1
20
7
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3eb8b1bcb38fca8ae796ea7c8622ad13.pdf
cfae69e54457114ee2840db478a5c6c0
PDF Text
Text
The St. John’s Review
Volume 54, Number 1 (Fall 2012)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Deziree Arnaiz
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800.
©2012 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
The St. John’s Communications Office
Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available online at
www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�Contents
Essays & Lectures
The Dispassionate Study of the Passions ..............................1
Eva Brann
On Biblical Style .................................................................17
Tod Linafelt
What is the Surface Area of a Hedgehog?...........................45
Barry Mazur
Some Reflections on Darwin and C. S. Peirce ....................87
Curtis Wilson and Chaninah Maschler
Poem
The Laws of Physics .........................................................124
Marlene Benjamin
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�ESSAYS & LECTURES
1
The Dispassionate Study
of the Passions
Eva Brann
Plato’s dialogue Gorgias ends with a long speech culminating
in a rousing cry by an aroused Socrates. He is speaking to
Gorgias’s student Callicles about his swaggering opinionatedness and their common uneducatedness. The words he uses
are neanieusthai, ‟to act like a youth,” to behave like a kid,
and apaideusia, ‟lack of teaching,” ignorance. And then he
concludes with a condemnation of Callicles’s whole ‟way of
life”—tropos tou biou—‟to which you summon me, believing in it”—hōi su pisteuōn eme parakaleis. esti gar oudenos
axios, ō Kallikleis—‟For it is worth nothing, Callicles!” My
fine 1922 edition of the Gorgias by the classicist Otto Apelt
rightly translates the address O Kallikleis, jingling in the Gorgian manner with parakaleis, as ‟My Callicles,” for there is
a curious, straining intimacy in Socrates’s peroration.1 The
rest is silence. It is a favorite question of mine to ask our
freshmen at St. John’s College, who all read this dialogue,
what happened that night at home, when Callicles was, perhaps, by himself.
Now some of you may have heard of the late Seth Bemardete, a student of Leo Strauss and a brilliant classicist at
New York University. In our youth we traveled together, and
Seth once imparted to me the following wild conjecture.
‟Plato,” it was said, was a nickname given to him because
of his broad shoulders.2 His real name was Aristocles: Callicles, Aristocles—he of noble fame, he of good fame; kalos
Eva Brann is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture was
presented to the graduate students of the School of Philosophy at the
Catholic University of America on March 30, 2012.
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
k’agathos was the Greek way of denominating what Chaucer
calls ‟a verray parfit gentil knicht,” a good and noble knight,
a perfect gentleman.3 So Plato represents himself in this dialogue as a noble yet rudely unregenerate youth in his moment
before conversion, a conversion accomplished by a usually
imperturbable Socrates impassioned to speak, for once, extendedly and hotly.
Do I believe this clever combination of clues? Not really.
Plato was, after all, of good family and a writer of tragedies
before Socrates captivated him, and the swaggering surly
youth Callicles has little of the high-bred, suave poet about
him, a poet who was, moreover, probably already philosophically involved when he met Socrates.4
Nonetheless, this anecdote about a conjecture seems to
me thought-provoking. Here, for once, Plato permits us to
see the spectacle of rational Socrates in a passion, un-ironic,
touched to the quick—surely this is not a mere mean anger
at being dissed by a Gorgiastic know-it-all.
Many of you are already teachers, though perhaps young
in comparison to Plato (b. 427 B.C.E.) when he wrote the
Gorgias (c. 387 B.C.E.). He was probably forty, and his
Socrates (b. 470) was probably about the same age at the dramatic date of this dialogue (shortly after 429, the year of Pericles’s death, which is mentioned as a recent event in 503c).
You will have experienced the unbalancing sense that the
stakes are high and souls are to be pierced and that passion,
or an exhibition of it, is in order. It is, to be sure, a wonderful
question about the nature of passion whether deliberate
demonstrativeness or disciplined reticence, either in the
speaker or the listener, does more to nourish it or to dampen
it, and how spontaneity and artfulness play into the effect.
But we do know that Aristotle believed Socrates’s display in
the Gorgias was effective. He tells of a Corinthian farmer
who was inspired by his reading of the dialogue to leave his
vineyard to its own devices, to join the Platonic circle, and
henceforth to make his soul the ‟seedbed,” that is, the seminar, of Plato’s philosophy.5
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
The Gorgias is, therefore, a good reference for beginning
to talk about the affects as an object of study. Not merely because it documents, so to speak, that people concerned with
the soul have in fact plenty of temperament—be it sober
Socrates or meek Jesus (e.g., Matt. 21:12, Jesus wreaking
havoc in the temple)—and that they don’t leave their affect
at the entrance to their inquiries or preachings. I don’t, of
course, mean the little negative furies that Socrates calls
‟eristic,” the eruptions of the contentious desire to win arguments, but I’m thinking of a large positive passion.
So this is where I zero in on my particular problem for
this talk. I have read my way through a tiny fraction of the
huge mass of contemporary writing on the emotions. I’ve
come away with the cumulative—documentable—impression that there is a thoroughgoing misapprehension about a
putative pagan rationalism and a supposed Western tradition
for which it is held responsible and which breaks out with insidious virulence in the Enlightenment. This view owes
something, I suppose, to Nietzsche’s brilliantly skewed portrait of the ‟despotic logician,” Socrates, the monster with
the ‟one, great Cyclopean eye,” in whom “the lovely madness of artistic enthusiasm never glowed.”6 The attribution of
monocular Cyclopeanism—i.e., vision without depth, carrying with it the charge of despotic sobriety—implies thought
unravished by beauty. All this imputed to a man who thought
that our soul contained a world that we could recover by
going within,7 and believed that true poetry requires a
Dionysiac frenzy inspired by the Muses, one cognate in kind
to the philosophical longing for beauty!8 All this ascribed to
a man who, attending a drinking party, bathed for once and
wearing shoes, slyly paints a verbal picture of Eros that is in
fact a self-portrait—Socrates looking at himself from a distance and recognizing the unwashed and unshod god!9
So much for the picture of Socrates the rationalist. And
something similar holds for Aristotle the intellectualist. His
great work, the founding book of institutionalizable philosophy (since it pre-sets the problems to be solved in Meta-
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
physics III), begins with an appetite, a root passion, which,
in the form of the desire to know, is humanly universal and
culminates in a passionate portrait of the ultimate object of
appetition. This ultimate object is a divinity that attracts,
without returning, love—an object that satisfies, that fulfills,
by its mere actuality, by its unadulterated energeia (Metaphysics II; XII.7), as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94:
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
unmoved . . .
except that the pure energeia of the divinity is the very opposite of the practically complete inertia of those unaffectable
human objects of attraction, these beautiful but hyletic lumps
of mere resistance that the speaker of the poem is excoriating.
Would it be too much to claim that this is the difference
between the philosophical Greeks and the God-regarding Hebrews, more significant than Homer’s anthropomorphic polytheism, which is in any case more characteristic of the poets
and the people than of the philosophers? I mean the lack of
reciprocity between adoring human and worshipped divinity:
The Socratic forms are great powers (Sophist 247e), but even
when they come on the comic stage in visible shape—which
they do in Aristophanes’s Clouds where they appear as
wordily nebulous beings, as shaped mists—they don’t do a
thing for their summoning worshipper, Socrates. In fact they
abandon him to possible suffocation in his thinkaterion—the
play leaves this uncomic outcome open—and exit satisfied
with their ‟temperate” performance (Clouds 269, 1509). The
Aristotelian divinity, Nous, is similarly unresponsive, an object of uninvolved attraction. The God of the Jews, on the
other hand, is beneficently or banefully involved with his
people, and when a certain Jewish sect grows into a great religion, He becomes caring outreach itself, namely, Love (e.g.,
Exodus 20:1-6, I John 4:8, 16).
Why am I dwelling first on the pagans and on the Chris-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
tians in talking to you about the study of the passions, when
the contemporary writers on the emotions simply drown out
these earlier voices by their volume? It’s not that I have much
faith in the explanatory power of chronology or in those longitudinal studies by which a genetic history is attributed to
ideas, and which tend to develop more arcane information
than illuminating depth. I can think of a half-dozen reasons
for my distrust, which there is no time to set out at the
podium, though we might talk about the implied historicism
of such studies in the next few days. Moreover, it is probably
less necessary at a Catholic university than at any other to try
to induce respect for the tradition. There is, however, a particular way in which I think that emotion studies should begin
with, or pick up at some point, the great ancient and medieval
works—of the latter, above all, Thomas’s ‟Treatise on the
Passions,” which he placed in the very center of the Summa
Theologiae, for this monk knew—God knows how—everything about human passion.
I think these pre-modern works should be studied for their
shock value, for the news they contain for us. Such a reading,
a reading that places them not in the bygone superseded past
but in a recalcitrantly unfashionable present, requires a difficult and never quite achievable art, one that graduate students
should certainly be eager to acquire: first, the art of summing
up, with some credibility, what a philosopher is really and at
bottom about (I don’t mean ‟all about,” a hand-waving locution, but the compact gist of his intention); and second, the
art of discerning how the particular part on which you mean
to focus is, or fails to be, properly derivative from that central
intention. Then, opposing gist to gist and consequence to consequence, there will emerge a coherent and discussable
schema both of the general notions that preoccupy the
denizens of modernity willy-nilly and of the sophisticated
twists that studious scholars and trendy intellectual elites
have given them. Approached in this way, emotion studies
seem to me as necessary to our self-understanding as any subject can be—necessary to us as human beings with a contem-
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
porary affectivity.
So now let me give you some, perhaps vulnerably sweeping, observations about more recent emotional studies, particularly in English-speaking lands. The groundbreaking
works for us were English; I will name Errol Bedford (1956)10
and Anthony Kenny (1963).11 But the American father of this
field is Robert Solomon with his book The Passions (1976).12
The Solomonic beginning and its consequences are full
of oddities. (I am avoiding the harsher term ‟self-contradictions.”) The thesis of the book is ‟to return the passions to
the central and defining role,” snatched from them by
Socrates, and ‟to limit the pretensions of ‘objectivity’ and
self-demeaning reason that have exclusively ruled Western
philosophy, religion, and science” since his days.13
Well, I guess we’ve read different works of Western philosophy. But now comes a surprise. How will this salvation
from two and a half millennia of despotic rationalism be
achieved? We must recognize that ‟an emotion is a judgment.”14 Of course, this dictum runs into difficulties concerning the meaning of non-rational judgments. Indeed, Solomon
eventually accepted that his claim is actually a cognitive theory. As such, he says rightly, it has ‟become the touch-stone
of all philosophical theorizing about emotions.” He could, in
any case, hardly escape this cognitivist denomination, since
it turns out that we become responsible for our emotions by
adopting this very theory of cognitive emotion. For as the
theory works its way into our unconscious volitions, it will
become true, and our emotions will indeed be as much in our
control as our judgments;15 so control is what it’s—after all—
about.
The Stoics are the moderns among the ancients. Their
cognitive theories, the first truly representational theories, are
more future-fraught than any others in antiquity that I know
of; they dominate modernity until Heidegger’s Being and
Time. The Stoics are hard to study, because the deepest of
them, belonging to the so-called Early Stoa, exist only in
fragments. But we have an extended text on Stoic passion
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
theory, the third and fourth books Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. Some of you, who have read the work, will recognize
that the modern dictum ‟an emotion is a judgment” is pure
Neostoicism. Neostoicism has, in fact, dominated modern
emotion studies. One major work in this vein is Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions
(2001).16
But how strange! The Stoics meant to reduce emotions
to mistakes, to diseases, to pathologies, of judgment. An emotion is a false appraisal, a perturbed opinion about what matters: an ‟upheaval of thought.” It is a deep and complex
theory underwritten by the Stoics’ fearless physicalism, their
notion of a material substratum, the pneuma, on whose
ground the psychic capacities can morph into one another.
But there is no question that, taken summarily, rationality
trumps affect. How odd, then, that modem theories so largely
save the emotions from rationalism by rationalizing them.
And I’ll list associated oddities.
First is the pervasive fear for the emotions, the sense that
we moderns have suppressed and demeaned them, that they
need saving. What teacher of the young (as scholars by and
large are) or observers of the world (as some of them may
be) could possibly think that that was what was troubling the
nations, cities, neighborhoods!
Second is a curtailed sense of thought in the West. I think
I’ve given some prime examples of the interpenetration of
thought and affect, even of the primacy of appetition in the
human soul in antiquity. When the ancients fight the passions
it is because they are so alive, experientially alive, to the
meaning of the word pathos, ‟suffering,” and the effect of its
licensed reign, its invited tyranny. It is really, I think, a modern idea of emotion that is at work here, among our contemporaries, one which pits its softness against hard reason.
Inherited Enlightenment terminology indeed conveys this
sense that our passions are attenuated, all but quelled by reason. The pivotal figure here is Hume. In his Treatise of
Human Nature, the term ‟passion” begins to be displaced by
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
‟emotion.” He uses both, mostly interchangeably. But emotion is the word of the future. Solomon’s book is entitled The
Passions, but the key word inside is ‟emotions.” Your own
conference called for papers on ‟Emotion.”
‟Emotion” derives from e-movere, Latin for ‟to move
out.” The significance of this substitution of emotion for passion is powerful. Ancient pathos, passion, was an affect emanating from an object; the object elicited the responsive
affect, from the outside in. Modern emotion comes from inside out; it emphasizes expression; subject prevails over object. It is the Romantic worm eating its way out of the
Enlightened apple.
At the same time, the non-affective, the rational part of
the subject becomes mere reason. Hume, famously, says:
‟Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of passions, and
can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey
them.”17 He can say that because Humean and enlightened
reason is not deeply affective, not driven by love, and so its
relation to emotion may indeed be one of subservience, standoff, or finally, enmity. I need hardly add that with this transformation of the appetitive, longing, loving, intellect into
manipulative, instrumental, willful rationality, philosophy
loses its proper meaning and becomes a profession. My brush
here is broad, but, I think, it has some good overlap with the
case. So my second oddity is the severely foreshortened view
of the capabilities of passionate thought.
Now a third curious notion, the oddest one of all: the unreflective launching of an enterprise which is, on the face of
it, like embarking on a destroyer with the idea of going swimming. The vessel of war displaces, cleaves, churns up the element, but, absent a shipwreck, the sailor stays dry. So the
student of emotion banishes perturbations, analyzes wholes,
whips up terminology, and, unless melancholy seizes him,
sails high and dry over the billowing depths of feeling, with
much solid bulkhead keeping him from immersion in the element to be apprehended. This not very elegant simile is just
a way of expressing my surprise at the fact that emotion stud-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
ies tend to precipitate themselves into a dispassionate subject
without much thought about how such a subject can come to
be—about how emotion can be subjected to thought without
being denatured in the process.
Here, incidentally, lies, it seems to me, the best reason
why cognitive scientists, and those philosophers who like to
be on solid ground, are by and large physicalists and might
well regard the Stoics as their avatars.18 What matter-and-itsmotions has in its favor in emotion studies is that in this spatial form the different motions of the mind appear not to
occlude each other; spatio-temporal events, laid our in extension and sequence, have patency. However, since cognitive
brain studies, including the emotion research, depend on prior
conceptualization and introspective protocols, it is hard to
think of them as independent of a philosophical phenomenology.
Therefore, in the unavoidable preparatory philosophical
exploration, the perplexity of thinking about feeling remains
a vexing one, the more so since it appears to me to be a variant of the greatest quandary, now and always: How is thinking about any form of our consciousness even conceivable?
How is it—or is it, indeed—that thought about awareness
does not collapse into a union, as does ‟thinking of thinking,”
the noēsis noēseōs of the Nous?19 How can we know that
thought about itself or its fellow internalities does not transform its object out of its true being?
Just this latter eventuality makes emotion studies problematic. Study does have its own affect, one of the most interesting in the list of feelings, namely, interest itself. The
word—from interesse, ‟to be in the midst of”—signifies what
student parlance calls ‟being into it.”20
To study is to bring to bear received learning and native
analytic and combinatory capacities on a determinate object.
If study is of a high quality, it is preceded and accompanied
by its opposite, leisure—free time for meditating or musing,
during which original questions rise up and take shape. But
the business itself focuses on problems such as Aristotle first
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
10
set for himself and left for his successors. Nowadays it’s the
dissertation advisor’s job. Now all the questions become formulated as demands for reasoning, and under reasoning all
things turn to reason—as under studious production all thinking turns to footnoted paper-writing.
It is indeed curious that this fact is not more of a perplexity to students of the emotions. Yet on second thought, it is
perhaps not so surprising that emotion studies seem so desiccated—perhaps they are not really more so than serious
scholarship ever must be. Robert Browning has his lovingly
respectful students sing at the “Grammarian’s Funeral”:
Learned we found him.
Yea, but we found him bald, too, eyes like lead,
Accents uncertain:
‟Time to taste life,” another would have said,
‟Up with the curtain!”
This man said rather, ‟Actual life comes next?
Patience a moment!
Grant I have mastered learning’s crabbed text,
Still there’s the comment.”
Here is the picture of interest raised to the pitch of passion. There is a sort of pure, dry, professional love (Browning’s grammarian’s passion was for Greek syntax, the
particles in particular) that can capture the loving admiration
of students. I know this from my own student days. But I
doubt that it suits philosophy, and, in particular, philosophizing about the emotions. Here another poem expresses our
condition more aptly: Wordsworth’s ‟The Tables Turned.” It
begins:
Up! up! my Friend and quit your books;
and this is its seventh verse:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
11
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
To be sure, there are now less intrusive ways of getting
inside Nature. Yet the conceptualizing of feeling will ever
and always be an abstraction in the basic sense—a removal,
a drawing away, from life. And in respect to the affects, this
sort of abstraction is doubly dubious. For in ordinary abstraction, the concept incarnate in concrete things is, by a specifically human cognitive operation, separated off from them.
But it is simply a premature, a prejudicial notion that the affects ‟stand under” (to use Kantian diction) abstractable concepts in the same way as do things.
It might follow that to view as problematic the dispassionate, studious study of the affects—be they impositions
from without or stirrings from within—is a sine qua non for
beginning rightly. I think it does follow.
There are early bonuses. I’ll give you in turn a suspicion,
a conjecture, and a figure. The suspicion is that we really are
partite beings, so that our affective and our thinking capacities are terminally distinct, structurally and dynamically heterogeneous. The conjecture is that it is this very disjunction
in their being which makes possible their conjunction in
thought and action, their effective complementarity. Here I’ve
written a sentence that I don’t even quite understand as I’m
reading it to you, and yet I have some faith in it. Finally, my
figure is that our affective capacities lie deeper in our nature
than our reflective powers.
To be sure, neuroscientists also say that certain brain
structures expressly subserving the emotions are located
deeper within the brain and appeared early in evolutionary
history, but that is not dispositive: What is biologically primitive might, after all, not be humanly primary. What I mean,
rather, is that affectivity has a certain abysmal, incomprehensible character that makes it feel—I don’t know how else to
put it—submersed; affects touch us (‟to feel” is related to the
Latin palpare, to pat) in intimate, that is, ‟innermost” regions,
�12
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
while articulable thought-activity intends, ‟stretches toward,”
emerges, towards comprehension of objects. We might be
constitutionally bipolar, extended between emotional depth
and thoughtful height. Perhaps an original question might be
formulated from this figure. It is something we could discuss
later, if you like.
Wordsworth’s lines imply that the murderous dissection
is performed on a lovely, living object. I must tell you that
emotion studies sometimes—too often—read as if they were
carried out on a latex-injected corpse that suffers every cut
with supine springiness. This is, as I’ve tried to show, a partly
inevitable result of making affectivity a ‟subject,” a thing
lying still under thought, literally ‟thrown under” its wheels.
Nonetheless, I feel tempted, by way of an ending, to say
how I think we can mitigate the dilemma, for if we can’t think
about our feelings, we’ll come apart. I’ll try to be practical.
First, then, you can’t study emotions at even the kindliest
advisor’s prompting. They are a subject that requires experiential urgency, some pressure for the relief of confusion. In
brief, you not only have to be a feeling being—as are we
all—but also a being enticingly oppressed by the enigma of
emotionality, the arcanum of affectivity. Some topics are well
approached in the brisk spirit of pleasurable problem-solving.
Not this one, I think.
Second, listen to what Socrates says in the Apology. He
does not say, as is often reported, that ‟the unexamined life
is not worth living.” What he really says is, I think, something
stronger: that such a life is ‟not livable for a human being,”
ou biōtos anthrōpōi (38a), is not a possible life, not a lived
life. That is what the -tos ending of biōtos signifies: ‟livable
or lived.” He means, I think, that experiences, passions
among them, that are not internally re-viewed, introspectively
re-lived, are in effect unlived—an unexamined experience is
not yours. A nice corroborating illustration comes in Thomas
Mann’s Magic Mountain, whose hero—meant to be a paradigm of simple humanity—engages in an introspective discipline he calls regieren, “ruling, regulating,”—in short,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
13
digesting, appropriating his affects and images.21 For as experimental emotion research requires protocols drawn from inner
experience, so conceptual emotion studies cannot do without
introspection. And unlike egocentric self-analysis, which is a
spontaneous sport, disciplined self-inspection is an art learned
by practice. So now I seem to have contravened everything I’ve
just said, which was that feeling is choked by thinking.
Here, then, is my last attempt at being practical about our
problem as students: how to keep feeling before ourselves while
bringing thought to bear on it. Or, more learnedly put: how to
turn what is, regarded in itself, the most subjective element of
our being, perhaps our very subjectivity itself, into an object. (I
will get myself into a word muddle here, unless I remind you
that before the eighteenth century “subject” meant just what we
now call “object”—for example, the being that arouses passion,
and we still use it in this way, as in “the subject to be studied.”
But by means of an inversion that is only partial, “subject” is
now used for the host of the emotion rather than for its object,
and “subjective” signifies a feature of emotional affect.)
Deliverance from the quandary of objectifying the essentially subjective seems to me to come from our great representational faculty, the imagination. Mental images are summoned
by feeling, arouse feeling and are, famously, affect-fraught, feeling-laden. There are those who deny that we have analogue images before an inner eye, but they are in retreat. The cognitive
scientist Stephen Kosslyn (the prime defender of mental analogue images),22 lay persons in general, and most students of
the imagination are convinced by their own inner experience of
imaginative vision and its affectivity—and what claim could
possibly override such personal, one might say, eye-witness
knowledge? (I might add here that the very latest neuroscience
seems, though incidentally, to clinch the argument for mental
visuality; mental images are directly machine-retrievable.23)
These affect-laden sights can indeed be held in mind, and
thinking can turn to them, play over them, study them. So, it
seems to me, emotion studies require an imaginative life. Here
is a practical consequence: Your profession requires you to read
�14
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
scholarly articles, but your mission needs you to read works of
fiction, particularly novels. For these not only stock your minds
with visualizable scenes of passion on which to dwell while you
think, they also school you in the adequately expressive diction
with which to articulate what you discovered. For, my fellow
students, if you speak of feeling either in flabbily pretentious or
technically formalizing diction, your papers will be worth—
well, next to nothing.
NOTES
1. Platons Dialog Gorgias, ed. Otto Apelt (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1922),
166. This is the very end of the dialogue, at 527e.
2. Debra Nails, The People of Plato (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 243.
3. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Middle-English edition, Prologue, l. 72 (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), 5.
4. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book III, Chapter 5, “Plato,” trans. R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library 184 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925).
5. This anecdote is found in a fragment from Themistius in the so-called
Akademie-Ausgabe of Aristotle’s works edited for the Prussian Academy
of Sciences by Immanuel Bekker (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1870), 1484b. The
fragment is translated in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, Vol. 12
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 24. The story is translated in its original
context in Robert J. Penella, The Private Orations of Themistius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 122.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, section 14: “das eine große
Zyklopenauge des Sokrates . . . in dem nie der holde Wahnsinn künstlerischer Begeisterung geglüht hat.”
7. Plato, Meno, 81c.
8. Plato, Phaedrus, 245a, 249d.
9. Plato, Symposium 203d.
10. Errol Bedford, “Emotions,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
LVII (1956-57), 281-304.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
15
11. Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion, and Will (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1963).
12. Robert Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life
(New York: Doubleday, 1976).
13. Solomon, The Passions, xiv.
14. Ibid., 185.
15. Ibid., 188ff.
16. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
17. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), 2.3.3. Emphasis
added.
18. See, for example, Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 275.
19. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII, Chapter 9.
20. See Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, 4 vols. (New
York: Springer, 2008), Volume I, Chapter 10, “Interest–Excitement,” 185202.
21. In Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Chapter 6, “Of the City of
God and of Evil Deliverance.”
22. See, for example, Stephen Kosslyn, Image and Brain: The Resolution
of the Imagery Debate (Boston: MIT Press, 1996).
23. Francisco Pereira et al., “Generating text from functional brain images,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5 (August, 2011): Article 72.
�16
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�ESSAYS & LECTURES
17
On Biblical Style
Tod Linafelt
The western tradition has not focused much attention on the
literary style of the Bible. Although it is true that the classical
literary critic Longinus (or “Pseudo-Longinus”), writing in
the first century C.E., makes a brief but famous reference to
the opening lines of Genesis in his treatise On the Sublime,1
the context for the reference is his treatment of “greatness of
thought” rather than any strictly literary qualities. More typical of pre-modern literary attitudes toward the Bible is Augustine’s judgment that biblical literature exhibits “the lowest
of linguistic style” (humillimum genus loquendi), and had
seemed to him, before his conversion, “unworthy of comparison with the majesty of Cicero.”2 Of course, readers have
not traditionally gone to the Bible in search of literary artfulness but rather for its religious value—that is, primarily as a
source for theology or for ethics. For Augustine, as for so
many religious readers after him, the Bible’s theological
truths and ethical teachings won out over its literary art or
lack thereof.3 But the fact is that the Bible—and my concern
here is more particularly with the Hebrew Bible or Christian
Old Testament—presents to the reader distinctly literary narrative and poetic works that both demand and reward expressly literary attention. Not only can we speak about the
literary style of the Bible, then, but we can and ought to speak
more precisely about its narrative style or poetic style, since
biblical narrative and biblical poetry each work with a very
different set of conventions and techniques—with different
Tod Linafelt is professor of biblical literature in the Theology Department
at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
�18
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
literary toolkits, we might say. Reading the Bible “as literature,” then, means more than just close reading, as it is often
understood. It also means becoming familiar with and attending to the distinctive and specific workings of narrative texts
and poetic texts. It seems clear that the ancient authors were
very much aware of the differing conventions and possibilities associated with narrative and with poetry, respectively,
and that their audiences would have responded differently to
these two primary literary forms. The better we understand
these forms, the better readers we will be.
I. ANCIENT HEBREW NARRATIVE
One must admit that Augustine was not entirely wrong. It is
hard to deny that from a certain angle the Bible is among the
most “unliterary” works of literature that we have. Working
as it does with a very limited vocabulary and often repeating
a word several times rather than resorting to synonyms, biblical Hebrew narrative exhibits a style that can seem simple,
even primitive, in comparison with the classics of world literature. (Things are very different with biblical poetry, as we
will see below.) Its syntax too seems rudimentary to modern
ears, linking clause after clause with a simple “and” (what
the linguists call parataxis) that reveals little about their syntactical relation, instead of using complex sentences with subordinate clauses (hypotaxis). Notice, for example, the dogged
repetition of “face” and the run-on syntax in the following
very literal translation of Genesis 32:21 (where Jacob is sending ahead of him a very large gift to his estranged brother
Esau, in hopes that Esau will be placated over Jacob’s earlier
stealing of his blessing): “For he said, ‘Let me cover his face
with the gift that goes before my face and after I look upon
his face perhaps he will lift up my face.’” Although modern
translations tend to obscure these features, even in translation
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LINAFELT
19
one is bound to notice the paucity of metaphorical description, the brevity of dialogue, the lack of reference to the interior lives of characters, the limited use of figural
perspective, and not least the jarring concreteness with which
God is sometimes imagined to be involved in human history.
Many of these features are elements of biblical literature’s
economy of style, or essential terseness. We may compare,
for example, Homer’s use of sometimes startling metaphors
in describing a scene with the practice of biblical authors (all
of whom are essentially anonymous), who by and large avoid
such elaborate figurative language. Contrast this description
in the Iliad (16.480-85, Fagles’ translation) of the death of a
single, obscure Trojan charioteer:
Patroclus rising beside him stabbed his right jawbone,
ramming the spearhead square between his teeth so hard
he hooked him by that spearhead over the chariot-rail,
hoisted, dragged the Trojan out as an angler perched
on a jutting rock ledge drags some fish from the sea,
some noble catch, with line and glittering bronze hook4
with the blunt recounting in Genesis 34 of the massacre of
an entire city by two of Jacob’s sons: “Simeon and Levi,
Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and came against the city
unawares, and killed all the males. They killed Hamor and
his son Shechem with the sword” (Gen 34:25-6). This brief
passage is typical of the tendency in biblical narrative to
avoid description of any sort, metaphorical or otherwise. The
principle applies, with some exceptions of course, not only
to physical description—so that we are rarely told what either
objects or people look like—but also, and more importantly,
to the inner lives, thoughts, and motivations of characters in
the narratives. It would be a mistake, however, to take this
economy of style as an indicator of the Bible’s essential sim-
�20
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
plicity or primitiveness as a work of literature. In fact, it is
primarily this terseness that lends biblical narrative its distinctive complexity as literature.
In beginning to think about the workings of biblical
narrative one could do no better than to read Erich Auerbach’s
“Odysseus’ Scar,” the opening chapter of his book Mimesis,
in which he compares biblical narrative style with Homeric
epic style.5 Auerbach offers the first and best modern articulation of how the austere terseness of biblical narrative is not
just the absence of style but is in fact a distinctive and profound literary mode in its own right. Auerbach describes Homeric style as being “of the foreground,” whereas biblical
narratives are by contrast “fraught with background.” In other
words, in the Iliad and the Odyssey both objects and persons
tend to be fully described and illuminated, with essential attributes and aspects—from physical descriptions to the
thoughts and motivations of characters—there in the foreground for the reader to apprehend. But with biblical narrative such details are, for the most part, kept in the background
and are not directly available to the reader. So, as noted
above, we are very rarely given physical descriptions of either objects or people in the biblical narrative.6 What do
Adam and Eve look like? We do not know. Abraham? Sarah?
Moses? We do not know. As Auerbach puts it in his comments on Genesis 22, where God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, it is unthinkable that the servants, the
landscape, the implements of sacrifice should be described
or praised, as one might expect in Homer: “they are servingmen, ass, wood, and knife, and nothing else, without an epithet.”7 Occasionally a certain quality is ascribed to some
person or object: we are told that Eve perceives that the tree
of knowledge is “a delight to the eyes” (Gen. 3:6), and likewise we are told that Joseph is “handsome and good-looking”
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LINAFELT
21
(Gen. 39:6). But as a rule such minimal notations are given
only when necessary to introduce some element that is important to the development of the plot. In the present cases
the attractiveness of the tree of knowledge leads, of course,
to the eating of its fruit (But what kind of fruit? We are not
told, the long tradition of the apple notwithstanding), and
Joseph’s attractiveness leads, in the next verse, to the sexual
aggression of Potiphar’s wife, and thus indirectly to Joseph’s
imprisonment. And even here one notices that we are not told
what it is that makes the fruit lovely to look at or what exactly
makes Joseph so beautiful.
Beyond a lack of physical description in the biblical stories, descriptions of personal qualities are also largely absent.
That is, characterization is rarely explicit, but rather must be
teased out of the narrative based on what characters do and
say (on action and dialogue, in other words, rather than on
direct evaluation by the narrator). The presentation of Esau
and Jacob in Genesis 25 illustrates this nicely. We are told
that Esau is “a man skilled in hunting, a man of the field” (v.
27), but the essential characterization of Esau as impulsive
and unreflective, indeed almost animal-like, is conveyed by
action and dialogue. Thus, coming in from the field to discover that his brother Jacob has prepared a stew, Esau inarticulately blurts out, “Let me eat some of that red, red stuff,
for I am famished” (v. 30). Robert Alter notes that Esau “cannot even come up with the ordinary Hebrew word for stew
(nazid) and instead points to the bubbling pot impatiently as
(literally) ‘this red red.’”8 And then, after agreeing to trade
his birthright to Jacob in exchange for some of the stew,
Esau’s impetuous, action-oriented character is suggested by
the “rapid-fire chain of verbs”: “and he ate and he drank and
he rose and he went off.”9 The character of Esau is starkly
contrasted in the story with the character of Jacob. If Esau is
�22
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
all instinct and action, Jacob is all calculation and deliberateness. The stew is prepared and waiting for the return of Esau
from the field, and one cannot fail to notice the businesslike
manner in which Jacob first suggests, and then demands formal confirmation of, the trading of the birthright: “And Jacob
said, ‘Sell now your birthright to me.’ And Esau said, ‘Look,
I am at the point of death, so why do I need a birthright?’ And
Jacob said, ‘Swear to me now’” (vv. 31-33). These initial
thumbnail characterizations of Esau and Jacob will be
fleshed-out further two chapters later, in Genesis 27, where
the blind Isaac is deceived into bestowing his blessing on
Jacob rather than the intended son Esau. The elaborate ruse
carried out by Jacob with the invaluable help of his mother
Rebekah, in which he impersonates Esau, confirms his calculating ambition even as it adds outright deceit to his resume
of character traits. Jacob will become a consummate trickster
as the story proceeds—though he will also, as an elderly man,
be tricked by his own sons (ch. 37)—but he is never actually
described by the narrator as tricky or deceptive, in the way
that Odysseus is described repeatedly in terms of his resourcefulness or Achilles in terms of his rage, for example,
but instead has his character revealed by what he says and
what he does. Esau, for his part, will play a lesser role in the
narrative that follows, although his reappearance in Chapter
33 is striking and in some ways unexpected, but both his inarticulateness and his utter lack of calculation are revealed by
his response upon hearing that Jacob has stolen his blessing:
“he cried out with an exceedingly great and bitter cry and he
said to his father, ‘Bless me, me also, Father’” (v. 34); and
again, a few verses later, “‘Do you have but one blessing my
father? Bless me, me also, Father.’ And Esau lifted up his
voice and wept” (v. 38). By not directly revealing the qualities of character of the actors in the narrative, the narrator
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LINAFELT
23
puts the onus of interpretation on the readers, who must work
out on their own—albeit with hints given—what they think
of these characters. To repeat, this is not the absence of characterization, but is a certain mode of characterization, and in
fact a fairly complex mode at that.
We may best see the complexity of this mode of characterization, and indeed of the Bible’s economy of style more
generally, when it comes to the inner lives of the characters.
Readers are often used to having access in one form or another to the thoughts, feeling, and motivations of the characters about whom they read. Again, Auerbach on Homer:
“With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even
passion does not disturb, Homer’s personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they
speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it.
Much that is terrible takes place in the Homeric poems, but
it seldom takes place wordlessly.”10 And so, for instance, the
tragic death of Hector at the hands of Achilles near the end
of the Iliad (in book 22) has devoted to it, in the Greek, fourteen lines of lament by Hector’s father, seven lines by his
mother, and fully forty lines by his wife Andromache. We
may compare this with the brief notations of grief in biblical
narrative. On the death of Sarah: “And Sarah died at KiriathArba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan, and Abraham
went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her” (Gen. 23:2).
On the death of Moses: “And the Israelites wept for Moses
in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the period of mourning
for Moses was ended” (Deut. 34:8). One might object that
since both Sarah and Moses had lived long and fruitful lives
their deaths lack the tragedy of noble Hector being cut down
in his prime over the affairs of his less-than-noble brother
Paris, so that their deaths inspire less intense expressions of
mourning. But even with more obviously tragic deaths we
�24
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
see in biblical narrative the restraint of the narrator, who acknowledges the grief of the survivors but refrains from allowing them full expression of it. We noted above, for
example, Jacob’s response to what he takes to be evidence of
the death of his young, beloved son Joseph: “A vicious beast
has devoured him, Joseph torn to shreds!” (Gen. 37:33). In a
scene that seems intended to characterize Jacob as an extravagant mourner, the narrator goes on to describe Jacob as rending his clothes and donning sackcloth and refusing to be
comforted by his other children: “‘No, I shall go down to
Sheol to my son, mourning.’ Thus his father bewailed him”
(37:35). Yet even here the few scant lines in Hebrew do not
come close to matching the sixty lines of direct lament over
the death of Hector, not to mention the extended scene in
Book 24 of the Iliad where Hector’s father Priam goes to the
tent of Achilles to beg for the return of his son’s much-abused
corpse.
Consider also the notoriously ambiguous story in Leviticus 10 of the burning Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron.
The reader is told that the two young priests brought “strange
fire” or “alien fire” (‘esh zara) before the Lord, “and fire
came out from before the Lord and consumed them, and they
died before the Lord” (10:2). Moses very quickly offers a sort
of cryptic theodicy, cast in verse form, in the face of the
shocking event: “This is what the Lord spoke, saying,
‘Through those near me I will show myself holy / and before
all the people I will be glorified’” (10:3). No more laconic
response could be imagined, both to the death of the young
men and to Moses’ extemporaneous theologizing, than that
attributed to Aaron: “And Aaron was silent.” Surely we are
to imagine Aaron’s grief as real and deep—indeed, a few
verses later Moses forbids Aaron and his other sons to go
through the public rituals of mourning while they are conse-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LINAFELT
25
crated for service in the temple (10:6-7)—and yet all we are
given is his silence. Unless one imagines this silence to indicate a complacent assent to what has just been witnessed, the
narrator gives us, to borrow from Auerbach again, “a glimpse
of unplumbed depths.” It is, in short, a silence that is “fraught
with background,” a silence that demands interpretation on
the part of the reader. Is Aaron feeling pure shock? Overwhelming sadness? Anger at God? Confusion or despair? Is
his silence a rejection of Moses’ statement of God’s intent?
And if so, on what basis? The fact is that we are given no access whatsoever into the inner life of Aaron, and because we
do not know what he is thinking we also do not know what
motivates his silence.
It is with regard to this latter issue, the question of character motivation, that we may see the importance of recognizing the distinctively terse mode of biblical narration. As I
noted above in considering the story of Jacob and Esau, the
narrator reveals very little about the inner lives of characters,
instead reporting mainly action and dialogue, what the characters do and what they say. If we are given little or no access
to the thoughts and feelings of the characters about whom we
read, then it follows that the motivation behind what they do
and say is also largely obscure. The importance of this obscurity of motivation can scarcely be overstated for any literary reading biblical narrative, since it more than anything
else is what gives the literature its profound complexity as it
forces the reader to negotiate the many possible ways of
imagining the characters’ inner lives. Let me try to justify this
claim with reference to the literature itself.
A classic example of the ambiguity of character motivation in the Bible may be seen in Genesis 22. In a story that
has never failed to engage the imagination of interpreters ancient and modern, God commands Abraham to take his son
�26
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Isaac and sacrifice him as a burnt offering. Although a few
chapters earlier we have seen Abraham challenge the justness
of God’s decision to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, here
Abraham says nothing in response. Instead, there is the narrator’s terse report: “So Abraham rose early in the morning,
saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him,
and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and
set out and went to the place in the distance that God had
shown him” (vv. 3-4). Abraham’s silent obedience here is
often taken to be motivated by an untroubled and unquestioning faith in God, which, depending on one’s perspective, may
be seen positively as an expression of ultimate piety, or negatively as an expression of unfeeling religious fanaticism. But
both interpretations fail to recognize the fundamental literary
convention of the refusal of access to the inner lives of characters. The fact that we are not told of Abraham’s inner, emotional response to the demand that he slaughter his son does
not mean that he has no inner, emotional response. Surely we
are to imagine that he does, but rather than describing it for
us or allowing Abraham to give voice to it the narrator leaves
us guessing as to what that response might be and thus also
as to his motivation for his actions. Now, it is possible to fill
that gap left by the narrator with an inner calm that reflects
absolute faith, but it is equally possible to imagine that Abraham is feeling anger, disbelief, and even disgust. (With God
for demanding the slaughter? With himself for not protesting?) And however one fills the gap of Abraham’s inner life
initially, surely it is complicated by Isaac’s calling out to him
in v. 7, “Father!” and by the plaintive question that follows,
“The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a
burnt offering?” It is precisely because we do not know what
Abraham is thinking or feeling that his brief response to
Isaac’s question (“God will see to the lamb for the offering
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LINAFELT
27
my son,” v. 8) takes on a deeply ironic double meaning. On
the one hand, it may be read as a ruse, if not an outright lie,
to deflect any suspicions that may be dawning on the son; on
the other hand, it may be read as a straightforward statement
of faith that a sheep will indeed be provided. It may even be
the case here that the author makes use of the ambiguities of
Hebrew’s seemingly rudimentary syntax in order to signal
the potential irony to the attentive reader. For there is no
punctuation in the Hebrew text and one may also construe
the syntax to mean: “God will see to the lamb for the offering:
namely, my son.”
To go back to Abraham’s initial response to Isaac, we
may see how what at first instance looks like wooden repetition may in fact be a subtly modulated use of a key word or
theme. When God first calls out to Abraham to begin the
episode, Abraham’s response is “Here I am”; when Isaac calls
in the middle of the episode, on the way to the place of sacrifice, Abraham’s response is, once again, “Here I am, my
son”; and when, at the climactic moment when the knife is
raised over the boy, the angel of Lord calls out “Abraham,
Abraham!” (22:11) his response is again “Here I am.” In each
case the single Hebrew word hinneni, “here I am” or “behold
me,” is repeated by Abraham. To substitute a synonym for
the sake of variety, as for example the JPS Tanakh does in
translating the second occurrence as “Yes, my son,” is to lose
a concrete expression of what is certainly a central theme for
the story, namely the anguished tension between the demands
of God and the ethical demands of another human being
(Abraham’s own child no less!). Surely every ethical impulse
demands that Abraham not kill his son, and yet precisely this
is what God demands that he do. He responds “Here I am”
to both God and Isaac, and yet he cannot be fully “there,”
fully present, to both equally. It is only with the third, very
�28
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
late, repetition of “Here I am” that the tension is resolved and
Abraham is no longer caught between these opposing demands on his loyalty. One might say that Abraham’s threefold
response provides the underlying armature for the story,
marking in a classically Aristotelian way the beginning, the
middle, and the end. Although the single word hinneni is literally repeated each time, it acquires a new depth of meaning—and certainly a new tone—with each repetition. And to
the end of the story it remains the case that we are never quite
sure what Abraham is thinking as he first travels in silence,
then responds to his son, then binds and raises the knife, and
finally sacrifices the ram instead.
If we do not know what motivates Abraham in Genesis
22, it is also the case that we do not know what motivates
Isaac to make his enquiry as to the whereabouts of the sheep
or what he is thinking as his father binds him and lays him
on the makeshift altar. But by this point we are not surprised
by this fact, since we have begun to see that the biblical authors make use of this convention in order to allow for depth
of character and depth of meaning. It is perhaps somewhat
more surprising to note that this convention applies to God
too, who is, after all, a character in these narratives as well,
and so the literary art of biblical narrative has distinct theological implications. What motivates God to demand the sacrifice of Isaac? The narrator refuses to tell us, though for any
reader, religious or not, this must certainly be a compelling
question. We are told that “God tested Abraham” (22:1); but
this does not give us an answer to our question. The sense of
the word “test” (Hebrew nissah) is something like “trial” or
“ordeal,” and so God decides to put Abraham through an ordeal, presumably to test his mettle. (A comparison with the
opening chapters of Job is apt.) But why, and to what end? Is
it to find out how strong Abraham is under pressure? To see
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LINAFELT
29
whether he values his son more than he values God? Does
God genuinely learn something new about Abraham, about
humanity, or about God’s self through this test? (“Now I know
that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me
your son, your only son” [22:12].) Without knowing what
motivates God or what God is thinking as the knife is raised,
we cannot finally even know whether Abraham has passed
or failed the test. Most readers assume that he has passed, but
a few have dared to suggest that God wanted not blind obedience from Abraham but bold resistance—after all, such resistance was honored when Abraham argued on behalf of
Sodom and Gomorrah—and that in failing to argue with God,
Abraham failed to show the strength of character that God
hoped to see.11 This reading may seem to go against the grain
of the narrative, especially in light of 22:16-17: “By myself
have I sworn, said the LORD, for because you have done this
thing, and have not withheld your son, your only son: That
in blessing I will bless you, and in multiplying I will multiply
your seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is
on the sea shore.” But the fact that such a reading is nonetheless possible—if only just—witnesses to the profound but
productive ambiguity of Hebrew literary style, which exploits
to great effect its distinctive economy of style.
There is very much more that could be said about the literary art of Hebrew narrative, especially about the patterns
or structures that authors and editors have used to construct
both individual stories and larger blocks of material, but before moving to consider poetry, I want to point out one final
way in which the literary and the theological are bound together. I mentioned at the beginning of this essay the jarring
concreteness with which God is sometimes imagined in the
Bible as active in the world: God walks in the garden of Eden
and enjoys the evening breeze; God shows up at the tent of
�30
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Sarah and Abraham to promise them offspring; God destroys
Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea; God inscribes with God’s
own hand the tablets of the covenant at Sinai; and in the final,
poignant scene of the Torah at the end of Deuteronomy, God
buries Moses after allowing him a vision of the promised land
that he is not finally to enter. But if the Hebrew literary imagination is relentlessly concrete in its workings, including its
imaginings of God, it does not follow that it is without craft
or nuance. In fact, divine agency and human agency are almost always imagined in these narratives as being inextricably but ambiguously bound together in such a way that
neither agency is autonomous or effective in and of itself.12
And so, God announces to Rebekah in Genesis 25 that the
elder of her twins (Esau) will serve the younger (Jacob); but
two chapters later, when the time has come to deliver the
blessing to the proper son, God has apparently left the matter
to Rebekah to work out, which she does with great effectiveness (see ch. 27). In Genesis 50, Joseph may declare to his
brothers, who had sold him into slavery thirteen chapters and
many years earlier, that “Even though you intended to do
harm to me, God intended it for good”; but the story also suggests that it is largely his own wits and talent, rather than any
supernatural intervention, that allows him to survive and
prosper in Egypt.
Even in the Exodus story, where God’s salvific power
seems more tangible than anywhere in the Bible, the divine
plan requires human agents for implementation. And so, after
a flurry of first-person active verbs by which the Lord resolves to liberate Israel from slavery (“I have seen . . . , I have
heard . . . , I have come down to rescue . . . , I will bring them
up [3:7-8]), God shifts unexpectedly to the second person,
saying to Moses, “And now, go and I will send you to
Pharaoh, and you will bring my people the Israelites out of
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LINAFELT
31
Egypt” (3:10). Moses quite naturally responds, “Who am I,
that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring out the Israelites from Egypt?” God’s answer is telling with regard to
the interdependence of divine and human agency: “I will be
with you” (v. 12). Who is it that liberates Israel—God or
Moses? It is both. But even that answer is too simple, since
the liberation of Israel requires not only the cooperation of
God and Moses but of Israel as well. Thus, Moses dutifully
announces to the enslaved Israelites God’s plan to liberate
them, which is again stated in a surge of first-person verbs:
“I will take you out . . . , I will rescue you from bondage . . . ,
I will take you . . . , I will be your God . . . , I will bring you
to the land I promised” (Ex. 6:6-8). The response? “They did
not heed Moses because their spirits had been crushed by
cruel slavery.” The point would seem to be a sociological one:
that the people cannot be liberated before they are ready, and
after generations of bondage and hard labor it will take more
than promises to get them ready. Only after seeing the very
real power of Pharaoh broken by repeated plagues are the Israelites able to summon the energy to come out of Egypt.
Pharoah himself is also a locus for this fundamental tension—in this case it is paradoxical—between divine sovereignty and human agency. On the one hand, God claims
responsibility for “hardening” Pharaoh’s heart so that he refuses to allow Israel to leave (Ex. 7:3; 14:4); but on the other
hand, Pharaoh is said by the narrator to have hardened his
own heart (8:11, 28). At other times a passive voice is used,
so that Pharaoh’s heart “was hardened” or “became hard”
(7:14; 8:15; 9:4)—thereby leaving the agency behind the
hardening unclear. This shifting of agency allows the narrative to retain a sense of God’s sovereign activity in history,
while at the same time affirming the moral culpability of
Pharaoh, whose repeated failure to fulfill his promise of free-
�32
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ing the Israelites represents rather realistically the psychology
of a tyrant. Logically, we readers may want to know, Which
was it? Did God harden Pharaoh’s heart, or did Pharaoh
harden his own heart? But the story refuses to settle the question, giving us a “both/and” that reflects a pronounced trend
in biblical narrative to render not only the inner lives of both
humans and God, but also creation and history itself, as unfathomably complex and finally unresolvable mysteries.
II. ANCIENT HEBREW POETRY
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,”
Emily Dickinson once wrote, “I know that is poetry.”13 Dickinson was, of course, somewhat more than averagely tuned
in to the effects of poetry. In truth, poetry—even great poetry—often fails to take the top of one’s head off, and even
sometimes goes unrecognized as poetry. There is no more
striking example of this than the Bible, which contains a distinctive body of poetry that has been, for two thousand years,
only rarely and inconsistently represented on the page in the
form of verse rather than prose. Though some passages are
lined out in the ancient and medieval manuscript traditions,
these include not only ones that we would now recognize as
poetry but also lists of names that are clearly not poetry (in
the same way that the phonebook is not poetry just because
it is lined out). And printed Bibles from Guttenberg on, until
the twentieth century, represent most of the poetic sections
of the Bible as blocks of text indistinguishable from prose.
The question of whether biblical poetry even exists has
been around since ancient times, and it has been exacerbated
by the fact that our primary models for what counts as poetry
are drawn from the highly metrical verse found in classical
literature. Already in the first century C.E., Jewish intellectuals like Philo and Josephus, feeling the need to defend their
cultural heritage in terms of Greek and Roman ideals, went
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LINAFELT
33
looking for iambs and hexameters in the Torah. And they
were followed in this task by later Christian writers such as
Origen (in the early third century) and Jerome (in the fourth
and fifth centuries), who also assumed that if poetry existed
in the Bible then it must exist in metrical form. The search
for meter in biblical literature has been revived on occasion
in the modern period as well, but it has never amounted to
much, for the simple fact that ancient Hebrew verse is not
metrical. This lack of conformity to classical standards—as
well as to virtually all poetry in the West until the nineteenth
century—has no doubt been a major factor in the tradition’s
lack of appreciation for biblical poetry, but so has the Bible’s
status as religious literature. Attention to literary form has
been a low priority for interpreters of the Bible, eager as they
have been to move to the content or the meaning of any given
passage. There has been very little allowance in biblical interpretation for the possibility that, as Wallace Stevens puts
it, “poetry is the subject of the poem.”14
A major breakthrough in understanding biblical poetry
came with Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of
the Hebrews, first delivered in association with Lowth’s chair
in poetry at Oxford and then published in 1753. Lowth’s most
lasting contribution, for good and ill, was his identification
of parallelismus membrorum, or parallelism of lines, as the
primary structuring principle of ancient Hebrew verse.
“Things for the most part shall answer to things, and words
to words,” Lowth writes, “as if fitted to each other by a kind
of rule or measure.”15 From Psalm 114, for example:
The mountains skipped like rams,
the hills like lambs.
Or from the Song of Songs:
Love is strong as death,
jealousy harsh as the grave.
�34
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Notice how “mountains” matches “hills,” and how “rams”
matches “lambs.” And notice the strict parallelism of
“love//jealousy,” “strong//harsh,” and “death//grave.” Lowth
admitted that many lines of biblical poetry did not display
the same equivalence of terms that we see here, but nonetheless the recognition that lineation was based on the matching
of two or three short lines in a couplet or triplet form, which
did not depend on meter, opened the way for more sustained
attention to such poetry as poetry, rather than just repetitioussounding prose.
For 200 years after Lowth nearly all attention to biblical
verse was on this phenomenon of parallelism, and most especially semantic parallelism (or parallelism of meaning),
which too often was reduced to the idea that the second or
third line in a couplet or a triplet simply restates the basic
idea from the first line. But recent scholarship has shown that
the relationship between lines is more intricate and more interesting than this. Adele Berlin, Michael O’Connor, F. W.
Dobbs-Allsopp and others have shown that that parallelism
involves not only semantic features but also grammatical,
syntactical, and phonological patterns (generally not apparent
in translation), and that there are complex syntactical constraints that underlie the ancient Hebrew poetic line, which
are not in the end reducible to “parallelism.”16 Moreover,
Robert Alter and James Kugel have shown that even when
the relationship between lines looks to be semantically parallel at first glance, there is often a subtle dynamism in which
the second line moves beyond the language or imagery in the
first by making it more concrete, more specific, more intense,
or more emotionally heightened.17 Thus, in the matched lines
quoted above from the Song of Songs: jealousy is a more specific emotion associated with love; harsh heightens and intensifies the connotation of strong; and the grave serves as a
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LINAFELT
35
concrete symbol of death.
Beyond the question of line structure, however, the cluster of other features that typify biblical verse has mostly been
overlooked by scholarship of recent decades. But one can get
a much richer sense of the distinctive workings of biblical
poetic style by recognizing these features—features that can
be seen more clearly when compared with the workings of
biblical prose narrative. As we saw above, ancient Hebrew
authors developed a prose style that was especially suited for
narrative (or storytelling) and that prefigured in important respects the style and techniques of both modern novelistic fiction and history-writing. Virtually all other long narratives in
the ancient world—from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Babylonian Enuma Elish to the Canaanite epics to the Iliad and
the Odyssey—take the form of verse, reflecting the oral origins of the epic genre. By casting their stories in the form of
prose, biblical authors pioneered a “writerly” form of narrative that did not depend on the rhythms of oral poetry and
that allowed for the development of a genuine third-person
narrator, whose voice could be distinguished from the direct
discourse attributed to characters within the narrative. It also
allowed for a depth-of-consciousness and an opaqueness in
its literary characters, so that, as we saw above, readers are
seldom told what characters are thinking or feeling at any
given moment, even though it is often vitally important to
characterization and to plot development.
Stylistically, however, biblical poetry works very differently. There are in the first place the formal differences that
mark the poetry as verse (instead of prose): not only lineation,
but also a compressed syntax that tends to drop particles and
pronouns in order to achieve the conciseness of the poetic
line. (Unfortunately, such syntactical structures are mostly
invisible in translation.) And biblical poetry is, to borrow
�36
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Terry Eagleton’s vague but appropriate characterization of
poetry in general, much more “verbally inventive” than biblical prose narrative.18 The terse, straightforward style of biblical narrative means that it tends to avoid elevated diction or
figurative language. But the poetry is filled with figurative
language, from the mostly conventional imagery found in the
psalms, for example, to the more inventive imagination of
the book of Job, to the double entendres of the Song of Songs.
Thus, the troubled fate of the psalmist is, often as not, imagined in terms of “the pit” that threatens to swallow or “the
flood” that threatens to overwhelm; and God is imagined as
a “rock,” a “fortress,” or a “shield.” As the suffering Job
imagines blotting out the day of his birth, he both personifies
and eroticizes it, imagining night longing for day which, in
his counterfactual curse, never arrives:
Let the stars of its dawn be dark;
let it long for light in vain,
and never behold the eyelids of morning. (Job 3:9)
Later, Job imagines God’s enmity toward him in terms of the
ancient grudge between God-as-creator and the chaotic force
of the personified Sea:
Am I the Sea, or the Dragon,
that you set a guard over me? (7:12)
Answering Job, thirty chapters later, God returns to this
image, but redefines and re-personifies the chaotic Sea not
as an enemy combatant but as an infant to be nurtured:
Who is it that contained the Sea
as it emerged bursting from the womb?—
when I clothed it in clouds,
and swaddled it with darkness. (38:8-9)
The Song of Songs, erotic poetry set in the alternating voices
of two young lovers, prefers a lush, bodily-based array of
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LINAFELT
37
metaphors. For example, the male voice proclaims:
Your breasts are like two fawns,
twins of a gazelle,
that feed among the lilies. (4:5)
Or this, from the female voice:
Like an apple tree found in the forest
is my beloved among the youths;
I delight to sit in his shade,
and his fruit is sweet to my taste. (2:3)
If line structure and other formal markers are enough to
establish the presence of verse in the Bible, they still do not
tell us much about its use or function. Again, a comparison
with biblical prose is instructive, since one of the most striking features of biblical poetry is that it is relentlessly nonnarrative. Once ancient Hebrew culture had developed the
flexible prose form that gets used for recounting stories, both
long (e.g., Genesis, 1 and 2 Samuel) and short (e.g., the books
of Ruth and Esther), it seems that verse was reserved for more
specialized, highly rhetorical uses. For example, the prophets
are most often represented as casting their messages in poetic
form. Note the parallelism and figurative language in, for example, Amos’ well-known cri de coeur,
Let justice roll down like the waters,
and righteousness like a mighty stream. (5:24)
This familiar parallel structure is combined with hyperbole
and a striking visual imagination (both very much lacking in
biblical narrative, though common in the ancient epic tradition)19 in the prophet Isaiah’s utopian vision of the future:
The wolf shall live with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. (11:6)
Verse also seems to have been the preferred form in ancient
Hebrew, as in so many languages, for the aphorism—the
�38
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
pithy and often didactic observation on the nature of the
world—which, like poetry more generally, aims for a maximum of meaning in a minimum of words. The book of
Proverbs is filled with such aphorisms in verse form, such as,
A soft answer turns away wrath;
a harsh word increases anger. (15:1)
For more skeptical versions of such aphorisms, one can turn
to the book of Ecclesiastes, as in
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is never filled . . .
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing. (1:7)
or
With much wisdom comes much grief;
to increase knowledge is to increase sorrow. (1:18)
But one of the most interesting uses of biblical verse is
as an early form of what will later go by the name of “lyric
poetry,” that intensely subjective, non-narrative and non-dramatic form that has dominated modern poetry at least since
Wordsworth. This early form of lyric foregrounds two final
characteristics of biblical poetry, both of which further distinguish it from biblical prose narrative. First, biblical poetry
is invariably presented as direct discourse, the first-person
voice of a speaking subject (a precursor of the modern “lyric
I”). Again, ancient Hebrew narrative separates the third-person narrator from the dialogue spoken by characters, which
is grammatically marked (by expressive forms and deictics,
to use the technical terms) as direct discourse, whereas the
narrator’s voice is not.20 Biblical poetry is also marked in this
way; it is, in other words, always presented as if it were dialogue. So, for example, the biblical narrator will never be represented as speaking in poetry, but characters can be, as in
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LINAFELT
39
the deathbed blessing of Jacob near the end of the book of
Genesis or the Song of Deborah in the book of Judges.
The second way that biblical lyric poetry distinguishes itself from narrative is in its willingness to give access to the
inner lives of its speakers. If biblical narrative trades in
opaqueness of characterization, biblical poetry fairly revels
in the exposure of subjectivity. When biblical authors wanted
to convey feeling or thought, they resorted to verse form. Obvious examples of this formal preference include poetic
books like the Psalms and the Song of Songs, where the expression of passion, whether despairing or joyful, is common.
We find also in narrative contexts briefer poetic insets that
serve to express or intensify emotion. Take, for example,
Jacob’s reaction to the bloodied robe of Joseph, which as
Alter has pointed out is rendered as a perfect couplet of Hebrew poetry: hayya ra’ah ‘akhalathu / tarof toraf yosef (“A
vicious beast has devoured him, / torn, torn is Joseph!”).21
The book of Job serves as an example on a much larger scale.
It begins in the narrative mode and gives precious little insight into Job’s thoughts or feelings. But when the story
moves to Job’s anguished death wish (“Blot out the day of
my birth, / and the night that announced, ‘A man-child is conceived’”), narrative gives way to the passionate but finely
modulated poetic form of chapter 3, followed by many chapters in verse containing Job’s impassioned defense of his integrity.22
T. S. Eliot’s pronouncement that “when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not
another thing” might seem like a truism, but it’s a sentiment
that sometimes needs repeating.23 This is especially true when
it comes to considering the poetry of the Bible, which has so
often been treated precisely as “another thing”—traditionally
as theology or as ethics, but more recently, under the guise
�40
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
of literary criticism, as narrative. By the latter, I mean that
even in recent “literary approaches” to the Bible, critics often
look for things like plot or characterization in biblical poetry,
categories more appropriate to narrative texts. But biblical
poetry is, in both the simplest and the most complicated ways,
poetry. To consider a biblical poem as poetry is to pay attention to its line structure, to its status as direct discourse, to
the sort of speaking voice it presents, to its diction and imagery, and to its willingness to express inner thought and
emotion as biblical narrative rarely does. It is, in other words,
to attend not only to what the poem means but also to how it
means.
NOTES
1. Longinus, On Sublimity, trans. D. A. Russell, in Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations, ed. D. A. Russell and M.
Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 470: “Similarly,
the lawgiver of the Jews, no ordinary man—for he understood and expressed God’s power in accordance with its worth—writes at the beginning of his Laws: ‘God said’—now what?—‘Let there be light,’ and there
was light; ‘Let there be earth,’ and there was earth.”
2. Confessions, VI.v and III.v, respectively.
3. So for example, C. S. Lewis, The Literary Impact of the Authorized
Version (London: The Athlone Press, 1950), 4: “There is a certain sense
in which ‘the Bible as literature’ does not exist. It is a collection of books
so widely different in period, kind, language, and aesthetic value, that no
common criticism can be passed on them. In uniting these heterogeneous
texts the Church was not guided by literary principles, and the literary
critic might regard their inclusion between the same boards as a theological and historical accident irrelevant to his own branch of study.” It is
not as clear as Lewis suggests that literary principles played no role in
the formation of the biblical canon; but even if one conceded the point
that does not mean that literary qualities are absent from the Bible, as this
essay endeavors to show.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LINAFELT
41
4. Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1991), 426.
5. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature (trans. Willard R. Trask; Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1953), 3-23.
6. This contrasts with non-narrative cultic or liturgical prose texts where,
for example, we are given quite detailed descriptions of the tabernacle
and its furnishings; see, e.g., Exodus 25-27.
7. Ibid., 9.
8. Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1996), 129.
9. Ibid., 131-32.
10. Auerbach, Mimesis, 6.
11. Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends (New
York: Summit, 1976), 93-94; Danna Fewell and David Gunn, Gender,
Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1993), 52-54.
12. In a related vein, see Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New
York: Basic, 1981), 33-34, who writes of the dialectic between “God’s
will” and “human freedom.” For Alter, the “refractory nature” of human
freedom is imagined primarily as working against God’s will, whereas to
my mind that is not always the case.
13. Emily Dickinson, Letter 342a (to Thomas Wentworth Higginson), in
Selected Letters (ed. Thomas H. Johnson; Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 208.
14. Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems
(New York: Knopf, 1937), 22.
15. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, translated from the Latin by G. Gregory (London: Thomas Tegg, 1839), 205.
16. M. O’Connor, Hebrew Verse Structure (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1980); Adele Berlin, The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp,
“Poetry, Hebrew,” New Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 4
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006).
�42
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
17. James Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and its History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Robert Alter, The Art
of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic, 1985).
18. Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 25.
19. This visual quality is what Aristotle might refer to as enargeia (Poetics
1455a; Rhetoric 1410b) or “vividness.” So also Demetrius, On Style, 209220. On enargeia in classical poetry, see Egbert J. Bakker, “Mimesis as
Performance: Rereading Auerbach’s First Chapter,” Poetics Today 20:1
(1993), 11-26, who ties it to the nature of orally performed epic; also Andrew Ford, Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1993). On vividness in epic poetry more generally, see Suzanne
Fleischman, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); and in classical
history writing Andrew D. Walker, “Enargeia and the Spectator in Greek
Historiography,” Transactions of the American Philological Associaton
123 (1993): 353-377. This quality of vividness, present also in biblical
Hebrew poetry, is largely absent in biblical Hebrew narrative.
20. On this phenomenon, see Robert Kawashima, Biblical Narrative and
the Death of the Rhapsode (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2004), ch. 3.
21. Alter, Genesis, 215.
22. Chapters 1 and 2 and then 42:7-17 of the book of Job take the form
of prose narrative, but the long central section of the book in 3:1-42:6 is
in verse form. Modern scholarship has mostly taken this as an indication
of different authors (though recent years have seen a rethinking of this),
without recognizing that the shift in literary form can be understood as
motivated by the differing literary resources offered by Hebrew prose and
Hebrew poetry. By convention, verse form allows the necessary access
to Job’s inner life in a way that prose does not, and it also allows for the
sometimes extravagant figurative language that we find in the poetic section of the book.
23. T. S. Eliot, Preface to the second edition of The Sacred Wood: Essays
on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1928), viii.
��44
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�ESSAYS & LECTURES
45
What is the Surface Area
of a Hedgehog?
Barry Mazur
Well, I don’t know the answer to the question of the title and
no hedgehog will be harmed, or even mentioned again, until
the very end of my lecture.
Eva Brann suggested tonight’s lecture might address the
question, What is area? I’m delighted to do this, and I’m delighted to be here, and to be among people—you, the St.
John’s community—with whom it will be such a pleasure to
contemplate this question.
In this lecture I’ll discuss the concepts of
• area—how it is familiar to us, and how when we
push it to the limit we get some surprises;
• length—since, at least at first impression it is a
more primitive “prior” concept— seemingly simpler than area;
• proportion—crucial to the understanding of both
length and area;
• invariance—as a way of characterizing length and
area;
• quadrature—as a crucial “format” for expressing
profound area relationships in geometry.
And I’ll conclude by alluding to Archimedes’ wonderful “mechanical method” in which he transmutes the problem of
computing area into the problem of computing something
akin to weight1 and thereby achieves the quadrature of the
Prof. Barry Mazur is the Gerhard Gade University Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. This was the annual Steiner Lecture, delivered on Friday 30 September 2011 at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
46
parabola. This offers us a glimpse of the power of analogy,
and the use of the thought-experiment as already practiced in
ancient mathematics.2 It also gives us the opportunity to touch
in passing on broader issues in mathematical thought such as
analogy, heuristic, paradox, invariance, and something I’ll
call characterization (a version of axiomatization).
1. AREA AS FAMILIAR
We all know what the word area signifies. It often refers to a
territorial cordon, as in restricted area or hard-hat area or
even area studies. It sometimes comes as a number, but always with a unit attached, such as square miles, square feet,
square inches, acres, or if it’s a bed area you’re interested in,
you can ask for it to be King-size or Queen-size, or a size of
lesser nobility.
Fig. 1
If you want to approximate the area of the enclosed shape in
Fig. 1 on a grid with a mesh of one-foot by one-foot squares,
you might count the number of one-square-foot patches that
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
47
comprise a union of squares that completely cover the figure
(in the above case it is 81) and count the number of onesquare-foot patches that the figure covers completely (in the
above case it is 39). Then you know that the area of the figure
in units of square feet is squeezed between these two numbers; that is, the area is smaller than the first number (or equal
to it), and bigger than the second. In the above case, we
would have
81 square feet ≥ area of figure ≥ 39 square feet.
If you want a better estimate, do the same thing with oneinch by one-inch squares.
If any of us were asked to calculate the square-footage of
this auditorium we’d come up with some figure or other, confident that we could refine it to any degree accuracy required.
And you may be painfully aware of the area of your dorm
room. So, what else is there to say?
Fig. 2
2. HOW GOOD ARE YOU AT COMPARING AREAS?
I’m not very good. Here’s an example. The area of the two
shaded triangles in Fig. 2 are equal.
�48
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
I know this thanks to Proposition 37 of Book I of Euclid’s
Elements. All of you either know that proposition now, or will
after your freshman year. This is the proposition that says that
triangles with the same base and height have the same area.
Proposition 37 of Book I will be a recurring theme in my lecture; it is a marvelous piece of mathematics that demonstrates
many things, including the maxim that to be profound and to
be elementary are not mutually exclusive virtues.
But if I simply compared those figures visually—without
either explicitly remembering or somehow “internalizing”
Euclid’s proposition—I would probably grossly underestimate (if that’s a possible phrase) the area of the spiky triangle
in comparison with the seemingly fat one. In a sense, then,
Euclid’s proposition–embedded in my central nervous system
as it is—has improved (a tiny bit, not much) my ability to
make off-the-cuff judgments and rough comparisons. Our native intuition, combined with a data bank of geometric experiences, determines our effectiveness in making judgments
about all sorts of attributes belonging to objects that we see.
I’m guessing that our eyeball comparisons are more reliable
in relation to straight-line lengths than in relation to curved
lengths,3 and much more reliable than our ability to estimate
area and volume, given the variety of possible configurations.
In teaching Euclid’s Elements, one often emphasizes “logical
thinking” as the great benefit that students take away from
learning geometry. But I also see a type of pre-logical—if I
can call it that—or intuition-enriching benefit as well. This
is hard to pinpoint, but it comes out as a general sharpening
of faculties in regard to thinking about, guessing about, negotiating, comparing, and relating geometric objects.
Such a benefit is very different from the other valuable
reward just mentioned—that is, being able to actually argue
the proof of Proposition 37 of Book I by making the elegant
construction shown in Fig. 3.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
49
Fig. 3
To continue our review of how good our intuitions are, let’s
pass to a slightly deeper basic geometric comparison authored by Archimedes that astonishes me now just as it must
have astonished Archimedes’ contemporaries. We will get
into this in more depth later on,4 but consider the following
striking way of recreating the area of any circle: the area of
any circle is equal to the area of a right-angle triangle defined
by the property that the two of its sides making the right angle
have lengths equal to the radius of the circle, and to the length
of the circumference of the circle, respectively. (Fig. 4)
Fig. 4
�50
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Here, as in the previous example, I “see” it not visually (if
this can be said), but only with the help of my memory of its
proof. (I will say more about this below).
Let us push a bit further. The two examples we’ve just
reviewed are examples of nicely enclosed, finite figures. We
are even poorer in intuition when faced with planar figures
(no matter how smooth and simple their boundaries seem to
be) that “asymptote” off to infinity. It may be quite difficult,
even if given long chunks of such a shape, to extrapolate and
guess by eyeball alone whether it extends out to a figure with
infinite area or finite area.
For example, consider Fig. 5, which was drawn as accurately as possible. I wonder whether you can guess if the area
bounded by the blue curve or the pink curve has finite area.
My point is that there’s no reason why you should be able to
do it no matter what talents of visual acuity you may possess.
Fig. 5
But, just in case you are wondering, if you continued tracing the curved regions ad infinitum in the manner smoothly
begun by the sketch—meaning that the pink curve is the
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
51
graph of the function y = 1/x and the blue curve is the graph
of the function y = 1/x2—then the (infinite) red-bounded region happens to have infinite area while the (infinite) bluebounded region has finite area. As a side issue, many calculus
students are amazed to find that if you “construct” an infinite
“trumpet” by rotating the red curve of the above figure
around the x-axis, then its surface area is infinite, even though
the volume it subsumes is finite. To put it in colloquial, but
misleading, terms: you can fill this trumpet with a finite
amount of paint, but you need an infinite amount of paint to
paint it.
This phenomenon illuminates much, especially for people
who know calculus, and could be the subject of a question
following the lecture. But I won’t dwell on this; I mention it
as a hint that there are things to dwell on here.
3. PUSHING TO THE LIMIT
You might wonder what is to be gained by asking questions
about infinite area versus finite area, or by considering the
concept of area in various extreme contexts. Mathematics
often does that sort of thing: it is a useful strategy to examine
a concept when it is brought to its limit, in the hope that the
strains inflicted on the concept will reveal important facets
of it that would be hidden in less stressful situations. If you
push a concept to its extreme border, you may see things that
would otherwise be overlooked if you remain in the comfortable zones. For example, you can learn what its precise borders are. Some of the most beautiful mathematics—and the
deepest—has emerged by seeking the extremes.
The issue we have just addressed, areas of infinitely extended regions, can be broadened, for it raises the question:
exactly how many subsets of the plane deserve to have a
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
52
well-defined area? Do all subsets have a reasonable notion
of area?
4. AREA AS PARADOXICAL
To get the blood circulating, let’s contemplate something that
is evidently impossible: Can you
(1) take a square S in the Euclidean plane, cut it (say,
with a scissors) into four pieces A, B, C, D of equal
area—so no two of these pieces overlap, and the four of
them cover the square?
In standard notation:5
S = A ! B ! C ! D;
(2) and now can you throw away two of the pieces (say
C and D) and move the other two (A and B) around by
Euclidean motions to get congruent shapes Aʹ, Bʹ in the
plane so that these two pieces cover the exact same
square again, i.e.,
S = Aʹ ! Bʹ ?
The answer, of course, is No, you can’t do this. Certainly not
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
53
if the concept of area has the properties that we expect to
have. By “properties” I’m referring to these two self-evident
axioms:
(1) the area of a union of non-overlapping figures is
the sum of the areas of each of the figures; and
(2) the area of a figure is preserved under Euclidean
motion.
For if you could do this, then our two formulas for S displayed above will give contradictory answers to the question,
What is the area of S?
With this in mind, consider the following strange fact
about spherical rather than Euclidean geometry. Let S be the
surface of a ball (that is, what mathematicians call the twodimensional sphere). There is a way of separating S into four
sets A, B, C, D, no two of which overlap, such that each of
these sets are—in an evident sense—congruent to any of the
others. (This means that, for example, there is a way of rotating the sphere that brings A precisely to the position that
B occupied (before that rotation)—and similarly, there are
ways of rotating the sphere to bring A to B and to C and to
D. Nevertheless, you can throw two of them away (say, C
and D) and find a way of rotating the sphere so that A is
brought to a set A′ and a (different) way of rotating the sphere
so that B is sent to a set B′ and these maneuvers have the
strange property that A′ and B′ together cover the sphere; i.e.,
S = A′ ! B′.
This is called the Banach-Tarski Paradox. Despite first appearances this is not actually a paradox although there is indeed a subtlety lurking in the way in which I worded things.6
It is merely a para-dox, that is: something contrary to expected
opinion.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
54
I brought this apparent paradox up not to confuse you but
rather to point out, at the very outset, that
• even though area is a concept we tend to feel perfectly
at home with, to get closer to its essence is to appreciate more keenly its complexity, and so
• in our discussion about area we had better start from
the very beginning, by noting that
• despite its reputation for having what are called
“proper foundations,” mathematics doesn’t seem to
have a “beginning.”
5. LENGTH IN EVERYDAY LIFE
Nevertheless, let’s begin with something seemingly a bit simpler than area: plain old lengths of straight line-segments. I
say “seemingly” because as often happens in mathematics,
the simpler-seeming concept (in this case, length) contains,
in a more visible form, lots of the essential aspects of its complicated companions (e.g., area and volume).
We all know what is meant when someone says “a ten
foot pole.” This is a relative statement, comparing the pole
to some foot-long ruler, and claiming that we can lay ten
copies of our measuring device onto the pole, covering it
completely with no overspill or overlap. Usually, of course,
the speaker of this phrase has something on his mind other
than this length-measuring thought-experiment.
In slight contrast, when we are told that the circumference
of this cup is eight inches long and we want to verify this directly, we must set aside our rigid, calibrated, ruler and use
something like a tape-measure, wrapping it around the rim
of the cup.7 Of course, there is also a well-known indirect
way of verifying this measurement which starts by using our
rigid ruler to calculate the diameter of the cup—but this indirection already involves a certain amount of mathematical
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
55
experience with π.
In even greater contrast, when we are told that the star
cluster NGC 1929 within the Large Magellanic Cloud (a
satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way shown in Fig. 68) is
179, 000 light-years away from us, other measuring devices
are required, and—given relativistic issues—what distance
means is already a subtle business.
Fig. 6
6. EQUALITY [OF LENGTH] IN EUCLID
The concept length occurs—in a somewhat cryptic form—
early in the Elements. It appears as mēkos in the definition of
line (Def. 2):
A line is breadthless length.
The concept reappears as diastēma (translated often as distance but meaning, more specifically, interval or gap) as
�56
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
something of a surprise. Euclid slips it into the discussion in
Book I in the definition of circle (Def. 15), which is described
as—and I’ll put it in modern vocabulary—a figure bounded
by a curve the points of which are equidistant from a given
point.
Thanks to this definition and the ability we have—given
to us by Postulate 3—of drawing a circle with any center and
any radius, we can begin to construct many line segments
that, in Euclid’s terms, are “equal” (meaning, are of equal
length). Even better, we are supplied with tools for establishing equality. Euclid wastes no time making use of these tools:
the very first proposition (Proposition 1 of Book I, see Fig.
79) goes straight to the task of constructing, on any line segment, an equilateral triangle, that is, a triangle in which all
three sides are “equal.” And we’re off and running, at least
as far as understanding equality of length goes.
On the facing page you see it in its full glory, ending with
a triumphant hoper edei poiēsai—i.e., “as was to be constructed.”
When later mathematics takes on the issue of length,
things proceed quite differently from the way Euclid proceeded. Modern mathematics throws a spotlight on transformations in a way that ancient mathematics did not.
Nowadays, as we introduce a new concept or new type of
structure, often—at the same time—we make explicit the
types of transformations or mappings between exemplars of
this structure that we are willing to consider (or rather, that
we are willing to allow). These allowed transformations are
the ones that respect the inner coherence of the structure we
are studying. In Euclidean geometry, the allowed transformations are the mappings of the Euclidean plane onto itself
that preserve the notion of congruence. They consist of rotations about points in the plane, translations, and also those
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
57
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
58
transformations that can be viewed as the composition of a
“flip,” (that is, a symmetry about some straight line) with a
translation or rotation. In one of the modern formats, the concept of Euclidean length and the collection of the allowed
transformations of Euclidean geometry are yoked concepts,
working in tandem:
• The allowed transformations are precisely those transformations that preserve length of all line-segments,
while
• two line-segments have equal length if and only if
there are allowed transformations bringing any one
of them onto the other.
In effect, these notions—“length between points in Euclidean geometry” and “the transformations that preserve Euclidean geometry”—are yoked, chicken-and-egg style, in that
each can be used to begin the discussion and characterize
(that is, explicitly determine) the other. Think of it this way:
We could invoke each of these concepts to provide the vocabulary for a system of axioms in a geometry, and the other
concept would then be one of the many features of that geometry. You can have length as your basic concept and stipulate
the transformations that preserve your geometry to be those
that preserve length, or you may start with the stipulation of
transformations of your geometry and derive length as one
of its invariants—in effect, deriving the entire geometry from
its group of symmetries. (The second viewpoint represents a
celebrated shift of emphasis, known as the Erlangen Program.) But there is also an important difference of mood between “axiomatization,” which sets up a theory starting from
one direction or the other, and presenting things in a balanced
way, where each concept “characterizes” the other.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
59
7. PROPORTIONS
Length is, at bottom, a relative concept: that is to say, “length
compared to what?” is a bona fide question. What are the
units? Inches? Feet? Miles?10 That is, when we deal with
length, we are dealing—unavoidably—with a proportion.11
This puts us in the mood of Euclid’s Book V, a work that
deals exclusively with proportions among magnitudes.
Say we are interested in the length of our ten-foot pole P.
We compare it to our one-foot ruler F, we might emphasize
the proportional aspect of length by recording the answer
symbolically this way:
(*) P : F “=” 10 : 1
I’ve put quotation-marks around the equality sign to emphasize that it is indeed a serious abbreviation of thought, turning
what began as an analogy (P is to F as 10 is to 1) into an
equality (the relationship that P has to F is the relationship
that 10 has to 1)—turning an as into a straight is. This is a
curious transition. The older notation for equality sign in quotation marks is a double-colon,
(**) P : F :: 10 : 1,
capturing equally well, I believe, the “as” aspect of the relationship. That a proportion of lengths is interpretable as a
proportion of numbers may well be self-evident, but that it is
an interpretation is worth bearing in mind.
The legacy of the Pythagoreans offers us yet another interpretation for the versatile notion of a proportion of lengths:
As the length is to the length,
So the heard tone is to the heard tone.
After this discussion it is safe to remove the quotation
marks in formula (*) displayed above, and write
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
60
P/F = 10/1.
We thereby see arithmetic in geometry (that is, by going from
left to right in the above equation). In other words, we have
an “arithmetic” (of proportions of straight line segments) that
mirrors “ordinary” arithmetic (of ratios of numbers). For example, you can add proportions of lengths of line segments:
A· − − − − − − ·B· − − − − − − − − − − − − − − ·C
D· − − − − − − ·E
AB/DE + BC/DE = AC/DE
and multiply proportions of lengths of line segments:
A· − − − − − − ·B
C· − − − − − − − − − − − − − − ·D
E· − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − ·F
AB/CD × CD/EF = AB/EF
and we have a natural interpretation of inequalities between
these proportions. These behave formally “just like fractions,”
as the notation indicates, and we have a veritable algebra of
geometrical proportions.
8. COMMON MEASURES, AND UNCOMMON MEASURES
All this makes perfect, and natural, sense and conforms to
the most elementary basic ideas we have about arithmetic as
long as we treat proportions of lengths that “admit a common
measure.”
That is, imagine that you are given two intervals,
A· − − − − − − ·B
C· − − − − − − − − − − − − ·D
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
61
and you know that there is a certain unit measure, say given
by another interval EF,
E· − − ·F
such that AB and CD are measured by (whole) number multiples of EF. For example, say AB is seventeen EFs long and
CD is four hundred ninety one EFs long; so we may write:
AB/EF = 17/1 and CD/EF = 491/1.
We then say that EF is a common measure for the line segments AB and CD. And, in this particular case, we then comfortably write
AB/CD = 17/491.
But the fun, as I think you all know, is already there at
the very outset of geometry for one of the most fundamental
of geometric proportions—that between the diagonal and the
side of a square
the diagonal AC / the side AB
—was shown to have no common measure,12 and nevertheless
the proportion AC/AB (alias √2/1) was still regarded as a genuine object of study, with the consequence that it forced us—
by the analogy between proportions of lengths and proportions
of numbers—to extend our very idea of what it means to be a
number. It is worth thinking about what it means for geometry
�62
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
to guide us in our evolving concept of number.
For all this is a beginning of one of the great analogies,
arithmetic ↔ geometry,
in which each profoundly influences the other. This type of
thinking goes against a view held by Aristotle (a view often
referred to as purity), namely:
We cannot, in demonstrating, pass from one genus to another.
We cannot, for instance, prove geometrical truths by arithmetic.13
9. THE UBIQUITY OF “ANALOGY” IN MATHEMATICAL THOUGHT
In the previous section we have been working through the
idea that straight line segments stand in relation to each other
“just as” numerical quantities stand in relation to each other;
that is, we are now faced with—as we’ve mentioned—one
of the primordial analogies between geometry and arithmetic.
That this “just as” relation is an analogy and not a direct
equality takes some convincing. A curious phenomenon occurs with many mathematical analogies once they get embedded in our thought. If A is seen to be analogous to
something else, B, there is the impetus to think of A and B
as, somehow, special cases of, or aspects of, a single more
encompassing C; and somehow to rethink the analogy as
equality. This switch is a form, but not the only form, of abstraction that is indigenous to mathematical sensibility. Versatile switching of viewpoints is one of the reasons for the
power of a mathematical frame of thought. This replacement
of a pair of analogous contexts for a single encompassing
context occurs so often that people with experience in mathematics have this type of thought engrained in them as second
nature.14
As I mentioned, replacing the two parts of an analogy by
a common generalized concept is powerful and occurs often
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
63
in mathematics, but in other contexts of thought it might seem
a strange thing to do. One rarely does this kind of generalizing with analogies and metaphors that occur in literature:
when thinking about the metaphorical comparison in
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
do we conceive of a more general entity that encompasses
“thee” and “summer’s day” as instances?
10. LENGTH AND STRAIGHT LINE SEGMENTS
You may have noticed that, although I’ve gone on at some
length, I never defined straight line segment. Now, you can
postpone talking about straight line segments if you phrase
things in terms of distance. That is, for any two points P and
Q on the Euclidean plane, if you have a notion of the distance
between P and Q—denote it by dist(P, Q)—you can pick out
the points on the straight line segment between P and Q as
precisely those points X such that
dist(P, Q) = dist(P, X) + dist(X, Q).
But the ancients seem not to have defined straight line segment this way. Euclid’s definition (Def. 4 of Book I) is elegantly enigmatic:
A straight line is a line which lies evenly with the points on itself.
This is reminiscent of Plato’s definition of a straight line segment as “whatever has its middle in front of its end” (Parmenides 137e). Here, Plato seems to be taking his straight
line segment up to his eye to view it as you would look
through a telescope, noting that the only thing he sees is its
endpoint. In effect, a straight line is a line of sight.15 A much
later take on the matter defines a straight line segment with
endpoints P and Q as the unique curve joining P and Q such
that among all curves joining P and Q it is the one having
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
64
the shortest length.16 But to make sense of this you must
know, at the very least, what it means for a curve to have a
length. Hence . . .
11. LENGTHS OF SMOOTH CURVES
Nowhere in Euclid’s Elements is the length of a curve that is
not a straight line, or polygonal, segment discussed. The first
nonpolygonal curve whose length was considered (in the
texts that I know) is the circumference (called the perimeter)
of a circle, as studied in Archimedes’s The measurement of
the circle.17 And there the length of the circumference of a
circle enters the mathematical discussion in the context of the
elegant statement about area18 that we have already briefly
discussed in Section 2.
Here it is as Proposition 1 of Archimedes text:
Proposition 1: Every circle is equal to a right-angled
triangle, whose radius [R] is equal to one of the [sides]
around the right angle while the perimeter [i.e., circumference T of the circle] is equal to the base [of the
triangle].
This is proved by approximating the circle by a regular polygon with a large number of sides, and arguing appropriately.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
65
This is an amazing theorem, of course, but the more specific
reason I’m mentioning it is that it exemplifies the general rule
that the computation of the length of any curvy curve depends—perhaps very indirectly—on relating it to the length
of approximating polygons. This is (quite directly) Archimedes’s method here. He makes use of a result about polygons analogous to Proposition 1, where the polygons in
question will be made to approximate the circle. For a slightly
more extensive sketch of Archimedes’s argument, see the Appendix, Section 20 below.
12.
LENGTHS
OF
CRINKLY CURVES
It has been said that there
is no way to measure the
length of the coastline of
Scotland.
It is just too crinkly,
and the length you find
yourself computing depends on how fine a grid
of measurements you
make—the result getting
longer and longer as the
measurements
grow
finer. Mathematicians
can easily model such an
effect, the most famous
construction being something called the Koch snowflake.
This is a closed curve obtained by taking the limit of an infinite sequence of crinkle-operations. Start with an equilateral
triangle and on an interval one-third the size of each side construct a small equilateral triangle. Here are the first few stages:
�66
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
At each stage you are faced with a longer curve, and in the
limit, you have seemingly contained a curve within a finite
region that is so crinkly so as to have—in effect—infinite
length.
13. WHAT IS AREA?
We’ll be interested primarily in the areas of figures in the Euclidean plane. Given our discussion of length it won’t be a
surprise to learn that we will be dealing, again, with proportions; in this case, the proportion of (the area of) one figure
to (the area of) another. Nor will it be much of a surprise to
find that just as straight line segments played a fundamental
role in all discussions of length, so too polygonal figures will
play such a role in our treatment of area.
Euclid is again very helpful here. The first time he discusses area, it is—in his vocabulary— parallelogramatic
area: Proposition 34 of Book I tells us that the diagonal of a
parallelogram bisects the (area of) the parallelogram. He fol-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
67
lows this up with the propositions (including the beautiful
Proposition 37 I’ve alluded to already) stating that two triangles with the same base and height have the same area, as do
two parallelograms with the same base and height.
And once we have these tools, we are in good shape to
deal with areas of polygonal figures. We can even go further,
as we saw in Section 11 above with Archimedes’s proof that
transforms the area of a circle into the area of a triangle by
means of polygonal figures. (As I’ve said, we will discuss
more in the Appendix, Section 20 below.)
14. AREA AS AN “INVARIANT”
Here is an exercise: make a (short) list of “axioms” that (you
guess) characterizes the concept of ratios of areas for a large
class of (plane) figures. You’ll surely include a number of
basic properties of the intuitive concept of area as hinted at
in section 4 above. But let me start the game by insisting that
one of your axioms be this:
Axiom of Invariance under Euclidean motions:
If A, B are a pair of plane figures for which you
have defined the ratio
area of A / area of B
�68
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
(or, for short, A/B) and if A′ is the image of the
figure A under a Euclidean transformation, then
we have the equality:
area of A / area of B = area of A′ / area of B
This is worth thinking about, but this is just a start, and
note that in your personal “theory of area,” part of the chore
is to make precise exactly what class of figures you are going
to be assigning a well-defined area. This might be a bit of
fodder for discussion following the lecture. This exercise was
solved elegantly and in somewhat astounding generality before World War II by the Hungarian mathematician Alfréd
Haar.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
69
15. SHEARS AND SIMILARITIES
Given a well-working “theory of area,” certain properties will
follow as consequences. For example, here are two basic features—two further invariance properties for the concept of
area.
(1) Shears
By a horizontal shear transformation let’s mean a transformation of the Euclidean plane to itself that keeps every
horizontal line in place, but moves it by a translation that is
dependent on the “height” of that line above the x-axis. That
is, for any point (x, y) in the plane it keeps the y-coordinate
fixed but allows the x coordinate to change by a rule:
x ↦ x + F(y)
where F(y) is some civilized (e.g., continuous) function of y.
This type of motion of the plane keeps all lines parallel to the
x-axis intact, but translates them by different amounts depending on their height. By a general shear transformation
let’s mean an analogous transformation, but with respect to
lines parallel to any fixed line: the line needn’t be the x-axis.
The area of figures is preserved by shears!
Now we’ve actually seen examples of this in our previous discussion: think of Proposition 37 of Book I of Euclid’s Elements. One way of revisiting the content of Proposition 37 is
to note that any two triangles with the same base and same
height can be brought one to another by a shear.
The three-dimensional version of this (where the question
is about volume rather than area) is sometimes referred to as
Cavalieri’s Principle, and is illustrated, for example, by the
following picture, where Cavalieri’s Principle would state
that the two stacks of coins on the next page occupy the same
volume.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
70
(2) The behavior of area under similarity transformations.
If
• A and A′ are in the class of figures for which you have defined the ratio
area of A / area of A′
and if
• P, Q are points in the figure A with P′, Q′ the corresponding
points in the similar figure A′,
then the square of the ratio
length of PQ / length of P′Q′
is equal to the ratio
area of A / area of A′
This square relation tells us that we are dealing with a twodimensional concept.19
Dimensionality as a concept opens up a host of marvelous
questions to explore, not the least of which is the grand idea,
initially due to Hausdorff, that the full range of possible geometric figures admits a continuous gamut of dimensions—
not just dimensions 0, 1, 2, 3, . . .
That such strange figures possessing non-whole-number
dimensions may have some bearing on questions in the nat-
�71
ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
ural sciences, economics, and finance—let alone pure mathematics—is the energy behind Benoît Mandelbrot’s wellknown fractals.20
16. I NVARIANCE
AS FEATURE ;
I NVARIANCE
AS CHARAC -
TERIZATION
I have been alluding to the invariance properties of length
and of area. Here is a summary and comparison.
Euclidean Length and the collection of Euclidean motions
suit each other’s needs perfectly:
• The (Euclidean) concept of length is invariant under the
Euclidean motions (i.e., translation, rotations, symmetries
about straight lines, and compositions of these). That is,
these transformations preserve Euclidean distance.
• Any distance relation between points that satisfies certain
natural axioms and that is invariant under any Euclidean
motion is (after appropriate rescaling of its values) equal
to the (Euclidean) concept of length.
• Moreover, any transformation that preserves length between any two points in the plane is a Euclidean motion.
In contrast to length, the invariance properties of (Euclidean) concept of area is stranger:
• The (Euclidean) concept of area is invariant under Euclidean motions, of course— but it is also invariant under
a much greater collection of transformations. For example, any of the shear transformations we have discussed
in the previous section (Section 15) preserves area.
• But as for characterizing this concept by invariance properties, things go the other way: area is characterized (up
to a mere change of scale) by its invariance under translations alone—that’s all the invariance you need invoke
to pinpoint this concept!
�72
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
It is quite fitting, then, that Euclid inserts his Proposition
37 in Book I, very early in his discussion of area: the proposition is, of course, a critical tool in establishing the simplest
arguments regarding area—but from a modern perspective,
it also points to one of the deep properties of the concept visà-vis invariance: there is a huge collection of transformations—far more of them than just Euclidean motions—that
preserve area.
17. CLASSICAL QUADRATURE PROBLEMS
The phrase quadrature of . . . loosely refers to the problem
of finding the area of . . . , which usually means expressing—
as some simple numerical ratio—the proportion of the area
of one figure to another figure.21 First, here is a simple example related to Euclid’s Proposition 37 in Book I of the Elements that we discussed earlier, and whose proof can be
found by putting together propositions in Book I of Euclid’s
Elements:22
Proposition: Let P be a parallelogram and T a triangle, such
that P and T have the same base and the same height. Then
P : T = 2 : 1.
This proposition follows the format of what I’ll call a
“Classical Quadrature Problem,” which I want to mean to be
a statement that the proportion of areas (or lengths, or volumes) of two geometric figures, all described entirely in clear
general geometric terms,23 is equal to a specific numerical
ratio.
There are quite a number of classical problems that fit
this mold, that is, problems expressing the proportion of the
areas of two figures, or volumes of two solids (described in
general terms) in terms of specific rational numbers. For example, Proposition 10 of Book XII of Euclid’s Elements tell
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
73
us that
the ratio of the volume of a cone to a cylinder
that have the same base and the same height
is 1 : 3.
This “1 : 3” reoccurs as the ratio of the volume of a conical solid built on any base to the cylindrical solid built on
the same base, and of the same height. The earliest text I
know that “explains” the “1 : 3” in this more general context
is Arithmetica Infinitorum by John Wallis, who did his work
before the full-fledged invention of Calculus; for the people
who know Calculus, this is an exercise.24
As with much of Archimedes’s work there are stories that
surround it. In one of his treatises,25 Archimedes showed that
the ratio of the volume of a sphere to that of
the cylinder that circumscribes it is 2 : 3.
and according to legend, this being his favorite result, he had
it engraved as a sculpture for his tomb.
The most intriguing, and thorny, of the ratios of elementary areas or volumes are the proportion relating the area of
�74
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
a circle to that of the square that circumscribes it, and the proportion relating the volume of a sphere to that of the volume
of the cube that circumscribes it. The story of the many attempts to understand these ratios leads us in interesting directions. For example, Hippocrates of Chios in his attempt to
square the circle studied classical quadrature problems relating the areas of lunes (which are figures consisting of the
outer portion of a small circle when superimposed on a larger
one, as in the figure below26)
to areas of triangles constructed in relation to those lunes. He
proves, for example, that the area of the lune (defined as the
region between E and F in the figure above) is equal to the
area of the triangle ABO. His results, however, go significantly beyond this.27
18. WEIGHING AREA
A famous example of a classical quadrature problem is
Archimedes’s “Quadrature of the parabola” and this is dealt
with in not one, but two of his treatises in quite different
ways:
• Propositions 14-16 of The quadrature of the parabola, and
• Proposition 1 of The Method.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
75
The aim is to “find” the area of a segment of a parabola
bounded by a chord.
We know, of course, that this means finding a proportion
between the red area of the above kind of figure and the area
of some other figure.
This problem is especially illuminating in that Archimedes
offers two approaches to it. The method in The quadrature of
the parabola is via exhaustion, i.e., approximation by polygons—which is a method similar to the one we have already
seen in the Measurement of the circle. This actually does
prove what he wants. But the more curious method is the one
that he himself refers to as a mechanical method—a mode of
reasoning to which he does not give the full authority of
proof: it’s an example of a heuristic28—perhaps the first example of such a not-quite-a-proof of which we have any
record.
A major tool Archimedes uses in this heuristic is his famous “law of the lever,”29 which proclaims that if weights W
and w are placed on the plank that is the lever, at opposite
sides of the fulcrum but at distances D and d from the fulcrum
respectively, then the lever will balance if and only if
D·w=d·W
�76
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
“Now what in the world does this have to do with area?” you
might ask. The answer is that Archimedes is engaged here in
an ingenious thought-experiment, where the rules of the game
are dictated by some basic physical truths, and the link to
area (he will also treat volume problems this way as well) is
by a profound analogy. In the figure below, imagine the point
K as the fulcrum of a lever. The plank of the lever is the line
segment HK. Archimedes will construct a triangle FAC deployed onto the plank as shown, and will be weighing (yes,
weighing) the parabolic segment P by weighing in a laminar
manner each line in the parabolic segment parallel to the diameter of the parabola against corresponding lines in the triangle FAC placed at an appropriate distance (at H) on the
other side of the fulcrum. Archimedes is thinking that you
can view the parabolic segment and triangle as swept through
by a continuum of line segments, and the area of these figures
is somehow distributed as slivers dependent on the varying
lengths of these line segments. So he uses his “law of the
lever” to find the balance, thereby concluding his heuristic
argument.
We can discuss this at greater length after the lecture if
you like, but here—a bit more slowly—is a recap of what
I’ve just said, broken up into the steps that Archimedes uses.
In the figure below, which is taken from one of the diagrams for Proposition 1 in the traditional text for The Method,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
77
the chord is AC and the parabolic arc we are to study is the
curve bounded by A and C. We are interested in the area of
the parabolic segment—let us call it P. Specifically, P is that
region bounded by that chord AC and the parabolic segment
that joins with it. For this task, the figure will give us all the
constructions necessary.
(1) The lever and fulcrum: We are going to weigh things
and balance thing so we need some apparatus. Don’t
mind that it is on a slant; but the straight line through C
and K is going to be our lever, and K will be our fulcrum.
(2) The tangent line: We draw the line CF through C tangent to our parabolic arc at C (I’ll say what F is in a
moment).
(3) Let D be the bisector of AC and construct a straight line
through D parallel to the diameter of the parabola. (Para-
�78
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
bolas do have well defined “diameters.” In simple English,
if we draw the full parabola, rather than the piece of it as
occurs in the above figure, the diameter is that straight
line piercing the parabola around which the parabola is
symmetric: in other words, flipping about the diameter
preserves the parabola.) This straight line will intersect
CF at a point that we’ll call E, and the parabolic arc at a
point B. So we can call the line ED.
(4) The basic triangle: Draw the lines AB and BC to form
the basic triangle ABC (which I’ll also call T).
(5) Note that T sits neatly in the parabolic segment P.
Clearly the area of P is bigger than that of T, but how
much bigger? The upshot of this proposition, after
Archimedes finishes proving it, is that we get an exact relationship, namely, P : T :: 4 : 3.
(6) Laminating by lines parallel to the diameter: The line
ED is parallel to the diameter. In the figure above, you
find a couple of other labeled lines parallel to the diameter: MO, and FA. What Archimedes wants to do is to think
of the family of all lines that are parallel to the diameter
and how they slice the figure as they sweep across it.
(Think of them as forming a moving family). We will
refer to any member of that family (and there are finitely
many of them!) as a laminar slice. In a moment we will
be slicing two figures by the lines of this family.
(7) The big triangle: This is FAC, built with edges the line
FA parallel to the diameter and the chord AC. Simple
geometry shows that FAC : T = 4. So, thinking of the formula above, we want to prove that P : FAC = 1 : 3.
(8) Weighing slices on the balance beam: Archimedes
hangs the big triangle FAC from its center of gravity, W,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
79
on the balance bar HK, as indicated in the figure. He then
considers laminar slices of it, comparing them to laminar
slices (by the same line parallel to the diameter) of the
parabolic segment ABC. He proves that to put each laminar slice of the big triangle FAC in equilibrium with the
corresponding slice of the parabolic segment ABC you
have to “hang” the laminar slice of the parabolic segment
ABC at the point H on the other side of the fulcrum. This
uses, of course, his law of the lever.
(9) Weighing the figures themselves: He then says that he
has hung the parabolic segment at point H and the big triangle at point W and, again, the law of the lever gives the
proportions of their areas.
There is a great amount of geometry that one can learn
by considering this result. First, note that we do indeed have
here an example of what I described as a “classical quadrature
problem” in that (a) we specified each of our figures merely
by generic prescriptions (take any parabolic, and cut it with
any chord, etc.), and (b) we asserted that the proportions of
these figures are given by a fixed rational ratio (4:3). That
alone deserves thought.
You might wonder: how many other interesting generic
geometric proportions can one come up with that have a fixed
rational ratio? Or, perhaps, a fixed ratio involving, say,
surds?30
What is gripping here is how we, using Calculus, could
immediately convert into a genuine theorem what Archimedes
does with his “method,” and how a dyed-in-the-wool Euclidean could also come to terms with this by offering an appropriate menu of axioms and common notions. Each of these
revisions of Archimedes’s work—via Calculus, or via appropriate axioms—would have the effect of reframing
Archimedes’s mechanical analogy by encompassing it with
�80
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
something non-analogical that has, perhaps, the authority to
explain more. And yet for me, the lesson offered by The
Method lies—to return to the issue of purity I mentioned previously in Section 7 above—in the unconstrained impurity
of the ideas behind it. The Method works on the strength of a
correctly guiding, but nevertheless difficult to justify, analogy
combining previously disparate intuitions that had originated
in somewhat different domains—the experience one has with
a certain weighing apparatus and the intuition one has via Euclidean geometry.
This type of thinking (working with profound analogies
and relating them to, or turning them into, equalities) is today,
as it was in Archimedes’s time, the source of much of the
most powerful mathematics.
19. HEDGEHOGS AGAIN
We have largely talked about areas of figures in the plane,
except for our excursion in the spherical geometry with the
Banach-Tarsky Paradox. This deserves more discussion,
which I hope will happen in the upcoming conversation period.
20. APPENDIX: SKETCH OF A PROOF OF ARCHIMEDES’ MEASUREMENT OF THE CIRCLE.
To describe Archimedes’s argument succinctly, we need some
vocabulary. Define the radius of a regular polygon to be the
length of a line interval that is obtained by dropping a perpendicular to any side of the polygon from the center N of
the regular polygon. Define the perimeter (or circumference)
of a polygon to be the length of its perimeter, i.e., the sum of
the lengths of the sides of the polygon. If the polygon is a
regular M-gon, then the circumference is M times the length
of any side.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
81
Here is “my” version of Proposition 1 for regular polygons,31 which is analogous to Archimedes’s Proposition 1 for
circles:
Archimedes’s Proposition 1 adapted to regular
polygons: The area subsumed by a regular polygon
is equal to the area subsumed by a right-angled triangle for which the two right-angle sides are of lengths
equal to the radius and the circumference (respectively) of the polygon.
In contrast to the actual Proposition 1 of the Measurement of
the Circle, this “polygon-version” of Archimedes’s Proposition 1 is now nicely within the scope of Euclidean vocabulary; its proof is within the scope of Euclid as well.
Some comments:
(1) Both this “polygon-version” and Archimedes’s Proposition 1 deal with a right-angled triangle whose base is
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
82
the circumference and whose height is the radius of the
figure to which this triangle is being compared. One
could rephrase these propositions by omitting the requirement that the triangle be right-angled.
(2) A visual proof of this polygonal proposition can be
effected simply by cutting and “straightening out to a
line” the perimeter of the polygon, and then arguing that
this paper-doll figure has the same area as the triangle
displayed below.32 (In the figure below we illustrate this
with a 3-gon, otherwise known as a triangle, which produces, when cut-and straightened-out, the three triangles
in a line labeled A,B,C. Each of these triangles have the
same area as the three triangles that make up the large triangle in the lower figure, which has as base the perimeter
and as height the radius.) This relies only the fact that the
area of a triangle depends only on its base and height.
NOTES
1. Since you read Archimedes’s On the equilibrium of planes in Freshman
Laboratory, this may not come as a complete surprise.
2. I am grateful to Paul Van Koughnett who drew most of the figures, and
to Paul Dry for helpful and incisive comments about early drafts of these
notes.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
83
3. Straight-limbed geometry;
In her arts’ ingeny
Our wits were sharp and keen.
From “Mark Antony,” a poem by John Cleveland (1613-1658). See The
Best Poems of the English language: From Chaucer through Robert
Frost, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 154-55.
4. A sketch of its proof is in the Appendix, Section 20 below.
5. The ∪ (“cup”) notation means “union.” That is, if X and Y are sets, then
X ∪ Y is the set whose members are either members of X or members of
Y or members of both X and Y.
6. For people who are familiar with group theory, a fairly complete description of what is going can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach–Tarski_paradox.
7. A delightful book that discusses calculations of this sort, and of more
theoretical sorts, is John Bryant and Chris Sangwin, How Round is Your
Circle? Where Engineering and Mathematics Meet, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011.)
8. The composite image in Fig. 6 was created by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The X-ray component was produced by NASA/CXC/U.Mich./
S.Oey; the Infrared component by NASA/JPL, and the optical component
by ESO/WFI/2.2-m.
9. Fig. 7 is drawn from Euclid’s Element of Geometry, an edition of the
Greek text with new English translation by Richard Fitzpatrick (Austin:
Richard Fitzpatrick, 2007), 8.
10. Two cowboys:
A: “My ranch is so big I can ride Old Paint from morning to night
and still not cover it.”
B: “I know exactly how you feel. My horse is like that too!”
11. This issue is taken up by Kant from a slant perspective. (That’s typical
for Kant.) In Book I, Sections 25 and 26 of The Critique of Judgment, in
discussing what he calls the mathematical sublime, he points out that in
comprehending in our imagination a specific magnitude (say, this pole is
ten feet long) one is engaging in two acts, of different natures: there is
the mathematical one of counting a number of feet (and comprehending
that act of counting) and then there is the essentially aesthetic one of comprehending—or internalizing in some way or other—what a foot is. From
Kant’s perspective, then, considering a proportion, per se, is an act that
extracts the purely mathematical aspect of “comprehension of a magni-
�84
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tude” from the underlying, and otherwise unavoidable, aesthetic aspect:
comprehending the unit. Of course, it is the latter that interests him.
12. At least if we insist that both intervals be measured by a whole number
of multiples of the chosen “common measure.”
13. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 75a29-75b12.
14. Here is an important example of this that originated over a century
ago, and is everywhere to be seen in modern mathematics: numbers are
analogous to functions. There are whole branches of mathematics
where these concepts are treated as not merely analogous, but as particular exemplars of a larger encompassing concept.
15. See, for example, the marvelous essay on this subject in Euclid: The
Thirteen Books of the Elements, ed. Thomas Heath, 3 vols. (Mineola, New
York: Dover Publications, 1956), 165-69.
16. This property distinguishes straight line segments as geodesics in
modern terminology.
17. For source material, various translations, commentary, and more related texts, please go to:
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k53966
(which is on the “Teaching” page of my web site).
18. That the ratio of the area of a circle to the length of its circumference
is a simple expression in terms of its radius is what is behind the beauty
of Proposition 1. This is a phenomenon that proliferates in higher dimensions; e.g., the ratio of the volume of a sphere to its surface area is, similarly, a simple expression in terms of its radius. This is worth pondering.
19. But neither of the above “invariance properties” need be, nor should
be, included as axioms, for they will follow from your list of axioms (if
you’ve formulated them correctly).
20. See Benoît Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1982).
21. Quadrature is the basic topic in the oldest existent Greek text, that of
Hippocrates of Chios.
22. Or better, by doing it yourself.
23. This is admittedly a bit vague, but I hope the examples convey the
kind of problem I’m referring to.
24. Hint: ∫ x2 dx = ⅓ x3 when evaluated over the interval 0 to x.
25. On the Sphere and Cylinder I.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | MAZUR
85
26. This figure can be found online at:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Lune.svg
27. I think that there are truly interesting (entirely mathematical, not historical) issues that lurk in this, and it is one of my plans to understand it
in depth.
28. This is especially fitting since it comes from the pen of the celebrated
shouter of “Eureka,” which derives from the same root.
29. There is an extensive earlier tradition of discussion about equilibrium
and disequilibrium on a balance, and on the action of levers of all sorts.
For example, this observation from Part Seven of Aristotle’s On the motion of animals: “A small change occurring at the center makes great and
numerous changes at the circumference, just as by shifting the rudder a
hair’s breadth you get a wide deviation at the prow.” I want to thank Jean
de Groot for conversations about this; I look forward to her forthcoming
commentary on Aristotle’s Mechanics.
There is also, to be sure, an extensive later tradition on this topic—
notably, Ernst Mach’s marvelous critique of the “law” itself, in the Introduction and first few chapters of his wonderful book The Science of
Mechanics (Chicago and London: Open Court, 1919.)
30. That is, square roots. This is not an idle question.
31. I say “my” version because, even though it is—in my opinion—implicitly invoked in Archimedes’s text, it isn’t dwelt on.
32. I’m thankful to Jim Carlson for this suggestion.
�86
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�87
ESSAYS & LECTURES
Some Reflections on Darwin
and C.S. Peirce
Curtis Wilson and Chaninah Maschler
Introduction
On a Saturday morning in the mid-1950s, I attended a St.
John’s faculty seminar on a selected reading from Darwin’s
Origin of Species. What chiefly remains in memory is an
overall impression: the discussion was halting and desultory,
failing to get airborne. In those days the available edition of
the Origin was the sixth and last (1872); compared with the
first edition of 1859, it suffers from excessive backing and
filling, Darwin’s attempts to answer his critics. Yet, even had
our text been from the sprightlier first edition, I doubt our
discussion would have got off the ground. After one spell of
silence a senior tutor spoke up to ask: Isn’t it [Darwin’s theory]
just a hypothesis? The implication, I thought, was: Can’t we
just ignore the whole idea?
The short answer to that second question is: we can’t, because Darwin’s theory is the grand working hypothesis (yes,
it’s a hypothesis!) of biologists everywhere, and as aspirant
generalists at St. John’s, we need to seek out its meaning. The
search can be exhilarating as well as disquieting.
Major features of Darwin’s theory are contained in his
phrase “descent with modification through natural selection.”
The descent of present-day organisms from organisms of preCurtis Wilson was a long-time tutor, and twice Dean, at St. John’s College
in Annapolis. Sadly, he passed away on 24 August 2012, shortly after this
article was completed. Chanina Maschler is tutor emerita at St. John’s
College in Annapolis. The Introduction, in the form of first-person reminiscences, was written by Mr. Wilson. Part 1 is by Ms. Maschler. The last
three parts were worked out by the two authors jointly.
�88
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ceding generations is obvious; Darwin requires us to keep
this fact in focus. The offspring inherit traits from their parents, but some variation occurs. Since far more offspring are
produced than can survive and reproduce, the variants best
suited to surviving and reproducing are the ones that win out.
Relative to a given environment, the surviving form will be
better adapted than the forms that failed. Darwin saw this
process as leading to diversification of kinds, or speciation,
as indicated by the title of his book, On the Origin of Species.1
Darwin opened his first notebook on “Transmutation of
Species” in July, 1837. In a sustained effort of thought from
1837 to 1844, he constructed the theory. The empirical evidence consisted chiefly of the biological specimens that he
had observed and collected during his tour as naturalist
aboard H.M.S. Beagle, from Dec. 27, 1831 to Oct. 2, 1836.
(This voyage was sent out to chart the coasts of South America and determine longitudes round the globe; taking along a
naturalist was an after-thought of the captain’s.)
At the beginning of the Beagle voyage, Darwin was a few
weeks short of his twenty-third birthday. So far in his life he
had had no clear goal. Enrolled in medical school at age sixteen in Edinburgh, he dropped out, unable to endure seeing
patients in pain. His father (a physician, skeptical in religion)
then sent him to Cambridge with the idea that he might fit
himself out to become a country parson, but young Darwin
found the course of study uninteresting. He completed the
A.B. degree, but later acknowledged that his time at Cambridge was mostly wasted. A chance by-product of it was a
friendship with John S. Henslow, the professor of botany.
Henslow it was who arranged Darwin’s being offered the post
of naturalist on the Beagle. Darwin’s father flatly rejected the
idea at first, but Josiah Wedgewood, young Darwin’s maternal uncle, persuaded him to change his mind.
In hindsight, we can say that young Darwin was ad-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
89
mirably suited to his new post. From boyhood he had been a
persistent collector of a variety of objects, from stamps to
beetles. As a naturalist he would prove to have an unstoppable drive toward theoretical understanding, seeking to connect the dots between his numerous observations. The voyage
of the Beagle, proceeding first to the coasts of South America
and the nearby islands, could not have been more aptly
planned to yield observations supporting the theory that he
would develop. The observations were chiefly of three types.2
Fossils from South America were found to be closely related
to living fauna of that continent, rather than to contemporaneous fossils from elsewhere. Animals of the different climatic zones of South America were related to each other
rather than to animals of the same climatic zones on other
continents. Faunas of nearby islands (Falkland, Galapagos)
were closely related to those of the nearest mainland; and on
different islands of the same island group were closely related. These observations could be accounted for on Darwin’s
theory; on the opposing theory of fixed species they remained
unintelligible.
But why the uproar over Darwin’s Origin, and why does
it still today produce uneasiness? It is not merely that it appears contrary to the creation story in Genesis. As John
Dewey put it in 1910:3
That the publication of the Origin of Species marked an
epoch in the development of the natural sciences is well
known to the layman. That the combination of the very
words origin and species embodied an intellectual revolt
and introduced a new intellectual temper is easily overlooked by the expert. The conceptions that had reigned in
the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand
years, the conceptions that had become the familiar furniture of the mind, rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final; they rested upon treating change
and origin as signs of defect and unreality. In laying hands
upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the
�90
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species
introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound
to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.
More recently Ernst Mayr has characterized Darwin’s
new way of thinking as “population thinking,” and the mode
of thinking prevalent earlier as “typological thinking”:
Typological thinking, no doubt, had its roots in the earliest
efforts of primitive man to classify the bewildering diversity of nature into categories. The eidos of Plato is the formal philosophical codification of this form of thinking.
According to it, there are a limited number of fixed, unchangeable “ideas” underlying the observed variability,
with the eidos (idea) being the only thing that is fixed and
real, while the observed variability has no more reality than
the shadows of an object on a cave wall. . . .
The assumptions of population thinking are diametrically
opposed to those of the typologist. The populationist
stresses the uniqueness of everything in the organic world.
What is true for the human species—that no two individuals are alike—is equally true for all other species of animals and plants. . . . All organisms and organic phenomena
are composed of unique features and can be described collectively only in statistical terms. Individuals, or any kind
of organic entities, form populations, of which we can determine the arithmetic mean and the statistics of variation.
Averages are merely statistical abstractions, only the individuals of which the populations are composed have reality. The ultimate conclusions of the population thinker and
of the typologist are precisely the opposite. For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion,
while for the populationist, the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking
at nature could be more different.4
Mayr’s abruptly nominalist “take” on the nature of
species is not required by Darwin’s theory, nor do all biolo-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
91
gists espouse it.5 One thing the theory does require is a new
attention to individual differences. Species may result from
processes that are fundamentally statistical, and yet be real.
For young Darwin, gentleman naturalist, noting individual
differences came naturally. His curiosity about connections
may also have been natural to him, but he developed it into a
powerful drive toward unifying theory.
Before coming to St. John’s in 1948, I had taken undergraduate courses in zoology and embryology in which Darwin’s theory was referred to; I accepted the theory as established. An
occasion for reading Darwin’s Origin had not arisen. On becoming a St. John’s tutor, I immersed myself chiefly in problems of the laboratory on the side of physical science, to
which my interests inclined me and for which my more recent
graduate studies in the history of science to some degree prepared me.
In multiple ways, during my early years at St. John’s, I
took my cue from Jacob Klein. My admiration for him was
unbounded. I respected him for his scholarly knowledge,
shrewdness, and sharp discernment. It was he who drew the
College community out of its 1948-49 leadership crisis and
communal slough of despond in the wake of Barr’s and
Buchanan’s departure, and he did so single-handedly and
spiritedly. During his deanship (1949-1958), he gave the College a new lease on life, a new stability, and an incentive to
move forward: testing, selecting, and improving the Program.
Our debt to him is incalculable.
As dean, Mr. Klein in the opening lecture each year undertook to address the question of what we were doing here,
what liberal education was. It was with trepidation, he told
us, that he addressed this question. Typically, his lecture took
a Platonic turn, as when he described the metastrophē, or turning round, of the prisoner in the cave of Plato’s Republic. The
�92
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
former prisoner had to be brought to recognize that the shadows he had previously taken for truth were in fact only images of conventional images. Getting at the truth was a matter
of penetrating beyond that scrim of images.
During the academic year 1954-55 I was co-leader with
Mr. Klein (“Jasha” as we tutors called him) of a senior seminar. On one evening the assignment was from Darwin’s Origin—this was perhaps the only place in the program where
Darwin’s theory was addressed in those days. I recall nothing
of the discussion, but at its end Jasha asked the students: Did
they consider Darwin’s book important to their lives? One
after another they replied with a decisive “No!”—a flood of
denial.
Though failing to lodge a protest, I thought the indifference to Darwin a mistake, and I was disappointed by Jasha’s
standoffishness with respect to it. My opinion was reinforced
in conversations I had at the time with Allen Clark, a Ford
Foundation intern at the College in the years 1954-56.6 Clark
had done graduate studies at Harvard on American pragmatism, reading widely in the writings of C.S. Peirce, William
James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and the Harvard-educated
Spanish émigré George Santayana. He was especially attracted to the writings of Peirce, who had been both a working scientist and a close student of philosophy, and had set
himself to making philosophical sense of natural science.
Peirce had embraced Darwin’s theory and interpreted it.
Attempting to catch up with Clark in philosophy, I began
reading such writings of Peirce as were readily available.
These were two collections of essays, the earliest assembled
by Morris R. Cohen under the title Chance, Love, and Logic,
and a later one due to Justus Buchler, The Philosophy of
Peirce. There were also the six volumes of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, published by Harvard Uni-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
93
versity Press in 1931-35 under the editorship of Hartshorne
and Weiss, but these were formidable, leaving the inquirer
puzzled as to where to get a leg up or a handhold.
My enthusiasm for Peirce was challenged one summer
evening in the later 1950s. During an informal discussion of
a Peirce essay at Jasha’s home, Jasha took exception to
Peirce’s “Monism,” the doctrine that the world is made of a
single stuff. Jasha saw this doctrine as contradicted by the intentionality of human thought. What was that?
The doctrine had been put forward by the Austrian
philosopher Franz Brentano in 1874.7 According to Brentano,
to think is to think of or about something. Analogously, to
fear or hope entails that there are objects (Jasha sometimes
called them “targets”) of these modes of consciousness. Their
objects need not be existents in the empirical world. I can
think of a unicorn, or imagine riding like Harry Potter on a
broom stick, or fear an imagined bogeyman in a closet.
Brentano therefore spoke of “intentional inexistence,” meaning that such an object is somehow contained in the thought
(cogitatio à la Descartes!) of which it is the object. Brentano
sought to make Intentionality definitive of the mental. He
concluded that mind, because of its intentionality, is irreducible to the physical.
Edmund Husserl, one of Jasha’s teachers, had been a student of Brentano. For Husserl, Brentano’s idea of intentionality became the basis of a new science which he called
Phenomenology. Husserl followed Brentano in treating intentionality as coextensive with the mental, and in asserting
the impossibility of a naturalistic explanation of intentional
acts. Jasha’s rejection of Peirce’s Monism, I am guessing,
stemmed from his acceptance, at least in part, of Husserlian
philosophy.8
Jasha may have been unaware that what he regarded as
�94
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Peirce’s Ontological Monism was an application of the
maxim Do not block the road of inquiry. Dualism, as Peirce
saw it, drew a line in the sand; naturalistic explanations were
guaranteed to be impossible beyond this line. The line in the
sand inevitably becomes a dare.
But I was still far in those days from understanding how
the various parts of Peirce’s thinking held together—or failed
to. A major difficulty with the Cohen and Buchler collections
and with The Collected Papers was that they did not present
Peirce’s papers in their order of composition. The editors did
not sufficiently appreciate that Peirce’s ideas developed over
time. Throughout his life, Peirce’s thought (like science as he
understood it) was a work in progress.9 When he died in 1914
he had not completed any single major work. During his last
active decade, however, he succeeded in resolving certain
major difficulties in his earlier philosophizing. A chronological edition of his work—published papers, lectures, and unpublished notes and correspondence—has now been
undertaken by Indiana University Press. Of these post-1950
developments I was made aware only recently. And their full
import did not dawn on me until encountering a book by the
Chairman of the Board of Advisers to the Peirce Edition Project, Thomas Short. It is Peirce’s Theory of Signs.10
Parts 1 and 2 of our essay provide an account of Peirce’s
pragmatism and of his progress from Kantian idealism to scientific realism. In Parts 3 and 4, with the help of Short’s
analysis, we shall indicate how Peirce accounts naturalistically for the emergence of intentionality and conscious purposefulness in the course of evolution.
Part 1. Peirce and Pragmatism
Peirce is the man through whom the word “pragmatism” enters upon the world scene as a philosophic term. According
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
95
to his own recollection,11 confirmed by the report of his friend
William James,12 this happened in the early 1870s, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, amongst a group of young Harvard
men, who used to meet for philosophical discussion. Later in
the 1870s the opinions Peirce had defended viva voce were
issued in print in two articles, “The Fixation of Belief” (1877)
and “How to Make our Ideas Clear” (1878).13 The first of
these two essays prefigured what Peirce would in the course
of a life-time come to say about science as an enterprise of
ongoing inquiry rather than a collection of upshots of investigation.14 The second was sent into the world, as the title indicates, as advice on how to go about gaining greater
intellectual control over one’s ideas than is furnished by the
ability correctly to apply, or even verbally to define them.
The advice runs as follows: “Consider what effects, which
might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the
object of our conceptions to have. Then our conception of
these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”
Note that the first person plural is out front. Also, that conceiving remains irreducible!
Peirce never became a full-time professor. Not even at
Johns Hopkins, where John Dewey was briefly a student in
his logic class. But just about every major American author
in professional philosophy—William James, Josiah Royce,
John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, C.I. Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars—acknowledges being profoundly indebted to Peirce’s
teachings, pragmatism being one of these.
Pragmatism is, in itself, no doctrine of metaphysics, no attempt to determine any truth of things. It is merely a
method of ascertaining the meanings of hard words and of
abstract concepts. All pragmatists of whatsoever stripe will
cordially assent to that statement. As to the ulterior and indirect effects of practicing the pragmatistic method, that
is quite another affair.15
�96
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Some of the Cambridge friends whom Peirce initially
persuaded to try bringing a laboratory scientist’s “let’s try it
and see” approach to bear on the study of “hard words,” particularly those used in metaphysics, suggested that he call
what he was offering “practicism” or “practicalism.” No,
Peirce responded, he had learned philosophy from Kant, and
in Kant the terms praktisch and pragmatisch were “as far
apart as the poles.”16 Praktisch belongs to the region of
thought where no mind of the experimentalist type can make
sure of solid ground under his feet. Pragmatisch expresses a
relation to some definite human purpose. “Now quite the
most striking feature of the new theory [is] its recognition of
an inseparable connection between rational cognition and
human purpose.”17
Here are two more statements of what pragmatism
amounts to:
I understand pragmatism to be a method of ascertaining the
meanings, not of all ideas, but only of what I call “intellectual concepts,” that is to say, of those upon the structure of
which arguments concerning objective fact may hinge. Had
the light which, as things are, excites in us the sensation of
blue, always excited the sense of red, and vice versa, however great a difference that might have made in our feelings,
it could have made none in the force of any argument. In
this respect, the qualities of hard and soft strikingly contrast
with those of red and blue. . . . My pragmatism, having
nothing to do with qualities of feeling, permits me to hold
that the predication of such a quality is just what it seems,
and has nothing to do with anything else. . . . Intellectual
concepts, however, the only sign-burdens that are properly
denominated “concepts”—essentially carry some implication concerning the general behavior either of some conscious being or of some inanimate object, and so convey
more, not merely than any feeling, but more too than any
existential fact, namely, the “would-acts” of habitual behavior; and no agglomeration of actual happenings can ever
completely fill up the meaning of a “would be.”18
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
97
Again,
Pragmaticism19 consists in holding that the purport of any
concept is its conceived bearing upon our conduct. How,
then, does the Past bear upon conduct? The answer is selfevident: whenever we set out to do anything, we “go upon,”
we base our conduct on facts already known, and for these
we can only draw upon our memory. It is true that we may
institute a new investigation for the purpose; but its discoveries will only become applicable to conduct after they
have been made and reduced to a memorial maxim. In
short, the Past is the sole storehouse of all our knowledge.
When we say that we know that some state of things exists,
we mean that it used to exist, whether just long enough for
the news to reach the brain and be retransmitted to tongue
or pen or longer ago. . . . How does the Future bear upon
conduct? The answer is that future facts are the only facts
that we can, in a measure, control. . . . What is the bearing
of the Present instant upon conduct? . . . There is no time
in the Present for any inference at all, least of all for inference concerning that very instant. Consequently the present object must be an external object, if there be any
objective reference in it. The attitude of the present is either
conative or perceptive.20
Part 2. Peirce’s Transition from an Initial Idealism
to Scientific Realism
As Peirce has told us, he learned philosophy from Kant. Yet
from the start there was one Kantian doctrine he could not
stomach: the doctrine of “things-in-themselves” (Dinge an
sich) somehow standing behind the objects we meet with in
experience—inaccessible beings of which, Kant says, we
must always remain ignorant. In papers of the late 1860s,
Peirce insisted that all of our cognitions are signs, and that
each sign refers to a previous sign:
At any moment we are in possession of certain information, that is, of cognitions which have been logically de-
�98
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
rived by induction and hypothesis from previous cognitions which are less general, less distinct, and of which we
have a less lively consciousness. These in their turn have
been derived from others still less general, less distinct,
and less vivid; and so on back to the ideal first, which is
quite singular and quite out of consciousness. The ideal
first is the particular thing-in-itself. It does not exist as
such.21
According to Peirce at this stage, all thoughts are of one
or another degree of generality, each referring to an earlier
thought, and none immediately to its object. Only if a cognition were immediately of its object, could it be certain, hence
an intuition. Our lack of intuition, as thus argued by Peirce,
was his initial ground for rejecting Descartes’ Cogito, ergo
sum. The real, as Peirce conceived it at this time, was an ideal
limit to a series of thoughts, a limit to be reached in the future:
The real . . . is that which, sooner or later, information and
reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore
independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very
origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits.22
Peirce here conceived all conceiving as in an infinite sequence of thoughts, stretching backward toward the non-existent
thing-in-itself (an external limit) and forward toward the real, to
be achieved at some future time (a limit located within the
thought sequence). A consequence was that any individual, considered as an “it” other than the universals true of it, is unreal.
With this consequence of his late-1860s theory of knowledge, Peirce was uncomfortable. If the aim is to get outside one’s
head and find a purchase on reality, it is indeed disastrous.23
Peirce at last found a way out in his “The Fixation of
Belief” of 1877:
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
99
To satisfy our doubts . . . it is necessary that a method
should be found by which our beliefs may be caused by
nothing human, but by some external permanency—by
something on which our thinking has no effect. Such is the
method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis . . . is this:
There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect
our senses according to regular law. . . .24
In “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), Peirce combined the hypothesis of real things on which our thinking has
no effect with his earlier notion of indefinite progress toward
human knowledge of the real:
Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic
views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a
force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion. . . . The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed
to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth,
and the object represented in this opinion is the real.25
In the years 1879-1884, Peirce was a part-time lecturer
in logic at the Johns Hopkins University, and he and his students O.H. Mitchell and Christine Ladd-Franklin (independently of Frege in Germany) introduced quantifiers into
predicate logic and the logic of relations. Thus the familiar
universal and particular propositions of Aristotelian logic,
“All S is P,” “Some S is P,” come to be replaced by
(x)(Sx ⊃ Px) [read: For all x, if x is S, then x is P], and
(Ǝ x) (Sx·Px) [read: There is an x such that x is S and x is P],
where we have used a notation now standard. Note that the
“x” denotes an individual in whatever universe of discourse,
fictional or real, we have entered upon, without any presumption that the essence of this individual is known to us. In relational logic, which is needed for mathematics, indices are
crucial for representing dyadic, triadic, n-adic relations, e.g.,
�100
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Rxy (read: x bears the relation R to y). All our thinking, according to Peirce in the 1880s and later, is laced with indexical elements, tying discourse to the world we’re in. The
index asserts nothing; it only says “There!” Like such words
as “here,” “now,” “this,” it directs the mind to the object denoted.
The discovery of the nature and indispensability of indices led to a vast extension of Peirce’s understanding of
signs and significance (the science of semeiotic he was seeking to build). An index is anything that compels or channels
attention in a particular direction. The act of attention responding to an index does not have to be a component of a
thought. For instance a driver, on seeing a stoplight go red,
may brake automatically without thinking; he thus interprets
the red light as a command. Therefore the effect of a sign, in
triggering an interpretation, need not be a thought; it can be
an action or a feeling. The extension of semeiotic to nonhuman interpreters is now in the offing, as will become apparent
in Part 4 below.
At the same time, Peirce has burst out of the closed-in
idealism of his earlier theory of knowledge. The result is what
we may call Scientific Realism.
Part 3. Anisotropic Processes
Just twelve years after the first copies of Origin of Species
landed in the U.S.A., Peirce wrote:
Mr. Darwin proposed to apply the statistical method to biology. The same thing had been done in a widely different
branch of science, the theory of gases. Though unable to
say what the movements of any particular molecule of a
gas would be on a certain hypothesis regarding the constitution of this class of bodies, Clausius and Maxwell [had
been able, eight years before the publication of Darwin’s
immortal work], by the application of the doctrine of prob-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
101
abilities, to predict that in the long run such and such a proportion of the molecules would, under the given circumstances, acquire such and such velocities; that there would
take place, every second, such and such a number of collisions, etc.; and from these propositions [they] were able
to deduce certain properties of gases, especially in regard
to their heat relations. In like manner, Darwin, while unable to say what the operation of variation and natural selection in any individual case will be, demonstrates that in
the long run they will adapt animals to their circumstances.26
Thus Peirce took explanation in both statistical mechanics
and Darwinian natural selection to be statistical. He meant,
Short argues, irreducibly statistical, and not mechanistic.27
Analyzed logically, a mechanistic explanation starts from a
particular disposition of certain bodies at some time, and by
applying general laws of mechanics, gravitation, chemistry,
electromagnetism, or other general theory, derives the particular disposition of these bodies at a later time. “Particular”
here is opposed to “general.” The explanations of Celestial
Mechanics are of this kind. The celestial mechanician, starting from the positions and velocities of the bodies in the solar
system at one instant, and assuming gravitational theory,
computes the positions and velocities of these bodies at a later
instant. If we should propose to ourselves a similar calculation for molecules of a gas confined in a container, we would
find it impracticable. The number of molecules is too large
(in a cubic centimeter of gas at one atmosphere of pressure
and 0°C. that number is about 2.7 × 1019, or 27 quintillion).
Ascertaining the positions and velocities of all these molecules at a specified “initial” instant is humanly impossible.
Moreover, the motions are not governed by a single law like
gravitation, but involve collisions of the molecules with each
other and the walls of the container; these introduce discontinuities that are difficult to take into account.
�102
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
But the crucial conclusion is this: even if such a computation were possible, it would not yield the conclusion for
which statistical mechanics argues. Statistical mechanics
seeks to establish that notably non-uniform distributions of
molecules in the gas will in time be replaced by a more uniform distribution, with reduction in the spread of velocities
amongst the molecules. The statistical argument invokes
probability.
How to understand probability in this context is by no
means settled, and we shall give only a rough indication of
the type of solution that is believed necessary.28 Consider a
system of n molecules of gas contained in a volume V. Let V
be divided into a large number m of equal cells, m being less
than n (if n is in quintillions, m could be in the millions or
billions). If the molecules were distributed with perfect uniformity throughout V, then each cell would contain n/m molecules. This distribution is a particular microstate—an
extremely special one, hence unlikely. We would expect that,
in most imaginable distributions, the numbers of molecules
in different cells would be different. To take this likelihood
into account, consider microstates in which the number of
molecules in all cells falls within the range n/m ± e, where e
is much less than n/m. Let the class of all microstates thus
characterized be called C, and let the complementary class,
or class of all microstates in which the number of molecules
in some cells falls outside the range n/m ± e, be called Cʹ′.
In the work of the earlier theorists, distinguishable microstates compatible with the overall energy of the gas were
assigned equal probabilities, since no reason presented itself
for assigning different probabilities to different microstates.
Later theorists sought grounds other than “equal ignorance”
for assigning probabilities to microstates. Whatever the mode
of assigning probabilities, the outcome must show the gas
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
103
progressing from less uniform to more uniform distributions,
both spatially and with respect to the spread of velocities. For
that is the empirical result: a quantity of gas under high pressure, when let into an evacuated chamber, spreads out
through the chamber and is soon more homogeneously distributed, with a uniform temperature and pressure lower than
the original temperature and pressure.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics extends this kind
of reasoning to all natural systems. It says that in any closed
system the processes have a direction: they progress toward
greater homogeneity and reduced capacity to do mechanical
work.29 For processes that are directional in time, Short uses
the term anisotropic (a-privative + iso, “equal” + tropos, “direction”). Anisotropic processes are defined by the type toward which they progress. We shall see that there are
anisotropic processes other than those that instantiate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. All such processes, however,
differ from mechanical processes, which proceed from a particular configuration to a particular configuration.
Whether the universe is a closed system we do not know,
but everywhere in the observable world we see the effects of
the Second Law, the “degradation of energy.” Nevertheless,
we also see that new forms of order, though improbable,
sometimes emerge. They are produced in open systems that
absorb energy from, and discard unused matter and energy
to, the environment. Ilya Prigogine has described such forms
of order, calling them “dissipative systems.”30 Locally, in the
newly created form, the second law appears to be violated,
but if account is taken of the exhausted fuel and other waste
materials ejected to the environment, the second law is found
to hold. Higher forms of order come to be at the expense of
a decrease in order elsewhere, an increase in homogeneity
and a lessened capacity to produce novelty.
�104
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
The first coming-to-be of living forms in the universe presumably occurred in the manner of Prigogine’s “dissipative
systems.” Such is the hypothesis generally accepted by scientists today. Living systems differ from the cases studied by
Prigogine in their greater complexity and in having the capacity to self-replicate. In 1953 the graduate student S.L.
Miller under the guidance of H.C. Urey circulated a mixture
of methane, ammonia, water vapor, and hydrogen through a
liquid water solution, and elsewhere in the apparatus continuously passed an electrical discharge through the vaporous
mixture. After several days the water solution changed color,
and was found to contain a mixture of amino acids, the essential constituents of proteins. Since then, most if not all of
the essential building-blocks of proteins, carbohydrates, and
nucleic acids have been produced under conditions similar to
those obtaining when the Earth was young (the atmosphere
needs to be free of oxidizing agents such as oxygen). The sequences of conditions and chemical pathways by which these
building-blocks may have been assembled into a living cell
remain matters of speculation.
Darwin’s evolutionary theory, taking the existence of living things as given, goes on to show how, chiefly but not
solely by means of natural selection,31 biological evolution
can occur. Our little word “can” here goes to signal what
Nicholas Maistrellis calls “the highly theoretical, and even
speculative character” of Origin chapter 4, dedicated to expounding that and how Natural Selection “works.”
We should not expect a series of examples of natural selection designed to win us over to his theory on purely empirical grounds. Even if Darwin had wanted to proceed in
that way, he could not have done so, for such examples do
not exist—or at least were not known to Darwin. . . . Notice
that all the examples of natural selection in this chapter are,
as Darwin repeatedly acknowledges, imaginary ones.32
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
105
Contemporary readers of Darwin have sometimes become so blasé about the shocking idea that order may emerge
out of disorder that they don’t notice how subtle, complex,
and distributed the over-all argument of Origin is. We have
found C. Kenneth Waters’ “The arguments in the Origin of
Species,” along with the other essays included in Part 1: Darwin’s Theorizing of The Cambridge Companion to Darwin,
particularly conducive to waking us up.
Peirce wrote, in A Guess at the Riddle (1887):
Whether the part played by natural selection and the survival of the fittest in the production of species be large or
small, there remains little doubt that the Darwinian theory
indicates a real cause, which tends to adapt animal and
vegetable forms to their environment. A remarkable feature
of it is that it shows how merely fortuitous variations of
individuals together with merely fortuitous mishaps to
them would, under the action of heredity, result, not in
mere irregularity, nor even in statistical constancy, but in
indefinite progress toward a better adaptation of means to
ends.33
A little later in this same manuscript Peirce sums up the basic
idea of Darwinian selection as follows:
There are just three factors in the process of natural selection; to wit: 1st, the principle of individual variation or
sporting; 2nd, the principle of hereditary transmission . . . ;
and 3rd, the principle of elimination of unfavorable characters.34
Darwin and Peirce lacked the benefit of a workable theory of inheritance. Nothing like our genetics was available
to them. We today single out genetic make-up as the causally
significant locale of “sporting,” And Peirce’s phrase, “elimination of unfavorable characters,” is replaced in more recent
neo-Darwinian formulations by the phrase “relative reproductive success,” meaning, the having of more numerous off-
�106
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
spring. The process is statistical: If one variant of a species
has more numerous offspring than do others, and if in addition these offspring survive to reproduce, the original variant,
possessed of one or more genetic alleles (alternative forms
of a gene), is more successful in propagating its genome to
later generations.
The hypothesis of Natural Selection confers little in the
way of predictive power. Its chief value is to provide a posthoc explanation of what has occurred. For example, visual
acuity is crucial to the survival of both predators and prey.
Evidently predators are better off with eyes in the front of
their heads as they pursue prey, and potential prey are better
off with eyes on the sides of their heads to detect predators
coming from any quarter. Another example: Flowers evolved
as a device by which plants induce animals to transport their
pollen (hence sperm) to the egg cells. The evolutionarily
older plants had been pollinated by the wind. The more attractive the plants were to an insect, the more frequently they
would be visited and the more seeds they would produce.
Any chance variation that made the visits more frequent or
made pollination more efficient offered immediate advantages.35
We can only guess at the detailed processes by which such
adaptations have been brought about. What Darwin gives us
is a heuristic for research, not a set of biological laws.36 Partly
on this account, because Darwinian explanation does not fit
the model of explanation in mechanics, it has taken a long
time before philosophers of science became willing to award
a comparable degree of intellectual dignity to Darwinian as
to Galilean and Newtonian science. The books listed in the
Bibliography appended to Maistrellis’s Selections help overcome the physics envy that stands in the way of appreciating
Darwin. Particularly helpful have been Sober’s persevering
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
107
efforts to clarify and show the interconnections amongst the
fundamental concepts of Fitness, Function, Adaptation, and
Selection, while steadily reminding us of the ineliminably
probabilistic character of most of the theorizing of modern
evolutionary biology.
One of Sober’s helps into the saddle is his distinction between selection for and selection of:
Selection-for is a causal concept. To say that there is selection for trait T in a population means that having T
causes organisms to survive and reproduce better (so having the alternative(s) to T that are present in the population
causes organisms to survive and reproduce worse). In contrast, to say that there is selection of trait T just means that
individuals with T have a higher average fitness than do
individuals who lack T.37
Here is an illustration of the contrasting terms being put to
use:
Worms improve the soil, but that does not mean that their
digestive systems are adaptations for soil improvement;
rather, the worm gut evolved to help individual worms survive and reproduce. The benefit that the ecosystem receives is a fortuitous benefit—a useful side-effect
unrelated to what caused the trait to evolve. The gut’s ability to extract nutrition for individual worms is what the gut
is an adaptation for.38
To balance our earlier quotation from Maistrellis stressing
the not strictly empirically encountered character of Darwin’s
examples in his chapter about natural selection-at-work, notice that Sober feels quite comfortable about urging against
the philosopher Jerry Fodor, a critic of Darwinism, that “biologists often think they have excellent evidence for saying
that agricultural pests experienced selection for DDT resistance, [or] that there has been selection for dark coloration in
moths.”39
Short adopts Sober’s selection of/selection for contrast
�108
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and, integrating it with Peircian ideas of explanation by final
causes, adapts it to new uses. The context is as follows. He
asks us to distinguish four kinds of physical process:
Mechanical processes that proceed from one particular
configuration to another and are reversible.
The processes described by statistical dynamics, which
are anisotropic and result in an increase in entropy and disorder.
The non-equilibrium processes studied by Prigogine,
which are also anisotropic, but produce open systems that
have increased order and diminished entropy. The dissipative structures can sustain themselves in the given environment for a time. Living things, we assume, are of this
kind—complex open systems that metabolize and have an
apparatus for replicating themselves.
With living things, a third sort of anisotropic process
comes into play: Natural Selection, the selection of characteristics for types of effect that conduce to reproductive
success.40
Given living things and their struggle for existence, given
heritable variability, given phenotypic features that in a given
state-of-its-world enhance a creature’s relative chance of producing fertile offspring, a new kind of directional process
comes into being, natural selection. And with it, the possibility of purpose comes on the scene.
Not that anything is a purpose or has a purpose in biological evolution before the actual occurrence of a mutation
that happens to be selectively retained because of some advantage that it confers. Only at that time, that is, when a
feature is selected for its effect, does the effect, say visual
acuity, become a purpose. There was no purpose “visual
acuity” or “adaptedness” or “survival” hanging around
waiting for an opportunity. But once eyes with adjustable
lenses become a feature of mammals, then it would only
be mechanicalist prejudice that could keep us from saying
that eyes exist for the purpose of seeing.41
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
109
Sober’s polar terms selection of/selection for are perhaps
worked harder and a little differently than they were previously:
It is because lenses and focusing increase visual acuity that
genetic mutations resulting in lenses and focusing were retained in subsequent generations; in fact, that happened in
independent lines of animal evolution. The selection in
those cases was for the visual acuity and of concrete structures (or the genes that determine them) that improved visual acuity in specific ways. . . . The of/for distinction is
relative to the level of analysis, but the object of ‘for’ is always an abstract type and the object of ‘of ’ is always
something genetic or genetically determined, hence concrete. . . . As the type selected-for is essential to explanation
by natural selection, such explanation is like anisotropic
explanation in statistical mechanics [in that] both explain
actual phenomena by the types they exemplify. Hence it is
not mechanistic. . . . It is qua adaptation—hence in that aspect—that [an adaptive feature, say S] is explained by natural selection. S could also be explained, had we knowledge
enough, as a product of a complicated series of mechanical
events. But, then, S’s enhancing reproductive success
would seem a surprising coincidence, a bit of biological
luck. S’s being an adaptation would not be explained.42
The “aptness” of organisms is one of the facts of life
that the Darwinian program of explanation seeks to account
for. Having had some success in this explanatory endeavor,
we easily forget that there is no guarantee that evolution
will bring about an increase in complexity or intelligence
or other quality that we admire. Overstatement here, Short
warns us, is common, and disastrous.43 Notice too that natural selection was not itself selected, and therefore does not
have a purpose. It just occurs.
�110
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Part 4. The Emergence of Intentionality and
Conscious Purposes
Cleverly joining Peircean reasoning to the more recent formulations of neo-Darwinian theory, Short’s Theory sketches
a narrative that strives to make intelligible the eventual emergence of the possibility of deliberately produced tools and
self-controlled action out of advantageous anatomy and biologically useful animal behavior. Here one must go slow and
notice that it is as the world comes to hold new kinds of entity
that new kinds of explanation become applicable.44 Short is
not reducing biological explanation to chemical explanation.
Nor will he assimilate human discourse to animal signaling.45
The last three chapters of his book are given over to exploring the implications of applying Peirce’s ideas of sign-action
(= semeiosis) to distinctively human language, thought, and
life. But unless we work from the bottom up, there is no explaining of emergents.
“Working from the bottom up” means for Short that he
must develop so general an account of Peirce’s semiotic triad
Sign-Object-Interpretant that it will be applicable both to
infra-human sign-interpretation—end-directed animal responses to stimuli—and, duly amplified, to distinctively
human life and thought. For Short, this behaviorist interlude
is in the service of Peirce’s Synechism:46 If successful in his
defense of Peirce’s ways, he will have warded off both Cartesian dualism and Reductionism.47
Among social animals, group behavior is determined by
mechanisms that cause one individual to respond to another.
A forager bee, for instance, having located nectar, returns to
the hive and there exhibits what look like dances. The bees
in the hive react to these dances as signaling the direction and
distance in which the nectar will be found. Ethologists have
instructed us that there is an immense variety of animal be-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
111
haviors that operate as though they were intended as communicative signs. By what criteria one determines the intendedness
of a bird- or monkey-cry the emission of which tends to result
in fellow-birds or fellow-monkeys reacting with behavior that
makes sense for the creatures in question (e.g., escaping in
an appropriate way from a certain kind of predator, or overcoming reluctance to approach more closely) has been a topic
for ethological investigation. But every parent is familiar with
the fact that infant wailing and screaming is not, in the earlier
phases of its life, an expression of the infant’s intention to
rouse its protectors. Yet when the infant is a little older its
jealous brother may justly complain: “She is not crying for a
reason. She’s crying for a purpose!”
We have deliberately introduced the word “intend” in its
ordinary sense before returning to the topic of intentionality
in Brentano’s scholastic and technical sense. (Unhappiness
about the lack of a non-dualist treatment of Intentionality was
what initially motivated our exploration of Short’s book on
Peirce’s semeiotics.) Unlike many semioticians, Short follows in Peirce’s footsteps by beginning with interpretive behavior, not with the sending of signs.48 This permits him to
take off from responses. For instance:
The deer does not flee the sudden noise that startled it, but
a predator; for it is to evade a predator that the deer flees.
The instinct to flee is based on an experienced correlation
of sudden noises to predators; the correlation is weak, but,
unless the deer is near starvation, it is better for it to risk
losing a meal than to risk being one. If no predator is there,
the deer’s flight is a mistake, albeit justified. Mistaken or
not, the flight interprets the noise as a sign of a predator.
A response is not merely an effect if it can be mistaken. It
ranks as an interpretation.
In what manner and measure this idea of mistake is available to infra-human animals is a hard question. When the dog
�112
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
that was, in some human observer’s estimation, “barking up
the wrong tree,” corrects itself and, redirecting its bark to the
neighboring tree, glimpses the spot where the cat in fact now
is, does the dog think to itself, “Now I’ve got it right”? Consider two other examples of interpretive responses, both reported by the ethologist Niko Tinbergen: male sticklebacks,
during the breeding season, tend to adopt a “threat posture”
toward potential rivals.
When the opponent does not flee . . . the owner of the territory . . . points its head down and, standing vertically in
the water, makes some jerky movements as if it were going
to bore its snout into the sand. Often it erects one or both
ventral fins.49
Tinbergen’s Plate I is a photo of a Stickleback exhibiting this
posture to its own reflection in a mirror! We know this fish is
making a mistake. Does he?
Lorenz reports . . . an incident which demonstrates the
power of [some varieties of Cichlid] to distinguish between
food and their young. Many Cichlids carry the young back,
at dusk, to a kind of bedroom, a pit they have dug in the
bottom. Once Lorenz, together with some of his students,
watched a male collecting its young for this purpose. When
it had just snapped up a young one, it eyed a particularly
tempting little worm. It stopped, looked at the worm for
several seconds, and seemed to hesitate. Then, after these
seconds of “hard thinking,” it spat out the young, took up
the worm and swallowed it, and then picked up its young
one again and carried it home. The observers could not
help applauding.50
The antelope that fled from a lion that wasn’t there, the stickleback that threatened a rival that wasn’t there, did they interpret something heard, something seen, as to-be-run-from,
to-be-ousted? Their behaviors, while in error in the particular
cases, were appropriate. And this holds true whether or not
these individual animals “knew what they were doing.”
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
113
Something like this is, we take it, what Short meant when he
wrote: 51
The purposefulness of interpretation accounts for the significance of that which is interpretable. In particular, as
that which has a purpose may fail of its purpose, the purposefulness of interpretations accounts for the possibility
that what is signified is not. Because what is signified
might not be, significance exemplifies Brentano’s idea of
intentionality, which he defined as having an “inexistent
object,” i.e., an object that is an object independently of its
existing. Brentano asserted that intentionality is unique to
human mentality, but the argument of [Short’s] book is that
sign-interpretation occurs independently of conscious
thought and, hence, that Peirce’s semeiotic applies to phenomena well beyond human mentality. Thus it provides for
a naturalistic explanation of the mind. But that is possible
only if purposefulness can occur without consciousness.
Peirce’s doctrine of final causation c. 1902 provides a defense of that assumption. For it identifies causation with
selection for types of possible outcome, regardless of
whether that selection is conscious. And it does so consistently with modern physics and biology.52
But the question that arose when we considered the dog
that eventually managed to bark at the cat is still with us: The
dog, in our judgment and in fact, “corrected itself.” And we
know that learning, in the sense of an individual’s behavior
being shaped “for the better” by its experience, is a constituent of the lives of very many (all?) animals. But did the
dog know that it corrected itself? Consider Lorenz’s much applauded Cichlid father, which had its worm and its baby too.
Mustn’t it have had some sort of “inner representation” of the
alternative courses of conduct between which it chose?
We seem at last to have reached the question of when and
how conscious purpose, planning, and self-control emerge.
Short’s entire book, not just the chapter bearing the name
“Semeiosis and the Mental,” is in pursuit of it. Given that
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
114
Peirce regarded thought to be internalized discourse, and that
an individual’s power of discourse is a skill that could not
have been acquired had that individual’s “instinct to acquire
the art” (as Darwin put it) not been activated in the course of
apprenticeship to speakers, Short and Peirce are clearly right
that “the capacity to think for oneself and to act in despite of
society is . . . social in origin.” He adds: “Individual autonomy and varied personality are further examples of the irreducibility of new realities to their preconditions.”53 Among
such “new realities” are not only new means to accomplish
existing purposes but also new purposes.
Because Short, under Peirce’s tutelage, is wholehearted
about accepting the Reality of purpose and purposiveness and
is unembarrassed about following Darwin in naturalizing
man, his investigation of how purpose can and has become
“emancipated” from biology has real content.54
Conclusion
We have seen that, according to Peirce, both statistical mechanics and Darwinian natural selection entail anisotropic
processes, defined by the type of result they lead to. The
“population thinking” that Darwin and later biologists introduced into biology was aimed at accounting for the emergence of biological types or species. The new thinking
differed from the typological thinking of pre-Darwinian times
in that the types or species arose in time.
Among the virtues of Short’s presentation of Peirce is that
he gives a sufficiently detailed description of Peirce’s Categories (in Ch.3) for readers to be supplied with opportunity
to become persuaded that Peirce’s trinitarian categorial
scheme accommodates Individuals and Kinds as mutually irreducible. Here is, however, not the place to exhibit or argue
the point.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
115
Why was the reception of Darwin at St. John’s so lukewarm in earlier days? The theoretical physicist’s impatience
with fussy descriptive details such as are dwelt on in Origin
(and must be by natural historians) was probably a contributing factor; and one that would have been exacerbated if the
assigned selection from Origin was pedagogically haphazard.
But vague apprehensions about the moral and philosophical
import of Darwin’s theory may have contributed more heavily to avoiding serious intellectual engagement with it.
Darwin himself anticipated this reaction. He explains (in
the Introduction to Descent of Man) that it was in order not
to stand in the way of the reading public’s making fair trial
of his general views that he allowed himself just one tiny
paragraph, on the final pages of Origin, that makes direct
mention of man:
In the distant future . . . psychology will be based on a new
foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown
on the origin of man and his history.
Twelve years later, in Descent of Man, the scope of Darwin’s intellectual ambition is made manifest. In Ch.3 he takes
on Kant:
“Duty . . . whence thy original?” . . . As far as I know, no
one has approached [this great question] exclusively from
the side of natural history.
So “approaching it,” Darwin writes:
The following proposition seems to me in a high degree
probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed
with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire
a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.55
His plan is to show how, granted the rest of our mental at-
�116
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tributes and the world’s make-up, the human species does
better with than it would without morality. Otherwise morality (sense of duty, conscience) and the instruments for its acquisition and maintenance could not have become “selected.”
But isn’t there something topsy-turvy about an explanation that subordinates, as means, something better, namely a
creature competent to have a sense of duty, to an end less
good, namely, mere comparative fitness for producing fertile
offspring? The complaint, we urge, limps, because it fails to
register that when something is fruitful and multiplies or fails
to, it is as a creature possessed of certain attributes that it
does so. Darwin freely ascribes sociability, intelligence, and
emotions (sympathy, jealousy, ennui, curiosity, courage, maternal affection, and so forth) to, for instance, domestic animals.56 Nevertheless, he reserves morality for human beings:
As we cannot distinguish between motives, we rank all actions of a certain class as moral, when they are performed
by a moral being. A moral being is one who is capable of
comparing his past or future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them. We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity;
therefore when a monkey faces danger to rescue its comrade, or takes charge of an orphan monkey, we do not call
its conduct moral. . . . It cannot be maintained that the social
instincts are ordinarily stronger in man than, . . . for instance, the instinct of self-preservation, hunger, lust. . . .
Why, then, does man regret . . . and why does he further
feel he ought to regret his conduct? . . . Man, from the activity of his mental faculties, cannot avoid reflection. . . .
Whilst the mother bird is feeding or brooding over her
nestlings, the maternal instinct is probably stronger than the
migratory; but . . . at last, at a moment when her young ones
are not in sight, she takes flight and deserts them. When arrived at the end of her long journey, and the migratory instinct ceases to act, what an agony of remorse each bird
would feel if, being endowed with great mental activity, she
could not prevent the image continually passing before her
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
117
mind of her young ones perishing in the bleak north from
cold and hunger. At the moment of action, man will no
doubt be apt to follow the stronger impulse. . . . But after
their gratification, when past and weaker impressions are
contrasted with the ever enduring social instincts, retribution will surely come. Man will then feel dissatisfied with
himself, and will resolve with more or less force to act differently for the future. This is conscience; for conscience
looks backwards and judges past actions, inducing that kind
of dissatisfaction which, if weak, we call regret, and if severe remorse.57
Darwin seems to have come upon Aristotle late in life and
recognized a soul-mate in him. He would, we believe, have
been in delighted agreement upon reading Aristotle’s observation in History of Animals, Book 1, 488b24, that we are the
only creatures capable of deliberating (bouleutikon):
Many animals have the power of memory, and can be
trained, but the only one that can recall past events at will
(dunatai anamimnēskesthai) is man.
Where are we then? Conscience, says Darwin in the
opening sentence of Descent of Man, Ch.3, is the chief mark
of distinction of the human race. Conscience cannot come
into existence or operate without the power of recollection.
The power of recollection (though no texts come to mind
where anyone of our three authors says this expressly) depends upon the power to learn and employ not just a communicative medium but an articulate language.58 Beings of
this sort, Peirce the logician will come to argue ever more
strenuously as he ages, are capable of acting not just in a motivated way, but in accordance with an ideal:
Every action has a motive; but an ideal only belongs to a
line of conduct which is deliberate. To say that conduct is
deliberate implies that each action, or each important action, is reviewed by the actor and that his judgment is
passed upon it, as to whether he wishes his future conduct
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
118
to be like that or not. His ideal is the kind of conduct which
attracts him upon review. His self-criticism followed by a
more or less conscious resolution that in its turn excites a
determination of his habit, will, with the aid of sequelae,
modify a future action; but it will not generally be a moving
cause to action.59
Permit us to conclude with an anecdote. A recent movie
presented a small group of adults with the situation of a male
high-school teacher accepting seduction by one of his beautiful girl-students. Ever intent on discussing la difference, one
of the men in the group of movie watchers asked “Do you
blame the teacher?” “Yes,” was the answer, “because although it may indeed be true that it is harder for young men
than for young women to resist sexual arousal, the teacher
knowingly entered upon a profession that he could foresee
would present him with such situations as he was now in. He
should, taking advantage of the human power of imagination,
have rehearsed inwardly how he would act if the world presented him with an opportunity that he should turn down.”60
With Peirce’s help, and instructed by Short, we hope to
have shown in this essay that nothing in Darwin interferes
with acknowledging the emergence of organisms competent
to entertain and criticize ideals. This is the kind of organism
we human beings are.
NOTES
1. According to Ernst Mayr in his One Long Argument: Charles Darwin
and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1991), what later authors think and speak of
as “Darwin’s Theory” is a combination of four or five strands—evolution
as such, common descent, multiplication of species, gradualism, and natural selection.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
119
2. See Ernst Mayr’s Introduction to Charles Darwin, On the Origin of
Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1972), xii.
3. John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (New York:
Henry Holt, 1910).
4. Ernst Mayr in Evolution and Anthropology (Washington: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1959), 2; also given in Mayr’s Introduction to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile, xix-xx.
5. See Elliott Sober, “Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism,”
Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, ed. Elliott Sober, (Boston:
MIT Press, 2001).
6. In the seminar described at the beginning of this essay, Clark was the
sole participant to speak up in defense of Darwin’s theory.
7. In his book Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Leipzig:
Duncker und Humblot, 1874).
8. Jasha spoke with admiration of Husserl’s repeated efforts to start all
over again from the beginning, in formulating the archai of philosophy.
Husserl’s notion of sedimentation in the sciences—our tendency to take
earlier achievements for granted—was a theme that Jasha took up in his
studies of the origins of algebra and of the work of Galileo. Seeking to
understand Jasha’s Husserlian antecedents, I read a good deal of Husserl
during the years I was reading Peirce. A lecture I gave in September, 1959,
was based on Husserl’s Erfahrung und Urteil.
9. The importance of this fact was first established by Murray Murphey,
in The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1961.)
10. Thomas L. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs (Cambridge: Cambridge Universty Press, 2007). I was introduced to this book by Chaninah Maschler.
11. The Essential Peirce, edited by the Peirce Edition Project, 2 Vols.
(Bloomingdale, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998), Vol. 2, 400. In
further references to this publication will be abbreviated to EP.
12. Ibid., 516.
13. These articles are reprinted in EP, Vol. 1, 109-123, 124-141.
14. Thomas L. Short, in a forthcoming second book about Peirce, gives
a detailed defense of this Peircean understanding of the sciences.
15. EP, Vol. 2, 400. Italics added.
16. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Of the Canon of Pure
�120
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Reason,” A800 = B828 ff. Kant there explains, “By the practical I mean
everything that is possible through freedom.”
17. EP, Vol. 2, 333.
18. Ibid., 401.
19. Peirce eventually (as here) made the name of the -ism ugly, “to keep
it safe from being kidnapped.” Consider what Peirce writes about how his
thinking does or doesn’t differ from that of William James, EP, Vol. 2, 421.
20. EP, Vol. 2, 358f. For a lucid brief description of Peirce’s later “subjunctive” version of pragmatism, one which acknowledges that “modern
science . . . is practice engaged in for the sake of theory,” see Short,
Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 173, second paragraph.
21. EP, Vol. 1, 52.
22. Ibid.
23. For other difficulties with his theory in the 1860s, see Short, Peirce’s
Theory of Signs, ch. 2.
24. EP, Vol. 1, 120.
25. EP, Vol. 1, 138-139.
26. EP, Vol. 1, “The Fixation of Belief,” 111; for the square bracketed
emendations, see ibid., 377.
27. Cf. EP, Vol. 1, 289f.
28. See Paul Ehrenfest and Tatyana Ehrenfest, The Conceptual Foundations of the Statistical Approach in Mechanics (New York: Dover, 1958.)
29. Cf. EP, Vol. 1, 221.
30. Ilya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1980). See also Stuart A. Kauffman, “Antichaos and Adaptation,”
in Scientific American, August 1991, 78-84.
31. See the concluding sentence of the potent last paragraph of Darwin’s
Introduction to On the Origin of Species. Gould and Lewontin, in their
famous protest against unrestrained Adaptationism (“The Spandrels of
San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptionist
Programme,” in Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, ed. Elliott
Sober, [Boston: MIT Press, 2001]), cite this sentence and add an approving reference to George. J. Romanes’s essay “The Darwinism of Darwin,
and of the Post-Darwinian Schools” (in The Monist 6:1 [1895], 1-27).
Romanes would join Gould and Lewontin when they write: “We should
cherish [Darwin’s] consistent attitude of pluralism in attempting to ex-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
121
plain Nature’s complexity” (82).
32. Selections from Darwin’s The Origin of Species: The Shape of the Argument, ed., Nicholas Maistrellis (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2009), 43.
33. EP, Vol 1, 200. For a correction of this overly cheerful scenario of inevitable progress see, e.g., Elliott Sober, “Selection-for: What Fodor and
Piattelli-Palmarini Got Wrong,” 11. This essay is available on the internet
at the following URL:
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/Fodor%20and%20Piatelli-Palermini%20april%209%202010.pdf
34. EP, Vol. 1, 272. Cf. Darwin, On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile,
127.
35. Helena Curtis, Biology (New York: Worth, 1979).
36. Equally important, perhaps, is the inspiration of Darwin’s intellectual
attitude—omni-observant, persevering, sober—to which Maistrellis calls
attention.
37. Elliott Sober, The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984).
38. The example stems from Williams via Elliott Sober and David Sloan
Wilson, “Adaptation and Natural Selection Revisited,” in the Journal of
Evolutionary Biology 24 (February 2011), 462-8. In this article, the authors are “revisiting” George C. Williams’s book on adaptation in order
to make sure the world knows that the book was a landmark in the development of evolutionary theory.
39. Elliott Sober, “Fodor’s Bubbe Meise Against Darwinism,” in Mind and
Language 23 (February 2008), 43. (Bubbe meise is Yiddish for “old wives’
tale.”) This article is also available on the internet at the following URL:
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/fodor's%20bubbe%20meise%20published.pdf
40. When Herbert Spencer attempted to explain evolution on mechanical
principles, Peirce countered that the endeavor was illogical. See EP, Vol.
1, 289. Among Peirce’s arguments was this: the law of conservation of
energy implies that all operations governed by mechanical laws are reversible. Whence follows the corollary that growth is not explicable by
those laws, even though they are not violated in the process of growth.
41. Private communication from Thomas Short, March 19, 2012.
42. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 130. Italics in last sentence added.
43. Ibid., 145
�122
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
44. Ibid., 144-145.
45. As Allen Clark wrote in a manuscript never published (“The Contributions of Charles S. Peirce to Value Theory,” 4), “No philosopher . . .
would be less inclined than Peirce to minimize the tremendous importance of the transformation that occurs when inquiry [or any other adaptive behavior] rises from the unconscious to the conscious level. For it is
at this second stage that man transcends the animal faculty of merely responding to naturally given signs, those perceptual clues furnished by nature; he begins to make signs, and to respond to signs of his own making,
and thus learns to provoke his own responses.”
46. “Synechism is Peirce’s doctrine that human mentality is continuous
with the rest of nature,” writes Thomas Short in his exchange with the
critics of his book, “Response,” in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society 43 (Fall 2007), 666.
47. Ibid. Dewey’s essay of 1896, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (Psychological Review 3 [July, 1896], 357-370) is offered in the
same, perhaps Hegel-inspired, spirit of synechism. (This article is available on the internet at the following URL:
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Dewey/reflex.htm.) But a more instructive
comparison would be between Thomas Short’s account of Peirce and the
life-long work of James J. Gibson, for instance, The Senses Considered
as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1966) and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,
1979.).
48. See Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 156f.
49. Niko Tinbergen, Social Behavior of Animals, Methuen’s Monographs
on Biological Subjects, Vol. 1 (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1953), 9.
50. Ibid., 45. The following anecdote of Darwin’s in his chapter comparing the mental powers of lower animals with human mental powers seems
to be to the same effect: “Mr. Colquhoun winged two wild ducks, which
fell on the opposite sides of a stream; his retriever tried to bring over both
at once, but could not succeed; she then, though never before known to
ruffle a feather, deliberately killed one, brought over the other, and returned for the dead bird.” Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981), 48.
51. Further clarifying remarks on Intentionality are given by Short in
Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 174-177.
52. Elliott Sober, “Fodor’s Bubbe Meise Against Darwinism,” 669.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
123
53. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 147.
54. Ibid., 148.
55. Darwin, Descent of Man, 71.
56. See Charles Darwin’s 1872 book Expression of the Emotions in Man
and Animals, ed. Paul Ekman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
57. Darwin, Descent of Man, Ch.3, 88-91.
58. Ibid., Ch.2, 54.
59. EP, Vol. 2, 377. Survey the Index to EP, Vol. 2 under “self-control.”
60. The answer is inspired by Peirce’s report of his childhood memory of
his younger brother’s having prepped himself in imagination for preventing the spread of a small fire. See EP, Vol. 2, 413.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
124
The Laws of Physics
Marlene Benjamin
In Memoriam
People say that the Laws of Physics
Are immutable,
Beyond the reach of hopes and dreams,
Immune to wishes,
And entirely indifferent to desire.
They say that the Laws of Physics
Are as solid in their abstractness as the materials
Whose movements they describe,
Whose broad encompassing axioms
Place with near precision all heavenly bodies,
All rocks and debris,
All breathing creatures—even us,
With all our singularity—
Within the vastness of this complicated
And wholly relational world,
Measuring all places with a confidence
In basic principles (as if some genius had bestowed upon
them personality)
The rest of us admire but so rarely can attain.
There is beauty in the Laws of Physics,
The beauty and elegance of those simple Euclidean equations
I struggled over long ago,
The amazing loveliness of a singularly striking accomplishment.
Marlene Benjamin is Associate Professor Emerita at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, and now lives in California. She is currently working on a
book entitled The Catastrophic Self: Philosophy, Memoir, and Medical Trauma.
�POEM
125
And yet this question haunts us:
Why should we not believe as Greeks believed?
Why should we not believe
That what we now call myths are really legends,
Embellished, we agree, yet legends nonetheless . . .
Why should we not have the confidence with which the
Greeks were blessed,
And take some tales of ordinary people, whose lives were touched
By strange and unexpected happenings, as legends of our own,
So that the Laws of Physics or Biology
Or of all the Natural Philosophies
Were not, as we believe, constraining,
But rather showed us ourselves as god-like,
Whose dreams inscribe upon the world what pleases us,
Able, like Athena, come full blown out of Zeus’s head
To enact the Laws of Physics to suit ourselves?
Then would you come walking back
To family and friends,
But especially, most especially, to wife and daughter;
All your molecules and atoms shaped perfectly again
Into your singularly recognizable form,
Striding purposefully and with that grin of yours
And, as on any ordinary day,
There would you be,
Arriving home,
Whole and un-bloodied,
Back into the life you should be living still.
�
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 St. John's Review</em>
Description
An account of the resource
<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
thestjohnsreview
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
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.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
125 pages
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
The St. John's Review, Fall 2012
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2012
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T.H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Arnaiz, Deziree
Sachs, Joe
Linafelt, Tod
Mazur, Barry
Wilson, Curtis
Maschler, Chaninah
Benjamin, Marlene
Description
An account of the resource
Volume 54, Number 1 of the The St. John's Review. Published in Fall 2012.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
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
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
St_Johns_Review_Vol_54_No_1_Fall_2012
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
St. John's Review
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c90e86698867d0d27ae95eae9b7ed48f.pdf
64f751389a2f8afbdb6799d17700eb89
PDF Text
Text
THE
St. o
'sReview
I
:
... ::: ............... ~--'~---1. ....... .
. . .
I
··.. . .
·.. :•. .
'
I
.•
.
..
)·<··
. · _:.-··
-
Winter, 1985
'·
�Editor:
J. Walter Sterling
Poetry Editor:
Richard Freis
Editorial Assistant:
Jason Walsh
Editorial Board:
Eva Brann
S. Richard Freis,
Alumni representative
Joe Sachs
Cary Stickney
Curtis A. Wilson
To the editor:
At the urging of alumni and colleagues, and with the co-operation of
Mrs. Klein, I am undertaking to
gather material for a brieflife of jacob
Klein. I shall be pleased to have
documents, reminiscences, or other
memorabilia.
I would be particularly pleased to
hear from alumni who were members
of his classes in his first years of
teaching, especially his first seminar.
Wye J. Allanbrook
St. John's College
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.
The St. John's Review (formerly The College) is published by the Office of the
Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis,
Maryland 21404. Edwin J. Delattre,
President, George Do'skow, Dean.
Published thrice yearly, in the winter,
spring, 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 XXXVI, Number 1
Winter, 1985
©
1985 St. John's College; All rights
reserved. Reproduction in whole or in
part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Composit£on: Fishergate Publishing Co. 1 Inc.
Printing: St. John's College Press
Cover: A Black-Figured Amphora
from the Boston Museum (Drawn,
measured and analyzed by L.D.
Caskey).
�THE
StJohn's Review
Contents
2 ...... The Parable of Don Quixote
Joe Sachs
10 ...... Politics and the Imagination
Eva Brann
19 ...... Five From The Old Testament (poem)
J
Kates
22 ...... James Joyce's Soul
Joseph Engelberg
27 ...... Watching Plains Daybreak (poem)
Richard Freis
28 ...... Self-Portraits
Elliott Zuckerman
36 ...... The Opera Singer as Interpreter:
A Conversation with Sherrill Milnes
Susan Fain
40 ...... Dynamic Symmetry, A Theory of Art and Nature
Howard J Fisher
56 . . . . . . The Song of Timaeus
Peter Kalkavage
68 . . . . . . A Note on Eva Brann's "Roots of Modernity"
Chaninah Maschler
BooK REviEw
77 . . . . . . Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze de Figaro and Don Giovanni
John Plato.ff
79 . . . . . . The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews by Flannery
O'Connor
Victor Gallerano
�THE ST. JoHN's REviEw
Winter 1985
The Parable of Don Quixote
Joe Sachs
n the twenty-fifth chapter of the first part of Don
Quixote, the fortunes and spirits of the book's hero
are at their lowest. He has been bruised and
laughed at, and has lost part of an ear and most
of his teeth. He has mistaken an inn for a castle,
whores for maidens, and windmills and sheep_ for
enemies. His intervention in the affairs of others has led
a servant boy to be beaten worse than before, and has
set loose on Spain an entire column of convicts who have
made him and Sancho the first of their new victims. Even
the simple-hearted Sancho has lost his trust in his master.
" 'God alive, Sir Knight of the Mournful Countenance;
said Sancho, 'I cannot bear in patience some of the things
that your Grace says! Listening to you, I come to think
that all you have told me about deeds of chivalry ...
is but wind and lies, all buggery or humbuggery, or
whatever you choose to call it. When anyone hears your
Grace ... , what is he to think except that such a one
is out of his mind?' " Shortly Don Quixote will be left
alone, sunk in gloom, in the Sierra Moreno, the Dark
Mountains. He had entered that lonely place partly out
of fear of the police, a fear which could influence him
because of his disappointment over the behavior of those
he thought he was helping. But even at such a time, Don
Quixote has an answer for his squire.
" 'Look, Sancho; said Pon Quixote, 1Jy that same God
I swear that you have less sense than any squire in the
world ever had. How is it possible for you to have accompanied me all this time without coming to perceive
I
Joe Sachs is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His lecture The JtUry
of Aeneas appeared in the Winter '82 issue of the Review. The Parable of Don
Quixote was origin<>.lly delivered as a formal lecture at St. John's College, Annapolis in September, 1982.
2
that all the things that have to do with knights-errant
appear to be mad, foolish, and chimerical, and everything
happens backwards?' "It is Don Quixote's standard evasion when things go wrong or he is proved wrong: we
are enchanted. Our senses are not to be trusted, and
things are not as they seem. In this case he is ·driven to
claim that everything is exactly the opposite of the way
it seems, and he is right.
The remainder of Part one, after Don Quixote enters
the Sierra Moreno, is the long unfolding of a series of
happy endings of stories yet to be made known to us,
and which come to pass without any effort on Don
Quixote's part. His last action in Part one is the freeing
of the convicts in Chapter twenty-two, with thirty chapters
remaining. Yet none of the good that is done in those
thirty chapters could have happened were it not for the
earlier deeds of Don Quixote. And the happy endings
do not come about by some comic reversal of Don Quixote's intentions. They grow out of his deeds directly in
the spirit of those deeds, by a Quixotic contagion. Finally,
it is not the case that Don Quixote's actions are justified
only by unforeseen cons~quences, but each of his acts
is, for those who have eyes to see it, good in itself, and
exactly the opposite of the way it seems.
Pairs of contrasting opposites in Don Quixote are often
remarked. The book combines the conventions of romantic fiction with all the ugly, smelly facts of real life. Of
the two main characters, one is tall, thin, energetic, and
spiritual, the other short, fat, lazy, and corporeal. The
main character acts like a lunatic but speaks like the wisest
of men. But the most important contrast in the book is
less often noticed. It is that between the story the narrator understands himself to be telling and the one he
tells, and it points the way to the underlying distinction
on which the book is built: the distinction between fact
and truth.
WINTER 1985
�Cervantes puts between himself and his story a
historian who comes from a nation known for lying
(I.9,II.3), a translator, and perhaps one or more other
people; it is the sort of matter about which Cervantes
is not a very careful bookkeeper. But there is one consistent voice which presents to us all the episodes in the
book, including those which precede the beginning of
Cid Hamete Benengeli's manuscript and those for which,
as Sancho notes with awe, there was no human witness.
The narrator through whom we know all that we know
of Don Quixote tells us that when his character decided
to become a knight he looked around for a make-believe
beloved just as he looked for a sword and helmet; but
the same narrator gives a careful reader all the information he needs to see that Alonso Quixano has been
secretly and hopelessly in love with Aldonza Lorenzo for
twelve years (I.1,I.25). The narrator mocks Don Quixote's speech about the Golden Age as nonsense which
only occurs to him by an association with acorns (I.11),
but the goatherds to whom it is addressed are moved by
Don Quixote's eloquent respect for their way oflife, and
repay him with all the gifts in their power. When Don
Quixote defends Marcela (I.14), the beautiful girl who
chooses not to marry anyone, the narrator tells us that
he is playing at defending a damsel in distress, but anyone
who listens to what he says will hear him give the reason
for which he became Don Quixote: that beauty demands
a response from us, an effort not to possess it but to be
worthy of it.
Cervantes writes in the guise of someone who never
sees the things that matter amid events he describes in
meticulous detail. In belittling his hero, Cervantes belittles
himself, and it is left to us to discover whether we are
cut to the measure of that same littleness. It is a simple
rhetorical trick that Cervantes plays, gently manipulating
his readers by appealing to our vanity, our pleasure in
feeling superior to the stupid narrator by seeing things
to which his coarse sight does not penetrate. A most
generous author, we are dealing with, who allows us for
the most part to indulge in superior laughter at the crazy
knight and the gullible squire, and still to have someone
tO look down on when we see those characters more
deeply and truly.
The narrator's misunderstandings begin practically
on the first page of this book, when he tells us that the
gentleman about whom he is writing has gone crazy. It
is certainly the most widely held opinion among those
who meet Don Quixote, but there are three exceptions.
In Part two, three sensible people come to know him and
come to other conclusions about his sanity. Don Diego
de Miranda, the gentleman in the green greatcoat,
decides that Don Quixote is "a crazy sane man and an
insane one on the verge of sanity" (II.17). And later, at
an inn, which he takes for an inn, when he is on his way
to Saragossa, Don Quixote meets Don Juan and Don
Jeronimo, who are finally unable "to make up their minds
as to just where they were to place him in the vague realm
between sound sense and madness" (II.59). It is no ac-
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
cident that this pair of judgments is made available to
us, for together they mean that the categories mad and
sane break down when applied to Don Quixote. He must
be said to belong to both, or to neither. He is unlike other
men, but the distinction between the mad and the sane
does not illuminate that difference.
The truly illuminating distinction is given to us by
Don Quixote himself, whose judgment is always the most
trustworthy in the book. When the gentleman in green
is worrying about what to make of his companion, Don
Quixote 6'llesses his thoughts, and breaks in on them in
a kindly way. He forgives his friend for thinking him
foolish and mad, and does his best to explain why he does
what he does. "Even as it is easier for the prodigal to
become a generous man than it is for the miser, so is
it easier for the foolhardy to become truly brave than
it is for the coward to attain valor. And in this matter
of adventures, you may believe me, Sefior Don Diego,
it is better to lose by a card too many than a card too few."
Prodigality, we shall see as we go on, is one of the
most important words in the book. When Don Quixote
appears ridiculous, which is most of the time, it is not
for lack of wits but for his deliberate choice to be prodigal. With what is he prodigal? With money, of course,
but with all the things that constitute himself. When, in
his fiftieth year, Alonzo Quixano became Don Quixote,
it was not because his brain dried up but because he
judged his safe and settled life to be a miserly one, a driedup life. From that time on he ceased to hoard his
capacities to act, to befriend, and to benefit. He gives
his reason for doing so again and again in a single word,
the most important word in the book: gratitude. As he
says to one of the shepherdesses in Part two, "My profession is nothing other than showing gratitude" (II.58).
Gratitude is the reciprocal response to grace. In his
discourse on arms and letters (1.37), Don Quixote explains that the highest achievement of human letters and
learning is distributive justice. He has chosen instead the
higher calling of the soldier, which aims at bestowing the
grace of peace. The middle-aged Alonzo Quixano decided
to stop living a life which received grace but returned
none.
In Part two, Don Quixote asserts that the greatest
sin is not pride but ingratitude. This has already been
shown in Part one. The whole of Don Quixote is a parable,
and its first part contains two parables-within-a-parable.
The captive's story is constructed as the parable of the
prodigal father; ingratitude is revealed in the parable of
the curious impertinent. While Don Quixote sleeps in
the inn to which he is taken from the Sierra Moreno,
his companions read aloud a story about a man who is
curious about the wrong things. His name is Anselmo.
Let us listen to him describe his complaint to his friend
Lotario (1.33).
"You may think, my friend, that in return for the
favors God has shown me by giving me such parents as
mine and bestowing upon me with no stinting hand what
are commonly known as the gifts of nature as well as
3
�those of fortune, I should never be able to thank Him
enough, not to speak of what He has done for me by
giving me you as a friend and Camila for my wife ....
Yet with all these advantages ... I lead the most empty
and fretful existence of any man in this universe. . ..
The thing that so tortures me is the desire to know
whether or not my wife Camila is as good and perfect
as I think she is, for this is a truth that I cannot accept
until the quality of her virtue is proved to me in the same
manner that fire brings out the purity of gold. For it is
my opinion, my friend, that a woman is virtuous only
in the degree to which she is tempted and resists temptation."
Can you hear why he is called Anselmo? I will remind you of the words of Saint Anselm in the first chapter
of the Proslogium.
"Lord, thou art my God, and thou art my Lord, and
never have I seen thee. It is thou that hast made me, and
hast made me anew, and hast bestowed upon me all the
blessings I enjoy; and yet I do not know thee. Finally,
I was created to see thee, and not yet have I done that
for which I was made."
"0 wretched lot of man, when he hath lost that for
which he was made! ... We suffer want in unhappiness,
and feel a miserable longing, and alas! We remain empty
. . . . I wished to smile in the joy of my mind, and I
am compelled to frown by the sorrow of my heart.
Gladness was hoped for, and lo! a source of frequent
sighs!"
Anselm puts an end to the torment in his soul by finding a proof of the existence of God, but Anselmo, who
also cannot enjoy blessings which rest only on faith, when
he seeks proof of Camila's love, destroys his own life and
those of everyone around him.
Anselmo insists that Lotario try to seduce Camila,
and try again and again while Anselmo keeps himself
absent from her. Since no human quality is infinite, and
since every time Camila resists temptation Anselmo
causes it to be increased, and since he himself is never
present to his wife to help her be his wife, Anselmo finally
achieves the only result that can come from his actions.
He makes Camila unfaithful. He does not prove her unfaithful, because she was not so until he made her so.
A wife's love is not a neutral fact to be ascertained by
experiment, but a living thing sustained in part by her
husband's faith in it. When Anselmo decides that his faith
is an insufficient foundation for his marriage, he loses
it, because there is no foundation other than faith for
a marriage to rest on. And it is important (Cervantes
underlines the importance by breaking the story off) that
the marriage continues for a while on a foundation of
deceit. The deception does not last because Camila's maid
joins in it, and the chain of corruption inevitably
lengthens until it pulls all of them down.
Anselmo's curiosity is impertinent or misplaced
because a wife's love calls not fo.r curiosity but for
gratitude. In his inability to appreciate the wife he has,
Anselmo removes himself from her, so that she has no
4
husband and he has no wife. The subsequent infidelity
and deaths only turn into fact the truth that was already
present in Anselmo's lack of faith. Don Quixote's village
priest pronounces the story implausible (1.35), proving,
for one of the innumerable times in the book, that he
does not know how to read a story. Every marriage is
founded on faith alone, but it is the unlikely and imaginary story of Anselmo that reveals that truth. And
once one has gotten hold of the truth behind the implausible facts, one sees that it is a truth about more than just
marriages. At that point Cervantes' story comes into its
own as a parable.
The story of the curious impertinent illuminates the
larger story of Don Quixote, but the characters in the
one do not stand for characters in the other. That is not
the nature of a parable. The myths Socrates tells in Platds
dialogues are intended to be interpreted, to be destroyed
as stories and transformed into their philosophical content. They have no use but to invite interpretation. The
allegory Dante tells in the Divine Comedy is always speaking of two or more things at once. The principal story
holds together as itself, but its principal meaning depends
upon the recognition of allegorical counterparts. A
parable differs from both. Its content is not intended to
refer to anything but itself. It is told because someone
who understands it will be in a position to think about
some other subject which is the teller's chief concern, and
because anyone who cannot understand it would not be
able to get anything out of any direct talk about that matter of chief concern. The parable draws on things close
to one's experience, to prepare the imagination to deal
with things less familiar.
The parable of the curious impertinent reveals that
there are things in the world which are invisible except
to the eyes of faith, things which genuinely exist but can
be destroyed if they are not believed in. In an important
exchange immediately preceding the reading of the story
of the curious impertinent, the priest declares that there
never were knights errant in the world. The innkeeper
replies that he knows there are none now, but that they
surely lived in those days. Sancho worries that one of them
might be right, but makes up his mind to wait and see.
If there is a knight errant in the world, only Sancho will
have his eyes open to see him.
Don Quixote's first encounter, the first time he leaves
home, is with two whores at an inn (1.2). He sees gracious
ladies, and addresses them with courtesy. Their first
response is coarse and cruel laughter. If the scene ended
like that, we would have to agree with the narrator that
Don Quixote suffers from delusions and sees not what
is in front of him but what he wants to see. But something
happens while no one is looking, and when we return
from the stables with the innkeeper, we find the young
women treating Don Quixote with kindness and bearing themselves with modesty. They have become the
gracious ladies that no one, including themselves, except
Don Quixote, saw them as. It is a very small and very
important event, even if it has no lastirig effect on the
WINTER 1985
�women's lives. For a short time at least, they were not
the sluts they had thought themselves to be, but free beings, capable of accepting and returning courtesy. Their
graciousness was nowhere to be seen until Don Quixote's
faith and their works brought it into being, but he saw
it while it was still nothing but possibility.
