1
20
6
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ab690596e3adf105c229546effea91bb
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Speeches, presentations, and other lectures
Description
An account of the resource
Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span>
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
speechespresentationsotherlectures
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
mp3
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:44:51
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
A Conversation with Tom Brokaw and Admiral Mike Mullen
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a conversation between Tom Brokaw and Admiral Mike Mullen held on February 19, 2017. This is part of the Great Conversations series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Brokaw, Tom
Mullen, Mike
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
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-02-19
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College has been given permission to post this online.
Type
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sound
Format
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mp3
Contributor
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Nelson, Christopher B.
Wolf, Mary
Relation
A related resource
<a title="Brokaw-Mullen" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/brokaw-and-mullen" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Event information on SJC Website</a>
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
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Brokaw-Mullen
Great Conversations
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PDF Text
Text
-~~
St. John's College
. . ·~
,...
T H RE E HUNDRED YE A R S
FOUNDED 1696 AS KING WILLIAM'S SCHOOL
II
•
~
PO. Box 2800, An napol is, MD 21404
410-263-2371, Fax 410-263-4828
LECTURE / CONCERT SCHEDULE - 1996-97
August 30, 1996
Ms. Eva T. H. Brann, Dean
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Why Read Books?"
September 6
Ms. Patricia Locke, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"A Sainte-Chapelle
of the Mind"
September 13
Professor Frederick Crews
Department of English
University of California
Berkeley, California
"Freud: Harmful or
Fatal If Swallowed"
September 20
Mr . John Verdi, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"How We Do Things
With Words: An
Introduction to
Wittgenstein"
September 27
Mr. Christopher B. Nelson
President
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Foundation, Generation
and Immortality: Images
of Fatherhood in the
Aeneid"
October 4
Professor Peter Suber
Department of Philosophy
Earlham College
Richmond, Indiana
"Infinite Reflections"
October 18
Professor Judith Grabiner
Pitzer College
Claremont, California
"Methodological
Imperialism and
cartesian Geometry"
October 25
Mr . Jody Gatwood and
Mr. Brian Ganz
Concert
November 1
Mr. Stewart Umphrey, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Eternity"
November 8
All-College Seminar
November 15
Professor John T . Bonner
Professor Emeritus
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
"Social Amoebae:
The Advantages of
Togetherness"
November 22
Ms. Janice Macaulay
Tutor, Graduate Institute
St. John's College
Annapolis
"The End of Tradition?
Pluralism and Problems
of Contemporary Musical
styles"
December 6
King William Players
�St. John's College
.
•
P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404
410-263-2371, Fax 410-263-4828
FOUNDED 1696 AS KING WILLIA M'S SCHOOL
LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - SECOND SEMESTER 1996- 97
January 10, 1997
Ms. Marilyn Higuera, Tutor
St. John's College
Annapolis
"Prelude to Vocation:
Eliot's Middlemarch"
January 17
Ms. Olivia Delgado de Torres
Tutor, St. John's College
Santa Fe
"Jocasta: A Wimple
of Widows' Weeds"
January 24
Professor Giuseppe F. Mazzotta
Italian Languages and Literature
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
"The Language of
Treachery in Lower
Hell "
February 7
Professor Vicki Hearne
Westbrook, Connecticut
"The Phenomenology
of Toto"
February 14
Mr. Eliot Fisk
Concert
February 21
Mr . Andre Barbera, Tutor
St . John's College
Annapolis
"Birdland:
21, 1954"
March 21
All-College Seminar
March 28
Professor Michael Davis
Sarah Lawrence College
"Euripides Among the
Athenians"
April 4
Mr . David Stephenson, Tutor
St . John's College
Annapolis
"Ptolemy 's Tr uth"
April 11
Professor Ronna Burger
Department of Philosophy
Tulane University
New Orleans, Louisiana
"Health of Soul and
Psychic Medicine :
On the Argument of
Aristotle ' s Ethics"
April 18
Profe ssor Stephen H. Ke llert
Department of Philosophy
Hamline University
Saint Paul, Minnesota
"Chaos Theory a nd
Scientific
Understanding"
April 25
Pa l e strina Choir
Concert
May 2
King William Playe rs
May 9
Mr. John Lynch
Ringling Brother Barnum
& Bailey Cir cus
February
To b e announced
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
2 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Lecture/Concert Schedule - 1996-97
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1996-1997
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1996-1997 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1996-1997
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
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
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pdf
Relation
A related resource
August 30, 1996. Brann, Eva T. H. <a title="Why read books?" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/267">Why read books?</a> (audio)
August 30, 1996. Brann, Eva T. H. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1247" title="Why read books?">Why read books?</a> (typescript)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Brann, Eva T. H.
Locke, Patricia
Crews, Frederick
Verdi, John
Nelson, Christopher B.
Suber, Peter
Grabiner, Judith V.
Gatwood, Jody
Ganz, Brian
Umphrey, Stewart, 1942-
Bonner, John T.
Macaulay, Janice Michel
Higuera, Marilyn
de Torres, Olivia Delgado
Mazzotta, Giuseppe F.
Hearne, Vicki
Fisk, Eliot
Barbera, André
Davis, Micahel
Stephenson, David
Burger, Ronna
Kellert, Stephen H.
Lynch, John
King William Players
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
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PDF Text
Text
ST
•
.JOHN'S
CO LL EGE
E
T H
G R E
L I
F
E N
I
E
L D
B RARY
•
•
.JUNE t, t 996
FRONT
L AWN
8c
LIBRARY
PLAZA
ANNAPOLIS
MARYLAND
�yr
i flamed in recognition of the
generosity of Stewart Greenfield,
alumnus of the class of 195 3
and member of the Board of
Visitors and Governors, and his
wife, Constance Greenfield.
St. John's College is deeply
indebted to Mr. and Mrs.
Greenfield for their gift which
will benefit generations of
students, faculty and citizens
of Annapolis.
�0 GR AM
I :30-
2:00p.m.
Prelude
Carrollton Brass Quintet
2:00p.m.
Presentation of Colors
by the U.S. Naval Academy Color Guard
National Anthem
written by Francis Scott Key, Class of 1796
sung by Aaron Silverman, Class of 1996
COMMENTS
Christopher B. Nelson
President, St. John's College
Stewart Greenfield
Board of Visitors and Governors
Kathryn Kinzer
Head Librarian, St. John's College
Robert 0. Biern
President, the Friends of St. John's
The Honorable Alfred A. Hopkins
Mayor of Annapolis
Louis L. Goldstein
Maryland Comptroller of the Treasury
Elliott Zuckerman
Tutor Emeritus, St. John's College
Dedication of the St. John's College
Tercentenary Commemorative Postal
Card Issued by the U.S. Postal Service
Ribbon Cutting
2:45 - 4:00p.m.
Self-guided Tour of the Greenfield Library
Reception on the Library Plaza
�HIS TORY OF
TH E S T. JO
THE FIRST FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY IN THE UNITED STATES
he King William School was established in 1696 by an act of the
era! Assembly of Maryland for "Propagation of the Gospel and the
Bucation of the Youth of this Province in Good Letters and Manners."
Thomas Bray, named Commissary of Maryland in 1696, felt that the clergy in
Maryland could not hope to visit and instruct all members of rural colonial
parishes, and he hoped that the provision of parochial libraries might ease this
deficiency. The "Bray Libraries" were to be given into the care of the members
of the clergy for the use of the parishes. A £400 gift of Princess Ann of
Denmark, for whom Annapolis was named, enabled the purchase of 1,095
volumes for the Annapolitan Bray Library, the first of the provincial libraries.
Both the establishment of the King William School by the civil authorities
and the Bray Library by the Anglican Church indicate the need felt in the
colonies for education in philosophical and spiritual matters. * The first
volumes arrived in Annapolis in 1697, the last in 1700. After fires in the
buildings that housed the collection, the libra1y was moved to the King
William School in 1704. In 1720, the Bray Books were transferred to the new
state house, and sometime in the second half of the century they were
returned to the King William School. * When St. John's College
commenced in 1784, the masters and students of the old King William School
joined the inaugural procession, and the property and endowment of the early
school- including the Bray Books- were conveyed to the new college. * Since
this early beginning, the college collection has grown- sometimes vigorously,
sometimes hardly at all- reflecting the fortunes of education in the country at
large. Since its arrival on the St. John's College campus, the library has moved
to McDowell Hall, Humphreys,
Woodward Hall, Mellon,
Woodward Hall, and now,
some 90,000 volumes strong,
to the new library. The new
Greenfield Library assures us
that 300 years of liberal
education through books will
continue long into the
20th century.
�H N' S
COL L E G E L IBRARY
THE
HALL 0 F
RECORDS
New Life for an Historic Building
n 1934 St. John's College deeded a section on the southwest corner of
campus to the State of Maryland for $10. The State constructed the first
state archive depository in the nation, the Maryland Hall of Records, on this
site. The Hall of Records commemorates the 300th anniversary of the state's
founding in 1634 and has a finely detailed interior with symbols of Maryland
carved in raised wood panels. Laurence Hall Fowler, a noted Baltimore
architect, designed the building in a Georgian Revival style to complement
the 18th and 19th century architecture of the St. John's College campus. * In
1986 Matyland's state archives moved to a new building on Rowe Boulevard.
The Maryland Board of Public Works approved the sale of the Hall of Records
in 1993 and St. John's College formally acquired the building in 1994.
Renovations were completed in 1996, the 300th anniversary of the founding
of St. John's College as King William's School and of Dr. Bray's library, the
oldest free public library in the United States and the origin of the St. John's
College library.
LIBRARY
PLAZA
n the post at the entrance to the
brary is a plaque honoring the memory
of Richard Weigle, who served as
president of St. John's College from
1949 to 1980. It is not inaccurate to
state that the College might not be here
today were it not for the leadership and
efforts of Dr. Weigle.
�A R c H I T
T H E
s a student I remember sitting
ouse one spring day, and for a
ming about the future instead of
t
woul
past. I remember wondering if I
er return to St. John's to once again
reflect on the good, beauty, excellence and
E
questions became a driving metaphor.
* In all
I wanted the design of the new library to evoke
a sense of history and change. The timelessly
ordered classicism of the historic building was
to be intentionally contrasted with the
sweeping modernism of the new construction.
other forms. Maybe I would even repeat, 'o
If you would, an old order expanded by a new
anthropos agathos with more vigor. Little did I
one. Using many finely crafted materials and
imagine that I would be back again, spending
shapes the design creates a dialogue between
four years actually constmcting instead of
an architecture of the past with an architecture
contemplating a form for the great books. It is
of today. This contrast happens not only with
always a sca1y proposition to satisfy a
the addition, but equally where new
deserving client, but to also satisfy my
construction occurs within the building. It
extended academic family was an exhilarating
must be remembered that the massive interior
challenge to say the least. How to shape a
core of the Hall of Records was a six story
form that not only followed its function, but
warehouse completely unsuitable for modern
also a form that many Platonists wouldn't
open book stacks. Computers were to replace
frown upon, seemed at best, an impossible task
card catalogs while open access to books and
on a campus that never ever took anything at
relaxed reading were to prevail over an
face value. Needless to say, in designing the
enclosed vault.
library, I had plenty of what we architects call
building of contrasts, attempting to evoke
friendly user input.
* The shaping of the
library was a test of nerves far more demanding
* As it stands today, it is a
paradox while following three simple themes:
stillness, movement and nature. Stillness is
than rubbing the Archimedean stones together.
reflected in the enduring serenity of preserved
Not unlike the gods on their best of days,
classical architecture, movement is evoked by
mysterious forces were always at work making
the paths of the heavenly spheres, and earthly
the impossible possible, and not surprisingly
nalllre is as clear as the sunlight, gardens and
* Approaching the building the
some days, making the possible impossible.
rustic stone.
The building was shaped by many caretakers,
classical orders of the early Fowler design for
and students of Plotinus will be happy to know
the Maryland Hall of Records remain
that sometimes many efforts can become one.
deferential to the quad and its guardians,
* Through all this four year saga you might
McDowell, Woodward, Pinckney, and
ask what it is the architect did besides bounce
Humphries. The new library's timeless
between all these gods like a cue ball on
symmetry and handsome entry remain as
a
billiard table. As the Socratic midwife I set
delicate and inviting as a classic Loeb volume
about pursuing the toughest question a
in the hand. Maintaining a sense of timeless
Quixotic architect can face. What shape is
temples in their sacred landscape was essential.
going to shape the library that will shape the
Gazing across the preserved green sea I'm
future Johnnies? Further, would Eva Brann ever
constantly reminded of Melville's simple poem,
approve of my imagination? I contemplated, I
"Creek Architecture."
meditated, I cogitated, and I agitated. Fax me a
muse faster than a New York minute, I prayed.
Metaphors were rolling, tongues were wagging
and ink stained napkins were endlessly trailing
behind me.
* In all my questioning, and
Not magnitude, nor lavishness
But form, the site;
Note innovating willfulness
But reverence for the archetype.
more meetings than there arc bricks, the
* Entering the library, the past and the
concept for the library began to take shape. It
present are married in a light filled core.
seemed to me the library should celebrate the
Sunlight in all its Platonic and spiritual
spirit of one of St. John's greatest gifts, the art
metaphors as the great illuminator pervades
of the question. Questioning the timeless
every room in the libra1y. Reconstructing the
c
T
�'
s
p
E R s
p
E
c
T I v E
building from a closed stack vessel to an open
strove to keep our reverence for the classical
living room for the campus was accomplished
archetype alive. Thank you Annapolis Historic
by filling every room with natural light and
District Commission, Historic Annapolis, the
outdoor views. The atrium is the center and
Ma1yland Historic Tmst, and the American
the focus of the library. From the central lit
Institute of Architects. Thank you
core all directions in the library are clear.
commissioners and then you Donna, Jeff and
The search for knowledge is as endless as the
Donna.
stair that takes you there.
* Climbing up the
* Unquestionably, the utilitarian
needs were of utmost importance. They were
stairway one views a series of elliptical
unrelentingly guarded right down to the last
segments. These patterns echo throughout the
iota of the last page in the last volume on the
library celebrating the celestial patterns and
last shelf that could fit on a single fiber of
reminding us of the astronomical transitions
carpet. There are people who can actually
between Ptolemy, Copernicus and Kepler. The
count the number of angels on the head of a
classical interiors preserve the known rational
pin and know the answer. Thank you campus
geometry of the past and are intentionally
committees. Thank you Kitty, Vicki, Wally,
$ As sure as
contrasted with the expansive paths above us.
Eva, Howard, Anita, and Wendy.
These curvilinear shapes are a constant
the sun rose and set, the budget was and
reminder of the unknown, the irrational.
always will be limited. Provisioning the voyage
Knowing and not knowing are always present
and steering the ship through numerous
in the differing geometries of the libra1y. As
financial shoals took one cool-headed set of
well we shouldn't forget the guardian columns
captains. Without the gclt there would be no
holding their torcheres of light as the quiet
gilded libra1y. You've taken us to the new
bearers of the building.
$ To the side of the
world and back. T hank you donors and thank
* With pencils and
historic building, a garden wall politely
you Bud, Jeff, and Chris.
envelopes volumes and concepts to come. The
trowels, computers and concrete, an undaunted
addition is, on the one hand, a garden and, on
and uneclipsed team of designers and guilders
the other hand, an abstract modern building
sculpted reality through snow and committees
crafted in stone and steel. Its shape echoes the
and more snow and more committees. Oh, and
endless pathways of the skylight in the main
I don't want to forget to mention committee�.
stmcture as well as the never ending paths of
Thank you Doris, Cathy, Tony and John.
nature. While the skin of the addition
Thank you Maureen and thank Cod for Atlas
intentionally contrasts with its neighbor,
himself, Junior Hood.
respect and dialogue remain. Adopting the
read, think, dream, and occasionally doze in
* As h1ture Johnnies
stone walls of Humphries and saluting Neutra's
the Greenfield Library, I hope that somehow
modern vision with a phalanx of steel fins once
these shapes and metaphors will give them
again remind us of past and present. The new
pause to reflect and question. For architects
stone work invites touch while abstractly
and for all of us, the relationship between
framing the indigenous plantings. Both inside
architecture and thought is a never ending
and out one is always in a light filled garden.
pursuit. To paraphrase Winston Churchill,
The site is preserved and the submerged new
"first we shape our buildings and then, they
form is intended to be as grand and polite as its
predecessor.
* So there you have an
shape us." I hope that we have shaped a form
well, and that it will continue to shape us all
introduction to the shaping themes. As we all
equally as well. Having continued to be a part
know, however, a shape is shapeless without its
of St. John's has been a heart filled blessing for
shapers. "Who were these shapers and makers?",
me. Thank you all for yet another odyssey I
you might ask. Let me introduce them
* First,
won't long forget.
the existing building had its unspoken demands
and if you didn't hear them, there was a chorus
of historic preservationists eagerly chanting
detailed directives. These champions tirelessly
Travis L. Price TTl, ATA
Class of 197 ·I,
SF
�TH E GR E ENFI ELD LIBRARY
THE MAIN LEVEL
The Hall of Records Plaque.When St. John's College
acquired the Hall of Records from the State of Maryland, the
College agreed to retain the original dedication tablet in the
entryway in recognition of the State of Maryland's
longstanding support of St. John's College and the other
independent colleges of Maryland.
2
The Friends of St. John's College Room is named in honor of
the citizens and businesses in and around Annapolis who
contributed to the library project. In honor of the College's
tercentenary the Friends of St. John's College set a goal to
raise
$1
million to restore and preserve the splendid Georgian
Reception Room in the Hall of Records as an area for reading
and research. They raised almost
$2
million. The College was
deeply honored by this expression of support. In the next year
the names of all donors to the Friends Room will be lettered
above the chair rail, honoring in perpetuity a community's
ongoing commitment to one of its oldest institutions. To
THE MAIN LEVEL
insure accuracy of the lettering, the names are first presented
in booklet form in the Friends Room.
3
The Lillian Vanous Nutt Room recognizes the contributions
of an artist whose talents, kindness, and generosity are known
to many in the Annapolis community.
4
The Gallagher, Evelius
&
Jones Conference Room honors the
prestigious Baltimore law firm, and one of its senior partners
Rick Berndt, whose guidance and financial support helped to
make possible this project.
5
Alumni Donors to the Library. On a calligraphied and fTamed
scroll on the landing at the mid-point of the main staircase will
IJ
be the names of the alumni who contributed to the renovation
I I I I I EI
and construction of the Greenfield library. To insure accuracy
III
I
£±±""'
prior to preparation of the scroll, the names are first on display
in booklet form.
THE SECOND LEVEL
6
The Stephen and Julia Ford Reading Room stands as a
symbol of the good will and concern shown by neighbors of
St. John's College and the residents of Annapolis.
THE SECOND LEVEL
7
The William E. Brock Rare Books Room is a tribute to the
former Senator, U.S. Trade Representative, and U.S. Secretary
of Labor and his wife Sandra, a member of the Board of
Visitors and Governors, for their extraordinary generosity and
hard work on behalf of St. John's College.
�S T. J 0 N S C 0 LL E G E
H
'
8
The Stephen L.
Feinberg
Periodical Room honors the
Chairman of the Board of Visitors and Governors and
Honorary Fellow '?f the College whose leadership, generosity
and commitment have helped to secure St. John's College's
future.
9
The Joy and Bennett Shaver Reading Room
friends of the College, whose volunteer
is
named for two
efforts through
Caritas and the Friends of St. John's and whose many other
contributions have set an
exam ple
for the community.
THE THIRD LEVEL
I0
The Ray Cave
Floor celebrates the
from the class of
1948 to his
devotion of
this
alumnus
alma mater and expresses the
sincere appreciation of the St. John's College community for
his tireless leadership as Chairman of the Campaign for Our
THE THIRD LEVEL
Fourth Century.
I 1
The Dr. and Mrs. George Schoedinger Ill Reading Area
named to recognize the contributions and interest of the
parents of alumna Sarah Schoedinger, Class of
MECHANICAL
ROOM
THE UNDERGROUND LEVEL
1992.
is
�E CIAL THANKS
The College also expresses its appreciation to the following:
Governor William Donald Schaefer for his generosity in permitting the
College to acquire the old Hall of Records Building.
The City of Annapolis, Anne Arundel County, and the
Historic District Commission of Annapolis whose cooperation
and support were vital to the project.
Travis Price, Doris Sung, and Cathy Cherry, from the firm Travis Price
Architects, Inc. for design, management and oversight of the project.
Henry L. Lewis Construction Company, Junior Hood and
Maureen Bands-Beckenholdt for their professionalism and precision.
John Gutting for his meticulous and sensitive landscape design.
Charles Wallace for coordinating the College buildings
and grounds operations with the construction schedules.
The St. John's College Campus Planning Committee for their careful
and valuable consultation on all design issues.
The Library staff, including head Librarian Kitty Kinzer,
Assistant Librarian Vicki Cone, and Walter Plourde for their expertise
during the planning phases and their thoughtful coordination
of the move into the Greenfield Library.
The students, faculty, staff and friends who, following tradition,
moved the books by hand from the old library to the
Greenfield library on May 6, 1996.
Desig11 by Zoe Pa11tclides Graphics
�-----·��-----�
/-
1996USPS
o-
7'
ynded
p
1 1696 as King William's School), the U.S. Postal Service is issuing
·
eci.ll postal card. The card's twenty cent stamp bears the image of
McDowell Hall.
McDowell Hall began as the grandiose dream house of
Maryland's colonial governor, Thomas Bladen, in 1742. Originally conceived
to have a central section with a wing on either side, the building soon proved
to be too expensive for the colony to complete. Roofless, its unfinished walls
exposed to the elements, the hulk which became known as Bladen's Folly sat
for more than 40 years before the site was given to a new college- St. John's
College- chartered in the new state of Maryland in 1784.
Reconstruction
of the building was completed in 1789, and the first students from King
William's School and the College moved in. The building served as dormitory,
library, dining hall, and classroom space until 1837 when a second College
building was constructed. McDowell Hall is named after John McDowell, the
first President of St. John's College. It is the third oldest academic building in
continuous use in the United States.
�
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 51, number 2 (2009)
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
Barbara McClay
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. All manuscripts are subject to
blind review. Address correspondence to the Review,
St. John’s College, P
.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 214042800. Back issues are available, at $5 per issue, from the
St. John’s College Bookstore.
©2009 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
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essay
The Secret Art of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica, Part Two...................................5
Judith Seeger
“The Things of Friends Are Common”........................37
Christopher B. Nelson
Review
“My Subject Is Passion”...............................................45
Eva Brann’s Feeling Our Feelings: What Philosophers
Think and People Know
Ronald Mawby
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
5
The Secret Art of Isaac
Newton’s Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Part Two
Judith Seeger
4. The Second Hidden Text: The Great Work of Nature
Tis true without lying, certain & most true.
That wch is below is like that wch is above & that
wch is above is like yt wch is below to do ye miracles
of one only thing
And as all things have been & arose from one by
ye mediation of one: so all things have their birth
from this one thing by adaptation.
The Sun is its father, the moon its mother, the
wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its
nourse. The father of all perfection in ye whole
world is here. Its force or power is entire if it be
converted into earth.
Separate thou ye earth from ye fire, ye subtile from
the gross sweetly wth great indoustry. It ascends
from ye earth to ye heaven & again it descends to
ye earth & receives ye force of things superior &
inferior.
By this means you shall have ye glory of ye whole
world & thereby all obscurity shall fly from you.
Judith Seeger is a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis. This essay is
published in two parts. Part one appeared in The St. John’s Review, volume
51, number 1. All bibliographical references appeared at the end of part 1.
Endnotes are numbered continuously through both parts
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Its force is above all force. ffor it vanquishes every
subtile thing & penetrates every solid thing.
So was ye world created . . . . (“Tabula
Smaragdina,” translated by Isaac Newton)37
The General Scholium with which the second and third
editions of the Principia end is so powerful that it may
obscure the discussion of comets that precedes it. That
discussion, however, is of crucial importance. The main text
of all three editions of the Principia culminates with
Newton’s demonstration that the formerly fear-inspiring
comets, rather than being supernatural signs of God’s wrath,
are natural bodies that obey the same laws as the planets. This
accomplishment is one of the triumphs of the book. But
Newton did not stop there. The wide-ranging disquisition on
comets at the end of Book 3—consisting primarily of celestial
observations, mathematical calculations, and inferences
drawn from Newton’s optical studies—includes, as well,
assertions about the active role comets play in the universe, in
passages that stand out in the context of mathematical calculations and demonstrations.
Consider, for example, the remarks that follow
Proposition 41 of Book 3 in all three editions. At this point,
Newton has already established that the bodies of comets are
“solid, compact, fixed, and durable, like the bodies of
planets” (918), and that their tails are composed of extremely
thin vapor which the head or nucleus of the comet emits
under the influence of the fierce heat of the sun. Then,
surprisingly (for what does this have to do with the mathematical determination of celestial motion ruled by universal
gravitation?), he states that this extremely thin vapor is
essential to the replenishment both of water on earth and of
a more subtle spirit required for life. The passage continues:
For vapor in those very free spaces becomes
continually rarefied and dilated. For this reason it
happens that every tail at its upper extremity is
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7
broader than near the head of the comet.
Moreover, it seems reasonable that by this
rarefaction the vapor—continually dilated—is
finally diffused and scattered throughout the whole
heavens, and then is by degrees attracted toward
the planets by its gravity and mixed with their
atmospheres. For just as the seas are absolutely
necessary for the constitution of this earth, so that
vapors may be abundantly enough aroused from
them by the heat of the sun, which vapors either—
being gathered into clouds—fall in rains and
irrigate and nourish the whole earth for the propagation of vegetables, or—being condensed in the
cold peaks of mountains (as some philosophize
with good reason)—run down into springs and
rivers; so for the conservation of the seas and
fluids on the planets, comets seem to be required,
so that from the condensation of their exhalations
and vapors, there can be a continual supply and
renewal of whatever liquid is consumed by
vegetation and putrefaction and converted into dry
earth. For all vegetables grow entirely from fluids
and afterward, in great part, change into dry earth
by putrefaction, and slime is continually deposited
from putrefied liquids. Hence the bulk of dry earth
is increased from day to day, and fluids—if they
did not have an outside source of increase—would
have to decrease continually and finally to fail.
Further, I suspect that that spirit which is the
smallest but most subtle and most excellent part of
our air, and which is required for the life of all
things, comes chiefly from comets. (926)
This is an allegory of circulation as the alchemists understood
it, in which the spirit provided by the tails of comets is
analogous to the philosophers’ mercury—whose many names
included dew of heaven, oriental water, celestial water, our
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
balm, our honey, May dew, silver rain—the spiritual agent,
whose properties were activated, according to Basil
Valentine, by expulsion from its habitat in the form of airy
vapors, and whose descent was perceived as heavenly
condensation falling to nourish the earth, which would perish
without it (Nicholl, 92-3).38 Newton is not here speaking of
circulatory motion within a single immovable plane, which he
has shown in Proposition 1 of Book 1 to be the motion of
bodies driven in orbits under the influence of centripetal
force. He is describing, rather, a continual churning within
the universe, the manifestation of nature as a circulatory
worker, to borrow his characterization of it in 1675.39 This is
an image of earth as retort, inasmuch as comets supply both
the fluids and the subtle spirit required for the development
of life itself.
The final book of the first edition of the Principia ends
abruptly with Proposition 42. But the second edition
continues. In addition to incorporating more observations
and calculations of the paths of comets, Newton in the 1713
edition extends the image of renewal nourished by comets to
the fixed stars themselves, writing, “So also fixed stars, which
are exhausted bit by bit in the exhalation of light and vapors,
can be renewed by comets falling into them and then, kindled
by their new nourishment, can be taken for new stars. Of this
sort are those fixed stars that appear all of a sudden, and that
at first shine with maximum brilliance and subsequently
disappear little by little” (937). This phenomenon, he
comments, had been noted by such reliable observers as
Cornelius Gemma, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler’s pupils.
In his last recorded conversation with John Conduitt,
Newton, at the age of 83, expanded upon the circulatory
image implicit in this understanding of those celestial events;
for, as the preceding citations from the Principia show, he
regarded the appearance of what we call supernovae as
evidence that the universe itself undergoes vast cycles of
destruction and regeneration. Conduitt wrote of this conversation that:
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9
it was his conjecture (he would affirm nothing)
that there was a <sort of> revolution in the
heavenly bodies that the vapours & light gathered
<emitted> by the sun <which had their sediment
as water & other matter had> gathered
themselves by degrees into a body <& attracted
more matter from the planets> & at last made a
secondary planett (viz. one of those that go round
another planet) & then by gathering <to them>
& attracting more matter became a primary
planet, & then by increasing still became a comet
wch after certain revolutions & by coming nearer
& nearer the sun, had all its volatile parts
condensed & became a matter fit to recruit <&
replenish> the sun (wch must waste by the constant
heat & light it emitted), as a fagot put into
<would> this fire if put into it (wee were sitting
by the <a wood> fire) & and that that would
probably be the effect of the comet in 1680 sooner
or later . . . (Iliffe, 1: 165).
Newton added that when this collision occurred, after
perhaps five or six more revolutions, it would “so much
increase the heat of the sun that <this earth would be burnt
&> no animals in this earth could live” (Iliffe, 1: 165).
Indeed, he seemed to Conduitt “to be very clearly of opinion”
that such a collision, and subsequent “repeopling” by the
Creator had happened at least once already, observing, first,
“that the inhabitants of this earth were of a short date,” partly
because “all arts as letters long ships printing – needle &c
were discovered within the memory of History, wch could not
have happened if the world had been eternal,” and, further,
that as far as the earth itself was concerned, “there were
visible marks of men [Westfall (1984: 862) has “ruin” here;
the word must be difficult to make out.] upon it whch could
not be effected by a flood only” (Iliffe, 1: 166). Such collisions were, Newton speculated, the cause of the suddenly
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
brilliant stars he had noted in the Principia—but without
mentioning there, as he did in his conversation with
Conduitt, that he took those stars to be “suns enlightnening
other planets as our sun does ours” (Iliffe, 1: 165). When
Conduitt asked him “why he would not own as freely what
he thought of the sun as well as what he thought of the fixed
stars—he said that concerned us more, & laughing added he
had said enough for people to know his meaning” (Iliffe, 1:
166).40
Newton could laugh, even in the face of past and future
death and devastation, for he trusted that a benevolent and
all-powerful God—both perfect mechanic and perfect
alchemist—determines everything that happens in the
universe, including the generation and apocalyptic
destruction of all living things (as, of course, Newton had also
read in the Bible, though he seems not to have mentioned
that particular bit of testimony in the conversation Conduitt
recorded). The second text concealed in the Principia, by
giving us an alchemical account of the generation of life,
expresses Newton’s confidence in God as perfect master of
the Great Work. This text is fully contained in the following
sentence, added to the second edition of the Principia, in a
translation based on that of Cohen and Whitman (938), but
retaining the ampersands of the Latin text. The issue is not
the use of the ampersand itself, which appears stranger here
in English than it does in the Principia, as it is used
throughout that work. What is striking is that both a comma
and an ampersand separate every term from the one that
follows it. This is not Newton’s common practice when
listing members of a series:
And the vapors that arise from the sun & the fixed
stars & the tails of comets can fall by their gravity
into the atmospheres of the planets & there be
condensed & converted into water & humid
spirits, & then—by a slow heat—be transformed
gradually into salts, & sulphurs, & tinctures, &
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11
slime, & mud, & clay, & sand, & stones, &
corals, & other earthy substances.
In the second edition this sentence is followed by two more
sentences. In the third edition those two sentences have been
omitted, so that the sentence cited above is the last one in the
body of the work immediately preceding the General
Scholium.
By the time he wrote these words, Newton had
abandoned his attempts to achieve experimental evidence for
the existence of the forces he had sought through his
alchemical work, but his references to comets show that he
had not abandoned his faith in the truth behind that quest,
for the language and imagery of this sentence come from
mystical alchemy. The sentence can be read as an allegory of
the three fundamental processes by which, according to the
alchemists, nature perfects her work: sublimation (the vapors
arise from the sun, the fixed stars, and the tails of comets);
distillation (by gravity they are condensed and turned into
water and humid spirits); and concoction (they change form
under the application of a slow heat). This process as a whole
Newton knew as vegetation, which in one of his earliest texts
on this subject (called “Of Nature’s obvious laws & processes
in vegetation,” written between 1670 and 1675) he explicitly
distinguished from what he called the “gross mechanicall
transposition of parts” (3r). In the 1670s Newton had no
inkling either of universal gravitation—writing, for example,
that clouds could rise high enough to “loos their gravity”
(5r)—or of a possible connection between comets and life on
earth. Although he writes in the manuscript that, “this Earth
resembles a great animall or rather inanimate vegetable,
draws in aethereall breath for its dayly refreshment & vitall
ferment & transpires again with gross exhalations” (3v), he
does not claim to know the renewable source of the ethereal
breath. After writing the Principia, however, he was able, in
allegorical language, if not in the language of experimental
science or mathematics, to complete the system of life-giving
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
circulation.41 The products of vegetation, listed in order as
rising from the depths of the planet toward its surface in the
presence of the fertilizing philosophical mercury falling from
the heavens are emphasized in the Latin text by the repetition
of the ampersand. The first three—fundamental salts,
oleaginous and fiery sulphurs, and transforming tinctures—
are alchemical ingredients of increasing power, associated
with spirit and necessary for the origin and development of
life. The next four describe the evolution of matter under the
gradual drying effect of slow heating: slime (the residue of
putrefaction), mire, clay, and sand. With the eighth member
of the series, stones (a category that includes precious stones),
we begin to see the organization associated with the mineral
kingdom, considered a union of spirit and matter. The ninth
member of the series is coral, which also appears in the generative series in “Of Nature’s obvious laws.” Unmodified this
would be red coral, a precious natural analogue (according,
for example, to Michael Maier, nine of whose works were
part of Newton’s library) of the crimson philosophers’ stone
(169). With coral we pass from the mineral to the vegetable
kingdom, for coral was thought in Newton’s day to be a
marine plant, which grew under water and hardened to stone
when brought into the air. The last member of the
sequence—seventh in the group comprising the evolution of
matter, third in the group comprising the evolution of life in
terms of the three “kingdoms,” and tenth in the entire
process comprising the gradual union of spirit and matter—
brings us to the animal kingdom, telling us that “all terrestrial
substances,” a category that includes our own bodies, have
come into being through the natural transmutation of
celestial vapors by gravity and the planet’s slow heat. Newton
begins this sentence speaking generically about planets. He
ends it speaking specifically about that which “concerns us
more”: our earth and ourselves.
The final sentence of the body of the Principia, then,
reaches back to the very beginnings of Newton’s concern
with cosmology. He has returned at the end to the old
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13
questions on a new level of understanding made possible by
his discoveries in the Principia, though not yet sufficiently
developed to be expressed openly in the mathematical
language of experimental philosophy. In the second and, even
more pointedly, in the third edition of the Principia (both
prepared with more leisure than the first edition), it seems,
Newton wanted to end his book with a powerful vision
encompassing all of nature; a vision which, like that of the
veiled text at the beginning of Book 1, would be at once as
clear as crystal to those who knew how to read it and as clear
as mud to those who did not. The dissertation on comets is
the last dual teaching. Through careful observations and
sophisticated mathematical calculations Newton has transformed our understanding of the nature of comets and the
laws behind their motion. But he has also composed hauntingly beautiful images of generation in our universe and on
our earth, for in the final allegory comets link the earth and
everything in it to the heavens. Newton chose not to express
this grand life-giving circulation openly in the Principia. But
he did include it. The processes revealed in these allegories
declare the Great Work of nature under the guidance of God.
In this vision perpetual circulation leads to life itself, and
universal gravitation is its motor.
5. “The fountain I draw it from”
Nature may truly be described as being one, true,
simple, and perfect in her own essence, and as
being animated by an invisible spirit. If therefore
you would know her, you, too, should be true,
single-hearted, patient, constant, pious, forbearing
and, in short, a new and regenerate man. (The
Sophic Hydrolith)42
I am not so bold as to assert that I have interpreted the
concealed texts correctly in every detail and I certainly do not
claim that I have discussed every appearance of symbolism in
the book. Nevertheless, I hope I have shown that a coherent
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
vision may be seen by reading the beginning of Book 1 of the
Principia in terms of numerological, esoteric geometrical,
theological, and alchemical symbolism, and by reading the
end of Book 3 in terms of alchemical allegory. I am not
arguing that the Principia properly understood is a sort of
Paradise Regained couched in mathematical metaphors, and I
have not forgotten for a moment that I am dealing with the
foundational text of modern terrestrial and celestial
mechanics; that what I have been calling the exoteric text has
existed ostensibly on its own for over 300 years; and that the
esoteric texts, in the absence of the exoteric text, would be no
more than mystical fancies, and perhaps not particularly
interesting ones at that. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake
to dismiss or avoid the esoteric texts, because they open the
way to a new and richer level of understanding of the work
as a whole, as well as of its author.
In fact, the existence of concealed texts in the Principia is
a solution, rather than a problem. Newtonian scholarship has
been a prolonged and uneasy exercise in rethinking his work.
Isaac Newton devoted the passion of his soul and the activity
of his intellect to discovering the intelligibility and the unity
of the world in all its manifestations. Yet even before we knew
of his vast manuscript collection of theological and
alchemical writings, whose subjects and style are so very
different from those usually attributed to the author of the
Principia, Newton was considered a complex and contradictory character. Now, the impacts of successive revelations—among them the ardency of his alchemical pursuits,
the intensity of his theological studies, and his conviction that
much of his work was restoring ancient learning—seem to
some to have shattered the possibility of ever seeing him as a
single, cohesive individual.
The Principia has been the crux of the problem.
Mathematicians and physicists have, quite reasonably,
focused on its mathematical and physical aspects. Meanwhile,
Newton’s biographers and the students of his theological and
alchemical pursuits have, for the most part, surrendered the
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15
Principia to those capable of following its formidable mathematics. I hope that, by looking closely at the Principia in a
way that (to my knowledge) has not been attempted before, I
have demonstrated that the mathematical, philosophical,
theological, and alchemical aspects of Newton’s work are
intertwined. But, even granting the existence of the concealed
texts, important questions remain: Why would Newton have
incorporated these teachings into the Principia? Why would
he have hidden them rather than revealing them openly? And
to whom are they addressed?
The first hidden text is particularly perplexing. Even as
mounting evidence persuaded me that it must be there, I had
no ready answer to the question why someone absorbed in
the relatively hasty composition of such a difficult and timeconsuming work would (or even could) have taken the time
and trouble to construct it. And yet perhaps it is not so
surprising. The language of symbol and allegory would have
been second nature to a man so thoroughly steeped in the
interpretation of alchemical and theological texts.
Incorporation of allegory and symbolism into his own text
would not have required inordinate effort. More importantly,
while for readers of the Principia, the hidden texts might
seem to be subsidiary to the open text—if they are seen at
all—for its author the relationship would have been the
reverse. The esoteric texts are not appendages to the exoteric
text; they are, instead, its foundation. There were certain
things Newton was not disposed to doubt and he held certain
convictions he would not deign to explain. In 1676, for
example, in a letter to John Collins, after asserting what he
realized was astonishing power and generality for his method
of fluxions, Newton wrote, “This may seem a bold assertion
because it’s hard to say a figure may or may not be squared or
compared with another, but it’s plain to me by ye fountain I
draw it from, though I will not undertake to prove it to
others” (Correspondence, 2: 180). The symbolic texts allow
Newton to incorporate into his masterwork the certainty
which was the source of his amazingly fruitful vision of the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
world, without having also to prove its existence to others.
They proclaim the glory of God suffusing both the universe
and the souls of men: the ground of Newton’s assurance that
the pursuit of knowledge through experimental and mathematical means is the proper vocation of humankind.
So did Newton include the hidden texts as a prayer of
thanksgiving to God, or perhaps as a personal meditation,
without intending them to be visible to others? I do think that
expression of his deepest beliefs at the heart of his greatest
work must have been a balm to the lonely soul of its author.
Newton had an attentive niece, devoted disciples, sympathetic colleagues, and even friends; but he had no peers. His
manuscripts with their repeatedly suppressed declarations
and speculations tell the story of an individual tormented by
the conflict between the aching desire to share his convictions
and the conviction that he could not do so. The “classical”
scholia, parts of which I have quoted above, serve as a particularly poignant example of this struggle, which he finally
settled by not including them in the Principia. The hidden
texts, thus, help resolve what must have been nearly
unbearable tension. Newton would have known that,
whatever their fate as far as the rest of the world was
concerned, they were there as his testimony of faith.
Nonetheless, it seems impossible that he concealed texts
in the Principia simply for his solitary satisfaction. There are
abundant indications within the work that signal the existence
of the first hidden text, while the remarks cited concerning
comets are in plain sight of anyone who reaches the end of
Book 3. Moreover, Newton himself, in the General Scholium,
calls our attention to the relation between God and natural
philosophy in a way that, when read only in the light of the
surface text of the Principia, is more puzzling than enlightening. The extended discourse on God, located at the center
of the General Scholium, is, frankly, shocking. It bursts
through the surface of the text with the force of a pent-up
spring, a surging torrent of words, far too powerful and far
too passionate to be neatly contained within the book the
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17
Principia seems at first to be. And then this ardent outpouring
vanishes without a trace, subsiding as suddenly as it began,
beneath the sentence: “This concludes the discussion of God,
and to treat of God from phenomena is certainly a part of
natural philosophy” (943).44 No one who reads this passage
can doubt that its author was a man of exceptional piety, but
if he was so very pious (and if he really believed that to treat
of God from phenomena is part of natural philosophy), how
could he have slighted God in his greatest work? It is true that
the Principia is a book of experimental philosophy (though
there are necessarily few actual experiments in it), and that
there is no experiment that will simply prove the existence of
God. But, except for a few scattered remarks, God appears to
be so utterly absent from the work that—despite the
testimony of Richard Bentley’s lectures, titled A Confutation
of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World, delivered
in 1692 and published in 1693—Newton has been
condemned for writing an atheistic book (or, alternatively,
commended for writing a secular one).45 Of course, I have
been arguing that God is not at all missing from the Principia.
On the contrary, anyone willing to admit that this work (like
white light, the stone of the philosophers, man, and the
universe) may be simultaneously one and many, and able to
follow the clues Newton has provided, can see that it is, in
fact, filled with God’s presence and that we are meant to see
that presence.
But if we are meant to see that presence, then why hide
the teachings? There are several partial answers to this
question. One reason may have been Newton’s personality,
which has been described by such various terms as prudent,
paranoid, modest, arrogant, cautious, suspicious,
domineering, fearful, and vindictive. A more important factor
in his decision to hide the teachings could have been his
particular situation in the context of the political and
religious turmoil that was occurring in England during his
lifetime. Most importantly, the nature of the teachings
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themselves would have determined the form of their presentation.
As for his personality, extreme reticence, whatever its
source, was apparently part of Newton’s character. Public
revelation of any of his work seems often to have required a
struggle with himself as well as with others; most of what he
wrote, by far, he did not publish. But a simple appeal to
character does not really resolve the issue, for in the works he
did publish Newton was not always quite so reluctant to
reveal his beliefs as he was in the Principia. In the Opticks, for
example, published during his lifetime in six editions (three
in English, in 1704, 1717/18, and 1721; two in Latin, in
1706 and 1719; and a French translation in 1720), he wrote
increasingly openly of his hopes and speculations regarding
natural philosophy, though he still disguised them (however
transparently) as queries. He first published the Opticks,
however, after the death of his nemesis Robert Hooke in
1703 and his own ascent to a position of fame and power as
author of the Principia and president of the Royal Society,
and at a time when he was becoming more conscious of the
need to leave his work for posterity. Openness had also
characterized his early “New Theory about Light and
Colours.” But the tone of ingenuous excitement in which on
January 18, 1672 Newton (who was not yet 30 years old)
described his discovery of the nature of light to Henry
Oldenburg as “in my Judgment the oddest if not the most
considerable wch hath beene made in the operations of
Nature” (Correspondence, 1: 82-3) is one he never again
employed publicly. Instead, burned by the hostility that work
aroused, he designed his Principia to ensure that the
expression of his deepest passions and convictions would be
visible only to like-minded readers.
Newton’s penchant for secrecy, however, was not simply
(and perhaps not even primarily) a matter of character. He
had compelling external reasons to conceal his theological,
philosophical, and alchemical beliefs. With respect to
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theology, in the General Scholium to the Principia Newton
finally affirms the strict monotheism and the vision of God as
Παντοκρατϖρ that underlie his work, though with characteristic discretion he eschews the scorching anti-Trinitarian
diatribes he allowed himself in his unpublished manuscripts.
But by the time the second edition of the Principia was being
prepared—and the General Scholium was Newton’s final
addition to that edition—its author was Sir Isaac, secure in his
renown; and the Principia was so highly regarded that it had
practically become a sacred text itself. Had the unknown
Cambridge professor expressed his dangerously unorthodox
beliefs in 1687, he would have risked his career if not his life
(for religious heterodoxy was a capital offense in England at
the time). Moreover, the peril of confessing such beliefs did
not abate during Newton’s lifetime. He was a member of the
Convention Parliament of 1689, which declared equally
illegal the Roman Catholicism he loathed and the Arianism he
held.46 Newton could reasonably conclude that open
acknowledgment of his religious convictions would have put
his entire philosophical program at risk. At the very least it
would have provided for a lifetime of distraction, as he would
have been forced to engage in endless discussion and defense
of his beliefs. He had better things to do.
Newton had good reasons, as well, not to proclaim his
unorthodox philosophical convictions in the Principia,
closely tied as they were to his heterodox theology. He
believed that the existence of gravity had been made manifest
through its effects as revealed in the Principia, and that such
revelation, as he wrote in the General Scholium, was—
indeed, had to be—enough for now. Throughout his long life
he repeatedly tried to claim the right to say that he did not
know the cause of gravity, insisting (as had Galileo) that
knowledge of causes was not necessary for the pursuit of
natural philosophy. In fact, Newton was convinced that
requiring that causes be known, or hypothesized, before
effects could be studied stifled philosophical progress.47 In the
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General Scholium, after his often quoted assertion that he
does not feign hypotheses, Newton continues: “For whatever
is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a
hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or
physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no
place in experimental philosophy” (943). This statement—in
addition to neatly equating, in terms of their uselessness, the
metaphysical with the physical and the mechanical qualities
that the Cartesians held with the occult qualities which to
them were anathema—stakes out Newton’s philosophical
position on this issue. He publicly refuses to attempt to
explain gravity, and, with the authority of the Principia
behind him, he goes on to declare that a search for its cause
is, at best, beside the point.
But his protestations were not accepted by the mechanical
philosophers. Surely the heat with which they attacked him
was due in part to their understandable suspicion that he
thought he knew the cause of gravity, and that it was not
mechanical; for it was quite clear that impulse was unable to
account for universal gravitation. Explanation of gravitation,
therefore, seemed inevitably to require acceptance of a
doctrine of attraction, of action at a distance, of a force that
was, to use their heavily-laden word, “occult.”48 Newton
would readily have admitted that the workings of gravity
were occult—in the simple sense that we do not know exactly
how God does it. But he could never have satisfied the strict
mechanical philosophers on this point, no matter what he
said, for conservation of the universe as Newton understood
it required active force;49 and any admission of a nonmechanical cause into the universe was unacceptable to those
who held that the physical world could only be intelligible in
terms of matter and motion alone. If Newton harbored
personal beliefs about God’s active role in the universe, he
also realized that it would have been foolish for him to
express openly in the Principia convictions for which he
could not supply experimental evidence. Wisely, he designed
the surface text of the book to preclude speculation about
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causes. The deeper teachings—composed in a language not
susceptible to argument—were reserved for those who could
appreciate them.
As concerns Newton’s alchemical quest, as well, there
were abundant reasons not to reveal it openly in the
Principia. Again, one was the character of the open text as its
author constructed it, for if he had no demonstrable evidence
of the cause of gravity he had no demonstrable evidence even
of the existence of the forces he sought so avidly through
alchemy. Newton seems to have read alchemical texts with
the same intent with which he read all texts: seeing their
deliberately deceptive exposition and dense symbolic enigmas
as expressions of a single truth uniting nature and revelation,
obscured by a veil that could be penetrated by interpretation,
which in this case was aided by the experimentation at which
he was so adept. Whatever the philosophers’ stone may have
meant for other alchemists, for Newton I believe achievement
of the stone would have been the culmination of his life’s
work: it would have meant the acquisition through experimental means of that truth which he sought so very intensely.
