Essay, readers
will find it less confusing if they first read the 'A' text
and see what structure it has and then read the later additions. After all, that is how he wrote them.
SUMMER 1985
�For example, the original text of this first essay has a
clear structure. In paragraphs 1-4 Montaigne proves what
he sets out in the title, and in 6-8 he makes three attempts
to draw general conclusions from what he has shown.
Let us look at what he says more closely.
His topic throughout the essay is something dramatic,
but especially so in the first part: How does one soften
the heart of an enemy whom one has offended and who
has at hand the means of taking vengeance? Montaigne
did not need a strong imagination to know what those
words meant. Memories of ambushes in which he had
been caught and scenes when someone he knew was torn
apart by a mob were sufficient. (Most of us, seeking a
relevant example, would have to refer to childhood, when
an irate parent, teacher, or schoolyard bully had us in his
or her power! Of course, when I say this I am speaking
of myself and probably of some of you. Others may well
know from harsher experience what Montaigne is talking about.)
(
Montaigne says the commonest way of softening an
enemy is to submit to him, to show that we recognize
that we are in his power. By doing so we transfer the
responsibility for acting to the aggressor, who holds unquestioned power and must decide how to use it. Montaigne was not thinking of an ordinary situation, such as
an irate parent, but of another one entirely. He was considering ruthless conquerors who had been moved to
spare the lives of those they were minded to kill, not because their prospective victims were submissive, but because they bravely stood up against their opponent
despite the odds. Although the stakes were life and
death, they kept self-respect and honor uppermost in
their minds.
Paragraph 2 gives an example of this kind of bravery.
An angry Prince of Wales, having been injured by the
citizens of Limoges, was forced to take their city by armed
force, and as he was vengefully watching his soldiers
butcher the citizenry, including women and children, he
saw three French gentlemen who with incredible boldness were still holding out. Although they were defeated men, they refused to admit defeat. This valor aroused
the admiration of the Prince and led him to spare their
lives and those of the other Lirnousins. Pitiable sights had
no effect on him; great bravery did. This point is also illustrated in paragraphs 3 and 4.
What possible lesson can we learn from the general
truth that some angry rulers have been softened by pity
and others only by admiration for bravery?
Montaigne makes three attempts to answer this question (paragraphs 6, 7, and 8). First, he says, tentatively,
that the three historical examples are more to the point,
more useful, in teaching us how to escape being killed,
because they show what softened the hearts of a hardheaded military leader. Presumably it is such a man that
we-or at least Montaigne-should most fear. He reminds
us that they held up unshaken against appeals to their
pity but bowed to examples of great bravery. The fact that
weaker natures, such as "women, children and the com-
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
mon herd, are inclined to subdue their desire for vengeance because of easy-going indulgence and softness" is
relatively unimportant, presumably because such weaker people are less likely to have the lives of others in their
power. To save our lives it is more important to know
how to soften the wrath of someone who can take them.
This conclusion is too facile for Montaigne. He immediately remembers that death may come not only from
those who hold in affection masculine and obstinate vigor
but also from "less lofty souls" (paragraph 7). Sometimes
they will be moved by pity, sometimes by "astonishment
and admiration."
Paragraph 7
The people of Thebes having put their generals on trial for
their lives for continuing in their posts beyond the time
prescribed ... , they just bravely absorbed Pelopidas who
bowed under the weight of such accusations and used only
pleas and supplications to protect himself; whereas with
Epaminondas, who came out and related proudly the things
done by him and reproached the people with them in a
haughty and arrogant manner, they did not have the heart
even to take the ballot in their hands~ and the assembly broke
up, greatly praising the loftiness of this man's courage.
These examples partly reverse the point of paragraph
6. If we take into account both inflexible admirers of virtue and weaker people, both appeals to pity and examples of audacity may be useful. This is Montaigne' s second
general position.
It is immediately revised in paragraph 8. There we read
about one of the great generals of all time, Pompey, first
behaving like the Prince of Wales, then on another occasion totally unlike him.
Here is Pompeius pardoning the whole city of the Mammertines, against which he was greatly incensed, in consideration of the valor and magnanimity of the citizen Stheno, who
took the fault of the people on himself and asked no other
favor but to bear the punishment alone. Yet Sulla's host, who
displayed similar valor in the city of Praeneste, got nothing
out of it, either for himself or for others.
This inconsistency leads Montaigne to attempt a third
generalization: "Truly man is a marvelous, vain, diverse
and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant
and uniform judgment on him." Note he says 'hard,' not
impossible.
By comparing these three tentative conclusions with the
first four paragraphs, we can learn what Montaigne means by an Essay. He says elsewhere that, if he could, he
would make decisions, but since he cannot, he writes essays." In the first four paragraphs of the present Essay
he sets down certain thoughts that have come to him from
67
�reading history. Then he attempts to judge his own musings, to say what can be learned from them. He says this
assessment is the purpose underlying the reading of
books. Reading yields matter to reflect on, so that we can
form our judgment.
We should not be put off by the tentativeness of the
judgments arrived at. Montaigne is a lot nearer to knowing what importance to give the three examples in the
first part of the essay after trying to assess them than he
was by merely reading them. The verb "to essay" is akin
"to try". 29 It is also related to "trial," where judgments,
however fallible, are delivered. Moral and political judgments are made by careful and repeated comparisons
with what we know and have stored in our memory.
They do not have the firmness and majesty of grand
generalizations, but they are not devoid of content either.
We may gradually discover the meaning for us of what
we claim to admire and/or reject.
In another essay, Montaigne says "History is my quarry. " 30 It is the source of the stones with which he intended to build the monument he would leave for his relatives
and friends. We see better how this works in paragraph 5.
Upon rereading the examples in the first part of this
essay, Montaigne discovers that either of these waysappeals to pity or an outstanding example of bravery" would easily win me." This is what he learned about
himself by re-examining those examples. Not only bravery moves Montaigne, but so do pitiable sights. There
are "tears of things" as his favorite poet Vergil tells us,
"For I am wonderfully lax in the direction of mercy and
gentleness. As a matter of fact; I believe I should be likely to surrender more naturally to compassion than to esteem." The expressions "as a matter of fact" and "I
believe" indicate that Montaigne is learning something
on the spot. Furthermore, when he says he is likely to
surrender more naturally to pity he is claiming to have
a glimpse of something quite stable, a natural tendency in
himself. Not everything about him, then, is completely
diverse, vain, and undulating. Self-portraits need ground
from which the figure can emerge.
Those who know Montaigne' s essay On Three Great
Men will have remarked upon two names in this first essay: Epaminondas (paragraph 7)"and Alexander (in the
last two paragraphs). They are the names of two of the
three men whom he considered the greatest in human
history. The third is Homer. What we can learn about
Montaigne by looking at the reasons he gives for choosing these men over all others? 31
The choice of Homer, although sincere on Montaigne's
part, is really a disguised way of pointing to Vergil, his
real hero among the poets. Montaigne never read Homer
in Greek and claimed not even to know him. He praised
him partly because "it is principally from Homer that Vergil derives his ability ... he is his guide and schoolmaster,
and ... one single detail of the Iliad furnished both body
and matter for that great and divine Aeneid. " 32 Montaigne
denied that these were the determining reasons for his
choosing Homer as one of the three greatest men in the
68
world. Instead he pointed to the place that Homer holds
in history and that "makes (him) ... a source of wonder
to me almost above man's estate. And indeed I am often
astonished that he, who by his authority created and
brought into credit ... many deities, has not himself
gained the rank of God." Still Montaigne would say
"possibly in his art ... Vergil may be compared with
him. I leave it to those men to judge who know them
both. I who know only the one can say only this according to my capacity that I do not believe that even the
Muses themselves could surpass the Roman." How much
Montaigne owes to Vergil can be seen only by reading
very many essays very well.
His choice of Epaminondas as the second greatest man
is almost as bizarre as picking Homer and praising Vergil through him. We do not know much about Eparninondas, and Montaigne did not either, mainly because
Plutarch's life of him did not survive. Still, Montaigne's
reasons were serious, and, I think, deeply personal. He
admired Epaminondas because ''his resolution and valor
did not arise from ambition but from motives that wisdom and reason are capable of implanting" in a wellordered soul. "As for ... this (military) virtue he has
... as much in my opinion as Alexander himself and Caesar. But as for his character and conscience, he very far
surpassed all those who have ever undertaken to manage
affairs. For in this respect which must principally be considered, which alone truly means what we are, and which
I weigh alone against all the others together, he yields
to no philosopher, not even to Socrates. " 33 "In this man,
innocence is a key quality, sovereign, constant, uniform,
incorruptible."
If we do not know fully the grounds for such a judgment, since we do not know Epaminondas, we do learn
about Montaigne from it. What he admired most was
moral integrity in a man vigorously carrying out his public
and private duties. "In this man alone can be found a
virtue and ability full and equal throughout, which in all
the functions of human life, leaves nothing to be desired,
whether in public or private occupations, in peace or war,
whether in living or dying greatly or gloriously. I know
no form or fortune of man that I regard with so much
honor and love."
Those words are a clear statement of what he admired
and sought in life. He may not have known much about
Epaminondas, but from that little he learned how to say
what he most admired and what he thought he should
strive for. It is not possible here to recount all that Alexander meant to Montaigne. (It would be easy to write an
entire lecture on that subject alone.) Briefly, there are
seventy-one mentions of Alexander in the Essays, and
they were made at all periods of Montaigne' s writing.
Alexander, his works, his deeds, and his habits, are
used as means of measuring other great men. How far
short do others fall from that overpowering figure? He
is almost a god in relation to other men, even great ones. 34
Still, Montaigne says that he could imagine Socrates, if
circumstances had been other than they were, accom-
SUMMER 1985
�plishing all that Alexander did, but he could not imagine
Alexander achieving what Socrates did. 35
Socrates seems not to be included in the list of the
greatest men only because his virtue was of such a high
order that it put him on a higher plain. "The soul of Socrates . . . is the most perfect that has come to my
knowledge ... I know his reason to be is powerful and
so much master in him that it would never so much as
let a vicious appetite be born. " 36 Montaigne said this even
though he knew and told the story of Socrates' overhearing people discuss his facial appearance and saying that
it had the marks of lust on it. Socrates interrupted them
to say that they were right. Those tendencies were within,
but that he had overcome them by effort. 37
Cato the younger also seems to be a man so far above
others as to brook no comparison. "Cato alone suffices
for every example of virtue. " 38
Thus the last two paragraphs of the essay are a glimpse
of Montaigne wrestling with a disturbing flaw in the
character of his hero, Alexander-his cruelty. As mentioned above, Montaigne says it is difficult to found anything stable on man, because he is such an undulating
object. This statement applies even to the ebb and flow
of Montaigne' s own thoughts. On the one hand, Alexander was a supremely great man, on the other hand he
was cruel, which was in Montaigne' s judgment a great
vice.
The condition for growth in understanding is to face
these contradictions. The truth about human thought is
flux, but flux in which some line of constancy must still
be sought.
Montaigne ends the essay by trying to find out what
possibly could be in a great man's mind that allows him
to be shamefully cruel. The fact that in paragraphs 9 and
10 he comes up with two different and plausible explanations means that he has not found one true explanation. However, the act of facing the problem and
producing plausible hypotheses is progress. The quest
is not an idle one. It is part of his finding out what he
should admire and at what point those whom he thought
were heroes have to be rejected. Julius Caesar might appear to have as much claim to be admired as Alexander,
but he is rejected because he overthrew the civil government and plunged his country into civil war. In examining Alexander's cruelty Montaigne is questioning his own
right to admire him. This is a deep moral question.
Anyone reading the last paragraphs of this essay will
gain an authentic glimpse of Montaigne's way of thinking. They will see Montaigne creating Montaigne-by trying to judge his own loyalties.
When I was mid-way into the writing of this piece, a
friend asked me what I was writing about. When I told
him, he said, "Good. You will be getting away from all
that heavy philosophy" by which he meant the Hegel
I was reading for seminar. I disagree. It is questionable
whether anyone deserves to be called a philosopher who
departs very far from the self-examination Montaigne carried on to the end.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
NOTES
1. All quotations from Montaigne are taken from The Complete Essays
of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame, Stanford, 1965. References are made to that work as Essays, followed by the Book, the num-
ber of the essay and the page in the Stanford edition.
2. Essays I, 1, 3.
3. Tempest II. 1, 148 ff. Cp. Essays of Michael, Lord of Montaigne, translated by John Floris, Vol. 1, chapter 3, 219-20, Everyman Library no.
440, London-Toronto, 1910.
4. References to Measure for Measure and the Apology for Raymond Sebond are found in The Relations of Shakespeare and Montaigne, by Elizabeth
Robina Hooker [Modern Library Association XVII (1903), 358-59, and
360 fl.].
5. See Encyclopedia Brittanica, 14th-Edition, "Guienne."
6. For information about the political events in which Montaigne was
involved, I am especially indebted to Henri IV, Babelon, Paris, 1982,
and to Montaigne, a biography, Donald M. Frame, San Francisco, 1954.
7. See La ]eunisse de Montaigne, R. Trinquet, Paris, 1972, 41-77 for a
complete account of how the Montaigne family came to be numbered
among the nobility.
8. Essays, IlL 13, 825 ff.
9. Essays, I, 14, 38.
10. Ibid.
11. Essays, m, 12, 805.
12. Essays, I, 26, 109 ££.
13. Essays, I, 26, 129 ££.
14. Essays, I, 26, 128.
15. Essays, II, 19, 507.
16. Ibid.
16a. Essays, I, 27, 134.
17. Essays, I, 26, 129.
18. Frame, Montaigne, 40.
19. See Essays, Book I, 20, "That to Philosophise is to Learn to Die." This
essay, written early, has additions made in the last year of his life. His
starting place is in one place an opinion of Seneca's, against which he
engages in a vigorous polemic (p. 26 ff.).
20. See Frame, Montaigne, 234--45.
21. Essays, III; 12, 812.
22. See Cambridge Modern History, Vol. II, London and New York, 1918,
290 fl.
23. The most memorable of these tragic happenings is the massacre of
St. Bartholomew. See The Massacre of St. Bartholomew, Henri Noguehe,
translated by Eliane Engel, London, 1962.
23a. Frame, Montaigne, 30 ff.
24. Essays, I, 56, 229.
25. Essays, II, 12, 323 and note. Even more severe about the Protestants is III, 12, 798.
26. See Frame, Montaigne, 179.
26a. Ibid., 281.
27. III, 12, 798.
28. III, 2, 611.
,
29. See Olivier Naudeau, La pensee de Montaigne et le developement des
Essais, Geneve, 1972, p. 51 and note 51. For all the last part of the lecture I am deeply indebted toM. Olivier's book. Anyone seriously interested in Montaigne owes it to himself to read it.
30. I, 26, 107.
31. See II, 36, "Of the Most Oustanding Men."
32. Ibid., 569.
33. Ibid., 573.
34. Ibid., 572.
35. III, 2, 614.
36. II, 11, 308.
37. II, 12, 809.
38. II, 13, 462.
69
�1 By diverse means we arnve at the same end
Appendix
1.) A. The commonest way of softening the hearts of those we have
offended, when, vengeance in hand, they hold us at their mercy, is
by submission to move them to commiseration and pity. However, audacity and steadfastness-entirely contrary means-have sometimes
served to produce the same effect.
2.) Edward, prince of Wales, the one who governed our Guienne so
long (a person whose traits and fortune have in them many notable
elements of greatness), having suffered much harm from the Limousins, and taking their city by force, could not be halted by the cries of
the people and of the women and children abandoned to the butchery, who implored his mercy and threw themselves at his feet-until
going farther and farther into the city, he saw three French gentlemen
who with incredible boldness were holding out alone against the as~
sault of his victorious army. Consideration and respect for such remarkable valor first took the edge off his anger; and he began with these
three men to show mercy to all the inhabitants of the city.
3.) As Scanderbeg, prince of Epirus, was pursuing one of his soldiers
in order to kill him, this soldier, after trying by every sort of humility
and supplication to appease him, resolved in the last extremity to await
him sword in hand. This resoluteness of his put a sudden stop to the
fury of his master, who, having seen him take such an honorable stand,
received him into his favor. This example may suffer another interpretation from those who have not read about the prodigious strength and
valor of the prince.
4.) Emperor Conrad ill, having besieged Guelph, duke of Bavaria, would
not come down to milder terms, no matter what vile and cowardly satis~
factions were offered him, than merely to allow the gentlewomen who
were besieged with the duke to go out, their honor safe, on foot, with
what they could carry away on them. They, great-heartedly, decided
to load their husbands, their children, and the duke himself on their
shoulders. The Emperor took such great pleasure in the nobility of their
courage that he wept with delight and wholly subdued the bitter and
deadly hatred which he had borne against this duke, and from that time
forward treated him and his humanely.
5.) B. Either one of these two ways would easily win me, for I am wonderfully lax in the direction of mercy and gentleness. As a matter of
fact, I believe I should Pe likely to surrender more naturally to compassion than to esteem. Yet to the Stoics pity is a vicious passion; they
want us to succor the afflicted, but not to unbend and sympathize with
them.
6.) A.Now these examples seem to me more to the point, inasmuch
as we see these souls, assailed and tested by these two means, hold
up unshaken against one and bow beneath the other. It may be said
that to subdue your heart to commiseration is the act of easygoing indulgence and softness, which is why the weaker natures, such as those
of women, children, and the common herd, are the most subject to it;
but that, having disdained tears and prayers, to surrender simply to
reverence for the sacred image of valor is the act of a strong and inflexible soul which holds in affection and honor a masculine and obstinate
vigor.
7.) However, in less lofty souls, astonishment and admiration can engender a like effect. Witness the people of Thebes: having put their
generals on trial for their lives for continuing in their posts beyond the
time prescribed and foreordained for them, they just barely absolved
Pelopidas, who bowed under the weight of such accusations and used
only pleas and supplications to protect himself; whereas with Epaminon~
das, who came out and related proudly the things done by him and
reproached the people with them in a haughty C. and arrogant A.manner, they did not have the heart even to take the ballots into their hands,
and the assembly broke up, greatly praising the loftiness of this man's
courage ....
8.) A. Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object.
It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him, Here
is Pompeius pardoning the whole city of the Mamertines, against which
he was greatly incensed, in consideration of the valor and magnanimity of the citizen Stheno, who took the fault of the people upon hlmself
alone and asked no other favor but to bear the punishment alone. Yet
Sulla' s host, who displayed similar valor in the city of Praeneste, got
nothing out of it, either for himself or for the others.
9.) B.And directly contrary to my first examples, the bravest of men
and one very gracious to the vanquished, Alexander, forcing the city
of Gaza after many great difficulties, came upon Betis-who was in command there and of whose valor he had experienced marvelous proofs
during this siege-now alone, abandoned by his men, his armor cut
to pieces, all covered with blood and wounds, still fighting on in the
midst of many Macedonians who were attacking him from all sides.
Stung by such a dearly won victory-for among other damage Alexander had received two fresh wounds on his person-he said to him:
''You shall not die as you wanted, Betis; prepare yourself to suffer every kind of torment that can be invented against a captive.'' The other,
with a look not only confident but insolent and haughty, stood without
saying a word to these threats. Then Alexander, seeing his proud and
obstinate silence: "Has he bent a knee? Has any suppliant cry escaped
him? I'll conquer your muteness yet; and if I cannot wring a word from
it, at least I'll wring a groan," And turning his anger into rage, he ordered Betis' heels to be pierced through and had him thus dragged alive,
tom, and dismembered, behind a cart.
10.) Could it be that-hardihood was so common to Alexander that, not
marveling at it, he respected it the less? C.Or did he consider it so
peculiarly his own that he could not bear to see it at this height in another
without passionately envious spite? Or was the natural impetuosity of
his anger incapable of brooking opposition? In truth, if it could have
been bridled, it is probable that it would have been in the capture and
desolation of the city of Thebes, at the sight of so many valiant men,
lost and without any further means of common defense, cruelly put
to the sword. For fully six thousand of them were killed, of whom not
one was seen fleeing or asking for mercyT but who were on the contrary seeking, some here, some there, through the streets, to confront
the victorious enemy and to provoke an honorable death at his hands.
Not one was seen so beaten down with wounds as not to try even in
his last gasp to avenge himself, and with the weapons of despair to
assuage his death in the death of some enemy. Yet the distress of theb:
valor found no pity, and the length of a day was not enough to satiate
Alexander's revenge. This slaughter went on to the last drop of blood
that could be shed, and stopped only at the unarmed people, old men,
women, and children, so that thirty thousand of them might be taken
as slaves.
Brother Robert Smith is a tutor emeritus at St. John's College, Annapolis.
70
SUMMER 1985
�Occasional Discourse
Mental Imagery
(The College and Contemporay Cognitive Science)
Homecoming Lecture, September 1985
Eva Brann
I am very much alive to the fact that this is Homecoming weekend-homecoming not only for the alumni but
also for me. I've been gone from St. John's far and long-as
far as Delaware and as long as a year. So I look on the
place where I've spent exactly half my life as an astronaut
in outer space looks on the very small planet which is
home. That, together with the nature of tonight'ssubjed,
prompts me to indulge in five minutes' worth of looking
backwards.
When I came to the college well over a quarter century
ago, I entered a fresh and heady world of learning, leaving behind what I felt, rather than understood, to be a
hide-bound, dreary academia, the academia of the decade
after the Second World War. The college, then only existent in Annapolis, was less than a third the size it is on
this campus now, and it had a kind of guardian spirit,
a philosopher king, as one might say (provided one said
it with a smile), in Jacob Klein, the Dean. It was conveyed
to me that he had described me as behaving like a fish
in water, and that was just how I felt-like one who was
disporting herself in her element, to whom understanding came as she breathed. I am recounting this largely for
the freshmen among you. For as it may for you, it turned
out for me that one cannot glide along in freshman glory
forever-there followed the notorious sophomore slump
bringing sophomore sobriety and with it a second beginning, the exchange of a weightless exhilaration for abetteranchored interest. One can't be forever tumbling about
in one's element; the time comes when the thronging intimations of truth have to be turned into precise questions
and problems. The program itself offered the way: twentyeight hundred years' worth of commentary on fundamental questions, not excluding the question whether these
are always the same or subtly or even cataclysmically
different in different ages.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
So, like most of my colleagues at the college, I paid only
very passing and largely aversive attention to the contemporary state of affairs. (I mean intellectual affairs, since
ignoring politics for very long is what a citizen does at
her peril.) At the end of tonight's lecture I mean to make
a principled argument for living in isolation from "current thinking;' from vogues and trends, for long stretches
of time. Nonetheless, a moment eventually came, and
happily an opportunity too, for catching up. I simply felt
a certain avidity to know what the world was saying. I
did a lot of reading, but of course I haven't begun to master
the matter-no one could, anyhow. Yet I think I have certain inklings concerning at least one area and its associations which I'll come to in a minute.
Let me, though, repeat to you in the largest and vaguest
terms my first impressions: Our contemporaries have
verve and sophistication. Quite a few of the best are, not
to mince words, charming (or not so charming) smartalecks. Their intellectual mode has explicitness, precision,
and often a kind of purity. All the possibilities which used
to remain obtusely unconsidered in the mid-century have
been articulated and worked over. The engine of invention has been producing faster and faster, and the mill
of rational speech has been grinding finer and finer. I hear
that there is a Chinese curse: "May you live in exciting
times" and also a Greek counter-curse: "May you hear
nothing new:' Well, we're afflicted in the way of China
and blessed in the way of Greece-at least on the face of it.
I want to claim right away that this condition of affairs
can't help but draw in the college. It may and ought to
affect the program in only a limited way, but I think it
might put us in a new position vis-a-vis the intellectual
world which I want to sketch out in a broad and somewhat undigested way later on. Consequently my lecture
will have two parts, which I will call with grand simplic71
�ity Psychology and Philosophy, the first to set out what I
learned this past year and the second to be a sort of coda
of conclusions for us. So then;
I. Psychology
Again, I must begin with a bit of intellectual history,
both personal and public. For a decade now my thoughts
have circled about the theme of the imagination. In fact,
I have collected so much stu££ that my ideas are beginning to sink under its weight-the time has come to carve
out some conclusions. As for the theme itself, I have been
drawn to it along several approaches-and, as I've
learned, when all roads lead to Rome, to Rome one must
go.
One of these approaches is bookish. The imagination
plays the role of the missing mystery in a number of
philosophical texts, by which I mean that a faculty by that
name is given a central task while its operation is left sanguinely unexplained. As Kant says, it is: "a hidden art in
the depth of the human soul:' I might say here what is,
broadly, meant by imagination in the philosophical sense:
It is a faculty which presupposes that somehow or other
two worlds of objects are present to us, one of which
seems to us to be outside, the other inside ourselves. The
inner world1 in turn, appears to consist of two realms,
one of which, though lacking a certain feature of "thereness" which belongs to the external world, has at least
one characteristic apparently and yet elusively in common
with it: it is shaped and colored and, in short, space-like;
the other realm is non-sensory and word-like. Philosophical texts have much to say on the role the imagination
plays in cognition, that is, in knowing. Lately they have
said quite a bit about the unintelligibility of imagining,
but what has rarely been confronted head-on is the question: "How is such an ability possible?" And that is what
of Delaware where I am teaching. It turns out that there
is a new and burgeoning science called cognitive psychology and in it a fiercely embattled area called mental imagery.
The title of tonight's lecture, "mental imagery;' betokens
the translation into the new science of the old mystery
concerning inner, space-like representations ("representations;' as opposed to the original external presentation, though our juniors are about to learn that most
philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century
think that representations are all we have).
The newness of the science that studies mental imagery
is expressed in the fact that most of what I am about to
report to you was published within the last five years. That
it is indeed a science can be seen from its method: It tortures nature, as Kant puts it, or teases out the facts, as
psychologists like to say, by simple but clever experiments.
As for the slippery and intriguing business of turning a
philosophical question into a scientific problem-what
changes the issue undergoes on the way and which endeavor ends up guiding which-! hope to say something
about that at the end.
To introduce cognitive psychology and to explain its special interest in mental imagery, in what actually goes on
when we see images before the mind's eye, I must one
last time go backward to give you a thumbnail sketchwritten on a tiny thumb at that-of the history of psychology.
The state of psychology represented a considerable part
of the aforementioned intellectual dreariness of the midcentury. In the half-century which lies between about 1910
and 1960 the discipline was dominated by two schools,
a soft one and a hard one, so to speak. The former was
psychoanalysis. Freud proposed as a provisional theoretical framework-ultimately reducible to biology-a model
or topography of the soul, in which the most extensive
territory was assigned to the unconscious, a pandemon-
imagination.
ium of anti-social passion, which a skill£ul analyst might
nonetheless tease out into the open and render less harmful. Although its founder did not think of psychoanalysis as primarily therapeutic, it eventually became almost
wholly the province of psychiatrists. The imagination
played a role in psychoanalysis since the interpretation
of dreams was thought to give access to the unconscious.
However, the interest was in establishing a symbolic interpretive vocabulary for therapeutic use, and that turned
out to be scientifically soft, that is to say, not extensively
amenable to verification. At the same time the imaginative agency that did the dream work, that turned the pas-
The third and last approach 111 mention is through the
fact that the imagination is usually regarded as the source
of made-up realms such as dreams and fictions. Since by
my reckoning I spend about 62.5% of my day betwixt the
one and the other of these, I wanted to learn something
about the power that is behind these non-existent and allimportant worlds. But tonight I haven't got much to say
about that topic.
In search of a clue to my theme I set about reading the
shelves of the excellent research library at the University
subject of study. The interest in their symbolism suppressed the interest in the images. (Freud also had a
theory of the origin of imagining in infantile wishfulfillment-hallucination.)
The hard school was behaviorism. It was very much
driven by what post-Freudian psychologists refer to as
their irrepressible "physics envy:' Its crude but forceful
tenet was that to be a science, psychology must deal with
what is verifiably observable. Therefore internal events,
intrigues me.
Another approach is through politics. The imagination
is a puzzle not only as a universal cognitive capability but
also as a general human gift which may be abused either
through hyperactivity or desuetude. I've become convinced that most political catastrophes are connected to
a fault in imagination: the inability to imagine accurately
the minute daily detail which any large vision might entail. So I became interested in what one might call "imaginative coherence;' or the projective powers of the
72
sions into symbolic representations, was not itself a central
SUMMER 1985
�being ipso facto unobservable and at best known through
the unverifiable reports of introspection, were excluded
from its field of inquiry. No event is more internal than
a mental image, and so Watson, one of the founders of
the school, uttered his notorious dictum directed at
reports of "reminiscence-imagery:" "Touching, of course,
but sheer bunk:' Sir Arthur Eddington summarized this
mind-set, which at once bedevils and buoys up the
sciences, in a sarcasm which might well stand as the epigraph of this lecture: "What my net can't catch isn't fish:'
In the sixties both empires waned, psychoanalysis because as a theory it was unverifiable, as a therapy it was
expensive, and as a world view it had been established.
Behaviorism, on the other hand, choked by the huge accumulations of quantified experimental results unlevigated by any interesting overall theory, more or less died
of tedium, though its method, too, had seeped into general opinion.
But mainly it was a new and vigorous interest that
usurped their place, the interest in cognition, in the temporal stages of learning in childhood and in the patterns
and processes of cognitive events in adults. Piaget, who
pioneered the former investigation, called "genetic epistemology;' had long had a special interest in the imagination because he thought of it as not as a congenital ability
but as a symbolizing function developing in the second
year of infancy, intermediate between mere perception
and rationality and responsible for the first interiorization
of representations.
The concern with imagery in adult cognition sprang
from several sources. One was a recollection of the fascinating imagery studies undertaken by experimental psychologists in pre-behavioral times. Another was the
spectacular new discipline of Artificial Intelligence, the attempt to write programs which would, when run (sometimes rather incidentally) on computers, simulate human
cognition. Cognitive functions involving figurative features turn out to be both rather recalcitrant to simulation
and theoretically intriguing. The effort fed a very old
philosophical debate concerning the distinction between
space and thought, for which the contemporary computer
terms-I will just throw them out for the moment-are
given by the pair "analog" and "digital:'
Yet another source of the new interest in images is the
burgeoning new brain science. The gist of the problem
here is that, contrary to earlier expectations, the brain
events which appear to be the accompanying conditions
of, or to mediate, the cognitive function of imagining show
absolutely no evidence of any formations of the sort that
used to be called "engrams;' formations analogous to the
imagery reported by subjects; that is to say, there are no
pictures in our brain, although the whole scientific community, with no significant exception, supposes that in
some, often rather sophisticated, sense cognition is just
brain states and events. (Note, therefore, that when I
spoke before of computers merely simulating cognition
and brain events merely mediating it, I was speaking far
more conservatively than do most cognitive psycho!THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ogists.)
The most pertinent source is, finally, philosophical, not
however insofar as the imaginative faculty is acknowledged but precisely insofar as it is denied. In this
century was written the first full-scale thematic treatment
of the imagination that I know of in the history of
philosophy, namely by Jean-Paul Sartre. He was inspired
largely by Edmund Husser!, who founded phenomenology, a philosophical school which is interested in the
description of experiences as experiences. However, it is
not that work which most cognitive psychologists take account of but rather Ludwig Wittgenstein's scattered and,
above all, Gilbert Ryle's systematic attack on the possibility and significance of cognition through mental imagery.
Ryle's Concept of Mind is one of those bold books which
mask the obscurity of their position by the hard-hitting
clarity of their opposition. What Ryle attacked is what he
identified as the essence of Cartesianism, namely the very
idea of internal mental representation which I spoke of
before: the notion that we have something-ideas,
thoughts, symbols or pictures-in or before our minds.
What Ryle found absurd in mental representations, and
so rejected on logical grounds, was that they required a
mind's eye, a mental mannikin before which to appear; he
dubbed it "the ghost in the mind's machine:' What he
objected to in the interiority of mental representations was
their lack of public evidence; here he followed the
methodological requirements of the behaviorists-but he
went further, converting the requirement of observability into a conclusion of non-existence. It's Eddington's
fishy argument all over: What my net can't catch, just isn't.
Naturally, mental images were included in this annihilation.
I want to interject here a comment on the attitude of
students of cognition toward ordinary experience. Their
method-driven mode sometimes makes them cavalier
about what they nowadays call "folk psychology;' meaning everybody's natural suppositions, for example the distinction we all ordinarily make between ourselves and our
bodies, and, most to the point, the fact that we all just
do seem to see pictures in our head. For my part, no theory is plausible which, yielding to mere logical squeamishness, fails to begin by honoring and to end by
grounding what we naturally say and believe.
This, happily, is the hypothesis of the book from which
most of what now follows is taken (from it, I should say,
with the aid of about six-hundred and sixty-six other
texts). The author is Stephen Kosslyn, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard. The title of the book, published in
1983, is, pertinently, Ghosts in the Mind's Machine. Its
impetus was the sense that, Ryle notwithstanding, we
do have and also use mental images, and that methods
might be devised for testing and tricking truths about
them out of subjects-in short, to make mental imagery
somehow observable by devising experiments which
would make the protocols of introspection more reliable.
(I should say here that Kosslyn has succeeded in developing a detailed theory of the structures and processes un73
�derlying mental imagery, but it would go too far to try
to describe it tonight.)
The problem proposed itself in three parts. The part
investigated first was: do people use mental imagery in
solving some problem? If the answer was yes, the question: "do people have mental images?" would have been
implicitly answered. The second part was to determine
what the distinctive features of such imagery might be.
The third part, which shaded confusingly into philosophy, was to determine the essential nature of such imagery. You might think these are plain enough questions,
but to ask them clearly and to answer them productively
turns out to be a, possibly bottomlessly, complex
business.
The first problem, then, whether people have mental
imagery, was attacked by Galton a century ago by the
naively empirical method of sending round questionnaires to great men, asking them to describe their breakfast tables. It was partly the surprising response of a
number of the scientists among the respondents that sent
the subject into eclipse-they claimed not to have such
imagery. No one regards this result as very significant
nowadays; experiments presuppose that subjects can and
do follow the order: "Visualize (or imagine) x"; the result
of the experiments is taken further to corroborate the assumption. In the seventies Alan Shepard and his associates devised a series of experiments designed to reveal
the mental representations of subjects by seeing if they
actually used imagery in doing certain tasks.
(I want to note two items on the way. First, people under the constraints of an experiment are called" subjects"
by psychologists. It is obviously a major question whether
a subject is coextensive with a full human being. Second,
in order to avoid the distracting bustle of visual aids, I
shall choose from a horde of experiments those most easily describable in words, and I shall omit some of the complicating control features.)
Shepard presented the subjects with pairs of pictures
of somewhat complicated three-dimensional block
shapes. In half of the pairs the two shapes were slightly
different, in the other half they were the same, though
differently oriented, at increasing angies of rotation. The
subjects were asked to look at the pictures and then to
judge whether each pair included different or identical
shapes. The hypothesis was that the response time would
be a linear function of the angle of rotation, that is to say,
subjects would take longer to answer in proportion as the
second member of the pair was farther rotated from the
original. The results startlingly confirmed the hypothesis, and were interpreted to mean that the subject mentally performed a rotation on the second member of the
pair to see if it would be brought into coincidence with
the first, taking twice as long for a doubly large angle.
Consider how remarkable it is that the participants, who
had been looking at mere drawings, apparently did the
mental rotation of the depicted solids not flatly in the picture plane but through a mental space, mimicking depthperspective.
74
(I want to point out here that "reaction time" is the
bread and butter of cognitive psychology, used in boring cases to festoon with numbers a dull fact no one disputes, but in interesting ones to make cognitive processes
reveal themselves. It means, of course, that in the most
telling cases subjects are required to report on some kinetic aspect of pre-given imagery. Since it seems to me that
when most itself, most absorbing, our imaginative capacity tends to self-produced timeless tableaus and transformation, it follows that the imagery processes clocked by
cognitive psychology are characteristically of a narrowly
mundane sort-but that is the price to be paid for hard
results.)
It is. the second part of the problem, concerning the distinctive marks of mental imagery, to which Kosslyn addressed himself. Here much ingenuity was required first
just to articulate the features which an internal image
might display and then to devise experiments to make
them manifest themselves. Kosslyn, too, fell back on the
very hypothesis attacked by Wittgenstein and Ryle, the
notion that our imagery has something depictive, something picture-like about it.
Let us stop to see what in our experience of imaging
might drive us to the picture analogy. First of all, people
do in fact experience themselves as viewing their images
"in their heads." -Much as they inspect scenes and portraits and still-lives outside, they seem to be gazing on
appearances in inner space. (In fact, there is a curious and
beguiling theory that the earliest art images are cave
paintings because caves serve as a physical representation of the black internal space that appears when the eyes
are shut.) Furthermore, they don't think that the landscape or persons or objects themselves appear but their
likeness or image, just as happens in a picture. That's after all, exactly why we call it "imagining." Not to be what
it represents is the hall-mark of any image, be it on mirrors, reflecting pools or photographic plate, as you can
read in Plato's Sophist. And finally, mental images share
with artificial images the fact that they are shaped by and
imbued with the author's knowledge and feelings, and
sometimes even more: It seems somehow to be possible
to imagine and to paint what the eye of perception has
never seen.
Guided by some such considerations (and helped by
the new field of visual information processing), Kosslyn
could frame a first precise question: Do we actually scan
our interior images? To elicit an answer he devised tht:
following double-checked experiment. Subjects wen
shown a picture of an island containing seven unevenly
distributed features, a rock, a tree, a beach and so on.
They were to inspect it until they could hold it before theil
mind's eye, and fixing on a given location, they were tc
determine whether or not a certain announced featurE
was on the island by making an imaginary black sped
move to it at top speed, and when it had arrived, the;
were to press a button. The reaction times bore out Koss·
lyn' s expectations. The little speck took proportionally
more time to reach more distant features. Subjects wen
SUMMER 1985
�evidently passing mentally over the intermediate distance, that is to say, mentally scanning their images.
To explain the double check part of the experiment I
have to begin to say something about an old battle of
latter-day gods and giants that rages in cognitive psychology. These days the antagonists are called "imagists" and
Hpropositionalists," or, for fun, 11 iconophiles" and
"iconophobes." The former claim that we both have images and use them cognitively along with propositional
thought. The latter (whose chief proponent is Zenon Pylyshin) argue either that we don't have them, or that if we
have them we don't use them-that they are merely along
for the ride, ''epiphenomenal,'' and that all cognition is
propositional. I won't attempt to be precise about what
is meant by "propositional" (except that it implies notfigurative and non-spacial representations), but let Kosslyn's double-check indicate the distinction. After having
had his island experiment criticized by the propositionalists because, they claimed, reaction times could have
been the same had the subjects run through mental lists
of features rather than scanned their mental images, Kosslyn simply instructed a second group of subjects not
necessarily to use images but just to answer as quickly
as possible, on the supposition that seven features could
easily be kept in mind as a list. Lo and behold, reaction
times were indifferent to the distances of the features
from base. Apparently the task could be done either by
scanning mental image or by consulting a word-like mental list.
Next Kosslyn investigated the mental image as object.
First he posed a rather startling question suggested by
the picture analogy. As opposed to sculpture in the
round, picture images, be they mirror reflections,
newspaper photographs, paintings, or wax impressions,
are all manifested on a medium: silvered glass, newsprint
on paper, paint on canvas, wax. The question became:
Do mental images have a medium which underlies all imagery in general? What is the inner picture plane like?
For example wax takes impressions differently if it is dry
or soft (here Kosslyn cites Plato's Theaetetus where the
mental medium is compared to a wax tablet), and paper
can be coarse or fine grained. Does the mental medium
too set a limit on the resolution of images? If so, it would
underwrite the picture-likeness of the imagery, since pictures are distinguished from their real originals precisely
by the fact that we can expect real objects to offer almost
infinite prospects of detail, bounded only by the acuteness of our sight, whereas a picture has an inherent limit
of resolution past which we are no longer looking at the
images it carries; for example, a human being can be in-
spected down to the pores of the skin and beyond, while
a newspaper photo presently dissolves into mere dots.
To test the grain of the mental medium, subjects were
asked to conunit to memory pictures of a rabbit next to
an elephant and of a fly next to a rabbit, so that the larger
animal would in each case take up most of the mental
space. They were then asked to report the features of the
large and the small animals. The latter took consistently
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
more time, as if the small features were harder to see,
or as if the viewers had to zoom in on them. Since many
people have a favorite familiar rabbit while few have a
favorite fly, they were also asked to look at a tiny rabbit
next to a large fly, lest they be reporting features from
mere verbal memory. Again the tiny animal's features
took longer to make out. Kosslyn concluded that the mental medium had a definite grain which makes small objects harder to discern-perhaps somewhat dubiously
since the result might be equally attributed to the resolving power of the mental eye. But then he didn't consider
the mind's eye to be an organ of sight, as we will see.
(I must inject here a doubt I feel myself about Kosslyn' s
procedures, which is that he always has subjects memorize objects which are pictures to begin with, that is, he
works with mental images of real images. There may be
a predisposing factor in that, but let us set it aside for
this lecture.)
Again the propositionalists demurred, claiming that
subjects were not inspecting mental images but verballike lists of features. They would look at the larger animal,
which also had more features, first and store its description ill their short term memory. (Short term memory is
the kind of memory where we "keep," say, telephone
numbers we have just looked up between the book and
the dial.) Now experiments have shown that the short
term memory can hold only plus or minus seven items.
Consequently the small animal's features had simply
been crowded out, and subjects would have to dig into
their long term associative memory files, where general
coherent knowledge about flies is stored, to answer questions about them, and this would take longer.
Again Kosslyn devised a double-check. When subjects
are asked without a picture whether cats have claws they
can answer just as immediately as when asked if they
have heads. In fact, claws which are spatially small, have
as much associative memory strength as heads which are
comparatively large, but when subjects are asked to answer the question by inspecting a mental image, they
nonetheless take longer to ascertain the presence of claws
than of a head. The medium does seem to obscure small
features, and furthermore, in general, we seem to be able
to solve memory tasks in two ways, through mental images and through verbal registration. (Ask yourself, for
example, how many windows there are in your house.
Most people answer by taking a mental walk through the
place. Now wait five minutes and ask yourself again.
Usually the answer will come in a word-fourteen in my
case.)
Finally, Kosslyn considered, a medium has a size and
a shape. For real pictures these are given by the dimensions of the frame. For our perceptual window on the
world the size is given by our angle of vision and the
shape by the fact that our eyes are set horizontally side
by side-consequently our visual field is roughly elliptical. To measure the size of the field-medium, Kosslyn had
subjects mentally walk toward memorized images of
animals of various sizes, a rabbit, a dog, a cow, until they
75
�overflowed the mental field. The subjects then placed a
real tripod at a distance from a real wall which they
judged equal to the mental distance of overflow of each
animal. That distance, it tumed out, increased proportionally with the size of the animal. The angle of sharp
central mental vision was calculated with a little trigonometry to be roughly 25°, similar to that of the perceptual
field. Furthermore, subjects were to imagine walking
toward a foot-long ruler held first horizontally and then
vertically. The vertical ruler overflowed the field sooner
than the other, showing that the inner medium, too, is
roughly elliptical in shape.
Most people suppose that seeing and imagining have
similarities. That they can be confusingly alike was shown
in a famous experiment made by Perky in 1910 on the
eve of the great eclipse of imagery studies and replicated
more recently in improved format. She seated subjects
before a screen in a well-lit room and asked them to
project the mental image of, say, a banana on the screen.
(There seem to be animal and vegetable psychologists.)
Unbeknownst to them she projected a faint slide image
on the same place. Subjects declared themselves a little
surprised that while they were thinking of the banana
as lying on its side, they kept imagining it as standing
on end, but no one caught on. Kosslyn considers her
results as well as his to indicate that perceiving and imagining share certain cognitive processes. For him that
means, of course, that they share brain mechanisms,
namely those that take. place well behind the organs of
visual perception (as suggested by the fact that people
who lose their eye-sight in youth continue to have mental images).
So much for a small sampling of the experiments and
their results. Now comes the serious business, the effort
to say what all this might amount to, in itself and for us.
II. Philosophy
I hope I have not left you with the impression that the
so-called propositionalists have been repulsed. All the
conclusions have been called in question, though for my
part, I'm pursuaded by the design itself of Shepard's and
Kosslyn' s experiments that introspection can be tricked
into yielding disciplined, hard information about internal, that is, psychic, states and events while the results
indicate first, that we have an intemal space-like receptacle which resembles in some respects the medium of
pictures and in others the field of perception, and second,
that the images therein are cognitively effective, that they
are at least sometimes used in the act of knowing and
are not merely epiphenomena-idle accompaniments of
cognition. That's what I am persuaded of, but as I mentioned, in cognitive psychology the battle between the
so-called iconophiles and iconophobes continues to ragesome say ad nauseam. I think, however, that the combatants show good instincts in carrying on, because although
within cognitive science it may be that as the formula-
76
tions become more and more refined the issue becomes
more and more obscure, and perhaps finally recalcitrant
to experimental resolution, from the philosophic point of
view the question won't go away.
Before summing up what, in rock-bottom terms, that
question is and why it matters, let me just quickly run
through some of the subsequent perplexities concerning
the imagination. There is the great dual question about
the relation of perception and imagination: could we perceive if we didn't imagine?; can we image what we
haven't perceived? Then we might ask whether we inspect our mental images passively or whether in beholding them we are actually producing them. Then there is
the question of the difference between real images and
imagination-images: what is the distinction between perceiving an image such as a portrait, and imagining a perception, such as the visualization of a friend's face? Then
we can ask about composition of images: are they wholes
made of parts?; for instance, can they fade in sections or
are they fragilely integral, generated and lost as a whole?;
and in general, how sturdy or evanescent are they? Are
they altered piecemeal or by so-called blink transformations? Do they obey compositional laws like the "law of
good form'' proposed by the Gestalt psychologists? And
since mental images, whatever else they are, are somehow images, there are all the questions about the way they
mix being and non-being first raised in Plato's Saphist and
now treated in logic under the heading of fictional or non·
existent objects. These are the enticing inquires which
would come next.
But for now let me state the two terms which seem tc
sum up the debate, as I said, in the most rock-bottom and
revealing way, namely: depiction vs. description (Ned
Block). The pictoralists say that some of our mental
representations are picture-like. Aristotle's famous remar1
that "the soul never thinks without images" would seerr
to be the founding dictum of this camp. (Though that ha'
been doubted, in fact by Martha Nussbaum, who lecturec
here a couple of years ago, in her commentary on thE
De Motu Animalium.) The descriptionalists claim that al,
our mental representations are language-like, that om
inner representations, although about the world, are neve1
like it.
I am now going to conclude by trying to show wha·
matters about this controversy and how it might affec
us in particular.
First, you might think it was pretty obvious that thE
debate would drive its proponents smack into such ques
tions as: what is depiction? What can it be but thE
representation of an object as a space-like image (not, b)
the way, necessarily visual)? But what is representation
what is space, what is an image? Well, the psychologist'
mostly do what I've done tonight, skirt around theS<
questions. But when the moment comes to take them Uf
a student of this program should be way ahead. Wha
is the inner point of the sophomore study of analytic ge
ometry, for instance, but to think about just these issues'
There is a picture on one side of the text and an equatior
SUMMER 1985
�on the other. The diagram is spatial and figurative and
appears to image something. The equation consists of letters and signs and seems to symbolize something. Are they
two manifestations of the same object which they
represent differently? Is the equation closer to words or
to logic than the figure is? What is the difference among
figure, symbol and word, and what difference does that
difference make? A successful sophomore mathematics
tutorial cannot help but be a rather deep introduction to
the depiction-description debate. In fact, come to think
of it, our study of Apollonius already offers a prime introduction to the issue: Remember the propositions
where figure and words jibe at the beginning and at the
end, but in between we are required to follow letter
manipulations which are geometric nonsense (or are
they?), while, on the other hand, Apollonius' very understanding of his curves as conic sections can't be adequately rendered in symbols (or can it?).
Images, however, are only a subheading of the category
representation, and mental images co;me under mental
representations in general. Cognitive psychologists are
one and all committed to the existence of mental
representations-else what would their experiments be
forcing into the open? But as I mentioned way back in
this lecture, students of philosophy in this century have
taken to attacking the whole notion of representation.
Recall that the title of Kosslyn's book Ghosts in the Mind's
Machine was intended as a rebuttal of Ryle' s attack on
mental representations, images, of course, in particular.
Kosslyn could take this position because he thinks he has
solved the very problem of that mind's eye before which
the images appear whose necessity made mental imagery
an absurdity to Ryle. Of course, the mind's eye is just
a sub-problem: all mental representation requires a self,
or subject, or, derogatorily, a "homunculus," before
whom the representations are present, and that fact
always leads to bottomless difficulties-though, in my
opinion these are mysteries we'll just have to live with.
I mentioned earlier on that Artificial Intelligence, or computer simulation of cognitive processes, was one of the
impulses behind the new study of mental imagery; Kosslyn was able to construct a computer model of his theory, and it is indeed through a computer analogy that he
means to dispose of the question: "what or who watches
the pictures of the mind?" The answer is simply that the
imaginal medium of a computer, the display screen, is
actually an array of dots, and that the computer's central processing unit, the analogue of the mind's eye, can
"interpret" the imagery because it is immediately translatable into words and numbers like: there is a dot in
row 5, column 7. So a computer can both generate and
read images without benefit of a mind's eye. "Goodbye homunculus" is Kosslyn' s chapter heading for this
solution.
Now, to my mind, it is both a surrender and an evasion (though, I should add, Kosslyn seems to know exactly what he is doing-! just can't make out his
explanation). It is a surrender of the notion that imagery
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
has some ultimate cognitive independence or value, because it implies that an image is only what is called an
"emergent" whole, or as he says: a display "does not
have to be a picture to function as one." That is to say,
the image emerges from non-figurative elements, namely from dots marking coordinate positions. Furthermore
the interpretation, so called, of the image, the computer
simulation of its comprehension, is nothing but just the
stored matrix of these points expressed in words and
digits, or even in digits only. In short, images are at the
bottom "digital," and not "analog," a pair of terms from
computer science which I've mentioned before, referring
to discrete word-, digit-, or symbol-like representations
as opposed to continuous, figurative, or space-like
representations. What we know when we apprehend an
image is finally its algebra, just as Descartes first implied
in his Geometry, which, as I mentioned, we study so carefully for that reason.
The evasion in Kosslyn' s solution to the mind's eye perplexity is simply this: As he explicity says, cognitive science
is not competent to deal with experience, with the conscious
sense we have of our cognition (although Dennett has
tried to provide cognitive science with a theory of consciousness). As a science it is bent on turning the interior into an exterior, on making inner processes observable,
and consciousness is hopelessly and recalcitrantly andessentially interior. (It is this conscious experience to which
the phenomenological school of philosophy which I mentioned before specifically attends.) Consequently, the
computer analogy simply circumvents the perplexing
sense we have of an inner vision-an evasion which is
practiced throughout the Artificial Intelligence community, only that generally the "what my net can't catch
isn't fish" principle is in full force. What is evidently possible, though hellishly complex, is to devise equipment
and programs which will "perceive" simple scenes, and
image them, or put images having the established features of mental imagery on the display and read them
off-an accomplishment which is then hypothesized to
give insight into human imagining.
If you think about it, what the fish principle does is to
put philosophy under the domination of science-with
the whole-hearted concurrence of what might be called
the hard-nosed branch of academic philosophy. The cognitive scientists decide what method of theorizing will
keep their inquiries within the concerns of science, and
then more or less knowingly move to exclude from being what their canon excludes from notice-that after all
is just what it means to turn human beings into experimental subjects. And they do this without let or hinderance, not to say with the connivance, of a large part
of the contemporary academic philosophical community. For the contest about who asks the questions has been
won by the scientists, in this case the cognitive scientists
("Cognitive Science" being the overall name for "Cognitive Psychology," "Artificial Intelligence," "Informa'
tion Processing," and so on), and they sit inside calling
the digital tune, while the professional philosophers skulk
77
�at the windows making comments. This state of affairs
can't help but eventually arouse our community's anxious interest, because, while our program is built on the
trust that the important questions are perennially the
same however diverse the attempted answers, the capitulation of philosophy to science makes urgent the question of questions I mentioned in the beginning, namely
whether the terms of the questions themselves may be
transformed radically and beyond translation from age
to age. For science itself, by its very progressive nature,
undergoes periodic revolutions which appear to some to
consign the old problems and terms to irreducible incommensurability with the new ones, and perhaps
philosophy should reflect this discontinuity. We could do
the intellectual world a great service by rousing ourselves
to a rigorous debate with the very clever contemporary
proponents of this point of view.
Lest I seem to have gotten away from the significance
to us of the imagery debate, let me quickly show how
it fits in. On the one hand there is a bunch of terms like
11 imagistic," Lpictorialistic," analogous" and ~~analog."
On the other there is "propositional," "descriptional,"
n symbolic" and
digital." As we have seen, even the
scientists who have devoted themselves to discovering .
the precise characteristics of mental imagery soon abscond into the camp of those who believe that all cognition is finally to be characterized by the second complex
of terms, although somehow the first keeps intruding itself on experience. Why is the battle so drawn out while
underneath the profession is so unanimous? The chief
reason is this: Human experience may speak for the significance of our imaging power, but the underlying impulse of cognitive scientists is to turn the mental into the
physical (forgetting, by the way, that their heroes, the
physicists, are meanwhile busy turning the physical
world into an intelligible one). Specifically, they expect
to explain all cognitive processes in terms of the sort of
logical functions which can be realized as a physical
machine, be it computer or brain. Now as I mentioned,
brain science apparently has at present no evidence that
well accommodates picture-knowing, although there are
basic facts of the brain's functioning which would lend
themselves to the "digital" cognition. So it is plain that
the impulse in cognitive science would be to explanations
in those terms.
Now I have a deep-felt though not yet very wellgrounded suspicion that it is our imagining capacity
which will turn out to be the impregnable center of our
embattled humanity-embattled, because it appears to be
infernally difficult to articulate in principle the difference
between the activity of a perceiving and reasoning human
being and the behavior of a sophisticatedly programmed
machine, that is if the factor of self-consciousness or inner experience is disallowed, while the purely and precisely rational argument for hanging on to what I might
as well call the soul, are confoundedly elusive. We might
talk about that in the question period.
My inklings that the imagination will be crucial in fi11
11
78
nally distinguishing human cognition from its computer
simulation do have some evidence and some arguments
in their favor. The evidence is chiefly in claims from critics of the Artificial Intelligence project that it will come
to its limits in capturing just those functions which have
analogue character. The arguments I can only gesture
toward by bringing up, belatedly, a pair of pertinent
terms which is conspicuously missing from the imagery
debate: imagination and intellect. It is one of those old
thought complexes whose meaning is supposed to be
hopelessly inaccessible to us once its transformation into
the current terms has been accomplished. Well, since I
can believe that only for a minute at a time, I think there
is a world of light to be gotten from carefully retranslating the debate into these terms, since we can then re-ask
(without ignoring the new contributions of cognitive
science) old but unanswered questions concerning our
strange double power to bring the looks of this world into
ourselves while leaving its stuff outside, and to bring forth
within us figures which were never of the outer world
and yet can act potently on it. One of the chief boons will
be that the traditional pair, unlike the contemporary set,
is not an opposition but a conjunction, and that whenever
imagination and intellect are considered as equally and
unseverably necessary to knowledge, reflection on thinking, reasoning, acting intelligently, takes on a very different coloration than when the faculty of imagery is
regarded as an analytical embarrassment. What I mean
is: to my mind what the contemporary intellectual world
needs most urgently is a revision of its mode and its understanding of rationality.
Early on I described the thinking of our more interesting contemporaries as being smart, precise, pure. That
begins to catch its flavor but of course not the serious impulse behind it, which is, to think of thinking as essentially analytic and formalistic, symbolic, logical rather than
analogical. I am using somewhat opaque buzz-words because I have not yet quite come to grips with what is going on, except for a sense that sweet reason requires the
curbing of this rampant rationality, requires, if I may put
it this way, a logically legitimate way of respecting the
mysteries. Now I can imagine that it might be one of our
students who is destined to work out such a revisal, having been prepared for the task by a program which does
not segregate works of the imagination from works of the
intellect and which contains many texts honoring-and
also despising-the appearances in a way wholly different from that of current cognitive science-a way in which
our environment is not understood as a source of information to be processed but as a world of figures sending us
significant looks and speaking to us in intelligible
tongues.
And in general, it is because of the temporal cosmopolitanism of the program, its intention to make a serious attempt at empathy into radically diverse human
possibilities, that the St. John's program can be a protection against the regimented seduction of the bubbling
Babylon which constitutes our contemporary intellectual
SUMMER 198:
�world; were I a child's mother I would not wish to send
it out there unprepared in some such way, because for
all its vaunted multiplicity and its vigorous polemics, the
marchings and wheelings of opinions take place in amazingly close formation-as is perhaps not so surprising considering the temporal parochialism of university training.
When I said in the first couple of minutes of this lecture
that I hoped to give reasons for maintaining distance from
"current thinking," enticingly brilliant though it bepractically I suppose this means clearing only a very
modest and very deliberately designed space for it in the
program-! had in mind mainly this phenomenon of
homogeneity. It has recently been given a sophisticated
rationale under the heading of "the social justification of
belief" by Richard Rorty (who lectured here a couple of
years ago) and has been joyfully taken up by parascientific disciplines such as Anthropology (Geertz) and
Educational Studies (Bruffie). "We understand
knowledge," Rorty says, "when we understand the social justification of belief," meaning that knowledge arises
not from taking in and testing for oneself what ihe world
has to give, but from devising language for obtaining the
concurrence of the community accredited to judge, while
learning means being absorbed into that society which
carries on the pertinent, essentially terminological conversation. To me this view of a community of learning
seems like philosophy's self-imposed revenge for its
voluntary subjection to science, for it is modelled on the
current philosophy-of-science view of science as a social
construction (which, by the way, apparently infuriates
practicing scientists, insofar as they pay it any mind).
Now this college is not only a program but also the community designed for the study of the program, and those
of our students who were self-aware members of the
former should make peculiarly discerning judges of the
pervasive and potent view I've just described. For the
community Rorty projects is a spatially scattered league of
competent professionals whose largely written communications are aimed at the fixation of shared belief, while St.
John's is a living community of people of carefully guarded amateur status who converse with each other face to face,
to save their souls, and, standing somewhat apart, prepare
for four years to grapple with a present that has been
twenty-eight hundred years in the making.
To conclude: Under these circumstances it is not so sur-
prising that, while in the sciences hopes are high, the
dominating philosophical mood is, according to temperament, either a rage for finis-writing or a lugubrious
nihilism-a zealous anticipation of an end to philosophy
which is no consummation but either a self-destructive
bang or an unravelled whimper of mere endless argumentation. But I imagine that some of us can think of an understanding of philosophy by which it excapes these
ignominies. If philosophy is directed wonder then we need
not follow the lead of the sciences in asking only warrantably pursuable questions or abandon answers because their complete formal justification proves elusive.
Then we are permitted to assume that when something
arouses such wonder in us it is given to us, first and last,
as wonderful, however relentlessly we may work it over
in between.
A practical illustration: Close your eyes and summon
the image of some attractive shape-an elegant object, a
familiar face, a significant scene. When you have it before your mind's eye, ask yourself, perhaps vaguely at
first but then more pointedly, what might have to be true
for that wonder to occur. How could such an inquiry,
refreshed by frequent recurrence to the inner experience
itself, peter out into mere argumentation? It seems to me
to consist of continual beginnings, impulses toward a
truth which is just out of sight.
Eva Brann is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
79
�80
SUMMER 1985
�Mozart's Happy Endings:
A New Lool< at the "Convention''
of the "Lieto Fine"
Wye
J. Allanbrook
We romantic moderns all too often make the tacit judgment that the conventions of eighteenth-century opem buffa
are hollow devices.....!'mere convention:' We tend to think
of them as having been elaborated to serve a purely musical function, and offering no support to the drama, or
even hindering it to the extent of causing serious obstruction. A case in point is the elaborate many-sectioned finale
which closes the principal acts of an opem buffa. Certainly
the innovation of this so-called "chain" finale was largely
responsible for the great success of the comic-opera style
in the mid- and late-eighteenth century; its fast pace and
musical continuity offered a pleasing antidote to the
monolithic stops and starts of opera seria. But the finale
style nevertheless had its detractors, even at the time,
notably Lorenzo da Ponte, who may be the first in that
line of critics who raised the cry of "mere convention"
against this fertile form. DaPonte, writing, one suspects,
with concealed pride about his mastery of finale poetics,
calls the finale "a little comedy or small drama all by itself:' Enumerating ironically the types of singing which
must take place in it--''l'adagio, !'allegro, !'andante, l'amabile, l'armonioso, lo strepitoso, l'arcistrepitoso''-he comes
at last to '1o strepitosissimo;' with which it must close.
This, he says, "in musical jargon is called the chuisa, or
rather the stretta, I know not whether because, in it, the
whole power of the drama is squeezed together, or because it gives generally not one squeeze but a hundred
to the poor brain of the poet who must compose the
words:' The practice of gradually massing all the characters on stage as the finale concludes he terms a mere
"dogma of the theater;' and complains that this convention prevails over the plot "in the face of judgment, reason, and all the Aristotles on earth:''
This talk of "mere convention'' implies the presence of
a truth buried beneath the convention which one can get
at by stripping away its calcified layers. In one extreme
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
case, Mozarfs Don Giovanni, the attempt to get at this supposed underground truth has occupied realizers of the
opera for two hundred years. The section which most
offends is of course the moment in the second-act finale
after the Don has descended to Hell when the rest of the
characters reassemble, chatting almost urbanely about
their experience with the mysterious shade they encountered on their way in. Then in a stylized movement
reminiscent of the French vaudeville finale, each pair (and
Leporello solitary) steps forth to pronounce his or her fate.
Finally, for what in da Ponte's terms would be the
strepitosissimo, the characters are called upon by Zerlina,
Masetto, and Leporello to sing what they call the antichissima canzon, and all give vent together to the moral of the
story: "This is the end of the evil-doer: And the death
of wicked men is always equal to their life!"2 The first line
of the moral is set as a pious and wildly fake fugue, the
last as a passage of stile legato, motet style, the strings dropping out-another massive period to balance the squaredoff fugue. The antiquity of the style of these two periods
makes it clear that this is indeed the antichissima canzon
called for in the text.
Successive critics have found this epilogue woefully inappropriate, its symmetries pallid and empty after the Dminor fireworks of Giovanni's disappearance. Jahn gives
an appalling catalogue of various scenes nineteenthcentury stage directors conceived as substitutes for the epilogue which would free the truths of the opera from the
fetters of "mere convention:' In one performance in Paris
the Don's descent into Hell was followed by the entry of
Donna Anna's corpse borne by mourners and the chanting of the Dies irae from Mozart's Requiem. Jahn hinlself
preferred to omit the entire epilogue, restricting the entry of the other characters to one final D-major scream
after Giovanni has fallen.'
Even the recent Cambridge Opera Handbook devoted
81
�to Don Giovanni, with intelligent commentary by Julian
Rushton, speaks of the scena ultima "problem;' and terms
it a "trivialization of the action"4 which is necessary only
to provide the obligatory measures in the proper concluding key. But such judgments are surely misguided; does
it make any sense to turn Don Giovanni into a tragedy?
Mozart gave us a clue to the answer to this question by
calling the work in his own private catalogue an opera buffa,
and its familiar classification, dramma giocosa, meant about
the same thing. To have the opera end on a dying fall in
imitation of the great nineteenth-century operatic tragedies is to force a private meaning on this work which it
will not bear. Clearly stripping away conventions is not
the answer; instead we must enter imaginatively into them
and make them come alive.
It is my intention within the brief compass of this paper
to examine one occasional practice of opera buffa which I
have noted which seems to me to provide a way into the
question-the habit of making music into a subject of discourse at the close of an opera buffa's last-act finale. To focus attention on music in opera, where music is the
natural mode of expression, and thus not a theme or subject matter, it is necessary suddenly to put music in relief
by placing quotation marks around it. This is most frequently done by troping into the operatic setting a kind
of music which is usually used for some social or ritual
purpose-Gebrauchsmusik, "occasional music:' It is of
course great fun to use occasional music in an opera, and
most composers have tried it in one form or another. In
Don Giovanni three stage orchestras playing social dance
music are characters in the first-act finale, and a windband on stage in the second-act finale plays three famous
tunes as Ihfelmusik for the gluttonous Don. Giovarmi, and
Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro, both sing obvious songs,
and in Figaro's third-act finale a Turkish march and a fandango play crucial roles. These are all uses of occasional
music which emerge from the plot, and at the same time
play a more significant-even symbolic-role in the cosmos of the opera. But there are other occasions in Mozart's
operas when music comments on music in a purely musical way. For example, toward the close of an ensemble
Mozart often lets music take over on the way toward the
final cadence, notably in those sublime and dramatically
purposeless digressions into species counterpoint in the
second-act finale of Le nozze di Figaro or the second-act sextet of Don Giovanni, where the antique vocal style becomes
the only topical reference, and we are carried away to the
climax on the wings of Fuxian song. But belonging to a
third and special class of overt musical reference in these
operas are the moments at the very end of last-act finales
when music is named-when attention is drawn to the
human habit of celebratory music-making. Then the
singers, by way of rejoicing, self-consciously sing, and in
realizing that they are singing, we the audience surrender
our doubts about the events on stage, compelled by the
sheer exuberance of their choral song. This occurs at the
close of Don Giovanni when the characters sing out the
antichissima canzon. It also happens at the close of Le nozze
82
di Figaro, where the participants, after the orchestra mimics
suitable martial music in a brief interlude, call upon each
other in chorus to run off and celebrate "to the sound of
the happy march;'' all doubts about the permanence of
the reconciliation they have just witnessed momentarily
dispelled in the joy of shared festival.
A random sample of opera buffas of the last three decades
of the eighteenth century yields a number of last-act
finales which display the same habit in one form or
another. In Pasquale Anfossi's La finta giardiniera of 1787,
the lovers in their closing duet imitate bird songs to
celebrate their happiness, commenting on this in the text.
In Haydn's I:incontro improvviso (1775), another seraglio
opera; the delivered lovers enjoin each other to rejoice by
singing happy tunes, at which point the texture turns conspicuously imitative to suit actions to words. In Cimarosa's Giannina e Bemardone (1781) the entire last-act finale
is framed by occasional music, in the person of a military
band which is on stage throughout. The characters comment on the beauties of the music at the opening, and
at the close of the finale command the band to play again
so that they can dance. Then in antiphonal choruses the
men and women sing nonsense syllables~'Laira, laira,
lallallera;' and so on. The close of Cimarosa's famous II
matrimonio segreto contains a brilliant chorus consisting of
extravagant vocal excursions in imitative and concerto
style, on the text "Let there be music, let there be singing; everyone must shine:'6 Martiny Soler's Una cosa rara,
one of the operas quoted in the last-act finale of Don
Giovanni, concludes with the two female leads dancing
and singing a "seghidilla'' in honor of their queen Isabella.
Even closer to home, the Bertati-Gazzaniga Don Giovanni
Tenorio closes with a comically triumphant chorus in
which the survivors all imitate the sounds of musical instruments, again with nonsense syllables. The text is
worth quoting in full:
All: Let us no longer speak of this dreadful event. Now let
us thlnk instead of rejoicing . ... What shall we do?
Women: a a a I want to sing. I want to leap.
Duca Ottavio: I want to play the guitar.
Lanterna: I want to play the bass.
Pasquariello: And I, to add to the fracas, want to play the
bassoon.
Duca Ottavio: Tren, tren, trinchete trinchete tre.
Lanterna: Flon, flon, flon, flon, flon, flon.
Pasquariello: Pu, pu, pu, pu, pu, pu, pu, pu.
All: What beautiful madness! What strange harmony! Thus
shall we all be happy.'
None of this will seem surprising to anyone familiat
with the conventions of comedy. Comedies traditionally
end with weddings; Figaro takes this convention fm
granted when in the second-act finale to Le nozze di Figan
he seizes upon it to manipulate the discomfitted Count,
taking Susanna's arm and saying to her with feigned in·
nocence: "To finish the farce happily, and after the cus·
tom of the theater, let us perform for them a matrimonial
SUMMER 1985
�tableau:'• Two horns in horn fifths add the flavor of the
ceremonial to his music. By bringing his own comedy
within the prescenium arch under the sanction of its conventions Figaro is trying to ensure that it can play itself
out to his satisfaction. Shakespeare's comedies often close
with double or triple weddings, and the blessing of music
and dancing. As Titania puts it at the end of A Midsummernight's Dream:
Hand in hand, with fairy grace,
Will we sing, and bless this place.
Of course many operas were in fact officially celebratory:
as feste teatrali commissioned to honor a royal wedding
or other ceremony they put their blessing on an actual
nuptial rite. In Martin's Una cosa rara the seguidilla in honor
of the queen would have joined fact and fiction when performed on a royal occasion. Comedy ends with the assertion of the proper orders, and thus an act of
communion and public festival is in order. Roman comedy often ended with an invitation issued to the audience
to an imaginery banquet, and in Old Comedy the players even threw morsels of food to the audience.' In
eighteenth-century opera buffas composers substituted for
the communal feast the musical banquet of the Tones
Macht-the "power of the tone" celebrated at the end of
Die Zauberflote-the sheer power of music to effect a sense
of joyous commonality. It is no accident that in several
of the examples I mentioned above the choruses close with
bird song imitations or nonsense syllables. The word is
a distinguisher, a divider; at the moment when the barriers between audience and performers so carefully kept
erected during the course of the drama are to be lowered,
language is an alien influence, hindering complete surrender to the healing process of music.
Comedy, as I have just said, ends with the assertion of
the proper orders of society, and in most of the opera buffas I have quoted from above, that assertion is achieved
unequivocally, with no doubts about its validity or
strength. When the imbroglio is finally untangled, the appropriate couples joyfully united, there is only celebration, and no regrets. But that cannot be said to be true
in the extreme case of an opera buffa which I cited at the
beginning of this paper-Don Giavanni, where the survivors appear at best diminished creatures in a pallid and
unpalatable universe after the departure of the Don. Nor
is it entirely true for Le nozze di Figaro. For there, although
the private pastoral reconciliation sequence which
Susanna and Figaro join in promises true wedded bliss
for the servant couple, the public ceremony in which their
noble counterparts are reconciled is much less convincing; surely the future holds more pain for the gentle
Countess from her husband's harsh and philandering nature. Great comedies like these two operas of Mozart's do
not seek to please by merely mechanical couplings and
uncouplings, or a harsh and reductive caricature of human foibles. Yet it is this very quality of depth and honesty
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
which occasions the wrongheaded charge that their endings are incommensurate with their content, and do not
in fine "tell the truth:' Certainly it is true that the joyful
assertion of the Tones Macht at the end of Don Giovanni
functions rather like the traditional deus ex machina-a
celebration of life in the face of cruelty, disorder, and
blighted hopes. So the most venerable comedy we
possess-Homer's Odyssey-closes with Athene the dea ex
mach ina stopping the raised ax of the emaged and bloodthirsty Odysseus and ringing a curtain of sanity and order
down over a dismaying scene of violence and nearslaughter. Comedy ends with the assertion of the proper
orders, but this assertion may not necessarily be the crown
of a serene and sane society; it may indeed be a lid
clapped on disorder and despair. Only our greatest
playwrights and composers-the names of Shakespeare,
Moliere, and Mozart might nearly complete the list-can
live with comedy on those terms. Having no illusions
about the darker side of human nature, they nevertheless choose to assert at the end of their works the goods
of continuity and order, and the equilibrium of good
sense. Is this not often the braver, higher act, to assert
that life goes on in the face of disorder, and not to succumb to the easy temptations of melodrama or to the solitude of tragedy? The cry of the lieto fine, the happy
ending--''This is the way things ought to be, just exactly
as they are''-is not always a facile assertion of an earthly
utopia, but a pledge to make the best of a bad-or at least
a difficult-job. The communal celebration effected by the
healing power of the tone is hardly "mere convention:'
but a gesture of the hopelessness of any more articulate
celebration superintended by the word, the explanation.
The celebration in these two great opera buffas of the necessity of human accommodation to what is moves one to
suspect that comedy at its greatest has a range and power
which are capable of encompassing even the tragic mode.
1. Lorenzo da Ponte, Le memorie di un avventuriero (Milan, Club degli
1973), p. 78.
2. ''Questo il fin di chi fa mal:/E de' perfidi Ia morte/ Alla vita sempre
ugual!"
3. Otto Jahn, The Life of Mozart, trans. Pauline Townsend, 3 vols. (New
York, Kalmus, n.d.), III, 213-214.
4. W.A. Mozart, Don Giovanni, ed. Julian Rushton (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 64-65.
5. "A1 suon di lieta marcia."
6. "Che si suoni, che si canti, tutti quanti ha da brillar."
7. "Tutti. Pill non facdasi parola
Del terribile successo;
Ma pensiamo in vece adesso
Di poterci rallegrar ...
Che potressimo mai far?
Donne. A a a, io vO cantare:
Io vO mettermi a saltar.
Duca
Ott. La Chitarra io vo suonare.
Lant. Io suonar vO il Contrabasso.
Pasq. Ancor io per far del chiasso
TI fagotto vO suonar.
Duca
Ott. Tren, tren, trinchete trinchete tre.
Editori,
e
e
83
�Lant. Flon, flon, flon, flon, flon, flon.
Pasq. Pu, pu, pu, pu, pu, pu, pu, pu.
Tutti. Che bellissima pazzia!
Che stranissima armonia!
Cosi allegri si va a star."
8.
"Per finirla [Ia burletta] lietamente
E all'usanza teatrale,
Un' azion matrimoniale
Le faremo ora seguir."
9. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, New Jersey,
ton University Press, 1957), p. 164.
Prince~
Wye J. Allanbrook is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis
84
SUMMER
19~
�Achilles and Hector: The
Homeric Hero (Part II)
Seth Benardete
Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero is the Ph.D. dissertation of Dr.
Benardete submitted in 1955 to the Committee on Social Thought at
the University of Chicago.
Til.E ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
85
�CONTENTS
Part I. Style
Introduction
Chapter
I. Men and Heros
II. Achaeans and Trojans
III. Achilles and Agamemnon
IV. Ancestral Virtue
V. The Armour of Agamemnon
VI. Ajax
VII. Heroic Virtue
VIII. Achilles and Hector
IX. Similes
X. Achilles' and Hector's Similes
XI. Heroic Ambition
Part II. Plot
Introduction .............................................. 87
Chapter
I. The Gods ............................................ 89
II. The Plot of the Iliad . ................................. 92
III. The Embassy ........................................ 94
IV. The Deception of Zeus ................................ 99
V. Patroclus ........................................... 100
VI. Achilles and Patroclus ............................... 102
VII. The Exploits of Achilles .............................. 104
VIII. Achilles and Hector ................................. 106
IX. The Funeral Games ................................. 107
X. Achilles and Priam .................................. 109
Epilogue ................................................. 110
86
SUMMER 198
�Introduction
It is very difficult at the present time to talk sensibly
about the Homeric hero, for not only has "virtue" itself
become an anachronism, we ourselves no longer
responding to it at once, but also, because of this unawareness, we either dismiss with contempt the tragic
hero, who embodies all virtues, or we rank him beyond
his worth. We have lost a just appreciation of virtue,
which only the world around us, and not poetry alone,
can supply. Unlike the philosopher, who may write down
all of his thoughts, the tragic hero resists translation. No
matter how well he is described, unless we have seen him
beforehand in action, and know what kind of man he is,
the poetic hero will ever remain alien to us. Unless we
are in immediate sympathy with Achilles, and regard not
his submission but his apostasy as the sign of his greatness, the Iliad will never seem real. His submission, which
his humanity imposes upon him, signifies his tragedy:
but his greatness lies in his disregard of all civility. We,
however, tend to turn his virtue into a vice, repelled by
his superhuman excellence and secretly pleased with his
downfall; or if we are more unconventional, we will
blame ''society'' for his own failure and assign his defects
to his opponents. The reason why we are so apt to distort the tragic hero, ignoring either his vices or his virtues, is the absence of examples in our midst, by whom
we could be guided in our estimate of their poetic counterparts. Indeed the "Homeric Problem" perhaps could
hardly have arisen, had not the hero as a reality no longer
been recognized and understood. Most other ages have
had an Alcibiades or a Marlborough to lend substance
to the poet's fiction; so that the paradoxical mean between
virtue and vice which the tragic hero maintains, being
both better than ourselves and yet unexceptional in justice
and virtue, was at once convincing. If we, however, must
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
look in vain for contemporary examples of the hero, our
only recourse is to fictional accounts that may impress
more deeply than the Iliad itself. Where then are we to
find them? Plutarch's Lives perhaps would have served
us best: but if his "moralizing historiography," which
was "for centuries the mental fare of the reading public," was "weighed by the nineteenth century and found
wanting, " 1 we cannot hope that a reference to him now
would suffice to restore him and make intelligible to us
the tragic hero. Although Plutarch has no other theme
than the hero-and how difficult it is either to praise or
blame him2-he is too old-fashioned to be of any use. We
need a poet whom we still read and partly understand:
so I have invoked the aid of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, not
in order to compare it with the Iliad and note the differences, but rather to appeal to everyone's imagination,
which Coriolanus, stripped of divine intervention, might
more easily excite. Since it is much shorter than the Iliad
(as well as simpler), its actors are forced to be more outspoken than Achilles and Hector, who only hint at what
Coriolanus and Aufidius state openly. By glossing the Iliad with this play, and thus making it less inaccessible
and more pertinent, I hope that my analysis of the Iliad
proper may carry more conviction than it otherwise might
have done.
The play's motif is the transformation of Coriolanus
from a man to a god: it is, like the Iliad, an experiment
in immortality. Coriolanus' progressive alienation from
Rome, from his friends, from his family mark his progress
toward a divine status. He becomes at last alienated from
his own body and ends up as a mere thing. He is thought
at first to be a god by others: he becomes a god at the
end in his own opinion. The play moves, as it were, from
simile to fact, from metaphor to tragedy.
Caius Marcius, outraged by the people's insistence on
their rights, who are in war nothing but "cushions,
87
�leaden spoons, irons of a doit, ~~ comes on the scene, after Menenius has likened them to a body's limbs and the
Senate to its belly, crying'
What's the matter, you dissentious rogues,
That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion
Make yourselves scabs?
The people are to him superfluous sores, whose authority
(vested in their tribunes) he cannot respect, for they lack
all power. Menenius had given them a place, however
small, in the commonwealth; Marcius denies them all
place, except what they might unlawfully usurp. They
are worse than strangers: they are a hostile infection.
Their weakness constantly increases his contempt, which
reaches its first climax in the battle where his own
prowess earns him the title "Coriolanus."' So even while
he curses the people as enemies, he is assuming the name
of the enemy's city. In his Roman triumph, he becomes
less Roman.
When Lartius hears how Marcius entered the gates of
Corioli alone, he announces the first stage in his becoming more than human:'
0 noble fellow!
Who sensibly outdares his senseless sword,
And when it bows, stand'st up!
He is like "his sword, death's stamp,"'
Where it did mark, it took; from face to foot
He was a thing of blood, whose every motion
Was timed with dying cries.
Once set in motion, he cannot stop but seems a perpetu:
a! instrument of death, indifferent to the object of his
slaughter and unsparing of himself. The operations of his
sword have been communicated to himself; and, now
that he is transmuted into that which he himself should
wield, whoever has, can use him. 7 He becomes like the
spoil he so much had despised.
But Coriolanus needs an enemy, no matter who it may
be; for what Valeria says of his son applies equally well
to himself:'
I saw him run after a gilded butterfly; and when he caught it, he
let it go again; and after it again; and over and over he comes, and
up again; catched it again: or whether his fall enraged him, or how
'twas, he did so set his teeth, ·and tear it; I warrant, how he roammocked it!"
Coriolanus thinks all things are gilded butterflies, whose
brilliance irritates his ambition, but whose capture
deprives them of their worth. To attain or lose his object
is equally fatal; his restlessness longs for ever-greater aggrandizement. Surfeit would kill him.
The envious tribunes, Sicinius and Brutus, are the first
to notice his godlike state:'
As if that whatsoever god who leads him
Was silly crept into his human powers,
And gave him graceful posture.
88
And when Coriolanus grows angry, calling the plebs
''those measles,'' Brutus remarks: 10
You speak of the people,
As if you were a god to punish; not
A man of their infirmity.
To him Sicinius was a "rotten thing," but to Brutus hE
is the "disease that must be cut away;" and though
Menenius objects to the Tribunes remedy, yet he thinko
Coriolanus is ''a limb that has but a disease,'' or a ''fool
gangrened. " 11 Not only the tribunes but Menenius, whc
before had called the people limbs, must now call Cori·
olanus so. He and the people reverse their roles: he be·
comes the boils and plagues he thought they were. 12 Frorr
being at the center of the body politic, he is now an in·
fection at its extremity. "Too absolute" and "too noblE
for this world," hating all dissemblance and rhetoric, hE
can only play what he is; 13 and unable to be a traitor tc
himself, he prefers to be a traitor to Rome. He is decree(
an outcast. "I shall be loved when I am lack' d," he telh
his mother, as if in echo of Achilles' threat: 14 but Achille•
did not have to help the Trojans in his own person-Zew
was his surrogate-while Coriolanus enters into oper
conspiracy with Aufidius, the enemy whom he had mos:
hated and most adrnired. 15 As his hatred of the peoplE
had turned him, metaphorically, into one of those whorr
he thought most inimical, so now his former hatred o
Aufidius seals his alliance. 16 Aufidius welcomes him
compares him to Jupiter, proclaims him a "noble thing'
and "Mars. " 17 He assumes all the aspects of an avehg
ing deity.
The Volscians make their attack on Roman territory
and Corninius brings the news that Coriolanus has joinec
them: 18
He is their god; he leads them like a thing
Made by some other deity than Nature,
That shapes man better; and they follow him
Against us brats with no less confidence
Than boys pursuing summer butterflies, or butchers killing flies
The gilded butterfly that his son had chased, as if in sym
pathy with his own attack upon the Volscians, is trans
formed, by his wrath's alchemy, into Rome and he
people. Though his opponent is different, his fury is tho
same. Cominius beseeches him, who "wants nothing o
a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in. " 19 to sparo
his native city, urging an "old acquaintance," but20
'Coriolanus'
He would not answer to; forbad all names;
He was a kind of nothing, titleless,
Till he had forged himself a name i' th' fire
Of burning Rome.
Having dropped the surname Coriolanus, which hao
been in his exile the one thing that remained his, 21 h
wishes now to be known as "Romanus": he has switcheo
sides, but stayed, ironically, the same.
SUMMER 198!
�Unmoved by Corninius and later by Menenius; his
mother, wife and son come to petition him, when the Romans send them as a last resort; but he resolves to refuse them:22
I'll never
Be ~uch a gosling to obey instinct, but stand
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin.
Only for a moment, however, does he succeed in checking instinct; for he soon succumbs to natural affection.
But having failed to acquire "Rornanus" as a title, and
Aufidius having denied his right to the "stolen name
Coriolanus, in Corioli," he belongs nowhere. 23 Traitor to
Rome, he seems to have betrayed his adopted city. His
divinity played him false; it admitted of no political sanctions; it passed beyond his own power: he became its
slave. He could not fulfill the obligations that the image
of himself, made by others and perfected by himself, imposed on him. Out of place everywhere, an alien deity
in the shape of a man, his nature trips him up in the end.
Once having gone beyond the bounds that he thought
conventional, he could not return to Convention. 24 The
no-man's land, into which he had trespassed "like to a
lonely dragon, " 25 was set with the lures of his own conceits, that drew him finally to his ruin.
Achilles is Coriolanus: both are gods in their wrath.
Achilles' attack on Agamemnon's authority corresponds
to Coriolanus' refusal to acknowledge the tribune's office;
his loss of Briseis to the loss·of the consulate; the ingratitude of Agamemnon to that of the people; his withdrawal
from the battle to the other's banishment; the fulfillment
of his wish that Zeus avenge his wrongs to Coriolanus'
invasion of Rome; his rejection of the embassy of Ajax
and Odysseus to the other's denial of Corninius and
Menenius; and his acceptance of his duty, after Patroclus'
death, corresponds to Coriolanus' sparing of Rome after
his family's petition. But that Patroclus had to die before
Achilles returns to the war, that Patroclus is not even
related to him, that his mother is divine and his father
far away, and that he is not married: all this deepens
Achilles' tragedy. His ties to this world are more attenuated than Coriolanus'; and as it is easier for him to break
them, so it is harder to renew them. Drained of all human substance, isolated from other men, but unable to
become divine, Achilles cracks, turns monstrous, and
dies.
Chapter I
The Gods
If the heroes regard divinity as the end of their ambition, we must first see what the gods do-before we can
understand why Achilles and Hector, Sarpedon and
Ajax, are so desirous to become like them. Blunt Ajax
states the paradox of heroic virtue: "Alas, even a fool
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
would know that Zeus himself defends the Trojans: the
spears of all, no matter whether good or bad do hurl
them, hit their target: Zeus makes all go straight. " 1 Zeus'
partiality makes it almost impossible to practice virtue.
Were Ajax to retreat, he would be blameless-' Zeus can
render vain and useless the distinction between good and
bad, base and brave. What should prove meritsuccess-may be wholly undeserved. The javelin-cast of
Paris, were Zeus to wish it, would go as straight as that
of Hector; if the gods had always favoured Nireus, he
would have equalled Achilles. Were not the providence
of the gods inconstant and fitful, 3 they would obscure
completely any natural order of excellence; but as it is,
they sometimes withdraw and let the heroes run themselves. Then does the world run true; then we can see
the heroes for what they are.
After Achilles sets the prizes for the horse-race, and
urges the best Achaeans to compete, Horner gives us the
order in which they accept the challenge. First Eurnelus,
who excelled in horsemanship and had the best horses;'
then Diornedes with the horses of Aeneias; third
Menelaus with one horse of his own and one of Agamemnon's; and then Antilochus. 5 Before Horner tells us who
carne last, Nestor counsels his son on the power of craft.
Although Antilochus' horses are swift-footed, they are
slower than the three pairs of horses that entered before
him, yet faster than Meriones' which are the slowest of
all. 6 Meriones is naturally reluctant to compete: only after Nestor, whose praise of craft gives him a chance, has
spoken at length can he bring himself to risk his horses
in a contest they cannot possibly win.
If we look at the race itself, we see that Horner has
presented the horsemen in the order in which they
should, but do not win.' That Eurnelus should have been
first, although he comes in last, Achilles, Horner, and all
the Achaeans acknowledge; and were it not that Achilles
wishes to gratify Antilochus, even in his misfortune he
would have taken second prize. 8 Had not Apollo and
Athena interfered, Diornedes would have either come in
first ·or tied Eurnelus: 9 we shall never know which, but
m any case he would be second. Menelaus was due for
third place, but the craft of Antilochus upset him; and
yet if the course had been longer, he would have outstripped hirn.'0 Antilochus then should have been fourth,
and Meriones, unequal in skill to the others, fifth. 11
Two things disturb the natural order; art and providence. If Apollo had not wished to help Eurnelus, Athena would not have broken his horses' yoke, nor given
more strength to Diornedes' horses. 12 The gods made him
who was to be first last, and him who was to be second
first. And Antilochus' art put him ahead of Menelaus: 13
but human art is not eternally superior; for the natural
slowness of his horses would have eventually betrayed
him. 14 Thus providence and art stand very close to one
another: both change the hierarchy set up by nature and
substitute for it an unpredictable order. The superiority
of art is short-lived, and given enough time, nature triumphs: whether the gods too are subject to nature re-
89
�mains to be seen.
Homer has also given a third order, the line-up, that
the casting of lots determined. Here no one is in his right
place except Menelaus: Eumelus is second, Diomedes
last, Antilochus first, Meriones fourth. 15 Menelaus, who
was third in excellence and third in victory, is also third
when mere accident tells his position. Chance mistakes
everyone else but Menelaus: mediocrity is all that you
can trust it to find out.
The heroes can never be certain, in whatever they do,
that they will be successful. They live in constant apprehension that the gods may interfere; who not only may
give them strength but deprive them of victory. They
often snatch the heroes from death. At the start of Diomedes' exploits, had not Hephaestus saved Idaeus, "hiding him in night," he "would not have escaped a black
doom;" but he was saved only because Dares, his father,
was a priest of Hephaestus and might have been vexed
if his son had died.'• Diomedes' bold strength, bestowed
by Athena, could not overcome the opposition of
Hephaestus, who, as the son of Hera, was partial to the
Achaeans, but did not dare disappoint his priest, Trojan
though he was. 17
When Athena sees what Hephaestus has done, she
fears lest the other gods might save their own favourites;
so, confident that the Achaeans will press their advantage, she persuades Ares, her most formidable enemy,
to stand aside, with herself, from the battle. 18 Ares complies, and each Achaean king slays a Trojan: Agamemnon slays Odius, Idomencus ·Phaestus, Menelaus
Scamandrius; Meriones slays Phereclus, Meges Pedaeus,
and Euryphylus Hypsenor .19 Among the Trojans who are
slain, Scamandrius was taught to hunt by Artemis;
Phereclus was the son of Harmonides, who "knew how
to make many curious things, for Pallas Athena loved
him;" and Hypsenor was the son of Dolo pion, who
served as priest to the river Scamander. And yet Scamandrius dies as surely as Odius, when they both turn to flee,
even though one was Artemis' favourite; and Phereclus
meets the same fate as Padaeus, though the one was
illegitimate, and the other had a father who was taught
by Athena. Neither Artemis, nor the Scamander, nor
Athena saved the heroes to whom they were attached;
and they are slain along with those who had before been
less fortunate and had always lacked divine protection.
As soon as the gods withdraw, everyone indifferently
dies: bastard as well as a priest's son, plain coward and
a coward whom Artemis loved. "Loathsome darkness"
seized Phaestus, whom no god had ever befriended; and
"purple death and strong fate closed the eyes" of Hypsenor, whose father was the priest of the Scamander. The
death of neither is much adorned: Homer merely states
what happened; but later, when the gods reappear, Aeneias kills Crethon and Orsilochus (their ancestor was a
river), and they not only die, when "the end of death
covers them," but they die beautifully. They are like two
lions who, having caught sheep and cattle, are slain at
last by men; and they fall like tall pines. 20 Their death
90
appears not only as itself but as something else: doubled
in the simile's reflection, it magically loses all its horror,
becoming beautiful and almost pleasant. Heroes may die
horribly-Homer sometimes is medically precise-yet in
his similes of death, employed only if the gods are
present, nothing but a noble death, purged of grossnes'
remains. The gods transfigure death, which is, withou1
them unfeigned, but in their presence more poetic.
It might be objected to this, that no distinction can hE
drawn between Homer and the gods; but, although
Homer inserts the gods whenever he pleases, he doe'
not treat them as his own machinery, over which he ha'
any control. He accepts them to be as real as the heroe•
themselves, and to actively belong to the story; while hE
rarely shows himself to be present. He only tells wha1
happened, not what he himself has made. To us it rna}
seem a pious fiction, but we are forced to accept it. Home1
separates himself from his work: he presents neither th<
narrative nor the speeches nor the similes as his own; anc
if they follow a pattern, we must understand their proxi·
mate causes, before we can refer everything to Homer
That the gods alone can inspire a simile about death.
holds true throughout the Iliad; for even the one excep·
tion, that I know of, supplies another proof. Patroclus.
whom the gods never prompt or encourage, drives hi•
spear through the jaw of Thestor, and grabbing hold o
it, drags him over the rim of his chariot, "as when a man.
sitting on an overhanging rock, pulls from the sea a sacrec
fish with hook and line, so he dragged him gaping or
the end of his shining spear. 21 The death of Thestor
ghastly in itself, becomes more ghastly in the simile; fo:
no gods are present but only Homer, who, feeling bounc
to stand beside Patroclus on his one triumphal day, call•
to him as if he himself were there. 22 Homer favour:
Patroclus and follows him everywhere, calling hin
''horseman Patroclus'' and repeating ''you answered hin
this, Patroclus." To no other hero does Homer seemS<
attached, but since the gods are absent, he can, as it were
only ensure the aptness and not the beauty of a simile
When Patroclus has killed Thestor and many other Tro
jans, and Sarpedon rushes against him, Hera persuade:
Zeus not to save his son, who soon after is killed b'
Patroclus. 23 Sarpedon, however, unlike Thestor, di'"
beautifully-like a white poplar, or an oak, or a state!~
pine-and nobly-like a high-spirited bull whom a lim
slays in the herd. Thestor died like a fish without tho
benefit of the gods; Sarpedon' s death was heralded b~
bloody drops that Zeus poured down. The gods beauti
fy death; they order the ugly chaos of war; they are tho
gilders of the heroic world.
We have seen the heros godless in snatches of war: wo
must now see them thus over a longer period. Athen.
and Hera return to Olympus at the end of the fifth book
"having stopped baneful Ares from his slaughter o
men;" and the sixth book announces the departure o
all the gods. 24 Each event will now be unconditioned h:
the gods: the heroes will act without them and hence wil
act differently.
SUMMER 198.
�Diomedes kills Axylus, who was "a friend to human
beings" -philos d'en anthropoisi-"but no one of them
warded off his mournful death." 25 When the gods are
absent, it is sadly fitting that a philanthropist, whose
kindness benefited other mortals but not the gods, should
die. He does not share in a divine providence. He is alone.
Menelaus captures Adrastus alive, whose horses had
entangled his chariot and spilled him on the ground. 26
As an accident puts him at the mercy of anyone who
might find him, Menelaus cannot congratulate himself
on his own prowess. He owes everything to chance and
nothing to himself; and aware of this, he is willing to accept ransom, until Agamemnon comes up and rebukes
him for his leniency, urging him to kill all the Trojans,
"even a boy still in his mother's womb." Nothing equals
the cruelty of Agamemnon's advice or Menelaus' action.
Though Agamemnon himself later kills the two sons of
Antimachus, who plead for their lives, he at least defends
his decision to kill them; and when Achilles rejects Lycaon' s supplication, his excuse is his fury which, ever
since Patroclus' death, has overtaken him 27 Here
Agamemnon, without offering any excuse, persuades
Menelaus to kill Adrastus; and, Homer adds, "saying
what he ought, what is just" (aisima pareipon).Not only
Agamemnon has become cruel but Homer as well; for
the gods, who before had taken sides, are now nowhere
to be seen. Their partiality had made the heroic world
moral; they had set limits to right and wrong, however
arbitrary they sometimes may seem; their disapproval,
which depended on their affections, had guided Homer
in his own judgment. When Achilles refuses to save the
life of Tros, who wordlessly grasps his knees, Homer tells
us his opinion: "He was not a sweet-tempered man nor
mild it\ spirit;" and when Achilles slays twelve Trojans
as an offering to Patroclus, he again blames him: "He
resolved evil deeds in his heart;" for Homer, knowing
that some gods disapprove of Achilles, can echo their
opinion. 28 But now that the gods have lost all interest in
human affairs, no one tells the heroes what they ought
to do, and without the gods they become monsters.
Hector, encouraged by Helenus, charges the Achaeans,
who retreat and cease their slaughter: "They thought
some one of the immortals had come down from the starry heaven to aid the Trojans. " 29 The Achaeans mistake
Hector for a god, when no gods are present; they think
he has come from the starry heaven when he is a mortal
who crawls upon the earth. 30 As heaven and earth, gods
and men, have never been so far apart, the heroes confound them. Diomedes, whom Athena had so recently
favoured, cannot tell whether Glaucus is a god or a man;
he is as uncertain as Odysseus when he confronts
Nausicaa. 31 He asks Glaucus: "Who are you, 0 most
mighty power, of mortal human beings (kala thneton
anthropon) ? Only here does a hero call another to his face
a "human being" and not a "he-man. " 32 Diomedes reck-
ons in absolutes: Glaucus is either human or divine; he
cannot be, what he himself once was, divinely inspired.
Critics have been puzzled that Diomedes, who has
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
wounded Aphrodite and Ares, should now be unwilling
to fight Glaucus if he turns out to be a god. 33 But there
is no difficulty: the gods have departed and left the
heroes, Diomedes along with the rest, alone. His ability
to distinguish between man and god depended on Athena's favour: 34 as soon as she withdrew from the battle,
he knew no more than the Achaeans, to whom Hector
seemed a god.
The burden of their mortality oppresses Diomedes and
Glaucus. One seems at a loss without the gods, the other
sees all men as alike and undistinguishable: "as are the
generations of leaves, such are those also of men. " 35
Genealogy is a mere succession of men, akritophyllon, 36
"undistinguishable leafage." But Glaucus wishes to gloss
over his own sense of smallness, and to impress Diomedes with his divine lineage, even if he cannot quite
believe it himself. He deals in superlatives: Sisyphus was
the craftiest of men; Bellerophon said his battle with the
Solymi was the fiercest he had ever entered; and Bellerophon slew all the men who were best in Lycia. 37 Glaucus,
the son of Sisyphus, fathered blameless Bellerophon,
whose beauty and manliness came from the gods, and
whom the gods escorted to Lycia and helped to slay the
divine Chimaera. Providence sponsored his deeds, and
even the king of Lycia was forced to believe in his divine
descent. But Glaucus knows how fitfully the gods favour
men: Bellerophon became hateful to all the gods and wandered alone, "avoiding the track of human beings;" and
two of his children fared worse: Ares killed Isandrus, and
Artemis in anger slew Laodomeia. And yet all their fates
were supernatural; Glaucus' ancestors were not ordinary
mortals. Thus Glaucus himself, looking back on his past,
partly proves that men are like leaves, and partly tries,
as he bolsters himself, to astonish Diomedes. 38 If he cannot claim that he is a god, at least he has divine ancestors. And Diomedes, who before had such contempt for
the genealogies of Pandarus and Aeneias, 39 now finds an
excuse to break off the combat. As his grandfather
Oeneus entertained and exchanged gifts with Bellerophon, so he and Glaucus should exchange their armour
and proclaim themselves "ancestral friends."
Axylus, a friend to strangers, dies; Glaucus and Diomedes, whose grandfathers were friends, agree to
separate. Axylus had no divine protection, while Glaucus had its shadow, a divine lineage. In his lineage are
the gods, whose presence then can save Glaucus (or Diomedes) even now. By calling up his past-made glorious by heaven-Glaucus reminds Diomedes that the gods
control, morally and physically, the actions of men. He
holds up, as a desperate shield, the flimsiest providence;
but Diomedes, no more anxious than himself to fight,
jumps at his offer. Their ancestral friendship replaces the
gods, who are, more remotely, their ancestors.4°
When Hector has returned to Troy and bid his mother
pray to Athena, he curses Paris: if the earth swallowed
up Paris and he saw him descending to Hades, Hector
would forget his sorrow. 41 Hector's wish before, though
just as vehement, that he be without offspring and die
91
�unmarried,42 Paris' cowardice had warranted; but now,
whether he shirks or not, Hector longs for his death. Zeus
Olympius raised Paris as a bane to the Trojans, for Zeus
Olympius is gone. 43
Everyone feels the absence of the gods. When Helen
had heaped scorn on Paris' strength, he falsely attributed his defeat to Athena: "Now Menelaus has won a victory with the help of Athena, but I another time shall be
victorious over him; for there are also gods on our side. '' 44
Another time he will be victor, whenever the gods so
wish it. Although he then was wrong about Menelaus,
he was right about himself-Aphrodite did save himso it seemed reasonable to suppose that some god had
protected Menelaus. His mistake was justifiable. But now
not even he thinks the gods make for victories: niki!
d'epameibetai andras. 45 Victory alternates between men:
who knows why? No longer Aphrodite but Fortune is his
goddess: Athena has just refused the Trojans' prayer. 46
Helen feels despair more deeply than Paris. Priam had
kindly received her on the ramparts of Troy; and she, provoked by his kindness, had burst out with: "Would that
death had been pleasant to me when I followed your son
to Troy." 47 But now, though Hector has not even spoken
to her, her sense of guilt is even greater: on the very day
she was born, not on the day she committed her crime,
she wishes to have died; but, she adds, the gods decreed
otherwise. 48
Hector leaves Helen and Paris, and meets his wife Andromache with his son Scamandrius. They form a beautiful but gloomy scene. Despair finally overtakes Hector;
he predicts the fall of Troy: "Well I know this in my mind
and my spirit, that there will be a day when sacred Ilium
will perish, both Priam and his people."" What
Agamemnon had foretold, when Pandarus wounded
Menelaus, Hector has come to believe, and in the very
same words prophesies: but Agamemon saw Zeus, shaking his dark aegis, as the cause of Troy's capture. 50 Hector sees nothing. The future is black: the gods have
deserted. 51
The absence of the gods has made the sixth book the
darkest in the Iliad, and we can now better understand
how the gods interfere in the heroic world. In the Iliad
providence makes a difference; it is despotic and can
either enhance or nullify a hero's virtue; but in the Odyssey it is kind and just (except for Poseidon, a benign ogre),
and it never interferes with merit but only assists it; none
of the gods favours the suitors. War and peace differ most
in this. In peace failure is man's own responsibility, 52 for
the gods have less at stake and exert little influence. In
war the heroes become puppets of the gods, and submit
to a fate beyond their control: necessity sets the course
and is the prevailing wind. And yet men still remain
responsible: this is the theme of the Iliad and the tragedy
of Achilles.
92
Chapter II
The Plot of the Iliad
Hector and Paris re-enter the battle in the seventh book,
appearing like a fair breeze that a god sends to tired rowers; and after some success on their part, Athena and
Apollo agree to stop the war for a day, and let Hector
challenge an Achaean to a duel. 1 Helenus, a prophet, intuits the plan of the gods, who do not openly show themselves but assume the shape of vultures, and remain, as
in the sixth book, invisible to men 2 Hector is pleased with
his brother's proposal, and offers to fight anyone whom
the Achaeans might choose as their champion; he also
promises, if he should kill his opponent, to give back the
corpse for burial, so that a mound may be built near the
Hellespont, "and someone of later times, sailing by in
a large ship over the wine-faced sea, may say: 'That is
the tomb of a man who died long ago, whom excellent
though he was, glorious Hector killed': so someone will
say, and my fame shall never die." 3
Hector wants immortal fame. Though he believes that
Troy will be taken, he wants a monument to be left behind for himself' It shall perish, he shall live on. The
gloom of the sixth book, brought on by the gods' absence,
is dispelled in the seventh by the light of a future glory.
Hector finds his way out of a godless present in his fame
to come. Fame is despair's remedy. If the gods are gone,
if they no longer care, then men must take care of themselves; they must adopt a surrogate for them, and Hector suggests what the Achaeans reluctantly accept,
immortal fame. Instead of being dependent on the gods,
they will become dependent on other men (anthropoi).
They will snatch from the very uncertainty of war a permanent gain. No matter who will be victorious, and
regardless of the justice of their cause, both sides can win
glory. They can share in the success of their enemy, and
even find a certain satisfaction in being killed.
The difference between the combat of Menelaus and
Paris, that took place a few hours before, and the present
contest of Ajax and Hector, indicates the great change
in the character of the war. Menelaus fought with Paris
to settle the war, Ajax and Hector fight in a trial of
prowess. They fought to decide the fate of Helen-who
would be her husband?-Ajax and Hector fight without
any regard for Helen, but only to determine who is the
better warrior. They exchange threats and boasts;
Menelaus and Paris fought in silence. They were in deadly earnest, while Hector and Ajax can break off their combat and give each other gifts in parting. Menelaus had
wished to accept Hector's challenge, but Agamemnon
(with all the other kings) restrained him, for though he
was the right opponent against Paris, he would have now
lost his life to no purpose. He is no longer the champion
of his own cause. Had Menelaus killed Paris, he would
have recovered Helen; if Hector now wins, the Achaean~
would recover Ajax' corpse, which would serve, once i1
SUMMER 198!
�was buried, as a memorial to both Ajax and Hector. Fame
and renown would seem to be as precious to Hector as
Helen is to Menelaus, and his new ambition so much inflames him that he can refer quite brazenly to the Trojans' perfidy. 6 Whatever oaths they may have broken,
whatever injustice they may have done, has no relevance
now. As long as Helen was at the center of the dispute,
the Trojans were in the wrong; but now that she is discarded, and becomes merely a theme for heroic exploits,
right and wrong no longer apply. "Publica virtu tis per mala
facta via est" ("The public way of justice is through
crimes").
As the cause of the war has changed, so also have the
central characters. Helen unleashed a war over which she
loses control. The war, having worked loose from its origins, now feeds itself: the desire for Helen generated the
desire for fame, but the offspring no longer acknowledges
the parent. There can now be no other end to the war
than the destruction of Troy. The restitution of Helen will
no longer suffice. Diomedes speaks for all the Achaeans
when, in answer to the Trojans' proposal (of returning
all the stolen goods except Helen), he says: "Now let no
one accept either the goods of Alexander or Helen herself; for even a fool would know that the ends of destruction have already been fixed for the Trojans. 7 Not
even if the Trojans give back Helen would the Achaeans
stop fighting. The war has passed out of her hands and
become common property. No longer is the war petty.
It has transcended the bounds of its original inspiration
and assumed the magnificence of heroic ambition. Paris
and Menelaus now have minor roles, Helen is scarcely
mentioned. 8 She was a necessary irritant that has become
superfluous, and Helen herself knows this. "Upon myself and on Paris," she tells Hector, "Zeus has placed an
evil fate, so that we might be the theme of song among
men (anthropoi) who shall be." 9 Not herself but her fame
justifies the war: in the perspective of later generations
can be found her own raison d' etre. What gives purpose
to the quarrel is not a present victory but a future fame.
In the third book Helen was weaving into a cloak many
contests of the Achaeans and Trojans, "who for her sake
suffered at the hands of Ares. " 10 As the war had been
staged for her benefit, she had gone up on the walls to
watch her two husbands, Menelaus and Paris, fight for
her; but now an impersonal fame has overshadowed any
personal pleasure, although she may still find some comfort in a future glory. Her pleasure has become more remote and less immediate: nothing that can be woven into
cloth or that can be seen. She is the plaything of the future (of her own renown) and no longer manages her own
destiny .11 She is caught up in a larger issue and concedes
her own insignificance. And Menelaus, like Helen, realizes the change which Hector proposes, for he berates
the Achaeans and calls them "spiritless and fameless in
vain,' ' 12 since they are not eager to accept Hector's
challenge; for unless they are animated by fame his
challenge is meaningless. They must disregard Menelaus
and look to themselves. Their own aggrandizements, not
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Menelaus' vengeance, must become their aim. As their
ambition, in becoming more selfish, becomes more grand,
so their prowess, in advocating immortal fame as its end,
can at last justify itself.
Socrates once derived the word heros ("hero") from
eros ("love")13 and though it is a jest, it is metaphorically true. The heroes, or their ancestors, are the offspring
of gods who fell in love with mortals; and they retain in
themselves a divine longing, which is not just confined
to physical desire, though that is its origin, 14 but which
prompts them to a transcendent hope, that turns their
only weakness into their best resource. If they are fated
to die, if they are barred from becoming inunortal in deed,
their death can ensure them a fictional immortality. Were
a goddess to fall in love with them again, they could only
continue an heroic line; but were they to turn aside from
a hopeless quest, and rely on themselves, they would be
assured of a deathlessness unaffected by the gods (oiothen
oios, "all alone"). 15 War absorbs into itself the desire they
have for self-perpetuation (after Helen left Sparta, she became barren); 16 for it unites their virtue with their ambition, so that, in displaying the one, they satisfy the other.
And if we are not repelled by allegory, no better image
for the Iliad could be found than the fable told by
Demodocus, about the adultery of Aphrodite and Ares
and its detection by Hephaestus. Here is all the horror
and glory of war in secret agreement with the desires and
delights of love, which the threads of art, more subtle
than a spider's web, bind together and reveal.
Homer has carefully prepared the shift from Helen to
fame as the cause of the war, a shift that the magical disappearance of Paris first indicates. When victory is almost
within Menelaus' grasp, as he drags Paris toward the
Achaeans, Aphrodite breaks the strap by which Menelaus
held him, and "snatching Paris away, she hid him in a
great mist, and set him in the sweet-smelling bridal chamber."" Paris is as effectively dead as if he had been killed.
Overcome by desire for Helen, he is indifferent to fame:
if Athena gives victory now to Menelaus, the Trojans'
gods at another time will aid him. 18 He becomes isolated
from the war, which now begins again without him.
Although his original injustice began the war, it continues
by the injustice of Pandarus, which serves as the transition between the recovery of Helen and the desire for
fame. Not Paris but Pandarus wounds Menelaus. Paris
disappears, and the responsibility for the war spreads
among the Trojans, while among the Achaeans Menelaus
remains the central figure, about whom they still rally.
But he too disappears in the seventh book, when
Agamemnon persuades him not to accept Hector's
challenge." To transform pettiness into grandeur, a private quarrel into a public war, may require injustice; but
once the transformation is completed, once both sides accept the new conditions, the demands of justice no longer
apply.
Were it not glory that we more affected
Than the performance of our heaving spleens,
93
�I would not wish a drop of Trojan blood
Spent more in her defense. But, worthy Hector,
She is a theme of honour and renown;
A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds,
Whose present courage may beat down our foes,
And fame in time to come canonize us. 20
The change that takes place among the heroes finds its
echo among the gods. Aphrodite saved Paris, but Diomedes in the fifth book wounds her, and she never reappears among men. Even as Paris, a man wholly
dominated by desire, disappears, so Aphrodite, the divine principle, as it were, which gives him most support,
retires, and leaves the war to Ares and Apollo, Athena
and Hera. 21
After the contest of Ajax and Hector, Nestor proposes
that a trench be dug and a wall built as a protection for
their ships and themselves." The kings agree, and while
they are labouring at the wall, the gods, seated by Zeus,
admire their work, and Poseidon speaks among them:
"Zeus father, what mortal on the boundless earth shall
still disclose his plans to the immortals? Do you not see
how the Achaeans have built a wall for their ships and
run a trench about it, but they have not offered famous
hecatombs to the gods? Its fame will go as far as the dawn
scatters light, and they will forget the wall that I and
Phoebus Apollo built for the hero Laomedon. " 23 Poseidon
fears that the fame of the Achaeans' wall will outstrip the
fame of his own wall. He interprets the wall as an insult
to the gods. Fame is not a concern of the gods: they can
neither hinder nor advance it. Not even the destruction
of the wall, which Homer describes," prevents us from
hearing of it. As long as the war concerns the quarrel
which Hera and Athena had with Paris, 25 the gods are
the ultimate authority; but as soon as the war turns away
from Paris and embodies the desire for fame, the gods
seem unnecessary. Just as Hector attempted to break
loose from them, in challenging an Achaean to a duel,
so Nestor takes up his suggestion and proposes the building of tomb, trench, and wall. Hector was unsuccessful,
for he does not kill Ajax. Nestor succeeds for a time, but
even his attempt is thwarted by the gods. The wall would
make the Achaean camp as permanent as Troy: should
they win or lose, it would remain as a record of their
siege. Nestor improved on Hector, for victory was the
price of his fame, while Nestor relies on a collective effort that disregards prowess as well as success. The wall
is the most glorious attempt to break out of the gods' influence, it fails. But Zeus helps them along in their belief, for he forbids in the eighth book any intervention
by the gods in the war. 26 In the fourth book Hera was
given carte blanche to do what she wanted, but now that
her personal revenge has been transcended, Zeus no
longer will brook any interference.
The desire for fame enhances everything. The shield
of Nestor, nwhose fame reaches heaven," and the
"curiously-wrought breastplate of Diomedes, which
Hephaestus had fashioned" become the objects of Hector's arnbition. 27 These unknown arms become desirable
94
in the light of fame. Everything is worth acquiring if fame
is the goal. Tencer is encouraged and urged on by the
offer of a tripod or two horses or a woman, if Troy is captured. 28 Tencer, who plays no role in the fifth book and
is mentioned once in the sixth, becomes in the middle
books an important figure. And in the same way, Glaucus and Sarpedon, Idomeneus and Meriones, become
more important. Everyone joins in the desire for fame.
Once the transition has been completed to the second
cause of the war, Homer begins to lay the foundations
for the third cause. It is now in the eighth book that Zeus
outlines the death of Patroclus and the return of
Achilles. 29 Even as the disappearance of Paris announced
the shift to the second cause, so Zeus' prophecy indicates
the final cause. Thus three causes underlie the Iliad: Helen first, fame second, and Patroclus third. From personal
revenge to impersonal ambition and back again to
revenge is the Iliad's plot. The love for Helen turns into
the love for fame, which in turn becomes Achilles' love
for Patroclus. From eros to kleous eros ("love of fame") to
eros is the cycle of the Iliad: but how Achilles' eros unites
the other two will be our final problem.
Chapter III
The Embassy
Agamemnon calls an assembly of all the Achaeans,
where he proposes in earnest what he had once used as
a test of their resolution; and yet now they hear silently
the same speech which before had upset them and induced them to return home 1 Their roles are reversed:
Agamemnon wishes as much to flee as the Achaeans had
wished before, and they now seem as determined to stay
as Agamemnon had been intent on capturing Troy.
Agamemnon, however, has changed his speech in two
respects: he no longer addresses the Achaeans as a whole
(though they all are present) but only their leaders, and
he omits to say how shameful their flight would appear
to future generations. 2 What now keeps the Achaeans
seated, though they are troubled in their hearts, 3 is the
desire for immortal fame. The plague and the withdrawal of Achilles had so broken their spirit that not even the
prospect of disgrace had then dissuaded them; but now,
even though Agamemnon fails to mention it (for fame
no longer attracts him), they are inclined to stay. As long
as Agamemnon wished to capture Troy, the ignominy
of his return was paramount; but his despair now makes
him ignore what has inflamed everyone else. Even as
Menelaus had been replaced by Ajax, so Agamemnon,
ouce his brother's suit lost its importance, had to yield
his own preeminence. He knows that the Achaeans will
not obey him, that the darkness of the night as well aE
their new ambition will check them. He hands over tc
the Achaean kings the business of the war. He is as ready
now to humble himself before Achilles, as prompt on thE
SUMMER 198
�morrow to be wounded and remain out of action for the
rest of the lliad 4 Thus Diomedes can openly assert
Agamemnon's wearness, 5 for Agamemnon has already
abandoned his pretensions to power, now certain that
no one will question his authority. Were Helen their object, his force must equal his rank, so that the Achaeans
may be obliged to avenge an abstract wrong that does
not affect them; but if their appetites are engaged, if immortal fame is now their object, so that defeat would seem
a personal disgrace, Agamemnon can afford to forego an
absolute sway and be content with the titular superiority. Diomedes can bid him depart as brusquely as he himself once ordered Achilles to return home, and be as
confident as Agamemnon once was that the others will
stay behind. 6 Even without Agamemnon the Achaeans
cohere and stick together: he has become superfluous.
But fame is so much more an inducement than justice,
that Diomedes goes even farther than Agamemnon ever
did: the others can also depart, he and Sthenelus will win
alone. Thus he usurps the power of Agamemnon and
replaces Achilles as the emblem of virtue.
Nestor, in partly approving of Diomedes' rebuke of
Agamemnon, assigns to him the leadership of the war
(of the young), while he reserves for Agamemnon his
authority in the council (among the kings).' He distinguishes between the sceptre and the fist of Agamemnon,
and thus prepares the way for his reconciliation with
Achilles. But although he is willing to grant Agamemnon's weakness before the whole assembly, he does not
wish to propose before them the embassy to Achilles: for
if they remain ignorant, they can always count on
Achilles' future support, but if they know (as Achilles
hopes},' its success would compromise Agamemnon, and
its failure would deprive them of hope. Were Achilles to
re-enter the war, Agamemnon would be forced, in admitting his error, to surrender his sceptre; whereas Diomedes can excel Agamemnon by night (the Doloneia)
without being his rival by day: he is wounded soon after
him in Book Eleven; but should Achilles refuse to return,
the Achaeans, in losing their mainstay, would also lose
heart. Nestor knows that Diomedes' nocturnal prowess
will not seriously affect Agamemnon's authority; but he
fears that an Achilles, able to support his ambition by daytime deeds, would disturb again the hierarchy of command. Achilles must be coaxed by something other than
the return of Briseis, something that no longer will allow
him to threaten Agamemnon, nor show up his own pride
as petulance. And that bait is immortal fame.
Nothing more clearly reflects the changed purpose of
the war than the embassy to Achilles. It offers the
Achaeans their best chance to reconcile Achilles with
Agamemnon. If Hector had not made his challenge, the
embassy would have been impossible. Only on this new
basis can the Achaeans hope to persuade Achilles to forget his wrath, and be aroused by a new ambition that affords greater scope to his fury. If Helen has disappeared
as the cause of the war, Briseis should also lose her importance. If the stake is now immortal fame, and the con-
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
flict is indifferent to Menelaus' just complaint, then
Achilles' quarrel with Agamemnon, who as unjustly provoked him as Paris did Menelaus, should be resolved in
favour of this larger issue. An indivisible trophy, inunortal
fame, will replace the division of spoils. What would always lead to disputes, the petty arithmetic of how much
each man is worth, will vanish before a more generous
calculation, whose scales are no longer in the hands of
Agamemnon but of all mankind. The exact weighing of
virtue in the coinage of booty becomes contemptible, and
what is beyond measure, immortal fame, is now set up
as its standard. Achilles is to be lured by honour: he can
forgive Agamemnon because Agamemnon can never
again dishonour him. Merit would be the only guide to
reward, and, in spite of Agmemnon's jealousy, Achilles
would receive his due. Let Agamemnon deprive him of
all material gain: it can only please for a lifetime, and
Achilles in the future will so much the more be recompensed. Achilles' fame lies beyond the touch of envy: if
he can now show himself magnanimous, the authority
of Agamemnon will yield before his own power.
Agamemnon must rely on gifts and bolster his rank by
the arbitrary display of his will, but Achilles can trust in
the present to his might, and to his deeds in the future.
The quibbles on their relative positions among the
Achaeans will not arise in the face of Achilles' future superiority. Agamemnon can irritate Achilles, but Achilles'
revenge is assured. As long as Achilles looks to Agamemnon for satisfaction, no number of gifts can disguise
Agamemnon's false position, nor persuade Achilles to
relinquish his claim to Agamemnon's sceptre; but if he
can only look beyond this temporary injustice, his ascendancy to come his own virtue guarantees. Agamemnon's
sway extends no further than the narrow circle of the
Achaean camp, and his every act of aggrandizement is
bought at the price of a future ignominy; while every accommodation by Achilles to his mean tyranny will only
increase his reputation and add lustre to his name.
Achilles' dangerous ambition, to rule over all the
Achaeans, can be diverted into a safer and more glorious end. To render him harmless as well as more worthy of himself prompts the Achaeans to send the
embassy: that Achilles cannot bring himself to accept their
offer, and that he cherishes more deeply his present humiliation than a lasting fame, all this makes the beginning of his tragedy.
The embassy prayed to Poseidon that they might easily convince the great heart of Aeacides (Mega/as phrenas
Aiakidao) "whom they found pleasing his heart (phrena
terpomenon) with the clear-toned lyre-beautiful it was and
intricately wrought, and it had a silver bridge-he chose
it from the spoils after he had sacked the city of Eetion,
and with it he was pleasing his spirit (thymon eterpen) and
was singing the famous deeds of men" (klea andron). 9
Achilles as Aeacides, as the grandson of Aeacus, sings
the deeds of famous heroes. In taking up the lyre he puts
on his ancestral self: as he finds his pleasure in the past,
he becomes part of the past and loses his present identi'
95
�ty. Excluded from action, he sings of the actions of others;
he consoles his inactivity by rejoicing in others' prowess;
and wrapped up in their past, he lives more by his own
past than by himself. Achilles remained by the ships, and
though "he never visited the ennobling assembly (agoran kydianeiran), nor ever went to war, yet he was destroying his spirit, and kept on longing for the battle-cry
and war. " 10 His self-imposed idleness still chafes him.
His absence from the war has not diminished his desire.
Even the assembly seems a place to win glory: kydianeira
("bringing glory") is used elsewhere only of battle, but
Achilles, now that he is cut off from all action, sees even
in speaking a certain prestige. As he cannot share in
present deeds nor in present counsel, he cannot hope for
a future fame. He is isolated from the present and the
future and so only the past exists as something which cannot be taken from him. He sacked the city of Eetion-no
one can deny it-but the witness to his virtue is this lyre,
which testifies as wen to his failure; for it gave him an
instrument more suited to a blind Demodocus than to an
Achilles. He celebrates the deeds of others, but others
should celebrate his own. The lyre cannot satisfy him,
for he is now forced to please himself instead of having
others please him. His pleasure is in another's fame and
not in his own. Klea andron ("the famous [deeds] of
men") stand one remove from erga andron ("the deeds
of men"); they are the reflection of virtue, not virtue itself; and Achilles, in singing of another Achilles, becomes
the shadow of what he was. In becoming a minstrel, he
has become unwillingly an anthropos; in withdrawing
from the war, he deserts his own character. If martial exce11ence is denied Achilles, he no longer is Achilles, no
longer what he thinks and we think he is. His "name"
depends on his deeds, and he cannot abandon all deeds
without forfeiting himself. In becoming passive, he loses
that which distingoished him: "idleness is the corruption of noble souls. " 11 But it was the very source of his
actions, his megalopsychia ("greatness of soul"}, which
had made him withdraw and betray his former self. And
the tragedy of Achilles lies here: what made Achilles destroyed AchiJJes. As soon as he reflects, he is lost, and he
is bound to reflect, to pick up this lyre, once he stops
fighting. If he ever doubts the worth of what he has been
trained to do, he will destroy himself. Any check to his
outer action will turn aU that force upon himself. His
sword needs an object, and if it is wanting, it will be himself. When the embassy arrives, he is ripe for persuasion.
When Odysseus has enumerated the gifts Achilles will
receive, if he puts off his rage, he te11s Achilles that "even
if Atreides is hateful to your heart-he and his giftstake pity at least on aU the other forlorn Achaeans, who
will honour you like a god: surely you might have great
honour among them, for now you might slay Hector,
who in his murderous lust would come quite near you,
since he says no Danaan, whom the ships brought hither,
is his equal. " 12 Odysseus is quite willing for Achilles to
reject Agamemnon's gifts, but he tries to irritate Achilles
by repeating the boast of Hector, even though Hector did
96
not mention him but Diomedes. 13 Achilles is right to reject Agamemnon's gifts, for though the gifts acknowledge
Agamemnon's need of Achilles, they do not admit
Achilles' superiority. Not only do they gloss over his
cha11enge to Agamemnon's rank, but they aim to restore
Agamemnon's predominance. Agamemnon has put a
price on Achilles' worth; he has calculated his equivalence in terms of so many horses and so much gold, and
were Achilles to accept them, he would be accepting
Agamemnon's estimation of himself. If he is reducible
to a cipher, he must submit to Agamemnon's domination. He would not acquire a greater rank, were he to allow ffiOre" to mean "better"; for then he would
acknowledge Agamemnon's right to settle his worth: but
he had withdrawn his support originally because
Agamemnon had presumed to decide what he could and
could not have. To accept the gifts is to accept Agamemnon's authority; and what is more, to receive seven Lesw
bian women, whom he himself had captured, 14 would
humiliate himself. In giving them to Agamemnon,
Achilles was the arbiter of Agamemnon's worth: in giving them back, Agamemnon would usurp his own position. Were then Achilles to acknowledge Agamemnon''
equation, and confound numerical superiority with natural greatness, 15 his whole attack on Agamemnon's posi·
lion would fail.
Even as the catalogue of ships was intended to confound number with strength, and thus whole peoples an
mentioned who never reappear in battle (for example,
the Rhodians and Arcadians}, so now Agamemnon'•
generosity gives a limit to Achilles' exce11ence, and hall
his promises can never be put to the test. Achilles wil
not live to enjoy the spoils of Troy, nor will he be abl<
to claim Agamemnon's daughter, nor the seven cities below Pylos. Not even if his daughter rivaled Aphrodite ir
beauty and Athena in skill, would Achilles marry her .1'
He could not. Only if he returns now to his father's home.
could he hope to marry; only his withdrawal now woulc
assure him the wealth Agamemnon so vainly promises.
only in Phthia would he live with the ease he carmot hav<
in the future if he stays.
Agamemnon wished to reestablish his position prio1
to Achilles' withdrawal, to forget his injustice so tha
Achilles might forget his weakness, and to reduc<
Achilles' attack on his authority to a mere outburst of tern
per. But once the gap between them has been opened
no appeal, that seeks only to restore Achilles' former sta
tus, can bridge it. Once Achilles has seen how valuabl•
he is, he will never be content with less than complet<
domination. If Achilles had not retired from the war, h•
would have never known if he was as great as he as
sumed, nor would the Trojans have ventured to fight ii
the plain, nor would the Achaeans have built their wall
His wrath freed the war from a static siege, where th•
worth of each hero could never be tested, and turned i
into a precise measure of excellence. Achilles' absenc1
from the field lets Diomedes and Ajax, Hector and Sar
pedon come forward, and make the frame, as it were
11
SUMMER 198
�within which we must see Achilles, when he at last reappears. The random sorties, that had made up so large a
part of the war, 17 have now given way to a full-scale war,
a war for immortal fame. It is this new kind of engagement Achilles is asked, but cannot bring himself, to join;
nor is he asked so much for the sake of Agamemnon (or
Menelaus or Helen) but because of Hector, who can now
become the measure of Achilles' prowess, which no
longer has to be weighed by the amount of booty he
receives. Achilles, however, refuses to consider the war
as changed, but prefers to gloat over Hector's success
rather than accept it as a challenge." He takes for granted what is by no means so certain, that he is better than
Hector .19 He does not see the war as anything other than
what it was. He is indifferent to immortal fame.
Achilles had already protested against the war in the
first book, saying that he had not come to fight because
of the Trojans, who had neither driven off his horses nor
plundered his land, but to obtain redress for Agamemnon and Menelaus." Achilles had been fighting in an
alien war; a war he had joined more out of lack of any
other attraction than out of a deep-seated feeling to see
justice done. He was willing to stay, if his prerogatives
were respected, and if nothing occurred that more affected him. But Agamemnon, in taking away Briseis, had not
only dishonoured Achilles, but also had made Briseis herself more desirable than she was. She may not be worth
fighting over, 21 yet she is the equal of Helen, who could
not be dearer to Menelaus than Briseis to Achilles. 22 If
the Achaeans fight for Helen, he askes the embassy, why
should not he fight for Briseis? If Agamemnon leads so
great an expedition to recover so small a prize, why
should not he desert a war that can bring him no satisfaction, and has already brought him disgrace? As long
as Achilles hammers away at the pettiness of the war,
he is perfectly justified: and yet he fails to see the change
he himself brought about. Achilles is careless of immortal fame. Although he mentions it as a choice his mother
gave him, it does not move him; although his return
means the loss of his fame, he still considers it a possibility. 23 His fame and his return are balanced for him, as
if they were equal alternatives; and they are nicely poised
if one has the chance, like Achilles, to reflect upon them.
He had not at first thought there was an alternative. He
had resigned himself to a short life, 24 but his enforced
idleness made him reflect. To choose immortal fame demands a certain blindness to the pleasures of life, of
which Achilles, in his very minstrelsy, has become aware.
Life seems more worthwhile than a bloodless renown. 25
Achilles, in having no care for the Achaeans, loses all
care for his fame. Their destruction and his ignominy
seem minor losses. He cannot pity them unless his
"name" has greater weight than himself. Achilles believes in the absoluteness of his virtue: it does not need
to be put into action, nor does the opinion of others measure it. He wishes to enjoy his virtue alone, 26 without performance and without regard for others. He does not
need to use his virtue in order to prove himself virtuous.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
What Shakespeare's Odysseus tells him, he does not
believe, 27
That no man is the lord of any thing,
Though in and of him there be much consisting,
Till he communicate his parts to others;
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught,
Till he behold them formed in the applause
Where they're extended; who, like an arch, reverberates
The voice again; or, like a gate of steel
Fronting the sun, receives and renders back
His figure and his heat.
Achilles finds his applause not in earth but in heaven,
where Zeus honours him. When Phoenix warns hinl that
it would be baser (kakion) to defend burning ships than
to receive Agamemnon's presents now,Z8 he replies, "I
think that I am honoured by the will of Zeus" (phroneo
de tetimesthai Dios aise). 29 He can disregard the honour he
would have from the Achaeans, because he has a greater honour from Zeus. Achilles sets Zeus higher than immortal fame. What the Achaeans and Trojans have tried
to escape from, the arbitrary decrees of the gods, Achilles
trusts completely. He does not find them arbitrary, for
they are mere extensions of himself: they are his surrogates. In neglecting human affairs, in thinking he can
decide when to interfere and when not, Achilles is elevated to a god. He despises the promises of Odysseus, that
the Achaeans will honour him like a god, for he believes
that Zeus (his Zeus) has bridged that "likeness," and
transformed it into a complete identity. Achilles is a god.
He wears the ring of Gyges. He does not heed the advice of his mortal father, 30 nor of those who are dearest
to him: Phoenix, Odysseus, and Ajax. 31 He has cut all
his ties with mortality but one. Patroclus is the flaw in
his presumed perfection, and is the silent witness to his
own doom. The true subject of the embassy is not
Agamemnon and his gifts, nor even immortal fame, but
Patroclus.
Achilles is given the cruelest choice: inlmortal fame, but
without the enjoyment of a living renown, or a present
luxury and ease, but without fame. Hector could
challenge Ajax because he knew he would not die 32 Immortal fame was something in the future and not what
would at once ensure his death. Euchenor knew he would
perish if he went to Troy, but he knew as well he would
die of a cruel disease if he stayed at home 33 He chose
the more glorious end, and shunned not a peaceful old
age but a painful death. And Adrastus did not believe
his father, who prophesied his death at Troy. 34 Achilles
is quite different from Adrastus, Hector, or Euchenor. Unlike Adrastus he believes his mother, unlike Hector his
prowess will certainly end in death, and unlike Euchenor
he could enjoy his kingdom. If Achilles were not Achilles,
the choice would never arise, for his wrath lies outside
the will of Zeus, and it was the pause in the fighting
which his wrath afforded that made the decision acute;
but insofar as Achilles is Achilles (that is, virtuous) there
can only be one answer, to elect immortal fame. And yet
Achilles decides too late, when, no longer willingly, he
97
�reenters the war. He is forced by necessity, as he himself admits, 35 and that necessity is Patroclus' death.
Achilles decides not by himself but by another. Patroclus
makes his decision for him. He wanted to be absolute,
but he discovers that it entails the death of his companion. In trying to escape all dependence on other men, he
sends to his death Patroclus. When he at last returns to
the war, he no longer fights for immortal fame, though
he may deceive himself into so believing, 36 but to avenge
Patroclus, and that vengeance is what Phoenix had called
baser and less honourable than acceptance of Agamemnon's gifts. 37 But before we look at this final stage, we
must first look at an absolute Achilles, an Achilles most
clearly revealed in the speech of Phoenix. 38
After Phoenix has pledged his loyalty to Achilles, he
inserts the story of his life most casually. "I would not
wish to be left apart from you," he tells Achilles, "not
even if a god himself would promise to scrape off my old
age and make me a blooming youth again, such as I was
when I first left Hellas, with its beautiful women;" after
which he tells how his mother begged him to sleep with
his father's concubine, and when his father learned of
it, how he cursed him and called upon the Furies to make
his son childless, which, Phoenix adds, "the gods, Zeus
of the dead and Persephone, fulfilled. " 39 Phoenix recites
this as if the mere remembrance of his youth sufficed to
recall his entire past, and yet it retells, though ambiguously, Achilles' own action, and weighs the right and
wrong of his wrath. Achilles bitterly allows Agamemnon,
in spite of his promised oath, to sleep hereafter with
Briseis, 40 and, with that assumed, Phoenix can draw the
parallel between his own story and Achilles'. Phoenix,
insofar as he slept with his father's concubine and was
cursed by Amyntor, and insofar as the curse was fulfilled
by Zeus, is like Agamemnon, who will soon sleep with
Briseis, was cursed by Achilles, the curse to be fulfilled
by Zeus. If the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles
is seen as similar to that between a father and his son,
where, strangely enough, Achilles assumes Amyntor's
and Agamemnon assumes Phoenix' role, we cannot tell
who was right and who wrong; but Phoenix goes on to
say, in lines that Plutarch alone has preserved, 41 that he
considered killing his father, was restrained by one of the
gods, and finally left home and came to Phthia. 42 And
likewise, Agamemnon dishonoured Achilles (by taking
away Briseis), even as Amyntor dishonoured his wife and
son (by having a concubine); and Achilles would have
killed Agamemnon, just as Phoenix would have killed
father, had not Athena restrained him; and again, having withdrawn from the war, he intended to return home.
Phoenix then is also like Achilles. His dishonour, his
wrath, his murderous intent and its check, his escape
from home, all correspond to something in Achilles' own
past. Phoenix has presented a complex story, so that
Achilles may have the best of both roles. As an outraged
father or a dishonoured son, as Amyntor or Phoenix,
Achilles is justified; but Phoenix, by telling it in such an
offhand way, wishes to warn Achilles that his grievance
98
is now past history, that already he has obtained as much
vengeance as could be wished, and that, if he persists,
he will destroy himself. The loyalty of Phoenix to Achilles
should serve as a model for Achilles, of what he owes
to Patroclus: for the gods protected Phoenix in his youth,
but he would not now accept their aid even if they
promised to make him young; just so Achilles, who has
been favoured by Athena and Zeus, should not now look
to them for assistance. Meleager' s story, then, is the condemnation, as Phoenix' own was the justification, of
Achilles. It is introduced expressly as a warning to
Achilles, and as Phoenix had summarized the books before the embassy in his own life, so now he fort ells the
subsequent events of the Iliad in the story of Meleager. 43
The high-spirited Aetolians were defending the city of
Calydon against the Couretes, and as long as Meleager
fought, things went badly for them; but when he became
angry at his mother and stayed at home, the attackers
began to succeed, and the elders of the Aetolians, promising a great gift, beseeched Meleager to return; his father,
mother, and sisters urged him, but only when his wife
Cleopatra recounted how many sorrows befall a captured
city, did he pity the Aetolians and re-enter the war 44 It
is not difficult to see how this corresponds to the plot of
the Iliad, but the most important point, I think, has not
been noticed: the situation is completely reversed.
Meleager is not one of the Couretes but one of the Aetolians; he is not attacking but defending Calydon; and
not his friend but his wife persuades him to forget his
wrath. Meleager is Achilles, the high-spirited Aetolians
are the high-spirited Trojans, and Cleopatra is Patroclus 4 '
Achilles then is a Trojan, and even as Patroclus' namE
is reversed in Cleopatra, 46 so the whole story present'
a mirror-image of the events at Troy. Achilles has become,
in his wrath, an exile; he has turned into an enemy, nol
just an observer, of the Achaeans; he has changed hi'
allegiance and become enrolled as a Trojan ally. He is 2
Trojan outside the walls, a Hector enraged. The Trojan'
could have appealed to Hector, as the Aetolians did tc
Meleager, by recounting the human sorrows that wou!C
attend a captured Troy: 47 but the Achaeans could nol
move Achilles except by pointing to a silent Patroclus
If Hector had withdrawn from the war, and had Priam.
Casandra, Hecuba, and Andromache beseeched him tc
return, Phoenix' story would exactly correspond; bu;
their very absence in Achilles' case lays stress on his iso·
lation, and shows how close he has come to an inhumar
self-sufficiency. Hector could be as much Meleager ae
Achilles is: but he is a civil Achilles, an Achilles who ha•
not lost aidos ("shame"); and yet in all else he resemble•
him, so that this first meeting between them, as it were
in the realm of an old fable, marks the first stage in thei
ultimate identity.
Agamemnon had ended his speech of reconciliatior
thus: "Let Achilles submit-Hades is implacable and un
conquerable, and therefore he is the most hateful of al
the gods to mortals;" 48 and though Odysseus quit<
reasonably omits it when he addresses Achilles, yet h<
SUMMER 198
�replaces it by promising him that he will be honoured like
a god. 49 He somehow suspects Achilles' divine pretensions, and Phoenix more openly, when he urges Achilles
to relent because the gods themselves are not inexorable, ''whose virtue, honour and power are greater,'' numbers Achilles among the gods. 50 Agamemnon and Phoenix try to persuade Achilles by example, and as their
choice of Hades and the gods depends on what they think
would seem convincing to Achilles, we can readily measure his ambition by his refusal. Achilles wants to be absolute: he almost succeeds. He has forced himself into
a posture that can admit (and ask) no quarter. He thinks
himself alone, splendidly alone, and though Patroclus
proves him wrong, his conviction lasts long enough to
seal his doom. As long as he believes in his own uniqueness he is as monstrous as the Cyclops. What is
metaphorically true in the Iliad becomes a fabulous reality in the Odyssey. 51 Both live alone: Polyphemus actually, Achilles by belief. Both cultivate and consult only their
thymos. 52 Both are huge (pelorios): Polyphemus is so huge
that the stone which blocks his cave not even two and
twenty wagons could move; Achilles is so huge that three
Achaeans had to bolt and unbolt the door to his tent. 53
If Polyphemus were killed, Odysseus would never be able
to leave the cave: if Achilles were killed, the Achaeans
would never take Troy. 54 War is like the cave of the
pastoral Cyclops, from which none escape but by the unwilling help of its denizen. Polyphemus must be blinded so that Odysseus may escape, Achilles must lose
Patroclus so that Hector may be killed. Polyphemus
devours the companions of Odysseus, Achilles wishes
his angry strength would allow him to devour Hector 55
Thus Polyphemus is one extreme of Achilles' charter, as
his immortal horses are the other: one the embodiment
of the animal, the other of the thing. Achilles is called
merciless, and he has a merciless heart (nelees etor), and
only Polyphemus is also said to be so neles thymos). 56
Polyphemus is wild and untamed (agrios) so is Achilles. 57
The Cyclopes are lawless (athemistoi), not because they
do not lay down laws each to his own family, but because
they do not have regard for one another, that is, they lack
civil shame. 58 Achilles likewise gives commands among
his followers but has no regard for Agamemnon's
decrees. 59 Polyphemus boasts that he does not pay attention to Zeus: Phoenix warns Achilles that he does not
regard the Litai 60 Polyphemus then is the brute perfection of Achilles, Achilles without weakness, without
Patroclus. He is what Achilles wants to but luckily cannot be. He shows what a monstrosity is bred out of disobedience to order, no matter how arbitrary that order
may seem. He is almost Homer's final verdict on Achilles,
whose disrespect for Agamemnon, though a trifle, unleashed a fury that sweeps Achilles on to his own death.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
Chapter IV
The Deception of Zeus
Achilles acts like a god, but Patroclus makes him forfeit that likeness. Though he suppresses nature, it finally betrays him in the shape of his friend: naturam expelles
furca, tamen usque recurret ("You may expel nature with
a pitchfork, yet it will always return"). His imitation of
immortality cannot last: Patroclus stops it. But the gods
whom Achilles imitates, do they too have their Patroclus?
Are they too subject to a power beyond their art? Homer
gives us his answer in the so-called "deception of Zeus."
When Hera sees Poseidon in disguise urging the
Achaeans to battle, she thinks of a plan to end the war
quickly: to put on a disguise that will deceive Zeus. She
enters her chambers, made by her son Hephaestus, the
lock on whose doors no other god but herself could open,
and adorns herself as artfully as possible.' Then, taking
aside a guileless Aphrodite, Hera begs of her: "Give to
me love and desire, by which you overpower all immortals and mortal men. " 2 Her excuse is that she wishes to
reconcile Oceanus, the "genesis of the gods," and Tethys, who have been at strife with one another, and for
a long time have not slept together, ever since "wrath
fell upon them. " 3 Aphrodite grants her request and gives
her a magical girdle, "wherein there was love and desire
and persuasive speech, that is wont to steal away even
the mind of the prudent." 4 Having put on this girdle,
Hera goes to the brother of Death, Hypnos, the "king
of all gods and all men. " 5 If he will lull to sleep Zeus,
she promises, he will receive a golden throne and a footstool, made by her son Hephaestus. 6 Hypnos at first refuses, protesting that he would even put to sleep
Oceanus-has per genesis pantossi tetuktai ("he who is the
genesis for all")-but not Zeus, unless he himself so
wished it; and reminding Hera how he had deceived Zeus
once before, when Heracles sailed home from Troy, and
had not Night saved him-"queen of gods and of
men" -Zeus would have cast him into the sea? Hera
deprecates his fear: Zeus does not care as much for the
Trojans as he had for Heracles; and she changes her reward: anyone of the Graces shall be his bride. 8 Hypnos
then agrees, if Hera will be willing to swear an oath, 9 and
once she is sworn, he accompanies her to Olympus where
Zeus surveys the Thasians and Mysians.'° Coming into
the presence of Zeus, while Hypnos assumes the shape
of a bird, Hera's beauty dazzles Zeus, and he wishes to
sleep with her at once. 11 Hera, however, "thinking
guile," says it would be shameless to sleep out in the
open, where anyone might see them: would it not be better to retire to her own chamber, which her dear son
99
�Hephaestus had made? 12 At last Hera's plan is discovered: she wished to lure Zeus into her chamber,
whose lock no one but herself could open; and once
locked in, Zeus would have to submit to her terms, and
the Trojan war would come to an end. And yet she cannot persuade Zeus (in spite of her girdle), for his desire
admits of no delay. They sleep together, and "under
them the divine earth sprouted fresh grass, the dewdrenched lotus, the crocus, and the delicate hyacinth.' ' 13
Thus Hera is foiled by nature. Even as Hypnos would
not accept her proposal, as long as she offered him the
throne of Hepaestus, so Zeus' passion outstrips her guile.
She had hoped to enlist natural powers, sleep and desire,
into the services of art: to entice Zeus by the charms of
Aphrodite and hold him by the craft of Hephaestus. She
believed that nature would submit to art, but she ought
to have known, when Hypnos rejected the throne made
by Hephaestus, that art must submit to the passions, that
the superiority of art is ephemeral, and that nature will
always triumph. Thus the deception of Zeus is a failure."
If then Hera fails to deceive Zeus, it is not surprising
(as some have thought it is) that Poseidon does not help
the Achaeans more than before; for Hypnos, who is as
guileless as Aphrodite, did not know what Hera had intended, and, thinking her plan a success, goes of his own
accord to tell Poseidon 15 The Achaeans are entitled to
no more than a short respite. Their leaders succeed in
routing the Trojans, until Zeus awakens and forces
Poseidon to retire from the war . 16
Sleep, Desire, and Night have equal powers over gods
and men, and only Death, the brother of Sleep, is man's
peculiar fate. Mortality distinguishes men from the immortal gods. It makes the gods, who are free from death,
the masters of men. Although they are subject like men
to sleep, desire, and night, yet their immortality grants
them one advantage: they are not forced to be moral. The
gods have the ring of Gyges, which allows them to do
whatever they wish without regard for the consequences.
If they sometimes feel responsible for their charges, they
help them; but if they ignore the heroes, they never pay
for their neglect. If they choose to be as arbitrary as
Achilles, they will never feel as guilty as he, after he has
sent Patroclus to his death. Ares is easily soothed by
Athena when he hears of his son Ascalaphus' death: 17
the revengeful grief of Achilles cannot be solaced. Mortality puts a limit to Achilles' irresponsibility, not only
by checking his aggrandizement but also by forcing him
to admit, that he can lose something more precious than
his own life. His virtue cannot stand alone; for even when
he thinks he is self-sufficient, he relies on the gods; and
this reliance becomes so great that in the end he can do
nothing unless they assist him. Achilles thought he was
closer to Zeus than to Agamemnon, but when Zeus denied his prayer, that Patroclus return alive, he discovered
his ties with anthropoi were stronger than his claim to immortality. When Sarpedon rushed against Patroclus, and
Zeus pitied them both, undecided whether he should
have Sarpedon or not, Hera dissuaded him, and Zeus
100
quite readily resigned himself to the loss of his son;"
while Achilles, who imitated his indifference (as herelied on his protection) could not bring himself to accepl
the death of Patroclus. He feels compassion more strongly
than a god ever can. His natural affections outstrip hi'
self-taught principles. His indifference crumbles. He
comes to see himself as more the son of Peleus than the
son of Thetis, more human than divine. Cyclopeau
Achilles, an automaton of enormity, puts not only himself but all heroes on trial. His experiment in immortality is disastrous, for it depends on a providential world,
a world that the gods must always take care of. Achille'
sums up heroic virtue, and shows that its price is eternal
providence. Pantes de Theon chateus' heroes.
Chapter V
Patroclus
Patroclus was much affecteq by Nestor's appeal, and
as soon as he returned to Achilles, forgetting to repor
what he was charged to find out, 1 begged Achilles to re
enter the war:z
ainarete, ti sea allos onCsetai opsigonos per, ai ke me Argeioisin aeikea loi
mou amoreis? (accursed [or dreadful] in your virtue, how will anothe
even yet to be born have profit from you, if you do not ward of
shameful ruin for the Argives?)
Achilles' virtue is accursed and dreadful, for no one iu
the future (let alone now) will take pleasure in or derive
benefit from it, unless he prevents an unseemly disaster.
Patroclus warns Achilles, as Phoenix had warned him before, that he is gambling away his fame as he holds stubbornly to his virtue. What Nestor had said, that Achille'
would enjoy his virtue alone-oios tes aretes aponesetaiPatroclus takes to mean the loss of immortal fame.
Agamemnon had pleaded with Achilles (through Odysseus) to help Agamemnon; Odysseus on his own accounl
had pleaded with him to help the Achaeans; Phoenix had
pleaded for him to help himself; and Patroclus to helf
posterity. He can be as isolated in the present as he wants,
if he will display toward the future a ghostly beneficence;
but were he to abstain from all action, his untested virtue would deny him all fame. Achilles insists so mud
on immediate honour, to compensate for his early death,
that he ignores the danger of a lasting infamy. He wish·
es to enjoy now, in fact, what posterity can only granl
him in fancy, to gather into the present moment all ol
the future. He cannot balance, against his conscious per·
fection, a promised glory. Although he has threatenec
to leave, he must stay, so that the defeat of the Achaean'
may sustain his intense awareness of his own virtue. In
deed he would even wish for the death of all Achaean'
and Trojans, were he and Patroclus to escape (beini
SUMMER 19E
�neither Achaean nor Trojan), "in order that we might
alone destroy the sacred heights of Troy." 4 He does not
think on the banenness but merely on the self-sufficiency
of such a triumph; which would make him at last the absolute master of his own honour.
When Odysseus reported Achilles' refusal to Agamemnon, he only mentioned Achilles' threat to depart at
dawn, and not his milder answer to Ajax, that he would
not consider "bloody war," before Hector would come
to the ships and tents of the Myrmidons. 5 The parable
of Meleager had made Achilles slightly modify his threat:
but the change is useless. Were Hector to succeed in
breaking through the wall, Achilles' belated action might
save himself, but it would not help the Achaeans, whom
Hector would attack, not on Achilles' flank, but on Ajax'.
Achilles had speciously moderated his stubbornness, so
that he might flatter himself by his own good nature, and
yet remain as adamant as before. As the Achaeans are
given impossible conditions to fulfill, should they wish
to appease Achilles, Achilles can persevere in his own
conceit and at the same time pretend his willingness to
relent. He can compromise without compromising himself. He can regret his obduracy but keep his wrath 6 He
can send out Patroclus, in all righteousness, without his
yielding at all, and can thus ensure his return, which the
Trojans might otherwise hinder, if they set fire to his
ships? He will obtain honour from all the Achaeans, as
well as Briseis and glorious gifts, even though he will not
have submitted to Agamemnon.