Do you see the connection with Anselmo? He
doubted the virtue his wife had, and thereby destroyed
it. Don Quixote believes in the virtues the two women
do not have, and thereby brings them into being.
Anselmo withdraws himself from his wife. Don Quixote
involves himself with total strangers. Anselmo does not
know how to love the woman he is in love with. Don
Quixote may have the secret of loving everyone in the
world.
But Don Quixote's subsequent acts of charity, with
the boy Andres and with the convicts, seem to be not
mad but naive, a mockery of the very notion of doing
good. When he prevents Andres from being beaten, and
leaves his master on his honor to pay the boy his just
wages, the result is the worst beating Andres has had in
his life, and the loss of his job. When Andres tells him
what has happened, and curses him for it, Don Quixote
is deeply troubled. When he frees the convicts, it is Don
Quixote who is beaten, by the very men he tried to help,
and robbed of everything he carries and wears. It is that
episode which sends him into the mountains, where, for
a time, he is not himself. For the narrator, there is nothing
troubling about these results. They merely confirm what
every grown-up in the world except Don Quixote already
knows. For Don Quixote they are severe tests of his faith
in people, but tests which he survives, and rightly.
Don Quixote has benefitted Andres by forcing an end
to a situation in which the boy regarded himself as someone who could be beaten at the whim of another, so long
as the beating was not too bad. Like the two whores,
Andres had taken himself at the valuation of others. They
are startled to be taken for ladies. Andres is angry at being forced to be a man. We see him last on the road to
Seville. We do not know what will become of him there,
but we know that it will be what he makes of himself.
Andres had accepted and made the best of a slavish role
into which he was born and in which he was remaining
by inertia. From Don Quixote he suffered the painful
gift of his freedom.
With the convicts, Don Quixote worries that some
might be innocent, convicted only because they were poor
and without friends. Others he sees to be guilty, but of
no very serious crimes. But his motive for freeing them
does not depend on the facts about them. Don Quixote
is outraged that, whatever they have done, the king should
make slaves of them. Don Quixote believes in punishment; he spends much of the book dealing it out. But
he does not believe in punishment that precludes
forgiveness. The king's justice rests on the ultimate in
impertinent curiosity: on the question whether a man
shall be allowed to continue to be a man or shall be
created a slave. The convicts had not used their freedom
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
well, but they had it not on human sufferance but by
God's grace. Don Quixote does not find a solution to the
problem of human ingratitude, but he does prevent its
multiplication, and hence rights a wrong.
'I'he two craziest of Don Quixote's deeds in Part one
seem not explicable as acts of faith or charity, because
they do not involve other people. They are his attacks
on the windmills and the sheep. There is a clue to the
meaning of these episodes in Part two, when Don Quixote
tells Sancho, "In confronting giants, it is the sin of pride
that we slay" (II.S). I suspect that, in attacking both the
windmills and the sheep, Don Quixote was ineffectually,
but literally, confronting giants- private companies of
great wealth which, under royal patent, were exploiting
the land of Spain on a gigantic and unheard-of scale. One
windmill is sufficient to knock Don Quixote off his horse,
but it is a clump of thirty or forty of them at which he
charges in anger. And it is not a flock or herd of sheep
at which he charges, but a vast assemblage of them to
which his word army is appropriate. There must be
wrong with the unbounded commercial development that
is beginning to change the face of Spain, because it is
founded on pride. On the other hand, every deed of Don
Quixote rests on faith in the Gospels. It should be becoming clear in what way the story of Don Quixote is itself
a parable.
At this point I have just about made good my claim
that Don Quixote's actions in Part one are all understandable and good. I have not mentioned several encounters
in which he gives and receives lumps and bruises. The
most serious injury he causes is a broken leg, to an arrogant young priest who speaks rudely and treats him as
though he were nothing. {I.19) Until he is in pain and
unable to move, Alonso Lo_pez is too wrapped up in
himself to recognize Don Quixote as another like himself
to whom elementary courtesy is due. And as soon as Don
Quixote sees that the man needs help, he is quick to give
it. Alonso Lopez has learned his own importance from
his theological education, but he has not learned who
his neighbor is. If he is capable of! earning such a lesson
at all, both the anger and the kindness of the crazy knight
could teach it to him.
Don Quixote is meddlesome, but his meddling always
takes the form of pertinent curiosity. Though he talks often
of the privileges of rank, he acts always as though every
human being deserves honor. He is entitled to teach manners to a priest, to insist that the king accord even a
criminal minimal recognition as a member of his own
species,- to require a master to treat his servant with
respect, to make that servant and prostitutes aware of
their own dignity, and even to strike a few blows at gigantic faceless companies which do their business in indifference to what they do to the world they share with ordinary people. Don Quixote earns the right to interfere
with everyone by recognizing every human life as a claim
upon himself. His curiosity is pertinent because when
the test comes he always acts as though the good of
another pertains to him. And we are entitled to wonder
5
�All of which I will make plain to him, to the
if, in Don Quixote, we are witnessing a man who loves
of a whore.
his neighbor as himself.
When Don Quixote enters the Sierra Moreno he is
far from believing that he has done anything worthwhile,
but his influence is already present in the world and working its own effects. He himself is miserable and alone.
He spends his time imitating the penance of Amadis of
fullest extent, with my sword.' "
Soon Don Quixote is drawing Sancho ahead of the
others they are travelling with, to question him in insa-
tiable detail about Dulcinea. As always, Sancho's
disloyalty has strengthened Don Quixote's faith, and Don
Quixote's healing anger at his squire has strengthened
Gaul, an episode noteworthy because it makes one realize
Sancho's devotion to his master. Those two are then
that nowhere else in the book does he imitate anyone.
Only in this brief, dark retirement from the world does
Don Quixote ever try to remember something a knight
in a book did in order to mimic it. Ordinarily he is the
wholly themselves, while those riding along behind them
opposite of an imitator, the most original of men, in the
nobleman Don Fernando, who has run away from home
sense that his deeds originate in himself out of the true
array of possibilities before him. It is the rest of us, who
has ended up in the Sierra Moreno in despair, is now
have, without knowing it, become new beings in Don
Quixote's image.
Dorotea, who has been seduced and deserted by the
and twice trusted men who then tried to rape her, who
judge and act out of habit, custom, and inertia, who are
in the company of three new knights-errant. Don
the imitators. The enchantment of which Don Quixote
speaks is primarily the siren song of habit which prevents
us from truly encountering the things and people before
us. We take them for what everyone else always takes
them for. In a chapter which Cervantes calls" one of the
most important in the entire history" (II.6), Don Quixote's niece tells him to act like what he is, a man who
Quixote's curate and barber, who, contemptuous of his
behavior but concerned for his welfare, have come hunt-
is old, sick, and poor. In the Sierra Moreno, that is just
society, has regained his sanity and hopes, and sworn
how he acts.
that Don Fernando will either marry Dorotea or fight
him. Two men for whom the idea of chivalry is matter
only for mockery, but who are in the Sierra Moreno on
When Sancho returns to him in the mountains, he
finds his master thinner than ever, jaundiced, fainting
from hunger, and sighing for Dulcinea. But when he tries
to speak to him of his beloved, Don Quixote will only
say that he is not worthy of her grace (I.29). When his
priest, for a joke, says he has heard of a mad sinner who
will undoubtedly be damned for setting free some galley
slaves, Don Quixote hangs his head in silent humiliation. It is his wonderful friendship with Sancho that
brings him back to himself. Here is the colloquy which
brings him out of his melancholy and restores his sanity.
(I.30)
"'Faith, Seiior Licentiate; (said Sancho,) 'the one who
performed that deed was my master. Not that I didn't
warn him beforehand and advise him to look what he
was doing, it being a sin to free them, for they were all
of them the greatest rogues that ever were: "
" 'Blockhea,d!' cried Don Quixote upon hearing this.
'It is not the business of knights-errant to stop and ascer-
tain as to whether the afflicted and oppressed whom they
encounter going along the road in chains like that are
in such straits by reason of their own crimes or as a result
ing for their friend to bring him home, have found
themselves distracted by Dorotea's distress, and each has
sworn himself to her service (!.28,29). Cardenio, who has
also been misused by Don Fernando, and had run away
to the Sierra Moreno to escape his troubles and all human
account of Don Quixote, and two despairing victims, who
are brought out of their solitude by Don Quixote's friends,
are now a band united by mutual faith, by the giving
and receiving of charity, and by the hope that life may
still hold some unlooked-for good for a young woman
in distress. The four of them connive at an elaborate
pretense of knight-errantry to patronize Don Quixote,
while none of them notices that they are living the actuality of it.
For the remainder of Part one, Don Quixote sleeps,
listens, holds back from disputes to be a peacemaker,
allows himself to be carried homeward in a cage, and,
after one abortive attempt in the last chapter to return
to knight-errantry, chooses the prudent course of returning home to await more propitious times. He, the most
active of men, is for the most part con,tent with his return
to passivity. We are never told why directly, but Cervantes
shows us why through the Captive's story, which is Cervantes' parable of the prodigal father.
Luke's story of the prodigal son begins with a young
of misfortunes that they have suffered. The only thing
man's heedlessness of others, the Captive's story with his
that does concern them is to aid those individuals as persons in distress, with an eye to their sufferings and not
to their villainies. I chanced to meet with a rosary, or
father's heedlessness of self. Each leads to the premature
distribution of an estate. The prodigal father, worried
that he will waste what he has, sells his lands, divides
string, of poor wretches and merely did for them what
my religion demands of me. As for the rest, that is no
affair of mine. And whoever thinks ill of it- saving the
dignity of your holy office and your respected person,
Senor Licentiate- I will simply say that he knows little
of the laws of chivalry and lies like an ill-begotten son
6
the proceeds among his sons, and sends them out into
the world. One pursues trade, and becomes wealthy; a
second pursues letters, and eventually becomes a judge.
The Captive, in the image of his father, becomes a knight.
After twenty-two years the family is reunited, the father's
faith justified, the wealth he denied himself multiplied,
WINTER 1985
�the sons whose presence he sacrificed returned to him
freely out of love. But this summary of the story leaves
out the most important character in it, the Moorish
maiden Zoraida. When the prodigal father lets go of his
property and his sons, he cannot know that a stranger
is waiting in the world whom only his deed will save.
Of the many quixotic characters in Don Quixote, the
most quixotic of them all is the Moorish princess Zoraida,
who cannot take any pleasure from wealth, a loving
father, or the society of her own people, because in her
childhood she heard stories of the Virgin Mary from a
Christian slave. She gives up everything to go with the
Christian knight to a country where the Virgin Mary
is worshipped. Upbringing, language, heritage, custom,
and ritual do not produce faith in Zoraida; the inspiration of the imagination by stories does. The prodigality
of the Captive's father, and of the Captive himself, who
returns most of his inheritance and embarks on a soldier's
life, · make possible her rescue from a country not
hospitable to her spirit. The band of knights-errant
descended from Don Quixote, and already enlarged, gives
her that reception to a Christian country of which she
has dreamed.
Between Don Quixote's return to the inn and the
Captive's arrival there, four more lives have been saved
from unhappiness. Don Fernando, who arrived breathing
threats and murder at Luscinda, who betrayed him after
he had betrayed Cardenio and Dorotea for her sake, has
relented and amended his life, making it possible for
Cardenio and Luscinda to marry, and returning himself
to Dorotea. Don Fernando's conversion is brought about
by the unanimous and whole-hearted urging of the group
in the inn, which includes the curate and barber, now
involved in the lives of others by the same pertinent
curiosity that took Don Quixote away from his home.
As Zoraida was waiting in the world for the liberating
act of the prodigal father, so, it turns out, was Dorotea,
lost, alone, and in danger in the Sierra Moreno, waiting
for the liberating, infectious generosity of Don Quixote.
She acknowledges as much, when, finally abandoning
all pretense with Don Quixote, she ~ays to him, "I am
convinced that had it not been for you, sir, I should never
have had the good fortune that is now mine, and in this
I speak the veriest truth, as most of these worthy folk who
are present can testify." (I.3 7) The long chain of entangled
lives which extends to the Captive's brother's teenaged
daughter and her boyfriend, which is linked in mutual
generosity to realize the highest possibilities of each,
which is the exact inverse of the chain of corruption extending from Anselmo, owes its existence to Don Quixote. In the parable surrounding the parable, he is the
prodigal father.
Don Quixote, having chosen not to hoard the grace
his own life contained, made it available ih unpredictable
ways to people unknown to him. Contributing also to
that transmission is, of course, an immense element of
coincidence, as, one after another, nine people who are
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
in various ways making one another unhappy arrive at
the same place. But perhaps coincidence is one of those
categories under which things appear to our enchanted
sight as other than they are. Cardenio and Dorotea are
both in the Sierra Moreno because it is the place of
despair, but they are not there together until Don Quixote's friends bring them together. Until that time, the
latent truth that their interests coincide cannot become
a fact, and that is why they are in despair. The coincidence of their connection with each other only has consequences in the world when the utterly disinterested
curate and barber choose to make their cares coincide
with those of two strangers. Similarly, the Captive and
his brother might have spent the night at the same inn
without knowing it, had Don Quixote's friends not been
there to ask each for his story, and to involve themselves
in those stories. If the truth of coincidence is that all lives
coincide, then the fact of coincidence ceases to be surprising. Arrival at the inn where the steadily multiplying good will begotten by Don Quixote works its effects
is for Don Fernando "like attaining Heaven itself, where
all the misadventures of earth are at an end" (I.36). In
contrast to Don Fernandds way of recognizing the truth
behind the facts, Don Quixote's taking the same inn for
a castle is modest understatement.
I have said that Don Quixote does not do anything
in Part one after he frees the convicts. He is present in
the subsequent deeds as the Captive's father is present
in the lives of his sons, in just the measure that they are
independent of him. But it is now necessary for me to
qualify what I've said, because Don Quixote, for a brief
moment in Chapter forty-five, does something important. He leads an army. He leads it in a conflict in which
no one is hurt because he quickly puts a stop to the
fighting. But it is an episode in which, while nothing happens, the participants reveal themselves for what they are.
It is thus like those Platonic dialogues which Mr. Klein
has called ethological mimes. Before describing the
episode I will mention two others of the same kind from
earlier in this book.
In Chapter four, during that first brief sally in which
the whole truth of Don Quixote can be read, he encounters some Toledo merchants on their way to buy silk.
For a moment they stand opposed, Don Quixote commanding them to swear that Dulcinea is the most
beautiful woman in the world, one of the merchants insisting that they be shown her, or at least her portrait,
before being required to commit themselves. In anger,
thoroughly provoked by the rude jokes of one of the merchants, Don Quixote lowers his lance and charges. As
happens as often as not with Rocinante, his horse
stumbles, and he is a loser without combat. But Don
Quixote on the ground, beaten by servants, with the merchants on their horses, laughing in a slightly embarrassed
way, is just the enchanted appearance, the merely factual outcome of the episode. The truth of it is one man
understanding that the beauty that is worth declaring
7
�and defending is the beauty that is invisible, while a group
of others think of the beauty of a beloved woman as they
do of the quality of a sample of silk. It is the soul of a
knight and the soul of a merchant that are set before us.
In Chapter twenty, Don Quixote and Sancho run
afoul of another phase of the textile industry, the sounds
of the hammers of a fulling mill. I am disregarding Don
Quixote's advice in speaking of it. "I do not deny;' he says,
"that what happened to us has its comical aspects; but
it is best not to tell the story, for not everyone is wise
enough to see the point of the thing:' The point of the
thing is that Don Quixote is truly brave, because he is
effects of such books. But what, exactly, are those harmful
effects? Four chapters of the text are devoted to a mammoth debate on the subject (1.47-50). The curate, of
course, contributes his characteristic argument that such
books foster mistaken notions among the uneducated
about the facts of the past. People might even be moved
by accounts of miracles which never happened. But a
new character, more elevated in the hierarchy of the
Church, a canon of Toledo, is introduced to carry the
principal responsibility for exposing the evils of the books
which have corrupted Don Quixote.
brave in the dark. The fact of the matter is that he, like
It is not right, the canon argues, that amusement ever
be entirely separated from instruction, and not possible
Sancho, spent a night in terror of something that could
not harm them, and had to endure Sancho's laughter in
events in an episodic presentation and a crude style. The
the morning. But does one who fears in the night have
the right to mock in the daylight? Night will always come
again, and will hold terrors, and Don Quixote has proved
that he can face them with courage. The revelation of
courage does not require a solemn occasion; for those
with eyes to see, it is compatible with events that are
ridiculous.
In Chapter forty-five, as in the flaring of a match or
a lightening-bolt, there is the briefest of military
engagements: the battle over Mambrinds helmet. The
battle has no outcome because Don Quixote does not
allow it to. The point of the thing is the drawing of a
line between the two sides, and the revealing of the
genuine willingness of each to fight. There is no issue
present worth fighting over, as Don Quixote says. But
there is the utmost importance in discovering for what
one is willing to fight. On one side is an army of police,
peasants, and servants, fighting in defense of the proposition that a barber's basin is a barber's basin and belongs
by right to the barber. On the other side is an army of
caballeros, Don Luis, Don Fernando, the judge, and their
natural and rightful leader, Don Quixote. One combatant seems to be on the wrong side, for Sancho Panza
fights with the knights. But Sancho is no longer the
cowardly peasant of twenty-five chapters earlier. Just five
pages before the battle begins, Don Quixote has noted
that Sancho has become a true man, and deserves to be
dubbed a knight. (I. 44) The knights fight to defend the
that pleasure could come from books that depict unlikely
canon knows that the books of knight-errantry violate
all these rules of good writing, because he has begun
reading practically all of them that have ever been printed.
In fact, he has enjoyed reading every one of them, but
has always caught himself in time to remind himself that
they are worthless, and incapable of affording true
pleasure. He has never allowed himself to finish reading
one. He once tried writing one himself, which observed
all the rules of good writing, but he left it unfinished when
he realized that most people wouldn't like it. Now the
canon is an honest man, and if he were to hear his opinions presented as briefly as this and all in one place, he
would find himself as peculiar as he finds Don Quixote.
Spread over twenty pages, and supported with abundant
examples, his discourse is in fact very impressive.
Don Quixote, of course, mops the floor with him,
but listen to the surprising way he does it. " Do you mean
to tell me that those books that ... are read with general
enjoyment and praised by young and old alike, by rich
and poor, the learned and the ignorant, the gentry and
the plain people- in brief, by all sorts of persons of every
condition and walk in life- do you mean to tell me that
they are but lies? Do they not have every appearance of
being true?" Don Quixote does not say that the books
are good, but that they are true. What is true about them?
They are in touch with the deepest springs of our common humanity. There are incessant references in the book
to the truthfulness of histories, by which everyone else
proposition that honor exists wherever one stakes one's
honor, even in the homeliest of objects. Don Quixote's
means some sort of authoritative assurance of a matching-
dignity elevates the barber's basin, just as his love elevates
Dulcinea above the sight of merchants and his courage
elevates a fuller's mill beyond the comprehension of a
coward. For the only time in the book, Don Quixote has
an army to lead, and the one thing he does with it, the
instant it comes into being, is disband it. The battle he
fights is against the automatic taking of the things in the
ote sees that a more important truth lies in what mat-
world at their lowest valuation, and it is both won and
lost as soon as the sides are drawn.
Don Quixote has learned to see the possibilities which
do not appear and the truths which facts never disclose
by reading books of knight-errantry. Cervantes, of course,
claims that he wrote Don Quixote to combat the harmful
8
up with a dead and inaccessible past. Only Don Quixches up with the buried longings and unrealized
possibilities in all of us.
Cervantes' discourse remains parabolic, but it is time
for our own to become direct. The effect, harmful or
otherwise, of books of knight-errantry, is not the subject of chief concern. The canon, showing the monstrous
improbabilities the romances ask us to swallow, mentions
a seventeen-year-old boy killing a giant, an army of a
million men defeated because the book's hero is on the
other side, and a tower full of knights miraculously scattered all over the earth, and concludes that books full
of such things have no place in a Christian state. Is it
WINTER 1985
�not clear that the canon is talking of one thing while
Cervantes is thinking of another, and that the name of
that other is the Bible? The canon tells Don Quixote to
turn to the Book of Judges if he wants to read about
knightly exploits, attributing its superiority to its accuracy. But even if the story of Samson and Delilah is
more factual than that of Amadis of Gaul, does the worth
of the Bible depend on its quota of facts?
In the first chapter of Part two, Don Quixote gives
a lesson in how to read, which is wasted on his audience
of the curate and the barber. He says, "the truth is so
clear that I can almost assure you that I saw with my
own eyes Amadis of Gaul?' Is Don Quixote talking about
be willing to let him die. We are left alone at the end
of Part two, in a way that we are not at the end of Part
one. We have only ourselves to rely on, and no longer
Don Quixote, to assimilate and come to terms with our
encounter with him. If we are to carry away anything
of importance from that encounter, it must survive a
passage through his inexplicable abandonment of
everything he believed. But Cervantes is too good a
storyteller to make even half a book entirely painful to
his best and most trusting readers. He gives as compensation for our ordeal Sancho Panza, for Part two is
Sancho's book.
With the many ways in which Don Quixote and
amusement? About instruction? Those two categories do
Sancho are obvious opposites, one is apt not to notice
not exhaust the purposes of writing, and it is only because
the canon thinks they do that he is so confused about
his own experiences with books. Stories that affect us set
how much they are alike. Each has left home and submitted himself to adventure and the workings of providence, Don Quixote because he longs to be
acknowledged and accepted by Dulcinea, Sancho because
he longs for an island, where he would be an important
man, see his children honored, and not have to do any
our imaginations to work. That activity can disclose
ourselves to us: what we care about, what we fear, what
we long for. The combination of disclosure and stimulation may, as it does with Don Quixote, inspire action.
Even when it doesn't, it may enrich the interior realm
from which thought and action can be nourished. It is
not possible for a work of fiction to relieve boredom for
a time, and then vanish as though it had not been.
Because the work of ou·r imaginations is an indispensable
partner in the presentation to us of a work of fiction,
reading or listening to one is always an experience which
must leave some mark. Under the word fiction I include
history, if it is formed into stories.
It follows, then, that stories cannot be received by us
passively or identically. And finally, it follows that the
Bible cannot be what it is, mostly stories, and be
understood for the many by a learned few who would
control the rightness of beliefs. In our vulnerability to
stories, we are all alike, and the canon cannot rise above
his own humanity. In our response to stories, where the
possibility of faith lies, we are independent and free, and
the canon cannot rise above us. Cervantes' book is a
parable of faith, written at the time of an Inquisition.
You may have noticed that I have not had much to
say about Part two, and you must realize by now that
I am not going to. In fact, I have used Part two as though
it were Cervantes' commentary on Part one. It is more
than that. In it, Cervantes magnifies Don Quixote's
mistakes, failures, doubts, and miseries, so that we will
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
work. Within their enormous sameness, their differences
make their friendship the most stable of self-maintaining
communities. When they pull against each other it is
always for the sake of the same goal, that grace without
which a life, whether devoted to honor or to pleasure,
is incomplete. In the course of his companionship, his
fights, and his reconciliations with Don Quixote, Sancho acquires habits which will sustain his quixotic long;
ings after he has lost his friend.
He has progressively become brave enough to fight
in defense of his master (I.24), alongside his master (I.45),
and finally in rebellion from his master (II.60). He has
likewise absorbed enough of his master's wisdom that he
is able, on his own in charge of his inland island, to resolve
a paradox that would defeat Bertrand Russel (II. 51). But
most important of all, association with Don Quixote has
liberated Sancho's imagination. What Sancho sees from
the flying horse Clavileno has nothing to do with knighterrantry, since his imagination has been differently
nourished than has Don Quixote's. A mustard seed from
the Gospels, some garbled astronomy, and memories of
his boyhood as a goatherd combine in Sancho's visions
(II.41). With the eyes of an imagination thoroughly his
own, set free in him by Don Quixote, Sancho sees that
his longing is for no earthly island (II.42).
As Don Quixote is a lover of honor, so is Sancho a
lover of pleasure, with sufficient imagination always to
be grateful and never to be satisfied.
9
�Politics and the Imagination
Eva Brann
T
he topic "Politics and the Imagination" is at
once larger and more restricted than "Politics
and the Arts;' the theme of this Tocqueville
Forum.* It is more restricted because I mean
to exclude the practical problem of the relation between the arts and public life. Indeed, by politics
I mean here not the working processes by which public
affairs are carried on, but a fundamental sphere of human
interest, namely that which is concerned with the wellbeing of a whole civic community as a whole. I think
that in this country even politicians in the narrow sense,
who are absorbed in the machinations of power, have
some inkling of this meaning of politics, while it plays
a large role in the thinking of all people who regard
themselves as citizens.
On the other hand, the topic "Politics and the Imagination" is larger than "Politics and the Arts" because,
although almost all works of art are works of the imagination, not all imagining actually results in works of art;
fOr example, dreams and daydreams have no actual
product.
I should also say what I mean by the imagination. I
take the term for present purposes in the most basic of
its usual senses, namely, as our ability for forming interior images, for envisioning eventful scenes and peopled
places. Such interior sights must certainly be derived from
exterior perceptions, but our imagination reshapes them
and infuses them with feeling. This is not the place to
'This essay was commissioned by the Tocqueville Forum of Wake Forest University for the 1983-84 series on 'Politics and the Arts: Robert Utley, director.
Publication of the series in a book is planned.
Eva Brann is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
10
pursue the fascinating philosophical analysis of our
strange ability for forming an interior world, except to
mention one of its important characteristics: the imagination is often thought of as a mediating faculty between
our blind desires and our directed activity, a testing
ground in which we shape our wishes into images and
prepare them for execution as works in the material
world.
This imaginative faculty seems to me to have a
definite, although limited, relation to politics. Most
political reflection is concerned with the relation between
hUman passion and human reasoning, with what we want
and how we contrive to get it. Of course, these activities
often bring the imagination into play, but they are not
specifically imaginative; they do not have their origin in
the imagination.
It seems to me, however, that there are two definite
ways in which the imagination as such has to do with
politics, corresponding to the two aspects of the imagination as a place for shaping wishes and as a ground for
planning works. In the first case the image remains an
unrealized dream, essentially interior;' in the second case
it is externalized and becomes a work of art.
The first case is exemplified by that peculiarly political
product of the wishful imagination, the utopia. A utopia
is an imagined political community, where the emphasis
is on the fact that it is imagined; it may be presented in
words, but in words which depict, which are images. That
is to say, a utopia is not a mere conception of reason
(though its life may be presented as eminently
reasonable), but the depiction of a wished-for community,
communicated with as much vivid detail as the author
can make plausible. It is a city painted in words.
A utopia will, .of course, present itself as the imagined incarnation of the author's ideas, but that is part
of an illusionistic technique used by utopian authors: at
WINTER 1985
�bottom it is not the image which follows the idea, but
the idea which was distilled from a vivid dream.
Now insofar as the utopian image is written down
in a book, the dream is, to be sure, externalized and
worked up. Nonetheless, utopias are in their very nature not
works of art, or at least they are not primarily such, for
what is crucial about art works iS that they are meant
to be the final realization of the maker's internal image,
and fulfillments or ends in themselves. Most utopias, on
the other hand, pretend to be nothing but beginnings,
mere sketches or blueprints for communities to be wished
for in the world. Although it is no proof, it is at least
an indication of this fact that among the score or so of
the best known utopias only one is generally acknowledged to be a work of great literary distinction, namely,
the book that gave its name to the genre, Sir Thomas
More's Utopia. By and large utopias give no more esthetic
satisfaction than does an account of a daydream: the
energy is in the wish, not in the work.
The first part of my talk will therefore be about that
application of the imagination to politics which produces
an imaginary community, a political wishjuljillment.
However, while the utopian imagination shapes and
encompasses imaginary communities, the art-producing
imagination may inform real communities from within.
Thus, the second way the imagination and politics
intersect is precisely insofar as the realized works of the
imagination, that is to say, works of art, become of concern to a political community.
Yet the relation of art to politics seems to me to be
of necessity primarily negatioe. Just as a gardener can only
select the seeds and choose the site, and thereafter can
only water and wait and weed out unwanted growth, so
a community can wishfully choose and encourage certain kinds of art, but it can effectively only exclude and censor what it opposes. Again, a sign of this fact is the exceedingly modest role accorded to works of art in most
utopias: just as they are not generally themselves real
works of art, so they admit such activity only in a very
subdued fashion, for example, in encouraging styles in
the crafts which are in harmony with the communal image. The grander arts, which depend more on individual
gifts, are evidently considered to have too intractable a
relation to the civic community.
The point I am making, that the arts are related to
politics most determinately through censorship, is not
quite the same as a familiar argument made by David
Hume when he lays it down as a principle that it is impossible for the arts and sciences to arise among a people that is not blessed with free government, claiming
that monarchy is positively injurious to the arts. He
himself says that this theory cannot account for a Homer,
and no more can it account for Shakespeare or any great
poet who takes for his subject the incomparably great.
So I am not arguing that political freedom is necessary
to art-a manifest falsehood-but, on a different level,
that a political community can never produce art: it can
only prevent it from coming on the public scene. If politics
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
interests itself in art positively, it must perforce be by way
of censorship.
Accordingly the second part will be concerned with
censorship of the arts in various political settings.
I. Utopia
A utopia is, as I have defined it, an imagined and
imaginary political community, envisioned rather than
conceived, a desire-filled depiction of a well-shaped communallife.
The name "Utopia'' was invented by Thomas More
and is the title of his little book, written in the beginning of the sixteenth century, the first full-blown utopia.
It is a Greek formation and means "No-place." Utopias
are no place in two senses: First, they are inaccessible.
More's Utopia is an island in the New World, but the
playful claim is that its coordinates have been lost; it is,
of course, a fantasy island. Second, it is no place because
it is a community which never could and, as surely, never
should be realized. The author comments at the end of
his fictional narrator's report that, while some Utopian
features are rather to be wished for than expected in
England, yet others are absurd and in themselves unacceptable. It is not hard to discover what features More
built into his fantasy city which are either unrealizable
or undesirable or both. For example, the Utopians live
in handsome houses which are reallocated every decade,
since there is no private property on the island. Now there
are passages in the Utopia itself and in More's other works
which make it clear that he regarded communism as unsanctioned by religion and impractical in this world. But
More's most serious reservations concern not what the
Utopians do but what they are; namely, cheerful pagans,
unwitting Epicureans, unphilosophical followers of all
natural, reasonable pleasures. They worship Mithras, an
ancient Persian sun god, while practicing religious toleration to the point of indifference. Now More was a devout
Christian and a devoted reader of philosophy who could
not and did not approve of these easy opinions and loose
practices for a living polity.
When then did he invent the fantasy? The answer
is that his Utopia is a subtle and revealing exercise in
delineating delightfully a community which might be
good if human beings were natural rather than spiritual
beings, if they had only enemies worse than themselves,
if they had no pride and knew nothing of original sin.
It is instructive to imagine the kind of community such
people might have, and part of the instruction is the faint
repulsion we are expected to feel at the lives of weightless
beings who do not share the fallen condition of real
human creatures. More gives the narrator and discoverer
of the island a Greek name meaning the "Babbler;'
Hythloday, but behind his babble stands the discerning
imagination of the author.
The word "utopia'' is, as a prefatory letter to Utopia
explains, to be heard also in a second way. Utopia means
11
�not only "no-place,'' but also the ('good place;' eu-topia (as
in "eulogi'). For, on the surface, life on the island, with
its fifty square-walled hillside cities in which each house
has a garden, cities watered by pure fresh rivers fronted
by solid piers and spanned by splendid bridges, is secure,
pleasant, and good.
This second aspect of utopia comes to be preponderant in later utopias which are no longer half-ironic images, but real wish-projections, indulgences of the author's
fancy; these are, for all their intended charm, slightly
repellent, as imaginary spaces dominated by someone
else's dreams of perfection always will be.
A fine example of such latter-day utopias is William
Morris's News from Nowhere, written at the end of the last
century. This Victorian Nowhere takes place right in
England, and instead of being unreachable in place it
is inaccessible in time; it is set in the future, but a future
shaped by Morris's nostalgia for a medieval past. It is
in fact a pre-Raphaelite dream, a future to return to. (I
might observe here that writers of utopias naturally
always play with the two .necessary coordinates of reality, space and time, and, having more or less run out
of uncharted lands on earth, they go to future times, and
latterly to outer space; the first futuristic utopia is Mercier's Memoirs de !Jln 2440 of 1770.)
The chief feature of this future-past is the achievement of a perfect integration of human beings and
nature, a m,achineless but productive pastoral, in which
work is pleasure. In fact one of the mild worries of the
Nowhereans is that they may use up their share of work
too quickly. Work is either of the type called "easy-hard;'
namely, healthy outdoor labor, or it is craftsmanship. The
country is gently and tolerantly anti-intellectual. Children
may read books avidly if they must, but this bookwormish affliction is expected to disappear in maturity. Books
were for a time when intelligent people could take no
pleasure in life but had to rely on the imagination of
others. The genuinely amusing work is housebuilding,
gardening and producing craftsrnanlike objects. The
N owhereans are uncompromisingly egalitarian and look
back with a shudder at the old ways when machines were
used for ordinary work while the intelligent elite followed
the higher forms of art.
Morris's Nowhere has in common with More's Utopia
those features which seem to belong to the very nature
of an imaginative polity: its life is somewhat subdued,
pastel-colored, so to speak. Morris acknowledges that passionate extremities may suddenly intrude into the
peaceful pastoral, but these are incidents to be quickly
resolved. Evidently, when the imagination applies itself
to shaping a perfected political community, it naturally
excludes just those eruptions of human extraordinariness
which are the chief occasions for grand art. And, of
course, that makes good sense, since the utopian imagination means to impose a certain coherence of atmosphere,
a pervasive communal tranquility which naturally excludes private outbursts. The political imagination can-
12
not help but bleach out the passions and contract the
private sphere.
Accordingly most utopias are communitarian: More's
Utopia is a tightly organized, rather herdlike, communist
republic. (At least one of its magistracies is an assimilation of an English office to Platds pig city: the lowest title
is that of "sty-ward;' that is, steward.) Morris's Nowhere
is an idyllic socialist anarchy, which is to say that there
is really no political structure to speak of: all problems
are regarded and solved as social problems.
Again, the ways of utopia are apparently inevitably
anti-philosophical, and this feature, too, lies in the nature
of the genre, first, because the imagined city is often
dreamed precisely in opposition to the harsh and difficult
reasonings of the philosophers, and, second, because its
idyllic internal life alleviates those human predicaments
which give rise to troubled quests. Of course, something
similar holds for religion: utopian religions are by and
large exceedingly tranquil since the suffering which intensifies religious feeling has been eliminated. The inventor has, so to speak, pre-empted all the passion and
has led his creatures into the promised land.
Where the two utopias differ most fundamentally is
in the attitude of their authors towards them. More
himself appears in his book as the somewhat sceptical
listener, and as author his stance is one of ironic delight.
Morris, on the other hand, depicts himself as literally
dreaming the dream in which he enters Now here, and,
when he awakes from it, his heart is heavy with nostalgia
for a time that never was. Most post-Morean utopias are,
then, unironic political dreams, and the dream politics
may consist precisely in dreaming of a community
beyond politics.
As political dreams, utopias are naturally shaped
about the intimate preoccupations of their authors, and
one among these is almost intrinsic to utopian imagining. Since utopian writers are themselves inventors and
contrivers of human nature and human environments,
their imaginations are particularly drawn to inventions
and contrivances, in short to technology, which they see
sometimes as a sinister spoiler and sometimes as the
bright savior of political communities.
There are then, first, the wholeheartedly optimistic
utopias of technological process,-whoSe optimism can be
either complexly serious or simple-mindedly shallow.
Early in the seventeenth century Bacon wrote the first
of the positive technological utopias, the New Atlantis. It
is the prototype of a research polity. Its management is
surrounded with slightly sinister mystifications, but
Bacon's insider's awe before the human mastery of nature
which is in the offing is palpable. In the early twentieth
century, on the other hand, H. G. Wells wrote A Modern
Utopia which lightheadedly celebrates an international
technocracy, endlessly on the move but strictly controlled by an ascet~c elite called, infelicitously, the "Samurai."
Morris's News from Nowhere was in fact one sort of reaction to utopian celebrations of technology, namely the
WINTER 1985
�pastoral. But there is also a very different kind of antitechnological utopia, an imaginary community which is
not a dream but a nightmare. This kind of anti-utopia
is not an invention of modern times. Plato depicts such
a place, the mythical island of Atlantis, whose image
Bacon meant to correct in his New Atlantis. The old
Atlantans are the ancient enemies of Athens, corrupt halfdescendants of Poseidon, the god of oceans and earthquakes and city walls. They inhabit a geometrically
circular island surrounded by concentric ditches and built
over with square castles with fantastically devised walls.
These earthmovers keep elephants for bulldozers. Their
island is amazing and awful.
In this century the fear of a now successful technology,
combined with the horror of totalitarian politics, gives
rise to a new political image, an image of the perversion
of the polis, namely a collective of isolated, terrorized,
technologically manipulated, lost souls. By the middle
of our century the number of published utopias stood
at about two hundred and fifty, and the most serious of
these belonged to the new type, which was labelled "dystopia" or "bad-place."The most famous of these are Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World, which imagines an England
genetically manipulated and controlled by an orgiastic
drug, and George Orwell's 1984, published in 1949, which
imagines a thoroughgoing totalitarianism in which
privacy has become a persecuted political sin: there is
no sanctuary from Big Brother's spying eye.
1984 has come and gone. Decades have passed since ·
the publication of 1984 and "dystopia' has not been realized, at least not in the West. It seems to me that the
dystopias themselves have had a small but effective part
in this blessed fact, perhaps primarily by causing intellectuals, whose political imaginations are notoriously weak,
to imagine terror and to learn to cherish what political
blessings they have. Indeed the type of dystopia cannot
help but be in general more effective than eutopia,
because while eutopias are intimate hopes to which an
author tries to win converts, dystopias are projections
of real, fearful possibilities to which the author tries to
open the world's eyes.
But while it is in general the case that utopias have
had minimal political effect, there is a small scale exception to this observation. In the nineteenth century ther.e
flourished in this country, in the New World where
Thomas More and Francis Bacon had once located their
utopias, scores of utopian communities. There were not,
of course, utopias exactly in my sense, both because they
were not, strictly speaking, independent political
communities- they had the American Republic as their
political ground- and because they were not imaginary
but very much flesh and blood. Yet they were usually
based on utopian blueprints, such as those devised by
Owen, Fourier, Cabet. Most of these realized dreams
were brief; many ended in disaster. In fact, the more suc-
as I mentioned, the latter were usually rather insipidly
religious.
Before concluding the section about utopias, I should
say that, once the utopian genre had become established,
it was used to clothe with imagined shapes all sorts of
notions and speculations. There are, for instance,
cosmological utopias in which the community mirrors
a hypothesis of the heavens, psychological utopias which
embody a theory of human control, and ideological
utopias based on issues such as feminism or ecology. The
genre is irrepressible.
Yet, a short generation ago, utopia was declared dead.
It had been discredited too long and in too many ways:
in the nineteenth century by the failures of its many attempted realizations, and, more severely, by the Marxist attack mounted against "utopian" socialism in behalf
of"scientific" historic principles of revolutionary develop-
ment. Utopias are but small-scale editions of the New
Jerusalem, the Communist Manifesto says sarcastically. Thus
in our century its decline has been mourned; bloodied
by the Marxist critique, it was said to have been killed
off by that political pessimism which caused utopia to
be displaced by dystopia. But these reports of utopias
demise are premature. The genre is, as I said, irrepres-
sible. Although the best known recent utopias are rational
constructs, (for example Nozick's libertarian utopia),
romantic, imaginative utopias continue to be written, and
even the founding of utopian communities still goes on.
Prolific as the utopian genre is and, no doubt, will
continue to be, it has not, I have argued, and it cannot
have, much political potency. The reason is inherent in
its origin in the wishful imagination. That makes utopias
finally rather private, even idiosyncratic, and certainly
ungeneralizable constructions. The products of the imagination stand each alone; it is only the intellect which
can discover universals. And therefore, even when there
is wide-spread utopian activity, it cannot have the unity
or coherence of an intellectual movement. Utopian visions
do not reinforce one another, nor dm one imagine utopian
politics arising except under the aegis of a political
framework based on more universal principles, as was
the case for the utopian communities in the United States.
That is not to say that utopian activity is not, just in itself,
therapeutic and vivifying. However, an activity which
matters as an activity, rather than because of its content,
is precisely what we call play, and, in the last analysis,
that is what utopianism is: the imagination at play, as
irrepressible and as salutary as play is a political
recreation.
I want to conclude by mentioning a role the imagination plays in politics in which it is not so spontaneously
inventive as in the construction of imaginary com-
munities, but perhaps correspondingly more powerful.
cessful and long-lived settlements were usually religious
I mean its role as imaginative memory, which contains
our common past and our common beliefs. Most people,
citizens and politicians, who love their country have a
foundations and not primarily social or political utopias;
vision compounded of its founding myths, its pristine
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
13
�principles and its historical high-points, which at crucial
moments informs their political action. This vision is
precisely not utopian because it is not inherently nowhere;
on the contrary it is the ideal behind the here and now,
the potent, practical image of a living political
community.
II. Censorship
When a strong imagination becomes productive and
by means of an adequate technique realizes it works for
their own sake, its products are works of art. Such works
in turn affect and shape the imagination of others. Thus
art, intentionally or unintentionally, enters politics in-
sofar as politics is the sphere of concern with the community as a whole.
Now I have argued that communities are powerless
to elicit the art which seems to them to preserve and
is its worth in itself, apart from rewards?" Next it is
decided that justice is better investigated "writ large." That
is to say, instead of searching for justice in its original
seat, the human being, the interlocutors will construct
a perfectly just political community and then articulate
the meaning of justice. Several books are devoted to the
developmental stages of this city which correspond to the
progressively higher parts of the soul as Socrates discerns
them. The high point of the construction occurs right
in the middle books, the fifth and sixth. It consists first
in the scandalous notion that the governors of the city,
corresponding as they do to the rational part of the soul,
should be philosophers, and then in the detailed description of the philosophical education of these philosopher
kings. There follows an account of the stages of decline
and fall such a city is subject to and their causes in the
souls of the citizens. The Republic ends with a cosmic myth
displaying an answer to the question whether justice is
a worth in itself.
The imagination and its works are discussed twice:
strengthen them, for the productive imagination is simply
not at their disposal. Communities can do but one thing directly
and effectively: they can proscribe aberrant artists and their art.
The classical justification for the control of works of
the imagination is to be found in Plato's dialogue The
Republic, written in the earlier fourth century B.C. It is
on the way to the perfect city (Books II-III) and again,
symmetrically, after its fall (Book X). This last treatment
is the most radical and most fundamental attack on imagining and on art that I know of. It could only make sense
where it occurs, namely, after the philosophical educa-
a twelve-hour-long conversation mainly between Socrates
is explicitly founded on a view of our world as being but
an image of true being; indeed the whole realm of things
present to us is a hierarchy of images from shadows and
mirror images through the natural objects which they
copy and which are in turn only images of their ideal
originals. Accordingly, the education of the guardians
of the city begins by turning the "bringing-up" of the
young into a "bringing-around" (the Greek words are agoge
and peri-agoge), by wrenching them away from absorption in the multitude of seemingly vivid images to those
unique, substantial thought-originals which will teach
them to keep the city harmonious and unified. In the
light of this philosophical understanding of the world,
image-making in general is a distracting and falsifying
and Plato's two brothers. In the course of it, they find
occasion for devising a small political community such
as the Greeks called a polis, a city. (In Greek the dialogue
is actually called Politeia, meaning "political framework;'
or "city-constitution.")
I should point out here that the city of Plato's Republic
is not strictly a utopia. To be sure, it too is "nowhere"
on earth; Socrates refers to it as a "pattern laid up in
heaven:' (In fact, Plato wrote another work containing
a "second-string" constitution meant more for practical
application.) But the city of the Republic differs from a
utopia in not being an imagined place; indeed, it is severely
lacking in imagined detail. It is rather, as Socrates says,
tion of the governors has been set out, for this education
a city "in reason:' an intellectual construct. One of
activity. Since visual images are the exemplary images,
Thomas More's friends, who recognized Utopia as being in a kind of respectful competition with the Republic,
made just this point in his prefatory poems: Plato's city,
he says, is a philosophical invention and full of philosophy
Socrates attacks particularly painters and, by implication, sculptors. One may well ask what possible political
harm could be done, for instance, by the Parthenon frieze,
a severely choreographed depiction of the sacred procession celebrating the goddess of the city of Athens, in
which human beings are shown in decorous beauty and
the gods, reverently depicted a little larger than men,
watch graciously from Olympus. The answer is that
Socrates is here attacking not the subject or style of any
art, but art itself as diverting the attention by a procession of images from those self-same unities of thought
whose contemplation keeps a community whole.
It is necessary to say that this radical proscription of
while N a-place,
its successful rival, embodies its
philosophy in an unphilosophical way (namely, as a fleshand-blood fiction).
The case must be put more strongly. Not only is the
city of Republic not a city of the imagination, but its very
building is framed by two massive and deep attacks on
all works of the imagination and on the imagination itself.
In Platonic dialogues where a point is made often
determines its interpretation, so let me give a rapid sketch
of the structure of the work, which is, in fact, rather
strictly symmetrical. There are ten books. In the first
of these are brought out the depths and the difficulties
of the controlling question: "What is justice and what
14
the imagination is to be taken in its context. Socrates
himself is, as I have mentioned, about to launch into the
telling of a magnificent myth, a huge and brilliant cosmic
image. The attack on the imagination is intended seri-
WINTER 1985
�ously enough within the intellectual exercise he and
Plato's brothers are engaged in: the thinking out of a city
which would realize a philosopher's understanding of the
human soul and which would therefore be safe for
philosophy. But it is not, I think, meant for practical
political implementation.
The censorship which is closer to possible political
practice is the one discussed earlier in the dialogue, at
the beginning of the building of the city, in connection
with the upbringing of the children. Socrates, first and
last, aims at the epic poetry of Homer-a bold and scan·
dalous attempt, since the Homeric poems were the great
primers of Greek education. What Socrates blames
Homer for is primarily the portrait of the gods to which
he has accustomed the Greeks: they are lustful, quarrel-
Plato thinks that it will stimulate and excite them and
lead to boisterousness followed by lassitude in the citizens.
Plato's Socrates deems the arts politically indigestible.
The second remarkable fact is that the problems
Socrates raises are very much our own. It is, for exam-
ple, a much debated problem of our time whether the
images children see affect their behavior and whether the
shows they watch work their feelings off or work them
up. Similarly some of us wonder what the social effects
of our popular modes of music and dancing really are:
How, to try a comical experiment of the imagination,
would our public life change if we made every seven-year·
old learn to dance the minuet? So the Socratic problems
are much alive even if his solutions are out of tune with
our society.
some, unstable, mendacious, and unjust-a fact, inciden-
Plato's Republic has been seen as a prototype of
tally, to delight and puzzle a post-Christian reader. Fur·
totalitarianism, for several reasons; because Socrates' intellectual exercise has been mistaken for a practical proposal, because Socrates' city is not a democracy (as if no
thermore, the Homeric heroes are indecently woebegone
and fearful of death; both gods and men are intemperate
in laughing and weeping. The tragedians are attacked
in addition for the very form of their poetry: its dramatic
format requires the actors to do all but turn themselves
into the person of the drama and so to lose their dignity
and selfhood in histrionics. All these productions are to
be banished from the city. Music too is to be purged of
all those modes which are not tonic but relax and slacken
the soul. What is left are tales of human excellence and
reverent hymns.
This precisely delineated call for a civic censorship
of the form and content of the arts may not seem to be
so radical as that subsequent attack on the imagination
itself which I have just summarized. Yet that is not really
the case, for what Socrates here criticizes about the arts
is what it is in their very nature to be and to do: they
absorb and inform the participant; they are concerned
with what is human-all-too-human even when imaging
the divinities; and above all, they burst the bounds of
tranquil dailiness in depicting what is extreme, ex-
cruciating, and passionate. The subdued decorum that
dominates utopias and that Socrates too recognizes as
a condition of civic tranquility is rarely .a cause of a theme
or a characteristic of art.
These arguments for political control of the arts are
above all remarkable in that they constitute a testimonial
to the knowledgeable seriousness with which Plato and
his Socrates take the arts (although they make little of
the artist himself). They share this attitude with their
fellow Greeks. For example, the public importance of
music, the power of its various modes to dispose the soul
and shape the schemata of the body, was recognized
throughout the Greek cities, where music and dance were
part of the city's life. Thus Aristotle ends his great book
on politics with a disquisition about the function of the
decent third possibility between totalitarianism and
democracy was thinkable), but- most weightily- just
because of those censorship provisions we are discussing.
Totalitarian states do, of course, have censorship of
the arts-and all sorts of other censorship Socrates never
proposes. I shall very briefly sketch the nature of the cen·
sorship practiced in the two chief totalitarian states of
our century to show how utterly different it is from the
classical case.
I mean, of course, Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union. The two cases differ in one important way: Nazi
censorship appears to have been devoid of articulable ra·
tional foundations, and appealed instead to misty but
emotion-loaded semi-ideas and watchwords, while Soviet
censorship is rigidly based on an ideological frame, shift·
ing only as the Central Committee of the Communist
Party declares changes in interpretation. The documents
of both are scoldingly rancorous and brutally threaten·
ing toward offending artists, although the Nazi literature
on censorship exceeds the Soviet documents in a vulgarity
that is scarcely communicable in English. The human
plane of either is simply incommensurable with Socrates'
gently ironic proposal to anoint and crown the poets and
politely speed them on their way to another city.
I should mention that the previous observation con·
cerning the inability of states to engender art is borne
out by the censorship literature itself: there are con·
tinuous small-voiced complaints that politically pure art
of real stature which is to replace the censored art has
failed to appear.
The explicit object of Nazi censorship was to purge
the arts of all elements not conducive to readiness for
sacrifice, obedience to Adolf Hitler, and the submersion
of the self in the totality, the State, the Race. For this
musical modes in citizen training. What is peculiar to
last purpose a new subject, called "race-style-science,
Plato, and where he differs from Aristotle, is his view
of the effect of very intense experiences on the soul. While
Aristotle supposes that attendance at a tragic performance
will work a purgation and transformation of the passions,
(Rassenstilkunde) was invented, and Nazi estheticians
debated whether the tango or the minor mode or chamber
music might be admitted as Germanic while proscribing atonal music for its rootless intellectualism and in·
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
15
�ternationally popular hits for their supra-national
cosmopolitanism. Effeminacy, decadence and the Jewish
spirit were to be rooted out in all the arts. Bookstores
were required to remove proscribed books on pain of being blacklisted. Of course the most notorious early act
of censorship was the government-supported book burning of 1933. As the books were consigned to the flames
a speaking chorus of brownshirted students would call
such lines as "For discipline and morality in Family and
State I give to the flame the writings of .. :• and supply
the name of the blacklisted authors, mostly novelists.
As for Soviet censorship, Lenin set the tone long
before the revolution by proclaiming that all literature
is party-literature, and that literature is not an individual
concern but belongs to the proletariat: "Down with nonpartisan literature, down with literary supermen." The
creation of art was to be organized, for art is, above all,
the organization of the emotions of persons, groups,
classes, nations. Stalin later summarized this view in a
politics. A totalitarian state is, or means to be, a different
whole than is a Greek city, whether it philosophical or
actual. The former is, so to speak, an embodied abstraction which attempts to pervade life totally from the top
down and absorbs rather than bonds its individual
elements; strictly speaking, its relations are not political
at all because they are that of an amalgam or a collective and not of persons. Its censorship tries to reinforce
this condition: the aim is not, as in the Socratic city, to
shape self-possessed citizens, but to meld a people into
a fervent mass.
The third point of difference lies in the contrasting
conceptions of the virtues that the arts are to be made
to instill. To cite just the Nazi list of affirmations as
revealed in the watchwords recurring incessantly in the
marching songs which were the most voluminous pro-
duct of the revised arts: loyalty, obedience, flag, flame,
race, blood, bullet, drum, submission and the love of
death. Compare to these the virtues of Socrates' citizens:
much quoted phrase to the effect that writers are the
engineers of the human soul. In 1920 Lenin sketched out
resolutions for Proletkult, the bureaucracy in charge of the
new proletarian culture: there are, he said, to be no new
and special ideas but the traditional culture is rather to
be appropriated by Marxist ideology. There are
manifestos stating that the working class has the leadership in literature; fellow travellers may be tolerated for
their expertise in technique, but all appearances of
courage stemming from a knowledge of what is truly to
be feared, temperance understood as a proper selfadjustment of the soul, justice interpreted as a knowledge
counter-revolutionary ideas are to be ruthlessly
concern with controlling and even excluding some arts
eradicated. Under Stalin followed attacks (which have,
incidentally, been lately revived) against formalism or
so-called abstract art, for example, in behalf of socialist
realism. Socialist realism demands that art always display
a proud and life-affirming optimism, while works with
for the sake of its own integrity. For these cities a decent
of one's proper part in the community, and wisdom to
be attained in the course of a long effort of learning.
The object of this comparison of obnoxious
totalitarian and benign Socratic censorship is to point
out what it seems to me we sometimes forget: that a cer-
tain kind of political community may have a defensible
censorship is conceivable, and Socrates initiates the
living people a dogmatic pseudo-myth of race or an
discussion of its rationale. A prime example of such a
debate in more modern times is the open letter, published
in 1758, whichJeanJacques Rousseau sent to d' Alembert
in response to his article in the Encyclopidie advising the
Republic of Geneva to establish a theatre. Rousseau wrote
as a citizen of this small republic, and his chief argument, which was directly influenced by Plato's Republic,
is that such an alien and sophisticated amusement will
undermine the simple and close communal life of the
no edifying content, which divorce art from socialist
truth, are declared undesirable.
Now let me point out the elements in which Socratic
censorship differs from totalitarian censorship.
First, whereas the totalitarian censorship enforces on
ideology of class, Socrates proposes his constraints on the
Genevans. Rousseau, like Socrates, recognized an ir-
poets as a philosophical exercise, a possibility to be considered on the basis of an ever-renewable inquiry into
reconcilable conflict between the arts and the political
community, a conflict perhaps less deep but correspond-
the conditions of a political community; the issue is,
ingly more extensive in ffiodern times when the drama
is no longer a great sacred public occasion but a mere
amusement. For it is just such a diversion which by its
agile worldliness, its artful excitations and its isolating
therefore, not this or that work or style, but the very
nature of art and its relation to communal life. The
Socratic attack on poetry is far more radical in thought
and far less disruptive in deed than totalitarian
censorship.
Second, there is a deep difference between a
totalitarian state and a political community in Socrates'
sense. In the former the dubious bond of race or class
if considered to underlie, precede and supercede the relations of individuals, while the very device on which
Socrates builds his city, namely that of a soul writ large,
displays his assumption that a city is ultimately shaped
and determined by the souls within it, and that the
political bond is one of individuals: "psychology" precedes
16
spectatorship may loosen the bonds of a small community.
What then about censorship of the arts in our own
political community,
in a national representative
democracy? It seems to me that it has no place whatsoever
with us. Indeed it is a dead, or at least a dormant, issue
(except with respect to pornography; and acknowledged
pornography, which is for the sali.e of sexual arousal, does
not come under my definition of art as a product of the
imagination which is not primarily an instrument of
anything). As its censoring role in the arts ought to be
nil, so the government's positive function can be only
WINTER 1985
�minimal. It can and should encourage the arts in general,
for example, by modest funding, but it can never rightly
make itself responsible for furthering a specifically communal, a truly political, art. In short, the proper attitude
American republic had been formed, and formed in conscious contrast to the classical model. In an ancient city
the primary bond is the political bond, and public life is
not only a means to human fulfillment but its very end.
of democratic governments to art seems to be friendly
tolerance or supportive indifference.
How can it be that an intense and critical relation
The modern model, however, interposes between private
and political life a social realm, "society;' a word of far
between politics and the arts is justifiable in classical com-
tween the individual and a determinate ideal whole,
more weight with us than politics. Political bonds are be-
munities while in our democracy a loose and tolerant
namely the laws, traditions and public spaces of the
relation is required? The answer seems to me to lie in
the change of meaning both terms, politics and art,
underwent in the century just before the founding of the
American Republic. Let me briefly outline the related
changes without attempting to articulate their deep common root.
First, the notion of Art. I have been using the word
as if its connotations for us were the same as in the
classical context- misleadingly, for just about the time
this country was founded there came to a climax a
development which transformed the meaning of the term.
Its original unpretentious sense was that of craft, of knowhow, of the ability to manage and produce objects of all
sorts. In the later eighteenth century the notion of a "pure
art work" came to the fore. Such a work of art was thought
to originate in the independent esthetic realm of the
radically free imagination, a world not bound to ordinary
given reality, a world of free play and autonomous illusion. Correlatively the craftsman was elevated into the
''Artist;' the godlike creator of this world, a genius, an
extraordinary being. And instead of the work of art as
a skillfully made object there arose ''Art" simply, namely,
that specially precious class of objects which is the product of the artist's absolutely self-determined imagination. Naturally this new artist claimed great authority
for himself and his imaginative realm. The German poet
Schiller, for instance, proposed that the problems of
politics could be solved if mankind were given an "esthetic
education;' so that human beings might live in the mode
of an artist, by the free play of the imagination (though
without themselves producing art). But although the artist's claim becomes one of universal human authority,
it is not hard to see that this new understanding makes
art essentially private. The final source and the final
arbiter not only for the form, but, above all, for the matter
of his products is the artist's own solitary imagination;
such works of private creation are not made to be put
in the service of the community and its divinities- the
artist would consider anathema any attempt at control
(as, for example, the ordinance of the Second Council
of Nicea proclaiming that the substance of religious scenes
is not left to the initiative of the craftsman but that the
craft alone belongs to the painter). So just as the
American republic was born, art became an essentially
personal enterprise, and the artistic mode came to be
privately over-valued and, with good cause, publicly
ignored.
In a parallel development that conception of a political
community which was to underlie the formation of the
community. Social relations, on the other hand, are between individual and individual; society as a whole is
an indeterminate abstraction. It is in terms of social rela-
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tions that the bulk of our life, and especially our religious
life, takes place. Accordingly, the political sphere is not,
for most of us, the place of our fulfillment. It is rather
reduced to administration, that is to say, to essentially
negative governmental functions which are meant
precisely to protect the private and social realms from
disturbance and intrusion. A political sphere which is
so restricted and which is, by a special provision of the
constitution, devoid of any legitimate religious dimension, is not naturally going to give rise to a very exten-
sive or elevating art- though such a thing is not impossible: the major speeches of Abraham Lincoln constitute
a political art of real grandeur. But while we may always
hope for more such works, especially for a renewal of
great political rhetoric, we scarcely expect it. John Dewey,
for example, who is, after all, the proponent par excellence of a democratic fulfillment of life, wrote a book
called Art ar Experience, devoted to bringing art back from
the estheticism I described before into ordinary life. But
he never remotely considers the possibility of a public
art celebrating our free political institutions. For him,
art belongs altogether to the social realm.
Of course, the fact that our art is rarely political does
not mean that it cannot be thoroughly and characteristically democratic and American. Tocqueville, after whom
this forum is named, foresaw in 1835, with marvelous
acuity, what the sources of poetry in a democratic land
might be: how when faith in positive religion is shaken
the idea of providence and historical destiny assumes a
more imposing appearance; how when life is crowded
with petty business the march of the American people
across the continent subduing nature on the way is invested with special romance; how the democratic poet
concentrates more on passions and ideas than on con-
crete individual men, always looking to the inner soul- in
short how American poetry is suspended between grand
massive movements and the most private passions of men.
Is this not a near-perfect anticipation of Walt Whitman?
Yet ohe would not claim that Whitman played the role
in America that the tragedians, say, played in Athens.
He is the poet of America as a democracy rather than
as a republic; he celebrates a social rather than a political
fellowship.
To conclude. If the privatization of art and the
socialization of politics cut the ground from under a com-
17
�munal art, is there then no public place left for the arts?
Not so.
I have been speaking of politics in the largest sense,
meaning the national political community. But in this
country the actual business of life is largely carried on
in the cities, and it is in the cities that a civic life in the
fulfilling, antique, sense is to be found. The cities too
are the natural seats of the arts, because they are the communities in which the arts are cherished and in which
the artists flourish, and so it is the cities which have the
symphony halls, the art centers and the theatres.
Therefore, it is in the cities that the arts and civic life
still intersect, and here too those classical dilemmas concerning the divergences of the judgment of the citizen
and the imagination of the artist may on occasion come
to life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle, Politics (second half, fourth century B.C.)
Basalla, George, "Science and the city before the nineteenth century;'
Transformation and Tmdition in the Sciences, Cambridge 1984
Denney, Reuel, The Astonished Muse, Popular Culture in America, Chicago
1957
Die Deutsche Literatur im Dritten Reich, ed. H. Denkler and K. Pruemm,
Stuttgart 1976
Dewey, John, Art as Experience (1934), New York 1980
Documents on Germany under Occupation 1945-54, ed. Beate Ruhm von
Oppen, Oxford 1955
18
Fehl, Philipp, "Gods and Men in the Parthenon Frieze;' The Parthenon,
New York 1974
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, New York 1975
Holloway, Mark, Heavens on Earth, Utopian Communities in America
1680-1880, New York 1966
Hume, David, "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences;'
(mid-eighteenth century)
Jaspers, Karl, Man in the Modern Age (1931), New York 1957
Literatur und Dichtung im Dritten Reich, Documents, ed. Joseph Wulf,
Rowohlt 1966
Manuel, Frank E. and Fritzie P., Utopian Thought in the Western World,
Cambridge 1977
McMullen, Roy, Art, Ajfluence and Alienation, The Fine Arts Today, New
York 1969
More, Thomas, Utopia (1516), The Penguin edition, 1976, has an appendix on "More's Attitude to Communism"
Morris, William, News from Nowhere (1890)
Morrow, Glenn P., Plato's Cretan City, Princeton 1960
Musik im Dritten Reich, Documents, ed. Joseph Wulf, Rowohlt 1966
Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia, New York 1974
Plato, Critias, Laws, Republic (first half, fourth century B.C.)
Plato, 10talitarian or Democrat? ed. T. L. Thorson, Englewood Cliffs 1963
Rousseau, Jean:Jacques, Politics and the Arts, Letter toM. D:Alembert
on the Theatre,· trans. Allan Bloom, Glencoe 1960
Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man, New York 1977
Schiller, Friedrich, Concerning the Esthetic Education of Mankind, m a
Series of Letters (1795)
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, A Difmse of Poetry (1821)
Die Sowjetphilosophie, Wendigkeit und Bestimmtheit, Documents, ed.
Wilhelm Goerdt, Darmstadt 1967
Theories of Education in Early America, 1655-1819, ed. Wilson Smith,
Indianapolis 1973
Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America (1835)
Utopias and Utopian Thought, A Timely Appraisal, ed. Frank E. Manuel,
Boston 1967
Der Utopische Roman, ed. R. Villgradter and F. Krey, Darmstadt 1973
WINTER 1985
�Five From
The Old Testament
Jacob
This sequence is from a forthcoming
book of poems based on Old Testament figures. 'Gideon' has previously
appeared in Shirim, 'Aaron' in
Kansas Quarterly.
I crossed the river feeling for sink- holes
with a crooked staff and a blind man crying
"Thief1 Thief1" while my brother wept,
the beggar, hungry as a hunter.
He is coming to meet me.
The desert trembles, he is still too far away
for me to see his hands.
Angels camp at the Jabbok ford.
I have offered him everything I ownnothing I claim is mine by right,
All I keep is the blessing I stole.
J.
Kates, widely published as a poet, is currently writing a novel about the
civil rights movement. Kates lives in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
Who are you, dressed like my brother Esau,
straining in my smooth arms,
begging me to let you go?
for Peter
]. Kates
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
19
�Aaron
Samson
He has stones between his teeth.
Lisping, spluttering, stuttering,
the words of freedom fall out of his mouth
like broken nutshells, admonitions
and commandments like the cracked pits
of luscious fruit.
I dropped like an empty bucket
into her bed. Three times I tried,
three times failed the test;
I had not guessed my own riddle.
He can do anything with his arms,
he has only to lift thembut his fingers are too subtle,
rebellious, fluttering like his tongue,
afraid to touch what moves suddenly.
Who you are and why you come
to lead me in my traces like a mill- ox
mashing the dull chaff under my bare feet
I know, my boy,
He has held his staff over his head
conducting God's glory, opening
passage through the water, wells
in the desert; I have bent down
to pluck it writhing out of the dust.
I am not so stupid as you think.
Your hair will grow, your beard thicken
and you will find some comfort
in the arms of women.
From private gold I fashion public images,
talking all the time.
I do tricks to distract the multitudes
while he stumbles up the mountainside alone
and returns shimmering,
speechless.
J
20
A man who has never known sweetness
in his belly grows sick of strength,
of swinging a dry bone.
J
Kates
Kates
WINTER 1985
�Saul
Gideon
Once I towered over the best of my tribe.
When I walked out, even on trivial errands,
men who were thinking of kings
whispered my name.
While I was threshing wheat behind the winepress
and keeping secret, he said to me,
If I can strike fire from the rock
I will make a man of valor out of you.
·The force of my arm drove all enemies down.
Now I lift my left hand only with trouble,
the right drums like five fools on the table.
My sons are treacherous archers
who shoot deliberately to miss the target.
All this was done with words
like a stick against the flesh,
nothing but noises dashed against each other
to let the light shine through.
There is an empty seat, a gap in the company,
a missing tooth throbbing in my jaw.
Where is the young hero who should be here,
the lad who would swagger out against giants?
Have I withered to a mote in his eye
now that the oil is dried?
An old man can shit, can sleep, be pitied
So I went against the dumb thing of Midian
with ten men only like a small stand
of flaming trees, and we cast it down
into its silence.
We are a division of the god of number.
As the man is, so is strength
multiplied by the trumpet of his speech
and the silence of the fearful.
because he is harmless, a king of wandering asses.
An old man can fling a spear at a hole
and watch it quiver in the mud wall
J
Kates
but miss the music he needs
to lull him into the morning.
And also the song King David sang sh'ivering in the
arms of Abishag.
]. Kates
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
21
�James Joyce's Soul
Joseph Engelberg
piece of writing becomes a work of art when
it is rich in meaning, when it embodies level
upon level of understanding. As in an archaeological investigation a hierarchy of artifacts waits to be uncovered: the equivalent
of bits of doth and shards of pottery; jewelry and pots;
murals and statues; rooms and houses; streets and cities;
etc. Nabokm.t 1 enjoins us not to overlook in the archaeology of any literary masterpiece the beauty and
greatness which can reside at the lowest level: in the
details, the literary shards and bits. This is a wise admonition, but an unnecessary one for scholars of James
Joyce. Much of their scholarship justly celebrates Joyce's
magnificient and suggestive detail. There are, however,
also in his works higher levels which await contemplation. Indeed, at the level of joyce's entire opus there lies
a theme which overarches all his works. It is the subject
of this essay.
The story of any human life is the story of an awakening and of a falling asleep: an emergence out of unconsciousness into consciousness (paralleling the rise of
consciousness in biological evolution), followed by a descent into unconsciousness and extinction. The works of
James Joyce, followed chronologically, retrace this cosmic
scheme. 2 Against the panorama of a civilization Joyce
depicts the birth, travail, and decline of a soul. It is the
story of Stephen Dedalus' soul, but it may as well be the
story of Joyce's soul, or of the soul of our time.
A
Joseph Engelberg teaches Physiology and Biophysics at the Albert B. Chandler
Medical Center of the University of Kentucky.
22
The Soul
For millenia the word "soul," a word rich in connotation, was common in our civilization. It was in use as
much in common life as in the most refined works of
literature and religion. Then recently- suddenly- it
disappeared from our midst. Why did it leave? Had we
become so old and wise as to no longer need words from
our spiritual childhood? Had the word "soul" become
meaningless and superfluous like the word "protoplasm"
in biology, "phlogiston" in chemistry, and "humor" in
medicine? Had mankind begun to conceive of the human
being as a machine, lacking any meaning beyond that
of a bag of parts- hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs: its destiny
to rust out and end on a scrap heap?
What might be meant by the word "soul"? When we
remember someone we may recollect some characteristic
part of the body, perhaps the hands or face; some disposition of the body, such as the gait, gesture, or posture;
some aspect of the inner self, such as mind, intelligence,
emotion, superego, unconscious, character. But each of
these is but a fragment of one's being, and "soul" does
not refer to any one of them. "Soul" may be said to stand
for the undivided, unitary, integrative essence of a person. That is why we cannot specify where in the body
the soul resides, or what its mass and chemical composition are. Like any attribute of an entire systempopulation size, gross national product, entropy,
volume,- it cannot be localized within the system.
The "soul" represeJ?.tS a unity. Yet it -is not selfcontained. It is embedded in, and draws its life from
family, friends, and society; from those that have lived,
live now, and are yet to live; from history, tradition, and
cosmos. To these the soul is connected by a myriad of
bonds- the greater their number and variety, the greater
its vitality, vibrancy, solidity and extension.
WINTER 1985
�Should some of the bonds be cut the soul loses size
and strength, and when many bonds are severed, it
shrinks, becomes vestigial; the body remains, but consciousness recedes. The organism withdraws from existence and gravitates towards automatism, somnolence,
sleep, unconsciousness, extinction. The body may be the
first to fail, and, failing, carry the soul to its destruction.
But the destruction of the soul can precede that of the
body. When isolated from the influences which nurture
it and give it life, the soul atrophies, leaving behind an
abandoned body adrift towards a physical doom.
Stephen Dedalus' Soul
What the scientific instrument is to the student of
nature, the work of art is to the student of human existence. It makes visible what is invisible to the naked
eye. James Joyce's trilogy, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, is such an instrument,
such a work of art. It can be likened to the vast mirror
in a telescope, which collects and focuses a myriad of
subliminal light impulses, enabling the eye to penetrate
the reaches of the macrocosm. Joyce's trilogy brings
together the subliminal impulses of a civilization. It is
an instrument with which one can probe the microcosm:
the soul of modern (post-enlightenment) man.
The Portrait opens with the first stirrings of consciousness, the awakening of a soul from a deep,
cosmological sleep. This consciousness unfolds; it
culminates in the person of Stephen Dedalus. In scenes
of Stephen's childhood in the Portrait, the word "soul" can
scarcely be found. It is in descriptions of his adolescent
years that it makes a frequent appearance. 3 Whenever
the adolescent Stephen falls into an introspective mood,
the word "soul" is likely to appear in his musings.
Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that
had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon
the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor
and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in
wreaths that withered at the touch? 4
before him, that the more scrupulously he tries to satisfy
the demands of his faith, the more he sins. He is disillusioned; he falls; he breaks with his religion. It is the first
of a series of sunderings from the formative influences
of his life. Thereafter the word "soul" appears less and
less frequently in the text.
The story of the unfolding of Stephen's consciousness
is one of anguish and bitterness. It portrays his relentless
struggle against the mass of social, moral, and intellectual traditions which limit his existence. He feels trapped in a tangle of family and friends, the Dublin social
order, Jesuit education, the Roman Church, Irish history
and nationalism, bourgeois values, heroic ideals, British
political and cultural ascendancy.
From early childhood on Stephen finds himself entangled in this thicket of disparate and conflicting influences thrust upon him by society. He strives with the
ardor of genius, and in the light of a gifted imagination,
to reconcile them. He fails. Later, at the height of perplexity and despair, he is graced at the seashore by a revelation which begins to lead him out of the mist of questions, conflicts, and introspective confusion in which he
had been enveloped since childhood• It is a liberating
vision yielding him the understanding that reconciliation is impossible, that incommensurables cannot be
reconciled, that there is a higher sphere to which he must
rise. What he cannot reconcile he will abandon. One by
one he cuts the bonds which tie him to society, country,
religion, tradition, friends, family. In a release of emotions long dammed he feels his being affirmed; in the
agitation of a newly-found freedom he sets out to recreate
the world. The Portrait ends on a heroic note.
"He would create proudly out of the freedom and power
of his soul ... a living thing, new soaring and beautiful,
impalpable, imperishable ... To live, to err, to fall, to
triumph, to recreate lifE: out oflife! ... Welcome, 0 life!
I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of
experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. 6
Somnolence
"Soul" appears some 170 times in the Portrait. Where
it appears it represents some emotion-laden, deep, inward experience.
Her image had passed into his soul forever and no word
had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had
called him, and his soul had leaped at the call. 5
The use of the word reaches a crescendo in the
descriptions of a series of sermons on salvation, sin, and
hellfire preached by a priest in school at Eastertime. The
sermons, and the ambience of the season, serve to raise
Stephen to the level of religious exaltation. He enters
upon a period of piety, but finds, as did Saul of Tarsus
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
At the conclusion of the Portrait, as we have seen,
Stephen is about to go forth to triumphantly forge the
conscience of his race. Joyce's next work, Ulysses, takes
up the story two years hence. It centers on a trinity of
persons: Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly
Bloom. The Portrait had led us to expect to find the hammerblows of heroic creation. This expectation is
unfulfilled. Ulysses opens on an early morning with a feeble, drowsy Stephen in his temporary domicile, the
Martello tower at Dalkey near Dublin.'
Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms
on the top of the staircase ... B
23
�Later that morning he is at Mr. Deasy's school, where
he languidly and dreamily performs the functions of an
assistant teacher, a job which he is about to abandon.
In the afternoon he defends an abstruse doctrine in the
National Library, and in the evening he carouses with
medical students in a hospital. Midnight finds him in
a brothel, drunk and hallucinating. Later, as the night
draws to a close, bucked up by a cup of coffee and a stale
roll, tired but sober after a long walk through the deserted
Dublin streets and a visit to an acquaintance's house, he
seeks a place to sleep.
Ulysses appears to gravitate towards sleep. As it draws
to a close, it is not Stephen alone who seeks rest: all the
major characters are preparing their entrance into the
world of dreams. The last chapters portray Stephen's
journey towards sleep, the ruminations of Leopold Bloom
as he prepares for bed, and the stream-of-consciousness
of Bloom's wife Molly, who, in bed, in a state suspended
between wakefulness and sleep, reminisces upon the
events of her life and the day just past. It is the end of
a long, wearying day, and one would not attach great
significance to all this turning to sleep were it not for
the fact that Joyce's next work, Finnegans Wake, to which
he devoted eighteen of the last twenty years of his life,
is set entirely in the world of sleep, dreams, and phantasmagoric language.
In all this, far from the smithy in which an uncreated
conscience is to be forged, it is a drowsy, listless, passive,
vulnerable, defenseless, diffident, defeated Stephen we
find- a Stephen unequal to the onslaught of life; a
Stephen in retreat, sunk into himself, detached from those
he encounters, acted upon by circumstances but incapable
of acting.
The Fading of Consciousness
Joyce died January 13, 1941, some 24 months after
the publication of Finnegans Wake. In his works he
systematically traced the rise of a human soul to the very
heights of consciousness, and then its subsequent descent into torpor and sleep. Had Joyce lived to write
another work, what might have been the next step in this
soul's journey? Might the oblivion of sleep been succeeded
by the oblivion of death, leaving behind a universe devoid
of consciousness-as it eXisted before humankind made
its appearance on earth? It is said that Joyce was planning another work which was to have as its setting the
Sea. 9 Had this work been completed, Joyce's opus would
have retraced on the scale of a humble city, Dublin, the
cosmic drama of the birth and rise of consciousness, and
its decline into unconsciousness- the Portrait being the
story of the coming to life of a human soul; Ulysses, a
journey towards sleep; Finnegans Wake, the world of sleep;
Joyce's projected last work, unconscious nature. The goal
of life, according to Freud, is death ( cf. Beyond the Pleasure
24
Principle). Joyce's imagination appears to have gravitated
towards unconsciousness, human extinction.
Stephen Dedalus could not reconcile with the realities
of his time and place, his idealized visions of religion,
love, family, and society. Failing in this reconciliation he
chose to break his connections with them. For them he
would substitute the integrity of his self and soul, and
build upon this foundation. Liberated from the smothering influences of his paralyzed homeland and people, and
energized by an abundant spirit, he would build a new
reality.
Ironically, as long as he had been a part of this land
and its people, his soul had burned with an ardent flame.
After he cut himself loose, paralysis and torpor descended
upon his consciousness. This is anticipated in the Portrait
in words of a prophetic nature:
The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would
fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in
an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he
felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some
instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still
unfallen but about to fall.lO
To sin is to break up that which needs be whole.
The passage brings to mind the powerful ending of
"The Dead;' a story in Dub liners, of the collapse of a soul
under the illusions of a lifetime and the events of an
even1ng:
His soul had approached that region where dwell the
vast hosts of the sea . ... His soul swooned slowly as he
heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and
faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon
all the living and all the dead. 11
The protagonist of this story is said to be at least in part
the young Joyce's conception of what he might have
become in middle age had he remained in Dublin and
become a conventional success there. 1 2 The story begins
with an energetic, confident Gabriel Conroy as he embarks, with pleasurable anticipation upon an evening of
festivity, self-exaltation, and amorous adventure. He is
a teacher at an Irish college (i.e., high school), financially
secure, socially established; a reviewer of books for a
prominent newspaper; a possessor of a fine wife, home,
and children; a man of authority and social standing.
But scarcely has he arrived at the house of his aunts for
their traditional Christmas party than he suffers a series
of psychic blows. These blows undermine his sense of existence, of his understanding of who he is, of who his
wife is, and of what life expects of him. As the evening
comes to a close, sitting at the window of an· unlit hotel
room, his wife fitfully asleep beside him, he feels his identity fading: he swoons as his soul tumbles towards the
cold, snow-covered, eternal land of the dead. It is another
depiction of the extinguishing, through isolation, of
consciousness.
Still another example is found in ''A Painful Case;'
WINTER 1985
�a story in Dubliners, written by Joyce in his early twenties, where he speculates as to what might become of
him by middle age were he to continue to live in a
society which he despises while systematically and scrupulously isolating himself from its influences. 13 The story
relates the progressive involvement of a Mr. Duffy with
a married woman, and his final scornful rejection of her
passion. Over a lonely dinner, one evening, he learns that
she has died. The news comes to him in an article describ-
ing the inquest into her death. He leaves his dinner half
eaten. As he walks out into the cheerless cold of a gloomy
evening, he meditates upon his own nature:
His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased
to exist, became a memory- if anyone remembered him .
. . . He felt his moral nature falling to pieces . ... No
one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast. He
turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river winding along
towards Dublin . ... He could hear .nothing: the night
was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent.
He felt he was alone. 14
Mr. Duffy had labored to be free. Fate had granted his
wish. He was alone.
Whose soul is departing?
Have we been speaking of James Joyce, or only of
Stephen Dedalus, an object of his creation? Some consider Stephen to be Joyce:
We ought to know a lot about Joyce, seeing that he was
at great pains to tell us all he could. He put himself into
all his books. He is the unnamed boy in Dubliners,
Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and Ulysses, Richard in Exiles, and Shem the Penman
in Finnegans Wake, and, if Joyce painted them himself,
who shall say that any of them is a bad likeness?
(Frank Budgen) 15
Others consider Stephen to be Joyce's creation:
... my brother was not the weak, shrinking, infant who
figures in A Portrait of the Artist. He was drawn, it is true,
very largely upon his own life and his own experience,
... But A Portrait of the Artist is not an autobiography;
it is an artistic creation.
(Stanislaus Joyce)••
No matter: the works of a literary artist inevitably
reveal to us something about himself and about the times
in which he lives. Joyce bridges the end of the previous
century, and the beginning of the present one. It was a
moment when, everywhere, young, sensitive, gifted intellectuals awakened to find, on the one hand, stagnant
social realities, nightmarish histories, and ancient,
hypocritical religions; and, on the other, the promise of
a liberated, secure, enlightened future based upon imagination, science, and reason. They thirsted for release,
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
for a fresh start, for escape from the smothering ambience
of tawdry traditions. They felt themselves to be living
at the very interface of a nightmarish past, and an iridescent future. They vowed to forget the past, to create
a new future, a future based upon freedom, honesty,
beauty, spirit, and justice. Like Stephen, they dreamed
of severing their bonds to existing history, tradition,
religion, culture, and society. In the end they found, as
he did, in place of liberation, in place of a new, pure,
and exalted life, that an unkind fate had granted themsleep, that is to say, a lower form of consciousness. 17
Ours is an age of sleep. The seemingly feverish activity around us is that of a troubled dream. There is
a great striving for sleep on earth and an eternal rest in
the world to come. There is a yearning for diversion,
anesthesia, alcohol, narcotic~, sleeping pills, and tranquilizers; for mental disciplines which would take us out
of this world and never bring us back; for sharing the
rest of the dead while yet alive. Genius appears to be falling asleep, consciousness to be departing. Its departure
is reminiscent of the mystical doctrine concerning the
Shechinah, the divine presence of God on earth. 18 When
humankind feels that everything can be under its complete control, when it relies only upon itself and thinks
that it does not need anything higher, the Shechinah turns
away, and departs, as if to say "You do not need me now.
I will go away and come back some other time:'
The Knight of Faith
Joyce reveals to us in his works the travails of Stephen's
soul, of his own soul, of his age's soul. To these revelations, he joins in Ulysses the legend of Leopold Bloom,
the narrative center around which other characters trace
their orbits. Bloom is seemingly a scandal and a stumbling block: a mediocre, vulgar, uncultured, unassuming,
undistinguished, canvasser of advertisements- hardly the
counterpart of the Ulysses of Homer's Odyssey. Yet joyce
saw Bloom as an embodiment of an ideal type: the good
man, the complete man. 19 In what sense can Bloom be
taken to be a good man, a complete man?
We have spoken of the "soul" as a core of personal
being measured by its capacity to integrate the "I" with
the "other!' Bloom, indeed, has a rich soul. He is luxuriously connected to the world around him, the world
and cosmos of Dublin and its people. In this he contrasts
with other characters in Ulysses. These, leading pinched
lives, are locked within themselves amidst clouds of personal obsession. They perceive the world which lies outside themselves to be contorted and an intrusion upon
their inner being. Not so Bloom whose mind and vision
are clear, whose heart is responsive to those around him,
who exults in the world. As we follow him on his
peregrinations, we become aware of the myriad connections which bind him with an inexhaustible sympathy
to the city and its inhabitants. 2 Food being a prerequisite
°
25
�for existence, he feeds the hungry: in the morning his
cat and wife; later the seagulls over the Liffey, the dogs
in Nighttown; and, in the early hours of the next morning, a debilitated Stephen. He consoles the orphans and
the widows: at Glasnevin Cemetery he leaves for the
family of a deceased acquaintance an offering considered
generous for a man of his means, and shows concern for
their receiving the life insurance. It is not the body alone,
however, which must be fed, but also the soul. Wherever
he goes he enters with sympathy into the lives of those
he meets: Stephen's sister, underfed and in a tattered
dress; Stephen wandering about the vast reaches of his
own intellect; Mrs. Breen shepherding a deranged husband; the elderly, deaf waiter at the Ormond Cafe;
romantic, lame, Gerty MacDowell at Sandymount shore;
Mrs. Purefoy in prolonged labor at the Lying-in Hospital
on Holies Street.
If Bloom is prodigal in entering such relationships
it is not because he is spared affiictions of his own: there
is his father's suicide, and the death of his only son; the
separation from his remaining child, a daughter, who
lives in a distant city; his being an outsider in the Dublin
scene; his lack of commercial success and social status.
Yet, in spite of such adversities and losses, there is
no hint, as he touches upon the experiences offered him
by this Dublin day, that he longs for a release from life,
that he wishes to escape its exigencies through sleep or
death.
In this Bloom recalls to us the "Knight of Faith;' the
Abraham-like figure in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling
who lives for the infinite yet is firmly rooted in the daily
round of a finite world. 21 What is remarkable about this
"knight" is the extraordinary presence he brings to bear
upon the everyday events and encounters of his life. Yet
he seems commonplace to others, his special nature being
unperceived by those around him. Bloom is such a
knight. He is a life-force which vivifies the narrative of
Ulysses and invests its earthbound finiteness with infinite
longings.
26
Life, Joyce seems to tell us, lies with the "Knight of
Faith" solidly rooted in existence; somnolence, sleep and
death follow the cutting loose of the soul from its
moonngs.
NOTES
1. V. Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, Ed. John Updike, New York
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, p. 373.
2. Cf. julian Huxley in Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn to the Universe.
Teilhard views each coming to life of a human being as a cosmic
event: with the arrival of humankind the universe became conscious of itself.
3. The implicit suggestion that the "soul" is something acquired during adolescence is reminiscent of the Talmudic dictum that the
child is born with an "evil inclination;' and that the "good inclination" begins to develop only at puberty (cf. (18), p. 89).
4. J. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York: Viking
Press, 1964, p. 171.
5. Portrait, p. 172.
6. Portrait, p. 170, 172, 252.
7. Cf. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1928.
8. ]. Joyce, Ulysses, New York: Modern Library, 1961, p.3
9. L. Gillet, Clayhookfor jamesjqyce, trans. G. Markow-Totcvy, London and New York, 1958, p. 119. Cited by S. L. Goldberg,Jqyce,
Abeland.Schumann: New York, 1972, p. 114.
10. Portrait, p. 162
11. ]. Joyce, Duhiiners, New York: Modern Library, 1954, p. 288.
12. C. H. Peake,JamesJqyce: The Citizen and the Arlist, Stanford, Calif:
Stanford University Press, 1977, p. 343.
13. Cf. S. L. Goldberg, Jqyce, New York: Capricorn, 1972, p. 40.
14. Duhliners, p. 145-147.
15. F. Budgcn, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972, p. 18, 118.
16. S. Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, New York: Viking Press, 1969, p. 17.
17. Cf. S. Zweig, Die Well von Gestern, Stockholm: Bermann-Fischcr
Verlag AB, 1944.
18. A Cohen, Ever)'man:r 'lidmud, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1979,
p. 42.
.
19. Budgen, p. :H:1 loc cil.
20. Peake, p. :124<129 lot: . .:it.
21. A. Goldman, Tht Joyce Paradox, Evanston, I11.: NmLhwestern
Uniw1·si!y Pres:-;, 1966, p. 76.
WINTER 1985
�Watching Plains Daybreak
for Erick Hawkins
Antelope, buffalo, hawk.
Avatars of Eden,
these gentle, millenia! beasts
dance on dawn-bleached grass
ceremony and enigma.
Their masks do not simply create an aesthetic distance,
inviting us to rest in contemplation; they are spurs
to a certain psychic motion.
Habit blinds us. These masks and stylized movements,
erasing the veil of familiarity in a revelation
of essence, restore to us the instrument of wonder,
the dishabituated eye.
Love moves between the two poles of unity and separation;
this distance is the place of wonder.
This dance thus works its conversion; quietly coerced to wonder,
we are awakened, one and new,
into the revealed Peaceable Kingdom, and drawn awake
to the things of this world in love.
Open your eyes!
Nothing has happened bifore!
This is the first daybreak ever.
Richard Freis
Richard Freis, an alumnus of St. John's, Annapolis, has published poems in
Poetry, The Southern &view and other magazines. President of the First and
Vice-president of the Second USA International Ballet Competitions, he is
a longstanding admirer of choreographer Erick Hawkins.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
27
�Self-Portraits
Elliott Zuckerman
started painting again in the fall of 1977, after
not having done more than an occasional picture
in twenty years. As a young man I had never
painted portraits or self-portraits, but since I
started again faces have been the only subjects
that interest me. When painting other people I enjoy the
effort to get a resemblance; but when I succeed, the
delight in the captured look seems to end my interest
in finishing the picture.
Only in a few of the earlier self-portraits have I been
primarily interested in resemblance. Once a new picture
is begun, the person on the canvas seems to me to be
someone else, someone not-quite-me, usually looking at
me, who may or may not reflect an aspect of my feelings, permanent or transient, about myself. I do not
reproach myself with excessive self-infatuation, because
it is not I who matters but the fellow in the picture.
There are now more than seventy self-portraits.
Those reproduced here were painted in oils and are all
of the same dimensions: 20 X 24 inches.
I
EDITOR'S NOTE:
It is at my urging that Mr. Zuckerman has
permitted these self-portraits to be reproduced
here, even though we could not afford to present them in color. I have asked him to write
a brief preface.
Elliott Zuckerman is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His lecture,
Beyond the First Hundred Years: Some Remarks on the Si"gnificance of Tristan, appeared
in the Winter '84 issue of the Review·
28
WINTER 1985
�Self-Portrait number 8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
29
�Self-Portrait number 35
30
WINTER 1985
�Self-Portrait number 46
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
31
�Self-Portrait number 31
Self-Portrait number 33
Self-Portrait number 48
Self-Portrait number 26
32
WINTER 1985
�Self-Portrait number 51
Self-Portrait number 11
Self-Portrait number 29
Self-Portrait number 4 7
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
33
�Self-Portraii number 24
Self-Portrait number 16
Self-Portrait number 18
Self-Portrait number 28
34
WINTER 1985
�Self-Portrait number 39
Self-Portrait number 41
Self-Portrait number 50
Self-Portrait number 10
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
35
�The Opera Singer as Interpreter:
A Conversation with Sherrill Milnes
Susan Fain
R
ecently I had the opportunity to speak with
Sherrill Milnes, leading baritone with the
Metropolitan Opera. Our talk centered
around the peculiar position of the opera
singer, standing between composer and audience. For twenty years Milnes has performed on the
stages of all the world's major opera houses. Most often
seen in the popular Italian repertoire, he has also received
much critical acclaim for performances of Thomas'
Hamlet and Saint.Saens' Henry VIII. Of towering height,
strongly sculptured facial features, and a unique and
powerful vocal timbre, Milnes dominates a stage
whenever he appears. In talking with him about his
thoughts on opera, one is first struck by the specificity
of his insight. The statements he makes are usually accompanied by examples from a particular work, and often
even a specific passage is sung in support of the thought.
· Opera, to Milnes, is a much bigger-than-life medium.
It has a power to reach out to an audience in a way that
cannot be ignored.
The music takes longer to develop. In a play you say,
"I love you~ In an opera that's a ten minute scene. There's
no such thing as, "I love you;' and "I love you too;' and
then you go on, which is the norm in a play. However
long it would take in a play, in an opera there would
be pages and pages of music, with one emotion going
for that duration of time. The music is like a two-byfour over our heads which is undeniable in its power.
You can't ignore it. To take a simple example, I suppose
you could go to a play being tired or angry at something
else in your life and really not enjoy it at all. And the
play would not demand your attention. The opera would.
In general, the music in opera, opera music (symphony
Susan Fain is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
36
really because it is the orchestra there that is really compelling; a piano wouldn't be as much so though still the
music would be more compelling than the spoken word)
will just take your attention. You could hardly sit there
and ignore it. It makes all of the emotions stronger, bigger, longer-lasting.
For Milnes, opera characters are thus simpler than
characters in a play, yet the presence of the music makes
them also more powerful. One cannot layer an operatic
character with multiple levels of meaning. "You can be
Sherrill, being I ago, pretending maybe one other thing.
But that's about as far as you can go in duplicity or triplicity of meaning!' More complexity simply confuses the
audience and there is no opportunity in an opera for a
long soliloquy of explanation. The Franco Zeffirelli production of Otello at the Met was a case in point.
Franco had a very definite idea about !ago; that he is
almost controlled, or consumed by ·some evil force that
is inside him, and over which he has only limited power.
Somewhat like an exorcist kind of thing, but Franco
didn't say it that way. When Iago says the "Credd:....!'I
believe in a cruel God who created me in his own image, out of the original slime, and after death there is
nothing;- Franco imagined that this is the first time that
Iago has ever said this; that it is this spirit that is saying
it, and that in fact, he is almost shocked at the words
that are coming out of his mouth, over which he has no
control. So that at the end of the "Credo;' Iago doesn't
laugh, but rather emits a horrified scream: "E vecchia
fola il Ciel. (Oh my God, what have I said?) AH!" And
then I cover my head with my cloak.
When you laugh at the end of the "Credd:_as is
traditionally done- then you have to think of the aria
as if it is the hundred and fiftieth time I ago has thought
this. There's a big difference in the way you do the aria
if you consider that he's never said these words before,
and that he's listening to some other voice speaking from
WINTER 1985
�within. And that scares him. But I also found that audiences, however, didn't always understand that. And it
makes the end of the third act (where Otello has swooned
and Iago stands over him proclaiming "Ecco illeone . . :')
a problem if you have rendered the ~~credd' in this
manner.
Instead of the traditional kicking of Otello, or putting my foot on his chest, Franco had me start to choke
the unconsCious Otello; to start to kill him, which is also
very different. Even though Iago says, "Chi puo vietar
che questa fronte prema col mio tallone?" Franco had
me start to choke him instead. Then at some point in
choking him, all of a sudden he realizes what he is doing. He is killing, he is choking Otello, and he realizes,
"This is my leader?' In a way, Iago chickens out. He
always talks about being the number one, but in fact
he doesn't really want to be the number one. He wants
a leader next to him. It's kind of a hate and love relationship. In the hate part he's strangling him, and then
he realizes, "Oh my God! What am I doing? I want
Otello to be there. I don'( want to be the number one:'
He wants to be the number one of the number one, but
he doesn't want to replace his boss, really. So he backs
off from choking Otello and sort of cringes away.
All of those things had a certain curve and validity,
but people didn't understand it. Franco was critical of
there being too many layers, and yet he had this Iago
very layered. As I recall the original performances, I and
the concept were sort of clobbered. They didn't get it
at all. Or else they got it- though nothing they wrote
indicated they did -and didn't like it. It was very untraditional. There are certain things that people want
to see. So now, even in that production, I do the traditional laugh.
For Milnes there is little doubt about the rightness
of yielding to the audience on these kinds of matters.
Because he sees his purpose as communicating a
character to the audience, rather than educating them
about the possible ways to think about a character, he
is sensitive to the audience's understanding. If the concept of the opera, for whatever reason, fails to effect that
commun.ication, then the singer has not achieved his pur-
pose. Milnes then related the story of Nicholai Gedda
and the "Flower Song" from Bizet's Carmen.
"Bizet wrote a very difficult, but very beautiful dimi-.
r;uendo f~r the final B flat of the 'Flower Song; but traditiOnally, singers unable to execute the diminuendo have
sung it loud and to great applause [Milnes then
demonstrates the "Carmen, je t'aime" in booming voice].
Gedda was able to diminuendo that B flat gorgeously,
almost as no other smger could, but the applause was
mtmmal. The question might be asked, why lower
yourself to accommodate the taste of the masses?" For
Milnes, and for Gedda, there is no question about the
answer. Gedda subsequently sang the ending loudly and
everyone raved. Why is this not merely pandering to applause? As Milnes put it, "If you're reaching out and turnmg on the audience, that's part of what it's all about. The
music is there to move the audience. It was written to
that end. Part of the performer's responsibility and obligaTHE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tion to the composer is to elicit that very response, as
long as the means used are valid."
This led us into a discussion of whether or not operas
should be performed come scritto (as written, i.e., exactly
as the score indicates) or whether there is room for interpolation and transposition.
Ordinarily I would only interpolate high notes if I think
they are supported by the drama. Various conductors
around the world-especially Muti in this day-want
only come scritto; never mind even the understood
tra':lspositions like that in La Traviata [which Milnes explamed and demonstrated]. For example, Muti has a
recording of Leoncavallds I Pagliacci where the Prologue
is performed just as written: "Pari di voi spiriamo l'aere!
Incominciate!" so that the voice goes down at the end
of the phrase instead of up. I think that the come scritto
in this instance is foolish. Someone might say, "Leoncavallo didn't write that. Verdi didn't write that" and so
forth, as if to say that we know for sure that what is on
the printed page is the only one that the composer liked.
Lots of cadenzas and other stylistic things were
understood and expected to be done. Certainly in the
bel canto period you had to do that. Sometimes the com-·
pos~r would just put a corona and you were supposed
to smg measures and measures of improvised music.
Various people showing off; that was the idea. Less valid
perhaps in Verdi's time, but I can't believe for a minute
that interpolations were not expected. These composers
were ve~y prac~ical guys, and often they were writing
for particular smgers who they knew would be singing
the part for the first short span of the opera's life. If those
singers didn't have great A flats, of course they weren't
going to write a high A flat in there. That's one factor
to consider.
There is an interpolated high A flat in the "Pieta"
in Act IV of Verdi's Macbeth: "Pieta, rispetto, amore." It's
a little angular to do it. It makes a double dominant
chord. You have two dominants before you go to the
tonic. That's a little angular musically. But Macbeth is
pouring out his heart at that point. "Is my only epitaph
to be a curse?" All of this is inside Macbeth and he is
wailing his soul at that moment. In that context, to take
an extra high note to accentuate the pain of his soul
seems perfectly appropriate. Macbeth is looking back
over his life and thinking, "I did all these things, but all
I ever wanted was pity, respect, and love:'
Milnes than talked about what he refers to as the
"craft" of singing: the limitations imposed by costume
staging, and the singer's own body. How does Do~
Giovanni, or Simon Boccanegra, or Scarpia move about
the stage? The desired answer is provided by the music
and the drama, but to execute that movement requires
the "mechanics" of singing.
~n the case of Simon Boccanegra [who is a young man
m the Prologue and twenty-five years older in Act I] the
problem is how do you move _as a young man? How do
you go from the younger to the older? Those are
mechanics. You can't just think yourself younger and
thereby become younger. You have to be able to make
37
�younger gestures. I have never found that a psychological
concept like younger or older can be immediately
translated into a physical reality just by thinking it. How
do you move older? Thinking older? What is thatthinking older? How do you think older? You have to know
what muscles to relax. You have to learn how to sit down
tired; which muscles aren't as elastic. Gestures have to
slow down. I use a cane as Father Germont [in La
Traviata] because it slows me down and stops muscular
gestures. No one on the operatic stage nowadays is so
old as to be able to portray old men simply by reason
of being old. The operatic stage is energetic in its nature.
But you have to slow certain things down. Simone, in
the Prologue, has to be more energetic and evidence
more off-the-top-of-the-head kinds of gestures than the
older Simone. And then you're poisoned and you're
slowly dying. How do you do that? There's still muscle
in the music. You have to use the curves of the music.
You have to get your energy up, say a big important
phrase, and then be weak again'. You try to portray the
death with a certain amount of physiological correctness
by using the curves of the music.
Movements are also determined to a large degree
by the clothes you are Wearing. You have to move in a
certain way because the costume demands it. Therefore,
we as singers have to learn artificially how to move in
the appropriate way since we no longer wear clothes like
that. When you get up out of a chair you cannot push
yourself up and wiggle your shoulders. That's very inelegant. As nobility you had to move smoothly. The older
operatic -characters can afford to flop into chairs and
struggle to get up from them. Simone does so only when
he is dying since he's still a vital man at forty-five.
Characters are often portrayed differently in different
productions when they are wearing different costumes.
Milnes spoke of some of the differences between a traditional Scarpia [in Tosca] and the concept ofScarpia [and
the opera] that he encountered with German director
Gotz Friedrich.
Operatic characters often show different faces in different
scenes and sometimes I'm not so sure that there is a connection. Scarpia is definitely one man in the church [in
Act 1]. That's his external, public face with the things
he says to Tasca assumed to be private, even though there
is the crowd coming in for the mass. The operatic
assumption is that they're not paying attention or hearing what's going on although I do, as Scarpia, from time
to time check to see if anyone's watching us, because I
think he should. I don't. think that the character should
assume that no one is looking, even though you know
that they're not staged that way, because it's not supposed
to be staging from the character's point of view. But that's
his external face.
In a certain way, what he does in the first act doesn't
so much determine what he is going to do in the privacy
of his own living room [in Act II], although his sensuousness is basically the same. Various Scarpias would
have to manifest that sensuality differently. If a singer
is short and heavy and paunchy he would have to be very
careful with the way he evidences his desire for Tasca.
In fact, it's even determined somewhat by costume. In
38
the GOtz Friedrich production the black, stark kind of
costume stayed for both the first and second acts. The
second act opens and Scarpia is there, with his fingers
tapping on the table, just staring into space. The curtain opens and he's just staring. He's not eating his food
as is traditionally done. He's staring into space and
thinking to himself, "I've got to get Angelotti; What am
I going to do? Well, Tasca may· be my best falcon;' and
so he speaks aloud his first line, "Tasca e un huon falco?'
The concept of the whole opera was that Scarpia himself
was under time pressure. If he didn't get Angelotti back
within a certain time, a day or a couple of days maybe,
his own head could roll; someone is looking over his
shoulder. Of course, none of this is in the opera but it
also makes perfect sense. So Scarpia is thinking to .
himself, "I gotta get him. I gotta get him. I just missed
him by two minutes in the church," and meanwhile there
is this sense of time ticking away. Maybe he's even
perspiring. He's worried. Internally he's worried. That's
a terrific concept. And you're just staring into space and
thinking, "How am I going to get him? Tasca e un huon
falco. I'm gonna use her. And if I do this and this and
this maybe I'll get Mario and Angelotti both?'
In the Met production, however, the costume in the
second act, very unlike the first act, is French Revolution foppish. Also correct as the style of the time. But
the false elegance of the costume negates somewhat that
sense that time is ticking away; that very intense kind
of portrayal. So I started thinking that maybe the intense number wasn't right with the look of the
costume- that false elegant, almost foppish kind of thing
with vest, long coat and all that. So I went back to the
also valid, more traditional, eating food. With that, instead of the driven thoughts of the Friedrich concept,
Scarpia is just thinking calmly, 'Well, Tasca is probably
my best falcon," as he's eating his food and drinking some
wme.
This concept [with Scarpia calmly eating] sets up
something that I do later in the second act: throwing
the wine in Spoletta's face. 'It's a good bit but the Spoletta
has to say it's all right. I usually ask. The actual act of
doing it is dramatically powerful because people aren't
expecting it. If Scarpia takes a bite or two of the banana,
a couple of sips of wine right away, and then goes into,
"Tasca e un huon falco;' then when he goes back to do
the throwing of the wine, it's much more set up than
if he were only to take it into his hand right before he's
going to throw it in Spoletta's face. Then it looks a little
bit like you're picking it up because the stage directions
say so. Also there's a practical consideration. You drink
it down so that there is only about a half an inch of wine
and you don't have liquid all over the stage. If you threw
a whole glass of wine the Spoletta would be drenched.
&arpia is a very special part. In a way like Iago, there
are many ways to do it. I don't mean many ways from
A to Z. There are not a lot of totally different concepts
in terms of the whole arch of it. But there are a lot of
ways to go from A to B and from B to C -the little curves
all along the major curve of a character. Iago the same
way.
Once the vocal line is secure and the technical aspects
of a part are in place, is it necessary for the singer to
understand his character as a human being? For Sher-
WINTER 1985
�rill Milnes, the answer is often "yes!' At the time of our
conversation, Milnes was preparing to sing the title role
in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra-a beautiful but complicated
opera about a young man who loses his daughter and
then finds her again twenty-five years later, having in the
meantime become the first plebeian Doge of Genoa.
There are such good human values in Simon, especially
in the relationship between the father and daughter. It
is the kind of role for which a singer should be older
himself. Vocally, it's very difficult for a young singer
because the center of the part sits low and yet you have
to be able to dominate. Vocally it requires maturity, but
also because of the special character of the father and
daughter relationship. The more you can feel about real
children, particularly having children of your own, the
better that will work.
Simone was also almost too good a man. If he had
been a little more savvy, a little meaner, he would have
dumped Paolo and never have allowed him the opportunity to poison him. Somehow he couldn't believe that
anyone could do something as heinous as that. So in a
way, Simone is naive.
Once on stage, the performer does not have the opportunity to think about who his character is; but part of
what sets Sherrill Milnes apart from less talented singers
is his ability to understand the man he is embodying.
Though operatic characters are indeed simpler and
louder and larger than life, for Sherrill Milnes they seem
never to cease to be human, even an enigma like Don
Giovanni. How evil is Sherrill Milnes' Don Giovanni?
There's a balance. In a Salzburg production by JeanPierre Ponnelle he staged it so that at the end, when
Giovanni goes to hell, my body is still there on stage and
Leporello covers me with my cape. Each person comes
up to me and sings their parts and there's almost a sense
that, "Gee, it's almost too bad he had to ... No, no, no,
he was an evil man and the right thing happened:' There
was a little sense that life was more interesting with him
around. There was just a touch of that. But the Giovanni
must also be dangerous enough to merit his demise. If
he's just a happy-go-lucky Giovanni who likes the girls,
and likes to play jokes a lot, then he's not an important
enough representative of the forces of evil to merit
everlasting damnation. He has to be dangerous. Funloving, but mercurial. He doesn't mind killing. He's
rather amoral, although that's not really true. I think
he does have his own code of ethics. When he kills the
Commendatore he senses for the first time in his life that
something may be going awry. He has broken one of
his codes. He has fought an old man although he had
tried not to. He still does it. He doesn't run away.
Someone from his own rank. An old man. And I have
the feeling that some kind of an alarm goes off inside
Giovanni even when he runs him through, and certainly
in the recitative right after. He doesn't exactly feel
remorseful, because I don't think he knows how to feel
remorseful. But for the first time in his life he may be
worried. A little alarm goes off, so that in the first
recitative, "Leporello, ove sei?" he evidences his concern.
Leporello asks, "Who's dead? You, or the old one?" and
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Giovanni responds, "Que demando la bestia? Il vecchio!"
In that response, especially if one pauses between the
phrases, one can hear the warning going of£ I killed an
old man though he forced me into it. I could have
avoided it. It was wrong of me. Of course I was going
to beat him. And I shouldn't have done it. It is this little
alarm that seems to keep pushing Giovanni through the
entire opera. All operas at that time were 24 hour operas.
Everything took place in 24 hours. And Giovanni is propelled through this time as if he's saying, 'We're going
to have fun even if it kills us." He and the time keep racing on. For all of Giovanni's recitatives I would almost
run onto the stage. He's racing around through the town
as if saying to himself, "Why did I do this? What am
I going to do?" And he's worried. He's never been worried before. Now sometimes he forgets this alarm, like
when he sees Zerlina and is distracted. But for the most
part, it's always there driving him onward.
Mr. Milnes was then asked about the difference between Mozart's Don Giovanni and the Don Juan stories
and legends that can be read in books. What happens
to the story when it becomes an opera?
The beauty of the music is of course the first thing, and
then the emotional power of this story being presented
as an opera. One is hit over the head with the emotional
power of the story when it is accompanied by Mozart's
music. You don't seem to get emotionally tied to the
various Don Juan stories in the same way. The great
beauty of the music creates bigger-than-life emotions so
that it can reach out in a much more overt and powerful way to say Something that the stories cannot say by
themselves.
One thing that is striking about Don Giovanni is that
even though the Don is the title role in what is often
considered the 'perfect opera, from a performer's standpoint, Don GioVanni himself is very shy. When you take
away the recitatives, as you do when the singers rehearse
just with the orchestra, Giovanni has very little to say.
And yet he is the driving force. The opera has to hinge
on him. Yet it is the other people in the opera who have
all the big set pieces. He has only the ~h'}inpagne aria
and the serenade, and in the serenade he is disguised.
And both of those pieces are very s~ort. The most satisfying scene with the orchestra is the supper scene where
Giovanni really gets to sing. At all other-times he'S plways
playi?-g at. s<_>n:ething el~e, ~ven playin~ at being <?iovanm. So It IS m the reCitatlves that he has· the most to
say and where he is most hill¥'elf. This is the hardest
part to communicate to the audie-nce-the conversational
things- because it is pure language. Yet this is where
Giovanni is most himself. And with Leporello he is
always himself.
When you are playing Giovanni onstage, you are not
thinking about the question of good and evil that governs
the opera. You are doing the human things that a
Giovanni would do in this stylized story. We have to
assume that he spent three days with Elvira and couldn't
stand her anymore. And he doesn't get to Zerlina for
a variety of reasons. In the opera, during those last 24
hours, Giovanni succeeds with no one. It's really the rise
and fall of Don Giovanni and the opera deals with the
fall- the last 24 hours of his life.
39
�Dynamic Symmetry,
A Theory of Art and Nature
Howard J. Fisher
J
ust before the onset of the 1920s there began to
be promulgated a certain theory that was partly
mathematical, partly historical, and partly
aesthetic. This theory was the invention of Mr.
] ay Hambidge, who was an artist and designer,
and by it he set out to explicate some remarkable
characteristics he had found in classical Greek and Egyptian designs. He propounded the theory under the title,
"Dynamic Symmetry." This name was meant to be a
translation of the Greek mathematical expression &uv<i.~Et
aUJ.LJ.LE'tpm, a term we know from Euclid. The Euclidean
expression describes a relation between magnitudes
which, though incommensurable directly in length, are
"commensurable in square!' The side and diagonal of a
square are two such magnitudes. As we well know, these
two magnitudes have no common unit. But the squares
constructed upon them respectively do have a common
unit; in fact the square on the diagonal is just double
the square on the side, as we learn in Meno.
"Dynamic Symmetry;' then, is a study of magnitudes
that are commensurable in square only. It is too bad that
both words have acquired meanings that are rather distant from their Greek cognates, as it makes the name
of the study somewhat non-explanatory today. But the
name "Dynamic Symmetry" has survived; and in any
case, respect for ] ay Hambidge's steadfast pioneering
probably dictates that we should retain it.
Hambidge did not take a mathematician's approach
to the incommensurables. His study was applied exclusively to problems of design and proportion in archi-
Howard Fisher is a tutOr at St. John's College, Annapolis. Dynamic ~mmetry,
A Theory of Art and Nature, was originally given as a lecture under the title,
A Grecian Uf?l, at St. John's College, Annapolis in April of 1984.
40
tecture, pottery, sculpture, landscaping, furnituremaking, typography, and other arts. In fact he regarded
Dynamic Symmetry as a rediscovered ancient art of
design and composition which had been perfected by
Egyptian and, especially, by Greek craftsmen long before
its more refined appearance as a ·theoretical science in
the mathematics of Euclid and others.
According to an account which Hambidge accepted,
Greek artisans had obtained from the Egyptians their
techniques for correlating design elements during the 7th
and 6th centuries B. C. E. They perfected this knowledge
as a practical geometry which for some 300 years provided the basic principles for design in the Classic period.
Traces of this practical geometry survived, in a more
highly evolved, mathematized form, in Euclidean
geometry; but the secrets of its·original artistic application otherwise disappeared. Sadly, no accounts remain
that would reveal to us how the ancient craftsmen
developed their designs or what principles and elements
they may have employed. In the absence of historical
evidence, the principles that guided the makers must be
sought through examination· of the surviving works
themselves. This means that any theory of the design of
these things must begin by advancing a theory of analysis:
it must instruct the spectator how to approach the work
in order to understand it as a composition.
In this Egyptian bas-relief (Fig. 1) the goddess is supporting a formalized sky in the shape of a bar. The space
between the vertical_ bars on each side is in the original
filled with hieroglyphic writing, which is not shown in
the sketch.
To analyze this design, Dynamic Symmetry looks first
to the containing rectangle AE; then to subordinate rectangles such as AC, DE, and FB, that appear to indicate
an underlying scheme to the composition. Rectangles DE
WINTER 1985
�A
mathematical language in their reconstruction it is our
task to see through the mathematized version, so to speak,
and to recover what we can of the ancient practices in
their own terms. These practices, in Hambidge's view,
would have been exclusively empirical. They were, from
the first and always, directed to the ends of making, to
the employment of human powers in a world riddled with
other powers both active and passive.
I
\
I
\
\
\
\
\
E
Figure 1
and FB are directly given by the hieroglyphic columns.
Rectangle CB (which is a square) is determined by the
tops of the columns. The goddess's head occupies the
space between the two remaining squares in the upper
corners.
In all cases it is the proportions of the rectangles, the
ratios of their sides, that the analysis seeks to uncover.
For according to Hambidge, all rectangles other than the
squares that were used by the classical designers have sides
that are not commensurable in length, but are only commensurable in square- 8uvcij.tm. cr(>~_q.t&Tpm.
The first labor of Dynamic Symmetry is, then, to
bring to light the elementary rectangles that govern the
classical designs. Yet this enterprise cannot proceed
without a simultaneous investigation into the geometric
properties of these rectangles, of their possibilities for
combination, subdivision, and exhaustion, as well as
other relations. Euclidean geometry is the science that
investigates these properties. I will therefore first set out
some of the elements of Dynamic Symmetry from a
geometrical point of view. Then I will discuss a few
examples of how these are thought to have been made
use of in the design of some works of Greek pottery and
architecture. Such is the order that Hambidge himself
followed in most of his writings; but it has this defect,
that it inevitably makes it appear that knowledge of
mathematical theory was prior to the design process, or
that the designer was striving to illustrate some
geometrical theorem in his work. Any such view would
of course be highly anachronistic, and is quite the reverse
of Hambidge's position. Nevertheless he has been
misunderstood on this point by at least one critic. 1 Let
me therefore emphasize that the Euclidean geometry shall
be only instrumental here. It is our indispensable pathway
to, as the only surviving remnant of, the ancient principles of design. But even if we are obliged to use a
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
If limited to the intended role of a translation from
the Greek, the expression "dynamic symmetry" properly
signifies only the mathematical character of commensurability. But Hambidge expanded his use of the
expression, playing as he did so upon a meaning which
attaches to the word "dynamic" in modern English. In
its modern signification, "dynamic" expresses the action
of force or the exchange of energy. Conformably to this,
Hamb1d15e tau!'ht that there were two kinds of symmetnes ·tn destgn. Opposed to "dynamic" symmetry
which carried overtones of life and activity, there was the
so-called "static" symmetry, suggestive of inertness. In thus
opposing "dynamic" to "static" (in the same spirit as did
Leibniz and the later physicists) he made the deliberate
and irrevocable step of tying the theorems of Dynamic
Symmetry to Nature- both human nature and nature
at large-and particularly to growing nature.
Let us turn to a thing in growing nature from which
we may make a beginning.(Fig. 2) This thing is the shell
of the nautilus, or rather the shape which that shell
preserves throughout its development. This shape is the
logarithmic or equiangular spiral, and though it can be
app_rehended under many of the different properties it
exhibits, we shall pay attention to its characteristic of continued proportion. The spiral (Fig. 3) can be understood
Figure 2
41
�as centering about a point or pole 0 (to which the curve
approaches indefinitely close). If, from 0, radii are drawn
meeting the curve in A, B, C, with the angles AO B and
BOC equal, it will be found then that the radius OB is
the mean proportional between OA and OC.
Now in particular let the equal angles AOB and BOC
be right angles\(Fig.4). Then since OBis the mean proportional it follows that if AB and BC be drawn, the angle
at B will also be a right angle.
Continued construction of the parallels meeting the
four radii, in both directions, results (Fig. 5) in the infinite "curve" called the rectangular logarithmic spiral. As
you see, this shape is strictly analogous to the smooth
B
c
~
A
~~
Figure 3
spiral curve, only it is constructed in jumps instead of
in the continuous progression that the nautilus shell
appears to exhibit.
Observe that since the angles at A, B, and C in this
rectangular spiral are all right angles, we may therefore
complete the rectangle ABCX in which AC is the
diagonal and in which, by hypothesis, OB is perpendicular to AC. This reveals the principle whereby a rectangular spiral may be constructed within a given
rectangle:
In the given rectangle (Fig. 6), draw the diagonal BD.
From a corner C drop CO perpendicular to BD, and
extend it to meet AB in E. Continue constructing perpendiculars EF, FG, and so on. Q E. F. Notice. that the particular proportions of the spiral- that is the ratios of its
c
successive radii or chords- are determined in advance
0
by the proportions of the given rectangle.
Now in the same diagram, extend EF to meet CD
in X. I say that rectangle EBCX is similar to rectangle
ABC D.
The similarity follows from the continued proportion
of the radii from 0. But here is a quicker way to see it.
Since the diagonal and all sides of the smaller rectangle
are respectively perpendicular to their corresponding
Figure 4
D~------------------~---------,C
c
[
A
\
\
\
\
,../ D
~~
\
\
~~
\
~~
\
\
Figure 5
42
~
\
~"'
;'"
AL-------------------~E~--------~B
\/
X
Figure 6
WINTER 1985
�elements in the larger rectangle, rotate the smaller one
through a right angle. The two rectangles will then share
a corner and a diagonal, and so must be similar- by
Euclid VI.24. This rectangle EBCX which was constructed on one end of the given rectangle and also similar
to the given rectangle is called the reciprocal of the given
rectangle.
The term '~reciprocal" also has an algebraic meaning. Suppose we are confronted with a rectangle (Fig.
7) contained by sides equal to unity and m, respectively.
What will be the length of the non-unit side of the
reciprocal rectangle? By the similarity of the figures, it
must be x, where
x : 1 :: 1 : m
or, algebraically expressed,
x=1/m
or
m=1/x.
I leave it to you whether the geometric or the algebraic
expression is the more fundamental.
_,
.,
m
:
I
I
I
I
I
B
Figure 8
I
J
Figure 7
Every rectangle has two diagonals, as AC and BD
(Fig. 8), as well as two possible locations for its
reciprocal- one at each end. So in every rectangle there
are four "poles" or "eyes" where the diagonals of the
reciprocal rectangles intersect those of the given rectangle,
as the upper sketch shows. Joining the poles G,HJ,K produces one central rectangle and four rectangles at the
corners. These are all similar to one another and to the
containing rectangle, since they share diagonals with the
containing rectangle. A little later we will look at a Greek
vase whose design plan grows out of this idea.
Now every rectangle exceeds its reciprocal. But there
exists a series of rectangles that are integral multiples of
their reciprocals. Such are called "root rectangles." Here
are some examples.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Consider the rectangle ABCD (Fig. 9), which is double
its reciprocal FBCE. If we choose FB equal to unity, or
1, then DC equals 2. What then will be the length of BC?
As we have seen, the sides FB, BC, CD must be in
continued proportion, with BC the mean proportional;
hence
1 : BC :: BC : 2
or, algebraically,
BC'=2
BC = -J2 or "root two!'
Thus the ratio between the shorter and the longer
sides of each of these similar rectangles is the ratio of
one tb root two. For the rectangle ABCD in particular,
if we now take BC equal to 1 (Fig. 10) we then have the
longer side AB equal to root two. The rectangle is
therefore called the "root two rectangle:' Naturally its
reciprocal is also root-two, since reciprocal rectangles are
similar to one another.
It is easy to describe other root rectangles in the same
43
�D
D
E
A
E
F
B
I
Figure 11
A
F
I
B
Figure 9
e:
K
c.'
1', , / 1'\
)'"'
\
/
/
D
/
/
/
/
~'], /
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
,/
/
\
\
/:0>
I
/
/
\
\
I
\
I
/
\
\
\
F'
\
\
\
/
f'
\
\
I
I
D
E
I
///
I
i//
A
B
C
F
Figure 12
B
A
Figure 10
unlimited; there are as many kinds of them as there are
integers. But we must distinguish between root rectangles
proper-such as root-two, root-three, and root-fiveand others which are root rectangles in name only. The
way. For example (Fig. 11), let the side AB of the given
rectangle be triple the side FB of the reciprocal rectangle.
Then if FB equals 1, AB equals 3; and we shall have
"root-four rectangle;' so-called, is actually just a double
1 : CB : : CB : 3
or, algebraically,
CB =
-J3 or "root three;'
which identifies the given rectangle (and its reciprocal)
as the "root-three rectangle:'
Root rectangles, then, have integral relations to their
reciprocals. The root-two rectangle is double its
reciprocal, the root-three rectangle triple its reciprocal,
and so on. Clearly the number of root rectangles is
44
square. Its sides are in the ratio two to one; thus they
are rational and directly commensurable. So with all
other root rectangles whose integer is a perfect square
number; they are all multiple squares, so we will not con-
sider them to be root rectangles, properly speaking.
There is a more methodical way to construct the root
rectangles, which is based on their serial evolution from
a square. Consider (Fig. 12) the unit square ABB' K,
with AB and KB' extended as necessary. Swing the
diagonal AB' down to AC and complete the rectangle
ACC 'K. I say that rectangle ACC 'K is the root-two rectangle. For it has been constructed upon the unit as one
of its sides; and its other side is equal to the diagonal
WINTER 1985
�of the unit square, which is of course
..J J2 + 1'
or ..fJ,.
Therefore its sides are in the ratio of one to root two.
QE.D.
By a similar application of the Pythagorean Theorem
to rectangle ACC 'K we see that its diagonal, AC ', must
be equal to root three. Therefore, swing diagonal AC'
down to AD and complete rectangle ADD' K; it is clear
that rectangle ADD' K is the root-three rectangle. In the
same way, rectangles AEE' K and AFF' K are seen to
be the root-four and root-five rectangles.
Once a single root rectangle has been selected, the
designer can construct innumerable related rectangles
according to a procedure called "application of areas." In
Euclid, as also in Apollonius, application of areas is a
method of comparing unequal areas by comprehending
them under the same height or in the same width; only
attention is paid not to the size but to the shape of their
difference. This, like other Euclidean topics, Hambidge
viewed as the outgrowth of an earlier body of empirical
knowledge or lore, supposedly serving the needs of
designers. Perhaps for this reason, Hambidge was a little careless with the Euclidean terminology, preferring
instead a locution that was simpler than but not fully consistent with Euclid's. I am going to follow Hambidge's
account, but remember that it is not quite the same as
Euclid's.
Application of areas is indicated in a classical design
whenever we find one rectangle superimposed upon a
second, so that it shares a side2 or end with the second
square AC is here applied to the side AG of the rectangle,
within the end AH as breadth.) It then falls short, and
the part left over is rectangle DB. If a square, as AF, be
applied instead to the side, AG, it exceeds by the rectangular area BE. It is by such application of areas that
many design themes are developed. Let us examine the
process as applied to the root-two rectangle.
If (Fig. 14) a square AB be applied to the end of a
root-two rectangle, it falls short and leaves the remainder
BC. If then to the end of this remainder a square CD
be again applied, it again falls short and leaves the remainder EB. I say that EB is also a root-two rectangle.
Thus application of areas preserves the proportions of
the original rectangle!
A
VI -I
c
-
'
I;!
D
I
rectangle but exceeds it or falls short of it in extent. As
in Euclid, attention is paid not to the size but to the shape
!:;!
of the excess or defect, "in order," as Hambidge says, "that
"V
'
the area receiving the application might be clearly
understom::l and its proportional parts used as elements
of design." 3
Suppose a square, as AC (Fig. 13), be applied to the
end AH of rectangle AB. (Euclid would have said that
£
M
B
Figure 14
We could prove this by the methods of Euclid, Book
I. But I will show instead a straightforward calculation
H
B
f--------j B
I
A
P
S9uore opplied to end
Figure 13
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
G
A
of the sort Hambidge employed. It is more adapted to
the needs of the craftsman in getting results for a particular case. Euclid himself does much the same in some
of the later books, where the circumstances are similarly
specific.
Let AM be unity, so that AB is the unit square. Then
by hypothesis, AC = ..fJ,, and NC and DE are each equal
to ..J2 -1. Moreover, DB= 1 - ND; and this reduces to
2- ..fJ,. Hence the ratio of sides of rectangle BE will be
G
Squo.re applied to s'1de
DB= 'l__~..fJ, =..J2
DE
..fJ,-1
QE.D.
45
�I
Calculation is easier, even in the age of digital electronic calculators, if we allow ourselves the use of rational
A
I
I
/v
I
approximations to the irrationals involved, such as 1.414
in place of root two. But since inaccuracies are introduced
by the rounding process, I wanted you to see that in this
case, at least, the analysis is exact.
In the same way we can show (Fig. 15) that if a square,
as CB, be applied to the side of a root-two rectangle, as
CK, the space FB by which it exceeds the rectangle is
made up of two squares and another root-two rectangle.
If root-two rectangles CK and DB are applied to both
sides of the square at once, the rectangles will overlap
to the extent of DK, and we can see by the equality of
the sides of the square that this space comprises one
square and two root-two rectangles, as the sketch shows.
c
c
/
/
D
__....-
I
I
A
1
I
I
I
HJ
F
,x
I
I
/
I
I
'
E
\
G
·,
\
\
\
8
E
K
8
Figure 16
F
-----
EF are root-two rectangles, for they share diagonals with
the containing figure. To each end of the upper rectangle
AC has been applied a square; so, as we just saw, each
..f1.
{i_
---I
B
K
c.
F
j)
I
~
1--- --
-- - - - -
{i.
I
--I
-
-
- -
,fi.
I
-
- -
11..
-
--I
of the remaining rectangles AH and IC must be roottwo. These two overlap to the extent of rectangle IH,
which frames the goddess's head. (But notice the delicate
leftward shift of her face and throughout her figure.)
Now let us investigate the proportions of the remaining areas: IH, DE (which is the same as FB), and DK.
We proved (Fig. 14) that when a square is applied to the
end of a root-two rectangle the remaining area is composed of a square plus another root-two rectangle. But
in the goddess design, AH is a root-two rectangle, and
square AJ has been applied to it. Therefore the remainder
IH is made up of a square and a root-two rectangle. But
rectangle AC is a square plus a root-two rectangle; so
rectangles AC and IH are similar. And the end of one
of them is equal to the side of the other; therefore rectangle IH is the reciprocal of rectangle AC.
Turn now to rectangle DE. It is the excess area that
arises when square CB is applied to the side of root-two
rectangle DB. As the previous diagram (Fig. 15) showed,
it must be composed of two squares plus a root-two rectangle. And in the same diagram we saw that rectangle
DK has to be made up of one square and two root-two
rectangles.
There is a remarkable pervasiveness of the root-two
Figure 15
Application of areas is striking in the composition of
the Egyptian design that served as our first example.(Fig.
16) The containing shape for the composition as a whole
is a root-two rectangle, AE, sketched here as having been
evolved from square CB which is applied to it. DB and
46
proportion scheme throughout this design. We have first
the root-two rectangle itself, as AE, whose side -when
the end is taken as unity-is 1.414. We have next rectangle DK, with side 2.414, which is one plus root two.
Next, rectangle AC, whose side is 2.707; this is one plus
one plus the reciprocal of root two. Finally, rectangles
DE and FB, whose sides are each 3.414, or one plus one
plus root two. Serving as a common element in all the
foregoing rectangles-a kind of universal co-ordinating
element, since it does not belong to any single root family
WINTER 1985
�in particular- is the square, with side equal to one. Here
are the proportions, tabulated in order.
Length of Side
1:1
1
1:1.414
-J2
1 +-J'l
1:2.707
1+1+ 1/-J'J.
1:3.414
D
D
Ratio
1:2.414
Rectangle-Root-Two
Family
1+1+-J'J.
. These figures show the remarkable power of applicatiOn of areas to generate new rectangles which are still
expressible in terms of the fundamental rectangle. This
preservation of the proportions of the fundamental root
rectangle is what Jay Hambidge called the "theme integrity" of Greek design. Virtually all of the designs
studied by Hambidge show that the craftsman chose a
single root rectangle and held to it. We almost never find
combinations of root-two and root-three rectangles for
example, in a single piece.
'
Now the method of application of areas automatically preserves theme integrity among the resulting
rectangles- but only if the rectangle that serves as the
base of the s~stem is a root rectangle proper. Rectangles
with ratwnal sides cannot be classified into "theme" families
at all! 4 This is the mathematical reason why the root rectangles proper, rather than rational rectangles, were
favored by the Greek designers, according to Hambidge.
Only the root rectangles allow such universal harmonization between the elements and the whole.
I said earlier that the number of kinds of root rectangles is unlimi~ed. But clearly as we move to higher and
h1gher roots 1t becomes increasingly difficult to"
distinguish them visually from one another. Now according to Hambidge, the Greek artists seldom if ever made
use of a rectangle of an order higher than root five. It
would, however, be most rash to conclude that the reason
for this upper limit was imprecision with respect to sight.
I have here drawn (F1g. 17) the root-five and root-six rectangles side by side. They do resemble one another closely;
but I doubt that an>:one will maintain that the eye is
powerless to d1stmgu•sh between them, provided there
IS
of the music that is to be played. The criteria lie in the
intelligible forms, not in the sensory apparatus of the
beholder.
In fact there is a mathematical consideration, which
has nothing to do with visual discrimination, that singles
out the root-five rectangle. This is its close relation to
ano_ther rectangle which was regularly employed in Greek
des1gn- the rectangle of the "Golden Section!'
a sufficient artistic motive to do so. The considerations
h~re
are analogous to the tuning of musical scales. The
d1fference between the true diatonic pitches A-sharp and
B-flat IS small, to be sure. But we cannot know whether
it is insignificant until we know what are the tonal demands
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Figure 17
II
As we began our study of reciprocal rectangles by
reflectmg upo~ the appearance of the spiral in growing
nature, so ~gmn let us return to another phenomenon
of growth m order to approach the Golden Section.'
Although there are a host of actually-occurring natural
phenomena that could be chosen, I prefer to consider
a somewhat fanciful one, which was put forward as a problem by Leonardo of Pisa between 1202 and 1228.6 This
is the question: "How many pairs of rabbits can be produced from a single pair in one year?" Leonardo sup-
posed that every month each pair begets a new pair which,
the second month on, become themselves productive. With this supposition he found that the number of
pairs in successive months would be:
f~om
1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, ...
These numbers follow the rule that each one after the
.
second, 1s the sum of the two that precede it.' This is a
summation series, but it is widely known as the Fibonacci
series· in honor of Leonardo who was the son of Bonacci·
that is, Leonardo Jiglio Bdnacci.
'
It is a remarkable trait of summation series that no
matter what chance number we may happen to begin
with, the series quickly begin to resemble one another.
For example, consider this summation series beginning
arbitrarily with the number 29:
29, 29, 58, 87, 145, 232, 377, ...
47
�In fact it is a theorem, which however I shall not here
prove, that all summation series, beginning with any
number whatever as the first term, approach without limit
the same ratio between successive terms. We can already see
that this ratio, whatever its exact value (a value which
is in fact irrational), can be given approximately by the
ratio of the last two terms of the two series which so nearly
resemble one another; that is to say, by 377/233 or
377/232 -which is a value around 1.61 or 1.62. Let us
designate the exact value of the ratio, whatever it turns
out to be, by the letter <p (for Fi-bonacci?). I will show
you later how to express it more exactly. And let us ask
the following question: "Is there a sequence which meets
both the requirements of continued summation and continued proportion simultaneously?" That is, is there a
sequence
such that for any three successive terms these relations
hold:
D
r
c.
E
'
'
"-
/
"-
"-
I
I
'
I
' '
I
"-
I
"-
"-
I
"-
I
"-, ol
'(;!
I
J
I
'-
'
I
F
A
'l'f
"-
"-
"-
B
Figure 18
(1)
and
?
(2)
If there is such a series, it will exhibit simultaneously
characteristics of the growth of the nautilus and also the
growth of a population of Leonardo's rabbits; for each
of its terms will be at the same time a mean proportional
and an arithmetic difference between the two neighboring
terms. I don't know if that remarkable combination is
enough to make you want to call it "Golden." It is in any
case reminiscent of the problem that faced the Demiurge
in Plato's Timaeus: the simultaneous control of geometric
and arithmetic means in the tuning of the Pythagorean
scale. Suppose then, that there is such a series; divide
the terms of equation (2) through by an+ 1> and we have
rectangle FC has the same relation to the given rectangle
as was set forth earlier in Figure 7, and thus it is the
reciprocal of the given rectangle. QE.D.
The rectangle whose sides are in golden ratio to one
another is called, it will come as no surprise to hear, ,the
"Golden Rectangle;' and we can state the following
theorem about it, which is merely a restatement of what
has just been proved: "When a square is applied to the
end of a golden rectangle, it is deficient by a space which
is itself a golden rectangle!'
By this same relation we are also in a position to
calculate <p. Since <p and its reciprocal must differ by
unity, or
<pi- 1/<p, = 1,
Multiply through by <p for the following quadratic
equation:
which can also be written
<p -1 =1/<p.
What this tells us is, <p has a value that exceeds unity
by its own reciprocal. No rational value of <p can satisfy
this condition. But we can give geometrical expression
to it as follows.
Consider a rectangle DB (Fig. 18) whose sides are
in the golden ratio to one another: let the sides be <p and
1, respectively. Then this rectangle must be composed of a square
plus its own reciprocal, according to the relation we just
derived. For AB = <p, and let square DF be constructed
so that AF = 1. Then FB = <p -1 =1/<p as above. Therefore
48
Reducing this by the quadratic formula (but ignoring
the negative root), we have
m= 1 +..J5,1618
2
.
'Y
which value is nicely in line with our earlier estimate.
We thus have the ratio of sides of the golden rectangle.
It remains only to show how to construct the golden
rectangle, since its dimensions are not rational. Euclid
gives two methods: Proposition 11 of Book II, To cut a
given finite straight line so that the rectangle contained
WINTER 1985
�by the whole and one of its segments is equal to the square
on the remaining segment; and Proposition 30 of Book
VI, To cut a given finite straight line in mean and extreme ratio. Either of these methods suffices, but here
is a shorter way that is given by Hambidge and many
other writers.
With AB as base (Fig. 19), construct the square
ABCD, and let BC be bisected at E. Join ED, and extend BC to F, where EF equals ED. Complete rectangle
AF. I say that rectangle AF is the golden rectangle; and
rectangle DF is the reciprocal, for it is deficient by a
square.
For let AB equal unity.
J
D
A
//
/
/
\
/
\
I
I
I
I
I
I
vv
\'""'
":I
\/
H
B
E
'
\
\
\
\
\
I
\
'
\
I
\
I
I
~,~
\
I
' '
I
\
G
c
F
Figure 20
DE='-"(\1,) 2 +1'-
V,..j5
+ V,..j5
1 +..J5
BF= V,
or
BF=
cording to Hambidge, is found frequently in classical
compositions. In order to apply it to a particular exam-
2
ple, let us draw out a few more properties of this shape.
Let there be given the root-five rectangle AB (Fig.
21) with central square DC and flanking golden rectangles
AI and CH. Now rectangles AC and IH are also golden
and this, as we just saw, is cp. QE.D.
G
D
A
'-
I
I
I
I
I
""
"' \
\
\
<!-:./
\
"'I
I
\
I
I
I
I
B
E
C.
rectangles, because each is formed from a golden rect-
angle and the square on its side. Draw diagonals AC and
HI, intersecting at E. Through E, draw FG parallel to
the base, and draw also the vertical, EK.
We may then immediately identify four other golden
rectangles, namely EH, EI, AE, and EC; they are all
parallelograms about the diameters IH and AC, and are
therefore all similar to one another and to the golden
rectangles AC and IH.
A Greek drinking cup (Fig. 22) in the collection of
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 7 illustrates the plan
we have just set out. What follows is one of more than
200 analyses which were published either by Jay Hambidge or by L. D. Caskey, late Curator of Classical Antiquities at MFA.
F
Figure 19
A
\)
H
In this same construction we see the close geometrical
connection that I said was to be found between the golden
rectangle and the root-five rectangle. In the same way
that we constructed rectangle DF in the previous figure,
construct (Fig. 20) rectangle JB on the opposite end of
the figure. I say that rectangle JF, formed of two golden
rectangles and a square, is the root-five rectangle.
For let AB equal unity. EH~EF~ V,..j5. But HF is
the sum of EH and EF; thus HF ~ ..)5, and rectangle JF
is the root-five rectangle. QE.D.
The root-five rectangle conceived as a square plus
two flanking rectangles is a design element which, ac-
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
I
K
C
B
Figure 21
49
�A
,,
\
\
\
'-
''-
\
f
'
I
I
IE
angle. But it was the circumstance of the pedestal base
being equal to the overall height that brought the figure
forth as a square plus two flanking rectangles, rather than
some other of the myriad ways in which the root-five rectangle may be subdivided. In Dynamic Symmetry the
concern is not with line but with figure in the sense of
/
/
/
-\-
'N
Euclid. (This is not "area," which is a notion that carries
metrical connotations that are no doubt anachronistic.)
'-
'
M
drinking cup, the containing figure was the root-five rect-
H
D
I
K
""
c
B
L
Figure 22
From the point of view of figure, as Hambidge several
times notes, voids function in a design just as actively as
do masses. In our example, the "empty" spaces FI and
CG- each of which· can be shown to be a double
square- are part of the spatial structure of this piece.
In the sketch, we see the main design plan for the
piece: the root-five rectangle I AB! serves. as the contain-
ing figure for the cup (minus its handles), while the central square DC determines the diameter of the base. The
join between bowl and pedestal is fixed by the intersection of diagonals, so that the rectangle AB containing
the bowl and the rectangle NC containing the pedestal
are similar to one another. Each is composed of two
golden rectangles.
The handles extend beyond the root-five rectangle.
If spaces AM and HL are added to accommodate the
handles, it is found by measurement that each added
space is (nearly) congruent with the area NC and that
each is therefore also composed of two golden rectangles.
Observe also that the curve of the pedestal appears
to be fixed in part by the intersection of diameters NK
and EI. Finally, the lower extremity of the handle join
lies on a diameter of the flanking rectangle, as AI.
Such an analysis as this one raises a number of questions. Are the geometrical correlations really essential to
this design, or are they just accidental? Moreover, do they
Now let us take up a more complex treatment of the
golden rectangle. This time I will simply assert the proportions of the design plan. The calculations are
straightforward enough, but they are time-consuming.
You will remember that when we were talking about
the reciprocal rectangles I called your attention to the
four "poles" (Fig. 8) which every rectangle has- these are
the centers of the four rectangular spirals that can be
drawn in every rectangle. Through the poles (Fig. 23)
of golden rectangle XY draw lines parallel to the sides,
X
I'' ' ,
\
w
\
I
I
J ',
//
I/
/
'f...
\
I
I
\
I
I
' I
'
I,
H
I
I
" "
'
'
:/
v
'
X
/
..
" / II
/-<..
I
I/
//I
J /K \
s/ /
\
\
I
'-
I
/ I
1\
/
I
taining figure; we cannot credit the root-five rectangle
50
'
A
reflect characteristics that are uniquely pertinent to the
with this relation. On the other hand, they will be golden
rectangles only if rectangle AB is root-five.
It would have been equally appropriate to raise such
questions in the case of the Egyptian bas-relief. If they
seem of greater urgency here, it is probably because of
the greater variety of things that are being counted as
"correlations" in this analysis, for example, intersections
of diagonals at a particular feature.
Hambidge's theories have been subjected to vigorous
criticism on just such points as these. • With your permission, though, I would like to defer their consideration until we have seen more of the kind of thing Dynamic
Symmetry looks for in a composition. One central idea
is illustrated in this example. Dynamic Symmetry is not
just a theory of ratios, but rather of spatial relations which
certain select proportions make possible. Here, works are
viewed in respect of their containment by a figure, and in
respect of their implicit articulation of that figure. In the
'-
\
i\
/
I
\ I
root-rectangles, or are they merely relations that are of
general validity? For example, rectangles AE and EC have
to be similar, no matter what proportions govern the con-
u
A
\
\
\
'
'-\
y
A
rp
<fJ
w
J
K
j'J
I
G
I
H
rp
rp
B
y
Figure 23
WINTER 1985
�as shown. We will then have golden rectangles at the corners and in the center, and squares WG, KZ remaining. Each of the areas AK and GB is composed of a
square plus a golden rectangle (Fig. 24). So we can
calculate the ratio of sides of figure AB; it is 3.618 : 2.618,
or 1.382.
A
A.
c
L
N E
--,
'I
''
/
J
!.,
I
L
E
/~
--
I,
/
~/
I
I
/'.,
I
t //
'
_ ; _ - --'L--
'
'
--
-- -/r----r,-- -/
'P
''
/'
/
/
/
I
I
I
' ,I
D
K
M
I
I
I
L/
''
/
/
/
/
''
'
F
Figure 25
I
'P
',I
-
/
I
I
I
/
'/ '
/
'
G
t
A
H
~-
the lower corner of the foot. The upper edge of a painted
decorative border coincides (nearly) with side G H.
The upper 2.618 rectangle functions this way: To the
applied squares AM and NK correspond respectively the
remainders LK andJN, both golden rectangles. The intersection of the square's diagonal, as AM, and the rect-
p
I
D
Figure 24
In his book on the Greekvase, Hambidge asserts that
many of them were constructed according to proportions
inherent in the 1.382 rectangle. Here9 is one of them (Fig.
25).
The containing rectangle AB is 1.382. Squares AH
and JB are applied at top and bottom to leave the remainders AK and GB which are 2.618. To the uppermost of these, squares NK and AM are applied; and
similarly also to the lowermost, as shown in the righthand sketch. The intersections of diagonals of the squares
determine the central rectangle CEFD, which is rootfive (for imagine it displaced to the right by the amount
FB; it will then be seen to consist of a square plus two
flanking golden rectangles). This central rectangle determines the width of the lip and the diameter of the bottom of the base.
The lower portion of the figure is governed by dimensions of the rectangle GB in conjunction with the central root-five area. The intersection of diagonal QD and
its reciprocal-producing perpendicular RS determines the
level of the top of the base. Diagonal DG passes through
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
angle's diagonal, as JN, determines the level of the upper edge of a decorative border.
Finally, consider a line PT which bisects the containing rectangle just above the vase's greatest width.
Diagonals PB and TV intersect at a level which determines the lower edge of the decorative border, while the
diagonal PD passes through the upper corner of the foot.
Our two vases illustrate that the classical mode of
employment of the golden rectangle was more subtle than
some investigators have appreciated. Although both pieces
depend decisively upon the compositional properties of
the golden rectangle, neither employs it as the overall
containing shape. In fact, of the rectangles that do function as containing shapes in Greek pottery, the golden
rectangle is by no means a predominating one, though
it is frequent. to
The golden rectangle has been characterized by a host
of writers- and researchers as the "most beautiful rect-
angle." Evidently, however, to the Greek designers a "most
beautiful" shape was not one to be slavishly perpetrated
at every possible occasion. Such an idea would be as
ridiculous as Socrates's comic example in the Republic
of the man who wanted to paint a statue's eyes purple
because "the most beautiful organs deserve the most
beautiful color:' Rather, as Hambidge observed, the
aesthetic significance of the golden rectangle in classical
design -lies in its value as a co-ordinating factor. 11 Its rich
system of relations and subtle potentials for transformation afford the designer immense scope of variation while
yet preserving the mathematical grounds of that unity
of theme which appears to have been so important in
Greek design practice.
51
�The methods of analysis used in these examples from
pottery are fully applicable in other arts. Except for the
dynamic symmetry. Nevertheless, Hambidge thought
relative difficulty of obtaining accurate measurements,
analysis of architectural works, for example, proceeds in
tually became the major part of his program to effect
exactly the same way and discloses identical geometrical
themes. In The Greek Vase Hambidge says: "There is no
essential difference between the plan of a Greek vase and
the plan of a Greek temple or theater, either in general
aspect, or in detail." 12 In all cases, Hambidge maintains,
analysis of Greek or Egyptian compositions shows that
the artist worked within a predetermined area:
The enclosing rectangle was considered the factor which con~
trolled and determined the units of the form. A work of art
thus correlated became an entity comparable to an organism
in nature.
Only such rectangles, simple or compound, were used, whose
areas and submultiple parts were clearly understood. If the
design for a vase shape were being planned the artist would
consider the full height of the vessel as the side or end of a
certain rectangle, while the full width would be the end or other
side. The choice of a rectangle depended upon its suitability
for a purpose, both in shape and property of proportional subdivision. A rough sketch was probably made as a preliminary
and this formalized by the rectangle . .. (The Greek Vase, p. 44)
that it was an inferior kind of symmetry, and it evena reintroduction of the dynamic techniques into contem-
porary design.
Here (Fig. 26) is a sketch of a ground plan that appears in one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. It is easy
to see how the plan is based upon the multiple repetition of the little square as unit. This is severe static sym-
metry.14 What is most lacking in this kind of design, as
compared with the dynamic designs we have studied, is
the sense of governance by the containing whole. The
subdivisions in the Leonardo design are not obtained
from the containing figure but from the Cartesian grid
( ]_
~
,....., ,..-
,....
Of all the virtues that Hambidge found in designs
~
based on d)rnamic symmetry principles, this character
of governance by the whole was probably in his view the
-
cardinal virtue. Its mathematical basis is the recurrence
of the ratio of the fundamental rectangle when given areas
are subdivided by application of areas-a recurrence that
is peculiar to the root rectangles and which we have
already recognized under the name of "theme integrity!'
The intimate harmonization of whole and part was
for Jay Hambidge a reflection of the organic designs produced in nature, and this impelled him to play increasingly upon the word "dynamic!' Gradually abandoning
its original, severe role- the mere translation of the
mathematical adverb ovv<ii'H-he more and more began
to rely upon a more current usage, a usage increasingly
expressive of force, life, and energy.
Hambidge repeatedly contrasted the dynamic symmetry of figure and its associations with life and organism
with an inferior,\ arithmetic"\ kind of symmetry that is
based on the lineal unit, or direct commensurability of
line. This kind of symmetry he called "static." "Static" symmetry so-called is based on a fixed unit. It is the kind
of ubiquitous commensurability we come up with when
we design on graph paper. "Static" symmetry characterizes
the art of most of the great civilizations, ancient and
modern. According to Hambidge, only the Egyptians and
the Greeks mastered the practices of dynamic symmetry:
and even the Greeks seem to have gone through a stage
of "quasi-static" design before bringing the dynamic
techniques to full fruition -and later, in the Hellenistic
period, to have reverted to the static methods. Certainly
the great Renaissance artists used static rather than
52
\I
r7 "\.
\
I 1'\
"/ " '
v
/
I
:'\ "
~ -
ltci
'
v
./
/
/
:,.-....
i'-'
\
)
If.}_
Figure 26
(or "trellis;' as Hambidge calls it). In fact this trellis vies
with the containing shape for dominance and may even
appear to be logically prior to it. A Cartesian grid is essentially infinite 15 and is "contained" only in a most accidental
sense by the overall shape. "Limited;' in fact, rather than
"contained;' is probably a better word with which to ex-
press the relation of a statically symmetric shape to its
outline. There is no reason inherent in the Cartesian grid
why the overall shape should not have been wholly different; and if it were, the pattern of subdivision based
on repetitive units would be affected not at all.
When the grid pattern is as emphatic as it is in the
Leonardo sketch, we can easily have the sense that the
grid is threatening to break out of the square into elongations and extensions. This actually happens -as when
an addition is made to an existing building. In any case,
the static treatment tends to emphasize measured, counted
space over shaped space.
"Static" symmetry need not be based on the square.
It is imposed whenever there is used a repetitiVe element,
whatever that element may be. It could be (Fig. 27) the
WINTER 1985
�equilateral triangle, the hexagon, or even one of the root·
was an antecedent specification- this is one of the ques-
rectangles. The mere deployment of a root-rectangle does
tions at issue) may not have been successfully achieved
by the builder, in the case of an edifice, or may have been
altered in the firing process, in the case of a clay vase.
And we must admit the effects of vandalism, decay, ero-
not achieve dynamic symmetry unless its peculiar potentials for explication by application of areas are made use
of.
sion, and other ravages of time in obscuring even the
dimension that was in fact achieved. Next, is it possible
to give a retrospective analysis of a given geometrical
form, otherwise undocumented, that can ever be more
than speculative? For example, if a certain architectural
facade should measure, say, 69.52 feet by 39.93 feet, for
a calculated ratio of 1. 741- are we to understand this as
an intended construction of the root-three proportion,
1. 732, or of the simple Pythagorean ratio 7:4, which is
1. 75? Or of some altogether different significance- or
none at all?
Furthermore, what categories of geometric "facts" in
a design are to be regarded as having aesthetic
significance? We found a feature in one of the Greek vases
that fell neatly at the intersection of two diagonals. But
in the overall design there are dozens of diagonals, and
hundreds of such intersections. The likelihood of a chance
IIIIIII
I
Figure 27
coincidence between a design feature and one of these
intersections is high, as Hambidge's critics have noted,
perhaps so high as to deprive even the most conservative
analysis of any statistical validity.
All of these criticisms were amply voiced during Jay
Hambidge's lifetime. He and his collaborators were not
without a defense of their position, but it cannot be said
that the defense is satisfactory in all respects. There reIII
To conclude this talk, I would like to voice a few
thoughts about Dynamic Symmetry as an historical
theory. Understandably, it is the historical aspect of Hambidge's teachings that has commanded most attention apd
generated most controversy. He asserted that the Greek
designers did deliberately aim for governance and theme
integrity, and that they consciously and masterfully
cultivated a system of empirical geometry to further those
ends. Given the nature of the available evidence, this is
an extremely difficult thesis to establish. Only occasionally can its components be formulated in a clearly testable
way; and even then, the "test" is not always decisive. Ham-
bidge and his collaborators repeatedly tried to show that
analyses of Greek artifacts according to dynamic symmetry principles were in significantly better agreement
with the actual dimensions of their subjects than were
main powerful inducements to skepticism, both of a
methodological and of an evidentiary nature. But despite
its glamour and notoriety, I do not think that the
historical aspect was the main component of Hambidge's
program. His overriding aim was to restore Dynamic
Symmetry to a place among the practical resources of
the contemporary working artist.
Most directly serviceable to the artist was his setting
out of those design objectives that are advanced by the
distinctive geometry of the root rectangles: elevation of
area relations over line relations, efficacy of the containing
rectangle, and the unity of proportion theme. Hambidge
never tried to promote these attributes as eternal or
universal aesthetic values; still less did he believe that the
techniques for achieving them constituted a recipe for
the manufacture of beauty. But he did believe that any
activity that aspired to creative power demanded a
substantial fabric of know-how and collective intelligible experience if it was to achieve anything. This credo
other, competing, analytic systems. But these claims were
found voice in his many and vigorous exhortations to
just as vociferously by other parties denied 16
Fruitful pursuit of this controversy is even now
practicing artists to put dynamic symmetry techniques
to use in their own work. Hambidge's rationale for such
hindered by a lack of sufficient understanding of the very
a redirection of artistic attention was that it would restore
canons of evidence themselves. For example, what level
of precision is to be regarded as significant in the
measurement of otherwise undocumented artifacts? For
a vigor and direction that, he felt, had been lacking in
modern design. There was, he asserted, a malaise plagu-
we have somehow to take account of the likelihood that
the dimension specified by the designer (if, indeed, there
preoccupation with the individual, the superficial, the
unique and the gimmicky. It had its root in a cultural
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ing twentieth-century art, in the form of an excessive
53
�malady that was more profound: our wholesale loss of
the vision of Nature as an objective but accessible intelligible order. For the artist, absence of such a public
Nature is equivalent to an emasculation of all the formal elements of his craft. Hambidge wrote:
Modern art, as a rule,.aims at freshness of idea and originality in technique of handling; Greek art aimed at the perfection of proportion and workmanship in the treatment of old,
well-understood and established motifs.
... this is the lesson that modern artists must learn; that the
backbone of art is formalization and not realism ... The Greek
artist was always virile in his creations, because he adopted
nature's ideal. The modern conception of art leads toward an
overstress of personality and loss of vigor. (The Greek Vase, pp.
44 and 142)
Hambidge's writings played down the real primacy
of his restorative program for the working artist. His
arguments were skewed to the historical question to a
degree that was partly unavoidable but partly needless
and misleading. He wrote as if it were the fact of the
Greeks' success with these methods-assuming it to have
been a fact- that made plausible a modern restoration
of the dynamic techniques.
The weakness of such an appeal is obvious; if the truth
of the historical claim is doubted, then so is the conclusion of superior merit correspondingly weakened. The
nature of the evidence, the evaluative tools of archaeology
and metrology, and the formulation of appropriate
statistical treatments were all in the 1920s too
undeveloped in the directions required by Hambidge's
study either to corroborate it or to refute it; and in such
a case weight remains with the skeptical position.
The situation is largely unchanged in the 1980s,
although comparable evidentiary and methodological
questions have begun to be addressed more adequately.
Much of this attenti9n has been in response to the work
of Alexander Thorn on megalithic monuments in Britain
and to other arChaeoastronomical investigations in
Britain, Mesoamerica, and the southwestern United
States.
Uncorroborated (but, I say again, equally unrifuted)
by other sciences, Dynamic Symmetry's appeal as a
modern design practice depended essentially on the persuasive powers of one man: Jay Hambidge. During the
short period of his public activity in this cause he was
active indeed. Besides his own research he inspired and
partly guided the research of others. 1 ' He published four
books (with two more that appeared posthumously) and
edited a journal, all devoted to Dynamic Symmetry. 18
He conducted classes and lectures for students in New
York and Boston, and he regularly addressed professional
associations of artists and designers here and abroad. His
influence spurred Tiffany's of New York to offer a line
of silver vessels made according to the "dynamic" ratios.
But Jay Hambidge died in 1924; and with his death the
54
influence of his ideas ceased to grow, despite the labors
of a company of dedicated followers whose numbers have
not vanished to this day.
I am sorry that obscurity has devolved upon Jay
Hambidge's work. Besides the metrological questions that
it raised, which archaeology and the other sciences of
antiquity will continue to address in one form or another
as their methods develop, there is that in Hambidge's
work which is particularly valuable to the spectator of
art, in expanding his observational powers. By forcing
our attention beyond the line and the curve, to the rectangular shapes they may imply, Hambidge opened up
what is literally a new·dimension in seeing. He once expressed the germ of this idea in the form of an aphorism.
It might be a little overstated- but evidently he didn't
think so. I leave it with you as a provisional final word: 19
"The line means nothing to design; the area means
everything."
FOOTNOTES
1. Rhys Carpenter, "Dynamic Symmetry: A Criticism," in
American journal of Archaeology, Second Series, XXV, 1
(1921). See especially page 35, where Carpenter assumes
that if the theory of Dynamic Symmetry is true,
"slaveborn humble artisans" would have to have known
a great deal about "all this geometry." For Hambidge's
opinion to the contrary, see The Diagonal, I, 1 (November
1919), p. 8 (note 11 below).
2. Generally I use "side" to denote indiscriminately either
the longer or the shorter of the lines that contain a given
rectangle. But when distinguishing them is important,
I shall use "side" to denote the longer line and "end" to
denote the shorter.
3. Jay Hambidge, Dynamic Symmetry: The Greek Vase, New
Haven, Yale University Press, 1920. Abbreviation for
references: The Greek Vase.
4. Rectangles with commensurable sides cannot be classifi"ed into theme
families. For the ratio of sides of any rectangle belonging
to the
Vm family can
be expressed as
c
where a, b, c, m are integers. The family will be a "proper''
root family only if m is a nonsquare integer; if m is a square
integer the radical can be eliminated and the family is said
to be merely "nominal" (like the so-called root-four family).
Any rectangle with commensurable sides has ratio p/q,
where p, q are integers. Then if possible, let
WINTER 1985
�Then, first, since p, q, a, b, care all integers, m cannot
have any nonsquare value; thus the rectangle does not
belong to atry proper root family. Moreover, with integers
p, q given and m any square integer, integral values of
a, b, c that satisfy the equation can always be found.
Thus the rectangle belongs simultaneously to all nominal
root families. Hence rectangles with commensurable sides
cannot be classified into theme families. Q.E.D.
11. Jay Hambidge, ed., "The Diagonal" (a periodical) I, 5
(March, 1920), p. 91. A total of twelve issues of this jour·
nal were published by Yale University Press; the first
dated November, 1919 and the last dated October, 1920.
12. The Greek Vase, Foreword, p. 6.
13. "Arithmetic" is my epithet, not Hambidge's.
5. The term "Golden Section" is of 19th-century origin. An
earlier term, "Divine Section," appears in Kepler and
other 16th-century writers. Proclus refers to it simply as
"the Section," and in Euclid it is the division into "mean
and extreme ratio." SeeR. C. Archibald, "Notes," in The
Greek Vase, pp. 146-157.
14. The plan also shows radial symmetry, which according
to Hambidge is another static form. '
6. Published for the first time in 1857.
16. Rhys Carpenter, op. cit.
7. MuseumofFineArts, Boston, No. 03.784. See The·Greek
Vase, p. 116; also L. D. Caskey, Geometry of Greek Vases,
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Communications to the
Trustees, V, 1922, p.175 (Fig. 132). Caskey reports a
bowl diameter of 27.4 em and a height of 12.05 em
which, however, appears to be a misprint for 12.15 em.
According to the latter figure, the bowl diameter exceeds
a true root-five rectangle by less than 3 mm.
17. Especially L. D. Caskey.
8. E. M. Blake, "Dynamic Symmetry-A Criticism" in The
Art Bulletin, III (1920). Also see Rhys Carpenter, op. cit.
9. Pelike, Metropolitan Museum, New York City, No.
06.1021.191. From The Greek Vase, pp. 95, 98.
10. Caskey, op. cit., p. 6.
15. For a haunting treatment of this Cartesian truth, see
Jorge Luis Borges' story, "The Library of Babel," in Ficciones, New York, Grove Press, 1962.
18. Besides The Greek Vase and The Diagonal, already cited,
these writings ofJay Hambidge are listed in the Library
of Congress Card Catalog:
·
Dynamic Symmetry, Boston, c. 1919. Microfilm 36800NK.
The Parthenon and Other Greek Temples: Their Dynamic Symmetry, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1920.
Dynamic Symmetry in Composition as Used by the Artists, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Author, 1923. N7430.H3.
The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry, New York, Brentano's,
c. 1926 and Dover, 1967. NC703.H25.
Practical Applications of Dynamic Symmetry, ed. Mary C.
Hambidge, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1932.
19. The Diagonal, p. 92.
•
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
55
�The Song of Timaeus
Peter Kalkavage
T
his lecture is about the strangest of Platds
dialogues, the Timaeus. I would like to focus
our attention this evening on the famous eikos
mythos, the "likely story," told by the character
Timaeus.
The likely story tells about the beginnings of the visible, touchable world. Our story-teller, Timaeus, takes us
through the process by which the world was generated
from its most radical causes and principles. Whereas the
Republic dramatizes the founding of regimes both in city
and in soul, the likely story shows the founding of the
cosmic regime, the government of the world. For
Timaeus, the world's founding depends to a great extent on the power of mathematics. Throughout the likely
story, Timaeus draws the listener's attention to the arts
of arithmetic, geometry, and especially the theory of ratio
we find in the fifth book of Euclid's Elements. Timaeus'
physicist is a mathematical physicist, and his bond with
mathematics expresses his dream that the world be wellgoverned, that the cosmos no less than souls and cities
display the virtues of stability, moderation, and wisdom.
Timaeus at one point articulates the motto of such a
physicist. It takes the form of a little jingle in Greek: pan
de to agathon kalon, kai to kalon ouk ametron; "All the good
is beautiful, and the beautiful is not measureless:' 1 The
physicist for Timaeus represents all that is decent, healthy,
and beautifully arranged, all that is conveyed by that rich
Greek word kosmos. Throughout the likely story, goodness
is associated with the beautiful structures of mathematics,
and badness is associated with the ugliness of disorder.
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. The Song of Timaeus
was originally delivered as a formal lecture at St. John's College, Annapolis
in 1984.
56
I will try in this lecture to say what the world, our world,
looks like through the eyes ofTimaeus' motto about the
good, the beautiful, and the measured.
The Timaeus is the most artful and artificial of all the
Platonic dialogues. There is really not anything in it that
could be called conversation. And the dialogue as a whole,
so plentiful in references to life and motion, seems
somewhat lacking in vitality and spontaneity. The major
.characters ---'Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates- meet
Socrates according to a preestablished plan. Socrates
appears in a most uncharacteristic way. He is dressed up,
kekosmemenos, as though he were going to some formal
event. 2 Socrates expresses a desire for a war-movie in
speech, then seems eager just to sit back and listen. The
entire program is presented with extreme formality by
Critias. 3 In fact, all the speeches to be given do constitute
a formal event. That event is the feasting of Socrates,
the dialogue's central dramatic image.
The likely story of Timaeus fits well into this highly
artful setting. Artfulness plays the central role in Timaeus'
mythical physics. The very word kosmos suggests not only
a world-order b_ut ornamentation. Timaeus' story is composed of what Socrates calls a prelude and a song4 The
pair of terms also means preamble and law. The song of
Timaeus, the nomos as Socrates calls it, embraces two
forms of artfulness, that of music and that of politics.
Timaeus' speech will show us how artfully arranged the
world of becoming is. His song sings the praises of the
god Kosmos, who for Timaeus is the whole of all
generated things.
The Platonic dialogues are all imitations oflive conversations. They are living images, dramas. This is true
even of the Timaeus, which seems at times quite lifeless
and undramatic. Very often in the dialogues something
in a speech or interchange is not so much spoken about
as it is playfully enacted. In the likely story, it is easy
WINTER 1985
�to see what is being enacted, or rather re-enacted. It is
the birth of the world as we know and experience it. The
likely story is mimetic in this precise sense: it "plays at"
world-building. It imitates the noble, though often risky
process by which the gods made a world-order. At the
beginning of the Critias, the dialogue which immediately
follows the Timaeus, Timaeus calls the cosmos "the god
who was born once upon a time long ago and who was
just now begotten by speeches!'' The likely story, in other
words, imitates the artist-god or demiurge. It is recreational. When god makes the world-soul, we are engaged
in the various. constructions. When the gods make us,
we are involved in the work of putting ourselves together.
The world with all its structure comes to light for
Timaeus in a divine activity we ourselves take part in.
Timaeus calls this activity of world-building in speech
"thoughtful and measured play!'6 Such play for Timaeus
is identical with the activity of the mathematical physicist.
To read the likely story profitably, we must therefore relax
our preconceptions about the serious nature of physics.
We must exert our imaginations and, I think, our sense
of humor.
There are many obstacles the reader confronts as he
reads the likely story. The story is very long and very
technical. Furthermore, it cannot help but strike us as
whimsical and ridiculous, a sort of prank. This is the
story, you remember, that Timaeus places in the region
of trust, pistis-' Yet what could be more unbelievable,
more unworthy of our trust, than some of the explanations we get from Timaeus? Take, for example, the story
of the liver. Timaeus describes the liver as a sort of movie-
screen for the soul. And the pancreas is said to be the
liver's wiper8 Is there anything less unbelievable, I
~
wonder, in the apparently more scientific parts of the
story? True, there is bound to be some sense behind such
unbelievable accounts. But even while we see a certain
sense to what Timaeus says, it is impossible not to say
to ourselves "Hah! A likely story." Whatever region fhe
likely story occupies, that region cannot be identified
simply with trust.
But there is another difficulty with the likely story.
The story is apparently incoherent. It is not one seamless
narrative but is composed of three stories. Timaeus makes
two radically different beginnings. And in his third story,
he makes no effort to show how the two beginnings are
related. This problem is the greatest occasion on which
the story seems to be incoherent.
Timaeus himself warns Socrates and us about this
problem the first time he uses the phrase "likely story!'
It is worthwhile quoting the whole passage in which the
phrase first appears:
Don't wonder, Socrates, if we are not able to pay you
back with speeches about the birth of gods and of the
All, that are not in every way in agreement with
themselVes and altogether precise. But you must esteem
the speeches we provide as likenesses inferior to none.
You must remember that I who speak and you my judges
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
have human nature. So, in order to receive the likely
story about these things, it is fitting not to search beyond
this. 9
The physics of Timaeus will be a likely story for two
reasons. The first is that the world is not a being in its
own right but an appearance, a moving and unstable
likeness of an intelligible, stable model. Proper speech
about the world must therefore take the form of imagery.
Secondly, the story-teller and his listeners are human,
not divine. They must know their place and not search
beyond the likely story. This passage ends what Socrates
refers to as Timaeus' prelude. Socrates' response to the
prelude is extremely interesting. He tells Timaeus to "perform the song;' a command which can also mean "execute the law."to
Now there are many strange things about the passage
I quoted. It is very important, first of all, because it is
addressed explicitly to Socrates. But the most important
feature of what Timaeus says is that he articulates the
limitations of the upcoming myth. Socrates is being
asked, as a human being, to take the likely story about
the cosmos as merely a likeness, not as the truth. That
is, the likely story begins with an apology and a caution.
But why apologize for a likeness? Myths after all are
likenesses. No one needs to be reminded of this fact. And
Socrates, although he tells many stories, never feels the
need to apologize for any of them. Indeed, we sometimes
feel that a Socratic mythos has the power of showing us
what dialectical logos cannot explain to us. At the end
of the Gorgias, just before the concluding myth, Socrates
says to Callicles, "You may think it is only a myth, but
I take it to be a true account:' 11 I take what Socrates tells
Calli des here to be true of all the Socratic myths. These
myths are images without apology because, as likenesses,
they aim at and in a certain sense contain truth.
Likenesses in this sense do not function as boundaries.
They are rather springboards for our perception of invisible, eternal truths. Socrates would never say, "You are
only human; do not search beyond the likelihood of my
story!' For Socrates, myths appear to belong to the level
of the divided line called imagination, eikasia, the level
at which images take us beyond themselves to that which
they image.'2
As I mentioned earlier, the story ofTimaeus is com-
posed of three separate stories. The high-point of the first
story is Timaeus' construction of the divine, intelligent
soul. In the second story, Timaeus unveils the receptacle,
the supreme condition for all body, change, and appearance. The third story is about the birth of human
nature. This third story is the most bizarre and most
playful story Timaeus tells.
The remainder of this lecture will be divided into
three parts, corresponding to Timaeus' three stories:
Part I-The Story of the Soul
Part II-The Story of the Body
Part III-The Story of Human Nature
57
�One reminder before we begin. Timaeus is a
masculine world. The likely story imitates Zeus giving
birth to Athena; a most accurate image, I think, for the
mathematical physicist and his various brain-children.
character in the dialogue, not Platds spokesman. Plato
causes us to reflect on the problem of a world not by a
direct encounter with the issues but through a human
Even when Timaeus introduces the "mother" of becom-
soul and its various motions, through the soul of
Timaeus. We will thus have two questions before us con-
ing later in his story, I think he retains his role as Zeus.
He re-creates the womb of becoming as a dynamic
stantly: What is the world; and Who is Timaeus? We
medium for artful, mathematical construction.
must be careful not to separate these questions. It is by
The likely story begins with ·the divine craftsman, the
demiurge, who gazes upon a perfectly stable and utterly
intelligible model of the world. The model or paradigm
simply is and thus experiences no becoming. It is that
being which the cosmos imitates at the level of regular,
no means clear that the likely story represents what has
come to be called "Plato's cosmology."
Let us now turn to the likely story.
Part I-The Story of the Soul
periodic motions and .the "laws of nature" which govern
such motions. 22 As the not-yet-actual structure of a mov-
ing world, the intelligible paradigm functions for the
craftsman as a kind of "cosmic blueprint;' a plan which
T
he deed imitated by Timaeus' story is the
birth of the world. The story is filled with
language that suggests begetting. Later in
his story, Timaeus will tell us that the world
guides the construction of the cosmos and in which the
various forms of motion, power, and life find their
is the "offspring" of a "father" and a
prophecy.
By consulting this model, the god tries to make
Becoming as beautiful, that is as orderly, as possible.
"mother:' 13 He will also tell us that the pyramid is not
only the element but also the seed of fire. 14 Human souls
are planted, originally, in their individual stars. 15 The
Before the divine ordering, Becoming is said to be in
a state of disorder. Timaeus calls this condition "not at
peace and out of tune."2 3 In order to regulate and tune
star-gods themselves are referred to as god's "children." 16
this ugly condition, the god consults not only the cosmic
blueprint but also the goodness of his own intelligence.
He looks within himself in much the same way that the
mathematical physicist looks within his intelligence for
the mathematical principles of order. The god desires that
the world imitate him as much as possible." To this end,
the god constructs intelligence within the soul and soul
within body. 25 The soul is that on account of which the
The likely story thus aims at being a likely biology as
well as a likely physics. Timaeus acknowledges that the
realm of becoming is also the realm of procreation.
But the central, overriding image for the likely story
is that of artful production, technt God is a craftsman,
a demiurge, who makes a world by giving it mathematical
order. This is very different from the story in the Bible
in which God says to his creatures, "Be fruitful and
multiply:' In the likely story, the goodness of a cosmos
derives wholly from mathematical ordering. Insofar as
becoming is good, it is mathematically structured. Fruit-
cosmos is a living being.
What Timaeus' construction means here is that the
cosmos is alive for the sake of being intelligent, not
because life is a good in itself. Life is present because
fulness is not good for its own sake. In fact, as we see
it is impossible, says Timaeus, to make the world in-
at the end of the story, the enis for begetting stems from
our mindless and tyrannical nature." The female kind
telligent without also making it alive. And unless intelligence is put into the world, the world will not be the
best and most beautiful of possible worlds. At this point
the cosmos is said to be an animal composed of body,
soul, and intelligence. The cosmos is patterned after what
Timaeus calls "the intelligible animal:'' 6 The intelligible animal contains the forms of all the animals that are
is derived from the "first men" who were cowardly and
unjust. 18 Procreation comes about because the first men
"fell" from their divine and orderly condition.
The theme of art is central to the entire Timaeus. The
dialogue takes place on the feast day of Athena, 1• and
there are numerous references to Athena in both the
Timaeus and the Critias. Athena is called a lover of war,
really living and are contained within the sensed cosmos.
the Titan Metis, whose name means craft or cunning.
The notion of an intelligible animal is one of the most
perplexing notions in the likely story. It is extremely difficult to see how an intelligible dog, for example, could
be called an animal. This difficulty comes up again and
again for the likely story. It reappears when we are asked
to accept the existence of an intelligible fire. 27 As a really
living, vibrant whole with all the signs of life, the sensed
cosmos appears to be more truly what it is than the
The myth about Athenas birth seems to me to provide
original it copies. The reason is that the sensed cosmos
an accurate image for Timaeus' re-creation of the world
is possessed of a soul. I think we need to remember here
that, although Timaeus appeals to the image-original
relationship we find in many other dialogues, this relationship has a special context in the likely story. It is in
wisdom, and art. 20 She is the patroness of Athens which,
as Pericles reminds us, philosophizes without becoming
effeminate. 21 I think that Athena, or more precisely the
birth of Athena, is one of the dialogue's implied images.
Athena was born out of Zeus' head. This intellectual,
masculine birth takes place just after Zeus swallows up
through art. Timaeus seems to be imitating Zeus. Having swallowed up the mathematical arts, Timaeus gives
birth out of his head to an artfully constructed, eminently
58
WINTER 1985
�the context of productive or demiurgic art. The artist
works from a vision of perfection that appears within his
intellect. So long as this vision is in the intellect alone,
the perfection is uncontaminated and stable, yet
unfulfilled. Fulfillment comes in the act of bringing forth
the vision of perfection, actualizing it in time and space.
In the context of productive art, the relationship of
original to image is the relationship of blueprint to fully
otherwise flabby and graceless world. This is much like
the way in which the Pythagorean scale gives structure
to the music we hear or the way in which Timaeus' song
as a whole gives backbone to our flabby conception of
the world.
It is important to note that these two contrary circuits which govern Becoming, the circuits of Same and
Other, are not confined to the heavens. The soul is said
actualized structure. The sensed cosmos, though an im-
to be "woven throughout" the body of the world "from
age, is nevertheless the fulfillment of the idea within the
mind of the demiurge.
Timaeus proceeds to show, first, how the body of the
world was constructed, and secondly, the soul. The body
of the cosmos displays the good and beautiful ordering
of mathematics. The four elements of body-fire, earth,
center to extremity?'32 The soul ensures that the entire
air, and Water-are arranged in a continuous propor-
tion. ' 8 The entire body of the world is then given spherical
shape and the motion of rotation. Soul is constructed
next.
The story of the soul is one of the most exquisite
pieces of architecture in the likely story. It is based on
a remarkable premise- that a soul can be built. In the
likely story, we are treated to a vision of a likely soul,
world is filled with the recurring patterns characteristic
of music. Musical intelligibility exists everywhere. It exists
not only in the heavenly motions but also in something
like the vibrating string. A string vibrates periodically.
It displays the togetherness of sameness and otherness.
The circuits of Same and Other are therefore not confined to a place. Like music, they do not belong
exclusively to the realm of body or to the realm of soul.
It is impossible to say, when we are listening to a piece
of music, that the music is either inside us or outside us.
It seems to be everywhere. We do not "stand back" when
we are really listening to a piece of music. The music
penetrates and engulfs us.
that is, a soul whose being in speech consists in its being
Tirnaeus' account of the soul is a powerful transfor-
constructed. This is all part of the re-creational activity
of the likely story.
The construction of the divine soul takes place in
three stages. The god first mixes together the forms of
Being, Same, and Other. This is accomplished, Timaeus
says, "with force."2 9 Next, the god articulates the mix-
mation of our ordinary experience of the world. The account requires that we see the world through the eyes
of the imagination. Usually we distinguish rather rigidly
between the inner and the outer; the non-extended and
the extended; the soul and the body. But in the likely
story the world is approached through the power of
likenesses. For Timaeus the soul's act of thinking and the
ture into a spine-like band, the sections of which corres-
°
pond to several octaves of the Pythagorean scale. 3 Finally,
he slices and bends this spine-like band into the circuits
of Same and Other. 31 You know these circuits from your
study of Ptolemy. Timaeus gives a two-fold meaning to
the circuits. They are the outwardly appearing motions
of the heavenly bodies and also the inner, invisible "revolvings" of our thinking, of our dianoia. Timaeus goes On
to tell us how the circuits of Same and Other, that we
see in the heavens, constitute the moving image of the
eternal which we call time. The circuits of Same and Other
cause the world to be measured by recurring cycles. In
this way, Becoming imitates the utterly non-moving look
of Being. Because of these intelligent circuits ordered ac' cording to musical ratios, the world is filled with
timeliness. It is characterized by time not merely as duration, but time as a principle of "right timing" or
seasonableness. Once the circuits are set in motion, the
world becomes thoroughly musical as the moving structure of time. The world is enlivened and also "set straight"
by the periodicity of rhythm as well as the periodicity
of the musical scale.
world's act of turning in a circle imitate one another. Now
our souls contain the divine circuits of Same and Other.
In the act of thinking we too "revolve within ourselves?'
The circuits are housed in our heads, or more precisely,
in our brains. This true self of each of us, the intelligence,
is planted in a star before being submerged in the violent
flux of becoming. As we gaze out and away from ourselves
into the heavens, we are in fact looking upon an appearance of our most intimate selves. We are in a sense
gazing within and not out towards a "beyond." Now gazing at the stars is an activity we all love. This ordinary
activity so often associated with softness and romanticism
has a very specific meaning for Timaeus. A star is
perfectly shaped, it is always brilliant, and its motions
are unwavering and thoroughly regular. Also, a star is
deathless. No wonder gazing at the stars can fill us with
admiration and longing.
We are remembering,
remembering what it was like, in our Golden Age, to be
entirely healthy and well-formed. Through the study of
astronomy we return to a likeness of what Timaeus calls
"the form of our first and best condition?' 33 Astronomy
vertebrae. Owing to its musicality and seasonableness,
is the true homecoming of the human soul.
Another powerful transformation of experience occurs
in Timaeus' story of the divine soul. This transformation has to do with that special phenomenon, the physicist
the soul seems indeed to function .as the backbone of a
himself. Timaeus' story "saves" this phenomenon. That
constantly moving order. It gives poise and rigor to an
is, it shows how the activity of the physicist forms a vital
I think it makes sense to compare the soul as Timaeus
constructs it to a spine. Our drawings for the cutting of
a monochord certainly resemble the spine with its
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
59
�part of the whole, how thinking about the cosmos is itself
the world's own most essential act. The likely story "saves"
the phenomenon of the physicist himself by allowing intellectual activity to permeate the whole ceaselessly.
Thinking finds itself reflected in the object of thinking,
especially in the heavens. This is another way of saying
that logos as thoughtful speech as well as logos as ratio
permeates the whole. The cosmos of Timaeus is an intelligent animal. It is always engaged in giving accounts
of itself to itself. 34 The physicist, then, does sporadically,
partially, and sometimes out loud what the cosmos does
continually, fully, and in silence. Strange as the likely story
is, it nevertheless has the power to account for the
presence of physics and the physicist within the world.
This should come as no surprise to us. As I have tried
to suggest in my discussion of Athena's birth, the world
of Timaeus has its home in the mind and speech of the
physicist. It is his brainchild. Such a world is not the world
in its originality but the world as it is re-created through
the powers of art. Throughout Timaeus' praise of the
god Kosmos, he is praising the physicist's god-like power
of re-creation, the power of bringing the world into being through speech.
The world is fulftlled for Timaeus in the physicist's
act of thinking. There are of course many wondrous and
admirable motions which the cosmos displays. Yet its
highest activity for Timaeus is clearly that of
thoughtfulness or reflection. The world longs, one might
say, to make itself known and articulate. Only through
the powers of intelligent human speech does the world
shine forth as what it most truly is- an intelligent, living embodiment of artful structure and purpose. Timaeus
calls the cosmos a "happy god:'35 This god would not be
happy, would not be fulftlled, were it not for the human
beings who tell likely stories about the world's structure.
Through the recreational powers of the physicist, the
world comes to possess something like a plot, a mythos.
In this way, the world comes to be an object of trust. We
can place our trust in the appearances only once we have
saved them with the peculiar powers of a likely story. At
the beginning of the story, Timaeus invoked to hhneteron, 36
that is, ourselves and our own powers of mathematical
story-telling. Our trust in the likely story is also our trust
in a world that we ourselves have brought into being.
Part II-The Story of the Body
I
n Timaeus' first story of origins, time plays the
central role. Time is said to be the moving likeness
of eternal, changeless being. I think this means
not that time as duration goes on forever, but that
time is one of the world's supreme ordering
principles. Timaeus agrees with Aristotle in the sense
that time is conceived as the measure of motion. 37 Time
gives the various happenings of the world rhythm and
periodicity. In the cosmic region below the heavens, the
world is constantly coming together and falling apart.
60
But this region is nevertheless ruled by the ever-intelligent
circuits of Same and Other. The world in a sense "knows"
when to do what. In his second account of origins,
Timaeus unveils the other supreme ordering principle
and dimension of a world- space as the giver of place.
For Timaeus, space, likt time, is a moving structure.
Space shakes what is within it. 38] ust as time is associated
with the world's stability, space is associated with the excitation of all things that have place.
Timaeus' first account of body at the very beginning
of his speech took the four elements of body as the uncuttable simples out of which body was composed. In
his second story the simple-minded notion of an element
proves to be insufficient. What confronts us in the region
below the heavens is the change of elements into each other.
Fire acts on water to beget steam, a form of air. Water
evaporates, steam condenses, and fire goes out, leaving
its descendants earth and smoke. The element of fire is
given special attention by Timaeus. Of all the elements,
fire is the most spirited, the most ambitious, and the most
desirous of gaining victory over the others. The elements,
in other words, are themselves unstable. They appear
in the wondrous display of appearing and disappearing.
In order to "save" this perplexing phenomenon, Timaeus
reconstructs the four elements out of the regular Platonic
solids.' 9
This ingenious construction accomplishes two highly
important goals. First, the elements are shown to have
parts. These parts- the various sides of the regular,
geometrical solids- can be rearranged to form other
elements. Timaeus' mathematical physics thus accounts
for the fact that an element can have integrity and iden-.
tifiability while at the same time being able to suffer
transmutation. There is a second goal which is of great
importance to the likely story. The regular Platonic solids
are called by Timaeus "the most beautiful bodies:'40 What
this means is that Timaeus accounts for the structure
of body in terms of principles that are beautiful and good.
Timaeus here puts to work once more the motto of his
physics that I quoted earlier: All the good is beautiful,
and the beautiful is not measureless. Of course, what I
have been calling an account of the elements is, like all
accounts of Becoming, a likely story. It represents the
attempt on the part of the physicist to construct the best
of all possible worlds in speech. Timaeus constructs the
paradigms or archetypes of the four elements. He makes
no attempt to deduce the real nature of body and change
from the supposition of mathematical principles.
Timaeus' second attempt to account for the world's
beginning unveils a new cause at work in the world.
Timaeus calls this cause necessity, ananke. 41 At one point
he refers to this cause as "the form, eidos, of the wandering cause."42 Fire does not act on water purposefully. Fire
burns because it has to, and water must evaporate
whether it likes it or not. In the second beginning
Timaeus makes, the world is seen as originating in the
cooperation of two causes- the good and the necessary.
The good is identical with intelligence, or more precisely,
with the ordering power and stability of intelligence. InWINTER 1985
�telligence is said to persuade necessity to take on the
beautiful structures of mathematics. 43
In his second beginning, Timaeus acknowledges the
role that mindlessness and chance play in the scheme of
things. This element of chance cannot be eradicated, nor
can it be fully mastered. Timaeus' reference to persuasion suggests that the god's work of ordering the world
according to an intelligent and intelligible design is
limited by the nature of the original condition in which
the design is supposed to inhere. What we have before
us in the guise of the necessary cause is none other than
the primitive and unmusical condition that exists "before"
the divine ordering. By leading us back to a reconsideration of this condition, Timaeus introduces us to that
dimension of a world which is distinct from the purposeful
activity of an intelligent soul. This new dimension is the
world of power.
When the gods construct our eyes, they do so for
reasons that are beautiful and good. We are given eyes
so that we might learn the intelligible structure of time
manifested in the heavens 44 By learning about this structure through astronomy, our souls become ordered and
healthy. We become assimilated to our first and best condition as stars. But unless our eyes have the power of seeing, no good will come of them. What I think this means
is that astronomy, although it functions as that through
which the human soul is rendered musical, is not sufficient for our complete understanding of the world. To
grasp the totality of our world, to tell the whole story
of the cosmos, we must become students of violent
change; we must study the world of efficiency or power.
There are no good ends in the world unless there are
powers to actualize those ends. Intelligence by itself cannot accomplish the actualization. As Timaeus informs
us, the intellect can only persuade the necessary cause to
work towards the best ends.
But what is ultimately responsible for this turbulent
though necessary aspect of the world? What is that in
which change appears? What is that in which the crafty
god builds his mathematical models of the four elements?