As early as the first edition of the Principia, Newton struggled
with the desire to reveal his alchemical pursuits, writing in
the Preface, after describing the procedure he would follow
in the book:
If only we could derive the other phenomena of
nature from mechanical principles by the same
kind of reasoning! For many things lead me to
have a suspicion that all phenomena may depend
on certain forces by which the particles of bodies,
by causes not yet known, either are impelled
toward one another and cohere in regular figures,
or are repelled from one another and recede. Since
these forces are unknown, philosophers have
hitherto made trial of nature in vain. But I hope
that the principles set down here will shed some
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light on either this mode of philosophizing or
some truer one. (382-3)
As usual, however, he resolved that the open text of the
Principia was not the proper place for conjectures, no matter
how fervently he may have held them. This brief statement of
his strong suspicion and hopes and a few speculations in the
last paragraph of the General Scholium, which he cut short
for lack of experimental evidence, are as close as he comes to
openly stating his chemical aspirations in that work.50
Failure to obtain experimental evidence for chemical
forces might have been sufficient motive for Newton to
withhold open acknowledgment of those aspirations, but
there were other cogent reasons for discretion, as well.
Newton surely considered himself among the philosophical
alchemists, for, unlike the puffers or smoke-sellers, whose
base activity the philosophical alchemists universally decried,
he was surely not interested in acquiring personal power or
amassing wealth through chicanery. Nevertheless, he knew
that alchemists were widely considered to be rogues and
conjurors and as such were both ridiculed and feared.
Therefore, in personal terms, there was much to be lost and
nothing to be gained by publicly espousing alchemy. In
practical terms, serious alchemists considered the power they
hoped to achieve too dangerous to be proclaimed openly to
an imperfect world, a constraint that we know Newton
respected.51 And finally, the philosophical alchemists were
engaged in a spiritual quest for purification and perfection,
which they also called healing, not only of metals but also of
their own souls. True philosophical alchemy required a
relationship between the practitioner and his God wherein
the success of the work depended at least as much upon the
state of the alchemist’s soul as upon his facility in deciphering
texts or his dexterity in following procedures. The one thing
serious alchemical writings make perfectly clear is that only
the pious and pure of heart will be able to discern the proper
proportions of materials, the correct degrees of heat for each
part of the procedure, and the precise timing necessary to
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perfect the work.52 Achievement of the philosophers’ stone
would have been a gift of God awarded to one who merited
it. Open acknowledgment of engagement in this intense and
intimate quest would have been not only foolhardy but also
impious.
There are, then, abundant negative reasons for Newton
to have hidden his theological, philosophical, and alchemical
beliefs; but there is also a powerful positive argument for
including those beliefs in the form of concealed texts.
Newton seems to have considered, repeatedly, the possibility
that the world was ready for him to reveal, in his own name,
the convictions he held. And every time he considered that
possibility, he rejected it. He, therefore, took his place as a
member of a distinguished secret fraternity long engaged in
the task of seeking the truth and revealing it in a dual
manner: each work simultaneously expounding one text for
the many, and another, through symbols and figures, for the
few.53 He believed that the alchemists, the ancient sages, and
the inspired writers of the Holy Scriptures—recognizing the
peril to themselves and quite possibly to others of openly
displaying their true convictions in unsettled times like those
in which he was living—had conveyed their mystical
teachings in metaphors, fables, allegories, images, parables,
and prophecies, as well as numerological and esoteric
geometrical symbolism. All of their texts, like the book of
nature itself, required interpretation. Newton understood the
worth of his Book of Principles. Why should it differ in this
respect from the world-changing works that preceded it? In
his remarkable passage about God in the General Scholium,
Newton comes close to expressing in words the vision of the
concealed texts. But the full force of mystical belief cannot be
conveyed in everyday language, corrupted by the Fall and
confined by what Newton called its “unavoidable
narrowness” (McGuire, 199). Newton had numerous reasons
not to express his mystical teachings openly, but he also had
a powerful reason to express them in the way he did:
Symbolism is their proper language.
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An unavoidable, and perhaps uncomfortable, consequence of this reading is the recognition that not all of the
teachings in the Principia were meant for everyone (though
the shock of this realization should be attenuated by recalling
that the book is a restricted text at every level). But if the
teachings were not meant for everyone, to whom were they
addressed? Clearly, Newton wanted others to continue the
work he had begun. He published and repeatedly revised
both the Principia and the Opticks in the interest of
promoting the development of natural philosophy, which, he
told Conduitt toward the end of his life, he felt the comfort
of having left less mischievous than he found it. But, aside
from those two books, he seems to have cared so little (or
perhaps, in some cases, feared so much) what his contemporaries would think of his work that he preferred not to
publish it during his lifetime, particularly if publication meant
that he would be hounded and pestered by critics.54 On the
other hand, he cared very deeply that his work be preserved
and, furthermore, that others know that it was his. Both his
reluctance to publish and his wounded outrage—when his
originality, at least with respect to his fellow moderns, was
assailed (as by Hooke); or his work, to his mind, was
hindered (as by Flamsteed); or his priority and even his
probity were challenged (as by Leibniz)—may be partially
understood if we realize that Newton considered the intellectual community to which he belonged to be temporal.55 In
the concealed texts Newton was addressing primarily those
he would consider his true intellectual heirs. Those philosophers, carrying on the task of improving natural philosophy
and presumably familiar with its venerable dual tradition,
would be able to see and recognize the true foundation of the
work in which they were engaged.
For Newton knew that the work was not complete.
Although he recognized that his remarkable achievements
had reached new heights of natural philosophy, he was also
well aware that his deepest questions had gone unanswered.
There is evidence that when he finished the first edition of the
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Principia, he still hoped he would find those answers. In the
early 1690s he immersed himself in a monumental study of
the entire alchemical tradition. He may, as well, have
attempted to initiate his young disciple, Nicholas Fatio de
Duillier, into his alchemical pursuits. But it came to nothing.56
In 1693 Newton suffered a breakdown, a mysterious episode
which led to rumors on the Continent that he had become
permanently deranged or had even died. The onset of this
crisis has been attributed—not fully persuasively—to various
causes; but equally remarkable (and also unexplained) is its
abrupt end. This end was characterized by the full resumption
of his sanity—if not of the intense intellectual power that had
previously marked his life—only a few months after he wrote
the rambling letters to Samuel Pepys and John Locke that
were the source of their fears for his state of mind.57 His
failure to unlock the chemical secrets of the universe, despite
his fevered attempts to do so, must have been devastating.
But Newton finally accepted that he would not be the one to
answer those questions. In 1696, at the age of 53, he
abandoned his experimental search into the unity of nature
and took a position as master of the mint.
Nevertheless, he did not repudiate his earlier failed
attempts. On the contrary, he left ample evidence of his
ongoing conviction that such unity did exist. This evidence
includes his elaboration of the second concealed text in the
second and third editions of the Principia, as well as his
decision to leave both that work and the Opticks open,
inviting further study and suggesting possible directions for
it. Newton also scattered clues to his beliefs outside of the
works published in his name. He impressed some of his
unpublished views upon the young men whose careers he
fostered, and they in turn disseminated them. His disciple
David Gregory, for example, in “The Author’s Preface” to his
Astronomiæ physicæ & geometricæ elementa (1702) included
a history of astronomy, according to which the laws his great
mentor Isaac Newton supposedly was the first to discover had
been in fact only rediscovered, as they had been known to the
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ancients. In the twentieth century the manuscript of this
passage was found among Newton’s papers, written in
Newton’s hand. Newton himself had composed it.
In addition, though he is said to have burned numerous
papers in the days before his death, Newton left millions of
words concerning the interpretation of history and scripture,
as well as his interpretation of alchemical texts and detailed
notes on his experiments.58 As he seems to have left no
written account of his reasons for wanting his unpublished
manuscripts to survive him, it is impossible to be certain of
his motives. One might surmise, for example, that Newton
left us his alchemical notes as proof of failure, as evidence
that not even he could unlock the chemical secrets of the
universe by following that path, and therefore as an
indication of precisely how not to proceed. But what, then,
do we make of the historical and scriptural interpretations
that accompany that record? Are we to regard them as
repudiated, too? In the absence of a note stating his intent—
whose discovery among the manuscripts would be a real
coup—it seems likely that he retained hope that another,
knowing of his efforts now that he was “out of the way,”
could pick up his task of unifying scripture, history, and
natural philosophy where he had abandoned it. Newton
could not have known that the executors of his estate would
label his alchemical writings not fit to print. Nor could he
have known that his more radical theological manuscripts
would also be deemed unprintable, despite the desire his
niece expressed in her will that they be published. Newton, in
short, could not have known the extent to which his
published work—particularly his Principia—like the
philosopher’s stone he had sought for so long, had begun to
transform both the world and himself within it. One of the
effects of this transformation may have been to shield the
secrecy of its author’s convictions after his death more
thoroughly than he intended. But he seems not to have cared.
Dying intestate, he left the matter in the hands of God, who,
he trusted, would allow it to be revealed at the proper time.
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For Newton believed the time would come when an
improved world would be ready to accept his teachings. In
the spirit of the ancient philosophers he most admired, his
philosophical aspirations extended beyond the realm of
natural philosophy; he trusted that its perfection would lead
to that of moral philosophy, so sadly imperfect in the
turbulent world he saw around him. The last edition of the
Opticks ends with the following passage, looking toward
progress in natural philosophy, which Newton believed
would lead not to a new morality but to a return to pure
ancient morality:
In this third Book [for the Opticks, too, is divided
into three books] I have only begun the Analysis of
what remains to be discover’d about Light and its
Effects upon the Frame of Nature, hinting several
things about it, and leaving the Hints to be
examin’d and improv’d by the farther Experiments
and Observations of such as are inquisitive. And if
natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this
Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds
of Moral Philosophy will also be enlarged. For so
far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is
the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and
what Benefits we receive from him, so far our
Duty towards him, as well as that towards one
another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature.
And no doubt, if the Worship of false Gods had
not blinded the Heathen, their moral Philosophy
would have gone farther than to the four Cardinal
Virtues; and instead of teaching the
Transmigration of Souls, and to worship the Sun
and Moon, and dead Heroes, they would have
taught us to worship our true Author and
Benefactor, as their Ancestors did under the
Government of Noah and his Sons before they
corrupted themselves. (405-6)
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But the outcome of Newton’s “method” has been quite
other than the unification of natural and moral philosophy he
intended. We can never know how things would have been
different had his concealed convictions been brought to light
before the twentieth century. In the event, his Principia was
driven like a wedge between reason and faith. Designed to
declare the power of the deity in the world and, thereby, to
revive and foster both natural and moral philosophy,
Newton’s masterwork has instead been seen as a monument
to the separation between science and religion, as antithetical
to the unity of the very traditions of which it was in fact the
culmination.
6. Conclusion: The Old Made New
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.59
So what then is this Principia? To construct his grand vision,
encompassing the whole of creation, Newton, of course,
drew on his exceptional mathematical ability. But the
Principia is more than the mathematical and physical
treatise—however great—that it appears to be. It is a little
world, an artful elaboration of secular and sacred traditions
of human knowledge, born both of Renaissance
Hermeticism, which was so influential in the development of
experimental science in the seventeenth century, and of
Newton’s faith in a beneficent creator who ruled the universe
and who (in the fullness of time) would allow his human
creatures to discover and reveal its lawfulness. Behind everything that Newton did was a firm faith in God’s providence.
All of his work conveys his conviction that we live in a world
whose history is the working out of God’s great story from
the creation to the apocalypse. We humans do not have the
power, he thought, nor should we have the desire, to alter
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that already-written story; but God has hidden clues to it in
both nature and scripture, which some of us may be granted
the power to see and understand. The texts concealed in the
Principia—in their vision of God’s glory filling, fertilizing,
and illuminating the entire universe and the soul of his
disciple—are Newton’s grateful acknowledgement of the
source of his understanding and also his message to the
future; they are the manifestation of his peculiar genius and
his true secret art.
I do not intend here to discuss the validity of Newton’s
vision of the world. My goal in this study has been merely to
urge a thoroughgoing reconsideration of his Principia, a book
that resolutely resists easy classification. Seen as a whole, the
work both supersedes, and incorporates, the secular and
sacred traditions of learning that preceded it. It is a
magnificent product of transformation and circulation, a
manifestation at every level of the old made new (and, for
that matter, of the new made old). Together with the unparalleled mathematical achievements of the open text, the
mystical journey near the beginning of Book 1 teaches us that
our minds are capable of ascending to the heavens and
beyond, while the cosmic allegory at the end of Book 3 shows
us that our bodies are composed of the material and spiritual
stuff of the universe. The open text is grounded upon the
visions expressed in the hidden texts, and the hidden texts
depend for their power upon the open text while extending
its domain.
The Principia, in sum, speaks to both our intellect and our
imagination, addressing our deep human desire to be intellectually, spiritually, and materially at one with our universe.
Newton’s greatest book is far stranger and far richer than we
have ever suspected. A mathematical and physical work of
prodigious power, the Principia is also an expression of the
highest art and a declaration of the deepest love of which this
remarkable man was capable.
*
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I would like to thank Curtis Wilson, Tom Simpson, and Dana
Densmore for reading and commenting on an early draft of
this paper. I would also like to thank Rob Iliffe and Peter Pesic
for doing the same for a nearly final draft, and the editors and
editorial assistants of the Review for seeing it through to
publication. I am especially grateful to Eva Brann for her
unstinting support from beginning to end. I have attempted
to address the questions and suggestions of these generous
readers. None of them bears any responsibility for anything
written here.
Notes
37
Isaac Newton’s translation of the Tabula Smaragdina, the “Emerald
Tablet” attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (quoted in Dobbs 1991, 274).
The passage continues with some alchemical instructions.
38
Simpson, too, in the final section of his article, addresses what he calls
the astronomical alchemy that comets undergo in their close approach to
the sun, which he calls the “furnace of the heavens,” a crucible that
reaches a temperature unattainable on earth, thus leading to “the
emission of that ‘spirit’ which was always the ultimate objective of the
alchemic search and is fundamentally needed in order to complete
Newton’s account of the true System of the World” (164).
39
Newton wrote in his Hypothesis explaining the properties of light: “For
nature is a perpetuall circulatory worker, generating fluids out of solids,
and solids out of fluids, fixed things out of volatile, & volatile out of
fixed, subtile out of gross, & gross out of subtile, Some things to ascend
& make the upper terrestriall juices, Rivers and the Atmosphere; & by
consequence others to descend for a Requitall to the former”
(Correspondence, 1: 366). These sentences were written while Newton
still accepted the vortex hypothesis of planetary motion, well before he
had any idea of universal gravitation. As he developed the Principia, he
abandoned the hypothesis of vortices and, indeed, in the Principia he
takes every opportunity to combat that hypothesis. I believe, however,
that the sentiment of the passage survives as a metaphor of the circular
chemical processes, moved by gravity, that make life possible.
40Actually
he had acknowledged it, writing: “The comet that appeared in
1680 was distant from the sun in its perihelion by less than a sixth of the
sun’s diameter; and because its velocity was greatest in that region and
also because the atmosphere of the sun has some density, the comet must
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have encountered some resistance and must have been somewhat slowed
down and must have approached closer to the sun; and by approaching
closer to the sun in every revolution, it will at length fall into the body of
the sun. But also, in its aphelion, when it moves most slowly, the comet
can sometimes be slowed down by the attraction of other comets and as a
result fall into the sun” (937). He does not, however, dwell on the implications of the predicted collision for life on earth, but moves directly on
to his remarks about supernovae to which Conduitt called his attention in
their conversation.
41
This image appears in the Opticks, as well. In Query 30, one of those
added to the Latin and later English editions of that work, Newton muses
about the convertibility of light and gross bodies into one another,
writing, “The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is
very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with
Transmutations” (374), and, later, “All Birds, Beasts and Fishes, Insects,
Trees and other Vegetables, with their several Parts, grow out of Water
and watry Tinctures and Salts, and by Putrefaction return again into
watry Substances. And Water standing a few Days in the open Air, yields
a Tincture, which (like that of Malt), by standing longer yields a Sediment
and a Spirit, but before Putrefaction is fit Nourishment for Animals and
Vegetables. And among such various and strange Transmutations, why
may not Nature change Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies?” (375).
Like the alchemical allegory at the end of the discussion of comets in the
Principia, these passages were written after their author had abandoned
alchemical experimentation.
42
Quoted in Waite, 1: 75.
43
There are exceptions: notably Alexandre Koyré, I. Bernard Cohen, and
Richard Westfall. But Westfall, who has produced the most comprehensive account of Newton’s life and work, admits with frustration that
during two decades of study Newton became ever more of a mystery to
him. In a modern version of the opinion of the Marquis de l’Hôpital—
who wondered if Newton ate, drank, and slept like other men or was
truly the god he seemed—Westfall concludes that there is no measure for
Newton, that he is wholly other. I do not agree; but I do believe that
until we acknowledge the texts hidden in the Principia we will never
understand its author.
44
Et hæc de deo, de quo utique ex phænomenis disserere, ad philosophiam
naturalem pertinet (764). This quote is from the third edition of the
Principia. In the second edition Newton states that to discourse of God is
the business of experimental philosophy, a statement which makes even
more perplexing the apparent absence of God from this particular book.
Newton seems to have thought better of that claim, for he changed it in
the final edition. Larry Stewart contends that the General Scholium “was
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written, and certainly perceived to have been written, with an eye to the
difficulties and the defence of the anti-Trinitarianism of his disciple
Samuel Clarke” (145-6). It is not clear to me why Isaac Newton would
have used his masterwork as a tool to defend Samuel Clarke, though it is
possible, as Stewart claims, that the General Scholium was (at least to
some degree) a salvo fired against societal assault on experimentalism. If
Stewart is right we find ourselves presented with yet another case in
which Newton manages to say what he means in a veiled manner.
45
The scholium following the Definitions does mention “Scriptures,”
(414) which is Cohen and Whitman’s translation of the Latin “sacris
literis” (52). And the first edition of the Principia contains (in Corollary 5
to Proposition 8 of Book 3) the following sentence: “Collocavit igitur
Deus Planetas in diversis distantiis a Sole, ut quilibet pro gradu densitatis
calore Solis majore vel minore fruatur” (583). Corollary 5 was excised
from the later editions, and some of its content was included in Corollary
4. But Newton replaced “God placed . . .” with “the planets were to be
placed. . .” (Cohen 1969, 529-30). This, by the way, is further evidence
that Newton’s use of the passive voice in the Principia is deliberate and
significant. Cohen argues, I think rightly, that these passing references are
indications that Newton was thinking of God all along, as he constructed
every edition of the Principia.
46
During Newton’s lifetime, refusal to accept the doctrine of the Trinity
could lead to prison; in 1696 a man was hanged for denying that article
of faith. Moreover, open expression of unorthodox beliefs was costly to
some of Newton’s disciples. Edmond Halley’s supposed atheism, for
example, cost him the Savilian professorship of astronomy at Oxford
University, which was awarded to David Gregory, another protégé of
Newton, who apparently was scarcely more religious than Halley, though
he was more discreet about his heterodoxy; and William Whiston lost his
position as successor to Newton in the Lucasian professorship of mathematics at Cambridge University for espousing religious views similar to
those Newton held. Newton, of course, considered the Trinitarians to be
the real heretics, and at crucial times in his life he refused to compromise
his beliefs. He was willing to sacrifice his appointment to Cambridge
University rather than take the requisite holy orders; he fought hard and
successfully against appointment by King James II of a Benedictine monk
to the university (though in this case the grounds were Roman
Catholicism rather than Trinitarianism as such); and on his deathbed he
refused the sacrament of the church. Nonetheless, he attended church
services occasionally; and he supported the Anglican Church. I doubt that
his intent in doing so was merely to disguise his true convictions in order
to protect his reputation. Newton would have regarded the Church of
England as a valuable bulwark against the political and religious
encroachments of the Roman Catholic Church, which he called the
SEEGER
33
Whore of Babylon, and which he identified in his Observations on the
Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, published posthumously in 1733, as the little horn of the fourth beast prophesied in the
Book of Daniel.
The widespread social upheavals of the time may also have influenced
Newton’s decision to be circumspect about his theological beliefs. David
Kubrin, in his article “Newton’s Inside Out!” speculates that the reason
he censored himself and repressed his insights, ideas, visions, and grand
plan of the cosmos, “was largely social, and stemmed from the fact that
Newton realized the dangerous social, political, economic, and religious
implications that would be associated with him should he dare reveal his
true thoughts” (97). Though Kubrin focuses on the social aspects of
Newton’s ideas, his claim is reminiscent of Law’s assertion that Newton
did not reveal his supposed indebtedness to Boehme because he did not
want to be associated with enthusiasm.
47
Descartes, for example, criticizing Galileo’s method in his Discorsi, had
written to Mersenne, “Nothing that he says here can be determined
without knowing what gravity is” (October 11, 1638, quoted in de
Gandt, 118). If Newton had waited to know what gravity was before
writing the Principia, the book never would have been written.
48
Newton considered action at a distance, in a universe containing only
matter, ridiculous, for he did not believe that brute matter could act in
any way at all. In Rule 3 of Book 3 of the Principia, added in the second
edition (Koyré, 268), he explicitly repudiates the notion that gravity is
inherent in matter. In his third letter to Richard Bentley, he expressed this
conviction even more strongly, writing: “That gravity should be innate
inherent & essential to matter so yt one body may act upon another at a
distance through a vacuum without the mediation of any thing else by &
through wch their action or force may be conveyed from one to another
is to me so great an absurdity that I beleive no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it”
(Correspondence, 3: 254).
49
As he wrote to Bentley, “Gravity must be caused by an agent acting
constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material
or immaterial is a question I have left to ye consideration of my readers”
(Correspondence, 3: 254).
50
Further evidence for Newton’s struggle with himself over this issue, as
well as his awareness of the effects revelation of his beliefs would have
had on others’ perceptions of both himself and his work may be seen in a
draft of a Proposition 18 (crossed out and relabeled Hypothesis 2), which
he wrote after finishing the first edition of the Principia. This hypothesis,
which was to have been part of a general conclusion to the Opticks,
reads: “As all the great motions in the world depend upon a certain kind
of force (which in this earth we call gravity) whereby great bodies attract
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
one another at great distances: so all the little motions in the world
depend upon certain kinds of forces whereby minute bodies attract or
dispell one another at little distances.” He refers to his demonstration of
universal gravitation in the Principia, and continues: “And if Nature be
most simple & fully consonant to her self she observes the same method
in regulating the motions of smaller bodies which she doth in regulating
those of the greater. This principle of nature being very remote from the
conceptions of Philosophers I forbore to describe it in that Book least I
should be accounted an extravagant freak & so prejudice my Readers
against all those things which were the main designe of the Book: but &
yet I hinted at it both in the Preface & in the Book it self where I speak
of the inflection of light & of the elastick power of the Air but the design
of the book being secured by the approbation of Mathematicians, I had
not scrupled to propose this Principle in plane words. The truth of this
Hypothesis I assert not, because I cannot prove it, but I think it very
probable because a great part of the phenomena of nature do very easily
flow from it which seem otherways inexplicable: . . .” (quoted in Cohen
1982, 63) He goes on to list some of the phenomena he has in mind.
Newton repressed but did not destroy this remarkable statement.
51
We know that Newton admitted the possibility that this fear was well
founded because of a letter he sent on April 26, 1676 to Henry
Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society, regarding a question raised by
a “B. R.” (Robert Boyle) in the Philosophical Transactions whether he
should publish the recipe for a mercury that heated gold when mixed
with it. Newton stated that he doubted that this particular mercury could
be useful “either to medicine or vegetation.” Then he continued:
But yet because the way by which mercury [Newton here
places an alchemical symbol instead of the word] may be so
impregnated, has been thought fit to be concealed by others
that have known it, & therefore may possibly be an inlet to
something more noble, not to be communicated wthout
immense dammage to ye world if there should be any verity
in ye Hermetick writers, therefore I question not but that ye
great wisdom of ye noble Authour will sway him to high
silence till he shall be resolved of what consequence ye thing
may be either by his own experience, or ye judgmt of some
other that throughly understands what he speakes about, that
is of a true Hermetic Philosopher, whose judgmt (if there be
any such) would be more to be regarded in this point then
that of all ye world beside to ye contrary, there being other
things beside ye transmutation of metals (if these great
pretenders bragg not) wch none but they understand. Sr
because ye Author seems desirous of ye sense of others in this
SEEGER
35
point, I have been so free as to shoot my bolt; but pray keep
this letter private to your self. (Correspondence, 2: 2)
Newton and Boyle engaged for years in a correspondence about
alchemical research, which itself was typically guarded in the manner of
alchemical writers who rarely revealed everything even to sympathetic
correspondents. Few of these letters survive, but in a letter of August 2,
1692 to his friend John Locke, who shared Newton’s interest in
theological and alchemical pursuits, Newton observes, and respects,
Boyle’s “reservedness” about revealing a certain recipe, a restraint he
speculated might have proceeded from his own (though he does seem
somewhat miffed that Boyle is being quite so reserved with respect to
him). (Correspondence, 3: 218)
52 Newton himself, in his old age, implied as much in a conversation with
John Conduitt, stating that, “They who search after the philosophers’
stone by their own rules [are] obliged to a strict and religious life”
(quoted in Dobbs 1975, 15; also see Iliffe, 1: 178).
53
In one of the “classical” scholia, which Newton decided not to include
in the Principia, after writing of the analogy the ancients made between
the harmony of musical strings and the weights of the planets, he
continues: “But the Philosophers loved so to mitigate their mystical
discourses that in the presence of the vulgar they foolishly propounded
vulgar matters for the sake of ridicule, and hid the truth beneath
discourses of this kind” (McGuire and Rattansi, 117). I am not claiming
that Newton considered the surface text of the Principia to be a vulgar
matter foolishly propounded for the sake of ridicule. My claim is merely
that in emulation of the ancient philosophers he composed the work as a
layered text.
54
As early as 1676, reacting in part to the criticism that followed his
1672 publication on light, Newton wrote to John Collins, who had urged
him to publish his method of fluxions:
You seem to desire yt I would publish my method & I look
upon your advice as an act of singular friendship, being I
beleive censured by divers for my scattered letters in ye
Transactions about such things as nobody els would have let
come out wthout a substantial discours. I could wish I could
retract what has been done, but by that, I have learnt what’s
to my convenience, wch is to let what I write ly by till I am
out of ye way. (Correspondence, 2: 179)
55
Special circumstances, among them Newton’s own character and that
of his adversaries, influenced the particular course of each conflict, but it
seems plausible that, as far as Newton was concerned, they all had the
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
same ground. The perception that the importance of his work was
historical could also go some way toward explaining the numerous
portraits of himself he commissioned. Further, it sheds light on his
willingness in his later life to let others carry on the controversies his
work aroused, rather than entering them himself until they touched his
reputation too closely, at which point he would join the fray, but usually
anonymously. This tactic was not unique to Newton, but it may have
been unusually powerful in his case, as in later life he was able to speak
with the voice of the Royal Society. He allowed Roger Cotes to write an
explanatory introduction to the second edition of the Principia, but he
refused to read it, so as not to be asked to clarify or defend it. He did not
want his peace to be disturbed by the obligation of justifying his work to
anyone.
56
During the same years that he was making, and failing at, his final
alchemical attempts he may have contemplated excision of the first
hidden text from the Principia. Whether we think he did depends upon
how we read David Gregory’s notes and Newton’s own manuscripts of
proposed alterations to the book. In any event, if he considered dismantling that text, he did not do it.
57
The letter to Pepys was dated September 13, 1693 (Correspondence, 3:
279), and the letter to Locke three days later (Correspondence, 3: 280).
On September 28 Pepys’ nephew John Millington visited Newton in
Cambridge and was able to report to his uncle that, though “under some
small degree of melancholy,” he seemed quite sane as well as “very much
ashamed” at the rudeness of the letter, which Newton himself characterized as “very odd” (Correspondence, 3: 281-2). In a letter of October
3, Newton apologized to Locke, explaining that “by sleeping too often by
my fire I got an ill habit of sleeping & a distemper wch this summer has
been epidemical put me further out of order, so that when I wrote to you
I had not slept an hour a night for a fortnight & for 5 nights together not
a wink” (Correspondence, 3: 284).
58
Rattansi estimates that Newton wrote 1,300,000 words on theological
and biblical subjects (167), and Westfall estimates that notes and compositions on alchemy in Newton’s hand exceed 1,000,000 words (1980, 163).
59
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2.
37
“The Things of Friends are
Common”
Christopher B. Nelson
I came to a startling realization over the summer as I was
preparing to greet our newest class: that I had returned to this
college to take the position I now hold in the year in which
most of our incoming freshmen were born. The years have
passed quickly, it seems to me now, and my appreciation for
the community of learning I joined back then has grown as
my friendships within the community have deepened. I think
I became a wee bit sentimental as I ruminated upon my first
year as a student at St. John’s more than forty years ago. My
Greek has gone rusty, but as with most all of memory, the
things learned first are remembered best, and I have kept with
me over the years two Greek sentences I recall reading in my
first days at the college: χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά and κοινὰ τὰ τῶν
φίλων.
The first can be roughly translated as “Beautiful things are
difficult” or “Noble things are difficult.” The second can be
translated as “The things of friends are common” or “What
friends have, they have in common.” Back in the days of my
youth the College used a different Greek grammar book, so
this last week I took a peek at the Mollin and Williamson
Introduction to Ancient Greek, with which our students now
begin to learn Greek. And there they were, the same two
sentences, buried in an early lesson on the attributive and
predicate position of the definite article, and I rediscovered
something I once must have known about the two sentences,
something I had carried with me all these years: they are both
nominal sentences with the article τά in the predicate
position, making it possible to write intelligible, whole
Christopher B. Nelson is President at the Annapolis campus of St. John’s
College.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
sentences without the use of a verb. I was pretty sure I had
not committed these sentences to memory because of the
substantive-making power of the article τά. It’s more likely
that I remembered them because they were both quite short,
and perhaps because they appeared to carry a mystery and a
whiff of truth in them that I might untangle for myself if only
I worked on them long enough. I felt justified in this interpretation when I read in this new text that “nominal
sentences are best suited to the impersonal and timeless
character of maxims or folk-sayings” (31).
I wanted to understand better the little maxim κοινὰ τὰ
τῶν ϕίλων, “The things of friends are common.” The
sentence seemed to capture a beautiful thought, and I had the
notion that if I made the effort to understand this maxim
better, I also might come to see why “beautiful things are
difficult.” Two birds, one arrow—so to speak.
So, I begin my reflection by asking whether this little
maxim means that friends share what they have, or that they
ought to share what they have. Today, I give you half of the
lunch I packed for us both, and tomorrow you will share
yours with me. But the sandwiches we eat are hardly common
to us both; quite the opposite, they are rationed out
separately to each of us, albeit equally. We may each have an
equal share in a good thing, but not a common good. We each
consume what the other does not and cannot consume. So it
is with all sorts of goods, earthly goods, goods that are
external to us; what I give to you in the spirit of sharing with
a friend is something I will no longer have after giving it. I
will have less of it after sharing it than I did before I shared
it, however good and generous my act of friendship has been,
and however much I imagine I may have gained in the
improvement of my character by sharing.
But what, then, are the things that could be common to
friends? What kinds of things can truly be held in common
without having to be meted out among friends? I suppose
things of the soul are of this nature, things that belong to the
heart, the spirit, the mind, things that belong to our inner
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39
lives. We both may love a single object or person without our
having to share that love as we might share the expense of a
gift to the beloved one. My love doesn’t grow less because
you love too. And, of course, if we should actually love one
another, that love is surely greater and stronger for it being
reciprocated and reinforced over and over. So it is with things
of the intellect. When I learn something you have shared with
me, it does not pass from you to me like milk from a pitcher;
you have lost nothing, and yet I have gained something that
is now common to us both. The sum of what is common to
us has just grown; it has not been redistributed. And should
we together go about learning something new, we will each
be richer for what we come to have in common.
In pursuing such learning together we enter a whole new
community. For example, when we learn Euclid 1.47—the
Pythagorean theorem—each of us has it wholly but neither of
us possesses it. We now have something that belongs to us,
but not merely privately; we have gained something that is
common to us both, and in learning it we enter the
community of all who have learned it. This perhaps is why we
say “things in common” belong to “friends”: the soul is not a
wholly private place, but is able to enter this sort of
community with others.
But there is an added dimension that I think has
something to do with the reason we seek these common
things. We are moved to love something because it is
beautiful, or to love some person because he or she is
beautiful to us. We seek to know something because we
believe that knowing is better than not knowing, that this
knowledge will be good for us, perhaps even that it can be
turned to good in the world about us. These things we have
in common are beautiful and good things, and we wish
beautiful and good things for our friends. If the common
goods are those that increase our community by pursuing
them together, then the greatest acts of friendship must be the
searching together for such a common good.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
St. John’s College exists for this purpose: to provide a
place and countless opportunities for our students to pursue
together the common goods of the intellect. We call ourselves
a community of learning, aware that the word “community”
in English, as in Greek, has the same root as the word
“common.” We make many an effort to put into practice the
conviction that we learn best when we learn with others, who
like us, wish to increase the common good. Such a
community offers some pretty fine opportunities for
friendship.
We also have a common curriculum that has us all reading
books that are worthy of our attention, even of our love—
books written by men and women who were themselves
model fellow learners. The books and authors may even
become our friends, as can the characters in some of these
books. If incoming students have not already met the Socrates
of Plato’s dialogues, they soon do, and they spend a lot of
time with him in the freshman year. For some of them it is the
beginning of a lifelong friendship with a character with
whom—if open to the possibility—one can converse over and
over again. The words on the page may remain the same, but
the reader brings a new conversationalist to the text every
time he or she returns to the dialogue. At least, so it is with
me. I call Socrates a friend of mine because I know that he
seeks only my own good. He has taught me humility,
inasmuch as I possess it all.
I have many such friends in the Program. Some of them
are books. Homer’s Iliad has been my companion since the
seventh grade, and I never tire of returning to it. The Aeneid
has become a more recent friend who has helped me to
understand and better bear the responsibilities of fatherhood
and the trials of leadership. The Books of Genesis and Job
have helped me understand what it means to be human and
how great is the distance between the human and the divine;
I read them to remind me how little I really understand about
the relation between the two, which in turn serves as a spur
to seeking to understand better. Euclid’s Elements may be the
NELSON
41
finest example on the St. John’s Program of the practice of
the liberal arts, and it is beautiful for its logical, progressive
movement from the elemental to the truly grand. Plato’s
Republic is the finest book about education ever written; it
inspires much of what I do as I practice my vocation at the
College, reminding me that a community of learning is
reshaping and refounding itself any time a few of its members
come together to engage in learning for its own sake—and
that this is what we ought always to be encouraging at this
college, even by device when necessary.
Other friends of mine are authors: Sophocles, who can
evoke a human sympathy to inspire pity in each of his
dramas; George Washington, whose restraint in the use of
power is evident in his finest writings and in the mark he left
on the founding of this country; Abraham Lincoln, whom I
consider this country’s finest poet, whose very words
reshaped what it meant to be an American; Jane Austen,
whose every sentence can be called perfect (and so she is a
beautiful author to me); and Martin Luther King, who taught
me that non-violent protest is more than a successful tactical
measure to achieve a political end, but a proper and loving
response to the hateful misconduct of fellow human souls.
Then there remain the characters whom I embrace as
friends: besides Socrates, there is Hector, Breaker of Horses,
“O My Warrior”; and Penelope, who weaves the path that
allows Odysseus to return home, and is far worthier of his
love than he of hers. There is Don Quixote, the indomitable
spirit, and Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke, whose simple
acts of goodness change the whole world about her. I rather
like Milton’s Eve, mother of us all, who still shines pretty
brightly in the face of his spectacular Satan. I was a teenager
when I met Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, and I grew to
adulthood with him, probably following a little too closely
his path to responsibility. There’s the innocent Billy Budd,
unprepared to face the force of evil in man, and his Captain
Vere, the good man who suffers to do his duty.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
The Program also offers some reflections on friendship:
every winter, Aristotle provides freshmen with a framework
for considering different kinds of friendships and the goods
they afford. Perhaps they will find his list incomplete, or
perhaps their own experiences will be embraced by his explication. And then there are examples of friendships, pairs of
friends in many of the books, who will also provide lessons in
friendship, for better or worse: Patroclus and Achilles, David
and Jonathan, Hal and Falstaff, Huck and Jim, Emma and
Knightley, to name a few.
We journey through the Program with the assistance of
many friends, some of whom live among us here and now,
while some others live on in the books we read during this
four-year odyssey. They help us as we struggle with the big
questions that in turn can help to free each of us to live a life
that truly belongs to us. It is these friends, standing close by,
who help us to find our answers to the questions: Who am I?
What is my place in the world? How ought I to live my life?
One of my more beautiful living friends, a colleague here at
the College, has put it this way: “Our friends are doubly our
benefactors: They take us out of ourselves and they help us to
return, to face together with them our common human
condition” (Eva Brann, Open Secrets/Inward Projects, 55).
Another of my friends, a St. John’s classmate and medical
doctor, gave last year’s graduating class in Santa Fe this
reminder, that we can learn from our friendships with the
books how we might be better friends to one another: “So
often we make shallow and inaccurate presumptions about
people, like the cliché of telling a book by its cover, which
robs you of the deeper experience that defines us as humans
in our relationship to each other. For me every patient is a
great book with a story to tell and much to teach me, and I
am sometimes ashamed when my presumptions are exposed
and I then see the remarkable person within, between the
covers of the book of their own story.” This doctor has
devoted himself to saving the lives of patients suffering from
cancer, and he has this to say about how he is guided by the
NELSON
43
spirit of community and friendship within the soul of every
human being: “In my own work, it is sometimes said, we are
guided…by the idea that to save a person’s life, it is
considered as if one has saved the world. To me that has
always meant the life saved is much more than a single life
restored, as that person is someone’s spouse, someone’s
brother or sister, someone’s parent, or child, a member of the
community, of a church, synagogue or mosque, or a friend,
and as all are affected by loss, all are restored by their return.”
(Stephen J. Forman, 2009 Commencement Address, Santa
Fe). This statement is a powerful testament to the wonder of
friendship at work in the world.
In this last story, I have moved us away from the inner
world of reflection and learning to the outer world of putting
what one has learned to work in a life devoted to helping
others. The second must always follow the first. By this, I
mean that we owe it to ourselves and to others to take
advantage of the opportunities this community offers to learn
with our fellow classmates and tutors how we might acquire
a little self-understanding through the common endeavor we
practice here, before going out and putting it to work in the
world. And in the process, perhaps we will make a few friends
who will stay with us for the rest of our lives, enriching them
because “what friends have they have in common.”
This little nominal sentence, κοινὰ τὰ τῶν ϕίλων,
happens to be the penultimate sentence in one of Plato’s
dialogues, Phaedrus, which is the only book read twice for
seminar, at the end of both freshman and senior years.
Phaedrus and Socrates have engaged in the highest form of
friendship as they have conversed together to try to understand how a man or woman might achieve harmony and
balance in the soul by directing that soul to a love for the
beautiful. Socrates concludes the inquiry with a prayer to the
gods:
Friend Pan and however many other gods are here,
grant me to become beautiful in respect to the
things within. And as to whatever things I have
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44
outside, grant that they be friendly to the things
inside me. May I believe the wise man to be rich.
May I have as big a mass of gold as no one other
than the moderate man of sound mind could bear
or bring along.
Do we still need something else, Phaedrus? For I
think I’ve prayed in a measured fashion?
To which Phaedrus responds:
And pray also for these things for me. For friends’
things are in common. (279B – C, trans. Nichols).
45
“My Subject is Passion”: A
Review of Eva Brann’s Feeling
our Feelings
Ronald Mawby
Feeling our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People
Know is Eva Brann’s latest large and wonderful reflective
inquiry into what it means to be human. Previously she has
written on imagination (The World of the Imagination, 1991),
time (What, Then, Is Time? 1999), and negation (The Ways of
Naysaying, 2001) as “three closely entwined capabilities of
our inwardness” (2001, xi). Now she takes up our affective
life: “that subtly reactive receptivity we call feeling, the
psychic stir seeking expression we call emotion, and the not
always unwelcome suffering we call passion” (2001, xi) as
well as those pervasive unfocused feelings-without-objects
called moods, each “as seen through the writings of those
who seem to me to have thought most deeply and largely
about it” (2008, 441).
Her inquiry aims at thinking about our feelings. The
second part of her subtitle—what people know—insists that
we have in our own experience the data that thinking about
feelings must address. Anyone who has been angry, for
instance, in one sense knows what the feeling of anger is. Yet
merely having felt the feeling does not enable one to grasp its
nature, sources, psychic situation, and human significance. To
grasp the full meaning of the feelings we need thinking, and
Ms. Brann believes that those who have thought best about
them are the philosophers. Hence she proposes “by way of
picked philosophers” to hit the “high points that will best
help me to make sense of myself—and of the world, natural
Eva T. H. Brann. Feeling Our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People
Know. Paul Dry Books, 2008. Ronald Mawby teaches in the Honors Program
at Kentucky State University.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and human-made, then and now, passing and perennial, the
world that impinges on me by instilling or eliciting feelings in
me” (xxi).
This book is singular. I would say it is sui generis were it
not of a kind with her previous trilogy of the human center
(1991, 1999, 2001). The reader naturally wants to classify
the book under the identifiable rubric of some collective
scholarly enterprise, but it resists. Ms. Brann explicitly warns
us of ten scholarly categories into which her book fails to fit.
In fact, although the book is full of learning, it is intended not
“as a work of scholarship for scholars but rather as an effort
at inquiry for amateurs” (xxv). Her inquiry into our affective
being aims at “getting a clear view of the contrasting possibilities and developing a warm—though correctable—
adherence to one of them for carrying on my life” (122), and
she hopes that reading philosophy “might be useful at the
least for gaining some sense of the way particular human
experiences are entailed by larger frameworks and, perhaps,
for finding a coherent set of livable opinions for ourselves”
(401). Her standards are dual: “verisimilitude by the criteria
of knowing and verifiability by the test of life” (442).
Ms. Brann, I would say, seeks significant truth, that is, a
view that can stand the scrutiny and serve the purposes of
both thought and life. She believes that large philosophical
accounts offer her the best chance of advance toward
significant truth. She knows her approach is not obviously
sound:
My approach is, I think, not very hard to defend
as a working method for marshaling views but not
so easy to justify as a way to establish truth. For
these grand wholes of philosophy are obviously
even less easy to reconcile than the narrow partialities of scholarship, while to cannibalize such
frameworks for handy parts to cobble together
would break up the very integrity that gives their
passion theories stature. Therefore the justification
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for my—somewhat unfashionable—interest in
grounds can hardly be, it seems to me, in culling a
theory from this tradition, but rather in showing
how and why the inquiry into human affect might
be thought to involve all the world there is. (398)
An option that Ms. Brann has declined would look toward
“psychological theories—those points of view that base their
observations concerning the passions on natural theories of
the soul (or the converse) and often only implicitly on
metaphysics (or its denial)” (xx). She justifies her neglect of
psychological science by saying that discredited psychological
theories disappear at once or fade away after becoming either
literary tropes or folk-psychological terms, whereas philosophical systems show a sort of eternal recurrence. Her
unpersuaded scientific opposition would interpret Ms.
Brann’s observation as showing that in science false coin is
eventually withdrawn from circulation, whereas in
philosophy bad pennies continually turn up. The scientist
would add that even for discerning the phenomena scientific
experiment has an advantage over philosophical reflection
because experimental manipulation can separate factors that
are ordinarily confounded, so the experiment may reveal
things that ordinary observation may not. On the other hand
the scientific literature tends to be dry: vital issues can be
desiccated through operational definition, and the reader
must travel many a dusty mile through descriptions of experimental setups and statistical analysis of results to find the
small god of factual truth who lives in those details. The issue
finally is whether such factual truths lead to a livable oasis of
significant truth, or whether philosophical reflection can lead
there, or whether “significant truth” names a mirage. I am a
lapsed psychologist whose life witnesses my sympathy with
Ms. Brann’s approach, but I add that psychological studies
too can be thought-provoking.
Having sketched Ms. Brann’s aim I turn to the book itself,
a handsome, well-produced volume of over 500 pages. I urge
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
potential readers not to be put off by the perhaps daunting
prospect of so much philosophical exposition. As she says,
“my subject is passion” throughout, but one topic does not
imply one continuous argument. Ms. Brann presents the
philosophers independently, on their own terms, and saves
her own conclusions for the end, so one need not read from
beginning to end to profit from the book. The ten chapters
between preface and conclusion could be read separately as
free-standing expository essays, serving as orientation for
those who go on to the original texts, as recapitulation for
those who have previously read them, or as cribs for those
wishing to be spared the trouble. And the work is a delight to
read. Her expositions are clear, her comments insightful and
judicious. Basing my judgment on the texts I know, her
accounts, even when brief, are nuanced and correct. She
knows the conceptual geography so well that she is never lost.
As a guide Ms. Brann is attentive to the needs of the reader
and her lively lucid graciousness makes her a fun companion.
The prose moves quickly without hurry, combines delicacy
with penetration, shows a keen wit and generous spirit, and
exemplifies Eliot’s dictum on diction: ”the common word
exact without vulgarity, the formal word precise but not
pedantic.” The honesty of her thinking and the accuracy of
her writing produce a dominant impression of sun-lit clarity.
*
In the remainder of this review I wish to imitate Ms.
Brann’s model by separating my exposition of the book’s
contents from my personal response. I do not think Ms.
Brann expects everyone who reads her book to adopt her
conclusions; neither do I expect everyone to adopt mine.
When, after considering various factors and divergent
viewpoints, we tentatively conclude on a way to put it all
together, our conclusion is neither independent of nor strictly
entailed by the dialectical considerations that inform it.
Truthful reporting should be disinterested, all the more so
where the topic has personal significance. Therefore I first
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present the contents with minimal commentary, and then
discuss my response.
Ms. Brann begins considering “passion itself ” through
the depiction of erotic love in Greek lyric poetry. The
passionate lover receives the uneasy privilege of being subjugated by an external power: “Eros whacked me.” Here the
source of the passion is outside, and the soul contributes only
the power to be so affected. One persistent issue in thinking
about feelings is the ratio between exogenous and
endogenous factors: how much is the feeling shaped by its
object, and how much is the object merely a trigger that
evokes a soul-formed feeling?
Plato begins the philosophy of feeling with his inquiries
into eros (brought inside the soul), spirit, desire, and
pleasure. We get the Platonic images of the soul from the
Symposium, Phaedrus, and Republic, and the account of
pleasure in the Philebus. Ms. Brann follows the latter thread
to Aristotle on pleasure as a bloom on activity, to Freud on
pleasure as the reduction of psychic excitation, and to
modern research on desire.
Aristotle gets a chapter of his own as the founder of
methodological emotion studies. Aristotle writes about the
passions in his ethical and rhetorical works because of the
centrality in the soul of appetite. Passions, like virtues, are
seen as means between extremes. A focus of Ms. Brann here
is the analysis of shame, which in the “cycles of popularity”
among passions has recently been on the rise.
The Stoics come next, with special attention to Cicero. As
“moderns among the ancients” they have a representational
theory of mind and insist on the primacy of the theory of
knowledge. Yet unlike many moderns who view a drench of
the passions as a welcome relief from arid rationality, the
Stoics view passions as mistakes, irrational excessive impulses
that upset the soul, and philosophy as the cure.
We then make a long jump to Thomas Aquinas, who
places us as rational animals in the midst of creation and
situates passions between the intellectual and vegetative
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
powers in the center of the soul. Thomas presents a “comprehensive and differentiated synthesis” (186) of the tradition.
Ms. Brann in a high tribute says that Thomas offers “the most
extensive and acute phenomenology of the passions known to
me” (446).
Descartes, the cunning innovator, next gives us “an initiating and deck-clearing simplification” (186). Descartes
considers a human being not as a rational animal but as a
minded machine, and says the passions arise in the body and
are felt in the mind. Ms. Brann traces Descartes’s taxonomy
of the feelings and ends her discussion of his Passions of the
Soul with this summary judgment: “a seminal treatise that
combines confident assertion with ready retraction, brisk
definitiveness with unabashed equivocation, proud
innovation with tacit recourse to the tradition, hopeful
emphasis on experimental science with a speculative physiology, and a determined reliance on the metaphysics of
distinct substances with an insistence on a human union that
the theory itself forestalls. But if the theoretical exposition is
surely obscure just by reason of its attempted lucidity, the
practical advice might be sage just because it is wisely
ambivalent” (227).
Spinoza refashions Cartesian notions into a system that
aims to overcome traditional oppositions such as body/mind,
impulse/freedom, desire/virtue, passion/action, emotion/
reason, and feeling/thinking. Spinoza’s onto-theology implies
that the impetus at the base of our being is emotional and that
affect is our body’s vitality. Intellectual understanding transmutes experience from passive to active and entails an
increase of joy. This chapter I found fascinating, as I have not
studied Spinoza, and his metaphysics is often taken as a
grounding precursor to contemporary mind-brain identity
theories. I don’t know whether his “God-intoxicated”
metaphysics finally works—Ms. Brann thinks not—but
thinking about it is invigorating.