Achilles carefully avoids any mention of the embassy,
as he now understands what Phoenix had meant, when
he warned him that to accept Agamemnon's gifts, if the
ships are already burning, would not only be baser but
entail less honour. 8 He now admits what he could not
foresee, that "it is impossible to cherish anger continuou~ly. " 9 But having admitted that, he cannot bring himself to confess his error. He must re-enter the war, and
yet he must maintain the absoluteness of his own virtue,
but not compromise his chance of returning home. And
Patroclus' s request, that he be allowed to put on Achilles'
armour, gives him the almost-perfect solution. He will
not go himself but will send a surrogate, who is the mere
extension of himself. Patroclus will be mistaken for him,
and thus he can rout the Trojans without ever leaving
his tent. But one thing upsets him: suppose Patroclus,
this inanimate toy, suddenly is fired by his own ambitions? Suppose his success will be too brilliant and involve Achilles in a greater dishonour?10 Were Patroclus
to do more than assure the return of Briseis, and either
kill Hector or capture Troy, Achilles would be eclipsed
by the very instrument of his design. Patroclus might become independent of Achilles; he might be able to achieve
what none of the other Achaeans had been able to do,
freedom from Achilles' tyranny. Achilles might find that
his armour was superior to himself, that the weapon and
not its owner guaranteed success, and that his own
renown could accomplish more than his own prowess.
His fears are unfounded: Patroclus does not excel him:
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
but he also fails to return. And his failure to return, the
one flaw in Achilles' scheme, sets the stage for Achilles'
own tragedy.
Patroclus puts on Achilles' armour, but leaves behind
Achilles' spear, which no one could wield except
Achilles." Automedon yokes Xanthus and Balius to the
chariot, and puts between the traces the blameless Pedasus, a horse Achilles had taken when he sacked the city
of Eetion, "who even though mortal followed immortal
horses." 12 A three-horse chariot is elsewhere unknown
to Homer. Why then should Patroclus add a mortal horse,
that at best would be superfluous and at worse a hindrance, to the two immortal horses of Achilles? "Homer
wishes to show us," the BT Scholiast remarks, "the nature of the hero, that it is composed of the mortal and
immortal." Quite true; but why should Homer wish to
insist on such a point now? His meaning goes deeper.
Even as Patroclus is Achilles' one tie to humanity, and
with his death dies Achilles' pity, 13 so Pedasus is
Patroclus, whose death reveals how impossible it is to
yoke together, as Achilles had wished, the rights of divinity with the duties of men. Pedasus is a mere appendage to these inunortal horses, Patroclus is nothing but the
trace-horse of Achilles: but the wounded Pedasus can
more easily be disentangled from his reins than the dead
Patroclus discarded by Achilles. Patroclus was to be only
an extension of Achilles, while his death, though it cuts
him off completely, binds him more closely to Achilles
than he ever was bound in life. Pedasus was a blameless
horse, not only because his excellence ranked him with
Xanthus and Balius but also because he was not responsible for his death; and Patroclus likewise is blameless, 14
his virtue being almost the equal of Achilles' and his
death Achilles' fault. Achilles' share of mortality dies with
Patroclus and Pedasus, and all that remains of him is the
immortality of his horses.
Homer speaks to Patroclus throughout his aristeia, as
if he somehow felt responsible for him and wished to console him for the harshness of his fate. Not his prowess
nor his victories but his ineluctable death enlists Homer's
sympathy: "Whom first, whom last did you kill,
Patroclus, when the gods called you to death?" 15 Homer
had spoken to Menelaus when his life was in danger, or
when he thought his petty triumphs should be celebrated; 16 and it is not accidental that he, who shares so little
in heroic ambition, and Patroclus, who is so little responsible for his fate, should be the two persons whom Homer
most often addresses. The plot involves them, one at the
beginning, the other at the end: but the plot is not their
own doing. Patroclus' death follows so quickly on the
heels of his success, that no one, except Achilles, moves
so much under the spell of doom. And yet the doom of
Achilles is part of his destiny (it is almost self-made);
Patroclus' death is alien to Patroclus and belongs more
to Zeus and Achilles than to himself: so Homer, in calling to him, seems to stand beside him and to be in at the
kill, lest Patroclus, without the gods and without Achilles,
feel himself completely abandoned.
101
�Zeus was undecided whether he should save Sarpedon
or not, and later he could not decide whether Hector
should die: 17 but he had no doubts about Patroclus. The
death of Sarpedon was arbitrary: he could have survived
Patroclus. The death of Hector was in itself unnecessary:
it could have been otherwise. Both are heroes without
a fixed destiny; not everything they do leads to one end;
they can repeat themselves. But Patroclus could not be
reprieved: not because his death arose from an inner
necessity (and in this he resembles Sarpedon and Hector), but because his death was the trigger to Achilles'
death. It foreshadowed another's death, a death that
could not be avoided. It set off another's tragedy. That
no god protests the fate of Patroclus indicates that none
will protest Achilles'.
Chapter VI
Achilles and Patroclus
If Menelaus had always seemed to cut a poor figure,
whether he worsted Paris or volunteered to fight Hector, he more than makes up for it after the death of
Patroclus. His efforts are sustained and his exploits prodigious. He shows as much concern for Patroclus' corpse,
says Homer, as a mother would feel for her first-born
calf. 1 But what is he to Patroclus, or Patroclus to him, that
he should be spurred on to such virtue? He does not act
so much out of some regard for Patroclus, as because he
feels his own interests are at stake. He sees that the war
has re-adopted its original character. As he had gone to
war to avenge the rape of Helen, so Achilles will re-enter
the war to avenge Patroclus' death. A private quarrel will
become once again the main theme of the Iliad. Achilles
will fight for Helen. 2 When Menelaus' love for Helen had
been transmuted into the desire for glory, he had lost his
importance, handing over to others the conduct of the
war;' but as soon as Achilles' love for Patroclus will shape
the rest of the Iliad, Menelaus reassumes, as a sign of
Achilles' return, his abandoned role. Almost spent is the
ambition with which Hector had inspired the heroes,
while the desire for vengeance, which had initiated the
war, returns once again as its cause. The combat of
Achilles against Hector and that of Menelaus against Paris
have more in common with each other than with the contest between Ajax and Hector. They are in earnest, while
Hector and Ajax competed for glory. They are provoked
by hatred, while Hector could exchange gifts with Ajax.
They are the rightful champions of their own cause, while
Ajax was picked by lot and Hector could have been Aeneas. And yet the central part of the Iliad, which dealt
with the love of fame, does affect the struggle between
Achilles and Hector. Achilles is not merely Menelaus nor
is Hector merely Paris, but Achilles unites Menelaus with
Ajax (the personal vengeance of one with the impersonal
102
ambition of the other), while Hector retains the role he
played against Ajax, even though he takes on some fea·
lures of Paris. Ajax and Menelaus join in protecting the
corpse of Patroclus, and thus indicate how the first twc
parts of the Iliad come together in the end. We must no"
see how Achilles puts off his wrath and re-enters the war.
When Achilles had prayed to Zeus, that Patroclus pus!
back the Trojans to the city as well as that he return safe
ly to the ships, Zeus granted the first request and denie<
the second; 4 and this new plan of Zeus', which Theti:
failed to report,S marks the first ruptrue between Achille:
and Zeus. As long as Thetis had told him what Zeus in
tended, Achilles could not fail to believe in his own pow
er; nor, as long as the Trojans continued to triumph
could he doubt the infallible result of his prayers. He i:
indeed pious Achilles. Never had he made a mov•
without the assistance of a god, whether Athena ha<
checked his impulse to kill Agamemnon, or Thetis ha<
answered his appeal for revenge: so he persuaded him
self that they would never desert him, and he could af
ford to dispense with his mother's intervention. H
treated the gods as if they were under his thumb, an<
were as obedient to his whims as he had hoped Agamem
non would be. Achilles, who thought himself the maste1
becomes the slave of the gods. He cannot live withou
them. He must live miraculously.
Patroclus is absent longer than Achilles expected, and
he begins to recall what Thetis had once told him, thai
the best of the Myrmidons would die, while he was stii
living. 6 Although he had known about this prophecy, h<
had forgotten it in his haste to obtain satisfaction, anc
free himself honourably from his own intransigence; anc
since his convenience advised him to ignore it, he sc
much the more easily could plead his forgetfulness. Anc
yet Achilles' memory is a strange mixtrue: he could keef
fresh the injury dealt him by Agamemnon, but he coulc
not remember the fate of Patroclus. Even he is uneasy
uncertain if he dispatched Patroclus in good faith; for ir
repeating now his admonition to Patroclus, he proves hi1
innocence by slightly changing his warning:"! chargee
him to return to the ships," Achilles says to himself
"when once he had averted the baneful fire, (and
charged him as well) not to fight against Hector. " 7 Bu
he had not told Patroclus to avoid Hector. He did forbi<
him to attack Troy, lest Apollo might rout him, but h<
now omits the baser motive which had dictated hi:
concern-his fear that Patroclus might achieve more glm;
and honour than himself8-and substitutes for that th<
pretense that he had warned him about Hector. Indeed
in his prayer to Zeus, he actually referred to Hector a:
Patroclus' opponent: ''In order that even Hector will se<
if our comrade knows how to battle alone. " 9 These an
not the words of someone who can truthfully say h•
warned Patroclus; but they are the words of an Achille:
who deliberately forgot the doom of Patroclus, so tha
his own pride could be appeased. Perhaps "deliberate
ly" is too strong an indictment, but his guilt is there. H
is not innocent of Patroclus' death, nor is he in turn corn
SUMMER 19E
�pletely responsible. He stands, like all tragic heroes, an
ambiguous trial tortured by the doubt of his innocence,
as he protests the consciousness of his guilt. He shares
his guilt with Hector, who is, as it were, his agent; but
he also shares Hector'S innocence, who merely carried
out the will of Zeus. His fury against Hector far exceeds
the fury of an innocent man. He exacts from Hector the
penalty he feels that he himself should pay. He attempts
to drown in the slaughter of Trojans the growing sense
of his own guilt. He expresses both is innocence and his
guilt, his grief at the loss of a friend and his pain at being
his murderer, when he tells his mother, ton apolesa, 10
which can mean "I lost him," as Achilles now intends,
or, what he finally comes to believe it means, "I killed
him." The murder of Patroclus was not Achilles' aim, but
the casual conseq11ence of his wrath. He had delegated
his shadow of himself, dressed in his own armour, to vindicate his honour. He had not so much been desirous for
Patroclus' death as he had been anxious for himself. He
was careless of Patroclus because he was certain of his
success; but his certainty was more a necessary hope to
further himself than. a proved conviction that it would
not harm Patroclus.
As soon as Achilles learns of Patroclus' death, "a black
cloud of grief engulfed him,'' and he throws himself upon
the ground, megas megalosti tanystheis keito ("mightily in
his might, he lay stretched out"), as if he were dead. His
captured slaves surround him and utter cries of lament,
and Antilochus fears he will commit suicide, "severing
his throat with iron. " 11 Achilles' muttered wailings are
heard by his mother who, when all her sisters are
gathered round her, laments the imminent death of her
son, 12
0 moi egO deilC, 0 moi dysaristotokeia
(" Ah me, wretched that I am; ah me unhappy bearer of the best
of men.")
Accompanied by the tearful Nereids, she leaves his
father's cave, and standing near Achilles takes his head
in her hands. It has often been noticed that all of this
scene resembles a funeral, and that it signifies the death
of Achilles." The phrase keito megas megalosti ("he lay
mightily in his might") was used of Cebriones' death, 14
and far from being a blemish was purposely planted there
to explain its occurrence here. Achilles is dead. Keiso megas megalosti ("You lay mightily in your might"),
Agamemnon tells him in Hades, "and your mother came
out of the sea, whom the immortal Nereids followed." 15
Thetis holds Achilles' head just as he will hold the head
of the dead Patroclus, and Andromache, Hecuba and Priam that of Hector. 16 With the death of Patroclus, Achilles
himself dies. ''I honoured him above my companions,''
he tells Thetis, "equal to my own head. " 17 Patroclus is
Achilles' head, and his death has cost Achilles his own. 18
He is now no more than a corpse. He stays alive by the
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
nectar and ambrosia Athena gives him: the very medicine Thetis gives the dead Patroclus and Aphrodite the
dead Hector, so that their bodies might not decay. 19
Achilles' and Hector's ambition, to be immortal and ageless, is finally granted them; they obtain the elixir of immortality,'0 one when he is dead, the other when he
wishes that he were. Achilles belongs to the world of the
dead, and his every action will seem as mechanical as a
somnambulist's, and as ineffectual as a dream.
Achilles is a work of art. He has more affinities with
the golden hounds of Hephaestus than with the natural
elements in his own lineage. His denial of nature is his
constant attempt to break out of mortality. Hence it is only
fitting that the eighteenth book should open with a catalogue of the Nereids and end with the making of his
shield.21 The Nereids represent all that he refuses to acknowledge, the superiority of nature over art; and the
shield proclaims all that he wants to be his, an ordered
and fabricated world. The shield is surrounded by Oceanus, 22 placed at the limits of man's nature, and beyond
which it is impossible to go. Ocean is the only one of the
gods that does not obey Zeus' summons, when he calls
all of them to assemble. 23 He is the only one beyond Zeus'
power. Hera had pretended she could reconcile Ocean
with Tethys, but she never does; Hypnos had pretended he could lull him to sleep, but he never does; and
Achilles pretends that Zeus is stronger than the Achelous,
but he only briefly succeeds.z< Hephaestus conquers the
Xanthus, so that the Olympian gods, who make the
heroic world providential, may dominate the Iliad. The
gods appear on the shield in the city of war, but they are
absent in the city of peace: 25 so it is not by chance that
the gods are less active in the Odyssey, nor that Odysseus travels to the end of Ocean, where Hades is, the absolute end of man. 26 Heroes live in a poetic world, a world
where accident has almost vanished, and everything
takes place according to fate. Providence is chance unblinded. The gods are technai ("arts"}, who correct the
faults of nature: but they are a small part of the whole.
They beautify the whole, and as war is uglier than peace,
they play a greater role in the Iliad than in the Odyssey.
Achilles needs them; without them he is a Cyclops; with
them he just manages to be noble. Achilles dies in Book
Eighteen. He dies when the providential world on which
he depended breaks down; but he is resurrected by art
and goaded on by the gods for the rest of the Iliad. He
cannot help the Achaeans until he is rearmed: the despoiling of Patroclus has stripped himself. He is refitted by
Hephaestus, so that he may take his revenge: but it is
merely a concession of the gods, merely a fiction of
Homer's, merely a sop to Achilles. He becomes a puppet, who performs his ghostly motions by a kind of inertia. The display of his virtue comes too late: he cannot
redeem, no matter how great his slaughter, the virtue he
lost in sending Patroclus to his death. Achilles is Achilles
because he is a warrior, but before he was willing, and
now he is compelled. He has lost his will. "Truly it is
not base," Thetis tells him, "to ward off destruction from
103
�your wearied companions" :27 but it is not noble either.
Achilles becomes a contrivance, a thing, a work of art.
He has lost that greatness of soul which, ironically, he
more displayed in his anger against Agamemnon than
now in his revenge on Hector. He becomes more hateful
to himself than Hades ever was. 28 He becomes his worst
Before Achilles arms himself for battle, he is reconciled
with Agamemnon: but one must not take Agamemnon's
self-humiliation as the vindication of Achilles. Agamemnon can afford to be abject because Achilles cannot now
dispute his authority: he is too busy defending himself
from his own guilt to make any demands on another.
Achilles had compared himself to Heracles, "whom fate
and the cruel anger of Hera conquered, and so even I,
if there is made a like fate for me, shall die. " 29 Achilles
begins here his self-deception. He must omit in his own
case the anger of Hera that was partly the cause of Herades' death; for it was not the wrath of a god but his own
wrath that sealed his fate. He tries to return to where he
was before his wrath, when he was okyrnorotatos allan
("doomed to an early death beyond all others"), 30 and
he had had no doubt that he would die at Troy. His wrath
then became his fate, taking over his external destiny and
making it his own. He brought himself to do through his
own action what fate had planned in advance. He becomes free of fate only to become enslaved to his own
character. Vainly he tries to restore a fateful world, where
he would no longer be responsible. What Agamemnon
does so brazenly in the defense of himself (excusing his
own folly on the grounds of Zeus'), 31 Achilles also does;
but he is more subtle than Agamemnon as his sense of
guilt is much stronger. He wishes that Briseis had
perished when he sacked Lyrnessus,'2 as if Briseis were
to blame and not himself, or as if he could not have found
another pretext for his wrath. He wishes that strife and
anger had perished among gods and men, 33 so that he
would not have been able to err. He shows himself indifferent to the gifts of Agamemnon, 34 as if he had never
cared for honour and was always careless of rewards. He
longs to go to war without eating, as if he had never feasted when the Achaeans were dying. 35 "The Achaeans cannot mourn a corpse with their bellies," Odysseus tells
Achilles, "for too many die day after day, one after the
other: when could one cease from toilsome fasting? But
we must bury him who dies and weep for a day, having
a pitiless heart. " 36 Achilles must have a pitiless heart
(nelea thymon), and Achilles once did have a pitiless heart:
when he had neither fought nor wept for the dead. 37 His
pitiless heart had kept him from the war, and his softened
heart has made him return. When he should have
showed his mildness, he preferred to be hard; when he
should now show his hardness, he must be mild. His
responsibility to Patroclus is too oppressively his own
burden for Patroclus to be numbered among the other
dead. Achilles tries to redeem his innocence by fasting,
as if physical privation would show his inner loss, but
by fasting he only stands condemned.
104
Chapter VII
The Exploits of Achilles
Achilles begins his exploits in the twentieth book, and
Homer addresses him by his father's name, "son of
Peleus," for with his return to the war he becomes like
his father. He takes over again the office which Agamemnon had filled in his absence: the Achaeans now arm
around him as they once were ordered to arm by
Agamemnon.' Achilles now enters the war with eagerness: akoretos, "insatiate," Homer calls him. The Trojans
take fright as soon as they see him, "swift-footed Peleion
ablaze in his armour, equal to mortal-destroying Ares. " 2
His virtue, his patronymic and appearance are enough
to warrant a simile, that also the presence of the gods
justifies. 3 He is known to the Trojans as the son of Peleus
(by his father's name) and as swift-footed (by his special
virtue). Apollo urges Aeneias to confront him, calling him
simply 'Peleides Achilles" ;4 but Aeneias will not venturE
forth, as he knows exactly what Peleides Achilles implies:
he does not wish to fight against "over-spirited Peleion,"
nor stand his ground, as he once did, before ''swift-footec
Achilles. " 5 Even as Achilles to him means violent anger,
so "swift-footed" means the son of Peleus 6 His swift·
ness is an inherited virtue, his anger his own: Aeneiaf
can resist neither.
Aeneias Anchisiades meets divine Achilles. 7 Anchises.
who mated with Aphrodite, begot Aeneias; Achilles i1
divine, an epithet that suggests his genealogy; for at one<
it is "Peleides" who stands before plain Aeneias; but th<
son of Peleus, after a simile, becomes Achilles once more,
who threatens Aeneias with his power: he speaks to hin
as divine and as swift-footed, in his lineage and virtoe.
Aeneias is unimpressed, "great-hearted" as he is, 10 an<
before launching a recital of his own lineage, calls hin
Peleides, which he inunediately retracts, saying, "they sa:
you are the son of Peleus and Thetis, but I boast to be th
son of Anchises and my mother is Aphrodite. " 11 Th
doubt that he raises about Achilles' parentage contrast
with the certainty he has of his own; and yet he puts fm
ward a tedious lineage as a shield against Achilles' su
periority, hoping to find in his past a counterweight t'
Achilles' present greatness.U
Aeneias hurls his javelin, Achilles holds up his shiel'
in fear: he fears as "Peleides" the spear of "great-hearte,
Aeneias," but as soon as he recovers his own spirit an
hurls back a spear, he becomes once again Achilles." An
as Achilles he rushes at Aeneias shouting dreadfully, bt
as "Peleides" he would have killed him, had nc
Poseidon pitied Aeneias and come to where he and"£<
mous Achilles" were standing." He sends down a mil
over the eyes of Peleides Achilles, for as the son of h
father he would have killed Aeneias, but when Poseido
scatters the mist, he turns into plain Achilles; 15 wh
speaks to his "great-hearted spirit" and decides to rail
the "Danaans lovers of war. " 16 Achilles was the first t
SUMMER 19:
�f' 'lovers of war'') in speaking of ~he Myr<illiidons ;ami! Tw,ijans, and only after that do Hector, Ly<llll>n, ""'d Hmmer employ it: Lycaon when he beseeches
Achilles, Homer when he either thinks of Achilles or
Achilles is almut to speak. 17 It is, like megathymoi Achaioi18
'('"ihigh-;Sjplirited Achaeans"), an epithet that depends solely•onAdlnilles' presence, or that applies to no one unless
:fhrey.,.,.,omehow transformed by Achilles, and become
wellle~;-. ·of him.
Hedter <encourages the "over-spirited Trojans to face
""!Relerom:·'' 19 Oruy if he recalls them to their highest ex•Geil!:ellllle,, - d degrades Achilles to his lowest, patronymic iidiOI!l!tiiiy, 'Will bis illlnetoric carry conviction. As the son
·l>if lb.iis Jliaitimer Adhililes <can be approached, for., Achilles"
he :says mill not ifull£llll!Ms boasts, but fail in lb.alf of what
he ~""'"-' 0 iNfotJI'Il'lkiides Achilles, as it w.,.-e, with all
hl!;~, hu!tlhra:lf®'f Achilles, the weakren-, ancestral
Jha]U,, l:lledm pmnniises tro ifight. Apollo, how<eover, disagrees,, and reminJlliimlg IE!ector of plain Achillles, who is
what lb.e tlb.lnks he iis, furbids him to meet Mrilles. 21
Achilles &en, shO!Iili!mg meadfully, engages Ephition,
whom he kills and boasts l()lWt6f as "divine.' . .n Next he
goes after "godlike l'olydol1lli.S'"' who "surpassed all the
youth in swiftness": Achi!l!es lllhterefore kills him in the
capacity of "swift-footed diviilme Achilles. " 23
Achilles becomes more and JIWl)re furious: he kiills ten
heroes one after the other (in t:birty-five lines), at~d yet
his name is never mentioned. 24 1:11iEwe Homer passes judgment on him: 25
11l1Se pkil~pto!mnoi
ou gar ti glycythymos aner en oud' agaiWJdlrwOn
("for not at all sweet-tempered nor gende.of mood was the man")
He is not "sweet-tempered" but "high-spirited," he is
not mild but pitiless. He loses his name in his fury: he
is like fire: he is equal to a god. 26 He goes through blood
as "high-spirited Achilles," and desires to obtain honour
in his father's name. 27
Achilles continues to destroy the Trojans. He drives
them into the river Scamander, and jumps in after them
"equal to a god:" he is "the Zeus-born" (ho diogenes),
inhuman and nameless. 28 His name returns: "divine
Achilles came on Lycaon as an unforeseen evil. '' 29 He observes Lycaon as swift-footed and divine, expecting him
to flee; but Lycaon stands still, so Achilles, not having
to pursue him, drops "swift-footed" and raises his spear
to kill him as "divine;" 30 and then Lycaon beseeches him,
and Achilles replies "unsweetly" and kills him as plain
Achilles. 31
The river-god Xanthus wishes to stop "divine
Achilles, 32 but the son of Peleus jumps on Asteropaeus,
despising his lineage and boasting his own. 33 Asteropaeus
is as frightened as Aeneias was: he calls him "highspirited Peleides-" He avoids the spear of Achilles and
tries to remove it from the river-bank in which it is lodged:
thrice he tries and fails to budge it-the spear of
Achilles-but on the fourth try, his last, it is the spear
of Aeacides, the spear no one but Achilles could wield. 35
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
A:s "Peleides" he slays seven heroes, but as "swift
Achilles," !by pursuing them, he would have slain more,
had noUhe:Xanthus begged him to fightelsewhere. 36 He
oont~usly ignores the river, though he pretends he
will obey it, and rushes <~gainst the Trojans "equal to a
.god;;"'"'7 a:mt as soon as the:Xanthus has reproached Apollo
fm his neglect of the Trojans, Achilles as "spearrenrnwned" pursues them. 38 The river, "a great god,"
swa:Nrows up Achilles in its stream, and "Peleides"
l'i'fu'eats, and as "swift-footed, divine'' he flees. 39 In blamillmg his mother for his present setback, he looks to heaven
"" the son of Peleus, and as such Poseidon encourages
;hJim;40
Wlhen il'riam looks out over the plain of Troy, he sees
Peleides. " 41 He is afraid lest Achilles jump
ower t:be wall, and he calls him that "pernicious, baleful
m;m'" (mKilms aner). 42 Oulos is used of Alles, of fate, and
of fire, bul nowhere directly of anyone mortal except
Achilles. 43 JHiector, it is tme, is compared to a baleful star,
or a deadly liire, or a muderous lion (oulios aster, oloon pyr
leOn o!oophron},44 but again, Achilles really is what Hector only seems to be. He is the end of Hector's ambition.
Achilles conditions the use of oulos, for in almost half of
its instances it is either said by him, or of him, or to him.
The formula epi geraos oudOi ("on the threshold of old
age"), for example occurs in Homer five times, but only
once, when Priam addresses Achilles, does it become
olooi epi geraos oUJliji, "the baleful threshold of old age. " 45
Priam calls Achilles oulos aner, that anonymous man, and
often in the last books he is merely "that man": deios
("hostile"), atasthalos ("ruthless"), omestes (" savage") 46
After Homer reveals that the Achaeans would have captured Troy, had not Apollo encouraged Agenor to resist
Achilles, Agenor sees him as "Achilles the sacker of cities."47 Achilles is "sacker of cities" not so much by the
cities he has taken, 48 but rather by the Troy he hopes to
take. His success has been anticipated in a simile: "As
when smoke rises into the broad heavens from a burning city, and the wrath of the gods set it afire, and made
toil for all and imposed cares upon many, so Achilles
made toil and cares for the Trojans." 49 Achilles is the
smoke, which foretells the end of Troy, even as he is like
the wrath of the gods (who now look down on the scene)
that sets the torch to Troy. 50 !f we look back over the similes of Achilles, this one belongs to them as the last in
a series. He was, at the beginning of his exploits, first
like Ares and then like a lion, his divine and natural
aspects alternately displayed; and again he became like
a god, but instead of returning to an animal identity, he
foreshadowed Hephaestus' help and seemed equal to
fire; after which he once more was a god and fire (they
now coalesced); and again he became like a god but then
returned to the animal world in the shape of a dolphin,
for he plunges into the Scamander to pursue the Trojans;
afterwards he was a god and an eagle as he fled the river
and again the Scamander itself compared him to the gods,
while as soon as the river subsided, he reunited fire with
divinity, resembling both the smoke of a city and the
"llllWlllSI:rouS
105
�wrath of the gods. 51 As Achilles conquers Troy in a simile, so the g<>ds dispute later "about Hector the corpse
and Achilles the sacker of cities, " 52 for Hector alone made
the city stand, and after his death the Trojans weep as
if "all Ilium were already smouldering." 53 Although
Achilles, by killing Hector, becomes ptoliporthos ("waster
of cities"}, it is nothing but poetic license that grants it,
which leaves him as ineffective in action as he was before in his absence.
We have traced the action and the epithets of Achilles
up to his encounter with Hector, trying to show how in
these last books the epithets become more striking, exact, and horrible, while his conventional epithets tend to
diminish; how the anonymity of Achilles is stressed more
and more, until his patronymic almost disappears in the
end; 54 how, in short, he has prepared himself for his battle with Hector.
Chapter VIII
Achilles and Hector
Hector is a civil Achilles. Respect for those weaker than
himself dominates everything he does. His mother and
father cannot persuade him to avoid Achilles, ashamed,
as he is, lest someone baser than himself might say, "Hector, trusting to his strength, destroyed his people." 1 He
is like Menelaus who, when he saw Hector advancing
towards him, wished to flee but feared the reproach of
the Achaeans, if he should abandon Patroclus who died
for his honour. 2 If Menelaus had resisted singly the Trojans, he would have done so out of shame, but, unlike
Hector, he reasoned it away, thinking that no one could
blame him, were he unwilling to fight against a godfavoured man. Hector is held by shame. He fears more
keenly the scorn of Troy's citizens than Menelaus the
scorn of the camp. His fear of others, not any inner restraint, makes Hector stand up to Achilles.' He had given
to And"omache, when she foreboded his death, two reasons why he must continue to fight: his shame and his
spirit' Even as now he felt shame then, but his high
spirit, which had been trained to be brave, no longer is
present. He is forced on by a necessity as great as
Achilles' that has nothing to do with virtue. He hoped
to kill Ajax and thus acquire immortal fame: now he is
content to die famously before Troy.' He is concerned
more with his own renown than with the fate of his people: his sense of shame has placed him above shame, and
made him disregard any interest but his own. Although
he cares more for Andromache than for the rest of Troy,
he prefers to act rashly than to save even her: 6 for to maintain his own self-esteem exceeds all other cares. In this
respect he resembles Achilles, who had cherished his
anger, though it meant death to the Achaeans, and now
belatedly defends them for the sake of Patroclus.
Hector to Andromache was everything: father and
106
mother, brother and husband. 7 Achilles was everythin
to Patroclus: he compared himself to a mother an
Patroclus to his daughter; he will be compared to a fath<
who burns the bones of his son; and Apollo will be ir
dignant that he shows more care for Patroclus than me
do for a brother. 8 And yet in spite of their responsibil
ties, both Hector and Achilles shirk them. Hector has bt
come an alien because of his shame, Achilles was isolate
from the Achaeans out of shamelessness.' Both are drive
to a combat each had sought to avoid. Achilles' vain ei
fort to re-establish his honour corresponds to Hector'
attempt to correct his mistake: as if Achilles could balanc
the death of Hector against the loss of Patroclus, and He<
tor, in clinging to his civil shame, could maintain hi
renown. At the cost of Troy's fall he preserves his sham<
He abandons Troy. And Achilles, in reacquiring his mru
tial spirit, loses his virtue. Each has made his own exce
lence contradict itself. In his desire to be the perfect here
each has ceased to be a hero at all.
Hector wonders if he could escape Achilles' fury, wer
he to offer him the return of Helen and all the wealth Pari
had taken with her; but he cuts himself short in so idl
a hope by saying, "There is no time now to chatter wit
him from oak and from rock, like a youth and a mak
as a youth and a maid chat with one another." 10 To whil
away the time (so neatly expressed in the epanalepsi'
a youth and a maid may beguile each other with the1
talk of fabulous origins and "old stories": 11 but Hectc
must resolve his dispute with Achilles as quickly as pm
sible, and were he to offer Helen back, who was the arcli
and origin of the war, 13 he would be guilty of a gros
anachronism. Patroclus' death is the cause of Achille'
reappearance, while Helen's bigamy has become a
mythical as a lineage from oak and from rock. The desir
for immortal fame had already discarded Helen, an
though that desire is by now less vehement, she does nc
reassume her former role. She has been replaced b
Patroclus. An obsolete Helen cannot appease a reveng<
ful Achilles, not even if he himself pretends that he fight
in a foreign land for her sake. 14 She had been unsucceS>
ful in settling the war, when the certainty of Troy's Caf
ture inspired the Achaeans;15 and she is no mor
successful now, as Achilles seeks his revenge for him wh
can never be restored.
Achilles pursues Hector round the walls of Troy, an
though he is swift-footed, he cannot overtake him: "A
in a dream one cannot pursue him who flees, and neith<
is one able to elude nor the other to pursue, so Achille
was unable to catch Hector nor Hector to escape. " 16 The
belong to a dream's endless pursuit, where the pursm
cannot catch the pursued, nor the pursued escape th
pursuer. Achilles' swiftness, which his epithet podiiki
("swift-footed") had promised, is in the act belied. H
does not measure up to his notices. His most outstanc
ing virtue, by which he excelled Ajax (his closest rival i
perfection}, is put to the test and found wanting. An
Hector, who thought that his encounter with Achill<
would be more decisive than the dalliance of a youth an
SUMMER 19:
�a maid, prolongs it as long as he can. Just as they make
a circuit of the wall three times, so in their shared dream
they thrice cannot elude one another. But the dream is
more real than their combat, for Hector's death is supernatural. Were it not that Apollo deserts him and Athena
deceives him, Hector would have continued to outdistance Achilles. His death is contrived. It satisfies
Achilles' revenge, it bolsters his prestige, it puts together
out of the scraps of his virtue a final victory. He does not
prove himself superior to Hector, but only proves that
the gods surpass both. What was to demonstrate his excellence merely shows up his weakness. Patroclus' death
was necessary for Achilles to realize his guilt; Hector's
death is necessary to make a fitting end. Homer ennobles Achilles as much as he can, and after his real death
in the eighteenth book, allows this armoured shell to become human again.
When Hector asks Achilles to respect his corpse, even
as he would give back Achilles' were he to die, Achilles
savagely replies: "As there can be no trusted oaths between lions and men, nor are wolves and sheep of one
heart in their spirit, but ever think evil of one another,
so you and I cannot be friends. " 17 Heroes had often been
compared to either lions and wolves, or men and sheep:
but it had always been a momentary likeness and not a
permanent condition. The similes had been the comments
of Homer, and not what the heroes thought of themselves. The accidental difference between man and man
had been expressed by the natural antagonisms among
animals: but it had never been elevated to a rule. Achilles
is quite willing to let Hector be a man, and assume for
himself the role of a lion. 18 He does not intend it as a
chance identity, but as nicely expressive of his lasting
hatred. He wishes that his fury and strength would allow him to devour Hector, 19 as if a simile to him were
but an optative, and to be a beast his ultimate ambition.
Hector at his death wears the arms of Achilles, 20 which
Patroclus had worn to deceive the Trojans, so that they
would mistake himself for Achilles; 21 and they were
tricked enough to grant the Achaeans a short respite,
while they themselves were forced back to the city. 22 Hector, then, in wearing these arms, partly resembles
Achilles. 23 He resembles him as much as Patroclus ever
did. He faces Achilles in the guise of Patroclus, who, as
the image of Achilles, had gone to war, and now returns
to confront him as Hector. Hector is what Patroclus had
seemed to be before his death: a mere extension of
Achilles. As Patroclus' death made him an individual and
not just a lesser Achilles, so the death of Hector stresses
the difference between arms and the man. He must be
killed where Achilles' armour does not cover him: where
the quickest death for a man happens to be: 24 where
Achilles can see most clearly his own flaw. Hector is
· almost panchalkeos ("all made of bronze")," almost a
thing, almost Achilles. He shares with Achilles the murder of Patroclus, and with Patroclus a likeness to Achilles.
Thus Patroclus is the means to the final identity of
Achilles and Hector.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Chapter IX
The Funeral Games
After the death of Hector, Achilles triumphantly ends
his speech with a paean, which includes all the Achaeans
in his own success: ''We have slain divine Hector, whom
the Trojans prayed to as a god. " 1 Although he slew Hector by himself (if we omit Athena's assistance), 2 and had
forbidden anyone else to attack Hector, lest he might
come second in the kill, 3 he feels for an instant no longer
isolated, and is quite willing to share his greatness with
the other Achaeans. If he can only be numbered among
them, they may take part credit in his victory. His slaughter of Trojans has restored his generosity and given him
once more a good opinion of himself. He so far forgets
his grief in the display of his prowess, that he wants to
press his advantage, 4 as if he had resumed the war to
gratify the Achaeans, and not to avenge Patroclus' death.
The war almost regains it lost purpose-the destruction
of Troy-and Patroclus almost becomes as superfluous
as Helen-nothing but an irritant to immortal fame-until
Achilles checks himself and remembers his guilt, "unwept, unburied Patroclus. " 5 He cannot shake off
Patroclus as the Achaeans ignored Helen, nor can
Patroclus be converted as Helen was into some higher
end. He must always remain a private sorrow. Achilles
must cling to Patroclus as to himself; he can no more
abandon him than himself; he must always remember the
crime he has done. Torn between his reacquired virtue
and his festering guilt, he cannot quite hold on to his new
status, nor slough off completely his former isolation. As
he has been galvanized into action by the death of
Patroclus, he must keep himself alive by continuous performance. To make amends to Patroclus, he abuses Hector, 6 for it is the only action he can do that does not betray
Patroclus (by starting a spiral of ever-greater aggrandizement); but the longer he prolongs this mechanical
savagery, the more withdrawn he becomes, and, instead
of allaying his guilt, he only increases his remorse.
Weariness at last overcomes Achilles, and he falls asleep
on the shore, only to be awakened by the ghost of
Patroclus, who complains that he now neglects and has
forgotten him.' Achilles then, promising Patroclus to bury
his bones with his own, stretches out his hand to embrace him; but Patroclus like smoke eludes his grasp, and
Achilles, astonished as by a revelation, cries out:'
e ra ti esti kai ein Aidao domoisi
psyche kai eidOlon, atar phrenes ouk eni tampan
0 popoi
Alas! Even in the house of Hades the soul and image are something,
but there are not at all phrenes.
The psyche is something after death, but there are no
phrenes at all. 9 Death is the loss of phrenes: the powerlessness to fulfill what one desires. Patroclus cannot clasp
Achilles' hand, for though his ghost looks exactly like his
107
�living self (in height and in features, in voice and in
clothes), 10 he can only gibber and vanish like smoke. Yet
his failure is no different from Achilles', who cannot
abuse Hector's corpse. He threatens to give Hector to the
dogs, but Aphrodite protects him, anointed with ambrosial oil, and Apollo covers him with a cloud, lest the sun
dry him. 11 No matter how much Achilles tries to humiliate Hector, he only succeeds in humiliating himself. He
is as ineffectual as the dead Patroclus, and as paralyzed
now in his action as he was before when he refused to
fight. He had thought that it was his psyche that he risked
whenever he went into battle-aiei emen psychen paraballomenos polemizein ("always risking my psyche in fighting"),12 but now he knows his psyche would have
survived his death, while his phrenes have disappeared
in his ineffectiveness. 13
Achilles tries to burn Patroclus, but the pyre will not
light; and though he prays to Boreas and Zephyrus and
promises them sacrifices, they do not hear him. Iris must
go in person to the winds, begging them to heed Achilles'
summons, and only then do they came and fan to a blaze
the pyre .14 What should happen as a matter of course
must now happen by the gods. Achilles cannot even start
a fire without divine intervention. He has become so isolated from the ordinary world that only the gods can keep
him going. The Trojans have no trouble in burning Hector; but Patroclus' s death, having broken Achilles' last
tie with man, brings about his break with the world. He
is a breach in the world. He belongs now completely to
another region, where every action must be managed by
the gods. If the winds had answered his appeal by themselves, if Iris did not have to plead for him, the scene
would have shown Achilles' hold over them. But they
do not respond; they are indifferent, as Iris is not, to his
grief. The isolation of Achilles is in this chain of command: he cannot start a fire directly, nor can he enlist
the winds in his cause: Iris must intervene. Even as the
gods gave him ambrosia and nectar, so that he could
demonstrate his virtue, so now the winds must sustain
his simplest desire. They are like the knocking at the gate
in Macbeth: they serve to recall the humdrum world, from
which we, in our sympathy with Achilles, have been
slowly removed. The winds seem rather comical, as they
sit at their feast: but it is we, who have fasted with
Achilles and seen the world through his eyes, that have
become tragic. We have come to expect failure: that the
corpse of Hector should not decompose, and that fire
should not burn. Cause and effect, will and act, have been
split apart, and only the gods hold them together.
When the pyre has been quenched and the bones of
Patroclus collected, Achilles sets up a series of games in
honour of Patroclus; but Achilles himself does not participate. He stands apart and distributes prizes. He says
his horses are the best, but he cannot prove it. 15 He says
he would take the first prize, if he competed; but he cannot put his boast to the test. He is the swiftest of heroes,
but he could not overtake Hector, nor can he now excel
Odysseus and Oilean Ajax. His virtues are as idle now
108
as they were at the beginning. They hold a promise th<
is never fulfilled. He obtains the epithet "swift-footed'
more often in this book, when he can do nothing wit
it, than anywhere else. 16 Only here is he called "hero,"
and his patronymic, which had tended to disappear dru
ing his exploits, again becomes frequent, for he regair
somewhat his former honour. He sees reviewed befor
him all of the virtues he himself once had, just as he sa1
in the catalogue of ships all the glory he squanderec
Homer had listed him in the catalogue, even though h
played there no role; and he assigns him here the tas
of offering prizes to others, since he cannot win a priz
for himself. He is no more a part of the games than 11
was a member of Agamemnon's host. He is as isolate
at the end as he was at the start; there by the paralys
of anger, here by the paralysis of guilt. Though his m
thority has never been greater, all his power is gone. H
has reversed roles with Agamemnon, whose power t
now acknowledges and whose authority is now his owr
He gives Agamemnon the first prize, without proof, i
the casting of fue spear. "We know how much you exo
us all and are the best in power and in spear. " 18 AchillE
had insisted before that he was fue best, and thi
Agamemnon had only usurped that title;" but now t
piously grants Agamemnon more than we ourselvE
would admit. As Agamemnon is best in the catalogue,
so is he best in the games; and as it was the fiat of Homo
and of Zeus that made him there outstanding, so it is tl
fiat of Achilles here that lends him prestige. Not only do<
Achilles abandon all his pretensions to rule, but he lear
over backwards to en11ance Agamemnon. He heaps upc
him all of his own ambitions and makes him as power£
and as absolute as he himself once was. And yet, in n
letting Agamemnon prove himself, he hints at his re
weakness and his own generosity.
Among the games Achilles set up was discus-throwin
and the discus itself was the prize, a mass of iron whi<
he had taken from the sacred city of Eetion. 21 There wou
be nothing remarkable in this, if we did not rememb
the other objects that came from there: the blamele
horse Pedasus, the lyre with which Achilles pleased 11
heart, Hector's wife Andromache, and the concubine
Agamemnon, Cryseis. 22 The return of Cryseis provokE
Agamemnon and led to his taking Briseis, who came fro
Lyrnessus near Thebe (the city of Eetion); 23 Andromach
the wife of his enemy, stood for Patroclus in the sto
of Phoenix; the lyre showed up Achilles' inaction and tl
wasting of his virtue; 24 the deafu of Pedasus, as that
Patroclus, was the death of the mortal Achilles; 25 and tl
mass of iron, which he may not toss, stresses aga
Achilles' idleness. Thus the city of Eetion is Achilles' ci
of failure. On that expedition which showed Achilles
his best, he captured the implements that now reveal t
defects. He must even in war, while he proves hims•
virtuous, collect the symbols of his future doom. He
never apart from his destiny: the seeds of his wrath, l
isolation, and his guilt were contained in the eviden
of his prowess. His casual acquisitions, which were t
SUMMER 1'
�spoils of war, instigate his wrath (Chryseis and Briseis),
recall his unpractised virtue (the lyre and the discus), and
destroy his humanity (Pedasus and Andromache). What
should have confirmed his excellence signify instead his
tragedy.
Chapter X
Achilles and Priam
Achilles cannot sleep after the funeral games, where
he has seen every kind of excellence that was once his
own boast, and he remembers Patroclus, "for whose
manhood and strength he longs. " 1 The loss he sustained
in the death of Patroclus is made more poignant by the
"manhood and strength" that the other Achaeans have
just displayed; who mock Achilles' present ineffectiveness, since he has only the memory of his past actions
to measure against them. Unlike Odysseus who gladly
forgets his toil as he sails homeward, Achilles must now
regret that all his bravery is over. 2 His self-inflicted grief
does not allow him respite: he must always go over again
the irrevocable past. As the recalling of what he was is
its empty iteration, so his dragging of Hector's corpse is
vainly repeated, for he can no more restore Patroclus by
his memory, than he can disgrace Hector by dragging.'
Apollo protects Hector even as Aphrodite had before, and
since they keep him beautiful, they deprive Achilles of
everything but the semblance of action.
All the gods who favour the Trojans pity Hector, and
urge Hermes to steal his corpse; but Hera, Athena, and
Poseidon object because of their old hatred of Troy.' No
longer are Achilles and Hector central, but the war has
become once again a mere feud among the gods. The
wrath of Achilles was an interlude in the Trojan war: it
suspended its first cause-Paris and Helen-and allowed
the heroes a greater scope to their ambitions; but now
that Achilles has almost worked out his tragedy, the war
returns to its origins. He has become as superfluous as
Helen once was. Yet Homer makes this heavenly dispute
his own final indictment of Achilles. Were Hermes to steal
Hector's corpse, Achilles would never become human.
He would be left to rot in his savage isolation, without
ever understanding his dependence on the gods and
other men. He would have been like Sophocles' Ajax,
had not Athena intervened and saved him from himself;
for it is she who in diverting his fury away from the Atreidae, makes him realize the enormity of his crime. If Ajax
had killed them, he would never have killed himself, and
thus asserted his claim to greatness. He would have rejoiced in the slaughter, as we see him doing, and he
would have been killed by the Achaeans, without reacquiring the honour he deserves. Suicide is the one reflective action of Ajax which shows us his virtue stripped of
rewards. So Achilles, were Hector to disappear like Paris,
would never be forced to give him back to Priam, by
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
which show of maganimity he is admitted into the family of men. To feel shame once again, to pity someone
weaker than himself, redeems Achilles, so that he can
eat, sleep, and even lie down beside Briseis. 5
Although Ajax obtained a posthumous triumph by his
own hand, and Achilles is truly noble as he confronts Priam, yet we must never forget that Athena alone made
Ajax' suicide possible, and that Zeus alone brought about
Achilles' vindication. That they both follow the prompting of the gods, when they could have resisted, is at once
a proof of their greatness and of their insufficiency. The
gods make the heroic world inhabitable. Had they not
stopped Achilles, he would have continued his senseless
dragging of Hector. He would never have escaped from
his monstrous impotence. Had Hera prevailed, and her
distinction between Hector and Achilles been accepted
(that a mortal is less than the offspring of a god), 6 Achilles
would never have realized his own humanity. Achilles
is as mortal as Hector, and his divine parentage allows
him no more irresponsibility toward men than a mortal
parentage allows Hector to betray Troy. If Hector's excess of shame, in putting his own renown before Troy's
safety, destroyed him, so Achilles is no different by his
lack of shame, which also destroys him. Achilles' honour
might be more than Hector's/ but his fate is the same.
If Hector only seemed to be the son of a god,' while
Achilles is half-divine, yet they both share a common
death. If two men equally desire immortality, but one has
the edge in the means to obtain it, he still is no different
from the other. As long as the gap between the gods and
men remains open (and if they are to be distinguished,
it must be so), no matter how similar to them a man may
seem, the distinction is fatal. Hector's funeral can end
the Iliad, and the scene be a purely Trojan affair, since
the difference between a divine and a mortal lineage, like
that between Achaean and Trojan, has at last disappeared. In losing his divine status and in gaining a civil
shame, Achilles becomes the image of Hector, whose
funeral can represent his own.
·
Priam decides to reclaim his son, after Iris has urged
him in the name of Zeus, and his friends escort him as
far as the plain, "with great lamentations, as if he were
going to his death. " 9 Zeus then sends Hermes to conduct him to Achilles' ships, so that no one might see him,
"before he comes to Peleion." If we remember that
Hermes is the conductor of the dead,'0 it is not strange
that he should be Priam's guide. Achilles died when he
heard of Patroclus' death, and was miraculously revived
in order to have his revenge; 11 but now that he has
finished his work, he belongs once again to Hades 12 With
the coming of night, Hermes leads Priam to Hades, where
a ghostly Achilles was as unable to harm Hector as
Sisyphus to roll his stone up the hill. His paralysis is the
price of his guilt, which he cannot expiate no matter how
long he may weep. His every action is timeless, for it has
no end. What he says of grief, that there is no effect nor
action in it, 13 is equally true of his guilt, which holds him
in Hades, where causes have no consequence and desires
109
�lack fulfillment. "For how long do you devour your
heart," Thetis asked her son, who, in abandoning his
wish to devour J7Iector, has turned upon himself. 14 He
becomes his sole object. He no longer has anything beyond himself, on which he can vent his fury, but must
always be reminded, and yet remain always unsated, by
the past-the bones of Patroclus and the body of Hector.
His grief alternates with his guilt, abusing Hector or
devouring himself. He can never escape from his own
hell.
In order to stress the unreality that surrounds Achilles,
Homer makes as real as possible the scenes at Troy. He
reports all the speeches at Troy-what Iris said to Priam,
what Priam to Hecuba and Hecuba to him-while he
makes Achilles in two lines agree to return Hector's
corpse; and though "mother and son in the throng of
ships spoke many winged words to one another," we
do not know what they said. 15 This silence conveys more
effectively than his words could have done the isolation
of Achilles. It allows us to imagine the magnitude of his
grief and prevents us from underestimating it. Its vagueness makes it more precise. At Troy, however, Homer
minutely describes how they harnessed a wagon to bring
Hector back; and if, for all its exactness, it has never yet
been fully explained,'' at least it stamps Priam's setting
forth as vivid and real, so that the tent of Achilles, which
has as many rooms as a palace, may seem the more insubstantial. Its huge doors, which require three men to
open and three to close, do not belong to the same world
as that of this wagon; 17 for it reflects the loneliness of
Achilles' guilt and the vastness of his grief, and has nothing to do with the everyday world, but corresponds to
the fantasy he himself has made.
As soon as Priam entered Achilles' tent, "he grasped
his knees and kissed his dread man-slaying hands, which
had killed many of his sons: as when a great doom seizes
a man, so that he kills another in his fatherland, and
comes to a foreign land, to the home of a rich man, and
wonder holds those who see him, so Achilles was
astonished beholding godlike Priam. " 18 The simile seems
pointless except for the wonder felt at the coming of a
murderer: for Priam did not kill anyone, but Achilles,
with his "man-slaying hands," did slay Priam's sons. If
Achilles had come to Priam, it would have been more
natural to compare him thus than to compare the innocent Priam to a murderer, and the guilty Achilles to a
wealthy man. Priam seems to represent someone else,
and I would suggest he is the dead Patroclus, who once
came to Peleus, having killed his playmate in Opoeis 19
Priam would come then in the guise of Patroclus to
Achilles, who would now be Peleus; for just as Peleus
"kindly" received Patroclus, so Zeus promised that
Achilles would kindly receive Priam. 20 We are transported back to Phthia, to the palace of rich Peleus, so that
the courtyard, megaron, hall and antechamber are all,
metaphorically, in place. If Achilles is cut off from the
present, Priam must appeal to the past. He must conjure
up a civil world, where Achilles would feel again the
110
sense of shame: so his first words are, "Remember yo1
father." 22 If Achilles remembers his father, he will a
knowledge the mortal half of himself; he will rememb
Peleus' reception of Patroclus and will thus pity Priar
"Achilles wept for his father and in turn for Patroclus.'·
By this shift in identities, Achilles becomes civil. r
weeps for Peleus, for that is himself; he weeps f,
Patroclus, for that is Priam. Achilles confronts Patroclu
no longer as a ghost but as the father of his enemy, wl
asks him for the corpse of him who killed him. B
Achilles killed Patroclus as much as Hector did: thus P:
am as Patroclus asks for Achilles. The corpse of Heel'
is mortal Achilles, and it is he as well as Hector who
buried at Troy. 24 Quis utrumque recte norit, ambos nove:
("Whoever knows either rightly knows both").
Epilogue
Homer began his Iliad by asking the Muse to sing tl
wrath of Achilles; he asked her to describe not Achill<
but Achilles' wrath, which began at a certain moment ar
brought about a certain end. We hardly see Achilles apa
from his wrath, and though he may exist apart, he wou
not then be a subject for poetry. Achilles is as uninh
ligible without his wrath as he is inconceivable away fro
Troy. Achilles is his wrath, and his wrath is his fate.
is his greatness. The moment of the Iliad is all of Achille
This single blaze is he. He has no history. Were we
see him sacking the city of Eetion, we might mistake hi
for someone else. As a mixture of all the heroes-the prio
of Agamemnon and the ancestral virtue of Diomedes, tl
loyalty of Patroclus and the shame of Menelaus, the pm
er of Ajax and the swiftness of his namesake, the beau
of Paris and the greatness of Hector-Achilles does n
assert his independence until he retires from the war. N
until he is alone, does he show himself unique. He on
becomes visible when he is about to die. Nothing mw
can be said about him, that does not concern his deal
The last days of Achilles tell us what he always was, f.
only in departing from heroic virtue, and in assuming '
unheroic posture, does he reveal himself.
When we turn to the Odyssey, we find Homer indiff•
ent to what stories the Muse might sing: "At any poir
goddess, daughter of Zeus, begin to tell even us.'' 1 If tl
Muse had begun differently, and described Odysseu
other adventures, we would have seen the same rna
There is no single adventure that makes Odysse1
unique. Whether he slays the suitors or blinds Polyph
mus, Odysseus cannot be taken for someone else. If I
had never gone to Hades, he would still be a subject f
poetry. Homer must select from Odysseus' travels tho
that would form a poetic unity; but that unity lies m
side himself and is more imposed upon him than diet<
ed by him. Teiresias tells him how he will die/ but th
death does not tell us more what kind of a man he is th<
the episodes Homer chose. His fate is not all of himso
as it is for Achilles; it would not reveal anything mm
SUMMER 11
�He is polutropos, "of many turns."
The Achilles of Homer and Achilles himself coincide.
There is no non-Homeric Achilles; but there would be
an Odysseus without Homer. Odysseus partly tells his
own story, and for a single night among the Phaeacians
he usurps Homer's role. He is both different from and
the same as Homer: but Achilles, as it were, employs
Homer and lets him be his chronicler. He is the doer,
Homer the talker, and had Homer sung of another man,
Achilles would not have survived at all. Except for one
fatal instance, Achilles does not bother about his fame. 3
Odysseus, however, sings his own praise and does not
need Homer's muse. He is more independent than
Achilles: he stands apart from his poem. He is not completely contrived. It is the nature of the tragic hero to be
inseparable from his poet, while the comic hero exists
even away from his fictitious self. What would Ajax be
without Sophocles? a bad loser. Would Socrates be different in life? Achilles is poetic: he cannot be translated into
the common world. He can only breathe in the world that
Homer made for him: in the Odyssey he is a ghost in
Hades.
The tragic hero has character, the comic hero personality. The one is stamped with certain attributes and cast
into a single mold; the other wears as many masks as he
needs. The comic hero can lie; the tragic hero must tell
what he thinks is the truth. 4 He does not shift from one
scene to the next, but he always carries with him all of
himself. He cannot suppress nor conceal. He can never
be a hypocrite. He is sublimely unaware of chance: he
would not stoop to craft. Although Achilles is a work of
art, he would not use art himself. He could no more tell
: Polyphemus that his name is "No-one" than restrain
himself from killing him. The tragic hero is forever
; trapped in the Cyclops' cave. To deceive another is to deceive himself; he would never sidestep an approaching
doom. He himself weaves the net that ensnares him, for
· he feels that only necessity can prove his greatness. His
imprudence is his foresight. It springs the trap of his fate,
and in his fate he lives. He fosters and feeds the extreme
situation, so that, with the odds all against him, he can
make his killing. The comic hero, however, is a catalyst:
there are no "solutions" that can precipitate his compound self: he is personally inert though he may disturb
everyone else; but the tragic hero enters into an "irreversible reaction," and 1/there's an end." After a certain
point he cannot retreat but must always advance to his
end. There are no rehearsals for the great event. He can
never repeat his past. Achilles made his way into his
death, Odysseus talked his way out of his. Odysseus
finds dangers, Achilles invents them. Poseidon prevented Odysseus' return home, and Odysseus, no matter
how much he might have profited from his travels, did
not welcome them. Achilles becomes angry at Agamemnon: no prophecy foretold it. He worked out for himself
how he was going to die. Odysseus' death is divorced
from him. Achilles made his fate his own affair; he set
the stage for the end. He is, in sense, the real poet of the
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Iliad, and Homer nothing but his scribe.
The tragic hero is rebellious, the comic hero revolutionary. Whatever laws the one may break seem to himself
undeliberated acts; while to the other every violation is
a matter of policy. One follows a destiny, the other a program. Achilles and Coriolanus invite disaster; they do not
play it. Odysseus and Prospera calculate each move: they
leave nothing to chance. To be rebellious is to pit nobility against necessity; to be revolutionary is to match wits
with chance. There is no victory in rebellion: there is only
the deed itself. The tragic hero "kicks against the pricks,"
though he knows what Hector means,
xunos Enualios, kai te ktaneonta katekta
Alike to all is the God of War, and he slays utterly even him who
would slay.
Note
There are at least two related errors in this study. Under the impression that Homer had to be proved a poet
through the smallest element, I attempted to vindicate
the epithets rather than to look at the larger units of action, which, however traditional their parts may be, could
not be subject to tradition in the same way. In my "The
Aristeia of Diomedes and the Plot of the Iliad" I tried to
make up for this defect. And again under the influence
of modern poetry, I believed that the discernment of a
symbolic pattern was enough to show the poet's hand,
even though the pattern could not be grounded in any
plausible sequence of actions. So I thought it was not
necessary to link Achilles' rebellion in Book I with the
combat between Paris and Menelaus in Book Ill. That
combat merely signified the state of affairs at Troy prior
to the shift to the love of fame away from the original
cause of the war, the love of Helen. I did not observe that
Menelaus' acceptance of Paris' challenge meant that
Menelaus no longer claimed Helen by law but saw the
necessity to prove his claim. Though Achilles failed to
replace Agamemnon, he forced everyone to acknowledge
the right of natural right. By reading Homer too poetically I did not read him poetically enough.
PART II: PLOT
Introduction
1. W. DenBoer, Laconian Studies, Preface.
2. 0., e.g., Cimon II.
3.Coriolanus 1. 1. 163-165 (following the lineation of the Cambridge
Works of Shakespeare, John Dover Wilson, ed.).
4. Ibid. 1. 9. 62-66.
5. Ibid. 1. 4. 53-55.
6. Ibid. 2. 2. 105-108; cf. 5. 4. 18-22.
7. /bid. 2. 2. 108-127.
8. Ibid. 1. 3. 61-66, cf. 67.
9. Ibid. 2. 1. 216-218, cf. 262-263.
10. Ibid. 3. 1. 80-82, cf. 254-259.
11. Ibid. 3. 1. 178, 219-221, 293-295, 304-306, cf. 234-235, 308-309.
12. Ibid. 1. 4. 30-34.
111
�13. Ibid. 3. 1. 254-259; 3. 2. 14-16, 39-41, 46-64, 99-123; cf. 4. 5. 139;
5. 3. 40-42.
14. Ibid. 4. 1. 15; cf. 4. 6. 42-46; ll. 1. 240-244; 9. 351-355.
15. Ibid 1. 1. 229-231; cf. 1. 10. 4-16.
16. a. ibid. 2. 2. 15-23; 4. 4. 12-26.
17. Ibid. 4. 5. 104-121, cf. 197-198.
18. Ibid. 4. 6. 91-96; cf. 5. 4. 11-14; King Lear 4. 1. 36-37.
19. Ibid. 5. 4. 23-24.
20. Ibid. 5. 1. 10-15.
21. Ibid. 4. 5. 76.
22. Ibid. 5. 3. 34-37, cf. 149-153.
23. Ibid. 5. 6. 85-101.
24. Cf. ibid. 2. 3. 116-120.
25. Ibid. 4. 1. 30; cf. 4. 7. 23; 5. 4. 12-14.
Chapter 1: The Gods
1.Iliad 17. 629-632; cf. 13. 222-227; 20. 242-243, 434-437; Odyssey 18.
132-135.
2. Cf. lliad 16. 119-122.
3. Cf. Iliad 15. 139-141; 16. 446-447.
4. Iliad 23. 288-289; 2. 763-767.
5. Ibid. 23. 290-304.
6. Ibid. 23. 304, 310, 530.
7. Cf. the foot race, Iliad 23. 754-792.
8. lliad 23. 536-538, 556.
9. Ibid. 23. 382-383.
10. Ibid. 23. 526-520.
11. Ibid. 23. 530-531.
12. Ibid. 23. 383-400.
13. Ibid. 23. 515.
14. a. iliad 23. 344-348.
15. lliad 23. 352-357.
16. Ibid. 5. 9-24.
17. a. lliad 20. 297-299.
18. lliad 5. 29-35.
19. Ibid. 5. 35-83.
20. Ibid. 5. 541-560.
21. Ibid. 16. 406-410; cf. Odyssey 12. 251-255.
22. Ibid. 16. 20, 584, 693, 744, 754, 787, 812, 843.
23. Ibid. 16. 419-491.
24. Ibid. 907-909; 6.1; cf. 11. 401.
25. Ibid. 6. 11-19.
26. Ibid. 6. 37-65; cf. 2. 831-834.
27. Ibid. 11. 122-142; 21. 99-106; cf. 21. 95 with 23. 746-747.
28. Ibid. 20. 463-469; 23. 175-176.
29. Ibid. 6. 108-109.
30. Cf. lliad 6. 108, 123, 128-129, 131, 142, 527.
31. Iliad 6. 119-129; Odyssey 6. 149-153.
32. Cf. Ilir:.d 9. 134 with 276; 21. 150; consider Odysset; 7. 208-212.
33. But cf. Basset, CP xviii, pp. 178-179.
34. Cf. Iliad 5. 128-132, 827-828.
35. Iliad 6. 146.
36. Cf. 21. 462-466, where Apollo speaks.
37. Iliad 6. 152-211.
38. Cf. Aeneas' speech to Achilles, Iliad 20. 200-241, where he recites
his lineage; note the frequency of anthropoi and of superlatives (204,
217, 220, 233) the gods are absent (144-152).
39. lliad 5. 244-256.
40. Cf. Iliad 6. 229 with 230, 235.
41. Iliad 6. 280-285.
42. Ibid. 3. 40, cf. 56-57.
43. Ibid. 6. 282-283.
44. Ibid. 3. 439-440; cf. 4. 7-12.
45. Ibid. 6. 339.
46. Ibid. 6. 311-312.
47. Ibid. 3. 173-174; cf. 24. 763-764.
48. Ibid. 6. 345-349; cf. 3. 180 with 6. 344.
49. Ibid. 6. 447-449.
50. Ibid. 4. 163-168; cf. 127-129.
51. Note the frequency of daimonie: ibid. 6. 326, 407, 486, 521, cf. 318; 7. 75.
52. Odyssey 1. 32-34.
112
Chapter II: The Plot of the Iliad
1. lliad 7. 1-42.
2. Ibid. 7. 43-61.
3. Ibid. 7. 87-91.
4. Cf. Iliad 6. 444-449.
5. Iliad 7. 104-107.
6. Ibid. 7. 69-72, cf. 351-353.
7. Ibid. 7. 400-402.
8. Cf. lliad 11. 122-142.
9. Iliad 6. 357-358.
10. Ibid 3. 125-128.
11. Cf. lliad 6. 323-324.
12. lliad 7. 100.
13. Plato Cratylus 398c 7-dS.
14. Cf. Plato Symposium 206cl-209e4.
15. lliad 7. 39, 226; cf. 6. 1; 11. 401.
16. Odyssey 4. 12-14.
17. lliad 3. 369-382.
18. Ibid. 3. 439-440.
19. Ibid. 3. 126-128. 7. 104-107.
20. Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida 2. 2. 195-202.
21. Cf. lliad 5. 330-333, 348-351, 427-430.
22. Iliad 7, 337-343; at 342 the volgate hippon would be merely a rr
take arising from laon; cf. 18. 153, where cod. A has laoi superscriptu
23. Ibid. 7. 446-453.
24. Ibid. 12. 10-33.
25. Ibid. 4. 31-33; 24. 27-30.
26. Ibid. 8. 7-22.
27. Ibid. B. 191-197.
28. Ibid. 8. 287-291, cf. 285 with 9. 133.
29. Ibid. 8. 473-477.
Chapter III: The Embassy
1. Iliad 9. 18-25 ~ 2. 111-118; 9. 26-28 ~ 2. 139-141.
2. Ibid. 9. 17; 2. 110, 119-138.
3. Ibid. 9. 4-8.
4. Cf. lliad 11. 276-279.
5. Iliad 9. 37-39; cf. Part I, Chap. IV above.
6. Ibid. 9. 40-46; 1. 173-175.
7. Ibid. 9. 53-75.
8. Ibid. 9. 369-372.
9. Ibid. 9. 184-189.
10. Ibid. 1. 490-492; cf. 9. 440-443.
11. BT Scholiast 1. 490; cf. Iliad 18. 104-110.
12. Ibid. 9. 300-306.
13. Ibid. 8. 532-538.
14. Ibid. 9. 128-130.
15. Cf. lliad 2. 123-133.
16. lliad 9. 388-391.
17. Thucydides i. 11.
18. lliad 9. 348-355.
19. Cf. Iliad 7. 113-114; 20. 434-437.
20. Iliad 1. 157-160.
21. Ibid. 1. 298-299.
22. Ibid. 9. 337-343.
23. Ibid. 9. 410-416.
24. Ibid. 1. 352.
25. Cf. Odyssey 11. 489-493.
26. Iliad 11. 762-763.
27. Troilus and Cressida 3. 3. 115-123.
28. lliad 9. 601-605, cf. 249-250.
29. Ibid. 9. 608.
30. Ibid. 9. 252-259; 438-443.
31. Cf. Iliad 9. 197-198.
32. Iliad 7. 52-53; cf. 20. 337-349.
33. Ibid. 13. 666-670.
34. Ibid. 2. 830-834.
35. Ibid. 18. 113; 19. 66.
36. Ibid. 18. 121.
37. Ibid. 9. 601-605.
38. I do not enter into the "discrepancies" in Phoenix' speech: t
SUMMER 1
�are less important, even if they do exist, than its purpose.
39. Iliad 9. 444-457.
40. Ibid. 9. 336-337.
41. Ibid. 9. 458-461 are found in his de aud. poet. 8 (459-460 also in Coriolanus xxxii, and 461 in de adul. et amic. 72b), where he says Aristarchus
excised them out of fear: scholars are divided as to whether they are
genuine or not; cf. G. M. Bolling, The External Evidence for Interpolation
in Homer, pp. 121-122 (with bibliography); G. Pasquali, Storia della Tradizione, pp. 231-232; Bolling in The Athetized Lines of the Iliad, pp. 26-27,
tried to refute Pasquali (unsuccessfully I believe).
42. Iliad 9. 462-480.
43. Cf. BT Scholiast I. 527; W. Schadewaldt, op. cit., pp. 139-143.
44. Iliad 9. 528-600.
45. Cf. lliad 9. 351-355, 551-552.
46. E. Howald, cited by Schadewaldt, op. cit., p. 140.
47. Cf. Iliad 6. 407-439.
48. Iliad 9. 158-159; cf. 1. 177 = 5. 891; consider 9. 312-313.
49. Ibid. 9. 302-303.
50. Ibid. 9. 497-501.
51. Cf. Part I, Chap. IX above.
52. Iliad 9. 255, 496, 629, 675; Odyssey 9. 278; cf. Eustathius on Odyssey
1. 69; 9. 183; 16. 31.
53. Iliad 24. 453-456; Odyssey 9. 240-243.
54. Odyssey 9. 302-305; cf. Iliad 9. 458-459.
55. Iliad 22. 346-347; cf. 24. 409; Odyssey 9. 291.
56./liad 9. 497, 632; 16.33, 204; Odyssey 9. 272, 287, 368; cf. Part I, Chap.
VTII above.
57. Iliad 9. 629; 21. 314; 22. 313; Odyssey 2. 19; 9. 215, 494; cf. Odyssey
9. 118-119; Iliad 6. 97-101; 24. 41; agrios is also used of battle, fire, and
Athena's wrath (Iliad 17. 398, 737; 4. 23).
58. Odyssey 9. 106, 112-115, 215, 269, 274-278.
59. Iliad 9. 97-99.
60. Iliad 9. 510; Odyssey 9. 275.
Chapter IV: The Deception of Zeus
1. Iliad 14. 153-186.
2. Ibid. 14. 198-199.
3. Ibid. 14. 200-210.
4. Ibid. 14. 216-217.
5. Ibid. 14. 233.
6. Ibid. 14. 238-241.
7. Ibid. 14. 242-262.
8. Ibid. 14. 264-268; d. BT Scholiast 270.
9. Ibid. 14. 271-276; cf. 15. 36-48; Aristotle Met. 983b 30-33.
10. lliad 13. 1-6.
11. Ibid. 14. 280-328; cf. 3. 442-446.
12. Ibid. 14. 329-340, cf. BT Scholiast 338.
13. Iliad 14. 347-348.
14. Some may object to my applying the terms "nature" and "art" to
Homer, as if he thought so abstractly; but if it be kept in mind that I
understand by nature that which always acts in the same way and is
indifferent to us, even though the gods may try to coerce it, the distinction is clear: the heroes appeal to the latter but not to the former,
who are gods that cannot be apostrophized (thus the winds do not hear
Achilles, Iliad 23. 194-195); and from the gods' point of view, Sleep and
Night are at the service of all, since by themselves, having no human
offspring, they do not take sides.
15. Iliad 14. 354-360.
16. Cf. Iliad 14. 14-15 with 15. 7-8.
17. Iliad 15. 113-142.
18. Ibid. 16. 431-461.
Chapter V: Patroclus
1. Iliad 11. 611-615.
2. Ibid. 16. 31-32.
3. Ibid. 11. 763.
4. Ibid. 16. 100; but cf. 17. 404-407; 20. 26-27.
5. Ibid. 9. 650-655, 682-683.
6.lbid. 16. 61-63; cf. P. von der Muehl, Kritisches Hypomnema zur Ilias,
pp. 241-242.
7. Iliad 16. 80-82.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
8. Ibid. 9. 600-605.
9. Ibid. 16. 60-61; cf. 4. 31-33.
10. Ibid. 16. 87-90; cf. 22. 205-207.
11. Ibid. 16. 130-144.
12. Ibid. 16. 145-154.
13. Cf. Iliad 21. 100-105.
14. Iliad 17. 10, 379; 23. 137.
15. Ibid. 16. 692-693 (cf. 5. 703-704; 11. 299-300), cf. 20, 584, 744, 754,
787, 812, 843.
16. Ibid. 4. 127, 146; 7. 104; 13. 603; 17. 679, 702; 23. 600.
17. Ibid. 16. 433-438; 22. 168-176; cf. 20. 277-299.
Chapter VI: Achilles and Patroclus
1. Iliad 17. 4-6; cf. BT Scholiast 16. 7-11; 17. 133-137.
2. Iliad 19. 324-325; cf. 9. 337-339.
3. Cf. Part II, Chap. II above.
4. Iliad 16. 241-252.
5. Ibid 17. 404-411. The iterative 'anayyEA.AeaKs (409) determines the
sense of l>fll"Ocs ys (410), which bears its normal meaning: a return to
the immediate present after a stated time in the past (Ameis-Hentze);
and it does not mean, as it is usually taken, that Thetis never told him,
which contradicts 18. 9-11; in Odyssey 22. 185-186 tpotpf:saKs serves the
same purpose (d. lliad 20. 408-411). Cf. how the interatives in Iliad 1.
490-492 explain 'eK l"OlO in 493.
6. Iliad 18. 9-11.
7. Ibid. 18. 13-14.
B. Ibid. 16. 87-94.
9. Ibid. 16. 242-244.
10. Ibid. 18. 82.
11. Ibid. 18. 22-34.
12. Ibid. 18. 54.
13. Cf. J. Kakridis, Homeric Researches, pp. 65-75.
14. Iliad 16. 776.
15. Odyssey 24. 39-48.
16. Iliad 23. 136-137; 24. 712, 724.
17. Ibid. 18. 81-82, cf. 114; 23. 94.
18. Kephale ("head") sometimes means psyche ("soul," "life"), and I
suspect it means so here (Iliad 4. 162; 17; 242; cf. Odyssey 2. 237 with
3. 74 and the v. i. Iliad 1. 3.).
19. Iliad 19. 38-39, 352-354; 23. 185-187.
20. Odyssey 5. 196-199.
21. Iliad 18. 39-49.
22. Ibid. 18. 607-608.
23. Ibid. 20. 4-9.
24. Ibid. 21. 194; cf. Part I, Chap. IX, X; Part II, Ch. IV above.
25. Iliad 18. 516-519, 535-540.
26. Odyssey 10. 508-515; 11. 12-22.
27. Iliad 18. 128-129; cf. 9. 601-602.
28. Ibid 9. 312-314.
29. Ibid. 18. 119-120.
30. Ibid. 1. 505, cf. 417-418.
31. Ibid. 19. 86-136.
32. Ibid. 19. 59-62.
33. Ibid. 18. 107-108.
34. Ibid. 19. 147-148.
35. Ibid. 9. 225-230.
36. Ibid. 19. 225-229.
37. Cf. Part I, Chap. VIII above.
Chapter VII: The Exploits of Achilles
1. Iliad 20. 1-2, 11. 15-16; 20. 3 ~ 11. 56.
2. Ibid. 20. 45-46, cf. 26-28.
3. Cf. lliad 20. 447.
4. Iliad 20. 85.
5. Ibid. 20. 88-89, cf. 80.
6. Cf. Iliad 22. 188-193.
7. Iliad 20. 160.
8. Ibid. 20. 164, 174.
9. Ibid. 20. 177.
10. Ibid. 20. 175.
11. Ibid. 20. 200, 206-209, cf. 105-106; 6. 99-100; and Odyssey 1. 215-216,
113
�where Telemachus doubts his parentage.
12. Cf. Part II, Chap. I above.
13. Iliad 20. 261-263, 273.
14. Ibid. 20. 283-291, 320; cf. 302-304.
15. Ibid. 20. 321-322, 341-342.
16. Ibid. 20. 343, 351-352.
17. Ibid. 16. 65, 90, 835; 17. 194, 224; 19. 269; 21. 86; 23. 5, 129.
18. a. Part 1; Chap. II above.
19. Iliad 20. 366.
20. Ibid. 20. 367-370; cf. 22. 250-258.
21. Ibid. 376-378.
22. Ibid. 20. 386-388.
23. Ibid. 20. 407-413.
24. Ibid. 20. 455-489.
25. Ibid. 20. 467; cf. 2. 241; 13. 343-344; 14. 139-140.
26. Ibid. 20. 490-494.
27. Ibid. 20. 502-503.
28. Ibid. 21. 17-18.
29. Ibid. 21. 39.
30. Ibid. 21. 49, 67.
31. Ibid. 21. 98 (cf. 11. 136-137), 116, 120.
32. Ibid. 21. 136-138.
33. Ibid. 21. 139-199.
34. Ibid. 21. 153.
35. Ibid. 21. 173-179.
36. Ibid. 21. 208-213.
37. Ibid. 21. 222-227.
38. Ibid. 21. 233.
39. Ibid. 21. 251, 265.
40. Ibid. 21. 272, 288.
41. Ibid. 21. 527; 3. 229.
42. Ibid. 21. 536.
43. Ibid. 24. 39.
44. Ibid. 11. 62; 15. 605, 630.
45. Ibid. 24. 487.
M~m~nm22M~M~D~mm~~
47. Ibid. 21. 544-550.
48. Ibid. 9. 328.
49. Ibid. 21. 522-525, cf. 18. 207-214.
50. Menis ("wrath") is used only of Achilles (Iliad 1.1; 9. 517; 19. 35,
75) or the gods (1.75; 5. 34, 178, 444; 13. 624; 15. 122; 16. 711; 21. 523).
51. Iliad 20. %, 164-175, 447, 490-494; 21. 12-14, 18, 22-24, 227, 252-254,
315.
52. Ibid. 24. 108.
53. Ibid. 22. 410-411, cf., 287-284
54. The frequency of his patronymic is: 20 in Book 20, 12 in Book 21,
11 in Book 22, 17 in Book 23, 5 in Book 24.
Chapter VIII: Achilles and Hector
1. Iliad 22. 105-107.
2. Ibid. 17. 91-105.
3. Cf. Iliad 11. 404--410; Schadewaldt op. cit., pp. 61-62.
4. Iliad 6. 441-446.
5. Ibid. 22. 108-110, cf. 514.
6. Ibid. 6. 450-465.
7. Ibid. 6. 429-430.
8. Ibid. 16. 7-11; 23. 222-225; 24. 46-48; cf. 9. 632-633.
9. Ibid. 22. 123-125.
10. Ibid. 22. 126-128.
11. Cf. Odyssey 19. 162-163; A. B. Cooke, CR, xv, 1901, p. 326; U.
Wilamowitz, op. cit., pp. 97-98; P. von der Muehl, op. cit., p. 234, who
translates Hesiod Theogony 35 as "alte Geschichten."
12. Iliad 22. 129-130.
13. Ibid. 22. 116.
14. Ibid. 19. 324-325.
15. Ibid. 7. 400-402.
16. Ibid. 22. 199-201.
17. Ibid. 22. 262-265.
18. Cf. Iliad 12. 167-172; 17. 20-23.
19. Iliad 22. 346-347; cf. 21. 22-24; 24. 41-44.
20. Ibid. 17. 183-197.
114
21. Ibid. 11.
22. Ibid. 16.
23. Cf. Iliad
Peleides'').
24. Iliad 22.
25. Cf. Iliad
798-801 ~ 16. 40-43.
278-282.
17. 214 v. i. J.lT!Yct9UJ.l(!)
7t~A.c1rovt
("[like] to high-spiri
322-325; cf. 8. 324-326.
20. 102; d. Eustathius ad loc., 510-511; 13. 321-323.
Chapter IX: The Funeral Games
1. Iliad 22. 393-394; cf. 16. 243-244.
2. Cf. 22. 216-223.
3. Iliad 22. 205-207; cf. 16. 87-90.
4. Ibid. 22. 379-384.
5. Ibid. 22. 385-388; cf. 9. 608-610.
6. Ibid. 22. 395-404.
7. Ibid. 23. 59-70.
8. Ibid. 23. 103-104.
9. Cf. Odyssey 10. 493; 11. 475-476.
10. Iliad 23. 66-67; cf. 2. 57-58.
11. Ibid. 23. 184-191.
12. Ibid. 9. 322.
13. Cf. Iliad 14. 139-142.
14. Iliad 23. 192-216.
15. Ibid. 23. 274-284.
16. The frequency of "swift-footed" is: 6 in Book 20, 5 in Book 21
in Book 22, 14 in Book 23, 4 in Book 24.
17. Iliad 23. 824, 896.
18. Ibid. 23. 890-891.
19. Cf. Part I, Chap. III, IV, above.
20. Iliad 2. 482-483, 579-580.
21. Ibid. 23. 826-828.
22. Ibid. 1. 366-369; 6. 395-397; 9. 188; 16. 153.
. 23. Ibid. 2. 689-691.
.
24. Cf. Part II, Chap. III above.
25. Cf. Part II, Chap. V above.
Chapter X: Achilles and Priam
1. Iliad 24. 6.
2. Iliad 8-9; Odyssey 13. 91-92; Cf. Iliad 19. 319-321; 23. 56; Ody
7. 215-221.
3. Iliad 24. 9-21.
4. Ibid. 24. 22-30.
5. Ibid. 24. 675-676.
6. Ibid. 24. 56-63.
7. Ibid. 24. 66.
8. Ibid. 24. 258-259.
9. Ibid. 24. 322-328.
10. Odyssey 24. 1-4.
11. Cf. Part II, Chap. VI above.
12. That the suffix -de (denoting motion toward, d. English "-ware
is only used here of a person-Pelefonade, "the-son-of-Peleus-war·
(Iliad 24, 338: it is unique until Ap. Rhod. iii. 647).-recalling at o
thanatonde, ''deathwards'' above and the common Afdosde ''towards
house] of Hades" (24. 328; cf. 9. 158, 312-313), also S;!J-ggests this.
Horace C i. x. 13-20. Note too the unique locative Aidi, "in Hadt
at 23. 244 in Achilles' mouth.
13. lliad 24. 524; Odyssey 202, 568.
14. Iliad 24. 128-129; 22. 346-347.
15. Ibid. 24. 139-142.
16. Ibid. 24. 266-274; cf. Leaf II, App. M, pp. 623-629.
17. Ibid. 24. 448-456.
18. Ibid. 24. 477-483.
19. Ibid. 23. 85-90.
20. Ibid. 23. 90; 24. 158.
21. Ibid. 24. 452, 644-647, 673-674.
22. Ibid. 24. 486.
23. Ibid. 24. 511-512.
24. Cf. Iliad 20. 127-128with 24. 209-210; 16. 852-853 with 24. 131Epilogue
1. Odyssey 1. 10.
2. Ibid. 11. 134-136.
3. Cf. Part II, Chap. III above.
4. Cf. Plato Hippias Minor 364d7-365d4, 369a7-371e5.
SUMMER 1
�•
Paradoxes of Education In a Republic
Theory and Practice: Eva Brann
Jan H. Blitz
Paradoxes of Education in a Republic.
By Eva T.H. Brann.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. 172 pp.:
cloth, $12.95.)
In this short yet comprehensive book, Eva Brann
examines American higher education in the light of the
foundations of the American political regline. Reviving
the ancient notion of Education as the culmination of political craft (p. 10), she argues that" American education
embodies certain root dilemmas that would become much
more amenable to reflection and resolution if they were
seen as originating in the very foundation of this country" (p. 1). 1 Miss Brann therefore examines the educational writings of the Founding period, particularly those
of Jefferson, and sets forth "several paradoxes of education in a republic in general and of the early American
Republic in particular in order to recover the roots in
thought-and quite incidently, in time-of some familiar
practical perplexities in American education" (p. 1). Her
explicit assumption is that the beginning truly rules in
America, "both insofar as its consequences inform our
educational institutions and insofar as it provides an everapplicable reference" (p. 13).
Miss Brann considers the paradoxes of education under
three general headings. Chapter One deals with the paradox of Utility, which concerns the purposes and ends of
education; Chapter Two, with the paradox of Tradition,
which concerns the ways and means; and Chapter Three,
with the paradox of Rationality, which concerns the content and substance. Each chapter traces the general paradox it deals with to its intellectual roots in the
Enlightenment ("this Republic was founded under the
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
aegis of the Enlightenment" [p. 27]) and then concludes
with an attempted resolution of the paradox it discusses.
Miss Brann's specific educational proposals are contained
in these resolutions.
The resolutions taken together amount to the restoration of classical education in America. Miss Brann seeks
the revival of a mode of learning that was "sometimes
unwittingly and sometimes explicitly repudiated" by our
Founders (p. 20) and which consists primarily in the reading of the collection of texts, chiefly of poetry, science,
and philosophy, that constitutes the Western tradition.
She intends, however, something far more radical than
what is ordinarily called classical education. She seeks
a return not merely to a certain set of texts, but to the
classical notion of intellect (p. 144), whose activity the
ancients called contemplation or theory (p. 132) and she
calls inquiry (pp. 22, 142-144), and which is aroused not
by practical problems but by paradoxes or perplexities inherent in things themselves (pp. 1, 62). She seeks to
replace "the mode of Rationality," which derives from
the Enlightenment and is characterized by the use of reason as a tool or a method for manipulating and managing the world, with a "question-asking mode, in which
instrumental reason yields to receptive intellect, theoretical construction to contemplative theory, critical delimitation to expectant openness" (p. 22). What most
distinguishes her ambitious book is not simply that it advocates the restoration of classical theory in America, but
that it does so on the grounds that such inquiry is the
mode of learning most suitable to the American polity.
Theoretical reflection, Miss Brann argues, is "that education most apt to foster what is of the essence to this
best of all practicable polities" (p. 148).
115
�I
The paradox of Utility consists in treating learning,
"which is naturally an end in itself" (p. 20}, as a means.
The idea of utility, which pervades modern life, is that
of instrumentality, of means. In education it refers to
learning intended for worldly use. Thus, for example,
mathematics, considered by the ancients the sort of learning that should be pursued primarily for its own sake or
to draw the soul to philosophy, comes to be thought of
by Locke and the other writers of the Enlightenment
chiefly as a training of the mind for use in the world. The
mind, whose leading faculty is thought to be instrumental
reason, is itself considered essentially a tool, which is employed or used on the matter it studies. Miss Brann, on
the other hand, maintains that Aristotle is correct when,
in "the first sentence of the founding work of first
philosophy," he says, "All human beings by nature
desire to know/~ or, as she retranslates more precisely
and more forcefully, "All human beings hunger
(oregontai) to know by their very nature" (Metaphysics,
980a22). Far from being merely instrumental, knowing
fulfills an aspect, perhaps "the essential aspect," of human nature. "[U]tilitarian education is [therefore] a contradiction in terms, a perverse enterprise. Learning is
naturally done for love, not for use; it is itself a mode of
living, not a mere means" (p. 59).
Miss Brann's resolution of this dilemma is to construe
liberal education as an inquiry into ends. Liberal education, she points out, is the traditional term for non utilitarian education. While the term has several meanings,
literally it means "pertaining to freedom or to the free
(liberi)." It can refer to the upbringing of children who
are to be free adults ("free children in particular are called
liberi in Latin"}, or it can be interpretated to mean liberating people from the shackles of guardians or conventions. "But in its original use the term means, precisely,
free from the bonds of utility" (p. 60). As an inquiry into
ends, liberal learning is the complement rather than an
alternative to useful learning. It provides the kind of
learning that intelligent practice requires but instrumental knowledge inherently lacks. It is therefore also a perfect complement to the American Republic. "We live in
a Republic that does not attempt to provide happiness
but to facilitate its pursuit; hence, all its ways are
instrumental-our public realm is primarily one of means.
Therefore, the inquiry into purposes, goods, ends, ought
always to have been crucial" (p. 61). In a word, "liberal
education provides that inquiry into ends which is crucially
necessary to a republic congenitally engaged in instrumental activity" (p. 20).
Miss Brann's general resolution is very compelling.
Surely, there is something perverse in treating learning
merely as a means-indeed, a means to a further means
such as wealth or power-and, even more so, in pursu-
ing the knowledge of means while ignoring the
knowledge of ends. To be a means, Miss Brann observes,
116
is precisely to be ultimately discounted in favor of an enc
"When that end is improperly established-false or fm
gotten-the mode of usefulness acquires a pathology" (f
25). Particularly in an "open-ended" polity in which tr<
clition is discredited and the individual and his choice
are infinitely valued, people need to reflect thoughtful!
on their ends.
Yet Miss Brann's resolution is itself paradoxical. P
she presents it, liberal education is at once the culmino
tion of the natural desire to know and a necessary co
rective of the inherent deficiencies and tendencies of tt
American polity. It is both an end in itself and a form<
prepractical republican training. As an end in itself, it
''naturally done for love, and not for use,'' and ''is itse
a mode of living." As a form of republican training,
neither is to be done for its own sake nor is itself a moe
of living, but exists "to provide for the possibility an
protection of the good life in the worldly sense" (p. 59
Seen in the one light, liberal education seeks knowled!
in the hope of applying it to "the perplexities of living'
seen in the other, it seeks a kind of learning "that is Til
instrumental, except in a most oblique way" (p. 61).
Aristotle appears to be Miss Brann's principal if not h
sole authority in the presentation of her resolution. St
not only quotes mainly from him, but seems to rest eve1
important point in her argument on a quotation from U
Politics or the Metaphysics. Yet Miss Brann tacitly depar
from Aristotle even while apparently deferring to hin
While explicitly restoring his distinction between liber
and useful learning, she attenuates his related and no le:
important distinction between theoretical and practic
inquiry, between philosophical and non-philosophic
education. Just as she uses the term liberal education ·
embrace both purely theoretical and prepractical educ
tion, so she argues that reflection on the practical pe
plexities of life can "conduct us" to the realm of pu
reflection, quoting a passage from the Metaphysics (982(
contrary to the sense of the passage, to support this stri
ingly non-Aristotelian conclusion (p. 62). 2 Why she do:
this is not immediately clear, but comes to light, upc
reflection, in Chapter Two. The reason is implicit in h
attempt to resolve the paradox of Tradition. Far fro
being wanton, Miss Brann's peculiar use of Aristotle
Chapter One proves to point to what she evident
considers the central problem of "our problema1
modernity" (p. 111).
II
Chapter Two deals with the paradox of Tradition. Mi
Brann uses the term tradition in a special sense. "By t
tradition I mean neither the old customs nor the rece
routines, neither the sedimentary wisdom nor the pet
fied habits of communities. I mean, to begin with, a C<
lection of books," specifically, "the collection of te>
generally recognized as the founding books of Weste
learning" (pp. 64, 20). Most immediately, the parad:
SUMMER 19
�of tradition concerns the Founders' repudiation of the
bookish tradition that made them what they were. More
broadly, it concerns the Enlightenment's repudiation of
the tradition as the principal means of becoming educated. Ultimately, 'it concerns the self-repudiation implicit
in tradition itself: "traditio literally means both transmission and betrayal" (p. 67). Miss Brann reserves the
term the tradition for the founding books of Western learning because the determining fact for the Western tradition is that it is handed down in texts and acquired by
study. Originating with Homer and the Bible, ours is
essentially a written tradition. She thus sometimes uses
the terms tradition and the tradition interchangeably. The
paradox of our tradition is ultimately the paradox of
tradition itself.
The paradox of tradition is inherent in the nature of
writing. Writing provides "an artificial memory, a way
of storing the inventions of the imagination and the discoveries of the intellect externally." Without it,
knowledge would soon perish and vanish into oblivion.
Yet, this artificial memory also induces a deeper, though
usually insensible, forgetfulness. It permits us to acquire
knowledge without inquiring into its intellectual roots-to
take, or take over, what is handed down (traditur) as
"given." Writing's pejorative tendency is to replace wisdom with memory.
Miss Brann describes the prevailing position of the
Enlightenment with respect to the tradition as one of
repudiation. This position, she says, has three distinctive features. First, "Modernity was to prevail." This
meant not only that contemporary writers were to prevail over ancient ones, but that "a productive complex
of secularism and science, of care and competence in the
present world-' present' in every sense-won the day"
(p. 74). Second, science, with the aid of instruments and
experiments, was to yield to the cry, "things, not words."
This was "a revulsion against book learning, against
words both as notions and as utterances, in favor of real,
literally 'thingish,' preoccupations" (p. 75). And third,
books were no longer to be approached with the trusting expectation that they may reveal important truths,
but with the skepticism that things may prove them
wrong. In brief, "the transnti.ssion or tradition of
knowledge was discredited in favor of the advancement
and diffusion of knowledge-these were the new key
terms" (p. 74).
At the same time, however, the Founders were primarily concerned with citizen education. In the "Rockfish
Gap Report," Jefferson writes that the final end of higher
education is ''to form [youths] to habits of reflection and
correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to
others, and of happiness within themselves.'' The great
difficulty, Miss Brann observes, is that the Baconian curricula implicit in the repudiation of the tradition, particularly in the preferential concern for "things, not words,"
while "almost elegantly appropriate" to America's
materialistic concerns and to "the vigorous intellectual
materialism that naturally forms part of the founding
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
philosophy of this Republic" (p. 95), cannot by their very
nature ever fulfill this end. The Republic's essential
educational requirements are fundamentally at odds with
its characteristic life and tastes.
Miss Brann's proposed resolution of this dilemma is
''the recovery of the very tradition in which the Founders
who repudiated it were so well versed" (p. 102). When
discussing the Founders' classical training, she remarks
that they had the tools and the taste to appropriate the
classical tradition. "They were founders of a polity
without 'a model on the face of the globe' (Madison, Federalist 14) who had the advantage of perfect selfawareness because they knew that which allowed them
to distinguish the new from the old" (p.88). They knew
in detail and from original sources, for example, what it
was that made the antique participatory democracies unsuitable models for modern republics. However, when
she says that within the tradition there are studies that
are "fundamental and necessary to mastering life in the
Republic" (p. 108), she does not mean primarily political works. She means, rather, the founding works of
modern science. Notwithstanding the importance she
gives to ancient political writings ("when the ancients become inaccessible, the moderns become unintelligible"
[p. 88]), she argues that a theoretical study of science must
constitute the core of modern citizen education. Aristotle to the contrary notwithstanding, a theoretical inquiry
into science must be the core of prepractical education
in a modern republic.
The reason for this uniquely modern necessity is the
problem that Miss Brann evidently considers the central
problem of ''our problematic modernity.'' Both our world
and our understanding of our world are formed and constantly transformed by modern science. Miss Brann indicates the fundamental difficulty when, explaining why
such a study of science is not likely to occur even in a
conventional elementary science course, she says she
opens four reputable textbooks in elementary physics and
finds that "Each uses, from the very beginning, the first
dimensionally secondary quantity of the science of
motion, namely, velocity/' that is, each begins with a
ratio or a quantity that is compounded of elementary
quantities, in this instance, space and time.
Thus I observe that all four books begin past the point where naive
questions might be asked. Yet who understands without reflection
how the time, how the place in which we live and have our being,
can be transmogrified into mere magnitudes capable of entering into
a ratio, and how those magnitudes have in tum been transformed
into quantities able to constitute a rational number? All such questions are regarded in textbooks as outside actual physics. And yet
they can never be considered with any immediacy in the abstracted
fields of philosophy of science or history of science, but only in the
actual context of real if elementary science. But considered they must
be, for our problematic modernity is the residue of such transformations (p.111).
Modern science, in addition to altering our physical
world, alters even more fundamentally our basic understanding of the world and of our mode of being in the
117
�world as it prepares its subjects for study. In Miss Brann's
telling example, it mathematizes, or algebratizes, what
it studies. It deliberately" denatures" nature in order to
study it. In the Republic (514b-515c), Socrates identifies
non-philosophers with cave dwellers, who, having their
legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, see only
the shadows of artifacts before them. Whatever they see
they understand in the light of conventional or received
opinions, which they take for the truth of things. Miss
Brann suggests that much the same is true of us. Notwithstanding the Enlightenment's intention to bring the
light of reason into the cave to dispel the shadows, we
modems, too, are prisoners in such a ~ave. Our imprisonment, however, is far more problematic because it is in
large part the result of science. Whereas in the Republic the
prisoners can escape the cave by moving from the artificial light of opinion to the, natural light of science or
knowledge, science itself casts the darkest shadows in our
cave. We moderns are the passive recipients of readymade scientific methods, terms, and premises that alter
our natural perception of even "the time ... [and] the
place in which we live and have our being." The scientist has replaced the legislator. Thus whereas in the Republic the cave is open at one end to the natural light of the
sun, in our cave the artificial light of the Enlightenment
tends to eclipse the opening. By teaching us to understand our world, including our mode of being in the
world, in the light of the requirements of the Cartesian
method, modern science threatens to imprison us in a
world of its own making.
A reflective study of science is therefore indispensible
to our self-knowledge. Without it, we cannot possibly understand our world, including ourselves. We cannot act
intelligently. In Aristotle's best polity the education of
citizens never goes beyond the imitative arts. Because ancient cities "lived by tradition in the widest sense" (p.
114), the natural ground of practice was "given." Even
as tradition opposed nature in one fundamental respect,
it preserved it in another. In our polity, on the other hand,
the repudiation of tradition has obscured both the conditions and the nature of practice. The natural ground
of practice must therefore be recovered. Theory must
recover what the repudiation of tradition has caused us
to lose. "[W]e moderns require [theoretical inquiry] precisely as moderns .... What was an exemplary culmination for the ancients is for us a common necessity"
(p.115). Aristotle's distinction between theoretical and
practical education must be at least partly obscured in
order to recover the Aristotelian realm of intelligent practice or prudence.
Now someone who agrees with Miss Brann on the need
for a reflective study of science might also think that such
a course of study could consist in the reading of certain
contemporary works in the philosophy and the history
of modern science. That is, in fact, what is usually done
in most American colleges and universities. Miss Brann,
however, maintains that the study must consist in the
reading of the originating works of the scientific
118
tradition-the writings of Galileo, Kepler, Newton, ar
the other first founders of modern science. "[F]or us
is to be either tradition or technique, ... we either retw
to the roots or fall prey to the consequences" (p. 111
The reason for this necessity at first seems paradoxio
It is "precisely because of the progressive character
science" that it is "philosophically necessary" to stuc
the original sources of the scientific tradition (p. 112:
Miss Brann explains that "In each of its supersedil
movements the scientific enterprise enters a higher sta
of abstraction and becomes more remote from and fc
getful of its immediately intelligible origins; there is
sedimentation of significance." Philosophical works, on tl
other hand, are neither simply timeless, like those
poetry, nor progressive, like the discoveries of scienc
but "are related in both and neither fashion." Almost '
such works address their predecessors and are address•
in turn by their successors. "Hence, the philosophical b
dition proceeds, but not progressively; it is rather a kil
of spiral on which motion comes periodically over tl
same position, but at a higher level." By "higher
however, Miss Brann means ''an extremely dubious at
problematic rise, which may, in fact, be a fall" (p
112-113). It may be "unavoidably the case," she saj
quoting from Bacon,
that 'in the arts mechanical the first deviser comes shortest, and til
addeth and perfecteth; but in sciences [that is, philosophy; Pl;
and Aristotle are among those instanced] the first author goeth f
thest, and time leeseth and corrupteth.' It is at least poss1ble tl
in philosophy all successors are unavoidably epigones and th
works attenuating elaborations and leveling explications of the ori
nal deep insight. The possibility must be contemplated that
philosophy a pejorative principle is at work, that the loss of im
cence, of immediacy, of naivete, must in the very nature of the thi
bring with it a loss of depth (p. 113).
Miss Brann thus suggests that the modern scientific e
terprise, by its very nature, presents in extreme form t
forgetful tendency of the bookish tradition. It epitomiz
what it repudiates: it exemplifies the paradox of tradih
and of writing itself. We must return to the foundi
works of the scientific tradition, then, because mode
science, owing to its progressive character, is itself a tJ
dition in every sense of the term.
III
The last chapter deals with the paradox of Rationali
It contains Miss Brann's explicit call for the return to t
ancient notion of the intellect. Taking as her starting po
Tocqueville's observation that the people in whom t
intellectual principles of the Enlightenment have reach
their worldly embodiment are also the people amo
whom less attention is paid to philosophy than amo
any other, she explains that wherever human beings c<
gregate some mode of thought becomes incarnate in t
community. This mode, differing both in itself and in
communal appearance, may be the tacit, inbred rna
SUMMER 1'
�tenance of a grown tradition, or the devoted, continual
exegesis of a God-given law, or the strenuous, correct
adumbration of a certified ideology. For us, the mode is
rationality. Whereas these other ways of using reason ''are
not the way of reason," ours is self-consciously rational.
Our way requires "an incessant application of the personal instrumental reason to the world, accompanied by
an unremitting demand for articulate explanatory speech.
And yet it is such reasoning and such speaking as can
be embodied in a people and become a national habit"
(pp. 121-122). Our way is at once reasoning and unreasoned. An ''unreasoned use of reason,'' it is the Cartesian method as an assimilated habit (p. 121).
Most of Chapter Three is spent describing certain fundamental facets of rationality and their inbuilt pedagogical paradoxes. Briefly stated, these include the pervasive
tendency to dichotomize subjectivity and objectivity, leaving us, like Swift's Laputians, no middle ground on
which to fix both eyes; and the familiar opposition between the head and the heart, which, resting at bottom
on the understanding of reason as a coldly wielded instrument serving a selfish will, teaches us finally to see
ourselves as oppressed by the very power of our minds.
The facets also include the Lockean conception of the
mind as an instrumental rational tool whose last resort
is self-evidence and which works on an alien matter obtained as evidence through what Locke calls experience.
The former tends to forestall reflection (what is selfevident requires no explanation), while the latter tends
. to forestall immediacy (Lockean experience comes through
· the senses packaged as "phenomena," "facts/' "data/'
"information," etc. "It delivers wood, not trees" [p.
1341). Above all, rationality's familiar aspects include the
; replacement of classical theory with Cartesian theorizing.
· Whereas classical theory is an activity which exists "for
· the sake of seeing and presenting the object as it is in its
· very nature, for the 'ardent love, the proud, disinterested love, of what is true'" (p. 132), Cartesian theorizing,
which confuses receptivity to truth with making mental
artifacts, involves methodological problem-solving and
is ultimately concerned with controlling the matter it
•. studies.
Miss Brann argues that the root of all these and other
related facets of rationality is "self-thinking." Self-thinking
• is a Kantian term capturing what she calls the ''chief commandment" of rationality and what Tocqueville calls the
principal character of the American mode of thought,
namely, "to seek the reason of things for oneself and in
oneself alone" (p. 21). It means always to think for one. self, which, as Kant says, is Enlightenment. The "self"
as used in the term refers to the agent who thinks, not
•to the object of thought. It is self-insistent rather than self. reflexive. 11 It signifies a conscious, self-assertive resistance
to authority, a mental declaration of independence." An
"assertion of individual sovereignty," it declares that "It
. is before this supreme court of the self that all cases are
ultimately brought for adjudication" (p. 125). While selfthinking thus corresponds directly to the political enfran-
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
chisement of the individual, it nonetheless ultimately undermines the conditions for republican life. For
republicanism rests on "a public realm in which the
thought of all coincides to form a consensus," but the
obligation to think for oneself turns everyone else's
thought-and finally even one's own-into mere opinion, and thus dissolves the basis for a truly public opinion, leaving the field to either a Locke an "forcelike vector
of the larger mass of atomic judgments" or "a necessarily compromised public consensus" produced by "continual cession of individual thinking" (pp. 125, 126).
Miss Brann argues that the ultimate consequence and
culmination of the various aspects of rationality is a preoccupation with form over substance-" a ubiquitous formalism, a deliberate preponderance of methods over
ends, of pursuit over realization, of possibility over actuality" (p. 21). The incessant demand for certainty, for
example, continually directs attention away from the
knowledge of things themselves to the formal conditions
of knowledge. The matter itself, as well as the approach
to learning, becomes highly formalized as strenuous efforts are made to replace substance by logic and content
by structure. Miss Brann says that a useful phrase for the
formal is that it is the condition of the possibility of an object, required so that it might exist, but not included in
what it is. Thus, in making decisions, "the decision making process" comes to matter more than the decision itself; in morals, the sincerity of the judgment matters more
than the content, and the intention and the background
of the deed are more regarded than the deed itself. In
short, process and manner eclipse purpose and content.
However, "Most pervasive in their formalistic consequences~'' Miss Brann observes, ''are the very founding
terms of this Republic." The principle of equality is a formal notion, whichever of the two major contending interpretations is accepted. If equality is taken to mean
equality of opportunity, it is merely a condition of the possibility for becoming or gaining some possible good. If,
on the other hand, it is taken to mean equality of results,
it similarly lacks substance, focusing attention not on a
good but on the comparison of its possession. Likewise,
liberty, "our noblest and our most exemplary formal principle," is nothing but the condition for the possibility of
being or doing or having something. "It is noble precisely
because it bestows nothing concrete at all." And as for
the pursuit of happiness, "that most characteristic of
American rights," the phrase literally speaks for itself (p.
141).
Miss Brann proposes the return to the classical mode
of inquiry and the classical notion of intellect as the resolution of these dilemmas. In Chapter Two she used the
term inquiry for the reading of the written tradition. Here
she means it to go beyond such study and include the
asking of questions. Generally synonymous with reflection, it is, as quoted earlier, "a question-asking mode,
in which instrumental reason yields to receptive intellect,
theo.etical construction to contemplative theory, critical
delimitation to expectant openness" (p. 22). It is con-
119
�cerned with giving reasons, not with mere reasoning;
with finding depth, not with achieving certainty; with
thinking, not with "thinking for oneself." Most of all,
it is concerned with seeing things as they are in their very
nature, without the mediation of modern methodology.
It involves the activity and the perfection of one's natural intellect.
Miss Brann's resolution raises a paradox of its own,
which in the final analysis underlies her book as a whole.
How can the classical notion of inquiry be combined
with-indeed, put in the service of-modern political
principles that rest fundamentally on the theoretical repudiation of that notion? More particularly, how can wereject Rationality as a public mode and still retain our
Republic's Founding political principles?
In elaborating her third resolution, Miss Brann explains
the "revealing double capacity" of a question. A question, she says, "can be asked either of a fellow human
being or about things. When addressed to a human being, it is a demand for the communication, the sharing, ·
of truth. When addressed to things, it serves notice that
the world is held responsible, that it is thought to be able
to answer, to speak out of its depths, to be endowed with
reasons" (p. 143). Inquiry in this sense implies or presupposes that the mind is naturally open to the truth, that
there is a fundamental harmony between the mind and
the world at its depths. Yet this is exactly what the Enlightenment's repudiation of the tradition denies: "For
let men please themselves as they will in admiring and
almost adoring the human mind, this is certain: that as
an uneven mirror distorts the rays of objects according
to its own figure and section, so the mind, when it
receives impressions of the objects through the senses,
cannot be trusted to report them truly, but in forming its
notions mixes up its own nature with the nature of
things" (Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, "The Plan
of the Work"). That is, the mind is essentially projective,
not receptive. It naturally confuses the seeking of truth
and the making of rational constructions. On this view,
theory in the classical sense is impossible, belief in its possibility resting on nothing more than the mind's inherent tendency to deceive itself. And just as the Enlightenment rejects the classical notion of the intellect, so it also
rejects the possibility of disinterested inquiry. Contrary
to the ancients' claim that theoretical wisdom could ever
be chosen for its own sake, the authors of the Enlightenment insist that no human activity can ever be free in the
sense that Aristotle means when, denying that the
highest science is a productive science, he says that "just
as we say a person is free who exists for his own sake
and not for another's, so this alone of all the sciences is
free, for only this science exists for its own sake"
(Metaphysics 982b25-28). According to the Enlightenment,
liberal education in the strict sense ("an education beyond utility" [pg.62]) is impossible because, contrary to
the classical understanding, the highest in man rests upon
and is reducible to the lowest: needs necessarily
predominate life.
120
In presenting her resolution of the paradox of utility
Miss Brann claims that liberal education in the strict sens
is a natural right (pp. 62-63). The modern notion of nah
· ral rights, however, directly implies self-thinking an
hence rationality as a public mode. The natural right t
self-preservation entails the right of everyone to decid
for himself the best means of preserving his own life. ''A
ways to think for oneself" means, ultimately, always t
have the right to judge for oneself the best means t
preserve oneself. Self-thinking thus derives directly fror
the primary concern for and natural right to self-prese1
vation. It is the effective guarantee of our most impo:
!ant right. Rationality as a public mode is thus inseparabl
from the rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Hal
piness as fundamental political principles, as indeed Mi•
Brann herself seems to say in setting forth the parade
of Rationality (pp. 122, 125). Miss Brann wants to con
bine what she evidently considers the best of the ancier
and of the modern worlds-namely, classical theory an
the American polity. Yet she herself observes th;
"modes of study have wide political implications" (1
101). Whether, or in what way, classical liberal educatio
and modern liberal democracy can be combined is lht
a question her resolution leaves open. 3
Miss Brann claims not to take sides in the battle h
tween the ancients and the moderns. "For my part," sl
says, "I think that were this contest ever finally abm
doned the Western tradition would have ended." TI
peculiar quarrels that constitute the contest "both mm
the tradition and perennially recollect it" (p. 69). Thu
later, in a note, she explains, "It goes without saying th
my own inquiry takes a middle ground in interpretir
modernity as a ruptured continuation, at once debilite
ing and invigorating, of the ancient tradition" (p. 16'
It is true that, in one sense, she does not take sides: tl
revival of the tradition "does not aim at a return to tl
past but at its reappropriation for the present. The pa
matters, not as it has gone before, but as it has gone in
the present" (p. 148). In a deeper sense, however, sl
does take sides, as, indeed, it seems she must. The a
dent understanding of the intellect and of nature is h
constant point of reference. Her guiding intention is
recover that understanding by studying the intelleclll
roots of the modern world from its perspective. 4
1. All italics are original.
2. Miss Brann often uses the term theory equivocally. Sometimes
uses it in the strict sense of "pure reflection" (p. 58; see esp. p. 1
but at other times it includes reflection on human affairs in the wi•
sense. Indeed, occasionally she uses it when she does not mean
all. For example, she describes as "theoretical" certain studies fav<
by Jefferson that, later, in a stricter context, she attacks as "abov,
an antimetaphysical polemic, which leads to an empirical metho
analysis" (pp. 57, 58, 93). In order to make her case, she often sl
insensibly between the wide and the strict sense of the term.
3. It should be noted that, in the last sentence of the book, Miss B1
offers a cryptic reinterpretation of "the essence" of the American
ity: "that it be a republic of incomparable equals" (p. 148). She does
explain what she means by this.
Miss Brann uses the term republic ambiguously throughout the b
SUMMER.
�Early in the book, when saying that it is "specifically education in a
republic" that she wants to consider, she presents the meaning of the
term in a way that obscures the primary distinction between ancient
and modern republicanism. She retains the public realm as the core
of the meaning of a republic, but she redefines the public so as to make
it include rather than oppose the private. The contrary of the public
becomes not the worldly private but the other-worldly communal. By
republic she seems to mean the City of Man as distinguished from the
City of God (p. 11).
4. Just as with other key words, Miss Brann uses the term paradox ambiguously. At times she makes no distinction between a paradox and
a problem. To resolve a paradox is the same as to solve a practical
problem. The resolution disposes of the paradox or alleviates its undesirable effects. It is in this sense of the term that her proposed resolutions are intended to remedy ''some familiar practical perplexities in
American education" (p. 1). At other times, however, she sharply distinguishes a paradox from a problem, calling it "a dilemma inherent
in [a] thing itself, the kind of inner breach not improperly called tragic''
(p. 1). Whereas "to solve a problem is, after all, to dissolve the matter
of the inquiry, since a solved problem is a matter of indifference" (p.
132), a paradox "is an incitement to an inquiry and to a resolution intended not to collapse the paradox, but recover its roots" (p. 148). An
insoluble object of contemplation, it is something to be recovered, not
removed, to be understood, not addressed. In the end Miss Brann seems
to intend classical inquiry to resolve the educational paradoxes of modernity in both senses at once. As she says at one point, "I am suggesting
that a recovery of the deep and vital founding paradoxes will prove therapeutic" (p. 45). As her inquiry shows, the tension between these practical and theoretical senses, which proves to underlie her inquiry, is
perhaps inescapable in the modern world.
Jan H. Blitz, an alumnus of St. John's College, Annapolis, teaches at the University of Delaware.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
121
�
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Sterling, J. Walter
Coughlin, Maria
Freis, Richard
Freis, S. Richard
Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Allanbrook, Wye Jamison
Brann, Eva T. H.
Alvis, John
Arnhart, Larry
Weatherman, Donald V.
Flaumenhaft, Mera
Fletcher, Charlotte
Smith, Brother Robert
Benardete, Seth
Blitz, Jan H.
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�Editor's Note
FROM
OUR READERS
'
With this issue the St. John's Review begins to charge
new subscribers. Old subscribers, St. John's alumni and
friends, students and their families will continue to receive the magazine without charge. My desire to turn the
St. John's Review into an unambiguously public magazine
and to win an additional audience prompts this decision.
From now on the St. John's Review will appear three
times a year1 in the fall, winter, and summer-L.R.
Editor:
Leo Raditsa
Managing Editor:
Thomas Patran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
Janet Durholz
Consulting Editors:
David Bolotin,
Eva Brann,
Curtis A. Wilson.
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned comments are also
welcome.
THESTJOHNSREVIEW (formerly The College) is published by
the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland
21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Edward G. Sparrow, Dean.
Published thrice yearly, in the fall, winter, and summer. For those
not on the distribution list, subscriptions: $12.00 yearly, $24.00 for
two years, or $36.00 for three years, payable in advance. Address
all correspondence to The St. John's Review, St. John's College,
Annapolis, Maryland 21404.
Volume XXXIII
WINTER 1982
Number2
©1982, St. John's College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Cover: Thick-billed Murre by J. J. Audubon; photograph courtesy of the
New-York Historical Society, New York City.
Composition: Britton Composition Co.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
ON" 'SEXISM' IS MEANINGLESS"
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Mr. Levin (" 'Sexism' is Meaningless") seems not to be able to
distinguish between what is in fact the case and his personal
prejudices, which he calls "factual beliefs" -a strange term since
if they were factual, they would presumably be knowledge, not
belief. Mr. Levin is, for example, concerned about the degradation of language as exemplified by the use of the word "sexiSm"
which, according to him, either has no reasonable meaning or
"simply encapsulates and obscures" the confusion which feminists have about their subject. To illustrate his notion of rhetorical abuse of language he chooses the word "exploit" which he
says means "to uSe another without his consent." From this definition it is then easy to argue that to use "exploitation" to describe contractual wage labor is to employ a rhetorical trap to
denounce wage labor itself. It was, however, not my impression
that consent, itself a rather tricky concept to analyze, had much
to do with exploitation. So I checked the dictionaries I have
around the house, the Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, the
American College Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary,
and the Oxford English Dictionary, and, curiously enough, none
of them used or implied the word "consent" as part of its definition. To quote just one of the four, the New Collegiate Dictionary, "exploit la: to turn to economic account (a mine); b: to t.ake
advantage of; 2: to make use of meanly or unjustly for one's own
advantage." I quote this not to be pedantic or to score cheap
points, but to indicate hQw Mr. Levin confuses his private view
of the world and language with that shared by most of the rest of
the English-speaking world. "Exploit" and "exploitation" are perfectly legitimate terms to use to describe contractual wage labor
if one believes either that surplus value is at the root of capitalist
profit, or, to be less doctrinaire, if one simply believes that
employers have, on the whole, more power than employees and
can use that power to arrive at less than equitable contracts
-not, I believe, a very radical position.
But we should turn to more substantive matters. When Mr.
Levin asserts in his title that "sexism is meaningless", this seems
to me to have two possible interpretations: l, that the term is
without clearly definable meaning; and 2, that there is no phenomenon corresponding to the term, whatever it might mean in
some loose, confusing way. I believe Mr. Levin to be wrong on
both counts.
As to the meaning of "sexism", Mr. Levin says the following:
" 'Sexism', then, is typically used to describe either the view that
there are general, innate psychological differences between the
sexes, or that gender is in and of itself important." He further as~
serts that "the first view is simply a factual belief supported by a
vast body of evidence, and the second view, however objectionable, is held by almost no-one." "Neither view," he asserts, "is
worth attacking." But, as I understand them, both are worth attacking, because the first is, I think, though clearly a belief, not
factual, and the second is, I believe, held by virtually everyone,
not no-one.
(continued on page 2)
�1
HESTJOHNSREVIEWWINTER82
•
1
I
3
George Dennison
Shawno (narrative)
24
Nietzsche and the Classic
William Mullen
33
The Trivialization of the Holocaust as an Aspect
of Modern Idolatry Robert Loewenberg
44
Proof and Pascal Brother Robert Smith
52
Five Translations
57
The Federal Republic of Germany:
Finlandization or Germanization?
Charles G.Bell
Anne-Marie Le Gloannec
63
Io (poem)
Laurence Josephs
64
Kekkonen, the "Finlandizer"
65
Hephaestus (poem)
Laurence Josephs
66
Mozart's Cherubino
Wye jamison Allanbrook
75
The Fury of Aeneas joe Sachs
Indro Montanelli
REVIEW ESSAYS
83
Objectivity and Philosophical Conversation:
Philosophy and the Mi?Tor of Nature, by
Richard Rorty
review essay by Arthur Collins
90
Afghanistan Fights: The Struggle for Afghanistan,
by Nancy Peabody Newell and
Richard S. Newell
review essay by Leo Raditsa
AT HOME AND ABROAD
98
Letter from Vietnam jean Dulich
FIRST READINGS
102
Laos; Marie-Noele and Didier Sicard, Au nom de Ma?X et de
Bouddha, Revolution au Laos: un peuple, une culture disparaissent, review by Leo Raditsa
106
A Dead Man's Knowledge; Varlam Shalamov, Graphite, review
by Lev Navrozov
Inside front cover-FROM OUR READERS
Michael Levin's "'Sexism' is Meaningless"
and Harry V. Jaffa's "Inventing the Past"
1
�(continued from inside front cover)
To defend the view that there are innate
psychological gender differences, Mr. Levin
says that he doubts that his daughter will
become a quarterback, not because of her
size, weight, and strength, but because of
psychology. I agree with him that it is unlikely that his daughter will become a quarterback, but I also believe that it is almost
equally unlikely that his son will become
one. It is a well-attested "factual belief'
that very few quarterbacks are the sons of
philosophy professors, not because of genetic psychological deficiencies but because
they are raised in homes where athletics is
valued less than other things. I think it is
also very likely that if Mr. Levin raises his
daughter praising her for docility, obedience, and gentleness and raises his son
praising his drive, aggressiveness, and assertiveness that his son will turn out more
aggressive than his daughter. And, in fact,
it is clear that that is, on the whole, how
sons and daughters have been raised. I
hope it is not necessary to rehearse the
whole dreary range of environmental differences that boys and girls are subjected
to, ranging from dressing daughters in
dresses and sons in pants (my wife as recently as the early 1960's taught in a Connecticut school system where girls were
allowed to wear pants only under blizzard
conditions), to spending years with school
books where the boys are doctors and the
girls are nurses looking admiringly at their
superiors, or where the boys are active
while the gids can only passively marvel at
their multi-talented male counterparts.
Certainly Mr. Levin's expectations for his
daughter will have consequences, but it is
less than clear that genetic differences are
the root cause of how she will turn out psychologically. The "vast body of evidence"
which he mentions is, at best, controversial, and to assume that the case is proven
as he does is to commit that marvelous
trick one can sometimes get away with in
geometry, namely to put what you're trying to prove in the given.
As to the second view, "that gender is in
and of itself important," that seems so
clearly true that he must mean something
other than what the words seem to say
when he denies it. Clearly the difference in
the reproductive systems is crucially important, as are differences in average size,
though what the psychological consequences
2
of those differences are is open to dispute, Now, in the extremes, this is clearly true.
and what the social and political conse- However, the amount of overlap between
quences should be are really the central is- women and men in even this test is so great
that it is not clear to me that any important
sue of Mr. Levin's article.
consequences follow. For example, in the
First, however, I would like to address
two other relatively minor linguistic mat- !980 Olympic Games, the winning javelin
ters because they are revealing of the way throw by a woman was 224 ft., 5 in., a disMr. Levin argues. The first is his assertion tance about 4 ft. less than that of the male
that he suspects that "feminists avoid the winner in !948. Even granted that 1980
word 'misogyny' because it carries no con- was a good year for women javelin thrownotations of system." The real reason they ers and 1948 a bad year for men, if I were
do not use it ("avoid" is, in itself, a rhetori- looking for a large group of spear-throwers,
cal gambit to suggest some devious game I would certainly open the competition to
they are playing) is because it fails to de- both men and women, because it seem eviscribe the phenomena they are concerned dent that some women are going to be
with. On the whole, men are not misogy- much better at it than most men. That is,
nists, though the amount of violence di- the statistical superiority of men even in
rected at women is appalling, the incidence this rather uninteresting and loaded inof rape being the most obvious example, stance is not such as to conclude that an
though by no means the only one. On the army of projectile throwers should autocontrary, men like women, when they stay matically be all male. We can note that
in their place. When the recently retired Plato, not a notorious egalitarian or femihead of the Baltimore Police Department, nist (women, after all, are dismissed before
Donald Pomerlau, was under attack for his serious conversation begins), makes a simitreatment of women on the force, he de- lar point in The Republic (456b): "Then we
nied vehemently that he had any preju- have come around full circle to where we
dices against women. He really was fond of were before and agree that it's not against
what he described as "little balls of fluff." nature to assign music and gymnastic to
Now misogyny is clearly not the word to the women guardians." "That's entirely
describe such an attitude, but I think "sex- certain." "Then we weren't giving laws
that are impossible or like prayers, since
ism" is.
Second, let us look at another little ploy the law we set down is according to nature.
of Mr. Levin's. He calls attention to the ug- Rather, the way things are nowadays
liness of "sexism" and comments on its proves to be, as it seems, against nature."
Mr. Levin then moves from this example
"grating sound," suggesting that that very
rather casually to the less obvious "factual
ugliness was the motive for coining it. Perhaps we don't all share Mr. Levin's delicate hypotheses" that women are inferior in
ear, but it should be noted that in the !8th "abstract reasoning" and superior in
century, a "sexism" was a "sequence of six "child-rearing." Here again the evidence is
cards" (OED) and I doubt that its "ugli- anything but clear. It is not clear what a
ness" disturbed anyone. And words like test of abstract reasoning would be; noth''saxophone," "hexadecimal," ''textile," ing that has yet been developed can lay any
and so on seem equally good candidates for claim to validity in judging that ability; and
rejection on grounds of ugliness, though I would certainly not trust Mr. Levin's
Mr. Levin is, I trust, not bothered by them. anecdotal evidence, given his prejudices.
But let us turn to the main issues. I fully That women, on the whole, do less well
agree with Mr. Levin that "better" means than men on the mathematical part of the
nothing without more specification of con- SAT's is true, but the reasons for that are
tent or context. " 'Better'," as he says, not obvious. A few of the many possible ex"must mean better at this or that particular planations are that male students are much
task." The issue then becomes, "Are men more likely to be directed into mathematics
generically better than women at signifi~ classes than female students (anecdotal evicant tasks?" He finds that "men are so ob- dence for this is everywhere), that the imviously better at some things than women" portance of mathematics is emphasized to
that it scarcely bears discussing. His first male students more than to female, or it
example is that men can obviously hurl may be that men are generally better a.t
(continued on page 107)
projectiles much farther than women.
WINTER 1982
�Shawno
George Dennison
A marathon. Euphoria. Sights and sounds in the
corridor of dogs. Finches and morning.
We could hear our children's voices in the darkness on
the sweet-smelling hill by my friend's house, and could hear
the barking of Angus, his dog. At nine o'clock Patricia put
our three into the car and went home. My friend's wife
and son said goodnight shortly afterwards. By then he and
I had gone back to the roomy, decrepit, smoke-discolored,
homey, extremely pleasant farmhouse kitchen and were
finishing the wine we had had at .dinner. It was late August. Our northern New England nights were drawing on
noticeably toward fall, but the cool of the night was enjoyable. He opened a bottle of mezcal he had brought from
Mexico, and we talked of the writings of friends, and of
the friends themselves, and of our youthful days in New
York. He had written a paper on Mahler. We listened to
the Eighth and Ninth symphonies, and the unfinished
Tenth, which moved him deeply. We talked again. When
we parted, the stars, still yellow and numerous in most of
the sky, had paled and grown fewer in the east. I set out to
walk the four miles home.
I was euphoric, as happens at times even without mezcal. For a short distance, since there was no one to disturb
(the town road is a dead-end road and I was at the end of
it) I shouted and sang. And truly, for those brief moments,
everything did seem right and good, or rather, wonderful
and strange. But the echoes of my voice sobered me and I
stopped singing. A dog was barking. The night air was
moist and cool. I became aware that something was calling
for my attention, calling insistently, and then I realized
that it was the stream, and so I listened for a while to its
George Dennison has published The Lives of Children (1969) and Oilers
and Sweepers (1979). His story, "Family Pages, Little Facts: October,"
appeared in the St. John's Review (Winter 1981).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
noisy bubbling. The lower stars were blocked by densely
wooded hills. A dozen or fifteen old houses lay ahead of
me still darkened for sleep.
Angus came with me. He is a pointy-nosed, black and
white mongrel in which Border collie predominates, and
therefore he is bright-eyed and quick-footed, and is amazingly interested in human affairs. He pattered along beside me, turning his head every few seconds to look at me,
and it was as if he were keeping up continually a companionable cheerful jabbering. I spoke to him at one point
and he barked lightly and jumped toward my face, hoping
to kiss me.
Abruptly he sat down. We had come to the edge of
what he imagined to be his territory, though in fact we
had crossed his line several paces back. He sat there and
cocked his head and watched me as I walked away. I had
taken only twenty steps when on my right, with jarring
suddenness, came the explosive deep barking of the German shepherd tethered to the one new house in the valley. Angus sprang up, bracing his legs, and hurled his own
challenge, that was high-pitched and somewhat frantic.
He was answered by a barking that seemed limitless. I
could hear it speeding away, the same challenge repeated
in voice after voice, and growing faint. Surely it passed beyond our village, very likely beyond our state. I was in a
corridor of barking dogs.
A soft projectile of some sort spurted from the shadows
to my right and came to rest not far from my feet, where it
turned out to be a chubby little pug. It was shaking with
excitement and was giving vent through its open mouth
to a continuous siren of indignation. The cluttered porch
it had been guarding suddenly flared with yellow light.
Two elderly spinsters lived here. They rose with the sun,
or before it, as did many of the older folk. The clapboards
of their house had been a mustard color, the trim of the
windows white, but that had been thirty years ago. The
3
�barn beside the house had fallen down, the apple trees
had decayed, the mound of sheep manure was grassed
over. Across the road, in a smaller house, lived a childless
couple related to the spinsters, and they, too, owned a
pug. While the one barked in the road ahead of me, the
other barked silently inside the house, its front paws braced
against the window and its rear paws stamping the back of
a sofa. These dogs I praised for their attention to duty.
They did not alter my mood. Brave as they were, they
were hopelessly affectionate, and I knew it, and passed on
confidently.
But now came a barking that I feared and loathed, more
savage by far than that of the German shepherd. He was
chained to a dying apple tree before a collapsing gray
house, the hard-packed yard of which was crowded with
wheelless cars. The dog was a Doberman. His barking was
frenzied. He leaped at me again and again and was jerked
back by the chain, as by a violent master. Were he free
and approaching me I should certainly try to kill him.
Overlapping these disturbing tones were the melodious
deep tones of the long-legged black hound tied before his
own little house in the strange compound farther on: a
mobile home, half of a barn, some small sheds, a corral, all
huddled before the large trees that bordered the stream.
Nothing was finished. There was an air of disconsolate
ambition everywhere, failure, and disconsolate endurance. The hound himself seemed disconsolate. He was
not tugging at his chain. He did not even brace his feet.
He followed me with his eyes, barking his bark that was almost a baying and was actually beautiful. He cocked his
head and seemed to be listening to the other dogs.
What a racket! What a strange, almost musical hullabaloo! I myself was the cause of it, but it wouldn't cease
when I passed. The sun would be up, the dogs would keep
barking, every bird awake w<;>uld raise its voice, and that
wave of noise would follow the sun right across the land.
More lights came on. The sun had not yet risen, but the
night was gone. It was the morning dusk, fresh and cool.
Birds had been calling right along, but now there were
more. At intervals I could hear roosters. There were only
three. The valley had been noisy once with crowing, and
the asphalt road had been an earthen road, packed by
wagon wheels and shaded by many elms. The elms were
garious good cheer and selfish, robust curiosity. He left
me to consort with a fluffy collie, who was not chained
but would not leave the shed it crouched beside. Now I
passed a small house set back from the road by a small
yard. A huge maple overspread the yard. Beneath the rna·
ple there stood a blue tractor, and near the tractor an
orange skidder, a pick-up truck, two cars, a rowboat, a
child's wagon, several bikes. A large, lugubrious Saint Bernard, who all summer had suffered from the heat, was
chained to the tree, and she barked at me perfunctorily in
a voice not unlike the hound's, almost a baying, but not a
challenge bark at all, or much of one. She wanted to be
petted, she wanted to lie down and be scratched, she
wanted anything but to hurl a challenge ... nevertheless,
she barked. I came to a boxer, tied; a pure-bred Border collie, tied; a rabbit hound, tied; several mongrels, not tied,
but clustered and apparently waiting for their breakfasts.
One, a black, squat hound, had one lame foot and one
blind eye, mementos of a terrible mid-winter fight with a
fox in defense of newborn pups, who froze to death anyway. She barked vociferously, but then ambled out to
apologize and be petted. How fabulous our hands must
seem to these fingerless creatures! What pleased surprises
we elicit from their brows, their throats and backs and bellies, touching as no dog can touch another dog ...
At almost every house there was a dog. At absolutely
every house with a garden there was a dog. One must
have one to raise food, or the woodchucks take it all. A
second car passed me. My euphoria was abating to good
cheer and I was aware that I was hungry. .
I was approaching the turn to my own road. In the crook
of the turn there was a trailer, a so-called mobile home,
covered with a second roof of wood. There were three
small sheds around it, and a large garden out back, handsome now with the dark greens of potato plants and the
lighter greens of bush beans. Near the garden were stakes
and boxes for horseshoe pitching. A few steps away, at the
edge of the stream, there were chairs, benches, and a picnic table. Two battered cars and a battered truck crowded
the dooryard, in which there was also a tripod, taller than
the trailer, made of strong young maples from the nearby
woods. From its apex dangled a block and chain. Bantam
stumps now, huge ones.
Even so, it was beautiful. There were maples and pines
beside the road, a few cows were still milked, a few fields
were still hayed, a few eggs were still gathered from hens,
a few pigs transformed to pork, a few sheep to mutton.
Swallows were darting about. They perched in long
against which three paddles and four inexpensive fishing
rods were leaning. Swimming suits and orange life vests
hung from a clothesline. The house was silent. All had
watched TV until late at night and all were still asleep,
among them my seven-year-old daughter's new-found
friend. The uproar of dogs was considerable here. Six
rows on the electric wires.
were in residence, more or less. The young German shep-
A car passed me from behind, the first.
And Brandy, the Kimber's gray and ginger mutt, trotted
up from the stream and joined me. His hair was bristly, his
legs short. He was muscular, energetic, stunted, bearded
and mustachioed, like some old campaigner out of the hills
of Spain. He went beside me a little way, cheerfully, but
without affection. There was no affection in him, but gre-
herd was chained. The handsome boxer was free; in fact
all the others were free, and with one exception ran to upbraid me and greet me. The exception, the incredibly
pretty, positively magnetizing exception was Princess, the
malamute, who did not bark or move. She lay at her royal
ease atop a grassy mound that once had been an elm, her
handsome wolf-like head erect and one paw crossed de-
4
hens were scratching the dirt near an aluminum canoe,
WINTER 1982
�murely and arrogantly over the other. Her sharply slanted,
almond-shaped eyes were placed close tpgether and gave
her an almost human, oriental-slavic air. It was as if she
knew she were being admired, and disdained response,
but followed me impassively with those provocative eyes.
How stran!lf she was! She knew me well. Were I to ap·
proach her she'd suddenly melt. She'd sit up and lift one
paw tremblingly as high as her head in a gesture of adulation and entreaty. She'd lay her head adoringly to one side
and let it fall closer and closer to her shoulder in a surrender irresistible in its abject charm-"! am yours, yours utterly" -as if pulling the weight of a lover down on top of
her. She ends on her back at such times, belly exposed,
hind legs opened wide, lips pulled back voluptuously and
front paws tucked under in the air. Especially in the winter, when all six dogs are crowded with the eleven humans
into the lamplight of the little home, she indulges in such
tricks. What a press there is then of dog flesh and child
flesh in the overheated room! There are times when
everyone seems glassy with contentment, and times when
bad humor, apparently passing over into bad character,
seems hopeless and destructive. Then there are quarrels
as fierce and brief as the fights of cats, and peace comes
again, usually in the person of Betsy, the mother, who is
mild and benign. She has lost her front teeth and can't afford dentures, yet never hesitates to smile. The children
drink soda pop and watch TV, while Verne, who is deepvoiced and patriarchal, with the broad back and muscular
huge belly of a Sumo wrestler, sits at the kitchen table sipping beer from a can, measuring gunpowder on a little balance scale, loading and crimping shotgun shells, and
glancing at the program on the tube. He is opinionated,
vain, and egotistical, to the point of foolish pomposity,
but he is good-natured and earnest and is easily carried
away into animation, and then the posturing vanishes. He
issues an order, directs a booming word to one of the kids
or dogs, but especially to Princess, who draws effusions
one would not think were in him. "Well, Princess!" he
roars, "Ain't you the charmer! Ain't you my baby! Ain't
you now! Oh, you want your belly scratched? Well, we all
do, Princess! We all do! But you're the one that gits it,
ain't you! Oh, yes you are! Oh, yes!"
This morning I didn't stop to caress the malamute. At
the turn in the road I heard a far-off barking that made me
smile and want to be home. I crossed the cement bridge
and turned into a small dirt road. There wouldn't be a
house now for a mile, and then there would be ours and
the road would end.
Day had begun. There was color in the sky. The moisture in the air was thinning.
The land was flat and the road paralleled the stream,
which was to my right now. Here and there along its
banks, in May, after the flood has gone down and the soil
has warmed, we gather the just-emerging coils of the ferns
called ficjdleheads. Occasionally I have fished here, not
really hopefully (the trout are few), but because the
stream is so exciting. Once, however, while I knelt on the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
bank baiting my hook, I glanced into the water, deep at
that point, and saw gliding heavily downstream a fish I
scarcely could believe to be a trout. What a passion of
helplessness seized mel I would have leaped on it bodily if
that might have succeeded. I learned later that ice had
broken the dam to a private fishpond in the hills and this
prize and many others had· fled down tributaries to the
main stream and the river.
To my left, beyond a miniature bog of alders and swale
lay a handsome small pond. Its outlet joined the stream
fifty yards on, flowing under a bridge of stout pine stringers and heavy planks. The game warden had been here
several times with dynamite, but the beavers had rebuilt
their dam across the outlet, and once again the pond was
eighteen inches higher than the stream. It was not unusual to see them. They had cut their half-tunnels under
all these banks, creating concave, sharply overhanging
edges. I had stood here with the children one night, downstream from the bridge, at the water's edge, looking for
beavers, and two had passed under our feet. It was a windless, mellow night of full moon. I saw the glint of moonlight on the beaver's fur as he emerged from his channel
under the bank, and then I saw his head quietly break the
water. The dark shape of a second beaver, following him,
glided like a phantom among the wavering images of the
moon and trees.
I could no longer hear the barking on the hill. I was very
hungry now, and intermittently felt sleepy, but here between the pond and stream the morning air was endlessly
refreshing and I entered that pleasant state of being
wholly relaxed, utterly drained of muscular energy, yet
suffused by awareness, interest, and approval ... the mild,
benign energies of momentary happiness.
Five or six bright yellow streamers-so they seemed to
be-approached me and sped by, dipping and rising.
They were finches. The pattern of their flight was of long
smooth waves, in the troughs of which they would flutter
their wings to ascend the coming slope, but fold them before the top and soar curvingly over the crest. Sleek as torpedoes or little fish, they would glide downward again into
the next trough and there extend their wings and flutter
them.
Beyond the bridge, the road began to climb. On both
sides vigorous ferns, green but no longer the vivid green of
summer, crowded the sunny space before the trees. There
was a coolness of night in the woods and it poured mildly
into the road, mingling with the warmer air.
Abruptly I heard and saw him, and though no creature
is more familiar to me, more likely to be taken for granted,
I was thrilled to see him, and gladdened, more than gladdened, filled for a moment with the complex happiness of
our relationship that is both less than human and utterly
human. Certainly I was made happy by his show of love
for me. But my admiration of him is undiminished, and I
felt it again, as always. He is the handsomest of dogs, muscular and large, with tufted, golden fur. The sound of his
feet was audible on the hard-packed, pebble-strewn road. I
5
�leaned forward and called to him and clapped my hands,
and he accelerated, arching his throat and running with
more gusto. He ran with a powerful driving stride that was
almost that of a greyhound, and as he neared me he drew
back his lips, arched his throat still more and let out a volley of ecstatic little yips. This sound was so puppyish, and
his ensuing behavior so utterly without dignity, so close to
fawning slavishness that one might have contemned him
for it, except that it was extreme, so extreme that there
was no hint of fawning, and certainly not of cringing, but
the very opposite: great confidence and security, into
which there welled an ecstasy he could not contain and
could not express rapidly enough to diminish, so that for a
while he seemed actually to be in pain. I had to assist him,
had to let him lick my face protractedly and press his paws
into my shoulders. And as sometimes happens ~'l' my euphorias and early morning solitudes, there came over me a
sense of the finitude of our world, and of my own brute
fraternity with the other creatures who will soon be dead,
and I almost spoke aloud to my dog the thoughts that I
was thinking: how much it matters to be alive together!
how marvelous and brief our lives are! and how good, dear
one that you are, to have the wonderful strange passion of
your spirit in my life!
As he wound around me and pressed his body against
mine, I remembered another greeting when I had seen
blood on his teeth and feet. He was three then, in his
prime. I had been away for several weeks-our first parting-and he had been baffled. When I came back I had
reached this very place in the road, in my car, also in summer, when I saw him hurtling toward me. His first sounds
were pathetic, a mixed barking, whimpering, and gulping
for breath. I had to get out of the car to prevent him from
injuring himself. I had to kneel in the road and let him kiss
me and wind around me. He was weeping; I had to console him. And then he was laughing, and dancing on his
hind legs, and I laughed too, except that it was then that I
noticed the blood. He had been in the house, Patricia told
me later, and had heard the car. He had torn open the
screen door with his teeth and claws, had chewed away
some protective slats and had driven his body through the
opening.
He danced around me now on his hind legs, licking my
face. I knew I could terminate this ecstasy by throwing a
stone for him, which I did, hard and low, so that he would
not overtake it and break his teeth. A few moments later
he laid it at my feet and looked into.my face excitedly.
Patricia and the children were still sleeping. I ate breakfast alone, or rather, with Shawno, who waited by my chair.
I had hoped to spend the morning writing, and I went
upstairs and sat at my table. It was ludicrous. The mere
process of holding still caused my eyes to close and head
to fall. Yet I didn't want to sleep, didn't want to abandon
that mood-too rare to be taken lightly-of happiness and
peace; and so I went into the garden and pulled up the
bush beans that had already borne and died, and carried
tall spikes of bolted lettuce to the compost pile. There is a
6
rough rail fence around the garden to keep the ponies out.
Shawno lay beneath it and watched me. I cleared a few
weeds and from time to time got rid of stones by flinging
them absently into the woods. I pulled out the brittle pea
vines from their chicken wire trellis, rolled up the wire
and took it to the barn. After two hours of this I went to
bed. Shawno had gone in akeady and was enjoying a second breakfast with the children. I had forgotten about
him, but as I left the garden I saw by the fence, where the
grass had been flattened by his body, a little heap of
stones. He had pursued every one I had tried to get rid of.
His parents. Ida's delight. His leaping. Children in
the park. An elderly scholar.
When Patricia was pregnant with Ida we were living on
Riverside Drive in New York. One bright October day we
saw a crowd of people at the low stone wall of the park.
Many were murmuring in admiration and we could hear
exclamations of delight. Down below, on the grassy flat,
two dogs were racing. The first belonged to an acquaintance in our building. She was tawny and short-haired
with the lines of a greyhound, but larger and of more massive head and shoulders. She was in heat and was leading the other in fantastic, playful sprints, throwing her
haunches against him gaily and changing direction at
great speed. The male, a Belgian shepherd with golden
fur, was young and in a state of transport. He ran stifflegged, arching his neck over her body with an eagerness
that seemed ruthless, except that his ears were laid back
shyly. The dogs' speed was dazzling; both were beauties,
and the exclamations continued as long as they remained
in sight.
Shawno was the largest of the issue of those memorable
nuptials. He arrived in our apartment when Ida was
twelve weeks old. She looked down from her perch on Patricia's bosom and saw him wobbling this way and that,
and with a chortle that was almost a scream reached for
him with both arms. Soon she was bawling the astonished,
gasping wails of extreme alarm (his needle-point bites),
and he was yelping piteously in the monkey-like grip with
which she had seized his ear and was holding him at arm's
length, out of mind, while she turned her tearful face to
her mother.
These new beginnings, and especially my marriage with
Patricia, overtaking me late in my maturity, ended a period of unhappiness so extreme as to have amounted to
grief. And I found that loving the child, cradling and dandling her, watching her sleep, and above all watching her
nurse at Patricia's bosom, awakened images of my childhood I would not have guessed were still intact. Something similar happened with the dog. I began a regimen of
early morning running, as if he were an athlete and I his
trainer, and I had trotted behind him through the weathers of several months before I realized that my happiness
WINTER 1982
�at these times was composed in part of recovered memories of the daybreak runnings of my youth, that had been
so hopeful and so satisfied as to seem to me, now, paradisal.
The dog developed precociously. He was not a year and
a half old when, in pursuit of sticks or balls that I threw for
him, he was leaping seven foot walls. He was a delight to
watch, combining power and beauty with indolent confidence, though this last, no doubt, was an illusion of his
style, for instead of hitching up his hind legs as he cleared
the obstacle at the height of his leap, he'd swing them lazily to one side, as if such feats were no more difficult than
sprawling on the floor. He became a personage in the park
and soon acquired a band of children, who left their
games to follow him, or who, more correctly, played new
games to include him. It was not only his prowess and
beauty that attracted them, but the extraordinary love he
bestowed on them. He was simply smitten with our race. I
was crossing upper Broadway with him once; he was
leashed; the crossing was crowded. There came toward us
an old gentleman holding a four-year-old boy by the hand.
The boy's face and the dog's were on a level, and as they
passed the two faces turned to each other in mutual delight, and Shawno bestowed a kiss that began at one ear,
went all the way across and ended at the other. I glanced
back. The boy, too, was glancing back, grinning widely. In
fact, the boy and Shawno were looking back at each other.
This incident is paired for all time with another that I
witnessed in New Yark and that perhaps could not have
occurred in any other city. It was in the subway at rush
hour. The corridors were booming with the hammering,
grinding roar of the trains and the pounding of thousands
of almost running feet. Three corridors came together in a
Y and two of them were streaming with people packed far
tighter than soldiers in military formation. The columns
were approaching each other rapidly. There was room to
pass, but just barely. Alas, the columns collided. That is,
their inside corners did, and these corners were occupied
by apparently irrascible men. Each hurled one, exactly
one, furious roundhouse blow at the other, and both were
swept away in their columns-a memorable fight.
I would never have known certain people in New Yark
except for the loving spirit of the dog; worse, it would
never have occurred to me that knowing them was desirable, or possible, where in fact it was delightful. The people I mean were children. What could I have done with
them were it not for the dog? As it was, I changed my
hours in order to meet them, and they-a group of eight
or so-waited for us devotedly after school. Most were
Puerto Rican. The youngest was only seven, the eldest
eleven. They would spread themselves in a large circle
with the dog in the center and throw a ball back and forth,
shouting as he leaped and tried to snatch it from the air.
When he succeeded, which was often, there ensued the
merriest and most musical of chases, the boys arranged
behind the dog according to their speed of foot, the dog
holding the ball high, displaying it provocatively, looking
back over his shoulder and trotting stiff-legged just fast
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
enough to elude the foremost boy, winding that laughing,
shouting, almost singing line .of children this way and that
through the park. I discovered that many of the by-standers I used to see at this time came on purpose to watch
the children and the dog. One elderly, white-haired man I
have never forgotten. He was jewish and spoke with a
German accent, wore a felt hat and expensive coats. He
came to our playground regularly and stood with his hands
behind his back, his head dropped forward, nodding and
chuckling, and smiling unweariedly. His face was wonderful. It was intelligent and kindly, was still strong, still handsome, and it possessed a quality I have come to associate
with genius, an apparent unity of feeling, an alacrity and
wholeness of response. Whatever he was feeling suffused
his face; he did not have attitudes and counter-attitudes
toward his feelings. One sensed great confidence in this,
and great trust in himself. The dog delighted him. It was
the dog he came to see. He deferred to the headlong, boisterous children, who, when Shawno would appear, would
shout happily and in unison, and Shawno would go to
them, bounding exuberantly, but it would not be long before the old gentleman >'vould call him, and Shawno would
leave the children, not bounding now but sweeping his
tail in such extreme motions that his hind legs performed
a little dance from side to side independently of his front
ones. The old gentleman would lean over him, speak to
him and pet him, and the dog would press against his legs
and look into his face.
We usually chatted for a few minutes before I went
home. When I asked him about his work and life he waved
away the questions with gestures that were humorous and
pleading yet were impressive in their authority. One day I
recognized his face in a photograph in the Times, alas, on
the obituary page. He was an eminent refugee scholar, a
sociologist. I discovered, reading the description of his
career, that I had studied briefly with his son at Columbia.
By this time we had moved to the remote farmhouse in the
country and our second child had been born.
Past lives. Streams. An incident in the woods. Ferocity and family concern.
Our house had been occupied by Finns, as had many
others near us. The hill, actually a ridge, sloped away on
two sides, one forested and the other, to the south, open
pasture with the remnants of an orchard. At the bottom
of these fields was a stream, and in an arm of the stream, a
sauna. It was here that the old Finn who had built the
house had bathed his invalid wife, carrying her back and
forth every day until her final illness. From this same small
pool he had carried water in buckets to the garden a few
strides away. The sauna was damaged beyond repair, but
we let it stand; and we brought back the garden, which
now was one of three. For the few years that the romance
of country living endured, it was this garden that I tended
with greatest satisfaction, carrying water in buckets, as
7
�had the old man. Just beyond the sauna a wooded slope
rose steeply. Racoons and deer erttered our field here, and
it was here that the ponies and dog all came to drink.
There were other relics of those vanished lives: handmade apple boxes with leather hinges cut from old boots;
door handles in all the sheds made of sapling crotches; an
apple picking ladder that was a tall young spruce (the bark
was still on it) cut lengthwise down the middle and fitted
with rungs of sugar maple saplings; ten-foot Finnish skis
bent at the tips with steam from a kettle. There were hills
wherever one looked, and there had been farms on all the
hills. Some of the Finns had skied to market. They had
cruised their woodlots on skis. Some of their children had
skied to school.
The hills and ridges are so numerous that in the spring,
while the snow is melting, the sound of water can be heard
everywhere. It pours and tumbles; there is a continual roaring; and when the thaw is well advanced the large stream
in the valley makes the frightening sounds of flood, hurling chunks of ice ahead of it, crowding violently into the
curves, and hurtling over falls so deep in spume that the
rocks cannot be seen. Later, in the hot weather, one hears
the braided sounds and folded sounds of quiet water. The
orange gashes and abrasions on the trunks of trees are
darkening. More trees are dead. The banks of the streams,
however beautiful, and however teeming with new life, are
strewn with debris in endless stages of decay.
The streams have become presences in my life. For a
while they were passions. There are few that I haven't
fished and walked to their source. These have been solitary
excursions, except for the single time that I took the dog.
His innocent trotting at the water's edge disturbed the
trout. Still worse was his drinking and wading in the stream.
I called him out. He stood on the bank and braced his legs
and shook himself. Rather, he was seized by a violent shak·
ing, a shaking so swift and powerful as to seem like a vibration. It shook his head from side to side, then letting his
head come to rest seized his shoulders and shook them,
then his ribs, and in a swift, continuous wave passed violently to his haunches, which it shook with especial vigor,
and then entered his tail and shook the entire length of it,
and at last, from the very tip, sprang free, leaving behind,
at the center of the now-subsided aura of sparkling waterdrops, an invigorated and happy dog. It was at this moment
of perfected well-being that one of those darting slim shadows caught his eye. He was electrified. He hurled himself
into the stream head first, thrusting his snout to the very
bottom, where he rooted this way and that. He lifted his
head from the shallow water, legs braced, and looked in
amazement from side to side. The trout had vanished so
utterly that he had no notion even of the direction of its
flight. He thrust down his head again and turned over
stones, then came up, his streaming fur clinging to his
body, and stood there, smooth and muscular, peering
down, poised in the electric stillness of the hunter that
seems to be a waiting but is actually a fascination. Years
later, after my own passion for trout had cooled, I would
8
see him poised like that in the shallows of the swimming
hole, ignoring the splashing, clamoring children, looking
down, still mesmerized, still ready-so he thought-to
pounce.