Timaeus calls this medium for appearing the receptacle. 45
He refers to it also as the mother of becoming •• and everexisting space. 4 7
Timaeus makes several attempts to say what the
receptacle is. This proves to be no small matter for the
receptacle, as the material ground or condition for the
appearance of determinate though shifting natures, does
not itself possess a determinate nature. If the receptacle
is said to possess a nature at all, such a nature must be
located in its indeterminateness, in its character as the receptivity to form. 48
Timaeus' attempts to speak about the receptacle take
the form oflikenesses. The receptacle is compared to gold,
which receives constantly changing shapes,49 to the
neutral base in which perfumes can be mixed, 50 and to
an instrument for purifying corn. 51 The use of images
to explain the receptacle is well-suited to the receptacle's
all-receiving nature. For the receptacle is not only the
medium for change and the womb of becoming. It is also
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the ground of all appearance and imaging. It functions
like the surface of a mirror. As the womb of becoming,
the receptacle is "impregnated" with the mathematical
structures of the four elements, that is, with the regular
Platonic solids. The divine craftsman gazes at the purely
intelligible forms of fire, air, earth, and water. At the same
time, he is said to schematize the receptacle "with shapes
and numbers:'" The purely intelligible form or eidos of
each element is called by Timaeus "father:'" In other
words, the world of change and appearance is born of
two "parents;' the formless and all-receiving receptacle
and the purely intelligible eidos. Timaeus makes it clear
that the offspring which is the cosmos is something in
between its two parents. The world is neither pure
formlessness nor pure form but a peculiar mixture of the
two. The world is the presence of intelligibility within the
realm of flux.
Now before the divine act of ordering, the receptacle
is already filled with "traces" of the four elements. 54 What
this means is that the primordial chaos could never have
been ordered unless it were potentially ordered, unless it
had a predisposition to be formed. Since the receptacle
and its contents are in perpetual imbalance, the ghostly
pre-cosmic elements are constantly vying for each other's
proper places. Through its vibratory motion, the receptacle tries to send these wayward elements back to their
proper places. There is a marvelous poignancy and aptness in Timaeus' account of the pre-cosmic condition.
Since the dynamic interplay of receptacle and contents
persists once the elemental traces are schematized with
shapes and numbers, this interplay may be said to
characterize the world as we know it. As our experience
of our world testifies, things that are made, whether by
art or by nature, tend to become unmade. The world
displays itself as a realm in which things that are brought
to order and unity, at the same time tend to fall to pieces.
The world tends both to order and to disorder, a fact
seen most vividly perhaps in the founding of cities and
in their constitutions, but seen no less in the history of
all plants and animals. In modern theories of the cosmos
this tendency is seen even in those celestial beings, the
stars and planets. Timaeus' receptacle confirms our sense
that the realm of change is also the realm of mortality.
Timaeus' reference to "traces;' ikhnC-literally "footprints" -of the elements suggests that prior to the divine
schematism body does not exist. The so-called elements,
stoicheia or letters of the alphabet, are not really elements
at all. They are rather the result of a subtle and beautiful
construction. So far are fire, earth, air, and water from
the status of genuine elements, that a man who possessed
just a little prudence, according to Timaeus, would not
even liken them to syllables."
Body, then, comes into being only with the god's construction of the regular Platonic solids in the medium
of the receptacle, the medium of eternally unstable space.
Insofar as body for Timaeus can be studied, it is indistinguishable from a mathematical object endowed with
mortality. According to Timaeus' provocative definition,
body is that which possesses the third dimension of depth,
61
�bathos. 56 The definition allows Timaeus to identify
bodiliness with solidity, and solidity with threedimensionality. More precisely, body's solidity derives
from the dimension of depth. The depth of body takes
on immense mythical significance when we remember
that the cosmos for Timaeus is a living being, a being
with a soul. While it might seem difficult to grasp the
connection between the living character of the whole and
the three-dimensionality of body, Timaeus' emphasis on
depth does point to the absurdity of a two-dimensional
living being. But why should a living being necessarily
be "solid;' that is, possessed of the third dimension of
depth? The answer lies, I think, in something Timaeus
says about the soul; he speaks of the soul "circling back
upon herself;' autl te anakukloumene pros autin. 57 The soul
or animating principle of the whole, in other words, is
a principle of inwardness and reflection. One might call
it a principle of "depth;' without which the world would
be superficial and lifeless. The depth Timaeus sees as
the defining characteristic of body thus supplies a
home-mythically-for the eternally reflective source of
life.
I say "mythically" in order to remind us that although
Timaeus' account of body dwells in the region of
mathematical physics, its primary dwelling-place is the
realm of stories and images. Timaeus makes no effort
to derive the "real" properties of body from his
mathematical principles. The likely story supplies no explanation of the descent from the purely intelligible archai
to the world of body and change. All takes place by way
of analogy and image-making, so that the most technical
constructions (like that of the musical scale or of the
regular solids) hover between the invisible and true beginnings and the world as it is given to sight and touch. Fire
is not a moving pyramid; it is merely lik a moving
pyramid. Nor does the likely story claim to be able to
derive the mathematical structure of fire from the eidos
of fire, from "fire itself by itsel£:' 5 • Even at its most apparently scientific moments, the likely story retains its
character as a mathematical poem, a poem that places the
mathematical arts in the service of non-mathematical
meaning and "depth!'
In the entire discussion of body and bodily change,
Timaeus make several references to guarding and sav-
ing the power, the dynamis, oflikely accounts 59 Indeed,
an invocation of "Zeus the Preserver"60 stands at the head
of Timaeus' second attempt to speak of beginnings. In
the same breath Timaeus calls his second story about
a mathematics of body "a strange and uncustomary exposition." Zeus is invoked to save us during the strange
business of constructing a mathematical poem about
body. He seems to be the patron god of likely stories.
The account will begin in distrust, perhaps even in our
laughter at such absurd hypotheses as those made by
Timaeus. But our imaginations will presumably save us
from distrust once we see that the mathematical
hypotheses succeed in saving the appearances, once these
hypotheses supply a reasonably coherent story of body
and bodily change. The safety of a likely story thus stems
62
from our remembering that what we are doing is building
mathematical models or analogies, that we are being recreational. The likely story in this way dramatizes for
us what we now call a scientific theory. A theory must be
careful not to promise what it cannot deliver. It does this
by acknowledging and insisting upon its origins in a productive, imaginative intellect. Strictly speaking, theories,
for Timaeus, do not belong in the realm of knowledge
but in the realm of trust, pistis. For this reason,
mathematical physics aims at persuasion. It is a form of
rhetoric. The rhetorical connection between physics and
the world is strongly implied by the fact that the divine
intelligence itself is said to persuade the receptacle to
assume the best and most beautiful mathematical form.6 1
We must remind ourselves at this point that the entire
Timaeus addresses the problem of the world in its totality.
The world of all generated things- gods and men, cities,
customs, reputations, and also likely stories. All such
generated things reveal in their individual fates the life
of the whole to which they are subject; all reveal the pervasive and inescapable workings of necessity within the
receptacle. The receptacle comes on the scene in answer
to questions of physics proper. Yet Timaeus' mode of
speech suggests that we see the world of bodily change
as revelatory of the soul, of our souls. In fact, at the end
of the likely story, we find souls going up and down the
scale of animality. 6 2 This happens in just the same way
that the four elements of body go up and down in their
violent change of place. The cosmos, you remember, is
both body and soul. And the receptacle, as the mother
of all becoming, is necessarily the place of souls as well
as the place of bodies.
No one can deny the power that place as well as time
exerts over our lives. Time and place together have to
do with the meaning of a life within becoming. Such a
life is unintelligible without history or, if you will, without
the story or plot of a life. Insofar as an individual life comes
to be defined as a story, it is governed by the Where and
the When. It is of the utmost importance to us that we
have a place; and at the appropriate times it is good and
necessary for us to change place. Sometimes the change
of place, like the change of the elements, is not smooth
and continuous but is a violent upheaval.
Timaeus' account of the receptacle fits well with
Critias' story about the great cycles civilizations go
through and the great wars between cities. In Critias'
story Athens plays the role of the great liberator of the
political world. Athens fights against the insolent kings
of Atlantis who attempt to enslave the entire mainland.
But as we know from the account given to us by
Thucydides, the Athens of Plato's day launches an insolent campaign against the great and powerful island
of Sicily, a campaign which proves to be Athens' downfall.
In the course of history, the roles have been reversed.
What is true in the political order seems to be true in
the cosmic order as well. The life of the whole cannot
be identified simply with the serene motions of the
heavens. Life is not only intellectual activity; it is also
the passion and vibrancy which cause the whole to be
WINTER 1985
�alive in the first place, to reach glorious moments which
tend towards tragic decay. At the beginning of tbe
dialogue, Socrates says he is filled with a desire to see
the best city go to war, to a fitting and beautiful war.
Socrates seems to be mimicking our fondness for life in
the sense of passion and vibrancy, and also our desire
to witness a beautiful show of strength. Socrates is asking to see the best city transformed into a heroic city,
a feat that requires great skill in the making of lively
images. Timaeus' two stories of origins- the story of the
soul and the story of the receptacle- reflect the two senses
of the term life. The divine soul, manifested as the moving structure of time, embodies life as intellectual activity.
The receptacle embodies life as passion and vibrancy.
Both senses oflife are necessary if we are to tell the whole
story about the life of the whole and our own spatiotemporallives as well. Yet it is no easy matter to say how
these two senses of life can combine to form a coherent
whole.
In the last third of the likely story, Timaeus attempts
to "weave together" the two supreme causes of Becoming: the good and the necessary. 63 He attempts, in other
words, to harmonize the two senses oflife which the two
stories of beginnings have uncovered. We might expect
that given these two accounts of the world's founding,
Timaeus in his third story will tell us how the two different accounts of origination are reconciled, how it is
possible for the soul to be the first and best of generated
things 64 and for the god to have constructed the elements
of body first. 65 But Timaeus makes no effort to explain
how the first story of origins fits with the second. He
leaves us with two beginnings, two archai. This incoherence of beginnings is meaningful. It suggests that
neither time nor space was constructed first. The world
itself is characterized by a double beginning. Time as intelligence and space as receptacle interpenetrate but are
not reducible to each other. This doubleness of good'!ess
as intelligence and the necessity of the receptacle makes
its most dramatic appearance in Timaeus' account of
human nature. For Timaeus our nature and the nature
of the whole imitate one another. If we find an
incoherence in our own lives, a tension between our intelligent and our passionate selves, this is because such
a tension exists in the world which we imitate and to
which we necessarily belong. The cosmos for Timaeus
is something like the human soul, and the human soul's
incoherence, writ large.
Part III-The Story of Human Nature
W
e know from the dramatic prologue to
Timaeus' speech that the likely story is
intended by Critias to be a preface to
Critias' own story about Athens and her
day of glory. You recall that the Timaeus
begins with a very watered down summary of conclusions we find in the Republic about the regime that would
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
be best according to nature. But Critias is not satisfied
with Socrates' concern for a non-historical city, a city
which had no actual birth in the realm of becoming: ''The
citizens and city you went through for us yesterday as
in a myth we will now carry over into the realm of truth."66
For Critias, Socrates failed to given an account of the
best city insofar as this city would have an actual birth
in the realm of becoming and history. History-or rather
the memory of past deeds-is identical with truth. Critias
does not distinguish between the faithfulness of this
memory and the truthfulness of what he remembers. His
memory is etched with stories he heard as a young boy.
Critias scrupulously avoids the word mythos when he refers
to his own story. He claims boldly that his account is
"true in every respect." 67 It is through Critias, in other
words, that we come to be suspicious of anything that
has the character of a likely story.
Socrates' speech is mythical for Critias, mythical in
the bad sense of the term, because it was about a city
with no history. It was about form without motion and
place. Critias attempts to correct this lack by transforming Socrates' best city by nature into a young and glorious
Athens. But Critias needs a transition from Socrates' inquiry into Being to his own concern for a begotten and
therefore genuine city. Timaeus supplies this transition.
Timaeus will generate a world in which things come to
be and pass away in a splendid show of beautiful structure and purpose. He will construct the cosmic background
and context for the cycles of human history. As Critias
says, Timaeus will generate the universe down to the birth
of human nature. 68 What this means is that human
nature is the intended goal of the likely story.
Timaeus' story of human nature began just before
the gods confronted the problem of the necessary cause,
the cause of power. The star-gods, who are said to be
the children of the demiurge, put us together piece by piece,
organ by organ. What Timaeus shows us in this very
odd and at times repellent view of human nature is that
for him human nature is something neither whole, nor
natural, nor especially attractive. The human animal is
a creature of great vulnerability and multifarious needs,
and it is to these needs that Timaeus' likely story is addressed. Our neediness is summed up by the fact that
we are not spherical: we lack the self-sufficiency and
general happiness Timaeus associates with the spherical
cosmos. Timaeus' identification of happiness with
sphericity reminds us of the myth Aristophanes tells in
the Symposium. But whereas that myth attempts to ground
our happiness in the love we have for other human beings, Timaeus' story grounds our happiness in the study
of the heavens.
It is true that our complicated bodily arrangement
demonstrates how well-meaning and ingenious the gods
were. Like the world as a whole, man is a sort of cosmos,
an artfully arranged living order. But precisely because
man is so artfully constructed in the likely story, he is
also something artifical or, as we say, synthetic. There
is something grotesque about him. Man is a moving network of parts and functions. There is one and only one
63
�thing about man in the likely story that is completely
non-artificial and unconstructed. This is his passionate
nature, the nature that is at odds with the intellect's efforts to give life order and artfulness.
Human nature starts out as a head. The head contains the divine circuitry of Same and Other. To this head
the gods attach a torso and limbs to serve as the head's
means of transport. 69 The gods then put the mortal parts
of the soul into the torso. Spiritedness and the love of
winning go in the chest, and the desire for food and drink
goes in the belly. 70 An amusing and plausible topology
of the human soul! Timaeus describes this addition of
spiritedness and desire to our divine intelligence as a pollution of the divine. 71 To minimize the bad effects the mortal
parts of the soul have on the intellect, the gods construct
a buffer to go between the head and the torso. That is
to say, the gods invent the neck. 72 Like the belly-button
of Aristophanes' myth, the neck is a constant reminder
of our "fall" from sphericity and happiness.
Like all the bodily constructions we find in this part
of the likely story, the invention of the neck points to some
invisible truth about the human soul. Timaeus' account
of the neck shows us in its peculiar comic fashion that
human nature is ultimately absurd and incomprehensible. There is really no logos of human nature, no
reasonable explanation of how the best in use is related
to the worst. This seems to be implied also by the fact
that Timaeus compartmentalizes the soul: intellect goes
in the head, spiritedness in the chest, and desire in the
belly. One can only tell likely stories about human nature,
and such stories look at man in terms of artful construc-
tion. The ingenious invention of the neck shows us that
we do not cohere by nature. Intelligence has no business
mingling with the passions, but it must mingle with them
if human nature is to be born at all. The neck forcibly
joins the head to the rest of us and at the same time supplies some protection for the head's "private life" of
thinking.
In the likely story, human nature is the most mixed
and most terrible of all things. We are composed of all
animal possibilities the world has to offer- the highest,
the lowest, and all the stages in between. Our soul in its
humanness is everything life can be. In our heads, we
lead the divine life of thinking. But owing to our other
parts below the neck, we partake of mindlessness. Because
of this region below the neck, we run the risk of losing
our human shape in our next birth. The penalty for a
deficient life is transformation into a lower animal. That
is, contained within our human nature is the full range
of animal possibilities corresponding to the various forms
of unintelligent life. This range stretches from the stars
all the way down to the stupidest, most worthless animals
there are. But the cosmos requires even these most worth-
less animals if it is to be whole. Deficiency itself seems
to be necessary to the world order, and this deficiency,
witnessed in the moral hierarchy of animals, is rooted
in the all-encompassing nature of man. The cosmos approaches its final perfection and completeness for
64
Timaeus as the original, healthy condition of human
nature becomes degenerate with time. In the closing
scenes of the likely story, the cosmos receives the animal
forms destined for it by the "intelligible animal."" These
forms are generated, so to speak, by the need in man's
nature to actualize in timE all the possibilities which lurk
within him and which constitute his being. For Timaeus,
the cosmos is both just and beautiful: just because it seeks
a harmonization between type of soul and type of body,
beautiful because through such harmonization it shows
itself to be a genuine kosmos, that is, a world governed
by a wondrous symmetry and coherence, even for those
beings farthest removed from the motions of intelligence.
Divine care in this way makes a blessing even of the curses
that man's nature brings upon the world. This intelligent
care which orders all things and which seeks to make good
out of bad, perfection out of deficiency, seems to be an
instance of Timaeus' guiding song: ''All the good is
beautiful, and the beautiful is not measureless." The
beauty and nobility of intelligence consist in its care that
the good triumph in all things. This divine care for the
order of all things is the same as the generosity of the
demiurge. It is that goodness which Timaeus, at the very
beginning of his talk, characterized as the god's lack of
phthonos, envy_,.
As we have seen, human nature in the likely story
contains within it all the animal possibilities the world
has to offer. These possibilities spring from the complexity
of our own nature. This complexity which makes us what
we are can be looked at in the light ofTimaeus' two great
cosmic principles- the necessary and the good. These
two principles define human life as well as the cosmic
life. Timaeus associates the passionate part of us with
the necessary cause, with the receptacle. As always in the
likely story, goodness is associated with the orderliness
of intelligence.
When Timaeus introduces our non-rational nature,
he calls the passions "terrible and necessary."75 The passions belong to our necessary nature insofar as we are
absorbed in the life of bodily desire, honor, and victory.
The turbulence with which these passions fill us remind
us strongly of the turbulence within the receptacle.
The passions are necessary because without them we
would not be human. To have human life at all, we must
be absorbed in the impulsive, non-reasoning sense oflife.
To be sure, as long as we are men and not stars, life in
this sense is a condition for the life of thinking. If we
do not care for our whole human lives as human beings,
our intellectual life suffers. Thinking presupposes that
our lower desires are held in check and that we get enough
food, sleep, and exercise. Furthermore, if we had no
spiritedness we would lack the daring it takes to tackle
and solve such things as mathematical problems. But the
lower passions are disruptive, terrible as well as necessary.
Human nature is therefore in the following quandary:
the necessary condition for our happiness is also an
enemy to our happiness.
One might be tempted to think that the gods should
WINTER 1985
�have made our passions less terrible before they put them
into our souls. But this, I think, would deprive them of
their nature and function as passions. A passion, insofar
as it is a passion, cannot be anything other than consuming and measureless. Passion must contain the
possibility for being terrible. I think it is this boundless
and frightening character of our passions that Timaeus
points to when he says that the gods mixed all the passions with "love, erOs, that attempts all things:' 76 Since
the passions for Timaeus are causes of disorder, they must
be subjugated by the force of intellect. Timaeus is clear
about how the· intellect itself becomes fit to rule the soul.
It becomes fit through the study of astronomy. This study
restores our intellect, our circuits of Same and Other,
to the originally divine and musical condition we lost at
birth.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture, the
likely story takes the form of a song. Timaeus sings the
praises of the god Kosmos. He sings the world into shape
with the beautiful constructions of mathematics and harmonics. The song of Timaeus, the nomos as Socrates calls
it, gives the world its musical and lawful shape. The center
of the song's teaching is this: all the good is beautiful,
and the beautiful is not measureless. It is now time for
us to ask what we are to make of Timaeus and his song
of order.
We know from the very beginning of the dialogue
that the making of order within becoming will be the
dialogue's central concern. Socrates gives us our clue in
his mathematical account of who is present. He counts
people. That is, he replaces their human identities by
their general characteristic of countableness. By counting his hosts, Socrates also implies the connection between time and number so important to Timaeus' story.
By asking where the missing fourth is, he implies the im-
portance of place in the dialogue, reminding us at the
same time that time and place always accompany qne
another. But the missing fourth remains unidentified
precisely because Socrates uses numbers instead of
names. Mathematics, it seems, has the power to order
beings, but it is powerless to identify them. Timaeus
fabricates an explanation for the absence of the fourth
host. Timaeus says he must have fallen ill, for surely he
would not be absent willingly from such a meeting. 77 A
likely story! The very first time we meet Timaeus he is
playing the role in life that he plays when he delivers his
speech about the cosmos.
The dialogue is filled with all sorts of playful
references to our desire for the orderliness and beauty
implied by that rich word kosmos. Even Socrates is ornamented, dressed up for the occasion. But it is in the
likely story of Timaeus that all the various senses of kosmos
find their most original place- in the world as a whole.
The cosmos is thus the paradigm and source for all the
ways in which order and the making of order appear in
human life.
In the light of what we have seen so far about the
likely story, let us return to our earlier question: Who
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
is Timaeus? What sort of man tells a story like the likely
story?
Timaeus is described for us by Socrates. Everything
about Timaeus is splendid, even his name which suggests timC, honor. He is an honored, powerful statesman
from Italy. He comes from a noble family, he is wealthy,
and he rules a city known for its good laws. Socrates also
says that Timaeus has "made it to the top in every
philosophy:' 78 Timaeus is the paradigm of the worldly
man, the successful worldly man. Unlike Socrates he is
an eminently public man, full of worldly experience and
known for his mastery of all learning. He seems too good
to be true, more like a work of art than a real human
being. I sometimes think this must be why, next to the
historical characters in the dialogue (Socrates, Critias,
and Hermocrates), Timaeus is conspicuously fictional.
He seems to be a likely story, that is, an ·unbelievable
though beautiful story.
Beautiful though he is, Timaeus makes us question
the virtues of a devotion to orderliness and accomplishment. Through the character of Timaeus, Plato causes
us to ask this question: Is it so clear that all the good
is beautiful and that the beautiful is not measureless? Is
it so clear, in other words, that orderliness and goodness
are the same? Even if we follow Timaeus in identifying
goodness with intelligence, it is far from clear that intelligence is good solely because it is a cause of order and
decency. In the Republic we get a different view of the
good. There the good is that which yokes together the
knower and the known. 79 In other words, the good is the
ultimate cause of truth.
The likely story is possessed of many virtues. Its
greatest virtue is, I think, its effect on our imaginations.
The story tunes and sharpens our ability to construct
and to identify likenesses within a world we are used to
thinking of in terms of meaningless facts. Through the
power of the likely story, the realm of body and change,
the object of the physicist, becomes a realm of meaning.
There are reasons for the way things are. We are thus able
to find ourselves reflected in the cosmos Timaeus builds
in speech.
But I wonder if we are able to find ourselves accurately reflected in the likely story. In the story's devotion
to a moral cosmos ruled by orderliness and art, something
human seems to get lost. I think the loss is especially felt
in Timaeus' treatment of our passions. For Timaeus our
passions are necessary but not good. Or rather, they are
good only insofar as they are necessary. The passions pull
us away from the orderly life of thinking. Timaeus tells
us something we know all too well from experiencethat the passions are terrible. But he does not leave room
for the possibility that a terrible thing is not for that
reason bad. Just as goodness is not necessarily identical
with order, badness is not necessarily the same as terribleness. The terrible things in us, those things Timaeus
sums up as "love that attempts all things," could very well
have more of a connection with the good things in us
than Timaeus is willing to admit. Is not our effort to learn
65
�the truth about all things rooted in a terrible longing,
a divine madness as Socrates calls it in the Phaedrus? 80
A soul possessed by the madness of philosophy is surely
not the same as a soul which has "made it to the top in
every philosophy."
In the likely story, the beautiful appears in one guise
only-the guise of mathematical structure. ForTimaeus
this mathematical beauty is always linked with nobility
or good character. It is never treated as something which
could awaken love. Iflonging is at all present in the likely
story, it is present in our longing to return to our original
condition as stars. But this sort of longing is prompted
by our desire to be orderly and well-shaped. Timaeus
at one point refers to the lover, the erastCs, of intelligence
and knowledge." But I think this refers simply to the
man who loves his own noble activity of building
mathematical models of Becoming.
The absence of the sort of beauty I am talking about
We never get to the true face of things in the story. We
must rest content with a beautiful mathematical facade.
The absence of the philosopher and the philosophical
love of the forms in Timaeus' cosmos brings up a
perplexity that lies at the heart of the likely story. Timaeus
often refers to the region of the forms which our cosmos
imitates. He refers also to the dialectical study of the
things that are always. Why then, when Timaeus constructs the cosmos and all its contents, does he leave out
philosophy as the study of the truly intelligible whole?
Why does astronomy rather than dialectic become the
highest human activity within Timaeus' cosmos? To
answer this question, we will seek guidance from the
divided line of the Republic.
On the divided line the level Socrates calls dianoia is
situated just below the level of dialectic. To this realm
belong all those activities called arts, technai. The most
important of these arts are the mathematical studies-
can be seen in Timaeus' portrait of human nature. The
arithmetic,
portrait combines the symmetry of structure with the
Socrates distinguishes these arts from the uppermost level
of dialectic in the following way. The mathematical arts,
unlike dialetic, make use of hypotheses which are never
grotesqueness of a medical operation. Let us consider
for a moment the beauty of a human face. In the likely
geometry,
astronomy,
and harmonics.
story, the face is entirely a matter of organs and their
questioned. Socrates compares such hypotheses to im-
proper functioning. If, for example, you wanted to say
that someone had beautiful eyes, Timaeus would point
out to you that the beauty of the eyes consisted in their
ability to see, especially to see the objects of astronomy.
The eyes, therefore, are beautiful because they lead us
ages. 82 This is why Socrates says that the mathematician
merely dreams the truth. 83 The mathematician is intellectually asleep, and in his sleep he has beautiful dreams
whose clarity and distinctness lull him into thinking that
he has found the truth itself. He is asleep because he does
not search for the original beings, the forms, of which
his own mathematical objects are likenesses. Caught up
in his dream world of beautiful structures, the mathematician beholds images, thinking all the while that the ob-
eventually to the ordering of our soul. Timaeus' account
of all the other facial organs follows much the same line
of thought. These organs exhibit nothing more and
nothing less than the gods' attempt to reconcile the
demands of orderliness with those of life's necessities. But
a face is not an orderly arrangement of parts that work
properly. It is a single, uncuttable look, an idea. It is
something that allows us to say "This is Socrates" or "This
is Theaetetus:' Because of the uncuttable look of the face,
we can identify Socrates and Theaetetus despite the
similarity of their faces. Furthermore, owing to the
character of the human face, it is ridiculous to give an
account of people by counting them. Timaeus shows us
that he does not know how to look at a human face. His
ingenious and well-meaning gods do not care if their arrangement of facial organs also inspires longing. Or
rather, if they care, they care because such longing would
cause us to "lose our heads" and become disorderly and
ugly.
The absence of a beauty that inspires longing in the
likely story is deeply connected with the absence of
philosophical love. The idea or look of the human face
resembles the uncuttable look of a Socratic eidos. This
eidos too cannot be reduced to a proper arrangement of
parts. In other dialogues, notably in the Symposium, our
perception of beautiful bodies is the starting-point for
our ascent to the purely intelligible region of the forms.
The likely story contains no such ascent. The cosmos is
our boundary and law-giver. And, as we saw earlier, we
must accept the likely story and not search beyond it.
66
jects of mathematics are in fact the truest, most original
beings. Despite the iinaginativeness characteristic of the
mathematical activity, he lacks the most important kind
of imagination. He is unable to see beyond the clarity
of mathematical objects to the more precise, -more
original, region of the forms. While the mathematician
works down from his unquestioned hypotheses to
necessary conclusions, the dialectician works up and back
to the vision of the forms. The philosophical education
Socrates outlines in the seventh book of the Republic
attempts to undo the mathematician's sleepiness, to make
the mathematical studies a ladder to the-higher region
of dialectic.
What we can say about Timaeus' likely story is that
it too works down from hypotheses. It embodies that intellectual activity Socrates calls dianoia. Unlike the
mathematicians described in the Republic, Timaeus begins
with the realm of the forms- the forms of Same and
Other, the intelligible animal, and the pure archetypes
of the four elements of body. Timaeus treats the forms
themselves as hypotheses from which he then descends to
make a world. Notwithstanding his supposition of these
forms, the motion of the likely story is away from the
assumed principles rather than towards them. What this
accounts for, I think, is the likeliness of the likely story.
In the likely story, we descend from the region of being
WINTER 1985
�to the image-world of becoming. We enter the beautiful
dream world of the mathematician. We build a hypothetical re-created world in speech.
As the cosmos gets filled and perfected in Timaeus'
story, it "closes upon itself:' It becomes a self-sufficient,
self-contained god. As we build this hypothetical world
with the powers of mathematics, we move further and
further away from the realm of Being which was our
starting-point. I think it is in this way that astronomy
as the highest of the mathematical arts comes to replace
the dialectical inquiry into first principles. This is one
of the important things the likely story dramatizes- the
covering up and forgetting of first principles as the true
objects of inquiry. Such a covering up is vital if we are
to guard and save the power of giving likely accounts,
of constructing theories. In the likely story, our desire to
ascend to the Republic's greatest study of the good gets
"swallowed up" by our attraction to the beauty of
mathematical structures. Because of this, the likely story
necessarily takes the form of play and diversion from
serious matters. True to our familiar expression "entertaining a hypothesis;' the likely story comes before us as
a form of entertainment for Socrates. As we have seen,
Socrates fully accepts Timaeus' conditions. He accepts
the likely story as his guest-gift and does not, on this occasion, search beyond it. He thereby takes the story in
just the right spirit, the spirit that shows exactly what
a likely story about Becoming is.
As the silent Socrates listens to Timaeus' song oflaw
and order, we of course wonder what he is thinking. My
guess is that he is enjoying his feast of speech, though
not because he is persuaded of its teaching. I think
Socrates must all the while be looking into Timaeus' face,
thinking about the quality of Timaeus' soul as it is
revealed in the likely story. He may be searching for some
trace of philosophical longing buried beneath the clever
constructions and worldly accomplishments that have no
doubt spoiled the glorious Timaeus.
Something is surely lacking in the Timaeus. This is
signalled by the famous absence of the fourth host. The
fourth host is perhaps the philosopher, who has no place
in the dialogue or in the world as Timaeus re-creates it.
The likely story offers us a strange and provocative
look at the world and at ourselves. But we do not find
ourselves accurately reflected in the likely world that
emerges out of Timaeus' head, the world without human
faces. For all its virtues of order and musicality, the likely
story leaves us with a need that can be met, I think, only
by turning back, back towards the first principles and
to those Socratic stories, like the myth of recollection,
which encourage us to turn back. Timaeus' cosmic song
thus draws our attention to that other singer who, for
now, silently listens.
FOOTNOTES
1. Timaeus 87c4-5
2. Ibid. 20b7 -c3
3. Ibid. 27a2-b6
4. Ibid. 29d4-6
5. Ibid. 106a3-4
6. Ibid. 59c5- d2
7. Ibid. 29c3
8. Ibid. 71a3-72d3
9. Ibid. 29c4- d3
10. Ibid. 29d6
11. Gorgias 523al- 3
12. R,public VI, 509d6-510a4; 511d6-e5
13. Timaeus 50d2-e1
14. Ibid. 56b3-5
15. Ibid. 41c6-d3; 41e4-42a3; 42d2-e4
16. Ibid. 42e5-43a6
17. Ibid. 91a4-b7
18. Ibid. 90e6-91a1
19. Ibid. 21a1-3; 26e2-27a1
20. Ibid. 24c7-d1; Critias 109c7-8
21 .. Thucydides, Pelopponesian Wars, II 40
22. Timaeus 83e4-5
23. Ibid. 30a4
24. Ibid. 29e2-3
25. Ibid. 30b4-6
26. Ibid. 31a4- b3
27. Ibid. 51b7 ~c5
28. Ibid. 32b6-7
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
35a8
35b4-36b6
36116-d7
36e2-3
42d1-2; 90c6-d7
37a2-c5
34b8-9
27d2
Aristotle, Physics; IV, 219b1-2
Timaeus 52d2-53a7
Ibid. 53c4-55c6
Ibid. 53d7-e2
Ibid. 47e4-5
Ibid. 48a6-7
Ibid. 48a2-5; 56c3-7
Ibid. 46e6-47c4
Ibid. 49a6
Ibid. 50d2- 3
Ibid. 52a8
Ibid. 51 a!- b2
Ibid. 50a4-c6
Ibid. 50e4- 8
Ibid. 52e5-53a2
Ibid. 53b4-5
Ibid. 50d2-4
Ibid. 53b2
Ibid. 48b5-c2
Ibid. 53c5- 6
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
57. Ibid. 37a5
58. Ibid. 51b8
59. Ibid. 48dl-4
60. loc. cit.
61. Ibid. 48a2-5; 56c3-7
62. Ibid. 92cl-3
63. Ibid. 68e1 - 69a5
64. Ibid. 34b10-35a1
65. Ibid. 69b8- c1
66. Ibid. 26c7 -d1
67. Ibid. 20d8
68. Ibid. 27a3-6
69. Ibid. 44d3-45a2
70. Ibid. 69c5-70e5
71. Ibid. 69d6
72. Ibid. 69d6- e3
73. Ibid. 39e3- 40a2
74. Ibid. 29e1-2
75. Ibid. 69c8
76. Ibid. 69d4-6
77. Ibid. 17a4-5
78. Ibid. 20al- 5
79. Republic VI, 508e1-509a5
80. Pha,drus 243e9 ff
81. Timaeus 46d7 -8
82. Republic VI, 510b4-51la2
83. Ibid.VII, 533b6-c3
67
�A Note on Eva Brann's "Roots of Modernity"
Chaninah Maschler
T
his note is a rather over-sized
response to Eva Brann's recent
"Roots of Modernity." (St.
John's Review, Spring 1984) Even after
several readings I find the essay (originally a lecture for students at a college
under Presbyterian auspices) hard to
understand. Its aim, in terms of the
original audience, seemed to be to help
students feel the weight of their religious
heritage by proposing the thesis that not
only they, as Christians, but all of us, as
moderns, live on or from Christianity.
Christianity's "world-historical" significance is made palpable by her sketching of an argument according to which
those respects in which modern life and
thought differ most profoundly from ancient life and thought (p. 69 list) can all
be connected with Christianity, either
directly, as preserving and implementing
Christian "spiritual and intellectual
modes" (p. 66), or indirectly, as expressing and drawing out the consequences
of a great refusal of at least portions of
Christianity.
What I call a "great refusal" (negation,
rejection) is given the rather different
name "perversion of." H-ere begins one of
my difficulties. Miss Brann's attitude to
the three men whom she singles out as
"founders of modernity" (Galilee, Bacon,
Descartes) is complex. Sometimes she
Chaninah Maschler is a tutor at St. John's College,
Annapolis.
68
praises them with faint damns, as when
she writes:
I am not saying that these founders
of modernity played silly and
wicked and blasphemous games,
but only that they still had the
theological learning and the
grandeur of imagination to know
what their enterprise resembled
[namely, the rebellion of Satan.] (p.
68)
Sometimes she takes grim satisfaction in
their getting the fall they deserved:
Their rebellion is ... against all intermediaries between themselves
and God and his nature. They want
to be next to him and like him. So
they fall to being not creatures but
creators. (p. 67)
Below I will try to state some of my
disagreements with both these passages.
Right now it is the pro-and-con attitude
itself that I am taking up. A to my mind
already perplexing situation (in which
many of us are caught), namely, that of
a non-Christian teacher who seeks to persuade Christian students, on nonChristian, intellectual grounds, to work
at appropriating their own Christian
heritage so that they may receive help
from it in fashioning or preserving a
"framework" for their thinking about ''the
nature and ends Of their life" (p. 69), is
made still more perplexing because the
teacher chooses to describe a negation or
rejection or refusal of elements of Christianity in words borrowed from the Christian tradition, words that would be
appropriate for someone who cleaves to
the teachings of Augustine but which I
find confusing as coming from someone
who expressly distances herself from those
teachings. What confuses me is that the
"complex" attitude seems weighted in the
contra-direction; I am unable to sort out
Miss Brann's reasons for this choice.
When Augustine says that Satan "did
not abide in the truth because the truth
was not in him;' he seems to identify
Satan's pride with envy, envy of the Son.
By the standards of Augustinian Christianity (though not, perhaps, by those of
Thomas), all human pride is ressentiment
at our being made the mere image and
not the reality of God, which is why people try to play lord over one another,
pretending to an inequality as that of God
to Man. Since, however, Miss Brann
declares herself a non-Christian, she can
be presumed free to distinguish proper
pride from soul-and-world-destroying
envy. Moreover, since, for her, Christ
would either be a prophet (as he is for
Moslems and Jews) or a teacher, it should
be possible according to her for a later
prophet or teacher so to interpret Christ's
message that its spirit is saved while its
killing letter is killed. It should even be
possible respectfully to decline the
teacher's teachings. Why, then, does she
not grant this kind of liberty to the
founders of modernity?
Descartes, for instance, in Meditation
IV, claims a will so large that it can double back on itself and shrink "commitment" to the sphere of what is evident to
the merely finite human understanding.
The cure for error, and even sin, is strictly
WINTER 1985
�in his own power. Indeed, his "method"
looks as though it should not only rid him
of errors previously committed but protect him against error and sin henceforth.
By teaching such Stoic self-help to others
he certainly seems to make the Sacraments superfluous to the Sage. Why call
this rebellion? Why isn't it, like Miss
Brann's own non-Christianity, a selective
by-passing of Christianity?
Again, Bacon when he writes (in "Of
Goodness and Goodness of Nature"), that
without goodness (which "answers to the
theological virtue of charity;') "man is a
busy, mischievous, wretched thing;' can
be read to give expression to something
like that Welcoming attitude to the pre-·
sent and to one's fellows for the lack of
which Miss Brann so much condemns
Heidegger. This attitude Bacon claims to
find in a properly doctored Christianity.
When he adds the sentence from
Machiavelli "that the Christian faith had
given up good men in prey to those that
are tyrannical and unjust;' isn't it in the
name of charity rightly understood that
he protests against such overweening
charity as does not heed God's command
to love our neighbor as ourselves (a command which he construes to mean that
"Divinity make the love of ourselves the
pattern; the love of our neighbors but the
portraiture")? To someone mindful of
Luther's protest against the pride of those
men who presume to "imitate Christ" it
is not at all obvious how Bacon's "realism''
isn't a reminder of the need for humility. 1
Admittedly, Bacon casts himself for the·
role of Advisor· to Princes (Queen
Elizabeth and King James I). In that
capacity he defends doctrines of royal
authority at odds with those which claim
that secular rulers, being charged merely
with the safeguarding of goods of the
body, are inferior to spiritual rulers, who
are charged with the perfecting of the
human soul. But critique of the doctrine
of Papal Plenitude of Power (see Introduction to Marsilius of Padua, Dejendor of the
Peace, Harper, 1967) was not initiated by
Bacon. He was trying to preserve the
English monarchy's earlier gains in authority. Since he served the ruler and the
church of the realm to the best of his ability, I again wonder on what grounds he
is called a rebel, though I recognize that
from a Roman Catholic perspective he
would deserve to be called so.
Miss Brann's come-back, if I understand her, is that not only or chiefly in
her estimation but in their own, the men
responsible for the "project" of finding out
the true constitution of the universe and
of using this knowledge to improve the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
conditions of human life were rebels, not
against the church and the state, nor
against God, but against the "traditional
wisdom" which teaches that men can only
have opinions about good and evil but
cannot gain moral episteme (science).
Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes themselves
(on this reading of "traditional wisdom")
held that the idea of a science of good and
evil is "demonic?'
I choose Goethe's word (which is not
Miss Brann's) for two reasons: First,
because as he came to use it, for instance
of Napoleon, a romantic flavor clings to
it and it is such a romantic reading of
Paradise Lost that seems to me presupposed
by her sentence about the three founders
"all" having a "cautiously sympathetic
respect for Satan" (p. 67). Nicholas
Machiavelli didn't call himself"Old Nick."
Second, because what prompted me first
to set pen to paper was my more than
uneasiness over her willingness to use
Augustinian vocabulary to characterize
the work of men who, in a period of European history when demonology had regained frightful power, tried to re-assert
sanity. 2 The reason for my believing that
it is important to determine how the great
teachers of Christian doctrine meant their
passages about Satan to be understood is
that it seems to me I cannot otherwise
understand or appraise opposition to their
teaching. My current guess is that the
Christians and non-Christians who
wanted to de-emphasize the Augustinian
tradition were right in holding that this
tradition gave support to the witch-craze.
That there had been such a craze on the
continent I happened to have learned in
a Dutch elementary school, where
children were taught to take pride in the
fact that in the little town of Oudewater
a scale-test was substituted for the watertest: Anyone accused of witch craft should
show levity rather than gravity, it was
argued. Therefore, if the pan with the
witch in it went down, that proved that
the accused, though perhaps guilty of
other crimes, was not guilty of a pact with
the deviL Elsewhere the test was whether,
when thrown into the water, the accused
floated or drowned. Floating proved
witch-craft. Drowning proved the
contrary.
More recently, I read in Montaigne's
"Of Cripples" (iii,ll):
our life is too real and essential to
vouch for these supernatural and
fantastic accidents. As for druggings and poisonings, I put them
out of my reckoning; those are
homicides. . .. However, even in
such matters they say that we must
not always be satisfied with confessions, for such persons have
sometimes been known to accuse
themselves of having killed people
who were found to be alive .... My
ears are battered by a thousand
stories like this: 'Three people saw
him on such and such a day in the
east; three saw him the next day in
the west, at such and such a time,
in such and such a place, dressed
thUs. Truly, I would not believe my
own self about this. HoW much
more natural and likely it seems to
me that two men are lying than that
one man should pass with the winds
in twelve hours from the east to the
west. How much more natural that
our understanding should be carried away from its base by the
volatility of our untracked mind
than that one of us, in flesh and
bone, should be wafted up a
chimney on a broomstick by a
strange spirit.
I tried to get an idea of just how reliable
the rumor about the witch craze was by
reading H. R. Trevor-Roper's The Euro-
pean Witchcraze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries (Harper, 1969), E. William
Monter's European Witchcmjt (John Wiley,
New York, 1969), H. C. Erik Midelfort's
Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany,
1582-1684 and the already mentioned
book about Witch belief in England by
Trevor Davies. If these authors are
trustworthy, Montaigne's principle, "...
it is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have a man roasted alive
because of them;' was very far from the
prevailing one. By some estimates, now
considered melodramatic, 100,000 people
were killed for witchcraft in Europe be-
tween 1500 and 1700. The only book I
have so far found that gives careful details
about how its figures are arrived at is
Midelfort's. According to him; "at least
3,229 persons were executed for witchcraft in the German Southwest" between
1561 and 1670 (p. 32). Of course, no such
The witches of my neighborhood
are in mortal danger every time
Some new authf::!r comes along and
attests to the reality of their visions.
... To kill men, we should have
sharp and luminous evidence; and
figure means anything exact until one
knows population figures too. But that
rumors about 30 Charles Mansons a year
would be pretty frightening is, I think,
fair to say. I bring up his name because
someone asked me whether it isn't
69
�necessary to examine whether some of the
accusations for witchcraft wouldn't by our
own standards be warranted in the sense
that real crimes were committed by those
who stood so accused. Norman Cohr.L
takes up the question in Europe's Inner
Demons (Basic Books, 1975). The crimes
(malef£c£a) of which witches were accused
were: causing hailstorms or unseasonable
rain to ruin the crops; causing miscarriages or impotence; bringing on sudden
illness, mental derangement, or accidents,
or deformities; and worst, killing babies,
cooking, and eating them. The power to
harm was always the result of a pact with
the devil, sealed by terrible obscenities.
Cohn argues (to me convincingly) that
the pattern of accusation is so stereotypical (he traces it to the second century,
1
'when pagan Greeks and Romans attached it to the small Christian ·communities in the empire"), and every supposedly documented case of witches's
sabbaths or infant cannibalism is so
dubious that the title of his book is warranted. He chooses a passage about
custom's being a treacherous school
mistress from Montaigne's "Of Custom,
and Not Easily Changing an Accepted
Law'' (i, 23) as frontispiece. Since I am
acquainted with the customary ritual
murder accusation against the jews, and
since some admittedly less than wholehearted investigation of this charge has
never presented me with reasons to
believe the justice of the accusation, I remain a partisan of those who sought to
dis-enchant the world. Amongst these I
count Galilee, Bacon, and Descartes.
Bacon dedicates the New Organon to
King James, before whom he dangles the
wonderful saying "that it is the glory of
God to conceal a thing but the glory of
the King to find a thing out!' (New
Organon, LLA ed., p. 15) Certainly Bacon
hopes to win the King as patron for largescale projects of scientific research and
technology. But I wonder whether he isn't
also trying to distract the King's curiosity from witchcraft's secrets (on which
James had written a book- Daemonolog£e,
Edinburgh, 1597; 2nd ed. London, 1603)
and to fasten it instead on "white magic."
It is perfectly true that such a hunch
would have to be backed up by passages
from Bacon's writings. But these are not
entirely lacking (Sylva Sylvarum, Stebbing's
JiliJrks of Bacon, ii, 642£), and it cannot be
considered unimportant that Parliament
in 1604 passed a new statute against
witchcraft according to which not the actual harm done through such craft but
"the mere fact of a contract With the devil"
70
was to be punished by hanging. That a
contract with Satan existed could become
known through confession or by finding
"witches's marks" (insensitive spots) on the
naked body of the accused (TrevorDavies, p. 62).
I even· wonder whether the passion
that went into Descartes's program of taking life and soul out of nature had
something to do with disgust at the
demon mania. That Cartesianism was
later used in the fight against the witch
craze is shown by the Dutchman
Balthazar Bekker's Betoverde J!Vereld (The
Enchanted World, )6~1) and Malebranche's
Recherche de Ia Verite (excerpts pp. 121ff of
E. W. Monter's European Witchcraze).
We would gravely wrong Christianity
if we supposed that it was chiefly responsible for originally stocking the world with
demons. There's plenty of Roman and
Greek demonology, and Hellenistic
Jewish Apocrypha are full of demons too.
Only, whereas in the so-called dark ages
many a bishop taught that belief in
werewolves and witches is unchristian,
church leaders between roughly 1500 and
1700 mostly encouraged rather than
discouraged popular fears. Around 1500,
the Dominican inquisitor in the little
diocese of the Province of Como reports
that a thousand witches were tried and a
hundred burned in his area every year.
According to the books I cited (to which
Bodin's Demonomanie must be added), the
situation in Como was not an isolated
one. If the historians' reports (not easily
dismissed, even by sceptics, seeing how
numerous, serious, and large the tomes
on witchcraft became with ·the invention
of print) are reliable, then it is reasonable
to wonder whether the founders of
modernity concluded that they could no
longer rely on the churches (Catholic or Protestant) to gentle and raise up the populace.
None of the men singled out by Miss
Brann were given to public ranting
against the church or clergy of the
country or city where they resided. They
were quite scrupulous to obey and to
recommend obedience to others, at least
as scrupulous as Socrates had been. They
not only wrote of an "interim ethics:' as
Descartes does in Discourse III and
Bacon in the New Organon, where he provisionally distinguishes "the proud and
ambitious desire of moral knowledge to
judge of good and evil" from "natural
philosophy:' but they _also practiced it.
And I do not see how, except by impersonating the standpoint of the Inquisitors,
Miss Brann could blame Bacon and
Descartes for meditating on the possibility
of an ultimate "moral and political
philosophy" that would be part of a
perfected "natural philosophy." True, there
is a great difference between meditation
and publication. Still, I wonder at the ease
with which she judges as due to
"unspeakable" pride what- others might
regard as due to a noble sense of
responsibility.
Let me turn now to those small but
perhaps telling literary and art-historical
facts on which Miss Brann's lecture relies
to make vivid that the three founders were
both warning their followers of the
dangers of the enterprise of establishing
"the kingdom of man" and advertising the
glory of it. 3 They are:
a) that in aphorism xciv ofBk I of the New
Organon Bacon writes:
Then only will there be good
ground of hope for the further advance of knowledge when there
shall be received and gathered
together into natural history a
variety of experiments which are of
no use in themselves but simply
serve to discover causes and axioms,
which I call experimenta lucifera, experiments of light.
In her judgment, this last tag is intended
to recall Satan's name before he became
rebel from envy of the Sun ..Son.
b) that at least two of our authors seem
to be intent on creating a new heaven and
earth, else why should they mimic the
Divine rhythm of creation by laying out
their scientific synthesis over six days?
c) that in his Letter to the Translator of
the Pr£nc£ples Descartes compares
philosophy to a tree (cf. New Organon I, 107;
Advancement of Learning, Everyman ed. p.
88; "tree of Porphyry"), which can be
presumed to be the very one that stood
in our First Parents' garden as the forbidden tree, and which also appears on the
title page of Descartes' Principles and
Galilee's DiScorsi.
When first one registers that
Descartes' Med£tat£ons are spread out over
a week sans Sabbath; that the Discourse too
is divided into six; that Bacon's Great Instaurat£on (Renewal) was meant to have six
parts; that the College of Bensalem is
called the College of Six Days; that the
Latin name of the "Preparation for
Natural and Experimental History" is
parasceve, which is Latin for the Hebrew
Erev Shabbath (cf. the prayer that concludes
Bacori's Preface to the Great lnstauration);
and yes, that Galileds D£alogues may have
stopped on the fourth day because that
is the middle of the seven and the day on
WINTER 1985
�which the heavenly bodies were madeone does stand amazed.
Nor would I want to deny the
Millenarian flavor of Bacon's Sabbath
talk. But it seems to me that every
"apocalyptic" passage in Bacon that I can
remember debunks the Biblical book
Apocalypse. For instance:
. . . All depends on keeping the eye
steadily ftxed upon the facts of
nature. . . . God forbid that we
should give out a dream of our own
imagination [whether of a world so
thoroughly gentled by the Lamb as
to hold no violent motions or of a
world delivered up to Demons] for
a pattern of the world; rather, may
He graciously grant us to write an
apocalypse or true vision of the
footsteps of the Creator imprinted
on his creatures.
The passion for knowledge is substituted
for the passion for revenge! Bacon and
Descartes, far from being the ones to
make the world shudder with the birthpangs of the Messiah, are trying to still
those pangs: to invite men to become
"masters and possessors of nature"_ is their
way of casting out demons. Their tactics
may have been ill-advised. May be the
Counter-Reformation Church, which
took a leaf from Euripides' Bacchae and
tried to tame the tumult through theatre
and its equivalent, was wiser. (I mention
the play to indicate that I am not even
confident that Biblical Messianism,
Jewish or Christian, was the ~~root" of
Europe's upheaval). But I do not see how
we can judge one way or the other until
we have learned something of the
political, social, economic, religious circumstances that Bacon, Galileo, and
Descartes were up against. That these
weren't pretty is insinuated by Bacon
when, in the essay "Of Custom and
Education;' he drops the names of Friar
Clement, murderer of Henry III of
France, and considered for canonization
by Sixtus V; Juan Jaureguy, would-be
assassin of William the Silent; Balthazar
Gerard, the man who succeeded in
murdering William. That Descartes too
wants us to understand the violent circumstances surrounding his meditations
on renovatio is shown by his eXplaining that
what brought ,him to Germany and to
that famous poele where he was sufficiently
"free of passion" to think were the religious
wars which, at the time of his writing of
the Discourse, and even in the year of their
publication, ~~were still not at an end."
Some twentieth-century historians
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
blame the Thirty Years War (1618-48) for
Germany's political backwardness as compared to other European nations, identifying it as the "root" of the horrors of the
first half of the twentieth century. More
than a third of the population of Germany
and Bohemia was killed off during that
war.
Returning to the much more pleasant
business of gauging the sense and the
weight that is to be given to the motif of
the tree and the six days, I should mention that only because, like Miss Brann,
I was intrigued by these details, I learned
that there is a long Christian tradition of
hexahemeral (six:.day) literature which
goes back to the church fathers. It seems
intermittently to intersect with a similar
Jewish tradition, of which kabbalah is one
expression. St ..Basil wrote a Hexaemeron;
so too did St. Ambrose and St. Bede, and
Oxford University Press recently _published a Hexaemeron by Grosseteste, this
last unfortunately not yet translated.
Of these books I have so far read only
St. Ambrose's. It is a series of sermons
delivered over the ftrst week of Lent. St.
Ambrose affectionately describes the
beautiful natural world that God made.
He seems to be using the opening chapter
of Genesis as a topical outline for natural
history."" From the translator's editorial
notes one learns that many of the joyous
descriptive passages are culled from
secular Latin authors while others are
recognizably lines from Job, Psalms, the
Prophets, or the New Testament where
the relevant natural wonder comes up.
The effect isn't really bookish. The congregation, eagerly waiting for Easter,
must have felt confirmed in its faith that
everything th~t God made is beautiful
and good, that God cares for men. There
is no hint of a conflict between secular
and sacred narration or of a tug of war
between edification and description.
Ambrose, as he unselfconsciously
allows Pagan authors (Cicero, Virgil,
Ovid, even. Lucretius) to testify, reminded
me of how I felt when, not far from Ambrose's Milan, in the little town of San
Giovanni di Bellagio on the shores of
Lake Como, I attended a festival honoring the lake and the saint who said that
God is love (that saint being the one after
whom the town is named). Perhaps this
merely private reminiscence of the_ great
fish catch, the young men's rowboast race,
the lights on the water, the local padre's
blessing of the children while he munches
on chicken drumsticks, the sound of the
churchbells, is not entirely irrelevant to
the question why Galileo, Bacon and
Descartes became "conspirators, for a
post-medieval way of life- ( cf. Preliminary
Discourse to the Encyclopedia ofDiderot, LLA
ed. pp. 72-80). Before they came on the
scene, others- I am thinking especially of
Colet, Erasmus, More, but perhaps
Nicholas of Cusa should be counted in
this group as well- had done all in their
power to work conservingly for reform,
for restoration of something like the
pastoral life and spirit (in all senses of the
adjective) I felt in Ambrose and the
festival of San Giovanni in Como (see
Three Oxford Reformers by Frederic
Seebohm, London 1869; any of Trevor
Roper's books on sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe; Henry Kamen's
little Signet paperback on the Spanish Inquisition). Their failure, in ·my judgment,
has great bearing on the choices made by
Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes.
As luck would have it, St. Ambrose,
while celebrating the works of the third
day, seems to comment on the tree pictured under the titles of the books of
Galileo and Descartes published by the
Leiden Elzeviers. 5
In truth, while you realize that you
possess frailty in common with the
flowers, you know that you have access to delight in the use of the vine,
from which is produced wine,
wherein the heart of man finds
cheer. Would that, man, you could
imitate the example of this species
of plant, so that you may bear fruit
for your own joy and delight. In
yourself lies the sweetness of your
charm, from you does it blossom,
in you it sojourns, within you it
rests, in your own self you must
search for the jubilant quality of
your conscience. For that reason he
says: 'Drink water out of thine own
cistern and the streams of thine own
well: First of all, nothing is more
pleasing than the scent of a
blossoming vine. Furthermore, the
juice when extracted from the
flower of this vine produces a drink
which is pleasureable and healthgiving. Again, who does not marvel
at the fact that from the seed of the
grape springs forth a vine that
climbs even as high as the top of a
tree? The vine .fondles the tree by
embracing and binding it with vine
leaves, and crowns it with garlands
of grapes. In imitation of our life,
the vine first plants deep its living
roots; then, because its nature is
flexible and likely to fall, it uses its
71
�tendrils like arms to hold tight
whatever it seizes. By this means it
raises itself and lifts itself on high.
Similar to this vine are the
members of the church, who are
planted with the root of faith and
are held in check by the vine shoots
of humility.
A little further on in the sermon Ambrose, by merging the tower of Isiah's Song
of the Vineyard with the tree just described, comes to identify the tree as the
church leaders- "the apostles> prophets> and
doctors" -while the vine remains the Christian Congregation.
If you look again at the Elzevier
emblem you will see that what twists
'round the tree is a grapevine with
bunches of grapes and that the scholar
who stands beside the tree seems to be
plucking some (cf. New Organon ii, p. 156
and 161 on "first vintage").
Consider next a passage fi-om Pica's
On lhe Dignily of Man (LLA ed., p. 28):
As the farmer marries elm to vine,
so the magus marries earth to
heaven, that is, lower things to the
qualities and virtues of higher
things.
Pica's lines alert us that, while listening to Ambrose, we didn't pay attention
to the question who planted the tree (now
identified as an elm) and who trained the
vine to grow upon it. The matchmaker,
God, was not pictured in Ambrose's
sermon. Only His voice was heard, from
far away, by those who remember the
Prophet who pleaded God's case with the
Congregation of Israel and its leaders ("I
ask you to judge between my vineyard
and me. What else could I have done for
it that I have not done? I expected it to
yield cultivated grapes, but sour ones
were all it gave.") In Pica the matchmaker
is on the scene, as he is in the Elzevier
picture.
Abstractly considered, Pica need not
have known Ambrose's use of the vinesustaining tree; he could have taken it
straight from the Italian landscape or
from Virgil's Georgics. But a passage in the
Heptaplous (LLA ed. p. 72) shows that
Pica did know Ambrose's sermon (or at
least, knew of it).
Putting the two passages together, we
seem to get a triple analogy: The magus
imitates God by imitating the farmer,
because as the farmer follows God's example when joining vine to tree in the
manner of God's joining the congregation
to its teachers, so the magus joins earthly
to heavenly things.
72
Now that the man in scholar's garb on
the Elzevier picture has been identified
as a magician, Miss Brann's case seems
clinched. We all know about Faust, how
he made a pact with the devil and gave
himself over to magic. Pica, however,
believes that there are two kinds of magic.
The first, he says, the Greeks called
goeteian.
The second sort they call by its proper and peculiar name, mageian, the
perfect and highest wisdom as it
were. Porphyry says that in the
language of the Persians, magician
means the same thing as interpreter
and lover of divine things means in
our language. . . The first is the
most fraudulent of arts, the second
is firm, faithful, and solid. . ..
From the second comes the highest
splendor and glory of letters,
desired in ancient times and almost,
always since then. No man who was
a philosopher and desirous of learning good arts has ever been studious
of the first. Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Plato, traveled
across the sea to learn the second.
When they came back, they
preached it and held it chief among
their esoteric doctrines ... As the
first magic makes man subject to and
delivered over to the powers of wickedness,
so the second makes him their prince and
lord . . . The second, among the virtues sown by the kindness of God
and planted in the world, as if calling them out from darkness to light,
does not so much make wonders as
carifully serve nature which makes them.
(Hepiaplous, LLA ed. pp. 27, 8)
We shan't know what Pica means until we figure out what the powers of
wickedness are and what lower and higher
things his magus joins in wedlock. 6 Since
the Hermetic writings on which he relies
contain passages as crassly demonological
as the terrible stuff one reads when one
studies the court records of the sixteenth
and seventeenth century witchtrials, one
cannot rule out the possibility that goeteia
is black magic and that the powers of
wickedness are incubi and succubi. But I
feel pretty confident that Miss Brann's
suggestion that the magus, emulates the
ordained priest by joining conjuring words
to things (so that, where the priest "makes
Christ" from wafer and wine, the magus
"transsubstantiates" portions of nature)
won't work: In the first place, the
eucharistic miracle keeps the species
(which to the scholastics means precisely
the looks) the same though the substance is
altered whereas Pica's and Bacon's
transformations alter the specieJ but not,
I believe, the substance, since the presupposition of alchemical practices is one of
"catholic matter" (Newton's word). Second, the last sentence in the passage
from Pica's Oration seems to rule out any
except natural wonders. Indeed, it is not
hard to read what Pica says about goeteian
as making fun of priestly hocus pocus.
This is not necessarily the same as
impiety: Zwingli is a pious Christian. But
it Would be a scandalous reading, and I
simply do not know Pico well enough (the
tone of the Heptaplous is rather different
from that of the Oration) to judge: Goeteia
may be witchcraft or black magic.
If, then, "higher" and "lower" (in
Milton, who used the same tree··vine pair,
identified with Adam and Eve) are not an
analogue to sacramental words and
things, I can think of only two other
possibilities: that the superlunary world
is higher and the sublunar lower and the
magus an alchemist, who knows how to
channel astral virtues into earthly things
so as to raise them up; or that mathemata
(shapes, numbers, order relations) are the
higher activating powers and sensible
things lower. 7 The contrast between a
stellar and a mathematical constrUction
of "higher" things is probably erroneous
from the perspective of the magi
themselves. But either way, what matters
is that the magus does not draw the
liberal/servile arts distinction in the manner of the dominant Platonic tradition,
that he does not deem the farmer's work so far
beneath him that it cannot remind him of God's
work and lure him on to do his own work.
Simon Stevin, that wonderful physicist and engineer who served Maurice of
Nassau and his country so well, comes to
mind. Stevin seems to have designed his
own logos. One of these, the endless chain
accompanied by the motto "wonder/miracle that is no wonder/miracle;' is
familiar to older St. John's alumni and
tutors. 8 There are two others: The first
shows a man digging and a woman spinning and bears the words ''Labore et Constantia:' The second is a picture of an open
drawing compass, and the maxim that
goes with this mathematician's tool is the
same as the one that flanks the picture of
the farmer and his wife.
When, in an earlier review of Miss
Brann's Paradoxes of Education in a Republic,
I used the phrase "salvation through
work," I was thinking of an attitude such
as Stevin's. I intended to contrast it both
with Lutheran teachings concerning
WINTER 1985
�salvation by faith and with Catholic
teachings concerning the indispensability
of the church sacraments. I was, without
saying so, "secularizing" the notion of
salvation, no longer considering the soul
in terms of its thousand-year journey and
life eternal, but rather the human being
in terms of the three score years and ten
granted him or her on earth. This earthly
life is disfigured by much meanness, vanity, pain, insecurity. The new burgher
mood, I thought, was that of trusting that
God helps those who help themselves and
one another, that not only physical but
even moral improvement comes, if it
comes at all, from work; from the products that it yields, but also from working, and from the intellectual, moral,
psychological, social, political conditions
needed for work and in turn produced
and maintained by work.
This work ethic is often regarded as
Protestant. But it really is not clear to me
that it is fundamentally Christian. Yves
Renouard's writings on the ethos of
Renaissance Florence, Genoa, Venice,
Pisa (Catholic cities all) and TrevorRoper's critique of the Weber thesis that
there is a special connection between Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism,
suggest that the Christianity of those who
"believe in" the work ethic may be accidental. Experience of town life, and
relish for it, respect for, and knowledge
of, the varieties of expertise and discipline
of fellow townsmen, may have more to do
with it.
I hope that it is becoming apparent
that I am using this note as an occasion
to express doubts about the insulation of
"ideas" from economic and political conditions oflife; just as I am questioning the
comforting hypothesis that the books that
made a major diflE:rence to our ancestors'
thought and life are always books that we
fmd fascinating.
Even if it could be said that I have
shown that the choice of the six-day motif
does not, cif itself, mean "Let me do it" (said
by the child, the eagle-men, to God the
father)- "I can do it just as well as you,
and better than my elder brother;:..__and
even if the Elzevier tree is probably not
hung with apples, Miss Brann's contention (if I grasp her meaning) that a kind
of bleak difi"ance undergirds "modernity"
might still be justified. But I would urge
that if one finds such a spirit in Goethe's
Faust, or Marlowe's, or in Milton's Satan,
it would take much analysis and argument to show that this is what secretly
drives Descartes, Bacon, and Galileo.
In Descartes one might see a terrible
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ambition to be self-begotten and selfraised which, in its twentieth century
working out, self-destructs into solipsism
and "no longer hoping to be less miserable
but only to make others such as he is:' But
the prima facie differences between him
and Bacon and Galileo seem to me so
great (despite Descartes's aping of
Galileo's cameraderie with master artisans
and his citing of many a saying of Bacon's)
that I believe mor.e is gained from studying these three men's books separately and
seeing the differences than from trying to
find the features of Descartes underneath
the skin of Bacon's and Galileo's faces.
For instance: I spent much time
puzzling over the sentence about not
brooking intermediaries cited above. I
considered four possible interpretations:
1. intellectual tradition and colleagiality
as "between" God and self; 2. "adventitious" experience as "between"; 3. ordinary pre-scientific experience and ordinary ways of talking as "between"; 4.
Christ and Christ's vicar on earth as "intermediaries between themselves and God
and his nature." I had difficulties with all
four. I'll pass them in review.
Galileo expressly rejects the phoenixlike solitary genius picture of himself
(Assayer, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo
(Stillman Drake, Vintage ed., p. 239), is
entirely willing to distinguish peripatetic
university science (represented by an
anonymous individual coyly given the
nickname Simplicius after that commentator on Aristotle) from Aristotle (whom
he regards as a fellow scientist; see e.g.
Dialogue, 2nd day, pp. 110!), is glad to
recognize other men's splendor (e.g.
Michelangelo'S or Copernicus's), builds
his case against the peripatetic world
system little by little and in great detail.
How different his attitude to his fellows
is from Descartes's b.ecomes apparent
when one compares his way of writing
dialogues with Descartes's in the Dialogue
on the Search for Truth. Bacon too, though
he certainly makes fun of the "vermiculate" questions of the scholastics (Advancement of Learning, Everyman ed. p. 26)
and the gabby post-Socratics, does not
peremptorily dismiss them but explains
at length whit of their teaching he deems
pernicious and why. To argue against
someone is, to my mind, to aCknowledge
him. Thus, only in Descartes could I find
that isolation which, on one interpretation of her sentence about dispensing with
intermediaries, is meant by Miss Brann
( cf. Bacon's Advancement of Learning, p. 30
Everyrrian ed. on the subject of many wits
and industries and one wit; for contrast,
see Machiavelli Discourses IX and
Descartes' ruminations on city planning
and legislation in Discourse II.)
With respect to their attitude to sense
experience and the question how one
prepares oneself fOr being graced with insight into the principles formative of
nature, Descartes again seems to me quite
different from Galileo and Bacon. Yes,
Galileo extols Copernicus (Dialogue, 3d
day, p. 328) for having had the courage
to "rape" the senses (as one translator has
it; I have not checked the Italian} Yes, he
distinguishes "primary" from "secondary"
qualities (Assayer, Discoveries and Opinions
of Galileo ed. Stillman Drake, Vintage, pp.
275ft). But, in the first place, it is not at
all obvious precisely how this is "modern"
(post-Christian, or "Christian by negation
of Christianity"); that is, what more there
is in Galileo's favoring of koina aestheta over
idia aestheta than there already was in
Democritus, Parmenides, and Plato ( cf
Theaetetus 185ff and elsewhere; De Anima
425al5f). 9
In the second place, many passages in
the Dialogue (Stillman Drake ed., University of California Press, 1962, 1st day, pp.
61f, p. 76, p. 101: see also p. 51 on how
one moves to axioms) seem to me to show
how much "Galileo enjoys rather than
detests the fact that it is in encounters
with the given world that generative ideas
are suggested to the human mind. His
parable about the man who has fallen in
love with sound (Assayer, cited ed., pp.
256ft) confirms for me Curtis Wilson's
distinction between Descartes, who gives
metaphysical primacy to mathemata, and
Galileo, who gives them methodological
primacy. 10
Descartes reminds me just a little of
Pentheus in his fear of"wet and wildness"
(Hopkins' "Inversnaid"). For the reasons
sketched earlier, we might do well to take
his aristeia against the malicious demon
rather literally and to regard the
metaphysical search for guarantees of men's
being capax veritatis as a theomachia!
I see no such desperation in Bacon.
It is true that he likes to assume a grappling stance and that there is much talk of
overcoming nature as though she were an
enemy (who ought to be killed?) But
when he writes that nature, "to be conquered, must be obeyed," or that he wants
to restore "intercourse' between the mind
and nature, or that he hopes to "wed" the
rational and empirical faculties, he shows,
I think, that nature the adversary is also
the paramour. For us it's hard to square
atomism with a sense for the life in
nature. But this may merely go to show
73
�that Bacon's and perhaps even Lucretius's
atomism was different from Dalton's
(though the prevalence of sexual
metaphors like "elective affinities" in
chemistry lasts through the nineteenth
century). At any rate, that, even if one
might accuse Descartes of pretending to
seraphic direct and immediate knowledge
of the nature of things, Bacon does not so
pretend, is shown by many passages, fOr
instance:
To God, truly the Giver and Architect of Forms, and it may be to
the angels and higher intelligences
it belongs to have an affirmative
knowledge of forms immediately,
and from the first contemplation.
But this assuredly is more than man
can do.
. (New Organon II, 15.)
I reserve discussion of the moderns'
alleged by-passing of or disdain for prescientific "ordinary" experience and
language for another occasion, but want
to call attention to their relish for the
language of the market place.
This leaves the last interpretation of
the sentence about not tolerating intermediar)es between themselves and God,
according to which neither Christ nor the
chuich as avenue to Christ but the Promethean makers of modernity "save"
mankind. I do not see how one can attribute such ambitions to Galileo, except
on the supposition that anyone who
claims to know how the heavens go thereby
claims to know the way to heaven.
Enough said about why I am uneasy
about dealing with "moderns" en gros
rather than en detail.
It is a lot more plausible· to credit
Bacon and Descartes with the ambition to
replace Christ. Miss Brann believes she
is obliged to ascribe this kind of vainglory
to them because otherwise it is, to her, incomprehensible that these men, whose
imagination should have been well-taught
in the dangers of such knowing as
removes boundary stones set to human
power, were so fearless.
Let me put this another way, in terms
of the opening of Pica's Oration on the
Dignity of Man. Pica, after citing a
sentence from the Hermetic book
Asclepius, 11 according to which a certain
Moslem, Abdul, and the god, Mercury,
agree that nothing on the world's stage is
more wonderful than man, goes on to explain how he, Pico, interprets their saying:
... For the sake of your humanity
and with kindly ears, give me your
close attention: Now the highest
Father, God the master-builder,
had, by the laws of his secret
74
wisdom, fabricated this ho~se, this
world which we see, a very superb
temple of divinity . . With the
work finished, the Artisan desired
that there be someone to reckon up
the reason of such a big work, to
love its beauty, and to wonder at its
greatness. Accordingly, now that all
things had been completed, as
Moses and Timaeus testify, He
lastly considered creating man. But
there was nothing in the archetypes
from which He could mold a new
sprout nor anything in His
storehouses which he could bestow
as a heritage upon a new son, nor
was there an empty judiciary seat
where this contemplator of the
universe could sit
Finally the
best of workmen decided that that
to which nothing of its very own
could be given should be, in composite fashion, whatsoever had
belonged individually to each and
everything. Therefore He took up
man, a work of indeterminate form;
and, placing him at the midpoint of
the world, He spoke to him, as
follows: "We have given to thee,
Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy
own . . A limited nature in other
creatures is confined within the laws
written down by Us. In conformity
with thy free judgment, in whose
hands I have placed thee, thou art
confined by no bounds; and thou
wilt fix limits of nature for thyself
. .. Thou, like a judge appointed
for being honorable, art the molder
and maker of thyself; thou mayest
sculpt thyself into whatever shape
thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow
downward into the lower natures
which are brutes. Thou canst grow
upward from thy soul's reason into
the higher natures which are
divine."
0 great liberality of God the Father.
0 great and wonderful happiness of
man! It is given to him to have that
which he chooses and to be that
which he wills. (Oration, LLA ed.
PP· 4,5)
Comparison with Republic IX 588ff should
make one wonder why what is in the
Republic chiefly regarded as a risk (the risk
of starving the puny little man inside and
feeding the lion and the many-headed
snake) is in Pica's Oration described as a
marvellous opportunity (cf. also Plato's
Protagoras).
The very premature guess at an
answer that might (if I have understood
her) be in accord with Miss Brann's
Hegelian-style hypothesis I suppose to be
this: After centuries of the Church's
teaching men their unfreedom (their incapacity to nourish their humanity except
through humble submission to mystery)
and after long observation of the worldly
advantages gained by those who hold
monopoly-access to the "works" 12 through
which men are bought free from the
powers of darkness, those who learned
that only a fraction of humanity is raised
on the doctrine of original sin came to
wonder ever more passionately at the
truth of this teaching. When someone
who has doubts about the truth of a doctrine takes cognizance of the advantages
gained from this teaching by those who
teach it (cf. the Pico citation on p. 12
above, italicized sentence about the first
magic), he is unlikely to continue in a
condition of doubt. He is prone to deny
it, or to affirm the truth of the formerly
doubted proposition's contradictory. Pica's
hymn to human freedom I view as an affirmation of the contradictory of the
Christian teaching that men are conceived in sin. It seems psychologically
plausible that a person who believes that
he has "seen through" the orthodox
teaching of our fall in Adam should feel
as elated as a patient who finds out that
the physician who warned him that the
condition of his lungs was such that he'd
die within the year had mistaken another
man's chest x-ray for his. The source of
Picds optimism, on this reasoning, would
be the joy felt at being delivered from
despair.
Delivering men from despair lS
Bacon's greatest ambition:
By far the greatest obstacle to the
progress of science and to the
undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this, that
men despair and think things impossible . . And therefore it is fit
that I publish and set forth these
conjectures of mine which make
hope in this matter reasonable, just
as Columbus did, before that
wonderful voyage of his across the
Atlantic, when he gave the reasons
for his conviction that new lands
and continents might be discovered
besides those which were known
before. (New Organon I, 92)
Most of the New Organon is given over
to uncovering and putting away grounds
for despair over the human ability to acquire more perfect knowledge than is
taught at the universities. But Miss
Brann's identification of the Elzevier tree
with the tree of knowledge gave expression to her wondering about the sources
WINTER 1985
�of Bacon's confidence in men's right to, and
moral ji"tness for, such more perfect
knowledge.
As for the right, why not, provisionally, trust that Bacon gets his hope from
where he says he gets it, the verse in the
creation chapter where God plans to
make man in His image and such as to
have dominion over all sublunar things
(Genesis !:26; cf. New Organon I, 129,
Parasceve last sentence; Great Instauration,
Preface)? Yet the non-Christian tradition
upon which Bacon and Pica are drawing,
when it concerns itself with re-entering
Paradise, stresses the great danger to individual and community when men who
are not morally fit in terms of native
temperament and careful training
"resume" (by studying maaseh- bereshithindifferently the narrative of beginning and
the making of the beginning) the
knowledge Adam had been granted: According to one story, four men entered
pardes: one went mad, one became a
traitor, one died, and only Rabbi Akiba
came forth whole. According to another,
certain scholars who had been studying
the creation story together fOr three years
came to understand it. As a result, "a calf
was created for them." They slaughtered
and ate it. But when they had concluded
their meal all their understanding proved
to have left them! These stories re-affirm
that what is in question is not men's ability to convert knowledge to use (as did
Thales and Archimedes too) but the
desirability of doing so, and the limitations, if any, upon such conversion.
But is that the issue between "ancients"
and "moderns"?
It is an issue, and a very important
one, in the opinion of those who are less
persuaded of the soundness of Mr. Klein's
distinction between "essential" and "accidental" history (or between "tracing
things to their roots" and "tracing their
history") than is Miss Brann. 10 them
much of Bacon's interest in technology
seems motivated by patriotic concern with
the stability of the realm. Fastening men's
interests, energies, intelligence on
economic well-being in this life is to
distract them from divisive religious passions and to unite them against those
who, by promising a bliss that none has
recently returned to .tell of, inflame the
human imagination with a zeal that is uncheckable because falsity of promise is entirely unverifiable. Precisely such promises were, according to Bacon, made to
the regicides mentioned by name in "Of
Custom and Education;' and are, according to current newspaper reports, being
made to Shiite terroristsJ13 It is also to
give hope to the English nation and their
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ruler that England can, by industrial and
commercial superiority, prevail over Spain
and France. I am urging that Bacon's New
Organon be read against the background
of the Essays. The Essays (e.g. "Of Unity
in Religion;' "Of Nobility;• "Of Sedition
and Troubles;' "Of the True Greatness of
Kingdoms and Estates") supplement what
one gathers from Bacon's "Letter of Advice to Queen Elizabeth" of 1584, from
his proposals for legal reform and his urging of a more rational economic and tax
policy: Bacon is continually worrying over
impending civil war. Less than a generation later that war broke the nation apart.
It was not because he was "modern" and
"charged the now with special significance" that he had a "feeling of crisis." It
was because he looked across the waters
and saw what was happening on the Continent and realized that many of the conditions prevalent there also obtained in
England.
If this suggestion, that Bacon takes a
statesman's interest in technology, checks
out, then we, who in the twentieth century have learned something about nationalist excesses, will of course want to
learn why Bacon mistrusted nationalist
passions less than religious passions. We
cannot pursue that question now. Notice
though that if this is the right question to
ask, the "transformations" that Bacon had
in mind (primarily agricultural, metallurgic, medical and only very very ultimately
political) were a lot less radical than those
that a Marxist stateless and classless
humanity would require.
In fact, my recent reading of Bacon
makes me wonder whether we do not
altogether misconstrue him by ascribing
a rectilinear idea of time to him ( cf. "Of
Vicissitudes"). His frequent talk about
time seems to me quite compatible with
a cyclic picture: There i~ "progress" also
for those poised on the wheel of fortune,
when the semicircle down has been completed. Neither self-love nor philanthropia
nor nationalist ardor require that gains
(in knowledge, power, security, public
morality), to rank as gains, be permanent. For Lucretius, not only individual
organisms and civic bodies but even
worlds are mortal. Nevertheless book v
lays out the story of the progress of
civilization. It seems to me at least as
plausible that Lucretius served Bacon as
inspiration as that Christian Heilsgeschichte
did. The a- or even anti-political character of Lucretius's teachings is not a good
argument against me, since original
Christianity is equally a- or anti-political.
There are, of course, also very great
differences between Bacon and Lucretius:
Lucretius's theoretical interests are so
limited as to be virtually non-existent.
Any likely story that allays fear of death
and of avenging gods will do. The only
causal account he is serious about is an anthropological and psychological one,
which shows that nearly all wickedness
stems from fear of death. Bacon, contrarywise, though he cannot be credited
with a single scientific discovery and even
though he speaks much about science for
use, knows of the happiness that comes of
trying to find out how things really are.
I venture to say that (not unlike Hobbes
and Spinoza) he may even share in some
version of the Platonic or Pythagorean
faith that seeking to know makes human
beings better, which would explain why he
doesn't build hedges around potent knowing (in the kabbalist manner) but trusts
that scientists will use their knowledge
charitably. (LLA ed. New Organon, p. 15.
But cf. Laurence Berns, "Bacon and the
Conquest of Nature II;' Interpretation VII,
1 pp. 1fl)
This brings me to my conclusion. If
I am permitted to omit the case of Descartes, made complicated also by his expatriate condition, I would urge that Miss
Brann misconstrued the moderns's interest in fruits and undervalued their interest in light, It is because of the hidden
¥1Qdynamic nature of what is really real
that the modern natural philosopher, like
the presocratic students of nature, must
take an interest in the arts and crafts:
It is the mechanical arts which give
the better insight into the secret places
of nature. Uncontrolled nature,
with her profusion and spontaneity,
dissipates the powers of the
understanding and by her variety
confounds them. In mechanical
operations the attention is concentrated and the modes and processes of
nature, not merely her effects are seen.
(cf. pp. 73, 107, 109, 122, 53 ofLLA
ed. of NeW Organon, all on forms as
laws of action)
Again and again Bacon writes that "works
are of greater value as pledges of truth
than as contributing to the comforts of
life" (p. 114 LLA ed. of New Organon) or
words to that effect.
And even if it were to be shown that
he conceives his own role to be that of a
magus who joins the people or vine to the
elm tree or ruler, there is not only pride
but also humility in that matchmaker's
work, since it is to be tested by the
sweetness of the grapes so produced. The
great question is who shall be the
wine-taster.
75
�FOOTNOTES
1. "Biirgen" Luther writes: "soli man wUrgen .
Standing surety is a work that is too lofty
for a man; it is unseemly, for it is presumptious and an invasion of God's rights. For,
in the first place, the Scriptures bid us to
put our trust and place our reliance on no
man, but only on God; for human nature
is false, vain, deceitful, and unreliable ...
He who becomes surety puts his trust in
a man, and risks life and property on a false
and insecure foundation; therefore it serves
him right when he falls and fails and goes
to ruin. In the second place, a man puts
trust in himself and makes himself God, for
that in which a man puts his trust and
reliance is his God . ." ( U0rks iv, pp. 18-24,
cited in Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury:
From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood,
Princeton, 1949).
2. There are many and long stretches about
demons in the City of God; see also Of Christian Doctrine ii, 23. I used to read these, as
well as passages in Luther about the Devil
and his cohorts, metaphorically. But I now
believe that this is an error. Thomas Beard,
Oliver Cromwell's teacher, reports that
Luther "in his colloquies telleth us how
Satan oftentimes stealeth away young
children of women lying in child-bed and
supposeth [substitutes] others of his own
begetting in their stead, in the shapes of
incubus and succubus; one such child
Luther reporteth of his own knowledge at
Halberstadt ...." (R. Trevor-Davies, Four
Centuries of Witch Beliefs, Benjamin Blom,
1972, p. 102).
3. The tree and day motifs are probably not
seriously being offered as "evidence" for the
Satanic self-conception of the new science,
and Miss Brann may mean no more by
"Satanic" than that there is something Promethean about the work and vision of the
three founders. But I worry over even jokingly re-establishing connections between
the old-time religion and suspicion of
science. To her Satan and Prometheus may
be one and the same, but to the students
she addressed (and not only to them)
Satan, the father of lies, and Prometheus,
the titan of foresight and the friend of
mankind, are not the same. What I am
questioning may, therefore, be the advisability of her rhetorical mode rather than
the truth of her thesis about the Christian
"roots" of modernity. I am really not sure.
One of the reasons for my not being sure
is that it seems as though the enterprise she
calls "tracing things to their roots;' which
to others looks like "intellectual history;'
seems to have practical implications, or at
least, implications for attitude; and I have
a hard time determining why a plain prose
statement about the dangers of technology
and the misguidedness of clflims for scientific theory stronger than those of the
Timaeus would not have done just as well
as a search for roots.
76
4. A dictionary observation about this expression may be in order. Bacon and Locke and
Boyle and even Teddy Roosevelt all still use
the word "history" or "historical" in the "data
gathering" or "investigative" sense when
they speak of "natural history" or "plain
historical method" or "history of the winds"
or "museum of natural history."
5. See the entry "Elzevier" in the eleventh edition Brittanica. It was the Leiden branch
of the formerly Flemish publishing family
that adopted the tree emblem (curiously
referred to as "the solitary" though the
message is "Non Salus") in 1620.
6. I suppose that the words "Non Salus" that
accompany the Elzevier emblem allude to
the words in Genesis "It is not good for man
to be alone." Cf. New Organon I, 89 for a
"forbidden marriage" and pp. 23, 3, 14
LLA ed. on commended marriages.
7. On alchemy, see Maryjoe Teeter Dobbs,
Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, Cambridge
University Press, 1975. I found this book
especially helpful in its effort to explain how
and why moral and religious self-formation
was thought to be accomplished through
alchemical practices. This should be a very
important theme to anyone who values the
distinction between liberal and servile arts
on the ground that, unlike the merely
useful arts, the role of the liberal arts is to
improve the human soul.
8. Cf. Last sentence of citation from Pica on
p. 12 above.
9. The rumor that Galileds "mathematization"
of nature involves its "idealization" has
reached me too. But I observe that however
irrelevant to the finding of the weight of
supposedly impure and consequently inherently inexact sublunar "sticks and
stones" the Pythagorean discovery of incommensurability is, Archimedes nevertheless argues the proposition that such
bodies balance at distances from the
fulcrum reciprocally proportional to the
bodies' weights as though they were
superlunar exact bodies. Else, why treat the
commensurable and the incommensurable
classes of cases?
10. How unreductionist Galileo is next to
Descartes is seen by comparing what
Descartes writes about the heart-as-a-pump
with the conclusion of Galileds parable
about the man who loves sound:
Well, after this man had come to
believe that no more ways of forming tones could possibly exist
when, I say, this man believed he
had seen everything, he suddenly
found himself once more plunged
deeper into ignorance and baffle~
ment . . . For having captured a
cicada in his hands, he failed to
diminish its strident noise either by
closing its mouth or stopping its
wings ... At last he lifted up the armor of its chest and there he saw
some thin hard ligaments beneath;
thinking the sound might come from
their vibration, he decided to break
them in order to silence it. But
nothing happened until his needle
drove too deep, and transfixing the
creature he took away its life with its
voice.
. By this experience his
knowledge was reduced to dif~
fidence, so that when asked how
sounds ·were created he used to
answer tolerantly that although he
knew a few ways, he was sure that
many more existed which were not
only unknown but unimaginable. I
could illustrate with many more examples nature's bounty in producing her effects, as she employs means
we could never think of without our
senses and our experiences to teach
them to us, and sometimes even
these are insufficient to remedy our
lack of understanding.
My point is that although Descartes has
read Harvey, he either fails to grasp that
a pump that is a muscle is a very
remarkable sort of pump or he cares about
nothing except itS being a pump. (Cf. Arthur Collins's shrewd observations about
Descartes' physics in "Unity of Leibniz'
Thought," St. John's Review, Winter
1982/83).
11. If you want to see snakes ori the tree, the
cadduceur, which is both the physician's and
Mercury's emblem, is probably the icon to
go for.
12. It is a matter of the greatest importance
that the dispute between Luther and the
Church of Rome over faith and works is
not primarily or at least not solely a dispute
about "passive" and "active" righteousness
in the moral sense but very much a dispute
about the need for or dispensability of the
church sacraments. 'Works" in Sacred Doctrine corresponds to avodah in jewish tradition. Avodah ("service") is, so long as the
temple with its sacrificial cult stands, the
temple service. Only through the prophets
and rabbinic elaboration of certain
elements of their teaching, does avodah
chiefly become ''doing justice, loving kindness (ahavath chesecl) and walking humbly
with God." The Roman Catholic church is
not just an ecclesia or synagogue but a temple and the mass is a sacrifice. I consider this
information indispensable to anyone concerned with the issues Miss Brann takes up.
However sane and tolerant modern American. Catholics may be, however
wholesome, psychologically, a religious
tradition which, through its sacrificial cult,
makes re-integration of the sinner into the
community a public act, the complaint of
critics of the church in the days of its corruption through worldliness, namely, that
it stood to profit from its monopoly on the
instruments of salvation (the seven
sacraments) was not fabricated.
13. Religious zeal of this sort is certainly not
the privilege of the Roman Catholic Christian, as is evident from the murder of the
De Witt brothers by a Protestant mob.
WINTER 1985
�BooK REVIEW
Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart:
Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni
Wye Jamison Allan brook
Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1983.
Pp. xii + 396; 11 figures.
T
he subjects of Mrs. Allanbrook's
book, Mozart's masterpieces Le
nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni,
are two of the most familiar and best loved
works in the operatic repertory. Not surprisingly, they are also two of the most
thoroughly studied. Mozart's version of
the Don Juan legend has fascinated
writers from the time of E.TA. Hoffmann
and the early Romantics to the present.
Figaro, while less an object of interest in
the nineteenth century, has in recent years
been examined for its underlying political
and social message, and in relation to
Beaumarchais's Le mariage de Figaro, from
which its libretto is drawn. Yet the vast
body of writings on these two operas by
no means leaves modern scholars with
nothing to add. It is a cliche, but no less
valid for being one, that with a great work
of art there will always be more to learn.
This is particularly true when a new study
offers a fresh perspective from which a
work can be reexamined. In her book
Mrs. Allanbrook provides a detailed and
insightful critical analysis of Mozart's two
great opere bu.ffe; her fresh perspective is
that of the topoi, or "topics:' that underlie
the music of the late eighteenth century.
The term topos is borrowed from
rhetoric "to designate 'commonplace'
musical styles or figures whose expressive
connotations, derived from the circumstances in which they are habitually
employed, are familiar to all" (p. 329, n.
4 ). Once the vocabulary of these topics
has been understood, they can serve as a
source of "independent information
[beyond our individual responses] about
the expressive content of the arias and
THE ST JOHN'S REVIEW
ensembles" (p. 2). The "hunting fanfare:'
for example, is a topic employed in any
number of Classic works in obvious imitation of actual horn-calls associated with
the hunt. Mozart's use of this figure to
open his String Quintet in E-flat, K 614,
enables a listener to place the work in a
general expressive framework. The
Quintet is not literally about a hunt, but
an audience's recognition and understanding of the figure give the music a
certain rustic quality and a sense of
lightheartedness and cheerful energy,
which derive by analogy from an actual
hunting scene.
The connection between the topical
vocabulary of the Classic style and the expressive qualities of Classic music has
been increasingly recognized in the last
three decades. Various topics have already
been identified and explored to some extent by other writers, especially Leonard
Ratner (in his Classic Music: Expression,
Form, and Style [New York, 1980]). Mrs.
AllanbroOk's study concentrates on a particular class of topoi: the rhythmic gestures
of dance, which, because they depict
human beings in motion, are especially
valuable topics in opera. The various uses
of gavotte, minuet, and so on communicate information about the personality and feelings of each of the
characters, as well as about their social
positions. (An important question, which
Mrs. Allanbrook never answers directly,
is the degree to which these rhythmic
gestures inform Mozart's non-operatic
music, and the operas of other composers,
as well as the two works under
discussion.)
The study comprises three large sections. In the first, the author outlines the
variety of dances known to the late eighteenth century and spells out the social
and affective connotations of each. Here
she draws extensively on eighteenthcentury writings, both of music theorists
such as Sulzer and Koch and of writers
on dance, most of them less well~ known
to musicians, such as Bacquoy-Guedon
and von Feldenstein. While some of the
dance topics are considered briefly in
Ratner's book, Allanbrook's discussion is
far more detailed and systematic. She
shows a clear spectrum of meters from the
most exalted, "ecclesiastical" duple meters
(alta breve and 4/2) that connote the
"learned" or contrapuntal style-and by
extension the nobility- to the more rapid
triple-meter dances with their connotations of humble frivolity. In addition, she
analyzes the historical and sociological
significance of the two anomalous dances,
the contredanse and the waltz, that represent the new trend in the late eighteenth
cen~ury towards simpler dances for
novtces.
The second and third sections of the
book examine in turn Le nozze di Figaro
and Don Giovanni, using the vocabulary
of rhythmic gestures presented earlier to
reach some striking conclusions. Allanbrook attempts to demonstrate that the
central ethos of F£garo is pastoral, and
that, far from being an operatic wateringdown of Beaumarchais's political message,
Da Ponte's and Mozart's opera is most
centrally about the friendship between the
Countess and Susanna, her maid. The
pastoral, with its connotations of bucolic
77
�simplicity, is suggested by several dance
gestures used in the opera: the 6/8
pastorale and siciliano, the 2/4 gavotte,
and especially the musette-gavotte. As
Mrs. Allanbrook argues, the many
numbers with pastoral connotations serve
to suggest a world in which Susanna and
the Countess can transcend the barrier of
class to meet as equals and as friends. The
heart of this world is the duet "Che soave
zeffiretto;' whose "pastoral text and music
figure the classless, timeless meadow
where two women ordinarily separated by
circumstance can meet and stroll quietly
together" (p. 147). And it is under the
aegis of the pastoral affect, at numerous
other places in the opera, that the Count's
schemes are defeated by Figaro and
Susanna and their allies. The argument
is a provocative one, though the multiple
meanings of "pastoral" are never spelled
out with sufficient clarity to support fully
the weight of the interpretation. We may
see, for instance, why it represents a
refuge from the brutal and selfish world
of the Count, but it is not clear why the
pastoral is "classless?'
In her treatment of Don Giovanni
Allanbrook takes a revisionist view of the
central character. While Don Giovanni is
the center around whom all the other
characters revolve, careful analysis reveals
that he is both essentially inarticulateKierkegaard saw him as a kind of
primitive life force-and empty. The
author points out that the Don is
anonymous; only once, in "Fin ch'an dal
vino," does he sing a solo that is not a conscious performance or disguise. Further,
Don Giovanni's obsession with seduction
has a coldly automatic quality, like the
need of an animal for food. This obsession makes him not so much evil or immoral, as has often been argued, as
simply outside human morality.
Don Gz'ovanni is distinguished from
Figaro by the overshadowing presence of
the supernatural (in the overture and
finale to act II). Of necessity, this widening of the framework carries with it a
price. "In accommodating the divine
perspective the opera has somewhat to
distort our view of that small part of the
world where we were formerly at home:
to gain the new dimension the vivid
planes of Figaro's terra firma must be compressed into a caricature of themselves, a
shadow play" (p. 199). The richness and
complexity of the world of human
78
morality and interaction are greatly
reduced, so that by comparison to Fi'garo
the other characters in Don Giovanni
(perhaps excepting Donna Elvira) have
the quality of stock figures, without much
depth and largely without the ability to
engage our sympathies. This lack of depth
has been pointed out before, particularly
with respect to Donna Anna and Don Ottavio; but Mrs. Allan brook's view of the
whole opera provides a powerful explanation for the phenomenon.
The analytical treatment of Figaro and
Don Giovanni that comprises the heart of
the book has many strengths. Despite the
title of the study, Mrs. Allanbrook's
discussion is by no means limited to matters of rhythm; she also employs more
traditional methods of harmonic, motivic,
formal, and linear analysis. This flexible
approach is complemented by the author's
concern with textual and dramatic as well
as musical matters, which enables her to
make many subtle points about the
dramaturgy of the works in addition to
correcting older misconceptions. She successfully defends, for example, the oftmaligned series of arias that precede the
finale to act IV of Figaro, by showing how
they fit Da Ponte's and Mozart's view of
the real subject of the opera. Similarly,
she rather convincingly refutes the notion
(of Edward Dent and others) that Don
Giovanni was originally <;:onceived in four
acts. In its broader dramatic framework
her analysis presents a needed corrective
to many older studies that viewed these
operas from the far narrower perspective
uf instrumental music. (This is largely
true, for example, of Siegniund Levarie's
Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro: A Critical
Analysis [Chicago, 1952].)
An important key to the success of
Mrs. Allanbrook's approach is its creative
and "humanistic" orientation. At its best
her analysis emphasizes not technical
features but revelations of character of
musical ethos. She is most concerned with
the ethical and moral world inhabited by
the characters, and the power of her
analysis depends chiefly on the degree to
which technical points are linked to the
larger central points she is making. At
times the many details of the discussion
may obscure the main thread somewhat,
as during the extended analysis of the
Statue scene in the finale to act II of Don
Giovanni. At a few other moments, an
analytic point seems forced or ques-
tionable. Far more often, however, the
reader nods and smiles in agreement at
a sensitive and insightful discussion of a
passage. Mrs. Allanbrook's treatments of
two marvelous moments- the final reconciliation between the Count and Countess
at the end of Figaro, and the Commendatore's death scene in Act I of Don
Giovanni-are particularly successful. On
several occasions the author shows how
the rhythmic organization of a theme differs from a hypothetical, more "orthodox"
phrasing. This technique, as in her
discussion of Donna Anna's "Fuggi,
Crudele, fuggi;' invariably leads to striking observations.
In all respects but one, the prodUction
of the volume matches the elegance of
much of the writing. The layout and
typography of the book are well styled
and its abundant musical examples are
carefully produced and easy to read. The
virtual absence of typographical errors is
equally admirable. But the lack of a
bibliography is rather frustrating; its
absence compels the reader to search
through the 53 pages of endnotes for the
first reference to a given author.
The central value of Mrs. Allanbrook's study rests on two interrelated accomplishments. The analysis of two of
Mozart's greatest operatic masterpieces is
challenging and genuinely enlightening.
Its flexibility of approach and its concern
for ethical and spiritual matters make the
book a model of critical analysis at its
most humane. But the other achievement
of this study, its presentation and
demonstration of a largely new conceptual framework for studying the music of
the late eighteenth century, is ultimately
more far-reaching. As Mrs. Allanbrook
shows, a grasp of the topical vocabulary
of this music can lead to a variety of new
insights into its expressive message. The
section on topos and the understanding of
rhythmic gesture should be required
reading not only for lovers of the Mozart
operas but for all students of the music
of the Classic era.
John Platoff
John Platoff is an Assistant Professor of Music at
Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. He is currently
working on a study of the operas of Mozart and his
contemporaries, to be called "Mozart and the Viennese Opera Buffa."
WINTER !985
�The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews by Flannery O'Connor
compiled by Leo J. Zuber and edited by Carter W. Martin,
University of Georgia Press, Athens 1983,
189 pp. ($17.25)
F
lannery O'Connor wrote the reviews
collected here almost exclusively for
the newspapers of Georgia's two
Roman Catholic dioceses. Anyone familiar with the species, "diocesan weekly;'
will know two things. First, at a scant twohundred words even Flannery O'Connor
was reined-in tight. (She called the
reviews "notices.") And second, she was
running-at least by New York Review of
Books standards- in a slow pack. Yet in
the event, the pieces bear all the marks
of the thoroughbred.
Surprisingly few Uust 25 of 143) touch
on literature or criticism. She mostly reviewed titles in hagiography, studies of
scripture, letters, and spiritual meditations. None is superficial, but neither are
they "packed:' Rather, as one might expect from a writer of her wit and nicety
they all are drawn to a telling point. What
one might not expect is how much they
seem to tell us about Flannery O'Connor
herself without being exercises in selfrevelation.
Given her unquestionable talents
some readers will still presume to lament
the "waste" of her energies in a quaint
faith and backward country. American
writers are, after all, conspicuous "roadplayers." And although Marion Montgomery's Why Flannery O'Connor Stayed
Home is one of the better scholarly adventureS of recent .times, that author's answer,
one partly grounded in the reviews collected here, will still puzzle readers
charmed by the "free-agency" of contemporary author-celebrities.
Flannery O'Connor did not have a
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
"career" in any of the conventional senses.
She called her activity both a vocation
and a craft, the end of which was good
writing. Period. She wrote, she said,
because she was "good at it;' and she
stayed at home most happily because she
could write there. For her immediate concern was simply practical as it would have
to be for any good craftsman- even for
a practitioner of some version of "art for
art's sake:'
If her immediate and public concern
was practical, Flannery O'Connor's final
concern was private and spiritual. In her
review of Carol'ine Gordon's How to Read
a Novel she carefully distinguished those
concerns. But as her reviews of other
books, .especially the books of Romano
Guardini, make clear, she believed that
spiritual and practical things are most
true to themselves when coincident in
time and place. She hinted at, but lacked
the space to develop, what was clearly a
sacramental aesthetic. She does direct the
reader to her constant source and authority in such questions, Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism which she seems
to have absorbed but never reviewed.
Just as the "stuff' of her stories came
from her locale, the rural South, so the
force of her spiritual penetration of that
"stuff' came from her Catholicism. She
once wrote to Andrew Lytle that"... the
only thing that keeps me from being a
regional writer is being a Catholic and the
only thing that keeps me from being a
Catholic writer (in the narrow sense) is
being a- Southerner?' Together the South
and Catholicism formed Flannery
O'Connor's one home. They combined
her immediate concerns and raised her
art above the parochialism of both the
local colorist and the parish fabulist.
More important still, they saved her from
that graver parochialism known as the
"literary career:'
For a long time now writers have felt
the need to justify their ways to readers.
But often as not they have been more interested in apologizing to themselves for
their own strange talents and mysterious
gifts. Flannery O'Connor's needs and interests in that last regard were not unique,
which is not to say that she gave any of
the common accounts of herself as an artist, but it does make the scope of her
reading for review less strange than it
might at first appear. For she seems to
have constantly turned to other minds
and voices to help articulate her place, her
powers, and her vocation in a world that
she knew she did not make.
We regularly celebrate lesser writers
for tediously parading their struggles
toward self-understanding, something
modern writers, like their readers, tend
to confuse with their art. Flannery
O'Connor simply looked to share her
Creator's own view of His creation and
to retrieve some nuance of that perspective in her art. She called it seeing the
"good under construction?' Those who
dare to write from such a place verge on
prophecy. The prophetic-poet is a frequent, if understated, theme in these
reviews. Few modern writers seem to have
been so fully conscious of what they were
up to. Without pomp or fanfare The
79
�Presence of Grace tells us more about what
Flannery O'Connor thought she was doing "at home'' than we have any right to
expect.
No one will rank these book reviews
with her fiction, or with her remarkable
letters, The Habit of Being. The Presence of
Grace, like her occasional talks, Mystery and
Manners, can only be read as incomplete
notes toward a memoir of Flannery
O'Connor's intellectual home. In this in-
80
stance the neighborhood is peopled with
the likes of Hans Kung, Eric Voeglin, and
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S. J. Like
every memory it bears a foreground of
things in sharp focus and a background
of things begging to be retrieved.
At the very least, the reader who takes
the trouble to wade back and forth among
these reviews will begin to see in Flannery
O'Connor what she remarked in one of
her own heroes, Friedrich von HUgel: the
mark of"... a genuine encounter with the
Church, a wrestling with it, a love tested
by considerable adversity.. ;' The Presence
of Grace tells us that a spacious and fearless
mind like Flannery O'Connor's is most "at
home" in such moments. To witness it
here is no small delight.
Victor Gallerano
Victor Gallerano, an alumnus of St. John's College,
Annapolis, lives in Washington, D.C.
WINTER 1985
�
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 St. John's Review</em>
Description
An account of the resource
<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
thestjohnsreview
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
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.
80 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
The St. John's Review (formerly The College), Winter 1985
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1985-01
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sterling, J. Walter
Freis, Richard
Walsh, Jason
Freis, S. Richard
Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Brann, Eva T. H.
Kates, J.
Engelberg, Joseph
Zuckerman, Elliot
Fain, Susan
Fisher, Howard J.
Kalkavage, Peter
Maschler, Chaninah
Description
An account of the resource
Volume XXXVI, number 1 of The St. John's Review, formerly The College. Published in Winter 1985.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_36_No_1_1985
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
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
St. John's Review
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d8142711e45ff5aac90e3e78053eca07.pdf
0b07e0f476758d3fc674e3ae06801cff
PDF Text
Text
The St. John's Review
Volume XXXIX, number three (1989-90)
Editor
Elliott Zuckerman
Editorial Board
Eva Brann
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Cary Stickney
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Subscriptions Assistant
Deirdre Routt
The St. John's Review is published three times a year by the Office of the Dean,
St. John's College, Annapolis; Donald J. Maciver, Jr., President; Eva Brann, Dean.
For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 per year. 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 $5.00 per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
© 1990
St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part
without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Composition
Fishergate, Inc.
Printing
The St. John's College Print Shop
�Contents
1 . . . . . . . Antigone: All-Resourceful/Resourcelessness
Joe Sachs
17 . . . . . . . The Nobility of Sophocles' Antigone
Janet A. Dougherty
33 . . . . . . . Hegel's Reading of Antigone
Patricia M Locke
51 . . . . . . . Idealism, Ancient and Modern: Sophocles'
Antigone and Schiller's Don Carlos
Gisela Berns
61 . . . . . . . George Steiner's Antigones: A Review
Eva Brann
67 . . . . . . . The Problem of Place in
Oedipus at Co/onus
Abraham Schoener
79 . . . . . . . Oedipus the King and Aristotle's List of
Categories: A Note
Chaninah Maschler
83 . . . . . . . Depth and Desire
Eva Brann
Woodcut by Emily Kutter
�Antigone: All-Resourceful/
Resourcelessness
Joe Sachs
This lecture has an ulterior purpose. It is a response to the growing chorus
of voices one hears saying that Sophocles is too difficult for our
sophomores to read. Now in some literal sense this is so obvious that it
hardly needs saying. But some people take it to imply that we ought to
stop reading Sophocles in the language tutorial, and this needs denying.
My own opinion is that Sophocles is too difficult for us not to read: too
good to miss, that is, and completely inaccessible unless one makes the
effort to read his own words. That such an effort made with the minimum
of tools is already richly fruitful is one of the things I hope to show. To
that end I promise that this lecture will be amateurish, in fact sophomoric.
I have no doubt that I will make mistakes that could be corrected by anyone
who has read all the scholarly literature on the subject. I have long ago
made the choice that such correctness is not worth its price. The reading
of Antigone presented here will rest on an elementary knowledge of Greek,
an ignorance of its metrics, a lack of fastidiousness about syntax, and a
heavy reliance on Liddell and Scott. I have had the luxury of being a
sophomore more than once, but my heart is in that tutorial, and I will
never graduate from it. Its very ineptitude prevents glibness, and requires
a slow, stubborn questioning of every word. With Sophocles that is not
Joe Sachs is a Thtor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This lecture was first given
at Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario, in October, 1988. Translations are
the author's.
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
a bad way to read. It also has the merit that anyone who wants to do it
can do it. It would be a shame to listen to a lecture of this kind and not
join in with it in the question period.
Sophocles never stopped thinking about the Oedipus story. He was in
his nineties when he wrote Oedipus at Co/onus, which he did not live to
see performed. It was about thirty-five years earlier that he wrote Antigone.
The three Theban plays that we possess are not a trilogy nor in any sense
parts of a whole. They are one story told three times from different points
of view. I do not mean that Sophocles used various characters to give subjective colorings to the events, but that he himself saw the essence of the
Oedipus story in three different acts of poetic concentration. I do not think
he changed his mind from play to play about Oedipus or about what made
his story important, though that would be difficult to show. I think he
saw in the story the most important truths about human life, and kept opening windows into it so that the rest of us could see them too.
But the Antigone seems to be far removed from the center of the
Oedipus story. Oedipus is long departed when it begins. His two sons have
tried and failed to share the kingship of Thebes, brought new misery on
the city, and finally killed each other in battle. Creon, who succeeds them
as king, and their sister Antigone respond to this catastrophe in incompatible ways, bringing on fresh catastrophe. And everyone knows that the
heart of this play is the scene in which the two main characters step forth
and debate the principles on which they have acted. The Antigone is a play
about a disastrous moral collision, one neither faced by nor caused by
Oedipus, who is so far in the background that he might be any dead king
who had both sons and daughters.
This is a false picture of the play, but an almost inevitable first picture.
More than other plays, the Antigone tempts us to single-sentence statements
of moral or theme, and that sentence is always about the conflict between
the laws of the city and the demands of private conscience, which listens
to a higher law. I could quote such sentences from various commentators,
but what would be the point? We can all say the same kinds of things
ourselves, and probably have. Whatever else the play may be, it has within
it a philosophic dialogue of undeniable clarity about a genuine and timeless
dilemma. Sir Richard Jebb does not hesitate to conclude that the conflict
of the play is not between people but between abstract principles, and that
Creon and Antigone move us not as themselves but as vivid personifications of duty. I hope this formulation feels uncomfortable to you, but there
is nothing impossible about it. Poetry is not by its nature hostile to rationality, and part of the power of Sophocles' writing is undoutedly an
�SACHS
3
intellectual power. He might, in this one play, have made everything human
and concrete an outer covering for an intellectual problem.
There is a philosopher, Hegel, who saw the intellectual realm as a living drama enacted by the ideas themselves. It is no accident that he loved
the Antigone. In his Phenomenology he sees the play as exhibiting the splitting in two of the ethical world, the destruction of ethical order by the
emergence of an inner contradiction. Antigone and Creon are both right
but also both wrong. Hegel says, "only in the downfall of both sides alike
is absolute right accomplished, and the ethical substance as the negative
power which engulfs both sides, that is, omnipotent and righteous Destiny,
steps on the scene" (#472). In Hegel's account of the play everything accidental and individual falls away from the characters, even though individuality is itself one of the things at issue. But Hegel writes with a depth
worthy of Sophocles, and his approach to the play cannot be dismissed
lightly.
The only way to achieve a truer perspective on the play is to begin looking at its details, but it is worth noting first that there is another philosopher,
of the same stature as Hegel, who seems to see the play in an opposite
way. Aristotle, in his Rhetoric (III xvi 9), criticizes the orators of his time
for writing too exclusively from the intellect, making it impossible for them
to discern or display moral character or purpose. He recommends that they
follow, instead, the example of the Antigone. This is a wonderful passage,
to which I will refer again. For the moment it defines a challenge for us:
to see how what is peculiar to the Antigone is what is specifically moral,
and does not stem from the intellect.
The debate between Creon and Antigone takes place in daylight. It is
important in many ways that the play begins in darkness. Antigone and
her sister Ismene meet outside the city before sunrise. It is an intensely
visual scene, but the pictures are in the imaginations of the two women.
We begin where they do, trying to assimilate the horror of the previous
day, and with Ismene at least, trying to see into another's inner visions.
There are no formulated principles here, no light by which to see one's
way. Ismene asks Antigone where she is in her thoughts (line 42); what
she sees clearly is that Antigone's thinking is spreading the darkness, like
the purple dye emitted by a certain whelk to make the sea murky (20).
This tiny example reveals the whole art of Sophocles, insofar as I can get
hold of it. Where a translation may have Ismene saying "you seem to be
pondering something," the word Sophocles has used for ponder is ka/khainein, not an invented word, but not a very common one either, and one
still heavily laden with its metaphoric origin. The root of the word is the
name of the purple murex, a sea mollusc which clouds the water when
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
it is threatened. Its secretion is the dye used by ancient kings for their royal
purple. The animal itself was therefore valuable, and worth searching for
through the murk. Thus its name came also to mean the searcher, as for
example Kalchas, the seer in Book One of the Iliad. This is Sophoclean
language: concrete, metaphoric, sensuous, and strong. We who do not speak
his language must read whole entries in Liddell and Scott to hear what
his characters are saying, and never be content to pick out one meaning
that seems to fit the context. But there is still another favorite device of
Sophocles in the line. Not only does Ismene say that Antigone is pondering, with a word that carries layers meaning gloom, royalty, and divine
insight; she says it is clear (deloun) that she is doing so. Sophocles loves
to jam together words whose senses clash. "It is clear that you are in a
murky soup of thoughts of royalty and divinity." The introduction of the
word "clear" serves only to emphasize that nothing here is clear. I will note
later some magnificent examples of this trick.
It is in this scene in and about darkness that the themes of the play
are introduced, and they are not law and conscience. The opening line is
Antigone's: 0 koinon autade/phon Ismenes kara, "Shared self-sister, heart
of Ismene." The word autade/phos means prosaically full-sister, daughter
of the same mother as well as father, but this scene, like the whole play,
is so full of the word autos and its compounds that one must, in retrospect
if not from the beginning, hear it as superimposing the meaning self on
that of sister. Similarly, kara, meaning head, or very summit of what someone is, like our use of heart to mean someone's very core, carries the sense
of Ismene's essential self. Antigone is saying "Ismene, what is most you
yourself is also shared, is my self, so fully are we sisters." The two-sided
question -what is shared? and what is oneself?- is the center of Sophocles'
envisioning of the Oedipus story.
Here, at the beginning of the play, the merging of two sisters into one
self is a pathetic illusion. Before the end of the ninety-nine lines Antigone
is telling Ismene she hates her. This moment when the sisters might be loving
and comforting one another becomes a new division and separation, like
that between their brothers. The image which dominates the whole play
is the one which fills Ismene's imagination in this scene. She describes it
twice. "We two were deprived oftwo brothers, dying on one day by a double
hand" (13-14). And again, "two brothers, in the course of one day, selfslaying wretched ones, working out a common doom with mutual hands"
(55-57). It might be a great misfortune that each brother gave the other
a fatal wound, but the special insight that makes this a nightmare vision
for Ismene is contained, in the first telling, in the singular phrase, "a double
hand," and in the second in the reflexive participle, "self-slaying." We are
�SACHS
5
seeing a combat to the death fought with a mirror, so that the hand one
lifts to strike the other moves backward to kill oneself. Oedipus lifted his
hand against his father, and destroyed himself. Here that deed is doubled,
as both Eteocles and Polyneices strike what seems to be merely a brother,
but for each turns out to be himself. And now in front of us it begins to
be quadrupled, as the sisters too begin tearing themselves apart. We look
at Antigone, and through two mirrors we see Oedipus. And there is one
more reflected reflection still to come.
But why does Antigone's loving greeting of Ismene turn so quickly into
a hate-filled parting? It is easy to blame Ismene. When Antigone tells what
she intends, Ismene replies that those who are women, weak, and subjects
must yield to those who are men, strong, and rulers (58-64). In response
to these arguments Antigone is splendid. In forbidding burial of Polyneices,
Creon has crossed two boundaries that restrain legitimate rule, into the
properly private (48) and into a realm where only the gods can be listened
to (77). As for his masculine strength, that can be put to the test by anyone
who does not fear death, and when Antigone looks at the image of herself
dying for burying a loved brother, she calls it a beautiful thing (72). Ismene
insists three times that the deed is impossible (79, 90, 92), but Antigone
elegantly and succinctly tells her that there is only one way to know that.
She uses the future perfect: "whenever I have no more strength, I shall have
stopped" (19). In the Rhetoric, Aristotle tells us that Antigone acts not
for the sake of what is useful or beneficial, but for the sake of the beautiful,
out of goodness rather than prudence, and in the Ethics he tells us that
the specific telos, or end, of virtue is the beautiful (III vii). There is no
question here, for example, of any superstitious fear that an unburied
Polyneices will be denled access to the other world, but only a clear sight
that burying him is right, fitting, appropriate, and leaving him unburied
deeply wrong, so that even the sacrifice of another life only makes the whole
picture more beautiful. Antigone is a human being in the fullest sense, one
courageous enough to do what needs to be done out of no practical calculation, for no reason other than that it is right. Her choice is beautiful,
Sophocles' picture of her making it is beautiful, and she is beautiful.
But she is also fierce. The chorus will say she is fierce with her father's
fierceness (471). In the first scene she is merciless with her sister. But worst
of all, she does not listen to Ismene. In the first line, she does not mean:
I see you, Ismene, for what you are and take that into myself as part of
me. She means: I look at you, Ismene, and see nothing but myself. The
two can have a shared self only if Ismene is willing to become Antigone.
If she does not feel the same feelings, Antigone rejects her as no true-born
sister of hers (37-38). But Ismene is no coward, but in fact a true match
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
for Antigone in firmness. If we listen to her we hear not a woman afraid
to act, but one strong enough to endure anything, if she is convinced that
any action will make things worse (39-40). Ismene is frozen in horror before
the image of her brothers, not because blood and death and loss are too
painful for her to look upon, but because they brought it on themselves.
In the speech in which Antigone only hears Ismene saying, let's act like
weak women subjects, she in fact is saying much more, that is much more
important. She asks Antigone to remember their father, not only dead but
having died hated, shamed, and having brought it all on himself, and the
mother who was to that father both mother and wife, the two names twisted
like the noose with which she mutilated her own life (49-54). Now their
brothers have added more horror and shame, and Antigone wants to keep
increasing it until they are all wiped out. To Antigone, all the deaths are
the work of enemies, against whom the family must be defended (9-10).
But Ismene keeps hammering at the fact that everything their parents and
brothers suffered was self-inflicted. In Ismene's view, she and Antigone
have no enemies but themselves. What they need now is to forgive the
beloved dead for their crimes, and be forgiven by them for taking no action (65-67). Antigone's deafness to her sister makes Ismene all the more
insistent, and Ismene's insistence makes Antigone all the more determined.
Like the blows struck by their brothers, every attempt to persuade turns
back on the sister who utters it as a new cause of her isolation.
In the course of this first scene, the most important word in the play
has been introduced and become increasingly prominent. That word is
philia. It means Jove which is not from desire, as eros, nor for all human
beings, as agape, nor between unequals, as storge, but for those who are
like oneself, of one's own kind. It therefore names both the love within
a family and the friendly feeling among fellow-citizens. You have all read
the sentence koina ta ton phi/on, the things of friends are common. Aristotle says in the Politics that the proper work of the lawmaker is to produce
this feeling among all the citizens (II v 6-8). The confrontation between
Antigone and Creon is not between conscience and law, but between philia
and philia.
This is part of the last of the mirror images of which I spoke. But the
word has already come under strain between the two sisters. In Antigone's
mouth philia means that which separates us from them, her immediate
family from everyone else, all of whom are therefore enemies. It is after
Ismene says that there is fault on the side of their family that Antigone
begins to say she hates her (86). Antigone's Jove is conditional, and those
who do not earn it feel her hate (93-94). Ismene's love is unconditional,
no matter what Antigone says or does (98-99). Antigone's words are all
�SACHS
7
about philia, and it is genuinely the motive of her deed, but she does not
recognize its presence in front of her. This rejection of her sister's love is
the worst error brought on by the darkness in which Antigone is moving,
and she will pay for it.
Creon, though he acts from calculation and prudence, is looking to
and acting for the sake of the same philia as is Antigone. Like her also,
he has a clouded view of it. His understanding of the friendship that makes
human community possible has an intellectual clarity, and his intentions
are good, but he is acting quickly in a critical situation, and he makes a
bad mistake. The Creon of this play is not the dishonest man he is in
Oedipus at Co/onus. Here he is a fitting antagonist for Antigone in the
stubborn purity of his determination to do what is best. He has inherited
the responsibility for a maimed and miserable city. Though his title to rule
comes through blood-kinship to the ruling family, all of Thebes's long
history of troubles has come from that same family. With the sunrise of
this day, the instant he becomes king, he intends to cut off that family
connection once and for all. His inaugural address to the elders of his city
is meant to show them a genuinely new beginning and show himself as
someone they can trust. They are to watch Polyneices suffer the ultimate
violation, left as a piece of meat for dogs and birds (205-6). They will see
that to Creon this violator of the city is no nephew, but is nothing (182-83).
Creon's true decree is that all bonds of love and loyalty will henceforth
begin with the city; no other bonds precede it, carry over into it, or carry
any weight against it (187-90). When one reflects that the ties within the
Oedipus family are those of a blood-kinship flowing back into itself in
a grotesque way, Creon's attempt to destroy all such ties is understandable.
But as the words for same blood, xunaimon, and common blood, haima
koinon, resound in his speech, we remember that Creon has a son and
that his very name is blood.
But Creon understands philia no better than blood-kinship, and no better than Antigone does. In fact the two misunderstandings of philia are
identical. Just as Antigone has sisterly love before her in Ismene, Creon
has the fellow-feeling of common citizenship before him in the chorus,
and he is equally blind. The chorus, when Creon encounters it, is in the
grip of a strong common emotion which he is preventing from flowing
into action, and he doesn't even know it. For him the sunrise is his entry
into kingship, but for the people of the city it is the moment they discover
that the besieging Argive army has left in the night. Creon is full of his
cleverness in having figured out a way to make them one people again,
and does not see that they are already of one mind, one heart, and one
motion, if he would just leave them alone, if not listen to them and join
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
them. What the chorus wants is to wipe out the war and the fear that have
filled them, with a day and night of feasting, dancing, singing, and
thankfulness to the gods (148-54). Creon is telling them to prolong the
horror by watching the desecration of Polyneices' corpse.
Creon and Antigone are mirror images in many ways. Antigone's imagination in the first scene is dominated by a picture of enemies creeping
up unseen on her friends (9-10). Creon likewise from his first scene keeps
referring to a plot against him fueled by money (221-22, 289-303, 1055).
There is no smallest shred of evidence in the play that this plot exists
anywhere but in his imagination. Both feel the need to act without delay
because of these threats. And having acted, both are inflexible. Creon compares Antigone to the hardest iron, which most easily shatters, and to the
wildest horse, most easily broken by a small bit (474-78), while Haemon
compares Creon to a tree that does not bend in the wind, and so is uprooted,
and to one who keeps a sail too taut, and capsizes (712-17). But the fundamental identity between them is seen in the words which are compounds
of autos. The Chorus tells Antigone that an autognotos orga, a self-willed
temper, destroyed her (875), while Teiresias tells Creon that his authadia,
self-pleasing or self-will, makes him guilty for his own bad luck (1028).
The self-will of Antigone and Creon is the conviction each has of being
the radical originator of his or her own deeds. This is the error of Oedipus.
Oedipus left home to start life fresh, by his own doing. When he lifts
his hand against his father, that is the outward, factual manifestation of
his effort to cut off his own sources and be in the world without
antecedents. Likewise, Antigone must act alone to save the honor of her
family. She cannot run the risk of letting there be any love between her
sister and herself which might dilute her resolution or divert her strength.
The two of them might become a new being, and see the good in some
way other than she sees it now. And likewise Creon as ruler has the whole
world on his shoulders alone. He repeatedly uses compounds of the word
kosmos when insisting that he cannot in any slightest way allow himself
to be ruled by a woman, a subject, or a child (726-27, 734, 746). If the
ruler is ruled there is anarchy (672), and the ordered world is destroyed
(660, 677, 730).
The meeting of Antigone with Creon is thus the confrontation of two
powerful, isolated figures, doing battle for the sake of philia. Faced with
each other, both are at their worst. In their determination to destroy each
other, each destroys himself. The axis of the play seems to me to be the
pair of lines 523 and 524. That is where they stake themselves. Creon has
been arguing that the reverence, honor, and love shown to Eteocles must
�SACHS
9
mean nothing if the same rites are accorded the enemy he lost his life
fighting. Antigone has been replying with immovable certainty that what
Eteocles and all the dead and the gods want is exactly what she has done
(505; cf. 89). They will never agree. Earlier, telling Creon in effect to shut
up and get on with whatever he intends to do, Antigone has said "my words
were born displeasing you" (501). Now, speaking her last words to him,
she says, "I was born not to join in hating but to join in loving." Creon's
last words back to her are, "Well you are now on your way below, if one
must love, love them." Antigone's word symphilein, to join in loving, and
Creon's word phileteon, one must love, are the nooses with which they hang
themselves. Antigone's word is beautiful, but she herself disfigures it.
Creon's word is a grotesque malformation with which not even he can live.
Both Antigone and Creon are far gone in spite when they utter these
words. Antigone is splendid in her courage, but she has been carrying a
contradiction within her since the first scene, and it has now come to the
surface. She has told Ismene that her love is conditional, and that Ismene
has failed to earn it. But she has just explained with scorn that she cannot
make a distinction between her brothers because her love is unconditional.
Which is the truth? At this moment Ismene comes on stage, and all of
Antigone's passionate coldness is turned upon her. Ismene had wanted
nothing to do with the deed, but wants everything to do with the sister
who must now suffer for it. All Ismene's words of desperate love for her
sister are met by Antigone with irony and mockery. When Ismene finally
screams, "Why do you torture me like this, when it does you no good?"
(550), all the fight finally goes out of Antigone. "In pain I am laughing
at you, if laughing is what it is." Antigone makes no effort at reconciliation, but Ismene has stopped her runaway anger. The effect of this stopping is to turn Antigone inward, where she begins facing the death she
has chosen. When she comes back onstage she will be a different Antigone
from what we have seen of her so far.
When Antigone has been led away for now, Haemon enters to plead
for her life. Just as Antigone's anger at Creon missed its mark and hit her
sister, so now all Creon's rage at Antigone lands on his son. In accordance
with his word phileteon, which says that love is a matter of impersonal
necessity, to be arranged by prudent deliberation, Creon first explains to
Haemon that when he thinks well about it he will see that this is not a
woman he wants to love (648-54). But Creon sees with fury that Haemon
fights for, follows, and serves this woman in place of his father (740, 746,
756). Creon knows how to handle proven and incipient treason at one stroke,
as he has done with Polyneices and the city. "Bring her here at once," he
�10
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
says to the soldiers, "and kill her in front of her bridegroom's eyes" (760-61).
Creon has gone momentarily mad, but he has lost Haemon forever. He
is hemorrhaging in front of us, and this wound will not close.
With the device of Haemon's name, Sophocles shows us Creon in confrontation with his own blood. This was already true, more distantly, in
his confrontation with his niece and desecration of the body of his nephew.
And it is a truth implicit in the political principle by which he has chosen
to rule, that only those human bonds will be recognized and honored that
derive from the political one. From the beginning of his kingship, Creon
has been doing violence to himself without knowing it. It must be emphasized that there is no intellectual contradiction here. Creon could live
by his principle if he were a worse man, one whose cruelty was not a
momentary mad impulse but a settled disposition, or if he were a man
of firmer principle, like Brutus, the first consul of Rome, who killed his
own sons for the sake of his city deliberately. But Creon is just an ordinarily
good man, who considers his son and his wife part of himself. By his rules
he has judged Polyneices simply an enemy, with no claim on him or on
Thebes. But in so doing, he has made Antigone a second enemy, on account of sisterly love, and Haemon a third, on account of erotic love, and,
on account of a mother's love for the last of her children left alive, Creon's
wife Eurydice· a fourth. It is not money but love that has produced the
plot against Creon, a widening circle of unruly, ungovernable loves from
which he himself is not exempt. When he returns from seeing his son try
to kill him and then kill himself, to discover that his wife has killed herself,
Creon for the first time sees the truth: "I, I killed you, useless I" (1319-20),
but also "I am dead" (1288), "I am no more than nothing" (1322). His own
self lay outside him, in his wife and son, by way of bonds over which he
had no control. He was not the source of the ordered hierarchy of Thebes,
nor even the free origin of his own life, but part of a shared self, which
he stabbed inward to the heart by striking outward.
There are pictures in the play of lives better ordered. Haemon tells his
father that he can listen to and respect a youth, a woman, and his subjects
and be all the better a father, man, and king (728-29, 737, 739, 741, 749).
The chorus tells Creon that he and his son have spoken well doubly,
mutually (725), even in disagreeing. This means not that these old men
are too witless to make up their minds, but that they see the truth only
in some yielding of both sides to each other. And the loveliest and most
touching moment of the play is Ismene's second entrance. Antigone,
wrapped up in herself, sees only someone who would not act but wants
to share the glory (538-39, 542-43, 546-47). Creon, wrapped up in his mission to restore civil order, sees lsmene's tears, and takes them for an in-
�SACHS
11
voluntary confession of treason (491-94). But the chorus, when they see
her, break into a brief lyric passage, the only lines they speak in the play
which are neither dialogue nor part of a full choral ode (526-30):
And now before the gates here is Ismene,
With sister-loving tears dropping down.
A cloud above her brows blood-red
Stains her face,
Wetting a beautiful cheek.
Philadelpha, sister-loving, is here an adjective modifying tears. I remember,
when I first read Antigone with a sophomore language class, asking how
a feeling and its object can be attributed to drops of salt-water. A student
named Ann Tive said simply, "They love her.'' Only the chorus speaks true
words about Ismene, and they are loving words. Though the chorus itself
speaks later of eros keeping watch on the cheek of a maiden, the love present here is not desire, not the remembered lust that moves the old men
of Troy when they look at Helen. These men of Thebes have suffered a
long time for the family of Oedipus, but they love this girl, and because
they love her they can know her. Similarly, in the whole play it is only
Ismene who speaks of Haemon with. love (572). This has confused centuries of editors so much that they often give the line to Antigone, though
every manuscript gives it to Ismene, and it has tempted at least one modern
reader to convict Ismene of desire for her sister's fiance. But Ismene and
the chorus are examples of the ph ilia that the play is all about. They can
love people a step removed from them because they genuinely love those
nearest them.
One of the most striking images in the play is that of Thiresias, the
blind seer. A great point is made of his being led by a boy. He enters with
the words, "Lords of Thebes, we have come a common road, two seeing
out of one" (988-89). Thebes had lords, plural, not a dictator, because
everyone must in some ways be led by others. Later he speaks of things
"I learned from this boy... for to me he is a guide, as I to others" (1012,
1014). Everyone who is unwilling to be led goes astray, misses the mark.
Aristotle's famous word in the Poetics, harmartia, which somehow came
to be misunderstood as a flaw, begins in archery and eventually becomes
the New Thstament word for sin. The English word error has perhaps the
closest range of meaning. Teiresias tells Creon that erring is common to
all human beings (1023-24). That is why he shouldn't be afraid even now
to change his course, but it is also why he should have known in the first
place that Polyneices deserved burial. The city need not have joined in
�12
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the honors, but there is no crime about which it can say that the criminal
went so far astray that even in death he cannot be allowed to be recognized
as human; and that we, the rest of us, are the only ones safely within the
human fold. But Creon's being wrong does not make Antigone right.
Ismene's last speech to Antigone uses the same word, examartia, that
Teiresias will use: "Surely the erring of us two is equal" (558).
Why do all human beings err? The chorus, in the ode pol/a ta deina
(332-83), suggests that the very excellence itself which defines being human
is the source of error. ~~wonders are many," the ode begins, "yet nothing
stranger than a human being walks." Th be human is to find a passage
through anything, sea, wind, or earth, and to find a mechanism to overcome the power of anything, bird, beast, or fish, cold, sleet, or rain. The
characteristic human epithet is pantoporos, all-resourceful, passing through
every obstacle. Antigone has used the verb from the same root in the first
scene to tell her sister, "I will find a way through, heaping up a tomb for
a most loved brother" (80-81). But in one of those magnificent clashings
I spoke of earlier, the chorus's word pantoporos collides with aporos,
resourceless, helpless (360). The meaning of aporos is immediately negated:
"helpless he comes upon nothing that is to be." But the poetic effect of
the line is the shock of hearing pantoporos aporos. In retrospect, or in
reading, the words can be tamed, but the poet is writing for the ear, and
Sophocles' words are wild. Pantoporos aporos cannot fail to confuse, to
disturb. The choral odes are all hypnotic, and this one conveys a dreamlike
sense that the very triumph of overcoming every obstacle is an achievement of helplessness.
That is certainly a description that fits Creon. He becomes the helpless
wreck he is at the end of the play precisely by mastering everyone, overcoming all opposition. In the antistrophe to the pantoporos aporos stanza
the same position has the words hupsipolis apolis, supreme in the city/
without a city. Supremacy destroys reciprocal relations, and destroys the
community. But when the chorus ends the ode in dread of human greatness
it is Antigone who appears before them. Ismene has told her amechanon
eras, ''you lust after impossibilities" (90), and that she is determined perissa
prassein, "to do extravagant things," things that go beyond (68). It is
primarily Antigone who displays the human excellence of refusing to accept
any restraints to her will. Those restraints are outwardly Creon and his
soldiers, but more importantly the inconvenient love and inconvenient
otherness from herself of Ismene. Philia is the power that saves us from
greatness, the acceptance of others into a wider self that can no longer
say "I will not be stopped."
But even though Antigone's defiance earned her death, she does not
�SACHS
13
in the end go to her death defiant. She has one more scene, and in it she
begins to return out of her isolation. The movement of the scene is difficult to understand, but full of truth. The chorus cries when it sees her
being led to dealh, but conceals its tears in her presence. She asks the chorus
for pity, but it gives her honor instead. She cries out that they are mocking her, and they rebuke her. In response to their rebuke, she begins telling
painful and frightening truths about herself for the first time in the play.
She has finally allowed someone to get close enough to break through her
control. It happens harshly, violently, because she has fought so hard to
make it impossible. As with her sister, Antigone has heaped contempt and
scorn on the chorus to their faces. She was certain she knew what they
thought, and that they kept silent like cowering dogs. It is her ugliest insult: "they tuck their mouths between their legs" (509). Then it was false,
but now they do in fact conceal their honest feelings, because she has been
so unapproachable.
Look at me, she says to them now, going to death solitary, unmarried,
choosing to marry death (806-16). They tell her what she seems to want
to hear: You are glorious, autonomous, not a victim, but alone of mortals
in choosing death (817-22). She compares herself to Niobe, turned into
rock, eternally weeping, and they say, Yes, you are godlike (823-38). This
is when she screams out that she is mocked. She wants not praise for her
solitary courage, but pity for her loneliness, not the glory of Niobe but
the pathos of her unending misery. They tell her everything she is suffering is her own fault: "You went out to the extreme edge of boldness, and
crashed into the high seat of Justice" (853-54). But they immediately soften
their rebuke with the thought that maybe it is somehow her father's struggle that she is paying for. And now the lid that she has kept so firmly on
her feelings is finally off. "You have touched my most painful worries,"
she says: Were my parents monsters? What in the world am I that was born
out of such horror? (857-66). We see now why Antigone erupted into such
violent hatred when Ismene suggested there was something wrong with their
family. It was a hatred of her own uncertainties. Ismene was a self-sister,
one that Antigone was trying to expel from herself.
Antigone's earlier certainty was a forcible effort of will in opposition
to her uncertainty. Then she had said, "I know I am pleasing those whom
it is most necessary for me to please" (89). Now she tells the truth: I nourish,
that is, I work to keep alive, a hope that I will be received with love by
father, mother, and brother (897-99). How is she nourishing that hope?
She has fed it by searching out the final, unassailable reason why she had
to act as she did. These lines which we must now consider are much debated.
Most editors and translators cut them out of the play, or put them in
�14
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
brackets. Sir Richard Jebb gives three reasons for doing so: the lines are
inconsistent with things Antigone has said earlier, illogical in themselves,
and ungrammatical. Yet the lines are in all the manuscripts, and they are
quoted by Aristotle. That the lines are inconsistent with her earlier appeals to divine law is true; she has changed now, and stopped pretending
to be doing a duty. That the lines are illogical is exactly what Aristotle
praises them for; it is here that he says Antigone displays that she was acting not for any benefit but for the beautiful, not out of thought but out
of goodness. That the grammar of the lines is strained is a sign that she
is strained; this is understandable since she is facing death with all her
private nightmares coming to the surface of her thoughts. In the Philoctetes,
Sophocles has the main character go to pieces in front of us, with incoherent
speeches and a long scream. And in the fourth line of this play, Antigone
in her passion says there is nothing without doom that has not come to
her, when what she means would have one less negative in it.
What does she say that so disturbed Jebb and Fitzgerald and others?
She says (904-20) that had it been a child or husband of hers lying dead
on the field she would have left it to rot. She could always get another
husband, or bear another child, but with her parents dead, how could she
ever get another brother? This is a repellent thought, and there is no reason
to think for one second that it is true. Imagine trying to take a child of
hers, living or dead, away from Antigone. We have known her for only
part of a day, but it is still obvious that it would be easier to take a cub
from a lioness or a grizzly bear. Why does she tell so ugly a falsehood?
I think it is an exaggerated way of saying, I buried Polyneices for the sake
of Polyneices. Her brother was irreplaceable, but love knows that every
human being is irreplaceable. At the fringes of thought, Antigone finds
an illogic for what has no logic. The immediate sight of love tells love what
it must do. When Antigone said it was not her nature to share in hating,
but symphilein, to join in loving, that was a smug debater's point against
Creon, and a lie made obvious by the presence of Ismene. But Antigone
now in her weakness and misery has made that claim true. She has let go
of everything but love. The murky soup of divine law, her family's blameless
nobility, and the human joy of overcoming all restraint have now ceased
to cloud her sight. In her imagination now she sees Polyneices as the only
thing in the world that matters, and the claims on her from loving him
as the only ones in the world not subject to conditions.
The important thing about ph ilia is that it is natural, given. We find
ourselves in the world loving others who belong to us and to whom we
belong. What we are is a result of whom and what we love. On the other
hand, the defining characteristic of human being is to accept nothing
�SACHS
15
natural as given but to be always overcoming every obstacle to our purposes or whims. Antigone is glorious in her successful defiance of Creon.
He says, "I am no aner, she is the aner" (484) if I let her get away with
this, but he is already too late. She outshines him even when they are at
a standoff. But she has announced that philia was the end for the sake
of which she had broken all restraints. The deed and its end were incompatible. That is the impossibility Ismene had seen from the first. When
Antigone returns before us on her way to die, she has collapsed under the
weight of the contradictions in her soul. But she has made her final choice.
It is love itself with its passivity and uncertainty that she has chosen, rather
than the glory of being its champion.
��The Nobility of
Sophocles' Antigone
Janet A. Dougherty
When Sophocles first presents Antigone to us, she is already determined
to violate Creon's decree prohibiting the burial of one of her two dead
brothers. Each has just died at the hands of the other in a battle for the
kingship of Thebes. Eteocles has been honored in a hero's funeral for
defending the city. Polyneices is dishonored as a traitor, his flesh cast outside
the city walls to rot and to be devoured by vultures and wild dogs.
This is all the background for the drama that Sophocles gives us explicity, but his Greek audiences were familiar with the story of Antigone's
father, Oedipus, the former king of Thebes. They were aware that his two
sons had quarreled over who was to rule the city after their father's death.
Either Eteocles had refused to step down when his turn to rule alternately
with his brother was complete, or Polyneices, the elder, objected to his
brother's ruling instead of himself. Whichever it was, Polyneices then married an Argive princess and marshaled an army of warriors to conquer
and recapture his city. The play begins at dawn on the day after the Theban
army has successfully repelled Polyneices and his allies. Since the civil war
has ended leaving the two contenders for the rule of the city dead, Creon,
the uncle of Eteocles and Polyneices and, at the time, the next in line to
the throne, now has power in Thebes. In one of his first acts as king, he
has prohibited the burial of Polyneices. When Antigone decides to attempt
to bury her brother, she deliberately defies Creon's decree.
Janet Dougherty is a Thtor at St. John's College, Santa Fe. This lecture was first
delivered at the Santa Fe campus in October, 1986. The translations are the author's.
17
�18
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In her opening speech Antigone refers to the misery and dishonor that
she and Ismene have suffered, evils that have sprung from Oedipus's slaying
of his father and from his incestuous marriage with his mother. These evils
have, as Antigone sees it, continued into the present. Creon's recent decree
prohibiting the burial of her brother is another in a long line of dishonors
to which she sees no end. She cannot view the decree with the detachment
her sister displays. Ismene expresses the hope and expectation that those
under the earth will forgive her for not risking her life to bury Polyneices.
She believes no woman is capable of resisting the power of the king. In
Ismene's view, Antigone's determination to oppose Creon will surely be
the cause of her death, and thus of another in the series of horrible, untimely deaths that have ravaged the family. For Antigone, in contrast, this
deterntination is the evidence that she is truly well-born. She has no choice
but to seek nobility in death- her formulation is kalon moi touto poiousa
thanein (line 72)-there is no splendor in resigned moderation. Thus, in
a final attempt to persuade Ismene to aid her, she says: "You will soon
show whether you are noble by nature, or a base daughter of a noble line."
Antigone believes that both sisters are noble by birth, and Creon seems
to have ignored the nobility of Oedipus's fantily in dishonoring the corpse
of his son. But Antigone also believes that she and her sister must prove
their nobility by burying him. It would surprise me if it were correct to
call any birth noble, but even if it sometimes is, the births of the children
of Oedipus could not be so called. Antigone is confused when she asserts
that if Ismene refuses to help in the burial of Polyneices, she will prove
herself unworthy of her origin. The same birth that is the source of Antigone's shame seems to provide the basis of her claim to honor, but she
nevertheless recognizes that honor depends upon deeds. In her actions
throughout the play she clings to her place in her tainted family. She hopes
to return to loving intimacy with all of its members in Hades. Her hope
is bound up with her conviction that the family is the source of nobility.
We must try to understand both Antigone's conviction and her hope, for
it is her motives that provide the key to the meaning of the play.
Antigone's preoccupation with her genesis and her expressions of concern for her unburied brother seem to most readers excessive. The intensity
of her feelings is all the more striking given the contrast they make with
Ismene's reaction to Creon's decree. It is not inevitable that a daughter
of Oedipus should feel the dishonor of her brother's corpse so acutely,
for apparently Ismene does not. Ismene's response is reasonable: for one
who wants to live, it makes little sense to court an untimely death for (he
sake of a corpse, even the corpse of one's kin. Ismene at least is able to
envision a life for her sister that is not plagued with the memory of what
�DOUGHERTY
19
happened in the lives of their parents and their brothers. She reminds Antigone that she is engaged to be married to the son of the man who has
just acquired power. Ismene believes that Antigone should ignore the fact
that Creon has handed down the hated decree, and concentrate on happier
thoughts. Why is Antigone so closed to this hopeful attitude of Ismene's?
How can Antigone's sense of her duty to bury her brother outweigh the
love of a man as promising and attractive as Sophocles shows Haemou
to be?
For Antigone, the prospect of marriage must take second place to her
obligation to challenge Creon and to uphold the laws of the gods below.
The conflict between Antigone and Creon is really a conflict over the nature
of the city and its needs. Creon's decree exemplifies his understanding of
the city, and Antigone believes that she cannot live honorably there. I shall
argue that her objection to Creon's city is essentially correct and that, when
she errs in her understanding of herself, her errors are due to her sharing
with Creon certain presuppositions that derive from the legendary founding of Thebes. I shall argue further that the founding of Thebes is a model
for the founding of all cities. The conflict between Creon and Antigone
is, then, a conflict of concern for us all.
Antigone is an imprudent, wrongheaded, and perhaps even mad young
woman. Still, she is extremely impressive in her single-mindedness and in
her firm resistance to the power of the king. No sensitive reader can remain
completely indifferent to her haughty dignity and her determination. Her
insistence that the gods below demand the burial of her brother commands
respect, for we cannot without an arrogance that resembles Creon's dismiss
the possibility that the laws of the gods supersede the laws of the city. But
the first three episodes of the play provide no clear evidence of Antigone's
rightness, and the three choral odes separating these episodes are tauntingly
ambiguous.
The hardest evidence of the views of the gods that Sophocles presents
comes late in the play, in the form of Teiresias's testimony to Creon that
the gods will not accept Theban sacrifice as long as Polyneices' corpse lies
rotting. But he also warns Creon of the anger of the cities whose men fought
with Polyneices: Creon has left their bodies to rot, unmourned, as well.
The anger of these cities may be Teiresias's real concern. If so, Thiresias
is warning Creon that he has been a dangerously incompetent ruler rather
than an impious man. Furthermore, although Thiresias's words establish
that Creon's decree was wrong, they do not clearly support Antigone's
rebellion against it. Before we can clarify and evaluate her reasons for
rebelling, we must see the implications of Creon's distasteful decree.
In Creon's view, it is clear that his responsibility for the safety of the
�20
THE ST JOHN'S REVIEW
city justifies his ruling that anyone who tries to bury Polyneices' corpse
shall die. But his decree has undermined the distinction between men and
animals by treating a man's corpse as though it were the corpse of a dog,
or worse. Teiresias's speech later in the play allows us to speculate that if
the gods exist and wish to be worshiped, they must have an interest in preserving this distinction. Even before 'Thiresias speaks, we must wonder whether
Creon's decree can be justified. Why not allow the two sisters to bury their
brother's body privately, without honor or distinction? Creon thinks that
if he as ruler does not utterly repudiate even the physical remains of the
traitor, he would himself be wounding the city to its heart.
Polyneices threatened the existence of the city not only in the way that
any belligerent enemy would have, but also, and even more dangerously,
in presenting the example of a man violating the city of his birth. Creon
responds by declaring it a crime to bury Polyneices' body, whether in
Theban earth or anywhere at all. There is no question that Creon recognizes
that he is interfering with the established means of disposing of the dead,
for if he did not, the distinction he makes between Polyneices and Eteocles
would have no force. Clearly, in making this distinction Creon intends to
announce that the traditional practice of ritual burial is not applicable to
the corpse of such a monster as Polyneices. He means to show that one
who fights against his own city not only rescinds his citizenship but also
relinquishes his humanity. Creon sees the city as the necessary basis of
friendship (190). He also considers it to be the source of human life, as
contrasted with the life of mere beasts.
Men and women who do not submit to legitimate rule are beasts; or
rather, human beings are beasts but for their submission to rule. Creon
articulates this view over and over again through his constant use of animal
imagery. Antigone is like a spirited horse (477-79), and so are potentially
disobedient subjects. Ismene is an adder who has sucked out Creon's blood
(531-33). Polyneices may be something worse than an animal, for he "came
to feed on kindred blood" (201-2). Creon retains his use of such imagery
even at the end of the play when he observes that a god " ... drove me
into ways of cruelty, overturning and trampling on my joy" (1273-75).
Maybe even the gods are not fundamentally different from animals in his
view. Creon's understanding of the city as crucial to the distinction between men and beasts helps to explain why, in his opening speech, in stark
contrast with the chorus's account in the parodos, Creon is silent concerning
the victory over the Argive army and ignores the disturbing fact that the
two brothers fought each other to the death. There is not much to celebrate
in the victory of the Theban army in battle if the city is about to succumb
�DOUGHERTY
21
to bestiality. Fratricide seems not seriously to disturb Creon, but the violation of one's city arouses in him all the horror incest can arouse, if not more.
From the start Creon anticipates that someone will try to bury the body
(219; cf. 289 ff.), and he expects this opposition to come from political
enemies, or from others whom they might bribe. We see no evidence that
anyone is jealous of his power. Creon does not expect Polyneices' sisters
to resist him, partly because they are women, and partly because he is blind
to the possibility that, for some, piety and the tie of blood can be strong
enough to overpower even the desire to live.
This is Creon's view. Now let us examine Antigone's.
As Antigone sees it, Creon bears the primary responsibility for forcing
her to violate his decree, for in promulgating it he has tried to transform
an act of piety- the burial of one's own dead- into an act of treachery.
Antigone does not describe Polyneices as an individual, and we have no
reason to think that there is anything beyond the fact that they are brother
and sister to account for the intensity of her feeling for him. The mere
fact of intimate blood relation matters. In Antigone's case the blood tie
is strengthened by her terrible family history, and the weight of that history
is all the more pressing because she feels compelled to bear that weight
by herself. Antigone's birth determines who she is. Even her name, antiagainst or before, plus gone- birth, suggests how overwhelmingly troubling it is to Antigone that she is the daughter of her own brother. As her
name implies, she wants desperately to undo her birth, and at the same
time to seek the root of her family's nobility, indeed all human nobility,
precisely in this disgraceful birth. She cannot reject her own birth, however,
without rejecting human birth itself.
With respect to erasing the shame of her birth, Antigone's thought is
apparently something like this: In correcting the impiety involved in leaving
her brother's corpse unburied she will act honorably (as, she believes,
Oedipus would have done), and at the same time she will replace the
memory of the hideousness of her birth with the memory of her own fine
act. It is she, and apparently not the city, who is concerned with the shame
of her birth, for there is no evidence that it will affect her future position
in Thebes. Furthermore, Antigone demands that in bestowing its honors
the city acknowledge the difference between what is respectable and what
is shameful in itself. She demands that all of Thebes recognize that,
although the circumstances of her brother's death were not praiseworthy,
the city's behavior in failing to bury him is more shameful. Worse, it is
impious.
Antigone's demand that the city see these things is an appropriate
�22
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
demand. But that she must act out her criticism of Creon in a noble death
for the sake of her brother's corpse suggests more: she must compel the
city in general and Crenn in particular to recognize her worth. Antigone
cannot rest in the private assurance that she can distinguish piety from
impiety. Antigone, like Creon, believes that the difference between the high
and the low will dissolve without the city's support. Her piety must be reinforced by the city's standards. It must assure her nobility as well. It is in
making this demand that Antigone's intention goes beyond an attempt to
cope with her personal history, and becomes an attempt to alter human
history generally. Again, to show how this may be I will begin by developing Creon's position. I shall then return to see where Antigone stands.
Creon's primary fear is that human baseness will destroy his city. But
in leaving the corpse that belongs beneath the earth above it, Creon has
confused at least two sources of baseness. A man may be base in that he
lacks the honors a city may grant, and he may be also be base by nature.
That is, he may lack the human qualities that merit honor. Baseness in
the man, as we all know, does not always coincide with baseness in his
position. Moreover, many of our private and physical acts make our kinship
with the animals undeniable, thus casting doubt upon the nobility even
of the supposedly "best" of us. As long as we live, we must accept that
most of our acts are determined by our corporeal nature. To the extent
that these force us to recognize our similarity to beasts, the city attempts
to treat them like corpses: it conceals them from view. Public institutions
like marriage and legal paternity give us a way to veil such acts under the
guise of choice and agreement, and many cities behave as though nobility,
rather than uncivilized, infant human beings, is propagated within certain
families. Corpses, of course, are always unworthy of the honors of the city.
The city has an obvious interest in recognizing that their proper place is
beneath the earth. But Creon considers even burial an honor (time) that
is his to withhold or to bestow. This is his most glaring mistake. Creon
is unaware, or willfully denies, that his city owes its health to a distinction
between the low and the high that is simply human, and thus independent
of any particular ruler.
Antigone responds to Creon's error with a similar error. She too fails
to distinguish between dishonor that derives from something shameful or
disgraceful in itself (aiskhros), and the unjust deprivation of the honors
and offices of the city (hai timat). Or perhaps it is more accurate to say
that she does not even recognize the latter. The gods, and not the city,
preserve the difference between human beings and animals, in her view.
She insists that the city recognize that the commands of the gods below
supplant its laws and its needs. This insistence accounts for the fact that,
�DOUGHERTY
23
even though she is too weak to complete the burial rites for her brother
by herself, she is determined to be discovered in the attempt. Antigone
gets angry when Ismene promises to keep her "crime" secret: she would
prefer that her sister proclaim it out loud.
After Ismene refuses to help her sister, Antigone loses sight of the
distinction between what is merely shameful, or at least unworthy of respect,
and what is impious. For Antigone is weak: she lacks the strength to bury
a corpse properly without help. She never considers calling upon Haemon,
her betrothed, probably because he is Creon's son. Far from being confident that the gods will reward her pious intention and her lonely efforts,
she fears that she has failed altogether. Her incomplete and perhaps ineffectual acts leave her exposed to the charge of impiety. There is no place
in the cosmos she inhabits for generous and forgiving gods.
If it is true that the gods recognize only deeds and not intentions, it
is ultimately impossible to distinguish between what their laws command
and what the city and its laws support, for it is not only isolated women
who need the help of others to act. Without the help of one another, individuals can rarely even survive. When they do, they are generally indistinguishable from beasts. Antigone is consistent in her understanding of the
gods, but her view seems unnecessarily harsh. If the gods take an interest
in humans at all, must not they acknowledge the defects we cannot overcome? Antigone does not consider that the city must fail if it demands
of its citizens all that piety would require, and that even the gods may
recognize this fact. With respect to the city, Antigone is mistaken. To the
extent that the birth of humanity depends upon the city and its diverse
ways of obscuring our bestial character, Antigone rejects and opposes this
birth. She assumes that the family can exist without the city, and in making this assumption, she errs again. But it is not clear that she errs in her
understanding of the gods. What grounds, apart from our wishes, do we
have for believing that they are as generous and as merciful as Ismene
hopes?
Both Creon and Antigone reveal through their behavior that they are
either unwilling or unable to separate what the city considers dishonorable
from what is low or unworthy in itself. The chorus have the distinction
no clearer, for in the first stasimon, where they glorify the various
achievements of man, they repudiate him who fails to honor the laws of
the land. They do not consider that it is sometimes appropriate to question
the validity of a law, and even to rebel. Although they also refer in the
same phrase to "the justice which he has sworn by the gods to uphold,"
there is no evidence that they see the gods as providing guidelines or limits
for human justice. What sort of city would be so sure that the gods always
�24
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
support what the ruler commands? The leader of the chorus does express
dismay to find that Antigone, a woman and a member of the ruling family,
has violated Creon's decree. But no one defends her.
Antigone's behavior reveals that it is in the family that the commands
of the gods, at least those of the underworld, are learned and remembered.
It seems to be especially the gods below to whom the standard of shame
belongs. Experience reveals that human beings develop a sense of shame
nowhere if not in the family. Although Teiresias does not mention it in
his account to Creon of the gods' response to his decree, it makes sense,
I think, to suppose that it is the family who will ordinarily bury their dead
and perform the rituals required by the gods below. But this institution
does more than provide for the disposal of the city's corpses. The passions that allow for one's attachment to others first arise in the family.
Shame is essential to love.
If the city does not recognize both the shame of its citizens and their
private attachments, it becomes an arbitrary order in which all subjects
are slaves. 1b avoid despotism, the city must recognize limits to its authority.
While it imposes a political hierarchy over the hierarchy of the family, the
city must accept the essential similarity of its citizens. That similarity lies
partly in their recognition of the horror of death and of other things even
more horrible, and partly in the fact that each has loved ones by whom
he will be remembered after his death. It is an inevitable fact that these
loved ones can never include the whole city. Those who compose the city,
whether rulers or ruled, are dignified as well as partial in their private attachments, for where we learn shame we also learn awe. In making citizenship identical with humanity, Creon's city both rejects men's need for
privateness and at the same time destroys their ability to look up. He
substitutes force for love, and fear, a bestial emotion, for everything that
would support the noble character a ruler should wish his subjects to have.
Creon ignores all this when he makes his decree. He recognizes only that
no one freely chooses to die.
If all of Thebes has difficulty recognizing a standard for the laws that
is independent of them, this difficulty may stem from the legendary origin
of the city. The original Thebans presumably arose from the earth, their
mother, which Cadmus sowed with the teeth of the dragon he killed. As
legend has it, Ares was the father of that dragon and Athena advised
Cadmus to plant its teeth in the earth. The gods, then, had a part in the
founding of Thebes. More accurately, that founding was based upon a conflict between the two gods-Ares, whose son Cadmus slayed, and Athena,
whose advice he followed. The earth, too, is a goddess; her children are
the ancestors of both Creon and Antigone. The original Thebans are clearly
�DOUGHERTY
25
not godlike- most of those who sprang from the earth slew one another.
They are not even fully human, for the human family was not part of
Thebes at its origin. The decrees of the rulers and the conventions they
enforced alone brought the family into being.
While Antigone's resistance to Creon's decree teaches us something
about the family in general, it cannot be denied that hers is no ordinary
family. It is, in fact, more reminiscent of the origin of Thebes than of the
groups of parents and children of which most cities are composed. If the
earth gave birth to the original Thebans, and if all true Thebans arise from
the earth, the city of Thebes can be nothing but a subhuman and incestuous
family. Creon's neglect of the family and all that it stands for implies that
he sees the city as a family, or at least as an adequate substitute for a family.
Moreover, when the leader of the chorus objects that Creon cannot kill
his son's betrothed, Creon responds by remarking that there are plenty of
other fields for Haemon to plow. He speaks as though mere earth were
an appropriate wife for a true Theban. But the citizens of Thebes are no
more able to live decently in a city in which the earth supplants human
mothers than Antigone is. Her inability to tolerate Creon's decree is a sign
of the plight that all Theban citizens ultimately share. Because she alone
understands the plight of the city, she has no city. The daughter of Oedipus
the king stands alone, outside the walls of Thebes.
If the family as we know it owes it origin everywhere to the support
of cities, we must all share the plight of the Thebans, and it is likely that
in our origins we were nothing but beasts. While many species take good
care of their young, they do not have families as we know them. Creon
is correct, then; the city is essential to human life. But government does
not suffice to make our lives human. The city lies between our base beginnings and the gods we revere, and although it can stifle our understanding
of both, it can neither alter our origins nor arouse our awe. Somehow while
providing for the shared life of the community, those who rule must support the shame and the reverence of the individuals who compose it. If
these passions die, the city can count on nothing but fear of death to keep
citizens loyal. In acknowledging the importance of the family, Sophocles
points out a way for a city to support shame and reverence without allowing
private loves and hates to endanger its security. But the task of a ruler in
balancing public against private concerns nevertheless requires a mysterious
skill. Antigone's story reveals only the problem- and Creon's refusal to
confront it.
Antigone upholds the traditional, timeless laws of the gods against
Creon's impiety. More than that, she insists on her attachment to her family
and refuses to be a part of Creon's Thebes. She describes herself as already
�26
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
at home with the dead (590 ff.). Hades is her proper home because the
family whom she cannot forget resides there. This is why she must secure
burial for Polyneices: without it the shade of her brother cannot enter
Hades but must endlessly wander the earth, like a roving beast. Antigone's
attachment to her family is primarily through memory, and so it does not
tie her to the one living member of her immediate family, Ismene, as much
as it does to the dead. Antigone cannot forget whose womb she came from
and which father begat her. She cannot forget that Ismene and Polyneices,
along with the honored Eteocles and even Oedipus himself, came from
the same womb. She cannot forget any of the horrors that stem from the
root of her father, Oedipus, and that apparently will not cease until she
is dead. Her unrelenting memory contrasts notably with the chorus's call
upon Bacchus at the end of the parodos to help them to celebrate the victory of Thebes and "to enjoy forgetfulness."
Antigone's need to remain tied to her family can be restated in the
following terms: Hades is the home of the dead, and she sees it as a home
in which all members of the family may live together in loving intimacy
through eternity. In death, then, there is an acknowledgment that despite
the distinctions among the generations and the difference between the sexes,
each of us alike is held dear. Reverence for one's dead ancestors allows
one to combine respect for the hierarchy among both dead and living family
members with a sense of our unity with them. The family can thus be an
ordered whole in which no one is a slave. Antigone is mad in thinking that
she can enjoy the loving intimacy of the family by joining the corpses of
the dead members of her family under the earth. The family must, of
course, be alive to share in the love that she craves. Still, there is a core
of truth in her feeling.
An Antigone sees it, to marry Haemon and to live in Creon's city would
be to give up her position as daughter of Oedipus, the dead and tainted
but still honorable king, to become Creon's slave. Under his rule, marriage
and childbearing become for Antigone merely bestial acts. This speculation
provides a way to think about Antigone's otherwise bizarre assertion
(906 ff.) that what she has done for her brother she would not have done
for a husband or a child of her own. If the city did recognize the importance of the family and its reverence for the dead, its members could more
easily bear being ruled by one from among them. Even a woman, who
could not participate in ruling in ancient Greece, could remain confident
of her place in a whole bound by blood alone, a tie the city did not create.
Antigone's incestuous family is both her solace and Creon's nightmare.
When the Antigone opens, Creon is no more ready than Antigone herself
to join with the chorus in a Bacchic victory celebration. In his own way,
�DOUGHERTY
27
he is as plagued as Antigone by the memory of the horrors of the past.
His assertion that he alone shall determine who is worthy of honor, and
that he shall do so on the basis of the good of the city and on no other,
is in effect a denial that men and women can be well-born, or that they
are honorable before the city metes out honors. As we have seen, it also
implies a denial that human beings in general are well-born in comparison
with beasts. He undoubtedly feels that this view is borne out by the recent
history of Thebes.
Through his slaying of his father and his incestuous marriage with his
mother, Oedipus confused the generations of his family in a way that can
be permissible only in Hades. In doing so he undermined the subsequent
stability of Thebes, for no city can be indifferent to the disgrace of its ruler,
and the troubles Oedipus began continued in the battle between his sons.
Each treated the city as though it were a private estate that he had the right
to inherit. Creon has gone to the other extreme. In his view, anything private
is a threat to the security of the city. The citizens of Thebes must substitute
honor for the friends of the city and hatred for its enemies for their private
loves and hates. But friendship or fellowship (philia) depends not only upon
the security of the city, as Creon argues in his opening speech (187 ff.),
but also upon the dignity of the individuals who make np the city. Antigone feels that she cannot retain her nobility in marrying Haemon as
long as her marriage depends upon submitting to Creon's decree. Similarly,
any lawgiver who seeks to protect fellowship by legislating what citizens
may love and hate will inevitably fail.
When Creon accuses Antigone of challenging his political authority
and his authority as a man (484 ff.), he is not far wrong. The exchange
between Creon and Antigone once she has been brought forward as a
criminal reflects her sense that his politics destroy phi/ia:
Not to join in hating, but in loving (symphi/ein), was I born
she says. Creon responds:
Go down now and love the dead, if it is necessary [for you] to love. No woman
will rule me while I live. (523-25)
Later Creon says to his son: " ... with loathing and as if she were a foe,
let this girl go to seek marriage in Hades" (654). Antigone's death is described both by herself and by the chorus as well as by Creon as a marriage. In fact, in the opening scene Antigone expresses a similar thought
when she tell Ismene that she will lie with her brother, a friend (or dear
�28
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
one) with a friend (73). How defensible we can consider Antigone's morbid
speech here depends npon whether her sense that Creon's sovereignty would
destroy the humanity of personal attachments is justified. Two dramatic
events in the play powerfully reinforce the sense that it is. One is Ismene's
attempt to implicate herself in Antigone's crime and to die with her. Ismene
reveals her despair when she asks Antigone "What life is dear (phi/os) to
me bereft of you?" (535 ff.). However deep the rupture between the sisters,
Antigone is Ismene's only friend in all Thebes. The other event that supports
Antigone's view of Creon's city is Haemon's suicide in her tomb.
Haemon's suicide seems more difficult to account for than Ismene's
offer to die with Antigone, for he seems to have a promising future in
Thebes. He is the son of the present ruler and is also his likely successor.
Why can't he accept his father's suggestion and find another bride? The
first and most important response to this question is surely that Haemon
loves Antigone, but I believe that the full answer lies as much in Haemon's
exchange with his father, just after he has learned that Antigone must die,
as it does in his love for her. In that exchange, Creon virtually outlaws
his son's passions when he accuses him of treasuring a private and indefensible love for the wrong sort of woman. Haemon claims that his knowledge
of the sympathies of the people and his respect for those sympathies
provoke him to try to reason with Creon. But as long as Haemon wishes
his father to free Antigone, Creon hears nothing but disobedience and
treachery in his words. He repudiates Haemon's advice just as vehemently
as he repudiates Antigone's so-called "crime."
The immediate cause of Haemon's suicide is that he has just found
himself trying to slay his father out of anger for the death of his betrothed.
Haemon cannot allow himself to perform such a heinous act any more
than he can bow to his father's will. This shows that Haemon respects the
claims of kinship even when they conflict with his own desires. The son
is about as unlike his father as he could be.
Just as Creon accuses his son of treachery for the sake of a woman,
so he accuses both the guard and Thiresias, and in fact whoever questions
his absolute authority as ruler of Thebes, of seeking to enrich themselves
at the price of the city's good. But it cannot be the case that any personal
interest that is not identical with upholding the security of the city makes
one a traitor. Not all such concerns are petty and unworthy of respect.
Creon's mistake in thinking so blinds him even to his own motives, for
he is surely as interested in his own glory as he is in the welfare of Thebes.
His error, as we have seen, has its base in a misunderstanding of the horror
of Oedipus's history, and its implications for the city. Creon's fate is no
more enviable than Oedipus's own.
�DOUGHERTY
29
Creon repudiates the passions that reside in and preserve the human
family at his personal peril, and in so doing he exposes Thebes to great
danger as well. This becomes clear in the occasion for his dramatic reversal
towards the end of the play (1092 ff.). When Teiresias tells Creon that to
enforce his decree will mean to sacrifice the life of his own son, he is willing
to bow to the traditions concerning death and burial (Jlll-12), but he is
too late. His personal catastrophe coincides with the danger to the city
about which Teiresias has warned him. Thebes has now witnessed the utter
ruin of a second ruler. Sophocles' Greek audience would probably know
also that the cities whose men died in Polyneices' war against Thebes were
already rearming against her. Creon at least may have learned something,
for he cannot fail to associate his neglect of the laws of the gods with his
loss of all who were dear to him. His suffering is pathetic and terrible.
Like Creon, Antigone too suffers a change of heart in the course of
the drama. In her case it occurs just after she has been condemned.
Although she never repudiates her illegal act, she is suddenly overwhelmed
by the terror of sacrificing the life that she has not yet had an opportunity
to live. Her success in performing a rudimentary version of the rites of
burial for her brother is not enough to console her. Indeed, Antigone snaps
at the chorus when, after she has compared herself to a goddess (824 ff.),
they remind her of her mortality (834 ff.). She accuses them of mocking
her, even though only a few lines earlier (828 ff.) they were clearly admiring
her glory. Their admiration looks like mockery to her because, now that
she has confronted the end of her life, splendor in death looks hollow.
In defending the domain of the gods Antigone exaggerates the claims
of the family and denies a place in her soul to the feelings she could have
had for a husband and children of her own. She is forced to expose the
basis of a tradition in the attempt to uphold it. As she does so, she does
violence to herself. In this sense, Antigone lacks self-knowledge, at least
up to the moment when she is condemned, but her imperfect knowledge
of herself is not a "tragic flaw" that makes her deserving of her fate. No
human being can have perfect self-knowledge and Antigone cannot be
responsible for being limited in a way that characterizes all human beings.
Rather, her situation is an extreme version of a plight we all share: never
fully knowing ourselves, we must continually learn about ourselves through
action and experience. Our need for political structures reflects this truth.
So do both our attachments to our families and the traditions that guide
us in giving due recognition to (God or) the gods.
The change in Antigone's tone when she is aware that she is about to
die provides an approach to understanding the obscure passage in which
the chorus tells her:
�30
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Advancing to the furthest limit of courage [or rashness, to thrasos] up to
the lofty throne of justice (diki) you fell, child, hard. You are paying in full
the penalty of the contest of your father. (852-55)
The passage implies something like the following: Attaining the foundation or throne of justice is not the same as living in the most appropriate
way. If we are to live decently, justice must guide the lives of mortals without
being fully disclosed to us. In forbidding the burial of Polyneices Creon
was the immediate cause of the denial of this possibility to Antigone, but
the real source of the problem lies further back- in Oedipus's incest, and
ultimately in the founding of Thebes, or rather, of the city in general.
Creon has denied Antigone the opportunity to live decently by forcing
her to confront a side of human life that cannot be fully reconciled with
the city. There is no way for a city- any city- to acknowledge fully the
reverence of men and women and the sources of their shame. Rulers are
not inevitably as blind as Creon. Still, Creon's errors merely exaggerate
the errors to which all cities in some way fall prey. Lawgivers must claim
that any act they label criminal is worthy of our disdain, and they must
label as such all acts that seriously endanger the city's security. They must
behave as though nothing that conflicts with the good of the city is worthy
of admiration, and as !bough only what hinders the good of the city merits
disgust.
But without Antigone's challenge to the view of the city, none of us
who are citizens can come to see ourselves as we are. For human beings,
self-knowledge must involve knowledge of the irreconcilable aspects of our
natures. The conflict between our animal nature and the institutions that
attempt to civilize or, if that is too hard, to conceal them, is often hard
to ignore. Creon is preoccupied with this conflict. But we sometimes experience an even deeper conflict between the power to sense what is worthy of reverence and of shame, and the advantages, perhaps the obligation, of submitting to standards that do not acknowledge these. The power
to sense what is above us and what is below is simply human. It consists
in a dim awareness of our inhuman origin as well as of our ability to ascend from that origin, an ability that no city, and probably no science,
can comprehend. Because Antigone's madness is this awareness, I cannot
wish her to have been different, however much I pity her fate. Antigone
conveys to us what she knows through arousing our admiration for her
and, at the same time, our pity and even disgust.
***
�DOUGHERTY
31
Sophocles' Antigone is often said to represent the contest between divine
law and human law, but this is an inadequate account of what is at issue.
After all, Creon claims and probably believes that the gods support his
decree. Nor will it suffice to read the play as a working out of the importance of the family weighed against the concerns of the city. For without
the city there is no family, and without the family, no city. The human
family is not simply natural; it needs the city both to bring it into being
and to support it through law. The city, in its turn, must contain many
families so that their members can associate with one another as similar,
if not perfectly equal, beings, and only then can they willingly submit to
one of themselves. How to combine many individuals who are members
of various families into a single whole is the riddle of the city. Creon seems
not to notice that to rule involves offering one's skill as a solver of the
riddle. He cannot even begin to consider its solution.
Both reverence for the gods and the ties of the family must be important
elements in solving the riddle of how a city, which is a collection of many
separate individuals, can be at the same time a whole. The city must respect
the fact that men and women are more than citizens, that in some sense
they are independent wholes. Rulers are reasonable only superficially when
they insist on the debt all men and women owe to the city. They forget
that the city owes its existence to a human insight that no city can fully
comprehend or sustain. Humans are the beings who sense what lies beneath
the earth and what reigns above them. We are the beings who know that
we are neither the one nor the other, that we are by nature in between.
The smooth sailing of the city sometimes depends upon obscuring this
sense in order to support the authority of rulers. Established procedures
and laws must often take precedence over the insights of individuals into
the will of the gods. But no city can long survive without the shame and
the reverence that lie deeper in human beings than does their political
allegiance. I do not have the solution to the riddle of the city, but I can
say this: The power of the sense of shame and of reverence is a power that
we too would be as vulgar and as foolish as Creon to ignore.
I have entitled this essay "The Nobility of Sophocles' Antigone," and
I do mean to call her noble. Through her daring and wrongheaded acts,
she reminds us all of truths that we cannot afford to ignore. Creon's Thebes
did not acknowledge her greatness in risking her life for a principle that
would make her city more human; we must not follow its example. Even
the perturbed passions of a woman may reveal a deep and weighty truth.
If Sophocles had no more to teach us than this, it would be enough to
justify our calling him wise.
��Hegel's Reading of Antigone
Patricia M. Locke
Hegel thought that Sophocles' Antigone was the "most magnificent and
satisfying work of art of [its] kind."' Repeatedly turning to the character
of Antigone in his writings on art, politics, and religion, Hegel showed
a great admiration for her even apart from the play. His lifelong attraction to Antigone led Hegel into conflicting positions related to her role
as a model for feminine life.
We will consider the two main positions Hegel held, and suggest reasons
for the disparity between them. The first view is discussed primarily in
the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and the Lectures on Aesthetics (given
in 1823, 1826, and 1828-29). This aesthetic, or dramatic, reading of the
play focuses on the collision between Antigone and Creon as embodiments
of opposed ways of life. The play hinges on the exploration of the conflict
between elemental oppositions: female and male, divine and human, and
private versus public duties. While the resolution is, according to Hegel,
external, affirming the value of each side, it further shows that a simple
binary opposition has been overcome. The audience has a more complex
realization that each pole needs the other in order to be what it is. Our
heroine has upheld the values of the hearth and the ancestral gods but
suffers for her neglect of the rights of the polis.
Hegel's second position is also found in the Phenomenology of Spirit
and in the Philosophy of Right (1821). It aims at the underlying ethical
Patricia M. Locke is a Thtor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This paper was presented to the Washington Philosophy Club at Georgetown University in March, 1989.
An earlier version was given as a lecture at St. John's College in September, 1988.
33
�34
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
or political meaning of the play. In the earlier work Hegel analyzes the
dnties that flow from the blood ties between brother and sister. In the
Philosophy of Right Hegel concentrates on the relations between husband
and wife as the essential bond that provides a basis for a political order.
It is my contention that this shift from the brother-sister relation to
that of husband and wife is the source of the disparity between Hegel's
views. While brothers and sisters have different functions as male and
female members of their community, they are similarly unself-conscious
in carrying out their tasks. On the other hand, Hegel assumes that in the
case of husband and wife, the man has an independent sense of self while
the woman does not. This assumption is based on the modern concepts
of state and civil society described in the Philosophy of Right. Hegel allows
a development of free self-consciousness to men, while retaining an ideal
of woman as static and ahistorical. This mistake on Hegel's part makes
it impossible to reconcile his aesthetic and ethical readings of the play.
What would salvage Hegel's insights abont the Antigone? If we argue
that Antigone, while fully feminine in character and goals, achieves a sense
of individuality-however limited- by virtue of her actions as an unmarried woman, not merely as Polyneices' sister, then we can claim her as a
dialectical heroine. Antigone's action begins as service for another, but ends
as service for herself. Since she can change, she can remain the magnificent epitome of womankind Hegel imagined her to be.
This essay will examine the aesthetic meaning of the Antigone in detail
and then consider the problems inherent in Hegel's ethical reading of it.
1: Aesthetic Meaning
In the Aesthetics Hegel defines drama as "the presentation, to our minds
and imagination, of actual human actions and affairs and therefore of
persons expressing their actions in words. 'A dramatization' rests entirely
on collisions of circumstances, passions and characters, and leads therefore
to actions and then to the reactions which in turn necessitate a resolution
of the conflict."' There is a dynamic quality to a good drama when the
inevitable collision between opposed characters is anticipated and endured.
According to Hegel, what makes Antigone a good play in a dramatic
sense is the beauty and power of the clash and its resolution. We will examine this collision as it appears in the plot and characterization.
Collisions depend first upon the plot, which is the primary structure
within which the dramatic movement takes place. Creon's edict forbidding
the burial of Polyneices is the presupposition of the conflict. In itself it
is a seemingly neutral command aimed at those who would challenge order
�LOCKE
35
in the polis. However, we hear about this command from Antigone in the
first scene of the play. Coming from this source, the edict is no longer
neutral: it has taken on an ominous cast. The tragedy is fated from this
beginning, when Antigone neglects the warnings of her sister lsmene and
strives to counter what she sees as a violation of a higher, divine order.
Yet one is aware that it is not so simple. As daughter of Oedipus, Antigone
must say "there's nothing grievous, nothing free from doom, not shameful,
not dishonored, I've not seen" (4-5) 3 • She is both innocent and guilty of
the crime she inherits. Antigone has a responsibility towards the polis as
the remnant of its ruling house, and a conflicting duty to her dead brother.
Creon is in a similar position, as both Antigone's uncle and ruler of Thebes.
Thus the situation is full of potential for collision between them and,
ultimately, among their several duties. How can one remain loyal to the
polis and the family in circumstances like these?
The question is a serious one, but one that Antigone does not need
to ask. She feels the compelling claim of the underworld, which grounds
her life. The gods of departed ancestors, of her father, mother, and brothers,
confirm her desire to act. She has no doubt that her action is consonant
with her determinate character and with the will of the gods. Since Antigone has the power to assert the primacy of the family, she rather than
Ismene is the heroine of this play. Ismene pleads with Antigone to remember
that women should not "force law" or fight with men. Antigone will not
compromise her duty to the underworld, and answers harshly that she will
bury Polyneices despite the consequences. Antigone dares the "crime of
piety," and with the act of pouring earth over the body of her brother the
play is set into motion. Her action has a specific aim and expected consequences that reveal the greatness of Antigone's character. She is able to
face death alone, abandoning the wedding plans and the hopes of young
womanhood.
At the same time, the action advances the plot because it demands a
reaction. Creon's expectation that the traitor is male collides with the calm,
knowing demeanor of the violator standing before him. His imagination
is more narrow than Antigone's, since he can envision only profit as a
motive for disobedience. He is confounded by an action based on love.
Their exchange defines the grounds of their differences: One is male, the
other female; one speaks of crime, the other of holiness.
Creon: You are not ashamed to think alone?
Antigone: No, I am not ashamed. When was it shame
to serve the children of my mother's womb? (510-12)
�36
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
They are clearly opposed, even in their ideas about what it is proper
for a woman to do. Ismene's course is proper yet unsatisifying to us. Communal values and the customs that guide everyday life do not set out an
obvious solution to the conflict between Antigone and Creon. What is
criminal to one of the antagonists is pious to the other. I will argue that
the resolution of this dramatic tension lies in Antigone's attempt to find
a connection between these opposing terms. She thinks independently on
behalf of her family. Antigone acts unwomanly and illegally, out of a
woman's loyalty towards her familial gods. In the end her action carries
the double weight of piety and treason.
In his Aesthetics Hegel stresses the importance of action in tragic drama
because it is "with action [that] a man steps actively into concrete reality
where forthwith the most general matters are condensed and confined in
a particular phenomenon."' The step into concrete reality confirms Antigone as one who wills to be who she is. At the same time, Antigone enables
the divine to manifest itself through her. The gods of the underworld are
given concreteness by her willingness to obey them without questioning
the source of the divine laws. Consequently, the most general spiritual
substance appears within a particular visible event. We do not hear soliloquies of doubt, as in Hamlet, for Antigone's action comes naturally to
her. Hegel thinks that the spiritual element in Antigone's act "is perfectly
married and reconciled with the equally justified external aspect, i.e., with
what is seen on stage."5
This tragedy is compelling precisely because what is seen on stage are
self-reliant characters acting out of a particular "pathos" that gives them
each a driving essential power. Each character feels his or her ethical stance
to be internally justified and fully binding. Their views are expressed in
"solid and cultivated objective language," rather than elaborate rhetoric,
for their eloquence is in line with their direct actions. 6 Only that which
is essential to the true character of Antigone is stated. We know very little
about her beyond her terrible lineage. Antigone defines herself at the outset:
"For me, the doer, death is best" (72).
This statement reverberates throughout the whole play, as Antigone
proves herself to be a doer and faces the horror of live burial as her punishment. Creon too experiences the devastating consequences of his actions,
as his niece, his son, and his wife die in rapid succession. These deaths
are dramatically necessary to restore the rights of the gods. Death here
is a negation, or canceling, of the negation that set the play into motion,
the burial of Polyneices.
The opposition of Creon and Antigone is regarded against the
background of the chorus. The choral speeches present the community's
�LOCKE
37
views, alternately commenting on the characters' decisions and placing those
decisions in their proper reference to the gods. Hegel thinks that the chorus,
although it is powerless and afraid of the contradictory gods, is important
as a surrounding universal context for the action. The chorus believes that
Fate destroys people despite their merit, and therefore must conclude that
"any greatness in human life brings doom" (613). Although sympathetic
towards Antigone, the chorus does not offer to help her. The "undercover
talk" in the polis remains undercover because the chorus lacks "the power
of the negative," as Hegel remarks in the Phenomenology. 7 This power
causes changes to occur by negating that which is. Antigone participates
in the movement of negativity when she challenges Creon's law.
In the Phenomenology, Hegel states that the chorus
is conscious only of a paralysing terror of this movement, of equally helpless
pity, and as the end of it all, the empty repose of submission to Necessity,
whose work is understood neither as the necessary deed of the character,
nor as the action of [Spirit] within itself. 8
There are three pertinent interpretations of this dialectical movement.
The chorus sees the hand of Fate, which strikes down even the bravest
heroine. Antigone interprets that fate as her own work, and is therefore
willing to sustain the negative, to hold with the moral rightness of her deed
throughout the play. The third interpretation, held by Hegel, is that we
are witnessing the activity of Spirit.
Spirit, which is difficult to define since it is continually evolving in the
history of consciousness, is here the implicit divinity acting through the
characters. Spirit appears explicitly as the frame within which their actions
have meaning. This frame is language. Thus Spirit is simultaneously in
the foreground and the background of the tragedy.
Spirit joins the three interpretations together. What happens in the play
is equally the work of Fate, of Antigone's will, and of the appearance of
Spirit's power. In this reflective activity Spirit is operating on a higher level
than is immediately evident in the play. The modern dialectical philosopher
is conscious of the interdependence of fate and individual will and of the
universality of their conflict in the life of a person or the life of the human
species. Only with this higher consciousness of Spirit present in the
philosopher can external and internal motivating forces be woven so tightly
together.
Spirit shows itself in a rather limited fashion in the poetic language
of the play, in the chorus as well as the main characters. The choral view
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
is bound to the past. It sees the one-sidedness of Antigone's position, for
its admiration is mixed with criticism of her neglect of Zeus's authority.
Creon too comes in for support and criticism by the chorus. First, he
is praised for upholding law in the daylight world of Zeus, but the fearful
chorus murmurs against him when they consider the dark fate of Oedipus's
house. Creon is as inflexible as Antigone. He will not listen to his son
Haemon, nor consider the feeling of the community when he banishes Antigone to her unusual bridal chamber. He claims that this live burial will
protect him from direct responsibility for Antigone's death, but we know
that such a technical reading of the law will not satisfy the underworld.
The one-sided action of Antigone cannot exist harmoniously with the
equally one-side reaction of Creon. The play turns on our recognition that
these two powers are incomplete without each other. To achieve equilibrium,
Antigone and Creon are destroyed by their complements, which are "intrinsic to their own actual being."' The resolution of the opposition between man and woman is echoed in the union of upper and lower divinities.
Thus the "powers animating action which struggled to destroy each other"
are reconciled at last.
Hegel claims in the Aesthetics that
only with such a conclusion can the necessity of what happens to the
individuals appear as absolute rationality, and only then can our hearts be
morally at peace: shattered by the fate of the heroes but reconciled
fundamentally. 10
There are two components to this reconciliation. First, we must accept
the fate of the heroes as rational, and we must feel "morally at peace."
We come to understand Antigone's death only if we see her initial position as blind towards the claims of public life. Second, we feel a certain
peace when we appreciate Antigone's bravery. She withstood great obstacles
and has given us a sense of the justice of her cause.
Aristotle's notion of catharsis in the Poetics is helpful here. This term
has been the focus of much criticism by commentators on Aristotle. For
the purposes of this discussion, let us adopt a Hegelian understanding of
its meaning. Catharsis is the pleasurable release of tension following pity
and fear. "Pity," Aristotle explains, "concerns the undeserved, while fear
concerns the similar." 11 The play points in two directions, to the past and
to the future. When it points to the past, Antigone's demise is undeserved
and therefore pitiable. She is struck down by fate while demonstrating her
noble character. She is consistent in her loyalty to the underworld, and
therefore suffers rather than learns.
�39
LOCKE
Ultimately, we do not pity her, as we might the helpless Ismene. The
pity for Antigone is canceled when we see her take responsibility for acting. Since she courageously wills her fate, we come to realize that her death
is best. The same character that brought her to an undeserved punishment
can now be seen as blameworthy. From the opening scene of the play, Antigone displays the "hot mind over chilly things" that marks her as the
daughter of Oedipus. Our fear that she will act like her father, listening
to no one as she draws her fate upon her head, heightens the tension of
the conflict with Creon. This fear is relieved when her death extinguishes
the possibility of future repetitions of the shameful acts of Oedipus's house.
Hegel accepts Aristotle's explanation of pity and fear, yet stresses that
in order to be most compelling, the object evoking these emotions ought
to be the power of Spirit. 12 By this Hegel means that our feelings ought
not to be directed only to finite, limited objects, such as the pity one of
Jane Austen's characters might feel for a young woman who has no dancing partners. This kind of sympathy degrades the sufferer to a helpless
victim of sad circumstances. We feel a deeper kind of pity for unwed
Antigone-a pity that recognizes the profound source of her pain.
At the same time, we must acknowledge the rights of the polis, which
also displays the divine substance. The catharsis that alleviates pity and
fear allows this fact to stand forth: The same substance that showed itself
in Antigone's one-sided action appears in harmony with itself when she
is struck down. In Hegel's view, tragedy is at bottom the conflict and resolu'tion of partial expressions of Spirit. Spirit's power is exercised both through
and upon the heroine of this play.
By focusing on the collision between Creon and Antigone and the difficult necessity of its resolution, Hegel locates the dramatic strength of
the play. For Hegel, the question "What makes this a good drama?" must
be answered in terms of dialectical movement through a fearful opposition.
Plot and characters work together to achieve finally a sense of vitality and
completeness.
II: Ethical Meaning
My objections arise when we turn to the ethical dimension of the Antigone. Hegel's interpretation in the Phenomenology is based on the
primacy of the brother-sister relationship, in which the sister's reality is
mediated by her brother. In the Philosophy of Right the stress is laid upon
the husband-wife relationship. This difference reveals Hegel's assumption
that women lack self-consciousness, remaining natural and unchanged even
when they freely enter the agreement of marriage. If one claims that modern
�40
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
marriage originates in "the free consent of the persons . . . to make
themselves one person, to renounce their natural and individual personality
to this unity," then one must accept that a woman attains her "substantive
self-consciousness" when she goes beyond her former unreflective way of
being. 13 Hegel should not ignore the meaning of her choice when he
describes woman's role in the procreative family. In the moment of
accepting the marriage proposal, woman has an active role in her destiny,
which is not mediated by either her birth family or her fiance.
Hegel fails to do justice to the play when he applies modern social structures, such as marriage arrangements, to it. We will review the argument
in the Phenomenology first and then consider the problem in light of the
Philosophy of Right.
A. Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel's discussion of Antigone in the Phenomenology comes under
the heading "The True Spirit: The Ethical Order." According to Hegel the
play is an example of the way true Spirit makes its appearance after a series
of inadequate attempts. Now Spirit is present in an unmediated form as
the ethos of a people. Spirit, or mind, is the people. Spirit is conscious,
that is, able to make distinctions, but not yet self-conscious. Thus it is
manifest in custom and habit rather than in a rational decision-making
process like the application of Kant's categorical imperative.