The Spinoza chapter contains an interlude on Adam
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, with its “wonderfully
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wise worldliness” that “operates with three moral-psychological terms, “sympathy,” “propriety,” and “the impartial
spectator” (236).
Whereas Smith assumes common sense, David Hume, the
topic of Ms. Brann’s next chapter, is reductively skeptical in
the Treatise of Human Nature. As she observes, “in matters
philosophical, when you deliberately deny depth you seem to
have to embrace compensatory complexity” (292). Thus
Hume’s view of the passions as reflective impressions
becomes “baroquely elaborate” (292), yet “the analysis of
pride in particular seems, complications aside, true to life”
(309).
In the chapter entitled “Mood as News from Nothing:
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and the Age of Anxiety,” Ms. Brann
begins with Romanticism. She comments on Rousseau, Kant,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Pascal before proceeding to
two thinkers who take up an “uncircumventable sense of
nothingness borne by a persistent mood about nothing in
particular” (342). Kierkegaard views anxiety as “the
intimation of the possibility of being free—to sin” (342) and
thus invests this mood with a deep theological-existential
import. Heidegger says anxiety reveals “The Nothing” that is
beyond beings and thus attunes us to the aboriginal. Ms.
Brann, who dislikes Heidegger’s character for its lack of
probity, nonetheless avers “Heidegger has told us an unforgettable truth in “What is Metaphysics?”: Moods are human
affects that tell not only how we are but what our world is”
(356).
Unlike these existential-ontological theories, Freud’s
account of anxiety uses “developmental, mechanistic, quantitative, that is, basically naturalistic terms” (368). Ms. Brann
contrasts ancient passion with modern moodiness, and notes
that moderns tend to see good moods as superficial and bad
moods as revealing, so anxiety, depression, ressentiment,
disgust, boredom, and their kin prevail in 20th century
thinkers and writers.
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52
We come at last to the dispersal of theorizing in our times.
Ms. Brann presents the very different philosophical accounts
of Sartre and Ryle, the empirically-based conceptualization of
Silvan Tomkins, and the currently dominate English-language
school of cognitivism. Cognitivism includes a cluster of
theories that generally view emotions as judgment-like evaluations that can motivate behavior. Modern theoreticians
emphasize the utility of emotions for the organism, a role I
think is made the more urgent since, unlike older theories in
which responsive and responsible reason can discern and
judge ends, many current theories admit only a shrunken,
neutered, calculative rationality.
In the final chapter Ms. Brann begins with a disquisition
on philosophical accounts as responses to the open receptivity of questions and as frameworks that set definite
problems by pre-determining constraints on solutions. She
then articulates the leading questions of the philosophical
accounts she has examined in the preceding chapters. She
concludes with her tentative answers to the questions that
motivated her project: Is feeling a legitimate object of
thinking? What is human affect? How are thought and feeling
related? Are emotions judgments? Are we fundamentally
affective or rational beings? Are the passions revelatory?
What distinguishes aesthetic feeling? Are the emotions good?
This fragmentary statement of content fails to convey the
book’s richness. It is full of insights, with many sagacious and
thought-provoking incidental remarks. It is striking how
often Ms. Brann can summarily depict philosophical accounts
of the soul with diagrams—images of the topography of our
inwardness.
*
Now then, what response did the book elicit from me?
Ms. Brann says that to make sense of ourselves we should
read the philosophers, and that made me wonder, for in my
experience the benefit of reading philosophy for finding
livable opinions depends on which philosophers I read, our
MAWBY
53
shared basis in what I call common sense, and the dependence
of their insights on their systems. Let me explain with
examples.
Plato and Aristotle—the former through images and
arguments, the latter through analytic articulations—
organize, refine, and supplement common sense, so when I
read them I feel that we share a common world. They see
what I see, and a lot more, so I benefit. As a ‘seventh-letter’
Platonist I don’t look to the dialogues for a systematic
philosophy that can settle every question it raises, and I don’t
find one. Aristotle used to annoy me when I felt he truncated
a discussion saying “enough about that”; I would rebel,
wanting—I now see—a systematic completion that is askew
to his enterprise; he is usually not imposing a theory but
trying to articulate what is there, and when he has said all he
has seen, he stops. I profit enormously from reading these
authors, though, of course, for both, if we push every
question to the end we come upon mysteries.
In contrast, philosophers such as Descartes and Hume
seem to be constructing systems intended as alternatives to
common sense. They say, in effect, that what is really there is
less or other than common sense imagines, so when reading
them I feel I am in their systems rather than in the world, and
if their systems are incoherent, as I believe they are, then I am
nowhere, and the insights I do gain from them are in spite of,
rather than because of, their systemic notions. Take
Descartes. Ms. Brann agrees that we can see clearly and
distinctly that Cartesian matter and Cartesian mind cannot
interact, yet according to Descartes, they do. And Hume’s
systemic notions don’t illuminate my experience but render it
inconceivable; his conclusions seem to me an unacknowledged reductio on his premises. These authors, rather than
ending in mystery, begin there.
So I wonder, What is the value of an incoherent system
for illuminating the passions? How can we make sense of
ourselves using notions that don’t make sense? Ms. Brann
writes, referring to Spinoza’s Ethics,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
What is the good of attending to a text so beset
with perplexities? Well, to begin with, I cannot
think of a work that is not so beset when pressed.
At any rate, don’t we study philosophical writings
largely to learn what price is to be paid for certain
valuable acquisitions, and don’t we think out
things on our own largely to find out what
problems follow from what solutions and what
questionable antecedents we can tolerate for the
sake of their livable consequences? (278)
Our choice, then, is not between some perplexity and no
perplexity, but between various configurations of perplexity.
To avoid perplexity is to abandon thinking, or at least to give
up that serious amateur personal thoughtfulness that since
Socrates has been called philosophy.
Philosophy as amateur (i.e., loving, hence feeling)
thoughtfulness is related to Ms. Brann’s distinction between
problem-solving and question-answering, which I would
describe as follows. Problem-solving aims at reduction of
uncertainty; when a problem is solved, our sense of the world
becomes more determinate. A solved problem moves out of
our center of attention; as the solution becomes a determinate thread woven into the fabric of belief or projected as
a settled line of action, attention is freed for new tasks. The
question-answering thought of reflective inquiry aims at
heightened awareness. A question is the soul’s attentive
receptivity focused and formulated. When an answer is
glimpsed, our experience brightens. The question does not go
away when an answer is disclosed; rather the answering
world is formed and focused in our soul more intensely.
Philosophies in Ms. Brann’s scheme sit between questions
and problems, and face both ways. Philosophies can set the
terms for formulating problems. In this employment
philosophy is often antecedent to science, a communal enterprise devoted to the piecemeal discovery of truth.
Philosophies can also assemble and organize questions. In this
MAWBY
55
employment philosophy contributes to living well, and is not
a collective scholarly enterprise. It is an individual way of
being more consciously alive. Friends can help each other
here—in the end Ms. Brann’s book is just such a friend—but
we are finally alone in our sense of what is true about what is
significant.
I have a final response that concerns one of Ms. Brann’s
conclusions. Among the “unformed urgencies” that she
brought, or brought her, to this study is this question, the
question of her project: “Are we fundamentally affective or
rational beings?” (461). Spinoza affirms the former, Aristotle
the latter, and Ms. Brann sides with Spinoza but quite
properly plays on an ambiguity in “fundamental” to have it
both ways: “while we are at bottom affective, we are at our
height thought-ful” (362). She concludes that our inwardness
is affectivity variously aroused (453). Thus my being, not the
impersonal intellectual “I” that Kant says accompanies every
representation, but me, my very own inner ultimate self, my
subject, is passion.
But the question, Are we thinking or feeling beings? is
inadequately posed, since it excludes other alternatives.
Maybe what is primary for us is neither feeling nor thinking,
but doing and making. Maybe as human animals we act and
produce to remain in being and thinking and feeling arise out
of our living agency. Deeds worth doing and artifacts worth
making surely have been praised in our tradition. That Ms.
Brann writes books is at least consistent with the primacy of
works and deeds. For she agrees with Thomas that baths are
restorative, and she has tenure. Why not soak in a luxurious
bath, feelings one’s feelings, thinking thoughts, and when one
has a “eureka” insight rest content with a self-satisfied smile?
Why leap out and write a book? Might it not be because the
“production of a perfect artifact” (443) is another fundamental way of being human? Now she could reply, rightly,
that clarity of thought requires verbal expression, so writing
is a means to thinking. And certain feelings, such as pride,
require genuine achievements about which to be proud. Thus
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
56
good works and deeds may be instrumental to the best
thought and feeling. Granted. But the best works and deeds
also require, as instruments, good thought and feeling. Which
is primary, which derivative, is not clear to me, so I cannot
approve of excluding a possible answer through the posing of
the question.
While this is a weighty issue when considering what it
means to be human, in terms of this book it is a minor
quibble. Ms. Brann undertook this project to better understand herself as a feeling being, and offers the book as an aid
for any reader also “hoping to come near to an answer to the
question: What does it mean to feel?” (234) The final test for
each reader, then, is whether after having read it one better
understands one’s affective being. For myself the answer is,
Yes, I do. My vision is larger and my discernment is keener. I
am still not sure in what sense the inquiry into human affect
reaches all the world there is, but it surely reaches the depths
of the soul and, as Aristotle observed, the soul is in a way all
things. This book energized my thinking mind and enlivened
my feeling soul, and engaging with it has been a pleasure. Ms.
Brann is again to be congratulated for a marvelous
achievement.
*
Brann, Eva T. H. (1991). The World of the Imagination: Sum and
Substance. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (1999). What, Then, Is Time? Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (2001). The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and
Nonbeing. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Brann, Eva. (2008). Feeling our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and
People Know. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books.
�
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Kraus, Pamela
Brann, Eva T. H.
Van Doren, John
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Zuckerman, Elliott
McClay, Barbara
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Seeger, Judith
Nelson, Christopher B.
Mawby, Ronald
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The St. John's Review
Volume XL, number one (2007)
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
Peter Ara Guekguezian
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. All
manuscripts are subject to blind review. 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.
©2007 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
Aurum Antiquum: Reflections in and on
Virgil's Aeneid .............................................................. 5
John C. Kohl, Jr.
Reviews
The Finest Fruits of Reason
Michael Comenetz's Calculus: The Elements ............ .43
M. W. Sinnett
Occasional Pieces
The Sting of the Torpedo Fish .................................... 53
Christopher B. Nelson
For the Graduate Students in Classics at Yale ............. 61
Eva T. H. Brann
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
�5
Aurum Antiquum:
·
Refle~tions In and On Virgil's
Aenetd
·
John C. Kohl Jr.
Part 1: Heroic Tension in Aeneid 5 and 6
Palinurus
Virgil's Aeneid leaves the attentive reader with many puzzles.
One such puzzle pertains to the de~th of Palinurus in books 5
and 6. On the voyage to Italy that closes book 5 (S.838-71)
Aeneas' helmsman Palinurus is enticed at night by the god
Somnus: since the seas are calm with a following wind and no
threat is on the horizon, steering itself is not needed; one can
take a break from the helm altogether. Palinurus vigorously
opposes this suggestion and clings to the tiller all the more
tightly, so much so that when Somnus overwhelms the sailor
with drugs, he falls into the sea, dragging the tiller and part
of the stern with him. Aeneas laments his missing helmsman:
"Palinurus, having trusted too much in the calm sky and sea,
you shall lie naked on unknown sands." However, when the
two meet next in Hades (6.337-83) Aeneas betrays nothing of
his former judgment, asking Palinurus, "Which of ,the gods
tore you from us and plunged you into the open sea?"
Palinurus, unaware of what we had been told, replies that it
was not by a god but by chance !forte), that he had slipped
John Kohl is an alumnus of St. John's College (1961), a retired biologist
(Ph.D., 1967) and an amateur classicist. He has taught Greek, mathematics,
and 'physical and biological sciences in liberal arts programs at Shimer
College, The College of St. Thomas More (fexas), and Thomas More
College (New Hampshire) and has held research positions in mammalian
mutation research, in chemical defense, and most recently in cancer
immunotherapy at Baylor Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, where he
currently resides.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and, grabbing the tiller for stability, dragged it and part of the
stern into the sea. Nor was he washed up a corpse on the
beach, but made it alive to the rock cliffs of the shore where
barbarous natives killed him and threw him into the breakers,
and now his body awaits burial.
This discrepancy is usually attributed to Virgil's having
composed books 5 and 6 at different times and having not yet
worked out fully the differences in the death of Palinurus; 1
however, I think that here in the underW-orld rhe poet is deliberately posing counter-lessons in how to read the fate of the
sailor. Charles Segal explains the two contrary aspects:
The apparent discrepancy is only a difference in
the point of view and in the mode of narration. In
5 the story is told in the third person by the
omniscient narrator with the full panoply of epic
conventions. In 6 the victim tells the tale as he
experienced it. Like any victim of a sudden catastrophe, he does not know exactly what happened.
Indeed, his vagueness about the 'great force' that
tore off the rudder (6.349) is only a subtle
reflection of the skill with which Virgil has kept
apart and yet reconciled the divine and human
levels. 2
According to Segal, in book 5 we have the comprehensive,
divine view of Palinurus' death, and in book 6 a personal,
human view of the same action. The act itself, Palinurus'
disappearance into the sea together with part of the ship, is
shrouded in mystery, and becomes ambiguous, enigmatic.
Yet, there is a Homeric precedent for this death, a
Homeric counterpart, that of the young and hapless shipmate
of Odysseus, Elpenor (x.552-60; xi.51-80), who got drunk in
Circe's house, forgot he was at the top of the stairs, fell down,
and broke his neck. 3 So the same sort of accident befalls on
the one hand Aeneas' trusted, prudent, and skilled helmsman
�KOHL
7
and on the other hand Odysseus' young, inexperienced, and
indiscreet shipmate.
Games And Underworlds
The points of comparison that Virgil raises in the Palinurus
episode constitute a subtle invitation to look at the other
principal episodes in the fifth and sixth books of the Aeneid
in light of one another and to consider the Virgilian episodes
in relation to their respective Homeric counterparts.
An overview of the episodes in the upper world of Aeneid
book 5 and lower world of 6 suggests that such a comparison
is warranted and, therefore, possibly illuminating. Aeneas
announces five contests for the Sicilian games (5.45-71): a
ship race, a foot race, a boxing match, an archery contest, and
a javelin throw. In addition, however, a riding display by the
boys (the lusus Troae), not given in Aeneas' initial agenda,
takes place after the fourth (archery) contest, and the last of
the announced contests, the javelin throw, is never held. The
Sicilian landing and activities are a prelude to Aeneas' visit to
Hades in the sixth book where there are, similarly, five major
encounters of Aeneas in the underworld: first, with his lost
and unburied helmsman Palinurus; second, with Dido; third,
with his half brother and former comrade Deiphobus; fourth,
with the punished souls in Phlegethon as described by the
Sibyl; and, finally, with his father Anchises and posterity in
the Blissful Groves. This indicates paired associations seriatim
of the respective episodes in each book.
Substantial portions of both of these books also have their
respective Homeric counterparts. In the fifth book the funeral
games instituted by Aeneas in honor of his father, Anchises,
clearly invite comparison with those instituted by Achilles in
Iliad XXIII in honor of his beloved Patroclus. 4 Only four of
the eight events in Iliad XXIII correspond with those in
Aeneid 5: a chariot race, a foot race, a boxing match, and an
archery contest. Virgil has recast the first and longest event in
the Iliad (XXIII.262-650), the chariot race with five
challengers, as a ship race between four boats selected from
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
8
the fleet as a whole, which is the most lengthy athletic contest
in the Aeneid (5.114-285). 5
Similarly, the five encounters in the Aeneid have parallels
with the respective five encounters in Odysseus' visit to
Hades in Odyssey xi: first, with his unburied shipmate
Elpenor; second, with his mother Anticleia; third, with his
comrade. Agamemnon; fourth, with. the punished in Hades
including a brief conversation with Heracles; and, finally,
with the prophet Tiresias, which in the Homeric order
.actually comes between the first conversation with Elpenor
and that with Anticleia, but which has a parallel in Aeneas'
visit with Anchises.
A comparison of Aeneid 5 and 6 with the two Homeric
parallels thus yields a rich complex of associations. In order
to explore these associations· systematically, the five events in
Virgil's games will be discussed in order. Each contest is first
examined in light of its Homeric counterpart in the Iliad,
then compared with the respective encounter in Virgil's
underworld; and lastly the underworld encounter is cast
against its counterpart in the Odyssey. The general scheme is
diagrammed below.
3
4
Chariot race Foot race
Boxing
Archery
Aeneid 5
Ship.race
Foot race
B,oxing
Archery
Troy Game
Aeneid 6
Palinurus
Dido
Deiphobus
Tartarus
Elysium
Antideia
Agamemnon Herades
Sequence
1
Iliad 23
Odyssey 11 Elpenor
2
5
Ship Race
The drama in both the Homeric and Virgilian accounts of the
race depends upon the· layout of the race course, which in
each consists of an outward-bound leg, a turning point, and
an inward-bound leg to the finish line. In the Iliad it is on the
inbound stretch that Apollo and Athena contest with one
another to decide the race between Eumelus, the front runner
�KOHL
9
and Apollo's favorite, and Diomedes, Tydeus' son and
Athena's champion, who is in hot pursuit. Thanks to Apollo,
Diomedes loses his whip, but Athena restores it, breathes new
strength into Diomedes' horses, and in her anger goes after
Eumelus' car and breaks the pole of his chariot, causing a
wreck. Antilochus now rashly challenges Menelaus for
second place by forcing the older hero to draw his team off
the course in a narrow passage near the finish line in order to
avoid a collision. For this act, the young man's second place
finish is later challenged by Menelaus at the awards ceremony
and he is rebuked: young warriors, no matter how valiant,
must learn to remember their place in the face of their
betters.
Virgil elegantly reworks the elements of Homer's race to
draw significantly different lessons. The narrow place in the
racecourse is resituated at the; turning point itself, where two
of the four ships fail of their own choosing. Gyas' ship, the
leader on the outbound course, enters the turn, but the ship's
pilot, Menoetes, fearing rocky shoals there, steers too wide
and loses the lead. For his timidity, Menoetes is pitched into
the sea by Gyas, and the ship loses its pilot and the race in the
bargain. Next, Sergestus, challenging Mnestheus for the lead,
rashly takes the inside course, where his ship founders on the
rocks. Mnestheus' ship, taking the middle course, flies
through the gap like a startled, frightened dove, leaving the
embarrassed Sergestus to free his ship and later slink back to
port like a wounded snake. Now the race is between the
survivors of the turn, Mnestheus and Cloanthus. As in the
chariot race, the gods decide the victor, but only after
Cloanthus vows sacrifice and libations to the host of divinities
of the sea and harbor did Portunus " ... with his own great
hand [drive] him on his way: swifter than wind or winged
arrow the ship speeds landward and found shelter in the deep
harbor" (5.241-43).
Aeneas' conversation with Palinurus in Hades constitutes
a counter-lesson to the boat race. As we have seen, Palinurus
claims here that no divine agency was involved in his fall
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
from the helm, that it was solely by chance, although we also
see that Palinurus struggled against his sleeplessness on the
fateful night. If we view this again in light of the Homeric
counterpart Elpenor, we learn that such accidents happen to
the skilled and responsible as well as to the young and inexperienced, even though Palinurus prudently tried to resist his
misfortune, while Elpenor seemed totally unaware of his.
Foot Race
There is a similar reworking of Homeric precedents in the
second contest on Sicily, the foot race. Three contestants are
racing for the finish line in Homer's story, Oileus' son, Ajax,
Laertes' son, Odysseus, and Nestor's son, Antilochus, who by
now has learned to respect his betters and is in last place.
Odysseus calls on his patron Athena, who not only assists her
favorite with added strength but also causes the challenger,
Ajax, to slip in the path on the dung from the sacrificial bulls,
much to the amusement of all onlookers. Ajax's complaints
and Antilochus' deference do win the former second prize at
the awards ceremony.
The field in Virgil's race is much wider than in Homer's;
in fact, we do not know exactly how many racers there are,
but seven-Nisus, Euryalus, Diores, Salius, Patron, and two
Sicilians, Helymus and Panopes-are named. The pair, Nisus
and Euryalus, the former the lover of the latter, is first and
third, respectively, as they come into the home stretch; only
Salius in second place separates them. Here Virgil presents an
episode altogether analogous to and reminiscent of Homer's
but with a shift in its comedic emphasis. Unlucky (infelix)
Nisus slips in the slippery blood (not dung) which, poured
forth by chance (forte) from the slaughtered calves, had
soaked the ground and green grass in the path of the runners.
Nisus, seeing Salius now as the leader, trips him up, allowing
his beloved Euryalus to win the race. No divinity has intervened here, and the end of the race, rather than relying
entirely on the befouled and risible aspect of Nisus to achieve
�KOHL
l1
a humorous pathos, dissolves in a comedic wrangling over
prizes. Salius vehemently claims first place and fraud.
Meanwhile, the comely Euryalus, his eyes filled with tears
over possible loss of victory, is winning favor with the crowd,
and Dibres, who would finish fourth and out of the money if
Salius wins, is protesting on behalf of Euryalus. When Aeneas
compromises by ruling in Euryalus' favor but giving Salius a
prize anyway, out of pity "for the fall of an innocent friend,"
Nisus now (successfully) puts in for a prize on his own behalf.
The prize awarded Nisus, a shield captured by Aeneas
from a Greek, foreshadows an incident later involving the
pair in much darker circumstances. In the first real action of
the Italian war, described in book 9, the pair is clispatched at
their own suggestion from the besieged Trojan camp to get
relief from Aeneas. As they pass through the sleeping, wineladen Italians at night, the pair takes advantage of the
situation to work havoc on the enemy forces like the
celebrated night expedition of Odysseus and Diomedes in
Iliad X. Unlike the Argive night expedition against the
Trojans, which proves wholly successful, that of the two
young Trojans against the Italians has a different outcome,
primarily because of the pair's avidity here for booty, as it was
for prizes earlier. Nisus, whom we know as a good runner,
could have escaped through the enemy lines to Aeneas, but
his loyalty to his companion, the captured Euryalus, a loyalty
which led to a comic scene earlier in Virgil's narrative, now
in the darkness of war proves fatal to both.
The counter-lesson to the foot race is furnished by the
second of Aeneas' principal encounters in Hades, Dido, who
answers Aeneas' earlier silence at Carthage (4.331-96) with
her own: in the face of such intense passion, words falter
because they are from her point of view unnecessary. Aeneas,
conversely, feels he owes her an explanation, but the explanation he finally gives her in Hades-that he left her unwillingly (invitus)-is weak and of no avail: hers was a love
unrequited. If the death of Nisus was the culmination of love
fulfilled, then in this counter-lesson Dido's death was the
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12
culmination of a love unfulfilled. What we seem to have at
the center of such passions in either case is death, which
renders the value we place upon passionate love ambiguous.
The intensity of the passionate relationships here is
heightened further by the parallel in the second major
episode in Horner's Hades (xi.155-224), Odysseus' meeting
with his mother Anticlea, who wasted away and perished in
grief over the absence of her son. In the Odyssey it is the
ebbing of passion, not its waxing, that proves fatal.
Boxing Match
The boxing contest in the Iliad (XXIII.653-99) is a relatively
short and direct affair. After Achilles has called the contest
and set forth the prizes, Epeius, "son of Panopeus and a man
valiant and big and with the looks of a prizefighter" (XXIII
664-65), stands up to take on any and all challengers. Only
one in the silent crowd rises to challenge him, Euryalus,
whose father Talaus, had been a good boxer. Epeius makes
good his appearance and repute and very quickly and
magnanimously dispatches the challenger, Euryalus. Virgil
reverses this pattern of events in the boxing contest on Sicily:
it is the reluctant challenger, Entellus, who eventually
vanquishes the favorite, Dares. But the match does not start
out that way: the older Entellus flails wildly at the more
nimble Dares, loses his balance, and takes a fall on his own.
This marks the turning point in the fight. In Homeric turning
points we would ordinarily have the arrival of a hero or a
god, who would advise and rally the oppressed warrior,
lighten and breathe strength into his limbs, and then retire as
the tide of affairs reverses. But no god directly enters into
Virgil's account here (5.450-57), nor are we privileged to
learn what Entellus thinks and says to himself:
Eagerly the Teucrians and Sicilian men stand up; a
shout mounts to heaven, and Acestes first runs
forward and in pity lifts his aged friend from the
ground. But neither downcast nor dismayed by the
�KOHL
13
fall, the hero returns keener to the fray and rouses
strength from his wrath. Shame, too, and
conscious valor kindle his strength. Heatedly he
drives Dares headlong over the entire arena with
redoubled punches, right and left.
Entellus, loser of the first round of the fight, will be declared
victor in the second round when the contest is halted to
prevent the very death of Dares himself.
The course of events here reminds us of a broader theme:
the Trojans, losers at Ilium in the first round, will be the
eventual winners overall in Italy. Such a reversal has its broad
appeal. There is a widespread impulse to cheer on the
underdog and a perennially engaging fascination with
turnings in the tides of affairs of men, whether they be in real
battles or in athletic competitions. The roots of this impulse
and this fascination lie in the hope and in the curiosity that
things are not what they seem and that appearances may be
deceiving. Here in the games anger, shame, and honor have
erupted to transform old Entellus, the one appearing physically weaker, into a furious fighter of overpowering strength.
Pulling the vanquished Dares from the fight, Aeneas says to
the overmatched warrior: "Unhappy man, how could such
frenzy seize your mind? Don't you see the other's strength
and the changed will of the god? Yield to heaven" (5.465-67).
To Aeneas this sudden transformation of Entellus can only be
attributed to the subvention of a god and to a change in the
favor of a god. Has a god chided Entellus and brought him to
a new sense of himself?
The counter-lesson to the boxing contest is found in the
third of Aeneas' major encounters in Hades, that with
Deiphobus, who recounts how his wife Helen betrayed him
on the fateful night when Troy fell. She seemed to be a
faithful wife and, trusting in her, Deiphobus sleeps, while
Helen, actually an enemy accomplice, disarms the house and
allows the enemy entry. Thus surprised and with his guard
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
down, Deiphobus is killed and mutilated. Entellus also seems
to be what he is not, a weak old man and not much of a
match for the younger and nimble Dares. But there are
numerous instances both in team and individual sports where
the favored contestant, deceived by the poor reputation and
weak appearance of the opponent, becomes overconfident,
prepares poorly for the contest, and does not prosecute it
with vigor, trusting that the outcome has or will soon be
settled favorably. As a consequence the favorite is surprisingly
defeated in an upset. From Dares' perspective, is not this an
alternative explanation for the result in the boxing contest
suggested by the juxtaposition here?
The Homeric parallel is found in the third major
encounter of Odysseus in Hades, that with Agamemnon, who
tells his visitor of his betrayal and murder at his homecoming
by his deceitful wife Clytemnestra and her companion
Aegisthus. This is an unseemly and shocking deed, so much so
that the victim is totally unprepared either tactically or in
spirit to defend himself and falls, "slaughtered like a bull in a
manger," Agamemnon says.
Archery Contest
The archery contest, the last of the contests described in the
memorial games to Anchises, parallels in most of its details
the archery contest in the Iliad, penultimate in the sequence
of events ordained by Achilles. The goal in both is to hit a
dove, tethered to the top of a mast. Twice as many men (four:
Hippocoon, Mnestheus, Eurytion, and Acestes) compete in
the Aeneid as in the Iliad (Tencer and Meriones), and Virgil's
account of sixty lines (5.485-544) correspondingly goes
beyond Homer's twenty-five line episode (XXIII.859-83) in
its emotional depth.
·The first of Virgil's contestants, Hippocoon, misses and
the dove flutters her wings in terror as she perceives the force
of the arrow in the quivering mast. Then Mnestheus succeeds
with his shot, like the first of Homer's contestants, Tencer, in
severing the cord holding the dove to the mast: " ... off to the
�KOHL
15
south winds and black clouds she sped in flight" (5.512 f.).
Then the dove, "now happy in the open sky and clapping her
wings beneath a black cloud," is transfixed by an arrow from
the third of Virgil's competitors, Eurytion (as by Homer's
second, Meriones): "Down she fell, dead, left her life amid
the stars of heaven, and, falling, brought down the arrow that
pierced her." Virgil's subjective sympathy for the victim here
far surpasses that of Homer, who simply describes the dove at
one point as "timorous" (XXIII.874) and her flight. as
"circling" (XXIII.875). Consequently the pathos is not
captured and concentrated by the successive reversals of fear,
freedom, exultation, and sudden end as in the Aeneid, nor is
the transfixed bird, the epitome of death, brought to earth for
all to examine but, rather, dove and arrow fall separately.
The counter-lesson to the dove killed in flight is furnished
by the fourth of Aeneas' major encounters in Hades, the visit
to Tartarus. In contrast to the senseless loss we feel at
witnessing the sudden death of a happy innocent-the dove
in flight-here we witness those who have committed crimes,
the guilty, and who are now being punished. The whole of
Tartarus is encircled thrice with walls, then with flames, and
entered by a gate of adamant, which is guarded by Hydra and
surmounted by an iron watchtower where sleepless Tisiphone
stands watch. There is no escape. The Sibyl, who says she was
instructed by Hecate, tells Aeneas of the inmates, their crimes
and punishments: the Titans, the twin sons of Aloeus,
Salmoneus, Tityos, Ixion, and Pirithous-all challengers of
Jupiter's reign-and those guilty of fratricide, of fraud, of
adultery, of betrayal of their kin, and of treason. The
admonition is given by Phlegyas, most miserable of all:
"Learn to be just and not to slight the gods" (6.620). This
sums up the lesson, though the Sibyl adds that it is impossible
for her to recount all the forms of crime and their punishments.
The Tartarean visit has its Odyssean parallel in the last
episode in Hades in Odyssey xi where Odysseus sees Minos
giving judgment; Orion with his club; Tityus being pecked in
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
his liver by vultures because he had raped Zeus' consort,
Leto; Tantalus being tempted; Sisyphus rolling his rock
repeatedly up the mountain; and Heracles, who stole the dog
Cerebus from Hades. Odysseus wanted to stay to see "men
still earlier," such as Theseus and Pirithous, but he is afraid of
being immobilized in Hades by Persephone and her Gorgon's
head, so he leaves. Of those whom he does see, only Tityus'
and Heracles' transgressions are specifically mentioned. In
general, Odysseus is more attracted to these and the others by
their notoriety rather than by their infamy, and the punitive
dimension in the Homeric adventure is not strongly brought
out, unlike that in the Virgilian parallel.
Returning to the archery competition on Sicily (5.519f.),
we are left with the fourth competitor, Acestes, who is yet to
shoot. The prize has already been taken, yet Acestes still
draws back his bow and launches his arrow into the empty
sky.
On this a sudden portent meets their eyes,
destined to prove of lofty presage; this in after
time the mighty issue showed, and in late days
terrifying seers proclaimed the omen. For flying
amid the airy clouds, the shaft caught fire, marked
its path with flames, then vanished away into thin
air; just as often shooting stars, unloosed from
heaven, speed across the sky, their tresses
streaming in their wake.
Unlike the three earlier contests, there is no direct point of
contact between this sign and anything in the comparable
Homeric event. Acestes is the fourth and supernumerary
competitor in the archery program, and his action goes
beyond anything that is conceived in analogy with Iliad
XXIII. The flaming arrow thns assumes a significance in the
drama of the Aeneid that lies beyond the action in the
Homeric epics and retutils us to Virgil's poem itself to find its
proper reference. The description quoted above (5 .522-28)
doubtless recalls the earlier shooting star shown by Jupiter to
�17
KOHL
Anchises (2.692-700), who like Acestes stood before a prize,
Troy, which had been lost.
The Lusus Troiae
And so, as the dust of the contest clears, we have what is
known as the Lusus Troiae, in which sons parade across the
field on horseback under the proud and attentive gaze of their
fathers: "The Dardanians greet the bashful boys with cheers
and rejoice as they gaze, seeing in their features their sires of
old" (5.575-76). The scene gives precise expression here to
the term "religion," binding the sons to the fathers, and
through them, to the forefathers in an unbroken line of
temporal succession. The first part of their equestrian
maneuvers (5.575-87) appears to consist of mock charges and
combat. The second part (5.597ff.) emerges as a sort of
intricate dressage:
Just as once on lofty Crete the Labyrinth produced
a track woven with blind alleys and possessed a
perplexing trick in its thousand paths, where for
one following the signs insoluble and irremediable
wandering awaits, so scarcely otherwise do the
sons of Tencer entangle their tracks and weave
their flight and battle games, like dolphins
swimming through the watery seas who divide the
Carpathian and Libyan waters and play amid the
waves.
6
The counter-lesson to the celebration of Trojan youth on
Sicily is the parade of future Roman greats on the Fields of
Elysium, which Anchises shows Aeneas at the conclusion of
his visit to Hades. In Virgil's depiction, it is as if Aeneas is
situated at the stationary hub of a rotating wheel on whose
periphery various Roman figures are affixed; he looks up at
the section moving in the upper world to see youths moving
from past into future, then looks down at the section in the
lower world to see heroes moving from future into past,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
about to be recycled to the upper world. Anchises explains to
Aeneas the doctrine of palingenesis, i.e., purgation in the
underworld and rebirth above, as they watch the succession
of Romans. How does this transgenerational rejuvenation
take place? The capacity to describe it is beyond us, since it
involves a reversal in the usual temporal order. Aeneas sees
only the barest, iconic presentation of his Roman successors
processioning by in a direction opposite to his and not their
growth, development, or interrelationships.
Tiresias, the blind Theban prophet and counterpart to
Anchises in this scheme, warns Odysseus that Poseidon is
angry over what Odysseus did to the Cyclops Polyphemus
and will make his return voyage difficult. If Odysseus really
desires a peaceful death at an old age, then after getting home
he must journey far inland to a place where oars are no longer
recognized as nautical implements and perform a funeral over
a sailor's cenotaph. Tiresias also gives Odysseus a second
warning: if he and his shipmates harm the Cattle of the Sun
on the island of Thrinicia (which the ancients later identified
as Sicily), then only Odysseus will come home, in a foreign
ship, and after much time, so that he will have to contend
with insolent suitors for the hand of Penelope. In all this
Odysseus hears much but sees very little from Tiresias, and
what he does hear is given as conditional instructions-if you
do this, then that will follow. Aeneas hears from Anchises,
and also sees much, but what he does hear and see is given
unconditionally.
Heroic Tension
The parallels between the events in Aeneid books 5 and 6 and
those in Iliad XIII and Odyssey xi, respectively, do not simply
focus our attention on certain elements of the action but also
contrast the lessons of the Virgilian events with those of their
Homeric counterparts, that is to say, the new with the old.
Thus in the first event, the chariot/boat race, we have
moderate resolve and the positive assistance by the gods
�KOHL
19
(Virgil) vs. interference and disruption by the gods and
respect for betters (Homer); in the second, the foot race,
pious love and loyalty (Virgil) vs. humiliation by divinities
(Homer); in the third, the boxing match, spirited determination and resolve in the face of disgrace (Virgil) vs. magnanimous strength (Homer); .and in the last event, archery,
persistence in the sacrifice for the larger goal (Virgil) vs. the
celebration of skill (Homer). In Hades Palinurus' struggles
(Virgil) contrast with Elpenor's ineptitude (Homer), Dido's
passion (Virgil) with Anticlea's loss of passion (Homer),
Helen's treachery not only to her family but also to Troy
(Virgil) with Clytemnestra's murder of her husband for her
lover (Homer), guilt and punishment in Phlegethon (Virgil)
with crime and notoriety in Tartarus (Homer).
Collectively, the Virgilian readings center upon civic
virtues rather than individual virtues in the Homeric counterparts. This is not surprising. Virgil's special concern, as
pointed out by Maurice Bowra/ "is the destiny not of a man
but of a nation, not of Aeneas but of Rome," whereas
"Homer concentrates on individuals and their destinies. The
dooms of Achilles and Hector dominate his design; their
characters determine the action." Curtius captures this
contrast as one between sapientia (King Latinus) and
fortitudo (Turnus); Putnam detects in Aeneas an irreconcilable difference between freedom and force, and Desrosiers
that of the patient, enduring, nearly comedic type of
Odyssean hero and the decisive, active hero whose pride
prefigures a tragic doom in the manner of Achilles. 8 Thus a
tension emerges between the spirit of the Augustan Age of
Peace and its ethical ideals and the spirit at ancient Troy with
its celebration of human excellence and valor.
. . The parade on the fields of Elysium is perhaps the most
conspicuous of the lessons in book 6 that pose interpretations
contrary to those of the corresponding events in book 5 but
it is not the only such lesson. In fact all the lessons do. Thus
we have, in the first place, an accidental occurrence (Palinurus
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
in the underworld) placed in opposition to occurrence due to
divine intervention (Palinurus on board ship, and the ending
of the ship race). In the second, passion that is altruistically
directed (Nisus and Euryalus in the foot race) is in opposition
to passion reflexively directed to one's own fulfillment (Dido
in the underworld). In the third, victory by wrathful spirit
(Entellus in the boxing match) opposes victory achieved by
exploiting disinterest and dispiritedness in the opponent by
surprise (Deophobus in the underworld). In the fourth, death
or injury as innocent victim (dove in the archery contest)
stands opposed to death as guilty transgressor (the prisoners
in Tartarus). In the fifth and final pair, events arising through
individual striving and skill (boys in the Lusus Troiae) are
opposed to those predestined as part of an atemporal cycle or
plan (the parade in Elysium). In general, these alternatives
reflect an elemental, Lucretian interpretation of motives in
which an agent is acting autonomously for himself or herself
alone, placed in opposition to a traditional, providential
interpretation of motives where figures past, present, or
future, and remote from the agent lay claim to that agent's
actions and intentions.
Once again we are brought back to the tension between
the two heroic types: the man of fortitude, confidence, skill,
and strength, mindful of his own prowess in light of his
forebears, and the man of prudence, negotiation, patience,
and persistence, mindful of and guided by thoughts of his
posterity. Aeneas, a refugee warrior from the plains of Ilium
is well acquainted with the first type of hero. Through his
Odyssean journey to Italy, home of his Dardanian ancestors,
and his prophetic experiences there, most especially in
Hades, he has now become acquainted with the second
heroic type. If such interpretations as we have given to the
events here indicate Virgil's concern with Aeneas and his
mission, we expect, therefore, that the second or "Iliadic"
half of the poem will be dominated by a man who represents
the fusion of these complementary types as the complete
hero. Such a man will display courage, martial skill, and
�KOHL
21
prowess, while acting as leader and statesman in adjudicating
and resolving disputes. In judging these disputes, he will be
aware of the contradictory motives and lessons pertaining to
each action, which will enable him to reach a just decision in
each case.
As Aeneas emerges from the underworld, soon to face this
civil strife and deal with its resolution, which he does entirely
successfully, we might expect him to be a much more
complex figure than before, laced with contradictory motives
and the task of resolving them. This would add an interiority,
a dimension of depth to his soul. But of the psyche of the
Trojan leader we learn nothing directly. There are no
monologues reported, nor internal dialogues, nor even the
occasional battlefield self-exhortation, any of which might
have revealed this psychic space. The terms "wooden" and
"frigid" have sometimes been applied to this frustrating
aspect. Yet Virgil's silence here may be a tacit invitation to the
reader to reflect upon the character and formation of the
beneficent leader as well as a quiet comment on how little
Aeneas is directly in control of his own destiny and that of his
people, being instead like a cipher in a cosmic account, told
by powers largely beyond his knowledge.
Part 2: Regarding Virgil's Golden Age
Aura Discolor
How much, then, of his mission does Aeneas in fact understand? If his project itself-to lead his Trojan refugees out of
the dying city and found a new Troy somewhere else-is
straightforward, the symbol attached to that project, the
golden bough, is problematic. The symbol has had many
interpretations, but is distinguished above all by being the
fusion of opposites: the natural shape and properties of
regeneration and growth contrasted with the artificial ones
formed of refined metal and having a sheen and a crackling
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sound in the wind. To found the new Troy, then, is to plant a
contrivance that must yet regenerate and grow naturally.
In a well-known study, "Discolor Aura: Reflections on the
Golden Bough," Robert Brooks reflects on his subject in this
way:
The poet has expressed life and death, both as
opposites, in the wisdom of the Sibyl, and as union
in the will of Aeneas. The human actors have
reached the impasse of inner experience and
outward observation, two irreconcilable aspects of
reality. The golden bough is the necessary and
external sign demanded to resolve the antinomy,
and bears a fundamental relation to it?
Later in the same study Brooks returns to the opposition:
The essence of the golden bough is the contrast
between its lifeless nature and its organic
environment. But we cannot stop here. Obviously
the image of gold must express other relevant
associations; otherwise lead or iron or stone would
have done equally well.
Brooks attaches considerable importance to the bough's
appearance at the moment of its discovery (6.204): discolor
unde auri per ramos aura refulsit. ("With diverse hue shone
out amid the branches the gleam of gold.") 10 The word aura,
a play on aurum, normally has no visual sense but rather
denotes an. atmospheric emanation, while the gleam is
discolor, variegated and not a pure color. Discolor aura, then,
is a strange way to describe the brilliance of gold and suggests
a secret, enigmatic, even sinister quality of the golden bough.
In Hesiod we read that Cronos held sway over a golden
age of men, but the old god was deposed by his son Zeus and
sent to Tartarus, and a new, inferior silver age of men was
initiated, followed by further declensions of men down to our
present iron age. But in Ennius' later account the destiny of
Cronos (Saturn) does not quite work out that way: he finds
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refuge (cf. lateo) in Italy, in Hesperia, land of the ancient
Latin folk. In the Aeneid King Latinus later greets the Trojan
delegation, telling them (7.202-04) that the Latins are of the
race of Saturn, and Evander will later explain (8.314-27):
Native Fauns and Nymphs used to inhabit these
groves and a race of men born of tree trunks and
the hardy oak, for whom there was neither custom
nor culture, nor did they know how to yoke oxen,
lay up wealth, nor spend their gains, but branches
and harsh hunted fare for sustenance nourished
them. First from heavenly Olympus carne Saturn
fleeing the arms of Jove and an exile from his lost
kingdom. He united an unruly race dispersed
among the high mountains, gave them laws, and
chose to call it Latium, since he lay safe in this
country. Under this king were the ages which they
say were golden. So calmly he used to rule the
people in peace, then little by little there followed
a worse age of duller hue (deterior. . .ac decolor
aetas).
So into this worse age ·of duller hue now steps a new man,
Aeneas, who forges a (re)union between his Trojans and the
Latins. Is the diverse hue of the golden bough, the token and
emblem by which he gains access to Hades and thence to his
mission in Latium, reflected later in the age of duller hue in
which that mission is carried forth in the second half of the
Aeneid? Conversely, is the decadent, discordant, discolored
age, which Aeneas seeks to resolve in Italy, heralded by the
variegated aura of his golden bough? That is, does the
decadence in the post-golden ages have its roots in the golden
age from which it declines?
Decolor Aetas
Virgil intends that his hero Aeneas prefigure his own patron
Octavian, whom Anchises describes to Aeneas, as we have
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seen, as the promised one, the son of a god, who will
reestablish the Golden Age in Saturn's Latin land, and spread
a Roman Empire. He also appears on Aeneas' brazen and
golden shield (8.675-81), a double flame corning forth from
his face and the Julian star upon his head as he commands the
fleet at the triumphal battle of Actiurn.
To indicate what is at stake in this Augustan picture, a
brief sketch of the mythological background of this golden
figure is important. As in much else in Virgil's epic, it is
instructive to begin by way of comparison with Horner and in
particular with the principal figure of the Iliad, Achilles.
Laura Slatkin11 has called attention to the legend in Pindar's
Eighth Isthmian Ode that Thernis had counseled the gods that
the nymph Thetis marry a mortal rather than the divine Zeus
or Poseidon, since the son of such divine union would
challenge father Zeus and overthrow the entire Olympian
order. Thus Thetis marries mortal Peleus instead, and the son
is the half-god Achilles. But at Troy Achilles now becomes a
similar threat to his commander in chief Agamemnon, an
inferior man, to whom, nevertheless, he must pay honor by
yielding the captive Briseus. It is at this point (Iliad !.503-10)
that Thetis puts to Zeus the request that her son Achilles be
properly honored. The subsequent action does not relate
primarily to the hegemony of either Zeus or Agamemnon but
rather to how Zeus works out the end of Achilles in the Iliad
and whether the hero's short-lived life and glorious end
constitute a just, fitting response to Thetis' request. Achilles
amidst the carnage of the ensuing war, the death of his
beloved Patroclos, and the retributive killing and desecration
of Hector exacts tribute from Argive and Trojan alike. In the
extraordinary last scene of the poem Achilles has in effect12
already achieved his goal as ruler and is enthroned as king of
Hades, where he will later lament to visiting Odysseus that he
would rather be a slave among mortals than hold his present
regal station. We are left to wonder whether such excellence
among men can only be so rewarded.
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The compass of the Aeneid's action, in contrast to the
Iliad's, is not from the heights to the depths of heroic fortune
but the past, present, and future of successful statecraft. In
comparison with the Iliadic myth, the central problems raised
by the Aeneid do not relate to the justice due a central heroic
figure such as Achilles but to the very existence of a city in the
face of a civil war, a city in which just dispensation might be
given. In this sense, the problems upon which Virgil's epic
turn might be said to be antecedent to those of its Homeric
prototype. A practical reading of the Iliad in this light
suggests at a minimum that preservation of the city is favored
when the best men are not situated in subordinate positions.
Such inverted circumstances often lead to internecine strife
among leaders, which, in turn is often fatal to the city as a
whole.
The problem of civil war is faced directly in the story of
Atreus and Thyestes. In one common version of the myth,
there is a dispute between the two brothers, Atreus (father of
Agamemnon) and Thyestes, over the kingship of Mycenae. A
ram with a golden fleece, a symbol of election, is born into
Atreus' flock. With the aid of Atreus' wife, whom Thyestes
has seduced, the golden ram is stolen, and Thyestes assumes
the kingship. Hermes then persuades Atreus to desist until the
course of the sun is reversed, which Zeus then accomplishes.
Again, let us first take note that the questions upon which this
myth centers do not focus on the two fraternal antagonists
and their doom but upon the very survival of the political
order of Mycenae, which will be torn asunder if and when the
two brothers collide in civil war over the kingship. Only some
outside, extraordinary intervention is able to avert this
destruction, in this case Zeus' action.
The Statesman
The mythic context of the Aeneid, as disclosed in an
important contribution by Jacob Klein, 13 turns on the myth of
Atreus and Thyestes and, in particular, on the re-embodiment
and extension of that myth in the story of the reversed
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cosmos in Plato's dialogue The Statesman. Virgil probably
read and discussed this dialogue with Octavian. A reading of
Virgil's ancient biographies, notably those sections attributed
to Suetonius in Aelius Donatus and that of M. Valerius
Probus, indicates that Virgil was in the circle of patronage of
Octavian long before the principate. Virgil's lifelong interest
in philosophy seems at first to have centered upon the
Epicureans and later shifted to the Platonists. 14
If we turn our attention to The Statesman itself, however,
it becomes evident that the Atreus{fhyestes myth is not quite
the entire story the Stranger wants to discuss with young
Socrates. The two had spent their previous discussion, in
effect, trying to find out what a ruler was, and by a laborious,
dialectical process had arrived at a provisional definition of a
ruler as a guide over human beings, a "shepherd of the
people" as is usually applied to Agamemnon at Troy. But men
can seize power by various means, usually violent. What
distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate rulers? If I say,
"Obey my orders!" to you and a group of your fellows, what
compels you to do so? or not to do so? It is this question that
leads them to the Atreus/Thyestes myth in the first place and
to the witness of Zeus especially. What is the pathos by which
the restoration of the throne to Atreus is enforced? Thus the
Stranger in Plato's Statesman is led to tell of the god's action
directly (268E-274E), where the god reverses the course of
the world from the ever more chaotic age of Zeus to restore
the earlier, Edenic age of Saturn or "golden age."