During most of the thaw there is little point in going into
the woods. Long after the fields have cleared and their
brown is touched with green, there'll be pools and streaks
of granular snow, not only in the low-lying places in the
woods, but on shadowed slopes and behind rocks. For a
whiie the topmost foot of soil is too watery to be called
mud. The road to our house becomes impassable, and for
days, or one week, or two, or three, we walk home from
the store wearing rubber boots and carrying the groceries
and perhaps the youngest children in knapsacks and our
arms. This was once a corduroy road, and it never fails that
some of the logs have risen again to the surface.
Spring in the north is almost violent. After the period of
desolation, when the snow has gone and everything that
once was growing seems to have been bleached and crushed,
and the soil itself seems to have been killed by winter, there
comes, accompanied by the roaring of the streams, a prickling of the tree buds that had formed in the cold, and a
prickling of little stems on the forest floor, and a tentative,
small stirring of bird life. This vitalizing process, once be·
gun, becomes bolder, more lavish, and larger, and soon
there is green everywhere, and the open fretwork of
branches and trunks, beyond which, all winter, we had
seen sky, hills, and snow, becomes an eye-stopping mass
of green. The roaring of the streams diminishes, but the
spreading of the green increases until the interlocking
leaves cannot claim another inch of sunlight except by
slow adjustment and the killing off of rival growth. Now
the animal presence is spread widely through the woods,
and Shawno runs this way and that, nose to the ground, so
provoked by scents that he cannot concentrate and remains excited and distracted by overlapping trails.
It was in this season of early summer that we came here.
The woods were new to me. I was prepared for wonders.
And there occurred a small but strange encounter that did
indeed prove haunting. We had been walking a woods road,
Shawno and I, or the ghost of a road, and came to a little
dell, dense with ferns and the huge leaves of young striped
maples. Shawno drew close to me and seemed perturbed.
He stood still for a moment sniffing the air instead of the
ground; and then the fur rose on his neck and he began to
growl.
At that moment there emerged from the semi-dark of a
dense leaf bank perhaps thirty steps away, two dogs, who
stopped silently and came no further. The smaller dog was
a beagle, the larger a German shepherd, black and gigantic. His jowls on both sides and his snout in front bristled
with white-shafted porcupine quills. He did not seem to
be in pain, but seemed helpless and pathetic, a creature
without fingers or tools, and therefore doomed. The uncanny thing about the dogs was their stillness. That intelligence that seems almost human and that in their case was
amplified in the logic of their companionship, was refusWINTER 1982
�ing contact of any sort not only with me but with the dog
at my side. Shawno continued to growl' and to stamp his
feet uncertainly. Just as silently as they h~d appeared, the
beagle and the shepherd turned into the undergrowth and
vanished.
I was to see these two dogs again. In the meantime, I
learned that it was not rare for dogs to run wild, or to lead
double lives; and that such pairings of scent and sight were
common. The beagle could follow a trail. The shepherd
had sharp eyes, was strong and could kill.
In the city cars had been the chief threat of Shawno's
life. Here it was hunters. He was large and tawny, and
though he was lighter in color than a deer, he resembled a
deer far more closely than had the cows, sheep, and horses
which in the memory of my neighbors had been shot for
deer-certainly more closely than had the goat that had
been gutted in the field and brought to the village on the
hood of the hunter's car. With such anecdotes in mind. I
discovered one day, toward the end of hunting season,
that Shawno had escaped from the house. At least eight
hunters had gone up our road into the woods. I know now
that his life was not at quite the risk that I imagined, but
at that time I was disturbed. I ran into the woods calling to
him and whistling, praying for his survival and wondering
how I should find him if, already, he had been shot.
Several hours later, his courting finished (probably it
had been that) he emerged into our field loping and pant·
ing, and came into the house, and with a clatter of elbows
and a thump of his torso dropped into his nook by the
woodstove. He held his head erect and looked at me. The
corners of his lips were lifted. His mouth was open to the
full, and his extended tongue, red with exertion, vibrated
with his panting in a long, highly arched curve that turned
up again at its tip. He blinked as the warmth took hold of
him, and with a grunt that was partly a sigh stretched his
neck forward and dropped his chin on his paws.
In February of that winter I saw the beagle and German
shepherd again. We were sharing a load of hay with a dis·
tant neighbor, an elderly man whose bachelor brother had
died and who was living alone among the bleached and
crumbling pieces of what had once been a considerable
farm. He still raised a few horses and trained them for har·
ness, though there wasn't a living in it. I had backed the
truck into the barn and was handing down bales to him
when a car drew up and a uniformed man got out. I recog·
nized the game warden, though I had never met him. He
was strikingly different from the police of the county seat
ten miles away, who walked with waddling gaits and could
be found at all hours consuming ice cream at the restaurant
on the highway south. The warden was large but trim, was
actually an imposing figure, as he needed to be-two at·
tempts had been made on his life, one a rifle shot through
the window, the other a gasoline bomb that had brought
down the house in flames, at night, in winter. He and his
wife and adolescent son had escaped. He was spoken of as
a fanatic, but hunters praised his skill as a hunter. A man
who had paid a fine for poaching said to me, "If he's after
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
you in the woods he'll git you. No man can run through
the woods like him." His large round eyes were a pale blue.
Their gaze was unblinking, open, disturbingly strange.
He addressed the elderly man by his last name. The
warden, too, was a scion of an old family here.
"We'd all be better off," he said, "if you'd kept him
chained.''
His voice was emphatic but not angry. He spoke with
the unconscious energy and loudness that one hears in
many of the rural voices. "He's been runnin' deer, and
you know it. I caught him at the carcass. It was still
kickin' ." The warden handed him the piece of paper he
had been carrying, which was obviously a summons. "I've
done away with him," he said.
We had come out of the barn. The warden opened the
trunk of his car and brought out the small stiff body of the
beagle. Its eyes and mouth were open, its tongue pro·
truded between its teeth on one side, and its chest was
matted with blood. The warden laid the body on the snow
bank by the barn and said, "Come back to the car a min·
ute."
The black German shepherd lay on a burlap sack, taking
up the whole of the trunk.
uyou know who owns that?"
The elderly man shook his head. No emotion had ap·
peared on his face since the warden had arrived. The war·
den turned his blue, strangely un·aggressive eyes on me
and repeated the question. I, too, shook my head. The
shepherd had been home since I had seen him in the
woods: someone had pulled out the quills.
Shawno was barking from the cab of the truck. I had
left the window open to give him air, and the smell of the
dead dogs must have reached him.
After the warden left, my neighbor went into the house
and came back with money for the hay.
"Obliged to you for haulin it," he said, and that was all.
That night, on the phone, I told a friend, a hunter, about
the dogs.
"The warden was right," he said. "Dogs like that can kill
a deer a day, even more. Jake Wesley's dogs cornered a
doe in my back field last year. She was pregnant with
twins. They didn't bother killing her, they don't know
how, they were eating her while she stood there. She was
ripped to shreds. I shot them both."
There was a crust on the snow just then. Dogs could run
on it, but the sharp hooves of the deer would break through
and the ice cut their legs. They spent such winters herded
in evergreen groves, or "yards/' and if the bark and buds
gave out many would starve. Occasionally the wardens
took them hay, but this introduced another problem, for if
the dogs found the snowmobile trails and followed them
to the yards, the slaughter could be severe.
And what of Shawno? I realized that I regarded him
habitually with the egocentricity of a doting master, as if
he were a creature chiefly of his human relations, though
certainly I knew better. I thought of the many cats his fe·
rocious mother had killed. And I remembered how, the
9
�previous fall, while our children were playing with a neighbor's children in front of our house, Shawno had come
into their midst with a freshly-killed woodchuck. He held
his head high and trotted proudly among us, displaying
his kill. It was a beautiful chestnut color and it dangled
flexibly full-length from his teeth, jouncing limply as he
trotted. He placed it on the ground under the large maple,
where he often lay, and stretched out regally above it, lionlike, the corpse between his paws. I was tying a shoelace
for one of the children. I heard a rushing growl of savagery
and out of the corner of my eye saw Shawno spring forward. I shouted and jumped in front of him. One of the
visiting boys had come too close.
I doubt that Shawno would have bitten him. Nevertheless, in that frightening moment I had seen and heard the
animal nervous system that is not like ours, that is capable
of an explosive savagery we never approximate, even in
our most violent rages.
He was with me in the pick-up one day when I went for
milk to a neighbor's dairy. There were usually dogs in
front of the barn and Shawno was on friendly terms with
them. This time, however, before I had shut the motor, he
leaped across me in the cab, growling and glaring, his
snout wrinkled and his front teeth bared to the full. His
body was tense, and instantaneously had been charged
with an extraordinary energy. Down below, also growling,
was a large black hound with yellow eyes. The window was
open. Before I could close it or admonish him, Shawno put
his head and shoulders through it, and with a push of his
hind feet that gouged the seat cover, propelled himself
outward and down on the hound.
There were no preliminaries. They crashed together
with gnashing teeth and a savage, high-pitched screaming.
The fight was over in a moment. Shawno seized him by
the neck, his upper teeth near the ear, his lower on the
throat, and driving forward with his powerful hind legs
twisted him violently to the ground.
The hound tried to right himself. Shawno responded
with siren-like growls of rage and a munching and tightening of teeth that must have been excruciating. The hound's
yellow eyes flashed. He ceased struggling. Shawno growled
again, and this time shook his head from side to side in the
worrying motion with which small animals are killed by
large ones. The hound lay still. Shawno let him up. The
hound turned its head away. Shawno pressed against him,
at right angles, extending his chin and entire neck over
the hound's shoulder. The hound turned its head as far as
it could in the other direction.
The fight was over. There was no battle for survival, as
in the Jack London stories that had thrilled me in my
youth. Survival lay precisely not in tooth and claw, but in
the social signalling that tempered their savagery, as it
tempered that of wolves. It was this that accounted for
the fact that one never came upon the carcasses of belligerent dogs who had misconceived their powers, as had the
hound.
The victory was exhilarating. What right had I, who had
10
' done nothing but watch, to feel exultation and pride? Yet
I did feel these things. Shawno felt them too, I am sure.
He sat erect beside me going home, and there was still a
charge of energy, an aura about his body. He held his head
proudly, or so I thought. His mouth was open, his tongue
lolled forward and he was panting lightly. From time to
time he glanced aside at me out of narrowed eyes. As for
me, I could not forbear looking at him again and again. I
was smiling and could not stop. I reached across and stroked
his head and spoke to him, and again he glanced at me. He
was like the roughneck athlete heros of my youth, who after great feats in the sandlot or high school football games,
begrimed, bruised, wet-haired, and dishevelled, would
walk to the dressing room or the cars, heads high, helmets
dangling from their fingertips or held in the crooks of their
arms, riding sweet tides of exhaustion and praise. And I
remembered a few glorious occasions, after I too had come
of an age to compete, when my brief inspirations on the
field had been rewarded by teammates' arms around my
shoulders.
But more than this, I felt augmented by his animal
power, as if my very existence, both spirit and body, had
been multiplied, as a horseman is animally augmented
guiding the great power of the creature. And I felt protected. It was as if somewhere within me there were still a
little boy, a child, and this guardian with thick fur and
fearsome teeth, who could leap nonchalantly over the truck
we now rode in, had devoted his powers utterly to my wellbeing.
How little of this, how nothing at all of this, came into
my account when I said at home, "Shawno got into a fight!"
Ida and Patricia came close to me, asking, "What happened? What happened?"
Ida had never witnessed the animal temper I have just
described. What she wanted to know was, had he been bitten?
If anyone had said to Shawno what the little boy says in
Ida's Mother Goose-"Bow wow wow, whose dog art
thou?" he could not have answered except by linking Ida's
name with my own. He often sat by her chair when she
ate. Three of the five things he knew to search for and
fetch belonged to Ida: her shoes, her boots, her doll. When
I read to her in the evening she leaned against me on the
sofa and Shawno lay on the other side with his head in her
lap. Often she fell asleep while I read, and we would leave
her there until we ourselves were ready for bed. When we
came for her Shawno would be asleep beside her. On the
nights when I carried her, still awake, to her bed, she would
insist that both Shawno and Patricia come kiss her goodnight, and both would. Usually he would leap into the bed,
curl up beside her and spend part of the night.
When she was five or six we bought two shaggy ponies
from a neighbor, and having fenced the garden, let them
roam as they would. The larger pony had been gelded, but
was still inclined to nip and sport. Late one afternoon I
WINTER 1982
�Down to Searles.
shoe pits by the road and games before supper and at night
under the single light at the corner of the store. Three
roads converged here. One was steep and on winter Sundays and occasional evenings had been used for sledding.
That was when the roads had been packed, not plowed,
and the only traffic had been teams and sleds. Searles's
father-the second of the three generations of C. W.
Searles-though he was known as a hard and somewhat
grasping man, would open the store and perhaps bring up
cider for the sledders. There would be a bonfire in the
road, and as many as a hundred people in motion around
it.
Searles was sixty years old when we arrived. His store
was wonderfully well organized and good to look at,
crowded but neat and logical, filled with implements of
the local trades and pastimes. Searles had worked indoors
for his father as a boy. Later as a youth, he had gone with
a cart and horse to the outlying farms, taking meat, hardware, clothing, and tools and bringing back not cash but
eggs, butter, apples, pears, chickens, shingles. Now when
he bought the pate called cretan, he knew it would be
consumed by the Dulacs, Dubords, and Pelletiers. The five
sets of rubber children's boots were for the Sawyers and
were in the proper sizes. He displayed them temptingly,
brought down the price, and finally said, "Why don't you
take the lot, Charlie, and make me an offer?" He knew
who hunted and who fished, and what state their boots,
pants, and coats were in. A death in the town affected his
business. He saw the price of bullets going skyhigh, put in
several shell and bullet-making kits, and said, "Verne,
what do you figure you spend a year on shells and bullets?"
The owners of bitches, when their dogs were in heat,
were often obliged to call the owners of males and request
that they be taken home and chained. Shawno was gone
for four days. At last the call came. He had travelled sev·
era] miles. When I went for him he wouldn't obey me, was
glassy-eyed and frantic. The only way to get him home
was to put the bitch in the car and lure him. It was pa·
thetic. He hadn't slept, was thin, had been fighting with
other males, and had had no enjoyment at all: the bitch
was a feisty little dachshund. For two days he lay chained
on the porch lost utterly in gloom. He didn't respond to
anyone, not even to Ida, but kept his chin flat between his
paws and averted his eyes. He had gone to bitches before,
but I had been able to fetch him. He had suffered frustra·
tion before, but had recovered quickly. What was differ·
ent this time? I never knew.
Apart from these vigils of instinct, his absences were on
account of human loves, the first and most protracted of
which was not a single person but a place and situation ir·
resistible to his nature. This was the general store.·
The one-story white clapboard building was near the
same broad stream that ran through the whole of the valley. The banks were steep here and the stream curved
sharply, passing under a bridge and frothing noisily over a
double ledge of rounded rocks. There had used to be horse-
come to ... "
In the summer there were rakes, hoes, spades, cultivators, coils of garden hose, sections of low white fencing to
put around flower beds, and perhaps a wheelbarrow ar·
rayed on the loading apron in front of the store. In winter
there were snowshovels, and the large, flat-bottomed snow
scoops that one pushed with both hands, and wood stoves
in crates, and sections of black stove pipe, while in the
window, set up in lines, were insulated rubber boots with
thick felt liners, and two styles of snowshoes, glistening
with varnish. At all times there were axes and axe handles,
bucksaws, wooden wedges and iron wedges, birch hooks, a
peavey or two, many chainsaw files and cans of oil. For
years he kept a huge skillet that finally replaced, as he
knew it would, the warped implement at the boys' camp.
He carried kitchenware and electrical and plumbing sup·
plies, and tools for carpentry, as well as drugstore items,
including a great deal of Maalox. All this was in addition
to the food, the candy rack, the newspapers, the greeting
cards, and the school supplies.
People stopped to talk. Those he liked-some of whom
had sat beside him in the little red schoolhouse up the
road, long unused now-would stand near the counter for
half an hour exchanging news or pleasantries. One day I
heard Franklin Mason, who was five years older than
glanced from an upstairs window and saw Ida leading Liza
and Jacob across the yard, all three holding hands. Jacob
had just learned to walk and they were going slowly. The
ponies came behind them silently. Starbright, the gelding,
drew close to Jacob and seemed about to nudge him, which
he had done several times in recent weeks, knocking him
over. Shawno was watching from across the yard. He sprang
forward and came running in a crouch, close to the ground.
I called Patricia to the window. His style was wonderful to
see, so calm and masterly. There had been a time when he
had harried the ponies gleefully, chasing them up and
down the road without respite, nipping at their heels,
leaping at their shoulders, and eluding their kicks with
what, to them, must have been taunting ease. I had had to
chastize him several times before he would give it up.
Now silently and crouching menacingly he interposed
himself between the children and their stalkers. Star·
bright knew that he would leap but did not know when,
and began to lift his feet apprehensively. Shawno waited ...
and it seemed that the pony concluded that he would not
leap, and abruptly he leapt, darting like a snake at Star·
bright's feet. The pony pulled back and wheeled, obliging
the smaller pony to wheel too. Shawno let them come
along then, but followed the children himself, glancing
back to see that the ponies kept their distance. The children hadn't seen a bit of this. "What a darling!" said
Patricia. "What a dear dog!"
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
uoh 1 it's horrible. I don't practice no more, that's what's
11
�Searles, say testily, ((I seen 'em, 1seen 'em." He was refer·
1
ring to the shingling brackets that had been propped up
prominently at the end of the co[lnter. Searles had known
for two years that Mason wanted to replace his roofing; he
had JUSt learned that Mason had decided on asphalt shingles. "I might borrow Mark's brackets," said Mason, but
he added, in a different tone, scratching his face, "these
are nice, though ... "
People didn't say "Searles's place" but "down to
Searles." "Oh, they'll have it down to Se;rles." "I stopped
in down to Searles." "Let me just call down to Searles."
He was C. W. the third, but had been called Bob all his life.
Of the men in the village he was certainly the least
rural. He had grown up on a farm, loved to hunt and fish,
play poker, drink whisky, and swap yarns. But he had gone
away to college, and then to business school, and had
worked in Boston for three years. He was not just clever or
smart but was extremely intelligent, with a meticulous,
lively, retentive mind. He had come home not because he
couldn't make a go of things in the city, but because he
loved the village and the countryside and sorely missed
the people. He subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and
the New York Times, read many periodicals, was interested in politics and controversy and changing customs.
When I met him, his three children were away at college.
We disagreed irreconcilably on politics. I was aware of his
forebearance and was grateful for it. And I was impressed
by his wit and his kindliness, as when, without reproach or
impatience, he allowed certain desperately impoverished
children to come back repeatedly and exchange their
penny candies; and as when he built a ramp for the wheelchair of a neighbor who could no longer walk but was still
alert and lively.
He was not a happy man. He drank too much to be
healthy, and his powers of mind by and large went unused. Yet one could sense in him a bedrock of contentment, and a correct choice of place and work. He was tall
and bony, carried far too large a stomach, and was lame in
one leg. In damp weather he used a cane and moved with
some difficulty about the store. I came to see that most of
his friends were old friends and were devoted to him. I
learned, too, that he had forgiven many debts and had
signed over choice lots of land to the town, one for a ball
field, another for picnics. His gregarious cocker spaniel,
who possessed no territorial sense at all lounged in the
aisles and corners, and on sunny days ca'u!d be found on
the loading apron under the awning. And it was here, in
front of the store, beside the caramel colored spaniel that
one sunny day I encountered my own dog who had vanished from the house.
'
He leaped up gaily, showing no guilt at all and came beside me when I entered the store.
'
Searles, on the high stool, was leaning over the Wall
Street Journal that was spread across the counter. The moment he raised his head, Shawno looked at him alertly.
Searles smiled at me. "I've got a new friend" he said·
.
12
'
'
and to the dog, "Haven't I, Shawno? What'll you have,
Shawno? Do you want a biscuit? Do you?" Shawno
reared, put his front paws on the counter and barked.
"Oh, you do?" said Searles. "Well, I happen to have
one. "
He put his hand under the counter, where he kept the
dog biscuits that had fattened the spaniel.
"Will you pay for it now?" he said. "Will you? Will you,
Shawno?"
Shawno, whose paws were still on the counter, barked
in a deep, almost indignant way. Searles was holding the
biscuit, not offering it.
. "Oh, you want it on credit?" he said. He held up the
b1scmt, and at the sight of it the dog barked in lighter,
more eager tones. ((What?" said Searles, uyou want it
free? Free?" Again Shawno barked, the eagerness mixed
now with impatience and demand. "All right," said
Searles, "Here 'tis. On the house." He held it out and
Shawno took it with a deft thrust of his head.
I watched all this with a long-lasting, rather complicated
smile.
I said that I hoped the dog wasn't a nuisance.
((Oh, no," said Searles, uhe's a good dog. He's a fine
dog."
And I looked at Shawno, who was looking at Searles
and thought, "you wretch, you unfaithful wretch. Ho~
easily you can be charmed and bought!"
Yet I let him go back there again and again. He'd trot
away in the morning as if he were going off to work, and
then at supperbme would appear on the brow of the hill
muddied and wet, having jumped into the stream to drink:
I didn't have the heart to chain him. And I couldn't
blame him. What better place for a gregarious dog than
this one surviving social fragment of the bygone town?
There were other dogs to sport with, there was the store
itself with its pleasant odors, there was Searles, my rival,
with his biscuits, there were children to make much of
him, and grown-ups by the score. Moreover, there were
cars, trucks, and delivery vans, and all had been marked by
the dogs of far-flung places. We would arrive for groceries
or mail and find him stretched on the apron in front of the
store, or gamboling in the road with other dogs, or standing in a cluster of kids with bikes, or stationed by the
counter inside, looking up inquiringly at customers who
were chatting with Searles.
My jealousy grew. I was seriously perturbed. Somewhere within me an abandoned lover was saying "Don't
you love me anymore? Have you forgotten how I raised
you and trained you? Have you forgotten those mornings
in the park when I threw sticks for you and taught you to
leap, or our walks here in the woods, and the thousand discoveries we've made together?"
Most serious of all was his absence while I worked. I had
built a little cabin half a mile from the house. He had been
a presence, almost a tutelary spirit, in the very building of
it, and then he had walked beside me every day to and
from it, and had lain near my feet while I wrote or read.
WINTER 1982
�Often when I turned to him he would' already have seen
the movement and I would find his eyes waiting for mine.
Those inactive hours were a poor substitute for the attractions of the store, and I knew it, in spite of our companionable lunches and afternoon walks. But what of me?
One day, several weeks after his first visit to the store, I
jumped into the car and went down there rather speedily,
ordered him rather firmly into the back seat, and took him
home. The procedure was repeated the following day.
The day after that I chained him, and the day after that
chained him again ...
Life returned to normal. I took away the chain. He was
grateful and stopped moping. I saw that he had renounced his friends at the store, and I was glad, forgetting
that I had forced him to do it. Anyway, those diversions
had never cancelled his love for me-so I reminded myself, and began to see fidelity where I had established
dependence. But that didn't matter. The undiminished,
familiar love wiped out everything-at least for me.
Eddie Dubord. Sawyer's Labrador. Quills.
Just below us in the woods the stream was speeded by a
short channel of granite blocks, though the millwheel was
gone that once had turned continuously during thaw, reducing small hills of cedar drums to stacks of shingles.
There had been trout for a while in the abandoned millrace, but chubs, that eat the eggs of trout, had supplanted
them.
Upstream of this ghost of a mill, just beyond the second
of two handsome waterfalls, one stringer of a rotted bridge
still joined the banks. Snowmobilers had dropped a tree
beside it and had nailed enough crossboards to make a
narrow path. I had crossed it often on snowshoes, and
then on skis, and the dog had trotted behind, but there
came a day in spring, after the mud had dried, that
Shawno drew back and stood there on the bank stamping
his feet, moving from side to side, and barking. He had
seen the frothing water between the boards of the bridge.
I picked him up and carried him across, and could not
help laughing, he was so big, such a complicated bundle in
my arms who once had nestled there snugly.
Beyond the bridge a grassy road curved away into the
trees. In somewhat more than a mile it would join the
tarred road, but halfway there, on the inside of its curve, it
was met by a wagon trail, now partly closed by saplings,
and it was here at the corner of this spur that my neighbor, Eddie Dubord, built a small cabin similar to my own.
It was summer. The dog had gone with the children to
the swimming hole and I was walking alone carrying a
small rod and a tin of worms. I saw two columns of smoke
ahead of me, thinning and mingling in the breeze, and
then I could see a parked car and a man working at something. The smoke was blowing toward him and came from
two small fires spaced twelve feet apart. The man was
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
blocky and short. He wore a visored cap of bright orange
and a chore jacket of dark blue denim. His movements
were stiff and slow, yet there was something impressive
and attractive about the way he worked. Every motion
achieved something and led to the next without waste or
repetition. He went to one of the fires carrying an axe,
which he used only to lift some pine boughs from a pile.
He threw several on each of the fires. I walked closer, but
stopped again and watched him. We had never met, but I
knew that it was Dubord. He was seventy-four years old.
He had driven the corner stakes to mark the floor of a
cabin, had tied a cord on one of them and had carried it
around the others. Apparently he had already levelled the
cord. I watched him as he picked up a five foot iron bar
and went away dragging a stoneboat that was simply the
hood of an ancient car turned upside down and fitted
with a yoke and rope. He stopped at a pile of stones, and
with his bar levered a large flat stone onto the car hood,
which he dragged back to one of the corner stakes. With
short, efficient strokes he levered the stone onto the
ground. When finally I walked by he was on his hands and
knees firming the stone and didn't see me.
Several days later I went that way again, and without
fully knowing why, stopped to watch him. He had finished the floor and had built a low platform the length of
it, and had equipped the platform with steps. He would be
able to work on the rafters and roof without resorting to a
ladder.
He had assembled several units of studs, rafters, and
cross braces, and now as I watched he pushed one erect
with a stick, and lodged it in the fork of a long pole that
held it while he adjusted it for plumb. He nailed bracing
boards at the sides, and drove in permanent nails at the
base. His concentration was remarkable. It was as total
and self-forgetful as a child's. Later, after I had come to
know him well, I marvelled more, not less, at this quality. I
had seen him at work on almost every gadget the economy
afforded: radios and TVs, pop-up toasters, lawnmowers of
several kinds, snow-blowers, rota-tillers, outboard motors,
locks, shotguns, clocks. On several occasions I had come
close to him and had stood beside him wondering how to
announce my presence ... but it never mattered how: he
invariably looked up with a start of panic, and then
blushed. It was not merely as if his concentration had
been disturbed, but as if some deep, continuous melody
had been shattered. Then he would smile shyly and greet
me in his unassuming, yet gracious, almost courtly way.
He had already roofed the cabin and was boarding the
sides-on the diagonal, as the old farmhouses were
boarded-when we finally met. And as has often happened, it was the dog who introduced us, ignoring utterly
the foolish shyness on both sides.
The smudge fires were going again to drive away the
bugs. A small stack of rough-cut boards lay on a pallet of
logs. Dubord had just hung the saw on a prong of the sawhorse and was carrying a board to the wall when Shawno
trotted up to him and barked. He was startled and backed
13
�away defensively, ready to use the board as a weapon. But
Shawno was wagging his tail in, the extreme sweeps of
great enthusiasm, and he did something he had almost
abandoned since our coming to the country: he reared up,
put his paws on Dubord's broad chest and tried to lick his
weathered, leathery face with its smoke-haze of white
stubble beard. By the time I reached them Shawno had
conquered him utterly. Dubord was patting the dog,
bending over him, and talking to him in that slurred, attractive baritone voice that seemed to have burrs and
knurls in it, a grain and dark hue as of polished walnut,
and that he seemed to savor in his throat and on his
tongue, just as he savored tobacco, black coffee, and
whisky. And of course he- knew the dog's name, as he
knew my name, and as I knew his. It was the simplest
thing in the world to shake hands and be friends.
To hold Dubord's hand was like holding a leather sack
filled with chunks of wood. His fingers were three times
the size of ordinary fingers. He scarcely gripped my hand,
but politely allowed me to hold his. Gravely he said,
"Pleased to meet you," and then his small blue eyes grew
lively behind the round, steel-framed spectacles. "I'd ask
you in," he said, "but there ain't much difference yet between out and in. You got time for a drink?" I said I did,
and he opened the toolbox and handed me a pint of Four
Roses.
His skull was shaped like a cannonball. His jaw was
broad and gristly. Everything about him suggested
strength and endurance, yet his dominant trait, I soon
came to see, was thoughtfulness. He listened, noticed, reflected, though it was apparent, even now, that these
qualities must often have been overwhelmed in his youth
by passions of one kind or another. He had come from
Quebec at the age of twenty, and for almost two decades
had worked in lumber camps as a woodcutter and cook.
He had farmed here in this valley, both as a hired hand
and on his own-had dug wells, built houses, barns, and
sheds, had installed his own electric lines and his own
plumbing, had raised animals and crops of all kinds. In
middle age he had married a diminutive, high-tempered,
rotund, cross-eyed, childishly silly, childishly gracious
woman. They had never had children. They had never
even established a lasting peace. Her crippled mother
lived with them in the small house he had built, knitting
in an armchair before the TV while her daughter dusted
the china knickknacks and photographs of relatives,
straightened the paper flowers in their vases, and flattened the paper doilies they had placed under everything.
Dubord liked all this, or rather, approved it, but felt ill at
ease with his heavy boots and oilstained pants, and spent
his days in a shed beside the house. There, surrounded by
his hundreds of small tools, he tinkered at the workbench,
listened to French Canadian fiddle music on cassettes,
and occasionally put aside the tools to play his own fiddle.
The camp in the woods served the same purposes as the
shed, but promised longer interludes of peace.
I got to know him that summer and fall, but it was not
14
until winter-our family's third in the little town-that
Dubord and I realized that we were friends.
The deep snow of our first winter had made me giddy
with excitement. The silence in the woods, the hilly terrain with its many streams, most of them frozen and
white, but :; few audible with a muted, far-off gurgling under their covering of ice and snow, occasional sightings of
the large white snowshoe hares, animal tracks-all this
had been a kind of enchantment and had recalled boyhood enjoyments that once had been dear to me. I went
about on snowshoes, and Shawno came behind. The following year I discovered the lightweight, highly-arched,
cross-country skis, my speed in the woods was doubled,
and our outings became strenuous affairs for the dog. Often he sank to his shoulders and was obliged to bound like
a porpoise. Except in the driest, coldest snow, he stopped
frequently, and pulling back his lips in a silent snarl would
bite away the impacted snow from between his toes. His
tawny, snow-cleaned, winter-thickened fur looked handsome against the whiteness. When we came to downhill
stretches I would speed ahead, and he would rally and follow at a run.
We had taken a turn like this through the woods in our
third year, on a sunny, blue-skied day in March, and
stopped at the camp to visit Dubord.
I could smell the smoke of his tin chimney before I
could see it. Then the cabin came in view. His intricately
webbed, gracefully curved snowshoes leaned against the
depleted stack of firewood that early in the winter had
filled the overhang of the entranceway.
I could hear music. It was the almost martial, furiously
rhythmic music of the old country dances ... but there
seemed to be two fiddles.
Shawno barked and raced ahead ... and Dubord's pet
squirrel bounded up the woodpile. When I reached the
camp Shawno was dancing on his hind legs barking angrily
and complainingly, and the handsome red squirrel was
crouching in a phoebe's nest in the peak of the roof, looking down with bright eyes and maddening calm. The
music stopped, the door opened, and Dubord greeted us
cheerfully-actually with a merry look on his face.
"You won't get that old squirrel, Shawno," he said.
"He's too fast for you. You'll never get 'im. Might's well
bark ... "
"Come in," he said. ui just made coffee. Haven't seen
those for a while, Where'd you get 'em?"
He meant the skis. He had never seen a manufactured
pair, though he had seen many of the eight and nine foot
handmade skis the Finns had used. He didn't know why
(so he said later) only the Finns had used them. Everyone
else had stayed with snowshoes, which were an Indian invention.
"Nilo Ansden used to take his eggs down to Searles on
skis," he said. The Searles he meant was Bob Searles's father. "He took a short cut one day down that hill 'cross
from your place. We had a two-foot storm all night and
the day before. He got halfway down and remembered
WINTER 1982
�Esther Barden's chicken coop was in the way, but he
thought there's enough snow to get up on the roof. .. and
there was. Once he was up there there was nothin' to do
but jump, so he jumped. Had a packbasket of eggs on's
back. Didn't break a one."
In the whole of any winter there are never more than a
few such sunny days, gloriously sunny and blue. One be·
comes starved for the sun.
He left the door open and we turned our chairs to face
the snow and blue sky and the vast expanse of evergreen
and hardwood forest. He stirred the coals in the woodstove, opened the draft and threw in some split chunks of
rock maple. There was a delicious swirling all around us of
hot, dry currents from the stove and cool, fragrant currents from the snow and woods. Occasionally a tang of
wood smoke came in with the cold air.
As for the fiddle music-"Oh, I was scratchin' away,"
he said. "I have a lot of fiddle music on the cassettes. I put
it on and play along."
His cassette recorder stood on the broad work table by
the window. The violin lay beside it amidst a clutter of
tools and TV parts.
"If I hear somebody's got somethin' special or new, I go
over an' put it on the recorder. Take a good while to play
the ones I got now. You like that fiddle music, Shawno?"
-and to me: "That was a schottische you heard comin'
in."
He was fond of the dog. He looked at him again and
again, and there began a friendship between them that
pleased me and that I never cared to interrupt.
Shawno lay on the floor twisting his head this way and
that and snapping at a large glossy fly that buzzed around
him. He caught it, cracked it with his teeth, and ejected it
with a wrinkling of the nose. Eddie laughed and said,
"That's right, Shawno, you catch that old bastard fly."
The dog got up and went to him and Eddie gave him a
piece of the "rat cheese" we had been eating with our cof·
fee. For a long time Shawno sat beside him, resting his
head on Eddie's knee.
We laced our coffee with Four Roses whisky and had
second cups. The squirrel looked in at the window,
crouching eagerly, its hands lifted and tucked in at the
wrists, and its feathery long tail poised forward like a canopy over its head.
"I built that platform to feed the birds, but he took
over, so I let him have it. That's where the birds eat now."
He pointed to a wooden contraption hanging by a wire
from a tree out front. Several chicadees fluttered around
it angrily. It was rocking from the weight of the bluejay
perched on its edge, a brilliant, unbelievable blue in the
sunlight.
Eddie had hinged a tiny window in one of the panels of
the side window. He opened it now and laid his hand on
the feeding platform, a few peanuts and sunflower seeds
on the palm. The squirrel leaped away, but came back immediately and proceeded to eat from his hand, picking up
one seed at a time. Shawno went over and barked, and the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
squirrel seized one last morsel and fled. Dubord closed the
window and turned to the dog, chuckling. Again the dog
sat with him, this time laying his chin over one wide rubber boot.
I saw his packbasket in the corner. He used it daily to
bring in water and whisky and a few tools. The handle of
his axe protruded from the basket. The basket was of ash
strips, such as the Indians make. I had bought several two
towns away. Dubord had made this one himself.
"The Indians can take brown ash wherever they find
it," he said. "Did you know that? They used to camp
every summer on the Folsom place. Diamond National
owns it now. There's brown ash down there, downhill
goin' toward the pond. I used to trap beaver with one o'
the men, and he showed me."
The basket was thirty years old.
He sipped his coffee.
"Have you met Mister Mouse?" he said.
"Who?"
"Don't know if he'll come while Shawno's here."
Smiling like a little boy, he said, "Keep your eyes open,
but don't move. Don't even blink. He can see it."
He put a peanut on the two-by-four at the upper edge
of the far wall, stepped back from it and stood there making a strange little whimpering sound. Shawno perked up
his ears and was suddenly excited, but I whispered to him,
no, no ... stay.
Again Dubord made the squeaking sound, sucking air
through his lips. Presently, quite soundlessly, a roundeared gray mouse appeared on the ledge, sniffing. It crept
forward a few inches and stopped, sniffing alertly and angling the delicate long antennae of its whiskers this way
and that. It nibbled the peanut rapidly, listening while it
ate, its bulging black eyes glinting with light from the windows and the open door.
Shawno got to his feet ... and that huge movement and
the sound of his claws on the floor put an end to the performance.
We stayed for two hours. He talked of his early days in
the States, and his years in the woods. I could hear the
French Canadian and the Yankee accents contending in
his speech, the one wanting to stress the final syllables,
the other to drawl them. Shawno sat close to him, sometimes upright with his chin on his knee, sometimes lying
flat with his nose near the broad booted foot. Until now all
his friendships had been friendships of play. This was a
friendship of peace. It was one of those rare occasions on
which, perhaps only momentarily, a little family of the
spirit is formed.
It was good sapping weather. The days were sunny, the
snow melting, the nights cold. When we saw Dubord several days later he was gathering sap from the huge maples
near his camp.
A rapidly moving cloud of light gray smoke rolled over
and over in the lower branches of the trees. I skied closer
and saw that it was not coming from the cabin, as I had
15
�feared, nor was it smoke, but steam from a bubbling large
tray of maple sap.
He had shovelled away some snow and had built a fire·
place of fieldstones he had gathered in the fall. The sides
were lined with scraps of metal. The back had been cut
from a sheetmetal stove and was equipped with a metal
chimney five feet high. A shallow tray, two feet by four,
formed the top of this fireplace/stove. It was from the
tray that the clouds of steam were rising.
While I was examining all this Dubord appeared, plod·
ding blockily on snowshoes, pulling a toboggan that I rec·
ognized, since I had helped in the making of it, splitting
out boards from a squared-off log of ash, steaming the
tips, nailing them around a log to cool and set. On the to·
boggan were two five-gallon white plastic jugs, each halffilled with sap. A tin funnel bounced against one of them,
secured by a wire to its handle.
Eddie threw me a furious glance that was scarcely a
greeting. His teeth were clamped and his mouth was
pulled down. I knew without asking that he had been
quarrelling with Nellie, his wife. How long he would have
maintained this furious silence I don't know, but it was
more than he could do to hold out against the dog. A dark,
deep blush suffused his weathered round face. He
dropped the toboggan rope, and smiling helplessly at the
corners of his mouth, bowed his head to the uprearing
dog, petting him with both hands and allowing his face to
be licked.
He took off the snowshoes and put more wood on the
fire. The four foot strips of white birch-edgings from the
turning mill-had been stacked in the fall and covered.
Papery white bark still clung to them. The wood was well
dried and burned hot-the "biscuit wood" of the old
farmhouse kitchens.
The tray was slanted toward one of its forward corners,
and there, with his brazing torch, Dubord had attached a
little spigot. He drained some syrup into a large spoon,
blew on it, tested it with his finger. It was too thin to drain
off.
I helped him pour some of the new sap into the noisily
bubbling syrup. The steam was sweet and had a pleasant
odor.
Several galvanized buckets stood by the fire and we
poured the rest of the sap into them. I noticed that just as
he had not filled the plastic jugs he did not fill the buckets
-an old man's foresight, avoiding loads that might injure
him.
I went with him back to the maple trees, and at last he
broke his silence.
"Was a damn good farm here fifty years ago," he said. "!
wanted to buy it but I couldn't meet the price."
The huge maples lined the road. There were smaller
trees around them, some in the road itself, but the maples
were leafy and well exposed to the sun, and their sap was
far richer than that of forest maples. The boiling ratio
would be forty to one, or better.
Buckets, four to a tree, clung to the stout, coarse-barked
16
trunks waist high, as if suspended from a single belt. They
hung from short spouts of galvanized metal, and were cov·
ered with metal lids that were creased slightly in the middle and looked like roofs.
Since I was helping, we filled the jugs, and soon had
sledded sixty gallons to the fire.
Nellie's canary, whom they had called Buddy, had been
killed that morning. The quarrel had followed its death.
She had been cleaning its cage and had let it out to
stretch its wings.
"She could've put it in the other cage," Dubord said.
He was stirring the boiling sap with a stick of wood, and
in his anger he splashed it again and again.
"It was right there under the bed," he said. "Damn
thing shittin' all over the place! If I come in with one
speck o' mud on my boots she raises hell! I wanted to go
out. 'Don't open the door!' 'Well put 'im in the cage!'"
He thumped the tray as if he meant to drive holes
through it.
"Freddie Latham was outside fillin' the oil tank," he
said. "Nellie's mother'd knitted some mittens for the new
baby, so Nellie says to me, 'Cit Buddy,' and she comes
right past me and opens the door. 'Yoo hoo, Freddie."'
He ground his teeth a while.
"Cit the bird!" he muttered explosively. "What'd she
expect me t'do, fly up an' catch it? Damn thing flew out
the door right behind her and she didn't even notice.
Then she opened the porch door and it flew out that one
too. Damn! If I been holdin' a stick o' wood I'd heaved it
at 'er! You could o' heard her down t'village. 'Save Buddy!'
'Here, Buddy!' 'Cit Buddy!"'
Dubord never glanced at me. His eyes were re-seeing
the whole event.
"He perched on the roof o' the shed," he said, "And I
got the ladder and started U:p with some birdseed, and
Freddie went in and got my smeltin' net. Soon as the bird
saw me gittin 1 close, he flew over an' perched on the ridge·
pole o' the house. Then he flew up to the antenna, and
Nellie's whistlin' to him an' suckin' her lips. 'Eddie, git
that canary record, maybe if we play it Buddy'll come
down.'"
Dubord glanced at me fiercely and demanded: "If he
could hear it up there what'd he want t'come down for?"
"By the time I come down off the ladder the bird' d flew
up to the electric wire. He was just gittin' settled ... wham!
Some damn ol' red-tail hawk been watchin' the whole
thing. I never seen 'im. Where he come from I don't
know. Couple o' yella feathers come down like snowflakes. I thought, here's your canary, Nellie. An' I thought,
enjoy your dinner, mister hawk. You just saved me two
hund'd dolluhs."
Dubord glared at me again and said, "Yessuh! That's
what I said! Two hund'd dolluhs! That's what I spent for
birdseed! I'm tellin' the truth, I ain't makin' it up! And I
ain't sayin' Buddy et that much, I'm sayin' we BOUGHT
that much! You saw him do that Christly trick! You and
WINTER 1982
�the Missus saw that trick the first time you come down.
Sure you did! Yau had the girl with you ... "
The trick he was referring to was something Nellie had
taught the bird, or had discovered, namely, that when she
put his cage up to the feeding platform at the window, he
would pick up a seed from the floor and hold it between
the bars, and the chickadees would jostle one another until one had plucked the seed from his beak, and then Buddy
would get another. Nellie had loved to show this off.
Eddie was still glaring at me. "WHERE DID YOU THINK
THEM BIRDS COME FROM?" he shouted. "We had t'have
them birds ON HAND! We was feedin' a whole damn flock
right through the year so Buddy could do his Christly trick
two or three times a month! In bad weather he couldn't
do it 't all, but we still had t'feed the chickadees."
He paced back and forth by the evaporating tray grinding his teeth and glaring. "I guess I warn't upset 'nough
t'suit 'er," he said "God tamn! Hasn't she got a tongue!"
One last wave of anger smote him and he howled
louder than before, but there was a plaintive note in his
voice and he almost addressed it to the sky.
"IT WAS NELLIE HER OWN GODDAM RATTLE BRAIN
SELF OPENED THE DOOR!" he cried.
And then he calmed down. That is to say, he walked
around the steaming tray panting and lurching and
thumping the sides and bottom with the little stick.
He had brought some blankets in his packbasket and
was planning to spend the night.
He drained off some thick syrup into a small creamery
pail and set it aside to cool. He drained a little more into
an old enamel frying pan and with a grunt bent down and
thrust it under the evaporator tray right among the flames
and coals. After it had bubbled and frothed a while, he
knelt again and patted the snow to make it firm, and scattered the hot syrup over it. When Shawno and I went
home I had a jar of syrup for Patricia and a bag of maple
taffy for the kids.
At around two o'clock the next afternoon I answered
the phone and heard the voice of Nellie Dubord, whose
salutation, calling or receiving, it always Yeh-isss, as if she
were emphatically agreeing with some previous remark.
Eddie had not come home. She knew that he had taken
blankets to the camp, but she was worried.
"!just don't feel right," she said. "]can't see any smoke
up there. I should be able to see the chimney smoke,
though maybe not. Ain't he boilin' sap? I should see that
smoke too. Can you see it up there? Take a look. I guess
I'm bein' foolish, but I don't know ... I just don't feel
right."
I went upstairs and looked from the west windows.
There wasn't any smoke. I skied across.
There was no activity at the cabin, no smoke or shimmering of heated air at the chimney, no fire out front.
Shawno sniffed at the threshold. He chuffed and snorted,
sniffed again, then drew back and barked. He went forward again and lowered his head and sniffed.
The door was locked. I went around to the window. DuTHE ST. JOHNS
REVIEW
bard lay on the floor on his back beside the little platform
bed. He was dressed except for his boots. The blankets
had come away from the bed, as if he had clutched them
at the moment of falling. I battered the door with a piece
of stovewood and went to him. He was breathing faintly,
but his weathered face was as bloodless as putty.
He was astonishingly heavy. I got him onto the bed,
covered him with the blankets and our two coats, and
skied to the road. I saw his car there and cursed myself for
not having searched him for the key. The nearest house
was three quarters of a mile away. I telephoned there for
an ambulance, and made two other calls, then went back
and put him on the toboggan and set out pulling him over
the packed but melting trail, dreadfully slowly.
I hadn't gone twenty paces before the men I had called
appeared. The two elder were carpenters, the young man
was their helper. They were running towards us vigorously, and I felt a surge of hope.
But it was more than hope that I felt at that moment.
Something priceless was visible in their faces, and I have
been moved by the recollection of it again and again. It
was the purified, electric look of wholehearted response.
The men came running towards us vigorously, lifting their
knees in the snow and swinging their arms, and that unforgettable look was on their faces.
Ten days later Patricia, the children, and I went with
Nellie to the hospital. The children weren't admitted, and
Nellie sat with them in the lobby.
Dubord was propped up by pillows and was wearing a
hospital smock that left his arms bare. I was used to the
leathery skin of his hands and face; the skin of his upper
arms, that were still brawny, was soft and white, one
would say shockingly white.
"Sicker cats than this have got well and et another
meal," he said. And then, gravely, "Nellie told me you
went in for me. I'm much obliged to you."
"Did the girls like their candy?" he asked ... and it took
me a moment to realize that he was referring to the maple
taffy, the last thing he had made before the heart attack.
A few moments later he said, 11 How's my dog?" meaning
Shawno, and I told him how the dog had known at once
that something was wrong, and that rapt, shy look came
over his face.
A neighbor came in while I was there, Earl Sawyer, who
after chatting briefly, said to him, "Well, you won't be
seein' Blackie no more."
Dubord asked him what had happened.
"I did away with him," said Sawyer. "I had to. He went
after porcupines three times in the last two weeks. Three
times I took him to the vet, eighteen dollars each time. I
can't be doin' that. Then he went and did it again, so I
took him out and shot 'im, quills and all."
Sawyer was upset.
"If he can't learn," he said. " ... I can't be doin' that.
Damn near sixty dollars in two weeks, and there's a leak in
the goddam cellar. He was a nice dog, though. He was a
good dog otherwise."
17
�Sawyer was thirty-three or four, but his face was worn
and tense. He worked ten hours a day as a mechanic, belonged to the fire department, and was serving his second
term as road commissioner. He had built his own house
and was raising two children.
"I don't blame you," said Dubord. "You'd be after 'im
every day."
"He went out an' did it again," said Sawyer.
There was silence for a while.
"I can't see chainin' a dog," Sawyer said. ''I'd rather not
have one."
"A chained dog ain't worth much," Eddie said.
Months went by before Eddie recovered his spirits. But
in truth he never did entirely recover them. I could see a
sadness in him that hadn't been there before, and a tendency to sigh where once he had raged.
The change in his life was severe. He sold the new cabin
he had liked so much, and spent more time in the little
shed beside the house. I drove down to see him frequently,
but it wasn't the same as stopping by on skis or walking
through the woods. Nor was he allowed to drink whisky.
Nor did I always remember to bring the dog.
Most of the snow was gone by the end of that ApriL
One night Shawno failed to appear for supper, and there
was no response when I called into the dusk from the
porch. I called again an hour later, and this time I saw
movement in the shadows just beyond the cars. Why was
he not bounding toward me? I ran out, calling to him. He
crept forward a few paces on his belly, silently, and then
lay still. When I stood over him, he turned his head away
from me. His jowls and nose were packed with quills. He
could not close his mouth. There were quills in his tongue
and hanging down from his palate. The porcupine had
been a small one, the worst kind for a dog.
He seemd to be suffering more from shame than from
the pain of the quills. He would not meet my eyes; and
the once or twice that he did, he lowered his head and
looked up woefully, so that the whites showed beneath
the irises. I had never seen him so stricken.
I was afraid that he might run off, and so I picked him
up and carried him into the house. This, too, was mortifying. His eyes skittered from side to side. What an abject
entrance for this golden creature, who was used to bounding in proudly!
The black tips of the quills are barbed with multiple,
hair-fine points. The quills are shaped like torpedoes and
are hollow-shafted, so that the pressure of the flesh
around them draws them deeper into the victim's body.
They are capable of migrating then to heart, eyes, liver ...
He wanted to obey me. He lay flat under the floor lamp.
But every time I touched a quill with the pliers, a tic of
survival jerked away his head.
Ida was shocked. He was the very image of The
Wounded, The Victimized. It was as if some malevolent
tiny troll had shot him with arrows. She knelt beside him
18
and threw her arms around his neck, and in her high, passionate voice of child goodness repeated the words both
Patricia and I had already said: "Don't worry, Shawno,
we'll get them out for you!" -but with this difference:
that he drew back the corners of his open mouth, panted
slightly, glanced at her, and thumped his taiL
I took him to the vet the next day, and brought him
back unconscious in the car.
I thought of Sawyer and his Black Labrador, and saw
from still another aspect the luxury of our lives. I did not
go to bed exhausted every night, was not worried about a
job, a mortgage, a repair bill, a doctor's bill, unpaid loans
at the bank. And here was another of the homely luxuries
our modest security brought us: he lay on the back seat
with his eyes closed, his mouth open, his tongue out,
panting unconsciously. Great quantities of saliva came
from his mouth, so much of it that the seat was wet when
finally we moved him.
A walk with Ida. Waldo. Persistence of the city.
Kerosene light and an aphorism. The rock above
the town. Wandering dogs.
Spring comes slowly and in many stages. The fields go
through their piebald phase again and again, in which the
browns and blacks of grass and wet earth are mingled with
streaks of white-and then everything is covered again
with the moist, characteristically dimpled snow of spring.
But soon the sun comes back, a warm wind blows, and in
half a day the paths in the woods and the ruts in our long
dirt road are streaming with water.
Black wasps made their appearance on a warm day in
March, then vanished. This was the day that a neighbor
left his shovel upright in the snow in the morning and in
the evening found it on bare ground. It was the day that a
man in his seventies with whom I had stopped to talk
while he picked up twigs and shreds of bark from his
south-facing yard, turned away from me abruptly and
pointed with his finger, saying, "Look! Is that a bee? Yes,
by gurry! It's a bee! The first one!"
But there was more rain and more snow, and then, alas,
came the flooding we had hoped to be spared, as the
stream overflowed our lower road, this time to a depth of
two feet. For several days we came home through the
woods with our groceries in rucksacks, but again the snow
shrivelled and sank into the ground, and high winds dried
the mud. I saw a crowd of black starlings foraging in a
brown field, and heard the first cawing of crows. The
leaves of the gray birches uncurled. There were snow flurries, sun again, and the ponies followed the sun all day,
lolling on the dormant grass or in the mud. Shawno, too,
basked in the sun like a tourist on a cruise ship. He lay
blinking on a snowbank with his tongue extended, baking
above and cooling below. I pulled last year's leaves out of
several culverts, and opened channels in the dooryard
WlNTER 1982
�mud so that the standing water could reach the ditch.
Early one morning six Canada Geese flew over my head,
due north, silently, flying low; and then.at dusk the same
day I heard a partridge drumming in the woods.
Several days after Easter, when the garden was clear of
snow and the chives were three inches high, Ida came
striding into my room, striking her feet noisily on the floor
and grinning.
"Wake up, dad!" she called. "It's forty-forty!"
She was seven. I had told her the night before how
when she was four years old and could not count or tell
time she had invented that urgent hour, forty-forty, and
had awakened me one morning proclaiming it.
When she saw that I was awake, she said eagerly, "Look
out the window, daddy! Look!"
I did, and saw a world of astonishing whiteness. Clinging, heavy snow had come down copiously in the night
and had ceased before dawn. There was no wind at all.
Our white garden was bounded by a white rail fence,
every post of which was capped by a mound of white. The
pines and firs at the wood's edge were almost entirely
white, and the heavy snow had straightened their upwardsweeping branches, giving the trees a sharp triangular outline and a wonderfully festive look.
The whiteness was everywhere. Even the sky was
white, and the just-risen sun was not visible as a disc at all
but as a lovely haze of orange between whitenesses I knew
to be hills.
An hour later Ida, Shawno, and I were walking through
the silent, utterly motionless woods. We took the old
county road, that for decades now has been a mere trail,
rocky and overgrown. It goes directly up the wooded high
ridge of Folsom hill and then emerges into broad, shaggy
fields that every year become smaller as the trees move in.
We gather blueberries here in the summer, and in the fall
apples and grapes, but for almost two years now we have
come to the old farm for more sociable reasons.
After breakfast Ida had wanted to hear stories of her
earlier childhood, and now as we walked through the
woods she requested them again, taking my bare hand
with her small, gloved one, and saying, "Daddy, tell me
about when I was a kid."
"You mean like the time you disappeared in the snow?"
This was an incident I had described to her before, and
of which she delighted to hear.
"Yes!" she said.
"Well ... that was it-you disappeared. You were two
years old. You were sitting on my lap on the toboggan and
we went down the hill beside the house. We were going
really fast, and the toboggan turned over and you flew
into a snowbank and disappeared."
She laughed and said, "You couldn't even see me?"
"Nope. The snow was light and fluffy and very deep."
"Not even my head?"
"Not even the tassel on your hat."
"How did you find me?"
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
"I just reached down and there you were, and I pulled
you out."
She laughed triumphantly and said, "Tell me some
more."
While we talked in this fashion the dog trotted to and
fro among the snow-burdened close-set trees, knocking
white cascades from bushes and small pines. Often he
would range out of sight, leaping over deadfalls and
crouching under gray birches that had been pressed almost flat by the heavy snows of previous years, and then
he would come closer, sniffing at the six inch layer of wet
snow, and chuffing and snorting to clear his nose. Occasionally, snorting still more vigorously, he would thrust his
snout deep into the snow and then step back and busily
pull away snow and matted leaves with his front paws.
Watching all this, I understood once again that the
world of his experience was unimaginably different from
the world of mine. What were the actual sensations of his
sense of smell? How could I possibly know them? And
how were those olfactory shapes and meanings structured
in his memory? Snout, eyes, tongue, ears, belly-all were
close to the ground; his entire life was close to it, and mine
was not. I knew that in recent weeks complex odors had
sprung up in the woods, stirring him and drawing him excitedly this way and that. And I could see that last night's
snowfall had suppressed the odors and was thwarting him,
and that was all, really, that I could know.
After three-quarters of a mile the trail grew steep, and
the trees more numerous. We could not walk side by side;
I let Ida go in front, and our conversation now consisted of
the smiles we exchanged when she looked back at me over
her shoulder. I watched her graceful, well-formed little
body in its quilted red jacket and blue snow pants, and felt
a peace and happiness until now rare in my life.
Milky sky appeared between the snowy tops of the
trees. A few moments later there was nothing behind the
trees but the unmarked white of a broad field-at which
moment there occurred one of those surprises of country
life that are dazzling in much the way that works of art are
dazzling, but that occur on a scale no artwork can imitate.
I called to Ida, and she, too, cried aloud. The dog turned
to us and came closer, lifting his head eagerly.
The sight that so astonished us was this: several hundred birds, perhaps as many as five hundred, plump and
black, were scattered throughout the branches of one of
the maples at the wood's edge. The branches themselves
were spectacular enough, amplified by snow and traced
elegantly underneath by thin black lines of wet bark, but
the surprising abundance of the birds and their glossy
blackness against the white of the field were breathtaking.
I threw a stick at them. I couldn't resist. The entire tree
seemed to shimmer and crumble, then it burst, and black
sparks fluttered upward almost in the shape of a plume of
smoke. The plume thinned and tilted, then massed together again with a wheeling motion, from which a fluttering ribbon emerged, and the entire flock streamed
away in good order down the field to another tree.
19
�Shawno, who had remained baffled and excluded, resumed his foraging. He stopped and raised his head
alertly, then leaped forward in a bounding, enthusiastic
gallop, and in a moment was out of sight. When Ida and I
came to the spot he had just left, she, too, quickened excitedly, and with no more ceremony than had been shown
me by the dog let go of my hand and ran.
And if I had been a child, I would have followed, since it
was here, precisely here, that due to the lie of the land,
that is, the acoustics of the field, the playful, headlong
gaiety of two voices could be heard quite clearly, a girl's
voice shouting "I did, Leo! I did!" and the voice of her
brother, who was eight, replying, "Ha, ha, hal" and then
both shouting, "Shawno! Shawno!" I stood there and
watched Ida's diminutive figure running alone across the
snowy field in the direction of the house that was still to
come in sight.
I looked back for a moment down the long slope of the
field, towards the woods, the way we had come. I had intended to look for the birds, but our three sets of footprints caught my eye, and I could not help but smile at the
tale they told. They were like diagrams of our three different ways of being in the world. Mine, alas, denoted logic
and responsible decision: they plodded straight ahead,
straight ahead. Ida's footprints, in contrast to mine, went
out to the sides here and there, performed a few curlicues
and turns, and were even supplanted at one place by a
star-shaped body-print where she had thrown herself
laughing onto the snow.
But the footprints of the dog! ... this was a trail that was
wonderful to see! One might take it as erratic wandering,
or as continual inspiration, or as continua] attraction,
which may come to the same thing. It consisted of meandering huge loops, doublings, zig-zags, festoons ... The
whole was travelling as a system in the direction I had
chosen, yet it remained a system and was entirely his own.
The voices of the children grew louder. I saw the dark
gray flank of the made-over barn that was now their
home, and then saw the children themselves, running
with the dog among the whitened trees of the orchard.
These two, Gretl and Leo Carpenter, together with Ida
and myself and Eddie Dubord, complete the quintet of
Shawno's five great loves.
Gretl is Ida's age, Leo a year older. They are the children of Waldo and Aldana Carpenter, whom Patricia and
I have .known for years. But I have known Waldo since the
end of World War II, when we both arrived in New York
from small towns to the west.
Aldana was evidently waiting for me. She was standing
in the doorway, and when she saw me she beckoned. I had
not planned to stop, except to leave Ida and the dog, since
in all likelihood Waldo would be working, but Aldana had
no sooner waved to me than the broad window right
above her swung open and Waldo, too, beckoned to me,
cupping his hands and shouting. Aldana stepped out and
looked up at him, and they smiled at one another, though
his expression was not happy.
20
Aldana was fifteen years younger than Waldo. By the
time I came into the kitchen she was standing at the stove
turning thick strips of bacon with a fork. She looked
rested and fresh-it was one of the days, in fact, that her
entirely handsome and appealing person seemed actually
to be beautiful. She wore a dark blue skirt, a light sweaterblouse of gray wool, and loose-fitting boots from L. L.
Bean. Her long brown hair, that was remarkably thick and
glossy, was covered with a kerchief of deep blue.
"Waldo was up all night," she said to me, having already
urged me to eat with them. The large round table was set
for three.
She said, in a lower voice, ''We are going back."
She meant back to New York.
I had known that they wanted to. Waldo's excitement,
coming here, had had nothing to do with country life. He
had been fleeing New York and an art world that had become meaningless to him. His own painting, moreover, af
ter two periods of great success, was in a crisis of spirit,
and he had begun to mistrust the virtuosity (so he had told
me) that allowed him to cover this fact with achievements
of technique. But the isolation of country life had not had
the rejuvenating effect he had hoped for, and he had been
saying to me for a couple of months, "We won't be staying
forever . .. "
I was not surprised, then, to hear Aldana say that they
were leaving. Nevertheless, it was saddening, and I knew
that the loss, for Ida, would be severe.
I said as much to Aldana.
"We'll certainly miss you," she said. "All of you. All of
us. But we'll be back every summer."
"When are you going?"
"Soon. I don't know."
"How do the children feel about it?"
"We haven't told them yet," she said. "They've been
happy here ... but they do miss New York ... there's so
much to do ... "
I could hear Waldo walking on the floor above our
heads, and moving something. I asked him, shouting, if he
needed a hand. "I'll be right down," he called back.
Aldana looked into the oven, closing it quickly, and I
caught the aroma of yeast rolls.
The handsome kitchen had been the stables of the old
barn. The ceiling was low and was heavily beamed. Narrow horizontal windows ran the entire length of two sides
and gave fine views of our mountains, though today nothing could be seen in them but snowy woods and a misty
white sky. Many leafy plants, suspended in pots, were silhouetted in the white light. At the far end of the kitchen a
flight of open stairs led to Waldo's studio, and there also,
at that end, was Aldana's nook: a pine work table near the
window, on which there were several jars of small brushes,
a broad window-seat with cushions and many pillows, a
stool, more hanging plants, shelves with books and kerosene lamps. She was fluent in Lithuanian, and for two
years, at a leisurely pace, had been translating a cycle of
folktales for a children's book. She had done a great many
WINTER 1982
�gouache illustrations as well, and I knew that the project
'
was nearly finished.
I heard Waldo on the stairs. He stopped part way down,
and leaning forward called across to me, "Do you want to
see something?"
After the whites and blacks and evergreen greens of the
woods it was dazzling to see the colors of his work. He was
noted for these colors. Color was event, meaning, and
form.
Small abstract paintings on paper were pinned to the
white work wall, as were clippings from magazines and
some color wheels he had recently made. Larger paintings
on canvas, still in progress, leaned here and there, and two
were positioned on the wall. A stack of finished paintings,
all of which I had seen, leaned against the wall in the corner.
Waldo had placed the new painting on the seat of a
chair, and we stood side by side studying it. The paint was
still wet and gave off a pleasant odor of oil and turpentine.
Waldo's manner was that of an engineer. Physically he
was imposing, tall and strong, with a stern, black-browed,
grave face that was actually a forbidding face, or would
have been were it not that his underlying good humor was
never entirely out of sight. When he was alight with that
humor, which after all was fairly often, one saw an aston·
ishing sweetness and charm. Aldana, at such times, would
rest her hand on his shoulder, or stroke the back of his
head; and the children, if they were near, would come
closer, and perhaps climb into his lap.
The studio windows were sheeted with a plastic that
gave the effect of frosted glass, shutting off the outside
and filling the space with a shadowless white light.
Beyond one of those milky oblongs we heard a sudden
shouting and loud barking. Ida and Grell were shouting
together, "Help, Shawno! Help!" in tones that were al·
most but not quite urgent, and the dog was barking notes
of indignation, disapproval, and complaint, a medley that
occurred nowhere else but in this game, for I knew with·
out seeing it that Leo was pretending to beat the girls with
his fist, and was looking back at the dog, who in a moment
would spring forward and carefully yet quite excitedly
seize Leo's wrist with his teeth.
"It's a total dud," Waldo said dispassionately, "but it's
interesting, isn't it? Kerosene light does such weird things
to the colors. It's like working under a filter. Look how
sour and acidic it is. It's over-controlled, too, and at the
same time there are accidents everywhere. That's what
gives it that moronic look. I should have known betterI've done it before. When you rob the eye you rob the
mind."
Abruptly he turned to me and lowered his voice.
"We're going back to the city," he said. ''I'm going
down in a couple of days and see what has to be done ... "
I knew that he had not sublet his studio, which he
didn't rent, but owned-a floor-through in a large loft
building.
"We haven't told the kids yet," he said, "but I think
they want to go back. There's so much to do there ... "
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Aldana's voice came up from below. We cut short our
conversation and went down into the warm kitchen, that
was fragrant now with the odors of bacon, rolls, just·
brewed coffee, and fried eggs.
The rosy, bright-faced children stormed in just as we sat
down. Leo and Grell clamored for juice, while Ida looked
at them joyfully. Shawno came with them. He trotted to
Aldana, and to Waldo, and to me, greeting us eagerly but
without arresting his motion or taking his eyes from the
children. "Hi, Hi," they said to me. "Hi, daddy," said Ida.
All three tilted their heads, took on fuel, and with the dog
bounding among them rushed out again as noisily as they
had entered.
The sky was beginning to clear when I left half an hour
later, and it was blue now, but a pale, wintry blue. A light,
raw breeze was blowing.
I crossed the dooryard without calling to the children.
They were throwing snowballs at Shawno, except for Ida,
who was tagging along. They ran among the budded but
leafless apple trees, while the dog, who did not under·
stand that he was their target, kept leaping and twisting,
biting the snowballs with swift snaps that reduced them to
fragments.
I went alone down the snowy road to the right, toward
the river. Little clumps of snow were falling wetly from
the roadside trees.
I had been cheerful coming through the woods with Ida
and the dog, but now a familiar sadness began to creep
through me. There was an objective cause in the fact that
our friends were leaving, but I knew that this was not the
cause, the cause was old, and in truth I didn't know what
it was. It was as if this sadness, which at times was
touched by homelessness, were a zone between the animation I felt in the presence of others and the firmness I
felt in the solitude to which finally, after many years of
loneliness, I had been able to attain. And I was obliged to
pass through this zone, though I had passed through it
thousands of times already.
My solitary footprints were the only markings on the
short spur from Waldo's house to the back road, but as
soon as I made the turn I found myself walking between
the muddy tracks of a car. In ten minutes I stood on the
high ledge that overlooked the river and that invariably I
came to when I walked this way.
The river was broad in this stretch, and was still heavy
with spring flood. The water was dark. Huge pieces of ice
were strewn in a continuous line on the steep bank across
from me. The ice had been dirty with debris a week ago,
but now temporarily was white.
Two miles downriver lay the town, on which all such
villages as ours were dependent. There were its hundreds
of houses, its red roofs and black roofs, its white clapboard
sidings, its large, bare-limbed shade trees, all following the
slopes of the hills. I could see the gleaming belltowers and
white spires of the four churches, the plump wooden cupola of the town hall, also white, and several red-brick
business buildings. It was a lovely sight from this angle,
21
�but it no longer stirred me. Just the opposite. The town
was spiritless and dull, without a public life of any kind, or
any character of its own, but the usual brand names in the
stores and the usual cars on the streets.
Just this side of the town, the elegant timbered latticework of a railroad trestle crossed the river high in the air,
emerging from evergreens on one bank and plunging into
evergreens on the other.
Halfway to the trestle, where the hills, for a short distance, gave way to lowland, the broad pasture of a dairy
lay in a sweeping bend of the river. Its tall blue silo and
unpainted sheet metal barn stood close to the highway,
uphill from the fields. Black and white cows, a herd of
Holsteins which I knew numbered a hundred and fifty,
progressed across their snowy pasture toward the river, as
if without moving.
There came a loud metallic scraping and banging from
the gravel pit below me. A bucket-loader was scooping up
gravel. It swivelled and showered the stones heavily into a
waiting truck, that quivered under the impact. Another
truck, as I watched, drove down the long incline to the
riverbank.
I went home by the same route, thinking chiefly of my
work, that had become a kind of monastery, I had had to
empty it of so many things.
Shawno and the children were still playing, but they
were no longer running. Ida and Gretl were holding the
two sides of a flattened cardboard box, quite large, and
Leo, wielding a hammer, was nailing it to the rails of a
broken hay wain by the house, apparently to be the roof
of a hut. The dog sat near them, more or less watching. I
didn't call or wave, but Shawno saw me. He responded
with a start ... and then he did something I had seen him
do before and had found so touching I could not resent:
he pretended that he hadn't seen me. He turned his head
and yawned, stood up and stretched, dropped abruptly to
the ground with his chin on his paws, and then just as
abruptly stood up again and moved out of sight around
the house. What a display of doggy craftiness! It makes me
smile to remember it-even though I must now say that
this was the last that I saw him in the fullness of his life. I
did see him again, but by our bedtime that night he was
dead.
I went back alone through the woods, walking on the
footprints we had made that morning. In a scant three
hours the snow had become both wetter and shrivelled. It
was no deeper than three inches now, and was falling
noisily from the trees, leaving the branches wet and glistening.
At the bottom of the first hill, where I had to jump
across a little stream, and where that morning I had lifted
Ida, I noticed the footprints of two deer. The deer had
gone somewhere along the stream and then had come
back, running. I hadn't noticed the tracks that morning ... but I wasn't sure.
Instead of going home, I turned into the little field at
the far end of which my cabin/studio was situated. Every-
22
thing was quiet, the fresh snow untouched. I was halfway
across the field when I caught a movement in the sky.
High up, drawing a broad white line behind it, a military
jet drifted soundlessly. A moment later the thunderclap of
the sonic boom startled me ... and as if it had brought
them into being, two dogs stepped out of the woods behind my cabin. Or rather, one stepped out, a brown and
white collie, and came toward me. The other, a solemnlooking rabbit hound, stood motionless among the trees.
I thought I recognized the collie and called to it. It came
a few steps, and then a few steps more. It stood still when
it heard my voice, then it turned and went back to the
other dog, and both vanished into the woods.
I built a fire in the cabin, in the cast-iron stove, and
spent the rest of the day at my work.
Before the house at night.
As was my custom, whether I had done the cooking or
not, I mixed some scraps and pan rinsings with dry food
and went to the door to call Shawno, who ate when we did
and in the same room. Ida had come home that afternoon
with Patricia, but Shawno had not.
Half an hour later, after we had finished eating, and
while the water was heating for coffee, I went outside
again and called him, but this time I went across the road
and stood before the barn. The lie of the land was such
that in this position, and with the help of that huge sounding-board, my voice would carry to Waldo's fields, at least
to the sharp ears of the dog. I shouted repeatedly. As I
went back to the house I thought I saw movement on the
woods road we had travelled that morning. I was expecting to see him come bounding toward me, but nothing
happened and I went into the house.
We finished our coffee and dessert. Liza was staying
overnight with the twins she played with. Patricia sat on
the sofa with Jacob and Ida and read first a picture book
and then a story of Ernest Thompson Seton's, that enchanted Ida and put Jacob to sleep.
I telephoned Aldana. She said that the dog had left
them shortly after Patricia had come in the car for Ida. He
had stayed like that often with Leo and Gretl and had
come home through the woods at suppertime.
I put the porch light on and went across to the barn
again. I was preparing to shout when I saw him in the
shadows of the woods road, at the same place in which I
had thought I had seen movement before. A turbulence
of alarm, a controlled panic raced through me, and I ran to
him calling.
He lay on his belly. His head was erect, but just barely,
and was not far above the ground. He pulled himself forward with his front paws, or tried to, but no motion resulted. His hind legs were spread limply behind him. His
backbone seemed inert.
I knelt beside him and took his head on my knees. He
WINTER 1982
�was breathing so faintly that I doubted if any air was
reaching his lungs. I heard my own voice saying in the
high-pitched, grievously astonished tones of a child, "Oh,
dog, dog ... "
I ran my hand down his body. Near his lower ribcage,
even in the shadows, I could see a dark mass that here and
there glistened dully. It was smooth and soft, and there
jutted out of it numerous fine points sharper than a saw. I
.was touching the exit wound of a large-calibre bullet, in·
testines and shattered bone.
I put my face close to his and stroked his cheek. He was
looking straight ahead with a serious, soft, dim gaze. He
gave a breath that sounded like a sigh because it was not
followed by another breath, and instantaneously was heavy
to the touch.
I stayed there a long while with his head on my knees,
from time to time crying like a child.
I heard the front door open and heard Patricia calling
me. A moment later she was kneeling in the mud beside
Tiffi ST. JOHNS REVJEW
me saying, "Oh, oh, oh . .. " in a voice of compassion and
surpnse.
We conferred briefly, and I went indoors.
Ida sat on the sofa, in the light of the floor lamp, looking
at the pictures in the Seton book. Jacob lay asleep at the
other end of the sofa.
I said to her, "Ida, something has happened ... " and
knelt in front of her. She saw that I had been crying, and
her face whitened.
I said, "Shawno has been hurt very very badly ... " I did
not want to say to her that he was dead. "He's out front,"
I said. "Come."
She said, "Okay" quickly, never taking her eyes from
mine. She gave me her hand and we went outside, into
the road, where Patricia still knelt beside him just beyond
the light from the porch. She was bowed above him and
was stroking him. She looked up as we approached, and
held out one hand for Ida, but with the other kept stroking
his head, neck, and shoulders.
23
�Nietzsche and the Classic
William Mullen
Quod si tam Graecis novitas invisa fuisset quam
Horace
nobis, quid nunc esset vetus?
If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece,
Balanchine
how will you ever get it finished?
T
O ASK WHAT CONSTITUTES A CLASSIC
is to ask
what kind of civilization we inhabit. Imagine, for the
sake of contrast, a purely archaic civilization in
which the paradigms for thought and action are so definitively expounded in the foundation myths that innovation is excluded altogether_ Then imagine, as its opposite,
a purely scientific civilization in which the piecemeal
progress towards greater knowledge and control relentlessly renders every aspect of the past an object for amusement and contempt If we like to think we have put the
first kind of civilization behind us forever (assuming it
ever existed) and yet have still not entirely succumbed to
the second (assuming it could ever entirely win out), our
conviction is somehow due to the presence of classic
works in our midst, holding at bay both the tyranny of the
past and the tyranny of the future by continuing to inspire new works in the present.
The usual lament of the classicist, of course, is directed
against the tyranny of the future, and the more threatened
he becomes by the ascendancy of science, the more Egyptological he becomes in his techniques-mummification of
the classics at all costs. But I am more interested in considering here the opposite threat, the tyranny of the past itWilliam Mullen is a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His book,
Choreia: Pindar and Dance, will appear in the summer of 1982 (Princeton University Press).
24
self, and its only true check, the continuous creation of
new work fine enough to take a place beside the old. The
reason we secure the presence of classic works among us
is not that they are so fine that we can never equal them
but, on the contrary, that they are so fine that they will always challenge us to equal them.
In his earliest writings on the Greeks, Nietzsche pointed
out that it is no accident that the people from whom our
finest instances of the classic are taken was one that
pushed the principle of competition to its limits, in the
spheres of poetry and art no less than athletics and politics. 1 But the power of competition to incite the artists of
our civilization to do their best is inadequately shown by
its place in the culture of a single people, for competition
between peoples as well as within them has long been a
governing principle for us. The complex civilization of the
West assumed its essential form when the Romans worked
out a truce with Greek culture whereby classic status was
granted to Roman imitations that could join their Greek
models in rank without replacing them. This notion of a
highest rank that remains open to expansion is one to
which the word itself points, the Latin classicus originally
designating someone who belonged to the highest of the
five classes into which Roman citizens were divided when
the roll of the army was called.
Classics, of course, can only be so designated by later
generations. "Le classique," as Valery put it, "c'est ce qui
WINTER 1982
�vient apnes." As a new work comes into the light it may
well seem to rival the classics of the past for brilliance but
it is impossible to say at the time whether it will also rival
them for durability. And the question of durability becomes particularly problematic when one considers that
while some classic works exist as objects-paintings, statues, buildings-others exist as performing events-music,
dance, theater. In the case of the art object the materials
of which the work is made give a preliminary guarantee of
durability and it is only a question whether the work will
continue to be valued enough to be maintained in a position of honor. In the case of the performance event, however, durability can be achieved only by revivals, where all
is at hazard because there is no guarantee that the revival
will house the original informing spirit. And the difficulty
becomes acute when one considers that the original Greek
classics in the medium we call "poetry" were actually of a
dual nature, being performance events when they first appeared and turning into classics only after being stripped
of their musical and orchestic accompaniment in order to
become durable as texts. The work done by the classic
masters of Greek music and dance has completely van·
ished, both the work done to accompany poetry and whatever autonomous masterpieces may have been executed
in these media. In what sense, then, do we really possess
the classics of Greek poetry at all, and what is it we are doing when we set about to "equal" them?
If the question of durability is made difficult by the fact
of the variety of artistic media, then we must ask what is
the ground of this variety in the first place. In order to
come into its proper flowering, a work of art must be pres-
ent to the senses as well as the mind, and the fact that we
possess five different senses is in itself enough to necessitate a variety of media that can appeal to them either severally or in combination. The variety of media is in effect
one of the conditions apart from which we would be unable to experience art at all, for it flows from our bodily
existence in time as well as space. And works of the performing arts, which require fixed periods of time to be
unfolded before us, by that very fact also require that we
accept the element of transience in their conditions of
presentation. It should be clear, then, that this is a quint·
essentially Nietzschean subject I have in hand, since it has
ultimately to do with the status of the bodily and the tern
poral. The desire for the old works of art that are kept
present to be rivalled by new ones turns out to be grounded
in the disposition·of a healthy civilization to set high value
on the presence in its midst of works by which the human
senses are exalted. It is in new work, before the mind has
set about to gain distance by reflection and categorization, that the element of sensuous presence is most obviously compelling; and by juxtaposing new work with old
we remind ourselves of the importance of remaining open
to the same intensity of sensuous presence in the classics
themselves as well as their recent rivals, even when, as in
the Gase of the performing arts, this means exposing ourselves to transient revivals in the absence of the original
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
production. Nietzsche himself had a zest for theorizing
about the differences among the various artistic media,
and I should like, therefore, to try to extend some of his
leading ideas in the course of exploring the nature of the
classic as it is incarnated in different kinds of works of art
and different conditions of presentation.
B
EFORE DOING SO, however, it is best to acknowledge
at the outset how quickly these ideas come to grief
when transferred from the realm of art to the realm
of politics. Throughout his writing there runs a notion
which, color it how one will, remains irreducibly offensive,
namely, that a statesman aiming at greatness should consider himself an artist and other human beings his medium. Curiously enough, this monster first rears its head
in an early essay on "The Greek State" in which Nietzsche
praises Plato precisely for his cool willingness, in the Republic, to treat all other citizens as mere tools and means
for the production of "the Genius." 2 That Plato's ideal Genius was meant to be a philosopher and a scientist rather
than an artist, Nietzsche proposed, is only a regrettable
consequence of his appropriation of Socrates' negative
judgment on art, and should not distract us from the essential point that on the matter of treating citizens as a
Mittel-the German word for both "means" and "medium" -Plato had got things right.
I suggest that the very oddity of this way of reading the
Republic has the advantage of forcing us to face one of
the gravest questions raised by the speakers of that dialogue as they devise a city in speech rather than in deed. It
was Hannah Arendt, using an Aristotelian distinction, who
suggested that the reason the program of the Republic
would lead to such oppressive political consequences if actually implemented is that it is based on a mistaken substitution of the category of fabrication for that of action. This
is so because the craftsman (and the Greek language did
not explicitly distinguish between artificers and artists)
must first contemplate in solitude the mental model of
what he wishes to make-its idea, shape, or form, whence
the Platonic "idea" -and must then use violence on the
medium at hand in order to realize that model as best he
can. (Compare, for instance, Republic SOla and 54la.) In
raising her objections to the analogy between craftsman
and statesman, Arendt's immediate concern was to show
how the violence implicit in it was actualized when Marxism declared the "making" of a classless society an end
which justified any "means" and hence any treatment of
one's "medium." 3 But she might equally well have given
an account of the justification of violence by Nazism
through reference to its esthetic goals, for it is well-known
how many esthetes flocked to the early Nazi movement
and how belief in the supremacy of German art served as
a stimulus to the task of creating racial purity. In order to
transform the rough block of the citizenry into the fair
statue of the state one must be prepared to hack off the
25
�racially or physiologically sick and not to flinch if this human marble happens to make cries of pain as it is hewn.
To see the notion of men as both "medium" and "means"
in its most virulent form one needs to turn to Nietzsche's
late notebook jottings collected posthumously under the
title The Will to Power. "To keep objective, hard, firm in
executing a design-this is something artists are best at.
But when one needs men for that purpose (as do teachers,
statesmen, etc.) then the calmness and coldness and hardness quickly disappear. In natures like Caesar and Napoleon one can get a sense for jdisinterested' work on their
marble, whatever may have to be sacrificed by way of
men." 4 In the face of passages like this the convenient notion of Nazis as coarse literalizers of Nietzsche's refined
metaphors breaks down. Here a proto-Nazi esthete would
find just the sort of encouragement he needed to emerge
from his esthetic cocoon into totalitarian practice. 5 It is no
exculpation of Nietzsche to argue that he expressed contempt for the particular analysis that was later to come to
power, namely, that he preferred racial mixture as a better
breeding technique than racial purity. He is as explicit in
theory as the Nazis were in practice in his contempt for
the ethical principle at issue, whose classical formulation
is Kant's imperative always to treat human beings as ends
and never solely as means.
T
to Nietzsche's complexity, however,
we must take seriously the parenthesis in the jotting
just quoted, in which he mentions as instances of
those who must use men as their medium not only statesmen but also teachers. Insofar as the contents and methods
of an educational system are not entirely pre-legislated
and supervised, there is a temptation to see something of
the artist's prerogative over his material in the way the
teacher exercises authority over his students, and in fact
metaphors of "molding minds" and "shaping characters"
are seldom absent in discussions of the way educators
transform the young. We do not feel uneasy with these
metaphors because in a society of specialists we like to
think that the various things that need to be taught are in
various hands and that accordingly some kind of benign
separation of powers holds sway. The good is taught by
the parents inculcating morality at home, the true by the
teachers transmitting knowledge at school, and the beautiful by the artists passing on skills in their studios. The
nature of the authority of the molders of the young becomes more provocative, however, when we turn from
the problematic pluralism of the present to a highly integrated society like that of archaic Greece. I am referring
now not to the theoretical programs of Plato's Republic or
Laws but to the realities of the city in the time of Pindar
and Aeschylus.
In these archaic cities the choral poets who train young
dancers to perform sacred odes in public spaces are granted
authority simultaneously to teach them singing, dancing,
26
O DO )USTICE
morality, and the tales of the tribe. In Athenian tragedy
the authority the playwright exercises over his performers
is complicated by the fact that as part of a dramatic fiction
the chorus members assume personalities other than their
own and doff them when the play is over, so that even
though they are allowed to participate in the ritual only
if they are able-bodied and free-born male citizens of
Athens, it is not these aspects of their identity which their
role in the play is exhibiting to their fellow-citizens. In a
Pindaric ode, however, the free-born young men or young
women of the city perform in propria persona and are expected by their elders to believe in the words they recite
as they dance. The elders would have dismissed a poet for
training the youth in odes that exhibited bad morals no
less than bad dancing, false tales no less than false notes.
Not that we need sentimentalize the matter by assuming
that every single member of a Pindaric chorus was a good
Boy Scout and did in fact acquire the morals Pindar had to
teach him. Enough that through participation in many
choral events a young person would be trained in the public quality of morality and learn by instinct how he was expected to act. (Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.)
Moreover, by making these young dancers the mouthpieces for what his civilization most valued, the poet was
in effect arranging a spectacle in which truth and goodness were fused with beauty, and unabashedly so. In all
this the dancers are unquestionably the medium of the
poet, but far from being denied their human dignity by
such treatment they are in fact led by it, educatively, from
the confusion of adolescence to the bracing norms of
adulthood.
EADERS OF The Birth of Tragedy will notice quite a
difference between my very Apollonian account of
these Pindaric dancers and Nietzsche's very Dionysian one of the tragic chorus. His dancers are empowered
by their song and dance to doff their identities and merge
with the primordial unity, while those I have preferred to
fix my gaze on are rather bringing their identities into perfect focus, declaring by song and dance the essence of
what it is to be a free-born and able-bodied young man or
woman in a particular city 6 Moreover, the dithyrambic
improvisations in which Nietzsche wishes to see both the
origin and the essence of the tragic chorus would seem
to have dispensed with pre-arranged choreography altogether and to require at most a leader who impersonates
the hallucinated god, whereas the odes of Pindar require
the poet's presence in the city not only as leader of the
dance during performance but also as choreographer and
chorus-trainer beforehand.' The choreographer's engagement with the dancers as the medium in which he executes a. meaningful design is in effect an aspect of dance
which Nietzsche ignores in preference to some more mys~
tical situation in which the dancers improvise through
direct contact with the powers of nature. Consider his
R
WINTER 1982
�characterization of the tragic dancers in the last sentences
of the very opening section of the book. "Man is no longer
artist, he has become the work of art: the artistic power of
all nature, to the highest delight of the primordial unity,
makes itself manifest in the thrill of intoxication [Rausch].
The noblest clay, the most costly marble, Man, is here
kneaded and hewn, and to the chisel strokes of the Diony·
sian world-artist sounds out the Eleusinian mystery-cry:
'Do you bow down, Millions? Do you divine your Creator,
World?' " 8 Both the metaphor from sculpture and the
mystical HDionysian
world~artist"
here betray Nietzsche's
unwillingness to consider the choreographer's art on its
own terms. Indeed, throughout his writings he takes infinite delight in dance as an activity and a metaphor, but
never once considers it as an artistic medium and never
mentions a single choreographer or ballet.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was positing the
chorus as the essence of the Dionysian in order to work
out an Hegelian scheme according to which the actors
represented the essence of the Apollonian and tragedy as
a whole constituted some higher synthesis in the history
of Greek genres. In order to fill in this scheme, he had to
posit Homer as the earlier type of the Apollonian, and
then lay Archilochus and Pin dar on the bed of Procrustes
as successive types of the Dionysian. Soon thereafter he
abandoned the whole Hegelian construct and began to
call in question the superiority of Athenian culture itself,
so that in the notes for We Philologists he is to be seen
playing with such tantalizing propositions as the following: "Athenian tragedy is not the supreme form we might
think it is. Its heroes are too much lacking in the Pindaric
quality."' I am, therefore, not interested in lingering to
discuss his earlier distortions, but wish rather to see what
his later use of the Apollonian/Dionysian distinction has
to say about the effects of various artistic media on those
who experience them, as artists, as participants, and as
spectators. The essential text lies in two consecutive
"Skirmishes of an Untimely Man" in Twilight of the Idols. 10
Here he restates his earlier association of the Apollonian
experience with the painter, the sculptor, and the epic
poet, and the Dionysian with the actor, the dancer, the
musician, and the lyric poet; but now he shows greater sophistication in suggesting both the physiological bases of
the distinction and the historical development which both
categories of media have undergone. In Apollonian art, he
theorizes, it is the artist's eye which is engaged, with the
result that the existence of the work as an object separate
from him is brought to the fore; while in Dionysian art,
the whole muscular and nervous system is engaged, with
the result that the artist'·becomes a mimic of whatever inspires him and hence a participant in the event which the
work of art becomes. The media of modern man are the
result of a process of specialization. The poet, the musician, and the choreographer, who used to be united in a
single performing artist who led the dance, are now three
separate specialists who do not necessarily form part of a
performance at all.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
A
S HEIDEGGER HAS SUGGESTED, Nietzsche's usual
interest in his characterization of art seems to be in
the state of the artist as he creates rather than in
the independent quality of the resultant work of art or the
particular modes in which the work is experienced by others11 This is the state Nietzsche calls Rausch- rapture, intoxication, frenzy, the feeling that "rushes" over the artist
and carries him beyond himself into creation-and it is
significant that in the sections just referred to in Twilight
of the Idols, the Apollonian artist is said to experience
Rausch no less than the Dionysian, only through the eye,
rather than the nerves and muscles of the rest of the body.
But in these sections the term Rausch is actually being
used by way of prelude to another, the famous "will to
power" itself. And, surprisingly, Nietzsche here assigns
the will to power a medium of its own, architecture. "The
architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollonian
condition: here it is ... the intoxication [Rausch] of the
great will that demands art. Architects have always been
inspired by the most powerful men; the architect has always been under the 'suggestion' of power. In architecture ... the will to power means to make itself visible ...
The highest feeling of power and sureness comes to expression in the great style."
Since elsewhere Nietzsche goes so far as to say that everything in the world is simply one form or another of the
will to power, one is at first perplexed. 12 Surely the will to
power will also be at play in the various states (Rausch
whether of the eye or the whole body) in which artists
turn to other media, and surely the resultant works of art
will also bear witness to it. Moreover, insofar as all art
brings things into full presence to the senses-into visibility, audibility, surface-why is it in architecture especially
that "the will to power means to make itself visible"?
Nietzsche is no longer interested now in setting up any
medium as a synthesis of Apollonian and Dionysian conditions, but rather in designating architecture as a medium that stands apart from them both and brings the will
to power into appearance in a special way.
A clue to his thinking here lies in the fact that this is
one of the rare occasions on which he mentions not only
the creators and participants in works of art but also their
patrons. To speak of these "powerful men" at whose b!'hest the architect creates a building is to raise the question of its purpose. In order to bring a great building into
being, an architect must employ more durable materials
than any other kind of artist, must claim more space, mobilize more resources, and give more commands. Above
all, he must consult more closely with the desires of his patron, whether individual, institution, church, or state, and
if the patron has commissioned a great building, then
these desires will reach beyond mere functionality. Whatever the intended function of the building might be, its
coming into appearance as a work of art shows that the
power of its patron is possessed of the will and the means
to stability and endurance. The patron will understand
this as well as the architect, and the cooperation of the
27
�two will always ultimately be with a view to the final effect of the building on other people. Churchill's saying,
that we shape our buildings and our buildings then shape
us, needs to be more precise. It is architect and patron
who shape the building, and it is us they are aiming to
shape by it.
I suspect, then, that Nietzsche sets such value on architecture precisely because it fuses the categories of art and
politics. And the suspicion is increased by the striking fact
that his favorite way of praising the Roman Empire is in
architectural metaphors. The most manic expression of
this association comes in The Antichrist: "Is it still not un·
derstood yet? The imperium Romanum . .. this most admirable work of art in the great style, was a beginning, its
construction was calculated to give proof of itself over millenia-to this day no one has ever again built in such a
way, has even dreamed of building in the same measure
sub specie aetemi! This organization was stable enough to
support bad emperors: the accident of individuals ought
to be insignificant in such matters-first principle of all
great architecture." 13 The praise continues into the next
section, which describes the Romans' act of consolidating
the classical heritage as "the will to the future of man, the
great Yes to all things made visible as the imperium Romanum, visible for all the senses, the great style no longer
merely art but rather become reality, truth, life . .. " 14
Underneath the dithyrambic phrasing it is not hard to
grasp the essential characteristics of architecture that
make it easy for Nietzsche to identify it with the will to
power. Any ambitiously constructed building is meant to
last longer than the lifespans of its builders and to be used
by future generations. These generations will be molded
by both the functional and the esthetic aspects of the
building. Architect and patron cooperate to cast the spell
of their power over the future both in art and in life, and
we may accept the legitimacy of this ambition without being forced to debate the morality of political ambitions for
the expansion of an imperial system in space. Roman ar~
chitecture remains our great symbol of the ambition to
make cultural institutions endure through time.
of art in its own right but also both a functional means
and a compelling symbol for the process by which a civilization honors its classical works. And as part of this process it also helps to create a space in which the new work
can be juxtaposed to the old, an act no less essential to a
healthy civilization than the preservation of the classics
themselves. To see a work of modern art exhibited in a
museum built in the neoclassical style is an experience
which, common as it may be, has some meaning if we consider the tension between old and new which these conditions of presentation intend to symbolize.
ITH ROMAN ARCHITECTURE as a paradigm, then,
I wish to bring this meditation on artistic media
to its proper culmination by offering a few examples of the ways in which some of the best works of art our
civilization has to offer have themselves symbolically acknowledged, as part of their own conditions of coming
into being, the crucial tension between the old and the
new, between that which is preserved in presence and
that which comes into presence for the first time. Buildings are not the only works of art capable of making such
acknowledgements, nor were the Romans the only people
to be conscious of their importance. I shall therefore include examples from poetry and dance as well as architecture, and take them from the earliest as well as the most
recent phases of the West. What I am looking for are cases
in which it is clear that an artist is not merely presenting a
new work of art by itself without any reference to its conditions of appearance, but on the contrary is going out of
his way to insure that the new work have old ones in its
background, and that the transience of the conditions of
its first appearance be assured of being transformed into
the durability of the conditions of preservation that will
attend it if its bid for classic status is successful.
My example from the earliest phase will be an ode of
W
Pindar, whose poetry is in many ways more archaic even
than that of Homer. The Fifth Nemean, one of his most
Mozartean compositions, is a victory ode, or epinician, for
a boy pancratiast from the island of Aegina, famous in antiquity both for its athletic statuary and its temple archi-
I
PROPOSED AT THE OUTSET that our civilization in its
essential form came into being only when the brief but
glorious artistic achievement of Greece was preserved
by the Romans in such a way that their own artistic efforts
might be juxtaposed to it. This is a process which it is one
of the most important tasks of architecture to make possible. It does so in one sphere by sheltering and setting in
relief those other works of art which endure as objects,
and in another by shaping a space for the performing arts
in which they can take on scale and project themselves to
a particular audience. If one includes churches and temples as well as museums and concert-halls, the comprehensiveness of architecture's roles becomes clearer, for
one is then speaking of sacred art and ritual performance.
A work of architecture is thus not only an enduring work
28
tecture.
To compliment his hosts, Pindar begins by having himself and his chorus of Aeginetan boys claim, as they strike
up the dance, that "I am no statue-maker, to fashion
sculptures at holiday as they stand on their own pedestals," an opening sally which may well have been underscored by choreography imitating sculptural positions for
a split second before whirling merrily on. In standard epinician form, the ode goes on to praise the boy victor, and
then to make its way back, by a series of allusions and
partly told stories, to the foundational age of the earlier
Aeginetan heroes, including the founding father Aeacus
himself, who had once saved all Greece from a drought by
supplicating his own father Zeus for rain. Finally, in its
last line and a half, the ode returns to the present and
WINTER 1982
�praises the athletic victories of the boy's grandfather in
the following language: "At the portals of Aeacus bring
him crowns luxuriant with flowers, in the company of the
blond Graces." The "portals of Aeacus" here are the fore·
court of a shrine to that hero at the center of the city,
fronting the agora, where victory dances were normally
performed. This shrine was decorated with friezes depict·
ing the same event alluded to in the ode, the moment at
which Zeus showed favor to Aeacus by showering on the
parched land; such moments of favor typically form the
climax both of the odes' mythical language and of their
choreography. Since the forecourt of hero-shrines was a
traditional place for erecting statues of victorious athletes,
the dancers may have been referring to a ritual custom according to which victors might have their crowns placed
on the statues of ancestors who had themselves been victorious in earlier games. Whether or not this is the case
here, it is clear that some kind of offering of flowers is being made before the shrine as the ode comes to its end, an
act carried out in stylized motion which is to be thought
of as a continuation of the ode's ritual choreography.
All we have left of this lovely event is the concluding
phrase quoted earlier about the portals of Aeacus and the
blond Graces: 7r/Jo8Vpoww llAtcxKofJ &ve~wv trouhvTlx 4>EPe
an</Jom;,,ara avv ~av8afs X&pwmv. Fully conscious that
his language is destined to endure as a memorial text, Pindar seems to be playing here, as often at the conclusion
of his odes, with the implication that as the never-to-be
repeated victory dance draws to its close the language
which it has sustained is begining to move into its own immortality as a text. He is seeking a symbol of the ode's
dual nature, as transient dance and as enduring text, and
he finds it in the contrast between the luxuriant flowers
out of which the young victor's crown has been woven
and the magnificently sculpted stone of the statues and
friezes at the front of the ancestral shrine. Nor is Pindar
satisfied to allude to this contrast by the language alone;
he seems also to have arranged to draw it into the circle of
the ode's choreography, by having the flowers placed in
the forecourt of the shrine at the very moment when the
language falls still and the motion of the dancers continues in silence. To this ritual motion the vivid archaic
smiles on the faces of the ancestral athletic statues and
the heroic friezes are witness, in that acclamation between living and dead which can be fully mutual only if it
is made in silence.
And somehow present in all this, through the invocation of the final phrase, is the consort of the Graces themselves, goddesses of the transient comeliness of dancing
and flowers, who as immortals can themselves never fade.
Through the fostering by these divine presences, as well
as by Father Zeus and Father Aeacus, the new work of the
poet has blossomed into public performance and is now
about to reach the moment at which it will cease to be a
ritual dance and begin to be a durable text. It is taking its
place among the immortal stone masterpieces by which
the center of the city is adorned, and by the act of naming
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
these masterpieces and declaring its place among them, it
becomes a monument to its own occasion. The old and
the new are thus made in the most essential way to belong
to each other, and the same is true of the transient and
the durable; it is a belonging registered by the combination of the several media at the occasion of the performance. The old and the durable are present as sculpture,
the new and the transient are present as dance, and sover-
eign over all is the language of the ode which both declares these dualities and transcends them.
SHALL NOT TRY to claim that such a blaze of civic splendor has been equalled by any poetic event of recent times.
If there is an absence at the center of our civilization it
may lie just here: in our inability to agree on any objects of
reverence deeply enough to summon forth our best poets
and have them arrange spectacles at the centers of our cities in which the young both embody and share our agreement in the course of their performance. Efforts to mount
such spectacles in the Twentieth Century have usually
been totalitarian parodies, and it takes only one look at
films of the Nuremberg rallies to make most people flee
back to pluralism with a sigh of relief.
Acknowledging this difficult absence, then, I nevertheless have no desire to end with yet another eloquent
grouse against the age. As Nietzsche puts it in one of his
aphorisms on the classic, "Both classically and romantically minded spirits ... are preoccupied by a vision of the
future, but the former out of the strength of their time,
the latter out of its weakness." 15 The more classically
minded tack here, the one which refuses to lapse into
complaining out of weakness, would be simply to let one's
eye rove in a fine frenzy until it lights on the best work
now being done and then to ask whether anything like the
same interplay of the old and the new, and of the durable
and the transient, is to be traced in the conditions in
which it comes into public appearance. The artists I wish
to honor by this kind of inquiry work in media which lie at
the two extremes of the spectrum I have proposed in
speaking of the combination Pindar arranges. They are
George Balanchine, whose repertory of dances currently
being offered at the New York City Ballet is acknowledged
to be one of the greatest choreographic achievements in
the century, and I. M. Pei, whose career seemed to reach
its peak recently with the opening of the East Building of
the National Gallery in Washington. And, as it happens,
next to both artists stand patrons worthy of them, respectively Lincoln Kirstein and Paul Mellon, whose roles and
intentions also deserve to be honored by reflection.
I
T
HE LEVEL OF EXCELLENCE at which the New York
City Ballet is performing right now is rather terrifying. One risks nothing in calling it currently the finest dance company in the world; the knowledgeable go
further and prophesy that what we have been seeing for
29
�Figure I: The architect's concept sketch, showing the existing network of streets
and the relationship between the National Gallery (West Building, left) and the new
East Building. The altitude of the larger of the two triangles which comprise the
new building prolongs the long axis of the old building. The numbers in the upper
part of the sketch refer to square feet of space in the two buildings. (Figures 1 and 2
courtesy I. M. Pei & Associates.)
the last few decades will someday be as legendary as Diaghilev's Ballet Russe. Balanchine has been choreographing
new works for this company uninterruptedly since 1935,
and his presence has set the finest dancers in the world
knocking at its doors. Since the company lacks a "star system," the number of dancers of the highest rank it can
admit is, like my definition of the classic, theoretically susceptible of indefinite expansion. These resources of talent
have in turn enabled it to maintain a prodigious repertory
from season to season, so that in the winter and spring
seasons of 1980-81, some forty Balanchine ballets were
performed in addition to those of the company's other
choreographers. The sense of superabundance is heightened yet further by the variety of musical scores represented. Of the musicians who have written expressly for
ballet, Balanchine prefers to choreograph to scores of his
fellow Russians Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, but he has
also choreographed a series of masterpieces in homage to
Bach, Gluck, Mozart, Brahms, Bizet, and others. Coming
away from an evening with a strong program, one feels
that by some miracle time has been collapsed and the
highest graces of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries have been made present together in the
same theater, not as objects but as living bodies performing at the limits of skill under the direction of a master
fully capable of rising to the scores he has selected.
Modern technology is of course hard at work trying to
pin down these wonders, the choreography by dance notation and the performances by videotape, and Balanchine himself has lived to contemplate the production of
his works by many other companies around the world
whose stagings he has neither supervised nor seen. Some
speculate that his preponderance will only be augmented
after his death and might have something of the same
30
daunting effect as Beethoven did on later writers of symphonies, but all talk of monumental permanence is pleasantly mocked by the man himself. "I want to make new
ballets .... If you made a borscht, you'd use fresh ingredients. If you were asked to write a book twice, you'd use
new words. People say, what about posterity? What do
you preserve, I ask? A tape? What counts is now. Nobody
will ever be the same again. And I don't care about people
who aren't born yet." 16 If one wants to seek the frame of
permanence in which all this new work is held, it is to be
looked for not in recording techniques but in the concept
of repertory which Lincoln Kirstein has so well articulated.
"Increasingly, however, what pleases our audiences is rep~
ertory-illuminated, to be sure, by .well-trained dancers
.... Stars are replaceable by emergent students; choreography, in repetition, persists." 17 In any given season's of~
ferings of the New York City Ballet, there will be two or
three new works by Balanchine and two or three of his
own versions of the Nineteenth Century classics, and
both categories will be set in relief by thirty-odd of his
pieces choreographed since 1935 and deemed worthy of
repeating. Some of these are already granted classic status
by the audience, and in the rapidly changing world of
dance, anything preserved for as long as fifty years is
shown to be a classic by that very fact; others, more recent, are still making their bids and may eventually be
dropped and never revived again. The point to be stressed
is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The
consort of new and old works which this repertory maintains in performance is as healthy an image as our time
has to offer of that imperturbable ceremony, refusing to
be retarded or accelerated, by which the ranks of the classic are augmented.
T
O MOVE FROM THE STATE THEATER OF NEW
YORK to the East Building of the National Gallery in
Washington is to feel these equations change their
terms and yet remain the same. The original gallery was
completed by Andrew Mellon in 1941 as a gift to the nation, and the new free-standing extension was completed
in 1978 by his son Paul, with the superbly understated designation "East Building." The very Roman piety of the
son to the father is registered by the fact that both buildings are of marble from the same quarry in Tennessee,
and though the new building looks lighter in color now, its
stone will deepen to the same hue as that of the old in a
matter of decades. In his uncompromising demand for the
highest quality of execution, Paul Mellon sustained a
tripling of costs during construction, and the building's
prime location at the end of the Mall closest to the national Capitol only accentuates the contrast between the
level of quality to be achieved by private versus public
wealth. The old main gallery (now called the West
Building) is itself the most harmoniously executed of all
the neo-classical buildings on the Mall, and it is to the
glory of the East Building that it harmonizes with the old
WINTER 1982
�one in proportions and quality of design while speaking its
own assured modern idiom. By his choice of axes and
shapes I. M. Pei has in fact accommodated the new
building not only to the old one but also to the original
design for the streets of the city which dates back to 1791.
L'Enfant's whole system of traffic circles, with radial
avenues leading out from them and cutting diagonally
across the grid of the other streets, is generated by the two
major axes he projected from the Capitol building, one
leading along the Mall to the Washington Monument and
the other along Pennsylvania Avenue to the White
House. The East Building is situated just at the point
where the angle between these two axes from the Capitol
begins to create trapezoidal city blocks, and the building is
itself a trapezoid bisected into two triangles whose angles
observe those of the avenues outside. Moreover, Pei has
used these angles as his governing principle not only in
the shapes of the building's two halves but also at many
other levels of detail, from the space-frame over the vast
and airy central court down to the very shape of the
blocks in the floors. Thus should one's eye ever drop to
one's feet it would encounter, there too, in the very cut of
the marble, an homage to the design commissioned by our
own founding father for the city to be named after him.
In all these details of execution, then, there is manifested on the part of patron and architect alike a desire
that the new should take its place beside the old in a tension whose vibrancy only enhances the harmony that underlies it. This desire reaches its most dramatic realization
in the contrast between the actual way the two galleries
are intended to be used. The function of the reposeful
West Building is, now as always, to house the permanent
collection of the National Gallery, while one of the principal functions of the energetic East Building is to provide
space for temporary exhibitions, the new genre of internationally organized blockbusters that has emerged in the
last few decades. The central court of the East Building
gives a view of all levels of the building in the manner of
an opera-house, and the ('performances" for which this
Figure 2: An elaboration of the two·triangle plan of the East Building. The larger
triangle {divided by the arrow) contains public spaces-the central court and the
galleries, for example. The smaller (lower part of the sketch) is devoted to secondary
uses such as the study center. (The small figure in the upper right shows a preliminary sketch of a triangular building on the existing trapezoidal plot of ground.)
of course,
the name of Nietzsche has vanished altogether. I
should ·like to think, however, that far from implying
his irrelevance I have been paying him the right kind of
tribute. It may be that his greatness is less that of a philosopher, if by that word we mean one who offers us an account of the world and a guide to life through examination
of universals, and more that of a critic, if by that word we
mean one who leads us to make exacting perceptions and
valuations of the particular. By his sustained refusal to
slander the body, the senses, and the moment in all its
transience, Nietzsche gave us a fresh sense of what is at
stake when we submit ourselves to the power of a work of
art in the plenitude of its presence. But to consider what
is necessary for that plenitude means to consider the nature of the immortal, the monumental, the classic. And it
F
ROM MY ACCOUNT OF RECENT WORK,
means, finally, to be strong enough to sustain an irresolu-
court provides ''intermissions" are in fact going on around
ble paradoxical desire-the desire to be witness to a "new
the building's sides in the various galleries and towers,
where space has been left open by the architect, so that it
can be shaped anew by the curators through use of temporary walls designed for each specific exhibit. The East
Building is, in other words, a place for festivals, whose brilliance is inseparable from their transience 18 Patron and
architect have incorporated into the function of the new
building an element of festival brilliance which will stand
in perpetual tension with the marmoreal achievement of
its fundamental design. I should, therefore, like to offer
the two buildings together, with their complementary
styles and complementary functions, as my final image of
the interplay between the new and the old, and the durable and the transient, which a healthy civilization has the
sense and the will to sustain. Here too, as with dance repertory, the ceremony of the classical is, in Pindar's phrase,
classic" as it comes into being.
at perpetual ((holiday on its own pedestal."
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
l. See "Homers Wettkampf' in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Karl
Schlechta, Munich 1966, III, 291-299. Hereafter all references will give
the title and section number of the work and then the volume and page
number in Schlechta. Unless otherwise stated all translations are my
own.
2. "Der Griechische Staat," Werke, III, 285-286.
3. The essential text in Arendt is The Human Condition (Anchor Books
Edition 1959), Chap. 31, "The Traditional Substitution of Making for
Acting," 197-206.
4. Der Wille zur Macht, no. 975, Werke, III, 850. Though Schlechta
abandons the section numbers of earlier editions of Nietzsche's Nachlass collected under the title Der Wille zur Macht, he provides in his fifth
volume (609ff.) a concordance by which a given section can be found in
his own edition.
5. Nor will it do to maintain that these notebook jottings remained unpublished by Nietzsche because he could not bring himself to recommend in public the adoption of such a stance of hardness. Consider the
quotation from Zarathustra with which he concludes Gotzen-Dam-
31
�merung: "All creators are hard. And you' must think it blessedness to
press your hand on millenia as on wax,-/-Blessedness, to write on the
will of millenia as on bronze,-harder than bronze, nobler than bronze.
Only the noblest are completely hard." (Werke, II, 1033) Compare this
with the laudatory remarks on Caesar and Napoleon in the same book,
"Streifzuge eines Unzeitgemassen" nos. 38, 44, 45, 49, Werke, II, 1015,
1019-1022, 1025. To be fair, however, it must be added that the connection between the artist's hardness on his material and the statesman/
general's hardness on human beings is not made explicit anywhere in
Gotzen-Dammerung but rather left as a hint, a not-too-esoteric doctrine.
6. Nietzsche shows himself quite conscious of the distinction: "The
young women who march solemnly to the temple of Apollo, laurel in
hand, and sing as they go a processional song, remain who they are and
maintain the names they possess as citizens; the dithyrambic chorus is a
chorus of transformed beings for whom their past as citizens and their
social position has become oblivious." Die Geburt der TragOdie no. 8,
Werke, I, 52. The second half of his characterization, however, is incomplete, for in all the tragedies we possess (as opposed to hypothetical
original dithyrambs), the dancers who have doffed their own identities
have donned others which are equally precise: those of old men, women,
slaves, foreigners, sailors, etc.
7. Nietzsche's assumption is based on the much-disputed statement of
Artistotle (Poetics l449a9) that tragedy arose &1rO rCJv to'~apxOvrwv rOv
tneUpap,{3ov, "from those who led off the dithyramb." For a very nonDionysian critical discussion of this passage and of Nietzsche's use of it,
see Gerald F. Else, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, New
York 1965, 9-15.
8. Die Geburt der TragOdie no. l, Werke, I, 25.
9. "Notes for 'We Philologists,'" trans. William Arrowsmith, ARION
N.S. l/2, 1973-1974, 361.
10. Nos. 10 & II, Werke, II, 996-997.
11. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Pfullingen 1961, Vol. I, "Der Wille zur
Macht als Kunst," particularly the chapter entitled "Der Rausch als
asthetischer Zustand," 109-126.
12. Der Wille zur Macht no. 1067, Werke, III, 917.
13. Der Antichrist no. 58, Werke, II, 1229.
14. Der Antichrist no. 59, Werke, II, 1231. Cf. GOtzen-Dammerung,
"Streifzuge" no. 39, Werke, II, 1016. Nietzsche was also fond of alluding
to Horace's claim that in his three books of odes he had erected a monument more durable than bronze: exegi monumentum aere perennius
(Odes III, 30.1). Earlier in Antichrist no. 58 he uses the phrase aere perennius to characterize the whole Roman Empire, and in the last section of
Gotzen-Diimmerung, "Was lch den Alten Verdanke" no. l, he names
32
Figure 3: View of the East Building from the vicinity of the east entrance of the
original National Gallery, looking in approximately the same direction as the arrow
points in Figure 2. (Photo by Tom Farran.)
Horace and Sallust as his two great stylistic models and says that "Even
in my Zarathustra one can recognize a very serious ambition for Roman
style, for the 'aere perennius' in style." (Werke, II, 1027). See also MorgenrOte no. 71, Werke, I, 1059. In Zur Genealogie der Moral, '"Gut und
BOse,' 'Gut und Schlecht"' no. 16, he praises the nobility of Roman inscriptions, a category which combines architecture and writing (Werke,
II, 796).
15. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, "Der Wanderer und sein Schatten," no. 217, Werke, I, 965.
16. New York Times, "Arts and Leisure Section,'' Sunday, AprilS, 1979,
D 17.
17. Lincoln KirStein, Movement and Metaphor, New York 1970, 10.
18. Compare Lincoln Kirsteip's remarks on the lobby of the State
Theater of New York: "Philip Johnson built a festival ambiance in lobby
and promenade. Performances commence when audiences first enter
the houses which frame them; large theaters are more than shelter. Intermissions which link units of repertory are happy times for appreciation, disagreement, sharings of what has just been seen and heard."
New York City Ballet Souvenir Book, 1975.
WINTER 1982
�The Trivialization of the Holocaust as an
Aspect of Modern Idolatry
Robert Loewenberg
1
The Holocaust, the murdering of the Jews on Hitler's
principle that a "thorough eradication of even the last
representative and destruction of the last tradition"
should be realized, is the most mysterious event of modern
times, and perhaps the most characteristic. 1 Mysterious
and characteristic as well is the subsequent trivialization
of the Holocaust in Western discourse by those, especially
Jews, who profess detestation of Hitler and Nazism. The
trivialization of the Holocaust, and not its denial, for ex·
ample, by the Right, is the most significant post-Holocaust
phenomenon at our disposal for the purpose of understanding the Holocaust.
The charge of trivialization supposes certainly a justification of the view that the Holocaust is not trivial. One
must establish that Hitler's choice to eradicate the Jews
and Judaism instead of Armenians or Biafrans is what
makes for the Holocaust's particularity. The mystery of
the Holocaust, in other words, is not the murdering of innocents, or the number and manner of their killing. The
description of Hitler's murdering of the Jews as a holocaust constitutes a claim, a narrowly tribal one in some
minds, that the gassing of Jews was not solely a murdering
of innocents demonstrating man's inhumanity to man.
Rather the Holocaust was a murdering of another kind
that demonstrates profound truths. This claim is explored
in this essay in connection with the suggestion of Emil
Fackenheim that the Holocaust was the result of idol worship.'
Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, Robert
Lo~wenberg has written Equality on the Oregon Frontier (University of
Washington Press, 1976) and articles on the history of the American
Northwest and on values in writing history.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The purpose of this essay is to locate the sources of trivialization and not to detail it-the latter a task that has
been undertaken by others 3 The best evidences of trivialization are found in the most likely places, in common
speech and in academic discourse. In both instances the
quite prominent involvement of the Jews in the trivializa·
tion of the Holocaust underscores the several points to be
developed in this study.
At the first level, that of common speech, trivialization of
the Holocaust is especially visible in the rights movements.
Here the language of the Holocaust and of European
Jewry is readily affixed to circumstances of victimization.
Civil rights proponents are inclined to refer to a Negro
ghetto as an "Auschwitz" or to the denial of a lunch program as "genocide." The denial of civil rights is fascist
while support of civil rights is in some ultimate sense Jewish. This perception of the rights movement and of Judaism is commonplace among liberal Jews today. Judaism,
1
once self-understood as chosenness or ' particularism," is
now to be conceived as universalist. Judaism's universalism has suggested to some advanced or Reform rabbis
that traditional or orthodox Judaism may itself be Nazi.
Accordingly, there has been a growing tendency in pro·
gressive circles to disavow the holiday of Chanukah,
which marks the defeat of Hellenists by a band of religious
zealots, as fascism.
Developments of this type at the popular level are informed by academic conventions regarding what is
thought to be praiseworthy about Judaism. At the aca·
demic level the trivialization of the Holocaust is, in fact, a
function or product of the insistence that Judaism is es·
sentially antireligious, actually a forerunner of secular and
atheistic humanism. The real Jew is the non-Jewish Jew.
This view, deriving from the distinction between universalism and particularism, is part of a larger vision of his-
33
�tory and human affairs in which the Holocaust is, above
all, an attack upon mankind. In this view of things, Nazism
and Hitler are perceived as reactionary, the enemies of
progress, secularism, and democracy. Thus Hitler was
among those "demonic enemies," as two Jewish writers
have recently and typically said, "of modernity."' As for
Mein Kampf, it is considered "deeply barbarous," a book
"to end books. "5 The Third Reich demonstrated once and
for all the evil of nationalism or particularism, of hierarchy
and authority. Nazism vindicated an opposite set of prin·
ciples: egalitarianism, universalism, internationalism, and
tolerance.
Scholars in fields other than German history, especially
if they are Jewish, are not hesitant to use the Holocaust as
in some respects a model and metaphor. A famous exam·
pie is Stanley Elkins' astonishing comparison of death
camp inmates with American slaves. Interestingly, the
comparison was offensive to some historians on the
ground that slaves did not behave as the Jews were alleged
to have done by Elkins. In other words, the comparison as
between murder and enslavement was not faulted, only
the suggestion that slaves behaved like death camp inmates. Uses of this type explain in part the popularity of
so-called Holocaust studies, a new academic subfield.
It is the burden of this essay to suggest that trivialization of the Holocaust partakes of the same philosophical
sources that informed the actual Holocaust itself. The hatred of Judaism (not equivalent to hatred of Jewish
people), whether in destroying Jews or in trivializing their
destruction, reflects neither prejudice nor fascist militarism, but a disordering of the terms of being, a disordering
of the relationship of the One and the many. This disordering and its consequences we call idolatry. Perhaps no
Jewish writer has done more to explore this question than
Emil Fackenheim.
Fackenheim's study of the Holocaust is notable for its
daring. He dismisses certain sanctified cliches of Holocaust literature, and ignores the taboos of normal political
theory. For example, Fackenheim does not suppose that
religion is an end equal to all others, but, on the contrary,
that it is "the most serious question facing a serious man."6
In this, Fackenheim offends behaviorists and secular humanists at once. But having done so, Fackenheim is free
to disregard as unhistorical and reductionist those accounts of the Holocaust which limit our apprehension of
Hitler or of Mein Kampf either to the influences upon
them or to behavioral inferences from them. Similarly, he
does not engage in a certain type of theologizing which,
by proposing that the Holocaust demonstrates the non-existence and irrelevance of God, suggests rather the nonexistence and irrelevance of any serious Jewish theology.
Fackenheim takes Nazism at its word and considers its
deeds in light of its word. In this he adopts the commonsense approach of Werner Maser, the outstanding historian of Mein Kampf. "To explain Hitler and to understand
the period of history over which he exerted so decisive an
34
influence," Maser has written, "nothing can be so impor~
tant or informative as Mein Kampf . ... Hitler clung faithfully to the ghastly doctrine set out in Mein Kampf."'
But the ghastly aspects of Mein Kampf are not always
the obvious ones. Hitler was an idealist, or one who is devoted to what modern liberal scholarship considers the
highest goal, freedom. Fackenheim takes note of Hitler's
idealism. The idealistic element in Mein Kampf is not outwardly ghastly. For example, Hitler writes of his wish to
replace one "spiritual" doctrine with another. He does not
idolize force in this matter. "Every attempt at fighting a
view of life by means of force will finally fail," he observed, "unless the fight against it represents the form of
an attack for the sake of a new spiritual direction." 8 This
new spiritual direction is what necessitates the "thorough
eradication" of Jews. Hitler seeks a "new . .. view of 1ife." 9
Hitler's ghastly doctrine aside, he was a moralist. Conversions and mere persecutions ofjews he regarded as destructive of idealism and immoral in other respects. 10 As
for persecutions, "every [one] ... that takes place without
being based on a spiritual presupposition does not seem
justified from the moral point of view." 11 Traditional Judeophobia failed to express "the character of an inner and
higher consecration, and thus it appeared to many, and
not the worst, as immoral and objectionable. The conviction was lacking that this was a question of vital importance to the whole of mankind and that on its solution the
fate of all non-Jewish people depended." 12
The eradication of Jews and of all Jewish things Fackenheim rightly considers to derive from a worshipping of
false gods or idolatry. Nazism sought to make the trinity of
Yolk, Reich, and Fuehrer into one. Hitler's purpose was to
replace the people, who are representative of the principle that God is One, with "eternal Germanity" as one. In
order to establish the significance of idolatry, Fackenheim
has recourse to Jewish sources. Idolatry is "false 'freedom,'" in particular, idolatry is the "literal and hence total
identification of finiteness with infinitude." 13 What relation exists between ancient idolatry and modern idolators?
The ancients were preoccupied with the problems of false
worship and false gods. Moderns are secular and do not
believe in gods. Fackenheim does not forfeit his fundamental discovery that Nazism is idolatrous by suggesting
the Nazis were antimodern pagans. He does not dilute or
caricature the rabbinic teaching on idolatry, but insists
that Nazism is the "most horrendous idolatry of modern,
perhaps of all time." 14 In making this his starting point,
Fackenheim assures us that he intends to show that
Nazism and its objectives were not trivial. Of course idolatry is not trivial in Jewish terms where it serves as a
counter to Judaism itself. But idolatry is also not trivial in
absolute terms. Rather it reflects a disordering of the relationship of man to nature and to the "divine Infinity."IS
Fackenheim points out that the ancient rabbis regarded
"one who repudiates idolatry is as though he were faithful
to the whole Torah. By this standard," says Fackenheim,
WINTER 1982
�"any modern Jew would be wholly faithful." 16 But it goes
without saying that modern Jews are not wholly fmthful
even though they do repudiate the w'orship of idols or
images. Does this not indicate the irrelevance of the rab·
binic teaching, and by implication the irrelevance of Juda·
ism? Fackenheim refers to the following talmudic passage,
a characteristic utterance regarding idolatry, to suggest
why such questions are not well-founded.
When someone in his anger tears his clothes, breaks utensils,
throws away money, this should be viewed as though he worshipped idols. For this is the cunning of the evil inclination:
today it says 'do this,' tomorrow, 'do that,' until it finall~ says
'go and worship idols' and he goes and does it. ... What 1s the
alien god that dwells in a man's body? The evil inclinationP
The danger of idol worship is not the "ludicrous anti·
climax" moderns suppose it to be. 18 Instead moderns who
suspect they are not subject to idol worship because they
are indifferent to the gods have fallen prey to idolatry
without even knowing it was a temptation. In the case of
Nazism, Fackenheim explains, idol worship is based in the
same feelings of ancient idol worship, that is, in "infinite
fear, hope, pleasure or pain." But the object of worship in
Nazism, namely the unity of Hitler, Yolk, and Reich, is
not recognized as an ido].I 9 On the contrary this object is
understood to bring about the liberation from "idolatrous
thralldom." In other words, modern idolatry understands
itself to be liberation or "demythologization." As Facken·
heim puts it, "the truth in this new false 'freedom' is that,
negating all worship, it negates all idolatry in the form of
worship. This new idolator takes himself for an enlight·
ened modern."20 Moreover, because the modern idolator
is enlightened, he scorns idols as mere sticks and stones at
the same time that he condemns all worship as superflu·
ous. But the idolatrous essence, the identification of finiteness and infinitude, survives like the duck inside the
wolf in the tale of Peter. "Because [the infinite feeling of
the modern idolator] is infinite, it does not vanish ... It
thus acquires the power of generating what may be called
internalized idolatry."21
Fackenheim recognizes two forms of modern "internalized" idolatry and distinguishes "internalized religion"
from both. Hitler's idolatry Fackenheim calls "idealistic."
It identifies finiteness with infinitude in making the finite
infinite. Nazism is "absolute whim ... the extreme in fini·
tude." 22 Naturalistic or empiricist idolatry is marked by
positivist and relativistic "anti-absolutism." It identifies fi.
niteness with infinitude in making the infinite finite; the
"degradation of the infinite aspect of selfhood to a false fi.
nitude."2' The so-called value-free perverters of Dewey
and Freud, but not Dewey or Freud themselves, are naturalist idolators according to Fackenheim because they
deny all goals, including even those of Dewey and Freud
that "man should make himself into the natural being he
is." 24
Internalized religion is carefully distinguished from idola·
THE ST, JOHNS REVIEW
try, whether of the idealistic or naturalistic sort. It would
be "a fatal error to confuse" internalized religion and inter~
nalized idolatry, says Fackenheim. 25 The knowing denial
of the divine Infinity, that is, the "raising [of an individual
or a collective self] to infinity in ... [the] very act of demal,"
is "internalized religion," not "internalized idolatry," when
this denial "issues, not in an atheistic rejection of the Divine but rather in its internalization. " 26 This situation, al~
tho~gh it "raises the specter of a modern, internalized
idolatry," is kept from becoming idolatry in the "modern
... philosophies ... [of] Fichte, Schelling, Hegel," because
"finiteness and infinitude are ... kept firmly apart." And,
what is true of these "idealist" philosophers is also true of
the "humanistic atheists ... Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche." The identification of finiteness and infinitude is
here "as firmly (if not as obviously) rejected ... by the fact
that Divinity vanishes in the process of internalization, to
be replaced by a humanity potentially infinite in its modern 'freedom' ... The potentiality never seems to become
quite actual." In sum, internalized religion is an ~~authen
tic challenge" to the divine Infinity which should be respected by Jewish and Christian thinkers. Internalized
idolatry, on the other hand, is "demonic perversion."27
Above all this distinction is rooted in the "honest rationality" of' the philosophers. Unlike idolatrous parodies of
thought which are "the product, not of reason, but of passion," the philosophers are not idolatrous.28 Naz1sm, mternalized idolatry, is a denial of the divine Infinity. At the
same time it is a literal and hence total identification of
finiteness with infinitude. Although Hitler was "no emperor-god ... and the Yolk, no worshipping community,"
yet the "will of a Fuehrer" and the will of the Yolk was the
sole reality. The object of idol worship is the will, internalized in Yolk and Fuehrer who are one. Nazism is a "bastard-child of ... the Enlightenment." 29
Fackenheim has undoubtedly pointed us in the direction of uncovering the source of the Holocaust's mystery.
The ground of idolatry or the identification of finitude
and infinity is false freedom. But Fackenheim's further
distinction between internalized idolatry and internalized
religion is not sound.
.
The philosopher's impulse, which does not deny the divine Infinity but which seeks only to bring the divine, "as
it were ... in[to] the same inner space as the human self,"
is surely an idolatrous aspiration 30 More important, .this
impulse participates in the same aspiration which informs
such demonic perversions as Nazism. The remainder of
this essay is devoted to exploring this suggestion and its
implications for the question of the trivialization of the
Holocaust.
2
Fackenheim's distinction between internalized religion
and internalized idolatry is outwardly commonsensical in
that thought is always different from action. But this dif.
35
�ference is especially inappropriate' as a distinction in the
case of the great philosophies, all of which sought to identify thought and act at some level. Commonsensical as
wen is the unmistakable difference between any of the
great philosophies and the comparatively low level theorizing of Hitler. But differences of this type have no philosophical relevance. Moreover, Fackenheim is himself
compelled to recognize the, to him, quite troubling compatibility of Heidegger and Nazism.
Heidegger's was "one of the profoundest philosophies
of this century," Fackenheim observes, and surely he was
an exponent of internalized religion. As late as 1946, however, Heidegger failed to recognize "radical evil" in the
Holocaust. Fackenheim considers this failure a "philosophical" one, not a challenge to the distinction between
internalized religion and internalized idolatry. 31 But Fackenheim does not explain how Heidegger's "philosophical
failure" differs from idolatry. One wonders if perhaps
there is no distinction between this philosophical failure
and idolatry or, put another way, if there really is a distinction between internalized idolatry and internalized religion.
Let it be noted here, before we consider this possibility,
that historically at least, there is no reason to suppose any
such distinction ever existed. Karl Liiwith has observed
that "nihilism as the disavowal of existing civilization,"
and not internalized religion, "was the only belief of all
truly educated people at the beginning of the twentieth
century." 32
Whether Heidegger is a nihilist or if nihilism is idolatry
are matters outside the present concern. But that Hitler
explicitly disavowed existing civilization and identified it
with judaism will not be doubted. Certainly it is this disavowal that Heidegger found "great" in Nazism. As for
Heidegger' s own statements against anti-Semitism, they
cannot be given much weight as evidence of a philosophic
intention as against an idolatrous one. The tradition of
modern philosophy is, of course, marked by hostility to Judaism1 as Fackenheim's study, among others, shows, even
as this hostility is almost always hedged about with the liberal's disdain for all "prejudice," especially for anti-Semitism.
A final observation about the great philosophies considered from the standpoint of Fackenheim's defense of the
distinction between internalized idolatry and internalized
religion is the supposed "authenticity" of the great philosophies. Consider that Fackenheim exempts Hegel from
an idolatrous identification of finitude and infinity, saying
he "reaches the Fichtean goal [of a divinized moral self],
but does so in the realm of thought only." Marx too is no
idolator, according to Fackenheim. Insofar as the theorist
of world communism realized that "society [is] as yet far
from classless," he did not identify the finite and the infinite.33 But one may question if these are plausible distinctions or authentic ones. Can Hegel or Marx, of all thinkers,
be defended on the ground that the idolatrous tendency of
an identification of finitude and infinity was not idolatrous
because it was limited to the realm of thought? Precisely
36
the identification of thought and act was their objective.
Hegel did not doubt the realm of thought would succeed
to action, in particular to the Prussian state. Certainly
Marx did not scorn the prospect of a classless society. The
distinction Fackenheim insists upon is here again not a
theoretical but a circumstantial and historical one. One
must look rather far to find a more pertinent example of
internalized idolatry, a knowing identification of the divine Infinity dwelling in a man, than Hegel's Wissenschaft
der Logik:
[The] logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason,
as the realm of pure thought. This realm is the truth as it is
without veil and [for itself]. It can be said, therefore, that this
is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence, before
the creation of nature and a finite mind. 34
We may not say of Hegel that he has taken "care [that] ...
the possibility of idolatry is ... recognized and avoided." 35
But the distinction Fackenheim would have us credit
between the great philosophies and demonic perversions
of them rests on what is itself a fatal error. Honest rationality, said to separate products of reason from those of
passion, in fact confoupd~ reason and passion.
Concerning the distinction between reason and passion,
it must at least be noted that the tide of modern political
philosophy, in which Leo Strauss noted three waves, is
dominated by philosophies of passion. 36 Beginning with
Machiavelli, who substituted glory for virtue, and Hobbes,
who replaced glory with power, the great philosophies
have been notable for their rejections of reason, whether
in hallowing folk minds as expressions of a general will or
in the sanctification of history as an expression of nature
or idea. In the third and present wave of modernity inaugurated by Nietzsche, the West has been inclined to think
"that all human life and human thought ultimately rests
on horizon-forming creations which are not susceptible of
rationa1legitimization."37
This historical consideration regarding passion and reason is not irrelevant to the distinction Fackenheim would
have us accept between the philosophies and Hitler. We
live at a time when it is the nearly universal presumption
of political thinkers that man is not a political being but is
instead an amorphous or "free" being, to be shaped by
history, by labor or by change. This presumption, a reversal of the understanding of Aristotle, is related to another
Aristotelian principle which modern political thinkers
have also reversed. This principle is that "the mind is
moved by the mover." 38 Reason, in other words, the an~
cients regarded as "revelation," not as a thing man-made. 39
These two related reversals of classical thought by moderns bear directly on our subject. They are the bases for
modern idolatry and for the too easy supposition that idolatry is not a modern possibility, or that honest rationality
is a hedge against such a possibility. The identification of
finitude and infinity in Nietzsche, one of Fackenheim's
great philosophers, is complete because the identification
of making and thinking is complete.
WINTER 1982
�In Nietzsche, thought is action, in particular it is vitalisrq. When Nietzsche internalizes the divine infinity (or
the One), his idolatry is not simply in the realm of thought.
It is palpable idolatry because thought is act in Nietzsche:
The greatest events-they are not our loudest but our stillest
hours. Not around the inventors of new noise, but around the
inventors of new values, does the world revolve; it revolves inaudibly40
And Zarathustra counsels:
'Will to truth' .... A will to the thinkability of all beings; this I
call your will. You want to make all being thinkable.4 1
Nietzsche's method is rational insofar as it is autonomous
and free, but it is openly passionate as well. What is art in
Nietzsche is system in Max Weber. Weber is the formulator of the principle of honest rationality as the basis for
the distinction between morality or idealism and immorality, the distinction informing Fackenheim's defense of
the great philosophies.
Weber's distinction between idealism and immorality
derives in part, as will be clear shortly, from his conviction
that facts and values are heterogeneous. It is not irrelevant
to add that Weber's teaching that only facts are knowable
while all judgments regarding values are relative continues
to inform both a naturalistic social science in which "value
judgments" are impermissible, and neo-Kantian secular
humanism in which the facts are said to be value-laden.
Academic social studies, in other words, must also be affected by the critique of honest rationality.
The context of Fackenheim's invocation of honest rationality is Weberian. But in a critique of Weber of the
profoundest kind, Strauss has shown the falsity of the distinction between products of reason and of passion fashioned by honest rationality.42 Honest rationality, or the
principle of freedom according to which one is free in the
degree that he is "guided by rational consideration of
means and ends," is said to be nihilistic.43 Strauss's critique
of Weber bears directly and with great force upon the subject of this essay and upon the question of idolatry.
According to Weber, reason, particularly in the determining of moral imperatives which appeal to intellect (unlike merely cultural or personal values and wants to which
our feelings are subject), is the glory and dignity of man.
Not choosing and not valuing is the equivalent of appetitiveness and passion. "Man's dignity, his being exalted far
above all brutes, consists in his setting up autonomously
his ultimate values, in making these values his constant
ends, and in rationally choosing the means to these ends.
The dignity of man consists in his ... freely choosing his
own values or his own ideals."44 Commitment to a value
which appeals to our reason Weber counted idealism.
But Strauss reminds us that the justification for this
view of idealism is a scientific understanding of values,
that is, an understanding that facts are possessed of transhistorical or universal character while values are relative
THE ST. JOHNS REVJEW
and discrete. Because the truth about values is said to be
inaccessible, a scientific and rational, as well as an honest
approach to values must be neutrality toward values. And
yet indifference to all values is precisely what Weber
counts as baseness. Freedom and rationality suggest a rational hostility toward theory. But this suggests an espousal
of unfreedom or passion. It is no accident that this hostility
to values and to theory is embodied in naturalistic social
science (behaviorism), and in the value-laden humanism
which frequently opposes it, that is, in those two forms of
academic social studies that grew out of Weber's distinction between facts and values. Thus, the positivist regards
theory as unempirical. He makes indifference to all causes
or Hopenness" a cause. At the opposite extreme stands
the humanist who dignifies all causes in the name of freedom and dignity regardless of whether a cause appeals to
our mind or to our passion. HA cause that appeals no further than 'the sphere of one's own individuality,' " the vitalism of Nietzsche, counts as a cause.45 The first position
is formalistic and self-canceling, and the second is simply a
doctrine of power. Weber, in sum, having undertaken the
defense of idealism as freedom and commitment to a value,
ultimately dignifies mere personal preferences and willing
as idealistic.
The distinction between idealism and appetitiveness
fades into freedom as such, as the distinction between values and facts, ought and is, collapses into an identity of
ought and is. The final formulation of Weber's ethical
principle would then be " 'Thou shalt have preferences'an Ought whose fulfillment is fully guaranteed by the Is."46
Honest rationality, the choosing of values as called for by
intellect as against acceptance of values which appeal to
our feelings, is obviously arbitrary. Why be honest or rational? Reason and passion, idealism and appetitiveness
are morally equal on the principle of honest rationality, or
rather there is no such principle.
Fackenheim's distinction between the great philosophies
and Hitler is subject to the same nihilistic consequence attaching to the distinction between idealism and immorality
in Weber. This would suggest that the distinction between
internalized religion and internalized idolatry is also inadequate. In fact, Fackenheim has not done full justice to
the rabbinic teaching, perhaps because he has done more
than full justice to the great philosophies.
Fackenheim's critique of the rabbinic teaching does not
do full justice to judaism. Certainly the rabbis would not
have supposed that the false freedom of the great philosophers in bringing the divine Infinity into the same space
with a human being was an "authentic challenge" to be
taken seriously as religious and not idolatrous. The rabbis
were not liberals for whom challenges to the divine Infinity counted as authentic. One cannot maintain that Nazism is idolatrous while consenting to an Hellenic gloss on
the rabbinic teaching. That "the Hellenic spirit of free inquiry ... is not rooted in judaism," as Husik has correctly
observed, is a fact that moderns find difficult to accept.47
37
�Concerning the subject of idolatry, one might even say
that this spirit of free inquiry is the essence of the yetzer
hara, the evil inclination. The divine Infinity which occupies the same inner space with the philosopher cannot be
God. Such an occupant, the rabbis say, is precisely "the
alien god." This is the god that says, "do anything," i.e.,
be free. Freedom, or the evil inclination, is the alien god.
In a word, freedom, understood as "false freedom," is
idol~
atry, even though we know it is today "a mark of intelligence and progress ... [to praise] serious consideration of
alien gods."48 Evidently the matter of "internalization"
has been the rabbinic interpretation from the start.
3
The Jewish teaching on false freedom is not ambiguous.
False freedom is false Exodus from Egypt. It is the making
of the golden calf while Moses is at Sinai preparing to deliver the Torah, or true freedom, to Israel. The remainder
of this essay is devoted to modern idolatry in two embodiments. First is the idolatry associated with the consideration of man as an animal lacking reason and a soul. Here
man exits from or escapes his condition as a being of more
than animal elements. Let us call this form of idolatry the
Mehan exodus, following Eric Voegelin, who locates the
contraction of man's being into a "power-self" as the
means of "concupiscental exodus" in the Melian dialogue
detailed by Thucydides.49 There is, in addition to the
Mehan exodus, a second embodiment of idolatry, or gnostic exodus. In gnosticism, men renounce the trappings of
their mortality, including history and culture, as if to bring
about, at God's expense, the conditions of perfection
symbolized in the garden of Eden. At the level of popular
and of academic discourse, these embodiments of idolatry
are understood in the language of political jargon as Left
and Right. This language does not intend religious meanings. Nonetheless, the present purpose is to suggest that
conventional political discourse misunderstands the difference of Right and Left, which it considers only political. The division, and opposition, of Right and Left, rather
than the content of either Right (Melian) or Left (gnostic),
is idolatry in its modern form.
It goes without saying that a judgment that Right and
Left touch religious aspects is offensive to much political
science. 50 But not all scholars are content that religious
questions should be divorced from political theory. Allan
Bloom has observed that "what is perhaps the most serious question facing a serious man-the religious question
-is almost a matter of indifference-" to political writers
in our time. This indifference is found in John Rawls, for
example, whose study of equality is considered by many
to be a significant contribution. But Rawls considers religion "just another one of the many ends that can be pursued in a liberal society."'!
Again it is Bloom who has pointed out that modern political writing which evades the serious questions also
38
evades the easy historical ones, inviting sloppiness and errors of fact. One may say, however, that what is most consistently mistaken by modern writers such as Rawls is the
involvement of political writing in idolatry. Rawls's equation of all ends is precisely idolatry of the gnostic type.
Knowledge that all ends or values are equal is not a human possibility, but a divine one. Must not metaphysics
and religion, dealing with questions about ends, be more
serious than other pursuits in a liberal society or in any society? If Nazism is idolatry, a political science such as
evinced in the work of Rawls is precluded from studying
it. One cannot undertake a study of Nazism as idolatry in
the context of modern political science because this science is implicated in idolatry. The following survey of Nazism as idolatrous suggests the nature of this implication.
The idolatry in Nazism is found in connection with the
Biblical teaching on freedom. The story of the Exodus is
an explication of true and false freedom. True freedom is
the recognition of God, and the recognition that follows
from the recognition of God, that man is radically distinct
from animals as well as from God. Man is neither raw desire nor spirit, man is
in~between
or in the metaxy, to use
the pertinent Platonic term. False freedom, in contrast, is
the freedom or exodus from the metaxy, symbolized in
the making of the golden calf, by which men simultaneously attempt to be gods themselves and to sanctify raw
desire.
The Exodus of the Jewish people is plainly not one
from Egypt but to Israel. Exodus from Egypt is marked
above all by wandering and by a desert. Moreover, the Exodus from Egypt and the opening of the Red Sea are not
effected by the Jews but by God. The Exodus is no war of
national liberation. Most important, to consider the Exodus as though it were a mere war of liberation from Egyptian bondage is idolatry. Thus, when the Israelites make
the golden calf they proclaim: "These are your Gods, 0 Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt." 52
But this is a lie; the golden calf was newly made by the
Jews. But then who split the Red Sea if not God or the
golden calf? Naturally, it must have been the Jews: God is
a projection or superstition; freedom is man's work and
man is the maker. Exodus is then freedom or the exercise
of human will: absolute whim. It is the liberation to do as
one lists, to wander. Exodus is the freedom not to wait for
Moses: to go to Israel or not. But of course the Bible
teaches that this is all false.
The calf makers are idol worshippers; they are slain.
They have forfeited reason by equating their whim or freedom with rationality. They made the same error that
Strauss detected in Weberian idealism or honest rationality. And, as in the Weberian instance, the mistaking of
whim for rationality is equivalent to animality or mere desiring. The calf makers are considered as animals. In one
of the most famous expositions of idolatry in the Bible,
Nebuchadnezzar is punished with the loss of his reason
and sent to forage in the manner of oxen for his failure,
WJNTER 1982
�demonstrated in his making of a gold,en idol, to recognize
that "the most High rules in the Kingdom of man." 53
Only reason, by which I mean the revelation that God
and not man is the maker of all things, can distinguish be·
tween exodus as false and as true freedom. A calf is a thing.
All things perish. Things come into being and go out of
being. The bush that burns but is not consumed is a sign
of divinity because it does not perish. Being remains,
namely, the process of coming into being and going out of
being remains. This process is known only to man who
alone among things possesses reason or soul. This permits
him to see the sign of the burning bush and to understand
it. This recognition indicates that aspect of man's being,
spirit or soul, which is not a thing. We call this aspect of
perception immortality.
Freedom is false when men pretend they are animals or
gods. The literal and hence total identification of finiteness and infinitude is a form of idolatry because such
identification is a willful disordering of reality. Idolatry is
the knowing denial of the doctrine which founds Judaism,
or monotheism: "Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord is your God, the
Lord is One." The Biblical exposition of this principle, set
in the Exodus or Passover story, specifies idolatry as false
freedom or exodus from the metaxy. There are two modes
of exodus or false freedom.
Men may escape the metaxy or the conditions of human being in the direction Fackenheim calls naturalism
by identifying as finite those aspects of being which are
infinite. 54 The insistence that man is an animal who invents God for the sake of satisfying behavioral imperatives
is idolatrous in this sense. The value-free principle is a
doctrine of raw power, as are its derivatives, for example,
the "open society," and certain versions of equality and
free speech. Justice, which regards all value claims as equal,
is achievable only by enforcement of absolute toleration
and permissiveness or by enforcement of sameness and
intolerance in the name of humanity. 55 Force is inevitable
in either case to insure absolute permissiveness or absolute
conformity, since it cannot be the case that values will not
clash, or that self-control will be considered a value superior
to others.
In fact, the sole means of avoiding the arbitrary dilemma
of tolerance is to undertake a transformation of the self,
that is, to undertake the elimination of the self or amour
propre. In other words, this doctrine of freedom entails a
reordering of the relationship of the One and the many
whether in the reformation of selves into a general will or
into Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer. As we shall see in
Hitler's case, work makes free because it destroys egotism.
In particular, freedom as work eliminates rewards based
upon skill. The individual is thus merged into the collective self. Freedom from values as the meaning of freedom
is simply power or will. We have already called this freedom from values the Melian exodus, after Thucydides:
"Men . .. rule wherever they can."56
Hitler's conception of right was certainly Melian. Alan
Bullock, who has called this aspect of Hitler's thought
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
<(crude Darwinism," notes that "no word occurs more fre-
quently in Hitler's speeches than 'struggle.' "57 "The
whole work of Nature," according to Hitler, is "a mighty
struggle.'' Again: "The first fundamental of any rational
Weltanschauung is the fact that on earth and in the universe, force alone is decisive."58
Voegelin explains that the "fictitious identity of conquest with reality can be achieved by identifying reality
with a humanity contracted to its libidinous self."" The
modern forms of this aspect of false freedom, according to
which values, and thus judgments concerning them, are
historical and ultimately identical to personal desire, is
embodied in historicisms of mind or spirit. In other words,
Melian exodus denies to philosophy all but historical and
pragmatic aptitudes. The difference between the ancient
and modern expressions of this exodus is the hint of tragic
fatality in the ancient and the absence of this hint in its
modern forms. The Athenian conquerors retain, "in the
background ... the tragic consciousness of the process."
They too will be massacred in time. Modern movements,
on the other hand, sink "to the untragic vileness of the
ideologist who cannot commit the murder he wants to
commit in order to gain an 'identity' in place of the self he
has lost, without moralistically appealing to a dogma of ultimate truth." 60
The dogma to which Hitler appealed was the Thousandyear Reich, eternal Germanity. This vision he conceived
as freedom and the elimination of Judaism. Freedom and
the replacement of Judaism with Germanity would prepare the way for a reconciliation of mankind. These objectives were exactly dogmas of ultimate truth for the sake of
committing murders. Moreover, these dogmas were the
instruments for the formation of selves.
We need not doubt Hitler used the word "struggle"
many times or that he identified morality with power. But
his object was not solely power. His murderous intention
was not arbitrary or irrational. Hitler's doctrine of the
blood is the key to the other side of Nazism and simultaneously to the idolatrous aspect of the great philosophies.
Hitler's notorious sacrifice of military goals so as to destroy the million Jews of Hungary reflects his commitment
to the doctrine of the blood. The doctrine of the blood is
an inversion of the doctrine of the soul. 61 Speaking often
of uour people" and "eternal Germanity," Hitler's purpose was to effect the "reconciliation of mankind/' or "all
non-Jewish peoples.''62 Nazism emerges as a counterJudaism at this point. The "purity of the blood ... [will]
enable our people to mature for the fulfillment of the mission which the Creator of the universe has allotted also to
them.''6l This, the "higher motive of national policy and
never narrow particularism" explains why the "State has
nothing whatsoever to do with a definite conception of
economics or development of economics."64 Nazism was a
moral doctrine of freedom for which race was the form.
As persecution of the Jews was immoral in Hitler's thinking, so the purity of German blood was not a medical or
39
�an anthropological doctrine, even though it had import at
such levels. One suspects we hear neither the hypocrite
nor the psychopath say, as Hitler did in 1932, "Let them
call us unhuman. If we save Germany, we shall have done
the greatest deed in the world .... Let them say that we
are without morality. If our people is saved, we shall have
paved the way for morality."65 The doctrine of the blood
introduces the gnostic aspect of Nazism.
Hitler's identification of right with power included the
second mode of exodus from the metaxy, or gnosticism.66
But the liberation of the spirit from the body in modern
gnosticism is not for rare men or for the elite as among an-
cient gnostics. The modern way of liberation is release
from the ego and egotism. The spirit, in other words, is no
private vision, it is a shared thing, for example, blood.
Modern gnosticism is distinguished from its ancient
forms in the same way that modern power politics differs
from Melian exodus of the ancients. For the ancient gnostic who strove to separate the soul from things, the instrument of liberation was the individuaL The soul with its
source in the divine was not thus denied. Liberation of
the souls of modern gnostics is altogether a thing of groups
which replaces the divine as the soul's source. Accordingly
modern gnosticism calls for the losing of the self as spirit.
The soul of modern man is liberated from the prison of
spirit, as well as the prison of the body, in becoming a thing
that does not perish, i.e., in submerging the ego in an immortalizing thing such as blood, sex, or excrement.
Consider Hitler's doctrine in connection with the tradition regarding the self extending from Rousseau. Since
Rousseau's description. of the self as formed by society, in
particular by the division of labor and the advent of property, there has evolved the idea that one's authentic self is
beneath the roles imposed by social life. Liberation is then
a release from property and its social and other derivatives.
Because this conception takes its rise in the doctrine of
the state of nature, or the doctrine that man has no nature
or telos, true personality or selfhood is freedom as such, or
becoming. At the same time, this vision of freedom imposes a conception of the self as selfless. Selflessness or
true selfhood is tantamount to compassion, and this is
how Rousseau defined it. The good self is not selfish in a
literal and a moral sense. The true self is not an I, but we.
This reversal of the classical and Jewish concept of the
self is part of everyday speech in which a self is virtuous if
it is selfless.