At this stage, Spirit is split into content and consciousness. The content is the folk, the entire community. Actual consciousness is found in
individual citizens. The union of their subjective wills with the objective
order ushers in the specifically ethical life of Spirit. Ethical Spirit is "the
good become alive," embodied in human action. 14 Natural activities give
way to a higher second nature, developed through habitual exercise of the
duties appropriate to one's station in the community. This results in a split
in the content, or substance. Ethical Spirit polarizes into two realms. The
first realm is the world of women, a community that is dedicated to the
needs of particular family members, living and dead. The second is the
world of men, which is located in the polis, a community that raises male
consciousness to universal concerns such as laws. The heart of Sophocles'
play is the conflict between male and female worlds. This conflict is inevitable, since people really belong to both spheres and cannot live without
one another.
The family is a distinctly feminine world, for it is women who bear
and educate children, care for blind fathers like Oedipus, and carry out
the final rites for relatives who have died. The ethical substance is here
�LOCKE
41
at its most immediate, close to nature and to the world beyond this life.
Its gods are those of the underworld and of the hearth, and its law gives
primacy to blood relatives. Hegel describes family life as harmonious
because the members together constitute an individual family. They are
not differentiated, nor do they display a struggle for recognition that might
lead to self-consciousness. One can think of parents, children, uncles, and
grandparents as internal organs of the larger familial organism. "Woman"
especially is defined as being-for-another, because her life is dedicated to
the health and perpetuation of this organism. Although she is dependent
by nature, woman turns the givenness of her sex into an ethical ground.
Her being as part of a family does not require self-conscious action in order
to obey the divine law. Woman endows natural activities with a spiritual significance by being a vehicle for mediation. Working through her, "the gods'
unwritten and unfailing laws ... always live, and no one knows their origin
in time" (455, 457). Nature's sensuous immediacy is canceled in this process.
All living things are supposed to grow naturally, but a male child is
trained for a non-natural end. His mother educates him for a mediated
future as a citizen of the city. By becoming a citizen, her son outgrows
her. 15 His new life requires a negation of the immediacy of home life. With
this, the mother has fulfilled her task. The family whole is broken open
because the son makes the transition to the second realm, the world of men.
The young man who enters adult life finds his actual being as an individual. His self-sufficiency in comparison with his family remains
unreflective and is limited by his participation in the city. His needs and
ideas are shared by other citizens, and find their fulfillment in the law.
Law alters the relation to natural desires by introducing a universal element.
The family, for instance, has been shown to be grounded in consanguinity
and structured in an organic way. The family under law, as signified by
marriage rites, is based on a contract between two people of different blood
who henceforth act as if they are of the same blood. Thus the city substitutes conventional bonds between people for the irrational bonds of
nature. Ethical Spirit is conscious of itself and actual in the offspring of
the marriage relationship.
Between them, man and woman share the substance of the ethical Spirit.
This substance shows itself as a natural sexual difference which they raise
to a universal status by accepting their duties established by convention.
Man is the guardian of the state and respects human laws; woman is the
guardian of the home and respects the laws of subterranean divinities. The
movement of man from private to public life is a development towards selfconscious Spirit, as Hegel outlines the process in the Phenomenology. Hegel
concludes:
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
42
Neither of the two is by itself absolutely valid; human law proceeds in its
living process from the divine, the law valid on earth from that of the nether
world, the conscious from the unconscious, mediation from immediacy-
and equally returns whence it came. 16
A dynamic equilibrium is maintained between these complementary
worlds. However, there remains a final task for woman to do. This is to
prepare for the return of man to the immediate realm of nature upon his
death. Although the major portion of his life may be spent in the public
sphere, at its end he comes home. Woman as mother, wife, or sister
transforms the natural process of decay into a spiritual one. This change
occurs as she gives death a religious meaning. Antigone negates the image
of "a rich sweet sight for the hungry birds beholding," as she pours earth
over the body and says the ritual prayers (29-30). The dead person does
not return to the particular phase of his childhood. Rather, his rest as a
completed being-for-itself is marked by simple universality. Her brother
has achieved a stable being; Polyneices has become an ancestor. The family
is preserved after all, in the memory of those who respect their forefathers.
Woman's primary ethical action, preservation of the family, therefore concerns the dead rather than the living.
It is necessary for Antigone to bury Polyneices both to secure the family
organism and to confirm her identity as his sister. Although woman is
unself-conscious in her being-for-her-family, as sister she has an ethical
substance through her brother. (Hegel entirely neglects the sister-to-sister
relationship between Antigone and Ismene.)
A brother is a bridge to the outside world because he can act as a citizen
as well as a family member. Hegel claims that, unlike other relations between men and women, there is little or no sexual attraction between
brothers and sisters. They are "free individualities in regard to each other.""
Yet in regard to the public world, the sister is not a free individuality. Her
consciousness has not been raised, so her life is essentially tied to her
brother's existence.
Hegel's position in the Phenomenology, somewhat modified in the
Philosophy of Right, stresses that the natural bond of consanguinity has
a higher value to woman than the complementary tie between husband
and wife. This value transcends its physical origin because it is attached
to an awareness of individual selfhood. Hegel states in the Phenomenology:
Consequently, the feminine, in the form of the sister, has the highest intuitive
awareness of what is ethical. She does not attain to consciousness of it, or
to the objective existence of it, because the law of the Family is an implicit,
�LOCKE
43
inner essence which is not exposed to the daylight of consciousness, but remains an inner feeling and the divine element that is exempt from an existence in the real world. 1s
These divinities seem irrational by the standards of the daylight world,
particularly because their demands cannot be articulated in the common
language of the polis. (One can see this most clearly in the treatment of
the Furies in the Oresteia.)
Antigone, then, has two sources of self-identity. She can draw on the
deep strength of familial gods, who honor blood and vengeance. She can
call on these divinities without recourse to an abstract confession of faith,
because she does not feel a distance from them that would require a conscious effort to overcome separation. Antigone can act intuitively, with
the power of the furies flowing through her hands.
Antigone draws on a second source of strength as well. Polyneices is
her link to the real world's rational, civilizing effects. Since the Olympian
deities, particularly Zeus, hold sway over the public realm, Antigone must
come to an awareness of their domination through Polyneices.
Perhaps Hegel's interpretation of the sources of Antigone's sense of
self can clarify her strange speech as she is led to her death. She begins:
0 tomb, 0 marriage-chamber, hollowed out
house that will watch forever, where I go.
Th my own people, who are mostly there;
Persephone has taken them to her. (891-94)
Antigone likens the tomb to the marriage chamber in order to stress
that her loyalty remains with her birth family. She dies unwed, because,
as she laments (referring to Polyneices), "In your death you destroy my
life" (871). She has no life left to give to Haemon or to future children.
Since marriage is within the province of the state, in this speech Antigone
asserts that she would not violate its rights if a husband or child died under
similar conditions. Antigone knows the limits and source of her power,
and remains within those limits.
Or does she? Is her choice really right? One must ask these questions
because of the way in which Antigone carried out her duty. At first, no
one knew who buried Polyneices. "The doer left no sign" but the dust covering the body was apparently sufficient to turn the curse (250). Antigone
appeared again in broad daylight, "with the sharp and bitter cry of a bitter bird," to renew the earthen covering. This time she was captured, calmly
admitted her transgression, and came face to face with Creon.
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Why did she perform this action twice? Hegel would not claim that
Antigone was trying to be a martyr, or that she was deliberately trying
to undermine the stability of the polis. Rather, Antigone needed to make
her deed known in order to establish that it was not due to fate or nature
or any other external cause. She chose to accept responsibility for the act
in order to vindicate her brother and to bring him to the gates of the underworld in his universal aspect. In Hegelian terms, she showed the spiritual
meaning in the seemingly uncontrollable event of death, but she could do
this only by transgressing the boundaries of her feminine self. She took
on some of the rebellious nature of Polyneices to act for him and, implicitly,
to act for herself as well. It is my view that by doing this Antigone
demonstrated an expanded definition of womanhood.
Antigone has come to a sense of her own integrity, her being-for-self,
as she steps into the public sphere. Since the significant members of her
family are dead, Antigone is her family. Suddenly she appears as an individual. No longer a passive vehicle of the divine, she mediates the upper
world for her family. Antigone is fully conscious that her public act is both
criminal and holy. Although Hegel does not think that women exert dialectical power in the public realm, in the Aesthetics he praises Antigone as
a heroine greater than Oedipus in her consciousness of the double meaning
of her deed. Hegel is unaware of the conflict between his views.
When Antigone moves away from the natural feminine role to engage
in a forceful debate with Creon, he is visibly disturbed by what he sees
as a subversion of his manhood as well as of the state. "I am no man and
she the man instead" (484). Antigone asserts a new power in the political
world by bringing the vocabulary of familial love to bear on legal relationships. This criterion for judging the worth of a law is not appropriate
generally. However, at this moment it reveals Creon's arrogation of power
to himself. He mistook law for justice and the polis for his possession.
Antigone's challenge opens up the seriousness of this mistake. Human
justice, like self-consciousness, is the result of intellectual and political
effort. The struggle to make the concept of justice actual is accomplished
in a specific historical context.
In the play, Creon acts as if the universal powers at work must bow
to his personal concerns. Further, he ignores the crucial foundation of the
polis in the family by slighting proper burial rites for Polyneices and his
sister. Thus neither Zeus nor the underworld deities receive their due.
Antigone's full consciousness of her deed, and her willingness to appear in public to claim her guilt, is likewise undermining the balance of
universal ethical powers. Ethically as well as dramatically, the play requires
the destruction of Antigone and Creon.
�LOCKE
45
Hegel's position in the Phenomenology is that the duality of male and
female, of polis and family, is universal and unchanging. There is neither
a dialectical sublation of one into the other, nor a higher synthesis. Thus
the resolution of the conflict restores the previous balance of powers.
Hegel does not see Antigone as a character who is both female and
male, political on behalf of her family and herself. There is an unnecessary
rigidity in his interpretation, since it is logically feasible that dialectical
movement can take place within as well as between the distinct roles of
the sexes. Hegel's limited interpretation is further complicated in the
Philosophy of Right.
B. Antigone in the Philosophy of Right
Hegel discusses Antigone in a section titled "Ethical Life," which is
divided into three parts: the Family, Civil Society, and the State. The family,
of course, is Antigone's domain, but it also must be viewed as the immediate
moment in a dialectical movement culminating in the State. It is this movement which puts the life into "Ethical Life." However, actual freedom exists only as an individual's exercise of duty within the boundaries of one
or the other of these communities.
The family under consideration in the Philosophy of Right is both
natural and artificial. It is the natural union of the sexes for the immediate
goal of perpetuation of the species. This is an external tie, which is made
internal through the artificiality of the wedding rite. In the marriage
ceremony, natural sexual differences are overcome by a self-conscious
"union on the level of mind." 19 Marriage is thus an immediate ethical relationship. Since it is established as a universal bond through their promise,
the sensuous aspect (that is, the changeable side of the relationship) is
subordinated to the unchanging ethical substance. Further, the spouses'
natural attachment to their original families is overcome by the trans formation inherent in ''two become one flesh." Thus it is important, in Hegel's
argument, that the man and woman have no close blood relation. The
priority given to natural consanguinity gives way to "artificial" consan-
guinity, even, I would argue, for a woman. In the acceptance of the marriage contract, a woman participates in a concious decision about ethical
matters.
The substance of the new family is love, a "felt unity" of an ethical
kind. This unity is felt rather than thought, so it remains on an immediate
level. This unity is ethical, that is, the "good become alive," because it is
founded on a rational ground. The implicit rational content of the marriage becomes explicit in property and, most importantly, in offspring.
�46
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Children have the potential to be free, and through education can fulfill
that potential. They then take their place in the succession of generations,
inheriting property and establishing their own procreative families.
The transition to civil society is caused by the multiplication of families.
The substantial unity of the birth family is lost in this new moment of
particularity. Civil society exhibits the splitting apart of needs and rights.
Private needs concerning private property bring people into conflict. The
universal principle appears only as the necessity that drives men to form
social ties in order to satisfy private economic interests. The interdependence
of one with all is still an abstract universality, for within the association
the universal and the particular are related but not synthesized. Members
have great differences of property and therefore of freedom.
Finally, the state draws together the felt unity of the family and the
economic differentiation of civil society. The state Hegel means is a constitutional monarchy, where the constitution mediates between the particular interests of citizens and the monarch. The conscious unity of various
classes under law signifies an expansion of freedom. This freedom is no
longer abstract, since it is exercised in political rather than simply economic
actions. Citizens find their true selves in political life.
A nation-state of this kind is significantly different from the polis, or
city-state, which is the setting of the Antigone. Hegel thought that the polis
exhibited a harmony of opposite powers, which remained separate from
each other and unaware of their separation.
According to Hegel, the polis is for us a "thing of the past," not to
be desired as a utopian vision for our future. The externality of the bond
between male and female, human law and divine law, is now apparent.
Ethical life of Spirit no longer fits within these bounds, since Spirit has
become more self-conscious in the Christian era. The polis continues to
have meaning for us as an image of political origin in a beautiful ethical
life. That beauty arises from the articulated harmony of Greek art, religion,
and politics. It is this interpenetration of the beautiful and the true that
gives rise to the tragic drama.
And so we return to the Antigone, a play that somehow speaks to us,
even though we find ourselves in a very different political world. In Hegel's
aesthetic interpretation, the character of Antigone remains the same, still
loyal to the gods of the underworld. He has no difficulty in holding Antigone up as a model for womankind to emulate, even though a harmonious
and beautiful existence within modern religious or political life is impossible. His interpretation in the Phenomenology and the Aesthetics respects
the timelessness of Antigone's plight, but this comes into conflict with the
�LOCKE
47
time-bound constraints of the Philosophy of Right. Hegel shows no sign
that he is using the play in different ways in his aesthetic and ethical interpretations. How are we to make sense out of woman as a complement to
man, when man has changed?
The problem can be summarized as follows. Woman, who is associated
with nature, in both the physical and the unreflective senses, is therefore
ahistorical. Man is, according to the Philosophy of Right, a historical being,
associated with self-conscious Spirit through his political activity. In the
play, Hegel argues, we see the equilibrium between the two disturbed, in
a collision that shows the rightfulness of both sides and a catastrophe that
restores justice. The two sexes remain distinct powers, however, and are
unaware of the distance beween them in this restored harmony.
The goal of Spirit is to become what it immediately is: to achieve
harmony as a result of its own self-conscious activity. Its achievement,
rather than a linear progression, can be seen as the closing of circle. On
the level of man and woman the circle is joined only if there is a movement by each out of himself or herself into the other's world. That implies
a negation of the righteousness of his or her position and a finding of
himself or herself in the other. If this is to be a mutual discovery and
recognition, I argue, both woman and man must be able to develop in
self-consciousness.
The shift in focus from the birth family in the Phenomenology to the
procreative family in the Philosophy of Right shows that the selfconsciousness of man has differentiated itself more completely, while the
consciousness of woman has not. Instead of two worlds, private and public,
there are now three: private, social, and political. The social world of
economic life, as well as the political world, are restricted to man. Freedom
and self-consciousness are generated in these spheres, which continue to
rely on the unconscious support of the feminine realm.
It is clear that there cannot be a public realm without a private foundation, but it is questionable whether a class of people-women-must
be limited to the private sphere. The case of slaves is significantly different
from the case of women, so the extension of freedom to slaves is not a
simple analogy for a solution to this problem.
What is the difference? Slaves can be admitted to be men endowed with
rights, when a political community has a sufficiently aware selfconsciousness. Women, however, can never be admitted to be men, even
if they are considered equal persons in the public sphere. According to
Hegel, this is because they are of a different nature. The fundamental
natures of men and women are complementary, Hegel assumes, and distinct
even when fully developed. Men are self-conscious while women are simply
�48
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
conscious. Thus Spirit seems far from its goal of achieving selfconsciousness in the relations between modern men and women.
We who observe the process of self-conscious Spirit struggling to know
itself, we who are in the know as philosophers, must ask whether Hegel
is telling us everything about Antigone. Can she remain still, a medium
for change without changing? Can she be outside the dialectical process?
Has she become, for us, a thing of the past not to be desired?
Our answer to these questions has to be no. When we recall the dynamic
image of Antigone offered in Hegel's aesthetic interpretation of the play,
we notice that she acted quite naturally, that is unreflectively, in carrying
out her duty. Antigone was portrayed as a doer who willed her fate.
Each of her actions was dialectical: each began as a negation and ended
with positive consequences. In remaining unwed, Antigone denied the
possibility of a procreative family of her own. This was in a simple way
a u~eminine action, for it was anti-generation and, ultimately, a withdrawal
of support for the state. Yet at the same time her virginity was a service
to the state, for she prevented Oedipus's fated blood from continuing to
haunt Thebes. Since her loyalty remained with her original family, which
had vanished into the underworld, Antigone found herself acting positively
as an individual in a public arena.
Antigone was a political being in spite of herself. Her last words were
addressed to the leaders of Thebes. There is a shift from the properly
feminine lament for Antigone's lost marriage to the strong declaration:
Look, leaders of Thebes,
I am the last of your royal line.
Look what I suffer, at whose command,
because I respected the right. (940-44)
While respecting the familial gods' "right," Antigone became quite clear
about her political position, as the last voice of the royal house. This position gives her the authority to directly address the elders as witnesses and,
ultimately, as responsible parties in her death.
Hegel neglected this political speech, which is crucial for an understanding of her character. I think that the speech shows that woman is political,
even when her loyalties seem to undermine the stability of the state. I do
not claim that her feminine world is canceled by her appearance in public
life or taken up by this higher realm. I do claim that feminine nature encompasses more than Hegel allows.
Only when we consider Antigone as a dialectical heroine, who changes
as she changes the world, can we continue to hold her as a model for
�LOCKE
49
womankind. Hegel neglects the historical character of human being when
he limits woman to a passive role as the mirror of a specific culture, as
if that were her nature. This oversight results in the contradictions between
his analysis in the Phenomenology and in the Philosophy of Right, which
includes cultural developments of the Christan era external to the original
Greek context.
In conclusion, I think that the polarities between female and male,
divine and human law, home and city, are eternal ones. The possibilities
for collision- and thus for drama- increase as the opposing terms deepen
and subtly shift in meaning. To allow woman to advance in selfconsciousness perpetuates the dynamic tension between the sexes and permits mutual recognition. Unfortunately, it magnifies the tension between
the demands of private and public life.
Hegel's view of woman is unnecessarily limited by defining her only
in relation to men. Antigone breaks through this limited view when she
acts on her own, without her brother or her fiance by her side. She brings
hidden divinities to bear on human affairs, and causes the spectator to
reflect on Hegel's assertion that the true is the whole. Like Antigone, Hegel
is both guilty and innocent of the past he inherits. Human being embraces
them both. In the end, the two of them might echo Teiresias's words:
We two have come one road,
two of us looking through one pair of eyes.
This is the way of walking for the blind. (988-90)
Notes
I. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Arts, 2 vols., trans. T.
M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 1218.
2. Ibid., p. 1159.
3. Sophocles, Antigone, in Greek Tragedies, vol. 1., trans. Elizabeth
Wyckoff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
4. Aesthetics, p. 1166.
5. Ibid., p. 1187.
6. Ibid., p. 1214.
7. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977), para. 734.
8. Ibid.
9. Aesthetics, p. 1215.
10. Ibid.
�50
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
II. Aristotle, Aristotle's Poetics, translation and analysis, Kenneth A.
Thlford (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1967), 1453a6.
12. Aesthetics, pp. 1197-98.
13. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1967), para. 162.
14. Ibid., para. 142.
15. Phenomenology, para. 451.
16. Ibid., para. 460.
17. Ibid., para. 457.
18. Ibid.
19. Philosophy of Right, para. 161.
�Idealism, Ancient and Modern:
Sophocles' Antigone
and Schiller's Don Carlos
Gisela N. Berns
Almost at the end of Schiller's Don Carlos, the blind, menacing figure
of the Grand Inquisitor, led by two Dominicans, appears before King
Philipp, the ruler of Spain (V, 10). From the outset, the appearance of the
old priest, which is in answer to the death of Marquis Posa, is foreshadowed
in the ominous presence of Domingo, the King's confessor. An idealistic
fighter for the liberation of mankind from tyrannical rule, Posa had been
murdered for betraying the King's trust. Accused by the Grand Inquisitor
for circumventing the authority of the church, Philipp confesses his
vulnerability to the striking radiance of Posa's character. In his emotional
devastation, the King consents to the sacrifice of Carlos, his only son and
Posa's friend, to the Inquisition.
Almost at the end of Sophocles' Antigone, the blind figure of Thiresias,
led by a young boy, appears before Creon, the ruler of Thebes (lines
988-1090). After the fatal battle between the sons of Oedipus, Creon had
issued an order for burying Eteocles, the defender, but not Polyneices, the
invader of the city. Antigone's attempt to bury her brother had been
punished with her own live burial in a cave outside Thebes. Ominous signs
have stirred Thiresias from his sacrifices to come to warn Creon and urge
him to restore the dead to the dead, and the living to the living.
With reference to his portrayal of the Inquisition in Don Carlos, Schiller
Gisela N. Berns is a Thtor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
51
�52
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
promises to "revenge prostituted mankind" by "striking to the soul of a
kind of man the dagger of tragedy, so far, had only grazed." 1 Compared
to Teiresias, the priest of a natural religion that acknowledges all powers
of the universe as gods, the Grand Inquisitor, in the service of the universal
power of the biblical God, rises to monstrous heights. Devoid of all natural
human feelings, 2 he is the more terrible as he uses the Christian doctrine
of love, consummated in the sacrifice of God's only son on the cross, to
perpetrate death and destruction. The defilement of sacrifices by birds feeding on an unburied corpse makes Teiresias urge Creon to restore Polyneices
to the dead and Antigone to the living. The defilement of the religious and
political atmosphere by a man's claim to freedom of thought makes the
Grand Inquisitor request the life of Carlos in exchange for the death of
Posa, which had been a murder rather than a sacrifice in the name of the
greater glory of the church.' With the same dramatic development, the two
scenes open up very different tragic perspectives: Where the ruin of Creon's
house, though foreshadowed in his increasing blasphemy against Zeus,
comes as a blow of fate, Philipp himself, in monstrous analogy to the Christian God, wills his only son into the murderous hands of the Inquisition.'
The link between Schiller's Don Carlos and Sophocles' Antigone is not
so far-fetched as it might seem. Schiller's translation of scenes from
Euripides' Phoenician Women, a play about the events that occurred before
those portrayed in Sophocles' Antigone, coincides with his Briefe iiber Don
Carlos, written soon after the completion of his dramatic poem.
However tenuous the chronological link between Schiller's reading Antigone and writing Don Carlos might be, what counts is the thematic link.
While Antigone and Marquis Posa resemble each other in their idealistic
fight for principles of a higher order than the ruling tenets of the day, they
are, at the same time, striking examples of the difference between ancient
and modern idealism. Whether systematic, as in his later plays, or sporadic,
as in the earlier ones, Schiller's integration of Greek archetypes into his
own modern historical drama only accentuates the modernity of his work.'
The purpose of this essay, therefore, is not so much to show Sophocles'
influence on Schiller as to explore paradigmatic forms of idealism within
the given contexts of Greek tragedy and modern historical drama.'
Understanding himself as a representative of all mankind, Marquis
Posa, early in the play, tries to inspire his friend Carlos to help in the liberation of Flanders from the tyrannical rule of Spain (I, 2). Feeling responsible
for her family, Antigone, in the opening scene, tries to persuade her sister
Ismene to help her bury their brother Polyneices (1-99). When their
idealistic expectations miscarry, both Posa and Antigone reveal themselves
as heartless fanatics. In the name of an abstract ideal that blinds him to
�BERNS
53
the needs of his friend, Posa exploits Carlos's love for the Queen in order
to further his political goals. For the sake of the dead brother outside the
city walls, Antigone poisons her sisterly love for Ismene with the bitter
shafts of hate.
Though they resemble each other in their expression of idealism, Posa
is concerned about an idea, Antigone about a body. Where the modern
idealist, with a cosmopolitan outlook, transcends all natural and historical
limits, the ancient idealist, with close ties to nature and mythical tradition,
focuses on the family and its conflict with the political order of the city.
As a move in his political game, Posa arranges for a meeting between
Carlos and the Queen in the royal garden (I, 5). Coming upon the queen,
left by Carlos just in time, the King, like the biblical God after the fall
of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, calls her to account for the
absence of her court (I, 6). Appealing to a higher and more enduring law
than Spanish court rules, the Queen tries to defend her womanly virtue.
With a distinction between good and evil that is merely political, Creon
claims the support of Zeus for leaving the body of Polyneices unburied
(162-222). Antigone, after she has been arrested at the burial of her brother
and brought before Creon, appeals to the eternal, unwritten laws of the
gods as safeguards for her action (223-331, 276-581). Like the Queen, later
in Don Carlos (IV, 9, 3759-70), she protests against having to hate where
her heart tells her to love (523).
Schiller's poetic practice, in anticipation of his advice to the modern
artist in Uber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen, "connects what
nature separated, and separates what nature connected."' In addition to
explicating a character like Antigone in such correlative characters as Posa
and the Queen, Schiller complicates the traces from Greek tragedy with
traces from the biblical tradition. By highlighting the historical world of
Don Carlos with the biblical intimations of man's past perfection in the
Garden of Eden, Schiller contrasts the Greek notion of nature with the
biblical notion of history and thus exhibits the inherently problematic
understanding of man in modern times.
With the biblical intimations of man's future perfection in a world to
come, Posa's vision of the progress of mankind through history dominates
his great audience scene with the King (III, 10). An implicit condemnation
of the King's despotic rule, Marquis Posa's idealistic picture of an age in
which the natural nobility of man will triumph in the rule of reason,
manifesting itself in political autonomy, at the same time affects and disaffects the King. Posa's confession of his love for humanity echoes the
titanic claims of Prometheus. Despite this anticipation of tragedy, it has
a hollow ring against his later inhuman betrayal of the King's trust.
�54
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Like Posa in Don Carlos (III, 10), the Chorus in Antigone (332-75)
paints a lofty picture of human nature. With its celebration of man as one
of the awesome things in the universe, the second choral ode describes man's
mastery over nature and his attempt at mastering his own nature within
the framework of nature as a whole. Aware of man's tendency to evil as
well as to good, the Chorus warns of overstepping the bounds of mortality.
Though both Posa and the Chorus recognize the creative power of reason
as the differentia of human nature within nature, the Chorus's stylized ode
focuses on the dangers, Posa's dramatic exposition on the glory of its artistic achievements.' The modern hybris of Posa, the artist, of creating a
world in his own image, seems to consist in his willingness to use men as
material in the process towards the perfection of mankind.'
More human than Posa, Carlos, earlier on, had begged the King to
let him share in the political responsibility for Flanders (II, 2). In a similar
encounter between father and son, Haemon, Creon's son and Antigone's
betrothed, tries to sway his father towards a more lenient execution of justice
(635-765). Though Haemon is more diplomatic than Carlos, their arguments, with comparable effects on Creon (766-80) and Philipp (II, 3; IV,
10), follow the same path.
Though they both fail to bring about a final reconciliation, the two
scenes are dramatic turning points in their plays. But where Haemon's
attempt to mediate between his father and his betrothed provides the axis
of symmetry in Antigone, 10 neither Carlos's emotional (II, 2) nor Posa's
rational (III, 10) appeal to the father and king in Philipp marks the center
of Don Carlos. That distinction is given to the threshold between the King's
lonely search for a human being worthy to be his friend (III, 5) and both
Carlos's and Philipp's own expression of humanity in their generous attitude
towards Medina Sidonia, the admiral returning from the defeat of the
Armada (III, 6-7).
After the fateful conversation between father and son in Don Carlos
(II, 2), strands of conflicting love stories are interwoven with the political
texture of the play. With the connotations of Adam and Eve's expulsion
from the Garden of Eden, Princess Eboli's confession of love for Carlos
(II, 8) in the royal palace (the center of Act II) mirrors Carlos's confession
of love for the Queen (I, 5) in the royal garden (the center of Act I).
Inconceivable for our modern sensibilities, Haemon and Antigone never
even mention each other's names, let alone speak to one another. 11 Only
the Chorus, in a passionate ode following Haemon's appeal to Creon, comments on the universal power of Eros and the disaster it may bring to mortals and immortals alike (781-800).
Revealing the darker sides of an idealism that shuns no human risk,
�BERNS
55
Posa finally loses his political game. In a highly emotional scene that echoes
the story of the sacrifice of Christ for the redemption of mankind, he
entrusts the Queen with his legacy for Don Carlos (IV, 21; cf. 3). Though
she is moved by Posa's artistic vision of a future new world, the Queen
cannot help accusing him of willful and inhuman ambition. Faced by death
and by an elusive facet of his own character, Posa, in his last moments
with the Queen, comes to realize something about the simple beauty of life.
In a similar mood, though publicly addressing a chorus of elders,
Antigone mourns her approaching death (806-943). In order to console
herself over losing the light of the sun and her own future wedding day,
she conjures up examples of past heroic deaths. Concerned with her natural
fate, Antigone laments the loss of the sunlight; concerned with the fate
of mankind, Posa reflects on the loss of "two short evening hours" (the
King's rule) for the gain of "a summer's day" (the ascendency of Don
Carlos). In Posa's metaphorical language, the historical progress from the
father's despotic reign to the son's enlightened rule supplants the cyclical
movement of the natural powers of the universe. 12
When they are accused of willfully overstepping the bounds of mortality,
both Posa (IV, 21; V, 3) and Antigone (891-943) speculate about how, under
different circumstances, they might have avoided death. But where Antigone's thoughts revolve around different relationships within the natural
realm of the family, Posa's thoughts involve different constellations of
political power with a view to the fulfillment of human nature through
historical progress.
The hybris of such cosmopolitan usurpation reveals itself in the murder
of Marquis Posa, which is the more terrible as it occurs in the middle of
his farewell to Carlos (V, 3). With his arms around the dead body of his
friend, Carlos, in a stupor, witnesses the King's visit to his prison. The
royal gesture of returning his sword, however, reawakens Carlos's sense of
the King's complicity in Posa's murder. As if to kill his father, but restraining
himself, Carlos strikes a more deadly blow by revealing the story of their
friendship and Posa's betrayal of the King's trust (V, 4). 13
In a similar sequence of events, a Messenger tells of Creon's visit to
Antigone's cave, where Haemon, with his arms around the dead body of
his betrothed, laments their fateful love (1155-1243). Creon's pleading with
his son only provokes Haemon's rage to kill him. When the attempt fails,
he turns his sword against himself and dies, embracing Antigone in the end.
In the Riga version of Don Carlos, the play ends with Carlos's attempt
to kill the King, the Queen's dead faint, and, finally, Carlos's suicide. 14
The King's cry of horror, as it were, echoes Creon's wild lament over his
son's death. Even in the full version of Schiller's dramatic poem, Carlos's
�56
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
farewell embrace of the Queen, his disavowal of all passion but for the
memory of his dead friend (V, II, 5315-16), and his gathering the Queen
in his arms at the end, might be seen as a modern transfiguration of the
tragic plight of Haemon and Antigone.
Because it is perpetrated in the name of the Christian God, the King's
final act of delivering Carlos out of the arms of the Queen into the hands
of the Grand Inquisitor far surpasses the horror of Creon's last steps when
he enters carrying the corpse of Haemon into a palace full of woe over
the death of Creon's wife who, on hearing the news about her son, had
committed suicide.
In the conclusion to his reflections on naive and sentimental poetry,
Schiller discusses the difference between the realist and the idealist. More
noble in his actions than in his thoughts, the realist moves within a finite
range of human possibilities. More noble in his thoughts than in his actions,
the idealist reaches for infinite heights of human perfection. 15 This difference, which for him is more pronounced in life than in poetry, Schiller
considers representative for the difference between ancients and moderns.
If this distinction is applied to the poetic figures of Antigone, as ancient,
and Marquis Posa, as modern idealist, their difference can be seen to stem
from the nature of their ideals rather than from the nature of their idealism.
Concerned about the fate of the family and its eternal conflict with
the political order of the city, the ancient idealist orients herself according
to the mythical past. Concerned about the fate of mankind and its temporary conflict with the powers of the earth, the modern idealist orients
himself according to the historical future. This fundamental expansion of
man's horizon from the realm of nature, governed by the principle of
necessity, to the realm of history, governed by the principle of freedom,
allows for a greater complexity of dramatic plot as well as of dramatic
characters.
Almost as a rule, two characters in Schiller's Don Carlos correspond
to one character in Sophocles' Antigone: Posa and the Queen to Antigone;
Carlos and the Queen to Ismene; Posa and Carlos to Haemon; Domingo
and the Grand Inquisitor to Thiresias; and Carlos and the King to the
Messenger. Themes of the Chorus are covered in dramatic exchanges between Posa and the King in one instance, and Carlos and Princess Eboli
in another. ' 6 Only the King and Creon, the realists in both plays, correspond
to one another as single characters.
As a curious addition to the list of comparable characters, no character
·in Schiller's Don Carlos takes on the comic role of the Guard called upon
to bring Antigone before Creon. Created in the image of the biblical God,
and in dead earnest about the infinite aspirations connected with that
�BERNS
57
origin, modern man seems to have lost his sense of the salutary function
of comic relief. By sustaining the tragic mood throughout Don Carlos,
Schiller indulges his modern sensibilities and thus contributes to the play's
idealistic grandeur. " In comparison with the earthbound idealism of Antigone, the heavenbound idealism of Marquis Posa truly seems to deserve
that name.
A sober commentary on idealism as a fundamental problem of human
nature in any given age, Schiller's Briefe iiber Don Carlos recognize both
the unique glory and the unique danger of its modern manifestation.
Notes
I. To Reinwald, April 14, 1783.
2. Schiller, Geschichte des Abfal/s der vereinigten Niederlande von der
spanischen Regierung, Einleitung, Schillers Werke, Nationalausgabe
[NA], ed. Lieselotte Blumenthal and Benno von Weise (Weimar:
Biihlau, 1943 ff.), XVII, i, 23; I, NA, XVII, i, 56-57.
3. Schiller, Don Carlos, Thalia-Fragment, II, 6, 2026-31, NA VI, 439;
cf. Geschichte, I, NA XVII, i, 59. With watchwords like "miitterliche
Kirche," ''Vatermord," "Pest," "Verwesung," "l..eichen," and "das Grab
selbst ist keine Zuflucht," Schiller's original portrayal of the Inquisition (Schiller, Siimtliche Werke, ed. Gerhard Fricke and Herbert
Giipfert, 5th ed., Miinchen: Hanser, 1975, IV, 83) umnistakably alludes
to the infamous story of the house of Oedipus.
4. Sophocles, Antigone, 184, 288, 304, 486-89, 658-59, 1039-44, 1063-90;
Schiller, Don Carlos, V, 10, 5261-79; 11, 5367-68; cf. Geschichte, I,
NA XVII, i, 54.
5. See Gisela N. Berns, Greek Antiquity in Schiller's "Wallenstein," Studies
in the Germanic Languages and Literatures, Vol. 104 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
6. Cf. to Siivern, July 26, 1800; to Goethe, April 4, 1797. Exploring a
structural analogy between Sophocles' Antigone and Schiller's Maria
Stuart, Florian Prader (Schiller und Sophokles [Ziirich: Atlantis, 1954,
120]) argues for the poetic effectiveness of Maria Stuart, "gerade wei!
sie nicht griechisch ist und Schiller die dramatisch wirksamen Elemente
der antiken "Ifagodie kunstvoll mitarbeiten lasst, ohne der Nachahmung
verpflichtet zu sein." Objectionable in Prader's notion is merely his
pretense (114), "Der Vergleich mag uns nur zeigen, wie Schiller in seinem
Bemiihen urn die Physik des Dramas so vie! vom antiken Vorbild in
sein eigenes, kiinstlerisches Schaffen aufnimmt, dass von einer Analogie
zu sprechen ist, die dem Dichter wohl nicht bewusst wird."
�58
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
7. Schiller, Uber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen, Letter 26, NA
XX, 401; Uber das Erhabene, NA XXI, 53, "Nun stellt zwar schon
die Natur fiir sich allein Objekte in Menge auf, an denen sich die Empfindungsfahigkeit fiir das Schone und Erhabene iiben konnte; aber der
Mensch ist, wie in andern Fallen, so auch bier, von der zweiten Hand
besser bedient als von der ersten und willlieber einen zubereiteten und
auserlesenen Stoff von der Kunst empfangen, als an der unreinen Quelle
der Natur miihsam und diirftig schopfen."
8. See Schiller's own reflections on the use of the chorus in connection
with Die Braut von Messina, NA X, 7-15, and Ilse Graham, Schiller's
Drama: Talent and Integrity (London: Methuen, 1974), "Element into
ornament: the alchemy of art: a reading of Die Braut von Messina,"
67-90.
9. For a discussion of the questionable character of Posa's idealism, see
Schiller, Briefe iiber Don Carlos, NA XXII, 138 ff.; Uber die
aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen, Letter 4, NA XX, 317; Letter
6, NA XX 328; Letter 9, NA XX, 334-36; Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, NA XX, 496-98, 503; cf. Oskar Seidlin, "Schiller:
Poet of Politics," in A Schiller Symposium, ed. A. Leslie Willson
(Austin: University of Texas, Department of Germanic Languages,
1960), 31-40.
10. Their names alone (Haemon/"concerned with blood," Creon/"concerned with power") exhibit the central conflict in Sophocles' Antigone.
II. The line "0 dearest Haemon, how your father humiliates you!" (572),
usually given to Antigone by modern editors, appears in all existing
manuscripts as a line of Ismene. On the emotional shallowness of the
ancients, especially in their portrayal of women, cf. Schiller, Uber naive
und sentimenta/ische Dichtung, NA XX, 432-36, 478, n. I; and to
Humboldt, Dec. 17 and 25, 1795.
12. Schiller, Don Carlos, IV, 21, 4313-14; cf. 4299-301; 3, 3435-39; 6,
3646-50; V, I, 4505-06; 9, 5068-70. See Gerhard Kaiser, "Vergotterung
und Tad: Die thematische Einheit von Schillers Werk," and "Die Idee
der ldylle in der 'Braut von Messina,'" in Von Arkadien nach Elysium,
11-44 and 164-66.
13. Carlos's "Ja, Sire! Wir waren Briider! Briider durch/Ein edler Band,
als die Natur es schmiedet" (V, 4, 4791-92) brings out the crucial difference between Antigone and Marquis Posa. For the inner connection between Don Carlos as "ein Familiengemillde in einem fiirstlichen
Hause" and Schiller's theme of idealism, see Helmut Koopmann, "Don
Karlos," in Schiller's Dramen: Neue Interpretationen, ed. Walter
Hinderer (Stuttgart: Klett, 1979), 99-106.
�BERNS
59
14. Schiller, Dom Karlos, NA VII, i, 354-58. For Schiller's dependence on
and independence from St. Real's "Histoire de Dom Carlos," see Gerhard Storz, Der Dichter Friedrich Schiller (Stuttgart: Klett, 1959), 118.
15. Schiller, Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, NA XX, 500.
16. Cf. Schiller, Uber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen, Letter 6,
NA XX, 322-23, 326-27; and lise Graham, "Die Struktur der Persiinlichkeit in Schillers dramatischerDichtung," in Schiller: Zur Theorie
und Praxis der Dramen, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn and Reinhold Grimm,
Wege der Forschung 323 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972), 351, 361-64.
17. It is interesting to note that this is not only a characteristic ofthe young
Schiller. In as late a work as his translation of Shakespeare's Macbeth,
he drastically changes the Porter scene (II, 5). Cf. Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, NA XX, 431-35, esp. 433, "Als ich in einem
sehr friihen Alter den letzteren Dichter zuerst kennenlernte, empiirte
mich seine Kiilte, seine Unempfindlichkeit, die ibm erlaubte, im
hiichsten Pathos zu scherzen, die herzzerscheidenden Auftritte im
'Hamlet', im 'KOnig Lear', im 'Macbeth' usf. durch einen Narren zu
stiiren, die ibn bald da festhielt, wo meine Empfindung forteilte, bald
da kaltherzig fortriss, wo das Herz so gern stillgestanden wiire."
��George Steiner's Antigones:
A Review*
Eva Brann
Anyone who has reread the Antigone about as often as is profitable for
the time being might consider turning to this book. The curious plural
of its title is glossed on the cover of the paperback: "How the Antigone
legend has endured in Western literature and thought." While conceding
absolute primacy to the Antigone of Sophocles' play, Steiner brings to
prominence the power of Antigone's story in its apparently inexhaustible
versions. Greek myths, he says, have had an "unbroken authority ... over
the imagination of the West," and among them the Antigone legend is paramount in both shaping and expressing the moral constitution of Western
humanity.
Steiner's thesis is not innocuous. Its explicit consequence is the elevation of Tragedy over Scripture and of Sophocles over Shakespeare. With
respect to the Bible, Steiner asserts, for example, that for German literature
the polla ta deina chorus ("Many awesome things walk the earth, but
nothing more awesome than man," 333 ff.) forms the heart of the "house
of being" (a Heideggerian phrase) much more than does any chapter from
the Luther bible. It is hard to tell how far Steiner means to generalize this
thesis. In Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, to cite a counter-example, the
liberal humanism of the classical scholar Zeitblom pales before the devout
deviltry of the Lutheran musician Leverkiihn. But even if it were only a
literary phenomemon, to me it seems sinister if it is true- as if something
appalling were excessively savored. At any rate, whatever may be the case
*George Steiner, Antigones. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984; Oxford Paperback,
1986.
61
�62
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
for the European continent, for the Anglo-Saxon countries the notion that
Greek myths matter more than the Bible is laughable. But Steiner is an
enthusiast, and his passion is productive enough to make his Hellenic bias
forgivable.
He argues his subordination of Shakespeare to Sophocles more
specifically, by citing Wittgenstein's subversive question: "Was [Shakespeare]
perhaps rather a creator of language than a poet?" The question is meant
to intimate that Shakespeare invented a new species of language but failed
to bring transcendent presence to earth. The index of this lack, which
Steiner connects with Shakespeare's "pluralism and liberality, his tragi-comic
bias," is his intuitive avoidance of myth.
Now it is another of Steiner's theses that "Greek myths are imprinted
in the evolution of our language, and of our grammar in particular," that
"the 'initial' and determinant Greek myths are myths in and of language,
and in which, in turn, Greek grammar and rhetoric internalize, formalize,
certain mythical configurations." "Myths speak themselves in men." For
example, Steiner reads in Narcissus "the long history of the demarcation
of the first person singular, together with the solicitations and menace of
solipsism, of the withering of our utterance to monologue, as these are
latent in the grammar of our ego."
There are two language-mysticisms current that I find-not very
profitably-unsettling because I can't make out what they mean when taken
at their word and because I can't determine whether they are deep or merely
sophisticated. One is the claim that our humanity is linguistic, is not only
enmeshed in, but exhausted by, language- that there is nothing beyond
speech for speech to be about, so that all speech is about speech and speech
is all there is: we are speech. The other is that language speaks, not the
speaker- we may utter sound, but the saying is accomplished by language.
Th these paradoxes Steiner appears to be adding a third: that legends articulate language. To me it seems that to speak responsibly I must believe
that it is I who speaks, and to speak substantively I must think that I speak
about something, and to speak consideringly I must suppose that the tale
is separable from the telling. However, to return to the point: It is in the
light of Steiner's linguistic theory that the demotion of Shakespeare from
poet-the speaker of myth-shaped language-to language-creator-an
autonomous maker rather than a conductor of truthful transcendent
presence-is to be understood. Steiner thinks of Sophocles too as a
humanist, but as one who possesses a pietas, a "haunted humanism."
Sophocles' relation to the gods stands median, between Aeschylus's sense
of neighborhood and Euripides' sophistic uncertainties: For Sophocles the
primal intimacies of god and men have receded, but certain human deeds
�BRANN
63
are darkly reminiscent of the scandals attendant on their aboriginal commerce. Clearly Steiner accords more gravity to Sophocles' archaic, primordial "scenes" than to Shakespeare's current human condition. Why, really,
I ask myself.
If I have seemed critical of Steiner's thesis so far, let me engage here
in a belated captatio benevolentiae for him. Steiner has acquired a sort
of anti public, readers who expect from him pretentious verbiage and trendy
interests. Antigones is not like that. The language is often apt and sometimes poignant. At worst there are arresting usages that fail to click and
hyperbolic metaphors that discredit their sentence: Oedipus's attempt at
self-perception is called "an incest more radical than that of blood." That's
verbiage too juicy for credibility.
However, I think I understand the cause of the urge to use strong
language. The reason is that people in their capacity as writers of books
about books- or reviews of books about books- are naturally unsuited
to the invocation of elemental and mighty forces, not being themselves
elemental and mighty, and so they are tempted to reach for language that
is a little beyond their format. In fact, I can't help reiterating here my misgivings about the business of cultivating a taste for tragedy: I think our respectable mission in life is to convert tragedy into comedy, to find happy compromises and innocuous resolutions where we can, and then to give unconvertible tragedy the serious empathy that is its due-short of savoring
it. It must be said in Steiner's favor that he has a high respect for drier
readings of the text than he himself engages in. Above all, his own
understanding of Antigone appreciates that very element in her: the "lucid
dryness" of her ethical solitude, which "seems to prefigure the stringencies of Kant." In fact, Steiner's portrait of Antigone is one of the most
admirable features of Antigones. He dwells on the fact of her youth: She
is a young woman, a girl really, whose pure unseasoned will to extremity,
whose gallant, immature resistance to compromise and resolution, give her
at first a desolate satisfaction that turns finally to doubt and despair. This
description brings home the difference (which readers are apt to forget)
between being a tragic heroine and watching one: what looks like demonic
grandeur from the outside is lonely misery from within.
While Steiner's interests in this book are not trendy, they are contemporary: Antigones is a splendid hermeneutic exercise. Hermeneutics was
once the fairly humble art of interpreting texts, particularly the Bible. When,
in half-conscious rivalry with the scientists, who often spoke of reading
the book of nature, the human world began to be construed as a text,
hermeneutics ceased to be mere philology and became philosophy. An influential work in this philosophical hermeneutics is Hans-Georg Gadamer's
�64
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Truth and Method (1960). It establishes a study called "effective-history"
[Wirkungsgeschichte]. Effective-history, or, perhaps better, actual-history,
traces the effect a text has had through time (what might be called its
longitudinal influence). The hypothesis is that the historical conduit is an
actual constituent of our present readings; we live in a world shaped by
previous interpretations, and a properly self-aware approach to the texts
of our tradition requires the recovery of their earlier receptions- one might
say that books bear the patina of their previous readings.
The Antigones is such a recovery: it traces at once the versions of the
Antigone legend and the fate of Sophocles' play-in fact, the two are inseparable. Antigone appears to be the most rewarding subject imaginable
for an effective-history. Steiner begins his book by showing that between
c. 1790 and c. 1905 Sophocles' Antigone was regarded in Europe as the
work of art nearest to perfection. Hence it inspired not only interpretative
commentary but a vast number of translations, adaptations, retellings,
reversifications, and libretti. In sum, it underwent every sort of attempt
at faithful recovery and originative recapture.
Let me say here that the account of these mutant Antigones, to which
much of Steiner's work is devoted, is absorbing throughout, though two
items might be of special interest to us. First, Steiner gives a long account
of Hegel's passionate preoccupation with Antigone, not only in the
Phenomenology but in works not read in the program of St. John's College. Second, he gives an extended analysis of Holderlin's notorious transla. tion of the Sophoclean text, a poetic tour deforce, extreme and deep, which
would surely have been a center-piece of the St. John's language tutorial
had we chosen to do German rather than French.
To return to Steiner's hermeneutic thesis: As he assumes in particular
that our cultural tap-root is in Athens rather than in Jerusalem, so he posits
in general, explicitly and often, that we have this history effectively in our
cultural sap. It seems to me a dubious assumption. I do think that we absorb opinions from our surroundings, and that the roots of many of those
opinions are to be found articulated in the texts of the program- that is,
after all, a chief reason for a "great books" education. But I doubt that
the sort of "cultural literacy" that Gadamer's and Steiner's thesis implies
can be atmospherically acquired. It is rather the result of a deliberate
classical education of the sort that Steiner tells us he received at the French
Lycee in Manhattan and that I could still piece together at Brooklyn College. This is a pedagogic order that has been disrupted. Present-day
students, by and large, come to Greek texts with a pristine nescience that
brings them- in some respects, I imagine- close to the state of mind that
the barbarians of the ancient world were in when they attended their first
�BRANN
65
performance of a Hellenic drama. Their cultural history has become as
effectively ineffective for them as it would be if they had none. Consequently they face the textual tradition without tradition. Iu the St. John's
seminar, which is a proving-ground (or rather a disproving-ground) of
hermeneutic hypotheses, the millenia between us and Sophocles are canceled not by a laborious longitudinal recovery but by a simple severance
of the last links in the conduit of time. On the whole, this seems to me
to work very well. I have more faith in the episodic recollections that mark
a renaissance than in the unbroken memory of history.
At any rate, even with its hermeneutic intuition neutralized, Antigones
is full of interest. I would like to conclude with two of Steiner's own reflections, the first his try at an explanation of the unbroken preeminence of
Sophocles' Antigone, the second his own interpretation of the play's
"subterranean" message.
The Antigone, he says, is preeminent because it is the one and only
literary text to express "all the [five] principal constants of conflict in the
condition of man": the confrontation of men and women, of age and youth,
of society and individual, of the living and the dead, and of men and gods.
The play presents each of these as "an equilibrium of fatalities." It is inexhaustible because it is encompassing in its antitheses and evenly poised
in its resolutions. That seems to me a persuasive formulation.
The subterranean significance of Sophocles' play, he suggests, is a judgment on tragedy itself. "Drama," which means literally, "deed," has a built-in
preference for the act over the word, a preference that is a kind of enactment of the opposition so prominent in Greek speech: logOi men ... ergoi
de- "in talk one thing, in actuality another." Steiner suggests that Sophocles
is issuing an implied warning against the domination of accomplished facts
over probing words, against the tragic elevation of Antigone's drastic deed.
I do not know whether Steiner is right in this particular case, but his suggestion points to a paradox that is the saving grace of tragedy in general:
the constitutional inability of even the most artful work to leave intact the
mute uniqueness of the tragic deed.
��The Problem of Place
in Oedipus at Co/onus
Abraham Schoener
The strangeness of this play begins with its name: Oidipous epi Koliiniii.
Let me tell yon what koliinos means: Herodotus and Xenophon use it as
a "heap of stones," but in particular of the stones heaped up in a barrow- a
grave mound. Its sister-word koliine is used by Sophocles exclusively as
a grave mound. It is the word with which Chrysothemis names Agamemnon's grave mound in the Electra. "Oedipus at Colonus" thus means
"Oedipus at the Grave Mound."
When Oedipus and Antigone reach Colonus, the place already bears
this name. A local inhabitant whom they meet at the beginning of the play
traces its name to an ancient knight named "Colonus"; but this etymology
has no support in mythology. There are no tales of this knight's life, but
just the story that he gave his name to the place. It is easy to suppose,
however, that no one would want his or her town known as the Grave Site
or the Corpse Mound; this etymology for the name would have been dismal
and grating. So it is equally easy to imagine how the legend of a founding
knight would arise- a knight who would give the town a glorious and noble
past rather than a morbid and gruesome one.
Yet if we accept this clever and somewhat mean-spirited etymology, we
are still left with a critical question: Whose grave site is it? Whose is the
grave that gives the town its name?
Abraham Schoener is a Thtor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This lecture was
given at the College in the summer of 1990. 'franslations are the author's.
67
�68
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
That is easy to answer. When Oedipus reaches Colonus, he says: "This
is my resting place (line 88)." The town has always been named for him;
his arrival finally makes the name true.
The central question I want to pose is about place: What is the nature
of place and places? I don't think I have even the beginning of an answer
to this, but I know where to look. In the Oedipus at Co/onus, we find
ourselves barraged by questions of place: Where are we? Is this the right
place? Is it permissible to tread here? Where will Oedipus's bones rest?
These questions give way to a kind of certainty about place: Oedipus knows
right away that this is the right place; at the end of the play, in an
astonishing reversal, he guides Theseus and his own daughters to the place
where he knows he must die. But this certainty on his part only engenders
more wonder and confusion on our part. We will never know precisely
where Oedipus leaves this world, for he insists that it must remain secret
to everyone but Theseus. In the end this special place becomes a mystery
to us. We get a fascinating description of the general locale from one of
Theseus's attendants. He says that Oedipus stopped at a katarrhakte
hodos- a "path crashing downwards, with its roots in brazen steps sprung
from the earth (1590-91)." Somewhere near here Oedipus disappeared. Now
what kind of place is this, with roots deep into the earth herself?
I. The Pharmakos and the Bounds of the City.
A pharmakos is a scapegoat, someone chosen from among the inhabitants of the city to be driven out in an exercise of purification. Putting
the scapegoat outside will somehow cleanse the city. This does not seem
so strange at all. If we can imagine the scapegoat as the cause or emblem
of the pollution, it seems easy to purify the city simply by removing the
stain. The expulsion of the scapegoat is no more remarkable than any other
form of cleaning. We wash with water, we rinse away the dirt and stain.
The expulsion of the scapegoat is the means of washing the city. The only
problem, I think, comes from trying to determine what counts as outside
the city. Outside the walls? What if there are none-what if they are incomplete or being expanded? Th the edge of the territory? But where is
this? The ritual of the pharmakos thus implies a problem of place. Where
precisely is the city and what are its boundaries? How far must we expel
the pollution before we are clean? And where is the pollution when it is
no longer among us?
The story of Oedipus seems to be built around this problem. He is expelled, as a baby, from the city, stranded on a hlll in uncertain territory,
imported to a new city, not his own; he expels himself from this new city
�SCHOENER
69
in an attempt to avoid becoming a wretch polluted by the stain of his
father's blood; and at the intersection of two roads- in a no-man's land,
neither in one city nor another- he murders his own father. Later, outside
his native city, he confounds the Sphinx, and is installed in the city as king
and savior. He begins his life as a pharmakos, expelled to avoid a stain,
he grows up apolis, without a city, but he reverses these circumstances as
he reaches adulthood. At his acme, he is at the center of a city, the loved
and revered ruler of the land.
But we know that he ends his life as he began it. In Thebes, his proper
home, he is discovered as twice stained: with the blood of his father, the
king,- and with his mother's sex. The city soon recognizes him as the source
of the pollution that is poisoning the city and so he must be driven out.
He is the perfect pharmakos, both the cause and the visible emblem of
the miasma, horribly mutilated by his own hand. And so he begins our
present play a wanderer, an exile- he calls himself apolis, a man without
a city (1357).
Not only is it easy to map Oedipus's life onto the pattern of the pharmakos, but it is easy to explain why the pattern is appropriate. Oedipus
has crossed certain uncrossable lines; he has violated certain inviolable oppositions. The city depends on these two oppositions. It is clear how quickly
all social and political stability would collapse if the young replaced the
old through force and not through time; and if children mated with their
parents and produced offspring who are neither absolutely children nor
siblings. The city depends upon a certain distance between young and old,
father and son, son and mother. Oedipus violated all of these boundaries
and, whether intentionally or not, thus threatened the order and stability
of his city. Whether he was knowing or not, he is stained with his transgression. He plunged himself twice, in different ways, into the forbidden zones
of his parents' bodies; willing, knowing, or not, he is stained by that penetration and there is no cleansing of the stain. This is the pollution, the miasma,
he both carries and represents, and as such he must be driven from the
city. Once he has penetrated these zones, the city is no place for him.
The model of the pharmakos and his stain helps remove a persistent
obstacle to our reading of the play. The pharmakos need not be guilty in
any sense (some cities simply expelled their ugliest inhabitants)-he need
simply carry the stain out. Thus we need not ask if Oedipus was culpable,
knowledgeable, rash, etc.-we need only ask if he was stained, polluted.
I have been polluted in many ways that were no fault of my own but left
me nonetheless polluted. Every time I have stepped in a dog's mess, every
time I have cleaned shellfish, every time I fill my fountain pen: in each
of these cases I have come into contact with something foreign to me-
�70
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the ammoniac redolence of the shellfish or the blue dye of the inksomething that is both foreign and hard to remove. But there are stains
more powerful than these physical nuisances.
It seems to me there are many occasions when we unwittingly cross
certain borders and are marked forever by that crossing- we round a corner in our car and suddenly see bloody corpses strewn about in a horrible
accident. It seems to me that whether Oedipus is guilty of anything or not,
he is stained in just this way. He has been somewhere terrible, much more
remote from the realm of our comfortable daily existence than the smell
of decomposing shellfish is- but now that he has been there, he is forever
marked by what he has seen, known, and felt. That is his stain, that is
the necessity for his expulsion from the city. What he knows and has felt
is simply too terrible for the city to contain.
II. The Re-integration of the Pharmakos.
This understanding of Oedipus's condition seems too easy to me. We
understand the question of his place as a strictly political problem, a problem for the city. We say that Oedipus is properly apolis-an exile without
a city- because his stain threatens the city's safety. We think of that line
in Aristotle-almost a cliche-"the man who can live outside of the city
is either a beast or a god" (Cf. Pol. 1253a29). Fine, we say, Oedipus is both,
cast out, apolis, he is a wretched beast, deprived of all society- but he
is also a god, super-human in what he has done, what he knows, what
he has suffered and endured. The proof of this is surely in his fate: Why
else would he simply vanish, summoned by a god who says "it is time for
us to leave"? His amazing disappearance would then be simply the ultimate
expression of his political position; as a man who is apolis, his proper place
is not with the dead humans below but with the gods above.
This scheme even lets us understand the most remarkable reversal
presented by this play. 1\vo present kings, one fallen one, and one pretender
to a throne all agree that the outcast, the polluted pharmakos, must be
brought back into the city so that it may prosper. This is not hard to gloss.
It means that the city must face and find a place for the terrible things
that threaten it. The city weakens itself by simply banishing all of its threats;
rather it must embrace them. Thus we not only still talk about Oedipus
and other such polluted citizens, but we celebrate them in the poetry called
'fragedy. And Athens, so wise among cities, celebrates these polluted citizens
in a competition presented for the most part at public expense, attended
by the whole city. This tradition thus welcomes the pharmakoi back into
the city and installs them at its heart. The city grows stronger by gazing
�SCHOENER
71
in wonder at the transgressors who threaten it. The secret boon that Oedipus
brings to Athens is thus nothing more than his legend-his mythos-which
now, because of Theseus's good will, becomes public property. By holding
this story in common, rather than expelling and forgetting it, the city
strengthens itself and grows to high health. Athens, the city of tragedy,
rises to its awesome pinnacle; Thebes, who made Oedipus apolis, stumbles
and fades.
The answer to the question about Oedipus's place thus becomes
paradoxical but fruitful. He is apolis and must be cast out of the city; but
precisely because the city must address what is apolis, his story must be
enshrined at the center of the city. His place as murderer is outside the
city; as legend, it must be at its center.
III: The Final Place
I still wonder whether these are the only considerations for our understanding of this question. Must we address the question of place only in
relation to the city? In other words, does the opposition of polis and apolis
exhaust the question of place? As much as I find the scheme outlined above
both helpful and convincing, I stumble when attempting to apply it to this
play. The play certainly has political concerns, but these concerns are confounded by the persistent strangeness of the play.
The root of this strangeness is surely Oedipus's final disappearance.
To make anything at all of it, we will have to return to our initial question
and investigate the nature of the place where he disappears.
In the first sentence of the play, Oedipus asks: "What region or city
of men have we reached?" (1-2). Antigone is his companion and guide,
but before she can answer, he asks her to find a seat for him- "whether
on ground which may be trodden or within the groves of the gods" (9-10).
This opposition is interesting; it already expands the opposition between
city and no-city with which we began. It is also interesting that Oedipus
is willing to accept a seat within a sacred precinct. This seems to indicate
a deep impiety on his part- he is willing to take a possible altar as a resting
place- and thus emphasizes his alienation from the affairs of men. This
also complicates his relation to the gods: not only is he apolis, an exile,
but he is asebes, insensitive to the traditional bounds of piety.
A local resident soon approaches but refuses to answer Oedipus's questions until the wanderer quits his seat; as Antigone suspected, the ground
is sacred. The local says that "it is impure to tread upon it" (37). Oedipus
does not seem shaken by this; after all, impiety is not foreign to him. He
maintains his seat and asks to whom the place is sacred. He learns that
�72
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the dreadful Furies hold it; but the local refuses to call them by that name.
He appeals to two circumlocutions and finally names them as "The Kindly
Ones (Eumenides) who have seen all things" (42).
The play marks a new beginning at this point. When he learns that
the Eumenides hold this place, Oedipus the wanderer suddenly announces
that "he will never leave his seat in this land" (45). Once the local leaves
to consult a higher authority about Oedipus's violation of the grove,
Oedipus addresses the Furies directly and says that Phoebus "spoke of this
place as my rest after a long time-my final place-where I would find
a seat of the dread Goddesses and a resting place for strangers; and there
I should close my miserable life as a boon to my new hosts and a curse
to those who exiled me" (88-93).
This is the first we hear of the prophecy that determines the' rest of
the play's action. Oedipus claims that Phoebus pronounced it years ago
when he first questioned Delphi about his father; it is interesting that
Sophocles makes no mention of it until Oedipus reaches and recognizes
his "final place." But this ancient and personal oracle has been recently
confirmed; both Creon and Polyneices have just had oracles that proclaim
that they will need Oedipus- or his body- in order to triumph in a current
conflict. These oracles differ in one essential feature from Oedipus's: they
all name him as the source of a benefit to whichever land he rests in; his
oracle names only one place, this place, in which he will close his life and
become a benefit to some- his hosts- and a curse to others.
This place is described at length. It is a lush grove sacred to the Furies,
within a larger plot, all of which belongs to Poseidon. The whole plot is
clearly sacred, but only the precinct of the Furies is so holy that it cannot
be entered without impurity. Oedipus eventually leaves this plot at the
behest of the chorus of local citizens; but at the end of the play, he reenters it, this time as his own guide, leading Theseus and his own daughters
to a destination clear only to him. This second time he makes his way to the
down-rushing path and the brazen steps- near which he finally vanishes.
The chorus's songs add to our knowledge of the place. After Theseus
has assured Oedipus that no one will ever dislodge him from this land,
the chorus sings a beautiful song praising their particular location:
Friend- within this land of fair steeds
you have come to the earth's best home-
where birds sing, ivy and vines grow thick, berries flourish, and the sun
always shines (668-80). I will quote the second strophe of this ode verbatim, for it is remarkable:
�SCHOENER
73
There is such a thing as I
Have never heard of in an Asian land
Nor in the great Dorian Island of Pelops: a sprout-
A plant-untouched by hands, self-madeA terror to the spears of our enemiesThat blooms mighty in this land.
I mean the olive with its silver leaves, nurturer of children. (694-701)
This plant, among the lush vines and plenteous berries, makes the
beautiful grove terrible and strange. An olive, untouched by human hands,
self-created- autopoios? An olive that is at once the nurturer of children
and a terror to enemies? This native plant, so similar to th<rwandering
Oedipus, is the surest sign that he has indeed found his proper place.
We must also consider its other chief inhabitants- the gods who hold
it- in order to grasp how this place can be proper to Oedipus. The first
gods are the Furies whose grove Oedipus has violated. They are so awful
that no one in the play mentions them by name; instead they are addressed,
as the first local does, in a series of euphemisms. The central one of these
is of course "Eumenides," "the kindly ones"- a euphemism that is nearly
a lie. The Furies are hardly kindly but vicious in pursuit of their quarry.
They hound murderers, those who, like Oedipus, are stained with the blood
they have spilled- especially those who are stained with their own parents'
blood. Their fury is so extreme and easily kindled that the chorus says:
We tremble to name them
And pass by their grove
Without a glance,
Without a sound,
Moving our lips (without a word) in silent reverence. (128-32)
The chorus makes clear that the Furies' presence in the grove is almost
palpable-as if its members avert their eyes in passing for fear of actually
catching a glance of them. The Furies haunt this land- it is not only dedicated to them but somehow suffused with them. This seems possible for
these awful forces in a way that would not be plausible for Zeus or Apollo.
We cannot imagine them lurking in or haunting a grove-if Zeus or Apollo
were present, he would not only be manifest but brilliant. Such gods could
not disappear if they were present. The Kindly Ones thus give us a small
clue for understanding Oedipus's final disappearance: When things are
terrible, too terrible to gaze at or even mention, then it is somehow all the
more plausible that they are present even if we cannot see them. We are
disposed to believe that such terrible things can haunt and hold a place.
�74
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The chorus repeats that the whole land in which the grove stands is
sacred to Poseidon. We do not imagine his place in the land in the same
way we do that of the Eumenides in theirs. The chorus is afraid of seeing
the Eumenides, but neither it nor the exceedingly pious Theseus ever betrays
any expectation of meeting Poseidon. The land is his, but he is not there.
What does this mean, that this land is consecrated to Poseidon, god
of the sea? There is a hint for us in a common Homeric epithet that the
chorus applies to him late in the play: they call him gaiaochos- the Earth
Holder (1072). Poseidon's waters encircle the Earth and bound it on every
side. But as they circle the earth, they never fall below it nor rise above
it. There are neither subterranean nor heavenly seas. This banality gains
some importance when we consider the remarkable prayer that Theseus
utters after Oedipus's disappearance. The messenger says that he hears
Theseus "reverencing both the Earth and the Olympus of the gods above
at once-in the same word" (1654-55). This opposition between earth and
sky reminds us of Zeus's trilateral division of the world after his ascension
to power; he reserved the sky for himself, gave the underworld to his brother
Hades, and gave the sea to his brother Poseidon. The earth thus seems
to be neutral territory-uncontrolled by any god. But this appearance is
belied by the common ascription of earthquakes to Poseidon: as earthholder, he is also earth-shaker. This suggests that Poseidon's realm is not
the sea alone but the entire surface of this middle realm between Hades
and Olympus. He would be the god who holds not only this sacred land
but the whole Earth, the common land upon which we all walk.
But this formulation cannot be right: we never walk on Poseidon's paths.
Poseidon holds precisely those grounds upon which we cannot walk; he
holds the shifting waters of the sea and the shifting surface of the earth.
His paths are no paths for us and our feet; they are by nature untreadable.
As Odysseus knows full well, Poseidon is the god who makes travel perilous,
progress disastrous. He is the lord whose realm offers no sure step. This
makes him the perfect lord of the land that contains our last mystery, the
down-rushing path.
Sophocles calls it katarrhakte hodos; many translators blanch at this
paradox and call it a "sheer threshold." Katarrhakte can mean "sheer" indeed, but it is usually more forceful than that; it comes from rhasso- to
rush at or strike suddenly. Theseus uses katarhasso ninety ,lines earlier to
describe the action of hail: it strikes you as a result of rushing straight
down. It is the parent of our "cataract," a lovely word for waterfall. Now
it is hard to understand a katarrhakte hodos. It would seem to mean a
path that dashes straight down, suddenly. Because such a path seems like
�75
SCHOENER
no path, some translators offer "threshold."* A hodos always goes somewhere-as indeed this one does; the messenger says that it is rooted in the
earth, in brazen steps. This is still a very strange path; it seems to be a
hole, or a cliff- a sheer drop from the grove to the roots of the earth. Can
we call such a drop a "path"? We could hardly come and go upon it. Though
it seems to go somewhere, it is still impassable. We could not tread on it.
This path is no path.
This is not the first strange path Oedipus has encountered; he killed
his father and thus initiated his pollution at a crossroads where three paths
met at once. These crossroads portended Oedipus's transgressions and
ultimate exile; after Thebes, he became a man of no city, but lived only
on path after path, crossroad after crossroad.
But this last path is not of the same order. It is not simply a path as
opposed to a city; it is not simply ek poleos or apo/is, as were the crossroads.
As we have seen, it is no road at all; it offers no conveyance but only an
abrupt end in itself. In this way this hodos does not recall his status as
apolis; nor does it contradict it. As an abrupt end, it portends Oedipus's
sudden disappearance, rather than his reintegration into the city. This disappearance thus does not resolve Oedipus's place in the city but displaces
it. In a certain sense, it indicates that from now on he is neither apolis
nor empolis but simply without a place. From this moment on, Oedipus
is nowhere.
IV: No Place
The down-rushing path is itself no proof of this. We hear only that
Oedipus pauses at this path, not that he ever embarks on it. But Theseus's
prayer gives us an indication of Oedipus's current place. In the prayer he
"reverences both Earth and Olympus at once- in the same logos." This
suggests that Oedipus is neither interred in the earth nor raised to heaven.
Nor is he in both. The amazing form of Theseus's prayer seems to suggest
a third possibility.
Theseus does not just join Heaven and Earth but he reverences them in
a single logos. This logos must have somehow overcome their differences-
* This translation depends upon reading ados ("threshold") instead of hodos here
in line 57. The majority of the play's manuscripts read hodos, not ados; moreover
ados is a rare form of the word for threshold. This word is oudos; the Form
ados appears nowhere else in tragedy and in only two or three instances in ariy
other authors. This translation thus seems to be prompted more by the paradox
posed by hodos than the textual support for ados.
�76
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
or suppressed them. In any case, it has caught these two opposites in a
single logos. It seems to me that this logos could not, any more, refer to
place. I do not know how to think of a place that is neither heaven nor
earth- or one in which the sharp differences between heaven and earth
are not addressed. In fact, it seems to me that this opposition is the very
foundation for any possibility of place. Theseus has seen something that
does not depend on this foundation.
This something is not a Force but another kind of place; after all,
Theseus does not pray to the gods of Earth and Olympus but to Earth
and Olympus themselves. He is praying to two places.
His remarkable vision (so potent that he must shield his eyes) is thus
not of Oedipus's epiphany, or of the angels who escort him, but of the
final place where Oedipus will rest. This place must be as different from
normal places as Oedipus was from normal humans. As we have seen, it
must be no kind of place we could understand. But just as it does not
depend on the fundamental distinctions that organize and delimit our
world, so this final resting place neither replaces Oedipus within the city
nor sustains his exile from it. Rather it leaves the distinctions of the city
behind. As heaven and earth are joined in one logos, so are joined the
fundamental distinctions upon which society depends. As we have seen,
Oedipus first became an exile precisely for transgressing these
distinctions- but in this place, the distinctions are not transgressed but
simply annulled in their conjunction. In this place, unlike Hades or Olympus, borders, boundaries, limits, order are no longer a concern.
One cannot deny the political concerns of this play. We cannot forget
that Oedipus has blessed Athens in a very political way; his place in their
land guarantees that Theseus and his offspring will always hold the
kingship. Does this manifest political legacy threaten the special place
Oedipus has found, beyond political structures and concerns?
No. I think instead, that Theseus's prayer and the place it reveals gently
chastise us- the city and its inhabitants- for some of the effects of our
political concerns. The play insists that Oedipus disappear. Oedipus himself
insists that we cannot know where his grave is; even his daughters are forbidden this knowledge. The grave can have no kolone- no grave barrow.
He forbids us to look on his resting place, but also to search for it or speak
about it. All trace of him must vanish.
His wishes are a clear prohibition against setting up his grave as a heroaltar. He thus prevents himself from becoming a ritual object for the City.
His prohibitions make him neither a presence in the city nor an exile at
its gates; rather they make him a true shade, a vanishing memory, whose
place is nowhere. This willful disappearance denies the eager city its oppor-
�SCHOENER
77
tunity to gaze at him, to wonder at him, to celebrate him- to gather in
the theater and review his tragic fate. His disappearance is meant to deprive
us of the horrible yet fascinating object we love to consider. It is a disappearance that undercuts the very aims and habits of the tragic theater.
The play is so crafty that we too, the spectators or would-be spectators,
are sympathetic to this undercutting. When the chorus in the play first
learn Oedipus's identity, they subject him to a humiliating and prurient
inquiry into his history. Having already won their respect, he begs them
to desist- but they press on. "Did you really kill your father? And these
lovely children- are they ... your sisters?" Oedipus answers truthfully and
concisely. We bristle with rage at the chorus's base curiosity- but whose
curiosity is this if not ours? Confronted with Oedipus's mutilated eyes,
wouldn't we be horrified but at the same time insatiable in stealing glances
at them? Even we spectators can understand his desire to disappear. This
is the desire to retire from the public's insatiable gaze-whether it be
solicitous or prurient. This is the desire to be nowhere- to be neither iu
the heart of the city nor wandering at its borders, but nowhere.
This desire is caught also in the words of the chorus, who utter one
of the strangest yet plainest lines in poetry:
me phunai ton hapanta nikai logon.
Not being exceeds all speech. (1225)
This is the final place Oedipus has found, his sweet end: not in the city,
not outside of it; not even in the play; but beyond all logos- in not being.
��Oedipus the King and
Aristotle's List of Categories:
A Note
Chaninah Maschler
Substance (ousia)
Quantity (poson)
Quality (poion)
Relation (pros tl)
Place (pou)
Time (pote)
Stance (keisthaz)
Condition (ekhein)
Doing (poiein)
Being done to (paskhein)
-so runs the most famous of all lists of categories! How did Aristotle,
or whoever it was that first supplied the list, obtain it? And what are
categories good for?
I believe the most direct route to an answer is to look at a passage in
Sophocles' Oedipus the King.
Jocasta: What made you turn around so anxiously?
*Categories lb25. As the Becker pagination number shows, the treatise on categories
opens Aristotle's works in their standard arrangement.
Chaninah Maschler is a Thtor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
79
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
80
Oedipus: I thought you said that Laius was attacked and butchered at a place
where three roads meet.
Jocasta: That is the story, and it is told so still.
Oedipus: Where is the place where this was done to him? (pou, paskhein)
Jocasta: The land's called Phocis, where a two-forked road comes in from
Delphi and from Daulia.
Oedipus: And how much time has passed since these events? (pole)
Jocasta: Just prior to your presentation here as king this news was published
to the city.
Oedipus: Oh, Zeus, what have you willed to do to me? (poiein)
Jocasta: Oedipus, what makes your heart so heavy?
Oedipus: No, tell me first of Laius' appearance, what peak of youthful vigor
he had reached. (poios)
Jocasta: A tall man, showing his first growth of white. He had a figure not
unlike your own.
Oedipus: Alas, it seems that in my ignorance I laid those fearful curses on
myself ... (poiein)
(lines 727-45, in the translation of Thomas Gould, Prentice Hall Greek
Drama Series, 1970)
Setting chapter iv of Aristotle's Categories side by side with the cited
lines from Sophocles' tragedy prompts the hypothesis that the nine
categories posterior to ousia may at one time have been the formal headings
under which a person charged with the task of finding the unknown party
responsible for a crime of violence was expected to carry on his investigation. As a result of pressing (like Oedipus or the modern investigative
reporter) for answers to the questions
Where?
When?
What did he look like?
How was he attired?
What was he doing?
What was being done to him?
the "first substance" question "Who?" would be tentatively answered, the
indictment drawn up, and the accused party brought to trial.
It is of course true that ordinary discourse, Greek or English, supplies
the small question words that demarcate and orient investigation. Positioning them in a juridic context, which is the effect achieved by dragging
in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, may seem needless. Yet the pathos of the
king's lines at 844 f.If he [the eye witness to the crime] continues still to speak of many, then
�MASCHLER
81
I could not have killed him. One man and many do not jibe. But if he says
"one belted man," the doubt is gone. The balance tips toward me. I did it.*
-is, I think more justly identified when this last hope is seen to be a hope
for mathematical clarity and exactness, for degreeless truth of predication,
as per Categories 6a20 ff., rather than a hope for innocence.
I seem to have reversed my course. Having promised to throw light on
Aristotle's Categories I end up using that little book to highlight Oedipus.
But wasn't it some progress in the other direction to propose, by way
of quoting the exchange of questions and answers between dialogue partners all too well attuned, that the categories are not primarily ontological
pigeon holes, nor semantical pigeon holes comparable to the grammarians'
"parts of speech," but, rather, shared demarcations of investigative
discourse?
If antecedent to asking particular questions about particular things there
were no kinds of questions for an investigator to ask, and if a person who
knows were unaware that what he or she knows are answers to questions
that might be asked of him or her, there could be no investigating or knowing, whether solo or in concert. The categories are, a grid for speech, perception, and thought that makes it possible for questions to be sufficiently
circumscribed for answers to fit them and to allow answers to generate
new questions. Calling them "schemes of predication" (skhemata kategorias
tou ontos) is just another way of saying the same thing.** My suggestion
is, in short, that "predicating" is the answering of an explicit or implicit
question and that "categories" are as much and as little a priori as are
question-types. Further, that the Greek word for "predicating," kategorein,
which bears the sounds of the word for "marketplace" or "town square,"
agora, within it, retains the memory of Jocasta's lines 849-50-"He [the
eye witness] can't reject that and reverse himself. The city heard these things,
not I alone"- the memory, that is, of public declaration. The fact that an
official "accuser," such as were Meletus and Anytus in the Apology, is called
a kategoros further confirms this.
•
A.t~st '!OV
d !-lEV oiJv En
aUtOv dpt9!J6V, oUK Byffi ~Ktavov·
oiJ yO.p ytvou' liv de; ye -role; 1to/...A.oic; iaoc;.
d 15' livop? ilv' ol61;rovov avo~cret, cracpro<;
[843-47]
'oii'' tcr,lv ~151] 'oOpyov e!c; &~t1: psnov.
** See Chantraine, Dictionnaire etymologique de Ia Langue Grecque, volume 1,
p. 392, on echo.
�82
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Where is the gain in having such antiquarian guess work as was just
laid out? Perhaps it will nudge us to think of informative speech as carrying the weight of vouching for what we say.
The question "What are categories good for?" was, even if sketchily,
at least addressed. Notice that this is by no means the same question as
"What is drawing up a list of them, and such charcterizing of them as
Aristotle offers, good for?"- because the latter question is tantamount to
asking, "Why turn tacit into explicit knowing?"
�Depth and Desire
Eva Brann
By an old tradition the first lecture of the year is dedicated to the new
members of our college, to the freshman students and the freshman tutors.
It is a chance to tell you something about the shape and the spirit of the
Program that governs St. John's College-and not only to tell you but
perhaps even to show you.
I think I am right in this spirit when I begin by examining the classname I just called you by: freshmen. A freshman, my etymological dictionaries tell me, is a person "not tainted, sullied or worn," a still-fresh
human being, where "fresh" means, so the dictionary points out, both
"frisky" and "impertinent." Later on in the year you will learn a weighty
Greek word applicable to persons of frisky impertinence. They are said
to have thymos, spiritedness or plain spunk, a characteristic necessary for
serious learning. This spirited frame of mind is perfectly compatible with
being shy and secretly a little scared. In fact, to my mind, it is a sign of
quality in newcomers to be anxious for their own dignity in the way that
shows itself in spirited shyness. It is our business, the business of the faculty
and of the more responsible returning students, to help your spiritedness
to become serious, to emerge from the shyness, whether it be of the quiet
or the boisterous sort; to help you channel your energy into a steady desire
for learning and to direct your boldness toward the discovery of depth,
and, moreover, to help you without leaving you tainted, sullied, and worn
out. I keep saying "help," because although great changes are bound to
Eva Brann is the new Dean of St. John's College, Annapolis. This is the Dean's
opening lecture of the current academic year.
83
�84
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
take place in you in these next years- do but behold the seniors: unsullied,
untainted, unworn, and transfigured- we none of us know who should
get the most credit besides yourself: the Program, our teaching, your friendship, or just plain time passing.
At any rate, the spirit of the college is invested in seriousness, a certain
kind of seriousness- not dead seriousness but live seriousness, you might
say. This seriousness shows itself on many occasions: in deep or heated
conversations in the noon sun or at midnight, in marathons of effort and
in the oblivion of sleep, in devoted daily preparation and in glorious
goofing-off, in the willingness to try on opinions and in the need to come
to conclusions. What does your school do to induce this very particular
kind of seriousness?
When you chose to come to St. John's you were, perhaps, attracted
by the fact that the mode of teaching normal in higher education is quite
abnormal here. I mean lectures. Only one lecture a week is an integral part
of the Program, on Fridays at 8:15 P.M. Now the chief thing about a lecture is that it is prepared ahead of time. For instance, I began working
on this lecture in March. A lecture ought to be the temporarily final word,
the best a speaker has to give you at the moment. It should not matter
whether the surface of the speech is brilliant or drab, as long as it is a
deliberate and well-prepared opening of the speaker's heart and mind to
the listeners. As such it carries authority. These authoritative occasions
are obviously important to the life of the school.
Yet our normal way is not the prepared lecture but the focused conversation, which is effervescent rather than prepared, provisional rather than
authoritative, and participatory rather than reactive. Your tutors will not
tell you but ask you; they will demonstrate not acquired knowledge but
the activity of learning. One reason why the teaching of new tutors- and
some of your classes will be taught by newcomers- is often most
memorable to freshmen is that their learning is genuinely original and keeps
sympathetic pace with yours. There is an irresistible but false local
etymology of the word tutor as "one who toots," perhaps his own horn.
What the word tutor really signifies is a person who guards and watches
learning. We are deliberately not called professors because we profess no
special expertise.
Since you will not be told things, you will have to speak yourselves.
What will you speak about? The Program will ask you to focus your conversation on certain texts- they might be books or scores or paintings.
These texts have been selected over the years by us because they have the
living seriousness I am trying to speak about. To my mind texts, like people, are serious when they have a surface that arouses the desire to know
�BRANN
85
them and the depth to fulfill that desire. Here, then, is my announced theme
for tonight: the depth that calls forth desire.
Th delineate that depth I must once again distinguish our kind of conversation, the kind associated with such texts, from the kind of fellowship
to be found in other places. All over this country, and wherever the conditions for some human happiness exist, there are people who know all there
is to know about some field that they till with a single-minded love. This
is the blessed race of buffs, aficionados, and those rare professionals who
have had the grace to remain amateurs at heart. They study history or race
stock cars or do biology or fly hot-air balloons. My own favorite fanatic
is the young son of a graduate of St. John's. This boy is persistently in
love with fish, with the hooks, flies, sinkers, leaders, reels, and rods for
catching them, with the books for studying them, with the aquaria, ponds,
lakes, and oceans for observing them. When I first met him he looked up
at me shyly and asked if I knew what an ichthyologist was. Since I knew
some Greek I knew the etymology of the word and could tell him that
it is a person who can give an account of fish, so he was satisfied with
me. This boy may have his troubles but he is also acquainted with bliss.
This kind of concentrated bliss we cannot deliver to you, except perhaps
in limited extracurricular ways. Instead we, or rather the Program, will drive
you through centuries of time and diversities of opinion, while depriving
you of the freedom and the serenity to till and to master a well-defined
field of your own choosing. You will study Greek and invest hours in
memorizing paradigms, but your tutorial is not a Greek class- it is a
language tutorial in which Greek is studied only partly for its own virtues,
and partly as a striking and, for you, a novel example of human speech
and its possibilities. You will study Euclid and demonstrate many propositions, yet your tutorial is intended not to make you geometers but to allow
you to think about the activity of mathematics. In short, you will be asked
to read many books carefully and to study many matters in some detail
only to find them passing away, becoming mere examples in the conversation. And these fugitive texts will almost all bear their excellence, their worthiness to be studied exhaustively, on their face, for we try to pick the ideal
examples. This procedure is practically guaranteed to keep you off-balance,
even to drive you a little crazy, since you will not often have the satisfaction of dwelling on anything and of mastering it. How do we dare do this
to you?
Here is a strange but unavoidable fact: Those who plow with devotion
and pleasure and increasing mastery some bounded plot on the globe of
knowledge often undergo a professional deformation. They lose first the
will and then the ability to go deep. Th be sure, specialists are often said
�86
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
to know their subjects "in depth," but that is not the depth I mean. Let
me illustrate with an example I have a special affection for. I began my
academic life as an archaeologist, and the first thing archaeologists do is
to dig deep past the present surface of the earth, or rather they scrape it
away layer by layer. But with every stratum they scrape away they find
themselves at a new surface, the surface of a former age. They poke into
time- a magical enough activity- but they do not pretend to pierce the
nature of things. For example, there would come up from the depths of
a well-shaft an ancient pot. I would catalogue it by naming its form, say:
kotyle, a kind of cup; by giving its dimensions: h. 0.108 m.; diam. 0.135 m;
by describing its proportions: deep-bodied, narrow-footed; by interpreting
the picture painted on it: a rabbit-this is the pot-painter being funnyjumping a tracking hound from behind; by conjecturing about the provenance and the stylistic influences: made in Attica under Corinthian influence; and by assigning a date: third quarter of the seventh century B.C.
Was I required to consider what I meant by dimensions, proportions,
styles, images, funniness, influences, places? Not a bit-that would have
meant time out and profitless distraction from my business, which was
to know all about the looks and appearances of the pottery of Athens in
early times. What this Program of ours offers you is exactly that time out,
and that splendid distraction. People will say of you, when you have
graduated, that you have acquired a broad background. But your education will have been broad only in a very incidental and sketchy waycertainly not in the fashion of a close-knit tapestry that is a continuous
texture of interwoven warp and woof. Many of the books you are about
to read do tie into one another. Sometimes a book written by an ancient
Greek will (I am not being funny) talk back to one written by a modern
�BRANN
87
American, or the opposite- the strands that connect these books seem to
run back and forth and sideways through time. But some books will stand,
at least as we read them, in splendid isolation, and all in all the texts we
study do not add up to a texture of knowledge: There is no major called
"Great Books." How could there be competence in a tradition whose moving
impulse is to undercut every wisdom in favor of a yet deeper one? There
is not even agreement whether this tradition of ours advances or degenerates
with time, whether Its authors are all talking about the same thing, though
in a different way, or in apparently similar ways about quite incomparable
things.
Here is what the books do seem to me to have in common: They intend to go into the depths of things. All the authors, even those subtly
self-contradictory ones who claim that there are no depths but only surfaces, are deep in the way I mean. This desire for depth, then, is what will
hold your studies here together. There is a word for this effort, to which
it is my privilege to introduce you tonight. The word is philosophy. The
term is put together from two Greek words, philos, an adjective used of
someone who feels friendly, even passionate love, and sophia, which means
wisdom or deep knowledge.
When I say that your school is devoted to philosophy, the love of deep
knowledge, I mean that all our authors want to draw you deep into their
matter, whether by words, symbols, notes, or visual shapes. Incidentally,
in a few weeks a lecturer, a tutor from Sante Fe, will come and contradict
me; he has told me that he will say that what we do needn't bear the name
of philosophy at all.
Let that be a subject for future discussion, and let me come to the heart
of my lecture tonight. It is the question what depth is and how it is possible. I think we are all inclined to suppose that literal, actual depth belongs
to bodies and space and that people or texts are deep only by analogy,
metaphorically speaking.
I want to propose that here, as so often in philosophy, it is really the
other way around: it is the body that is deep merely metaphorically, as
a manner of speaking, while the soul and its expression alone are deep
in the primary sense.
Certainly the depth of a body or a space is elusive. If a body has a
perfectly hard and impenetrable surface, its depth must be forever beyond
our experience-a kind of hard, inaccessible nothingness. On the other
hand, let the physical body have a hollow in it-such caves are powerful
allegories of depth and you will in the next four years come across some
famous holes: the grotto of Calypso, the underground chamber in Plato's
Republic, Don Quixote's cavern of Montesinos. Now ask yourself: Where
�88
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
actually is the depth? The containing boundaries of the hollow are all faces
of the body, and no matter how deep you seem to be inside the body, you
are still on its surface, just as I argued before about archaeological
excavations.
Now consider matterless bodies, geometric solids. Euclid says in Book
XI that a solid has length, breadth, and depth, but he gives us no way
to tell which is which: it depends on your perspective- in fact all three
dimensions are lengths delineating the surfaces that he says are the extremity
of the solid. What is inside that solid, what its inwardness or true depth
is, he does not feel obliged to say. These are questions you might want
to raise in your mathematics tutorials: Can one get inside a geometric solid?
How?
Bodies, I am suggesting, are either too hard or too involuted or too
featureless or too empty to have true depth. Only divine or human beings
and the texts they produce- texts made of words, notes, paint, stones, what
have you- can be literally deep or profound. For I attribute depth or profundity to that which is of a truly different order from the surface that
covers and hides it. And it must be the inside and foundation of just that
surface, so that we can gain entrance to it through that particular outside
and through no other. Every depth must be sought through its own proper
surface, which it both denies or negates and supplies with significance:
the surface that hides its own depth is never superficial.
Human beings seem to me the most obvious example of such depth.
All human beings have a surface, namely the face and figure they present.
I personally think that in real life almost all people also have an inside,
their soul, their depth. But there are some famous novels in which characters
are described who are nothing but empty shells. Facades that hide nothing
often flaunt an insidiously unflawed beauty. Against such nearly impenetrable surfaces the people who are attracted break themselves, but if
they do burst through, they fall into an abyss of nothingness.
However, these are fictions, and actual human beings have by the very
fact of their humanity an inner sanctum. We begin by noting, casually,
their face, their demeanor. As our interest awakens we proceed to read more
carefully, to watch their appearance ardently for what it signifies. If we
are lucky, they may open up to us, as we do to them. If we go about it
right, this interpretative process need never come to an end, for the human
inside, or to give it, once again, its proper name, the soul, is a true mystery.
By a true mystery I mean a profundity whose bottom we can never seem
to plumb though we have a persistent faith in its actuality. I think that
for us human beings only depths and mysteries induce viable desire. For
love entirely without longing is not possible among human beings. Many
�BRANN
89
a failure of love follows on the- usually false- opinion that we have exhausted the other person's inside, that there is no further promise of depth.
It is not only in respect to living human beings that depth calls forth
desire. This college would not be the close human community that it is
if you did not get to know some human beings deeply-which is called
friendship. But such love is only the essential by-product (to coin a contradictory phrase) of our philosophical Program, a program that encourages
the love of certain para-human beings. These para-human beings are the
expressions of the human soul, our texts, as well as the things they talk
about.
Let me take a moment to ask whether this particular desire for depth
I keep referring to is common among human beings or even natural. I say
it is absolutely natural and very common. You will see what I mean when
I tell you what I think is the nature of desire. Desire seems to me to be
a kind of negative form or a shaped emptiness in the soul, a place in the
spirit expecting to be filled, a kind of psychic envelope waiting to be stuffed
with its proper contents.
Now take a long leap and ask yourself what a question is. A question
is a negative form or shaped emptiness in the mind, a place in thought
waiting to be filled, a psychic envelope ready to be supplied with its proper
message. Questions therefore have the same structure as desires. In fact
questions are a subspecies of desire: a question is desire directed upon
wisdom or knowledge. Therefore I might go so far as to say that this school
teaches the shaping of desire- because here we practice asking deep questions. Now I think that very many, probably all, human beings would like
to ask such questions if they only knew how. That is why the desire for
depth is both common and natural.
What we most often, or at least most programmatically, ask questions
about are those texts I have been mentioning. As I have intimated, such
a text, particularly a text of words, is a curious kind of being, neither a
living soul nor a mere rigid thing. What a book might be, such that it could
have genuine depth, is a question that should arise over and over again
in the tutorials and the seminars. That books do have depth is shown by
the fact that they induce questions, the directed desire to open them up.
I want to end by giving a sample of a deep text and a demonstration of
the beginning of a reading, a mere knock at its gate, so to speak.
The text is a saying by Heraclitus. Heraclitus flourished about 500 B.C.
He was early among those who inquired into the nature of things, and
he had a contemporary antagonist, Parmenides. Heraclitus said that it is
wise to agree that "All things are one." Parmenides said things that, on
the face of it, seem similar, but whether he meant the same thing as
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
90
Heraclitus, or something opposite or something incomparable- that is a
matter of ever-live debate. In any case, Heraclitus and Parmenides together
embody the great principle of our tradition that I mentioned before; you
might call it the "the principle of responsive differentiation." However, I
shall not try to talk about Heraclitus's actual wisdom tonight; that along
with the previous questions-"What is philosophy?", "What is a solid?",
"What is a cave?", "What is a book?" -I leave to future discussion. I shall
attend only to the preliminaries with which Heraclitus surrounds his
wisdom.
Heraclitus's book is largely lost, though as far as we know it was not
a treatise but a book of sayings. Even in ancient times it had a reputation
for depth; the tragedian Euripides said of it that it required a Delian diverthe divers from the island Delos (which means the "Manifest" or "Clear")
were evidently famous for diving deep and bringing things to light.
The saying I have chosen goes:
001(
&~ou
a'A'AiJ.
~ou
Myou
UKOOOUVTU~
o~o'Aoy&iv oo<p6v &o~tV !:v nciv~a &!vat
Transliterated it reads:
ouk emou alia tou logou akousantas
homologein sophon estin hen panta einai.
On the surface this saying is in Greek and needs to be translated. Since
I have argued that surfaces are, like traditional Japanese packaging, an
integral part of the contents, they must be carefully and patiently undone.
Now to put Heraclitus's Greek into English is, up to a certain point, not
hard. Your Greek manual will tell you about the use of the accusative and
about various infinitives, and your Greek dictionaries will give you the
meaning of "listening," of "wise" (which you are already familiar with in
philosophy), and of "agree."
But then you look up logos. "Logos" is one of the tremendous words
of our tradition, to which it is, once again, my privilege to introduce you.
Without even looking it up, I can give you the following meanings: word
and speech, saying and story, tally and tale, ratio and relation, account
and explanation (that was the meaning which occurred in the word
"ichthyologist"), argument and discussion, reason and reasoning, collection and gathering, the word of God and the son of God. As you Jearn
Greek you will see what it is about the root-meaning of logos that makes
this great scope of significance possible.
But how are you to choose? You are caught in a vicious circle: Unless
�BRANN
91
you know what Heraclitus means by logos you cannot choose the right
English translation, and unless you discover the right English word you
cannot know what he means by his saying. However, sensible people find
ways to scramble themselves out of this bind. Try a meaning that makes
a good immediate sense: choose "reasoning."
Listening not to me but to my reasoning,
it is wise to agree that all things are one.
This yields a saying that is particularly pertinent to us, since it might
be posted over every seminar door. For though we must look into each
other's faces, we must not get stuck on personalities. Each seminar member
has a right to say: "Never mind me, answer my argument." Heraclitus is
introducing a great notion into the Western world here: Not who says it
matters but what is said.
But there is more signifying surface to the saying. Listen to its sound
and notice that in the second line the word homologein sounds like logos.
"Agree" is a good first meaning but it does not preserve the similarity of
sound. Homologein literally means "to say the same." Let me try that, and
for "my reasoning" I will substitute "the Saying."
If you listen not to me but to the Saying,
it is wise to say the same: that all things are one.
Now what sense does that make? What Saying? Whose saying other
than Heraclitus's own? Suppose the translation did make sense, then
Heraclitus is saying that there is a saying that can be heard beyond his
own, a speech to which we must listen, a speaking that it would be the
part of wisdom to echo in what we say. What impersonal speech could
that be? Heraclitus in fact tells us not what the logos is, but what it says,
for he bids us to say the same: "All things are one." What if this saying,
of which no human being is the author, were a power whose saying and
doing were one and the same? What if its speech were an act? Let me play
with a third, somewhat strange, version:
Once you have listened not to me but to the Gathering,
it is wise similarly to gather all things into one.
Here logos is translated as gathering or collection. It is the power that gathers
everything in the world into a unified whole, the organizing power we are
�92
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
invited to imitate by giving a comprehensive account of the universe in
speech. The logos speaks primarily; our logos becomes deep by imitating it.
I think by now the text has begun to draw us through its surface into
its depth. You can see that it demands of you the playful seriousness I mentioned at the beginning, a seriousness that calls out all your capacity for
careful attention to surface detail as well as your willingness to dive into
the depths.
Here I shall stop. But although I am ending, I am not finished- and
neither, of course, are you. If you have in fact listened not only to me but
also to my argument, and if you are possessed by the proper freshman spirit,
now is your moment, the part of the Friday night lecture that is the true
St. John's: the time for questions.
���
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 St. John's Review</em>
Description
An account of the resource
<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
thestjohnsreview
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
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.
92 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
The St. John's Review, 1989-90/3
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1989-1990
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Zuckerman, Elliott
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Stickney, Cary
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Routt, Deidre
Sachs, Joe
Brann, Eva T. H.
Dougherty, Janet A.
Locke, Patricia M.
Berns, Gisela
Schoener, Abraham
Maschler, Chaninah
Description
An account of the resource
Volume XXXIX, number three of The St. John's Review. Published in 1990.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_39_No_3_1989-1990
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
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
St. John's Review
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/678a157227ac50a25b6191eee0eb4767.pdf
93c4e0cbfd5ba865885365dd41489a39
PDF Text
Text
The St. John's Review
Volume XLII, number one (1993)
Editor
EllfDttZuckerman
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
Cary Stickney
John Van Doren
Robert B. WU!tamson
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Jack Hunt
The St. John's Review Is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's
College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Eva T. H. Brann,
Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 for
three Issues. Unsolicited essays, stories, poems, and reasoned letters are
welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's College, P.O.
Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back Issues are available, at
$5.00 per Issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
© 1993 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction In whole or
In
part Without permission Is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John's CoUege Print Shop
�Please note that this year, and for at least one year more, the
Review wlll be appearing semi-annually rather than three times
a year. Subscriptions wlll of course be adjusted so that what was
a year's subscription will still entitle the subscribers to three
Issues.
�Contents
1 . . . . . Seeing Through the Images:
Eva Brarm's World of Imagination
Dennis L. Sepper
21 ..... Joseph and Judah
Chantnah Maschler
41 ..... What is a What-is Question?
Joe Sachs
57 ..... "Words Should Be Hard" (Poem)
Elliott Zuckerman
59 ..... Anselm's Proslogion and its
Hegelian Interpretation
Adriaan Peperzak
Translated by Steven Werlin
79 ..... The Dialectic of Love in War and Peace
Randolph Perazzini
105 ..... Two Poems
Moira Russell
107 ..... Two Reviews
Eva T. H. Brann
111 . . . . . Crossword Contests
Decorations by M. C. Dodds
��Seeing Through the Images:
Eva Brann's
World of Imagination
by Dennis L. Sepper
At the outset of The World of the Imnginotion: Swn and Substance,•
Eva Brann explains how the project of the book originated:
In 1he Western tradition 1he imagination is assigned what might
best be called a pivotal function. It is placed centrally between 1he
faculties and intermediately between soul and world. Thus it bo1h
holds the soul together within and connects it to the objects
wi1hout. Yet the treatment given this great power even by habitually
definitive authors like Aristotle or Kant is tacitly unfinished, cursory, and problematic. The imagination appears to pose a problem
too deep for proper acknowledgment. It is, so to speak, 1he missing
mystery of philosophy. It was both 1he mystery and its neglect that
first drew me to 1he subject. (p. 3)
In the Preface Brann lists other motives for her Interest in Imagination. Beyond the odd neglect of Its mysteries by philosophy there Is
the recent vogue of imagery studies in cognitive psychology; her love
of fiction and the attendant wonder about how words are turned into
Imaginings; and "the doubly and triply enigmatic magic of the Imaginative life," the encompassing motive that led to the desire for a "delineation of the inner space into which the mental imagery Is, as it were,
• Eva T. H. Brann, The World ofthe Imagination: Sum and Substance (Savage,
Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991), x!v + 810 pp. References to It are
indicated in 1he tex! by page numbers enclosed In parentheses. The book Is
now avallable in paperback.
Professor Sepper is In 1he Department ofPhllosophy of the Universlzy of Dallas
in Irving, Texas.
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
painted, and a theory of Its reflection In the material Images of the
arts, particularly In paintings" (4).
These motives In effect articulate the structure of the book. Part
One Is dedicated to the history of philosophers' attempts to explicate
Imagination, Part Two to the chief phenomena and topics pursued by
twentieth-century psychological Investigations; this leads to Part
Three, In which Brann presents a three-fold logic/ ontology of Images
as real, mental, and Imaginary. Part Four treats questions of literary
Imagination; Five, the spaces of perceptual experience, of geometry and
physical modeling, and of the painter's Images. The last major division,
Part Six, discusses Imagination as worldly and world-making, especially In Its theological, public-political, and affective character, that
Is, In those aspects that direct It to life In a many-dimensioned world
of feeling, thought, and action.
Not the least of the book's achievements Is to organize a vast
amount of Information and literature that might otherwise scare off
beginning researchers, or, what would be worse, might lead them to
concentrate prematurely on just some part. The problem is that In
studies of Imagination a single approach cannot stand for the whole,
and the various contributions are so diverse and fragmentary and tend
to make so many presuppositions that one is In constant danger of
not even glimpsing the whole.
Yet anyone who has tried to assemble literature on the Imagination
knows that, at least at first glance, imagination appears to be among
the least neglected of subjects. Judging from the frequency and
prominence with which "Imagination" and Its related forms appear in
the titles of books and articles one Is tempted to say that it Is a very
popular topic. But by looking Into the contents we more often than
not find that these works are not really about Imagination In any
lmporlant sense. The problem Is that "Imagination" In the late twentieth century Is an attention-getter, a word loaded with almost wholly
positive overtones. It strikes us with admiration for artistic creativity
to read of the Imaginative VIsion of poet X or sculptor Y; we experience
anticipated satisfaction that a philosophic work brandishing Imaginative Reason will overcome the mincing small-mindedness of rationalism. We inwardly assent when anyone urges the cultivation of our
powers of Imagination, and we are easily brought to marvel at the
Imaginative Intensity of children, who (we believe) are richly endowed
with it. Yet If we were asked to give a reasoned argument for such
Impulses, we would probably discover that behind them lies less a
concrete understanding of what Imagination and Images are than a
�SEPPER
3
vague yearning for creativity, for visionary power, for transcending a
too mundane reality.
The historically minded will recognize traces of Romanticism In
these twentieth-century Impulses. To identifY them Is not to dismiss
them as false, however. Indeed, Brann, having taken a jaundiced view
of Romanticism, nevertheless remarks In the very last section of the
book ("Coda," p. 790) that "sober romanticism" Is a "perfectly acceptable term" for the "life centerecj on the imagination" that she proposes:
"a life in which the imagination is suspect except as it is seconded by
reflection and fulfilled in action, a life in which the imagination is not
worshiped as an autarchi!' source but understood as the enigmatic ·
conduit of visions."
The philosophical basis of The World of Imagination Is most concisely expressed in the Preface:
This book is frankly writien par/1 pris. It has a multiple thesis. Its
parts are these: There is an imagination; it is a faculty or a power;
spectfically it is a faculty for internal representations; these representations are image-like; therefore they share a certain character
with external images; in particular, like material images, they
represent absent objects as present; they do so by means of
resemblance. (5)
The sobriety of the romanticism announced in the coda Is grounded
here. The power or faculty called "imagination" Brann understands as
not essentially creative but recreative, or, more accurately, representational by way of resemblance. The object of imagining Is mental
images, which are like publicly visible Images. Accordingly, a great
deal of the book js devoted to understanding the power of imagination
by concentrating on the objectofthat power, on images, more precisely
on visual images. This Is true to the degree that at times it Is the image
even more than the imagination that is the real subject-matter of this
study.
But simply quoting from the beginning and end ofa book can falsifY,
subtly or worse, the meanings of an author. With Eva Brann's book,
we would thereby overleap the accomplishment of the nearly eight
hundred intervening pages: a compendium of the history and the
phenomena of the imagination, along with a significant attempt to
penetrate philosophically and psychologically the nature of images
and the power that produces them. The "sober romanticism" that she
espouses on page 790 Is hardly meant as a slogan, since every word
of her description has a qualification distilled from the preceding
investigation. Imagination is as central as the Romantics thought, but
�TilE ST.
4
JOHN'S REVIEW
not autonomous or autarchic, because It Is In need of being thought
out and sometimes lived out; and though It "sees," the source and
nature of the seeing Is puzzling, even mysterious.
1.
The positive notion of Imagination as creative Is a legacy of Romanticism, yet not just that, for although the precise filiations and Influences are In dispute there Is an ancestor tradition that goes back to
Neoplatonlsm and to the ecstatic and prophetic Imagination of medieval Islamic thinkers like Averroes; It passes through the Italian
Renaissance and Dante, for whom altafantasia and altotngegnoreach
to the threshold of divine illumination. Indeed, this tradition directly
enters Romanticism through F. W. Schelling's appropriation of
Giordano Bruno.
A Platonic origin for this tradition might at first seem an unlikely
prospect, especially if we are mindful of the apparently devastating
critique of mimetic art at the conclusion of the RepubUc, where Images
are described as several times removed from truth because the maker
of Images deals In derivative simulacra rather than ultimate reality.
Still, from other passages in the RepubUc (and elsewhere In the
dialogues-for example, In the Sophist), especially from the question
that occurs to many readers-by Book Ten of the RepubUc If not
sooner-of whether It Is not possible after all for artists to have direct
access to the Ideas, there Is justification for a more positive Platonic
conception of Imagination. From the simile of the Divided Line above
all: for although images strictly speaking appear on the lowest of Its
four divisions (images of physical things, the physical things themselves, the mathematlcals, and the Ideas), the different levels serve as
images or representations of one another, and there is in general an
ontological relationship of Imaging that ties together the line as a
whole. Viewed from this perspective the Divided Line shows not the
unreality of Images but the ontological dynamics of Imaging and the
sharing of reality on many levels that characterize the Good (for which
the Line itselfis an extended image). If Plato presents images variously
as intrinsically false, as representing an Other, and as standing for
the whole of reality, it is not surprising that quite different notions of
Imagination can claim descent from him.
In contrast, Aristotle has a more carefully circumscribed understanding of images and imagination, also more narrowly psychological; yet because of a crucial provision In the psychology they play a
central, indeed essential, role in human knowing and being. In the
�SEPPER
5
third book of De Anima he remarks the existence of phantasia, a power
of soul that retains the effects (or aftereffects) of sensations in the
absence of the sensed objects. A little later, after his discussion of
agent and potential intellect, he makes an astounding and pregnant
claim: that there Is no thinking without phantasms. We also find out
that phantasms are Important to the practical life. since desire often
aims at Its object through their Intermediacy.
On the one hand it is easy to understand the point of these
affirmations. The Aristotelian conception of knowing has us derive
everything Intelligible from the sensible, and accordingly Imagination
can be seen as a middle power which is not dependent on the
immediate presence of sensible objects and which can perform a kind
of distillation of what individual sensations have provided. On the
other hand, Insofar as we conceive the best human activity as the
contemplation of the highest, noncorporeal being, and insofar as
understanding is in and through noncorporealintelligible species, the
doctrine that all thinking requires phantasms seems to tie thought
too closely to a remnant of the physical realm.
In later Greek and Latin Antiquity and in the Islamic and Latin
Middle Ages Aristotle's discussions of imagination, common sense,
and memory were gradually expanded Into a doctrine of internal
senses having corporeal locations in the brain (specifically in the
cerebral ventricles, that is, the four spaces or chambers within the
enfolding hemispheres of the brain). Any simplified presentation of the
internal senses doctrine risks distortions and historical falsifications,
not just of the exact delimitation of their functions but even of their
names; here It Is enough to say that the internal senses accounted for
the common field of sensation where the deliverances of the different
sense organs are compared and contrasted (the common sense), for
the various functions of remembering and recalling contingent experience (memory in general), for the ability to recall and recombine
tmages (under the names tmagination and phantasia), and even for
the mind's ability to perform a first classification or identification of
individuals under universal terms (called cogitation or estimation).
These internal, organically located, protocognltive powers served the
preparation and perfection of the phantasm that Aristotle had identified as necessary for thought.
Until the early seventeenth century this schema was a staple of
psychological theory so widespread that It is virtually Impossible to
find theories of Imagination that are independent of it; for the same
reason it is usually impossible to trace the particular sources of the
schema that actually influenced individual thinkers. By the end of
�6
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that century, however, it had vtrtually disappeared. It was replaced In
large part by doctrines of Impressions acquired through external and
Internal processes conceived In accordance with the new science, and
by the various corresponding doctrines of ideas. In the Cartesian and
generally rationalist traditions the Imagination and memory, closely
tied as they are to the senses, are understood as tending to obscure
the truth-which Is, after all, proper to Intellect. Indeed, one can no
longer depend on images as having any cognitive reliability whatsoever, since they can easily represent nonexistent things, and since
even when they do represent an existing thing there Is no Intrinsic
assurance that they actually resemble it. In the empiricist traditions
the recombtnative capabilities of Imagination and memory constantly
threaten to tum cognition Into fantasy. Imagtnation and memory must
preserve the origtnal sense Impressions as unchanged as possible and
must reproduce, compare, and associate them accurately If error Is to
be avoided.
The powers of phantasia, imaginatio, and the other tntemal senses
were thereby divided and redistributed within a new natural scientific
framework, and from this division and redistribution was born the
modem conception, or rather conceptions, of Imagination. Insofar as
imagination simply reproduced, usually In weakened form, the deliverances of the senses It was Imitative; Insofar as it divided and
recomposed those deliverances It was in danger of leading the mind
away from truth Into fantasy. Even the empiricist thinkers who taught
that all thinking was to be understood In terms of impressions and
Images had to find ways of distinguishing some cognltively reliable
remnants from what was merely fanciful (when they did not ultimately
surrender to the apparent impossibility of finding such reliable remnants). What these modem developments left us with was the division
oflmagination tnto receptive and productive kinds: receptive imagination provides building blocks for thinking and understanding, whereas
productive Imagination makes fancies. The latter might offer entertainment but not objective truth; the former, although It yields materials for cognitive constructions, Is no longer based on an intelligibility
or transparency of phantasms that would allow one to posit a resemblance to existing things, much less abstract from them an tntelligible
species. Thus did modem philosophy both cognitively and ontologicaliy devalue the image and the power of productng it. Even in thinkers
for whom the Imagination plays a crucial role, or where a slgntflcant
attempt has been made to overcome the dichotomy of productive and
reproductive imagtnations-I am thinking especially of phenomenology and Kant-lmagtnation Is as much taken for granted as explained,
�SEPPER
7
so that the reader Is left with the work of sorting out not just the details
oflts operations but also its foundational principles.
2.
I offer these historical remarks not as anything new; the reader can
find a much more detailed and historically thorough account (though
without my emphasis 'on the doctrine of internal senses) in the first
part of Brann. Rather, it is here, in these Platonic and Aristotelian
origins and the modem transformation, that we can quickly gain a
sense of the range of issues raised and touched by imagination:
cognition, creation, art, error, human psychology, the nature ofbeing.
And it is here that one can gain a sense of what Brann has set out to
do and what she has in large part accomplished: to give a view of
imagination and its images at once ample and focused, at once rich
and common-sensical, so that we might defend imagination against
the slights and belittlements that obscure its powers of enabling
human beings to inhabit a world, as well as against the exaggerations
that posit it as a faculty of world-making.
Influential streams of twentieth-century philosophy and psychology deny the very existence of imagination, in method when not in
fact. 'I)rpical here would be Gilbert Ryle's denial of internality in The
Concept ofMind, which treats imagining as a kind of make believe, a
role-playing that does not entail mental images; and, in psychology,
behaviorism and the streams within cognitive psychology that propositionalize imagination. The approach of the final chapters of Part
One and that of Part Two is largely determined by this negative
philosophical and psychological background. Brann's goal is to show
that the experimental evidence rigorously gathered by psychology in
the past decades provides solid support for affirming the existence of
images.
The ''hard data" about imagining that Brann presents will have to
be accounted for by any future theories. Those unfamiliar with the
experiments will be fascinated, and every other reader will be impressed by the quantity of literature that she has mastered. In one
experiment, for example, subjects are presented with pictures of
three-dimensional solids and asked whether they represent the same
solid differently oriented or two different solids. The response time
turns out to be proportional to the amount of mental rotation at a
constant rate that one would have to execute in trying to make the
pictured objects coincide. This and similar experiments strongly
suggest that the subjects are not merely sorting propositions but
�8
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
having and manipulating mental images. In another experiment the
subject Is instructed to study line-drawings of different-sized animals
drawn so as not to strtctly preserve their relative slzes (for example, a
rabbit would be middle-slzed rather than tiny In comparison with an
elephant). The subject is then told to imagine the pictured animals in
the space In front of him or her, getting closer and closer, until the
image begins to overflow the edges of the subject's field of Imaginative
space. Finally, the subject 1,; asked "to take a 'mental walk' toward the
images and to place a real'trtpod at that distance from a real wall at
which they judged the Imaged animal to be" when the overflow
occurred. 'The result was that the various distances at overflow were
roughly proportional to the real-life slzes of the different animals"
(244). Again, the Image-thesis is consistent with the experiment In a
way that propositions are not; moreover, the experiment shows that
Imaginative space has a basic resemblance to perceptual space and
that familiar Images have a strong connection to the knowledge and
memory of real relations In the world of experience.
Given this kind of data It may be hard to conceive that some
theorists dispute the existence of images and reduce them to propositional form. Accordtng to proposltionalism, when we describe ourselves as having Images, we mean nothing more than that we are
disposed to utter a not necessarily well-ordered set of statements
describing properties that we interpret as belonging to an Image. If I
say that I am Imagining my son asleep, I am perhaps actually
predisposed to make statements like "His eyes are closed," 'The
blanket is gathered up around his chest," 'The muscles of his face are
relaxed and he looks angelic," and so forth. All the apparatus oflogic,
sets, and linguistic theories assists this proposltionallzation of imagination.
The reason that this kind of theory has plausibility is doubtless
that for most people dayttme imagination is typically not very vivid
and distinct; furihermore, as imaginative attention shifts, one image
is very easily displaced by another Image or image aspect, or even by
a "statement." For example, I cannot say that when I first thought of
my son sleeping I visuallzed the blanket, the relaxed muscles, and the
like. First I sought to conceive an appropriate object of Imagining,
settled upon my son, then his sleeping-but only at this point did I
tum to images, and even then the Images (if such exist) were progressively adjusted by my attention and interests. My search was more
logical-discursive than imagistic. And once I settled upon my son with
eyes closed and blanket drawn up to his chest, I did not immediately
�9
SEPPER
picture the blanket that is his favorite--indeed, I did not picture it at
all until I was already writing this sentence!
Brann ably takes sides on the argument between imagists and
anti-imagists while being fair to both. The lesson that she draws from
the experiments and the theorizing of psychological science is not so
much that the existence of mental images is proved as that they make
very plausible the claim, advanced as well by common sense, that we
reaUy do imagine images. Western philosophy and science have almost
always associated ima'ges with the channnels of sense, so insofar as
we can show that Images as Imagined are governed by principles and
parameters found In sense we have good grounds for the existence
thesis. Although expedients might be Invoked to save propositionalism, they would be ad hoc and would have to appeal to yet deeper
mechanisms to account for the temporal functioning of imagination.
in cases like these--they are abundant-the advantage is overwhelmingly with common-sense folk psychology, which "naively" holds that
Imagining really does involve having mental images.
3.
In the first part of her book Brann reviews the opinions of the learned
on imagination; in the second part she establishes the existence of
Images. She goes on in the third to describe their nature. Part Three
presents the logic of images-which is simultaneously the ontology of
images-according to three kinds: real images (that is, real depictions
of real objects), mental images (unreal pictures of real objects), and
imaginary images (mental images of unreal objects).
"Real" is not intended approvingly, nor Is "unreal" derogatory.
Brann takes the real In a (Latinly) literal sense, as meaning
'"thinghood,' and material thinghood at that" (387). The metaphysics
of the image as founded in the principles of Otherness and Sameness
is explained by following Plato's Sophist. As usual Brann does. not
brush aside the unresolved difficulties of the argument and acknowledges that, as so often in the controversies about imagination, we are
faced with another divide on the question of existence of"such beings
as Images, meaning that some things, natural and artificial, display
the look of other things without being as fully what those others are"
(395). Her positive thesis, once the kind of being that resembles
another is affirmed, Is that we can develop a significant understanding
of a logic of pictures and picturing. Not a theory of picturing in
language (language is assertive, pictures are not), but in Images,
pictorial images.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
10
This logic has boih Internal and external aspects. Internally an
image has truih-value, because It can reveal someihing about what it
depicts and can correctly correspond to ihe visual facts; yet to be fully
true !he picture must be not just shown but also asserted, even if only
by having a title. Pictures always have a point of view, whereas
statements are not ordinarily perspectival-ihey try to state simply
how things are In lhemselves. Propositions follow syntactical rules,
but !here are no such rules for pictures; ''whatever markmaking Is
physically possible and cru1 gain acceptance is allowed" (40 1). Pictures
do not have discrete and countable subjects and predicates; ihus it Is
often not easy to say what a picture Is "about." Propositions use
general names, whereas ihe figures of a picture are always concrete
and determinate and usually lnok Uke somelhlng. Propositions are
digital, pictures are analog. Propositions can be put togeiher by
determinate connectives, but ihe concatenation of pictures Is much
more open-ended and indeterminate In meaning. Moreover, pictures
cannot be negated per se,lhat Is, one cannot concretely and positively
Image negations and contradictions.
Externally Brann argues for a syncretism oflheories ofhowplctures
represent originals. She presents four major lheories concerning lhe
object of representation: lhe causal (referring to lhe history of production),ihe aulhorial (referring to Intention), !he inferential (emphasizing
lhe pictorial competence of ihe observer), and ihe projective (basing
Itself on a lheoryofhowihe original is projected against a background).
Theories of ihe representational relation Itself she schematlzes Into
lhree types: lhe make-believe, based on socially established and
internalized rules of language use, ihe denotative, which holds !hat
pictures refer to originals as words do to lhlngs (symbolism), and lhe
resemblant, which comes In varieties speclfied according to ihe many
ways of producing resemblance. The overriding concern of her argument, however, is not to be eclectic but to showihat, once ihe existence
of images is affirmed and !heir resemblance to some original acknowledged, !here Is ample space for all ihese different lheories to make
!heir specific contributions to understanding images and imagination.
4.
Parts One lhrough Three of The World of Imagination move from
general philosophical iheorles of imagination lhrough psychological
lheories and phenomena to a logic of the nature of Images. Once it is
established that Images are and what !hey are, Parts Four lhrough
Six discuss ihe evocation, lhe making, and the use of Images In lhe
�SEPPER
11
context of their spaces and their capacity for allowing us to re-view or
re-envislon the world. Part Four examines the relations between
language and Images In epic, poetry, novels, myths, and fantasy; Part
Five, the Inner space of Imagining, the space of geometrical envisioning
and physical modeling, and the aesthetic space of painting; and Part
Six, the functions of imagination In theology, In private and public
visions and memories, and In Its attachment to place and to feeling.
The first three parts display Brann's deep sense of objectivity. She
submits herself to the task that the subject matter Imposes and carries
It out with energy, care, and fairness. In the last three we witness In
addition the stronger emergence of her philosophical and even personal preferences (though, as she grants at the beginning of the book,
her taking of positions Is implicit all along). But this hardly Impairs
the book's value. The discussions of literary, aesthetic, theological,
and political uses of Imagination are indeed shaped by her experience
and preferences, but few readers will be able to pretend to anything
ampler or deeper. Even where one can quickly think up alternative
emphases and different examples, the occasions are rare that she can
be accused of onesidedness.
In reading many passages I could not help feeling admiration for
the beauty and rightness of Brann's description. Her evocation of the
scene In the Odyssey In which Penelope Interviews the still-disguised
Odysseus Is a brief masterpiece of engaged Interpretation that
illustrates with supreme clarity the theoretical point that passages of
literature must often be pictured in order to be appreciated.
Yet It Is precisely when Brann so strongly emphasizes the primacy
of visual Images that I begin to feel an uneasiness. Not that she
oversimplifies things. For example, the scene from the Odyssey Is not
used to prove that literature simply translates seen things Into words
while reading does the reverse. As she remarks at the end of the first
chapter of Part Four:
So far In this chapter I have been concerned with literary Imagining
as It has Spectftcally to do with envisioning, be It of the figures or
the structure of a text. The objection will be raised that the "literary
Imagination• has other, more peculiarly literary function$, particularly the narration of events and the development of the Inner
characteristics of people, places, and objects. I readily grant that
all these are the business of Imagination In the wide sense. My
project In this book Is, however, to atlend to the imagination In Its
root-sense, as visual Imitation. That is why the power of verbal
Imagining to Imitate, within Its limits, the visual world, real or
Imaginary, Is here the center of attention. (486-87)
�12
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The "root-sense" of visual imitation, she also contends, Is connected
to "a temperamental leaning toward the spatial aspects of literature,
toward a panoramic visual contemplation In preference to an essentially temporal narrative development, [wWch] ... betoken[s] a sort of
pre-political conservatism, conservatism In the literal sense, a liking
for the timeless looks of things" (486).
I noted earlier that In some ways this book Is more about Images
than about Imagination, T/tf! World ofimages rather than Imagination.
One can, I tWnk, take Issue with this "temperamental leaning'' and
assert that in Its enthusiasm for Images as timeless looks it underplays
something else that Is Important. In the ordinary sense of the word,
Imagination has more to do with the power of Imagining than the ol?fect
of Imagining; !tis the use of Images, not having them, thatls crucial,
and In use Images or phantasms (to use the ancient term) are not
Intrinsically more spatial than temporal. An animal that can retain
and recall visual images, the fixed looks of things, does not thereby
become an imagining animal. Having such a power Is a material
condition of Imagination, but one also has to add to It a formal cause,
the ability to take an image as an image. That means that a being
unable to take an Image as an Image would have hallucinations, not
Imagination. Such a creature would have the capacity for seeing but
not for recognizing a difference between appearance and reality, or
between original appearances and their reactualization.
Imagination is therefore a way of taking Images. What a visual
Image Is Is a semblance of a sensation (It Is sensation-like without
being a sensation). Although one might well grasp a great deal more
from the example of visual images than of other kinds, this taking of
a semblance as a semblance Is not Intrinsically visual. My memocy of
a tune Is a semblance of a sensation just as much as a remembered
image of my father's face, as Is also an imagined utterance of a
sentence like "I can Imagine someone speaking, even myself, as easily
as, perhaps more easily than, I can conjure up a picture of a face."
The Intentional act Is as crucial as the phantasm. Imagination, to
exist, requires both; or rather It requires the semblance of sensation
taken as semblance. This taking of the semblance occurs against the
background of the organic being's experience and so at least in this
sense shares In temporality.
The tradition that extends privilege to the visual sense as the
paradigm of sensation Is highly plausible, of course, and as long as
one maintains the spirit of analogy between visual and nonvisual
imagination the paradigm Is quite legitimate. This tradition has a
decided advantage thatls already indicated in the title ofBrann's book:
�SEPPER
13
the images of vision present us not merely with images but with a
context as well, with the background of the visual world. Things seen
and things visually Imagined appear withto a space, a context, a
world. Taste, smell, and touch cannot provide anything comparable.
Sound can; an argument can be made, however, that It provides a
world that Is not sufficiently determinate. A forest at dawn Is rich In
sounds, but the majority of what would be present to vision Is silent
and so does not appear. On the other hand, sound is in some cases
too close to the nature rof Inward experience to allow a detachment
sufficient for Imaging. Music appeals to a memoxy for sound, but
(apart from madrlgallsm and program music) It does not per se Image
anything. Still, a remembered tune does resemble and Image the
original performance.
At the outset Brann noted that she was excluding from treatment
nonvisual and In particular auditoxy lmagexy (13-14). The grounds are
several. Audltoxy lmagexy may Involve "an actual performance, a
voiceless exercise of the larynx, a physiological, not just a neurological
event." Auditoxy lmagexy Is non-mimetic and temporal, but It also has
a spatiality about It (I presume this means that any lessons it might
teach can be approached through the more intrinsic spatiality ofvisual
imagexy). The lmagexy of sound has been less well studied than the
visual; and treating It in any detail would end by raising even harder
enigmas than are dealt with In the existing book (14-15).
Putting aside the last point, one might well find the others arguable. (a) That the auditoxy is so close to actual performance may mean
that the auditoxy Is closer to being part of the external world and the
active life than is the visual; but then an ampler treatment might have
helped illuminate the transition from mind to world that is important
to all the practical uses of Imagination highlighted in Parts Four and
Six. (b) Sound Is as much a part of dreams and hallucinations as Is
sight, and It Is at least conceivable that lmaglnaxy conversation Is
more our constant companion In evexyday life than Is lmaginaxy
picturing. (c) Perhaps the salient point about the near-performance of
auditoxy Imagining is that It ordinarily Is inhibited; moreover, given
Brann's penchant for allowing common sense Its due I don't see why
the neurological situation or brain state ought to carxy much weight
in deciding what Is proper to Imagination. And (d) not evexy auditoxy
imagining can be conceived as an Incipient performance, for although
I may Inhibit humming the four-note theme of Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony when It comes to mind there is no way that I can give a
laxyngeal performance of the many simultaneous Instrumental voices
that I can, with effort, put before my mind. Indeed, it seems likely to
�14
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
me that for the average person engaged In daytime Imagining It is
easier to produce vivid sounds than vivid sights.
Excluding sound Images because they are Intrinsically temporal
and derivatively spatial, whereas visual images are the reverse, also
appears problematic. One of Brann's chief witnesses is Kant, who
although he gave priority to temporality In actual experience claimed
that temporal consciousness has space as an ultimate condition (94;
cf. 586). Brann's discussiqn of this essential point seems unjustifiably
thin. And well it might. as dependent as It is on Kant's "Refutation of
Idealism," a passage added in the second edition of the Critique ofPure
Reason. This is not the place to argue Kant Interpretation; still. one
needs to point out that Kant apparently sensed the weakness of this
argument even as the second edition was In press, since he inserted
emendations In the preface. Moreover, the controlling element of the
argument Is the contention that "all determination of time presupposes something permanent in perception" (Critique of Pure Reason,
B 275); for Kant this permanent thing has to be outside consciousness,
since the concept of substance is based solely on matter (B 278). It is
thus not spatiality thatls atlssue but enduring substance. Some Kant
scholars consider this passage to be in tension, If not contradiction,
with the rest of the Critique; but, putting that aside, it Is clear that
there are many unresolved problems susceptible to attack. One might,
for instance, side with Descartes against Kant (and Brann) and argue
that the first experience of permanency comes In the discovery of the
self-evidencing reality of one's self In the failed attempt to doubt one's
own existence.
It is not my Intention to side with Descartes or to imply that Brann
has gotten Kant wrong, for I believe that the Issues are still open and
perhaps not even adequately understood. Nevertheless, it seems to me
that the temporality ofimaglnation and the imaginative role of sounds,
and especially oflanguage, need fuller attention. Here the better guide
is likely to be Hegel's Phi.Wsophy of Mind (the third pari of the
Encyclopedia ofPhi/osophical Sciences), of which Brann remarks that
"there is no assessment of the Imaginative function in the work of
knowing that is as grand and yet as just" (1 07). I would add: not simply
in the work of knowing, but also in the work of re-envisioning and
re-forming the world, In that temporal playing out of possibilities
which is the subject of the second half of her book.
Hegel's treatment of imagination culminates in language. Language
as spoken is a phenomenon that is in many ways as rich as the visual
Imagination, and one can argue that some of the phenomena that
Brann deals with, In particular literary imagination, are inconceivable
�SEPPER
15
without it. I would contend that reading is not primarily a function of
visual imagination but of aural instead. An obvious rejoinder would
be that language is too closely involved with concepts to represent
imagination in its simplest form. Yet the visual image as timeless look
seems to me too simple to rise fully to the reality of imagination.
Indeed, I think that the "timelessness" is the result of abstraction
rather than an essential character of imagination. To illustrate by a
contrast of images, the fundamental object of imagination is less like
a timeless picture than a "film clip," from which we derive the
possibilities of both a static spatiality and a connected temporal
development.
Let me suggest here that the genus of imagination is the repotentiation of appearance. I apologize for this ungainly phrase, but at least
until we have a more naturalized, habitual way of speaking about it
something like this will have to do. The term does not in itself imply
representation; representation is one of the basic functions of imagination, but it is not exclusive to it, and representation itself falls
into the larger class of this repotentiation of appearance. The notion
includes both the origin in appearance and the power to re-evoke the
appearance in implicit or explicit relationship to an original real-world
object or to other appearances. In this sense the phantasm of which
Aristotle spoke is not simply a recalled or regenerated sense-image,
much less just a visual image called to mind in the absence of a sensed
object, but an enriched and prepared intermediate originating in
sensation and developed as an intention and an occasion of thought.
From this position one might eventually proceed to conclusions like
these: Although the Romantics were wrong in asserting that imagination made worlds, it is true that it can rehearse worlds, and that this
rehearsal is for the most part in Implicit comparison with the world of
existence. The images we form are like transparencies that can overlie
the world, or they are projections that tske the real and extrapolate
potentialities that are not, or not fully, realized. And it is precisely
because of the resemblance function of images that the work of the
imagination does not need the constant presence of the plane of
reality, because it carries significant, even essential elements of that
world with it. A reader of Brarm's Conclusion will recognize that this
is precisely where she arrives, the conclusion with which she tskes
the sum and identifies the substance of imagination. Here I could not
agree with her more. It is a real (and in some ways pioneering)
achievement to have structured the book so that every chapter is
interesting in its own right while helping to build up the final thesis
that is so briefly stated in the Conclusion. (I in fact recommend that
�TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
16
readers tum to It Immediately after finishing the introduction). Imagination understood and shown as a transparency laid over reality
more adequately approaches the essence of the matter than the
vartous philosophical and psychological traditions have managed In
more than two thousand years.
5.
Even ifBrann's use ofKant is questionable, his argument nevertheless
points In the right direction: that experience presupposes the existence ofwhat endures. What endures seems to me not so much matter
or space as world, which is precisely Brann's ultimate frame of
reference for imagination. The world, In turn, is the rather mysterious
unity of a manifold that has the dimensions of both space and time.
And spatial images, to give Brann her due, have the advantage of
embodying a multitude of determinate relations simultaneously
withtn a relatively fixed framework or space that Is a surrogate for the
real world.
Nowhere does this aspect of Brann's argument appear more
strongly than in Pari Five, "Depletion: The Theater of Imaging." It
begins with the assertion of an Inner vision (intuition) that has as its
field of play Inner space, which comes In three versions, the perceptual, the geometric, and the Imaginative. They are spaces that possess
strong analogical and logical connections to one another.
Perceptual space Is closely tied to perceptual memory, the most
basic form of reproductive imagination; the second, geometric one Is
a place of attenuated perceptions where "the deliverances of direct
vision and the insights of the Intellect find each other" (598). Brann
contends that It Is the three-dimensional Euclidean form of geometric
space that Is the space of our mathematical imaging; It Is contingently
three-dimensional (stnce we can in prtnciple conceive that there might
well have been more or fewer dimensions to our spatial experience),
but essentially Euclidean. This contention, far from expresstng another temperamental preference, is based on a mathematical principle: among the many geometries for which we have consistent
mathematical systems, only Euclidean space preserves proportionalIty between similar geometric figures, or rather it is only In Euclidean
space that geometrical slmilartty is possible. Imaging based in resemblance could have no other kind of geometric and experiential field.
And It Is on the basis of a space that preserves proportional relations
that we can build physical models crucial to the natural sciences. The
�SEPPER
17
richness of analogical relations that it preserves even allows us to use
spatial images to model the realm of the mental.
Part F1ve further defends the thesis that imaging is based on
resemblance by arguing that pictures and paintings are imitations of
mental images, imagination-images. The thesis is developed chiefly by
way of claiming that "the great occidental and oriental traditions [of
painting] seem to be at heart phenomenalistic" (670). Paintings simultaneously simulate their objects and reveal them. Paintings are thus
"doubly images: They are physically based images of mental originals,
which are in turn memory-images of real or fictional originals," a state
of affairs that "permits the most straightforward account of the enigma
of painting: that a loss in verisimilitude is often a gain in verity" (673).
In a book that is full of moments of beauty one of the most beautiful
is the example that follows, the Old Stone Age cave paintings of
Lascaux, which provide "a psychological training ground for the right
responses to vital appearances by means of vivid visual imagery. If
so-if it was in fact vital that these apparitions should live in memory-their unsurpassable beauty turns out to be of the essence. If
beauty is indeed in essence memorable visibility, the magic of such
visions is not primitive but primordial" (675).
Parts Four and Six are so detailed in their historical accounts and
so rich in their panorama of phenomena of the imagination that they
deserve an extended treatment all their own. Here I will note simply
that the example ofLascaux embodies a principle repeatedly exemplified there, that in literature and in the various public and private uses
of imagination we see displayed its power of re-envisioning the world.
And at the heart of this principle is the basic phenomenon of imagination, transparency, to which Brann devotes her attention in the
conclusion.
She begins with an epigraph drawn from Victor Hugo: ''The universe
is an appearance corrected by a transparence" [773). Brann's initial
comment ls worth quoting in full:
In the philosophical part of this study I considered the productive
function of the imagination in constituting a koowable world, and
in the psychological part I reviewed Its reproductive role in cogoitively indispensable processes of visualization. I went on in the
logical part to analyze the constitution of images, and in the literary
and spatial parts I returned to the imagination as a power for
picturtog words and a capacity for shaping configurations. But the
last part was largely devoted to the Imagination as a world-making
agency. This activity begins to an Inner space with visitations rather
than exertions: it Is antecedent to the "labor by which reveries
become works of art," in Baudelaire's words. To this internal,
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
18
unlabored work of the imagination can be attributed our most
specifically human mission: to remake the world imaginatively. An
ortginary, world-constituting imagination plays its role in the blind,
arcane abyss beneath consciousness. The artful, poetic imagination
is embodied In overt, visible works before our eyes. But the worldrevising, world-emending imagination of which I am here speaking
projects an Inner world onto the external environment and elicits a
second appearance from the visible world. This imaginative world
is neither so interior as, to lack visibilily nor so external as to be
devoid of soul. (774)
,
To change the image but not the point, one might say that imagination is always at least implicitly biplanar: it sees one thing as a
projection of another, either in the same space of experience (for
example, when we project a sphere onto a plane in three-dimensional
Euclidean space) or between different spaces (when we project a
geometrical schematlzation of a physical situation, or when we analogize an intellectual process with corporeal images). In this sense it
does not matter what the nature of the image is, so that its being
intrinsically either spatial or visual Is not essential to its imaginative
use. What does matter is that one Is able to move in and between both
the planes.
6.
Although I take exception to the central preference in Brann's conception of Imagination, and though there are many particulars with which
I might quarrel in an even more extensive discussion, I can nevertheless say that these things do not greatly affect the value and importance of the book, for four reasons. First, as I remarked earlier, the
vtsual image, more readily and more fully than other kinds of image,
carries with It the possibilities of the world of appearance. Second,
whatever the status of the visual image, most of the claims Brann
makes about imagination are analogically transferrable to nonvisual
and extravisual Imagining. Third, her argument and tone are models
of moderation; she does not push arguments further than they can be
legitimately carried, and she remains fatr even in refutations. Fourth,
the book demonstrates the author's constant skill at making the
phenomena of image and imagination shine through the words so that
readers might see them for themselves.
This "Praise ofthe Imagrnation," as the Preface calls it, amply fulfills
the threefold result Brann hoped for: it is a book to read for the
�SEPPER
19
attraction of its matter, a compendium to consult for Information, and
a text for study in a course or seminar (4-5). Doubtless there will be
further disputes about its value and completeness In this or that
respect, for Instance whether the seven exclusions she made---some
"regretfully, others with unregenerate glee"-were all justified
(postmodem interpretations, the traditions of the Near and Far East,
imaginings produced by hallucinogens, the imagination of occult pmctices, political and commercial image-manipulation, non-visual imagery, and the psychodyniunlcs of image-formation and -connection); but
it is also beyond doubt that concerning the topic imagination the work
will serve as a source-book, or rather the source-book, for the next
generation.
It will not be a bad thing if people look upon The World of the
Imagination: Swn and Substance as a kind of resource or reference
work, something that its length alone assures. But it would be a shame
if its compendiousness deterred them from actually reading it. By just
consulting it or scavenging they would miss the best part: that in
attempting a genuine conspectus of images and imagination, the
author has synthesized her experience, the experience of a lifettme.
The result manifests what can be called by no more appropriate name
than wisdom. Let us be grateful for it; let us profit from it, so that we
might ultimately experience and know those insights of imagination
that (to quote Brann's concluding works) "convey at each return a
coalescence of meaning and appearance that the ever-available external phenomena forever lack," that "shape the imaginative life as a
prelude to action, an incitement to reflection, and an intimation of
paradise" (798).
�20
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�I
Joseph and Judah
Chaninah Maschler
.. .It cannot be but an industrious and judicious
comparing of place with place must be a singular
help for the right understanding of scriptures.
George Herbert, The Country Parson.
This lecture Is a brief commenl:aty on Genesis, chapters 37-50. These
fourteen chapters! hold the story of Joseph and his brothers, how
they, who were the twelve sons of Jacob by four different women (see
e.g.46:8), became the Children of IsraeJ,2 ancestors of the collection
of tribes who, as the next four books of the Pentateuch will show, after
four hundred years of slavery In Egypt (Exodus 12:40; cf Genesis
15: 13) and for1y years of wandering In the desert (Numbers 14,
Deuteronomy 1:3) became constituted as one people under one law. 3
What I chiefly hope to show Is how the concluding chapters of
Genesis4 comment on the conditions for Israelite and-who can
tell?-perhaps, eventually, human, solidarity. What! value In the story
Is Its truthfulness. The over-all message seems to be this: There Is no
"final solution" to the problems of human rivalry and envy. But the
reason for this tendency to human strife Is not that hule ("matter" or
"mother") Is refractory, but that hunian beings are. There may,
nonetheless, be '1nterim solutions." Acknowledging the need that
human groups have of both a Joseph and a Juda!I Is among these
Interim solutions. 5
Before proceeding to some comments on this text, I had better
remind you of the outline of the story.
Joseph-the first-born, 6 long-awaited,7 son of his father's favorite
wife, Rachel, the woman his father Jacob had loved at first sightS-is
so much hated by his ten half-brothers that they mean to kill him. By
a curious series of accidents, Joseph does not die. Instead, he Is sold
Into slavery In Egypt. In Egypt, he starts out being a house slave to
one of Pharaoh's courtiers, Potiphar by name. But before long Joseph
rises to a position not unlike that which he had held In his father's
house, second In command, becoming steward to Potiphar and superChan!nah Maschler Is a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This lecture
was giVen at the college In November. 1992.
�22
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Intending all the doings on Potiphar's estate (39:4).
Potiphar's wife develops a fancy for the handsome Hebrew slave9
and trtes to seduce him (39:7). Joseph resists her (39:8-10). Mme
Potiphar, unsurprisingly, denounces Joseph to her husband for attempted rape (39: 16-18). Very suprlslngly, Potiphar, Instead of having
Joseph executed, or at least mutilated, puts him In jail (39:20). In jail
too Joseph finds favor with his superior, the chief jailer. Joseph again
becomes the second In command (39:23).
While Joseph Is thus ihcarcerated It happens one morning, three
days before Pharaoh's birthday, that Joseph notices that two fellowprisoners, men who had previously been highly placed courtiers to
Pharaoh but who had fallen out of favor, namely, His Majesty's Chief
Cup-Bearer and His Majesty's Chief Baker, look downcast. When
Joseph asks the jailed courtiers what Is troubling them they report
that they have dreamed dreams and feel the lack of an onelrocritic.
Joseph,while disclaiming expertise In the matter of dream Interpretation (what he says Is: "Don't Interpretations belong to God? Tell me,
please," 40:8), construes the dreams as foretelling that both men's lots
are about to change-the Chief Cup-Bearer will In three days be
restored to favor and resume his task of handing the cup to Pharaoh;
the Chief Baker will In three days be beheaded. What Joseph foretells
comes to pass: Pharaoh uses the occasion of the royal birthday
festivities, which call for a gathering of all his court, to reinstate his
butler and to execute his baker.
Two full years after the reinstatement of the butler and the execution of the baker, thus on the night preceding the royal birthday and
the attendant festive gathering of the court, Pharaoh himself dreams
a dream:
He was standing beside the Nile, when out of the Nile came seven
cows, handsome and sturdy, and grazed In the reed grass. But right
behind them, seven other cows, ugly and gaunt, came up out of the
Nile ....And the ugly gaunt cows ate up the seven handsome sturdy
cows. Then Pharaoh awoke.
He went back to sleep and dreamed a second time: Seven ears of
grain, solid and healthy, grew on a single stalk. But close behind
them sprouted seven other ears, thin and scorched by the east wind.
And the seven thin ears swallowed up the seven solid and full ears.
Then Pharaoh woke up: It had been a dream.
(Throughout this lecture I use E. A. Speiser's translation, slightly
modiljling It on a few occasions, the one exception being Judah's
speech In chapter 44, where I use the translation of Eric I.
Lowenthal.)
�MASCHLER
23
When, the morning after, none of the courtiers, not even Pharaoh's
wise men, are able to interpret Pharaoh's dreams, the Chief CupBearer recalls how, while he was out of favor and In jail, a young
Hebrew fellow-prisoner had explained the fates which his own and the
Chief Baker's dreams foretold (41:9-13). Pharaoh straightaway commands that the Hebrew youth be rushed from his dungeon. Barbered,
bathed, and clad In decent robes, Joseph appears before Pharaoh,
hears Pharaoh tell the dreams, Interprets them to mean that God Is
by their means foretelling what He Is about to do-namely. sending
seven years of agricultural plenty followed by seven years of dearthand advises Pharaoh to act providently:
"Let Pharaoh... seek out a man of discernment and wisdom and
place him In charge of the land of Egypt. And let Pharaoh take steps
to appoint overseers for the land so as to organize the country of
Egyptfor the seven years of plenty. They shall husband all the food
of the good years that lie immediately ahead, and collect the grain
by Pharaoh's authority, to be stored In the towns for food. And let
that food be a resetve against. .. the seven years of famine .... "
Joseph's advice is taken, the whole court assenting, and Joseph
himself becomes, now for the fourth time, and humanly at the highest
rank, second In command.
"1 place you In charge of the whole land of Egypt." With that Pharaoh
removed the signet ring from his hand and put It on Joseph's hand.
He then had him dressed In robes of fine linen, and put a gold chain
about his neck. He also had him ride In the chariot of his second
In command, and they shouted "Abrek" before him. (41:37-43)
As Joseph foretold, so things turn out. The seven years of plenty
come and during this time Joseph has the over-abundant Egyptian
grain crop gathered In storehouses (41:47ff). Next comes the cycle of
dearth. Famine has struck the land of Egypt and along with It all of
the eastern Mediterranean, including the land of Canaan, where
Joseph's father and brothers dwell. Somehow, Joseph's father, Jacob,
learns that Egypt (normally the region's breadbasket) Is supplied with
foodstuff. Jacob therefor!) sends ten of Joseph's brothers, all except
his full brother, Benjamin, down to Egypt to buy provisions for the
family. The brothers succeed In their mission, returning home to
Canaan with food stores.
However, for reasons which the brothers could not fathom, the man
In charge of food distribution, whom we, the readers, know to be
Joseph, but who was identified by the awe-struck brothers as "the
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
24
man who Is lord of the country," had kept one of the ten, Simeon with
him In Egypt. The viceroy, Joseph, detained Simeon, In Egypt as a
hostage, ostensibly to test the truth of the story which the brothers
had told when he, Joseph, falsely accused them of having entered
Egypt as Canaanite spies rather than as members of a famine-struck
household. When the viceroy, that Is, Joseph, tormented them with
his false accusation, the bewildered brothers had replied:
"No, my lord, truly yow; servants have come to procure food. All of
us are sons of the same man ....Your servants have never spied ....
We, your servants, are twelve brolhers, sons of a certain man in !he
land of Canaan; the youngest Is today with our falher and anolher
one is not."
Only if the nine brothers return to Egypt with that youngest brother
who, they said, remained In Canaan with thetr father, only then would
the viceroy release their other brother, Simeon, whom the viceroy had
chosen to serve as a hostage and had bound before their eyes (42:24).
(Simeon, you may recall, had long ago been a ringleader In a terrible
deed of violent revenge motivated by "righteous Indignation," the
massacre of the people ofSchechem, whose Prince had raped Simeon's
sister Dinah. See 34:25, 30,31.)
As the famine persists In Canaan and grows more severe, Jacob
urges his sons again to descend to Egypt for rations. Judah reiterates
(43:3) what Jacob's sons had told their father earlier (42:29fi): Only If
Benjamin, Joseph's full brother, Is with them will the viceroy grant
them an audience, release Simeon, and meet their request to be sold
food. Jacob, who had, apparently, not been willing to put Rachel's
second son, Benjamin, at risk for the sake of perhaps freeing a son of
Leah, Simeon (cf 42:38), now that all stand to die of starvation,
consents to having Benjamin go down with his other sons (43: llfi).
The nine, along with Benjamin, appear before Joseph for a second
time. They are received with exquisite courtesy. Simeon Is brought out
to them (vajotseh alehem et shbnon, 43:23) enttrely unharmed. Mysteriously, they are treated as honored house-guests of the viceroy, who
dines In the same room with them, although at a separate table
(43:32). Still more mysteriously, the brothers' order ofbtrth Is known
to the steward and they are served accordingly, except that Benjamin's
food portion Is five times as large as that of any one else. No wonder
that the brothers get rip-roaring drunk at that meal (last half verse of
ch.43)!
Next, Joseph instructs his steward to ffil the brothers' sacks with
as much food as they can carry, to return each man's money, and
secretly to stash Joseph's, the viceroy's, silver goblet in the mouth of
�MASCHLER
25
Benjamin's bag. The brothers set out early the next morning to
re-ascend to Canaan. But before long the Steward overtakes them and,
as he had been instructed by his master, Joseph, he demands to see
the brothers' bags and, still following instructions, says to the brothers:
"Why did you repay good With evil? It [viz. the goblet you have stolen]
is the very one from which my master drinks and which he uses for
divination. You have done a base thing." (44:lft)
The brothers are, of course, completely mystified by this accusation.
As for the goblet, it proves to lie where it had been put, in Bet1iamin's
bag.
Earlier, in perfect confidence of their innocence, the brothers,
under Judah's leadership, had sworn that, should the goblet be found
in any of their bags, the one whose bag held the cup would be ready
to die and the remaining ten would become slaves to the viceroy. When,
under the steward's escort, the brothers re-enter Joseph's house and
re-encounterJoseph, Judah re-affirms this oath, except that he tries
to erase the death penalty for Benjamin. Joseph releases the brothers
from this vow, demanding only that Benjamin stay. The rest of them
may depart, With all the food, for Canaan.
All are silent, except for Judah, Jacob's and Leah's fourth son
(29:35), neither a first born With a firstborn's rights and responsibilities for leadership, nor a last born (vs. 30:17 ff), as was Benjamin, and
as Isaac, the brothers' grandfather, and Jacob, the brothers' father,
had been.
Judah requests of the viceroy that he be accepted as Benjamin's
placetaker. The speech in which he makes this request has an
overwhelming effect. Joseph can no longer contain himself. He sends
his Egyptian attendants out of the room, bursts out crying, and says
to his brothers:
"I am Joseph. Is my father really still allve?... Come closer to me... .!
am Joseph, whom you once sold to Egypt.. .. But do not worry now
or reproach yourselves for having sold me here. It was really God
who sent me here in advance of you as an instrument of survival.... Hurry back, then, to myfttiher and tell him, "Thus says your
son Joseph: God has made me lord of all Egypt; come to me Without
delay. You will live in the land of Goshen, where you will be near
me-you and your children and grandchildren, your flocks and
herds ....There I will provide for you.... "
With that he flung himself on the neck of his brother Benjamin and
wept; and Benjamin wept on his neck. Then he kissed all his
brothers, crylng upon each of tbem; only then were his brothers
able to talk to him. (45: 1-14)
�26
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Joseph's brothers and father, along with their wives and children
and livestock, come to settle in the Goshen region. Pharaoh has not
only given permission that the Jacob clan reside there but takes an
Interest In the clan's well-being; In fact, It Is at Pharaoh's command
that Joseph furnishes his brothers with Egyptian wagons that will
ease the clan's relocation. Once the brothers, their wives, and their
children, along with Jacob their father, have arrived In Goshen,
Pharaoh even honors Ja<;ob with a court audience. In every way our
story seems to have a happy ending:
The dreams of lordship which Joseph had dreamt at the very
beginning of our story (37:5-ll), when he was a youth of seventeen,
after his father, by giving him that princely robe (37:4), had made
manifest that he had chosen to elevate Joseph above his brothers,
have been borne out.
Jacob, the man who, at his mother's urging, had tried to acquire
his brother's first-born rights by stealth (chs. 27 and 25), and who
must, or ought (cf Hosea 12:4, Jeremiah 9:3), to have Interpreted the
suffering that thereafter befell him as deserved, lives to regain and
bless his favorite son and even meets and blesses the grandsons by
Joseph (47:29fl), finds out that his worries about Simeon, or perhaps
rather, his apprehensions that Simeon's brothers are guilty of having
sold one ofthelr own Into slavery, were unfounded, and dies peacefully
In bed (49:33). (By his sufferings I mean: the substitution, In the
marital bed, of the elder for the younger and beloved sister; the death
In childbirth of the woman he loved (ch. 35); the loss of Joseph-the
son who, in Jacob's Imagination, was his true firstborn (30:25,26).
being the firstborn by the wife so greatly loved that a seven-year
indenture as bride-price seemed to him but a few days (29:20); the
nagging suspicion that nine of his sons had sold their brother Simeon
into Egyptian slavery for food; the agonized waiting for the return of
Benjamin.)
Through Joseph's foresight and careful management, both his own
family and the population of Egypt are preserved (ch. 47).
But how can a story such as I have just told have a happy ending?
True, we have all the preceding stories ln the book of Genesis to show
that rivalry and envy need not lead to murder, as It did In the case of
the first pair of brothers, Cain and Abel: Abraham's firstborn.
Ylshmael, and his younger brother Isaac bury their father Abraham
together (25:8fl); the battle Esau plans against his younger twinbrother Jacob (33:1) Is staved off (33:10); earlier, Abraham had
providently prevented war between his own and his nephew Lot's
households (ch. 13); and even Laban and his son-In-law and nephew
�MASCHLER
27
Jacob and their households become, in a manner of speaking, reconciled (ch. 31). Yet deciding to split and make a treaty, which Is what
happens In most of these cases, Is not amity and peace. It Is truce and
avoidance, a "holding operation."
To see whether and how something better happens In the case of
Joseph and his brothers I want to look more narrowly at three
sentences(!)a statement by the Biblical narrator about Joseph and about his
brothers,
(2) the request of Judah already alluded to, that he be allowed to
go surety for his brother Benjamin, and
(3) a question asked by Joseph of his brothers and, I think, himself.
(1) The statement by the narrator occurs In ch. 42, vs 7, In the
context of the brothers' first meeting with Joseph In Egypt, after they
had spent some twenty years or so believing him dead or disappeared.
The narrator reports:
When Joseph saw his brothers, he recognized (vqjakirem) them, but
made himself unrecognizable (vajitnakef) to them and spoke
harshly to them.
The root of the words I pronounced just now in Hebrew is repeated:
When Joseph recognized his brothers (vqjakef) while they failed to
recognize him (lo hakiruhu), he was remtoded of the dreams he had
dreamt about them and said to them: "You are spies. You have come
to look at the nakedness of the land."
When the brothers, poor yokels, staunchly deny that they are spies,
Joseph repeats his accusation:
"Yes, you have come to look at the land in its nakedness." What's
going on here?
·
It is altogether according to expectation that the brothers should
fail to perceive the seventeen-year-old father's pet whom they had put
In an empty desert watering hole some twenty years earlier in the
grandly dressed and probably enthroned viceroy of Egypt. Nor is it
strange that Joseph, contrariwise, seeing the ten of them together,
dressed as he remembers his kinfolk to dress and speaking In the
language of Canaan on which he had himself been raised, should
recognize his brothers. So our lexically economical text can be presumed to dwell on the root of the Hebrew word for "recognize,"
"discern," "identify," and, perhaps (see Brown, Driver, Briggs p. 648
top), "foreign," "strange," for reasons beyond the reported fact.
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
28
This same root, nkr, occurs twice, and at crucial places, elsewhere
In our text. It figures In the vignette at the end of our story's opening
chapter, ch. 37, when the brothers arrange for a messenger to bring
Joseph's blood-stainedcoatof distinctioniO to his father, so as to trick
the father into saying and believing that Joseph had been tom to
pieces by some wild beast (see 37:32 and look before and after). The
other spot where It occurs Is Inch. 38 (vss 25,26 to be exact}, the odd
episode about Judah and his widowed daughter-In-law, Tamar.ll
Spelling out the full meaning of this fact Is too large a task for me. I
do, however, want to use the fact that the thematic root, nkr, as used
In these two other places, Involves some sort of trickery; I also want
to use the fact that In the two locales just indicated some sort of coming
to one's senses, acknowledging of a wrong, seems to be lnvolved.l2
The present question is, what does It mean, psychologically, to
report (as does the narrator In the King James version) that Joseph
"knew" his brothers but "made himself strange unto them." The
blatantly false accusation that his brothers are spies comes to our aid.
Isn't It obvious that Joseph rather than his brothers Is doing the
spying?
He does so at great length. First he incarcerates the brothers
together (42: 17}, commanding that one of them be freed to return to
Canaan so as to fetch the youngest brother, Benjamin, whom they
had mentioned when the viceroy grilled them. One brother Is to be
released, the remaining nine are to stay in Egypt until the released
one returns with Benjamin. Joseph gives the brothers three days to
moan and bicker over who Is to stay, who to leave, meanwhile availing
himself of the opportunity to listen in on their conversation. ln the
course of these three days he overhears his brothers saying:
... but we are guilly concerning our brother [though we are Innocent
of the charge of spying], In that we saw his soul's distress when he
pleaded with us but did not listen. (42:21)
In addition, Joseph learns that the ten had not been an undifferentiated troop of enemies, since he overhears his eldest brother, Reuben's,
exclamation:
"Didn't I warn you to do no wrong to the boy? But you would not
listen. Now comes the accounting for his blood. • (42:22; cf 37:22,
37: 29,30)
I imagine that it was as a result of what he has thus found out that
Joseph changed his command: Nine are to return to Canaan while one
Is kept In Egypt as a hostage (42:19).
Throughout the three days Joseph spoke to the brothers via an
�MASCHLER
29
Interpreter, so that they are not aware that the viceroy is spying on
them.
When Joseph changes his mind about how many are to stay In
Egypt and how many are to return to Canaan, the narrator quotes
Joseph as having said "I fear God .. .," which jerked me Into realizing
that one man could hardly have carried enough food back to Canaan
to keep the father, the women, and the little ones back home alive,
and made me aware that Joseph's first command was, from a practical
point ofview, more than lll-considered. Are we meant to condemn him?
· Only on rare occasions does the narrator in Genesis tell us outright
which of two or more competing characters to side with. (To my mind,
this Is one of the attributes of the book which equips It for being
torah-instruction: We are called upon to judge, but the more we study
the narrative, the less confident we feel that we know enough about
fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers justly to appraise their
character and conduct. Every new connection we make between this
verse and that seems to change meanings and motives.) Thus In the
present instance the narrator seems to leave the reader free to follow
the Impulse of feeling sorry for the brothers and critical of Joseph.
Joseph, after all, Is perseveringly manipulative, playing with, indeed
tormenting, his brothers In Incident after incident; playing even with
his father, since he has the money with which the brothers paid for
foodstuff put back Into their sacks, so that their father may well have
been led to believe that they had sold their brother Simeon Into slavery
(cf 42:35,36). The fact that the narrator tells us (42:24) that Joseph
absented himself to cry when he overheard Reuben's speech (and thus
found out that at least one of his brothers had tried to protect him),
does not necessarily alter one's atlltude. It Is not Inconceivable to me
that someone who enjoyS lording it over underlings should weep while
playing some cat-and-mouse game with them. Yet when one looks
back at the preceding chapter everything begins to look different.
There, In chapter 42, we were told that Joseph had married Into
high Egyptian society, had acquired a new, Egyptian, name, and that
he called his firstborn son Menasseh "because God has caused me to
forget my hardships entirely and all my father's house" (42:51).
Clearly, It Is Joseph's Intention to separate himself from his past, no
longer to be his father Jacob's son but to become fuJJy Egyptian. When
the brothers appear before him, they and his past are invading this
carefully contrived new life of Joseph's. He feels spied on, naked,
vulnerable, when suddenly they stand before him. When he catches
himself being, after all, unable to forget his father's house, this may
well have been a shaming realization. Only thus can I explain Joseph's
�30
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
shocking locution "you have come to look at the nakedness of the
land." Therefore, when Joseph, In 42:25, ordered his servants to
return the money with wWch his brothers had paid for corn, It was
probably not In order to mystifY them or to alarm Ws father (though
this was the effect, see 42:28,35,36). Rather, Joseph, who seems so
much In control, Is making a private, only half voluntary, gesture,
whose meaning he only half-knows, a gesture of making a distinction
between the rest of the hungry and his own hungry brothers. The free
gift of grain Is a token of kinship.
There Is, however, only one person in his father's household who
Is entirely unsullied with responsibility for the crime committed
against Joseph, thus fit to be loved unreservedly, Ws younger brother
Benjamin. The sons of the concubines Bilhah and Zilpah, with whom
Joseph prior to age seventeen used to go sheep-herding, probably
hated him as much as did Leah's sons, since the enigmatic verse 37:2
(about Joseph's being a tattle-tsle) probably applies to them. Joseph
must have realized tWs. AB for Reuben, though Joseph had wept upon
hearing how this oldest brother and arch rival had tried to protect him
(42:24 after 42:22), upon reflection Joseph may have believed that
Reuben was merely trying to re-lngratiate himself with Jacob after the
unsavory episode of his sleeping with his father's concubine Bilhah
(35:22; cf 1 Kings 2:13 ff and Solomon's reply In vs. 22). Simeon and
Levi, next after Reuben In the order of birlh, had proved by the
vengeance they took for the rape of their sister Dinah to what extremes
of violence their pride could lead them. Joseph must have supposed
that, as at Schechem so In Dothan, Injured pride drove Simeon and
Levi to murderous hatred. And as for Jacob, Joseph must have come
to realize In the course of all those years since he was seventeen, when
his father publicly declared his choice ofJoseph for' the leadership role ,
of fir:;;t born by giving Wm that coat of distinction and provoked not
only those dreams of Joseph's but Joseph's teUing his brothers what
he had dreamt, that Ws father was much to blame for what happened
thereafter.13 Only Benjamin, memento of their common mother Rachel,
Is a kinsman altogether free of blame. No wonder, then, that Joseph
Is obsessed with the idea of getting Benjamin to join him In Egypt.
Let this suffice, for the time being, as commentary on the first
sentence.
(2) I turn, next, to the second of the three sentences I promised to
discuss, namely, Judah's request in ch. 44 vs 33. It runs as follows:
"Please, let your servant [I.e. Judah] stay as servant to my lord
lnsteadof(tru:hath) the boy [ie. Benjamin], let him be his placetaker,
but let the boy 'go up' with his brothers.
�MASCHLER
31
The long address of Judah from which I culled this sentence (the only
long speech in Genesis) Is what released Joseph to make himself
known (httvada) to his brothers (45: lft). How difficult this moment was
for Joseph is, perhaps, shown by the narrator's telling us:
"And there stood no man with him when Joseph made himself
known to his brethren." (45: I end)
I do not believe that the narrator is merely repeating the information
that Joseph had sent all his Egyptian attendants out of the room when
he broke down in front of his brothers and said to them:
"I am Joseph. Is my father [really] still alive?"
Postponing a reading of Judah's speech in its entirely, I turn to the
third sentence on which I promised to comment, namely, Joseph's
question. In the ultimate chapter of the Book of Beginnings Joseph
asks (50: 19):
"...Am I In God's stead?" 14
The story of Joseph and his brothers, and thus the book of Genesis,
might have ended with chapter 48 (Jacob's adoption of Joseph's two
sons and the transfer of the one piece of real estate in Canaan that
Jacob holds in his own name, viz. Schechem, to Joseph); or, conceivably, with chapter 49 (holding the so-called "blessing" of the twelve
tribal fathers along with Jacob's charge that he be buried to lie with
Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebeccah, as well as with Rachel's
sister, Leah. in the ancestral burial cave of Machpelah, rather than
with Rachel, on the road to Bethlehem; cf35: 19,20). Instead, the book
of Genesis closes with chapter 50. This chapter begins by telling us of
· · the elaborate, Egyptian-style (see 50: 2, 50: 11) funeral rites for Jacob.
Only fairly late in the chapter, In vs. 50:8, 12-14, are we advised that
Joseph's brothers are members of the mourning party for their father
(as Ylshmael had been part of the mourning party for Abraham in vs.
25:8 and as Esau had been part of the mourning party for Isaac In vs.
35:29).
We are thus somewhat prepared for the fact that in vs. 50:15 the
brothers fear, in spite of the grand reconciliation between Joseph and
his brothers that had been descrtbed in ch. 45, that now that the
protecting presence of Jacob, their common father, is no more, Joseph
will get even with them. The brothers therefore send a messenger to
Joseph whom they have instructed to say to Joseph:
"Your father gave this command before he died: 'So shall you say
to Joseph, "Forgive, I urge you, the crime (pesha) of your brothers,
and their sin (chatatem), although they did eVil to you."'"
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
32
Mter the messenger Is through speaking, the brothers themselves
approach and, saying
"Now, then, forgive, please, the crime (pesha) of the bondsmen of the
God of your father... ;
they throw themselves down before Joseph and declare
"Behold, we are your boJ;!dsmen."
When Joseph, In reply, says to them,
"Don't be afraid. For am lin God's stead?"
I Imagine he Is, first of all, commenting on the discrepancy between
the brothers' declaring themselves "bondsmen to the God of Joseph's
father" and their simultaneously offering themselves to this father's
son as "his bondsmen." That these two masters-the God of Israel on
the one hand and Pharaoh or Pharaoh's place-taker, Joseph-are
separate and distinct the Book of Exodus will show at length (cf
Leviticus 25:42, the restrictions upon enslavement of an Israelite by
an Israelite; also Leviticus 26: 13).
Second, I Imagine that something Is being said (either by Joseph
or by the text) about the true locus of forgiveness. Human beings are
not the ones either to give or to withhold forgiveness, not even when
they have personally been wronged. As Ifto emphasize this, the Mosaic
code contains procedures which remove the burden (and the light) of
forglvlng from human beings. Someone meditating on Leviticus 5:202615 might even want to go so far as to say that here lies an
Insufficiently explored "way" towards recognizing the reality of God:
Faith would thus be tantamount to believing .In' the· possibility of
altering the meaning of a person's or a group of people's past, a faith
that would set one free to conduct oneself In that hope.
But I also wonder whether, when Joseph, through the question he
addresses to his brothers-"Am I In God's stead?"-denles his own
divinity, and tries to reassure his brothers that the evil which they
Intended against him was or became Intended by God towards good
(50: 19,20), he Is realizing that his own passions too have been turned
towards good by a power beyond himself. His earlier disdain for and,
later, rancor against his brothers, the rush of love for Benjani!n, the
!-told-you-so, resentful, and burdened showing off to his father16_all
this too was being used by God for good. For example, as a result of
his manipulating his brothers In that deeply ambivalent way which I
tried to describe earlier, all his brothers, not only Juda!I, have proved
their solidarity with one another. This, perhaps, is why, as our text
�MASCHLER
33
has It, Joseph Is now able to speak to his brothers' hearts (50:21 end;
contrast this with the end of 37:4?).
The Bible recognizes. It seems to me, that "playing God" (as Is
ahnostnecessarilythe temptation of a solitary leader, and as may have
been Joseph's penchant In particular) can be guarded against only If
there Is atleast one other human being with whom authority is shared,
or who has gifts the leader lacks and needs, or who serves as his critic.
Locke seems to have perceived this when he slyly reminds Flhner, the
author of Patriarcha. a political tract In defense of perfectly centralized
royal power, that according to the Bible, a child Is under the authority
not only of Its father but of Its mother as well (see e.g. Leviticus 19:
1-3). I wonder whether Judah serves In this capacity In our story.
You will remember that It was Judah's speech, In ch. 44, that
released Joseph to declare himself to his brothers. Let me recite his
speech to you:
"Let your servant, I beg, please have a word in private with my lord.
Do not be angry with your servant for you are as Pharaoh. My lord
asked his servant, 'have you a father or a brother?' We said to my
lord, 'We have an aged father, and there Is a little son of his old age;
his brother is dead, and only he Is left of his mother so that the
father dotes on him. •Yet you said to your servants 'Bring him down
to me that I may set my eyes upon him.' We told my lord 'The boy
cannot leave his father; for If he should leave his father, he would
die. • But you declared to your servants 'Unless your youngest
brother comes down with you, you shall not come before me.' When
we returned to your servant, my father, we reported my lord's words
to him. Our father said to us 'Go back and bring us some food.'
Then we told him 'We cannot go down; only If our youngest brother
. . . Is with us, can we go; for we shall not be allowed. to see the man If
· our youngest brother Is not with us. • But your servant my father
said to us 'You know that my wife bore me two sons. One left me,
and I said, he must have been tom to pieces! neither have I seen
him since. If you tske this one from me as well, and he meets with
disaster, you will send my white head to Sheolin grtef.' Now then,
please, let your servant remain as a slave to my lord Instead of the
boy, and let the boy go up with his brothers. For how can I go up
to my father If the boy Is not with me? I could not bear to witness
the evil that would overtske my father. (Ertc I. Lowenthal translation, pp 97-101, TheJosephNarrat!veinGenesls, Ktav, New York,
1973.)
The most Immediate effect on Joseph of Judah's speech was, I
Imagine, that It triggered awareness In Joseph that he had allowed his
yearning for Benjamin to overwhelm aU other considerations, that he
had allowed himself, in effect. to become his .ftd;her's rival for
�34
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
BeiJJamin's consoling presence; that, knowingly and unknowingly, he
had-In scheming to get this brother by his side-been avenging
himself not only on his brothers but also on his father. The effect on
us, the readers, Is harder to describe: Look again at the speech and
notice, for example, how the possessive adjectives "your," "my," and
"our" are being used. What Is uncanny about the speech Is its
detailed, Imperturbable, exactness, Its objectivity about every Item
In the family's history. There Is no rancor or regret, no emotional
complexity even, In Judah's quoting Jacob as having said, to Judah,
his legitimate son,
"You know that my wife bore me two sons .... •
(as though Leah had never been a wife to Jacob, and as though her
six sons counted for nought; compare the narrator's switches from
"his sons" to "Joseph's ten brethren" to "Benjamin, Joseph's brother"
to "his brethren" to "sons of Israel" in the early verses of chapter 42;
notice also how Jacob answers Reuben in 42:38: "My son shall not go
down with you; for his brother is dead, and he alone is left.") Nor is
there any self-dramatizing when Judah says, simply, that, quite apart
from having solenmly sworn to go surety for Benjamin (erawon), he
could not bear to see the effect on Jacob of losing Benjamin, so that
life as a member of the Jacob clan would be impossible for him were
he to return to his father without Benjamin.
Hear now how Judah spoke to his widowed daughter-in-lawTamar,
in chapter 38, when he found out that he had wronged her:
"You are in the right rather than I."
Judah makes no atlempt to excuse or justify himself but acts in the
light of his new knowledge: His twin-sons (Perez and Zerah) by Tama.t
are accepted by him as legitimate placetskers ofJudah's deceased sons
Er and Onan (see 46: 12), but Judah henceforth abstains from sexual
intimacy with Tamar. Such inthnacy between a father- and daughterin-law Is, of course, forbidden in the sexual code of Leviticus 18.
Let me add one further detail to the characterization of Judah. It
is hidden away in that amazingly packed opening chapter 37.
Long ago, Jacob had sent Joseph off from Hebron, Abraham's site,
to his brothers at Schechem, probably on a mission of reconciliation.17
A mysterious man, encountered by Joseph while he is looking for his
brothers, advises Joseph that his brothers and their herds have left
Schechem for Dothan. Before he gets close to the brothers they catch
sight of him and conspire to kill him.
They said to one another: Here comes that master dreamer! Why
�MASCHLER
35
don't we klll him now and throw him tnto one of the pits? We could
say that a wild beast devoured him....When Reuben heard this, he
tried to save him from their hands .... "Shed no blood" Reuben told
them. "Just throw htm tnto that pit, out there tn the desert, but
don't do away with him yourselves•-his purpose betng to deliver
htm ... and restore htm to his father. So when Joseph reached his
brothers, they made Joseph strip off his coat of disttnction (ktoneth
passtm) ... seized htm and threw him tnto the pit. They sat down to
their meal. Looking up, they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites comtng
from Gilead ...bound fur Egypt.
Then Judah [seetng the caravan] said to his brothers, "What would
we gain by killing our brother and covertng up his blood [I.e. killing
htm without actually spilling his blood, namely, by letttng htm die
tn the pit]. I say, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites....After all, he is
our brother, our own flesh." His brothers agreed. Meanwhile [however] Midiantte traders passed by, and they pulled Joseph up from
the pit. 1hey sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of
silver.
Reuben's plan had been to free Joseph from the dried-up watedng
hole. I Imagine Judah had figured this out for himself. But Judah,
sizing up the situation more accurately than his elder brother, knew
that it would be hopeless for the two of them-Reuben andJudah-to
protect Joseph against the other eight, or to escape their notice. Under
the circumstances, selling Joseph to the Ishmaelltes was a good plan.
Judah Is prevented from canylng It out because, so I Imagine (on the
advice of Lowenthal), Joseph's cries from the pit have been heard by
the band ofMidlanlte traders, so that the latter rather than Joseph's
brothers became the ones to "profit" from selltng Joseph Into Egyptian
slavery.
Thus Judah's, like just about everyone else's, planned action tn the
Joseph story, becomes deflected .from tts intended course.IB Yet this
should not prevent us from recognizing that Judah, though very
different from Joseph-not Irresistibly handsome, not first or last
born, not equipped to dream up long-range designs, not a charmer of
the great-has attdbutes of character befitting a leader. Even Jacob
must have recognized this when, In 46:27, he Is reported to have "sent
Judah before him unto Joseph to show the way to Goshen" (ve-et
jehudah shalach lefanav eljosefl-horot lejanav goshena. ... )
That verse carries much weight with me: First, because our enttre
story is about sending and being sent, especially, about sending and
being sent ahead of others. Second, because It seems confirmed by
whatJacoblssupposedtohavesaidofJudahandofJosephlnchapter
49, where he foretells the twelve tdbal fathers' fates. Of Judah Jacob,
In 49:8, says:
�36
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
"It is you whom your brothers Will praise."
Of Joseph he says, in vs. 49:26 end:
•... One set apart from his brothers" or, perhaps, "the prince among
his brothers."
As If to spite the fact that Jacob's adoption of Joseph's sons Menasseh
and Ephraim In the chapter preceding this Patriarchal blessing seems
to show that th.ejlrst-bom()fRachelremn.inedJacob's "elect, • the book
of Deuteronomy, in having Moses mention Judah next after Reuben
(33:7), quietly differs In Its judgment, as does Chronicles 5: l. This
leads me to wonder whether those who preserved our story may,like
me, have had complicated reservations about identifYing Joseph as
our story's hero. Were It the case that Joseph, In 47:18 till the end of
the chapter, Is serving his master Pharaoh too weJI,19 the narrative
might bear the tmplication that Joseph, In serving as a functionary
for the Pharaoh's turning free Egyptian peasants into tenant farmers
(albeit tenant farmers who retain four fifths of the yield of the land and
their own work) Is partly to blame for the future enslavement of the
children oflsrael.
•••
Notes:
l. In the synagogue reading-cycle they are divided into the four
weekly "portions": vayeshev=37:1-40 end; mlkkets =41:1-44:17;
vaylggash =44: 18-47:27; vayyechi =47:28-50:26. Readers unfamiliar With the synagogue articulation of the Bible text may like
to look at the Soncino Press edition of the Pentateuch, edited by
J. H. Hertz. That edition also gives the "portions" from the Prophetic Writings read inlmediately after the recitation of the Pentateuch portion, called "haftarah" =conclusion. The rabbis
responsible for selecting the hqftarah must have had reasons for
juxtaposing a particular prophetic With a particular pentateuch
portion. For example, I am Impressed by the fact that they chose
to have the second portion of the Joseph story, 41:1-44:17,
followed up by the story of the judgment of Solomon in 1 Kings
3:15-4:1. I Imagine the rabbis were Inviting the congregation to
think of both Joseph and Judah as being "tested," as were the two
mothers In the judgment of Solomon story. And when they selected
1 Kings 2:1-12 as "follow up" to 47:28-50:26, they must have
wanted the congregation to meditate on Jacob's "last wlll" side by
�MASCHLER
37
Side with David's. One reason for my reporting this sort of information is that only thus, through examples, can I convey that
Bible exegesis "sub specie unitatis," as I defended it in an earlier
essay ('Thinking about the Garden Story"), and practice It here,
Is not, or need not be, opposed to higher Bible criticism. Only if
multiple authorship deprives the Bible of all authority, only then
must one choose between exegesis and documentary hypothesis.
Since, however, the authority of the Bible is no greater and no less,
for me, than the authority of our entire multi-stranded, tensionfilled, Intellectual, legal,and moral tradition, the respect for the
text which prompts me to exegetic endeavor is not only compatible
with but calls for individual judgment and choice in the present.
2. For the change of name, and its Import, see ch. 32, especially vss.
27 - 29; there Jacob, on the night before meeting his estranged
brother Esau, wrestles with a man who blesses him and changes
his name from Jacob (heel) to Israel (god-wrestler), meanwhile
refusing to disclose his own identity. Notice the strange echo of
this episode In Rachel's words, at 30:8, when her maid Bilhah
conceives a second son, whom Rachel calls Naphtail. See e.g.Exodus 12:40; cf Genesis 15:13.
3. Deuteronomy 29:9ff; 31:9ff; see also Deuteronomy 17:14ff, especially vss 18 - 20: "...When he has ascended the throne of the
kingdom, he shall make a copy of this Torah in a book at the
dictation of the Levitical priest. He shall keep it by him and read
from It all his life, so that he may learn to fear the Lord his God
and keep all the words of this Torah and observe these statutes.
In this way he shaU not become prouder than his feUow country
meri...
4. Plato's Laws, N, 720c.
5. The historic fact, if it be one, that the Joseph story's poising of
Judah over against Joseph is connected with the rivalry between
the royal House of David (the Southern Kingdom of Judah) and
the royal House of Saul, the Benjamlte (the Northern Kingdom) is
not only compatible with but commentary on the moral that I
draw.
6. 30:22ff.
7. 30: Iff; Barren Rachel so much envies her fruitful sister Leah that
she longs for death. Desperate for children, she gives Jacob her
maid-servant Bilhah to wife so that whatever children may be born
of that union will legally rank as her own, through adoption.
Through her maid-servant, Rachel acquires two sons, whose
�38
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
names (Dan and Naphtali) commemorate her rivahy with her
sister. Finally Rachel herselfbecomes pregnant and bears Joseph.
Immediately after the birth of Joseph, Jacob leaves his father-Inlaw's homestead and returns to Canaan to establish a separate
household of his own (30:25).
8. 29:9; 29:16-20.
9. Joseph, as far as I know, Is the only man In the Pentateuch who
Is called handsome-jafe toar vifeh mareh=of beautil'ul form and
fair to look upon (39:7). Since the same phrase Is used to describe
his mother Rachel (29: 17), Joseph may have looked like his
mother. Perhaps Rachel, In tum, looked like Jacob's mother
Rebeccah, who-being Laban's sister-was Rachel's aunt. Jacob,
you will remember, had been his mother's favorite whereas Jacob's
twin brother Esau had been his father's favorite. Cf David in l
Saniuell6:2-ruddy-complexioned, with fine eyes, fine to behold;
Absalom in 2 Samuel 14:2-praised for his beau1y; Saul, in l
Samuel 9:2, praised for his tallness.
10. K'tonet passim. I call this mysterious, conceivably many-colored
or embroidered, tunic a "coat of distinction" because the same rare
word is used at 2 Samuell3:18, to refer to the princess Tamar's
garment.
11. CfRobertAlter, TheArtofBiblicalNarrative(Basic Books, 1981).
I was both thrilled and (such Is vani1y) disappointed that Alter
noticed the verbal (and more than verbal) echoes of 37:32f (Zoth
matsanu.. Haker-na hak'tonet, bincha ht 1m lo. Vqjakirah. Vajomer:
k'tonet b'nL Chajah raah achaltehu. Tarof toraf Jose.Jj In 38: I7
("And she said: Will you give me a pledge-eravon? ....And she said:
Discern (Haker-na] please, to whom the signet, the cords, and the
staff belong [le mi. ha chatometh, etc.] And Judah acknowledged ...
(vajakerjelwdah]" and In 42:7ff. Fully to appreciate these verses
requires that one put them together with one another, and with
Judah's pledge, in 43:8ff, to be placetaker (eravon) for Benjamin,
and with his living up to this trust In vss 44: 18ft', and (finally) with
the nine-for-one, one-for-nine, and one-for-one games that Joseph
plays with his brothers.
All-Important though It Is for us, today, to discriminate between
a mere symbol or pledge on the one hand, and the moral and legal
category of serving as stand-in for one's brother, friend, or fellowhuman being on the other hand, I nevertheless believe that the
passages to whose vernal linkage I am calling attention are
ultimately connected with Abraham's substitution of a ram for
�MASCHLER
39
Isaac, Isaiah's song of the suffering servant, and Freud's entire
theory of dream interpretation. Substitution, and coming to one's
senses, orfailing to, upon recognizing what is being substitutedfor
what and why, or failing to seems to me to be the over-arching
theme. On the motif of suretyship, see the Appendix to Benjamin
Nelson's The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal
Otherhood (2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 1969)
12. I imagine that Jacob's refusal to be consoled over the supposed
death of Joseph is not altogether unlike AchUles' mourning for
Patroclus: Jacob must have realized that he is partly responsible
for Joseph's "being tom."
13. Cf. Deut. 21:15ff: "If a man have two wives, the one beloved and
the other hated, and they have borne Wm children, both the
beloved and the hated; and if the firstborn son be hers that was
hated; then it shall be, in the day that he causes his sons to inherit
that which he has, that he may not make the son of the beloved
the firstborn before the son of the hated, who is the firstborn. But
he shall acknowledge the first born, the son of the hated, by giving
Wm a double portion of all that he has, for he is the firstborn of
his strength, the right of the firstborn is his."
14. Cf 30:2, Jacob's angry reply to Rachel's "Give me children or else
I die." Substitution-of a husband or a ruler for God, of a coat for
a man's corpse or for the man, of a signet, cord, and staff for their
owner, of one Israelite for another-appears to me to be one of the
major themes of our story. Indeed, Benjamin Nelson, in the
appendix to The Idea of Usury, points out that within Jewish
tradition the Joseph story became the emblem of the obligation
that any Israelite be willing to serve as stand-in for his fellows.
15. "If anyone sin and commit a trespass against the Lord, and deal
falsely with his neighbor in a matter of deposit or of pledge or of
robbery or have oppressed his neighbor or have found that which
was lost and deal falsely therein and swear to a lie, in any of all
these that a man does, sinning therein, then it shall be, if he has
sinned and is guilty, that he shal; restore that which he took by
robbery or the thing which he has gotten by oppression or the
deposit which was deposited with him or the lost thing which he
found or any thing about which he has sworn falsely, he shall
restore it in full and add the fifth part.... and he shall bring ...a ram
without blemish from his flock .... for a guilt offering to the priest
and the priest shall make atonement for him before the Lord and
he shall be forgiven ...."
�40
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
16. I am thinking of Joseph's second dream, how In It his father, the
sun, and his mother, the moon, along with his eleven stellar
brothers bow down before him, he alone being the same Inside
and outside the dream, unsubstituted for; furiher, I am thinking
of his telling this dream, not only to his brothers but also to his
father, who rebukes him (37:10,11). I am also thinking of his
outrageous Insistence on flaunting his status as ihe father's
favorite when he wears that coat of distinction while supposedly
sent on a reconciliation mission to his brothers (37: 14ff; 37:23).
Finally, I am thinking of the message which, at 45:9ff, Joseph
commands his brothers to give to his father: "Hasten ye, and go
up to my father and say to him: Thus says your son Joseph. ..."
17. I owe the suggestion that this was a mission ofreconciliation (along
with a number of other details In my commentary) to Eric
Lowenthal (11te Joseph Narrative in Genesis, Ktav, New York.
1973), though his over-all reading of the Joseph story Is rather
different from mine. Such an Interpretation of what is going on In
37:13 requires that one take stock of the fact that If Jacob had
merely wanted news about ihe flocks he could easily have sent a
servant, that the trip, from Hebron to Schechem, is long and
perilous, and ihat "sending" and "being sent" are !hematic to our
story. This means that I readvs. 37:13in the light of Exodus 3:10.
18. CfProverbs 16:9 ("Man plans his journey by Ws own wit, but it Is
the Lord who guides his steps"), 20:24 ("It Is the Lord who directs
a man's steps; how can morlal man understand the road he
travels?"), and the Player King's lines In Hamlet Act iii scene 2. The
passages from Proverbs are also cited by Gerhard Von Rad, "Die
JosephgescWchte," BibUsche Studien, 5 (Neuklrchener Verlag des
Erziehungsverelns GMBH, 1964). On what this implies, namely,
a double causality, human will and divine redemptive will, see
Maimonldes' Guide to the Perplexed in ii, 48 and Malmonldes'
"Letter on Astrology," Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook (Cornell, 1963).
19. CfExodus 22:25, Deuteronomy 23:20, Numbers 18:21, Deuteronomy 10:9
I
�I
What is a What-is Question?
Joe Sachs
Once when I was talking to a senior about possible topics for his essay,
he looked around, leaned forward, slid his eyes left and right, dropped
his voice, and said "I'm thinking about writing on ... Wlttgensteln."
That was the most dramatic occasion on which I've been made aware
of a rumor that seems to circulate among some students that there Is
a secret, wicked doctrine that Is concealed from them by some
unknown authority, because to reveal It would be to unmask the fact
that Plato has been refuted. For, so the story goes, Wlttgensteln refuted
Plato.