The Ever-Recurring Return
The Stranger explains:
During a certain time the god himself joins in
guiding and rolling around all in its motion, while
at another time, when the periods have at length
reached the proper measure of time, he lets it go,
and of its own accord it turns back in the opposite
direction, since it's a living being and endowed
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with intelligence from him who put it together in
the beginning. (268C-D)
One is fancifully reminded of a spring-driven toy or top that
one winds up at the beginning, then lets go of until the toy or
top runs down, becomes wobbly, and tips over, at which
point one winds it up again. And the stranger adds that bodily
things like the cosmos can't go on forever in one direction
like the divine, but this winding up and running down is the
next best thing to it. (269A-270A) Translated into political
terms, we see a society originally face-to-face with the
divinity that organizes and inspires it. Then the divinity
retreats into the background. As the generations of men
proceed one after another, the original divine memory
becomes ever dimmer, the inspiration weaker, the inhabitants
more forgetful of their origins, the organization more
corrupt, and the society more dissolute. We see Plato's
concern for this weakening reflected in many other dialogues:
the myths of recollection in the Meno and Republic, the
replacement of defaced images by fresh images in the
Symposium, magnetic chains of iron rings hanging from a
lodestone in the Ion, et cetera. In the face of dissolution, a
renewal by a divinity is then required.
But what then is suffered by the cosmos during this liferestoring winding-up? young Socrates asks. This leads to
further elaboration of the Stranger's myth. (270Bff.) There is,
in fact, great destruction of humans at this time, the Stranger
declares, and only a small part of the human race, having had
many strange experiences here, has survived to tell the tale.
The renewal, we infer, is a violent one, a period of protracted
and most destructive civil war, and the reversal is. indeed a
cosmic reversal. Time itself is reversed; everything is put back
to its original condition; memory itself is now put out of
question. Things are not begotten in succession but spring up
out of the earth on their own accord. There are no special
bonds of kinship and no special claims thereby on wealth and
power. Creatures do not eat one another and do not have to
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labor for their food; strife and competition are thus eliminated. Men may even have the power of conversing with
other animals. Such is the Edenic life of men during the reign
of Cronos when the god himself is their shepherd and unlike
that of the present age of Zeus, who remains aloof.
So, once the universe is turned back and the earthquake,
shock, and destruction resulting from the end of the old age
subside, the new epoch takes over; however, the material
element in the cosmos persisting from previous times
gradually takes over and prevails. The cosmos therefore
becomes more and more fierce. Men require special assistance from the gods (Prometheus, Hephaestus, Demeter,
Dionysus) and finally a more extreme intervention is
warranted to reverse the whole order again. But here (274E2)
a difficulty arises: the two interlocutors are in search of the
statesman and his art. If Cronos as shepherd of the people is
the paradigmatic statesman, then Cronos has no statecraft, no
art, because Cronos in the golden age has nothing to do,
neither to feed or lead men nor to care for them at all. The
good statesman is a statesman paradoxically by not having to
exercise any statecraft. This puzzle, which we may perhaps
characterize as that of the philosopher-king, will send the
conversation of the two off again in search of the statesman
and his rule. Here we will leave them and turn back to look
at the story in a wider context.
The Statesman myth has been reexamined more recently
by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who begins his discussion with a
passage from the peripatetic Dicaearchus, a student of
Aristotle, a passage that in turn was cited by Porphyry in his
treatise de Abstinentia. 15 According to Dicaearchus, the
Golden Age, which in his account actually existed and was
not an idle fiction, was home to men who were vegetarians
and had food in abundance, though not in superabundance,
lives devoid of property, social conflict, and wars and a style
of living simple and frugal, symbolized by the acorn. These
Golden-Age people lived under the direct patronage of
Cronos, who is according to Vidal-Naquet "an extremely
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ambiguous divine personage." Vidal-Naquet asks, What does
Dicaearchus' text acquire from the past and what does it
conceal? Vidal-Naquet finds an answer to his question in
Theophrastus' tract On Piety where this era is portrayed as a
period of vegetable consumption and animal sacrifice, which
apparently has succeeded vegetable sacrifice and has actually
appeared as a substitute for human sacrifice: thus,
vegetable-human-animal. These fourth-century speculations of Dicaearchus and of Theophrastus and later of
Porphyry are built on a theory of actual progression or
evolution from one earlier stage to the next. In this
progression Cronos emerges as a terrible, cannibalistic god
and the golden age as an age of enormous ambiguity from a
political standpoint.
Virgil's account of Saturnus in the Georgics and especially
in the Aeneid draws in many of its aspects upon Ennius' translation of Euhemerus' account of Saturn.' 6 But Euhemerus'
Saturn used to dine on mortal flesh (until Jupiter put an end
to it) and he was not beneficent god; Saturn in Virgil, on the
other hand, is a vegetarian and a benefactor.
Do wild men become tame in the age of Cronos, or do
tame men become wild (cannibalistic) in this epoch? Since we
are moving from one kind of man, one kind of animal, to
another, we cannot say. But two contrary attempts, two
contrary movements, have been made, according to VidalNaquet, to bridge the gap. In the "upward" movement, we
import the civic order into the virtues of the golden age, a
tendency expressed by the Orphics and Pythagoreans; in the
"downward" the entrance into the Golden Age is tantamount
to making contact with bestiality, expressed in various
Dionysiac practices. In some cases, notably in Euripides'
Bacchae both movements are present. The ambiguity even
seems to reach The Statesman in a somewhat lighter, more
playful fashion. The Stranger asks the young Socrates
whether men were more blessed in the reign of Cronos or
now in the reign of Zeus? They decide that it depends on
whether men in the first age engaged in philosophical conver-
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sation with the animals or merely ate, drank, and gossiped
with them. (272B1-D1)
In the Aeneid itself this ambiguity surfaces in the figures
of the Cyclopes. When we first encounter them in book 3 of
the Aeneid, they are the sheep-grazing, cannibalistic savages
with whom we are familiar from Horner's Odyssey. But in the
Aeneid's sixth book we learn of and in the eighth book we see
the Cyclopes of Aetna, skilled metal workers in Vulcan's shop
who set to work on Aeneas's shield. In contrast, Horner's
Hephaistos in Iliad XVII works on Achilles' shield alone, and
the robot-like, wheeled tripods he has made cannot be
compared to Vulcan's Cyclopean assistants, who have names
("Thunderer," "Lightning," "Fireworker") and who respond
to Vulcan's exhortations. Clearly some sort of Cyclopean
transformation has taken place, of which, however, we
receive no further information. On the deeper ambiguities in
Virgil there will be more to say later; now we move on to
other aspects of the Golden Age in Plato.
History
Colin Starnes17 brings our attention to the eighth book of
Plato's Republic where, having concluded along with the
other interlocutors their description of the best state, the true
aristocracy, Socrates and Glaucon embark on a description of
the other, inferior ones. These Socrates subsumes under four
types: tirnocracy, (whose principle is honor); oligarchy
(wealth); democracy (liberty); and-worst of all-tyranny
(power). They then talk about the ways in which one type
may collapse into the next, inferior one. Socrates prefaces this
discussion with the following observations:
Hard as it is for a state so framed to be shaken,
yet, since all that comes into being must decay,
even a fabric like this will not endure forever, but
will suffer dissolution. In this manner: not only for
plants that grow in the earth, but also for all
creatures that move thereon, there are seasons of
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fruitfulness and unfruitfulness for soul and body
alike, which come whenever a certain cycle is
completed, in a period short or long according to
the length of life for each species,IS
Seen in the light of Socrates' discussion of the political
forms in the Republic, the myth of the golden age in the
Statesman has sufficed to bring to light a new conception of
social history. As Klein points out, the myth does not rest on
the old, "organic" conception as seen in the Republic,
according to which the social order goes through successive
cycles of growth, maturity, senescence, and death like the life
cycle of an annual plant, but rather on a revolutionary
conception, where at the beginning of each cycle there is a
revolution, a reversal, a renovative overthrow of the
previous, senescent, decrepit age, and the restoration of the
new age, which then gradually declines. In turning the course
of events back to a golden past, the statesman turns back and
binds the political order back to its ancestral foundations.
This gives a deeply religious character to Roman politics and,
conversely, as Hannah Arendt has explained, a deeply
political character to Roman religion:
In contrast to Greece, where piety depended upon
the immediate revealed presence of the gods, here
religion literally meant re-ligare: to be tied back,
obligated, to the enormous, almost superhuman
aud hence always legendary effort to lay the
foundations, to build the cornerstone, to found for
eternity. To be religious meant to be tied to the
past, and Livy, the great recorder of past events,
could therefore say, Mihi vetustas res scribendi
nescio quo pacta antiquus fit animus et quaedam
religio tenet ('While I write down these ancient
events, I do not know through what connection
my mind grows old and some religio holds
[me ]'). 19
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Negatively, as in the case of transgression, it is the
loosing, the releasing from these bonds of religio either by the
restitution of damages or by the paying of a like penalty that
constitutes just absolution. 20 Positively, the religious sense of
the Romans, which was cultivated at funerals by the presence
of ancestral death masks and the giving of orations honoring
ancestors as well as the recently departed, has been observed
to contribute significantly to the formation of future generations of Roman citizens.
For who would not be inspired by the sight of
images of men renowned for their excellence, all
together and as if alive and breathing? What
spectacle could be more glorious than this?
Besides, he who makes the oration over the man
about to be buried, when he has finished speaking
of him, recounts the successes and exploits of the
rest whose images are present, beginning from the
most ancient. By this means, by this constant
renewal of the good report of brave men, the
celebrity of those who performed noble deeds is
rendered immortal, while at the same time the
fame of those who did good service to their
country becomes known to the people and a
heritage for future generations. But the most
important result is that young men are thus
inspired to endure every suffering for the public
welfare in the hope of winning the glory that
attends on brave men. 21
In Virgil's epic this conception, eminently both religious
and political, centers upon that revolutionary figure, pious
Aeneas, from whom the poem takes its title. The variegated
hue of the golden bough by which he gains access to Hades is
an external sign of the union of life and death, of freedom
and force, fused in the character of Aeneas. But this union,
which characterizes the hero and pervades his age, only
extends so far. In subsequent generations of men this union
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progressively falls apart; the ages become inferior. Thus to
extend the metaphor: the brilliance of the variegated hue
now diminishes as the elements successively separate to form
ever-duller colors. 22 Further, turning the cosmos back to its
pristine condition is accompanied by much destruction and
civil strife, as Plato's Stranger reminds us. The gold of the
golden age thus achieved is a gold alloyed with sadness and
loss. This, I suggest, is another meaning of the bough's
discolor aura.
There are other dark aspects of the golden age as well. In
the eighth book of the Aeneid, as we have already seen,
Evander describes to Aeneas Latium's past (8.314-36); from
this description it is fairly clear that Saturn, overthrown by
his son Jupiter, came as a refugee amongst the aboriginal,
primitive peoples of Italy, to whom he was a political and
cultural hero, ruling in peace. This Saturnian age then gave
way to debased societies as warfare and acquisitiveness
supplanted the Saturnian element, a decline aided and
abetted by waves of invaders. The Latins under Latinus are
remnants of this aboriginal Saturnian element, as is made
clear by various other allusions in the poem as well. 23 Now
come Evander and Aeneas, exiles from foreign lands and both
descendants of Jupiter. Aeneas is persistently and vehemently
opposed throughout the poem by Saturnian Juno. Her wrath
against Aeneas and the Trojans is announced at the very
beginning of the epic (1.4) and is sustained nearly until the
end (12.842). In two soliloquies (1.37-49; 7.293-322) and in
three conversations (Helenus to Aeneas: 3.435-40; Juno to
Allecto: 7.331-40; Juno to Jupiter: 10.63-95) Juno makes
clear the reasons for her antipathy: her beauty has been
slighted in favor of others (the Judgment of Paris); her
husband cheats (Dardanus, the Trojan founder comes from
the dalliance of Jupiter with Electra), and her own children
are not pretty to look at Uuventa has been spurned by Jupiter
in favor of Ganymede, and Mars and Vulcan generally are not
attractive figures either). In contrast, Aeneas' mother is
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Venus, the winner of the Judgment of Paris, and both Aeneas
and his Trojan companions are described as handsome,
beautiful people. Witness the taunts of Numanus at Ascanius
and the encamped Trojans at 9.598-620 and the protest of
Iarbas to Jupiter at 4.215-18: the Trojans are effeminate,
foppish people, incapable of fighting. The very sight of these
beautiful Trojan dandies, we imagine, makes Juno angry-a
properly Saturnian sentiment. Finally and more broadly,
there is the prediction that a Trojan remnant will someday
establish itself and overthrow Carthage, Juno's favorite city.
Mythological orthodoxy within the foregoing context thus
indicates that restoration of the golden age in Italy would
entail bringing Saturn or at least his representatives out of
hiding and reestablishing them. But the divine allegiances are
all wrong for this. Juno, the chief opponent of Aeneas, and
her associates-Turnus, Latinus, the Latins, Jutnrna and
allies-are of Saturnian stamp and resist the new order in
Italy, while Aeneas, Evander, and the Trojans and their allies
are the J avian protagonists of that new order. The institution
of the new order represents, therefore, the complete
subversion of the Saturnian elements and not their reinstitution. But Aeneas' institution, as we have seen, is quite
precisely advertised as setting up the return of the golden age,
which Virgil's own patron Octavian, descendant of Aeneas'
Jovian line, will reestablish in Saturn's Latin land, and from
which will extend a golden empire (6.789-800; 8.675-81).
How, then, can the usurpers of golden Saturn properly found
a golden age?
There are two ways to look at this new foundation, and
here the recent critics are sharply divided into two camps.
Advocates of the Empire, the "Augustans," point to the final
reconciliation of Juno and Jupiter in which the latter will
declare her to be not only Saturn's other child but also his
sister (12.830) and are well aware of the century of civil strife
and confusion that marks the late Republic; they will look at
the amalgamation of the Saturnian and the Jovian as a
complete solution to the dynastic and political problems of
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the, past. The Saturnian gold will be alloyed with the Jovian
iron to produce a metal of stronger characteristics, if duller
hue. But the scene of this reconciliation is somewhat
ambiguous. Jupiter sees Juno seated on a cloud above the
battle, watching the final battle between Aeneas and Turnus,
and they exchange decisive words in the following dialogue,
beginning with Jupiter: "The end is reached. You have had
the power to chase the Trojans over land or wave, to kindle
monstrous war, to mar a home and to blend bridals with woe.
I forbid you to try any more." To which Juno with submissive
expression responds:
Because indeed, great Jupiter, this as your will was
known to me, I left unwillingly Turnus and the
earth: you would not have seen me alone on an
airy seat to suffer fair and foul, but girt in flames I
would have stood beneath with the very ranks and
dragged the Teucrians into hostile strife. Juturna I
confess I persuaded to help her miserable brother
and I approved that she dare greater things for his
life, but not spears nor stretch the bow. This I
swear by the implacable fountain head of Styx,
sole dread ordained for gods above. And now I
truly yield and I give up the fight in loathing.
(12.803-06)
Juno had in fact earlier told Jutnrna this: "If you dare
anything more favorable for your twin, do it; it is fitting.
Perhaps better things may follow for the unhappy."
(12.152-3) While not openly encouraging Juturna to do
battle on behalf of her brother, these words do not discourage
it either. Consequently, Juno's later vehement denial before
Jupiter, who has reproached her for the fact that Juturna now
faces Venus on the battlefield, may indicate that Juno's
withdrawal has less to do with a fundamental change of heart
and more to do with the implicit external threats of her
brother. Under this view, the new golden age is not the
voluntary melding of the Saturnian and the Jovian but the
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involuntary usurpation of Saturnian by the Jovian. The new
age is really the age of iron; instituted by political force and
by poetic craft, it has been gilded in Saturnian guise to
produce a shaded gold. The Saturnian partisans of the old
Republic will say that by sleight of hand the Jovian has been
substituted under the appearance of the Saturnian, and they
were clear about the Augustan parallels. As put by Ronald
Syme, one of the exponents of this point of view,
In the Revolution the power of the old governing
class was broken, its composition transformed.
Italy and the non-political orders in society
triumphed over Rome and the Roman aristocracy.
Yet the old framework and categories subsist: a
monarchy rules through an oligarchy. 24
This line of reasoning has been carried forward by Inez
Scott Ryberg, who writes:
But if one side of Virgil's picture of Latinus is
Saturnian, the other side is Roman. He appears
wearing the trabea, the traditional garb of the
Roman king; he presides over Roman customs, the
opening of the Gates of War and the making of
treaties; he resists the breaking of the alliance with
the Trojans and will take no part in the
unrighteous war. 25
This ambivalent picture of Latinus carries over to an
ambivalent position of Augustus: "That the new Golden Age
of Augustus will embody the qualities of the reign of Saturn
is an important part, but only part, of the concept." Thus, she
suggests, the phrase said of Augustus, aurea condet saecula
(he will establish the golden age) has the overtones condere
lustrum (to establish the purifying sacrifice) and condere
urbem (to establish the city). This overtone or "echo,"
according to Ryberg, "hints, with 'flattering ambiguity,' that
the founder of the new Golden Age will be like Jupiter, the
son greater than his father who brought to a close the reign
�KOHL
37
of Saturn." But here, I think, we find a deviation from the
scheme we have been exploring: rather than successive
restorations of the golden age, we have successive challengers
to it, each challenger aspiring to overthrow and outdo his
predecessor, a scheme not devoted to achieving political
stability but, if anything, to undermining it.
Virgil in his poem does not resolve the status of the
golden age. Like his mentor, Plato, he shows us much, tells us
little, and moments of resolution seem rare. In the case of the
bough, it is a symbol, and it has a certain power, namely of
guaranteeing Aeneas passage through the underworld, but
not much more. There is, in Brooks' critique, no
"transcendent quality, passing beyond the contrasts of nature
to an ultimate harmony. . .it is unnatural, embodying the
contrasts of nature, rather than the supernatural,
transcending them." The bough is received and exercised in
ritual silence. "The rite is effective," Brooks comments,
and the hero receives his power, but not the
knowledge of what that power should mean...
The amor which impels him to pass living into
death receives no answer. This deeper antithesis of
success in action/frustration in knowledge is the
central and fundamental significance of the golden
bough. Certainly it is this which effects that
curious distortion of the language at the moment
of the bough's discovery. Discolor aura: not the
light of revelation, but the dubious and shifting
colors of the magic forest.
In similar manner, the more we turn back to pursue and
to restore the golden age, the more this age seems to recede
into the past. It becomes a dim, indistinct, and shifting glow,
the object of a quest that is ever-to-be-completed. Saturn
remains hidden, and with him hides that direct apprehension,
that illuminating knowledge of man's true estate. That to
which we keep turning back is instead a counterfeit Saturn, a
Jupiter disguised as Saturn, or perhaps a sort of negotiated
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
cobbling together, an amalgamation of elements of the two.
Thus, the same antithesis of success in action/frustration in
knowledge, which Brooks uncovered as the central and
fundamental significance of the golden bough, discloses itself
here also. As a result, we have the constituting of a new
political order without the express declaration of its constitution; we have a new beginning, a novum principium, but
without the enunciated new principles. To indicate this intermediate, indeterminate quality 'which seems to pervade
Virgil's poem, Brooks says, "the Aeneid is a work in limbo,"
and he concludes his study with an allusion to Dante's well
known exposition of that place in the fourth canto of the
Inferno, where Dante's Virgil tells us that because he is
unbaptized he is lost, and without hope he lives in longing.
But unlike Dante, I would suggest that "limbo" in its original
meaning is not a place of darkness but a place at the edge of
things. Those who fell under the sway of the old order, the
pagan "ancients," were drawn and moved by the figures of
Aeneas, of Anchises, Ascanius and others, no matter how
dimly descried. In a distant, indistinct way virtues were made
visible, although unlike for Dante and the People of the Book,
they could own little true explanation.
Notes
1. SeeR. D. Williams, P. Vergili Marionis Aeneidos Liber Quintus (Oxford,
1960), xxv-xxviii.
2. Charles Segal, "Aeternum per Saecula Nomen, the Golden Bough and
the Tragedy of History: Part 1," Arion 4 (1965): 617-57.
3. Citations are based on the Oxford editions of Munro and Allen (third,
1920), Allen (second, 1917), Mynors (corrected, 1972), and Burnet
(1901) for the .Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and Statesman, respectively.
4. "In fact, all of Virgil's poem is modeled on what you might call a
mirrored reflection of Homer's," we are told by Macrobius in his
Saturnalia, "you have only to compare the two passages." Macrobius: The
Saturnalia, Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Percival
Vaughan Davies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). The
passage quoted is from book 5, chapter 2, section 13. Macrobius goes on
�KOHL
39
to identify over one hundred half-line to two-line parallels between Virgil
and Homer. Georg Nicolaus Knauer in his more recent work, Die Aeneis
und Homer: Studien zur poetischen Technik Vergils mit Listen der
Homerzitate in der Aeneis, 2nd ed. (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht, 1979), expands the list to over five hundred such parallels.
5. AB if to emphasize the nautical and equestrian parallels, Virgil borrows
part of his description of the start of the boat race from a passage in
which spirited horses are described in the third book of the Georgics
(5.144-45 = G 3.104-05).
6. The labyrinthine associations of the Trojan riding display are elicited
by John L. Heller, "Labyrinth or Troy Town?" The Classical Journal 42
(1946): 123-39.
7. C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London: Macmillan and
Company, 1945), p. 35.
8. E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 173; M. C. J. Putnam,
The Poetry of the Aeneid: Four Studies in Imaginative Unity and Design
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965.), xiii - xiv and pp. 191 194; R. V. Desrosiers, "Two Greek Concepts of the Hero and their Echo
in Virgil's Aeneid," unpublished lecture, Berlin, N.H., 1989.
9. American Journal of Philology 74 (1953): 260-80.
10. The sections pertaining to the Cronos discussion in Hesiod are found
in Works and Days, 109-201 and Theogony, 736-885, and those in
Ennius in Euhemerus, 8-65 and Annals, 25-29.
11. The Power of Thetis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
Zeus' obligation to honor her son is fulfilled through the unfolding of the
events on the plain of Troy. I have traced Zeus' latent direction of the
principal actions here in "Design in the Iliad Based on the Long Repeated
Passages," Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 22 (1994/5):
191-214.
12. See Eva Brann, Homeric Moments, Clues to Delight in Reading the
Odyssey and the Iliad (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2002), Chapter 13,
''Achilles as Hades and Achilles in Hades." This interpretation makes it all
the more striking that Priam, guided by the psychopomp Hermes, has
come to Achilles to ransom the body of his son from the underworld so
that it might be properly honored by and among the living. And so they
held funeral for Hector tamer of horses.
13. Jacob Klein, "The Myth of Virgil's Aeneid," Interpretation: A journal
of Political Philosophy 2 (1970): 10-20. [Also in Jacob Klein, Lectures
and Essays, ed. by Robert B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman
(Annapolis: St. John's College Press, 1985): 269-84.] Klein speculates
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that the frequent Homeric references throughout the Aeneid, which the
poet has deliberately transposed or otherwise modified elements in the
Homeric originals, reflect the reversals in the Statesman myth. Further,
Macrobius' discussion of such occurrences in Virgil at the very center of
his Saturnalia, a dialogue that is reported as taking place at the winter
solstice when the sinking sun is now reversing its course, also suggests
such a revolutionary view. And Aeneas' Dardanian homecoming to
Latium where the whole Homeric cycle begins (in an extended sense)
now situates Virgil as the poet ancestral to Homer, thereby rendering
some plausibility to Virgil's enigmatic boast that it was easier to steal
Neptune's trident or Hercules' club than a verse from Homer.
14. As recorded by Henry Nettleship,Ancient Lives ofVergil, with an
Essay on the Poems of Vergil in Connection with his Life and Times
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1879). Later writings also support Virgil's
reputation as a Platonist: "Emperor Severus Alexander. . .Vergilium autem
Platonem poetarum vocabat eiusque imaginem cum Ciceronis simulacra in
secunda larario habuit, ubi et Achillis et magnorum virorum." "Emperor
Severus Alexander... used to call Virgil the Plato of poets and he kept his
portrait, together with a likeness of Cicero, in his second sanctuary of the
Lares, where he also had portraits of Achilles and the great heroes." See
The Scriptores Historiae Augustae, with an English translation by David
Magie, Ph.D. (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Loeb
Classical Library, 1953), Vol. 2, 21.4.
Klein (loc. cit.) calls our attention to part of an interpolation by an
unknown hand in a 15th century manuscript of Donatus' biography of
Virgil: audivit a Silane praecepta Epicuri cuiits doctrinae socium habuit
Varum. et quamvis diversorum philosophorum opiniones libris suis
inseruisse[t] de animo maxime videatur. ipse fuit Achademicus. nam
Platonis sententias omnibus aliis praetulit. "From Silo Virgil learned of
the teachings of Epicurus. Varus was his companion in this doctrine. And
although he seems to have inserted the opinions of opposing philosophers
in his books with great intent, he himself was of the Academy. For he
preferred the views of Plato before all others." See Jacobus Brummer, ed.
Vitae Vergilianae (Leipzig: Teubner, 1912), apparatus plenus, pp. 32-3.
15. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "Plato's Myth of the Statesman, the Ambiguities
of the Golden Age and of History" pp. 285·301 (Chapter 14) in The
Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and forms of Society in the Greek World,
trans Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1986)
16. Patricia Johnston, "Vergil's Conception of Saturnus," California
Studies in Classical Antiquity 10: 57-70 (1977).
17. "The Eternity of Rome: Virgil's Doctrine and its Relation to Plato" in
Philosophy and Freedom: The Legacy of James Doull, ed. David G. Peddle
�KOHL
41
and Neil G. Robertson (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2003),
pp.·· 181-200. For Starnes the primary elements corrupting and thus
ultimately destroying the city "have to do with the random, irrational
aspect of nature that is in principle impenetrable to human knowledge
because we can only have sure and certain knowledge of what is both
fixed and universal-that is, the Forms or Ideas." (p. 190)
18. The Republic of Plato, translated by Francis MacDonald Cornford
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 269 [546A]. Socrates goes
on in this passage to associate political instability with the instability of
human generations. Certain marriage numbers govern the procreation of
perfect children, thus assuring the perfect continuity of generations and
perfect order in the city, but it is difficult to determine such numbers and
inferior children are born out of season, leading to disharmony.
19. From "What Is Authority?" in Between Past and Future: Eight
Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 121.
The citation is from Livy's Annals, book 43, chapter 13.
20. See Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought:
About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), Chapter XII, esp. pp.
439-42.
21. Polybius, The Histories with an English Translation by W. R. Paton
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1923)
Book 6.53.10-54.4.
22. "Moreover, the more minute the particles into which anything is
pulled apart, the more readily it is perceived that the color gradually
fades away and is extinguished: as happens when purple wool is torn up
into small parts; the purple and scarlet colour, brightest of all, is wholly
scattered apart when the wool has been pulled apart threadwise; so that
you may learn from this that the particles breathe away all their colour
before they are dispersed apart into the seeds of things." Lucretius, De
Rerum Natura 2. 826-33, W. H. D. Rouse translation in the Loeb
Classical Library (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 3rd ed. rev.,
1937).
23. The allusions to the Saturnian character of Latinus, Turnus, and
Juturna, on the one hand, and the Jovian associations and descent of
Aeneas and Evander, on the other, have been recently discussed by
Richard F. Thomas, "Between Jupiter and Saturn: Ideology, Rhetoric and
Culture Wars in the Aeneid," The Classical ]oumal100 (2): 121-47 (Dec.
2004-Jan. 2005).
24. The Roman Revolution (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1939), introductory chapter.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
25. Inez Scott Ryberg, "Virgil's Golden Age," Transactions and
Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 89:112-31 (1958).
For a recent survey of the ambivalent and contradictory ways the golden
age presents itself in Virgil's poetry and their various critical interpretations, see Christine Perkell, "The Golden Age and its Contradictions in
the Poetry of Virgil," Vergilius 48 (2002): 3-39.
�43
The Finest Fruits of Reason
Review of Michael Comenetz's
Calculus: The Elements
M. W. Sinnett
The Principle of Sound Learning is that the noise of vulgar fame
should never trouble the cloistered calm of academic existence.
Hence, learning is called sound when no one has ever heard of it;
and 'sound scholar' is a term of praise applied to one another by
learned men who have no reputation outside the University, and a
rather queer one inside it. If you should write a book (you had
better not), be sure that it is unreadable; otherwise you will be
called 'brilliant' and forfeit all respect.
-F. M. Cornford
Microcosmographia Academica:
Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician
Of the making of textbooks about the calculus there is no
end, and, as Steerforth says to young "Daisy" Copperfield,
"there never was a more miserable business." It's not that
they prove to be "unreadable"; much worse, they're not
meant to be read in the first place. Reading, after all, is an
intensely personal enterprise replete with risks and responsibilities, and offering consequences uneven and unpredictable
at best. Textbooks, on the other hand, are intended to be
successful, and therefore proceed without reference to or
dependence upon such quaint contingencies as the judgment
and perseverance of individual students. (That they accordingly do nothing to foster the judgment and perseverance of
individual students is perhaps a trifle inconvenient from the
standpoint of anyone with the interests of education at heart,
Michael Comenetz, Calculus: The Elements. World Scientific Publishing Co.,
2002. M. W. Sinnett is a tutor at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College.
�44
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
but there's no doubt of its being good for business: The intellectual and spiritual vices reinforced by most textbooks
strengthen the market for more of the same, a nice example
of what systems analysts call a "negative feedback loop.")
"Success" is defined in terms the modern world owes to
B. F. Skinner: the subjects are to be conditioned into the
reliable performance of certain operations, the origins and
meaning of which remain soothingly obscure. The colorcoding of components of its presentation, for example,
practically allows a modern text to read itself to the students,
and since even this may fail to produce the desired results,
many textbooks now include a computer disc in order to
offer "interactive guidance," as well as, in a warm and
supportive voice, the text's personal encouragement: "I am
your friend. Trust me. Math is fun." A week's worth of class,
meanwhile, demonstrates that the blue, purple, magenta, and
brown bits (constituting roughly 900AJ) of the text can be
safely ignored; the important parts are the section summaries
(in red, for easy reference) and the worked examples (in
green, the color of life). These, in turn, are keyed to vast
arrays of repetitive and uninteresting exercises which
sufficiently disclose, in and of themselves, the venerable
pedagogical principle governing the whole: monkey see,
monkey do.
It was not always so. In the age when men were formed
of gold, there were texts in the land that were also booksgood books withal, perhaps even great books. Hardy,
Whittaker, Courant, Spivak, Apostol. These were the names
of high places, points of entry and the means of apprenticeship to the professions of science. The latter, the two
volumes of Calculus by Tom M. Apostol of CalTech (known
to us as "the gospel according to the Apostol Tom"), was the
constant companion for four solid semesters of any of us in
the University's departments of science or engineering. It was
a book we not only read and re-read, but also poured over,
despaired of, rejoiced in, feared, hated, loved, savored,
�SINNETT
45
emulated. It was a book of which we hoped to be found
worthy. These modern texts seem rather the work of a pygmy
race.
Nor, in most respects, does the work under review,
Calculus: The Elements by Michael Comenetz, bear
comparison with these great treatises; in its scope, intended
audience, and purpose, it is poles apart. And yet, in one
essential way, it both invites and survives such comparison,
for Comenetz's text is also a book, a very good book, a book
that demands and rewards careful reading and reflection.
The beginning of Calculus is with the "problem of
calculus," and comprises brief discussions of five types of
inquiry about physical and mathematical objects for which
neither classical Greek geometry nor medieval Islamic algebra
provide adequate resources. By way of proposing "lines of
thought" that lead naturally to "the problem," Comenetz asks
us to consider (1) the density and mass of a wire; (2) the
growth rate and total volume of some quantity in threedimensional space; (3) the velocity, acceleration, and distance
traversed by a "particle" in space; (4) the accumulation of
quantities such as velocity and momentum through the
operation of a force over time; and, (5) certain quantities
associated with curves, such as the areas bounded by a curve
or the inclination of a curve. In each case, a problem entirely
amenable to classical or medieval treatment under conditions
of appropriate uniformity becomes wholly intractable under
the circumstances of variability often prevailing in the world
around us. If the density of the wire, for example, is
uniform-that is, if the ratio of mass to length is independent
of the size or location of the segment of wire consideredthen the ordinary algebraic operations of multiplication and
division are sufficient to express the relations between these
quantities: density is the quotient of mass by length, and
hence, mass is the product of density with length. If, on the
other hand, the density of the wire varies with length, as one
expects in practice, then the "generalizations of notions of
quotient and product" that appear in Chapter Two are called
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
for. As the reader proceeds through the situations described
in (2) through (5) "the same problem presents itself again and
again to the eye that knows how to look;" namely, the
problem of understanding the mutual determination of
quantities whose relation is non-uniform. That such relations
prevail between quantities routinely experienced in the
physical world suggests an essential feature of the calculus
that Comenetz is determined we shall see. This mathematics
arises not through turning away from the world, but through
active engagement with it.
This connection with (what Eric Voegelin would call) the
"engendering experience" of the subject is sustained
throughout. Questions from the first chapter are employed in
the second in order to motivate the introduction of the
integral and derivative. Problem (1), in particular, pertaining
to the mass of a non-uniform wire, plays the central role in
introducing the "integral" as a generalized sum of differential
quantities reflecting the variations in the wire's density along
its length. The notion of integral is then more briefly applied
to the components of problems (2) through (5), which
pertain to the accumulation of quantities over space or time.
The process is then repeated in terms of the components of
these same problems that pertain to the generalized quotients
expressing the infinitesimally local character of the
phenomena in question. Beginning again with the wire, the
"function" m = m(x), which gives the mass of the wire at
each point x along the wire's length, is used to define the
density of mass at x as the "limit" of average densities over a
sequence of decreasing intervals containing x. This notion of
"derivative" is then applied to the corresponding components
of problems (2) through (5); that is, to the determination of
the strictly local characteristics of the quantities being
considered. Thus, just as Comenetz in Art. 2.4 applied the
definite integral in calculating the area bound underneath the
graph of a function, so in Art. 2.9 he turns to the computation of the graph's slope at an arbitrary point. The careful
arrangement of the problems, with geometric properties of
�SINNETT
47
graphs corning last, permits smooth transitions between the
two halves of Chapter Two and between Chapters Two and
Three. The use of the definite integral to discuss the area
bound by a curve over a fixed interval (Art. 2.4) leads
naturally to the "indefinite integral" (Art. 2.5) interpreted as
a function giving the area bounded by the curve over a
variable subinterval. The question that then naturally arises
(even if not explicitly forrnulated)-how fast this variable
area is changing-leads to the discussion of the derivative (in
Art. 2.6 and following). Lurking in the background, of
course, is the Fundamental Theorem, which Cornenetz
reserves for the following chapter. The immediate transition
to Chapter Three is also effected by means of problem (5) on
the geometry of curves, where (especially in §2.9.9 on
"Differentiability") he presents examples that raise rather
difficult questions as to the existence and general properties
of derivatives and integrals.
We therefore turn from the physical problems that
motivate the concepts of "integral and derivative" in Chapter
Two to a largely mathematical account of the processes of
"differentiation and integration" in Chapters Three and Four.
Here the emphasis is upon an orderly mathematical account,
which proceeds from an heuristic discussion of limits and
continuity, through an abstract (though not rigorous)
definition of the derivative, to the delineation of differentiation formulae for standard categories of functions and the
general algebraic properties of differentiation. The explicit
statement of the Fundamental Theorem then leads to
discussion of indefinite integrals, the formulae for definite
integrals corresponding to known derivatives, and to the
further applications of differentiation in determining mathematical properties of functions and of their graphs. This
approach is continued in Chapter Four, where "local"
properties disclosed by derivatives are applied to "global"
properties best characterized by the generalized summation
of definite integrals. Thus the chain rule for the differentiation of suitable compositions of functions leads to
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
techniques of integration such as "substitution," "parts," and
"partial fractions." We discover in general that the applicability of integrals is as various as our ability to build differentials of relevant quantities. The two chapters of pure mathematics then lead to two more of applied mathematicsspecifically, to the study of equations containing differentials
(a.k.a. "differential equations"), and again the same inverse
relationship between "differentiation and integration" is
found: the equations that express physical processes as
relations between derivatives can be solved (at least in these
elementary circumstances) by means of integration.
Perhaps the most beautiful thing in Calculus is
Comenetz's seventh chapter on "plane curves." Nowhere else
do we see so clearly the historical background that modern
analysis has transformed. The tools constructed in preceding
chapters are the means to a simplified and very clear
discussion of the "arc length" and "curvature" of smooth,
non-intersecting curves in the Cartesian plane. Precise references to the Lemmas of Part 1 of the Principia permit
Comenetz not only to connect his account with that of
Newton, but also to show what is at stake in both. Instead of
a characterization that applies to a figure as a whole, as in the
geometry of Euclid or Apollonius, the modern approach,
which begins with Newton and applies to a much wider class
of curves, characterizes curves in terms of their "local
geometry" (Art. 7.3); that is, it characterizes them in terms of
their behavior in neighborhoods of individual points. The
qualities that are truly "intrinsic" to such curves, such as "arc
length" and "curvature," are therefore most naturally defined
analytically. This chapter includes a number of examples in
which the analytical definition of curvature is beautifully
illustrated in terms of the geometrical figure known as the
"osculating circle"; but in the end it is curvature as a function
of arc length, k = f(s), that determines the curve independently of all geometric considerations. And this use of arc
length as an independent variable expressing position "along"
a curve allows a smooth transition to the final topic of the
�SINNETT
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chapter, a lovely yet brief treatment of the generalization of
the Riemann integral known as the "line" or "contour
integral."
The elegance and cohesiveness of this chapter is but the
clearest example of a general feature of Comenetz's Calculus;
namely, that it is a carefully thought-out and entirely selfcontained whole. The five problems briefly discussed in
Chapter One return time and again, and develop in tandem
with the mathematical language they help to motivate.
Because they demonstrate the depths that open up through
the appropriate analytical concepts and techniques, the
problems not only receive extensive discussion in their own
right, but also necessitate the application of the virtually all
the mathematics that Comenetz presents. Even the
concluding chapter on Taylor series, which might at first seem
to have been tacked on, provides the author a chance to
survey the journey on which he has led the reader. Thus,
there are no loose ends. Indeed, as the book concludes, we
are invited to "contemplate," not the five platonic solids as at
the close of Euclid's Elements, but "the elegant formula" for
the power series computation of n/4, and to recognize in it
"the depth that yields the finest fruits of reason."
Its elegance notwithstanding, there is also something
disquieting about the wholeness of this book; in particular,
there is something artificial-not to say unnatural-about
Comenetz's invitation to contemplation, which is as if to
suggest that we have arrived someplace special. No such
invitation is forthcoming from Euclid at the close of Book 13,
since none is needed, except in the case of perverse moderns
such as myself whose cosmic piety on that august occasion
was all too rapidly swept away in a torrent of rather obvious,
and rather blasphemous, questions. (What do "Platonic
solids" look like in n-dimensions? or in a locally compact
topological vector space? or in a Banach space? Are there
Platonic solids in a Banach space? Hilbert space, sure, but
Banach space? What happens if ... ?) For those who come
freshly to Euclid-which in a just world would include every
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
literate person-the urge to contemplation arises ineluctably
from the movement of the text itself; one contemplates
because it's the natural thing for anyone who (thinks he)
dwells in a cosmos to do. Modern mathematics, by way of
contrast, promulgated by inhabitants of the universe, is
fragmentary by nature. Consummations are therefore
illusory, and wholes are inseparable from the idiosyncrasies of
authors, as witness the fact, which Comenetz knows perfectly
well, that from any point in Calculus one can ascend vertically into the theoretical ionosphere and never be heard from
again. This, in turn, is simply further evidence of the
perspective that guides Comenetz's careful arrangement of
his material in the first place; since this mathematics is exegetically related to the order of the physical world, to entertain
seriously some final wholeness about it would be to indulge
oneself in the fantasy of (what Paul Feyerabend calls) "the
conquest of abundance." Our true place in the order of things
is more aptly described by Newton's famous metaphor
(suggested by the cover of Calculus) that we moderns, at best,
are as small boys playing on a beach and diverting ourselves
in finding now a shinier pebble or a more curious shell, while
"the great ocean of truth" lies undiscovered before us.
Comenetz has indeed presented his readers a cornucopia of
"the finest fruits of reason," but ten more volumes of such
would still imply that the greatest harvest is yet to come,
indeed, that the greatest harvest will always be yet to come.
These considerations also lend urgency to the question
for whom Calculus: The Elements is intended. It certainly has
the features of a textbook, including sets of "questions" with
"answers [in the back]," a "topical summary" keyed to the
appropriate articles and sections of the text, and a "reader's
guide" that, among other things, offers alternative routes
through the material. It is somewhat difficult to imagine,
however, the nature of the course (or courses) in a conventional college or university to which it would be appropriate.
It is clearly not intended, on the one hand, for the training of
mathematicians. The book is indeed full of delightful
�SINNETT
51
surprises for the mathematically-minded reader (integrals and
derivatives clearly presented prior to, and with nothing more
than a "cautionary" remark about, limits; a definition of
continuity that clearly derives from general topology; and
numerous intimations of a beautiful generalization of calculus
known as differential geometry), but it contributes little to
the learning that the beginner would require in order to
notice them. Only a few of the central theorems of the subject
are formulated as such, and even these cannot be rigorously
proven given the relegation of such things as a precise
("epsilon-delta") definition of limit to brief discussions in fine
print. On the other hand, it seems too demanding for the
"calculus for poets" course and has the wrong practical orientation for the "calculus for business administration" course.
Nor is it appropriate to a class of science or engineering
students, in which context it would be judged both deficient
and superfluous at the same time, deficient in certain
necessary technical matters and superfluous in offering a
good deal of instruction in physics that would be more
exhaustively taught elsewhere. Precisely as a coherent and
self-contained whole, Comenetz's Calculus is a terminal
introduction to a non-terminal subject. One can easily
imagine it enticing its reader to further study, but it is difficult
to see how such study could be undertaken without the
reader, at least in part, starting over someplace else.
This is not to deny, however, the worth of reading
Calculus. To the contrary, members of any of the categories
mentioned will profit from the perspective, not to mention
the idiosyncrasies, presented here. But perhaps it is not
categories of readers that Comenetz has in mind. Perhaps it is
only when we stop thinking about categories of readers (as
authors of mere textbooks never do )-perhaps it is only when
we consider who, and not what, the readers are-that we
discover the "actually existing individual" (Kierkegaard) for
whom this book is a godsend. What, in the end, does it
achieve? What does it do? And the answer is that it doesn't
do anything. It's a book not a machine; it's meant to be read,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and wondered at, and reflected on, and struggled with. It can
be said to make the case for mathematical physics as among
"the finest fruits of reason," but even this only for those who
have eyes with which to see, and energy with which to
persevere, and courage with which to inquire. It is hard to
imagine the person willing to undergo the risks of genuine
reading who would not profit from, and delight in, what
Comenetz offers.
A painful duty, thus, confronts me: Calculus: The
Elements is, in my opinion, definitely not unreadable.
Comenetz, therefore, as I need hardly add, cannot be judged
a sound scholar. Alas!
�53
~
The Sting of the Torpedo Fish
fj:-- Christopher B. Nelson
Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught? Or if
not teachable, is it acquired by practice, or if neither, whether
men possess it by nature or in some other way?
So begins Plato's dialogue, Meno, opening as abruptly upon
the reader as my remarks have upon you this afternoon. You
freshmen will spend a good part of this year with Plato, his
frustrating protagonist, Socrates, and this very dialogue,
Meno, in both English translation and the original Greek. I
think I am on relatively safe ground in saying that the reason
we spend so much time on the Meno is that this dialogue
belongs peculiarly to this college; it is deeply rooted here. I
hope to expose a few of those roots this afternoon, but let me
first return to the beginning.
Tell me, Socrates, if you can, whether human
excellence can be taught? If not, whether we can
acquire it by practice? Or if neither of these,
whether we are born with it or it comes to us in
some other way?
Meno's question is interesting, for it appears to go to the
heart of some very big questions that all of us share: what
does it mean to be human? and how can we be better human
beings? Parents would love to know how to raise children
who are improvements on themselves; all parents want what
is best for their children. Teachers would be happy and
honored above all others if they could teach their students
virtue. As for students, why else are you here but that you
Christopher B. Nelson is President at the Annapolis Campus of St. John's
College. This is the Convocation Address to the Class of 2010, delivered at
Annapolis on August 23, 2006.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
believe that some answer might be given to Meno's question:
What is the right path to virtue? How might I acquire hnman
excellence?
But Meno's question has its flaws. For one, it comes ont
of the blue and without context. We are supposed to know,
somehow, what Meno is talking about. We are assumed to
have a common vocabulary and even a common nuderstanding of basic concepts.
Speaking of vocabulary, some of you will have noted that
I translated the Greek in two different ways when I repeated
Meno's question in English, an exercise you freshmen will
undertake as you try first to discover what is being said and
what it means before asking whether it is true. Such attempts
at translation will be first steps to getting at the root of
Meno's question.
Socrates appreciates what is at stake in Meno's question.
He thns goes straight to the heart of it with a response that
would confound any student hoping to receive the almighty
truth from a teacher. Socrates in effect says: how can I say
how virtue is acquired when I don't even know what it is?
And worse, Socrates then says that he has never met any other
person who knows what virtue is. He entreats Meno to help
him understand what Meno thinks it to be. Meno makes the
attempt, responding confidently with what he has heard from
other teachers, repeating their opinions as his own. Yet, under
Socrates' questioning, Meno finds himself disowning the
opinion he began with. After two false starts, Meno begins to
get uncomfortable with Socrates' examination. When
Socrates begs him to start over yet a third time, Meno tries to
divert the conversation from the question of virtue to the
problem with Socrates:
Socrates, I certainly used to hear, even before
meeting you, that you never do anything else than
exist in a state of perplexity yourself and put
others in a state of perplexity. And now you seem
to me to be bewitching me and drugging me and
�NELSON
55
simply subduing me with incantations, so that I
come to be full of perplexity. And you seem to me,
if it is even appropriate to make something of a
joke, to be altogether, both in looks and in other
respects, like the flat torpedo-fish of the sea. For,
indeed, it always makes anyone who approaches
and touches it grow numb, and you seem to me
now to have done that very sort of thing to me,
making me numb. For truly, both in soul and in
mouth, I am numb and have nothing with which I
can answer you. And yet thousands of times I have
made a great many speeches about virtue, and
before many people, and done very well, in my
own opinion anyway; yet now I'm altogether
unable to say what it is.
It is beginning to look as if Meno has no interest in the
answer to the question and is more concerned with his image
or reputation than with the truth. On the other hand,
Socrates is not satisfied; he still wants to proceed with the
search for an answer. He is also willing to conduct the search
with Meno, a man who seems to have no thoughts of his
own. Socrates, in wishing to proceed, has done two things: he
has told Meno that he will serve as Meno's teacher if Meno
will let him, that is to say, that he will join Meno in the
search; and he has told the reader that he is willing to do so
because he might actually learn something from Meno. He is
truly open to the possibility that the teacher may learn from
the student-any student, even Meno. So, Meno, what is
virtue?
Meno now tries a sting of his own, challenging Socrates
with a classic learner's paradox: either we know something or
we don't. If we know it, we don't need to search for it. But if
we don't already know what we are looking for, how will we
ever recognize it when we see it? Socrates will not be deterred
by Meno's attempt to bring the conversation to an abrupt
halt. Instead, he takes Meno's problem seriously and answers
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56
in two ways. First, he repeats a myth he has heard that
suggests that learning is a kind of recollection, which requires
an exercise of responsibility for learning by the one doing the
learning. Learning does not occur when someone else, a
teacher for example, tries to put knowledge into a student.
Instead, it is an act of recovery, in some way, of something
already known to us.
When Meno demonstrates that he doesn't get it, Socrates
resolves upon a way to show Meno what he means, asking
Meno to observe carefully as he examines one of Meno's
slave boys about a problem in geometry which is new to him,
a problem that can be demonstrated by a drawing in the
earth-a problem, not incidentally, that you will be working
on in your mathematics tutorial with Euclid. The slave boy
reaches a point where he expresses with confidence an answer
that is false, an answer that he comes to understand as wrong
a few moments later under Socrates' questioning. The slave
boy tries again with the same result. Socrates asks him to start
over, just as he did with Meno a little earlier. He asks the boy
to produce another answer, and the slave boy says: "Indeed,
Socrates, I do not know."
Socrates turns to Meno, and by extension to us, and says:
Do you see, Meno, what advances he has made in
his power of recollection? He did not know at
first, and he does not know now, what is the
[answer]: but then he thought that he knew, and
answered confidently as if he knew, and had no
difficulty; now he has difficulty, and neither knows
nor fancies that he knows.
Meno: True.
Socrates: Is he not better off knowing his
ignorance?
Meno: I think that he is.
�NELSON
57
Socrates: If we have made him doubt, and given
him the "torpedo's shock," have we done him any
harm?