The tradition of this mode of thinking is long and considered honorable. It stretches, for example in American
letters, from john Humphrey Noyes who hoped to "extinguish the pronoun I," and replace it with "the we spirit,"
to Norman 0. Brown." Brown suggests that the "boundary
line between self and the external world bears no relation
to reality." Liberation for Brown is release from self by
means of return to the pre-socialized conditions of polymorphous perversity. The Hhuman consciousness can be
liberated from the parental (Oedipal) complex only by be-
40
ing liberated from its cultural derivatives, the paternalistic
state and the patriarchal God."68
This conception of self, including the role of man as
maker of God, is the one we have detected in Nazism. The
liberation from God, thus the liberation of the self, establishes the idea of freedom, of exodus from the metaxy.
The power to free the soul from the body is brought about
by freeing the self from an L The I perishes. What remains
is a thing possessed of the characteristics of God, that is,
of oneness. Those basic and selfless elements which outlast
the individual have become the instruments of immortality. What perishes excessively-excrement, sexuality,
blood-are now the bases for oneness and everlasting life.
Donatien de Sade uncovered these principles two centures before Hitler put them into practice. "What we call
the end of the living," said de Sa de (in praise of the motto
that "the freest of people are they who are most friendly
to murder''), "is no longer a true finis, but a simple trans-
formation ... of matter ... [D]eath is hence no more than
a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one
existence into another."69 Here in palpable form is the
identification of finitude with the infinite exposed by
Fackenheim. But Hitler is not a "parody" of the great philosophers. In assuming a material and communal replacement of the divine as the source of man's freedom,
Hitler's attack upon Judaism substitutes German blood
for the souL Hitler would, in this way, immortalize or
make infinite a finite thing. Hitler insists that judaism is
the negation of German blood-judaism is a race, not a
religion-exactly as Marx insists that judaism is the negation of communism-the god of judaism, he says, is
money. But if we consider, in Hitler's case, the actual doctrine of blood in judaism where it serves as a symbol of
the soul, Hitler's gnostic intention stands out boldly.
The Nazi's blood was his souL As a Jewish symbol that
had become an object of worship, the Nazi doctrine of the
blood is in truth "an absolute falsehood." 70 The blood as a
substitute for the soul of man is false. In judaism the blood
is typically considered to be in the soul only when the
body is alive. "The flesh whose blood is still in its soul,
shall ye not eat. ... Blood ... belongs to your souls." 71
This is plainly because the soul is not a thing. Preservation
of the blood of generations, what Hitler believed to be the
jews' purpose, and what he hoped to make the German
purpose, was to create oneness and immortality, as it
were, the salvation of souls. Jewish pollution of the racial
stock of others, imperiling the survival of non-jewish humanity, robbed souls by interruption of the transmission
of blood. In Nazism the soul is in the blood. The soul is
preserved after the ego dies, and because it is, the race is
preserved.
The doctrine of blood is false because it is wholly a distortion of the order of being. The source of human freedom is not the absence of the divine and its replace. men! by a Nazi or a communist community. It is hardly a
coincidence that both Hitler and Marx considered the
elimination of jews and judaism to be a condition for the
WINTER 1982
�establishment of their projects. 72 In both cases the extinguishment of the divine in the name of a man-made creation of freedom and of human being is critical. As for the
racist aspect of Nazism (and for the scientific and class
aspects of communism), they are perhaps best described
as opiates for the proletariat and the intelligentsia respectively.
The blood is then the soul made matter, an absurd idea.
The characteristic of the soul is immortality. What can it
mean to proclaim that the soul is not spiritual or that
some thing, perishable by definition, is immortal? What
aspect of a person does not perish? The answer, embodied
in the doctrine of the blood is: that aspect of a person
which is neither an ego nor a soul. Of course there is no
such thing. But what did Hitler think this thing was? Of
course he supposed it was freedom. The masses shall enter into the service of freedom once they understand that
the Jew intends the "enslavement, and with it the destruc·
tion, of all non-Jewish peoples."73 Blood is the oneness of
soul of the German people. Oneness will come about by
the destruction of vanity or egotism, the opposite of
oneness.
Egotism must be destroyed. But how is this possible?
By destroying the people of egotism. This is the people
that hides behind a false, unenlightened doctrine of elec·
tion and the divine as One. This people, the representa·
tive of the false God of spirit, and therefore the enemy of
oneness or the German people, is the Jews. "The Jew is
the mortal enemy of our people," said Hitler, because
"the Jew is ... nothing but pure egoism."74 And thus this
destruction of Jews is part of the means for liberation,
namely work. The people become one as they give over
their egos to the community. The doctrine that man is
one is egalitarianism.
"Egalitarianism," said Erich Fromm, uis not sameness
but oneness."75 Hitler's doctrine is egalitarian in the deep-
est and purest modern sense. As such, Nazism is the purest distillation of modernity. When Hitler proclaims that
"the Jew forms the strongest contrast to the Aryan" because only the Aryan is willing to give his "life for the exis·
tence of the community," he intends to be taken at his
word. 76 Giving up one's life for the community calls for
the relinquishment of ego. The means of doing so is of
course not prayer. Everyone knows, Hitler said, "a nation
cannot be freed by prayer." 77 Rather the way to freedom
is work. Work creates oneness in the process of effacing
egos. Work "establish[es] the equality of all in the moment
when every individual endeavors to do the best in his field
.... It is on this that the evaluation of man must rest, and
not on the reward." 78 Work makes free. Hitler promises
freedom from the ego, that is, from death, from anxiety,
by promising immortality in this world. This is the mean·
ing of Hitler's doctrine of the blood. It is the foundation of
the "everlasting [German] people." 79
It is correct to say, with Fackenheim, that Hitler is no
emperor-god; nor are the Yolk a worshipping community.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
It is Germanity in its immortalizing sacrifice of egos that
is God or one. This is the everlasting German people in
whose name Hitler professed to speak. The Jews, who are
said to live on behalf of an everlasting God, the God who
is one because man and all things are many, are the obvi·
ous spiritual power to be destroyed.
Hitler's idolatry is unmistakable. It reflects a disordering
of the relationship of the One and the many. Man is en·
joined, in the name of salvation, to leave his place in the
metaxy that he may assume full freedom. In the language
of political science Hitler's Melian exodus is fascist or
right-wing. Here, only power counts because all values are
equal, making law the rule of the stronger. Man is an animal. To this, Hitler's obvious or familiar side, is added the
other more subtle and as it were saintlier side. This is the
idolatry of gnosticism whereby men singly or together
take God into themselves or into their ideals.
Hitler's case suggests that modern idolatry cannot fail
to be both Melian and gnostic. We do not often, however,
credit Hitler's gnosticism or realize the Melian aspects of
gnostic or liberal idealism when it is expressed in the seductive language of opposition to Melian realism. The position of Judaism is obviously not the only representative
of the principles idolatry must oppose. It has long, however, been symbolic of all the enemies of idolatry. The hatred of Judaism is an aspect of modern if not all Western
idolatry, that is, of the impulse arising from the horror of
existence and the desire to leave the condition of the
metaxy. Consider the case of Jean Sartre, whose philosophy is the most recent great philosophy considered by
Fackenheim.
Sartre is the outstanding figure of left-wing humanistic
atheism. His insensitivity for Judaism, together with his
well-known sympathy for persecuted Jews, troubles Fack·
enheim. It may well be the case, Fackenheim thinks, that
Sartre's position is the product of his view that "an individual's freedom is ... destroyed by a divine Other," i.e.,
by God.BD But Fackenheim does not sufficiently consider
the effect the doctrine of freedom works upon Judaism.
Sartre' s view of freedom is idolatrous. It depends on the
replacement of the One with freedom. But this freedom,
gnostic in form, is not theoretically stagnant. It leads
somewhere. It leads to Melian exodus, that is, it permits
Sartre to say that he does not know if anti-Semitism is
"wrong or right" in socialist countries. 81 But Sartre would
know if racism is wrong or right. Is this another "philosophical failure" as in Heidegger's case?
The process we find in Hitler-from self-conscious Melian exodus to an unintended gnostic exodus imposed upon
him by the core of his project or the replacement of the
divine with the human-we also find in Sartre. In Sartre,
however, the order of exodus is reversed. Sartre's replacement of God with freedom is ultimately an assault upon
theory or reason; it is the idolatry we have discovered in
Hitler which does not distinguish reality from history or
the struggle for power. Accordingly Sartre must ultimately
41
�look to history, as had Hegel and Marx, as the source of
human reason. The individual's freedom then becomes a
matter of struggle against history in the manner of neo·
Kantians or Emersonians who look to the vanishing of
swine and madhouses brought about by an impulse of
spirit or will. But this is the same gnostic denouement into
which a crude reasoner such as Hitler evidently stumbled.
Hitler is not a bastard-child of the Enlightenment, only a
relatively childish enlightener. His erstwhile opponents,
those who have trivialized his deeds, are less childish but
not less idolatrous.
Trivialization of the Holocaust is the failure to consider
Nazism idolatrous. This failure is due to the implication
of the trivialization of the Holocaust in the sources of idolatry. Trivialization of the Holocaust accords what Fackenheim suggests is a posthumous victory to Nazism. 82
The Holocaust, according to two Jewish students of the
subject, is an example, unique in its excess, of how men
mistakenly put obedience above other, better traits. Seeking a model or prototype of this human failing in Western
civilization the authors hit upon the Akedah, the binding
of Isaac by Abraham, his father. Their reasoning is as
follows:
[In] the Judea-Christian tradition ... wrongdoing is utterly
clear . .. [It] is unauthorized pleasure. It is also very clear that
hardly anywhere in this tradition is there any story or statement to the effect that 'Thou shalt not obey legal orders from
superiors if they seem [sic?] atrocious to you.' Abraham, who
was prepared to obey the directive to murder his son Isaac as
a demonstration of his faith in the superior being Jaweh, is
not condemned for his blind obedience, but rather held up as
exemplary. 83
It is Abraham, the first Jew and the man who defied all
other men on earth in proclaiming God as the measure of
all things, who is here said to be the cause of the Holocaust. In other words, the cause of the Holocaust is
Judaism. Here, to be sure, is a literal trivialization of the
Holocaust. Obedience to Hitler by German Nazis is
counted the equivalent of obedience to God by Abraham
(and Isaac). It is clear the authors, Kren and Rappoport,
consider obedience to God or to Hitler the same because
honest rationality calls upon social scientists to regard all
objects of valuation as equal. The authors, as we say, do
not believe in God. But we have already suggested the
source of this atheism is not a theological investigation. It
is an opinion regarding theory, or rather the supposed
necessary limit upon theory imposed by the effort to insure man's freedom.
Harry Neumann has called social science of this type
modern Epicureanism because it seeks tranquility of mind
on the principle that Hfreedom from pain is man's summum bonum." If all ends are equal, if "no favoritism would
be shown to any particular claim," any suggestion of superiority or of divine election constitutes an impertinence, a
threat to science and peace. The equation of obedience to
God and to Hitler presupposes the equality of ends. But is
42
not knowledge of the "superhuman vantage point" reserved to God? This is the vantage point assumed by modern Epicureans who insist that "philosophy's quest to the
answer of the question of the good life is over." The good
life is freedom from pain and the good is pleasure. For this
reason modern Epicureans consider religion evil and
threatening. Religion cannot promise freedom from pain
as the equivalent of the good. Religion does not claim that
all ends are equal. In this religion and philosophy are together the enemies of "modern Epicureanism's final solution. " 84
In saying that Abraham was a model of "blind obedience" that should be despised, Kren and Rappoport wish
plainly to indict Judea-Christian civilization as the source
of the Holocaust. Above all, Judaism is the source of the
Holocaust.
The case of Abraham, the first Jew and the father of
Judaism, is undoubtedly pertinent to the subjects of obedience and idolatry. Abraham was the son of Terach, an
idol maker. Obedient to God, he cast his father's idols into
the fire. But Abraham was not a rebellious or whimsical
son. Hitler and Rimmler were obedient only to whim, to
themselves, and they cast people into furnaces. In other
words, the Nazis proceeded on the principle that Kren
and Rappoport believe to be the great truth after the
Holocaust, that "there is no morality per se, because there
is no immutable religious or legal standard for human behavior."85 Precisely the Nazis confounded pleasure, authorized or not, with the good. Abraham understood the
good to be distinct from pleasure, from his whim, because
he did not suppose he possessed divine knowledge to
regard all claims as equal. In recognizing reason he recognized its source. For this reason he rejected his father's
unreason or idolatry.
Abraham's obedience to God was disobedience to the
atrocious rule of men. More important, Abraham defied
Nimrod, the first "mighty man upon the earth ... a crafty
hero before God."86 The significance of Abraham's defiance of Nimrod could not be greater for an understanding
of idolatry. Nimrod is the founder of political idolatry, the
first to suppress men lefneh hashem, in God's name. Nimrod claimed the superhuman vantage point as his own.
Terach brought the idol-hating Abraham to Nimrod, but
Abraham did not recant. Nimrod, indulging an impulse
evidently natural to political idolators-it was of course to
become Hitler's trademark-cast Abraham into the fiery
furnace. But Abraham survived. Abraham is the founding
symbol, also in fire, that God and not man is the measure
of all things. Like the burning bush, Abraham becomes a
sign of the One that does not perish. But Abraham's
brother, Haran, supposing Abraham's survival demonstrated Abraham was now the new king, followed him into
the fire and, of course, he died.
Naturally, Judaism survived the burning of Jews by Hitler. Hitler, like Nimrod, was mistaken in thinking the soul
is a thing. Hitler was also mistaken in thinking man is a
god who can defy the order of being and assume the suWINTER 1982
�perhuman vantage point. As for the, trivialization of the
Holocaust, its source is the incapacity to distinguish the
blind obedience of Haran from Abraham's obedience.
Haran, unlike Abraham, obeyed any authority indiscrim·
inately, because he held that there is no morality per se.
l. Adolf Hi tie<, Mein Kampf, New York, Houghton Mifflin [1925, 1927],
1939, 221.
2. Emil Fackenheim, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought, New York 1973.
3. See, for example, Edward Alexander, "Stealing the Holocaust," Midstream, November, 1980, 46-50.
4. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Yehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the
Modern World: A Documentary History, New York 1980, vii.
5. Dorothy Thompson, "A Review of Mein Kampf' in Hitler, Mein
Kampf, ii.
6. Allan Bloom, "The Study of Texts," in Melvin Richter, ed., Political
Theory and Political Education, Princeton 1980, 122.
7. Werner Maser, Hitler's Mein Kampf: an Analysis, London 1970, 11.
8. Mein Kampf, 223.
9. Mein Kampf, 221.
10. Mein Kampf, 155.
11. Mein Kampf, 221.
12. Mein Kampf, 155-56.
13. Fackenheim, Encounters, 189.
14. Fackenheim, Encounters, 175.
15. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
16. Fackenheim, Encounters, 173.
17. Quoted in Fackenheim, Encounters, 178.
18. Fackenheim, Encounters, 179.
19. Fackenheim, Encounters, 217.
20. Fackenheim, Encounters, 187.
21. Fackenheim, Encounters, 187.
22. Fackenheim, Encounters, 194.
23. Fackenheim, Encounters, 196.
24. Fackenheirn, Encounters, 196.
25. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
26. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190-91.
27. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
28. Fackenheim, Encounters, 192.
29. Fackenheim, Encounters, 197, 187.
30. Fackenheim, Encounters, 191, 194.
31. Fackenheim, Encounters, 217, 223.
32. Karl LOwith, Nature, History, and Existentialism, Evanston, Illinois
1966, 10.
33. Fackenheim, Encounters, 191.
34. G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, New York 1969, 50.
35. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
36. Leo Strauss, "What is Political Philosophy?" in What is Political
Philosophy and Other Studies, Glencoe, Illinois 1959,9-55.
37. Strauss, Political Philosophy, 54.
38. Aristotle, Metd.physics l072a30.
39. Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, Baton Rouge 1974, 188-190.
40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Walter Kaufman,
ed., The Portable Nietzsche New York 1960, 243.
41. Kaufman, Nietzsche, 225.
42. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago 1953, 35-80.
43. Strauss, Natural Right, 44.
44. Strauss, Natural Right, 44.
45. Strauss, Natural Right, 46.
46. Strauss, Natural Right, 46.
47. I. Husik, "Hellenism and Judaism," Philosophical Essays, Oxford
1952, 13.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
48. Harry Neumann, "Torah or Philosophy? Jewish Alternatives to
Modern Epicureanism," The Journal of Value Inquiry, 1977, 23.
49. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182, 181.
50. Eugene Miller, ''Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry," The
American Political Science Review, 66 1972, 796-817.
51. Bloom, "The Study of Texts," 122.
52. Exodus, 32:4.
53. Daniel, 4:25.
54. Fackenheim, Encounters, 196.
55. Neumann, "Torah or Philosophy?" 23.
56. Quoted in Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182. "Of the gods we be·
lieve, and of men we know, that by a necessity of nature they rule wher·
ever they can. We neither made this law nor were the first to act on it;
we found it to exist before us _and we shall leave it to exist forever after
us; we only make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, if you
were as strong as we are, would act as we do."
57. Alan Bullock, "The Political Ideas of Adolf Hitler," in Howard Fertig
ed., The Third Reich, New York 1975, 352.
58. Adolf Hitler, Speech, 13 April 1923; Adolf Hitler, Speech, 2 April
1928, quoted in Bullock, "The Political Ideas of Adolf Hitler," 352.
59. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182.
60. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182.
61. Mein Kampf, 221.
62. Mein Kampf, 442, 217.
63. Mein Kampf, 288-89.
64. Mein Kampf, 841, 195.
65. Adolf Hitler, Speech 1932, cited in Mein Kampf, 402n6.
66. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, Chicago 1952, 107ff.
67. John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms, Philadelphia
1870. Reprint edition titled, Strange Cults and Utopias of Nineteenth
Century America, New York 1966, vii, 626.
68. Norman 0. Brown, Life Against Death, New York 1961, 155.
69. Donatien A. F. de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, Paris 1795, in
Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, eds., The Marquis de Sade, the
Complete Justine Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, New
York 1965, 330-1, 333.
70. Fackenheim, Encounters, 188.
71. Genesis, 9:4, 5.
72. "[T]he emancipation of society from Judaism" is equivalent to the
emancipation of man from exchange, "the bill of exchange [being] ...
the real god of the Jew." Because "Judaism attains its apogee [and its
"universal dominance"] with the perfection of civil society," the destruction of Judaism is equivalent to and necessary for the realm of free·
dam or the abolition of civil society. Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Ques·
tion" in T. B. Bottomore, ed., Karl Marx Early Writings, New York 1964,
40, 37, 38. Note the remarks of Erich Fromm on this topic in the forward
to this volume, iv-v.
73. Mein Kampf, 442.
74. Mein Kampf, 416, 487.
75. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, New York 1956, 15.
76. Mein Kampf, 410,412.
77. Mein Kampf, 988.
78. Mein Kampf, 647.
79. AdOlf Hitler, Speech 26 March 1936 in N. H. Baynes, ed., The
Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April, 1922-August, 1939, 2 vo1s. New York
1969, II, 1317.
80. Fackenhdm, Encounters, 209.
81. Fackenheim, Encounters, 211.
82. Fackenheim, Encounters, 207.
83. George M. K:ren and Leon Rappoport, The Holocaust and the Crisis
of Human Behavior, New York 1980, 141.
84. Neumann, "Toiah or Philosophy?" 17, 20.
85. Kren and Rappoport, The Holocaust, 142.
86. Genesis, 10:8-9.
43
�·Proof and Pascal
Brother Robert Smith
To F. H. and to my friends just off Bambury Road
In his lecture, "Power and Grace," Douglas Allanbrook
said of Pascal:
One final question: what does Pascal's attitude toward
proof have to do with him personally, with Pascal as a
man?
For both Thrasymachus and Pascal, however, the voices of
power and persuasion are the only thinkable ways of talking
about politics. Reasoning about politics with any purity of discourse is foolishness. In reading over this pensee [103], most of
you have probably been struck by the lack of anything that
could be called . .. dialectic . .. the complete absence of premises . .. Pascal seldom argues: he states persuasively what is to
him the case. 1
Allanbrook may have been flattering us. When we hear
Pascal speak we may often be so dazzled by his epigrams,
his examples, and his similes that we do not think to ask
whether he is talking reasonably. It might not occur to us
that one example does not necessarily prove a general
statement or that his lack of dialectic is consciously antiphilosophical.
.
.
In his lecture, Allanbrook made good hts charges agamst
Pascal: that Pascal says we have no power to discover justice that according to Pascal we cannot know the differenc~ between a just and an unjust action, and that justice
has no power in this world.
These are shocking charges. They ought to make us ask
questions about Pascal himself. Did he reject argument
on all matters? Not only about politics, but about all that
is important in our lives? Why? What substitute for reasoning, for dialectical inquiry and proof dtd he propose?
How does Pascal proceed in a typical section of the Pensees? Does he argue? What is his attitude toward dialectics, toward philosophical inquiry in the tradition of Plato
and Aristotle, or theology, as practiced by St. Augustine
and St. Thomas? Does Pascal argue about philosophy and
theology or does he "state persuasively what is to him the
case" and. no more?
A second consideration. Aside from his practice in the
Pensees, what does Pascal think of proof itself? Does he
think it impossible? If it is possible, when is it so?
A tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, Brother Robert Smith professed membership in the Order of Christian Brothers in 1939.
A lecture read at Annapolis on October 30, 1981.
44
1 Happiness
How can Pascal set out to defend the Christian religion
without resort to argument? He says he intends to show
that religion is not contrary to reason, to make it attractive, to make good men wish it were true, and, fmally, to
show that it is true. Wh at d o " sh ow, " " rnake, " an d "' "
ts
mean to him?
First a few remarks on the order, or lack of it, in Pascal's
text. Until forty years ago, when the work of a man named
Lafuma appeared, editors had arranged Pascal's thoughts
at their discretion. Lafuma showed that Pascal had tentatively chosen some thoughts for a work, an Apology for the
Christian Religion, for which the Pensees are only the
working notes. Pascal decided on twenty-seven numbered
headings like Order, Beginning, Conclusion. Not quite
chapters, they appear to be divisions of a whole work.
With his thoughts written out helter-skelter on large foho
sheets, he selected those that related to his division headings, strung them together with needle and thread, and
placed them in packets, each packet with a headmg. Lafuma was the first to realize the significance of these arrangements, especially the titles and needlework. Oth~r
arguments have since been advanced to conflfm Lafum~ s
view that Pascal selected about one th!rd of the matenal
included in what we know as the Pensees for his projected
work.
I have chosen to examine Section Ten of those thoughts
selected from the Pensees. It is called The Soverign Good. I
have picked it because it provides a good ~xample of Pascal's last, provisional arrangement, and gives a clear picture of his procedure:
The sovereign good. Debate about the sovereign good.
That you may be content with yourself and the good things innate in you.
There is some contradiction, because they [the Stoics) finally
advise suicide. Oh, how happy is a life we throw off like the
plague! (147)
WINTIR 1982
�Second part. Man without faith can know neither true good
nor justice.
'
All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However
different the means they may employ, they all strive towards
this goal. The reason why some go to war and some do not is
the same desire in both, but interpreted in two different ways.
The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is
the motive of every act of every man, including those who go
and hang themselves.
Yet for very many years no one without faith has ever reached
the goal at which everyone is continually aiming. All men
complain: princes, subjects, nobles, commoners, old, young,
strong, weak, learned, ignorant, healthy, sick, in every country, at every time, of all ages, and all conditions.
A test which has gone on so long, without pause or change,
really ought to convince us that we are incapable of attaining
the good by our own efforts. But example teaches us very little. No two examples are so exactly alike that there is not
some subtle difference, and that is what makes us expect that
our expectations will not be disappointed this time as they
were last time. So, while the present never satisfies us, experience deceives us, and leads us on from one misfortune to another until death comes as the ultimate and eternal climax.
dence Pascal would have preferred this order. Number 148
should perhaps precede 147 because 148 begins with a
general statement of Pascal's point in this section: "Man
without faith can know neither true good nor justice."
This expression, "without faith," reminds us of the place
of Section Ten in the Apology. In saying, "Man without
faith," so absolutely, so uncompromisingly, without any
nuance or admission, Pascal runs head-long against a philosophical and theological tradition that he knows and refuses to follow. He does not turn to Aristotle, who was
known to the men around him, or to St. Thomas, whom
he had read selectively, or even to St. Augustine, who says
that the philosophical writings of the ancients, especially
those of Cicero, helped him on the way to his conversion
in the garden. (St. Augustine, for example, thanks Cicero's
lost work, Hortensius, for his turn to the search for wisdom
instead of the pursuit of political and financial success.)
Unlike Aristotle, who had a great deal to say about happi·
ness in the Ethics, and even defined it, Pascal does not
refer to human experience for his understanding of happiness. Instead, he says, "Man without faith can know
neither true good nor justice."
Pascal expects his reader first to despair of finding guidance by his reason. He hopes then he will be receptive to
the religious alternative.
The first sentence in the development of Section Ten
What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim
but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all
that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries
in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things
that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are,
though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled
only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words,
by God himself.
reads:
God alone is man's true good, and since man abandoned him
it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to
take his place: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages,
leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war,
famine, vice, adultery, incest. Since losing his true good, man
is capable of seeing it in anything, even his own destruction,
although it is so contrary at once to God, to reason, and to
nature.
How do we react when we hear this sentence? Pascal
expects us to agree. Very likely he is not mistaken, for the
contrary is too unlikely.
Pascal, however, does not even offer the weak argument that the contrary is too unlikely. He expects us to
agree without question, and he is willing to proceed with
that unexamined assent.
Some seek their good in authority, some in intellectual inquiry and knowledge, some in pleasure.
has not been discussed. We think we know well enough
Others again, who have indeed come closer to it, have found
it impossible that this universal good, desired by all men,
should lie in any of the particular objects which can only be
possessed by one individual and which, once shared, cause
their possessors more grief over the part they lack than satisfaction over the part they enjoy as their own. They have realized that the true good must be such that it may be possessed
by all men at once without diminution or envy, and that no
one should be able to lose it against his will. Their reason is
that this desire is natural to man, since all men inevitably feel
it, and man cannot be without it, and they therefore conclude ... (148f
A word on the numbering of the thoughts within the
sections. In Section Ten, Lafuma, relying only on his
judgement, put pensee 147 before 148. There is no eviTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
All men seek happiness.
We are not aware that the crucial term, "happiness,"
what the sentence, "All men seek happiness," means, and
that is all Pascal needs. In contrast, Aristotle, who began
his discussion of happiness in the Ethics with just such an
unexamined use of the word, devotes the whole of Ethics
I and most of X to clarifying what the word means.
Section Ten continues:
All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However
different the means they may employ, they all strive towards
this goal. The reason some go to war and some do not is the
same desire in both, but interpreted in two different ways.
The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is
the motive of every act of every man, including those who go
and hang themselves.
Something extraordinary is happening in these sentences. Pascal has got us to agree that "happiness" applies
indiscriminately to anything that man seeks. We have
45
�agreed that, to use his example, there is no difference between leading a charge and leading a peace march.
Had we realized how Pascal was using the term, most of
us would have questioned whether happiness in that
vague sense is the goal of all man's efforts. Most of us
think "happiness" is a term with many complex meanings. We think that what we are doing now is better or
worse, more or less conducive to happiness, than what we
were doing, say, two years ago. We think there are kinds
and degrees of happiness.
Pascal has made us accept uncritically an apparently obvious statement containing a term whose meaning seems
equally obvious. With the acceptance of that statement,
we have been led to agree that all the things we strive for
are the same. Am I characterizing Pascal fairly?
Already wary of the consequences of our uncritical acceptance of the obvious, we will be even more suspicious
of what follows:
Yet, for very many years no one without faith has ever reached
the goal at which everyone is continually aiming.
Once more, we have a general statement. This statement is not, however, offered without discussion. We are
asked to accept it because there are indications in our experience that it is true:
All men complain: princes, subjects, nobles, commoners, old,
young, strong, weak, learned, ignorant, healthy, sick, in every
country, at every time, of all ages, and all conditions.
The opening sentence seems plausible because we know
that we all complain, and so we cannot imagine anyone
else not complaining. In that case, he would be, well, odd.
No, everyone complains. A parade of characters passes
through our imagination-all complaining as we imagine
them. So we agree.
Without protest, we are accepting a new definition of
happiness. Happiness now means "something that satisfies
us completely." Only when happiness means complete
satisfaction does our complaining show that no one has
reached happiness without faith. Because all men, including ourselves, complain, they cannot be. completely satisfied, i.e. happy. Everything comes out so clearly and with
such assurance that we agree. No one, including ourselves,
is happy. But, you will agree, Pascal's procedure does not
amount to an argument.
Tacitly and guardedly, Pascal admits that his conclusion
is open to question:
A test which has gone on so long, without pause or change,
really ought to convince us that we are incapable of attaining
the good by our own efforts.
By saying, "really ought to convince us," Pascal protests
too much. He raises the possibility that we have not been
convinced that we are incapable of attaining the good by
our own efforts. Why do we all keep scurrying about so
46
much when we really ought to know that all our efforts
are doomed to failure?
But example teaches us very little. No two examples are so exactly alike that there is not some subtle difference, and that is
what makes us expect that our expectations will not be disappointed this time as they were last time.
Pascal says we keep scurrying about because we think
that the future will be different. We think that we will be
happy next time because then, everything will turn our
way, to our complete satisfaction. We think this because
we want to, not because we are convinced by proof.
Pascal's argument that mere reason leads to despair
would be conclusive if our failure to be completely satisfied was the same thing as complete misery. Then we
would not get out of bed in the morning. In fact, though,
we do get some satisfaction out of writing our essays, such
as they are, and hope to write better ones. There is more
than a "subtle difference" between failing to be completely satisfied and suffering complete misery. We are
not fools to keep on hoping to improve our situation. A
more modest definition of happiness might make us accept some complaint. Even the chance to complain may
occasion a certain happiness.
I know this may sound unfair to Pascal. I am not without question granting him his definition, and so I lead you
to doubt his word. Pascal would not be at all surprised by
what we have done, nor would he think us guilty of bad
manners. I am pointing out that Pascal has, without saying so, substituted a definition of happiness derived from
faith for one derived from ordinary experience. A definition from faith, which restricts happiness to the complete
and unqualified happiness that comes from seeing God
face to face, supports his argument and will find acceptance among his readers if they are believing, though nonpracticing, Christians. The Apology was, in fact, addressed
to such Christians.
So, while the present never satisfies us, experience deceives
us, and leads us on from one misfortune to another until death
comes as the ultimate and eternal climax.
A man without a conventional religious upbringing
would be unprepared for Pascal's assertions that "the
present never satisifies us" and "experience deceives us"
or Hleads us on from one misfortune to another." He would
be even more unprepared for the assertion that death is
the "ultimate and eternal climax." This is the language of
sermons heard in childhood. It is useful for evoking sentiments felt then. Someone who has these sentiments to recall will follow the whole resounding periodic sentence in
the way Pascal intends. Someone who has not been exposed to religious oratory is not so likely to follow it
unhesitatingly.
I am saying that this enthusiastic tone will seem sincere
and justified to a reader who can bring to the text religious
WINTER 1982
�associations from childhood. Those qf us who have a deep
religious background, strengthened by childhood memories, will be carried along by Pascal's prose to his conclu-
do the things we did when we believed, the responses will
follow, revived by the automatism of habit:
sion: the present never satisfies us, experience deceives us
For we must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as
much automaton as mind . .. habit provides the strongest
proofs and those that are most believed. It inclines the autom-
with its endless variety and promise of something better,
we are led from failure to failure until lastly, our life ends
in a crash-the last resounding crash-death.
The text we have been studying is a powerful piece of
rhetoric, worthy of a sermon in the grand tradition, be·
cause, like all successful oratory, it ties the speaker's mes·
sage to sympathies dormant in the hearer's memory. Like
a speech in a dramatic production that makes a character
come to life, Pascar s prose succeeds in evoking our own
experience. Racine realized this when, smarting under
Pascal's boutade that a good playwright was as bad as a
public poisoner, he told the authorities at Port-Royal that
their darling Pascal was himself a dramatist in the Provin·
cia! Letters.
Pascal, in fact, has been practicing oratorical art. He be·
gan with something that any reader could accept without
reflection. He went on to talk about our futile search for
happiness. Those readers whose experience confirms
what they read, believe him because they find the truth of
his words in themselves, just as Pascal claimed to find the
truth of Montaigne' s words in his own, not Montaigne' s,
experience.
Pascal's discourse is, then, limited to those who have
had a conventional religious upbringing in childhood. His
discourse is like a discussion among a closed circle of
friends who agree on what is desirable but differ as to how
to achieve it.
To get his hearers to turn towards God, Pascal relies on
reviving deeply ingrained beliefs dormant in their memo·
ries. When he began the Pensees, he must have thought of
making the Apology a series of letters like the Provincial
Letters:
A letter of exhortation to a friend, to induce him to seek. He
will reply: 'But what good will it do me? Nothing comes of it.'
... The answer to that is 'the Machine.' (5)
After the letter urging men to seek God, write the letter about
removing obstacles, that is the argument about the Machine
... (11)
What does he mean by the "Machine?" It is the response
that arises in us when we see something that once moved
us deeply, in a new context:
The fact that kings are habitually seen in the company of
guards, drums, officers, and all the things which prompt automatic responses of respect and fear has the result that, when
they are sometimes alone . .. their features are enough to strike
respect and fear into their subjects ... (25)
The "Machine" also helps to recall dormant religious
sentiments. We who once actively believed can again experience the responses we made when we believed. If we
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
aton which leads the mind unconsciously along with it. (821)
In addressing this audience of those who once strongly
believed, Pascal defines happiness as the result of a direct
vision of a personal God, whom we know even as we are
known:
What else does this craving for happiness . .. proclaim but
that there was once in man a true happiness . .. an infinite
abyss which can be filled only ... by God himself. (148)
Does Pascal believe this reliance on faith is our only
hope for knowing anything about happiness? Cannot we,
with our reason, our good sense, explore experience and
discover something worthwhile? Does Pascal go so far as
to reject the possibility that man can acquire for himself a
high .and noble happiness? He does.
Debate about the sovereign good.
That you may be content with yourself and the good things innate in you. (147)3
The quotation is from Seneca and it is given so that
Pascal can immediately reject it:
There is some contradiction, because they [the Stoics] finally
advise suicide. Oh, how happy is a life we throw off like the
plague!
With this sarcastic comment, Pascal dismisses Seneca
and all others who find in man's nature a genuine good
capable of being the basis for a moral life. Man, in his fallen nature, cannot find any of the good things that Seneca
attributes to him.
God alone is man's true good, and since man abandoned him
it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to
take his place: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages,
leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war,
famine, vice, adultery, incest. Since losing his true good, man
is capable of seeing it in anything . ..
Pascal does not think that we can ever come to know
what is best by reasoning about our own nature or the
things around us. We have not succeeded in rising to that
knowledge and we never will.
2 Proof
From Section Ten, a single, though typical, section of
the Pensees, we have gotten some idea of the Pascal's conception of the limitations of philosophical inquiry. We will
be more confident we know his mind if we look at another
47
�work where he discusses proof and qur ability to produce
it. In a short essay called, On the Geometrical Art, he says:
To show how to make unbeatable proofs . .. all we have to do
is to explain the method that geometry uses, for geometry
teaches it perfectly by example.4
[Attempts to clarify these truths] confuse everything, and de-
A few lines further he says:
What goes beyond geometry, is beyond
ness because such knowledge cannot come to the level of
speech. Geometry falls short of the highest method of
proof.
.
We should not try to clarify these first truths, known
from the heart. Attempts to clarify these truths bring obscurity and disagreement. We are better off without them:
us.5
stroying all order and light, destroy themselves and get lost in
inextricable difficulty.8
We know the truth not only through our reason but also
[Geometry] does not define any of these things: space, time,
movement, number, equality, nor large numbers of similar
thirigs, because these terms naturally designate the things
which they signify for anyone who knows the language . .. and
any clarification which one might wish to bring to them will
bring more obscurity than instruction.9
through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first
principles ... like space, time, motion, number .. it is on such
knowledge, coming from the heart and instinct, that reason
The passage immediately following shows the limits of
philosophical discourse, in Pascal's conception:
Reason cannot go beyond geometry, the model of perfect reasoning. How does geometry serve as a model for
reasoning? In the Pensees we read:
has to depend and base all its argument The heart feels that
there are three spatial dimensions and that there is an infinite
series of numbers, and reason goes on to demonstrate that
there are no two square numbers of which one is double the
other. Principles are felt, propositions proved, and both with
For there is nothing weaker than the discourse of those who
wish to define these primitive words. What necessity is there
for explaining the word "man?" What advantage did Plato
think he was offering us in saying that man is a featherless
certainty though by different means. (110)
biped? As if the idea which I have naturally and which I can-
Pascal speaks of knowledge we have through the heart
as sentiment (751), from sentir, "to feel," "to sense." The
connection is more than verbal. Through the heart we
have knowledge that is certain and cannot be doubted
but, like our knowledge of "green" or "soft," cannot be
expressed.
Geometrical reasoning is perfect because it begins in
the knowledge of the heart:
Geometry only sustains things that are clear and unchanging
through natural reason. That is why geometry is perfectly
true, since nature supports it where reasoning fails. This
order, the most perfect on the human level, consists not in defining everything or demonstrating nothing, but in remaining
on the middle ground of not defining things that are clear and
understood by all men, and of not defining all others, of not
proving what is known by all men, of demonstrating all
others.
Like Pascal's favorite theologian, St. Augustine, we
know what time is as long as we do not try to say what it is.
We know what time is because our heart tells us what it is.
When we try to clarify what is already clear in its own way,
we only add confusion. Nothing that we know is clearer to
us than time or number. Time and number are examples
of first known truths, which cannot be clarified:
Geometry, when it has arrived at the first known truths, stops
there and asks that they be granted, since it has nothing more
clear from which to prove them.?
The first known truths are geometry's strength and its
weakness. They are its strength because they give geometry a universally agreed starting point. They are its weak-
48
not express were not more exact and more sure than the one
he has given me in his useless and even ridiculous example,
since a man does not lose his humanity by losing his two legs
and a capon does not gain humanity by having its feathers
removed. 10
In a moment of euphoria, Pascal said that to be a
geometer is the most beautiful profession in the world.
Geometry, however, cannot define its starting points. Pascal exalts geometry at the same time that he casts doubt
on other inquiries that attempt to define their starting
points. Geometry is the best thing man can do on his own.
In contrast, Plato believed that philosophy should begin
with the study of "primitive words" such as space, time,
and equality. He urged apprentice philosophers to start by
inquiring into the greatness, the smallness, and the equality of their fingers.
Just as when he held that the true good could only be
found in faith, Pascal by refusing to inquire into the nature of space, time, and equality rejects much of the work
of philosophers before and after him.
But there is a more serious obstacle to achieving a full
grasp of the world through geometry. In its three branches
~movement, number, and space-geometry lies between
the infinitely great and the infinitely small:
Consequently . .. [the three branches] are all contained between nothingness and the infinitely great . .. and they are infinitely removed from either of these extremes. 11
Man is not to conceive of these two infinities but to admire them. Their contemplation will keep man from making any rash statements about the whole of the universe
or the combination of its parts. The world is a sphere
whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is
WINTER 1982
�nowhere. Our discourse can start with the inexpressible
data of the heart, but these do not correspond to any starting point in the universe. Worrying ab,aut whether Copernicus is right makes no sense. We will never have a sense
of the whole, we can have no hope of reaching an end, a
limit. We must remain in an unpretentious middleness. At
no stage of our intellectual journey are we any further
along than when we started.
Descartes is right in thinking that things are put together out of matter and motion, but when he hopes to
construct in thought a world so like the one God made
that one cannot tell the difference between the two, the
two infinites will mock him.
Descartes useless and uncertain. (887)
Because they failed to contemplate these two infinities, men
have rashly undertaken to probe into nature as if there were
some proportion between themselves and her. (199)
We have no starting point, no fulcrum for the lever that
is supposed to move the world: the infinities " ... meet in
God and in God alone."
Geometry, the best of the sciences, cannot help us say
where we are. Even if it could:
... we do not think the whole of . .. [geometry} is worth one
hour of trouble. (84)
Remember, though, that geometry, despite these limitations, " ... alone observes the true method, while all
other discourses are by natural necessity in some sort of
confusion. 12
3 Morality and Politics
What does Pascal think about other forms of discourse,
discourse which, because it is beyond geometry, is also beyond us?
Pascal thinks there are only two domains in which men
aspire to excellence: science, on the one hand, and moral~
ity and politics on the other. He thinks we cannot succeed
in either domain because each demands that we obtain
the unattainable, namely, a comprehensive grasp of the
world.
We have, in a preliminary way, seen how little Pascal
thinks of our ability to see what is good. Because of this inability, we cannot establish moral order in our lives. Without faith, we have no reason to say that incest is inferior to
anything else that attracts men. Without grace, selfishness
is our ultimate guide.
In Allanbrook's lecture, we meditated on our inability
to discover what justice is and our consequent inability to
establish any political order. We are living in an insane
asylum, Pascal says. How could Plato or Aristotle, in the
Laws or the Politics, pretend to show us just ways of living
in society? They had no such intention. They were not serious when they wrote those books. They knew enough of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the world to see that laughing with friends is our only serious occupation:
... When [Plato and Aristotle] amused themselves by composing their Laws and Politics, they did it for fun. It was the
least philosophical and least serious part of their lives: the
most philosophical part was living simply and without fuss.
If they wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a
madhouse. (533)
Since we live in an insane asylum, it might be useful to
ask our fellow inmates to treat one another less cruelly:
One cannot ask the insane to discover justice.
If we leave the matter there, you may wish to dismiss
Pascal as a misanthrope. It is fairer to try once more to see
things as he sees them before we bid him farewell. Let us
look at a passage where he describes the real difficulties of
any talk about human authority. A present-day writer on
Pascal says that the following passage is a paradigm of the
insuperable difficulties that Pascal thought stand in the
way of not only political, but of all discourseY
... Ordinary people honor those who are highly born, the
half-clever ones despise them, saying that birth is a matter of
chance, not personal merit. Really clever men honor them,
not for the same reason as ordinary people, but for deeper
motives. Pious folk with more zeal than knowledge despise
them regardless of the reason which makes clever men honor
them, because they judge men in the new light of piety, but
perfect Christians honor them because they are guided by a
still higher light.
So opinions swing back and forth, from pro to con, according
to one's lights. (90)
Pascal's statement here is anti-Cartesian. Descartes
held that if we could not persuade others of our meaning,
we did not know what we were talking about. Pascal says
we cannot persuade others unless they share our starting
point in discourse. Not normally transmitted by one
speaker to another, the starting point is given from nature, as in geometry, or by custom, or by private experi~
ence, or by faith.
Anybody who does not see the wider bearing of the passage we are about to study, might dismiss it as a piece of
baroque rhetoric, an example of Jansenist obsession with
the Fall of Man. But Pascal means what he says, in this instance, to apply to all human discourse.
For Pascal, the pattern of all knowledge about matters
moral or religious is illumination from above, and no dis~
course can be successful without it. With illumination
from above, lesser truths are made valid. Without it, they
are misleading.
Pascal has listed five successive opinions:
l. Ordinary people honor those who are highly born.
In an earlier pensee, he tells us the dark grounds for this
honor:
49
�I am supposed not to honor a man dressed in brocade and at-
tended by seven or eight lackeys. Why! He will have me
thrashed if I do not bow to him. (89)
Our ordinary man thinks as he does because he fears
the strong arms and stout sticks of the lackeys who follow
their expensively dressed master. Don Giovanni frightens
Leporello into submission by reminding him that stout
thugs ready to use their whips will punish his failure to
obey.
2.... the half-clever ones despise them [the highly born], say·
ing that birth is a matter of chance, not personal merit.
Pascal himself takes this view when he asks whether
sailors would allow someone to direct a ship at sea merely
because he was the first-born son of some nobleman.
Birth is not enough to determine the command of a ship.
Why should it be accepted for the rule of a country?
3. Really clever people honor them, not for the same reason
as ordinary people, but for deeper motives.
Pascal tells us their motives. Reason cannot discover
any universally accepted sign of legitimacy apart from custom or bring forth any laws that all men will think are just.
As soon as people begin to dispute about who should rule
them or whether the commands of the rulers are just,
there will be the greatest political evil-civil war. A really
clever man will know that we can never be sure about
right or wrong and that convention only determines who
rules us, president, king, parliament. The clever man will
say we should leave well enough alone because things will
only get worse through civil war. Protest against injustice
arouses passion-and passion may lead to rioting in the
streets, repression, or anarchy.
4. Pious folk with more zeal than knowledge despise them
[the highly born] regardless of the reason which makes clever
men honor them, because they judge men in the new light of
piety.
Here Pascal seems to be thinking of people who, in the
enthusiasm of new converts to religion, think that one
need not care about political matters or even fear civil disorder. They may be well-advised to place their hopes in
heaven, but they are short-sighted in not realizing what a
great evil civil war is in this life, a life that they and others
must share.
We should pause here to note how "opinions swing
Dack and forth, from pro to con" among the four groups.
Two groups say we should honor those highly born, two
say we should not. The two groups who say we should
honor them do not say we should do so for the same reasons. Neither do the two groups who say we should
despite the high-born.
Most important in all this is the extreme, perhaps insurmountable difficulty that those who hold one set of opin-
50
ions have in persuading those who hold other opinions. In
abject fear of the whip, an ordinary man like Leporello
does not need to be convinced to obey because of the
evils of civil war. He probably will never be detached
enough to think about the matter. Leporello does think
for a moment how unjust it is that he should remain outside as a sentinel while his master disports indoors, but
the mention of the whip makes him forget that thought.
Those who fear civil war will probably riot want -fo give
their reasons for enduring present evils to men like Leporello. They will also find it discouraging to argue with halfclever men who hope in the future and do not fear civil
war because they have not experienced it.
The new converts, who believe they have nothing to
learn from others, are similarly isolated and unlikely to be
able to talk to any of the others.
What of the fifth opinion?
5.... but perfect Christians honor them [the high-born] because they [the perfect Christians] are guided by a still higher
light.
Perfect Christians share Pascal's belief that we should
submit to those who hold power over us because we are
thereby submitting to God. God has ordained that the unjust power of rulers should weigh upon us in punishment
for original sin.
The first four explanations are all consistent with the
last one. If it is true, they all can be partially true as well,
even if they do contradict one another. Rulers do have the
power to frighten and punish us. We are in this slavish
state because an angry God has left us prey to the passions of the strong because we rebelled against him. Fear
belongs to a fallen nature. So does the cruelty of the
powerful toward the weak. The doctrine of the Fall accounts for Leporello's fear of Don Giovanni.
The doctrine of the Fall also accounts for the second
explanation, which holds the highly born in contempt.
Men are all equal in the state of innocence. None are by
nature superior. All are subject only to God and because
of him are well-disposed toward one another. Because of
the Fall, however, the restraints on human behavior have
been removed and the strong unfairly try to dominate the
weak. Their domination is unjust in itself, but that injustice is our reward for having rebelled against the only naturally superior ruler. The second explanation is both true
and incomplete. The fifth explanation confirms and completes its truth.
The third explanation, that of the really clever, who
fear civil war and on that account respect authority, is
based on experience. It is consistent with the fifth reason,
that of the perfect Christians.
The fourth explanation, that of the zealous convert,
though religious, is insufficient because it does not consider the crucial religious truth-that only the redeemer
can redress the Fall.
WINTER 1982
�The Fall and Redemption are the ~ey that resolves the
conflicting opinions about authority. That key opens the
understanding to whatever truth is contained in any hu·
man opinions. Pascal is calling all valid discourse about
moral matters-matters other than geometry-"ciphered
language." The doctrine of the Fall and Redemption
breaks that code. Supplied by faith, it illumines our
searching just as our instinctive knowledge of number illumines our geometrical quest. This key is given by God.
Those to whom he does not give it wander in the incompleteness of one of the first four partial truths. Only with
the fifth explanation, that of the perfect Christians, can
we preserve what validity lies in each of those explanations while avoiding their limitations, their semi-falsity.
Pascal would consider this account of the incompleteness of our knowledge of a prime political matter a paradigm of our knowledge in general. All knowledge of what
is important, of what is true for man and for the world, is
fragmentary.
_ Like the two infinities, all knowledge meets and is comprehended in and by God. Only those who see him face to
face will see clearly the general truths. Goodness, justice,
and happiness are revealed only dimly and in faith to
those who have the key of the Fall and Redemption.
Pascal uses the language of seduction when he wants to
make us feel as he does about these matters. God overcomes our resistance, he says, by an overpowering delight,
not by argument or proof. Pascal thinks God gives us the
ability to accept enlightenment, the will to surrender, because of Christ's death for us. Not only does he not think
we should look for arguments, he believes that to hope to
achieve enlightenment by them is blasphemous. To obtain moral knowledge by human means would make the
Cross useless. (808).
To know what Pascal thinks is true, we would have to
see within ourselves what he sees. By his own principles,
he can only hope to point us in a direction that leads us
on. He can remind us of the advantages of accepting
Christian doctrine. But Pascal also thinks that God must
move us to accept in order for us to yield. Short of that experience and lacking an interpretation of it that would be
identical with Pascal's own, all that we can do is look at
Pascal himself.
Before we leave him, let me read one passage where he
tells us how alone he felt in the world. Let us hear Pascal
describe what must have been his state of mind before the
religious experience on the night of Monday, November
23, 1654, that made him turn to God.
When . .. I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and
man left to himself with no light, as though lost in a corner of
the universe . .. incapable of knowing anything, I am moved
to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying
desert island, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of
escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive
people to despair. I see other people around me . .. I ask them
if they are better informed than I, and they say they are not.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Then these lost and wretched creatures look around and find
some attractive objects to which they become addicted and
attached. For my part, I have never been able to form such
attachments ... (198)
How consistent his language is with what must have
been his feelings! Never having been able to form any attachment to people or things around him, Pascal speaks of
those who have as "wretched and lost." We can see how
much religious reassurance and enlightenment must have
meant to him.
It need not be true that Pascal always felt the way he
did in this passage. "Never" may be a hyperbole justified
by the depth of his revulsion for things or people he no
longer admired. "Never" shows how unimportant they
were to him when he wrote those words.
Another sign of this solitariness is the harshness with
which he speaks about love, the passion of love:
A man goes to the window to see the people passing by; if I
pass by, can I say that he went there to see me? No, for he is
not thinking of me in particular. But what about a person
who loves someone for the sake of her beauty; does he love
her? No, for smallpox, which will destroy beauty without destroying the person, will put an end to his love for her.
And if someone loves me for my judgement or my memory,
do they love me? me, myself? Where then is this self, if it is
neither in the body nor the soul? . .. we never love anyone ex-
cept for borrowed qualities. (688)
How much must it have meant to such a man to have
felt that he knew that God cared for him, and that Christ
had died for his sake. We who remain outside this experience will remain unaffected by his account. Some of us
may even want to say that he is describing a delusion.
There is no need to argue about the matter. Nothing
could have been more important for Pascal than a revelation which, in his own words, brought him "certainty, cer-
tainty, peace." From the high point of that experience he
henceforth judged all else.
It will be no surprise to us that he could not prove what
he said, or, indeed, successfully point to it.
1. Douglas Allanbrook, ''Power and Grace," The College, January 1977.
2. All quotations from the Pensies are from the translation of A. J.
Krailsheimer, New York 1966.
3. Seneca, Ep. 20.8.
4. Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres Completes, Louis Lafuma, ed., Paris 1963,348.
Translations by Brother Robert Smith.
5. Pascal, Oeuvres, 349.
6. Pascal, Oeuvres, 350.
7. Pascal, Oeuvres, 351.
8. Pascal, Oeuvres, 351.
9. Pascal, Oeuvres, 350.
10. Pascal, Oeuvres, 350.
11. Pascal, Oeuvres, 352.
12. Pascal, Oeuvres, 349.
13. Louis Marin, La critique du discours, Paris 1975, 372~374.
51
�Five Translations
Charles G. Bell
By Victor Hugo, past eighty years old
Ave, Dea: Moriturus te salutatA judith Gautier
La mort et Ia beaute sont deux choses profondes
Qui contiennent tant d'ombres et d'azur qu'on dirait
Deux soeurs egalement terribles et fecondes
Ayant Ia meme enigme et le meme secret.
0 femmes, voix, regards, cheveux noirs, tresses blondes,
Brillez, je meurs! Ayez !'eclat, !'amour, l'attrait,
0 perles que Ia mer mele a ses grandes ondes,
0 lumineux oiseaux de Ia sombre foret!
Judith, nos deux destins sont plus pres l'un de !'autre
Qu'on ne croirait, a voir mon visage et le votre;
Tout le divin ab!me appara!t dans vos yeux,
Et moi, je sens le gouffre etoile dans mon arne;
Nous sommes tousles deux voisins du ciel, madame,
Puisque vous etes belle et puisque je suis vieux.
Death and beauty are two somber loves,
As deep in blue and shade as if to say:
Two sisters, alike fecund and destructive,
Bearing the burden of one mystery.
Loves, voices, looks, tresses dark and fair,
Be radiant; for I die. Hold light, warmth, solaceyou pearls the sea rolls in waves up the shore,
You birds that nestle, luminous, in the forest.
Judith, our destinies are nearer kin
Than one might think to see your face and mine.
The abyss of all opens in your eyesThe same starred gulf I harbor in my soul.
We are neighbors of the sky, and for this cause,
That you are beautiful and I am old.
Charles Bell is a tutor at St.John's College, Santa Fe. These translations are a sequence from a forthcoming collection of poems, The Five-Chambered Heart.
52
WINTER 1982
�. Goethe: Se/ige Sehnsucht (1814)
Sagt es niemand, nur den Weisen,
Wei! die Menge gleich verhonet:
Das Lebendige will ich preisen,
Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet.
In der Liebesnachte Kiihlung,
Die dich zeugte, wo du zeugtest,
Dberfallt dich fremde Fiihlung,
Wenn die stille Kerze leuchtet.
Nicht mehr bleibest du umfangen
In der Finsternis Beschattung,
Und dich reisset neu Verlangen
Auf zu hoherer Begattung.
Keine Ferne macht dich schwierig,
Kommst geflogen und gebannt,
Und zuletzt, des Lichts begierig,
Bist du, Schmetterling, verbrannt.
Und solang du das nicht hast,
Dieses: Stirb und werde!
Bist do nur ein triiber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.
Sacred Lust
Tell the wise; the many lour,
And make ignorance their shame;
Say I praise the living power
That hungers for a death of flame.
Love-nights breed us as we breed:
In the candlelighted cool,
Feel the gates of dark go wide
For the moulting of the soul.
From its woven bed of shadows
Mere enclosure falls away:
Love spreads new wings to the meadows
Of another mating play.
Tireless, upward; spaces dwindle;
Nothing hems declared desire;
God is light and light will kindle,
And the moth wings leap in fire.
Know, until you learn to weave
Each flame-dying into breath,
Everywhere you haunt the grave
Of the shadowed earth.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
53
�Petrarch (1304-74): Sonnet XI,
After Laura's Death
Se lamentar augelli, o verdi fronde
mover soavemente a !'aura estiva,
o roco mormorar di lucide onde
s'ode d'una fiorita e fresca riva,
Ia 'v' io seggia d' amor pensoso e scriva;
lei che '1 ciel ne mostro, terra n'asconde,
veggio et odo et intendo, ch' ancor viva
di sl lontano a' sospir miei risponde:
"Deh perche innanzi '1 tempo ti consume?"
mi dice con pietate: "a che pur versi
degli occhi tristi un doloroso fiume?
Di me non pianger tu, che' miei dl fersi
morendo eterni, e nell' eterno lume,
quando mostrai di chiuder, gli occhi apersi."
If birds' lament, green leaves' or tendrils' stir
To the soft sighing of the air of summer,
Or through the wave-wash at the petalled shore
Of a clear stream, crystal's liquid murmur
Sound, where I sit bowed to the forest floorHer, whom heaven showed and earth now covers,
I see and hear and know, as if the power
Of her live voice responded from afar:
"Why do you spend yourself before your years?"
She asks in pity. "Or wherefore and for whom
Pour the wasting river of your tears?
You must not weep for me. My life became,
Dying, eternal; and to eternal light,
The dark, that seemed its closure, cleared my sight."
54
WINTER 1982
�Catullus, 55-54 BC: Attack on Caesar
for his favorite Mamurra (#29)
Quis hoc potest uidere, quis potest pati,
Nisi impudicus et uorax et aleo,
Mamurram habere quod comata Gallia
Habebat ante et ultima Britannia?
Cinaede Romule, haec uidebis et feres?
Et ille nunc superbus et superfluens
Perambulabit omnium cubilia
Vt albulus columbus aut Adoneus?
Cinaede Romule, haec uidebis et feres?
Es impudicus et uorax et aleo.
Eone nomine, imperator unice,
Fuisti in ultima occidentis insula,
Vt ista uestra diffututa mentula
Ducenties comesset aut trecenties?
Quid est alid sinistra liberalitas?
Parum expatrauit an parum elluatus est?
Paterna prima lancinata sunt bona;
Secunda praeda Pontica; inde tertia
Hibera, quam scit amnis aurifer Tagus.
Nunc Galliae timetur et Britanniae.
Quid hunc malum fouetis? aut quid hie potest
Nisi uncta deuorare patrimonia?
Eone nomine urbis opulentissime
Socer generque, perdidistis omnia?
The man who can face this, the man who can take it,
Is whored himself, a drunk, a swindler. Mamurra
Laps the fat of crested Gaul and farthest Britain.
Pansied Romulus, you see this thing, you take it?
How he struts his way through everybody's bedroom,
Like a white dove, a white-skinned soft AdonisPansied little Roman, you take it in, you bear it?
You are like him then, as drunk, as whored a swindler.
And was it for this, Rome's only great general,
You conquered the remotest island of the West,
To feed this screwed-out tool of yours, Mamurra?
See him spend, twenty or thirty million? First were
His own estates, then the loot of Pontus, then of SpainHear Tagus, the gold-bearing river. They say the Gauls
And Britains fear him? And you love the mongrel? Both
Of you, Caesar, Pompey? While he swills oil of patrimony?
For this, like in-laws, father and son,
You have sluiced wealth and all of the world-city.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
55
�SanJuan de la Cruz (1549-1591)
Cancion de Ia subida del Monte CarmelaThe Ascent of Mount Carmel
En una noche oscura,
con ansias en amores inflamada,
oh dichosa ventura!
sali sin ser notada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.
In the dark of night
With love inflamed
By luck, by chance
I rose unseen
From the house hushed in sleep.
A escuras y segura
por Ia secreta escala, disfrazada,
o dichosa ventura!
a escuras, en celada
estando ja mi casa sosegada.
Safe in the dark
By a secret stair
My luck, my chance
And night for a veil
I stole from the house of sleep.
En Ia noche dichosa,
en secreto, que nadie me veia,
ni yo miraba cosa,
sin otra luz ni gu1a,
sino Ia que en el corazon ard1a.
By chance of night
By secret ways
Unseeing and unseen
No light, no guide
But the flames that my heart gave-
Aquesta me guiaba
mas cierto que Ia luz de mediod1a,
adonde me esperaba
quien yo bien me sab1a,
en parte donde nadie pareda.
Led by those rays
Surer than day
I came where one waits
Who is known to me
In a place where none seemed to be.
Oh noche, que guiaste,
oh noche amable mas que el alborada,
oh noche, que juntaste
Amado con amada,
amada en el Amado trasformada!
Night that guides
Purer than dawn
Night that joins
Lover and loved
And the loved into Lover changed.
En mi pecho florido,
que entero para el solo se guardaba,
all! qued6 dormido,
yo le regalaba,
y el ventalle de cedros aire daba.
In my flowered heart
That is only his
He lay in sleep
Lulled by the breeze
The fanning of my cedars gave.
El aire del almena,
cuando ya sus cabellos esparda,
en mi cuello her1a
y todos mis sendidos suspend1a.
Down turrets that air
With hand serene
As it stirred in his hair
Gave my throat a wound
That took all sense away.
Quedeme y olvideme,
el rostro recline sobre el Amado,
ces6 todo, y dejeme,
dejando mi cuidado
entre las azucenas olvidado.
I ceased, I was gone
My face to his own
All passed away
Care and all thrown down
There among the lillies where I lay.
con su mano serena,
56
WINTER 1982
�The Federal Republic of Germany:
Finlandization and Germanization?
Anne-Marie Le Gloannec
Is the Federal Republic of Germany headed for "finlandization"? Since Zbigniew Brzezinski detected neutralist leanings in West Germany nearly three years ago, the
charge has often been made. On both sides of the Atlantic, analysts and politicians and West German opposition
parties have followed the former National Security Adviser
in asking themselves about the Federal Republic's eastward slip. The most polemical have pointed to supposed
neutralization plans (the famous "Bahr Plan") and Bonn's
deplorable "Atlantic coolness" as something unusual, even
shocking, in a government that had supported American
policy with few reservations, even in the seventies. Others,
more prudent and at first loath to adopt conclusions they
regarded as hasty, have nevertheless discerned the first
signs of "finlandization" in the policies followed since the
winter of 1979. Rather, of "self-finlandization" or "voluntary finlandization." For we are dealing in this instance
not so much with neutrality imposed by the Soviet Union
as with a policy deliberately chosen by Bonn to soothe an
unduly touchy neighbor.
Richard Lowenthal, who is thought to have conceived
confuse the views of what the Christian Democratic-Socialist opposition calls the "Moscow wing" of the Social
Democratic Party with those of the governing Social Democratic-Free Democratic coalition. For instance, despite
his moral authority, Herbert Wehner did not speak for the
SPD majority-and even less so for the governing coalition
-when he called the Warsaw Pact's arms build-up defensible in the winter of 1979-80, and when even more recently
he did what he could to take the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan for the reaction of a power on its guard. Wehner's
controversial remarks in any case provoked opposition that
reached the center of his party. Moreover, the inclinations
of Helmut Schmidt's character, the makeup of the coalition, and the differences natural between party leaders
and men-in-office see to it that not even the SPD itself inspires government policy.
Even though the opinions of Social Democrats, snipers
or not, cannot be attributed to the government wholesale,
the government itself is not beyond suspicion. There is
plenty of evidence in relations between Moscow, Bonn,
and Washington: the West Germans' irritation with Ameri-
the term ufinlandization," calls "self-finlandization" ab-
can ((human rights" policy; their initial evasion of, then
surd. And in any case the Berlin political scientist holds
that neither term does justice to West German political
reality. The Federal Republic of Germany itself denies
that it wants to steer "a course between the blocs." In the
spring of 1980, it should not be forgotten, Chancellor
Schmidt did not succeed in hiding his annoyance at some
analyses (in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) that at-
hesitant and limited support for, President Carter's counter
reprisals after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan;
their cautiousness at plans for the neutron bomb, and later
in regard to deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles; their lack of enthusiasm for the consolidation and expansion of the Atlantic alliance. Until recently, all signs
seemed to indicate that in loosening its Atlantic ties, Bonn
sought to forestall Soviet suspicions and objections, and
tacked the readiness "to appease" and the inconsistencies
of the government 1
In the past few years West German politics undeniably
betrays a number of ambiguities. One must not, however,
Anne-Marie Le Gloannec is on the staff of the Centre d'Etudes et de
Relations internationales de la Fondation nationale des Sciences Politiques in France. This article first appeared in Commentaire 14, Summer
1981.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that in its wish to please Moscow, it reserved its criticisms
for its American ally. The new administration in the United
States does not appear about to win over Bonn completely
to its views on East-West policy.
We must not forget that German-American tensions
have a specifically Western dimension that comes of profound differences over economic policy and the export of
nuclear technology. In these two areas, pressures from
57
�Washington have caused bitterness, even exasperation,
on the other side of the Atlantic. Also, German-American
relations have always been susceptible to the conflicts
that exist in any alliance. In our examination of present
tensions and "slipping," we should avoid yielding to the il·
lusion of an over-idyllic past. In the fifties and sixties the
two partners entertained suspicions of each other. When
Washington sought agreement with Moscow, West Ger·
many feared Washington would drop it. And the American
administration feared Bonn's too-close understanding with
its Soviet neighbor.
Are the present transatlantic misunderstandings the
same as in the past-or have they changed with the change
in the relative strengths of the United States and West
Germany? In any event, are they great enough to justify
Bonn's apparent weakmindedness towards Moscow? Does
the loosening of transatlantic ties necessarily tempt West
Germany to "appease" the USSR? In other words, are
German-American relations and German-Soviet relations
a zero-sum game? Finally, is it really a question of pusillan·
imity and appeasement? Perhaps Bonn desires to play an
independent role, neither too pro-American nor too antiSoviet? As Raymond Aron asked:
Do the Europeans shrink from American leadership because
they have come to have confidence in themselves or because
the power of the Soviet Union frightens them? Or is there a
third reason that subsumes the other two: the decline of
America?2
Beyond Electoral Turmoil
With detente in danger, the disagreements between the
United States and West Germany have never appeared
deeper. What might have passed a few years ago as simple
disagreements over particular policies-over human rights,
or the arms build-up-have now spread over the whole
range of economic, military, and political relations between East and West, and after the Soviet intervention in
Afghanistan have come to bear on fundamental questions:
the nature of East-West relations, and more specifically
the assessment of Soviet ambitions and the development
of a suitable Western policy. Does the Soviet Union seek
to take advantage of local instability when the occasion
arises? Or does it pursue a policy of systematic expansion?
Should the West pursue detente, or return to containment?
Despite various shades of opinion, the Carter administration was pretty much united in its perception of a will
to expand in Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. In West
Germany, however, the various party leaders expressed
widely differing opinions that ranged from one extreme to
the other. The opposition leaders, Hans Kohl and FranzJosef Strauss, as well as the CDU's military affairs specialist
Manfred Woerner, reached conclusions similar to Washington's. Herbert Wehner, as already mentioned, saw the
move as a defensive measure; Willy Brandt minimized the
importance of the intervention. These reactions were
hardly surprising, for they came from the opposite sides of
58
the political chess board. The same cannot be said of the
attitude of Chancellor Schmidt, who did not see fit to interrupt his vacation, and who in his New Year's address
showed little of his usual vigor in his condemnation of the
Soviet operation. A few days before had he not declared
that Soviet leaders, far from being adventurers, desired
peace?
The nature of the Soviet intervention-surgical operation or act in a drama of expansion-raised the question:
what would become of Europe? Those who adopted the
hypothesis of expansion could not escape the fear that
sooner rather than later Berlin, Hamburg, or Paris would
suffer the fate of Kabul. A groundless fear, according to
Schmidt and his minister of foreign affairs-who considered the intervention "reversible" and thereby reduced it
to an anomalous case, limited in time and place. From
there it needed just a step to invoke the "divisibility" of
detente-a step some took, even though the FrenchGerman communique of February 1980 condemned the
concept.
There should be no exaggeration of the differences in
understanding between Chancellor Schmidt and Strauss.
Strauss denounced the Soviets' global ambitions, but
nonetheless still agreed with his political rival that Moscow did not want to unleash a Third World War. Schmidt
wanted detente to be divisible, but still claimed the dangers of the new balance of power in Asia or the Persian
Gulf region, and, consequently, for Europe. In the chancellor's perspective, the divisibility of detente did not
excuse West Germany or Europe from all action. He considered it of importance, however, not to react too harshly,
especially in the resort to sanctions. The Afghan crisis,
Schmidt would say in the course of 1980, did not recall
Europe in 1938-39 and Hitler's expansion-but 1914 and
the incapacity to master international difficulties. Such is
the explanation of Germany's silence in regard to American sanctions-a policy Germany judged inappropriate
and even dangerous.
It was actually as if almost in regret that Chancellor
Schmidt declared himself in favor of the Olympic boycott
that President Carter demanded, and he contented himself
with an embargo on strategic products and with symbolic
declarations at the same time that he refused sanctions
against the Soviet Union for its military intervention. This
was a compromise between the political necessity of supporting the American protector and the fear that America
would unleash the crisis. It was also a compromise between the Social Democratic Party that followed Willy
Brandt in his opposition to retaliatory measures and Foreign Minister Genscher, who favored a demonstration of
Atlantic solidarity. Ever ready to demonstrate its proAmericanism and to demand usacrifices," the opposition
had a field day denouncing the governing coalition's recantations and ((neutralist" leanings.
If one may trust certain public opinion polls, however,
~~neutralism" may respond to the wishes of a significant
minority, and in some cases, a majority, of the West GerWINTER 1982
�man population. Asked whether they wished for "greater
independence of the Federal Republic of Germany from
the United States" or "unconditional support of American foreign policy," 49 percent of those polled answered
"yes" to the first question (with 29 percent "no"), and 52
percent said "no" to the second (with 26 percent "yes").
Forty-five percent of the respondents believed that the
military neutrality of both Germanies "would make a fit
contribution to the maintenance of peace. " 3
The significance of these results should not be overestimated, quite apart from the debate over the reliability
of the methods used by different West German polling organizations. Since the beginning of the Federal Republic,
West Germans have favored a policy of neutrality. Sometimes a minority, sometimes, notably in the second half of
the fifties and during the seventies, a majority. When
questioned, however, not simply about the policy they
would like to see Bonn follow, but about the military position they prefer for the Federal Republic, only a few declare themselves for neutrality. The most that can be said
is that Social Democratic sympathizers, people under
twenty, and people with advanced education, are more
likely to favour neutral status than the rest of the population. 4 In the majority, West German public opinion remains as much attached to NATO as to the American
military "umbrella" that it expects will protect it in the
event of a Soviet threat.' To be sure, in 1980 public opinion
continued to believe in the possibility of war (58%). Most
Germans, however, did not believe that Moscow's resort
to force in Afghanistan called into question the detente it
damaged. And in 1981, most Germans favored a policy of
conciliation.' All in all, the coalition's attitude seems to
answer public expectations better than the opposition's.
The legitimate distinction between the Social Democratic-Liberal line and the Christian Socialist opposition
does not mean that lines are clearly drawn and policies
consistent. Despite their disagreements over the nature of
the crisis and the immediate measures to take, the government and the opposition were closer than they would
have liked people to think. In contrast to Washington, no
German political party, much less German public opinion,
was eager to question detente. The pace of official East·
West contacts slowed down in the early spring of 1980,
but it soon picked up again. Strauss was not the last politician to make his appearance in Communist capitals. (Unlike the government, however, the opposition says it is
ready to risk detente the better to preserve it.) Moreover,
in favor, in various degrees, of resumption or pursuit of
disarmament negotiations, both the governing coalition
and the opposition recognize the need for strengthening
NATO to restore the East-West military balance,' and for
providing economic, political, and military aid to countries close to the Soviet Union (Pakistan, Turkey, and
Greece; the cultivation of ties with the Islamic countries).
Lastly, except for those Social Democrats who, like Willy
Brandt, seem to give European solidarity first priority,
both sides emphasize the importance of the GermanTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
American alliance (even though the opposition appears to
consider it more important than the government).
The old divisions between the left and right wings of
the Social Democratic Party have reappeared with greater
force than ever in the last few months, really in the last
two years, to shake the Social Democratic consensus on issues of external security. This was especially evident when
Karsten Voigt, among others, appeared to question the
delicate compromise that emerged from the party conference on December 1979 (the Doppelbeschluss, or double
resolution). Voigt, the Social Democratic spokesman for
the parliamentary commission on foreign affairs, judged
early in 1980 that the lack of progress or results in the arms
limitations talks mortgaged the deployment of American
missiles in Europe. Social Democratic deputies also undermined the foundations of Bonn's policy towards the
Atlantic alliance by opposing arms sales to Saudi Arabia
and by proposing reductions in military spending. The
joining of this leftist opposition with groups as diverse as
the German Peace Union (DFU), close to the Communists, the churches, and the ecologists; the coordination of
pacifist movements, opponents of nuclear power, and the
extra-parliamentary opposition (APO) around the same
issue, a sometimes violent coordination whose capacity to
make a sensation does not necessarily mean it enioys a
wide following-all this disturbs the balance at the heart
of the SPD, without, incidentally, sparing the Liberals,
(FDP), and forces the governing coalition into a weak or
rigid position. Witness Helmut Schmidt's recent remarks
on Soviet policy, or on the pacifism of young Germans.
Much of the leadership and of public opinion, undeniably, would like, in one way or another, to see Europe as
an island of peace precisely because it wishes it were one.
There would then be no more worry about sanctions or rearmament; more costly decisions could be avoided. To
calm oneself with the attribution of reassuring intentions
to the Soviets-is that not already "finlandization" of a
sort? 8
The Ostpolitik and its Fragile Gains
People have outdone themselves in repeating that
detente brought tangible benefits to the Germans-and
until recently one could believe that the Ostpolitik bore
fruit in every area. The status of West Berlin, guaranteed
by the four powers in September 1971, assured that city
some military and political security and, in theory, reduced
the risks of a sudden Soviet seizure. With the fundamental treaty signed in October 1972, the two Germanies
resumed relations pretty much broken off since the beginning of the sixties. During the seventies, several million
West Germans visited East Germany each year, and several
hundred thousand East Germans went to West Germany.
Over fifty thousand East Germans have settled permanently in the Federal Republic. Thanks to a significant
audience for West German television and the development of trade, West Germany makes its presence felt be-
59
�yond the Elbe. In negotiating the, treaty of 1972, the
Social Democratic-Liberal coalition meant to maintain
and strengthen the ties between the .two Germanies and
thereby keep alive the idea of German nationhood. If we,
however, may believe West German public opinion, that
holds that the two states are growing further and further
apart, and if we believe certain analysts who report the
development of two distinct national consciousnesses, we
are led to ask whether the coalition has really reached its
goal.
These measures have, in any case, improved the lot of a
good many people and permitted a relative "normalization" of relations between the two Germanies. Bonn also
normalized relations with other Socialist capitals. In recent
years, over half a million Soviet, Rumanian, and Polish citizens of German origin have been allowed to settle in the
Federal Republic; the volume of West German trade with
these countries has quintupled since 1970. Chancellor
Schmidt figured along with Valery Giscard d'Estaing
among the preferred partners of Edward Gierek.
This relative ((normalization" of relations with Eastern
Europe, rather than any immediate gains, give the Ostpolitik its historical significance. By abandoning its revisionist claims and by no longer making German unity a
prerequisite for detente, West Germany ceased troubling
its Eastern neighbors and importuning its Western all-ies:
it made itself ordinary, and thereby undid the mortgage
that up to then had weighed on its foreign policy. With
this added maneuvering room and with a measure of prestige won for it by its skill in negotiation-not to mention
its considerable economic strength-the West German
government could now make its voice heard in international councils. German participation in the Guadeloupe
summit in January 1979 surprised some observers. But her
presence represented the logical outcome of previous diplomatic activity. This growth in West Germany's power
could not, however, obscure the fact that the gains of the
Ostpolitik depended, at least in part, on the goodwill of
the Soviets and their East German allies. The border incidents, the harrassment, the pin-pricks in West Berlin, during the sixties, were there to remind everybody. In spite of
everything, West Germany was not a state like any other.
Even without considering the 17 million East German
"hostages" of the Soviet Union, the Federal Republic remains extremely vulnerable: on the front line of battle, it
would be devastated in both a conventional and a nuclear
war-but with all that it remains powerless to assure its
own security by itself.
This special characteristic and its liabilities give the Soviets a political bargaining advantage that they have not
failed to exploit, when international tensions or the internal
weaknesses of the Socialist camp have provoked a more
rigid attitude in the Kremlin, or when Moscow hoped to
divide NATO by isolating West Germany. NATO's decision of December 1979 to strengthen its theater nuclear
forces in Europe, the deterioration of East-West relations
after Afghanistan, and the threat of destabilization in Po-
60
land, have revivified Soviet and East German pressures
and threats. The Soviets reminded the West Germans in
the summer of 1980 that their territory would be the first
and worst casualty in a nuclear exchange-and that American protection was not certain. Following that, the East
German authorities decided to restrict severely all travel
between the two countries. They also let it be known that
West Berlin could suffer the consequences if Bonn changed
the conditions of inter-German trade (in the event of Soviet intervention in Poland).
It is hardly surprising then, that the West German leaders attempt to keep detente alive, to continue to enjoy its
benefits, that they wish to slow further worsening of the
international climate, since they would be among the first
to suffer, or even that they censor their words or actions
in anticipation of Soviet objections. Bonn, for instance,
refused to respond with reprisals to East Berlin's affront
after the elections. It has since, it is true, contemplated
not renewing the "swing" accords-credits without interest granted to East Germany-if East Germany did not
rescind its decision. Such a display of deliberate firmness
was successful in 1973, when East Berlin also had decided
to increase the amount of obligatory currency exchange
for travellers entering East Germany. But circumstances
are now different. There are grounds for fearing that, unwilling to risk detente, Bonn finds herself without recourse. In such an event, powerlessness would succeed to
deliberate firmness.
Everything, including the vulnerability of her economy,
glaringly evident for a year now, has contributed to make
West Germany either directly or indirectly susceptible to
international tensions and pressures. Extremely dependent on world trade for her raw materials and energy, and
for the export of her finished goods, West Germany seeks
to diversify her raw material sources and her new markets.
Her trade with Eastern Europe and the USSR represents
a little less than 6 percent of her total foreign trade, but
certain sectors and industries export a larger proportion of
their production to the East: the exports of Mannesmann,
and Hoescht made up almost 9 percent of their output in
1979. By 1985, 30 percent of West German imports of natural gas will come from the Soviet Union.
Is there not a danger that in allowing this dependence
West Germany is granting the Soviets the means to exercise pressure and influence over her? Without entering
into the broader debate on the advantages of East-West
trade (structural advantages for the East, sectorial advantages for the West), we should note the disagreement
among experts on the threshold of independence. At the
Soviet Union's and West Germany's announcement of an
agreement on natural gas (whose conception had been
made public at the moment Chancellor Schmidt in Moscow condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), the
Americans warned West Germany against dependence on
more than 30 percent of any product from any one country. In contrast, German experts set the critical threshold
at 40 percent. The political dimensions of this labyrinWINTER 1982
�thine quarrel need to be remembe,ed: American objections and West German defiance.
In my opinion, the danger, if there is one, lies else·
where. The fear is not of Soviet pressures or threats of an
embargo. Nor is it deplorable that Bonn is reluctant to enact strict economic sanctions that the business community
would not hear of, and which the Christian-Democrats
might not have applied with any greater vigour had they
been in power. Sanctions, it turns out in retrospect, are of~
ten evaded.
What is questionable is "Arms-of-Peace" thinking itself,
the kind of thinking that impelled Egan Bahr' s remark
that it is "necessary to institutionalize the interest in the
maintenance of peace through large-scale economic projects beneficial to both parties."' Chancellor Schmidt
apparently shares the same perspective, for he favors the
establishment of long-term contractual economic relations between West Germany and the Soviet Union. In
1977 he even tried (in vain) to have the Bundestag solemnly ratify the Soviet-German twenty-five year commer·
cia! accord. The desire to bind the Soviet Union with a
network of contracts is like trying to tie Gulliver down.
This is the policy of the West German government, specifically, of the Social Democratic-Liberal coalition. Instead of resorting to sanctions it prefers to take advantage
of the commercial and financial ebb and flow to buy concessions and guarantees. But mutual economic ties do not
necessarily guarantee the partners' political goodwill, especially the goodwill of a centralized and authoritarian regime
-when Bonn risks excessive conciliatoriness because of
its anxiety to protect investments or because of its respect
for treaties (its rationale in the question of sanctions).
West German government and business circles showed
the political and economic powerlessness of this attitude
during the Polish crisis. Poland's creditors felt obliged to
lend her more money to save her from bankruptcy. At the
same time Bonn, haunted by the memory of 1968, refrained from gestures or statements that might give the
Soviets an excuse to intervene. For these two reasons
Bonn found itself even less desirous and able to attach political conditions to its loans to Warsaw. 10
As in the early sixties, West Germany's Eastern policy
shows no innovation. In the sixties, however, she had
nothing to lose. Now, any revision might endanger the
Ostpolitik's accomplishments, both the more immediate
(increased human contact) and the less tangible (security
and relative independence). To preserve these benefits,
Bonn no longer gives priority in her dealings to peoples in·
stead of governments, to "change" instead of "reconciliation." It is undoubtedly time in West Germany for a fresh
debate on the ultimate goals and means of the Ostpolitik,
a debate the coalition in power has up to now appeared to
wish to avoid.
An Actor in Search of a Role
The Soviet leadership that in 1980 raised some doubts
about the effectiveness of America's military umbrella,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
knowingly touched a raw nerve in Bonn. More than once
in the past Europeans have questioned American ability
and willingness to deter or repel a Soviet attack-doubts
more than ever justified by the progressive change in the
Soviet-American military balance since the beginning of
the seventies. The mutual "neutralization," to use Helmut Schmidt's word, 11 of Soviet and American strategic
forces, along with Soviet conventional and nuclear superi·
ority in Europe, separates the United States from Euro·
pean territory more than ever before, for it is not certain
that the U.S. would be willing to engage its strategic forces
in the case of a limited Soviet attack on the old world.
Western Europe and especially the Federal Republic of
Germany, a "state on the front line" without her own nuclear capacity-and subject not only to Soviet pressures
but also to Washington's goodwill-finds herself singularly exposed as long as war remains a textbook hypothesis. The decision of the NATO Council in December 1979
to deploy medium-range missiles in Europe starting in
1983 and at the same time to begin negotiations with the
Soviet Union on the reduction of theater nuclear forces,
will make up for Europe's military inferiority without,
however, undoing her political powerlessness: the mere
presence of Pershing and cruise missiles under American
control will not reassure further the Europeans against
the risk of American indifference; and the propaganda
campaign the Soviets unleashed from the fall of 1979 to
the summer of 1980 shows that they will hardly forgo the
crudest sorts of intimidation.
The uncertainties of the American commitment, and
Washington's demonstrated relative indifference to the
military balance in Europe, have led Bonn to its own initiatives to protect its interests: the call for the strengthening of European middle-range nuclear capacity, and, at
the same time, for negotiations for the reduction and re·
balancing of Soviet and NATO theater nuclear forces.
Bonn counts on both reinforcement and negotiation, the
United States tends to stress reinforcement. Is the coali·
tion yielding to pacifist tendencies that hold sway inside
the Social-Democratic Party? Certainly. But realistic considerations also guide it: the stationing of middle-range
nuclear arms on her territory that spares West Germany
neither political pressures nor destruction in the event of
nuclear war, will serve as a bargaining chip for the West in
the negotiations-negotiations that, thanks to Helmut
Schmidt's diplomacy in Moscow in June 1980, will open
without preconditions.
Both the relative success of the chancellor's mission to
Moscow and President Carter's suspicion beforehand that
the chancellor might trade his commitments for the proposal or acceptance of a moratorium 12 served only to reinforce a sense of isolation in West Germany, a sense that it
could hardly count on its American ally (not to mention
the disturbing effect of the failure of the raid in April1980
to save the hostages in Tehran).
Even more serious, the West Germany that doubted
the authority and efficacy of American leadership, also
61
�was losing faith in American values~at least in its conception of American values. The United States no longer
held a fascination for West German elites. 13 With the
United States itself in the throes of self-doubt how was it
to escape such disillusion? Such circumstances make it
easier to understand the government's and public opinion's tardy and lukewarm show of solidarity with Washington during the winter of 1979-1980. In their criticisms of
American policy and sometimes of the bases of Atlantic
solidarity, the West Germans seem unobtrusively to give
way to indifference to the Atlantic Alliance and to retreat
upon themselves 14 Those under twenty, significantly,
tend more to neutralism than their seniors.
This indifference and withdrawal is no easier to reverse
because concealed. Even if the new U.S. administration
succeeds in the restoration of America's political and
moral authority, and, at the same time, in respecting the
wishes of her allies, West Germany will no longer be the
model ally, Washington's right arm. As we have seen, the
Ostpolitik and the changes in the international system in
the seventies have combined to fashion a stronger, more
independent, and more self-confident Federal Republic of
Germany.
Until very recently, Bonn still refused a role consonant
with her power. In May 1978, Helmut Schmidt declared
at the U.N., "I speak in the name of a country that is neither able nor desires to assume the role of a Great Power."
Under a constant barrage of criticism for almost thirty
years, called too Atlanticist or not enough, too revanchist
or too accommodating toward the East, Bonn steered a
middle course without making waves. Barely two years
ago, however, the chancellor took to different words: he
demanded heavier responsibilities and a greater role for
his country. Even public opinion in West Germany conceives a powerful Federal Republic, more readily than in
the past-20 percent for enormous, 47 percent for great,
influence on the international scene15 All this has not
kept the government, nor in all likelihood public opinion,
from recognition of the limits of this influence, particularly in its relations with Eastern Europe, and of the political and moral constraints that still weigh upon its actions
-limitations that Bonn and the people sometimes find irritating. In contrast to the fifties and sixties, West German leaders dare assert themselves among their allies at
the same time that they exercise the greatest discretion in
t!Jeir dealings with the countries of Socialist Europe-all
in all a curious reversal.
The contrast between confidence toward the West and
timidity toward the East, the distortions that come of the
combination of economic might and military weakness,
the ambiguities of the Federal Republic's international
role, drive the Germans to question themselves. Once the
first enthusiasms faded-the enthusiasm for reconstruction under the auspices of the pax americana and the enthusiasm for a certain conception of Europe-the erosion
of the myth of economic invulnerability and a certain disenchantment with Social Democracy opened the way to
62
the uncertainty and insecurity that, according to Richard
Lowenthal, springs of cultural and political rootlessness. 16
The search for identity, with certain intellectuals as selfappointed scouts, compounds in Germany the malaise
general in Western democracies. My analysis, if correct,
should hardly occasion retrospective surprise-at least insofar as in the last ten years the Ostpolitik has encouraged
inter-German contacts and rekindled the concern of West
Germans for the Germans in the East. That the East German United Socialist Party's (SED) policy of ideological
demarcation-Abgrenzung-with its transplantation of
undesirable East German intellectuals to West Germany
has revived the awareness of German identity and the
search for it-that would be an irony of history. The
search for identity does not, however, necessarily amount
to the desire for national unity-as the declarations of
Guenther Gaus, former permanent representative to East
Berlin, and the public debate that followed tend to show.
Strong but vulnerable, faced with equally unsatisfactory
alternatives when it comes to political and military security, still afflicted with a "deficit in legitimacy" and with a
loss of cultural identity, West Germany is in some sense
an actor in search of a role. There is no certainty that she
will find this role either in a political union of Europe that
Walter Scheel and Hans-Dietrich Genscher recently did
what they could to revive or in the Franco-German dimension. Based on real but limited complementarities,
the Franco-German marriage rests on a double misunderstanding. West Germany, without doubt, relies more than
France on the Atlantic Alliance and on the continuation
of American protection. The defense of her national interests, however, which lie in Central Europe, will drive her
to greater Gaullism than France. It is a paradox that a
greater consciousness of her own interests and of her distinctive particularity could very well lead the Federal Republic to a certain kind of "finlandization." 17
Translated by Lisa Simeone, Philip Holt and
Preston Niblack
1. See especially Fritz Ullrich Fack, "Der Nebellichtet sich," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 23, 1980, and "1st das Friedenspolitik?"
FAZ, May 23, 1980.
2. Raymond Aron, "L'hegemonism sovietique: An I," Commentaire 11,
Autumn 1980, 358. (translation in The St. John's Review, Summer 1981,
20).
3. Poll said to have been made in March 1980 at the request of the
Chancellor. Cited with no further reference by the weekly Der Spiegel,
18, 1980, "Mit den Amerikanern nicht in den Tod."
4. I rely here on polls conducted by Emnid (especially those reported in
Informationen, Emnid-Institut, 5, 1980) and by the lnstitut fur
Demoskopie Allensbach (files).
5. See especially Werner Kaltefleiter, "Germans, Friendlier but Apprehensive," Public Opinion, March-May 1979, 10-12. See also Gebhard
Schweigler, "Spannung und Entspannung: Reaktionen im Westen," in
the excellent collection of Josef Fullenbach and Eberhard Schulz (eds.\
Entspannung am Ende (Munich 1980). Schweigler gives the following
characterization of German pUblic opinion: "Because of the complexity
of West German security policy, public opinion in the Federal Republic
appears to hide its head in the sand in blind reliance on NATO's deterence."
WINTER 1982
�6. See the Emnid poll in Der Spiegel, March 2, 1981, and the poll in Le
Point 442, March 9, 1981; The International Herald Tribune, April14,
1980.
7. Even if the government, despite earlier commitments, is not prepared to devote 3 percent of its gross national p[oduct to military spending.
8. Pierre Hassner, "Western European Perceptions of the USSR,"
Daeddlus, Winter 1979, 114.
9. The first assessment of the Ostpolitik in Die Zeit, December 14, 1973.
10. In the winter of 1980-81 the government-more particularly, the
Minister of Foreign Affairs-showed some firmness (at the heart of the
common market) in dissuading the Soviet Union from intervening.
11. Cf. the lecture Helmut Schmidt gave on October 28, 1977, at the Institute of Strategic Studies in London.
12. President Carter suspected that Chancellor Schmidt, who declared
himself in favor of a three-year moratorium, actually wanted to put an
indefinite freeze on the deployment of tactical forces in Europe.
13. See Gunter Gillessen, "Defiziten im deutsch-amerikanischen Verhalltnis," FAZ, July 31, 1979, as well as Martin Hillenbrand, former U.S.
ambassador to West Germany; "The United States and Germany" in
West Gennan Foreign Policy, 1949-1979, Wolfram Hanreider ed., Boulder,
Colorado, 73. See also the recent article by the Vice-President of the
Bundestag, Annemarie Renger, "Das Buendnis an einer Wegmarke,"
FAZ, April4, 1981.
14. See the words of Guenter Grass, Sarah Kirsch, Thomas Brasch, and
Peter Schneider to the Social-Democrats of Schleswig-Holstein: "Don't
let the American government that since the war in Vietnam, has lost
the right to launch moralizing appeals, draw you into (a policy that could
lead to the destruction of all life on this planet)." Quoted in "mit den
Amerikanern nicht in den Tod," Der Spiegel, 18, April 28, 1980.
15. R. Wildenmann poll, cited by Martin and Silvia Greiffenhagen, Ein
schwieriges Vaterland: Zur politschen Kultur Deutschlands, Munich 1979,
315. See also Dieter Bossmann, Schueler ueber die Einheit der Nation,
Frankfurt-am-Main 1978, 249.
16. Richard Lowenthal, "Incertitudes allemandes," Commentaire, 6, 979.
17. As Fritz Stern has aptly observed, "Germany in a Semi-Gaullist Europe," Foreign Affairs, Spring 1980. For a plea to anchor West Germany
in the Franco-German community within a united Europe and in the
Atlantic Alliance, Joseph Rovan, "De !'Ostpolitik a l'auto-neutralisation?," Politique Internationale, 10, Winter 1980-81, 85-100.
Io
Under a cloud, milky she stood,
Garlanded, surprised by her cow
Voice after love, and by his wife
In a fine rage planning revenge,
Skillful as Maupassant. The gadFly stung her beauty lumbering
Inside bovine embarrassment
To lurch through a sea she hardly
Noticed, though it was named for her.
A long time galloping, her flowers
Withered as an old joke, she came
To seed on Egypt, so arid.
That good girl, transformed by the careLessly human god-his quick loveLay in the hot desert, panting
Slow birth on monumental sand
Where every grain seemed in the heat
An eye watching her terrible
And unprivate delivering.
lAURENCE JOSEPHS
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
63
�Kekkonen, the "Finlandizer"
Indro Montanelli
One of the few voices that rose in protest on March 12,
1940, when the government in Helsinki announced that
Finland, bled dry after four months of heroic resistance,
had sued Russia for armistice, was the voice of a deputy of
the agrarian party. Urho Kekkonen said that Finland's sur·
render turned the blood split up to then into a "useless
sacrifice.''
I was not surprised. I knew him. A man of the people,
son of a game warden, Kekkonen had fought as a boy un·
der the flag of Mannerheim in the war of liberation from
Russia in 1919. His nationalism even drove him to a bit of
sympathy for fascism. He wanted war to the death, "heroic
suicide." I thought that such ideas would not get him very
far in the politics of a country that, abandoned by the West
and overwhelmed, had to resign itself to the role of satellite of the U.S.S.R.
I was much surprised, therefore, at the news in 1956 that
he had succeeded Paasikivi to the presidency of the Re·
public. With some worry-for I am a great friend and admirer of Finland-I asked myself how the Russians would
take it. As it turned out the Russians took it so well that
for twenty-five years they not only put up with the presidency of Kekkonen but urged his reelection-and now are
doing all they can to delay his retirement.
I do not know how Kekkonen, with his political past,
won their confidence. But I cannot conceive he resorted
to duplicity, because he did not have it in his character.
For he had not only the shrewdness, but also the abrupt
straightforwardness of a peasant. And perhaps it was just
this abrupt straightforwardness that won him the respect
of the arrogant victor. In 1950 Paasikivi, who knew men,
entrusted him with negotiations on which the survival of
Finland depended-negotiations that had failed two years
before. The story goes that Stalin took to him among other
reasons because of his capacity to hold his liquor, which
even the Finns considered phenomenal. In any case, for
the agreement he brought home, Kekkonen received the
reward of the office of prime minister. From that moment
Paasikivi of his own accord arranged to leave him his own
office, the presidency of the Republic.
Kekkonen assumed the presidency in 1956 at an espe·
cially dramatic moment. The government of Finland had
One of the great journalists of Europe, Indro Montanelli is editor and
founder, nine years ago, of the important newspaper, Il Giornale Nuovo.
This article first appeared in II Giornale Nuovo on October 16, 1981.
64
refused to allow the Soviet government to station troops
in Finland, and Moscow had broken diplomatic relations
with Helsinki, a move taken for a prologue to invasion. At
the Kremlin Kekkonen succeeded in fixing things up. But
four years later the crisis broke out again. Kekkonen
showed up alone in Novosibirsk for a stormy, nine~hour
exchange with Khrushchev. In Moscow there were ru·
mours that they had also let loose with slaps. Questioned,
Kekkonen replied only: "I was not slapped." Even if the
story is not true, the fact that it was told tells quite a bit
about Kekkonen's diplomacy in the face of the Russians.
In the last twenty-five years Kekkonen has done his best
to "finlandize" Finland. He had no other choice-and he
succeeded. Finland is the only satellite of the Soviet Union
where fundamental democratic liberties are respected and
whose door is open to the West.* I do not think that this
miracle is all Kekkonen's doing. Above all it is Finland's
doing and the doing of what even Kekkonen in his youth·
ful nationalistic extremism had called "the useless sacrifice." In fact nothing was more useful than that sacrifice.
Because of it Finland was not erased from the political
map of Europe like the three other Baltic countries, Esto·
nia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In those four months of hellish
winter war on the isthmus of Karelia, the Russians learned
at their own expense of what stuff the Finns were made
and that they could not take their subjection for granted.
Just this always escapes the promoters of the "finlandiza·
tion" of Europe. They forget that to finlandize themselves
the Finns in twenty-five years have dared look Russian
might three times in the face-in 1919, in 1939, and in
1941; that they have inflicted unforgettable defeats and
losses on those unspeakable battlefields; that they sacri·
ficed the best of the best of two generations. And defeated,
they did not bow their heads. The victors demanded trials
11
of War criminals." Instead of suffering a Nuremberg trial,
the marshall who led them against the Russians three times
became president of the Republic. The Finns found only
one "war criminal," Tanner, a former Social Democratic
minister whom they sentenced to ten years. Upon his re·
lease they reelected him deputy and president of the party.
*On February 5, 1982, in the General Assembly at the United Nations,
Finland along with all the free nations of Europe (except for Austria,
Spain, and Turkey, who abstained, and Greece, who voted in favour)
and the United States, Canada, Israel, Japan, Australia, New Zealand,
and Fiji-twenty-one in all-voted against a resolution punishing Israel
for the extension of jurisdiction to the Golan Heights.-LR
WINTER 1982
�As for the Communists, they were and remain a minorityand outside the government. Even' the Russians trust
Kekkonen more than the Communists.
There is no finlandization without Finns. In other
hands-for love of my country I shall not name names-it
does not take much to imagine what would become of
"finlandization": the rush to servileness, zeal outdoing
zeal, bulgarization.
According to news from Helsinki coming through Stockholm, Kekkonen, eighty years old and suffering from a
stroke, is now providing-with deliberation-for his succession. I do not think there is much to worry about. For
even if the finlandizer goes, Finland remains.
Translated by Leo Raditsa
HEPHAESTUS
Thrown away, damaged, thrown down, falling
Broken, limited except the hands, eyes;
Only the will intact, the need braced against
Those wrong legs, ugly and mechanically bad.
Still godlike, inventive craftsman holding
Metals in the indestructible brazier, that flame
Tempering what could be tempered-not his legsBut unchangeable beauty; and seeing it,
Praising it in the armor of the beautiful doomed!
Of Achilles who wept for love in the pursuit of glory.
Hephaestus the gifted dwarf, the talented lover
Of the garb of beauty, striking gold shell
To curve with his skill, grown warm
Over the breast of the more fortunate hero
In whose fame, in whose sulking annointment
The sound of the hammer rang like bells in a dream.
LAURENCE JOSEPHS
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
65
�Mozart's Cherubino
Wye Jamison Allanbrook
Cherubino makes his first entrance in Le nozze di
Figaro midway through the first act, as Susanna is angrily
reflecting on the pretensions of her old enemy Marcellina,
the Countess's blue-stocking governess, after an angry encounter with her:
Va' Ia, vecchia pedante,
Dottoressa arrogante!
Perche hai /etta due libri,
E seccato Madama in
gioventu .. . '
Cherubino brings with him a literary aura of a gentler sort:
while Marcellina clings to pedantry as the emblem of her
superiority, lovestruck Cherubino is not learned, but a
natural poet. He hands Susanna a love song which he has
written, either to one woman or to all (when she asks him
what to do with it, he gives her leave, "with transports of
joy" as the stage directions have it, to read it to every
woman in the palace 2). When she chides him for his impetuousness,3 he answers her in song. Unlike ''Voi che
sapete" -Cherubino's rendition, in Act II, of his own
composition, accompanied by Susanna on the Countess's
guitar-the lovely "Non so pili" is not intended as a real
performance. Yet it has much in common with the later
aria-staged-as-love-song.
Obvious similarities are their closely related key signatures C'Non so pill" in Eb major, ''Voi che sapete" in Bb),
their duple meters, and the prominence in them both of
winds and horns. But, more significantly, in an opera
whose arias are dominated by dance rhythms both pieces
are clearly meant to be apprehended as sung poems, "Non
so pill" as well as HVoi che sapete," even though in the
first case the plot does not suggest an actual performance.
Not measured gestures, but measured words seem to be
the native element of Cherubino's song.
This article comes from a book, The Motion of Character: Rhythmic
Gesture in "Le noz:ze di Figaro" and "Don Giovanni," that the University
of Chicago Press will publish in the fall of 1983.
66
Cherubino's nature unfolds gradually in the course of
the first two acts. A page in Almaviva's castle and probably the Countess's godchild,' at first he seems just a minor character, a member of a detachable subplot. Yet he
ultimately acquires transcendent importance as a touchstone for all the other characters in the opera.
The three principle occasions one has for observing
him in the first two acts are these two solo arias and,
strangely enough, a scene in which he himself is entirely
mute-his romp with Figaro at the end of Act I, "Non
pili andrai," where Figaro playfully initiates the boy into
the joys of war. When Cherubino's "second nature" is
made explicit, it becomes clear that this brilliant march
aria is actually a hymn to the young page, to his figure and
to his powers. But it is necessary first to examine Cherubino's literary idiom: to establish that it is indeed literary,
in HNon so pill" especially, and to discover what its
precise resonances are.
"Non so pili" is divided into two sections. The text of
the first half of the aria consists of two stanzas each containing three ten-syllable lines, and a fourth with nine
syllables:
Non so piu cosa son, cosa faccio . . .
Or di fuoco, ora sono di ghiaccio . . .
Ogni donna cangiar di colore,
Ogni donna mi fa palpitar.
Solo ai nomi d'amor, di diletto
Mi si turba, mi s'altera if petto,
E a par/are mi sforza d'amore
Un desio ch 'io non posso spiegar/5
In rhyme scheme the two stanzas are united by end
rhyme-aabc, ddbc. The first three lines of each stanza
have f~minine rhymes, but the c rhyme (palpitar, spiegar)
is masculine. Mozart sets the poem in a quick alia breve
(2/2) with a single bass note "plucked" on every beat
while the other strings 11 Strum" an accompaniment-the
WINTER 1982
�orchestra is a stand-in for the performer's guitar. Traditionally in popular musical settings pf Italian poetry the
metrical foot (anapests here) established the basic rhythm
of each member, while the number of syllables dictated
the primary and secondary stresses and the cadence;6 the
same principle seems to be in operation here. A rhythmic
germ with an anapestic shape
is repeated three times in each line, with a secondary
stress on the third syllable and a primary stress and cadence on the ninth. Each of the first three lines closes
with a feminine ending
JJ/JDJOjJJ
but the anapest is preserved in the fourth for a masculine
ending and thus a full stop. In order to direct attention to
its integrity as a unit line of a poem, each line is carefully
set off from the next by a quarter note rest: 7
/
'~:p
f
f
Example l
Furthermore, all repetitions are of)"hole lines, and not of
single words or phrases abstracted from their lines, as
would frequently occur in most arias.
All these elements work together toward the apprehension of the regular poetic rhythms of the aria. But there is
a musical problem with a series of lines or a series of stanzas:
"one thing after another" militates against the dramatic
curve of a piece which gives it conviction of a beginning,
middle, and end. In a poem read aloud, meaning, and to a
lesser extent rhythmic variations, provide a sense of crisis
and resolution where it is wanted (as it is not always in a
lyric poem). But in an operatic aria, particularly in Classic
music where climax always has to do with the dramatization of a departure from and return to a certain harmonic
place, a series of lines does not make a period, nor a series
of stanzas a fully shaped whole.; Mpzart always has to alter
the line and verse forms slightly to provide the contractions in .the material, the critical imbalance which creates
the demand for balance-regularity- to return. To shape
the first stanza into a period, Mozart works an augmentation, with syncopation, on the anapes_tic line:
original phrase:
in augmentation:
with syncopation:
n IJ n
J Jl IJ
J J IJ J J ]J J J IJ
J J ]JJ J fJ J..l']J
This transmutation of the regular anapests permits a
sense of closure at stanza's end while still carrying a suggestion of the poetic meter of the verse.
The second stanza raises the problem of the shaping of
the larger-scale formal elements of the aria. The usual
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
plan of an aria in Classic music begins with a statement of
the home key and then modulates to the key a fifth above
it, the dominant (this corresponds to the conventional
term ((exposition" of a "sonata form"). It then moves back
to the home key, or tonic, either directly or after a motion
through a few other keys in order to diffuse the power of
the dominant. This motion through foreign keys (the "development" of a sonata form) I call the X-section.8 Mozart
decides to locate the rhythmic crisis of "Non so piu" early,
in the move to the dominant, and creates it by first exaggerating regularity, then breaching it. He sets the first two
lines of the new stanza carefully as lines of poetry, but in a
somewhat different manner than before: the short syllables of the head anapest are lengthened to occupy an entire measure, a metrical adjustment which doubles the
breathing space between unit lines (two beats instead of
one), and results in leisurely-musically uncompellingphrases of 3 + 3:
IJ. Jli n J n !J J 3 ~IJ.JIJ JJJ OIJJ 3>1
These relaxed phrases, however, create a launching pad
for the motion to the second key area, a motion which is
paralleled by a transformation of the poetic diction which
is charming and dramatically apt. His words about the
movements of his own passion move Cherubino out of
the measured artifice of his verse to sing in a more direct
and passionate style. The three-measure phrases quicken
to urgent and breathless two-measure units,9 the harmony, also quickening, darkens to a diminished seventh
chord on the word desio ("desire"), 10 and desio is itself repeated a fourth higher as the Eli slips down to an Eb and
the beginning of a strong Bb cadential formula:
'"
]f,
r'
x•
Example 2
The repetition of the word desio is governed by an exclusively musical necessity: for the first time in the aria a single word is repeated, lifted from its unit length of poetry,
and it weakens the illusion that the singer is performing a
canzona. But it brings a passionate intensity to this important cadence which would be lacking if the strumming
metrical regularity were retained. Thus in retrospect the
introduction of the leisurely three-measure line length at
the beginning of this period serves to intensify the effect
of the contractions of desire at its final cadence. The great
wit in this manipulation lies in Mozart's realization that
after the lulling regularity of the poetic lines phrases measured purely musically-"aria-style" -would appear as
the accents of true passion, rendering the final cadence
on the dominant "heartfelt" and thus structurally strong. II
67
�"Non so pill" has no formal X~section, moving immedi~
ately back to Eb and a repetition of the opening period. (A
detail in the bass line of that repetition is further confirmation that Mozart intended the aria to be apprehended
as sung verse, as opposed to dance or declamation. At the
opening the bass played only roots of chords, as if to stress
the affinity of the orchestra with a "giant guitar" playing a
simple chordal accompaniment. Since by the return of
the tonic the poetic form is firmly established, the bass
can be put to a different use; compare the following measures with the bass line of example number 1:
1'1·
51
W.'bt• 1 "I p ra II $J ~lh p
jt' J sIr '-
Example 3
In the return the bass has been freed from its mimetic role
to add some contrapuntal interest, implying that it was
under some constraint before.) The fifty-one measures
ending with the repetition of the opening material represent the main body of the aria, a strophic song adapted by
clever modifications to the exigencies of the key area process. The forty-nine measures which remain, an extended
coda, introduce Cherubino the poet's special subject matter-the pastorale. Its text moves Jove out into the country:
Par!o d'amor veg!iando,
Parlo d'amor sognando:
A!l'acque, a!l'ombre, ai manti,
Ai /ion; al!'erbe, ai fonti,
A!l'eco, a!l'arta, ai venti
Che if suon de' vani accenti
Portano via con se."
The second time through, the text is set to a musette with
tonic pedal point, Cherubino and the violins taking the
skirl (ms. 72-80):
Example 4
The pastoral affect, which comes to dominate the opera
in its last two acts, makes a modest entrance here. Cherubino, the young court page, would surely have read or
heard some pastoral poetry. Here he mimics his models,
naively imitating Tasso, perhaps, or another Italian poet
of the pastoral mode. Yet the literary reference, and its
support in Mozart's canzona-like setting of the text, are
not merely for the sake of a convincing characterization of
the youthful poet. In "Voi che sapete" the literary frame
broadens to include Dante, and Cherubino's donne, by
then no longer the vague generality "Women" but clearly
68
Susanna and the Countess, will receive from him homage
of a more profound sort. In "Non so piu" the tremulous
youth who, if no one else will listen, tells his love to himself," becomes a creature in his own pastoral landscape;
the poet is rightly not quite at home within the narrow
bounds of Almaviva's castle.
Cherubino sings the canzona of his own composition
early in Act II, at the behest of Susanna, who is anxious
to comfort the Countess after some tactless words of
Figaro's have left her sad and distracted. Furious at the
Count, Figaro speaks with cruel banter to the Countess
about the Count's attempts to seduce Susanna. He exits
after having enjoined the two women to help him in a plot
to humiliate the Count which may involve new dangers
and humiliations for the Countess, for to set it in motion
the Count will receive an anonymous note about an assignation which the Countess has supposedly made with a
lover. To draw her mistress's attention away from her
troubles, Susanna suggests that Cherubino perform his
composition; the diversion is a welcome one, for Cheru~
bino wants to pay court to the Countess and the Countess
to put her unfaithful husband from her mind. Susanna indulges them both in a moment of loveplay, her indulgence in itself an act of Jove.
The loveplay must, however, be merely an innocent
tableau. It is crucial to da Ponte's and Mozart's conception of their story that the relationship between Cherubino and the Countess be treated less suggestively than it
was in Beaumarchais's original. They took pains to eliminate certain passages from Le mariage de Figaro which
suggested more than a delicate flirtation between the two.
Whereas in Le mariage the Countess often seems to be
hesitating between two lovers, in the opera Cherubino is a
pet, and never a real source of temptation. In Act II, scene
iii, of the play the Countess excitedly prepares herself for
Cherubino's arrival as one would for a lover. Da Ponte in
the corresponding scene (the recitative before this aria)
has her instead sadly lament the improprietous conversations Cherubino overheard when he hid in the chair in
Act I. He omits a scene from the Beaumarchais (IV, viii)
between the Countess and the Count in which the
Countess expresses surprising anguish over the departure
of Cherubino from the castle. The text of "Voi che
sapete" is another of da Ponte's interpolations. In Le
mariage Cherubino sings, to the tune "Malbroug s' en
va't'en guerre," a ballad-like poem about a particular lad's
intense devotion to his godmother. Da Ponte's text, on
the other hand, is conventional and impersonal, addressed
not to one donna, but to the collective donne:
Voi che sapete
Che cosa e amor,
Donne, vedete
S'io l'ho ne! cor. 14
WINTER 1982
�The change is a material one: it is important to Mozart's
conception of Cherubino's role in the opera that he be
more "in love with love" than with any particular object
of his desires.
Again, as in "Non so pili/' the text is plainly a poem,
consisting of seven four-line stanzas with abab rhyme
schemes:
2. Quello ch'io provo
f::i ridiro;
E per me nuovo,
Capir no! so.
5. Ricerco un bene
3. Sento un affetto
6. Sospiro e gemo
Pien di desir
Ch'ora e diletto,
Ch'ora e martir.
Senza vo!er,
Palpito e tremo
Senza saper,
4. Ge!o, e poi sen to
L'alma avvampar,
E in un momenta
Torno a gelar.
Fuori dime,
Non so chi'/ tiene,
Non so cos'e.
7. Non trovo pace
nario had a characteristic stress on the fourth syllable, and
was often set as a galliard: IJ J J IJ J I .16
Mozart's musical line reflects the same stress, although
not the galliard's triple rhythms:
These two measures constitute a unit length, corresponding to one line of poetry, which will be deployed in various
multiples as the aria progresses.
The first verbal stanza-and first period-consists of
four of these lengths (eight measures), brought to closure
by a four-measure cadential phrase (ms. 17-20). The first
two measures of this phrase are poetically anomalous,
smoothing over the quinario rhythms to provide a rhythmic and melodic climax which drives home the cadence,
and its second two measures are a rhythmic rhyme with
the second of the unit lengths:
Notte ne di:
Ma pur mi piace
Languir cos/. 15
Its sentiments are pure Cherubino. Again, as in "Non so
pili/' Mozart must set the poem as a convincing song, unw
derlining its literary origin. Furthermore, since in "Voi
che sapete" opera's great artifice and the reality are oneCherubino is actually meant to be singing-the stanzaic
nature of the piece must be more than just a suggestion.
Yet a straight strophic construction with the same music
repeated seven times will be monotonous, while the usual
key-area plan is too dramatic, obscuring by its spirited
curve the necessary poetic element of formal repetition.
Mozart solves the problem in much the same way as he
did in "Non so piil," combining the key-area plan with
outlines of stanzas asserted by attention to the configurations of Italian metrics. In "Voi che sapete," however, the
solution is even more of a triumph. Neither element is
submerged at the appearance of the other, and Mozart's
attention to the detail of the text is exquisite.
In 2/4 meter, Andante, "Voi che sapete" opens with a
gesture which could in theory be a slow contredanse:
But the stately harmonic rhythm of the opening, underlined by the plucking of Susanna's guitar (pizzicati in all
the strings), militates against the usual rhythmic excitement and compression of a key-area dance form. Cheru·
bino's music is ingenuous and leisurely, lacking the urgency
of dance. Clearly at the outset the principles of syllable
count and of the integrity of a unit line of poetry set the
limits. "Voi che sapete" uses the five-syllable line or quinario (the second and fourth lines of each stanza are quinarios with the fifth syllable verbally but not musically
mute-it is sounded in the orchestral introduction). QuiTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
In the truncated orchestral introduction this cadential
phrase serves as a neat consequent member for two unit
lengths:
I~'"
~~:;-
,~~~ &1 1Ipr1IrIJI11 r 'I Q' f3 •Iiii' iJrl r jj1i It rt zj
,
anl.u.At..f
J t
c.tnJ'<!flt"'"f-
I
Example 5
Once one knows the aria, however, the consequent
sounds tacked on: it is clear that the introduction is a compression and that the proper mode of the aria is the expansive spinning-out of poetic stanzas rather than the
antecedent-consequent symmetries of dance. After the
first period the consequent will be withheld until the two
crucial moments of closure which remain-the end of the
"exposition" and the final cadence of the aria. All the
other stanzas will be left open-ended, "poetically," rather
than "musically" conceived.
The second poetic stanza (ms. 21-28) moves to the
dominant of the dominant, F major, preserving the rhythm
of the preceding stanza's first eight measures except for a
few small variations. The modulation introduces the first
dark harmony of the piece, a d-minor triad, aptly on the
word nuovo ("new") for a nice poetic touch. The third
poetic stanza opens in F major, the proper key of the sec·
ond key area. Once the dominant has been achieved, all
that is lacking is the characteristic confirmation of the
new harmonic place. This stanza, like the second consisting of eight measures modelled on measures 9-16, only
postpones confirmation. Each four-measure member
ends on the dominant of F major, and the interest of the
69
�stanza is in a madrigalistic touch-a pretty painting of the
contrast between diletto and martir ("pleasure" and "torment"): diletto receives an ornamental division, while
Cherubino's warblings turn dark ori the word martn (an
f-minor chord and an augmented sixth), as the pretty
youth sings prettily of the pangs of love:
~
~
"'
Cl.'o#I'JI. ~ .11- kf·fto
..1_1_
'F ;r'
:I-
!-Jl
~
~
j•,
J,l·-~-~
J .L
""t-
*·
\r
Example 6
The conventional pathos of the turn is delicately comic.
The next stanza constitutes one of the critical moments
in the juggling of musical and poetic priorities, the problem being how to bring the second key area to an emphatic
close while preserving a sense of the repetition natural to
a strophic song. At this moment in "Non so piu" Mozart
breached poetic regularities, having first rather exaggerated them. Here he takes the opposite tack, violating a
firmly established principle of the key-area plan by closing
the exposition in an alien key. At the outset of the new
stanza (m. 37) the bottom of the C-major triad (V of F)
drops out:
The X-section begins with a harmonic move toG minor
and a new stanza-the fifth one-in rhythm essentially
resembling the second and third:
In ''\nnlJ. \
• Jfl ffflh nn !D Jn
' J n n J, J n !H J lffl .fff'lll J
; J n Jm J J n J J n J ; J
n
n
J~
J>
ms. 21-28
ms. 29-36
ms. 45-52
Again the text is apt for the harmonic motion, speaking of
Cherubino's search for a good outside of himself, the nature and whereabouts of which he does not know. G
minor is conventionally "outside" the place just abandoned, and the modulation to it is open-ended,_ "searching" (passing through G as V of C ~nd then backmg up to
a G tonic through an augmented stxth to D). But the ftrm
harmonic cadence at the end of the stanza (stanzas 2 and
3 both ended on a dominant, not a tonic) gives the lie to
the charmingly melodramatic words of Cherubino's
quest, settling gently back in a harmonic place and reasserting by its sing-song rhythmic rhyme the frame of the
poem.
In "Non so piu" Mozart disturbed the regular poetic
rhythm during the move to the dominant, balancing that
gesture against the return and expansive pastoral coda.
The balance is different in "Voi che sapete:" the rhythmic crisis helps to weight the eighteen measures of thereturn against the forty-four measures of "exposition." Now
for the first time the repetitive trochees
IJnJJJI
- "I_.,
Example 7
The entire stanza is set in Ab major, a key with a remote
and cool relation to the tonality of the aria. The strange
modulation is suited to the text-Cherubino's description
of the fire and ice of infatuation-and rationalized by the
repetition of the four-measure consequent which closed
the first period: it makes here a solid rhythmic rhyme back
to that cadence in order to counterbalance the harmonic
aberration. Thus by a brilliant manipulation of the elements which he set up as "musical" and "poetic" premises at the beginning of the aria, Mozart has managed a
convincing close to the second key area without at all
abandoning metrics. The strange key (a side-slipping modulation instead of the usual drama of the move up to the
dominant) and the eight-measure rhythmic rhyme-yet
another stanza-are unconventionally undramatic. (Literal end rhyme between the first and second key areas is
unusual, since the dramatic point of the new key area is
the movement to the new harmonic place.) Yet the fourmeasure consequent-marked as having a umusical"
function because it diverges just enough from the regular
strophic rhythms to act as a closing gesture-can still signal forcefully the end of a major formal section. Thus the
second key area of the canzona is dramatic in asserting an
essentially undramatic gesture-the rhythmic repetitions
of verse.
70
and the constant four-measure units lose their hold. Urgent and breathless sixteenth notes with an iambic stress~ffliR J' 'ffllh• fflifl J' nfl'ljl'
... - I .. -1"' - I "'-/
begin a long-arched nine-measure phrase which culminates
on the dominant (m. 61). Five of these iambic phrases ornament a chromatic scale in the bass which overshoots
the dominant by one note. A four-measure trochaic unit
length emerges from the iambs and the phrase backs
down to F, the dominant of Bb, ending in a harmonic and
rhythmic rhyme with stanzas 2 and 3. The text is appropriately breathless; for the first time two stanzas constitute one sentence, and the antitheses pile up to a climax;
"I sigh and moan without wanting to, I quiver and tremble without knowing it, I find no peace night or day, and
yet it pleases me to languish this way." These two stanzas
of text are crammed into the nine measures of music. The
rhyme, which provides a mimetic pause on languir (vii' of
V, m. 60) restrains their breathy passion;
/
..
.....
~
/1""*""~ ..
:
"'
r· e* ,..f-k ~ J,:
Jo.'f
p«r ,.;
..
.. "
.,.
,,,_ .,-k
(1-
"
~
Example 8
WINTER 1982
�Cherubino seems for a moment to step outside his formal
song, overwhelmed with emotion. Yet his outburst does
not violate the studied dramatic effects of a charming !tal·
ian song, since the end rhyme once again asserts the
frame of the poem. The piece plays itself out in a return
to the tonic and to the first stanza of text -a final rhyme
both of key area and of canzona. The four·measure conse·
quent makes its third and fourth appearances to provide
the rhetoric of cadence.
Cherubino is indeed a strange invention; some specta·
tors find him repellent, others merely silly. Certainly da
Ponte and Mozart went out of their way to underline his
mixed nature. A young and blushing girl, dressed as a boy,
tremulously singing the cliches of passion with a cool and
vibrato.free voice-the creature before us must be very
special. One expects him to dance-the established rhyth·
mic idiom of the opera-and his dance turns to song. His
conventionally melodramatic gestures-the chromatic turn
on the word martir for example-suggest a moonstruck
adolescent, yet suddenly his song turns to a cool and sub·
tie Ab major, a strange and otherworldly place, laid out but
never explored. Early adolescence is a peculiarly amor·
phous time of life, when youth is androgynous and uncle·
limited-unsure of what it is or what to expect from the
people around it. Cherubino knows of himself only that
he does not know himself, and he is strikingly undiscrimi·
nating in his relationships. "I no longer know what I am,
what I do," he confesses; "every woman makes me blush,
makes me tremble." The decision to compose the role for
a young woman did more than simply ensure a convincing
portrait of adolescence, however. It kept Cherubino from
being particularized and "embodied," located in a real
place and time like the other characters in the opera. He is
the only character who is "placeless," not generated and
defined by the manners of a particular social world (which
is one reason for his failure, when left to himself, to dance,
for affecting a particular social dance gesture must mark
him as a member of a particular class). More precisely, he
off triumphantly, accompanied by an entire military band
which Figaro has summoned up from nowhere. "Non pili
andrai" is an exuberant romp for the trio (Susanna is on
stage, although she does not sing), and a coming·of·age for
a dreamy adolescent engineered by his affectionate but
realistic "older brother," Figaro.
The aria is cast in rondo form. In its main section and
first episode Figaro describes Cherubino as he is now and
in the other sections as he will be on the field of battle,
both in a comically exaggerated style. Of Cherubino now
Figaro says:
Non piu andrai, farfallone amoroso,
Notte e giomo d'intomo girando,
Delle belle turbando il riposo,
Narcisetto, Adoncino d'amor.
Non piu avrai questi bei pennacchini,
Que/ cappello leggero e galante,
Quella chioma, quell'aria brillante,
Que/ vermiglio, donnesco color."
The music to which the first stanza is set is a C·major
march in 4/4 time with a dotted upbeat. Its opening mo·
tive consists almost exclusively of C·major triads, with a
rousing military fanfare to the words "disturbing the
beauties' beauty·sleep," a musical mixed metaphor which
becomes a substantive trope both in the aria and in the
opera. Here the mixture is one of amorous language and
military music, whereas in the first episode of the rondo
(ms. l5ff.) two musical styles mingle: amorous music in·
sinuates itself into the martial ambiance. Describing
Cherubino's appearance in a gently mocking idiom, Fig·
aro alternates a gavotte rhythm with the orchestra's
march:
Viol,.,. II
/1'-..
is "out of place/' for he is not in his proper home and his
genealogy is left unclear. There is, however, one sympa·
thetic portrait of Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro which
may help to make sense of his changeling natureFigaro's description of the boy in his aria at the end of the
i>•'.ta.· .,. ...;1\Wii bo: }"'........~-
R,..,JJ
ltJJ
p
t~
d.;. ,.,.·,
I
I
T
Example 9
first act, his "battle song," "Non pill andrai."
Following the Count's announcement that Cherubino
must leave the castle, Figaro, fond of the page and amused
at-some would say jealous of-his adolescent love pangs,
wants to sweeten the bitterness of his banishment from
his amorous playground. He sings for Cherubino an aria
containing consolation, paternal advice, and encourage-
ment, interlarded with affectionate jibes at the boy's
youth and cynical comment on the nature of that glorious
endeavor, war. Since Figaro is always actor and illusionist,
Cherubino can't simply walk off to war; he must march
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
A little Adonis on his way to battle deserves a mixture of
erotic and military gestures; the march and the coy gavotte
with its pastoral and amorous connotations are a wholly
appropriate conjunction here, and Figaro revels in them.
The brief gavotte dissolves into a dominant pedal, which
calls back the original march theme (m. 31). Figaro's fancy
is afire: after repeating the march he launches an enor·
mously expanded episode (ms. 43ff.)-the description of
Cherubino at the front-returning to the same dominant
pedal and bedroom march (m. 78) and adding a coda. Orig·
71
�inally the march gesture, found p~incipally in the strings,
was merely the orchestral accompaniment; now it becomes
a presence on stage, brought to life as a real military
march. Mozart calls on the full colors of the orchestra:
strings alternate with winds and brass, including trumpets, and the tympani sound for the first time. Figaro, no
longer singing a human vocal line, imitates a trumpet
voicing battle calls:
Example lO
In measure 61 the strings drop out entirely and a full military band plays a new march, suitable for the field and not
at all singable. In the coda this field march returns, and
the stage directions read "Partono tutti alia militare;" 18 in
this playful aria about playing the imaginative has drawn
playfully near to the real, with the help of the "realistic"
rhythms and colors of music.
Figaro's description of Cherubino goes a long way toward explaining some of the paradoxes which surround
him. There is much about the "little Cherub" which
evokes another moonstruck child, an antique deity-the
figure of Eros-Cupid. The imagery of the libretto of Le
nozze di Figaro, thoroughly pastoral, is also frequently
classical. Much of this language centers around Cherubino himself; even Basilio calls him "Cherubino, Cherubin d'amore," hinting at the connection with Eros, and to
Figaro in this aria he is a "little Narcisetto, little Adonis of
love." The classical and the pastoral were for the eighteenth century two genres inextricably mixed. The shepherd-lovers of late eighteenth-century pastoral pieces are
inevitably given classical-sounding names, often drawn directly from the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil;
they are distant descendants of that tradition. At the end
of the opera Figaro is moved to draw the connection himself: just after Susanna sings her beautiful pastorale,
"Deh, vieni," musings on the theme of the correspondence between the twilight night and the state of a lover's
soul (and meant to tease Figaro for the absurdity of his distrust of her), he is drawn, coming to interrupt her purported rendezvous, ironically to style himself as Vulcan,
and Susanna and the unknown lover as Venus and Mars.
The pastoral diction and musette of "Non so pili" place
Cherubino squarely in the Arcadian tradition; as Eros he
presides over the couples in the opera-the indigenous
deity of pastoral love.
The pastoral Eros of Le nozze di Figaro is very different
from whatever Eros presides, for example, in Don Giovanni. There Eros wounds, and often disastrously; he
strikes Donna Elvira just as Virgil's Cupid cunningly
pierced the breast of Dido with a fatal love for Aeneas. In
Figaro, on the other hand, Eros is love through his very
vulnerability. In his openness to all love and love for all, he
72
touches Susanna, Figaro, and the Countess, and makes
the Count suspicious and edgy, although Almaviva is
plainly never quite sure why he should distrust the young
page. The Count ought to worry less about the possibility
of Cherubino seducing the Countess and more about the
efficacy of Cherubino's selfless brand of love, which Almaviva is incapable of comprehending. In the dogma of
Cherubino's eros, being moved by someone is equally as
important as one's own su<;cess in moving the other toward oneself. Cherubino celebrates passion in the strict
sense of the word-the joys and pains of suffering the object of one's affections to move one. When in the finale of
the second act the Count gasps out "Rosina" (II, 15, 229230), he is beginning to learn about this "being affected."
Cherubino's relationships with Susanna, the Countess,
and Figaro reveal the many facets of his special "affection." One erotic thread runs through them all: an aliveness to the physical qualities of the beloved-his walk, his
gestures, the sound of his voice-so that merely glancing
at the beloved gives one an involuntary start. Cherubino
presides over many relationships not explicitly erotic. He
is fond of Susanna, and calls her sorella ("sister"), she
dresses him up like a doll, and they banter and plot like
brother and sister. When in Act II they are caught in danger together they behave like two frightened children. Yet
Susanna affectionately appreciates Cherubino's beauty;
his physical presence moves her. "Che vezzo, che figura!/
Mirate il bricconcello,/Mirate quanta e bello!" 19 she cries.
Cherubino's affection for the Countess is more explicitly
erotic; he steals her ribbon for a magic talisman, and she is
obviously fluttered by his presence. When Susanna admires him the Countess turns away abruptly, snapping
"Quante buffonerie!"20 as though to remind herself to keep
her distance from the charming boy. Rosina is not a middleaged matron, but a young girl recently married and suffering from the inattention of a philandering husband. But, as
I have already pointed out, Mozart and da Ponte treat the
erotic side of their affection more delicately than did Beaumarchais, combining it with Cherubino's hero-worship of
his handsome and benevolent godmother; if anything,
Cherubino's stammering when he speaks to the Countess
makes her seem more matronly than she actually is.
Despite his awkwardness and naivete, his constant facility for annoying, all the characters in the opera find themselves moved in some way by this absurd child. The
Count's exasperation at Cherubino's ubiquity goes deeper
than he realizes. When he cries "E mi fara il destino/Ritrovar questa paggio in ogni loco!"21 he is only admitting to
the boy's disturbing influence on all the loves and friendships in the opera. The affection between Susanna and
the Countess also patterns itself on Cherubino's eros:
awakened by each other's admirable qualities, they move
toward each other and toward friendship. The opera is in
fact about the friendship between the two women and its
possibility-how trust and affection can exist between
two people who share nobility of character, but not of
rank. Now it can be seen more clearly why it is fitting that
WINTER 1982
�Cherubino be a poet. The androgynous Eros-Cupid, neither young nor old, male nor female, .human nor divine,
sings a song which celebrates the passions which Susanna
experiences gladly, the Countess perforce sadly, which
the Countess is too dignified, Susanna too matter-of-fact,
to express outright. The utterly conventional poetry of
"Voi che sapete" from its first line suggests another, less
conventional poet and a more serious intent: "Donne
ch'avete intelletto d'amore"22 is the first line of Dante's
sonnet sequence about the fine discipline of love, and the
abstract quality of its language is a reflection of the tradition in which erotic love sets the soul on the path to
higher things. Cherubino the poet is celebrating the two
women themselves; the opening words of his song sweep
them into his court. He identifies them as "donne che
sanno che cosa e amor, che hanna intelletto d'amore."2 3
He dubs them secular Beatrices, mediums for the workings of Eros. A special aura surrounds them; comprehend-
ing "che cosa e amor," they are gifted with a surpassing
vision of the way things are. (The Countess, it should be
pointed out, returns the compliment, in "Porgi, amor,"
her aria at the opening of Act II, addressing her petition
there to the god of love, Cherubino-Eros.) Furthermore,
by addressing the two women indiscriminately as donne,
Cherubino reveals the special bond between servant and
mistress; initiates, at least, can address them on equal
terms. This relation fittingly comes to light reflected in
the eyes of its catalyst, Cherubino d'a more.
We return in a roundabout way to Figaro and "Non pili
andrai." There exist various interpretations of what Figaro is up to in the aria. It may be perhaps just what it
seems~Figaro's attempt to divert Cherubino from the
sorrows of parting~or, as some have suggested, actually
an attack on Cherubino, teasing banter meant to rub salt
in the wounds, stemming from Figaro's jealousy of the
boy's appeal for the ladies or from a plebeian's resentment
of the aristocratic page 24 In the latter case an aside which
Figaro makes to Cherubino just before the aria~"Io vo'
parlati/Pria che tu parta"' 5 ~is taken as a bullying invitation to a later showdown, whispered so that Susanna can't
hear. That aside, however, has a further audience~the
Count and Basilio. Although many editions have them
leave the stage just before the aside, in the 1786 libretto
(and in the corresponding scene from Le mariage de Figaro) they do not leave, and indeed witness the whole of
Figaro's performance; the scene is rarely played this way,
and loses most of its significance as a result. A scrap of dialogue from the beginning of Act II, just before Cherubino
sings "Voi che sa pete," clarifies the intent of the aside immediately. Figaro is expounding to the Countess the plan
for the Count's humiliation, which involves dressing
Cherubino as Susanna and sending him to the rendezvous
with the Count. Then Figaro says to the Countess, "Il picciol Cherubino,/Per mio consiglio non ancor partito . .. " 26
He plainly wants words with the boy here in Act I not in
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
order to vent his jealousy or class resentment, but to keep
Cherubino from leaving the castle, so that they can lay
plans about the plot he mentions in Act II. Thus all
through "Non pili andrai" Figaro is foresworn to keep
Cherubino back from battle; he has no intention ofletting
the Count disturb the ornamental life of the "amorous
butterfly, flitting around night and day." In the course of
the plot the lad will have to be disguised as a maiden, but
the task takes almost no effort; already his checks have
"that blushing, womanly color." By celebrating the imminent departure as if in rueful assent to it, Figaro's affectionate romp with Cherubino is meant to keep the watching Count off the scent.
Yet the artful dodge has deeper overtones. If Cherubino is the presiding genius of the opera, offering a paradigm of the right way to love, the moment of romping joy
must be more than a sugar-coated pill for a charming
young rascal and a dodge to deceive the Count. "Non pili
andrai" establishes an important relationship between Figaro and Cherubino. Least of all is Figaro teaching Cherubino; he is describing Cherubino, celebrating CheruCherubino, and enlisting Cherubino.
In the first case, Cherubino's comportment on the
stage will not in itself spell out his "second nature." We
need the comments of another observer who will single
out details which consolidate the scattered impressions
generated by "Non so pili." We hear Cherubino called a
"little Narcissus, little Adonis of love," have our attention
drawn to his "little feathers," his "sparkling air," his
"blushing, womanly color," and our impressions are confirmed; it was right that the youth reminded us of that
other love child, the pagan cherub Eros.
Secondly, Figaro celebrates Cherubino. Susanna and
the Countess need not be embarrassed about being moved
by Cherubino, even in his guise as a page; for women to
amuse themselves decorously with the castle mascot is
perfectly proper. Figaro must also be touched by the
power of the strange youth, but to show it is for him a
more delicate matter. Both Figaro and Cherubino are
male, and while they are near the same age, Figaro has attained his manhood. On the other hand, Figaro may be a
little jealous of Cherubino's luscious youth. Circumstances
prevent their sharing the innocent playmate-friendship of
Susanna and Cherubino. Later, at the end of the opera,
Figaro turns away momentarily from the graces of the two
women, giving in to the darker passions of jealousy and
distrust. It is important that he show here that his primary
attachment is to the court of Cherubino, and not to the
selfish brotherhood of the Count and his satellites. Figaro
will rarely reveal how Cherubino moves him; a fraternal
romp in which all three join is one of the few occasions
where it is possible. Figaro shows his affection for Cherubino by exercising for the boy his imaginative talents;
"Non piu andrai" is a moment of uloveplay" between
Cherubino and Figaro.
Finally, Figaro enlists Cherubino. Figaro in his tribute
to the page admits the power of Cherubino's kind of pas-
73
�sian. Only this eros will unite all the conspirators, later on
even moving an unlikely ally like Marcellina over to their
side (when she sees Figaro as if for the first time, and is
genuinely moved by the person of her son). To arm Eros·
Cupid with arrows and shield was an ancient conceit.
Here in "Non pill andrai" Figaro is arming Cherubino,
girding him for the struggle to come. In fact the figure of
the "bedroom soldier," usually the matter of vulgar jokes,
becomes in Figaro an emblem for the righteous of the
opera and for the right kind of passion; the gentle Count·
ess moves to a mixture of lyric and military modes in
"Porgi, amor," and in the finale to Act III a ragged band of
militants for Eros executes a stirring march, the uniformed Cherubino at their head, before they outmaneuver
the Count once again. The gesture of the military march,
taking off from Cherubino's imminent field commission,
becomes a testimony to trust in the powers of human af.
fection when matched against the assailing brutishness of
men. "Amor vincit omnia": the lyrics of Cherubino the
poet celebrate this maxim in all its delicate compulsion.
l. "Go on, you old pedant, you stuck-up lady scholar; just because you
once read two books, and annoyed Madame in her youth ... " (I, v,
75- 78).
2. "Leggila alia padrona,/Leggila tu medesma,/Leggila a Barbarina, a
Marcellina,/Leggila ad ogni donna del palazzo!" ("Read it to my mistress, you read it to yourself, read it to Barbarina, to Marcellina, read it
to every woman in the palace").
3. "Povero Cherubin, siete voi pazzo?" ("Poor Cherubin, are you
mad?").
4. In the original of Le nozze di Figaro, Beaumarchais's Le mariage de
Figaro, the Countess explains that Cherubino is related to her family
and is her godchild (1, x). Da Ponte omitted the scene in which these
lines occur, but the Countess is referred to as Cherubino's comare or
godmother (by Susanna-!, v, 86). It was customary to take nobJe.born
boys into noble households as pages.
5. "I don't know what I am, what I'm doing .... Sometimes I'm on fire,
sometimes I'm all ice .... Every woman makes me blush, makes me
tremble. At the mere names of love, of pleasure, I grow agitated, my
heart skips a beat, and a desire which I cannot explain forces me to
speak of love!"
6. See Putnam Aldrich, Rhythm in Seventeenth-Century Italian Monody
New York 1966.
7. Lines three and four of the first stanza might seem to be an anomaly
in an anapestic scheme because of the string of six eighth-notes with
which they begin:
Q-.~.,; do11·n4.. CM·11'.fr- ,1; e~-/D-r~
n1nn
J JJ/JJ
But the first eighth-note on the syllable don- is an appOggiatura varying
the line by embellishing the all-important word donna; it does not distract from the underlying rhythm.
8. For a more detailed discussion of the reasons for substituting these
terms for the more conventional ones, see Leonard G. Ratner, "Harmonic Aspects of Classic Form," Journal of the American Musicological
Society 2, 1949, 159-68.
9. Measure 22, using for the first two lines the syncopation from the
earlier cadence.
10. Measure 27-vii7 ofF, the new dominant. Or the Db could be regarded as a chromatic appoggiatura to a V~ of V; the effect is the same.
ll. Ordinarily to register "truest" passion in the middle of an operatic
aria the character moves from strictly measured music to the freer
74
rhythms of recitative. For example, in the finale to the second act of
Figaro, in the midst of a spirited 4/4 interchange between the Count
and the Countess, he calls her suddenly by her Christian name and she,
deeply stung, answers him in a phrase of recitative which brings the
rhythmic action to an abrupt halt (II, 15, 230-233). In "Non so pill" the
strictly "poetic" setting is apprehended as the artifice, and the singer
need not resort to declamation to register his natural voice.
12. "I speak of love when I'm awake, I speak of love when I'm dreaming: to the water, to the shadows, to the mountains, to the flowers, to the
grass, to the fountains, to the echo, to the air, to the winds, which bear
away with themselves the sound ofthe empty syllables" (ms. 54-91).
13. "E, se non ho chi m'oda,/Parlo d'amor con me"-the last two lines
of the text of "Non so pill."
14. "Ladies, you who know what love is, see if I have it in my heart."
15. "I shall tell you again what I'm feeling; it's new for me, and I don't
know how to understand it. I have a feeling full of desire; sometimes it's
pleasure, sometimes torment. I'm cold, and then I feel my soul all
ablaze, and in a moment I'm cold again. I'm looking for a good which is
outside of me; I don't know who has it, or what it is. I sigh and moan
without wanting to, I quiver and tremble without knowing it, I find no
peace night or day, and yet it pleases me to languish this way."
16. Alddch, 103-133.
17. "No more, amorous butterfly, will you go flitting around night and
day disturbing the beauties' beauty-sleep, you little Narcissus, little
Adonis of love. No more will you have these fine little feathers, that light
and rakish cap, that sparkling air, that blushing, womanly color."
18. "All exit in military style."
19. "What a bearing, what a face! Look at the little colt, see how beautiful he is!" (II, 12, 89-92).
20. "What foolishness!" (II, 12, 119).
21. "And will destiny make me find this page everywhere!" (II, viii, 8385).
22. "Ye women who comprehend love ... "
23. "Women who know what love is, who comprehend love ... " My
sentence is a conflation of the opening line of the aria and the opening
line of Dante's poem.
24. This suggestion is made by Siegmund Levarie (Mozart's Le nozze di
Figaro: A Critical Analysis, Chicago 1952, 72), and by Frits Noske ("Social Tensions in Le nozze di Figaro," Music and Letters, January 1969,
52). Because it is important ammunition for those who see the opera as a
revolutionary comedy in the tradition of its original, and not as a pastoral
romance about the nature of true attachment, as it seems to me to have
become, this suggestion needs refutation. It depends partly on the assumption that Figaro, while he defers to Cherubino in public, addressing him in the second person plural at the beginning of this scene ("E
voi non applaudite?"), is in private insolent (he addresses Cherubino
thereafter exclusively as tu).
But since all Figaro's remarks except for one aside are overheard by
the Count and Basilio (see above), there is actually no distinction made
here between public and private. According to the original libretto, Figaro's final words to Cherubino before the aria ("Farewell, little Cherubino. How your [tuo]fate changes in a moment!") are said with feigned
joy (finta gioia)-the public prevails. Furthermore, although Cherubino
is probably of gentle birth, he is nevertheless a child, not in his proper
home, and in a position of service; ordinary protocol will probably not
apply. The issue of Cherubino's aristocracy never seems to be a live one
in his relationships with Susanna and Figaro, and so tu is no more necessarily insolent than voi defers. Susanna calls Cherubino voi perhaps for
the same reasons as the Countess does-to keep the attractive and
amorous boy at arm's length. And Figaro's tu to Cherubino is probably
affectionate, his one public voi a perfunctory attempt, before he warms
to his role as fond older brother, to conceal from the Count and Basilio
their relationship as friends and-as I shall show in a moment-future
conspirators.
25. "I want to speak to you before you leave."
26. "Little Cherubino, who on my advice has not yet left ... " (italics
mine).
WINTER 1982
�The Fury of Aeneas
Joe
The story Homer tells in the Iliad begins with the eruption of the anger of Achilles. As the twenty-fourth book of
the poem opens, that anger has reached its greatest intensity. Achilles "let fall the swelling tears, lying sometimes
along his side, sometimes on his back, and now again prone
on his face; then he would stand upright, and pace turning in distraction along the beach of the sea ... (At dawn,)
when he had yoked running horses under the chariot he
would fasten Hektor behind the chariot, so as to drag him,
and draw him three times around the tomb of Menoitios'
fallen son, then rest again in his shelter, and throw down
the dead man and leave him to lie sprawled on his face in
the dust ... So Achilleus in his fury outraged great
Hektor." (24. 9-22) The wrath which has withstood the
events of twenty-three books has swollen into a rage
which denies Achilles sleep, food, or the cessation of his
tears, a rage which breaks forth in monotonous acts of revenge which do not relieve but frustrate and provoke.
Achilles now walks the circular path at the center of anger
in which it is quenchless, infinite.
But the Iliad is not finally the story of the victory of anger over Achilles, because Zeus has one last scheme. He
arranges for Priam to visit Achilles, to stand before him
risking his wrath, to ask in person for pity. Priam kills the
anger of Achilles by displacing it with the grief of Achilles,
which can meet and merge with the grief of Priam and
come to rest in mutual comforting. Here is Homer's de~
scription of that last and least-expected turning point in
the Iliad: as Priam ends his words to Achilles, saying, " 'I
put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my
children,' " Homer continues, 10 So he spoke, and stirred in
the other a passion of grieving for his own father. He took
the old man's hand and pushed him gently away, and the
A tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis, Joe Sachs delivered this lecture in Santa Fe on September 18, 1981, and in Annapolis on October 2,
1981.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Sachs
two remembered, as Priam sat huddled at the feet of
Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor and
Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos. The sound of their mourning moved in the house.
Then when great Achilleus had taken full satisfaction in
sorrow and the passion for it had gone from his mind and
body, thereafter he rose from his chair, and took the old
man by the hand, and set him on his feet again, in pity for
the grey head and the grey beard, and spoke to him and
addressed him in winged words." (24. 506-17)
Book twenty-four ends with one last Homeric dawn, in
which the doomed people of Troy celebrate the burial of
their beloved Hector with fitting ceremonies and a glorious feast. Such was the burial of Hector, breaker of
horses, only because, between his wrath and his own imminent death, Achilles rejoined the human community.
The climax of the Iliad, then, is the moment when Achilles remembers his father. That moment, which pierces his
heart and lets the anger drain from it, will not add a day to
his life or to the survival of Troy, but it does make supportable the enormous weight of grief which has built in
Achilles, in Priam, in the Trojans, and in the hearer or
reader of the poem.
Virgil's Aeneid is, above all else, a reply to the Iliad and
Odyssey and a rejection of the kind of comfort Homer offers. I have set before you at length the moment into
which Homer puts a power which counterbalances all the
horror and pain of the Iliad because Virgil frames the
Aeneid with two echoes of that moment. Twice in the
Aeneid, in scenes of battle, the image of Aeneas' father
comes into his mind. On the first occasion, Aeneas is looking at Priam, and the memory of his father stirs him to action. The scene is in Book two, but it is a flashback to the
beginning of Aeneas' story, and the memory of his father
marks the beginning of his undertaking of the deeds to
which he has been called. On the second occasion, Aeneas
has just watched a young man die whom he killed, and
75
�whose father he is about to confront. The two characters,
Lausus and Mezentius, evoke memories of Hector and
Priam for the reader, and in Aeneas a memory of his father which occasions a moment of understanding. This
scene is in Book ten, but it is a direct preparation for the
understanding of the concluding lines and action of the
Aeneid. Thus the climactic moment of the Iliad is present
in the first and last events in Virgil's story, and in both
cases it is put in a perspective in which its power is acknowledged but its weight is lessened.
In Book two of the Aeneid we watch alongside a helpless Aeneas while Achilles' one deed of comfort and kindness is desecrated by Achilles' son. Listen as this third
generation speaks to the first: " 'Carry off these tidings; go
and bring this message to my father, son of Peleus; and
remember, let him know my sorry doings, how degenerate
is Neoptolemus. Now die.' This said, he dragged him to
the very altar stone, with Priam shuddering and slipping
in the blood that streamed from his own son. And Pyrrhus
with his left hand clutched tight the hair of Priam; his
right hand drew his glistening blade, and then he buried it
hilt-high in the king's side. This was the end of Priam's
destinies ... Now he lies along the shore, a giant trunk, his
head torn from his shoulders, as a corpse without a
name." (2. 547-58) As Neoptolemus sinks back into the
horror from which his father had emerged, the words
"This was the end of Priam" overtake and destroy the
calm of the words "Such was the burial of Hector."
Aeneas can do nothing for Priam, since he watches
trapped on a roof-beam of the wrecked and burning palace. But as he watches Priam die, he remembers his own
father, and all his helpless loved ones whom he has left at
home while he fights a useless battle to vent his rage at
the conquering Greeks. It seems that the memory of his
father will recall Aeneas to the deeds the ghost of Hector
has asked of him: to let Troy fall, and carry himself and
Troy's holy things across the sea. Like Achilles, Aeneas
has been wasting himself in the effort to exact the satisfaction of revenge from his enemies, and like Achilles he
is restored to himself in remembering his father. But just
as we begin to expect Aeneas to return to save his father,
wife, and son, and leave revenge behind, his eye lights on
Helen. In that sight his father's need of him is forgotten,
and a blind fury to destroy the cause of so much evil overwhelms even his capacity to keep that evil from reaching
those dearest to him. As Aeneas' sword is about to fall on
Helen, his goddess-mother grabs his arm. Venus sends
him to save his family, after showing him that not Helen
but the gods are responsible for the destruction of Troy.
But the violent arresting of Aeneas' arm when it has been
set in motion by the strongest longing in his heart leaves
behind a feeling of frustration which is not released until
the last lines of the poem. That is the beginning of the
story of Aeneas' journey. Let us try to understand how it
speaks to Homer.
The healing of Achilles' anger is the last event in his
story, and nearly the last in his life. It is enshrined forever
76
by the structure of Homer's story, which makes it the resolution of twenty-three books of tension. Achilles' story
moves out of anger, through pity, to a peace in the midst
of war. But does Homer's framing of that story reveal or
distort? Does his emphasis convey the true weights of
things? Virgil carries Homer's story beyond Homer's ending, to submerge Achilles' humanity in the brutality of his
son and Hector's glorious funeral in the hideous, headless,
nameless corpse of his father. But more important, Virgil
appropriates the climactic moment of the Iliad to make it
a fleeting mood which has no lasting effect, none in the
world and none in the heart of Aeneas. The Iliad ends
with a frozen picture of a pendulum at the top of its
swing: the picture is beautiful but that of which it is a picture is unstable. If only the dualities in our lives could be
laid to rest by our embracing of their wholesome sides, if
only the death of anger could be an overcoming, once and
for all, of its power over us, then the world might be a turbulent but finally a simple good place, and evil our own
fault. But dead anger rises again; the self-destructive passions can be seen for what they are and still reassert their
power over us. The poet Homer can show us things that
make us glad, but is that seeing what we need? The anger
of Aeneas recurs throughout the Aeneid, and both its ebb
and its flow are destructive. One of the principal teachings of the Aeneid is that rage is ineradicable from the human heart, because its cure is worse than the disease. Let
us watch as Aeneas' eyes are opened to this ugliest of
truths, in Virgil's second echo of the climax of the Iliad.