Now to make the last sentence have any meaning at all, one has to
take the name Plato as shorthand for "Plato's theory of forms." And
what is that? Our dean once gave a lecture called "Plato's theory of
forms," and pointed out that, If the phrase was to refer to anything
that could be found In the clialogues, every word In it, except "of,"
would need to be changed. Let us see what Wlttgensteln's famous
refutation actually refutes. It consists In arguing that the various
things we call games are not all alike. One of them might resemble a
second In some characteristics, but have clifferent characteristics In
common with a third, with pairs of games overlapping in many diferent
ways, so that some two might have no characteristics In common at
all, except for membership In the same extended farnlly. You have your
brother's nose, he has your mother's eyes, she has her grandfather's
forehead, and so on. You are all Smiths, but "Smith" is not a word
with a single meaning. There are people with the Smith chin, others
with the piercing Smith gaze, but there Is no Smithness, and you
would never be tempted to think there was. All there Is that belongs
to all the Smiths Is an array of family resemblances.
Now If Meno had only had the chance to hear talk of family
resemblances, as he had heard about effluences, the clialogue that
Joe Sachs Is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. This lecture was delivered
at the college in Santa Fe In Aprll of this year and In Annapolis in May.
�42
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
bears Ws name could have been over ln lhree pages-or could lt? How
would we decide when we had a llst of all the relevant characteristics
of all the tWngs called virtues, to be sure there were none common to
them all? And why, when Socrates gives two examples of definitions
of shape (75b, 76a), does he not llst characteristics at all, but set the
thing he's defining as a whole ln relation to something else? And have
you noticed that Socrates never asks a question llke "what is a game?''
He often refers to a game called draughts, which footnotes tell us is
something like checkers, but only as a way of sharpening by contrast
the meaning of the thing he is interested in at any time. And in the
Lysis, in which some friends have been wrestling, he does not use the
occasion to ask about wrestling or playing, but about friendshlp.
There is a memorable occasion ln the Parmenides when the old
phllosopher tells the young Socrates that he is not yet completely
ph!losophlc (130e), just because he wants to inquire not about dirt
but about the just and the beautiful. By that standard, Socrates at
the age of seventy had still not grown up as a philosopher. Plato never
stated a theory of forms for Wittgenstein or anyone else to refute, but
Socrates often resorted to the hypothesis that there are invisible looks
that belong to intelligible things. If we want to understand what he
meant, we have to pay some attention to when he turned to this
hypothesis, how he followed it up, and what he was looking for on
such occasions. Wittgenstein and others like him tell us to look to the
use of a word, if we want to find Its meaning. Socrates uses the word
etdos only when he has ftrst asked what something ls, and he does
not ask that question Indifferently about anything and everythlng. We
have to ask, what guides the asking of the what-is question?
But where should we begin? You have read dialogues that take aim
at virtue, rhetoric, and justice, to mention only the first lhree on the
list. But something odd happens in each of them. The inquily aimed
at virtue seems to concentrate instead on what learning Is, the one
that asks about rhetoric shifts to a relentless asking of the question,
what ls the best life?, and the tmmense dialogue about justice seems
to encompass everything In the world, but especially the question of
what would be the best possible education. Like our own seminars,
the conversations of Socrates never seem to keep to the opening
questions, so before we've gotten anywhere with the question of what
Socrates chooses to ask about, we already have to worry about why
hls questions don't seem to stick. Like the statues of Daedalus that
Socrates mentions near the end of the Meno (97d-e), they seem to get
up and run away, though perhaps they do not altogether escape, but
try to lead us somewhere.
�SACHS
43
This fact, that Socrates' own what-is questions always tum out to
be about something else than the thing they were first asked about,
Is to me the most Important and revealing thing about them. We Will
return to this soon, but first it turns out that the easiest place to begin
looking at the what-Is question Is in a dialogue in which Socrates does
not lead the discussion. In that dialogue there is someone else who
has a methodical way of proceeding with such questions, and he never
lets the original topic run away, but keeps battering at It so directly
that it Is soon Impossible to tell what It Is. I am speaking of the Sophist
, a dialogue in which the Eleatic Stranger learns before our eyes how
to ask what something is, not by witnessing or Imitating Socrates, but
by the reliable method of trial and error. He starts out the dialogue as
a disciple ofParmenldes, and in the course oflt discovers, and displays
to us, that Parmenldes was wrong about who and what are most truly
philosophic.
In the first half of the dialogue he presents the orthodox
Parmenldean line, that there Is a universal method for getting knowledge, applicable indifferently to any topic, that cares no more about
the art of the general than about the art of removing lice (227a-b).
Topics of inquiry do not count for philosophy; logical structures do.
Philosophic discipline requires purging ourselves of any motive to care
about any one thing more than any other. Once we are pure, disembodied logicians we can begin to learn. Now you may think this Is what
Socrates himself says In the Phaedo , but one shouldn't decide too
quickly what It means to say that philosophy Is nothing but the
practice of dying and being dead (64a). For one thing, in both the
Symposium and the Republic, Socrates likens philosophy to erotic love
(210a-d, 474c-475c). But one only needs to take one step back from
the Phaedo Itself to see that even there the questions about philosophy, dying, and being dead are not dispassionate but urgent ones.
Socrates rebukes his friends for their grief over his dying (117c-e), but
that Is only because he wants to harness all that powerful feeling to
what he.calls keeping the logos alive (89b). Phaedo reports that those·
present were never far from laughter or tears, and spent the whole day
in the grip of an unaccustomed experience he calls wonder (58e-59a).
The philosophic approach of the Eleatic Stranger Is too methodical,
too patient, too relentless to let wonder or desire get in Its way.
The Stranger has a technique for moving from a word to the thing
meant by It (218b fl), a universal strategy for capturing what anything
is, the method of division. It begins by casting a net, finding some
general class of things that the looked-for thing must necessarily
belong to. Then, to shift the metaphor, it begins quartering the field,
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
always dividing the class before it in two. Why should there not
sometimes be a division into three parts? Because the power of logic
is greatest where contradictories are concerned. The two parts of any
division must be made in such a way that anything in the world must
be found in one or the other of them. Black and white is an inappropriate division of colors, but black and not-black form a pair of classes
that include everything there is, not even restricted to colors, since
there is no possible middle ground between them into which anything
could slip. To locate anythihg in one side of such a division, it is only
necessary to assure oneself that it cannot be in the other side. In
practice one might fail to make all divisions exhaustive and mutually
exclusive, but it is never a very difficult matter to correct them. The
method is as simple as it is universal. And if something is in the
original class, and repeatedly narrowed down into smaller and smaller
sub-classes, mustn't one eventually reach a class that includes it and
nothing else? I think the answer has to be yes: the Stranger's method
is infallible. But one only needs to read the dialogue to see that the
Stranger's method fails. How can this be? We have just endorsed the
law of contradiction, and now we find that something infallible fails.
The problem, though, is not a collapse of logic, but a misapplication
of it. Doctors can't be expected to make shoes, and logicians are not
philosophers. The ancient Eleatic school and the modem analytic one
are victims of the same mistake.
The Stranger's method of division is too logical in the sense that it
is nothing but logical. It is a mechanical repetition of a logical
procedure; point it in a new direction and start it up again, and it will
grind on to a new conclusion. Ask it which of the two conclusions one
should choose, and it is silent, because it can only get its teeth into
contradictory alternatives, but its own products can never contradict
one another. The infallibility of the method is its vice, because it will
always succeed in telling you what something is, no matter how often
it has already given you different answers to the same question. I will
remind you what the sophist turned out to be: he was a hunter of the
children of the rich, a businessman who trafficked in wisdom as either
a manufacturer, traveltng merchant, or local retailer, a professional
athlete whose sport was debate, and a purifier of souls, who opened
the posssibility of!earning by refuting the mistaken opinion of knowledge. The Stranger calls this result unsound (232a), but it is not
mistaken. My summary of the six definitions already shows how to
reduce them to four, since the retailer, traveling salesman, and
manufacturer differ in only incidental ways, and perhaps we could get
them down to three by saying that hunting for customers is subordi-
�SACHS
45
nate to the purpose of transacting business with them, but now we
are stuck. The sophist has to make money out of his teaching, has to
be able to win arguments, and has to have an effect on his students
that changes the opinions they already had. But what is he really
after-money, victory, or the betterment of his students? Tell me
please, by logic alone, how to answer that question. In fact I already
went outside the bounds of the Stranger's method when I said that
the first four definitions could be reduced to one because they all had
the same purpose. End~ and means can be distinguished by human
beings, but not by means of logic.
From the standpoint oflogic, it has to be purely arbitrary to decide
whether the sophist is most properly considered a businessman, an
athlete, or a healer of souls. From the standpoint of anyone who might
consider entrusting the education of a son or daughter to him, it is
the only question that matters. ''What Is a sophist?" is not answered
by a list of characteristics that specify membership in classes. It is
only answered when we know which of those characteristics govern
the rest, and make someone a sophist. How do we decide that? I don't
know of any recipe, and I don't see how any answer to the question
can be without risk of error. We have crossed over from the safe domain
oflogic to something called philosophy, and we have done so at exactly
the same place that the Eleatic Stranger did. Not only was a swarm of
definitions of one thing an unsound result, but the sixth definition of
the sophist in particular outraged the Stranger as a human being
(23la). It seemed to give the sophist more honor than he deserved. In
trusting his own desire to do justice, the Stranger abandons his
principle that the method of the logos must honor lice-pickers and
generals equally. He understands that abandoning his neutrality
means giving up Parmenides as his spiritual father (24ld), and that
plunges him into the deepest questions about being and not-being.
The dialogue seems to tell us that we can't find out what anything is
unless we are willing to ask-that means abandon all our present
opinions about-what everything is.
Let us step back and try to understand what has happened. Does
the what-is question ask for a definition of a word? If so, there could
not be so much at stake in asking it, and there would be nothing wrong
with arbitrarily picking one definition out of many as long as everyone
involved in the conversation understood it and agreed to it. But the
Stranger made clear from the beginning that the point was not to draw
lines around a word but to leave the word behind and find the thing
meant. The definition is what makes the thing what it is. That in turn
means that there must be something else involved with the thing on
�46
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
which we focus the question. We think of a definition as an identity,
a group of words that can be substituted for a single word, but in the
dialogues of Plato the what-Is questions that are asked are always
looking beyond the things asked aboutto their rootedness In the whole
of things. What defines virtue? Not any group of words, but the nature
of human beings. And what defines the sophist? According to the
Stranger, when he has broken loose from Parmenldes and is free to
be Socratic, It Is the nature of being itself, an irreducibly twofold
structure that allows for the possibility of Images. The Socratic what-Is
question Is always the question about how things are, asked In so
radical a way that It permits no ready-made opinions to remain as
crutches.
Now it is possible to arrive at this kind of questioning from any
starting point, but it is also easy to see why Socrates only asks the
what-is question about certain kinds of things. There has to be some
issue that matters enough to us to make It worthwhile to call Into
question all the safe opinions on which we base our lives. Parmenides
had It exactly backwards when he told Socrates that philosophy
requires a studied indifference to its topics. Philosophy can only be
about what matters to us. This also explains a common phenomenon,
that the asking of the what-Is question makes other people laugh.
Martin Heidegger, at the beginning of a book called What is a Thing?,
suggested that philosophy could be defined as that at which menial
servants laugh. The snobbishness of his remark is out of place and
obscures his Insight. Someone who does not care about the thing In
question can't see the point of suspending his prejudices, and he is
as likely to be a professor as a servant. But it Is even more important
that this very laughter wears two faces, for It need not be the smug
self-congratulation of the unexamined life, but can also be the spontaneous childlike delight we all take In the sudden appearance of
wonder.
Indifference seems to be the only reaction one cannot have to a
philosophic question, If one Is aware of it at all. And the fear that the
presence of desire will destroy our "objectivity" Is misplaced. First of
all. In the new landscape opened by the experience of wonder we lose
the familiar landmarks by which our desires are ordinarily steered.
What we thought we wanted may lose Its appeal. Achilles and Priam
gaze at each other In wonder, and no longer wish each other dead.
Second, the power of wonder takes us beyond vanity, so that selfishness itself can make us give up cherished but worthless opinions.
Gorglas and Thrasymachus, two of the vainest humans one could
Imagine, become absorbed in following the arguments of Socrates and
�SACHS
47
each spends a long time willing not to be the center of attention. And
finally, objectivity is static, while desire is dynamic, so if philosophy
Is an activity In which we can be changed, only desire can set It In
motion and keep It In motion. In Plato's portrait of him, the old
Parmenldes Is reluctant to get Involved In a philosophic discussion,
and compares himself to an old racehorse with no desire to run, and
to an old man falling In love, with no desire to feel desire (137a).
Now there Is another character in the dialogues who Is even less
able to move and change than is Parmenides, and whose very name
means standing-still or staying-In-place, and this Is Meno. Let us look
at the Meno to see an example of how Socrates asks and answers a
what-Is question. That's right, I said "answers," and I am not referring
to the lame conclusion that virtue comes by divine lot. Socrates himself
discounts this result as one In which no trust can be put because It
evades the true question about virtue (lOOb). All the energy of the
dialogue is In Its first half, before Meno finally and irrevocably digs In
his heels (86c-d). !tis in that first half of the dialogue that I claim that
Socrates in fact answers the question about virtue, not by giving it a
genus and specific difference or any such neat package that we can
thoughtlessly carry away, but by sketching a first approach to an
answer that would carry the inquiry to a new plane if anyone paid
enough attention to notice It, and made enough of an effort to follow
It up. Of course Meno Is not the person to do either of those things,
and no one else present steps forward, as often happens In other
dialogues. But the dialogue remains alive for us to enter into, and
when we have gotten past our first exasperation over the fact that
Socrates won't tell us anyihing, but only ask more and more questions
and claim total ignorance, we can begin to notice that he does make
some dtrect assertions.
One of the strongest of these occurs just before the discussion
breaks down, and Socrates says he would fight for it in word and deed
(86b-c). That Is the conviction that Inquiring all by Itself makes us
better and braver people. Doesn't that have to mean that self-directed,
philosophic learning is at least one way that at least some virtues are
acquired? Now that may seem to be a weasely, Meno-like claim that
falls to tell us what virtue is, but let's look more closely at exactly what
Socrates says. He says that by believing one needs to Inquire after the
things one doesn't know, we are better, more man-like, and less inert.
There are three surprising words here that probably don't quite match
your memory of the passage. Socrates does not say that the belief in
question leads us to become better, but that merely believing It, we
already are better. But in what respects, exactly, are we better? Now
�48
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
all of you know that the topic of the dialogue, virtue or excellence, is
arete, and that it is related to the words aner, man, and andreios,
manly or brave. But Socrates avoids by a fraction of a milllmeter saying
that believing in the need to inquire makes us more manly, andreioteros; instead, he uses the word andrikoteros, more man-like. And
finally, the second way that we are better is by being less inert, less
argos. You may recall that in the Odyssey, Odysseus has an old dog
named Argos, who recognizes him after his twenty-year absence. If
you are like me, you wonder, when you read it, why Odysseus's dog
has the name of Agamemnon's city, but it doesn't. Argos is a common
adjective meaning lazy, a contraction of a-ergos, inert.
So while it is surprising that in the mere believing of something we
are already better people, these are two very weak sorts of goodness
that Socrates gives us credit for. We are less like lumps of rock, and
more nearly resemble men. But even this approach to virtue has
far-reaching implications. F1rst, what does masculinity have to do with
virtue? Just because a connection between them is built into a
language, no speaker of the language is compelled to accept it, but to
Meno that connection is the whole story. Meno's various efforts to say
what virtue is add up to a fairly simple and coherent picture. Virtue
in its strongest and most proper sense can belong only to men, and
to them only in the prime of life and when not enslaved (7le); these
manly fellows have the power to help their friends and hurt their
enemies, for what else is human excellence but the ability to rule other
people (73c-d)? He later adds that the man of virtue will help himself
to gold and silver, as well as to honors and offices, since these are the
beautiful things that give delight (77b, 78c-d). But instead of admiring
this lovely picture, Socrates keeps raising picky objections. The most
persistent one is whether any action can be good without temperance
and justice (73a-b, d, 78d), but the first one is whether a woman who
acted in the same way would be any less excellent than a man (72d-e).
Meno, when compelled to, pays lip service to both of these pieties, but
never shows any sign of believing them. But it is equally clear that
Socrates is talking about a simply human excellence that has no bias
toward the male. His claim is an equal-opportunity insult: none of us
knows how to live well. When he says we need to be more man-like he
means more like human beings. We are none of us what we are born
to be and meant to be.
Now I am not claiming to get all this out of one slightly unexpected
adjective, but that adjective confirms a theme that is present in most
of the dialogues. Socrates is always comparing the virtues to humble
arts like shoemaking. This makes some people climb the walls, notably
�SACHS
49
Callicles in the Gorgias (490e-49la). Why is Socrates so insistent
about this comparison? We come into the world without shoes, as
Socrates himself displays, but we are not condemned to go barefoot
and vulnerable If someone has taken the trouble to develop the
capacity to fit us with shoes. Shoemaking is in us as a possibility, but
it takes work and at least a little thought to get it out into the world.
I think the meaning of Socrates' constant comparison is this: If we
thought even as much about how we ought to live as the shoemaker
does about how to protect feet, our lives would be revolutionized. We
have to work to become what we are by birth and by tight, and it is
only in a minority of people who excel the rest of us that we even see
what a human being is. And that is the reason for Socrates' faint praise
when he says that believing in the possibility of!earning already makes
us more nearly human. Without that belief we are as inert as rocks,
as static as Meno.
Meno does explicitly deny that learning is possible (SOd), and he is
literally motionless. He repeats in the center of the dialogue the same
words he had flung at Socrates at the beginning, as though no
conversation had gone on at afl. How like some people we afl know,
Meno is, and how like ourselves. Between his repetitions a spectacular
event has taken place, but spectacles no more than arguments have
power to move him. If he had been sharp enough to see what Socrates
was doing in the slave-boy scene, Meno would have been moved to
anger. Socrates dangles in front of Meno a nonsensical concoction
about priests, priestesses, and reincarnation,just because that's what
it takes to get him interested in anything, which drops out of the
dialogue with hardly a trace, but what Socrates shows to Meno is living
proof that his slave is a better man than he is. Meno is immune to the
insult, but we are meant to look at him and at his slave, and to wonder
at the sight of a world turned upside-down. Socrates shows us that
the splendid Meno is not as much of a human being as is some
nameless piece of property that he owns and orders around. Now I am
not claiming that the slave is a model of excellence. All he does is try
to understand something, recognize that he doesn't, and try again,
and all Socrates claims is that this is a motion away from the inert
and toward the human. The understatement is breathtaking, and is
typically Socratic. Remember that the two arts Socrates most often
praises and recommends as models of the virtues are shoemaking and
medicine, and that Socrates himself has no use for either of them. But
even that much art would mend our lives.
Let us sum up what this reading of the Meno amounts to. It says
that virtue is activity that brings out our properly human capacities,
�50
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that learning either is that activity or inevitably accompanies it, and
that merely believing that learning is necessary and possible is the
start of the acquisition of virtue. What would Socrates say about this
formulation? He has in fact given us a standard to test it by, in his
two sample definitions of shape as the only thing that always turns
out to follow along with color, and as that to which a solid reaches, or
the determining boundary of a solid (75b, 76a). He tells Meno he would
love to hear even that sort of statement of what virtue is, and ours
does in fact resemble it. It appears that virtue is the only thing that
always turns out to accompany learning, and is that toward which
human activity reaches, the determining boundary of human nature.
This sort of answer is nothing one can rest with; in fact it is a destroyer
of rest, an invigorating answer that won't let us stand still. But it
explains why the clialogue that asks what virtue is dwells on what
learning is. And it gives us more ammunition to understand Meno
himself.
When Meno won't pause even for a second to think about the
definitions of shape, Socrates accuses him of hubris. Now the root
sense of this word applies to a horse that won't accept confinement.
Any question Socrates asks, anything definite that needs to be thought
about, Meno jumps over like a fence. He will not stay within any
determining boundary that would permit learning, and therefore
inevitably stays within his ignorance. And twice later (SOB, 81E),
Socrates calls him panourgos, someone who will do anything, in the
sense of stop at nothing, a shameless and unscrupulous man. When
Meno wants something, he takes the shortest route to it, without
stopping to wonder what he does to himself in the process. So he
misses the mark of properly bounded human activity on both sides:
in doing anything he can do nothing. He is panowyos and argos at
the same time, since he has not begun to think about which desires
he ought to satisfY, and has left himself helpless in the one arena in
which his boldness and eagerness would have been of some use to him.
The clialogue is so far from falling to say what virtue Is, that it says
it in a strong positive statement of conviction by Socrates, in the
negative example of Meno, the tiny beginner's example of his slave,
and, we have to add, the ever-present positive example of Socrates
himself. But none of these are explicit statements. Why is the clialogue
so indirect, inexplicit, and tantalizing? The fact that it is never
straightforwardly explicit means that we readers have to do all the
work, though Plato has handed us all the necessary tools. In the case
of this clialogue, we will only see what it says virtue is Ifwe begin enact
it ourselves, to learn it without being instructed. I said earlier that the
�SACHS
51
what-is question is never about a word. To anyone who has experienced such a question, the suggestion that it asks how a word is used
Is simply childish. We looked at one side of the what-Is question when
we saw that It asks how a thing Is defined, how It fits In with all that
Is. But It Is equally true that the very asking of such a question begins
to define us, to shape us and work us into new beings, launched into
learning.
But we seem not to .have said anything about the eidos of virtue.
At Meno's first attempt to speak about virtue, Socrates told him to
keep an eye on some one look that is the same In all virtues, however
many and various they might be. We have gotten as far as to say that
vtrtue always has the look oflearnlng, and to see that learning Itself
does not look like Meno's ability to quote from teachers and poets, but
does look like his slave's honest puzzlement and at the same time like
Socrates' energetic questioning. But this Is far from being able to see
what makes all virtue what it is. We are about as far along that road
as the slave-boy Is in geometry. Socrates describes that condition as
being on the borderline between knowledge and opinion, in just the
way we are at the moment we are awakened out of a dream (85c). The
slave, and we, could easily go back to sleep. In the Republic especially,
Socrates keeps cautioning that philosophy is a long road and hard
work (435d, 504b-d, 515e). The dialogues as a whole are only concerned with Its first step, the transition from sleep to waking, and they
do have the amazing power to set us in motion, but where we go after
that Is up to us.
But we can sketch out some directions we might choose to take.
For example, how should we think of the relation between a broader
form such as virtue and a narrower one such as justice? This probably
sounds like a silly question. Virtue Is obviously a genus of which
justice is one species; broad classes contain all sorts of smaller
sub-classes. But It is not a good idea to be hasty In matters of this
sort, and what seems obvious here is not at all necessary. The idea of
classes is one of the ways that logic can trlvialize philosophy. It is
precisely the mistake of the Eleatic Stranger to think that what is
looked for by the what-Is question can be trapped In classes without
being understood. The sophist does belong to the class of hunters,
and to that of salesmen, and to that of athletes, and so on, but that
is just the trouble. Every characteristic he has assigns him to some
class, and every one of them says something about him, but that
doesn't mean we can assume that they say what he Is. Some of those
classes he belongs to are merely parts of what he Is as a sophist, and
others are Incidental to what he primarily Is.
�52
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
But suppose we found some characteristic or cluster of them that
was both necessruy and sufficient to his being a sophist. Because of
Its necessity, every sophist would have to be In that class, and because
of Its sufficiency, everything In that class would have to be a sophist.
You will be surprised to hear that this Is not good enough either. It
would give us a test by which we could unfailingly Identify sophists,
but It still might not reveal what they are. How Is that possible? Think
of any proposition In Ew;lid about triangles, the more obscure the
better. I choose I.20, but' any one will do. In any triangle, two sides
tsken together in any manner are greater than the remaining one. Now
because this Is a proven proposition, It Is necessruy, and If Its steps
are reversible, which I think they are, It Is also sufficient to determine
a triangle. So as a good logician, I define trisngle as that of which two
sides tsken together In any manner are greater than the remaining
one. This Is an Infallible marker for a class that contains all triangles
and only triangles, yet It completely misses the point of defining
something, which Is to reveal what It Is.
.
In order to think about anything worthwhile, we have to abandon
the picture of classes nested within classes, and both Plato and
Aristotle In fact did that. Plato really did have a theory of forms, but
It Is nothing like what Is meant by virtually everyone who uses that
phrase nowadays. The thing that Wittgensteln is said to have refuted,
Plato had already refuted, In a more complex way. Plato's own theory
arose out of difficulties like the one I mentioned a moment ago: How
should we think of the relation between virtue and virtues? In the
Protagoras, Socrates asks whether justice, moderation, and so on are
not lnstsnces of virtue but parts of one whole, as the mouth, nose,
eyes, and ears are parts of one face (329d). And this Is a common
theme In the dialogues, as Socrates always seems to force people,
against common sense, to conclude that courage or justice or temperance Is Impossible In Isolation from the rest, and from wisdom. They
are as different from one another as eyes are from a mouth, and putting
them together does not blend them into a homogeneous mixture. Why
then shouldn't someone be brave while being unjust, intemperate, and
stupid? But If Socrates' suggestion Is tempting to you at all-If you
suspect that real bravery Is possible only In someone who Is just and
temperate and wise-then you have a tough problem on your hands.
It used to be called the problem of the one and the many. Aristotle
reports that Plato solved It by postulating that each form Is put
together In the way a number Is (Metaphysics 987b 21-2). Four Is not
something that belongs to each of Its units, but only to all of them
together. But the forms are not mathematical numbers, with identical
�SACHS
53
units, but are complexes of other forms, each distinct from the rest,
but impossible outside the complex. That means we can't stmply add
up wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice, because none of them
is anything at all in isolation from the rest. Wherever courage, say, is
found, virtue as a whole is already in play. But we can't get at virtue
itself, apart from the virtues, because it is nothing but the being-together of them all.
We know about this theory of Plato's only because Aristotle tells us
about it, and because that permits a kind of hindsight to be applied
to a few very obscure passages in the dialogues. Jacob Klein and
Robert Williamson have been inspired to make partial reconstructions
of it. • I mention it only to show that the technical and labortous side
of philosophy is as much a field for tmagination and wonder as is the
beginning of philosophy, when the what-is question first takes hold.
And I can report on yet another road one might take in the same
pursuit. Aristotle follows his teacher's lead in many more respects
than is usually seen, but in this one he charts a new course. It begins
with the observation that we call something medical, for example, in
a vartety of ways (Metaphysics, Bk.IV, ch. 2). There is a medical knife,
a medical book, a medical degree, a medical procedure, and a medical
person. Only in the last case is the word used in its prtmary sense, as
indicating the presence of a certain kind of knowledge and skill. The
knife is an instrument of that skill, the book one of the causes of it,
the degree a sign ofit, and the procedure an act or effect ofit. Whenever
something other than a human being is called medical, it is meant in
a dertvative sense that points to the primary one. This structure of
meaning operates everywhere, and again, Aristotle is not interested in
the way words are used, except as a pointer to the causal structure of
the world. And yet again, it is not the structure ofspecies within genus
within higher and higher general classes that reveals anything about
the world, but a more complex and intimate pattern that could never
be found by logic alone.
For example, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle asks a question he says
was asked in ancient times and must always be asked and struggled
with (l028b 2-4), what is being? By the end of the seventh book of
that work, he has determined that being is meant in its prtmary and
• Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Tiwught and the Origin of Algebra (M.I.T.
Press, 1968), Ch. 7, c. Robert B. Williamson, "Eidos and Agatlwn In Plato's
RepubUc," In FourEssays on Plato's "Republic, "Vol. XXXIX (1989-90), numbers
1 and 2, of this magazine.
�54
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
proper sense only of animals, plants, and the cosmos as a whole. They
are the only things that are in their own right, and everything else is
in some way derivative from them. Now this goes far beyond anything
present in linguistic usage. Language doesn't even know that it is
saying "being" in more than one way, but misleads us by appearing
to collapse them all into one. Aristotle is correcting the language by
discovering complexity where it suggests simplicity. Hls thinking is
moving entirely among the things at which language points, and points
in an inadequate way. Butit is a much greater step to single out active,
organized, self-maintaining wholes as the only things in our experience that display being as such. Language claims that title equally
and indifferently for tables, rocks, flowers, wood, bones, and all sorts
of other things that Aristotle thinks are only beings of the second rank,
beings-by-courtesy, derived from and dependent on those few things
that are always at-work-staying-the-same. Butwhatlfthe true beings
themselves have sources and causes? If they do, then the same pattern
continues, and even the primacy beings in our experience are derivative beings in the true order of things. This is exactly what Aristotle
concludes, as he follows the causal order upward to forms, and then
to the being-at-work offorms, and fmally to the divine intellect. Being
is not the class that includes evecything indifferently, but the activity
that proceeds from one source to the organized whole of all things.
Beings belong to a complex pattern that points to the highest being.
Now this pattern of one primacy meaning that governs the rest is
found everywhere in Aristotle's writings, but even it does not serve as
a method of lnqutcy for him. When he asks, in the NicomacheanEthics,
what is the good?, he seems to conclude that the various goods are
not linked by derivation from one primacy good, but are all the same
by analogy (1096b 27-30). That means that the human good has to
be a separate topic of lnqulcy, not found by derivation from a higher
good. Thomas Aquinas, lncidentslly, uses the word "analogy'' to refer
to the other pattern of meanings derived from one primacy instance, ·
but for Aristotle it makes a great difference which of the two patterns
is at work. For example, when we speak of a healthy diet, we mean
one that contributes to the health of an animal; it is not the diet but
the animal that can be healthy ln the primacy and governing sense.
But suppose we speak of a healthy society? Do we mean one ln which
the people are physically fit and free of disease, or one in which the
people co-operate in a way analogous to the parts of a healthy animal
body? The former would be a case of meaning by derivation, the latter
one of meaning by analogy. Aristotle's inquiries are guided by the
�SACHS
55
things for which they are looking. and do not seek to fit those things
into ready-made patterns of any kind.
In fact, in the Physics there is yet a third and most surprising
structure, that has only recently begun to become evident to me.
Aristotle asks what motion is, and gives an answer that applies to four
kinds: change of being, qualitative change, quantitative change, and
change of place. The definition seems to apply most directly to the first
two kinds. but the Physics Is organized around a progressive narrowIng down of all change to change of place, as the primary motion. The
number of kinds of motions is reduced In stages from four to three to
two to one. But the primary motion involves the least change, while
the primary change is the one that turns out to be least properly called
a motion. Change and motion name the same four kinds of action in
two opposite ways, so that the upward scale of motions is ·.he
downward scale of changes, with birth and death at one enr'. and
change of place at the other. This in tum reflects the twofold nature
of nature, as life and cosmos, in which Aristotle permits both sides to
be primary at the same time. One recent book about the Physics claims
that the early definition of motion Is discarded when the later books
are reached, but in fact that understanding of change In terms of
potency and being-at-work remains dominant, even while the motion
that displays it least Is being found to be the primary motion. in the
eighth chapter of the last book of the Physics there is a final demonstration of what Is wrong with Zeno's paradoxes that brings the
definition of motion to the forefront, and shows that all motion must
be understood as change, even at the limit of mere change of place,
and that all change must be rooted in the potency that goes with the
nature of some being. The meaning of motion, and its relation to
change, are imbedded in the way this world is organized. To get the
structure of meaning straight is to come into sight of the way things
are. In this case that produces a paradox beyond any that Zeno
imagined, a structure in which two things are simultaneously prior to
and derivative from one another.
So what is a game? Perhaps there is some common element present
in everything we call a game. Perhaps there is not, and they only share
a set of family resemblances. I can't work up enough interest in the
topic to form an opinion about it. All I can say is that, as far as my
own experience goes, there is no what-Is question there at all. But
what is virtue, or motion, or the good, or being itself? Reading Plato
and Aristotle has made it obvious to me that these are questions I have
a stake in pursuing, and has drawn me into the pursuit. The briefest
of sketches have shown us four different structures by which the one
�56
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
thing asked about might be related to the many things called by Its
name, none ofwhich Is as crude as either of the two alternatives about
games. To recapitulate them: the one thing In question might be
composed of the very things that are derived from It; It might be the
primary Instance to which all the others point; It might be an Internal
relation, present In the many things by way of analogy; and It might
be part of a bi-polar relationship, In which It and something akin to It
jointly govern a group of things that bear both of their names.
Aristotle's lnqulrles along the path of the what-is question are so
diverse, and the theory he attributes to Plato Is so unexpected, that
we are in no danger of becoming Platonlsts or Aristotelians. Even If we
wanted to, where Is the method to follow, or the procedure to Imitate?
Philosophy of a Platonic or Aristotelian kind Is nothing but activity
stimulated by the what-Is question, opened and re-opened In wonder,
led by desire, full of hard work but more enlivening than tiring, offering
not doclrlnes and dogmas but wide-open possibilities, as broad as the
human capacities we are so likely to leave unused and Inert.
�Words Should Be Hard
Words should be hard to come across,
As odd ones are in ancient manuscripts.
Let's take the appellation of your lips.
It shouldn't be reachable with ease. We first
Should have to search, and even then
Be sent from stem to root in the lexicon.
As for the kiss itself, the elusive bird
Should lurk in the glossary of highly
Irregular verbs. For, after all,
As the antic distich says, it's in that act
That the soul (poor thing) desires to cross over.
Elliott Zuckerman
�58
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�Anselm's Proslogion
and its Hegelian Interpretation
Adrtaan Peperzak
translated by Steven Werlln
To Paul Ricoew-, as a sign
ofgratitude and admiration.
1. Hegel on Anselm
St. Anselm is the only philosopher of the middle ages whom Hegel
discusses seriously in his lectures on the history of philosophy. Hegel
also devotes important pages to Anselm in his lectures on the philosophy of religion, especially in the Introduction to the main part-which
deals with religion that is Christian or "absolute"-where he explains
the credo ut intelUgam (I believe in order to understand).' There are
two main reasons for Hegel's interest:
(1) In contrast to those of his colleagues in theology and philosophy
who proclaim at every turn that the human mind cannot know God,
let alone prove his existence, Hegel believes that genuine faith does
not merely permit, but even requires, the believer to seek to understand rationally what he believes.
(2) According to Hegel, Anselm's proof of the existence of God,
presented in the Proslogion, is an expression--clumsy though it might
be-of the heart of all philosophy and all theology that deserves to be
called an absolute science.
It is more than probable that when Hegel dealt with the argument
that Ansehn makes in the Proslogion he had not read the whole book,
and so did not know the chapters, so important for understanding the
book, In which the author sets out, In a prayer, the emotional context
This essay is a translation of ..Le proslogion d'Anselme apres Hegel, .. which
appeared in the Archivio di Filosojla, Anoo LVIII (1990).
Adriaan Peperzak holds the Arthur J. Schmitt chair in Philosophy at Loyola
University of Chicago. Steven Werlto, an alumnus of St. Joho's College,
Anoapolis, Is his sludent.
�60
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
within which thought must move in order to att:am a cert:am understanding of God. In fact, all the quotations that Hegel offers to his
students are taken from Tennenman's History of Phllosophy. That
book makes no clear reference to the Indissoluble union between the
religious sentiment, expressed in chapters 1, 14, 16-18, 22, and
24-26, and the work of the understanding presented in the context of
prayer. Without a sense of that union, Hegel interprets the Proslogion
as though it were a thematic discourse, comparable to the philosophical treatises of modems such as Spinoza, Leibnlz, and Kant.
But the Hegelian interpretation is dominated not only in its form,
but also in its content, by the perspective of eighteenth-century
philosophy, notably by Kant. Hegel does not give a precise analysis of
the concept that Anselm starts out from, namely id quo malus cogitarl
nequit (that than wWch a greater cannot be thought). instead, Hegel
declares that concept to be equivalent to a number of different
expressions: to "the concept of the most perfect" and "the universe of
reality'' (der Inbegri.ff der Realttl.it and das Allgemeine der Realitdt)expressions which suggest the omnitudo realitatts (totality of reality)
of Leibnlz and Kant-and, on the other hand, to "the thought of a
highest" (der Gedanke eines Hochsten) and to "the Wghest thought"
(der hiichste Gedanke).
But even if Hegel did not know the framework that Anselm introduces his argument within wWch there is nevertheless a surprtsing
resemblance between their conceptions of what Hegel calls the "proofs
of the existence of God." Hegel tells us, in Ws Lectures on the Proofs of
the Existence of God, that any such proof is nothing but a way of
conceptualizing "the rising of the Spirit towards God" (ein denkendes
Au.ffassen dessen. was die Erhebung des Geistes zu Gott ist).2 In trying
to take in what is true in the various proofs, Hegel starts from Christian
faith, just as Anselm had, in order to comprehend what that faith has
testified. For Hegel, if the attempt is to succeed, the comprehension
that it reaches must include the necessity of its conclusion, and to ·
this end, the hypothesis the conceptualization starts from must show
itself to be a self-evident truth. For him, Anselm's great discovery is
that the content of the concept from which he deduces the necessary
existence of God does not have any foundation except itself. Even If it
is only taken as the thought of a hypothetical possibility, it imposes
by its own force the necessity of what it hypothesizes. The belief In the
existence of God, which, as an empirical fact, is prtor in time to the
deduction of that existence, is no longer required for knowing that God
exists as God. The proof shows Itself to be a proof a priori, a deduction
of the necessary implications of a pure concept. The task that then
�PEPERZAK
61
remains is the deduction, from the concept of God, of a subjective and
historical expression, which is the Christian faith. Such a deduction
will also show that the initial concept Is at the heart of that emotional
faith which Is prior in time to its assumption.
In fuct, Anselm's argument contains all that is necessary for a
complete philosophy: the concept of the perfect, or of God, is nothing
but the concept of the Logos (or of "the Logical"-das Logische-as
Hegel often says), which includes within itself all being and all thought.
The argument, which can rightly be called "onto-logical," is only a way
of proving that the Logos, or God, is the absolute identity of thought
and being, the first and the last, the foundation and the end of all that
is and all that is thought.
For Hegel, like Anselm, faith has an emotional side. But Hegel goes
much farther than Anselm, thinking as he does that the essence of
faith lies in its emotional form and that its contents are identical to
the theological science that one discovers in transforming emotional
adherence into rational knowledge. Although the truth of reason does
not depend on faith, faith is not superfluous: insofar as humans have
knowledge, they must also express truth in the emotional side of their
lives. A complete philosophy would also have to undertake analyses
of the representational, imaginary, and narrative dimensions offaith,
but in order to be brief I limit myself to its emotional aspect.
Like Hegel, Anselm trusts the power of reason to advance the
understanding of what he believes. We shall see, however, that he is
also convinced that there is an insurmountable gap between God as
he reveals himself through a living faith and God as he Is known by
rational thought. Anselm believes that reason can shed light on faith
because he accepts reason as a human means of deepening "the
elevation of his soul in faith towards God." Indeed, reason can
appropriate certain aspects of faith through the clarification of faith
by concepts. And yet, Anselm never uses reason to oppose what he
has received as the truth from the faith of the religious and historical
community that he is at home in.
Hegel does not oppose faith to reason either. He too is convinced
that they cannot contradict each other. He depends on what he calls
a "faith in reason" (Giaube an die Vemtmftl,3 which pretends to more
than Anselm's confidence in reason does. From Anselm's perspective,
we might say that Hegel bets on two different sorts offaith: a faith in
God and a faith In the Reason of Logic. For Hegel himself, however.
these amount to only one faith. God is the Logos; Reason, understood
rightly. is God. Faith is only a temporary way of atiaching oneself to
the truth of the Logos, a truth which better manifests itself when one
�62
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
has understood that the Logos is the "only necessary" thing. Because
religious faith is only reason, as expressed in the human psyche, not
yet "elevated" to the level most adequate to Spirit, Reason is the
supreme measure that faith is subject to. The Logos thus controls and
judges all religious faith, including the faith of the absolute, or
Christian, religion. 'The elevation of the spirit to God" must obey
logical necessities if it is to be fully worthy of God and humanity.
The concept that Anselm begins from in the second chapter of the
Proslogton and that Hegel takes to be the concept of the highest
perfection, is understood by Hegel as the abstract concept of the
absolute: the concept of the idea insofar as this latter is the original
identity of thought and being. His love for Anselm's argument is
understandable: by means of an analysis of the abstract concept of
perfection, the argument shows that the highest thought, the thought
of what is most universal, implies being. Thought and being are, then,
just two aspects of the One, which is also totality. The thought of
perfection is the Infinite. It encompasses not only all finite beings and
thoughts, but also the pseudo-infinite that most theologians contrast
with it. Despite certain blunders, a monk of the middle ages-which
were, for Hegel, very obscure-had surpassed Kant in affirming with
all lucidity the central truth of absolute Idealism: in the identity of
thought and being, the Logos is the Infinite and the Perfect. The Idea
of all ideas, the Essence of all that is, is not surpassed by anything or
any thought. It exists as the beginning and the end, as the meaning
of all that is and is thought.
For Hegel, there are two weaknesses in Anselm's effort:
(l) An adequate proof of his thesis would start either from thought
and show that it includes being or from being and show that it
necessarily implies thought. The difference between the two paths is
the difference between the a priori and the a posteriori proofs of the
existence of God. In either case, the proof would have to begin with
the most objective and necessary sense of thought or being and not
with a particular instance, whether subjective or otherwise contingent. Anselm starts out from the subjective consciousness of a certain
individual who thinks the notion of perfection. He does not begin with
the Logos as it displays itself in a Logic that is universal and necessary.
(2) Anselm limits himself to a phenomenological perspective, but
Hegel shows clearly in the Encyclopedia that such a perspective is not
sufficient for proving that the secret of the universe consists in the
self-realization of the absolute as the spiritual identity of subjectivity
and objectivity. Only (onto)logy, a logic which encompasses all that is,
can prove the thesis which Anselm sketches out in the Proslogion.
�PEPERZAK
63
2.Anselm
Now that we have seen how Hegel transforms Anselm's argumentum
untcum into a foreshadowing of post- and anti-Kantian idealism, let
us now see what we can learn from Anselm htmself.
Any interpretation of the "single argument" must begin with a
correct grasp of the framework It exists In, its text and its contexi; so
I will consider these at length. First, I will consider the title of the
Proslogion. It means "allocution," as Anselm remarks in his preface.
He contrasts this aUoqutum with the soliloquiwn. or soliloquy, of the
Monologion. The Proslogion Is thus neither, like the other book, the
meditation of someone "who would seek what he does not know by a
reasoning in the silence of his interior," nor is It a theological or
philosophical treatise. It is a speech addressed to someone. In fact,
the Proslogion Is addressed to many people. Like all writing, it is
addressed to Its readers. This direction is barely mentioned by Anselm.
Anselm also speaks, In many passages, to his soul (anima mea), to his
heart (cor meum), or to the "little man" (homunclo) that he Is. But the
principal addressee is, however, one who is continually present as
though he were someone who hears and intervenes, without making
a sound. It is God-Deus meus, my God, or Dominus meus, my Lord,
or simply Til. The frequent repetition of meus in Deus meus and
Dominus meus shows that the connection which binds Anselm to "his"
God is more intimate than the relation between a philosophical mind
and a theme that it might try to comprehend. The relation between
the writer of the Proslogionand the heart that he exhorts or reproaches
seems to create a distance between the texi and Anselm htmself, but
Anselm undermines this impression by directing himself primarily to
God and by constantly identtJY!ng htmselfwith his soul and with the
homuncio to whom he addresses htmself. The book, oriented as It Is
from the beginning towards God, is a prayer that Anselm's heart
directs towards "his God." All of the arguments and all of the analyses
that arise In the texi are presented as parts of a long prayer, one that
tolerates no distractions.
This prayer is a direct and an utterly natural expression of faith. It
is not subjective-if that word means "arbitrary." On the contrary,
Anselm appeals, in describing its content, to what has been transmitted to him by the historical community that calls itself the "Christian
Church." In Chapter Two he says "credimus," or "we believe." This
community had, In its thousand years, borrowed from the languages
of many cultures in order to translate and interpret the heritage of its
�64
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
faith, a faith which was not particular to any of those cultures, but
was strong enough to redeem them all. One of these languages Is the
language of Hellenistic onto-logy, translated into Latin, which Anselm
found in the works that he read In his abbey. He uses that language
when, after the Invocation at the beginning of Chapter Two, he
reformulates the rock of the Christian faith: "Grant that we might
understand, as much as you think It beneficial, that (quia) you are,
as we believe it, and that you are what (quod) we believe. Now, we
believe that you are something (aliquid) than which one can think
nothing greater."
If we take the understanding (intelllgere or intellectus) that Anselm
seeks to be a synonym for "wisdom," then the prayer seems to carry
on a biblical tradition that is expressed, for example, In the wisdom
literature and in many of the psalms. Anselm then changes the "You"
(credimus te esse) into a "something" (aUquid) that one can only "think"
(cagitare). Is this not a metabasis eis allo genos, a change of kind?
Hasn't Anselm left the biblical tradition in order to adandon himself
to the pagan world of Greek philosophy? Are we confronted once again
by the insurmountable difference between the God of Abraham and
the God of the philosophers?
Anselm's Intent is to show that the God of faith Is the one and only
Lord and God, and that all the value of our life and our Intellect
depends on this single God. Anselm uses a reason that has been
educated by certain great Greek thinkers in order to "understand a
little" (aUquatenus inteUfgere, Chap. 1) that God is what he Is, but he
always maintains his radical and intimate connection with the emotional fountain that springs from desire and hope, and Is the fruit of
religious maturity.
Anselm would firmly deny that there could be a contradiction
between the God of faith and the God of philosophy. He often warns
us not to overestimate the power of the intellect, yet he never deprecates the gift of reason through which man Is seen to have been created
in the image of God.
Although the beginning of the second chapter might suggest that
the faith that Anselm starts from Is a belief in a doctrine composed of
true propositions, this Is not the case. Uke the pistis which Paul
speaks of, Anselm's faith (fides) is, from the start, an utter abandonment and a complete confidence. By God's grace, faith engages the
believer in the practice oflove on the basis of gratitude and joy in hope.
In faith, a life Is seized by an orientation that becomes both a habit
and a disposition of the soul and the body. "God" is thus the name of
the Unique One who orients, penetrates, supports, and consoles even
�PEPERZAK
65
before granting a clear consciousness of what he Is bringing about in
the soul.
At the same time, a living faith inevitably deploys Itself in all the
essential dimensions of the human being engaged by It, and so also
In the Intellect, which Is, in Itself, an inclination towards more light.
An authentic believer Is engaged by his faith in an effort to comprehend
what he lives, having received and understood that faith in the
community which heed~ its tradition. Every authentic believer tries In
this way to gain a certain wisdom. If he has learned methods of
reflection, If he has, for example, studied Neoplatonic treatises, he
uses the practical techniques found in those works, orienting them
according to the wisdom that all faith hopes to blossom into. The
Christian faith has never required that the believer be intelligent, or
that he dedicate himself to philosophical or theological studies. Just
like the blind and the deaf, those who are not intelligent are called to
essential wisdom. But if an authentic believer is authentically philosophical, It Is Impossible for his philosophy to be isolated from what
constitutes the deepest Inspiration of his life. His faith inevitably seeks
an understanding of itself along the path of ontology.
The orientation of a life that seeks God, an orientation grounded In
belief and in love, Is thus the moving force of, and the condition for,
the philosophical investigation Anselm proposes to us. The Investigation is not an autonomous enterprise, because belief and love not only
precede it, but also accompany it and support it. It is therefore natural
that the long chapter that opens the investigation consists of a prayer
in which "my whole heart" (totumcormewn) asks God to help, to teach,
to illuminate, and to renew the man who looks up, from his miserable
state of ignorance, in order to see whether, in hope, his God will grant
what he desires. Anselm's project Is In no way apologetic: neque entm
quaero inteUigere ut credam (for I do not seek to understand in order
to believe); he hopes only to acquire or receive a certain understanding:
credo ut inteUigam.
In concentrating on a philosophical task within a prayer, Anselm
tries to link two fundamental attitudes: the more radical of the two Is
that of the faith in which he finds himself naked before the face of his
God. The other Is that of someone who reflects upon God by seeing
him through a thought In which he appears as a theme or an object.
The stake In the enterprise-and this is the stake in all theology that
Is not atheist-Is to know whether these attitudes can be combined.
Anselm's wager Is the hypothesis that the philosophical intentaccording to which God Is manifest as a thought, as something said
thematically----<:an be integrated Into the Intent of prayer. If he sue-
�66
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ceeds in it, a believer who is (also) a philosopher will have expressed
his faith by speaking to God about God himself, offering to him the
perspective, the presuppositions, and the means of phtlosophy. Philosophy will have lost its autonomy, but it will have been saved by its
integration into the prayer which fulfills its purpose. While seeming
to reduce God-in the course of his allocution-to a theme, or to
something said, Anselm continually calls him ''You," "my Lord," and
"my God." He speaks to Gqd and offers to him what he thinks of him,
submitting whatever he thinks he knows to God's ultimate judgment.
Anselm's understanding is thus determined by desire and expectation;
he knows and feels that even when his understanding Is made
thematic, his thought Is drawn, guided, and Illuminated by the You
that hears it. The investigation is an exercise in Speaking. and, insofar
as grace has preceded his faith, that Speaking is first and foremost a
way of responding to the one who is his Ufe. The wisdom that he
prepares is discovered to be a gift that fulfills a vision at the heart of
faith. He seeks a concrete knowledge instead of the abstract consciousness and near-Ignorance from which he staried. The God whom
he believes in grants him food for thought. He grants him to think that
very God. As a beginning, God grants him to think God in the form of
a concept that scarcely reveals the tnfinite richness ofwhat he "always
already" is for the heart and the soul of the believer.
The living faith in God is not only the point of departure; it is also,
roughly spreaking, the criterion that allows one to judge whether the
Investigation effectively reaches its end. Faith guides reason all along
Its path. It is, for example, very clearly evident in Chapter Fourteen.
Having proven that God exists as omnipotence, life, truth, justice,
mercy, goodness, and etemi1y themselves, Anselm must note to his
regret that this God, God as (re)presented in the fullest of concepts,
does not correspond to God as he appears prior to all philosophy and
thanks to the experience of faith. The gap between the truth of God
revealed in faith and the truth of God thought by reason Is the gap
between the hidden wisdom of an emotional adjustment to the God
whom one can call "Tu, Deus meus," and the lucid concept of certain
contours of God-a concept that has nonetheless not yet reached its
full completion. Faith is not prevented by any lack of speculative
brilliance from guiding and evaluating the results of philosophy,
whose inner logic obeys only Itself. Without faith, philosophy cannot
find God, because it lacks the perspective and the orientation through
which it can knowwhat direction to search in. Without faith, It cannot
even construct Its initial concept. Without that concept, however,
there can be no beginning and no proof.
�PEPERZAK
67
The movement that begins In faith and strives towards a more
illuminated faith here is a process by which an abstract concept
becomes concrete and "fulfills" itself little by little. Where does this
movement lead? Chapters Fourteen and F1fteen show that the doctrine
that can be deduced from the starting point does not so completely
fulfill the concept that the God of thought can be recognized as the
true God of faith.
When Anselm asks, in Chapter Fourteen, whether his "soul" has
found what it sought oy means of the deduced concept-that is, to
know God as it knows him by a faith that has not yet been transformed
Into ontological understanding-he notes that it has not: "that which
Is the highest of all beings, beyond which nothing better can be
thought, which Is life itself(tpsa vita),light, wisdom, goodness, eternal
blessedness, and eternllyutterly happy, and who Is all this everywhere
and always,"ls not the God that the prephilosophical faith recognizes
as its God, the God it prays to and depends upon as Its "creator and
recreator." This discovery plunges the disappointed soul into a crisis,
as much emotional as Intellectual.
The disappointed soul must learn to accept two things If it is to
overcome the depression that threatens It: (l) that the ontological
argument has made the soul see something of its God-"the soul sees
you in a way" even If "It does not see you such as you are" (sicuti es)and (2)-that even this "something," which becomes more visible through
the course of twelve chapters,is still an abstract thought. The logic that
has been uncovered has not yet reached the sense in which the soul
feels that God Is truth and goodness, etemily and blessedness.
The second movement of the Prosl.ogion (Chap. 16-26) Is a new
attempt to identify the God of philosophy with the God offaith. Though
Anselm strongly afllrms their thorough ldentily, he acknowledges In
the last chapter that the utter lucidi1ythat belongs to faith In reference
to Itself remains an ideal that will not be realized on earth. Anselm
seeks the reason for the gap between the two ways In which God
reveals himself In the wretched fate of men as the Inheritors of a
heritage of sin. The tradition of evil (starting with Adam and Cain) that
cuts across the tradition of faith (starting with Abel) plunges us into
a darkness of Ignorance and deformily that we are unable to depart
from entirely. This is to say that we all, believer and unbeliever, carry
the opposite of wisdom at the heart of our existence. We are all fools.
instpientes. We all tell ourselves In our hearts, In one way or another:
Non est Deus. "there Is no God."
What prevents the insipiens from becoming sapiens, or wise?
Anselm asks himself this question at the end of Chapter Three,
�68
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
immediately after he has set out the core of his single argument, thus
surrounding that argument between two quotations of the fool who
says in his heart that there is no God. The fool hears with his ears and
grasps with his consciousness the thought of something than which
nothing greater can be conceived, but he does not realize what this
thought necessarily includes. The concept with which Anselm tries to
formulate the core of what "we believe"-abstract and enigmatic as
that concept is-does not stand, for the fool, as a thesis that affirms
the proposition that existence is contained in the essence signified by
the words he has heard. The fool grasps the (pseudo)definition of God,
but he cannot pass from the reference it contatos to the thing to which
it refers.
Why not? What prevents him from making that transition? If
Anselm is right in saying that the transition is logically impeccable, it
would seem that the fool lacks Intelligence or logical ability. Butifthat
Is where the obstacle lies, then we would have to say that all atheists
are bad at logic and that all those believers who do not see the logical
necessity of the argument are just as foolish and stupid (stultus et
lnsipiens, Chap. 3) as the fool who says there Is no God. In Chapter
Four, which explains why the fool, even while truly "thinking," says
In his heart there Is no God, Anselm makes a distinction that Is already
evident between "thinking the word (voX) that signifies a thing (res)"
and "comprehending what the thing Is," but he does not say why the
atheist Is stupid and foolish enough to deny the connection between
the two. Immediately after his "explanation," however, Anselm thanks
God for having given to him what he sought: the understanding of the
concept that he previously had possessed by faith alone. Thanks to
divine illumination, a "little man," full of darkness, understands that
the abstract concept IQM demands that one transform It Into a phrase
affirming the existence of what Is thought or represented in the
concept. • Apparently, logic alone does not suffice in order to pass from
the abstract concept to the evidence of a concrete thought. But why
Is the the fool unable to pass from the nearly empty concept of God to
Its merely partial fulfillment? What experience or motivation does he
lack?
If we can suppose that the fool is not only the atheist that we find
outside of us, but Is also someone living In our heart, then the answer
to the question seems to be found in the first chapter of the Proslogion,
*IQM is an abbreviation of id quo malus cogitari non potest (that than which a
greater cannot be thought). [Translator]
�PEPERZAK
69
where Anselm asks God to grant him the right orientation, the attitude
that will allow him to progress from a blind faith to one that has been
illuminated by the comprehension of its contents. Without God's
assistance, man Is bent over (incW"Vatus) so that he cannot look above.
Anselm writes, "I am not able to look [anywhere] but down" (Chap. l);
without the illumination that comes from the face of God, the eyes of
man remain blind. That Is why the writer asks: "Lift me up, until I am
able to direct my gaze above. •
What humans lack, What prevents them from using philosophical
reflection to Intensify and elucidate their faith In God, is a perspective
that distinguishes between the high and the low, and looks upon the
being of the world In the context of that difference. Instead of speaking
of high and low, one could also speak of more and less, of smaller and
larger, or of better and worse. The need for such a perspective is
evident In the initial concept that Anselm uses to tty to condense the
heart of faith so that It can be thought by anyone. The formula of the
IQM has no meaning-what It Is trying to say cannot be grasped-if
the one who hears It or speaks it does not presuppose that the universe
of being can and must be thought within an ultimate dimension
characterized by the possibility of a gradation In the greatness of
beings. Only then can beings be compared to one another. Anselm's
ontology presupposes both a comparison of different dimensions of
the universe of being and an intuition of the directions In which one
might encounter the greater and the less.
The meaning of "greater" and "less" is not very clear, but it Is In any
case far removed from the emphasis on quantity characteristic of
modern science. If we speak, like many of the commentators, of
qualitative differences, It is a little bit clearer; at least we are made to
see that matus and minus are, In relation to being, supposed to point
to something about value. A reading of all those passages In which
that most fundamental presupposition appears confirms that rnatus,
as It is used in the IQM, refers to what has more value. It Is a synonym
for melius (better). In fact, as early as Chapter Three, without giving
any argument, Anselm passes from the concept of matus In the IQM
to that of melius. He writes: Si enim aliqua mens posslt cogitare aliquid
melius (For if some mind could think something better...) This latter
concept will dominate the rest of the Proslogton.
The perspective that the whole argument rests in Is thus one in
which God is sought by starting from a universe characterized by a
ladder of beings arranged according to their greater or lesser "value,"
"goodness," or "greatness." God is not sought within this universe:
that would be to think him as a being within a dimension that
�70
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
encompasses him. It would then be possible to think of something
greater or to identitY hlm with the totality of all the degrees of being,
that totality which-even If It Is something---surely Is not God. What
Is sought Is something that separates Itself by a "not" from what
thought can (re)present to Itself of what Is greatest.
If this manner of approaching the universe of beings Is a condition
sine qua non for grasping the meaning of the abstract concept that
Anselm offers us, one can understsnd what the fool would need In
order to follow Its deduction. It Is not that the nonbeliever lacks logic,
but that he has no sense of what Is high and what Is low. His world
does not point towards summits, because It Is filled with Indifference.
Neither the nonbeliever's world, nor the nonbeliever himself, has a
radical orientation that directs his life, his actions, and his feelings
towards the height that can awaken, or has already awakened, the
most radical human desire.
Who would not here be reminded of Plato? For him, not only the
psycne and the poUs, but the whole cosrrws, appears as a wonder
within a dimension greater and higher than the essence and the being
of ideas-within the dimension dominated by the agathon. The
agathon Is neither a being nor an essence, nor an idea among the
Ideas, nor the greatest nor the highestldea. It is the Good itself, beyond
the whole gradation of beings, outside of the totality of the gradual
differences that can be compared. All of Plato's work Is likewise set In
a "space" oriented by what Is low and what Is high. To understsnd It
one must discover the meaning and the necessity of the references
expressed by words like "€KE'ia<" (up there) and "€rrtKnva" (beyond). To
understsnd It Is to know-or at least to surmise-what the upward
orientation that results from true eplstrophe demands.
Just like the sophist and the tyrant, the fool cannot discover the
true Good because he Is not looking In the right direction. He does not
love the Good, and does not recognize what Is better even when It Is
presented not just In an abstract concept, but concretely. That Is why
he understsnds the IQM as an indifferent thing ''without any [real]
meaning" or "as having a foreign meaning," a meaning that deforms
what the concept says (Chap. 4). He does not follow the dynamism of
the concept, and he denies what It suggests, because his way of being
In the world Is not religious. Bent towards what Is below, he is not
open to the light that comes from above.
But are we not being unjust when we accuse the atheist of
indifference and Insensibility to the degrees of difference between the
better and the worse? It goes without saying that the atheist whom we
are speaking of does not coincide with some one who pronounces the
�PEPERZAK
71
words "there Is no God," anymore than someone who says the contrary
would thereby already be a believer. But even If we only speak of those
who say In their hearts that God Is an illusion or a pseudonym for
some finite thing, It would be unjust to pretend that they do not have
enough taste or culture to distinguish the degrees of a long ladder of
value or being. What they deny Is not that there is a multitude of
degrees of quality, but that there exists a single "thing" beyond all that
can be thought to be exceedingly great and good. They admit the
possibility of something better, but not of the Good Itself. Ansehn
wrestles with their quite civilized relativism when he identifies what
exceeds any possible maximum ofbeing and goodness with what exists
independently as the absolutely Good that all the degrees of goodness
and being, including all possible maxima, depend upon. He presupposes not only a ladder from what Is lowest to what Is highest-a chain
that may be without definite endpoints--but also an attraction exerted
by what escapes all gradation, the non-graded that Is beyond what Is
Infinite In a merely finite way, the Good beyond all that Is. The
philosophical enterprise presents Itself as an attempt to reconstruct
the orientation that the heart and soul of the believer experience In
faith and because of faith. This reconstruction will not succeed If the
endpoint of the orientation Is not present both In the perspective In
which, and In the movement by which, thought finds itself, In hindsight, to have been guided and transformed. The logical task that
Anselm tries to explain must be sustained by what Is at least a seed
of wisdom. Otherwise, the Initial foolishness will prevent one from
perceiving and feeling the rightness of the logical passage that transforms the abstract concept of the IQM into the affirmation of a
proposition that sets out Its existence. Logic alone Is not enough; an
orientation and a movement that Is prelogical, a good destre and the
attunement of emotion-or a certain faith and hope-are necessary
above all.
The whole ProslogiDn Is the deployment of an emotional certainty
that becomes conceptually conscious ofltselfbymeans of an (onto)loglcal strategy. That Is why Its second half, beginning after the disappointment expressed In Chapter Fourteen, Is dedicated to a deepening
of the discovery In two respects:
(1) The prayer becomes more Insistent, giving free rein to the
fundamental sentiments that testifY to the proximity of a God who
seems far away because even someone bathed In his light cannot not
see him completely.
(2) The discovery that the light of God, as It Is In Itself, Is "too much
for me" (nbnia miltq and "inaccessible" (Chap. 16) develops into an
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
72
amendment of the formula from which the investigation had started.
Anselm writes, ''Thus, Lord, not only are you that than which one can
think nothing greater, but you are something greater than can be
thought" (Chap. 15). Even so, this correction does not abolish the
initial formula, because the new "definition" can be justified rationally
by the original formula. lf God were not great enough to exceed all that
can be presented or represented in human thought, then human
thought would still be able. to think such a thing, and God would not
be IQM (Chap. 16).
.
Thought can thus think something beyond all that enters into it. It
can think beyond what it thinks, beyond all the beings and all the
ideas, beyond the being of beings itself, beyond the universe of being,
ErrE~enva
Tiis oVcrtas.
We must conclude, then, that the true sense of the initial abstract
concept of God is not yet evident in Chapters Two and Three. Nor is
it present in Chapters 4-13, where God is understood as truth and
goodness, eternal and omnipresent, the source of all that is true and
good, etc. A truer grasp requires one to open one's soul to a reality
that surpasses what can be thought.
Can one experience this reality? As the end of the Proslogion proves,
there is a joy (gaudi:um) that makes it evident that one can. The path
that Anselm pursues is not, however, the path of a purely emotional
experience-though such a path would also be possible-but that of
an (onto)logical investigation sustained and guided by such an experience. That is why, after a long prayer that constitutes a new
departure, Anselm goes on to deepen the provisional outcome of his
investigation by making a new appeal to the concept than which
nothing better can be thought (Chap. 18). ''The second sailing,"
however, which is the task of Chapters 18b-26, does not bring much
new knowledge. Instead, it reenforces, unifies, and simplifies aspects
deduced in the course of the first part of the book, by insisttng that
God is not the highest, the best, the being that is superior, the most
lasttng and the most extended being, but extra omne tempus, metaphorically "outside of time" (Chap. 19), and ante et ultra omnia,
metaphorically "before" and "beyond" everything (Chap. 20). The
"presence" of God (Chaps. 20, 22) is a presence that is utterly unique
and not temporal in any sense. It is thus no longer a presence, a here
and now, opposed to the past and the future. The eternal presence of
God differs as much from the present, which is opposed to the future
and past within temporality, as transcendence differs from the totality
of beings. ''You alone, Lord, are what you are, and you are who you
are" (Chap. 22). The "Greek" question as to the being of God seems
�PEPERZAK
73
here to coincide with the question of God's presence as It was revealed
to Moses and was known to Ansehn as Ego sum qui sum. At the same
time, the expression ''you are who you are" seems to allude to the word
by which Jesus ventured to identify his omnipresence in history as
EyW djlL, or "I am."
The deepening of the argument, which occupies Chapters 15-26,
culminates in a formula that attempts to summarize the essence of
God in the truest and simplest manner, a formula found In Chapter
Twenty-three. It Is a formula whose radiance the three last chapters
celebrate: "God Is the good Itself." At the same time, if one would like
to know what this divine good means, one must not only know all that
has been said about its existence, its properties, and Its unique
essence, but also that It Is a trl-unlty of truth and love. Or, to
summarize it in an (onto)logical manner, which does not, however,
exclude allusions to the NewTestsment: God Is the Good thatis simple
and uniquely necessary, the one and total perfect good, the only tWng
that is good. To say It with Ansehn and Plato, God Is the Good.
3. Ansehn against Hegel
The reaction that Ansehn would have had to the Hegelian Interpretation can now be summarized as follows:
(1) The faith that seeks to understand neither wants to nor can
abolish itself as the foundation of the meaning ofllfe and of thought.
It can tWnk of itself as something more than an expression of a
speculative truth-an expression that is perceptible, Imaginary, and
emotional-and It would like to do so because to reduce It to such an
expression would remove its character as a face-to-face encounter
with God. In the faith that Is understood as an encounter, the soul
lifts itself up to tell God all that It has grasped of him. But It knows
all the while that it has grasped only a little compared to the inaccessible light that the soul feels Itself to be enveloped in, even though It
cannot see that light.
(2) God Is not the identity of being and thought that encompasses
all things, but the Unique One, which, of course, contains the fullness
of being and the good, but In a way that separates it from what exists.
Thanks to creation and re-creation, God is known. The ascent towards
the absoluteness of God Is, In effect, the heart of human being and Its
logos, and thus the source of all other truths. But it Is not an idea: it
leads and judges the whole history of the Intellect, because It precedes
and exceeds reason by an adherence that Is older and more prophetic
than reason. TWs adherence, manifest In love and In hope, Is as
�74
'IHE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
different from any (onto)logical comprehension as God Is different from
the ideas and beings of speculative thought.
4. Two Remarks
In the course of the analysis I have just given, Plato and Hellenistic
Neo-Platonism have been present in the backround. In fact, many
aspects of the Proslogion show more affinity with Platonic inquiries
that they do with the Hegelian system. In particular, that idea of the
ayae6v which occupies the center of the RepubUc seems very close to
the bonwn that dominates the Proslogion. Uke Plato's Good, the God
of the Proslogionls before, outside of, and beyond (epekeina, ante, and
ultra) the universe ofbeings. Anselm's God rules, as the absolute end,
not only the desire that Initiates the whole search and the entire
process of the Investigation, but also the entire universe, In relation
to which he Is the one who "gives." One could multiply the structural
parallels between the Proslogion and the Platonic works, or also the
works of Plotinus, but It is also necessary to say that there Is a certain
affinity or convergence even with respect to their contents. It is no
surprise that many Fathers of the Church thought that Plato had read
Moses and that God had sent him to the Greeks In order to prepare
them for a more authentic revelation.
However, a comparison of the Investigations undertaken by Plato
and Anselm would require that the words In which they are written
be understood apart from the context of the life and the culture In
which each Investigation had Its expression. Thus Anselm's Good Is
not the sun of Plato's aesthetic-religious universe. In Plato's cosmos,
where wonders both mortal and divine show themselves in the
illuminated space between heaven and earth, the Good shows Itself
In the beauty of essences, the excellence of communities and of
individual human beings, the nobility ofworks, and the natural justice
of a good education. The idea of KaAoKayaela does not leave room for
the Good to manifest Itself as a personal being who can hear or forgive.
Also, the meaning of"giving" is determined as an anonymous source
of light, which neither hears nor speaks. The whole ethic of the polis
and the human psyche is dominated by an admiration for the way in
which their excellence unfolds in a beautiful life. Arete Is above all the
success of being In the various forms of well-proportioned harmony.
The Good Is identical with Beauty. Neither a thing nor a person, the
Good-and-Beautiful Is the anonymous beyond without a face. The
destiny of all being Is to fulftllltself as the wonder that at its core, In
�PEPERZAK
75
the "idea," it is. It must shine forth in order to let the idea, which is
also the ideal, become manifest In the splendor of the phenomena.
For Anselm, bonwn. the Good, is heard, received, and felt in a
different way. When he says to God: "You are nothing other than the
unique supreme good... " (Chap. 22) or 'This good, it is you, God the
Father..." (Chap. 23), he is attempting to make the name "good"
coincide with the true name of God. In calling God "good," he expresses, first of all, biblical reminiscences, and not so much the
concepts of agat/wn and bonwn he had received from the tradition of
the noble pagans. This is evident, for example, in Chapters 8-11, in
which the first stage of his onto-theo-logical discovery of God reaches
Its culmination: the mercy that seems so difilcult to reconcile with
justice Is surely an aspect of God inherited from the biblical tradition
and not from Plato, whose aesthetic ethic does not exclude the worst
cruelties towards weak infants, the handicapped, criminals, and
barbarians.
It Is, at the same time, remarkable that, In his prayer, Anselm does
not address himself to God by calling God bonwn or summum bonwn.
His preferred vocative Is "Lord" (Domine), but he also, though less
often, calls God altissime Domine, bone Domine (Chap. 4), Domine
Deus, Dominus meus et Deus meus, Deus meus, and Deus meus et
Dominus meus. Only once does he call to God with the words 0
trrunensa bonttas (Chap. 9), but In every case It Is the word Tu or es
that accompanies these names, and what Anselm asks for and destres
is to see his God face to face. God, the creator who has "formed" and
reformed all, to whom all being and all knowledge is indebted for what
It is, evidently does not allow himself to be thematlzed as an Idea or
as something said. EVen the most beautiful words, like "good," cannot
name him for one who is striving to maintain a face-to-face connection
that allows one to address him with the pronoun Tu.. Saying ''you"
affirms God in an act of speaking and prevents one both from reducing
God to a theme and from trying to circumscribe God within a dogmatic
thesis. In using the second person singular pronoun, Anselm distinguishes himself not only from Plato, but also from his own argument. That God Is the Good, and even Goodness Itself (bonttas ipsa),
is an expression that belongs to the genre of thematic discourse.
EVerything must be done to furnish this concept with a way to enter
Into the full richness of biblical heritage and the whole spiritual
experience of Christianity, but the truth of speaking to God will never
be able to coincide with the truth of a phtlosophical reflection, which
treats that truth in the third person, reducing it to an object, as great
and as supreme and as infinite as one would like to make it. The
�76
'IHE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
language of (onto)logical discourse results in a provisional name or
pronoun, a pseudonym rather or a pro-pronoun of God. The Good of
the Platonic tradition has served Anselm, as It can sttll serve anyone
who, belonging to another tradition and history, has received and
acquired another sort of knowledge of God, made up of faith and of a
desirous intimacy In hope.
The second remark I would like to make concerns the ambiguity,
no doubt Inevitable, of onto-logical language. It Is evident in the
Republic, where Plato Is careful to separate the Good itself from the
whole collection of beings, even whlle, in the very same context, he
treats the Good as an "idea," calling It "the idea of the Good," and
presenting the knowledge of the Good as an ideal knowledge.4 The
Good cannot be what Is beyond (hrEKEtva), it cannot be transcendent
or infinite, and at the same time be an idea. It cannot even be the idea
of the summit. As Plotinus saw very well, the One is absolutely
separate from the totality of beings or ideas. Although Anselm too
knows very well that God is neither a being nor the being of the totality
of beings, he also juxtaposes an insistance on the fact that God is
outside of (extra), before (ante), and beyond (ultra) the universe, with
expressions that call God the highest good (summwn bonum), the end
of a ladder of values. If we wanted to discuss Heidegger's rough and
cavalier critique ofwestern ontology, It would not be difficult to defend
Anselm, with other thinkers from Plotinus to Malebranche, against it.
We might insist, for example, on the meaning of the formulas "the
truth itself," "the good itself," or "the essence Itself." We would have to
acknowledge that even the Initial concept that the whole argument of
the Prosloglon Is based upon yields itself to two different interpretations. IQM can be understood as an indication of what does notln any
way belong to the ladder of gradations. But one can also read it as
that which is the greatest of all fmite beings. Anselm might reject the
second Interpretation by arguing that one can think something greater
than the entirety of all finite beings, but the atheist could answer
him-andnotjustthe atheist, but many believers would do it too-that
he commits a petitio principii, since the possibility of an idea of the
infinite Is not given as Immediately and rationally evident.
But this is to begin a new reading, a re-reading of the Proslog!on
from the point of view ofits logic. Wbatl have tried to show is, however,
that a reading that restricts itself to the logic of the argument is a second
reading, because it requires first of all that one explain how the sense
of the words of the "onto-logical" argument, is experienced, perceived,
and lived by the author. This could not be done without a clear
consciousness of the intimate connections between the (onto)logical
�PEPERZAK
77
argument and the religious experience that Is Its dynamic and prophetic support.
Let us come to a close by saying that on the basis of a discipline,
one many years long, of religious life-a discipline above all emotional
and meditative-Anselm did not think It necessary to explain at length
that the td quo malus non cogitar! potest ls neither an id, nor the
greatest of all beings, nor universal being, nor the history of being or
beings. It is the horlzon which rules all other horizons (and above all
that of the finite, the temporal, the historical, and the Intentional). For
one who admits the possibility of thinking God, that horlzon is the You
to whom all being and the experience of thought belong .
•••
Notes:
1. G.W.F. Hegel, Geschtchte Der Phtlosophte 19 (XV), pp. 164-69, and
Vorlesungen iiber dte Phtlosophte der ReUgfon. Gloclmer 16 (XII) pp.
214-18.
2. Gloclmer 16 (XII), pp. 392 and 399.
3. See Hegel's Berlin Inaugural speech of October 22, 1818, in Berliner
Schrlften 1818-1831, Hamburg, 1956, p. 8-9.
4. Plato, Republic, 509b and 517c.
�78
THE ST. JOHN"S REVIEW
�The Dialectic of Love in
War and Peace
Randolph Perazzini
Although he dreaded nothing so much as ridicule, Tolstoy never let
that stop him from adopting positions and doing things that, even to
a sympathetic eye, make him look ridiculous. At the age of sixty-one,
for Instance, having recently fathered his fourteenth child, he became
convinced that Jesus wanted everyone to be celibate; and to the deep
humiliation of his wife, Sonya, the man who had long sung the praises
of married life and childbirth wrote and published The Kreutzer
Sonata, a novel which denounces marriage as "legalized prostitution."
If universal celibacy were to make the race extinct, Tolstoy wrote, he
would have "no more pity for these two-footed beasts than for the
icthyosaurus,"l but he realized there was little danger of that. Celibacy
was "an ideal to strive for," but only a few individuals would be able
to regain such innocence. Unforlunately for him, Tolstoy was not one
of those few: for at least ten years after The Kreutzer Sonata, his diaries
and his wife's chronicle the frequent demands of his passion that left
her increasingly ashamed and estranged, but invariably left him
cheerful and animated.
It would be a mistake to think that such contradictory behavior
(verging on hypocrisy) was a product of Tolstoy's old age, after his
famous conversion. That conversion only gave him slightly different
terms in which to express the dilemma that he embodied his whole
life. On the one hand, Tolstoy was a darling of nature, blessed for more
than eighty years with robust health, strength, appetites and the
capacity to satisfy them. He was wealthy, high-born, brilllant, and
talented. He could play like a cliild and talk with peasants as easily
Randolph Perazzini delivered this lecture In Santa Fe In September, 1991, and
in Annapolis in September, 1992. At the time he was a tutor at the Santa Fe
campus.
�80
1HE Sf. JOHN'S REVIEW
as he could concentrate on intellectual matters for twelve hours at a
stretch and publicly stand up to the Tsar and the Holy Synod.
On the other hand, Tolstoywas a prophet possessed by a God whose
love Is embodied In every manifestation of life. From his earliest days
he was often filled with a sense of love that made all things one, and
he longed to melt permanently Into the whole.2 Because life Is the gift
of God, Tolstoy was convinced that living Is a matter of the utmost
moral seriousness. Anything less Is a desecration. He regarded ideas,
therefore, as vain trifles tmless they were carried and lived to their
limits. As a young man he could not study Stoicism without subjecting
himself to physical duress; in old age he could not believe in moral
purity without embracing celibacy, poverly, and asceticism.
in War and Peace, written at the prime of his life, we have Tolstoy's
attempt to show how human life-lived In the flesh, organized into
societies, and conditioned by ttme--ls our access to God's blessing.
Throughout the novel, Tolstoy contrasts two ways of living. One
way, which we see most blatantly in Napoleon and the old Prince
Bolkonsky, Is rooted in the natural order. It starts from the premise
of an autonomous and sufficient self, and seeks harmony by imposing
the selfs image, order, or will onto the world. For Tolstoy, all such a
person really does Is look at himself; his actions, however gratifying,
are cut off from life and bound, therefore, to be fruitless. In building
his life on the self, moreover, such a person Is building on the most
uncerlaln of foundations, because at some moment each of us will
die-inevitably, irrevocably, and alone. And if I am the basis of
everything, my death means the annihilation of the universe. (Tolstoy
was so terrified by the possibility of such meaninglessness that a few
years after finishing War and Peace, when by all outward signs his life
was at Its richest, he couldn't undress alone for fear that the sight of
his belt would tempt him to hang himself.)
The other way of living, which Kutu2ov and Platon Karataev exempli(y, Implies an Immaterial order Tolstoy calls the ''whole." This kind
ofllfe takes for Its premise the infinite web of relations which sustains
all things moment by moment. Its kind of harmony comes when we
are most deeply Involved in what we're doing: at such moments, we
forget about ourselves and become one with the activity or person at
hand. Such lives usually go unnoticed, like Captain Tushin's heroism
at the Battle of Schon Graben, but it is here, Tolstoy Insists, that life
Is affirmed and history given content. By opening themselves to what
life offers, such people experience God's love in the flesh and spirit so
that it passes through them like wine through water. 3 They come to
fruition through the unfolding of God's providential scheme, and they
�PERAZZINI
81
are redeemed from the horror of death and awaken Into cahnness and
peace.
That sounds very nice, butlt's not so simple-not In War and Peace,
and certainly not In the dilemma of Tolstoy's own life. Our experience,
after all, Is absolutely personal: that Is to say, every one of us has his
or her own life which no one else can ever experience, and every one
of us cannot help feeling ourself to be free and autonomous. Since God
has given us this life with Its consciousness of freedom, it must be for
our good. To think otherWise, for Tolstoy, Is blasphemy. So there must
be a right way to be a self, without which love is Impossible; by the
same token, since a self Is essential, being self-less Is as dangerous
as having the wrong kind of self. The love which animates Tolstoy's
universe, then-or rather, the human way for that love to be knownIs dialectical: It requires constant efforts to heighten the self so that
the self can be thrown away. The more we have In us to throw away,
the greater our joy and the more worthy we are of the whole which,
like a parent, is waiting to catch us.
In the stories of Nlkolay Rostov and Prince Audrey Bolkonsky, we
see the transformation of egoists Into people who love. Prince Andrey4
arrives at an unconditioned and undialecticallove which is, perhaps,
closer to the divine, but which can only be realized In death; Nlkolay
finds a human love that roots him In the flesh and the cycle of
generation while gracing him with the touch of spirit. With his
Insistent egoism and unceasing aspiration after the truth. Prince
Audrey is more like Tolstoy, but the commonplace Nlkolay is his hero.
In the stories of Princess Marya, Pierre, and Natasha, on the other
hand, we see characters with an Innate tendency toward the whole
develop the kind of selves which allows them to live happy and fruitful
lives-the kind Tolstoy's God Intends them to live-In spite of the
sufferings they undergo during the novel and, by implication, after its
end.
Nikolay and Prince Audrey each enter the army to be a hero. Their
ambition assumes they can use events to magnlty themselves In order
to exert power over others. Prince Audrey wants to command the
Russian army and defeat Napoleon, while Nlkolay only wants to make
the Emperor love him. Thinking as they do, they understand events
In reference to themselves, a ridiculous delusion In people so Inconsequential, but a frightening one In a Count Rostopchln or a Napoleon.
At the beginning of their careers, however, both Nikolay and Prince
Audrey undergo an experience which begins to show them what's
wrong with a life aimed at self-aggrandizement. Because Enns Bridge
Is the novel's first battle scene and a paradigm for all the others, in
�82
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the interest of time I'll speak just of it and leave aside the mission to
Vienna which begins Prince Audrey's education.
Before Nikolay comes under fire for the first time at Enns Bridge
(II, 5), he has ''the happy air of a schoolboy called up before a large
audience for an examination in which he feels sure he will distinguish
himself. •5 He has been embroiled in a dispute with his commanding
officer and expects the skirmish to vindicate him against "his enemy,•
the colonel. Since the whple point of the battle, he imagines, is to awe
his enemy with his courage and make him seek reconciliation, when
the hussars are finally sent onto the bridge, he rushes far ahead
"thinking that the farther he went to the front the better" and has to
be called back. He is confused because "there was no one to hew down
(as he had always imagined battles to himselij," and he is unprepared
to take part in what's really happening since he has not brought a
torch, not expecting to be sent to do something as unheroic as burn
a bridge. He has nothing to do but stand there waiting to be kllled.
Mter the man next to him is shot, Nikolay sees the sky, 6 "calm" and
"deep," and has a sudden glimpse of his connection with It and ofthe
fragility ofllfe: "'In myself alone (he thinks) and in that sunshine there
Is so much happiness ... Another instant and I shall never again see
the sun, this water, that gorge!'"
That insight makes him realize how much he loves life, but as soon
as the danger is over, his egoism reasserts itself, and he misinterprets
his feelings to mean that he is a coward. Because he can only conceive
of the world in relation to himself, Nikolay cannot seriously regard the
possibility of his own destruction; he only Indulges in self-gratllYlng
images of getting what he wants by dying romantically. His behavior
here and later atAusterlitz (not to mention his brother Petya's heroism)
demonstrates that a way of life aimed at enlarging the self by Imposing
it on others is incoherent: it encourages recklessness under the name
of colU'age, and it demeans the normal and healthy desire to live by
calling it cowardice. On the other hand, the part of Rostov that
recognizes his connection with the whole of God's creation, symbolized
by the infinite sky, realizes that life is a blessing which it is sacrilegious
to squander.
Nikolay's mistaken conclusion suggests a consequence of egoism
that is deadly in the moral sense as well. To sustain the delusion that
the world is an object for the aggrandizing selfto impose on, the egoist
not only cuts himself off from reality by regarding events in reference
to himself, but sooner or later he has to betray his own humanity as
well. In its most extreme form we see Napoleon and Count Rostopchin,
self-deluded actors trapped in the isolation of their own madness, who
�PERAZZINI
83
are so far lost to human feeling that the one measures greatness by
the number of corpses left on the battlefield, and the other incites a
mob to murder a helpless youth "for the public good" (993). But even
its less extreme forms are deadly: thewaxen-facedPrince Vasili spends
the novel "like a wound-up clock" saying things "he did not even wish
to be believed" (4), while Boris Drubetskoy overcomes the "feeling of
horror at renouncing the possibility of real love" (609) in order to marry
Julie Karagina's estates and forest.
Nikolay also betrays himself, though he is such a novice at egoism
that his case is more silly than repulsive. Although the Battle of Schi\n
Graben is an important Russian victory, it is a humiliating fiasco for
Nikolay, who falls off his horse, sprains his wrist, and has to run from
the French like "a hare fleeing from the hounds" (201). Poor Rostovl
From the affair of the stolen purse to the hapless cavalry charge,
nothing in his military career has happened the way it was supposed
to. He has given up a peaceful, happy life among people who love him
to live in wretched conditions and let people he doesn't even know try
to kill him. And most confusing of all, everyone else seems to think
this is perfectly natural. So Nikolay goes along, betraying himself by
living as if what he knows to be false were true.
Appropriately enough, his self-betrayal begins with a lie. When he
visits his old friend Boris (III, 6), Nikolay begins the story of his
experience at Schi\n Graben intending to tell the truth, "but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably" he turns itinto a self-glorifYing cliche.
In the middle of his story, Prince Audrey comes in and immediately
recognizes that Nikolay is lying. Confused and embarrassed, Rostov
falls silent and then tries to pick a fight with him. As he rides back to
his regiment later, however, something in Nikolay's heart whispers
that he has lost touch with himself, for "he felt with surprise that of
all the men he knew there was none he would so much like to have
for a friend as" Prince Audrey.
By now, Prince Audrey has also had enough experience to doubt
his own illusion of heroism, but since he is more self-reliant that
Nikolay, he has not fallen into such an easy trap of trying to deny what
he knows. His egoism is a more integral part of his character and his
self-delusion runs deeper than Nikolay's. He will shed it gradually as
he matures, like something foreign to his nature, but Prince Audrey's
progress toward love will be stymied again and again by a self-delusion
that is each time harder to recognize: it takes death finally to free him
of egoism.
A revelation at the Battle of Austerlitz sweeps aside his egoism's
first illusion. PrinceAndrey anticipates it the night before (III, 11) when
�84
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
he recognizes the "dreadful" character of his egoism: that he would
trade everyone dear to him for "a moment of glory, of triumph over
men." And the proud young man who slouches In the best drawingrooms with his eyes contemptuously half-closed Is honest enough to
admit that his aspiration springs from a pathetic longing to be loved
by anyone, by the cook and the coachman. Nonetheless, PrlnceAndrey
wants nothing but glory. By compelling the love of others through an
act of astounding heroism. he wants to share with everyone what Is
absolutely personal and unshareable-the sense, which Tolstoy
thinks we all have, especially when we're young, that there Is something tenibly special and precious about me, and that Ifeveryone knew
me as I do, from the Inside, they couldn't help but love me. Prince
Audrey's longing for glory and power is his soul's attempt to break out
of the Isolation of being an autonomous self by sharing that self with
the whole world.
Of course, he has It backwards. Now, and for most of the novel,
Prince Andrey is so deeply Impressed with the experience of being
himself that he cannot remember that the other person Is also unique
and precious to herself, that she has "other human Interests entirely
aloof from his own and just as legitimate as those that occupied him"
(785). 7 The first step toward learning that Is to recognize the InsignifIcance of the self and the peace and happiness of being embraced by
God. That Is what happens to him on the field at Austerlitz (Ill, 13),
where Prince Andrey gets the moment of glory he wanted. His heroic
charge before the eyes of his surrogate father, General Kutuzov,
prevents the outright capture of the Russian army with Its commander-in-chief and even wins the praise of his false Idol, Napoleon.
And having gotten what he wanted, Prince Andrey gets shot and sees
how worthless It is: all that running, shouting, and fighttng over sticks
and dirt, driven by fear, anger, and "paltryvanity." Notonly''grealness"
but even life and death fade to Insignificance before "the lofty, justB
and kindly sky" which contains the whole of creation, and whose "quiet
and peace" is ready to penetrate anyone who will only look up. And
because life has been freed of the terrible burden of having to be
significant enough to withstand the fact of death, Prince Andrey can
see it for what it really Is: a free gift, the kiss of God,9 and therefore
something "beautiful."
By the time Pierre visits him two years later, Prince Andrey Is living
at Bogucharovo.IO He seems to be living according to ideas derived
from his vision at Austerlitz-the same ideas that Pierre wllllater learn
In prison and that Tolstoy himself fully agrees with. Uke the people
who flee Moscow In 1812 not from self-conscious patriotism but only
�PERAZZINI
85
because "it was out of the question to be under French rule" and, by
doing so, actually "carry out the great work which saved Russia"
(929-30), Prince Andrey lives only for himself: that is, he devotes his
attention to the things which are of immediate concern to him, not
trying to direct the course of life, but only to live the best life he can,
avoiding evil.ll He lives by ali the right Tolstoyan ideas-and Tolstoy
shows that he's terribly wrong, because his ideas have grown not from
the love which connects him to the whole, but from the despair of
disappointed egoism. If the world were a machine that we could
comprehend, the rightness or wrongness of an idea would determine
its truth or falsity. But for Tolstoy the world is a miracle, infinitely
beyond our comprehension, so truth is to be judged not be ideas, but
by the state of the heart which holds them.
Events in the novel suggest how the right ideas can be wrong.
Because he acts only for himself, Prince Andrey institutes all the
reforms which the self-consciousness of Pierre's benevolence prevents
him from accomplishing. And we are free to believe that by freeing his
serfs and building them schools and hospitals, Prince Andrey improves the material conditions of their lives. But because he thinks of
peasants as objects to be disposed of according to economic principles,
not as human beings to involve himself with, his reforms can do
nothing to improve the moral quality of their lives. Events in the novel
may suggest that Prince Andrey was right in thinking that such
improvements would even harm the peasants (417). Is it merely a
coincidence that in all of Russia (at least as portrayed in the novel)
only the peasants at Bogucharovo betray their homeland in 1812 by
rebelling against their countrymen and siding with the French? And
if we are not meant to contrast them, why does Tolstoy include the
incident in which Marva Kuzminichna, the Rostov housekeeper, gives
twenty-five rubles of her own money to a young, unknown relative of
her master's who shows up during the abandonment of Moscow to
ask for help (980)? fl'olstoy couldn't know it, but there is a sharp
contrast between the rebellion at Bogucharovo and the way the
peasants on his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, acted during the Revolution:
armed with axes, pitchforks, and scythes, they fought off the Communist-led "expropriators" and saved his house from being burned. 12
Tolstoy himself had been dead for seven years by then.)
After Austerlitz, Prince Andrey cannot hold on to the incomprehensible something he saw in the sky which made the insignificance of
life a blessing, but he can remember well enough the nothingness of
human affairs and the paltriness of the individual self he is still
trapped ln. It takes Natasha to restore that vision. When he first sees
�86
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
her running and laughing across !he driveway at Otrodnoe (VI, 1).
Prtnce Andrey feels "a pang," and for only the second time In !he novel,
he remembers !hat other people have lives of !heir own, lives which
are separate from his but capable of being "brtght and happy" nonetheless. Later, he overhears her rapture with the moonlit night. These
two brtef encounters with !he spontaneous joy she takes In !he world
outside herself arouse in Prtnce Andrey "an unexpected turmoil of
youthful thoughts and hopes" which convince him !hat his life is not
over. His emotions, Tolstby tells us, are connected to "all the best
moments of his ltfe," but he still doesn't know how to feel !hem except
in terms of his aggrandizing self. So when he decides to end his
self-imposed exile, Prtnce Andrey thinks, "'It is not enough for me to
know what I have In me-everyone must know it: Pierre, and !hat
young girl who wanted to fly away Into !he sky. everyone must know
me, so !hat my life may not be lived for myself alone while others live
so far apart from it, but so that it may be reflected In !hem all. and
!hey and I may live In harmony!"' (462-63).
Prtnce Andrey's delusion !hat !he way to make !he world harmonious Is by projecting his Image onto It is no different from !he lie which
Napoleon gives to justttY !he Invasion of Russia. namely, !hat Europe
would have been blessed by unity and peace under his benevolent rule
(91 0-11). The monstrous arrogance of !he assumption !hat he had !he
rtght and the wisdom (let alone !he power) to annul !he cultural and
political herttage of centuries and to dictate to millions of people how
!hey must live helps us to see !hat it is actually Prince Andrey who
first betrays Natasha.
That may take some explaining. Let me star! by returning to Prince
Andrey's "best moments," which Tolstoy identifies as "Austerlitz with
the lofty heavens, ... Pierre at !he ferry, (Natasha) thrilled by !he
beauty of !he night., and !hat night itself," and "his wife's dead
reproachful face" (462). Why Is !hat one of his "best moments"? The
answer, I think, Is suggested by Prince Andrey's explanation of the
effect Natasha has on him after they become reacquainted at !he ball.
Listening to her sing, he almost weeps because of a ''vivid sense of !he
terrible contrast between something infinitely great and indefinable
within him and !hat narrow and physical something !hat he, and even
she, was" (512).1 3 In other words, Natasha makes him feel constantly
what until now he has felt only In his "best moments,'' !he awesome
and incomprehensible condition ofbeingboihan embodiment of God's
Infinite and eternal love, and an individual human being who dies.
Natasha has !he same effect on him as "!he lofty, just. and kindly sky":
she makes his deluded aspiration for power and eminence vanish like
�PERAZZINI
87
the morning fog. But just as he could not hold onto the sky after
Austerlitz, so now he cannot matotato both sides of the dialectic. Once
again he comes down on the side of the self, and the separate and
limited world he thinks he can know and control.
Perhaps Prince Andrey throws away his chance for happiness with
Natashajust because he loves her as he has never loved anyone else.
It's not until he has been mortally wounded at Borodino, some nine
months after their engagement is broken off, that he first Imagines
how things felt to her. 'He realizes then that he had never considered
her character and needs, never "pictured to himself her soul," and so
only then does he feel"the cruelty of his rejection of her" (1023). Like
Napoleon, who regards the war as a "personal struggle between
himself and Alexander" (972), Prince Andrey seems to see his engagement to Natasha as a contest between himself and his father. Having
projected onto her the image of"some ideal love" (858) that has nothing
to do with who Natasha is, he agrees to the test ofher constancy which
his father demands. But by treating her as an object to hang his
self-gratifying fantasies on, Prince Andrey betrays her Individual
dignity and worih, the value which being an embodiment of God's love
Imparts to each of us. And by thus betraying her, he betrays his own
"best moments." And that may be precisely what he's after.
The egoism which Infects Prince Andrey's attitude toward Natasha
shows itself in his behavior. First he abandons her abruptly for three
weeks without telling her that he will be out of town; the Irony of his
having gone to seek his father's approval for marrying makes
Natasha's pain over this unexpected rejection more poignant to us.
Then he does not try to make Natasha's entry into his family less
difficult by telling Marya of his happiness and winning her support;
instead he annoimces his engagement in a letter to her from Europe
asking her to intercede with their father, which he should know will
only make his sister's life more miserable. Is it any wonder that Marys
Is predisposed against Natasha when they meet? Worst of all, after
their engagement Prince Andrey insists that Natasha suspend her life
for a year while he goes on what should be their honeymoon trip
without her. Starving for the love he has withheld, she finally tries to
run away with Anatole Kuragln, and Prince Andrey Is free to return to
the hopelessness and self-pity he seems to relish. The inviolability and
dominance of his Individual self have been preserved. Rather than
accept her In all of her otherness, he has remained committed to his
idea of how she should be. And if the cost of doing so is bleak despair,
a loss of faith that makes him a living corpse and the universe
something Indifferent and alien, so much the better. For how else can
�88
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
he prove to himself how noble he Is than by the exquisiteness of the
pain he feels at the meaningless joke the universe has played on him?
Egoism leads Prince Andreyto throwaway his chance for happiness
with Natasha, and aristocratic pride leads him to throw away his life
at Borodino. But the Instant before the grenade explodes, all his
self-defenses fall away, and he realizes once more that he loves "'this
grass this earth, this air"' (904). Later In the operating tent, softened
by the memory of"all the best and happiest moments of his life" (907),
he catches up with his eneniy, Anatole, groaning and sobbing painfully
after his leg has been amputated; and suddenly Prince Andrey Is
overwhelmed with "ecstatic pity and love ... for his fellow men, for
himself, and for his own and their errors" (908). Tolstoy means us to
see that Prince Andrey and Anatole really are the same, for they both
treat Natasha with the same self-centered disregard. That one of them
Intended to marry his plaything Instead of discarding her only makes ·
his cruelty the more perverse; It doesn't lessen her pain one whit, any
more than all of Napoleon's noble Intentions, even If they were true,
would make the thousands of victims any less dead. In a world where
our actions affect other people, good Intentions can be a dangerous
kind of self-congratulation, when what's really needed Is to open
ourselves to what life offers, the painful no less than the pleasant, so
that we can come to our own fruition in God's providential scheme.
In order to celebrate life this way, the egoist needs to deepen his
sympathies and feel his limits so that he can find peace In his
underlying identity with the rest of humanity, each of whom also
embodies God's love. Recognizing others as such, he can then rejoice
In the surface differences which reflect the Infinite power and richness
of that love. To deepen his sympathies, Tolstoy suggests, the egoist
needs to suffer. Only then, unable to Ignore his own mortality, is the
sense of his uniqueness softened enough for him to realize that others
have also had the same experience, and to feel toward them as he feels
toward himself. To know his limits, the egoist needs to stretch them:
that Is, with all his efforts to strive for grealness, honor, and wisdom,
and by so doing to learn how powerless, ephemeral, and Ignorant he
actually Is. This Is part of what I meant when I said that the dialectic
of love demands that the self heighten itself In order to throw Itself
away. F1nally, to rejoice In the otherness of people, the egoist needs to
feel the assurance of being loved and to find some particular other
who calls his soul without trying to own it.
Prince Audrey's revelations at Austerlitz and Borodino both occur
under the Influence of Intense physical pain, and Tolstoy explicitly
connects the two phenomena. When he wakes up on the field at
�PERAZZINI
89
Austerlitz, Prince Audrey's "first thought" Is: "'Where Is It, that lofty
sky that I did not know till now, but saw today? And I did not know
this suffering either. Yes, I did not know anything, anything at all till
now"' (312). And his repeated disappointments as he aspires toward
the wrong things-glmy, power, social reform, romantic love, and
finally a kind of Satanic hopelessness--are all lessons In the insufficiency of the self which the obstinacy of his egoism makes necessary.
But what Is it that calls his soul?
Just before Natasha is returned to him {XI, 15), Tolstoy tells us that
"all the powers of (Prince Audrey's) mind were more active and clearer
than ever." He distinguishes between "human love" "which loves for
something, for some quality, ... purpose, or ... reason," and "divine
love" ''which Is the very essence of the soul and does not require an
object." Human love is conditioned and speclflc. It joins particular
individuals, each of whom is defined In pari by what he or she honors
and contemns, and the regard each feels for the other Is at least parily
the consequence of who that other person Is. Human love, therefore,
requires us to be worthy of being loved, another reason we heighten
the self In order to love. So, for example, Nikolay realizes in the F1rst
Epilogue that his habit of hitting peasants is a moral failing which
demeans him for Marya's love, and he tries to change it.
Divine love, on the other hand, Is absolute. Like the sky whose
justice and kindliness is that It overarches the whole world equally
and without distinction, divine love derives from a source infinitely
beyond creation. All of the distinctions and judgments that we have
to make to live in our world are trrelevant to it. 'To love everything and
everybody and always to sacrifice oneself for love (Tolstoy writes)
meant not to love anyone, not to live this earthly life" (XII,4). So Prince
Andrey "unconsciously detaches himself' from the world. For a time
after Natasha returns to him, "love for a particular woman ... (binds)
him to life," but with that binding come '1oyful and agitating thoughts"
which prevent him from feeling the ecstatic love that graced him in
the operating tent.
Prince Audrey's "last spiritual struggle between life and death"
occurs in a dream, and divine love wins out. By the time his sister
arrives two days later, Prince Andrey shows a greater insight Into
others than he has ever had before. With his egoism gone, he understands Marya's unspoken thoughts and motivations and wants to do
what will comfort her. But It is dreadful for her to be with him because
he understands not from sympathy-not, that Is, from Inside a self
that feels--but from some great spiritual height from which he has to
make a conscious and reluctant effort to concern himself with human
�90
TiiE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
interests. By the time Prince Andrey dies, Natasha and Marya both
know "that this had to be so and that it was right."
Whatever his death means for Prince Andrey, for Marya it is in
painful contrast to that of their father, who fmaily opened his heart
on his deathbed and offered her the love which he spent his life trying
to hide. His life was poisoned before the novel opens when the mad
Emperor Paul exiled him to his estate; although the next Emperor,
Alexander, has long since rescinded the edict, the old Prince's egoism
keeps htm imprisoned in the country. To annul his banishment, he
exiles the world instead: by his will alone, he deludes himself, is his
life determined. And in order to insure that he is never hurt again, he
tries to regulate every detail of the life on his estate. But the old Prince
is in a state of permanent rage because he knows that all of his efforts
must fail. He can never be in control of his life because everything he
does is a desperate reaction to his fear of death; and he can never be
impervious to pain because he loves his children, especially the
Princess Marya. So the more he loves her, the more miserable he
makes himself, and her.
Because human love connects us to someone who will die, it is a
constant and inevitable threat. The only way to be secure from loss,
grotesquely enough, is to be already dead. Until then, the egoist makes
every effort to imitate the dead-imprisoning his emotions in codes of
behavior which regulate the self as if it were a machine, starving them
by trying to restrict his encounter with what life has to offer. Although
the old Prince has nothing but contempt for Prince Vasil!, their
respective worlds ofBald Hills and Petersburg are invariably described
as mechanical and lifeless. He in the personal sphere, Prince Vasil! in
the social, and Napoleon in the historical are all extreme examples of
the blasphemous incoherence of a life based on the delusion that the
self is autonomous and sufficient.
But because the old Prince does love, Tolstoy finally absolves him
of egoism and, by so doing, begins Marya's redemption as well. She
does not need to soften the self until she can feel her connection to
the whole. On the contrary, she needs to develop enough respect for
her self to participate in the dialectic of love. For all their apparent
differences, Marya is her father's daughter. Her most cherished hope
is also the hope she most fears and suppresses, that some man will
love her with an "earthly love" (237). To her horror and shame, "all the
personal desires and hopes that had been forgotten or sleeping within
her" reassert themselves after the old Prince's stroke (X, 8). Though
she accuses herself of wishing for his death, her father knows better.
By thanking her for the years of sacrifice and devotion and begging
�PERAZZINI
9I
her forgiveness, the old Prince Implicitly acknowledges the naturalness and legitimacy of her hopes. Princess Marya could not have loved
her father with such patient devotion and understanding If she did
not want so badly to love and be loved. It Is love which makes us
capable oflove: as Natasha will later say about her cousin Sonya, "To
him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be
taken away'" (1275).
As If to confirm the rightness of Princess Marya's hopes, as soon
as her father Is dead Tolstoy sends Nikolay Rostov to rescue her from
rebellious peasants. Though he once wanted to be a hero, Nlkolay's
military career has been composed of the "simple and agreeable" (715)
banalities of regimental life punctuated by personal failures at Schon
Graben, Austerlitz, and Tllslt. As a result, he now has the stature to
perform the most heroic act In the book without even noticing it. He
is so outraged by the peasants' refusal to let Marya escape the French
that, unarmed and alone, he overcomes the entire village. Time and
fox-hunting have taught him to throw himself Into the moment so that
he acts with undoubted conviction and his attention completely
absorbed in the matter at hand. Nikolayalso overcomes Marya's heart,
just in the moment of Its greatest trauma and anguish, because here,
too, he forgets himself listening to her. But love Is dialectical: so
because the self which he forgets Is generous and honorable and
knows what It feels like to love a parent, the consideration he shows
her is as sympathetic and comforting as it Is sincere. Although she
feels ashamed of having fallen In love with a man who may never love
her just days after her father's death, Marya relishes her feelings for
Nikolay and never tries to fight against them. She has begun to learn
that life gives her a right to be happy: the self must be nourished by
love if It is to give itself In love. Perhaps this Isn't always the case.
PerhaRS some rare people have spiritual gifts so high that they can
•
sustain themselves indefinitely on the mere hope oflove. Perhaps. But
poor Sonya, the "sterile flower' (1275) of the book, is Tolstoy's portrait
of what happens to an ordinary person who lives on hope too long.
Fortunately, life fulfills Marya's hopes. The lesson of self and
happiness that she begins to learn when she meets Nlkolay, she
finishes learning from his sister Natasha. The "tender and passionate
friendship" (XV, 1) which grows up between them after Prince Audrey's
and Petya's deaths helps each of them develop the particular kind of
self she needs: Marya's "life of devotion, submission, and the poetry
of Christian self-sacrifice" helps Natasha to acquire the moral ballast
she lacks, while Natasha's "belief In life and Its enjoyment" helps
Marya to overcome her BolkonskY habit of denying herself happiness.
�92
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Two actions late in the book show that Princess Marya has developed
the respect for self which makes her happiness in the First Epilogue
possible. F1rst, she must let the dead bury the dead, and give her
blessing and encouragement to the awakening love between Natasha
and Pierre. Then she must act for her own happiness by practically
proposing to Nikolay when his misguided honor threatens both of
them with loneliness and separation.
The friendship between Marya and Natasha is one example of the
miracle of love, which brings happiness and life out of suffering and
death. That power is central to the stories of Pierre and Natasha which,
taken together, symbolize the redemption of Russia through the fires
of war. Like Marya, both of them have such a strong, innate tendency
toward the whole that they lack selves in some crucial way. Natasha
(whom I will not have time to discuss in this talk) has to develop the
moral depth to recognize what's worth giving herself to and what isn't,
while Pierre will never find what his heart wants until he throws away
the false selves he has accepted and becomes as a little child.
Early in the book, Anna Mikhaylovna leads Pierre up the back stairs
of his father's mansion, directs him in the performance of various
rituals whose significance he does not understand, and insures that
he is successfully inltiated into a new world, membership in which
brings a new identity. As a result of her sponsorship, the illegitimate
Pierre is transformed into the Count Bezukhov, 14 heir to one of the
greatest fortunes in Russia. By presenting the scene through Pierre's
naive eyes, which observe the literal events without understanding
whattheymean or what's at stake, Tolstoy emphasizes how completely
disconnected Pierre is from the events that are shaping his fate. But
unlike Nikolay at Enns Bridge,I5 Pierre misunderstands events by
disregarding hlnlself. He doesn't realize that he is the issue, that Anna
Mlkhaylovna and his cousin are fighting to secure or steal his inheritance. Pierre is so unassuming that he has no real self. Appetites he
has aplenty, along with sudden passions, a hear! full of kindliness,
and a head confused by windy abstractions. But he has no spectfic
convictions or aspirations, no particular loves (even deluded ones)
which could help him choose which appetites to foster and which to
restrain, which career to follow, how to understand the intentions and
character of others, what to give his hear! to. As a result, the events
that happen inside hlni are just as mysterious and alien as those that
happen outside of him. Whether it is the way he becomes Count
Bezukhov or Helene's husband, whether it is the lust which makes
him prey to her or the fury that drives him to shoot her first lover,
�PERAZZINI
93
Pierre always feels that these things "had to be" (80) and "could not
be otherwise" (222).
Pierre's self-betrayal is also marked by a lie-he tells Helene he loves
her when he doesn't-and he, too, consents to live as if what he knows
to be false were true. Not surprisingly, he soon finds his life loathsome.
The blessings of youth, health, marriage, riches, and position become
so many curses, and the only thing that Pierre owns is his torment.
With no basis from which to judge, all actions become indistinguishable
and meauingless. "'What is bad? (he asks himself after the duel) What
is good? What should one love and what hate? ... All we can know Is
that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom"'
(378-79). Once again we see that ideas alone are Insufficient to contsin
truth or falsity: without a self to ground It, Socrates's most powerful
insight becomes a cry of despair.
Pierre and Prince Andrey are the chief representatives of the
opposite poles of human experience which the dialectic of love brings
together, so Tolstoy is careful throughout the novel to syncopate and
Invert their stories. Prince Audrey begins In disappointment and rises
to the height of military glory before his first revelation embitters his
life; Pierre begins by being raised to the pinnacle of worldly success,
which collapses under him, plunging him Into the belly of despatruntil
he Is plucked out by his first revelation (V, 1). It comes to him after he
has been emotionally and spiritually wounded at the duel. He meets
Joseph Bazdeev, an old man with "bright eyes," who persuades him
not with words but with "the calm firmness and certainty of his
vocation, which radiated from his whole being," that God exists, that
He is in every manifestation ofllfe, and that He is to be "apprehended,"
therefore, not by "lntellect"16 but by living. Connected for the first time
to another human heart, Pierre feels "a joyful sense of comfort,
regeneration, and return to life."
Prince Andrey loses his first revelation by getting the ideas right
while forgetting the vision of the sky which animated them; Pierre, on
the other hand, hangs on to the faith that can redeem him, but so
clutters it with vague and far-fetched ideas that it does him no good.
He confuses Bazdeev's spiritual truth with the Freemasonry he practices. Like Princess Marya, Pierre has so little respect for himself that
he consistently assumes that truth and goodness are to be found in
"the far distance" (1226), in lofty abstractions and vast goals. Although
Bazdeev tells him what he later learns In prison, "that God is here and
everywhere" (1226), Pierre cannot hear it yet because without a self
there is no here, so God must be everywhere else. Thus he misses the
principal aim which attracted Bazdeev to Masonry. Instead of trying
�94
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
to apprehend the mystery of an immanent God, Pierre gets lost In
words and turns God Into the Architect of the Universe, who plays a
kind of numerological hide-and-seek with the world.
Pierre misses the second aim of Masonry as well, the purification
and regeneration of the self, because his contempt for self leads him
to think It can be transformed with a wish. This shows not only how
little Pierre knows himself, but also how easily self-lessness falls Into
the same complacency anq hypocrisy that beset egoism. For all his
longing for the good, Pierre spends most of the novel leading a
dissipated and profligate life wWch at one point becomes so bad that
even his Incestuous, adulterous wife is embarrassed by it.
Having missed the first two alms of Masonry, he has no chance of
contributing to the third, the Improvement of mankind. Rightly understood, this aim Is the consequence of the first two: when a person
who works unceasingly on purifYing himself touches another whom
he recognizes as another embodiment of God's love, the other has the
chance to know love. Only thus can he be "Improved." But without a
self from which to feel the humanity of others, Pierre can only
understand the third aim as an Invitation to make people the objects
of his self-conscious benevolence. Like Prince Andrey, Pierre does not
establish a human relationship with Ws peasants, as Nikolay does In
the First Epilogue. Instead, Pierre Is content with staged receptions
where he Is pleasantly embarrassed by the sight of his own good
Intentions. The only effect his "benefits" (411) bring Is to make the
peasants'life harder: In order to build the brick schools and hospitals
he has ordered for their good, the serfs' manorial labor has been
Increased. A life based on the obligation of self-sacrifice for the sake
of others turns out to be as Incoherent as one based on self-aggrandizement. The problem, then, Is not In the content of the aim-not In
egoism or self-lessness-but rather in the attempt to reduce life to a
program based on one pole of human experience. Morality Itself
becomes Immoral when It hardens Into a prescribed code.I7
Freemasonry entangles Pierre In another fu.lse identity added to the
one Anna Mikhaylovna gave him. After the first flush of enthusiasm,
he fmds that Ws life Is more loathsome than ever, only now he's better
at running away from it. He doesn't begin to find hiniself until he
. discovers that he has fallen in love with Natasha (VIII, 22). Actually,
Pierre has always loved Natasha, but It takes the shock of sympathy
when he feels her shame and anguish after betraying Prince Andrey
and attempting suicide to make him realize it. By feeling the pain of
someone else's limits and failures, Pierre can forgive himself for his
own failures and propose to her although he Is already married. If he
�PERAZZINI
95
were free, he tells Natasha-that is, if he had not married a woman he
knew to be stupid and immoral-he would marry her on the spot. But
since he Isn't free, he has nothing to gain from his declaration. For
Tolstoy, the absence of personal motive Is the touchstone of sincerity,
and so Natasha takes it, responding to the first gift of love she has
received In over a year with "tears of gratitude and tenderness." Freed,
at least In spirit, from the consequences of his self-betrayal, Pierre
rushes outside where he sees "an immense expanse of dark starry
sky" crowned by "the enormous and brilliant comet of 1812." Feeling
the connection between the comet and "his own softened and uplifted
soul," Pierre feels for the first time the sacredness of his own life.
Now that something outside himself has called his heart, Pierre sees
that the questions he has tormented himself with are trrelevant to the
all-engrossing activity of living. He becomes obsessed with the idea of
throwing himself Into the general catastrophe which the French army
Is bringing to Moscow: "He now experienced a glad consciousness that
everything that constitutes men's happiness-the comforts of life,
wealth, even life Itself-Is rubbish It Is pleasant to throw away ..."
(840). Though he doesn't understand It yet, Pierre recognizes that only
by ridding himself of everything extraneous and abandoning himself
to the terrible force of the whole can he find the self that can love and
be loved by Natasha.
So he goes to Borodino, where the "terrible stormcloud" he has been
desiring ''with the whole strength of his soul" (836) engulfs him. In the
novel's greatest Irony, Tolstoy sends Nikolay shopping for horses and
keeps Prince Andrey on the sideline, reserving for the civilian Pierre
the honor of defending his country in the great battle before Moscow.
He ends up at the Knoll Battery, ''which the French regarded as the
key to the whole position," but which Pierre assumes to be "one of the
least significant paris of the field ... just because he happened to be
there" (884-85). The stormcloud does indeed burst, nearly killing him:
dazed and terrified, Pierre jumps up and runs back toward the battery
and Into "a thin, sallow-faced, perspiring man In a blue uniform" (889).
Instinctively they grasp each other by the throat, surprised, frightened,
unsure who Is the captor and who the prisoner. By restricting the
portrayal of actual battle to this one Incident, the novel implies that It
Is here, far from Napoleon and Kutuzov, unconcerned with heroism,
honor, or fatherland-here, where men are most free because they are
concerned only with themselves at that very Instant-precisely here,
where the battle Is reduced to the smallest possible unit, that history
happens. And because In that instant Pierre's grip Is tighter than his
�96
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
opponent's, the Russians recapture the Knoll, win the Battle of
Borodino, and destroy Napoleon's army.
Pierre, of course, never knows that Tolstoy has emblematically
fulfilled his Insane delusion ofbeing L'russe Besulwf, the one destined
to end Napoleon's career. That is to say, he never realizes that by living
up to the demands of his own private life which bring him to Borodino,
he has done his part to defeat Napoleon. Nor does he realize that he
has discovered freedom, though In a dream the night after the battle,
Bazdeev tells him, "'To endure war is the most difficult subordination
of man's freedom to the law of God"' (941). But Pierre does come to
understand it In prison, under the Influence of his final sponsor,
Platon Karataev. Piaton 18 is the only sponsor that Pierre himself seeks
out. He begins his search when he throws away the identity Anna
Mikhaylovna gave him and runs down the same back stairway which
she had conducted him up. Then he forgets his mad plan of killing
Napoleon to abandon himself once more to what life offers, the chance
to save a child and defend a young woman. Arrested, tried, and sent
to a firing squad, Pierre achieves the sacrifice he has been longing for.
Faced with imminent death, he, too, discovers that the self is an
absolutely personal locus of "memories, aspirations, hopes, and
thoughts" (1068) whose existence Is precious only to himself and
depends entirely on an Impersonal and Incomprehensible whole.
As it turns out, the whole has sent him there to witness executions,
not to be executed himself. But Pierre's sacrifice Is complete nonetheless. Everything In his past life-"his faith In the well-orderingl9 of the
universe, In humanity, in his own soul, and in God"-has "collapsed
Into a heap of meaningless rubbish" (1 072). Suffering, it seems, is just
as necessary to the self-less, not to deepen his sympathies, but to
teach him that the self is precious precisely because It Is finite and
his alone.
Once again Pierre Is redeemed from despair, this tinle through
Platon Karataev, whose ''well-ordered arrangements" (1073) as he
prepares for sleep begin to restore "the world fuat had been shattered
... in (Pierre's) soul with a new beauty and on new and unshakable
foundations" (1076). From a simple peasant Pierre learns that fue self
exists most truly when it is absorbed in the moment-by-moment
encounter with God's love, which we call Ufe. Furthermore, because it
Is life which makes everything precious, it cannot be burdened or
trivialized wifu an "aim" (1226). Life is its own "aim." 1hat, Pierre
realizes, is true autonomy and the best evidence that life is sacred. He
was wrong-headed to try to embrace the whole with vast aspirations
and abstract philosophies, when all the time "the great, eternal, and
�PERAZZINI
97
infinite" (1227) is here, In you and me, In daily life, If only we will look
at it. This discovery makes Pierre "much simpler" (1228), his servants
say, much more natural and direct.
Pierre also learns that because the encounter with the divine which
constitutes our true self is absolutely personal and immediate, we
live free from the causality of external conditions and time past. That
he experiences freedom in battle and discovers it in prison confirm
what his dream told him: that human freedom exists in the momentby-moment encounter with a context over whose course we have no
control.
Pierre learns these things by suffering the hardships of a month in
captivity. The "Christian"20 life that Pierre learns from Platon is very
similar to the divine love Prince Andrey discovers. Like that love, the
love Platon exemplifies is entirely impersonal. Tolstoy writes:
"Karataev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood them, but loved and lived affectionately with everything life
brought him in contact with, particularly with man-not any particular man, but those with whom he happened to be" (1078). It is
important for Pierre to discover this kind of love because through it
he learns to rejoice in the infinite variety and otherness of people.
But the problems which unconditioned love raises do much more
than that. Pierre recognizes "that in spite of Karataev's affectionate
tenderness for him ... he would not have grieved a moment at parting
from him" (1078). And because he learns to feel the same way about
Platon, Pierre is able to turn away from him moments before he is shot,
in order to keep his own attention focused on living. Tolstoy says that
Pierre's behavior expresses "the full strength of life in man and the
saving power he has of transferring his attention from one thing to
another" (1177). This incident and Tolstoy's explicit approval may well
be the most troubling thing in the book, for It flies In the face of every
morality based on love as well as the natural compassion even Platon's
dog shows. And to make matters worse, Tolstoy seems to confute the
lesson of Pierre's prison experience, which taught him that intellectual
activity distracts from the immediate encounter with life which is
freedom and happiness. We should open ourselves to what life has to
offer, the novel has often implied, the painful as well as the pleasant.
But Pierre prevents himself from realizing that Platon has been shot
by counting the number of three-step units to Smolensk, as frivolous
a use of rationality as one could imagine. And Tolstoy approves.
Tolstoy makes Platon's death as troubling as he can, I think, to
insist upon two important points. The first is that any system of
thought and behavior, including the one presented in the novel,
�98
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
reduces life from a miracle to a machine. So, for Instance, although
he Is convinced that self-forgetfulness is the key to effective and
meaningful action, Tolstoy also knows that it is only Intermittently
possible, and sometimes the very worst way we can act. Pierre forgets
himself and abandons himself to the moment when he realizes that
he is not a spectator at Borodlno. Just as he had volunteered to supply
a thousand men because he was swept up by "the necessity of
undertaking something and sacrificing something" (840), so now he
suddenly volunteers to bring ammunition for the gunners. He runs
toward the ammunition wagon, but the habit of self-doubt makes him
pause-and saves his life when a shell hits the wagon (889). If he had
acted like a good Tolstoyan, he would be dead. Again, Tolstoy is tireless
In his insistence that unless we are firmly grounded in the common
and personal interests he calls "real life" (457), our lives will be empty
and futile. At the same time, however, he also knows that ''real life" Is
the most unreal thing of all, that the only thing real is the incomprehensible something which Prince Andrey discovered In the sky. We
cannot help but make systems of thought and behavior: It Is the
essential activity of human life to understand the truth and act in a
way that acknowledges the moral significance of our existence. But
heaven help us, Tolstoy Implies, if we should come to believe the
systems we make, If we should mistake them for the life they try to
describe.
The night after Platon's death, Pierre has a dream (XIV, 3) which
justifies his heartless turning away in terms of the "divine love" that
Platon represents. It tells him that the selfs first duty is to preserve
itself, for "while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine,"
and "to love life is to love God." Tbe primacy oflife comes from Its being
sacred, but Its primacy does not excuse us from risking our lives when
the situation warrants it. In fact, there seems to be something crucially
important about facing death, not as a distant abstraction but as an
immediate possibility. To express this complex responsibility we have
toward life, the dream repeats "the same thoughts" It brought him the
night after Borodino: "Harder and more blessed than all else Is to love
this life In one's sufferings, In one's Innocent sufferings." Then, as if
to reward Pierre for having put life's claims first, the dream passes
Into a vision ofhow the soul does not die, but only returns to the whole.
Unconditioned love Is not really heartless In turning away: since Platon
continues in the whole, it's only the delusion that we are separate and
personal selves which makes his death seem sad. "How simple and
clear It Is," Pierre thinks In the dream, comforted.
�PERAZZINI
99
When he wakes up moments later, however, Pierre still cannot face
Platon's death. And this, I think, is the second point Tolstoy means to
drive home: delusion though it is, we encounter God's love as separate
individuals. The whole may be what's true, but it's not where you or
I live. The vision leaves us dissatisfied. Pierre's dream sounds remarkably like Prince Andrey's thoughts moments before his dream, the one
in which death wins out over life. Perhaps it is a greater spiritual
achievement for Prince Andrey to choose the whole, or for us to be
comforted by the visiort of Platon 's returning to the whole, but Tolstoy
doesn't seem to think so. He calls Prince Andrey's thoughts "too ...
brain-spun" (1090). In choosing life-individual, human life, however
much of a delusion it is-we are committing ourselves to being
dissatisfied With the comfort ofknowing that we Will dissolve back into
the wholec We are committing ourselves, that is, to a sentence of death
in all its dreadfulness. And to recognize the sacredness of life under
those conditions, "to love this life in one's ... innocent sufferings" is
"harder and more blessed than all else." Divine love redeems Pierre,
then, by teaching him how to turn away from suffering and death, not
from callousness but from understsnding and faith. It teaches him,
we might say, the lesson of Job.
Pierre having chosen "this life," Tolstoy sends Russian partisans to
attack the convoy the next morning and free the prisoners. It is during
this action that fifteen-year-old Petya Rostov becomes a hero: like his
brother Nikolay at Enns Bridge, he rushes ahead of everyone-but he
is killed. Petya's death is not necessary to redeem Pierre from captivity
or to free his country of the French. It kills his mother spiritually and
hastens his father's death, but It restores Natasha to life by re-awakening the love in her which seems to have died with Prince Andrey. It
is the way of life to bring all things to an end, and to make all endings
someone else's beginnings. So it is in the novel, and so it Will be With
this lecture-after a brief epilogue.
Near the beginning of this lecture I said that Tolstoy regarded ideas
as vain trifles unless they were carried and lived to the extreme. That
was true of his convictions about moral purity and art, and it's
certainly true of his theory of history, which is nothing but the dialectic
oflove writlarge. It is not enough, for Tolstoy, to have explored a vision
of the relation between self and whole as it exists In one time. If that
vision is true, Tolstoy seems to believe, It must also inform the relation
between self and whole through time. The mechanical notion that an
individual causes an historical event derives from the egoistical delusion that the world is an object for the self to act upon. Because the
world is a whole comprised of separate beings, each of whom has the
�100
'IHE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
legitimacy and value of embodying God's love, the relationship between leaders and the people has to be reciprocal, dialectical. We make
them possible, Tolstoy insists, and they are the means by which we
acquire a societal and historical self. Cause-and-effect is fine for
billiard balls, but it is blasphemous to think of ourselves that way.
But even extending the dialectic of love to apply to history doesn't
take it far enough for Tolstoy: near the end of the Second Epilogue he
expands the context once again and applies his vision of the relation
between self and whole wliJtout regard to time, in the metaphysical
discussion of free will and necessity that ends the book. If life is its
own "aim," being gifted with life confers a kind of autonomy on each
of us-the autonomy of making our own life what it is. Not that we
have any conirol over the conditions around us or the sequence of
events that happens to us; but rather, we make our life in a moral
sense by lransforming, moment by moment, the things life offers us
into our life. By the same token, since life is the whole, the course of
events and the conditions within which we live grow from it without
regard to what we want, expect, or need. As tiny parts of the whole,
we do help bring these events about, but never as we intend and
always in ways that we cannot realize. Necessity and freedom, then,
are also dialectically related: neither can exist without the other.
Whether or not Tolstoy is justified in applying the dialectic of love
to these larger and larger contexts, the book that comes of it is like
some vast symphony that takes a single theme and explores it,
develops it, lransforms it until it reaches monumental proportions.
For all of its heterogeneous material and hundreds of characters, War
and Peace embodies a remarkably single vision: that love embodies
itself in separate beings whose vecy separateness not only makes
possible the recognition of the whole, but also animates the universe
by making it inevitable that that recognition will be forgotten and
recalled endlessly.
�PERAZZINI
101
Notes:
l. Henry Troyat, 'Iblstoy, trans. Nancy Amphoux (Garden City: Double-
day, 1967), 499.
2. When Tolstoy was five, his older brother Nlkolay told him about a
magical green stick on which a secret was written that would end
disease, anger, and misery; the stick was buried in a forest on their
estate, and Its discovery would make everyone love each other as "ant
brothers." In his Mef11Dirs, written seventy years later, Tolstoy writes:
"The ideal of the 'ant brothers' clinging lovingly to one another only
not under two armchairs draped with shawls but of all the peoples of
the whole world under the wide dome of heaven, has remained
unaltered for me. As I then believed that there was a little green stick
whereon was written something that would destroy all evll in men and
give them great blessings, so I now believe that such truth exists
among people and will be revealed to them and wli1 give them what It
promises." By his own wish, Tolstoy Is buried where the green stick
was said to be hidden.
3. I owe this lovely image to Emily Bronte. Catherine Earnshaw uses it
in Chapter 9 of Wuthertng Heights.
4. It's worth noting, I think, that Tolstoy always calls him "Prince
Andrey, • using his full formal name to suggest the dominance and
tenacity ofhis egoism. He is the only character that Tolstoy so names.
5. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise &Alymer Maude, ed. George
Gibian (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966), 1079. All future references
will be placed within square brackets in the text When quoting more
than once from a particular scene, I will give book and chapter
references once rather than repeat what is often the same page
number.
6. The Russian word, nebo, means both "sky" and "heaven. •
7. Thlstoy measures Prince Andrey's progress from egoism to love by
repeating four s!mllar moments. The first time Prince Andrey realizes
that others have their own legitimate life Is the night before Austerlitz,
when he has a momentary glimpse of what it must have felt like to
his wife, Use, to be pregnant and dumped so lovelessly in the country
with his father and sister. The second time happens as he is driving
toward the house at Otrodnoe (VI, 1) and sees Natasha for the first
time. The painful sight of a life so "bright and happy" (It must also be
"foolish." he assures himself parenthetically) and so "separate" from
his begins his return to life. The third time (from which this quotation
is taken) is in 1812; visiting Bald Hills after It has been abandoned,
he sees two peasant girls running away with green plums they have
taken from his orchard, and wishes them well. The last time Is when
he is thinking about "human" and "divine love" after Borodino and
understands what things must have felt like to Natasha; moments
after this insight, the real Natasha returns to him. Each time his
insight Is deeper and more explicit, and his sympathy fuller.
�102
TiiE ST. JOHN'S REViEW
8.1 have changed the Maudes• translation here. They call the sky
"equitable, • but spravedlin!lf (related to pravda, "truth, justice") really
means "just" in the sense of impartial, equitable, or fair.
9. I wish I could take credit for this Image, but in fact It belongs to
Luciano Pavarottl, who used It to describe his vocal talent.
10. The name of Prince Andrey's estate, Ironically enough, means something like "enchanted by God" (Bog and charovat?
11. Tolstoy's idea of the right way to live sounds like the just life in the
Republic, both in its analogical, social manifestation and Its real,
moral sense: "Thus, Glaucon, it was after all a kind of phantom of
justice-that's also why It was helpful-its being right for the man who
ts by nature a shoemaker to practice shoemaking and do nothing else,
and for the carpenter to practice carpentry, and so on for the rest...
And in truth justice was, as It seems, something of this sort; however,
not with respect to man's minding his external business, but with
respect to what is within, with respect to what truly concerns him and
his own. He doesn't let each part in him mind other people's business
or the three classes in the soul meddle with each other, but really sets
his own house in good order and rules himself; he arranges himself,
becomes his own friend, and harmonlzes the three parts ... • (443c-d,
translation by Allan Bloom) In What Is Art?, written three decades
after War and Peace, Tolstoy develops an aesthetic vety much like
Socrates' in Books II-III and X of the Republic.
12. Troyat, op. cit., 731.
13. I have changed the Maudes' translation again. Neopredelimyj, which
they translate "illimitable, • is more strictly "indeterminable" and
"indefinable. • Tbe word they translate as "limited" is uzkij, "narrow. •
And telesn!lf means "physical" and "corporeal" more than "material.•
Tbe adverb beskonechno, "infinitely," is the same word which Prince
Andrey repeatedly uses about the sky.
14. Pierre is the only character in the novel whose name changes, from
"Monsieur Pierre" to Count Bezukhov, then to "the man who does not
give his name," and finally back to Count Bezukhov-but a different
person from the first time he bore that name. I take this as a literal
sign that he spends most of the novel discovertog his self.
15. Tolstoy uses mlli!aty imagety more than once to associate Pierre's
experience as he is maneuvered into marriage with Nikolay's early
mlli!aty experience. Most important is the dreadful "line" (199, 200,
225) each has to cross: on this side is life, safety, and what they have
been; on the other side is uncertainty, pain, and death. Each has a
sense that just by having crossed that line, he will be Irrevocably
changed.
16. The Maudes use "reason, • but the Russian, wn, is not quite so specific.
It means "mind, brains, wit, intellect. •
17. Tbe failure of Pierre's religiosity anticipates the contradictions that
would embitter the last thirty years of Tolstoy's life, after his conversion. Not only did he welcome the role of spiritual leader to the
�PERAZZINI
103
disciples his Chrtstian anarchism attracted, but as the "apostle of
love• he quarreled with every frtend he ever had, especially his wife
Sonya, whom he refused to see on his deathbed.
18. The name Is, Indeed, the Russian form of Plato (and the word
tolstyj--remarkable colncidencel-means "thick, heavy, stout, fat•). In
Anna Karentna, another peasant named Platon sparks the religious
conversion of the autobiographical character Levin.
19. The Maudes translate this "right-ordering,· but the word,
blagoustrqjsbJo, Is the same word that Tolstoy uses on the next page
to descrtbe Platon's way of preparing for sleep. The Maudes translate
the second appearance as "well-ordered," and I have adopted this
phrase for both.
20. In Russian, the word for "peasant" (krest:Janin) differs only slightly
from the word for "Chrtstian• (xristtonln). Platon himself makes the
pun which associates the two.
�104
1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�I
Two Poems
Moira Russell
Illusory
jar Vmcent Van Gogh
So much sadness, even when there is so much yellow in the world.
yellow past sun, past joy. past comfort,
yellow as a quilt for the eyes, yellow as an explosion.
I can't tell you when it was I first knew
that there was no blackness in the world-not even in night;
that there was always a hint of color, a saving grace,
hiding deep somewhere within the blackness.
The stars bum yellow. white, blue-red and gold.
so there Is only red-blue darkness. yellow blackness. Illusory.
Even in eyes' pupils.
the gateway to darkness.
live yellow sparks. In the beginning there was yellow.
not sun yet, nor even light.
color without form,
wriggling and kicking In God's hand, like an infant.
its color yelling out
like an infant's first squall; then as it lit up to white
and then burnt down to deep tawny lions gold
God smiled at yellow. the very first of all his children; he knew
that he had created as he had wanted to.
Moira Russell attended St. John's College in Santa Fe and was graduated from
the Universlt;y of Delaware in 1992. She lives in Albuquerque.
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
106
Strange Me~?ting
Often I imagine
my two grandfathers, never knowing
each other In llfe, ,somehow meeting.
Different ends
of the same spectrum, cruelly, they'd talk
of what they held In common:
money, whiskey, women, death.
Yet even there
they are dMded-take whiskey: one lived In Prohibition,
a dapper bootlegger, a dandy;
one lived in endless poverty,
violent llfe and violent death, a powder-monkey
working with dynamite all day
and coming home and making moonshine, bragging
that his "likker" was as powerful-he'd drink-no,
better.
Their lnfluence on me
is so powerful
it is unseen; like the moon
pulling on creatures deep within the sea,
like hidden water
running through the earth, their blood,
oil and water, runs uneasily In my veins,
never mlxlng, yet mlxed In me,
powering this hand that writes of their imagined meeting,
strangers in name, but uni1y In heredity.
�I
Two Reviews
Eva T. H. Brann
Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander and 'The Ionian
MissiDn, New York: W. W. Norton (1970, 1981).
Cynthia Ozlck, 'The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories, New
York: E. P. Duttoq (1983).
This time I want to commend to the attention of the community a pair
of books that belong to a series, and a collection of stories. The series
and the collection are connected by nothing but their Incongruity.
Among the many reminders to us that we do not live In the very best
of all possible worlds Is the fact that the texts that edlty do not
Invariably delight and the tales that are salutary to the soul do not
always give the most pleasure. I do think the well-balanced reading
life should range over both extremes. Here, then, Is an example of
each, one a realistic British sea-romance and the other a theological
Jewish fantasy.
For the adults among the readers of the Hornblower books who
have longed for one more adventure there is relief: Patrick O'Brian's
fifteen-book Aubrey-Maturin series, the best fighting navy novels I
have ever read. (Consider that Joseph Conrad writes about commercial vessels, though he wouldn't have liked so crass a way of putting
it.) Like the Hornblower novels, this series follows the rocky rise of Its
hero through the navy list durlng the Napoleonic wars. Unlike the
Forester stories, this series Is an entertainment meant for grownups.
The way I went about It was to get the first and the eighth volume,
Master and Commander and 'The Ionian MissiDn. I mean to get the
fifteenth as soon as It Is available In paperback, and then to fill In
haphazardly, as If picking up occasional tales about a familiar setting
and Its likable Inhabitants.
To me the chief delight of these books Is the sea talk. The special
vocabularies of all the honest trades-so antithetical to jargon-are
always wonderful, but among them the speech of sailors Is most
wonderful. For one thlng, It is vigorously poetical and exuberantly
traditional; for another, !tis an essential part of the working life of any
boat-skippers who can't rely on the crew to know the language of
their orders might as well go and do It themselves (which Is what my
skipper, Bert Thoms, our tutor who died In 1978, would often have to
�1HE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
108
do). Naturally not everybody Is so fond of sailing speech. In the opening
chapter of the voyage to Brobdingnag, Swift Inserts a sardonic halfpage of nautical gibberish-at least, I think It must be that. O'Brian,
on the other hand, Is persuasively professional, and there are sometimes whole pages oflanguage that I can't make heads or tails of but
In which I have utter faith. For example, Captain Jack Aubrey has just
set his Sophtes old-fashioned spritsail topsail. edging away another
half point:
At the taffrail Mowett was explaining the nature of this sail to
Stephen, for the Sophie set It llytog, with a jack-stay cltoched round
the end of the jib-boom, havtog an Iron traveller on It, a curious
state of affairs In a man-of-war, of course.
Well, of course. Like most members of this community, I don't like
being subjected to Insignificant speech even If! can divine Its Intention
very well, but I love listening to significant speech though I don't
understand a third of it.
The other objects that are lovable about these books are Its Captain
Jack Aubrey, called "Goldilocks" behind his back by the crew, and his
friend, the ship's surgeon Stephen Maturln, a hopeless sailor and an
Indefatigable naturalist. In fact, the most horrifying engagement In the
books Is the mating of a pair of praying mantises observed by Stephen,
a mating that Is carried on undeterred by the fact that the female Is
the while systematically dismantling her mate. The beauty of It Is that
In this romance the Incident Is a metaphor for nothing at all-just a
well-observed piece of natural history.
Young Jack as well as middle-aged Jack Is fattish and blond, daring
and cautious, insubordinate andTorylsh, moody and exuberant, naive
and cunning, childlike and commanding, bearlike and delicate. Although he makes love In ail ports, he is altogether present only In two
places. One Is the quarterdeck of his sloop Sophie (and later of his
frigate Swprise) before and In battle, the other Is in the captain's cabin,
sawing away at his fiddle In concert with friend Stephen's cello. They
both know the mUsic of the "London Bach." As It happens, Stephen
has come across the fact that "Bach had a father," and has brought
some of father Bach's scores on board. Playing them reveals a side of
the amateurishly musical Jack that realigns his figure from lovable to
moving.
There Is, of course, third among delights, lots of naval action:
chases, engagements, sllpplngs-away, bombardments, hoardings,
love trysts In exotic ports-and very little pretense of plot otherwise.
Years of pleasure!
•••
�BRANN
109
ConseiYatively speaking, one might say that the people in Cythia
Ozick's book, particularly In the title story, "The Pagan Rabbi" (1966),
are not outdoor folk. The nearest the rabbi comes to the ocean Is
sewer-straddling Trilham's Inlet Park, off Long Island Sound (I have
reason to think) but not to be found on the going map of New York
City and environs. Here he hangs himself with his prayer shawl from
the young oak with whose roving splrlt he has fallen In love. Hence
the tale Is fantasy, but it Is dead serlous fantasy. In the epigraph of
the story, taken from the Talmudic Ethics ofthe Fathers, Cynthia Ozick
announces the danger that drives Rabbi Kornfeld to his death:
Rabbi Jacob said: "He who Is walking along and studying, but then
breaks off to remark, 'How lovely Is that tree!" or 'How beautiful is
that fallow fieldl'--8crlpture regards such a one as having hurt his
own being.•
This saying speaks to me because I was brought up the other way
around, to think that total absorption In Inward talk while walking
through a fallow field-or a field of corn in tassel-is a sin against
nature.
Kornfeld's embittered widow suspects him of studying nature-botany, perhaps mycology. But those Baconlan distractions are not his
undoing. He develops a mad and beautiful theory of"free souls." Only
the human soul Is Irremediably Indwelling. The souls of natural
beings, of trees and animals, can roam free, leaving the natural body
at peace, allowing It to see, to witness, to confront Its own soul. What
has captivated the rabbi is not the science of nature but the souls of
nature: water and wood nymphs. the visible spirlts of myth. In the
feiYently God-involved mode of a piously sedentary learned Jew he
has surrendered to paganism-to open-eyed wandering about (he
joins a hiking club), to visible splrlts (he begins by descrying a naiad
and ends by embracing a nymph), and to the supersession of God's
will by the free Imagination (he thinks that If Moses had told the
Hebrews of the doctrine of "free souls" they would have preferred to
stay enslaved In Egypt while letting their souls wander at pleasure In
Zion).
No one in this story Is lovable or even pleasant, not the runaway
rabbi, not the bitter rebbetzin, nor the bookseller who tells the
tale-not even, or least of all, the rural spirit that seduces him, for In
love-battle with a Jew, the nymph proves to be a demon. But they are
all reenacting an old and deadly serlous antagonism, and thus they
command respect.
�llO
TilE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�I
Results of
Crossword Number Four
Solution to "Famous Pairs" by Captain Easy
1f' 2p. 3 I 4D E. 5s I 6Ft 7 I u
1): A Jz.. A f12f( p '1:> 0 N
'A c. ~ 'P I A "p 181 p 0
c. E ~'1- A f I ~ i'"p I u
2~ -r u 23]) E
0 p. A N
'"p u N I ~ [2'1-! M E N T
-r u E' 3J- ~T
E I"'it E
3'R.. I N G aLl 1<- N u M la'P
"f::. 0 wI"L '(? l''R. A- p u A
,c.
Ek
"'
4b t•1·~
I
I
0
·'ft. v A
M N ot7 E
E' ~ E ~
59R
44~
l
1-l
E 1) I"~ 0
A 1> I 0
I E i•(:. R.
,,..
.s
571
v
N A
4~
as gw
A 1~
A- I 'f..J E
s
I
s
E
L
T
21J
~ K
2tl.s
0 <"N
"T-
N
I 5A-i
s
-r A "B
c
s
s
l-1 A I
A 1aN G 0
-r I 0 N
E c A- 141='
c: I"B
L
L0
0
N
A c.
1.(
e "b u e "L
'(
c
A
L
5~
The winners of the $35 book tokens, redeemable at the St. John's
College Bookstore, are:
Jerry Bains, Phoenix AZ
Christopher Lee, Portland ME
Steve Stalter, Topeka KS
The solution and the names of the winners of Crossword Number
Five will appear In the next regular Issue.
�112
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Crossword Number Six:
"Poreus"
By Cassandra
Answers to ten clues, marked by asterisks, are to be decoded phonetically before entry Into the •diagram.
Across
I. Composer reverses role
as young knight (8)
*4. To flout reality, conceal
what Is bizarre (5)
7. Spawn of vile animals,
Initially (3)
10. Meat for least Important
or most Important man?
(4)
*12. Once started, wandering
nude takes right path (8)
*13. Give us any new order,
then rescind It (5)
14. Make candy money (4)
16. Regular fee sent directly
to Pole (4)
18. Sewer with top off reveals
water (4)
19. Hydrogen works when
used for making beer (4)
*20. Unknown artist and
celebrity finally join
forces to produce kind of
picture (1-3)
21. Give authority to put In
combination of French
and English (6)
24. Left gun out-it's found
In chest (4)
25. Half-Japanese car game
(3)
*26. Expense Is nothing like
Latin song (6)
27. To claim as one's own,
put pointless pointer on
entry (8)
Down
*I. How to address Turkish
governor: "Do as I say!" (4)
2. Possessed, found In part
of Hell (3)
3. Dancing girl and fat
treatment (7)
*4. Place for products of
burning, like hightension beam (7)
5. Following bad pun?
There's nothing in It (4)
6. Sneer about birds (5)
8. Extra room for tenth
British monarch (5)
9. Poor leaderless seminar
must stay put (6)
*1 0. Avoid taking trick-or,
taking fifty, avoid giving
enough money! (9)
11. Began bad ode about
writer (6)
*13. Linger longer to display
old-fashioned corset (7)
14. Ethical maxtm starts
from the lips (5)
*15. Where to dispose of what
Is finished-and ruined,
you tart! (3-4)
17. Money Is corrupt heart of
despot (4)
22. Metal beast (3)
23. Organ froduces soundyes? (3
�CROSSWORD
1
113
3
2
9
8
7
4
110
6
111
12
13
14
15
17
16
18
19
21
20
24
26
5
23
22
25
(2.7
As usual, three book tokens of $35, redeemable at the College Bookstore
(Annapolis), will be awarded for the first three correct solutions opened
at random eight weeks after the mailing of this issue. Marl< envelopes
" Crossword No. 6."
��
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 St. John's Review</em>
Description
An account of the resource
<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
thestjohnsreview
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
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.
113 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
The St. John's Review, 1993/1
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1993
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Zuckerman, Elliott
Brann, Eva T. H.
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Hunt, Jack
Sachs, Joe
Sepper, Dennis L.
Maschler, Chaninah
Peperzak, Adriaan
Perazzini, Randolph
Description
An account of the resource
Volume XLII, number one of The St. John's Review. Published in 1993.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_42_No_1_1993
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
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
St. John's Review
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2b69b2ce561c611b2fc3cefb8e8bdaec.pdf
3ac6a94fca6362b5bfa8ef769aeb6a4c
PDF Text
Text
The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVI, number two (2002)
Acting Editor
George Russell
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
James Carey
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Blakely Phillips
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St.
John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the distribution
list, subscriptions are $15.00 for three issues, even though the
magazine may sometimes appear semiannually rather than three
times a year. Unsolicited essays, stories, poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St.
John’s College, P Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800.
.O.
Back issues are available, at $5.00 per issue, from the St. John’s
College Bookstore.
©2002 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Publishing and Printing
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
Measure, Moderation and the
Mean............................................ 5
Joe Sachs
Plato and the Measure of the Incommensurable
Part II. The Mathematical Meaning of the Indeterminite
Dyad................................................................................
................... 25
A.P. David
Moral Reform in Measure for
Measure............................................63
Laurence Berns
Book Reviews
Eva Brann’s, The Ways of
Naysaying ................................................79
Chaninah Maschler
Eva Brann’s What, Then, is
Time?.....................................................107
Torrance Kirby
The Feasting of Socrates
Peter Kalkavage’s translation of
Timaeus...................................117
Eva Brann
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
Measure, Moderation, and the
Mean
Joe Sachs
(with particular reference to the story Odysseus tells in
the Odyssey)
Anyone who comes to love the writings and artworks that have
survived from ancient Greece ought one day to visit Olympia. In
Athens there are wonderful things to see, but also evidence everywhere of the destructive effects on buildings and statues of some of
the most polluted air anywhere in the world. But, in Olympia, in
the Peloponnese, where the most famous of the ancient athletic
games were celebrated, one can still breathe purer air, and see glorious sights. In particular, in the museum there, at the two ends of
the large main room, restored to their complete shapes, are the two
pediments of a temple of Zeus built in the decade of the 460s BC.
(Illustrations are at the end of the text.) The form of a pediment will
be familiar to you as what sits above the appropriate sort of
entrance to a temple. Picture a rectangle, wider than it is long, made
of evenly spaced vertical columns; resting on top of this row of
columns is a triangle, shorter than it is wide, with a series of sculpted figures across it. The statue at the center of the triangular pediment is the tallest figure and the focus of the whole composition.
The eastern pediment at Olympia depicts Zeus at its center, in a
monumental style that makes one think of Egypt. In fantasy, one
might see this pediment as a doorway into ancient Greece, leading in
from the east. But the truer doorway to things that are most characteristic of classical Greece is at the other end of the room. The western pediment depicts the defeat of the Centaurs, who are men in
their heads, arms, and upright chests, but horses in their legs and horizontal lower trunks. They are attempting to carry off human
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
women, and one young boy, but the sculptor has captured the
moment of their defeat. They are being fought by human heroes,
including Theseus, but they are defeated by a look and a gesture. At
the center of the pediment is Apollo, ten feet tall, looking to his right
with his right arm outstretched, the hand level, the palm downward.
The look in his eyes is not angry but serious, and his face is not
clenched in threat but calm. The centaurs cannot have their way
when faced with the power radiated by such dignity. This scene, displaying in outward figures an inner topography of the human soul,
holds in it something of the spirit of classical Greece. The fact that
you or I can see these seemingly invisible qualities, just by being
patient and receptive in front of some shaped blocks of stone, is one
of the amazing achievements that has survived from that time and
place.
Zeus was, as you know, the father and ruler of the Olympian
gods, and even the name of the town Olympia was taken from its
temple of Zeus, who was the Olympian, but somehow Apollo came
to be pre-eminent among the gods imagined as living on Olympus.
At Delphi, on Mount Parnassus, above the Gulf of Corinth, there
was an ancient temple of Gaia, Mother Earth, which was considered the center of the earth. But people were kept away from it by
the Python, an inhuman monster, until Apollo killed it. The Pythia,
the priestess of the temple, then became a medium through whom
people could consult Apollo, and learn his word, or oracle. The
story of Pythian Apollo embodies the same meaning as that of the
Apollo sculpted at Olympia, a victory on behalf of humanity, won
over older and subhuman enemies. The dragons and half-humans
are not wiped out, but become subject to something shining and
beautiful. I think you will find some version of this insight present
in almost every work you read from classical Greece, though not
everyone would agree, and it may certainly at times be something
hard won and dimly seen. But even tragedy, a type of poetry discovered by certain Greeks, always displays that, even in the most
horrendous circumstances, there is a human dignity that we can still
SACHS
7
recognize; that when it is recognized it commands respect; and that
this respect allows all things to be seen in their true proportions.
Above the doorway of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, we are
told (Plato, Protagoras 343B) that two sayings were inscribed:
Know thyself, and Nothing to excess. These may seem to be disconnected—an exhortation to self-knowledge and a platitude about
not going overboard with anything—but to think them together is
to find the meaning of each. Know thyself means know your true
limits, the greed and ambition to which no human being should
aspire and the depths to which no human being should sink. And
Nothing to excess is not just practical advice; it means that the
nature of anything, including human life, is revealed only when its
true proportions are found—that the truth of anything is its form.
The positive version of Nothing to excess is another saying—
Measure is best—and the measure of a thing is its form.
To take a simple example, what are the right proportions for
the entrance to a temple? When I described the pediments at
Olympia and asked you to picture them and the columns under
them, I’ll bet you got their proportions just about right. The rectangle formed by the columns is wider than it is high. How much
wider? Enough so that it will not look squashed together, but not so
much that it would become stringy looking. Let your imagination
squeeze and stretch it to see what goes wrong, and then notice that
to get it right again you have to bring it back to a certain very
definite shape. This is the golden rectangle. It has been produced
spontaneously by artists, architects, and carpenters of any and every
time and place. What is the ratio of its width to its height? I can tell
you exactly what it is, but not in numbers. I can also tell it to you
in numbers, but not exactly. It is approximately 61.8 units wide and
38.2 units high. That will get you in the ballpark and your eye will
then adjust it to make the ratio exact, but it can be proven that no
pair of numbers, to any finite precision, can accurately express this
ratio, which is that formed by cutting a line so that the whole has
to its larger part the same ratio that the larger part has to the smaller. If you have a calculator, you can check that 61.8 is to 38.2 in just
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
about the same ratio as that of 100 to 61.8, but no matter how
many decimal places you take it to, any ratio of numbers for the
parts will fail to match that of the whole to the larger part. We know
many things by measuring, and our usual way of measuring is with
numbers, but in this case numbers are too crude an instrument by
which to know something our eyes know at a glance.
Taking the measure of something, then, does not necessarily
require quantifying it. We are always going too far in trying to quantify things. The intelligence quotient is a precise number, and no
doubt it means something, but it doesn’t capture anything worth
calling intelligence. An acquaintance of mine, who grew up in
Baltimore, once watched an old, uneducated cook in North
Carolina make biscuits. She was writing down the recipe, and at one
point asked “How much shortening did you use?” The reply was
“Enough to make it short.” This example reveals both the genuine
intelligence of the cook, which would not show up on any test
score, and the fact that she was measuring the shortening not by its
volume or weight but by its feel as she mixed it into the dough. Her
hands were performing a qualitative measurement, just as the eyes
of your imagination were measuring the rectangle by its shape,
rather than by the lengths of its sides. You should not be too quick
to agree with me about this, because if you do, you may have to give
up many other things you believe.
I am claiming, and this is something I learned from certain dead
Greeks, that the world really has qualities in it, that they are not
subjective distortions projected onto it, but the true forms of things.
I know them by my senses, and I know them better that way than
by any theoretical explanations of them. With the golden rectangle,
the discovery of the ratio of its sides reveals something that we can
never name directly—we cannot say how many times bigger one
side is than the other, or than any possible fractional part of the
other—but we can still recognize that ratio in two ways: in its sameness with another ratio, or, even more simply, in the distinctively
shaped rectangle it produces. What is quantitatively incommensurable is qualitatively harmonious. Similarly, the experienced cook
SACHS
9
knows that all batches of flour and shortening are not identical, and
that they may not behave the same way at different times of the
year. If you want the biscuits to turn out right, the only thing to
trust is your hands.
We need not go through all five senses, but one example of
measurement by the ear will be helpful. Clamp a guitar string at
both ends, put a bridge under it about two-fifths of the way from
either end, and pluck the two parts. You will hear something interesting. But what if the string is not of uniform thickness all the way
along? If you have measured the two lengths to make them exactly
as two to three, you might still hear something that sounds wrong,
just a little off. The interval of a fifth is produced by strings with
lengths in a perfectly commensurable ratio, all other things being
equal, but the lack of uniformity in real strings means that one tunes
an instrument best with one’s ear. It is true that musicians nowadays
sometimes use little electronic devices that read out frequencies of
vibration. But if the machine malfunctions, it will do no good for
the musician to tell the audience he got all the numbers right. Only
for the ear is there such a thing as being in tune.
Measure, proportion, and harmony are in the nature of things,
and we have a direct responsiveness to them that orients us in the
world. These are not the ratios of mathematics, but incarnate ratios.
And the words pure and applied do not fit the distinction, because
the purer instances of measure are the ones given to our senses. A
tradition preserved by a twelfth century writer (Johannes Tzetzes)
tells us that the inscription above the doorway of Plato’s school, the
Academy, read “Let no one without geometry enter under my roof.”
Does this mean that skill in mathematics was, as we would say, a
prerequisite for his classes? I don’t think so. It seems to me important that the entrant is not required to have mathematics, but geometry. Much of mathematics develops from the act of counting, a fundamental and natural power without which we could not speak or
think, but geometry starts in a different way, from a sensory recognition of the ordering of simple visible shapes. In Plato’s Gorgias
(508a), Socrates actually tells a young man that he is without geom-
�10
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
etry, but he is not criticizing Callicles for his intelligence or learning
or skill, but blaming him for a failure of moral choice. The young
man is greedy and in danger of having no friends, Socrates says,
because he does not recognize the way geometrical equality gives all
things the proportions that let them be part of larger wholes. The
loss of a sense for geometry is equated with losing one’s way in the
human world.
An example that shows both the positive and the negative side
of this is the central scene in Plato’s Meno. Meno’s “boy,” a slave
who has never been taught geometry, begins to discover it in front
of us. Relying at first solely on his ability to count, he twice goes
wrong in trying to measure the side of the double square, but counting also shows him he is wrong. With Socrates leading the way, by
drawing figures and pointing at them, the slave eventually is led to
trust his eyes, and to see the square double itself, out of itself. And
while Socrates asks all the questions, the slave has to do all the seeing himself, out of himself, just as he was led to his mistakes, but
made them himself. This is all very elementary, but the slave has
geometry in him, and he also has a little bit of courage and determination in getting it out—two qualities his master lacked when he
found some unexpected difficulty in answering other questions.
And this finally is the point of the scene, the reason Socrates
arranges it in front of us: Meno cannot see that his “boy” is a better man than he is. We can all recognize that certain people deserve
more respect than others, if we are honest, but Meno has lost that
capacity. He has lost his way. He is without geometry.
This way of understanding geometry may help explain an
apparent inconsistency in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Near its
beginning, Aristotle says something that might at first seem to be
opposite to the inscription on Plato’s gates. He warns the reader not
to look for the precision of mathematical demonstration in the
study of ethics (1194b 19-27). Is this not equivalent to writing on
the portals of this sort of philosophy, “let no one try to enter here
with geometry”? If so, it is odd that Aristotle fills his exploration of
ethics from the beginning with references to actions that are in pro-
SACHS
11
portion, or in ratio, or in a right ratio. For instance, someone may
have good fortune and a steady course through life, but be knocked
out of equilibrium by some misfortune. The inability to cope with
disaster is out of proportion (1100a 23, 1101a 17) with the rest of
the life. Since some alteration is inevitable, and some grief would be
appropriate, and no rules prescribe its amount or how it should be
expressed, only a geometrical eye can judge this. The fitness of such
actions might be measured with some precision, but it can never be
demonstrated. All the circumstances and all the history of any
action can never be known, too many considerations have to be balanced, and equally good alternative ways of handling difficulties are
always possible.
Aristotle, then, does believe that human actions can be chosen
and recognized as right or wrong with precision, but he denies that
this is the same as the precision of a mathematical demonstration.
But he not only uses the language of ratio and proportion for the
kind of precision appropriate to ethics, he also speaks of all actions
that come from virtues of character as actions that hit the mean.
This is easy to misunderstand, because readers tend to ignore the
warning he gives almost as soon as he begins talking about the
mean, that this sort of mean is also an extreme (1107a 6-8, 22-3).
In fact, people rarely understand that this sort of mean is not quantitative at all. But taking it in a quantitative sense opens the way to
identifying the mean with the mediocre, the middle of the road, or
even middle-class morality, the sort of timidity that shies away from
anything that might distinguish one from the crowd. But one of the
things that Aristotle says hits the mean is courage, and he says plainly that there is no such thing as too much courage.
Now one way to see how courage both is and is not a mean
condition is to extend the mathematical language to a second
dimension, and this is both accurate and helpful. There is no such
thing as too much courage, but there is such a thing as too much
confidence, just as there can be too little of it. Courage occupies a
mean position on a scale of fearfulness and fearlessness. The sense
in which courage is an extreme is on a different axis, one on which
�12
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
the person who has just the right amount of fear puts that attitude
into action in the most excellent way. We might even liken this twodimensional scheme to the appearance of the west pediment at
Olympia, on which Apollo occupies the middle position, but also
towers over everyone else. Courage is like that. As I say, this is true
and it helps one keep hold of Aristotle’s claim that the virtues are
extremes of human character, but also stand in and aim at a mean.
But for all that, this talk of measuring along two axes seems to
me to be misleading in the most important respect. I can show how
very simply. Just ask yourself if the power of Apollo over Centaurs
and humans would be greater if he were taller. As it is, he towers
over them, but the design could have been made in such a way that
he dwarfed them, reduced them to puny insignificance. With a little bit of play in the imagination, I think you can see that this would
destroy the sculpture’s effect. The designer of the pediment (who
may have been someone named Alkamenes) wasn’t aiming at making Apollo as big as possible, but at making him extend the human
stature just a little. The Centaurs are sub-human monsters; a gigantic Apollo would also be monstrous. The sculptor has not only
placed Apollo in the middle of the horizontal array; he has also hit
a mean along the vertical axis. All the power of the ensemble
depends on getting the figures in a right relation to one another. As
with the golden rectangle (and recall that the pediment originally
sat on top of one), it is not a matter simply of adjusting Apollo’s
height, but of forming a single design.
Apollo’s height is a precise mean between a ridiculous shortness
and a monstrous tallness, but that mean is also an extreme in the
sense that it is unsurpassably right. But the way in which it is unsurpassably right is not quantitative. It is unsurpassably right in the
design to which it belongs. It fits, and nothing else would. Liddell
and Scott, the authors of the standard dictionary of ancient Greek,
will tell you that aretê, the word for virtue, comes from the name
of Ares, the god of war, but another school of thought derives it
from a humble verb that means to fit together (arariskein), or be
fitting—it may be related to a similar humble verb, from wood-
SACHS
13
working (harmozein), from which we get our word harmony.
Courage too, as Aristotle or any thoughtful person would explain
it, comes not from the bloodthirstiness of the war god, but from
recognizing what one’s circumstances call for and carrying it into
action. Only when the circumstances are extreme, as they are for
Patroclus or Hector, does courage call for the extreme risk, or sacrifice, of life, or perhaps, in the case of Achilles, for the sacrifice of
revenge. At the end of the Iliad, the usual ways of confronting an
enemy are no longer fitting, and Achilles recognizes that.
The recognition that Hector’s body belongs to his father and to
his city has nothing to do with anything quantitative. It is not
arrived at by adjusting any sort of dial up from too little or down
from too much. But it is a measured response to the situation that
Achilles faces. It is geometrical equality that Achilles restores, by letting the dead man be given an appropriate funeral. It is dignity that
he measures. Priam, the miserable wreck of an old man at Achilles’s
feet, dominates his action in exactly the way Apollo dominates the
Centaurs. In both cases, anger takes up a subordinate position in the
design of the human soul. It finds its right proportion to the whole.
On a list of the various meanings of the word logos preserved from
Aristotle’s school by an ancient scholar (Theon of Smyrna), one of
those meanings was the ratio of one who gives respect to the one
who is respected. By looking at Apollo in his glory, or at Priam in
his misery, we can begin to take our own measure.
This kind of qualitative measurement is appropriately represented by ratios, because a ratio is not a quantity. A ratio limits a
quantity. It is a revealing fact that we all have trouble remembering
what Euclid means by greater ratio—that it is not the span of the
interval between two magnitudes but the size of the first in relation
to the second that he is referring to. A length, or an area, or a volume, or for that matter a weight is measured by its size or amount,
but a ratio is something on a different order of things. We measure
length by cutting it up and counting the pieces, but ratios do not
admit that kind of treatment. Fractions do. Fractions are quantities
but ratios are not. The nature of quantity is that of material. There
�14
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
can always be more of it or less, arranged this way or that. And this
way of looking at quantity helps one see that ratios belong to the
realm not of material but of form.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus tells a story that goes on for four long
books. About two-thirds of the way through it he tries to stop and
go to bed, but his hosts will not let him. He claims the story is taking too long to tell, and there is too much more of it, but they are
spellbound and persuade him to go on. The king who speaks for
them tells Odysseus that there is a morphê upon his words (XI,
367), meaning a shapeliness or gracefulness. This is one of the
words that comes later to be used for “form” in an important philosophic sense. Odysseus need not measure his words by time or number, the king is telling him, because his hearers measure them by
beauty and depth. A form does not merely surround its content
with a shape. It transforms the material and makes it be what it is,
through and through. And just as Alkinous praises Odysseus for the
form of his story, Aristotle too, in his Poetics (Chap. 8, 1451a),
praises Homer for knowing where to start and end an epic poem to
make it be one story goverened by one action.
What is the form that governs the story Odysseus tells the
Phaiakians? Neither they nor we ever take that story to be a simple
report of the events that Odysseus witnessed and took part in since
the time he left Troy. It is a story formed or transformed by art. But
if all stories that reshape events were lies, fiction would simply mean
falsehood. Alkinous distinguishes Odysseus from the multitude of
liars the dark earth breeds. His criterion is not easy to translate, but
it is understandable to us because we too have heard Odysseus tell
his story, and know exactly what he means. Lattimore makes
Alkinous say that the liars make up stories from which no one could
learn anything (XI, 366). The more usual translation has it that the
lying stories are made up out of things no one could see, and this,
in turn, either in the sense that all the human witnesses are dead, or
in a deeper sense. Both translations are possible, and both capture
something of what Alkinous is talking about. Odysseus is trying to
get something out of the Phaiakians, but he is also letting them learn
SACHS
15
from his experience, and they count that a fair exchange. Things
that are literally false, contrary to fact, are redeemed from falsehood if they capture truth that goes beyond the merely factual. No
one can go see if the story was accurate, but no sensible person
would try to check it in that way, because its proper subject is something that cannot be seen. The story puts in front of the eyes of our
imaginations things that are invisible.
What is Odysseus’s story about? It is, first of all, full of fabulous
beings, gods and monsters and people who live in strange ways. A
question that is repeatedly asked, not with formulaic phrasing but
with constant changes in its wording, is whether the characters that
are about to be encountered are human, that is, dwelling on the
earth and eaters of bread (VI, 8; IX, 89, 191). And even among
those who are not immortal gods and monsters, some dwell under
the earth and drink blood, some dwell in mountain caves and are
cannibals, and some eat the lotus fruit and dwell in their own psyches. But these non-humans are not only a background against
which the human form is displayed, they are constant temptations
to the humans themselves.
Some of the companions of Odysseus are seduced by the lotus
into the oblivion of ignorance, but Odysseus himself is later seduced
by the Sirens, toward the oblivion produced by the love of knowledge. On either side there is a loss of connectedness to the human
community. And Odysseus’s story begins among the Kikones, where
his men get drunk and reckless with success, and then, when their
luck turns, lose six of their companions out of each of their twelve
ships; his story ends among the cattle of Helios, where the men who
are left, less than fifty of them on their one remaining ship, get hungry and reckless in misfortune, and lose their lives. In both overconfidence and despair their hungers become unmeasured by judgement. And again Odysseus too experiences the same dangers, in his
different way. His hunger for recognition, when he has saved himself and his men from the Cyclops, results in a foolhardy judgement
which brings him Poseidon’s curse, and turns victory into needless
defeat; and this is followed by another foolhardy judgement, that he
�16
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
could stay awake for ten straight days with the bag of winds, and
arrive home the single-handed savior of his men. His hunger for
glory is as deadly to his judgement as his companions’ hungers are
to theirs.
This break-down of judgement is again a loss of the connectedness of human community, since disproportionate hunger of any
kind, whether from extreme self-indulgence or extreme need,
brings isolation. After the fiasco with the bag of winds, Odysseus
twice shows himself to us in isolation on top of mountains (X, 97
and 148), and this image surrounds his explicit comparison of a
monstrous Laistrygonian to a mountain peak (X, 113), and echoes
his earlier description of the Cyclops (IX, 187-92). Here is what
Odysseus says when he narrates his first sight of the cave of
Polyphemus: “Here a monster of a man bedded down, who now
was herding his flocks alone and afar, for he did not mingle with
others, but stayed away by himself, knowing no law, for he was
formed as a wondrous monster, not like a man, an eater of bread,
but like a wooded peak of the high mountains which stands out to
view alone, apart from others.” In his outsmarting of the Cyclops,
Odysseus displays the power that lets a puny human master a gigantic brute, but in his glorying Odysseus outsmarts himself, and ends
up no better than a Cyclops.
Finally, Odysseus is measured against the gods. This is most
apparent in his verbal jousting with Athena when he awakens on
Ithaca in Book XIII. She uses superhuman knowledge and magic to
deceive and test and tease him, while he holds his own with his
merely human skills, to her delight. “That’s my boy,” she says in
effect, and he replies, in effect, “So where have you been for so
long.” But this alliance of man and goddess as friendly rivals is not
the one that is his true test. It is Kalypso who offers him the ultimate choice, to be her lover forever, while neither of them grows
old, on an island that grows everything to delight the senses and
requires no work. He chooses to go back into the sea, to work, to
fight, to take chances, and ultimately to die. He does not talk about
any of this in the story he tells the Phaiakians, though he had told
SACHS
17
the king and queen the bare outline of it the day before. We know
the story of Kalypso’s island from Homer’s telling of it, before we
know how to understand it. It is Odysseus who puts it in context.
From the time, early in Book X, when he comes down from the
mountain on Circe’s island, the rest of Odysseus’s story is about his
losing battle to win back the trust of his companions. “I am in no
way like the gods,” he has said to Alkinous, “but count me equal to
whomever you know among humans who bears the heaviest load of
woe.” (VII, 208-212) But unlike another man who might say that,
Odysseus had a choice, and chose human troubles. What he lost,
with his companions, was more worthy of choice to him, than what
he could gain from Kalypso’s gift.
We make much of Achilles’s choice, to live a short and glorious
life instead of a long and ordinary one, and pay less attention to
Odysseus’s choice, to live not at ease forever but for a long but
bounded time, amid troubles that will eventually come to an end.
You probably know that the first word of the Iliad is wrath; of the
Odyssey the first word is man. The shaping of the Iliad rises from
the flare-up of Achilles’s wrath, to come to completion when that
wrath itself finds its limit, not just in duration but in submission to
a higher good; the wrathful, warlike side of human life finds its
form and proportion within a larger whole. The Odyssey is formed
in a different way. It starts in three places (Olympus, Ogygia, and
Ithaca). It backs up, and proceeds for a while on parallel tracks, as
we hear a story told and watch the interaction of the teller and hearers, and finally begins moving forward in its second half. But
through and through, the form that shapes the Odyssey is the form
of the human being, as it shows us a man travelling up to all the limits of what it is to be human, coming to know them, and choosing
to remain within them. A participle in the fifth line of the poem
(arnumenos), as it is usually translated, credits Odysseus for saving
his life, but it has a richer meaning: he earned or achieved his life,
proved worthy of it by learning that it was worthy of his choice.
The Phaiakians understand his story, and honor his choice by making one in its image: they choose to risk their easy life by taking on
�18
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
his troubles as their own, and their journey to Ithaca is their last
carefree voyage. The first thing we hear about the Phaiakians is that
they live far away from men who earn their bread (VI, 8), but the
human form becomes visible to them in Odysseus, and draws them
out of their isolation.
In the west pediment at Olympia, human dignity is made visible in the figure of Apollo. In the toils and troubles of Odysseus at
sea, human worth becomes apparent against a background of goddesses and monsters and bad choices. The beauty of the Phaiakians’
action is set against the perversion of the human image in the young
suitors who have taken over Ithaca. The suitors are worse than the
Centaurs at Olympia, who are simply appetites that have not yet
come under control. The suitors have no respect for any man or
woman (XXII. 414-15), and so they cannot be reformed. What they
cannot recognize, they cannot take as formative. Their image, in
their feasting, reflects that of the human pigs on Circe’s island; in
their obliviousness to someone else’s home, it reflects that of the
lotus eaters; and in their reasoning that Telemachus is about to
become an obstacle to their pleasure and so, of course, should be
killed, they are no different from the cannibal Cyclops. Odysseus
knows what to do when immortality is offered to him, because he
has learned to respect the claims of human need, and wants to
redeem his loss of his companions, for which he bears not all, but
enough, of the blame. And he will have to use the same standard to
decide what to do about the suitors.
But in Ithaca and abroad, in the story that surrounds that of
Odysseus, there is a gallery of portraits of simple human dignity.
They work on us to convey the power we respect in old people
whose experience has brought them understanding. One of them is
Nestor, who responds to strangers first by feeding them and only
afterward asking whether they are pirates. (III. 69-74) Pre-eminent
among these figures is Eumaeus, the swineherd, a victim of pirates;
born the son of a king (XV 412), he was kidnapped and sold into
.
slavery, but came to accept his lot as the lowliest of servants with no
bitterness (XIV 140-147). He balances the picture of life on Ithaca:
.
SACHS
19
as the suitors have turned a palace into a pig-sty, Eumaeus, with his
courtesy and shrewd judgement, has turned a pig-sty into a place of
gracious hospitality. Homer refers to him as the godlike swineherd
(XIV 401, 413), and as the swineherd, first in the ranks of men
.
(XVII. 184). But surrounding and woven through all these portraits
of age and wisdom is the un-regarded figure of Mentor. Odysseus
had left him in charge in Ithaca (II. 225-7), but his power to rule
rested on nothing but respect. With the invasion of the suitors, the
foundation of civilized life on Ithaca collapsed, and in the resulting
chaos we hardly notice Mentor, since he cannot fight, and barely
raises his voice. He is glorified in the last line of the poem, when
Athena, in a poetic equivalent of the sculpted figure of Apollo at
Olympia, has put an end to the violent strife of people who are all
alike (XXIV 543), making herself recognizable in the voice and liv.
ing form of Mentor. These last words of the whole poem confirm
our sense that its first word, man, is what it intends to reveal to us,
and the final embodiment of that revelation is in a radiant presentation of a character so humble the poet had to compel us to notice
him at all, a character whose dignity lives only in the medium of our
respect, while that dignity, in turn, is the only foundation for shared
human life. Homer makes us err, in overlooking Mentor, and come
to ourselves in recognizing him, so that, in a small way, we mimic
Odysseus’s journey.
But if we are to take the human measure from
Mentor, that must mean that he displays human excellence, and that would be a very strange claim to make.
The poet Homer can play in a serious way by putting the
kingly soul of Eumaeus in a position in which he has only
pigs to rule over, and he can leave us with the vision of a
goddess who makes a humble man resplendent, but neither of these figures seems to display any maximum of
human possibility. Instead, what we seem to see in them
is the last shred of dignity that cannot be taken away from
any human being by any sort of mistreatment from others, but can only be lost by one’s own act. When
�20
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Odysseus comes out of the sea alone on the island of the
Phaiakians, he burrows under a pile of leaves. Here is the
way Homer describes this action: “As when someone
hides away a glowing ember in a black ash heap at the
end of the earth, with no countrymen anywhere near, no
others at all, saving the seed of fire in a place where there
is no other source from which he could start a fire, so did
Odysseus cover himself up with leaves.” (V 488-91)
,
Odysseus almost lost himself on his journey. And the
thing that nearly smothered the last spark of humanity in
him was his drive to excel.
We are told in the third line of the poem that many were the
people whose cities he saw and whose intellects he knew, and for
Odysseus every new experience was a test. Seeing and knowing
were never for their own sake for him. He was always taking the
measure of any new places and their inhabitants, and that, for him,
came to be for its own sake, continually to prove himself more than
the equal of any kind of skill or strength or strategem, and worthy
of respect from anything that exists that can pay respect. He wanted to go beyond anywhere others had been, to find every limit and
surpass it. This fits a conventional understanding of excellence, but
it makes no sense. It aims at nothing but beyond everything, so that
the task is infinite and formless. To achieve excellence in this way is
to measure oneself against what is measureless. Only a being of
infinite capacity could be genuinely successful. One image of human
finitude in the Odyssey is our need to sleep. The journey from
Aeolia to Ithaca is long and hard, but achievable, but also just barely longer than anyone could stay awake for. With a dangerous cargo
like the bag of winds, a sensible captain will have to admit his own
limits to himself, and take someone else into his confidence, but
Odysseus does not permit himself such weakness. That stubbornness costs him more than nine years of trouble, and eventually costs
every one of his companions his life. When we see Odysseus give
way to sleep again, the meaning is exactly the opposite of the former occasion. His sleep brings to an end his efforts to persuade his
SACHS
21
comrades, and they eat forbidden meat and die; they decide that
they are no heroes, and cannot hold out indefinitely against hunger.
Afterward, Odysseus never ceases to defend them. But it is usually not his companions themselves that he refers to, but the common lot of human beings that he discovered by paying attention to
them. No less than six times he lectures people about the cursed
belly, and the things its need can drive people to (VII. 215-21; XV
.
343-5; XVII. 286-9, 473-4; XVIII. 53-4; XIX. 71-4). The man who
once despised weakness in himself is now the fierce defender of
those whose strength fails them. His rejection of the offer of immortality is in part a gesture of solidarity with his companions, and his
disguise as a beggar on Ithaca in some way displays the truth. In
front of the Phaiakians, Odysseus could have told his story to present himself as the hero of Troy, the most important man in the
world, but he chooses instead to make his loss and his need central.
He tells one of the suitors “Nothing feebler than a human being
does the earth sustain, of all the things that breathe and crawl on
the earth” (XVIII, 130-1), using the same adjective he chose when
telling Kalypso “I know very well that thoughtful Penelope is feebler than you in both form and stature” (V 215-17). He has learned
,
to see what is fragile in us and in need of protection as having a
higher claim on his effort than any extraordinary achievements that
might extend human glory.
But the radiant dignity conferred on Mentor at the poem’s end,
and glowing from within Eumaeus in its midst, is not the whole of
the human image either. There is also heroic action that is not ambitious for glory but called forth in defence of what is dignified but
weak. In Aristotle’s ethics the word that names human dignity is
spoudê, seriousness, the quality that is apparent in certain exceptional people who know what to take seriously. But in the Odyssey
the focus is on aidôs, respect, the quality present in all of us that
enables us to recognize dignity. Respect can take the place of force,
and can bind together a community, establishing the conditions of
life under which the things that have seriousness and dignity can be
given their due. The actions that embody respect constitute what
�22
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Aristotle calls distributive justice, the paying of what is due not
merely in the quantitative medium of money but by reference
always to the qualitative medium of honor. In a just community,
according to Aristotle, there will never be simple equality, but rather
proportional equality, actions and titles and gestures that make evident what different people deserve. And this is what Socrates called
geometrical equality, since it requires an act of seeing rather than
one of calculating.
In the Odyssey, our seeing is put to work most vividly beyond
the world in which we live and make choices, envisioning the
Cyclops, the passage between Scylla and Charybdis, or Odysseus
lashed to the mast while the Sirens sing, but as in the west pediment
at Olympia, these figures depicted as outwardly visible display the
shape of the invisible human soul. The soul that Homer lets us recognize as unsurpassably right in its ordering is the one that we see
in the hero in rags, in his feeble old father in armor (XXIV 513-25),
.
in the boy who calls an assembly of adults, in the woman who neutralizes the strength of 108 men (XVI. 245-51) and stops time itself
for four years by unweaving every night what she wove by day (II.
94-110). It is the human balance in which strength has reason to
give way to weakness, and weakness has resources to find strength.
It is the human mean that can live only within a community. The
best human life is a topic that demands philosophic reflection, but
such reflection would not be possible if one could not, in the first
place, simply see its form.
NOTE:
The central importance in the Odyssey of the respectful attitude aidôs
that makes human communities possible is something I first learned by reading Mary Hannah Jones’s senior essay, “A First Reading of the Odyssey,”
included in the collection of St. John’s College Prize Papers, 1977-78.
SACHS
23
�24
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
25
Plato and the Measure of the
Incommensurable
Part II. Plato’s New Measure:
The Mathematical Meaning of
the Indeterminate Dyad
Amirthanayagam David
I shall argue that the controversial developments—some
would say the reversals—in Plato’s later metaphysical outlook
were in fact an inspired response to some truly epochal developments in the mathematics of his day; in particular, to certain
seminal advances in the theory of the irrational. Following on
my reading of the geometry lesson at Theaetetus 147, and of its
significance for that dialogue and for the Sophist and the
Politicus, I can now shed light on one of the most obscure
notions associated with Plato, a thing known to Aristotle as the
“indeterminate dyad.” The discovery and description of this
remarkable object—remarkable, all right, yet thoroughly nonmystical and mathematically legitimate—can be seen as the
motive force behind some of the arguments and constructs in the
late dialogue Philebus. In interpreting the ancient testimony, my
reconstruction demonstrates that the mathematical meaning of
the late Platonic metaphysics was either not transmitted to, or
simply lost on, the successors of Plato and their critic Aristotle.
But where the philosophers strayed, the mathematicians found a
fruitful path: the conclusion to the work started by Theaetetus
and Plato finds a home of concision and elegance in the mathematics of Euclid’s Book X. A historian of ancient philosophy
may have to distinguish in future between the academics who
inherited Plato’s arguments, and the mathematicians who understood them.
�26
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Perhaps the best evidence for a revision, radical or not, in
Plato’s thought comes from Aristotle’s intellectual biography in
Metaphysics A. He there refers to a kaí flsteron, an “even
afterwards” in Plato’s career (987b1). The passage is explicit
that there was a before and an after in Plato’s thinking which
was not apparently defined by the death of Socrates. What is
more, the change was apparently of some considerable moment;
the whole force of the expression is in the kaí; Plato is said to
have accepted the premise of universal flux espoused by Cratylus
and the Heracliteans, even afterwards. The theory of sensation
we have discussed in the Theaetetus is an example of his new
approach to an old premise, an approach based on a new mathematics of measurement.
At one time during the geometry lesson in the Meno, Socrates
counsels the slave boy, who is trying to find the line from which a
square the double of a given square is generated, “if you do not care
to count it out, just point out what line it comes from (e£ m±
boúlei ¡rivmeîn, ¡llà deîxon ¡pò poía$, 84a).” This is the
vintage Socratic irony, a playful but possibly sinister half-telling:
there is in fact no straightforward way to count out such a line with
the same unit measures that count off the side of the given square.
In a passage that means to inspire confidence in our ability to learn,
Socrates hints at a shadowy impediment that lurks, even as the slave
boy triumphs. This problem of incommensurability was the bane of
measurement science—metrhtik≠, that science which assigns
number to continuous magnitude—perhaps onwards from the time
of Pythagoras. Measurement prò$ ållhla, or mutual measurement, the reciprocal subtraction (¡nvufaíresi$) of two magnitudes, came to an end or limit (péra$) at the common measure of
these magnitudes; but if the magnitudes were incommensurable, the
process of subtracting the less from the greater, and then the
remainder from the less, would continue indefinitely (i.e., it was
unlimited, åpeiron). Such everyday magnitudes as the diagonals of
squares with countable sides were årrhton, inexpressible, or
DAVID
27
ålogon, irrational, in terms of those sides, an embarrassment to
any serious measurement science.
The in-betweenness of irrational lengths with respect to rational (countable) ones—in the Meno, Socrates takes pains to show by
a narrowing process that the required length, the side of an eightfoot square, lies somewhere in between two and three feet (83ce)—may have been the clue to a new approach. Plato’s Stranger
proposes a new branch of measurement science in the Politicus
(283d ff.); alongside measurement prò$ ållhla, there is now to
be measurement prò$ t±n toû metríou génesin, measurement
toward the generation of the mean. I have suggested that
Theaetetus’ seemingly humble classification of roots (Theaetetus
147c ff.) was the ultimate inspiration for this formulation; his novel
use of the mean proportional allows number and magnitude (the
phenomena of arithmetic and geometry) to be subsumed successfully under a revitalised and heuristic measurement science.
“’Squaring’ is the finding of the mean (› tetragwnismò$
mésh$ eflresi$, De Anima 413a20),” and he who defines it this
way, says Aristotle, is showing the cause of the fact in his definition.
To square a given rectangle, one has to find the mean proportional
between the lengths of its sides. Theaetetus distinguishes between
two kinds of length as sides of squares: a mêko$ is the length of a
side of a square number (4, 9, 16, etc.), the mean proportional (or
geometric mean) between the unit and a square number; a dúnami$ is the side of a square equal to a rectangular number (2, 3, 5, 6,
etc.)—i.e., the geometric mean between the unit and a rectangular
number—which is incommensurable with the unit in length
(m≠kei) but commensurable with it in square (dunámei).
Taken by itself, this classification is hardly more than a new
way of naming the phenomena of measurement science. Even at
this stage, however, the roots of non-square numbers, formerly
irrational and intractable, have become more expressible (@htá);
they are at least commensurable in square. A third category can
now be envisioned—incommensurability in length and in square—
so that where we had a polar division of opposites (rational-irra-
�28
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tional), now we have an enumeration of the phenomena: rational,
expressible, irrational.
But the true mathematical utility of this re-classification lies in
the lucid quality of the geometric mean. We recall that for any interval, this mean can be approximated in length by interpolating successive pairs of arithmetic and harmonic means within the given
extremes. Since in a rational interval, like that between the unit and
a non-square number, the interpolated means are also rational, and
since they define an evanescent sequence of rational intervals
around the same geometric mean, the incommensurable roots of
non-square numbers can now be systematically approximated with
numbers of their own. Each of these lengths, which we nowadays
call √2, √3, √5, etc., is approximated as a geometric mean by one
or more series, each unique and infinite, of arithmetic and harmonic means, which give better and better rational over- and under-estimates (respectively) of each incommensurable length. Though the
geometric mean is never reached, each successive pair of interpolations reduces the interval containing it by more than half, so that
each of the approximating extremes approaches closer than any
given difference to the mean (by Euclid’s X.1). Hence the process is
unlimited in its degree of accuracy.
The uniqueness of each of these “dyadic series,” corresponding
to each of the incommensurable roots, is the key to their achievement. Numbers may now be introduced, in a mathematically useful
and rigorous way, to describe the lengths of these roots.
Measurement science can thereby fulfil its mission, once paralysed
in these cases, to number the greater and the less. Irrational roots
are no longer vaguely “in between”: each dyad of interpolated
means defines all rational lengths, whole or fractional, than which
a particular incommensurable root is greater, and all than which it
is less. Since the “dyadic interval” can be made to shrink indefinitely, these incommensurable lengths have been uniquely measured in
terms of a given unit, as uniquely as any commensurable length.
A rational length is measured by one number, a “one many,” a
single collection of so- and so-many units (and fractional parts).
DAVID
29
These lengths are therefore measured both absolutely and relatively in terms of the unit length; one can answer the question, “How
many is it?” with respect to them. An irrational but expressible
length, on the other hand, is measured by a series of pairs of numbers, a unique but “unlimited” or “indeterminate” dyad (¡óristo$
dúa$). Such lengths are only relatively measured in terms of the
unit; for them, one cannot answer the question “How many is it?”
with a definite number, but one can always answer the question, “Is
it greater or less than this many?” There are now two ways in
which number can be applied to continuous magnitude—with a
normal ¡rivmó$ measured by the unit, or an indeterminate dyad
of such ¡rivmoí—so that both the diagonal and the side of a
square can be “counted off ” in terms of the same unit length.