Meno: I think not.
Socrates: We have certainly, it would seem, assisted
him in some degree to the discovery of the truth;
and now he will wish to remedy his ignorance, but
then he would have been ready to tell all the
world again and again [the answer he gave at
first?].
Meno: True.
Socrates persuades Meno that the slave boy simply would not
have been ready to inquire and learn the truth without first
being reduced to perplexity. The torpedo's shock not only did
not hurt, it positively helped; it was the condition for the
learning that did occur (and the slave boy did go on, with
Socrates' help, to find the solution to the geometry problem).
Socrates has shown us, the readers (and Meno, if he were
listening), that understanding our own ignorance is necessary
for learning to take place, especially understanding our
ignorance of the everyday, common things we thought we
knew well. When we can look at the familiar and suddenly
realize that we really do not understand it, when we can look
at what we always thought we knew, and ask "what is this
thing?" then we are ready to learn and well along the path to
better understanding. In that state we are truly torpid, just as
the slave boy was, and we bring a sense of wonder to our
search. This wonder comes not from something we understand, but rather from our desire to understand, what we
sometimes call a love of learning, born not in understanding
but in ignorance.
Socrates has done something else in his demonstration.
He has also shown us the power of discovering what
something is not, and helped us see that knowing what
something is not is much more than knowing nothing; it is a
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
kind of "knowing ignorance," an "intelligent perplexity" that
comes from trying out and discarding false notions. He has
also helped us see not only that we do not know what virtue
is, but also that we do not even know what learning is.
We now look at Meno and see that he is a slave: a slave
to his pride, a slave to the opinions of others, unwilling to
examine what he clearly does not understand. Meno's
problem is not that he is ignorant, but that he has no desire
to be free from the shackles of that ignorance.
We look at the slave boy and see that he is free; free from
the false notions he has been carrying around with him, free
from barriers to learning. This freedom, strangely, comes not
from the certainty of knowledge but from the recognition of
his ignorance.
Let me return to the place where I began, when I said that
this dialogue of Plato's is deeply rooted at the College. We
want you to acquire the freedom of Meno's slave boy, the
freedom that allows you to acknowledge the one certainty in
life: "Indeed, Socrates, I do not know." Recognition of that
certainty is the path to learning things that will belong to you,
not just repeating things that belong to others. We also want
you to have practice with the tools you will need to acquire
this freedom, tools that will help you to listen and to read
attentively and deeply, to express yourselves intelligibly and
precisely, and to measure and reckon the world in which you
live accurately and comprehensively; tools that will help give
shape to your understanding who you are and where you live,
and what your responsibility is toward others and the world
you inhabit together, the world of the body and the world of
the spirit.
We live with a deep paradox at the College, one that you
will confront right at the outset. We have made very deliberate choices about what should and should not be included
in this all-required curriculum (and there are many, many
excellent works that are not on the program list simply
because there is no room for them in just four years). Yet we
tell you that, for all the conviction we may have that these
�NELSON
59
choices constitute the best undergraduate curriculum we can
devise, this conviction is not grounded in the answers these
books purport to give but in the questions they raise. When
we say that this college is committed to radical inquiry, we
mean inquiry into the very traditions and books that have
shaped the world into we are born. This is why we are not
ashamed to admit that, although we are called an institution
of higher learning, we really do not know what learning is.
We share the conviction, nonetheless, that it is worth the
search to find out. When we welcome you to St. John's
College, we are welcoming you to join us in a search that we
imagine will sustain all of us for all of our lives, a search for
origins and foundations that will be firm enough to support
the good life we each wish to live. We call on you to join us
as fellow lovers of learning, not as would-be scholars.
One of the things you will discover as you read the
several Platonic dialogues on the program is that they
demand your engagement. They ask for you to reflect on how
you might respond to Socrates. So, let me venture into the
conversation of the Meno with a small, tentative reflection on
the question Socrates puts to Meno: "What is virtue?" My
thoughts, at least for now, are these: the way to virtue may
require that we come to know our great weakness, our own
ignorance. This ignorance is common to all who are less than
divine; it is something we share with one another in our
humanity. If there is a connection between knowledge and
right conduct, it is likely to be found in our ignorance and in
the humility it inspires, in seeing that every single one of us
has a long, long way to go toward understanding, in the
endless search for truth. I suspect that human virtue lies
somehow coterminous with this strange path toward
knowledge, which is a path through ignorance and therefore
available to us all. As we are not likely to attain great heights
of knowledge, it is more likely that we can share with each
other the great peaks of desire. It may be that the love of
learning, more than the attainment of understanding, is what
binds us together most tightly. It may also be this love of
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
learning which impels us to great acts of virtue, like the virtue
we will be asking you to exhibit every day in class: helping
your classmates to experience the loving sting of the torpedo
fish, helping them see that you too have a lot of baggage to
unload, and coming to see that learning is best pursued in a
community of lovers of learning, each seeking what is best for
the others.
And now I see that I have found my way to a typical
difficulty experienced by all Socratic interlocutors. I have
tried to say something about the nature of virtue, in terms of
loving and learning, when I'm not sure I know what these are.
So, let me leave you with this question: Tell me, freshmen,
what is this love of learning that has brought you to our door,
and where does it come from? For I do not know, although I
am happy in the thought that we have this much to share with
each other for four full glorious years.
Welcome to St. John's College! May you experience the
sting of the torpedo fish early and often. May the sting never
hurt, but help you along the path toward understanding and
freedom.
�61
For the Graduate Students in
Classics at Yale
1
Eva Brann
I'll begin by thanking you for coming to listen to me on a
busy weekday. As far as I know, a sense of guilt was not a
recognized affect in the pagan world where about forty-nine
percent of my moral allegiance lies, otherwise I would
apologize to you-apologize for being about to suggest to
you a way of life, a way that may not jibe with your purposes
and plans as graduate students who have chosen your place in
the academic organization of studies at a large university, as I
did over half a century ago. The least I can do, however, is to
give you my bona fides, although, as I will tell you in a
moment, I did not exactly keep the faith.
About fifty years ago I haunted Phelps Hall, as you do
now. The tutelary deities of those days were called Bellinger,
Bennett, Dawson, Immerwahr, Silk. I recall them with the
tenacious affection that the young conceive for their teachers.
Not that we were all that well taught: we learned not what
we needed to know but what our professors wanted to teach.
It is my impression, gained from our students' reports and
appointment interviews, that you graduate students are far
more rationally and rigorously prepared than we were.
Perhaps that, too, has its downside. In any case, our teachers
were giants, but our education was haphazardly splintered.
Nonetheless we scrambled ourselves into some semblance
of learning, but above all we achieved what we really wanted:
to get to Greece, or Rome, or wherever our hearts lay.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean on the Annapolis campus of St. John's
College. The occasion for this talk was the award of the Yale Graduate
Alumni Association's Wilbur Cross Medal as well as the celebration of the
sixtieth year of Yale's Directed Studies, a Great Books Program. It was
delivered on October 12, 2006.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
I went to Athens, full of philhellenic fervor. It was an
uneasy first year at the American School of Classical Studies.
I learned that the Hellas of my dreams-partly, I guess, a
legacy of my German childhood, but more, I like to think, tbe
manifestation of some aboriginal memory-was most reliably
accessible in the secure irrealities of my imagination, as I was
before long to learn that the Greeks were most inexpugnably
alive in the volumes of my then incipient library. Yet tbe
place, Greece itself, was pervading my reading and imagining
with its sensory lucidities: the pungent aroma of the thyme at
landfall on Ceos after a wild, nauseated crossing from
Sunion, the backlit blown poppies growing on Hymettus, but
above all the then still pristinely diaphanous atmosphere of
Attica, which gave sensory truth to Aristotle's saying that
light is the activity of a transparent medium (De Anima 418
b9).
Unfortunately this numinal landscape was overrun by
latter day squatters, the modern Greeks. I must have been
infected with tbis attitude from my elders, but I certainly
colluded in it. It was only eventually that I began to wonder
with some empathy what it must feel like to be the rightful
yet very remote heirs to all that broken and buried glory. We
archaeologists were, in any case, called to be intent on ruins
above ground which were meant to be salvaged from the
daily business of a modern-and then very poor-city, and
from the detritus-a treasure trove to us-from which we
scraped the earth away, careful trowelful by trowelful. Not
that I did that myself; I wasn't any good at it, capable of
sweeping away millennia at a trowel-stroke, while inspecting
at puzzled length what a discerning eye would have immediately identified as discombobulated fill. Also, I was intimidated by the Greek workmen who had been competently at
this job for generations.
But I saw what we were doing, and I studied what we
brought to light. For one thing, there was a melancholy to it.
A colleague of those years, Seth Benardete, once said to me
that Roman buildings were enhanced by ruination, while
�BRANN
63
Greek temples were diminished. It seemed true, but why? I
now think it is because Roman edifices anticipate romanticism, as it were, for they have in them something that lends
itself to the deconstruction into that suggestive incompleteness which is indeed one characteristic of the romantic.
A cracked Roman column will gather around itself a pastoral
veduta; a Greek column drum will focus the eye on its
collapsed perfection. For romantic is what the Greeks are not,
at least at their canonical best: plan and detail participate in
each other reciprocally; ruination cannot enhance them. A
shorn or broken temple or treasure house is a kind of animadversion on passage. One might say, fancifully, that temples
disapprove of time.
I am going somewhere with these divagations. (You will,
by the way, forgive all the vocabulary. There is an expansive
pleasure in being among people who, by reason of their
profession, are able to decode, even if they don't know, all the
excellent words our Grecolatinate Auglosaxon English holds
in store for us.) What I'm wandering toward are all the intellectual aporiai, the perplexities, that bedeviled that essentially
glorious first year-the intellectual ones, I mean; I'll spare
you the personal ones brought on by youth and Attic nights.
These perplexities were far more engaging than the mere, idly
sweet melancholy of being too late in history.
First I should say that I fell heart and soul into the activity
that engendered these perplexities. I was endlessly lucky and
still feel full of gratitude for falling in with an organization
like the American Excavation of the Athenian Agora-if there
are many like it. To put it succinctly: these were fanatics; they
worshiped at the (anum of scrupulousness: of digging
technique, of cataloguing protocol, of generous collegiality.
In the fifties not all the foreign schools were up and running,
and visiting unhoused scholars would marvel at the institutional hospitality they received. The Agora was a model for
canonicality: everything that was done was done exemplarily,
from spelling to photography, from restoration to exhibition.
There was a kind of communal concentration on the work,
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
any JOmmg of two sherds, each discovery of a pottery
workshop or (glory of glories) of a pot painter, every
convincing serialization of artifacts was noted with interest.
I got into this meticulous enterprise in a way I can't
account for to this day. I was invited to come down from
Soudias Street on the slopes of Lycabettos to the Agora below
the Acropolis. Homer Thompson, the director, took me
through the show rooms where the unpublished potsherds
were laid out and asked me what I'd like to work on. I
pointed at some attractive looking stuff; never was there a
luckier index finger. It landed on the Late Geometric and
Protoattic pottery, the period when the black praying-mantislike figures of the Dipylon funeral amphorae were morphing
into rounded polychrome human representations, and the
funerary somberness was replaced by sometimes intentionally
comical exuberance.
I might inject here that that very inclusive respect for all
times and populations of the Athenian market place which is
now doctrine in the humanities was practiced earlier in the
American excavation, perhaps there first and most paradigmatically. But there was-or seemed to me-to be something
behind it, something tacit but palpable, which lent both
backbone and pathos to the studious objectivity of the
research: everyone knew that there was a center, quite
literally evident in the study vitrines of our museum and
workrooms, the Stoa of Attalus. There was a culmination, a
standard, a reference point: the Athenian mid-fifth century,
the Classical Period. No one would have dreamed of saying
so, but it was known, the way in a decently egalitarian
community everyone knows to whom the aristeia would go if
there were to be a competition, but no one has the bad taste
to say so.
I left archaeology. One way to explain it is that there were
just too many issues no one had the bad taste to broach. I
might as well mention the tacitly proscribed word: it was
philosophy. My leaving was, in a very mild way, felt to be a
�BRANN
65
defection by those who had helped me and meant me to have
a career in archaeology. I still feel a twinge.
We were all deeply engaged in our work. I remember a
night when those funereal stick-figures off a Geometric pot
marched across my brain in a dream. But what was that
work?
We were erecting what had fallen and turning up what
had been buried, often in actual graves. Were we mounting a
renaissance for real life or a reburial in display cases? What,
to leap to the largest context, was the human intention
behind all those latter day "-logies" and "-graphies"-archaeology, topography, chronology, epigraphy? What did we
mean by reaching back into time, resurrecting the dead
through their artifacts and making what was earliest appear
latest? I recall sitting in my apotheke, my work and storage
room, with all those eighth- and seventh-century pots, when
Homer Thompson, who was not only a brilliant but an
attentive director, stuck his head in and asked, "What's new?"
What could be new? I was cluing out laboriously what the
most ignorant potter's ten-year old paidion would have
known as a matter of course. A friend and I once figured out
that it took fourteen times as long to study one of those little
oil lamps the excavation produced by the thousands as it did
to make one.
What were we doing? Were we not systematically and
well-intentionedly, yet literally, abusing what we had seized
on in research? Take drinking cups: kotylai, skyphoi,
kantharoi-I could type and serialize them, yet I'd never
drunk from one of them; it would have been against
protocol. Take ancient texts: we mined them for topography,
chronology, prosopography, but we didn't read them, not as
words meant to tell human truths.
I learned the lingo, the serviceable dialect of the trade, the
necessary initiation into the mysteries of the guild, one dialect
in the very language you are now learning to speak with
aplomb. I used it appropriately, but did I know what I was
saying?
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Archaeology is, if anything, grass-roots history. Who can
doubt that there is Herodotean history? Historia is inquiry; of
course one may inquire, as he does, into great and wonderful
human deeds to keep them from falling into oblivion. It
makes immediate sense. But historical research as an
academic discipline, and particularly archaeology, is
concerned also with pots and pans and babies' potty chairs.
(The Agora has several.) A sophisticated intellectual structure
is needed to warrant the study of what one might call
"deedlets," ergidia (to coin a term) rather than a deed, an
ergon, a significant action. For we should wonder under what
hypothesis the essentially surd realia of the long dead begin
to speak: how does an artifact, especially an undistinguished
one, express its maker's world? And how should we care:
engagedly to learn of our advances and our losses, or objectively, just for the heck of it, just because what is buried
beneath asks to be exhumed, just as a mountain is climbed
because it is there?
I spoke, as we all did, of development: pot-shapes
developed, evolved. How, by what detours through the
potter's vision-governed hands, did inorganic pieces re-enact
the evolutionary lines of organic species? We spoke of
chronology and were intent on establishing datings, but what
was time that it could be accounted for through excavational
strata, the spatial laminations of time, as it were? The
measurement of time by motion is problematic enough, but
its visible capture in vertical stasis-nothing is more
anathema to an excavation than a disturbed stratification-is
terminally puzzling.
We all talked of proportion: the masked standard was
classical harmony. The degenerate members, say of a series of
amphorae, were long and lank, while earlier examples were
refreshingly, finely young, and tautly chubby, like those
archaically smiling korai. But of the theory of proportion,
probably the greatest topic of Greek mathematics, we never
spoke, and to the question "what must the world be like for
the parts of a whole to be in a proportion, to have the same
�BRANN
67
ratio to each other?"-of that we seemed never to think.
Some of you probably know the remarkable answer to that
very question: how is it possible that a first element of a shape
is to a second as a third such element is to a fourth. Only in
a Euclidean world is such proportionality possible; there are
other realms in which two shapes may be the same but no two
can be similar, so that one canonical proportion cannot
govern differently sized items.
One cold winter's week I went down to Corinth to look
at the Protocorinthean pottery collection in the American
excavations. I had the excavation house to myself; at night
there was a fire in the common room and a hot meal. There
I perpetrated a horrible deed, all unknowing-as Greek
hamartiai are ever committed. I got hungry at midnight and
ate up the Corinthian starter yogurt in the icebox, the one
that made the far-famed, the finest, creamiest yogurt in the
archaeological world. There also I found a bookcase of the
olive-green Loeb series and determined in youthful hubris to
master in the cozy evenings all thirty-six Platonic dialogues,
both those certainly genuine and also those probably
spurious. I carne back with an anathema on me for the yogurt
and treasure in my heart from the Plato.
I have been at my college, St. John's, for the past halfcentury, thinking back now and then on my early years as a
graduate student of classics and archaeology. I think I am
intended to wax wise on the basis of age, and I'll take the
challenge. You must know that where I come from we have
no professors, authorities, or specialists, and our students are
meant to look on us as just better-prepared fellow learners.
That is not hyperbole but actual practice. As a result none of
us tutors, as we call ourselves, wilt readily under scepticism.
So if you find the following three lessons I've drawn from my
two lives doubtful or even repugnant, I can't ask for anything
more familiar than to hear you say so.
One. Some of you, very few I would guess, are scholars to
the bone. The pursuit of a delimited problem through
thickets of opinion and mountains of evidence gives you a
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soberly orgiastic pleasure. You don't need advice, you'll do
what you love and gain the recognition you deserve. But
others among you, quite a few I would again guess, know in
your heart of hearts that your enthusiasm for scholarly
research is a little forced, more drawn by duty than by joy;
that the minuscule adjustments to previous opinions that you
tweak into an issue and the slight variations you contrive
upon old contextures give you only a meager satisfaction.
When you acknowledge this condition in yourself, finish your
degree, by all means. But, on the supposition that you do
want a life of learning, forget about the university and go
teach at a good small college. By good I don't mean prestigious. Lovely things go on in fairly obscure places, where
unsophisticated but willing young students often bring their
teachers back to basics, to elementary questions of the sort
that scholarly research races too far ahead of. As Thomas
More advises a promising but very corruptible young man in
one of my favorite plays, "A Man for All Seasons": "Be a
teacher."
Try not to think, in fact never think, of the writing you do
as "my work." Those of you who are researchers at heart
must believe-though there is something problematic about
it-that they are part of a common progressive work, the
advancement of learning. As I say, it's problematic whether
there is any actual progress in the humanities, or whether as
the cutting edge digs into the future, the past silts up and
sinks into sedimented oblivion. Yet whoever is nonetheless
committed to scholarship must surely believe that they can
own no real estate on the orbis intellectualis where all is
common ground tilled for the increase of knowledge. So
much the sadder is it to hear teachers speak of "my work." Is
teaching not their work?
To put it another way: The scholarly world is more and
more a virtual world, spatially expansive but often topically
constricted. For my part, I think the humanly full life is
concretely local and intellectually wide, to be lived in a faceto-face community whose members can talk to each other
�BRANN
69
about anything, where nothing of human interest is interdicted; where you don't have to mount a colloquium to have
a colloquy, where there are no taboos except indifference and
incivility; where discourse does not divide into either shop
talk or chat but observes the truly interesting human mean;
and above all, where no one owns a specialty so that others
have to venture opinions with the disclaimer, "Of course,
that's not my subject." Once I knew more about Protoattic
pottery than anyone then alive in the world, an Englishman
or two excepted. It is an experience everyone should have
sometime. And then they should stop and live in that
acknowledged semi-ignorance which is both proper to human
inquiry and the ideal state of teachers, who, before producing
another article, should set themselves to learn what their
students ought to know.
Let me make sure here that I'm rightly understood: These
instructions aren't meant as categorical imperatives, unconditional commandments. They are rather what Kant calls
"hypothetical imperatives," of the "if-then" type. The
protasis of each is: "If you want to live happily" -as Aristotle
thinks of happiness: the soul activated in accordance with
human excellence. The apodosis is: "then try doing it this
way."
Two. Socrates is said to have told the Athenians in his last
public appearance that "the unexamined life is not worth
living for a human being;" "ho ... anexi!tastos bios ou biotas
anthropoi" (Apology 38A). I think he is being more absolute
than "worth living" conveys. I would translate: "the
uninspected life is not a lived life." Socrates is uttering both a
claim and an injunction. The injunction is to ask yourself
what you're doing, and the claim is that if you don't, you
aren't all there, not quite alive. To me what Socrates says
seems utterly true, and on that hypothesis I'll proceed. What
are we mostly doing, we who are at home in the world of
learning? That's plain: mostly we use words. To be human
means to have logos-and indeed we do hardly anything but
employ /ogoi-rational speech in general and special words in
�70
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
particular. It is, then, part of our peculiar business to know
what we are saying.
So don't use words you don't understand or don't mean
to come to understand at least partly. Graduate school is
rightly more training than education, more preparation for a
profession than learning for the sake of being all there.
Hence, the possession of a professional vocabulary, often
well-invented and always serviceable for expressing yourself
within the guild-and, I can't help adding, for marking
greenhorns and amateurs-is not only an accomplishment
but also a professional deformation. So talk human whenever
possible and know something, at least a little, of the explicit
or implicit theory behind the language of the humanities.
You might construe what I've just said as an invitation to
theorize, to engage in theory. Not so, just the opposite. It is
an incitement to philosophy, which is just the name for the
questions Socrates thinks will make you come to, be all there,
all aware. Moreover, here's a claim some of you will resist
and some of you will recognize as the articulation of your
own suspicions: Theory is the enemy-were I given to
hyperbole I would say, the deadly enemy-of philosophy,
more accurately, of Socratic philosophizing. I mean, say, legal
critical theory, literary theory, every kind of social theory; I've
just come off a bout of reading "desire theory," and I know
whereof I speak. I could talk for hours about this
displacement of thought, perhaps with some of you for a
while afterwards. But for now I'll put it in capsule form; I
understand philosophy to be everyone's business, certainly a
classicist's. It is the desire to look as straight, deep, and
directly into yourself and out into the world as you can. (It
has, of course, only a tenuous, occasional connection to the
academic subject by that name.) That effort I am speaking of,
introspective and contemplative, looking within and gazing at
the heavens, used indeed to be called theory. Theoria has had
a long and fascinating passage of diminution into "theory."
Theory is a rational screen, a mental jig under which things
are re-formed into pre-assigned shapes. It is a form of ration-
�BRANN
71
alization but not always of thinking. It is logos, however, not
plus receptive love but plus willful manipulation. A theory is
fun to devise but the devil to inherit, because duty demands
that we grasp it and wisdom asks that we resist it. Here's
another way to put it: when you spot trendiness or recognize
ideology-the marks will be a jigged and unnatural terminology-become a porcupine, all quills up.
Three. My third hypothetical imperative does verge on
the categorical. There is a sort of human minginess that
appears characteristically in academic settings-not that
academics typically practice it, but that it lurks as an endemic
danger of mutual infection. I have heard it said that its
meanness is large in inverse proportion to the minuteness of
the issues. Many of you will soon be members of departments
and will be absorbed in departmental politics. The issues are
not in fact so very small, since they concern the way the life
of learning is lived, and it is right, or seems right to me, to be
passionately involved. But passion is not pathos; beware of
false moral drama. Be as little ignoble and ungenerous as you
can.
I could fill Twelve Tables with negative advice but I'll
close with one piece particularly pertinent to this talk. In
published research plagiarism is a serious offense. In reflective
conversation it is a lovely compliment. If as teachers and
colleagues you find ideas you thought were yours by priority
turning up in your colleague's conversation, smirk with inner
satisfaction and then offer a serious critique of your own
thoughts, lest your borrowers fall into the original sin of the
intellect: holding opinions that have been purloined but not
appropriated.
I've kept you too long, but that's what happens when an
elder of the tribe is urged to talk. Yet, before I stop, one afterthought: If you could all band together to found a movement
for the abolition of the "original contribution" requirement
of the doctoral dissertation you would do the world of
learning a great service. For in the humanities the drive for
�72
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
originality and the search for insight are too often at crosspurposes.
�
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Kraus, Pamela
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Hunt, Frank
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Kohl, Jr., John C.
Sinnett, M. W.
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The St. John's Review
Volume XLV, number three (2000)
Editor
Pamela Kraus
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
James Carey
Beate Rubm V<in 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 welc?me. 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.
©2000 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 Qffiu and the St. John's College Print Shop
��Contents
The Liberty Tree: A Memorial
What's In a Name? Why Should We Remember?
The Liberry Tree on St. John's College Campus
Annapolis, Maryland, June 3, I999 ................................................ 5
Dr. Edward C Papa!fuse
The Liberry Tree Ceremony............................................................ I I
October 25, I 999
Christopher B. Nelson
Essays and Lectures
What Was New About the New Republic? ................................ I9
Harvey Flaumenhift
What, Then, is Time? .......................................................................47
Eva T.H. Brann
The Taking of Time ......................................................................... 67
Douglas Allanbrook
Nature and Creativity in Goethe's Elective AJfinities............•••••..85
Astrida Orle Tantillo
Three Poems
Pears
Preparation
While You Are In The Hospital .................................................. IOJ
Laune Cooper
Review
Mind in the 04Yssey.......................••......................••.....•.....•........... !07
Seth Benardete's The Bow and the Lyre
Paul Ludwig
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�-.:f What's In a Name?
fj- Why Should We Remember?
The Liberty Tree on
St. John's College Campus
Annapolis, Maryland
Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse
President O'Brien, Governor Glendening, Comptroller Schaefer, ladies
and gentlemen:
Today,* we not only pay tribute to the largest known Tulip tree in
America as a Maryland Treasure well worth saving, but also, through the
miracle of modern genetics, we ~ommence its cloning as a living memorial to those who have struggled over the years since its birth to define the
meaning of Liberty. Indeed, there is no greater symbol of resistance to
arbitrary rule and of the advocacy of representative government than a
Liberty Tree. One historian, John Higham, has even suggested that the
Liberty Tree replace Uncle Sam as "a compelling symbol of American
identity:'
The idea of Liberty embodied in a living tree comes from Boston in
1765, when the Sons of Liberty chose a stately elm under which to voice
their opposition to the Stamp Act, a British-imposed tax on newspapers
and official documents. They also commissioned Paul Revere to design a
medal that each member wore that bore the image and the caption "Liberty
Tree:' The best known and most articulate critic of the Stamp Act was a
resident of Annapolis, Daniel Dulany, whose stirring words helped marshal all of the colonies to resist taxation without representation.
• Dr. EJwan.J C. Papenfuse is State Archivist of Maryland. He delivered these remarks on the occasion
of designating the Liberty Tree a Maryland Treasure by the Maryland Commission for Celebration
2000 on June 3, 1999.
�6
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Undoubtedly, Dulany and the Sons of Liberty also supplemented their
words with such protest songs as the popular "Liberty;' first widely published in 1763, which begins
Hearts of oak are we still, for we're sons of those men
who always were ready,
steady boys, steady,
to fight for our freedom again and again.
and has a chorus
Come, chear up, my lads, to our country be firm,
As kings of the ocean, we'll weather each storm,
Integrity calls out, uFair Liberty;' see,
Waves our flag o'er our heads, and her words, are, BE FREE
The Stamp Act was repealed, but in its place carne ever more repugnant
and repressive laws passed by a Padiarnent in which Americans had no vote.
By September 1775, the citizens of Annapolis, like their counterparts in
the other twelve colonies, returned to their Liberty Trees to condemn the
oppression and launch a resistance that would end in independence. This
time a new song was composed by Thomas Paine, the author of Common
Sense, which again was instandy popular. Called 'The Liberty Tree;' one
verse in particular resonates the meaning of liberty as succeeding generations of Americans have come to define it:
The celestial exotic struck deep in the ground,
Like a native it flourish'd and bore;
The fame of its fruit, drew the nations around,
To seek out its peaceable shore.
Unmindful of names or distinction they carne,
For freemen like brothers agree:
With one spirit endow'd they one friendship pursued,
And their temple was Liberty Tree.
�PAPENFUSE
7
The British so hated Liberty Trees that when they occupied the seaports of Boston and Charleston they cut the Liberty Trees down. The
Boston Liberty Elm became fourteen cords of wood to fuel the British
campfires, while the stump of the Charleston Liberty Oak was burned to
remove
any trace of its existence, only to have its roots made into heads of
canes, one of which was presented to Thomas Jefferson.
Annapolis was never occupied and its Liberty Tree would become the
town's oldest living survivor of the Revolutionary era, ultimately playing a
role in our nation's history, not unlike that of Annapolitan Charles Carroll
of Carrollton, who became the revered last surviving signer of the
Declaration of Independence.
As a symbol and shelter to Liberty, the history of this Liberty Tree did
not end with Washington's resignation as Commander-in-Chief, nor with
the ratification of the Treaty of Peace, both of which occurred but a short
distance away in the historic Old Senate Chamber of the State House. Over
time, it was visited by a number of distinguished citizens and became the
site of celebration, including the 4th of July.
In December I 824, the Marquis de Lafayette returned from his horne
in France to speak in its shadow, having witnessed a revolution in his own
country in which over 60,000 Liberty Trees were planted, and in which the
Liberty Tree became a general symbol of adherence to its principles.
Lafayette came to Annapolis to thank Maryland for the citizenship
bestowed upon him some forty years before, and to receive, once again, the
accolades of a grateful people for the part he had played at Washington's
side during the Revolution.
One hundred and four years later, in I 928, even President Calvin
Coolidge would speak here in tribute to the principles for which this tree
stands.
Beginning its life as a sapling 400 orso yeats ago, and now nearly IOO
feet tall with branches spreading 60 feet wide, this magnificent tree proudly symbolizes the constant struggle to define and defend what is meant by
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
8
'Liberty'. It has weathered debilitating storms that cast its limbs on the
sleeping Civil War soldiers encamped beneath it. A fire in its trunk renewed
its life but required tons of concrete and reinforcement bars to keep it
standing. To keep it alive requires careful and constant care. An offspring
today flourishes on English soil at Kew Gardens. Soon each of the original
I3 states will have a genetic duplicate, fulfilling in fact the historic motto
of the Maryland General Assembly which dates back to the time of the
Revolution: Crescite et Multiplicamini, Grow and Multiply.
In its most recent history, however, lies the most meaningful testimony
to this tree's distinguished past. Under its branches, successive generations
of St. John's students have debated and discussed the great books of the
world, held their commencements, and, for recreation, have battled the
Navy with croquet mallets and wooden balls.
As Clemenceau, France's World War I Premier, is thought to have said,
"Liberty is the right to discipline oneself so as not to be disciplined by others:' Today we too often take liberty for granted. Like the students of St.
John's, we should stop and think of how we got where we are, how much
pain and travail we went though to get here, and how so many people &om
so many different nations have managed to come together here to live in
relative peace.
We live in a great nation in which liberty carries with it a great deal of
responsibility. It is most important that we pause now and then, perhaps in
the shade of a great tree such as this, to reflect on what Liberty is all about
and to recall the words of Thomas Paine in I775:
From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms,
Thro' the land let the sound of it flee,
Let the far and the near,-all unite with a cheer,
In defense of our Liberty Tree.
Thank you.
�PAPENFUSE
9
Sources:
Documentation for these remarks ts available at the Museum
Without Walls on the Maryland State Archives web site:
http://www.mdsa.net
��-..:f Liberty Tree Ceremony
fj:- Christopher B. Nelson
Introduction
I don't quite know how to greet you this cool brisk morning, as we
all feel such a deep sense of sadness over the duty we must perform today.
So we will do our best to celebrate the great life of the Liberty Tree and
the good things that it stands for.
I am Christopher Nelson, president of St. John's College. I want to
start by setting out the protocol for this morning's ceremony, providing
you with an explanation for our action, and telling you what we will be
doing with the wood and leaves once the Liberty Tree is down and what
the college will be doing for an appropriate memorial and commemora-
tion.
First, let me thank all of you for being with us to pay tribute to this
venerable old friend, this symbol of America's most treasured prize: the
independence and liberty of our people.
I want especially to thank:
• Governor Glendening for joining us
• Janet Owens, our county executive
• Dean Johnson, mayor of the city of Annapolis
• Louise Hayman, executive director of
Maryland 2000
• The several members of the Maryland
legislature who are here, including our own
representative, Richard D'Amato
• And most of all, the many, many friends of the
Liberty Tree gathered here today.
Christopher B. Nelson is President at the Annapolis Campus of St. John's College. These remarks
were delivered on Octobrr 25, 1999,
�12
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
When I have completed these introductory remarks, we will hear a
few words from the Governor, from Louise Hayman of Maryland 2000,
county executive Janet Owens and Mayor Dean Johnson. I will speak for
the college. We will then have a presentation of colors by the U.S. Marine
Corps Color Guard, followed by a moment of silence during which the
bell in McDowell Hall will toll thirteen times, once for each of the thirteen original colonies.
Mayor Dean Johnson will present a commemorative wreath to be laid
at the foot of the Liberty Tree.
We will then dedicate an offspring of the Liberty Tree as a monument
to its natural parent. This is the tree now standing just opposite the Liberty
Tree on the front of our campus, grown from a seedling of the Liberty
Tree planted IIO years ago, and now a majestic tree in its own right.
After that dedication, I will introduce a special guest who will place
a bouquet of flowers at the foot of the new Liberty Tree. This will be followed by the singing of the national anthem, authored by one of our
alumni, Francis Scott Key, and sung by one of our faculty members, Peter
Kalkavage.
That will conclude the ceremony.
Following the ceremony, workmen from The Care of Trees will begin
the difficult work of raking down the tree. The college will save all the
wood from the tree that can be preserved. We will haul it off campus to
a site where the wood can be cured for use at a later date. Mementos of
the tree will then be made available to all who want a piece of the Liberty
Tree. We are still determining what form those mementos should take.
In the meantime, we have already removed a few low hanging branches and plan to distribute to everyone present this morning commemorative leaves from the tree. College representatives staffing the reception
table will distribute leaves to everyone following the ceremony. We also
have at those tables copies of summaries from the lengthy report of
arborist Russell Carlson, the last in a succession of tree experts the college consulted in an effort to save the tree.
�NELSON
13
At those tables, we have two books available for written comments by
members of the public. Some of you may wish to express your sadness
over the loss of the tree, others to share a story about it, and some to suggest what we might do with the wood. I invite all of you to take the time
to sign the books and add your thoughts and comments.
The Decision to Take Down the Tree
Almost six weeks ago, on September sixteenth, hurricane Floyd hit
the area, bringing high winds and dumping over twelve inches of rain on
the city of Annapolis. Area work crews are still cleaning up the damage
caused and clearing the countless trees downed by the hurricane. The
Liberty Tree suffered a fifteen-foot crack extending from the split at the
first huge branch off the stem and well down into the trunk itsel£ A second crack has developed along the main stem. The cracks indicate both
that the tree has decayed and that the wood is brittle. Because the trunk
is filled with concrete, stress from the wind has been causing the tree to
pivot. The tree was deemed a safety hazard and a fence was erected. The
college gave notice to all that the area within was unsafe.
During the first several days afi:er the storm, the college called in several experts to examine the damage to the tree. The local tree company
that has been under contract to rake care of the tree since 1959 advised
that it be taken down, saying that it posed "an imminent risk of failure"
and that it was already "in the process of failing:' Other private firms, the
state Department of General Services, the National Arboretum and other
sources were consulted, and all reported to the college that the Liberty
Tree could not be saved. College officials sought help from the governor
and comptroller of Maryland. The governor and the Department of
General Services arranged for the arborist who cares for many of the
state's large trees to take a look at the Liberty Tree.
On October fifteenth, we received the twenty-seven-page report of
this arborist, Russell Carlson. He found that the tree was "now structurally weakened to a degree that it poses a hazard to any person or object
�14
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
within reach of its branches:' He declared it to be "at great risk of massive structural failure:'
He further found that the decay in the tree was progressing at an
increasing pace and that the decline in the tree's structural integrity could
not be reversed. The uentire tree now consists of a hollow shell of wood,
sometimes only two or three inches thick ... much below the safe threshold level:' Afi:er examining the alternatives including pruning and
mechanical supports, he concluded that even the "process of installing
these support mechanisms and shortening the canopy would be detrimental to the tree, and would result in a more rapid decline of its vitality:' He concluded, 'The only prudent course of action ... is to remove
the tree now. It is inherently unsafe, and at a high risk of failure:'
The tree has lived a long and valiant life and has already been on life
support for the last century. Notwithstanding the health and beauty of its
canopy, its structural support is no longer sufficient to carry its weightany weight-and its hollow shell is too fi:agile to support external means
of reinforcement. The crack has widened in the weeks since hurricane
Floyd and the tree is now standing only because of the cables already
strung through the tree. The pressure on those cables too is growing.
Tulip trees grow rapidly and typically die early, usually within their
first 100 years. Their wood is soft and brittle. Well-maintained, longlived, protected and healthy trees may survive to 250 years. None other
we know of has lived past 400 years as the Liberty Tree has. In other
words, this may be not only the last surviving Liberty Tree fi:om the days
of the Revolution, but the oldest known tulip tree, too--and it now is in
the process of dying.
It is with a heavy heart that we take the tree down now before it does
damage to others. We hope to leave a stump at the base and surround it
with a protective iron fence. When the stump has produced new suckers
in the spring, suitable stock for cloning, we will remove the remainder of
the stump and its concrete interior, and make room for a clone or seedling
to take its place in the same spot. A cloning project is now underway in
�NELSON
15
laboratories at tbe University of Maryland, part of a project undertaken
by the Maryland Commission for Celebration 2000. [It was not possible
to preserve tbe stump of tbe tree, Ed.]
I want to thank the governor, his staff and tbe Department of General
Services for tbeir support in helping us tty to find a way to save tbe tree,
tbe controller, too, and his staf£ and tbe Maryland Commission for
Celebration 2000 for tbeir prescience in starting a cloning project four
months before tbe hurricane hit. I tbank also the many friends who offered
advice and financial support as we agonized over tbis decision.
The Liberty Tree at St. John's College
St. John's College is the tbird oldest college in the United States, tracing its origins to I696. Yet tbe Liberty Tree was a mature tree back tben.
It began irs life long before Isaac Newton ever gave tbought to tbe notion
of universal gravitation to explain why tbe tree's broken boughs might fall
down toward tbe eartb ratber tban away to the heavens. Back to tbe days
of Cervantes, before the dawn of modern science, before classical music
was ever conceived-this tree's birtb predates tbe majority of the great
books on tbe St. John's College classical program of education. It stood
tall and majestic in tbe years before tbe Revolution to serve as a popular
public meeting place in colonial times. And, of course, it was here tbat
Annapolis residents planned tbeir own tea party before burning tbe vessel Peggy Stewart in I 774. Francis Scott Key, a graduate of tbe college, was
an admirer of tbe tree, and one of his classmates, John Shaw, penned a
poem entitled "The Ancient Tree;' one of many poems written about tbe
tree by students of tbe college over tbe centuries. In tbose days, two hundred years ago, when irs age was tbought to be approaching 400 years, irs
condition was even tben described as fragile. Hear tbe opening lines of
John Shaw's I 797 poem:
The ancient tree, autumnal storms assail,
tby shattered branches spread tbe sound afar;
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
thy tall head bows before ·the rising gale,
thy pale leaf flits along the troubled air.
General Lafayette was greeted beneath its boughs in I824 and Civil
War soldiers camped here too. It has suffered through wind and storm,
lightning strikes and hurricanes, even fire and a gunpowder explosion in
its hollow trunk.
For the past seventeen years, students &om the college and midshipmen from the Naval Academy have fought their annual battle on the croquet field of honor beneath this tree.
And for as many years as memory can serve, seniors have received
their diplomas beneath the tree during the college's annual commencement ceremonies.
The Liberty Tree has served generations of students as a symbol of
the world they would enter upon leaving these halls-a world touched
deeply by the idea of individual political freedom under the rule of law,
in a nation rooted deeply in these principles with the perennial promise
of renewal.
But this tree has also served these students as a symbol for the kind
of education they began at St. John's College. I am speaking of a liberal
education. This word "liberal" is related to the word "liberty;' and the
college's own motto is built on a Latin pun over the root word for liberty. It goes like this:
Facio liberos ex libecis libris libraque
I make free men from children by means of books and a balance
These two things, government by the people under law ... and liberal education, ought always to be linked together in the minds of our
students and in the minds of all thoughtful Americans if we wish to
remain a free society dedicated to preserving life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
�NELSON
17
Let me see if I can be more clear about this relationship. Consider
this formulation for education: I go to school to learn a trade so that I
can get a job and earn a living.
Now, there is nothing wrong with wanting this much &om an education. It is really quite useful. But there is something terribly wrong with
wanting nothing more. After all, does that formulation sound like "the
pursuit of happiness?" No; it may be a necessary condition for life, but it
is not sufficient for living a good life--a life concerned with happiness. You
must ask more of your education than how to make a living if you care about
living a good life. Liberal education is concerned less with the means-the
"how-to"--of achieving your desires, and more with the ends themselves.
A liberal education frees the individual &om the limitations of thinking
about means, and helps him to think about life's purposes. To distinguish
good &om evil, you must free yourselves &om the prison of ignorance, the
constraints of convention, and the bonds of prejudice and popular opinion. Liberal education has to do with that kind of liberation.
The health of the nation depends on its citizens experiencing that kind
of liberation. The power to choose one's own ends in a government <if the
people and by the people carries with it the awesome responsibility of
knowing something about what the purposes of government ought to
be-which ends are good and which are bad, which ones are conducive to
the management of private affairs alone, and which are concerned with
the public good-those purposes that ask what it means to have a government for the people.
These then are the principles of liberty to which we dedicate ourselves at St. John's College, and it will behoove us to recall these purposes with other symbols once this dear tree is gone.
The closing refrain &om another srudent's poem &om I896, dedicated to this tree, now seems appropriate:
Farewell, thou noble Poplar Tree!
Each rising sun but hastens our advent
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Upon the stage of life, when we must leave
Thee, Poplar, Yea, how soon; but sun ne'er shed
A brighter glow in human heart than doth
Thine image, Poplar: and although decades
Have rolled away, and Fortune kind called
To us position with the foremost, still
Unquenched will be the spark of love which draws
Us to thee, Poplar
And now we turn to the next generation. 1;, 1889, a seedling of the
Liberty Tree was planted on the opposite side of the front campus near
the Greenfield Library. We will, at St. John's College, begin a new tradition next May, weather permitting, by celebrating commencement under
its limbs.
We hereby dedicate it to that purpose and to carry with it the memory of its parent and the symbol of political freedom for which it stood
Thank you all for joining us this morning. Please feel free to stay to
sign the comment books, take your Liberty lea£ and observe the beginning of what promises to be a long and difficult tree removal project.
Farewell, dear Friend. Farewell, thou noble poplar.
�--:g What Was New about
fj- the New Republic?
Harvey Flaumenhaft
Practical people ofi:en have a certain disdain for theory, since theory
does not tell you what to do here and now, about this or that particular.
Be glad that it doesn't-since, afi:er all, if theory did tell you what to do,
there would then be no need for you. The decisions that you are called
upon to make could be made instead by a computer program. The very
value of theory for the man or woman of affairs depends upon the difference between theory and practice. Theory does not determine practice;
it informs practice. What I mean by that is not that theory supplies practice with its information; I mean, rather, that theory gives practice its
form. The terminology, the premises and the methods that are now in use
by practical people as they go about their business are all the outcometo a surprising degree--of theoretical reflections that arose unexpectedly and controversially but eventually carne to be taken for granted.
Unless much of what we think were taken for granted much of the
time, we would not be able to cope with the complex and ever-changing
world, and so we usually do not worry much about theoretical questions.
We do not keep wondering what ultimate standard of success to use in
judging what we do. We do not relenrlessly pursue the question of what
questions are the best to ask, or try to fi:nd an answer to the question of
what makes answers adequate or even relevant.
Sometimes, however, in unprecedented or in critical moments, we
cannot take such things for granted. And even in quiet times, amid circumstances that do not seem momentous, we sometimes get the feeling
Harvey Flaumenhaft is Jean at the Annapolis campus of St. John's College. This lecture was
delivered there on August 28, 1998. Earlier versions were delivered at Anne Arundel Community
College, Arnold, Maryland, on May 5, 1987, and at the National Defense University: Industrial
College of the Armed Forces, Washington, DC, August 27, 1990.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that unless we reassess prevailing modes of thought we shall miss out on
hidden opportunities, or else drift gradually downward to disaster.
In order to make ourselves more thoughtful about the fundamental
things we take for granted-to get some perspective on our handling of
the urgent particulars of the here and now-there is nothing better than
considering the thinking of first-rate minds of other times or places. For
doing this, we Americans have a ready resource of our own, one guaranteed to be not only somewhat distant but at the same time also especially relevant to our needs. The United States was, after all, the first "new
nation"-the first country that attempted to make fundamental innovations by reflection and choice, an effort that requires hard thinking. The
records left to us by the American founders can help us to rethink for ourselves a very serious effort by some very thoughrfUI practical men to consider the foundations of politics.
Those who laid the foundations of the new American nation were
raised on the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity. They admired the
virtue that sprouted from the soil of the ancient republic, and they sought
to revive republican government, which had fallen into disrepute. They
sought to revive it, however, on a new foundation and in a new form. They
rejected the classical philosophy that articulated the foundation of the
classical city, and they rejected the classical city as a model of political
organization. Under the influence of modern philosophers, they believed
that the understanding of nature (including human nature) had recently
taken some great steps forward, and had thus made it possible for even
greater progress to be made-if only those who led the way saw dearly
what they were trying to do, and could articulate it dearly enough, and
promote it courageously enough, to gain and keep a following in a country so fOrtunately endowed with natural and with human resources as was
America.
The attempt of the American founders to progress beyond the classics cannot be understood without understanding what it was that they
sought to go beyond, and why. Among other things, it is not easy to
�FLAUMENHAFT
21
understand how to fit together, on the one hand, the rejection of classical philosophy and the classical city, and, on the other hand, the admiration for classical virtue. To understand those things requires theoretical
reflection.
Among the American founders was Alexander Hamilton-a man
admired, even by his enemies, for penetrating to the foundations of practical questions, for relentlessly pursuing a line of thought to the end, and
for expressing his thinking with extraordinary clarity. 1 During the
Revolutionary War, Hamilton was aide-de-camp to George Washington,
the Commander-in-Chief of the American army. He was a prime mover
in the effort that produced the new Constitution of the United States,
and he was responsible for the classic account of its meaning, The Federalist
Papers, the writing of parts of which he assigned to collaborators. When
Washington became the first President of the new republic, Hamilton
acted as a kind of prime minister in his capacity as Secretary of the
Treasury, creating the financial basis for national security and prosperity.
And when Washington was called from retirement to preside over the creation of an army during America's quasi-war with France, Hamilton was
placed in charge as second-in-command to the aged chie£ There can be
no doubt that Hamilton was a most practical man of affairs. It was
nonetheless his belief that, however much the practice of government
might differ from the activity of theory, no one could be a statesman who
did not engage in theory. His theoretical reflections informed the words
by means of which he accomplished his deeds--deeds that did much to
shape the world around us and also to shape the minds with which we,
even now, observe and deal with that world.
That is why I propose to consider Alexander Hamilton's account of
the problem of popular government and its solution. It raises questions
about how to relate the classical political thought of our tradition to the
world that we inhabit as Americans. So, let me turn now to my subject. It
might be called "the effective republic:'
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The New Foundation
When the new Constitution was first proposed, its opponents argued
that it would not be safe. So much power should not be placed in any government over a country so extensive as the United States of America, they
said. Alexander Hamilton replied that this argument wandered from the
real question. It is absurd, he said, to give a government the job of directing the most essential interests of the nation, while not daring to entrust it
with the powers that it needs for doing the job effectively. The people, he
agreed, should be vigilant and carefUl to see that their government is so
formed as to be safely vested with the requisite powers. But the question
that he thought the critics should address was this. did the structure of the
proposed government render it worthy of the people's confidence? It was
beside the point to attack the proposal for giving the government too much
power. If there was to be a government extending over the entire United
States--if the states were to remain united-then the powers of the Union
would have to be at least as great as those proposed, said Hamilton.
Without the powers proposed to make it a more perfect union, the very
incompletely united Union would fall apart. The extent of the country, far
from arguing against the powers proposed, was itself the strongest argument
in Javor of a powerfUl government-for no weaker government could preserve the union of so large a country.
But the adversaries of the Constitution wished to keep the Union, even
though it required what they were unwilling to accept--effective government of the Union. HLet us not attempt to reconcile contradictions;' insist-
ed Hamilton, "but firmly embrace a rational alternative:' The question of
the extent of the Union's powers could not be the real question, because the
alternative to the Union was not a real alternative for choice. It could
become such an alternative only
if there were a reconsideration of the spir-
it of modern life, and of the modern view that derives civil society from an
equality of natural rights. From the principles of modern government came
the foundation that supports the structure of modern government.
Modern government is, fundamentally, representative popular government;
and the representative republic when perfected is extensive. Only a rejection
�FLAUMENHAIT
23
of the large republic could justifY the refusal to generate an effective government of the Union, which might become ever more completely the government of the nation. Hamilton therefore had to discuss why the large
republic is, in principle, better than the small.