The worst man in the Aeneid is undoubtedly Mezentius,
a tyrant who tortured his subjects for sport until they rebelled and he escaped. Thousands of those subjects unite
with Aeneas in his Italian war, solely for the chance to kill
Mezentius. Without any good reason, as Virgil puts it, another thousand remain loyal to Mezentius, among them
his son Lausus, called breaker of horses. When Aeneas
wounds Mezentius with a spearcast, Lausus, his valor
awakened by his love for his father, prevents Aeneas'
sword from falling, giving his companions the chance to
save Mezentius and drive back Aeneas. Fury rises in Aeneas as he is once again thwarted on the point of killing a
thing of evil, but as he waits in shelter for all his enemies'
javelins to be thrown he calms down, and shouts at La usus
to be sensible and withdraw. When Lausus insists on
fighting him, a greater anger surges in Aeneas, and in that
rage he kills Lausus.
At whom is Aeneas angry? Can it be at Lausus, whom
he has no desire to fight and for whom he has nothing but
admiration? As Aeneas looks at La usus' dying face he sees
the image of his own love for his own father, and gives the
dead Lausus to his companions for honorable burial. It is
at this moment that the transformation in the heart of
Achilles resonates most strongly in the Aeneid, but Aeneas felt his pity before Lausus was dead, and would have
spared him had he not been driven to a resurgence of his
dead anger. To understand the killing of Lausus is, I think,
to be halfway to understanding the killing of Turnus,
WINTER 1982
�which would be equivalent to understanding the whole
Aeneid. Let us keep trying.
'
Lausus loves a father whom no one could respect. His
motive is therefore pure, irrational love, with no other
support. By painting Mezentius as unrelievedly, monstrously evil, Virgil makes the central choice of Lausus'
life be between love and everything that makes sense.
Even further, the circumstances of the battle force Lausus
to measure the strength of that love, since after he has
saved his father's life he could retreat honorably, and
must decide whether to do so or to throw away his life.
Unrestrained love and loyalty are, for Lausus, consistent
only with what is wild and reckless: to attack Aeneas and
die. Both Lausus and Aeneas have a long time to think
about this before it happens. There is an irrational and inescapable logic at work in the scene: the better a man Lausus is the more is it necessary that he die in a bad cause,
and the more fully Aeneas recognizes his goodness the
more necessary is it that he kill him, and not do him the
insult of refusing his self-sacrifice. The rage which supplies the motive power for the killing Aeneas has no heart
to commit is a rage brought about by his recognition of
the way in which both Lausus and he are trapped.
Achilles and Priam, suffering the worst private grief,
could draw together in mutual recognition and give each
other what each needed most. Priam gave Achilles deliverance from his anger, and Achilles gave Priam the means
and the time to unite with his city and his dead son in one
last civic festival. In the corresponding Virgilian recognition scene, it seems that Lausus can give Aeneas nothing,
and Aeneas can give Lausus only death. With the image
of his own father in mind, Aeneas asks the dead Lausus,
"Miserable boy, what can I give you now? What honor is
worthy of your character?" (10. 825-6) He gives to the
corpse the weapons in which it found its only happiness,
and gives the corpse itelf back to its own people, to be
mingled with the ashes and shades of its ancestors, wondering aloud if that will matter to anyone. Finally, he dedicates to La usus the only gift in his power which can solace
such a miserably unhappy death: the resolve to make his
own greatness such that there will be no shame in having
fallen beneath it. Thus La usus has given something to Aeneas-the burden of another obligation to the dead. The
Homeric comfort of the sharing in human community is
not available either to Lausus or to Aeneas. Lausus, whom
Virgil introduces in Book seven as a young man worthy to
be happy, had the wrong father, and he cannot but be the
son of his father. Aeneas likewise cannot escape being the
man on whom Trojans, Italians, and gods depend to stand
divided in war from Lausus, and be his killer. The Homeric world, whatever divisions may be within it, makes a
whole; the Virgilian world is too full of purposes too
deeply crossed to be composed, ever.
Am I going too far in reading in an intensely painful but
small tragic event a vision of a tragic world? Is not Virgil's
theme the bringing of law to the world? Are not the tragedies of Lausus and Turnus and Camilla and Nisus and
1
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Euryalus and Pallas and Evander and Amata and Dido
and Palinurus the events which Virgil shapes into the
transformation of the world into a place in which such
things will no longer happen? It is true that the bringing
of the world to peace under law is the theme of the Aeneid,
but we must not let anyone but Virgil tell us what Virgil
thinks about that subject.
We hear of it first, early in Book one, from Jupiter. He
tells Venus that Aeneas' Roman descendents will be the
lords of all things, without limits in time or place, that one
of them, meaning Augustus, will carry his empire to the
Ocean and his fame to the stars, and in doing so allow the
rough ages of the world to become gentle under law. And
here are Jupiter's last words: "The gruesome gates of war,
with tightly welded iron plates, shall be shut fast. Within,
unholy Rage shall sit on his ferocious weapons, bound behind his back by a hundred knots of brass; he shall groan
horribly with bloody lips." (293-6) Forty lines devoted to
triumph and glory seem to dissolve in four lines of ugliness. One's gaze is turned not outward, to a world finally
free of the source of war, but to the struggling caged being
confined within. The last words of this first picture of
Rome are not of victory or victors but of a victim, Furor,
and of the sights and sounds of his pain. Why is rage presented as a person? Why is a reader who is incapable of
enjoying a description of torture made to sympathize with
the cause of war?
Three lines after this ghastly and troubling portrait we
hear for the first time in the poem the name of Dido. One
third of the poem of the founding of Rome is the story of
Dido, and more than a third of its impact is carried by Virgil's presentation of her. One famous commentator has
said that Virgil was "no master of the epic art" because he
allowed such things as the sufferings of Dido to overwhelm his efforts to glorify Rome. Another has said that
the Aeneid is the first wholly successful epic ever written,
because it is the first to have the unity attained previously
only in dramas, a unity evident primarily in the complete
merging of the Dido story into that of the triumph of
Rome. Each commentator is half-right. The Aeneid is unified, but not around the figure of Augustus; Dido is the
most powerful figure in Virgil's composition, but not by
accident. The theme of Rome's bringing of a new age of
law to the world enters the poem, modulates to a strange
sadness, and passes over into the story of Dido. Dido's
story is deeper than Rome's, and illuminates it.
Dido is, to begin with, in the same situation as Aeneas,
and she has handled that situation so well that everything
about her gives hope to Aeneas at a time when he has
none. She too has been driven out of her own country and
been responsible for the lives of a band of fellow-refugees.
She too has had to find a new life in the strange and unknown lands of the West. She has won a place for her people by winning the respect of neighboring rulers, and under
her leadership, her subjects are building the conditions of
a healthy communal life: fortifications, houses, a harbor, a
theater, a senate. Already built, in the center of the city, is
77
�a temple to Juno, filled with scenes of the Trojan War.
The work under way is to Aeneas a vision of happiness,
and the completed work feeds his soul. One of the other
Trojans sees in Carthage a city with the power to impose
justice on the proud and a ruler with the goodness to
spare the defeated. We will hear almost the same words
spoken in Book six as an exhortation to Rome. The story
of Dido, smaller only in geographical scale, begins where
the story of Rome aims.
Dido's Phoenician Carthage, where Aeneas tells the
tale of his long wanderings, is, like the Phaiakian Scheria
of Alkinous and Arete, a city ruled by virtue and strong intellect. Dido herself, like Penelope, is a woman with the
dignity to keep arrogant suitors at a distance. And the hospitality, the capacity to permit another to be at home in a
place that is not his own, that is so beautifully depicted in
the Odyssey, is enjoyed by Aeneas nowhere but in the
home of Dido. In Virgil's re-casting of Homer's story of
Odysseus, almost all its places and people are condensed
into the story of Dido. Like the Iliad, Homer's Odyssey is a
story of the recovery of human community. Its culmination is the restoration of political order to Ithaca. But Dido's story reverses the Odyssean motion from anarchy to
order, from savagery to serenity. In the midst of his journey Odysseus is cursed by a one-eyed monster, a nonhuman being who lives outside all law. At the end of his
stay in Carthage, Aeneas too is cursed by a being who is
outside all law and community, and that monster is Dido
herself.
Why was Dido so successful as a ruler? I think Virgil's
briefest answer can be found near the end of Book one:
because her soul was in repose, because in turn her heart
was out of use {resides animas desuetaque corda, I. 722).
Since the death of her first husband, she tells her sister,
Aeneas alone has caused her judgment to bend and her
soul to totter. (4. 20-3) The empty pathways which the
flame of love once burned through her have not closed or
healed. The ancient flame is still within Dido, just as a living rage is still behind the gates of war which Augustus
closes with force and with law. In Latin, the name of Augustus' victim and that of Dido's conqueror are the same,
furor. Virgil's one brief portrait of a happy city is of Carthage under the rule of Dido for only so long as the furious
love within her is out of use. In the Odyssey, political community is displayed as the natural and the only life which
realizes what it is to be a human being. In the Aeneid, political life is presented as depending upon the inhuman
constraint that Dido practices upon herself and Augustus
exerts on the world. Carthage thrives on Didp' s serene
control, and collapses into disarray when she falls in love.
Many readers have seen in the fate of Dido a dangerous
example which Aeneas must see and learn to avoid. Such
readers see the foundations of the political life in Aeneas'
rejection of her. Like an oak tree in the Alps shaken by the
North wind, Aeneas suffers from love and care for Dido,
but he withstands their fury. Reason holds firm against
passion and duty vanquishes desire. One pities Dido, but
78
rejoices that Aeneas does not let his own pity become a
morass in which the hopes of his son and of the world
would be lost. But Aeneas is bound to Dido not just by his
love for her, which is his to control if he can, but by the
fact that he has allowed her to love him. That is not passion but choice, and to reverse it is not duty but betrayal.
In the simile of the oak tree, it is Aeneas' mind which
overcomes the care in his breast, but that is merely the
overcoming of the last obstacle to a choice he has already
made. The widespread interpretation according to which
Aeneas' rejection of Dido is a victory of the rational and
political over the passionate and personal does not stand
up to a moment's scrutiny. He has already told Dido that
he loves her less than he loves the remnants of Troy
which he had been bidden to carry to Italy. (4. 340-7) His
choice is personal through-and-through. And in setting
out for the city he will build in Italy, Aeneas knows that he
is leaving Carthage in wreckage. (4. 86-9) His choice is political through-and-through as well. Aeneas cannot choose
otherwise than he does. He has gotten himself into a fix
from which there is only one way out. But he cannot pretend that what he does is not a betrayal. Aeneas does not
understand his destruction of Dido as he will later understand his destruction of Lausus, but we need not be fooled.
But if Aeneas' abandonment of Dido cannot be praised
as an act of Stoic virtue, must it not be given its due as an
act of piety? Twice Aeneas tells Dido that his leaving her
for a bride and kingdom in Italy is not by his own will but
in accordance with what is fated, and we have known from
the second line of the poem that Virgil is writing of a man
whose deeds are compelled by fate. But what is the nature
of that compulsion? What does Virgil understand fate to
be? He tells us that Dido's death was not only undeserved
but unfated (4. 696), and, narrating a battle in Book nine,
he tells us that if Turnus had hesitated a moment to break
the bolts on one gate, Rome would never have come to be
(9. 757-9). In order to understand what Virgil has written,
we must conceive a fate that is both limited and fallible.
The Latin fatum contains all the meanings of our word
fate, but in it they are derivative meanings. Never absent
from the Latin word is its primary sense of a thing spoken
or uttered. And Virgil does not present the speech which
is fate as an irrevocable decree, but uses the word with
verbs meaning to call or to ask. The source of fate is a mystery in the Aeneid, but the nature of its action is evident.
Fated outcomes are known to some among the gods and
the shades of the dead, but are brought about only by human beings who must be lured, persuaded, or tricked. Every device of rhetoric must be used, because fate in the
Aeneid remains always and altogether subordinate to human choice.
The fall of Troy in Book two, for example, is a fated
event. The destruction of the city is completed by Neptune, who shakes the walls and uproots the foundations
from the earth, but neither he nor any other god acts so
directly until the conquest of the Trojans by the Greeks is
an accomplished fact. First, an indecisive war has been
WINTER 1982
�carried on for ten years. Second, the Greeks have concealed their best fighters in a counterfeit religious offering
left on the beach of Troy. Third, a lying story told by a
Greek has aroused the pity of the Trojans and inclined
them to bring the fatal horse into their city. But beyond
all the strength, cleverness, and rhetorical skill of the
Greeks, one more element was necessary, without which,
Aeneas says years later, Troy would still be standing: the
minds of the Trojans had to be made left-handed (2. 54-6);
they had to be brought confidently to trust that the divine
purpose was opposite to what it truly was. One respected
Trojan leader, Laocoon, priest of Neptune, would have
held Troy against all the resources of Greeks and gods,
had he not been made to seem to be profaning a sacred offering. Laocoon pierced the horse with a spear, before Sinon told the Trojans that their prosperity would depend
on treating the horse with reverence. At that moment a
pair of gigantic snakes came across the sea and the land,
making straight for the small sons of Laocoon, and killing
them and him. That horrible supernatural spectacle was
the call of fate which the Trojans answered to their own
rmn.
That which is fated must be recognized, interpreted, assented to, and carried out by human beings, who may be
mistaken or may have been deliberately deceived. Aeneas
is responsible not only for his choice to answer his fate,
but also for the judgment that what fate calls him to is
good. The half-understood future that could be brought
about by Aeneas' deeds does make a powerful claim upon
him, but so does the life of Dido, which he has allowed to
become dependent upon him. No one but he can make
the final decision that the former claim is more worthy of
respect than the latter. That Aeneas is not comfortable
with his choice is obvious when he begs Dido's ghost for
understanding and absolution. Her stony refusal and undying hatred make it forever impossible for anyone to say
that his choice was right. And the unforgettable example
of Laocoon makes it equally impossible to take any comfort in the reflection that Aeneas' choice was fated.
There is a powerful presence in the Aeneid of the inescapable, but it is not the same as nor even entirely compatible with the fated. The divine call which pulls one
toward the future may be refused or defeated, but the human entanglements which grasp one from out of the past
cannot be escaped. Aeneas can abandon Dido, but he can
never be free of the pain of the knowledge that he has betrayed the love and trust he had once accepted from her.
The true fatalism of the Aeneid is not a sense of the inevitable triumph of what is to be, of a healing and elevating
future, but a sense of the sad burden of all that has been,
of past choices and rejections that one has not gotten
beyond.
Readers are sometimes puzzled by a character in the
Aeneid who is mentioned repeatedly but to whom Virgil
seems deliberately to have given no human features or
qualities. He is the closest companion of Aeneas, but we
never hear either speak to the other. He is the true or
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
trusty Achates, whose name has become an idiomatic label for a devoted friend, but he seems to be nothing more
than a label; we do not know who Aeneas' friend is or
what he is like. But Virgil often gives his characters names
which are descriptive in Greek. A Greek soldier whom Aeneas encounters on Sicily and whose story he trusts is
called Achaemenides, "still a Greek." An aging boxer who
rouses himself to win one last fight is called Entellus, "mature" or Hat an end." A monster who seems to delight in
evil itself is called Cacus, "the evil one." As a Greek word,
Achates would name ''one who grieves," one whose spe·
cia! or characteristic business is to grieve. Never absent
from the side of Aeneas in anything he does is the true or
trusty grieving one; never, in the Aeneid, does hope overcome grief.
The burden of grief which one feels through the last
two-thirds of the poem is thus explicitly figured in the person of Achates as Aeneas' second self. The inescapability
of the past is also figured by Virgil in one of the great central images of the poem, that of the labyrinth. We hear of
it first in Book five, in connection with an intricate display
of horsemanship by the Trojan children, but the words
are too strong for their immediate occasion. The sons of
Troy are said to be entangled in "an undiscovered and irretraceable wandering" (5. 591) as in the dark and ambiguous Labyrinth of ancient Crete. Aeneas soon sees a carved
image of that Labyrinth on the walls of the Sibyl's cave,
when he begins his journey in Book six to the land of the
dead. The Sibyl tells him that it will be easy to enter that
land, but to retrace his way to the upper air, "this," she
says, "is work; this is labor." (6. 126-9) We are made to
think of the Trojans' journey to Italy as labyrinthine, and
to expect Aeneas' return from Hell to be especially so. We
are startled, then, at the end of Book six, when Aeneas' return to the upper world is no trouble at all. Notoriously,
that return is through the gate of false dreams. Great ingenuity has been expended by many interpreters to remove
the taint of falsity from Aeneas' mission, but it cannot be
done. Aeneas returns to earth with his soul burning with
the love of coming fame, and that is a false exit from the
land of the dead, the place of Dido. The Labyrinth image
is still with us, the sense of betrayal of Dido's love has not
been left behind, and the Sibyl is right: what lies before
Aeneas is the true labor. He has not left the place of the
dead; he will carry it with him wherever he goes.
The war in Italy which occupies the last third of the
Aeneid has a labyrinthine structure. When Turnus enters
the Trojan camp in Book nine, he is pressed back to the
walls and carried back to his comrades by the Tiber before
there is any decisive outcome. In Book ten, when Turnus
has killed Pallas, he and Aeneas fight toward each other,
but juno lures Turnus away from the battlefield with a
phantom-Aeneas made of wind. In Book eleven, when
there is a truce, Aeneas and Turnus are both eager to submit to single combat when a double misunderstanding
makes the war resume; the two men finally catch sight of
each other across a plain, just as night falls. In the last
79
�book, Turnus' goddess-sister, disguised as his charioteer,
keeps carrying him away when Aeneas catches sight of
him. It is only in the last lines of the poem that Aeneas
reaches the center of the maze. The monster he finds
there is not Turnus, now humble, resigned to death, and
gracious in defeat. What is the meaning of Aeneas' last
furious act of violence? What does the maze of war and
frustration that stands between Aeneas and his final confrontation with Turnus have to do with the false exit from
the land of the dead by which Aeneas seems to have entered his labyrinth?
The strange and abrupt ending of the Aeneid collects
into itself all that has gone before it. It is a vivid culmination of the theme of the labyrinth, but that image in turn
takes its meaning from a chain of connected images of
which it is part. The first of these images is Aeolia, the
vast cave of the winds in which, we are told, angry tempests rage in indignation at the mountain which confines
them (l. 53-6). Unrestrained, those winds would destroy
the seas, the lands, and heaven itself. Therefore jupiter,
here called the omnipotent father, confined them and
gave them a king skilled to know when to loosen, when to
draw in, their reins. Can the word omnipotens be intended seriously in this context? It seems that it cannot
mean more than "stronger than anything else," so that
even the winds can be brought under the control of the
strongest one. If jupiter were truly able to do anything, he
could change the nature of the winds, or destroy them
and replace them with others just as useful and not as
dangerous. Could it be that one with the power to choose
otherwise would judge it good to design a world in which
hurricanes must sometimes be unleashed? The single
word omnipotens leaves that question hanging over the
poem.
The second image in the poem which picks up the
theme of caged fury is one we examined earlier: Furor,
rage itself, removed from the world and imprisoned behind the iron gates of war. What we found strange in that
picture was the presentation of rage personified as an object of pity. We saw then that the image of Furor led directly into the story of Dido and that her story was of the
unleashing of furor within her. It is in the story of Dido
that the two earlier images begin to make sense. Dido is
ruined because she is capable of loving without restraint.
The years of her self-denial make possible the existence of
Carthage, because the chiefs of the surrounding countries
respect her fidelity to her dead husband, and because it
gives her reign a dignity and stability under which her subjects thrive. But her sister, who loves her, does not want
Dido to continue that life. Royalty does not fulfill the
longings caged within Dido.
When Venus wants to bind Dido to Aeneas by means of
lust, she begins by arousing in Dido tenderness for a small
child. Once Dido falls in love with Aeneas, her ruin is assured, but she only becomes vulnerable to falling in love
by first feeling a loving response to a child. Would Dido
have been better off if a child sitting in her lap could
80
arouse no irrational longing in her childless heart?-if intimate contact with a child left her feeling no more than
the general benevolence she had for all her subjects? If
not, if a cold, loveless life is never choiceworthy, then the
omnipotent father was right to leave the furious and destructive things in the world, and Virgil was right to grieve
over the imposition of law on the earth. For even a mother's love is potentially furious, as we see it in the mothers
of Euryalus and Lavinia. And the loving, irrational desire
to have a child of one's own is inseparable from all the raging loves and hates within us. It is not the political life
which fulfills us, if Virgil is right, but the loving attachments to particular other people, which also make us vulnerable to frenzy, madness, and war.
Virgil uses the cave of the winds and the gates of war as
images of the human soul, which always encloses irrational longings and loyalties capable of furious emergence
into the world. Madness, as of Lausus, anger, as of Aeneas, rage of battle, as of Turnus, passionate love, as of
Dido, prophetic frenzy, as of the Sybil, and poetic inspiration, as of Virgil himself: these are the meanings my small
Latin dictionary gives for the word furor, the name Virgil
gives to the being at the center. And what is the labyrinth
which surrounds the center? It is, I think, Virgil's picture
of any life which ignores or denies the furious things at
the center. Aeneas leaves the land of the dead glorying in
his vision of the Roman future, only to find in Italy the
same intractable opposition he has left behind in Dido,
and finally to yield to it in himself. And Augustus subdues
the proud of all the world, only to become a monster of
pride himself.
In Book eight a fourth image joins the winds, the gates
and the labyrinth. In the land of King Evander Aeneas
sees the rock on which the Senate of Rome will one day
stand, and learns that it once enclosed the home of a murderous, fire-breathing, half-human monster named Cacus.
From the "proud doorposts" of this senseless killer there
had always hung rotting, severed heads of his human victims. (8. 195-7) Evander tells how Hercules killed the
monster and exposed his dark cavern to the light of the
sun. Commentators routinely take the triumphant Hercules as a '~symbol" for Aeneas, who overcomes the monsters
of unreason, Dido and Turnus, and for Augustus, who will
overcome war itself. One who reads Evander's account
not as a symbol but as a story, though, must feel some unease as Hercules, before he can kill Cacus, must become a
thing of fury and frenzy himself. Hercules' triumph is not
an example with which one can be quite comfortable.
Book eight ends with a hundred lines describing the future glories of Rome depicted on Aeneas' shield, culminating with Augustus sitting in triumph over conquered
peoples from all the nations of the earth. In a characteristic stroke, Virgil says that Aeneas rejoiced in the images,
ignorant of the things, so that once again a portrait of
Rome just fails to come into focus as a sight at which one
could be glad. The attentive reader will have seen that Augustus on the shield hangs the spoils of all the world on his
WINTER 1982
�"proud doorposts," a phrase used qnly of him and of
Cacus. The same spot is still the home of a monster, but
the new one ravages the whole world-'
There are two kinds of motion in a labyrinth. The outward motion is an illusion of progress away from something. It is the more pitiable, because the more ignorant,
of the two kinds. It characterizes the march of imperial
Rome outward over the world. It is seen in what Virgil
calls in Book six the "proud soul of Brutus the punisher,"
expeller of the Tarquins, the first to rule as consul, who,
"for the sake of beautiful freedom" put love of country and
praise ahead of everything else and killed his own sons.
Virgil calls him "unhappy father, no matter what posterity
may say of his deed." (6. 817-23) And Augustus cannot escape the same human vulnerability that Brutus tried to
deny. A few lines later in Book six, the entire spectacle of
the shades of the heroes of Rome is immersed in grief
over Marcellus, the young man Augustus adopted and
named as his heir, but who died when he was twenty. No
political order holds any answer for or relief from human
troubles. It is after Aeneas hears the infinity of grief over
Marcellus in his father's voice, that he looks back over the
souls of his triumphant offspring, recovers his own love of
fame, and returns to the world through the gate of false
dreams.
But Aeneas is no Augustus. He is too aware of the losses
and pains of others for his own proud illusions ever to last
for long. Aeneas for the most part moves in the other direction, inward in the labyrinth. This is the direction of "if
only." If only Helen were dead; if only Dido could be
made to understand; if only Lausus would see reason; if
only Turnus would surrender. Aeneas never uses his quest
for political glory as an excuse to turn his back on a human being in distress, but he cannot relinquish that quest,
on which so many others depend, and he can never quite
find his way to the center of the source of distress to remove its cause. At the beginning of Book eight, the last in
a long succession of divine apparitions comes to Aeneas.
The old god of the Tiber tells him that his troubles are
near an end, and that home and rest await him. He must
fight and win a war with the Latins, but for once help will
be available. Inland along the Tiber live Arcadian Greeks
ruled by King Evander. They will happily join Aeneas in
his fight and he can put an end once and for all to the
troubles he has carried with him for so long and in which
he has involved so many others.
Aeneas does find welcome and help in Evander's city,
Pallanteum. As in Carthage, he finds too much welcome
and too much help. It turns out that Evander once met
Aeneas' father, and adored him with youthful love. The
gifts Anchises gave him seem to be the only signs of
wealth Evander has allowed to remain in his city. (8. 15569) History repeats itself in Pallanteum, in a double sense.
As with their fathers, Pallas is fired with a loving admiration for Aeneas. As he joins with him, we see in one brief,
lovely scene, a greater closeness between the two than we
ever see between Aeneas and his own son. (10. 159-62)
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
But Aeneas' recent Carthaginian history repeats itself at
the same time: from Evander and from Pallas, Aeneas has
again accepted the loving gift of a human life, entrusted
to his care. Pallas seems to think Aeneas can answer the
deepest questions of his life, but the two men know each
other only for a day. When Pallas arrives in Latium he
begins to fight, and two hundred lines later he is dead.
Like every young man in the Aeneid, excepting only Iulus,
who is deliberately kept out of the fighting, Pallas dies at
the moment of his greatest valor. That is the theme of
Book nine, in which, in Aeneas' absence, only young men
are fighting. It is embodied in the figure of Euryalus,
whose longing for glory leads him to put on the shining
helmet of one of his victims, immediately to become a victim because that shining makes him an easy target. (9. 35966, 373-4) It is embodied, too, in the similes of Book nine,
which liken the young warriors to beasts of prey which, if
they are daring and successful predators, become a danger
to men and an easy prey. Pallas cannot escape the Virgilian logic of glory and death.
The saddest words of this saddest of poems are spoken
by Aeneas to the corpse of Pallas: "The same horrible fate
of war calls me from here to other tears; hail from me eternally, dearest Pallas, and eternally farewell." (11. 96-8) In
the last lines of the poem, Aeneas recognizes that there is
no such thing as an eternal farewell. The dead live as
sources of obligation, and neither death nor any ceremony
can cancel such debts. If Dido can be assimilated to a
larger purpose, then she did not live. If Lausus' decision
to throw away his life were not acknowledged as binding
his adversary, then Lausus would not be recognized as the
source of his own choices. And if Pallas can be forgotten
for the sake of the living, and the greater number, then
Pallas himself is accorded no worth at all. Human worth
does not fit in any scales. Its claims are unconditional.
We admire Aeneas in the war books of the last third of
the poem because he always seeks the sanest and most
sensible solutions for his enemies as well as for his own
people. We rage along with him when trivial, irrational
causes produce and prolong the slaughter. Aeneas longs
for peace and for harmony with all the tribes in Italy. And
what does Turnus fight for? For wholly selfish reasons
and for the joy of fighting. Must he not be cut down like
the irrational thing he is, so decent citizens might get on
with the business of living in co-operation? To see that
this is not how Virgil regards Turnus, listen to this simile
with which Turnus goes out to fight: "He is delirious with
courage, his hope already tears the enemy: just as a stallion when he snaps his tether and flies off from the stables, free at last to lord the open plains, will either make
for meadows and the herds of mares or else leap from the
stream where he is used to bathing and, wanton, happy,
neigh, his head raised high, while his mane sweeps across
his neck and shoulders." (11. 491-7) Turnus is young,
strong, brave, and handsome. He is not made for submission to a foreigner who arrives saying he is destined to
marry his fiancee and be his king. In the line following the
81
�simile of the stallion, Virgil brings 'Camilla into the poem,
to fight beside Turnus. She is in .instant and complete
communion with Turnus. The freedom and the lordship
of Italy is theirs by birth and by nature. Each of them is
crushed by what Aeneas has brought to Italy, but each
dies with the sentiment that something unworthy has
happened.
At the end, when Turnus lies wounded at Aeneas' feet,
we begin to hear again the familiar echoes of the end of
the Iliad, but this time they are like a deceptive cadence in
a piece of music. Turnus asks Aeneas to remember his
own father and to return him, alive or dead as he prefers,
to his father. But as Aeneas begins to relax, and we expect
the gesture of reconciliation that Aeneas has tried so hard
and so often to make to come finally as a healing ending to
the poem, Aeneas instead remembers Pallas, and kills Turnus in fury. Why? It is his seeing the belt of Pallas, which
Turnus is wearing as spoil, that precipitates the deed.
What does Aeneas see when he looks at the belt? I think it
is not too much to say that he sees in it everything that
has happened to him through the eight years and twelve
books that have gone before.
The belt is carved with a legendary scene of fifty bride-
82
grooms killed on their wedding night. It recalls the spectacle
Aeneas watched from the roof of Priam's ruined palace,
with its fifty bridal chambers for his sons. (2. 503-4;
I 0. 497 -9) It must, too, re-open the wound of the memory
of the bridal chamber he himself shared so briefly with
Dido. And as showing men cut down in their youth, it must
remind him of much that has happened around him in
the war just fought. But more than anything else, it brings
back to him Pallas, to whom he could not succeed in saying good-bye. As he kills Turnus, Aeneas calls Pallas "my
own." His acceptance of the call of fate prevented Aeneas
from dying alongside his own people in his own city of
Troy. It prevented him from remaining loyal to his own
lover, Dido. But the gods have now left Aeneas alone. The
last act of the poem is the first one that is unequivocally
Aeneas' own, and on his own, though inclined toward a
characteristic and politically sound act of kindness, Aeneas commits a furious and painful murder out of love.
Turnus dies rightly feeling that his death is unworthy of
him. But Aeneas, finally at the center of the labyrinth of
his own life, could not let Turnus live and be worthy of
the gift of Pallas' life and death. In the inevitable conflict
of unconditional claims, one can only cling to one's own.
WINTER 1982
�REvmw EssAY
Objectivity and Philosophical Conversation
Richard Rorty's Pht!osophy and the Mirror of Nature
ARTHUR COlliNS
Men have confident beliefs which they take to be knowledge,
and then it sometimes turns out that what was confidently believed is discarded and replaced by contrary beliefs, perhaps just
as confident. Such convictions can be important beliefs at the
heart of a whole way of looking at the world. Naturally philoso·
phers have concerned themselves with this instability in our beliefs, and they have tried to find permanent foundations for our
claims to know anything. With foundations our knowledge is reliable and objective; without foundations our pretensions to know
collapse into the beliefs we happen to have. Discourse with no
foundations seems to reduce to a flux of opinions, for we have no
way of determining which opinions are really grounded and
which are not. But where shall we find foundations for knowledge, and how shall our claims to know such foundations themselves be insulated from the possibility of error and replacement?
Discussions of the objectivity of knowledge were already sophisticated in Greek philosophy. Protagoras held that no objec·
tive foundation of a belief can get beyond the fact that it seems
to be true to the man who holds it. All beliefs, then, are true for
those who hold them, and grounding is an illusion. So Protagoras
proposed to substitute the contrast: healthy versus unhealthy belief for the unavailable contrast: objectively grounded belief versus mere opinion. If this report of Protagoras' doctrine from
Plato's Theaetetus is reliable, Protagoras was the first pragmatist.
Socrates opposed this relativism and Plato's theory of Forms is
an effort to articulate foundations of knowledge solid enough to
enable a philosopher to rule against one man's conviction and in
favor of another's on objective grounds. The preponderance of
philosophers since Plato have defended the idea of objective
knoWledge and pursued its foundations. A minority including
Nietzsche and the American pragmatists have more or less sided
with Protagoras.
This conflict is the theme of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature.* The thesis of the book can be summarized
in two general claims: The first is that modern philosophy has
been dominated by an essentially Cartesian and mistaken idea of
inner representations as the foundation of knowledge of all outer
realities. The second claim is the assertion of a sweeping historical and pragmatic relativism about human knowledge. In rejecting Cartesian inner mental representations, Rorty contends that
the dominant modern program that sought to furnish foundations for knowledge is a complete failure. In his general relativist
view, Rorty asserts, with Protagoras, that the objectivity philosophers have looked for cannot be found at all and knowledge can
have no foundations.
The conception of inner representations as the necessary
starting point for all knowledge is what Rorty calls "the Mirror of
Nature." The mind is this mirror. Descartes and most thinkers
after him place the source of objectivity in the knower's mind
rather than in any specially apprehended outer reality such as
Plato's Forms. Epistemology has been promoted since the Renaissance as a kind of bogus science that ·confirms its hypotheses
in terms of the ultimate evidence we find reflected in the mirror
of the mind. Rorty says that the rejection of this spurious epistemology will bring with it huge changes in philosophical practice.
This first claim is powerfully argued and richly illustrated, and
Rorty's many-sided discussion of it repays study.
According to his second general claim, Rorty' s Protagorean
relativism, philosophers are deceived in thinking that there can
be objective reasons for preferring one view of things to another.
In the course of exposition of this relativist view, Rorty denies
that science can be understood to attain a progressively better
approximation to the truth. He finds that we cannot successfully
segregate meanings and facts. We cannot distinguish features of
a conceptual scheme and truths that are asserted within and
*Princeton University Press, 1979
Review.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Arthur Collins has published articles in many philosophical journals. He has previously contributed "Kant's Empiricism" (July 1979) and "The Scientific
Background of Descartes' Dualism" (Winter 1981) to the St. John's
83
�with the help of that scheme. So we qmnot suppose that earlier
scientists were talking about the same reality that we speak of, but
saying different things about it. Thus there is no way in which
we can see ourselves as the proprietors of a better understanding
of the same world. Our distinctions between conceptual truths
and factual truths, and between mathematical propositions and
empirical facts, are not absolute. Such distinctions are always dependent upon our own contingent decisions and relatively transient objectives of our discourse. There are no privileged truths,
no absolutely secure modes of reference, no irrefragible assertions about meanings, and no incorrigible data of sense. All these
candidates for an Archimedean fixed point in epistemology turn
out to be moveable. Our intellectual undertakings, systems, and
theories are endlessly adjustable in many ways and subtle ways,
but nothing is permanent and there is no given point of contact
with the real, no unchanging frontier between our thought and
what we think about.
Unlike his rejections of the Mirror of Nature, which is limited to
a particular conception of objectivity (the Cartesian conception),
Rorty's general relativism does not leave room for a contrast between the situations of philosophy and science. In rejecting traditional Cartesian epistemology, Rorty says that philosophers
have mistakenly tried to copy what scientists legitimately do. But
when he advances from this critique to a relativistic rejection of
the very idea of objectivity, Rorty asserts that philosophers and
scientists are alike in their susceptibility to the mistaken idea that
rational investigation can lead, and has led, to a better and better
understanding of things. There are no thought-independent
truths to be sought by philosophers or scientists and no objective
methods to be adopted by either.
Rorty is right to reject what he calls the Mirror of Nature. He
is also right to say that it has exerted an enormous and mostly
bad influence on modern thought. But he seems to think that if
we don't have Cartesian foundations for our knowledge we must
become relativists. If the Mirror of Nature is no good, there is
nothing else. That means that Rorty himself is still under the
spell of Cartesian thinking about the mind and knowledge. He is
agreeing that if there is to be objective knowledge at all, there will
have to be Cartesian foundations for it. If this is Rorty's assumption, it would account for the fact that he moves so easily from a
penetrating critique of the Mirror of Nature to the general repudiation of objectivity. On the whole Rorty treats these two very
different views as if they were one and the same reaction to the
history of modern philosophy. This is a mistake.
1
The goal of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is an assessment of the claims and prospects of contemporary philosophy,
especially the broad current of thought finding expression primarily in English, called "analytic philosophy." Rorty identifies
the most important historical roots of the modern outlook in the
pervasive influence of Descartes' philosophy of mind and in
Kant's two-sided philosophical project: the identification of objective knowledge and the demonstration of the inescapable
though disappointing limits of such knowledge. The Mirror of
84
Nature is really Descartes' invention. Descartes imposed on subsequent philosophers, and prominently on the British empiricists,
the job of trying to get from a perfect acquaintance with inner
mental representations (which are taken to exhaust our ultimate
evidence) to knowledge of extra-mental reality. This project,
which is hardly represented in classical thought, determines the
characteristic schedule of solipsistic problems which are the first
business of all modern epistemology. Endless variations within
this Cartesian epistemological framework have been articulated
since the seventeenth century. As recently as 1949, in the Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle aptly called Cartesianism "the official
doctrine." Russell, Moore, Santayana, Carnap, Ayer, Chisholm,
and Sellars are some of the best known twentieth century philosophers whose projects are decisively influenced by this tradition.
This is so even though some of these thinkers have expressly rejected Cartesianism and tried to break its hold on philosophy.
Rorty's repudiation ofthe Mirror of Nature is the repudiation of
this tenacious idea.
The Kantian contribution to the modern outlook is, Rorty
says, the idea of a universal system for judging and comparing
the credentials of all intellectual undertakings. In Rorty's terminology this is the "transcendental turn" which projects a scheme
for the universal "commensurability" of all doctrines, theories,
and beliefs. The rejection of this idea is Rorty's relativism. It is an
error, he says, to suppose that all our thinking belongS to the
same intellectual space within which views can always be tested
against one another and choices forced by a fixed rational procedure. Accepting the idea of such a universal scheme, philosophers
have thought of knowledge as a matter of gradual convergence
on the truth.
Rorty, however, allows no concept of truth external to the particular pragmatically judged intellectual constructions that men
make in grappling with the world. In their pretense to occupy a
viewpoint outside all viewpoints, Kantian foundationalists are
dogmatic and self-deceptive. Their claims to permanent judgments and fixed tests conceal the creative and constructive play
of human intelligence under the guise of ever-closer conformity
to truth. For Rorty, what we take as known can have no foundations apart from acceptance in the unending interplay of human
discourse. Accepted truths, systems, and sciences have the value
that they do have because they confer an understanding on
things that enables us better to negotiate our existence, not because they approach more closely to the final truth about things.
In this view, Rorty substitutes the idea of the utility of belief for
the discarded idea of objective truth, much as Protagoras substituted healthy belief for objectively grounded belief.
There can be no epistemological foundations and Rorty thinks
pursuit of them should stop and is going to stop some time soon.
Foundationalism has so contaminated the structure of philosophical thought and so determined the content of modern philosophy that its rejection will mean the end of most of what we
know as philosophy. When current practices have been abandoned, science will still be science, and scientists will continue to
generate and discard their own standards of admissibility. But, if
Rorty is right, epistemology will no longer be credited as a kind of
preliminary science. The philosophy of mind has been develWINTER 1982
�oped almost entirely in the service of Mirrqr-of-Nature projects,
so it too is finished. The same is true of the bulk of the philosophy of science. Language has become, for analytic philosophers, the refuge of foundationalist pretensioD.s which are denied
appeal to the mind by contemporary hostility to dualism. As a
consequence, philosophy of language is mostly "impure," Rorty
says. It has been fatally infected by the epidemic passion to find
objective foundations somewhere. Most of the aspirations of
philosophical logic and ontology, including the resurgent essentialism encouraged by Kripke, are also to be cancelled in the
coming purge. Even the value-oriented branches of thought
have been hopelessly compromised by foundationalist schemes
that try to identify the cognitive part of discourse involving values and to relegate the rest, in the positivist manner, to emotion,
arbitrary preference, and taste.
Rorty thinks that some kind of philosophy will survive the
coming demise of foundationalism and objective pretensions. He
admits that he is vague about the contents and purposes of this
philosophy of the future:
Our present notions of what it is to be a philosopher are so
tied up with the Kantian attempt to render all knowledge
claims commensurable that it is difficult to imagine what philosophy without epistemology could be. (357)
The predictions that Rorty does make are the least convincing and
the least appealing part of his book. He sees the tendency of things
to come in -the continental hermeneutics movement (H. G. Gada mer, in particular) and in philosophical "deconstruction" (Derrida). He endorses a considerable list of European existentialists,
structuralists, and phenomenologists whose writings are as longwinded as they are difficult to grasp clearly. Rorty says that the
new philosophy will be "conversational" without being exclusive
and competitive. Philosophy will be "edifying" which contrasts
with misguided efforts to be "systematic." Philosophical discourse will be "abnormal" in the sense of Thomas Kuhn's "abnormal science"; that is, it will take place without the benefit of
an inherited framework of standards and methods shared by a
consensus of those participating. 1 Philosophy will be open, pluralistic, even "playful." It will abandon its agressive assertiveness.
The work of philosophers will become more like activities in art,
politics, and religion.
Rorty does not succeed in saying (in fact, he does not try) what
will be the subject matter or the goals of the conversations to
which philosophers will contribute when they have given up the
hopeless search for objective foundations. Nor does he say why it
is that anything such a philosopher could say might strike us as
edifying. It often seems as if he is only dreaming of something
nice that otherwise unemployed philosophers can apply their talents to when most of the things they now do have been abolished.
2
Like most radical relativists, Rorty is not entirely consistent.
His examination of analytic philosophy finds that this whole enterprise is mired in the Cartesian-Kantian "problematic." Analytic philosophers are prominently guilty of presuming that they
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
have at least our concepts or conceptual schemes at their disposal. The accessibility of his own concepts is alleged by an analytic philosopher to be the source of the necessity and objectivity
of his conceptual analyses. Rorty rejects this allegation and the
philosophy it tries to legitimize. But his own arguments are full
of points which are indistinguishable in their standing from the
views he rejects as lacking any credentials at all. For example, he
finds that Locke's confusion of explanation and justification is
one of the great influential errors of modern thought. Maybe he
is right. But, in what sense can Rorty allow himself access to
what is really "explanation" and what "justification" while denying that analytic philosophers have access to concepts and thus a
basis for their analyses? He praises Wilfred Sellars for not offering "a theory of how the mind works" or a theory "of the 'nature
of concepts'." He describes a claim Sellars makes as "a remark
about the difference between facts and rules" (187). The use of
the informal word "remark" for the praised opinion of Sellars
and the weighty word "theory" for the bad views Sellars avoids
sounds like an effort to deflect the question. If the foundation of
this "remark" about facts and rules is not a kind of conceptual
analysis, then what is it? Again, Rorty says in the context of the
possibility of foundations for knowledge:
The question is not whether human knowledge in fact has
"foundations," but whether it makes sense to suggest that it
does-whether the idea of epistemic or mo.ral authority having a "ground" in nature is a coherent one. (178)
This kind of claim about what makes sense and what does not,
and what is and is not coherent, is just the sort of thing that analytic philosophers propose all the time. If their pretenses to know
what makes sense and what does not are empty, then what gives
substance to Rorty's identical pretenses?
These inconsistencies are predictable. As Socrates said of Protagoras, a relativist is always in trouble when he tries to assert
anything. He naturally thinks his relativism is objectively correct
and he thinks the foundationalist thinkers he opposes are objectively wrong. It is hard to see how a relativist can say less than
this and still have an intelligible position.
Rorty's general relativism sometimes appears to undermine his
own best insights. He is attracted by John Dewey's thinking be~
cause Dewey emphasized the social character of knowledge as
opposed to the solipsistic stance of Descartes. Similarly, in psychology Rorty thinks that a healthy materialism that is not a reductive mind-brain identity theory will supercede the confusions
of Cartesian philosophy of mind. Perhaps these are very sound
convictions to have. They fit ill with relativism. If we are to appreciate the validity of physiological psychology do we not have
to suppose that idealism is objectively wrong? It is not just another alternative conversational stance for philosophy. Rorty
thinks a materialist philosophy will survive the prevalent philosophical errors. Why? Surely he thinks we will be left with the
body and its relation to all our intellectual functions after the illusions of the Mirror of Nature have been dispelled. If so, this
material subject matter must be objectively available to us. In the
same way, if we are to base our understandings, like Dewey, on the
irreducible social context of discourse and knowledge, we must
85
�take that context as something that the world objectively contains. There really are other people with whom we speak and interact. How can we praise Dewey's vieW if we say that even these
convictions about social reality are just "optional descriptions"?
Even Rorty's customarily sensitive historical judgments are
sometimes distorted by his application of a set of standards to the
views he rejects which he cannot apply to his own views and
those he endorses. For example, he simultaneously praises Jerry
Fodor and condemns Kant in this passage:
The crucial point is that there is no way to raise the sceptical
question "How well do the subject's internal representations
represent reality?" about Fodor's "language of thought." In
particular there is no way to ask whether, or how well, the
products of spontaneity's theories represent the sources of receptivity's evidence, and thus no way to be sceptical about
the relation between appearance and reality. (246-7)
This passage actually describes Fodor's view in terms which do
not distinguish it at all from Kant's. Rorty knows that Kant's theory of the mind and empirical reality also rules out scepticism
"about the relation of appearance and reality" and, therefore,
deserves whatever praise Fodor deserves on that count. But
Rorty's rhetorical usage of the Kantian terminoloy (''spontaneity"
and "receptivity") seem to imply that Kant held the opposite and
that Fodor's stand is an improvement and a correction.
3
Rorty is entirely right to say that epistemological illusions are ·
responsible for the spurious format of scientific theory-building
that many modern philosophies have adopted. Mirror-of-Nature
thinking leads directly to this format. If our knowledge has to
start from acquaintance restricted to inner representations, such
as seventeenth-century ideas or twentieth-century sense-data,
then the mere assertion that there is an extra-mental world
stands in need of defense. In the absence of a successful defense,
we have no reason at all for thinking that there is any subject
matter for sciences like physics or biology to investigate. So a preliminary philosophical theory is needed to vouch for the existence of a subject matter for all other sciences. Empiricists have
constructed a great many such "theories" which introduce material objects only in hypotheses that are supposed to be accepted
because they explain the patterns we encounter in our mental
experiences. Here the philosopher imitates scientific theories
that posit unobserved atoms in hypotheses that explain observed
combining weights of elements, or that posit unobserved heavenly
bodies in hypotheses that explain observed orbital perturbations.
When philosophers argue in this way they are making epistemology into a hypothetico-deductive science. Philosophers then posit
unobserved chairs and tables to explain observed perceptual experiences! It is a virtue of Rorty's critique to release us from this
misapplied model of scientific thinking.
When we have fully rejected the Mirror of Nature, a lot of this
"scientific" philosophy will automatically be eliminated. This is
very much to be hoped for, but it gives us no reason at all for
thinking, with Rorty, that these misguided epistemological thea-
86
ries will be replaced by the incommensurable badinage that he
sees coming. In fact, a significant scientific influence in philosophy is unaffected by Rorty's critique. For philosophers of the
empiricist, rationalist, and analytic traditions, quite apart from
theory-construction, scientific influence in philosophy has meant
a tough-minded independence, it has meant adherence to the
ideals of self-criticism and clarity, and it has meant the open ac~
ceptance of tests of one's ideas in competitive intellectual confrontations. Rorty's general relativism and his predictions for the
future appear to depend on rejecting these wholesome influences along with the inapplicable pattern of hypothetico-deductive theory construction. The elimination of Cartesianism and
its aftermath, however, does not show that there is anything
wrong with these ideals, nor with their adoption in philosophy.
Rorty claims that once the epistemological bias is eliminated
there will be a general change in direction in philosophy which
will not be limited to those disciplines directly engendered by the
Mirror of Nature. It is in this spirit that he says that language
tends to replace the Mirror in the continuing but spurious foun~
dationalist projects of anti-dualist analytic philosophers. This is a
sensitive insight. Perhaps it is generally true in philosophy today
that real advance in understanding is only attained with the recognition that all theorizing is out of place. Our intellectual needs
are mischaracterized and our confusions made permanent insofar as we think that what is required is something like a theory.
This may be the clearest and most enduring part of Wittgen~
stein's elusive teaching. Here is Saul Kripke's appreciation of the
same thought in the context of theories about reference and
names:
It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong. You
may suspect me of proposing another theory in its place, but I
hope not, because I'm sure it's wrong too, if it's a theory.2
If this attitude is right we have inherited a conception of philosophical thought which deforms our actual problems by forcing
them into the mold of scientific theory. The harmful conception
goes beyond the influence of the Mirror of Nature. To say that
we should stop this deforming and forcing is good, but that in it~
self does not show anything about what philosophers should do
instead, and it bodes nothing for relativism. The understandings
that survive misguided foundationalism ought to be, per se, more
objective, not less objective, than the illusory pursuit of philosophical theories where such theories can accomplish nothing.
4
Under the influence of Kant, most philosophers, according to
Rorty, have accepted the idea of the universal commensurability
of all opinions. Like the idea of theory-building in philosophy,
the idea of commensurability is modelled on scientific practice.
Scientists intentionally try to sharpen opposed views in order to
force a showdown which only one view will survive. The process
of sharpening differences and forcing choices is only feasible if
the holders of different opinions share a general framework
within which their views are commensurable. Rorty thinks that
WINTER 1982
�there is such a general framework which permits commensuration withiri particular sciences, or maybe wit,hin the whole scientific enterprise at a particular time. But there is no permanent
commensurating framework for science through all lime, and no
framework that embraces scientific,. moral, artistic, and philosophical activities all at once. There may be some great truth in
this view about commensurability. If so, Rorty's exposition of
that truth is inadequate. His discussions of incommensurable
discourse never get beyond the unresolved tension between insightful critique and disastrous relativism.
Can there be such a thing as discourse that does not presuppose a shared commensurating framework of meanings? How
can speakers get as far as conversation without commensurability? The framework of shared meaning may not suffice for formulation of a means for resolving differences, but this does not
establish incommensurability. Inability to resolve differences is
notorious, for example, in economics, but no one will conclude
that views on the effects of monetary policy are, therefore,
incommensurable.
We would, I_think, say that the views expressed in two different
poems are often incommensurable. To the extent that we would
say that, we would also say that poems do not make assertions in
any ordinary sense. If two speakers do make genuine assertions
for one another's benefit, that is, if they produce sentences that
they mean to be true and mean to be taken as such, then. they
must also hold out the hope, at least, that they can find some
way of telling whether their assertions are compatible OF ihcompatible, that is, they must presuppose commensurability. They
cannot be indifferent about this and simply go on with the conversation. So commensurability seems to be indispensable for
participation in a conversation in which assertions are made. It
may be that this is too rigid a conception of commensurability
for exhibition of the point that Rorty wants to bring to our attention about the multiple enterprises of the human intelligence.
He offers us no guidance on a less rigid conception.
These abstract difficulties find concrete illustration when we
turn to Rorty's examples of incommensurable discourse. He calls
Marx and Freud edifying philosophers whose discourses are incommensurable. He criticizes those who try to draw the thought
of these figures into the "mainstream," and that means those
who want to make the doctrines of Freud and Marx commensurable with other opinions and theories about psychology, physiology, economics, history, and morals. Rorty's relativism is out of
hand here.
We may all agree that the insights and theories of Freud and
Marx are hard to connect with less revolutionary patterns of
thought about man. These two are similar in that they both construct self-contained schemes of things with relatively clear internal rules for investigation and interpretation (though this is a
problem for these systems). Furthermore, for their initiation
such systems may depend on an exceptional willingness to ignore prevailing rules and concepts and entrenched opinions.
Rorty is sensitive to all this insulation of these radical theories
from the rest of the universe of thought. But this insulation is
necessarily only partial. Thinking, no matter how radical, must
preserve substantial contact with preexisting thought. This is the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
minimum price of intelligibility. Marx and Freud, in particular,
certainly do respond to earlier views and they both expect their
work to be preferred to other doctrines on rational grounds, even
on "scientific" grounds. Freud connects his work in straightforward ways to the international psychiatric thinking of his time.
He incorporates in his thinking some large ideas from earlier
German philosophy, and he openly commits himself to the ultimate commensurability, even the. reducibility, of his psychological
theory to the workaday conceptual scheme o£ physical medicine
and physiology. Similar points apply to the doctrines of Marx.
These thinkers regarded their own views as commensurable with
the "mainstream" and only in the setting of that commensurability were they able to think of their own views as important.
The question of commensurability arises for Rorty only when
he thinks about two beliefs that seem to be opposed. Freud's
opinions seem to be incommensurable just because he says such
things as, "Slips of the tongue and lapses of memory are intended." Assertions like this seem to be in flat contradiction to
our ordinary opinion that slips and forgetting are unintended.
Furthermore, there is something especially troublesome about
the seeming opposition of Freud's claim to the ordinary view
about slips and lapses of memory. The ordinary view is not
merely a widely held empirical belief. It belongs, rather, to a
framework of shared meanings. We all think, though we don't articulate such thoughts much, that a verbal performance is not a
slip, by definition, if it fulfills the speaker's intentions. This
comes, in some sense, from the meanings of "a slip'' and "intentional." Similarly, it is not just that we have found that people do
not intentionally forget things. They cannot intentionally forget
because doing anything intentionally entails knowing what you
are doing. If you knew what you were forgetting, that wouldn't
be forgotten. Within the context of this limited illustration, I
think it is this special character of Freud's opposition to ordinary
thinking that leads Rorty to the contention that his doctrines are
incommensurable and his philosophy edifying. Freud's view cannot be commensurated with the mainstream because it conflicts
with the framework of meanings within which assertions about
intentions and slips and forgetting can be logically related to one
another.
There is something in this. Freud expresses views which are
not only new opinions in psychology but which also deform the
accepted system of meanings within which psychological assertions are customarily formulated and compared. Freud does not
discuss these deformations himself. He seems to be far from fully
aware of them. But he is certainly not simply making false statements with the old concepts. He is trying to make true statements with altered concepts. No one seems to know just where
Freud violates the traditional system of interrelated concepts
and beliefs and where he relies on a common fund of meanings
in order to communicate anything at all. Now we have to ask,
Where does incommensurability fit in here? Can we say that
Freud is not really opposing established views but merely "sending the conversation in new directions," as Rorty thinks the new
non-foundationalist philosophers will? Can we agree that Freud's
opinions may become the prevailing belief by simply replacing
without ever confronting earlier opinion?
87
�I think that we must try to reconcile, or to choose between,
Freud's doctrines and the ordinary beliefs with which they seem
to conflict. For example, we can attempt reconciliations that
stress the unconscious status of the intentions Freud finds. We
can try reformulations of Freud's views that capture the spirit
without the conceptual deformations, for example, ascribing intentions to a subagent for behavior that is unintended by the
whole man. And we can try to soften the apparent rigidity of the
ordinary system of meanings by calling attention to non-psychoanalytic contexts, such as brain bisections, where the contrasts
"intended/unintended" and "forgotten/not forgotten" come
under remarkable pressure. These are suggestions for "continuing the conversation," and it may be that Rorty has in mind just
this development of conversational philosophy. But these efforts
at understanding Freud are also nothing short of efforts at making his thinking commensurable with the thinking of others. If
we are not trying to make Freud's ideas commensurable in such
ways, then we are just not trying to understand him. It will not
do to call this failure to understand edification or respect for a
kind of creativity.
Quite a bit of just this not-trying-to-understand is presently
done in the intellectual world. It generates the familiar self-enclosed cultish point of view in which unexamined and deformed
terminology become an insider's rhetoric. When this happens,
the failure of commensurability will not promote a democratic
conversational mentality. The very fact that there are still such
things as Freudianism and Marxism is in part a measure of the
extent to which incommensurability seals off thinking from the
give and take of ideas which Rorty values.
5
Rorty's thinking is very well-informed and he always tries to
use the views of other philosophers as guideposts even in cases
where he does not want to follow them. Throughout his book he
says that Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger have been his
greatest guides, showing him the path out Of epistemological
foundationalism. These three thinkers all reject the schemes
that have grown out of Cartesianism, and they all attack the Cartesian root and not just the modern branches. But Rorty actually
has little to say about the views of any of these three. In the
fourth chapter, which he calls the "central chapter of the book,"
he examines instead, and in quite a bit of detail, much more recent analytic philosophy and, in particular, the views of Sellars
and Quine._ It is as though these tough-minded analysts, who do
not reach the relativism he adopts and whom Rorty himself calls
"systematic philosophers," help him to see the virtues of the
much vaguer and more relativistic doctrines of Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. According to Rorty's exposition, Sellars
clearly grasps the hopeless defects of "the Myth of the Given,"
and all the foundationalist programs that have been based upon
it. His appreciation of "the logical space of reasons" marks Sellars's perception of the indispensable contrast between causal explanation and justification. But Rorty finds that Sellars remains
committed to the illusion of "analysis," which is the idea that
our concepts are, in any case, accessible to us, so that we can
88
make entirely secure judgments as to what is and what is not true
of these concepts. Just here Quine's thinking is most important.
Quine's rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction is aimed at
precisely this presumption of the availability of our own concepts as unshakeable support for analytic judgments. Rorty sees
the two ideas: (i) the incorrigible data of sense, and (ii) incorrigible
access to our own concepts as the twin supports of contemporary epistemological foundationalism. Therefore, a combination
of Sellars's critical rejection of the first view and Quine's rejection of the second, a combination that neither Sellars nor Quine
fully attains, is just what Rorty wants in order to disenfranchise
foundationalism.
Throughout Rorty's work there is erudition, sensitivity, and
much truth. At the end there remains a large gap in his argument. The failure of Cartesian foundationalism does not establish relativism. Rorty seems uncbaracteristically insensitive to
the problems of internal coherence bf relativism, problems that
have been known since Socrates criticized Protagoras. Even
Rorty's appeal to the painstaking work of analytic philosophers
seems odd, since they are, in his own characterization, systematic philosophers whose work would have to appear to be a waste
of time dominated by baseless illusions from the vantage point of
edifying conversational philosophy. Sellars and Quine are both
philosophers whose thinking is pervaded by the idea of science.
Given Rorty's meticulous presentation of their doctrines, and
given his appreciation of the clarity (Quine's anyway), the penetration, and rigor of this, the best philosophical thinking of the
analytic school, his final position that seems to applaud all the
voluminous obscurantism now produced in Europe is disappointing.
There is another kind of inconsistency in Rorty' s thought which
is understandable, maybe even attractive, if not altogether acceptable. At several points in his discussion, Rorty seems to draw
back from his own radical conclusions as though in recognition
of the fact that they are in themselves so profoundly unsatisfying. In this mood, Rorty describes the anti-systematic conversational philosophy he endorses as essentially reactive and critical.
Such philosophy demands a correlative systematic and objective
philosophy. Without systematic philosophy to react to, edifying
philosophy is nothing at all. In consequence, Rorty seems to envision a cyclical alternation between systematic and critical philosophy, each of which has its purposes and legitimacy:
Great systematic philosophers are constructive and offer arguments. Great edifying philosophers are reactive and offer
satires, parodies, aphorisms. They know their work loses its
point when the period they were reacting against is over.
They are intentionally peripheral. Great systematic philosophers like great scientists build for eternity. Great edifying
philosophers destroy for the sake of their own generation. (369}
Here Rorty seems to agree with my judgment that his conversational philosophers, left to themselves, do not have anything to
talk about. The only real views ever at issue are those of philosophers who look for objective truths. These truths try to be universally commensurable in that they are to be tested against all
comers. If this is Rorty's view, he may be right to oppose a partieWINTER 1982
�ular conception of foundations, but it hardly makes sense to oppose the very idea of objective knowledge daims.
It seems that Rorty might envision something like this: Some
day, through the reactive efforts of thinkers such as himself and
the great figures he admires (Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein), the program of the Cartesian Mirror of Nature will be set
aside and it will no longer have any appreciable hold on the philosophical imaginations of men. When that day arrives, a philosopher considering objectivity, rational methods, and truth will not
be planning to relate his beliefs to any supposed inner magazine
of perfectly apprehended representations. Of course, under
these circumstances edifying philosophers will have nothing to
say. Their conversations will have dried up as a consequence of
their own success. Their work will have "lost its point," as Rorty
puts it. Now, at this stage, we could imagine that there would be
no further philosophy produced at all out of a recognition that
any new objective theory is bound to have the same deficiencies
as its predecessors, or we could imagine a new systematic project
that is not obviously susceptible to the criticisms raised in earlier
reactive phases. When he says that edifying philosophy is essentially reactive, Rorty seems to me to envision the latter development, and in some passages I think he expressly foresees a future
return to thought with objective foundations. However Rorty's
speculations on this point come down, neither of these outcomes is compatible with the general relativism that he presents
in most of the book. For if there is no further systematic project
in the offing, then conversational, creative, and edifying philosophy is not a true successor to the philosophy we have known but
merely a final winding down of philosophy. And if further sys·
tematic projects are to be expected when conversationalism has
lost its point, then Rorty must concede the inadequacy of his
own arguments for relativism. If objective philosophy has a real
future, then we are not entitled to rule it out generally in favor of
pragmatic relativism.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
In this dilemma we can see that Rorty has become ensnared in
the very traps he detected in foundationalist schemes. A relativist
allows that, within the context of relevant human activities and
needs, one assertion may be warranted and another assertion not.
But the effort to elevate the concept of warranted assertibility to
that of objective truth allegedly fails because it presupposes that
we can abstract from any particular context of activities and
needs, or it presupposes that there is one all-embracing context.
This is the viewpoint beyond all viewpoints that Rorty repudiates. But his own efforts at characterizing the plural projects of
human intelligence have engendered just the same presupposition. Rorty thinks that he can assess objective projects from a
perspective in which they are a mere phase inevitably overcome
in the next phase of reactive criticism. The reactive phase, in
turn, is ultimately sterile and needs replacement by further objective efforts. Thus we are to see the intellectual life of man as a
permanent vacillation between the illusion of theory and the impotence of criticism. Perhaps this view can seem to be acceptable and not simply a form of despair, because possession of it
seems to embody a higher objectivity and understanding. But
really there is no such point of view and no occasion for despair.
It is impossible to accept a permanent role for systematic philosophy and at the very same time to repudiate the idea of such philosophy. Rorty's picture of alternating objective and reactive
phases of philosophy does invite us to regard his relativism as a
higher objectivity, but this is not so much a virtue of his account
as it is a contradiction in it.
I See Kuhn, T., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago 1962.
2
Kripke, S., "Naming and Necessity," in Davidson, D., and Harman, G.,
editors, Semantics of Natural Language, Dordrecht.Holland 1971.
Quoted from the slightly revised reissue, Naming and Necessity. Cambridge 1980.
89
�R:Evmw EssAY
Afghanistan Fights
The Struggle for Afghanistan
by Nancy Peabody Newell and Richard S. Newell*
LEo RADITSA
Le regime des Seleucides ne constituaitcependantnullement un
regime colonial dans le sens oil nous 1' en tendons aujourd'hui.
Comme ils n'avaient aucun zele missionaire, et ne cherchaient a
ameliorer ni la religion ni les egouts d~ leurs sujets, mais laissaient les indigenes aussi crasseux et aussi heureux qu'ils l'avaient
ete auparavant, la dynastie ne donna jamais lieu a aucune insurrection de leur part.
E. J. Bickerman
On December 8, 1978, just after signature of treaty between
Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, like the Soviet treaties with
Vietnam, Angola, and Ethiopia, the New York Times said, "Instead of being a strategic highway to India, as the Victorians
feared, Afghanistan looks more like a footpath to nowhere."! But
catastrophe teaches provincials geography. In the last three years
Kabul has become almost a household word. And people have
slowly come to grasp that places few had heard of before 1979,
Kandahar, Jalalabad, Mazar-i-Sharif, are not about to become
family estates of the Bonaparte family. The Afghans are fighting
to almost everybody's amazement in the West-and the rest of
the world.
This ignorance does not come from scarcity of books or lack of
involvement with Afghanistan. We have been more involved
with Afghanistan since 1945 than the British in the nineteenth
century.2 This.ignorance comes from lack of judgement.
In contrast to nineteenth-century accounts, largely written by
British officers in India, and to the diplomatic correspondence
the British government published at the time of the Afghan crises of 1836-42 and 1873-79, the writings in this century, especially those after 1945, betray little grasp of Afghan history. They
obscure fundamentals that nineteenth-century writings stressed:
*Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London 1981, 236 pages.
90
The difficulties of access that Afghanistan opposes on all
sides to an invading army, surrounded as it is by the vast
tracts of mountain and desert, the former only to be traversed
by surmounting steep ridges and threading narrow defiles
where a few hundreds of well-armed and resolute men could
effectually oppose the passage of as many thousands, entitle
it to be considered in a military sense, as one of the strongest
countries in the whole world, whilst the manly independence
of its hardy inhabitants, their sturdy valour, and their skill in
the use of weapons of war, to which they are trained from early
boyhood, combine to render them far from despicable oppo·
nents, especially on their own ground, for even the disciplined
warriors of Europe ... Afghanistan is the great breakwater established by nature against an inundation of northern forces
in these times. [Emphases minep
In the nineteenth century the British knew Afghanistan less
but saw it more clearly and respected it more. They knew less
but what they knew counted for more.
And wear~ busy relearning some of it-but it is already very
late. In its contrast with Richard Newell's earlier book, The Politics of Afghanistan (Cornell University Press, 1972), The Struggle
for Afghanistan betrays this relearning, for unlike the earlier
work it concentrates on events.
And events are teaching us what we should have known: that
Afghanistan is not a typical country of the so-called "Third
World" -a term that serves largely to undo nations, and to excite
them to undo themselves, by blurring the distinctions between
Leo Raditsa writes frequently on events in the world for Midstream
(most recently, "The Source of World Terrorism," December 1981). He
recently published a monograph on the marriage legislation of Augustus, "Augustus' Legislation concerning Marriage, Procreation, Love
Affairs and Adultery" (in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Roemischen Welt,
Berlin !981, II, 13).
WINTER 1982
�them-because it never experienced direct colonial rule and until1973 had a monarchy (not, of course, in ,the European sense)
that had lasted for more than two hundred years; because in its
many isolated valleys traditions of self-rule and assembly prevail
that are hundreds of years older than the monarchy. And that
just these traditions of self rule and their unwritten constitution
-and not the 1964 written constitution which in retrospect
turns out to have hastened the destruction of the monarchy
-give Afghanistan the strength of resistance: in May 1980 a traditional assembly-a jirgah-brought 916 representatives of
groups fighting in all parts of Afghanistan to Peshawar.
Based on the recognition of the fastness of the territory,
(greater than France) and of the courage of its peoples, British
policy in the nineteenth century supported Afghan independence-which meant independence from Russia and Russia's
manipulation of Persia-at the same time that it did not interfere with Afghan internal politics and its way of life except for
commerce. In the nineteenth century, the amirs of Afghanistan
carried on prolonged subtle and difficult negotiations with the
British government of India and much less frequently with missions of the Tsar-negotiations that betrayed a remarkable grasp
of relations between European nations and Afghanistan's place
in them, and a recognition that their capacity to cope with their
place in the world did not mean they had to become like the nations they dealt with. 4 The crises of 1836-42 and 1873-79 came
about when Britain forsook its own policy of support for the independence of Afghanistan, and interfered directly and unnecessarily in Afghan affairs.
The crisis that came to a head in 1878 and that, incidentally,
precipitated "The Second Afghan War," started in Europe in
1873, and especially in 1875, with the revolt of the Christian
provinces of the Turkish Empire, Herzegovina and Bosnia. Austria, Russia, and Germany, with Italy and France, in early 1876
demanded reforms of the Sublime Porte-demands that Britain
supported only after the Sultan's request. In May Bulgaria rebelled, in late June and early July, Serbia and Montenegro-in
the expectation of support from Russia. In September 1876, Turkey's brutal suppression of rebellion in Bulgaria reported in the
Daily Mail aroused public opinion and sent Gladstone out of
retirement to denounce in Parliament a government that countenanced such atrocities-a furor that hindered the British government's support of Turkey. With the failure of another attempt,
in this instance sponsored by Britain, at negotiations with the
Porte, Russia declared war on Turkey on April 27, 1877. Her
troops approached Constantinople in December.
In response to the threat to Constantinople, Disraeli summoned Parliament two weeks early and announced that the prolongation of fighting between Russia and Turkey might require
precautionary measures. In February 1878, the British fleet sailed
through the Dardanelles to Constantinople; British troops, some
from India, arrived in Malta, and, with Turkish consent, in Cyprus. War between Britain and Russia appeared possible.
In response to Britain's resort to troops from India, Russia mobilized an army of fifteen thousand men (whose size was exaggerated to thirty and eighty thousand men in the reports that reached
India) in Russian Turkestan along the borders of Afghanistan
and sent a mission into Afghanistan. At first in response to inTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
structions from London and then on his own, the viceroy of India
treated with the amir in Kabul for the establishment of a British
presence in Afghanistan, especially in Herat. Aware that the
pressure on Afghanistan came from the crisis in Europe and despite the insistence of his friends and associates that he sacrifice
the independence of Afghanistan in the choice between Russia
and Britain, the amir prolonged negotiations in pursuit of the inherited policy of preserving Afghanistan's independence by neither yielding to Britain and the British government of India or
Russia. The expectations of his delay were fulfilled when the
powerful nations of Europe came to an agreement with Turkey,
which deprived it of much of its territory in Europe, in July 1878
in Berlin, just at the moment of the arrival of the Russian mission in Kabul In part out of ambitious obstinacy-he apparently
dreamed of pushing the frontier of British India beyond the
Hindu Kush-and in part because of the slowness of communications, the viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, entered Afghanistan
with ill-prepared and badly equipped troops from the army of India, and started "The Second Afghan War" -after the resolution
of the crisis in Europe.
It had been the same in the crisis of 1838-42, "The First Afghan War." Britain had become embroiled in a war of succession
in Afghanistan on the side of the "legitimate" king after it had
foiled a Russian-manipulated attempt of Persia to seize Herat
from Afghanistan before it occurred. In 1838, in a letter meant for
Lord Palmerston, that accepted, without acknowledging it, Britain's understanding of recent events, the Russian diplomat,
Count Nesselrode, reaffirmed. with admirable clarity and nuance
the traditional policy toward Afghanistan, now generally identified with the catchword, "the buffer state":
La Grande Bretagne, comme la Russie, doit avoir a coeur le
meme interet, celui de maintenir la Paix au centre de l' Asie,
et d'eviter qu'il ne survienne dans cette vaste partie du globe,
une conflagration generale. Or, pour empecher ce grand
malheur, il faut conserver soigneusement le repos des pays intermediaires qui separent les possessions de la Russie de celles
de la Grande Bretagne. Consolider la tranquillite de ces contrees, ne point les exciter les unes contre les autres en nourrissant leurs haines mutuelles, se horner a rivaliser d'industrie,
mais non pas s'engager dans une lutte d'influence politique;
enfin, plus que tout le reste, respecter l'independance des
pays intermediaires qui nous separent; tel est, a notre avis, le
systeme que les 2 Cabinets ant un commun interet a suivre
invariablement, afin d'empl!:cher la possibilite d'un conflit entre 2 gran des Puissances qui, pour rester amies, ant besoin de
ne passe toucher et de ne passe heurter au centre de l'Asie. 5
The intelligence of British policy towards Afghanistan in the
nineteenth century was in part Afghanistan's doing. The Afghans
inflicted spectacular defeats on the British in the two instances,
in 1838-42 and 1878, in which they blundered into violating
their policy, defeats which brought the British Parliament
enough to its senses to have the government of India withdraw
its forces without being driven out.
In the story of these events there is nothing more instructive
than this capacity of the British government and public to learn
from errors-and Afghan courage. This capacity to acknowledge
error made the British blunders in Afghanistan different in kind
91
�from the present Soviet attempted conquest. In contrast to the
British, the Soviets, because they do not recognize opposition
and, as a result, have no parliament that can publicly acknowledge error, will not leave Afghanistan unless driven out. What officer in the Soviet army could say the words Lieutenant Vincent
Eyre published in London in 1844 and 1879!
We English went on slumbering contentedly, as though the
Afghans, whose country we had so coolly occupied, were our
very best friends in the world, and quite content to be our
obedient servants to boot, until one cold morning in November we woke up to the unpleasant sounds of bullets in the air,
and an infuriated people's voices in revolt, like the great
ocean's distant, angry roar, in a rising tempest.6
The unwelcome truth was soon forced upon us, that in the
whole Afghan nation we could not reckon on a single friend.?
Even a generation after the Second Afghan War the disasters
and the blunders of each war were vividly remembered and discussed clearly.
But Afghanistan was not to keep European ways out forever.
In the twentieth century the monarchs of Afghanistan, in varying degree, began to suffer the attractions of Europe they had resisted in the times of her greatest confidence. At the same time
the political experience they inherited allowed them to appreciate the full seriousness of the self-destructive convulsions that
overwhelmed Europe. "The Europeans demonstrated to the Afghans and other non-Western peoples that Western culture was
capable of self-destruction. Afghan modernists were confronted
with the realization that Europe did not have all the answers to
the needs of modern society," Newell sensitively observed of the
effects of the First V\'orld War on Afghanistan in his first book.
Fearful as they were, those convulsions intensified, rather than
weakened, Afghanistan's entanglement with Europe, because
they made it clear that Britain and Europe, with Russia turned
inside out in 1917, and refugees from Soviet Turkestan in
Afghanistan in the early twenties to prove it, no longer had the
control that the exercise of the traditional policy toward Afghanistan required.
Untill945, the monarchs remained capable of controlling the
European influence they encouraged: only their misjudgement
occasioned the excesses that occurred. But after 1945, they lost
control over the pace of "modernization" in part because of the
breakdown and reversal in the traditional policy toward Afghanistan that occurred, more or less unacknowledged, after the British left India in 1947.
At the end of 1948, with Europe still in ruins and Britain out
of India, the Afghan minister of national economy asked the
United States, without stating it in those terms, to take up the
traditional Western policy toward Afghanistan. At the same time
that he acknowledged the central government's need for arms
for domestic control, he foresaw that Afghanistan would fight
for the West in the war now actually going on:
._..it [Afg~an~sta~] wants U.S. arms in order to make a positive contnbubon m the event there is war with the Soviets.
Properly armed, and convinced of U.S. backing, Afghanistan
could manage a delaying action in the passes of the Hindu
92
Kush which would be a contribution to the success of the
armed forces of the West and might enable them to utilize
bases which Pakistan and India might provide.
Ab?ul Majid referred repeatedly to the "war", indicating his
behef that a war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. is inevitable, and said that when war came Afghanistan would of
course be overrun and occupied. But the Russians would be
unable to pacify the country. Afghanistan could and would
pursue guerrilla tactics for an indefinite period. a
Several years later, in the early nineteen-fifties, the United
States decided as a matter of policy to refuse military aid to Afghanistan for fear of offending the Soviets, and because they
judged that no amount of military aid could defend Afghanistan
from a determined Soviet conquest-an expectation Afghanistan's previous history and the events of the last three years
belie.
After the American refus;l, Prince Daoud, prime minister
from 1953 to 1963, turned to the Soviet Union for military and
economic aid. After Bulganin's and Khrushchev's visit to Kabul
in 1955, the Czechs in 1956 supplied the first arms to the Afghan
army, and Afghan officers, eventually as many as 200 a year,
went to school in the Soviet Union.
At first Soviet aid projects meant to attract attention with
quick results: in 1954 a highly visible, twenty-thousand ton grain
elevator in Kabul whose grain, although mostly supplied by the
United States, was often mistaken for Soviet; the paving of the
streets of Kabul, a project rejected as unimportant by the United
States. But soon the Soviets concentrated on projects that would
count when it came to force: besides equipping and training the
army, exploration for natural gas and oil and minerals, jet airports, communications, and spectacular all-weather roadsroads that with their reenforced bridges now bear Soviet armor
and gas _decontamination equipment into Afghanistan. In 1956,
the Soviets offered credits for a road through the Hindu Kush
with a tunnel at the Salang pass which would cut one hundred
and fifty miles and two days from the distance between northern
Afghanistan and Kabul A few years later, work started on another road from the Soviet border to Herat and Kandahar.
Despite the warnings of writers in the West alarmed by the
ominous possible uses of the roads, the governments of the
West, first the United States but then, as Europe recovered economically from the war, France, Italy, and Germany chose to
compete with the Soviets exclusively in economic terms. They
helped agriculture, improved the southern roads, organized an
airline, built airports and hydroelectric projects, improved local
education on all levels, sent Afghans abroad to study-"education" to turn out fateful for the country. In contrast to Soviet
money which was lent against barter arrangements for agricultural produce and for raw materials, like natural gas, whose terms
have never become public, gifts made up eighty percent of
American aid to Afghanistan until 1967.
The United States' decision to compete on unequal terms, in
economic but not military aid-which represented itself as a continuation of the old policy under a new name, "non-alignment,"
instead of "buffer state" -actually amounted to an unacknowlWINTER 1982
�edged reversal of the old policy, for it substituted engagement in
Afghanistan's domestic affairs for support of its independence.
The West's unwillingness to recognize the new policy's reversal
of the old blinded it to its greater risks-risks that plainly acknowledged would have made undeniable the recklessness of
fostering change within Afghanistan without supporting its independence. Did Afghanistan need an army, which the United
States allowed the Soviets to control, for anything except standing up to the Soviets?
We pursued the inherently more dangerous policy, because
we feared the bluntness and explicitness of the old. The old policy faced the risk of war-and appreciated Afghan courage and
Afghanistan's formidible natural defenses-the new policy ignored the possibility of war (and true to its evasiveness, acts as if
nothing is happening, now that war has occurred!) in the protestation of good intentions and the condescension of the assumption
that the Afghans could not resist a determined Soviet attempt at
conquest. In retrospect, in pursuit of this policy of changing Afghanistan's domestic life without supporting its independence,
the West appears unwittingly to have cooperated with the Soviets in undermining the central government of Afghanistan
(which both it and the Soviets mistook for the country).
The new policy with its almost exclusive preoccupation with
Afghanistan's domestic affairs had another fateful consequence
besides the forgetting of Afghanistan's past. It forgot where Afghanistan was. It forgot how the world was put together. It forgot
that the independence of Afghanistan meant the safety of Pakistan and India, and to a degree of Persia, the Persian Gulf, the
Sea of Arabia. Because of this readiness to forget that Afghanistan was an actual country in a specific place that came of not
facing the possibility that Afghanistan might have enemies, Afghanistan despite our greater involvement in it appears to us
much further away than in the nineteenth century.
Admittedly, the British in some sense had it easier, because
they did not have to defend India without being there-and being there, and riding and walking everywhere they went, they
knew how the world was put together. But there are deeper
causes for this incapacity to see that countries are in specific
places and to remember their past. So-called ideological competition serves to blind people to the past and to what is actually going on before their eyes. Besides the diplomats of the West,
much of the youth in Kabul and many in the government fell for
this ideological brooding which does not distinguish between
one country and another: forgetful of their monarchy's political
experience and their country's independence and self-rule they
took themselves for any country in the "Third World" -an expression which, Irving Kristol has profoundly pointed out, exists
only because of the UN's capacity to spread its illusions.
After ten years, in 1963, the king dismissed Prince Daoud as
prime minister. In his concentration on winning money from
abroad for economic development, Daoud had suppressed all political activity except for the distraction of agitation for the "autonomy" of the Pushtun peoples in Pakistan-agitation meant to
foster the illusion of "national" unity and coherence. The foreign money for improving Afghanistan's "infrastructure" and for
education had produced the beginnings of a middle class (about
one hundred thousand by 1973) but not the increase in producTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tion for the trade the new roads meant to facilitate. Largely dependent on the Kabul government, the new middle class spent
its money for imported goods instead of investing in light industry and agriculture.
In an attempt to make up for Daoud's neglect of politics, the
King in 1963 appointed a committee to draft a new constitution.
Approved by a traditional countrywide tribal and ethnic assembly-a national jirgah-the new written constitution betrayed
the divided mind of the monarch-and his hesitations. At the
same time that it granted parliament legislative powers and excluded the entire royal family, except the king, from political office, it granted the king control of foreign and military affairs, the
appointment of the cabinet, veto of legislation, and the dissolution of parliament. At the same time that it sought the consent
of the people, it attempted to preserve the absolute powers of
the king: "The King is not accountable and shall be respected by
all." (Article 15)
Of the 209 members of the 1965 Parliament, the first elected
with universal suffrage, 146 were tribal and ethnic leaders, 25 religious leaders. There were only four deputies from Kabul, four
women, four from the newly founded People's Democratic Party
of Afghanistan (PDPA), among them Babrak Karma] and Hafizullah Amin. Traditional authority, status, wealth, not political issues,
decided most of the electoral contests, especially in the country.9
The king attempted to mediate between this parliament
(largely from the country) and the Westernized Afghans in the
government in Kabul. At the same time as he called himself the
"founder of the progressive movement in Afghanistan," the king
attempted to explain his reforms in Islamic terms. The king's ambivalence betrayed itself in his vacillations in regard to the independent press he alternately tolerated and suppressed, and in his
refusal to approve a law parliament passed for the establishment
of parties that might have in the course of time, a generation-but as it turned out there was to be nowhere near that
amount of time, brought the country into the politics of the city.
Unwilling to risk the organization of the popular will of the country through parties, the king unwittingly encouraged clandestine
groups in Kabul and the other cities of Afghanistan- where less
than ten percent of Afghanistan's estimated fifteen million people live.
In all its ambiguity the new constitution brought an explosion
of political action, outside parliament, at the University and on
the streets of Kabul. For the first time, less than two years after
the dismissal of Daoud, in 1965, organized Marxist-Leninist
groups, especially the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan,
appeared in Kabul During the debate for confidence for the first
cabinet under the new constitution in October 1965, the police
and the army killed at least three high school and university students in demonstrations in the streets. In October 1968, students
prevented the enforcement of a law on education they did not
like. In May 1969, an unimportant matter precipitated a general
strike that closed the University until November. In November
1971, new exam requirements provoked another general strike
that rapidly assumed political character, and again closed the
University for five months.
In the absence of other political organizations, Babrak Karmal
and other representatives from the tightly-organized People's
93
�Democratic Party of Afghanistan often dominated debate in parliament at the same time that their coffirades manipulated crowds
at the university and in the streets. But the students did not need
much encouragement. Western and Soviet money during the ten
years of Daoud's prime-ministership had increased the numbers
of students, but not the quality of education. In primary and secondary schools throughout the country, the teachers, often with
only a few years more study than their students, persisted in rote
instruction that allowed students little discussion or initiative. In
Kabul language difficulties plagued the University: in the sixties
about one hundred professors from abroad lectured in six languages, with the result that the one European language Afghan
students chose to learn determined the· education they got.
There were not enough books: of the hundred thousand books
in the library, the bare minimum for a university, eighty percent
were in English. Also, students wanted to study "letters," fashionable and customary. But the country needed technicians. By
the end of the sixties, Afghans in Afghanistan who had returned
from graduate study abroad numbered five hundred-and in Afghanistan, in contrast to many "Third-World" countries, most
had returned.
Out of this chaos came many students more ambitious than
qualified-and in addition unemployable-good prospects for
the political agitation and the clandestine organizations bent on
undoing the world in the name of bettering it. In some ways a
grotesque magnification, and to some extent a reflection of the
battling that undid many western universities in the same years,
this chaos had more brutal-or, at least more obvious-consequences in Afghanistan.
At its founding in january 1965, PDPA openly declared its allegiance to Soviet foreign policy and the Soviet model. Like many
organizations that cannot cope with opposition, it succumbed almost immediately to the hatred of faction. Each faction had a
newspaper that bore its name: Khalq (Masses), was closed down
by the government in 1966 after five issues, because of vilification of Western influences and of the royal family, and Parcham
(The Banner) lasted until 1969. By 1971, Pareham began to
organize Marxist-Leninist cells in the army, especially among
junior officers-and perhaps to establish contact with Prince
Daoud in forced political retirement, who was to destroy the
monarchy in 1973 with its help. At the same time that it kept up
open and close relations with the government and the army, the
Soviet Union secretly financed and manipulated the organizations meant to undermine them, Parcham and, to a lesser extent,
Khalq. In this situation in which the street counted for more
than a parliament that could not muster the will to legislate, the
king unnecessarily contributed to the heady disorienting atmosphere in Kabul by siding with the Arabs-and the Soviet Unionagainst Israel in the international propaganda war that sought to
undo victory on the battlefield in 1967.
In retrospect it is clear that the present war for Afghanistan
started with Daoud's destruction of the Monarchy in 1973-an
event whose significance was hardly appreciated at the time by
commentators not used to valuing inherited institutionsiO_and
that was hardly remembered in the catastrophe of 1978. Up to
1973 there had been abdications and struggles for succession, but
no direct attack on the monarchy. The only institution of the cen-
94
tral government that had survived more than a generation, the
two-hundred year old monarchy, enjoyed real respect among
educated and uneducated Afghans alike, who called it the
"Shadow of God." Such an enormity required a prince like
Daoud, who was also cousin and brother-in-law of the king, but
a prince with a mind confused by "progressive" ideas-and
with an army ready to obey him in part because of Parcham's
infiltration.
With the exception of some tribesmen, the countryside did
not react to Daoud's destruction of the monarchy, probably because they did not realize that Daoud intended to do away with
the monarchy, rather than substitute himself for the king, and
because they were used to defending themselves from the monarchy rather than defending it. With the monarchy gone, restraint
gradually disappeared in Kabul.
In his proclamation of a republic after his seizure of power,
Daoud called the king a "despot." Despite his promises to turn
the king's "pseudodemocracy" into real democracy, he adopted
the Marxist program and pro-Soviet foreign policy of Parcham.
He emphasized the bloodlessness of his coup at the same time
that he admitted eight murders. 11 The Soviet Union offered
much military and technical aid to the new regime that it, India,
Czechoslovakia and West Germany quickly recognized. For the
authority of the king which rested on the consent of the tribes,
Daoud tried to substitute the fascination of his personality-and
the distractions of his Marxist program, meant for the students
and intellectuals of Kabul whom he mistook for the people of
Afghanistan.
A little more than a year after his seizure of power, Daoud began to undo the Communist infiltration of his regime. In 1975 he
expelled the Parcham leaders. In 1977 he dismissed forty Sovie~
trained officers and began to send officers for training to Egypt
instead of the Soviet Union. Despite his success in undoing
Communist infiltration in at least the top positions in his regime-but not in the army-Daoud still did not, or could not,
conceive a program other than Communist: democracy, in his
1977 constitution, turned out to mean a one-party state that
recognized no opposition.
After its expulsion, Parcham, probably upon Soviet instigation, came in 1976 to an understanding with Khalq, that had
from the beginning considered Daoud too "reactionary" to support. At the same time, in order to lessen dependence on the
Soviet Union, Daoud conciliated Pakistan and turned for aid to
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and, more importantly, Egypt and
Persia. Aware of Soviet and Marxist infiltration in Kabul, the
Shah had already in 1974 offered two billion dollars in credits,
mostly for the construction of a nine-hundred mile railway to
connect Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat with Persia and the world
outside. Several hundred thousand Afghans had gone to work in
Persia and the states along the Gulf. In early 1978 a few months
before his murder and the destruction of his regime, Daoud
visited Sadat, who had recently won the attention of the world
with his visit to Jerusalem.
But it was too late. Unable to defend the status-quo because of
his destruction of the monarchy, Daoud could neither go backward nor forward. That he got into most trouble over women's
rights tells something of the disorientation in Kabul that abWINTER 1982
�sorbed Daoud to the point that he forgot the countryside. 12 He
had become a European in spite of himself. In the end those
who did not hate him would not support him.
Unlike the seizure of power of 1973, the coup of 1978 brought
much murder: guesses ranged from two to len thousand dead.
Carefully planned (according to Khalq, as early as 1975) and carried out by some of the same officers who had seized power in
1973, the coup of 1978 was precipitated by the unexplained
murder of Mir Akbar Khyber, an important leader of the Parcham
faction-one of seven political murders in the last months of
Daoud. Frightened by Khalq-Parcham demonstrations of mourning and defiance that numbered, perhaps, ten thousand, the first
demonstrations against him, Daoud ordered the arrest of the
most important Communist leaders. Either inefficient or infiltrated, Daoud's police allowed one of these leaders, Hafizullah
Amin, after his arrest, to write detailed instructions to army and air
officers to begin the seizure of power the next morning, April 27.
With air battles, spectacular in their precision, and intense street
battles, the coup took a relatively long time, something like
thirty-six hours, time enough for decisive mediation by Western
ambassadors who understood the significance of eventsY
The April 1978 coup brought a mounting fury of intrigue between one faction after another in Kabul and an attack on the
countryside that by early 1979 had provoked violent resistance
throughout Afghanistan. Open in its hatred of the destroyed
monarchy and the murdered Daoud, the regime at first sought
to win confidence at home and abroad with its denial of Marxism
and Communism. Its first proclamation acknowledged God. In
an interview with Die Zeit, Taraki, a leader ofKhalq and the new
President of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, denied
disingenuously that the violence of the seizure of power aimed
at anything other than democracy. 14 A leading expert on Afghanistan scolded the New York Times for calling the coup Communist.15 But soon the fancies that justified their violence overwhelmed the new leaders' capacity to distinguish their seizure of
power from an uprising of all Afghanistan, a "revolution." "But
he [Taraki] insisted on calling himself the leader of a revolution,
not a coup. The conviction that the masses were behind them
would lead Taraki and the clannish Marxist leadership to disaster."
Unwilling to know themselves in the distasteful role of despots,
which in any case was beyond their justification, the new leaders,
within a few months of their seizure of power, took the measures
that Montesquieu taught provoked the ruin of despotism: with
totalitarian arrogance which, unlike the open cruelty of despotism, knows no limits, they attacked Afghan customs and religion
in the name of freedom In October 1978 they unfurled a new
flag for Afghanistan, modeled after the flags of the Soviet Socialist
Republics, which by substituting red for Islamic green undermined their Islamic pretences before the whole country. In November they announced reforms that interfered with customs:
compulsory education; limitation of marriage price; required licensing of all marriages and prohibition of marriage before the
age of eighteen; prohibition of usury in customary credit arrangements between the poor in the country and their money
lenders; redistribution of three million acres of the best landmeasures all ·taken without adequate study of the conditions
they ostensibly meant to correct.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Used to heady "progressive" pronouncements of reform from
Kabul, the Afghans did not react until the arrival in the countryside of bands of fanatic Marxist university and high-school
students as government officials, backed by the well-paid and
radicalized police, showed them that the new regime, in contrast
to Daoud, meant what it said. Tribal and religious leaders who
resisted were arrested and executed.
The attempt to enroll by force all school-age children (up to
then families had voluntarily enrolled about fifty percent of their
boys but only ten percent of their girls) in schools of Marxist indoctrination in which Russian substituted for English amounted
to an attack by the privileged young of Kabul on the authority of
the parents in the countryside. Based on the crude brutality of
the expectation that the expropriation, and destruction, of the
top two percent of the population would free the rest from "oppression" and, even more cynically, win their allegiance to complicity in murder, and robbery, the land reform program ignored
many of the realities of land tenure in an old and poor country
only incipiently sensitive to economic differences. Despite the
recent appearance of something approaching a rural proletariat
of no longer independent nomads, a "majority of farmers and
herders appear not to be hopelessly poor" (by Afghan standards)
and own their own land. The uncertainty that came with the expropriation showed itself in a one-third drop in the spring wheat
harvest in 1979. In the Newells' judgement the abruptness of the
marriage reform shows that it aimed, not at the "emancipation
of women," but, like the compulsory Marxist education program,
at undermining families in order to expose individuals to "social
engineering." The resort to force in all these measures provoked
explosions of resistance throughout Afghanistan-resistance that
coalesced after Kabul showed its readiness to depend on Soviet
force, with its treaty with the Soviet Union on December 8, 1978.
With the countryside in resistance throughout Afghanistan by
the beginning of 1979, uprisings took hold of the cities: in March
1979, in Hera~ the Afghan city closest to Persia, perhaps five
thousand people, in a city numbering eighty-five thousand, including all known Soviet advisers and Khalq members, were
murdered, often with savage atrocity-an event that wants a
Livy to find its proper place in Western history; in April in Jalalabad Afghan soldiers, ordered to attack resistance groups outside
the city, killed their Soviet advisors in mutiny and fled to the resistance, after suffering defeat from loyal government and, according to some reports, Soviet troops. There was violence also
in Kandahar, Pul-i.Khumri, and Mazar·i-Sharif.
The first purges took place just two months after the KhalqParcham seized Kabul: in July, Hafizullah Amin expelled Babrak
Karmal and five other Parcham leaders to the exile of ambassadorships in eastern Europe and jailed hundreds of Parcham
members. Reckless, arrogantly confident that the Soviets needed
him more than he them, in some sense an amateur, with illusions of independence, for unlike Soviet trained Parcham members, he had learned his Marxism on American campuses,
Hafizullah Amin defied the Soviets in his fanatic impatience, only
to become more dependent on them. For instance, Soviet advisors, whose numbers increased from fifteen hundred at the
time of the coup to at least five thousand by the early summer of
1979 to ten thousand at the time of the invasion, often took the
95
�places in the ministries and elsewhere, of the Parcham members
Amin purged. By driving events beyoll,d anybody's control, Amin
probably more than anyone precipitated the Soviet attempt at
conquest that began with his murder.
Even as he jailed Parcham members and prepared the measures that by provoking rebellion in the countryside would make
him more dependent on the Soviets, Amin convinced visiting
American "experts" in the summer and fall of 1978, and apparently, the American ambassador, who saw him frequently, that
he could turn Afghanistan into a Communist country without
succumbing to Soviet domination. This fanciful expectation
came of the illusion, which led to the support ofTito in 1948 and
in the last ten years to the support of Communist China, that
the enemy is just another nation, Russia, and not Communism
that seeks domination by destroying governments of every sort.
Even the murder of the American ambassador in early February
1979 in a Soviet-directed attempt, supposedly, to rescue him
from unidentified terrorists, did not awaken the West to the
seriousness of the situation not only in Kabul but throughout
Afghanistan-and to the increase in Soviet penetration. After
all, what free nation makes a fuss about the murder of an ambassador? The United States which had up to then ignored
Amin's treaty with the Soviet Union meekly withdrew even further from Afghanistan after uttering its first disapproval of the
Communist regime. Perhaps nothing more shows the participation of Western diplomats and journalists in Amin's illusions than the sensation caused by Amin's foreign minister's
outburst against Soviet "unreliability and treachery," less than
three months before the invasion-in the fall of 1979. At the
same time Amin began to plot against his closest associate Taraki
who may have been in touch with Babrak Karmal and other Parcham members during his enthusiastic reception in Moscow in
September 1979.
Speculation about Soviet motives for invading Afghanistan on
December 25 with eighty-five thousand troops (soon to number
one hundred thousand) serves largely to continue the evasion
that kept Western journalists and governments from anticipating
the danger of attempted conquest throughout the preceding six
years, and taking action against it before it occurred-even after
intelligence reports of Soviet troop movements along the northern
bank of the Oxus River early in December 1979. According to
the Newells, Amin's defiance of the Soviets and his successive
purges of their favorites, Parcham and then Taraki, drew the
Soviets to attempt the conquest of Afghanistan. But the struggle
between factions that turned murderous in the end was at most
a precipitating cause. The reason for the attempted conquest is
that the Soviets can not face the uprising of almost a whole nation, of almost all the Afghans, not for their "world revolution"
but against it. "The most self-defeating aspect of Khalq's program was its failure to give those elements of the population it
championed anything they could recognize other than trouble.
As a consequence, Khalq ignited one of the most truly popular
revolts of the twentieth century." (Emphasis mine.)
In appearance abrupt, the attempted Soviet invasion of Afghanistan actually brought to a head a generation of active infiltration
in Afghanistan. Already in 1950, the year Spanish, incredibly, attained equal priority with English-and four years before the ap-
96
pearance of a ten-thoUsand copy edition of a Russian-Vietnamese,
Vietnamese-Russian dictionary-students at Soviet language
schools studied Pushtu.
To the surprise of both the Soviet Union and the United States,
it turned out, however, that without an open fight Afghanistan
was not for the stealing. Suddenly, the courage of the Afghans
rediscovered the buffer state, under all the obfuscations about
"non-alignment," and the wisdom of nineteenth century diplomacy. But the courage that was too much for the Soviets was
also too much for the West. The United States too could not
cope with the courage of men ready to fight, almost with their
bare hands and without waiting for support, against the soldiers
of a regime that terrifies it and the other leading nations of the
world. The Soviets tried to destroy the men of this courage; the
United States cynically took their destruction for granted. "The
primary inadequacy of American policy lay in the fact that it immediately conceded Afghanistan. Carter conveyed that concession even in his strongest denunciations of the invasion."
The unreality of the West's response showed itself in the ludicrousness of Western statesmen's remarks and proposals for
Afghanistan. Without blushing, the government of Germany remarked on the divisibility of detente, a remark which, if it meant
anything at all, meant that Germany expected Europe to be conquered last or next to last-and without fighting. Fresh from
handing Rhodesia to Mugabe with the acclamation of the whole
world, Lord Carrington proposed "non-alignment" for Afghanistan, just at the moment when the Soviets were lost in the attempt, and denying it, to destroy the buffer state, for which
"non-alignment" had been for a generation a kind of codeword
that obscured the realities of its survival both to the West and
the Soviets: the courage of the Afghans and nature's gift of
fastness.
The United States' admission that it would fight for the Gulf
of Persia but not by implication help the men and women resisting aggression in Afghanistan, showed for perhaps the first time
since 1945 that it was reduced to defending natural resourcesnot freedom. Against this shameless-and unintelligent, for it
forgets Afghanistan's strategic position (but mountains and courage do not appear in the defense budget)-admission of a policy
of expediency, nobody said a word. Least of all those who, with
the mindlessness of the "educated," had been quick to assume
that the lust for profits had driven us to fight for Indochina. The
consequences of preferring expediency to the defense of freedom-as if aid to those ready to fight for freedom in Afghanistan
were not expedient!-shows itself in the United States' readiness
to cater to the whims of Saudi Arabia and to forget that the importance of Israel comes not because of its ties with American
Jews, but because it has the reliable daring strength that can only
come of democracy-the only democracy in the Middle East ex·
cept for Turkey whose moderate temporary military dictator·
ship, terrorism's bitter fruit, now begins to awaken the contempt
of those who can only recognize freedom in its absence. It also
shows itself in the prevarications of our relationship to China, itself occasioned by our abandonment of Indochina, especially in
the refusal to recognize that China, which has not said a word
for Poland (but totalitarian countries fear nothing more than a
meaningful word), is more ruthless than the Soviet Union, and in
WINTER 1982
�the readiness to make embarassing compromises of dubious legality in the support of Taiwan. But the truth is that the struggle
that counts, and the only one we can win, r~ally win-and without major war, but at the risk of small wars in which individuals
but not whole populations die-is for freedoffi. We were in Indochina because of freedom.
United States and Western evasiveness shows itself most in its
incapacity to face up to the Soviet use of gas in Afghanistan, reported already in May 1980 by Newsweek-and in Laos since
1976, and in Cambodia-and to supply the Afghans openly with
elementary weapons and simple medicines. The Soviet resort to
gas in violation of two international treaties is an international
issue, that is, an issue that affects all countries if there ever was
one. It occurs at a moment when the government of the United
States, against its desires and probably unnecessarily, has yielded
to the importunity of some of Europe for arms control negotiations for both middle and long-range nuclear strategic weapons.
To enter into such negotiations in the knowledge that the Soviet
Union is violating two international treaties against the use of
gas, amounts to saying we will negotiate with you no matter
what you do. That is not to negotiate, but to yield without acknowledging, and even knowing, it-just what totalitarian countries mean by "negotiate." The only newspaper I know of that
has shown courage in facing up to Soviet use of gas, the Wall
Street Journal, is right in its judgement that the enormity of the
outrage is too much for the government.
Because the Afghans dare fight the Soviets we are afraid to
help them, not fight along with them, but simply to help. There
have been reports in the American press that the government
has seen to weapons for the Afghans from the beginning. But
then why the secrecy? And why President Reagan's casual remark in the first months of his presidency that he would aid the
Afghans if they but asked? 16 Do we really live in a world in which
Sadat dared say that he sent old weapons from East Europe, apparently paid for by the United States, to people fighting for
their homeland against brutal aggression with more or less their
bare hands in cold and heat we can barely imagine-but the
United States does not?
Whatever the truth of these rumors of covert aid to the
Afghans from the United States, every report I have read from
men who have dared enter Afghanistan and every report the
Newells cite tells of the absence of modern weapons, especially
of ground to air missiles, and of simple medical supplies. 17 We
may send some weapons, but they do not get through.
The underlying reasons for Western refusal to help the Afghans are not pretty. Fear, first of all And then condescension.
We are quite used to pitying the weak whom the Soviets, in
much of the world, know how to turn into unwilling victims of
their own hate and resentment, but not to respecting the brave.
Who are these unlettered rustics with their World War I rifles to
teach us courage? Who are they to fight for their country and us,
unasked?
The sixty to two hundred resistance groups, often acting on
their own and, thereby, baffling Soviet planning, draw their cohesion and authority not from European parliamentary institutions and "political" ideas, which served largely to destroy the
Monarchy and bring the European civil war to Afghanistan, but
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
from age·old tribal assemblies that make binding majority deci·
sions, assemblies where speakers with age, wisdom, courage and
brilliance in speaking, and lineage exercise the most influence.
That we take it for granted that these are ineffective and primitive tells a good deal more about us and our distance from the
past that made us than it does about the Afghans. For these institutions resemble those of Homer, who lived only a hundred generations ago.
The British in the nineteenth century were much closer to
that past. In 1841 Vincent Eyre knew who had marched in
Afghanistan before him-"a country hitherto untraversed by an
European Army since the classic days of Alexander the Great."
As a result Afghanistan was closer to them than Europe to Af~
ghanistan. In contrast, the Afghans now know the intimacy of
our minds and what Afghanistan means to us better than we
who can barely catch sight of their country in the distance. Several months ago, the leader of the National Liberation Front of
Afghanistan, Sayed Ahmed Gailani, explained the strategic and
moral significance of the war for Afghanistan to an Italian journalist with a clarity beyond most officeholders in the West:
The Pakistanis have done their Islamic duty by us, not only
because of solidarity, but also because they realize that in the
eventuality of the consolidation of their grip on Afghanistan,
the Russians already plan a blitz through Pakistani Baluchistan that would bring them to the Sea of Arabia-in the ful·
fillment of a dream of centuries. The Sea of Arabia means oil
and the strangulation of Europe. The Europeans either do
not grasp this sequence of events-or pretend they do not.
In answer to the reporter's question: "What would the Afghans like from Europe?" Gailani said:
A bit of solidarity, if not for humanitarian reasons, for the vulgar reasons of expediency. Would you dedicate to us a few of
those peace marches that occur everywhere often in favour of
our invaders. You walked for Vietnam where the two great
powers collided. You might walk for us, a country where nobody collided with anybody, which has been invaded in the
coarsest colonial fashion, the fashion we escaped in the time
of the British and which now comes to us from Moscow.
We ask ourselves over and over again: How can Europe, hypersensitive Europe, who rises to her feet for Chile and Cambodia, find the strength to close her eyes to our instance, the
most shameful of all?
Our fight can have three great consequences: the liberation
of Afghanistan from an invading army, the rescue of Pakistan
from probability of a similar fate, the frustration of the plan to
encircle Europe. Unless it is just this that you want-to be
encircled. 18
Tucked away in the pages of the New York Times several
weeks ago, the U.S. Army chief of staff remarked almost as a
matter of course that the Third World War had started in Af.
ghanistan. 19 It may also be won there. But there is not much time.
1. "Keeping Cool about Kabul," New York Times, December 8, 1978.
2. In his proposal on March 12, 1948 to President Truman to raise the
American Diplomatic Mission in Afghanistan from Legation to Em-
97
�bassy, George C. Marshall observed" ... that the American Community
in Afghanistan is now larger than that oLany other foreign state." Foreign Relations of the United States, Part 1, V {1948), 490-494.
3. Vincent Eyre, The Kabul Insurrection of 1841.42, London 1879, 1-2,
63. Published on the occasion of "The Second Afghan War," this second edition of Eyre's The Military Operations at Cabul, which ended in
the Retreat and Destruction of the British Army (London 1843) contains a
long introduction, not included in the first edition.
4. For an account, extraordinary in its intelligent subtlety, of the nego·
tiations that broke down in the crisis of 1879, see H. B. Hanna, The Second Afghan War, 1878-79-80, London 1899, 2 vols., especially I, 1-285.
5. Correspondence Relating to Persia and Afghanistan, London 1839, 261.
6. Eyre, Kabul 2, London 1879, 53-54.
7. Eyre, Cabul1, London, 1843,29.
8. FRUS, Part I,V (1948), 490-494.
9. Christine F. Ridout, "Authority Patterns and Afghan Coup of 1973,"
Middle East Jouma/29, 2, 1975, 165-78.
10. Without distinguishing between the king and the monarchy, the
New York Times called the King "conservative" the day after the coup,
July 18,1973. The next day, in perhaps a typographical error, it reported
that "Afghanistan had been ruled by the monarchy for 43 years." Two
days later, on July 21, 1973, C. C. Sulzberger assured everyone that
there was no significant difference between the King and Daoud: "Af·
ghanistan was no democracy under King Zahir nor will it be under President Daoud."
The former American Ambassador to Afghanistan (1966-73) Robert G.
Neumann ("Afghanistan Under the Red Flag," The Impact of the Iranian
Events upon Persian Gulf and United States Security, Washington, D.C.
1979, 128-148 also barely notices the disappearance of the monarchyprobably because the intensity of intrigue and gossip in Kabul robbed
him of perspective.
11. According to the New York Times ofJuly 26, 1973, Daoud stated: "I
can safely say that this was in every sense a bloodless coup. It not only
enjoyed the complete cooperation of all branches of the army but also the
support of all people, particularly the intellectuals and youth." (Emphasis
mine.)
12. Robert G. Weinland, "An Explanation of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan," Center for Naval Analyses, Alexandria, Virginia 1981,7. For
an example of the disproportionate interest in the position of women in
a country with more tractable and pressing problems like a high infant
mortality rate, see the ideological but interesting study of Erika Knabe,
Frauenemanzipation in Afghanistan, Germany 1977.
13. See the interesting article by Hannah Negaran {pseudonym for an
Afghan), "The Afghan Coup of April 1978: Revolution and International Security," Orbis 23, 1, Spring 1979, 93-113. The reluctance of
Afghans even abroad to speak of events in Afghanistan openly betrays
the nearness of the violence that appears so far away.
14. Die Zeit, june 9, 1978.
15. Louis Dupree, New York Times May 20, 1978: " ... an enlightened
press should avoid the loose use of the term 'Communist.' All should examine the words of the new leaders carefully for governments, like persons, should be considered innocent until proven guilty."
16. New York Times, March 10, 1981. For the indications, all from unidentified sources, that the United States sends arms to the Afghans,
Carl Bernstein, "Arms for Afghanistan," The New Republic, July 18,
1981, 8-10.
17. I cite only the most recent reports: II Giornale Nuovo, December 2,
1981; Neue Zuercher Zeitung, December 20-21, 1981; Foreign Report,
January 7, 1982.
18. Il Giomale Nuovo, October 29, 1981.
19. New York Times, January 3, 1982.
See also the important article by Pierre and Micheline Centlivres,
"Village en Afghanistan," Commentaire 16, Winter 1981-82, 516-525.
AT HOME AND ABROAD
LETTER FROM VIETNAM
Hanoi, ecological city
Four A.M. at my hotel, right in the middle of Hano~ near the Grand Theatre. The
crowing of roosters from the yards nearby
awakens me. Not-to-be-believed! Thirty
years ago, at the age of thirteen, I had last
seen this colonial city that looked more like
a French provincial town-with, however,
every feature of an urban center-than a
capitol. In thirty years the regime has managed to rusticate Hanoi at the same time
that its population (not counting the new
suburbs) has quadrupled to 800,000.
98
In that early morning's walk and in the
following days, I saw other sides of the city's
"ecological" transformation. With the exception of a few public buildings, no new
housing had gone up within the city limits.
Banana trees, vegetables, chicken cages,
pig pens take up every square foot of the
gardens of the villas of the past. Fertilized
by the excrement of fowls and little pigs that
are raised like dogs, a vegetable green spills
from the terraces of even small apartment
houses. The inhabitants are even encour-
aged to take up part of the sidewalk to plant
fruit trees-or vegetables that the urine of
passing children waters.
Interior spaces are laid out with the same
ecological concern. Each individual takes
up an average of one and a half square
yards. He eats, sleeps, studies, works, and
entertains on a bed made of one large
wooden board. Thin panel-partitions and
balconies under the ceilings quadruple the
available space. Four to five households
now live in the space once taken up by
WINTER 1982
�one. This crowding makes for the mutual
surveillance the State desires. In the course
of time, however, it may make for loyalties,
and even connivance against the state's
hostility.
The housing crisis
Unventilated and usually dark, these low
houses in the center of town are still preferable to the recently and poorly constructed
dormitory houses of the suburbs that break
down into slums within four to five years.
They are preferable because the life of the
streets makes footage in front of these
houses worth a mint in rent or in sale price.
With their stands set up there, small craftsmen and peddlers earn ten times more than
state employees, even despite heavy taxes
and the necessity of restocking in the open
market.
In the suburbs humidity and mould
crumble the walls; doors and windows don't
shut; the stairwells stink; running water
reaches only to the second floor; the waste
drainage system is inadequate or nonexistent. Coming home from factory or office,
men and women have to carry pails of water
to the third, fourth, or fifth floor, and, for
fear of theft, in addition, their bicycles.
These houses in the suburbs are not available to anyone who wants them. Heroes of
labour and high-level state and party offi·
cials have preference; others may leave
their names on a waiting list that may drag
on four or five years. But money can always buy the right to rent from those who
enjoy preference.
The state also builds housing for those
who can pay lavishly for associative ownership-four to eight thousand dong down,
the rest in monthly installments, with salaries in the range from 50 to 200 dong a
month. And yet because of the crises in
housing the waiting lists for co-ownership
of these apartments are long: illegitimate
favors and illegal transactions are the rule.
The discrepancy between the earnings
of employees and bureaucrats and what
they spend always bewilders foreigners. A
family of four with two working adults
spends an average of 500 to 600 dong for
essentials: food, clothing, medicine, travelbut the two salaries together hardly add up
to 200 dong. How do people make up the
difference? This is one mystery in the everyday life of a citizen of Socialist Vietnam.
Small in size, the apartments hold a bewildering amount of stuff. Refrigerators
and TVs take center stage; then sewing
machines, radio-cassettes, thermos bottles,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
dishes, kitchen utensils, clothes, canned
and dry foods, table, chairs, bed; even a
mo-ped or a bicycle kept away from thieves
,-all crammed into a poor lodging of twelve
to twenty square yards.
No paintings, no vases with flowers. Even
in the homes of intellectuals, there is no
room for aesthetics. Only one picture hangs
on the wall, high above the many shelves
filled with useful objects-the portrait of
Uncle Ho, outward sign of loyalty to theregime, and protective talisman against the
indiscreetness of the cultural police.
Meant for lawns and children's play, the
space between houses was turned two years
ago into vegetable gardens with plots for
each apartment. Every family gets two
square yards of land for vegetables and its
pig or chickens. Dogs-traditional guardians of the Vietnamese house, children's
playmates, and a special holiday delicacyare nowhere to be seen. Utility and survival
are the only things that count.
The inhabitants of sprawling suburban
projects in Hanoi should count themselves
lucky in comparison to the half of Hanoi
dwellers who swarm in areas that have no
sewage system. On rainy days, it takes acrobatics to keep your knees dry crossing the
muddy lanes in these slums infested with
flies, mosquitoes, and rats. Thirty to fifty
people share a common toilet, a sink, a tiny
kitchen. Despite the single-story houses,
the population density makes the pollution
from the garbage and excrement left uncollected in the humidity among swarming rats
far worse than in the areas overwhelmed
by the exhaust of cars in Western cities.
The institute of health of Hanoi reports
the highest incidence of respiratory and intestinal maladies in just these areas that
the tropical heat makes ideal for the prolif·
eration of bacteria. And yet it is these streets
which house the favorites of the regime,
the proletarians of the workshops and factories-except when these rural-born workers still keep a house in the surrounding
countryside, fifteen or twenty kilometers
outside the city.
Urban life
In Hanoi people travel mostly by foot or
on bicycle, which should please the world·
wide ecological movement-except for the
anarchy of traffic. Fatal accidents occur
daily in the wild swarm of cyclists that
thread daringly between trucks driven by
young "bodoi" drivers still used to jungle
paths. No one pays any attention to the
traffic lights that hardly ever work because
of power blackouts. Without looking ahead
or behind drivers turn right or left. The
young policemen who casually direct traffic are completely overwhelmed. A cigarette
will do if you are stopped for a violation.
After dark, the undiminished traffic of motor·
bikes in the unlighted streets and boulevards
of Hanoi causes serious collisions between
cyclists-and fatal crashes between trucks
and motorbikes.
The use of electricity is severely restricted. With its frequent and prolonged
power cuts, Hanoi becomes a little village
after nightfall. Except for the embassy area
and the houses of the top men, darkness
covers the city. Ostensibly, the energy is
saved for the sake of factories and country
agricultural machines. But such darkness,
in a city of a million people, increases crime
-thefts, break-ins, rapes, prostitution in the
parks, juvenile delinquency. By depriving
the urban proletariat of its one relaxation,
TV sets and radios, it also invites a noticeable rise in a birth rate already rising at an
alarming thirty percent a year. One saying
in Hanoi goes: "I bury my joy deep in the
belly of my wife, and from year to year my
family grows."
Socialist "work"
Like space, time, especially work-time, is
used ecologically. The factories, workshops, and offices have realized the dream
of all Western ecologists, the two-hour day.
A worker, who barely lives five days on his
monthly salary, gives the Party-State its
due: two hours. The other six he keeps for
the pursuit of his private interests. In factory Number X in Hanoi, the team of mechanics makes spare parts for a series of
underground bicycle, kitchen-, and household-ware workshops. They draw upon the
state's raw materials, which rarely arrive at
the same time. This excess of some materials and absence of others equally necessary,
excuses non-fulfillment of quotas and leaves
workers with nothing to do. But since it is
the rule, the socialist rule, that machines
must run unceasingly, workers more often
than not turn the machines to practical advantage-instead of letting them run on
emptily. With the surplus materials or with
scraps that have a way of piling up, they
make themselves objects not forseen in the
plan. Garment workers have a way of cutting large scraps from the textiles the fac·
tory provides-scraps that they turn into
pretty blouses at home for their own use
or, more often, for sale on the open market
in competition with factory goods. When
99
�occasionally the local marketing of factory
"surplus" materials, or of items made out
of them, arouses the suspicions of the economic police, truck-drivers cart the illegal
merchandise away to sell along the roads in
the country~much to the delight of the
peasants, who usually have to do without
manufactured goods.
With such a duplication of effort, socialist enterprises have no chance of reaching
the goals they negotiate with the stateunless they indulge in the common practice of altering the books. The failure to
meet production goals, however, compels
managers to multiply expensive overtimea move that in turn encourages the workers to increase the amount of overtime by
further reducing their productivity during
the regular day.
For twenty years the Party-State has
thundered against the waste and theft of
the public property and means of production of the nation. But the workers and employees feel even more robbed and exploited by a state that pays them wages too
low for their biological reproduction. Who
is the thief here? That is the question.
Short of shutting down its own enterprises
-a move which it will never bring itself to
make-the state can always hold its managers "responsible" to more easily dismiss
them. But the system survives the removal
and replacement of advisors, unchanged.
Workers in distribution and service are
not to be outdone by factory colleagues. According to the Party's daily paper, the People, the Peoples' control committees from
a sample of 500 state stores exposed the following covert practices: the employees of
state stores keep the best of the merchandise, sometimes all of it, for themselves; in
food stores, employees sell customers flour
and other grains after buying up all the rice
for themselves; in the bicycle store M. K.,
the employees together buy up all bicycles
and tires for their own use and especially to
resell at large profit to relatives and neighbours; at a state "supermarket," Bach Hoa
in Hanoi, the shopper who asks for a piece
of fabric, a thermos bottle, a ballpoint pen,
a notebook, or a bar of soap, can expect the
automatic response of the saleslady, "All
out" -but he knows for a fact that a buyerspeculator ready to share his profit with
the saleslady could take home a good supply. Even for rationed items for which you
have coupons you often have to buy your
place in the long lines made up oflittle professionals between the ages of eight and fifteen. This mafia of buyers-speculators in
connivance with the salespersons, whose
wages rarely exceed twenty-five dollars a
month, infests almost all the state stores in
100
Hanoi and in the other cities of Vietnam.
In this racket, the buyer and saleslady
never deal alone but in concert with every
one of their colleagues-and with the omnipresent agents of the police.
Widespread corruption
The transportation business is just as riddled with corruption. It often takes weeks
to get the authorization necessary to move
from one city to another, and, especially,
from north to south-and just as long again
to get a train or bus ticket. The train ticket
from Hanoi to Haiphong, three dong at the
official state price, is available only on the
black market for ten times the price. State
officials take an unlimited number of "business" trips, often with their families. Employees of the railroad and bus lines sell at
least a third of their tickets to "relatives"
and friends who then renegotiate them on
the black market. The price of airplane
tickets is prohibitive. And yet the Vietnamese travel constantly, both to visit friends
and family and, more often, to speculate
on the significant differences in the price
of merchandise in different regions.
At least once a week the party papers accuse a bus or shipping line of misappropriating hundreds of tons of rice or wheat
flour. But the denounced crimes go unpunished. Prompt enough in handing down
harsh verdicts against their political enemies, public tribunals are slow and indulgent towards economic delinquents whose
hands are no dirtier than anyone else's.
The gangrene of corruption does not
spare the most "sacred" sectors of socialist
society, health and education. The managers and staff of hospitals and clinics skim
off substantial amounts of the medicine
and food intended for the sick. Managers
report an inflated number of beds or patients. If the state maintains it cannot meet
such inflationist demands, the patients
have somehow or other to pay for the supposedly free services and medications. In
this condition of severe scarcity and blatant inequalities, it seems only natural that
hospital workers attend to their own wellbeing before treating the rest of the people.
In the socialist system there are at least
three types of hospitals: those for the people, those for the middle-level bureaucrats,
and those for the higher officials of the
Party-State. Within each type treatment
varies according to wage or salary scales.
Everyone in Hanoi knows that the large
hospital, "Viet-XO" (Russian-Vietnamese)
admits only high-level officials, who are assigned to wards according to salary. Before
explaining his symptoms, a sick man who ar-
rives at a hospital must show his party card
or his certificate of salary.
The hard times of 1980 showed the weakness of the Vietnamese academic system. At
the start of the 1980 school year, the regime
took pride in an enrollment of 13 million,
from nursery school to secondary school,
and a teaching staff of 300,000.
At the material level, the academic system is totally inadequate. The buildings (including those made of wood and corrugated
iron or mud) barely suffice for a third of the
students. Classes are organized in shifts:
morning classes from seven to eleven or afternoon ones from one to five are for youths
following a normal course of studies; evening classes, from six to ten, are for adults.
Children are left to themselves a good half
of the day. The youth organizations cannot
cope with their numbers. They often loiter
in gangs in the parks or in the streets of the
suburbs. In the present hard times, children
help their families in their unofficial workshops or do their own small-time peddling in
front of state stores, train stations, movies,
and theatres. Some of them prove to be excellent pickpockets. A walk after dark in certain areas of Hanoi and Saigon is ill-advised.
In 1980, the students or their parents had
to buy textbooks and notebooks, often at
high open-market prices. In many schools,
students have neither paper nor pencils to
copy down the lessons of teachers, who cannot keep up standards. After school, students and teachers run into each other in
the pursuit of small deals on the sidewalks.
The teachers I interviewed said they had
never known their profession so debased
and humiliated. Their poverty wages allow
them no time for advanced study, for research, or self-instruction.
Secondary-school teachers with classes
preparing for degrees or for college entrance
are a bit better off. They reserve their best
teaching for those students whose parents
can pay extra for special lessons. To pass
the entrance and graduation exams of universities and technical schools, you had
better be the child of high-ranking officials
in the regime, or be able to afford large payoffs-or be a genius. The certainty that
their students, unless they are ready to go
till the soil in the New Economic Zones,
will be unemployed after graduation from
high school or university, discourages many
honourable teachers. In the south, the lot
of students and their teachers seems even
more desperate. There, in addition to the
material deprivation common to all Vietnamese, the newly "liberated" suffer the psychological torment that comes of not being
able to absorb socialist education based on
Leninist indoctrination.
WINTER 1982
�Indoctrination
Instruction in "revolutionary vigilance,"
even and above all towards one's parents
and relatives, replaces the teaching of mo·
rality. The outcome of an individual's exams depends in large part on his political
history and on the political history of his
parents and grandparents. As they say in
the South, "Hoc tai thi ly lich": "Study
with your brains, compete with your political past."
(Students in the South are divided into
four categories:
A. Militant, or belonging to the family
of a party militant;
B. Worker, or child of a worker-family
which did not work for the old regime;
C. Child of a petty official or non-ranking
military man of the old regime. Petty bourgeois origin;
D. Men who worked for the old regime,
or child of parents who held high positions
in the old regime.)
University professors and researchers
must keep strictly to "the eight valuable
hours of socialist work." A professor of
medicine from the faculty of the University of Paris, fifteen minutes late for his lecture, often puts up with the reproaches of
his doorman-comrade.
The regime appoints officials, recruited
from the illiterate peasantry, to watch over
the activities of Southern intellectuals
barred from all teaching. Former professors of literature and law hang on in untenured positions at the Institute of Research
in the Social Sciences. Others who are in
shape pedal bicycle-taxis. All of them
dream of leaving their country~now become a foreign land-even though not
many years ago most took part in the struggle against the American presence. The
Southern intelligentsia is most pitiable.
The regime distrusts the quarrelsome habits it took on in the long struggle against
the American war. To make matters worse,
the Stalinist conception of a proletarian
science and technology radically different
from, and far superior to, bourgeois science, still holds sway over Vietnamese
Communist bureaucrats.
During a national congress of the
Writer's Union, in Hanoi in May 1980, in
celebration of thirty-five years of literary
production under the regime, Nguyen
dinh Thi, famous writer and ex-president
of the union, conceded: "Over thirty-five
years of independence and socialist construction, we have seen a host of writers
and poets emerge, but not a single literary
work." This outrageous admission earned
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
him the total suppression of his play,
"Nhuyen Trai a DOng Quan," commissioned by the Party's Central Committee
: to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the
national hero, general, chief of state, and
poet. Party censors accused him of playing
down the great man's victorious resistance
to the Chinese army of occupation in his
overemphasis of his hero's time of disgrace
-and of implicitly slandering the present
socialist regime in his critique of the despotic monarchy of that time. The fate of
this party writer, producer of some twenty
novels extolling the anti-colonialist and
anti-imperialist struggles and the construction of socialism, sheds a harsh light on the
predicament of not-so-conformist writers
and artists.
Painters and musicians are encouraged
to take up subjects that will build socialism,
and socialist love of country and of work.
Eastern or Western Impressionism, abstract painting, and painting of nude figures are on the index. A squad from the
cultural police descended upon the studio
of painter B one day to seize his paintings
of too-delicate young girls, and to teach
him to draw "a hand with all five fingers."
The censors classify music into three
fundamental groups: red, yellow, and blue.
The radio broadcasts red or revolutionary
music, martial in its rhythms and lyrics, all
day long. Yell ow music, romantic and softening like the former music of the South or
agitated like the Western "disco" music, is
passionately condemned. Finally, blue music, like classical music and the light music of
the West, is to be listened to in moderation.
Repression is so severe that many intellectuals confess that they do not dare to
write their thoughts and real feelings, even
privately. They do not dare pursue unorthodox ideas for fear these might slip out in
conversation with an unreliable colleague
or in the course of police questioning. The
motto of Buddhist and Christian monks,
"Banish impure thoughts," has become a
party order to the subjects of the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam.
In twenty-five years of socialism, at least
sixty famous writers and artists have
known banishment, expulsion from the
Party, reeducation through work in camps.
Professor Tran Due Thao, once a student
and professor at the :Ecole Normale Superieure of Paris, is the most notorious
case. For requesting more freedom in university teaching and in literary and artistic
expression, and particularly for daring to
criticize the anti·intellectual Stalinist practices of the Party, he was arrested in 1958,
subjected to self-criticism and sent to tend
cows in a reeducation camp in the High
Regions. Upon his return to Hanoi in early
1960, he was barred from teaching and
publishing. In exchange for a food allowance, he translates works of Marx and
Lenin. Denied hospital privileges, he must
depend on the help of friends in case of illness. Since 1971, at the request of some intellectuals of the French Communist
Party, the Vietnamese Communist Party
authorized Tran Due Thao to publish
some articles on the philosophy of language in the French journal La Pensee.
Country life
Compared to country life, the cities with
all their poverty seem to the Vietnamese
peasants like little heavens-for they still
have medicines, white rice, sugar, cigarettes, and all sorts of amenities. Despite
Party propaganda, the young people (students or graduates) sent to the country see
that the peasants are even more exploited
than the urban proletariat. Unable to bear
the harsh conditions of country life, the ostracism of local officials, the ignorance the
Party fosters in the peasantry, most of
these young people sneak back to the cities.
Organized into cooperatives that have
collectivized all the means of production,
land, and equipment, the peasants take
their work in the collective rice paddies in
resignation for a corvee for the Party. They
control neither the production plan nor the
distribution that allots them the bare minimum of food: forty-four pounds of paddy
per person per month in a good harvest,
about thirty percent of total production.
The rest must be sold to the state at ridiculously low prices. The manure, agricultural
equipment, and other items of everyday
use supposedly supplied by the state at low
prices are available in far from sufficient
quality or quantity.
With the exception of Party schools for
the children of the political bureaucracy,
the schools, which are free, offer no prospect of advancement. Because in 1980 the
medical clinics had no medicines, the peasants had to seek their medicines in the cities at black market prices. To survive they
must, in addition to the eight hours of socialist work on the rice paddies of the cooperative, put in as much or more time on
their family plots. The productivity of
these individual plots, that taken together
make up five to seven percent of the communal lands, surpasses the collective rice
paddies six or seven times.
Thanks to a tropical climate that knows
no harsh winters, the peasant may, with
101
�deft rotation, manage four or five harvests
a year: one of rice, one of potatoes or corn,
two or three of kidney beans, soy beans,
tomatoes, squash, tobacco, etc. He takes
his tools and fertilizer from the cooperative's stocks.
Convinced the state exploits him, the
peasant flaunts a high rate of absenteeism.
In his five to six hours on collective land,
the peasant prepares his strength for the
pursuit of much more lucrative work at
home: truck farming, pig and poultry raising, handicrafts or peddling. In consequence
of these arrangements, young researchers
from Hanoi, engaged in a survey of rural
life, were astonished to find thirty-hour day
schedules for peasants: eight hours of work
on the cooperative farm, eight more of work
at home, eight hours for sleep, four hours
of domestic activities (kitchen work, housework, childcare ... ) and one hour for relaxation or political meetings.
The family economy resorts to all available labor, from six-year-old children tore-
tired grandparents. The children are given
the least burdensome tasks, such as babysitting or watching the pigs and poultry.
But the children's work in the family interferes with their schooling: most Vietnamese peasant children quit school after the
elementary grades.
The yield of the family plots not directly
consumed at home fetches prices on the
open market in the cities from eight to ten
times higher than in state stores. Only this
parallel economy, which the State tolerates
in suspicion, allows the peasant to add
enough to the meager collective-farm food
rations to satisfy his basic needs for clothing, housing, health, transportation, social,
and cultural life.
More spacious than city homes, half the
houses in the country in the North are now
solidly built, with brick walls and red tile
roofs. Not the productivity of the cooperatives, as the regime would have it, but
twenty years of desperate work on plots of
individual land have built these houses.
This article appeared in 1981 in the autumn issue of Commentaire.
Eight years ago the writers, a physician
and a professor of education at the top of
French professional life-Paris-and about
to join the Socialist Party, accepted an invitation from the French Ministry of Foreign
Affairs to spend five years in Laos. With
their three infant daughters they arrived in
Vientiane, for an at first sight "mad adventure" that reflection had told them actually
amounted to an "extraordinary opportunity," on September 14, 1974-little more
than six months before the Communist
conquest of South Vietnam that they enthusiastically took for the "liberation" of
Indochina. Despite their expectations, their
eyes were alive enough to see what went
on before them-and their souls strong
enough to stand the pain of their sight.
Every Communist victory in Vietnam
brought the Communist Pathet Lao nearer
to power. A little more than six months after the signature of the Paris accords to end
the Vietnam War January 23, 1973, a Provi·
sional Government of National Union was
formed in Laos in which Communist ministers matched right wing minist~rs in pairs.
Even the police was reduced to powerlessness by the resort to pairs: a Communist
accompanied each American-uniformed regular policeman. The conquest of Saigon in
April 1975 made possible-in addition to
the Khmer Rouge conquest of Phnom Penh
-the "Liberation" of Vientiane and the
seizure of power in Laos by the revolutionary committees supported by the Pathet
Lao on August 23, followed by abdication
of the king on November 29 and the decla·
ration of the Peoples Democratic Republic
of Laos on December 2.
The more the Communists in Vientiane
The state may complain that the oblig·
atory deliveries of produce from the cooperatives leave much to be desired-and
sometimes do not occur at all. At fault,
however, are not the collective-farm members, who receive only thirty percent of the
harvest-but the middle-men who each
skim something off the surplus: officials of
the cooperative, of the commune, of the
district, and of the province; managerial,
administrative, military, and political officials. In the endless "bureaucracy" in Vietnamese rural society, there is an official for
each four or five workers.
Hdnoi, November 1980
JEAN DULICH
Translated by Colette Hughes
Jean Dulich is a pseudonym for a Vietnamese.
FIRST READINGS
LAOS
Au nom de Marx et de Bouddha, Revolution au Laos: un people, une culture disparaissent, by Marie-Noele and Didier Sicard
InterEditions, Paris 1981, 207 pages.
Laos has long since returned to the strategic insignificance for which, one judges,
nature intended it and for which its inhabitants unquestionably yearn.
J. K. Galbraith
New York Times
January l, 1982
This is a real book, a book that had to be
written. Like most such books it is also a
story of self-education. It has an awkwardness, not to be confused with ineptness,
that tells in its dreadful simplicity indelibly
of experience.
102
WINTER 1982
�tighten their grip on Laos, the more they unity, and equality between the various
fall into dependence on the Communists peoples of Laos. Who could object? People
of Vietnam. For instance, the arrest in responded to the regime's call with undeniMarch 1977 of the king, whose legitimacy , able eagerness: after thirty years of guerrilla
the Communists had made a great show of warfare they yearned for reconciliation.
respecting in their years of infiltrating the Since all were to take part, reconciliation
royal government, came a few months be- meant meetings which people in the beginfore the signature of the treaty of "friend- ning attended with enthusiasm.
ship and cooperation" (july 18, 1977) with
This readiness to trust the regime's offer
Vietnam that spelled out the "special rela- of reconciliation and attend its meetings
tions" that obtain between the two coun- was, in the Sicards' retrospective judgetries in national defense, the arts, radio, ment, a mistake that could not be undone,
press, education-and secretly traced a new for the regime had no intention of keeping
frontier between the two countries.
its promise of reconciliation. "Caution! If
To some extent the Communist seizure you trust in good faith, if you honestly deof power in Laos amounts to a disguised sire an understanding, know that under
North Vietnamese conquest. But the North their apparent frankness and good will your
Vietnamese ascendance, like almost every enemies of thirty years' standing intend to
other fact in Laos, has to be denied. Since remain that way." "The function of the pothe "friendship" treaty, expression of anti- litical meetings is to invite people to tie
Vietnamese sentiments brings eight years their own hands of their own free will."
in the camps. Haircuts, accents, and the
At these meetings, that took place in the
availability in butcher shops of dogmeat, a beginning two or three times a week, on
Vietnamese delicacy Laotians despise, be- short notice, at any time of the day or night,
tray the Vietnamese, who disguise them- individuals had to demonstrate their adherselves in the uniform of the Pathet Lao. ence to propositions that changed with beOnly the Thai kids, for the moment safe wildering rapidity. There was no question
beyond the wide Mekong, dare refer openly of objecting or expressing one's thoughts.
to the North Vietnamese domination of The ever-changing line had to be repeated
Laos: they call the Laotian children on the as if one meant it. The primary experience
other side, "dog-eaters."
of these meetings was that one can be made
Because they were less obviously brutal to assent to anything: the writers agreed at
and murderous than the Communists in one of these sessions that foreign reporters
Cambodia and Vietnam, the Communists should be kept out of Laos, because their
in Laos thought they could undo Laos with- news might hurt the "revolution." At least
out anybody, either Laotian or foreigner, made to appear to assent to anything. " 'I
noticing. At a time of exclusion of foreign- am sure that ninety percent of us make beers not from the socialist countries from lieve we agree. But do we have any other
Vietnam and Cambodia, they allowed men choice .... '" "To give up speaking, means
and women like the Sicards the freedom of dying to yourself and thereby to others."
the country. This confidence of the ComAnd the self-betrayal requires actions as
munists in Laos that they could get away well as words. Often, the betrayal of friends.
with anything that was not unmistakable Or symbolic "political" action: on a night
-and with their, in appearance, frank and in December 1977 the whole population
open manner they won the Sicards at first- suddenly turns to digging trenches to defend
makes the Sicards fear that "the 'normal' the "revolution" from imminent attack beworld of tomorrow will perhaps be closer to cause the line holds that Thai "imperialism"
the world of Communist Laos than our threatens the nation.
own."
In addition to frequent political meetings,
In the beginning, immediately after the there are weekly sessions of self-criticism at
seizure of power, the new regime offered work and, especially at the university,
reconciliation. In contrast to the old gov- monthly rehearsal of political thoughts in
ernment it promised to explain all its ac- writing-"autobiographies" that allow no
tions: people would no longer be ruled from fact or feeling to escape the great simplistic
the outside without explanation, but would divide "before and after the revolution." At
themselves take part in decisions. All were self-criticism sessions a person criticizes
to help realize progress, reconciliation, himself before suffering the criticism of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
everybody else. In grand self-criticism sessions, an individual, for instance, a young
woman, pregnant by a professor who has
fled across the Mekong, faces a thousand
people on her feet for six hours. These criticism sessions serve to isolate individuals
-and at the same time to make them feel
responsible for their isolation. "'The most
painful thing is not to be able to speak
openly to anyone. Out of fear, we use ambiguous language. But the torture is unbearable.'" They reinforce each person's
sense of his own powerlessness and of the
force of the state without limits-which
cannot be distinguished from everybody
else and from oneself-that does what it
pleases with impunity. The forced writing
of "autobiographies" makes individuals feel
that Party cadres can see through them-as
one student put it. But again they are the
ones making themselves transparent.
In 1979, four years after the seizure of
power, Party cadres addressing these meetings openly confessed the deceptiveness of
their initial offers of reconciliation:
Now that you have advanced in your
study of our politics, you can realize that
we never had the slightest intention of
carrying out the program announced in
1975. The announcement of the program
was simply a step necessary to reassure
the people, to win their acceptance of
us- in order to reach the only and glorious goal of socialism.
Reconciliation that looked like an offer
to negotiate meant only to disarm the people and turn them to their own oppression.
"Between brotherly countries there are
never negotiations-there is only one reality: the correlations of forces." Negotiation,
even the demand for an openly acknowledged surrender instead of the offer of reconciliation, would have meant the Party
recognized limitations, acknowledged another will than its own, another world than
the mind of Lenin. The seizure of power,
therefore, does not bring the end of fighting
but continuation of fighting by other means:
fewer are murdered but almost all made to
lead themselves to a living death. "To reduce the forces of the enemy to powerlessness without fighting them, that is the
greatest victory."
But such a victory has no end, it needs
triumph after unacknowledged triumph,
for an acknowledged triumph would mean
103
�recognition of limitation. After the -.seizure
of power, the life in a person which•might
lead him to say or think something unexpected and obvious, to say "no," bec'omes
the enemy. In order to survive physically
the individual must never cease denying
that life-the reason for the frequency and
unexpectedness of meetings, self-criticism
sessions and the rest. "This process of education/reeducation really means learning
to cover up your individuality and turning
yourself into a skeleton or body of marblethe only stuff fitted to this society."" ... biological existence becomes the only point
of reference that does not arouse suspicion .... "
You cannot read the Sicards' account of
the Pathet Lao's exploitation of the yearning for pe"!ce and reconciliation to continue
war without combat-but not without murder-without wondering what it tells about
big international "negotiations" with the
Soviet Union and China. Ever since 1944,
the back and forth between the yearning
for peace and the failure of negotiations,
for instance, the failure _to conclude a
peace in Europe, has served to keep many
people from realizing that the Second
World War continues in a succession of
wars-small only in the sense they are not
total-which served to ideologize and
polarize the perceptions, especially of
"elites," throughout the world in unprecedented fashion. (And polarization of perception means paralysis of the capacity to
see what is going on and to make common
sense judgements: in terms of the struggle
to destroy men's minds, all wars since 1944
have been waged throughout the whole
world.) The terror at nuclear extermination, and the negotiations to soothe it, are
major weapons right now in the struggle to
destroy the remnants of Europe's freedom.
The pursuit of settlement through negotiation played a role in the destruction of
South Vietnam. Those who should most
study this book, diplomats, will probably be
the last to read it.
Besides political meetings, forced-voluntary labor also continues the war after the
seizure of power without guerrilla combat.
It acts out the theses of political meetings.
Everywhere at all times individuals must
look active. In the morning before work in
front of the ministries they water vegetable
gardens to foster the self-sufficiency of
Laos-gardens whose produce is not gath-
104
ered, for the point is to sow, not necessarily
to reap. After work there are calisthenics
and sports. At the university the grounds
show continuous regimented activity-in
contrast to the easy-going leisure before the
''revolution."
The point of this labour is not to accomplish anything but "to realize a concept for
a moment": to show that the people together can do anything-and the individual
alone nothing. Like the "discussions" at
meetings it is largely gesture, but gesture
with the purpose of turning people to their
own oppression-with the excuse that it
will earn them entrance into the "socialist
fraternity." Sometimes the forced-voluntary
labour accomplished the opposite of its intention. For instance, because of the failure
to consult the "reactionary" experts of the
past, ditches dug from the Mekong to irrigate the rice paddies drained them. "The
display of energy in labour has only one
purpose: to express vengeance, the vengeance of the fighters of the Pathet Lao on
those who collaborated or waited, upon
those who thought the nation could come
to independence without turning Communist. And those who suffer this vengeance
must not only undergo it-they must
desire it."
Like the political meetings, the forcedvoluntary labour turns people into accomplices in their own oppression. That everybody suffers makes the suffering easier to
bear. The satisfaction people feel at the
sight of others, once their betters or their
elders, suffering like themselves, blinds
them almost against their will to the system
that crushes them.
But they want somebody to blame for
their self-inflicted misery. "I will bear oppression, the absence of liberty, hunger,
the hardness of life on condition that I can
let my aggression loose on somebody whom
I can hold responsible for my misery. To
survive and overcome my misery, I am ready
to turn in my neighbour-even at the cost
of my moral consciousness." And the readiness to turn in neighbours also means the
nations nearby still outside the "socialist
fraternity."
In this book that describes a society turning into a camp, there is little about the
camps that are nevertheless a distinct unmentioned presence. At the center of the
life left in Laos, the Sicards were about as
far away from awareness of the camps as
anybody could be within Laos. Behind the
still dead waters of a dam about sixty kilometers from Vientiane, there are islands
with a series of camps of increasing severity.
On the first of these islands, one for women,
one for men, open to the world in the boast
of the regime, weaving, basketry, gardening, songs, and dancing "mildly reeducate
parasites-drug addicts, the young unemployed, juvenile deliquents, criminals, lepers,
and prostitutes. The Sicards were turned
away upon their arrival to visit these islands. In other camps there are something
like fifty to sixty thousand officers, soldiers
and civil se~vants of the royal governmenT
-about 2 percent of the population of
Laos. Upon the seizure of power, the officers and soldiers of the royal army went
willingly to political meetings that, in their
instance, turned immediately, brutally into
a concentration camp.
Everybody exists with the unexpressed
fear that they too might disappear into these
camps. "The talk is of freedom, but in reality there is fear and spying." The students
of the Sicards disappeared, it turned out
never to return, often on the excuse of fortyday political meetings or of study abroad in
eastern Europe. "Seven of my students disappeared in October 1975. Arrested because
they insisted on thinking for themselves
and because they could not conceive that
their classmates would use their lives to
dress themselves in progressivism's rags."
A student, a cadre in the Party, obscure
and incapable before the "revolution," now
full of that feverish energy whose characteristic is that it cannot focus enough to accomplish anything, who has the power to
decide which students can go home or
abroad, who makes a show of not going to
his home village for his mother's funeral
(for the Party has become his parents), goes
to a splendid dinner at the house of a
young woman, a classmate. In self-criticism
session the next day at the University, he
denounces her for keeping "bourgeois"
ways. The anger of the Sicards leads them
to the despairing realization that normality
has come to mean such betrayal: people
make believe they take it for granted.
A society that turns into a camp means
paralysis-literally the freezing of movement, not only in private and traditional
life-that is, feeling and thought-but of
actual physical movement, simply getting
around. At night patrols, meant to protect
WINTER 1982
�that sometimes arrest arbitrarily, discour- body else but themselves-as capable of
age circulation. In Vientiane, people are re- anything-and with impunity.
duced to walking because of the scarcity of ' The attack on tradition and the rigidifipublic transportation, and because other cation shows itself perhaps most in the noise
means meet with disapproval: cars show that replaces traditional music and even
privilege, tricycle taxis "exploit" drivers- traditional sounds like the calls of farmers
who as a result without customers must to their water buffaloes. From five-thirty in
work in the fields in the country_ The "rev- the morning, martial music in alternation
olutionary" salute, the clenched fist, like with political announcements blares from
the Hitler salute in Germany, replaces the loudspeakers at almost every comer in Vientraditional, now "reactionary," greeting, tiane. At the hospital and elsewhere there
hands together with a slight bow of the is singing of "revolutionary" songs and
head 1 The young walk apart from each music-which makes the traditional and
other and no longer hold hands. Dress ancient music look somehow out-of-place
changes from the elegance and fresh care and ridiculous. "For the first time in Laos I
that once distinguished one individual from saw that people no longer lived music with
another, to the disguise of monotony: hair their hands and bodies ... they listened rigid
can no longer be worn long, nails painted; in silence." "We can do nothing about it. It
Ho Chi Minh sandals made of tires replace is the people's will," officials told Sicard in
traditional footwear; above all, no jeans; no answer to his complaint that the earsplitting
American cigarettes except in secret; the noise at the hospital disturbed the-seriously
uniform jackets of the liberation army for sick. Like the meetings and the forced volstudents.
untary labour, the noise aims to destroy the
The attack on the spontaneous centers capacity to think-or, at least, to hear your
on the goodwill that informs private and tra- thoughts. At one point Sicard, to his astonditional life: it desires to violate and devour ished bewilderment, comes upon a tradiit. More than ten people cannot meet with- tional Laotian orchestra at the hospital
out permission. Marriages also require per- playing "revolutionary" martial music. Sudmission-and occasion political speeches. denly, the players stop playing but the music
Upon requesting permission for a tradi- continues: the orchestra had made believe
tional Laotian party, a baci, for a newborn it played the music that came from recchild, a couple is asked whether it has for- ords. "Laotian easygoingness makes it imgotten that the "revolution," too, is an in- possible to keep up subterfuge for a long
fant. Not ready to attack Buddhist priests time."
directly, the Party drives them to violate
In the name of return to traditional Laotheir vocation in its exercise. For instance, tian medicine-that had at first stirred Si~
they are told to preach hatred of "Ameri- card-lepers, later accused of "spying for
can imperialism" or to work to avoid arrest the Americans for pay," no longer receive
for "parasitism" -both violations of their antibiotics. The paralysis of life also shows
tenets. Individuals must give the traditional itself in hunger and the incapacity to protest
alms to monks in secret for fear of accusa- against it. The significance of the recurtion for "abetting parasitism." As a result rence of food in her students' grammatical
of this interference individuals and families examples finally comes to Mrs. Sicard: they
now do secretly the things they did openly have nothing to eat between five-thirty in
"before the revolution" -and suffer guilt the afternoon and eleven-thirty the next
and conflict, for they must risk their lives morning-but they had been ashamed to
to live in their accustomed manner. They tell her until questioned! Time rigidifies
experience the state-that is, almost every- also into universal Socialist time: the dates
of Stalingrad, the "October Revolution,"
obliterate the Buddhist festivals of custom
that bore no fixed dates. "The only reality is
1. For an essay showing exact parallels in Nathe undeniable existence of a society that
tional-Socialist Germany, and stressing, like the
Sicards, the acquiescence and cooperation of inmakes its power to crush felt at every modividuals in their own oppression in order to
ment."
survive, see Bruno Bettelheim, "Remarks on
Escape is the only resistance. Since 1975,
the Psychological Appeal of Totalitarianism,"
three hundred thousand have fled-around
(originally published in 1952) in Surviving, New
Ymk 1979, 317-322.
!0 percent of the population. Of the about
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
three hundred thousand Hmong tribeSmen
who fought with great bravery alongside
the Americans and the South Vietnamese,
seventy-five thousand have fled, fifty thousand have been murdered-many by Vietnamese and Soviet gas attacks since 1975
or 1976, largely ignored by a press that has
too long taken self~hatred for indignation.
To flee one's native land forever always
leaves scars that last for generations. But
for Laotians, more timid and with less ex~
perience of the world than Westerners,
flight from their native land means the end
of everything. They flee because of their
children, they remain because of their parents. They flee because they feel "nailed"
to a past they will never be able to live
down: not to have fought for the Communists means to have made the wrong choice
for all time. In the beginning, scornful and
uncomprehending of those who fled, the
Sicards ended up helping anybody they
could to flee. They tell a story emblematic
of Western callousness and the incapacity
to grasp the significance of events at the
moment of their occurrence. At about four
in the afternoon at the luxurious swimming
pool of the Australian embassy along the
Mekong river, a woman, tipsy or unconscionable, rose as if at a football match to
cheer a swimmer she had just noticed making his way toward the shore of Thailand.
The head went down under the surface at
the sound of a shot from an until-then-inattentive Pathet Lao guard. With its disappearance, she collapased when, and perhaps
because, it was too late.
Except for the daring of these flights, the
Laotians do not protest or resist. Brought
up never to show their emotions, they pre~
tend not to notice what is going on. They
are helpless before this seizure of power
and conquest called "a revolution" that exploits every weakness of their character, es~
pecially their incapacity to yield to their
rational anger and to defend themselves.
They are helpless before the onslaught that
above all-and in this it differs from the
clas~ical despotisms of the past described
by Montesquieu-makes them complicit in
their own oppression.
Unlike many observers the Sicards do
not feel this helplessness differs in kind
from the helplessness of the West. "We fear
that this change we lived through in Laos,
in the heart of Indochina, has a universal
meaning. For what is at stake is not simply
105
�a political phenomenon, not simply some
abstract correlation of forces, not simply
the replacement of one culture with another. This is the death of man, and riddle
of riddles, with his own consent.''
The last most terrible pages of this book
tell of the Sicards' own helplessness. Didier
Sicard demanded antibiotics, available in a
nearby ward reserved for Party cadres, for
an adolescent dying of meningitis. He was
told to mind his medicine and stay out of
politics. He demanded vitamins to treat the
alarming increase in cases of beriberi. A
commission of Soviet doctors replied they
knew of no beriberi in Laos. The Sicards
are overwhelmed by the realization that
they did not get through to the men responsible for the outrages all around them.