The original significance of the unit and the indeterminate
dyad can now be recognised in the context of the new branch of
measurement science: the former, already a principle and product
of the existing branch, measurement prò$ ållhla—for the unit
is the measure of all commensurable magnitudes, and the ultimate
result of the reciprocal subtraction of commensurable quantities—
is a measure of all rational means (including the roots of square
numbers). The latter is a way of measuring all the expressible geometric means (the roots of rectangular numbers); it is a principle
and product unique to the new branch, measurement toward the
generation of the mean, for paired interpolation represents a way
to “generate” an expressible geometric mean numerically, and the
resulting indeterminate dyad of greater and lesser values is a precise
and exhaustive way to locate an expressible length within the scale
of the rational continuum. The unit and the indeterminate dyad,
the respective measures of rational and expressible means, are
therefore rightly conceived as the two proper principles of that science which approaches measurement through the construction of
means.
*
*
*
*
*
*
�30
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
In the Philebus (23c ff.), Socrates proposes a four-part division
of all beings. The first two segments cover the limited and the
unlimited, the once all-embracing Pythagorean pair of opposites.
The third division encompasses those beings produced by the mixture of the polar principles; this mixed category represents the distinctive late Platonic innovation in ontological thinking, outlined
also in the Sophist (see 252e). A fourth division is enumerated to
cover the cause of the mixing in the category of mixed beings.
At first glance, the mathematical subtext of this classification seems fairly straightforward. The unlimited stands for continuous magnitude, that which admits of being greater or less
(24e); the limited stands for number and measure (25a-b). The
mixed class stands, as could be expected, for continuous phenomena that admit of measurement or a scale: Socrates mentions music, weather, the seasons, and “all beautiful things
(Øsa kalà pánta, 26a-b).” The demiurge of the Timaeus,
who constructs a cosmic musical scale out of elements he has
mixed (35b ff.), could be seen as a mythical archetype of the
fourth kind of being, the cause of mixing. The mixer is also a
measurer.
Certain peculiarities in Plato’s presentation suggest, however,
that it is motivated by the developments in ancient measurement
theory that I have described. First of all, the distinction made
between the limited and the unlimited is virtually analytic. This
would not be necessary for a distinction between number and magnitude, because of the phenomenon of commensurability. But the
class of the more and the less, the pair which characterises the
unlimited, is said to disallow the existence of definite quantity; if it
were to allow quantity (posón) and the mean (tò métrion) to be
generated in the seat of its domain (‰drˆ ™ggenésvai), the moreand-less themselves (a dual subject in Plato’s Greek) would be made
to wander from the place where they properly exist (24c-d). The
class of the unlimited therefore stands for the greater-and-less qua
greater and less, those magnitudes which refuse numerical measurement of any kind, like the radically incommensurable lengths
DAVID
31
(commensurable neither in length nor in square). The class of the
limited, on the other hand, is said to cover only those things which
admit of everything opposite to the more-and-less (toútwn dè tà
™nantía pánta decómena):
prôton mèn tò ªson kaì £sóthta, metà dè tò
ªson tò diplásion kaì pân Øtiper ∂n prò$
¡rivmòn ¡rivmò$ ˚ métron ˜ prò$ métron...
(25a-b)
first the equal and equality, and after the equal the double and everything whatever which is a number in relation to a number or a measure to a measure.
The limited is therefore the class of commensurable magnitude.
Is the distinction between limited and unlimited then a descriptive
one based on that between number and magnitude, or really an analytic one between two kinds of magnitude, the commensurable and
the incommensurable?
The mixed class is also described as the class (£déa) of the equal
and the double (25d); this means it must be meant to include within it the whole class of the limited or commensurable. One could
have expected this if it corresponds to a class of scalable magnitudes. But Socrates goes on to add this curious category to its
domain:
...kaì ›pósh paúei prò$ ållhla t¡nantía
diafórw$ ®conta, súmmetra dè kaì súmfwna
™nveîsa ¡rivmòn ¡pergázetai (25d-e)
also so much of a class as stops things which are opposites, differently disposed to one another, and fashions
them into things commensurable and harmonious by
putting in number.
�32
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
This function appears to be unique to the mixed kind of being.
Since only incommensurable things can be made commensurable,
the unlimited did indeed signify the incommensurable, as was surmised; and the class mixed from the limited and the unlimited
appears to include a new species not found in either apart, which
makes incommensurable magnitudes commensurable by “putting
in” or “inserting” (™ntívhmi) number. With somewhat uncharacteristic acuity, Protarchus understands Socrates to mean that certain constructions (or “generations,” genései$) follow from the
mixing of the Pythagorean opposites (25e). (This interchange
seems to be a single Platonic exposition split between two speakers. The author better remembers his dramatic premises when,
within less than a Stephanus page, he has Protarchus suddenly
express his unsureness about what Socrates could have meant by
the members of the third class.)
The two ways of measuring magnitude in terms of a single unit
length, by means of a number or an indeterminate dyad of numbers,
correspond to the two classes which make up Socrates’ third category. In particular, the second way of measuring corresponds to that
construction described above which is unique to the mixed category. Both take up magnitudes that were formerly irreconcilable, subsumed by an opposition of greater to less—i.e., incommensurables
belonging to the category of the unlimited—and make them concordant and commensurable by “inserting number.” But neither of
them does this in such a way as thereby to reduce these magnitudes
to the class of the limited. Rather, certain lengths turn up in the
measurement of magnitude, incommensurable as such but commensurable in square, that call forth a peculiar application of number, one which inserts greater and lesser values in such a way that
they become more and more equal. This use of numbers comes to
light only in measurement science, and hence only in the mixed category of beings; it does not suggest itself in the operations of pure
arithmetic, the science of the class of the limited (governing numerable, discrete quanta and their formal equivalents, like commensurable lengths). An indeterminate dyad is a numerical description of
DAVID
33
a peculiar kind of length, neither irrational nor rational, but belonging to a third analytic class called “expressible.”
The mathematical subtext of Socrates’ proposal therefore runs
as follows: the distinction between unlimited, limited, and mixed
is, after all, a descriptive one based on that between magnitude,
number, and measured magnitude. But when Socrates attempts to
bring unity to each category, drawing together into one (e£$ ‰n,
25a, 25d, etc.) the beings subsumed by each, he employs a threepart analytic distinction that applies properly to magnitude alone.
That is to say, he brings unity to each of the three realms—number, magnitude, and measured magnitude—by describing each of
them in terms of the particular kind of length, the particular kind
of one-dimensional magnitude, which uniquely characterises it.
Hence the class of the unlimited is not just the class of the greaterand-less, but the class which positively rejects numerical description, like that of the radically incommensurable lengths. (The analogy is strict, for recall that this class is said to reject from its own
rightful seat both definite quantity (posón) and the mean (tò
métrion); on my reconstruction, this means it rejects the only two
ways of counting lengths, either with a single number, or with an
indeterminate dyad of numbers that approximate a geometric
mean.) The class of the limited, likewise, is not just the class of
numerable things, things which can be expressed as ratios of a
number to a number, but also the class of certain kinds of magnitude, those which can be expressed as ratios of a measure to a
measure, for commensurable lengths share all the properties of
numbers. Hence the distinction between magnitude and number
(unlimited and limited) can be reduced to a distinction between
two kinds of line. And finally, the mixed class, or the class of the
scale, though it includes within it the class of the limited, comes to
be characterised by a use of numbers and a kind of magnitude
which are each unique to it. These are the indeterminate dyad and
the lengths which it measures, once incommensurable but now
made “expressible” by the insertion of number. The expressible
�34
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
roots form a third analytic possibility within the field of onedimensional extension, alongside rational and irrational lines.
The reductionist spirit of Socrates’ analysis is in the best traditions of ancient mathematics. To reduce one problem to another is
of course heuristic of a solution, but the process can also be useful
in definitions and classifications. An example has been given in
Aristotle’s reduction of the problem of squaring to that of finding
a mean proportional line. One effect of Euclid’s proposition II.14,
which contains a solution to Aristotle’s reduced problem, is in turn
to reduce a comparison in magnitude between any rectilinear
figures to a comparison between squares, and hence to a comparison in one dimension, between square roots. A later and particularly virtuosic example is to be found in Apollonius’ use of the
three kinds of application of area upon lines, the parabolic, hyperbolic, and elliptic, to both name and define the three kinds of conic
section. In Plato’s case, the distinctions between his ontological
realms of the unlimited, limited, and mixed—two of which, as
opposites, had had a long-standing currency in metaphysical thinking—have been reduced to the distinctions between the three kinds
of line studied in the new measurement science: irrational lines
that are incommensurable both in length and in square; rational
lines that are commensurable both in length and in square; and the
expressible lines that are incommensurable in length, but commensurable in square.
This analysis is also in the spirit of the “enumerative” method
Socrates had earlier set out (16c-17a). One is to seek out the form
(£déa) which lends unity to a field of phenomena, and then seek out
those things measured by this hypothetical unit-form (i.e., those
phenomena which are “numbers” if the original form is taken as a
unit). The method intends to be self-correcting, for one is enjoined
in turn to analyse the original unit (tò kat ¡rcà$ ‰n, 16d) in
the same way that one has analysed the enumerated phenomena, to
see “how many” it might actually be. A converse procedure is equally espoused in the case of a science like grammar (18a-d): when the
datum seems unlimited or continuous, as does the phenomenon of
DAVID
35
human vocalisation, one is first to discover the numbers into which
it naturally divides, which govern pluralities such as those marked
out by the distinction between vowels and consonants, before one
proceeds to analyse these further into their units. There may be an
analogy here with modern analyses in terms of “sets,” which also
presume that things need to be sorted before they can be counted
or related. Euclid’s definition of ratio (V requires a relation of
.3)
kind between the compared terms. Even the infinite field of number
itself is nowadays divided in such a way that unitary types may be
distinguished (“Reals” over “Rationals” and “Irrationals”) while
individual members remain both infinite and infinitely instantiatable. An “enumerative theory of forms” would seem to reflect the
ontological and epistemological implications of the interdependence of sorting, on the one hand, and counting or measuring on the
other. The new Socratic method is developed as an explicit reaction
to the Parmenidean or Pythagorean type of thinker—but also, perhaps, to the early Plato—who analyses everything in terms of
opposed principles like the one and the many or the limited and the
unlimited, and fails to articulate the crucial phenomena that are
ordered, like numbers, in between such opposites. Hasty and simplistic analysis in terms of opposites is said to characterise arguments that are made eristically, while the enumerative method, the
method that discovers the numbers of things and their ordered relations, characterises the truly dialectical approach (17a).
Socrates had earlier made it clear (14d-15c) that the familiar
paradoxes of the one and the many were no longer his concern.
Any lazy riddler could prove that an individual like Protarchus, or
a thing made up of parts, was at the same time one and many. It
was the possibility of formal unity, in the face of the sensible births
and deaths of numberless individuals, the unity that is asserted of
things in discourse—whether of “man” or of “ox” or of the beautiful or the good—that was of vital philosophical interest. Did any
such units exist? How might they persist as individuals? And how
is it that they partake of the infinite multiplicity of things that
come into being? The genuineness of these perplexities calls forth
�36
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
his enumerative approach, a philosophical pathway that Socrates
says he had ever loved, but which had often deserted him in the
past (16b). The method is hard, but the results can apparently be
astonishing; all the achievements of the arts (técnai) are said to
have been discovered on this road (16c).
The implications of this method, shot through as it is with the
influence of the burgeoning measurement science, are staggering for
the “classical” Plato. Consider that we are here hypothesizing the
existence of forms as measures, enumerating phenomena in terms
of a posited unit-form, and then examining the posited unit, presumably against the phenomena themselves, to check for its possible plurality. The method itself is therefore mixed, in such a way as
to cancel Plato’s earlier formulations. Neither is this the unhypothetical reasoning from forms to forms, whatever that may have
meant in The Republic, nor is it a reasoning from unquestioned
hypotheses, in the manner of synthetic geometry. The once eternal
forms, the objects and immutable guarantors of knowledge, have
become provisional and heuristic.
God is said to have made all beings out of the one and the many
with the limited and the unlimited as innate possessions (16c). This
would tend to insure that all phenomena will be inherently numerable, and hence to guarantee their susceptibility to an enumerative
method; we shall find the unifying form, for it is in there (eflr≠sein
gàr ™noûsan, 16d). It is as though the pairs of opposed ontological elements, once the principles of the eristic disputations, have
now been “re-packaged” in the premises, made the condition for
the possibility of an enumerable reality. Inasmuch as it was
Aristotle’s understanding (Metaphysics M.4, 1078b12) that the theory of forms was invented in the first place to account for our sense
of dependable knowledge in the face of a Heraclitean flux—and
note that the premise of a reality in flux is still accepted at Philebus
43a—it seems that this theory has now been modified to make sense
not so much of our ability to know as of our ability to count. And
this change of purpose is sparked in turn by a renewed confidence
in this sovereign ability, in light of Theaetetus’ successful attack on
DAVID
37
the irrational. Number had at last been restored to some of her
Pythagorean glory, as a measure of the things that are, that they are,
and the things that are not, that they are not, and what is more, of
the things in between. The victory here was sweet indeed, for the
irrational square roots were recovered from the domain of flux and
incommensurability on the very terms by which this domain is distinguished. The indeterminate dyad is both a measurement and a
process of measurement: interpolating means between means
involves a measurer and a thing measured which are continually
changing, just as in the Heraclitean or Protagorean contentions; yet
this process of itself yields a unique measure of the fixed mean proportional between the interpolated means, and makes expressible
and commensurable the once irrational root of a rectangular number.
Indeed, this process of measuring or counting in an indeterminate dyad has proved to be revelatory of form, in the sense that it
creates the class of the expressible and defines the mixed category
of being. On the one hand, things need to be sorted before they can
be counted, and hence the knowledge of form has primacy over
measurement, and the ability to count depends upon the ability to
know. But it would seem in this case that the act of measurement
can itself be disclosive of form, and hence that knowing can depend
on counting. There appears therefore to be a dialectical relationship
between sorting and counting, which is reflected in a self-correcting,
enumerative theory of forms. This methodology of the Philebus can
be seen as reincorporating certain aspects of the Pythagorean, in the
sense that once again, knowledge has become coordinated with
measurement, and to know something is in some sense to comprehend its number.
Confidence in the grounds of an enumerative approach to the
sensible world—a confidence that may once have deserted Socrates
in the face of an irrational diameter, leading him, with Meno’s
honest slave, to the abyss of irony—can allow that significant guarantees of veracity will come from the method itself. There are, for
example, different ways to “count” or measure a phenomenon,
�38
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
each of them legitimate, based on the premises and aims of the
investigator, as the several alternate divisions of the sophist and the
statesman make clear. One measure of the truth of a hypothesis,
that such-and-such a form is a genuine unit, must, under this
method, be the economy and scope of the enumeration it affords,
as a unit in fact. A criterion for a successful articulation, a guarantor that a dialectical enumeration corresponds to a real one in the
world, must therefore be the elegance of that articulation, in terms
of the economy of means and breadth of cover which problemsolving mathematicians have always striven for in the concrete
practice of their art.
Indeed, it is an informed sense of respect for developments and
concrete formulations in the arts that seems to move the older
Plato. In the spheres of grammar and music, for example, although
it appears that an abstract analysis in terms of opposites, in the manner of the sofoí, may to some extent be applied in the interpretation of phenomena, by itself such abstract analysis simply does not
make you much of a useful theorist (17b-c). An investigation into
the numbers and kinds of sounds, on the other hand, or an enumeration of the different scales and modes and the vagaries of
rhythm—these, it seems, can truly render you wiser than the common run, in music and in grammar.
Behind this sensitivity of Plato’s to the enumerative and the
concrete aspects of the arts, as against the approach through dogmatic first principles, may rest his experience of the dramatic
changes in the mathematics of his day. A distinction like that
between the rational and the irrational, which must have seemed as
basic to the science as that between odd and even numbers—an
eternal, immutable opposition, seemingly a part and principle of the
order of things—was made obsolete by the emergence into history
of a new formulation through the mind of a single, brilliant practitioner. Recall that Theaetetus’ reforms began very humbly on the
level of classification and definition: he makes the distinction
between square and non-square the basic one for number, beyond
the distinctions between, say, odd and even or prime and compos-
DAVID
39
ite. But of itself this suggests a new way to approach the measurement of lengths, as geometric means, and this further yields, or
reveals, a third, formally distinct category of magnitude called
expressible. Experiencing this revolutionary development, as witness or participant, must lead a thinker away from a view of tà
mavhmatiká as eternal, innate verities that can be investigated and
learned as though by recollection, towards a view of mathematics
that must acknowledge the importance and ingenuity of the problem-solver in situ, together with the power of classifications, definitions and measurements to reveal, or to obscure, the fundamental
nature of their objects. As the traditional theory of forms and the
doctrine of mávhsi$ ¡námnhsi$ can be seen as responding to the
ontology and epistemology of the earlier geometry, so can a selfcorrecting, enumerative theory of forms be seen as a response to the
ontological and epistemological implications of the new mathematics and a dynamic measurement science.
Insofar as other arts aspire to the mathematical, the new philosophical outlook must also apply to them; although, to be fair, the
provisional, enumerative approach would have long since guided
the formulations of practitioners in music and grammar, without a
felt need for a mathematical paradigm or a philosopher’s blessing.
Perhaps one should credit Plato only with waking up to the new
realities of science and art around him, much in the spirit of later
revolutions in philosophy. One need not qualify, however, one’s
estimate of the implications of this change of view for Plato’s political thought; they are as great as the differences between the
Republic and the Laws. In this vein, while Plato’s guardians had
learnt their lessons and then interpreted the world, so that nature
and politics alike would have been for them a kind of applied mathematics, Plato’s statesman is of an altogether different mould of
mathematician. He is a problem solver, in amongst it like a navigator or a physician, who must be able to adapt his laws to suit changing conditions, or improve upon his formulations to serve the present (see Politicus 295c ff., 300c). It is of course notorious that the
guardians’ inability to solve a problem—the numbering of love, and
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
40
its irrational quantities—leads inexorably to the degeneration of
their regime.
*
*
*
*
*
*
In Metaphysics N, Aristotle introduces his redaction and criticism of the Platonist (or Academic) metaphysics with this statement:
“All thinkers make the principles opposites (pánte$ dè poioûsi
tà$ ¡rcà$ ™nantía$, 1087a30).” There appear to have been
various schools of thought among Academic ontologists, all of
whom posited the unit as a first principle or “element,” but each of
whom disagreed as to the nature of the opposite principle, whether
it was the “greater-and-less” or the “unequal” or “plurality”.
Aristotle makes short shrift of all these formulations, as they treat
affections and attributes and relative terms as substances (1088a16).
In N.2, he mentions a group who posit the indeterminate dyad as
the opposed element, as a way of getting around some difficulties in
the other versions; but it is still a relative principle, and in addition,
all these formulations fall to Aristotle’s argument that eternal things
simply cannot be composed of elements (1088b28-35).
Aristotle then feels, before he adumbrates his own approach to
ontology, that he must explain why these thinkers ever came up
with formulations so narrow and forced, constrained as they are by
the dogma of opposed principles (1088b35 ff.). His answer is that
they had framed the problem of ontological multiplicity in an oldfashioned way (¡rcaikô$, 1089a1-2), for they were still arguing
in response to certain paradoxes of Parmenides. The implications of
this reconstruction of recent intellectual history are decisive both
for our sense of Aristotle’s access to Plato, and for our knowledge
of Academic thought and its relation to Plato. All the Academics,
and thus Plato as well, are said to reason about existence in terms
of an opposed pair of first principles—always the unit and something else; they do this under the direct influence of Parmenides,
perhaps as part of a tradition of arguing against certain eristic dogmas of his, such as the one which Aristotle quotes:
DAVID
41
o∞ gàr m≠pote toûto dam˜, e–nai m± ™ónta
For this may never be enforced, that things which are
not, are.
These thinkers are said to have felt that the possibility of multiplicity in the world would be threatened unless Parmenides were
refuted, and some other thing than unity or being were allowed to
exist. This was the origin of the “relative” principles that stood
opposite the unit. The unit and the indeterminate dyad, on this
scheme of Aristotle’s, are but one alternative among several pairs of
first principles proposed by different Academic philosophers.
The first thing to note is that the Philebus itself is Plato’s direct
and unambiguous criticism of the ontological reasoning based on
two opposed principles, in favour of a technical, empirical, enumerative approach. From the perspective of philosophical method, the
dialogue can hardly be said to have any other point. Plato conceived
of his enumerative method as a more illuminating and more useful
way of articulating phenomena, which comes to yield significant
new categories in the analysis of being (e.g., the mixed one and the
cause of mixing). No further clue seems to be necessary for the conclusion: Aristotle, somehow or another, has entirely missed the
point of Plato’s late formulations, by classing them with the type
that Plato himself characterises as eristic rather than dialectical, and
from which he most particularly wants to distinguish his own.
The next point, however, is that there must actually have been
a vigorous tradition of thought which both preceded Plato and
outlasted him in his own Academy, characterised by the use of
opposites as first principles. To believe so much is the only way to
attach any seriousness to Aristotle’s redaction. This tradition originates with Parmenides, and must once have included Plato in its
ranks, again if one is to pay any respect to Aristotle’s judgement.
But Plato came to argue against such thinkers not only in the
Philebus, but also in the Sophist, where they are called “the friends
of the forms (o‹ tôn e£dôn fíloi, 248a).” These were the lat-
�42
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ter-day champions of eternal, immutable, unmixing forms, the
kind of weary theoretical construct that is often now taught as
Platonism. When the differences seem so clear, the question must
become: How could Plato’s new “mixed” ontology have come to
be confused with the old-fashioned approach through polar principles?
Recall that on my reading of the Philebus, there are for Plato
three ontological realms apart from the agent of cause. The first is
the realm of the limit, the realm of arithmetic, whose principle is
the unit. The second is the realm of the unlimited; its principle,
analytically opposed to the unit, is the dual greater-and-less, the
principle of irrational flux. The third realm is that of the mixed
beings, which I have interpreted as the realm of measurable things.
Its principles are two, and reflect the two ways that magnitudes
may be numbered or made commensurable, absolutely in terms of
the unit or relatively (but uniquely) by an indeterminate dyad. The
thing to note is that the unit appears as a principle twice in this
scheme, opposed in two different ways to two different things. The
distinction between the unit and the greater-and-less is strictly analytic, and belongs squarely in the Parmenidean tradition; whereas
the distinction between the unit and the indeterminate dyad is
merely descriptive, serving to recognise ways of applying numbers
inside the sphere of measurement that happen not to arise in arithmetic. The unit and the dyad are therefore not opposites; they are
simply different.
If a thinker in the Parmenidean tradition, or a historian of the
Parmenidean tradition, were to interpret Plato’s scheme in light of
their own practices, or to force it into a Parmenidean mould to flatter a historical premise, the conflation of the two distinctions would
be an inevitable result. If the Philebus could not be consulted—if it
were ågrafo$ in the sense “unpublished”—no recourse could be
had to the original reasoning; but even if there were such recourse,
Plato’s three realms of number, magnitude, and measure, and the
important differences between the distinctions unit/greater-and-less
and unit/indeterminate dyad, could only be understood in light of
DAVID
43
an underlying mathematical paradigm, as I have argued. Such a
thinker or such a historian would not be likely to know or to care
about the analytic possibilities in one dimension. (This is as much as
to say, he would not know what was meant by the indeterminate
dyad.) He will look for the polar principles in any ontological
scheme; at best he will see that the indeterminate dyad must connote something different from the greater-and-less, as the principle
chosen to stand opposite the unit. But he will never envision a
scheme that encompasses both oppositions.
The question next to ask is whether it was his Academic
sources, or whether it was Aristotle himself who did not understand
the mathematical meaning of the indeterminate dyad. There is
intriguing evidence in Metaphysics M and N for the latter interpretation. It would seem that his sources were in the dark about this
too; but whatever one concludes about the Academy, there is evidence that Aristotle had Plato’s accounts at hand either to quote or
to paraphrase, and that he could not make sense of them.
In N.1 (1087b7 ff.), Aristotle mentions a group of thinkers who
attempt to generate the numbers, o‹ ¡rivmoí, from the “unequal
dyad of the great and small,” taken as a material principle in relation to the formal “one,” and someone else who would generate
them from the principle of plurality. (He probably intends, respectively, the followers of Plato and Speusippus.) The generation of
numbers does not seem to have been a concern of Plato’s, however; the “problem” of multiplicity, or of how things can be both one
and many, which when posed by Parmenides might have led his successors to theorise in the abstract about the generating of numbers,
seems to be regarded in the Philebus (14c-15a, 16c-17a) as merely
a staple of the eristic paradoxes, now subsumed within the premises of Socrates’ concrete enumerative approach. Which is to say, it
appears that Plato is no longer so interested in number theory as he
is in simply counting. I am therefore inclined to think that neither
the above-mentioned group nor the ‘someone else’ represents
Plato’s line of argument, or Plato’s understanding of the unequal
dyad. Aristotle bears this out by going on immediately to mention
�44
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
an individual who speaks of the one and the unequal dyad as ontological elements (1087b9), thereby distinguishing him from the
group who had used them (afterwards, I presume) as formal and
material elements in the generation of numbers. Aristotle’s complaint about this individual is that he does not make the distinction
that the unequal dyad of great and small is one thing in formula
(lóg¨), but not in number (¡rivmõ).
Why would not Plato have made this distinction? The unequal
dyad is not one thing in formula alone: the successive pairs of interpolated numbers relate uniquely to one object as well, the side of
the square that is their single geometric mean. Further, since it consists of successively more equal sides of a single rectangular number,
the dyad can quite emphatically and strikingly be said to be of one
number, with a rationale that Aristotle might have appreciated if he
had been more familiar with the construction.
On this model of progressively “equalised” rectangular numbers, we have a transparent motivation for the original formulation
of terms like “unequal,” “indeterminate dyad,” “greater-and-lesser,” and “exceeding and exceeded,” which find their way into the
theories of Plato’s followers. In addition—and this point would
seem to be decisive for the interpretation—we should expect to
find them opposed in this context to a concept of the unit which is
associated with the square or “equal”. On no other grounds but
those of the new measurement science, as I have described them
here, would such an association be expected. Sure enough, the unit
in these theories is described as the equal (1087b5, 1092b1), in
such a way as to mystify not only Aristotle but also modern interpreters of these passages.
Neither Aristotle nor his Academic sources seem to connect
these various expressions with geometrical representations of number; the theories on the generation of numbers betray no influence
of Theaetetus’ square/oblong distinction, nor of the geometrical
interpretation of number that is settled convention by the time of
Euclid. The Academics seem to have posited “ideal” numbers which
were generated individually in succession (two, three, four, as
DAVID
45
Aristotle says in M.7 1081a23, and so without distinction as to
square or oblong) from the unit and the indeterminate dyad.
Aristotle takes some pains to make sense of this theory: if the units
(monads) of ideal numbers are all the same and addible, then they
are not ideal at all, but normal mathematical numbers (cf.
1081a19); but if the monads of each ideal number are distinct and
inaddible, they must be generated before each of their respective
numbers can be generated, as a point of logic (1081a26 ff.). This is
true no matter how these monads are generated; but Aristotle once
more quotes “he who first said it” (› prôto$ e£pµn, 1081a24)—
again distinguishing him from those who later used such phrases as
the “unequal dyad”—to allude to a possible mechanism for this generation of inaddible monads (¡súmblhtoi monáde$): they arise
out of unequals, once these are equalised (™x ¡níswn (£sasvéntwn gàr ™génonto)).
To begin with, Aristotle cannot rightly make attribution to
anyone of a theory on the generation of inaddible monads. As he
says, no one actually spoke that way (1081a36). Aristotle, perhaps
himself in reaction against the eristic movement, constructs these
arguments to save his opponents from the obvious fallacy of ideal
numbers composed of normal, identical, addible monads; yet the
alternative, unstated by them, but which he says follows reasonably from their own premises, turns out to be impossible as well,
if truth be told (1081b1). There is therefore no reason to suppose
that Plato thought or said that the generation of inaddible monads, or any monads, was connected with his notion of the unequal.
On the contrary; Plato seems to have anticipated Aristotle’s notion
of the unit as a measure, both in the intuitions of the enumerative
method and in the specifically mathematical context. At 57d-e, the
distinction is made in the Philebus between the units of the arithmetic of the many, which change as different things are counted,
and those of the arithmetic of the philosophisers, which are always
identical. It would of course have been an easy (but pointless) solution to the problem of the irrational to say that incommensurables
are simply measured by different unit lengths than commensurables.
�46
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
The enumeration of Theaetetus and Plato, on the other hand, is
predicated on the assumption of identical units. While some lengths
still remain incommensurable on these terms, all the formerly irrational square roots become expressible through an indeterminate
dyad, and the achievement of this articulation would be lost without the assumption.
What can be attributed to Plato, however, is that his notion of
the unequal involved a process of equalizing it. In neither place in
M where Aristotle mentions this idea (as above, and at 1083b24)
can he make anything of it, nor does it seem to have any intuitive
connection to the Academic number-generation theories he covers
there. The only conclusion, I suggest, is that Aristotle refers to this
conception of the unequal merely because he knows it to have been
true of Plato’s thought. The “Platonists” speak of the unequal as a
generative principle, Aristotle might have reasoned, and who knows
what they mean, as to how it generates; Plato himself also spoke of
the unequal, and the only action he attributed to it was “being
equalized”; perhaps this was somehow the “generating action,” as
obscure as that seems; one ought therefore to mention what the old
man said, in fairness to them. In N, Aristotle for the first time mentions a number-generation theory which did, perhaps, try to interpret the process; it first declares that there is no generation of odd
numbers at all, and that the even numbers are generated out of the
great and small when these are equalised. Aristotle’s criticism of the
logic of this account verges on the sarcastic: faneròn Øti o∞ toû
vewrêsai ‰neken poioûsi t±n génesin tôn ¡rivmôn.
(“Clearly, it is not on account of philosophical theorizing that they
produce their generation of the numbers.” 1091a29) Neither
Aristotle, for whom the notion seemed fatuously self-contradictory,
nor these latter theorists, for whom it was received dogma, could
have known the original mathematical context, for neither could
interpret or properly apply the notion that the unequal as an elemental principle involved a process of being equalized. We can now
restore the context, in the process of “equalizing” an unequal,
oblong number with an indeterminate dyad of more and more
DAVID
47
equal rational factors. (It is particularly striking that these latter
Academics seemed to know that the notion “unequal-when-it-isequalized” served in such a way as to divide all numbers, but they
tried, with dismal consequence, to apply it to the familiar, venerable distinction between odd and even; they must have been unaware
of the division of numbers by square and oblong, which supplanted
the earlier distinction in the course of Theaetetus’ study of irrational roots, and where alone the notion of the “equalized unequal”
has any use or coherence.)
“Those who say the unequal is some one thing, making the
indeterminate dyad from great and small, say things that are far
indeed from being likely or possible,” in Aristotle’s view (M.1,
1088a15). He complains that to adopt such ideas is really to adopt
his lowly Category of the “relative” as a substantial, unitary first
principle. Something is great or small only in relation to something
else. Unlike the superior Categories of quality and quantity, which
have more substance because they involve absolute change, whether
by alteration or increase, there is no such change proper to the
Category of the relative. While a compared term may remain substantially the same, it becomes greater or less merely by quantitative
change in the other term. Aristotle is therefore at a loss as to why
such metaphysical honour should be paid to concepts that are
inherently relative.
Plato could have replied: “Consider the nature of measurement
toward the generation of the mean.” In this process, the relative
terms do not depend simply on each other, but both are related to
an unchanging third thing, a single geometric mean. Furthermore,
the pairs of relative terms are uniquely related to their proper mean,
the root of a particular oblong number. And because the greater and
lesser lengths approach closer than any given difference to the
unchanging length of the root, their status in relation to this length,
qua members of an infinite succession of approximating pairs, poses
a heady puzzle for any common-sense idea of their ontological difference from, or identity with, this single length. There is therefore
every reason to see the indeterminate dyad of great and small, a self-
�48
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
correcting binary approximation of a single geometric mean, as a
unitary and substantial thing in its proper mathematical context.
But if the context was lost, and one had access only to the words in
its name, then Aristotle’s objections might seem judicious.
That Aristotle knew about the geometry of means is clear
enough, but he must not have been familiar with the interpolation
of means in the peculiar configuration of the indeterminate dyad,
where means become extremes, which in turn beget means, which
then in turn become extremes, while each pair of harmonic and
arithmetic means serves as the extremes to the geometric mean in
the middle. The notion of relativity embodied in this configuration,
involving a process of equalising, and motion towards a fixed
object, is more subtle and peculiar than that involved in a simple
comparison, or even a static analysis expressed in terms of a mean
and extremes. I claim it is this peculiar conception of the relative
that Plato raised to the level of a principle, to stand in tandem with
the absolute measure connoted by the unit.
While the Academic metaphysicians may appear to have used
these very same principles, right down to the letter of their formulation, it is clear that neither they nor Aristotle grasped their proper function. They have nothing to do with accounting for multiplicity in the universe, or with the generation of numbers. They
have everything to do with the measurement of numbers. After
Theaetetus, numbers are figured as square or rectangular; they can
be compared not only in quantity, but in size, by the length of their
square roots, just as after Euclid’s II.14, any rectilinear figures can
be compared by the sides of their equivalent squares. While all
numbers have either absolutely or relatively measurable rootlengths, not all lengths have countable squares. This is one of the
odd new ways that arithmetic and geometry, number and magnitude, become interlinked after Theaetetus’ happy reformulation.
It is therefore in this context, the context of measurement, that
Plato is likely to have distinguished the absolute from the relative,
being-in-itself from relative being. Aristotle alludes to just such a
distinction, in a passage which once again exemplifies his peculiar
DAVID
49
mire: he wants to review the Academic theories on the generation
of multiplicity based on certain contrary principles, including principles first conceived by Plato, but conceived in a context where in
some cases they weren’t even contraries, and where they had had
nothing to do with generating either multiplicity or numbers; he
knows the language of Plato’s own articulation of these principles,
but doesn’t have the mathematics to interpret the words. In this
case, he may even foist his own innovations in usage back on to
Plato’s original phrases, just to make sense of them.
At 1089b16, Aristotle once again invokes “he who says these
things,” claiming this time that this person had also proved for himself (prosapef≠nato) that that which was potentially a “this” and
substance (tò dunámei tóde kaì o∞sía) was not “existent in
itself ” (πn kav afltó); it was the “relative” (tò pró$ ti). What
the expression “potentially a ’this’ and substance” may have meant
for Plato is a difficult thing to determine. In particular, Aristotle
seems to take dunámei, with obvious anachronism, in his own characteristic sense of “potentially”; he had just now used the word this
way when introducing part of his own familiar solution to ontological analysis, that we must hypothesize in each case what a thing is
potentially (¡nágkh mèn oun...flpoveînai tò dunámei πn
flkást¨, 1089b15-16). Perhaps Aristotle is here weaving his own
terminology into the Platonic materials? But his next comment is a
scholium, on Plato’s appropriation of the term “relative,” that it is
just as if he had said “quality” (¸sper e£ eªpe tò poión); and
there was never a scholium without a text.
So what could the Greek text “tò dunámei tóde kaì
o∞sía” have meant to Plato? Recall Knorr’s observation that
dúnami$ and dunámei mean “square” and “in square” throughout
Greek mathematical literature. (The only exception is the very passage in the Theaetetus [148a] where the eponymous hero applies
the term dúnami$, for the first time, to a square root.) Thus in
Plato’s context, the same words may well have signified “that which
has particularity and existence in square”—i.e., that which is countable (because it is commensurable) only in square (dunámei), like
�50
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
the expressible as against the rational lines. It is these very magnitudes which one could expect to find distinguished as relative in
their being, insofar as their being depends on their measure; the
rational lengths, on the other hand, have the self-subsistent being of
definite quantity, in length and in square, while the irrational lines,
which cannot be made commensurable in either length or square,
are captive to the realm of flux and non-being. If Plato equated
“that which has being” with “that which can be counted”—and his
enumerative method suggests a move in this direction—then it is
entirely and specifically appropriate that that which has being in
square be allowed only a relative existence. It has no autonomous
number, but only a relative count. Even the phrase pró$ ti may
have had a specific connotation for Plato, which is lost in the
anachronistic aura of the Categories; for such beings are measured
by a process that is inherently pró$ ti, “towards something,” measurement toward the generation of the mean. Plato’s distinction
would have been between that which exists or is measured on its
own terms (tò πn kav afltó)—the equal, the square, and rational lengths—and that which exists or is measured toward something
else (tò πn pró$ ti), the unequal being equalized, the rectangle
approaching the square, and the indeterminate dyad approximating
the mean.
It seems clear that any such significance in these phrases could
never have been allowed to emerge through the schemata of
Aristotle’s redaction. He explains (1089b4 ff.) that in response to
the diversion caused by Parmenides, the philosophers posited the
relative and the unequal as the types of opposed principle which,
when mated with being and the unit, generated a manifold reality.
He points out, however, that neither of these posited principles is in
fact the contrary (™nantíon) or the negation (¡pófasi$) of being
and unity; each is rather another single nature among the things that
exist (mía fusi$ tôn øntwn). This is also the point of his critical scholium on Plato’s use of the phrase pró$ ti: the Category
“relative” is no more a legitimate candidate than the Category
“quality” for that contrary and negation of being and the unit which
DAVID
51
the Academics were supposed to be seeking; each is simply “some
one” of the beings (‰n ti tôn øntwn, 1089b20). He goes on to
complain that if Plato had meant to explain how things in general
are many, he shouldn’t have confined his investigation to things that
lie in the same Category (whether this be “substance” or “quality”
or “quantity,” let alone the insubstantial “relative”).
The sense of this reading ranges from the misguided to the wilfully obtuse. In the first instance, we cannot fault Plato for failing
either to prophesy or to apply the revolutionary insights into
ontology expressed in Aristotle’s theory of the Categories. Nor can
we fault him for not being interested any longer, as indeed he wasn’t, in the problem of how things are many. Still less can we fault
him for giving up the reasoning by opposites. He would of course
have agreed that his conception of the relative, in the configuration
of the indeterminate dyad, is in no sense the opposite of the unit
and its measure, but simply a different way of measuring, based
also on the unit, that applies to certain types of being (i.e., certain
two-dimensional numbers and one-dimensional magnitudes—
oblongs and their roots). But the full picture of Aristotle’s plight as
a redactor emerges when one throws in the fact that Plato’s complete formulation did in fact include a genuine opposition as well,
between the unit and the greater-and-less qua greater and less. One
then has a recipe for the peculiar quandary of Metaphysics M and
N towards Platonic thought, based in part on unwitting conflations, but in part also on flagrant, self-serving anachronisms, and
characterised by a haplessness in the face of Plato’s own expressions, when read in light of their borrowed use in the irrelevant
theories of the Academy.
A question remains: where did Aristotle get those “texts” of
Plato, which he seems to treat as quoted material? Although the distinction between absolute and relative being may be consistent with
the Philebus and with other ontological discussions in the later
Plato, the specific phrases which Aristotle comments on, such as tò
dunámei tóde kaì o∞sía, do not seem to occur in the dialogues.
Where, then, did Plato draw this mathematical distinction, and to
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
52
what did he apply it? Was it perhaps in a Lecture on The Good—a
lecture which seemed to promise moral philosophy, but delivered
mathematics—a lecture which nobody understood?
*
*
*
*
*
*
The mathematical development of ancient measurement science will prove much easier to trace than its philosophical obfuscation at the hands of Academics and Peripatetics. As forbidding
as the structure of Euclid’s Elements X seems to be, I believe its
logic is profoundly simple, following directly in the spirit of
Plato’s enumerative method, and upon Theaetetus’ geometrical
interpretation of number.
After Theaetetus’ first efforts had rendered all the square roots
countable, he next sought to extend his classificatory net even further into the uncharted regions of the irrational. He could use his
already successful methods as a paradigm: since exploring numbers
in terms of the means between them had yielded the class of
expressible lines, he was led to explore the possibility of means
between the expressible lengths themselves, and the possibility of
irrational means. While in general such means could not be “counted off,” since the expressible lengths, treated as extremes, had not
the fixed values necessary for a computation of means, the mean
lengths could still be constructed and named with respect to rational lengths; just as at the time of the Meno, the root length of the
double square could not as yet be counted, but it could be constructed within the unit square and was named “diameter” (or the
“through-measure”) by the professors (Meno 85b). Orders of irrationals could thus be defined in terms of means, though they could
not be made commensurable.
Just such an assignment of orders is credited to Theaetetus by
Pappus, in his commentary on Elements X, on the authority of
Eudemus’ history of mathematics (now lost):
...it was...Theaetetus...who divided the more generally
known irrational lines according to the different means,
DAVID
53
assigning the medial line to geometry, the binomial to
arithmetic, and the apotome to harmony, as is stated by
Eudemus, the Peripatetic.32
The passage does not suggest that Theaetetus invented the three
lines and their names, but only that he first saw the essential parallelism between the structure of their relations and those of the
familiar means. The medial simply is the geometric mean between
two expressible lengths. That is why it is called méso$, the mean
proportional; the name “medial” serves only to distinguish it in
English. The binomial is a sum of two expressible lengths, and so
can be associated with the arithmetic mean, which is half the sum
of two rational lengths; but the apotome is merely a difference of
expressible lengths, and the connection with the harmonic mean is
less obvious. This also comes clear, however, as one recalls the fundamental feature of pairs of arithmetic and harmonic means which
makes possible the measurement by an indeterminate dyad: if one
applies a rectangle contained by rational extremes to the length of
their arithmetic mean, the height of the new rectangle turns out to
be the length of their harmonic mean. Euclid’s X.112-14 illustrate
a significantly parallel property of binomials and apotomes: if one
were to apply the same rational rectangle to a length that was
known to be a binomial, the height would turn out to be an apotome; further, and curiously enough, the expressible terms of such
a binomial and an apotome would be commensurable with each
other, and in the same ratio. If Theaetetus was responsible for these
propositions, he might well have been led to view the binomial and
apotome as “irrational means” between rational extremes, or as
irrational factors of an oblong number, counterparts to the rational
arithmetic and harmonic means.
It is clear, however, that Euclid’s presentation is not designed as
a theory of means. The bulk of his 115 propositions in Book X are
concerned with enumerating and constructing twelve different
kinds of binomial and apotome, making with the medial thirteen
types of irrational line; the full list is given by Euclid after Prop.
�54
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
111, before the proofs that establish the analogy between the binomials and apotomes, and the arithmetic and harmonic means. The
rationale for this enumeration becomes more apparent if one considers David Fowler’s handy grouping of the propositions:
X1-18: general properties of expressible lines and rectangles,
X19-26: medial lines and rectangles,
X27-35: constructions underlying binomials and apotomes,
X36-41, 42-7, 48-53, 54-9, 60-5, 66-70, & 71-2:
blocks of propositions dealing with each of the six types
of additive irrational lines. They are described in X3641 and also, in a different geometrical configuration, in
the Second Definitions following X47,
X73-8, 79-84, 85-90, 91-6, 97-102, 103-7, & 108-10:
blocks of propositions, parallel to the previous, dealing
with each of the six types of subtractive irrational lines.
They are described in X73-8 and also, in a different
geometrical configuration, in the Third Definitions following X84,
X111-14: the relations between binomials and
apotomes,
X115: medials of medials...
As Fowler himself observes, the propositions seem to represent an
exploration of the “simplest operations of adding, subtracting, and
squaring pairs of expressibles.” Before Theaetetus classified them in
relation to the different rational means, the binomial and apotome
may have first been distinguished and defined as part of an investigation of the “arithmetic” of expressible lengths. An investigator
might have said, if we are to understand the expressibles the way we
understand numbers—and indeed, numbers are the very paradigms
of our understanding—then we must comprehend their arithmetic;
what might the manipulations of arithmetic look like when applied
DAVID
55
to expressible lines?
Whereas the prospect of such an investigation might have
daunted the most optimistic of researchers, with its seeming openendedness and unlimited number of possible cases, Euclid was
able, by manipulating squares and rectangles, to organize the
infinite additions and subtractions of expressible lengths into six
types each. Thus Euclid accomplished the first ever rigorous ordering of radically incommensurable lengths, as the sums and differences of expressible ones. One cannot measure these sums and differences as such, and so one cannot “count off ” the irrational lines
that are produced; but one can number their types, and enumerate
their orders.
While the fundamental early propositions of Book X are generally credited to Theaetetus, and the propositions about mean proportionals (“medials”) seem to suit his historical and mathematical
character, the enumeration of the binomials and apotomes must
belong to Euclid. Pappus says that Euclid, following Theaetetus,
“determined...many orders of the irrationals; and brought to light,
finally, whatever of finitude (or definiteness) is to be found in
them.” This should naturally refer to his ordering of possible binomials and apotomes, and the enumeration of six corresponding
types. Though they do not depend on the proofs involved in
Euclid’s enumeration, Theaetetus’ propositions, about the relations
between binomials and apotomes, are then placed by Euclid at the
end of Book X, so that they can be expressed in terms of that enumeration, and take on a new authority: each pair belongs to one of
six sets of ordered pairs of binomials and apotomes whose terms
turn out to be commensurable and in the same ratio; each pair consists of corresponding members of one of a finite number of possible combinations of additive and subtractive expressible lengths.
It is possible, then, to trace the genesis of Book X in this way:
Theaetetus first extended the insights of measurement toward the
generation of the mean by using the three means involved in that
science as heuristic paradigms with which to interpret irrational
magnitudes. Just as an expressible length is a geometric mean
�56
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
between rational extremes, a medial length is a mean proportional
between expressible extremes; and just as arithmetic and harmonic
means are pairs of commensurable rational factors of the rectangle
contained by the extremes of their interval, binomials and apotomes
are pairs of irrational factors of the same rectangle. In his investigation of binomials and apotomes, Euclid discovered their classification, and thereby produced an ordering of irrationals in terms of
possible types of sum and difference—an arithmetic of expressible
lines. This in turn advanced the classificatory scope of Theaetetus’
propositions on the relations between binomials and apotomes,
when they were placed after Euclid’s work, at the end of Book X.
While Theaetetus could likely have proved that a rational area
applied to a binomial produces an apotome as breadth, and that the
terms of these irrational factors are commensurable and in the same
ratio, Euclid could now add, as he does in the enunciations of
Propositions 112 and 113, that such a binomial and an apotome
belong to the same order.
David Fowler approaches the book from a very different angle,
as part of his reconstruction of the ancient mathematics of ¡nvufaíresi$. He proposes an anthyphairetic theory of ratio, where
ratios between quantities are described by counting the number of
mutual subtractions which can occur between them: one counts the
number of times the lesser subtracts from the greater, then the number of times the remainder can be taken away from the lesser, then
the remainder of that transaction from the former remainder, and
so on; the list of numbers thus produced gives a unique description
of the particular ratio. He finds evidence for the historical existence
of this approach in several quarters, including a direct allusion in
Aristotle’s Topics to a definition of same ratio as same antanairesis
; and he sees the peculiar implications of this ratio theory as providing the most economical of many proposed rationales for the
total sequence and layout of Euclid’s Book II. The most surprising
fact he uncovers is a remarkable periodicity that arises in the anthyphairetic description of ratios of the form √m:√n—that is, ratios of
expressible lines.
DAVID
57
The achievement of Fowler’s work is to have rediscovered, and
in some measure to have resurrected in our day, the other branch of
measurement science, measurement prò$ ållhla. The periodic
repetition of the terms in the otherwise infinite mutual subtraction
of expressible quantities would have been the great discovery of this
science; as Fowler observes:
Those ratios that can be now completely understood
and described in finite terms by the arithmoi include the
ratios of the sides of commensurable squares, that is the
ratios of expressible lines √m:√n...
Note how fitly this parallels the development I have
described in the science of measurement toward the generation
of the mean: those lengths which can now be uniquely measured
in terms of the ¡rivmoí include these same expressible lines,
the sides of commensurable squares.
As far as the rationale for Euclid’s Book X is concerned,
however, Fowler’s reconstruction of the mathematics of anthyphairesis shows only why the relations between expressible lines
would have seemed a thing worth investigating. We gain no
insight into the specific form of the book as we have it, into its
method and structure in the classification of the irrationals;
these are better explained as an integral outgrowth of the new
science proposed in Plato’s Politicus, the science of measurement
toward the generation of the mean. This is not just because
Theaetetus is said to have classified the irrationals in terms of the
different means. Consider that the entire investigative strategy
of Book X, including the work I have ascribed to Euclid, is to
manipulate squares and rectangles, a manipulation in two
dimensions, in such a way as to distinguish and to enumerate the
forms of the associated lines. This approach was born with the
science of measurement toward the mean, on one fateful day. As
he lies dying off-stage, the story is told of how the young
�58
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Theaetetus, Theodorus’ student, on the day of Socrates’ appearance in court, divided all numbers between the square and the
oblong, and distinguished two kinds of line as the sides of
squares equal to each kind of number. The “square side” of an
oblong number is the geometric mean between the sides of the
oblong. The names Theaetetus chose for these two lengths,
mêko$ and dúnami$, did not survive, for the implications of a
classification by sides of squares made the distinction itself obsolete: both kinds of length would now be called @htá, expressible. But the technique applied in his classification was to direct
the exploration of lines to its crowning achievement, in the enumerations of Euclid’s Book X.
We ought, however late, to acknowledge the dramatist who
saw the significance of such a day for history, saw it in a way that
must combine the personal and the universal, the historical and
the mathematical. Innovations in mathematics must have moved
that man in a way that made even innovation in religion seem a
distant charge, a memory of youthful import. We must come to
recognise the changes in this chronicler of the human argument,
as he took his bearings anew, and found new patterns, enumerative structures, emerging in a discourse that strains to keep
pace—paradigms of order no longer laid up in heaven, yet resonant, perhaps, with a piece of divinity. His myth of the globe’s
reversal (Politicus 268d-274e) encompasses a deteriorating
world, but also a return, through the numbering of its classes
and kinds, to the elegance of god’s tenure. Let him stand
absolved at last of the mystifications of his followers: Plato’s
own measures, his own mysteries, must finally furnish our count.
DAVID
59
2. Wilbur R. Knorr and Miles F. Burnyeat, “Methodology, Philology, and
Philosophy,” Isis, 1979, 70:565-70
3. Miles Burnyeat, “The Philosophical Sense of Theaetetus’ Mathematics,”
Isis, 1978, 69:489-513, on pg. 513, pg. 513
4. Knorr, Evolution, pg. 192
5. Ibid., pg. 192
6. Ibid., pg. 69 ff.
7. Ibid., pg. 96 (In full: “(a) The proofs are demonstrably valid. (b) The
treatment by special cases and the stopping at 17 are necessitated by the
methods of proof employed. (c) The proofs will be understood to apply to
an infinite number of cases. (d) No use may be made of the dichotomy of
square and oblong numbers in Theodorus’ studies, either in the demonstrations or in the choice of cases to be treated. (e) Theodorus’ proofs utilize the
special relations of the lines in the construction of the dynameis. The geometrical methods of construction are of the type characteristic of metrical
geometry as developed in Elements II and are closely associated with a certain early style of arithmetic theory. (f) But the arithmetic methods by which
Theaetetus could prove the two general theorems, on the incommensurability of lines associated with non-square and non-cubic integers, were not
available to Theodorus.”
8. Malcolm Brown, “Theaetetus: Knowledge as Continued Learning,”
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1969, 7:359-79, on pgs. 3678
9. Knorr, Evolution, pg. 158
10. This proof is given by Knorr, Evolution, pg. 184
11. Ibid., pg. 159
12. see Euclid’s Elements X Def. 3
NOTES:
1. Wilbur R. Knorr, Evolution of the Euclidean Elements
(Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1975), pgs. 65-9
13. see Plato’s Politicus, 278b-e
14. see Euclid, The Elements, 3 vols., Vol. 3, ed. Sir Thomas Heath
(Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1947), pg. 3
15. see Euclid II.14 and VI.13
�60
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
16. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 371 ff.
17. Proclus, In Platonis Timaeum Commentaria, 3 vols., Vol. 2, ed.
Ernst Diehl (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903-6), pgs. 173-4
18. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 371
19. see David H. Fowler, The Mathematics of Plato’s Academy
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pg. 14 ff.
20. see Plato’s Timaeus 36a for this usage
21. The reading of B and T; editors usually read to )to
22. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pgs. 376-7
23. Ibid., pg. 377
24. see Theaetetus, 185c
25. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 374
26. quoted in Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 373, note 38
27. Euclid, X.1
28. Brown, “Theaetetus,” pg. 379
29. Julia Annas, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Books M and N, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1976, pg. 195
30. Ibid.
31. Knorr, Evolution, pgs. 65-9
32. tr. W.Thomson and G.Junge, in Fowler, Mathematics, pg. 301
33. Fowler, Mathematics, pgs. 169-70
34. Ibid., pg. 192
35. tr. Thomson and Junge, in Fowler, Mathematics, pg. 301
36. Fowler, Mathematics, pg. 17 ff., and see Aristotle, Topics 158b
37. Ibid., pg. 192
38. see Ibid., pgs. 190-1
DAVID
61
�62
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
63
Moral Reform in Measure for
Measure
Laurence Berns
(St. John’s College, Annapolis)
To what extent are the principles of classical political philosophy and the American polity reconcilable? The Declaration of
Independence did not mean, Lincoln tells us, that all men are equal
in all respects. The Declaration, however, presupposes that the difference between man and man is never as great as the difference
between man and beast, on the one hand, and man and God, on the
other. This “equality” by superiority to beasts and inferiority to the
divine sets limits both to human servitude and to human sovereignty.1 These principles issue in the rule of prudence that just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed. This
equality, as Locke put it, “in respect of Jurisdiction or Dominion
one over another” is not incompatible with the classical principle of
fundamental inequalities in capacities to govern. As a matter of fact
the institution of free elections (the Declaration’s “Right to
Representation”) introducing a principle of merit into the system is
predicated on the existence of such inequalities of ability, and the
capacities of electors roughly to discern them. (This does not, of
course, mean that the judgment of the electors is always correct, but
that it is sufficiently deliberate and well-informed to avoid disasters
that would unhinge the very frame of government.)
The classical position on democracy has been put, I believe,
with great clarity by Thomas Aquinas quoting St. Augustine:
If the people have a sense of moderation and responsibility and are most careful guardians of the common
weal, it is their right to enact a law allowing such a people to choose their own magistrates for the government
Delivered at the Convention of the American Political Science Association,
September 1993, The Washington Hilton Hotel, Washington, D.C.
�64
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
of the commonwealth. But if, as time goes on, the same
people become so corrupt as to sell their votes and
entrust the government to scoundrels and criminals,
then the right of appointing their public officials is
rightly forfeit to such a people, and the choice devolves
to a few good men. [S.T., I-II, Q. 97, A. 1.]
I have no problem with this statement in principle, despite the
questionable practicality of its remedy for corruption. As Benjamin
Franklin put it, “If any form of government is capable of making a
nation happy, ours I think bids fair now for producing that effect.
But, after all, much depends on the people to be governed. We have
been guarding against an evil that old States are most liable to,
excess of power in the rulers; but our present danger seems to be
defect of obedience in the subjects. There is hope, however, from
the enlightened state of this age and country, we may guard effectually against that evil as well as the rest.” [Lett. to Ch. Carroll,
5/29/1789] What most threatens the required state of enlightenment today, it seems to me is not any paucity of economic resources
devoted to education, but rather the reigning generally accepted
opinions about what constitutes enlightenment. The AugustineThomas statement suggests, at the very least, that there is a natural
connection between the will to preserve free institutions and the
sense that those living in accordance with them are worthy of them.
How can a corrupt people be reformed? This, of course, is the
problem set for its protagonists by Shakespeare’s Measure for
Measure. Some distinctions between Duke Vincentio’s situation and
ours must be made. He has a single city and its environs to reform,
we have a huge and highly diversified nation. Our laws derive their
constitutional authority from the very people needing reform, his
do not. His polity is monarchical, ours is not. Our polity contains a
diversity of religious sects, his does not. Religious authority and
moral authority, if not united, form a well-functioning team in his
regime, in ours ... they do and they don’t. Obviously we are not
likely to find immediately applicable recipes from a study of
BERNS
65
Measure for Measure. We are obliged to put things in constitutional terms: “the abuse of the first Amendment”; the tendency of
lawyers and judges to ape intellectual fashions, sanctioning licentiousness with shallow-pate notions like freedom of expression, bargain-basement moral autonomy.2 We can, as teachers, try to change
the intellectual fashions. The only way I know how to do that is to
try to rise beyond the realm of intellectual fashion altogether, by
trying to understand the Duke’s problem as much as possible, as my
better, William Shakespeare, understood it.
Vienna, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, is ruled by a
Duke, who “above all other strifes contended especially to know
himself,... a gentleman of all temperance.” Like those two political defectives, Prospero and Socrates, he has no taste whatsoever
for the theatrical pomposity endemic to political life. His apolitical temperament has caused him wrongly (“t’was my fault”) to
allow Vienna’s strict and biting laws to become toothless and contemptible; licentiousness thrives, and “Liberty plucks Justice by
the nose.”
His keen sense of justice prevents him from punishing in his
own name evil deeds bred by his own permissiveness. But purification there must be. He appoints a Lord Angelo (soon to prove a
Fallen Angelo), a man of “stricture and firm abstinence”, who
“scarce confesses that his blood flows” to stand in for himself, that
is (unlike American executives) to “enforce or qualify the laws.” But
first something should be said about why someone like puritanical
Angelo was needed.
The Vienna presented at first in the play seems to consist primarily of nunneries, monasteries and whorehouses, with almost
nothing in between: the only family man presented is the absurd
comic figure Elbow; austere celibacy, on the one hand, and saucy
profligacy, on the other, again almost nothing in between. As sexuality is debased, celibacy, for some, gains in attractiveness.
Something seems to be radically wrong with the way most Viennese
think, feel and behave in regard to their sexuality. Immediately fol-
�66
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
lowing Angelo’s appointment the Duke pretends that affairs of state
require his hasty removal to foreign parts; Angelo is on his own.
Political scientists (Bloom and Jaffa) quite properly refer to
Machiavelli’s The Prince, chapter VII, as the locus classicus for the
Duke’s mode of procedure with Angelo.3 Cesare Borgia on taking
over Romagna found that because it had been very badly governed
it was full of robberies, quarrels and insolence. To reduce it to peace
and obedience he appointed a very cruel man, Remirro de Orco, as
his deputy with full powers. Remirro soon reduced it to peace and
unity. The reform being accomplished, in order to deflect the hatred
it had generated from himself Cesare had the cruel Remirro placed
one morning in the piazza at Cesena in two pieces, a piece of wood
and a bloody knife beside him. The ferocity of the spectacle left the
people both satisfied and stupified. Bacon speaks of this way of proceeding both in his Wisdom of the Ancients [III], and his Essays
[XIII], but both seem to have been published after this play was first
presented. One is tempted to go along with our scientific fashions
and play at being “more hard-nosed than Thou,” but the differences
between Shakespeare and Machiavelli at least deserve listing. The
Duke does not kill Angelo, though he had full warrant to do so;
unlike Cesare with Remirro, the Duke is not interested merely in
using Angelo, but also as with everyone else, including himself,
making him better, reforming him; above all, since he is not omniscient, he is interested in understanding Angelo: “Hence shall we see,
/If power change purpose, what our seemers be.” It is not simply
because he courts popularity, that he doesn’t institute the reform
himself, it is rather because he is not the right man for the job, and
it would not be, or at least not seem, just for him to do so. There is
another work of Machiavelli’s that bears close comparison with
Measure for Measure, that is Mandragola4; the Duke seems to combine characteristics of both Ligurio and Frate Timoteo, but here
again the differences should prove instructive.
The Duke does not leave Vienna, he goes underground in the
guise of a “holy friar” both to observe and invisibly to correct the
course of his reform. Angelo evidently goes to work immediately:
BERNS
67
the houses of prostitution are put down, and a young gentleman
named Claudio is sentenced to death for fornication; for the
woman he is engaged to marry (the marriage delayed by dowry
problems), Juliet, is big with child. Angelo rejects the urgings of his
second in command and his Provost that here the punishment is
way out of proportion to the crime. Claudio has a high-spirited sister, Isabella, who has entered the austere order of St. Clare -“When
you have vow’d, you must not speak with men /But in the presence
of the prioress; /Then, if you speak, you must not show your face;
/Or if you show your face, you must not speak”- as a novice. She
wishes for an even “more strict restraint.” We are, I suppose, to
imagine her quite beautiful; her moral beauty at least engages the
affections of the play’s two main protagonists. She is urged by the
dissolute gentleman Lucio to plead with Angelo for her brother’s
life. Despite her choosing to renounce family life, her’s is the only
powerful display of family feeling in the play. While hearing her
plea the transforming event of the play takes place, Angelo finds
himself possessed by an overwhelming passion, which, both to himself and to her, he calls love for Isabella. He, on second interview,
proposes that she yield her body to him for one night in exchange
for her brother’s life.
The critique of Angelo would seem to be a critique of
Puritanism in general. Licentious Lucio thinks Angelo “a man
whose blood /Is very snow-broth; one who never feels /The wanton
stings and motions of the sense...” This is surely wrong. The Duke
had made a similar, but more penetrating, observation: “Lord
Angelo is precise; /Stands at a guard with Envy; scarce confesses
/That his blood flows...” If he must guard against envy, he feels the
desires whose indulgences he must not be envious of. With old
Escalus, before he has fallen, Angelo admits that he too has had the
desires that lead to the actions he is punishing with death, acting
upon them makes the difference. He is too good, at least too strict
and too proud to consort with the dissolute; he proves to be not
good enough to be celibate. He wants to be associated with the
highly virtuous, is attracted by Isabella’s purity; he wants to pre-
�68
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
serve the image of his gravity; and he wants the joys of what he calls
love: your brother shall not die “Isabel, if you give me love.”
He seems to be altogether confused about the difference
between “yielding up thy body” and “give me love.”5 It was
Isabella’s moving persuasiveness that led him to give more attention
to the erotic side of his soul than he could handle: “Go to your
bosom, /Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know /That’s
like my brother’s fault. If it confess /A natural guiltiness, such as
his....” He replies to himself: “She speaks, and ’tis such sense /That
my sense breeds with it.” [2.2.137 ff.] He did warn the Duke: “Let
there be some more test made of my metal, /Before so noble and so
great a figure /Be stamp’d upon it.” The Duke knows that: “He doth
with holy abstinence subdue /That in himself which he spurs on his
power /To qualify in others.” [4.2.79] The immoderate Puritan
allows the bitterness from his own frustrated desires with perhaps a
touch of envy to spur him on to punish those who will not abstain.
The fear of falling into temptation increases the severity. The intensity of purifying zeal seems to be directly proportional to the
difficulty one has in keeping one’s own illicit desires under control.
The judgment is warped in the direction of severity by what one
feels is required to frighten oneself into abstinence. Isabella’s loveliness and what he sees when he follows her advice and looks into
his own soul push him over the edge.
And now I give my sensual race the rein:
Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite;
Lay by all nicety and prolixious blushes
That banish what they sue for. [2.4.159 ff.]
On reflection it might not seem so strange that modesty should
provoke desire.
Any competent political scientist can figure out why Angelo
never intends to fulfill his side of the bargain. Isabella can find no
“charity in sin.” “More than our brother is our chastity.” The Duke
disguised as Friar Lodowick prepares Claudio for death with a ser-
BERNS
69
mon crammed with Stoic commonplaces on the worthlessness of
life. From here on the Duke uses the holy privileges associated with
his disguise to inform himself of everyone else’s secrets. He overhears Isabella’s account to Claudio of Angelo’s proposal. In another remarkable scene Claudio begins by sharing Isabella’s righteous,
honorable and Christian indignation at the impossibility of Angelo’s
plan. But he has been brought to face the fear of death in a very feeling way.
Death is a fearful thing.
...to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bath in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world: or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling, -’tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death. [3.1.115 ff.]
Claudio’s speech is a beautiful illustration of that “very illusion
of the imagination” beautifully described by Adam Smith: the way
a man or woman’s sympathetic imagination attributes to the dead
what he or she would feel being alive, if he or she were housed in
the dead person’s body. And thus “the foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us, and ... the idea of those circumstances,
which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes
us miserable while we are alive.” The Duke certainly does not
explain anything like this to Claudio or to anyone else in this play,
�70
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
but I don’t think he would disagree with the way Smith closes this
chapter. “And from thence arises one of the most important principles in human nature, the dread of death, the great poison to the
happiness, but the great restraint upon the injustice of mankind,
which, while it afflicts and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society.” [The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.1.13] Bloom
quite properly refers to Lucretius [III. 417 ff.] in his discussion of
this passage, but Smith, it seems to me, is more balanced, even more
“classical”.
Claudio goes on to plead:
Sweet sister, let me live.
What sin you do to save a brother’s life,
Nature dispenses with the deed so far
That it becomes a virtue. [3.1.132 ff.]
This is not the first time Nature has been invoked to oppose
chastity law. The licentious but eloquent Lucio puts it in a way that
comes close to generally accepted opinion among our intellectuals.
Your brother and his lover have embrac’d;
As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time
That from the seedness the bare fallow brings
To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb
Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry. [1.4.40 ff.]
The licentious have their say in this play. But Shakespeare has quite
naturally, but not altogether explicitly, built Nature’s answer to
promiscuity into their very speech: it is full of the imagery and fear
of venereal disease. The Duke seems to have come to the realization
that Nature in human society requires law for its fulfillment.6
Isabella is moved by Claudio’s speech, but in exactly the opposite direction. “O, you beast. . . faithless coward...dishonest wretch,”
she replies.
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?
Is’t not a kind of incest, to take life [i.e., to be born
BERNS
71
again]
From thine own sister’s shame?
...Take my defiance,
Die, perish! [3.1.135 ff.]
This is not the first time sexual imagery enters Isabella’s speech
in moments of great passion. Answering Angelo she is primarily
thinking of stripping herself for whipping:
Th’impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies,
And strip myself to death as to a bed
That longing have been sick for, ere I’d yield
My body up to shame. [2.4.101 ff.]
The Duke’s first task is to avert the great impending injustice
brought on by his scheme, but he does it in a way that also seems to
be perfectly calculated to bring Isabella to face her sexuality, and
human sexuality in general, more temperately. His reform will turn
out to be a comprehensive reform; all the representative characters,
Pompey, Lucio, Claudio, Angelo and Isabella are in different ways
reformed. The Duke uses the religious authority he has assumed to
engage Isabella in a plot that will right all wrongs. Angelo, it turns
out, had been engaged to marry a lady, Mariana. When her brother carrying her dowry was wrecked at sea, Angelo “pretending in
her disoveries of dishonour” called off the marriage. This wronged
lady, the “forenamed maid” has unreasonably been driven by his
unkindnesses to a more violent and unruly love for Angelo. She still
regards him as her “husband.” Isabella is to agree to Angelo’s terms,
arrange for a short meeting in a very dark place; Mariana is to be
substituted for Isabella. If the encounter is acknowledged afterwards, it may compel him “to her recompense.” By this, the Duke
argues, “is your brother saved, your honour untainted, the poor
Mariana advantaged, and the corrupt deputy scaled.” The Duke as
friar will frame and make Mariana fit for the attempt. The fact that
this seems to pose no special difficulty suggests that Mariana may
indeed be as right as one can be to mate with Angelo. But it is too
�72
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
easy these days to berate Puritanism, Mariana may just see some
nobility in Angelo’s austerity, a nobility that manifests itself to us as
well even in his guilty self-condemnations. It can hardly escape
Isabella’s later reflection that what takes place between Angelo and
Mariana is in many respects parallel to what took place between
Claudio and Juliet. But this conjunction is sanctioned by a holy
man, who declares that “the doubleness of the benefit defends the
deceit from reproof.” Isabella is happy to go along. Even the pleasure of revenge on Angelo seems to be sanctioned by this holy man.
Isabella’s imagination is invited with no impiety to receive scenes of
her enemy coupled with his affianced lover, thinking he is violating
herself. If her soul is puritanical, it will have to become Puritanism
with a certain sense of humor.7
The Duke’s plan for deceiving Angelo succeeds, but Angelo
sends no reprieve for Claudio. On the contrary, he advances the
time for his beheading. He has no interest in preserving the life of
a man privy to his crime, and who, if he has the least grain of honor,
would be bound to think of little else than revenge. The Duke, again
using his assumed religious authority, attempts to get the Provost of
the prison to substitute the head of a convicted murderer,
Barnardine, for Claudio’s, to fool the wicked Angelo again. The
Duke had invoked “the vow of my order.” The “gentle Provost” is
the only one who refuses to bow to religious authority, “Pardon me,
good father, it is against my oath.” When the Duke, without fully
revealing himself, is forced to prove he is acting not only by religious authority but by the authority of the Duke himself, the
Provost goes along. He who refused to subordinate political authority to religious authority for his “care and secrecy” will be rewarded by the Duke with “worthier place.” But Barnardine has been
drinking and is not prepared for death today. He simply will not
consent to die today. This is an amazing prison. They all agree that
to take him in this condition is damnable. Luckily, the captive
pirate, Ragozine, who resembles Claudio, has died that morning:
the perfect head to substitute for Claudio’s. Besides provision of
some fine comedy, the prison scenes are essential for understanding
BERNS
73
the Duke’s basic strategy of reform. Pompey the procurer now put
out of work becomes the prison’s executioner’s assistant. The servant of false love, venereal disease and the unlawful begetting of life
quite easily becomes the true servant of its lawful taking. Pompey’s
coarseness is re-formed to serve the rule of law. The taking and the
begetting of life have been connected before. Angelo declares:
Ha? Fie, these filthy vices! It were as good
To pardon him that hath from nature stolen
A man already made [a murderer], as to remit
Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’s image
In stamps that are forbid. ’Tis all as easy
Falsely to take away a life true made,
As to put mettle [metal] in restrained means
To make a false one. [2.4.42 ff.]
As Jaffa put it, “Fornication, as a kind of false coinage of citizens, becomes more than a private action.”8 The regulation of
coinage, society’s circulating medium, is usually a rather unquestioned prerogative of sovereignty. The penalties for counterfeiting
have never been light. To “coin heaven’s image” joins biblical sanctity of begetting to the need for sovereign political regulation of that
private behavior which is the source of life for society as a whole.9
(The coining image occurs at least three more times in the play, in
speeches by the Duke [1.1.35-36], Isabella [2.4.128-29] and Angelo
[1.1.48-50].)
Threats of death color the whole atmosphere of the play. Fear
of death in potential malefactors seems to be indispensable for the
restoration and maintenance of law-abidingness. But absolutely no
one ever gets killed in this prison. It is the genius of this Duke to be
able to employ the fear without ever having to follow through with
the act. The ploy would never work, if it became generally known.
The great final act and scene of the play pulls all strands together, the return of the Duke and resumption of his authority in a
grand public ceremony, where the Duke “like power divine” reveals
all hidden iniquities and resolves all difficulties with perfect justice.
�74
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
This justice, both legal and natural justice, is primarily justice in
marriage. For the chaste sexuality of marriage, the raising and nourishing of families under the law, is the solution for the sexual corruption of Vienna.10 The dissolute gentleman, Lucio, is forced to
marry the prostitute who is the mother of his child. Angelo, who
sought Isabella, who was too good for him, is ordered to marry and
love the less scrupulous Mariana. But the Duke knows that the institution of marriage, upon which the health of his polity depends,
will not be on a firm foundation unless it shines forth at the paradigmatic center of society. He too must marry, and marry well. The
high-minded Duke asks the high-minded Isabella to be his wife.
How that works out, we never learn. As part of the apocalypse the
Duke staged for his triumphal return, Isabella was made to believe
that her brother had indeed been executed. It may be that the Duke
wanted her to weigh the events leading to that result more carefully, or merely, as he said, “to keep her ignorant of her good,/To make
her heavenly comforts of despair/When it is least expected.” He
might be made to pay for those hours of despair. These reservations
aside, it seems to be a near perfect marriage. If it should be that the
Duke comes short of perfection by contemplative leniency and
Isabella by spirited severity, it would be by the blending of their
virtues and the mitigating of their defects in their shared lives or in
their offspring that Vienna could hope to receive its perfect Lord.
NOTES:
1. Cf. H.V. Jaffa, The Conditions of Freedom: Essays in Political
Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp.
152-53; G. Anastaplo, St. Louis University Law Journal (Spring, 1965), 390.
2. G. Anastaplo, “Censorship”, The Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th
Edition, 1986 printing, Volume 15, pp. 634-641; The Amendments to
the Constitution: a Commentary, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995), pp. 52-56: R.A. Licht, “Respect is not a Right”,
Crisis, Vol. 11, No. 7, July-August, 1993, pp. 41-47; “Communal
BERNS
75
Democracy, Modernity, and the Jewish Political Tradition”,
Jewish
Political Studies Review, 5:1-2 (Spring, 1993).
3. A. Bloom, Love and Friendship (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1993), p. 330; H.V Jaffa, “Chastity as a Political Principle: Measure for
.
Measure”, Shakespeare as Political Thinker, eds. J. Alvis and T.G.
West (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2000), pp. 211-12.
4. The most reliable and literal translation known to me is by M.
Flaumenhaft (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1981).
5. Cf. W. Shakespeare, Sonnets, Nos. 129 and 116.
6. L. Berns, “Gratitude, Nature and Piety in King Lear”, Interpretation,
Vol. 3/1 (Autumn, 1972), Sections V and IX; “Rational Animal-Political
Animal: Nature and Convention in Human Speech and Politics”, Essays in
Honor of Jacob Klein (Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1976), pp.
29-35, esp. section III; [uncorrected version in The Review of Politics,
Vol. 40, No. 2 (April, 1978), pp. 231-54.]
7. L. Berns, “Transcendence and Equivocation: Some Political, Theological
and Philosophic Themes in Shakespeare”,
Shakespeare as Political
Thinker, cited n. 3, pp. 402-4.
8. “Chastity as a Political Principle: Measure for Measure”, citation
n. 3, p. 221.
9. The locus classicus for the relation between private and public, polity and family is Aeschylus’s trilogy Oresteia. The trilogy begins with a
world where family feeling, the spirit of revenge and cycles of blood feuding dominate and characterize political and social life. Agamemnon, the triumphant leader of the Trojan expedition, is killed on his return to Argos
from Troy by his wife Clytaemestra for the sake of “my child’s Justice”, that
is , to avenge the death of their daughter sacrificed to propitiate the gods
holding up the expedition to Troy. The ruling deities are the Old
Goddesses, the Daughters of Night, the “ingrown, vengeful Furies.” In the
second play, Orestes, Agamemnon’s and Clytaemestra’s son, following the
charge of Apollo’s oracle, avenges his father’s death by killing his mother.
The Furies, “the bloodhounds of my mother’s hate,” pursue him. The third
play, The Eumenides, the well-meaning ones, celebrates the founding of the
Court of the Areiopagus at Athens. Orestes seeks sanctuary at Delphi. The
Pythian oracle is overwhelmed by the pursuing Furies. Apollo himself inter-
�76
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
venes and stills the Furies long enough for Hermes to guide Orestes to
Athens for a final resolution of his case. At Athens Pallas Athene takes
charge. She who was not born of woman (born from the head of Zeus), a
most man-like female, almost a mean between male and female, turns the
trial over to an open court of Athenian citizens. The Furies argue against,
Apollo argues for Orestes; gods as advocates, before human beings as
judges and jury. The jury of twelve human beings is given the authority to
decide. The sovereignty of hitherto untamable family feeling is brought
under the supervening authority of the polis, the political community.
Although they have the authority, the human beings by themselves are incapable of deciding between conflicting rights of mother and father. The jury
splits evenly. The deciding vote is given to the goddess Athene. Divine help
is required for settling such questions. She decides for Orestes. It seems that
reasonable procedures for settling and dispensing with problems may
sometimes be more important than assurance that the solutions are correct.
These questions are no longer to be dealt with violently behind closed
doors but deliberately before public and open spectacles of law court,
assembly and theater. The Furies are unwilling to accept these dispensations of the younger gods. By a combination of threats and persuasion
Athene cajoles the Furies to integrate their authority over family feeling and
the household into the service of the greater good of the political community. They shall “win first fruits in offerings for children and the marriage
rite.” The Furies finally agree and are transformed into Eumenides. The
feelings they preside over which are capable of tearing the political community apart cannot be extinguished: they are to be redirected against the
despotically minded consumed by “a terrible love of high renown” and
external enemies; they will bolster the mutual love of fellow citizens. “This
is a cure for much that is wrong among mortals.” Cf. M. Flaumenhaft,
“Seeing Justice Done: Aeschylus’ Oresteia”, Interpretation, Vol. 17/1,
(Fall, 1989), pp. 69-109, reprinted in The Civic Spectacle: Essays on
Drama and Community, (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994),
Chapter 1; and David K. Nichols, “Aeschylus’ Oresteia and the Origins of
Political Life”, Interpretation, Vol. 9/1, (August, 1980), pp. 83-91.
10. L. Berns, “Gratitude, Nature and Piety in King Lear”, citation n. 6, p.
50: “... love and passion ... need to be controlled by law and authority. Being
conceived outside the ’order of law’, Edmund was banished from the family circle. He is not altogether ’unnaturally’ devoid of family feeling.”
BERNS
77
�78
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
79
A Review of Eva Brann’s
The Ways of Naysaying
Chaninah Maschler
“The first impetus” for this study,1 Eva Brann tells us in her
Preface, was the desire to deepen her understanding of the two
“capacities of our inwardness” that had been the themes of two of
her previous books, The World of the Imagination and What, Then,
is Time? “As the imagination ...makes present what is not before us
by reason of nonexistence or withdrawal, so memory ...holds what
is not with us by reason of having gone by....Therefore... to understand something of imagination, memory, and time, we must mount
an inquiry into what it means to say that something is not what it
claims to be or is not there or is nonexistent or is affected by
Nonbeing. And that is what I am after in Ways of Naysaying” (pp.
xiif, my italics).2
Addressing, I presume, readers of the first two volumes of her
trilogy, Brann explains that and why there will be less reliance on
introspection and more reliance on logic and language in the present volume: ”We could, it is thinkable, be aware of our internal
images...without having language for them....But whether we
could know about negation—that we are capable of it and how—
without speech is doubtful to me. Hence within my scheme, no,
not, non- are deeper than imagination and time, in the sense that
the former underlie the latter and are revealed in their analysis” (p.
xiii). Earlier in this paragraph, and in more detail later, when summarizing Freud’s essay “On denial” in her Chapter One, she allows
that there is a pre-linguistic “nay-saying of instinct and gesture.”
Since this paragraph is rather condensed, and much hangs by it,
let me try to say in my own words what I believe it to hold: Doing
no, for instance, spitting out or pushing away or averting the gaze,
occurs (ontogenetically and, according to Freud, also phylogenetically) before speech. And a sort of prereflective reacting to heard
Eva Brann’s The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing. Lanham, Md: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2001. Chaninah Maschler is tutor emeritus at St. John’s College.
�80
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
“no,” or even the uttering of the syllable “no” (as mere substitute
for the gesture of rejection) may well be a phase of children’s intellectual history. Further, having images and reacting to them, or to
having had them, can occur without the one who reacts being aware
that what he or she is reacting to is an image. But to peg an image
as an image, which means, to take it as a likeness of its original, that
requires, according to Brann, the thought “This is and is not that.”
Therefore there can be no sizing up of a mirror image, memory
image, dream image, perceptual presentation as “merely” an image
until after negation has entered upon the mental scene. Now knowing about negativity, which is different from prereflectively reacting in a rejecting or separating manner, that could not occur sans
speech. While images are, therefore, existentially “prior to” (earlier
than) speech, in involving recognized negativity they show themselves conceptually “posterior to” speech.3
Brann seems to be employing some version of the
Aristotelian contrast between “first to us” and “first in nature.”
This is how I construe her claims that, while imagining and recollecting are more manifest, negativity lies “deeper” than do
these “capacities of our inwardness”; and that, furthermore,
whatever is condition for the possibility of negativity lies more
deeply still. Her book as a whole will argue that the Platonic discovery that Being “holds” Nonbeing may well be the ultimate
answer to the question “was die Welt im Innersten zusammen
halt” (“what it is that most intimately holds the world together,”
Goethe, Faust Pt. 1, li 383).
The Introduction of Brann’s book is given over to etymology. It draws attention to the fact that in English, German,
French, Latin, and Greek (the languages in which the Western
philosophic tradition is expressed), most of the basic words for
naysaying—no, not,non-,nothing, and negativity—start with a
nasal sound. Jesperson, and before him Darwin, remarked on
this fact and entertained the thought that, conceivably, our signs
for negation are transitional between naturally expressive gesture and conventionally learned word. The n-word would then
MASCHLER
81
have originated as a substitute for the snort of aversion or refusal
and in the course of linguistic and cultural history have proliferated into a multiplicity, the last but not least of which would be
the abstract general negation word “not” we use for contradiction.
In Chapter One, Brann, like many of us today, seems to
share Darwin’s impulse to give direction to speculation about
human archai by studying child development. Accordingly, the
title of her book’s first official chapter—“Chapter One,
Aboriginal Naysaying: Willfull No”—refers initially to “the primordial ‘no’ to everything” of the toddler (p. 9), but eventually
to other respondings (Goethe’s Mephistopheles serving, seriocomically, as paradigm) that reject, disobey, or spit out what is
given. Thus some of the discussion of nihilism in Chapter Six
looks as though it were continuous with Chapter One’s analysis
of childish “no.” The toddler rejects the breast, the command or
prohibition, the saying “so it is” of the grown-up; the nihilist
turns down shared traditions, institutions, and even intersubjectively acknowledged matter of fact.
I loved the affectionate and knowing description of “the terrible twos” in this chapter. I share Brann’s admiration for Freud’s
astonishingly potent brief essay on negation, which she summarizes,
pretty much in Freud’s own words, on pp. 10-12. But it looks to me
as though Freud’s quasi-Nietzschean “genealogy” of the intellectual function of judgment out of the interplay of biologically “primary impulses” has, when Brann is through with it, become tinted with
Augustinian surmises of original sin. In evidence I cite the fact that
it is rather late in the chapter (footnote 28, p. 22) that the “healthy
naysaying” of resistance to temptation and of rebellion against
tyranny are mentioned; also, that the emphasis on self-awareness’
emerging from deeds and words of “arbitrary willfullness” (cf. p.
18) does not seem to be balanced by reflections on the child’s need
to exercise, so as to perfect, skill at matching expectation with outcome, and vice versa. What I have in mind is well-explained by
Jerome Kagan. In brief, Kagan holds that much of what we
�82
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
observe in the not quite two-year-old is made intelligible if we
view it as due to the emergence of “three related competencies”:
ability to notice that some happening or action is at odds with
what is right and regular; absorption by the idea of standards as
standards, both those set by others and those set by oneself; awareness of one’s own and the world’s ability or inability to meet standards. I am confident that Brann would agree that these competencies involve the child’s increasingly better memory: Isn’t much
of the toddler’s “testing” of the world, commandeering of adults,
and “first Adam”-like rage at the world’s or the grown-ups’ not
coming through connected with practicing the ability to match
outcome with forecast and plan, remembrance with presentation?
It is my impression that Brann writes more nearly in this spirit in
What, Then, is Time? (See p. 165).
The chief questions asked and answered in Chapter Two, where
the not of logic is taken up, are as follows: 1.What is negation?
2.Where is the sentence negated? 3.Is the positive prior to the negative? 4. How is negation related to falsity?7
Following Aristotle, Brann assigns negating (the act) and negation (the act’s sentential consequence) to the genus of opposition.
An admirable overview of types of opposition, as described and
classified by Aristotle, is provided, while opposition in general is
recognized to be indefinable.8 Plainly, the idea of not is clarified
when, through insertion into its genus, it is made evident that not
must be discriminated from fellow-contenders for naysaying primacy, for example, speaking linguistically, the particles non- or un- or
a- and, speaking semantically (?), the polar relations of contrariety
and privation. The not of contradiction is declared the winner, on
Aristotle’s authority (p. 27). But, Brann hastens to add, contradiction, which is “sheer, unintermediated opposition” (studied as such
under the heading of question 4), belongs to thinking and speaking,
not to things.
We seem, perhaps contrary to expectation, to have ferreted out
something like an answer to the question of what negation consists
in. A summing up of the interim upshot of the inquiry into the
MASCHLER
83
nature of not is provided on p. 29f. and concludes with the sentence: “Negation arises from the human desire and ability to make
distinctions; it is (most likely) grounded in the oppositions and
polarities that belong to beings....”
Where in the declarative negative sentence is the particle that
accomplishes negation located? is the second question. What
motivates the question? One could imagine a linguist who is trying to learn an exotic language asking it. He would, I suppose,
have tried to obtain a corpus of utterances sufficiently rich to
hold instances of all the elementary affirmative sentence patterns
of that language (supposing this possible); next, he’d have consulted with a native informant as to how one would, in his language, “say the opposite(s)” of these. Assume the native informant is a speaker of English and the linguist’s native tongue is some
non-Indo-European language, say Chinese or Hebrew. If I understand Brann correctly, she believes that the Chinese linguist
would somehow find out that all the elementary affirmative sentence patterns of spoken English are reducible to the triadic pattern S is P How could he have found this out? The best I can
.
come up with is that, in learning English, he relies on the same
logical truth on which he relied when he acquired his mother
tongue—that whatever is said is interpretable as making some
comment on a declared or otherwise manifest topic: The topic is
named by one part of the sentence; the sentence attaches the
comment to the name; and in so doing comments on, that is,
predicates the sentence’s predicate of, the thing or things in the
world that is or are the sentence’s topic.12 The question now
becomes how and why this insight into the logically dyadic T-C
structure of simple 13 affirmative sentences issues in the triadic S
is P structure. The reason for my selecting a Chinese-speaking linguist was, of course, that (as Brann reports in the long and important footnote 22 on p. 64), Chinese sentences do not require a
copula to accomplish the job of commenting. Hebrew doesn’t
either: Joseph holech “merely juxtaposes” what is, strictly speaking,
a participial (thus adjectival) form of the verb to the proper name
�84
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
“Joseph” to say what in English would be said by the sentence
Joseph is walking. But nothing stands in the way of a Hebrewspeaking linguist’s learning that in English sentences an “is” must be
inserted between “Joseph” and “walking” for the predicating job to
be accomplished.
What all this fussing is about is the issue how logical and grammatical distinctions differ and mesh. Brann’s fourfold answer to the
question where the negation particle is located in a sentence proceeds, not on the linguist’s basis of studying a corpus of English negative sentences, nor on the logician’s basis of reflecting on the negating jobs that would have to be accomplishable if the tasks of describing and reasoning rightly are to be carried out. Rather, she works
with the S is P pattern of “traditional” logic and negates, first the
“is” or copula, next the “P” or predicate, third the sentence “S is P”
as a whole, and finally, although not whole-heartedly, even the “S”
or subject. Having done this, she points out the jobs done by the
patterns which thus emerge.14
Why does she proceed in this manner? She is, usually, not at all
friendly to mere algebraic patterning. More important, she knows
that Frege, whose “deep critique of the classical view [of negation]”
was taken up appreciatively in the concluding section of the treatment of question 1 (pp. 30-32), endorses something like what I
tried to say through my fable of the Chinese or Hebrew-speaking
linguist, that what chiefly matters is the irreducible logical contrast
between naming and predicating and their complementarity,15
whereas the presence or absence of some form of the verb “to be”
is a linguistic accident.
On first reading I thought that her manner of proceeding in
Chapter Two is due to her not being as convinced as was Frege of
the need for a principled distinction between logic, as a normative
science, and psychology and linguistics as empirical sciences which
acknowledge logical norms in practice (as we all do when we think),
but which do not study them.16 Brann reports and up to a point
explains that Frege distinguishes T-C structures qua what he calls
Gedanken (“thoughts”) from “assertions” (what Kant called “judg-
MASCHLER
85
ments”). And she appreciates that “thoughts,” including negations,
are for Frege objective and atemporal whereas he regards “assertions” as acts of a speaker or thinker who at some time or other
asserts an assertable or its contradictry. She even quotes a sentence
of Frege’s which brings this contrast to bear on the issue of negation.17 But she refuses to let go of inquiry into what it is in human
beings and the world that leads to nay-saying.18
On second reading I found an outright answer to my question,
why Brann distances herself not only from Frege but also from Plato
and the Aristotle of On Interpretation, in footnote 22 (p. 64). She
writes: “I accept...[‘S is P’] as the fundamental sentence form
because people whose thought is congenial to me19 have built on it
structures that are of great interest, and because I have corroborated by introspection that it is my most basic declarative mode of
internal speech, closer to thinking than the bipartite sentence consisting of a subject and a predicative verb.”20
Postponing till her penultimate chapter, Chapter Six, inquiry
into what she calls the “greatest question,” namely, whether
Something or Nothing is ultimate, the issue in section 3 of the present chapter is whether “in human speaking denial is always derivative and in human speech negation is always secondary” (p. 36).
Boethius, ancient authors in the Aristotelian tradition, and modern
cognitive science are reported to endorse the opinion that the affirmative is prior to the negative, as at first blush it would seem to be,
since any negating particle is an “addendum.” Bosanquet and
Bradley are described as having answered the question in a more
nuanced way: “Negation is not as such a denial of affirmative judgment; it does not presuppose a particular affirmative judgment to be
denied. But it does presuppose some general affirmation, namely,
that of a world having a positive content judged to be real....The
positive judgment itself cannot take place before the distinction
between a mere idea and a fact of reality is recognized. ‘And with
this distinction the idea of negation is given’ ” (p. 40).21 Still, the
over-all conclusion of the inquiry in section 3 is that negation is
“secondary.”
�86
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
More minute examination of Bosanquet’s and Bradley’s
remarks on negation might have yielded a scheme for differentiating the diverse senses of the prior/posterior relation; causal priority
might have become differentiated from conceptual priority; priority in dignity or rank from temporal priority.22 But as it stands, section 3 seems to favor a temporal sense of prior/posterior. This bothers me because I am inclined to believe that logicians qua logicians
have no business asking about temporal priority and that conceptually the positive comes or rather is on the scene along with the negative. Thus neither is prior to either.23 As an illustration, consider
the following: At the beginning of the Prior Analytics, Aristotle
defines argument or deduction (syllogismos) as follows: “A deduction is a discourse in which, certain things being stated, something
other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so.”
I believe that anyone who grasps the type of necessity here spoken
of grasps along with it the impossibility of the contradictory. Upon
reflection I recognize that I base this apparently psychological
observation on the conceptual (i.e. logical) truth that must-bes are
the contradictories of cannot bes and cannot be apart from them.
Indeed, it dawns on me that my seemingly psychological claim may
be nothing but the conceptual truth itelf in another form of words.
The treatment of question 4 (how negation is related to falsity)
shows a respect for Wittgenstein that was, I believe, absent from
Brann’s previous writings.24 His Tractatus is praised both for asking
and for answering the following questions: (1)“How do Truth and
Falsity come to be obverses” (i.e. opposites)? (2)“How is negation
related to them and to truth-values?” (3)“Why are propositions
bipolar?” (4)Can we justify the logic textbooks’ assumption “that
each proposition has only one negative?”(p. 47).25 The two paragraphs immediately preceding the enunciation of these questions
seem to report the answers that Brann found in Wittgenstein. I
quote them in full:
“It all begins with a discrimination exercised by us over a logical space wherein things are seated within their place in their proper relation configurations, a discrimination of the otherness of what
MASCHLER
87
is false. So prototruth26 is in the world of fact. Now comes a proposition. In its negative and positive sense it is like a solid body that
restricts all movement into a certain place; in its positive sense it has
an empty place where the object can fit in (Tractatus 4.463). These
[comparisons ]are pictures of the ... inherent bipolarity of every
proposition. It shows negation from the beginning related to the
negated proposition, for it is that hole which the negating proposition is blocking (Tractatus 4.0641). So to understand a proposition
is to see the logical space (Tractatus 3.4) and to discriminate what
the facts would have to be like to make a proposition...[i.e. a logical picture] true or false.”
“Truth, then, or falsity, is the consonance or correlation of a
propositional picture with reality (Tractatus 2.21), where reality
(Wirklichkeit) is the existence or non-existence of facts (Tractatus 2;
2.06)—a non-existent fact being one that is pushed out of the world
picture by the fact that exists. In this correspondence is truth in the
primary sense, and it comes in the duality true-false because of the
way logical space divides and we discriminate the facts. In the sense
of propositions lies the polarity positive-negative, the latter of
which is expressed in the sign not- when the facts fail to correspond
to p. Truth values, T and F, are secondary to and derived from negation: ’The sense of a truth function of p is a function of the sense of
p’ (Tractatus 5.2341). Thus T and F are not properties of propositions (Tractatus 6.111) any more than are positive and negative.
The truth values of the truth tables capture the relations of T and F
to p and not-p more than they define the latter.”
Section 4 concludes with the following remarkable observations:
(1)The examination of the Tractatus has revealed that for
Wittgenstein and other moderns “truth comes from the world, and
negation is in propositions. For traditional philosophers it is just the
other way around: Negation is in the world of appearances and in
the beings of the intellect, and truth is in the propositions” (p. 48).
(2)What Aristotle says about the true and the false in
Metaphysics Bk. IV 1011b25 and Bk VI, 1027b19ff tends to show
,
�88
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
that Heidegger was quite right when, in his Logic, he denied that
the Aristotelian texts hold a “correspondence theory of truth” (p.
48).
(3)Aristotle speaks “for a world very different from the one in
which the propositional calculus of Russell and Wittgenstein is at
home. For Aristotle negation (I mean negation in an objective form,
contrariety interpreted as Nonbeing and its effects) is in the world
and falsity (I mean the not always unintentional failure of speech to
reveal being is in statements....Whether negation is in the world or
in speech is one of the numerous but interrelated marks by which a
classical world...is distinguished from a modern world. For a world
that has negation built in responds to receptive thought since it
reveals its own distinctions, while a solidly positive one demands
constructive reason since oppositions need to be made” (p. 49).
As the just-reported grand conclusions of section 4 of Chapter
2 tend to confirm, negation became thematic for Brann by virtue of
her interest in the psychological and ontological topics that were
mentioned in the opening paragraph of this review; whereas logicians—from Aristotle through the Stoic logicians and Frege, Peirce,
Russell, Quine—attend to negation chiefly because of how it affects
what is and what is not a valid pattern of argument. Patterns of reasoning or deduction rather than patterns of judgment or of propositions may well be their primary concern.27 This difference
between herself and the logicians might also explain the otherwise
rather puzzling remark, on p. 25, that “by and large the negations
of logic28 take place in symbols and are found in books. They are
not so much naysayings as naywritings.” For the purposes of reasoning the idea of contradiction, that is, of an opposition which is
not only exclusive but also exhaustive, is indispensable: Illiterate
Athenians have no trouble grasping the sense of arguments by contraposition such as, “If virtue were teachable, there’d be teachers of
virtue, yet there are none. Therefore, virtue is not teacheable.” And
I surmise that the pattern of Euclid’s reductios (which likewise
involve the stark negativity of contradiction) was first discovered as
a debating gambit and passed on by teachers of rhetoric. I say this
MASCHLER
89
partly because it seems to me that even Euclid’s Elements still retain
a viva voce dialogic rhetorical mode.
“When we refer to a nonexistent object, what are we thinking
of and what are we talking about?” (p. 76). Chapter Three begins
by pointing out that this is a distinctively modern question,29 different from the ancient one taken up in Plato’s Sophist, how nonbeing can be, to which Chapter Four will be devoted. Four types of
non-existents are mentioned for purposes of illustration—“members of extinct species [dodos, for instance]...deceased human
beings [for example, Socrates]...artifacts no longer extant,30 but
also all the entities that never did exist in the ordinary sensible
sense, such as unicorns” (p. 79).
Roughly speaking, four types of answers are sketched in
Chapter Three: Bertrand Russell’s “theory of definite description,”
Alexius Meinong’s “theory of objects [and objectives],” the recent
version of Meinong worked out by Terence Parsons in his 1980
book Nonexistent Objects (New Haven: Yale University Press), and
any one of a number of theories according to which “pretense and
make-believe are the chief explanatory principles,...[not of the
behavior of nonexistent objects], but [of] how they manage to
come on the scene to begin with, [and] what we cognitively do to
cooperate in fiction making” (p. 99). From the way these theories
are elaborated it becomes apparent that, although —as the two earlier volumes of Brann’s trilogy argued—our ability to think and
speak truly or falsely of bygone things is testimony to the powers
of the human imagination, in that the feat of “re-calling” depends
on or consists in the imagination’s having succeeded at making
temporally absent things present, it is the “saving” of fictional entities that chiefly matters for the purposes of the present book’s
Chapter Three.
Before she turns to a fairly detailed examination of Russell’s
treatment of proper names and definite descriptions, Brann lets us
know that “the theory that is the winner in the world of logic
[namely, Russell’s], will turn out to be something of loser in the
world of fiction” (p. 76). Russell’s theory, as she tells us Parson too
�90
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
observed, pays too high a price for its clarity: “The theory commits
us to treating the sentences of fiction as false, while most of us think
they have at least a sort of truth, and some of us even believe that
they often have more truth than mere fact does” (p. 86). Meinong,
contrarywise, “comes near to saving the phenomena of that intentional experience of central interest to this trilogy...the experience
of imagining (p. 91). Russell’s excision of nonexistents from reality31 is false to the power that some non-existent beings and places
have, moving us “as models and attractors,” and “outliving us by
millennia, and in a word impinging on us as if existence were home
to them as well [as to ourselves?]” (p. 102).
Instead of recapitulating what Brann says about the technical
aspects of Russell’s theory of description and Meinongian rival theories, I want to dwell a little on Brann’s question how we are to
account for the fact that the Natasha, Pierre, and Andrey of
Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the Hari Kumar and Ronald Merrick of
Scott’s Raj Quintet32 have become our companions.
A familiar answer begins by reminding us of our unabating
curiosity about our fellow human beings, whether met in the flesh
or encountered vicariously through what our friends, our children,
our journalists report and our television news programs show. “But
the characters who people novels are immensely more memorable
than the Tom or Dick or Harry that our neighbors tell us about.”
Well, that does somewhat depend on what a particular neighbor is
capable of telling us about a particular Tom (or Jane for that matter), not to mention the particular Tom or Jane spoken about. But
to the extent that it is true, may it not in large part be the result of
novelistic characters’ (at least those that dwell in novels of substance) becoming so much better known to us than any persons not
our “real life” intimates?33 Novelists are much better at noticing
things than most of us are, and better at imparting what they’ve
noticed too. Also, our acquaintance with novelistic characters is a
shared acquaintance, shared with other make-believe characters in
the novel, with the novel’s author, and with fellow-readers of the
novel. It is hardly news that sharing (comparing notes and impress-
MASCHLER
91
sions) is immensely pleasurable, greatly contributes to a feeling of
solidarity, and is constitutive of our sense of reality.
Add to what’s been said our relish for just about all human skills
or powers, our own as readers and the novel-making skills of the
author. Most important, count in the special joys of play and makebelieve: Aren’t we well launched on the beginnings of some sort of
answer to the question “Why and how do fictional characters
become real to us?”
Brann does not think so. At least, she rejects the idea that what
we relish, in ourselves and novelists, is the exercise of the human
power of make-believe: “Being absorbed into a fiction, living in its
landscapes and with its people, is not well described as a form of
pretense—not on the reader’s or viewer’s part and so much less on
the poet’s or painter’s part....Children, to be sure, play ’Let’s pretend,’ but that is usually when the game requires that roles be
assigned , and I’d bet that the mover of the pretense doen’t often
assign, say, the submissive role to herself; in participating in a novel,
on the other hand, we may well surrender ourselves to the experiences of the underdog ”(p. 99f).34
I wonder whether childish “dramatic play” (as the child psychologists call it) and make-believe of every sort is here conceived
of in all its richness. Think of the infinite variety of solitary and collaborative pretending and letting be we catch our children at! Sure,
sometimes there is one kid in charge (“I’ll be mommy and you’ll be
baby”) but by no means always. Two games of make-believe I
remember watching were: spreading out newspapers on the floor to
be islands and going island-finding, island-hopping, and islandworking; arranging marbles in rows and letting them be children at
school. Neither of these games called for leadership. Older children
would sometimes join the younger ones at play, humbly grateful and
gratified to be allowed “in” on the game. Improvisational theatre
has some of these qualities, I believe, though I cannot be sure since
I have never participated, either as actor or as audience.35 I went on
like this because I want to make concrete that there might be ways
of “taking fiction seriously” and trying to understand why and how
�92
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
make-believe matters that don’t proceed by way of ontology but by
way of psychology. The British pediatrician and child psychologist
D.W Winnicott may have something to teach us here.36 And as for
.
grown-ups making believe, I have begun to read Kendall L.
Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe, On the Foundations of the
Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Part Four of this book tries to show why it is all right to do without
fictional entities. I should, however, also mention that in Austria, at
the University of Graz, much is currently being written about the
logic and ontology of fictional objects.
A reader of an earlier version of this review advised me that I
need to report where I stand on the issue of the being and non-being
of fictional characters. I am undecided, because I have insufficiently considered (to give just one example) whether my belief that one
can be as mistaken in one’s “reading” of a fictional character as one
can in one’s “reading” of a violin sonata does or does not have
ontological implications. My laziness about ontology may have
something to do with the fact that I lean toward believing that it is
more illuminating to ask questions about how imagined persons
and places are and are not like historical individuals and geographic regions, or how what one learns about good and evil from living
hooks on to what one learns about them from literature, than it is
to delve into ontology.
The rest of Chapter Three is devoted to reflections on lies and
lying37 and to Anselm’s so-called ontological proof of the impossibility of God’s non-existence.38 The setting out of Anselm’s argument is very pretty!
Chapter Four: When we begin to read Chapter Four’s first
paragraph, we are already in possession of the guidepost furnished
in the Preface (p. xiv): “Here [in section 2] comes on the scene the
Non of philosophy (my italics), a prefix signifying not the brusquely rejecting denial of fact in words but the more forgiving opposition of two elements in the same world. The thought of Nonbeing
comes among us as the unbidden effect of Parmenides’ injunction
against it, and Plato will domesticate that same Nonbeing, bringing
MASCHLER
93
it into philosophy as the relational principle of diversity, the Other.”
But to reach section 2 we must traverse section 1. It begins:
“Parmenides learned from the goddess who dwells in the house of
truth that ’Being is’ and that he must not embark on the way of
Nonbeing. As far as I know, Nonbeing had not established itself in
anyone’s thought—at least in the West—before Parmenides’ deity
warned him off this path of inquiry; nor has it ever vacated its place
in thought since. Her [i.e. the goddess’s] repeated prohibitions and
injunctions against this Unthinkable and Unsayable seem to have
done for this philosophical offense what inveighings against sin
have so often accomplished in the moral sphere—they have
launched it on its career as a well-formulated and ever attractive
presence” (p. 123).
Among the titillating suggestions of Brann’s commentary on
Parmenides’ poem there is this, that this “heroic epic” (in dactylic
hexameter) is “unmistakably [intended as?] a rival to Homer’s
Odyssey,” so that “the ancient difference between philosophy and
poetry” of which the Republic speaks (607b)39 first comes on the
world scene when the journeying of young Parmenides displaces
that of middle-aged Odysseus.
I find myself incapable of paraphrasing what Brann says about
Parmenides. Here are some more quotations: “We often use phrases like ‘sing a song,’ where the object is the action of the verb made
into a thing accomplished. Parmenides sometimes does something
symmetrical with the verb ‘to be’ at the front end of a sentence. He
turns the verbal sense into a subject. But I don’t think that Being or
its negation is thereby established as a thing....On the contrary,
mere verbal ‘Is’ remains the truest kind of showing forth, and the
nounlike forms merely display the inability, or rather unwillingness,
of the goddess’s speech to get outside the meaning of that little
word which courses through human speech surrounded by subject
and predicate. Parmenides’ poem is a rebuff before the fact to those
who will claim that Indo-European languages are indefeasibly subject-and-predicate-ridden. For this is what Parmenides is bidden [by
his goddess] to convey: the sheer Isness of which we always get hold
�94
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
when we think beyond multiplicity....The common declarative tripartite sentence...is an implicit expression of three distinctions:
between the thinker and the thought (since some thinking person is
having and uttering a thought); between the thought and what it is
about (since the sentence states a thought-proposition about an
object); and between the object and its properties (since the sentence predicates a property of its subject). At the very beginning,
before these elements have ever been formally established, the goddess wants to prevent them from being distinguished....My main
purpose in this section has been to enter just enough intothe meaning of ‘Is’ to make sense of the ’Is not’ that trails it as its unwelcome
but unshakable doppelganger” (p. 130ff.).
“The next step in the ancient story of Nonbeing is...the reversal of its outlaw status and its integration into the community of
Beings. It is taken in Athens, the city of reconciliations” (p. 138).
What follows the exquisite paragraph whose two opening sentences were just quoted40 is a fresh setting out of reflections on
Plato’s dialogue the Sophist.41
I describe a few of these.
Seasoned readers of Platonic dialogues agree in noticing that
the conversation in the Sophist begins with the question whether
corresponding to the three names or titles “sophist”, “statesman”,
“philosopher” there are three beings or three types of being. Given
the fact that there is a dialogue called Sophist and also one called
Statesman, the non-being of a dialogue called Philosopher is a glaring fact. Some Plato commentators have argued that the Philebus is
the “missing” dialogue. But Brann believes that there are indications
in the Sophist that Plato means us to understand that “sophists and
philosophers are identical,” though differing in three respects: First,
the dialectical skill which is shared by sophists and philosophers is,
in the philosopher, accompanied by a kind of professional ethics.
Dialectic is, for him, a sacred trust. For the sophist it is a moneymaking techne, for sale to the highest bidder. Second, unlike the
traveling sophist, who is detached from civic loyalties, “the philosopher never forgets his human circumstances” (p. 139). Third, the
MASCHLER
95
philosopher is “that rare sophist who acknowledges Nonbeing
without taking cover in it” (p. 139).
To catch the “vulgar” sophist, the philosopher-sophist—in this
dialogue represented by an unnamed stranger-guest from
Parmenides’ city, Elea—must somehow show that contrary to what
Parmenides’ goddess taught him, Nonbeing is.
But it is not only to catch the sophist; nor just to defend the
possibility of false speech, negative speech, and error. Rather, to
save philosophy itself (to save speech itself?), Nonbeing must be
allowed to be! (Sophist 260A). The stranger therefore, Theseus-like,
or again, Athena-like, bestows citizenship on Nonbeing by declaring
it a form among the koinonia of forms (p.141). It is the diversifying
relational principle or form Otherness, not to medamoos on,
absolute nothing. “It is its ...[being identified] as the Other that
saves it from the utter inability—which Parmenides does indeed
assert—to become sayable....Nonbeing both bonds and negates
among beings, but its negation is not annihilation” (p. 142).
The chapter’s last paragraph makes the transition to Hegel: “In
Nonbeing naysaying has found its enabling principle in the realm of
Being. Now comes a view of speech and thought [namely, Hegel’s]
as themselves having inherent negativity. As Nonbeing was a source
of ontic diversity, so this [Hegelian] negativity will be the source of
mental motion” (p. 144, my italics).
Concerning Chapter Five I merely report that it employs the
trinity Spirit, Understanding, Reason to display and classify the
kinds of negativity encountered in Hegel’s Phenomenology, Kant’s
First Critique, and Hegel’s Logic. Devotees of Hegel will find much
to admire here. The chapter concludes with a paragraph announcing that, though the earlier chapter concerning Parmenides and
Plato and the present one concerning Hegel conspire to reaffirm
that Being is prior to Nothing, this is not as yet fully established:
Therefore Chapter Six42 jousts with the “greatest question”—which
is ultimate, Something or Nothing?
Most winning, witty, and sometimes even wise of all the sections of Ways of Naysaying are the concluding pages of this chap-
�96
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ter, Chapter Six, about Nothing, offered under the seemingly bleak
heading, “Nothing as Inescapable End: Death” (pp. 188-198)!
However much of the time I was rather lost in this chapter. The
reason, I imagine, is that Brann’s question, whether Something or
Nothing is ultimate, never jelled into being a question for me. Yet as
best I understand the chapter, the various items it gathers together—“modern nominalism” (p. 170), Epicureanism and the void (p.
171ff), the “blithe nihilism” of some of the Buddhist schools (p.
173), the political “nihilism” of the mid-nineteenth century Russian
revolutionaries portrayed in Turgeniev’s novel Fathers and Sons (p.
179), and Heidegger’s teachings concerning the nihilating nihil (das
nichtende Nichts, p. 184ff) —are thought to deserve to stand side
by side because they all affirm, albeit in different ways, that Nothing
is more C primordial, more really real, than Something. This is the
sense in which they are all of them “nihilisms.”43 Another thing that
they may have in common is an ontology in which will is prior to
understanding.
It is possible that my failure to understand the chapter and its
leading question is due to incomprehension of Heidegger: I tend to
become so overwhelmed with irritation at his preachy incantational tone, his haughtiness, his tricks of inverting grounds and their
consequents, his abuse of the scholarly riches deposited in etymological dictionaries, that I become incapable of paying attention to
what he says.
Conclusion: (1)Is all human “opposing” (in will, word, or deed)
reactive to, thus parasitic on, a “posing”? (2)Might negating
responses constitute evidence for the being of Nonbeing,
Nonexistents, or even of Nothing? (3)Supposing there are
Nonexistents and Nonbeings, by what powers of the soul do we
encounter them?
In her final chapter, Brann recapitulates the affirmative answers
she earlier gave to questions (1) and (2). But she now expands on
what was said about Nonbeing in her pivotal Chapter Four:
“Besides the nonexistents that respond to our sense of what is missing...there are also declines and falls from existence, right in the
MASCHLER
97
world around us, that we experience as a sort of nonexistence.
Take, for example, the reflection of a willow tree that appears in a
pond. Take the numerous things and people in the world without
that are not what they appear to be....This last group, fallen existences [my italics], particularly raises the question whether it is our
way of experience or the nature of things that provides the not or
non here” (p. 215). As the past participle “fallen” which I underlined just now goes to show, Brann is introducing a principle of hierarchy into the realm of being. “Nonbeing as otherness is the universal relativity....But there is also ...a vertical Nonbeing....This
Nonbeing...has in it something of absolute inferiority, of defective
or deficient Being” (p. 216). Brann has brought us back to the central books of Plato’s Republic, I mean, books VI and VII, with their
image of the sun, diagram of the unequally divided line, and story
of the prisoners confined to life in a cave.44 It is in this context that
she reaffirms the answer to question (3) that’s been with us since her
book’s opening sentence: It’s neither sensing nor thinking that give
us access to nonbeings and nonexistents but imagination and memory.45
Obviously, then, this review cannot have done justice to the
book it tried to summarize and (in some measure) appraise, since
that book is one third of a three thirds whole. I hope, however, to
have conveyed something of its extraordinary scope, writing style,
intellectual daring and imagination.
NOTES:
1. The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing (
New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001)
2. Cf. What, Then, Is Time?, p. 165:“...we are able to have and interpret
images, to live consciously in the phases of time, and to think and speak negatively. My guess is that these three capacities are really triune, three-in-one.
They may be the root of our humanity, and perhaps the subject of another
book.”
�98
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3. See also World of the Imagination, pp. 405 and 783, where Brann
expresses her agreement with Freud and Wittgenstein that one can “speak of
what is not, but not depict it.”
4. His self-identification, from Faust pt. 1, lines 1336-8, is quoted on p. 14:
“I am a part of the force that constantly wills evil and constantly effects
good....I am the spirit that constantly denies.” Omitted from the quotation,
though surely Nietzscheans would hold that they are, if not the, an arche of
“nihilism,” are the lines: “und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entste-
ht/ Ist wert das es zugrunde geht;/Drum besser ware es dass
nichts enstunde...” (“and rightly so, because everything that originates
deserves to perish. Wherefore it would have been better if nothing had originated.”)
5. Brann’s use of the Freud essay is filtered through Rene Spitz’s The First
Year of Life and No and Yes. I have not read these books. Therefore I
cannot tell whether her complaint that Freud’s speculations— about what it
was that first prompted the human race’s invention of a “symbol” for negation— fail to include reflection on not as accomplishing “denial of truth or
untruth” is also Spitz’s. “Psychoanalytic theory does not tell whence comes
mature negation and possible truth telling; these may not have a naturalistic
genesis” is the concluding sentence of her account of Freud. What a non-naturalistic account of origins might consist in is not explained.
6. The Second Year: The Emergence of Selfawareness (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1981).
7. This list slights her treatment of double negation, of the logical paradoxes that are generated when negation and self-reference are allowed to combine, of the stretching of the concept of number through the introduction of
negative numbers and zero, and of Kant’s discovery or invention of “directed quantities” (vectors) in the pre-critical essay “An Attempt to Introduce the
Concept of Negative Numbers into Philosophy.” Since these topics are listed
in the well-prepared index, I omit page references.
8. Cf. Metaphysics ix, 1048b1-10
9. The quoted sentence ends with the bracketed remark “...of which the first,
the opposition of oppositions, is surely that of thinking itself to its object.”
This claim makes me uneasy, given the remark, on p. xiii of the Preface, that
“the mysteries and conuncrums of intention—denotation and reference,
MASCHLER
99
sense and meaning...are happily not within the task of this book.” In my estimation, Frege’s insistence on the need for a Sinn/Bedeutung contrast and late
Russell’s attempt to dispense with it must be discussed by anyone who investigates thinking and speaking and their “objects.” Observe also that conversational exchange is given no role in the account. A quick way of making this
manifest is that, throughout the book, saying “no” is classified or explained
in terms of exercising the will, although it surely figures when answering
what linguists indeed peg as “yes/no questions.”
10. My hunch is that Anscombe’s remarks about “internal” and “external”
negation in her Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (see in Anscombe
pp. 31, 34, 35, 46, 47, 51), and her question (p. 53) “...Is the property of
being true or false, which belongs to the truth-functions, the very sam property as the property of being true or false that belongs to the propositions
whose internal structure does not interest us?” is what first prompted Brann
to make the question about the “location” of the negation particle thematic.
11. If we are both looking at the ocean and you say “Majestic!” my guess
that it is the ocean that is said to be majestic is pretty safe. That’s how I mean
“otherwise manifest.”
12. For the somewhat ampler statement of this Fregean type of analysis of
“simple” sentences which is the source of my remarks, see pp.132f,
Anscombe and Geach, Three Philosophers: Aristotle, Aquinas, Frege. Please
observe that although English, which has pretty nearly dropped the use of
case endings, tends to place the name of the topic early in the sentence,classical Greek and other languages that use case endings to express syntactic
structure may, for rhetorical purposes, place it late in the sentence. Note also
that nothing prevents a simple sentence’s having a “complex” topic, for
instance the ordered triple {Athena, Athens, this olive tree}, which is, on one
analysis, the topic of the sentence “Athena gave Athens this olive tree.” When
the topic is so identified, the predicate is “—gave—to—” When the item that
would, in Greek, be in the nominative case is singled out as the name of the
sentence’s topic, the predicate would be “—gave Athens this olive tree.”
What chiefly matters, from a Fregean logical point of view, is the contrast
between proper names (e.g. “Theaetetus”) and concept words (e.g “flies” or
“sits”) as in the sentences “Theaetetus flies” and “Theaetetus sits.” A person
who is unaware that the word “give” is trivalent and the word “fly” or “sit”
is monovalent hasn’t got the hang of the semantics of these concept words.
�100
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
MASCHLER
101
Cf footnote 11 below. See further Anthony Kenny’s Penguin volume about
Wittgenstein, pp. 121f.
question (p. 63) “Is Being at the true center of every sentence even if it is
obscured by a predicative verb?”
13. How “simple” is to be understood in this context is, of course, much in
14. In the spirit of Kantian “architectonic,” these ways of negating a sentence
are later (p. 95) brought to bear on lying, so as to yield a classificatory scheme
for lies.
21. I note that there’s a large dose of such “idealist” thinking in Freud’s essay
on negation: “the performance of the function of judgement is not made possible until the creation of the symbol of negation has endowed thinking with
a first measure of freedom from the consequences of repression and, with it,
from the compulsion of the pleasure principle.”
15. In the “dream theory” of Theaetetus 202 the mistake is to suppose that
22. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics Bk V, Ch.ll.
sentences consist of nothing but names; earlier, at 190, it looks as though sentences are being spoken of as consisting of nothing but predicate words. For
explicit correction of such “homogenizing” treatment of the constituents of
sentences, see Sophist 262.
23. Peter Geach’s essay “The Law of Exclude Middle” (p. 79, Logic
need of saying.
16. Does “doing logic”/“doing empirical science” exhaust the genus “investigation”? Brann would certainly question this bipartition.
17. “Perhaps the act of negating, which maintains a questionable existence
as the polar opposite of [affirmative] judging, is a chimerical construction,
formed by a fusing of the act of judging with the negation.” (p. 128 of Geach
and Black’s Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob
Frege, Oxford: Blackwell, 1952).
18. In footnote 54, on p. 69, Brann calls on Anscombe to testify that, as
Brann puts it, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, in “rejecting inquiry into
the way world, pictured fact, language, and thought are related” and “pretending that epistemology has nothing to do with the foundations of logic
and the theory of meaning,” made claims that are “fantastically untrue”
(Anscombe, Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, (London: Hutchinson
University Library, p. 28).
19. For example, and especially, Kant and Hegel.
20. This sentence continues, after a colon, as follows:”The briefest way to
put the reason why is that thinking speech brings its objects to a standstill
even as it goes about discerning them through their properties. The declarative is expresses at once that transfixing done by thought and the expansion
with which the object of thought responds.” The just cited explication of
Brann’s “introspective” report is tantamount to an affirmative answer to the
Matters, Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) contains a nice exposition of this thesis.
Geach, like Brann herself (e.g., p. 28), exploits Wittgenstein’s metaphor of
“logical space” and the notion of boundary for this purpose. Note, by the
way, that it would be a mistake to assimilate Wittgenstein’s logical space to
Brann’s psychic space, as she describes it on the opening pages of her Preface.
Studying Brann’s, Wittgenstein’s, and the cognitive scientist Gilles
Fauconnier’s uses of metaphors of space would be a delicate but worthwhile
undertaking.
24. See, e.g., What, Then Is Time?, p. 112ff. In other sections of Ways of
Naysaying Wittgenstein continues to be treated as the or a bad guy: He
would, as Brann reads him,want to prevent her and fellow philosophers from
investigating whether there is “some one truth behind [the] many appearances” of, in this instance, negativity (p. xiv and note 11 on p. xvii). In the
chapter on nihilism, Brann approvingly reports that Stanley Rosen has
“shown” that “‘Wittgenstein and his progeny are nihilists because they cannot distinguish speech from silence.’” After the brief quote from Rosen, she
goes on to say: “For [according to Wittgenstein] it makes no difference what
we say. It makes no difference because if, as the later Wittgenstein
says...speech becomes meaningful only in a context of gamelike rules and
conventions and as a ‘form of life,’ then we can never get beyond these and
never receive a sensible answer when we query a conventional usage or conventionalism itself ” (p. 183).
25. I was helped by Anscombe’s version of this last question, which runs as
follows: What right do logicians have to define “not” by telling us that “not
p” is “the proposition that is true when p is false and false when p is true”?
The phrase “the so- and- so” is, after all, legitimate only when there is a soand-so and there is only one such.
�102
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
26. Does this word (or its German equivalent), occur in Wittgenstein’s text?
27. It is a striking fact that only Aristotle’s treatment of “immediate inference” is taken up (footnote 7, p. 61) and “syllogizing” omitted. Note also that
in Chapter Three, when dealing with Russell’s account of Definite
Description, nothing is said about the need, in mathematical reasoning, for
the principle of “substitutivity of identicals” or the “principle of existential
generalization.” See Ausonio Marras’ Introduction to his anthology,
Intentionaliy, Mind, and Language (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1972) for some brief remarks about the latter two. When all is said and
done, Brann does not seem to be really interested in formal logic. This is how
I account for her not catching the slip in claiming that “In symbolic logic we
do not enter the propositions as we did in section 2, but take them as primitive, symbolized by p or q, etc.” (p. 43; cf p. 212). She certainly knows that
Frege’s treatment of quantification (analysis of the sense and use of such little words as “all”, “some”, “one,” which is needed for doing predicate calculus) is what is usually singled out as the true “advance” beyond premodern
logic; Stoic logic, though “pre-modern,” had already dealt with the definitions of the logical constants of propositional logic and with its basic argument patterns.
I look as though I’m being a pedant about the history of logic. But that’s really not what I care about. Rather, ever since the days that I heard the World
War II German soldiers who were entering Amsterdam, Holland, sing
“Denn wir alle lieben nur ein Madelein, Annemarie” I have wondered, “Should I feel sorry for that girl, Annemarie, burdened with being
loved by this whole troop of men? Or are there as many Annemarie’s as there
are men in this troop, and each of the girls gets one of the singing men? For
a fine essay on this topic, see Peter Geach’s “History of a Fallacy” in Logic
Matters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972).
28. I believe this means the not of contradiction.
29. I am not sure how “modern” is meant here: post-Occamist, that is postrealist (in the scholastic sense of that word)? I ask for clarification of the
adjective because I am not certain what, exactly, the systemic import of the
observation is. See footnote 23 on pp. 111ff. See also the remark about the
“inherent nihilism of an absolute nominalism” in her commentary on Wallace
Stevens’ poem “The Snow Man” and the continuation of this thought in her
interpretation of “The Course of a Particular,” p. 170. FootnoteA 3 on p. 199
MASCHLER
103
claims that “nominalism is one of the philosophical positions adopted by
those for whom disillusionment is a warrant of truth” and concludes with a
remark about the “fanatically honest.” These are, says Brann, the folk who
“take pride in shivering in the metaphysical cold.” The quoted passages
sound—what shall I call it?— dismissive to me. I wish there had been something more nearly like an explanation of what the nominalism/realism issue
is and why Brann favors the realists. Cf pp. 4-6 of W Stace, The
.T.
Philosophy of Hegel (New York: Dover, 1955)?
30. Artifacts no longer in use, like sliderules, or tools for living about which
we learn through literary remains but examplars of which have not been
encountered by archaeologists? I try more nearly to specify the question
because I am confused whether the general question of how we can speak or
think truly or falsely of kinds that are“bygones” is being raised or rather the
question how bygone individuals can be referred to? Cf Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations ¶79 about the many senses of “Moses did not
exist.” See also G.E.M. Anscombe and P Geach, Three Philosophers
.T.
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1973) pp. 135f about the importance of Frege’s reviving
the scholastic contrast between singular and universal propositions.
“Traditional” logic rides roughshod over the distinction. Geach’s essay “Perils
of Pauline” in Logic Matters is refreshingly lucid and unstuffy on the subject of names and descriptioons (and much else besides).
31. Cf. p. 100: ”What Russell says he means, flatly and irremediably, and
therefore he must be flatly and irremediably wrong: It cannot be the case that
what is said about and within fictions is false—unless one maintains that logically accurate speech has no correspondence with humanly normal speech.
For we say both that it is true and that it is true to life that Natasha Rostov
marries Pierre Bezuhov, and we want to keep on saying just that.”
32. See the splendid appreciation of the Raj Quintet in Brann’s contribution
to the anthology Poets, Princes, and Private Citizens edited by Joseph M.
Knippenberg and Peter Augustine Lawler (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield,
1996).
33. The special pleasure we take in our own children is not solely due to
their being ours; it has much to do with our knowing them better than most
other people’s children.
34. I worry a little about the rhetorical effects of using the words “pretend”
and “pretense” in lieu of “make believe.” But let that pass.
�104
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
35. The novelist Jorge Luis Borges writes somewhere, “[The actor] on stage
plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him
for that other person.” I acknowledge, however, that novels differ from stage
plays, involve (in addition to the things mentioned) some special a deux intimacy between the reader and the book.
36. See for example Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock Publications,
1971 and perhaps also some of the essays about Winnicottt included in the
collection edited by Grolnick and Barkin, Between Reality and Fantasy
(New York: Jason Arons, 1978). I particularly recommend Rosemary
Dinnage’s “A Bit of Light.”
37. As best I recall, Brann does not, when treating of “the lie in the soul” (p.
94), worry about what Freud called repression.
38. I was puzzled that Brann did not reserve space in her book to discuss the
important topic of children’s and grown-ups’ often being uncertain whether
this or that “really happened” and whether this or that named individual
(Satan, Cerberus) or species of entities (witches) “really exists” or not.
Helping children sort out the dreamt from what’s in the public world of the
awake is among our parental responsibilities. Thus “...does not exist” seems
to me to hold as important a story as is that about the being of non-beings.
39. Cf Epinomis 990 on that mere farmer’s almanac, Hesiod’s Works and
Days?. Parmenides reputedly was the first to propose that the moon shines
by the sun’s reflected light and that the earth is a sphere; also, that the
evening and morning stars are one and the same. I therefore keep hoping for
a reading of his poem that will show that its episteme/doxa contrast has
astronomical meaning. But no such reading is endorsed by Brann.
40. These sentences allude, of course, to Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’
Oedipus at Colonus. This well illustrates the dramatizing vividness of Brann’s
ontological discourse.
41. Cf The World of the Imagination p. 389ff. and Jacob Klein, Greek
Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (English version,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), p. 82 and A Commentary on Plato’s Meno
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), p. 114f.
42. Corresponding to the afternoon of the day on which Man was created,
male and female, in God’s image? Yes, of course I am joking in playing with
the numbers. But I am not just joking: The chapters in Genesis that tell in
MASCHLER
105
detail how man became man (chapters 2, 3, 4) hold a plethora of negation
words, whereas the opening chapter lacks all negativity.
43. If there is an explicitly stated definition of the word “nihilism” in
Chapter Six, I need to have it pointed out to me.
44. Cf. Eva Brann, “The Music of the Republic,” St. John’s Review, volume xxxix, numbers 1 and 2. Se especially pp. 75,6.
45. Cf. the discussion of “opinion” on pp. 38ff of “The Music of the
Republic.”
�106
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
107
The Potent Nonentity: A
review of Eva Brann’s What,
Then, is Time?
Torrance Kirby
Time, Augustine claims, is so ordinary as to be impossibly
difficult (Conf. XI.14). This is the paradoxical theme to which Eva
Brann returns often (one is tempted to say “time and again”) in her
remarkable, recently published volume What, Then, is Time? Time,
the “potent nonentity,” proves to be as elusive a quarry as the
Sophist himself. The inquiry begins with a high sense of wonder
peculiarly fitting in this of all philosophical quests. The inner experience of time and its foundation or ultimate ground, constitute the
heart of this investigation. Brann employs an extended, highly elaborated aporetic approach to the search for a definition. So numerous and complex are the poriai encountered that this Protean
beast is not pinned down with a definition until well into the closing chapter of the book. The investigation as a whole is composed
in the form of a diptych with one larger panel devoted to the study
of various selected texts or “presentations” by philosophers who, in
Brann’s estimation, “have written most deeply and most engagingly about time.” A second smaller panel contains the author’s own
“reflections” on the matter. She is careful to point out, “study and
thought, though not of necessity incompatible, are by no means the
same” (159). This book is worthy of the most careful reading with
both ends in view.
The predominance of the prolegomena in this investigation is
consistent with the spirit of much contemporary, postmodern
inquiry. Brann’s approach is underscored by the splendidly postrevolutionary claim that her purpose is “not to change the world
but to interpret it!” Viewed in another light, however, the methodology of this book is resonant with the very best ancient authors,
Eva Brann. What, Then, is Time? Lanham, MD. Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.
Torrance Kirby is an assistant professor at McGill University.
�108
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and its hermeneutical approach reminiscent of Aristotelian science.
The first part of the book, a study of earlier philosophical “presentations” of time, constitutes a “history” such as one finds at the
outset of many of Aristotle’s treatises. Brann’s study of the
attempts of her predecessors to define time is thus by no means any
ordinary history. Her extensive review of the preeminent contributions to the hermeneutics of time clarifies wonderfully the question concerning time and enables the reader to make the great
ascent from mere study to thought. In the “reflections” of the second part, Brann proceeds intrepidly to face the question “what,
then, is time?” head on.
Discussion of the “lisping” efforts of predecessors (Metaph.
A.1) in this chase turns out to be a daunting task. The relevant texts
range “from the hard to the hellishly hard,” as Brann puts it. As in
an Aristotelian “history,” the texts are selected with a view to clarification of certain key facets of the problem of definition. Four crucial theories about the nature of time are addressed through the
study of four pairs of philosophers. The originality of Brann’s
approach is striking. The unexpected pairings - Plato and Einstein,
Aristotle and Kant, Plotinus and Heidegger, Augustine and Husserl
- prove to be both inspired and illuminating. An important element
of Brann’s purpose in this approach is to demonstrate that the larger questions about the nature of time are themselves by no means
“time-bound.” By pairing the authors in this way Brann ensures that
the problem of definition predominates over less important considerations. The first approach to the theory of time, as exemplified by
the arguments of Plato’s Timaeus and Einstein’s Special Theory of
Relativity, proposes that time is “external,” namely that time refers
to external motions of which it is the measure, as in the case of a
clock’s measurement of the diurnal rotation of the sun. (The consideration of time as the “externality” of history and its movements
is mercifully ruled outside of the present inquiry.) In the cosmos of
Timaeus, time is the very intelligibility or “numbering” of the external motion of the visible heaven. As Brann puts it, this identification
of time with phenomenal motion continues to “bedevil” the dis-
KIRBY
109
course of physics. Einstein displays little interest in the essential
nature of time, but is absorbed rather by the question of quantifying time owing to complications arising from the implication of
temporality in locomotion. After the fashion of the hunt for the
wily Sophist in the Platonic dialogue of that name, the consequence
of this initial “presentation” of a definition of time is to introduce a
dichotomous division - namely between time in the world and time
in the soul - which is of considerable use to Brann in advancing her
own quest for an acceptable formulation. The boundaries have been
narrowed considerably by the exclusion of merely “external” time
as a fallacy.
Before proceeding to the presentations of internal time, Brann
examines a pair who propose highly speculative accounts of the
generation of time out of space. Hegel’s dialectical exposition of the
genesis of time out of space is put forward by Brann as possibly the
most profound of all treatments of “external” time. For Hegel, time
from its first genesis as a pure Becoming, behaves like incipient spirit (Geist): “Time is the Concept itself that is there and which presents itself to consciousness as empty intuition. For this reason Spirit
necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time just as long as it
has not grasped its pure Concept, that is, has not annulled Time”
(Phenomenology ¶ 801). Through a discussion of Bergson’s mission
to suppress “extensive space” in favour of “intensive time” Brann
effects a transition to the second principal stem, viz. internal time
or “time in the soul,” which is the general focus of the remaining
three pairs of texts in the series of presentations.
With her examination of the theories of Aristotle and Kant,
Brann arrives at the second crucial stem of the dichotomous division of time into the categories “external” and “internal.” Although
for Aristotle motion is properly the “substrate” of time, while conversely for Kant time is itself the ground of motion, both philosophers are “driven” to relate the notion of time to a “psychic counting.” As Aristotle says, “time is the number of motion” where
motion is understood as disclosing continuous magnitude. The
“truth” of time resides in the numbering or counting soul that meas-
�110
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ures the before and after of this magnitude. Time, according to this
presentation, is no longer viewed as an independent, “substantive”
reality or but is rather reduced to the status of an accident or predicate which exists “for thought.” For Brann, Kant’s treatment of
time displays a deep affinity with Aristotle’s on this more general
level. The internal sense of time, however, represents much more in
the Kantian metaphysics than ever dreamed of by Aristotle. For
Kant this psychic counting is perhaps the most intimate characteristic of humanity. Indeed Brann shows that Kant’s treatment of time
is most accessible when the Critique of Pure Reason is viewed as “a
new founding of human nature whose centre is time” (55).
Appearances may be removed from time but not the reverse, which
reveals that time, for Kant, is prior in the order of knowing; the
apprehension of change is understood to depend upon the a priori
intuition of time. In one of numerous penetrating aperçus scattered
throughout the discussion, Brann draws attention to Kant’s
nonetheless restricted view of our ability to know ourselves as temporal beings by reminding us of his low opinion of music. This, in
turn, is contrasted with Leibniz’s opposing exaltation of the unconscious counting of the soul in music as “a pleasure given to us by
God so that we may know of him; in music soul is revealed to itself
and God to it” (Principles of Nature and Grace ¶ 14).
In the subsequent paired “presentations” of Plotinus and
Heidegger, the inquiry proceeds to consider the “ground” of temporality—that is, of some higher, possibly transcendent source of
this inner sense of time. Thus the dichotomous division of the
“hunt” advances to a new level of precision. For both Plotinus and
Heidegger, as Brann shows, time constitutes the “deepest condition” for humanity. Plotinus identifies time with specifically
“human” being in its manifestations of a peculiarly ecstatic nature,
by the human’s attempt to escape the element of its temporal fallenness. The Soul’s very “appetite for things to come” (Enneads III.
7.4, 34) keeps her in her fallen state. Temporal being strives for salvation, viz. the overcoming of temporal “dispersion,” through
union with the eternal hypostasis above. Happiness, understood as
KIRBY
111
“the flight of the alone to the Alone,” is thus altogether outside
time, for it is no mere mood or emotion, but rather a fundamental
possibility for the soul, that of an undispersed present even beyond
being (Enneads I. 5.7, 15). Time is made explicable through eternity, its original ground. Although radically distinct from Plotinus
with respect to virtually the entire substantive content of his
thought, Martin Heidegger at least shares with Plotinus the supposition that temporality is the key to understanding human existence.
As a being whose essence is its existence, this ultimate ground is for
Heidegger not the transcendent eternity of the Plotinian Primal
Hypostasis, but rather the temporality of human being itself,
Dasein. The discussion stemming from this remarkable dialectical
pairing of Heidegger and Plotinus is particularly illuminating.
In chapter four Brann arrives at her final pairing of Augustine
and Husserl with the observation that no two philosophers are both
further apart and closer together. Through an examination of their
discourse on time as a temporal “stretching” of the soul (distensio,
as Augustine puts it), the argument—for it is indeed an argument—
acquires a distinctly sharper dialectical edge. The coincidence of
identity and difference in their thinking about time is uncannily
appropriate to their strongly dialectical approaches to the quest to
define time. According to Brann, while Augustine sifts through the
phenomena in search of existence and while Husserl neutralizes
existence in order to find the phenomena, both look within themselves for the phases of time, that is to say, for past, present, and
future. For both philosophers, Brann argues, the problem of “internal” time is not to be referred to a higher ontological ground for
resolution, as is the case with Plotinus, for example, but rather time
is to be understood as arising out of and discerned within the soul
or consciousness. Brann’s argument on this point is open to some
dispute, at least with reference to Augustine if not to Husserl.
Perhaps the device of pairing the presentations has led to a downplaying of Augustine’s affinity with Plotinus. It is common among
contemporary existential readings of Augustine to de-emphasise his
dependence upon Neoplatonic metaphysics. He begins his presen-
�112
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tation on time with the “in principio” of Genesis 1, the revelation
of the divine creative activity understood as totally beyond the temporal, narrative realm of human existence. In making his transition
in Confessions from Book X on memory to Book XI on time,
Augustine shifts gears as it were from looking within at the phenomena of consciousness to looking above at the higher ground of
the life of the soul, ab interiora ad superiora. The Creator, who is
altogether above the flux of becoming, is understood nevertheless
by Augustine to be present, knowing, and active within the temporal realm.
While temporal human existence, dispersed or “distended” as
it is through phases of past, present, and future, is to be contrasted absolutely with the undivided existence of “the One,” Augustine
finds nonetheless within the soul as imago dei a positive image of
the activity of God in creation. The enigma of the human experience of time is thus referred by Augustine to the exemplar of the
Trinity for resolution. In the psychological image of the Trinity—
memoria, intellectus, et voluntas—Augustine finds a model for his
reflection upon the experience of time as at once continuous and
without extension. He points to the chanting of a psalm as a potent
revelation concerning time. He reflects upon the recitation of a
song that he knows, Ambrose’s hymn Deus Creator Omnium. The
song is stored in memory, an already completed whole which the
soul intends to sing. Before singing, the soul’s expectation possesses the complete song. As the soul sings, the relation of expectation
to memory shifts syllable by syllable until the entirety of expectation has finally become a memory of the song as completed, as having been sung. Memory, presence, and expectation are united in
the song. Through the singing of praise, itself a mode of confession, Augustine begins to see how the timeless and the temporal
become one. Through song the soul is enabled to think the divine
object in the image, and this, Plotinus certainly would regard as the
most extreme absurdity. Thus, by “collecting” ourselves, we can
escape from our temporal constitution into God’s “standing Now,”
as Brann puts it, into eternity.
KIRBY
113
Brann concludes the part devoted to presentations of time with
an extensive and complex analysis of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological treatment of internal time-consciousness. The text of
Husserl’s Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins we
owe, Brann tells us, to Edith Stein’s supererogatory editing of various manuscripts and notations. By way of a background sketch,
Brann offers a helpful introduction to Phenomenology itself and
looks at the influence of Augustine, William James, and Franz
Brentano on Husserl’s reflections upon time. Husserl is particularly
engaged with the problem of integrating the phases of time. Brann
claims that he in fact “solves the problem of relating the present, the
moment of primary perception to its immediate retentional past
and protentional future by giving a model for the orderly sinking
away of perceptions and their intertwining with present consciousness” (160). With Husserl, the presentations have in a certain sense
come around full circle. Husserl brings his account of time to completion by reconstituting “external” time in the form of an absolute
temporal flux which transcends the temporal phenomena of internal time-consciousness and which is, moreover, the underlying principle which sustains human subjectivity. As Brann concludes,
Husserl’s ultimate temporal flux is “a very nearly inarticulable final
fact” (156).
In the Second Part of the book, titled “Reflections,” Brann purports to finally face the question “What, then, is time?” (The claim
that the “Presentations” are a mere exercise in “study” and that
only now, in the final pages is she going to roll up her sleeves and
get down to the serious business of “thought” seems not entirely
ingenuous. Already a good deal of hard thinking has gone into
both the pairing itself and the ordering of the pairs, all of which
serves to advance the quest for a definition.) The reflections proceed with a consideration of certain formal similarities between
time and the faculty of imagination - here, once again, is the
Sophist and the wedding of Being and Nonbeing. Brann shows that
images present a relatively constant picture, viz. Being and
Nonbeing in fusion, while time, on the other hand, is a flux of
�114
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
“Being as passing over into Nothing and Nothing as passing over
into Being” (Hegel, Phil. of Nature ¶ 259). Time and imagination
are thus connected with one another through the way Being is
related to Nonbeing in both temporal process of becoming and in
images. As might well be expected, Brann offers a fascinating comparison of these concepts by building upon her previous exploration of the faculty of imagination.2
There follows Brann’s own interpretation of the phases of time
together with their appropriate faculties: past and memory, future
and expectation, present and perception. Throughout, she draws
upon the foregoing presentations of time by the philosophers which
provide both the categories and a vocabulary which enable Brann to
penetrate the question deeply and swiftly. This section of the book
is a wonderful demonstration of the dictum of Bernard of Chartres
who claimed to be able to see things far off by virtue of “standing
on the shoulders of giants.” In an interesting and frequently amusing section Brann proceeds to analyse various “time pathologies” as
forms of “phase-fixation.” Here we have an opportunity to reflect
on aspects of time’s “brutal tyranny,” e.g. the contemporary idolatry of novelty, a fixation on the “just now,” the trivialising of the
past in nostalgia or the future obsession of the IT phenomenon.
Brann even reviews cures for these time-induced pathologies such
as that offered by Nietzsche in his teaching on the Eternal
Recurrence of the Identical. Brann counters this frantic cycle of
reincarnation with another, much more attractive option, namely
the concept of Aevum, as manifest in the sempiternity of the angels
in heaven or, alternatively, in the fictional temporality of the novel.
All of this is delightful. Brann recommends the cultivation of “aeveternity” as at least “a partial relief for our temporal ills.”
In the last chapter of the book Brann moves closer to the final
struggle with the definition of time by way of a via negativa. Here
time is finally unveiled as the potent, indeed tyrannical, non-entity.
The revealing is apophatic. Time is not external motion, nor is it an
abstraction from process. It is not a power or force, nor a “fungible
substance” (i.e. time is not even money!). Time is certainly not a
KIRBY
115
mere linguistic usage. As Brann succinctly puts this point,
“Language can guide thought but it cannot constrain it.” (Brann
notes in passing how neatly the distinctions of philosophical inquiry
concerning time seem to turn up in the problems of linguistics.)
Time is not Dasein. Whereas Heidegger regards human finitude as
ultimately expressed in the fact our mortality, that our existence is
“destined” to end, Brann counters optimistically that human finitude is better sought in the fact that we begin, “we do not temporalize ourselves; we are born temporal.” Time is no determinate
being; it is not perceived by the senses, it is without external effects,
and elusive to insight. Time is therefore a non-entity. Though
apparently nothing, time’s “not-being” is nonetheless very powerful
(although, be it noted, not “a power”). “What, then, is time?” Here
the argument finally shifts from marked apophasis to a more kataphatic note. The affirmative definition comes in nine-fold form (a
touch which no doubt would have pleased Pythagoras). It is not this
reviewer’s intent, however, to spill the beans. In order to reap the
full benefit of Brann’s final, dramatic unmasking of Time—to be
altogether “present” as it were at the capture of this elusive beast—
readers are well advised to follow the leader of the hunt herself
along the trail through all its intricate twists and turns. And who
indeed are the intended participants in this quest? Brann recommends her book to anyone who longs to learn about time by pursuing the quest described above, to aficionados, to students who
seek to come to grips with some of the primary texts on time, and
finally to teachers who might be on the look-out for some tips on
selections for a syllabus on the interpretation of time. This is an
unusually difficult book whose author challenges the reader to “take
note” and whose rewards are proportionate to the investment of
careful, punctuated attention.
NOTE:
�116
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
1. See Eva Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991).
117
The Feasting of Socrates
Eva Brann
Before reviewing Peter Kalkavage’s Focus Press translation of
the Timaeus for the St. John’s community, I must, in all fairness,
confess my partiality. He, Eric Salem, and myself were the cotranslators of Plato’s Phaedo and his Sophist for the same publisher.
Together, over several years, we worked out some principles of
translation which are discernible in this Timaeus version. In fact, I
think the three of us would welcome with some glee the notion of
a St. John’s school of translation. For we wanted to be working very
much with the spirit of the Program and a possible use by our students in mind. We thought that translations of Plato should render
word for word, even particle for particle, with the greatest exactitude, what the Greek said, avoiding all interpretative paraphrase,
craven omissions, and latter-day terminology. But we also stipulated that they should catch the idiomatic expressiveness and the
changing moods of the original. These principles are clearly at work
in this rendering of the Timaeus.
We learned as well, however, that each dialogue is a unique universe of discourse, the artful representation of an inquiry with its
own approaches, terms, settings, and above all its own participants,
each of whom is in a mood specific to this never-to-be-repeated, yet
ever-to-be-continued conversation. Thus it follows that the Timaeus
made its own particular demands on the translator. It is, after all,
less a dialogue than a short tale of antiquity by Critias followed by
an account of the cosmos by Timaeus—a long one. The familiar
voice of Socrates falls almost silent as these speeches are made to be
a feast for his enjoyment—or, perhaps, amusement. Timaeus’s cosmology is full of the sort of technical matter Socrates does not scruple to spoof in the Republic—the very dialogue which establishes
the sort of ideal city that his companions agree to bring to moving
life for him by giving it its historical and cosmological setting.
Peter Kalkavage, Plato’s Timaeus. Newburyport, MA: The Focus Philosophical Library (2001).
�118
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Timaean cosmology involves not only the moving spheres and circles that bear the astronomical bodies and the geometric elements
from which they are constituted, but also the musical “harmonies”
(scales) that ensoul the heavens. Three beautifully clear appendices
provide the reader—and this edition is meant for the “adventuresome beginner”—with the fairly elementary knowledge needed to
enjoy this heavenly entertainment. It should be said, though, that
the cosmological astronomy of the Timaeus together with its sober
mathematical exposition in Ptolemy’s Almagest was the serious science that stood behind the New Astronomy of the dawn of modernity. (There is a story—I cannot vouch for its truth—that in the
early days of the St. John’s Program books of astronomy and
physics were to be found in the library ranged under “Music,” courtesy of the Timaeus.) The dialogue is so full of Greek science that
there is a danger of regarding it as a source of antiquarian problems.
But, the translator observes in his Preface, that is the very danger,
the one of reducing the cosmos to a collection of mummified facts
and recondite puzzles, to which the Egyptian priests are said to fall
prey. So less is more by way of learned exegesis, and the well-illustrated appendices give just enough to make the dialogue intelligible
to an amateur.
Since I’ve started at the back, let me say that here too you will
find an English to Greek glossary. The entries tell not only how a
Greek word is translated and, if more than one translation has to be
used, why that is necessary, it also gives the root or central meaning
and others that flow from it. In sum, the entries are a pretty interesting lesson in philosophic Greek.
To go to the front end of the book, there is, besides the Preface,
the Introductory Essay. The Timaeus, the only Platonic dialogue
known in medieval times and in all epochs the most influential one
among those philosophers to whom the constitution of the cosmos
was of central interest, is also, in Peter Kalkavage’s words, “the
strangest of Plato’s dialogues. It is so strange that one wonders
whether anything can be taken seriously . . . . [It] is strange not only
to us but also in itself.” The Introduction is intended to illuminate
BRANN
119
that strangeness without dispelling it. The odd but necessary question is pursued: What is the Timaeus about? Socrates is all dressed
up (kekosmenos) and in a strange mood. He gives a truncated, philosophy-free version of his Republic and asks to be told about this
stripped-down political blueprint mobilized to go to war. The
resulting verbal feast prepared for him among the three eminent
men who are present (one mysterious fourth is absent) has an oddly
skewed relation to the truth and the love of wisdom that are
Socrates’ normal preoccupation, for it is presented as a “likely
story,” and a story of likenesses, the way of being that is so dubious
for Socrates.
The festivity begins with Critias’s retelling of an antiquarian
tale about archaic Athens as told by the Egyptian priests to the visiting lawgiver of Athens, Solon. We hear that this old Athens,
ancient even to the ancients, once defeated a huge and sinister
island empire called Atlantis.* Critias thus presents a pseudo-historical Athens as the embodiment of a “pale image” of the Republic.
There is plenty to puzzle about in this beginning.
For this city Timaeus supplies the cosmic setting; we are invited to wonder how fitting it is. A divine craftsman appears out of
nowhere and makes the cosmos, the well-ordered beautiful world,
in the image of an original model. Hence the cosmos has two wonderful features. It is a copy and thus, while imperfect in its being,
capable of being in turn a model, as it indeed is in the dialogue. And
second, it is intelligible, interpretable, not only as an intentionally
made work of art, but as en-, or rather, circum-souled. For whereas the human animal has its soul within, the cosmos is encompassed
by bands of soul matter. All these wonderful and significant doings
can be read in the dialogue, but the Introduction brings out their
thought-provoking strangeness and their relevance to our humanity.
Thus after the cosmic construction there is a harsher “Second
Founding.” It has an elusive “wandering cause,” the “source of
power as opposed to goodness”—an intra-cosmic, semi-intractable
cause called “necessity” acting in a scarcely intelligible theater of
�120
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
operation, space. Within it arise body and the human animal: “The
making of man for Timaeus is a pious desecration,” says the
Introduction. It is delegated by the Craftsman-father to his starsons.
This part of the Timaeus, the coming-to-be of organic life within the cosmos, is so weird that our undergraduates aren’t even asked
to read it, yet Peter Kalkavage shows how to begin to make humanly applicable sense of it.
Finally he returns to the question: “Why is the greatest philosophical work on the cosmos framed by politics?” An answer is suggested: The frame signals Plato’s reflection on what happens when
the Socratic search for truth is replaced by a Timaean will to order.
But this shift to the constructive will might well stand for the revolution that initiated our modernity. The means to this new age are
also adumbrated in this miraculous dialogue; in his final assessment
of the Timaeus Peter Kalkavage says that “the likely story presents
the paradigm of what it would mean to use mathematical structures
to make flux intelligible—at least as intelligible as possible.”
Twenty-one centuries later the calculus will perfect these structures,
and so the science by which we live and which Plato has prefigured
will really take off. Read this introduction to get a sense of what it
means for a work to be great, to see deep into things and far into
time.
But better yet, read the splendid translation framed by the valuable apparatus. It is trustworthy; it sticks close to the text, word for
word. But it is also readable—not translaterese but good, lively, and
flexibly intoned English, since faithfulness in translation includes
preserving something of the literary quality of the original. This dialogue in particular is, for all the wild exuberance of its philosophical imagination, written in fresh, plain Greek, though plain terms
are often put to novel uses.—Would you expect to find Being,
Becoming, Same, Other, ordinary words with a gloss of high philosophy, in a cosmological context? Perhaps the best example is the
divine Craftsman. As the translator points out in the glossary, the
Greek word, which has passed into English as “demiurge,” merely
BRANN
121
means a skilled worker available for orders from the public, so it
was just right to preserve that sense with the plain English word. To
help with background knowledge, there are lots of footnotes right
on the page.
Here’s my recommendation, then: We have all these wonderful
alumni seminars around the country. Why not devote one here and
there to a reading of the Timaeus?—And perhaps some participants
might take advantage of Peter Kalkavage’s translation (which is,
incidentally, purposely inexpensive). I’d love to come and help, and
so, I imagine, would he.
*I can’t resist a footnote.
In our own last century, there have been droves of people,
many of them now active, who have fallen into Plato’s antiquarian
trap and gone in search of this lost continent. The description of the
island, which enormous geometrically planned public works have
transformed into something formidably awful, is set out in the dialogue Critias. Its Speer-like architecture (Speer was Hitler’s architect) appealed to the Nazis, whose mythmakers represented Atlantis
as an early Nordic utopia, to be rediscovered by state-sponsored
archaeologists. These people had at least got it right with respect to
the scariness of the drawn-and-quartered, brass-walled locale. Most
modern representations, be they in books, songs, or movies (of
which Disney’s “Atlantis” is the latest) are governed by the mistaken notion that Atlantis was meant to be a lost place of marvels and
beauties, a sort of mid-ocean Shangri-la. It’s actually a totalitarian
topography, the triumph of the will over nature.
�
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 St. John's Review</em>
Description
An account of the resource
<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
thestjohnsreview
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
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.
121 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
The St. John's Review, 2002/2
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2002
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Russell, George
Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Carey, James
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Phillips, Blakely
Sachs, Joe
David, Amirthanayagam
Berns, Lawrence
Maschler, Chaninah
Kirby, Torrance
Description
An account of the resource
Volume XLVI, number two of The St. John's Review. Published in 2002.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_46_No_2
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
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
St. John's Review
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bb96bd74b34266bcaeac10c3dd7c1785.pdf
978cc58d894991e55808611e285ead6a
PDF Text
Text
The St. John's Review
Volume XLVII, number one (2003)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
James Carey
Beate Ruhm von Oppen
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Justin Castle
The St. John's Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John's College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Harvey Flaumenhaft, Dean. For those not on the
distribution list, subscriptions are $15.00 for three issues,
even though the magazine may sometimes appear semiannually rather than three times a year. Unsolicited essays, stories,
poems, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review, St. John's College, P.O. Box 2800,
Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at
$5 .00 per issue, from the St. John's College Bookstore.
©2003 St. John's College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John's Public Relations Office and the St. John 's College Print Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
Philosophy and Resurrection:
The Gospel According to Spinoza ................................. 5
John Cornell
What Tree is This?: In Praise of Europe's Renaissance
Printers, Publishers and Philologists ......................... ... 39
Chaninah Maschler
The Empires of the Sun and the West ... ....................... 83
Eva Brann
Plato's Timaeus and the Will to Order......... ........ .... .. 13 7
Peter Kalkavage
�4
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�5
i
Philosophy and Resurrection:
The Gospel according to
Spinoza
John F. Cornell
Many years ago, as a student in a course on philosophy, I
wrote the obligatory essay on David Hume's theory of causality, laying out his famous criticism of the principle of cause
and effect taken as a ground for metaphysical knowledge. I
gave my draft to a typist, as was common before the days of
computerized word processing. I recall my annoyance when I
received back the typed version of my paper on Hume's idea
of cause. The title read: "David Hume on Casual
Relationships." Now I understand that the Scottish philosopher enjoyed himself in the salons of Paris as much as any
foreign visitor, and that the new title had some potential as a
line of research. But that was not the paper I had written; and
so I had to insist that my typist correct a good hundred references to "casual connections" and the like, to express the
more philosophical affair of causality.
This correction of my academic essay recurred to me
recently in reading the books of Spinoza. It recurred to me
because this transformation of "casual" into "causal experience" seemed a perfect summary of the philosophical life as
Spinoza understood it. While Hume, the skeptic, saw our
minds' ideas somewhat as my typist had, with no great
distinction between the casual and the causal, Spinoza made
much of the difference. He taught that "casual experience,"
where things merely happen to us, is our lowest level of
awareness. If we do not wish to live and think merely at
random, we have to raise our minds above the accidents of
existence that have generated our opinions and pursue the
John Cornell is a tutor at the Santa Fe campus of St. John's College. This
essay was delivered as a lecture in Santa Fe in October 11, 2002.
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
deeper reasons for things, the causal necessities inherent in
Nature . We have to replace our vague notions with what
Spinoza calls "adequate ideas," ideas manifesting their logical
power in the comprehensive order of thought.1 The distinction between casual and causal thinking thus marks for him
the two endpoints of the steep path that leads from mere
opinion or collective belief to wisdom.
The departure point of belief that Spinoza generally has
in mind is biblical religion. He holds that the foundation of
all adequate ideas is the idea of God. But he deems the stories
of the Bible to reflect a natural, in-adequate opinion about
deity and the divine rewards and punishments. The God
whose special providence in human history is described in
Scripture is a casually received notion answering to imagination. Spinozist philosophy, however, revises the idea of God,
understanding God as the one Substance conceived in and
through itself. He finds it necessary to revise other biblical
concepts, too-the "love of God," "divine decree," "blessedness," "salvation" and "true religion." Judaism and
Christianity take these ideas in an inadequate sense, whereas
his philosophy assigns them their proper meaning. Now we
know few details about the early thinking of Spinoza, which
led to his expulsion from the Synagogue in 1656. But we
might deduce that his original confrontation with orthodoxy
arose from his radical redefinition of religious language to
make its primary object purely philosophical.
Spinoza comes to rewrite the European treaty between
philosophy and faith on similar terms. He reverses the
doctrine of Thomas Aquinas that the truths of religion are
above human reason, and teaches that it is the philosopher
who knows true blessedness. What the religious believer
believes is a shadow of what the serious thinker thinks (53).
This teaching entails a unique, philosophical view of the
Gospel, which I shall try to explain by looking at Spinoza's
understanding of the idea of resurrection.
�CORNELL
7
In general, Spinoza's achievement resembles that of the
navigators who sought a new route to the East Indies and
incidentally discovered America. In the course of re-negotiating the relation of faith and philosophy, and arguing for the
separation of church and state, Spinoza incidentally founded
modern biblical criticism.2 Most scholarly explorations of the
Bible today take place on the spiritual continent that he
discovered. Yet what may be particularly significant for us in
the 21st century, as we study his view of the New Testament,
is the difference between him and present-day students of
Scripture. The difference lies in this paradox of Spinoza's
thought-that, as an interpreter of the Bible, he is more radical and rational than our contemporaries, but at the same
time he is a more considerate and humane advocate of biblical religion.
Spinoza and Present-day New Testament Scholars
I should begin by clarifying this claim about Spinoza's superiority. When one walks into an urban bookstore today, one
finds shelves upon shelves of books of the latest biblical
research, books disputing the Old and New Testaments as
creditable texts and traditions. Few of the more popular of
these writers hold anything sacred except what goes by the
name of "scientific history." On our topic, the rising from the
dead, we might find a book-length debate entitled Jesus'
Resurrection: Fact or Figment, or a video of a lecture with the
subtitle "The Greatest Hoax in History?" The blend of vulgarity and sophistication in these scholars is striking. But one
should also be on the lookout for the bad conscience betrayed
sometimes in their prose. For the majority of them are exreligionists who have not thought their way to any sound philosophy or even to a learned ignorance.3 As a result many of
them indulge guiltily in the destruction of traditional biblical
faith, while they themselves are unable to replace it with any
comparably profound vision of life, a vision that might continue to bind people to community and meaningful activity.4
�8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Spinoza, by contrast, writes the Theological-Political
Treatise in the Latin of the learned, and further specifies that
he only addresses philosophers. Even so, he is cautious about
disclosing his boldest thoughts. While driving his stake into
the heart of religious fanaticism (and this in the service of
religion), he refrains from explicit criticism of the founding
miracles of either Judaism or Christianity, the revelation to
Moses on Mt. Sinai or Jesus' Resurrection. Publicly he
respects these miracles as constitutive of particular religious
faiths. In human terms, what matters about the Resurrection
is not the literal fact of the event (which, as we'll see, Spinoza
does not believe). What matters is what the Resurrection
means spiritually and practically to people as an idea. This
distinction corresponds to the general distinction he makes
between the truth of the Bible as a factual account of the
world and what the text's language means (91)5. For Spinoza,
biblical science could establish the essential thing for faith,
the meanings of scriptural texts, which converge in their
moral message. But believers would be mistaken to try to
establish the factual truth of, say, the miraculous events in the
history of salvation (52, 85). Establishing truth always leads
to questions of a philosophical sort. Spinoza would have
considered our contemporaries, continually testing religious
"facts" (like Creation or the Resurrection) through scientific
research and debates, as rather too literal-minded-as misunderstanding the aims of both Scripture and science.6
What Spinoza thought decided the question of religion
vs. philosophy was not the persuasiveness of some research
but the attractiveness of a particular way of life (38). This is
a point that few present-day Bible scholars understand,
perhaps because they have not made such a choice and are
neither full-fledged philosophers nor whole-hearted believers. For Spinoza, as I said, philosophers are committed to
thinking beyond accepted beliefs to a comprehension of the
whole. But most people (including philosophers in their
youth) require the support that traditional belief gives their
�CORNELL
9
efforts to live good lives. This distinction between the
philosopher and the believer-the distinction that today's
Bible scholars ignore-is important for the way it enters into
Spinoza's understanding of the New Testament and makes it
so exceptional. He holds that this distinction between the
freedom of philosophy and the natural necessity of religion is
the key to understanding Jesus. Jesus counts as a philosopher
precisely because his thinking was distinct from the religion
he taught (55,146,148). It is even reported by Spinoza's
confidant Ehrenfried von Tschirnhaus that Spinoza held Jesus
to be the "consummate philosopher." "Christum ait fuisse
summum philosophum. "7
Now one might object that such a view of the founder of
Christianity only shows Spinoza's bias. His enterprise is to
impose a naturalistic viewpoint upon the Bible and its
miracles. Of course he would project his own rationalistic
mind back onto Jesus, just as he overrates Solomon's wisdom
and Moses' political craft. Moreover, the objector might ask,
how do the rationalized heroes of Bible history that Spinoza
imagines result from his own rule of interpretation, of strictly adhering to the book? Yet Spinoza would remind his critic
that he defends the rights of reason against religion on scriptural grounds. He does not just reduce miracles through a
systematic naturalism. He argues that theology has made
more out of miracles than the Bible intended (78-79, 85-86) .
Europeans took the "miraculous," which is largely an idiom
in biblical poetry, as literal truth (17, 80-4).8 Spinoza's rules
for biblical interpretation only generalize this check on
anachronistic practices (89). So long as scholars proceed
through apt comparisons and with linguistic sensitivity, they
are free to interpret the Bible rationally and speculatively (57,
78, 82, 85, 92, 94-101, 158-9, 162-3). Spinoza's rule of
establishing scriptural teaching systematically from Scripture
itself is a guide for historical accuracy (86, 90-2), not an
excuse for literalism. He is far from underestimating the
Bible's intellectual power,9 and that is all his reading of Jesus
�10
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
insists upon. Spinoza discerns a bold philosophical mind
behind the Gospel texts, bolder than theologians might imagine. He only conceals the full import of his view of Jesus, for
he has no desire whatsoever to disturb the beliefs of ordinary
believers. He would simply indicate to philosophical readers
that the Gospel's historic power is no miracle to one
acquainted with the power of philosophy. Today's "quest for
the historical Jesus," forever entangled in religious controversy, was not only anticipated by Spinoza but also concluded by him to his own satisfaction. Jesus was a thinkera thinker with a new program, as we shall see.
Jesus' New Idea of Salvation according to Spinoza
Let us look more closely at the Treatise with this problem of
Jesus in mind. At the foundation of the Treatise is a distinction between philosophical or causal knowledge of nature
and the knowledge revealed to the prophets that they teach
to everyone. Now bear in mind that the Treatise teaches that
all knowledge is divine, and that prophetic knowledge may
simply duplicate natural knowledge under another form (9).
That leaves us to wonder what the genuinely prophetic
knowledge is, that might be unexplainable in any natural
terms. This question will play a subtle role in Spinoza's
interpretation of Jesus-or "Christ," to use the name Spinoza
chooses. Only on one point will it turn out that Christ has
characteristically prophetic knowledge. I promise to come to
that shortly. The greatest part of Christ's wisdom is simply
natural. Spinoza teaches that God communicates to philosophical minds naturally without mediation, and that
Scripture exhibits Christ's communication with God to be
like that-a direct intellectual intuition, "mind to mind" (14 ).
Although Spinoza never puts it so bluntly, Christ appears to
be specifically a Spinozist philosopher, since he assigns Christ
the indispensable credentials for philosophy according to
Spinoza's other writings. Christ perceived the things revealed
to him truly and adequately and he taught these things, at
�CORNELL
11
least to his disciples, as eternal truths rather than as laws
designed for the good of human beings (55-6).
Now, in declaring Christ's knowledge to be "true and
adequate," Spinoza refers us to Jesus' parables of the kingdom and to Matthew 13 in particular. Here Spinoza hit the
bull's-eye. In Matthew 13, Jesus addresses to the crowd parables of "things hidden since the foundation of the world."
Then, taking the disciples to private quarters, he restates the
speech, but with subtle verbal omissions and substitutions. It
can be argued-though we will not do so here-that this private speech of Jesus on what he calls scandal explains the
essential enmity that motivates the behavior of groups and
individuals.lO Spinoza's claim for Jesus' higher knowledge has
good scriptural support.ll The Gospel actually shows Jesus
adapting an obscure wisdom to the unschooled multitude
(55).
Spinoza thus discovers in Christ not a Savior sent to take
away the sins of humankind-at least not in the mysterious
theological sense-but a sage attempting to enlighten the
mass of humanity. Similarly, Spinoza wonders about the
import of certain remarks by the apostle Paul. Why does Paul
regularly state in his epistles that he is adapting his language
for ordinary human comprehension? Why does he say openly that it is not possible to say everything openly? Why does
Paul speak of having the mind of Christ, referring ambiguously to a spirit of knowledge as well as to a more encompassing spiritual renewal? (56) Much takes place in the New
Testament, in Spinoza's view, as if Jesus and some of his
disciples spoke the scriptural language of redemption as an
idiom to capture the imagination of the Gentile world without the world being able to realize just how ambiguous that
idiom might be.
Now at the heart of the Bible's mission to the Gentiles is
the teaching of "true virtue." Spinoza considers the demonstration of the "divinity" of Scripture to hang upon the truth
of its moral doctrine (90). But let us beware. Since all knowl-
�12
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
edge is divine, the Bible's "divinity" can prove nothing about
its special, supernatural source. Moreover if, as Spinoza
insists, the study of the Bible only yields what its language
means and not the truth of what it says, then only a philosopher can demonstrate its divinity through its true moral
doctrine. For only the philosopher can compare biblical
teaching to a true account of morality-like Spinoza's Ethics,
which derives the social virtues from first principles (51,
58).12 The Treatise proceeds as if the divinity of Scripture
were established by anyone and from Scripture alone, since
Scripture has to tell us what its idea of true virtue is (90). But
this procedure only tests the reader's mettle. Spinoza also
teaches that how much the reader sees into the truth of the
Bible, as truth, depends on how much reason there is in the
reader (101). Later he turns this question of the method of
discerning biblical truth into a question about the historical
origin of that truth in reason. The Apostles themselves, he
tells us, depended on a related method of rational deductions.
He says darkly that they drew many conclusions from whatever Christ revealed to them, and that they could well have
disclosed a few things but they declined to do so (146) .13
Now surely the apostles and prophets could not have
relied upon pure reason for their doctrine of God. For, in
teaching humanity about God's Providence, they attribute to
God affections such as love and forgiveness; whereas unaided philosophical reason cannot recognize the attribution of
feeling to God (166-7). Thus the teaching about God's care,
which is indispensable to the moral effort of most everyone,
reaches people through sacred Writ. Yet, according to
Spinoza, the Bible's view of Providence is not definite. He
claims that the Bible does not teach "formally" in what way
precisely God cares for all those who worship him and
practice good works (93). Scripture allows for both a popular idea of God's relation to humanity and a purely rational
idea (163). God may be taken as the exemplar of good life
because he has a just disposition (popular conception), or
�CORNELL
13
because we see by means of God what is true and just (philosophical conception). God may direct human affairs by giving
commandments or by letting some men discover natural laws
as "eternal truths" (168, cf. 56).
Now if knowledge of the way God directs the world is
not the specialty of the prophets, is not the distinctive knowledge for which we can rely on them, then what is their claim
to superior vision? Spinoza's answer-which he has presupposed throughout his discussion-is given in Chapter 15. The
essential prophetic insight is this, that those without understanding may be saved-the salvation of the ignorant.
Scripture not only teaches true virtue and obedience to all
human beings, whether they are philosophers or not, but it
also teaches that everyone may be saved. People without any
genuine understanding, indeed people with mistaken ideas
(say, about how Providence really works), if they practice
charity and justice, can achieve blessedness. Now the reader
of the Treatise must be aware that in Chapter 4 Spinoza
defines "blessedness" as the knowledge of God. Our true
salvation, our "supreme good" is philosophical knowledge, of
which God is the totality (51-2). So serious is Spinoza about
the philosopher's blessedness, that at one point he identifies
the Holy Spirit itself as the rational spirit of truth, regardless
even of how the prophets and historians of the Scriptures
expressed or experienced it (95). But in Chapter 15, he
redefines the Holy Spirit in a way that takes it to be clearly
accessible to all, not just to philosophers or the God-filled
prophets. Here he calls the Holy Spirit the peace of mind
resulting from "good actions" (177). On this view everyone,
even people with no learning at all, may be "saved."
From page one of the Treatise Spinoza has assumed an
uncompromising philosophical standpoint in looking at the
Bible. Wisdom for him is the gold standard of "salvation." In
Chapter 15 he presents almost as a philosophical curiosity the
idea that people without wisdom can be "saved." But this
curiosity happens to constitute the distinguishing feature of
�14
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
biblical revelation (175-77). And such a feature of revelation
must affect, in particular, Spinoza's account of Christianity, as
Christianity is a teaching addressed to all humankind. Now if
we turn back to Chapter 1, and to that one point on which
(as I said earlier) Christ's knowledge surpassed ordinary
philosophy, I believe we shall see how Spinoza implicated
Christ in this business of the salvation of the ignorant:
A man who can perceive by pure intuition that
which is not contained in the basic principles of
our cognition and cannot be deduced therefrom
must needs possess a mind whose excellence far
surpasses the human mind. Therefore I do not
believe that anyone has attained such a degree of
perfection surpassing all others, except Christ. To
him God's ordinances leading men to salvation
were revealed, not by words or by visions, but
directly (14)
Now the attribution to Christ of an intuition of what is not
encompassed by human cognition surely makes Christ superhuman. So one might have thought. But there is a verbal subtlety here, which the English translations obscure. Spinoza's
text does not use the term "human" as a positive description
of "mind," except in this passage. Instead, it plainly states
early on that "mind," meaning the thinker's experience of
certitude, is divine (1 0). Hence saying that Christ has a mind
"far surpass[ing] the human mind" does not place Christ
above philosophers. In fact, when Spinoza first uses this
expression, "far surpassing" (Ionge excellentiore),14 it is to say
that all mental intuition surpasses by far our grasp of words
(10). The only superiority Spinoza grants to Christ is one of
degree-as this translation has it, he "attained such a degree
of perfection." Spinoza goes on to specify that Christ received
by direct intuition "the ordinances leading men to salvation"
(14 ). This is a valuable clue to Christ's particular excellence,
but the reader cannot appreciate it until he or she reads later,
�CORNELL
15
in Chapter 15, that the one biblical idea above philosophy is
the salvation of people who are ignorant but righteous (174).
Retrospectively the implication is clear. Christ's "higher"
intuition, formerly unknown to philosophy, was the insight
that confirmed and expanded the prophets' teaching
(cf. 224). Christ saw that all ignorant but righteous people in
the world could be saved.15
The reader who discerns Spinoza's hypothesis about
Christ must apply it to a rereading of the Treatise in order to
realize its full implication. Spinoza claims Jesus for philosophy because he sees him as universalizing the Hebraic mission
of saving the unlearned (79). He sees him as recasting biblical
beliefs so that they apply to every soul independently of political context-inspiring in all people a faithful way of life that
resembles the conduct of the wise (161). Spinoza hints in
chapters 4, 5 and 11 that Jesus' popular teaching was a philosophical contrivance (55, 67-8, 146), and in chapter 13 that
such a contrivance was not in fact unknown to the prophets
(158, 169). Then in chapter 14 he derives by rational deductions a popular religion-including the indispensable but
non-philosophical precepts about God's love and forgiveness-a religion that happens to correspond to the Gospel. In
this religion, he says, a believer whose heart is inspired by the
love of God "knows Christ according to the spirit" (167).
The faithful person can "know" Christ without actually
participating (like the philosopher) in Christ's knowledge.
Spinoza's points all add up. Jesus reasoned out a general,
interior gospel on the conviction that the ignorant could be
saved. He taught what all people should do and believe in
order to experience an inward blessedness like that of the
philosopher (177)16.
A tentative sketch of the founder of Christianity as
Spinoza saw him begins to come into focus. While both the
Hebrew prophets and the philosophers of late antiquity had
glimpsed the possibility of improving human accord and thus
the fortunes of wisdom in the world, pagan polytheism had
�16
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
presented a general obstacle. For it inspired only a shallow
piety in the multitude and never commanded the social
virtues. But a sage like Jesus, arising amidst the people of the
one righteous Lord, might abstract the great moral lessons of
the prophets and broadcast them in order to pursue several
great objectives (94, 224). First, to try to preserve the spirit
of Israel, as Israel would find herself dispersed increasingly
through the Roman Empire. Second, to expose the Empire as
a mere secular authority despite its cult of divine emperors.
And third, to awaken in the Gentile world a desire for spiritual blessings and a collective life more compatible with
reason. The heart of the new program was the simplified
creed that taught the salvation of all people. But if this
general salvation was opaque to most philosophers, Spinoza
saw far enough into the Gospel to recommend it from a
powerfully practical viewpoint (17 6). For, properly understood, the Gospel would help foster the conditions of enlightenment, both for philosophers and for the multitudes, in this
world, in generations to come.17
The difficulty for us in grasping Spinoza's account of
Christianity lies not just in conceiving a Jesus with a rational
program for humanity. The difficulty also lies in imagining
Spinoza's approach to the New Testament. Unlike most of us,
he was learned in all the great Jewish literature. He did not
begin with the assumption that the Gentile Christian theologians knew best how to read Gospels and Epistles that were
written by Jews in a Hebraic style (90, 100). Himself in
possession of older and subtler practices of interpretation, he
viewed later Christian theology as translating the Bible's
extravagant poetry into dogmatic absurdities (16-21, 89).
When Spinoza conceived Jesus as a sage who taught a popular salvation, he by no means thought he flouted the account
of Jesus in the Gospel. Here is where a closer look at the
theme of resurrection may be illuminating. A philosophical
inquiry into Christianity can hardly ignore its central miracle,
though, as I mentioned, the Treatise does just that.18 Yet in a
�CORNELL
17
private letter we find Spinoza's view that the Resurrection is
not an actual physical event, but rather a powerful idea suited to the general imagination. For him the "true" resurrection
is salvation through philosophy, which is the topic of his
book, the Ethics. So our next step is to become acquainted
with his thinking about resurrection in these other texts.
Then we can test the adequacy of that thinking by trying to
read the Gospel from Spinoza's standpoint, seeing if the
Gospel treats the theme of resurrection at all compatibly with
his theories. The second half of this essay will therefore take
up two questions. What is salvation through philosophy for
Spinoza such that the believer's faith in the Resurrection
could stand in for it? Can we find in the Gospel Spinoza's
Christ, a philosopher who preaches the Resurrection as the
means of saving the unlearned? Let us try to be open to
Spinoza's boldest thoughts.
Philosophical and Popular Salvation in Spinoza
We saw in the Treatise that, to explain divine Providence,
Spinoza distinguished a popular idea from a philosophical
one. The popular mind imagines God caring for people like
an attentive, invisible parent. Spinoza's Ethics spells out that
this conception is a reflex of the believer's emotional needs.
These may evolve into the desire to find special favor with
God, to search out the divine will so as to be on the winning
side. Philosophy, the Ethics explains, has a more sublime
conception - an adequate idea of God. From experiences like
that of intuitive certainty in mathematics,19 it envisions the
divine intellect as working by necessity. God who lacks nothing desires nothing. He predetermines things without willing
or aiming at them: to have purposes would betoken imperfection. Hence God does not make extrinsic objects. He
expresses his infinite power into Nature-expresses it through
his attributes, which are dynamic like verbs, rather than static properties like adjectives.20 God is ceaselessly entering into
everything. Such is Spinoza's view, and the philosophical view
�18
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that he suspects lay behind the Hebrew scriptures (though
they have come down to us in a corrupted condition).21
Spinoza denies to human sentiment the satisfactions that
the God of tradition afforded, but he purports to give no
small compensation. The adequate idea or the "intellectual
love of God" sublimates the old feeling for divinity and
raises it above deception. It needs no sanction outside itself.
From blind obedience we turn to a dynamic vision of eternal
truth, according to which everything moves by causal necessities-including human beings. Over against this cosmic
necessity, the categories of the human moral world-praise
and blame, merit and sin-appear as inadequate opinions
with no power beyond our conventions (d. 49). In the universe at large the human moral perspective is a small affair,
like the interests of the salamander or the fly. Philosophers in
pursuit of self-understanding seek a connection with the larger Whole. They look suspiciously not upon the passions, as
the moralists do, but upon the moralists' self-centered ideas
about attaining the Good. Indeed the moralists' doctrine of
free will is misleading. Free will describes only our ignorance
of the causes that move us as we experience our own striving.
Philosophers prefer to search out the unconscious causes of
desire and envy. They would look upon passion without
passion, and transform it into the higher pleasure of interpreting it. In the end, if their conduct surpasses the ethical
standard of the city, it is because they are moved by reason's
deepest necessities.
Relieved of the illusory notion of the will, the philosopher is little aggravated by other people's "willfulness."
Others' offenses, like everything in the world, have causes,
the understanding of which robs them of their power to
offend.22 What we take to be a nuisance or an evil, Spinoza
says in the Ethics,
arises from the fact that [we] conceive these things
in a disturbed, mutilated, and confused manner:
and on this account (the strong human being]
�CORNELL
19
endeavors to conceive things as they are in themselves, and to remove obstacles from true knowledge.23
The so-called "problem of evil" is dispelled like vapor. It
arose simply by mistaking God for a human mind and mistaking human minds for separate, free agents. The philosopher meditates on the general causes of things and declines to
take the cosmos so personally.
Spinoza admits the existence of freedom in one sense.
Namely, freedom as the escape from ignorance that begins
when one is disencumbered of the very notion of evil. A
proposition in the Ethics states, "If men were born free, they
would form no conception of good or evil as long as they
were free." (4.48) But we are not born free, because instead
of wisdom and judgment we acquire opinions about good and
evil. We are conditioned and motivated by others' emotions;
we are ingrained in the fear of death. We "fall" into mere
nature-this is the mythical expression-we descend to an
inferior psychic state where every pain and anxiety is designated an "evil." Spinoza is actually re-interpreting Genesis in
a non-moral sense, as a note to this proposition spells out:
Thus it is related that God prohibited free man
from eating of the tree of knowledge of good and
evil, and that as soon as he ate of it, at once he
began to fear death rather than to desire to live;
again, when man found woman, who agreed most
perfectly with his own nature, he knew that there
could be nothing in nature more useful to him; but
that afterwards, when he thought that the brute
creation were similar to himself, he began at once
to imitate their emotions and lost his freedom,
which the Patriarchs under the guidance of the
spirit of Christ, that is, the idea of God, afterwards
recovered: on this idea alone it depends that man
should be free, and that he should desire for other
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
20
men the good which he desires for himself. (cf. 5457)24
Spinoza is saying that latent in every human being is the adequate idea of God or (as he calls it here) the "spirit of Christ."
Whatever our individual histories, the realization of that ideal
of wisdom would be a release from fear and obsession, from
passivity and the irrational imitation of others. What does
this Spinozist liberation look like?
Before proceeding to answer this question by further
glossing Spinoza's Ethics, I should cite the crucial statement
he makes in a letter about Christ's Resurrection. In a way it
contains our answer. For Spinoza the Resurrection is an
incontrovertibly profound symbol (cf. 83, 95). It describes for
all minds the shift in a person's spiritual center of gravity
from the self to the presence of God in the self. Remember:
the special virtue of prophecy and religion is to teach everyone, which philosophy as philosophy fails to do.
I ... conclude [Spinoza writes] that the resurrection
of Christ from the dead was really spiritual, and
was revealed only to the faithful in a way adapted
to their thought, namely that Christ had been
endowed with eternity and rose from the dead
(here I understand the dead in the sense in which
Christ did when he said, "Let the dead bury their
dead"), and also by his life and death gave an
example of extraordinary holiness, and that he
raises his disciples from the dead, in so far as they
follow the example of his life and death. And it
would not be difficult to explain the whole teaching of the Gospel in accordance with this hypothesis. (emphasis added)25
Spinoza goes on to say (and with reason) that Paul's arguments in 1 Corinthians 15 agree with him that the
Resurrection is spiritual.26 However Jesus' immediate disciples may have experienced his Resurrection, its spiritual
�CORNELL
21
essence was his being "endowed with eternity." He rose from
the dead in the sense of rising gloriously above the living
death that people accept as human life, and the disciples truly
rise from the dead when they follow Jesus' example.27 The
"fact" of the Resurrection is the spiritual event effected by
faith. Faith makes the faithful person active and able to fulfill
a higher vocation in joy.
Now to return to Spinoza's Ethics. It traces out a hereand-now "resurrection" on the plane of rational metaphysics.
(Again I must reduce the argument to simple steps.) The idea
of every person exists in God.28 Initially an individual has but
an inkling of it. What one calls one's "self" is largely one's
body's idea, one's ego we might say today, defined and affected by other people's egos,29 One's eternal essence remains
impersonal and unrealized. But rational people derive from
the adequate idea of God other adequate ideas about how the
soul functions. They learn to transform the affects that are
passions, incited in the social entanglement of inadequate
ideas, into affects associated with the joy of self-understanding,30 Spinoza's is a philosophy of endeavor: the endeavor to
be who one truly is, is the activity of God within.31 As
individuals reinforce their true being with whatever outside
them enhances it, they move by degrees toward intellection
of their true natures-as if a special Providence were guiding
them,32 Thus the self as an essence understood increases at
the expense of the inadequate idea held by the empirical self.
The individual's irreducible, original essence-at one time
impersonal and unrealized-is gradually personalized and
eternalized.33 In an early sketch of the Ethics, Spinoza called
this arrival at self-knowledge a rebirth-echoing the Gospel
of John.34 The rationally enlightened person is thus like the
man born blind in that Gospel, who washes away the mud
and begins to see. He can now say meaningfully, "It is 1." Or
to be precise, he says, "I am," ego eimi Uohn 9:10, cf. 6:20).
�22
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Resurrection as Philosophical Allegory in the Gospel of John
Now let us turn to John's Gospel, to chapter 11 on the raising of Lazarus, to test the plausibility of Spinoza's conception
of Christ and resurrection from the biblical side. Spinoza
himself took Lazarus as a test case. According to Pierre Bayle,
the French philosopher who lived in Rotterdam, Spinoza told
his friends that "if he had been able to convince himself of the
resurrection of Lazarus, he would have broken his system
into pieces."35 Perhaps Spinoza was implying that the Gospel
itself did not really try to convince him of a literal resuscitation of a dead man. For John's story of Lazarus is extremely
odd and provokes a series of questions in the inquiring reader. Indeed, since the early Church Fathers the story of Lazarus
has sometimes been taken as an allegory.36 For no one had
found this Lazarus, the alleged friend of Jesus, in any other
ancient source,37 John may well have invented him. Such
invention is called midrash, the Jewish practice of elaborating
tales on Biblical ideas. Spinoza assumes this practice in his
general account of the Bible and recognizes the special role
midrash had in generating the Gospels (21, 146-7).38 For him
the Christian scriptures were characteristic products of the
Hebrew genius,39 for which the notion of history never
excluded fiction and poetic play. Each Gospel writer had pursued freely his own original method of teaching (147). Paul
had not hesitated to lead the Christian movement, having
fetched inspiration from the mere echo of Jesus' words.
Spinoza's awareness of the evangelical imagination made him
audacious about reinterpreting the New Testament texts; but
this audacity comes out in reference to few specific
passages.40 We cannot say exactly how he read John's text
about Lazarus. Nor can we pretend to offer this text's "true"
meaning on objective grounds. (As Spinoza knew, when it
comes to the speculative reading of Scripture, there are no
rigorous proofs.41) But we can develop a rough idea of how
a philosopher might read this resurrection episode in John.
We can try to "explain" the chapter on Lazarus as Spinoza
�CORNELL
23
suggested in the letter I cited-according to the "hypothesis"
that the whole Gospel takes resurrection to be a spiritual
awakening rather than a literal event.
Clearly John 11 teaches that resurrection follows from
belief in Jesus (11:25). But reading it as a factual account of
Jesus' power to revive a corpse does run into a paradox. For
how would any factual proof of such power over nature be
consistent with belief? Moreover, readers cannot come to
believe in Jesus and the Resurrection the way the characters
in the story do, for these latter are on the scene for the miracle. Perhaps we should first ask, what exactly is the miracle?