The only serious republican alternative to the extended republic is the
very small republic. The opponents of the proposed Constitution, said
Hamilton, keep referring to Montesquieu, who wrote that a republican government must have a small territory. But they have not drawn the right conclusion from the principle with which they so readily agree. They have not
noticed that when Montesquieu recommended a small extent for republics,
the size that he had in view was far smaller than the limits of almost every
one of the American states. If the opponents of the Constitution were
right that the liberties of the United States would probably be easily subverted under a government having the powers proposed, then there ought
at once to be an end of all delegated authority. The people should resolve
to recall all the powers which they have previously let go out of their own
hands, and, in order to be able to manage their own concerns in person,
they should divide themselves into very many, very little republics--into as
many states as there are counties.
Hamilton insisted that if Americans refused to the government of the
Union those extensive powers which are needed to maintain an extensive
republic, then limited monarchy is what they would eventually get, at best.
More likely, they would end up living under several little despotisms.
America's best hope for effective government in a republican form was the
Constitution that had been proposed.
Hamilton gave several reasons why the small republic is undesirable.
One reason is the overwhelming urgency of mere safety from external danger. It overwhelms, afrer a time, even the ardent love of liberty. An independent small republic, unable to withstand the power of a great enemy, is
in a terrible situation; so is an independent small republic continually at war
with neighbors as small as itsel£ And mere confederation is no solution to
the problem of external defense.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The requirements of external defense, moreover, do not conflict with
considerations of internal welfare. The extensive republic is better than the
small one, not only because it is safer from external danger, but also because
it is safer within. It is also more prosperous within. Let us examine these
reasons more closely.
The public councils of a large jurisdiction are more likely to act impartially than are the public councils of a smaller one, which does not contain
so great a variety of interests. Councils with jurisdiction over a more exten-
sive territory, containing a greater variety of interests, are less apt to be
tainted by the spirit of faction. They are more out of the reach of those
occasional ill humors or temporary prejudices and propensities which frequently contaminate the public deliberations in smaller societies that are
less diverse. These evils beget injustice toward and oppression of a part of
the community; and they engender schemes that gratifY a momentary inclination or desire but terminate in distress, dissatisfaction, and disgust. It is
harder for these evils to produce an effect when a variety of interests must
get together on a large scale--as they must before they can do much harm
in an extensive republic. Extensiveness, moreover, not only presents an
obstacle to the predominance of partiality in the public councils of the
whole; it also helps to repress fuction in local councils, as well as local insurrection against public authority. When a country is extensive, local disorders
are disorders merely in a part, and hence may be overcome by those other
parts that remain sound.
Consider the ancient history of the small republic. In the republics of
old, the people's true condition was that of a nation of soldiers. In those
barbarous times, war was the principal business of man. The people of
antiquity were poor, and the maxims they lived by were ferocious. The
classical republics were inflated with the love of glory. The assembled people, jealous of authority, were an ungovernable mob.When not fighting
against other peoples, they clashed tumultuously among themselves.
Among themselves, they alternated between anarchy and despotism; with
others, between despotism and servitude.
�FLAUMENHAFT
25
But eventually came those humane innovations of later times which
accord with the pronouncements of enlightened reason. Not heroic display
but profitable business, it came to be acknowledged, is the business of government. The industrious habits of a modern people, absorbed in gainful
pursuits and devoted to productive improvements, are incompatible with
the condition of a nation of soldiers, where civic life centers on an assem-
bly of warriors whose delight is domination. The industrious habits of a
modern people are incompatible with the condition of a nation of citizens
absorbed in being citizens; for if merely the power of appointing officers
of government were ordinarily exercised by the people at large, the people
would have little time for anything else. If those who might otherwise go
about their business, with enterprise and industry, instead were busy where
the action is, the citizenry would be impoverished-unless the action were
that collective piracy which supported the armed splendor of antiquity. But
modern humanity discountenances fierce rapacity; modern enlightenment
looks not to dominion and to plunder, but to commerce and to industry.
The common good, the good that is common to common men,
requires that participation in government be uncommon. Government
by
the people cannot secure popular safety and prosperity. A people's liberty is
not a stage or an arena for displaying popular action. It is rather a protective fence, which, properly erected by popular fear and desire, and prudently managed by wise and energetic leadership, may become a productive
force. Liberty is that security for life and property which is provided by
checks and controls on government.
It was want of safety against the power of their governors that first led
ancient men to popular government, said Hamilton. The interests of the
people required government intimately connected with the people. In the
first, crude attempts to institutionalize this connection, government for the
people was identified with government by the people. Modern enlightenment, in founding government on the equal right of every man to secure his
safety and prosperity, had revived the ancient prejudice against establishing
power far from the hands of the people who are to be affected by the exer-
�26
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
cise of that power. The modern doctrine of equality had, however, also generated a modern improvement which permitted government to be popular
while freeing it from the defects of government by the collective body of
the people. This principle of popular representation, said Hamilton, gave
to modern republics the decisive advantage over ancient republics.
Only in the small republic was it possible to have direct democracy, government conducted directly by the assembled people. But the very good reasons for having popular government at all are reasons that argue in favor of
representative democracy, and against government conducted directly by the
assembled people of a small republic. It is sometimes said that a direct
democracy would be the most perfect government if only it were practicable. Experience had proved, said Hamilton, that there is no political observation more false than that.
Small commonwealths are jealous, clashing, and tumultuous--the
wretched nurseries of unceasing discord, and the miserable objects of universal pity or contempt. Unceasing agitations and frequent revolutions are
the continual scourges of small republics. In the ancient democracies, where
the people themselves assembled, the field of debate presented an
ungovernable mob, which was incapable of deliberation and was capable of
every enormity. In these assemblies, the enemies of the people systematically brought forward their plans of ambition; they were opposed by their
enemies of another party; and it became a matter of contingency whether
the people subjected themselves to be led blindly by one tyrant or by another. Thus no &iend to order or to rational liberty can read without pain and
disgust the history of the commonwealths of ancient Greece. They were a
constant scene of the alternate tyranny of one part of the people over the
other, or of a few, usurping demagogues over the whole. This, together with
the lack of a solid federal union to restrain the ambition and rivalry of the
different cities, ended-afi:er a rapid succession of bloody wars-in their
total loss of liberty and their subjection to foreign powers.
It is impossible to read the history of the small republics of ancient
Greece and Italy without feeling horror and disgust at the distractions
�FLAUMENHAFT
27
which continually agitated them, and at the rapid succession of revolutions
which kept them perpetually in vibration between tyranny and anarchy,
enjoying only brief and occasional felicity amid the furious storms of sedition and party-rage that repeatedly and frequently overwhelmed them.
The original government of most had been monarchy, which had sucetunbed to its natural disease, despotism. In reaction, those communities
had established popular governments in which (except for Sparta) the jealousy of power hindered the people from trusting out of their own hands
an authority competent to maintain the repose and stability of the commonwealth. Thus they had erected government to keep them safe from each
other and from strangers; then, finding themselves not safe from their government, they exchanged it for one which lefr them even less safe from each
other and from strangers.
But a government framed for durable liberty must pay as much regard
to giving the magistrates a proper degree of authority to make and execute
the laws with vigor, as to guarding against encroachments by the magistrates
upon the rights of the community. Just as too much power leads to despotism, so also too litde power leads to anarchy, and both lead eventually to the
min of the people. These well-known maxims had never been given
sufficient attention in adjusting governmental frameworks, and so the advocates of despotism had been able to draw arguments not only against the
forms of republican government, but even against the very principles of civil
liberty, from the disorders that disfigure the annals of the small ancient
republics.
America, however, was the beneficiary of progress. If it had been found
impracticable to devise models of a structure more perfect than that of the
small ancient republic, then the enlightened friends to liberty would have
had to abandon the cause of republican government as indefensible. But it
did not have to come to that, for the science of politics--like most other
sciences--has been greatly improved. Now well understood is the effectiveness of various principles, which the ancients either did not know at all, or
only knew imperfectly. These principles are powerful means for retaining
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the excellencies of republican government while lessening or even avoiding
its imperfections. Hamilton gives a catalogue of things that tend to the
amelioration of popular systems of civil government-things that he says
are either totally new discoveries or else have progressed towards their perfection principally in modern times. After listing the regular distriburion of
power into distinct departments, the introduction of legislative balances
and checks, and the institurion of courts composed of judges who hold
their offices during good behavior, he comes to the representation of the
people in the legislature by deputies of their own elecrion; then he says that
he
will venture, however novel it may appear to some, to add one more, on
a principle which has been made the foundarion of an objection to the new
constitution: the enlargement of the orbit within which such systems are to
revolve.
In comparing our governments with those of the ancient republics, we
must not hesitate to prefer our own, because every power with us is exer-
cised by representarion, not in tumultuous assemblies of the collective body
of the people, where what almost always has to govern is the art or impudence of the orator, rather than the utility or justice of the measure.
However, it is only by enlarging the orbit within which popular systems are
to revolve that full effect can be given to the principle which makes the
modern American republic superior to the ancient republic-the principle
of representation. And, with reciprocal action, it is only by representation
that republican government can be made extensive. The celebrated principle
that no government
but a despotism
can exist in a very extensive country
has been misunderstood. It relates only to democtacies where the whole
body of the people meet to transact business, and where representation is
unknown.
The New Problem
We must, said Hamilton, prefer our own governments to those of the
ancient republics, because every power with us is exercised
by representa-
tion. But jealousy of power has prevented our reaping all the advantages
�FLAUMENHAFT
29
which we ought to have obtained from the example of other nations. This
jealousy of power has rendered the constitutions of the American governments in many respects feeble and imperfect.
Americans threw off the British monarchy, not because a free people
cannot have a prince, but because the British monarch refused to recognize that a free people must have its own representatives. Great Britain is
a free country because its inhabitants have a share in the legislature
through representation. In no government is consent safely given once for
all time: a people not represented will be a people oppressed, and representation requires an intimate connection of interest between the representative and those he represents. The requisite intimate connection of
interest does not, however, require that the
body of representatives mirror
the citizenry in all its multitudinous socio-economic variety. Indeed, the
true and strong bonds of sympathy between the representative and the
constituent are polirical-the twofold requirement that the representative
depend upon the constituent for continuance in office, and that the representative and his posterity be bound by the laws to which he assents.
The end of government is to secure the safety and prosperity of the
people, who are its source. Government by the collective body of the people endangers and impoverishes the people. Popular representation, while
securing the people against themselves (by removing government from the
hands of the collective body of the people), also secures the people
against the government. Only, however, if things are properly arranged.
The body of representatives is different from the body of the people.
The representative body is superior to the people in its ability to serve the
people's interests. The representatives' interests, however, are not superior
to the people's interests. Representatives might nonetheless come to think
that they are. Safety requires, therefOre, that the members of the representative assembly be numerous, and also be frequently elected.
That is not enough, however. Government flowing from the people
must be divided to work for the people. Some partition of governmental
power is essential to free government-indeed, the very definition of des-
�30
potism is: a government in which
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
all
power is concentrated in a single
body. Absolute monarchy is its most obvious form, but no single body, not
even a representative assembly, is a safe depository of ample unchecked
power.
In a nation itself made up of states, the particular state governments
may contribute to safety against the general government of the whole by
their multiplying the depositories of power. From one point of view, the
state governments are the parts of the whole. But there is something problematic in a multiplicity of depositories of power that are wholes of a
sort similar to the whole of which they are parts. The government of such
a whole (the parts of which themselves are wholes) verges on being a mere
league of governments or a government over governments-that is to say,
no government at all. If the whole is not to be an anarchy, the parts must
lose their similarity to the whole, thus leaving the government of the
whole a great mass of power deposited in a single representative body.
However urgent may be the question of the partition of power among
the component parts of a compound republic (that is, a nation of states),
the central question is that of the partition of power among the several
departments in a single government.
There is a sense in which good government is thoroughly representative. Under the proposed Constitution, Hamilton pointed out, the
President of the United States himself would be a representative of the
people. He would act to protect the people against an unfaithfUl
Congress. Nonetheless, the proper name "The House of
Representatives" belongs most properly to that one of the several governmental branches which is the representative body. By means of representation, the people obtain public servants, whom the people hire to free
themselves for business other than the public business, and whom they
can fire for acting as if free to neglect their tie to the people. The ends of
representative government are served by government conducted according
to law-legislation is the most manifestly public of acts--and legislation
by a numerous assembly most represents the multitudinous people. The
�FLAUMENHAFT
31
legislature seems to represent the immediate being of the society. There
is no question that free government requires a freely elected popular
assembly. The question is what else it needs.
Though representative government is perfected by the partitioning of
governmental power, it is diffirult to maintain such partition in a government that is thoroughly representative. Insofar as the parts do not
approach being whole governments themselves, the parts must be differentiated organs. But one of them, the popular legislative assembly, the
part most properly called representative, tends to primacy and even hegemony. The partitioning of power, and even the intermixture of the powers of the parts, are partly explained by the need for checks upon power,
and for balance to preserve the system of checks. But the partitioning of
power cannot be understood unless one understands the parts as differentiations of power, each with its own peculiar property. Representation
is necessary to the foundation of good government, but representation is
not the whole of it.
Popular representation freed the populace from continual contention
and for productive industry, while safeguarding them against their governors. Americans had accepted this governing principle, Hamilton
thought, but imperfectly. Representative popular government could succeed as an alternative to the discredited participatory popular government
only by developing administrative effectiveness. By itsel£ representation
did not suffice to protect the people against turmoil and invasion, and to
manage their prosperity. The people had to choose: government by the
people, affecting democratic workings-or government from and for the
people, effecting popular works. The proper end of government is popular, as also is its source. Popular representation is the fimdamenral
reliance for keeping the ends of government popular. According to
Hamilton, while the Chief Executive is in a sense a representative, the representatives in the most precise signification are those officials who are
most numerous and have the shortest duration in office of all the men
publicly elected. On the other hand, Hamilton also thought that while
�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
32
uthe administration of government" (the actual business of governing)
is in its "largest sense" the work of
all the parts of the government11
legislative, executive, and judicial-yet in its most precise signification"
the administration of government is the work of the executive part. The
most popular part of government, the numerous assembly of representatives with short duration in office, cannot itself do the actual detailed
work of governing.
Government flowing &om the people must be divided to work for
the people. Partition prevents bad deeds by multiplying the agencies which
must cooperate to act. The powers needed to do much of anything are
separated, on the presumption that although the several depositories of
power will have difficulty coming together, and staying together, in order
to do bad things, they will nonetheless come together, and stay together, in order to do good. But the fear that leads to precautions against government's doing bad may lead to arrangements that keep government
&om doing much good. In a government amply arranged for safety
against government, adequately arranging for effectiveness of government is a problem.
The problem is twofold: to concentrate power sufficiently for many
wills to act as one, at one time, soon enough; and to stabilize policy
sufficiently for many actions to be in concert during a long time, for constant purposes. Unless the powers of government are apportioned to
promote effectiveness, those who take part in the mutable affairs of the
multitudes of men massed in political society will be uncooperative and
improvident. Good government--a system of liberty that is effective for
protection and prosperity-must concentrate power and keep policy
constant. America's new order of the ages would not last for ages if the
founders could not &nd a way to make the means of safety also
efficacious.
The man who most sharply posed the problem rried to show the way
to a solution. It was Alexander Hamilton who taught what it takes to
administer a republic. The people are the beginning and the end of good
�FLAUMENHAFT
33
government, he thought, but between the source and the outcome operates that organization of means which is administration. Popular representation is of little avail without effective administration. Republican
statesmanship required that American principles be restated.
Government flowing &om the people must be divided to work for the
people. Partition can promote good deeds by differentiating agencies so that
different sorts of work are done. The very device for diminishing danger
from government can be employed as well for promoting effectiveness of
government. Effectiveness of government had two ingredients fur
Hamilton: unity and duration. Neither of these is characteristic of the
numerous and short-lived popular representative body that is both characteristic of free government and fundamental to good government.
Nonetheless, both ingredients of effectiveness could be infused into parts
of a popular government properly partitioned.
To see how, let us consider the Presidency and the Senate. Both institutions were attacked by opponents of the Constitution. From the
Presidency, they said, monarchy would arise; &om the Senate, aristocracy.
Hamilton defended the constitutional provisions for both Presidency and
Senate, as necessary to the success of popular government. Let us first
consider some of Hamilton's arguments concerning unity in the
Presidency, and then some others that he made concerning duration in
the Senate.
The One Ingredient of the Solution
The true test of a good government is irs aptitude and tendency to
produce a good administration, said Hamilton, and rorms of government
differ in their aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.
Hamilton presented himself as someone who is able to estimate the share
that the executive in every government must have in its good or bad
administration.
The single-minded attention to security &om abuse of power, he said,
does not attend with due care to the mischief that may occur when the
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
public business cannot go forward at critical seasons. Whenever two or
more persons are engaged in any common enterprise, there is always a
danger of difference of opinion, and there is peculiar danger of personal emulation and even of animosity if it be a public trust or oflice clothing them with equal dignity and authority. Men often oppose a thing
merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may
have been planned by those whom they dislike, or because they had once
been consulted and happened to disapprove.
The principles of a free government require submitting to the inconveniences of dissension in the formation of the legislature. In the legislature, moreover, prompt decision is more often bad than good. There,
deliberation and moderation are often promoted by the differences of
opinion and the jarring of parties that may sometimes obstruct salutary
plans. In the executive department, however, dissension does no good that
counterbalances the harm which it does to what should be the characteristic features of the executive: vigor and expedition.
A numerous legislature is best adapted to deliberation and wisdom,
and is also best calculated to conciliate the confidence of the people and
to secure their privileges and interests, whereas a single executive is best
because the proceedings of one man are most eminently characterized by
decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch.
Hamilton presented a list of the sorts of "executive details" that constitute what seems to be most properly understood by the administration
of government: "the actual conduct of foreign negotiations, the preparatory plans of fi:nance, the application and disbursement of the public
monies, in conformity to the general appropriations of the legislature, the
arrangement of the army and navy, the direction of the operations of
war; these and other matters of a like nature:'
The apportiomnent of power into several depositories is not an itemby-item distribution guided only by the wish to prevent abuse by equilibrating the capacity for abuse: there are sorts of work into which the various powers of government have a natural tendency to be sorted. The
�FLAUM EN HAFT
35
executive power has an inherent nature: it is not a convention produced by
the Constitutional Convention. What our Constitution does is to vest the
executive power, with certain expressed exceptions and qualifications, in
an official called the President, and the executive powers which it enumerates are not exhaustive of the President's powers. There is unanimous
agreement that the vesting of the executive power in the President ought
to be interpreted in conformity with other parts of the Constitution
which express exceptions and qualifications. There is also unanimous
agreement that it ought to be interpreted in conformity with the principles of free government. About the meaning of the latter, however, there
is antagonistic disagreement. According to Hamilton, free government
must not only be free, it must also be government. Free government need
not simply be popular; it may also be monarchical.
The idea that a vigorous executive is inconsistent with the spirit of
republican government is, to say the least; not without its advocates; but
Hamilton places them in a dilemma: those who are unfriendly to the proposed Constitution because its executive is energetic must choose between
government that is republican but bad, and government that is good but
non-republican.
Opposition to the energetic executive must be abandoned by enlightened well-wishers to republican government, for energy in the executive
is a leading characteristic in the definition of good government. Energy
in the executive is essential to the protection of the community against
foreign attacks, and it is just as essential internally. Internally, it is essential to the steady administration of the laws, and it is also essential to the
protection of property against those irregular combinations which
sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice, as well as to the secu-
rity of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, faction,
and anarchy.
Whatever may be our theory about the preferability of republican
over monarchical government, practice shows the necessity of an energetic
executive. Hamilton's problem is to persuade enthusiastic defenders of
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
republicanism that a due dependence on the people, and a due responsibility-the two things which constitute safety in the republican sensecan consist with an executive attacked as monarchical because of its ener-
gy. The chief or central difficulty with which Hamilton must contend is
the fear that a concentration of governmental power in one man, the chief
executive, is not safe. Americans' habits and opinions impede the effort to
protect their rights and promote their interests. They resist being governed, because they fear being oppressed.
It is often best in a monarchy for the prince to relinquish part of an
excessive prerogative in order to establish a more moderate government,
better adapted to the happiness or temper of his people. A government
characterized by the absolutely unqualified monarchical principle is less
truly energetic than is its antithesis, free government. But, although freedom has this tendency to energize government through the extensive feelings that identifY public and private, it also has a tendency to enfeeble government, through the fear and the fear-manipulating envy which resist the
concentration of power in men elevated above their fellows to exercise
public authority. Freedom is not identical with energy: fi:eedom energizes
when the requirements of energy are not ignored. A country like Great
Britain, in which the principle of freedom has been joined to the monarchical principle, may have both governmental energy and popular enthusiasm. Early in the American Revolution, Hamilton declared himself in
favor of what he ca!Ied "representative democracy;' and also urged an
arrangement for administration by single men that he said would "blend
the advantages of a monarchy and republic in our constitution:'
Executive energy is essential to good government, however much it
may be thought to be not republican, said Hamilton, and unity is the first
ingredient of executive energy. This argument-that an executive authority lacking unity would be exercised with a spirit habitua!Iy feeble and
dilatory-applies with principal weight to the first of two methods that
destroys the unity of the executive: the arrangement for a plurality of
magistrates of equal clignity and authority. That feeble arrangement is also
�FLAUMENHAFT
37
unsafe, owing to the danger of differences that might split the community
into the most violent and irreconcilable factions. Thus there are not likely
to be many advocates of this arrangement.
More numerous were the advocates of the other method that destroys
executive unity. This second method-the method more popular in
America--ostensibly vests executive power
in one man, but subjects him
wholly or partly to the control and cooperation of others who are the
members of his council. To this arrangement, which makes a council's conrurrence constitutionally necessary to the operations of the ostensible exec-
utive, the argument that a plural executive is an executive lacking energy does
not apply with equal weight, Hamilton concedes; but he says that it does
apply with a weight which is considerable. Harniltoris argument then goes
on to turn against
itself the argument for an executive council. Not only is
the executive in this method still quite feeble (even if not so feeble as in that
other plan), an executive with a council is also in fact unsafe. The method
of an executive council, as much as the other method for plurality in the
executive, tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility, thus depriving
the people of their securities against infidelity in elected officials. Those
securities are the removal and punishment of wrongdoers, and (even more
important in an elective government, because more commonly required) the
censure of public opinion.
The council in the British monarchy helps keep Britain free: it increases responsibility-from no responsibility whatever, to responsibility in
some degree (though only in some degree, for the King of England is not
bound to do what they say). But the American executive with a council
would be less responsible, and would therefore be more dangerous to
republican liberty. To recognize that many cannot exercise executive authority well, but to stop short of vesting that authority in one, is in fact to
reduce the security against infidelity to the people. A few may combine
more easily than many, but are harder to watch than one.
The state government of Hamilton's immediate audience, he points
out, has no council except for the single purpose of appointing to offices.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
The republican fear of unity in the executive seems to make its last stand
on this ground of appointments: even if there is only one chief magistrate,
there must be many other magistrates; to allow him to name them all by
himself would make him a lone magistrate, followed by his friends and servants. Hamilton therefore takes note of how the President, while making
appointments under the proposed Constitution, will be subject to the control of a branch of the legislative body.
What sort of arrangement is best calculated to promote a choice of the
right men to fill executive offices? The legislators themselves are not to be
the holders of executive office-they themselves are not to constitute the
administtation. If the power of appointment is to be placed in a body of
men, that body must be not the people at large, but a select body of a moderate number. Men in a select body of a moderate number, however, unlike
a numerous and dispersed people collectively, are regulated in their movements by a systematic spirit of cabal and intrigue; which spirit of cabal and
intrigue is the chief objection against reposing the power of appointment
in such a body. The resolutions of a collective body are frequently distracted and warped by a diversity of views, feelings, and interests; and nothing
ls so apt to agitate men's passions as personal considerations, whether relat-
ing to themselves or to others whom they are to choose or prefer. Hence,
the process of appointing to office when an assembly of men exercises the
power will be a display of attachments and animosities that will result in a
choice, not for merit, but for what gives to one party a victory or to many
parties a bargain.
One man, by contrast, will have fewer personal attachments to gratifY
than will a body of men, each of whom may be supposed to have as many
as does that one man. Moreover, a single man with the sole and undivided
responsibility will have a livelier sense of duty and a more exact regard for
reputation. He will be led by the concentration of obligation and interest
to investigate with care what qualities merit appointment, and to prefer with
impartiality men who have those qualities. Hence, to analyze and to estimate the peculiar qualities adapted to particular offices, one man of dis-
�FLAUMENHAFT
39
cernment is better fitted than a body of men of equal or perhaps even of
superior discernment.
However, to reduce the danger of evils from one man's uncontrolled
agency in appointments, it would be well to restrain him by making it dangerous to his reputation, or even to his political existence, fOr him to play
favorites or to follow popularity. An effective check will be the requirement
of the Senate's cooperation for appointment to office. Such a check would
not impair executive energy: the Senate restrains only by the power to concur or not; the President retains the initiative.
The Other Ingredient of the Solution
Hamilton argued that there would be more constancy under the proposed Constitution because the Presidency would be a seat of resistance to
harmful change, and of persistence in beneficial action. But the feature most
characteristic of the Presidency was unity, not duration. Another part of
government received a name that suggested lasting a long time-namely,
the Senate. With respect to number, the few Senators are more than one but
less than many; with respect to number, the Senate and the House of
Representatives differ from each other only in degree, while both differ in
kind from the President: bodies of men are more or less numerous, but
unity is not numerous at all. The Senate is distinguished by duration: the
body, for at no time can its membership change
for the most part; and its members remain in office longer
Senate is a continuing
entirely, or even
than any other officials elected in the republic. As the President is the incarnation of nnity, so the embodiment of duration is the Senate.
When the New York RatifYing Convention discussed the provisions
for the Senate, an amendment was proposed: no person should be eligible
as Senator for more than six years in any period of twelve years, and the legislatures of the several states should have power to recall their Senators and
to elect others to serve for the remainder of the time for which those
recalled had been appointed. Hamilton spoke against the amendment.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
He began by speaking of the noncontroversial end, We all are eager to
establish a republican government on a safe and solid basis, he said. We
must therefore mix the ingredients that make for safety with those that
make for solidity; we must not think that we have established good government when we have provided only for republican safety. The choice of
means to the noncontroversial end is most controversial.
Nothing was more natural than that, in the commencement of a revo-
lution which received its birth from the usurpations of tyranny, the public
mind should be influenced by an extreme spirit of jealousy. To resist these
tyrannical encroachments and to nourish this jealous spirit was the great
object of all our institutions--and it was certainly a valuable object, he said.
But the zeal for liberty became excessive. In forming our confederation, this
passion alone seemed to actuate us, and we appear to have had no other
view than to secure ourselves from despotism. Safety from despotism is certainly one important object of good government. But there is another
object, equally important, which enthusiasm kept us from attending to. Our
exclusive attention to tying the representative to the people has kept us from
seeing the need also to embody in our government another principle, a principle of strength and stability in the organization of government, and vigor
in its operations.
In every republic, he said, there should be some permanent body to
correct the prejudices, check the intemperate passions, and regulate the
fluctuations of a popular assembly. A body instituted for these purposes
must be so formed as to exclude as much as possible from its own character those infirmities and that mutability which it is designed to remedy.
It is therefore necessary that it should be small, and that it should hold
its authority during a considerable period. We shall never have an effective government unless our government has within it some stable body
which will pursue a system, will guard against innovations that lead to
instability, and will have the opportunity to know what must be known
for directing public affairs.
�FLAUMENHAFT
41
The people do not possess the discernment and stability necessary
for systematic government. To deny this would be flattery, which their
own good sense must despise. Yet these ttuths are not ofi:en held up in
public assemblies-although they cannot be unknown to any who hear
me, said Hamilton. The reason for this seems to be that the people are
not only lacking in information but are also misled by artful men or by
men of influence whose views are partial. The body of the people in every
countty intend the good end; it almost goes without saying that the populace desires public prosperity. The people's leaders in America, however,
need to be told that the people's deficiencies do not include an incapacity to bear being told that they have deficiencies. The people are capable
of recognizing that it is misleading flattery to tell them that they need not
provide against their deficiencies. A part of the misleaders are misled by
partial views that can be enlarged; a part of them, artful and ambitious,
may be overcome by leadership that holds up in public assemblies the
ttuths not ofi:en publicized in enthusiastically republican America.
Because two objects need to be conciliated, there ought to be two distinct
bodies in our government. One of the two bodies is to be immediately
constituted by, and peculiarly to represent the people. Being dependent on
the people and possessing all the popular features, it will have a quick sensibility of the ideas of the people; this body, being made up of representatives elected for a short term who shall be closely united to the people,
is the representative body. In addition to the representative body, there is
to be another body: a permanent body with the firnrness to stand against
popular fluctuations and to pursue the public interest, the ttue interest of
the people, as the arts of demagogues and designing men play upon and
generate popular dissatisfactions.
The next day, Hamilton spoke again. He began by pointing out the
source of the difficulty: ttuth in the matter under debate resided not in a
single principle, but in a judicious combination of principles. There is a
double object in forming systems of government-safety for the people,
and energy in the administration. But one element in administrative ener-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
gy or governmental strength is stability: without stability as well as security for the rights of the people, government is not government, The principle of stability in government and the principle of safety for the people
are best combined by instituting one branch peculiarly endowed with sensibility, and another with knowledge and firmness, Through the opposition and mutual control of these bodies, the government in its regular
operations will perfectly combine individual liberty with governmental
strength. The principle of caution, of a laudable anxiety for the safety of
the people, is the principle justly applied in reasoning about the representative house. However, we constantly have it held up to us that, as it is
our chief duty to guard against tyranny, it is our best policy to form all
the branches of government for this purpose, But, replied Hamilton,
experience shows that when the people act by their representatives, they
are commonly irresistible; when the people have an organized will that
pursues measures, they will always prevail. And the principle that justly
applies to the representative body would destroy tl1e essential qualities of
that which is senatorial. We should not impose the same principles upon
branches of government designed for different operations. The two houses were built for different kinds of work. The differences laid down in
building them were meant to be embodiments of differences in nature.
The House of Representatives was designed primarily to keep the people
safe; the Senate, to keep the government steady.
The Status of the Solution
Hamilton's two themes of unity and duration are the two aspects of
his one problem: to give effectiveness to the American constitution of
republican liberty. Hamilton presented himself as the great friend of
republican government, not-as his opponents charged -its secret foe.
He said that what he sought was this: by the establishment of properly
differentiated parts within governmental machinery founded upon popular representation, to give to the republic the effectiveness without which
it would be discredited and destroyed.
�FLAUM EN HAFT
43
It was not simply to get things done that Hamilton was a proponent
of constitutional arrangements for energizing and stabilizing the exercise
of governmental power. Things may get done, soon and so as to last a
long time, even when a constitution makes for fragmented and mutable
government. If the machinery of government provided by the constitution is lacking in effectiveness, then a political machine unknown to the
constitution may be improvised to do the job: effective decisions can be
made and enforced by a boss sitting in the back room, and then sent up
front for dignified promulgation by those who formally preside; or the
man who presides up front with a popular air of republican humility may
himself do the effective work, operating his own machine in the back
room. But constitutional arrangements that necessitate such extraconsti-
tutional arrangements so that the public business may in some way go
forward are dangerous and demeaning.
Hamilton repeatedly declared himself "iiffectionately attached to the
Republican theory:' He said that he had "strong hopes of the success of
that theory;' but in candor ought to add that he was "far &om being
without doubts:"
ul consider its success as yet a problem;' he said. As
yet, successful republican government was not an accomplished fact but
a project to be accomplished-for "it is yet to be determined by experience whether it be consistent with that stability and order in Government
which are essential to public strength & private security and happiness:'
In the circumstances, he said, republican theory ought to govern governmental practice.
11
1n the abstract:' or neglecting the circumstances
here and now, the nonrepublican theory may seem to be better.
"Permanent or hereditary distinctions" of political rights are an essen-
tial part of the British constitution, a constitution that is good, as well
as being the best that there yet has been. Experience thus shows that the
nonrepublican theory can be successful in practice. Experience, moreover,
gives cause to doubt whether the republican theory can be successful in
practice. But "every good man" ought to have "good wishes" for the
republican theory's essential idea, the "idea of a perfect equality of
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
political rights among the citizens:' The republican theory has a more
desirable constitutive principle than does the nonrepublican theory. The
nonrepublican theory would seem to be better only because the republican theory would seem to be less practicable. The republican theory
11
merits "the best efforts to give success to it in practice." It has hither-
to from an incompetent structure of the Government ... not had a fair
trial, and ... the endeavor ought then to be to secure to it a better chance
of success by a government more capable of energy and order:'
Hamilton had repeatedly "declared in strong terms;' he insisted, "that
the republican theory ought to be adhered to in this Country as long as
there was any chance of its success:'
The republican problem could be solved only by the development of
a republican form of government that did not lack the aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration. If such a form were not developed, warned Hamilton, if popular prejudices against being governed
were flattered to the point of inciting those popular propensities which
bring on the self-destruction of popular government, then monarchy
would after all prevail. Proclaiming long and loudly the merits of the
British constitution, Hamilton tried to teach emphatically what he
thought Americans needed most to learn-the lesson that government
cannot be good unless it joins to private safety public strength• In rejecting the hereditary principle in government, a British inheritance from less
enlightened times, Americans had not cast off their unenlightened
parochial prejudice against executive energy. But the necessity of executive energy was rooted in the nature of things: in some way or other it
would return; and if refused a stately republican admission, it would
break violently through the front door-or enter by stealth through the
back. In some way or other, Hamilton thought, the public business would
go forward, or the government would cease to be. His wish was that the
public business might go forward in a way not &tal to liberty and to
honor. Monarchy under the free British constitution produced a good
administration, but the independent Americans did not have the materi-
�FLAUMENHAFr
45
als for a constitution of the British sort: their failure to solve the republican problem would produce a tyrant or a boss.
Previous experience had shown the republican theory to be doubtful.
But republican government might succeed if "so constructed as to have all
the energy and stability reconcilable with the principles of that theory:'
Not only would Americans "endure nothing but a republican government;' but it was "in itself right and proper that the republican theory
should have a fair and full trial:' Considerate and good Americans should
wish for a true test of the republican theory in America, said Hamilton,
and should therefore advocate republican institutions of the greatest possible energy and stability. Republican government would be vindicated as
a good form of government only if it could thus be formed for durable
liberty--only, that is to say, if it could thus be made effective.
1
Citations for the passages here paraphrased and quoted from Alexander Hamilton will be found
in my book The EJftctivt Republic: Admirristraticm and Constitution in tbt Thought of Alexaudrr Hamilton
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1992).
��-;f What, then, is Time?
!j:- Eva Brann
When our dean asked me to lecture this September it was because I've
just completed a book on time, and I'm happy to have the opportunity
to talk about it. There seemed to be three possible kinds of profit that I
figured might come to you and to me if I gave what one might call a book
report.
First, even if the writing of books is a few decades off for most of
you here tonight, it turns out that writing papers and annual essays is not
so different from writing books, and I thought I might be able to tell you
something useful. In fact I'll do it right now. When the time comes to
write, whether it's a small paper or a long annual essay, never think: 'Tve
got to write this thing! Help! I need a paper!" Instead, search your soul
for a question you have nursed for quite a while, whether articulately or
inarticulately, something that bothered and puzzled you, something that
might be very intimate but is capable of public expression. Then flip mentally through the books you've studied, or the music you've sung, or the
theorems you've proved, or the experiments you've reenacted, and ask
yourself which have a bearing, taken in the largest sense, on your issue.
What will happen next is the result of a mixture of concentration and
luck: some paradox or analogy or some other significant array will jump
out at you. Seize that and slowly pummel, stroke, and shape it into an
articulate order. Of course, none of that can happen at the last minute.
For looking into yourself, for calling on your studies, for finding a crystallizing moment, for working all of it into a well-shaped whole, time is
of the essence.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at the Annapolis Campus of StJohn's College. Her book is
entitled: What, Thm, Is Timt (Lanham, MJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). This lecture was delivered
at the Annapolis campus, September 4, 1998.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
My second thought was that time is one subject concerning which it
does not matter whether one is a freshman finishing the second week at
the college or a senior beginning the fourth year, or even a tutor who has
taught most of the program. Stormy love is not a pressing issue to all
ages, nor is looming death, but there is, I think, no one, at any time of
life, for whom time does not become a problem in some way or other. I
know this &om experience, Of the things that have urgently interested me
&om time to time, the mention of Being and Nonbeing, for example,
provokes mostly stupefied noninterest, the mention of the imagination
elicits an account of people's favorite fantasy-series, but the mention of
time gives rise to intelligently companionable puzzlement. People have a
different relation to the question concerning time than to other deep matters, which they are either willing to bypass as too obscure for their taste
or to treat with the most unreflective but familiar particularity.
The title of this lecture-and of my book-is "What, then, is
Time?" It is a quotation from the most famous sentence ever written on
time by the man who was most deeply immersed in its elusive familiarity,
St. Augustine. It comes &om the eleventh book of his Confessions, which
we read in the sophomore year. Here is the whole sentence:
What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I
want to explain it to the questioner, I do not know.
My own concern with time started -&om two ends at once, intellectual puzzlement and deep-felt irritation, and it developed, as really good
questions do, from annoyed fascination to serious interest. The intellec-
tual puzzlement was just that expressed by Augustine: What sort of a
being, if it was a being, could be so handily familiar in daily usage and so
fugitive to the grasp of thought? Here I did as all my fellow humans do:
I make time, kill time, manage my time, waste time. To be sure, I've never
"done" time, though but for the grace of God I might have. I know that
time heals all wounds and ravages all the beauties of the world. But if I
�BRANN
49
ask myself what it is that does this, I see and touch nothing and think of
less. That is at first just a puzzling and then an engaging state of affairs.
The irritation I experienced had a superficially different source. In all
the departments of life people talk of time as a force or a power, not just
in the sort of dead metaphor that makes up the unconscious poetry of
popular usage, as in all the phrases cited above. No, they mean it literally, especially when they are talking of the so-called "phases" of time.
"Phase" will be the most important word in this lecture. It is my worddifferent authors use different words-for the three parts of time, past,
present, future. Perhaps I should have said the three parts of human time,
for I will argue that only human, or human-like, beings have pasts and
presents and futures.
It is the future with which these people mostly play infuriating havoc.
They say and they mean that there is a future coming and our business is
to form a reception committee for it. Some see this Future with a capital
F as a doom, as in Yeats's great poem, uThe Second Coming":
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Far more of our contemporaries see it cheerfully as a benefactor,
though a totally manipulative one: it is the Information Age or the Global
Age or the Age of Megacorporations, you name it, and our duty is to be
ready or to be run over by time. They engage in what I call to myself
"proactive passivity:' This time-mode-the adjective, incidentally, is
"temporal;' so I will say, this temporal mode-strikes me as paralyzing
the human will, and that is one form of immorality.
So besides the intellectual desire to understand the nature of time and
whether it is a being or a nothing, I also began to think about time in its
human effects. Almost everyone who has lived for some time has neat
observations about these effects. For example, I have been at St. John's
College forty-one years or almost IS,OOO days. Sometimes it seems like
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
forever and sometimes it seems like a day. What accounts for this mad
elasticity of time? But besides these time-ruminations there is also that
sense I have of the important moral consequences of not thinking about
the nature of time, about accepting what seem to be abuses of our phasenature. In fact, a new hero of mine, Octavio Paz, whom I discovered
through an alumnus of St. John's, Juan Villasenor, put my thought much
more expansively than I would have had the courage to do. He says in his
book on India:
I believe that the reformation of our civilization must
begin with a reflection on time,
Recall that I am still laying out the possible profit of telling you about
my book, and here is the last one, chiefly to mysel£ Imagine what a pleas"
ure it will be to come on campus and to be able to fall easily into a conversation about this magical subject with some proportion of the people
that live and learn here-with the more virtuous part, I might add, those
who come to Friday night lectures,
Now let me tell you of two discoveries or devices--it's always hard to
tell whether it's one or the other-about which the book crystallized, One
was the discovery-and I became persuaded that it was a discovery, was
really there to be _founJ.-that writers on time who lived millennia apart in
time and who were wodds apart in thought were at crucial moments driven into the same understanding, or at least the same problem, Once I had
discovered one such pair of time-twins I came upon three others. And
finally I came to believe that amongst them they pretty well established the
perennial possibilities and the pertinent problems concerning time. In a
moment I will tell who these writers are and what deep notion each pair
shares, But let me say here that it was a blessing to find such a principle of
selection. For it is hard for most of us to think about these enigmas without help. The trouble is, there is too much help on offer. I own a bibliography of time which tells of nearly 200,000 books and articles written
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51
between I 900 and now. Of course, much of it is piffling, but much of it
is, I am sure, thoughtful. I chose four great writers, and they paired quite
naturally with four more, and by good luck these are the eight among the
ancient and modern writers generally agreed to have the deepest theories.
The pairs, then, are Plato and Einstein, Aristotle and Kant, Plotinus and
Heidegger, Augustine and Husser!. Since many of you will not have read
them, though all are on the Program, I'll present their time-theories as simply and as unencumbered by terminology as possible. But I'll omit completely telling you about one pair, Plotinus and Heidegger, because it is too
tricky to do, although their similarity on the point of time is most spectacular in view of their diametric opposition on everything else that mat-
ters.
The other discovery was that a human effect which never ceases to
enchant me, namely the images that arise before the mind's eye in our imagination, had a certain remarkable similarity
with our sense of time, a for-
mal sort of similarity. Images are absent presences or present absences; they
are not what they are, they are made of Being and Nonbeing. What I mean
is that any image, but particularly a mental image, presents someone or
something not actually present. To imagine an absent friend is to have him
there, but not really. Time as well, it turns out, has this curious character of
being and not-being, of being there but not really, of being present only in
its absence. My all-time favorite time-saying is by the inimitable Yogi Berra.
When someone asked him: fiWhat time is it?" he replied: You mean
11
now?" It is the wisest of answers, because you can't tell time, and yet we do.
It is always and never Now.
So the book began to have two parts. One part was a study of these
eight philosophers for the purpose of seeing what kinds of answers could
be given to the question "What is time?" and what problems were inherent
in the answers. But studying, while a help to thinking, and fur most of us
an indispensable help, is not thinking, since to understand what others
think is simply a different activity &om the thinking that goes directly, with-
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
out intermediary, to the question, So in a second part I tried to go directly
to the question, having absorbed all the help I could.
Therefore in this lecture, too, after telling what some of the best writers I could find have thought about time, I will try to tell what I think. I
should say right now, lest you be disappointed, that what I conclude first
and last is that it is a true mystery. I mean a potent effect whose characteristics are poignantly clear but whose nature is finally unfathomable. You
can specify a mystery but you can't resolve it.
If you have a huge field of apparently possible answers to a question,
it clears the decks somewhat to begin by removing the answers that are
simply unacceptable. In thinking about the ways time is spoken of. it
seemed to me that whatever else is said, time is spoken of either as occurring in nature or as being within. the human being. Time is either external
or internal, or perhaps both.
External time has attracted by far the greater interest. Time is written
of in religion, where it is a great question how an eternal God acts in created time. Time is treated in history, where it is a great question whether
the times make history or people do. But, above all, time is a great subject in physics, where the best-grounded and most remarkable theories of
time are developed.
Without question, the physicist who has done most to make other
physicists and people in general think about time is Einstein. The work I
chose to examine is his I 905 paper on what came to be known as the
Special Theory of Relativity. What struck me first was that every mention
of time was in quotation marks. This habit conveyed to me that I was dealing with the most careful and thoughtful of writers, one who knew that
time in physics is a most problematic notion. Einstein says tight away:
It might appear possible to overcome all rhe difficulties
attending the definition of "time" by substituting "the
position of the small hand of my watch" for "time:' And
in fact such a definition is satisfactory ...
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At least it is satisfactory when we are talking only of time here and
now. Before Einstein, physicists had believed what everyone believes: that
it is the same time throughout the world, that every other Here simply has
the same Now as my Here. This situation was called simultaneity and was
regarded as a chief feature of external, I mean narural, time. Einstein goes
on to show that for any stationary Here far away &om my own, it takes
some calculating to synchronize our watches. And, when we are moving
relative to each other, one of our most entrenched senses about time is
overthrown, namely that what time it is is independent of our state of rest
or motion. Einstein's theory rums out to have to do entirely with the
measurement of time-what my local clock and your local clock tell
under different physical conditions. That is why Einstein puts "time" in
quotations: he is warning us that not the nature of time but its measurement is at issue.
Now I'll jump back rwo and a half millennia and quote to you what
is the most famous, most o&en cited definition of time. It comes &om
Plato's dialogue called Timaeus. Timaeus is a made-up character, a visiting
physicist. He and some of Socrates' friends have planned an amusement
for him. On the day before, Socrates had produced for them a picrure in
words of the ideal political community-some people think it is the one
set out in the dialogue called The Republic. Now Timaeus will reciprocate
by painting for Socrates' entertainment the cosmos, the ordered world
within which such an ideal city might fit. In the course of giving a mathematical account of such a cosmos, Timaeus says this about the way the
maker of the world introduced time into it:
He planned to make a movable image of eternity, and as
he ordered heaven into a cosmos, he made an image of
that eternity which stays one and the same, an eternal
image moving according to number. And that is what we
call time.
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THE S"I JOHN'S REVIEW
What Timaeus is saying is that the heavens move like a great cosmic
dial and that this motion allows us to tell time.
So the mythical early physicist and the greatest of modern physicists
are saying the same thing: Time is what the clock tells, in one case the
cosmic clock, in the other a local watch. And so say all working physicists
in between, It is a working, a so-called operational definition of time, and
it works just fine-until you begin to think about it. That time is what
the clock tells is what one might call a dispositive definition. It disposes
of time as an issue. But if you turn it around and try to say that the clock
tells time you're in trouble. Time never appears on the face of a clock. Nor
does it appear anywhere else in nature, ever. All other natural phenomena
appear somehow to sight or hearing or touch. Of time not a trace.
What does appear is motion, An analog clock is a standard cyclical
motion, A digital clock is a standard progressive motion, Clocks are calibrated motions. There is no time actually used in physics and none that
actually appears in nature. There is much more to be said about this
shocking claim, and I'll be happy to hear any arguments you might have.
Among other points then to be made, some, who have read Newton,
might want to point out that Newton, at least, does stipulate true natural time, an equable flux that comes before motion. And I would answer
that it is not only as physicist but also as theologian that Newton puts
time into nature. For this so-called absolute time, which has no observable features, is probably not so much in nature as in God's mind, in that
part of God's mind, called his "sensorium;' with which he is receptive to
all of nature, irs infinite spaces, irs primary forces, irs ultimate bodies. My
point at the moment is, however, only to reinforce a conclusion I came to:
Wherever time is seriously considered, mind, soul, consciousness and sen-
sibility come on the scene. Time can only be internal, meaning within a
mind, possibly God's mind.
So I disposed to my own satisfaction of the vast majority of theories
of time. Intricate and interesting as they are, they are really theories of
motion, not of time, and they don't tell what time is. But time is the sort
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55
of subject for which every settling of the mind in one respect is punished
by a complementary problem popping up in another. You can, and I think
you have to, take time out of nature, but I am not so perverse as to claim
that the outside world isn't full of variations: locomotions, processes,
alterations. The mystery that has now popped up is that we have no idea
what is really going on in this time-deprived world. Let me show you what
I mean.
Human time, internal time, will be distinguished by its phases, past,
present, future. But nothing in nature; except perhaps the near-human
mammals, apes and dolphins, has a past or a present or a fUture. Edwin
Muir says in a poem called "The Animals":
But these have never ttod
Twice the familiar ttack,
Never turned back
Into the memoried day.
All is new and near
In the unchanging Here...
Animals and sticks and stones do not have a past, though they might
be said to be their past. But I, for one, just cannot imagine what it is like
to live in the unchanging Here and not have memory, how such a being
gets itself into and out of existence, in short, how anything can change
without having phases of time. But then again the effort is love's labor
lost: How could I have empathy with, feel my way into, that which has no
inside? So the outer world becomes in this respect opaque, and this is the
price to be paid for making a philosophical choice. In coming to conclusions in philosophical inquiries, I want to say as an aside, it is always a
matter of what we can best live with for the time being-which is why all
philosophy as carried on by human beings is ultimately moral philosophy.