They take their helplessness for the helplessness of the Laotians. Perhaps, like the
Laotians, they proved incapable of undoing
their good manners. At the end of their account they bravely print the criticisms of a
friend, an anthropologist who left Laos with
them after ten years: "Do not fool yourselves, you were quite popular in spite of
everything. They never did you the honor
of hating you. We were all class enemiesbut hardly dangerous. You began to try their
patience only at the end with your criticisms and unceasing talk. Then you really
became a nuisance with your readiness to
help people escape across the Mekong and
your visits to the refugee camps in Thailand.
But on the whole you were tolerated. They
took you for too idealistic to be taken seriously."
They observe profoundly that the Communists feed on merely verbal opposition
because they know how to outbid and turn
it to ridicule. (An observation reinforced by
the recent revelation that one of the most
outspoken energetic anti-communists in
Saigon government circles was actually a
Communist agent-the Wall Street Journal,
February 10, 1982.) "To argue with them
means you have already surrendered. Pay
attention to what they do-not to what they
say."
They observe with fear that "this flight
into an imaginary world (really the world of
another, of Lenin?) paralyzes the capacity
to oppose, to say no." They ask themselves;
"Who can be against the declaration that
history is progress? What can you say against
Hate excited in the name of Solidarity?
Against the extirpation of a culture in the
name of Progress? The words are Peace,
Independence, Neutrality, Democracy,
Prosperity-what can you say in their faces?
Are we to say they are not true? That the
truth is that instead of Peace there is war,
instead of Independence, dependence on
Vietnam, instead of Neutrality, alignment
with the Soviet Union, instead of Democracy, totalitarianism, instead of Prosperity,
poverty? But in the name of what? In the
name of whom? What are we defending?"
Events in Laos are much nearer to us
than we dare imagine, just because we take
them to be so far away. For in the name of
freeing itself from Europe, from which it
had achieved formal independence in 1954
at the time of the Geneva accords on Vietnam, Laos has been abandoned by the West
and itself to the European civil war, the
war that did not stop after victory in 1945.
LEO RADITSA
A DEAD MAN'S KNOWLEDGE
Graphite, by Varlam Shalamov, translated
by John Glad, 287 pp., Norton, 1981,$14.95.
One day in 1929, a gifted, decent, indeed
noble young man of 22, Varlam Shalamov,
disappeared. The Western expression "arrested" does not describe the situation. After a brief, ghost-like reappearance in 1934,
he disappeared again, presumably forever.
Yet, miraculously, in 1950 he came back
from the other world. He entered the other
world a tall, powerfully built, handsome
youth, and emerged an invalid, an old, sick
man.
The other world had a very prosaic geographic location: Kolyma, some fifty miles
from American territory, beyond the Arctic
Circle.
106
This is Shalamov's second book published in the West. What is it? Short stories?
No. Apparitions from Kolyma are beyond literature or scholarship or essays.
Shalamov tells what Dante would call
"strange narratives."
Right on the cover of the book and in
the reviews of his previous book, Kolyma
Tales, Shalamov has been compared with
and to Solzhenitsyn. Why? Both are Russians who were in "Soviet prison camps."
Jack London tells a story of a French policeman not able to distinguish between
two natives until one of them explained
that he was small and stout, the other tall
and thin.
Shalamov says about an Andreyev, an
old prisoner (who is himself), gazing at the
newer Kolyma prisoners:
These were living people, and Andreyev
was a representative of the dead. His
knowledge, a dead man's knowledge,
was of no use to them, the living.
According to Victor Nekrasov, a Russian
writer in exile, Shalamov lives in Russia in
poverty and obscurity, completely forsaken
and forgotten by his relatives and whatever
friends he had, except for one devoted person who comes to see him.*
F arne, literature, politics, Russia, greatness, Tolstoy~all that Solzhenitzen, immensely ambitious and immensely successful, wanted in his youth and wants nowburned out in Shalamov. Hark to a dead
*Shalamov died on January 17, 1982.
WINTER 1982
�man's knowledge. Andreyev's neighbor
was crying.
Andreyev, however, stared at him without sympathy. He had seen too many
men cry for too many reasons.
These reasons are then described by
someone who no longer belongs to the humanity that weeps-by God or by angels or
by the dead.
The only touch of literature Shalamov
affords is an occasional final punch linethe last sentence of the narrative. In
"Dominoes," a prison doctor (a prisoner
himself) whose privileges (such as a separate room) made him a semi-god in the eyes
of ordinary prisoners, has a fancy (gods and
semi-gods do have fancies) to play a game
of dominoes, and his favorite ordinary prisoner is escorted to the doctor's room by
another prisoner.
In the divine privacy of the room, a di, vine orgy unfolds: the semi-god treats the
mortal to some porridge and bread, and
they drink tea with sugor(certainly the food
of semi-gods). Hours fly by in this heavenly
bliss, and after a game of dominoes, apotheosis follows: the mortal is treated to a cigarette which he smokes almost in delirium.
Ecstatic, he says goodbye to the semi~
divine doctor and walks out of the room
into the dark corridor. The punch line: the
other prisoner had waited for him by the
door all these hours (in the vain hope to get
a crust of bread or a cigarette butt).
Some reviewers invoked Dostoyevsky's
"Notes from the House of the Dead." Shal·
amov says, with his terse, lustreless, dead
man's scorn: "There was no Kolyma in the
House of the Dead."
Or: "Dostoyevsky never knew anyone
from the true criminal world." Even criminals in the Russia of Nicholas I and serfdom
(the first, ferocious half of the nineteenth
century) were not real criminals compared
with criminals in post-1917 Russia.
Kolyma. What's the moral of Shalamov's
life? Of anyone's Kolyma life? There is
none. Every minute of Kolyma life is a
"poisoned minute."
There is much there that a man should
not know, should not see, and if he does
see it, it is better for him to die.
Shalamov saw. The tragic mask he speaks
through is his death mask.
LEV NAVROZOV
FROM OUR READERS (continued from page 2)
mathematics than women. On the verbal
part of the SAT's, scores are about equal.
Perhaps women, in their passive way, read
more and hence become better readers
and so overcome their intellectual deficiencies and test as equals to men, or perhaps
they are equal. Both the math and verbal
parts of the examination demand reasoning ability, and so no conclusion can be
drawn from these results. In the absence of
solid evidence, it seems to me incumbent
on us to treat men and women as equals
rather than assuming inequalitieS and thus
injuring those who, though equal (or often,
be it noted, superior), are treated as..inferiors.
As for child-rearing, it is my impression
that as men spend more time with their
children, many of them become quite proficient at rearing them (sometimes even
better than their wives). Again this may be
a case where habit and prejudice are seen
as laws of nature.
Mr. Levin claims that child rearing is
highly valued by all but feminists. What is
the measure of that valuation? In a society
in which the value of one's work is measured either in terms of money or public
honor (usually the former), child-rearing
seems among the least esteemed jobs.
Nursery school teachers, kindergarten
teachers, and day-care workers, not to
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
mention mothers, get about as little money
or public recognition as it is possible to get.
It is true that those who prefer to have
women at home rather than in the workplace have tried to puff motherhood and
family publicly, but they draw the line at
considering raising children sufficiently
important work to make mothering a qualification for, say, social security. Rather, it
seems to me that the respect paid to rearing children is the kind one typically gives
to those who relieve us of difficult and, on
the whole, unappealing tasks to keep up
their morale. Though I think it is certainly
the case that managing a household well
requires a variety of skills, managerial, financial, social, and political, it is equally
certainly the case that women trying to return to the work-place after years of raising
children and managing households are
treated as if they had been idly passing
their time and had no useful skills, unlike
their male counterparts, who, whatever
paid employment they have had, are treated
as eminently employable. If Mr. Levin really
does value child-rearing, not in some abstract "Yes, the future of our nation depends on h6w our children are raised" way,
but by actually valuing the people who do
it, I commend him; but I think he is part of
a small minority of men.
I do not wish to belabor the issue, but we
should consider at somewhat greater length
the issue of what "sexism" means in terms
of treatment of women in the work-place.
Mr. Levin introduces "a complaint of dubious relevance" at this juncture: namely,
that "judging people on the basis of what is
usually true is unfair to the unusual." His
response to that "dubious objection" is that
"expectations must be based on what is
generally, even if not universally, true."
But this response is inadequate for at least
two reasons. First, "what is generally true"
is sometimes true because of historical circumstances. When Dr. Johnson, a man not
full of the prejudices of his time, met and
was so impressed by the intellect of Fanny
Burney that he offered to teach her Greek
and Latin, he was not permitted to by her
family, most strongly by her brother, be·
cause it was inappropriate for English ladies
to learn Greek and Latin. It was indeed
"generally true" that English ladies were
not classicists, but it by no means followed
from that historical fact that they could not
or should not be. What we are accustomed
to seeing is often the result of a history of
discrimination, and we should not be misled into thinking that what is "generally
the case" is generally the case for good reason. Custom sometimes misleads us into
107
�finding invalid reasons for those appearances, as, for example, the notion of' women's genetic incapacities. The notio~ that
women are genetically lacking either'. certain abilities or psychological traits t:[anslates into their not being considered on
their own merits. Employers have not always employed the "brightest" or the most
skilled, despite Mr. Levin's claim, because
prejudices have prevented them from seeing the talents in front of their eyes or
because they prefer to hire those with
whom they are psychologically more comfortable (see, for example, the study of hiring practices of monopoly and non-monopoly companies of Harvard Business School
graduates by Alchian and Kessel in H. G.
Lewis's Aspects of Labor Economics). Since
Mr. Levin, for example, is convinced of the
inferiority of women in "abstract reasoning" as distinguished from "twenty questions", I would assume that women in his
philosophy classes would be looked at
somewhat differently than men, and his
judgements of students might reflect his
"factual beliefs". The Supreme Court,
after all, knew in much the same way as
Mr. Levin does, that it was perfectly appropriate for women not to be permitted to
practice law (in an 1872 decision the court
ruled that 111inois was within its rights to
deny women admission to the bar). Mr. Justice Bradley's opinion is strikingly like
Mr. Levin's. He, too, claims that "the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which
belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it
for many of the occupations of civil life."
He, too, is not a misogynist. He is in sympathy with the "humane movements" which
have for their object "the multiplication of
avenues for women's advancement." But
this should not be construed to mean that
they should have free admission to those
professions which require "that decision
and firmness which are presumed to predominate in the sterner sex." We can now
laugh at such closed-mindedness, but common sense must have made this home
truth seem obvious to those justices and, in
fact, they had, not surprisingly, never seen
successful women attorneys. Women trying to enter medical schools faced much
the same kind of prejudice, though different rationalizations for the prejudice were
found. And, even when women have been
able to get the jobs for which their abilities
fitted them, they have traditionally been
108
paid less than men. For example, in a lawsuit brought against the U. of Maryland, it
was determined that women were paid, at
the same ranks, in the same departments,
and with the same qualifications, several
thousand dollars less per year than their
male colleagues. And the U. of Maryland is
by no means unusual in this respect. The
most recent figures comparing the salaries
of male and female academics (The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 25,
1981) showed that women on full-time,
nine-month appointments earned, on the
average, approximately 15% less than their
male colleagues. And this difference does
not result from the fact that women tend to
teach in the less highly paid departments
such as the Arts and Humanities. The salaries of women teaching in the Arts were
only 74% of the men's salaries while in the
Humanities the women earned 86% of
what the men ·earned. The only area in
which women's salaries came close to
men's was, curiously, Physical Education,
where women were only 6% behind. And
if it should be objected that women are
paid less because they have earned their
doctorates only recently and hence are
concentrated in the lower academic ranks,
or that women change jobs less frequently
because of family ties, or that they are more
likely to interrupt their careers for childrearing, a study by the National ResearcP
Council (see the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 2, 1981) shows that "Objective
factors alone cannot account adequately
for the career differences which exist between male and female Ph.D.'s." And this
discrimination continues despite "affirmative action" programs which, according to
the study, have not produced "reverse discrimination." I would suggest that sexism
on the part of those doing the hiring and
promoting is the cause of these disparities.
The relatively new issue of equal pay for
comparable work is the old story in new
guise. The jobs open to women simply paid
less than men's jobs, and the differences
had nothing to do with skill, arduousness,
responsibility, or any of the other distinctions one might draw. The only significant
distinction was whether men or women
were doing the work. For example, when
almost all elementary school teachers were
women, elementary school teachers were
paid significantly less than secondaryschool teachers, many of whom were male.
As men began to move into elementary
school teaching, the salaries began to
equalize, and today, in most school districts, all public school teachers are paid on
the same scale. The work didn't change,
only the workers.
Second, we have a long-standing and
rightly respected tradition in this country,
one not always followed but one worth preserving, that people are to be judged on
their individual merits or lack thereof, not
by their belonging to some particular
group, religious, ethnic, or sexual. To act
counter to this deliberately is to invite a
system in which we are judged, not by
what we can do, but by some general notion
of what the group we belong to is capable
of. This seems to me to be a pernicious
doctrine and one to be opposed strongly.
We should note, in closing, that similar
prejudices in the guise of natural laws have
been operative for centuries. The notion of
a decadent "Jewish physics" could only
make sense because it was obvious that
Jews were greedy, treacherous, and dishonest, though clever. Without such prejudices
based on what was obvious to most, the
idea would have been still-born. The presumed obvious inferiority of blacks was
necessary to make slavery a reality and a
morally justifiable institution. Just as "racism" and "anti-semitism" are genuine words
describing genuine facts about the world,
so is "sexism," and to fail to see the evidence of it around one seems to me to be a
case of willful blindness.
GEORGE DOSKOW
St. John's College
Annapolis, Md.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review
... Sexism, according to Professor Levin,
is meaningless, for what it purports to
describe is really the honest recognition of
reality. Facts are facts: there are innate differences between men and women it is only
sensible to recognize ....
But consider this: the illiteracy of the
poor in former days was "confirmed by
experience countless times"; would it
therefore now be correct to assume innate
differences between rich and poor individuals? And would it be fair to deny a job to a
poor person on the assumption of his personal illiteracy? Most of us would agree
not, yet this is precisely what we do to
women in our society. We deny them opWINTER 1982
�portunities based on historical experiences
which have little to do with their innate
abilities or present circumstances, and
much to do with past conditions.
As a female scientist "comfortable in
milieus demanding aggression," I can easily
define sexism (haVing personally experienced it) as the assumption that a generalization true of some persons of a given
gender is necessarily applicable to anyone
of that gender, and the consequent denial
of an opportunity which would otherwise
be granted.
... And what of the exceptional
woman ... ? Prof. Levin would accuse me
of being "perniciously utopian" to expect
exceptional talents to be recognized, but
does not the advancement of society depend upon the recognition, and utilization,
of exceptional talent? ....
Prof. Levin is co.rrect that no one promised me at birth that I would enter the field
most suited to my talents, but having one
way or another managed to do precisely
that, do I not now have the right to be
judged on the basis of my achievements
and experience, without regard to my gender,
as I would expect to be judged without regard to my race or religion? And yet in spite
of my proven ability to work in dominantly
male environments, I am invariably asked
in job interviews how I will "manage," as if I
were a deaf-mute or paraplegic, as if my experience proved nothing. This is the meaning of sexism. That Prof. Levin fails to
understand the meaning of this word in no
way disproves that the word has meaning.
But what of the innate differences between men and women? I would not deny
that men and women "differ significantly";
few feminists do. I do maintain, however,
that with the exception of tasks requiring
great physical strength, these differences
(which Prof. Levin noticeably fails to enumerate) do not necessarily, or even generally, make men any more competent at
holding jobs, solving problems, or wielding
authority than women. Different, yes; better no ....
... apart from the gross biological features, we just don't know what the innate
differences between men and women are,
because we don't know how to distinguish
the. effects of social conditioning from genetic determinism. But to deny that social
attitudes have any impact on human behavior is clearly absurd ....
... in attempting to justify the sexist attitudes which women encounter as the natural result of historical experience, Prof.
Levin actually demonstrates the need for a
"women's movement." He cites the examTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ple of a professor who, used to encountering 1'inferior philosophy examinations"
from female students, comes to expect pre1
cisely that. (Should we ask who this profesl)Or might be?) His expectation is in fact
fulfilled by his own prejudiced perception.
This expectation is changed only by a "run
of good female tests," i.e., the woman must
first prove herself where a man need not.
She must, in fact, initially perform better
than that man in order to get the same
grade, in order to compensate for her professor's bias. Hence for women to obtain
equal recognition of their talents they must
change society's expectations; i.e., they
need a public umovement," a public declaration of intent.
Finally, albeit reluctantly, I must take issue with Prof. Levin's implication that to
be a feminist is to hate men, tacitly or
overtly, and that a woman who engages in
traditionally male activities is ~·m at ease
with her essential identity." As such an accusation can neither be proved nor disproved, Prof. Levin rna y further suggest
with impunity that such a woman "cannot
very well admit this to herself: no ego can
support such self-hate, such ·loss of
meaning."
Well, Prof. Levin, you may refuse to believe this, but I do not hate men. Indeed I
am close to both my father and my two
brothers and am romantically involved
with a wonderful man whom I hope, in
time, to marry. I also have every intention
of having children (by my lawful wedded
husband, I might add), although it may
take some time to work out the logistics of
doing so. How is it possible that I love men,
children, and science? ....
NAOMI 0RESKES
Unley
South Australia
To the Editor of the St. John's Review
I enjoyed the Autumn 1981 issue of the
Review, especially Harry Jaffa's remarkable
article, "Inventing the Past," which taught
me much about my adopted country.
One article, in my opinion, failed to
reach the high standards of this issue.
Michael Levin's" 'Sexism' is Meaningless"
does less than justice to either editor or
author, whose tastes, thinking, and attitudes are, I know, sympathetic to women,
their goals, aspirations, and difficulties.
Some of the article's arguments are clever,
but they have nothing to do with tbe subject at hand. In fact it is hard to say what
the subject at hand is, since Mr. Levin sets
up as a straw man the extreme rhetoric of
the "feminist,'' and then proceeds to ridicule it at the same shrill level. Much of the
discussion about feminism is certainly embarrassing and, as Mr. Levin says, confusing. Instead of helping to clear away the
confusion, the author adds to it by trivializing the argument.
It is silly to say that "sexism" is meaningless. It obviously means something important to a great many people, or he would
not be writing an irritated article against it.
His opening words point out the emotion
the subject calls forth. Should this emotion
not have alerted him to the fact that there
must be more to it than mere silliness? According to his own argument, the obvioUs
is often true, and people should trust their
own commonsense perceptions, feelings,
and beliefs. Are the perceptions of those
against whom he is arguing not bound to
have some validity? It seems perverse to
deny that there was a need for changes in
law and attitudes. Ten years ago I would
never have received a sizeable raise to put
me on the level of the men in my department had it not been for pressure to comply
with the new government rulings. Today
Time-Life has women writers, the Naval
Academy has women midshipmen, and it
works out fine-or at least as imperfectly as
usual. Some "obvious" things are true,
others are not, and it is part of growing up
to learn to distinguish between them.
Most surprising to me is the fact that an
article on "sexism" fails to mention the only
real difference between men and women,
the only difference which is not merely statistical and therefore endlessly arguable in
individual cases. (It need not maher to a
woman mathematician that there are few
other women mathematicians. A creative
person will always be different.) In not
mentioning that women are the only ones
who can and do bear children, Mr. Levin
agrees with 11 feminists" who strangely also
ignore this fact. Lysistrata, and Medea, said
they would rather face the enemy three
times than bear one child. Today, though
science has eliminated the dangers of
childbirth and-they say-fear of pregnancy, women have not changed in this respect. They are still usually responsible for
raising the children they bear; and raising
children is probably more difficult, not less,
than it was in the past.
The subject is highly charged, it seems
to me, because it is the area where public
and private can least easily be disentangled. Reason and emotion, individual and
family converge. How does a legal system
deal with this situation, ensure justice, and
allow freedom? How do men and women
109
�react, and children cope? Abortion legislation and ethics, open adoption r~Fords,
child welfare, ERA, pornography-all
these are highly emotional issues. And the
discussion is so often embarrassing beCause
it touches us personally, on the level of our
intimate feelings and fears. The irrational,
secret fears men and women have towards
each other are surely part of life; where
there is magic, as between a man and a
woman, or a mother and child, there is fear
as well.
Mr. Levin deals only with surface irritations. Does he mean-though he does not
say it-that many problems being discussed are part of life, private, and can
never be solved by political means publicly,
but only worked out privately, with as
much good will and understanding as
possible? His occasionally clever and amusing, irritated and irritating article has not
helped us to understand. And even today,
we need philosophers who will do that.
LARISSA BONFANTE
Professor of Classics
New York University
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Mr. Levin has a point in his article
"'Sexism' is Meaningless" (St. John's Review, Autumn 1981). Many women are angry with men and for no apparent reason.
He concludes that a feminist is angry because she has "lost the sense of the values
peculiar to her sex." This conclusion is possible only if the word "sexism" is meaningless. I suggest that Mr. Levin has simplified
the argument and in so doing has missed
the case where "sexism" does have meaning.
Anger is a result of facing something
that you want to change but cannot. What
can't be changed does not have to be a law
of nature. An individual may become angry if he or she is treated in a way he or she
does not like. If this treatment stems from
applying characteristics true, in general, of
either sex to an individual of that sex, it is
"sexism." Mr. Levin denies that anyone
holds the belief that gender is intrinsically
important. It is true that men and women
are different and that some characteristics
are generally true of men and some of
women. Because I can generalize this way,
I can know a lot about someone immediately. If I meet a man, I know that chances
are he is more aggressive, better at math
and stronger than I am. He may later prove
to be none of these, but they are fair assumptions. This is not "sexism." All I am
saying is that most men are like this and
110
chances are that this individual will fit into
the generalization. I accept that gender is
intrinsically significant. I can be called
"sexist" only ifl am unable to see this man
in any other way than that which fits my
preconception. When a woman is angry at
all men, that too is "sexism." Sexism is the
attitude which holds that the differences
which exist between men and women in
general can be applied, without qualifications, to individual men or to individual
women. It is exactly the belief that gender
is intrinsically important in evaluating individuals. If this is not accepted as the definition of "sexism," then "sexism" is indeed a
meaningless word.
By this definition of "sexism," the word
seems to be susceptible to exactly the same
problems in application as Mr. Levin
points out with the use of "exploitation."
There is a stable central case, that between
individuals, and vaguely peripheral ones,
the judgment of men and women in gen~
eral. Mr. Levin, then, is ignoring the ''stable central case" which gives this word
meaning and focussing on those "vaguely
peripheral ones" to which it is not applica~
ble. "Sexism" has no meaning when ap~
plied to groups. It is entirely a question of
the treatment of individuals.
If "sexism" is not,_ in fact, meaningless,
the question arises whether "anti-discrimination" legislation is an appropriate solution. Can an individual ever be considered
not by the general rule but as an individual
through the law? The law is impersonal
but it is made personal by the judicial system. You are judged in a trial, in which you
are faced by individuals. You and your situ·
ation are judged as a particular one. The
sole purpose of the judicial system is to
interpret the law and to apply it to particular cases. Women should have the right of
recourse under law if they feel they are being treated unfairly. This, however, is a
negative solution. The other side is the
question of affirmative action. Should
quotas be legislated? People should have
the right to hire whomever they wish, yet
will people recognize that women can do a
good job if they do not see many women
working in responsible positions? The generality of the law makes it impossible to
solve this dilemma theoretically. The real
issue is not one of the meaningfulness of
"sexism," or of the ability of the law to address it, but of the extent to which legislation can be justified in doing so.
KATHARINE HEED
Annapolis, Md.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Mr. Levin uses the word "feminist"
with the same thoughtlessness and vehemence with which he claims feminists use
"sexism."
The author characterizes a feminist as a
woman who believes there is absolutely no
difference between the sexes and, therefore, objects to the, in her opinion, prevalent view that men are superior to women.
He also asserts that. feminists secretly know
there is a difference between men and
women although they profess otherwise.
As a result they are filled with self-loathing
and, in classical Freudian behavior, transfer their loathing onto men, the world, and
nature. Mr. Levin's very general argument
does not document this serious accusation.
Why does the request that people be
looked upon each as an individual meet
such rage? It seems reasonable that girls,
like boys, should perfect their talents in
sports, mathematics, physics, biology, literature, or language. Why shouldn't women
expect to have a career after they leave
school, and to receive the same pay as a
man for the same work? Most women will
have to work when they leave school. Mr.
Levin implies that the only permanent jobs
which have evolved naturally for women
are those of telephone operator and
mother. Where has Mr. Levin been if he
has not noticed that society has changed
drastically, not only over the past twenty
years, but since the Industrial Revolution
put women in factories? How can a woman's right to continue at these jobs but also
at others requiring physical or intellectual
ability be denied? Levin thinks it can be beqmse women lack the necessary aggression.
When Mr. Levin writes ''The discomfort
of women in milieus demanding aggression
has been confirmed by experience countless
times," I must question whose experience.
To survive, women must be aggressive.
More than half the households in the
United States require two incomes for sup·
port. Thousands of women work to support
families by themselves. Because women
pay taxes they deserve protection from the
government against discrimination.
Aggressive behavior is not limited to the
office. Perhaps Mr. Levin has never experienced shopping, especially in a bargain
basement or in a department store during a
big sale. Five minutes in Loehman's would
change even Mr. Levin's mind about ag·
gression. Perhaps Mr. Levin never has had
to return an unsatisfactory article of clothing or of food, or to argue about being overcharged for a service. No one can deny that
driving children to school or oneself to work
WINTER 1982
�requires aggression. Many women perform
at least one of these tasks daily.
Mr. Levin's expression "people think"
makes his argument less cogent. The people I know don't think the way Mr. Levin's
people do. My experience, both at St.
John's and in my job, shows me that a
woman is expected to perform tasks, both
academic and secular, as well as she can,
i.e., as well as a man.
On such a serious question which involves the lives of over half the population
of the United States, why does Mr. Levin
think he can dismiss legitimate demands
with the generalization "people think" or,
even worse, "ordinary people think"? How
can he attack with such vehemence "feminists" whose work and political beliefs he
does not clarify? Isn't his article merely
pOlitical cant?
ELOISE PEEKE COLLINGwOOD
Annapolis, Md.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
... What is one to make of a philosopher
who identifies "essential identity" and "significance" with gender and who lets a simple comma serve as the only argumentative
transition in the statement that "Women
differ physically from men, and act differently"? Our bodies are ponderous and
absorbing fates, each one different, but we
are capable of directing them in moral actions and of giving them meaning with our
discourse. We do not increase our chances
of finding meaning when stereotyping is
deemed reasonable and factual. Prof.
Levin worries about tiny firefighters when
he might have been watching the Olym·
pies, but the variety of biological "fact" is
acknowledged even by him, despite his
confusion of instances and hypothetical
classes, instinct and behavior, and biology
and politics (for the last of which we have
another useful neologism, "racism," to give
suffici~nt historical warning).
The implication that troubles me more is
the denial of the brilliance and achievement of St. John's women and, manifested
right here, their unequal share in recognition. And the damage to both the taught
and the teacher if anyone should seriously
think that "if a professor has found over
many years that females write inferior philosophy examinations, it is reasonable for
him to anticipate that the next female philosophy examination will be inferior." A
nice ambiguity toward the end there: who,
after all, in the philosophical life is the
marker? In a society more severely maledominated and oligarchical than our own,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
and no less stultified, Dante submitted
himself under correction to "donne
'ch'avete intelletto d'amore." Such intelletto might get us all a better grasp of
public understanding and the cardinal virtues and help us distinguish the vicious circle of self-congratulating conventions from
the deep imperative of mutual liberation.
E. C. RONQUIST
Concordia University
Montreal, Canada
continue to enjoy the right to select national leaders, who routinely involve all of
us in crises that could destroy civilization
as we know it and, indeed, could destroy
the world and its ecosystems.
If the United States must remain militarily strong, women can help us do so. As a
feminist, I even dare hope they may help a
little to humanize the military.
LEON V. DRISKELL
Professor of English
University of Louisville
Louisville, Ky.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Professor Michael Levin's article "'Sexism' is meaningless" (St. John's Review,
Autumn 1981) so frequently violated stan·
dards of argumentation that I found it hard
to take seriously. Nevertheless, I suspect it
may do considerable harm, chiefly because
it appears in your publication-the standards of which have seemed to me generally high. I cannot undertake here to point
out all of the essay's faults, but I have selected one which seems to me particularly
flagrant.
Because it suits his purposes, or because
he is not paying attention to what he
writes, Professor Levin equates conscription with battle readiness. The issue of
conscripting women, particularly in times
of peace, must be separated from such issues
as degrees of aggressiveness and tolerance
of the stress of combat. When Professor
Levin writes that the "pivotal objection to
conscripting women has nothing to do
with any inherent 'inferiority' of femaleness, everything to do with the ability of
women to fight," he is guilty of grievous
equivocation.
Many a Norman has been conscripted to
do clerical work, administrative work, or
strategic work. Many a Norma has done
similar work in the private sector (with relatively higher pay, enormously greater freedom of choice), and some of those Normans
have been maladroitly thrust into combat
though no more aggressive or tolerant of
"the stress of combat" than their female
counterparts.
Conscription means yielding one's free~
dam of choice, but it does not automatically mean going into battle. Neither does
abandoning sex discrimination mean that
all of us-men and women-must give up
our differences or share bathrooms. Re~
turning from Korea some years ago, I
found that many of my male friends and all
of my women friends had been going
ahead with their lives while I submitted to
military regimentation. Meantime, all of us
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
I will not address Mr. Levin's callous misrepresentations of the positions of those of
us whose active vocabulary includes the
word "sexism," although anyone interested
in reasoning as opposed to sophistry could
not but take offense at the many misrepresentations in his article. I will, however, as
a social scientist in training, challenge Mr.
Levin, or anyone else, to present me with
clear evidence that " ... there are general,
innate, psychological differences between
the sexes." Mr. Levin claims that this is
" ... simply a factual belief, supported by a
vast body of evidence." I know of no such
"evidence" that can be drawn from the social science disciplines and that would withstand close scrutiny. If Mr. Levin's evidence
is drawn from disciplines or traditions other
than the social sciences, I would certainly
not object to seeing that as well. I ask him
to produce the evidence, and all can debate
it, and we will debate the larger question of
upon what basis is one able to make reasonable statements about human nature and
behavior, and what should be the method
of verification for such statements. These
are issues that members of the St. John's
community can get their teeth into, but in
order to do so we must move away from
the unsupported statements made by Mr.
Levin. Furthermore, I ask Mr. Levin to
produce this evidence because I believe
that the ultimate truth and validity of his
argument depend upon it.
I would like to make one further statement. (This should be allowed an irate alumnus.) I was deeply disturbed by the decision
to print that article. It was so clearly biased,
so badly reasoned and argued, in places simply so silly, that it does not represent St.
John's College well. Mr. Raditsa is using
The St. John's Review to propagate his own
political philosophy. I will not debate here
whether it is a good philosophy, or a correct one, I would only raise the question of
111
�whether it is the purpose of The Review to
propagate it. I think not. I also think that
his doing this is only made more unbearable
by the fact that he is in the process presenting us with articles which insult our illtelligence. I wonder if Mr. Raditsa does not care
more about propagating his political philosophy than he does about serving St. John's.
He must certainly see that the two goals are
not identical, and that he was made editor
of the St.john's Review to do the latter and
not to do the former at the latter's expense.
DAVID E. WOOLWINE
Princeton, New Jersey
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
As an alumnus of St. John's College, I
was morally and intellectually affronted by
your decision to print the article, " 'Sexism' is Meaningless," by Michael Levin, in
the recent issue of The St. John's Review.
Has The St. John's Review become such a
mouthpiece for right-wing views that it will
print anything which supports them-even
an article of such patently poor scholarship
and moral insensitivity as Michael Levin's
piece? The factual and logical errancies of
the article are manifest, and scarcely need
refutation. The flagrant moral callousness
of the article is more serious, flying as it
does in the face of obvious injustice, first
by belittling and denying the history and
continuing reality of that injustice, then by
supporting and sanctioning it. If the article
had been titled not " 'Sexism' is Meaningless" but rather " 'Racism' is Meaningless"
or even "'Anti-Semitism' is Meaningless,"
would you have printed it? Let the Editorial
Staff examine its memory and it will discover how the arguments put forward by
Mr. Levin, and similar unsupported claims
of "scientific" evidence, have previously
been used to "prove" the genetic, moral,
and intellectual "difference" of blacks and
Jews, supporting institutionalized bigotry,
the denial of civil liberties, and unequal
opportunities in housing, education, and
employment.
STEPHANIE SLOWINSKI
Princeton, New Jersey
112
Professor Levin replies:
Those of us who persist in noting that
men and women differ are so regularly accused of being "for discrimination" that
my wife dubs this "The Ritual Missing of
the Point." The point, of course, is that the
typical man does differ in certain systematic
ways from the typical woman. It is no one's
fault, and people are within their rights to
use this patent fact in making judgments.
Within their legal rights?, some correspondents ask. Certainly. Anyone who thinks
that individuals should be treated as individuals will repudiate the quota mentality
that has settled on our public officials like a
disease. Quotas should be repealed and
abandoned immediately. I also believe that
laws against discrimination are unsupportable. They conflict with liberty of association. If I choose not to hire you because of
your looks (or sex, or color, or religion) I
withhold from you my consent to enter into
an agreement. I am not thereby thwarting
your will or interfering with your liberty,
since you do not have any prior right to my
consent. Unless you regard me as your slave.
Some confusion has arisen about the
Norma-Norman example. I was simply repeating the sort of thing feminists cite. In
fact, this so-called "Pygmalion effect" has
not been scientifically replicated, and what
is more, educators are now generally agreed
that the ordinary methods of classroom instruction are somewhat biased in favor of
girls, who are temperamentally more inclined to sit still for lessons.
As for my Freudian analysis: in addition
to the evidence cited in the references to
Ed Levine, there is also some suggestive
work by S. Deon Henderson on the rising
female crime rate and its possible relation
to anomie. Unfortunately, as Miss Henderson herself reports, investigation into the
adverse effects of feminism is an absolutely
taboo topic in sociology. No one will touch
it. That is probably why we have no psycho·
social profile of the typical feminist, even
though social scientists will normally rush
to study just about anything. So, even
though I lack medical credentials, someone
has to begin suggesting hypotheses. I should
note as well Frances Lear's concession (The
Nation, 12/12/81) that "lesbians make up
a large portion of the volunteer work force"
in feminist political organizations, which I
take as some further confirmation.
I agree with Miss Heed that anger is often prima face evidence of a wrong; often,
but not always. Sometimes it is a symptom
of dysfunction.
I stress again that I approve as much as
anyone does "treating each individual as
an individual." With little faith that repeti·
tion will convince my more splenetic correspondents of my good faith, I turn to some
more specific points.
l) Neurologists like Restak and Pribram,
endocrinologists like Money, and even selfdescribed "feminist" psychologists like Mac·
coby and Jacklin have found that by four
months male and female newborns respond differently to such variables as speech
tone and exhibit neurological differences.
Benbow and Stanley found that 10-12 year
old girls who both tested as well as the ablest
boys on math aptitude tests and reported
finding math as much a girl's as a boy's subject, did less well than the same boys on
more difficult math aptitude tests. At the
upper levels of ability, innate differences
appear most clearly. Some people still tell
each other that all this is "social conditioning" (whatever that might mean). Some
people also still believe the Earth is flat.
2) A woman should indeed be free to do
what she wants. Who denies that? But even
sanguine feminists have lately admitted to
"logistic problems" in pursuing a career
and raising a family. Even the EEOC has
lately admitted that the famous wage dis·
crepancies between men and women are
entirely due to voluntary decisions women
make-e.g., having babies during their
prime career advancement years. The feminist "solution" tends, unhealthily, to be
advocacy of government intervention.
3) That there are bad arguments for jew·
ish covetousness does not rule out good
arguments for gender differences. Since no
one is planning concentration camps for
women, the implied analogy is even more
absurd. In fact, all questions about racial
and ethnic differences are empirical, in
many cases still open, and worth investigating. Given the number of Japanese Nobel
Laureates in physics, I would be neither
surprised nor displeased to learn that Japanese are smarter than the rest of us.
WINTER 1982
�Editor's Note
On Harry V. Jaffa's
"Inventing the Past"
The policy of the St. John's Review is '
to publish writing addressed to important
questions. Some of these questions are To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
disturbing as the response to Professor
Levin's article shows. Such open invesHarry V. Jaffa's article, '~Inventing the
tigation and discussion is in the tradi- Past," (Autumn 1981) was interesting and
tions of St. John's College. The views valuable, but I was bothered by his slightexpressed by the writers in the St. John's ing reference to the protests and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. He
Review do not necessarily reflect the
speaks of the people involved as seeking a
opinions of the editor.
minority veto upon majority action, as trying, ' 4 in behalf of their Thoreauvian consciences," to "arrest the process of constitutional government."
I question whether the events of the sixties and early seventies actually fit the
categories of "majority action" and "constitutional government." To mention some
of them: in the election of 1964 the majority
elected Johnson as President after he denounced Goldwater's proposal for extensive bombing of North Vietnam-and after
the election, he did just what he had denounced. The Vietnam war was waged, of
course, not after a declaration of war by
Congress as provided by the Constitution,
but on the basis of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which itself was passed by Congress
after it heard misleading testimony by the
Administration.
Coming to 1968, the majority elected
Nixon, who had a plan to end the war-and
then waged it for four more years and included a secret bombing of Cambodia.
I submit that these events certainly do
not fit the categories of majority action and
constitutional process, and to talk as if they
do is to talk about a dream world.
THOMAS
RALEIGH
Cocheton, New Yark
Professor Jaffa replies:
Mr. Thomas Raleigh questions my assertion that the demonstrators against the
Vietnam war, or some of them, were attempting to "arrest the process of constitutional government." He does so on the
ground that the actions of the United
States, in prosecuting the war, were themselves unconstitutional
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The principal ground of his objections is
that the war was not waged "after a declaration of war as provided by the Constitution, but on the basis of the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution, which itself was passed by
Congress after it heard misleading testimony by the Administration."
The war in Vietnam was a limited war,
and the United States has prosecuted
many such wars without a formal declaration by the Congress. Among these have
been the naval war with France, during the
presidency of john Adams, Woodrow Wilson's war with Mexico, many Indian wars,
and, above all, the Civil War. The last, our
greatest war, was from the point of view of
the Lincoln government a "rebellion." To
have asked for a declaration of war against
"rebels" would have been to confer upon
them a political status that it was the whole
point of the war to deny. This points up
the paradox that there are circumstances
in which a declaration of war may defeat
the policy for which the war is waged.
Such was the case in Vietnam. Rightly or
wrongly, the Johnson administration (and
later that of Nixon) thought that North
Vietnam itself should not be invaded, and
that this "privileged sanctuary" could not
be maintained once a formal declaration of
war had been made. It was feared that if
North Vietnam was invaded that China
would intervene, as it did in North Korea
in 1950.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was not the
sole basis for the prosecution of the war.
Not a man or gun was sent to Vietnam except upon the basis of appropriations made
by the Congress. And not a dollar was appropriated, except upon the basis of extensive-sometimes exhaustive-hearings by
committees of both houses, and after
debates and votes in both houses. The
Congress authorized every step that the
administration took, and the American
people participated in such authorizations
through their elected representatives. The
opposition to the prosecution of the war
was extremely intense, and extremely vocal, but no one can rightly say that their
rights were ignored or suppressed.
To say that the American government
acted unconstitutionally in Vietnam is to
say that a free government cannot act in
such circumstances except upon something
like unanimous consent. This is absurd.
113
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Radista, Leo
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Durholz, Janet
Bolotin, David
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Allanbrook, Wye Jamison
Brann, Eva T. H.
Dennison, George
Mullen, William
Loewenberg, Robert
Smith, Brother Robert
Bell, Charles G.
Le Gloannecc, Anne-Marie
Josephs, Laurence
Montanelli, Indro
Collins, Arthur
Dulich, Jean
Navrozov, Lev
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The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_33_No_2_1982
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�THE COLLEGE
Volume XXXI
July, 1979
Number I
The Great Electrical Philosopher, by Howard J. Fisher .................................. .
Odysseus Among the Phaiakians, by William O'Grady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
14
Kant's Empiricism, by Arthur Collins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Some Classical Poems of the Tang and Sung Dynasties, translated by Julie Landau . . . . . . . . . . . 25
For Bert Thoms, by Eva Brann, Janet Christhilf O'Flynn,
Patricia Pittis Sonnesyn, Leo Raditsa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
30
Don Giovanni, or the Triviality of Seduction, by Wye Jamison Allanbrook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
36
Inner and Outer Freedom, by Eva Brann..................................... . . . . . . . . . 43
The Collapse of Democracy at Athens and the Trial of Socrates, by Leo Raditsa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
German Resistance to Hitler: Elites and Election, by Beate Ruhm von Oppen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
56
R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, review by Fred Baumann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
R. F. Christian, ed., Tolstoy's Letters, review by Laura Bridgman..........................
62
Talking With Pictures: 'Les Bandes Dessinecs', by John Dean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Letters ............................................................... Inside back cover
Editor: Leo Raditsa
Managing Editor: 1-1IOmas Parran,
Ten Years
Jr.
Consulting Editors: Eva Brann, Beatc Ruhm von
Oppen, Curtis A. Wilson.
THE COLLI:<~Gg is published by the Office of the
Dean, St. John's <Allege, Annapolis, Maryland
21404. Richard D. Weigle, President, Edward G.
Sparrow, Dean. Published twice yearly, usually in
January and July.
Front cover reproduced from Michael Faraday,
Experimental Researches in Electricity III, London,
!855.
© 1979, St. John's College. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
With this issue The College completes its first ten years. Whatever
good will become of it in the future will owe a good deal to the skill
and tenacity of my predecessors, Laurence Berns, Malcolm Wyatt,
Robert Spaeth, and Beale Ruhm von Oppen-and to Tom Parran,
who has seen to the demands of organization for the past six years. I
have opened several departments: Between the Old and the New which
deals with books that are not forgotten but are not or are not yet classics; At Home and Abroad which means to look both at the world right
around us but not in our books, and the other worlds beyond the seas
and to the north and south of us whose distance tests the understanding; Recent Readings which will look at books new enough to start the
critical faculties of the plainspoken. I should like to publish a series of
essays on almost forgotten authors of genius, of which there are a great
many (Clarendon, Simon Bolivar, Cavour, Giannone, Lucan,
Mirabeau-to name a few at random), and on authors more remembered than read. There is space for poems and narrative.-L.R.
�The Great Electrical Philosopher
Howard J. Fisher
In 1965 I attended a gathering whose guests also included
tremendous weight in his account to two of its aspects: first,
Jacob Klein. During a quiet moment in the evening, so quiet
the establishing of natural laws; and second, the application
there was no possibility that the incident could escape unnoticed, Mr. Klein fixed me in his sight and demanded,
to natural phenomena of analytic mathematics. So impressive
"Who is your hero?"
have become in our time the almost unquestioned paradigms
of our intellectual powers.
Now I did not then believe that I had any heroes; moreover,
I had been educated, if that is the word, according to a fashion which he1d that there were no heroes-there were opinions and deeds, to be sure, and these were to be judged, affirmed or denied-but the individuals who happened to affirm those opinions or to accomplish those deeds had only a
very loose, accidental, and dispensable relation to them. Had
one of their number never been born, it was sometimes af-
have been the achievements of these twin endeavors that they
Though I cannot easily explain why I think these are false
paradigms, why they are at best narrow and at worst stultifying, I can at least invite you to share with me the reading of a
scientific work which is utterly different in character yet no
less a part of our own time. In Faraday's laboratory, experiments do not generally issue in "laws." In his writing,
moreover, descriptions of things are always in English prose,
firmed, someone else would have come upon the scene, with
never in that pure syntax of symbols which is algebra. If I
about the same effect upon the world's history.
What a surprise, therefore, to hear myself reply to Mr.
Klein's question, after only slight hesitation, with the name
"Thomas Jefferson." This answer actually proved to be a good
one. Jefferson has turned out to be one of my heroes indeed,
remember rightly there is not a single equation to be found
anywhere in the Experimental Researches, or even (it has
and there are others too. I am here tonight to say something
about one of the others-that is Michael Faraday, styled
"the great electrical philosopher" by the man who is responsible for Maxwell's Equations.
Faraday's Experimental Researches in Electricity is the title
of a three-volume collection of reports of his experimentation
and speculation about electrical matters during the period
been said) 1 a statement of the kind that one would want to
put into the form of an equation! Instead there are
accounts-reaHy, histories-of the actions of electric and
magnetic powers. These are not forensically arranged so as to
eliminate this hypothesis while confirming that one, nor are
they linked as the confirmations of predictions which were
deduced from stated premises. But they are episodically
linked, one theme or subject continually evolving, suggesting
another, reappearing in a new form or with new associations,
until at last we begin to feel that the story told gives a likely
from 1831 to 1855. It is a remarkable record of discoveries
and also of the designing and construction of all sorts of ingenious experimental apparatus. It is the account of a mam-
account of what the actors and agencies did; but, more important, it reveals who and what they are.
moth investigation into things in the heavens and under the
out equations, without proofs or theorems-why, anyone can
Someone might say, patronizingly, "A physics book with-
earth-things which, as I hope to show you, defy in every
read it!" If it is true that anyone can read Faraday, that is of
way the notions of science which were then, and stili are, in
vogue.
If someone were to give an account of what the scientific
course a good thing. And if true, it is not because the absence
of algebra makes Faraday's book an easy book. It is at least as
difficult to read the Experimental Researches as it is to read
Don Quixote. Or, for another comparison, Thomas Simpson
once said that Faraday wrote like no one so much as like
enterprise is, I suppose he would be unusual who did not give
A lecture read on January 16, 1976, at Annapolis, and on MayS, 1978, at
Santa Fe.
Aeschylus. That remark was, for me, the single most helpful
guide to the study of Faraday's writings.
Our knowledge of nature has become for us nearly the
same as our mathematical and symbolic understanding of na-
�The College
lure. We can, I think, just barely imagine what it might be
like if things were otherwise, by conceiving the bygone age of
forms, and disposes both before our eyes and in secret. If we
can only view the exercise of natural agencies we will have
which Socrates told Phaedrus: 2 "a time when men were con-
science~that
tent to listen to oaks and rocks." (That is, I understand, a
known.
is, knowledge in the presence of the thing
time when our apprehension of nature and divinity was im-
mediate.)
In our time we don't do much listening to the oaks and the
rocks, but we speak, powerfully and often beautifully, about
them. This our speech has become our science. Like all
speech it is symbolic~but where do the symbols, with which
we weave prize-winning explications of nature, come from?
Since the rise of the- scientific laboratory as a social institution, this question has only one answer: the symbols adequate
to natural appearances arise out of experience.
This pronouncement is the manifesto of the scientific labo-
ratory, and from it follows the genesis of the laboratory as an
institution dedicated to the deliberately artful and exhaustive
production of experience and its interpretation.
II. Seeing
At the very opening of the Nineteenth Series of experimental researches, in the year 1845, Faraday takes the
Indeed what we really want is the one true physical
signification of that which is rendered apparent to us
by the phenomena and the laws governing them.
(3303)
But it requires the exercise of considerable ingenuity to put
ourselves in the position where we can observe nature, and
more ingenuity still to read aright the fascinating interplay of
powers and effects, to see them as they really are and not just
as a list, however accurate, of descriptions and laws about
them. For Faraday, science requires more than accuracy or
even generality. It demands a species of "agreement" between
nature and our representations of it, an agreement which I
think it is fair to say has for Faraday nothing less than visual
similarity as its paradigm. A visual emphasis is meant, I
think, by the word "agree" in his declaration:
opportunity to correct a misapprehension that had arisen over
his use of the title, "The Illumination of Magnetic Lines of
Force." Apparently it was thought that he claimed to have
rendered the lines of force luminous. "This was not within
my thought," he explains.
I intended to express that the line of magnetic force
is iJluminated as the earth is iJJuminated by the sun,
or the spider's web iJJuminatecl by the astronomer's
lamp. Employing a ray of light we can tell, by the
eye, the direction of the magnetic lines through a
body; and by the alteration of the ray and its optical
effect on the eye, can see the course of the lines just
as we can see the course of a thread of glass, or any
other transparent substance, rendered visible by light;
and this is what I meant by illumination . . . .
(Zl46n.) 3
Thus does Faraday express, in a footnote, what is in fact for
him the paradigm of science: to make visible to the eye the
powers of nature. In the almost comical misunderstanding
which called it forth we can glimpse a striking difference between Faraday and the scientific community at large, for
while some of his readers thought he was announcing the
achievement of a new electrical effect, namely "glowing
lines" -and this was scarcely an unjustified expectation to
have of the most celebrated experimentalist of the day~
Faraday's real intentiori. was to announce a new exhibition of
magnetic actions which up to then had been hidden; it is just
this disclosure of what was formerly only surmised that marks
the opportunity for scientific knowledge. Nature acts, trans-
z
When the natural truth and the conventional representation of it most closely agree, then are we most
advanced in our knowledge. (3075)4
Now the science of the philosophers-of-science usually
turns out to be divided into two steps. First the facts, the
"data"; and second our reasonings and analyses upon them.
The "data" are not general, or even intelligible, that is to say
they are low. And yet they are supposed to have the authority
of Minos to consign the "high" inteJlectual theories either to
long life or to oblivion. This, .I say, is the science of the
philosophers-of-science, but the science of the philosophers is
not like this. Though Faraday certainly respects a difference
between "speculation" and what he calls "the strict line of
reasoning" (3243), this is not the difference that is alleged to
obtain between theories on the one hand, and facts on the
other. I think that for Faraday the scientific enterprise has,
really, only one part, and that I would call interpretation.
What is interpretation? First, it is sightful. It is concerned
with things that are before us and which lay hold of us, calling forth surmises and anticipations. Second, it is re-creative,
for the things which unfold to interpretive sight represent
themselves in images which collect and associate the multiple
articulations of appearance into a rhythm of emphasis, as the
accented syllables both collect and articulate the spoken
word. Thirdly, it is rhetorical, for it attempts to elicit for the
things of nature the assent and trust of the intellect. The activity by which we interpret is not homogeneous, it is not
always strictly under our control. Sometimes we have to construct new arrangements of things, sometimes we only attend
to what is already there. But we are always, always looking.
�July, 1979
The deliberate exercise of the senses, aided by appropriate
.\
artifice, for the sake of interpretation of nature, is the express
mark of the scientific laboratory.
Ill. The Image
The single most powerful, influential, and controversial
image in the Experimental Researches is certainly that of the
"line of force." With respect to this image, I am going to
assert a claim which will seem excessive and romantic, and
about which it will b~ difficult to be persuasive. For I will
claim that this image of the line of force has a career. It does
not remain the same with itself but evolves, and through it
the magnetic phenomena from which it derives show more
and more their true identity. Furthermore I will claim that
this evolution of imagery is found within the phenomena
themselves, and not introduced from the outside by the
Figure 2:
(Adapted from Faraday).
writer's craftiness or prejudice. At every stage, including the
last, the imagery that Faraday employs constitutes a vision in
the first shows a single "line of force" being traced with a
which the natural powers proclaim themselves to us; so that
compass needle by moving the compass always in the direc-
science is achieved when the phenomena explain themselves.
tion to which its needle points (Fig. I). The second shows a
Later I will return to his view of the phenomena, but now
let us mark the first stage in the story of the lines of magnetic
force. When they first appear in Faraday's accounts the lines
are thought of as nothing real. They are only the materials for
complete pattern of lines as indicated by iron filings scattered
a simile, a mere construct by the imagination out of the successive orientations of iron filings or smal1 compass needles in
regions surrounding a magnetic body. Here are two pictures:
over a sheet of paper that conceals a bar magnet beneath it
(Fig. 2).
These are lovely and intriguing shapes; but of course we
hasten to remind ourselves that there is nothing really there
that has shape; no more than when a bouncing ball leaves
behind it, as its wake, an ethereal series of inverted parabolas.
So at least is the teaching of Newtonian mechanics which
holds, rightly, that form without material is not physical but
purely mathematical; but holds wrongly, in my opinion, that
"material" is little hard massy particles which are capable of
sustaining forces-so that where there is no matter there are
neither forces nor shapes.
Newtonian principles teach us that each end of the compass needle is subject simultaneously to two forces, one attractive and one repulsive, and that it is the combination of
these, in their action upon the needle, that in every place
establishes the direction of attraction. The "shape" that we
find in the curve is not the shape of anything, and therefore
not a shape at all, but only a kind of continuous chronicle of
the successive directions in which a needle may be urged.
The actual forces are completely dependent upon the presence, in each position, of a material body for them to act
upon.
So according to the Newtollian way the magnetic curves
are nothing in themselves. They are neither powers nor the
vehicles of powers. They are not even appearances, for they
can never be made wholly apparent-they can at most be
indicated piecemeal by discrete bits of matter. To the physicist they are useful, possibly, as a mnemonic or as an aid to
the imagination; but no more than that.
This view of the lines of force as a merely temporary aid to
the thinker is a view which-excepting a few of Faraday's
readers such as Kelvin and Maxwell-remained dominant in
Figure 1
the scientific world during his lifetime. We will now ignore
3
�The College
that Newtonian assessment, and return again to view the
line-patterns of the magnet, for in truth they are very inviting,
and interesting questions arise concerning them.
First question: In what do the lines terminate? Are there
active puddles or points within or on the surface of the magnet? If we could make a magnet small enough, would the
lines all come together at two points, as the "magnetic pole"
theory seems to hold?
Second question: Where do those lines go which extend
beyond the limits of the drawing? Do they eventually return
to the magnet, or do they terminate somewhere else? Need
they terminate at all?
Third question: Why don't the lines cross or touch each
other? Can they move? If one moves, do they all move?
Even if we admit that the meaning of the lines of force at
this stage is only a pointing, we may still ask, at what do the
pointers point? The Newtonians have their answer: the pointers attempt to point at the (distant) sources of force that act
upon them; only, because they are simultaneously acted upon
from two different directions, the needles point to neither one
but to some direction in between, favoring whichever pole is
the nearer.
But I think we can admit another interpretation, not only
in harmony with the shapes of the curves, but even suggested
by them: namely, that the needles point, but not to some
distant center of attraction; rather they point along the axis of
some structure or process which exists right where they are, in
their own neighborhood, and which also has a character
everywhere else, though the needle not be there to show it. A
compass needle would in this way be interpreted more nearly
like a weathervane. A weathervane does not really point at the
distant source of the wind, you know, but it turns so as to lie
in whatever direction the wind happens to be blowing in its
own immediate vicinity.
To make this comparison is to reverse the order of discovery and to make the curves in some sense prior to the -iron
filings! Those doctrines of scientific methodology called
"operationalism" would be most censorious of this reversal.
But why shouldn't we do it? If we attend to the curves themselves, and do not continue to give decisive weight to the
accident that they were first understood only through the actions of compass needles, who would fail to be moved by
their legible character of form, or fail to respond to them as
he would to any other interesting natural object?
Faraday makes just such a response, and he is moved to do
so by the discovery of a new kind of magnetism, "diamagnetism," which differs from ordinary magnetism in this way.
When an ordinary magnetic body, such as an iron filing or
needle, is placed within the influence of a magnet and left
free to turn it will "point," as I have said, along paths which
ultimately tend toward the polar regions of the magnet. What
Faraday discovered was that whereas needles of iron, nickel,
platinum, and other materials which had been recognized as
magnetic would point axially, toward the north and south
poles, there were a number of substances (2253, 2996) which
pointed in the perpendicular direction, that is, equatorially
(Fig. 3). A compass needle made not of iron but of bismuth,
4
Eguotoviol~
Axially
Figure 3
for example, would always point east-and-west! It is even true
that most materials turn out to be of this "diamagnetic"
character, although their pointing tendencies are so weak it is
not surprising that it was the magnetism of iron~from now
on called "paramagnetism" by Faraday-which people
noticed first. Other diamagnetic materials listed by Faraday
include water, iodine, caffeine, sealing wax, bread, apple,
leather, mutton, and fresh beef (2280). All of these substances
point equatorially when formed into tubelike shapes and suspended between the faces of a magnet. How is this "pointing"
to be understood?
One of the reasons I delight in reading Faraday's experimental histories is that he is so sure-footed in asking questions. His writings also betray an instructive caution about
what a question is. He very seldom asks a question in words,
and when he does it its usually in a context that he calls
"speculative." When he engages in "speculation" it is always
with cautions and warnings to the reader. Questions asked in
words arc dangerously self-moving; because they have the appearance of rightly dividing the world and its alternatives,
they give rise to disputes and doctrines that have a logic of
their own and leave nature behind. It is far better to ask questions without words, and this is what Faraday does again and
again, and it is this activity that really constitutes "experiment": he asks questions in practice.
The "question" about diamagnetism is, whether pointing is
the key to its understanding. Is diamagnetism (or' paramagnetism, for that matter) essentially a power to point, or is it
something else? The question arises tacitly, because while observing the pointing behavior of a bismuth bar he noticed also
another effect, a recession of the bar as a whole from the magnet's pole faces (2259), (Fig. 4a).
�July, 1979
By "conducting power" Faraday intends to express-with
the usual cautions about hypothetical speaking-the "capability which bodies may possess of effecting the transmission of
magnetic force" (2797). So we should judge those to be the
better conductors which sidle up towards the places of greatest
magnetic force, and the poorer that are displaced from there
(2798). Quickly, however, the imagery of the lines of force
begins to direct the discussion; to effect the transmission of
magnetic force is to conduct the lines of force; so those conductors are better which gather up the lines of force, conveying more of them onward through a given space. And those
conductors are worse which gather up fewer, or even disperse
the lines of force within themselves (2807). Here is a picture
to show the difference (Fig. 5).
I
I
I
I
I
I
(a.)
(b)
Figure 4: In (a), bar does not hang vertically but recedes from the pole. In
(b), ball cannot "point" but nevertheless recedes.
v
Are the causes of pointing and of recession one and the
same? If so, under which aspect will we see most clearly the
meaning of diamagnetism? This question is not even spoken:
instead Faraday proceeds immediately to substitute a small
bismuth ball (2266, 2298) in place of the bar (Fig. 4b). A ball
is radially symmetrical and hence cannot "point," but it can
approach or recede as a whole; and in a series of trials Faraday succeeds in formulating what he calls the "ruling principle" of the motion: that diamagnetic material tends to go by
the nearest course from stronger to weaker points of magnetic
force (2300). Diamagnetism under this aspect, the aspect of
migration from strongly-magnetic regions to weaker ones,
takes precedence over and interprets the action of pointing,
for if the portions of material dispose themselves into the
weaker regions the result will be, in an elongated body, that it
points away from the strong, polar regions. Faraday explicitly
subordinates pointing to migrating in this passage:
The cause of the pointing of t11e bar ... is now
evident. It is merely a result of the tendency of the
particles to ~110ve outwards, or into the position of
weakest magnetic action. (2269)
In the same way, paramagnetism is viewed as migration
towards the regions of strongest magnetic action. Yet the account docs not rest here. The interpretation of diamagnetism
and paramagnetism as migration is itself transcended, this
time with the aid of another image according to which bodies
are viewed as magnetic conductors. The refinement of this
image of "conducting power" accomplishes finally that reversal of priority which I indicated before, namely, that reversal
by which the lines of force acquire more explanatory power
than the bodies which first made them manifest.
"
a.\
0
\
j/
aI I
Figure 5
Faraday does not take pains to distinguish them, but there
are two different manifestations of this gathering power. If the
conducting bodies be stable and fixed, inspection shows that
the lines of force are drawn towards the better conductors
(2807), while, if the bodies are free to move, they will migrate
as described before, the better conductors occupying those positions in which the greatest concentrations of lines of force
are found. I think I know why Faraday does not labor to distinguish the two cases: it is because to do so would require
license to promote matter over lines of force, or lines of force
over matter; and he has no cause to do either. Material body,
on the one hand, and the lines of force, on the other, stand
forth on a perfectly equal footing. It is as much correct to say
that lines of force are drawn along by the iron as it is to say
that the iron is enmeshed and entangled in a web of force.
We have completed a miniature Odyssey of successive reinterpretations, viewing the magnetic actions first as instances of
pointing, then of migration, then under the image of conducting power, and finally as a gathering up of the lines of
force. In this evolution the image of the lines of force has
become increasingly dominant and indispensable; while the
role played by matter in the magnetic story has correspondingly diminished. Even the image of "gathering up"
does not exalt the gatherer over the gathered, for as I have just
explained, the materials march to the tune of the lines of
force just as readily as do the lines of force follow the lead of
their material partners. The relations between matter and
lines of force are those of mutual action, stress, and equilib-
5
�The College
rium. They are no different from the relations that obtain
between matter and matter, or between one line of force and
another.
The new-found equality between material bodies and lines
of foree is the heart of a thoroughgoing reinterpretation of
matter. The same considerations, moreover, will lead equally
to a reinterpretation of space. All the magnetic experiments
prior to the Twenty-eighth Series of experimental
researches-that is, prior to the use of the Moving Wirerepresent moments in the evolution and employment of the
image of the "gathering and dispersing" of lines of foree; and
they culminate in the simultaneous reinterpretation of matter
and, by necessity, space.
When I speak Of a reinterpretation of matter, I should
make clear that I mean in respect of its relation to force. In
the Newtonian mechanics, matter was always invoked as the
seat of action of, and reaction to, any force. Even when
forces were thought to act "at a distance," as in gravitation,
the primary phenomena to which the laws of foree applied
were the actions of bodies upon bodies. This situation might
have sufficed if the only "distance" force had been the gravitational one, for all matter gave rise to and was subject to gravitation. But the attempt to include magnetic and electric
forces into Newton's mechanics, forces to whose influence
not all bodies were subject, naturally 1;1ade it imperative to
formulate a theory of the relation between certain species of
matter and the forces that were specific to them.
In his 1854 paper' on magnetic philosophy Faraday expounded and criticized three theories of magnetic action, two
of which are what I have been calling Newtonian, for they
portray matter as the foundation of relations of force. One of
these Newtonian treatments is Coulomb's theory which,
positing active powers of matter, comes under conscientious
scrutiny by Faraday. Coulomb's polar theory is that of "two
magnetic fluids, which being present in all magnetic bodies,
and accumulated at the poles of a magnet, exert attractions
and repulsions upon portions of both fluids at a distance, and
so cause the attractions and repulsions of the distant bodies
containing them" (3301) 6
Coulomb's theory is uncomfortably hypothetical, because
no one has ever seen this magnetic fluid or demonstrated its
properties. Nevertheless, the theory is in perfect harmony
with the great Newtonian principle that Foree is ultimately
dependent on Matter.
Now the imagery of the "gathering up" of lines of force
leads us to an interpretation of polarity that is completely different. According to this image, the disposition of lines
through an elongated sample of paramagnetic material, like
an iron needle, looks like this (Fig. 6):
The ends of the needle, under the influence of the dominant magnet, appear to take on the character of origins or
seats of force; but we now see that this is the necessary result
of the gathering up of the lines of foree by the iron. Sinee the
lines pass through the needle and are not severed, their increased concentration within the iron results in their mutual
approach and increased concentration in the areas near its
two ends, where they enter and exit.
6
s
N
Figure 6
The meaning of "pole," therefore, is a plaee of concentration of force, and not a fountain of creation or a place in any
way distinguished in kind from its surroundings. We see that
Coulomb's theory embodied an important assumption which
the "gathering" image escapes: Coulomb's theory had identified the cause of origin of the foree with the fact of its localized action. But these are two distinct topics, as -Faraday
perceives: "My view of polarity," he writes, "is founded upon
the character in direction of the force itself, whatever the
eause of that force may be ... "(3307). Thus any disposition
of conductors which results in regions of more and less concentrations of lines of force will approximate to the appearance of "poles," and artful fashioning of the shapes of conductors can establish fields which run the whole spectrum
from near-uniformity (no poles) to near-perfect polarity. Here
is a picture to show how changing the shape of the conductor
also changes the course of the lines of force external to the
conductor (Fig. 7).
Figure 7:
Left: ncar-uniformity; right: ncar-polarity.
In this way the imagery associated with the lines of force
performs an indispensable interpretive function: it reveals the
character called "polarity" as a geometrical one (since it has
�July, 1979
to do only with the pattern of disposition of the lines) and at
the same time makes matter quite irrelevant to the question
of the origin of the lines of force. This no longer takes us by
surprise; we are becoming accustomed to the idea of the
equality of matter and force, and so we no longer look to the
former for an explanation of the latter.
The view of magnetic matter as conductive, and especially
the interpretation in these terms of diamagnetism, leads to
highly interesting questions regarding the role of space. For
under the image of conducting power, of different degrees of
gathering or dispersing of the lines, space itself becomes a
conductor; for it stands midway between paramagnetic and
diamagnetic materials. One of Faraday's early classifications
of materials in their magnetic order from paramagnetic to
diamagnetic lists "vacuum" (that is, space 7 ) right in the middle (2424):
Figure 8
Is "mere space" magnetic? There is no doubt that it is a
conductor and in this respect it does not differ in kind from
0°
Iron
Nickel
Cobalt
Manganese
Palladium
Crown-glass
Platinum
Osmium
Air and Vacuum
Arsenic
Ether
Alcohol
Gold
Water
Mercury
Flint-glass
Tin
Heavy-glass
Antimony
Phosphorus
Bismuth
This serial order of magnetic power was ascertained by repeated "pointing" experiments of the kind I first described.
The image of gathering-power interprets what experiment had
already shown; that the "paramagnetic" or ~<diamagnetic" behavior of materials is relative to the surrounding medium in
which they are immersed. Any material will appear
paramagnetic, that is, it will move towards the concentrations
of force, if it is placed in a medium having poorer gathering
ability than itself-look at Figure 8 to see this-for then the
lines of force flock to the sample and, if constraints permit,
orient both it and themselves so that the greatest number of
them may pass for the greatest distance along the superior
conductor. Likewise any material will appear diamagnetic if it
is placed in a medium which has greater gathering ability
than itself (2348). Even a bubble of air or vacuum, if suspended in or adjacent to another material, can be made to
exhibit at will either of these two magnetic characters.
iron or bismuth, standing as it does midway between them!
But is space really a middle degree, itself a kind of material?
Or is it a zero state, falling between the two great classes of
materials but belonging to neither of them?
Whether space should be counted as one of the materials is
a question which, I think, Faraday was never able to ask in a
"practical" way to -his own satisfaction. His views shifted tentatively over a seven-year period. In 1845, for example,-the
year of the pointing experiments, he declares himself unwilling to follow the experimental intimations that would include
space as one of the materials:
Such a view ... would make·mere space magnetic,
and precisely to the same degree as air and gasses.
Now though it may very well be, that space, air, and
gasses, have the same general relation to magnetic
force, it seems to me a great additional assumption
to suppose that they are all absolutely magnetic,
rather than to suppose they are all in a normal or
zero state. (2440)
The possibility of a material interpretation of space is there,
I believe him to be saying, but the experiment lacks the compellingly luminous character which would present the image
directly to us. It remains only a "great additional assumption." In 1850, no new experimental articulations of the
question having been achieved, he is even stronger in his insistence that space is a state between materials, and not a
material itself. He says, "mere space cannot act as matter
acts" (2787). But what is this "acting" power which matter
has but space cannot have, and in the name of which we are
asked to hold back from embracing a world-picture which is
through-and-through material? Faraday has already undercut
the Newtonian notions of matter's alleged power to originate
force-why does he hold on to a supposed power of gathering
it?
He needs another experiment. Not the so-called "crucial"
experiment that purports to decide between alternative
7
�The College
theories, but an interpretive, illuminating experiment which
was really the only kind Faraday ever performed: an experiment that will teach us how to talk about space (3159).
Such an experiment Faraday never found, but I believe he
did find enough to cause him to cool somewhat in his defense
of the uniqueness of space. In 1852 he delivered what was, I
think, his last word on the subject: "Experimentally mere
space is magnetic" (p. 443). But the experiments did not
satisfy, for though they were brilliantly successful at putting
into practice some of our dearest questions about magnetism,
A wire loop or ring thrust over the end of a bar magnet
"cuts" lines of force, which lines emerge in all radial direc-
tions from the bar. A current, detected by a galvanometer,
acts in one direction when the ring is placed over the magnet;
in the opposite direction when removed (308 5). Suppose this
ring were placed like a wedding ring at the magnetic equator
of the bar-position B in Fig. I 0-having initially resided at
-----
A
they left this one-the question of the materiality of spaceawkward, merely verbal, hovering about the regions of
Hypothesis but never bursting into the strength of Vision.
The experiments I mean are those clustering about the
phenomena of the Moving Wire, which will constitute our
next section.
/
I
I
IV. The Moving Wire
As I have so far described it, the evolution of the line of
force as a symbol has been the result of experiments which
disclosed the various shapes, groupings, and courses of the
lines (3234, 3237). With the Twenty-eighth Series of researches, Faraday turns our vision toward their quantity, their
number, and above all their power (3070, 3073).
"The Moving Wire" is Faraday's name for a device, or
class of devices, which make manifest the magnetic production of electricity. He had experimented with it in his earliest
researches•, long before he began to employ the Line of
Force as an interpretive image. Now his return to the topic
after an intermission of twenty years is distinguished with a
series of exercises that depend upon the image of the line of
force for their very design. One of the earliest such exercises
. is this one (Fig. 9):
Figure 10
some distant point A. The ring would cut, exactly once,
nearly all the lines of force which emerge from the ll1agnet
(3102, 3133).
Now the galvanometer, by which the currents of electricity
are indicated, was already understood by Faraday to be an
instrument which indicates the quantity of electricity evolved
in its circuit (361-366); and provided that the electricity fully
completes its action before the (slow-moving) galvanometer
needle has departed very far from its original position, the
needle will be hurled to a maximum deflection, according to
the amount of electricity evolved (3103-3105). The galvanometer is therefore a kind of bucket in which quantities of
electricity, which may in fact have been evolved not all at
once but in succession, can be collected together into one
single action.
\
\
/
/
./
/
I
11
I
'""
,,,
r
three times and so on upon the magnet, the galvanometer
would indicate the amounts of electricity evolved by these
' \.
'-
'--
I
~
\
8
unit of counting. If the ring were placed quickly once, twice,
l
{
\
(Adapted from Faraday).
the ring upon the equator of the magnet cuts the same
number of lines of force, and this number thus becomes a
I
\
Figure 9:
When, therefore, I first read Faraday's account of the
bar-magnet and equatorial ring I thought I could guess the
use to which it would be put. For each instance of placing
l
multiple actions, respectively. The galvanometer-and-ring by
this means would become "calibrated" in units of lines of
force. The apparatus would become an instrument with
which we would, in principle, "count" the lines of force of
any magnet; or we could count the number of lines of force
which inhabit any region through which the wire can be
made to move.
This "calibration" experiment was indeed performed by
Faraday, but only to confirm a relation that he had already
found out about in a different way. This relation was that the
quantity of electricity evolved is exactly proportional to the
�July, 1979
number of lines of force cut by the moving wire in its transit.
Now in the modern, axiomatic formulation of electrodynamics this law, the "Law of Electromagnetic Induction," as it came to be called, appears as one of the four
cardinal principles of that science, much as do Newton's
Laws appear in the science of mechanics. Nevertheless, for
Faraday the proportionality is regarded not so much for its
magnitude as for its meaning: it is a "principle" not because
of the testable consequences which follow from it, but it is a
"principle" in the sense of being the totally revealing form
under which the magnet displays itself. What I mean is that,
if a quantity of electricity is strictly proportional to a quantity
of magnetic lines, then each line may be acGounted responsible for a determinate share of the total effect; and the lines of
force come to be seen, for the first time, as agents, each exercising a determinate power.
The moving wire experiments are experiments of power,
and with these experiments the lines of force come before us
under a new and pressing image, that is as axes of power. The
power of the magnet resides in the lines of force, and moreover
it is through the electrical exercise of this very power that the
moving wire is able to count them so faithfully. For the electrical activity in the wire, Faraday thinks, is not a mere signature or concomitant of the magnetic force, but is itself the
equivalent in power to that force which constitutes the magnetic system. He writes:
When [the wire] is moved across the lines of force, a
current of electricity is developed in it, or tends to be
developed; and I have every reason to believe, that if
we could employ a perfect conductor, and obtain a
perfect result, it would be the full equivalent to the
force, electric or magnetic, which is exerted in the
place occupied by the conductor. {3270)
The interpretive consequences of the growing image of
power as the essence of the magnet are immense. Through
the moving wire, power is revealed directly in the form of
power; moreover, it is shown to occupy place, for the force
which the moving wire brings to light is exerted, not at a
distance, but in the very place occupied by the conductor!
The magnetic power is not to be thought of as an endowment
of the material of the magnet but is proportionally distributed
throughout the places about it. The power resides in the lines
of force, and each line is the locus of a constant action which
is neither lost nor diminished with distance. The system of
lines extends to indefinite size and therefore-contrary to
action-at-a-distance theories-the magnet does not act
"where it is not," for it is everywhere.
The images of power are the first fruits of the moving wire
and in fact the final experimental interpretation of the magnet
will be obtained under this imqge. But the moving wire is
also a probe of great subtlety which can illuminate even the
conditions existing within the interior of the magnet; a place
from where iron filings are necessarily excluded. The moving
------~~-------
'
'
~
'
''
/
I
''
''
''
'
Figure II
wire can disclose the fate of the lines of force when they enter
the magnet. Here, if anywhere, the question concerning the
relation between the magnet and its own lines of force will be
met.
As one of a series of experiments which route the galvanometer wire through passages made in the interior of the
magnet, Faraday constructs this arrangement, in which a
loop is guided down the axis of the bar, emerging at the
equator {Fig. II). It is thus partly interior and partly exterior
to the bar. When the whole apparatus is revolved, no current
is produced to the galvanometer, although the external part of
the wire is certainly cutting lines of force (I should explain
that Faraday previously showed that the lines remain stationary, even when the bar revolves). "We must look," Faraday
says therefore, "to the part of the wire within the magnet, for
a power equal to that capable of being exerted externally, and
we find it in that small portion which represents a radius at
the central and equatorial parts" (3116).
When this radial portion of the internal wire-which I
have labeled aE in the sketch-is revolved, it produces a current equal to and opposite to that which the exterior wire
produces when it alone is revolved (3116). Since the current
is equal, it must be that all of the lines of force external to the
magnet must therefore continue through into the interior of
the magnet, and, moreover, continue in directions parallel to
the axis, such that they can be cut by the radius wire! Furthermore, since the current evolved is opposite we can conclude that the direction of the lines from north to south exterior to the bar is continued unchanged within. For example, if the loop is at the north end, the magnetic action
from north to south passes from inside to outside the loop, in
those portions exterior to the magnet. To produce an opposite
current in the interior, the action must pass from outside to
inside the loop-simply a continuation of the direction of the
external line of force! I will quote Faraday's summary:
So, by this test there exists lines of force within the
magnet of the same nature as those without. What is
more, they are exactly equal ~n amount to those
without; and in fact are continuations of them, absolutely unchanged in their nature, so far as experimental test can be applied to tl1em. Every line of
force therefore, at whatever distance it may be taken
from the magnet, must be considered a closed circuit, passing in some part of its course through the
9
�The College
magnet, and having an equal amount of force in
every part of its course. (3ll7)
of the materiality of space are all taken up into a single powerful image, the most comprehensive, and yielding the most
explicit interpretation of the magnet. This image is the System of Power, and it is most completely set forth in Faraday's
paper titled "On the Physical Character of the Lines of Magnetic Force . " 10 This paper is, by itself, such a high and
humane model of scientific rhetoric and teaching, as to be
the most rewarding conclusion to this history.
V. The System of Power
N
Through the action of the moving wire, the magnetic line
of force was carried to its highest development as a symbol.
1D be not
onlythe moving wire magnet's exterior line of but the sign of
the locus of the has disclosed the
--=~~~~-~~i~~~~~~~~~~~-~~==~=-Forinterior condition as well. The line action, forceunchanged
its
of force is
in its nature, whether we view that part of it which resides
within the iron bar, or its continuation outward into the sur-
rounding places; power resides equally in both phases of the
Figure 12
The lines of magnetic force are closed loops. They have no
beginning or end. They only appear to rise and to terminate
at the extremities of a magnet, but we now see (Fig. 12) that
they are continued uninterruptedly within, compressed together but unchanged in nature. This is the same condition
as was represented, in the case of a material which was not
itself a magnet but which was subject to the action of an
external magnetic field, by the image of gathering power. 9
There is no longer any obvious fountain or sink of the lines,
such as was postulated by the theory of poles or magnetic
fluids, and therefore there is no longer any reason-or even
any possibility-to identify the place of appearance of the
lines with the cause of their existence. In the sense of limited
centers or active origins of the lines of force, "poles" do not
exist! (3289). The word "polarity" retains a meaning, but it is
a geometrical meaning only, marking the sense of direction to
and from along the lines, and distinguishing the places of
concentration of the lines as they enter a new medium.
Accordingly, the relation which the magnet (l should say,
the iron) has to its own lines of force does not seem to be any
different from the relation which the surrounding medium
has to its lines of force, that is, the relation of a conductor.
To be sure, we do usually want to think of the iron as somehow the active cause of the lines, and this conventional view
was given perfect expression in the theory of poles. But now
that notion is rendered untenable or at any rate occult: as we
find there is nothing in the unfolding of the magnet's power
which gives any visible confirmation to the idea that ponderable matter is "originative" of the lines of force. What the
magnet's relation to its lines is, has not become a settled question; but it is growing in its status as a question that can be
asked in practice. Through the Moving Wire, first, the unfolding of this relation, second, the rendition of "conducting
power" as geometrical in content, and third, the articulation
lO
line of force. Therefore we must not suppose that division of
the magnet into an "inner" or iron portion and an "outer" or
air portion is a division between the active and the passive .. The
inner, iron, part of the magnet is not the active origin of the
magnetic power; nor is the surrounding space the passive stage
whereon the magnet displays its peculiar action.
The outer medium, no less than the iron, is essential to the
magnet and defines what Faraday calls the system or atmosphere of power (p. 402). The family of closed magnetic
curves filling and surrounding a bar magnet constitutes an
atmosphere whose shape is that of a solid of rotation-really a
nest of surfaces of rotation-about the bar's axis. This interesting shape Faraday calls "sphondyloid," from the Greek
word for "beetle" (Fig. 13).
~----
Figure 13:
c
-----------------------B
--~
--- -,
"Sphondyloid."
"All the phenomena of the moving wire," Faraday writes,
"seem to me to show the physical existence of an atmosphere
of power about a magnet, which, as the power is antithetical,
and marked in its direction by the lines of magnetic force,
may be considered as disposed in sphondyloids, determined
by the lines or rather shells afforce': (3271).
The sphondyloid form is characteristic and exemplary.
Even those magnetic systems which do not display the
sphondyloid shape have forms which can be viewed as distortions and transformations of it. The atmosphere about a
spherical magnet, for example, comprises lines of force whose
�July, 1979
will be a corresponding irregularity imposed
angles of refraction are rather gentler than those of a hard,
well-charged bar magnet; the shape of the atmosphere is
somewhat stubby by comparison, but in it the characteristic
sphondyloid structure can readily be perceived. Another example is the horseshoe-magnet, which is really just a barmagnet bent into a U-shape. Bending the bar produces a cor-
upon the pattern of distribution of power; and the
sphonydyloid (or whatever shape) will distend, indicating by
this the new equilibria of power that have been set up within
the system (Fig. 15). Faraday writes: "if a piece of cold iron
responding distortion in the shape of the atmosphere, a comi-
by air or even mere space, there is a concentration of Jines of
cal one, I think: it turns the sphondyloid inside out (Fig. 14).
force onto it and more power is transmitted through the space
magnet, there
. . . is introduced into a magnetic field, previously occupied
thus occupied than if the paramagnetic body were not
there. . . . A new disposition of the force arises; for some
passes now where it did not pass before, being removed from
places where it was previously transmitted" (3279).
In the old rhetoric of action-at-a-distance one would have
described that event as an action between two bodies~the
magnet acting upon (attracting) the iron sample. But here,
one speaks not of the action of a magnet upon another body
but of the coming-to-be of an irregularity in the atmosphere,
the transformation of the sphondyloid into some other unnamed but perfectly definite shape. The subsequent motion
of the intruding iron sample is viewed, not as a passive submission to the magnet's force, but as non-equilibrium. The
original sphondyloid and its various distortions are like forms
of a soap-bubble. Ordinarily the spherical shape of a soapbubble is stable, just as the sphondyloid magnetic atmosphere
is stable. But if the bubble is stretched or elongated a new
disposition of tension arises in the surface; and the offending
Figure 14:
Lettered regions correspond to those of the Sphondyloid in the
previous figure.
body, if unconstrained, will tend to be drawn back into the
bubble as the latter regains, so far as possible, its spherical
shape. In just the same way that the shape of a bubble indicates the conditions of stress and strain within itself, so does
the shape of the magnetic atmosphere stand as the visible
symbol of the plurality-a plurality of relations but not of
agents~that
constitutes the magnetic system.
The magnet resolves itself into Form and Material in a way
quite independent of the nature of its iron or other ponderable "inner" medium. The true magnetic material is not iron
or nickel or anything other than power, and this power is a
magnitude possessing quantity and location just as much as
any ponderable body does. The power is disposed in an atmosphere of lines or surfaces of force whose presence and
number are displayed by the Moving Wire. It is because the
lines or surfaces are continuous and because they, not intersecting, contain one another, that we are permitted to speak
Figure 15
So the shape of the tangible core of magnetic material has
much to do with the form of the magnetic atmosphere, but as
Faraday says, "the condition and relation of the surrounding
medium has an essential and evident influence" (3274).
One change that can be made in the surrounding medium
is to introduce an inhomogeneity into it. If this is done, for
example by bringing a piece of iron into the vicinity of the
so emphatically of shape. The magnetic atmosphere has
shape and place in an Aristotelian way, that is by containing
and being contained.
Shape in this sense is independent of size. As a System of
Power, the magnet has shape without size, and I mean this in
two different ways. The first way that the atmosphere has
shape without size is in that it is a nest of forms (Fig. 16).
Now many bodies have shape only "on their surfaee"-think
of a marble statue, for example. We imagine that if we could
plunge into its substance, we would have left form behind,
and that everywhere beneath its surface there is only undifferentiated stuff. Not so the sphondyloid of power. Like an
onion, or like the figures of Silenus, each of which contains
another within itself, its form extends throughout all of its
ll
�The College
Figure 16:
"Dissection" of sphondyloid.
parts. Beneath every surface there is another, for it is a nest of
surfaces rather than a solid with a surface. No matter how
much or how little of the atmosphere we look at, form is
present. And this is the first way.
The second way in which a magnet has shape without size
is that it has no inherent size. An isolated magnet would be of
infinite extent, for there is no container or surface of accumulation of magnetic power so long as the magnet is absolutely
alone (3255). (In another place, Faraday calls empty space
"the great abyss" for lines of force [2852].) Every magnet is,
potentially, an infinite body; yet its atmosphere of power can
be compressed, contained, and distorted by other systems of
magnetic power. If a small bar-magnet is immersed in a
strong, alien magnetic field-such as the Earth's-and if it is
constrained so that its poles face toward the like poles of the
exterior magnet, from which poles they would normally repel;
then the two atmospheres will not mix, and the first will be
virtually contained in the second; as though it were a drop of
oil contained in a volume of water (Fig. 17).
power of the system, however contained or bent, remains the
same. In the case of the small atmosphere contained by the
larger one Faraday declares: "I have no doubt ... that the
sphondyloid representing the total power, which in the experiment ... had a sectional area of not two square inches in
surface, would have equal power upon the moving wire with
that infinite sphondyloid which would exist if the magnet
were in free space" (3275).
We are now in possession of the final experimental interpretation. A magnet represents a fixed and constant body of
power. Like that of a volume of gas, the distribution of this
power has no inherent size, but it can be given size by confinement. In a manner very much unlike a gas, however, the
magnetic atmosphere, a structure comprising shells or surfaces, has shape throughout itself; and this shape, though
tending to secure its own geometry, can be penetrated and
distorted by other magnetic systems. Tangible material is not
what defines a magnet. The iron in a bar-magnet is only a
sort of skeleton: it is the magnetic atmosphere, the sphondyloid of power, that can be named the body of the magnet,
and so revealed the magnet stands forth as an infinite elastic
corporeal extension, variable as to shape but incorruptible as
to power. That a magnetic system has corporeality independent of its skeleton of ponderable matter is the capstone of the
discoveries of the Moving Wire.
The magnet is above all a geometrical body, neither n1atter
nor space. Geometry resides not in a fictitious empty space,
but in the articulate extensive continuum; and the magnetic
articulation of this is what has been brought to sight. The
magnetic world is a new geometrical world, shapely, visible,
and fluid.
Epilog: The World-Traveler
N
Figure 17
In the figure the dotted curve AB represents the boundary
between the two magnetic systems. Though the space be ever
so densely filled with lines of force, there will always remain
such a curve as AB which divides all the lines of the smaller
atmosphere from all the lines of the larger. And the total
12
There are two questions, each of which leads to an aspect
of Faraday's scientific practice which is distinguished and excellent. They are, "What is rhetoric?" and, "What is experience?"
In my section called "The Image" I narrated the course of
appearance of space among the magnetic materials. Under
one view of. this appearance, space is to be considered the
neutral, passive ground through which materials-the only
true agents-relate to and interact with one another. According to a second representation, which I have associated with
Faraday's use of the Moving Wire, the division between space
and matter is subverted; and along with that the seat of natural power is ascribed not to isolated material centers but rather
to the great continuum of extension, with respect to which
the former "active centers" become only the boundaries.
These views differ in imagery. They do not differ in predictive power. Insofar as they are able to generate predictions at
all, the two views are indistinguishable. Their predictions are
the same. There is a current of thinking which holds that,
therefore, the two views are the, same: that it is their testable
content which constitutes their entire standing as scientific
pronouncements, and the additional differences between
�July, 1979
them are only, as Hertz once wrote, "the gay garment" in
which we clothe them. 11
But I will affirm the contrary, that it is the image, and
nothing else, which carries our knowledge of the object. It is
the image which tries to reveal what the object is. The following out of one image into another is rhetoric. The evolution
of the image of space as a passive ground, into the image of
space as a conductor among conductors is a rhetorical
achievement-it is exactly insofar as an account is deliberately and faithfully rhetorical that the account is scientific.
Natural science is rhetoric.
Earlier in this talk I labeled as the "manifesto" of the scientific laboratory, a pronouncement that symbols come into science through "experience." It is important to emphasize the
artfulness through which this experience is gained, for the
experience of which I speak is to be contrasted with the experience gained by, say, a world-traveler. There is a sort of
traveler, of whom let me take Gulliver or Herodotus as examples, whose experience is gained artlessly. They find themselves in a place and report what has happened. They return
with stories, legends, even with what might be called factsall of them of a new and strange character, which is why we
are so eager to hear about them.
What kind of thing do these experiences go to make up?
The answer is already seen in the relation which these "artless" storytellers have to their own stories-they carry them
back with them in the same way that they would carry back
riches and gifts from the far land. At home, the stories are
assembled into a picture, a mosaic; they depict the world for
us. This world that is depicted has its most important character in being large and therefore, for the most part, distant. It
is varied. And it stays put whilst we come and go. This last
points to the most important effect that travel stories have
upon us, for they incite us to give up the feeling that our
"place" is our immediate (Aristotelian) container. Thus the
contiguity between the storyteller and where he is, is lost; and
the first ground is cleared for the appearance of that duality
between the self and the world, of which thinkers have made
so much.
So. I am claiming that the "artless" encounters of travelers
are of a type, and that they go to articulate an order which
comprises knowing selves and objects. The objects are always
at a distance, the speech all on the part of the selves, and the
objects wait to be described. It so happens that there is one
traveler who is anything but artless and does not fit this picture; that is Odysseus. Faraday is like Odysseus. 12
Faraday's journey is a journey of sight, speech, and image.
Home is a world that is knowable and known, a world
enriched by powers newly brought to light. These powers are
not monsters like Polyphemus, that they must be tamed and
controlled by gods, wiles, or magic; and likewise Faraday's art
is neither magical, devious, nor divine. Faraday's rhetorical
art establishes an occasion in which the distance between an
act of speech and the things spoken about may become absolutely minimal. The result of this is that, under his art, the
things transform so as to become more articulate. They do
not become other than they are, or more perfect (his ex-
perimental art is not that of "eliminating errors'')-they only
become more articulate.
This scientific activity may also be compared to what we
may imagine of the philosopher who returns to the cave 13 .
He does not tell travel-stories-about the perfect world there
and the degenerate here. He does not scoff and deride. He
does not jeer, "Your fire is trash compared to Fire." What he
does is tell stories and legends that enable us to see Fire in
fire. We then love it, as one loves the Beautiful in the beloved. It is not the man who has seen perfection that mistreats
the world, it is the ignorant man who thinks things are merely
what they are, mere givens, pragmata, facts.
The hero's return from the land of the sun at once elevates
and shames. The two are forever connected! Most people
read the hero's return as destructive, in that the cave is to be
judged by an impossible high standard; but such fears are appropriate only when the hero returns from another world literally. When the perfect is not "other" but is seen in the
object at hand, then does the object have meaning and value;
and one who has gained this vision acts, not bestially and
tyrannically, but honorably and well.
I. Thomas King Simpson, A Critical Study of Maxwell's Dynamical--Theory
of the Electromagnetic Field in the "Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism,"
Diss., Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 1968. Available through
University Microfilms, Ann Arbor. For other important studies on Faraday,
Maxwell, and electromagnetism in general: "Faraday's Thought on Electromagnetism," The College 22, 2, Annapolis: St. John's College, July 1970;
"Some Observations on Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism,"
Hist. Phil. Sci., 1, 3, 1970; "Maxwell and the Direct Experimental Test of
His Electromagnetic Theory," Isis 57, 4 (number 190), 1966.
2. Plato, Phaedrns, 275 B.
3. Michael Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity, 3 volumes,
London: Bernard Quaritch, 1839 and New York: Dover, 1965. References in
parentheses are to article number unless otherwise indicated.
4. In the context in which this remark is introduced by Faraday, it has in
part the function of justifying the image of the line of force, the most visual of
all of Faraday's images.
5. Faraday, "On Some Points of Magnetic Philosophy," Philosophical
Magazine, February 1855. Appears as articles 3300-3362, Exp. Res.
6. Faraday states the theory here, but he does not ascribe it to Coulomb
until article 3307. See also Charles Coulomb, "Sur I'Eiectricit€: et le
Magnetisme-2e Memoire" (1785}, Collection de Memoires, Paris: Societe
Franpise de Physique 1, 1884, 116.
7. Faraday frequently, but not uncritically, uses the words "space" and "vacuum" interchangeably. See especially articles 2784 and 2787.
8. Faraday, Exp. Res., article 36, November 1831.
9. Compare Figure 12 with Figure 6.
Hi. Philosophical Magazine, June 1852. Appears as articles 3243-3299, Exp.
Res.
ll. Heinrich Hertz, Electric Waves, trans. D. E. Jones, London: Macmillan,
1893, 28.
12. Simpson, A Critical Study.
13. Plato, Republic, 519 D.
13
�Odysseus
Among the Phaiakians
William O'Grady
When Odysseus awakens alone on Ithaka after an absence
of twenty years, the land looks strange to him and he fears
that he has been betrayed by the Phaiakians, who promised to
take him home. Odysseus says, "Come, let me count my
goods and look them over," lest something have been taken
away. "So speaking, he counted up the surpassingly beautiful
tripods and caldrons, and the gold and all the fine woven
clothing. Of these things nothing at all was missing." Having
returned home, Odysseus needs to know what he has brought
with him, what he has to offer. The most important things,
the things he most cares about, the things he must possess if
he is again to be husband to Penelope, father to Telemachus,
son to Laertes, king to his people, are not things that can be
counted and looked over. Still, there is some solace in count-
ing what can be counted, and finding that of these nothing is
lacking. But in the measure that Odysseus is able to trust that
he has also managed to return home with what is most impor-
tant, with a heart that is whole and brave, he is greatly indebted to the Phaiakians, the people of Scheria, among
whom he stayed for three days. They are indebted to him as
well, as I shall try to show. My attempt here is to understand
something of what happens while Odysseus is among the
Phaiakians.
Odysseus' encounter with the Phaiakians immediately prior
to his homecoming is not a chance encounter. Two assemblies of the gods on Olympus (recounted in books one
and five) have been held to arrange that his return, which is
clearly a big and difficult matter, should come about in the
right way. In particular, both when Athena comes to
Nausikaa in the form of a dream, bidding her to think of her
marriage and to do her laundry, and when Athena herself
goes through the city calling the Phaiakians to assembly, she
is said by Homer to be "devising the return of great-hearted
Odysseus." The assembly culminates with Odysseus weeping
boundless tears as he hears the story of the fall of Troy. We
must try to understand in what way the encounter with
Nausikaa is important for Odysseus, supplies him with something needful; and, we must try to understand the meaning of
the tears shed by Odysseus as he hears his greatest victory
sung. The premise of my attempt to understand is that according to Homer the gods sometimes make available to
human beings what they need most.
That Odysseus' needs as he comes to the land of the Phaiakians are urgent and delicate appears most vividly in this
A lecture read at Santa Fe on January 12, 1979.
l4
simile describing his shelter during the first night. "As when a
man buries a firebrand beneath the dark embers in a remote
place where there are no neighbors, and saves the seed of fire,
having nowhere else from which to kindle fire, so Odysseus
buried himself in the leaves." The fire has almost died in
Odysseus; only a seed remains from which however the full
blaze of fire might grow again. But if the seed dies, there is
no other source from which fire might be kindled. And this
seed has come to be, in a strange way, outside of Odysseus:
he must dispose of it, protect it, care for it, in an anxiously
self-conscious way.
Odysseus and Nausikaa are together only twice, the second
time very briefly. Nausikaa asks Odysseus to remember her,
since he owes her his life. Odysseus, promising to remember
her always, uses a different and extraordinary word:--"You
have given me my human life" (the difference in Greek between bios and zoe). One could almost translate: "You have
en-humaned me." Odysseus means, to begin with, that when
he first saw Nausikaa in her loveliness and innocence he
knew for certain that the world does not contain only, or even
chiefly, monsters. He has, after all, seen so many monsters
that as he swims toward the island of Scheria Athena must
specially intervene to supply him with presence of mind
when, afraid of being dashed against the sharp rocks or,
again, of being carried farther out to sea, a third fear suddenly
rises up-a monster may appear. Thus the wholly convincing
gentleness of Nausikaa's appearance is immeasurably important. But even more important, perhaps, is a discovery Odys-
seus is led to make about himself. He hears himself saying to
Nausikaa: "I have never seen anything like you, neither man
nor woman. Wonder takes me as I look on you. Yet in Delos
once I saw such a thing, by Apollo's altar. I saw the stalk of a
young. palm shooting up. I had gone there once, and with a
following of a great many people, on that journey which was
to mean hard suffering for me. And as, when I looked upon
that tree, my heart admired it long, since such a tree had
never yet sprung up from the earth, so now, lady, I admire
you and wonder." Not only is Nausikaa herself invincibly
lovely and innocent, but she reminds of other lovely and innocent things seen long ago and almost forgotten: there have
always been such things in the world. Above all, Odysseus
becomes aware that just as long ago-so much violence ago
and so much hideousness ago-his heart was capable of responding in awe and gratitude to the appearance of lovely and
innocent things, wholly without reference to how they might
be useful to him; so now his heart is capable of the same: it is
somehow the same heart. This is a very difficult thing to
�July, 1979
know, and it is the sort of thing that human beings, sometimes, most need to know. This is the deepest meaning,
perhaps, of Odysseus' gratitude to Nausikaa for having been
an indispensable source of his human life.
Athena in arousing Nausikaa to go to the river where she
will meet Odysseus is said to be devising the return of Odysseus. The very same words are used as she summons the
Phaiakians to assembly. Why is the assembly, described in
book eight, of such importance for Odysseus, even before he
begins to tell his story? Near the beginning of the meeting
Odysseus weeps, though he tries to conceal it, as he hears the
minstrel sing of a quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus.
Then athletic contests take place, and Odysseus' heart seems
to lighten. After his victory in throwing the discus, he speaks
"in language more blithe," as Lattimore translates. Again,
Odysseus seems to share fully in the enjoyment of all the
Phaiakians as Demodicus sings of the adultery of Aphrodite
with Ares, although this enjoyment is perhaps not altogether
easy to understand. (The gods are of course immortal, so that
their doings always seem somehow comic, but here Hephaestus is so pained as to utter the wish that he had not been born;
moreover, Poseidon's urgent attempts, apparently inspired by
compassion for Hephaestus, to bring to an end the unseemly
spectacle of the vulgar laughter of Apollo and Hermes, remind us disconcertingly that Poseidon is other and more than
the mere persecutor of Odysseus.)
After these incidents, and before he reveals his name,
Odysseus weeps again, but this time in a vastly deeper and
wider way, as he hears the song, which he himself requested
of the strategem of the horse and the fall of Troy. What do
these tears mean? How have they come about? Is it good that
Odysseus should shed them? Before trying to understand this
happening, let us listen to a translation of Homer's astounding words: "So the famous singer sang his tale, but Odysseus
melted, and from under his eyes the tears ran down, drenching his cheeks. As a woman weeps, lying over the body of her
dear husband, who fell fighting for his city and people, as he
tried to beat off the pitiless day from city and children; she
sees him dying and gasping for breath, and winding her body
around him she cries high and shrill, while the men behind
her, hitting her with their spears on the back and shoulders,
force her up and lead her away into slavery to have hard work
and sorrow, and her cheeks are wracked with pitiful weeping.
So Odysseus shed piteous tears from under his brows."
The earlier tears, the tears over the quarrel with Achilles
who has died, are perhaps not too difficult to understand. But
what of these final tears, necessary before Odysseus can name
himself? How can the tears of the victor be likened to the
tears of the vanquished, the tears of the sacker of cities to the
tears of a woman trying to hold on to her dying husband,
which she cannot, to shelter him from further blows from his
enemies, which she cannot?
I think the pain in Odysseus' soul at this moment has two
sources. The first has to do with Odyssesus' request to the
singer that he sing Kosmos hippou which means, to begin
with, the ornament of the horse, the device of the horse, the
horse as the product of resourcefulness, artfulness, cleverness,
the horse as the manifestation of wit and talent considered in
isolation from all else. But Kosmos hippou, as the singer well
knows and truthfully sings, means finally and fully the world
of the horse, the world out of which the horse came to be,
the world of prodigious single-mindedness, of goals to which
all else becomes subject, of the breaching of Troy as the end,
an end justifying all things, including the perversion of worship represented by the horse. Again, the world of the horse is
the world the horse leads to, the fall of a holy city, the
broken-heartedness, homelessness and utter forlornness of
Andromache. Odysseus weeps because he is deeply implicated in the perversion of high things and in vast human suf-
fering, and because his delight in the play and display of his
own incomparable resourcefulness has in some way distracted
his attention from what he has been implicated in.
But this sorrow felt by Odysseus, a deeper sorrow perhaps
than most human beings ever know, is not the deepest sorrow
felt by Odysseus, who has come to Scheria from the island of
Calypso, where deathlessness and agelessness are available to
human beings. The deepest and widest sorrow that Odysseus
feels, which somehow makes bearable all that is involved in
facing his responsibility for the fall of a city whose men and
women also prayed to Zeus, is sorrow over a world-the
world of mortals-in which all dear things perish and in
which all attempts to shelter those dear things are doomed to
failure; which attempts, however, except in the eyes orutterly
base human beings, are never objects of scorn or condescensiOn.
The breadth and impartiality of Odysseus' sorrow shows itself again in book twenty-three. When Odysseus and
Penelope are finally in their bed together, and after they have
made love, Odysseus tells stories. He begins after the fall of
Troy, and what he tells is "all cares, both so many as he had
placed upon human beings and so many as he himself, sorrowing, toiled through."
As Odysseus weeps these tears in which the whole mortal
world is bathed, Alkinous, king of the Phaiakians, asks Demodicus to cease from singing, and tells Odysseus that the
time has come for the stranger to reveal his name. But Alkinous, who surely suspects strongly that this stranger is Odysseus, in whom Poseidon is going to be exceptionally interested, if he is in the fate of any storm-driven wanderer,
"digresses" remarkably. After requiring of Odysseus that he
declare his name, he recounts what he has heard from his
father, namely that some day Poseidon, angry with the Phaiakians for giving conveyance to some man, will turn the re-
turning ship to stone and surround the city with a great wall
to hide it. Alkinous gives Odysseus a chance to lie, to deny
that he is Odysseus, or at least to present himself as an Odysseus on good terms with Poseidon. At any rate, if Odysseus
does present himself as persecuted by Poseidon, he had better
have some great good thing to offer the Phaiakians, in gratitude for which this people would be willing to run a very
great risk-this people which has enjoyed, ever since its removal from the vicinity of the Cyclops who harried them savagely, a perfectly riskless existence; an existence, moreover,
requiring no patience: the fruit trees are always in season, and
15
�The College
human sorrows are understood to be fashioned by the gods
"so that there will be a song for men who are to come" -as if
to say: let's get the sorrows and the lives over with, so that the
song can begin.
And it turns out, after Odysseus has told his story, that it
seems to the Phaiakians that he has given them a great good
thing, namely, the most wonderful stories they or anyone else
and ending his life. The alternative, as he puts it to himself,
is not simply to go on living, but rather "to go on being
among men." All that Odysseus and his companions have
shared during ten years at Troy seems to stand revealed as
mutual infidelity: there is mistrust, jealousy and resentment at
ingratitude on the one side, and on Odysseus' side absentmindedness, lack of imagination and complacency. That
have ever heard; moreover, he has somehow brought them to
Odysseus brings these charges against himself is clear from
understand that it is not quite right for human beings who
live and choose to live a riskless existence to delight in stories
about human beings whose lives are full of risks. The Phaia-
two considerations: first, in narrating the adventure to the
kians somehow understand, when Odysseus has finished
Phaiakians, Odysseus speaks of the prospect of an early return
having been ruined by "our own folly;" and, second, Odys-
return, namely, conveyance to his homeland, regardless of
seus after the fact is able to reconstruct in his previously inattentive imagination the pained and resentful conversation
among his men which he did not hear because he was asleep.
Odysseus decides to endure in silence and remain, but he
the risk to themselves; but also that in order truly to possess
conceals himself (kaluptesthai) and withdraws, as, we under-
Odysseus' wonderful stories, genuinely to enter into them,
they themselves must run risks, must not lead an altogether
stand, do his men: no one has the heart to look anyone else
speaking, not only that sheer gratitude for a wonderful gift
requires that they try to give Odysseus some good thing in
sheltered-hence storyless-existence. And so they risk the
thing they love best, their access to the sea, for the sake of
Odysseus, and for their own sake. It is not entirely clear how
their risk turns out, partly because of a textual question: Zeus
says to Poseidon either "Turn the ship to stone but do not
surround the city with a mountain to hide it" or "Turn the
ship to stone and surround it with a huge mountain to hide
it" (in Greek the difference between mede and mega). But in
either case, we are told by Homer that Poseidon turned the
returning ship to stone "and then he went away."
in the face.
In what follows the aloneness of Odysseus is not spoken of,
but rather presented in three tableaux. When they come to
the island of the Lastrygonians, after the adventure of the
winds, the other nine ships drop anchor inside the harbor,
Odysseus' ship alone outside the harbor. On this island, as
again on the island of Circe, Odysseus alone climbs up to a
high place of outlook and there takes his stand, a solitary figure against the sky. But then, on the island of Circe, a sort of
miracle happens: as Odysseus is returning to the ship, "Some
one of the gods pitied me, being alone, and sent a great stag
with towering antlers right in my very path." Odysseus slays
the stag and, with much trouble on account of its size, man-
II.
Now let us consider for awhile the tales Odysseus tells to
the Phaiakians during the wondrously long night of the assembly. The tales are full of monsters of various kinds and it
is difficult for us to understand the status of these beings.
Perhaps it would be good for us to keep in mind Socrates'
statement in the Phaedrus that to know myself includes knowing whether I am a being as fierce and complicated as the
monster Typhon or one to whom a gentler and simpler na-
ture belongs-it seems difficult to speak of the human soul
without speaking of monsters of one kind or another.
But however uncertain we may be about what account to
give of the Cyclops, Skylla, the Sirens and others, Odysseus'
tale is never unintelligible to us. This is so, I think, because
centrally the tale is about human companionship, human
pain at its being fractured, and human joy at its being restored.
Let me try to sketch briefly what happens to this companionship in the tale he tells the Phaiakians from the Adventure
of the Bag of Winds to the Adventure of the Stag, and then
make a suggestion about how such stories co.me to take shape.
When Odysseus sleeps, and while his ships are within sight
of Ithaka, his companions open the bag given to Odysseus by
King Aolius and a hurricane drives the ships far from Ithaka.
Odysseus immediately considers throwing himself into the sea
16
ages to carry it back to the ship. And then "I threw him down
by the ship and roused my companions, standing beside each
man in turn and speaking to him in kind words: 'Dear
friends, sorry as we are, we shall not yet go down to the house
of Hades. Not until our day is appointed. Come then, while
there is something to eat and drink by the fast ship, let us
think of our food, and not be worn out with hunger.' So I
spoke, and they listened at once to me and obeyed me, and
unconcealing themselves (ek-kaluptesthai, the undoing of the
concealment and withdrawal resulting from the Adventure of
the Bag of Winds), along the shore of the unresting sea, they
wondered at the stag; for truly he was a very big beast. But
after they had looked at him, and their eyes had enjoyed him,
they washed their hands and set about preparing a communal
high feast."
Well, I think that it is not exactly the stag they are wondering at, big though it be, but rather, shyly, they are wondering
at the miracle of the restoration of companionship and the
possibility of communion that has somehow taken place.
A number of important events affecting their reconstituted
fellowship follow, events which show that not only has their
fellowship been re-constituted, but it has been constituted at a
deeper level. The next morning Odysseus addresses his men
in a way he has never addressed them before. He says that
none of them, including himself, knows the place of the rising of the sun or of its setting: they are deeply ignorant regarding the encompassing things. But perhaps, all the same, there
�July, 1979
is some metis, some device, some plan, says polumetis Odysseus, the man of many devices. Then he says: "But I do not
think so." Odysseus is at a loss, and says so out loud.
Events, however, arrange themselves, and Odysseus must
risk' emasculation, that is, in some way risk his relation to
Penelope for the sake of his men whom Circe has turned into
swine. This adventure has a happy ending, and Odysseus'
men, having feared that he was lost, tell him in winged
words, "0 great Odysseus, we are as happy to see you returning as if we had come back to our own Ithakan country." But
this moment is not enough. As Circe says to all of them_,
"Now you are all dried out, dispirited from the constant
thought of your hard wandering, nor is there any spirit in
your festivity, because of so much suffering."
Odysseus recognizes the truth of this: the companionship,
which is not forever, needs festive time spent together. And
Odysseus must let his companions tell him how much time is
necessary. They come to him at the end of a year spent on
Circe's island and say that the time has come to go. Once
more they make for home. But of course only Odysseus returnp.
The others perish at sea for having eaten the sacred cattle
of the Sun, after valiantly resisting this temptation for a long
time. In response to their urgent plea not to measure their
endurance by his own endurance, nor to ask of them that
they make his endurance their own measure, Odysseus wanders off while his companions choose likely death at sea over
starvation. Once again, Odysseus knows exactly what they say
to each other without having been present. He knows their
ways and respects their dignity. Above all, he has heard Elpenor, the youngest and most foolish of them all, who fell to
his death because of athesphatos oinos, "more wine than even
a god could say," pronounce his blessing upon the time "I
was among my companions."
Let me try to say a few words concerning this story Odysseus tells to the Phaiakians about his experiences in companionship in the middle of a world populated by monsters. How
does it become a story rather than a mere sequence of happenings? For me this question means especially: how does
Odysseus know that the appearing of the mighty stag was
brought about by some one of the gods-he does not say
which one-who pitied him because he was alone? For after
all, only on this "interpretation" of the appearing of the stag
does the stag become the beginning of reconciliation and the
restoration of communion. My suggestion would be that, although at tl1e time of this happening Odysseus was somehow
aware of its meaning, he comes to comprehend its full meaning only when he puts it into a story. I mean two things by
this. First, Odysseus does not describe his feelings of loneliness; rather, he describes one ship outside a harbor and nine
within, and a man twice taking his stand by himself on a high
place of outlook. Again, he describes himself and the others
withdrawing into concealment and emerging from concealment. Happenings seem to be more important than feelings
for story-telling.
But second, and more important, and in some way qualifying my first suggestion, I think it is of decisive importance
that Odysseus tells his story to Alkinous and Arete, not to
himself. It is probably true that important stories, true stories,
the narration of the truth of what happened, must be prepared in solitude: perhaps Odysseus could have said nothing
true about what happened if he had spent any fewer than
seven years in concealment with Calypso. But, I suggest, the
most important truths of any story are the truths we hear for
the first time as we tell the story to someone else, try to reach
his soul with our words, try to make him understand how it
was. I cannot, of course, prove this, but I firmly believe that
when Odysseus heard himself telling Alkinous and Arete that
the stag appeared because some one of the gods pitied him in
his aloneness, he knew immediately that this was the truth of
the matter, although he had never before said any such thing
to himself, even tentatively.
As we read in the first lines of the Odyssey, Odysseus suffered many sorrows deep in his heart struggling to achieve his
soul and the return of his companions. These two objects of
his striving seem to involve each other deeply. The return of
his companions turns out to be impossible. This impossibility
is rooted both in the nature of the world-the adverse winds
holding Odysseus and his companions on the island of the
Sun cannot change until the prohibition against eating the
sacred cattle has been violated; and in the nature of the
companions-as the encounter with the Lotus-eaters indicates, to become forgetful of one's return follows frOrTI~ not
being ready to bring back tidings: unlike Odysseus, his companions are not able in imagination and speech to make their
life before the departure to Troy and their life after that moment into one life~that is why they cannot return. But, as
the next line informs us, what Odysseus desired most of all
was to draw his companions to himself (erusthai). This was
his ultimate task in relation to them, as theirs was actively to
allow tl1emselvcs to be drawn to Odysseus. In this task both
Odysseus and his companions succeed. Their success receives
its perfect seal in Elpenor's words to Odysseus in the underworld, that is, from beyond life in which of course it is always
possible to re-appraise what has happened. Elpenor, the
youngest of Odysseus' companions, wholly affirms his life in
the companionship. He asks Odysseus to remember him, and
he asks that the oar with which he rowed be erected on his
burial mound as a memorial to the time when "I was among
my companions." These final words spoken by Elpenor, and
the affirmation they contain, render articulate and therefore
somehow bearable the sheer gesture which Odysseus describes
as "the most piteous sight my eyes beheld in my sufferings as
I questioned the ways of the sea": six of his companions
seized by Skylla reach out their hands toward an impotent
Odysseus and utter his name.
Let us leave Odysseus for now. He has many troubles still
to face when he reaches lthaka. But for now we can with
Homer be happy as the ship of the Phaiakians carries him
homeward: "She carried a man with a mind like the gods for
counsel, one whose spirit up to this time had endured much,
suffering many pains: the wars of men, hard crossing of the
big waters; but now he slept still, forgetful of all he had suffered."
17
�Kant's Empiricism
Arthur Collins
According to Kant, nature is the system of interconnected
spatia-temporal objects and events comprising the total range
of possible hum~m experience, and nature is the subject matter of all human knowledge. At the same time, nature is itself
a product of the activity of the human cognitive constitution,
and it would not exist at all were it not for human mental
activities. The mind creates nature. This is a summary expression of a radical subjectivist tendency in Kant's thought.
He says that we are affected by an unknown and unknowable
reality, and this provides a raw material that excites the operation of our various faculties. In particular, it activates the sensitive aspect of our cognitive constitution which organizes the
input as a system of "intuitions" in space and time, and it also
awakens the conceptualizing aspect of our mental makeup
which works up intuitions into representations of objects and
thus gives rise to conscious experience and to the realm of
objects of such experience. All of the objects with which experience can ever acquaint us must be found in this spatiatemporal world of perceptual experience. Even philosophical
knowledge as expressed in principles like the principle of universal causality is only knowledge about the empirical world
of possible experience. Kant never tires of warning us against
interpreting such metaphysical principles as are accessible to
us as truths about reality outside the mind-imposed conditions of possible experience. His Transcendental Dialectic is a
catalog of erroneous theories produced by philosophers who
have made the very mistake that he so urgently requires us to
avoid.
This is radical subjectivity because the only reality we get
to know, on Kant's theory, even though it is called "nature"
and is the subject matter of all science, is not a reality that is
independent of our existence as subjects of experience, and
not independent of the occurrence of our thinking processes
as subjects. The content of our experience cannot be characterized at all without ineliminable reference to contributions
that we make in working up raw materials into a unified and
comprehensible system of objects of experience. The objects
we get to know would not exist at all, they would be nothing,
in Kant's own explicit and dramatic way of putting it, without
our mental activities. That is, the very mental activities that
go into our getting to know about the existence and character
of objects of experience help to create those objects and to
determine their character. Without our thought nothing
Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Professor Collins
is finishing a book on The Critique of Pure Reason.
18
would be caused by anything else, nothing would be prior to
or later than anything else, or simultaneous with anything
else either. For space and time and causality are among the
features of empirical things that owe their standing entirely to
the contribution of the knowing subject. Of course, the things
that originally set in motion all of this creativity of the mind
would exist even though we did not exist. But these are, as
Kant calls them, things as they are in themselves, and we can
never know anything at all about them. Things in themselves
are never objects of our experience and the failure to realize
that we can know nothing about them is the greatest source of
error in metaphysics according to Kant.
I think that the magnitude and the daring of the claim that
the mind itself fabricates the world it experiences has always
been one of the reasons for great interest in Kant's philosophy. At the same time, it is generally believed, and I believe
also, that Kant was not only one of the great original figures
of philosophical thought, but that his philosophy contains insights of permanent value, insights from which we can learn,
and which make the arduous penetration of his obscurity and
his inconsistency worthwhile. It is his thinking about experience, objects of experience, and consciousness, that is, it is
his radical and unattractive subjectivist theory, that also embodies his most valuable permanent contributions. It is of
these contributions that P. F. Strawson speaks, in his wonderful book on Kant, saying that Kant made " ... very great and
novel gains in epistemology, so great and so novel that, nearly
two hundred years after they were made, they have still not
been fully absorbed into the philosophical consciousness." 1
What I have to say here is organized with a view to showing
how this permanent and large contribution of Kant's thinking
can be approached in the setting of an explicit doctrine the
subjectivism of which appears so extravagant.
I have already said that Kant holds that all human knowledge, apart from appreciation of merely formal truths of logic,
has for its subject matter the realm of possible experience,
which is the perceivable natural world. This much is in itself
appealing to empiricists like all of us because it is a powerful
empiricist commitment. Kant is indeed an empiricist of sorts.
We can think of empiricism as a doctrine concerning
knowledge or as a doctrine concerning reality. As a theory of
knowledge, empiricism is the view that all knowledge claims
rest ultimately on appeal to perceptual experience. As a
theory of reality, empiricism is the view that the world accessible to us in sense experience is reality. Kant's thinking has a
�July, 1979
major anti-empiricist component corresponding to each of
these two conceptions of empiricism. First, there is his theory
of synthetic a priori knowledge, that is, the claim that we do
possess factual knowledge about the world which is not justifiable by appeal to experience. So Kant thinks that there is
knowledge which is not empirical knowledge. Second, there
is Kant's doctrine of the thing in itself, that is, a reality which
we never do, and cannot possibly, encounter in experience.
So Kant thinks that there is reality which is not empirical
reality.
Both of these central themes of Kant's philosophy are crucially connected with his subjectivism. The theory of synthetic a priori knowledge is connected with subjectivism in
that the constitutive role of the mind in forming the spatiatemporal world is the foundation of Kant's explanation for our
possession of synthetic a priori knowledge. Kant is persuaded
by Hume's analyses that no necessary propositions and no
universal propositions can be given a rational justification, if
the admissible foundation for such justification is limited to
experience. Experience cannot prove that, in the future, it
will not itself overthrow any universal generalization that we
find supported today. And any factual proposition defended
by appeal to experience can hardly be necessary, since further
experience might always show it false. Kant accepts this much
from Hume, He does not follow Hume in simply abandoning
the task of justification of our necessary and universal beliefs.
He does not fall back, as Hume does, on mere naturalistic
explanation rather than justification of our possession of such
beliefs. How can we simply abandon justification here? What
leads Hume to his famous scepticism is precisely what sets the
fundamental question for Kant. If knowledge of scientific law
cannot, and if knowledge of causal necessity cannot, be justified by experience, then Hume says we do not really have
any such knowledge. Kant agrees that such knowledge cannot
come from experience, so it must be a priori. It is not merely
analytic knowledge, that is, these known truths do not reduce
to formal and barren identities, so it is synthetic knowledge.
But we do have such knowledge. It is absurd to suppose that
scientific and mathematica.J understanding, the greatest
achievement of human reason, is in fact no achievement at
all but, rather, a collection of rationally unsupported beliefs
with which nature happens to endow us. Thus, for Kant, the
question cannot be whether we have synthetic a priori knowledge but only, "How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?"
Many philosophers before Kant thought that man has some
inner source of knowledge or other. What is special about
Kant's view on this point is precisely the empiricist element in
it. What we know on the basis of our constitutional resources
are, for Kant, truths about the world of experience even
though they are not truths derived from the world of experience. It is beliefs about the world of experience that Hume's
scepticism undermines. The general disparagement of perception in rationalist thought led to the idea of siphoning away
the perceptual as the locus of secondary qualities and mere
phenomena. Rationalists thought that scientific grasp was attainable only when an intrinsically misleading perceptual pic-
ttue of reality was replaced by mathematical representation.
Kant rejects both the scepticism engendered by radical empiricism and the downgrading of perceptual reality by the rationalists. The world of which mathematical science is a true
representation is the world of objects in space and time. That
is the realm of perception.
The second major anti-empiricist theme in Kant's thought,
the concept of the thing in itself, is also directly connected
with his subjective theory of the constitution of the natural
world. That there must be another reality apart from the one
that is created in the course of our attainment of conscious
experience is a fundamental feature of Kant's theory from the
outset. Although the end product of the activities of our mental constitution would not exist without those activities, and
although this end product exhausts the range of scientific investigation, the subject is not also asserted to be the source of
the initial input upon which these lavish creative powers are
to operate. Kant's notion of affection by things is patterned on
the analogy of perception. This is only an analogy, however.
To say that we are affected by outer reality is not just an
extremely abstract way of saying that we perceive things. The
objects we encounter in perception, according to Kant, are
produced by our mental faculties working on a raw input
which first awakens their creative potential. We cannot suppose that Kant is referring to objects of perception as the items
that originally affect us. He cannot be telling us that the input
that awakens our faculties comes from the finished product
that their activity creates. It must be reality independent of
our thinking that provides the origina] source of affection out
of which we construct objects of experience. We know, for
example, that these objects all exist in space and time. But
this is because the raw material of the initial encounter with
outer things is subjected to the fonns of our sensibility. Space
and time, according to Kant, are those forms and they constitute a framework provided by the subject upon which the materials of receptivity are deployed. The original sources of this
affection are not spatia-temporal things at all.
Thus, the idea of a second reality composed of things in
themselves is a fundamental part of the theory of nature that
ascribes it to the creative activities of the knowing subject.
This is reflected from the start in Kant's use of the word "appearances" ("Erscheinungen") as a general term of reference
for the constituents of the world of possible experience. There
would be no point in calling the items encountered in experience "appearances" without a correlative reality that is not
merely empirical. There must be things in themselves even
though we cannot get to know anything about them.
Another deeper aspect of the relationship between Kant's
subjectivism and his conception of things in themselves is illuminated by comparing Kant's position with Berkeley's
idealism. Early reviews of the Critique of Pure Reason were
disappointing and rather shocking to Kant because they
bracketed his views with Berkeley's idealistic philosophy. The
attitude of those who saw an affinity with Berkeley is not any
mystery. Berkeley, too, rejected the theory of secondary qual19
�The College
ities and insisted that the reality we encounter in our perceptual experience is the only reality we come to know. Furthermore, in his way, Berkeley makes the empirical world
depend for its very existence on the mental activities that we
naively think of as giving us access to it. Is that not a view like
Kant's? It is not, in the first instance, because for Kant perceptual experience is founded upon an affection by a nonmental reality even though the object of which we ultimately
become conscious is not that nonmental reality. For Berkeley, there is no reality apart from empirical reality, and that
means, apart from the content of consciousness. Kant never
entertained such a view and was legitimately alarmed when
his ideas were taken to endorse it. At the same time, this
distinction which was so crucial to Kant tends to shrink in
significance just because Kant holds that we do not and cannot know anything about this nonempirical reality. His theory
then seems quite like Berkeley's with the difference that Kant
adds a gratuitious commitment to a wholly unknowable reality.
I want to use the difference between Berkeley's and Kant's
subjectivism, as the motif for a first effort of rethinking Kant's
thoughts in a way that captures what is valuable in them. I
said that the thing in itself is the core of the difference, but
the fact is that, though Kant mentions it, he does not emphasize the thing in itself when he argues at length against the
viewpoint of idealists and distinguishes his position from
theirs. Instead, Kant tries repeatedly to formulate a surrogate
distinction between subjective and objective, although both
sides of the distinctions he introduces inevitably appeal to
empirical reality, that is, to the reality that is thoroughly undermined by the subjectivism of his overall view. In the Prolegomena, for example, Kant offers a distinction between
"judgments of perception" and "judgment~ of experience". If
I judge that the room feels warm to me, the correctness of
this judgment of perception requires nothing more than my
own perceptual state. In a judgment of experience, however,
I judge that the room is warm, and if I am right an objective
quality exists in the object of my experience. Therefore, my
judgment is objective and generates predictions about the experience of others which are not entailed by assertions limited
to my perceptual states. This distinction is supposed to divide
public intersubjective knowledge from mere private appreciation of one's own mental states. Kant tries to make the distinction within the realm of natural objects of experience all
of which are products of our own constitution as subjects of
experience.
In the second edition passage entitled "The Refutation of
Idealism" and in the Paralogisms dealing with spurious
philosophies of mind, Kant makes similar and more complex
efforts to distinguish between a level of subjective experience
and a level of objective fact, again without relinquishing any
of the overall subjectivism of the thesis of the minddependence of nature. Kant organizes his views with reference to a philosophy of mind which he rightly takes to be
held in common by many philosophers of both rationalist and
empiricist schools, and which he regards as the foundation of
various species of idealistic philosophy. The definitive and
20
most influential articulation of this philosophy of mind is
Descartes'. Descartes' scrupulous pursuit of indubitability led
him to a revolutionary conception of the conscious mind and
its immediate objects. This conception has dominated philosophy and determined the schedule of philosophical problems
since the time of Descartes. Kant, of course, shares this inheritance. It is prominently reflected in his notion of "representations" as immediate objects of consciousness. Kant also recognizes fundamental limitations and illusions of the Cartesian
philosophy of mind. He rejects outright the essential premise
that, as conscious subjects, we are in direct touch only with
the private contents of our minds, and that all other realities
are at best subject matter for relatively tenuous hypotheses. A
line from Hume's Treatise is a fine statement of this Cartesian
premise and an indication of its power over philosophers of
all schools:" ... 'tis universally allowed by philosophers, and
is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really
present with the mind but its impressions and ideas, and that
external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion.'' 2 This is the view that engenders
idealism. It does so when arguments for the existence of
extra-mental realities are left problematic or are flatly ruled
out, as they are by Hume and Berkeley respectively. If we
cannot get beyond our ideas, beyond "perishing" mental existences, as Hume calls them, with which we are i:n_direct
contact, then perhaps those perishing ideas are reality and
nothing beyond and in addition to such mental things exists
at all.
This epistemological starting point, shared by Descartes,
the classical empiricist tradition, and so many later thinkers,
does not offer a minimally coherent account of conscious experience according to Kant. \Ve cannot start with the idea of
a conscious subject surveying wholly self-contained and
ephemeral materials, such as Hume's perishing impressions
and ideas. The missing ingredient necessary for the coherence
of this viewpoint is the enduring conscious subject for whom
the transitory contents are objects of consciousness. For we
are not given any self except as one among other objects of
experience. Experiences of a self are just experiences of "empirical self consciousness" and they are, as such, together
with their content, as transitory as other experienced contents. We do not experience our selves as an enduring content that goes with all the other transitory contents. The empiricists actually share elements of this insight with Kant, but
they do not pursue it to the end. Berkeley recognized that the
concept of a perceiver, a thinking self for which ideas are
conscious contents, could not be simply another idea. So
Berkeley posited the notion of "spirits'' to fill in for the missing idea. To Hume, this account of a needed owner of impressions and ideas was not only unconvincing but also incompatible with Berkeley's own brilliant demolition of the
corresponding concept of a material substance as the needed
owner of sensible qualities. Paralleling Berkeley's repudiation
of material substance, Hume repudiated mental substance.
The only reality to which experience attests is the reality of
the conscious contents of experience. Thus, ". . . when I
enter most intimately into what I call myself . .. I never can
�July, 1979
catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can
observe anything but the perception. " 3 This is much the view
that Kant expresses when he limits knowledge of the self to
empirical selfconsciousness. Transcendental selfconsciousness
(or apperception), the principle of the necessary ownership of
all my experiences by a single subject, corresponds to nothing
that I experience and is, therefore, reducible to the barren
analytic formula: "All my experiences are mine." An "abiding
self" contemplating hypotheses that might account for its
fleeting conscious states is not a part of any epistemological
starting point to which we are entitled. An abiding self is not
given, and our idea of an abiding self is itself something that
needs to be accounted for.
Kant's solution to the problem posed by a starting point
that lacks a given subject of experience is more or less dictated
by the problem. The stability and unity of experience does
not come from an antecedently given enduring subject.
Therefore, the antecedent existence of enduring objects of
experience must provide the foundation of stability and unity.
Kant expresses this saying that there must be a "pennanent" in perception. The content of experience must support
the thought that the same object is encountered again and,
thus, the object must endure unperceived in the interval between perceptual encounters. Then the sameness of the object of perception can introduce the fundamental stability
which the absence of the given sameness of the subject leaves
wanting. For this, objects of perception must be independent
of our perception of them. Kant reads this independence as
the necessary existence of enduring objects in space. Space is
the presupposed region for the existence of unperceived things
which, a fortiori, cannot be found in the given temporal sequence of our perceptions. The concept of an enduring self as
an accompaniment of experiences is itself derivative and depends upon the continuity provided by episodically perceived
but continuously existing spatial objects. Kant thus solves the
problem of the external world by refusing to allow it to arise
and rules out all solipsistic philosophies and all the conceptions of mind that give rise to the theories he co11ects under
the pejorative title "rational psychology." Perceived objects in
space must exist unperceived, our acquaintance with them
must be direct and no mere question of inference or hypothesis, and they must not depend upon our perception of them
for their existence.
The core of Kant's profound contribution to metaphysics
and epistemology ·is to be found in these views about the concept of experience, the subject and the object of experience,
consciousness and self-consciousness. It is in just these areas
that much remains to be learned from Kant, for just these
views have "still not been fully absorbed into the philosophical consciousness" as Strawson says. I cannot try to restate
these views here in a way that satisfies us and conforms to
current philosophical perspectives and usage. I will address
the much more modest question of the compatibility of this
promising view of e~perience with the pervasive subjectivism
that we find in Kant's conception of the empirical world. For
notwithstanding his anti-idealist arguments for the indepen. dent existence in space of immediate objects of conscious-
ness, Kant never retreats from his contention that space is
itself subjective and that perceived objects exist "only in our
faculty of representation." Here, as in the contrast between
judgments of perception and judgments of experience, Kant
tries to substitute a distinction within subjectively constituted
nature for a distinction between subjective experiences and
objective realities. How can Kant have supposed that his
anti-idealist views could be consistent with his assertion that
the mind makes nature? How can we find these strands of
Kant's thinking compatible? If we are to regard his opposition
to idealism and the philosophies of mind that engender solipsistic problems as part of his permanent contribution, we
need a way of looking at Kant's subjectivism that mitigates its
seeming irretrievable unattractiveness.
I want to look again at the premise that makes Kant's
theory seem so extravagantly subjective. The continuously existing spatia-temporal. world of perceivable objects is our own
creation. The a priori knowledge we have of it is explicable
precisely because we have made this system of things ourselves, and that is why we are in a position to say what the
fundamen.tal principles of its structure must be. Given this
understanding, all our knowledge, and not merely synthetic a
priori knowledge, must be regarded as knowledge of a-~mere
construction, a world that is a creature of our thought and,
therefore, a world that deserves to be called imaginary. This
is why Kant's subjectivism seems to collide with his refutation
of idealism. In his refutation he insists that immediate acquaintance with independent objects is essential if we are to
have experience and not just imagination of outer things.
How can this distinction move us if Kant presents the whole
of possible experience together with all objects in space and
time as products of our own minds which exist only in us? It
appears that we are asked to distinguish between reality and
imagination in a context which is all imagination to begin
with.
It is imagination that carries the burden at crucial junctures
in Kant's own construction. Imagination is at the heart of
memory and all synthesis. Imagination, for Kant, is the capacity to think a non-given object. All the mental activities
upon which conscious recognition of objects depends involve
appeal to something not presently given. Imagination enables
us to conceive the existence of objects unperceived, and to
appreciate the continuous existence of what is experienced
intermittently. Imagination is Kant's fundamental tool for the
construction of a stable world out of transient receptions of
raw material. Thus, that stable world is an imaginary world.
I have intentionally pressed Kant's subjectivism to the
limit, reading it as the view that the world is a figment of the
imagination. I mean to show how very close Kant's view is,
even in this extreme form, to another passage of thought
about experience which can be presented so as not to seem
extreme at all but, on the contrary, so as to seem quite
common-sensical. This view does not promote a despairing
ignorabimus concerning things in themselves, nor does it
generate Humean scepticism concerning the empirical world.
21
�The College
Finally, this view is quite like the thoughts that Kant presents
and sometimes it seems to be none other than just Kant's
thought.
This alternative interpretation can be expressed within the
framework of a rough empiricism that endorses the general
idea of a perceptual foundation for knowledge while remaining noncommittal on the analysis of perception and a11 other
matters of detail, crucial though they must be in the long
run. One thing is certain for any such empiricism: The perceptual experience upon which our knowledge is thought to
depend is episodic. Our visual experiences, for example, start
and stop as we open and close our eyes. The content of visual
experience shifts gradually and abruptly depending upon our
movement, and the movement of obstructions to vision, and
upon what it is that happens to be visible. Tactual impressions require contact and are interrupted or broken by broken
contact. There are comparable discontinuities affecting the
other perceptual modes. Sleep ends experience altogether and
awakening restores it with new content. This is the character
of our experience. It is for this episodic character that Hume
said that impressions and ideas, the only things truly "present
with the mind," are perishing existences. Episodic character
is not a disappointing or regrettable fact about perceptual experience. It is not feasible at all to suppose that experience of
all the things we perceive would be better if it were more
continuous, or that our perceptual experiences would be
more helpful to us if they coincided in duration with their
objects.
In saying that we are empiricists we mean that we take this
mass of episodic experience to be the only foundation we
have for knowledge of the world. That world of which we do
get to have knowledge does not have an episodic character,
and its constituents are not perishing things as all of our experiences certainly are. On the basis of intermittent and relatively chaotic visual, auditory and tachtal experiences we get
to know a stable world of things that has permanent existence
globally and of which prominent local constituents are relatively enduring things. These enduring things are not given.
I state rough empiricism in this way in order to suggest
Kant's conception of representation. Kant says that appearances exist only in our faculty of representation and this
strikes us as a hopelessly subjective conception, giving nature
the status of an imagined world. But in one way Kant only
means that objects are never the given content of any perceptual experience, and that such content is all that ever is given.
Properly viewed this is undoubtedly correct. The given content of a perceptual experience is, for example, a view of a
bridge. The bridge itself is not given. It is this view that
perishes, should the viewer close his eyes. The bridge does
not perish. The view, not the bridge, is, as Kant says, necessarily locatable in time with respect to all other mental contents of the subject. One might say, speaking of the view, that
part of the bridge is obscured by an office building. This sort
of thing is true of the given content, but not of the enduring
object. This content and not a stable object is what is given.
Such reflections will always eliminate the possibility that the
content of an experience might be an object in nature.
22
Our thinking is complicated by the fact that we can only
describe the given content of experience in terms of objects
which are not given in the experience. This is Kant's view.
Only when quite a bit of collecting, comparing, abstracting,
in short, a lot of synthesis has taken place can we have an
idea of an object of perceptual experience such as a bridge.
Only then can we describe anything as "a view of a bridge."
All description, being irreducibly comparative, necessarily
goes beyond the immediately given and alludes to a range of
related contents. Furthermore, consciousness of perceptual
experience is itself dependent upon the same synthesis that
makes description possible. Consciousness presupposes that
experience involve recognition. So, in order that experiences
be conscious at all, they must be recognized as experiences of
this or that, and that means just that they must fit descriptions
framed in terms of objects of experience. Therefore, it seems
that we can only describe our experiences in terms of a picture of stable objects that we form on the basis of episodic and
perishing experienced contents. Intrinsically, that is, apart
from all comparison, the given is indescribable, for description is comparative. So we can describe the given only in
terms of the non-given. This dark sounding formulation
means that to describe our experience at all we have to say
things like, "] can see part of the bridge from here," although
the bridge itself is not given for it does not perish, and~ the
bridge is not. in itself partly obstructed, and so on. After we
have attained consciousness and can describe our experiences
in the language of objects, it remains the case that what is
truly given is not objects but always perishing views, or representations.
Empiricists generally concede nowadays that we can devise
no language of empirical description short of the so-called
material-object language in which descriptive terms fit, in the
first instance, relatively durable public objects. This is certainly part of what Kant means in arguing for permanence as
part of our necessary conception of objects perceived. That is
the argument that Kant depends on in opposing subjective
idealism and the Cartesian starting point in epistemology. It
rCmains to be seen whether this conception of permanence in
immediate objects of perception is compatible with the subjective tendency of Kant's own commitment to the transience
of the given in experience. So far we have seen that Kant
shares this commitment with all roughly empiricist viewpoints.
The known world of permanent existence is not what is
given. Certainly from the point of view of empirical learning
theory, it must be supposed to take some doing on the part of
any organism to get to recognize what it is in experience that
betokens objects of continuing existence. But we do succeed
here, and when we do, we have a picture of a stable empirical
world of which our experiences are transitory representations.
We speakers can describe our experiences precisely by characterizing them as experiences of that stable world. The natural
philosophical question here is, what is the status and the validity of the conception of the stable world to which we attain. Sticking to the factual level which is itself undercut by
sceptical speculation, we all tend to think that the picture we
�July, 1979
have of the stable material world is something like an automatic interpretation we make of our episodic experience quite
early in life. What I want to emphasize is that, however it is
formed, it must be formed, for it is something like a picture of
the world and not the world itself which we come to possess.
What is given, when we have matured and learned a bit, is
still a transient content. The attainment of the level of conscious description gives us two things to talk about. One is the
now-describable experiential episodes themselves and the
other is the picture of the world that we form on the basis of
those episodes. We form the picture. Doing so is coming to
understand our experience. As a picture, it exists only in our
thinking and without our thinking processes this picture of
the world would not exist.
intuition must represent objects since "the properties of things
in themselves cannot migrate from those things into my faculty of representation. "4 Thus, to say that we must represent
things is just to say that the things we get to know cannot
themselves enter our minds. This is hardly a limitation or a
reason for any discouraged subjectivism. The idea that our
knowledge is drastically limited requires the further thought
of a contrasting cognition of reality that does not involve representation. If we could go beyond mere representation, or
strike through the veil of appearances and, thus, encounter
reality itself, then our knowledge would be unfiltered by subjective mediation. It is this thought that supports subjectivist
conclusions. But this thought is very implausible when explicitly stated and examined. Surely it is only because we are
able to represent the world that we are able to get to know
anything about it at all. Representation is a necessary means
At this point 1 think it looks as though Kant's subjectivism
will inevitably follow and it will not be compatible with the
objective claims of his refutation of idealism. Kant thinks,
and it seems that we shall have to follow him, that one kind
of request for objectivity is inevitably going to be disappointed. Suppose we ask, How does our picture of a stable
world compare with reality? Is it a good representation? Or
does it fall short? When he is at his most subjective, Kant
thinks, first, that these questions cannot possibly be answered
and, second, that the fact that we cannot answer them has
.something to do with the limited character of merely human
cognitive capabilities. For have we not agreed, as empiricists,
that the accessibility of the world consists in our possession of
a picture of it in terms of which we describe and interpret the
ephemeral given? We are in no position to compare reality
to knowledge, not an obstacle. We noted above that the episodic and perspectival cht_uacter of perceptual experience
cannot be thought a regrettable feature of it. Essential properties of experiences can never be properties of objects, and
essential properties of objects can never be properties of expe-
riences. This is as it should be. Objects could not possibly be
given. They cannot migrate into our minds, as Kant says. We
have to see the world from somewhere. But an object does not
exist from somewhere. The world does not start and stop~~ but
how could we expect that our experience of it might be other
than transient? A continuous experience of everything at
once, from nowhere in pa-rticular, would not be experience at
all. Exactly what is required is transient experience (in which
objects are not given) which we come to recognize as experi-
ence of objects.
with our picture, as though both the world and our picture of
it were available for comparison. The closest we get to reality
is the picture. There is no comparing to be done. At the same
time, Kant continues in the conviction that just such a comparison would have to be made in order to justify any claim
that the picture we have in our minds is not just something
created by us, but is also a valid indication of things as they
exist apart from our experience and our capacity to create
conscious pictures in terms of which fleeting impressions are
Kant loses sight of these relations because he always thinks
in terms of an alternative mental constitution, superior to the
human, namely, the mind of God. In the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth centuries, philosophers still commonly adverted
to God's thinking, not merely as part of a theological commitment, but also as a convenient vehicle for expressing
we cannot compare the picture with the world itself, for we
views about necessity and objectivity. The greatest philosophers thought it profitable to argue about what God might
have done, and what He could not have done; and whether
He might have created the universe earlier than He did; and
only know the world insofar as we have this picture. Kant
whether He preceives the world; and what sufficient reasons
ordinarily reads this as entailing a limited subjective horizon
for human knowledge. But no such discouraging conclusion
actua11y follows from the character of our experience and our
conception of the world based on experience. Subjectivism
He has for creating as He does. Along with its other functions, the idea of the mentality of God operates in Kant's
thought to make our human intellectual undertakings seem
interpretable.
We have only our picture of the world of stable objects and
here is an intellectual illusion to which Kant and many other
philosophers are susceptible. Things must be represented if
they are to be known and representation does lead to knowledge of things and not to knowledge of itself. Kant is sometimes partially aware of this himself and that is why he never
abandons the idea that the needed distinction between subjective and objective must be formulable within the framework
of the assumption that stable objects are "thought" by us but
never given. In the Prolegomena; for example, Kant says that
comparatively inadequate. This encourages Kant to read the
necessary role of representation in knowledge as a limitation
and a falling-short of theoretical possibilities. For example,
Kant says that human intuition is sensuous, meaning that we
have to be affected and thus representations have to be
engendered in us. These representations and not the affecting
reality are given. God's intuition would not suffer these limitations. God knows reality without having to be affected. He
does not really have to look down through the clouds, nor
wait for a propitious moment for his apprehension of things.
23
�The College
He does not, then, rely on representations as we must. The
idea of this kind of mentality is just what makes our apprehension of reality seem disappointing.
Consider Kant's conception of space and time in this light.
Men have to apprehend things from somewhere and at some
time. Since a thing must be viewed from somewhere, if it is
going to be viewed at all, its being somewhere relative to a
man's viewpoint is a necessary condition for its intellectual
accessibility to him. But this is a consequence of the fuct that
men must rely on representations. If we did not have to take a
look in order to know reality, as God does not, it would not
have to be somewhere in order to be known. If we knew everything without bothering with a sequence of transient experiences, interrelatable in time, and, therefore, surveyable by
memory and understanding, then time would be all at once
for us. There would be no time. These are precarious speculations. The idea of the mind of God helped Kant to feel
supported by thoughts on the margin of intelligibility like
these. God does not have to create a picture and then face the
unanswerable question of its adequacy. He grasps things as
they are in themselves, without a perspective and without imposing subjective conditions. Further, while human intuition
is passive and receptive and only our understanding is active
and creative, God's intuition is called "creative intuition" by
Kant, suggesting the theory of Malebranche inherited by
Berkeley that God's thought of realitY is the same as his sustaining creation of it. Naturally, God does not have to acquire and collect subjective views of things, retaining old ones
for the sake of comparison and eventually for the construction
of descriptions cast in terms of abstracted empirical concepts.
But this is just what man must do. This fanciful thinking
about divine cognition prevents Kant from recognizing the
potential of his own theory, not as a quasi-factual account of
our mental faculties, but as an ex;Jloration of the very concepts of cognition and experience. If we do reinterpret his
thoughts as philosophical analyses of these concepts, then
they do not have to carry nearly the burden of unattractive
subjectivism that Kant himself ordinarily presents along with
his best insights.
Verbal expression is a form of representation and a helpful
model for the relationship of representation and reality. Consider propositional expressions as our pictures of the world.
To contemplate the world at all we have to frame propositions. To believe anything we have fo assent to propositions.
To know anything is to assent to a proposition in a context
wherein other complex conditions are satisfied. It looks as if
our knowledge will always be mediated by propositional expression, and this looms as an obstacle to some fancied unmediated objectivity. Are propositions, then, an unavoidable
distorting lens, imposed by our needs, through which we
have to approach reality? We are tempted here to complain
about a logical feature of the perspective of any knowing subject as if it were a factual obstacle to human knowledge.
Propositionality makes thought possible. We cannot put a
natural object in the place of a propositional subject. A structure of words makes it possible to say something. A structure
of objects says nothing. Therefore a structure of objects does
24
not say anything that might be true, or believed, or known.
Still we come back to Kant's question: If all we have is the
proposition, then how do we know it is true? Kant often
thinks that the fact of the matter is that we do not. Our picture of the world goes no further than the systematic interconnectedness of our thought1, for it can go no further. Then
Kant leans toward something like a coherence theory of truth.
Scientific knowledge is the coherence of appearances. But his
thought about perception and his refutation of idealism pave
the way for something better than this. As empiricists we
ought to answer the question, How do we know that propositions are true? by appeal to experience. Of course, when we
have attained consciousness and our experiences have become describable, we cannot literally follow the "plain historical method" Locke envisioned. We cannot retrace our epistemological steps back to the unsynthesizecl and indescribable
given. But we are entitled to call attention to simple situations
where "I see it" is the only right answer to give to questions
like, "How do you know that the mail has arrived?" This is a
good answer and one that Kant's understanding makes available for epistemology. For does he not say that enduring objects in space must be the immediate objects of perceptual
consciousness?
Idealism is the thesis that the objects of consciousness are
all mental things, that is, that they are all ideas. Ideas are
dependent upon thought for their existence. But Kant a-rgues
that the things of which we are conscious in perception are
not mental things but objects, independent of our thought,
that exist in space. These are the immediate and not the inferred objects of perceptual experience. Of course, this is inconsistent with the Kantian claim that there are no spatial
things apart from our mental activities. To say that objects are
"independent" has to mean that they exist in themselves. It is
the comparison of human with divine apprehension of things
that encourages Kant to make space and time systems of
purely subjective relations, and not just systems of relations,
following Leibniz. If we drop the rhetoric of the limitations of
mere human faculties, we are free to characterize the objects
of consciousness in perception as spatia-temporal objects
while conceding that such objects are never given. The given
is always a perishing content. As such, the given is not an
object of consciousness at all. Synthesis of the given, that is,
integration and learning which results in a conception of a
stable world of objects is required for all recognition, description and consciousness. When we attain consciousness we
can recognize an experience as a view of a bridge. Only thus
recognizable can experience be conscious at all. The experience retains the perishing and perspectival features of a representation. That is its subjectivity. But when a perceiver does
see a bridge, for all the subjectivity of his experience, the
object of which he is conscious is a bridge and not a representation.
To say that objects are not given is to say that objects do
not migrate into our thought, as Kant put<; it. Upon reflection, this cannot be a shortcoming of our thought. Objects
could not migrate into God's thought either. We can and do
become conscious of objects. That we do is a presupposition
�July, 1979
of consciousness in general, according to Kant. That means
that self-consciousness and consciousness of our representations as such are conceptually dependent upon our success in
attaining consciousness of enduring independent objects. As
objects of consciousness, the status of mental things, of ideas,
is derivative. This ordering of things is quite the reverse of
idealism. It is at the center of Kant's most valuable philosophical insights.
1
The Bounds of Sense, London 1966, 29.
Selby-Bigge, Editor, London 1888, 67.
3/b;d .. 252.
4 Section 9.
2
Some Classical Poems
of the T'ang and Sung Dynasties
translated by Julie Landau
Meng Hao-jan
Li Po
(689-740)
(701-762)
Spring Dawn
Spring sleep: dawn takes me by surprise
The birds sing everywhere
All night there was the sound of wind and rain
How many blossoms have fallen?
Wang Wei
(701-761)
Autumn Dusk m the Mountains
Deserted mountain, fresh from rain,
The air by evening turns autumnal
Moonlight spattered among the pines,
A clear spring over rocks,
The rustle of bamboo around the washing girls
Water-lily leaves part for a fishing boat
Spring fragrance has vanishedBut why not linger?
Julie Landau has studied Chinese at Columbia University and for a year
(1967-1968) in Hong Kong. Trained at the University of Hong Kong, David
Fung translated at the United Nations from 1946-1970.
Fighting South of The Wall
Last year war
At the Sang Kan source,
This year war
Along the Ts'ung,
Swords washed in the sea at T'iao Chih,
Horses put to graze in the snows of T'ien Shan:
Miles of war, years of war,
The armies aging.
The huns think killing cultivates the land
And reap, time and again, white bones in yellow sand.
The Ch'in built the wall against them,
The Han kept the beacons burningThey burn on ... and on,
Expansion never ends
In the fields, men fight and die,
Butchered horses scream to heaven,
Black ravens carry human entrails
And drape them over withered branches
Soldiers are smeared over the grass,
Generals act-but to what end?
An instrument of evil, that's what an army is,
Good prince, don't use it, 'til all else fails!
"War Chariot Song," "For WeiPa, Living in Retirement," "Autumn Dusk
in the Mountains," "Spring Dawn," "Song of Ch'ang Kan," "Hard Road I,"
and "The People North of 'The River" were done in collaboration with David
Fung.
25
�I
A Hard Road
I
Gold goblets of clear wine, ten thousand a measure,
jade plates, rare food, worth ten thousand more
I put aside the cup, throw down my chopsticks
Draw my sword, look desparately about,
I'd cross the Yell ow River; ice blocks it!
I'd attempt Tai Hang; snow darkens the sky!
Oh to drop a line and fish beside a stream,
Or sail, dreaming, to the sun's edge.
It's hard to go on, hard, hard,
The road forks again-now where?
Oh, for a long wind and the breaking waves
And a tall sail to carry me over the sea.