The very premise of the story, the fact of Lazarus' physical
death, is made ambiguous from the start. Jesus says Lazarus is
not sick with the sickness one dies from.42 When Jesus later
mentions Lazarus's "death," it is following a metaphorical
speech about spiritual deadness. It is his disciples' dullness
that takes the "death" of the living literally. Then, we note
that Lazarus' sisters suggest that his "death" is a result of jesus
not being there with him, the absence that the text dramatizes by having Jesus not go to Lazarus when he hears of his "illness" (11:6). The text becomes coherent if we posit (after
Spinoza) that Lazarus's illness-not-unto-death is metaphysical, like the ailment we call the "human condition"-the universal affliction of the "absence of God."43 This illness would
still be "for the glory of God," as Jesus says (11:4). Only
the glory here would be the "awakening" that follows a
person's experience of absolute loss and disillusionment. As
Spinoza observed, death in the Bible is a metaphor for life
lived in anxiety about all sorts of evils. Resurrection is the
higher identity a person attains that overcomes this attitude
(Mt 8:22, Jn 5 :25).
This metaphorical reading agrees well with Psalm 82,
which Jesus cites in John immediately before we hear about
Lazarus. In fact, the Psalm teaches a view of Genesis something like Spinoza's. All humans are gods, children of the
Most High, but all are living under the reign of mortality.
�24
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
According to the psalm, the weak and needy go about in
darkness, without knowledge, whereas those who should be
enlightened have done little to help humankind. Is this the
human situation that Jesus remedies, allegorically, in John
11? When Jesus proposes to go to Lazarus in Judaea, the
disciples-most un-philosophically-declare their fear of
death: they all might be killed with Jesus on the way. Jesus
replies with a metaphor inspired by the psalm: they have to
learn to walk in the night by the light within (11: 10;
Ps. 82:5). He adds that Lazarus "sleeps," associating Lazarus
with these disciples who are in the dark. Ironically, Jesus'
hints are lost on the disciples who take his speech literally. For
such as them, Lazarus' death and their visit to his tomb must
be literal events. But if we understand Lazarus' "death" and
"illness" to refer to one and the same condition, then the
story takes place in a beautiful figurative sense. Jesus calls
Lazarus by name out of the cave of the unconscious; he
enjoins the crowd to unbind him, so that he can emerge as an
individual.44 Note that not all of the disciples are left out of
the language game surrounding Lazarus' uncertain "death."
For Thomas the twin-the double man-responds with a
double meaning of his own to Jesus' proposal to go to
Judaea.45 He says "Let us go and die with him," obscuring
whether he means literally to die with Jesus, or figuratively to
die and be raised with Lazarus. So the chapter plays upon the
ambiguity of what is literal and what is literature. Thus it
unfolds on two planes simultaneously, addressing different
readers in their different needs.
Prominent among the needs of most readers is the need
for a God (like Jesus ought to be) who does not leave human
beings in the lurch. Notice, almost everyone in John's story
complains about the evil of Jesus letting Lazarus die. Martha
is the first. This wouldn't have happened, she says, if Jesus
had been here. Mary follows suit: her accusation is the first
thing out of her mouth. Finally the crowd chimes in with the
complaint against Jesus-like a chorus in a Greek tragedy,
�CORNELL
25
always a little late but nonetheless helpful in stating the
theme. For the crowd fully generalizes the grievance against
Jesus. They ask (with unintended irony), couldn't the man
who opened the eyes of the blind have kept poor Lazarus
from dying? Spinoza would detect in that complaint all the
anxiety that people have named the problem of evil (1-2).
Why did God let such and such tragedy happen? Martha, in
her grief, hints at the possibility of a miracle. The
Resurrection on the Last Day, she implies, is not doing much
for her or her brother now! So Jesus tells her (ambiguously),
I am the Resurrection and the Life who does indeed "work"
right now. People need assurance of God's willing compensations for the felt evils of the world. And Jesus gives them what
they ask.
How the "miracle" of raising the dead works-how Jesus
helps people overcome their passive devastation by the
world-seems to be indicated in a curious passage. Martha
goes to Mary to say the Master calls her, and Mary immediately "rises." But as far as the reader knows, Jesus may or may
not have called her as Martha claims. On the textual facts
alone, Mary's getting up is an effect of pure faith that she is
personally called. Is this not the faith that Spinoza says lifts
people out of their misery? Twice it is said that Mary
"rises"-once using the same Greek word as is used for
Lazarus' rising (anistemi: 11:23). The second time the crowd
watches her rise up-an even plainer adumbration of the
Lazarus "miracle." This superfluous vignette is not so
superfluous if we see it as a genuine miniature of the Lazarus
drama-a play within the play, reflecting the very power of
belief that the larger story calls upon. In other words, the text
is self-conscious. It points to its own concern to move people
in their secret depths (11 :28) in accord with their idea of a
personal God.
Yet this is not the only moment when John's text affords
us a higher perspective on his miracle play of Lazarus. As the
people remove the stone from Lazarus' tomb, and Jesus is
�26
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
about to call him forth, he makes a not too subtle aside.
"Father, I thank you, that you have heard me. And I know
that you always hear me, but because of the crowd (ton
ochlon) who are standing by I said this, that they may believe
that you sent me." Here Jesus is certainly not addressing the
crowd, and not the Father who always hears and hardly needs
to be addressed aloud. There must be another, self-selecting
audience for these remarks. Jesus distinguishes between his
speaking for the crowd, for the sake of their belief, and his
speaking more frankly what he knows. Implicitly, he distinguishes between the apparent "miracle," and the eternal
presence of God, the fully "awakened" state to which he calls
Lazarus. But the crowd hears Jesus' prayer as expressing
gratitude for filling their need. They need, he says, to believe
that God sent him-sent him (no doubt} to display God's care
in a more dramatic way.46 The evangelist has made Jesus
rupture the realistic surface of the very story he is in, and
indicate to the attentive reader that the miraculous fiction
itself follows from his charitable mission to teach everyone.
In sum, a reader might see in the story of the resurrection
of Lazarus a spiritual allegory and-more than that-a tale of
the sage instructing appropriately both the learned and the
unlearned in the faith that will elevate them. If one is willing
to run the risk of reading the Gospel philosophically, one may
find it surprisingly consistent with Spinoza's hypothesis, that
Jesus was a wise man who, in making wisdom accessible to
all, was obliged to make it speak in widely different ways.
Summary: Spinoza and Christianity
Spinoza's account of Christianity resulted from the extraordinary combination of his Jewish learning, his passion for
philosophy, and the historical crisis to which he responded.
Following the civil wars and religious violence of the 16th and
17th centuries, it was apparent that Christianity in the West
was in jeopardy as a civilizing force. The aftermath of the
Reformation raised a fundamental question about the relation
�CORNELL
27
of traditional theology to the political order. Spinoza's
answer was officially to excise truth from the religious
sphere-to destroy the zeal for mere "true belief," the varieties of which were tearing European states apart-but to
preserve for humanity the Bible's teachings of justice and
charity.
This emphasis on the Bible's moral teachings, however,
did not prevent him from asking why these teachings agreed
with the truths of pure reason, or what pure thinking was
behind biblical texts. In this Spinoza made the learned
assumption that biblical language, like much poetry,
contained a surrogate knowledge (21,53,95). A philosophical
mind (expressing God's self-activity} might liberate from the
parables and fictions of Scripture their deeper truths.47 Given
this philosophic stance toward the Bible, and the dogmatic
conflicts of Christianity in Spinoza's day, the paradox of the
Theological Political Treatise follows. The Treatise officially
separates religion from philosophy, and insists that the Bible
does not teach speculative reasoning. 48 But at the same time
the Treatise indicates a passage from biblical faith to wisdom.
As the Scriptures occasionally associated their own teaching
with wisdom, Spinoza had only to associate wisdom in turn
with the Scriptures. The result was his use of a pious vocabulary to describe the philosopher's inner life, his express
reverence for Solomon and Jesus the sage, and his doctrine of
the salvation of the unlearned, behind which lay the idea that
belief in resurrection approximated the philosopher's identification with divine mind. To readers today, these ambiguities of Spinoza are puzzling in the extreme. But by such
ambiguities he left open for future philosophers the path he
had traveled in his own thinking. He left open the possibility
of overstepping religion with the implicit sanction of religion
itself, of moving from faith to philosophy without rancor or
guilt.49
The siren call of philosophy makes modern intellectual
adherents of the Bible anxious. If they remain faithful to their
�28
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
religion, it is often by flirting with nihilism or skepticism
at the same time. Since Pascal they have argued that our
choices are either to subjugate the intellect to the mystery of
revelation or to wander aimlessly in a futile search after
meaning (cf. 171-2). They hardly dream that the Bible itself
might "save" anyone by confirming one in the life of reason.
But Spinoza looked at the Bible differently. He suspected that
some of its authors had faced the problems of despair and of
disappointment in divine Providence (78, 222), and had
wrestled with the problems of existence no less bravely than
the classical schools of wisdom (5). Such biblical authors simply expressed their spiritual discoveries in inspiring and philanthropic ways. As for Jesus, he was the "consummate
philosopher" because he not only knew in himself the way to
blessedness, the "natural light" that the philosophers would
always follow (cf. John 11:10), but also found a general path
for all those who could not travel the philosophers' dangerous road. If the learned grasped the Bible's intentions,
Spinoza thought, they would see that the salvation of the
ignorant was in fact their own salvation, too. For the learned
would no longer be lost in scholastic quarrels arising from a
confusion of the Bible's pedagogy with metaphysical theory,
and in compensation they would find new "meaning" both in
the literary depth of the scriptural text and in the humane
guidance of others. The political order was therefore not
doomed. The ethics of happiness might be acquired by the
multitudes and, over generations, the number of those
coming to wisdom might increase. It all depended on whether
wisdom presented itself wisely. It depended on the solicitude
of the learned toward the learners.so
Near the end of John's Gospel is an episode with Thomas
the Twin, who challenges the disciples' story that the Risen
Jesus came and spoke to them. He is struck in their account
by Jesus' showing them his hands and his side, as if this selfdisplay carried some special meaning. Only if Thomas sees
and touches these wounds, he tells his friends, will he believe.
�CORNELL
29
Days later, the group (along with Thomas) is visited again in
its sealed rooms. Jesus specifically addresses the skeptical disciple and invites him to touch his wounds. The text indicates
no such move on Thomas' part. It thus underscores what
Jesus says next, that Thomas believes because he has seen
him, using the word horao-"to see"-which in John's text
includes the divine act of knowing.51 Jesus adds, Thomas
should recognize that others too are blessed, though they
believe without "seeing."52 Now a philosophical reader,
understanding "seeing" as a metaphor for knowing, may
detect in Jesus' remarks about blessed belief the Spinozist idea
of the salvation of those without knowledge. Such a reader
might therefore entertain the ironic possibility that Jesus'
rebuke of philosophy conceals some philosophy, and that
what Thomas beheld with the eye of knowledge, apart from
his friends, is the essential question implied in the story. Did
Thomas know Jesus as the one who scorned every apparent
evil and thus overcame the world? Or, to express it in the
text's figurative language, did Thomas know Jesus as the one
who through his very wounds attained his eternal identity?
The story quietly approves some such conjecture. Yet it does
not, as a story, offer certitude. Hence the Spinozist reader
receives the same cautionary lesson as Thomas. He must
respect the belief of believers in the literal Resurrection, as
the way in which God has made manifest to them their tie
with eternity.53
Acknowledgement: The author expresses his gratitude to
many generous colleagues who gave valuable advice in the
development of this essay: Karina Gill, Ned Walpin, Brendan
Laselle, David Bolotin, Linda Wiener, Daryl Koehn, Barry
Goldfarb, David Levine, Michael Golluber, Tucker Landy,
Janet Dougherty, & Caleb Thompson.
�30
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Notes
1 Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, translated as
The Way to Wisdom by Herman De Dijn (West Lafayette, Indiana:
Purdue University Press, 1996), pp. 21-25, and 115 on experientia
vaga; and Ethics 2, P 40, Note 2. All Ethics citations are from the
A. Boyle translation of Spinoza's Ethics and De Intellectus
Emendatione, with an introduction by T. S. Gregory (London: J. M.
Dent & Sons, 1959).
2 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990), p. 112.
3 Some
examples of the New Testament scholars' true belief in "critical progress" and their innocence of philosophy may be found in
Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current
Research, Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans, ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1994), e.g. pp. 253, 270.
As examples of scholars who have popularized their work, yet have
vague misgivings about it, see John Dominic Crossan imagining
himself having to account to Jesus for his research, in Jesus: A
Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: Harper, 1994), p. xiv; and
Marcus Borg, jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: Harper Collins,
1991) who feels he must "recover the vision of Jesus" for the sake
of "church and culture" (p. 17), but can only serve up some lame
cliches about "spirit."
4 Karl Jaspers raised similar concerns half a century ago. See his
debate with Rudolf Bultmann in Myth and Christianity: An Inquiry
into the Possibility of Religion without Myth (New York: Noonday
Press, 1958), pp. 51-53.
Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, Samuel Shirley trans.
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1998). These and all page
references in the text refer to this edition (and differ in other printings).
5
6 Cf. Roy Hoover, "A Contest between Orthodoxy arid Veracity," in
Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment (Downers Grove, Ill.:
InterVarsity Press, 2000), pp. 124-146.
7 Die Leibniz-Handschriften der Koniglichen offentlichen Bibliothek
zu Hannover, ed. Eduard Bodemann, (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1966),
�CORNELL
31
p. 103. The authenticity of Leibniz' note recording Spinoza's conversation is little contested today. See Xavier Tilliette, Le Christ de
Ia Philosophie (Paris: Cerf, 1990), p. 72. See also Richard Mason,
The God of Spinoza: a philosophical study (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), p. 212; Richard Popkin, "Spinoza and
Biblical Scholarship" in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed.
Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
p. 401; Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano
of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 236,
n. 4. Granted, contemporary biblical scholarship recognizes that
Jesus is steeped in the Jewish wisdom tradition. See, for example,
Frances Taylor Gench, Wisdom in the Christology of Matthew (New
York: University Press of America, 1997), and Ben Witherington III,
Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1994). But it is the very rare scholar who gives us any profound idea, comparable to Spinoza's, of what Jesus' wisdom was
about. See Jean Grosjean, Ironie Christique (Paris: Gallimard,
1991); Albert Nolan, Jesus before Christianity (Maryknoll, N.Y.:
Orbis Books, 1992); and Jack Miles, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of
God (New York: Knopf, 2001).
8 See also Letter 75 to Oldenburg, in The Correspondence of
Spinoza, A. Wolf trans. (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966), p. 349,
where Spinoza refers to the style of expression typical of oriental
languages.
See Letter 21, to Bylenbergh, Ibid., p, 179-80. "I take care not to
impute to [Scripture] certain childish and absurd views; and this no
one can do better unless he understands Philosophy well, or has
Divine revelations."
9
10 See John F. Cornell, ''A Parable of Scandal: Speculations about
the Wheat and Tares in Matthew 13," in Contagion, 1998, 5: 98117. Under the influence of Spinoza's suggestion about Matthew
13, Alexandre Mather on draws similar conclusions about the deeper layers of this Gospel text. See Alexandre Matheron, Christ et le
salut des ignorants chez Spinoza (Paris: Editions Aubier, 1971),
pp. 132-134.
11 Pace Sylvain Zac, Spinoza et ['interpretation de l'ecriture (Paris:
P.U.F., 1965), p. 199.
�32
12
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
See also Spinoza, Ethics, 3 P 30; IV P 35-37, 46.
13 "Atque hoc eadem etiam modo Apostoli ex rebus, qual viderant,
quasque audiverant, & quas denique ex revelatione habuerant,
multa concludere, & elicere, eaque homines, si libitum iis esset,
docere poterant." Spinoza, Opera, Gebhardt edition (Heidelberg:
Carl Winters Universitatsbuchhandlung, 1972), III, p. 156.
Compare "natura nobis dictat, non quidem verbis, sed modo
Ionge excellentiore" (Gebhardt, III, p. 16) and "ejus mens praestantior necessaria, atque humana longa excellentior esse deberet"
(p. 21).
14
15
Cf. Matheron, Christ et le salut, pp. 144-145.
16 Johan Colerus left us some interesting biographical details bearing on Spinoza and Christianity, as cited in the introduction to the
Dover edition of Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise & A
Political Treatise, R. H. M. Elwes, trans. (New York: Dover
Publications, 1951). According to Colerus, Spinoza once assured his
Christian landlady that her religion was a good one and that she
could be "saved" in it, so long as she lived a pious and peaceable life
(p. xix). See also the end of Letter 75 to Oldenburg (touching on
the Gospel of John), in The Correspondence of Spinoza, A. Wolf
trans. (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966), p. 350, and Letter 43 to
Jacob Ostens, p. 259, on the salvation of the ignorant among nonChristian nations through the "spirit of Christ." Spinoza's private
comportment is perfectly consistent with holding an idea of Christ
the philosopher who represents wisdom and makes salvation open
to all people whether they get that wisdom explicitly or implicitly.
The idea that Spinoza was too fearful to speak his mind tactfully
among his friends matches little in the philosopher's character. His
indifference to giving his thinking the color of orthodoxy among
them can be seen at the end of Letter 73 (21) to Oldenburg, in
Correspondence, p. 344.
17 Cf. Matheron, Christ et le salut, pp. 54-70, 77-84, 276. The
Treatise suggests, in chapter 16 (directly following the chapter on
the salvation of the unlearned), that a genuine political problem,
opaque from the standpoint of pure philosophy, is mitigated thanks
to the prophetic mission to all ordinary people. For according to
chapter 16, as less rational people enter into the social contract,
�CORNELL
33
they compromise their "sovereign right" or "self-interest" (to
remain irrational) far more than rational people. (180) Thus
Spinoza delicately raises the question of how the prophets' teaching, promising "salvation" to people who strive for moral goodness
without wisdom, helps them endure the harm they may suffer by
nature under the constraints of civilized life.
18 Spinoza could not but take an interest in the subject of the soul's
fate. Steven Nadler, in Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish
Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) argues that what
drove the Synagogue to pronounce its ban against the young
philosopher was his adamant denial of personal immortality.
19 Ethics 1, Appendix, p. 32. Spinoza makes an exception for the
great non-mathematical sages of history.
Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York:
Zone Books, 1992).
20
21
Letter 73 to Oldenburg, in Correspondence, p. 343.
22
Ethics, 5 P 5 - P 10.
23
Ibid., 4 P 73 Note.
Ibid., 4 P 68 Note. Again, independently of Spinoza but perfectly in accord with his doctrines, I have argued that Matthew 18
teaches salvation from our "fall" into the world's scandal, and
teaches it at two significant levels, one philosophic and one popular. See ''Anatomy of Scandal: Self-Dismemberment in the Gospel of
Matthew and in Gogol's 'The Nose'," in Literature and Theology,
16 (2002), pp. 270-290.
24
25
Letter 75 to Oldenburg, in Correspondence, pp. 348-349.
26 Spinoza's reading of 1 Corinthians 15 is entirely sound. One
cannot make good sense of this curious argument of Paul-"For if
the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ
has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your
sins." (15: 16-17)-on the notion that the Resurrection is a past,
historic event. The apparent consequence of Christ's non-Resurrection,
futile faith, is really the reason for the non-Resurrection! Faith has to
bring about Christ's Resurrection in the faithful.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
34
27 Spinoza avoids deciding whether the disciples all understood the
Resurrection in the same way. Both in the Treatise and in his earlier
response to Oldenburg (Correspondence, p. 344) Spinoza leaves
open what parts of Jesus' knowledge his disciples received.
According to Oldenburg's more literal reading of the Gospels,
Spinoza recognizes (or "does not deny") that that the texts show the
disciples receiving an apparition of the Resurrected Jesus and
believing in it. In this way God accomodated to them the revelation
of his mind (p. 348). Perhaps his remark near the end of the letter
applies here: Spinoza holds that Paul and John know and teach spiritual meanings, albeit in a Hebraic way (p. 349). All this is relevant
to the reading we propose of John 11, where the disciples do not
all have the same depth of insight.
28
Ethics, 2 P 11-12, 45, and 5 P 22, P 30.
29
Ibid., 2 P 13.
30 Ibid., 4 Preface, P 15; 5 P 6.
Cf. Ethics, 3 P 6, and "Short Treatise on God, Man, and his
Well-being," (chapter 5) in The Collected works of Spinoza, ed.
Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), vol. 1,
pp. 54, 84.
31
32
Ethics, 4 P 18 Note, P 19-20, 30-35.
Ibid., 5 P 20, Note, P 21-22. Regarding the distinction between
personal immortality and eternity in Spinoza, see Genevieve Lloyd,
Spinoza and the Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1996),
pp. 114-117.
33
"Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being," pp. 138-140
(Chapter 22). Spinoza also develops there the distinction between
human beings moved merely by their animal spirits and those
reborn in spiritual knowledge, following John's Gospel and
1 Corinthians 2-3. From the discussion of the soul's re-awakening
in divine union, Chapter 23 follows on the subject of its "immortality."
34
Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary (Selections),
Richard Popkin trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.,
1991), p. 320.
35
�CORNELL
35
Evangile de Jean, traduit et commente par Jean-Yves Leloup
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), p. 281. It is worthy of note that the
Fathers of the Church understood the political implications of allegorical reading of the Gospel, given that spiritual knowledge could
not be attained by most believers. See Jean-Yves Leloup,
Introduction aux 'vrais philosophes' (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998),
pp. 61-2. In any case, Spinoza's philosopher Christ can be loosely
traced back to the early Fathers, probably by way of Erasmus,
whose philosophia Christi could not have been unknown to him.
Spinoza even includes Erasmus in one of the dialogues contained in
his "Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being." (See note 31,
above.) I say "loosely traced to the early Fathers" because the idea
of "philosophy" that is applied to Jesus undergoes significant mutation from the Fathers, to Erasmus, to Spinoza; and these writers
base their conceptions independently upon the New Testament. See
Anne-Marie Malingrey, Etude semantique des mots de Ia famille de
'philosophia' dans Ia litterature grecque chretienne des quatre premiers siecles, 2 vols. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1961).
36 I;
37 Add to this the fact that the ancient Gospel of Thomas (to which
John's Gospel is closest in point of view) assumes that resurrection
is an interior event, already accomplished by some disciples. See
The Gospel of Thomas, Marvin Meyer trans. (San Francisco:
Harper, 1992), and Harold Bloom, Omens of Millenium, The
Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrections (New York: Riverhead
Books, 1996) p. 188.
In contemporary scholarship, see Frank Kermode, The Genesis of
Secrecy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 81-83,
and especially pp. 105-109 regarding John's "reality effects." Also
see Bernard Dubourg, La Fabrication du Nouveau Testament, v. II:
];Invention de jesus (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Dubourg details the
cabbalistic mechanisms that could generate Christian ideas from the
language of the ancient Hebrew scriptures.
38
E.g. Letter 75 to Oldenburg, in Correspondence, p. 349.
Incidentally, Dubourg (see previous note) makes the strongest argument, and joins a growing scholarly consensus today, that the New
Testament exhibits the same literary craft (or craftiness) as the
Hebrew Scriptures, only differently employed.
39
�36
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
In certain passages of the Treatise (35 ,67) its author suggests that
he has figured out more than he will say. He prefers to encourage
the experienced reader to re-examine the Bible with Spinoza's ideas
in mind.
40
41 Letter 21 to Bylenbergh, in Correspondence, p. 172, and cf.
Treatise, p. 105.
Kierkegaard founds his text Sickness unto Death on the Lazarus
miracle, skillfully inverting the meaning in John's text, which says
that that sickness is not Lazarus'! Nonetheless, Kierkegaard's psychological teaching exhibits some striking parallels with Spinoza's
teaching about overcoming anxiety and becoming oneself. "It is
Christian heroism-a rarity, to be sure-to venture wholly to
become oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual
human being, alone before God" See S0ren Kierkegaard, The
Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for
Upbuilding and Awakening, Howard and Edna Hong translation
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 5.
42
43 Another parallel of Spinoza's thinking with our interpretation of
Lazarus: the subtitle given (by another hand) to Spinoza's "Short
Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being" (an early sketch of his
Ethics) mentions the text's purpose to cure those who are sick of
mind.
Daryl Koehn pointed out to me why it follows that the crowd is
told to unbind Lazarus.
44
Ancient gnostic texts even suggest that Thomas is the spiritual
"twin" of Jesus. See Robert M. Grant, The Secret Sayings of Jesus:
The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday,
1960), p. 65.
45
A related example of the pedagogy of the Bible occurring on two
levels: Spinoza refers to instances of biblical texts that both give a
poetic description of some supernatural occurrence (like "being
sent" by God) and then redescribe the same occurrence in natural
terms. (Treatise, pp. 19, 80)
46
47 See Spinoza, Emendation, (1st part regarding fictions and feigning) especially pp. 103-105. Also Ethics 3 P 11-13, 28-30, 4 P 1
Note, and 5 P 10 Note, P 11-14, 20. For discussion of how
�CORNELL
37
Spinozist reason collaborates with the power of the imagination, see
Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical
Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 217- 250.
Cf. Letter 21 to Blyenbergh, in Correspondence, p. 180.
Remember: Socrates could not teach wisdom to Meno or to anyone
else.
48
Concerning the avoidance of scandal by the wise, cf. e.g. Romans
14:13-23, 1 Corinthians 8.
49
50
See Spinoza, Emendation, p. 27 (paragraphs 14 and 17).
51 A complete list might begin with John 1:18, 3:3, 3:11, 3:36,
6:46, and 8:38.
52 The Greek tenses at John 20:29 indicate that what divides
Thomas from other disciples is not Thomas' historical opportunity
to converse with the resurrected Christ.
53
Again see Letter 75, p. 348.
�38
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�39
1-
What Tree Is This?
In Praise of Europe's
Renaissance Printers,
Publishers And Philologists
Chaninah Maschler
Prefatory Note
The aim of this essay is to praise certain lovers and makers of
books-the printers and publishers and philologists of early
modern Europe. That these men deserve to be remembered,
that we owe them a huge debt, though not because they
authored great books, I found out only because I stuck it out
with the perhaps "idiot" question, What tree is this? which
initially I asked about the tree that is pictured on the title
page of Galileo's last great work, the Discourses on Two New
Sciences.
Three publishing dynasties-Elzevier, Etienne, Plantinare spoken of in the course of the first portion of the essay. At
the essay's midway mark Pico della Mirandola enters the story.
My discovery that Pico had a hand in diverting a scholarly
friend of his, Aldo Manuzzio, from the life of pure scholarship to a publisher's life made the inclusion of Pico in my
narrative plausible. A brief (largely borrowed) account of
Aldo's life and work led me to a short narrative about
Erasmus's work as a Bible scholar. Inclusion of Erasmus was
due not only to my believing that it is with justice that
Erasmus is given a place among the great re-educators of
Chaninah Maschler is tutor emerita of St. John's College. This lecture was
delivered at Annapolis on January 18, 2002. The lucidity of the illustrations
for this lecture is due to the care and expertise of Cara Sabolcik and Tom
Crouse. The Editor regrets omission of the following thank-you note from the
book review of Eva Brann's The Ways of Naysaying in volume 46, number 2:
"Conversation with my friends Rob Crutchfield and Priscilla Shaw substantially contributed to the writing of this review."
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
40
Europe, but also because-enigmatic though he be-he
shows, in how he comments on the imprints of two of the
publishing houses who served him and whom he served, that
he was as aware as Bacon of the long run differences that
print might make to our lives.
I hope that when this year's crop of St. John's seniors
drinks a toast to the American Republic, to the Republic of
Letters, and to Plato's Republic, they'll call to mind that the
men commemorated in the present lecture helped make our
citizenship in these republics possible.
,~
[Before the art of book printing was known],
the manuscripts of any single book were few in
number, and to obtain the entire literature of any
one science involved considerable difficulty,
expense, and travelling, which only the rich could
afford. It was easy for the dominant party to effect
the disappearance of books that shocked its prejudices and unmasked its impostures .... Besides, only
works recommended by the names of their authors
were copied. All the research that could acquire
importance only if allied to other research, all the
isolated observations and detailed advances that
serve to maintain the sciences ... and to prepare a
way for further progress, all the materials amassed
by time and awaiting genius, remained condemned
to eternal obscurity. The conversation of scholars
and the unification of their labours ... did not exist.
Each man had to begin and to end a discovery
himself and was obliged to fight alone against all
the obstacles that nature puts in the way of our
efforts .... [Contrariwise, once printing was on the
scene], many copies of a book would be in circulation at the same time, information about facts and
discoveries reached a wider public and also
�MASCHLER
41
reached it more promptly.... Any new mistake was
subject to criticism as soon as it was made.1
Condorcet, whose words in his Sketch for a Historical
Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind I quoted just now,
is selectively expatiating on a passage in Bacon's New
Organon (Aphorism 129), where Bacon, intending, he says,
to "quicken the industry and kindle the zeal" of men of
scientific talent, had claimed that the world-historical efficacy
of such instruments as the directional compass, gun powder,
and moveable type has been far greater than the virtu of any
political or even religious leader, so that it is only right that
inventors be given divine honors, while political founders and
legislators are honored as mere heroes.
That the voyages of discovery (thus the finding of a "new
world" beyond the Mediterranean) were "made possible" by
the directional compass, and that the ways of waging war
(against, for instance, the natives of this recently discovered
new world) were drastically altered by the use of guns-of
this I was, in a dim and general sort of way, aware. But not
until fairly recently did it occur to me that the way the world
looks to human beings and even, perhaps, the way it is may
have been transformed by printing. (Take my words as paraphrase of Bacon's "[These inventions] have changed the whole
face and state of things throughout the world" Aph. 129). And
it was really more or less by accident that I became curious
about the individuals who practiced the art of printing, I
mean the businessmen, artisans, and scholars who constituted the publishing industry. As yet I know a little about just a
few. They are:
the
the
the
the
the
Italian Aldo Manuzzio
Swiss Johann Fro ben,
Frenchman Henri Estienne
Belgian Christopher Plantin
Dutchman Louis Elzevier
�-
-------
--- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
42
I learned these names because I made a mistake about a
certain picture that had provoked my curiosity. Here it is:
fig. 1
DISCORSl
E
DIMOSTRAZIONI
MATE MATICH E,
intorno J d11e nuout fcien~e
Attcnenti aUa
MEC:ANICA
& i
MoviMENTI LocALI;
tk/SjziiiiT
GALILEO GALILEI LINCEO,
Filofofo e .Matematico prima rio del Sereniffimo
Grand Duca di T ofcana.
0•111UAfpnuliutkleelllr~~ JjgrAMit.tl"Jc~~t~iSIIiJi.
IN LEIDA,
Apprcll"o gli Ellevirii. x. n. c. xnvW'.
The picture you're looking at comes one's way at St. John's
College when, in the junior year, Galileo's Discourses on Two
New Sciences are begun. Perhaps, like me, you overlooked the
bottom line identifying printer and publication date and erroneously assumed that this emblem was inserted at Galileo's
instance, either because your psychological "set" was to treat
the author as "figure," the printer-publisher as negligible
"background"; or, conceivably, because the cover of the
Dover paperback version looks like this:
�43
MASCHLER
fig. 2
dialogues concerning
TWO NEW SCIENCES
TRANSLATED llY HENRY CREW
AND ALFONSO DE SALV!O
WITH AN !NTRODUCTIQN llY ANTONIO FAVARO
fig. 3
L £ 11
CEUVRES
Mathematiques
DE
SIMON
~TEVIN'ci<Brugcs.
OufontuuctCcslco
MEMOIRES MATH.IlMATIQV·BS,
Efq,udltsldt:u.erdleTra-lu.ut&:Trc..Jllalbd'rincc M&UI.ICI
dcNu;~~~'::.~~::-._
lAI'IfllmJIIIoAWizi,(ro.g.-J
P• ALBEJlT ~IRAilD.samidou,~
A
LEYDE
CllorDon,vcnrllre&:Abr.lum~,lmpdlacllnord!n&lre.
dci'Univerlir(, AIUI!il cl~b-o.IDIT.
~
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Seeing the Stevin title page (figure 3)-with the same
man, tree and motto-may, without your hearing anything
further, have the immediate effect of your correcting your
previous error and shifting to the idea that the emblem is the
printer-publisher's rather than author's "hall mark." (Goldand silversmiths or pewter ware manufacturers were required
to identify themselves on their products. Printers too were so
obliged by law. By the way, the craftsmen who made the
printing fonts had to be highly skilled workers in metal.) But
this third picture did not come my way until long after I'd
become curious about the title page of Galileo's Discourses on
Two New Sciences. Since that page is obviously carefully
designed-just look at the message conveyed by the relative
sizes of the letters!-it was not unreasonable to imagine that
the title page entire, including the picture that intrigued me,
was some sort of commentary on the message of the book
that it was introducing .
Now when I first encountered Galileo, I had spent some
years as teacher of the history of philosophy at a conventional
college. Therefore my head held such facts as the following:
Descartes's Meditations are spread out over six days, that is, a
week sans Sabbath. His Discourse too seems to be mimicking
the Divine rhythm of creation by being laid out in six parts.
In his Letter to the Translator which precedes the French
edition of the Principles, Descartes compares philosophy to a
tree.2 Bacon's Great Instauration (renewal) too was intended
to have six parts, and his College of Bensalem is called the
College of Six Days. The Latin name of Bacon's "Preparation
for Natural and Experimental History" is parasceve, which is,
in New Testament Greek, a stand-in for the Hebrew erev
shabbath (Sabbath eve). So, since I'd been taught to rank
Galileo with Bacon and Descartes as fellow-founders of
"modernity," men whose teaching sought to undermine the
medieval heritage, it was just about inevitable that I should
take the tree on the Discorsi title page to be the tree that
stood in our first parents' garden, the twisting item a snake,
�MASCHLER
45
the man a wise man such as Galileo, filosofo e matematicohere caught in the act of plucking a fruit from the forbidden
tree, this fruit being, perhaps, one of the two "new" sciences.
It did not occur to me that seeing the tree as the tree of
knowledge might be a mistake! The riddle for me was not
what tree this might be but rather, why does Galileo, as per
the motto Non Solus (Not Alone), deny that he's alone when
the picture shows him to be alone? This question was made
the more vivid when I learned that the standard name for the
emblem is The Solitary.
Puzzling over the perhaps piddling question about the
apparent discrepancy between motto and picture led to a
larger question. The Renaissance greats are often described as
marked by a new individualism and pride, such as is shown,
for example, by Bacon, when he sends his Great Instauration
into the world with a proem that begins: "Francis of Verulam
reasoned thus with himself and judged it to be for the interest of the present and future generations that they should be
made acquainted with his thoughts" (New Organon, p. 3).
This same pride is also exemplified by Descartes when, in Part
2 of the Discourse, he stresses that towns and legal codes
designed by a single "projector" are much to be preferred to
those that spring up higgledy-piggledy in the course of generations, and he insinuates that he, Descartes, is such a solitary
"projector." It is an individualism expressed in a somewhat
different way by Montaigne, when he publishes the Essays as
a book whose "matter" is himself. How, I came to ask myself,
do this individualism and pride harmonize with these authors'
equally notable emphasis on the collaborative and progressive
character of science and invention? (Advancement of
Learning, pp. 3 0-31; p. 143 of the Oxford Bacon paperback)
The book of Galileo for which The Solitary serves as
emblem is written in dialogue form: three charactersSalviati, Sagredo, and Simplicia-converse, in every-day
Italian, about matters of physics. Salviati, who opens the
conversation, is the conversation leader. He does not always
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
46
speak in his own name. Sometimes he reads aloud from a
Latin book written by someone known to all the conversation
partners but not identified by name. He is simply called "our
author."
Taking these facts into account, I construed the enigmatic emblem cum motto to mean that if there are to be "new sciences," neither the author, vicariously present to the three
men conversing through his Latin book, nor the three men
instructed by it, should be regarded, or regard themselves, as
solitaries. (Inventing a demonstration is probably something
that you do alone, in your study, but conversation, in the
course of which demonstrations are appraised, doesn't happen when you're by yourself.)
Something like this interpretation seemed confirmed by
the printer's Address to the Reader, which begins with the
sentence:
Civil life being maintained through the mutual and
growing3 aid of men to one another, and this end
being served principally by the employment of arts
and sciences, their inventors have always been held
in great esteem and much revered by wise antiquity.
It ends:
Of these two new sciences, full of propositions
that will be boundlessly increased in the course of
time by ingenious theorists, the outer gates are
opened in this book, wherein with many demonstrated propositions the way and path is shown to
an infinitude of others, as men of understanding
will easily see and acknowledge.
It may be further nuanced by the opening remarks of
Sagredo, who reports that he likes to hang around with
artisan foremen at the Venetian shipyard because by talking to
them he has frequently received information about matters of
mechanics that he would not have obtained had he relied
strictly on already available book learning.
�MASCHLER
47
The interpretation of Non Solus just reported was conceived while I was still under the mistaken impression that
Galileo was the one responsible for the emblem on the
Discorsi title page. The Solitary is, however, the trademark of
Louis Elzevier, the printer and publisher of the Discorsi, so I
found, as more books with this device on their title page came
my way-many of them, though by no means all-scientific
or mathematical books. 4 So the original question now
became, what did the printer-publisher-the man whose
Advice to the Reader spoke of how, by employing the arts and
sciences, men help one another to improve civic life-what
did he have in mind in marking his merchandise with this
emblem?
fig. 4
Figure 4 resembles the
Elzevier tree. Yet the lines
below the picture cite anothVARRONIS
opera quz fupcrfum.
er publisher, Henri Estienne,
under the date. And there
J N L I B. D E .L IN G. LAT.
Conictlancalofcpbi Scaligcri, r«<>are, of course, pictorial
gnita 3c appcnditc .wa..
differences: This bearded sage
IN Ll B R 0 S DE R B R V ST.
Notz clufdcm lof.Scal.non uuca cditz.
seems to be wearing a Roman
or Greek toga rather than a
HitJ/i1111llifotrMIII<.A DR.. T Y.RN.
c,.,..,,. in tm.DI U,guutiM:c.university man's scholar's
blltii.Uti•llih~t~ <.ANT. A Y G YSTJN/. /ttiiiP.YICTCJ!/1
gown; nothing twists around
Clliig•tUIItsitlli&.DtrtrM.fliel.
the tree, though its branches
seem similarly disposed; the
banner with the motto is on
the right rather than on the
left; and this time the motto
A N N 0 M-. D. LX X II I,
runs Noli Altum Sapere
ExcudcbatHcnr.Stephanus.
(Whether this should be read
to mean Don't Seek to Know High Things or, rather, Don't
Be Haughty depends on whether you take the Latin word
altum adverbially or accusatively).
M.. TERENTII
�48
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
figs. 5, 6, 7, 8
PAI.IIIII
&r«bwa.oa.J.TIITUB.Aifl•cnp.S;!d.-~
M.P. J:l: Ylllo
CVW
r-.IVILIDIO
.. I D I &
I find pictures 5 - 8 quite intriguing, particularly the ones
showing a pruning hook suspended from heaven and bearing
�49
MASCHLER
the motto Rami ut Ego Inserrerer Defracti Sunt (Branches
Have Been Broken Off So As To Let Me Be Engrafted). If the
pictures leave you cold, perhaps I can persuade you to take an
interest in them by showing you page 43 (notice the Arabic
numeral!) from Henri Estienne's Plato edition.
figs. 9,10
]> L A T 0
N
I S_
opera qua: extant omh!a_
EX NOVA JOANNIS SI!RRANiiN-
Rij=t:O'kn~m:~::~:::?:~7!:-~g:.--
El,ID~M ..i!Iuutdi.llwJUI~IIiiUwwprtttUtMNTiiot.
If you were to pull out your own edition of the Platonic
dialogues, you would notice that the opening lines of the
Crito bear the Stephanus page number 43 : the Estienne
dynasty's Hellenized name is Stephanus . My picture
acquaints you with the fans et origo of what you learned to
call, when you were St. John's freshmen, Stephanus pagination!
Here is another odd effect of encountering these
Stephanus trees, especially the title page of the Bible: Though
the initial interpretation of the Elzevier tree (the tree that
brought us here), was mistaken; and though the Stephanus
�50
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tree is not the tree of knowledge either, nevertheless the
motto Don't Seek To Know High Matters or Don't Be Proud
does seem to demarcate (roughly) some such territory as
Don't Grow Too Big For Your Breeches.S
The reason for my being skeptical about the idea that the
Stephanus tree was intended as a reminder of Genesis 3 is
that some of the pictures very prominently display grafts, and
all the pictures, even those which do not exhibit a pruning
hook or marks of grafting, show branches that have been cut
off from the tree.
The world, our minds, the Bible, and other great books
are simply full of all manner of trees.6 One tree is likely to
conjure up another in our minds. But obviously, this need not
mean that so it was intended by whoever designed the title
pages. Doesn't the mind's associational play becomes tedious
when there is no principle for sorting the relevant from the
irrelevant ?
As it turns out, there is a passage inCh. 11 of Paul's Letter
to the Romans directly apposite to the Stephanus emblems
that were shown. It runs as follows:
If the dough offered as first fruits is holy, so is
the whole lump; and if the root is holy, so are the
branches. But if some of the branches were broken
off and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in
their place to share the richness of the olive tree,
do not boast over the branches. If you do boast,
remember it is not you that support the root, but
the root that supports you. You will say 'Branches
were broken off so that I might be grafted in.' That is
true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast only through faith. So do
not become proud, but stand in awe."
The Greek uses the verb hupselophroneo, that is, "I am
high minded," "I am proud," which rings rather differently
than does the Latin, especially when, as on the picture, the
�MASCHLER
51
Latin is taken in isolation. Notice that when the motto is Noli
Altum Sapere, the "solitary" points; when the motto is Ut
Ego Insererer he prays. Is the solitary intended to be St. Paul
when he points and a grafted pagan when he prays?
fig. 11
The pictures in figure 11 are three versions of an emblem
employed by the great Antwerp publisher, Christopher
Plantin. Again there is a tree and a man, but this time the man
sits comfortably in the tree's shade, to the left, and holds one
branch that he's cut off. Besides, unlike Elzevier's solitary,
he's wearing a hat. The motto runs: Exerce Imperia Et Ramos
Compesce Fluentes, that is: Exercise Authority and Trim the
Flowing Branches. I tracked down the words to Virgil's
Georgics, 2.370 (Loeb ed., p. 141) Milton, in Paradise Lost,
9.215f, 9.427f, 4.305, uses the same image, as does
Shakespeare in the garden scene of Richard II (4.3).
I earlier took the step of detaching the emblems plus mottoes from the titles and authors of the books on whose front
page they appear and of attaching them, instead, to three
publisher-printers-Elzevier, Stephanus, Plantin. Do the three
trademarks "allude" to each other? Intentionally so? How
could one tell? More generally, why would an engraver, poet,
man of letters, painter, publisher want to be "reminding" the
viewer or reader of another artist's artful item? On the other
�52
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
hand, if there is no intentional alluding going on, why all
these tree pictures? Mere habit and lack of invention?
One of the surprises that came my way as I kept on the
track of finding the sense and purpose of the Elzevier imprint
was that bibliophiles, historians, curators of libraries, and
professors of the curious subject "bibliography" have all for
some hundreds of years been studying publishers' imprints. 7
Since these devices sometimes look reminiscent of heraldic
coats of arms, and since coats of arms-plainly visible identifying marks that can be seen even from a distance and in the
melee of battle-probably originally served warriors to make
it possible for their brothers in arms to rush to their assistance, it occurred to me that the likeness between coats of
arms and publishers' imprints to which the just mentioned
book experts draw attention may conceivably imply that the
three publishing dynasties that I have so far mentioned-in
roughly chronological order, the Estiennes, the PlantinMoretus house, the Elzeviers-all used trees as their trademark, as though to proclaim to the world that they were, so
to say, "in this together." Such a notion, of "us against them,"
is perhaps not altogether misguided, since Christopher
Plantin, in preparing his magnificent polyglot Bible, relied on
the scholarly philological work previously done, and published, by Robert Estienne,s and several Elzeviers, before an
independent press under that name became established, seem
to have worked for the House of Plantin.9
The tree motif that I've shown you was, however, not the
sole Plantin publisher 's imprint. It was the first. But the far
more famous and more frequent identifying mark of the
House of Plantin-Moretus is not a tree; it is a drawing compass. It was under this imprint that, for example, most of the
works of the Flemish engineer, bookkeeper, and mathematician Simon Stevin (1548-1620) were first published (the polyglot Bible of 1568-72 as well).
�MASCHLER
53
fig. 12
I had become interested in Simon Stevin
even before reaching the
St. John's campus or reading Jacob Klein's book on
the history of algebra for
linguistic reasons. Having
spent some of my early
school years speaking
Dutch (the vernacular
language in which Stevin's
Works were, by his
express choice, originally
published), I was aware
that Dutch holds a double set of words for things mathematical and scientific-one employing strictly ordinary
natively Dutch words and roots, the other pseudo-Latin or
pseudo-Greek, as is our English mathematical and scientific
vocabulary. When I found out that Simon Stevin was the one
who had, single-handedly, coined the former, the scientific
vocabulary employing strictly Dutch roots, I became curious
about this man. His teaching style too was special (initially it
was, perhaps, developed to instruct the then ruler of the
northern Low Countries, William the Silent's son, Maurice of
Nassau, 1567-1625). It seemed much more welcoming than,
say, Vieta's, more like Galileo's. Stevin's pedagogic mode
gives the impression of being shaped by the desire to give
"people who have good horse sense" (to use Galileo's phrase
in a letter to Kepler) an opportunity to become engaged by
and to contribute to scientific endeavor even if they lack
university training and, embarassed by this fact, feel excluded
from discourse peppered with alien Latin and Greek jargon.
To my delight, it turned out that Stevin had written a booklet
called Het Burgerlyk Leven (Civic Life), which fact seemed to
�54
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
confirm that, though chiefly an engineer, Stevin was far from
oblivious to matters socio-political.lO
Given these facts, it is not so strange that my imagination
was piqued when I found that some of the books of Stevin's
published by the Plantin press exhibited the banner bearing
the Plantin motto Labore Et Constantia (By Dint of Work and
Perseverence) as held by a man with a spade, that is, someone
who works the soil, and a woman with a Jacob's staff (a
Jacob's staff is a right-angled cross with a long vertical used
by surveyors and anyone studying the heavens to estimate the
size of angles).ll
fig. 13
Since the hand holding
the characteristic Plantin
compass seemed to come
from the heavens (clouds
surround the wrist to which
that hand is attached),
I wondered whether the
message was that all threethe mathematician-engineer, the farmer, and the
student of the heavensshould live by the printer's motto: By Dint of Work and
Perseverance. Of course, the motto leaves enigmatic what the
goal or outcome of such a "work ethic" might be.12
Had it not been for the fact that, before joining the
St. John's faculty, I had been interested in the relations of
science and religion, so that I had spent time mulling over the
early chapters in Genesis, I would probably not have paid
much attention to the emblem with which this talk began, the
Elzevier tree. But given a long-standing curiosity about
whether the psychological sources of religion and science are
one or many, it was inevitable that I would, eventually,
encounter the Jewish mystical tradition, called Kabbalah and,
�MASCHLER
55
having heard that a certain Italian nobleman, Pico della
Mirandola (1463-1494 ), was the first Christian to dabble in
Kabbalah, that I would try to read some of this man's books.
The most famous of these, today, is called An Oration on the
Dignity of Man. Pica's Oration, which is an astonishingly
hope-filled celebration of human freedom, was intended to
serve as an introduction to the defense of a huge tome of 900
theses which the then twenty-four year old prodigy of learning had published and to the public disputation of which, in
Rome, he invited all scholars.
I have not yet read Pico's Nine-Hundred Theses. [A copiously annotated translation by S.A. Farmer was brought out
in 1998 under the title Syncretism in the West: Pica's 900 theses (1486).] I have, however, read Pico's Oration. It begins
with a retelling of the myth told by the travelling teacher
Protagoras when, in Athens, he conversed with Socrates
about the question whether virtue can be taught (Protagoras
320Dff):
Reverend Fathers: I have read in the records of the
Arabians that Abdala the Moslem, when questioned as to what on this stage of the world ...
could be seen most worthy of wonder, replied:
'There is nothing to be seen more wonderful than
man.'... It seems to me I have come to understand
why man is the most fortunate of creatures and
consequently worthy of all admiration and what
precisely is that rank which is his lot in the universal chain of being-a rank to be envied not only
by brutes but even by the stars and by minds
beyond this world .... God the Father, the supreme
Architect, had already built this cosmic home we
behold, the most sacred temple of His godhead ....
But when the work was finished, the Craftsman
kept wishing that there were someone to ponder
the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty, and
to wonder at its vastness. Therefore, when every-
�56
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
thing was done (as Moses and Timaeus bear
witness), He finally took thought concerning the
creation of man. But there was not among His
archetypes that from which He could fashion a
new offspring, nor was there in His treasure
houses anything which he might bestow on His
new son as an inheritance, nor was there in the
seats of all the world a place where the latter
might sit to contemplate the universe. All was now
complete; all things had been assigned to the highest, the middle, and the lowest orders .... At last the
best of artisans ordained that that creature to
whom He had been able to give nothing proper to
itself should have joint possession of whatever had
been peculiar to each of the different kinds of
being. He therefore took man as a creature of
indeterminate nature and, assigning him a place in
the middle of the world, addressed him thus:
'Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine
alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we
given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy
longing and according to thy judgment thou
mayest have and possess what abode, what form,
and what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The
nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by
Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance
with thine own free will, in whose hand We have
placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of
thy nature .... Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are
brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy
soul's judgment, to be reborn into the higher
forms, which are divine.' ... Why do we emphasize
this? To the end that after we have been born to
this condition-that we can become what we
�MASCHLER
57
will-.. .we may not, by abusing the most indulgent generosity of the Father, make for ourselves
that freedom of choice He has given into something harmful instead of salutary. "13
The two most remarkable things in the Oration are, first,
that Pico nowhere mentions original sin; and second, that (in
a passage which I did not cite) he seems to regard what we
would probably call science as the endeavor whereby
mankind becomes ruler of the powers of wickedness.
Pico never got to deliver the speech, nor was it published
during his lifetime (1463-1494). But it was published soon
thereafter, by his nephew, Giovanni Francesco, in a posthumous edition of his uncle's Works . Now Pico's Oration holds
the line: ''As the farmer marries elm to grapevine, so the
magus marries earth to heaven, that is, lower things to the
qualities and virtues of higher things."14
Look again at the Elzevier tree. What's twisting around
the tree is not a snake but a grapevine. The tree does not bear
apples or pomegranates (the fruits which the "forbidden tree"
is frequently said to have borne). It is an elm tree. But our
original idea, that the solitary man standing beside the tree is
whoever plays the role of Galileo-the filosofo e matematico
-seems affirmed. Pico calls him a "magician," but since Pico
is careful to explain that the art practiced by magi such as
Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Plato (all of whom he
mentions by name) "does not so much make wonders as
carefully serve nature which makes them," it does not seem
altogether unsafe to regard Stevin or Galileo as illustrative of
Pico's idea of the magus.l5 We seem, then, to have succeeded
in finding an answer to the question what the Elzevier
emblem means.
Pico's words become all the more interesting when one
finds out that there is a long church tradition of "hexahemeral," that is, six-day literature. It goes back to the Greek
church father St. Basil the Great's Hexahemeral Homilies.
(Basil was Bishop of Caesarea. His birth and death years are
�58
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
330-379.) St. Ambrose (340-397, Bishop of Milan), St. Bede
(672-735, priest and author of an ecclesiastical history) and
Grosseteste (1175-1253, Bishop of Lincoln) all imitated these
homilies in their own Hexahemera. Hexahemera are, I gather
from editors' notes, a series of sermons delivered over the
first week of Lent. St. Ambrose, sometimes directly translating Basil's Greek into Latin, in the course of his sermons
affectionately describes the beautiful and well-adapted
creatures that God made. He seems to be using the opening
chapters of Genesis as a topical outline for natural history.
From the translator's editorial notes one learns that many of
the joyous descriptive passages are culled from pagan authors
while others are recognizably lines from Job, Psalms, the
Prophets, or the New Testament, where the relevant natural
wonder comes up. The effect isn't at all bookish. The
congregation, eagerly waiting for Easter, must have felt
confirmed in its faith that everything that God made is beautiful and good, that God cares for his creatures. There is no
hint of a conflict between secular and sacred authorities.
Indeed Basil, in his 6th Homily, concerning the sun and
moon, argues for rational astronomy: "Do not then measure
the moon with your eye but with your reason, which is much
more accurate than the eyes for the discovery of truth"
(Fathers of the Church, volume 46, p. 102).
As luck would have it, St. Ambrose, while celebrating the
works of the third day, touches on the tree of the Elzeviers.
He writes:
Who does not marvel at the fact that from the
seed of the grape springs forth a vine that climbs
even as high as the top of a tree? The vine fondles
the tree by embracing and binding it with vine
leaves and crowns it with garlands of grapes. In
imitation of our life, the vine first plants deep its
living roots; then, because its nature is flexible and
likely to fall, it uses its tendrils like arms to hold
tight whatever it seizes. By this means it raises
�MASCHLER
59
itself and lifts itself on high. Similar to this vine
are the members of the church.
A little further on in the sermon Ambrose, by merging the
Tower of the Prophet Isaiah's Song of the Vineyard with the
tree just described, comes to identify the tree as the church
leaders-the apostles, prophets, and doctors"-while the vine
remains the Christian Congregation.
Pico, I conclude from this textual evidence, is drawing on
a Church tradition which is not afraid of allowing Pagan
authors (Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, even Lucretius) to join the
Biblical in testifying to God's hope that human beings, rightly guided, can learn how to use their freedom wisely. But he
seems, somehow, to have added a "third thing" to Ambrose's
two: the farmer is the one who marries tree to vine; the
magus is the one who ensures the entwining of lower (say
material?) and higher (say mathematical?) things. Is God the
one who marries church leaders to their congregation? My
guess is that according to Pico the farmer's work, which
includes but does not consist of the work of matchmaking,
imitates God's work as described in Genesis 1. Non Solus
refers to the vine and the tree in the Mediterranean landscape; to Man and Woman; to church leaders and congregation.
This same short-lived Pico, whose oration on our "perfectibility"16 became (according to the Cambridge History of
Renaissance Philosophy, p. 313 ), a popular and influential
work that was often quoted and imitated, and many of whose
ideas filtered into the thought of sixteenth-century thinkers,
was instrumental in establishing one of Europe's most important early presses, the Aldine. Here's the story: Pico and
young Aldo Manuzzio had become friends in their student
days. Aldo even resided with Pico for two years. Pico
arranged for Aldo to serve as tutor to Pico's two nephews.
One of these nephews came to supply Aldo with funds to
start up a printing press. The city of Venice was selected as
locale for the printery-the same city that later figures as
�60
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
locale for Galileo's Discorsi. The plan was that Aldo would
retrieve, edit, print, and distribute, and thus preserve for the
entire world, the whole corpus of Greek literature. The 11th
edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (volume 17, pp. 624626) contains a glowing account:
At Venice Aldo gathered an army of Greek scholars and compositors round him. His trade was
carried on by Greeks and Greek was the language
of his household. Instructions to typesetters were
given in Greek.17 The prefaces to his editions were
written in Greek .... His own industry and energy
were unremitting. In 1495 he issued the first
volume of his Aristotle. [The whole Aristotelian
corpus, in 5 volumes, was eventually brought out
by Aldo.] ... Nine comedies of Aristophanes
appeared in 1498. Thucydides, Sophocles, and
Herodotus followed in 1502. Xenophon's
Hellenica and Euripides in 1503. Demosthenes in
1504 ... .In 1513 Aldo reappeared with Plato, which
he dedicated to Pope Leo XlB .... Nor was Aldo idle
in regard to Latin and Italian classics.... To his
fellow workers he was uniformly generous, free
from jealousy and prodigal of praise. While aiming
at that excellence of typography which renders his
editions the treasures of the book collector, he
strove at the same time to make them cheap ....
When he died, bequeathing Greek literature as an
inalienable possession to the world, he was a poor
man."19
We, who take the availability in our bookcases of our very
own volumes of Aristotle and of Plato so much for granted,
owe much gratitude to Aldo!
Aldo, the businessman and scholar, gathered 'round
himself an international circle of men of learning who would
constitute a New Academy {presumably in emulation not only
�MASCHLER
61
of Plato's Academy in Athens but also to rival the one
established under Medici auspices in Florence and headed by
Marsilio Ficino, 1433-1499). A catalogue published by the
Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, commemorating an exhibition entitled "Learning from the Greeks, an
Exhibition Commemorating the Five Hundredth Anniversary
of the Founding of the Aldine Press," reports that, according
to its rules, the Aldine New Academy's members were to
meet for symposia, serve as an advisory board to the press,
and assist in the editorial tasks of seeing the texts into print.
While the Beinecke catalogue is scrupulous about discriminating what is known about the New Academy's rules (which
included the stipulation that only Greek was to be spoken at
meetings) from what is known about obedience to them, it is
altogether confident that there was an Aldine circle, to which
scholars of many different nationalities belonged, including
an Englishman, Thomas Linacre. It was owing to this English
connection that the Dutchman, Erasmus, came to visit Italy
and became an intimate of Aldo's.
The sequence of events appears to have been, roughly, as
follows: Erasmus (1469-1536), the first European to succeed,
literally, in living by his pen, keeping himself independent
from churches and courts and universities and casting his lot
with Europe's great printer-publishers,zo in his younger days
served as tutor to an Englishman, Lord Mountjoy, while they
were both studying in Paris. Lord Mountjoy invited Erasmus
to England and there introduced him to Thomas More,
Colet, and Linacre. Colet, who later became Dean of
St. Paul's Cathedral in London and founder (or re-founder?)
of one of England's most famous "public schools,"21 had
become convinced that it was necessary, and possible, "to
bring back the Christianity of the Apostles." He, though
agemate to Erasmus, seems to have set Erasmus his life's task:
Erasmus was to learn Greek very well so that he would be
able to retrieve the original New Testament as well as the
�62
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
work of the early church fathers and have them-the original
authorities for a Christian life-published and spread.22
Erasmus carried out this plan. He went to Italy, partly, at
least, in the hope of bettering his Greek. He met and made
friends with Aldus and his circle. Eventually he brought out a
New Testament in Greek and Latin (several of the early
Church Fathers' Works as well). Erasmus's text of the New
Testament, in the 1519 edition, was the one that Luther used
for his German translation. It was also the base text for
Robert Estienne's third edition of the New Testament, published in Paris in 1550, and it was the first to be published
with critical apparatus. Erasmus's text underlies our King
James version, and when the Elzeviers, in 1633, published
their Greek Testament they proclaimed it "the received text"
(textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptus). The scholars
who produced the recent University of Toronto edition of
Erasmus's Works, on whom I am relying for this information,
write: "Thus was created the so-called textus receptus, the
foundation of protestant Bible scholarship for three centuries,
until the ninteenth century ushered in a new era of Biblical
criticism. "23
It was, more than anything, because of such philological
labors that the more learned of his contemporaries hailed
Erasmus as "the prince of theologians." One of these writes
to Erasmus:
[You are] ... the first author in our times of the
rebirth of theology, [you are the man who] called
back theologians from the ... turbid waters of the
scholastics to the sources of sacred letters ....As
with a trumpet you have summoned the entire
world to the philosophy of Christ. We do not
doubt that you were born to restore theology.
Therefore, fulfill your destiny and purge with your
most learned hand Augustine and Hilary that we
may distinguish the spurious from the genuine, as
�MASCHLER
63
in previous years you did most successfully with
Jerome.24
I do not know why Erasmus, when he brought out the
first edition of his "purified" New Testament, called it Novum
Instrumentum.25 But the coincidence that this tag should
sound so much like Bacon's Novum Organum to our ears
helps to make vivid that Erasmus's hopes for reform and
renewal were as much vested in the recovery of access to
Sacred Scripture as were Bacon's, later, in the recovery of
access to nature. Both men thought of themselves as fighting
idol worship!
Erasmus apprenticed himself to the notorious philologist
Valla (1406-1457), whose notes to the New Testament he had
discovered a decade or so earlier. By quoting from Erasmus's
letter to the man to whom he dedicated his edition of Valla's
Notes on the New Testament, I may convey why I believe we
do wrong in looking down our noses at philological labors as
mere dry-as-dust scholarship, a scholarship for which only
men who have the soul of someone raised by maiden aunts
would have the patience. Erasmus writes:
As I was hunting last summer in an ancient
library.. .luck brought me a prey of no ordinary
importance, Lorenzo Valla's notes on the New
Testament. At once I was eager to share it with
the world of scholarship, for it seemed ... ungenerous to devour the prize of my chase in solitude
and silence. But I was a little put off... by the
entrenched unpopularity of Valla's name .... 26
You, however... began to urge me ...not to cheat
the author of the credit he deserved or to deprive
countless students of such an enormous advantage
.. .I am inclined to believe that the most unpleasantly hostile demonstrations ... will be made by
those who stand most to profit, that is, the theologians. They will say it is intolerable presumption in
�64
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
a grammarian, who has upset every department
of learning, to let his impertinent pen loose on
scripture itself.... Tell me what is so shocking about
Valla's action in making a few annotations on the
New Testament after comparing several old and
good Greek manuscripts. After all, it is from Greek
sources that our text undoubtedly comes; and
Valla's notes had to do with internal disagreements, or a nodding translator's plainly inadequate
rendering of the meaning, or things that are more
intelligibly expressed in Greek, or, finally, anything
that is clearly corrupt in our text. Will they maintain that Valla, the grammarian, has not the same
privileges as Nicholas the theologian? .. .! do not
believe that theology herself, the queen of all the
sciences, will be offended if some share is claimed
in her... by her humble attendant grammar; for
though grammar is of less consequence in some
men's eyes, no help is more indispensable than
hers. She is concerned with small details, details
such as have always been indispensable for greatness. Perhaps she discusses trivial questions, but
these have important corollaries. If they protest
that a theologian is too grand to be bound by the
rules of grammar, and that the whole business of
interpretation depends on the inspiration of the
holy spirit, what a novel distinction is offered to
theologians, who are to have the exclusive privilege of expressing themselves ungrammatically.. .It
will be said that it is sinful to change anything in
the Holy Scriptures .... On the contrary, the sin of
corruption is greater, and the need for careful revision by scholars is greater also .... The ... discrepancies in our current texts prove clearly that they are
not free from errors.27
�MASCHLER
65
If, though a Christian, you believe that serving God is
something quite distinct and separate from ferreting out
truth-the true and correct reading, for instance, of the verses in Romans that had been taken to teach men that their will
is depraved-you may impatiently shrug off Erasmus's
exegetical labors as mere fussing. If, further, you have not
been advised, by secondary literature, that ever since St.
Jerome and Augustine there had been opposition within the
Christian church between those who held to a philological
idea of Bible exegesis and those who believed in the need for
an "extra" of a directly inspirational sort, scholarly Europe's
adoration for Erasmus will be baffling. There is, however, a
book bearing the title Erasmus, Lee and the Correction of the
Vulgate: The Shaking of the Foundations (Librairie Droz,
Geneva, 1992) which argues that it would not be a distortion
to see the quarrel between Luther and Erasmus in terms of
the fact that whereas Luther claimed that at a certain time
and in a certain place he "underwent an illumination or
inspiration enabling him to penetrate to the meaning of
Romans 1:17 .... Erasmus undermines and rejects the need for
this kind of extraordinary intervention .. .insofar as his own
day is concerned" (p. 17, Coogan).
As Erasmus reads Romans 5:12, the Vulgate translation of
the Greek text eph' ho pantes hemarton was erroneous. The
Vulgate takes the Greek words to mean "in whom all sinned"
(in quo omnes peccaverunt).
Augustine had supported his doctrine of original
sin as an inherited depravity with this translation.
Erasmus was the first in the history of Western [as
opposed to Eastern) exegesis to understand [the
Greek preposition] epi as having a causal sense
(because all sinned). In a very lengthy annotation
expanded over several editions Erasmus defended
his translation and interpretation ... as referring
not to original sin in the Augustinian sense of an
�66
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
inherited guilt but rather to personal sins committed in free imitation of the sin of Adam.
When criticized for his paraphrase, Erasmus replied that
Origen, Ambrose, and Theophylact Gerome, or rather, pseudo-Jerome as well) all favor his interpretation here. The
editors of the Toronto ed. of Erasmus's Paraphrase of Romans
(volume 42, p. 147) add a quote from the Greek Church
Father Origen in evidence: "For all who are born in this
world are not only nourished by parents, but also instructed,
and they are not only sons of sinners, but disciples"
(PG 14;1018B-C).
Given Erasmus's return to what was in the West a preAugustinian reading, more nearly in acccord with Origen, not
only of Romans 5:12 but also of 6:15ff, it is not surprising
that he became a hero to such as were filled with Pico's pedagogic hopes! And no wonder that some of the eighteenthcentury philosophes, for example, Pierre Bayle and Jean
LeClerc, embraced him as one of their own kind! The
Toronto editors of Erasmus' Paraphrase of Romans
(pp. 148ff.) go so far as to say: "Like Origen and Pelagius,
Erasmus interprets Paul as teaching that sin is more a matter
of custom [that is, second nature] than of nature."28
Erasmus's philological labors on the New Testament
made scriptural warrant for the dogma of the trinity questionable as well.29 This did not lead him to deny the doctrine.JO Rather, in accord with the Estienne motto Noli Altum
Sapere, Sed Time (Don't Be Haughty, But Be Mraid), it led
him to question a theology-, that is, theory-centered
Christianity. In evidence I cite from a letter which he used as
preface to his edition of St. Hilary of Poitier (ca.315-367):
Is he who cannot disentangle according to the
method of philosophy what distinguishes the
father from the son or the holy spirit from both,
or what the difference is between the generation
of the son from the father and the procession of
�MASCHLER
the spirit, is he destined not to have fellowship
with the father, son, and holy spirit? .... After the
richest talents have applied all their energy for a
long time to the investigation of [high theological
questions], this at last is the final result of their
effort: they realize they know nothing; and, what
is more, they contribute nothing to the devout life.
Thus, nowhere more does that well-known passage
from Paul apply: 'Knowledge puffs up, charity
builds up.' What arrogance, what contentions,
what tumult, what discord ... do we see gush forth
from this kind of absurd learning. Although our
life is so fleeting, we neglect meanwhile those
things without which no one has any hope of
attaining salvation. Unless I pardon my brother's
sins against me, God will not pardon my transgressions against him. Unless I have a pure heart, I
shall not see God. Therefore, with all my energy I
must aim, I must practice, I must strive to cleanse
my soul of malice, hatred, envy, pride, avarice, and
lust. You will not be damned if you should not
know whether the spirit proceeding from the
father and the son has a single or a double principle, but you will not escape perdition unless you
see to it in the meantime that you have the fruits
of the spirit, which are charity, joy, peace,
patience, kindness .... Toward this end the chief
concern of our study must be focused and directed .... The sum and substance of our religion is
peace and concord. This can hardly remain the
case unless we define as few matters as possible and
leave each individual's judgment free on many
questions. This is because the obscurity of most
questions is great and the malady is for the most
part intrinsic to our human nature... Many puzzling
questions are now referred to an ecumenical coun-
67
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
68
cil. It would be much more fitting to defer such
questions to that time when we shall see God face
to face without the mirror and without the
mystery.31
Let me conclude by reporting what Erasmus offers in the
way of commentary on the publishers' emblems and mottos
on which I have threaded much of this essay. He does not, in
the Adages, which are my text for this purpose, touch on the
motif of the tree and, as far as I know, omits adages derived
from Holy Writ altogether, mining solely pagan literature. So
it was I, not Erasmus, who brought an anti-theological,
Erasmian, reading of the Estienne motto and tree . He does,
however, include a motto that came to figure (in 1642, thus
long after Erasmus's death) on the title pages of some of the
Amsterdam Elzeviers: It runs Ne Extra Oleas (Not Beyond
the Olive Trees). The words were taken, says Erasmus,32 from
Aristophanes's Frogs (993 ), and a scholiast is reported to have
explained33 that the sense of the motto is Acknowledge
Limits.
Erasmus does dwell on two other printers devices-the
Aldine press's anchor-cum-dolphin and the Frobens's
caduceus.
Fig.14 and fig. 15
Without Aldo
Manuzzio-the
Venetian printer set
up
m
business
through the good
offices of Count Pico
della Mirandola, see
p. 55 above-and
without Christopher
Proben-the Basel
printer from whose
presses most of
�MASCHLER
69
Erasmus's writings issued-such
a life as that of Erasmus, independent scholar and man of letters, would have been impossible. Erasmus was well aware that
his own freedom and his service
of mankind depended on these
printer-publishers. The longest
commentary on a proverb (14
pages) is devoted to the Aldo
motto, Festina Lente (Make
Haste Slowly).34
Erasmus tracks the saying to Suetonius's "Life of
Augustus" and remarks:
It does not surprise me that this proverb was a
favorite with two Roman emperors, and they by
far the most worthy of praise, Octavius Augustus
and Titus Vespianus ... .It is easy to see that this
saying pleased Titus Vespianus, from the evidence
of ancient coinage. Aldus Manutius showed me a
silver coin of old and obviously Roman workmanship, which he said had been given him by Peter
Bembo, a young Venetian nobleman, who was
foremost in scholarship and a great delver into
ancient literature. It was stamped as follows: on
one side there was the effigy of Titus Vespianus
with an inscription, on the other an anchor, with a
dolphin wound round the middle of it as if round
a pole. This means nothing else than the saying of
Augustus Caesar, Hasten Slowly, or so the books
on hieroglyphics tell us. That ["hieroglyphics"] is
the word for the enigmatic carvings which were so
much used in early times, especially among the
Egyptian soothsayers and priests, who thought it
wrong to exhibit the mysteries of wisdom to the
vulgar in open writing, as we do; but they
�70
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
expressed what they thought worthy to be known
by various symbols, things, or animals, so that not
everyone could readily interpret them. But if anyone deeply studied the qualities of each object, and
the special nature and power of each creature, he
would at length, by comparing and guessing what
they symbolized, understand the meaning of the
riddle .... The anchor, because it delays, slows
down, and stops the ship, means slowness; the dolphin represents speed .. ..This kind of writing... not
only has great dignity but gives no little pleasure .... What symbol is better suited to express the
ardent and dauntless activity of the mind than the
dolphin? .... So this saying, Make Haste Slowly,
appears to have originated in the mysteries of the
most antique philosophy, from thence to be taken
up by the two most admirable of Roman emperors .... Now it has come down to Aldus Manutius of
Rome [Aldo was born in Rome] as the third heir in
succession ... .Indeed I should not think this symbol
was more illustrious when it was stamped on the
imperial coinage and passing from hand to hand
than now, when it is sent out beyond the bounds
of Christendom, on all kinds of books, in both
languages, recognized, owned and praised by all
to whom liberal studies are holy.... Consider as
well that, however one may sing the praises of
those who by their virtue either defend or increase
the glory of their country, their actions only affect
worldly prosperity, and within narrow limits. But
the man who sets fallen learning on its feet (and
this is almost more difficult than to originate it in
the first place) is building up a sacred and immortal thing, and serving not one province alone but
all peoples and all generations.35 Once this was the
task of princes, and it was the greatest glory of
�MASCHLER
71
Ptolemy [the ruler, not the astronomer]. But his
[Ptolemy's] library was contained between the narrow walls of its own house, whereas Aldus is
building up a library which has no other limits
than the world itself.
Of Proben he writes:
What Aldus was striving to do among the
Italians ...John Proben is trying to achieve on this
side of the Alps ... .lf the northern princes were to
favor good learning as honestly as the Italians, the
serpents of Proben would not be so far from the
riches of Aldus's dolphins. Aldus, making haste
slowly, gained both riches and fame, and deserved
both; Proben, holding his staff erect, looking to
nothing but usefulness to the public, not losing the
simplicity of the dove while he expresses the wisdom of the serpent ... Proben has amassed less
money than fame.
The interpretation of Proben's caduceus emblem that
Erasmus gives derives, of course, from the New Testament.
Erasmus is quoting Jesus' words, who says, addressing his
disciples: "I send you out as sheep admidst wolves, so be ye
wise as serpents and innocent as doves." (Matthew 10:16).
Whether the Proben bird really is a dove I cannot tell from
the picture. Nor have I seen a Proben imprint with this motto.
It may exist. But it is equally possible that Erasmus is pulling
everybody's leg, rousing hopes for the revelation of secrets
that are non-existent.
But perhaps both of his comments constitute an apologia
pro vita sua? Erasmus never joined Luther's Protestant fold.
And while court records of inquisitorial interrogation of men
accused of heresy show that some, for example, Baptist,
laymen framed the formula of their Christian faith exactly in
the terms provided by Erasmus's New Testament text,36
which they knew by heart and quoted to the inquisitor,
�72
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Erasmus, unlike these Baptists, died in his bed, not at the
stake. For this he has been blamed. Luther denies him the title
of Christian and calls him a sceptic. Some pre-World War 2
twentieth-century historians have called him a coward.
I don't call him anything but thank him.
Notes
1 Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the
Human Mind, Weidenfeld and Nicolson English ed. of 1955,
pp. 72££, first published in French in 1795 . A richly detailed working out of what's "in" these words of Condorcet's is given by
Elizabeth Eisenstein's book The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Earlymodern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1979). Somewhat
surprisingly, Eisenstein does not mention Condorcet.
2 Francis Bacon, New Organon, trans. Fulton H . Anderson (Library
of Liberal Arts, 1960); Advancement of Learning, ed. G.W. Kitchin.
3 Italics, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. Please notice that the
printer is sufficiently self-possessed to take it upon himself to
address the reader.
Since the list of Elzevier science books deserves to be known, I tick
off some of them: Descartes's Geometry, Meditations, Principles,
Passions, Opera Omnia; Gilbert's De Mundo nostro sublunari
philosophia nova; Hobbes's Elementa Philosophica; several of
Francis van Schooten's mathematical books, which were studied by
Newton; Vieta's Collected Works; Stevin's Mathematical Works, in
a French version; Christian Huygens's Theoremata; the medical
writings of that Professor Tulp whom Rembrandt depicts in his
''Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp,"-all of these were brought out by
the Elzeviers.
4
5 The Amsterdam branch of Elzevier, which used the goddess
Athena, along with her shield, olive, and owl as its imprint, likewise
stressed that curbing hybris is the mark of wisdom, for their motto
was a quotation from Aristophanes' Frogs, line 993:
me ... ektoth ... ton elaon (Not Beyond The Olive Trees) . A.C.J.
Willems, in his book about the Elzeviers, reports that an ancient
�MASCHLER
73
scholiast explained the meaning to be something like ''Acknowledge
limits!" A.C.J. Willems, Les Elzeviers, 1880, p. xciii.
Yeats's chestnut tree at the end of ''Among School Children," the
"tree diagrams" of Chomskyan linguistics, the genealogical tree of
Jesse, the tree of which the Duchess speaks to John of Gaunt in Act
1, scene 2 of Shakespeare's Richard II, not to mention the fact that
in the days when our St. John's Liberty Tree still stood, it was spoken of as a symbol for our nation in that "the relation between
branches and trunk suggests the joining of unity with diversity,
which is the genius of America."
6
7 Evidently, scholars who do intellectual or cultural history rather
than study great books, have long taken cognizance of the fact that
the capitalist enterprise of printing and publishing has, as Bacon
claimed and the eighteenth-century philosophes reiterate, changed
the face of the world.
8 Fred Schreiber, in his book The Estiennes (E.K. Schreiber, New
York, 1982), terms Robert Estienne the founder of modern lexicography through his Latinae Linguae Thesaurus. Robert was also the
publisher of David Kimchi's Sefer haShorashim, a Hebrew thesaurus
designed on the principle of grouping words of the same (usually
triliteral) root together. Henri 2 Estienne, Robert's son, later
applied this same principle of organization to his huge Thesaurus of
the Greek language. The Plantin polyglot Bible, in Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, Syriac, and Aramaic is, by cognoscenti, ranked as "the
most important work ever produced in the Netherlands by one
printer"-so says L. Voet, former director of the Plantin-Moretus
Museum in Antwerp and author of The Golden Compasses: A
History and Evaluation of the Printing and Publishing Activities of
the Officina Plantiana at Antwerp (Amsterdam, London, New York,
1969-72).
According to the business records preserved at the PlantinMoretus House in Antwerp, Louis Elzevier had done some bookbinding for the Plantins in 1565-7, and his father, Hans Elzevier,
had-between 1567 and 1589-worked as a "pressman"for the
Plantins. Colin Clair, Christopher Plantin (Cassell and Co., London,
1960), pp. 154ff.
9
�74
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
For a summary of this little book, see Ch. 14 and 18 in Edward
Dijksterhuis's remarkable Dutch biography, Simon Stevin, an
abbreviated English version of which was published by R.
Hooykaas and M.G.J. Minnaert under the title Simon Stevin:
Science in the Netherlands around 1600, (Martinus Nijhoff, 1970).
(For Dijksterhuis's comment on what I called Stevin's teaching style,
see especially p. 121, beginning ?lines from the bottom of the page,
describing the distinctive logical and rhetorical attributes of Stevin's
famous "wreath of balls" demonstration). Dijksterhuis, in the
concluding chapter of his biography of Stevin, cites a fascinating
passage about city planning. Stevin recommends that on both sides
of the street houses be furnished with canopies. These would serve
pedestrians as protection against rain, sun, and traffic. "Such
protection would not only be agreeable for the wealthy but also
advantageous to the poor, who must, to gain a living, stay outside
and who don't have a change of clothing when once they're
drenched to the skin, and whose stockings and shoes wear out with
mud, so that they walk around with wet feet, as a result of which
they contract many diseases, diseases that are infectious, so that
they reach the wealthy. Therefore, if the wealthy were to underwrite the erection of such canopies, they would advance their own
interests as well." (I tried to render this amazing prose roughly as it
stands in Stevin's sixteenth-century Dutch. Dijksterhuis expects the
modern reader to find fault with Stevin for caring so little for the
well-being of the poor per se. It has, strangely, not occurred to him
that (a) the Adam-Smithean idea of enlightened self-interest is
entirely in accord with the rest of Stevin's thinking and (b) that
Stevin, precisely if he really wants those overhangs built, had better
appeal to the interests of the only burghers who have the wherewithal to put them up.)
10
J.
11 According to Dijksterhuis's list, the books published under this
particular Plantin vignette are: Dialectic (1585), The Art of Tenths
(1585), La Pratique d'Arithmetique (1585), The Building of Forts
(1594). I give the Dutch titles in English. We, who take the availability of printed self-help books on every conceivable subject for
granted, need a little dose of history to realize how huge a difference it makes that even commoners with just a little education can,
without going to school, teach themselves double entry bookkeeping or "how to draw a picture, compose a madrigal, mix paints,
bake clay, survey a field, handle all manner of tools." (p. 243
�MASCHLER
75
Eisenstein). Self-help literature is, to this day, the most lucrative part
of publishing.
12 Cf Bacon's New Organon Bk 2, last sentences of the concluding
aphorism, 52 (pp. 267f. LLA ed.). See also the quotation from
Bacon that Kant selected as frontispiece for the 2nd edition of the
Critique of Pure Reason.
The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer et al,
(University of Chicago, 1948), pp. 223££.
13
14 On the Dignity of Man, p. 28, Library of Liberal Arts ed. Cf.
Renaissance Philosophy of Man, p. 249. I am a little bewildered
that, as the English sentence runs, the elm is earthly and lower, the
vine heavenly and higher.
15 Pico holds that there are two kinds of magic. The first, he says,
the Greeks called goeteia. "The second sort they called mageia, the
perfect and highest wisdom as it were. Porphyry says that in the language of the Persians, magician means the same thing as interpreter
and lover of divine things means in our language .... The first is the
most fraudulent of arts, the second is firm, faithful, and
solid .... From the second comes the highest splendor and glory of
letters, desired in ancient times and almost always since then. No
man who was a philosopher and desirous of learning good arts has
ever been studious of the first. Pythagoras, Empedocles,
Democritus, Plato, travelled across the sea to learn the second.
When they came back they preached it and held it chief among the
esoteric doctrine ....As the first magic makes man subject to and
delivered over to the powers of wickedness, so the second makes him
their prince and lord .. ..The second, among the virtues sown by the
kindness of God and planted in the world, as if calling them out from
darkness to light, does not so much make wonders as carefully serve
nature which makes them," Dignity, p. 27-28. For commentary on
Pico's distinction between goeteia and mageia, compare D. P.
Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella,
(London: Warburg Institute, 1958). See also Maryjoe Teeter Dobbs,
Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, (Cambridge University Press,
1975). I found the latter book especially helpful in its effort to
explain how and why moral and religious self-formation was thought
to be accomplished through alchemical practices. This ought to be an
important question for those who value the distinction between
�-
-
- - - - - - - --- -- --------- -
76
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
liberal and servile arts on the ground that, unlike the merely useful
arts, the role of the liberal arts is to improve the human soul. To
determine whether alchemy and Pica's "magic," understood as
Dobbs and Walker explain them, are rivals to the Sacrament of the
Eucharist, one might have to study the portions of Part 3 of
St. Thomas's Summa Theologica that directly concern the latter.
16 Cf. Rousseau's Second Discourse, on Human Inequality, trans.
Masters and Masters (St. Martin's Press, 1964), pp. 113f.
17 Something analogous is reported, for Latin, by Henri 2 Estienne,
in a Preface addressed to his son Paul (see his 1585 edition of Aulus
Gellius). The father writes: ''And as I am on the topic of speaking
Latin, I will add another notable reminiscence of my father's family, by which you may understand the facilities I enjoyed as a boy for
acquiring that tongue. There was a time when your grandfather
Robert entertained in his own household ten men employed by him
as correctors on his press, or in other parts of his business. These
ten persons were all of them men of education; some of them of
considerable learning; as they were of different nations, so they
were of different languages. This necessitated them to employ Latin
as the common medium of communication, not at table only, but
about the house, so that the very maidservants came to understand
what was said and even to speak it a little. As for your grandmother, except one made use of some very unusual word, she understood
what was said in Latin with the same ease as if it had been French.
As to myself and my brother [Robert 2], we were allowed at home
to use no other language whenever we had to address my father or
one of his ten journeymen." Quoted by M. Pattison, Essays, vol. 1,
p. 71. Readers of Montaigne may be struck by the resemblance
between Montaigne pere and Robert Estienne. I am reminded of the
household of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, "the father of modern Hebrew,"
where, long before the founding of the modern state of Israel, only
Hebrew was to be spoken. This last observation is relevant to my
purposes because I am trying to convey how large a debt we owe to
the single-minded, perhaps fanatical, devotion of these men who
believed that through the right kind of filial piety, a critical filial
piety, re-birth is possible.
18 Before his elevation to the Papacy, Leo X was Giovanni de
Medici.
�MASCHLER
77
19 I could imagine that the relatively lengthy narrative about the
Aldine press is included in the eleventh ed. of the Brittanica because
the Encyclopedia's editors felt that their own enterprise of serving
the public good through the diffusion of knowledge beyond the
halls of the University and that of the house of Aldo were one and
the same (If you are of little faith with respect to the educational
value of encyclopedias, you may be willing to reconsider in light of
the report that young Faraday picked up the rudiments of science in
the course of reading the scientific articles included in the encyclopedia volumes which he was binding while he was apprenticed to a
French emigre bookbinder). For a detailed acount of Aldo
Manuzzio, see Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius:
Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice, Blackwell and
Cornell, 1979. Lowry reports that there is a letter from Aldo to
Catherine Pia which expresses the "idealism" inspired in him by,
among others, Pico's faith in human dignity and Pico's hope of
"reconciling all faiths in a single ultimate mystery." Unfortunately
Lowry does not quote from this letter. He does, however, quote a
"sort of declaration of intent" which Aldo, from 1495 on, attached
to all of his editions of Lascaris' Greek Grammar and of his own
Latin Grammar. It runs: "I have decided to spend all my life in the
service of my fellow men. God is my witness, I desire nothing more
than to do something for them, as my past life shows, wherever it
has been spent, and as I hope my future life will show still more,"
Lowry p. 66.
20 In 1509 the Archbishop of St. Andrews presented Erasmus with
a ring bearing a figure that Erasmus identified as an image of the
Roman godlet Terminus. Erasmus adopted the Terminus figure,
having added the inscription Cedo Nulli (I Yield to No One), as his
personal emblem, with which he confirmed his most important documents (see Erasmus, volume 2 of Correspondence, ed. R.A.B
Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson (University of Toronto, 1974),
p. 150). I am, however, obliged to report that according to Lisa
Jardine (Erasmus, Man of Letters, p. 82), there is a letter of Erasmus
to Charles V's secretary Alfonso Valdes, in which Erasmus attaches
the words Cedo Nulli to Terminus, not to himself, and Terminus he
identifies as Death. Yet since Erasmus so writes in response to his
being criticized for pride, it is hard to tell who is "really" speaking
in the motto.
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
78
The school still exists. It counts John Milton (1616), the Duke of
Marlborough (1650-1722), G.K. Chesterton (1874-1938), and
Montgomery (1887-1975) among its graduates.
21
22 Cf Frederic Seebohm, The Oxford Reformers, (London, 1869);
J.A. Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus, (New York: Charles
Scribner, 1912)
23
Erasmus, Correspondence, 3.220.
Urban Rieger, in a letter to Erasmus quoted on p. 33 of John C.
Olin, Six Essays on Erasmus, with a translation of Erasmus's 1523
Letter to Carondelet, (Fordham University Press, 1979).
24
25 Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum came out one year before
Luther affixed his 95 Theses to the portal of the church of
Wittenberg.
Valla's reputation as an enemy of the Catholic Church derived in
large measure from his having employed his philological expertise
to debunk the genuineness of the so-called Donation of
Constantine. In this document, "the emperor Constantine, in gratitude for his conversion by Pope Silvester, supposedly granted to
that pope and his successors for ever, not only spiritual supremacy
over the other great patriarchates and over all matters of faith and
worship, but also temporal dominion over Rome, Italy, and 'the
provinces, places, and civitates of the western regions."' I have not
read Valla's De (also credita et emendita Constantini donatione
declamatio, though there is an English translation by Christopher B.
Coleman. All my information about Valla derives from Cassirer et
al., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, (University of Chicago,
1948), and the 11th ed. of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
26
Letter to Christopher Fisher of 1505, Correspondence, vol. 2,
pp. 89-96.
27
That Augustine's "reduction of all bad concupiscences to the concupiscence of sex and the identification of sexual concupiscence
with the ... corruption [we all have inherited from Adam was] something new, introduced by Augustine into Christian theology," is
argued at length by Harry Wolfson in a 1959 lecture reprinted as
Essay 6 in his paperback volume Religious Philosophy: A Group of
Essays (Atheneum, 1961). See also Elaine Pagels, "The Politics of
28
�MASCHLER
79
Paradise: Augustine's Exegesis of Genesis 1-3 versus that of John
Chrysostum" and "Christian Apologists and 'the Fall of the Angels' :
An Attack on Roman Imperial Power?" in Harvard Theological
Review 78:1-2 (1985) 67-99 and 78:3-4 (1985) 301-25. On this
same topic (the so-called Pelagian controversy), see Peter Brown,
"Pelagius and his Supporters ... " and "The Patrons of Pelagius: The
Roman Aristocracy... " in Journal of Theological Studies, N.S.,
volume19, Pt 1, April1968 and volume 21, Pt 1, April 1970. Our
own Peter Gilbert's finely balanced account of the Pelagian controversy in his recent lecture "Predestination in the New Testament
and St. Augustine" reopens the issue.
In Erasmus's edition of the New Testament the last chapter of
1 John lacks the Vulgate's verses 7, 8: "Quoniam tres sunt qui testimonium dant in caelo: Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus sanctus: et hi tres
unum sunt. Et tres sunt qui testimonium dant in terra: Spiritus, et
aqua, et sanguis: et hi tres unum sunt." When he was criticized for
thus deleting the "proof text" for trinitarianism, Erasmus answered
that he had not found any Greek manuscript containing these
words "though he had in the meanwhile examined several others
besides those on which he relied when first preparing his text."
(Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its
Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, (Oxford, 1964), p. 101,
quoted by Coogan.
29
Newton, along with every other Christian anti-trinitarian of
modern times, uses the philological labors of Erasmus.
It is reported that six years after the Council of Trent and sixtythree years after Erasmus's death, the following dialogue between a
Franciscan friar and an Anabaptist layman occurred:
INQUISITOR: What, don't you believe that Christ is the second
person of the Holy Trinity?
ANABAPTIST: We never call things but as they are called in
Scripture.... The Scripture speaks of one God, the Son of God, and
the Holy Spirit.
INQUISITOR: If you had read the creed of Athanasius you would
have found in it God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
Spirit.
�80
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ANABAPTIST: I am a stranger to the creed of St. Athanasius. It is
sufficient for me to believe in the living God, and that Christ is the
Son of the living God, as Peter believed; and to believe in the Holy
Spirit which the Father has poured out upon us through Jesus
Christ our Lord, as Paul says.
INQUISITOR: You are an impertinent fellow, to fancy that God
pour out his spirit upon you, who do not believe that the Holy
Spirit is God. You have borrowed these heretical opinions from the
diabolical books of the cursed Erasmus of Rotterdam, who, in his
Preface to the Works of St. Hilary pretends that this holy man says,
at the end of his twelfth book, that the Holy Spirit is not called God
in any part of the Scripture .... Will you be a follower of that
antitrinitarian? .... You have sucked the poisoned breast of
Erasmus .... But St. John says ... There are three that bear record in
heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three
are one.
ANABAPTIST: I have often heard that Erasmus, in his Annotations
upon that passage, shows that this text is not in the Greek original."
The source for this dialogue is an early Mennonite martyrology recorded in G. Brandt, The History of the Reformation in the
Low Countries, (London: 1720-23). All of the foregoing information derives from Coogan, pp. 68££, who also reports that the
Anabaptist, a certain Herman van Flekwijk, died at the stake at
Bruges on 10 June, 1569. Bruges is Simon Stevin's city of birth.
Erasmus's peace-loving "accommodationism" is in the spirit of
Paul's Romans 14, broadly interpreted.
30
31 Olin, pp. 99-101. See also pp. 105, 108-10 of this same letterpreface. Erasmus concludes the letter, manifestly addressing contemporary issues (his tract against Luther-the Discourse on Free
Will-comes out the following year): "Diverse are the gifts of men
of genius, and many are the different kinds of ages .... Reverence is
the due of ancient authors, especially those authors who are
recommended by the sanctity of their lives in addition to their
learning and eloquence. But this reverence does not exclude a
critical reading of them." The Colloquies, the Discourse on Free
Will, the Paraclete, the Anti-Barbarus are all to the same effect.
32
University of Toronto ed., vol. 33, p. 82
�MASCHLER
81
33 Alphonse Charles Joseph Willems, Les Elzeviers, Histoire et
Annates typographiques (Paris, Bruxelles, The Hague, 1880), p. xciii
University of Toronto ed., vol. 33, pp. 3-17. In the Margaret
Mann paperback edition of (selected) Adages (now out of print) this
is the lead entry.
34
Cf. Bacon on the three kinds of ambition, pp. 118f. LLA ed. of
New Organon. I leave it to the Bacon scholars to determine whether
the resemblances between Erasmus's commentary on the adage
Festina lente and Bacon's Aphorism 119 are significant.
35
36
See footnote 21 on pp. 26f.
�82
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�83
t
The Empires of the Sun
and The West
Eva Brann
This lecture is dedicated to my friend and fellow tutor
William Darkey in Santa Fe, who first introduced me to the
book behind this lecture, William Prescott's History of the
Conquest of Mexico.
>f
I shall begin with two sets of facts and dates. On or about
August 8 of 1519 Hernan Cortes, a hidalgo, a knight, from
Medellin in the Estremadura region of Spain, having sailed
his expeditionary fleet from Cuba to win "vast and wealthy
lands," set out from a city he called Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz
on the Gulf of Mexico to march inland, west toward the
capital of Anahuac, the empire of the Nahuatl-speaking
Aztecs. The city was called Tenochtitlan and its lord, the
emperor, was Montezuma II. Cortes knew of the place from
the emperor's coastal vassals and from delegations
Montezuma had sent loaded with presents to welcome-and
to forestall-the invaders. The presents included many works
of well-crafted gold.
Cortes had with him about 300 Spaniards, including
about forty crossbowmen and twenty arquebusiers, that is,
men carrying heavy matchlock rifles. He probably had three
front-loading cannons. His officers wore metal armor. There
were fifteen horses for the captains and a pack of hunting
dogs. (I might mention here that the Aztec dogs were a hairless type bred for food.) The band was accompanied by
Indian porters and allies, a group that grew to about 1000 as
they marched inland. Early in November they passed at
13000 feet between the two volcanoes that guard the high
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John's College, Annapolis. This
lecture was delivered on September 13, 2002, at Santa Fe and was the
Homecoming Lecture on October 4, 2002, at Annapolis.
�84
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Valley of Mexico. Some Spanish captains astounded the
Indians by venturing to climb to the crater rim of the ominously smoking Popocatepetl. On November 8, Cortes was
on the causeway to Tenochtitlan. On November 14,
Montezuma, the ruler of a realm of 125,000 square miles,
capable of putting in the field an army of 200,000 men with
a highly trained officer corps, quietly surrendered his person
to the custody of Cortes, declared himself a vassal of
Emperor Charles V, sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire,
and transferred his administration to the palace assigned to
the Spaniards. He soon made them a present of the state
treasure which they had discovered behind a plastered-over
door in the palace aviary. Cortes's surmise that just to enter
Tenochtitlan was to take Anahuac captive seemed to be
justified.
On June 30, 1520, Cortes being absent, Montezuma was
either murdered by the Spaniards or stoned to death by his
own people as he appeared on the palace wall attempting to
contain a rebellion. The latter account seems more plausible,
since he appears to have been shielded by Spaniards to whom
he was a valuable pawn and since some of his nobles were
growing disgusted with his submissiveness. The uprising had
been induced by the young captain whom Cortes had left in
charge, who had massacred unarmed celebrants of the feast
of Huitzilop6chtli, the city's chief god; this god both was and
stood for the Sun.
The Mexican uprising culminated in the noche triste, the
Sad Night, when the Spaniards were driven from the city with
enormous loss of life. In June 1521 the Spanish situation
looked desperate to them, as a vigorous, indomitable, eighteenyear-old emperor, Cuauhtemoc, Montezuma's second
successor (the first having died of smallpox), assumed the
leadership of an Aztec army now better acquainted with these
once apparently invincible invaders.
On August 15, 1521, just two years after his landing,
Cortes's band, augmented by some new arrivals and an allied
�BRANN
85
Indian army from Tenochtitlan's old enemy, Tlaxd.la, fought
its way, foot by foot, back into the city, with frightful losses
on both sides. The Spaniards were supported by a flotilla of
forty brigantines, light square-rigged sailing vessels that
Cortes had ordered built and dragged overland to Lake
Texcoco, the complex shallow water on which Tenochtitlan
stood. It was the first fleet of sailing ships to float on the lake.
I am still in the realm of fact when I say that within a few
days this city, surpassing all cities then on earth in the beauty
of its situation and the magic of its aspect, was completely
razed. Within four years it was overlaid, under Cortes's
supervision, by a complete Spanish city, whose cathedral, the
Cathedral of Mexico City, was eventually built hard by the
Great Temple of Tenochtitlan. In this total catastrophe the
Spaniards had lost fewer than 100 men, the Aztecs or Mexica
about 100,000.
I have, of course, omitted myriads of gripping details,
such as a novelist might hesitate to invent. But I shall now
abbreviate an abbreviation: In August 1519 there was a large,
powerful, highly civilized empire called Anahuac. By August
1521 it was gone; instead there was a new realm, a colony
called New Spain; Spanish was replacing the native Nahuatl.
Now the second set of facts, even more curtailed. On May
13, 1532, Francisco Pizarro (like Cortes from the Estremadura
and his distant relation) arrived at Tumbez, a port at the
northern end of the Inca empire and of modern Peru. This
empire was called by its people Tahuantinsuyu, meaning the
Realm of the Four Quarters. Pizarro had 130 troopers,
40 cavalry and one small cannon. The Inca Atahualpa-Inca
means Lord-had an army of 50,000 men. On November 16,
1533, the Inca came, at Pizarro's invitation, to meet him in
the town plaza of Cajamara. There he was unintelligibly
harangued by the chaplain of the expedition and given a
breviary: the Inca scornfully threw the scribbles to the
ground. Within 33 minutes, he having been seized, 4000 of
his men had been massacred. Resistance and the empire itself
�86
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
fell apart with his capture. Atahualpa offered to fill his prison,
a cell 22 x 10 feet, with gold to the height of his reach in
exchange for his freedom. While the temples which were
encrusted with gold were being denuded and the condition
was being fulfilled, the Inca was condemned to death by burning. This sentence was commuted to strangulation when he
agreed to be baptized. Pizarro soon took Cuzco, the capital,
and installed a puppet Inca, Manco Capac, who mounted a
rebellion; it was put down with great loss of life on the Inca's
side in 1534. There followed a period of civil war among the
conquerors. Again to summarize the summary: A tiny band of
Spanish ruffians brought down, within two years, the most
efficiently administered polity of its time. Quechua, the native
language, was replaced by Spanish as the chief language.
It is thought that this second scenario was, on Pizarro's
part, a reprise of Cortes's conquest. If so, it is a demonstration of the inferiority of imitations.
The kind of facts I have listed here are spectacular yet
uncontested discontinuities in the stream of life. The dates,
which tell us both the temporal order of these facts and their
distance from us, serve to dramatize the discontinuity: About
half a millennium ago there occurred, not very far south of us
and close to each other in space and time, two mind-boggling
events-the destruction by a very few Spaniards of two great
civilizations.
We at this college have read or will read in. Herodotus)
Persian Wars hqw in July of480B.C. a band of 299 Spartans,
the same in number as Cortes's original companions, died in
holding the pass of Thermopylae against an Asian army of
who knows how many hundreds of thousands, led by Xerxe~,
king of Persia. Their. object was to give the Greeks time and
courage to repel the invader. But the Spartans were defending their own land from a self-debilitating .behem<?th. The
Spaniards' situation in Mesoamerica isjustthe inverse, except
that in each case the few were the . free. What, we may
�BRANN
87
wonder, would our world be like if the Asians had prevailed
in 480 B.C. or the Nahua in 1519 A.D.?
How could it happen? How did these American empires
fall? Just as Herodotus drew conclusions about the nature of
the Greeks from the Persian defeat, so one might wonder if
illumination about the nature of our West might not be found
in these catastrophes that mark the beginning of modern life.
To put it straightforwardly: In reading about Mexico and
Peru I began to wonder if there might be a clue in these events
to the apparently irresistible potency of the West when it
touches, be it insidiously or catastrophically, other worlds, be
they receptive or resistant.
Let me explain the not altogether appropriate use of the
term "the West" in my title, "The Empires of the Sun and the
West." Our tradition-! mean the one whose works we study
at this college-is usually called the Western tradition. It is
thereby revealed as defining itself against the East, Near and
Far, the Orient, the place where the sun rises. Our North
American republic is in this sense the West's very West and its
currently culminating expression. But, of course, the Aztecslet me interrupt myself to say that the people of the imperial
city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan did not call themselves Aztecs but
Mexica and that they called those who spoke their language
the Nahua and that the term Aztec was introduced to the
English-speaking wprld by the aforementioned. Prescottthese Mexica, then~ of course thought of the invaders as being
from the quarter pf the rising sun, from the e;ast. This .turns
out to be .a significant Ja~t. C~lumbus thought that he was
"sailing not the u1)ual. way" but w:est-:-:-sailing west to reach
the East, Japaq, China, India. It was for quite a while a very
unwelcome discoyery that the people whom the adventurers
so hopefully .called Indians (as I will continue to do here)
inhabited a long continent which, although it contracted into
a J:lal:'row isthmus in the middle, blocked the ocean. route to
the fabul9us Orient.. Thus .Prescott calls Tenochtitlan "the
great capital of .the western world .." So "West" is, strictly
�88
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
speaking, nonsense as used in this context, but I cling to it
because it is the available shorthand for ourselves, for those
living in the tradition that has its roots in Jerusalem and
Athens, achieves its modernity in Europe, has come to its current culmination on this continent, and is spreading its effects
all over the globe. What can be more necessary at this
moment than to grapple with the being of this West?
As I read on it seemed to me often that the reasons given
by historians for Anahuac's sudden collapse before the
Spaniards might well be cumulatively necessary but could not
be sufficient conditions. I mean that without their operation
the Empires could not have fallen so quickly, but that
altogether they did not so completely account for the fall as
to make it seem unavoidable. It is true that the Spaniards
brought horses into a land without draft animals, and so the
cavaliers could run down the pedestrian Aztec warriors and
frighten the Indians into seeing the Europeans as centaurs,
four-footed monstrous men-horses. But these Indians soon
learned that man and horse were separable and mortal;
during their desperate and bloody defense of Tenochtitlan
there appeared on the skull rack of a local temple, beneath
53 heads of Spaniards, the heads of a number of horses, of
"Spanish deer," as they were now called. The crossbows and
cannons may have delivered more swift and terrifying
destruction than the Aztec javelin-throwers, the metal armor
deflected the cuts of obsidian-studded wooden swords. The
driving greed for gold, which, as Cortes ironically represented to an Indian official, was the specific remedy for a disease
that troubled the Spaniards, may have disoriented the people.
The physical disease brought by the Spaniards, the smallpox,
did more than decimate the uninoculated natives; Spanish
luck at crucial junctures may have demoralized the caciques,
the Indian chieftains. The harsh exactions and suppression of
Montezuma's empire did indeed provide Cortes with Indian
allies (though the 150,000 Indians that came with the now
900 Spaniards to retake Tenochtitlan were by their very
�BRANN
89
numbers an encumbrance on the heavily defended causeways
into the island city and by their excited hatred for their
Mexica oppressors a danger to Cortes's prudent intentions;
moreover, they tended to fade away when things went badly).
The crucifix may well, in Carlos Fuentes's words, "have made
their minds collapse," as they saw how their own numerous
gods demanded numerous sacrifices of them, while this one
Christian god sacrificed one man, himself. Such factors or
forces are called, in the categories in which history is conceptualized, technological, demographic, epidemiological, political, psychological, or what have you. Perhaps they were necessary to Spanish success. But a number of contemporaries
thought that at various junctures it might well have gone
otherwise. For example, the strong-minded king of Texcoco,
Cacama, said that all the Spaniards within Tenochtitlan
could be killed in an hour; Cortes himself thought so. To me
historical inevitability seems an ex post facto cause. It is the
way a fait accompli presents itself, when passage has turned
into past. I cannot quite tell whether my rejection of historical determinism should be reinforced or thrown into doubt
by the fact that the Mexica themselves had given themselves
over to fate, as I will tell. Perhaps that very self-surrender was
a sufficient condition, the factor that makes the outcome
practically certain. But that would only be half the explanation; for the other half one would have to look in the nature
of the Europeans as well.
Before doing that, let me complete the apology for my
title. In it I mention the two empires, though I will speak of
one only, Anahuac. I mean no reflection on the Inca realm,
that marvel of social administration and public works built
with the most astounding masonry I've ever seen. But both of
the Peruvian protagonists were like deteriorated copies of
their Aztec templates. Pizarro was an intrepid thug, by all
accounts, and Atahualpa a culpably and carelessly arrogant
man with a violent history. Since it seemed to me that the
pairs of chief actors in this drama not only were the main
�90
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
factors because both empires were autocracies, but were also
in their very distinctive ways personally emblematic of their
worlds, I chose the more humanly accessible, the more
expressive duo.
Finally, I refer to the Sun because the solar domination
under which both these Precolumbian empires labored
seemed to me more and more significant. The Incas called
themselves the Children of the Sun; their great Sun Temple at
Cuzco, the Coricancha, was studded with gold, "the tears
wept by the sun." So too the Mexicans, who called their
generals "the Lords of the Sun," had come into the marshes
of Lake Texcoco, their place of destiny, led by priests who
bore on their backs a twittering medicine bundle. It was
Huitzilopochtli, who was reborn on the way at Teotihuacan,
the birthplace of the gods, and later installed in Tenochtitlan
in the Great Temple. There he was incessantly nourished with
human blood. Of course, when I use the indicative mood in
speaking of the Aztec gods, I am not reporting fact-I am
telling what the Aztecs said and are thought to have believed.
The most difficult thing, I have discovered, is for historians to
find the right voice in speaking of alien gods, especially when
they are many in number, fluid in function, and visible in
many forms.
The Indians' relation to the sun I have come to think of
as symbolic of the whole debacle. and even its proximate
cause. To anticipate my version of a common.idea: rhe daily,
annual and epochal returns of the. heavenly bodywere to the
Aztecs so fearsomely antic, so uncertain, that they burdened
themselves, as their traditions taught them,. with rituals and
sacrifices .. These were so demanding that they enfeebled bpth
th.e Nahua empire and the Nahua's souls. The West's relation
t.o the Sun was just the opposite.
In 1506, just about the time young Cortes came to the
Indies, Copernicus was beginning to write On. the
Revolutions of. the Heavenly Spheres. It .is one of Western
modernity's seminal works, which our sophomores studY. In
�BRANN
91
it he shows that the mathematical rationalization of the
heavens is more economically accomplished and the celestial
phenomena are better "saved" if the sun stands stably at the
center of the world. But his motive is not only mathematical
economy. "For who," he says, "would place this lamp of a
very beautiful temple in another place than this, wherefrom
it can illuminate everything at the same time?'' Cortes was
surely not a premature Copernican, but he acted out of a
tradition in which one God controls the cosmos through the
laws of nature. Since the deity is not capricious, celestial
nature is ever~reliable, well-illuminated and confidenceinspiring. Nature's sun does not, in any case, respond to
human propitiation and Nature's god prefers prayers to ritual sacrifices.
Let me append here a poignant incident told by Cortes.
In the final days of the investment of Tenochtitlan, a delegation of parched and starving Mexica came to the barricades.
They said that they held Cortes to be a child of the Sun, who
could perform a circuit of the earth in a day and a night. Why
would he not slay them in that time to end their suffering?
Let me hold off yet one more minute from my main task
to tell you what motives drew me into a study so far from our
Program. To begin with, there was the sheer enchantment of
what proved to be a fragile civilization and the unburdened
romance of comfortably un.~current drama. All that romance
I got from reading William Hickling, Prescott's Conquest .of
Mexico ofl843, and his Conquest ofPeru of 1847. Of the
first ~ook he himself wrote that it was conceived "not as a
philo$ophical theme but as an epic in prose, a romarice.of,
chivalry.'' For this approach later historians, for who111
demythification, deromanticization, and rhe dispersal of
human deeds into forces and patterns is a professional
requirement, despise.him somewhat, .and it .took me awhile.
to see what valuable lesson..could be .drqwn from .his telling.
Presc,ott has it right: first the great ,tale: then . the critical
theory~
�92
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
From the first I knew I was reading the American Gibbon.
We at St. John's used to read parts, particularly the notorious
fifteenth chapter, of that English historian's monumental
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, completed in 1788. To
my taste the American is the finer of the two. Gibbon
conceals in the magnificantly Latinate periods of his style the
universal irony of the ultimately enlightened man. I do not
fault him for sitting in judgment, for a non-judgmental
historian is an incarnate contradiction and produces only an
armature of facts without the musculature that gives it human
shape. But I am put off by his judging as an Olympian
enthroned on Olympus. In that fifteenth chapter, which treats
the question "by what means the Christian faith obtained so
remarkable a victory over the established religions of this
earth?" (a question of the kind I am asking) he reflects with
raised eyebrows in turn on the mortification of the flesh,
pious chastity and divine providence, so as to come to a
pretty secular answer, just as if Christianity were not first and
last a faith. Surely when a faith conquers, its substance must
be given some credit.
Prescott, on the other hand, who had in his youth
privately critiqued Gibbon's style for its "tumid grandeur,"
writes with deliberate American plainness, though to this
twenty-first-century ear, with a dignified elegance. What matters more to me is that he does his level best to enter into the
feelings and thoughts of his alien world, finding much to
admire in the Aztecs and much to blame in the Spaniards; for
example he calls the massacre of the Indians in fateful
Cholula a "dark stain" on Cortes's record. But for all his
romantic pleasure in new marvels he never condescends to
accept the horrifying elements of Aztec civilization.· He
recognizes that these are not individual crimes but systemic
evils that his Western liberal conscience cannot condone. One
might say that he dignifies his subjects with his condemnation. For this candor he is, as you can imagine, belittled these
days as naive, culture-bound, and ethnocentric. I shall have a
�BRANN
93
word to say on the sophisticated reverse bigotry of his belittlers.
His style, to add one more feature, is extraordinarily
vivid; it compares to Gibbon's as a classical statue in all its
original bright encaustic colors to one that has been dug up,
now only bare white marble. This visual aliveness may be a
"blind Homer" effect. When Prescott was a young student
dining at the Harvard Commons, he was hit in the eye by a
hard piece of bread during a food fight and was half-blind for
the rest of his life. It is characteristic of this man that,
although he knew whose missile had hit him, he never told
the name. His enormous collection of sources was read to
him and evidently richly illustrated in his imagination.
I might mention the other chief sources I read. (A longer
bibliography, merging books read and those merely consulted, is attached.)
First for anyone interested in the actual course of the
Conquest is Bernal Diaz del Castillo's True History of New
Spain of 1555. This simply told, incident-rich account of the
march on Tenochtitlan and what happened afterwards gains
credence from the fact that the old trooper was disgruntled
with his captain's assignment of rewards-the common
condition of the Conquistador ranks; the poor devils got little for their endless exertions and wounds. In spite of his
grievances, Diaz's love and admiration for Cortes unsuppressably dominates his story.
The Conquistadores are sometimes represented as having
had eyes for nothing not made of gold. Here is the old
soldier's recall of Tenochtitlan as he first glimpsed it, thirtysix years before, on a causeway leading toward the island city:
We were amazed and said that it was like the
enchantments they tell of Amadis, on account of
the great towers and cues (temples) rising from the
water, and all built of masonry. And some of our
soldiers even asked whether the things we saw
were not a dream. It is not to be wondered that I
�94
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
here write it down in this manner, for there is so
much to think over that I do not know how to
describe it, seeing things, as we did, that have
never been heard of or seen or even dreamed.
These men, some of them ruffians, but with medieval
romances behind their· eyes to help them see alien beauty,
were evidently not altogether sick with gold greed. But those
later writers who don't blame them for the one, accuse them
of the other: they're either merely medieval knight-errants or
merely mercantile expeditionaries. In fact, they seem to have
been poignantly aware that they were seeing sights no
European had ever seen before or could ever see after.
Here is what they saw: A city edged by flowering "floating gardens," the mud-anchored chinampas, lying on the
shining flat waters of a shallow, irregular lake collected in a
high valley guarded by the snowy peaks-even in August-of
the two volcanoes; straight broad causeways connecting the
city to the shore giving into straight broad avenues leading
from the four directions of the winds to its sacred center
which the Mexica regarded as the center of the world, with
its great, gleaming, colorfully decorated temple pyramid; a
grid of smaller streets edged with bridged canals; a myriad of
lesser temple pyramids, some smoking with sacrifices; palaces
with stuccoed walls and patios polished to gleam like silver;
sparkling pools; crowds of clean, orderly people going about
their business, especially in the great market of Tlatelolco;
gardens everywhere; and the white houses of the city's quarter million inhabitants with their flat roofs, the azoteas from
which two years hence such a deadly shower of missiles
would rain down on the returning Spaniards that the
dwellings were demolished one by one.-All these features of
the vision have been, incidentally, described with a poet's relish by William Carlos Williams:
[T]he city spread its dark life upon the earth of a
new world, sensitive to its richest beauty, but so
�BRANN
95
completely removed from those foreign contacts
that harden and protect, that at the very breath of
conquest it vanished.
Our tutor Jorge Aigla in Santa Fe has made a verse translation
of an anonymous transcript of Tlatelolco, written only seven
years after the starved and sick Mexica, who had defnded
their city foot by foot, finally surrendered its devastated
remains. Here are a few stanzas:
And all of this happened to us.
We saw it all
We watched it happen
With this sad and mournful fortune
We saw each other's anguish.
On the road lay broken arrows;
Hairs are scattered
The houses unroofed
Their walls red, blackened.
***
A price was set upon us.
A price for the young man, the priest,
The child, the virgin maiden.
Enough! The price of a poor man
was two handfuls of corn,
only ten insect cakes;
Our price was only
twenty cakes of salty gruel.
Gold, jades, rich embroidery,
Quetzal plumages,
All that which was precious
Was valued not at all. ..
�96
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The mutual admiration of Indians and Spaniards was
great-in the beginning. True, the Spaniards, whom Cortes's
vigilance kept sleeping in their armor, stank in the nostrils of
the much-bathing Indians, and the priests with their long,
blood-matted hair in their gore-bespattered sanctuaries
nauseated the Spaniards. (I omit here, for the moment, the
Spaniards' response to the sacrifices themselves, which
marked, on the Christians' side, the beginning of the end of
amity.} The Spaniards were astonished by Indian craftsmanship. Dfaz describes after decades a necklace made of golden
crabs (others say crayfish) that Montezuma placed around
Cortes's neck. Of course, Dfaz described the golden gifts
more often in terms of the pesos they weighed when melted
down into bullion. I note here that the Aztecs did not,
evidently, have scales and did not reduce objects to their
universal stuff, ponderable mass (thus the Mexicans used natural items, quils of gold dust and cocoa beans, for currency,
while the Spanish had the peso d'oro, the "gold weight,"
calibrated in fact to silver, to 42.29 grams of the pure
substance); this intellectual device of universal quantification
even those critics of the West who deplore it can hardly
forego in the business of life. The Spaniards were astounded
by, and perhaps a little envious of, the stately splendor of the
cacique's accoutrements. The Indians, on their part, were
amazed by the invaders' daring, tenaicty, and endurance.
They called them, as the Spanish heard it, teules, teotl being
the Nahuatl word for god. The term seems to have been used
somewhat as Homer uses dios, indicating sometimes just
excellence and sometimes divinity. As we shall see, the Aztecs
had a serious reason to call Cortes and his people gods. The
Spanish, on their side, in their very horror of the frightfullooking Aztec god-images, paid them a certain respect in
regarding them not as mere idols, deaf and dumb objects of
stupid worship, but much as the Mexica themselves did:
Sahagun, of whom I will shortly tell, records an Aztec ruler's
admonitory speech in which he says: "For our lord seeth,
�BRANN
97
heareth within wood, within stone." The god-representations
were not of masks of nothing to the Christians, but they were
images of demons, of the Devil in various shapes. Thus in
looking at the Nahuatl side in Sahagun's dual language text,
I noticed that diablo, Devil, had become a Spanish loan word
in Nahuatl-one new name for all the old divinities, to be
abominated but also acknowledged.
The second eyewitness source is Cortes himself, who
wrote to his sovereign, Charles V, five letters reporting on his
activities. Of these cartas de relaci6n, letters of report, all but
one are extant in copies. They are not notes but voluminous,
detailed accounts beginning with the first, pre-Cortes exploration of the Gulf Coast and ending with Cortes's own postConquest explorations; the second and third letter contain
the material for this lecture. The English version conveys a
flavor of studiedly plain elegance. These clearly literary works
are charged by historians with being both subtly self-aggrandizing and consciously myth-making. To me it would seem
strange if Cortes, in writing to his sovereign, on whom
depended acknowledgements and rewards, did not portray
his exertions most favorably. It might be said-! don't know
whether in mitigation or exacerbation-that he was also
willing to suppress a brave but irrepressible compaflero's
guilt: Nowhere have I found even a mention of Alvarado's
culpability in the events leading to the noche triste. It is also
said that Cortes invented the myth of an Aztec empire which
rivaled Charles's own, to whet the Spanish emperor's interest
in his new dominion. To me, the account itself, telling of
tributes owed by the subject cities and of their chiefs obliged
to be in attendance in Tenochtitlan, sounds more like information he was in fact given by proud Mexica officials or
disaffected dependents.
Above all, Cortes fills his letters with myriads of meticulously noted detail-too thick and too vivid to be attributed
to mere mendacious fantasizing. He would have had to have
been a veritable Gabriel Garda Marquez to invent so magical
�98
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
a reality. For, he says, "we saw things so remarkable as not to
be believed. We who saw them with our own eyes could not
grasp them with our understanding." Cortes himself will
appear in a moment.
The third source, the most exhaustive in scope and
remarkable in method, is The History of the Things of New
Spain by the before-mentioned Friar Bernadino de Sahagun.
He had arrived as the forty-third of the religious that Cortes
had requested in one of his letters to the emperor. The
Conquistador needed them to carry on the task of conversion, because, as he said, the Indians had a great natural
attraction to Christianity; indeed in the early post-Conquest
years, Indians were baptized by the thousands a day. (The reasons that Cortes's observation is not implausible will be mentioned below.)
The name New Spain in Sahagun's title is, incidentally,
Cortes's own for conquered Anahuac: "New Spain of the
Ocean Sea." For the Conquistador it betokens a great colonial
accession to old peninsular Spain and the emphasis is on
"Spain." But later the accent shifts to "New," as the criollos,
the Mexican-born Spaniards, rebel against the old country's
domination. Eventually a nativist revival and a growing sense
of nationhood leads to a rejection by the native-born
Spaniards themselves of their Conquistador heritage, and
when in 1821 the country achieves independence, it will be
called by the old Nahua name for Tenochtitlan, Mexico (now
pronounced in the Spanish way, Mehico). Nativist Mexico's
tutelary deity will be Quetzalc6atl, the dominating god of this
lecture, of whom more in a moment.
Back to Sahagun. He learned Nahuatl himself and spent
the rest of his life, with much untoward clerical interference, compiling the world's first inside ethnographic
account. In his college he trained his own informants,
Indian boys, often of noble descent, who could interview
their living elders and obtain the information that Sahagun
compiled in parallel columns, Spanish and Nahuatl. The
�BRANN
99
work, in twelve volumes, is known as the Florentine Corpus.
Lisa Richmond, our librarian, fulfilled my unexpectant hopes
by buying the very expensive English edition for our library,
and if one reader a decade finds the delight and illumination
in it that I did, the investment will be well justified.
Sahagun begins with the gods and their births-for like
Greek gods, these gods were born, at Teotihuacan, 33 miles
northeast of Tenochtitlan. This sacred city was well over a
millennium old when Anahuac was established, and in ruins.
But there the Mexica came to worship, particularly at the
great temple pyramid dedicated to Quetzalcoatl. What bound
new Anahuac to old Teotihuacan-the name means City of
the Gods-was their common era, that of the Fifth Sun, upon
whose destruction the world would end.
Sahagun then records everything from the sacred rituals
and binding omens to the set moral speeches (much more
charming without failing to be scary than similar speeches
made by our elders) down to the riddles people asked, such
as "What drags its entrails through a gorge?" Answer: "A needle." The next to last book is an inventory of the "Earthly
Things" of New Spain, its flora, fauna and minerals; the chapter on herbs begins with the plants "that perturb one, madden
one," the hallucinogens. The twelfth book is Sahagun's own
history of the Conquest.
Some say that the first bishop of New Spain, Zumarraga,
conducted a huge auto-da-fe, a book burning of Aztec
codices, those screenfold books composed in glyphs (stylized
figures with fixed meanings) combined with lively pictures.
Others say that those codices that weren't destroyed by the
hostile Tlaxcalans or in the great conflagration of
Tenochtitlan were spirited away by Indians. In any case, the
art of illustration was still alive, and Sahagun used the talents
of Indian painters to supplement his records in this visually
delightful pre-alphabetic way.
Finally I want to mention the History of the Indians of
New Spain by another Franciscan, affectionately named by
�100
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
his Indian parishioners Motolinia, Nahuatl for "Little Poor
One," since he took his vow of poverty seriously. He reports
the terrible post-Conquest sufferings undergone by the Indian
population; worse than their cruel exploitation by the disappointed Conquistadores and colonists was the succession of
European plagues (smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, for
which the Indians reciprocated only with syphilis). I am
impressed, over and over, with this pattern: that the
inoculated West does most of its harm to other civilizations
unintentionally, and I mean not only through their physical
susceptibility but even more, through their spiritual and
intellectual vulnerability. The reason we can cope with our
dangerously developed, potent tradition is that we know how
to fight back, how to subject our powers to constraining
criticism and how to correct our aberrations by returns to
sounder beginnings. Critique and Renaissance are the continual evidence of our self-inoculation, and we see right now the
dangerous consequences of the Western invasion of souls not
so protected.
But Motolinia also reports successes, not only in conversions, which were too stupendous in number and abrupt in
spiritual terms to be always quite real. What is lovely to read
about is not only his affection for the gentleness and
dignified reticence of his boys but their quick intelligence
and general talentedness; some learned enough Latin in a
few years to correct the grammar-a tense but triumphant
moment for their teacher-of a visiting dignitary. They sang
liturgies like angels and easily learned to play European
instruments. No wonder Mexico City was to become, in the
eighteenth century, this hemisphere's greatest center of
baroque music; its chief composer, Manuel de Zumaya,
Chapel Master at the very Cathedral of Mexico City which
replaced Huitzilopochtli's temple, was part-Indian.
I should also mention two more works written with great
sympathy for the Indians: Bishop las Casas's Short Account of
the Destruction of the Indies of 1542, a book of passionate
�BRANN
101
accusation against the Spanish conquerors and colonists, and
Cabesa de Vaca's Relaci6n, the story of the tribulations of a
discoverer of Florida, who was himself for a while enslaved
by Indians.
By contemporary historians the Aztecs are treated in
almost comically opposite ways. Jacques Soustelle paints their
daily life as an idyll of gentle, flower-loving, orderly culture,
made poignant on occasion by the necessities of the ritual
care and feeding of the gods. It is the myth of harmony and
happiness the Mexica themselves encouraged in the revisionist accounts that succeeded the "book burning" by Itzc6atl,
their first emperor. Inga Clendinnen, on the other hand,
depicts a somberly severe, fear-ridden, god-encumbered
society, whose sacrificial rituals, coruscating with whirling
sights and penetrating musical noise, were, she says, "infused
with the transcendent reality of the aesthetic." Hugh Thomas,
the most recent historian of the Conquest, a sensible and
thorough marshaller of thousands of facts, speaks similarly of
"the astounding, often splendid, and sometimes beautiful
barbarities" of Aztec ritual practice.
What astounds me is not the antithetical views of Aztec
life, for these polarities seem to have been of the Aztec
essence. What takes me aback is that my contemporaries seem
to wish to appear as knowing what is beautiful but not what
is wrong. There are of course exceptions, writers who feel
insuperable moral unease over these alien customs they are by
their professional bias bound to honor. The imaginary
experiment that I, as an outsider and amateur, have devised
for myself to put the profession in general to the test is this:
When the Spaniards first came on the remains of ritual
killings-later they saw the rituals themselves and eventually
found the body parts of their own comrades-they broke into
the holding pens where prisoners were being fattened and
stormed the temples. Would the professors have done the
same or would they have regarded the practice as protected
by the mantra of "otherness"? I am assuming here that they
�102
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
do disapprove of human sacrifice in their own culture. For my
part, I cannot tell what I would have had the courage to do,
but I would have been forever ashamed if I had not shared in
the revulsion, the reversal of an original appreciation that, for
all their rapaciousness, the Christians had for the Indiansand I might add, for certain remarkable Indian women.
I have thus evolved for myself two categories of historians: non-condoners and condoners. The older writers tend to
be non-condoners; they are not careful to cloak themselves in
moral opacity; what they abhor at home they will not condone abroad, be it ever so indigenous and ever so splendid.
One remarkable exception is the before-mentioned
Bartolome de Las Casas, who lays out the case for human
sacrifice as being both natural-since men offer their god
what they hold most excellent, their own kind-and also as
being within our tradition-since Abraham was ready to
sacrifice his son Isaac at God's bidding, and God himself
sacrificed his son. The difficulty with this latter argument
would seem to be that Abraham's sacrifice was called off, and
God's sacrifice was unique, while Indian sacrifices were
multitudinous.
Las Casas is the preceptor of Tzetan Todorov, a European
intellectual who, in his book Conquest, tries hard to come to
grips with "the Other," with the Aztec non-West. He finally
elevates the Other over his own: The Aztecs made sacrifices,
the Spaniards committed massacres. And here the rational
difficulty is that Aztec religion commanded these deaths and
Christian religion forbade them, so that Todorov is comparing customs with crimes.
This enterprise of restricting universal morality in the
interests of empathy with otherness puzzles me a lot. For if
we are really and radically each other's Other, then those
who leave their own side to enter into the Other will thereby
also lose their footing as open-eyed contemplators. In any
case, it seems to me that the non-condoning Prescott's grand
narrative has done more for the memory of this bygone
�BRANN
103
civilization than have the condoning contemporaries. For he
induces what Virgil calls lacrimae rerum, tears for lost
things-while they invite, in me at least, contrariness, resistance to their sanctimonious self-denial.
You can see that as I read on I developed an interest in historiography, the reflective study of historical accounting itself.
For it seems to me of great current importance to consider a
propensity of Western intellectuals, particularly pronounced
in the social studies and expressive of a strength and its complementary weaknesses native to this tradition: knowledgeable self-criticism flipping into unthinking self-abasement
before the non-West. I say this mindful of the moral quandary
of pitting the humanly unacceptable, but, so to speak, innocent evils, the traditional practices of a whole civilization,
against the crimes of individuals transgressing the laws of
their own, crimes magnified by its superior power.
And now a final motive for this, my aberrant interest: We
here on the Annapolis campus are only 200 miles further
from Mexico City than from our other half in New Mexico;
Incan Cuzco is nearly on our longitude of 76° W Yet these
pre-Columbian empires are hardly ever in our common
consciousness, even less now than in the decades after
Prescott's very popular book appeared. True, some of the skyscrapers of the twenties and thirties intentionally recalled
Mesoamerican pyramids. True, the Nahuatl words chocoldtl
and tamdlli are in our daily vocabulary, as is Nahua cooking,
that is, Mexican food, in our diets. The Aztecs had in fact a
high cuisine; the description of the emperor's daily service
with its hundreds of dishes-among which (lest we be tempted too much) there may have been, as Dfaz reports, the meat
of little children-is staggering in its variety; indeed there
cannot ever have been a potentate more luxuriously or
elaborately served. Of all this we've adopted, through
modern Mexico, the low end, but where else do the Empires
of the Sun figure in our lives? This surprised sense of their
missing influence made me engage in another one of those
�104
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
imagination-experiments by which we see the world anew:
What if, as King Cad.ma of Texcoco and some later historians thought possible, the Mexica had just killed Cortes and
his band, so that the Westernization of Anahuac had been
held off for some centuries?-for it is not within my
imagination that the West was forever to be resisted. Suppose
the unwitting extermination of the Indians by disease had
thus been prevented. (I might say here that this huge demographic disaster, possibly among the worst in history, is
numerically unfixed. Some say Anahuac had thirty million,
some say it had four before Cortes. Some say by the midfifteenth century this population had been reduced to 2.6 or
1.2 million, to be fully restored only much later.) Suppose,
then, that the ravaged generation of the Conquest and postConquest era had instead been preserved, and Nahua civilization with it. Suppose eventually North American jeans
and technology had drifted down and Aztec gorgeousness
and craftsmanship up the latitudes.-! might inject here that
the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who has grappled
seriously with such dreams, comes to the sad but realistic
conclusion that the loss of native culture is worth the benefit
to ordinary people that these imports bring.-Suppose moreover that our American English had absorbed some of the
suavely dignified classical Nahuatl, its urbane address, its
poetic rephrasings, its expressive word-agglutinations;
suppose as well that the speech of the Nahua had accepted
some of our flamboyant informality. Suppose our clothing
had been restyled by Aztec orchidaciousness and our manners
had been a little improved by Aztec ceremoniousness.
Suppose our political discourse had been informed by a
neighboring monarchy against which we had never had to
rebel. We can learn in our imagination whether such fine
acquisitions could have come into our way of life without losing their hieratic heart. Would not one of the parties in this
cultural exchange eventually turn out to contribute the core
and the other the decoration? My provisional answer is that
�BRANN
105
the West would assert itself as the substructure and the
Empire of the Sun would become part of its recreation-they
would be the pilgrims and we the tourists.
The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes tells of a similar imagined reversal of history in the semi-historical story "The Two
Shores." Here Aguilar, Cortes's first interpreter who had long
lived with the Maya, speaks from the grave. He tells how
even while in Cortes's employ he held with the Indians and,
by always translating not what Cortes said but what he
thought, caused trouble . He confesses that he was jealous of
Malinche, the Nahuatl- and Mayan-speaking woman, whose
Mayan Aguilar translated into Spanish. She soon became
Cortes's mistress and learned Spanish; she was one of the
central figures of the conquest, present and mediating on
every great occasion; Aguilar was made redundant. But
revenge is not his final passion. It is rather a plan to mount
with his Mayans a reverse conquest, a successful invasion of
Spain, and there to recall the defeated Moors and the
expelled Jews, to inaugurate a darker-skinned, better melded
Europe, "a universe simultaneously new and recovered,
permeable, complex, fertile," where "Sweet Mayan songs
joined those of the Provencal troubadours . . .. "But Aguilar,
as he dreams his impossible dream, is dead of the bubonic
plague that did not attack only the uninoculated Indians.
So these imagination-experiments endorse the question
raised by the facts with which I began: How can we understand what happened here, on this American continent,
between 1519 and 1534? Can we compel the fortunes of war
and the forces of history to show their human motive power?
To get at some sort of answer, I shall take up the four
factors in the conquest of Mexico that seem to me most
revealing: One is a god, Quetzalcoatl; one is a practice,
human sacrifice; two are men, Montezuma and Cortes.
1. Quetzalcoatl, the most appealing of the Mesoamerican
gods, is also most deeply implicated in the Mexican debacle.
This is a complex figure, a god of human interiority and of
�106
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the works of civilization, a searcher into the depth of hell and
the guardian of terrestrial idylls, a priest king of Tula and the
deus absconditus of Anahuac, an Indian Prometheus.
He was not the tribal god of the Mexica, having been in
the country long before they arrived. Their god was
Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and of the sun, or rather the
Sun itself, who shared the great temple pyramid of MexicoTenochtitlan, the scene of so much of the drama in this tale,
with Tlaloc, the god of rain-the god who floods the heavens
with the god who drenches the earth. When the Mexica were
still Chichimeca (as the Nahua called the wandering semisavages of the north), coming down from their mythical city
of origin Aztlan (whence the name Aztec) in search of their
appointed home, their priests carried on their backs, as I
mentioned before, a twittering medicine bundle. This was
Huitzilopochtli, reborn at Teotihuacan, the birthplace of the
gods, as the Fifth Sun. His name means "Hummingbird On
the Left" or "On the South," perhaps because he and his
people went southwest to find their marshland home on Lake
Texcoco, perhaps because those little hummingbirds are fierce
fighters and because the god-figure was half-bird, having a
thin, feathered left leg. In effect their god was crippled.
Cripples, dwarves, hunchbacks, albinos play a great role in
Nahua history, partly because the valley people had an inexhaustible interest in the sports and varieties of nature:
Montezuma's palace complex included besides an aviary, a
zoo, an arboretum, a gallery of anomalous humans; but there
may be something deeper to it, some sense of awe before the
exceptional-! don't know.
The war god was a hummingbird because Aztec warriors
who died in battle went not to the murky Hades of Mictlan
but to a sunny Elysium where they flitted about feeding on
flowery nectar-perfect examples of a dominant Aztec
characteristic, the abrupt juxtaposing of or transiting from
the brutal to the delicate.
�BRANN
107
Most of the Aztec gods seem to have had frightful aspects.
There is a statue of Huitzilopochtli's mother Coatlicue, a
chunky monster with a necklace of human parts and a head
like an oblong package made up from two compressed snakes
springing from her neck. The tribal god himself must have
looked inhumanly terrifying. Not so Quetzalcoatl. The Aztecs
were very sensitive to human beauty-the ugliness of the
gods is clearly deliberate-and this god was represented as
beautiful, though in a way which, although not unique to
him, is yet most remarkable.
Quetzalcoatl's name combines the word quetzal, a
Mesoamerican bird that has precious green tailfeathers (the
green of quetzal feathers and of jade was the color of the
Mexica nobility), with coat!, meaning snake. So he is the
bird-snake, or the Plumed Serpent, belonging both to the sky
and the earth. And thus he is shown in some sculptures, with
coils whose scales are lengthened into feathers neatly piled
into a spiral. The fanged jaws are wide open and frame a
handsome, spare young male face, with high-bridged nose,
well-shaped eyes, thin-lipped mouth-the face, I imagine, of
a young Aztec noble.
Is this face that of the god within a serpentine integument, or is the creature as a whole the god, or is it the god's
priest in his ritual costume? It is not clear that it is even a permissible question. The Aztecs appear to have had the most
flexible notions of their divinities. The gods amalgamate
competences, share names, identify with their victims, and
merge with their priests. As far as I can tell, this mode is
neither confusion nor indeterminacy. It is rather a kind of
conceptual fluidity which does become fixed in the very
precisely promulgated rituals. The graphic art of the Aztecs
expresses this multifarious melding by its complexly intertwined figures with their attributes all drawn indistinguishably on one plane and discriminable only to an expert in
Aztec divinity.
�108
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
But of Quetzalcoatl we know that he was indeed both god
and man. As man he was then lord of Tula, and as the Toltec
lord he became fateful to the Mexica.
To me the most appealing characteristic of these newcomers, these recent Chichimeca, was their longing deference
to a city of the past, Tula, a city forty miles north of their lake
and overthrown more than 300 years before Montezuma's
day. Tula was to Tenochtitlan what Athens has been to Europe
and still is to us in Maryland and New Mexico: the source of
wisdom, art, and ideals of life. The Toltecs were to the
Mexica like gods, walking swiftly everywhere on blue sandals, wrapped in flowery fragrance . For them corn sprouted
in enormous ears, precious cocoa beans-one of the Mexican
currencies-were found in plenty, and cotton grew already
dyed in rich colors. They made works of art so exemplary
that the Aztecs gave their own craftsmen the generic name of
tolteca, Tulans.
Over this earthly idyll Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin, Our Dear
Lord Quetzalcoatl, ruled as priest and king, godlike but also
all too human. I cannot tell you what then happened in all its
tragicomic detail. But in brief, Huitzilopochtli and other gods
arrived in the guise of mischief-making wizards. Never mind
the disparity in dates. This is the story of a newer god of war
undoing an older god of civilization, and, I suspect, the story
of how Huitzilopochtli's people betrayed their assumed
Toltec heritage. These wizards assaulted the Toltec lord, who
had grown in some way neglectful, with portents and temptations. They tempted him with pulque, the wine made from
the maguey cactus, the American aloe, whose consumption
was fiercely regulated in Tenochtitlan. They raised indecent
passions in princesses and induced civil wars that
Quetzalcoatl had to win with his army of dwarves and
cripples. They caused the Tolteca to sing and dance themselves to death. To these temptations the lord of Tula
succumbed as a participant. Finally, however, they tried to
force him to make human sacrifices. Here he balked and
�BRANN
109
refused and was for that steadfastness driven from Tula. All
this is told by Sahagun and other Indian sources. This is the
moment to say once more what needs saying just because it
seems too naive for words: To report that Huitzilopochtli did
this and Quetzalcoatl that is not to confer the status of
existence on these divine figures. Indeed they became fateful
to their people precisely because they were so vulnerable to
non-existence proofs.
There is a stone head that shows the Dear Lord weeping,
long clublike tears issuing straight from the god's eyes,
probably those he wept as he went into exile. The same head
shows him heavily bearded, an unusual feature in a young
god; and among the Indians in general. He is also supposed
to have been light-skinned.
Quetzalcoatl flees toward the east. He crosses, in space
not time, the path of the Mexica's god going southwest, and
he makes his way toward the east coast, there to embark with
his loyal band on a raft of serpents and to drift into the rising
sun-the very way Cortes, a white bearded man, took in
reverse going west and inland. Cortes comes this way in
1519, just as the year that in the Aztec calendrical cycle is
Quetzalcoatl's birth and death year, ce dcatl, One Reed, had
come round again. In this year the Dear Lord was destined to
return by boat from his trans-oceanic exile. You can see the
tragedy taking shape.
The biggest pyramid in America rose at Cholula to mark
one of the god-man's stations of flight. There the old god
failed his people when, on his way to Tenochtitlan, Cortes
massacred more than a hundred unarmed Cholulan nobles in
his temple precinct. Cortes thought he had uncovered a plot
to betray his band to the Mexica. Perhaps he had, and
perhaps the planned ambush would have been the end for
him if he had not prevented it with his characteristic
merciless decisiveness. That we shall never know, but we do
know this: The Cholulans remembered an old prophecy that
the god who had rested from his flight in their city would
�110
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
protect them, and that if they pulled a stone out of his
pyramid, a flood of water would sweep the enemy away. With
panicky energy they succeeded in wrenching out a stoneand got a cloud of dust.
The Plumed Serpent, briefly to finish his tale, was not
permanently discredited, nor did he cease to occupy imaginations. He became the savior god of a resurrected Mexico. The
friars who came at Cortes's request wanted a warrant for
treating the Indians as aboriginal Christians; they saw in the
wandering god St. Thomas, one of Jesus's twelve disciples
who was his missionary to India. Quetzalcoatl was also the
guardian god of the nativist movement in New Spain and
Mexico, celebrated in murals and hymns by Mexican painters
and intellectuals and even by that wandering Englishman D.
H. Lawrence. His novel of 1926, The Plumed Serpent, is a
repulsively fascinating, garishly proto-Nazi fantasy of the
god's return in provincial Mexico, complete with the
paraphernalia of Nuremberg: a charismatic god-representing
leader, choreographed soldiery, Nazi-like salutes, and finally
human sacrifice-all this so that the heroine, a manless
ageing Irishwoman, might find a man who is a man, that is,
who hardly ever talks. It is a travesty of the sorrowful Toltec
divinity of civilization.
2. Human sacrifice was, I have learned to think, not really
just a Mexican custom ascribable to "otherness." The Mexica
knew the story just told of Quetzalcoatl. I cannot believe that
some of them, especially their last emperor, did not reflect
that they were co-opting the god into a practice he abhorred
and over which he went into exile. Perhaps those priests of
Huitzilopochtli, with their skull-decorated black gowns and
blood-matted hair, were fanatics totally absorbed in their
cultic task, but the educated nobles, admirers of Tula, so
refined in their intimate habits and their social life, must have
had qualms and doubts-unless there is no way to infer from
ourselves to others.
�BRANN
111
The numbers are staggering. It is reported that at the
inauguration of Huitzilopochtli's Great Temple in 1487,
20,000-by some readings 80,000-victims were lined up
four abreast in queues stretching from the temple onto the
city's causeways. (Is it altogether an ironical coincidence that
these were about the numbers of Indians said to have
presented themselves for conversion on certain days after the
conquest?) And this killing went on, in smaller numbers, in
the numerous minor temples of the city. Every twenty days,
by the ritual calendar, there was a god's feast, requiring sometimes quite a few children, sometimes a woman, sometimes a
specially prepared youth.
The operation itself is often shown in the codices. The
victims march, mostly unassisted, to the top of the pyramid;
there they are laid on a convex sacrificial stone, their limbs
are held by four priests while a fifth chokes off his screams
with a wooden yoke, the obsidian knife rips into the chest,
the heart, still beating, is held up to the Sun and put in a
wooden bowl, the "eagle dish." The victim is rolled down the
steps to be dismembered and distributed for feasting according to a strict protocol. The victims are children bought from
the poor, the pick of slaves for sale in the market (who are
ritually bathed), beautiful young nobles prepared in a year of
splendid living for their role as ixiptlas, god-impersonators.
Evidently certain divinities, like the ever-present
Tezcatlip6ca, Lord of the Near and Nigh, who shared functions with the city god, were not only recipients of victims
but were themselves sacrificed, albeit through their human
incarnations-one noteworthy parallel to Christianity.
It seems to be true that these ritual killings were not
sadistic in intention or demeaning to the victims. While there
are reports of weeping family and frightened victims, the
sacrificial human was evidently well co-opted into the
performance. Moreover, the cactus button peyotl and the
mushroom teonandcatl, "Flesh of the Gods," both hallucinogens, and the alcoholic pulque seem to have been
�112
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
administered to the sacrifices, who were, in any case, intoxicated with the ritual swirl and the musical stridor around
them. For the prepared chosen at least this passage into a
flowery next world was perhaps a high point of this lifethough who knows how many victims, particularly the
children, died experiencing extreme fear.
These frightful, somber, and splendid festivals were evidently thought to be truly necessary to the survival of the city
and the continuing existence of its world. Yet, as I said, the
Aztec nobility, who were so finely attuned to right and wrong
conduct (as their stock homilies, preserved by Sahagun,
show), must have felt themselves to be living over a moral
abyss, doing a balancing act in a threatening and fragile
sacred world, which doomed them in their hearts for what
they did and through their sacred duties for what they might
omit to do.
I have neglected to mention the largest and most steady
supply of victims, the prisoners.
The highest calling of Huitzilopochtli's people, the
soldiers of the Sun, was war, and the object of war was to take
captives, an even higher object than the merciless subjugation
of Anahuac's cities. Promotion in the army was strictly
according to the number of prisoners taken. The warriors
needed to take prisoners to rise in rank; the city needed prisoners for their flesh and blood, the sacrifices that would feed
and maintain the good will of the gods. It was a tight circle of
necessities.
This religious trap-! will call it that-had three devastating secular consequences. First, the Mexican army never
learned, until it was too late, to fight to kill, to fight a war for
survival in realest earnest. Second, Tenochtitlan trained up a
deadly enemy for itself, the city of Tlaxcala, seated between
itself and the eastern coast. There was a bizarre but logical
institution in Anahuac, the so-called "flowery war,"
xochiya6yotl. The Triple Alliance of Anahuac, eventually
dominated by Tenochtitlan and including Texcoco, had a
�BRANN
113
mutual arrangement with three cities across the mountains, of
which the aristocratic republic of Tlaxcala was the most
independent. The agreement was to stage battles regularly for
the sole purpose of obtaining from each other prisoners for
sacrifice. This was a strange kind of ceremonious warfare,
which required the high-born warriors skillfully to take their
enemies alive, only to bring them back home to their delayed
warriors' death. Meanwhile the Tlaxcalans remained free, in
training, and full of hatred, and they became Cortes's most
effective allies.
And third, the evidence and actual sight of human
sacrifice turned the Spaniards' stomachs-as powerful a
revulsion as the moral one, I imagine. So when, as I said, they
saw the remains of their own people, an ineradicable repugnance seems to have turned their hearts, a disgust which
became the pretext for much savagery of their own.
3. Montezuma was installed as tlatodni of MexicoTenochtitlan in 1502. Tlatoani means "He Who Speaks,"
who has authority. Since Tenochtitlan was the secular and
sacred center of the Aztec world, he was the speaker over the
universe, the uei-tlatoani-usually rendered as "emperor."
When he was killed in 1520 he was 52. His lineage was even
shorter than the city's existence, whose founding date is
1345. The Anahuac empire was put together during the next
century; Axayacatl, Montezuma's father, who died in 1481,
was only the third emperor. As was the custom, the council
that chose the new lord did not go to the son but first to
Axayacatl's two brothers. When Montezuma became the
sixth emperor, Anahuac was less than seventy years old.
Historians disagree whether objectively the empire was in a
state of youthful vigor or in the course of rigidified decline
when Cortes came. But there can be no doubt that
Montezuma was a monarch who personally felt doom
coming. Motolinia says (probably incorrectly) that his very
name-nomen omen-meant one who is sad and serious, as
well as one who inspires fear and respect.
�114
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
As was necessary for the tlatoani, he had proved himself
as warrior and officer, but he was also a highly educated man.
The Mexica, like most high civilizations, were committed to
a well-defined and diversified plan of education for their
young. The set speeches, the traditional admonitions, that the
ruling nobles made to their boys and girls upon their having
reached the age of discretion are loving, somber, straitlaced,
meticulous-and full of Nahua charm. The one from which I
will read a sampling goes on for six of Sahagun's columns. It
begins thus:
Here art thou, thou who art my child, thou
who art my precious necklace, thou who art
my precious feather, thou who art my creation,
my offspring, my blood, my image.
And then the child is inducted into Aztec pessimism:
Hear well, 0 my daughter, 0 my child. The earth
is not a good place. It is not a place of joy; it is not
a place of contentment.
Then the little girl is given rules of conduct, for example:
At night hold vigil, arise promptly. Extend thy
arms promptly, quickly leave thy soft bed, wash
thy face, wash thy hands, wash thy mouth, seize
the broom; be diligent with the sweeping; be not
tepid, be not lukewarm.
What wilt thou seize upon as thy womanly
labors? ... Look well to the drink, the food;
how it is prepared, how it is made .. . .
Then the speech touches deep moral matters:
May thou not covet carnal things. May thou not
wish for experience, as is said, in the excrement, in
the refuse. And if thou truly art to change thyself,
would thou become a goddess?
�BRANN
115
But there was also public education, a dual system. The
Young Men's (and Women's) House, the telpochccilli, was
open to the lower nobility and even to commoners. The boys'
house had features of our prep school. The emphasis was on
physical hardening and the performance of rough public
service. A lot of rowdy fun was overlooked; some of the older
boys even took mistresses, and, Sahagun reports, "they
presumed to utter light and ironic words and spoke with
pride and temerity."
The second institution, the famous calmecac, was part
seminary, part cadet corps. Here went the high nobility and
commoners destined by talent to be priests. The daily routine
was punishing; for example, sleep was often interrupted
when the boys were called to draw blood from their earlobes
and ankles with maguey spines. This self-sacrifice was said to
have been instituted by Quetzalcoatl, who was in fact the
tutelary divinity, the super-tutor, of the calmecac. Discipline
was fierce. There were constant humiliations, and if a noble's
son was found even a little drunk on pulque he was secretly
strangled; a commoner was beaten to death.
The curriculum was rigid and rigorous. The boys learned
the revisionist Mexica version of Nahua history from painted
books that were expounded to them. They learned to speak
ceremoniously and to perform ritual songs and dances accurately. They learned, besides the sign and number count of the
360-day solar calendar with its five unfortunate "hollow"
intercalary days, the divinatory calendar. This was the
"Sacred Book of Days" by which the priest told the feast days
of the gods, the personal destiny of a baby and the epochs of
the world. This study was evidently the most effective initiation into the Aztec way of seeing the world. That is the
reason why the friars, trying to extirpate Aztec worship,
denounced this sacred calendar with particular vehemence as
having cast loose from the natural heavenly revolutions and
being an evil convention-as they said: "the fruit of a
compact with the Devil."
�116
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The two calendars came together every 52 years, an era
called the Bundling of the Years. Ominously, such an epoch
evidently occurred in 1506, "One Rabbit," when just as many
year-bundles had gone by as would make the setting of the
fifth Sun imminent, and with it the final destruction by earthquakes of Huitzilopochtli, his city, and the world whose
center was Tenochtitlan. The year of 1519, moreover, was, as
I said, ce acatl, "One Reed," the name of the year of
Quetzalcoatl's birth, exile and prophesied return. A student
of the calendar presumably knew himself to be living at once
near doomsday and near delivery.
From this schooling and his experience in the field,
Montezuma emerged as high priest, warrior and tlatoani:
spiritually austere for all his palatial luxury, a severe father to
his Mexica, rigidly religious, and, for all the self-abasement
his set accession speech required, an autocratic and aristocratic ruler, the first to restrict high office to the nobility. He
was inaccessible to the populace, stately and ceremonious
with his nobles, reserved as to his person: When Cortes, as he
himself tells, tried to hug him "in Spanish fashion,"
Montezuma's horrified attendants stopped him; this was
court etiquette but presumably also personal preference. But
above all he was a burdened man, doom-ridden, half hopeful,
self-doubtful. "What shall I do, where shall I hide? If only I
could turn into stone, wood or some other earthly matter
rather than suffer that which I dread!" he cried out, this victor of nine pitched battles, to his magicians who could not
turn to good the omens of evil to come (and got severely punished for it). This was no coward's funk but a pious man's
terror of a probably inevitable future.
There was a city across the lake, Texcoco, a member of
Tenochtitlan's Triple Alliance. It paralleled the Italian cities of
the Renaissance in high culture; it was a Tula revived. In the
fifteenth century it had a poet-king, Nezahualc6yotl, whose
poetry has the fragrance that arises when the melancholy of
existence melds with soundness of heart. Like a Nahua
�BRANN
117
Lucretius he offers his bitter cup with the rim sweetened by
honey. He speaks:
I, Nezahualcoyotl, ask this:
Is it true one really lives on the earth?
Not forever on earth,
only a little while here.
Though it be jade it falls apart,
though it be gold it wears away,
though it be quetzal plumage it is torn asunder.
Not forever on earth,
only a little while here.
This is beauty to console for the brevity of being, but in the
Texcocan Renaissance prince it is without the panicky gloom
of the Mexican Emperor of the late Fifth Sun.
Nezahualcoyotl's underlying sense of life's inconstancy is the
same, but Montezuma's was infected by the consciousness of
a more starkly immediate doom.
I think that Montezuma was probably an overwrought
exemplar of a Mexica noble: devout witness of constant
bloody brutality; refined connoisseur of jade and feather
work; watcher for imminent death and destruction; avid
collector of fleeting things like birds and flowers; cruel lord
and ever-courteous prince; liar of great ability and treacherous too, as the Tlaxcalans believed; high noble of candid and
simple bearing: witness the poignant speech of submission he
appears to have made to Cortes when he was still in his own
palace, when he still believed in the Spanish savior. He said
with a smile:
You too have been told perhaps that I am a god,
and dwell in palaces of gold and silver. But you see
it is false. Myhouses, though large, are of stone
and wood like those of others. And as to my body
[here he threw open his cloak]-you see it is flesh
and blood like yours.
�118
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Some see delicate irony in his words, particularly in the
reference to the absence of gold. But to me his speech sounds
heartfelt, and he was in fact submitting to men he thought
might be teules, gods; Cortes's band, the santa campania, the
Holy Company, might indeed be bringing back QuetzalcoatlCortes, "the white hero of the break of day."
He had had some cause to be thus receptive, for in the
decade before Cortes's arrival the omens had multiplied: the
spontaneous combustion of Huitzilopochtli's temple, tongues
of celestial fire, finally a bird found in Lake Texcoco bearing
a black mirror in its head in which the emperor briefly
glimpsed the strangers landing-Sahagun catalogues eight
serious omens.
I think Montezuma became heartsick and started vacillating, now welcoming the Spaniard from afar with golden gifts,
now holding him off or even arranging his ambush. In the
end he was transfixed like a rabbit by a snake, truly a snake
since Cortes played the role of the Plumed Serpent. So he sent
the Spaniard Quetzalcoatl's regalia, since it was the year
ce acatl, One Reed. Not all his nobles were pleased at the
emperor's submissiveness; they wept when not much later
they attended his litter to his place of custody, his father's
palace.
Some historians think the omens were an ex post facto
invention to make the catastrophe more palatable to simple
people. But they sound very plausible; ominous events do
occur in clusters before disasters (as Machiavelli observes in
his Discourses), at least for those who have prophetic souls.
The omens help explain Montezuma's fragility before the
crisis. It was, I want to say, a type of fragility almost designed
to highlight Cortes's robustness, as if Montezuma had found
his fated match, the better to reveal the West to itself.
Once he had made his submission to the Spanish emperor and been taken into Spanish custody, another side of his
character came out: He became receptive to new experiences,
learned to shoot the crossbow, sailed Lake Texcoco on a
�BRANN
119
brigantine, the first wind-driven vessel on those waters.-It is
always the West's inventions, especially those that shoot far
and go fast, that first beguile the non-West. He retained his
exquisite courtesy and generosity; he became sociable and
even affectionate with the Spaniards. It has been suggested
that he was displaying the pathological bonding of a victim to
his kidnappers. But by a concord with Cortes Montezuma
was running his empire from Axayacatl's palace where he and
the Spaniards were quartered, and he was free to indulge in
his old pleasures like hunting. It is reported that if there was
fun afoot he could dissolve in giggles.
But this priest-emperor never converted or gave up
human sacrifice, although frequently subjected to Cortes's
passionate theological harangues against the ritual on the
grounds of human brotherhood. As Fuentes says, it was simply a more urgent question to him whether the sun would rise
and the world go on than what the Spaniards did to him or
his empire.
Nevertheless, I wonder if it ever came to him that his religious practices were, in the nature of things, futile, that the
Christians had a sun that moved reliably and stably (and
would soon even stand still) precisely because it was not a god
and therefore not amenable to human exertion and sacrifice.
Octavia Paz says in his Labyrinth of Solitude that the Aztecs
committed suicide because they were betrayed by their gods.
I think they were, speaking more precisely, betrayed by their
trust in their visible and palpable gods, who (as I think in contrast to the early invaders, who acknowledged them as devils)
did nothing and were nothing and absconded more crassly
than could an invisible deity or one less abjectly served-a
truth I have, strangely enough, never found enunciated by the
historians I have read.
4. Cortes, finally, the Conquistador, seems to me a man as
emblematic of the conquering West as Montezuma was of the
empire of the doomed Sun. Cortes was a hidalgo from an old,
turbulent, moderately situated family. Having gotten into
�120
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
various scrapes he chose to come to the Indies in 1504 when
he was nineteen-an age more often given over to wanderlust
than to acquisitiveness. In 1519 he began to subdue Anahuac,
whose chiefs became, as he put it to his sovereign, "Your
Majesty's vassals, and obey my commands." No sooner had
he conquered Mexico for Spain than he was beset by endless
audiencias and residencias, tribunals and inquiries, conducted
by officials whose rectitude was apparently not much greater
than his own and whose daring was considerably less.
Nevertheless, by 1529 he was Marquess of the Oaxaca Valley
and Captain-General of New Spain, empowered to discover
further lands and to colonize them. (In fact following Mexico
he discovered and named California after a queen in one of
those medieval romances.) He died in 1547, and his bones
have undergone grotesque removals paralleling his downward course in Mexican history, during which Quetzalcoatl
was raised to a national hero while his unwitting impersonator was suppressed by the descendants of the Conquest.
The story of his and his Holy Company's march toward
Tenochtitlan in 1519, his first peaceful entrance into the
sacred and magical city, his expulsion, near-annihilation and
devastating re-entry have lately been retold in all its fictiondefying detail by Hugh Thomas in Conquest. He lands on
Anahuac's eastern shore with his little fleet of "water houses,"
as the natives described his three-masted square-riggers, of
the type called naos. When they . first saw them, they
reported on them as "mountain ranges floating on water." '
His boldest first stroke is to dismantle his ships before he
marches inland. Now the thirty-four-year-old sailor emerges
as a man of many devices and deceits, a bold man of faithand greed-inspired audacity-albeit somewhat more devoted
to the salvation of his soul than to the amassing of gold; a
resilient man well acquainted with suffering and depression;
a man of self- and other-punishing endurance and scary
tenacity, who seems to live on little sleep; cruel and charming, careful of his companions and demanding their utmost;
�BRANN
121
prudent and daring; circumspect and lightning-quick; generous and grasping; kind and manipulative; and always an
adventurer and a wanderer and an elegant teller of adventures and wanderings-as complex a man in his way as
Montezuma. Prescott says in his personal memoranda, in
which he details for himself the oppositions of Cortes's
character:
The great feature of his character was constancy of
purpose . . .. He was inexhaustible in resources,
and when all outward means were withdrawn,
seemed to find sufficient to sustain him, in his own
bosom.
Now listen to the beginning of Homer's Odyssey:
Tell me, 0 Muse, of the man of many twists who
wandered so much when he had sacked the sacred
city of Troy. He saw the towns of many men and
knew their mind, and suffered much on the sea,
seeking to save his soul and the return of his compamons.
No two men could be more alike; if I were to inventory the
characters of the two adventurers nearly every feature in one
list would turn up quite recognizably in the other, beginning
with "constancy of purpose" -Odysseus is polytlas, the
"much enduring"-including the occasional bouts of lassitude and depression. And this happy circumstance tells me
that Cortes was not primarily a man of his time: not just a
medieval knight-errant or a mercantile-minded gold prospector, or a hard-to-control vassal of the Spanish crown, or a
fierce competitor for the rights of first conquest.-He was
certainly all these, and it was because he returned to the Gulf
Coast to intercept his Spanish pursuers that he first lost
Tenochtitlan. But before these and more fundamentally he
was a man who in his intense individuality expressed an
ancient type of the West, Odysseus the self-sufficient, who
�122
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
talks to his own heart, who has many twists and devices, who
is blunt and tactful, who can be driven to extreme cruelty and
engage in gratuitous acts of kindness, who lies but not
ignobly, and above all, who can, in a pinch, rely on his virgin
goddess, Athena, because he relies on himself.
In Cortes that ancient pagan character type seems to have
comfortably accommodated, or better, absorbed the God
from the other root of the Western tradition, though Cortes
was-more parallelism-particularly devoted to the Virgin.
Hugh Thomas says that he became more God-fearing as the
expedition went on-who wouldn't? His flagship sailed
under a banner he had inscribed with the saying: "Friends, let
us follow the Cross and if we only have faith in this sign we
shall conquer." He was citing the legend under which the
Emperor Constantine fought the battle that in 312 turned the
Roman Empire Christian. Cortes's Christianity is a debated
subject, but to me it seems unquestionable. It is-to state the
obvious-Cortes's chief distinction from his pagan avatar,
and to my mind the reason why, unlike Odysseus the Sacker
of Troy who returns, however dilatorily, to his own rocky
Ithaca, Cortes the Conquistador of Anahuac stays to colonize
it for his "Most Catholic and Invincible Emperor." One kind
of evidence is that this prudent commander several times put
his expedition at risk because of his religious impetuousness
and had to be restrained by Bartolome de Olmeda, the wise
and patient friar with the expedition, a man who while
practicing prudence also thought of the Indians' feelings-so
unlike Pizarro's fatal chaplain. On one memorable occasion,
the emperor, at Cortes's request, invited him with some of his
captains to come up the Great Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli.
Montezuma himself was, as usual, carried to the top, but
Cortes insisted on marching up all 113 steep narrow steps
and declared to the solicitous emperor waiting for him that
"Spaniards are never weary;" indeed, as I mentioned, Cortes
slept little when on campaign. Montezuma then obtained permission from the priests for Cortes, who was clearly already
�BRANN
123
in the Christian conqueror mode, to enter the sanctuary. This
reeking place so disgusted him that he asked Montezuma
with a smile-not a charming one, I imagine-how so wise a
prince could put his faith in a representation of the Devil. He
offered to install in this temple, as he had on other pyramids,
a cross and an image of the Virgin, before which the false
gods would shrink into oblivion. Montezuma was deeply
shocked and said-here is irony-that these were the gods
that had ever led the Mexica to victory. Cortes, perhaps
nudged by Friar Olmeda, apologized. But it was a dangerous
moment. Montezuma stayed behind to expiate the sacrilege.
This action, which could have meant the early end of
Montezuma's policy of submission, was certainly impolitic
and clearly inspired by pure if untimely Christian fervor. In
his own account Cortes naturally suppresses this incident in
favor of what must have been a later occasion, when he did
actually topple the idol down the pyramid steps, and, as he
claims, stop the sacrifices.
Cortes became de facto emperor of Anahuac close to the
time, namely 1513, that Machiavelli's Prince appeared. So I
looked Cortes up, as it were. I have often wondered for
whom this manual on rulership is meant, since natural
princes already know it all and untalented rulers will simply
use it as permission for misconduct. Cortes, it turns out,
knows most of Machiavelli's lessons: how to fight both like a
fox and a lion, for he was proud of his "cunning stratagems"
and fierce even when wounded and unarmed; how not to be
good on occasion, for he could be brutal; how to get credit
for every exploit, for his letters take care that he should; how
to rule more by love than fear, as his trooper Diaz attests;
how, finally, to be lucky, and-a Machiavellian or Odyssean
trait of his own-how to lie royally without being commonly
dishonest. But there were many more things that he did not
do by this book but did rather against its explicit advice: he
relied heavily on auxiliaries, fought with an amateur's
improvisation, and did not study eminent predecessors-for
�124
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
there were none. But above all, Machiavelli doesn't seem to
know, or at least to enunciate, the two kindred qualifications
most needful to an imperial conquistador: large dreams and
deep faith-in Cortes's case, Christian faith, but faith also in
a more expansive sense, as I will try to show.
Both rulers made mistakes. Montezuma should not have
sent gold to greet the "Holy Company," though how was he
to know? He should not have quartered the Spaniards in
Axayacatl's palace where the state treasure was hidden-and
so on. But the chief mistake was to believe the prophecies and
to submit to the omens, and so to the bearded white men
coming over the water. Some of his nobles seem to have
realized this, but they were themselves used to submitting to
their lord, and so they wept silently.
Cortes's errors were those of a nervous yet decisive
aggressor. At Cholula he stained his name with a possibly
preventable massacre. At Tenochtitlan, when he hastened to
the coast to repel his pursuers, he left in charge a valorous
young brute, Pedro d'Alvarado, whom the Indians called
Tonatiuh, the Sun, because he was blond and beautiful. He
proved worse to them than their own doomed Fifth Sun, for
as he was edgy, eager and without judgment, he unleashed a
massacre on the unarmed celebrants of Huitzilopochtli's
festival which ended every chance of peaceful dominion and
brought on that Sad Night. This was the night when the
Spaniards, their Indian allies, and the Spanish women fighting
desperately alongside their men, were driven from the city
and nearly exterminated.
Above all, he razed Tenochtitlan, the finest city in the
world. Was it a mistake, a crime? Here is what he himself says
in his account of the recapture of the city from the Mexica,
who under the young Emperor Cuauhtemoc, Montezuma's
nephew, had learned the Spanish skills: to fight to kill, to fight
at night, to fight from the water. The passage is from the third
letter to Emperor Charles V:
�BRANN
125
All I had seen forced me to two conclusions, the
one that we should regain little of the treasure the
Mexicans had taken from us; the other that they
would force us to destroy and kill them all and this
last weighed on my soul. I began to wonder how I
could terrify them and bring them to a sense of
their error. It could only be done by burning and
destroying their houses and towers of the idols.
Of course, the letter explains first things first: why the
Emperor isn't getting his customary fifth of treasure. Of
course, Cortes assumes that the Mexica are legally in rebellion (an imperial arrogation, to be sure, on par with the Aztec
emperor's treatment of cities that refused the dominion of
Huitzilopochtli). But it also reveals a certain travail of spirit,
a conscience, a care for a people whose intelligence Cortes
admired and whose fate he pitied, albeit he was its cause. On
Cortes's premise the destruction was a necessity, but was the
premise itself necessary? For my part, I simply cannot judge.
It is true, however, that once he was master of Anahuac he
looked carefully after his realm and probably did it more
good in the long run than it ever was in Montezuma's power
to do: He spent his own resources in rebuilding the country,
introduced new plants and draught animals, condemned the
enslavement of the Indians and recorded in his will his deep
misgivings of conscience about the institution itself, and tried
to mitigate the treatment of the natives by the colonists. And,
of course, he abolished human sacrifice. All in all, his dubious
deeds had the effect of relegating Anahuac to the past; his
good deeds gave Mexico a future. And, pressed to think in
these terms about the Conquest itself, I suppose with the
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa that it belongs in the long
run to the credit side of something, call it human welfare.
But the question I proposed was how and why it
could happen. So let me try to come to some sort of conclusion. Two worlds clashed (here the cliche tells the simple
truth), and the leaders happened to be emblematic of their
�126
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
worlds. Let me first compare the divinities that led the
leaders.
We have an alumnus, Peter Nabokov, the stepson of the
man to whom this lecture is dedicated, William Darkey. He is
an expert on Indian sacred life and its sacred space. When he
heard that I was reading on this subject he sent me a large box
of books from his private library. In one of these books I
found an article containing an antithetical listing of Aztec and
Christian religiosity.
On the left, the Nahua side, is listed (I select for brevity's
sake) Symmetry, Autonomy, Interchangeability, and Cyclicality.
On the right, the Spanish side, is listed Hierarchy,
Centralization, Fixity, and Linearity. This right side is in fact
recognizable as a checklist of features condemned in the West
as evils of the West, a compendium of the self-critique of the
West such as was current in the later part of the last century
and still is, albeit somewhat muted by recent events.
I also recognize the left side of the list, and it does appear
to me to be descriptive of Aztec religion. But notice this
strange effect: how each characteristic of that religion
induced an opposite effect on the Aztec polity. The complexly related Symmetries of divine functions make for a draining
tangle of rituals; the Autonomy of the deities-as many as
1600-leads to a burdensome multiplicity of services; the
Interchangeability of identities leads to dependence on priestly interpreters; and the Cyclicality leads to a sense of
inescapable doom. In fact it was Anahuac that most tended
toward social Hierarchy, administrative Centralization and
rigid Fixity of protocol. The Spanish side, on the other hand,
gave its real-life practitioners one supreme god, reliable in his
operations, author of a stable creation, progressing hopefully
into a new day. And so it was the Spaniards who could afford
to be free, flexible, energetic, and self-reliant: When God
permits them to be defeated it is, Cortes says, on account of
their own sins, a deserved punishment, not an unintelligible
divine antic.
�BRANN
127
But, a student of Aztec religion might argue, the similarities to Christianity are remarkably exact and numerous, so
why would religion make the difference? To give a sampling
of the parallelisms: The Indians had the symbol of the cross,
a Maltese type, that turns up frequently in their visual art.
They had absolution by confession, though it could be undergone only once in a lifetime. They had a form of baptism,
ritual fasting, even an invisible god. Above all, they had the
ritual ingestion of their god's blood: the victim's or their own
blood was kneaded into loaves of amaranth seeds that were
god-images and were then eaten. This last practice, the
analogue of Christian communion, is most interesting to me,
because some scholars represent this Christian sacrament as a
form of cannibalism that brings Christianity closer to the
Aztec feasting on flesh. But, of course, the blood partaken of
during the Christian Eucharist is precisely not the blood of a
living human being. Even a very untheoretical Christian
knows that it is a mystery which is accompanied by a complex
rational theology. Communicants know, if vaguely, that the
wafer and wine are neither merely symbolic nor brutely
real-the nature of their transformation is open to rational
questioning: For example, have they undergone transubstantiation, so that the substance itself, the bread and the wine,
are to be regarded as now the body and blood of Christ, or
have they achieved consubstantiation, such that they present
a duality of visible properties and invisible essence?
I may be allowed to dismiss the beguiling but bizarre
notion of the friars that the Indians were lapsed Christians,
baptized a millennium and a half ago by QuetzalcoatlSt.Thomas; at any rate, they themselves were always afraid
that the willing conversions of the Indians were perhaps
rather shallow and masked the survival of the old similarseeming worship. It remains a problem, requiring really deep
investigation by people who know not only the methods of
comparative ethnography but the ways of faith, whether such
similarities betoken pure coincidence, or are features belong-
�128
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ing to some general human religiosity, and whether such
all-human phenomena have a deep or shallow common root.
To me it seems, judging only at first glance, that a stupendously unwieldy religion supported by many disparate narratives, whose meaning, being a matter of memory, is uncircumventably in the hands of trained priests, is simply incommensurable with a religion that has one simply told "Good
News" (Evangel/ion), one master story whose ever new
interpretations, carried on by priests, theologians, and
laymen alike, strive for coherence. Let me make my point
brusquely and minimally: Such a religion, Christianity in the
present case, seems to me simply more energizing. To wit:
Cortes liked to read, as he said, when he had time, and he
knew some theology which, in turn, gave him the selfconfidence to harangue an emperor. He went to mass in the
morning without fail and was ready for the day. In defense,
Montezuma could only tell divine stories-myths to us-and
insist on his gods' past services, which he had to keep securing by spending every day much time and many resources on
arduous cultic performances.
Moreover, Cortes's Holy Company could rely on their
God who, being invisible-though having one and only one
human incarnation-was therefore impervious to sudden
physical toppling, to being bodily thrown down the temple
stairs, as Moses had once burnt the golden calf. This God, a
god mysterious but not capricious, made nature according to
laws and left it largely alone. Thus God's created nature was
open to the self-reliant inventiveness of human beings. This
natural realm, being amenable to human rationality, invited
initiative, for its God had himself engaged in radical innovation when he created the world and when he irrupted into
history in human form.
I have been engaged by this puzzle: We know that the
Indians had wheeled toys; why did Anahuac wait for Cortes
to introduce wagons? It seems to me that it is not generally
true that necessity is the mother of invention, but rather than
�BRANN
129
inventions develop necessities: We see a convenience and we
need it. Anahuac, to be sure, had enough slaves and
commoners with tumplines to drag its building stones anywhere. But why didn't someone think of the splendor of
rolling in stately carriages over the waiting causeways of
Tenochtitlan? By my premise it was not lack of need but
something else, at which I am guessing: the Aztecs were close
and loving onlookers and clever users of nature, but they
were not on the lookout to go her one better, to whirl rather
than to walk over her terrain. Perhaps the wheel isn't the
most convincing general example, since it seems to have
come to the Western world not as an original invention but
by diffusion, probably from Mesopotamia, but to me its
absence in Anahuac does seem telling for Aztec inventioninertia. Why did they not lever their simple tools into
machines, those devices for compelling nature to outdo herself? Why did they refrain from enlarging their bare-eyed
observation through those instruments that bring close things
that are beyond and below human vision? Why had they, as
gifted a people as ever was, no interest in seizing the mechanical advantage or extending sensory acuity? Well, as for the
latter, they had no glass for lenses (which is why Cortes's glass
baubles were acceptable gifts). But then-why not?
Theology, the laws of nature, interpretative accessibility,
and inventiveness-these are great but they are not the only
advantages that these Westerners who came out of the East
carried with them. Others have been intimated: the fraternal
equality of human beings insofar as they are ensouled
creatures that Cortes preached to the Aztec nobles, whereas
Anahuac was caste-ridden; the ensuing closeness of the leader
to his men that made Cortes listen to the complaints and
sometimes-never at crucial moments-heed the advice of
his companions, whereas Montezuma was deliberately
remote-the tlatoani, the Speaker, not the spoken-to, whose
subjects had to avert their eyes when he passed-and autocratic; the project of propagating to all the world a truth felt
�130
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
to be universal that unquestionably drove Cortes if not the
"Holy Company"-the name was first given ironicallywhereas the Mexica, once the conquered cities had accepted
Huitzilopochtli, collected their gods in turn, ever more of
them, for whom Montezuma even established a sort of allAnahuac pantheon; and (significant for our times) above all,
the tenacity of the Christians in holding on to life, whereas
the Aztecs seemed somehow-I'm far from understanding
it-to surrender themselves more readily to the thought of
death and so to death itself.
Of course, the Conquistadores' Christianity was intertwined with that other root of our West, pagan Greco-Roman
antiquity, of which I mention now only the intellectual taproot, the Greek one. From this dual root stems, it seems to
me, that faith in a more comprehensive sense I mentioned
before, the faith that underlies a daily life free for confident
projects: the trust in the stable motions of nature combined
with a contemplative care for transcendence, the faith in "the
Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," to cite our founding
charter
All of us here know-or will learn in the next four
years-how much the Christian and post-Christian West
owes to the Greek science of celestial nature and the rational
account of divinity. But I want to recur to the human model
that is exemplified with such spectacular accuracy by Cortes,
the Homeric Odysseus, the first mature Western man (for
Achilles, though in years the same age in the Iliad as was
Cortes in 1519, is constitutionally a youth). This man, a
soldier and sailor too, is free, self-reliant, inventive, a discoverer of new lands, be it of the world or the soul, and, I nearly omitted to say, the lover of women of stature: Like
Odysseus, who had his semi-goddesses abroad and his
Penelope at home, Cortes had in his life two royal daughters
of Montezuma and two Spanish wives, but above all his comrade, his advisor and interpreter, Malinali or Malinche, the
Mexican princess christened Dona Marina. It was his
�BRANN
131
partnership with her that gave him his Nahua nicknamethe Indians addressed him as "Malinche;" if it was meant in
derision, it was a misplaced scorn. She and Cortes were, like
Odysseus and Penelope, one in their wily works, and they had
a son, Don Martin Cortes (named after the Conquistador's
father), a son to whom he was attached, as Odysseus was to
his-more legitimate-Telemachus.
I cannot pretend to understand how this distinctive
species of Odyssean individualists is propagated down the
ages, nor can I quite figure out whether this self-reliant,
energetic type produces the tradition of trust in nature's
manageableness or the tradition of inquisitiveness generates
the type of the man of many devices, the polymechanos. In
other words, to me this question seems askable and therefore
pursuable: Whatever may be the case for the rest of the
human world, is our West ultimately more a civilization or a
kind of human being? I tend toward the latter, but for the
moment I will take the safe though weasly way and say that
together, type and tradition in tangled reciprocity, they are
responsible for the West's apparently irresistible expansiveness. The Empires of the Sun, on the other hand, fell so fast
into ruin because they and their leaders displayed in their
high-bred, melancholic rigidity and their fearful care for the
courses of their Sun characteristics that were, so to speak, the
fateful complement, the matched antithesis, of the confident
and focused daring of the Western invaders.
The lessons learned in thinking about a problem amount
more often to collateral insights than direct solutions. So I
want to end with two such lessons I believe I learned: First,
that we really must come to grips with our West in its
apparently irresistible expansiveness and if, on thoughtful
consideration, it proves necessary, acknowledge candidly its
superiority-superiority, that is, in the scope it gives, remarkably enough, to individual human nature by the very universality of its conceptions. And two, that we, as conscious
representatives of that tradition, owe those overrun and
�132
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
extinguished civilizations, with all their irreplaceable strange
beauty, a remembrance-not merely as projects for research
but as objects of human regard.
Addendum: In the question period at the Santa Fe
campus on September 13, 2002, a deeper issue than is
broached above was raised. I have presented Cortes as the apt
heir of a European tradition of ever-hopeful receptivity to
and invention of machines and devices (one such, not
mentioned above, is the huge-and ludicrously failed-catapult employed in the retaking of Tenochtitlan). Now the
question was asked whether, aside from being a more freeing
and invigorating faith than was the service of the Aztec pantheon, Christianity also provided the conditions for the transformation of the ancient theoria of natures into the modern
science of Nature and the project of mastery; in other words:
was Christianity implicated in technology? I have come upon
this claim in an article by M.B. Foster in Mind of 1935-36. Its
main point is this: Natural science presupposes that nature
must embody an intelligible mathematical scheme, but which
of the possible laws it realizes is left to experimental observation. These conditions imply that the world was created (not
generated) by a God who wills it-hence its contingencybut whose will is constrained by his understanding-hence its
intelligible lawfulness. This, Foster argues, is basic Christian
theology.
Books Read and Books Consulted
Baldwin, Neil. 1998. Legends of the Plumed Serpent: Biography of
a Mexican God. New York: PublicAffairs.
Boone, Elizabeth Hill. 1994. The Aztec World. Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Books.
Broda, Johanna, David Carrasco, and Eduardo Moctezuma. 1987.
The Great Temple ofTenochtitlan: Center and Periphery of the Aztec
World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
�BRANN
133
Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nunez. 1542. The Account: Alvar Nunez
Cabeza de Vaca's Relaci6n. Translated by Martin A. Favata and Jose
B. Fernandez. Houston: Arte Publico Press (1993).
Carmack, Robert M ., Janine Gasco, and Gary H. Gossen. 1996.
The Legacy of Mesoamerica: History and Culture of Native
American Civilization. Upper Saddle River, N .J.: Prentice Hall.
Carrasco, Davfd. 1982. Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire:
Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Clendinnen, lnga. 1991. Aztecs: An Interpretation . Cambridge :
Cambridge University Press.
Columbus, Christopher. 1492-1504. The Four Voyages of
Christopher Columbus. Edited and translated by J. M. Cohen.
Baltimore: Penguin Books (1969).
Conrad, Geoffrey, and Arthur A. Demarest. 1988. Religion and
Empire: The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansionism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Copernicus, Nicolaus. 1543 . On the Revolutions of the Heavenly
Spheres. Translated by Charles Glenn-Wallace. Great Books of the
Western World, no. 16: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler. Chicago:
Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. (1952).
Cortes, Hernan. 1520's. Hernan Cortes, Letters from Mexico.
Translated by Anthony Pagden. Oxford: Oxford University Press
(1986).
Diamond, Jared. 1999. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of
Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton.
Dfaz del Castillo, Bernal. 1555. The Discovery and Conquest of
Mexico. Translated by A. P. Maudslay. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux (1956).
Dfaz, Gisele and Alan Rodgers. c. 1500. The Codex Borgia: A FullColor Restauration of the Ancient Mexican Manuscript. New York:
Dover Publications (1993).
Florescano, Enrique. 1999. The Myth of Quetzalcoatl. Translated
by Lysa Hochroth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
�134
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Foster, M.B. 1935 and 1936. "Christian Theology and the Science
of Nature." Mind, 44 : 439-66 (part 1) ; 45: 1-27 (part 2).
Fuentes, Carlos. 1998. "The Two Shores." In Clashes of Culture .
Chicago: The Great Books Foundation.
Galeano, Eduardo. 1985. Memory of Fire: 1. Genesis: Part One of
a Trilogy. Translated by Cedric Belfrage. New York: Pantheon
Books.
Gibbon, Edward. 178 8. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
Vol. 1. New York: The Modern Library.
Jennings, Gary. 1980. Aztec. New York: A Tom Doherty Associates
Book (1997) .
Kadir, Djelal. 1992. Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe's
Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Klor de Alva, J. Jorge. 1999. "Religious Rationalization and the
Conversion of the Nahuas: Social Organization and Colonial
Epistemology." In Aztec Ceremonial Landscapes. Edited by Davfd
Carrasco. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado.
Lafaye, Jacques. 1976. Quetzalc6atl and Guadalupe: the Formation
of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531-1813. Translated by
Benjamin Keen. Foreword by Octavia Paz. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press.
Las Casas, Bartolome de. 1542. A Short Account of the Destruction
of the Indies. Translated by Nigel Griffin. London: Penguin Books
(1992).
Lawrence, D. H . 1926. The Plumed Serpent [Quetzalcoatl]. New
York: Vintage Books (1992).
Le Clezio, J. M.G. 1993 . The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted
Thought of Amerindian Civilizations. Translated by Teresa Lavender
Fagan. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Leon-Portilla, Miguel, editor. 1969. The Broken Spears: The Aztec
Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston: Beacon Press.
- - - , editor. 1980. Native Mesoamerican Spirituality: Ancient
Myths, Discourses, Stories, Doctrines, Hymns, Poems from the
�BRANN
135
Aztec, Yucatec, Quiche-Maya and Other Sacred Traditions. Mahwah,
N.J.: Paulist Press.
Llosa, Mario Vargas. 1990. "Questions of Conquest," Harper's
Magazine (December):45-53.
- - - . 1989. The Storyteller. Translated by Helen Lane. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1513. The Prince and The Discourses.
Translated by Luigi Ricci. New York: Modern Library (1950).
"Motolinfa" (Fray Toribio de Benavente). c. 1541. History of the
Indians of New Spain. Translated by Francis Borgia Steck, O.F.M.
Richmond, VA: William Byrd Press (1951).
Naipaul, V. S. 1969. The Loss of ElDorado: A History. New York:
Penguin Books (1981).
Paz, Octavio. 1985. The Labyrinth of Solitude and The Other
Mexico; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude; Mexico and the United
States; The Philanthropic Ogre. Translated by Lysander Kemp, Yara
Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash. New York: Grove Press.
Pearce, Colin D. 1997. "Prescott's Conquests: Anthropophagy,
Auto-da-Fe and Eternal Return." Interpretation, Vol. 24, 3
(Spring):339-361.
Peck, Harry Thurston. 1905. William Hickling Prescott. Port
Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press (1968).
Prescott, William Hickling. 1843, 1847. History of the Conquest of
Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru. New York: The
Modern Library.
---.History of the Conquest of Mexico. Introduction by James
Lockhart. New York: Modern Library (2001).
- - - . 1823-1858. The Literary Memoranda of William Hickling
Prescott, Vols. 1, 2. Edited by C. Harvey Gardiner. Norman: The
University of Oklahoma Press (1961).
Ricard, Robert. 1933. The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay
on the Apostolate and Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant
Orders in New Spain: 1523-1572. Berkeley: University of
California Press (1982).
�136
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Sahagun, Fray Bernadino de. 1547-1579. General History of the
Things of New Spain (Florentine Codex, 12 Books). Translated by
Arthur J. 0. Anderson and Charles Dibble. Published in thirteen
parts: Santa Fe, N.M.: The School of American Research and The
University of Utah (1953-82).
- - -. 1585. Conquest of New Spain: 1585 Revision. Translated
by Howard F. Cline. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press
(1989).
Sejourne, Laurette. 1976. Burning Water: Thought and Religion in
Ancient Mexico. Berkeley: Shambala.
Soustelle, Jacques. 1955. The Daily Life of the Aztecs on the Eve of
the Spanish Conquest. Translated by Patrick O'Brian. Stanford:
Stanford University Press (1970).
Thomas, Hugh. 1993. Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall
of Old Mexico. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. The Conquest of America: The Question of
the Other. Translated by Richard Howard. New York:
HarperPerennial (1992).
Townsend, Richard F., editor. 1992. The Ancient Americas: Art
from Sacred Landscapes. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago.
Von Hagen, Victor W 1957. Realm of the Incas. New York: Mentor
Books.
Walker, Ronald G. 1978. Infernal Paradise: Mexico and the Modern
English Novel. Berkeley: The University of California Press.
Williams, William Carlos. 1925. "The Destruction of Tenochtitlan:
Cortez and Montezuma." In In the American Grain: Essays by
William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions Books (1956).
Wolf, Eric. 1959. Sons of the Shaking Earth. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
�137
1-
Plato's Timaeus and the
Will to Order
Peter Kalkavage
"And whoever thinks another a greater friend
than his own fatherland, I say that man is nowhere."
Sophocles, Antigone 182-3
The Timaeus is the strangest of Plato's dialogues. It is so
strange that one wonders whether anything in it can be taken
seriously. Here conversation and inquiry are suspended, and
in their place Plato gives us long speeches that take the form
of myths. Socrates for the most part is silent. His silence is
like the receptacle we hear about in Timaeus' speech: it
provides the receptive "space" for all the stories and images
to come. We hear about Solon among the Egyptians, the lost
continent of Atlantis, an Athens grown young and heroic, the
musical construction of the soul, and the geometric construction of body. We also hear about ourselves. These are the
most bizarre tales the dialogue has to offer-tall tales about
our souls and bodies, about how we came to have a sphereshaped head, a neck and torso, eyes and ears, liver and spleen,
bone and flesh, an upright posture; about the manifold
diseases that afflict body and soul; about where sex came
from, and how birds evolved from feather-brained
astronomers. With the Timaeus, even more than with other
hat
dialogues, we wonder what in the world Plato is up to. \'(T
is the point of all this cosmomania? And why is Socrates
silent?