There is perhaps a solution to the timelessness of nature. It is a commonplace for writers on time that there are two kinds of time. They
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
might be called succession-time and phase-time. Phase-time is dynamic in
the sense that the human present, about which time breaks into past and
future, continually shifts-as Yogi Berra's counter-question, You mean
now?" makes clear in its unavoidable absurdity. Succession-time, on the
other hand, is static. It is merely the endless chain of before-and-afi:er,
established once and for all. It is time all by itself, no one's time, the time
of all events taken only with relation to their succession and to nothing
and nobody else, Perhaps nature does have its time, succession-time, But
11
even the successions of nature turn out to be more intelligible as causal
than as temporal sequences,
This is the moment to introduce Aristotle, who produced the first
extensive treatment of time ever, in Book Four of his Physics. Here is what
he says time is:
Time, then, is not motion but that by which motion
has number.
Aristotle seems to be making spectacularly short shrifi: of that mysterious power, time. It is nothing but an attribute of motion. Then he says
what sort of attribute:
Time . , , is the number of motion with respect to
before and after.
What the deep meaning of all this is can't come out unless we follow
up what Aristotle means by motion, number, before-and-afi:er. But we
might guess at two problematic elements of this understanding of time.
The first, which is by far the less deep of the two but is endlessly discussed, is this: if time is the number of motion as a progression in which
the parts come before and afi:er, if it is in fact the succession-time I just
introduced, it must somehow share in a chief feature of motion, namely
continuity. Physical motion borrows this feature fi:om the fact that it takes
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place over distance. Distances are representable as mathematical lines, and
these lines must be continuous-no elements can be missing. So time, as
Aristotle himself emphasizes, is continuous, like a line. Wherever you cut
the line you get a point that belongs to both parts of the cut. This point is
the Now. Time is in every way like a line of geometry: It lies upon its points,
each of which is a Now. The only difference is that the geometric points are
static, whereas the Now moves forward, ever the same in its features, ever
different in temporal location. But as you know by now, a point is that
which has no parts, so the Now has no parts. Therefore it has no extent, no
bulk, no force, no presence. Therefore the point-Now of the mathematical
model of time is as far removed as anything can be from the humanly experienced present, which is vivid, full, and altogether the most impressive
phase of time. Insofar as time is continuous it is not very human.
But then Aristotle has also said that which will make time totally discontinuous. For time is a number by which motion is counted, and anum-
ber is a collection of completely discontinuous units-there is no way one
unit can be tangent to another. Motion, locomotion at least, is bound to
distance and borrows from that fact its continuity. But number is bound
to something else which reinforces its discontinuity. Many things in the
world are collections of items. Aristotle mentions herds of horses and
flocks of sheep. Other things, such as distances of all sorts, can be marked
off into artificial units. All these things have a number that belongs to
them. But nothing in nature gets its number unless someone is counting.
Aristotle says that it is the soul that counts. So time, in order to be the
number of motion, requires a wide-awake counting soul. Now comes the
critical question: When the soul is counting, does it take time to do it?
Does it get its numbering from some motion? What distance does that
psychic motion cover?
Aristotle is in big-and I must say unacknowledged-trouble. Time
in nature is only the number of motion, but what is the counting that
announces that number? I don't think he knew, but perhaps in the question period someone will make his case.
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58
Now let me leap 2000 plus years ahead. For Aristotle, time originates
with the counting soul. To
my mind, Aristotle's true modern successor,
the one who takes Aristotle's thought and turns it thoroughly and precisely upside down, is Kant. Here is an aside: This kind of inversion of
thought, so that it is the same in name but utterly different in significance,
is the chief moving force of the philosophical tradition we study at this
college. By "force" I don't mean some magical attribute of the passage of
time, but the way of proceeding that is congenial to those immersed in
this tradition. At any rate, whatever time is, if it has power it has it only
as an aspect of human consciousness.
Back to Kant. You will be relieved to hear that I do not plan to tell
you what is in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant's founding book, although
everything in there is sooner or later related to time. Instead I will focus
on a few sentences which show what it is that brings Kant so very close
to Aristotle in the letter, though he is worlds apart in meaning.
Kant regards time as a constitutional part of our receptive capacity,
our ability to take in what is given to us. Such a capacity is called "sensibility;' and we are so made that whatever comes to us, the world of nature
especially, comes in the form of temporal sensibility. The Critique is a great
work of philosophical art, and I omit the many factors that feed beautifully into rounding this notion out, in order to concentrate on just one
thing: When we ask what it means that nature comes to us in the form of
time, the answer is that whenever we think about nature we begin by
noticing quantities, and we do that first of all by numbering-not topof-the-head counting, but a deeply interior kind of beating out of units
that add up into a number. Here is Kant's word on what is happening in
this counting: ul generate time itself ... "
So Aristotle and Kant agree that time is a kind of psychic beating or
counting. It does not save Kant from the question I asked of Aristotle
that he calls time a form of the sensibility. Is this form, I now ask, itself
static or is it fluid? If it is static, how does it produce the psychic flow of
pulses? If it is fluid, is there yet another time behind Kant's deep consti-
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tutional time? Let me say right now that all the authors who put time
within the soul run into this trouble. And those who put the origin or
ground of time outside of the soul run into other and worse troubles.
Both Aristotle and Kant have been primarily interested in what I have
called succession-time, the steady chain of before-and-afi:ers found in
nature, though apprehended by our counting. Now is the time to speak
of human time, phase-time.
To my mind, Augustine is the greatest writer on time-and the most
beautifUl one. Here's another aside: very broadly speaking, philosophers
come in rwo kinds, those who inquire serenely and hopefUlly into a subject they long to know and believe they can approach and those who question severely and disenchantedly a matter they think is ultimately hopeless. Augustine certainly has travails of the soul, and I would not be unfair
to call Husser!, who takes up rwo millennia later exactly where Augustine
had !eli: off. a fi.tsspot. But both are not so much driven as led by faith in
their subject, and I want to say that these are the philosophers I trust and
prefer to be with.
Augustine wants to know what time is because it is the human counterpart of God's eternity, the eternity of the God he has just found and
acknowledged. But there is nothing exalted about his questioning-it is
very down-to-earth. He loves to sing hymns, and the question is: How do
I measure times, the long and short syllables, the lengths of the stanzas?
Distances are easy to measure. They stay put while you lay a measuring
stick alongside them. But the moment slips away, the past is no longer, the
fUture not yet, and there is no way to lay a time-stick along an elapsed
time. Lengths measure lengths, motions measure motions-what measures time? Here is his answer, as I said, to
my mind the most illuminating
thing ever uttered about time, a new discovery, as he himself says:
Time is nothing else but a stretching out, though of what
I do not know. Yet I marvel if it be not of the mind itself.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Our mind or soul is distended and that makes it capable of holding
time, so to speak. How distended, how stretched? Here is Augustine
agam:
This then is clear and plain, that neither things to come
nor things past are, nor should we properly say: 'There
are three times, past, present, and future:' But probably
we should say: "There are three times, a present of things
past, a present of things present, and a present of things
future:' ... The present of things past is memory, the
present of things present is sight [or perception), the
present of things future is expectation.
So we can measure times gone
by and times
to come because
they are
now present to us. But the solution of the measuring problem is the least
of it. What Augustine has done is to tell what makes a human being temporal, how time is in us.
To be human is to be present and to have things present before or within. Yet another aside: certain so-called postrnodern writers, taking their
departure &om Heidegger, think that this is a very derivative way of
approaching human Being and that to think of human beings as containing presences within and confronting things present without demeans the
originality of existence. But Augustine does think that to exist is both to be
in the present and to be in the presence of things.
Augustine's book on time in the Confessions is preceded by a book on
memory, and this book is the indispensable preparation for his understanding of time. For there he shows how we can also be in the presence of
absent things: we have the whole spacious world, its fields and palaces,
within us, not, however, the things themselves but their images. Here you
can see how the imagination, as a power for making the absent present, is
essential to our inner sense of time. For with it we can have memory of past
times and also expectation of future things, since expectation is a forward-
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61
directed imagination. And since much of what has happened to us is now
present to us or is now recoverable, we can not only measure time somewhat as we do space, which is all there simultaneously. We can also see how
our mind is a temporal image of God's mind, who holds all creation
together there at once, in the eternal Now.
To be human, then, is to have a mind so stretched that it encompasses
in its present both memory and foresight. One way to depict that condition is in a diagram like a coordinate system. The horizontal axis is the time
of the world, of Creation; it is succession-time. God knows how it works;
we don't. Astride of this horizontal coordinate sits a vertical stretch of line,
our mind. Where the two intersect is the moment of sight, of perception,
our point of intake for the world. The segment below represents remembered events, dropped out of sight but not out of mind. The part above
represents the dreams and plans we now have for the future-and that is
all the future that actually exists. As the world passes by, our memory line
grows longer and our expectation line shortens. Then one day it ends.
Husser!, who actually draws diagrams of this sort, in fact marks one of
his lines as the "tug towards death:' It is not, however, one of the axes he is
marking in this way, but one of the oblique lines with which he connects
the horizontal axis of succession-time and the vertical axis of phase-time.
These oblique lines show how each perception offered by the horizontal
succession-line sinks away into vertical memory
in an orderly and continu-
ous manner, without any scrambling or dislocation. Husserl's time-diagrams are clever and complex, and I had a lot of fun-fun bordering on
agony, that is--working them out.
Husser! is the founder of a way of inquiry called Phenomenology. Its
chief feature is that it excludes all questions of existence and realiry, such as
whether time is real. Instead a Phenomenologist pays attention to the
appearances within consciousness, articulating and ordering them. Our
sense of time is a perfect subject fur Phenomenology and Husserl's lectureseries known as The Phenomenology '!f lnternalTime-Consciousntss is the great firstfruit of his method.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Husser! makes hundreds of acute observations, but his main advance
on Augustine is to puzzle seriously over the extent of the present. Recall
that the point-Now of mathematics is too skimpy to live in, but consider also that an extended present is going to be part past, part future.
Husser! finds a way, fairly technical, to show that there is a discernible
immediate past and an immediate future that are so bound in with the
present as to give room, so to speak, for perception, so that there is time
for a time-sequence, say a melody, to be taken in. He shows how the present has time for the world to impress itself on us.
One last word about Husser!, The horizontal axis, which represented
the world's time for Augustine, represents an internal time-flux, a contin-
uous sort of subjective succession-time, for Husserl. For he is withholding all claims about the reality of the world and its time, and attending
only to our inner experience, to our internal time-consciousness. In trying to understand this internal flow, Husser! is drawn into questions
beyond Phenomenology. The question that finally preoccupies him is the
familiar one: how can this flux, which is one aspect of our sense of time
and for him the deepest, be spoken of? Are we fluid through and through,
or is this flux grounded in a stable form? But how can a fixed form be the
source of a flow? Husser!, a man who is willing to admit ultimate perplexity without losing faith in the worth of his problem, says:
For these things we have no names.
Now is the time for me to say what I think time is-maybe it would
be more sensible to say "how time works:'
I think that phase-time is the fountain and origin of all time. Every
phenomenon of time is derivative from the fuct that we have past, present and future. To me the most astounding circumstance of our temporal life, surpassingly strange but apparenrly unavoidable, is the crux and
center of the three phases: the present. All that is ever real for us, all that
is really there, really present, occurs in these point-by-point moments of
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presence. This is the instant of perception when we see and hear and
touch the world. The rest, the long stretches behind and before, is
absence-what has gone by and what is yet to come.
Human life would therefore be very pointillistic and poor if present
existence were all we had. Happily there are ways of being that are even
more potent rhan present reality and momentary existence. There is the
actuality of imaginative memory and of imaginative expectation. The
present of perception is the point of intake for the novelties that the
world offers to our senses, but the past and the future are also present to
us as images, as memories of things past and plans for things to come.
These are the present actualities, the powerfully present absences that give
coherence and resonance and significance to the moment. They also make
it possible for us to measure time directly, not by observing external
motions as of the hands of the clock, which never displays time at all, but
by the thickness of the image-pictures we flip through or leap over to get
to the past moment from which we want to estimate a stretch of time.
Our memory is like a laminate of transparencies or a carousel of slides,
and my claim is that this accumulation we call the past and this projection we call the future is what produces our inner sense of time. And this
thickening of the present by past and future is what Augustine calls "the
stretching of the mind:'
Now note that I have described the present as punctual, instantaneous, momentary. And this description seems to be supported by the
observations of all kinds of people, perhaps poets above all. The Nows
that matter are somewhat isolated-instants of recognition, moments of
meaning. In his book The Labyrinth '!f Solitude Octavio Paz calls the Now
"explosive and orgiastic" and wonders how it fits into ordinary historical
passage.
But much of the time of our lives passes in seeming continuity, and
this sort of time, the time that seems like a continuous passage, usual-
ly called duration, has to be accounted for as well. I think it works as
follows.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Our present appears punctuated by the ever-varying world and our
perception of it, Now we see our friends, now they've disappeared around
the corner; now we hear one note, now another. But there is another time
experience that we become conscious of when we are deprived of most
external sensation or when our inner images are pushed out of sight by
fear and anxiety. Or we can deliberately close off our senses and empty
our minds to concentrate simply on our inner duration. What then comes
to the fore is a sort of inner pulsing, the very beat of our mere consciousness, empty life itself. I am trying to describe the soul's aboriginal
counting that both Aristotle and Kant discovered. This inner beat then is
the origin of that succession-time that is mirrored in the before-and-a&er
of physical motion and that plays so large a role in our practical life.
Now most of the time we are not taking note of this pulse, or paying much attention to our inner life at all The beats recede and merge as
in a long perspective; time's passage appears continuous and acquires all
the characteristics and problems of a line in space. Then, retrospectively,
time is thought of--not felt-as a continuum that is continuously cut by
a point-like Now, the kind of Now in which nothing can happen,
So my description of time, which leaves time as what I call "a wellspecified mystery;' ends with the point-Now. And that is where a review
of the various pathologies people attach to the phases of time begins.
I'll give the sketchiest summary of our time-troubles, partly because
time is short, partly because every one of us has a lot of personal experience with this aspect of time, and it will make a good subject for
future conversation.
One way, then, to think of the way people wreak havoc with the perceptual present is that they treat it as a mere, point-like Now, monotonously empty and featureless, while racing unrestrainably forward. To/try
to live in this Now is to long to fill it with strong stimulation and increasing novelty. Now-life is the pathological counterpart of present-life.
Similarly, some people deprive themselves of the image-filled memory that gives the present its anchor of significance by rushing to keep up
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with novelty and trashing not only their own past but that past which
their communities have in common, their external memories.
And finally, some people are so dominated by a future that is supposedly coming at them that they give up what they really care about to
make themselves into ready servants of this oncoming power. But according to my understanding the future is nothing but the dreams and plans
we currently have, and as far as the humanly-made world is concerned,
nothing is coming but what we actively or passively agree to. It is that passivity which is, to my mind, the greatest time-pathology.
��--:f The Taking Of Time
fj- by Douglas Allanbrook
Part One
Consider the short Latin verse: Deus creator omnium:' St. Augustine
examines this verse towards the end of his chapter on time in The Co'!frssions,
a chapter which comes at the end of his autobiographical examination. Try
to memorize it, to inscribe it permanently on your minds: Deus creator
omnium." Consider its aspect on the written page. Read it out loud It is now
11
11
present to you in space as you take the time to read it-as convention pre-
scribes-from left to right, though it could be written &om right to le&. It
would take the same time to read : "muinmo rotaerc sueD:' Once I have the
verse in mind, however, and utter the syllable De, the whole of the verse's
future begins to pass through my present utterance into the past. If I have
the verse memorized it is--of course-all of it present in some unspeak-
able manner in my memory. If I recite it, give life and breath to it, its direction is by no means reversible: it has a beginning, a middle, and an end It
is in this sense analogous to God's relation to his creation, except for the
fact that our verse was made, not created, and has an earthly author, the
estimable Bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose--a formidable rhetorician.
The time it takes to recite our verse may be longer or shorter depending on the speed with which it is read. By paying attention to the motion
of the second-hand on your wrist watch, you can tell you how long it took
for you to recite it. You count as the second hand sweeps past and, if in one
recitation you count up to ten and in a second recitation you count to seven,
you say the second recitation is faster than the first and that the first is slower than the second. When you have done this you have not done very much,
though it is your attentive mind which has done it. It has numbered a
motion and compared it nmnerically with another motion. It's not, howevDouglas Allanbrook is tutor emeritus at St. John's College. This lecture was delivered at Annapolis
on February 17, 1995, and at Santa Fe, November 12, 1993.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
er, as if you had taken rhe true measure of rhe verse. If, experimentally, you
slow up rhe recitation excessively, you will run out of brearh. If you speed
it up too murh, it will sound breathless. Your lungs and your brearh are now
fixing limits to rhe rime taken for rhe performance of rhe verse, Our bodily organs and our senses do provide a mean for us; they guide us into a
pleasing lengrh of time ("Deus creator omnium"). The senses also judge of
anorher relation, a fimdamental relation which obtains between syllables of
our verse. While rhis ratio may be roughly numerable, its presence is signalled to us--and is immediately present to us--via our bodily senses, You
may develop a notation for rhis which might seem to be completely numerical or metrical (quarter note; half note), but such a notation does not hit
rhe mark. All of the traditional names which attempt to label what is going
on catch rhe essence of rhe ratio more correctly. Here are just a few of
rhem: rhe eloquent Latin terms, elevatio and deposition; rheir Greek equivalents,
arsis and thesis; or simply our English upbeat and downbeat. How does rhe measuring of rhe second syllable by rhe first syllable occur physically; how is us
measured by De in rhe word Deus in our Latin verse? What has transpired?
When rhe second syllable has been uttered it is compared physically
wirh rhe first syllable; our body's attention is directed to a happening in
time, directed not by our ability to compare 2 to I, but by rhe physical force
of our feet and the motion of our brearh as it is inhaled and exhaled. It is
an event, not a cognition, though we are well aware of it. (It is not unlike
our primitive sensing of same and other, and rhe connection this has wirh our
ability to compare I to 2.) Once rhe first pairing is established, future rime
seizes us: we suspect rhat the next syllables will be like rhe opening ones,
rhat rhere will be a knowable and sensed double: DeuS gives tise to c;:,;;,
anorher iamb. 1 We will be able to dance or at least walk steadily to what is
awaiting us, and we are not disappointed Our pulses adjust to it and our
feet can so easily give us a down beat. The meaning of rhe words now has
its soul, its brearh, its animus; our hope for rhe future becomes realized as
rhe verse moves rhyrhmically rhrough rhe present moment of sense, on into
rhe past. God becomes rhe creator of everything, starting from ground zero,
�ALLANBROOK
69
as we prepare to say the word Deus, and ending as ending with the very thing
itself as we say the word omnium---everything.
Consider now a verse that may be more familiar. It is in the English language, though it has a Scotch accent. "My love is like a red, red Rose:' My
and is are up-beats even though My has a lot more weight than the innocent
little copula is. When "my love" is safely tucked into the past, my anticipation of the future is rhythmically capped when is is notched with like. A marvel occurs when, with the memory of the past two iambs ("My love is like")
firm in our memory, we get a simple little article, a, followed by two reds and
a rose: My love is like a red, red Rose:' Of course the first iamb, My love"
11
11
has not the gravity, at least to the general public, of
11
Deus our Latin verse,
11
;
however, has not the excitement that is generated by a simile. The future
awaits us when a simile is broached. What will it be like? A red, red, Rose.
What a happy consummation! Think about the second red. The first one
comes as the downbeat of an iamb--a red, the second one as the first word
in a pair that ends with rose. Consider the force of the three ri.
Now for a verse much closer to us than that of Robert Burns, though
it may be that only to certain rather aging Americans does it seem so irrunediate. This generation's rhythmic habits may well be different. Here goes: "I
can't give you anything but love 2 3 4 Baby!" Read it out loud: it starts with
a jolt on I, foot down, first person singular. Once we have heard it with its
catchy tune and rattling snares we tap our feet. Can't help it. After its slamdunk into love on the first down beat of the third measure you can't help but
begin counting empty time (2, 3, 4!) so that Balry!, in all its sweet fecklessness, gives us a double jolt on the fourth down-beat of the piece. There's an
endearing insouciance, a sophisticated sappiness in the whole verse. Its con-
struction pulls us into the act, making us both witty and sexy as the 1--the
(g<>--<lances through its slice of time, deprecating itself and fi:nessing us
into the universal seduction game!
The "My love.. in the verse My love is like a red, red Rose" is more
mysterious than the 'T' in "I can't give you anything but love,-Baby!" My
points to its down beat love; but that is something that can't be pointed to,
11
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
let alone defined. In reciting the verse we could, if we wish, imitate the longs
and shorts of our Latin verse: uDeus creator omnium"-"My love is like a
red, red Rose"-but there's no necessity for it. English verse depends on
stress, not length. In either performance, however, the foot comes down on
the important words kve and like, The rest of the quatrain takes off from
the like and plunges the rose first into spring-time, June, and then, in the next
two verses, into a simile that is the heart of this essay. Here is the quatrain:
My love is like a red, red, Rose
That's newly sprung in June.
My love is like a melodie
That's sweetly played in tune.
A melody has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is a wordless and
memorable piece of time, coiled up in our mind's winter like a tulip bulb
ever ready to unfold when spring arrives, Is love like a melody? Love is a
hope, an anticipation, looking ever forward to a consummation that
would mark its demise. All similes are double-edged: they are both like
and unlike what they refer us to. That is the pathos of all similes and in
particular of this simile:
My love is like a melodie
That's sweetly played in tune
A melody can be repeated over and over again, Its very reality lies in
its not being real! Love is not like that.
We must look back at the first verse we examined, which is by now
firmly stored up in your memory: uDeus creator onmium." St. Augustine
places his discussion of this verse, as you may recall, at the very end on
his chapter on time, a chapter which in its turn is placed at the completion of the autobiographical section of his Co'!fessions. The unfolding of
his life's time has led him-almost of necessity-into both a meditation
�ALLANBROOK
71
and an explication centered upon the word time. It is only with this in
mind that the sense and meaning of his analysis of the verse gets its full
import. Let it be stated hypothetically: if God created everything, then
time is indeed part of that creation and accompanies every created thing
in the course of its life here in this created world. That world has a beginning, a middle and an end, as does the life of a man and the history of
the world. A melody or a psalm in such a world might well then be a true
image of creation, and not merely a construct that taunts us with both its
likeness and its pathetic difference: not a simile, not a metaphor.
Just as at this moment in his life he both looks forward with anticipation and backwards into the halls of his memory, so when Augustine is
about to recite our verse his expectation extends fotward into the future over
the whole extent of the psalm. Once he begins reciting, whatever he plucks
from the future and lets fall into the past enters his memory, what he calls
his faculty of "looking back at:' The life of this activity is both backwards
to memory and forward in expectation of what he is about to recite. In
other words his--and our-present attention is what the future passes
through on its way to the past. As I progress, expectation lessens and memory increases. Here are his exact words:
And what is true of the whole psalm is also true of every
part of the psalm and of every syllable in it. The same
holds good for any longer action, of which the psalm may
be only a part. It is true also of the whole of a man's life,
of which all of his actions are parts. And it's true of the
whole history of humanity of which the lives of all men
are parts.
This tremendous conclusion completes his discussion of time and
memory, and the verse chosen- Deus creator omnium, C'God the creator
11
of everything")--substantiates in its words what the action of his attention
performs. The moments, weeks, months and years of our life, the totality
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
of such parts, the very ages of man, are not one damned thing afi:er another, mere perturbations in the sea of becoming-tomorrow and tomorrow
and tomorrow-; they have a true beginning, a true middle, and a true end
because and only because they were created by God. Given this understanding, our psahns and our speeches reflect this: they are true images, not
the paltry work of our so-called creativity with its games of simile and
metaphor, When we give voice to them we lend them the life of our breath
and of our movements which serve to measure their lengths and to round
out their periods. Genesis tells us our breath was the breath of life, our
"inspiration;' breathed into us by the Diviniry, that very breath which measures our syllables and our feet. This is the literal meaning of both the
famous word psyche and its Latin twin animus. Our enlivening, our first aspi-
ration, was from God, our first inspiration.
For most of us such statements seem to issue from the mouths of
either saints or madmen; we are not, like St. Augustine, rhetoricians seized
by the blinding, ever-present moment of ultimate attention, Grace. Our
poems are not the Psahns or the Bible and our lifetimes are opaque. We take
our time differently, and the perennial memorability of our constructs, of
our cherished lyrics, of our caged nightingales, are--of necessity-fraught
with pathos as we cottfront the tricky sea of self-love, and swim like drunken boats in a medium which sets no limits, which has no port of arrival,
nor any hope of one!
Part Two
All poems are time-pieces-always constructed, always formal. The best
of them are like an excellent Swiss watch, unswervingly acrurate. They make
us catch our breath as we are paced through their matchless lengths. I propose now to get down to brass tacks, to present to you three marvelous sonnets, one Italian, one English, and one American. All three of them, being
Italian or Pettarchan sonnets, follow a pattern of eight lines followed by six
lines: an octet followed by a sextet, as you can readily observe if you glance
at your scores. (They are scores, as this is an essay whose subject is music.)
�ALLANBROOK
73
Read carefiilly to yourself the first and by far the earliest of these sonnets
so as to have something in your ears before any discussion of them ensues.
Que! rosignuol, che si soave piagne
Forse suoi figli o sua cara consorte
Di dolcezza empie il cielo e le campagne
Con tante note si pietose e scorte;
E tutta notte par che rn' accornpagne
E mi rammente la mia dura sorte;
Ch' altri che me non o di ch'i' rni lagne,
Che'n dee non credev'io regnasse Morte.
0 che lieve inganar chi s' assecura!
Que' duo be'lurni, assai piu che'l sol chiari,
Chi penso rnai veder fra terra oscura?
Or cognosco io che rnia fera ventura
Vuol che vivendo e lagrimando impari
Corne nulla qua giu diletta e dura.
e
There were sonnets around the literary landscape before Pettarch; he,
however, firmly established the form with his many, many sonnets to the
Lady Laura: one set was written ~~In Vita di Madonna Laura'1-"In the
life of Lady Laura"-and another set written "In Morte di Madonna
I.aura"-"In the death of Lady Laura:' To those of you who do not know
Italian the reading of the sonnet may be somewhat irksome as it could
only have be a musical experience for you if you can mouth the proper
sounds of the words, and for those who are not acquainted with Italian
they are merely words. If you examine closely the scores you will note that
the separate lines, the measures as it were, all contain eleven syllables, the
famous undecasillabe employed throughout the Commedia by Dante. There is
also a rhyme scheme which is in the octet,
abba abba
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
and in the sextet,
cdc cdc,
rhyme being a rhythmic device which chimes like sounds at the ends of
measures, underlining the last downbeat. As all Italian words end in vowels it strains less the Italian poet to rhyme than his English brother,
though the rhymes in this particular sonnet are all double: compagne-m'accompagne-lagne, consorte-sorte-Morle. In the sextet: s'assecura-oscura-duraJ chiariimpari. Once we are accustomed to Italian sonnets, whether they be in
English or Italian, our anticipation of what is to come is specific, and
pleasure results as we see the fUture slipping past us with the lengths and
accents we expected, but with the actuality of the sounds-that is the
words-brand new. If we are acquainted with Italian the particular meaning of the rhymed words reaches a climax at both the end of the octet
and at the end of the sextet: sorte, Morte--fate, death-, and at the end of
the sextet oscura, dura--dark, harsh.
Here is a rough but adequate translation:
That nightingale that is weeping so smoothly, perhaps
for his little ones or for his dear consort, with sweetness
fills the night with so many notes both pitiful and
accomplished. It is also my companion all night long,
and reminds me of my own hard fate: I cannot blame
anyone but myself for believing that she was a goddess
and not subject to Death. Oh how easy it is to be secure
in one's self-deceit! Who ever thought to see beneath the
dark earth those two eyes dearer than the sun? But I recognize that my bitter path means living and crying at the
same time, bitter and harsh as anything here below.
�ALLANBROOK
75
The nightingale is famous. Its very name is beautiful in many languages: Nachtingal, Nightingale, Rossignol, Usignuolo, Bulbul. We are told constantly that its chirpings are beautiful and without fUrther thought we
apply our human word song to its nocturnal emissions.
What has the nightingale to do with the life and death of Laura?
Some have gone as far as doubting that the Lady Laura existed. Others,
who enjoy a mixture of philosophy and criticism, would admit that while
Petrarch may have met her during the years he lived in Avignon, he "idealized" her. She is, without a doubt, nearly immortal in the countless
songs and sonnets written to her by Petrarch, just as he himself has gained
immortal fame as the author of her praise. The fourteen-line form,
known forever after as the Petrarchan sonnet, has a most particular sub-
ject matter, a subject matter which is inseparable from its formal structure. In its first eight lines, the octet, the sonnet pays attention to something in nature. In its concluding six lines, the sextet,
it takes a look,_ as in
a mirror, at the author, or at all of us, in contradistinction to nature. This
is the artifice or the nature of a sonnet.
In one important use of the word nature we are all of us as natural as
the nightingale. But the nightingale is not self-conscious, and we are. In
this our natures differ. Is it a fallacy to feel sympathy with nature, and to
feel that it, in its turn, is sympathetic to us? If, as seems to be the case,
modern biological science demonstrates that we share DNA with the
humblest of one-celled creatures and worms, that we are in fact akin to
them, what follows for us? Does the fact that all life is akin induce sympathy or even empathy in us or in them? We can't soar like the gimlet-eyed
eagle, though we are remarkably like the sluggish worm both spatially and
temporally: food in the front end, digest in the middle, and out at the
other end. Beginning, middle, and end. As it is so wittily put by Gilbert
and Sullivan in a song addressed to a grieving tit-willow: '"Is it weakness
of intellect, birdie' I cried, 'or a rather tough worm in your little inside?"'
Nature is a slippery word. It so easily becomes a red herring, a deception designed to lead us on some defiantly theoretical trip. In so many
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
books and in so many arguments this word is employed as a pawn in some
artful game. We, almost all of us, also say commonly that nature has its
ways of taking time: summer and winter, spring and fall, generation and
corruption. The sun and the moon have their periods as do our physical
bodies. Analogically our very sentences are periodic (as are our melodies)
and the entrancing completions of our rhythmic verses are a musical
device which enhances this "natural" phenomenon.
Does great nature mock our symmetries or are we imitating her tak-
ings of time, her comings to be and her passings away? If she eternally
returns as the seasons roll by and the great sphere rotates, then indeed
Laura's death is not consonant with her, and the nightingale's courtship is
indistinguishable fi:om lament.
Look over the sextet of the Petrarch sonnet again:
Oh how easy it is to be secure in one's self-deceit. Who
ever thought to see beneath the dark earth those two eyes
clearer than the sun? But I recognize that ·my bitter path
means living and crying at the same time, bitter and harsh
as anything here below.
When Augustine at the end of his dissertation on time analyzed for
us Ambrose's verse "Deus creator omnium;' he, as a trained rhetorician, one
might even say as the ultimate rhetorician, was well aware of the full
meaning of the words he was looking at. If God is the creator of every-
thing, he is creator of time. God's time it is and not our time, or nature's
time. The creator's time has a true beginning, middle, and end as do our
days and years, as do our lives. as do our syllables, our phrases, and our
periods. All of these aforementioned things are true images of God's
time, a tracing of his reality, and the ever present now, the ultimate
moment of attention, is indeed the moving finger of eternity.
Let us now take up Augustine's analysis again. This time we will operate upon it; it will suffer a violent sea change in the process. Instead of
�ALLANBROOK
77
11
1
employing his verse Deus creator omnium" ( God the creator of everything")
we will substitute the sonnet of Petrarch we have been examining.
For what is true of the whole sonnet is also true of every
part of the sonnet and of every syllable in it. The same
holds true for any longer action of which the sonnet is only
a part. It is also true of the whole of a man's life, of which
all of his ,actions are only parts. And it is true of the whole
history of humanity, of which the lives of men are only
parts.
Time is now the locus of pathos; it is in truth our time, our brief span,
our transient moments and days which find their image in our syllables and
in our phrases and in our periods. History's great paragraphs pass befOre our
eyes in all their awful sameness. We seek solace in the crystallizing moments
of present attention, moments which seek to memorialize our lives by fixing
rime within our human constructs with the aid of words and with the aid
of music.
A priest wrote the next sonnet and he speaks of a priest's business--the
administration of the sacraments.
It is, nevertheless, a true sonnet both in
form and in content. if indeed it is proper to separate the two.
Felix Randal the furier, 0 he is dead then? my duty all ended,
Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardyhandsome
Pining, pining, rill time when reason rambled in it and some
Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?
Sickness broke him. Impatient he rursed at first. but mended
Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some
Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom
Tendered to him. Ah, well, God rest him all road ever he
offendedl
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too
it endears
My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy
tears,
Thy tears that touched my heart. Child, Felix, poor Felix
Randal
How far from then forethought of. all thy more boisterous
years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and
battering sandal!
On reading the score, note the rhyme scheme: in the octet,
abba abba
-all ended, -handsome, --and som~ --all contended; --mended, --began som~ ransom, --offended. In the sextet,
ccd ccd
--endears, -tears, -Randal; --years, -peers, -sandaL There is not a fixed
syllable count but rather an astonishing, fulsome line whose rhythm lopes
along with a prose-like spring.
While the Petrarch sonnet begins with "Q.<el rosignor' ('That nightingale"), this sonnet begins with a proper name, Felix Randal, and then
names his profession. He is a farrier, or blacksmith. The natural event
reported is the reception of the news of his death. "Oh he is dead then?"
It is cast in the vivid present and immediately followed by "My duty all
ended;' a completed perfect tense. The rest of the octet takes past time as
it progresses: "pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it.'' A single past event-"Sickness broke him"-and what transpired afi:er-"he
�ALLANBROOK
79
cursed at first, but mended I being anointed and all; though a heavenlier
heart began some I months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom I tendered to him"-a past perfect moment. The octet ends with a
third person imperative, a prayer for all future time in reference to what
is past: ''Ah, well, God rest him all road ever he offended:' With hope and
prayer the blacksmith's time will be consonant with God's time.
The sextet then proceeds to pack a wallop, but not until its last three
lines. It begins with a present general statement: ''This seeing the sick
endears them to us, us too it endears." Then we are thrust back to past
time as bearing witness to the general statement. "My tongue had taught
thee comfort, touch had quelled thy tears, thy tears that touched my heart,
child, Felix, poor Felix Randal:'
A mere priest might have stopped here, but the time-artist, the poet,
seizes the moment of compassion, his memory and imagination placing
it against the blacksmith as he was in his prime, working at his forge.
How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous
years
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fetter for the great grey drayhorse his bright and
battering sandal!
The extraordinary phrase "How far from then forethought of" crams
time into a capsule. The regular iambs concentrate our attention; the reit-
erated consonantsf and th give added intensity: "How far from then forethought o£'We could-though we needn't-recite it with long and short
syllables as was done in our Latin verse: uDeus creator omnium,-~~how
far from then forethought o£'The last two verses of the sextet and of the
sonnet stamp an image so vividly upon the mind's eye that the very conceit of the poem loses its feeling of artifice as the poem clangs into its last
rhyme of sandal with Randal and the figure of the man, the blacksmith
Felix Randal, resounds in our ears.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and batter
ing sandal!
The then in "How far from then forethought of" has become a now,
present to us in all its pathos if we pause to think back at the opening of
the sonnet: "Felix Randal the farrier. Oh, he is dead then?"
The last sonnet, by Robert Frost, begins, not with a nightingale or
with the death of a man, but with an anonymous bird singing in its sleep.
We are not told whether it is a robin or a lark or a whippoorwilL It is a
plain sounding sonnet, its sophistication arising out of its seeming simplicity. It employs, with three notable exceptions, short Anglo-Saxon
words.
A bird half wakened in the lunar noon
Sang halfWay through its little inborn tune.
Partly because it sang but once all night
And that from no especial bush's height,
Partly because it sang ventriloquist
And had the inspiration to desist
Almost before the prick of hostile ears,
It ventured less in peril than appears.
It could not have come down to us so far,
Through the interstices of things ajar
On the long bead chain of repeated birth,
To be a bird while we are men on earth,
If singing out of sleep and dream that way
Had made it much more easily a prey.
The octet reports an event in nature; the sextet-as is traditionalcomments on the natural event, bringing in not so much the poet as all
of us "men on earth" as the focus of attention. The metric structure
�ALLANBROOK
81
adheres strictly to the rules of the game: there is a ten syllable count. It
is written in iambic pentameter, the bread and butter of English
versification.
Unlike Shakespeare's habits with the pentameter, there are no caesuras
after the first two feet, however. The rhyme scheme differs from that of
the other two sonnets and sounds with the close clang of rhyming couplets: noon-tune, night-height, vmtriloquist-desist, ears-appears, Jar-ajar, birth-earth,
way-prry. When a Latinate word crops up in the fifth line it sticks out, the
sound of it and its placement having everything to do with its meaning:
vmtriloquist. The poet himself is a ventriloquist in this sonnet. He's a plain
old bird using plain old words. You can't put your finger on him. Where
is he? The next line delivers over to us the most famous of all Latinate
words having to do with poesy: inspiration. We have one more Latinate
word in the sextet: interstices, a crabbed and fussy word. With these simple
observations in mind, peruse the poem once again:
A bird half wakened in the lunar noon
Sang halfway through its little inborn tune.
Partly because it sang but once all night
And that from no especial bush's height,
Partly because it sang ventriloquist
And had the inspiration to desist
Ahnost before the prick of hostile ears
It ventured less in peril than appears.
It could not have come down to us so far,
Through the interstices of things ajar
On the long bead chain of repeated birth,
To be a bird while we are men on earth,
If singing out of sleep and dream that way
Had made it much more easily a prey.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
It's part of the pleasure of the piece that it is not a nightingale singing
for its mate; it's some plain feathered creature. It is not singing in some
imagined garden, some sylvan grove reminiscent of our ancestral Eden, It
is happening in some plain old woods. To be sure, the moon is out as the
bird is "half wakened in the lunar noon:' The singer's Hinspiration" is not
the source of his singing, quite the contrary: his "inspiration, is a cautionary impulse to desist from singing before danger appears. There is no
snake that will imperil him in this non-Eden. He must be alert for a fox
or a marauding owl which could silently swoop from below or above and
consume him utterly. Very much a report on nature and certainly intended as a palliative for the "pathetic fallacy:'
In addition to being most "American;' this sonnet is decidedly a
11
modern" sonnet. It is, as we would expect, this aspect and reflection
which comes to the fore in the sextet, The word nature, if we dare employ
it any longer-and many are the writers and lecturers who brandish it
about with equanimity-is now part of a new bali game, a game in which
time and distance leap far beyond the limits of imagination. We are nowadays beyond even the old "modern" view of Pascal, who was aghast when
faced with the infinity of space: 'The eternal silence of those infinite
spaces terrifies me;' he wrote. We cannot, as he could not, conceive of the
cosmos as a glorious ornament. How consoling it would be to have a
crystalline sphere with a proper, finite diameter! Our mathematical
artifices in this century have plunged us far beyond Pascal into a numbing beginning of an explosion emanating from a near infinitesimal point,
an explosion that coagulates into something that is no longer matter, as
if we had ever known what that was! Black negativity reigns at the center
of our galaxies, and there are simply too many of them either to imagine
or to conceive. Vision ceases. It is almost with a sense of relief that we
turn from such matters and consider our men on the moon and their view
of our home, our blue and cloud-shrouded sphere, enveloped in its
gaseous life preserver. Back down on earth we take time as evolution presents it to us. We have no choice but to accept being's timetable as estab-
�ALLANBROOK
83
lished by Darwin, and our reading of the geological record, rhe long bead
chain of repeated birrh, as Mr. Frost states so succinctly. Benearh our
gaseous envelope, in our little corner of the universe, something remark-
able confronts us, something more wondrous than a miracle. We men on
earth hear a bird singing in its sleep and pay attention to it. Borh man and
bird have emerged from evolution's long and solidified game of chance.
We are both of us, bird and man, the residue of evolution's random but
ordered production of all of our dear and memorable species. What a
coincidence; we are aware of each other. It cannot have been planned! It
did occur, however. Frost's sonnet is full of this wonder;
it calls attention
to a simple event and rhe poem itself becomes a memorial, an artifice that
escapes from time by fixing our attention upon a moment in time.
It is also a cautionary sonnet. God is not looking at rhe bird nor looking afrer him. The bird could well be dead if he were not a ventriloquist,
cunningly throwing his voice, singing from a certain undetectable height,
and having rhe inspiration to stop singing before the onslaught of a
marauding fox or a cruising owl.
All of our songs and sonnets are constructions, cages in which we
place our nightingales. They are made out of our breathing, our walking,
and our heartbeats: the physical lumber of our existence from day to day.
They are all cautionary tales in which we celebrate and lament our timeridden lives, and in which we preserve for future generations our bestcrafted observations, like insects preserved over millennia in Baltic amber.
What we do when we are wide awake is
pay attention to our existence, to
its duration, and to our place: what, where, and when. These celebratory
constructs are our perennial poems;
they fix us with fUll self-conscious-
ness in that moment of observation and parhos. They are rhe nearest we
have to a definition of ourselves as we peer forth from rhis obscure corner of an unimaginable universe, observing, wondering, and preserving.
Some of you may be wondering, remembering rhe opening of this
essay, if St. Augustine has been lefr far behind, if I have not insisted that
all our poems are either pagan or secular. Perhaps so. It is perfectly clear
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
that there can be no music in Paradise: that ultimate construct is out of
time, eternal. ("Is there no change of death in Paradise;' begins a canto of
Wallace Stevens.) When we recite--or even better, sing-and intend to
ourselves the meaning of "Deus creator omnium;' we assent that God, the
creator of everything, made the world and established its time as having
a beginning, a middle, and an end. We make of the history of the world
a celebratory hymn of praise, a psalm, an ultimate period. We can quote
Augustine backwards and try it on for size:
What is true of the whole history of humaniry, of which
the lives of men are parts is true also of the whole of a
man's life, of which all his actions are parts. The same
also holds good for any action of which the psalm is a
part and what is true of the whole psalm is also true of
every part of the psalm and of every syllable in it.
There is another psalm which sings so eloquently of this same thing:
"Let everything that has breath, Praise the Lord;' a psalm set with per-.
fection by Stravinsky at the end of his "Symphony of Psalms:'
Bear in mind however that when our priest played at poet he took
time as a true time-keeper. The last lines of his incomparable sonnet
speak in never-to-be-forgotten words the pathos of self-conscious human
existence when face to face with death, time's end.
How far from then forethought o£ all thy more boisterous
years.
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and
battering sandal.
I. In Latin, meter is quantitative.
�~
fj-
Nature and Creativity in Goethe's
Elective Affinities
Astrida Orle Tantillo
Both in his literary and personal life, Goethe has the reputation of
being a lover. Yet, it is difficult to pin down his views of love from his literary texts. Werther is a great romantic who refuses to give up his love for
Lotte, while Faust is so caught up in his own sphere of enjoyment that he
cruelly forgets about Gretchen. The poet who uses the naked back of his
mistress to tap out hexameters 1 is the same novelist who preaches the
virtues of renunciation in Wilhelm Meister.
In his autobiography, Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und W.hrheit), Goethe
provides us with sketches of his views on love. He describes in great detail
his first and youthful loves-Frederica, Charlotte, and Lili-and how he
literally runs away in order to escape romantic attachments with them. He
then describes how these flights become intimately entwined with his art.
His powers of creativity exist symbiotically with his capacity to love: his
artistty stems from his ability to turn the reality of his romantic experiences into poetty. He tells us, for example, that he himself was Werther,
but instead of actually shooting himself, he does it on paper and thereby
escapes Werther's fate (HA 9:588). Love inspires the young Goethe to
write a novel about suicide, but art makes possible his own escape (HA
9:588).
For Goethe, art becomes a means of overcoming limits in order to
gain new freedoms and insights. This relationship in itself is perhaps not
at all unusual when speaking of writers and their work. Goethe, however,
extends this view of creativity into the natural realm. According to his
natural philosophy, nature is not limited to the procreative in its expressiveness, but finds other creative avenues as well. Both organic and inorAstrida Orlc Tantillo is Assistant Professor in the German Department at University of 1Ilinois at
Chicago.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ganic natural entities are capable of overcoming regular Hlaws" of nature
in order to create new entities and forms.
This essay examines the relationship between love, nature, and creativity in Goethe's most scientific novel, Elective Affinities. During the course
of his novel, Goethe compares natural and human artistry. The characters
in the novel are successful to the extent that they are able to be creative.
Their creativity, however, is not limited to innovative endeavors, but is
closely linked to their ability (and inability) to find creative solutions in
the face of personal obstacles. Similarly, throughout Goethe's scientific
works, plants, animals, and inanimate colors strive to be creative in the
face of struggles or obstacles, And like human artists, plants and animals
are capable of creation beyond and apart from sexual reproduction. Even
colors possess a myriad of creative possibilities in their various interactions with the world around them, Moreover, time and time again,
Goethe draws parallels between nature's works and his own, whether he
likens the process of writing an essay to the growth of a plant' or applies
Aristotle's principle of compensation' to both organic forms and literary
works (HA 1:201-203). Goethe's scientific works therefore provide a
philosophical and non-literary context for the importance and role of
creativity in Elective Affinities.
A generation before Darwin! Goethe hints in some of his scientific
works at how plants and animals may break out of a necessitous gene
pool through eros and create a new species. In other words, Goethe suggests that animals are not limited to procreativity in their creative endeavors, but that they may have the ability to evolve and change their forms as
their environment or other conditions warrant. For example, in a review
essay' on the anatomist d'Alton's works on sloths and pachyderms,
Goethe describes how an animal may, through an exertion of its will,
change its own form and its way of life. In the middle of this scientific
commentary, Goethe asks for our indulgence. He wishes to deviate &om
scientific prose for a moment in order to use more poetic expression. He
then begins a kind of tale or fable about a monstrous spirit, which we
�TANTILLO
87
could well recognize as a whale in the ocean. Goethe's fable, as we shall
see, is an evolutionary one. This monstrous spirit attempts to live on land.
At first this creature feels constrained by its new environment. Soon, however, it sprouts monstrous or enormous limbs to help him carry his mon-
strous body around on land. This whale goes through a period of experimentation as it tries to find the correct balance for its limbs in its new
environment. The first creative attempt of this creature backfires-it
grows disproportionately large gangly limbs out of an "impatience" to
gain freedom on land (GA 17:350). Goethe, however, describes another
attempt of a monstrous spirit which is more successfUl in its endeavors to
produce a new form for itself. He writes of a later cousin of the first creature, an Unau (a type of sloth), which forges a more balanced approach
to the limitations of a new environment. This cousin, which successfully
challenges some limits, while accepting others, creates a new body for
itself which approaches the "mobile ape genus:'
Goethe similarly examines the mobility and the creativity of particular species, in a less fancifUl manner, in several other scientific works. In
his review essay6 on d' Alton's works on rodents, Goethe discusses a vari-
ety of different kinds of rodents and describes how their particular
method of balancing their wills against necessitous limirs leads to deliberate artistry, warfare, and even the creation of new creatures.
In this essay, Goethe describes teeth generally for all animals as a
"shackle of nature;' a shackle which determines their development. He
links the clumsy state of cows to their "incompleteness of chewing" and
explains that their teeth keep their development close to the ground and
occupied with food. His examination of the rodent family, however,
shows how nature's very shackle leads to creativity not only in the animal's
activity, but also in the formation of new animals.
Goethe's description of the main characteristic trait of rodents,
incessant gnawing, illustrates how this activity has far-reaching creative
implications. This gnawing may be regarded as a kind of almost convulsive passion (GA 17:355) or as a Hcontinuous exercise, a restless drive to
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
be occupied" (GA 17:357) which finally escalates into a "destructive fit"
(GA 17:357). Afi:er satisfying their needs, the rodents still would like to
live in more secure plenty. They exert their passionate energy toward the
gathering or collecting drive as well as toward other activities, which
leads, according to Goethe, to some deeds that at first appear to be very
similar to
II
deliberate artistry". 7 For example, the obsessive gnawing of
beavers enables them to build elaborate dwelling spaces for themselves,
Whereas many of Goethe's contemporaries, such as d'Alton, believed
that animals create their dwellings out of "dumb instinct," Goethe
argues the opposite. In d' Alton's mind, there is no great difference
between a beaver's dwelling and a snail's shell. Both are created out of an
animal's unconscious instinct for shelter. 8 Goethe, in contrast, argues
that a rodent's passionate drive leads to highly creative acts-acts that
appear to be more closely related to human artistic activities than to
determined natural ones.