A Hard Road
III
Have you ears? Don't wash them in the Yin!
Have you a mouth? Don't eat bracken in Shou Yang!
Hide your light, obscurity's valuable
Why compete in lonely pride with moon and cloud?
Observe: from antiquity the worthy who rise high
And do not then withdraw, end badly,
Tzu Hsu was thrown into the Wu
Chu Yuan drowned himself in the Hsiang
Lu Chi, despite his talent, could not protect himself,
Li Szu regretted not drawing in the reins earlier
And never heard the Crane's cry in Hua T'ien.
Only Chang Han, famed for perception,
Felt the autumn wind and turned toward home.
Drink while you canWhat are a thousand years of fame to the dead?
Climbing the terrace to watch for your return~
Sixteen now, and you far away,
Up the Yangtze, past gorges, torrents and rocks.
The fifth month I could not stand
The sad cry of the monkeys rising to heaven,
Your footprints where you lingered,
Covered by new moss,
Moss too deep to sweep away.
Falling leaves, early autumn wind,
The eighth month, a flurry of butterflies
Two by two in the western gardenMy heart aches,
My looks fade.
When at last you come back through San Pa,
Send word ahead,
I'll meet you, however far,
Even to Ch'ang Fung Sha.
Tears for Old Chi, Master Brewer
of Hsuan Ch' eng
So, Chi Sou, you've gone down to the Yellow Springs
Still brewing your best wine, no doubt.
On the terrace of night, where there's no dawn,
To whom do you sell it?
Yellow Springs means Hades.
Tu Fu
(7I2-770)
War Chariot Song
Song of Ch' ang Kan
My hair still in pigtails
I picked flowers, played by the gate,
You, astride a bamboo pole,
Trotted round the well, juggled green plums,
Shared childhood on a lane in Ch'ang Kan,
Easy together, not suspect, untroubled.
At fourteen I became your wife
Too shy to raise my eyes in your presence,
I averted my face, looked at dim corners:
A thousand calls, not one turn of the head.
At fifteen I dared laugh and look up,
Desired to mingle our dust and our ashes.
Like the lover in the story I keep my vigil,
26
Chariots rumble
Horses neigh
The men are ready, bows and arrows at their waists
Fathers, mothers, wives and children come
Dust rises, the view to Hsiang Yang Bridge is blockedThey pull, they stamp, they block the road,
The noise of their cries rises to heaven
At the side of the road, an old man asks the soldiers why?
They blame the endless call-up:
"At fifteen sent north to man the river defence
By forty moved west to work the frontier farms."
�"Before you leave, the elder binds up your black hair
White haired, you're garrisoned still!"
At the front, blood flows like water
But doesn't quench the emperor's ambition
You must down ten cups in sequence.
Ten cups and I am still not drunk
just warmed by your long affection.
Tomorrow, high mountains rise between us
Our course, vague and uncertain.
"Don't you know? East of the mountains China has
two hundred divisions?
A thousand villages, ten thousand towns, gone to seed."
When women work hoes and plows,
Rice grows helter skelter, you can't tell east from west
The men suffer
Driven like dogs and chickens
"And, old man, we don't even dare complain
Take this winter, no rest at the front
But here the district officer wants rents and levies
Where's the money to come from?"
"One thing is certain, a son's a misfortune
Have a girl
A girl can be married to a neighbor
A son will be buried in alien grass."
"Don't you see piled to the peak of Ch'ing Hoi
Generations of white bones no man mourned?"
New ghosts protest a futile sacrifice while old ghosts cry
The dark sky weeps for them.
For WeiPa,
Living in Retirement
Life keeps us apart
I move with Lucifer, you with Orion
But tonight, just tonight,
We share this candle.
Youth, health, how long can they last?
We're grey already
And when I ask about old friends
I find that half are ghosts.
How could I know twenty years ago
That only now I' cl step again into your hallYou weren't yet married,
Now suddenly a row of sons and daughters
With happy faces honor us
And ask me where I'm from.
Ask, answer, ask and are not done
When you bid them set out food and wine.
In night rain, spring chives are cut
To eat with steaming rice and millet.
You toast our meeting face to face~ so rare
Ch'en T'ao
{9th Century)
The Journey West
Sworn to wiping out the huns at any price,
Five thousand in fine sables fell in the Mongol dust.
Alas, the bones on the Wu Tung's banks,
Are men still, in dreams, within the inner chambers.
Wang An-shih
(1021-1886)
The People
North of The River
The people of the North
Endure the bitterness of two frontiers
Families teach the young to farm and weave
Paying taxes to officials and tribute to the huns.
This year's drought left a thousand acres bare,
Still conscripts are hustled into river service
Old lean on young and struggle south,
But there, even in good years, people starve
Sorrow extends from heaven to earth, dawn to dusk.
On the roadside, ashen faces,
Born too late for the great Sung times,
They measure out the grain and a few coins, without war.
27
�Su Shih
Li Ch'ing-chao
(1037-1101)
(1084?- c. 1151)
Sheng Sheng Man
Searching, searching, again and again
Cold and still, cold and still
Yung Yu Lo
P' eng Cheng: I lodge for the night at Swallow Pavillion,
dream of P'an-p'an, and write this tz'u.
Bitter bitter, cruel cruel sorrowFever, chillsNo stay, no rest.
Two three cups of thin wine
Can not hold off the evening or delay the wind
The geese have passed
And left me sick at heart
Though once, we were old friends
The ground is full of yellow flowers piling up
Dry, brittle, wounded
Who can pick them now?
I keep my vigil by the window
Alone, how can I stand its getting dark?
And the Wu Tung, and thin rain?
Dusk, day fades, bit by bit, drop by drop
One thing after another
How can one small word 'grief' tell it all?
Geese were considered messengers.
The Wu Tung is a tree whose leaves make a distinctive melancholy sound in
autumn. Last to lose its leaves, it is a symbol of autumn, which, in turn, is a
symbol of age, as spring is a symhol of youth.
Wu Ling Ch'un
The wind has dropped leaving the earth fragrant with fallen
flowers
I know it's late, but what's the use of doing my hair?
Things go on-all but you! Everything is finished,
And all I had to say has turned to tears.
Along the Suan, I hear, it's still springIf only I could take the skiff there!
But I'm afraid-that light boat in the Suan,
How could it carry so much sorrow?
28
Bright moon like frost
Fine breeze like water
Clear view without end
Fish jump in the pond
Round lohts leaves ooze dew
Not a voice, not a soul.
The third watch sounds
A leaf shatters on the ground,
Breaks my erotic dreamIn the vast night
I can not find it again
Awake, alone, I walk in the small garden.
I have traveled to the borders of heaven
Mountains block my return
Eye and heart strain toward home until they break
Swallow Tower is empty
What has become of its lovely lady?
Now only swallows are locked in
The past is like a dream
When one wakes
Pleasure fades, regret lingers .
You who will come
To my Yellow Tower on such a night
Will sigh for me.
P'an-p'an had been a beautiful singer and dancer, favorite of the military
governor of Hsu-chou, cenhnics earlier. Hsu-chou had built Swallow Tower
for her, and she had lived there after his death, faithful to his memory.
Yellow Tower was built hy Su Shih himself in the same area.
�Hsin Ch'i-chi
(1140-1207)
Chiang Ch' eng Tzu
Man Chiang Hung
On the 20th day of the first moon, 1075, I record the night's
dream.
Traveling on the river, rhyming with Yang Chi-weng
Ten years living and dead have drawn apart,
I do nothing to remember,
But I can not forget
Your lonely grave a thousand miles away,
There is nowhere I can talk of my sorrow.
Even if we met, how would you know me,
My face full of dust,
My hair like snow.
In the dark of night, a dream: suddenly, I am home,
You by the window
Doing your hair.
I look at you and can not speak,
Your face is streaked by endless tears.
Year after year must they break my heart,
These moonlit nights,
That low pine grave?
These selections come from two outstanding periods in the three
thousand years of China's unbroken poetic tradition: T'ang (618-907)
and Sung (960-1279). From the sheer volume of poems-48,000 in
the complete T' ang anthology by over two thousand poets, and much
more in the Sung-it is clear that people who wrote poetry didn't think of
poems as monuments. It was an everyday form of expression. Often it
simply recorded an event-a meeting, a holiday, an excursion.
Most poetry was written by officials, or aspiring officials. For centuries, examinations, which gave entrance to the bureaucracy, centered on poetry. Quite naturally, therefore, the poets thought of themselves primarily in their political role, and only secondarily or not at
all as poets. Most of the greatest poets aspired to political success.
Few achieved it. None achieved it for long.
Of the great T'ang poets, Li Po went unrecognized until after he
was forty. He enjoyed favor at court for only a year or two before
court intrigues and a series of unfortunate accidents forced him into
exile in remote, disease-ridden provinces. Tu Fu failed the imperial
examinations three times and spent his life drifting from one miserable post to another. Meng Hao-ian, too, failed, gave up, and became a recluse. Of these poets, Wang Wei had the least troubled
career, but even he had periods out of favor and in exile. For almost
all poet-bureaucrats, it was a life of constant wandering. Three years
was the normal time of duty in one place.
In Sung times, Wang An-shih was the most controversial states-
I have seen the mountains and rivers
We're quite old friends
I still remember, and in dreams can travel everywhere
South of the river and north.
Lovely places one should visit with just a staffThe shoes I've worn out in a lifetime!
1 scoff at the world's work-what a waste for thirty nine years,
Always the official, the wanderer.
The lands of Wu and Ch'u
Rise to the east and south,
The great deeds
Of the rivals Ts'ao and Liu
Have been blown away by the west wind
And left no trace.
By the time the watch tower is finished, its occupant is dead,
The banners are not yet rolled up, but my head is white
I sigh over life's vagaries, now sad, now happy,
Now as in ancient times.
man. Radical even by our standards, his ideas shaped China for almost two decades until a new emperor rescinded his reforms. History
did its best to forget him until recently. Su-Shih was his main political rival. Although Su's opposition to Wang's policies led to repeated
exile, the two remained friends and exchanged poems.
Li Ch'ing-chao is virtually the only woman poet most Chinese acknowledge. Other women are known to have written, but almost
nothing has been preserved. Li has fifty-odd poems out of an oeuvre
known to have been much larger. The two poems included here were
written after the death of her husband. The T'ang poets brought several older forms to excellence never surpassed. They added two of their
own that had, not only a fixed number of words per line, but a fixed
number of lines and an exacting prosody.
Partially as a reaction to these constraints, the Sung poets, while still
using these forms well, began to experiment with a form that came out of
the singing houses: tz'u. These were lyrics "filled in" to tunes that came
to China from central Asia. In the beginning, it was a much freer style:
length was not fixed, there were long lines mixed with short, and
enjambement was frequent. Initially, it was sung. With time, the tunes
were lost and the patterns codified, and all thought of singing tz'u
forgotten. About all that remains of their not quite respectable origin is
these song titles which now identify simply a pattern. Over six hundred
are commonly used. In the preceding selection, the tz'u have their
pattern-titles simply transliterated. -J.L.
29
�For Bert Thoms
July 15, 1917
Between classes at about ten fifteen on the morning of December 12, 1978, Bert Thoms collapsed of a heart attack. He
died soon after in the hospital. His colleague and friend, the
Reverend J. Winfree Smith, conducted the funeral service in a
crowded Great Hall on the morning of December 16, a soft,
bright, almost balmy day. He is buried in St. Anne's Cemetery within sight of the College in Annapolis. I have asked
several friends, colleagues, and students to write on him.-
L.R.
Eva Brann
Some of the masters whose influence left a trace upon my character
to this very day combined a fierceness of conception with a certitude
of execution upon the basis of just appreciation of means and ends
which is the highest quality of the man of action.
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea
Bert Thoms, whom I shall miss over and over as the seasons roll round, was my friend. Our friendship flourished
largely in one element. We saw each other on land only
occasionally-just to exchange a word of agreement on some
plan or situation-and during the annual spring scraping,
when the boat's bottom was cleaned and painted in his yard.
This nautical working bee had a ritual tinge, and it was
topped off by a hearty and hilarious lunch, hospitably provided by his wife, Josephine.
But twice or thrice a year we were thrown into the closest
proximity, for a day or two or even for a fortnight. That was
when he invited me to sail as part of his crew for a Sunday
sail on the Chesapeake or for the school-end northward cruise
to Buzzards Bay, where he always brought the boat for the
summer. I think he was pleased with my pleasure in sailing
and regarded me as permanently signed on. For the rest, he
was an inveterate recruiter of crews, usually St. John's students. Now and then he even made a press gang of me, for it
is not easy to find an able-bodied-and sound mindedcomplement of four, free at the same time; and to be on
board of that boat with a passable crew was, I think, the great
recreation of Bert's life. I am already regretting the times I
backed out, unable to get away and sometimes, truth to tell,
unwilling to subject myself to the heat and the head and the
green stuff in the drinking water-for the small tortures of
each trip were transfigured by marvellous moments.
30
December 12, 1978
Bert's last and best-loved boat was called the Cygnet. There
are many fancy and funny names to be seen on sterns in
Annapolis harbor, but the Cygnet was unwhimsically named
after its class, and a stumpy little swan of a boat it was. Bert
himself was a no-nonsense sailor; he wore old slacks and a
visored cap and some ratty but warm gloves preserved from
his days as a pilot in the Second World War, when he ferried
planes across the Atlantic. He was totally without nautical
affectation, but to his crew he was the Skipper, and that,
quite untinged by facetiousness, is the image I have of him.
For he knew what he was doing, at every moment and in
every situation. Of course, pleasure boating in a sloop of little
more than twenty foot length may not seem a major
enterprise, but nasty, even dangerous, situations can arise:
you can run hard aground or be becalmed in a shippiiJgJane
or caught in a squall. Bert could work us off, get the outboard
going (we had a standing bet of a quarter on its starting by the
third pull), take in sail. And so, in the comfort of his competence, we enjoyed our scrapes.
He was infallible-almost-but when something did go
wrong it was wonderful. One night, on the dreary waters of
the Delaware Bay, I had gone below early to sleep off a
headache. The next morning my bunk partner, Janet Christhilf (later O'Flynn) woke me up with the unforgettable words:
"Have a look, we're sitting in a meadow." I made a rude reply
and raised myself to the porthole. We were sitting in a
meadow. The Cygnet, which had two flat keels for just this
contingency, had somehow-Bert never vouchsafed an
explanation-come to rest on a water meadow in the delta of
the Maurice River, only a few miles of knee-deep black muck
away from the town of Bivalve. Our consolation was apparently to be that we were not in the Cohanssey(?), a river
famed for flies, and indeed turned in Bert's telling into a kind
of £luminal Lord of Flies. It was typical of sailing with him
that a river, so obscure that on no map in Walla Walla is its
name printed, should have become a byword to me. Oddly
enough that day turned into a cosily memorable one. When
the wind failed, the mosquitoes came in black clouds, but we
closed the hatch, sipped Southern Comfort, the boat's universal elixir, read novels and gave ourselves over to a swamp
existence. Noon tide came in and went out without us. Night
tide would, Bert had said, be higher. A wind sprang up;
clouds were chasing across the moon. A fishing skiff with two
drunk anglers turned up and offered to tow us off in return for
being pointed toward home port, Bivalve. No success for
either side. Finally Bert with Donne! O'Fiynn kedged us off,
having packed the other half of the crew into the dinghy to
�July, 1979
lighten the boat, which, suddenly swimming free, flew off
into the night. All these events are told in the Cygnet's log.
But usually the mistakes were committed
by the crew, si-
lently noted and silently rectified by Bert. They rarely perturbed him, though once, during a night watch off Point
Judith, shared by Meredith Anthony and me we managed it
thoroughly. Bert had given us a course and told us to hold it;
then he and Michael Anthony had gone below and stuffed
themselves into their quarter bunks. Soon the wind stiffened,
but we, intoxicated by the blowy black night air and secure in
the roguish pretense of sticking by orders, sailed on as we
were, heeling hard and the deck awash. Presently he shouted
up, and on bending down I saw him hugging the ship's store
of liquor to his bosom and angrily accusing us of causing
"internal shipwreck." In my kitchen there still hangs~and
always will~a carefully engrossed Greek quotation from
Sophocles, which he later presented to me, advising that "he
who will not slacken sail betimes, shall sail home sitting on
the keel"-a very Bertian present, savoring at once of round-
about rebuke and affable reminiscence, not to speak of
learned wit.
1942
Said quarter bunk, a coffin-like ·container extending under
Hence he knew about the aeronautical significance of the
the cockpit seat, was my joy: To be lapped in the leeward
bunk, with the boat going fast and the water soughing against
the side, made for the most delicious naps available this side
of Lethe. There were a number of other specific delights so
acute that they overbalanced hours of mild torture~which
flight patterns of wild geese and how to catch and clean
fish~under his tutelage I used a mackerel tree to haul in my
first and last catch: five mackerel and two pollock at once. He
could judge a distance, spot a buoy in a fog, show up a cheating car mechanic, fell a tree so that it would fall between two
others. He knew materials: what glue would stick what to
Bert, however, never seemed to regard as an avoidable evil
but as a source of stoic relish. For example, he would rarely
let us land to eat or shower, partly because it was a source of
pride to sail frugally and self-sufficiently, but ultimately, I
concluded, because he liked discomfort on board better than
luxury on land. But those delights were worth it: ghosting on
a zephyr up an Eastern Shore creek on a frosty fall morning
with the sky covered by honking wedges of wild geese and
white flights of wild swans, floating through the meadows of
the inland waterway watched by a heron on the banks, sailing
into a lovely New England town harbor for a rare bowl of
clam chowder, warming up at anchor after nightfall with a
cup of cocoa-cum-Southern Comfort accompanied by lots of
clowning.
The boat was often resonant with Bert's intoning of hymns
and ballads, of which he had a cyclically boundless repertoire, including my favorites, "The Christian Cowboy" and
"Ballad of the Dismal Swamp." Bert had an often-foiled longing to sail down to the real source of this latter mournful
song, the North Carolinian Dismal Swamp, and that had
been the very destination for this coming spring cruise-but
now that trip will never be. Once, in Long Island Sound, I
discovered that he knew by heart more stanzas of the "Internationale" than I knew it even had. But then he had more
curious knowledge~which he retailed with sly unobtrusiveness on the proper occasion-than anyone else I know,
knowledge stored away in the course of his varied occupations: he had been music major, labor organizer, lumberjack,
pilot, hunter, mechanic, professor, and, of course, St. John's
tutor.
what at what temperature and under what tension. He knew
what doohickey would turn what trick and what tool was exactly right for what job~although he could always devise a
jury rig, in a pinch. He could fix anything, under the most
unlikely conditions, going to work with inexhorable, slow,
sure doggedness, pitting his patient know-how against the re-
calcitrance ofthe thing.
He sailed with seasoned correctness, like someone who
could write the manual as soon as read it. Like any good
captain, he was a tyrant, but a tacit tyrant, who would spot an
incorrectly tied knot right away but let it go until he was at
leisure to amble over and retie it with pedagogically ostentatious wordlessness. He persisted in hinting for lunch at 1300
hrs., when the landlubberly cook was willing at one o'clock. I
understood his insistence as stemming from that uncompromising sense of appropriate procedure which sometimes
suddenly becomes crucial on a boat. He had that nautical
"fierceness of conception" combined with "certitude of execu-
tion" of which joseph Conrad speaks. I wanted to learn, but I
was a little unnerved by his ways. So eventually I quietly resigned my position as anxious navigator and became a con-
tented galley slave, handing up always welcome cups of black
coffee laced with spiritual substance and unobtrusively giving
the captain the lion's share of the noodles; he needed it.
For on board he was indefatigable. The crew might goof
off, curl up in the sun with a book or retreat below out of the
cold rain. He sat in the stern, apparently impenetrable to cold
and wet. At home he had a reputation for deep and welltimed sleep~that is, when he had put everyone to work. But
31
�The College
on board he always had one eye open-incidentally, a blessing to a crew to whom his ship-shaking snoring was a legend.
He was, though not young, and lumbering rather than athletic, agile enough in an emergency, and tireless and tough.
Once, off the coast of New Jersey, we ran into a squall, one
accurately predicted by him, I should add. He sent us below,
closed the hatch tightly and battled the elements. Stupefied
by excessive carbon dioxide and the mad heaving and a heady
sense of safety-in-danger, we were startled scared just twice:
when the storm jib blew with a loud report, and again when
Bert urgently beat on the hatch door: his cigarette lighter
wanted refilling.
On board we seldom talked of teaching, but I did learn a
lot about certain sides of the college, especially about those
students who had made outsiders of themselves by their wild
and weird behavior and who had found in Bert someone to
calm and tame them. He was, as I said, a tacit though not a
taciturn man, especially where he felt deeply. l think there
were long-standing silent resentments; he thought that his
projects had been too often slighted and his opinions neglected. Perhaps I ought to have learned more of all this on
our long watches together, but he was a proud man, and I
was not sure that it was my place to ask.
This pride showed itself in an odd and characteristic mannerism. A mood would seize him for sesquipedalian utterance. For example, homeward-bound he would hand me the
binoculars with instructions to find the black nun buoy a
point off the port bow-only he would say to sight "a navigational marker of the female ecclesiastical class," an order
which strained more than the eye. I took it for a signal that
his practical know-how was not to eclipse his verbal versatility.
For he had a passionate relation to the logos, and it was
that which drew him back to the college after an enfOrced
absence. And this passion came in rare conjunction with a
capacity for action in Conrad's sense: not political activity or
technical efficiency, but a kind of masterful intimacy with
man's tackle and nature's tricks. We needed such a man in
the St. John's community, and we shall miss him very much.
Walla Walla, Washington
Janet Christhilf O'Flynn '74
Bert Thoms declared the supremacy of reason over passion.
From the first he carried this out in a most original way. At
the age of four Bert left home. For fuod he took along a box
of sawdust: he figured that since he couldn't eat much of it at
a time, it would last quite a while. The experiment ended
when his path led by the schoolyard where his sisters were
playing and he was returned to his mother.
I first met Bert during my sophomore year at St. John's
College. He had become a teacher in the years since he first
left home and he led his students into the same life of courage, originality, and respect for reason. He was hospitable,
welcoming the opportunity for discourse outside as well as
32
inside the classroom, and he was loyal. When lack of funds
threatened to make me take a year off from school, Bert invited me to live with his family, rent-free. His family had
welcomed live-in students before, at Washington-Jefferson
College, and a rich friendship with the whole family always
resulted from the arrangement. It is a privilege now to have
one p1ore paper to write for Bert.
Bert knew that the practice of reason demands faith and he
took to heart the warning in the Meno that misology is the
greatest evil into which a man can fall. So far was he from
misology that his daily work and play centered around words.
The work lay in awakening his students to the full weight of
meaning in speech and in being faithful to the conclusions
reached. The play lay in examining each English word anew
for its alliterative and rhythmic oddities, for its punning possibilities in any of several languages, and for the humorous
consequences of its careless and habitual use by lazy tongues.
In Bert's sophomore language class we used C. S. Lewis's
Studies in Words as a beginning for our discussion of the
shifts in meaning that occur through time. Bert pointed out,
for instance, that the word "discrimination" as it is used in
talk about racial or sexual bias today actually means "lack of
discrimination," or judging the individual on the basis of a
stereotype. He used this clarity of definition in seminar discussions to shock students into hearing themselves in similar
contradictions. Since grammar aids clarity of thought,- he
read the assigned language papers as thoroughly for form as
for content, and marked them accordingly. His award for
achievement, whether in Greek grammar or in geometric
propositions, was a button reading, &.peTi, €7TtO"'Ti,f.L7} ~<TTLv:
knowledge is virtue.
Bert did appreciate the deliberate ambiguities of meaning
used in poetry. One of his favorite poets was John Donne and
"Batter my heart, three-personed God" one of his favorite
poems for complexity of images. He also prized Donne for his
logic. Donne's poem, "The Flea," prompted comparison
with Marvell's poem, "To His Coy Mistress." Although
Donne attempts to seduce his mistress by belittling the action
desired, his poem is logical and, Bert suggested, his argument
should be more convincing to a reasonable woman than
Marvell's attempt at seduction which, though lyrical, is based
on a false syllogism. We were assigned one poem to
memorize for class, with the recommendation that we make
memorizing a regular habit. Bert claimed to have in his
memory thirty hours of verse which had stood him in good
stead whenever he did not have access to books.
Unfortunately for his friends, Bert's memory included verse
far worse than any of Donne's. The doggerel which he delighted in rendering, usually in song, included the "Ballad of
the Dismal Swamp," "Psalm 40" rerhymed and set to a nursery tune in which all the unaccented syllables came on the
down beat, and the spiritual which began, "Oh, I'm a cowboy, a Christian cowboy. I round up dogies for the Lord."
Some of these treasures came from his childhood in Michigan, as did the only piano piece he had mastered, the "March
of the Little Sages".
An earlier and sweeter memory was of the many names of
�July, 1979
flowers, some in Latin, that his mother taught him as she
grew them to sel1 in town. Bert's love of names and renaming
of familiar objects created a Thomsian world around him. A
newcomer was taught to say "fraudulent discomfort" for
cham-pagne, and "rational quadruped" for poodle. Even his
students were affectionately renamed. Donnel turned into
Donnelovitch, Janet into Janeticule, and Claire into Clairenon-de-la-lune.
In this Thomsian world, Bert reigned. His special throne
was at the helm of his sailboat, a Signet named Cygnet,
where his competence compensated for many errors of skill
and judgment on the part of the accompanying student crew.
He was a benevolent despot. Once, out on the open ocean,
we hit a storm at night and all but the captain went below out
of the heavy rain. We huddled in the hatch, growing drowsy
from lack of oxygen and queasy from the violent pitching,
while the indefatigable doggerel songs wafted happily from
above in the wet wind and lightning.
Bert at times fell into despondency, as do we all. One such
low period came after the death of a long-time friend and
neighbor in Onset, Massachusetts. During the ensuing
months Bert lost his appetite and became silent and withdrawn. He sought fortification, but not comfort: he read Epictetus and held fast to the statement that one must not regret
that which is not in one's power to change. This encapsulated
Bert's struggle not only against grief but also against attacks of
other passions such as desire, anger, and jealousy: he willed
that reason should win out over passion. But of these things
he said very little. One clue to his silence is in the playful
wedding gift he gave to me and Donne!. It is a handmade
cribbage board, carved with an inscription that is a translation
into Greek of c1 sentence from Eva Brann's lecture in praise of
Jane Austen: "Happiness is more deserving of speech than
unhappiness".
In speaking of Bert's life there is much more that deserves
to be said. But I am inadequate to the volume of it, and so I
dose here.
Patricia Pittis Sonnesyn '74
One day in Freshman Laboratory our professor plunged his
large hand into his pocket and retrieved a Kleenex. He proceeded to separate the "two-ply" tissues, delicately and carefully he folded one and returned it to its former place, while
with the other he blew his nose. This meticulous thriftiness
fascinated me. Although I considered myself to be thrifty, the
idea of separating Kleenex tissues had never crossed my mind!
Bert was thrifty; nothing was to be wasted with Bert, almost
everything could be reused or used for some other purpose.
Even his green work pants were creatively patched after a saw
had eaten through the pants and Bert's lower leg. Be1t ate
everything that was served to him~even the apple core.
Even as a dignified professor Bert had a great sense of
humor. In our early acquaintance in Freshman Lab I managed to persuade my lab partner to concoct a solution which
proceeded to explode the test tube and cut his finger. I feared
1969
the worst from Bert but he only laughed uproariously, probably thinking that my partner had to be more stupid than I to
allow himself to be duped in such a way.
Bert was a. surrogate father to me. He always encouraged
my questions and answered them whenever he could. I remember how when I would get annoyed because the seminar
readings were entirely too philosophical for my taste, Bert
would invite me over to help him fix the engine of his truck,
or build some new contraption for his boat. And still he managed to find some way to bring in Freshman Lab.
In the first years of our friendship we were most of the time
doing things: fixing a motor, building a dinghy, repairing or
cleaning and painting Cygnet. He had the knowledge, I had
the interest and the small hands. It made a good team. Here
was a man who had integrated his love of philosophy with the
practical world in a very tangible way. He loved to work with
his hands as well as with his mind. I was vastly impressed~
here was someone worth listening to.
33
�The College
But Bert was not only a great teacher, he was also a man of
great compassion and understanding. When I was in the hos-
of forgiveness. As one who made few mistakes himself, I
could understand how he might hold this view. He was a
pital he was the first to send a cheerful card in which he said
"it's times like these when all the poetry you have stored in
your memory comes in handy." When I found out that I had
hepatitis in my Senior Year, Bert dropped everything at a
moment's notice and drove me from Annapolis to Long Island without a second thought. When I wrote to him in great
distress from the Santa Fe campus, he responded im-
persistent, stubborn man. He preferred to repair the situation
mediately. His friendships were important to him, this was
obvious, and his loyalty was unmatched.
As far as Bert's own life was concerned, I do not remember
a time when he sought sympathy from others. He patiently
endured his own personal trials in silence. Others could only
conjecture the amount of pain and sorrow he might be suffering. In his last year I experienced him as more silent than
usual; he was a solitary and lonely man yearning for a sparring partner-someone with a mind equal to his own. Yet, in
rather than admit a mistake and leave it at that.
One summer Bert, Josephine, and I took a weekend sail
around Martha's Vineyard. One day we decided to fish instead of sail because the weather was unfavorable. By dusk we
had barely caught enough for dinner, nevertheless, we rowed
back to Cygnet, and Bert proceeded to clean the five porgies.
It was raining, cold, and the sea was thrashing. While rinsing
the porgies Bert managed to lose two of them. You could not
imagine the face of a more dejected man than Bert's at this
moment-we had worked all day in the cold and Bert had
managed to lose two-fifths of our meager prize. He practically
threw himself headlong over the side in .an effort to retrieve
them. Every nerve and every muscle was concentrated on the
immediate task at hand. Bert's attention could hardly have
been distracted by anything short of a greater castastrophe.
the eight years that I knew Bert, I cannot recall him ever
After much persistence, he managed to retrieve one of the
having complained about anything. Nor was he ever sick in
those years. At least, if he was, no one ever knew about it. He
was a man of great strength and few tears.
two, but we mournfully followed with our eyes the other fifth
of our meal as it floated downward and away and was finally
eaten by others less deserving.
Bert's hands fascinated me; they were powerful hands. I did
not know him when he played the piano with those hands,
Bert did not dwell on the negative. He was a man of few
words-we often sat at meals in which long periods of silence
were not uncommon.
Bert rarely got angry, but when he did, watch out! His fuce
would take on a darker complexion; one could almost hear,
and feel, the rumblings of a volcano ready to erupt inside
him; but he rarely let it. out, instead he would become stone
cold and deathly silent. He rarely let you know explicitly why
you made him angry; that was for you to figure out for your-
self.
Bert had a slow, steady pace when he worked. I do not
remember him ever getting flustered or angry if what he was
doing was not going right. He was careful, cautious, and very
precise in his work. I cannot remember him ever swearing
when a tool slipped and he scraped his knuckles or cut himself on a sharp edge. His speech likewise was slow and care-
fully worded. He walked at a studied, controlled pace. I do
but it would be hard to imagine, for they were not a musi-
cian's hands with long gangling fingers and a wide ieil"ch.
They were not the usual hands of a scholar either. Bert was
unusual-after all, who still wore a crew cut in the 70's or
narrow bow ties when wide ones were in? His hands were the
hands of an engineer, a mechanic. He built from nothing, he
repaired, he remodeled with those hands. He was an artisan
as well as a builder of minds. Often in the evenings we would
make popcorn, and Bert would grasp half the bowl with one
hand. On the Cygnet we often had hot soup and saltines; Bert
would take about five and with one hand he would pulverize
them like a compressor then drop them into his bowl of soup.
When he lighted a match he enjoyed entertaining his students by waiting until the last moment before he extinguished
the flame.
not remember ever having seen him hurrying somewhere.
One of Bert's hobbies was to outsmart the auto manufac-
Most everything that he did was carefully and thoroughly
done.
talents until they were needed. His next door neighbor in
Onset once boasted that he was an excellent cribbage player
and pestered Bert to play with him. Bert put it off many times
until finally he could put it off no longer and beat the man so
badly that he never asked Bert to play with him again.
In times of crisis (particularly sailing), Bert would become
turers and auto parts dealers. Whenever he did he would
chuckle and be happy with himself for the rest of the clay. On
one occasion I had a fuel injector in my VW which did not
seem to be working properly. The dealer told us it would be
$3 5. 00 for a new part. When we took the old one out of the
car we found that it was just the tubing (which had been
crimped) which was defective. When the tubing which cost
all of ten cents had been replaced, the injector was as good as
new. Bert chuckled whenever he recalled that little maneu-
increasingly more calm. In a controlled, quiet tone he would
ver.
Bert was a modest man; one usually did not know of his
give orders and his "deck apes" would carry them out. He
It was on his boat that Bert was most content, I think. With
thrived in the challenge of the moment. Fear was not known
when one was with Bert. He was in charge; we all knew we
were in good hands, even when the raging seas pounded our
good company, lively conversation, "Southern Comfort,"
lemon drops, pork & beans or corned beef in a can, saltines,
small craft.
Bert did not believe in forgiveness. He thought forgiveness
was ultimately harmful to both the forgiver and the recipient
34
and a light breeze to move Cygnet along, he was a happy
man. On the night watches, when he thought his crew was
sound asleep, one occasionally heard old Christian hymns
floating from the stern.
�July, 1979
Leo Raditsa
Bert Thoms was careful-a care which showed itself also
in his exactness of dress. He was bold, shy, in some matters
almost the creature of his conviction, courteous, not anxious
to please. There was something disconcerting in his grace,
something fierce in his softness that kept me awake and my
eyes open in his presence. He impressed me as a man who
knew something of courage-who knew the wonder of words
but also their limitations, the frontiers beyond which they
have little consequence. That is, he knew the distinction between action and words: he knew when you had to do something instead of talking and wben you could talk freelywhich always meant to him, more than anything else, careful
listening with eyes bright in attention and recognition.
Because he had known courage, he also knew beauty, although he hardly ever talked about it (to me): the knowledge
of beauty was evident in his eyes and in his smile which illuminated his whole face in intelligent recognition. This love
of beauty made it possible for him to help some students yield
to the best in themselves. What first brought me to his friendship was wonder at a Senior Essay he had supervised: every
word, every observation in it moved of its own sweet will. At
my admiration he remarked, a spark in his eyes and modesty
passing through his face for a moment like a shadow, that he
too thought the paper "pretty good." He knew something of
the art of midwifery and the toughness of love it requires.
His presence made you recall independence of mind-and
with it the surprises and disappointments of freedom.
He made you aware you were standing on your own two
feet on the turning earth when you talked to him. He knew
about danger also-that was evident in the respect he gave to
people and things. That respect meant also he would not suffer casual blunders in simple matters one could be expected
to know something about, like the position and angle of the
sun at various times in the year. But when I asked him real
questions, for instance, on the meaning of a passage in
Ptolemy, the care he took in his explanations and drawings
told something of the love with which he had studied that
author.
He did not devour books but questioned them. He did not
substitute them for life. I always felt there was a world
elsewhere ·for him-in that sense he was worldly. He saw
what was going on before his eyes. He knew other people
lived; his courtesy and grace-and his ferocity-came of that
knowledge.
He spoke little but he did not have to speak to make you
feel his presence. In fact the silence, the pauses, in conversation with him taught me often more than the words. They
taught me about pace and thereby reminded me life moves of
its own. They showed me my impatience. They encouraged
me to reflect and to Jisten to myself. There was something
deliberately slow about his pace-but it also had its own lilt
which came unmistakably of nature. This capacity to teach
with few words sometimes made his presence insistent, even
occasiona1ly insistently oppressive. His greeting was almost
always joyous and deep as if he were welcoming you to his
1952
own house.
He had an appetite for thought, knew its strength and its
capacity to strengthen. With gaiety in his eyes and energy in
his voice he told me a few weeks before his death that the
struggle of reading Michael Oakeshott's On Human Conduct,
which he was reviewing for this journal, was well worth it.
Earlier he had rejected with some impatience my suggestion
that he review a first-rate study of Adam Smith. He did not
like secondary sources: they did not have enough fight in
them and yielded (as a result) little sustenance.
He remembered vividly. When he talked of his former
teachers in graduate school critically, almost vehemently, it
brought me up sharp: it was as if he had just walked out of
their classrooms. I could not find the words to talk to him of
the War when he was a Navy pilot: it is still too big and
intimate an event for easy words. But his remarks about the
Depression, .wbich had left its indelible mark on him, taught
me unforgettable things about those years-about the teachings of rough necessity. He did not remember; he recalled:
the past lived in him strongly enough to be palpable. I suspect
he wondered whether people who had not suffered through
disaster could summon the courage to avoid it in the
future-but he never said a word of it.
Of his death, this much can be said in thanks, it was swift
and painless.
Cum semel occideris et de te splendida Minos
fecerit arbitria,
non, Torquate, genus, non te facundia, non te
restituet pietas;
infernis neque enim tenebris Diana pudicum
liberal Hippo]ytum,
nee Lethaea valet Theseus abrumpere caro
vincula Perithoo.
Horace, Odes 4, 7
35
�Don Giovanni,
or
the Triviality of Seduction
Wye Jamison Allanbrook
One striking feature of El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado
di piedra, the first Don-juan play, 1 and of many versions
thereafter, is its beginning in medias res, with cries of rape
and pursuit in the darkness. If in the earliest versions of the
first scene some of the names and faces differ from those
Mozart's Don Giovanni has made us familiar with, nevertheless all the openings share the same silhouette, and for sound
dramatic reasons. The story itself has the thinnest of plotlines:
Don Juan is a libertine, so Heaven punishes him. For a successful presentation of the plot on stage two scenes alone are
indispensable: one to make a compelling display of the depth
and depravity of Don Juan's crimes, and another to bring the
final vengeance of Heaven down on his head. In between
these pivotal scenes the author was meant to improvise, inventing as large and varied a bouquet of seductions as might
please him. Tradition, however, fixed the outer scenes firmly
in place in order to assure a modicum of dramatic power and
coherence in a work which could be easily weakened by diffuse and errant improvisation in its episodes. Final vengeance
took the shape of the "Stone Guest," whose visitation became
the hallmark of the legend. The opening and indictment
scene, with Giovanni bursting from a darkened house pursued by an outraged noblewoman, provided evidence of at
least one sin commensurate with the high degree of celestial
attention afforded by the Statue's visit and gave the play a
dark and galvanizing opening.
By the eighteenth century the traditional beginning had
been supplied with a brief upbeat-a monologue by Don
Giovanni's comic servant as he plays sentry for his master
outside the house of Donna Anna. It was left for Mozart to
bind the two traditions-of low comedy and high tragedy,
This essay is taken from a longer essay on Don Giovanni which is part of a
book entitled Two Mozart Operas: A Grammar of Musical Gesture.
I. The Jester of Seville and the Stone Guest, written by the Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina in the early seventeenth century.
2. "A desperate fury" (I, i, 102-103). (The measure numbers given throughout this essay are from the Eulcnberg miniature orchestra score.)
3. "Constantly trying to conceal his identity" (measures 79-80).
4. "Chi son'io tu non saprai" (measures 81-83).
36
opera buffa and opera seria-into perhaps the most stunning
opening scene in all operatic literature. Leporello introduces
the subject of seduction in an aria which is a vulgarly hearty
smack of appreciation for the cavaliere's way of life, delivered
with rolling eyes and the occasional leer. The high passion of
the chase is grafted directly onto his final cadence. Donna
Anna enters on the wings of opera-seria indignation, moving
to the rhythms of a quick and passionate march:
'"'
14
.. ...
14" spe·
~
"'
.. sc. ,..,.,
,..•~o.c-
..,._ J..i1 d8o h" 1<- sei ~1- 11"
....
·I
:
'-
v
She characterizes herself as a "furia disperata," 2 and has the
bearing of a classical tragic heroine. Nobility is as full-blown
and majestic in this opera as buffa is salacious.
We are used to this combination of modes, and rarely let it
raise the questions it ought to about the tone of an opera
which today is largely presumed, probably due to the accounts of its nineteenth-century admirers, to be about the
seducer as superman. But at the least the supple farce of buffa
would seem bound to undermine the monolithic intensity of
the grand style, suggesting a rather ironic perspective on the
postures of passion. Furthermore, the protagonist's music is
not of either mode, neither comic-the style of a sardonic
rake-nor heroic. At his first entrance he wants only to identify himself as No-Man. The stage direction describes him as
"cercando sempre di celarsi," 3 and his response to Donna
Anna's challenge is oddly oblique: not "you will never detain
me," but "you will never find out who I am. " 4 He also conceals himself in his music, adopting for his first utterances
Donna Anna's vocal line and never in the remainder of the
trio (Leporello supports the duo throughout with patter imprecations about approaching trouble) originating any of its
rhythmic or melodic material. It is hardly surprising that a
�July, 1979
pursued seducer should try to conceal his identity from his
intended victim. Yet although Tirso's Don Juan, pursued by
Isabella and several Spanish nobles, also at first calls himself
No-Name, he finally cannot resist revealing himself, crying
out "Fool! I'm a gentleman!" (nor could Odysseus leave the
Cyclops without informing him that No-Man was Odysseus,
son of Laertes 5 ). Giovanni is strangely free from this besetting
vanity. Chameleon-like, he doesn't even betray himself in
speech, borrowing Anna's music, and Leporello's and Anna's
words. 6 The most striking thing about him is that he sees
nothing demeaning in escaping, pursued and nameless, into
the darkness; he feels no need to regain his public dignity. In
fact if the music of the movement were not so elevated, Don
Giovanni's first appearance on stage would amount to a simple sight gag. Certain musical images in Leporel1o's ariahorn calls, and triplets for galloping horses-made the hunt a
live metaphor for seduction. Now suddenly the gentleman
hunter sprints out, determinedly stalked by his erstwhile
prey~" exit, pursued by a bear."
In other eighteenth-century versions of Don Giovanni the
chase scene might well have been played for laughs. Don
Juan Tenorio had fallen into disrepute in the eighteenth century. His story belonged primarily to the popular theater,
where it had degenerated into the spectacle of a comic gentleman scrambling out of windows, inventing adroit lies to
cover misdemeanors, and taking the occasional pratfall. Of
the two eighteenth-century versions beside Mozart's of any
reputation, Goldoni's Don Giovanni Tenorio is merely, on
his own account, an undercover attack on a lover who had
spurned him, while in Giuseppe Gazzaniga' s popular opera II
convitato di pietra the tale is eyed from a certain remove,
placed, as it were, in quotation marks. It is presented as the
second act of a two-act opera, the first half of which shows
the members of an Italian opera company travelling in Germany debating what work to produce, and deciding on Don
Giovanni despite the fact that it is a vulgar farce. In his
choice of libretto da Ponte was perhaps less to be praised for
prescience than he was to be censured for panderiflg to low
tastes. For the eighteenth century the subject of hellfire and
damnation had lost both its dignity and its shock value. 7 And
to the refined libertines of the Enlightenment seduction as
grand guignol must have seemed merely adolescent. To be
5. Ody'"Y IX. 500-505.
6. "Questa furia disperata/Mi vuol far preeipitar" ("This desperate fury wants
to make trouble for me") combine.~ Anna's epithet for herself with Leporello's
predicate-"Sta a veder ehe il malandrino/Mi fara preeipitar" ("It's clear that
this rogue will make trouble for me").
7. In Tom Jones, Fielding remarks on the status of hell as a literary subieet
matter that "Had this history been writ in the days of superstition, I should
have had too much compassion for the reader to have left him so long in
suspense, whether Beelzebub or Satan was about to appear in person, with all
his hellish retinue; but as these doctrines are at present very unfortunate, and
have but few, if any believers, I have not been much aware of conveying any
such terrors. To say truth, the whole furniture of the infernal regions hath
long been appropriated by the managers of playhouses, who seem lately to
have laid them by as rubbish, capable only of affecting the upper gallery-a
place in which few of our readers ever sit" (Henry Fielding, The History of
Tom Jones, A Foundling, Book XII, Chapter XII).
caught out in attempted seduction was ridiculous and unmanly, behavior beneath a gentleman's dignity; the preferred
sport was drawing-room intrigue with the tacit consent of the
seduced. Most eighteenth-century works which are notoriously about seducers turn out under closer scrutiny to be
about something quite different. The burden of Richardson's
Clarissa Harlowe is the unflagging virtue of the heroine, and
the role of Lovelace her seducer is to make it manifest. Tom
Jones is a doughty adventurer whose amorous interludes happen to him because of his winsome beauty and sheer niceness. Even the arch-rogue Rousseau- of the Confessions is passive in his escapades; he makes a point of describing his frequent amours as the result of his weakness, and not a matter
of premeditated pursuit.
In fact, although there is much talk about the "Don-Juan
type," it is difficult to name any other representative of ihe
class except for Don Juan in his various manifestations; when
dealing with such a character, writers seem to have been
drawn exclusively to the Don as sui generis, the full and sufficient expression of a creature which, although perhaps frequently enough encountered in ordinary life, did not cut a
very attractive figure as the center of a play or a novel. For
the straightforward seducer is a difficult literary hero in any
era; depending on the sophistication of the audience his exploits will be either too horrible or too banal to be witnessed
with approval. The reason for the extraordinary popularity of
the Don-Juan figure previous to the eighteenth century may
have been that he was inextricably paired with as galvanizing
a figure invented for his despatch-the famous Stone Guest.
When sin was punished by damnation, the audience need
not be uneasy about enjoying either.
But with hellfire emasculated and seduction reduced to a
vulgar and demeaning pursuit, the eighteenth century could
have little interest in a morality play. Where the theme of sin
and just damnation was retained, it was. usually so thickly
veiled as to be unrecognizable: in Choderlos de Laclos' Les
liaisons dangereuses 8 the seductions are cerebral campaigns of
the utmost refinement, and the seducers are punished by
natural, not supernatural, causes. 9 In the face of these fashions it is surprising that da Ponte retained the traditional armature of the Don-Juan story, even discarding the disclaimer
provided by Gazzaniga's ironic introduction, and that Mozart
played the chase scene seriously. Of course the elevated gesture is Donna Anna's, and Giovanni remains almost a cipher
in the scene. But the potential joke of the hunted turning
tables on the hunter must have been intended to comprise a
more significant image. Starting from Mozart's vignette of the
hero locked in ungraceful flight from a bristling fury, we must
somehow manage to assimilate faintly ridiculous behavior
into the account of a man whom, variously damned or worshipped for the past two centuries, Kierkegaard termed the
8. Published in 1782, iust five years before Don Giovanni was produced in
Prague.
9. A duel, for the Vicomte de Valmont, and for the Marquise de Mcrtcuil a
disfiguring disease.
37
�The College
"expression of the daemonic." 10 The extraordinary reputation
of Giovanni the superman must be squared with the thin
melodrama of his story, the insignificance of his introduction,
and the banality of his pursuits.
The conclusion of the first scene reveals more of the Don.
Donna Anna's father, the Commenclatore, enters and challenges Don Giovanni to a duel. Giovanni refuses, having no
desire to cross swords with an old man, but the Commendatore persists, and Giovanni finally accedes in exasperated decision ("Misero! Attendi,/Se vuoi morir" 11 ). He battles with
and kills the Commendatore. Then with Leporello gaping
from a nearby hiding-place he stands over the old man as he
dies.
Musically the five through-composed sections of the overture and first scene are arranged in a symmetrical hierarchy of
gesture. From the supernatural heights of the grim 0-minor
fantasy introduction the affect declined to the bright clarity of
the D-major galant style, touching bottom with Leporello's
ribald buffa grousing. The high galant with Anna's stirring
exalted march began the reascent and, at the entrance of the
Commendatore, there returns the somber pathos of the fantasy style:
'
/
Jll,hCI
.(:1-.f.f. ....
vt .. ,V'uC~~
c..-..,, ....
~
.;.
. . . . . ..
.(.
1'
•
f.
.
'
.
.
'
g, d, f: tragic fantasy
~ant, courtly ma~ ~~: highgalant, exalted march
F: buffa foot march
In the fantasy section time is taken in very special ways. The
fantasy gesture is suited to the depiction of high tragedy because, unlike the galant and buffa styles, it is free from the
normal gestural and temporal restraints of the dance and of
the period. Here the fantasy communicates both the immediacy and the enormity of the event, first by a pantomimic
choreography of the actual challenge and battle-a literal
representation of time's passing-and then by a surreal distention of time to mark the Commendatore's death throes. Time
is taken first below and then above the threshold of periodic
10. Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, "The Immediate Stages of the Erotic."
His full appellation for Don Giovanni is "the expression of the daemonic as
determined by the sensuous."
II. "Poor wretch! Look out, if you want to die" (I, i, I 55-56).
I2. "Ah, the poor devil falls alr~ady" (sciagurato is related to sciagura, "bad
luck").
13. The alia-breve sign (¢) is an appropriate choice for the death music with
its motet-like quality, since the eighteenth century thought of it as originally
an ecclesiastical meter with its roots in the sacred style of the Renaissance.
I4. Giovanni's words are a dispassionate report of the Commendatore's death
throes: "Cia dal seno palpitanteNeggo !'anima partir" ("Already I see his soul
departing from his throbbing breast"). The Commendatore's words are almost
the same.
38
.
'
Figure I
d: fantasy, ombra
dance structure, the normal time element of the opera. The
fantasy and its temporal distortions cause a sense of the portentousness of these events to pervade the scene, fulfilling the
less specific portent of the overture; its tone is never again
matched in the opera until the Stone Guest appears in the
next-to-final scene.
Giovanni's behavior throughout the challenge and battle is
marked by an insouciant and natural nobility; it is honorable
and properly formal. The sequence of challenge and refusal,
second challenges, and final assent, is portrayed musically by
a series of formal antecedent-consequent phrases (measures
139-46), not set in a continuum of ordinary periodic rhetoric,
but meant to be directly mimetic of the ritual formality of the
meeting. Giovanni's acceptance follows a decisive measure of
silence and is couched in a squared-off phrase of eight measures which puts the brakes on the semi-regular phrase rhythm
set up at the outset; it has the stern and ceremonial flourish
appropriate to the occasion of a formal calling-out:
For Giovanni to refuse the Commendatore's challenge would
be an insult, a violation of the code of honor. That he is
acting from the sense of a nobleman's necessity and not from
viciousness is made clear by the detachment of his death knell
for the Commendatore after the fatal blow is struck. His
words, "Ah, gia cade il sciagurato," 12 are coolly free from
either triumph or regret.
A careful choreography for a sword fight follows until, at
the moment of the death blow, time and pantomime are arrested by a fermata. The new time signature, alia breve (2/2),
and the instruction Andante slow the tempo by half, 13 making the previous d equal .I. The strings mark time with
gravely ticking triplets over a dominant pedal; they measure
out the precious seconds of life remaining to the Commendatore. The very deliberateness of their ticking puts the scene
out of time. Time passes normally only when attention is not
called to it and the shapes of events in time themselves are
left to measure its passing for us. The monotony of the measured triplets is temporarily open-ended, fixing on the bare
phenomenon of time's passing to make the present moment
seem capable of enduring forever. Over the ticking of the triplets the low murmurs of Don Giovanni and Leporello seem
automatic, elicited from them involuntarily. They are not
singing to us or to another character, but are transfixed and
private in awe of the moment at which "the vital spirit leaves
the throbbing breast." 14 Giovanni's first music is again not of
his own invention; it uses Anna's "come furia disperata" of
�July, 1979
the chase music cast in F-minor and slowed to twice its original tempo:
Hearing the familiar figure in sl~w motion and in the minor
heightens the dream-like effect of the scene. Giovanni's voice
emerges from the sepulchral mix of bass tones occasionally to
sculpt a phrase, either by a sharp dissonance or by a reach for
a high note. His torpor underlines the preternatural quality of
the moment: "real" time has been suspended so that the audience may be made to recognize the grave import of the
Commendatore's death.
A chromatic line in the oboes descending from the dominant marks the flight of the soul from the body and returns us
to familiar measured time. By supplying the implied resolution of the chromatic line which ordered the swordplay and
by turning directly mimetic again (although now of a "supernatural" event-the hushed gravity of the death scene made
such a fancy possible) this second chromatic descent puts
time back on the track, heightening the fantasy's quality of
parenthesis, of a moment frozen in time:
behavior of an arrant blackguard. He wears no mask in either
episode; he is not "playing a role."
It is precisely this perplexing contradiction in his nature
which brings many delineators of the character of Giovanni
to elevate him. George Bernard Shaw's counter to Ruskin's
outraged attack on the libretto of the opera 16 cheerfully embraces the prodigy of the Don:
As to Don Giovanni, otherwise The Dissolute
One punished, the only immoral feature of it is its
supernatural retributive morality. Gentlemen who
break through the ordinary categories of good and
evil, and come out at the other side singing
Finch'han dal vino and Ld ci darem Ia mana, do
not, as a matter of fact, get caJJed on by statues, and
taken straight down through the floor to eternal torments; and to pretend that they do is to shirk the
social problem they present. Nor is it yet by any
means an established fact that the world owes more
to its Don Ottavios than to its Don Juans. 17
Attacking Ruskin for prudishness, Shaw displayed his habitual
reverse prudishness as far as the question of the existence of
the Divinity is concerned. A visit from a stone deus ex
machina (or machina dei) may be a bad way to solve the "social problem" posed by Don Giovanni, but Shaw clearly did
not in truth consider the Don to be one. In the Don-Juanin-Hell sequence of Man and Superman 18 he ultimately installed the Don in heaven, there to ponder through his high
intellect a mysterious quantum called "Life: the force that
ever strives to attain greater power of contemplating itself'; his
task in heaven was to be "the work of helping Life in its struggle upward." For Shaw Giovanni's intent pursuit of earthly
pleasure was n)erely a passing phase in the evolution of a
superhuman intelligence.
Kierkegaard's word "daemonic" imputes so111ewhat the
same kind of surpassing worth to Don Giovanni's nature, and
the word has since become the adjective most commonly associated with encomia of the Don. It< orthography is intended
to recall its derivation from the Creek llat!Lwv-divinity,
genius, or tutelary deity-and to extend its implications be-
15. "Leporello, where are you?" "I'm here, more's the pity . . . . Who's
dead? you or the old man?" "What a sh1pid question! the old man" (I, ii,
But returned to ordinary time Giovanni is impatient of last
rites, and forestalls the anticipated tonic by hissing out for
Leporello. The drop from high fantasy to the lowest buffa
dialogue in recitative secco ("Leporello, ove sei?"/"Son qui,
per disgrazia ... ./Chi e morto? voi o il vecchio?"/"Che
domanda da bestial il vecchio." 15 ) is immediate and stunning. It only underlines Giovanni's polymorphic nature: a
gentleman when answering the Commendatore's challenge,
at his opponent's death he slips back down into the seamy
194-98).
16. "And yonder musician, who used the greatest power which (in the art he
knew) the Father of Spirits ever yet breathed into the clay of this world; who
used it, I say, to follow and fit with perfect sound the words of the
Zauberfl6te and of Don Giovanni~foolishest and most monstrous of conceivable human words and subject of thought-for the future amusement of
his race! No such spectacle of unconscious (and in that unconsciousness all
the more fearful) moral degradation of the highest faculty to the lowest purpose can be found in history" (quoted in G. B. Shaw, Shaw on Shaw, ed.
Eric Bentley [New York 1955], pp. 50-51).
17. Ib;d., pp. 51-52.
18. Man and Superman, Act III.
39
�The College
yond the limits of the field of Christian demonology. 19 For
Kierkegaard "daemonic" signifies the supernatural not as
above the natural, but as quintessentially natural. To him the
Don is a life force, a power of nature-in his own words,
"primitively controlled life, powerfully and irresistibly
daemonic." Giovanni's cruelties and vulgarities are to be
excused-or veritably embraced-because "his passion sets
the passion of all the others in motion ... the existence of all
the others is, compared with his, only a derived existence."
The daemonic man's sins are sins only in the eves of the
petite bourgeoisie, whose restricted vision is mean and crippling. The daemonic man is above the morality of the vulgar,
and properly the only moral being: as Shaw has the Devil
observe after Don Juan departs for heaven, "To the Superman, men and women are a mere species ... outside the
moral world."
The music of Mozart's opera will not, however, suffer a
similar apotheosis of the character of the Don. Let us for the
moment characterize as "natural" the mode of behavior appropriate to the galant and buffa worlds which formed the
full and resonant cosmos of Le nozze di Figaro and which
reappear in Don Giovanni more narrowly circumscribed.
Then Giovanni is a man whose behavior is both super- and
sub-natural. The opera's melange of musical styles, and more
particularly the brilliant mobile inverted pyramid of social
gestures which constitute its overture and first scene (see Figure I), carry the theme of the opera with them. The hero is a
buffoon; the buffoon is a hero. By being both he is fully
neither. Were he only an obsessive seducer he would be of no
interest to us, but he can behave like a Don as easily as not.
He redeems himself from mere vulgarity in the battle with the
Commendatore, acting with clean and spirited disinterest: secure in the propiety of having granted Anna's father an opportunity to avenge the insult to his daughter, "L'ha voluto: suo
danno, " 20 he says indifferently to Leporello afterward, his
elevated disinterest degenerating into a careless flippancy. He
is a galvanizing and disturbing figure-daemonic, if you
must-because his sphere of action encompasses the highest
and the lowest possibilities of human behavior. Rarely do we
encounter a man at once of such silliness aDd such intensity,
such spirit and such utter lack of humanity.
Nor can it be said-although it might save the dark
hero-that Giovanni runs the moral gamut in a conscious or
wilful manner. There are some striking similarities of attitude
between Don Giovanni and the notorious seducer of Les
liaisons dangereuses, but one crucial difference separates him
from the Vicomte de Valmont: Valmont is all selfconsciousness and calculation, 21 while Giovanni's conduct
cannot be explained by recourse to any principle or deliberate
intent; he is not purposefully anarchic, or involved in a willed
rebellion against ordinary moral standards. Early in Act II, in
response to Leporello's importunities, Giovanni makes an insouciant defense of his way of life:
40
Gio: Lasciar le donne! Pazzo!
Lasciar le donne? Sai ch' clle per me
Son necessarie pill del pan che mangio,
Piu dell' aria che spiro!
Lep:
E avete core
D'ingannarle poi tutte?
Gio:
E tutto amore:
Chi a una sola fedele
Verso l'altre crudele.
Io, che in me sento
Si esteso sentimento,
Yo' bene a tutte quante.
Lc donne, poi che calcolar non sanno,
II mio buon natural chiamano inganno. 22
e
He delivers his sophistical argument with an easy indifference
to its truth or falsehood, taking the lazy pleasure in casuistry a
child might display. And Leporello, easily giving up the protest, answers him in the same spirit: "Non ho veduto mail
Naturale pill vasto e pill benigno. " 23 But Giovanni's first lines
state the truth of his case: women are to him like food 24 and
the air he breathes; he pursues them at the command of a
stimulus-response mechanism as natural to him, and as
automatic, as the instinct to maintain one's life by taking
nourishment. Accounts don't interest Giovanni, and he is in
fact incapable of giving one. Obsessive natures don't have in-
19·. Goethe, to whom the word "daemonic" was of great importance, defined
it as "that which cannot be explained by Reason or Understanding," and
which "manifests it~elf in the most varied way throughout all nature." He
denied that it was an attribute of Mephistopheles (on the ground of his being
too "negative" a creature), and when asked whether it entered into the "idea
of the Divine," he responded, "My good friend, what do we know of the idea
of the Divine? and what can our narrow ideas tell of the Highest Being?"
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckerman, March 2-8,
1831).
20. "He wanted it-it's his loss" (I, ii, 201).
21. His most effective enemy, Madame de Volanges, says of the Vicomte:
"He has never, since his youngest days, taken a step or said a word without
having a project, and he has never had a project which wasn't dishonest and
criminal. ... His conduct is the result of his principles. He knows how to
calculate all the evils a man can allow himself without being compromised;
and so as to be cruel and wicked without danger, he has chosen women as
his victims" (Choderlos de Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses, Lettre IX).
22. Gio: "Let the women alone! Madman! Let the women alone? You know
they are more necessary to me than the bread I eat, than the air I breathe!"
Lep: "And yet you have the heart to deceive them all?''
Gio: "It's all a matter of love. Whoever is faithful to only one woman is
cruel to all the others. Since I feel in myself such a generous sentiment, I
love them all. Then the women, because they don't know how to reckon my
good nature, call it deceit" (II, i, 82-95).
23. "I have never seen a more broad or more kindly nature" (II, i, 95-97).
The two go on then to plot the seduction of Donna l'::lvira's maid.
24. Frequently the Don describes the attractions of his new favorite with the
imagery of food. Zerlina has a "viso inzuccherato" (a "sugared complexion")
and fingers "like curds" (I, ix, l06, 115-116). Giovanni's canzonetta describes a beloved with "la bocca dolce pitl che il miele" ("a mouth sweeter
than honey") who carries "zucchero ... in mezzo al core" ("sugar ... deep
in her heart"-II, 3, 25-28, 29-32).
�July, 1979
sights; they can hardly be said to have sight, insofar as that
sense is a human faculty. The objects of his obsession swim
into his ken conducted by one or another of his senses-he
picks up a scent, 25 he pricks up his ears at the sound of a
female voice-but he lacks the impulse to combine these impressions into the articulated whole which brings men to the
threshold of a moral world. He is merely inexplicable-a
monstrum, a prodigy, spontaneously at the service of an obsession. Questions of morality can have no relevance to his
actions.
Although one function of Leporello in the opera is to project, as a pale double of Don Giovanni, the trivial vulgarity of
incessant womanizing, he also serves to provide a realistic
moral standard for the measure of base behavior. He helps us
to remember that most ordinary men cleave to one woman,
with occasional lapses, and fear God, although an occasional
touch of pride may make them forget their proper place; their
sins are committed, judged, and shriven in a familiar moral
sphere. There are certain depths beneath which even
Leporello refuses to sink. He probably regards his own seductions as mere flirtations, the prerogative of a bachelor who
will eventually settle down with some Giannotta or Sandrina.
When Giovanni flaunts his seduction of one of Leporello's
girls, Leporello asks in an aggrieved tone:
E mi dite la cosa
Con tale indifferenza?
... Ma se fosse
Costei stata mia mog1ie? 26
And although he comes to take a certain delight in playing
25. So he greets the first entrance of Elvira: "Zitto: mi pare/Sentir odor di
femmina! ... "("Hush: I think I smell the scent of a woman! ... "-I, iv,
254-55).
26. "And you tell me that with such indifference? . . But what if she had
been my wife?" (II, xi, 212-213). Giovanni answers "Meglio ancor!" ("Better
still!")
27. "Quasi da piangcre/Mi fa costei./Se non muovc/Dcl suo dolore,/Di sasso
ha i] core,/0 cor non ha" ("She almost moves me to tears. If he isn't moved
by her grief, he has a heart of stone, or no heart at all"-II, xiv, 247-302).
28. In I, iv, Leporello tries to chide Giovanni for his wicked ways, but is
immediately bullied out of it. In the buffa duct "Eh, via, buffone" opening
Act II Leporello threatens to leave Giovanni, but easily changes his mind
after a bribe of four gold pieces.
29. "Il padron con prepotenza/L'innocenza mi ruhO" (II, 7, 22-33).
30. I, II. The traditional sobriquet "Champagne Aria" is not actually appropriate to the aria. Its music is inebriating, and its text speaks of intoxication, but strictly in anticipation of the coming festa. To have the Don sing
with champagne glass in hand is to obscure the point that his galvanic energy
arises from the spur of his obsession, not just from .strong wine.
3 L The contredanse "democratized" social dance: it moved the activity from
the court into the dance hall, and, with its emphasis on walking through
follow-the-leader figures rather than performing a series of difficult characteristic steps it opened the field to the enthusiastic amateurs of the
bourgeoisie.
32. "Let the dancing be without any order: make some dance the minuet,
some the follia, some the allemande" (I, II, 33-56).
the stand-in for Giovanni with Elvira in Act II, he is moved
to pity for her in the finale to Act II when Giovanni pitilessly
mocks her efforts to make him repent. 27 That his attempts to
reform Don Giovanni or to leave the Don's service 28 come to
nothing, does not change his function as moral measure. We
are not concerned to find in Leporello a model of perfection,
but merely to discover in him some vague consciousness of a
moral imperative no matter how feeble or fleeting. In indulgent self-defense he pleads subornation: Giovanni has robbed
him of his innocence. 29 His besetting sins are all too human,
his very moral weakness an acknowledgement of a nodding
acquaintance with the way things ought to be.
Don Giovanni's actions, on the other hand, are characterized by a moral neutrality: he is not evil but banal, not
noble but punctilious, and without fear where true courage
would discern what properly is to be feared. His "baseness"
amounts to a trivial obsession with seduction, his "nobility"
to mere freedom from the passions of hate and fear. The obsession and the freedom are opposite sides of the same
coin-an habitual disposition which forfeits the right to be
judged as excess and thus traps him outside, not above, the
limits of human virtue and human vice.
The moral world of the opera is delineated by the familiar
ga/ant and buf{a-courtly and peasant-dance gestures. To
be fully human in the opera is to move in such-and"such a
way, to be defined by a particular gesture or stance. In the
anonymity of his moral void, Giovanni is strangely denatured. Moving across the hierarchy of classes quickly established by the opening music he gives allegiance to none, although he partakes of them all by imitation; he is veritably
No-Man.
Mozart marks Giovanni's non-participation ingeniously,
casting almost every one of his solos as a performance or a
disguise. The Don woos Zerlina in the guise of a nobleman
in "L3 ci darem la mano" (I, 7), serenades Elvira's maid with
a canzonetta, providing only his voice for Lepore11o dressed as
Giovanni {II, 3), and sings to Masetto and his band disguised
as Leporello {II, 4). He does, however, have a "theme song,"
sung in a private moment, when he is giving Leporello orders
for the peasants' ball-the famous "Champagne Aria," "Fin
ch'han dal vi no. " 30 Mozart made a telling choice of gesture
for Giovanni's sole unguarded moment-a rapid and feverish
contredanse. The contrcdanse had no place in the hierarchical vocabulary of eighteenth-century social dance. Resembling our modern square dance, it was a new dance, cutting
across the established order of classes and affects, 31 and hence
the true dance of No-Man. The text and the macro-rhythm
of the aria expand the social connotations of the contredanse
into a thorough-going metaphor for Giovanni's nature:
Senza a1cun ordine
La danza sia:
Chi'l minuetto,
Chi Ia follia,
Chi 1' alemanna
Farai ballar."
41
�The College
Giovanni's command to Leporello calls for the very anarchy
the contredanse had introduced into the orderly cosmos of the
social dances. Another antithesis of this hierarchy is the famous list which Leporello keeps for his master; Giovanni reminds us of it here:
Ah! la mia lista
Doman mattina
D'una decina
Devi aumentar. 33
The insatiable cry of "just one more" grants the preceding
units no particular identity, and hence no dignity or worth;
the counter is interested in the counted only insofar as they
resemble each other and thus deserve a place in the list.
Mozart perceived the listlike nature of the contredanse-an
additive dance in which phrase piles on phrase as the dancers
intemperately improvise yet another figure-and took pains
to make Giovanni's music reflect it To leave the impression
of additive or chain construction on the form of the aria (going against the grain of the essentially dramatic plan of the
Classic movement with its clearly delineated beginning, middle, and end), he built with clear-cut and even-measured
units, repeated without alteration. The staple of the piece is a
"tonic phrase" -three similar two-measure units punctuated
by a fourth:
This phrase is deployed as a stabilizer whose mere recurrence
marks the aria's major hinges. Lost in a relentless moto perpetuo we know where we are only when we hear yet another
tonic phrase.
Since the list as a form of ordering is in truth an analogue
of anarchy, it is one with the middle-class contredanse, which
is placeless and classless. The Greek word 1:f-r07ro,, literally
"without a place," came to mean "strange," or "paradoxical,"
and, particularly when applied to human beings, "repugnant," or "harmful." Giovanni's menace seems to be of the
same nature. Just as the contredanse cut across the established
orders of dance gestures, so does the Don cut across the world
of Donna Anna and the other characters, threatening to subvert it. What brought this rootless creature into being is left
unexplained. He is merely a phenomenon whose nature has
33. "Ahl hy tomorrow morning you should increase my list by a decade" (I,
ll, 70-85).
42
been molded not by the proper moral orders, but by an illusory liberty whose obverse is an idee fixe. Although he is
hardly aware of the threat he poses, its power to destroy the
world of the other characters is unmistakeable.
To counter Giovanni's anarchic contredanse no human
music will suffice. Only divine justice can take on a man for
whom there is no judgement on earth, and only the
superhuman rhythms of the alla-breve pathetic fantasy can be
measured against the breathless, intemperate music of the
"danceless dance." Yet, symptomatic of the Dan's moral neutrality, the instrument of his punishment must issue from a
situation related only indirectly to the crimes he is to be
punished for -a situation in which, according to some
criteria, he can be said to have acted well. The murder of the
Commendatore, by redeeming Giovanni from the perpetual
venality of a career of seduction, makes him worthy of
punishment on a grand and celestial scale. Giovanni's transgressions are all concentrated into that one stroke of the
sword. The spectral hush of the Commendatore's requiem
music raises the moment out of the opera's time, to compel.
recognition of the horror and pathos of the act itself free from
any moral palliative (the Don's quasi-decent behavior, for example). It renders inexorable the ultimate arrival of the divine
avenger: his retribution will be postponed only until Giovanni
has thoroughly demonstrated the mean and trivial preoccupations of the dedicated seducer of women.
There is music in the overture, first, and last scenes which
is cast in the high tragic style, but it would be a mistake to
consider the "tragedy" to be Don Giovanni's. If there is any
pity and fear to be excited in this opera, it is for the lives of
the people he has left behind him. Their habits and pursuits
have been denigrated and diminished by the mere existence
of a man who cannot be touched by the moral order; in the
opera's bright commonplace of an epilogue they reappear
briefly to repair things as best they can. Not the tragic mode
itself, but the mixture of genres, of exalted style and low
farce, manifests this diminution to us throughout the opera in
increasingly dark and turbulent colors. Don Giovanni gives us
a panoramic view of all the orders of society, showing them
stretched to the breaking point; the mixed genre has a vision
both less noble and more encompassing than tragedy.
�Inner and Outer Freedom
Eva Brann
Vast topics are notoriously easy to avoid, and those who
undertake to wrestle with them in public owe their audience
some concrete reason for their choice. Let me begin with
mine.
First, this summer I had occasion to study Supreme Court
decisions bearing on freedom of religion and the public
schools. The graduate students with whom I read these included a number of inner-city school teachers, who were
both black and strong churchwomen. They were peculiarly
alive to a jolting paradox powerfully suggested by these decisions. Baldly stated it is this: In the interest of freedom of
religion, that is, in order to protect the possibility of living by
one's beliefs, it is required to keep the public realm, in which
students and teachers spend the most strenuous part of their
waking life, vigorously free from all particular beliefs and all
religious exercises. In other words, freedom of religion requires freedom from religion. This quandary raised for me a
general question concerning freedom as it appears in the external world. What is this notion which feels so exhilaratingly
rich and yet requires so stringently enforced a void, which
holds such promise of fullness but presupposes the most carefully constructed vacancy?
Second, in one of my classes this term we are reading a
work by Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of
Morals, which culminates in a consideration of human freedom. For Kant, freedom is entirely internal, ciur inner power
to overcome all the natural laws of psychology by which we
are determined and driven, and to act original1y and independently as rational beings. Freedom is inner selfdetermination. It is a harsh view, for it means that the only
clear index of the actual exercise of our freedom comes when
we are opposing our natural inclinations and desires, when
we do not as we want, but as we ought. Freedom is preemmiently self-control. It is a noble but negative test that it is
neither possible to accept nor to forget.
Eva Brann is Arnold Professor for 1978-79 at Whitman College, Walla
Walla, Washington. This is the text of the Arnold Lecture read on
~o~cmber 6, 1978. At present reviewing its curriculum, Whitman College
mv1ted her as a representative of St. John's College. With materials and
meth_o?s used at St. John's, she is teaching courses in Kant, Hegel and Marx,
Euchd s Elements and Lobachevski's Theory of Parallels, the Parthenon,
Oedipus Rex and the Phaedrus, and on "Education in a Republic." The
University of Chicago Press has just published her book, Paradoxes of Education in a Republic.
And finally, the following observation gave food for
thought. When I first arrived in Walla Walla, I discovered
Pioneer Park as a lovely place to jog. You all know the place.
The point is that it is a small park, but laid out on the lines of
a grand European city park, and very handsome. Every day I
ran by a sign that read as follows. It said that the park was
closed to vehicular traffic for a month in order "to determine
the possible effects such an action might cause." (I don't need
to tell you that the actual effects such an action did cause
were dozens of letters to the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin.) I
kept asking myself why the public prose writer hadn't found it
in him just to say "to see what will happen." And it came to
me that this magnificent prose had a point to make: The park
is not just a place of beauty but also the scene of passionate
contention and rational compromise, a microcosm of the
double nature of the free world. Of course, I shall make myself clearer later.
Let me begin my inquiry, then, with a description of the
sense of freedom, and with examples of the feeling of freedom, both to recall to you the familiarity of the notion and to
have evidence for certain observations.
Case 1: When I first drove into the Walla Walla valley I
was amazed by its-oddly unsung-beauty, by the contoured
hrlls, colored mocha and mauve and mat gold, and the
velvet-faceted Blue Mountains. With that sense of beauty
came a feeling of expansiveness, of beckoning aspects and accessible vistas and magical destinations, in short, a sense of
the freedom of the land.
43
�The College
Case II: Long ago, when I set off in my first car to leave
home for graduate school-! was going from Brooklyn to
New Haven, from the frying pan into the fire, a Westerner
might say-! recall feeling, all love and gratitude to my parents notwithstanding, an enormous sense of being out from
under, a ballooning feeling of freedom from constraint.
Case III: I have worked hard all week, and there is a friend
on the phone wanting to know if I would like to go for an
exploratory ride in the country and then perhaps tea. There is
a little click of satisfaction. I'm exactly in the mood and free
for the occasion.
Case IV: We're in the car, ready to take off from Walla
Walla, with the map before us. East to the Blues, west to
Lake Wallula, north to the Snake and south into the
Wallowas-each is a possible direction; all we have to do is
exercise our freedom to choose.
Such personal examples are, I am sure, familiar to
everyone. They are the small daily appearances of freedom in
our lives, modest recurrent phenomena which add up to a
free life. I could, of course, have begun with examples of
unfreedom, of daily oppression, which can take an equally
small, even trivial or absurd shape. For instance, I have been
told that in a popular restaurant in Moscow ice cream dishes
come in cosmic form: there are nine planetary choices named
from Mercury to Pluto. But what a disappointment: if you
order Pluto, you get vanilla-flavored state base with plum
jam, and Mars turns out to be vanilla-flavored state base with
marmalade, and so on; thus freedom of choice is covertly
frustrated.
The trouble is that the relation of small personal freedoms
to the grander notion of civic freedom is different from the
relation of small deprivations to political oppression. Except
on certain ceremonial occasions, freedom with a capital F
does not itself make anyone wildly happy. It is its small consequences that we cherish. The obverse for oppression, however, does not obtain, for the political unfreedom from which
those small frustrations arise is by no means innocuous; it can
itself cause the most terrible suffering, suffering too great to
speak of in a lecture like this. That, incidentally, is what refugees from oppression, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, sometimes fail to understand. They are so accustomed to the soultrying enormities of unfreedom that they cannot properly
value the diffuse, unextreme, even unedifying appearances of
freedom. But these are the ones with which a positive inquiry, the kind that is appropriately carried on among us,
who daily experience freedom, should begin.
So I will return to my cases, which I listed only in order to
go from observation to theory. (When I speak of theorizing I
do not mean the vigorous but dry exercise of attempting to
find a definition of freedom, but rather the attempt first to
articulate the perplexities contained in the phenomena and
then to penetrate the appearances themselves.)
Notice, then, that in all the instances freedom is followed
by a preposition: freedom of the road, freedom from parental
supervision, free for tea, free to indulge my preference. (I
omit such familiar phrases as freedom under the law, freedom
through discipline, freedom in Christ, because these reflect
44
on the conditions of freedom rather than on its nature.)
These prepositions, "of, from, for, to," seem to be almost
unavoidable when we speak about freedom.
Now when used of ordinary situations and notions and
things in this world, prepositions are not particularly mysterious; they usually express spatial relations: sitting under the
apple tree, passing through the looking glass. But what about
the case of freedom, which is nothing spatial?
I think the prepositions of freedom also express situations
and motions and relations, but not of bodies to bodies as when
lovers sit under the apple tree, but of souls to the world.
Freedom of the road, or, more importantly, freedom of
speech or of religion, then means being in a situation to take
hold, to take advantage of the outer world. For example, we
have the ability to utter words, which means literally to
"outer" them, to make loud meaningful sounds. Freedom of
speech means being in a position to appropriate this power.
Freedom from constraint, on the other hand, or those old
freedoms articulated during the second World War, freedom
from want and fear imply an aversive motion, a motion of
shaking off the shackles of the world.
Again, being free for anything, from a talk to a new friendship, means being so well-ensconced in the world as to be
receptive and ready for it, while being free to choose means
being set up for action, ready to sally out and do things._
In sum all our feelings of freedom express various aspects of
a relation we have to the external world as we range through
its beauties, realize our powers within it, secure ourselves
from its oppressions, ready ourselves to receive it and reach
out to act on it.
The fact that this relation has a number of facets, expressed
in the various prepositions "of, from, for, to," must follow
from the different ways human beings, souls, are in the
world: they take possession of it, withdraw from it, await it,
step into it. That is outer freedom.
How the world can be constituted so that our relation to it
must have these half-metaphorical aspects is the subject of a
different-and deeper-inquiry usually called phenomenology. But what is the relation of freedom itself?
Let me give a two-word answer. Outer freedom is real possibility, that is, power not over people but over things and
circumstances. Again, I must leave aside the most abysmal
question, namely, what the world is such that we, embodied
souls, can have within it what in mechanical systems are
called degrees of freedom. I shall assume that we all have a
working knowledge of possibility.
Then external freedom is real possibility. "Real" is Latin
and means pertaining to things. Real possibility is to be distinguished from mere, logical possibility. Let me take you
through an example.
All of us have some property. Now it is logically impossible
for all of us, legally and responsibly, to give that property up.
For although it is in the very notion of property that we may
sell it or give it away-alienate it, as the term goes-it is also
part of its meaning that we are responsible for disposing of it
to another person or quasi-person, like a government. We
have no right, for instance, simply to abandon our house so
�July, 1979
that it becomes a dangerous neighborhood nuisance. Consequently it is logically impossible for all persons to give up
their property at once, for each must, as I said, give it to
someone: humanity holds property like a wolf by the tail-it
cannot let go. But it is logically perfectly possible for half of
all the people to give up what they own to the other half. The
other half might, perhaps, be willing to receive it (though
once they had the stuff they might be sorry). Yet is it not a
real possibility. It will not happen because it is against human
nature and worldly circumstances. Finally, that one or two
people we know should give away all they own is both logically and really possible, though it takes a good deal of preparation and arrangement. Some people are free, by nature and
circumstance, to get rid of the gear of ordinary life.
Now the point is that to be free, either from things, or for
them, takes much planning and careful arrangement. A
world of chaos and inchoateness, the tohuwabohu of the Bible, holds no real possibilities except for a divine creator, and
we are not creators, but only organizers. A perfectly structured, motionless world, on the other hand, has no scope for
action either. In Dante's Divine Comedy there are two kinds
of hopeless hell, the heaving horror of the upper circles of
sinners, and the nethermost circle of perpetual ice in which
Satan is suspended. Real possibility exists in a world which is
at once organized and open.
Outer freedom therefore requires a land crisscrossed by
paths surfaced with road metal, bridged by toll booths, edged
with service stations, lined by fences, and marked by signs
setting limitations and giving directions. And what holds for
the freedom of the road goes for all the other freedoms. They
ali require multifarious physical and mental arrangements,
arrangements for production of goods and prevention of evils,
for delivery of services and collection of debts. But most of
ali our freedom demands the ten-thous~nd real constraints of
the liberating law. (Incidentally, those pioneers who first
found these paths, like the two local heroes, Lewis and Clark,
had far fewer freedoms than we who follow them, though
they had one in an irrecoverable degree: that of really acting
in the world.)
One more observation on the character of external freedom: it goes the way of self-abrogation, of self-cancellation.
Free time without engagements begins to hang heavy on our
hands. Long aimless travels suddenly begin to pall and we
want a destination. Too many options with no preference
drive us crazy. It is the natural fate of freedom to terminate in
commitment. We all know that perpetually free spirits, who
fail to foreclose on their freedom, acquire a peculiar reek
about them, as of stale ozone; a world fixed up for freedom
compels us to take advantage of it. That is why we are all so
busy. For, in Shakespeare's words: "Lillies that festersmell far
worse than weeds."
It is in the very nature of real possibilities, then, to compel
us to realize them, and external freedom is secured by innumerable constraints. People who are not born free but released from slavery by human arrangements are called freedmen. With respect to outer freedom we are all freedmen, for
such freedom is established by myriads of positive contri-
vances.
But we are also free simply-not free to or for or from, not
free as situated in the world, but simply free. This
freedom-let me call it inner freedom -cannot be secured by
external arrangements. For example, the law can protect
freedom of utterance, but a legal freedom of thought is an
absurdity: who could stop us? Nor does this freedom push us
to take advantage of the world. On the contrary, its index is
often a capability for serenely sitting it out.
What, then, is inner freedom? Let me begin by sketching
out two extreme answers, not the most extreme answers possible, but such as will yield a useful framework.
The first is sternly and soberly deflating. It is that there is
no such freedom. There is none because we have no inside,
no interior. Our psychic system is continuous with or, at
least, analogous to our physical organization. Our inner and
outer natures obey the same mechanical (or statistical) laws.
As in physics we rely on observations of motions for our
theory, so in psychology we depend on the evidence of behavior (indeed, this view is usually called behaviorism), and that
tells us that human beings are pushed by needs and pulled by
incentives as bodies are moved by collisions and attractions,
and that interpersonal behavior is as predictable as are the
actions and reactions of bodies. This view is difficult to deal
with in its own terms. It will not do to produce some_tmpredictable behavior because, first, such behavior would itself be
a mere reaction, and second, because inner freedom does not
display itself as erratic behavior The freest people are also the
most reliable. Perhaps the ultimate defense against this view
lies in the difficulty this sehool of thought has in saying what
it means by, and how it comes to care about, its stern and
sober truth; but that development is beyond this lecture.
At the other end stands the Kantian view I mentioned in
the beginning. It is also severe, but it is grand as well. Kant
agrees that we are natural beings, subject to the pushing and
pulling laws of psychology, to our wants, desires, and inclinations. But, he claims, there is also a universally acknowledged
fact, a moral fact. It is not known through any outer or even
inner evidence because it is entirely internal-internal even
beyond our inner sense of ourselves. It is the fact that sometimes we determine and lay down the law to ourselves: we
withstand our own nature, deny our own inclinations and do
not as we want but as we ought. Freedom is an inexplicable
fact; it makes itself known in moral action, which in turn is
eVidenced as rational opposition to our natural inclinations.
Human freedom shows up as radical, reasoning resistence to
human nature. It is a grand view because it assigns to us, as
rational beings with a supernatural root, infinite responsibility
for our actions. But it seems to me to make too harsh a division between our reasoning and our feeling self.
Let me, therefore, take a great chance and tell you what I
think inner freedom, what being free simply, means. I think
it means nothing more and nothing less than having an inside, that is, a plaee where one is genuinely and literally by
oneself-though not alone.
One way to remind ourselves that we are capable of having
such a space is to think of cases we know where it has become
45
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vacuous or obstructed. It has become vacuous in people who
have gained the whole world and lost their own soul by allowing themselves to be entirely, hectically, absorbed in exterior
business, especially the kind that has no solid substance. It
appears obstructed in obsessed people, who have what is so
graphically called a "hang-up;" that is to say, their own inner
space is strung through with psychic barbed wire in which
they have entangled themselves. Indeed, every loss of human
interiority points to some personal or public pathology, as
fearful as it is instructive.
Positively speaking, it is in this inner space that imagina-
tion and thinking have their place. Or perhaps better, it is in
this place that we think things out in the imaginative presence
of everything we care about. I feel sure that everyone here
knows just what I am talking about, and why one might say
that the possession of such an inner place is identical with
being free: here, inaccessible to the world's manipulations but
not isolated from its gifts, we fulfill our most intimately
proper function, which is-! think-to think. By thinking I
mean simply our episodic efforts to recover and clarify our life
within ourselves.
But this inner freedom is not a set of real possibilities, that
is, possibilities supported by things, but an actuality within
the soul. For when we are within ourselves we are already in
the act of being what we were meant to be, whether we are
shaping images, or pursuing a perplexity, or reaching a reso-
lution. This freedom is not in what we might do but in what
we are. And that has important external consequences, for
what we are issues in what we do.
For, although this activity usually takes place in secluded
and quiet episodes-what Shakespeare calls the "sessions of
sweet silent thought" -once it is done, it consolidates into
conviction and clamors quietly but insistently for expression,
for communication and common action. And that is the
source of the problem which made me attempt this lecture.
are, of course, the schools which are generally considered to
be the great public facilitators of opportunity. ("Opportunity"
is, evidently, another word for real possibility.) So, naturally,
the Court was eventually asked to decide whether the governments, particularly state governments, might facilitate ex-
pressions of the inner life through the schools by making it
easier for parents to send their children to religious schools,
or by releasing children to attend religiou-s instruction, or by
giving them opportunities to say a non-sectarian praxe!~ By
and large, the court has held that all such facilitations were
unconstitutional, since they tended either to establish one
religion in special benefits or, by sanctioning religion in general, to interfere with the consciences of non-believers. Consequently, in the interests of conscience, religion must be
banished from the ever-expanding public scene. And that is
what my students found at once persuasive and perplexing:
that the public scene, which is full of means for the enjoyment of outer freedom, requires vacancy with respect to the
expression of inner freedom.
hibiting the free exercise thereof." It is usually understood to
I think we succeeded in formulating the resolution this
country has worked out. It consists in the fact that we all lead
double lives, sometimes exhilarating, often dangerous, always
wearing. This is our double life: we are all, always, both
members of factions of interest and participants in fellowships
of conviction.
have two clauses. One says that no government, federal or
state, shall push or prefer one religious organization over the
Factions-the word is Madison's; we would say interest
groups-are the numerous shifting col1ection of externally
others. The second says that no government shall make difficulties for individuals over their religion. The author of
free people who band together to get the public to facilitate
their rationally selfish way; they have a perfectly legitimate, if
not very noble, common cause. Indeed Madison thought that
a well-constituted polity was precisely one which gave these
inevitable groups scope by exerting themselves to delimit each
Let me revert here to those Supreme Court decisions I
mentioned in the beginning. They were concerned with reli-
gion in the public schools, and they were all based on that
section of the First Amendment which says: "Congress shall
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or pro-
these clauses, Madison, was crystal-dear about their purpose:
they were equally intended to protect and to strengthen the
expression of the life of conscience, and so of religion, since
that is precisely what religion, in one of its aspects, is. Con-
other. Parties, unions, business organizations are examples of
science, a Latin word which James Joyce rendered in English
factions of interest. The space of factional activity is the pub-
as "inwit", or "inner knowledge," is, of course, a principal
mode of inner freedom.
So far so good. But recall that worldly freedom demanded
lic realm in its official and civil forms.
Fellowships of conviction, in contrast to factions of interest, are communities of people who draw together as in-
not only constraints to keep us from interfering with each
ternally free human beings, that is to say, as human beings
others' enjoyments of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," but, even more, conveniences and facilities to make
whose inner lives have some agreement and who are therefore
in some manner friends. Churches and private schools are
such enjoyment a real possibility. Chief among such facilities
examples of fellowships of conviction. The place where the
46
�July, 1979
life of conviction is carried on is the inward looking, semiprivate association.
Of course, parties, unions, and chambers of commerce are
based on some principles and will, insofar as they recall
them, be communities of conviction. Conversely, churches
and schools are going businesses, albeit very much non-profit
businesses, and have interests to defend. Indeed, how communes of conviction behave as interest groups is a fascinating
matter. For example the Maryland college where I ordinarily
teach was founded in the year after the Revolution, in 1784,
as a non-sectarian, secular state school with the eager support
of the local Catholics, who, in the absence of a Catholic
seminary in which to train their priests, were anxious to send
them to a school that required no religious test and attendance at all; in this they obviously acted as an interest group.
There are, incidentally, some associations that have lost all
sense of this distinction. Those are called movements, that is,
ideological interest groups. Let me interject a very biased remark: the recent tragedies of Europe are the consequences of
such unsober politicizations of faith (which is precisely what
totalitarianism is), and this country doesn't need them.
That we all belong to these two kinds of groups, and usually in a somewhat fused and simultaneous way, is a fascinating fact of American life. But how in the world do we do it?
For these groups are not merely different in flavor-lifestyle would be the current word-but evidently incompatible
in mode. Let me sketch out how that is.
Interests are eminently negotiable. A friend of mine, who
used to be high in the councils of government, Robert
Goldwin, says that a really brilliant negotiator is not one who
finds a compromise, a middle ground, but who devises an
alternative that gives the parties something different but more
attractive than they had ever thought of demanding. But who
can compromise, not to say negotiate, his genuine convictions? In the early Christian church a long and even bloody
battle was fought over the littlest letter in the Greek alphabet,
the iota. The iota's difference was between· the words homoiousios and homo-ousios which mean respectively "of like
substance" and "of the same substance." The issue was
whether Christ was merely like God the Father but not equal
with bim, or whether the godhead was a trinity of equal persons. This battle between the so-called Arians and Athanasians has been the laughing stock of moderns (though so great
a scientist as Newton was still deeply involved in it). But is it
really so comical that people should be unable to compromise
their convictions about the nature of God?
There are numerous other contrasts between the worlds of
conviction and interest, which show themselves, and are very
familiar to us, in their different atmospheres. Let me briefly
delineate these appearances.
The world in which we associate by interest is on occasion
brutal but ordinarily impenetrably bland. It is calculating and
civil, hard-headed and reasonable, selfish and serviceable. In
accordance with the evanescent character of external freedom, it shifts constantly to provide new means, but it also
requires accretions of the most rigid emptiness, like bureaucracies. We all recognize its various dialects. For example,
we all understand and, I think, approve of the calculations
that go into the instructions which the girl at the check-out
counter in the super-market has to say: "Have a pleasant
day." It is a bland civility which is intended to give a tiny
edge on the competition by lubricating the shopper's exit.
Or, again, take the park prose I cited in the beginning. It
signifies that Pioneer Park is not only a little paradise for the
recreation of the soul, but also the scene of contending interests, namely of those who want it to be free to cars and those
who want it to be free from cars, interests to be satisfied by
objective experimentation and compromise. This broad and
multifarious, but at bottom uniform, world in which we float
fairly free, as in a medium, secures us the means for what
Hobbes called "commodious living." It is therefore not to be
despised. There are even occasions when it becomes a community full of pride in the rational decency, reciprocal respect, and staunch reliability which founded and which preserves it.
The world in which we unite primarily by conviction, in
contrast, is intimately exclusive and inevitably quarrelsome,
alternately stagnant and ardent, intense and durable. This is
the world of expressed interiority, of "spiritual substance" or,
rather, of many substances, for the very way such communities float in the free world tends to multiply and even
competitively differentiate them, both from that world and
from each other. That is the blessing and mystery- of
pluralism.
That pluralism is a blessing because it permits us to live at
once in both worlds, the outer and the inner. That it is a
mystery is plain when we ask ourselves how in the world we
emerge from the concentration of our convictions to live
civilly and reciprocally with those who think otherwise or not
at aH or, again, how we ever succeed in collecting ourselves
out of the dispersion of the external world into communities
for furthering the life of the soul.
Of course, there are perfectly practical circumstances that
make for toleration of each other's secular selves: the steep
loss of interest, like a rapidly diminishing field of force, which
comes from the distance a big continent affords; our mandatory public affectation of fallibility {we might be shocked to
hear a minister declare in church that "''m probably wrong,
but I feel that we may well have immortal souls," but we
would not be utterly amazed to hear him say it on a talk
show); the fact that the follies of the wide world are grist to
the mill of faith and as such induce a certain fondness.
Of course, equally, there are human-all-too-human reasons for joining communities of conviction: for social purposes, out of convention, as a kind of insurance.
But when we look beyond these circumstantial explanations, there is still the undeniable fact that we-all but the
most lukewarm-have found a way to exist, like doppelgangers, in two ultimately diverse worlds. You must forgive me if
I have done little more tonight than to formulate an inquiry.
I do know one thing though: the attempt to resolve this mystery must always run concurrent with the preservation of the
fact, the fact, namely, that in this country we can live a life
both of outer and inner freedom.
47
�The Collapse of Democracy at Athens
and the Trial of Socrates
Leo Raditsa
Thucydides did not finish his account of the "intense
movement" (so he named it) among the Greek peoples that
he judged to be the greatest event of history including the
Trojan War. The incompleteness of Thucydides' account
suggests the war never ended-and perhaps there is some
truth in that. For the kind of war-and in his opening paragraph he carefully defines it-Thucydides describes, without
specific political aims and which proceeds by revolution, is
difficult to end. One can terminate hostilities-but to make
peace: that is another, much more difficult matter.
The crisis which we call the Peloponnesian War did, however, come to some sort of end and it is about that end and
what came after it, especially the trial of Socrates, that I am
going to talk to you tonight. The period runs. roughly from
410 to 399, the year of Socrates' trial.
The historical question I wish to face is what is the relation
of the trial of Socrates to the collapse of democracy which
occurred at Athens with the slow ending of the war. To put it
simply, why was Socrates prosecuted in 399 instead of some
time earlier, for instance, in 423 when Aristophanes had the
Clouds produced?
Xenophon, who begins his narrative about where
Thucydides leaves off, does not mention the trial of Socrates,
although he does mention Socrates' attempt when he was in
Prytany to prevent the illegal trial of the generals who had
commanded at Arginusae in 406. Diodorus Siculus mentions
the trial, but only in passing, the way he mentions the death
of Sophocles in 406. I think ancient historians did not include the trial of Socrates in their compositions because they
understood history to deal with the public life of a city, of its
officers and of its citizens in public assembly and in battle.
They did not conceive history to include the relation of private to public life, something which was the subject of much
of Socrates' activity. Although Socrates was charged with a
public crime-a -ypacf>.f), not a 8tK'I), which referred to a civil
suit, as Socrates reminded Euthyphro at the start of his conversation with him-he was charged as a private citizen, not
as an office holder.
There was another and deeper reason for not including the
trial of Socrates in the ancient accounts of the period. In contrast to Plato-and in this he is profounder than PlatoXenophon admits that he does not understand how it could
have happened that Socrates was tried and condemned. That
A lecture read at Annapolis on February 18, 1977
48
is, Socrates made him question the world his eyes saw-and
this involuntary questioning is Xenophon's greatest tribute to
Socrates. But this questioning did not extend to history. For
Xenophon, history bore some relation to tragedy. But public
men and cities suffered tragedy. To include the trial of Socrates in his composition Xenophon would have had to conceive of the tragedy of a private man. He could not-like
most Athenians.
Think on it a second. All the Athenian tragedies are about
public individuals, kings and princes, when they are not
about gods. There is something radically wrong with the way
we read tragedies, as if they were about the lives of private
individuals. The private individuals, the individuals who hold
no office, appear in comedies. There they trip over their fantasies which they take for actions, grow embarrassed at -themselves, at the greatness they feel trapped in their insides but
which betrays them when they open their mouths. There
they grow haughty with their magnificent and outrageous
gods. It is a measure of what happened to Athens that a generation after he had been subject to a comedy Socrates became protagonist of an event that the best of his contemporaries knew they could not understand. 1 For it was the
tragedy of a private man. Even now we cannot easily integrate
the trial of Socrates into the history of Athens and of the other
Greeks-just as historians of the Roman empire hardly ever
include the trial of Jesus in their accounts of that period.
The Collapse of Democracy at Athens
The last ten years of the war, the period from 411 to 401,
represent the precipitation of that crisis in leadership which
we call the Peloponnesian War. It is the period of the war in
which the war became more and more something that happened to Athens and something that Athens did to herself. It
is also the period in which Sparta took to the sea and in
which Persia became increasingly deeply involved. 2
The events of 411, the formation of the oligarchic government of the 400 and then of the Five Thousand, which represented a reaction to the Sicilian disaster, not only shook
Athens' domestic political confidence. They isolated Athens
in the Greek world. The oligarchic revolutions in other allied
cities which had accompanied the changes at Athens in 411
had not served, as the oligarchs at Athens had expected, to
�July, 1979
make settlement with the Lacedaimonians possible, but had
lived on the brink of civil war. At Athens itself the situation
was tense. In 410 the returned democracy had passed strict
laws encouraging the punishment of those who had been involved in the oligarchic movement of 411. There were many
exiles. The division which had occurred with the coming of
Of these events the collapse of Athens or the time of the
Thirty, as it is usually called, was the most devastating. The
experience of Athens during this period left an indelible impression on the whole ancient world. People thought of it
with the same horror as the men of Colonus looked upon the
face of Oedipus. Sallust's Caesar, written during the death
agony of the Roman Republic, in the face of the proscriptions
of the young Octavian, recalls the horrors of the years of the
the oligarchs in 411 had not been overcome. In an important
Thirty at Athens with a vividness which makes one imagine
sense Athens in 410 was no longer one city but two. This
meant nobody knew what might happen next.
With the weakening of the predominance of Athens and
Sallust had lived through the time. The Thirty, who were led
by two of his close relatives, and Socrates' trial-these are the
two central experiences of Plato's life.
Somehow no matter what she did Athens always wounded
herself. This is the terrible sense of this last decade and
earlier-for it really started at Melos in 416. When the Athenian people illegally condemned commanders they suspected
instead contributed to bringing these cities under Lacedaimonian sway. Everywhere there was instability, and the cities
her instability, other Creek cities grew more aggressive in
their views. For the first time during the Peloponnesian War
Greek leaders, especially the Spartans, reckon with public
opinion outside of their cities. For instance, Pausanias, one
of the Kings of Sparta, is said to have intervened in the Athenian civil war at the end of the period of the Thirty because he
feared the consequences to the reputation of Sparta if the
slaughters of the thirty continued.
In the first part of this period, the six years leading up to
the destruction of almost the entire Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in September 405, the war is largely at sea for both
to be innocent after the great victory at Arginusae in 406,
they hurt themselves. As Socrates later pointed out, the)'_discredited themselves, destroyed their public life and made
themselves incapable of recognizing and standing up to their
real enemies, when they violated their own Jaws.
In Socrates' presence Athenians knew they were doing this
to themselves. This is the meaning of Alcibiades' wonderful
sides. The sea war of these six years takes place mainly in the
and terrifying remark that Socrates was the only man in
Hellespont and in the Bosporus, and along the adjoining
Athens who made him feel ashamed. In Socrates' presence he
could not fool himself-he knew that what he did somehow
coasts of Thrace and Asia Minor with its three major islands,
Lesbos, Chios and Samos. It was through these straits that
betrayed what he was. Alcibiades meant Socrates made him
many of the Athenian grain ships sailed. When she chal-
feel alive. Socrates gave men something like the feeling you
lenged Athens in this area Sparta was aiming at her life lines
sometimes get from infants when they make you wonder how
you have become what you are.
but not, in the beginning at least, for total victory. For after
several of the major battles she attempted to negotiate with
Athens. For the first time in the War Athens was on the defensive in a way she had never been when Sparta had wasted
Attica in the first years of the war.
For her part Sparta appears to be without a coherent policy
in this period. Her most noble commander drowned at the
battle of Arginusae, Callicratidas tried to keep free of Persian
entanglements, but Lysander, the Spartan commander who
was to bring the war to an end, had no scruples about taking
all the money he could from Persia for building the fleet and
paying its crews.
The main events of this period are the return of Alcibiades
to Athens in 408; the victory of the Athenian fleet at Arginusae in 406 and the unlawful trial and execution of the
generals of the fleet which followed upon it; Lysander's destruction of the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in the fall of
405; and the collapse of Athens in the period 405-401, espe-
Alcibiades' return to Athens in 408, with his appearance
before the council and the assembly and his election to position of Commander in Chief, made a deep impression on
Athens. They saw him now almost like an outcast, like
Oedipus, forced to live beyond the protection of the laws, his
life always in danger, in Sparta and in Persia. Here was the
man who in his life, almost in his person, summed up most
of the destructive and constructive actions of the years since
415: the castration of the Hermae and the parody of the mysteries (from which he was now exonerated), the expedition
against Syracuse, the Spartan fortification of Decelea in Attica, and the involvement of Persia in the war-and constructively and more recently, the prevention of civil war during
which run from May 404 to August 403, when the Thirty
the oligarchic crisis in 411 and the re-establishment of Athenian control of the Propontis and the Bosporus in 410.
When Alcibiades sailed into the Piraeus he waited cautiously, without disembarking, for his friends and relatives to
escort him up to the city. To many, both rich and poor,
democrats and oligarchs, he seemed like the one individual
were in power.
capable at the same time of overcoming the division which
cially after the siege and surrender, in the fifteen months
49
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remained within the city and of prosecuting the war with in-
telligence.
But something like six months later he is either not reelected or removed from his command because a
subordinate-against his express orders-engages Lysander
and loses fifteen Atpenian ships. He goes into exile on his
estate in the Chersonese. The great expectations had come to
nothing-the crisis continued.
Almost a year apart, the two great naval disasters of Arginusae and Aegospotami were in a sense both self-inflicted. l
call Arginusae a disaster even though it was an Athenian victory, because its repercussions at home did much to discredit
the unstable democracy. When Athens learned that the Spartan commander Callicratidas had encircled the Athenian
commander Conan at Mytilene she sent out a hastilygathered fleet of II 0 ships which she manned with free men
and slaves (who were later awarded their freedom).
Immediately after the Athenian victory a storm suddenly
rises which prevents the Athenian commanders from picking
up the several thousand dead and survivors floating in the
rammed and waterlogged ships that had not sunk. At Athens,
the news of the losses blunts the joy of victory. Following a
little after the news the Apaturia, a festival which draws together families to acknowledge births and marriages, makes
the grief worse.
The matter comes up in the council and the assembly.
Under the influence of their politicians the people seem unable to accept that some things are not under human control,
that a storm occurs in "divine necessity," as one speaker puts
it. Their politicians dominate them by nourishing their yearning to make someone responsible for everything.
tion for sentencing from the assembly. The generals are condemned as a group and immediately executed.
Sometime later the people regret their action, as they had
been warned they would in the assembly. They turn upon
their leaders and prosecute them, depriving one of them of
fire and' water. But it is too late. All along they had known
what they were doing was wrong, but they could not stop it.
Against the speaker who had opposed them they had shouted
that it was unthinkable that the people should not be allowed
to do whatever they desired.
After Arginusae the tension in many of the cities increases.
Returned as acting Commander of the Spartan fleet, Lysander, with headquarters at Ephesus, supports the so-called
oligarchs in a bloody seizure of power at Miletus. Four
hundred of the wealthy and prominent citizens of Miletus are
executed in the market place. For his predecessor Callicratidas' attempt to lead the Greek cities with words, Lysander
substitutes terror, for which party labels are mere pretexts. In
Karia, a city allied to Athens is wiped out.
Sailing from Samos, the Athenian fleet finds no support
among the Greek cities. Except for Mitylene, all Asia turns
away from Athens. When news comes that Lysander is retaking Lampsacus on the Hellespont almost the entire Athenian
fleet, one hundred and eighty ships, sails to Aigospotami, a
barren stretch of beach just fifteen stades ( a slade is 600 feet)
across the water from Lampsacus. Despite Alcibiades'
warning-from his estate on the Chersonese he watches the
whole disaster take shape before his helpless eyes-the Athenian commanders remain in their exposed position and offer
bly is adjourned.
In a subsequent assembly it is proposed to vote on the guilt
battle to the Spartans for four days. On the fifth day Lysander
surprises the Athenians after they have disembarked and destroys or captures more or less their whole fleet. It is the Fall
of 405.
At Athens they prepared for siege: all the harbours except
one were filled up, walls were repaired and guards put on
them. The city sought a hasty and incomplete unity in the
restoration of full citizen rights to those who had been partially deprived in the previous troubles. But they did not recall the exiles.
At Aegospotami in assembly with the allies of Sparta, Ly-
of the generals as a group and to count their previous tes-
sander executed one of the Athenian commanders, because
timony as a trial-all highly illegal. A brave speaker in the
assembly attempts to stop the proceedings on the grounds of
unconstitutionality (the ypacf>Tj 7mpavoJLwv); but the
people, turning into a mob, threaten him. This is the first,
crucial attempt to resort to the ypacf>T, '11'apavoJLWV since it
had been restored after the Four Hundred had abolished it in
411. 3 It fails. But the grounds of the illegality have been
clearly stated in the assembly. The crowd also intimidates all
of the council except Socrates when it seeks to keep the mo-
he had been the first to break the international law of the
Greek cities. He had hurled the captured crews of two ships
of Sparta's allies from a precipice, and in the assembly at
Athens he had supported a motion to cut off the thumbs of all
Theramenes, an important and able politician who had been
a subordinate commander at Arginusae, accuses his superiors
of neglect. There is debate both in council and assembly, and
the six generals who had dared to come back to Athens defend themselves ably and with witnesses, even though they
have not yet been formally accused. At the point when it
appears the generals will win some kind of release the assem-
50
prisoners of war and make them incapable of ever rowing
again. Lysander also showed himself as the undoer of other
Athenian outrages: at Melos, Torone, Scione and Aigina he
restored the remaining original inhabitants.
From Chalcedon and Byzantium on the Bosporus and
�July, 1979
elsewhere, Lysander set the Athenian garrisons loose on con-
dition they sail nowhere else but to Athens. He wanted to
burden Athens with as many mouths as possible. Everywhere
the Greek cities turned to Sparta.
But at Samos, the other port of the Athenian fleet, the
democracy .held, and again knew itself in the slaughter of
prominent citizens. For the first time since before the Persian
wars, Athens is cut off from the sea, closed in upon herself,
Athens, whom almost ten years before, Peisthetaerus in the
Birds had called "the city of the lovely triremes."
Throughout the whole winter and until April of the following year, 404, Athens and the democracy resisted-and
writer, son of Cephalus and brother of Polemarchus, who appear in the first book of the Republic), believed in them at
first.
The commission delayed the reform of the laws, but appointed magistrates and council, and started to rule. Before
the council and with public ballotting, they tried and killed
notorious sycophants, individuals who had used the threat of
prosecution for extortionary purposes. Although illegal, these
killings won wide consent among the citizens, because men
felt they were justified.
Soon, however, Critias, a close relative of Plato, and an
interlocutor of Socrates, asked Lysander for a Spartan gover-
people starved. There was an early attempt at negotiation in
nor and garrison to support him in dealing with unruly and
which Athens offered to accept Sparta's leadership in alliance,
a situation that would have allowed her considerable independence. But at Sparta the Ephors insisted on tearing down
part of the walls. In response the people at Athens forbade
subversive elements. With Spartan troops behind them, the
Thirty now began to kill all individuals who might oppose
them, and whose property would furnish the money necessary
for the support of the Spartan garrison.
At these outrages many went into exile, including Anytus ·
(who later instigated the prosecution of Socrates) and
Thrasybulus, who was to lead the democrats. Megara and
Thebes teemed with Athenian exiles despite Sparta's order
forbidding any Greek city to receive them. (By January 403,
when the Thirty left Athens for Eleusis, where they had exterminated the population, perhaps as much as half of the
male population had left Attica.)
Among the Thirty themselves the outrages also produced
any motions concerning peace. Men grew convinced that any
terms with Sparta meant the fate of Melos.
In this tense and dangerous situation Theramenes managed
to persuade the assembly to let him find out from Lysander
whether the Spartans wanted to destroy the Long Walls to
reduce Athens to slavery, or simply as a guarantee of their
good conduct. Theramenes remained with Lysander, who
was besieging Sames until, with the worsening situation at
Athens, the assembly granted him power to negotiate.
The new terms which the Lacedaimonians and their allies
opposition. Theramenes, who knew the distinction between a
offered were much harsher than the previous demands of the
moderate oligarchy and terror, told Critias that they were now
much worse than the sycophants of the democracy who had
extorted money, but not killed for it. Critias answered, brutally, that changes of constitution required killing: "How do
Ephors: Athens was to have the same friends and enemies as
Sparta. (In our terms this meant Athens lost the capacity for
an independent foreign policy.) She was to tear down the
Long Walls. Her fleet was not to number more than twelve
ships. The exiles were to return.
When Theramenes returned to the starving city with these
terms, men crowded around him in fear-but in the assembly there was still some resistance to surrender. In acting as
go-between between the Athenian democrats who desired to
resist to the end and the probably undecided Spartans
Theramenes had saved his native city from total
destruction-or rather from destroying itself. To the intoxi-
cating sound of flutes, Lysander had sections of the Long
Walls tom down. The Spartans and the returning Athenian
exiles, according to Xenophon, imagined that that day meant
the beginning of freedom for the Greeks. It was April 404.
In the following month the Athenian assembly, in the
presence of Lysander, voted to give thirty men the power to
revise the laws and reform the constitution. The Thirty promised to make the city clean and honourable and to impell the
citizens to justice and excel1ence. Plato, then twenty-four
years old, and many others, perhaps even Lysias (a speech
you think thirty can rule over many without terror?"
Critias now disarmed all the population except three
thousand of the more wealthy. All, except these three
thousand, could be arrested and executed without trial. As
Socrates later pointed out in his own trial, Critias sought to
dominate by involving as many as possible in his outrages.
Under the swords of the Spartan garrison he compelled the
three thousand to condemn the inhabitants of Eleusis to
death. When he could no longer tolerate the freespokenness
of Theramenes, he made the council his accomplice in his
death.
Sometime during the early winter of 404, Thrasybulus,
with about seventy followers, took the border fortress of Phyle
which overlooked the whole Attic plain to Athens. The
Thirty immediately responded, but were repulsed in a minor
skirmish. This minor set-back shattered their confidence and
showed their cowardice matched their brutality.
Sometime after this Thrasybulus, now with something like
seven hundred badly armed followers, took the section of the
51
�The College
Piraeus called Munychia. There in pitched battle the men of
the Piraeus, as they now came to be called, managed to defeat
the Thirty and the three thousand. Critias, first cousin to
Plato's mother, and Charmides, his uncle, were both killed.
Mindful that the enemy dead were citizens, the men of the
Piraeus did not strip their bodies. They sought instead to use
their victory to shake the by now largely forced loyalty of
many of the three thousand (especially those who had not
committed crimes) to the Thirty. Shortly after the battle the
three thousand removed the Thirty from office and elected
twelve to rule. The Thirty and their followers fled to Eleusis.
It was January, 403.
At this point Athens was no longer a living city but three
factions, one in the city, one in the Piraeus, and one in
Eleusis. From Eleusis the Thirty sent men whom they fancied ambassadors to Lysander, saying there had been a revolt
of the mob at Athens and requesting his help. Intent on surrounding the democrats at the Piraeus, Lysander managed the
forget did not cover the Thirty, "the twelve" who had committed their "executions," and several other categories. It was
contractual and could only be enforced upon appeal from in-
appointment of his brother as naval commander .and authorization for himself to hire mercenaries. But Pausanias, one of
the heroes of Phyle and Piraeus had been few. Lysias tfilderstood the deep struggle for self-respect Athenians waged during this time. "The Thirty killed my brother" he says, "they
even made it hard to bury him-! will not forget." 'Then,
under the Thirty, you were afraid," he tells the judges, "but
the kings of Sparta, alarmed at the thought that Lysander
might turn Athens into his private possession, convinced the
Ephors and the Spartan assembly to send him to Attica with
companies of the regular Spartan army-ostensibly to help
Lysander, but actually to prevent the destruction of the men
of the Piraeus. Pausanias' expedition, with the Spartan army,
amounted almost to a reopening of the war. In fact, Thebes
and Corinth refused to join, because they said Athens had not
violated any of her treaty agreements. With Spartan authority
to come to a settlement, Pausanias managed to negotiate an
agreement in which both the oligarchs of the city and the
democrats of the Piraeus agreed not to fight each other. At
Pausanias' insistence the oligarchs also agreed to return prop-
erty expropriated under the Thirty to its owners. The consitutuion of th" democracy was restored. It was probably August 403, fifteen months after the assembly had first elected
the Thirty.
For the next two years Athens lived in fear of renewed attempts to undo the democracy. In 401, upon rumours that
the Thirty at Eleusis were hiring mercenaries, the whole city
took arms and went out to meet them. During the ensuing
negotiations the men of the city killed the commanders from
Eleusis and managed a reconciliation with their followers,
with the help of their relatives and friends in Athens.
Either at this time or two years earlier, in August 403,
dividuals in court. (Andocides, for instance, appeals to it in
his speech "On the Mysteries" in 399, the year of the trial of
Socrates. )4
II
Athens After the Thirty and the Trial of Socrates
The atmosphere in Athens after the Thirty was somewhat
unreal. It had become a city that feared disturbances and
feared itself. It also remained in an important sense two cities.
When you spoke at Athens during this time you always addressed two audiences, the men of the city and the men of
the Piraeus. In these years Lysias speaks directly to a deep
sense of unease and complicity with terrifying events which
must have prevailed among the majority of Athenians. For
now there is nothing stopping you from voting the way you
desire, now there are no excuses."
Lysias attacks Theramenes, not distinguishing him in any
way from Critias. Theramenes had betrayed the trust the
people had shown him and brought the city down in starvation. Everything which had occurred in the assembly that
voted authority to the Thirty in the spring of 404 had been
arranged beforehand, secretly, between Lysander and
Theramenes. The vote had not been freely taken. If the
Thirty had not killed Theramenes the democracy would have
had to-a remark that, in its inverted way, pays a deep compliment to Theramenes.
In all the violence the only obvious palpable tie that remained between the factions was the gods; to them the city
now made appeal. Of the Thirty, Lysias said, "they wanted us
to participate in their shame instead of the gods, to substitute
complicity with them for our common relation to the gods."
He also described the Thirty as men who believed their power
to be firmer than the vengeance of the gods-something
quite like what the Melians had said to the Athenians.
When the men of the Piraeus addressed the three thousand
after their defeat in January 403, they spoke first of their
when Pausanias negotiated the reconciliation, every individual in Athens swore not to beiu grudges for anything in the
past. This meant nobody could prosecute for offenses under
common gods. Immediately after Pausanias had succeeded in
the Thirty, probably including the expropriation of property
which Pausanias had sought to undo. The agreement to
belonged to Athene, who lived on the Acropolis. Perhaps
Euthyphro exemplifies this new-found, somewhat showy
52
bringing peace between the factions Thrasybulus went up to
sacrifice on the Acropolis: he meant to reaffirm that Athens
�July, 1979
piety of Athens after the Thirty. It is full of unquestioning
assurance~and yet at a loss for words.
With this piety there is a forced and unconvincing blustering patriotism. Andocides does not blush to compare the
Athens of the year of Socrates' trial with the Athens of the
Persian wars. Anytus shows the brittle, touchy confidence of
these years when he takes "personal" {as we would say) offense at Socrates' observation {in the Meno) that the sons of
the pillars of the community had not turned out so well.
People yearn for conviction, but are incapable of it.
Socrates came from another world. The world of Athens
and the Greeks before the Peloponnesian War. At its outbreak
in 430 he was about 40, and already famous throughout at
least the Greek world. Men came from as far as Cyrene to
listen to him. 5 This is the Athens of the fifty years between
the Persian and the Peloponnesian War, the Athens that
neither feared itself or others. It was a city that did not fear
the unexpected. A city in which important things beside
crime happened on the streets. In fact, to that street life and
its casual encounters, to how one can live on the streets, Socrates is one of our greatest witnesses. I think his refusal to
wear sandals speaks of his feel for that life and of his insistence on its importance.
Another witness to that street life is Herodotus, whose
book, like the Odyssey, is also a book of manners.
Although-or perhaps because-careful and cautious,
Herodotus is confident and respectful of his readers' intelligence, of their capacity to think. Socrates has the same respect for the intelligence of the people he encounters. He
could tolerate the movement of other peoples' minds {when
they did actually move) and he knew that movement to be as
unexpected as truth. That is why he preferred to talk, to listen
as well as to speak, rather than to write or teach.
Unlike Herodotus, Socrates did not travel-as he remarks,
he never left town. Even when everybody went to a festival,
he remained behind with the cripples and beggars in the deserted silent city. Herodotus instead went everywhere with the
same ease that Socrates stayed at home. Both give an example
of the best kind of courage, the unassuming kind, the kind
that does not have to prepare a face to meet the faces that you
meet.
The Athenians of that time were used to living in a world
that strengthened them, in a world where the throbbing flow
of the sky was palpable, in a world that knew nuance, that
could see the shape of the human body because it knew it to
be more than the sum of its parts. Pericles says Athens was
largely free of the jealousy of the lives of others which contributed so much to the later hatred of Socrates. In the presence of Herodotus and Socrates one feels one's pretensions
like a kind of awkwardness that one could drop.
The only man who breathes this confidence during the
Pe1oponnesian war besides Socrates is Aristophanes. Aristophanes knows in the way he appears to know everything,
that in this time you can only breathe it in laughter, his kind
of laughter which serves for reverence and respect. Alcibiades
knew this confidence lived, but it always eluded his grasp
although he traveled the world to seek it-when he knew
perfectly well (but only Socrates could make him admit it)
you could only find it at home.
This kind of unassuming confidence cannot be experienced
without remembering Aeschylus, a man with strength enough
to have compassion for a god. Significantly, during the time
of the war it is only Aristophanes who can approach Prometheus with something equivalent, but at the same time
entirely different from, the pitiless tenderness of Aeschylus.
Most of the spectators and judges at Socrates' trial knew
nothing of this world of Athens before the Peloponnesian war
except what they saw before them in Socrates. Plato was~ born
in 428, Xenophon, who was not at the trial, perhaps in 435.
Meletos, Socrates' official accuser, was perhaps Plato's age,
certainly not much older; "a youthful defender of the youth,"
Socrates calls him. Ashamed at appearing in Court-for the
first time in his life, he emphasizes-Socrates at his trial feels
the weight of seventy years of living and the dignity they demand. He says he did not prepare a speech because it was not
something for a man of his age to do-especially since his
whole way of life with its love of justice speaks for him-in
his defense.
Plato knew, of course, that Socrates came from another
world; in fact one major part of his work is remembering and
recreating a world he had never entirely known, but which he
knew to be destroyed. Remember that Plato lost Socrates just
after the experience of the Thirty had forced him to acknowledge the dishonour of his family, perhaps not of his parents,
but of the brothers of one of his parents and of another close
relative. His repudiation of their acts is strong, and it awakens
admiration. For Plato, the trial of Socrates was as terrible as
the time of the Thirty.
Plato's love for Socrates is for a dead man; everything he
writes is about a man who has disappeared. Unlike Aristophanes, Plato never had to face Socrates with any of his
writings. His writings were meant to substitute for Socrates, to
replace him, to keep him alive once he was dead. This is the
hardest illusion to deal with when you read Plato, the illusion
that you are inside Socrates, that you are hearing his voice. It
is also the drama of reading Plato, who is an artist, a different
kind of artist than the poets, for he thought he was not an
artist.
With Xenophon it was different. He stayed outside of Socrates. In Xenophon you can hear how Socrates' vmce
53
�The College
sounded to somebody who did not entirely understand Socrates but who knew he did not understand him, who knew he
was out of his depth but had the courage to stay there-that is
rare. "I cannot forget him, I cannot forget him, the memories
keep overwhelming me," Xenophon says somewhere with
wonder. But unlike Plato, he never forgot they were
memones.
Socrates was charged with impiety. The specific charge,
which is preserved, with slight variations, by Xenophon and
Diogenes Laertius, was that he did not worship the gods that
the city worshipped and that he introduced new gods. The
second charge is that he destroyed the youth. There are other
examples of charges of asebeia with other charges attached to
them. For instance, Aspasia was charged with asebeia and
letting Pericles meet free women in her house. There is a text
of Aristotle that associates asebeia with disrespect for parents
and corrupting the youth. In any case it is clear that corruption of the youth was a prosecutable offense. 6
Plato's stress on corruption of the youth accords with Anytus' own views. In the only direct quotation from his speech
we have, Anytus told the judges he had not expected Socrates
to appear in court, but once he had, they had no choice but
to condemn him. Otherwise, he would ruin their sons. In
this Anytus agreed with the Thirty, who had actually attempted to order Socrates not to speak to the young.
Anytus' argument to the fathers to protect their sons is the
strongest kind of appeal. As Socrates points out in his questioning of Meletus, it makes him responsible for all the troubled youths in the city. How lucky they would be if I am the
perhaps even death. 8
These disturbed relations between futhers and sons were intensified by the war. Thucydides mentions the enthusiasm of
the youth for the war at its beginning. Pheidippides would
have been brought up in the country if it had not been for the
war.
Socrates was one of the few people in Athens willing to
look these troubles in the face rather than deny them and, by
denying them, wish them away. Anytus instead wanted to
wish them away, in somewhat the way locasta tried to talk
Oedipus out of what he had learned-and then committed
suicide. "Because I can help," Socrates says with something
like astonishment, "I am overwhelmed by their jealous rage,
as you put it, Euthyphro"-the word is ¢8ov€w used
elsewhere of the gods' resentment of overreaching human bemgs.
Anytus' relation to Meletus shows something of what Anytus thought the proper relation of the elder generation should
be to the younger. He put Meletus up to charging Socrates,
Meletus who was just a kid in Socrates' astonished but fearful
eyes. How did he dare accuse him of impiety? Socrates asked,
Did he not know what he was getting into? With a charge of
impiety anything could happen.
Meletus was one of those young men for whom the world
is unreal, for whom, as Socrates said of others, everything is
thetaerus, where Pisthetaerus manages to show him, by con-
upside down. He was one of those youths who wished to be
serious but did not dare to be, who wanted to be a hero but
feared the risks. Anytus offered him the easy way out, the
illusion of self-respect, the easy way· to grow up: the role of
protector of the city and of his peers. Socrates is fierce when
he questions Meletus, catching all the irresponsibility of that
pretended earnestness. Anytus trapped Meletus with his
conceit-and to all intents and purposes he ruined him.
Contrast Anytus' manipulation of Meletus with Socrates'
handling of Glaucon, Plato's brother, as Xenophon tells it.
Like Plato, Glaucon at twenty wanted more than anything
else to go into politics. Uncontrollable and the despair of his
family, he was making a fool of himself climbing up to speak
in public, and doing the other things you did to have a politi-
versation not unlike those of Socrates in Xenophon, that he
cal career at Athens.
belongs on the Thracian front. Aristophanes means to show
here-and it is probably meant as a compliment to
Socrates-that the youth can be talked out of these wild fan-
Socrates cared about him because of Plato and because of
Glaucon's uncle Charmides, and because he must have had
all the charm of intelligence awakening. (There is always
cies if there is anyone around who knows how to take the
something important to be said for young men who dare
time to talk to him. (Incidentally, in our world, where we do
not call things by their proper names, the would-be father-
make fools of themselves in defiance of their family-as long
as it is on their own-and not to please somebody else.)
Socrates asked Glaucon some questions which incidentally
show something that I do not think is apparent from Plato,
that Socrates had a fairly extensive knowledge of the facts of
Athenian politics. He asked how long could Athens live off
only one who ruins them, Socrates remarks.
There is plenty of evidence of disturbed relations in Athens
between fathers and sons during the Peloponnesian War. The
son of Pericles in Xenophon speaks matter-of-factly of Athens
as a place where sons held their fathers in contempt. 7 You
remember the struggle between Pheidippides and Strepsiades
in the Clouds, where there is little question of the father holding the respect of his son. In the Birds there is a scene between a youth who desires to murder his father and Pis-
killers pass for revolutionaries.) There is in Xenophon also a
remarkable conversation of Socrates with his son who is
deeply angry with his mother. In all this we should keep in
mind that disrespect for parents carried severe penalties,
54
�July, 1979
the agricultural production of the Attic countryside, how
much food did she need in general, what were her expenses,
what were her revenues-the list reads like a catalogue of the
facts Pericles had at the ready when he spoke to the Athenians.
Glaucon cannot answer any of these questions. At one
point he answers, "But, Socrates, I can make a guess." "No,
when you know we will talk." Then Socrates asks him something else, "Why don't you run your uncle's estates?"
Glaucon answers innocently, "Because I cannot persuade
him to entrust them to me." "You cannot persuade your uncle, but you think you can persuade the city!"
This is pretty much the opposite of what Anytus did to
Meletus. It is the kind of humiliating conversation which
teaches the difference between dreams and facts, between illusion and life-without learning that distinction (and it is
not something you learn in the head), you live your whole
life among the shades.
Politics is also a struggle to distinguish the actual from illusions, enemies from friends, war from peace, what you can
do from what you cannot, and, most importantly, aggression
from goodwill and life from death. In the fifteen years preceding the trial of Socrates Athens had clearly failed in that
struggle, over and over again misjudging situations. When
the consequences of those misjudgements turned to disaster,
it grew difficult to put up with Socrates: he reminded people
of too much. Without wanting to he made Anytus feel he was
a bad father, and that there might be a connection between
the kind of father he was and the kind of political leader he
was. More generally he made people feel they might have
been responsible for what had happened to them. Or, as he
puts it to the judges, "You cannot hurt me but you will hurt
yourselves putting me to death."
Nobody in public life after Pericles, and probably not even
Pericles, had been able to make people feel responsible for
what happened. Socrates made them feel responsible because
he came in between the relations between generations. You
remember how he says, "if I went abroad and had conversations, the fathers would drive me into exile; and if I did not,
the sons would." In Athens it had taken collusion between
generations, between Meletus and Anytus, to prosecute him.
For it is the relations between generations which determine
whether cities live or die or merely survive.
People had gone through disaster; they had seen their
fathers and brothers and children and friends killed. They had
taken that, but they could not take the dim but unmistakable
sense they had in the presence of Socrates that these disasters
were of their own doing, that these disasters had to do with
how they thought and talked and what they were. When Socrates told them they took better care of their slaves than their
friends, of their bodies than their lives, he reminded them,
quite unwittingly, of that.
Because he knew his own smallness Socrates struck other
men as grand, boastful, even arrogant. Because he took his
own measure, he appeared to tower over other men who had
trouble telling themselves from gods. And this was intolerable, especially after the events of the last ten years had held
up their smallness to them. A generation before they had
laughed at him and respected him-now in the narrowness of
defeat, possessed by memories they could not face, they killed
him-because they feared themselves in him.
l. For the relation of The Clouds to Socrates, Bruno Snell, "Das fruehste
Zeugnis ueber Sokrates," Philologus 97, 1948, 125-134; Wolfgang Schmid,
"Das Sokratesbild der Wolken," Philologus 99, 1948, 209-228; T. Gelzer,
"Aristophanes und sein Sokrates," Museum Helveticum !3, 1956, 65-93.
2. On the sources for this period, S. Accame, "Le fonti di Diodoro per Ia
guerra Deceleica," Rendiconti della R. Accademia dei Lincei (Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche) l4 (sixth series), 1938, 347-451;
"Trasibulo c i nuovi frammenti delle Elleniche di Ossirinco," RiviSta di
filologia classica 28, 1950, 30-49.
3. J. Hatzfeld, "Socrate au prod:s des Arginuses," Revue des Etudes Anciennes 42, !940, 165.
4. For the character of this agreement, Ugo Enrico Paoli, Studi sul processo
Attica, Padua, 1938, 121-142, especially 122; also, Studi di diritto Attica,
Florence, 1930.
5. J. Burnet, Plato's Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates and Crito, Oxford, 1970
(orig. ed 1924), especially V and the commentary to the "Apology".
6. For the charge, A. Menzel, Untersuchungen zum Sokrates Processe,
Abhandlung der Sitzungsber. d. kais. Akd. zu Wien 145, 1901-1902, especially 7-29. Also E. Derenne, Les proces d'impiete intentes aux philosophes d
Athfmes au yme et au JVrne sif!cles avant J.-C., Liege, 1930; N. Casini, "II
processo di Socrate," Iura 8, 1957, 101-120. For the association of asebeia
with disrespect for parents, Aristotle "On Virtues and Vices," 1251" 31:
lxfJ8{3eta J.LBv 7j 1rep't 8eoV~ 11'A'TJJ.LJ.LBAeux Ka't 1rep't fiai.J.Lova~ i) Ka't 1rep't
ToV~ KO'.TOtXoJ.LBvov~ Ka't 'TT'ep't yovels Ka't 1rep'i 7ratpl.fia. Also J. Lipsius
(with Meier and Schoemann) Das Attische Recht und Rechtsverfahren, Leipzig, !908, 359.
7. On the relation of Xenophon's "Defense of Socrates" to Plato's "Defense," U.V. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, "Die Xenophontische Apologie,"
Hermes 32, 1897, 99-106; J. Mesk. "Die Anklagerede des Polykrates gegen
Sokrates," Wiener Studien 32 (1910}, 56-84; E. Gebhardt, Polykrates
Anklage gegen Sokrates, Diss. Frankfurt. 1957. For the attitudes of Socrates'
judges, see Larissa Bonfante and Leo Raditsa, "Socrates' Defense and his
Audience," The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, 15, 1978,
17-23.
8. For the death penalty for disrespect of parents (KaKWrrew~ yovBwv
ypmpi)) Lysias, 13, 91. As with many crimes, the penalty for disrespect of
parents was probably not specified (for leeway in Attic legal procedure after
conviction, U.E. Paoli, Processo Attica, Padua, 1938, 86-89). Recent scholars think disrespect for parents was usually punished with partial loss of citizen rights. (0.nJ.Lf.a) for life, for instance with loss of the right to hold office
and speak in the assembly-but not with the loss of private rights, such as the
right to hold property. L. Beauchet, Histoire du droit priv€ de Ia Republique
Athenienne, Paris, 1897, I, 362-371; A.R.W. Harrison, The Law of Athens,
Oxfmd, !968. !, 78-8!.
55
�German Resistance to Hitler:
Elites and Election
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
It is my task today to start with German resistance to
Nazism, such as it was. The title of the whole conference is
"The Role of the Educated Elite" and the subtitle "An examination of the response of the professional, intellectual,
and religious communities to the rise of Nazism and the
Holocaust." Yesterday's speakers have addressed themselves,
among other things, to intellectual and political antecedents
and developments, and social or sociological conditions and
preconditions of the Nazi period. We also had a brilliant discussion of some goings-on in the bureaucracy. It is now my
task to say something about German resistance.
In thinking about the subtitle, I stumbled over the word
"communities." It gave me pause. It sounded so American,
so un-German, so inapplicable to the German social
configuration-and yet it was Germans who made so much
of Gemeinschaft, community; as, for instance, contrasted
with Gesellschaft, or society. The togetherness of community
or Gemeinschaft was the soulful thing, the thing engaging the
inner man, the thing which could cure or counteract the ills
of society, Gesellschaft.
Perhaps there's the rub-and a method of access to the
subject. If one proceeds by word association, by listening to
overtones and compounds, one may get into it. The rub
seems to be that Gemeinschaft or Gemeinschaftserlebnis, the
experience of community, did not, on the whole, provide the
human cohesion that acted as an effective barrier to inhumanity. No, on the whole not: but what barrier, what resistance there was, did depend on community or communities,
on family and on friendship. Perhaps what is awkward-and
helpful-about the subtitle is that it elicits the difference between, say, America and Germany, certainly the Germany
before 1945.
The point of difference seems to me to be that Germany
had no professional or intellectual communities, or had at
This is the somewhat shortened text of a paper presented at a conference,
sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, on The
Holocaust: The Role of the Educated Elite, held at San Jose, California,
March 27 to 29, 1978.
56
best some pockets of solidarity in the professions, or some degree of professional ethos. Community did exist in somewhat
higher degree among co-religionists and that may have been a
difference in kind as well as degree. Christians speak of the
communion of saints; and the German word for that is
Gemeinschaft der Heiligen: Gemeinschaft here has to do for
both communion and community. By "communion of
saints" is meant the community of the faithful. But it is salutary, not just an archaism, that the sacramental word, the
name of the sacrament, is kept in English. It may have contributed to the German perdition that they only had one word
for the religious and the secular community, that that word,
charged with religious connotation and increasingly perverted, was appropriated for the paramountcy of the People's
Community, the Volksgemeinschaft. The other communities
the Nazis broke up and atomised and used the atoms to fill
the totalitarian system. That is what totalitarianism is and
does. It absorbs the de-structured or destroyed.
As you know, all parties, unions, and associations but one,
the National Socialist, were destroyed, that is, abolished or
nazified. Only the churches remained.
Why did not a sense of danger make the opponents to Hitler and his victims into a community? There may be several
reasons: Hitler's uncanny gift for timing and deception; an
inadequate discernment, among his opponents and victims,
for seeing where the greatest danger lay; an inadequate talent
for apprOpriate and effective combination; economic insecurity; an almost nationwide resenbnent of the Treaty of Versailles and the Western powers which had imposed it and
were still enforcing it-and looked like giving to Hitler what
they had denied to his predecessors. This was probably Hitler's strongest card in the months and years of consolidation
of power. His promise of removing "the Shackles of Versailles," getting rid of reparations and removing
unemployment-promises which he seemed, surprisingly, to
be able to keep-helped him immensely and hindered the
formation of early and effective oppositional groupings.
And then, of course, there was a whole series of punitive
decrees and laws, brought in with breathtaking speed, which
punished any banding together and any protest or dissent. A
legal profession brought up on an overemphasis on positive
�July, 1979
law and without a tradition of natural law (a lack probably
due to the prevalence of Lutheranism), applied these laws,
decrees, and regulations-even if many members of the profession did their best to circumvent them or to interpret them
in ways favourable to the accused. And then there were the
extra-legal means of coercion, concentration camps and, in
the summer of 1934, the blood purge ostensibly directed
against rebellious Nazis, but in fact also against anti-Nazis,
such as the Berlin head of the Catholic Action.
The records of the Gestapo and Security Service show
where resistance persisted, where groups that had avoided
Gleichschaltung continued to cohere in some sort of fashion
and continued not to conform. The Secret Police files are the
chief source for what resistance there was.
On the subject of sources, the following needs to be said:
they have to be read in the original, because the business of
wrong translations goes on and seems to be getting worse.
Because of these mistranslations there is a risk that written
history will seriously misrepresent what happened.
Let me give you an example. On 29 April 1937 Hitler addressed a gathering of Party Kreisleiter or District Leaders. It
contained what is, to me, the most telling and-on the sound
recording which I have heard-most frightening utterance by
Hitler on the subject of the jews. Lucy Dawidowicz in her
book The War Against the Jews 1933-45 even translates it
correctly, but gets the setting wrong. She calls it "a speech
before a regional NSDAP meeting. " 1 The important point,
however, is precisely that it was only the medium level party
hierarchs-a section of the Nazi elite, if you will-who were
thus addressed, in confidence, which is why the speech was
only found and published long after the war. It was not generally known at the time. The significant paragraph was a
response by Hitler tO a question in a newspaper why more was
not being done against the Jews. Its gist was the inexpediency
of uttering a clear and premature challenge to the enemy one
means to destroy. Before this audience of Party Leaders Hitler
explained, in a voice rising with emotion, how he does not
tell his enemy to fight, but calls on his own inner wisdom to
maneuver him into a corner before striking the final blow.
The translators of that passage, in a book containing some
background papers prepared by members of the Munich Institut fiir Zeitgeschichte for the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt
in the middle sixties, have Hitler telling his audience that he
shouts louder and louder as he tells his enemy what he has in
mind for him. 2 There are probably two reasons for this misrepresentation; the translators' insufficient knowledge of the
subject and their failure to notice a pair of square brackets
that show that Hitler on the sound recording shouts louder
and louder as he tells this select audience of his internal
dialogue: "and now, wisdom .... " 3 In the case of Hitler but
also in that of Goebbels, historians should hear the original,
not just read a transcript. In this case, however, punctuation
showed what happened.
If that speech had been generally known at the time, if it
had been published-let alone broadcast-in April 1937,
many jews would not have waited until November 1938 before beleaguering foreign consulates to get out of Germany,
now an unmistakable .death trap. Because they did not know,
despite the Nuremberg Laws and everything else that had
happened and been written, it took the pogrom or Kristallnacht on November 10, 1938, to step up the rate of emi. gration.
Like the victims the bystanders, including the "educated
elite," also did not know about the threat of physical extinction. Before Hitler had come to power I had read Mein
Kampf, secretly, because of its obscenity (sex, sadism, an obsession with syphilis and the "racial" pollution of blood) and
other objectionable features that, to put it mildly, made it
unsuitable for a nice young girl. Among other things that
reading prompted me to leave the country in the summer of
1934, at the age of 16. But put yourselves in the position of
fathers of families, perhaps aging fathers with unexportable
professions, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis and
unemployment everywhere and restrictions on emigration not
only to the Western democracies but also Mandatory Palestine, and you will see why many stayed so long-many too
long. As for Hitler's old book-few seemed to know how seriously to take it.
You will also see why friendly and decent gentiles did not
think of removing Hitler by force until 1938 and why the
final plot did not happen, and miscarry, until 1944.
But to turn more specifically to the reactions of the--educated elite in Germany, let me start with the professional
academics~or rather with the leading luminaries in the
politically and ethically most relevant disciplines. There was
quite a spectrum, from instant and continuing collaboration
to instant and persistent recalcitrance and resistance. There
was also early collaboration, or at least toleration, and later
resistance, and vice versa. In some cases there was more than
instant co1laboration, there was anticipation. And remember,
the student organizations were nazified before the Nazis came
to power. Much of academic youth, inasmuch as it was political, was in the vanguard of the Nazi Movement and exercised pressure on the professors._ Not all students were
Nazis, and there were many spontaneous nationalists and
even some Nazis on the faculties. The organized student
body, however, was far more advanced in Nazism than its
teachers. This readiness to embrace Nazism among students
may have had something to do with the economic crisis and
academic unemployment as well as with the restlessness of
youth. Speedy faculty adaptation to the new regime was
enforced from below as well as above, from the students as
weB as the Party and government. Some professors, many of
them, were responsive to pressures, including at times physical violence, from the students and the younger faculty.
The leading German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, was
not, one would think, intimidated; more probably he thought
his Moment had come with the momentous upheaval in the
country. He was probably not mainly or merely or primarily
subject to the mental climate prevailing in 193 3 because of
his philosophy. I think it was his relationship with language
that was his temporary undoing when in 193 3 he made a
nauseating Nazi speech as the newly-installed Rector of
Freiburg University• and when later, in the fall of that fateful
57
�The College
year, he fulsomely endorsed-as did the prominent theologian Emanuel Hirsch-the government's decision to leave
the League of Nations and to put that decision to a plebiscite
that won the nation's overwhelming support. 5
Heiclegger's philosophical language was so deep, his spirit
dwelt on such heights, that he could be badly mistaken about
what happened in the middle ground of politics where
people's livelihoods and lives are at stake. I would say that he
had a tin ear for everyday political language-and he had
never read Mein Kampf. This was, admittedly, a distasteful
reading-but I think it was a duty, certainly for anyone who
took part in the political dialogue.
There was a general weakening of the sense of language
among the educated; not only because political emotions
were inflamed and the language in which they were expressed
of Holy German Art, even if the wicked and shallow West
were to make the German People and Holy Roman Empire
fall apart, or the patriotic and anti-Eastern harangue of King
Heinrich, Henry the Fowler, in Lohengrin, that are the most
objectionable. What strikes me as bound to be either acutely
uncomfortable or dangerously de-sensitizing is the combination of massive rejection of single figures that resemble
Wagner's "Jew" and the incestuous narcissism of the rejectors, the heroes and heroines, whether human or divine, or
half-and-half. The desensitizing language in which all this is
transacted leaves those who submit to the experience with an
impairment of their sense of language or linguistic judgment.
Whoever sits through a work by Wagner without at least
tended to extremes, but also because nineteenth century phi-
some reservation or revulsion is bound to be brutalized by the
exposure. Can opera or music drama really have such an effect? Yes, but, of course, mainly on people whose German is
losophers, from Hegel to Nietzsche, had disdained common
comprehensibility and played their own games with language
only _mitigating circumstance about the Anglo-American and
which, in Nietzsche's case, was often aphoristic or poetic. But
in a nation as given to music as Germany, music provided
the chief corrupter: Richard Wagner.
In all the discussion of Wagner's contribution to Nazism
(and we know what a Wagner-addict Hitler was ever since his
attendance, in his teens, at a performance of Rienzi in Linz)
and in all the discussion of Wagner's anti-Semitism, too little
attention has been paid, so far, to his destruction of the sense
of language (and of shame) among his compatriots. Whatever
he served up as language (written, remember, by himself: he
did not employ librettists), with its compulsive alliterations
and hypnotic music, cast its spell, its destructive spell, on the
music-loving educated elite-to the extent that it went to the
opera and did not avoid Wagner. Remember Mime in the
Ring? He is the excessively unattractive foster-father of Siegfried. He has also been interpreted as an incarnation of heartless capitalism. Remember the terms and manner of Siegfried's rejection of him before storming out, free at last, into
the world? Take Mime himself. Although he is a mere
mythological dwarf, he sounds exactly like "the jew" who, in
Wagner's article on "The Jew in Music," is said to be incapa-
ble of human speech and therefore also of music. Everyone
knows about Beckmesser in The Mastersingers, that sunny
work (when compared with the gloom of the others): he was
meant to represent Eduard Hanslick, Wagner's "half-Jewish"
critic. What people do not seem to realize or to have, so-to-
up to understanding the language of the work. That is the
Jungian new wave of Wagnerism. Its followers and afficionados know not what they hear.
The Berlin opera celebrated Hitler's arrival in power, in
early !933, with a Wagner opera. In my remaining months
in Berlin-until june !934-I got most of my operatic education: it included quite a dose of Wagner. I am grateful for
the experience.
While finishing high school in Holland after leaving Germany, I noticed that other "intellectual" young German refugees, including especially Jewish Germans, were not only
reading Thomas Mann, with whom I was acquainted, but
also Stefan George, whom I did not know. For me it was the
beginning of an interest in George which was both philological and political. I had not got much beyond Christian
Morgenstern before, in German poetry.
Stefan George is not much in favor now, largely because
he and his circle are rightly regarded as "elitist." There are
those who consider him a counterpart to Wagner. They are
wrong, I think. There may be snobbery in the Wagner cult,
but one can hardly call its devotees an elite.
George's poetry had power, although it strikes many as
forced; it helped to keep the language truthful and forceful.
The George Circle was elitist and it included Jews. They left
the country as did George himself. He evaded Nazi approaches to him by going to Switzerland in !933, where he
died in December. Led by brothers called Stauffenberg, some
speak, any gut-reaction against, is the frightening text of
Beckmesser's garbled version of the prize song in Act III. I do
not see how any solid citizen, Bildungsbiirger, or opera buff
can sit through that scene of the good people of Nuremberg
all turning against the limping plagiarist who delivers a
nonsense-text full of frightening metaphors, among other
things about hanging and deprivation of air. True, few people
really hear or know the text-but that is what Wagner, as
always, wrote first, read to others, and published separately.
What no-one can help noticing in this scene of ''radiant joy"
and apotheosis of peoplehood is the all-against-one scenario
on the sun-drenched Festwiese outside Nuremberg. It seems
tion in listeners who could be expected to share Stauffenberg's
detestation of the regime and, possibly, his willingness to take
to me it is not so much Hans Sachs's aria about the survival
risks to remove it. Stauffenberg made it his business to brief
58
young disciples took care to foil the new German government's attempt to claim George as its poet laureate at his fu-
neral. Claus Stauffenberg was the man who tried to kill Hitler
on 20 July 1944. Until their execution for complicity in the
plot to remove the Nazi regime, Berthold and Claus Stauffenberg were George's literary executors.
To denounce the regime and rally opponents, Claus Stauffenberg recited "The AntiChrist," a poem not in George's
usual hellenic and pagan manner. This was not just a case of
using an appropriate old poem of George's to elicit recogni-
�July, 1979
himself on the theology of resistance and tyrannicide, both
Catholic and Protestant, in order to overcome the conscientious scruples in the pious men he recruited for the conspiracy. It may sound strange that this needed doing. But it is not
strange if you put yourselves in the shoes of a Catholic or
Calvinist or Lutheran. The Lutherans especially had the
greatest difficulties of conscience. Gestapo interrogators knew
the connection between religion and resistance. They always
asked those they questioned about church connections and
religious ties.
I am inclined to say, after what I have seen and heard of
the surprisingly pervasive presence of Christian faith among
those who did resist, among the educated elite as well as
among common folk, that Bonhoeffer was right in his statement, in his Ethics and elsewhere, about the rediscovery of
the Christian· foundation of Western culture brought about by
the attack of the neo-pagan barbarians.
It was the turn or return of so many men of conscience to
their faith that made Helmuth James von Moltke-a landowner and lawyer far removed from George and his circle,
though acquainted with the lawyer Berthold Stauffenberg...,-work quite systematically to bring Catholics into his own
group of planners for a better Germany. He may not have
been far from the truth in a letter to his wife written during
and after the trial that sentenced him to death: he commented
sardonically that he was dying as a martyr for St. Ignatius of
Loyola. A Protestant, he had had the temerity to bridge the
denominational gap and to bring three Jesuits into his circle.
One of them, Alfred Delp, was sentenced to death in the
same trial. And it was not just the judge's, Roland Freisler's,
personal aversion to Jesuits that caused his diatribes and death
sentences. Hitler himself had, on the one hand, officially deplored and, on the other, energetically exploited the religious
schism in Germany. To oppose him effectively one had to
overcome the division between Protestants and Catholics.
It is surprising that the cultural historians of our time have
paid so little attention to the factor of religious faith and
theological foundation, and only little more to its attenuation
and perversion. An Israeli, Uriel Tal, 6 seems to be the notable and laudable exception. He limits himself to the Second
Reich, but within those limits he traces, with great seriousness and subtlety, the differences between "Christian" and
anti-Christian anti-Semitism and shows the deadly danger of
the replacement of the first by the second.
Attention to or neglect of this aspect may be a matter of
generations and personal experience. The generation of
Thomas Mann and Max Horkheimer saw the significance of
religion in the Jives of those who had it, in times of pressure
and persecution. The younger generation that stayed in Germany and did not succumb to the National Socialist pseudoreligion saw it too.
The small group of student rebels who were executed in
Munich in 1943 for a campaign of anti-Nazi leaflets deplored
the failure, the sins of omission of the educated majority.
They pleaded for a recognition of guilt and for an uncompromising struggle against Hitler and his all too many helpers. In their indictment of the most~detestable tyranny the
German people had ever put up with, they mentioned the
misguidance, the regimentation, the revolutionizing and
anaesthetizing of a whole young generation, in order to make
it into godless, shameless, and conscienceless exploiters and
murderers. Their~at first cautious, at least circumspect, and
finally quite reckless-campaign against the regime ended in
a proud and willing expiation on the guillotine. One professor
died with them. It was he who had undertaken to help them
to get something like a real education-both in his classes
and in extra-mural meetings involving some of the leading
figures of Munich's displaced intelligentsia, such as Theodor
Haecker and Carl Muth, the former editor of the Catholic
monthly Hoch/and 7 Among these students, too, there was
the realization that an education without a metaphysical and
religious dimension was making their academic generation
into tools of the regime. They made up the deficiency as best
they could and were fortunate in finding older mentors to
help them.