The silence of Socrates in the Timaeus signals the absence
and withdrawal of philosophy itself, as Socrates understands
it, from the day's proceedings. In particular, it signals the
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John's College. This lecture was delivered in
Annapolis on March 24, 2000.
�138
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
absence of that erotic stnvmg that draws the philosopher
beyond the passing show of mortal opinion to a godlike
vision of what eternally is. Plato's strange drama draws us
away from this striving. It directs our attention to a form of
thymos or spiritedness that may be called a "will to order."
This will is glorified in the famous likely story of Timaeus.
Craftsmanship, rather than contemplation, is the hero of the
story. Philosophy in a sense makes an appearance ; but it tends
to be understood as the mastery of distinct disciplines, the
systematic presentation of theories, the building of models,
and the solving of problems. It is philosophy made technical
and effective-philosophy (if one may call it that) with all the
divine madness taken out of it. Plato was so thorough a
student of Socrates that he imagined what it would mean to
go beyond Socrates-beyond the knowledge of ignorance,
the claim not to teach, the treatment of virtue as a perpetual
question, and the tension between philosophy and the city. In
the Timaeus, Plato seeks to interest us profoundly in one such
experiment in going beyond Socrates, an experiment in
which the love of wisdom is displaced by the will to order.l
The true center of the Timaeus is not its cosmology but
the desire of Socrates. This is the motive force behind all the
speeches to come. Socrates presents his desire in his longest
and most important speech in the dialogue. Yesterday,
Socrates gratified the desire of Timaeus, Critias,
Hermocrates, and the absent fourth to hear what Socrates
thought about the best political order. He did so, he says,
because he knew he would then be able to make a demand on
them (20B). He knew that those who showed up today would
be compelled by justice to pay him back with a "feast of
speech" -a feast that would depict the just city in the act of ,
waging war. Socrates expresses his desire through a provocative simile. "My affection," he says, "seems to be something
like this: it's as if someone who gazed upon beautiful animals '
somewhere, either produced by the art of painting or truly
living but keeping their peace, were to get a desire to gaze
�KALKAVAGE
139
upon them moving and contending in some struggle that
seemed appropriate to their bodies" (19B-C).
The most striking thing about this desire is its irrationality. Socrates does not say, ''And so, now that we've looked at
the just city at rest, it makes sense to investigate the city in
motion." On the contrary, he portrays himself as a man struck
by a passing fancy. It is no thought, no logic that leads to the
city in motion but a mere feeling or pathos. The irrationality
is heightened by Socrates' reference to chance: he just
happens to feel like this (19B), the way we might just happen
to want to go to the movies. Furthermore, the desire for the
deeds and words of war seems to spring from thymos or
spiritedness, which delights in honor and victory rather than
truth. Socrates depicts himself as desiring, not a philosophic
account, but an encomium or song of praise. What he seems
to want from his hosts is not truth but beautification or
flattery. This fits well with the dominant word of the dialogue,
kosmos, which means not just order but ornament and beautiful display. It also fits with the name Timaeus, which
suggests time, honor. But why would Socrates, who refuses to
put up with the flattery of love in the Symposium, here in the
Timaeus compel his hosts to engage in flattery? And how is
the cosmology of Timaeus related to such a project?
The Timaeus is the story of a descent into Becoming. It
appears to be a sequel to the Republic. In that dialogue,
Socrates and Glaucon bring the discussion to its highest point
when they take up the question of philosophic education. To
reveal the need for such an education, they go down into a
cave. Human nature, we are told, dwells in a cavelike condition of ignorance and deception (7 .514A). The word for
condition in this passage is the same as the one Socrates uses
here in the Timaeus to describe himself-pathos, which also
means feeling or affection, as well as suffering or affliction.
The cave is the place of political orthodoxy or right opinion.
The cave dwellers sit in a sort of prenatal position with their
gaze forced upon the cave wall. They are enthralled-that is,
�140
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
both fascinated and enslaved-by moving two-dimensional
images of three-dimensional artifacts, projected. on the wall
by the enforcers of the city's opinions. These projectionists
are no doubt the poets, whose art of making deceptive imitations of human excellence binds the souls of the cave-citizens
to the city's beliefs and customs. The prenatal position of the
cave people suggests that they are in a kind of womb which
paradoxically refuses to give them birth and bring them to
light, refuses to let them grow into free and upright beings.
To ensure their provincialism, the protective cave-mother
keeps them in the dark and charms them with exciting
political movies that stir the soul to praise and blame. The
potential philosopher seeks freedom from this stultifying,
prenatal condition. He is turned around, converted, from
Becoming to Being and eventually to the study of the Good.
The art of thus turning the soul around, as Socrates describes
it, comes from the power of mathematics.2
Just as the Republic takes us from Becoming "up" to
Being, so the Timaeus brings us back "down"-back to the
cave of body, custom, opinion, and change. The dialogue is a
grand defense or apologia of Becoming in response to
Socrates' indictment of Becoming in the Republic. The will to
plunge from the heights of Being into the depths of Becoming
is intimately connected with the will to order, for the turn
from Being to Becoming is also the turn from theory or
contemplation to practicality and accomplishment. Becoming
engages us as practical, productive beings. As children of
Becoming, we are caught up in the doing and making of
things. We are ambitious, restless beings desirous of both
honor and mastery.
Socrates' hosts, who are praised for their reputation and
accomplishment,3 have an agenda: to make the realm of
doing and making look as good as possible. They will try to
renovate th~ cave of Becoming in order to make it more
receptive to the intentions and designs of enlightened
political craftsmanship. But this political agenda requires a
�KALKAVAGE
141
preliminary step: a divine sanction and a basis in the overall
scheme of things. The will to order cannot accomplish politically what nature will not let it accomplish in the first place.
There must be a predisposition to order. This is where the
cosmological myth of Timaeus comes in. Through the power
of science and fiction combined, Timaeus will make
Becoming stand forth as a kosmos or beautifully ordered
Whole. This Whole is not so much discovered by the
cosmologist as it is made. Mathematics, here, has a role
contrary to the one it had in the Republic. Instead of turning
the soul from her fixation with Becoming to the dialectical
study of Being, mathematics now supplies the beautifying
principles in accordance with which the cave of Becoming
can be transformed into an enlightened home for moral
correctness, political reform, and scientific research. The
adjective kosmios in Greek means decent and well behaved.
This is the quality that Timaeus will try to infuse into the
world of Becoming. He will try to make the wild world of
body and change decent and law-abiding, at least in speech.
The turn from Being to Becoming is, in effect, the undoing of philosophic conversion. This turn is most clearly seen
in the character of Critias, the spokesman in the dialogue for
nomos or convention. At one point he tells Socrates that the
city described on the previous day was in fact a myth, and
that he, Critias, will carry over Socrates' merely theoretical
city into what he calls "the truth" (26C7-D3) . Critias
identifies the truth with Becoming. His extreme vanity
regarding his genealogy and his family connections with the
great Solon confirms this fact. The ancient Athens Solon hears
about from the Egyptian priests is more real than Socrates'
city because it actually existed in a real terrestrial place-so
Critias would have us believe. According to the wisdom of
Egypt, a wisdom Critias clearly admires, what is older is more
real and authoritative than what is younger and more recent.
Old ways are best. The oldest things are the most real and
true, and the oldest priests are the wisest of all. Truth is a
�142
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
long-standing custom or nomos, and knowledge consists in
the oldest hearsay about the oldest things.4
The Timaeus is a time machine. It attempts to unearth
hidden origins by taking us back to those origins in mythic
time. Throughout the dialogue, speech is playfully depicted
as generative or originating and, in that sense, thoroughly
temporal. Solon's story takes us back to a forgotten place at
a forgotten time . What he hears from the Egyptian priest is
about the periodic structure of time itself. Critias, in order to
retrieve this story, goes back to the time when he was very
young. Timaeus, too, stresses the playfully generative power
of speech: he presents the cosmic order, not as it eternally is,
but as it came to be "once upon a time." This temporalization
of logos is yet another way in which the Timaeus takes us
back to temporal beginnings but not "up" to eternal principles. Instead of recollection, as we hear it described in the
Meno, the Timaeus steeps us in the shadow land of memory.
Such is my prelude to the speech of Timaeus. In what follows, we shall explore how this speech embodies the will to
order. What is thinking in the likely story? What does it mean
to be kosmios, cosmic, in one's thinking? What is the
strength, and the weakness, of such thinking? My attempt to
address these questions falls into three parts, which mirror
the tripartite order of Timaeus' speech: The Piety of Physics,
Space Dreams, and The Human Condition.
The Piety of Physics
Timaeus introduces the phrase "likely story" in what Socrates
calls the prelude or preamble to the speech itself (29D).
Socrates reminds Timaeus that he ought to invoke the gods
according to nomos or convention. Timaeus agrees that it
would be sound-minded or moderate to do so, thereby
exhibiting his favorite moral virtue. He adds an invocation
that reflects a curious brand of piety. "We must also invoke to
hemeteron," he says-what comes from, or has to do with,
ourselves, our own resources (27D). This self-invocation
�KALKAVAGE
143
embodies the will to order that animates the upcoming myth.
God, as Timaeus proceeds to say, is a demiurge or craftsman.
But a stronger and more daring claim seems to be at work:
the claim that productive art, demiurgy, in some sense is our
god.
Timaeus begins his prelude by drawing a sharp distinction
between Being and Becoming. The strictness of the distinction makes it extremely difficult to understand how a cosmos,
as the mixture of Being and Becoming, could ever come about
at all. This is typical of Timaeus: he makes hard and fast distinctions and then immediately proceeds to blur them. After
thus distinguishing what always is from what always comes to
be, Timaeus introduces his famous demiurge. This mythical
figure, in whom the will to order is most evident, hovers
between the realms of Being and Becoming. The word
demiourgos means "one who works for the people or demos."
It refers to anyone who crafts anything.s Now we all delight
in a thing well made-a well-made chair, building or piece of
music. We love the way everything fits together beautifully,
and how a thing well made is a thing that lasts. In the likely
story, Timaeus counts on and seeks to gratify this human
delight. He makes the world of nature into a well-made, longlasting artifact.6
The divine craftsman is postulated, willed into being.
There is no proof for his existence. The question for Timaeus
is not whether there really is such a being but what he was
looking at when he made the world: was it a changeable or
an unchangeable model? Timaeus at one point expresses
skepticism regarding our ability to discover the true poet and
father of the world (28C). He makes us suspect that the
demiurge is a practical postulate that fills the void of our
theological ignorance, that he is not the true god, whom we
cannot presume to know, but the god whom decent, intelligent people should believe in if they are to affirm the best of
possible worlds. Later we hear that this divine craftsman is
good and therefore ungrudging (29£) . Unlike the gods of
�144
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Herodotus, the divine craftsman had no envy: he did not
jealously guard his divine prerogative, the flame of artful
intelligence, but wished that all things should possess it to the
extent that their natures allowed.7 Artful intelligence, one
might say, is always in the mode of generosity. It seeks to
bestow itself on the world as a divine gift; it rejoices in seeing
itself multiplied, reflected, and embodied. The cosmos comes
about, not through chance and necessity, nor through the sex
and violence depicted in Hesiod's Theogony, but through the
sober professionalism of techne or art. By presenting god as a
generous craftsman, a divine being who works for the common good, Timaeus saves us from making god in the image
of a tyrant.
For Timaeus, the world of body and change is made in the
likeness of a changeless and purely intelligible archetype or
model. Timaeus expresses his preference for a changeless
model in pious terms: it would be "not right," ou themis, that
is, blasphemous to say otherwise (29A). Herein lies one
reason why the likely story is likely. Likely, eikos, means "has
the character of a likeness." It also means probable, reasonable, and equitable or fair. Speech for Timaeus imitates the
condition of its objects. Accounts of what is abiding and
intelligible, he says, "are themselves abiding and unchanging"
(29B), while accounts of the nonabiding and changing,
accounts of mere likenesses, are afflicted with likelihood. In
an echo of the divided line in the Republic, Timaeus says:
"just as Being is to Becoming, so is truth to trust" (29C).
Likely stories are not put forth for the sake of insight but are
a kind of rhetoric. We must be persuaded by them, trust them,
and put up with their necessary flaws.
The infirmity of speech about divine origins points to a
deeper infirmity-human nature. Timaeus tells Socrates that
he must not wonder if many of the things said about the gods
and the birth of the All are self-contradictory and imprecise
(29C). This is where the phrase "likely story" first appears.
Adopting the formal tone of a man accused, Timaeus says:
�KALKAVAGE
145
"But if we provide likelihoods inferior to none, one should be
well pleased with them, remembering that I who speak as
well as you my judges have a human nature, so that it is fitting
for us to receive the likely story about these things and not to
search further for anything beyond it" (29C-D).9
This sentence about accepting likely stories points to the
connection that physical accounts have, for Timaeus, to both
piety and prudence. Timaeus draws a line beyond which
prudent human beings should not go in speaking of things
divine. But the drawing of this line is not just an admission of
infirmity. Rather, it demarcates the realm within which
human beings precisely because they are aware of their
limitations and all the contingencies of life, are all the more
able to exert their powers of prudent mastery, their will to
order. Timaeus' defense of the inevitable shortcomings of his
speech is a not-so-veiled warning against the immoderateness
and erotic striving of philosophy. The immoderate questioning of everything, if left to itself, would undermine the
controlled play of invention with the unpredictable play of
conversation. In the end, it would prevent human nature
from being as masterful as it could be. Timaeus thus cautions
Socrates against being Socrates, against asking questions and
striving to go beyond the boundaries of plausibly established
grounds. Socrates must be receptive to, and content with, the
likely story about divine origins. If he wants to enjoy his feast,
he must mind his manners and act like a gentleman. He must
control his striving to be divine and remember that as
Timaeus' harshest judge, he too is, after all, only human.
Socrates is more than happy to accept the terms on which
his guest-gift is offered. In the most telling moment of the
dialogue, Socrates calls the likely story, not a logos or mythos,
not an account or a story, but a nomos (29D). Nomos is both
law and song, as well as custom and convention. Timaeus is
our singer and legislator for the day. He will entertain us, but
he will also lay down the law. His logos is a form of music. It
sings of Nature as both a divine Artifact and a divinely estab-
�146
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
lished nomos or Convention. It celebrates the prudent founding of the cosmic regime and invites us to join in by following all the mathematical constructions. Long before Critias
gives man his Athenian citizenship in the dialogue, the physics
of Timaeus will make us dutiful citizens of the world at
large-good cosmopolitans.
The world for Timaeus is both image and god.9 This is his
central teaching. Unlike the images put forth by Socrates, the
cosmic image does not point beyond itself. If it did so, it
would cease to be a god. In the divided line, Socrates revealed
the power of what he calls eikasia, imagination. It was at the
bottom of the line and served as the foundation for the whole
line. This is the power of recognizing images as images,
likenesses as likenesses.lO It is the power by which we are able
to make our ascent up the line. In the upper, intelligible
portion of the line, eikasia is the power by which we move
from hypotheses to non-hypothetical archai or principles.
This power is absent in the Timaeus, where we have plenty of
image making and imitation but no image recognition as
such, at least not the sort of image recognition by which the
soul is enabled to move from images to their intelligible
originals. To be sure, the world of Timaeus is full of images.
But these are all internal to the cosmos, all within the realm
of Becoming. Images here do not transcend themselves, even
though they are crafted in the likeness of intelligible originals.
This seems to be the direct result of the fact that they are
artificial: art, whether human or divine, conceals its foundations in order to build on them. The original points "down"
to the image; but the image does not point back "up" to the
original. Mathematics is no longer the prelude to "the song of
dialectic," as it was in the Republic,11 and the eide seem to be
necessary only in the way that a lifeless blueprint guides and
points ahead to the actual building. Furthermore, when
Timaeus first appeals to the intelligible model, he does so for
the sake of beauty and stability rather than truth (28A-B). The
model is postulated so that the cosmic edifice will be secure
j'
�KALKAVAGE
147
and beautifully built-not so that the human soul, by reflecting on the heavens, might be drawn to the super-heavenly
beings that are beyond all hypothesis.
The construction of the cosmic soul is the most impressive architectural feat of Timaeus' first account of origins. The
soul is made out of music-a scale that stretches four octaves
and a major sixth in Pythagorean tuning. This act of scale
building is the most revealing instance of the will to order and
of what cosmic thinking means for Timaeus. Cosmic thinking
is productive and practical rather than theoretical. It makes
sturdy and beautiful wholes out of beautiful parts by negotiating its way through technical difficulties. Here the divine
craftsman takes the beautiful ratios of the Pythagoreans and
finds a way of fitting them together in a coherent whole. He
then bends his diatonic pattern into circles and makes the
orbits for the Sun, Moon, and planets. These outwardly
appearing circles are then mythically presented as the inward
revolutions of discursive thought, dianoia.
But before he does any of this, the craftsman first makes
a kind of intelligible dough out of the forms of Being, Same,
and Other, and kneads them into "one entire look." He must
use force or violence, since Other is loath to mix with Same
(35A-B). Here we have the most obvious example of the will
to order in the dialogue. Same and Other, as Timaeus understands them, have no natural togetherness. He denies them
the dialectical interweaving and participation in one another's natures that we hear about in the Sophist (253A). Same
and Other are simply separate ingredients, like Being and
Becoming. Force is required to get them to mix. The result is
not an intelligible unity but a highly useful blur. It is as
though Timaeus wanted to convince us of the impossibility of
ever understanding the world dialectically so that he could
get on with the more productive task of flattering the world
with mathematical constructs. He raises a dialectical problem
only to bury it with art.
�148
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
At several pivotal moments in his speech, Timaeus
reminds us that the cosmos is a god. The god who made the
world, in other words, bestows his divinity on the world.
Physical science, especially astronomy, thus becomes the '
truest form of piety. Strictly speaking, astronomy, like scale
building, is not theoretical for Timaeus but is a form of
praxis. This praxis supplies medicine and therapy for the
human soul. In our heads are housed the divine circuits of
Same and Other (44D). These are the circuits of sound judgement or phronesis, the circuits that govern a morally healthy
life. But once they are immersed in the sea of Becoming and
given mortal birth, they become deformed and we grow
abysmally ignorant and disordered. (Witness the behavior of
babies.) Before our birth as mortal beings, we dwelled with
the gods, whose happy life consisted in regularity, symmetry,
and perpetual health. This divinely healthy life Timaeus calls
the form, eidos, of our "first and best condition" (42D).
Astronomy is thus the great human homecoming, the happy
return to our heavenly origins. It is also the medicine by
which we correct and stabilize what Timaeus calls "the
wander-stricken circuits in ourselves" (47C).12
The piety, moderation, and lawfulness of Timaeus set him
at odds with eros and its notorious destabilizing influence
over human life. His war on eros is evident throughout the
dialogue. Eros, as it is described in the Symposium, is a yearning for that which one lacks, and Timaeus cannot abide lack.
He is driven to structural perfection, completeness, and
mastery. Timaeus is always filling things up. We see him filling
up the part of a missing fourth at the very beginning (17A-B),
filling up the musical intervals of octave and perfect fourth
(35C ££.),rejecting the existence of a void (SOC), and filling
our ignorant souls with scientific explanations designed to
dispel our wonder and cure our perplexity (SOB-C). He is
careful to make the cosmos into a nonerotic animal, an ,
animal that feels no lack. If the cosmos is to be a "happy
god," as he calls it (34B), then it must be complete and
�KALKAVAGE
149
autonomous or self-related. Timaeus bestows on it the shape
of a sphere to ensure this result (33A ff.). As a sphere, the god
Cosmos neither needs nor fears anything whatsoever outside
itself. It has no arms, no legs, no sense organs, none of the
things we humans have that remind us of our condition of
dependence and vulnerability.13
This happy lack in the cosmic body is mirrored in what is
said about the cosmic soul-the best of all begotten things
(3 7A). The life of this soul consists in thinking. This is not
philosophic contemplation but the condition of unending,
unerring sensibleness or right judgement. This judgement is
mythically depicted as the inward circling of thought.
Happiness, for Timaeus, is really healthiness, and the healthy
process and condition of thinking are, in the end, more
important than what thinking is ultimately about. If there is
any pleasure in the soul's life of perpetual sensibleness, it
must be the pleasure of being constantly busy gathering information. She has no leisure. Soul is the thought-energy of the
world-always knowing what is going on everywhere and
always reporting to herself what she finds. She is like the
Egyptian priests described in Solon's account, and her truth,
like theirs, is really factual correctness. In the complex
description that Timaeus gives of the soul's intellectual
activity, he avoids the metaphor of seeing. Seeing suggests the
possibility of arousal and the pleasure we take in simply
beholding the objects of desire. The dominant metaphor
instead is that of touch, which is more amenable to a mechanical and physiological view of thinking. This absence of
seeing in the cosmic soul stands in marked contrast with what
we hear in the myths of the Phaedo and Phaedrus, where the
soul's ultimate joy consists in the leisured and ecstatic vision
of eternal truth.
Seeing is honored in the likely story. Without our vision
of the starry motions, we would never have discovered the
arts of arithmetic and astronomy (47A-B). But this seeing
inspires thoughts of duty rather than of love. Indeed, the stars
�150
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
themselves move in circles for Tirnaeus not, as Aristotle suggests in the Metaphysics, because they are in love with the
divine intellect,14 but because it is their assigned duty to do
so. Their prompting comes from piety toward a father rather
than desire for a beloved. In beholding the starry motions, we
indeed behold beauty. The function of this beauty, however,
is not to entice or arouse but to rectify. The glory of seeing,
for Tirnaeus, is that it leads, ultimately, to the highest form of
touch: the being in touch with our better, starry selves. To
think cosmically is to align our souls with the authority and
will of the heavens, especially with the all-mastering circle of
the Same (36C-D). In such a world as this, to think is not to
see but to obey-to obey, that is, the masterful motions of our
own souls projected onto the starry sky.
Space Dreams
The Timaeus is not just about order; it is also about disorder.
Plato makes disorder a rich and interesting topic. It even
acquires a certain dignity in the likely story. Disorder comes
from chance or what Tirnaeus also calls "necessity" (47E) and
"the wandering cause" (48A). This cause is present from the
very beginning of the dialogue when a fourth failed to show
up according to plan. Tirnaeus, in his very first likely story of
the dialogue, asks Socrates to believe that the mysterious
fourth was absent because he carne down with something,
that his absence was the work of chance and necessity rather
than choice. Chance and necessity are also present in the best
city that Socrates summarizes. Try as the city may to vanquish
disorder and keep people in their proper classes, the unpredictable sway of eros and sexual generation messes things up
(19A).15 The city can maintain its good order only by a constant and hard to imagine redistribution of human types.l6
But necessity is not just the spoiler of the best-laid plans.
It is also the other great cause, without which the cosmos ,
could never have been made. This is its dignity. Just as artful
intelligence is the cause of the good and the beautiful, so
�KALKAVAGE
151
necessity is the cause of power and effectiveness. At a pivotal
moment in the likely story, Timaeus says: "For mixed indeed
was the birth of this cosmos here, and begotten from a standing-together of necessity and intellect" (47E-48A). He goes
on to tell us that the world came about through the persuasion of necessity by intellect. The world, in short, originated
in a grand piece of rhetoric. Presumably, this rhetoric goes on
continually, as the realm of efficient causes constantly cooperates, for the most part, with that of final causes. It is hard
to see what Timaeus means by "persuasion" here.
Nevertheless, a direct consequence of the image is that it
reminds us that intellect and necessity are two fundamentally
different and opposed orders of causality. Even as it yields to
thoughtful persuasion, necessity retains its right to do as it
pleases. Timaeus thus saves the phenomenon of unpredictability.
In this second founding of the cosmos, Timaeus is at pains
to make Becoming sound as perplexing as possible. Becoming
is the realm of unstable and illusory appearance.17 Earth, air,
fire, and water all appear to be constantly changing into each
other. They cannot be called elements at all, since they lack
integrity and steadfastness. To use Timaeus' language here,
you can never accuse fire of being a "this," since, no sooner
do you call it "this," fire, than it changes into "that," air. It is
always escaping the indictment of stability (49E). The legitimate name for any of the elements is therefore not "this" but
"suchlike" or "of this sort" (49B-50A).18 The assumption of
radical flux leads Timaeus to postulate the existence of a
mysterious "in which" that is prior to body and is the abiding
and underlying substrate of change. In the language of
Spinoza, this "in which" is the enduring substance of which
earth, air, fire and water (not to mention their composites)
are but passing modes. It is not really a thing at all but a force
field, the medium not of determinate things but of tensions
and resolutions-the field of things happening. Just as the
soul seems to be the world's thought-energy, the receptacle
�--------------------------------------
152
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
seems to be its body-energy, energy that somehow remains
self-same and "conserved" even as it assumes a variety of
forms.
Timaeus has many names for this field of dynamic qualities that underlies and causes change. He calls it a receptacle
and wet nurse (49A, 52D), a mold (SOC), and a mother of
Becoming (52D). It is simultaneously the unpredictable cause
of motion and the indeterminate ground of imaging. Art and
nature are continually blended in the likely story. Here this
uneasy blend-one of Timaeus' many blurrings-is especially
prominent. On the one hand, Timaeus likens the receptacle to
gold, which is constantly being worked into different
geometric shapes by a tireless goldsmith (50A-B). The curious
image reminds us of Timaeus' fascination with ornament:
even the matter out of which a cosmos is made must be
thought of as artistic and golden-a beautiful medium just
begging for a craftsman. On the other hand, the receptacle is
clearly biological or natural-not an artificial "it" but a living
"she," the cosmic womb and mother who gives birth to the
four kinds and keeps them in motion. The elusive receptacle
is not a merely passive substrate for form but a never-failing
process that somehow differentiates itself spontaneously or
from within, like the morphogenesis we witness in living
things. If the receptacle is body-energy, it also seems to be
life-energy. That is, the receptacle seems to correspond to a
certain primordial understanding of soul.
In spite of Timaeus' attempt to bring space down to earth
through humble similes like winnowing baskets (52E) and the
manufacture of perfumes (50E), the parts of his account are
obscure at best and don't seem to fit together. The incoherence seems to reflect the elusive character of space itself. For
example, space, chora, not only gives all things place; it also
dislodges them from their place (52E-53A). Space, we are
told, is like an instrument that causes shaking (53A). It is the
underlying cause of all the circulation and turbulence in the
mortal realm. It governs everything from vibrating strings to
�KALKAVAGE
153
the circulation of the blood to earthquakes. We experience
this turbulence in the constant flow of our bodies and in the
passion of our souls. We also witness it, or rather hear about
it, in the rise and fall, the flowering and ruin, of cities and
even whole civilizations. The cycles of birth and death
recorded by the Egyptians are all due to the sway of space,
and so are the fates of legendary Atlantis and Plato's contemporary Athens.
But the most interesting thing Timaeus says about space
has to do with dreams. Space is neither purely intelligible nor
purely sensible. It is "graspable by some bastard reasoning
with the aid of insensibility, hardly to be trusted, the very
thing we look to when we dream and affirm that it's somehow necessary for everything that is to be in some region and
occupy some space, and that what is neither on earth nor
somewhere in heaven, is nothing" (52A-B). This amazing
description of space reminds us of Critias, who claimed to
make Socrates' city real by giving it place-Athenian place. If
the chora is, as Timaeus' description seems to indicate, a
seductive Siren who bewitches us into thinking that to be is
to be spatial, then Critias appears to be her adoring slave and
victim, her "space man." The dream-inducing power of space
reminds us of the cave-mother of the Republic. Space is the
cosmic counterpart and ground of our cave-condition. It is
the prepolitical, natural ground of our susceptibility to political indoctrination and of our unreflective rootedness in a
political place.
Critias first heard the story about Athens and Atlantis
during the festival of Apaturia (21A-B). On this day, Athenian
boys were initiated into their tribe as a preparation for fullfledged citizenship.19 The ceremony involved the singing of
songs. Critias remembers singing the songs of Solon, which
were new at the time. Through the festival that Critias nostalgically recalls, Plato draws our attention to the very
moment in time when, through songs that are also laws,
young prepolitical souls are planted in the soil and chOra of
�154
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the motherland. The word Apaturia derives from the word
pater, father. But it also suggests the word apate, deception,
thus suggesting a dark side to this heart-warming event. In
being welcomed into the fold of tribe and city, the nascent
citizens are nourished on the nomoi. These laws and customs
are made sweet through song and are thus magically transformed into sentiments. The laws and customs will, from this
moment on, give the children eyes to see with and ears to
hear with. As dyed-in-the-wool citizens, they will be incapable of seeing and hearing anything else, anything outside
the boundaries of their protective "space." Convention will
be their wisdom.
Earlier, I suggested that eikasia, image recognition, is not
present in the Timaeus. Here in the receptacle we have the
sort of imagination that is present. The cosmic space that is
the ground of body seems, at another level, to be the inner
"space" of imagining-the phantasia of our souls. This is the
faculty that does not recognize images as images but rather
makes images and welcomes them unquestioningly.
According to this inner sense, the receptacle is our phantasia
writ large and made into a cosmic cause. When Socrates
expressed his desire for animals in motion, he seemed to
speak from within this very faculty. His irrational receptivity
to the speeches of his hosts, the pathos that he seems to have
contracted, is a playful imitation of our all-too-human
susceptibility to exciting images. It is the susceptibility that
allows us to be entertained and kept in the cave.
Timaeus calls attention to the fact that space is like a
dream-inducing drug. He also makes it clear that he posits the
existence of what he calls "the unsleeping and truly subsisting
nature" (52B). Presumably this refers to Being and the realm
of the eide of the four elements. Timaeus at one point "casts
his vote" for such beings (51D). But as we saw earlier, it is not
Timaeus' intention to use cosmic images to wake us up from
our space dreams so that we might transcend the cosmos
through dialectic. Likely stories employ the hypothesis of the
�KALKAVAGE
155
forms in order to involve us, safely and entertainingly, in the
dangerous realm of body and Becoming. They are the dreams
of a sly and healthy soul. Having alerted us to the fact of
deception, to the poetic sophistry of space, Timaeus proceeds
to manufacture deceptive dreams of his own. These are the
beautiful mathematical dreams that invite us to imagine the
four elements of body, four beautiful animals in motion, as
though they were four regular geometric solids.
Along with the construction of soul out of musical ratios,
the construction of body out of geometrical figures is a paradigm of what cosmic thinking means for Timaeus. The demiurge is virtually absent here, and so the ingenious model
building arises completely from what has to do with us and
our will to order. The whole account is playfully deceptivea grand piece of poetic sophistry, in which image-making is
promiscuously fused with argument, mythos with logos. The
sophistry of geometrical physics reminds us of what Timaeus
had earlier called bastard or illegitimate reasoning. And the
poetry or phantasia that plays the guardian to this reasoning
reminds us of what he had called insensibility. Timaeus would
have us believe that geometric solidity or three-dimensionality can explain the properties of physically solid bodies. Like
Descartes, he attempts to explain body in terms of extension.
The questionable nature of this project is underscored by
Timaeus himself, who calls on "god the savior to grant us safe
passage out of a strange and unusual narration to the decree
based on likelihoods" (48D).
Like his mythic goldsmith, Timaeus schematizes space
with geometrical shapes. First, he selects the regular solids as
archetypes for the four elements of body. He does so on the
grounds that they are "the most beautiful bodies" (53D).
Truth seems not to be at issue, unless "is true" means nothing
more than "beautifully fits the appearances." Next, he fits
together or "harmonizes" the geometric solids by constructing their faces and assembling them through a kind of
cut-and-paste method. The construction here is very childlike
�156
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and unsophisticated. Finally, he assigns each solid to the elemental body or kind that seems to be most like it: the cube to
earth, the pyramid to fire, the octahedron to air, and the
icosahedron to water. This account of body renovates and
beautifies our imagination of change. Change, the drunken
spree of appearance, is now the elegant rearrangement of
structural parts. Dionysus, it seems, has been persuaded to
accept the sober gifts of Apollo. As for the dodecahedron, the
god, we are told, used it to make panels for decorating the
sky with animals, presumably the animal figures of the zodiac and the various constellations (55C). The apparently
off-hand explanation actually reveals the point of all that has
gone before: the regular solids are a kind of jewelry that
beautifies and flatters the world. The mathematization of
body and change makes nature more presentable and more
pleasantly thinkable for decent-minded human beings. In his
Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl refers to what he calls
the "garb of ideas," with which modern mathematical physics
dresses up nature, covers its naked truth, with the formal
attire of constructs and symbols.20 Timaeus is doing consciously and deliberately what Husserl says the modern physicist does for the most part unconsciously. He is covering up
nature with a gorgeous dress of ratios and geometric figures.
Through Timaeus' playful, ceremonial act of dressing up
the world, Plato entertains us with a new kind of physicsa mythematical physics. The properties and behavior of fire,
for example, are now traced to geometric causes. Why is fire
hot? Why does it burn? Why, because it is a pyramid, and
pyramids have sharp angles and keenly cutting sides (5 6E57A). Why is earth resistant to change and motion? Why,
because it is a cube, and the isosceles triangles out of which a
cube's square faces are composed are not capable of being
redistributed to form the equilateral triangular faces of the
other solids. Furthermore, a triangular base makes an object
easy to tip, and a square base makes it harder to budge. Cause
here is completely analogical. To explain body, for Timaeus,
�KALKAVAGE
157
is to build geometric models for body that function as beguiling analogies. Perhaps it is more correct to call them
metaphors, since the noble sophistry at work here consists in
identifying physical body with its geometric analogue, that is,
in blurring the distinction between the model and that of
which it is the model. This is what Critias says he will do with
Socrates' theoretical city: He will establish a beguiling correspondence and harmony between that city and ancient
Athens (26C-D)-a correspondence that will be so exact that
one would swear that the two cities were one and the same.
Socrates' desire was, at bottom, to be entertained by deceptive, life-like images that blur the distinction between the real
and the fabricated: the animals in motion he wanted to see
and hear about could be either "truly living" or "produced by
the art of painting." Timaeus and Critias enact a will to order
that provides Socrates with just such entertainment.
Like astronomy, physics for Timaeus has a practical function. Becoming is not just something we contemplate and
want to get to the bottom of. It is also our life-sustaining
world, the cosmic source of our coming to be and passing
away. We are the children of Becoming and must speak
appropriately about our cosmic mother. In speaking rightly of
the cosmos in general, Timaeus attempts to give physical
science a moral defense and reason for being. In fact, his
physics seems to be a direct response to Socrates' youthful
disenchantment with physics in the Phaedo. Timaeus does
what Anaxagoras had failed to do-present the phenomena
of change in terms of a best of possible worlds. He
re-enchants the world with intelligence, moral purpose, and a
kind of piety. Mathematical physics, quite apart from whether
or not it reveals nature itself as mathematical, acquires its
truest vocation in making us dutiful sons of the cosmic order.
In addition, it soothes our serious and turbulent lives with a
decorous distraction and provides what Timaeus calls "a
pleasure not to be repented of" (59C-D).
�158
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The likely story teaches us how to sing noble songs of
change. These songs aim at "saving the appearances." But
they offer a form of consolation. They save us from despair
over our world and help us to cope with, and even to enjoy,
the otherwise meaningless spectacle of instability, violence,
decay, and death. Indeed, according to the official report of
the likely story, death from old age is geometric in nature and
is therefore a pleasure to contemplate: it consists in the
collapse of the perpendicular or root that keeps our inner
triangles erect. These triangles give way at last after fighting
numerous battles with the alien triangles that would invade
and destroy us (81D). Structure is power, and Becoming is a
war of structures, all battling constantly to preserve the
identity of their constitutions or regimes. All mortal things
eventually lose in this war-they die. But at least likely stories
furnish us human beings with intellectual armor so that we
may fight in the noblest and most intelligent way. Armed with
what Timaeus calls "the power of likely accounts" (48D), we
take on all comers who would disparage our cosmic place and
sing a song of despair. As we go off to do battle with
unhealthy opinions about the world, we remember the songs
of our cosmic Apaturia.
The Human Condition
Timaeus' role in the dialogue is assigned to him by Critias. "It
seemed good to us," he says, "that Timaeus here-since he's
the most astronomical of us and the one who's most made it
his business to know about the nature of the All-should
speak first, beginning from the birth of the cosmos and ending in the nature of mankind" (27A). Man, prepolitical man,
is the goal of the likely story. Timaeus achieves this goal in
some of the weirdest, and funniest, moments in all the
dialogues.
What is human nature for Timaeus, and why were we
born in the first place? Let us take the latter question first.
Man comes about because the cosmos must be complete. If
�KALKAVAGE
159
the world is to be perfectly filled, it must contain all the animal kinds represented in the eternal archetype that Timaeus
calls "the intelligible animal" (39E). The various animals
derive from the mystic number Four, which is alluded to in
the dialogue's opening. The four animate kinds correspond to
the four elements of body (39E ff.). The star gods are mostly
made of fire. Then come animals that crawl on the earth, fly
through the air and swim in the water. Man is not one of
these four kinds. He is rather the generator of the mortal
kinds, the means by which the lower kinds come to be. In his
head, man lives the life of the gods, the life of circularity and
prudence. But in his torso he contains all the lower animal
possibilities-the thymos and rage of a lion, and the
epithymia or desire of all mortal animals. In the very shape of
his body, man thus unites the two cooperating causes of
cosmic order. He is the unity-in-opposition of the good and
the necessary.
The original humans were in some sense male, although
strictly speaking they lacked sexuality. When these "first
men" yield to emotionality and vice, when they abuse their
divine heritage, they are reborn, first as women, and then as
the various subhuman animals they imitated in life (42C-D).
The likely story, having begun with the stars, ends with
shellfish. These animals devolve from humans who were "the
most mindless and ignorant men of all" and whom the gods
deemed no longer worthy of "pure breathing" (92B). The
cosmos is thus completed by what Timaeus calls dike or just
retribution (92C). And yet blame and punishment seem to
have nothing to do with it at all. Vice and ignorance are
necessary if the world is to have its full complement of animals. In spite of the fact that they are said to be "punished"
by cosmic justice, vice and ignorance are nevertheless useful,
indeed necessary, to the cosmic purpose. Man completes the
world through his fall from divinity into the various animal
forms. Timaeus is so complete in his will to order that he puts
even moral evil and ignorance to an artistic use, thereby
�160
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
completing his justification of god's ways to man. Evil, in a
sense, becomes both ornament and demiurge. It is like the
dissonance for which a piece of polyphony is all the sweeter.
Such is man's cosmic function: he perfects and beautifies
the world with his evil. But what is man's nature? Here I
return to the word pathos, which occurs frequently in the dialogue. The recurrence of this word and its cognates signals
the extent to which necessity rules the dialogue and its
conception of a world. The human condition is a continual
state of affection and affliction, a continual suffering or
"being done to." Man suffers his birth and all his mortal
baggage. His pathemata or passions are also sufferings, as
Timaeus poetically reveals when he catalogues our "affections
terrible and necessary." He cites "pleasure, evil's greatest
lure," "pains, deserters of goods," "anger, difficult to
appease," "hope, easy to seduce," all mixed together with
Timaeus' archenemy, "all-venturing eros" (69C-D). Since he
suffers desire, man must have arms, legs, and a digestive
system. He must also have a respiratory system and a circulatory system. A reproductive system is grafted onto him only
later, after he has suffered his first fall. Timaeus gives a long
account of breathing. Breathing is completely mechanical in
nature and requires no action of the soul. It is a pathos
(79A)-not something we do but something we suffer. The
surprisingly long discussion of disease highlights the fact that
life is suffering. It is the correlate to Timaeus' glorification of
health. Ignorance, too, is a disease-the greatest of all
diseases (8 8B)-and education is therefore our greatest
medicine and therapy. In Timaeus' case, we would have to
say, ''A cosmologist looks at the world as a doctor looks at a
patient."
Just as Timaeus reveals the nature of the cosmos in the act
of showing the cosmos being made, so too man's nature is
revealed through the artful making of man. The likely story
puts us at the scene of our own birth-or rather, manufacture. The gods put us together piece by piece, like benevolent
�KALKAVAGE
161
Dr. Frankensteins. Since there is no intelligible model for
man, they must make us up as they go along. The work is
neither easy nor desirable. In fact, the gods make us only
because they were told to do so by their father (41C-D). The
making of man, as Timaeus explicitly describes it, is a pious
desecration (69D). In obedience to their father and his will to
order, the gods must take the good and beautiful principle of
intelligence, the principle he most embodies, and defile it
with mortal madness and complexity. Their work consists in
the delicate and dangerous art of compromise. They must
make us capable of unintelligent organic life while at the
same time making us as good and intelligent as possible. The
art of compromise is most evident when they invent our hair.
Hair is a compromise between an unshielded head, which
would make us very intelligent but short-lived, and a head
protected by lots of flesh, which would make us long-lived
but "dense" (75E-76D).
The gods are provident for Timaeus. They make our parts
always with an eye to the various falls we are destined to
experience. They are always saving us from ourselves. They
make flesh as a protective padding (74B) . They make our
neck to keep our intelligent heads both separate from and
attached to the lower regions of our being (69D-E). They
make our intestines to fend off the constant gluttony that
would prevent us from engaging in philosophic research
(73A). And they make our liver smooth and shiny so that the
intellect can use it as a reflecting medium to frighten and pacify the desirous part of the soul with appropriate moving
images, thus bringing about a condition of law and order
(71A-D). The point of all this outrageous wit seems to be that
there is moral meaning and purpose to how we are built and
who we are. Through all his physiological jokes, Timaeus
causes our inward nature to appear right at the "surface" of
our bodies. We are what we look like, and our being is
revealed not through a dialectical inquiry into our nature but
�162
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
through the scientific examination of our prudently designed
structures and motions.
Throughout the likely story, Timaeus gives mathematics a
moral employment. In his account of man, he mathematicizes
morality itself. At one point, we are told, "all the good is
beautiful, and the beautiful is not disproportionate" (87C).
Virtue and happiness are a matter of establishing the right
ratios and proportions in things. Timaeus does not seem to
think that virtue is something we don't know, something
about which human beings most need to ask: what is it?
Moral education is like medicine and gymnastics. It is simply
a matter of paying attention to the manifest ratios that regulate life and seeing to it that the proper ratios and regimen are
established (87C-E). Thinkers should make sure they get
some physical exercise, and athletes should make sure they
study music and the liberal arts (88B-C). A sound mind in a
sound body. Like the cosmos, we must be well rounded. The
human good is uncomplicated. It is, like the art of medicine,
simply the conscientious application of sensible theory to life.
It is the will to order.
As we have seen, Timaeus is driven to filling things up and
making them complete. But in at least one respect his cosmos
is not complete. It does not contain the philosopher as dialectician. In the opinion of the likely story, Socrates, the erotic
troublemaker, must be banished from the cosmos. There is no
worldly place, no chora, for him. One who questions the
nomos and the dreams that attach us to place must be left
atopos-that is, both placeless and strange.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
So why is this dialogue taking place? Why has Socrates
allowed himself to sit passively by while his hosts entertain
him with the flattery of Becoming? It seems that the hesychia
of Socrates, his silence and his peace, is really a form of
passive aggression. Socrates has set up his ambitious hosts for
a Sicilian expedition in speech-an ambitious project that
�KALKAVAGE
163
ends in ruin. He probably knows, in general, what to expect,
as he cunningly draws them out by imitating the cave-desire
for moving images-a desire that is theirs rather than his. But,
being an avid connoisseur as well as judge of human souls,
Socrates also wants to see exactly how they will reveal themselves, and how far they will go, in the act of trying to defend
Becoming and surpass the city in speech.
In the Timaeus, Socrates has shown up to guard the city
in speech from ever coming into being in space and time. He
does so to reaffirm what he said about the best city in the
Republic, that it is not a blueprint for political actualization
but "a model ... for the man who wants to see and found a
city within himself."2l Under a deceptive flag of truce and
welcoming receptivity, he draws out his hosts as though onto
a field of battle. Their effort is sure to entertain Socrates and
perhaps even to instruct him. But I suspect he is still more
entertained, and gratified, by their ultimate failure. This
failure is represented by Critias. In the dialogue that bears his
name, Critias never gets to the war-story he promised
Socrates. Plato cuts him off in mid-sentence, just as he is
about to give the speech of Zeus that will bring divine
retribution upon the Atlantians. The promised flattery of
Athens is consigned to oblivion, like Atlantis itself. It is as
though Critias, who had boasted so mightily of his powers of
memory (26B-C),22 simply and utterly forgot. Through his
failure to recover the speech in praise of Athens' heroism,
Plato playfully mimics something deadly serious-the folly of
forcing a city back, in deed and not merely in speech, to a
purported first and best condition. In his speech to Solon, the
old Egyptian priest referred to the myth about Phaethon, son
of Helios. Phaethon tried to drive his father's car, the sunchariot, in order to prove that he too was a god. The result
was destruction for him and near destruction for the whole
earth (22C). The Egyptian priest tells Solon that the truth of
this myth has to do with a periodically recurring alignment of
the planets. The priest's piety for scientific explanation blinds
�164
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
him to the political significance of Phaethon. The insolence of
Phaethon is the potential insolence of would-be reformersreformers like the famous Critias, who tried to force a democratic Athens into an oligarchic mold. The will to order,
when infected by the love of honor and the lust for power,
easily degenerates into the will to tyranny.
Plato, more than any other philosopher, is constantly
reminding us of the dangers of being human as well as the
dangers of philosophy. Danger and safety, perhaps the most
central terms of the Platonic dramas, become central because
of Plato's care for what we do and what we suffer. Through
the drama of the Timaeus-Critias, Plato continues his care for
the human condition. In the likely story of Timaeus, he
concocts a bizarre yet healthy-minded dream about a world
set straight by the will to order, a dream in which the world
is saved from disorder and despair. In the vanity and ambition
of Critias, he points to the diseases this will itself can
contract. Shakespeare's Ulysses supplies the most fitting last
word on the strength and the weakness of the will to order:
"0, when degree is shaked,/ Which is the ladder of all high
designs,/ The enterprise is sick. "23
Notes
1 Other experiments in going beyond Socrates include the Eleatic
stranger from the Sophist and Statesman, and the Athenian stranger
from the Laws.
2 For the "art of conversion or turning around," see Republic 7.
518D ff. The mathematical arts that pave the way for dialectic are,
in order of appearance, arithmetic, plane geometry, solid geometry,
astronomy and harmonics. The conversionary art must "draw the
soul from Becoming to Being" (7. 521D) .
The praise of Timaeus is breathtaking (20A) . He is rich, powerful,
honored, and he comes from an aristocratic family. The city from
which he hails is Locri, which Socrates calls "a city with the best
laws in Italy." Furthermore, he has "reached the very peak of all
philosophy."
3
�KALKAVAGE
165
Solon heard the story about ancient Athens in the district of Sais
(21E). The word for district here is nomos. (Nomos comes from the
verb nemein, which means to apportion or distribute, and districts
are areas of distributed land.) Plato thus combines in one word the
deep connection between attachment to custom and attachment to
place.
4
The demiourgoi or craftsmen are central to Socrates' critique of
imitation in Republic 10. After postulating three kinds of couchesthe one produced by carpentry, the one produced by the art of
painting, and the one that is in nature-Socrates playfully suggests
that perhaps the couch that is in nature was also produced by some
kind of craftsman, not a demiourgos but a phytourgos or "natureworker" (597B-D). Socrates refers to a "craftsman of heaven" at 7.
530A.
5
6 Sometimes Timaeus makes the cosmos sound as though it were
eternal. But there are also indications that, while it is very long-lasting, it is nevertheless mortal. This fits with what Socrates announces
in the Republic: "for everything that has come into being there is
decay" (8. 546A). For example, time is said to come into being
along with the heavens "in order that, having been begotten together, they might also be dissolved together-should some dissolution
of them ever arise" (38B). And when the god makes the cosmic
body, he saves it from old age and disease but falls short of making
it deathless (33A ff.).
7 The ongoing presence of god's generous artistry in the world is
signaled by the fact that things other than the divine craftsman are
called demiurges in the speech, and that the verb demiourgein, to
craft, sometimes occurs as a synonym for "causes" or "brings
about." Earth, for example, is called "the guardian and craftsman of
Night and Day" (40C); fire is at one point the craftsman of nonuniformity in air (59A); and again, the color red is "crafted by the
cutting and staining action of fire upon moisture" (80E).
8 Timaeus' use of eti, still or more, seems to echo Socrates' use of
this little word at the end of his political summary. He asked
Timaeus whether he was "still yearning for something more in what
was said" (19A). Socrates seems to be tempting Timaeus to go
beyond the boundaries of his political mentality, beyond the will to
order. Timaeus has no yearning to do so. He says, "Not at all."
�166
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Timaeus calls the cosmos "the god who was one day to be" (34AB) and a "happy god" (34B). See also 55D, where Timaeus says that
the cosmos is "by nature one god." In the dialogue's closing
sentence, the cosmos is a "sensed god" (92C).
9
10 Republic 6. 509C ff. For the definitive account of eikasia in the
Republic, see Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno, Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1965, pp. 112-125.
11 Book 7. 532A. Socrates' language here is very close to the way in
which he describes the likely story. He speaks of the "song itself that
dialectic performs," autos ... ho nomos han to dialegesthai perainei.
12 At the beginning of the Critias, Timaeus prays to "the god who
has just now been born through speeches" (1 06A). He identifies the
just retribution of this god (dike) with medicine (pharmakon) and
this medicine with knowledge (episteme).
Timaeus derives his catalogue of happy privations from two fragments by Empedocles (29 and 134). He discretely suppresses what
Empedocles in both fragments makes explicit-that the cosmic god
lacks organs of reproduction.
13
14 The final cause of motion moves things, says Aristotle, has eramenan, "as the object of erotic love" (Metaphysics 12. 7. 1072B).
15 Sexual generation is the cause of the decay of the best city in the
Republic. The rulers will fail to perceive and calculate the marriage
number, "and they will at some time beget children when they
should not" (8. 546B).
16 This political redistribution of types foreshadows the cosmic
reshuffling of the four kinds by what Timaeus later calls the ch6ra
or space. Socrates even uses the word chara in this part of his summary. This is its first appearance in the dialogue.
17 Necessity, in the form of what Timaeus calls "assistant causes,"
first began to assert itself in the likely story just as Timaeus is giving
a mechanical account of the reflective, and deceptive, power of
mirrors (46C-D).
18 In the simile of the goldsmith, Timaeus has a hypothetical someone ask the question "Whatever is it?" in response to the constant
"morphing" of the receptacle. The safest answer, says Timaeus, is
�KALKAVAGE
167
that it's gold (SOB). This is the closest Timaeus ever gets to Socrates'
What is it? question. It is very interesting that his concern for
safety (which reminds us of Socrates' similar concern in the Phaedo
when he recounts his "second sailing" in search of cause) and the
What is it? question lead Timaeus, not to the determinate form
whose likeness fleetingly appears in the midst of change, but to that
which is itself undergoing change. His answer, in other words,
already points "forward" to geometric schematization rather than
"backward" and "up" to the eidetic "father" of the spatiotemporal
"offspring" (SOC-D).
19 For more on the Apaturia, see H. W Parke, Festivals of the
Athenians, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 88-92.
20 "In geometrical and natural-scientific mathematization, in the
open infinity of possible experiences, we measure the life-worldthe world constantly given to us as actual in our concrete worldlife-for a well-fitting garb of ideas, that of the so-called objectively
scientific truths" (Ibid., p . 51). The drama of the Timaeus takes
place during the Greater Panathenaea, the festival in honor of
Athena. The central event of this festival was the procession in
which an elaborately embroidered peplos or robe depicting the
Battle of Gods and Giants was carried to the Acropolis and draped
over the statue of the goddess. In his likely story, Timaeus participates in, and corrects, the Greater Panathenaea. His ceremonial
"garb of ideas," paraded before the silent Socrates, replaces the
Battle of Gods and Giants with decent gods and the beautiful war
of mathematical objects in motion.
Republic 9. 592B. The centrality of place in the Timaeus and the
man who was gazing upon beautiful animals "somewhere," pou,
contrast sharply with what Socrates says about the best city in this
passage: "It doesn't make any difference whether it is or will be
somewhere (pou)."
21
In the Critias, Critias invokes Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, as the divinity on whom the whole project of gratifying
Socrates depends (108D).
22
23
Troilus and Cressida I. 3. 101-103 .
��
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 St. John's Review</em>
Description
An account of the resource
<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
thestjohnsreview
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
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.
167 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
The St. John's Review, 2003/1
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2003
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Carey, James
Ruhm von Oppen, Beate
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Castle, Justin
Sachs, Joe
Cornell, John F.
Maschler, Chaninah
Kalkavage, Peter
Description
An account of the resource
Volume XLVII, number one of The St. John's Review. Published in 2003.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_47_No_1_2003
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
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
St. John's Review
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/27cf647ee1d07f84e3970649ca46bf7a.pdf
f6ff3ee9a09205a4056ff3d7a204fd20
PDF Text
Text
The St. John’s Review
Volume XLVIII, number three (2005)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Sarah Navarre
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson,
President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited
essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address
correspondence to the Review, St. John’s College, P
.O. Box
2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available,
at $5 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2005 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction
in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing and Printing
The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essays and Lectures
A Glance, A Look, A Stare........................................... 5
Jerry L. Thompson
Muthos and Logos.......................................................41
David Stephenson
Meaning and Truth in Klein’s
Philosophico-Mathematical Writings...........................57
Burt C. Hopkins
Addendum
Two Images.................................................................89
Chaninah Maschler
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
A Glance, a Look, a Stare
Jerry L. Thompson
In 1968 or 1969 a friend asked me to the first session of a
workshop given in New York City by the photographer
Harold Feinstein. Feinstein was an experienced teacher, and
he began by talking to the assembled group of 20 or so about
his approach to picture-taking. He said that each of us, the
moment we stepped into his studio, had an immediate
impression, a notion, an idea of his place. That impression,
gained at first glance, was, he said, what photography was all
about. A snapshot—a view recognized and seized in a fraction
of a second—was the photographer’s view of the world.
Certainly many of the best-known photographs made
during the twenty years before my visit to Feinstein’s studio
could be connected to this understanding of how photography worked. Two of the books of photographs most
admired by young ambitious photographers at that time were
The Decisive Moment, a book that presented large reproductions of minimally-captioned photographs by Henri CartierBresson without any text other than appreciation of the
pictures, and Robert Frank’s The Americans, another book
whose main content was pictorial. Though very different in
form, in attitude, and in meaning, the two books contained
pictures that looked like quick glimpses of the worlds they
showed, views recognized and seized at first glance. I was a
beginning photographer, but I had experimented with several
cameras, and I knew that with a small camera a picture could
be made in daylight at 1/500th of a second. At that shutter
speed, the operator did not even have to hold the camera
Jerry L. Thompson has been a working photographer for more than thirty
years. He is the author of Truth and Photography (Ivan R. Dee, 2003), a
book of essays on photography, and a forthcoming book combining some of
his own photographs with a long essay on their making.
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
perfectly still in order to get a clear picture. With a wideangle lens pre-focused (that is, set at the “hyperfocal”
distance setting, the setting which would allow everything off
to the horizon and most of what was as close as 3 or 4 feet
from the lens to be in focus when the aperture was
constricted for a daylight exposure), the photographer could
rush the camera to his eye to snap anything he saw within a
fraction of a second of his first awareness of the scene’s
potential to become a picture.
In discussing Feinstein’s approach after the class my
friend and I agreed that spontaneity was at its center. The
idea was to act—to respond to a strong impression—before
conscious deliberation or prolonged analysis could weigh in.
Feinstein was proposing, we decided, a theory of visual truth.
Directness and honesty of vision are most possible when the
photographer, or artist, acts spontaneously and seizes the
moment before he or she has a chance to ponder other
considerations: should I be a little farther off? Should I make
an exposure that will allow for detail in all the dark areas, or
one that will record only dramatic highlights in a sea of darkness? Should I wait for a more amiable expression to appear
on that person’s face? Should I shoot a vertical so that it can
be considered for the cover of Life magazine? Each such
deliberation, the thinking goes, chips away at the picture’s
“purity,” compromises the artist’s perception, and takes the
result further away from the “unmediated” truth of an instant
response. Such thinking found many receptive auditors in
1968 and 1969.
The rise in prominence of the so-called “AbstractExpressionist” painters had helped prepare the way. These
“New York School” painters did not usually make preliminary sketches, let alone use perspective studies or scaled
palettes. They rejected every device attached to European
(mostly French) Beaux Arts training. For them that training
was anathema; it reeked of the academy, flattery of princes,
dishonesty, decoration, and corruption. Immediacy and
THOMPSON
7
authenticity, not perspective, drawing, harmony, and a
pleasing likeness were important to them. Their ambition, as
a group, was not to copy nature but to create it.
Photographers were more hesitant to substitute their own
productions for the subjects they depicted. Most photographers then (if not now) still thought the pictures they took (or
made, to use the word many artist-photographers have
insisted using) at least referred to, but more likely clarified or
even understood, the world those pictures showed.
Photojournalism was a model for many, especially those who
worked with small hand-held cameras, and photojournalism
was generally thought able to present a kind of truth about
what was going on in the world. Photographers in 1969 were
more likely to single out Eddie Adams’s pictures of the
summary execution of a suspected Viet Cong than they were
to speculate about how many times Douglas McArthur had to
wade ashore on the Philippines until the photographer got
the picture the war effort needed.
Though they might not follow the painters all the way to
proclaiming their pictures a second, new nature, one that
could stand on its own without reference to a “subject,” many
ambitious young photographers in 1969 would have agreed
that (a) photography is art; that (b) authenticity and immediacy in art are good things; and that (c) authenticity and
immediacy are most available to an artist when working
spontaneously. Hovering in the background of this thinking is
the notion that there is something natural about this way of
working. When the photographer Nick Nixon (who began
photographing seriously in the late 1960s) was asked about
his way of working by a group of students in 1975 he said his
role was like that of a plant, a tree whose business it is to bear
fruit (I paraphrase his remarks from memory). His job, he
explained, was to produce the fruit. Discussing and analyzing
the fruit was somebody else’s job. He also said he rarely used
the camera’s controls for adjusting the drawing of the image
projected on the ground-glass viewing screen of the large
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
view camera he used. If the picture wasn’t there (that is, if he
didn’t see it whole and ready to frame), he didn’t try to fiddle
with the camera’s adjustments in order to coax a reluctant
picture to appear. John Keats would have understood all of
this, at least at the moment in February, 1818, when he wrote
to John Taylor that “In Poetry I have a few Axioms,”
including this one:
That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves
to a tree it had better not come at all.
Keats’s remark rightly suggests that the line of thinking I have
been discussing did not begin with Harold Feinstein, or with
the New York School painters. M. H. Abrams includes what
he calls “vegetable genius” among the theories of unconscious
genius and organic growth he finds widespread, particularly
in England and Germany, as early as the eighteenth century
(The Mirror and the Lamp, Oxford, 203). These theories have
several features in common: they hold that the artist is not
directly responsible for what he makes; that he may not
understand, in an analytical sense, what he is doing; and that
the mechanism by which he works is like that of a plant.
Johann Georg Sulzer, author of a four-volume dictionary
of aesthetic terms published between 1771 and 1774, wrote
that
It is a remarkable thing, belonging among other
mysteries of psychology, that at times certain
thoughts will not develop or let themselves be
clearly grasped when we devote our full attention
to them, yet long afterwards will present themselves in the greatest clarity of their own accord,
when we are not in search of them, so that it
seems as though in the interim they had grown
unnoticed, like a plant, and now stood before us in
their full development and bloom. (Abrams, 203)
THOMPSON
9
In 1793 Immanuel Kant went further to declare that the
productive faculty of the fine arts was properly called genius,
which he defined as “the innate mental aptitude through
which nature gives the rule to art.” This faculty of genius
cannot indicate scientifically how it brings about
its product, but rather gives the rule as nature.
Hence, where an author owes a product to his
genius, he does not know himself how the ideas
for it have entered his head, nor has he it in his
power to invent the like at pleasure, or methodically, and communicate the same to others in such
precepts as would put them in a position to
produce similar products. (Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment, ¶46; also cited by Abrams, 207)
These theories were not confined to the visual arts. The
passages quoted above speak of authors and ideas. And the
theories do not appear as the aphoristic musings of practitioners; they are not the haphazard reflections of artists
puzzling about what they do, but systematic treatments by
serious philosophical writers. These theories are presented in
the very form—discursive writing—that the activity the theories discuss, the activity of spontaneous invention, would
seem to shy away from. Writing is, after all, the setting down
of reasonable speech—argument, what Keats called “consequitive reasoning,” and what philosophers at the time of
Plato and Aristotle meant by logos: a logical train of thought.
Discursive writing involves connecting and setting down an
articulated succession of ideas.
Sometime between 1942 and 1945 Erich Auerbach wrote
one such articulated succession of ideas, a long and detailed
one, about a descriptive passage in Balzac (The essay
appeared in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature). In that essay, he stresses the harmony and
stylistic unity of a passage near the beginning of Le Père
Goriot (1834), which describes the first appearance of the
�10
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
pension-mistress Madame Vauquer. Every detail given by
Balzac contributes to “an intense impression of cheerless
poverty, shabbiness, and dilapidation,” and along with the
physical description, “the moral atmosphere is suggested.”
Auerbach’s discussion builds to the following observation:
The entire description, so far as we have yet
considered it, is directed to the mimetic imagination of the reader, to his memory-pictures of
similar persons and similar milieux which he may
have seen; the thesis of the “stylistic unity” of the
milieu, which included the people in it, is not
established rationally but is presented as a striking
and immediate state of things, purely suggestively,
without any proof.
By “not established rationally” and “without any proof,”
Auerbach means that Balzac does not present an extended
argument or logical train of thought to demonstrate that all
the details he names and observations he makes are in fact
related, bound in some chain of causality. According to
Auerbach, what Balzac presents is a striking and immediate
state of things, something we take in all at once, uncritically,
as if at a glance. In fact we encounter the components of this
impression one at a time, as we read, but they accumulate to
affect us as a growing ensemble, as a complete whole already
existent and gradually revealed—not as a logical proposition
or arithmetic calculation which must be worked through to
the end before we can see and accept what is meant.
“What confronts us, then, is the unity of a particular
milieu, felt as a total concept of a demonic-organic nature
and presented entirely by suggestive and sensory means,”
Auerbach concludes (416). Balzac accomplishes the remarkable feat of presenting, in words that must be read and understood in sequence, the kind of impression we would have had
if we had been there to look at the actual room. What he tells
us over the course of sixteen sentences, most of them quite
THOMPSON
11
long, we could have taken in had we been there, at a glance,
in a single glimpse, like the view we were invited to take from
the threshold of Feinstein’s studio. This is so because the
sentences do not reason with us or attempt to demonstrate—
they offer, as Auerbach says, no proof. Rather, these sentences
overwhelm us with detail and observation mixed together, an
imaginative description in which odors have moral overtones
and misfortune oozes from worn furniture.
When we know a thing at a glance, we do not consider
evidence and weigh opinions as a jury might during a
prolonged deliberation. We see the thing and know it at once
for what it is, as we recognize a face that suddenly comes into
sight without thinking, that nose, those eyes, brown hair
parted on the right: it’s John Doe! Rather than reason our way
to an identification, we somehow consult a memory-bank and
call up, all at once, the one we recognize. Recognizing this
feature of human understanding, Balzac could reasonably
expect his reader to reach into his or her memory-bank of
“pictures of similar persons” to “recognize” the intertwined
physical and moral dilapidation of Madame Vauquer and her
milieu. He doesn’t attempt to argue that this thing is
connected to that, or that the one is a cause of the other: he
presents not a thesis to argue, but a milieu to recognize; we
see it, recognize it, and take it in as a whole.
This taking in at a glance depends, as Auerbach notes, on
“memory-pictures of similar people which [the reader] may
have seen”: if I have never seen John Doe before I will not
recognize him when his face suddenly appears. If I have the
opportunity to look at him a little while, I may note a certain
kind of nose, details of grooming, hair color and texture, etc.,
and conclude that he is a certain kind of person, but I will not
“recognize” him if I don’t know him. In this instance
knowing at a glance would not be available to me, but
another approach, an approach involving sustained
reasoning, demonstration, the kind of thinking involved in a
“proof ”—such an approach might lead me somewhere. Such
�12
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
prolonged consideration would hardly have time to come
into play during a glance, but it might during a stare. But
rather than start down this path, which will lead in a different
direction, let me take the line of thinking we have been
considering—that some operations of the soul are spontaneous—a little farther back in time.
The careful reader will have noted a new word in the last
sentence. In the quotations I cited, Kant refers to mental aptitudes and to things going on the author’s head. Kant speaks
of the operations he discusses as taking place in the mind
because he saw human experience as split between two
worlds. The phenomenal world is the physical world, the
world of space and time. Everything here is completely
explained by the laws of physics. Our bodies are in this
world. This world is nature, and it is available to us through
the understanding. The other world—the noumenal world—
is a thing apart. This is a suprasensory world in which the
reason operates; it is in this world that moral judgment and
the will exist. This is the world we can know only with the
mind, which, as he notes, is in the head.
But in the last sentence of the paragraph before last I used
the word soul instead of mind. I did so in preparation for
following the line of thinking we are considering farther back
in time. Where we are headed—the thinking of Plato and
Aristotle—there is no sharp cleavage between two worlds.
There is an ordered cosmos, and there are many independent
things in that cosmos, and some of those things have souls.
Whether the soul is a thing that survives the death of the body
it inhabits is, in this world, an open question. Plato’s Socrates
likes to speculate about this from time to time, but he freely
admits that in doing so he is indulging himself, not demonstrating, and that he does so for pleasure and comfort (as in
the Phaedo, the conversation that takes place on the afternoon before his execution). Aristotle is not prone to mythological speculation.
THOMPSON
13
But whatever its ultimate fate, the soul, in the world we
are now considering, is intimately connected with the body
and the cosmos it inhabits. One kind of thinking available to
this soul is perception, and the soul perceives by using its
bodily organs of sense. This soul has motions that may take
the form of movements, either of small particles within the
body or of large things outside us through use of the limbs.
Choice and moral judgment operate not in spite of nature,
but through nature, in cooperation with it. This is so because
nature, choice, moral judgment, and everything else are parts
of an ordered cosmos. Men tend to know and seek the good,
and avoid the bad in the same way that light things tend to
rise and heavy ones fall, and for the same reason: because the
cosmos is ordered.
Not only is the cosmos ordered, but it is ordered in a way
that men can know, at least up to a point. Reasonable speech,
offered in good faith, can be answered in good faith so that
two earnest speakers working together can come to know
what neither of them could have come upon on his own. This
is one example of dialectic, and its application leads upward
from commonplace observations everyone agrees on to ideas
about these observations, from there to groupings and classifications, and on to an awareness of causes. Specific causes
have more general causes, and the discovery of proximal
sources leads to those that are more remote, more fundamental, more unifying. All this is available to those who use
reason in good faith.
“In good faith” means with the intention of discovering
the truth. This world is no Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, no
Pollyannaish rich boys’ club where only the privileged few are
taken into account, where everyone is just, noble, and good
because he (and only hes need apply) can afford it. The texts
that give us this world are full of instances of what appears to
be reasonable speech used for base ends: flatterers, tyrants,
sophists, eristics, and practitioners of all the vices are present
in these texts. The highest and best that these texts point to
�14
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
can hardly be called “Greek thought,” or “the Greek way.”
These best possibilities were defined—let alone practiced—by
only a handful of thinkers, some of whom were at odds with
the culture they lived in (Socrates was executed; Aristotle
died in exile).
But the possibility of knowing and playing a healthy part
in an ordered cosmos lives in these texts, and this broad
vision—this vision of wholeness—underlies the earliest
appearance of the spontaneous operations of the soul we
have been considering. According to translator Joe Sachs,
Aristotle’s On the Soul uses twenty-four different words to
mean thinking. The broadest of these, noein, can be thought
of as meaning “to think” in a general sense: the activity of the
soul that includes everything from sense perception to the
highest kind of reason. But one word in the cluster, theorein,
refers to just the kind of taking-in-all-as-a-whole we have
been considering: the view of Madame Vauquer’s pension,
and the glimpse of Feinstein’s studio. This verb is translated
by Sachs as to “contemplate.”
Contemplation gets a lot of attention from Aristotle. He
begins with simple examples such as recognizing a figure, say
a triangle, at first glance: we do not have to count the angles
to know it as a triangle; we see it all at once. In a similar way
we recognize a face we know, as in the example I used earlier.
On this level, contemplation is almost like simple perception,
only a bit more complex since it involves recognizing a
pattern and not just a single sensation.
But elsewhere Aristotle’s examples of contemplation are
of things more complex; in the Nicomachean Ethics he
speaks of the exercise of this ability not in the realm of
perception, but in moral judgment: he speaks of recognizing
instantly, without calculation, the right thing to do in a particular situation. Contemplation is available for all our actions,
from the lowest to the highest. Sachs has given the best exposition I know of this feature of Aristotle’s thinking; here is a
part of it:
THOMPSON
15
Like our highest knowing, our perceiving takes in
something organized and intelligible all at once
and whole. That is why we can contemplate a
scene or sight before us as well as something
purely thinkable. In neither case is the thing
grasped our product, and that is why Aristotle calls
both perception and contemplative thinking
passive (pathêtikos), but this receptiveness to being
acted upon should not be confused with inertness.
It is rather an effortful holding of oneself in readiness. Attentive seeing or concentration in thinking
requires work to keep oneself from distraction; it
is a potent passivity (dunamis) that becomes
activity in the presence of those things that feed it.
Nutrition is the active transformation of things in
the world into the living body; contemplation is
the effortful openness of the soul to a merging
into the intelligible foundation of the world.
Reading and listening are always hard work, and
hardest of all when one lets the meaning of the
speaker or author develop within oneself.
Contemplation, as Aristotle intends it, is the same
sort of act without the building up of interpretation; it is rather what he calls affirming something
not by thinking any proposition about it but by
touching it…Aristotle believes that the activity of
knowing is always at work in us and available to
us…potentially guiding everything we do in the
same way the blind grub worm is led to its food
and a plant is turned to the light. (Sachs, On the
Soul, 37)
In order to understand what this contemplation is, it is
necessary to distinguish between what we do in contemplation and what we do in deliberation, which is also thinking,
but thinking of a different kind. Deliberation involves paying
attention and thinking things through. We apply it when we
�16
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
are faced with things that could be one way or another. As a
photographer in the street I notice a small detail—the
chipped polish on a fingernail, say—and I start to wonder
about what this detail tells me. Does it mean the person is
careless of her appearance, therefore unselfconscious and
possibly willing to agree to be photographed by a stranger on
a public street? Or was the chipping an unfortunate accident,
and is the stranger sufficiently concerned about this small
mishap to be worried about how she looks, and therefore
reluctant to agree have her picture taken here and now?
Things could stand either one way or the other, and deliberation comes into play to weigh the alternatives.
When we deliberate we are in the realm of practical judgment. We are using our ability to think to figure out what is
best for us to do. Such thinking is an important part of living
in society, but it is not contemplation. Contemplation does
not, like deliberation, lead us to consider things that can be
one way or another; rather, it leads us to the awareness of
what cannot be otherwise—what Sachs, after Aristotle, calls
“the intelligible foundation of the world.” And, as he carefully says, in contemplation we are led not just to see this
“intelligible foundation,” but to merge into it, to participate
in and become a part of it.
What can this mean for a skeptical, secular, subjective,
egoistic modern? One of the attractions of Aristotle’s
thinking is that it offers a way to think about the self in the
world that is neither subjective nor egoistic. What he
proposes is that the cosmos is ordered, and that things
happen, for the most part, for reasons. He calls those reasons
causes, and he consistently finds that causes usually have
other causes; those that are farther in the background are
more general causes, which he refers to as sources. Following
this line of thought does not involve rejecting modern
science, but rather taking what modern technological science
tells us and thinking about it in the context of what we know.
To do so involves remaining skeptical that scientific explana-
THOMPSON
17
tion—especially when it can be expressed only in mathematical formulations incapable of being rendered in speech that
is not either non-sensical or hopelessly equivocal—is the
whole story, the version that eliminates any possibility it
cannot presently account for. In support of this sensible attitude, I might cite the wisdom of a thinker who began as a
physical scientist, Immanuel Kant:
The understanding which is occupied merely with
empirical exercise, and does not reflect on the
sources of its own cognition, may exercise its functions very well and very successfully, but it is quite
unable to do one thing, and that of very great
importance, to determine, mainly, the bounds that
limit its employment, and to know the laws that
lie within or without its own sphere. (Critique of
Pure Reason, “Of the Ground of the Division of all
Objects into Phenomena and Noumena”)
If we follow Aristotle in accepting the principle of an
ordered universe as a model for our thinking—and in this it
claims no more of our absolute, final, and unquestioning
belief than any proposal of modern science should—then we
can think about thinking in ways that are denied us if we
accept the world as mostly dark, silent space where particles
collide at random, a realm where some accident of chemical
connection has made it possible for “us” to “think” about
those random collisions. To follow Aristotle’s lead we do not
have to believe in anything, except in the possibility that
thinking can actually lead us to things not completely determined by what we are and what we already happen to know.
As Aristotle himself says in the Nicomachean Ethics, after
observing that “the intellect is something divine as compared
with a human being”:
But one should not follow those who advise us to
think human thoughts, since we are human, and
mortal thoughts, since we are mortal, but as far as
�18
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
possible one ought to be immortal and to do all
things with a view toward living in accord with the
most powerful thing in oneself, for even if it is
small in bulk, it rises much more above everything
else in power and worth. (10.7)
Taking what Aristotle says seriously requires accepting the
possibility of an ordered universe, and the possibility that the
intellect can perceive something of this order.
As we go through our daily lives we do notice that, for the
most part, things do seem to be connected in a causal way. If
we follow Aristotle’s thinking we start with commonplace
observations that many things seem to make a kind of sense;
if we subject these observations to reason, clarify them and
try to find some order in them, we are doing what Aristotle
did. Reading his thinking can help clarify our own, and
disclose possibilities we find attractive but might not—as
“educated” post-Enlightenment moderns—have known
about without his help.
If we can entertain his notion that our world—the world
we can discover and know—has some kind of order, then we
can approach that order in contemplation. Think of that
order as what we call in everyday speech “the big picture.”
Someone who can’t get past petty details doesn’t get the big
picture: that person can’t see the forest for the trees. If we
notice that chipped fingernail (to return to the example I used
earlier), we are paying attention to details involved in what
Aristotle calls an ultimate particular. If we use that bit of the
world as a guide to whether we should act or not—in this
example, ask permission to take a picture—we are in the
realm of practical judgment. We are deliberating. But if we
happen to be in such a state—a state of open receptivity, of
“potent passivity,” as Sachs calls it—that when we see the
chipped nail we also see something about the single human
life whose whole history up until that moment includes that
nail and the events that led first to its painting and later to its
chipping, then we are moving beyond deliberation. If we see
THOMPSON
19
not only the nail and the history that led to it, but also something fundamental about what human life on earth actually is,
in its briefness, in its vulnerability to shocks and surprises,
mishaps great and small, in its reliance on vanity and attempts
to please, and on things taken up only to be discarded in
distraction a few moments later—if we see at the same time
we see the chipped nail a whole concatenated bundle of small
ambitions and great disappointments, then we are on the
point of merging into the intellectual foundation of the
world. We are in a state where ultimate particulars and
universals both are present and connected, in a state where
we can be aware of a thing itself and of its place in a larger
order at the same time. In contemplation we see neither
without the other.
“An example is in fact a source of something universal” is
how Aristotle puts it (Nicomachean Ethics, 6.3). In contemplation we see what we can know of the world’s order
unfolding before us—not from us: it is not our product,
though we are included in it, but before us. We see what is
there to be seen. How do we know for sure that what we see
is before us, rather than merely from us, the fevered product
of an active imagination? We don’t. It may be only that. But
it also may not be only that, and years of disciplined attempts
to make it be not only that may help bring about the richer
possibility, a world disclosed to us rather than a world imagined by us. The whole of the Nicomachean Ethics makes clear
that contemplation is the highest, most difficult use of our
ability to think, and that it is not available to everyone. Only
those who are able to hold themselves so that they are not
distracted by passions, needs, local interests—all the possible
missteps Aristotle calls vices—can achieve the state of undistracted calm from which it is possible to see what is there
rather than the opportunities for profit, reminders of desire,
occasions to use a favorite skill, and so forth—the buzzing
static of everyday life familiar to every normal citizen of the
everyday world. In contemplation, we use the will to suppress
�20
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
distraction rather than to initiate aggressive action. This
explains why photographers who are extraordinarily
talented, clever, and skillful can produce work that, though it
may hold our attention for a time, never achieves greatness or
profundity. Look at how clever I am, look what I can do, the
pictures say. If a photographer has a marketing campaign in
the back of the thinking part of his soul as he works, the
needs and possibilities of that campaign will find their ways
into the picture, and a careful, thoughtful viewer’s attempt to
penetrate that picture will be blocked somewhere in the
realm of deliberation—where strategies are hatched—before
it can arrive at contemplation. What the photographer
needed to see, and not what was there, is what the picture
will be about, what that picture will show.
This distinction may be difficult for some readers to
accept, but it is real. Recall that effort is necessary, that will
must be exerted to acquire and maintain the “potent
passivity” we are discussing; steady practice of this discipline
over a long time makes attaining the sought goal increasingly
possible. It is a prospect worth pursuing. Imagine a diligent
photographer who looks at the same or similar subjects for
thirty or forty years. The showing off and cleverness, the
willful self-full-ness get used up, sown like so many wild oats
during the first few years. Eventually he or she might settle
down, so to speak—in Aristotle’s model, come to terms with
and tame the disorganized, distracted state of uncontrolled
passions normal to childhood—and begin to see what’s really
there. A genius (in the modern sense of being extraordinarily
quick-witted, not in Kant’s more neutral descriptive sense)
might come to the same point in two or three tries, and then
go off in some other direction.
I have strayed so far from the example I began with—
standing on the threshold of Feinstein’s studio—that I have
taken this discussion back to the time of Alexander the Great,
and almost brought it full circle. Read what Sachs has written
about Aristotle not from the point of view of a student of
THOMPSON
21
ancient thought, but from the point of view of a photographer:
We can contemplate a scene or sight before us as
well as something purely thinkable…in neither
case is the thing grasped our product…receptiveness to being acted on…a potent passivity that
becomes activity in the presence of things that feed
it…the effortful openness of the soul to a merging
into the intelligible foundation of the world…
when one lets the meaning [of another] develop
within oneself…affirming something not by
thinking any proposition about it but by touching
it. (On the Soul, Sachs, 37)
These could be tenets of an aesthetic of photography that
would come into play on the doorstep of Feinstein’s studio,
at the window of Madame Vauquer’s pension, on a violent
Vietnamese street, any place or time since the invention of
the camera. This suggested aesthetic, if scrupulously
followed, would produce pictures not based on the principles
of good design, nor in accordance with the wishes of an audience or market. These pictures would not speak first and
most loudly about what the photographer knows, would not
be deliberately expressive of anything urgent about that
photographer’s own self or needs, nor would they present a
poetic construction intended to distract a viewer’s attention
from the everyday world he walks and breathes in. The
pictures stemming from such an aesthetic would be quiet and
true, diligently observant of the things in front of them, and
alert to orders of order ranging far beyond ideas about scurves and The Rule of Thirds.
What might a work of photographic art called into being
according to the principles gleaned from Aristotle be like? It
might be something like a work of another kind of art
discussed by Auerbach a little later in the same essay I
referred to earlier. This work is also a work of fiction, and
�22
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Auerbach’s commentary concerns the author’s manner of
telling the reader about his characters’ world:
We hear the writer speak; but he expresses no
opinion and makes no comment. His role is
limited to selecting the events and translating them
into language; and this is done in the conviction
that every event, if one is able to express it purely
and completely, interprets itself and the persons
involved in it far better and more completely than
any opinion or judgment appended to it could do.
This description picks up the new note introduced by
Aristotle into what we are considering. In referring to Balzac,
Auerbach noted that that author depended on his reader’s
“mimetic imagination,” on “his [the reader’s] memorypictures of similar persons and similar milieux he may have
seen.” To the extent that this is true, Balzac expects his reader
to match the description he reads with what he already
knows. Aristotle goes further. The thing grasped is not our
product; it is achieved through “an effortful holding of
oneself in readiness,” the “effortful openness of the soul to
the structure of the intelligible world.” This is not matching
selections from our memory-banks with the stimuli that
present themselves. Relying on memory-banks is mediation;
full openness to what is is im-mediate.
Balzac appeals to what the reader already thinks and even
tells the reader what he, Balzac, thinks about the world he
describes. But the later 19th century French writer Auerbach
turns to promises to go farther in the direction Sachs indicates:
There occur in his letters…many highly informative statements on the subject of his aim in art.
They lead to a theory—mystical in the last
analysis, but in practice, like all true mysticism,
based upon reason, experience, and discipline—of
a self-forgetful absorption in the subjects of reality
23
THOMPSON
which transforms them (par une chimie
merveilleuse) and permits them to develop to
mature expression. In this fashion subjects
completely fill the writer; he forgets himself; his
heart no longer serves him save to feel the hearts
of others, and when, by fanatical patience, this
condition is achieved, the perfect expression,
which at once entirely comprehends the momentary subject and impartially judges it, comes of
itself; subjects are seen as God sees them, in their
true essence. (On the Soul, 37)
The writer referred to is, of course, Gustave Flaubert, and
the letters mentioned were written while he was at work on
Madame Bovary. His practice, and the theory of it deduced
from his letters by Auerbach, take us to the threshold of an
exciting prospect—the prospect of coming to know something that is truly foreign to us. In ordinary life this is a
prospect that presents increasing difficulties for most of us,
especially after the first dozen or twenty years of life. This
prospect is also the central challenge of photography as a
mature art.
* * * * * * * *
Photography is not primarily a studio art. The discussion so
far has been directed towards photographs that come into
being when a photographer looks at something new to him,
something strange, something beyond the range of his
familiar daily experience. Some photographers have made
discoveries while rearranging the stuff on their desks or
kitchen counters, of course, and such a familiar happening as
the play of sunlight on a window curtain can appear miraculous to a certain kind of person in a receptive mood. But for
many photographers encountering something new involves
travel, or at least walking out of the house. The specific
pictures I have mentioned so far were taken in a battle zone
�24
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
in southeast Asia and in the Philippines; the hypothetical ones
I have speculated about would have been made in the
entryway of a strangers studio and in the corner (or at the
window) of a French pension. Travel or walking around is
easiest for the young and unattached. They have more physical stamina, and more time. So it is hardly surprising that
photographers often do more work when young than later
on.
Walker Evans continued to work with a camera until very
near the end of his life, when a fall broke his collarbone,
making it difficult for him to hold even the small camera he
was using at the time. Even before this fall, his work, though
daily or nearly so, can hardly be compared in volume and
intensity to the work he did in 1935 and 1936, when he
exposed hundreds of 8x10 negatives and dozens of rolls of
35mm (and other sizes) film on a series of auto trips that took
him through parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia,
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. As an older man his
work was less strenuous, conducted at a more leisurely pace,
and less adventurous than the work he had done in his mid30s.
He took a job with Fortune magazine, and after retiring
from that, a job teaching at Yale University. As his work
became known to a new generation interested in the kind of
photography he did, he was asked to speak to school and
museum audiences from time to time. He gave a few
prepared talks, but mostly he preferred taking questions from
the audience. If a session went well, he might appraise its
success by saying, “They got a good talk out of me.”
As he aged, Evans grew more reflective, and he talked
about his own work and photography in general. Some of his
reflections were recorded on audio tapes by the institutions
that asked him to speak. Anyone who considers these talks as
a body might well come to the conclusion that Evans was
shaping an image of himself, presenting the story of his development and work as he wanted it to be understood.
THOMPSON
25
Some things he mentions again and again: he liked to talk
about going to Paris as a young man, about seeing James
Joyce once in Sylvia Beach’s bookstore but being afraid to
approach him. He liked to talk about spending time with
Hemingway in Cuba, and he frequently talked about other
writers he had read but not known: D.H. Lawrence and
Henry James, for example. He once began a question-andanswer session at a summer art program for college students
by reading a long sentence from James’s The American Scene.
That was his idea of getting the ball rolling with a roomful of
art students in 1972. A recently-published portfolio of his
photographs, most taken during the 1930s, was displayed on
the wall behind him, and the students’ questions were about
those pictures and not the passage Evans read.
Evans’s literary interests were more than a snobbish
pretension (though they were that as well). One observation
that comes up more than once in these late taped conversations (Evans died in 1975) was his debt to two French writers,
one of them Gustave Flaubert. I don’t think Evans ever cited
a specific passage in Flaubert, and I’m sure he never read
much (if any) critical writing on Flaubert. He had a low
opinion of criticism in general: he considered critical writing
to be a good deal below what is now called “creative” writing.
For Evans, writing fiction was art, and writing criticism was
not. He looked down on the English Department at Yale for
being concerned mostly with criticism instead of artistic
production.
But somehow, despite his disdain for critical analysis,
Evans managed to intuit that there was something in the
work of Flaubert—a writer of fiction—that he could learn
from and use in his work as a photographer. He was able to
intuit this, and to acquire what he needed not by making
propositions about it—not by analyzing what Flaubert had
done, and then constructing from that analysis a program to
direct his own approach to picture-taking. Rather, he
absorbed it directly, as if by osmosis, relying I think on some-
�26
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
thing like the procedure described by Immanuel Kant in the
passage quoted earlier. You might even say that Evans, in
looking at Flaubert as an artist, saw something whole and
formed—saw at a glance, if you like—something he recognized and understood, not by analysis and calculation, but
recognized in the way we recognize a triangle without
counting the angles, or the face of our friend John without
making an inventory of his features.
If the connection between Flaubert and Evans is a real
one, and I believe it is, then it may be worthwhile to try and
work out just how something of Flaubert can be seen in a
picture made by Evans. We might ask what it was that Evans
absorbed, if not from page 213 of Madame Bovary then at
least from the spirit in which Flaubert worked—a spirit
which, as we saw from the brief passage of commentary by
Auerbach and that passage’s parallels with Sachs’s distillation
of a current in Aristotle’s thinking, has special ambitions and
connections with other approaches to the world and earlier
bodies of thinking.
Let me take as a starting point the print that sits propped
up on the desk where I write. It is of a well-known Evans
picture, the flashlit view he made of kitchen utensils on the
wall of a frame house in Hale County, Alabama, in the
summer of 1936. The picture presents a small rectangle,
mostly light gray in tone. Some of the tiny spaces between the
vertical boards that form the room’s wall have been plugged,
and are quite dark gray, almost black. Others are cracks that
let in the daylight, and are white. Shadows of things on the
wall are dark, and some reflections of the flash (from a bulb,
probably) are as bright as the daylight showing through the
cracks. For the most part, then, the field we see in this picture
is gray, but the variations make a pattern—a pattern that is
sufficiently arresting, in a graphic sense, to be noticeable at
first glance. The material shown is unfamiliar to most of us
(or at least it was, until this picture became so famous), but
THOMPSON
27
the pattern of its display might cause anyone interested in
looking to pause, ask, What’s that? and take a closer look.
Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead, 1936
Even after this preliminary, superficial examination
comments suggest themselves. This odd pattern—odd
because it is unexpected, yet graphically sure, odd because we
recognize the pattern before we identify the real-world stuff
that forms the pattern—attracts us, and causes us to linger.
Our attention has been attracted to the look of the picture.
The look of the picture may be understood as its distinctive overall form, that look that makes it different from other
pictures in the way that my face makes me different from
other faces. Just as we linger at the sight of certain faces more
than at the sight of others, so too we are more apt to linger
at the sight of certain pictures. This feature is important to
�28
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Kant, who attempted to establish that some arrangements are
“naturally” appealing to “all men in all countries.” I am not
the one to judge how far he succeeded in this effort, but his
concern with significant form underscores its hold on our
attention.
When we are at the stage of being attracted by the look
of the picture, we are in the position we were in on the
threshold of Feinstein’s studio. We are taking in the picture as
a whole, at a glance, and we may be open to an experience of
contemplation—the experience, the reader will remember, of
letting the truth of what is seen unfold within us, directly, as
something not our product. Faced with this picture, what
would that mean?
It might mean, for a start, exerting effort to avoid distraction, freeing our attention of irrelevant demands from some
personal agenda of wants of our own. An obvious example
might be to avoid thinking about the provenance of this
particular print. How old is it? Who printed it? From what
collector or dealer did it come? What cryptic and possibly
value-enhancing notations in pencil are on the back? How
much will it bring at auction?
Each of these concerns is legitimate, in its appropriate
context, but none of them has anything at all to do with
looking at the picture contemplatively, that is, in such a way
as to let what is seen unfold within us.
In a sense, what I am describing is trying to calm down
the static so that we can approach something like the ideal
“purity” that was the justification of the spontaneous first
glance recommended by Feinstein at the first session of his
work shop. It is important to understand, however, that we
are not after a state of child-like innocence, some kind of
willful ignorance. We live in the world, and if we take this
picture seriously we will soon enough have to work very hard
at bringing as much of that world’s experience as we can to
bear on it, but only after the picture begins to tell us what we
need to bring. Before that can commence, we need to shed
THOMPSON
29
and focus, exert the effort it takes to avoid distraction and
attain quiet.
As the pattern continues to exert its hold on our attention, we may begin to survey the terrain that, at first glance,
seemed so inviting. What things do these modulated grays
disclose to our attention? The photographer’s wish to show
small details is evident, but not obsessive: the flat light of the
head-on flash illumination has minimized surface detail which
would leap to the eye if seen in hard cross-light.
The manner of rendering this humble scene hardly calls
attention to itself at all, at first glance. We have noted a
certain uneasy tension among the various things visible—the
“elements” of the “composition.” The two horizontal strips
of lath nailed across the vertical planks seem to the viewing
eye to float, in spite of the clearly-visible heads of the nails
securing them, and their echo in the darker, fuzzy marks in
the picture’s center comes into play in this connection: they
seem almost to recede in space, denying the obvious flat wall
that ends the picture’s depth. The tilt of the cross member
near the picture’s top—so flimsy a timber can scarcely be
called a beam—adds to the sense of disorder, and the objects
it supports cooperate in this impression as well. The glass jar
is cockeyed (with reference to the board edge next to it, but
who would expect a plank in this structure to keep to a true
vertical?); the metal can looks off-kilter too—unless it is
hanging true and the planks are off. The mysterious bit of
crud suspended on a tiny line from the leftmost nail confirms
the true vertical. A plate with a centered hole, odd patches of
adhering paper—one a ripped commercially-printed notice
retaining only the word fragment “AM”, in bold capitals, and
“It’s [undecipherable] ized” in small, faint, linked script—and
a single nail near the can complete the decorations on the
“ground” of this “figure-ground composition.”
Viewers familiar with other pictures by this photographer
will recognize this tense, slightly-unnerving kind of arrangement of forgettable or cast-off objects. Both the objects
shown, and their manner of framing and organization, as well
�30
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
as the seemingly unemphatic use of light and tone are characteristic of his work. These “stylistic elements” offer interests of their own, which can be expanded upon by those who
believe the chief interest of pictures to lie in their relation to
the history of style. Or perhaps such a line of analysis is
another distraction leading away from what this picture has
to show its viewers. Indeed, the tensely-organized visual field
sets off a central focus, a “subject,” which lies at almost the
exact center of the picture, where its diagonals cross. Its
subject is the family silver chest.
The objects forming the “ground” are so nondescript, so
arrestingly organized (or disorganized), that it is easy to see
them only—that is to say, to note their visual weights and
positions without thinking too much about what they might
be, or be used for. What viewer has an experiential reference
for a topless Mason jar, or a plate with a hole in the center?
We look at the tonalities, the textures, the odd spacing, and
our experience is visual, “aesthetic.” Perhaps the can with its
quaint wooden handle and the plate, certainly the textual
fragment AM (a fragment freighted with ambiguous possible
meanings), register as knowable, if disparate, objects. Any
“kick” this recognition adds to our experience of the picture
might be related to Surrealism (the picture was made in
1936), and also “aesthetic.” It would have to do with beauty.
But at the picture’s center the rules change. The objects
shown so clearly there, and highlighted by the reflection of
the flash from their shiny surfaces, present a great load of
specific information, and of recognizable illusion. These are
utensils we know well; we feel them in our hands. We recognize the shell-like edges of one fork’s handle and note the
different pattern of the next handle over, and the lack of
ornament at all on the handle of a nearby spoon. In between
is a knife with a wooden handle (like the handle of the leftmost utensil), a handle whose halves are held together by
wire.
THOMPSON
31
No narrator or even caption is needed with material as
familiar, as everyday as this. Any viewer likely to see this
picture would recognize—and understand—the distinctions
in play among patterned, plain, wooden, broken, tarnished,
matched, and odd—as quickly as he or she might almost feel
the utensil in right or left hand, familiar from lifelong practice. These small images, so recognizable and familiar, send
out “kindred mutations” to the minds of any viewers who
bother even to identify what the picture shows. A lingering
look—the arresting organization of the picture encourages
it—raises the question of how this familiar material in the
center—the “figure”—relates to the strange unsettling
“ground” surrounding it. At this point, the picture begins to
weigh in with its full largeness of meaning, the full force of
its allusive reference.
Once the silver-chest is seen to exist in such strange form,
and understood to reside in so hostile and unsettled an environment, the imagination of an engaged viewer begins to
work. He enlists his memory-bank, allowing what he knows
to appear according to directions coming from the unfolding
representation in the picture. That imaginative work might
begin perhaps with the hands that hold, and wash, and polish,
and put away those prized salvaged utensils—might those
hands resemble the ruined members Hesiod dreamed of
preserving as new in the Golden Age? Then there might be
the odd attenuated daily chores that utilize the strange objects
on the wall, now understood as utensils also, saved and
arranged also. What sort of use might that suspended bit of
crud have? How could anyone value such a thing so much as
to hang it on the wall? Who could have such a need?
Lear has an answer: “Oh, reason not the need. Our basest
beggars/Are in the poorest thing superfluous.” This answer is
only a short space from the extreme of sympathetic identification, an extreme whose full limit finds voice in this howl:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this hideous storm,
�32
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may’st shake the super flux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
This speech of Lear is offered as part of the front matter of
the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which this
picture first appeared.
We have now gone outside the picture. To have done so
at the beginning of our look at the picture—to have started
our look with a consideration of the book in which the
picture was published and its front matter might have been a
distraction. But at this point, well into an experience of the
picture, we want to know more: a question has been raised—
who could have such a need?—and anything we recall or can
learn about the picture’s first use and the circumstances of its
making can properly be called in to help answer that question. Our unfolding awareness of the picture—and of the
things in the picture—directs our thinking. In order to be in
us, the things in the picture tell us what they need. Our
memories and imaginations respond to the call and give the
picture what it needs to develop within us. When puzzles or
conflicts arise, they must be settled by thinking, and the
thinking appropriate to contemplation—theorein—is supplemented by another of Aristotle’s twenty-four kinds of
thinking—dianoein. This is the thinking that thinks things
through, as in propositions and demonstrations. This
thinking allows the viewer to sort out what he senses in that
first look, when he or she takes things all at once, as a whole.
But this problem-solving thinking, the thinking that looks at
details, identifies them, and connects them to other things we
recall from past experience—dianoein—operates in the
service and at the direction of theorein. A vision of the whole
THOMPSON
33
comes first, and as it develops it looms over and directs the
step-by-step thinking it requires in order to unfold
completely.
Evans made the pictures and determined their arrangement in the book, and their placement apart from the text.
James Agee was responsible for all the text. His huge sensibility may have worked its massy gravity on his collaborator.
Agee’s text suggests moral urgency, as if he desperately needs
to help the hardness and deprivation he observes, or at least
immolate himself to make up for it. For his part Evans is
moved so far as to wonder at what he sees—his “momentary
subject,” to use Auerbach’s phrase, and the qualification is
appropriate: Evans was not a humanitarian aid worker, but
an artist. He was in Alabama for three weeks, with the tenant
farmers for less time that that, and he stood in front of no
individual subject, including the human ones, for more than
a few minutes. But during that brief time he had available to
him the special attitude toward his “subject-matter” that had
been developing within him, and he paid close attention to
details. Close attention indeed: he, like Flaubert, gave his
momentary subject “self-forgetful absorption” so that the
subject “completely filled” him to the extent that “his heart
serves him only to feel the hearts of others”—others meaning
milieux as well as individual people. It is this “fanatical”
(Auerbach’s word used in connection with Flaubert; Evans
reported to Lincoln Kirstein that he was so stimulated by the
possibilities of photography that he sometimes thought
himself “completely crazy”) concentration that allows him to
come up with an approach, discover the approach that allows
his chosen momentary subjects to speak for themselves in
“mature expression.”
He has framed (and lighted) this picture in a characteristic
way, but this characteristic way does not overwhelm the
subject-things with his “artistry.” He has made a picture in
which the things shown can begin to work on the viewer, a
picture in which the world of the picture, the milieu it shows,
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
34
can emerge as more noticeable, more important, and more
worthy of attention than the artistic milieu that set the stage
for its production.
This is what Evans found in Flaubert. According to
Auerbach, Flaubert completely dispenses with the “separation
of styles”—the notion, prevalent in Western literature prior
to the nineteenth century that only elevated figures (kings,
princes, and heroes, for example) were worthy of the serious
attention of tragedy. Humbler sorts appeared in comedy and
in satire, but were not taken as seriously as the figures in a
tragedy are. They did not come in for the serious treatment,
the close attention reserved for figures of high standing. Here
is Auerbach in an earlier essay (on Petronius):
Everything commonly realistic, everything
pertaining to everyday life, must not be treated on
any level except the comic, which permits no
problematic probing. As a result the boundaries of
realism are narrow. And if we take that word
realism a little more strictly, we are forced to
conclude that there could be no serious literary
treatment of everyday occupations and social
classes…in short of the people and its life. Linked
with this is the fact that the realists of antiquity do
not make clear the social forces underlying the
facts and conditions which they present. This
could only be done in the realm of the serio-problematic. (Auerbach, 270)
In Flaubert, however, he finds that
There are no high and low subjects; the universe is
a work of art produced without any taking of
sides, the realistic artist must imitate the procedures of Creation, and every subject in it essence
contains, before God’s eyes, both the serious and
the comic, both dignity and vulgarity….There is
no need for a general theory of levels, in which
THOMPSON
35
subjects are arranged according to their dignity, or
for any analyses by the writer commenting upon
the subject, after its presentation, with a view to
better comprehension and more accurate classification; all this must result from the presentation of
the subject itself. (Auerbach, 429-430) [italics
added]
The artist works for “a self-forgetful absorption in the
subjects of reality which transforms them (par une chemie
merveilleuse) and permits them to develop to mature expression.”
Flaubert wrote as a part of nature. In accordance with the
procedure outlined by Kant, Auerbach interpreted the rule of
nature given through Flaubert. Evans neither analyzed
Flaubert’s nature nor read the rules formulated by Auerbach
or anyone else. But he liked the look of the chimie
merveilleuse, the “self-forgetful absorption in the subjects of
reality which transforms them and permits them to develop
to mature expression”; through some trick of temperament,
talent, instinct, and sleight-of-hand he came up with his own
version of it. Flaubert found tragedy in the life of a provincial
wife, and Evans found matter for high seriousness in a poor
tenant-farmer’s makeshift kitchen. As the photographer Lee
Friedlander put it: after Walker we could take a picture of
anything.
It is hard to think of Evans’ pictures as glances. Many of
the best-known ones resemble nothing so much as direct
stares. This is so because the attention they give has a relentless quality: they are so clear, so unagitated—that is, not
dominated by a sense of urgency, a sense that something must
be done about state of affairs the camera shows. They avoid
extreme contrasts of black and white, presenting for the most
part a lucid field of modulated grays. They are composed not
only in the sense of being unruffled emotionally, but also in
the sense that they present their subjects in a way that might
be called appropriately elegant. This dignified presentation of
�36
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
humble objects represents the artist’s rejection of the “separation of styles.” Like Van Gogh, Evans made a worn pair of
boots the subject of a picture.
In their stillness, his pictures are also like stares. Many of
Evans’s pictures from the mid-1930s were made with a view
camera, a large apparatus that must be used atop a tripod.
The view to be taken is framed in the camera’s ground glass
screen, which can be seen only when a black cloth covers
both the photographer’s head and the viewing screen of the
camera. The film must be inserted and the lens closed from its
viewing mode and reset before the film can be exposed and
the picture made. All this takes time, several seconds at least,
maybe a minute or two, and during this time the subject must
not change in any important way if the photographer is to get
on film the picture he saw on the viewing screen. And his
exposure times were not instantaneous. Exposure times of
one-half second and one full second, even in sunlight, were
recorded on the negatives storage envelopes. The pictures
look still because the subjects are still.
The subjects may have been chosen in part for their stillness, but the photographer’s concentration gives them an
extra measure of stillness. His attention to detail results in an
organization that includes even tiny features of the scene,
recording them with great fidelity while at the same time
preserving a masterly control of the whole picture, the overall
look of the scene that attracted his attention in the first place.
Utility poles and their shadows, the raking light on clapboards, the small figure of an onlooker with his head cocked
a certain way, even the clouds in the sky seems to settle into
their proper places like so many elements of an ordered
cosmos. The pictures seem still because they look inevitable.
Also, many of Evans’s best-known pictures were made
from a distance—from across the street or down the block.
He frequently used a lens of long focal length—a “telephoto,” which yields a picture with flattened perspective.
This tool allows the photographer to stand far off and yet
THOMPSON
37
keep the objects he looks at large within his picture’s frame.
The world is examined closely, yet held at arm’s length.
The unruffled stillness of these photographs and what we
know about the procedure of their making suggest that
photography’s glance can be extended in time so that it
becomes a stare. On the threshold of Feinstein’s studio we
were invited to take in what we saw in the blink of an eye,
before the corrupting influence of second thoughts could
come into play. Under Evans’s dark cloth, time slows down;
there is time for the appearance of second and even thirdthoughts. But under the discipline taught by Flaubert these do
not appear as corruptions or distractions: instead of listening
to distraction, the soul of the photographer exerts a willful
effort to avoid distraction so that the things in front of the
camera’s lens can fill it completely, obliterating (for the
moment) I want, I need, I hate, and even I know.
This extension of time from the glance to the stare
prepares the way for a further extension. The time of the
photographer’s stare at the subject, however long it lasts, will
still be brief. Life in the phenomenal world of space, time,
and traffic demands it. The “momentary” subject will pass
from view, and the photographer’s contemplative experience
of it will end. But the photograph lasts, and the picture can,
at any future time, become the subject of some viewer’s own,
later, separate contemplation. Flaubert’s discipline—and all
the possibilities available in contemplation—apply to pictureviewers as well as picture-takers.
Let me end this essay by stating the obvious: what a
photographer does when photographing, and what a viewer
does when he looking at a picture are similar, but are not the
same thing. Both photographer and viewer can look in
contemplation at what they see—I write “can look” because
contemplation is not available to all people, nor at all times.
But the attention each of the two, photographer and viewer,
gives is of a different order.
The viewer has a long time to look, a whole lifetime if the
picture’s hold on him is strong. The viewer has the possibility
�38
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
of endless revisiting, re-thinking, exploring various leads,
various directions of thought that may arise, from time to
time, during moments of contemplation that are each
different, possibly increasingly comprehensive as the experience of the picture (and the viewer herself) mature during the
viewer’s prolonged intermittent stare.
The picture that occasions this viewing experience has to
be made during a relatively short time. How does a photographer “capture” profound order in a brief instant, at a
glance? How, at a glance, does a photographer take in the
ordered “look” of a meaningful scene and sense its connection to the ordered “intelligible foundation of the world?”
The only honest answer is, I don’t know how.
Discipline and experience help prepare the ground: a
prepared, receptive photographer who is also knowledgeable
about his art and experienced in its practice is receptive in a
way that is different, more potent, from the passive receptivity of a neophyte. Not everyone standing at the threshold
of Feinstein’s studio would see something worthy of much
attention or thought. An experienced architectural photographer might hit at once on the right place to put the camera in
order to make a picture suitable for the pages of Architectural
Digest. But another photographer—or that same photographer, if he managed to shed his professional ambition, even
for the moment needed to contemplate this “momentary”
subject—might find a view that would see in the ultimate
particulars on view there some universals truly worth
thinking about. How that happens, how genius operates in
that brief instant of time, is a mystery. Somehow, inside and
outside connect—merge, and an order that is corresponds to
an order we can know, perhaps an order great enough to
attract the attention and stimulate the thinking of viewers for
a long, long while. In that brief instant—during the photographer’s glance that discloses the look that prompts the
viewer’s stare—the photographer resembles Stevens’s
connoisseur of chaos, the pensive man:
THOMPSON
The pensive man . . . he sees that eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.
39
�40
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
41
Muthos and Logos
David Stephenson
What is a story? What is a good story? And how does a story
differ from other constructions of language either written or
spoken? From a lecture or essay, for example, a history, philosophical treatise or mathematical proof?
If you ever try to write a story, or even tell a tale without
writing it down, you know how difficult it is to define exactly
what you are doing—stringing words and sentences together,
yes, but to what end? A speech or a proof has a much more
obvious goal, viz. to praise or blame or persuade in the first
case and to demonstrate truth in the second. Stories teach
too, perhaps, but to say what or how they teach requires
insight into a very obscure part of the human soul, obscure
because logic does not operate in exactly the same way in
stories as in demonstration, nor can there be a simple truth to
illuminate or an action to promote. In fact, didactic stories
are universally condemned, because a concluding moral or an
explicit insight detract from the virtue of a story as such, and,
conversely, precisely those details that delight us in a story
will in general complicate any conclusion we might want to
draw from it.
Nevertheless, a story is always about something. The Iliad
and Odyssey tell you right at the beginning that they have a
subject: Achilles’ rage or Odysseus’ manhood. But if the
author does not tell you, it is usually a real chore to formulate in just a sentence or two exactly what a story is about.
Authors themselves confess to the difficulty or even disparage
the effort. Try formulating the subject of Oedipus or War and
David Stephenson is a tutor on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
This lecture was presented on June 15, 2005. Mr. Stephenson’s story, “The
Glass Eye,” won first prize in the short story contest sponsored by Bards and
Sages and will be published this winter as part of their annual anthology.
�42
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Peace or Waiting for Godot and you will see how elusive is the
task.
So I’m ready to listen to analysis and advice from
anybody who offers tell me what makes a story, even
Aristotle.
Story and Plot
Before I turn to the ancients, let me consider some modern
advisors. You can find shelves in any library or bookstore
loaded with books that will teach you how to write. So they
claim. Usually half of any such book is advice on how to sell
what you have written, and the other half encourages you to
keep writing at all costs, despite rejection, ignoring family
and friends, eking minutes out of hours and hours out of days
so that you can devote every spare bit of time to the elusive
pursuit of a writing career. No, that’s not fair; they also give
advice to the wordworn: tricks of the trade; rules of the
thumb; inspiration to the perspiring. “Avoid adverbs and
adjectives,” they say; “use short sentences”; “eliminate
cliches”; “maintain tension”; “flesh out your characters”;
“show, don’t tell”; “write what you know.” Much of this is
stylistic advice. Once upon a time, you could find both
readers and authors reveling in the clever peregrinations of a
long sentence. No longer. The modern publisher presumes
that the modern reader has a modern impatience. But if all
this advice has to be taken with a grain of salt (there’s a cliche
that somehow has not lost its savor), it also contains some
useful maxims.1 A parade of adverbs and adjectives do often
weaken rather than strengthen a description, because they
imply an attribute without exhibiting it, without making you
see or feel it. That is, “wily Odysseus” cannot charm or
dismay you with his wiles until you actually see him in
disguise or hear him telling clever lies. Nor can “swift-footed
Achilles” frighten you with the ferocity of his pursuit until
you watch him outrunning a river or hectoring Hector
beneath the walls of Troy.
STEPHENSON
43
So where the modern advisors give hints about how to
catch and hold the attention of a reader or an editor, they
rarely stop to examine the nature of the activity of writing, or
of its object: the story itself. You have to go back a little ways
to find someone, like E. M. Forster, willing to tackle that
question. “The king died and then the queen died”: that is
story, he says. “The king died and then the queen died of a
broken heart”: that is plot. Here we have a serious attempt to
characterize the storyteller’s art: he must connect events as
cause and effect, and the principal causes must lie within the
characters.2
Now E. M. Forster wrote some brilliant novels—
Howard’s End, Passage to India, A Room with a View—nevertheless, I have to modify his terminology. The first version of
“the king died, etc.” is hardly even a story, in my opinion,
though it does reflect the ancestry of the word, “story,” which
is offspring of the word, “history.” That is, in Forster’s first
example, a “story” is a mere reporting of events, which can
pass for a primitive kind of history even though these events
occurred only in the writer’s imagination.3 Forster amplifies
this dry version of his little tale into a more interesting one by
making connections, but even the second version hardly presents all the rudiments of a true story. As it stands it can hardly
suffice to identify anything. We need at least another sentence
or two to put us in mind of a specific tragedy. From the point
of view of the modern writer the connection between characters and events may be all you need, but Aristotle insists
that these connections belong to the context of the individual
work, they function within its identity.
Of course, we do need to distinguish this naked version
from the one clothed with all the linguistic and imaginative
elaborations of published literature. A plot is only the barest
skeleton of what we ordinarily call a “story,” whereas print or
performance fix it in its fullness. We can agree with Forster’s
designation of such an outline as “plot” only as long as we
reserve the word “story” for a higher kind of being than the
�44
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
unconnected sequence of deaths out of which he forms his
first example. By “higher kind of being” I do not mean a socalled “short story.” In “story” we must find the essence of a
work of literature, its “soul,” as Aristotle says.
The distinction between story in its full and its synoptic
form is easy for Aristotle, since he can call any complete work
of literature (including plays) a “poem” (something made,
poiêma). For the “essential story” he has other words, words
like muthos and logos. How well do these Greek words correspond to “story” and “plot?”
Muthos vs. Logos
The clearest distinction between muthos and logos is made by
Plato rather than Aristotle. In the Phaedo (61B), Socrates says
that the god told him in his dream to make music. His
attempt to comply turns him to meter and rhythm, and to
story as well. To be a true poet, he says, he must make
muthos, not logos. However, Socrates protests that he is not
muthologikos enough to make up a story from scratch. So he
cheats. He borrows one of Aesop’s fables and adapts it to
meter. Now this bit of dialogue is interesting not only because
it separates muthos radically from logos, but because after
dividing them it recombines the terms into a single adjective,
muthologikos. Muthologikos is hard to translate: we need to
coin a noun that tells us Socrates’ flaw: he is no mythologue,
no teller of tales, no mythologician.4 Here, as so often,
Socrates pretends to a modesty he really lacks. He has no
qualms about making up a story and even calling it muthos
when he needs one in this and other dialogues.5 But the
significance of this passage for us lies in the way Socrates’
understanding of poetry forces him to keep muthos and logos
apart, which he may have forgotten to do elsewhere.
At first these terms seem almost interchangeable in
Aristotle’s Poetics, and some scholars (e.g. Fyfe) translate
them indifferently as either “plot” or “story.”6 For example,
STEPHENSON
45
at the end of chapter 17 Aristotle uses the word logos where
one might think muthos more appropriate. Here is his
complete description of the “logos” of the Odyssey:
A man is for many years away from home and his
footsteps are dogged by Poseidon and he is all
alone. Moreover, affairs at home are in such a
state that his estate is being wasted by suitors and
a plot laid against his son, but after being stormtossed he arrives himself, reveals who he is, and
attacks them, with the result that he is saved and
destroys his enemies. That is the essence (to idion),
the rest is episodes. (Fyfe, trans.)
Whether one calls this synopsis “plot” or “story” hardly
matters: the point is that even such a brief account allows us
to identify the whole work and distinguish it from any other.
It is an only slightly more extended distillation of story than
Forster’s simple “plot.” Note that Aristotle does not name the
man or his home or son. This summary is enough to fix the
game even without naming players. It is just enough to identify the book by its events alone. Names should come later in
the construction of a story, according to Aristotle, names that
indicate character by their meaning or names drawn from the
legendary list of characters that traditionally embody the
necessary traits. First sketch the story in general (katholou),
he says, then fill it in with episodes and choose names.
Perhaps it might help to see how Aristotle defines logos in
general (Poetics 20.11): “logos is a composite meaningful
utterance of which some parts mean something in themselves.” To this Aristotle adds that logos can be one either the
way a sentence is, or the way the whole Iliad is. That any
sentence is itself a logos should be clear. A word is an atom of
meaning. Out of words the sentence forms a compound that
is not just a mixture or average or blend: it is a unity that
generates new meaning out of these components. But the
�46
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
entire Iliad too is a logos, one whose parts are logoi— viz.,
sentences. From this point of view, what causes wholeness in
either a story or a sentence is clearly meaning, and the same
could perhaps be said of any logos, whether that word
signifies ratio or reason or speech.
But this is different for muthos. Muthos too is unified, but
it is unified around action, (praxis), rather than meaning.
Aristotle defines muthos as “a representation (mimêsis) of an
action. For I say,” he says, “that muthos is the synthesis of
deeds (pragmata).”
Consider Oedipus. He has performed a series of deeds,
many outside of the play: he leaves Corinth; he kills an arrogant old man at the crossroads; he solves the riddle of the
Sphinx; he marries the king’s widow and rules Thebes; he
hunts down the criminal responsible for the plague; he
consults oracles; he examines witnesses; he ignores the warnings of Tiresias and Jocasta; he looks for his true parents; he
finds out who they are; he blinds himself. The play binds all
these deeds into a single action: the action of self-discovery.
In the end, and only in the end, does he know who he is.
Thus, in a story, deeds culminate in action, and action is the
result of choice—hence the peculiarly human quality of
stories that the word logos does not capture. An epic or a
drama has a soul, and that soul is its muthos.
It is within Aristotle’s metaphor of life that one might best
seek the source of beauty in a poem, which, he says, “must be
constructed...round a single piece of action, whole and
complete in itself, with a beginning, middle and end, so that
like a single living organism it may produce its own peculiar
form of pleasure.” Beauty, he says, belongs to “a living creature or any organism composed of parts.” The very unity of
life, the unity that nature preserves in growth and reproduction, must evoke aesthetic pleasure in the scientific or philosophical observer; so also the imitation of that life in a poem
should inspire a similar wonder and delight in everyone, all
the more when it develops a story which—as story—always
STEPHENSON
47
involves human life moved by choice and will and character
as well as desire. The analogy with nature in general is not far
to seek: praxis is to kinêsis as humanity is to nature. For
praxis—political, moral, deliberate action—is a motion
proper only to humans, and this is what moves a play or an
epic forward. A rock falls from its nature as a rock and a seed
sprouts out of its nature too; a story imitates the activity that
defines a human being as a political and social animal.
I think we must decide for ourselves whether the beauty
of a story is the cause or the result of that unity that a human
being provides through the cooperation of his own character,
means and ends, that is to say, whether beauty resides in the
representation or in the action itself. If the natural organization of a living creature, and of man in particular, is reason
for delight; so also is the construction of a poem. A poem
about human beings, therefore, a play or an epic, can bear us
a double beauty.
We might try to capture the distinction between muthos
and logos by equating them to “story” and “plot,” respectively. But if we turn to elementary plots, such as the one
Aristotle offers for the Odyssey, we find their differences
eroding. The sense of these words start to shift and overlap.
Does Aristotle’s description reflect the meaning of the epic or
its action or something else? If by “meaning” we mean what
just suffices to identify it in words, then, yes, this plot is its
meaning. But the single action, the praxis that subsumes all
the deeds of the Odysseus to his story, his muthos, is harder
to find within this description. Perhaps it lies in the homecoming itself, of which the trials and triumphs are only
details. Or maybe at the most fundamental level plot and
story are the same thing, or different aspects of the same
thing, plot emphasizing the logical sequence and progression
of events and story emphasizing their subsumption under the
larger dramatic whole of human endeavor.
An epic like the Odyssey contains many stories: it is
polymythic, one might say. There is the story of the Cyclops,
�48
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and the story of Nausicaa, the tale of Telemachus’s trip to
Sparta and the story of the suitors’ slaughter. Similarly the
Iliad contains the “Diomediad,” Hector’s farewell, Priam’s
suit, Achilles’ scream on the wall, any one of which could
form the basis of a separate play. Each of these sequences
forms its own story. You remember Diomedes? Athena loves
him. With her help, he kills more heroes than Agamemnon
and Menelaus together, and even wounds the gods,
Aphrodite and Ares. Could not some author focus on him
alone? Or on Hector: the Trojan hero’s conquests in battle,
his sense of duty, the tender love of his wife and his son, his
willingness to sacrifice himself to protect Troy. There, too, is
a story worth isolating and presenting by itself. Each part of
the Iliad is its own story, and the whole epic is a story
composed of stories. So a story can be a higher unity in two
ways, a muthos muthôn—a story of stories, an action of
actions—or a logos logôn—a plot of plots, a meaning of
meanings. In this respect tragedies and epics differ: a tragedy
can contain only one story, one muthos, though it always
contains many logoi.
Aristotle limits the number of distinct poetic elements to
six. Muthos comes first, because he believes story to be the
aim and end of a poem. He ignores lyric poetry in this treatise, although he must know of Anacreon and Sappho and
Pindar. Why? The answer may be political: “the play’s the
thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Or
perhaps a poem with fewer elements is simply less of a poem.7
The remaining five poetic elements, listed in order of
importance, are: character (êthos); thought or reason (literally “thinking through”: dianoia); language, delivery or
diction (lexis, a word deriving obviously from legô); song
(melapoiia); spectacle (opsis). All of these, with the exception
of spectacle, figure in epic as well as tragedy. Character plays
an obvious role in any story. Thought, as understood here, is
the kind of thought that speech can exhibit, what displays
character and motive, but insofar as it dictates what is appro-
STEPHENSON
49
priate to a speaker and a situation, it could influence the poet
in a more general way. Aristotle refers the reader to his
Rhetoric for a full discussion of this topic. Lexis may be his
own coinage: at least, according to the Rhetoric (3.1), it is a
neglected art, however important to the public speaker— to
the poet as well, since this is what governs the choice of
words. Lexis or lexis en logô “is the interpretation by means
of words, which has the same power in prose and verse.” As
to the last two elements of a poem, melopoiia and opsis,
Aristotle says only that song is the more important.
So he has his own favorite list of features and advice to
the poet about how to improve many of them. The story must
progress from a “tightening” to a “loosening,” for example,
the first part building to a climax that turns happiness on its
head, after which the drama unravels to its natural end. For a
truly tragic effect, the hero of a story must be better than
ordinary, but must be brought low by a single failing, and his
fall must evoke pity and fear. The greatest of all writing skills
is the proper use of metaphor. This cannot be grasped from
anyone else. It is the sign of genius in a poet, since to
construct a good metaphor is to contemplate similarity.
Metaphor produces in miniature much of the pleasure of
poetry, for, Aristotle claims, we learn from metaphor the way
we learn from anything that raises our sights from species to
genus. And learning is the greatest pleasure. And so on.
Thus, the Poetics is full of such practical pointers for
writers. So is the Rhetoric. Although that treatise deals with
speeches rather than stories (the word muthos, therefore
never appears) it is worth reading for its general advice.
Aristotle could be a modern writing instructor after all. He
gives many writing tips that still work.
Other kinds of poetry might alter the order of importance
in his list. Some will disagree with Aristotle’s preferences
even in the drama or epic. Beautiful, well-crafted language,
for example: isn’t that what we love most in Shakespeare?
Wordsworth? Virginia Woolf? Should language always be
�50
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
subordinated to story-line? What about character?
Nowadays, writers often aim for “character-driven” rather
than “plot-driven” stories, that is, they spend their energy on
the development and delineation of characters, and then
pretend to sit back and let the characters lead where they will.
But this brings us back to story. Perhaps the truth is that such
works too are “story-driven,” if not plot-driven. Even those
who disregard Aristotle’s recommendation to begin with plot
must end up with some kind of unity. Can dialogue and
narrative come to life without something like a soul?
History of Muthos and Logos
Homer did not like the word, logos, or at least did not appreciate its philosophical or poetic implications. It appears only
twice in his epics: once in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey.
With only these two examples available, it is hard to discern
any peculiarities the word might entail for Homer, but it must
have been a rare or strange term to him. Patroklos takes
pleasure in logos when applying his medical knowhow to
tend Eurypylos’s wounds (Book 15). What could the word
mean here? “Chat?” “Banter?” “The anecdotes of heroes?”
The context gives us even less help with meaning in the
Odyssey, where logoi figure only among Calypso’s charms.
Maybe the word simply had not yet acquired the power
that philosophy or mathematics or even the law courts were
to give it in later times. It obviously derives from the verb
legô, whose oldest sense referred more to gathering and
selecting than to speaking, and that is how it is used in the
Iliad: in Book 23 Achilles commands his companions to
gather up (legômen) Patroklos’s bones for the funeral pyre.
From this primitive sense gradually evolved the mode of
speech signified by legô in Attic Greek.8 That is, to speak well
requires the collection and ordering of perceptions and ideas,
and this is the province of logos. Perhaps, therefore, the best
rendering of the verb in English is “recount”—one can
STEPHENSON
51
recount an experience or an adventure for the pleasure of the
audience. As to its corresponding noun, “account,” that too
can lend authority to the telling of a tale as well as reckon up
cost. Both English words express the ordering (and even
enumerating) function of discourse. In this way one can see
how after Homer the mathematical sense of the word developed naturally alongside its reference to speech.
Homer has no such hesitation about muthos. That word
laces many pages of his epics. Agamemnon sends away the
priest Chryses with a harsh word (muthos), for example, and
Nestor is accused of loving words too much (again muthos).
Sometimes, as if to emphasize Agamemnon’s despotism, its
meaning verges on “command,” but in most places, wherever
a later Greek author might use the word logos, Homer is
comfortable with muthos. In the second example one might
find a trace of its later connection to the specifics of storytelling—long-winded Nestor loves to tell tales of his past
heroism and revels in the words that recall it. But nowhere
can you discover any allusion to myth or fable or falsehood.
You accuse Nestor of exaggeration at your own peril.
Even in Plato’s dialogues the suggestion that muthos
signifies a flight of fancy would be a mistake. The “myth of
Er” in the Republic, the charioteer in the Phaedrus,
Persephone’s provisions for the rebirth of souls in the Meno:
these all have distinctive places in the dialogues, but none of
them can be dismissed as mere entertainment. Even the cave
depicted in Book 6 of the Republic is more than allegory. All
of these muthoi are more than myth. That is, muthos and
logos do not part company until much later, when truth and
fiction become the touchstones of modern discourse. They
have a long way to go before they spawn myth and logic in
the English language. Truth can adopt a mythological as well
as a dialectical or scientific form. Perhaps our modern
tendency to sunder fact from fiction absolutely makes us
exclude some mysterious region where they cooperate or
�52
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
overlap, a region Socrates saw how to exploit. Lying may be
a way to tell the truth better.
Aristotle expresses this succinctly in the Poetics: “Homer
has also taught others how best to lie,” he says (24.18), and
in constructing stories one should “choose the plausible
impossible rather than the unpersuasive possible.” Poetic
effect justifies exaggeration and distortion, he claims, as in the
case of Hector’s flight from Achilles. For Hector to outrun
swift-footed Achilles so long while the rest of the army stands
idly by strains credibility. But it also vividly exhibits Hector’s
desperation and emphasizes the imminence of Achilles’ own
demise, which will seize him soon after Hector’s death. In
answer to critics who object to a story on the grounds that it
is untrue, Aristotle suggests the reply, “But perhaps it should
be.” One can paint people as better than they are—“for the
paradigm exalts,” he says. So also other elaborations or idealizations may prove more fruitful in poetry than technical
accuracy.9
Nowhere is Aristotle’s appreciation of the value of poetry
more apparent than when he measures it against history. This
is another version of his preference of the possible to the
actual. The historian “tells what happened,” he says, “the
[poet] what might happen. On account of this, poetry is more
serious (spoudaioteron) and philosophic than history. For
poetry says things in general, but history in particular.”
History Itself
In his History of the Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides admits
that some readers will dislike his work because it lacks
muthôdes character, which one scholar translates as
“romance.” Literally, of course, the adjective means “storylike”—muthos + eidos.10 Whether that criticism is justified or
not, I leave you to determine. But if muthos neither denies
nor requires reality for its foundation, and implies only the
unity of human action, it is possible to find much that is story-
STEPHENSON
53
like in Thucydides’ book. For Thucydides does not confine
himself to the mere reporting of facts; he is interested in
causes as a story writer is, and, if he has to seek them in the
mere inference of document and speech and event, and,
unlike the poet, has no more than speculative access to minds
of his characters, so much the better if he succeeds in finding
the plausible and persuasive in his speculations.
Indeed, there is no one character to focus on throughout
the Peloponnesian Wars except Thucydides himself, and he
appears in the flesh only once in the course of his narrative.
However, Aristotle insists (Poetics, 8.1) the unity of a poem
should not derive from the unity of the hero, but rather from
the unity of his action. If, therefore, the war between Athens
and Sparta is not just an unconnected series of advances and
retreats, debates and battles, then perhaps it has an identity
that can give it the wholeness approximating that of a story,
of a muthos. After all, what above all makes a deed one is its
purpose, and what arranges deeds into a story is the progression of a series of deeds to a higher goal that reaches beyond
and above the separate and unrelated determinations of an
individual. Consider Oedipus, who discovers his identity at
the end of a criminal investigation aimed at anyone but
himself, the procession of witnesses whose independently
innocent responses spiral slowly inward of their own accord.
Or Achilles, whose bloody triumph on the battlefield of Troy
is forced upon him by his repeated refusals to fight. It is the
oneness of action that unifies the deeds of one man, and not
the reverse, and this is the very unity celebrated in tragedy
and epic. Perhaps a better name for that kind of grand unity
is “fate,” not because the gods force it upon the heroes of
these stories, but because their lives and their deeds acquire
meaning and power and beauty precisely in our understanding of this unity.
We have to take Aristotle’s demotion of character seriously. A story does not derive its unity from the singleness of
its protagonist, but from the wholeness of its action. This is
�54
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
hard to swallow. Can an action be one if it arises out of the
deeds of more than one person? This is a question crucial to
our inquiry into the action of history. But Thucydides would
not be the only author to think about cities as analogous to
men, and thereby to suggest that they have character like men
and might even act on the world’s stage like the actors in a
play.
So, if we can find the story in the Peloponnesian Wars,
perhaps we can discover a purpose to the great concatenation
of human events that compose that conflict and that history,
one that would justify Thucydides’ claim to have written his
book “not as an essay which is to win the applause of the
moment, but as a possession for all time.”
1 Aristotle has his recommendations, too, and many of them are quite as
helpful as those of modern writers on writing. The Poetics is full of advice
to the budding poet; so is his Rhetoric: I recommend Book three of the
latter to anyone planning an essay.
2
I am assuming that the queen’s heart was broken because the king died,
otherwise the second version, which Forster offers as “plot,” remains very
incomplete and misleading.
3
That history might better include some speculation as to causes is an
objection incidental to the present distinction, though we can return to it
later.
4
It would be a mistake to settle on “mythologist” as the proper translation here.
5 Aesop’s “fables,” by the way, are muthoi for Plato, as you might expect,
but Aristotle uses the word logos when he refers to them (Rhetoric, 2.20,
passim).
6
It is worth noting that Latin retains or even extends the breadth of
meaning of the word logos in cognates, like “lex” and “lego,” but to my
knowledge has no cognate or equivalent of muthos.
7
Later, Aristotle declares epic poetry inferior to tragedy in part because it
lacks the elements of music and spectacle.
STEPHENSON
55
8
So also in English, the “tale” of one’s woes could begin with enumeration, continue with anecdote, and only after much retelling finally expand
into story
9
There is either irony or venom in Aristotle’s comment, however, for he
knows Socrates attacked the poets (in the Republic and in Ion) for lacking
the technical knowledge that their subject matter requires. Aristotle seems
much more forgiving or even encouraging to the liar.
10
Could there be a pun here? muthos + ôdê rather than eidos? That is,
an allusion to the lack of melody in his history?
�56
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
57
Meaning and Truth in Klein’s
Philosophico-Mathematical
Writings
Burt C. Hopkins
I want to begin my remarks with an apology for their
imposing title, which is the product of my profession, for I
am a professional philosopher. I am therefore manifestly not
a Tutor but a Professor, and, as such, a significant portion of
what I am required to spend my time doing is called—on my
view mistakenly—“research.” One of the expectations my
profession brings with it is that my research be “specialized,”
and to this end I have spent the better part of the last twentyfive years focusing my research on the phenomenological
philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger—the
two German giants of European philosophy in the first half of
the twentieth century. Jacob Klein also spent a significant
amount of time studying these phenomenological philosophies. Moreover, he attributed great things to both philosophers: Heidegger, in Klein’s own words, was “the first man
who made me understand something written by another man,
namely Aristotle”;1 and Husserl, again in Klein’s words,
“pointed to . . . a character of speech to which the ancients
apparently did pay only scant attention,”2 a character that
Husserl, and Klein following Husserl, called “sedimentation.”
From my own studies of Husserl and Heidegger, I know
that—when viewed within the context of their own
thought—both of these characteristics singled out by Klein
Burt Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University, and is Secretary
of the International Circle of Husserl Scholars. He is currently completing a
book, entitled Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein on the Origination of the
Logic of Symbolic Mathematics: An Inquiry into the Historicity of Meaning.
This essay was delivered as a lecture at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, on April
29, 2005.
�58
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
are the result of each thinker’s thematic engagement with the
concepts of meaning and truth. This consideration, therefore,
brings me back to the apology for my imposing title, because
Klein never treats either of these concepts in a thematic
manner in his writings, and I think, given the apposition of
Heidegger’s and Husserl’s philosophies to his own thought, it
is legitimate to wonder and then investigate why this is. I
should add that not only scholarly curiosity leads me to
wonder about this, but also the nature of the interrelationship
between the most fundamental problems posed by Klein’s
writings, namely, how to understand properly the radically
different conceptualities that determine the meaning and
truth of the most basic concepts that belong, respectively, to
ancient Greek and modern European science, and how best
to overcome what Klein once spoke of as the “symbolic unreality”3 that is characteristic of “the modern idea of knowledge
and science.”4
To say that meaning and truth are not thematically treated
as concepts in Klein’s writings, then, is not to say that one
cannot find in his writings discussions that take up the
meaning of things or the concept of their truth. After all,
Klein, more than any other thinker in the twentieth century,
wrote about the meaning of the ancient Greek concept of
number, and, indeed, he compared and contrasted this
concept’s meaning with the meaning of the modern concept
of number. In addition, Klein, more than any other twentieth
century thinker, wrote about the fundamental change in the
relation of science to truth that occurred when, in a process
he identified as beginning in the sixteenth century,5 the
ancient meaning of the concept of number was transformed
into the modern meaning. But it is to say that Klein neither
writes about meaning and truth as concepts—about what
contemporary professional philosophers would call “the
concepts of meaning and truth,”—nor ever discusses which
concepts of meaning and truth presumably validate or otherwise justify the philosophical claims that he makes about the
HOPKINS
59
different conceptualities of ancient Greek and modern
European science.
There is, perhaps, a ready explanation for this, namely,
that Klein had no use for what he called “Modern ‘philosophical’ jargon,”6 and that he therefore sought to avoid it as
much as possible. Talk of the concepts of meaning and truth,
even by thinkers of the stature of Husserl and Heidegger,
would have to count for Klein as such jargon, because it is the
very thesis of his magnum opus, Greek Mathematical Thought
and the Origin of Algebra,7 that the philosophical preoccupation with concepts per se is a distinctly modern preoccupation. Moreover, if not in this work, then certainly in his
subsequent lectures and essays, such a preoccupation is
viewed as a philosophical mistake. Thus, in a lecture given in
1939, Klein says, “it is doubtful whether philosophy exists
today,”8 and he clearly suggests that the reason for this is that
“all our life and thoughts are molded by” the existence of a
science that is not doubtful, namely, “mathematical physics.”
And because, in Klein’s words, “the medium of mathematical
physics, or rather its very nerve, is symbolic mathematics,”
and because, moreover, this nerve (according to his Math
Book) is only made possible by concepts that refer solely to
other concepts and not to the individual objects to which
they, as concepts, should properly and rightfully refer, on his
view contemporary “philosophy’s” near total preoccupation
with such concepts per se is not worthy of philosophy’s good
name.
According to this explanation, the attempt to investigate
the concepts of meaning and truth in Klein’s writings, especially in his philosophico-mathematical writings, that is to
say, his writings on the history of the philosophy of mathematics as well as the history of mathematics itself, would be
misguided if this inquiry were oriented by the very concepts
of meaning and truth that these writings demonstrate are a
philosophically derivative byproduct of the modern “‘scientific’ consciousness.”9 According to Klein, these concepts are
�60
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
“abstractions of abstractions…which at the same time we
interpret as being in direct contact with the world.”10 They
are hardly suitable for taking the measure of any thinker’s
thought, let alone Klein’s, of all thinkers. Klein pointed out
something that even Husserl and Heidegger did not see,
namely, that the meaning of concepts as well as the meaning
of truth underwent a radical and irrevocable transformation
of their ancient and classical “meanings” in modern thought.
Therefore to properly investigate meaning and truth in
Klein’s writings on the philosophy of mathematics, one
would have to—at least according to this line of thought—
begin by comparing the status of meaning and truth in Klein’s
writings with its status in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s.
Even though Klein mentions Heidegger by name just one
time in his writings that I know of,11 and refers to him once
more without mentioning his name,12 it is still not much of an
exaggeration to say that in a certain sense Klein’s entire
thinking is informed by a fundamental criticism of a fundamental aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy. Specifically, Klein
criticizes Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato and the role that
this interpretation plays in Heidegger’s criticism of Aristotle
and then, growing out of this criticism, Heidegger’s account
of the continuity of metaphysical thinking from ancient
Greek to contemporary twentieth-century philosophers.
Heidegger maintains that Plato’s philosophy is guided by an
unexamined presupposition about the meaning of the Being
of beings, namely, that this meaning is determined by the
static cognition of what they are, and that this cognition
conceals within itself the likewise unexamined presupposition
that, inseparable from how they are, is their constant availability in terms of their “looks” (eidos) to the logos of any
soul that bothers to look at them.
With only two references to Heidegger in all of his writings (neither one of which, by the way, directly engages
Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato), my claim about the critical relationship of Klein’s thought to Heidegger’s may
HOPKINS
61
appear to some as tenuous. However, the following considerations should remove any doubt about this matter. In 1925,
Heidegger gave a lecture course on Plato’s Sophist, which was
published after his death in a volume based on his and his
students’ notes. According to Leo Strauss, in 1925 Klein
attended Heidegger’s classes regularly.13 Toward the end of
the course, Heidegger has this to say about 253d5-e2 of the
Sophist: “I confess that I do not genuinely understand
anything of this passage and that the individual statements
have in no way become clear to me, even after long
study.”14Heidegger then goes on to single out precisely what
he does not understand:
(1.) Mian idean dia pollôn… diaisthanetai (d5ff.),
the dialectician “sees one idea throughout many,”
one determinateness of beings in its presence in
many, of which henos ekastou keimenou chôris
(d6), “each lies there detached from the others,”
such that this idea, which is seen throughout all
the others, pantê diatetamenên (d6), is extended
and ordered from all sides.
(2.) . . . kai pollas heteras allêlôn (d7), the dialectician sees many ideas, which are different from one
another in substantive content—this is partly
understandable—but then Plato adds: hupo mias
exôthen periechomenas (d7f.), “they are encompassed by one idea from the outside.”
(3.) kai mian au di’holôn pollôn en heni sunêmmenên (d8f.), the dialectician sees “that the one
idea is again gathered together into one
throughout many wholes.”
(4.) kai pollas chôris pantê diôrismenas (d9), the
dialectician sees “that many ideas are completely
detached from one another.”15
�62
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Heidegger mentions and rejects the traditional interpretation,
which “has been eased by the introduction of a distinction
between genos and eidos, genus and species,”16 because it is
based on an “unjustifiable procedure, since Plato precisely
does not make that distinction.” Heidegger therefore
concludes, “so in fact it remains completely obscure what is
meant by this mian di’ holôn pollôn en heni sunêmmenên
[one idea is again gathered together into one throughout
many wholes], and furthermore by the hupo mias exôthen
periechesthai [they are encompassed by one idea from the
outside] and above all by the keimenou chôris [lies there
detached] within the unity of one idea.”17
The fact that Klein most likely was in attendance when
Heidegger articulated these words (or, at the very least, was
made aware of them by others who heard them), decides, of
course, nothing about the relationship of his thought to
Heidegger’s. However, the fact that the apex of the first half
of Klein’s Math Book, Chapter 7C, presents a detailed understanding of precisely what Heidegger confessed was
“completely obscure” in the Sophist, does indeed decide
something about this relationship. In that chapter, Klein presents an understanding of the Stranger’s and Theaetetus’s
dialogue in the Sophist about the division of intelligibles that
takes aim at the following: Heidegger’s philosophy of the
continuity belonging to the putative unquestioned meaning
of the Being of beings in the metaphysical tradition, a continuity that, beginning with Plato, is supposed, unquestioningly, to think that Being is the being present to the logos—in
cognition—of beings. Indeed, there can be no mistake about
this: the heart of Klein’s chapter in the Math Book offers an
understanding of the second directive in the Sophist
regarding the division of intelligibles, that is, the directive
concerning different ideas being encompassed by one idea
from the outside, which shows that “Being” is not thought
here as something present to the logos in the cognition of
beings. Moreover, Klein’s Math Book as a whole shows that,
HOPKINS
63
rather than continuity, there is a radical discontinuity
between the way “Being” is understood by Plato and Aristotle
and the way it is understood in modern philosophy.
Klein’s Math Book establishes its understanding of the
Stranger’s directives about division by taking into account
Aristotle’s references to the Platonic theory of “eidetic
numbers” (arithmoi eidetikoi), specifically, his report that
Plato attributed a numerical mode of being to the eidê which,
in one important respect, is distinct from the mode of being
of mathematical numbers. While others before Klein had
taken up the issue of the relationship between Greek mathematics and Greek philosophy that is so important for the
formation of both mathematical and philosophical concepts,
both generally and in the particular case of Plato’s philosophy
(most notably Julius Stentzel, J. Cook Wilson, and Oskar
Becker), Jacob Klein was the first—and remains to this day
the only18—thinker to make “an attempt”19 to do so from, in
his words, “within the structure of the arithmos concept
itself.”20 Attempts before and after Klein’s to interpret
Aristotle’s reports about Plato’s “unwritten teaching,”
namely, that the eidê are in some sense numbers, approach
talk about numbers from the conceptual level of modern
mathematics, that is to say, from the modern symbolic
concept of number. Klein’s attempt, therefore, stands alone in
its endeavor to approach both Greek mathematics and Greek
ontology from a conceptual level that does not presuppose
the basic concepts of modern mathematics.
What Klein modestly refers to in his Math Book as his
“attempt” to think the relationship between Greek mathematics and Greek ontology from “within the structure of
arithmos concept itself,” is actually a veritable philosophical,
mathematical, and historical tour de force that ranges over
ancient texts on the one hand—neo-Platonic and neoPythagorean mathematics, and Pythagorean, Platonic, and
Aristotelian philosophy—and, on the other hand, early
modern mathematics and early modern philosophy, while
�64
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
linking them all together in the modern’s interpretation of
the arithmetical work of Diophantus. Three themes orient
Klein’s historical investigations of the mathematics involved
here together with its philosophy: (1) the shift that the
meaning of the concept of number underwent in the transition from ancient Greek to modern mathematics; (2) what
makes this shift possible; and (3) the attendant shift in the
very conceptuality of the “objects” of science and knowledge
generally—in the very meaning of science and scientific truth,
from the ancient to the modern meaning.
These themes, in turn, are tied together by Klein’s
account of the similarity between (1) the Platonic attempt to
grasp the proportional relationships between numbers in
mathematics and the analogical relationships between eidê in
ontology in terms of the isomorphism of their relationships
with the very structure of the arithmos concept itself; and (2)
the modern interpretation of symbolic calculation as the
complete realization of the ancient general theory of proportions. Both the Platonic attempt and the modern interpretation, in Klein’s words, “exceeded the bounds set for the
logos,”21 precisely insofar as each assigns to eidê, to
“concepts,” a numerical characteristic. And this means
nothing more and nothing less than that for ancient Greek
philosophy, as for contemporary philosophy (insofar, that is,
as “philosophy” can still be said to exist), there is an insuperable limit to that which the logos—speech—can make intelligible, and this limit is reached when numerical characteristics
are attributed to what the Greeks called “eidê” or “ideas” and
the moderns (both the early ones, the so-called fathers of
modernity, and us, their contemporary progeny) call “general
concepts” or “general objects.”
The reason for this, according to Klein, is, for all its
complexity, relatively straightforward, namely: numbers
properly refer to individual objects, that is, to more than one
of them; numbers, therefore, refer to a “multitude” of
objects, and, moreover, to exactly “how many” of them there
HOPKINS
65
are, while number concepts (eidê) properly refer to the characteristics of numbers that are responsible for the exact
delimitation of the “how many” inseparable from each
number. Numbers are therefore many, and number concepts
are one, albeit not one in the sense of each one of the many
ones that are assembled together by every number, but “one”
in the very different sense of “unity.” Moreover, even though
there are many number concepts responsible for the exact
delimitation of each number, for instance, the two most
important concepts of the “odd” and the “even,” each of
these concepts is not itself many but one (in the sense of a
unity). Hence, to ascribe to any number concept a “numerical” characteristic, specifically, the characteristic of its being
many, cannot make sense, because while numbers are intrinsically multitudinous, number concepts are not. Moreover,
not just number concepts, but any concept that is related to
their being “many” of something—many horses, many
philosophers, many emotions, and so on—is one in the sense
of being a unity. Hence Klein’s conclusion, that Plato’s theory
of eidetic numbers, of concepts whose unity is in some sense
“numerical,” cannot, strictly speaking, make sense to the
logos, to speech. Likewise, because of this fundamental difference between what a number is and what a concept is, Klein
also concludes that the modern mathematical general concept
(or, what amounts to the same thing, general object) cannot,
again strictly speaking, be said to be “numerical” in a manner
that makes any sense.
Of course, the question how Klein knows that there is a
fundamental difference between numbers and number
concepts, not to mention how he can know that there is a
radical shift in the meaning of the ancient Greek concept of
number and the modern one, returns us to the topic
announced in my title. This is the case because what Klein
knows about these matters is presumably something that he
(and those who follow him on this) thinks is true. This means
that Klein must know that it is true (1) that numbers and
�66
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
number concepts, despite their relationship, are fundamentally different; (2) that the Greek and the modern concepts of
number and number concepts have different meanings; and
(3) that because of (2), the Greek and the modern meanings
of philosophical and scientific truth are different. In other
words, for Klein to know what he thinks he knows, he must
know the truth of something that cannot be true for either
“the Greeks” or “the moderns,” namely, that the true
meaning of their concepts of number and truth are radically
different. In the case of the Greeks, they did not, among
other things, live long enough to discover this truth; in the
case of the moderns, they were prevented from discovering
this because they believed (and continue to believe) that the
superiority of their concepts and truth over the ancient Greek
ones is a superiority that is based in their completion and
perfection of the Greek concepts and their truth.
But I am getting ahead of myself here. Before considering
the question of meaning and truth in Klein’s writings, we
need to return to the critical challenge that Klein’s Math Book
presents to Heidegger’s understanding of both Plato and the
continuity of the putative metaphysical meaning of the Being
of beings in the history of philosophy. As we have intimated,
this challenge takes issue with the distinctly modern preoccupation with concepts per se that informs Heidegger’s
approach to Plato’s philosophy, and therefore may have an
important bearing on the topic of meaning and truth in
Klein’s writings. Heidegger’s approach to Plato’s philosophy
supposes that the meaning of Being is not interrogated by this
philosophy but is already understood—uncritically—as the
eidos, the “look” of something that is present to cognition
and therefore available to the logos, to speech. Moreover, he
supposes that something “remains completely obscure” in the
Stranger’s dialectical directive regarding ideas that are
different from one another being perceived as encompassed
by one idea from the outside. Contrary to this last supposition, Klein’s Math Book endeavors to show that there is in the
HOPKINS
67
Sophist, albeit in a veiled way, an articulation of how ideas
that are different can nevertheless be encompassed from the
outside by one idea. Because of the nature of the problem
addressed in the Sophist, what Klein refers to as the problem
belonging to the ontological participation of the ideas with
one another, the account offered there cannot, on Klein’s
view, be expected to be “completely clear.” Nevertheless,
Klein shows, contra Heidegger, not only that it is not
“completely obscure,” but also that the question of Being is
not “one” but “twofold.” This has the following consequences: (1) Being for Plato has an intelligible structure; (2)
Being’s intelligible structure can be articulated into its parts,
although it cannot be, strictly speaking, known, because the
logos is unable to give an account of these parts that is not
paradoxical; and (3), because of the truth of (2), it is manifestly false to think, as Heidegger does, that Being in Plato is
something that has or is “meaning.” And, once the latter is
recognized to be the case, the resultant alienation from
Plato’s philosophy of the meaning of Being that Heidegger
ascribes to it, as well as that of this putative meaning’s alienation from the history of philosophy, becomes apparent.
Klein illuminates the veiled manner in which Being’s
intelligible structure is manifest in the Sophist by using
Aristotle’s account of Plato’s unwritten doctrine in a way that
takes seriously what they report while bypassing their
polemic against the report’s contents. Moreover, Klein places
the account of numbers from both Aristotle’s texts and
Plato’s dialogues within the context of his “reconstruction”
of the phenomenon of number, arithmos, which he maintains
provides the basis for the theoretical considerations about the
proper mode of being belonging to numbers that is found in
ancient Greek mathematics and philosophy. Finally, the sine
qua non of Klein’s reconstruction of the ancient Greek
arithmos is that its mode of being is non-symbolic; that is, it
is not symbolic in the sense that both the number concept and
the numbers themselves that belong to modern mathematical
�68
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
analysis—that is, to modern algebra—must be characterized
as symbolic.
Klein discerns the intelligible structure of Being in the
Sophist on the basis of what he refers to as its “arithmological”22 structure, a structure that is related to, but not identical with, the basic structure proper to the Greek arithmos.
The latter, in Klein’s words, is “grounded in the phenomenon
of counting,”23 and according to him its basic structure
precedes “all the possible differences of opinion” regarding
the mode of being of number in Greek mathematics and
philosophy. Klein characterizes this basic structure as a
“definite amount of definite things,” and singles out two
intrinsic peculiarities that belong to it. Both peculiarities, it is
important to note, assume a fundamental significance for
Klein’s understanding of the different “conceptualities” characteristic of Greek and modern science. The first peculiarity
concerns the reference to more than one thing—that is, to a
multitude that is inseparable from each arithmos. The second
concerns the exactitude of this reference: each arithmos
delimits precisely so many things.
These characteristics belonging to the structure of
arithmos are basic to and therefore underlie the different
ancient views of its mode of being, because, despite their
differences, all of these views share the common assumption
that each arithmos is both one and many: it is “many,” insofar
as it refers to more than one thing; it is “one,” insofar as each
arithmos is exactly the “unity” of the amount in question.
Accounting for how this mode of being belonging to numbers
comes about—how not only the unity of each number is able
to refer to an exactly delimited multitude, but also how each
different number is able to delimit a different amount of
things—was the business of ancient Greek theoretical arithmetic and logistic according to Klein. Significantly, for him,
neither of these Greek sciences had as their subject matter
numbers, but rather the eidê of numbers, above all the “odd”
and the “even.” Klein explains that the reason for this is
HOPKINS
69
rooted in the basic structure of the numbers themselves: theoretical mathematicians appealed to these eidê in the attempt
to account for both the one-over-many structure of number
in general, and the different amounts that characterize the
unity of each different number.
Plato, on Klein’s view, did not think that the mathematics
of his day, or, indeed, the mathematics of all time, succeeded
or could ever succeed in explaining either the basic one-overmany structure of numbers or the differentiations—in accordance with the different numbers—of the unities proper to
the being one of each different number. Plato’s reason for this
is simple: it cannot ever make sense to the discerning logos to
say that something is both one and many—that the many is
one and the one is many. Thoughtfulness about numbers,
therefore, in contrast to counting or calculating with them,
exceeds the bounds set by the logos, by speech that is intelligible, for “accounting for” what it is that is thought.
Notwithstanding this, the combined thoughtfulness of the
mathematician and the philosopher, both together, is able to
recognize in the two kinds of unity characteristic of the mode
of being of numbers (viz., the one-over-many unity in general
and the different unity of the different amounts characteristic
of each different number) the following: the mode of being
of a unity that unites separate things in a manner allowing
them to belong together even though their unity, as a whole,
is “outside” or “external” to them. And it is precisely the
“common thing” (koinon) of this unity that can be recognized
as being responsible for the belonging together, the “community” (koinonia) of mathematical things whose mode of being
is otherwise separate from one another—or of ontological
things whose mode of being, likewise, is otherwise separate
from one another. In other words, it is the structure of this
unity, which Klein refers to as “arithmological,” that holds
the key to understanding the dialectical directive in the
Sophist and thus the key to legitimating my claim that Klein’s
entire thought can be properly understood to be informed by
�70
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
a fundamental critique of Heidegger’s disputing that this
directive can be understood.
What is it that can only be recognized by the philosopher
and the theoretical mathematician, both together? The theoretical mathematician recognizes the peculiar one-over-many
mode of being of numbers, wherein each number is
composed of many things, each of which is counted not as the
thing that it is but as “one”: anything at all can be counted
only because the items really counted are understood to be
identical ones that are many, indivisible, and, therefore, intelligible. The philosopher recognizes that the two unities
involved in the mode of being of numbers cannot be
accounted for, with precision, by the eidê of numbers
appealed to by the theoretical mathematician, namely, by the
“odd” and the “even.” The philosopher realizes this because
the mode of being of the unity of each of these “concepts” is
also one over many, albeit in a different manner than that of
numbers. Each concept, the “odd,” the “even,” is both a
unity—as what can or cannot be divided evenly—and a multitude, because what can or cannot be evenly divided is
precisely not one but many. Thus the philosopher’s thoughtfulness recognizes that the thought of the theoretical mathematician mixes together that which, if our logos—our
speech—is to make sense, cannot be combined: the one and
the many. Both together, however, the philosopher and the
mathematician can recognize what neither one of them alone
can recognize: the unity of each number is something that is
“outside” of the many things, and the many ones that it
unifies as just this determinate amount. The unity of the
Stranger and Theaetetus, as two interlocutors, is, as a whole,
outside of each one of them: neither the Stranger nor
Theaetetus is “two,”—as each is rather precisely not two but
one—nevertheless, both together are exactly “two.”
This joint recognition of the common thing that is
responsible for the belonging together or community of identical ones or monads in an arithmos, however, addresses
neither the problem of accounting for the many different
HOPKINS
71
numbers, that is, for what makes one number, say “two,”
different from another, say “three,” nor the Stranger’s directive about the dialectician seeing one idea encompassing from
“outside” many different ideas. It does not address the first,
“mathematical” problem, because each of the wholes that are
outside of the ones or monads, and that as such compose the
common thing that is responsible for the belonging together
of the mathematical monads, must comprise a different
“common thing” in the instance of each different number—if
the fact that there are many different numbers is to be
addressed. It does not address the second, “philosophical”
problem, because the very terms of the Stranger’s directive
stipulate that the many ideas that are encompassed by one
idea are different ideas, whereas the many monads encompassed by one number are the same.
What does address these mathematical and philosophical
problems, is the Stranger’s and Theaetetus’ failed attempt to
count the first “three” of the “five” greatest ideas, namely,
Rest, Change, and Being. Even though Rest and Change are
opposites and therefore manifestly different ideas, they are
both encompassed from the “outside” by the idea of Being.
Both together have to be recognized as Being, since neither
Rest nor Change, by themselves, can be recognized as Being.
(If either Rest or Change were thought to be Being, impossible things would happen: for Rest to be, it would have to
change: for Change to be, it would have to rest.) The idea of
Being, however, cannot be recognized as something different
from Rest and Change, because then neither Rest nor Change
would be at all. Hence, the only possibility left is to recognize
that, just as neither the Stranger nor Theaetetus alone is
“two,” but only both taken together are “two,” likewise,
neither Rest nor Change is Being, but only both taken
together are Being. According to Klein, the Sophist instantiates an aspect of what Aristotle reported about Plato’s
unwritten doctrine, namely, that the ideas are in some sense
numbers, and that in addition to mathematical numbers there
are eidetic numbers. Moreover, the dialogue also exhibits the
�72
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
difference between mathematical and eidetic numbers
reported by Aristotle: that the monads of the former are
many and alike, while those of the latter are many but not
alike and are therefore not comparable. Thus the idea
belonging to Being, as a whole, is like the whole belonging to
a mathematical number: it encompasses from the “outside”
the many monads that it, as a whole, brings together;
however, it and what it brings together are also unlike a mathematical number, because the intelligible monads that the
mathematical number brings together in the unity of one
number are identical—while the intelligible monads that the
eidetic number brings together are different. This is illustrated in the Sophist: The ideas belonging to Rest and Change
are different; nevertheless, the idea belonging to Being, like
the whole belonging to number, exhibits an “arithmological”
structure, although, just as in the case of the mode of being of
the mathematical arithmos, the mode of being of the eidetic
arithmos exceeds the limits set by the logos. In the former
instance, as we have seen, this is the case for Klein because
the mode of being of both mathematical numbers and their
concepts mixes the one and the many; in the latter instance,
this is the case because the attempt to give an account of the
“parts” of Being, namely, the ideas Rest and Change separately as well as the idea of both together, counts “three” of
them—Rest “one,” Change “two,” and both together “three,”
—when, in truth, there are only “two”: the ideas of Rest and
Change. The eidetic number of the idea of Being, then, is
“Two,” not “three.”
Contra Heidegger, therefore, Klein’s Math Book shows
that Being is not characterized by Plato as the idea of something that is present to cognition and therefore available to
the logos, and, in the process of showing this, he shows that
the Stranger’s second dialectical directive is not completely
obscure. Only the “arithmological” structure of the community of ideas, that is, the one idea encompassing many ideas
from “outside,” can provide the “paradigm” for the structure
HOPKINS
73
of the one over many mode of being of mathematical
numbers, and not vice versa. Moreover, only the taxis, the
order of eidetic numbers beginning with the eidetic “Two,”
the idea of Being, can account for the many discrete mathematical numbers, for the differences in the one over many
unity of each arithmos as exactly so many. In addition, only
the “arithmological” structure of the community of ideas can
account for the many genê and eidê of that which has Being,
and for the analogia, the proportion, by means of which both
certain mathematical problems and the Being of certain
things can be understood. In other words, the “foundation”
of the Being of both quantitative and qualitative beings, of the
beings counted and calculated with by mathematical thinking,
and the beings collected and divided by dialectical thinking,
are the arithmoi eidetikoi.
As I have already suggested, because of the numerical
character that is ascribed to this foundation, specifically, to
the ascription of a number-like being to its eidetic “concepts,”
Klein maintains that the “solution” to the problem of the one
and the many that is provided by the theory of eidetic
numbers, is in his words, “bought . . . at the price of the transgression of the limits which are set for the logos.”24 For not
only is the “ordinary mode of predication, such as: ‘the horse
is an animal’, ‘the dog is an animal’, etc., no longer understandable,” but the “natural” meaning of number, as the exact
amount of a multitude of things, “is now lost.” (The former
is the case, because the “arithmological” unity is precisely
something that cannot be predicated of that which it unifies:
neither the mathematical monads in an arithmetical number,
nor the eidetic monads in an eidetic number can be said to be
the number in question, as a horse or a dog can both be said
to be an animal. The latter is the case because the monads in
an eidetic number cannot be counted and therefore do not
have an exact amount.) If Klein is right about Plato’s philosophy, this much is clear: Being is neither a concept nor something that can be known and articulated “with complete
clarity” by the logos; what can be articulated about it is its
�74
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
inseparability from its opposite, and the “common thing”—
Being—shared by each term of the opposition characteristic
of it is manifestly something that does not have or express
what the moderns would call “meaning.”
Klein’s reason for this last point is also presented in his
Math Book, and can be succinctly stated as follows: the
modern preoccupation with “meaning” is, in fact, a preoccupation with “concepts” that have as their primary referents
other concepts, and, therefore, not the individual objects to
which all concepts originally refer.25 The concepts that
provide the foundation of modern, symbolic mathematics are
paradigmatic of concepts whose fundamental mode of being
is their relationship with other concepts, all of which, in turn,
are derivative of or otherwise dependent upon the symbolic
concept of number in general for their “meaning”—a term
which must be kept sharply distinct from “intelligibility.”
Individual beings are “intelligible” as changing or resting,
indeed, as changing in one respect while simultaneously
resting in another. The “invisible looks” (eidê) of Rest and
Change, too, are “intelligible,” though not as individual
things that are resting or changing, but rather as that which
all resting and changing individual things have “in common.”
Their commonality is likewise “intelligible,” although, again,
it is not intelligible as individual things are. As we have seen,
because Being is not one but twofold for Plato, the “intelligibility” either of things or their “invisible looks” can never be
complete. In comparison with this incomplete “intelligibility,” the “meaning” of the modern symbolic concept of
number in general is completely “unintelligible.” This
concept refers neither to individual beings nor to what they
share in common, their “invisible looks”; rather, the symbolic
concept of number in general does not, properly speaking,
refer to any thing, but is itself something that is referred to as
if it were some thing, namely, as if it were an individual thing
just like the individual beings that, for the ancient Greeks, are
intelligible as resting and moving. But it is not a being like
those beings. It is not a being at all, but a cipher, a sense-
HOPKINS
75
perceptible mark (or marks) that is not only treated like some
individual thing, but, in a fundamental ontological sense, also
replaces all the individual things, individual beings, in the
world with “concepts” that cannot refer to things or beings
because the mode of being of the latter is now self-evidently
taken to be “conceptual.”
Klein’s Math Book traces the symbolic number concept’s
remarkable power both to replace individual beings with
concepts, and to do so without “detection,” to the literally
twofold mode of being “unintelligible” proper to the mathematical symbol. On the one hand, it combines a completely
indeterminate and non-perceptible concept—quantity in
general—with a completely determinate sense-perceptible
“mark.” Because this mark is indistinguishable from that with
which it is combined, viz., from the non-perceptible concept
or quantity in general, it is patently not a sign, if by “sign” we
mean a part of language that indicates something other than
itself in a manner distinguishable from the significance of
what it indicates; rather than signifying something other than
itself, the mark presents itself as what it symbolizes. For
instance, “2” does not signify something other than itself, for
example, the exact amount of some kind of object; instead, it
presents itself as the “concept of two,” which means, “the
general concept of twoness in general”26—and it does so in a
manner that involves absolutely no immediate reference to
any individual things. Therefore, to call “2” a “number sign,”
or “a” a “letter sign,” is a misnomer, since in both cases what
is meant is the “symbolic relation between the sign and what
it designates.”27 In the case of “2,” what is meant is “the
general number-character of this one number,” while in the
case of “a” what is meant is “the general numerical character
of each and every number.” On the other hand, the
completely indeterminate and non-perceptible concept from
which the sense-perceptible mark is indistinguishable assumes
the status of something whose mode of being is itself indistinguishable from other sense-perceptible individual things,
�76
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and, as such, it assumes the status of something that can be
“treated” just like these other sense-perceptible things,
including being counted. Most significantly, the completely
indeterminate quantitative mode of being of the concept that
is inseparable from the mathematical symbol becomes determinate precisely insofar as the sense-perceptible mark that is
inseparable from it is treated like other sense-perceptible
things, for instance, rocks, tables, copies of Klein’s Math
Book, and so on. Thus, in the case of the symbol “2,” Klein
says, “The concept of twoness is at the same time understood
as referring to two entities.”28
Both of these characteristics belonging to the mathematical symbol reveal their complete “unintelligibility” only in
comparison to the incomplete “intelligibility” of the Greek
arithmos. The Greek number’s incomplete “intelligibility”
involves the mixture of (1) the “intelligibility” to mathematical “thinking” (dianoia) of the exact determination
belonging to the amount of a definite multitude of sensible or
thinkable (and, in this latter sense, “intelligible”) beings and
(2) the “unintelligibility” to philosophical “thoughtfulness”
(phronêsis) of its one over many mode of being. In comparison and contrast, the mathematical symbol’s complete “unintelligibility” concerns (1) its absolute lack of an immediate
reference to any definite things and (2) the thing-like determinateness of its sense-perceptible mark, which presents the
“concept” of an indeterminate quantity in the manner of a
determinate object, and therefore, presents a mark that
neither signifies anything nor shares an “invisible looks” with
any other thing, as something that is nevertheless “intelligible.” In other words, Klein says that the “symbolic unreality” of the mathematical symbol is located in the fact that it
presents something intrinsically and completely “unintelligible” as something that is “intelligible.”
The mathematical symbol’s complete “unintelligibility,”
however, is not for Klein tantamount to a putative meaninglessness. On the contrary, it is precisely the character of its
mode of being as “unintelligible” that necessitates its involve-
HOPKINS
77
ment with “meaning,” namely, with the meaning that accrues
to it on the basis of the “stipulation” of rules for manipulating
otherwise “unintelligible” sense-perceptible marks, rules
whose “syntax” is derived, originally, from the rules of operation with non-symbolic numbers. Mathematical symbols are
therefore only meaningful insofar as their “pure” conceptual
mode of being is accorded a numerical significance that is
akin—somehow—to non-symbolical numbers, to amounts of
things that can be, “in principle,” counted.
Klein’s Math Book, and his lectures prior to 1940,
employs what he characterizes as “the” language of the
Schools or Scholastic language’s talk of first intentions and
second intentions, or, as he himself sometimes notes,29 the
more properly articulated distinction between the objects of
first intentions and the objects of second intentions, to
“express” the state of affairs involved here. He uses this
language to (1) describe both the shift from the ancient
“meaning” to the modern “meaning” of numbers and (2)
delineate the corresponding shift in the paradigm of the
ancient “meaning” and the modern “meaning” of what it is to
be a concept, the latter shift being characterized (likewise
prior to 1940) by Klein as the transformation of the ancient
concept’s “conceptuality.” (The scare quotes around the word
“meaning” here call attention to the fact that, strictly
speaking, for Klein, the term “meaning,” being commensurate solely with the modern concept, is therefore a
misleading, if not falsifying, basis upon which to compare and
contrast the statuses of ancient Greek and modern concepts.)
First intentions concern the existence and quiddity of an
object, its being in its own right; second intentions concern
an the object insofar as it has being in being known, in apprehension. Hence, the state of being of an object in cognition is
second, while the state of being of an object in itself is first.
Because the Greek arithmos is inseparable from the direct
reference to a multitude of definite things, the status of its
referents lends itself to being designated as first intentional.
�78
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Because the concept of “indeterminate or general quantity”
concerns an object insofar as it known, the status of its
referent lends itself to being designated as second intentional.
Moreover, the sense-perceptible mark that belongs to the
modern symbolic number is, like any other sense-perceptible
thing, the object of a first intention, and because of this, Klein
maintains that the “conceptuality” characteristic of the mode
of being belonging to the modern concept of number is tantamount to the apprehension of the object of a second intention
as having the being of the object of a first intention.
Moreover, he maintains that the modern “conceptuality” of
number is only manifest in its contrast with the ancient Greek
“conceptuality,” which is characterized by the first intentional
status of the objects to which it refers and is therefore related.
Klein also appeals to the distinction between first and
second intentions to clarify Descartes’s attempt to understand
the origin of the novel mode of being that belongs to the
symbolic number concept, an attempt that Klein maintains
was the first, as well as the last such, in the philosophical
tradition. Descartes’s attempt appealed to the power of the
imagination to assist the pure intellect in making visible to it
(the pure intellect), as a “symbol,” the indeterminate object
that it has already abstracted from its own power of knowing
determinate numbers. Abstraction in Aristotle presupposes
definite beings that are intelligible in terms of common qualities, the latter being “lifted off ” the former in accordance
with a process that is more logical than psychological;
abstraction in Descartes presupposes definite beings but not
their intelligibility, in the case at hand their “intelligibility” as
so many beings. Rather, Descartes’s abstraction works upon
the mind’s act of knowing a multitude of units, separating out
the mind’s own conceiving of that multitude, which it immediately makes objective. The mind turns and reflects on its
own knowing when it is directed to the idea of number as a
multitude of units, and, in so doing, it no longer apprehends
the multitude of units directly, in the “performed act” (actus
HOPKINS
79
exercitus) and thus as object of its first intention, but rather
indirectly, in the “signified act” (actus signatus), as object of
its second intention. Thus, notwithstanding the fact that what
is being conceived by the intellect is a multitude of units, the
intellect’s immediate apprehension of its own conceiving as
something, as one and therefore as a being, has the effect of
transforming the multitude belonging to the number into a
seemingly independent being, albeit a being that is only a
“rational being” (ens rationis). To repeat: this “rational
being” is the result of the intellect, which, secondarily (in
reflection) intends a thing already conceived before, and
intends it insofar as it has been conceived. When the rational
being is then “grasped with the aid of the imagination in such
a way that the intellect can, in turn, take it up as an object in
the mode of a ‘first intention’, we are dealing with a
symbol.”30
Abstraction for Descartes is therefore characterized by
Klein as “symbolic,” because the “concept” (Begriff) that it
yields is manifestly not something that is lifted off the intelligible qualities of things, but rather, is something whose very
mode of being is inseparable from the following: (1) the intellect’s pure—by “pure” is meant completely separate from the
things it apprehends—grasping of its own power to apprehend these qualities themselves, and (2) this power itself
being apprehended as an object whose mode of being is
nevertheless akin to the very things that its mode of being
separates itself from. Klein stresses that the “kinship”
between the power of apprehension proper to the “pure”
intellect and that which is effectively foreign to it (i.e., the
things possessing the intelligible qualities that are apprehended by the “pure” intellect’s power) is established by
making this power “visible.” The algebraic letter “signs” of
Viète or the “geometric” figures of Descartes are what accomplish this. They are what—in the language of the Schools—
allow the object of a second intention to be apprehended as
the object of a first intention, and are therefore “symbols.”
�80
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
The indeterminate or general object yielded in “symbolic
abstraction” is neither purely a concept nor purely a “sign,”
but precisely the unimaginable and unintelligible identification of the object of a second intention with the object of a
first. This identification is “unimaginable” because “images”
properly—both for the ancient Greeks and for Descartes—
refer to either particular objects of first intentions or to their
particular “common qualities.”31 The identification between
second and first intentional objects is “unintelligible” because
for “natural” predication, to say that a concept is both
general and particular “at the same time” is nonsensical.
Nowhere that I know of does Klein write that this identification, which makes possible the symbolic “language” of
algebra and therefore, mathematical physics, is a mathematical mistake. Likewise, nowhere that I know of does Klein
write that the science that symbolic mathematics makes
possible is a philosophical mistake. Moreover, so far as I can
tell, Klein never even hints in his writings that the identification of the objects of first and second intentions means that
first and second intentions have been “confused” by modern
science, as some have suggested. What Klein does explicitly
characterize as a mistake is the view of the symbolic language
of algebra as “a purely technical or instrumental matter.”32
He writes, “it is a common mistake to believe that we can
translate the theorems of mathematical physics into ordinary
language, as if the mathematical apparatus used by the physicists were only a tool employed in expressing their theorems
more easily.”33 He also writes that the early modern “natural
philosophers,” in their self-interpretation of their new
science, the “true” physics, understood it to be the perfection
and the completion of the science of the ancients. And clearly,
Klein’s Math Book is an “argument” whose goal is to refute
the veracity of this self-interpretation, and to do so primarily
on the basis of the different “conceptualities” that are characteristic of the incomplete intelligibility of the ancient
number concept and the complete unintelligibility belonging
HOPKINS
81
to the meaning of the modern symbolic number concept.
That said, on my view it does not follow that the argument
extends also to the new science itself, that is, to the claim that
the symbolic cognition made possible by the “conception”
proper to the symbolic number concept is something that is
somehow false or less true, in comparison with the ancient
number concept and ancient “science” generally. Modern
science, mathematical physics, and the symbolic cognition
that is its main nerve, is therefore not a mistake on Klein’s
view.
What for Klein is a mistake, however, is the interpretation
of the “true” object (singular) of this science as the objects
(plural) of the first intentions that were and indeed remain
the “true” objects of ancient Greek science. The nature of this
mistake is neither “mathematical” nor, strictly speaking,
“scientific,” but philosophical. It is a mistake that was made
by the early modern inventors of mathematical physics, and
it is a mistake still made today by their innumerable progeny,
philosophers and non-philosophers alike. It is a mistake made
by Husserl, who, despite himself and the attempt present in
his last writings to restore the integrity of knowledge threatened by the all pervading tendency of “sedimentation,” of the
forgetfulness of the original meanings of our words and
concepts, nevertheless could not let go of his earliest belief in
the “mere” instrumentality of the symbolic calculus. Husserl
likened the putative “technicity” of symbolical calculation to
the “rules of the game” that govern it mechanically, rules that
originally spring from the categories and objects that are
“given” in the experience that makes our language and “traditional” Aristotelian logic both possible and intelligible.
Klein had to know about Husserl’s mistake, which is no
doubt why, among other reasons, Husserl’s name is not
mentioned once in the original version of his Math Book, and
why the concept of “intentionality” to which Klein appeals in
that book and in his writings and lectures before 1940 is that
of the Schools, not of Husserl. The reason for this can found
�82
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
in Klein’s account of the symbolic character of the indeterminateness or generality of the modern concept of number.
While Husserl was also aware of this indeterminateness—
indeed, besides Klein was perhaps more aware of it than any
other twentieth-century thinker, calling it the concept of the
“anything whatever” (Etwas überhaupt) and assigning to its
investigation a new science, which he called “formal
ontology”—Husserl nevertheless thought that its “intentionality” could be distinguished from the sense-perceptible
marks that manifest the mathematic symbol. This, as we have
seen, is for Klein simply not possible, because, absent such
marks, the pure concepts of modern mathematics would,
quite literally, be invisible and therefore inaccessible to the
“pure intellect” that calculates with them in symbolic cognition. Moreover, such an intentional distinction between the
symbolic “signs” and the indeterminate objects to which they
are related symbolically (and therefore not “significatively”),
occludes the most important characteristic of the general
object that this symbolic relationship makes possible, namely,
the utter impossibility of its conceptual “meaning” ever referring directly to the individual things or objects in the world.
Husserl, of course, spent most of his life trying to show both
that and how the meaning of the “concept” of “something in
genteral” is “objective,” and is such in the precise sense that
the origin of its unity (as well as the origin of all its possible
modes of being and relations) is rooted ultimately in the
“phenomena” of individual objects and the “evidence” of
their individuality that is presented in the perceptual experience of them. Klein, likewise, spent most of his life trying to
show that it is a philosophical mistake to think that the
meaning of a “concept in general” could ever be traced to an
origin in individual objects and their perceptual experience.
Klein’s “reason” for trying to show this impossibility can
be found in his account of the “symbolic abstraction” in
Descartes’ articulation of the genesis proper to the mind’s
representation to itself of its pure concepts—to what makes
HOPKINS
83
such concepts “concepts,” which Klein refers to as their
modern “conceptuality.” As we have seen, Klein characterizes
the modern “conceptuality” in terms of the, comparatively
speaking, complete “unintelligibility” of the meaning proper
to the general concepts that it makes possible, an unintelligibility that emerges when this “meaning” is compared to the
incomplete intelligibility of the “conceptuality” of ancient
Greek concepts. In a word, on Klein’s view, the “conceptuality” responsible for Descartes’ articulation of what a
“concept” (Begriff) is, is not only paradigmatic for all modern
concepts, but it is also the source of the late modern problem
of providing cognition with a “foundation,” in the sense of
both establishing and providing an account of the connection
between general concepts and their “objects.” Because,
however, this connection is second intentional in the instance
of the concept of an object in general, Husserl’s attempt to
provide the sought-after foundation by appealing to “intuition,” namely, to the intuition of the relation between the
object of a second intention to the object of a first intention,
is in principle doomed to fail. It is so for the simple reason
that the status of the relation between second intentional
objects, which manifestly are not first intentional objects—
notwithstanding their philosophical misinterpretation as
such—and first intentional objects themselves, is not perceptual but symbolic.
Klein’s reason for distancing himself from Husserl’s
phenomenological account of “meaning” is therefore at once
philosophical and historical; or, rather, it presupposes a mode
of awareness that is neither one nor the other, but “both
together.” Indeed, only the presupposition of such a mode of
awareness can justify the radical distinction he makes
between the respective “meanings” of ancient and modern
“conceptuality,” which distinction, strictly speaking, annuls
the omni-temporality—or, what is the same thing, the omnihistoricality—of the very concept of “meaning” and assigns
an historical locus to the concept of truth—a locus that is
�84
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
relative accordingly as it is proximate to the ancient Greek or
the modern “conceptuality.” Moreover, it is only the presupposition of such a mode of awareness that can account for the
status of the vantage from which Klein makes the comparison
between ancient science and philosophy and modern science
and philosophy, a vantage whose sights are indeed set on the
things themselves that are in comparison.
I, for one, do not presume to be in the position, philosophically, mathematically, historically, or otherwise
speaking, to judge that the mode of awareness presupposed
by Klein’s account of these matters is unwarranted. Indeed,
unlike Hans-Georg Gadamer, who complained that Klein
together with Leo Strauss, “employ a style in their work that
is too much a commentary, so that finally their voices are
lost,”34 I find the hermeneutical “transparency” of Klein’s
writings thought-provoking in a manner that renders trivial
the claims of “philosophical hermeneutics” regarding the
historically conditioned character of all our understanding.
For me, Klein’s writings show not only what remains, even
now, some three quarters of a century after the publication of
his Math Book, as perhaps the most significant specimens of
our “historically conditioned” understanding “in” history, but
also, that the “history” that they are in is none other than the
historia that Plato’s Socrates’ spoke about in the Phaedo.
“Historia” in that sense is a problem, concerned neither with
a contingent sequence of events or philosophical theories nor
with the “concept” or “meaning” of “history” as such, but
rather, with the problem of inquiry itself. The mode of awareness presupposed by the philosophical-mathematical-historical distinctions that Klein’s writings make regarding meaning
and truth points, on my view, to the author’s encounter with
“inquiry” (historia) as something that comes forward as a
problem whenever the question arises of the origin of whatever it is that is under discussion. To the question of whether
the inquiries in Klein’s Math Book and other writings are
“true,” I believe that the best answer would have to be some-
HOPKINS
85
thing like this: Klein has said what he thinks is true of the
matters addressed by his inquiries. The question of whether
what he has said is “correct” is one that has to be posed not
to their author and the putative concepts and meanings that
govern his “philosophy,” but to these inquiries themselves. If
Klein has not spoken correctly, it is our “task to take up the
argument and refute it.”35
That said, I would like to close with a suggestion and a
question. The suggestion: Klein’s well-known reticence to
discuss, in any detail, the presuppositions of his own thought,
may be rooted in his polite refusal of Leibniz’s invitation to
“follow him [Leibniz]—to the audience-chamber of God,”
and to join him, along with the other immortal philosophers,
“on a little stool at God’s feet.” The question: does the shift
from the ancient Greek to the modern conceptuality of
numbers, which Klein has shown applies to the cardinality of
numbers, extend to their ordinality as well? Specifically, is
there an historical locus proper to the truth of the “firstness”
of the first intentional objects and the “secondness” of the
second intentional objects by which Klein expresses the decisive shift from the ancient to the modern consciousness?
Notes
1
Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss, “A Giving of Accounts: Jacob Klein and
Leo Strauss,” The College (April 1970): 1-5, here 1. Hereafter, cited as
“Accounts.”
2
Jacob Klein, “Speech, Its Strength and Its Weaknesses,” in Lectures and
Essays, eds. Robert B. Williamson and Elliot Zuckerman (Annapolis: St.
John’s College Press, 1985): 361-374, here 370-371. Hereafter cited as
“Speech,” while the volume itself will be cited as “Essays.”
3
Jacob Klein, “Modern Rationalism,” in Essays, 53-64, here 64.
Hereafter cited as “Rationalism.”
4
Ibid.
�86
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
HOPKINS
87
5
Although sometimes he identifies it as occurring earlier, for instance,
when he stated in 1970 that it occurred “about 500 years ago”
(“Accounts,” 1).
Plato and Platonism, ed. Johannes M. Van Ophuijsen (Washington D.C.:
The Catholic University Press, 1999), 218-239; “Figure, Ratio, Form”
Plato’s Five Mathematical Studies,” Aperion XXXII, 4 (1999): 73-88.
6
19
Klein, Math Book, 62 (my italics).
20
Ibid.
21
Jabob Klein, Math Book, 184.
22
Jacob Klein, “Concept of Numbers,” 51.
23
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 54.
24
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 99.
Jacob Klein, Plato’s Trilogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1977), 2. Hereafter, cited as Trilogy.
7
Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra,
trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969; reprint: New
York: Dover, 1992). This work was originally published in German as
“Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra” in Quellen
und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik,
Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, no. 1 (Berlin, 1934), pp. 18–105 (Part I);
no. 2 (1936), pp. 122–235 (Part II). Hereinafter, cited as “Math Book.”
8
Jacob Klein, “The Concept of Number is Greek Mathematics and
Philosophy,” in Essays, 43-52, here 43. Hereafter cited as “Concept of
Number.”
9
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 9.
10 Jacob Klein, “Modern Rationalism,” 63.
11
Jacob Klein, “Speech,” 374. He also mentions him by name in
“Accounts,” which, however, is a transcript of a tape recording.
12
Jacob Klein, “Aristotle, an Introduction,” Essays, 171-195, here 171.
13
“Accounts,” 3.
14
Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André
Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 365.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., 366.
17
Ibid.
18
Works by Konrad Gaiser, J.N. Findlay, and H.J. Krämer on Plato’s
“unwritten doctrine,” for all their diversity, share the following characteristics: 1) they fail to acknowledge the priority of Klein’s work on their
topic, and 2) they (perhaps, consequently) approach Plato’s “mathematics” and “eidetic numbers” from an alien conceptual level. See,
respectively: Platos Ungeschriebene Lehre (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1968);
Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1974); and Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics, trans. John
R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). Mitchell
Miller’s work is an exception to 2); see “‘Unwritten Teachings’ in the
Parmenides,” Review of Metaphysics 48 (March 1995): 591-633;
“Dialectical Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato’s Statesman,” in
25
There may be one possible exception to this, namely “the so-called
general theory of proportions” (Jacob Klein, “The World of Physics and
the ‘Natural’ World,” in Essays, 1-34, here 27; hereinafter, cited as
“World of Physics”) of Euclid, although Klein does not appear to be altogether of one mind about whether this “theory” really represents a case
where ancient concepts refer originally to other concepts and not to individual objects. In 1932, he wrote, “The fifth book of Euclid, in fact,
contains a ‘geometrical algebra’” (Ibid.), which he characterized as not
treating “the ratios of particular magnitudes, geometrical forms for
instance, or numbers or bodily masses or time segments, but ratios ‘in
themselves’, the wholly undetermined bearers of which are symbolized
[symbolisch . . . versinnbildlicht] by straight lines” (Ibid.). In other words,
he seems to characterize here an indeterminate or general object as corresponding to the general procedure of Euclid, and therewith, a non-individual object as the “referent” of this procedure’s “concepts.” However,
in his Math Book, which I assume was written later (it was published
1934-1936), precisely this possibility is ruled out by Klein, when he
writes, “For ancient science, the existence of a ‘general object’ is by no
means a simple consequence of a ‘general theory’” (Math Book, 161), and
he goes on to quote Aristotle’s view on this matter (in Metaphysics M 3,
1077 b 17-20) as definitive: “‘The general propositions of mathematics
[namely the ‘axioms’, i.e., the ‘common notions’, but also all theorems of
the Eudoxian theory of proportions] are not about separate things which
exist outside of and alongside of the [geometric] magnitudes and numbers,
but are just about these; not, however, insofar as they are such as to have
a magnitude or to be divisible [into discrete units]’” (Ibid.). It is therefore
upon the basis of this, apparently, later view of Klein’s that I refer to the
“all” here.
26
Ibid., 25.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
�88
29
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 306, n. 324.
30
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Jacob Klein, Math Book, 208.
31
Indeed, it is for this reason that Descartes, on Klein’s view, stresses the
“power” of imagination, and not the imagination’s “images,” to assist the
pure intellect in grasping the completely indeterminate concepts that it
has separated from the ideas that the imagination offers it, because these
ideas are precisely “determinate images”—and therefore, intrinsically
unsuitable for representing to the intellect its indeterminate concepts. The
imagination’s power, however, being indeterminate insofar as it is not
limited to any particular one of its images, is able to use is own indeterminateness to enter into the “service” of the pure intellect and make
visible a “symbolic representation” of what is otherwise invisible to it, by
facilitating, as it were, the identification of the objects of first and second
intentions in the symbol’s peculiar mode of being. The imagination’s
facilitation involves, as it were, its according its “power” of visibility to
the concept’s invisibility.
32
Jacob Klein, “Modern Rationalism,” 61.
33
Ibid.
34
The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn
(Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1997), 236.
35
Plato, Meno, 75C-D.
89
Addendum
The following images correspond to pages 68 and 69 of The
St. John’s Review, volume 47, number 1 (“What Tree Is This:
In Praise of Europe’s Renaissance Printers, Publishers, and
Philologists,” by Chaninah Maschler). Omitted originally
because of print quality, they appear now at the request of the
author.
�
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 St. John's Review</em>
Description
An account of the resource
<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
thestjohnsreview
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
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.
89 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
The St. John's Review, 2005/3
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2005
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Navarre, Sarah
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Thompson, Jerry L.
Stephenson, David
Hopkins, Burt C.
Maschler, Chaninah
Description
An account of the resource
Volume XLVIII, number three of The St. John's Review. Published in 2005.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_48_No_3
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
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
St. John's Review
Deprecated: Directive 'allow_url_include' is deprecated in Unknown on line 0