A rodent's creativity, however, is not limited to its collection of nuts
or to its building of elaborate housing structures, but has far greater possibilities. In discussing the various members of the rodent family, Goethe
further illustrates how limitless the variations of the structure of these
creatures can be. He suggests in this essay that species may evolve and
change over time. While he admits on the one hand that animal forms are
in part determined and static, he also argues on the other hand that the
forms can change and transform themselves into infinite varieties over the
generations (GA I7:354). In other words, an animal is not limited simply to reproduction in its ability to create, but it may change its very form
from one generation to the next, He stresses the versatility of the rodents
and describes how their capricious will (Willkiir) leads to the creation of
so many different forms that a close observation of them may cause us to
fall into a kind of insanity (W..hnsinn). He then points to the variety of
different rodents, including beavers, flying squirrels, and rabbits, and
describes how different environments led to the formation of each rodent
type. He further explains how these rodents are very similar to very dif-
�TANTILLO
89
ferent animal groups. He describes how rhe rodent species "leans as much
toward the carnivores as toward the ruminants, as much toward the apes
as toward the bats, and resembles still orhers which lie between these genera" (my translation). If any doubt is left about the creative heights the
rodents can achieve, Goerhe links upright posture in squirrels and in
human beings, contending rhat borh stem from the same desire (GA
I7:355-56). This tendency, which Cornell calls "Faustian excess;' is a
striving to break free of limits imposed upon rhis creature (485).
Goethe's account of passionate striving extends into the inanimate
world. He demands in his Theory of Colors (a work which he thought
eclipsed all of his poetry") that we analyze colors according to their
actions and passions. He explains that we can only understand colors if
we study them as we would rhe behavior of human beings. Notably,
some colors are more active (e.g. yellow), while others are more passionate (e.g. blue). Their interactions
an4 unions, moreover, are seen as acts
of procreation. Goerhe characterizes the entire Theory of Colors as a kind
of play in which the individual stories of various colors form the plot of
an intricate drama. And like any play, it must be experienced visually if
one is to experience its full effect:
A good play is only half present in the written text. The
greater portion of it draws on rhe glitter of the stage, the
personality of rhe actor, the power of his voice, the distinctiveness of his gestures, even the intelligence and
favorable mood of the audience. This applies all the more
to a work on natural phenomena. If rhe reader is to enjoy
and make use of it, he must actually have nature before
him, either in fact or in the activity of is imagination. 10
This scientific work becomes a drama in every sense of rhe word as
we witness colors that act in various ways. The main plot of this play is
a kind of love story between yellow and blue and rhe dilemma they face.
They can eirher choose an earthly marriage and meld into the color green
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
or they can aspire towards heavenly heights and meet through
intensification in the ideal color pure red (HA I3:478-79, 52I).
Although both green and pure red are formed by the union of two
opposing colors, red is the more perfect union because it is able to reconcile, without destroying, the characteristics of each opposing color
(HA 13:499-500). [Notably, the drama here echoes that work which
critics tend to think of as Goethe's best-Faust. Faust has a double nature
and laments that the two souls in his breast are not at peace (HA 3:4 I,
lines I I I 0-22). He, too has a choice in the direction he may take. Faust
is successfUl in his gamble, and in the end, we literally see a unified soul
ascending towards heaven.)
Goethe does not, however, speak of love and creativity in nature sim-
ply metaphorically. Like the natural philosopher Lucretius, Goethe
believes that animate and inanimate nature act similarly, 11 and that the
human and the non-human realms are in some way a reflection of each
other. Goethe's world is an active and interactive one, in which colors,
chemicals, plants and people-all have characters and all influence one
another. He therefore believed that human beings stand to learn about
themselves from the inanimate world.
As we now turn to Goethe's novel Elective Affinities, we can begin to
trace the theme of creativity and necessity in the human realm. Having an
overtly natural scientific premise, this novel gives us an opportunity to
witness the successfUl and unsuccessful human attempts to overcome limitations through creativity, especially those limitations presented by love.
Elective Affinities, on many levels mirrors the themes of his scientific works.
However, where nature often seems human in his scientific works, the
characters in the novel see their own actions in light of natural principles,12 Moreover, where Goethe's example of the rodents demonstrates
how one can use desire to strive to reach beyond one's self-whether to
create collections, build intricate structures, or create entirely new physical forms--the characters in the novel illustrate how limiting natural
desire may be when not accompanied by creative striving.
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91
One of the main themes of the novel is marriageY Two of the main
characters, Charlotte and Eduard, have recently wed after the death of
their respective first spouses. Although they were childhood sweethearts,
both initially married for money and position. Their current relationship
to each other drastically changes with the arrival of the Captain, Eduard's
close friend, and Ottilie, Charlotte's young and beautiful niece. The novel
takes its title from an eighteenth-century chemical principle of attraction,
"Wahlverwandtschtiften;' translated as "elective affinities" or telations by
11
choice:' 14 This conveniently ambiguous name, suggesting both marriages
and chemical bonds, asks us to examine not only the actions of human
beings but also the actions of nature in matters of love. Is love at first
sight, in essence, at all different from the reaction between limestone and
sulfuric acid? Conversely, if even the elements are viewed as possessing a
kind of will and choice in their actions and interactions, should not
human beings, too, be able to free themselves from "fatal" attractions? In
the novel, the characters themselves discuss the theory and make analogies
to their own lives. The focal point of the discussion is what happens to a
pair of united elements once a third party is introduced.
As in Goethe's characterization of passionate squirrels and colors, the
chemical formula within the novel is also described in passionate terms:
tender elements unite, flee from one another, search for one another, and
show marked inclinations for particular partners. Where the Theory if
Colors presents a love story between blue and yellow in which we study
their actions and passions, the chemical theory of elective affinities portrays a love-story among the inanimate elements. One of the main characters, the Captain, even echoes Goethe's instructions from the Theory if
Colors. he lectures another character that one can only understand these
natural elements
(with
their various unions or marriages, divorces, and
reunions) if one is an active observer and has these elements before one's
very eyes (HA 6: 275-76).
The basic premise of the principle of "elective affinities" is rather
straightforward: opposites will attract and form a new union. Charlotte and
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the Captain, however, see completely different dynamics at work behind the
theory. Charlotte, responding to her husband's fascination with the
udivorces" or the separations of the elements, cannot abide the word
"divorce:' even when merely referring to chemicals. She laments: HDoes this
sad word, which unfortunately we hear so often in society now, also occur
in the natural sciences?" (36; HA 6:273) She then denies the term "elective" or "choice" either to the elements or htunan beings. Instead, she
stresses the power of necessity and opportunity: "I would never see a choice
here, but rather a necessity of nature, and possibly not even this; for after
all it may be perhaps only a matter of opportunity. Opportunity occasions
relationships, just as it makes thieves" (37; HA 6:274). Strikingly, in her
own life, fi:ee will has litrle to do with her choices, Her first marriage was
arranged. Her second, to Eduard, comes about because both of their
spouses die unexpectedly, giving Charlotte and Eduard the opportunity to
marry.
In contrast to Charlotte's rather deterministic interpretation of the
theory, the scientific-minded Captain believes, in a manner reminiscent of
Lucretius, 15 that both human beings and the elements operate under the
rubric of fi:eedom, In observing the interactions between various chemical elements, the Captain believes "that it is justifiable to apply the word
elective affinity, because it really does look as if one kinship was preferred
to the other and chosen before it" (36; HA 6:274). His interpretation
emphasizes that nature's most simple elements do not act in a predetermined or mechanistic way, but are to a certain degree free to choose their
own partners, During the course of the novel, the Captain, like his view
of the elements in the theory, will fi:eely move fi:om place to place (HA
6:258; 479) and be willing to go fi:om partner to partner. 16
Given that each of the characters sees a radically different dynamic at
work within the theory, a question for us becomes whether the events in
the novel validate either of these character's views-Charlotte's deterministic view of nature or the Captain's opposing one of free will--or
whether they point to another possibility.
�TANTILLO
93
Many critics side with Charlotte, claiming that nature represents
necessiry and that Goethe is illustrating our unsuccessful battle against
nature and necessity. 17 Such interpretations revolve around a mistaken
impression of Goethe's natural philosophy and do not take his creative
view of nature into account. Nowhere in his scientific writings does
nature seem simply determined or for that matter simply &ee. Nature, as
the examples of the rodent species and evolving whale demonstrate, may
at times be highly creative. Indeed, that we are to view colors as characters with actions and passions (or elements as passionate beings), further
demonstrates how creative Goethe believes nature may be. Even Charlotte
does not see nature acting differently &om human beings. If she views
nature as determined, it is because she believes human beings to be so.
Similarly, the Captain thinks the elements are free because human beings
are. Strikingly, although these two characters have diametrically opposed
opinions on love and freedom, they agree with Goethe's basic tenet that
human beings and nature are similar.
One of the difficulties in trying to interpret the role of nature is that
the tone of the novel is never consistent. Occasionally it is ominously serious: one child goes insane, another drowns, and both Ottilie and Eduard
die. At other times, however, it is playfully, even maliciously, ironic.
Charlotte, the character who most defends societal norms, also rearranges
tombstones for aesthetic reasons. The institution of marriage is vehemently defended, but its champion is the eccentric bachelor, Mittler. The
greatest critic of marriage, the unhappily married Count, cannot wait to
marry agam.
Nor are Goethe's own comments on the book very elucidating. He
hints to one friend that the novel contains an all-pervasive theme (GA
24:636). He also claims, much as he did about Werther, that the novel is
highly autobiographical-that he experienced every line within it (GA
24:395). When accused of being a heathen, he defends himself by saying
that he killed off Ottilie (presumably for her sins), 18 yet in his autobiography he tells us her character was based upon a Christian saint. At one
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
time he claims to hate Eduard (GA 24:219), while at another he admits
to admiring his capacity to love.I''
If we return to text and examine the main relationships in the novel,
then Ottilie and Eduard's relationship seems to support Charlotte's deterministic interpretation of the chemical theory. Eduard and Ottilie act
very much as if no freedom of choice exists for their lives. Opportunity
has brought them together and once it has, no force seems strong
enough-whether societal customs, paternal emotions, or duty to one's
guardian or spouse-to pull them apart. At the end of the novel, the narrator even characterizes them as representing not two human beings, but
one (HA 6:478). Ottilie and Eduard, in their love for each other, do not
appear to have any freedom to refuse their affinity. Their passion for each
other appears to be too strong for rational choice to play a role in their
relationship.
Conversely, Charlotte and the Captain's relationship seems to support
the Captain's view of nature. They seem so free from lasting attachments
that they unite and separate at wilL Charlotte marries rwice without love
and therefore cannot understand why Eduard and Ottilie cannot renounce
each other. After she first is widowed, she does not think of Eduard, the
love of her youth, for hersel£ but attempts to unite him with Orrilie. When
her attempts fail, she marries Eduard primarily because he is so persistent
in wooing her (HA 6:246). Although Charlotte eventually falls in love
with the Captain, it does not stop her &om either encouraging him to
accept a promotion that includes an arranged marriage, or when that falls
through, from trying to play match-maker berween Ottilie and the
Captain. Similarly, the Captain spends most of the novel drifting in and
out of romantic alliances, whether to the neighbor girl in the "Novella" or
to Charlotte.
Given that events in the novel support both Charlotte's and the
Captain's opposing natural views, how then are we to interpret the novel?
Perhaps the most important issue within the chemical theory and its rei-
�TANTILLO
95
evance for human beings is not whether nature is free or determined; at
times it may be free while at others determined. Neither extreme view
(that love is a necessitous force or that we may freely choose it) seems an
adequate explanation for the events in the novel. If we return to
Charlotte's and the Captain's discussion of the chemical theory, we discover that an important aspect is missing from both of their interpretations: both fail to address in any detail the creative function of the theory. Neither discusses the consequences of chemical unions, i.e. the creation of new entities. Charlotte appears to be more concerned about
avoiding divorces, while the Captain is fascinated by the elements' ability
to move from one partner to the next. The characters' inability to focus
upon or understand the creative aspects of nature within the chemical
theory becomes reflected within their own creative endeavors throughout
the novel. Their limited and often failed artistic attempts come to reflect
their personal limitations. Unlike the creative beavers, the evolving whale,
or the procreating colors, the characters do not seek creative options.
When we first meet Charlotte, she is putting the finishing touches
on a "moss hut:' The irony of this moss covered hut is heightened by
the way Charlotte treats the windows. To her, the windows are frames,
the view is a painting she has created by landscape gardening (HA
6:243). Charlotte's relationship with nature is analogous to her relationship with human beings. Like her efforts to tame and cultivate nature,
she hopes to restrain and civilize others. She believes that since she can
control her emotions and renounce the Captain, Eduard and Ottilie
should be able to renounce each other. But as her landscaping techniques
are faulty, and only make nature a greater adversary to the inhabitants of
the manor, so too does her plan of control backfire in the human sphere:
had she agreed to a divorce earlier, neither her baby nor Ottilie would
have died (HA 6:460).
Similarly, the Captain believes he has a great deal of control over
nature. His naesthetic" endeavors involve many mathematical calculations.
He believes that by carefully measuring and mapping nature one will have
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
mastery over it. For example, he calculates the exact number of stones
that need to be taken away from a cliff in order to build a better paththe exact number, moreover, that will then be needed to build a new wall.
So too, he believes he has a solution to get rid of beggars: they are to
receive money, not upon entering the town, but upon leaving it. His
rational calculations, however, fail to take the powers of nature into
account. His newly created shores crumble beneath the spectators' feet,
and beggars are not daunted in trying to receive money both within town
and while leaving it.
Eduard also attempts to practice art on nature. The first time we
encounter him, he is grafting shoots onto fruit trees (HA 6:242).
Eduard's efforts here, as in music and love, are sterile. The trees do not
produce fruit as they did before. This metaphor of grafting is used
throughout the novel. Charlotte hopes that her baby will act as a grafTed
shoot (HA 6:4 19), uniting the family, but Eduard has his eye on another young shoot: Ottilie. The middle-aged Eduard hopes to rejuvenate
himself and produce new fruit through Ottilie, but both nature and society reject such forced and artificial attempts at creativity. In his own
attempts to unite himself with Ottilie, Eduard stubbornly insists on getting his own way, but will not trouble himself with the details (HA
6:447-51). He believes that love itself is his talent and that he is already
a master of it (HA 6:355).
Similarly, the more Ottilie falls in love with Eduard, the more she
abandons her own creativity to become like him. She proves her love to
Eduard by adopting his handwriting to the extent that one can no longer
distinguish his handwriting &om her own. She eventually gives up her
own domestic pursuits and takes up Eduard's of gardening. Ottilie's and
Eduard's artistic attempts mirror their personal failures. Eduard plays the
violin abominably but insists that the others listen to him. Ottilie intentionally learns to play pieces, not as they are composed, but in accordance
with Eduard's mistakes. In consciously mimicking Eduard's unconscious
mistakes, Ottilie rejects art to choose mediocre conformity.
�TANTILLO
97
In this novel, art generally reflects the characters' limitations. Even the
minor characters do not attempt to be creative when they practice art, but
remain largely imitative. For instance, when a large party is bored, they put
on tableaux vivants. They search through copperplates and tty to imitate,
through elaborate stagings, selected pictures (HA 6:392-94). In essence,
they imitate imitations of art. The fact that the characters are trapped in
imitation is closely linked to their failures in love. Indeed, the only dilettante who is praised in the novel is an architect whose love for Ottilie
makes his paintings come to life (HA 6:370).
One of central Cteative" events in the novel is the conception of the
baby, Otto. On the night the child is conceived, the biological parents
engage in spiritual adultery, with very strange consequences. While making love to each other, each spouse thinks of another: Charlotte of the
Captain and Eduard of Ottilie. "And so the absent and the present were
interwoven-miraculously enough--seductively and blissfully each with
the other" (HA 6:32I). The result of this nocturnal indiscretion? A baby
who bears a resemblance to Eduard (HA 6:420), has Ottilie's eyes, and is
otherwise the spitting image of the Captain (HA 6:42I). As the baby
grows older, his resemblance to Eduard drops out of the account, and he
becomes more and more like Ottilie and the Captain (HA 6:455; 459).
The baby's procreation is symbolic of the artistic limitations of the
individual characters. Charlotte and Eduard, on their own, had not yet
been able to conceive a child. Otto is only conceived with the participation of ali four of the main characters. His existence, moreover, further
demonstrates that nature is both necessitous and capricious. Biology plays
a role in that he is born of Charlotte and resembles Eduard. However, his
resemblance to the other characters indicates that nature can break free of
its regular laws to create this being. We witness the triumph of love, not
mind, over matter. Love demands its rights and creates a ttue representational picture of the facts. This triumph of spiritual love, however, comes
at the expense of natural love. The maternal instinct appears to be
destroyed. The baby is largely ignored by its biological mother. Ottilie, the
11
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
spiritual mother, is a careless guardian, She simultaneously reads, walks
and carries the baby. Due to her carelessness, the baby dies in a boating
accident. Once again Goethe's irony comes into full play as Ottilie loses
her balance in the boat while carrying the baby and the book in the same
hand. Afi:er the baby dies, one would expect someone to mourn his death.
Again, Goethe appears to tease: the mother has no reaction, while the biological father is pleased. Almost everyone is relieved as this little being
dies. His death is not tragic because no one has chosen to love him. Here
the parents are even free to refuse an aflinity.
If the baby demonstrates, albeit in a very bizarre way, the creative
powers of love,20 the relations between the pairs, demonstrate the limitations of love. One might reasonably ask what alternatives these characters
really had. In the novel, two characters, the Count and the Baroness, have
situations similar to Ottilie and Eduard's: their marriage is delayed
because the Count's wife will not grant him a divorce. Unlike Eduard and
Ottilie or Charlotte and the Captain, however, this couple creatively work
around the obstacles, They meet whenever possible, but they also attempt
to keep up some appearances for the sake of society. Although not immediately, they eventually find togetherness afi:er the death of his wife. And
once again, they do not immediately marry, but wait for the time of
mourning to pass (HA 6:390).
Goethe explored even more radical relationships in an earlier play,
Stella. In a scenario similar to Elective Affinities, a man is torn between duty
to his wife and child, and love for a younger woman. Tragedy is averted in
the play because the women agree to a rather unconventional solution.
They agree to share the husband and occupy "one house, one bed, and
one grave"(HA 4:346). Afi:er the play was banned, Goethe rewrote the
ending which parallels that of the novel: the husband and the lover kill
themselves,
In Stella, Goethe openly explores the most radical of solutions
through art, By so doing, he presents both sides of the coin. We see the
mistakes which lead to tragedy, but we also see radical, partly ironic, solu-
�TANTILLO
99
tions. As a novelist, Goethe is able to explore and weigh, and at the same
time ask that we too explore and weigh, intricate moral questions. Certain
situations cannot be understood in terms of a simple opposition between
good and bad. The novel, as the two different endings to StelL., forces us
to consider anew society's standards.
Goethe, however, is not a nihilist or a relativist, even in matters of love.
He acknowledges and respects limits, partly because as an artist and scientist, he realizes that if one is to advance and create new and higher
forms, one requires limits and obstacles if only to overcome them. When
he describes an organism's attempt to flourish and strive towards beauty
and creativity, he stresses that superfluity of resources is just as damaging
to an organism as scarcity. In a conversation with Eckermann, Goethe
turns to the example of an oak tree in order to discuss how beauty arises
in nature. He suggests that an oak tree is beautifUl only if it has struggled
with opposition and competition as it has grown. Harsh conditions may
be "favorable" as long as they are balanced against good ones. If, however,
the oak tree grows in a moist marshy place, and the earth is too nourishing, it will, with proper space, prematurely shoot forth many branches and
twigs on all sides; but it will still want the opposing, retarding influences:
it will not show itself gnarled, stubborn, and indented; and, seen from a
distance, it will appear a weak tree of the lime species; it will not be beautiful-at least, not as an oak. (IS April I827; GA 24:618-19)
Like an indulged or spoiled child, the oak tree that never has to face
adversity will never have a beautiful character. It will not have grown at a
measured pace, but will grow disproportionately. Goethe spoke also of a
plant that is over-watered in his "Metamorphosis of Plants:' Although
such a plant will grow continuously, it will never intensity its form to
reach its greatest articulation of form. Similarly, while the conditions for
the oak tree's growth ensure survival, they do not enable it to reach the
height of its potential.
The most ideal conditions for the oak are mixed ones. The oak must
have enough nourishment to grow, while it must also engage in some
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
struggles: "a century's struggle with the elements makes it strong and
powerful, so that, at its full· growth, its presence inspires us with astonishment and admiration" (GA 24:6I9). Beauty arises only if the tree has
faced some adversity that acts as a check upon its desire to thrive. And
while numerous different circumstances influence the development of the
tree outside of its control (the conditions of the soil, the climate, the
proximity of its other neighbors, etc.), the individual tree actively participates in the entire process as well. It has a will that expresses a tendency
(Tendenz), drive (Trieb), and striving (Bestreben).
Goethe's natural world is comprised of entities which are always
struggling to achieve new kinds of perfection and new ways of flourishing as they attempt to overcome the limits presented to them either by the
outside environment or by their own forms. And just as nature oversteps
its own boundaries to create a new kind of perfection (GA 17:106), so
too Goethe describes how a master artist intentionally deviates from the
norm in his works to create a masterpiece (HA 12:169).
In the end, the failure of the main characters of Elective Affinities in their
artistic endeavors is a reflection of their failures in their personal lives.
They never attempt to use their love to reach beyond their passions and
attempt innovative solutions to their problems. Charlotte and the
Captain, despite their feelings for each other, remain largely wedded to the
laws of society. Neither initiates creative options until it is too late. Ottilie
and Eduard, the most passionate of the characters, similarly do not try to
use creativity to channel the destructive nature of love. When Charlotte
buries them together as the last act in the novel, they, like the color green,
are finally joined together at the expense of their individual lives;
NOTES
!.Goethe, "Romische Elegien" (Y), vol. I, GJtthts Wtrkt: Hamburger Ausgabe
(Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, I960) I 60. References to this edition will be
hencefOrth cited in text as "HA:'
2. See my article, "Goethe's Botany and His Philosophy of Gender;' Eighterntb~Crntury
Life 22 (!998):128-31.
�TANTILLO
101
3. Aristotle, PariS of Animals 655a I8-34, 657b 5-35, 664a I-I4, 674a 32-6I8;
Cmrmtian of Animals 749b 5-750b5; 750a2I,35.
4. The extent to which Goethe was a precursor to Darwin is a debated point. See
John F. Cornell "Faustian Phenomena: Teleology in Goethe's Interpretation of
Plants and Animals;' Journal cf Medicine and Philosoplry 15:489; George A. Wells, Goethe
and the Development cf the Sciences 17 50-1900 ( Alpen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff and
Noordhoff, 1978) 28; Timothy Lenoir Goethe and the Sciences: A Re-Appraisal, cd. by
Frederick Amrine, J. Zucker and Harvey Wheeler (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing
Co., I986) 27.
5. Goethe, "Die Faulticre und die Dickhautigen," vol. 17, Gedenkausgabe drr Hirke, Briife
und Gespriirhe (Zurich: Artemis-Verlag, 1949) 347-54. This edition will be henceforth cited in text as "GA."
6. "Die Skelette der Nagetiere, abgebildet und verglichen von d'Alton:'
7. For further discussion, see Cornell (286ff).
8. Eduard Joseph d' Alton, Die Skelete der Nagethiere, abgebildet tmd verglichen (Bonn: In
Commission bei Eduard Weber, I 823) I -2.
9. Conversations with Eckermann, February 19, 1829, John Oxenford translation (San
Francisco: North Point Press reprint, I984). [(GA 24:328)]
10. Translated by Douglas Miller, CcetM Scirntifir Studie; (New York: Suhrkamp, I988)
I62. (HA I3:32I).
I I. Goethe was quite familiar with Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. He even planned to
write a poem similar in scope to Lucretius' poem. See Grete Schaeder, Gott und Welt:
Drei Kapitel Goetbescber Wrltanscbauung (Hameln: Fritz Seifert, 1947) 286.
12. Many commentators have noted the importance of The Theory if Colors in interpreting Elective Affinities. See, for example, Loisa Nygaard, "'Bild' and 'Sinnbild' ;•
Crnnanic &virw, 63 (I988):58-76; John Milfull, "The Idea of Goethe's
Wahlverwandtscbajten,"Germanic Review, 47 (1972): 83-84; Alfred G. Steer, Goethe~
'iflective Aifinities:"Tbe Robe o/ Nessus (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1990), 4 I; Hans Reiss,
CortbrJ Navrls (Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, I969), 206-7.
13. Walter Benjamin is the most notable critic who takes exception to this statement
in his essay "Goethes Wahlverwandtscbciften," Gesammelte Schrijten, ed. by Rolf
Tiedermann & Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt Suhrkamp, 1978) I3Iff.
I 4. Goethe takes the terms "Wahlvetwandtschaften" from the translated title of the
chemical treatise "De attractionibus electivas."The treatise was written in 1775 by the
Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman and was translated into German by Heinrich
Tabor in I 782.
I 5. Specifically, the Captain's opinion of elective affinities seems to mirror Lucretius's
claim that since "nothing comes from nothing;' animal and human will must find
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
its origins in the most basic unit: the atom. See De Rerum Natura, trans. by W.H.D.
Rouse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), lines 2.220-23; 253-60.
I 6. He begins the novel as Eduard's second self (HA 6:267). He then joins briefly
with Charlotte, but then leaves the manor when offered a job promotion which
includes an arranged marriage. Moreover, during the story of the neighbor children,
we discover that he was in all likelihood engaged as a young man to another woman.
Towards the end of the novel, he once again hopes to be united with Charlotte.
I 7. Marita Gilli, "Das Verschweigen der Geschichte in Goethes WablvtrWandtschtiften
oder Wie man der Geschichte nicht enftlichen kann;' Sie, und nicbt Wt'r, ed. by Arno
Herzig, lnge Stephan, and Hans G. Winter (Hamburg: Dolling and Ga!itz, !989)
553-65; Milfitll, 94; Albert Biclschowsky, Guth" Srin Leben und srine I#rke (New York:
G.P. Putnam's Sons, !907), 2:383; Emil Staiger, Goethe (Zurich: Artemis Verlag,
!956), 2:495; Reiss, 209; Friedrich Gundolf. Goethe (Berlin: Bondi, 1920) 553.
18. Varnhagen von Ense, Tagebuch vom 28. Juni 1843. Cited in HA 6:623. Thomas
Mann explores the possible Christian implications die to this remark in
Gesamrnelte Werke, Band IX, Rcden und Aufsiitze, "Zu Goethes
Wahlverwandtschaften;' Frankfurt, I 974.
19. Letter to Karl Friedrich von Reinhard. Weimar, Feb. 21, 1810, GA 19:597.
20. Other commentators, such as Steer (54), believe that the baby represents a criticism of loose Romantic practices in love and marriage. Atkins attempts to explain
away the baby's appearance by pointing to possibility of intermarriage among the
families in the past ("Die Wahlverwandtschaften: Novel of German Classicism;'
Gennan Qu'fterly, 53 (!980) n.29, p.35).
�-.:f Three Poems
fj:- Laurie Cooper
Pears
All summer long on a I2.5-horsepower John Deere
I cut grass in 43-inch swaths, each week
holding back the jungle that would otherwise begin,
the wildness that waits just below surfaces for an opening.
I cut grass in 43-inch swaths, each week
vigilant, keeping safe the gardens, the house, our lives
from the wildness that waits just below surftces for an opening.
The days grow shorter. My shadow spreads across the lawn.
Vigilant, I keep safe the gardens, the house, our lives.
Now it is November, the last mowing of the year.
The days are short. My shadow spreads across the lawn.
Soon winter's white palms will try to press the chaos down.
It is November, the very last mowing of the year
and there are fallen pears, at least 200 on the ground
daring winter's white palms to press their chaos down,
unyielding to my tractor's slow, insistent blade.
Fallen pears, at least 200 on the ground. They are
silent, sunned breasts or low, harvest moons
that will not yield to my slow insistent blade.
Or they are a gathering of golden, swollen wombs.
Laurie Cooper lives in Chaplin, Connecticut, and is a 1988 graduate of St. John's College,
Annapolis.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Silent, sunned breasts and low, harvest moons
hold their gaze though I turn quickly away.
Even a golden gathering of lost, swollen wombs
cannot distract me from
my essential task.
They hold their gaze, though I keep turning away.
Time slithers past. The grass has not yet grown to haybecause I will not be distracted from my task.
But when you come outside to kiss me, you've grown old.
Somehow time has passed. The grass is not a tangle of hay
but your hair is gray and your lips purple from the cold
as you come outside to kiss me. I see that you are old.
On your breath is a fuint scent of fermented pears.
Though your hair is gray and your lips purple from the cold,
I must keep cutting the grass in 43-inch swaths.
Your breath's scent of fermented pears is lost to the wind
as I ride past on my I2.5-horsepower John Deere.
�COOPER
Preparation
If sometimes I find myself imagining
the thick unmoving whiteness of your hands
lying properly at your sides or nicely folded
on your chest, the heavy scent of a gardenia
fastened there, an organ softly swirling tones
through a darkened vestibule,
If sometimes I imagine all of this, it is because
I am stunned by the life that moves in every grain
of us, how when we embrace it is only the beginning,
and never enough. It is also the end: there will be
a last time that our skins will touch. One of us
will be cold, the other warm and dying.
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�THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
106
While You Are In The Hospital
At home, I think I see small pools of blood
forming in corners of the bathroom ceiling,
but they are clumps of ladybugs, having found
their way in through the old wood of this leaning
house. They are slow and silent as they mount
each other, wrap their spindly legs around, cling.
In the hospital, beneath the syncopation
of intercoms and monitoring machines,
there is a silence: a woman in a room down
the hall contemplating her amputation, snowstooped trees through your window, fear.
Here, mail arrives daily: merchandise
sales, conference announcements, friends
sending cheer. I sort it into piles to keep,
recycle, discard. I think of love I've left,
and lost, and never known.
If I could really love, I would take away
these tubes dripping lipids and glucose
into your blood. I would liquefY the things
you love and Rood them through your veins:
our sleeping dogs' rhythmic breathing, huge
orange trumpets of the amaryllis we thought
would never bloom, the crunch of the gravel
road coming home. If I could really love,
I would climb onto your narrow back
and wrap myself around, guarding like
a ladybug, or Achilles' mighty shield.
�--:£ Mind in the Odyssey
!j- Paul Ludwig
Veteran readers of Homer will find Seth Benardete's book The Bow and
the Lyre to be an exciting and at times disturbing meditation on the Odyssey.
For those wary of the maddening difficulty of Benardete's oracular style
of writing, the present volume is more readable than some of his previous works. Benardete's explications of texts rarely fail to strike a nerve.
Beginning readers of the Odyssey who use The Bow and the Lyre as a companion volume may be so overwhehned by the ingenuity of his interpretations that they lose the inclination to interpret the Odyssey in any other
way. At the same time, many readers with firm prior interpretations of the
Odyssey will be repelled by Benardete's conclusions. Among them:
Odysseus on his return commits gross injustice against the suitors;
Penelope and Odysseus, when finally reunited, fail to achieve love or intimacy.
Before we come to grips with these substantive issues, Benardete's
method of reading Homer merits considerable attention. He tteats poetry as proto-philosophy. The Bow and the Lyre is intended to explore the
extent to which Homer anticipated Plato's thought, hence the subtitle "A
Platonic Reading of the Odyssey:' Those who hold that poetry asserts
nothing will lay aside the bopk as useless to them. When, for example,
Menelaus keeps his grip on Proteus- despite the latter's shape-shifting,
does this story of a god who is one thing despite becoming many things
mean that Homer is wrestling with the philosophical problem of being
vs. becoming? Many readers would be loath to say so. Benardete recognizes that his interpretations may seem "forced and willful" (p. xi) if he
repeatedly discovers Platonic thoughts in earlier Greek poetry. But readers who fear that Benardete is merely digging up what he himself has
Seth Benardete. The Bi.Jw and tbt Lyrt: A Platonic Reading of tbr Odyssey. Lanham, Md: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1997. Paul Ludwig is a tutor at St. John's College.
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
buried are, he suggests, like people who would question their luck if. wandering in a dark wood, they came across a clearing in which they could
take their bearings.
One problematic method of reading is the principle of logographic
necessity &om the Phaedrus, i.e. the assumption that the placement of
every detail in a piece of writing has a purpose and contributes to the
overall meaning if only the reader can find out how (a principle Benardete
elsewhere admits is mythical). Homer never seems to nod in The Bow and
the Lyre; the slightest commission or omission can be seized upon and have
meaning wrung out of it. An amazing assertion early on highlights the
difficulty inherent in this method: "No one in the Iliad dies in pain;'
meaning that Homer never explicitly says that X died "in pain:' Teeth can
grip the dirt in the paroxysm of death, but if Homer does not say it is
painfUl, it is not painfUl. Reading Benardete can be infuriating because of
such claims, even though they are often adduced in support of a larger
argument
which Benardete can and does sustain on other, more substan-
tial grounds. The principle of logographic necessity implicitly contradicts
longstanding trends in classical philology, in which apparent inconsistencies in Homeric epic are typically explained away as the result of diverse
sources knitted into a motley whole. Benardete, by contrast, is able to
make his principle pay high returns when he provides alternative explanations for such problems as the unsatisfactory ending of the Odyssey, where
the jarring quality of the final scenes--e.g. the dismemberment of
Melanthius, the strangeness of hearing conversations in Hades a second
time, Odysseus's cruel teasing of his father Laertes, and the falseness of
the forced reconciliation between Odysseus and the relatives of the dead
suitors-all scenes which most readers would prefer to ignore, are fUlly
integrated into his troubling interpretation.
The substantive issue of greatest concern is Odysseus's choice
between immortality and mortality. he refUses the immortality offered
him by Calypso, choosing to remain a man. The treatment of this theme
is among the most fruitfUl in The Bow and the Lyre. What good does
�LUDWIG
109
Odysseus see in mortality? On the one hand, the questing of Odysseus's
mind, his desire to see the cities of many men and know their minds,
would not be possible or even necessary if he stayed with Calypso, since
Odysseus presumably would have access to divine knowledge once he
became a god. This implication merely puts a fine point on the problem
since seeking knowledge entails the desire to find it why would Odysseus,
of all people, turn down divine knowledge?
The answer comes at the "peak of the Odyssey;' when Odysseus goes
to rescue his men from Circe,- who has turned them into swine. On the
way, Hermes shows him that things have natures. The nature of the moly,
a plant with black root but white blossom, enables Odysseus to resist the
magic of Circe, who transforms men such that their bodies become pigs
but their minds remain human, Just as nature teaches that, in a plant, blossom goes together with root, no matter whether they are as different as
white from black, so Odysseus learns that, in man, mind goes together
with body. This knowledge is proof against a magic which would claim
to separate body from mind.
For such a reading to work, Circe's magic cannot be taken literally.
Since mind and body always go together, Circe cannot truly have changed
the men's bodies into pigs while leaving their minds human. Later, Circe
admits it was the mind (not body) of Odysseus that was proof against her
enchantment. But her statement is odd because the men's minds were not
supposed to be enchanted any more than Odysseus's: only their bodies
were said to have undergone change. This problem was recognized in
antiquity: the two descriptions of enchantment contradict one another
(I 0.329 with 239-40). If Circe's version is accepted, then the men's
minds were affected: they believed an illusion about their bodies being
changed into pigs. The men were superstitious because they lacked knowledge of nature; hence their "bestiality" was not literal. The
moly/enchantment episode becomes a symbol of the emergence of philosophy. By contrast, a conservative reading might say that the efficacy of
the moly's nature lies in its being (at most) an herbal antidote to Circe's
�110
drugs
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
11
(if not mere medicine" in the sense of a magical talisman). On
the conservative reading, Homer would not have understood the full
implications of his word physis (nature). For Benardete, it is the revelation
of physis which is at stake. Lest we suspect that such an interpretation is
wholly his own invention, Benardete quotes a scholiast to the effect that
taking the moly meant taking the complete logos.
A god (Hermes) thus gives Odysseus access to knowledge which,
apparently, was hitherto a divine preserve. Knowledge of nature allows
Odysseus to share the gods' knowledge without becoming a god himsel£
Calypso's later offer to make Odysseus immortal thus appears ungenuine:
in the light of nature, Odysseus sees that a transformation in which his
body became deathless and ageless would also destroy the unity of body
and mind which makes him Odysseus. Belief in the separation of mind
from body, at least in the case of Circe's enchantment, produces only bestiality. By refusing immortality, Odysseus seems to achieve a humanity
which Benardete regards as the peak of humanity, not open to everyone,
since man's being, the inseparability of mind and body, is not complete
unless he has knowledge of that being, i.e. unless he knows about the
inseparability.
Benardete's chief preoccupation is that Odysseus may achieve this
knowledge only to forget or reject it. Odysseus seems subject to two
temptations, which arise from his given name and his punning nom de
guerre. In the cave of the Cyclops, he puns on the two Greek words of
negation, ou and mf, when he tells the Cyclops his name is Outis, No-one.
This clever idea keeps the other Cyclopes from coming to Polyphemous's
aid when he cries out after his blinding. Odysseus's heart laughs when he
comprehends that his name Outis and his metis (cleverness or mind but
also No-one) fOoled the Cyclops. Mind is no-one. The universal applicability of mind means that mind is the property of no one in particular:
pure mind is sheer anonymity. If Odysseus comes to think of himself as
pure mind, then he believes in his own unconditionality, a type of godhead. But this is a paradox because anonymity means being a nobody, a
�LUDWIG
111
person without fame, the opposite of a god. No sooner does Odysseus
think himself beyond the Cyclops's reach than he vaunts himself and his
victory: he wishes Polyphemous to know his real name, so that
Polyphemous may know whose mind got the better of him. Odysseus's
mind is thus not disembodied but conditioned by the emotions of pride
and anger. Driving Odysseus to assert his triumphant mentality, his
unconditionality, is an emotionalism which belies it, and which arises
from his true name, the origin of which Homer reveals shortly before the
slaughter of the suitors: his grandfather named him Odysseus with a pun
on odyssamenos, angry or hateful. Anger such as he expresses against the
Cyclops who threatened his life, and whom he taunts, is related to pride,
the desire to be somebody, to be famous. Eventually the suitors, whose
consumption of Odysseus's household would reduce him to a nobody,
must bear the brunt of his pride, even though their crimes do not rise to
the level of capital punishment. Benardete regards this pride as an inadequate view of death, an attempt to escape death through glory, as though
in a shade existence one could continue basking in one's fame (contrast
I 1.482-91 with 24.80-94), a belief which entails a forgetfulness of the
humanizing knowledge of the inseparability of body and mind.
Odysseus's quest for justice against the suitors is thus characterized by
the most gross injustice, which in turn implies a lack of self-knowledge.
Readers who always thought that the suitors got what they deserved and
that Odysseus was both wily and good will experience constant annoyance with The Bow and the Lyre as Benardete again and again exculpates enemies and minor characters in the Odyssey solely with a view to inculpating
Odysseus's own behavior. From the Cyclops (who punishes liars and, his
cannibalism notwithstanding, is a vegetarian) to the Lotus-eaters (if
Odysseus had not used force to drag aboard ship the ones who partook,
they would at least have remained alive, unlike the rest of his crew), to the
crewmen who ate the cattle of the Sun (Odysseus's imploring them not
to put in at that shore and then making them swear an oath not to touch
the cattle was insufficient warning), to the suitors themselves (self-defense
�112
THE ~1. JOHN'S REVIEW
forced them to plot Telemachus's murder), Benardete tries radical readings
on for size, None should perhaps be taken as his final word, but the interpretive license can be breathtaking: angry at the crew for opening the bag
of winds, Odysseus puts in at the harbor of the Laestrygonians and loses
his men on purpose.
The issue of Odysseus's injustice is set up as a contrast between justice and necessity: getting rid of Ithaca's disaffected princes is politically
necessary to secure the throne for Telemachus, Odysseus's self-righteous
anger may render him incapable of distinguishing when he is acting out
of Machiavellian expediency and when he is exacting justice, The
Cyclops's cave exemplifies the problem in microcosm. After Polyphemus
has eaten two of his men, Odysseus's first thought is to draw sword and
run him through. Then he realizes that they would all be trapped in the
cave, unable to move the huge stone blocking the entrance, They need
Polyphemus alive to remove it; hence the plan of blinding him. For
Benardete, the heroic but vain act of killing the Cyclops while trapping
oneself in the cave would have been justice. When the practical question
of escape comes to the fore, necessity overwhelms justice, The blinding is
therefore technically non-just or even unjust, since it is administered in a
spirit of selfish expediency. Odysseus's anger then reinterprets expediency as justice,
As with the Cyclops, so with the suitors: the political expediency
which necessitates their removal effectually empties their punishment of
justice. When the suitors see death staring them in the face, they make an
eleventh-hour promise to pay back the property they have used up. Why,
Benardete asks, could not Odysseus have accepted the suitors' promise?
He knows one answer: because there is no means of holding the suitors
to that promise, and they could just as easily return in force after they
have been let off the hook. Practicality necessitates their deaths. For
Benardete, nothing practical is allowed to interfere with justice, which
must be perfect and spotless if it is to be justice at all. It is worth noting
the narrowness of the choice he offers us. The only way Odysseus could
�LUDWIG
113
have fulfilled justice was to act in a naive, hopeful and self-wounding fashion. Similarly in the Cyclops's cave, the only course Benardete considers
just was for Odysseus to cut off his nose to spite his face. These alternatives seem parodies of justice. Would not conventional justice prescribe
that the Cyclops deserved death for his cannibalism but also concede that
necessity allowed only a lesser sentence to be carried out? Benardete offers
no argument other than an implicit one: maiming the Cyclops was too
happily coincident with Odysseus's selfish interest for us to believe that
the maiming in any way was just. That an action was motivated by selfish
interest is a popular criterion for judging actions, but it is also a notori-
ously broad criterion. Conventional justice has seldom proscribed one
person's injuring another who threatens him, in order to defend his own
life. Some stronger critique of Odysseus's violence against the Cyclops is
surely needed before we can accept Benardete's conclusion. Likewise if the
suitors do not deserve death (a big assumption), their own willfulness has
nevertheless put them in a situation in which, for them to receive any punishment at all, the punishment must be death. Their crime has only two
possible rewards: death or ruling Ithaca. Surely the latter is the less just of
the two alternatives.
The Bow and the Lyre at various points suggests the alternative punishments of a beating for the suitors and a "stinging rebuke" for the disloyal slaves. But it is unclear on whar grounds Benardete could ever argue in
favor of inflicting punitive justice on another human being. His Homer,
looking on from a "perspective beyond justice," does not condone the
anger of Odysseus but rather, in the title sentence of the book, distinguishes the bow from the lyre, i.e. the life of action from the life of observation and thought. There is something too easy about making the theoretical life the only just life if said justice is achieved only because the theoretical man does not have to act in the world. To cite a Platonic example: when the Thirty tyrants tried to deputize Socrates to help round up
Leon of Salamis for what was to be an extrajudicial killing, Socrates
"justly" did not obey. Instead, he went home. He did not warn Leon, he
�114
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
did not try to restrain his fellow deputies, he did not raise a rebellion in
the streets. Justice conventionally understood would have required a more
fUll-blooded action, If this is the way in which the Homeric perspective
is beyond justice and injUstice, then no man of action, no Odysseus, can
ever be righteous. Why then does Benardete recur constantly to justice,
particularly justice with an impossibly high standard? What he must mean
is that Homer deprecates punishments such as the slaughter of the suitors, the hanging of the slave girls, and the dismemberment of Melanthius
without reference to their justice. Homer would deprecate the bloodshed
because it is inhumane, and Benardete would have moved to a standard
different from justice, a standard such as "humanity" (the term he used
to describe Odysseus' knowledge of mortality).
Penelope and Odysseus's failure to achieve intimacy is a crucial interpretation which clarifies Benardete's assumptions. Why are husband and
wife so distrustfUl that they must test each another instead of falling into
one another's arms? Benardete signals that he knows but is unimpressed
by Penelope's reason for testing Odysseus, She has long feared that an
impostor might deceive her into giving hersel£ only to find that she has
been hopelessly compromised. As Benardete also points out, Penelope's
erotic longing is so powerful that she mistrusts her own strength to resist
seduction, and she has thrown up high walls to guard against its ever happening, even while she simultaneously uses sexual charm to gain time for
Telemachus, a beautifUl example of love allied to intelligence, For
Benardete, however, caution and prudence imply the absence of love. Just
as practical necessity compromises justice irretrievably, so mind hardens
heart. The same assumption underlies both pairs, justice/necessity and
love/prudence, since Benardete characterizes the expediency which drives
out the blind emotional wish for justice as the insight of cold calculation.
Mind and heart seem simply incompatible. Here again, the strictness of
the dichotomy which Benardete brings to the text makes it unclear how
Penelope and Odysseus could ever have fUlfilled his high standard of
emotional love except by becoming mindless. Readers who had thought
�LUDWIG
115
that the Odyssey taught how to love wisely will find no Jane Austen in this
pantheon. As should be clear, Benardete deprecates choosing a heartless
mind. What prevents Odysseus from being dehumanized by Circe, who
like Calypso wishes to keep him, is his heart or manliness, a strength of
soul "that can be lost or diminished regardless of knowledge" and which
responds to the call of justice when she offers him food and drink before
his comrades have been set free.
The theme most difficult to assess is the withdrawal of the gods &om
contact with man at the close of the age of heroes. Teiresias prophesies
that Odysseus must undertake a second journey to carry Poseidon's fame
so far inland that the people he meets will mistake an oar for a winnowing fan, i.e. he must act as missionary to people who have never heard of
the sea nor of its patron deity. His mission symbolizes a new religious
dispensation which will obtain not only between Poseidon and landsmen
·but between god and man everywhere: the aloofness of the gods will
inevitably give rise to misunderstanding and the need for intermediaries.
Ignorance, superstition and dependence upon priestcraft will characterize
the new age. Benardete compares it variously to quasi-Biblical prophethood, to the pity and fear of Greek tragedy, and to Plato's Cave. The
moral aspect of this religiosity implicates the guest-host relationship:
kindness toward strangers and beggars will no longer arise out of generosity but out of fear that a beggar may prove to be a god in disguise.
Mistaken identity, the mistaking of a somebody for a nobody, is the crime
of the suitors when Odysseus comes disguised as a beggar. Their punishment can only be proportional to their crime if they have, in fact, insulted a god in disguise. For Benardete, this is a morality of "entrapment;'
characteristic of the human type who will flourish in the new regime:
slaves elevated beyond their desert such as the swineherd Eumaeus who
resents Melanthius's insults and the extra labor the suitors imposed upon
him and who takes out his resentment on Melanthius by helping to dismember him Homer's frequent direct address of Eumaeus would otherwise be odd if it did not signifY that he is the addressee of the Odyssey and
�116
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the low type who will hereafter interpret the poem as the vindication of
justice,
In this reconstruction of Homer's rhetorical project, Benardete is ret-
icent about the intended reception of the poem among other categories
of its audience. Since an age of heroes is always perceived as pre-existing
whatever age one happens to be in, it follows that Homer is not ushering
in a new age but fabricating a mythical transition to explain how his audience arrived in its current, unheroic age. His audience will enter a new age
only to the extent that this new explanation succeeds in bringing about a
revolution in their thought, For Benardete, the majority of us, like the
swineherd, are intended to misconstrue even this new lie about how the
heroic age ended, and to be confirmed in our low morality: one wonders
to what good end. Presumably the grandeur as well as the shortcomings
of Homer's Olympians will give students of nature a hand up toward
appreciating the grandeur of the cosmos and man's place in it Would a
third category of Homer's audience have been intended to ennoble themselves by taking, however ignorantly, Penelope and Odysseus (and
Achilles) as paradigms for their own morality, or is the revolution intended to eradicate the last vestiges of heroism?
The contribution of The Bow and the Lyre is to have opened up a vista
on Homer's story, and the book constantly forces engagement with the
original, The strong reactions it provokes serve to lay bare the assumptions which each of us brings to the text. Though the reader may disagree
with the relative weight assigned to certain premises, the awareness of
alternative possibilities is always present in the book. Readers who strike
-out on their own will tend to meet Benardere coming back from wherever they were headed.-
�LUDWIG
117
��
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<em>The St. John's Review</em>
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<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.
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Office of the Dean
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St. John's College
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ISSN 0277-4720
thestjohnsreview
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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117 pages
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Office of the Dean
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The St. John's Review, 2000/3
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2000
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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
Papenfuse, Dr. Edward C.
Nelson, Christopher B.
Flaumenhaft, Harvey
Allanbrook, Douglas
Tantillo, Astride Orle
Cooper, Laurie
Ludwig, Paul
Description
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Volume XLV, number three of The St. John's Review. Published in 2000.
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The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_45_No_3_2000
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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pdf
St. John's Review
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