"Elites" are apt to be faithless. The part of the educated
elite which resisted the Nazis found its faith again in surprising measure. And I think there are enough records left, if one
knows how to read them, to show the role not only of a
proper education, but of faith, in a person's ability to resist
the devil and his works.
Perhaps I should not end without saying that these eoneh!sions were reached by an agnostic observer.
l. Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-45, New York 1977,
488.
2. Helmut Krausnick and Martin Broszat, Anatomy of the SS State. Translated by Dorothy Long and Marion Jackson. London 1970, 51-2.
3. "Es spricht der FUhrer": 7 exemplarische Hitler-Reden. Hcrausgegehen
und erlii.utcrt von Hildegard von Kotze und Helmut Krausnick, unter Mitwirkung von F. A. Krummacher, Giitersloh 1966, l48.
4. Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitiit, Brcslau 1934, 22. For a
fuller treatment of the subject see the texts of two lectures, "Student Rebellion and the Nazis," St. John's College Press, Annapolis 1972.
5. Bekenntnis der Professoren an den deutschen Universitiiten und Hochschulen zu Adolf Hitler und dem nationalsozialistischen Staat. Oberreieht vom
Nationalsozialistsehen Lehrerbund Deutsehland/Sachsen. (Dresden, n.d.,
pp. 13-14 and 36-37 [Heidegger] and 15-17 and 38-40 [Hirsch]).
6. Urie1 Tal, Christians and Jews in Gennany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870-1914. Translated by Jonathan Jacobs. Ithaca,
N.Y. 1975.
7. See "Student Rebellion and the Nazis," (Note 4); also loge Scholl, Students against Tyranny: The Resistance of the White Rose, Munich 19421943. Translated by Arthur R. Schultz, Middleton, Conn. 1970; Christian
Petry, Studenten au{s Schafott: Die Weisse Rose und ihr Scheitem, Munich
1968.
59
�The College
BETWEEN THE OLD AND THE NEW
The people had been misled, but so
An Autobiography, by R. G. Collingwood. 167 pages. Oxford University had their leaders. They had been taught
by philosophical "realists," obsessed by
Press 1939.
the task of refuting the "idealism" of
Green and Bradley. According to ColIn 1933, at the end of his life, the pro- lingwood, Green and Bradley were not
fessional English philosopher R.G. Col- "idealists"; their school was critical and
lingwood wrote a short autobiography. derived from Hume. Its criticism did not
He called it the story of the thought of a paralyze, though, since "it sent out into
man whose business was thinking. It is public life a stream of ex-pupils who carnot, however, directed to others in the ried with them the conviction that phibusiness. Its audience is the moderately losophy, and in particular the philoswell-educated public which cares more ophy they had learnt at Oxford, was an
about the front page than philosphers' important thing, and that their vocation
disputes. The Autobiography records was to put it into practice."
The realists held that "knowing makes
how Collingwood came to understand
the importance of the link between the no difference to what is known." Their
front page and philosophy. A revolution model for all knowledge thus was those
in the teaching of philosophy at English disciplines which give a formal, quanuniversities had broken that link around titative description of relations among
the turn of the century. The conse- phenomena but do not say anything
quence, he learned to believe, had been qualitative about the phenomena themthe corruption of public life.
selves. These disciplines make up modThe Autobiography itself reforges that ern natural science. Just as the "realists"
link. It contains a clearly argued account understood modern natural science to
of the English philosophy of his youth. reduce natural things to a common,
It leads us step by step through a life of mathematical standard, so they wanted
thought on apparently unrelated to reduce human things to some comsubjects-philosophy, history, archae- mon, formal standard. Traditional moral
ology-yet shows us how all his pur- philosophy, it now appeared, had been
suits turned out to be parts of a single based on a mistake, because it went beconcern. And it is written with the pas- yond a formal description of moral besion of a decent man whose country havior and claimed to teach students
had, in the year he wrote, forfeited its how to be moral. "Realism" set to work
on a "new kind of moral philosophy,
decency.
The process of corruption had been purely theoretical, in which the workgradual. Newspapers had stopped ings of the moral consciousness should
educating active citizens; instead they be scientifically studied as if they were
had started to treat public affairs as spec- the movements of the planets, and no attacle and turned their readers into voy- tempt made to interfere with them."
The new moral philosophy came to
eurs. The public had learned "to forgo
that full, prompt, and accurate informa- nothing. The realists soon discovered
tion on matters of public importance that the very words and categories they
which is the indispensable nourishment used to describe "moral behavior" were
of a democratic society." It had devel- shot though with qualitative, "unscienoped a "disinclination to make decisions tific" assumptions. The notion of "moral
in the public-spirited frame of mind behaviorism" was, as B.F. Skinner has
which is a democratic society's life- most recently demonstrated, a contradicblood." Moral debasement had culmi- tion in terms. In the hands of the "realnated in the betrayal first of Abyssinia ists," every part of philosophy suffered
and then of Spain and Czechoslovakia. the same fate. Even the theory of knowlAppeasement of Fascism abroad, Col- edge, where "realism" had begun,
lingwood concluded bitterly, had been turned out to involve self-contradiction.
accompanied by surrender to Fascism at How could a theory of knowledge be
home, for the essence of Fascism was the developed on the implicit assumption of
politics of naked self-interest, the appeal the impossibility of actual knowledge?
to fear or greed.
As the masters of realism fell silent, its
60
students learned that philosophy was a
"futile parlour game" which could not
help men to live. Taught to reject reason,
the British ruling class could only turn to
passion for direction. They had been
trained, Collingwood lamented, "as the
potential dupes of every adventurer in
morals or politics, commerce or religion
who should appeal to their emotions
and promise them private gains .... "
Collingwood rejected "realism" on
philosophical grounds before he became
fully aware of its political consequences.
Among the best passages of the book are
those which recount how he groped his
way to an initial break with the realists.
He brought his experience as an archaeologist and historian to bear on
their chosen field of logic.
Both the realists and their opponents,
Collingwood came to see, held that truth
inhered in propositions which were in
turn understood as analagous to a
grammatical sentence. Thus the realists
were "intuitionists," maintaining the
existence of a one-to-one correspondence between the factual truth and
its expression in a logical prop<?:~ition.
By asking himself what he was doing
when he excavated a Roman site or contemplated the supreme ugliness of the
Albert Memorial as he walked through
Kensington Gardens every day, Collingwood came to the view that the
propositional model of truth was a fallary. Before you could judge the truth of
a proposition you had to know what
question the proposition had been advanced to answer. Until he could comprehend what the architect of the Albert
Memorial had thought he was doing,
Collingwood's aesthetic judgment, formulated perhaps in respect to quite different problems, would be unfounded.
Collingwood was not preaching relativism; he did not mean that aU "questions" were equally intelligent or appropriate, much less that anything, no matter how muddled, could be justified as
an "answer." By his logic of questiOn
and answer, he insisted on carrying into
the elements of rational discourse the
principle that you have to understand
what is being said before you can refute
it or agree with it.
When the realists refuted their predecessors' "errors," it usually meant that
they misunderstood them because they
misunderstood what it was their predecessors had been trying to do. Those
who refuted the ancients' "theories of
moral obligation" translated f:iel as
though it contained the notion of moral
�July, 1979
obligation. It was, Collingwood contended, like saying "trireme" meant
"steamer" and then proving that the ancients did not understand steamers.
Collingwood found support for the
logic of question and answer in much of
the philosophic tradition, notably in the
Baconian-Cartesian scientific method, in
Plato and in Kant. Contemporary philosophy, however, was dominated by
propositional logic; it had taken a philosopher who was also an historian to
see the difficulty. It is therefore not surprising that for Collingwood history became the discipline which served as his
model, as natural science had been the
model of the realists. The historian, after
all, worked by setting himself a series of
questions whose purpose was to understand the actions of the past. The historian tried to put himself in the place of
other men, now dead, and think their
thoughts. This reliving was never total;
the historian relived Caesar's thoughts
on the banks of the Rubicon while remembering that he was not himself actually Caesar. But though the reliving
was "incapsulated," kept apart from the
historian's life in the present, it was
real.
Collingwood brought philosophy and
history close together. The study of a
problem, he argued, was actually the
study of the history of thought about
that problem, and the study of history
was actually the study of past thought.
He might then appear to be simply an
historicist, supplanting philosophy with
history as the subject for rational attention. Quite the opposite seems true to
me. The characteristic mark of historicism is that time changes everything,
even human consciousness. Consequently each age is unique and the experiences and thoughts of its men cannot be recalled by the changed minds of
later generations. Collingwood's absolute assurance that re-enactment of
thought is possible, that time can be
crossed as readily as space, is diametrically opposed to the- historicist view. If
anything, that assurance could be questioned. Is that "capsule" in which reliving takes place, really airtight, i.e. timetight? On what prior assumptions does
this assumption rest?
In turning to history and the logic of
question and answer in reply to a philosophy of propositional logic that based
itself on natural science, Collingwood
was trying to "save the phenomena,"
the way human things appear to human
beings and the way humans talk about
them. He understood the futility and
perversity of studying human beings by
pretending they were not human. In this
case, the measurer and the measured are
the same-the human mind. A standard
alien to the measured is alien to the
measurer as well. A mathematical description of moral "behavior" does not
help someone with a moral problem,
though it may tell him the untruth that
there is no such thing as a moral problem. Through history, Collingwood tried
to save philosophy from sterility and the
language of human discourse-of feelings and judgments, of praise and
blame-from degradation.
For us, Collingwood's Autobiography
raises disturbing questions. We seem
more confused and cynical than Collingwood's England in some ways. His
shock at newspapers which substitute
entertainment for sober information
seems quaint today. Our political language is poorer than England's in 1940.
just compare the debates of the 1976
presidential campaign, with their timid
reliance on social science jargon and
meaningless accumulations of incomprehensible statistics, with parliamentary speeches of the thirties and forties.
Or consider the Mayor of New York who
followed contemporary convention in
finding no epithet worse than "senseless" for the murderous bombing of
Fraunces Tavern.
Even when moral issues are faced directly, the terms in which they are
treated often blur them beyond recognition. A high government official extends
the term "political prisoner" to criminals
whose poverty may have influenced
them to commit their crimes. The same
official uses "racismrr for insufficient
sensitivity to the problems of racial
minorities. Others extend the term to
mean those who oppose policies of race
preference. (And the United Nation
smears as "racist" anyone who defends
the existence of a Jewish state.)
Recently, however, our academic philosophy has begun to show lively concern for moral and political issues. Books
with titles like A Theory of Justice and
Taking Rights Seriously have had great
success outside departments of philosophy. They have even demonstrably influenced high public officials. Has this
new moral philosophy begun to clarify
our discourse? There is evidence that its
effects are at least mixed. A liberal professor of law, for instance, justifies his
belief that liberals (but not conservatives) should be exempt from the libel
laws by referring to a principle laid
down by the author of Taking Rights
Seriously. The principle is that "inequality to enhance human dignity is permissible." A justice of the United States Supreme Court follows the same author's
argument that discrimination against an
individual by reason of his race is permissible if that race is not thereby stigmatized as inferior.
Will the revived concern with moral
philosophy among those who determine
policy improve the health of our democracy? Or will it merely provide the attack
on its fundamental principles with new
and sophisticated weapons? Was Collingwood right in longing for a revival of
philosophic interest in the ruling class,
or were we better off without it?
Are the basic principles of our republic properly revealed as inadequate in
the new thought? or; perhaps, is there
something unphilosophical about some
of the new philosophy which accounts
for the curious results that can obtain
when it is applied to contemporary
political problems?
Collingwood's Autobiography advocates the logic of question and answer as
opposed to the logic of propositions.
Philosophy, he contended, should return
to the Platonic "dialogue of the soul
with itself" in order to escape the dogmatism of a teaching that assumes its
own categories. The power of the view
of philosophy as dialogue extends beyond Collingwood's attack on a particular dogmatism, the positivism that
sought to replace philosophy with its
version of natural science method. Philosophy conceived as question and answer excludes all dogmatisms, all ways
of thinking that start with the answers
already in place.
If one wanted to pursue further the
question of the new moral philosophy-its authenticity as philosophy-Collingwood's Autobiography
would be a book to reflect upon. It is not
only that its argument reminds us of
what philosophy must be if it is not to
become sterile. Rather it is that it shows
us what real philosophy looks like in action as it records the life of questioning
and answering of a genuinely undogmatic man.
FRED BAUMANN
Fred Baumann is a program officer at the Institute
for Educational Affairs in New York. He is finishing a book on the concept of fraternity in Schiller
and the late eighteenth century.
61
�The College
RECENT READINGS
Tolstoy's Letters. Selected, edited, and heart."
translated by Mr. R. F. Christian, 2 volIn the 1850's letters to the editors of
umes. New York: Charles Scribner's current literary journals appear as
Sons, 1978.
Tolstoy then in his mid-twenties begins
to write for publication. He forms close
Professor Christian has selected whole associations with a few among the sociletters and portions from 608 out of the ety of writers, with whom he corremore than 8,500 of Tolstoy's letters now sponds over the years. He reads extenpublished in the Soviet edition of sively the contemporary novels, drama,
Tolstoy's works. The letters are pre- poetry, and criticism. His letters to felsented chronologically in nine periods in low writers give his opinions on works
Tolstoy's life, each with a short introduc- written, advice and criticism of the use
tion. Bibliographical notes introduce of characters and plot, his evaluation of
each of Tolstoy's correspondents as they the grace, clarity, authenticity of style
appear. Tolstoy wrote the earliest letter and its lack of contrivance. Tolstoy is
in 1845 when he was seventeen; he dic- critical of his own writing while imtated the last a few days before he died mersed in it; he does not know whether
in November 1910.
it is good or bad. He needs to share it
As a young man Tolstoy writes fre- with others, to read it aloud, to see its
quently to certain relatives: to tante effect upon himself and the audience.
Toinette Yergolskaya, and to his second For him dishonesty and lies are exoldest brother Sergey. These letters are ceedingly ugly.
informal, conversational, affectionate,
He travels in 1857 to Paris and Switfull of descriptions of what he is doing zerland. During his travels he writes of
and people he has met. He tells of plans the impression scenes make upon him:
to study music, drawing, languages, and peasant women about their domestic
work, a horrifying experience of a public
law.
Interrupting his university studies, he beheading in Paris, a night stagecoach
goes with his brother Nikolay to the ride through Switzerland sitting beside
Caucasus to serve as a soldier. In his the driver. He speaks about the state of
travels and his life in the army he is con- mind and health of Russians living
tinually interested in the customs of the abroad: the social freedom and the
people, in army life and the character of charm of living abroad changes many.
the officers with whom he associates. In He, however, considers the state a conhis leisure time, which appears to be spiracy designed to exploit and corrupt
abundant, he spends much time hunt- its citizens with loathsome lies. He caning, gambling, debauching, reading, not distinguish between the greater and
and beginning to write. He is frequently the lesser among the lies politics speaks.
sick. At times bored with army life, he "I will never serve any government
feels a lack of rapport with his compan- anywhere."
ions: " ... there's too big a gap in eduOn his return to Moscow and
cation, feelings and outlook on things Petersburg Tolstoy finds people conbetween myself and those I meet here tinually
shouting
and
angry.
for me to find any pleasure in being Everywhere he sees incidents of patriwith them."
archal barbarism, thieving, and lawlessHe keeps himself busy with quiet ness. He feels disgust for his country.
pursuits such as reading and writing, The only salvation is to be sought in a
and the intimacy of a few friends. Yet he moral life, in art, poetry, and friends,
evaluates this period as a beneficial ex- undistrubed by government intervenperience in the trials of life, in activities tion. Yet it is" ... not possible to create
and physical deprivations which teach your own happy and honest little world,
him to yearn for the tranquillity and in which you can live in peace and
peaceful delights of love and friendship. quiet, without mistakes, repentance or
But after almost two years he says he's confusion". "To live an honest life, you
bored beyond endurance-everything have to strive hard, get involved, fight,
seems meaningless. "If only there were a make mistakes, begin something and
single person one could talk to from the give it up .... "
62
In the early 1860's Tolstoy feels that he
will not write again, that he is ashamed
of all he has written. He had not said
what urgently needed saying with courage and strength. He gives himself to
farming at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana.
He starts a school for boys and girls and
for older people that are interested. He
is impressed by the disproportion between educated and uneducated Russians: the majority remains ignorant.
With no regard for the children's needs
or for society's interests, Government
schools make pupils stupid. Tolstoy develops methods of teaching and materials such as a primer and selected readings. He appoints teachers and supervises the teaching. He is enthusiastic
over the response of the children, their
fondness for him, their attentiveness
and good behavior. "I don't reason
about it, but when I enter a school and
see this crowd of ragged, dirty, skinny
children with their bright eyes and often
angelic expressions, alarm and terror
come over me, not unlike what I feel at
seeing people drowning."
Real life is too rich in events for anyone to have time to think. In-- Ofder to
write, he must arrange to be free of interruption. He must "get off the anthill,"
where one is continually intruded upon
and struggling with pretense and falsehood. Tolstoy withdraws to a distance
(without closing his eyes), in order to
allow creation to occur. When so inspired he plunges into his work with
enthusiasm. In his early years as husband and father, he feels happy in family life: "I've never felt my intellectual
powers, and even all my moral powers,
so free and so capable of work. ... Now
I am a writer with all the strength of my
soul, and I write and I think as I have
never thought or written before."
Of War and Peace, Tolstoy in 1865
says, " ... I describe events and the feelings of people who have never existed."
They are marvelous people, nhis children," whom he loves very much and
would like to move his readers also to
love. Art must tell the truth, must convey what real people do and feel. The
reader can participate only if the author
understands his characters. The artist
desires to show his readers the wonder
of life:
The aim of an artist is not to solve
a problem irrefutably, but to make
people love life in all its countless
inexhaustible manifestations . . . .
if I were to be told that what I
�July, 1979
should write would be read in
about twenty years' time by those
who are now children, and that
they would laugh and cry over it
and love life, I would devote all
my life and all my energies to it.
In the 1880's, distressed by the futile
and frivolous life in Moscow, Tolstoy returns to the country or travels in Russia.
Partially estranged from his family, he
writes to his wife distantly, but says he
will be delighted to return to the family
and to her if she wishes. For his peace of
mind he needs to love her. But repulsion
for the family's way of life shows
through. In 1896 he writes his wife of
the pain of seeing in his family just the
opposite of everything he considers
good: they have proved unresponsive to
his pleas and urgings to amend.
He becomes acutely aware that his
way of life with its material advantages
and vanity contradicts his beliefs and
undermines his credibility in his own
eyes-but also in the eyes of others. He
rejects his great property and struggles
to change personal habits; he withdraws
from social pursuits that do not conform
with his professed ideals and seem evil
and meaningless. To change the evil in
the world each individual must try to
live well and to love.
The answers to these questions of the
heart are translated into actions in the
ritual of the church. Tolstoy will submit
to tradition when it accords with what
lives in his heart. He seeks to understand the meaning of life given by
Christ. For him prayer is asking for
God's help-but also asking another
person for help. Tolstoy wants to know
what he should do when he sees a
mother beating her child, when he sees
bribery, terrorism, censorship, religious
persecutions. Activity must satisfy the
needs of the soul but it must also help
others.
At times miserable, confused, he
wants to rest. He wishes to die, yet feels
that he is living the last years of his life
badly, angry with those around him, a
grumbling old man. Tormented by his
relationship to his wife, he writes to her
describing his state of mind, asking forgiveness, anticipating recriminations,
reviewing disagreements, and solutions.
He fears to lose his freedom and betray
his own convictions in a false reconciliation. But he wishes not to hurt
her. The weakness of his physical powers intensifies his sense of going downhill without the ability to resist-and
with the world's wrongness mercilessly
before his eyes.
From conviction he continues to do
the work he can do best of all and which
he considers pleasing to God and useful
to other people. He corresponds extensively with people who are interested in
his social, ethical, and religious ideas,
with artists, teachers, philosophers, and
musicians. He writes to foreign newspapers about the persecution of the religious community of the Dukhobors. He
writes to authors and editors of journals
about ways to convey to the public an
attitude toward life in accord with Christian principles. Many letters are to his
children growing up. The tone of his letters to everyone is honest, wonderfully
candid; he is open in his words.
Tolstoy does near the end leave his
wife, to go he knows not where, a mystical sort of departure. He travels with
friends, and then, falling ill, dies in a
train station. He had said goodbye to
everyone.
LAURA BRIDGMAN '75
A registered nurse, Laura Bridgman works at
St. Luke's Hospital in New York.
AT HoME AND ABROAD
Talking With Pictures:
'Les Bandes Dessinees'
Paris: One aspect of individual selfassertiveness in French culture is the
cult of disrespect exhibited in French
literary graphics, a type of art which is
sometimes labelled caricatures de moeurs
and one in which French artists have excelled since the time of Honore Daumier
(1808-1879).
Literary graphics are drawings produced in a printed or lithographed form
that satirize morals and manners. They
are composed in a literary, compositive
manner, relying upon the combined use
of dialogue, narrative sequence, and
linear representations to achieve their effect. They encompass a wide range of
subjects, including the lower classes and
their way of life, caricatures of societies'
"solid citizens" such as businessmen,
doctors, lawyers, politicians, the petits
bourgeois, and well-known literary
characters.
The modern school of French literary
graphics was greatly affected by les
evenements of spring 1968, the shortlived, student-led "revolution" which
resulted in the liberalization of many
previously ossified French institutions
(such as the Sorbonne) and encouraged
an atmosphere of inciteful, witty commentary among the Paris intelligentsia.
One way this criticism of society was
expressed and subsequently distributed
throughout France was in the monthly
bandes dessinees journals such as Pilote,
Metal Hurlant, Charlie Hebdo, Hara Kiri,
L'Echo des Savanes, and (A Suivre). The
majority of these journals were estab-
lished in the aftermath of les evenements
of spring 1968 and contain much of the
best work of contemporary French literary graphics.
In addition to the work published in
these and other journals, deluxe, largeformat albums are regularly produced as
individual roman by Parisian publishing
houses. The work of these artists and
their predecessors is regularly evaluated
in the French academic quarterly Les
Cahiers de la Bandes Dessinees, now in its
tenth year, and the less scholarly, intermittently produced Phfnix.
Since its establishment in 1959 Pilote
has offered the general reader a comic
assessment of everyday French life. Curreritly one of its best artists is the fortyfive year old Claude Klotz who has al-
63
�The College
ready published twenty-four romans and
is especially well-known for his Le cafi
de la plage stories. These stories are concerned with droll caricatures of the ambitious, middle-class Frenchmen, who
are portrayed, as David Overbey has
written in The Paris Metro, as "suave
dogs, cats, and other creatures, on the
make for money, fame, and romance,
but whose minds are so crammed with
dreams and illusions fostered by the
popular media and filtered through a
nutty self-psychoanalysis that they
rarely succeed in being anything but
funny."
Most of the work which appears in
Metal Hurlant represents a future in
which men and women are oppressed
by machines, totalitarian political regimes, or their own uncontrollable
psychoses. There is also a tendency in
Metal Hurlant to focus on images to the
exclusion of words, as in the work of F.
Cestac, Michel Crespin, "Moebius" Q.
One of the more striking ads for the Pilote
Giraud's pseudonym), Philippe Druillet series of roman.
and Bihannic, that lends this collection a
cinematographic quality.
Charlie Hebda and Hara Kiri offer, as
the latter's name might suggest, highly pointed out, this use of black-and-white
satirical, sometimes distasteful and vi- graphics is effective because it directs
cious parodies of contemporary French the reader's attention first to the use of
life. They represent a strain of trium- space, of light and shadow, and thereby
phant nihilism in French literary imparts a purity of line to the narrative
graphics in which the idea is no longer that cannot be gained with color. In
to criticise in order to illuminate a par- other words, with color literary graphics
ticular problem or to bring about the reader's attention is distracted from,
humorous relief-but to criticise for the rather than directed towards, the actual
sake of criticism. An internationally story and the language that is being
aimed example of their distinctive brand used.
Probably the best example of this
of nihilism could be seen on a recent
cover of Charlie Hebda which showed a technique in (A Suivre) (whose name is
vomit-yellow caricature of a Chinese the English equivalent of the "[to be
soldier and a Vietnamese peasant trying continued]" message that comes at the
to bite each other's mouth off-with a end of a serialized story) would be the
huge caption emblazoned above their surrealistic work of Tardi-Forest, Monheads: "GO! GO! YELLOW PERIL!"
tellier's bleak stories of the wastelands of
The artists of L'Echo des Savanes are suburban life north of Paris, the more
more in touch with the mundane prob- adventurous material of Hugo Pratt and
lems of life such as pollution and French Deschamps-Auclair, and the sardonic
politics. They try to combine their caricatures of Benoit Sakal.
criticisms with a sophisticated use of
French bandes dessinies artists proudly
black-and-white graphics. The editor of trace their tradition back to Honore
L'Echo des Savanes recently explained Daumier. A set of his literary graphics
their artistic philosophy, "I see L'Echo which St. John's readers would be espedes Savanes as living up to its title ... cially sensible to would be Daumier's il[for it] means to me the echo of things lustrations for Homer's Odyssey, first
heard in open space ... the sounds of published in the journal Charivari in
1842 as part of the series Historie Anthe city heard in images."
The most consistently sophisticated cienne.
One lithograph of june 26th, 1842,
use of black-and-white graphics can be
found in (A Suivre), which first appeared Ulysses and Penelope, is meant to illusin Paris in February, 1978. As the trate Odyssey, xxiii, 295ff., the final bedAmerican critic David Pierce has room reunion of Odysseus and
64
Penelope, which Homer lovingly described in the following manner:
They then
gladly went together to bed, and their old
ritual.
[And when they] had enjoyed their lovemaking,
they took their pleasure in talking, each
one telling his story.
She, shining among women, told of all she
had endured in the palace ...
[While] shining Odysseus told of all the
cares he inflicted
On other men, and told too of all that in
misery
he had toiled through. She listened to him
with delight, nor did any
sleep fall upon her eyes until he had told
her everything.
(Od. xxxiii, 295-296; 300-303; 306-309)
In contrast to Homer's version,
Daumier's illustrated version of this
scene shows an octogenarian, petits
bourgeois Odysseus lying back in bed,
sound asleep, probably snoring, with a
huge stocking cap covering -his bony
skull, while a chubby, slovenly,
throughly middle-aged Penelope stared
down at her returned beloved with an
adoring but bewildered look on her
face-as if she were about to say,
"What? You're asleep?"
john Dean '70
�LETTERS
March 18, 1979
To the Editor:
The Jacob Klein memorial issue of The
College was most welcome. In particular,
it was good to have a record of Mr.
Klein's spontaneous speaking manner,
irresistibly turning even a speech into a
kind of dialogue, in the lecture on the
Copernican Revolution; the silent presence of the student audience could be
vividly felt. One phrase in the transcription puzzles me. On page 16, paragraph
2, line 8, there is a sentence beginning,
"But Rheticus had already chosen as a
model for the first report (Narratio Prima)
this sentence of Albin us ... " I spent
some time wondering in just what ways
a sentence could be a "model" for a
treatise and what the significance of that
description was, and ended by wondering whether Mr. Klein had not said
"motto". As you know, Albinus' sentence is the motto of the Narratio Prima.
Further, this would lend point to the following remark that Rheticus also used
the sentence within the report. Could
you clarify this?
The photographs were also welcome. I
well remember the snow sculpture.
There was a lot of excitement building
it, and then everyone waited impatiently
for Mr. Klein to appear, to hear what he
would say. He approached it with faultless self-possesion, stood contemplating
it for a moment, his body as still and
stable as Ptolemy's earth-he had a
curious choreographic capacity to transform anyplace he stood into a center-,
but with his eyes full of animation. Finally, waving his arm at it, he passed
his judgement: "It's a good symbol. It
melts," and dissolving back into motion
went on to his office.
RICHARD FREIS '61
Millsaps College
Jackson, Mississippi
Professor Freis' conjecture is correct: the
tape of December 6, 1967, says "motto,"
not "model." Also, the translation from
Osiander is Edward Rosen's, not Klein's, as
I wrongly stated in footnote 9.- L.R.
�The College
St. John's College
Annapolis, Maryland 21404
Non-profit Org.
lJ. S. Postage
PAID
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Lutherville, Md.
�
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St. John's College's Office of the Dean published <em>The College</em> from 1969 to 1981. The publication superseded <em><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/collections/show/37" title="The Bulletin of St. John's College">The Bulletin of St. John's College</a></em>. <em>The College</em> was in turn continued by <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/collections/show/13" title="The St. John's Review"><em>The St. John's Review</em></a> in 1981. <br /><br />A separate magazine for St. John's alumni titled <em>The College </em>began publication in 2001, continuing <em>The St. John's Reporter</em>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The College" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=12">Items in the The College Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Radista, Leo
Parran, Jr., Thomas
von Oppen, Beate Ruhm
Wilson, Curtis A.
Allanbrook, Wye Jamison
Brann, Eva T. H.
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The_College_Vol_31_No_1_1979
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'F I L~
THE COLLEGE
CoPY
St. John's College
Annapolis, Maryland
Santa Fe, New Mexico
April 1974
�THE COLLEGE
Vol. XXVI
April, 1974
No. I
Editor: Beale Ruhm von Oppen
Managing Editor: Thomas Parran, Jr.
Editorial Advisory Board: William B. Dunham, Michael
W. Ham, Paul D. Newland, Barbara Brunner Oosterhout
'55, E. Malcolm Wyatt, RobertS. Zelenka
THE COLLEGE is published by the Development Office
of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. Richard D.
Weigle, President, Paul D. Newland, Provost.
Published four times a year, in January, April, July, and
October. Second class postage paid at Annapolis, Maryland, and at other mailing places.
IN THE APRIL ISSUE:
Jacob Klein at 75
f11 The Poet of the Odyssey .
by Eva Brann
1
5
Dance, Gesture, and The Marriage of Figaro
by Wye Jamison Allanbrook
13
News on the Campuses
22
Alumni Activities
23
ON THE COVER: This sketch is one of eight by Anne
Buchanan Crosby which were included in the Festschrift
presented to Jacob Klein on March 3, 1974.
�Jacob Klein At 75
Jacob Klein's seventy-fiftll birthday was celebrated on
Marcil 3, 1974, by a festive gathering of contributors to a
Festschrift called Essays in Honor of Jacob Klein at tile
llouse of President and Mrs. Weigle.
Nearly ·four years llad passed from Samuel Kutler's first
letter inviting contributions, in April, 1970, to tile presentation of tile completed typescript, in a splendid box made
by Micllael Parks, to our former Dean of long and decisive
tenure. Tile secret llad been well kept and tile surprise was
complete.
All tllat remains now is tor tile book to be printed.
Meanwllile tile readers of The College may be interested in
his successor's preface to the collection, with its celebration
of tile life and work of Jasha Klein. Our readers may also
like to know the contents of tile Festschrift pending 'its
publication.
Preface
The studies and essays here collected were written for
presentation to Jacob Klein oh the occasion of his seventyfifth birthday. Diverse though they are in subject matter
and perspective, they are motivated by a shared sense of
indebtedness to a great teacher, a shared respect and admiration for his great learning and wisdom, a shared love for
his humanity.
Jacob Klein was born in 1899 in Libau, Russia. His
education was begun in Lipetsk, and continued in Brussels
from 1912 to 1914 and then in Berlin. After graduating in
1917 from the Friedrichs Realgymnasium in Berlin, he
studied at the universities of Berlin and MarburgjLahn,
his subjects being philosophy, physics, and mathematics.
In 1922 he received the Ph.D. at Marburg under Nicolai
Hartmann.
In the years that followed, he continued studying in
Marburg a:nd Berlin, chiefly physics, mathematics, and
ancient philosophy. It was an important event for him, he
has told us in one of his very few autobiographical statements, when he came to hear Martin Heidegger in Marburg in 1923. The fundamental thing he learned from
Heidegg~r was not Heideggerian philosophy, but something he had previously felt to be somehow beyond possibility, namely, that what another man had thought and
written might actually and genuinely be understood. In
the particular case, the writings newly understood were
those of Aristotle. It was to the recovery of classical
thought, the thought of Plato and Aristotle, that Jacob
Klein now turned, devoting himself to this aim with intensity. A second aim of his studies was to see how the
classical mode of thought had come to be transformed
into the modern mode of thought, the thought out of
which modern science emerged. The two topics are closely
conneCted, for the development of modern science has
brought with it not only new insights but also a fundamental forgetfulness of what the ancients knew. The
sedimentation of thought-the imbedding and burying of
earlier insights in later formulas and procedures-thus became a central theme and concern. As a consequence, a
pressing .question came to the fore: how should people be
educated?
A first outcome of these studies was an extended work,
Die griechische Logistik und die Entstelmng der Algebra,
published in two parts in the Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomic und Pllysik in 1934
and 1936. The first part was the thesis for the Habilitation,
which would have taken place at the University of Berlin·
in October, 1932, had it not been for the change in the
political situation in Germany at that time. The entire
work has been recently translated into English by Eva
Brann and published by the M.I.T. Press under the title
Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra.
In 1934-i935, Jacob Klein was a visiting lecturer in the
history of mathematics at the University of Prague. From
1935 to 1937 he was a fellow of the Moses Mendelssohn
Stiftung zur Forderung der Geisteswissenschaften. During
this time he was chiefly concerned with the elaboration of
a· study of Galileo' s physics and its relation to Plato, Aristotle, and Archimedes. Also, his researches concerning
Platonic cosmology led him to nndertake a fresh analysis
of the stmcture of Platonic dialogues, in particular the
Charmides, Meno, and Pllilebus. But this work was not to
1
�The College
be completed till much later. Exile from Germany intervened.
On April!, 1938, Jacob Klein arrived in New York. In
May, through Paul Weiss of Bryn Mawr College, and
Mortimer Adler of the Law School of the University of
Chicago, he was put in touch with Scott Buchanan, dean
of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. It had been
only the year before that Stringfellow Barr and Buchanan
had, as Buchanan put it, "taken over this old and decrepit
college with a mortgage and other disorganized finances."
Buchanan's interest in Klein appears to have been immediate. He explained it in a letter of June ll to a group
in New York called the Emergency Committee in Aid of
Displaced Scholars:
As you may have seen in the papers and magazines,
we are installing a four-year program of liberal education in which we are reading the great books from
Homer and Euclid to Freud and Russell. A great part
of our program deals with the history of mathematics
and science, and we are at present working hardest on
getting some of the original books translated and
organized for pedagogical purposes. Dr. Klein's work
in Greek mathematics and in Renaissance science is
directly and almost completely comprehensively pertinent.
A small grant from the Emergency Committee, finally
announced on September 24, after three months of waiting, made possible the appointment of Jacob Klein to the
faculty of St. John's College for the academic year 19381939. On May 1, 1939, Buchanan reported to the Emergency Committee that .
the arrangement has been more than successful. He
[Jacob Klein] has done very important work, both in
the very special kind of research which we are doingparticularly in relation to Greek and Renaissance
mathematics; also, he has proved to be a very superior
teacher, not only of the students but for the rest of
the faculty. I think he has been very happy here, and
both of us are convinced that he should remain with
us as long as we can be of mutual good.
St. John's College at this time was going through the
pangs of a new birth, the birth of what was then called
"the New Program" and later simply "the Program." A
conventional elective curriculUm and a conventional departmental arrangement were being dismantled; the attempt was being made to set up an all-required program
of studies that would be an appropriate modern replacement for the m.edieval liberal arts curriculum. The dedication to liberal education was to be singleminded; the usual
distractions of American collegiate life were to be put
aside. Mr. Klein has written of the arduousness and the
difficulties of those times:
I cannot forget the years when Scott Buchanan and
Stringfellow Barr began exploring and erecting the
goals of the College with the help of the faculty ....
The College grew, slowly and not always in the right
1
·
2
manner, but we saw always the Goal shining before us
and demanding severe and grim efforts to be made by
all of us.
The fact is, however, that the history of those times has
never been written; and the records are sparse and the
memories evanescent from which such a history could be
reconstructed. Still, that Jacob Klein was deeply and energetically involved in the planning and the work is evident
enough from the college records. Perhaps most interesting
here arc the titles, some of them plain, some of them
puzzling, of talks and lectures that he gave from year to
year before the college community. On April 10, 1939,
during his first year, he and another tutor, Herbert
Schwartz, conducted a public qisputation in the Great Hall
of the College on "The Active Intellect." During this same
year, Mr. Klein gave a series of ten lectures to New Program sophomores on "The History of Algebra" -a series
that was repeated with variations in succeeding years and
became a tradition. Some of the other titles, with the dates
of the lectures through the fall of 1948, are as follows:
"Passion, Fate, Knowledge"
"How to Read a Newspaper
Today"
HArithmology"
October 25, 1940:
''Descartes"
May30, 1941:
November 14, 1941: "Greek City, Greek Sky"
"Aristotle"
February 20, 1942:
"System and Matter"
April23, 1943:
"Geometry"
August 13, 1943:
Address to the Graduating Class
March 14, 1944:
1
"Arithihetic and Geometry''
May 19,1944:
"The Quadrivium"
July 26, 1944:
"Virgil"
August ll, 1944:
"Quadrivium?''
October ll, 1946:
"The Nineteenth Century"
May 16, 1947:
Commencement Address
June 9, 1947:
December 12, 1947: "On Nature"
"Plato and The Liberal Arts"
October 7, 1948:
February 9, 1940:
May 18, 1940:
In July of 1948, the Board of Visitors and Governors of
the College approved a sabbatical leave for Mr. Klein for
the following academic year. Already in the previous year
Barr and Buchanan had left to try, unsuccessfully as the
event proved, to establish a sister college in Massachusetts.
St. John's and the St. John's program had managed to
survive the war, b.ut the financial situation ·of the College
remained precarious, and in some of its phases the opera-
tion of the program was notably questionable or chaotic.
In the middle of the academic year 1948-1949, there came
an administrative crisis. Jacob Klein once more found his
Platonic studies interrupted; he was called back to the
College to become its Acting Dean on January 31, 1949.
Acting deanship turned into deanship in September of the
same year, directly after Richard D. Weigle became the
new president of the College, undertakin& first and fore-
�April, 1974
most the arduous and necessary task of putting the finances
of the College in order.
For nine years thereafter, tiJI July, 1958, Jacob Klein
served as dean. It was a period of consolidation, of strong
leadership. Nostalgia for a vanished past gave way to a
new ethos. The community became aware of itself as
having a shaping and stabilizing force at its center. In
faculty meetings, in meetings of committees, in official
statements of educational policy, above all in lectures to
the college community, Jacob Klein articulated, in words
that were at once arresting yet simple the meaning and the
aim of liberal education. For history's sake, we give the
titles of the lectures of those years:
"Liberal Education and Liberal
Arts"
~~what is a Platonic Dialogue?"
January 13, 1950:
September 29, 1950: "The Liberal Arts"
September 26, 1951: "The Liberal Arts"
"The Great Mother and the
October 3, 1952:
Liberal Arts"
(this lecture dealt with Robert
Graves' The White Goddess)
"The Conservative and the
February 15, 1953:
Revolutionary"
"History and the Liberal Arts"
June 5, 1953:
"On Tradition"
October 2, 1953:
May 21, 1954:
Aristotle"
October l, 1954:
"The Liberal Arts and the
October 7, 1949:
11
Muses"
"The World and the Cave"
January 7, 1955:
September 30, 1955: "The Liberal Arts and the
Problem of Learning"
"Plato's Phaedrus"
April6, 1956:
"The Art of Questioning and
October 5, 1956:
the Liberal Arts"
September 27, 1957: "The Delphic Oracle and the
Liberal Arts"
Commencement Address
June 9, 1958:
During these years, the series of lectures on the history of
algebra was several times repeated for different classes of
sophomores and juniors. Also, a lecture on the Copernican
Revolution, first given on April 29, 1949, was repeated for
succeeding classes of sophomores.
The mere titles, of course, cannot recapture for us the
spiritedneSS the imaginative interpretations, the reflective
questioning, the unusual insights, the unmistakeably distinctive thrust and direction of thought in these lectures.
Nor can they reveal how these characteristics and qualities
have fostered and formed the intellectual life of individuals
and of the ongoing college community.
Another topic should be mentioned here: the evenings
for visiting lecturers and faculty, or for faculty and students, at the Klein's home, where Mrs. Klein presided so
magisterially and magically over the kitchen and the spicier
1
portions of the conversation, and where all things pertaining to the College and the great world were discussed with
the detachment and the freedom that are supposed to
characterize the Abbey of The!eme. These are not, and
wiJI not be, forgotten.
We record here the statement written by Richard Scofield and inserted into the faculty minutes for the meeting
of June 2, 1958, the last faculty meeting during Jacob
Klein's deanship:
The Faculty, acting on the motion of the President,
expressed by a standing vote their appreciation of the
services to the College of Jacob Klein as Dean during
the past nine years, and they wished to have recorded
in the minutes a formal statement of their gratitude
to him for his guidance in the common task of keeping the program of studies alive and healthy. Beyqnd
the call of duty, almost beyond the limits of the
possible, he has devoted his time, his energies, his
humanity, his great learning and wisdom to the
intellectual welfare and the general happiness of the
,
College community.
The academic year 1958-1959 became Jacob Klein's first
and indeed only full sabbatical year. He spent it mostly
in England, and there made good headway in the writing
of a book that he had intended to complete more than two
decades previously. The book, bearing the title A Commentary on Plato's Meno, was finished after the return to
St. John's, and published by the University of North
Carolina Press in 1965.
The series of formal lectures to the college community
now resumes:
October 30, 1959:
"The Problem and the Art of
March 3, 1961:
April 20, 1962:
April26, 1963:
February 28, 1964:
February 12,1965:
"Thought, Image, Abstraction"
"Aristotle"
''Leibniz"
"On the Nature of Nature"
"On Dante's Mount of
Purgatory"
"The Myth of Virgil's Aeneid"
Commencement Address
''On Precision" ·
Commencement Address
Writing"
February 25, 1966:
June 12, 1966:
February 23, 1968:
June 8, 1969:
The 1968-1969 academic year was Mr. Klein's last year of
full-time teaching, and at the end of June, 1969, he retired
from the faculty after thirty-one years of service. Yet the
preceptorials with students go on, and the formal lectures
to the college community continue, too:
May 20, 1971:
October I, 1972:
February 23, 1973:
May 3, 1974:
"About Plato's Philebus"
''Plato's Ion"
"Speech, Its Strength and Its
Weaknesses"
"Plato's Phaedo"
3
1
�The College
And this list will be continued. A number of the foregoing
lectures have been published:
HOn Dante's Mount of Purgation," Cesare Barbieri
Courier, Vol. VII, No.2 (Trinity College, Hartford,
Conn., 1965)
"The Myth of Virgil's Aeneid," Interpretation, Vol. 2,
Issue I ( 1971 )
"About Plato's Philebus," Interpretation, Vol. 2,
Issue 3 (1972)
"Plato's Ion," Claremont Journal of Public Affairs,
Vol. 2, No. l (1973)
The following lectures and essays have appeared in a
St. John's publication, The College:
"The Problem of Freedom" (December, 1969)
"On Precision" (October, 1971)
"Discussion as a Means of Teaching and Learning"
(December, 1971)
"Speech, its Strength and its Weaknesses" (July,
1973)
Other of Mr. Klein's published writings include:
"Phenomenology and the History of Science," in
Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund HusserI
( ed. Marvin Farber; Harvard University Press, I 940)
!'Aristotle, An Introduction," in Ancients and Mod-
erns, Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosphy
in Honor of Leo Strauss (Basic Books, Inc., 1964)
"On Liberal Education," in The Bulletin of the Asso·
ciation of American Colleges, Vol. 52, No. 2
(Washington, D. C., 1966)
"A Note on Plato's Parmenides," in Orbis Scriptus:
Dimitrij Tscl1iiewskij zum 70. Geburtstag (Miinchen: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966)
Lectures already printed for use within the college community, and others yet to come, will one day be collected
and published in a volume for a wider circle of readers.
For over three and a half decades Jacob Klein has devoted himself with singular intensity and with singular
clarity of purpose to the teaching and learning at St. John's
College. For some of us who have come to the College,
his teaching has had much or all to do with the definition
of liberal education and of our lives. Our debt is an exquisite burden that we happily bear, knowing what it is
ours to do: the conserving of a tradition of responsible,
radical inquiry; the carrying on, most seriously and most
playfully, of the art of questioning; the obeying so far as
we individually can of the Delphic Oracle's enigmatic
behest; the careful and intent following of Ariadne's
thread, the conversation that concerns the soul's good. In
diverse and modest ways the essays which follow take up
this task.
CuRTIS A. WILSON
Dean
St. John's College
Annapolis, Maryland
March 3, 1974
4
Here follow the contents of:
ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JACOB KLEIN
As Presented to him on the Occasion of his
Seventy-fifth Birthday
Introductory Letter by Richard D. Weigle
Preface by Curtis Wilson
Contributors
Douglas Allanbrook ...... Study in Black and White (for
harpsichord).
Robert Bart
.. The Shepherd and the Wolf:
On the First Book of Plato's
Republic.
Seth Benardete .......... Euripides' Hippolytus.
Laurence Berns
.... Rational Animal-Political
Animal: Nature and
Convention in Human
Speech and Politics.
.An Appreciation of Kant's
Eva Brann
Critique of Pure Reason: An
Introduction for Students.
Anne Buchanan Crosby ... Eight Sketches.
Robert A. Goldwin ...... The State of Nature in
Political Society.
.. Plato in Hermann Cohen's
Simon Kaplan
Philosophy of Judaism.
. Mythos and Logos.
John S. Kieffer
. The Source of the Source of
Samuel S. Kutler .
the Dedekind Cut.
David R. Lachterman . . . Self-hood and Self-Consciousness: An lnq~iry into
Kantian Themes.
Margaret W. Rattner .... Politics and the Constitution.
Beate Ruhm von Oppen .. Bach's Way with Words.
Robert Sacks
.... Ptolemy as a Teacher.
Richard Scofield
.... The Christian Phaedra or
Farewell to Tragedy.
J. Winfree Smith ........ "Watchman, What of the
Night?"
Brother Robert Smith
Lear and the Story of Eden.
Leo Strauss .
. ...... On Plato's Apology of Socrates
and Crito.
Robert B. Williamson .... Eidos and Agatlwn in Plato's
Republic.
Curtis Wilson
... Newton and the Eotvos
Experiment.
Elliott Zuckerman .
. Four Sketches for a Study
of Prosody.
Editorial Board:
Samuel S. Kutler, Chairman
Eva Brann
Robert B. Williamson
J. Winfree Smith
Elliott Zuckerman
�The Poet of the Odyssey
by Eva Brann
1. On Seeing Homer
Epic is that kind of poetry-as distinguished from lyric
and epic poetry, the poetry of the lyre and of actionwhich is particularly named after the word, for epos means
the word as uttered in speech or song. Hence in reading
the Homeric epics we certainly should, in addition to
attending to the tale told, listen closely to the sound itself
of the utterance. Let me give two examples of what the
sound of the word may reveal.
First, an example of listening for meter: At the beginning of the Odyssey, Zeus speaks, because
He thought in his heart of blameless Aegistheus.
In Greek:
a
mnesato I gar kata I thymon I mymiinos I ATgis I thoio
(I 29). Notice that the fifth foot is not a dactyl (- ••) but a
spondee (--). Now it is a rule of the epic hexameter line,
rather rarely broken, that the fifth foot, at least, must
be dactylic. In this line, therefore, the very name of the
murderous shirker who together with treacherous Clytemnestra turned Agamemnon's return into an ambush 7 a
vile fact which forms the background of the Odyssey, does
violence to that stately cadence of the epic meter, making
it unnatural, heavy, and misshapen.
Second, an example of listening for words: When
Achilles grieves for the death of his dearest friend,
Patroclus, whom he had sent into battle in his own stead
he cries:
Him have I lost.
But if we listen to the Greek words-ton apolesa (I1.
XVIII 82), we will hear a second, equally possible, meaning, ominous and enlightening:
Him have I killed!
Nevertheless what I want to say here will derive more
from sight than from sound. The a"cient conviction that
Homer was blind is surely a consequence of the special_
place that sight holds in his poetry, a recognition of its
preternatural visual intensity. But we can go further; we
can say that both the Iliad and the Odyssey depend crucially on vision, on allowing the words to build a visible
world in which the inner events of the epic suddenly
appear. Let me now give an example of what the sight
behind the word may reveal:
Achilles the swift is pursuing a dazed and bemused
This article Is adapted from a formal lecture presented at the An·
napolis campus on Friday, October 6, 1972.
Hector around the walls of Troy (Il. XXII !22 ff.). They
run in agonizing slow motion,, three times round as in
a dream, and the fastest man. on earth cannot catch his
much more solid, slower quarry. Finally Hector breaks the
eternity of this pursuit and stands, facing about. What
does Achilles, what do the spectators see? They see
Achilles facing Achilles, for Hector is wearing Achilles'
old armour, striped from Patroclus' corpse (XXII 323).
Greek armour covers practically the whole man; a Greek
in battle is an armoured effigy. The antagonist that
Achilles so viciously hurls at is himself, the old Achilles
before Patroclus' death, before his dreadful apotheosis,
when he was still a man among men. Yet this crucial sight,
the most revealing vision of the Iliad, is not told directly in
words but only prepared through them.
So there exists a second epic realm "behind" the epic
lines, a world swirling wit\! ironic double visions, significant glances, tactful asides, mysterious smiles, meaningful
gestures, awesome scenes. So, for example, Achilles, even as
he sits stubbornly by his tents, is given his usual epithet
"swift in his feet" (Il. IX 196). For we are to see him
swift and sedentary at once. And there is a similar irony
in calling the villainous Aegistheus "blameless." So Odysseus delivers Agamemnon's conciliatory message to the
offended Achilles exactly as given, except that Homer
paints in a revealing gesture. For he makes Odysseus repeat
the king's oath that he has never been to bed with Achilles'
girl, " ... as is the rule among mankind, men or women
... /'with a deep obeissance: '' ... as is the rule, my lord,
of men and women ..." (Il. IX 134, 276). So Telemachus,
wide-eyed but adroit, compares Menelaus' palace to Olympus in a stage whisper, bending toward his friend with
ostentatious reticence (Od. IV 74); so he persuades this
same friend, Nestor's youngest son, who conveys his perfect
understanding with a glance, to allow him to board boat
homeward without a farewell call on old Nestor who will
talk on and on; so Odysseus, as indulgent glances pass between him and Nausicaa's parents, takes the blame for her
charmingly over-discreet lack of hospitality (Od. VII 303).
There is no end to such examples.
Here, then, is a world of crucial sights for the eye, which,
however, arise from the stately, artificial tongue of the
Homeric epic, a language especially well fitted to conspire with the poet to produce this inexhaustible store of
paraphenomena. For just as the subtleties of human intercourse are best entrusted to sedate ceremony in life, so a
fixed, formulaic language seems best for conveying its
intricacies in poetry. And more particularly, the well-
5
�The College
burnished epic idiom appears especially to invite a lively
complement of images.
I hope now to make explicita part of this implicit, complementary world. Yet that will be more a task in what I
might call "perceiving" the epics than in interpreting them.
TI1is latter task is much harder, if it is possible at all, and
it can only be undertaken on the premise that poetry contains something intended for truth, and that behind the
realms of uttered word and imaginative sight there is yet
a third world of truth into which the former realms lead.
I shall try somewhat to interpret one of the epics, the
Odyssey-yet very cautiously, because I wish to avoid a
certain kind of irresponsibility which that poem particularly induces in interpreters. I will give an example.
Odysseus is shut up for seven years by the nymph
Calypso, whose name means, "She Who Covers." She lives
on an island in the navel of the sea "in hollow caves,
longing for him to beher husband:"
en spessi glaphyroisi, lilaiomene posin einai (I 15),
as the bewitchingly slippery Greek goes. Now a cave, it is
sometimes said, is a womb, and Odysseus' painful escape
from its timeless moist comfort is a second birth. But is
this "interpretation" not itself a metaphor, and should
the interpreter of poetry himself ply poetry? I think not.
It seems to me that 'interpretations of poetry should be
soberly prosaic, and should not represent the poet as having proposed fantasies which no sane adult can credit. For
poetry begins in marvelling, and no one can marvel at the
incredible.
finds an Achilles who, at intervals, familiarly addr~sses the
dead (XXIII 19, 105), and in whose precincts the body
of Hector lies for many days mysteriously uncorrupted
(XXIV 420). Achilles, whose home is Pthia (IX 363),
which means the "Perishing Land," must appear to Priam
-and to us-to sit in the somber splendor of underworldly
state, the potentate of a premature, above-ground hell, who
harbours not only the souls but also the bodies of the dead.
We shall see this same dread being, who dominates the
end of the Iliad, once more, at the center of the Odyssey.
Reciprocally there is established within the Iliad, as
Achilles' particular foil and counterpart, the man who will
give his name to the Odyssey, a poem which begins with
the word "man," as the Iliad begins with the word "wrath"
-menis in Greek. For as Achilles' being is concentrated in
a passion, so Odysseus is a man "of many turns/' polytropos, a man of craft-metis in Greek.
·
These two have had their royal quarrels (Od. VIII 75),
but they are ultimately bound rather than divided by being
in that peculiarly intimate opposition of extreme and mean
.which is embodied in their spatial position in camp, where
Achilles' boats 'are beached at one far-out wing, while
Odysseus' little fleet is drawn up in the very middle of the
Greeks (Il.XI6).
Homer has put their comparison in Odysseus' own
mouth (Il. XIX 216). It is short, but may be adumbrated
as follows:
Everything about Achilles is young, brief, brave, brilliant, somber, .swift, abrupt, unwise, grave; he is in essence
short-lived; "minute-lived" (minynthadios) is his proper
2. Achilles and Odysseus
By way of beginning let me paint one more picture from
the Iliad. Achilles the truthful, for whom a liar is "as
hateful as the gates of Hades" (IX 312), knows something
which dominates all his doings, a knowledge so painful that
he lies about it even to his friend Patroclus and only old
Nestor guesses what has happened (XVI 51, XI 794): his
mother has told Achilles plainly and finally how "shortlived," how "swift-fated," he is to be (I 416, XVIII 95).
So, once Patroclus, his deputy in death, is gone, Achilles
is not longer quite among the mortals, but both above and
below them: in battling for his friend's corpse, he who has
fed on the immortals' food, on ambrosia (XIX 347), is like
a divine, an Olympian, being, while when he fights Hector
he is like a beast, a lion or a wolf who could feed on Hector's raw flesh (XXII 262, 347). But when the battle is
burnt out and he returns to his tent, he becomes yet something else, a being which Agamemnon had detected in him
earlier..:..he assumes the part of Hades, the ruler of the
underworld (IX !58). Let me set the scene.
The god who conducts the dead to the underworld
across the river Styx is Hermes. Now Priam, who comes
by night to beg for his son Hector's body, is brought to
Achilles' abode by Hermes who awaits him by the river
(XXIV 353). The garments which Priam brings with him
are white, the Greek color of mourning (XXIV 231). He
6
term.
Odysseus is of an older generation (II. XXIII 790),
short-legged-dignified while seated in council, but squat
on his feet, as the Trojans have observed (Il. III 2ll); a
wrestler (II. XIII 710, Od. IV 343 and VIII 230), not a
runner, except once, and then away from battle (Il. VII
95); given to cunning clowning on occasion (II. X 254 ff.,
Od. XIV 462 ff.); a clever speaker, endlessly resourcGful,
who is used on every misSion or embassy: to enter Troy
as negotiator or as spy (Il. Ill 206, Od. IV 246), to fetch
Achilles for the Trojan expedition (Il. XI 767), to return
the captured girl Briseis to her father (Il. I 3ll), and
finally, to attempt-fateful failure-to bring Achilles back
into battle (Il. IX 180). And he has staying power-he
ever refuses to leave precipitously (Il. II 169, Od. Ill 163)
and he, not Achilles, sees the war to its conclusion by
means of the well-disciplined strategem of the wooden
horse. ( Od. IV 270 and VIII 502).
The words that belong to Odysseus are "much" and
"many" (poly and polJa). Lis teo to the first lines of his
own epic and hear how these words sound at once the seasputtering accusation against Poseidon's name and the
Greek cry of pain popoi:
Andra moi enncpe, mousa, polytropon, hos mala polla
plangthe, epei Troics hieron ptoliethron epersen.
pollon d'anthropon iden astea kai noon egno,
�April, 1974
polla d'ho g'en pontoi pathen algea hon kata thymon.
In snm, as Achilles' life is concentrated in camp, so
Odysseus' life extends beyond, into peace. Perhaps nothing
brings this out better than the names of their only sons.
Achilles' son, who comes to Troy after him, is called
Neoptolemns (II. XIX 327), the "New Warrior," while
Odysseus' son, who awaits him at home, is called Telemachus, "Far-from-Battle."' It is a significant touch that in
the Iliad, Odysseus assumes for himself the appellation of
"Father of Telemachus" (II 260 IV 354), as if to show
where his heart lies.
Now every characteristic anecdote, every revealing story
of Odysseus in the Iliad has, as the references above show,
its deliberate counterpart in the Odyssey, just as the underworld Achilles who will appear in the Odyssey is prefigured
in the Iliad. The two epics belong together not only as
the natural sequence of "War and Peace" -to give them a
joint title taken from their one and only rival work-but
as the two elements of a sight seen in the Iliad: Achilles
bearing before him on his new shield-the shield Odysseus
is to inherit (Od. XI 546)-the dancing and battling cities
and the encircling Ocean of the Odyssey (XII 478 ff.).
The world of Odysseus is, at it were, supported by Achilles.
I shall return to this observation later.
3. The cheating myths
I shall begin with the second half of the Odyssey. No
sooner has Odysseus arrived back home in Ithaca than he
begins to give various accounts of himself and his trip.
He tells five such stories (XIII 256, XIV 199, XVII 419,
XIX I 72, XXIV 303), of which only one single one, the
last, told to his father as an afterthought, is clearly, though
cleverly, concocted. The other four, in spite of certain
tongue-in-cheek touches, shine with verisimilitude, and, in-
deed, everyone finds them plausible. To be sure, Odysseus'
own annouricement of Odysseus' imminent return is
sceptically received, but on the part of one listener, at least,
this disbelief is, as we shall see, pretended. Only Athena,
the first to hear one of these accounts, exposes them. Told
to her they are indeed
j~lying
lore/' or ''tricky tales," or
"cheating .myths" (XIII 295), for she knows, as we shall
see, the still deeper truth of the matter.
The longest of these tricky tales is told to Eumaios,
Odysseus' faithful swineherd (XIV 199). It goes like this:
The teller is a nameless Cretan bastard who enjoys war and
seafaring, and who, on returnirig from service in Troy, sets
out fcir Egypt to find a fortune. There his men, drunk and
out of control, attempt an incursion on the locals and are
routed. The narrator himself seeks protection from the
Egyptian king, stays to live with him for seven years, and
is then persuaded by a cunning Phoenician to come to stay
with him also for one year. This Phoenician later causes
the Cretan to boaril a boat which is ostensibly conveying
cargo to Libya but is in fact carrying orders to sell him as
a slave. They are shipwrecked and he, riding the mast, is
driven to the Thesprotians on the north-western . Greek
mainland. Here he hears of Odysseus, who has gone to the
famous nearby oracle of Dodona to seek advice concerning his return. They promise the Cretan passage but, once
on board, strip him of his goods and bind him. He escapes
while they are having supper in Ithaca, and hides in a
thicket,
Each of the four tales is different, but the same thread
runs through all of them. TI1e teller is a Cretan. The Cretans were the famous seafarers and the infamous liars of
antiquity. This Cretan has sailed to all the far-flung Mediterranean ports of call-Cyprus, Libya, Egypt-and has had .
much commerce with the Phoenicians, the shippers and
conveyers of that sea.
Now 1 claim that distributed through these cheating
myths are the facts of the voyages of Odysseus-that he has
really spent the last ten years in these places. It is at the
least plausible to think so. He must have been somewhere
on earth or sea in those lost years. But no candid adult will
claim that he was in fact with the giants, nymphs, and
witches that people those adventures of his which I shall
call "the odyssey proper," meaning the travels which belong peculiarly to Odysseus. Therefore we must think that
he was with those Cretans, Egyptians, and Phoenicians
who in fact people the Mediterranean sea, among whom he
has in fact been reported seen (XIV 382), and who keep
coming to his mind when he is obliged to give an account
of himself. This is, after all, precisely where Menelaus
went, who having been driven off course at ,the same place
as Odysseus, took his ships to all these ports, and especially
to Egypt, in search of gold (III 301, IV 83). So it is clear
what Odysseus was doing-no man was ever more prudent
about worldly things, more greedy for goods, to put it
plainly, and less likely to he willing to return profitless
from Troy, or to assume beggary except as an ironic guise.
He does, in fact, return a rich man, and "Save my things,
save me," is the merchant-like orde.r of his prayer to
Athena (XIII 230). Furthermore, not only does a young
Phaeacian contemptuously describe him as looking like a .
huckster (VIII 163), hut he in fact has' the versatility appropriate to an "operator": he is a skillful servant by grace
of Hermes (XV 321 ), a useful consultant and an enchanting raconteur with the polish of a professional minstrel-at least his swineherd thinks so (XVI 521). And
finally, is it not curious how Homer himself says in the
third line of the Odyssey that Odysseus saw the cities of
many men, while the adventures of the odyssey proper are
ma'inly about the islands of single women?
Now of these odyssean adventures, as opposed to the
factual accounts, only one single one ever comes to the ears
of the known world while Odysseus is yet lost. It is reported by Athena to Telemachus in a prototypical cheating
myth (in which she tactfully turns the seductive nymph
into "rough men" [I 198]) as well as by Proteus to
Menelaus (IV 557), and by Telemachus to Penelope
(XVII 143) that Odysseus is, for the duration, with
Calypso, with her whose name signifies oblivion. That is
7
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to say, throughout Greece Odysseus is reported missing-
sions of occurrences which by their radiance invite interpre-
the "stormy snatchers" have swept him away, ''out of
tation. Such versions are here called adventures: The adventures of Odysseus' odyssey are the truths of his travels.
This amounts to the provoking assertion that the realm of
the imagination is closer t.o the world of truth than the
sight and out of hearing" (I 242).
The other places and beings of the odyssey proper are
made known to no one, not even on Odysseus' first return.
Instead, the cheating myths allude to the adventu.res (IXXII) in parallels and coincidences.
For instance: the drunk attack on the Egyptians in the
cheating myth is a parallel to the Ciconion adventure; the
seven years with the king of Egypt are coextensive with the
time given to Calypso, and the year with the Phoenician
coincides with the year assigned to Circe; the Thesprotians
and Phoenicians are, like the Phaeachms, people that give
passage. In both the cheating myths and the adventures
there are shipwrecks and lonely survivals riding on mast or
keel, oracles consulted, whether Dodona or Teiresias, passages promised, thickets for hiding.
These coincidences reveal how the cheating myths and
the adventures are related to each other. As the notorious
"Cretan 'liar paradox" of logic arises when a Cretan claims
that all Cretans are liars-upon which his speech cannot
be called either true or false-so Odysseus, who is shamelessly careless about harmonizing his various accounts or
hiding his embroideries, can hardly be said to tell true
or false. The essentially prosaic lying tales are neither true
or false-they are, as I said, mere fact. Odysseus expresses
his contempt for fact, for the publicly accessible, dull,
daily labors of life, by making his accounts precise but not
uniquely exact; they express what might-obnoxiouslybe called "reality in general." They are a tissue of facts.
What I mean is this: Anyone who travels in truth, trav-
world of "reality."
4. The odyssey
So then, for instance, in Egypt, a source of narcotics (IV
228), where in fact the inhabitants drug themselves at
their feasts by sniffing the lotus flower, some of Odysseus'
men are evidently induced to "experiment"-this is trans-
figured by Odysseus into that perilous venture into the
state of irresponsible forgetfulness and loss of purpose
which he tells of as the Land of the Lotus Eaters (IX 84 ).
So Odysseus comes upon one of a tribe of troglodytes, staring, blinkered, and depthless of vision, who are without
cities 1 assemblies 1 laws, commerce, or true communication.
Him Odysseus recognizes as a Cyclops, a single-eyed "Circle Eye," who does not know the power of words (IX
112). For example, Odysseus has told him that he is called
"No-one," and the Cyclops after having been blinded by
Odysseus, in turn uncomprehendingly repeats to his neighbours that "No-one" has hurt him, so that they leave him
without help. Similarly he misses the second meaning and
warning contained in Odysseus' anonymous name, a warn-
ing which Odysseus himself explains on a later occasion
(XX 20): A parallel form of outis, the Greek word for
"no-one," is metis; but metis is also Odyssyus' word, the
word for wisdom and craft, so that Odysseus has named
himself to the giant Cyclops as his foil in craft and civili-
els twice. First, he flees home, accomplishing an itinerary,
zation.
to which belong charter groups, terminals, hotels, sightseeing excursions, transportation. These are the facts, or if
you like, the prose of the trip, boring at best, sometimes
So, again, they come to a place where Odysseus' swilling
and gorging men make pigs of themselves and become like
animals; this reveals itself to Odysseus as the power of
'even hazardous, and these, in their trying indifference, are
Circe, the "Circle Woman" who turns unmanly men into
soon confused, forgotten, perhaps reinvented. But behind
the facts of companions, locale, and transportation there
are the places and voyages of the soul seeking home, those
pigs, while he masters her by attacking her, sword before
him, and armed with Hermes' herb, surely an aphrodisiac
(X 321). Note that Odysseus understands all his men's
desires as the appetite for food and drink-in his report
they even eat the lotus which the Egyptians sniff. With
respect to himself, on the other hand, Odysseus transforms
his sojourns among men (the Egyptian king, the Phoeni-
presences and appearances, those fragrant essences, which
come as much from, as to the imagination-the sights
which are seen by the soul, not the eyes. These are the
truths, or, if you like, the poetry, of our travels, for which
the facts-some, not all-were only the occasion.
So while a shabby, mendaciously factual Cretan Odysseus is collecting loot in Egypt and Phoenicia, and Odysseus
of, as we shall see, inore splendid stature is on a different
voyage, a voyage of true nostalgia (literally: "return ache"),
on which he sees, as can only a man whose strongest roots
are at home (IX 34), the truths of alien people and places.
When I say he "sees their truths" I mean, then, that certain appropriate factual occasions of his travels form themselves for him into cogent and brilliant events which, although they live only for and by the imagination, are yet
more capable of carrying a meaning than are the mere facts.
By the poetic truths of events I therefore mean those vcr-
8
cian trader) into encounters with women-a marvelous
touch!
One more interpretation: somewhere on his travels
Odysseus hears a kind of poet,y, debilitating and corrupting, in which all the toils of Troy are turned into melodrama and sentiment. He listens ravished and yet with
reservation and resistance. He is in truth hearing the Song
of the Sirens (XII 184).
And so, further, the truth of the whole progress of his
seafaring is that it is a road into oblivion along which he
divests himself not undeliberately of the attendance of his
men-even recklessly, as his lieutenant claims (X 436). For
he brings them into places and temptations with which
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they cannot cope and leaves them on their own at crucial
moments, or, in the terms of the adventures, he falls into
a deep sleep. This is the sleep in which he lies when they
let out upon themselves the winds which Odysseus had
had, so to speak, "in the bag," and again when they ravenously fall on the Sacred Cattle of the Sun and by eating
them bring final destruction on themselves (X 31, XII
338). As Athena says, using the same equivocal word as
did Ac)1illes concerning Patroclus: " ... I knew in my heart
that you would return having lost (or equally: having
destroyed) all your comrades" (XIII 340). According to
the fourth line of the Odyssey, Odysseus strives to gain
"his soul and the return of his comrades;" the odyssey
proper shows that these two purposes are incompatible.
A sufficient interpretation of the Odyssey would offer a
coherent fabric of truth-behind-fact woven out of all the
adventures. I shall attend in some detail only to two of
them. I shall begin with the last, the twelfth sea-adventure,
Odysseus' stay on the Island of the Phaeacians.
5. The twelfth adventure
. .
Phaeacia, which means the "Radiant Land," is the place
of the first telling of the "odyssey proper." The man who
made the odyssey, which is in Greek as much as to say the
poet of the odyssey, is Odysseus, who recounts his voyages,
truthful!y, artfully, and in well-rounded order, beginning
and ending with Calypso (IX-XII). Phaeacia is therefore
the place where the odyssey is composed, where the seaadventures-''experiences," as we would say-are given
shape, put into words. Thus Alcinous, the Phaeacian king,
interrupts the telling of that adventure of adventures, the
voyage to Hades, to exclaim that Odysseus does not seem
"a cheat and a dissembler" who "fashions lies out of what
No-one has ever seen," and he marvels at Odysseus' ''shape-
lin\'SS of words" -morphe cpeon, at his epic form (XI
367).
Here, as Odysseus steps on land, Poseidon gives up Odysseus, sputtering his dismissal in his own version of the
fourth line of the Odyssey:
Houto nyn kaka pella pathon aloo kata ponton.
So now, having suffered many evils, wander on over
the sea! (V377)
And here Athena, for the first time in ten years, again
appears to Odysseus (XIII 318). That is as much as to say
that the formless element, the sea of troubles and boredom
which surrounds the islands of adventure and delight,
persecuting as it conveys, now recedes in favor of craft,
clarity, and composition.
For this radiant country is a land of luxury and lyre, of
dances and baths, of near-animate works of art (such as
candelabras in the shape of golden youths and gold-andsilver dogs), of perpetually blooming orchards, of magnificent architecture, and cunning tapestries (VII-VIII).
And the Phaeacians have poetry-wonderful, irreverent
comedy (VIII 266) and heart-rending melodrama of the
siren sort, which makes Odysseus weep like a woman (VIII
523). They are, moreover, a folk which regards all the
present pains of mankind as sent by the gods for the sole
purpose of being turned into song for those to come (VIII
580) -aesthetes, we would say.
The Phaeacians have. been removed from Hyperia-the
"Beyond Land," where they suffered from the crude
strength of the Hyperian Cyclopses, to Scheria-the "Cutoff Land" (VI 4, 8). In this country they live in detached
elevation-they have no enemies and yet they do not love
strangers (VII 32), but are intimate only with the gods
(VII 205). Nevertheless their vocation is to give passage,
to convey-we would say: to "communicate"-and the
spirit-like nature of what they convey is shown in their
ships, which are swift as thought and governed by thought
(VII 36, VIII 559). Of course they pray to Hermes the
Interpreter and Conveyer (VII 137).
In this resort, in this-I will say it-in this artists' colony,
Odysseus becomes a poet. Here he frequently expresses his
love for singers (VIII 487, IX 3), and here he himself
sings. It seems very appropriate that this is the only adventure which is reported directly by the poet of the
greater Odyssey, by Homer himself.
Odysseus is conveyed out of Phaeacia, where dreams are
given shape in comfort, to rocky Ithaca with his treasure
of tales while lying, as he is wont to at crucial moments,
in a Hermetic sleep much like death (XIII 80). And Poseidon, the god of untiring formlessness, in revenge covers,
(literally "calypsoes"), the sea exit of the odyssey forever
(VIII 569). There will be no second such epic.
Odysseus is received into "reality" by Athena who, in a
transport of affection, apostrophizes her Odysseus as cunning, dissembling, bold, brilliant in craft, insatiate in tricks,
and as a man who will not leave off cheating myths and
deceits (XIII 293). The man who was praised for his
truths in Phaeacia, the land of poetry, becomes a mere liar
in rocky Ithaca.
6. The middle adventure
Phaeacia is the place in which Odysseus found himself
able to shape his trip into poetry, to give it form. Is there
a place whence the substance or matter of poetry is particularly derived, a bourn and source of poetry?
If it can be shown, as. I hope to do later, that there is
in fact a thirteenth adventure, then the seventh adventure
becomes in humber what it is in truth-the central event
of the odyssey, the one which earns Odysseus-one time
only in all the epic-the appellation "hero" (X 516).
This seventh adventure is Odysseus' voyage to the mouth
of the Land of the Dead (X), to Hades, the underworld at
the extremes of the earth and sea, which is to he reached
only by ship (XI 159). Odysseus has been sent there particularly for the pupose of consulting the oracle of Teiresias
on his return (X 492). He is indeed told of its stations and
hazards, but the management of his reinstatement in Ithaca
is, significantly, left in his own hands. In addition Teiresias
utters that strange prescription which orders Odysseus to
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leave Ithaca once more, promptly after regaining home,
in order to march inland, an oar on his shoulder, until he
shall come to a place where that oar shall be taken for a
farmer's tool. There he is to plant it in the ground, and
then he may feel assured of a gentle death, late and far
from the sea (XI 135). The meaning of this planted oar
is that it is a sailor's grave. This is pointedly shown by the
form of the burial, a mound with an oar stuck on top,
which the company gives that drunk young fool Elpenor
who anticipates Odysseus' ship in Hades by falling off a
roof and breaking his neck (XII 15). Odysseus' oar will,
of course, mark a cenotaph, an empty tomb, just such a
tomb as Telemachus has promised to make for him, should
he remain lost at sea (II 222). This inland ceremony is a
necessary and fitting aftermath and conclusion to the
odyssey, for as Circe says with awe, Odysseus is "twice
dead" (XII 22)-twice dead as he is twice traveled-and
therefore owes himself a burial, a false tomb far inland,
remote from the sea that hates and drives him.
But the business on which he has come takes only
the briefest time. His stay is really otherwise occupied: In
Hades Odysseus is instructed in the myths of the Greekshere he becomes learned in the matter of poetry.
Here he learns the tragedies of Agamemnon and Oedipus; here he is told the tales of Minos, Tantalus, Sisyphus,
Heracles. Here at the center of the center of the Odyssey
come forth all the women of Greece in their grandeur,
among them two who have slept with gods but kept faith
with their husbands, Tyro and Alcmcne, to whom his own
wife has already been favorably compared (II 120). (At
this point in his tale Queen Arete, grateful for his praise
of women, charmingly interrupts to praise Odysseus, not
indeed for his tale-but for his beauty and ·size [XI 337]).
·But as king and mighty ruler of the dead (XI 485), here
as in life, comes Achilles, inconsolable at his state- he
would rather be a slave on earth than the king of the dead.
Odysseus, a passing visitor in Achilles' very own realm,
comforts him a little with a good report of his son the New
Warrior, Neoptolemus. Achilles as the most ghostly of the'
dead, as Hades' deadest denizen, dominates this world.
All that come to tell their tales to Odysseus are sou1spsychai (X 530)-which means, in Greek, "cold breaths,"
spirits, bodiless and bloodless. Hades is the repository of
shades, that is to say, of the ghosts of the past, of beings
of memory. Of themselves these are impotent, unable on
their part to see the living, and like dreams, impalpable
(XI 29, 143, 207). It is Odysseus who gives or refuses these
schemata presence by refusing or giving them blood (XI
147). It is Odysseus who gives flesh and blood to memories,
which are the substance and matter of poetry. Odysseus'
central adventure is his voyage to the bounding flux which
surrounds and delimits our world of bodily sights, a voyage
of recollection to those remote recesses of memory where
lives our common past, the dead whose stories have been
canonized into myths. In Hades Odysseus is initiated into
the lore which is the matter of poetry.
10
7. The thirteenth adventure
Everywhere people are talking of the "returns," the
nostoi, of the Greek contingent from Troy. The minstrel
sings of them in Ithaca and Aeolus wants to hear about
them on his floating island (I 326, X 14). One such return
is famous, or infamous, above the rest-that of Agamem·
non, king of Greek kings, foully murdered on his return to
Mycenae by Aegisthus and his treacherous wife Clytemnestra. Zeus tells of it on Olympus, Nestor tells Telemachus in Pylus, Menalaus in Sparta, and Agamemnon
himself tells Odysseus in Hades (I 36, III 264, IV 518, XI
412). But there is another return which is much spoken
of because it is yet outstanding- Odysseus' own. Moreover,
the former stands ·behind and informs the latter. Telemachus, on his trip in search of his father, never forgets
that other, avenging, son, Orestes (I 298, III 203), while
Odysseus' own homecoming is colored by the murdered
king's advice in Hades: "Therefore do not you yourself
ever be gentle to your wife, and do not tell her the whole
tale which you know, but tell her some, and keep some
hidden" (XI 442).
.
Consequently Odysseus returns filled with suspicion,
which is confirmed by Athena's similar, albeit less partial,
advice to "tell no man or woman" of his return (XIII 308).
And although in Hades Penelope's own mother:in-law,
Odysseus' mother Anticleia, has already declared to him
Penelope's constancy (XI 217), Penelope herself behaves
deviously enough to justify Odysseus' reserved behavior.
The house is full of wooers, daily wined and dined, to
whom she sends messages and promises, and among whom
she has favorites (XIII 381, XVI 397).
The fact, then, of Odysseus' retutn is that he slips back
. late, slow, suspicious, and incognito, outwits Penelope's
wooers by gaining possession of his old powerful weapon,
the great bow, makes a blood bath among them and those
servant girls who follow them, and only then, having repossessed his hall, reveals to his wife who he is.
:
But the truth of his return, which turns it into a thirteenth adventure by giving it the sheen of a high tension
is this: Those two, Odysseus and Penelope, recognize and
know each other from the moment he enters his home, and
. proceed to act out a charged, subtle farce, worthy of the
complex nature commOn to them, in which poetry and
prudence are intertwined by means of a high craft. Their
object is to know the truth about each other. The way the
evidence for this situation mounts is a _model of Homeric
·subtlety. Let me set it out.
Penelope, whose epithet is "the circumspect" (periphron), would be unlikely to fail 'to notice what it plain
to everyone else. Telemachus has returned from his trip
suddenly bearded (XVIII 176) and a man, and for the first
time certain that he is the son of a father he has never seen
(XV 267). This certainty comes to him first in Sparta
where he arrived at the delicate moment of her daughter's
wedding to be immediately recognized .by the aging but
still uncanny Helen,· who sees in him the father she had
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evidently known very intimately (IV 143, 250). With this
image before her, how could Penelope herself miss the
original? Then also, signs and portents announcing her
husband's return have mounted: an old oracle, claiming
that Odysseus would return in the twentieth year of his
absence, is revived; a strange sooth-.sayer, Theoclymenus,
suddenly comes on the scene for no other purpose but to
announce the return; the swineherd Eumaius has repeated
to her Odysseus'. cheating myth, according to which he is
even now in Ithaca. Moreover it is now or never that Odysseus must return to her, since he himself has told her to
re-marry at the appearance of Telemachus' beard (II 170,
XVII 157, 527, XVIII 270). Accordingly she presses her
son for the results of his trip in curiously assured terms.
She had, she says, despaired of ever seeing Telemachus
again when he had gone off after tidings of his father. And
she continues: "But come, give me an account of how you
came face to face with the sight of him" (XVII 44). Telemachus, who has promised his father secrecy, is clumsily
evasive. It is clear that she is, at the very least, highly
expectant.
Odysseus comes into his hall from the pig farm where he
has revealed himself to his son in glory (XVII 264 ff.).
Now Odysseus has a property familiar in people of temperament and mobility of soul: his stature changes with the
occasion, or as Homer put it, he is frequently-four times
in Ithaca-transformed by Athena, twice from his native
radiance to an equally congenital shabbiness, twice the
reverse (XIII 429, XVI 172,456, XXIII 156). He comes
in the shape he assumed for his cheating myths: his frame
shriveled, a worn and weary, aging, balding, beggary
huckster. Argos, his ancient hound, hears him and gladly
expires. Odysseus refuses to be presented to Penelope. She
is at once collected and hysterical, twice laughs "a
meaningless laugh" (XVIII 163), and falls into a relaxed
sleep, is herself bea)ltified by Athena, and immediately
goes before the wooers to announce herself ready for remarriage and to ask for gifts. Odysseus is deeply satisfied
with her strategem. That evening, after Telemachus has
gone to sleep, Penelope descends and, blooming in beauty
like two goddesses, sits on a throne to interview Odysseus.
And now begins a curious, teasing, allusive conversation
(XIX 104 ff). Odysseus asks her not to question him
" ... lest you fill my heart with many sorrows ..."' (XIX
1!7). Now the Greek here for "sorrows" is odynaon, a word
which sounds in Odysseus' own name; so for instance, he
sits on Calypso's isle "sorrowing fOdysseus-like] for his
return" (noston odyromenos, V 153). He is audibly naming himself to her. Next he tells a cheating myth, shamelessly different from the one the swineherd has already
repeated to her. In this story he calls himself Aethon (XIX
183), the "Burnished or Shining One," the splendid Odysseus he is not now but can expect to be when his moment
comes. By presenting himself as a Cretan who left home
again a mere month after his return from Troy, Odysseus
immediately insinuates the uncomfortable fact that he
himself is not yet home to stay: that there is one more
absence in store for his wife. As this Cretan he claims to
have seen Odysseus twenty years ago and, laughably, describes in detail a brooch he then wore. He also claims that.
Odysseus is now near home. She, playing the sceptic, says
(and from now on she keeps speaking in this equivocal
way): "Neither will. Odysseus come nor will you be conveyed hence . . . " and "Him will I never receive home
again ..." (XIX 257, 313). These statements hold, of
course, equally if the man before her is Odysseus. Then
she tells Odysseus' old nurse: "Corne arise, wise Euryclea,
and wash your master's ..."-she turns the order to wash
her master's feet into: " ... your master's contemporary's
feet" (XIX 358). Euryclea, who has immediately seen
whom the stranger resembles, discovers the scar on his leg.
Homer takes time out to tell the story of the scar, acquired
by Odysseus as he climbed Parnassus, the Muses' mountain, on a boar hunt, and of the naming of Odysseus by
his grandfather Autolycus. That famous thief, liar, and
misanthrope insisted on calling Anticlea's baby "Odysseus,"
the "Hated One," or better the "Object of Wrath," as in
the verb odys~omai, "I am wroth" (XIX 4407), a meaning alluded to by Athena when she asks Zeus about Odysseus in these terms: "Why are you so very wroth with
him?"-ti ny hoi toson odysao? (I 62). The scar goes with
his name as his ·signature, and, in fact, the Greek word for
scare, oule, is to be heard in a dialect version of his name,
Ulysses (Oulixeos). Scars and persecution, especially at
sea, characterize the Odysseus of the cheating mythsthe prosaic Odysseus.
Euryclea sees the scar and with a clatter drops the foot
into the bronze basin. Penelope, sitting next to them, does
not move a muscle-Athena, that is, her alert wariness, has
turned her attention aside.
After this episode Penelope tells her husband a deliberately provoking dream and asks him to interpret it: She
had twenty geese who had left the water to feed in her
house, and her heart was warm with joy. A great eagle
came swooping down and broke all their necks and she
wept. In the dream the eagle himself interpreted, saying:
the geese are the wooers and I am your husband returned.
Odysseus interprets, speaking ambiguously of the dream or
of himself: Odysseus himself has shown you what he will
do.
Penelope next conspiratorially proposes the contest of
the bow: whoever can string and shoot straight Odysseus'
great weapon is to have her in marriage. Odysseus, of
course, approves.
They go to sleep, she upstairs, he below. Odysseus hears
her weeping, and presently "it seemed,to his heart that she
had already recognized him and was standing at his head"
(XX 99). To avoid a precjpitous reunion he takes his
blankets and moves outdoors.
When the contest begins on the morning after, Penelope
argues for letting her husband participate, reassuring the
wooers in her new equivocal mode: ''Do yon expect that
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if the stranger strings Odysseus' great bow he will take me
home and make me his wife?" (XXI 314). Just as in her
order to Eurycleia, the Greek word order gives the momentary impression that she is calling the stranger "Odysseus."
It is the day of the feast of Apollo, the god of bow and
lyre. Odysseus strings the weapon like "a man well skilled
in the lyre and song" and the string sings sweetly for the
poet-archer.
Penelope has been sent upstairs and there sleeps the
soundest sleep ever since Odysseus' going (like Odysseus
she takes to sleep at crucial moments). Carnage goes on
below until the hall is purged of wooers and followers.
Euryclea is sent upstairs to announce Odysseus' presence.
Penelope descends. She finds Odysseus sitting against a
pillar, with lowered eyes. Silence ensues, so long a silence
that Telemachus feels compelled to interrupt it. Odysseus
smiles at his nervousness: Let your mother test me. She
will not acknowledge me because I am shabby; so let us
bathe. And to keep rumour of the killing from spreading
he orders a mock wedding feast; therefore everything that
follows has a background of marriage music. The bath and
Athena burnish Odysseus into glowing radiance; he has
become 41Aethon."
With matter of fact indifference Penelope now accepts
him as master of the house, but she still refuses to call
him by name and addresses him distantly as "Sir" (XXIII
174). Off-handedly, she orders his bed to be brought out,
the bed which Telemachus had feared fouled with spider
webs (XIV 35).
Worse has happened-it has become a movable piece of
mere furniture, this bed which Odysseus joined with his
own hands, using a live olive as post-ua great token," as
he says-and building the bed chamber around it. For
the first and last time, Odysseus is distraught with anger.
And at this moment Penelope throws her anns about
him and calls him Odysseus. For the true crux of this last
adventure was not the testing of Penelope by Odysseus,
but that of Odysseus, so slow to come home, by Penelope,
and her question was never: is this Odysseus? but: is it an
Odysseus who cherishes live roots deep in the house? But
now she comes to him, Homer says, as if she had reached
land after a shipwreck (XXIII 239). His wife, by masking
her immediate penetration of Odysseus' factual incognito,
has raised the occasion of his return into a test of the
wanderer's truth to his roots; she has assured herself that
the "great token" still holds its meaning.
Dawn is held back by Athena while they talk. Again
before anything else, he tells her once more that he is not
yet home for good, that he has, by Teiresias' prescription,
to go inland to consummate his release from Poseidon and
Hades, the sea and the underworld. So Ithaca is for now
only a way station between sea and land.
Then they go to bed, and "after the two had delighted in
lovely intercourse, they delighted in tales" (XXIII 300).
And so, in this resting place, Odysseus tells the odyssey
12
once more, for the first time in the "real" world. He tells
his wife the whole story, in order and complete, all twelve
adventures, including-for the first time, of course-the
Phaeacian adventure, and not withholding his long times
with the two ripe seductresses Circe and Calypso. In one
point only does he follow Agamemnon's advice not to tell
all: he omits any mention of Nausicaa, who, lithe as a
young palm shoot, dreamed of him in Phaeacia; he does
not mention to his middle-aged wife the only girl in the
Odyssey.
Might we not expect this work with its concurrent
realms of prose and poetry to have an ending appropriate
to each? And so it has. The concluding scene of the twentyfourth book occurs within the realm of sober political fact
(XXIV 205 ff.). Odysseus completes his return by revealing himself to his father, Laertes. The three generations of
Laertes' house together face an uprising of the slain wooers'
relatives, for whom, as for the wooers, courtship and
carnage are both entirely political matters (XXII 52).
Odysseus' resumption of the kingship of Ithaca, in spirit
legitimate because -of the kindness and justice of his past
rule (IV 88, XIV 61), is confirmed in fact when Athena
causes the parties to swear mutual oaths of peace. So,
literally, ends the Odyssey.
But simultaneously another concluding scene is taking
place in a very different realm. There is a second Descent
to Hades. Hermes leads the souls of the wooers into the
underworld (XXIV 1 ff.). They throng about Achilles.
Agamemnon draws near, once more tells the tale of his own
murder and consoles the ever disconsolate Achilles with an
account of the Funeral of Achilles, the most memorable of
funerals, for to it came to sing the daughters of Memory,
the nine Muses themselves (60). Then the wooers tell and
make deposition in Hades of the adventure called the Return of Odysseus, and how-note well-their death was
plotted by husband and wife togeth<;r ( 168). Henceforth
the story of constant Penelope is recorded among those
of the other unforgettable women of Hades, so that there
may be made about her too "a pleasant song among men
on earth" ( 197) .
And so the repository of poetic truth holds the full tale
both of Achilles' end and of Odysseus' return.
It follows that although the principal and paradigmatic
matter of poetry is and remains Achilles, that warrior of
deathly splendour who is all one, all passion, altogether
nothing but a being for poets, there is a second great matter
for poetry: there is Odysseus, a vivid, viable, versatile, multifarious man, the man by whose agency alone Achilles is
admitted to blood and voice, the man who made the odyssey-a poet. And so it is shown that the Odyssey, a poem
about a poet, is a work of reflection.
Miss Brann has been a tutor. in Annapolis since 1957. After graduation from Brooklyri College she earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees
from Yale University. She was an instructor in archeology at Stanford
University, and then a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies
at Princeton, before coming to St. John's.
�Dance, Gesture,
and The Marriage of Figaro
by Wye Jamison Allanbrook
My lecture tonight has two subjects-dancing, and an
opera- Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. The link between them is a question: Bow does one express in music
the passions and affections of human beings? Although
all. music to a certain extent finds the same answer to that
question, I would like to talk this evening about one particular kind of music-that of the late eighteenth century,
of Mozart, Haydn, and much of Beethoven, which we
often call by the name "Classic," and which constitutes a
large part of the music we know and love best. What
dancing has to do with the question of expression in this
music is the subject of the first part of my lecture. How one
composer used dancing for this purpose is the subject of
the second.
Illave often heard it said as a compliment to the music
of Mozart and Haydn that it is "abstract," the pure formal
play of note against note, purged of messy notions like expression, or what is termed "content." If there could be
such a music-and I doubt that there can-I don't think
that I ,would like it very much. But I can sympathize with
people who say such things. They have had bad experiences
with perverse or tricky musical imitation by third-rate
composers, and are relieved not to find waterfalls or moonlit nights in their Mozart. Such talk does, unfortunately,
obscure the fact that imitation is the core of late eighteenth-century music, although, indeed, a more subtle kind
of imitation, with a nobler object-how men move. One
French musician and writer on music wrote in 1785 that:
"Imitation in music is only true when its object is songs.
In music one can imitate truly war1ik~ fanfares, hunting
airs, rustic songs, etc. It is only the question of giving a
This article was delivered as a lecture at St. John's, Annapolis, on November 3, 1972. 111e text has been left as delivered, the "sheet"
which was put in the hands of the audience is appended, and the
music which was, o.n that occasion, played, is indicated by the beginnings of the passages in question.
melody the character of another melody. Art, in that case,
does not suffer violence." To paraphrase: a direct link between music and the object imitated should not, and
actually cannot be forged. But much music is written to
accompany certain actions which men perform. If we in
our more complicated music imitate that simpler music 7
namely that of dances, fanfares, etc., we will achieve our
goal without violating the principles of good taste. This
writer articulates a principle central to musical taste in the
late eighteenth century-that music in expressing men's
passions should imitate only other music. Let me show
you a simple application of this principle. If a character in
an opera enters singing a strophic folk song-like Osmin,
for those of you who saw the production of The Abduction
from the Seraglio here a few weeks ago-our first impressions, at least, will be of a rather simple, artless fciiow, perhaps a peasant or a servant. On the other hand, for Belmonte, the hero of the opera, the grand Italian style of
singing with its runs and trills is as much a part of his
nobleman's habit as his velvet suit and frilled shirt.
In this simple example, the composer, by choosing certain familiar types of music for his characters to sing,
establishes limits for his characters, and gives them their
particular life and movement· on the stage. A composer
begins any piece of music by making such choices. The
choices offered by a heroic grand opera style and a simple
German folk song are fairly obvious. But there are certain
other kinds of choices which arc so fundamental, which
determine so much of the shape of a piece from its very
outset, that I think that we often fail to take them into
account. I am talking particularly about the measure in
measured music-what it means to choose 3/4 time instead
6!8 as the meter of a piece of music.
We today generally regard meter merely as a psychological phenomenon, originating within men, not from
outside them. We argue that men tend a priori to impose
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on any string of undifferentiated pulses groupings of two or
three, by somehow "hearing" the 'regular occurrence of a
stronger pulse. From this standpoint meter becomes only
a mechanical measuring device, which renders time man-
ageable. Writing 4/4 at the beginning of a piece simply
provides a neutral background on which we will shape the
true life of the piece, and that we call its rhythm. Most
modern music textbooks would make such a distinction
between meter and rhythm. Analogous books in the late
eighteenth century give an entirely different picture of
meter. Constantly repeated in these books is the assertion
that all meters, by nature, express certain characters or
affects. They carry with them a certain distinctive shape
or configuration which places expressive limits on a piece.
The composer can learn about this shape, examine its
potential, manipulate it, but he does not invent it. To
write 3/8 at the beginning of a movement meant to an
eighteenth-century composer not simply a unit of three
eighth-note pulses, but "a gaiety which has something
wanton in it." Expression was the essence of meter, not
just an occasional attribute of it.
The next question ·is, of course, how one makes such
choices. What is there about the nature of any given meter
which enables it to express one special passion? The
theorists I have quoted had a veritable mania for what may
· seem at first meaningless classifications of meters. They
organized them into two general categories-those suitable
· for church music and those for dancing. By dance, they
meant not ballet, but the dances of society, high and low,
like the minuet, gavotte, and contredanse. These dances
were performed in courts and on village greens, by amateurs, for their own enjoyment. Eath dance had its own
formal steps, its own particular meter, ·and its own appropriate locale. Of these two metrical categories-for the
church and for dance-the second group was subdivided
into smaller sections, which I will discuss later. (The ecclesiastical did not admit of division.) Such a classification
is not as arbitrary as it first seems. We are accustomed to
think of dances as special musical color: local (boleros,
sambas, etc.), or antique (minuets, pavanes), indicated.by
special rhythmic patterns, and employed when the composer's intent is to transport us into a very special locale,
era, or frame of mind. Their use often verges on the quaint
and precious, and is, to reiterate, a very special type of expression.
We must approach dance music from the other direction, if we are to understand why it was so important to
the eighteenth century. Rather than being a means of
catching the expression of certain very special gestures by
special types of people, it was one of the most direct ways
theorist put it: "Almost nothing appears in the moral character of men which cannot be expressed comprehensibly
and in a lively way by the position and movement of the
body. Thus dance in its way is just as capable as music and
speech of being modelled on the language of the passions."
Thus these two metrical categories-those for the church
and those for dancing-divide the cosmos as well, into the
sacred and the secular, the divine and the human. Many
other gestures beside dance came in for their share of
imitation in the human sphere-singing itself, as we have
seen, and martial and orchestral styles, but the dance still
remained the central symbol of this half of the eighteenthcentury world.
Now that we have divided the world, the rest of the
task seems simple; all we have to do is decide what music is
appropriately divine, what human, and then imitate that
music when. that part of the world is our subject. But what
music, on earth, is divine? The music of the spheres, un~
fortimately, we must reject as being out of time. Here
history comes to.our re>cue. Being unable to produce for
the church eternal music, the eighteenth century thought
it appropriate to reach back in time; divine music ought,
at least, to be venerable. 'I11e pure concords and longbreathed phrases of Renaissance sacred vocal polyphony
seemed much more suitable for the church than that profane imitation of the way human beings move which is
dance. Closely associated with this particular style, for
reasons too complex to develop here, were meters based on
groups of two with longer note values as their basic beathalf-notes and whole-notes rather than quarters and
eighths, which would require a quicker and lighter execti'
tion. As one theorist put it, the "true seat" of that meter
we call "cut time," in which half-notes in groups of two.
form the measure, is in the church, while the natural
movement of 3/4 time is the minuet. The criteria by
which we judge qualities of meters seem to be both the
length of the note value taken as beat, and the numberduple or triple-of those notes in each measure. A, spectrum of meters, mnging from the most divine to the peculiarly human, would have at the one extreme those duple
metep with long note values such as 2/2, or cut time, and
at the other, triple meters with the eight or sixteenth-note
as pulse ..
The question which suggests itself from this observation
is whether triple meter is necessarily more danceable than
duple. Let us compare a common gesture in duple meter,
the march, with the rhythmic pattern of a 3/4 measure.
The pattern of accents for a march in 4/4 time, if one steps
on beats l and 3, is pictured on your sheet. Left, right, left,
right. Let me play you one.
of expressing, in a measured and musical way, the gestures
which represent the passions of all human beings. A man's
thoughts and emotions found an outward manifestation
in his gestures, which, when harnessed and transformed by
measure and symmetry, and set to the appropriate music,
were the content of the fine art of the dance. As one
l4
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�April, 1974
The pattern of a. minuet, a dance in 3/4 time, is also
shown on your sheet. I'll play you a famous example from
Mozart's opera Don Giovanni.
One moves in step with a 'march, but it is just that-a
step without danced content. In triple meter, however,
there is a disproportion in the time allott~d to downbeat
and upbeat (foot down and foot up); the up is double the
down. This allows the dancer more time for the expansive
step or gesture before the upbeat drives him to the next
measure, and the next step. Characteristic of the march, on
the other hand, is the intensity and inevitability with which
it drives on to the next step; in the pedestrian" alternation
of left foot and right there is no room. for the expansive
gesture, the invention and fantasy of the dancer.
Any careful listener will immediately object, and rightly
so, that the example of duple meter I have chosen, the
march, is the most secular of expressions, and certainly
not employed only for the church, albeit the church militant. But even in the theater, meters which are danceable
are capable of expressing ,a broad range of passions, but
must stop short of the most exalted ones. The expression
of these-when the most noble of men (or women) voice
the most tragic or moral sentiments- must be left to that
musical style which stems not from the dance, but from
the divine or ecclesiastical. 2/2 meter, and almost as often
4/4, are usually chosen for those moments. Donna Anna,
the heroine militant of Don Giovanni, sings wrathfully of
her seduction in 2/2 time, and the effect is of a kind of
slow and exalted march step. Let us hear it.
11
once. Two of the most popular dances of the century-the
gavotte and the contredanse, the patterns of which are
shown on your sheet-were in 2/4 and 4/4 time respectively. But both involve tinkering with the most customary
patterns of the duple measure to give the dancer some
platform for his gesture-something the march would not
allow. The march is a perfect bridge between the exalted
passions and those more mundane ones which are the
subject of, dance. Its intensity and singlemindedness can
of course become anything but pedestrian, as Donna Anna's aria shows us, and given the right treatment it can also
be painfully comic-nothing but the most literal flatfooted
imitation of how the poor human body moves in its
unexalted moments.
·
I have tried to show how for the eighteenth century
meter was anything but a mechanical device for measuring
off equal hunks of time. Instead, every meter imitated a
different way of moving, and thus of being, and the whole
of the metrical spectrum reflected an ordered cosmos, with
the divine and the human as its essential parts. Why has
meter lost this meaning for us today? To see meter as
bearing the stamp of human character was to express the
confidence that human passions were held in common,
and could be expressed by certain gestures common to all
men, which gestures in turn could be imitated and held
up to view by sensitive composer-observers. Later composers, in the nineteenth century, ]ike Schubert, Brahms, and
Wagner, began to lose this confidence in a universal affective vocabulary, and thus grew less interested in depicting
the ways men move and speak on this earth. The emotions
of the individual, attempting in his own private vocabulary
to express his own passions to a universe of other beings,
took its place. One no longer made observations which
could be immediately shared and understood by other men,
but instead spoke idiomatically, and hoped that a few
would respond. The voice and the words it could express
became far more important than dance; even symphonies
often became simple song forms-outcries, rather than
representations of shared human experience. Meter was no ,
longer interesting in itself as a manifestation of the universal movements of man; it had become just a background
for pitch, and thus song.
*
The danceable takes its .proper position to the right of
the metrical spectrum, in the more modest, worldly passions. Exalted grief and anger soar from the left, in the tradition of the other-worldly.
To say this is certainly not to assert that dances are not
written in duple meter. On your sheet you will find a
rough chart of the metrical spectrum as I have conceived
it. In any spectrum the shadings toward the middle must
become more ambiguous, pointing in both directions at
*
*
Let us turn now to The Marriage of Figaro. Before we
look at any of its music, I would like to tell you about two
things-what I think the opera is about, and why it is
the world of dance which illuminates the opera. This necessitates a prologue. I'll begin by telling you the story of
the opera. It is set in Spain. The principal characters are
the Count Almaviva, his wife the Countess, whose name
is Rosina, and their servants, Susanna and Figaro. Susanna
and Figaro are about to be married, but the Count, still
15
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young and lusty, hopes to seduce the bride first. The
Countess, Susanna, and Figaro spend most of the opera
trying to forestall him. At times they enlist the help of a
young page, Cherubino, a lovestruck adolescent. Another
character who unexpectedly comes to their aid is Marcellina, an aging and somewhat tiresome lady who at the outset belongs to the party of the Count, but discovers in the
course of the opera that she is Figaro's mother, and
naturally changes sides. The action of the opera extends
over one day; the original title of the play from which the
libretto of the opera was fashioned was La folle JourneeOne Mad Day. At the end of the day all these characters,
and a few more I haven't mentioned, meet in the garden
under the cover of darkness, some to seduce, and others to
catch the erstwhile seducers in their seduction. All plots
are forced out into the open, the Count is shamed and
returns humbly to his Rosina, Susanna and Figaro are
· reconciled after a brief lovers' quarrel, Marcellina marries
the illegitimate Figaro's father, and Cherubino finds a wife
for himself.
All this seems at first of the familiar stuff of comedy: the
usual mad imbroglio and happy resolution, where main
plot and subplot are hopelessly tangled together, and then
neatly and symmetrically untangled for our delectation.
But this imbroglio is only the background against which
something more disturbing, and more human, occurs.
Su~
sanna and the Countess step out from behind the masks
of comic convention. Indeed, many of the other characters
in the opera, touched by the humanity of Susanna and
the Countess, undergo a similar metamorphosis. The opera
depicts a friendship between the two women based on
mutual trust, respect and affection. 'I11e warmth radiating
from this friendship generates in us a real concern for what
happens to the various couples in their couplings and tmcouplings. It raises the plot from the level of mere farce.
It even moves us to be genuinely happy for Marcellina
when she metamorphoses from blue-stocking harridan to
beaming mother, where we might have simply been relieved that a serious complication had been so fortuitously
resolved. But such a friendship is not the easy thing it
might seem to us in our enlightened age. The Countess is
a noblewoman, and Susanna her servant. Class barriers
violating either character's delicate sense of what is appropriate. This place must be beyond class, and with its
own sense of time; it cannot be promised to be permanent,
or even to be of more than one mad day's duration.
Thus the opera is in one sense about class distinctions
and what they amount to. We must first accept the fact
that they have meaning. 'T11en we can look more closely
and see if they always mean what they seem to on the
surface. In other words, are the noble-born always noble,
the base-born always base? The social dances of the
eighteenth century were uniquely suited to the examination of this question. Each dance had persistent associations
with one class or another. The minuet was long a dance
peculiar to the aristocracy; the contredanse-a word thought
to have been derived from the English word "countrydance" -was associated with the out-of-doors and simple,
rustic folk. The choreographies and rhythmic patterns of
these two dances also provide strong contrasts. The minuet
was a dignified dance for couples, with refined, highly
stylized steps and gestures. The contredanse involved as
many people as you please in a gay follow-the-leader serpentine executed with many little quick steps-much like our
modern reeL The measure of the minuet was a moderate
3/4 time with accents distributed fairly evenly across the
measure, as shown on your sheet. The contredanse measure
in 2/4, had a very strong downbeat, so strong that in very
quick tempi the measure often seems more like the beat.
Let me play you a very fast contredanse.
Thus the social hierarchy brought with' it a hierarchy of
expression. A man walks, talks-, and gestures in manners
appropriate to his class, and these external postures themselves reflect his character. As Aristotle says in the Ethics
of the proud man: "A slow step is thought proper to the
proud man, a deep voice, and a level utterance; for the man
who takes few things seriously is not likely to be hurried,
nor the man who thinks nothing great to be excited, while
a shrill voice and a rapid gait are the results of hurry and
cannot be removed merely by strong sentiment or sentimentality. These barriers are very much a part of why
each character acts the way he acts; they are not merely
artificial hurdles to be leapt across by any two decent
people so inclined. The Countess is bound to feel a little
Aristocratic, dignified, grand, serious, noble. Neither of
uneasy about reaching out to Susanna; in one moment of
these two clusters of associations is foreign to us; each
despair, she sees as a symptom of her misery the fact that,
as she says, "I must seck help from one of my servants!"
This is, after all, the way the ordered world in which she
lives would see her.
It is the task of the opera first to show us both characters
catches the three-fold combination of class, gesture, and
character or affect. I have chosen each word carefully, or,
perhaps I should say, I have stolen each word, because I
have excerpted them from a late eighteenth-century source
and their proper worlds, to convince us that each woman
as they are used in the theater. He also. includes a third
class-a middle ground between the aristocratic and the
peasant-and I would like to quote him directly about it.
merits our respect and the respect of the other, and then
to find a place where such a friendship can exist without
16
excitement."
Country, comic, lively, nimble, merry, mischievous.
-a writer on music-in his classification of social dances
�April, 1974
"This class includes the dances which are called in technical language demi-caractcres-of middle character. Their
content is an action from everyday life, in the character of
the comic stage-a love affair, or any intrigue in which
people from a not completely ordinary kind of life are in-
world. One indication of this is that he never, when left
to himself, dances. He also seems to be peculiarly undiscriminating in his relationships-'-an attitude popularly char-
volved. These dances require elegance, pleasant manners,
in the castle. ''Every woman," he says, "makes me blush,
every woman makes me tremble." Add to this. what seems
at first only an operatic artifice-the fact that the role of a
young boy is actually played by a woman-and one realizes
that every effort is being made to insure that Cherubino
and fine taste." This middle world, this mean between the
extremes of class, was often expressed by a dance called the
gavotte. The gavotte was a special arrangement o.f the 4/4
measure-the most radical manipulation of duple meter
possible. It retains that symmetricality of step which characterizes the march, but turns it inside out. The halves of
the measure are transposed: beat number three-the "weak
strong beat" of a march-becomes beat number one in one
sense, and yet does not nsurp the proper position of the
''true" beat number one. Such a transposition creates a
special situation in which there is only one truly weak beat
out of four, forming a graceful rhythmic curve, which peaks
at the downbeat and then falls. This pattern is shown on
your sheet. Three such strong beats are truly "beaten";
each is experienced qnite distinctly. The gavotte falls short
both of the simple gravity of the minuet and the exuberance of the contredanse, and substitutes, because of
the almost artificial control of its rhythmic beating, a coy
primness of affect. I'll play you an example of a gavotte.
Eighteenth-century songs whose texts dealt with pastoral
love-the love of shepherds and shepherdesses-were often
set to gavotte rhythms. It is a venerable tradition to idealize
the love of shepherds and shepherdesses, to raise it out of
time and, paradoxically, out of class. This tradition dates
as far back as TI1eocritus, a Sicilian poet of the third century B.C. An eighteenth-century manifestation of it was
the court of Marie Antoinette, in which the nobles would
all go to the country, dress as shepherds and milkmaids,
and play at love. They were attempting, in a world where
class is so very important, to imagine it away, to be artificially naive.
Marie Antoinette's court showed a consciousness of this
Greeo-Roman pastoral tradition of idealized love. So does
the libretto of The Marriage of Figaro. References to
Greek and Roman gods and demi-gods are scattered about
-Bacchus, Venus, the Sibyl, the Zephyrs-as though to
set up a deliberately "classical" context. But, more impor-
tantly, Eros is one of the main characters of the operaan Eros who is perhaps more Mozartian than Platonicbut Eros, nevertheless. I am referring to the young page,
Cherubino, whose name means "little Cherub." He is the
only character in the opera who seems to be placeless, not
bounded and defined by the manners of a given social
acterized as "in love with love." He speaks, at one famous
moment in the opera, of being in love With every woman
is never particularized, never "embodied" in the sense that
every other character in the opera is. Figaro even describes
him as Eros, or at least as the "little Narcissus, little Adonis
of love," beplumed, and with a "scarlet, womanly complexion," like every androgynous Cupid. The pastoral CupidEros of. The Marriage of Figaro is quite different from
whatever Eros it is which presides over Don Giovanni.
There Eros wounds, often disastrously, just as Virgil's
Cupid pierces the breast of Dido with a fatal love for
Aeneas. In this opera, however, Eros is love through his
very vulnerability-his openness to all aspects of love. It is
this element of Cherubino's nature which touches Susanna,
Figaro, and the Countess, and makes the Count suspicious
and edgy around Cherubino, although he is clearly never
quite sure why he should distrust the young page. He
senses that Cherubino bespeaks the kind of love which the
Count knows little about-passion in the strict sense, that
is to say, the joys and pains of suffering the object of one's
affection to move one. This being affected has many facets.
The thread of eros which runs through them all is an
aliveness to the physical qualities of any person who moves
you-the way he walks, the sound of his voice-so that
merely looking at him will give you an involuntary start. But
many of the relationships over which Cherubino presides
have this sense of eros only in the background, while the
actual relation is not strictly erotic. Cherubino flirts with
Susanna and the Countess, and both women obviously are
moved by his handsomeness and youth. But his relationship to Susanna is more of brother to sister, to the Countess of page and patroness. Eros makes these relationships
sparkle and reverberate, but it does not dictate their nature.
This "being moved" by someone also serves in a more
general sense as a pattern for the affection of Susanna and
the Countess; they are affected by those things which they
find admirable .in each other, and this brings them to
friendship. All the characters in the opera might find as an
example of this kind of attachment to another human
being their own affection for this absurd child, Cherubino.
Despite his awkwardness and naivete, they are strangely
moved by him. Little Cherubino is the tutelary deity of
The Marriage of Figaro-the showing forth of the kind of
human attachment which Mozart wants to celebrate in
the opera-an eros of many facets, which binds people to
one another by the recognition of those things which make
each one unique. The musical world over which Cherubino
presides, not dancing, as befits a deity, is the strange, half-
17
�The College
lit, classical-pastoral place which is characterized by the
gavotte, and another dance which I shall describe to you
in a moment.
This, then, is what I think .the opera is about. Susanna
and the Countess are two fine women who are moved by
each other's fineness to form a delicate attachment which
needs a special place in which to flourish. Cherubino both
articulates the nature of that attachment and presides over
that special place. The other characters are affected by the
magic which surrounds that place to rise to the level of
fineness which Susanna and the Countess display. I have
chosen four moments of music to play for you tonight.
Each uses dance in a special way; the first two to illuminate
the characters and explore their proper places, the second
two to focus on this new and unique place-the pastoral
world of Cherubino.
The first moment belongs to Susanna and Figaro, and is
actually two separate pieces-a duet between them, and
then a solo for Figaro. It takes place in the couple's new
bedchamber, where they will spend their marriage. night.
Figaro tells Susanna how convenient their new location
is-each of them can speed right to his master or mistress
at the sound of their bell. How convenient, says Susanna
sarcastically. If you should by some chance be sent away,
the Count will only be a step away from me. Figaro is
chagrined, and after Susanna leaves, he plots his revenge
on the Count. These two pieces tell us everything we need
to know about Susanna and Figaro. They show us that
Susanna has more sensitivity and refinement than Figaro,
perhaps is a little wiser, but also that Figaro will follow
Susanna and learn from her in these matters, and that when
he does see the ramifications of a situation he will face it
with a wit, sophistication, and boldness of imagination
which make him fully as attractive in his own way as
Susanna is in hers. It is important that Susanna's greater
sensitivity not diminish Figaro in stature; it is, after all,
with their marriage that we are concerned.
The essence of the duct is this: Figaro begins with a
typical contredanse figure rather flatly repeated three times,
in four-measure phrases, as he describes the convenience
of their situation. As he mimics the call of the Countess's
bell, the lilting contredanse with its strong downbeat is
metamorphosed into march,. to propel Susanna into the
Countess's bedchamber. Then Figaro, with almost painful
literalness, tells us how convenient it is for him also. Three
times the contredanse phrase is repeated, again the bell
rings, and Figaro marches into the Count's chamber. Susanna then takes up the contredanse phrase and mimics
Figaro, but with heavy irony. To suggest the Count's nefarious intent, she repeates the contredanse three times, like
Figaro, but moves from a major to a minor tonality, to give
the proper menacing import to her suggestion. At the
moment when the march should occur, she substitutes for
it a speech-like phrase, which obliterates all dance rhythms,
to underline the seriousness of her point. Let me play the
·
duet.
18
We see from this that Figaro loves to playact; he is in
fact a born mime, who can summon up vividly before our
eyes any imaginary situation. He will do this frequently
during the opera, and often it will save both their skins.
Here, however, it only serves to point up Susanna's greater
sensibility. Figaro's repetitive contredanse is of the commonest dance idiom, and his tactlessly graphic march only
adds to our sense that his playacting is mere buffoonery.
The march also betrays his sense of importance at being
the Count's favored servant and betrothed to the Countess's favorite; he delivers both himself and Susanna into
their service with a ceremonial flourish. Susanna's imitation
of the contredanse in minor is irony with a very serious in-
tent. It touches us, and enlarges our sense of her range of
feeling. Though she may be proud to serve the Countess,
she is dismayed that Figaro, blinded by his pride in service,
might blithely serve her up to the Count as a ceremonial
victim; no pride would make her serve like that. When,
clearly finding the low comic march distasteful, she instead
inserts a thougbtful speech-like phrase, our sympathies
cannot help but be with her, and from here on we demand
from Figaro some response which will measure up to her
intelligence and wit.
Figaro does not disappoint us. Susanna's announcement
has deflated his high spirits, and has left him very angry at
the Count. He pulls himself together and launches a venomous blast at the Count which treats the Count's traditional music with an irony well matched to that with
which Susanna treated Figaro's musical invention in the
duet. His aria opens as a minuet, a version more spare and
muscular, and slightly faster, than the one I just played you.
Figaro invites the Count to dance, with himself as accompanist. You will hear his guitar in the plucked strings of
the orchestra; horns also are dominant, to i1nderline the
noble, ceremonial nature of the dance. Figaro is again,
just as in the preceeding duet, vividly miming a situation
in which he serves the Count, but this is service in a wholly
different manner. It is a tribute to his wit and control that
he sings not passionately but ironically, cloaking his angry
insolence in the noble politesse of the minuet. At the
end of the first presentation of the minuet, the music three
times leaps high on the word Sl, or yes, and Figaro casts
aside all pretence of accompaniment to become a dancer
himself, performing a caprioia, or leaping dance step-an
inappropriate embellishment to the dignified minuet, and
a blatant insult to the Count. For as the piece moves into
�April, 1974
its second section, Figaro becomes the dancing master, the
situation his dancing school. His words here are "If you
want to come to my school, I will teach you the capriola"
-the step which he has just performed. The great joke on
the Count is that the dance to be taught in this dancing
school is no longer the minuet, but a dance step whose
Italian name derives from the word capra, or goat. It suggests both somersaults of children and dancers leaping, or,
to anyone who knows Italian, the activity of cuckolding;
the horns of the goat are the eternal symbol for a man
who has been put in this embarassing positiorf. You may
have thought that you were going to cuckold me, says
Figaro, but two can play at that game. To drive his statement home, Figaro performs the caprioia twice more, again
on the word Sl. Then after a brief and reflective pause, in
which Figaro steps outside the dance, he swings into a
new dance, a quick contredanse, to list all the Count's
devious schemes which he plans to overturn. The contredanse is a wonderful invention here. On the literal level it
fits perfectly with the scene which Figaro is describingthe dancing master dragging his recalcitrant pupil through
the paces of social dance. Now that we've learned the
minuet and the capriola, let's try a new one .. But the contredanse, with its emphasis on group dancing and its selfconsciously countrified associations, is the very dance
which the Count would not be apt to perform. Thus
Figaro, in his vivid imaginings of revenge, has transported
the Count into a social setting in which he would never
be found by choice, and in which the rules of behavior are
those of a more "democratized" city life, such as Figaro
must have led before he came to the aristocratic seclusion
of Count Almaviva's castle. 'I11e rhythmic patterns and the
choreography of the contredanse also suggest a kind of
intoxication or dizziness. As Figaro grows intoxicated by
his thoughts of revenge, he also dazzles his hapless victim
with a list of his sins: "the art of fencing, the art of conniving, fighting with this one, playing with that one." One
after another Figaro reels them off, to leave his victim
reeling. A good Figaro on stage must be both dancer and
mime; he must not only perform the capriola, but also
must at this moment become a kind of diabolical ringmaster, cracking his whip to summon up the evidence,
now from this side, now from that. Then he exits tri. umphantly, after a close which recapitulates the sequence
of minuet and contredanse. The minuet seems all the more
menacing after the relentless flourishes of the contredanse.
Let us listen to it.
The next moment I have chosen is one of great triumph
for Susanna. She does just what Figaro has been telling us
he would like to do-teach the Count how to dance. Just
like Figaro, she chooses the Count's proper music, the
minuet, as the tune, but even a more aristocratic version,
with a slower tempo, closely resembling the example I
played you earlier. This moment occurs in the finale of the
second act during one of the little entanglements which
plot the curve of the comedy in this opera. The Count
has good reason to believe that Cherubino is locked in the
Countess's closet; he is wildly jealous and angry. As he
storms about the Countess's bedchamber, Susanna cleverly
substitutes herself for the page, so that when the Count
opens the closet door, he is confronted not by Cherubino,
but by Susanna. Listen to the beginning of her m'inuet.
'I11e marvel of this moment is the absolute justice with
which we accord Susanna her minuet. She is not just the
clever servant, revelling as she beats her master at his own
game. She is nobler than the Count, and the minuet becomes her proper music, not his. The Count dimly perceives this, and is shamed by it. Circumstantial evidence
tells him he has a right to be jealous, but the characters of
the women who face him tell him he does not. Circumstances may have driven Rosina· to form such a friendship
with her servant girl, but at this moment that girl is her
equal, while the Count does not measure up. Moments
later the ladies force the Count to his knees, he gasps out
in supplication "Rosina/' and we applaud, because we
know that, at least for the moment, he has been moved
by their nobility-he is learning about "being affected."
The next piece I have chosen-a duet between Susanna
and the Countess-takes place late in the opera, but the
scene which it 'paints might have occurred at almost any
point. It shows us Susanna and the Countess calm and
secure in their friendship. Their mutual trust and affection
are all the more remarkable at this point, because it is the
moment of the Countess's greatest degradation; all else having failed, she is reduced to ignoble plotting to win back
her husband-in front of, and with the aid of, her servant.
Yet the two women are in perfect unanimity; they say little,
but seem to understand each other completely. They sing
often in parallel thirds, with Susanna's voice the higher,
at times one imitates the other's phrase. The Countess is
dictating, Susanna taking down, a letter to the Count,
making a rendezvous for him and ostensibly for Susanna,
for that evening in the garden. The Countess, of course,
intends to go herself, disguised as Susanna. She deliberately
chooses a bucolic text for her letter; wishing to make it
allusive, a hint rather than an open invitation, she sends
only .a short poem, the text of a song, which is "What a
19
�The College
gentle zephyr will sigh this evening beneath the pines in
the thicket." The dance pattern which Mozart chooses to
base the duet on is the most pastoral of all-a slow 6/8
meter actually called the pastorale, which traditionally
accompanied the songs and dancing of Sicilian shepherds.
Let me play it for you.
1,1~
(&. .....,,... \
S11\\! 1ll~r,?"~a __ \
1
__.....--,
(
l
~
~ ~:w-JU..r
Clk
••
':L!JWW
The use of the pastoral by sophisticates is usually per·
verse; Marie Antoinette and her milkmaids were aristocrats
affecting the naive and simple, and they changed its vivid
colors into faded pastels. Mozart, however, transforms and
elevates the genre. He too sees it as a place out of time,
where Eros presides. But Marie' Antoinette and her court
delighted in pretending to be what they were not. Susanna
and the Countess, because they take their delight precisely
in what the other is, use the pastoral as a place where they
meet without having to deny what they arc. The duet is
to the opera like the eye of a hurricane is to the actual
stotin. Although the situation is deadly serious, Susanna
and the Countess seem to play together, in a sheltered and
convention, not a source of it. It is sophisticatedly naive,
not simply naive. Thus the gavotte seems at first to be
the perfect music for the Count here. Shamed but not
repentant, he uses it ironically; he seems to be asking an
innocent question, but there is menace in his intent. Un-
fortunately for him, he has chosen the wrong music, the
very ground on which his three opponents can stand
united By the end of the quartet they have transformed
the Count's pastoral gavotte into a soaring hymn-a cek
bration of their unity. Mozart effects the transformation
using the very melody and rhythms which the Count had
introduced, but he gives them to the trio in close harmony,
with suspensions. Under the beating of the gavotte, he
adds a true country element-a bagpipe bass-a long droning held note which provides a new and more stable level
of rhythmic action; it "grounds" the gavotte, so to speak,
and gives it depth. This is by no means the last entanglement in the opera, and the trio knows it. Worse, as a
matter of fact, is to follow immediately. But this moment
still has much in common with the duet we have just
heard. The extraordinary beauty of the transformed gavotte
lifts the moment out of time to a new significance, and
leaves it indelibly with us-a picture of an enduring relation between three people-even though in a few seco-nds
the mi'lee will continue. Let us hear it.
intimate place, which cuts across the opera, intersecting
with it, but on a wholly different plane.
The final moment I. have chosen is perhaps my favorite
in the opera.It is a point in the action when this pastoral
place becomes a public stance; its denizens, armed by Eros,
face their enemy and force him to submit, at least for the
moment. They sing, of course, a gavotte. It takes place. in
the second act finale, soon after Susanna's triumphant minnet. Susanna and the Countess have just shamed the Count
into submission when Figaro enters to announce that all
preparations are ready for the wedding. Deprived of Susanna
and the Countess as culprits, the Count turns on Figaro
and inquires about the contents of a certain incriminating
letter which Susanna and the Catmtess have just confessed
that Figaro wrote. Figaro stammers, and the ladies hasten
to alert him to the fact that the truth is out; he needn't
make up a story. Relieved, he joins the ladies in asking the
Count to allow the wedding to proceed. The Count, bafl!ed
again, as he expected Figaro to get into deep trouble in this
new story, can only mutter a prayer that Marcellina will
soon come to his rescue.
The Count introduces the gavotte rhythms himself,
when he turns to Figaro with the letter. The shepherds'
dance of the duet we just heard is the raw material of the
pastoral, used with sophisticated intent. The gavotte, with
its artificial rearrangement of the 4/4 measure and its coy,
"beating" affect, is a result of the play with the pastoral
20
The Marriage of Figaro is not, as some have asserted, a
revolutionary's manual, nor a facile witness to the aphorism
that true friendship knows no bounds. It tells us instead,
with wit and a certain resignation, of the kinds of fragile
traits with which some humans are endowed which enable
them, in this world,_ to move to a new place, a "room of
their own." It also asserts with some joy that with them
these same people may take others, less well endowed. The
class distinctions of "noble" and ''base" are not obliterated.
Instead we take the other senses of these two words, and
with the help of the gestures of dance, apply them where
they most genuinely seem appropriate. Mozart paints human passions by using as mediator in his imitation the
music written to accompany social dance. He is the choreographer of the passions.
Mrs. Allanbrook is a graduate of Vassar College, holds an M.A. degree
from Stanford University, and recently completed her doctoral dissertation. At Stanford she was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a
teaching assistant in music. She has been a tutor at St. John's since
1969.
�April, 1974
DANCE, GESTURE, AND THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO
Rhythmic Patterns of Five
I
I
I
-v-u -u-u
Minuet ( ~ .or
§)
''I
-uv
1/..
-we.;;~
Gavotte ( ~)
--1~.}
Contredanse (fr}
__ ,..1..~
I
I
-v -u
Pastorale
(~)
I
"
-uu-tJu
I"
.
-uu-u-U
*Top number indicates number of beats per measure, bottom number the
note value counted as the beat.
The Spectrum of Heters
Ecclesiastical
(exalted passions)
2
2
4
4
march
Human
(terrestrial passions)
2
6
4
dance
8
The Cast of Characters of the Opera
Count Almaviva
The Countess, Rosina, Count Almaviva's wife
Susanna, servant to the Countess, betrothed to Figaro
Figaro, servant to the Count
Cherubino, young page to the Count and Countess
Harcellina, aging spinster and friend of the Count
21
�The College
NEWS ON THE CAMPUSES
WEIGLE HoNoRED
The city of Annapolis has taken formal recognition of President Richard
D. Weigle's 25 years as president of St.
John's College.
It has adopted a resolution congratulating him on his years as president and
expressing its appreciation for his contributions to the community. The resolution was introduced by Mrs. Barbara
Neustadt, who called Mr. Weigle one
"Now, therefore, be it resolved by the
mayor and aldermen of the City of Annapolis that it hereby congratulate Dr.
Richard D. Weigle upon completion of
25 years as president of St. John's College and expresses its deep appreciation
on behalf of the citizens of the City of
Annapolis for the many contributions
made by him which have made Annapolis a better place in which to live and
to work."
of Annapolis' "outstanding citizens."
The resolution reads:
"Whereas, Dr. Richard D. Weigle
became president of St. John's College
in June, 1949; and
GRADUATE INSTITUTE
The eighth session of the Graduate
Institute in Liberal Education will run
from June 23 through August 16 on the
"Whereas, during his tenure and be- Santa Fe campus. The Institute enrolls
cause of his leadership and strong dedi- about 150 students from all parts of the
cation, the college has grown physically, · country each summer. Director David
increased its size of enrollment from Jones has announced that applications
196 students to 375, and gained greater are now being considered for the 1974
session.
financial stability; and
"Whereas, Dr. Weigle had the foreThe Institute offers a liberal arts prosight to locate another St. John's Col- gram in keeping with the St. John's
lege in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a educational policy of reading and dispresent enrollment of 255; and
cussing great books of the past and
"Whereas, the City of Annapolis, the present in order to illuminate the accollege, and Dr. Weigle have had strong complishments, frustrations, and fundaties throughout the years; and
mental inquiries of western civilization.
"Whereas, Dr. Weigle stood in the The program is divided into four segforefront as an outstanding leader in ments: Politics and Society, Philosophy
the city and county, having· served on and Theology, Literature, and Mathethe Anne Arundel County Board of matics and Natural Science. While
Education for twelve years, five years originally designed for secondary school
as its president, president of Historic teachers, the Institute is attended by
Annapolis, Inc., vice-chairman of the members of many other professions as
Hall of Records, chairman of the Mary- well. There are no textbooks, lectures,
land Commission on the Capital City, or written examinations; the studies are
and as a member of the Governor's Ad- approached entirely through small disvisory Commission on Higher, Educa-
tion in addition to membership in numerous other clubs and educational
bodies; and
"Whereas, it is the desire of the Governing Body of the City of Annapolis
to cite Dr. Weigle for his many accomplishments;
·
22
cussion classes.
Participants. can earn nine graduate
hours during a summer term. Those
who successfully complete four summers of work receive the degree of Master of Arts. The Institute is ·accredited
by the North Central Association of
Colleges and Secondary Schools.
BOARD OF VISITORS AND
GoVERNORS
John T: Harrison, Jr. of Stamford,
Conn., and Daniel T. Kelly, Jr., of
Santa Fe, were elected to the Board of
the College at the February meeting on
the southwestern campus.
Harrison, vice president of Marsh &
McLennan, Inc., of New York City, is
the son of the late John T. Harrison
of the class of 1907 at St. John's. He is
a graduate of St. Paul's School and of
Yale University.
A native Santa Fean, Kelly is a partner in the Kelly and Noss Agency, a
general insurance firm serving northern
New Mexico. He attended Portsmouth
Priory School in New Hampshire and
graduated from Harvard University. He
also holds a master's degree from Harvard's School of Business Administration.
SANTA FE TUTORS
Two new Tutors, Miss Ida Doraiswamy and Mr. Gerald Myers, have
joined the Santa Fe faculty this semester.
A native of Cliingleput, Tamilnadu,
India, Miss Doraiswamy began her undergraduate work in India at Voorhees.College, Vellore, and Sara Tucker
College in Palayamkottai.
She received both a B.A. and an
M.A. from Madras Christian College
in Tambaram and later came to the
United Stataes to study at Oberlin
College under the Oberlin Shansi Exchange Program with Lady Doak College in Madurai, India. In 1962 she received an M.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin.
Miss Doraiswamy was a Tutor at St.
John's in Annapolis for two years and
then returned to India to teach at
Lady Doak College and later at Baring
�April,
Union Christian College in Batala,
Punjab.
Last year Miss Doraiswamy was in
Africa teaching mathematics at Wesley
Girls' High School and Adisadel College in Cape Coast, Ghana.
Mr. Myers graduated from the University of Colorado, received his Ph.D.
from the University of Colorado Medical Center in Biophysics in 1969 and
has done further work in Biology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at
Yale University.
He has been a U.S.P.H.S. Fellow at
the University of Colorado Medical
Center and from 1969 through 1971
was an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale.
Earlier Mr. Myers was a Biology
Teaching Assistant at Loretto Heights
College in . Denver, Colorado and
taught Chemistry at Yale. More recently he has been a Seessel Research Fellow in the Department of Molecular
Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale.
Mrs. Myers and their four children
will join the new Tutor in Santa· Fe at
the end of this school year.
FELLOWSHIPS
St. John's seniors on both campuses
1974
received special honors just as this was
going to press.
Thomas J. Watson Fellowships were
awarded to Santa Fe senior David F.
Gross, of Saratoga, Cal., and to Annapolis seniors, Donne] O'Flynn, of District Heights, Md., and to Theodore B.
Wolff, of Lexington, Mass. Wolff is
the son of St. John's alumnus Peter C.
Wolff, of the class of 1944.
In Annapolis, senior Michael Jordan,
of Media, Pa., has received a Danforth
Foundation Fellowship for graduate
study. He plans to enter graduate work
in comparative literature next fal).
ALUMNI ACTIVITIES
SKYROCKETS,. ROMAN CANDLES,
ANDBIGBEN
By now all alumni in the continental
United States should have received an
announcement of the Alumni Association London tour, June 29-July 7, 1974.
Unlike previous trips where a minimum
number of travelers was required, any
number can make this trip.
The only possible problem could be
space, since we will be sharing a flight
with another alumni group. Our best
advice is to get your reservation-and
· your deposit-into the mail as soon as
you make up your mind.
London on July Fourth should be interesting, to say the least. Make your
plans now to join the gang heading for
the British Isles. And if enough people
are interested, we could plan a gettogether with our alumni who live in
the London area-perhaps on the
Fourth.
Lest you western folks wonder why
you received a mailing about a trip
originating in D.C., we mostly wanted
you to know that the Alumni Associa-
tion was doing this thing. And if any
of you want to join in, that of course
would be wonderful.
HOMECOMING
1974
There are certain problems simply in
sharing a town with another educational institution-and when you are in the
boating capital of the Mid-Atlantic
states, the problems are magnified.
October, as many alumni are aware,
has been the traditional Homecoming
month; even the 'new' by-laws show it
as the normal month for the Association Annual Meeting. But in Annapolis,
gem of the upper Chesapeake, October
is just too popular.
The first and last week-ends have
Navy home football games, while the
two middle weekends are given over to
a pair of national boat shows. Those
four events give us just too much competition for housing, parking, meals,
and plain walking around' room.
So what can the Association planners
do? They look first at September; this
did not work too well last year-many
said it was much too early-and besides,
only the last weekend is really possible;
for other reasons, that cannot be used
this year. Result: November 2, unhappily, is the date.
One big advantage: it gives all of us
time to make our plans for baby, house,
or pet sitters, to rearrange business ap-
pointments, and to save gasoline for the
trip. And most of us will be ready for
a break about that time, anyhow.
The Class of 1949 is making plans
for its silver anniversary reunion-it
should be a good one-'24 is also making some arrangements to get together,
according to Ridgely Gaither, so we
hope others will follow suit. How about
'14 and '24 and '34 and '44 and '54 and
'64? We know some of you are impossibly far from Annapolis, but more than
one-third of all alumni live within three
hours' drive.
Details of programming will appear
in the July issue. The Homecoming
Committee promises a very special program, with something for everyoneand one or two surprises.
23
�The College
'
CLASS NOTES
1912
Philip L. Alger, "Mr. Induction Motor" to
electrical engineers, received special recognition
on his 80th birthday in January, when the In-
stitute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
presented him a specially inscribed brass plaque.
Still active, Mr. Alger presented two papers on
rotating machinery during the IEEE winter
meeting.
1923
S. Paul Schilling is the author of God Incog-
nito, published in February by Abingdon Pres_s.
In his new book Dr. Schilling discusses ways m
which God can be experienced today, -ways
which may be quite' different from the conventional or traditional.
1928
For his book, The Dreyfus Case: A Documeutary History, Professor Louis L. Snyder, of
the Department of History of The City College
and The City University of New York, has been
voted a citation by the New Jersey Writers
Conference. The award was scheduled to be
presented at the Fourteenth Annual Luncheon
of the Writers Conference at Newa.rk College of
_ EngineCring on April 27.
be the only St. Johnnie to attain that distinction.) l-Ie is now a marketing representative for
the Simmons Company, and makes his home
in Westfield, N.j.
1943
Dr. H. Wi11ard Stern has been promoted to
full professor of philosophy at Kean College
of New Jersey (formerly Newark State College).
After 37 years with the Federal GoVernment,
bio-chemist with the National Institutes of
Health, Bethesda, Md. He says he will remain
in Bethesda for the time being, doing consulting
work.
His many friends and classmates will be saddened to learn.that Claxton J. "Okey" O'Connor lost his wife on February 3. In December
Okey was na111ed the Secondary Schools "Man
of the Year" at the U.S. Lacrosse Coaches Association's meeting. A member of the Lacrosse
Hall of Fame since 1964, Okey has been active
in both the Coaches Association and the Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association since 1942.
1932
In December President Nixon announced tl.1e
appointment of James F. Campbell as U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador. Jim had been serving
with the Agency for International Development
as AssiStant Administrator for Program ancl
Management Services since 1971.
1937
In February the Lacrosse Hall of Fame Foundation announced that five men would be inducted into the Hall this spring (April 27, to
be exact). St. John's own Everett Smith, Jr. is
one of the number being so honored. At St.
John's Everett made the varsity lacrosse--team
his freshman year, and was selected first-team
All-America for four consecutive years. (Information from the Hall of Fame shows Smith to
24
/
1952
Alvin Aronson writes that he is back in the
States, now living, albeit perhaps temporarily,
in New Hampshire, and hopes to return to
Israel in September. He is writing a play about
St. John's, perlrdps to be called "The Great
Experience."
1944
In January Arthur Hymau, University Professor of Philosophy, Yeshiva University, was the
featured lecturer in a threc·day Medieval and
Renaissance Collegium conducted at the University of Michigan. Artie spoke on "Religion
and Philosophy in Medieval Philosophy: The
Islamic and Jewish Traditions," "Religion and
Philosophy in Medieval Philosophy: 'Ibe Christian Tradition," and "Thomas Aquinas on Natural and Human Law."
1945
An address change card from Rogers Albritton shows that he is with the Department
of Philosophy at the University of California at
Los Angeles. lie did not say whether this was a
permanent change from Harvard.
His classmates will be ple-dsed to know that
George Cayley (Washburn while at St. John's)
recently received his B.A. degiee from Richmond College in New York.
1930
R. Ellis Mitcllell last June retired as a research
of the National College of Education, Evanston,
Ill., last October.
1947
II. Gerald Hoxby is managing director of the
DuBois Chemicals plant in North Ryde, New
South Wales, Australia. Cerry set up the plant,
and expects to be there for another two or three
years. lie, Liz, and children Alison and Blair
stopped by the College while on home leave a
few months ago. Their home is in St. Ives, near
North Ryde.
·
1948
Peter J. Davies, after a number of years with
USAID, is now Director, Program Coordination,
for the Western Hemisphere Region, Internatiomll Planned Parenthoo::l Federation. His wife
Phyllis expects to graduate in June from New
York University Law School; son Kenneth wiU
finish at Cornell University at the same time,
while younger son Christopher is a sophomore
at Cornell.
1949
Just a reminder to all you '49'ers: Jonathan
Brooks and Allan Hoffman arc making really
fine plans for your Silver Anniversary reunion at
Homecoming next fall. In this connection, does
anyone know the where-abouts of Solon10n S.
Finebinm, James W. Ray, or George P. Welcll?
How about Michael L. Rourke? The Co11ege
has "lost" these members of the class.
1950
C. Ranlet Lincoln represented the College at
the inauguration of Calvin E. Gross as president
1953
Last September St. John's was represented by
William M. Aston at the inauguration of John
D. Rockefeller IV as president of West Virginia
Wesleyan College.
1961
Miclmel W. Ham, admissions director in
Annapolis, has been invited to become a member of a recently-organized joint committee of
the American Mathematical Society and the
Mathematical Association of America.
A recent letter from John C. Kohl, Jr., tells
us that, after a three-year stint as an assistant
professor of biology at Trenton State College, he
is now doing graduate work in environmental
sciences at Rutgers University. His-principal interest areas are pollution control, waste disposal,
and resource recovery.
1963
December brought a delightful Christmas
letter from John Jermain Bodine. "J .J ." has
received his Ph.D. degree from Hartford Theological Seminary; his dissertation was on the
twentieth century Islamicist Duncan Black Macdonald. "J .J .'s" wife Ruth is in Hungary th_is
year, studying music at the Liszt AcademY m
Budapest. lie is still in the Dean's Office at
the Seminary, and also keeps busy with the
Ministry Support Program there and with. the
Red Cross.
Dr. Oliver M. Korshin is director of HEW's
U.S.-U.S.S.R. Health Exchange program, With
an office in the Health Services Hoadqmrters in
RockviJJe, Md. Via a recently installed direct
"hotlinc," American and Russian scientists can
exchange vital information conccming drugs,
environmental health, cancer discOveries, and
all manner of other medical matters.
J. Waiter Sterliug has filed for the Democratic primary, in a bid to run against Mrs.
Marjorie Holt for the Maryland 4th District
Congressimwl seat which Mrs. Holt now occupies.
1964
William W. Dunknm III is head of the
science department of T. C. Williams High
School in Alexandria, Va.
Kevin D. Witty is a trust officer and head of
the Employee Benefit CI'rust Division of the
California Canadian Bank in San Francisco. l-Ie
completed his military obligation in 1969, a
captain in the Army Corps of Engineers at the
time of his release. lie then spent three years
�April, 1974
with Bankers Trust Company in New York
until moving to his present position in January,
1973. Kevin and his wife, the former Lela Dawn
Barrett, were married in July, 1967, and have
two sons, Sean McDonald, 4, and Jason Merrill,
1. Mrs. Witty's father is James H. Barrett of
the class of 1941, now a retired Air Force officer.
1967
B. Meredith Burke writes that she will be
working as a consultant to the Development
Economics section of the World Bank through
May.
Hope (Zoss) Schladen and husband Jon are
the proud parents of Sarah D. Schladcn, born
November 14, 1973. Hope and Jon both teach,
she high school equivalency, he at Rochester's
Alternative Junior High School.
1968
Gregory Congleton (SF) has just completed
seven months as a trainee in the Controller's
Department of FPC Ind. Inc., Pittsburgh, Pa.,
and is now working as a programmer I systems
analyst at their sheet glass plant in Henryetta,
Okla.
George E. Deering, III (SF) graduated from
the University of Massachusetts in June, 1973,
and is now enrolled in the University of Massa, chusctts Medical School.
Congratulations to Joshua T. Gillebn II for
passing the Maryland St<~te Bar examinations
during the winter.
Augusta Goldstein (SF) writes,"! am teaching (for a11 intents, purposes, and superficial
appearances)" eighth grade physical science in a
Los Angeles suburb. She also says that, for
"teacher credentialing" purposes, St. John's
graduates arc considered mathematics-physical
science majors in California.
Hamld Morgan (SF) writes that he has
graduated from the University of New Mexico
with a double maior in political science and
journalism. 111is spring he will retum to UNM
to work on his master's degree in business administration while working part-time as manager of a small publishing company. He is
married to the former Chris Anderson of Tulsa,
Okla., whom he met when they were the only
two advanced Greek students at UNM.
Jonathan Sinmeich has completed law school
at the University of Virginia, and is now with
the firm of Paul, Weiss, Refkind, VVhorten &
Garrison of New York. He, Masha, and son
Aram were scheduled to move to that city on
March l.
A new Ph.D. degree recipient from Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, Cal., is
Robin A. Smith (SF). T11e title of his dissertation: "Plato's Dialectic from the Standpoint of
Aristotle's First Logic." Robin is currently visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Occidental Col1cgc in Los Angeles.
University of California at Los Angeles. Presently she is studying music at San Diego State
University.
Anne Christy Chapin (SF) is in Albuquerque
teaching Science of Creative Intelligence and
Transcendental Meditation.
Robert J. Chassell {SF) has received an M.A.
degree in economics from Cambridge University, England.
John D. Goodwin (SF) tells us he served in
South Vietnam in 1970-71 as a Chief Warrant
Officer- Medical Evacuation Helicopter Pilot.
He completed his St. John's junior year in 1972,
attended an aviation school in Colorado in
1972-73, and is now a qua1ificd 'copter instructor as well as a commercial helicopter pilot,
with airplane commercial and instrument ratings. John has been employed by Rocky
Mountain Helicopters since last May, covering
a six-state area. He and his wife Veronica live
in Tesuque, near Santa Fe.
Jesse Tepper (SF) has received his Master's
degree in sociology from the State University
of New York at Stony Brook.
1970
A short "John Dean letter" tells us Dikran
Kizi1yan works in San Francisco and lives in
Berkeley, and that Dennis Rains and Mary
Shepard were married last September.
Joan (Barstow) Hermindez (SF) now lives in
Huehuctenango, Guatemala, where she and her
Guatemalan husband arc <~ctive in the Baha'i
Faith, "working for the unity of mankind."
They have one son, BacH Rafael, a year old.
After almost four years in Guatemala, Joan
definitely prefers the simpler life there to the
more sophisticated life in the States, and says
she is very happy.
Kitty (TeipelJ Morel (SF) received a M.S.
degree in mathematics from the University of
Tulsa last June. She and her husband Jim now
live in Dallas, where she is an engineering programmer and he is a scientific systems analyst.
1971
\Villiam H. Bue11 is a sudent at the Holy
Trinity Orthodox Seminary in Jordanville, N.Y.
Bill writes that he is in a fivc.ycar program
In Memoriam
.1·904-Col. Edward 0. Halbert, New
Lon9w1, CT, January 21, 1974.
-1'912-II.~ \Vilson Wheeler, Baltimore,
MD, O<;t<>!Jer !7, 19721.
19.)6""-C. Kemp Hoff, Miami, FL, Deccnlber....J'97 3.
19£D--C. Garner Werntz, Sun City, AR,
Janna~? 974.
.,lJJ' ~Lucien E. Felty, Rowlesburg, WV,
1<171. /
l9,Jf1:::._<=:apt. Samuel B. Purdie, Merritt
1969
After leaving St. John's in Santa Fe, Marcy
(Byles) Ayauian (SF) studied economics at the
Islaf!~yt:, January 2, 1974.
1~'1-Dr.
Paul F. Giffin, Keyser, WV,
leading to a Bachelor of T11eology degree. All
classes are in Russian; Bill says he is aided in
his leaming of Russian by a conversational
knowledge of modern Greek, a skill he has acquired over the past two years.
K. Elisabeth Jackson is now business manager
for a neurological diagnostic facility for minimally brain·damaged children in Washington,
D.C. Foxe loves her job and does a lot of
travelling.
We have just heard from Rebecca Schwab
(SF) that she graduated from the State Uni·
versity College in Brockport, N.Y.
Jeffrey Sonl1eim, having passed graduate qualifying examinations in mathematics, is now a
candidate for the Ph.D. degree at the University
of I1linois.
1972
Louise Romanow (SF) writes that she is
studying environmental biology at the University of Massachusetts.
1973
Richard Collen (SF) is working for the
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and
would like to get in touch with St. Jolmnics in
the area. His address is 4 West Court, 1\.pt. A,
Sausalito, Cal. 94965.
Peter M. Fairbanks, whose insistence resulted
in the Communicard last summer, finally used
one to tell us officially of his marriage to Cenita
last June, and of their subsequent tour "with
a group of kids" to Iceland, Norway, Sweden,
and Denmark. As of January Peter \vas bying·
for a trainee position in an art house, but was
also considering graduate school as a possible
alternative.
Joanue (Charbonneau) Rice (SF) will finish
work on a Master's degree in English at the
University of Montana this spring. She plans
to start work toward her doctorate next fall.
Further infom1ation on Deborah E. Sehiftcr
has been received from her father: she is teaching mathematics to American students enroHed
at the regional high school at the kibbutz Kfar ';
Blum in Upper Galilee. Debbie frequently sees
Jan Huttner, \vho is staying in the nearby town
of Qyriat Shmona.
January..)-T,I974.
19'3'2-William L. Waller, Baltimore,
MD~Jm uary 10, 1974.
-John R. Bossert, Annapolis, MD,
No •emjlor25, 1973.
1~-Edward G. \Villiams, Hasbrouck
Heights, ])l.j;- January 15, 1974.
l;t~Frcdcrick R. Buck, Baltimore,
MD, February 6, 1974.
l,sl-f5:........Franklin B. Pumphrey, Crownsville, lvJD, February 12, 1974.
15)')2-Peter D. Gordon, Rockford, IL,
J~muary 29, 1974.
1965-Hugh Boland Johnston, Falls
Chmch, VA, January 15, 1974.
�r++++~~~~:J:
NOTICE
>~<
:1:
:j:
;J;
The recent mail election of Alumni representatives
:j: to the Board of Visitors and Governors was com>!<
:j:
:j:
>!<
:1:
:j:
:j:
t
:1:
>!<
t
t
pleted on March 31st.
Article VIII, Section IV, of the Alumni Association By-laws provides that "The two candidates >!<
receiving the highest number of votes shall be con- :1:
sidered elected."
Accordingly, Dr. David Dobrcer '44, of Alhambra, ;j;
CA, and Francis S. Mason, Jr., '43, of Ne'Y York
City, have been elected to the Board of the College. :j:
++++++++
The College
St. John's College
Annapolis, Maryland 21404
f
t
>!<>!<~
Second-class postage paid at
Annapolis, Maryland, and at
additional mailing offices.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
<em>The College </em>(1969-1981)
Description
An account of the resource
St. John's College's Office of the Dean published <em>The College</em> from 1969 to 1981. The publication superseded <em><a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/collections/show/37" title="The Bulletin of St. John's College">The Bulletin of St. John's College</a></em>. <em>The College</em> was in turn continued by <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/collections/show/13" title="The St. John's Review"><em>The St. John's Review</em></a> in 1981. <br /><br />A separate magazine for St. John's alumni titled <em>The College </em>began publication in 2001, continuing <em>The St. John's Reporter</em>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The College" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=12">Items in the The College Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Santa Fe, NM
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
thecollegemagazine
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
24 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Development Offices of St. John's College
Title
A name given to the resource
The College, April 1974
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1974-04
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
von Oppen, Beate Ruhm
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Dunham, William B.
Ham, Michael W.
Newland, Paul D.
Oosterhout, Barbara Brunner
Wyatt, E. Malcolm
Zelenka, Robert S.
Allanbrook, Wye Jamison
Description
An account of the resource
Volume XXVI, Number 1 of The College. Published in April 1974.
Identifier
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The_College_Vol_26_No_1_1974
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
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St. John's College
Language
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English
Type
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text
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
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pdf
The College
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